Chapters:

He Dreamed of Flying

In Control of Nothing

Hayden Mitman

Chapter one – He Dreamed of Flying

Jason Willow woke up with a thud, the cold floorboard greeted his face when he found himself a few feet from his bed.

Opening his eyes, he noticed scratches on the floor that he’d never have seen if he wasn’t at this vantage point. The 27-year-old Willow sat up and took stock of his surroundings. Dressed in a black t-shirt and pajama pants he’s worn to bed since college, he raised a hand to wipe sleep from his eyes and sat up on the cold floor.  

He’d done this before.

“Fuck…,” he muttered, as he moved his hand from his eyes to the spot on his forehead that had so recently met the hardwood floor. The hardwood floor – wall to wall throughout his apartment — had been a selling point of this place when he moved in last year, but, as he rubbed the sore spot on his forehead, Jason thought that adding some thick carpeting might be a good idea.

Especially since, lately, he’d been falling out of bed in the middle of the night.

The lanky, red-haired Jason has had a few rough nights since he moved to Philadelphia on his own. He had a steady job - part-time at the grocery store. And, it wasn’t work worries that kept him from sleeping soundly at night. It wasn’t the depressing reality of his, admittedly, stagnant love life that kept him sleeping restlessly.

He’d long ago gotten used to being single.

No, it was something else, something he couldn’t put his finger on. On the worst nights, he’d dream of being young again, being with his family. He thought of his father and brother, both of whom had died in a car accident Jason was just a child no more than four years old.

But, he wasn’t troubled by thoughts of the accident.

He’d had enough nightmares about that.

These past few nights, he didn’t just dream of his father and brother. Instead, he dreamed of the things they had missed. He imagined his father being at his college graduation. He thought of dancing at his brother’s wedding. In imagining these moments he’d never experience, it felt like he lost his father and brother all over again.

But, that wasn’t what he dreamed about last night. No, it was a new dream and something about it stuck with him as he walked to the bathroom to brush his teeth.

Last night, Jason dreamed of flying.

But, it wasn’t one of those “soar over the mountains and wake up falling” kind of dreams that you see in movies.

Instead, he was back in high school, waiting patiently in line for lunch. He was looking over a sneeze guard at the thick, congealed cheese, clumped on top of a spongy brick of tepid pizza – the kind of tasteless, greasy cheese you only ever find in public schools - when he glanced over his shoulder to see Christie Carpenter.

Jason adored Christie when he was in Taft High School. She was a sweet brunette who played clarinet. She always had more friends than he had overdue homework. Jason had always too shy to make a move — he had been quiet and cagey as a kid, especially after the accident —but she was always so nice and always seemed just a touch out of his league.  

And, she was always smiling. In his dream, Jason remembered the way she’d push her shoulders back, just a touch, when she grinned.

When Jason looked back down at his plastic tray, he saw his feet and the linoleum floor beneath his sneakers. Then, as he watched, the grey and blue checkered patterned of the floor slid sideways beneath his motionless shoes.

His shoes glided like two small hovercrafts, lifting him just inches off the sticky linoleum floor and moved him through the cafeteria.

When he woke up from the dream, he was on his bedroom floor.

Just thinking of it again, Jason grinned while flossing his teeth in the bathroom mirror.

Stepping out of the shower, Jason kept the dream alive in his mind, really trying to remember Christie’s smile and what she might look like now. He imagined her glance and pictured how her hair fell across her forehead when she wore a ponytail. As he dried off and caught a glimpse of his pale, skinny body in the bathroom mirror, he thought about how, in his dream, she arched her neck back and the stale cafeteria light hit her skin just so the moment she noticed him.

He thought about the dream the whole time while he got dressed. As he buttoned his work shirt, Jason looked out the window and thought of skipping work when he saw just how brightly the sun was shining.

But, why waste a vacation day?

Instead, Jason dressed in his pale green shirt and tan khaki work uniform, hopped on his bike and rode to the Fresh Market, his green apron tucked in his back pocket.

