Diary of a Teenage Superhero (Teen Superheroes Book 1) Read online

  She nods.

  “Can you tell me where I am?”

  “You’re on Fort Washington Avenue.”

  “Which city?”

  She gives me an odd look. “New York City, of course.”

  “Thanks.”

  I turn around and meander through the dozen aisles that make up the library. Why am I in New York City? Does my family live here? I find I can remember images of the city, but they could be from television programs. I can’t actually remember any street in detail, whether it be from here or anywhere else in the country.

  The questions remain: who am I and how did I get here?

  I slowly decide on a course of action.

  “Can I use your internet?” I ask the woman at the desk.

  She looks up. “Our internet isn’t working. I’m sorry.”

  She looks a little annoyed. Maybe she’s busy playing Minesweeper. I persevere anyway.

  “Where are your encyclopedias?” I ask.

  She nods towards a nearby shelf. A few minutes later I’m searching the ‘S’ volume. The man back at the room told me I had to find the Swan. He did not tell me to find Mr Swan. I had to find The Swan. Possibly the name is some sort of code. Maybe something in the encyclopedia will give me a clue.

  Fifteen minutes later I put the book down in frustration. I’ve found out a lot about swans. They’re part of the same family that includes geese and ducks. They are among the largest flying birds in the world. They feature in the mythology of many different cultures.

  Unfortunately none of this is going to help. If someone gives me a snap test on swans I should ace it, but as far as finding out what the hell is going on -.

  I drag open the encyclopedia again. There must be something in here that will help. I’m half way through studying the section again when something leaps at me from the first line:

  Swan (Genus Cygnus)

  That’s the second time today I’ve seen the word Cygnus. The business card I extracted from the dead man’s pocket bore the company name Cygnus Industries. The address was West Forty-Ninth Street. I lay down the book in triumph. At last I have a lead. The Swan must be located at Cygnus Industries.

  “We’re closing soon,” the woman calls from her desk.

  The woman is becoming icier by the moment. She must have bombed out of Minesweeper. Still, I bravely ask her for directions and within minutes I’ve found my bearing. Despite everything I’ve been through, I now have a spring in my step. An hour before I was cold, alone and lost.

  Okay, I’m still cold and alone, but at least now I’m not quite so lost. I have a plan. The man in the room said to find the Swan. The Swan can probably tell me all sorts of information, like my last name, my address and how the hell I got into this situation.

  I’m feeling brighter by the moment. Maybe I’ll even get my memory restored. This time tomorrow I could be with family and friends and looking back on this whole experience as an unpleasant memory.

  It only takes me a few minutes to find the right address on West Forty-Ninth Street. It turns out to be an art deco apartment building nestled between taller, more modern structures. Turn of the century apartment blocks huddle together across the road. A motley collection of small businesses seem to operate out of the address. I can see signage in one window for a mortgage broker. Another window advertises shoe repairs.

  My eyes slowly shift to the roof of the building. A shape seems to be silhouetted against the night sky. For an instant I think it’s a bird, but then I realize it is growing closer with every passing second. Before I can make a move, it becomes terrifyingly close and the object slams into the roof of the car parked behind me. Glass and metal fly in all directions. A passing woman screams and faints. An elderly couple stare in horror at the sight.

  I stare in horrified fascination at the dead man. He is covered in blood and more is appearing with every passing second. I can see his face. He looks stunned. Obviously death was the furthest thing from his mind when he reported to work this morning.

  Nobody needs to tell me his identity. This is the Swan. As surely as night follows day he is the man who held the answers to all my questions and now those answers have died with him.

  One thing I know for certain.

  This swan could not fly.

  I look back up at the building and get my second shock for the evening. There is a man leaning out of a window high above. His hands are on the sill. He peers down, not at the dead man on the car, but at me. Our eyes meet.

  Doctor Ravana’s face twists into an expression of seething hatred.

  Chapter Seven

  A hand suddenly grabs mine. I’m jolted out of my astonishment by a familiar face, a person who is not looking at me with hate or a maniacal desire to kill me.

  “Brodie,” I say.

  “I thought I might find you here.”

  “How –?”

  “Now’s not the time,” she interrupts. “Looks like we’re too late to find Mr Swan.”

  “You know about him?”

  She shakes her head. “Later.”

  We hurry down the street and through a confusion of back alleys and main roads until we’ve put some distance between us and Ravana. It can’t happen soon enough for me. We hurry through a district surrounded by abandoned factories and high fences. It starts to rain and within minutes I’m feeling cold and wet. A distant roll of thunder reverberates around the buildings like the beating of an enormous drum.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “I’ve got a place.”

  “Where is it? Underwater?”

  She gives me an odd look. “What makes you say that?”

  “You’re English, aren’t you? You know, bad weather and -.”

  “No,” she says. “I think I’m Australian.”

  “You mean you don’t remember -.”

  “Later.”

  She flashes me a smile. For the first time I realize she is quite attractive. She has red hair, blue eyes and a neat, heart shaped face. She is still wearing the same clothing – jeans and a jacket.

