This is a long way from finished. I don’t have a deadline for myself, or even a plan. But today I scribbled a few lines of what’s going to be the second story in the Sons of Thunder universe. Enjoy!
***
Not many people walk toward a man with a gun. Most run in the other direction, of course. It’s the rational thing to do. Heroes run toward the man with the gun. Very few people walk, and of those that do, even fewer smile and wave while walking.
But calmly walking into danger came a lot easier to a man whose skin was bulletproof.
Connor Merritt’s wild dark brown hair refused to obey combs and brushes. He wore a black leather jacket. Frayed cuffs marked the bottom end of his blue jeans, brushing slightly against the ground as he walked.
“Freeze! Back off man! I’ll kill you!”
The man with the gun shifted its barrel away from the man he’d been mugging and toward Connor. He grew more and more agitated with every step Connor took, waving the gun and pushing it forward toward Connor as a substitute for pulling the trigger.
“I’ll kill you! I’ll do it man!”
The three of them stood in a parking garage. Outside, hints of the dawn to come oozed into the sky in the east, but the sun’s entrance still hung in the future. Instead, buzzing fluorescent lights provided the only illumination. Cigarette butts and discarded gum littered the ground. At this hour cars dotted the area like checkers toward the end of the game.
Two men stood in the aisle between yellow-lined parking spaces. Both were African American. One stood perfectly immobile, frozen with fear. The other seemed to vibrate like a violin string, he was so wound up. Behind Connor, the silver four-door sedan from which he emerged to begin his walk waited with its door open, dome light adding a tiny contribution to the garage’s dim lighting.
Tall, skinny, like a potential basketball player before training bulked him up, the gunman looked slightly older than Connor. His curly dark hair pressed tight against his scalp.
“I know there’s more to you than that,” Connor replied. “You don’t want to be a murderer.”
“Shut up man! Just shut up and walk away!”
“Walking away from you isn’t going to do you any good. Put the gun down.”
The gunman did the opposite. He pulled the trigger.
The lead slug punched Connor low on the left side of his torso. It hurt – they always hurt. Objects moving at hundreds of feet per second – thousands, sometimes – were pretty much destined to hurt.
But the slug, misshapen by impact, fell to the pavement in front of Connor.
Not before the second one hit. And the third. And the fourth, fifth, sixth… the gunman gave up only after completely emptying his ten-round magazine.
About a month prior, Connor Merritt met a man named Ethan Moses and a girl his own age named Anna Wales. They told him something he refused to believe at first: the things that occurred in the Book of Acts and the Gospels weren’t just stories from another age. They were real and, more important, they could happen today as easily as they could happen two thousand years ago.
In the Bible, zealots stoned the Apostle Paul to death, but he stood and walked away without so much as a scratch. Today, Connor could take ten rounds of nine-millimeter hollow point and keep smiling.
In the Bible, a believer baptized someone, then found himself suddenly in a completely different city. Today, Connor’s new friend Anna could teleport.
God still gave people miraculous gifts and, for some reason, all of a sudden he did it more than ever before. Connor didn’t understand why. He didn’t understand how. He didn’t even really understand much about God.
But he looked at the scattering of misshapen lead and copper slugs in front of his feet and understood one thing for sure.
Supernatural gifts were real.
