Super

by JohnFoxe@null.net

Other stories by me (AKA fritzcatt) :
 - amazing-mike
 - trinity
 - sparks-plantation

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S u p e r

Fellowship Tabernacle, Jonesboro, Arkansas

Samaas wasn't actually in the church when the chaos started. Still, he watched the frightful events unfold before his eyes.

The first thing that happened was...

some sort of commotion at the back of the room.

Then a shriek.

The alarming noise abruptly halted the pastor's sermon, mid-sentence. Collectively, the congregation jerked their heads around and after registering what they were seeing, several of them gasped in shock. In the back stood Cecile Walker—sweet old Sister Cecile—her eyes open wide in terror, a knife held to her throat. Holding her from behind was one of the only three white men in attendance, though there were several white women among the shocked faces.

The young man had apparently entered quietly after the sermon started. "Happy Robert E. Lee Day!" he greeted loudly and cheerfully.

The official holiday in the U.S. was Martin Luther King Day, which was still a contention in a handful of areas—pockets of Arkansas among them. This day was a special Monday service at the church, according to the message board out front.

Samaas hadn't paid much attention to the recent conflict in the area and avoided being drawn in. The Americans had to work this out for themselves. He only focused on immediate threats.

"No phones!" the young man growled, wiggling the knife at Sister Cecile's exposed neck. "I better not see a cell phone!"

Samaas saw the armband—the white cross on a red circle with a blood drop in the center—the Ku Klux Klan insignia, he realized.

"It's not!" the man loudly proclaimed," ...I repeat, NOT Martin Luther King Day! Today is... say it with me... Robert E Lee Day!"

"Please, young man," a quivering voice from the crowd begged, "please let her go ...we can talk about this calmly."

"Say it!" the young man continued. "We're going to make a point here today! ...a statement! Say it, everyone... repeat after me... Happy Robert E. Lee Day!"

More murmurs and whimpering.

"SAY IT!" he bellowed, shocking the crowd into silence.

From a small tearful voice in the crowd: "Happy Robert E. Lee Day."

A few more voices: "Happy Robert E. Lee Day."

Followed by the rest of the congregation "...bert E. Lee Day."

The young man smiled a toothy grin. "There! Now we're cookin' with gas! From this day forth, every third Monday of January is Robert E. Lee day. And to make sure our great State of Arkansas remembers this, we're going to make a sacrifice." He arched his eyebrows, scanning the room. "...maybe a lot of sacrifices."

He pushed Sister Cecile away. She tripped forward and fell to the beige carpet, her dress flapping up and exposing her ancient dark legs. Several from the crowd rushed forward and helped her to her feet. Sister Cecile no longer blocked the view of the young man, revealing, not just a large hunting knife in his right hand, but also a rifle in the other, a military-style weapon. More gasps. A few in the congregation began a mixture of prayers and whimpers. "Oh dear Lord..."

It was right then that everything flipped.

Samaas Arrives

The armed intruder's expression instantly changed to an almost-comical surprise as Samaas' ghostly presence faded into view directly in front of him.

More gasps. A scream. A squeak followed by a thud as someone fainted and slid from the pew to the carpet.

Then a voice of recognition from someone in the crowd, "Samaas? Is that Samaas?"

"Samaaas!" someone whispered excitedly.

The young man didn't seem to retain his wits. Instead of trying to raise his rifle, he slashed out with his knife. The blade and his hand passed harmlessly through the phantom body of the large man standing before him. Again, he swung the knife wildly, slashing nothing but air.

A moment later, the insubstantial body became opaque and solid. He slapped his powerful hand on the young man's chest and slammed him down to the floor onto his back, his head connecting with a thud.

Samaas grimaced at the sound. "Dam," he muttered.

It was over, just that quick. The young man's eyes rolled back as he wheezed then fell silent.

He could have slammed him even harder, of course, but he'd held back. He'd learned over the years that killing the target was not the preferred outcome, especially these days.

"Call 911," he calmly said to no one in particular, handing the gun and the knife to one of the older men closest to him.

The entire crowd became a cacophony of voices all at once as they approached, muttering, yelling, praying, laughing, crying.

"Samaas! Thank God you came!

"Praise Jesus!"

"God sent Samaas!"

Several people were already tapping 911 on their cell phones. A few aimed their phones at Samaas, capturing an image of their hero and the man lying unconscious at his feet.

