Super Human by Michael Carroll

he squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. Probably needs to be charged up or something. He put it into his backpack anyway, and resumed looking around.
    The backpack was getting full now, so he knew that he couldn’t take much more. He felt a little disappointed at that. I’m not going to get another chance to come back here.
    He walked back to the workbench and stared at the jetpack. He knew that if he took it, it would be missed a lot sooner than the gloves and grappling gun.
    It’s got to be worth a fortune. Lance remembered a newspaper article about Paragon that had said no one knew exactly how it worked, but dozens of engineering companies all over the world were trying to duplicate it.
    He reached out and picked it up. It was very heavy, but not unbearable.
    He couldn’t stop himself: He slung the jetpack onto his back and fastened the clips across his chest. It didn’t seem quite so heavy with the weight distributed across his shoulders.
    Lance grinned as he pictured himself soaring and swooping through the air. Man, that would be so cool!
    From the other side of the garage door there was a loud clunk . Lance froze. That was a car door being closed.
    A motor whined into life and the garage door began to rattle upward. Lance looked around for somewhere to hide. Oh God . . . Paragon’s gonna beat the crap out of me!
    He wasted three seconds trying to unclasp the jetpack, then gave up. He grabbed his backpack and ducked down under the workbench.
    He heard a man’s voice say, “Marcus ain’t gonna talk, but that don’t mean we’re safe. They’ll have their forensics guys all over him.”
    Another man’s voice, much quieter: “So . . . What, we’re taking everything ? That’s gonna take hours!”
    “Go a lot quicker if you ain’t complaining. Start loading the truck.”
    “But what’s the point? We’re not gonna need mosta this stuff now!”
    From his position underneath the workbench Lance could see their legs, so he was able to tell which way they were facing as they moved about the warehouse.
    The door to the front office was still slightly open, and it was only a few feet away. He figured he’d need five seconds at most to get through the door. Come on, turn around, turn around!
    Minutes passed, and Lance’s right leg began to cramp. The two men had made several trips out to their truck, but only one at a time.
    Eventually, the one with the softer voice said, “Listen. . . . About Marcus.”
    “What about him?”
    “If the cops can get him to talk . . . we’re toast.”
    “All the more reason to stop shirking and start working. If the cops find this place with us still in it, The Helotry are gonna come down on us like a ton of lead bricks.”
    The other man muttered, “I’m more worried about Paragon finding us.”
    “He won’t. Marcus’s stuff all got burned up with his car.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because we’re here and Paragon ain’t.”
    “Yeah, well, I’m just sayin’. It’s taken our guys years to reverse-engineer his armor and jetpack and I didn’t even get a chance to try it out. If the schedule hadn’ta been moved up we coulda all had jetpacks and armor and everything.”
    “Yeah, well, if Marcus hadn’t been dumb enough to take the thing out for a test flight, then Paragon wouldn’t have noticed him and he wouldn’t have got caught. So . . . Hey—where is the jetpack?”
    Under the workbench, Lance cringed.
    “I just loaded the crate inta the truck,” the other man replied.
    “Not that one. The one Marcus was working on earlier. It was right here on the bench.”

CHAPTER 7

    Right now, Roz Dalton despised the “one thing at a time” limitation on her telekinesis. If she’d been able to control more than one object, she might have had a chance to get away.
    Instead, she’d been captured. The gray men had rushed at her, knocked her to the ground. At gunpoint they’d cuffed her wrists and ankles, and carried her inside the power plant.
    Now she