That last question bugged him, so he angled his body downward so he could get below the clouds and see if he could see any landmarks. He put his hands out in front in a Superman pose and let out a belly laugh. This was far better than all the dreams he had when he was young. When he broke through the cloud layer, there was no land below, nothing but water. Great. He would have to wait until he saw some land so he would know where he was. When he finally saw land, he also saw the sun, and the coastline didn’t look too familiar. He tried slowing down, to limited success. The land was zipping by way too fast below him. He angled downward more, and the ground came up way faster than he expected. He narrowly missed a group of banana trees and hit the ground at over 700 miles per hour, leaving a long furrow in the ground.
Climbing out of the crater he had made, he found himself face to face with two black men staring down at him. One of them was pouring out the contents of a flask he had been drinking from and the other was just standing there slack jawed. He finally recovered his wits enough to address Walter.
“Jambo mzungu.”
“Come again?” Walter said.
“Jambo…hello. You’re a mzungu.”
“Mzungu? What’s that?”
“That’s what you are. A white fellow.”
“Never heard that word before.”
“You not been in Kenya much before?”
“First time here.”
“What did you do?” the other Kenyan asked, “Fall out of the plane?”
“No plane. I don’t know how to explain it to you guys.”
“You fell from the sky like a stone, make a hole in the ground, and you’re not hurt. That’s some weird juju there.”
“I’m in Africa?”
“Yeah, mzungu. That town over there is Ahero.”
“Wow, went farther than I thought,” Walter said, lifting into the sky and taking off, heading west.
4
Franklin walked out of the store and took about ten steps across the parking lot when he was whisked clean off his feet and carried five-hundred feet into the air. The city below went by in a blur until he was set down at the front door of Walter’s apartment.
“Whoa dude, could have warned me about that,” he said.
“Didn’t think you’d mind the ride home,” Walter said.
“Yeah, it was way cool, but I never saw you coming. So you can really fly. What’s it like?”
“Like nothing you can ever imagine. You’ve had the dreams? This is way beyond you’d think it would feel like. I passed an airplane. Can you believe that?”
“Hey, slow down old man. I’m the kid, remember? Can we take this inside?”
They went in and sat down, but Otis was standing near the door and whining.
“I’ll take him out,” Franklin said.
When Franklin came back, Walter handed him a Coke and sat down in his recliner with a beer. He finished one beer, went for another, and finished that one.
“That’s weird,” he said.
“What’s weird?”
“Not even a buzz. Takes a bit to get me drunk, but I’m not even feeling a buzz after two. That’s not normal.”
“Part of your powers? You can’t get drunk?”
“Maybe. Only one way to find out. I’ll have to approach this scientifically.”
In the time it took Franklin to finish two Cokes, Walter downed an entire twelve pack without even feeling buzzed.
“Well, I guess that could have its advantages, at times.”
“You’re not feeling anything?”
“Nope, like I was drinking water, except…yeah, excuse me for a sec.”
“Might not get you drunk, but it still goes through you,” Franklin said when Walter came back.
“You got that right, like a racehorse. Where were we?”
“How far did you fly?”
“Would you believe Africa…Kenya to be precise.”
“You went to Africa and back in a few minutes?”
“Pretty much. Had a hard time figuring out how to slow down. Left a good sized crater and a couple locals saw me. If you could have seen the looks on their faces.”
“You must have really been booking.”
“Not sure. I passed an airliner somewhere over the Atlantic and kept going faster. Made a sonic boom over Europe and the next thing I knew I was over Africa. Figured out slowing down by the time I got back here. It’s pretty much in the head.”
“In the head?”
“Yeah, not like I have an engine to control or anything. I want to speed up and it just happens. I want to slow down, it happens. It’s not really a physical thing…well…it kind of is. It’s hard to explain. The body feels different when I’m changing speed, but I don’t know how I’m controlling it.”
“You’re gonna need a manager.”
“A manager? You get that from your comics?”
“Maybe not a manager. I don’t know what to call it. The support guy, the guy in the lair sitting behind all the computers. ‘Hey Superman, robbery in progress in Indian Hill’ and then the hero says, ‘I’m on it.’ That sort of thing.”
“Lair? You think there’s a lair somewhere?”
“We’re not sitting in it?”
“This is just my apartment, and not a very nice one either.”
“Let me guess. Too many noisy kids?”
“That’s part of it.”
“What do you think? You think I can be the dude helping you be the hero?”
“I’m not a hero.”
“Man, you’re Superman. If that’s not a hero, I don’t know what is.”
“Look kid, what I can do is pretty far out. I felt like a kid flying out there, but I don’t know what to do with this. I mean, what do I do, fly around looking for bad guys and just scoop ‘em up and drop ‘em off at the station?”
“That would be a start.”
“And where do you come in?”
“I don’t know. I can go online and when I see stuff going down, I let you know?”
“How do you suppose you do that?”
“Get me a phone and get you