He looked closer at the intruder and noticed his baby-face, hoping he hadn't caused a serious head injury. Had the guy really intended to kill all these people? Maybe. As much as the thought angered him, his goal hadn't been to leave the man a vegetable.

"Nineteen?" someone from the circle of faces solemnly questioned, "Maybe twenty?"

"He's so young... such a waste."

Samaas was not brutal, not anymore. Not like the old days. He used force when it was appropriate but kept it to a minimum. He didn't crave vengeance. Nor did he wish to dispense punishment. He only helped the best he could.

A short time later, flashing blue and red lights shone through the stained glass windows.

He saw no need to stay any longer. He locked his eyes on Sister Cecile. "You alright?"

"I'll be fine. Thank you, young man," she answered with a bewildered smile.

He nodded then quickly faded away, leaving the church and the congregation behind.

An instant later, he stood on the deck of a boat in the Florida Keys, the old woman's words "young man" still echoing in his mind, causing him to smile.

He looked to see if the boy was still on the island. He was. Samaas had been curiously watching the boy for a couple of months.

New Kid

Did he look to be nine? Ten? He couldn't tell—with dark skin typical of islanders, wild black hair, and ragged shorts. Sometimes he wore just an old cloth wrapped around his waist. Sometimes, not even that. He also seemed to have a preoccupation with his little penis. Fortunately, that part had yet to show up in a viral video.

He couldn't decide if the boy's origin was Caribbean, Mexican, or some other South American heritage. He could have passed for any of those. Sometimes the boy was in Florida or Louisiana. Other times he was as far as Panama. Today he was on one of the tiny undeveloped islands in the Zapatilla Cays.

"Lucky boy ...an island all to yourself," he muttered aloud. From many miles away, Samaas watched the boy dig in the ground, like a badger, and he guessed he was hunting his dinner. "Why not just order a pizza?" he mumbled, watching clods of dirt fly up from the growing hole that quickly piled around the edges as the boy's blurred hands pawed deeper. 'Silly idea... remote island... pizza delivery' He imagined a chopper with "Pizza Hut—30 Minutes or it's Free!" emblazoned across the side and chuckled to himself.

Samaas didn't need remote cameras or long-range telescopes to watch the boy; all he needed was the sun. He could see great distances with his own eyes, able to watch anyone he wanted from hundreds of miles away, sometimes farther. This was one of his abilities.

The public saw him as a superhero. However, in days of old, he was a sun god—THE Sun God, actually. He was also a god of justice. He was Shamash. He was Utu—bringing wrong and injustice into the light. Still, he was mostly remembered as sun god. The great Ra had nothing on him.

Not that Samaas commanded the sun—just the opposite. He was dependent on the sun. Even the reflected sunlight from the moon sufficed, most of the time. However, his abilities were strongest in the sunlight.

And for now anyway, they belonged to him alone, these powers, and to none of the other immortals, just as the boy's particular abilities belonged only to him—he who commands the storms – the wind and the rain, thunder and lightning.

The boy actually had been the focus of a viral video just a couple of weeks earlier, and another one in the weeks before that. Everyone wanted to know just who was this incredible boy.

Samaas knew the answer to that.

In short, the boy was one of the gods. There was little doubt anymore.

The great Baal had been a storm god, not a false idol as the Hebrews had claimed. But Baal was long dead... how many millennia ago? It turned out that immortality, like everything else, was relative, and conditional.

The boy was a new god, as unlikely as that seemed. He wondered not how this happened, but why, and he knew that the others of his kind wondered the same thing. Surely, Anu was too ancient and lacked the will to start fathering more children after millennia of silence

The boy might have other powers too, Samaas suspected. Impressive was the speed and strength he displayed as he dug a hole in the earth with his small hands. The clincher had been the first time he had witnessed the boy ride the wind.

Samaas didn't need wind to travel. He could slowly fade away and become insubstantial while simultaneously fading-in a distance away. He'd lost track of the number of times he'd been mistaken for a ghost. The first time he had seen Star Trek on television in the 1960s, he was struck by the way Captain Kirk beamed down to a planet, fading from his starship while, at the same time, his molecules reassembled on the planet below.

He saw the boy was dripping wet now, sitting on the beach, his hair plastered to his head. He ate something, chewed, swallowed. Samaas wished he had been paying attention, curious what the boy caught.