For a moment, while riding, looked down at the pavement as the bike sped downhill.

The morning breeze in his hair and the sun on his skin, Jason let his feet off the pedals, smiling to himself as the ground moved below.

He thought of the cafeteria’s linoleum floor as the pavement sped beneath his feet.

By the time Nick walked over to the aisle where Jason spent most of his day, the welt on Jason’s forehead had nearly disappeared.

Nick — a short, good-natured heavy-set kid — was always someone Jason always considered a good guy. He was always friendly, and only seemed withdrawn when Jason talked about his time in college. Nick dropped out and seemed to regret it.

“Yo, Buddy” said a grinning Nick as he reached down to grab a can of peas from the belt to help a woman in Jason’s lane to finish bagging her groceries. “What you up to after work?”

“Eh, I just rented that new Hellsent shooter game,” Jason said as the woman lifted her bags and turned away.

“Thanks ma’am, have a nice day.”

“Word?” replied Nick as he nudged Jason’s elbow with a nod and looked into the distance – it was a sort of silent suggestion that Jason should check out the butt on the woman whose groceries he had just bagged as she walked away.

“I been wanting to check that out. It’s from a new developer or some shit, right?” continued Nick.

“Yeah, it’s pretty cool. I played a little last night. If you want to come by, we can order pizza and play tonight.”

“Yeah, sure, sounds cool. I got some banging trees, too. We can kill brain cells and demons,” laughed Nick before he wandered off to help another customer.  

That evening, Jason was already playing video games as Nick, dressed in a ratty red t-shirt and a pair of jeans, loose on his frame, packed weed into a glass pipe.

“Dude, this stuff is great. I got it a few days back from my buddy. He grows it in his garage,” said Nick, his fingers topping on the top of the green pile of weed he’s overstuffed into a blue glass pipe.

“Here,” he said, handing it to Jason. “Take the first hit. Tell me what you think. It should taste like strawberries.”

Jason handed Nick the controller, taking the pipe. He leaned back into the couch as Nick fired a virtual machine gun into the face of a rampaging monster.

“Whoa! The guns in this are sick,” laughed Nick as virtual blood splattered across the screen.

Upon lighting the pipe, Jason breathed in deep.

He smiled and exhaled.

Nick stopped shooting as a smoke cloud gathered around Jason’s face. The red haired grocery store employee exhaled and noticed Nick had seemingly stopped playing the game.

“Dude, no, you got to move, you’re getting killed,” said Jason, coughing out the last bits of the weed smoke in his lungs.

Nick sat silently staring at the TV as demons began to win their takeover of the planet. Jason looked over at his friend, prepared to goad him on his poor performance. The television screen turned red as the room filled with the sounds of Nick’s character being killed as he sat, stiff and still, silently watching.

“Dude, you’re not even trying to move,” Jason said as he turned to look at Nick.

He saw the young man sitting still, his eyes open wide.  

“Here, gimme the controller, I’ll kill them.”

Nick didn’t reach for the glass pipe that Jason’s tried to hand him as he reached for the controller. Instead, Nick was stoic, his fingers stiff on the controller. Jason looked at Nick’s eyes, and, although the rest of Nick wa still, his pupils moved side to side.

“You ok, man?” asked Jason.

Leaning forward, Jason put the still smoking glass pipe down on the coffee table in front of the couch.

The electronic screech of an on-screen demon’s laughter filled the room when Nick’s character was finally killed. Nick didn’t react. Instead, he stayed still as a statue and his eyes move over to look at Jason, darting from floor to ceiling and back again.

“Hey, Nick,” said Jason as he placed his hand on Nick’s shoulder.

At Jason’s touch, Nick gasped and breathed in hard, like he’s hungry for air.

He sat up, gasping, and dropped the controller.

“Whoa, that was weird,” Nick said, flashing a smile that relieved Jason.

