SHAZAM!: The Word of Power #8
He doesn’t change out of his pajamas when he slips out the window at an abyssal hour. Sprinting about a block before he yells, “SHAZAM!”
He shoots down the road and leaps to the peak of a crazy tall ComVast building. He scans the city from a thousand feet up, and sees a swerving mack truck. A jump from the tower causes a knotted stomach but the broken asphalt feels almost cushiony.
He runs ahead of the truck and sees a car about to cross its path. Grabs the back bumper and forces the car past the truck just in time to catch it to the back. Yanked beneath the wheels and snags the front axle, dragging his chest and knees on the ground.
He kicks up to his feet, shattering a long line of road until he stops. Trying his best to set it down gently, the truck tips to the right. It teeters on four tires till Shazam can get to the other side. It lands on eight wheels with a bounce that jolts the sleeping driver awake. The bottle drops.
Billy reaches in, snatches the key from the ignition, and tosses it down the street, “Come on man, this would be bad even if this wasn’t the biggest truck ever.”
He runs down every street. Nothing makes you feel more alive than one hundred miles per hour with wind in your hair. He does take a fly to the face, which is like a brick at this speed.
Is that a crowbar?
He halts in the middle of the street staring at a group quietly wrenching the door of a drug store, “Evening, losers!”
They jolt. A split second of shock. One of them bounces off the wall and another finds himself across the street. He spends the next thirty seconds locking them in their own van. He makes an anonymous report with one of their phones and a speeding car shoots by.
Someone's in a rush, maybe he should stop them and ask them to drive safely. Six squad cars follow half a block behind.
He wastes no time approaching the license plate. The driver luckily has chosen to drive straight, which is certainly less annoying. He sprints to the driver's side and knocks on the window. The annoyed bald guy rolls the window down, "What's up man?"
What is going on with these nonchalant criminals? "You're like twenty miles over, dude. This is a residential area."
"Oh, I'm sorry. Here, I'll just drop it into second gear," he reaches over and puts a revolver in Billy's mouth and fires.
Hot lead bounces between his teeth and he spits it into the front tire. The large driver tries to intimidate the vehicle into driving correctly despite its injury. It swerves into Shazam and like a hammer to the knee, there's a destructive reflex. The fiberglass box with people in it careens into a local deli.
All this power. All the good intentions. All the snark and smug sense of satisfaction in the world can't stop you from being a dumb kid, playing fast and loose with the lives of others. It finally dawns on Billy the level of importance he's stumbled into. No grand wizardly lecture can teach the gravity of strength better than a mistake.
He pulls the criminals from the wreck, tears welling up in his eyes. One tries to fight him. One isn't responding. One doesn't have a pulse.
Going to administer CPR the thought lands. He doesn't know his own strength. The only way to make this any worse would be pushing someone's rib cage to tiny pieces.
"Freeze!" he's frozen alright, "Hands up!"
He doesn't know what to do, so he defaults to a tactic that always works when he's scared, alone, and confused. He just runs away.