  “Where is this place?” I ask.

  “It’s close.”

  “What happened to your motorcycle?”

  “It ran out of fuel.”

  “And you didn’t get more because…”

  “Because I have no money and I didn’t feel like robbing a bank to get some.”

  Under these crazy circumstances this seems like a reasonable explanation. She takes a right turn under a gap in a wire fence. I follow her across a vacant lot littered with refuse. We reach a double wooden door secured with a chain. Dragging on the bottom edge, she creates a gap for me to enter.

  Whatever the warehouse used to be was a long time ago. There are pieces of machinery all over the place; it’s odd looking apparatus not much larger than a person. I suspect that it belonged to the last business run here. Probably this place has held many different commercial enterprises over the years.

  “They used to make shoes here,” Brodie says.

  “And before that?” I ask. The high ceilings are almost fifty feet above the floor. There’s a crane and pulley system that runs the whole length of the structure.

  “That’s anyone’s guess.”

  Now the storm has begun in earnest and it’s raining hard. Through the glass skylights in the ceiling I can see lightning flash. Its stark light floods the many dark recesses of the warehouse. There are other corners which remain in pitch darkness. Those are the ones that scare me.

  “We’re safe here,” Brodie says. “I’ve been here a while.”

  “How long is a while?”

  She shrugs. “About three days.”

  “You don’t have a home?”

  Brodie shakes her head and leads me towards a small office at the rear of the warehouse. She lights a candle and its flickering glow reveals a couple of piles of blankets, a few tins of food, some bottles of water and a few books.

  “This is home,” she says. “Ever since I landed…here.
”

  “You mean…” I try to understand exactly what she is saying. “Um, what do you mean?”

  “I woke in a building on the other side of town,” Brodie says. “I had no idea who I was or how I got there or where I came from. I assumed I’d been in an accident and so I started looking for a police officer.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “I had only walked about a hundred feet down the street when I van pulled up behind me. These guys jumped out and tried to drag me into the van.”

  My blood goes cold. It was bad enough for me, but I can only imagine it would be every woman’s worst nightmare. Brodie sees the look on my face and forces a laugh.

  “It’s okay. They got more than they bargained for.”

  “What do -?”

  She throws a few punches into the air. She’s fast. Incredibly fast. Unnaturally fast. I don’t think I realized her speed when she faced Doctor Ravana back in the room. She drops low and kicks into the air. Leaping to her feet, she snatches up a piece of timber from a nearby pile and tosses it up. A second later her hand snakes out and strikes the centre of it.

  It shatters into matchsticks. I pick up a clutch of the shattered remains and examine it carefully.

  “Remind me not to start any arguments,” I say.

  “I only use my super powers for good,” she says with a straight face.

  “But seriously, that’s not normal.”

  Fast is fast, but she’s so fast I doubt any martial arts expert on Earth could keep up with her. And not only is she quick, but she knows what she’s doing too.

  “I think I’m about three times as fast as a martial arts expert,” she says. “Maybe faster.”

  “Do you know what style you’re fighting in?”

  “Style?”

  “Kung Fu, jujitsu…”

  “Oh, that.” She shakes her head. “Not a clue.”

  “And what about your name?” I ask. “How did you work out your name?”

  “It’s on my clothing.”

  I suddenly realize my clothing might be similarly marked. I check the inside back of my jeans and – hey presto! The name ‘Axel’ is stitched onto a small label. I then proceed to tell Brodie about waking up in the room, the guy on the floor and everything that had happened to me since I woke. She listens in dead silence until I finish. Then she just shakes her head in amazement.

  “Good thing I’ve been following those guys for days. Otherwise…” She lets the word hang in the air. Finally she says, “That book must be important. It might answer all our questions.”

  “We can find it in the morning,” I tell her. “I know where I left it.”

  She nods. “We’d better get some shut eye. We’ll start out early.”

  Brodie hands me blankets and a pillow. I don’t expect to sleep, but by the time she blows out the candle I find I can barely keep my eyes open. The storm subsides to a steady flow of rain. The wind blows distantly and a piece of metal bangs out a random tune.

  The next thing I know is Brodie’s shaking me awake. At first I don’t know where I am. There is a cramp in my neck and I feel stiff and cold. I look up at her face and don’t immediately recognize her. Then it all comes back.

  Oh. That’s right. Mrs Bruce Lee.

  Time to move.

  It’s early morning. Brodie produces a spare sweater. I’m glad of it because it’s a cold morning. We’re out the door in minutes. The rain has stopped, but the streets are still wet. We walk a couple of blocks. Then Brodie spots a nice car. She produces a wire coat hanger from her jacket.

  My eyes desperately examine nearby apartments. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting us a ride,” she says. The car door opens and within minutes she has the vehicle hotwired and we’re driving through the early morning city streets. I’m shaking my head in amazement. Whatever Brodie was before she arrived here, she was no girl scout. Still, I’m not about to criticize her. Without her we would be walking twenty blocks. Now we cover the same distance in a fraction of the time.