Nick smiled and rubbed his eyes as he reached to pick up the fallen controller.

“I must have smoked too much on the way over.”

 “What happened?” asked Jason.

“I just got, like, all stiff or something. Did the trees make you feel that too?”

“Nah, I’m fine… but, I’ll just order pizza and take it easy on that for a bit,” said Jason pulling out his cell phone while Nick returned to the game.

Far away, in a dark room lit by the glow of an array of computer equipment, a woman in a dark blue military jacket sat hunched over a television screen displaying a map of Philadelphia.

The only sound in the room was the soft hum of computer fans cooling the equipment.

A yellow circle suddenly appeared on a small part of the illuminated map followed by an audible ‘blip’.

“Sir, we have another energy signature coming out of Philadelphia. The readings and locale are similar to that signature we caught on the scanner last night,” she said.

A large, imposing man, dressed in a military uniform walked over to the woman. Lights flickering on a million computer panels glimmered off of the medals on the man’s uniform as he stepped behind her and leaned over her shoulder.

“Ok, send someone over to check it out,” he said, his face hidden in shadow as he loomed over the seated woman.

At Jason’s place, the doorbell rang.

“Huh, I bet the pizza guy forgot something. We tipped him, right?” asked Jason as he set down his video game controller on top of a half empty pizza box.

Nick turned, ready to reply with a mouth full of pizza.

“Yeah, I gave him five bucks. But, maybe we got soda with the large pie and he forgot to give it to us? They did that last time,” said Nick.

Jason lingered in the doorway of his apartment for a moment, listening to Nick before he stepped into the small hallway between his apartment and the stairs down to the front door. The sounds of the videogame can be heard throughout the hallway.

Stepping downstairs to the entrance, Jason’s hand turned the knob and he swung the door open to see two uniformed police officers on the porch of the house.

“Oh, um, can I help you, officers?” questioned a slightly stoned Jason, his eyes still red and weary.

“Yes sir,” replied the taller of the two officers, both young men. The taller one had a chiseled jaw and hard stare. The other, shorter police officer seemed to be looking past Jason, like he was trying to peek behind him into the apartment’s hallway.

“We have a report of a disturbance at this residence. Is there anyone inside with you?” asked the taller cop.

“Oh, um, just my friend. I guess we were playing videogames pretty loud. I’ll go turn them down, thanks,” said Jason, and, with that, he stepped back, ready to close the door.

The taller officer put up his hand, catching the door.

“Not that type of disturbance. If you’ll have us inside for a moment, we can check it out,” said The Officer.

While Jason was confronted by the taller police officer, the second cop pulled a black box from his pocket. It wasn’t something that looked like standard police issue equipment to Jason. The device looked like a handheld videogame, like a black and green gameboy with no casing, it had wires throughout the body of it that jutted out at odd angles.

The short cop turned it on with the twist of a knob on the top and it immediately came to life with a loud beeping.

“Inside,” said the short officer, never taking his eyes off the strange machine.

Jason looked down at it, about to make a joke that it looked like one of those ectoplasm scanning devices from the “Ghostbusters” movies, but, he held his tongue, not wanting to interfere with whatever the police were doing.

“Umm, well,” Jason stammered, his mind suddenly pictured them walking in with that device to find a fat kid sitting in his apartment playing videogames while smoking a pipe full of pretty decent – and highly illegal – marijuana.

“Guys, I mean, I’m kind of busy. We will just keep it down and, you won’t hear a call from this place again, I promise,” Jason said as he began to gently push back against the taller officer’s arm in an effort to shut the door.

“Dan, it’s getting stronger,” said the shorter cop.

“Son, we’re going to do a quick sweep and…” started the taller cop.

“Uh, um…” Jason stumbled over his words as he steps backward. In a moment of panic, he dropped the charade and turned, running back to his apartment.

The Officers followed, shouting for him to halt. Jason flung open his apartment door and slammed it behind him.

“Dude, cops!” Jason yelled.

