Chapter 8: Constrained

Since Tony and his compatriots had interrupted the later part of my day—which would have included getting something to eat—I had him run me to a fast food restaurant so that I could get something to eat. Of course I sat in the back seat of the convertible- the better to see him if he decided to try and do something to try and take control from me. I was very much aware, still, that until I had achieved my goals, and he had finished his usefulness to me, that my luck could change at the drop of a hat, proverbially speaking, and that I couldn’t let that happen, or I was fucked.

As we were pulling out of the drive-thru, and about to pull back onto the main street, a phalanx of police vehicles raced by, heading for the downtown area. I knew, almost as soon as I made the decision to go and follow them, that it was a bad idea, but my curiosity just wouldn’t let me ignore the potential of what that processional of law enforcement could possibly mean. This wasn’t supposed to be a sight-seeing drive, but I had a feeling that this might be something I’d want to have seen with my own eyes.

It was a bad idea, and it was something I would have wanted to see.

It was a bad idea, because we happened to end up right inside of the cordoned off area right as they—the police, that is—closed off the streets to other traffic for a few blocks in all directions from where the action was taking place. It was also a bad idea, because after we got caught up in the police cordon, not only couldn’t we go anywhere, but there was nothing to see. Well, not at first.

It was something I would have wanted to see, because about five or ten minutes after we were sat there, parked on the side of the road, when the action started making itself known; the first sign was a rather bright bit of flashing, almost strobe-like, from around a corner about a block or so ahead of where we were sat. The action quickly escalated, when a few, smallish boxy objects—which I later learned were microwaves—sailed through the air from the same general location; they made a rather terrific crashing sound, especially the ones that hit parked cars and glass window fronts. This was quickly followed by a flying person, who veered in our general direction, and I got a good look at both him, and the one who followed.

What I noticed about the first person—the flying person—at first, was the trash can lid that they were standing on, flying through the air, much like a skateboarder on the street. He appeared to be a teenage kid, dressed in what looked like a blue spandex uniform, with something like a bulletproof vest, and a pair of really bulky leg-warmer kind of things. In the brief look of him in those few moments that I caught of his face, he was smiling; he looked like he was having the time of his life.

The other person was much more clearly a guy, an older one in comparison to the flying teen; he might have been as old as thirty; he stomped, stalked, pounded after the teen, throwing almost anything he could get his hands upon; he was tall, well built—but not overblown—and dressed simply in a pair of jeans, heavy boots, and a “wife-beater” t-shirt. There were moments when he would bounce around and leap onto or off of things like a parkour enthusiast, trying to get to the flying teen.

The teen was dodging just about everything thrown at him, and he was throwing back what seemed to be balls of charged lightning, which the gravity-bound man dodge with almost equal ability; he got tagged, once or twice, before the teen managed to hit him squarely with one of those charged lightning bursts. He jerked as if tazed, and then collapsed to the ground. The teen slowed to a halt, moving to hover perhaps a few meters from the ground above the prone man, a slight smirk on his face; by this point, the two of them were maybe fifty meters away from where we were sat, Tony and I.

I figured that the kid was playing the hero, since he didn’t seem to be trying to do away with the other guy, but the police apparently decided that now that there weren’t two super-powered guys to deal with, it was the time to swoop in and pretend that they had control of the situation. They demanded, loudly of course, that the flying teen stop flying, get on his knees, and put his arms behind his back. The kid solidified his role as a hero, at least in my mind, by actually doing what they demanded.

“Hey, I’m on your side!” the kid—and it was definitely a kid, judging by the voice; a pitch that basically told one and all that puberty was only just taking hold of him—protested, as the officers just about leapt on him to hold him down and put cuffs on him. At nearly the same time, almost absently, another pair of officers nonchalantly wandered over to the other, prone man, and began to check him over, before attempting to cuff him.

Predictably, that was when the prone man regained consciousness.

The officer closest to him—the one applying the cuffs—began to struggle with him for a brief moment, trying to keep his leverage and get the second of the cuffs around his other wrist and finish restraining him, but it was a lost cause as the man managed to not only fight his way free, but grabbed the officer by his shoulder and his gun belt, and tossed him into the other, female officer.

That drew the attention of the other officers, who had had very little need to dogpile the teen kid, but who now stopped what they were doing. The kid hadn’t been resisting— something he definitely could have been doing, but even still, the other officers climbed to their feet, with a pair of them reaching for weapons while the other pair ran at the newly awakened criminal, attempting to bull rush him, I figured. The remaining officer pulled the kid to his feet, and I could see that the officer was distracted by the actions of his brothers-in-blue; half of the metal cuff was attached to the wrist of the teen, but the other half dangled, unburdened.