In the cab of the truck, a large muscular male figure, with long flowing brown hair tied back into a neat pony tail, was behind the wheel. “About another forty miles to Victoria,” he said aloud in a low, deep voice.

In the passenger seat, a young woman with very light brown skin and long, wavy black hair nodded. “Uh huh,” she added absently as she applied the finishing touches to her black nail polish which matched the cotton dress she wore.

The driver frowned slightly; he was hoping for a bit more conversation as the trip had been rather quiet for the past few hours. “You excited?” he asked casually.

“About?” asked the woman, not looking up from her nails.

“Going home.”

She paused and looked up at him, neither frowning nor smiling. “Oh, baby,” she said, her voice smooth and sultry. She was about to raise her hand to gently rap him across the scruffy cheek but stopped for fear of messing up the still drying polish. “I've told you before that we didn't live in Victoria for very long - only when I was still a baby. My mother and I moved around an awful lot for many, many years, so I don't really consider any place 'home'.”

It was the young man's turn to nod. He felt a little sad for her even if she would never show that feeling herself. Their lives had been so different before they found one another. Still, he liked being with her. They made a good team.

He thought for another second. “So,” he finally said without taking his eyes off the road, “we gonna get a hotel room or something?”

“No,” the woman shook her head. “I'm thinking if we're staying for awhile that we might as well get something more comfortable and bigger. Much much bigger.”

The driver nodded again. He never should have doubted that she would have a plan. She always did. What was it that she always said? Oh, yeah, that she was the brains and he was the brawn. A good team indeed.

***

Further north of the truck's destination, in the small suburb community of Ashebury, a blonde teenaged girl sat on the edge of her bed. Tucked between her shoulder and her left ear was the handset of her phone. “I'm really sorry, Anita,” she said as she glanced across the room at the portable TV on top of her dresser.

The sound had been muted, but the images and text scrolling across the bottom of the screen told the tale. The Victoria Police Department had erected a number of wooden barriers to cordon off sections of Valley Stream Drive. According to reports, there were a large number of armed individuals holed up in the vacant Kessler building with at least one hostage. The police were trying to determine the best way to handle the situation with minimal injury to all involved.

“I'd love to come hang out with you and Cynthia, but I'm kind of in the middle of something for my mother,” the blonde continued to say to her friend on the other end of the line.

“Oh,okay, Clare,” the voice on the other end replied with a slight hint of disappointment. “Call me tomorrow morning though, okay?”

“Sure will,” the blonde said. “Bye.” She hung up the phone and reached down to pick up a tall, red boot. I hate lying to Anita, Clare Harper thought as she sat back down on the edge of her bed, but I really don't have a lot of time to waste. She pulled the red boot over the gray spandex body suit she wore and stood up.

She turned to the gray cat that was lying on her floor. “So, Sebastion, am I ready to go?”

The cat looked up at her and let out a slight meow.

Clare turned to the mirror to check if her everything was in place. “Oh, right,” she said as she reached for the red mask and placed it over her eyes. “Can't forget that, can we?” Now satisfied that her costumed identity of Lodestone was complete, she turned towards her window and opened it. She could feel the cool November air as she climbed up on the wooden sill and launched herself outwards and into the darkened evening sky.

Her magnetic powers allowed Lodestone to quickly move high above the neighborhood before she flew off south. It would only take her ten minutes to fly to fly to the part of the city where the crisis was taking place, and she was unrestricted from following the roads below her. As she flew she couldn't help but think of what her freshmen year Geometry teacher Mr. Phelps used to say: the shortest distance between two points is a straightline.

***

The red and blue patrol car lights bounced off the side of the old downtown building as a number of police officers, armed and ready, waited safely behind their vehicles.

Three floors above street level inside the darkened Kessler building, which had once been a quaint hotel in the days between the two world wars but had since been left abandoned when its owners could no longer compete with the high-rise chains which moved into the area, a number of figures scurried among the shadows and dust.

“This is stupid!” one of the figures exclaimed after pulling away from the frame of one of the windows. “The cops just keep comin'!”

The other shook his head. “What the hell was Bobby thinking? He's gonna get us all arrested - or killed!”

The first one glanced back at the window nervously. “So, what do we do if the cops decide to rush us?”

The second fingered something in his right hand. “You got a piece. You'll have to use it.”

“I don't think that's a good idea,” a female voice as a silhouette appeared in the open doorway behind them. “I think you should both should just give yourselves up quietly.”

The male figures spun around at the sound of the voice. “Who the...?” one exclaimed.

“Don't question! Shoot!” the other shouted. There was the sound of metal on chamber and shots rang out. Both men soon were firing a hail of bullets at the newcomer.

The female stepped forward into a patch of light coming in from a side window. The two men saw a blonde teen vision dressed in gray and red step confidently forward as their spray of lead veered out of her path as if by some unseen force. “I guess you don't get the concepts of 'give up' or 'quietly', do you?” Lodestone asked. She concentrated and gave a sweeping gesture with her hands.

Both males found their guns being pulled away out of their hands and tossed away into the darkness. “Damn!” one of them shouted.

The other lunged forward, letting out a loud shout as he did so.

Lodestone reached forward to meet him, grabbed him about the shoulders, crouched and used her hands to guide him as his momentum flipped him over her form. He went crashing into the floor behind her. She turned to the other one, clearly the more nervous of the two. “Where are the others?” she asked pointedly.

The second man glanced upward toward the ceiling. Then, his eyes rolled backward as he fainted to the floor.