Without a word, Nick grabbed the small glass pipe and thrust it into his pocket. Jason reached under the kitchen sink and turned, and in one motion, raised his left hand, waving a blue aerosol bottle, hurriedly dispersing the scent of wildflowers throughout the room.

“They got some kinda sensor shit for the weed,” Jason said in a stern, yet hushed voice – the voice your mother uses when she wants to get your attention in church.

Jason’s face was lined with panic just as the apartment door was kicked open.

WHAM!

“Get your hands up, boys. I don’t know what you’re thinking running like that,” the taller officer said as he burst through the door.

“Look, we were just hanging out. The noise is the TV, man,” Jason said, as he brought his hands up toward the ceiling. His bottle of air freshener hit the floor with a thud.

“I said get them up!” the cop yelled. He set his eyes on Jason as he lifted his pistol, bringing it to point at the young man’s face.

The other officer entered the room, still looking down at the beeping device in his hands.

“No… No,” muttered Jason as he raised his empty hands.

He turned his head to look at Nick. Nick was standing just in front of the couch, slouched with his hands at his sides. His t-shirt –it read “Han shot first” and had a cartoon picture of Harrison Ford on it – was stained with grease from the pizza.

Nick keeps his hands at his sides and didn’t budge.

“Get your hands up, man. Come on!” shouted a frightened Jason, staring at his friend.

On the other side of the room, the machine in the shorter officer’s hands went crazy. It beeped and whined, screeching like a sick baby bird.

Jason turned to look back at The Officers as they stood still. One had a gun pointed at Jason, the other had his eyes glued to his device.

But, other than the noise of the device, it was silent in the room.

Cops bark like dogs, especially when they are worked up, Jason thought.

But at that moment, the taller officer just stared back at Jason.

Jason felt a strange sense of unease as he looked up at the tall officer who still had a gun leveled at his eyes.

Jason stepped to the left and the policeman’s aim didn’t follow.

Instead, only the cop’s eyes moved, following Jason as he stepped away from in front of the barrel of the gun.

The machine screamed in the shorter cop’s still hands.

“Um,” Jason muttered, as he began to walk towards the front door past the two cops. They made no move to stop him.

In fact, except for Jason, the three other men in the small apartment stood in stiff silence.

Jason looked back at his friend while the machine continued to sour the air with its irritating song. An ear-piercing electronic whine filled the room as Jason stepped closer to the shorter officer.  

Wincing from the noise, Jason stepped around the immobile law enforcement officials and opened the front door, before he looked back over his shoulder at the three men, all standing stiff as stone.

“Nick, I…” Jason began to say.

Just then, the three men gasped for breath.

“That’s it. Get down!” shouted the taller officer, firing his gun straight through the apartment wall where Jason had just been standing.

The bullet cut into the plaster and Nick moved his hands up to cover his ears, trying to shut out the noise from the screeching machine and the crack of the pistol shot.

Jason didn’t wait around to see what would happen next.

He bolted out of his apartment, bounding through the old building that he’d always thought had a charmingly long hallway between his door and the downstairs front entrance.

Suddenly, Jason wished this hallway was much, charmingly shorter.

Lifting his feet, Jason shook off any feeling of being stoned as the panicked adrenaline sped him forward.

He finally reached the flight of stairs, just as The Officers burst out of the apartment after him.

His feet carrying him as fast as he can go, Jason opened the downstairs door to the outside world and looked up and down the street for someplace to run. It was just after twilight on a weekday evening and the sidewalks outside the apartment building were alive with people out walking their dogs and pushing their kids in strollers.

Without a moment to decide what to do, Jason looked across the street for someplace to hide.

The Officers have sped down the stairs, just in time to find an indecisive Jason on the porch. The tall cop lifted his gun, getting his sights trained again on Jason. The other looked at the screaming device as he fumbled around on his waist, one hand blindly reaching for his gun.

“Wait!” shouted a panicked Jason as he began to stumble backwards.

