Force of Will part 2
by BlueBard

Will's beloved royal blue Chevy sat forlornly on its rims, the tires cut to black ribbons. The driver's door hung open to reveal slashed vinyl and shreds of white foam erupting from the despoiled upholstery. Will let out a strangled cry of rage.

From either side of him, a group of men slipped out of the dusky shadows into the last glow of sunset. They were dressed roughly, and each carried a bat or a pipe. The man in front spoke with a knowing smirk pasted on his face as he brandished a set of brass knuckles.

"Welcome to Sycamore Street, Mr. Powers. Say hello to the Welcoming Committee."

As if to punctuate the thug's statement, one of the men stepped over to the car and raised a baseball bat high over his head, a look of vicious satisfaction on his face. "No!" Will cried out with an outstretched hand. The bat descended on the car's windshield and the glass shattered. Will barked an inarticulate cry of frustration and then sharply focused on the leader.

"Who are you?" Will hissed through clenched teeth, his voice low and menacing . "What do you want?"

The lead thug laughed harshly. "Like I said, Mr. Powers; we're the Welcoming Committee. You're new around here, so we thought we'd make some introductions, get acquainted, show you the ropes... That kind of thing. We like to be friendly and helpful that way, you know?" He half turned toward his companions.

"Right, boys?" he asked them. The other men laughed in agreement.

The man faced Will again, dropping all pretense of friendliness from his expression. "One thing you should know, Mr. Powers; it ain't safe to walk around down here after dark. You need protection. That's why me and the boys are paying you a visit. Your uncle paid us to keep an eye on things for him, but he didn't keep up his payments. Bad things happen when you don't have protection."

"Like Mr. Jones getting beaten half to death, you mean," Will glared at the thug.

"Exactly!" the man smiled again. "You catch on quick, Mr. Powers. See, that wouldn't have happened if we'd been keeping an eye on things. Tell you what we'll do; you can hire us to protect your property, just like your Uncle Charlie did, and we'll see to it nothing else happens. What do you say, Mr. Powers? Do we have a deal?"

Will thought about his predicament. Before the Change, Will would have had no choice but to give in to these thugs. What could one ordinary man do against seven ruthless crooks? Will wasn't an ordinary man anymore, though. He remembered lifting his car one-handed the previous morning. Was his Edge enough to handle this kind of trouble? There was only one way to find out for certain.

"No deal," Will decided.

A look of surprise crossed the racketeer's face, and the faces of the other men. The surprise gave way to irritation and anger.

"Bad choice, pretty boy," the man replied in a hard voice. "Get 'im, boys, and make sure Momma don't recognize her son when we're through."

The thugs closed in, brandishing their weapons.

Time seemed to slow as Will rushed in to meet the charge. The lead thug's bat smashed into his forearm. Will felt the impact, but there wasn't a lot of pain. The bat glanced away, much to the wielder's surprise. Will's fist snapped out to strike his opponent's midsection. As he connected, a tingling sensation shot through his arm and the man was catapulted into the air and across the narrow street. Pain blossomed as a hard object connected with the back of his skull, but Will's anger blazed through the pain and shrugged it off. In an instant the pain dwindled to nothing, and Will was reaching out for the man behind him.

He grabbed his assailant by his leather jacket and hurled him away into a brick wall a good dozen yards away. The man thudded heavily into the wall and slumped to the ground in a daze. Two down for the moment, but the other five had closed in and began beating him from every side. Will was fast enough to duck some of the attacks, but couldn't stop them all from connecting. Only his superhuman willpower and endurance prevented him from collapsing under the rain of blows.

The hired muscle used the length of their weapons to keep themselves out of Will's own reach. He finally landed a punch thrown at one man who made the mistake of straying too close. The thug was hurled back and slammed against the Chevy, but he was immediately replaced by one of the other thugs who, though battered, rejoined the fray. Sheer determination kept Will going, but he could feel the pain and the confusion of battle gradually eroding his confidence.

"Eat this!" a man in a blue jacket exclaimed as he stepped in on Will's left side and swung his weathered baseball bat at Will's head. Will jerked backward, but was caught with a glancing blow to his temple. He fell to the ground with his head spinning and his ears ringing. The men kept hitting him, and the pain began to get worse and worse.