Two floors up, another male was shouting orders. “Ron, Luke! See what all that noise was about!” The two nodded and ran out of the room towards the stairwell. Bobby Simpson meanwhile tightened his grip about the man he held at gun point. “You best hope no one's tryin' to play hero, mister! Trust me - me and my boys know how to shoot!”

There was the sound of a number of shots from the hallway beyond, and then the sound of a loud thud. Both the gunman and his hostage turned to the doorway just as one of the two who had left suddenly came flying backward through the air into the room.

Bobby's eyes grew wide. “Luke!” He watched as the big guy landed hard on his back on the floor. He hardly moved; instead Luke groaned and rolled over as he fell unconscious.

“Okay,” Lodestone called as she stepped into the room. “Are you going to learn from the others and give up, or what?”

The younger black man clenched his teeth and pressed the barrel of the gun to his hostage's temple. “Back off, blondie!” he called out. “Back off or he gets his head blown off!”

Lodestone stopped moving forward and raised her hands slowly to show she was unarmed. “Okay,” she said as she carefully surveyed the room. Dusty walls, some broken discarded furniture, burned out light fixtures hanging from above. “Now, let's just talk this out.”

“No talk!” Bobby ordered. “You just back off and get the cops to back off too! I want a clear out of this building or else! You hear me? You hear me?”

Lodestone nodded. “Okay, okay, I hear you,” she said. “We can just...” She started to concentrate.

“No! I told you that I want...!” Bobby's words were cut short as the light fixture hanging behind him swung forward with great force, smacking him in the back of the head and knocking him forward suddenly.

As Bobby Simpson fell to the floor, the older black man he was holding onto was able to get free. He rushed towards the heroine. “Thank you so much, miss...”

“Lodestone,” the heroine replied. She began to help him untie the ropes held his hands behind his back. “And you are?”

“Calvin Whitaker,” the man replied. “I'm a city planner.”

“Why did these men take you hostage?”

“Men?” Whitaker scoffed as the ropes fell away. He rubbed his aching wrists. “Hardly. Young punks you mean. Gangbangers.”

Lodestone took a moment to get a better look at her sparring partners for the evening. From their faces she could see they were barely her age, teenagers themselves. They could easily be kids from my high school... She shook her head. “So, why did they do this?”

“It was about protecting their 'turf',” Whitaker said. “I'm in charge of a project for the city to do some urban renewal in some sections of the city, and these gangs are dead set against it. They don't want to lose their places to hang-out, places they have no right to be in anyway. Mostly older abandoned buildings on property that the city is attempting to buy back for renovations.”

Lodestone just shook her head. “Wow, I never knew...” she started to say. “Well, come on, sir. Let's get you to safety so the police can come in and do their job.” As she started to escort him to the stairs, she had to wonder what kind of desperation would drive people so young to throw their lives away like this.

***

On a desolate stretch of highway 127 somewhere close to the border of Kentucky and Tennessee, a non-descript delivery van moved quickly through the night. The only one giving notice were some cows in the nearby field that happened to glance up as the vehicle roared past them.

Inside the van were three men. The driver was a rather muscular man mid-forties with receding hair and black ponytail. The one in the passenger seat and the other one sitting on a small crate in the back behind them were mirror images of one another; both men were in their mid-twenties with blonde crew-cut hair and deep blue eyes.

“Okay,” the one on the crate said as he adjusted himself for the third time in ten minutes to avoid the discomfort of the box seat, “time to switch, brother.”

The blonde up front just shook his head. “Nothing doing,” he said. “I called shot-gun.”

“Come on, man! This isn't funny.”

“Really? You'd never guess from the smile on my face, would you?” He grinned widely to counter the frown of his twin.

The brother in the back reached forward and punched his twin hard in the arm.

“Hey!” the one in the front exclaimed. “Why you...?” He started to reach back over the seat to lay a hand on the one who struck him. “Get back here!”

“Switch!”

“No!”

Arnie Tackett grumbled, took his right hand off the steering wheel and jerked firmly the one brother back into his spot in the front. “Both of you - cut it out - NOW! I wouldn't have agreed to spring the two of you from prison with me if knew you were going to act like a bunch of brats!”

“Hey, lay off my brother!” the one in the back said. An electric charged danced from his raised finger tips.

“Back off with the sparks, Battery!” Tackett growled. “I ain't in the mood!”

“He's Assault,” said the brother in front. “I'm Battery.”

“Whatever!” Tackett growled. “Oh, and another thing - as long as we're partnered up, your brother's gonna have to come up with another handle. Having two 'Assaults' on this mission is gonna get real confusing real fast.”

“How come you get to keep the name?” Assault asked in the back.

“Because,junior,” Tackett said flatly, “I've been at this business long before you boys were even a lusty thought in your old man's loins. That and the fact that your only real criminal experience was a failed jewelry store robbery a few months ago that got you both landed in prison by a rookie hero.”

Battery was about to defend his brother by bringing up that this Assault also ended up in prison earlier in the year thanks to a rookie hero too, but he felt best to hold his tongue. He had seen a few hours ago how ruthless this older man was. The elder Assault had killed two guards using nothing more than his bear hands as they made their escape from a maximum security prison. This was one hard-core individual! Instead, he said, “Okay, Mr. Assault, so what's the plan?”

Arnie Tackett smiled broadly. “Boys, have you ever been to Victoria, Georgia?” And as he began to outline his plan to his newest partners, the van continued its south-bound trek.

(to be continued)