Jason’s back hit the fence along the edge of the porch and he began to stumble over.

Looking down, he saw his shoes and, below them, he watched the faces of the two police officers, both raising their guns toward him as he tumbled backwards over the fence.

Then, instead of landing on his head, Jason watched the two officers as their faces grow wide with surprise and their forms suddenly got smaller. From between his feet, Jason watched the men, seemingly stunned, looking back at him as he fell away from the porch.

Jason wasn’t falling down.

He fell out.

Instead of landing hard in the bushes alongside the porch, Jason’s body careened away from the house. From his point of view, Jason saw the concrete steps up to his porch and the walkway in his yard. While he was trying to figure out what he was seeing, Jason’s head slammed into the back of a man walking his dog on the sidewalk at least three yards from his porch.

“What?!” shouted the dog walker as he turned to look back at Jason, who was curled in a ball when his head and shoulder pressed into the man’s back.

Hovering a few feet from the ground, Jason saw everything from his horizontal position.

After impact, he tried to scramble to his feet, but Jason can’t touch the ground.

He flailed, struggling against the dog walker, Jason’s arms and head entangle in the man’s jacket, knocking the man onto the ground. The small dog barks wildly as Jason, looking like a twisting ball of arms and legs, strained as he tried to right himself.

Jason’s body separated from the coat and he shot away, like litter caught in a breeze. His form soaring, just feet above the pavement, Jason moved over the street. From his viewpoint, everything was spinning and he tried to right himself and he spun, unable to control his trajectory. His form shot across the street and he finally slammed into the aluminum siding on the front of a row home directly across the street from his apartment building.

His face mashed into a creeping vine grown against the house, Jason gripped the foliage in an effort to get his head back over his feet. His fingers slipped through the thin, wet plants as he tried to make sense of what was happening.

The cops watched the whole thing. Theynever stepped foot off of Jason’s porch.

“Halt. Get back here!” shouted the tall police officer from across the street.

Then, the police opened fire.

Terrified screams filled the block as passerby ducked and took cover while the police shot at the man who had just flown off the porch and was scrambling against the cheap aluminum siding of the house across the street.

“Shit, shit!” gasped Jason.

He pulled at the plant and was finally able to correct his stance, getting his hands firmly planted in the plants, Jason clung to the creeping ivy along the façade of the house. He dug his fingers into the side of the building and – nearly weightlessly – pulled himself up the side of the house.

Police continued firing and Jason could hear the bee’s hum of bullet trails as they speed past his head. Dirt shot into his eyes as the bullets tore into the building as he climbed. His eyes welled with tears and the thought of dying, but he kept his hands pulling at the creeping ivy.

Reaching the top of the house, Jason was suddenly flung once more away from his home and into the open air. He rolled, head over feet, balling up again, trying to prepare for the next impact when he remembered his dream.

“The floor, the cafeteria...,” he thought as his spinning self soared past a chimney.

With all the grace of a crash test dummy flung into the air by a catapult, Jason tried to move to find a way to control his trajectory.

Sitting up as the wind tugged at his face, Jason watched power lines and tree branches whip at his sides while he was sent through the sky.

“Ok…I can, maybe…” Jason muttered as he moved, trying to sit up. He stared at his shoes and tried to focus on the steady image, just like he did when he stared at the linoleum floor in his dream.

Looking past his feet to the spinning world around him, Jason felt the wind slow and the spinning start to subdue.

He looked down, seeing rows of homes and the shocked faces of the people who noticed him. He stared past his feet, allowing his dirty sneakers to frame the world below.

The blur of gray, green and red as he passed over streets, trees and row homes, soon cleared to show the detailed patched roofs and chimneys he was flying by.  

Finally able to focus, Jason sat up.

His legs outstretched, Jason sat in the open air. His body was still moving, but the spinning had stopped. Feeling a firm nothingness beneath him, Jason looked at his feet while he sped through the atmosphere. He took a breath and tried to crawl to his knees.