"Get away from me!" Will cried out in a mixture of pain and anger. The rage he felt inside suddenly became a hot surge of power running through his body, then blasted outward from him in an explosion of blue energy. The azure corona of force caught his assailants and tossed them aside like rag dolls. The three who were closest and had been standing over him were caught in the heart of the blast. They were thrown over ten feet straight up into the air Flailing wildly, they'd smacked into brick walls or slammed face first into the pavement.

The blue flare didn't pass unnoticed. Within the Freedom Fortress, Mentor's scanners pinpointed a large eruption of Energy-X. Mentor looked up from the display at Minute Man.

"It is the same unusual energy signature as before," he said. "And the police are responding to some sort of disturbance in the vicinity."

"Looks like our mysterious friend has come out in the open," Minute Man remarked. He turned toward a man clad in silver as he pointed at the city map. "Bullet, get out to that location as fast as you can, before this person can disappear again. We'll be right behind you in the Freedom Flyer."

"Aye, aye, Boss-Man!" grinned Bullet, then disappeared in a flash of silver.

Will looked up slowly, unsure of what had just happened. He'd felt the force of his rage leave his body like a surge of electricity, and now the gang had been scattered as if by a grenade blast. Only one man remained standing; the gangleader had been far enough away that the shockwave of the explosion only staggered him. The racketeer's face was frozen in an expression of shock as Will slowly climbed to his feet.

Will stared at the man, his eyes hard with anger. "Now I'm really peeved!" he growled as he advanced upon the thug menacingly.

Wide eyed, the man reached into his jacket and pulled out a semi-automatic pistol. Will stopped short as the man wrenched it up to point at his face.

"Stop right there!" the racketeer shouted in a trembling voice. "What did you do to the boys?" he demanded. A light went on in the man's eyes. "You gotta be one of those super-freaks, ain't ya?" The thought clearly panicked the desperate criminal. "Let's see how you handle a bullet to the brain, Powers!" he screamed.

Cold fear blossomed in Will's heart as the thug pulled the trigger of his gun. Time again seemed to slow as the firearm bucked from the recoil of the shot. Will's fear mingled with instinct and Energy-X to forge a new manifestation of willpower deep within him. The imperative to stop the slug from ripping through his body was instantly formed into an aura of blue force that sprang up around him and turned aside the lethal projectile.

Azure energy rippled around Will's body as he gazed in wonder. The thug gazed too, but in shock and abject fear.

"No! It ain't possible!" The man whirled away and ran as fast as his feet could carry him. They weren't fast enough, though. Will leapt forward with extraordinary speed and caught the back of the man's jacket as the blue aura faded away. He spun the thug around and wrenched the pistol out of his hand.

"Aaagh! My hand! You broke my hand!" he screamed in pain as he gripped his wrist with the other hand. Will grabbed the man at the collar and effortlessly lifted him off the ground with his left hand. The racketeer howled in wide-eyed fear.

"That's not all I'm tempted to break," Will glowered. At that moment, he heard the sirens of police cars in the distance. They were coming closer. Will wasn't ready to deal with the police; he had to get out of here.

"Better wrap this up," he thought to himself. His mind raced as he focused his attention on the racketeer.

"You and I are going to have a little talk," he said as his power kicked in once again. "You attacked me, but you'll tell the cops you don't know who it was. You'll remember I beat the living daylights out of your men. You don't remember any explosions or blue energy or bulletproof men, got it?"

"Got it, Mr. Powers," the man replied in a hollow voice as he dangled from the end of Will's arm.

"And another thing," Will added, as a malicious thought crossed his mind. "From now on, you don't want anything to do with William Powers. I frighten the hell out of you. You're going to have nightmares about me, and you won't come anywhere near me ever again." Will pushed with his mind as hard as he could. "Right?"

"Yes, Mr. Powers." A faint tinge of fear crept into the man's dull tone.

"Good. When the cops get here, you surrender peacefully." Will lowered the man to the ground. "Now, I want you to fall down. Don't get up 'till the police get here." Will released his grip and the racketeer obediently collapsed to the sidewalk.

At the far end of the street, a patrol car swerved around the corner and accelerated toward them with flashing lights and the wail of a siren.

Will realized he was still holding the thug's pistol and nearly threw it aside, but caught himself. "Can't leave it", he thought. "Fingerprints." Will turned to run in the other direction when a man dressed in silver suddenly appeared at the opposite end of the block, cutting off his retreat. The buildings on this street were built practically on top of each other, effectively creating a brick canyon with steep walls. There weren't any convenient alleys to lose his pursuers in.

Will knew he had to get out of there. The only way out was up.