To the public, Samaas appeared to be a twenty-something superhero, but in actuality, he was almost as old as civilization itself.

But how old was the boy, really? Why was he just being noticed these last few months? His height and physical appearance said nine, but the way he moved and carried himself suggested he was older. And where had the boy been until now?

He looked closer at his determined face. Human, yes, Samaas thought. And more than just handsome. This was no surprise as most of the gods were pleasing to behold. Still, the boy was nothing less than stunning, in a dark and animalistic sort of way. He had laid eyes upon countless men, women, and children over the great expanse of time. This boy's appearance was unique. Wild, as a panther is wild.

'Don't get obsessed,' he reminded himself, scowling.

He was drawn to novelty just like anyone else. The boy was indeed a curiosity. But he was also frightening... a dark cloud, obviously powerful, and after seeing the destruction unleashed by the boy in the days earlier, Samaas knew he was also dangerous.

Over the last few days, he'd wished Inanna were here. She would know more about the boy. If anyone was in the loop, it was Inanna. But he couldn't find her. She was too far away, apparently. The curvature of the earth was the limit of his sight.

"Anna... where are you?" he mumbled to himself. He thought of asking one of the others where she'd gone but decided against it. Him and his kind avoided conflict by avoiding each other. Well, for the most part. Some of them, the particularly good-natured ones, spent time with each other.

Recently, he had called her Anna. Long ago, she was Inanna, and at some point in the middle, she was Ishtar, known far and wide and, for a time, was the most renowned deity to walk the face of the earth. To this day, she was known to possess great power, though no one believed anymore that she was literally a "god." The Abrahamic religions changed everything. That suited Samaas just fine.

Inanna didn't have the reputation of being a "hero." A few priests and historians had, quite stupidly, confused her with a succubus, just as they had accused Lilith. Idiots! To some men, a strong or willful woman must ergo be a soul-sucking demon. Inanna, in this present day at least, had a good reputation. However, only Samaas himself currently filled the role of a hero. A superhero.

Samaas looked away from the boy to a minor scuffle hundreds of miles west.

God Smackdown

Just as he refocused his attention to the small island, he saw a shadow from above cover the boy—a shape descended from the sky. He saw the massive black feathery wings and knew that it was Zu. The truck-sized wings whooshed a cloud of dust and the wind pushed the boy to the ground onto his butt.

Samaas could guess what was about to happen next. Zu would demand the boy explain himself, as some of the other immortals had done in the previous weeks, wanting to know who he was, if he was an immortal, why he'd rudely refused to answer their questions... at which point the boy would completely ignore him or he would call on the winds to carry him away from Zu's bothersome yapping. Two others had even tried to snatch the boy, unsuccessfully of course.

This time was different though. It wasn't the boy who was carried away by the winds.

The little god looked furious as he jumped to his feet. Zu pointed his accusing finger at the boy, like a father scolding his child, demanding respect and obedience (Zu was not one of those afore-mentioned good-natured gods). The boy's hands were at his sides, balled into fists, his previous sweet face twisted into an angry grimace. His eyes flashed white light, reminding Samaas of frightening celestial battles in days of old.

A wind gust, carrying dirt, branches, and leaves, suddenly circled the winged man and formed into a funnel, like the dust devils of the high desert. The great black wings flung wildly out of control. The funnel grew large, then massive. The wind roared as if it were alive. It lifted the winged man and carried him up and away, flipping and spinning, shouting and cursing. He finally vanished into the distance.

Samaas saw a large black feather float lazily down from the sky. He both cringed and laughed. Making enemies of the other gods was not a good idea.

They were curious, after all. Who could blame them?

Friend or Foe?

As for the public, a few news outlets had echoed popular media descriptions of the boy and had likened him to "St. Francis of Assisi." He'd been captured on video rescuing a frightened deer from a busy highway, had rescued stranded dolphins from the beach, had commanded the wind to lift a fallen zebra colt from a ditch in a Florida wildlife ranch, setting it down a short distance from its mother. Most impressive of all, he'd brought great torrents of rain onto a forest fire, no doubt saving many animal's lives and habitats. The videos went viral and the boy had earned a reputation as a 'savior of beasts.'

So... was he both a storm god and a protector of beasts? 'So much power in such a small body' Samaas thought. 'But he seems oblivious to all this.'