In fact, as he moved, Jason bent a knee and – to his surprise – he felt the nothingness, like an unseen floor, that held firm beneath his body. He sat up and began to put his foot down toward the distant ground. He shifted his weight and found that he could soon put all of his weight on his left foot.

A wide smile crossed his face as Jason set his foot and leaned forward, climbing to stand.

“Holy shit,” said Jason while he looked down, keeping his eyes focused on his feet. He thought of his dream, and those linoleum tiles that moved so slowly as he hovered just inches above.

He looked past his feet, trying to focus on the blurred ground below.

And soon, the world moving beneath his feet slowed, coming to a halt.

Jason stood in midair, looking around him, and down at the nothing between his shoes and the street far below.

The panic that had filled Jason’s mind burned away, and he felt instead a rush of excitement as he gathered a sense of control over the situation.

“Holy fucking shit….I’m flying like a fucking superhero!” he screamed, raising his hands in celebration.

He stood there, stopped in mid-air, like he’s was on some sort of unseen platform, and gathered himself.

“I guess…I am flying,” he said.

“But, what now?” he thought while looking around. Jason watched the whole of Philadelphia spread out below him. He was a few hundred feet off the ground, just a bit above the rooftops below. His body moved slowly as the darkness of evening set in.

He stood there, noticing a “Go Philles!” banner hung on the top of the four-story housing below.

Looking down, he saw people on the street noticing him from below. With nowhere to hide, he stood in the air just above a billboard for used cars along nearby I-95. Cars pulled over, kids pointed out of sunroofs and adults stared wide eyed as Jason looked down at them.

He figured he’d only traveled a few blocks from his apartment. He could see the sign for the Girard Avenue exit he took every time he wanted to drive to the mall. He smiled and waved back at those who stared, just as Jason noticed police cars coming up the roadway below his feet.

“Jason Willow!” echoed a megaphone somewhere below.

“Jason Willow, stay where you are!”

His name bounced back, reverberating off the sides of the brick buildings near the highway. He looked around for the voice.

Below his feet, Jason spotted two police cars pulling under his feet as they started to block traffic on the roadway. A cop with his head out of one of the car’s side windows looked right at Jason and squawked through the megaphone.

“Jason, it’s over. For your own safety and that of those around you, come down or we will shoot!”

His moment of freedom ruined, Jason filled with panic once again, and his grasp on this particular spot in the air began to slip. Looking at the cop cars below, between his white and blue Converse All-Stars, Jason watched as the world below begin to slide away.

Without ever moving his legs, Jason was carried away over the Delaware River while the world suddenly sped below him.

He began to breathe easier. Jason looked up and the ground below his feet sped away. In no time at all The Officers were quickly in the distance.  

His apartment was now probably miles away. Everything below Jason’s feet sped into a blur when he looked up at the moon.

“Ok…again,” he said as he looked back down at his feet. Using his posture as a guide, Jason once again steadied his breath and was again able to slow his motion.

Throughout his strange flight, Jason had begun to realize that, while he’s controlling his stance and speed, he’s not really controlling the direction in which he’s moving over the earth.

Finding himself above a wooded area, Jason’s mind raced determine just how far he’d gone.

How long ago was it now that he was stoned, finishing his third slice of pizza and taking down that alien encampment with Nick?  

He then remembered Nick and the cops, who were probably still at his apartment, as he found stable footing among the clouds and looked down on the world. While he may have been disoriented for a moment, Jason was no stranger to his surroundings. He had lived in Philly since he graduated college – Bachelor of Arts from Temple – and he wasn’t lost ever in the city, even if he was above it.

But, even if he didn’t need a landmark, he found one.

He realized he was above the woods of Fairmount Park when he looked down and recognized the green faded copper on the roof of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the lights from cars in the distance slowly inching through traffic around Elkin’s Oval. He grinned at the moonlight reflecting off of the Schuylkill River as it snaked a path southeast toward the ocean.