Bullet smirked as he saw a gunman in a dark suit caught between himself and the police. He knew there was no way he was going to let this hombre get away and it looked like this wasn't going to turn into a repeat of what Minute Man called "that Direwolf" incident. Bullet was about to dash in and disarm the guy when the man suddenly crouched and sprang high up to the top of a three story apartment building. The silver-clad hero watched in astonished surprise as the dark-suited man made his getaway by bounding from darkening rooftop to darkening rooftop.

"Y'all ain't gettin' away from ol' Bullet that easy," he said with fierce determination. The guy could sure jump, and he was pretty fast for a guy wearing black oxfords, but nobody was faster than Bullet. He streaked off in an argent flash, intending to cut the man off at the pass, so to speak.

Bullet turned the corner just as the man leapt down to the pavement from a tall building and ran toward the next block of tenements.

"Speeding Bullet!" he crowed as he sprang forward with superhuman speed. At the last possible instant, the man leapt straight up into the air as Bullet whizzed through the spot where the man had been standing and very nearly ricocheted off the wall. The dark-suited man dropped down on top of a two story pawnshop and stared down as Bullet looked up at him.

"Why don'cha stand still, you dad-blasted jackrabbit?" Bullet called out in frustration.

"Why don't you leave me alone?" the light-haired man replied in equal frustration.

"No can do, partner," answered Bullet. "Got a few questions about what happened back there. Not to mention about how come you can leap tall buildings in a single bound. I'd kinda like to know about that too. You got a name, pal?"

"None of your business." The man turned and ran across the rooftop.

In a flash, Bullet raced around to the other side of the buildings, down an alley and up a fire escape. The man stopped short as Bullet cut him off.

"Well now, Mister None-of-your-business," drawled Bullet. "Looks like you done run out of places to go. Why don't you come along quietly?"

To Bullet's surprise the man smirked back at him, though his arrogant grin was partly obscured by the shadows of twilight.

"Come and get me," he said insolently. He held both his hands out as if to say 'here I am', the pistol still clutched in his right hand and pointed down at the roof.

"If that's the way you want it, fine with me; Ah'm itchin' for a tussle."

Bullet leapt forward with blinding speed and caught the man's right hand. He yanked the gun away, then bent his arm behind his back in a loose half-nelson. The man seemed to be making no effort to stop Bullet and offered no resistance.

"Gotcha!" Bullet exclaimed. "Change your mind about giving up?"

"No," the man in the dark suit answered firmly. "Don't move," he commanded.

"Don't move?" Bullet almost laughed, but then a kind of a tingling sensation shot up the arm he was using to restrain the man. Before even Bullet could react, the tingling reached his brain. His thoughts seemed to slow to a crawl and his muscles refused to listen as he tried to tell them to get him away from there. Even thinking at all was a chore, and soon he couldn't even do that much. All he could do was listen and wait for someone to tell him what he should do.

"Drop the gun," came a Voice that Bullet obeyed immediately. The gun clattered to the rooftop. "Let go of me," said The Voice. Bullet's hand dropped away from the man's arm. The man turned around to look Bullet in the face and poked a finger in his chest. The tingling sensation rippled out through the man's fingertip, freezing his thoughts.

"I just want to be left alone," the man said. "I haven't broken any laws and everything I've done tonight was in self-defense. I want nothing to do with Freedom Force, and if you people know what's good for you, you'll stay out of my way." The man regarded Bullet with thoughtful green eyes that glared at him.

"And as for you," the man began in a Voice that Bullet simply could not resist.

"Get lost."

The world blurred and faded as Bullet's brain disconnected. He felt a sensation of running as fast as he could, but his vision grew strangely dim. His eyes could see, but yet he could not see.

After some time -- Bullet had no idea how long -- his eyesight seemed to clear and his brain started working again. He found himself standing next to a wooden fence, beyond which were the tall stalks of a corn patch. Above him the sky was lit with bright afternoon sunshine.

"MmmOOooo."

Bullet looked over his shoulder at the source of the sound. A black and white milk cow watched him as it thoughtfully chewed its' cud, as if wondering what this man was doing standing out in a cow pasture. Bullet's nose wrinkled with a stiff smell and he slowly looked down to find his left foot in a small pile of manure.

He lifted his communicator to his mouth.

"Freedom Fortress, come in Freedom Force. This is Bullet..." He paused.

"Uh, can anybody tell me where in nowhere am I?"

To Be Continued...