The boy didn't seem to notice or care about the attention he drew, nor about the current trends... but just about the animals themselves, as if he couldn't focus on the big picture long enough to see it. Samaas was only guessing all of this, of course, but these were the impressions he got from the boy.

Animal rights groups tried to count the boy as one of their ranks. Rural republicans assumed the boy was on the side of the ranchers. Vegans assured each other on social media that the boy was a fellow vegan. Samaas knew he wasn't any of those. He'd seen the boy catch and eat an eel, after all. Raw. Protecting animals wasn't his 'special ability,' ...it was his interest, Samaas guessed. Most of the time, he seemed to be completely distracted and self-absorbed.

While the media speculated the boy was a friend to all of nature and to humanity, they hadn't seen what Samaas had seen. The boy had thrown a temper tantrum after two immortals unsuccessfully attempted to capture him, and then, after howling and pounding his little fists, he had disappeared in a whirlwind, far from his pursuers. He then let loose his fury on a random Atlanta neighborhood, wielding a freak tornado that lasted only a minute but killed two people, injured six, destroyed two homes, and damaged several more. Three of the injured were children.

The boy's tantrum had a death toll.

As far as Samaas knew, no one connected the St Frances boy to the tornado. After all, a weather event was "an act of god." The crazy part was... this carnage had literally been an act of god – a pint-sized god with an explosive temper. Samaas wondered if this old expression fit the definition of irony, or in this case, was the exact opposite of irony, which in itself seemed... ironic.

At least eight "superhumans" still existed in the world, though almost no one believed they were literally gods. Back when the Sumerians had yet to scratch their first marks in clay tablets, dozens of gods existed. But, 'shit happens,' Inanna had remarked to Samaas even before that particular expression became popular. The great Baal had been continually persecuted, first by the Hebrews, then even more so by the Christians and the Muslims. They couldn't kill him of course, but in a long sustained fit of despair, he buried himself deep under the earth, and eventually let himself die.

There were eight left now. However, not all eight were "gods." One was a modern superhuman created by science ...a "super-soldier," and another of the eight was a human-turned-immortal, created in ancient Egypt by way of sorcery.

Now though, it seemed there were nine again.

Was the boy created by Anu to be a hero?

A god, no doubt, but a "hero?" ...only time would tell.

The boy didn't speak, apparently, not that Samaas had ever heard. He shied away from all people so there was no way to know for sure. Samaas was too curious, though. He would know, eventually—he felt compelled to know. He wasn't particularly fond of children, but he felt oddly drawn to this young god. Emotionally. Spiritually.

Over the millennia, he'd had physical relationships with both male and female, young and old, intense and casual, long term and short term, romantic but not sexual, sexual but not romantic. He no longer kept count of the wives and partners he had witnessed grow old and he'd eventfully buried.

Centuries earlier, he'd partnered with a girl who was only fourteen. This was common at the time, however.

Another time, he'd fallen in love with a fifteen-year-old young man. He hadn't known Samaas' true identity—this was purposely left secret. At seventeen though, the young man had become obsessed with a wealthy older man so Samaas left him, quietly, without explanation nor even hard feelings.

Samaas had kept his distance from the little boy-god for the previous months... until a week earlier. He had accidentally gotten too close. So now, the boy knew he was watching.

While standing in a tree houses (he had many, scattered far and wide around the world), he'd witnessed the boy approach a fawn with his little erection protruding out before him. It looked hard as a stick. The fawn didn't run. It allowed the boy to walk right up to it. The naked boy cooed and purred to the fawn, his hips pushed forward. It looked to Samaas that the boy wanted the fawn to lick his little boner. It almost did lick it too. Just inches away. But the fawn's mother appeared and both deer wandered away into the forest.

The boy hung his head but continued to play with his erection.

"Why doesn't he just masturbate the little thing?" Samaas mumbled aloud. "Maybe he hasn't figured that out yet," he answered himself.

But then...Samaas realised he himself was now physically standing in the woods, not far from the boy.

"Fuck!" he whispered-cursed.

Rarely did he accidently fade to a place without meaning to. But it had happened a few times in the past and it happened this time. 'Maybe I meant to,' he would later think.

The boy saw him. He stood frozen in place, sniffing the air, wide-eyed, his little boner still pointing up.

Samaas felt his own blood of embarrassment rush into his face and he immediately faded back to where he'd previously been standing... the tree-house, hidden deep in the forest outside of Biloxi.

to be continued