“Ok, now what?” he asked aloud as he surveyed his surroundings.

Jason looked out along the horizon, watching a long line of traffic flow beneath his feet on I-76, and he saw the shocked faces of drivers looking back at him, some obscured by murky windshields.

He couldn’t go home. He knew that. The police were there.

He wondered for a moment if Nick had escaped.

But, then again, police might forgive something like a little bit of pot possession when someone they’re following disappears into the sky after floating straight across the street, right?

But, where could he go?

“Mom’s,” he thought.

“Yeah, she lives just off of 76…not too far.”

Ok, now, how to get there.  Jason had gotten the standing thing down, at least, for the moment, but, what made him move across the sky? Why was he soaring over the city with reckless abandon?

But, for the moment at least, he was at a dead stop.

He just stood there — in midair — doing little more than providing a spectacle for the sorry saps below on their evening commute.

Without a word, he looked around, and then down at his shoes and – like a toddler lurching forward from its mother’s grasp – took a step, finding that his weight held as he put down his foot.

Amidst power lines and insurance company billboards that lined the highway, Jason took another step.

Then, he decided to walk to his mother’s home.

In a darkened control room, the general, with his shimmering medals, peered down, closely examining a map of the City of Brotherly Love. A red dot pulsed as he stared down at the screen.

“Yes, yes, I know,” he said to no one in the room. Instead, the shadowy figure spoke into an earbud as he viewed the map.

“Yes, of course. We won’t let him out of our sight. We know his location. I’ll get the response team on him immediately.”

The general reached up and clicked his hand on the earbud, a light on the side turned off.

The man, an imposing, stocky specimen of a soldier in his autumn years, turned to a computer near his hips and began to type.

In New York City, a gloved hand picked up a ringing cell phone.

The grey haired, middle-aged man lifting the phone was impressively muscled and dressed in a black and gold police uniform. The uniform was tight - streamlined almost - and his badge consisted of the silhouette of a golden eagle that stretched vertically down the entirety of his chest.

He stared out over the skyline as he answered his phone.

“Yes, sir?” he said.

The man’s feet hang from the edge of the George Washington Bridge as he sat on the edge of the steel like a turn of the century construction worker relaxing at lunch. Traffic honked below him.

“Officer, we need your help,” said the voice on the other end.

In his small control room, the general loomed over his computer monitor. The Officer’s chiseled face appeared on the screen.

“We’ve lost a target. He’s hovering somewhere over Southeastern Pennsylvania at the moment,” the general said.

“Ok, sure. I can be there. What should I expect?” replied The Officer as he climbed to his feet.

“Not sure. He’s a young man and his abilities are new to him. We don’t know what he can do, but he’s able to fly, that’s for sure. His name is Jason Willow. He’s a grocery store clerk in Philadelphia. It looks like he’s leaving the city.”

“I’m on my way.”

In Lancaster, PA, a middle aged woman knelt in soil, studying the roots of a dead tomato plant in her garden. She struggled to pull the brown roots from the dry, crumbling dirt.

A small, white dog playfully scraped its paws in the dirt, trying to help her pull the roots.

“Mom!... Mom!”

She looked up. Seeing nothing, she shook her head.

“Did you hear that Tesla? No? Mommy must be going nuts,” she said, looking at the dog.

The mutt stopped digging. It looked up at the sky and began to bark.

“Huh? What’s up Tess?” the woman wondered aloud.

Across the road from the house, a drop of blood hit the pavement.

Another followed right behind it, falling through the dry air.

The woman’s glace moved skyward and she saw a drop of blood about to drip from the bottom of a white and blue sneaker hanging about 30 feet in the air.

“Mom….help,” moaned Jason Willow.

Blood streamed from the corners of his eyes, out of his nose and from the sides of his mouth as he spoke.

He collapsed in mid-air and fell, hitting the dirt with a dry thud.

His mother ran to him, but the dog beat her there.