“Mum, she’s OK, she’s fine! I don’t know how he did it, but Danny saved her! He ran across, picked her up and saved her life! It was brilliant! She went all white and she was shaking and everything, but apart from that she was OK. Her bike was wrecked, though. And she wouldn’t let go of Danny for ages. Now she’ll be even more nuts about him. The police came and an ambulance and everything, but they didn’t need it. No one was really hurt.”
“You’re sure she was OK?”
Colin nodded. “She was. It only took her a few minutes to start blaming Brian for the accident, so that means she was back to normal.”
“Who were the ambulance crew?” his father asked. He was a paramedic, based at the local hospital.
“I didn’t recognise them.” Around a mouthful of mashed potato and peas, he added, “but they checked her over and said she was OK.”
Colin’s mother gave him her famous thin-lipped look, the one that told him she wanted to believe him, but wasn’t so sure. “You promise you’re not making this up?”
“No, it really happened!” Colin waved his cutlery around, demonstrating: “The bus came brrrrrmm around the corner, really fast, and Susie was here, OK? And we were on the corner and all of a sudden Danny was like … zoom! One second he was right next to me and the next he’d scooped Susie up in his arms and was lying on the far side of the road, holding on to her. Then the bus went screeee because the driver hit the brakes, but it was too late because he still hit the bike.”
Colin’s parents looked at each other. His dad said, very quietly, “I see.”
“It’s true,” Colin said. “I swear! You can ask Danny or Brian.”
“That was… very brave of Danny,” his mother said, “and very stupid of Susie to just stop in the middle of the road.”
“Yeah, I know. You should have seen Brian’s face, though. I thought he was going to throw up or faint or something.”
Mr Wagner pushed himself back from the table and got to his feet. “I’d better phone Susie’s parents, see if they need anything. And Danny’s parents too.”
“He’s fine,” Colin said. “There wasn’t a scratch on him.”
“Well, I’ll phone them anyway. Danny might have gone into shock.” He went out into the hall, closing the door behind him.
“So,” Colin’s mother said, “will Danny be coming to the party tomorrow?”
Colin nodded. “Yeah, I think so. And Brian says his parents are going out and they wanted to know if Susie could come too. So I said it was OK. Who else is coming?”
His mother began to list the friends and relatives that had been invited to the party. There were the usual last-minute cancellations and changes and Colin found himself wondering why they couldn’t go to someone else’s.
“And I don’t want you staying up late tonight. We’re going to have a full day tomorrow getting everything ready.”
“But I want to see Max Dalton’s interview!”
“You can tape it and watch it in the morning.”
“You just said that we’re going to have a full day tomorrow!”
“Then you can watch it the day after.”
“Then I’ll be the only one who hasn’t seen it!”
Caroline Wagner sighed. “All right, then. You can stay up for it. Now finish your dinner.”
After dinner, Colin phoned Brian. “So are you coming out tonight?”
“Are you kidding?” Brian said. “My folks went mad about what nearly happened to Susie! They said it was my fault for teasing her. I added up all their punishments and apparently I’m grounded until I’m sixty-one. They’re not even letting me go to your party tomorrow night!”
“You could tell them that you have to come so that you can thank Danny for saving Susie’s life.”
“I already thought of that, but they told me to phone him instead. You know what Susie did? Remember when I had my camera last summer? Well, she took all my photos that Danny was in and she put them up all over her bedroom wall.”
Colin laughed.
“Mad, isn’t it? And you know something else? You know the way we have to write about one of the heroes for homework? Well, Susie’s class has to write an essay called ‘My Hero’, and she’s going to write about Danny.” He let out a long sigh. “God, he’s going to have even more girls after him now! And it’s not as though he’s really a hero. I mean, he just happened to have been looking in the right direction to see the bus. Any one of us could have done it.”
“There was no way he could have seen the bus coming from where we were standing. He must have heard it.” Colin paused. “Though I’ve always had good hearing and I didn’t hear it coming. Did you?”
“No.”
“Then how did he know?”
Brian didn’t have an answer for that one.
“And how did he move so fast?” Colin asked. “I mean, one second he was right next to me, the next he was picking Susie up.”
“I suppose… Col, I wasn’t looking in the right direction. I heard Danny shouting at her, so I turned to look at him. I mean, I was looking right at Susie. I turned to look at Danny when he shouted, but he was gone. And then I looked back and they were on the ground on the other side of the road. I didn’t actually see it happen. Did you?”
“I did,” Colin said. “He was just a blur.”
“But my point is this: he did it in the time it took me to turn my head twice.” They both fell silent again, then, slowly and carefully, Brian said, “Col, that’s not possible. No one can move that fast.”
“Not these days, anyway,” Colin said. “Not since all the superhumans disappeared.”
There was another long pause.
Brian said, “What if…?” He stopped. “Nah, that’s crazy.”
“What?”
“Well, what if Danny is a superhuman?”
Most of the prison was underground. From the air, it looked like a small, isolated farmhouse. Its exact location was known only to a small handful of people. Even the prison doctor didn’t know how to find the place on his own; he was driven to and from the prison in a truck with blacked-out windows.
Warden Mills stood in the doorway, squinting his eyes to shield them from the dust stirred up by the twin rotors of the descending Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopter. Even before the copter touched down, the rear ramp was dropped and fourteen people disembarked. The woman was dressed in a simple black trouser suit with a white blouse and flat shoes, but the thirteen men were wearing crisp army fatigues and all were heavily armed.
“What’s all this?” the warden asked.
“Random inspection,” the woman said.
“But we just had one last month!”
“I think you’ll find that the key word is ‘random’. It wouldn’t be a random inspection if you knew we were coming, would it?”
“Guess not.”
Mills led them along the hall and down into the storm cellar, where a hidden door slid back to reveal the wide stone stairway that led into the prison.
As the men began to unpack their equipment, Mills turned to the woman. “How long will this take?”
“Not long,” she said. “Anything to report?”
“No.”