Free Aberrant Trilogy 1: Super Charged by Franklin Kendrick

stairs.
    “I’ll be back for dinner, Grandma!” I call out. Then I’m out the door and down the driveway.
    The Vestige bounces against my chest as I walk briskly down the country road. There are no sidewalks in this area of town, so I kick up dirt along the soft shoulder of the road. My hands feel like they are filled with energy. This must be what Super Guy felt when the Vestige first came to him.
    Suddenly I let out a laugh and shake my head.
    “Super Guy is a made up character,” I mutter to myself. “It’s Dad who must have felt what I’m feeling back when he first found the Vestige.”
    But, how did he find the Vestige? Did it come to him mysteriously like it did to me?
    Those are questions that I tuck away in the back of my mind. For now, my focus is on testing out these powers.
    I come to a stop at a wooden fence, the kind made by sticking two rounded poles horizontally into the stakes, and look out beyond at a giant field of tall grass.
    “This is perfect,” I say. There are no houses around, and there are no animals grazing that I can tell. No chances that someone will see what I’m doing from the roadway if I wade far enough into the grass, and no chance that I will injure or kill something if I lose control. I’m lucky I didn’t do any permanent damage to Tyson back in the cafeteria.
    With one last glance around me, I step over the fence and make my way into the sweet-smelling grass.
    Insects buzz by me, zipping past my ears as they are stirred by my footsteps.
    I walk until I can’t see the road any more.
    On three sides of me, to my right, my front, and my back, are trees. They form a diorama of sorts, and they also give me easy targets if I can manage to make the energy blasts travel more than ten feet.
    A gust of wind tugs at me, rippling the grass like a rolling ocean of greens and ochres, as I plant my feet on the ground and face the trees. The roadway is to my left, so I will be sure not to aim anything that way.
    There’s a scraggly, dying tree in front of me. Its limbs snake this way and that, twisting up towards the sky. What little leaves it has are all brown. That will be my target.
    “Alright,” I say. “Here goes nothing…”
    I lift my arms up and aim the palms of my hands at the tree.
    Without over-analyzing it too much, I feel the energy pooling in the soft pads of my hands, and I pull my fingers back, spreading my fingers until they are taut, creating a stretched feeling in my hands.
    In an instant a rippling, purple energy appears, pooling at the center of each palm. It looks almost like liquid, but it’s not wet. It’s shimmering, rolling around like a sphere of light. Then, before I can get too good of a look, the spheres shoot out in front of me. They cut through the grass, singeing the ends of the ochre-colored blades, until the blasts of energy evaporate into thin air.
    The force of the blasts is so powerful that when I look down at my shoes I can see that there are tracks coming from my toes where I have been pushed back on the dirt.
    “Wow!” I say.
    This is some powerful stuff. I feel like I’m super charged with energy.
    I wonder if I can do this single handed.
    Reaching out my right hand, I aim for the gnarled tree. Focusing all the energy in the center of my palm, I stretch my fingers out and send the ball of energy hurtling over the ends of the grass, rippling them out like water, until the blast strikes the trunk of the tree about twenty feet away. Bark is ripped in tiny bits from the impact zone and goes flying through the air.
    As for the energy, on impact it is mostly absorbed by the tree after the initial impact, and it quickly disappears.
    I find myself trembling.
    I turn my hand so that I can see my palm, lying flat in front of me.
    This power is certainly not for someone who’s careless.
    Next I reach up and pull the Vestige out of my shirt.
    If things go exactly like the comic book, then I have to have the Vestige on my person in order to do things