  After a while I tell her to pull over. We climb out of the car and make our way down an alley. In the next street I recognize a couple of landmarks. A café. A diner. A used bookshop. This is the place.

  Heading down another alley, my eyes search the brickwork. We end up at the other end and slowly work our way back again. I’m beginning to think Ravana’s men have already found the book, but then I notice a shadow near the ground. Easing the book out of the slot, I breathe a sigh of relief. It appears undamaged.

  Opening it, I start leafing through the pages. Brodie looks at my face as slowly my expression turns from excitement to disbelief.

  “What is it?” she asks finally. “What’s written in it?”

  “That’s the problem,” I say. “Nothing’s in it. All the pages are blank.”

  Chapter Eight

  We stare at each other in stunned amazement. Brodie takes the notebook from me and turns over the pages one at a time. She even holds the pages up to the light to see if any words have been etched onto the paper.

  “You’re sure the book is important?” she asks skeptically.

  “Absolutely. The man dragged it out of his pocket with his dying breath and forced it on me.”

  Brodie nods. “Okay, let’s head back to the car.”

  We return to the vehicle and spend the next half an hour in the front seat examining the book from front to back. At the same time it grows lighter in the street outside. People walk past the vehicle on their way to work. A street cleaning machine zooms down the road. A café owner starts setting out tables and chairs onto the sidewalk. Another day in the Big Apple.

  Finally Brodie puts the book down between the seats. “The book is a dead end. For now.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  She thinks for a moment. “What about Cygnus Industries? We could go back to see what we can find.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “To see what we can find? You mean, like bad guys with guns and psycho doctors? You might have super powers, but -.”

  “I don’t have super powers,” Brodie starts. “Well, actually I sort of do, but that’s beside the point. I still think Cygnus Industries is the safest place for us right now.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “They’re probably turning this city upside down looking for us,” Brodie explained. “Cygnus Industries is the last place they’d expect us to return.”

  I can’t fault her logic. It seems so unlikely we would return there that it’s probably the one place we should go. I nod.

  “Okay. But you’re Batman if the bad guys turn up.”

  She smirks. “Okay, boy wonder.”

  We drive across town to Cygnus Industries. Taking care to park some way down the block, we approach the address carefully. The body and the damaged car are long gone, of course. All that remains is a little broken glass on the road. We stroll past it nonchalantly and enter the main lobby. It’s an older building, but clean and well maintained. We make straight for the elevators and reach the floor without incident.

  The door to Cygnus Industries has been broken open; the lock is hanging on by a single screw. Obviously the men who attacked our contact didn’t bother knocking. A zigzag of police tape is strung across the front. No sound comes from within. Silently, we push the door open and ease our way between the police tape. We close the door behind us.

  “Wow,” says Brodie.

  Wow, indeed. Imagine a fairly typical office with filing cabinets, desks, computers and partitions. Now imagine it has been turned upside down and every file and piece of paper taken. Desks upturned. Computers smashed. Even the water dispenser had been pulled off the wall.

  “They obviously don’t have a cleaner,” I say.

  We start to methodically search every filing cabinet and desk for papers and find exactly – nothing. Not a single page has been left behind. We even start lifting furniture and still find nothing. Not a business card. Zilch. There is a smaller room that leads off the
main office of Cygnus Industries. Possibly it was the manager’s office as all it contains is a desk and a wardrobe. We search the drawers of the desk and still find nothing.

  I try plugging in one of the computers, but it simply gives me a blue screen. It doesn’t even start to boot up.

  “Holy hell,” I groan. “This place has been stripped clean.”

  “Wait a second,” Brodie holds up a hand. “Did you hear that?”

  We both freeze. I realize Brodie is referring to the elevator. It sounds like the doors are closing. We look at each other. If someone is coming to this office there are frighteningly few places to hide. There is the desk in the manager’s office which can fit about half a body under it. Then there’s the wardrobe behind it.

  We quickly scoot into the office and climb into the wardrobe. Standing there with the door slightly ajar, I peer out to see if anyone enters the main office. At the same time I’m conscious of how close I am to Brodie. She is only a few inches away. My eyes stray to her face. Her lips.

  She whispers. “Keep your mind on the job.”

  I avert my eyes. At that same moment I hear the front door to the office creak open. A shuffle of feet. Someone clears their throat. The drawer of a filing cabinet is eased open. More footsteps.

  Finally someone steps into view. It’s a kid a couple of years younger than me. He is of Asian appearance. Maybe fourteen or fifteen. Black hair. Round face. A bit overweight. He looks completely focused on carrying out the same identical search we have just completed.

  I catch Brodie’s eye. The whole thing is bizarre. To make matters worse, I know it’s only a matter of time before he enters the manager’s office and opens the cupboard to find – us! A horrible thought goes through my mind. It’s terrible, but I can’t help it. No, no, no. That’s too awful. Do not even think about it.

  Because all of a sudden I can imagine myself leaping out of the cupboard and scaring the daylights out of the kid. A smile creases my lips.

  Brodie looks at me, frowning and I simply shake my head.

  Don’t worry.

  I’m one of the good guys.