Saxon arrived at his home a few hours later. He felt better after having a small meal,

but he needed to fuel up if he wanted to really fly and check his top speed. He found

some sandwich ingredients and bottled milk. He grabbed a plate and made himself

a plate full of sandwiches. He drank the milk while he ate.

He decided that he would fly to New York, or as far east as he could in one jump. He

had no doubt that he could reach the Big Apple eventually, maybe faster than the prop

planes in the air could. He didn’t need to fly that far to see how fast he was.

He looked around the house until he found an atlas. He put that on the kitchen table.

He checked his watch. It was still running fine. He grabbed a pair of goggles from a

drawer and put them on. The buttons felt warm and alive.

He was as ready as he would ever be.

It was a good thing he was doing this in the dark so no one would recognize him. He

didn’t want to wind up in the papers. He also didn’t want to explain to his boss about

what he could do all of a sudden.

Flanagan would want to test him to see if he could build more like him somehow. He

didn’t plan to spend the rest of his life in a box being prodded.

Saxon went out to his backyard. He looked up at the night sky. How high did he want

to go? He decided it was better if he flew high enough to get a straight path east, but

not high enough that he could die when his power ran out.

He checked his watch. He pressed the buttons. The jets fired him into the air. He

laughed as he roared through the night sky.

He had decided on New York on a destination because that was the only place he

knew. He doubted the arrow would point to some random point east. It needed his

input, and he needed to know the place where he was going.

He soared east, climbing to get through the mountain range that separated the state

from Nevada. He didn’t know how fast he was going, but he figured it had to be

hundreds of miles per hour.

He figured if he hit something, it would turn him into a rotten tomato hitting a brick

wall.

He didn’t care.

He looked behind him. His passage had swept snow up in a small cloud as he went

by. He smiled. Some mountain goat probably wasn’t enjoying the sudden wind, but

that was okay.

He started down into Nevada. He checked the clock running backwards on his hand.

He figured he still had a few minutes. He should look for a spot to land before his

time ran out.

He passed a few places without stopping. The test was to see how far he could go

with the time he had. He needed a spot somewhere ahead of him.

He looked at his hand and thought he was in the last thirty seconds of his flight. He

saw a sign ahead. If he could reach that, he would know the approximate distance he

could fly in one shot.

The clock started running down and fading as he pulled up in a sliding hover just feet

above the ground. He came to a running stop as his power ran out and he kept going.

He ran the speed off and laughed as he checked his watch.

He had been in the air ten minutes from the moment he pushed the button to his

landing. He nodded.

He looked at the sign on the side of the road. Last Stop, Nevada, no population. He

looked around. He saw some buildings in the distance, including one that looked like

a rundown saloon. He didn’t know where he was, but that didn’t matter.

He had landed in a place he could find on a map when he got home. All he had to do

was look at the distance, and the time in flight. That would tell him how fast he had

been going.

He might have been flying faster than a speeding bullet.

How did he do more with his new ability other than flying around for the fun of it?

He decided he needed to get home. Once there he could figure out how far he had

flown, then he could think about testing for other abilities.

He doubted any other thing he had been given by the meteor would be as great as

flying, but there might be something there that could be useful.

He waited by the sign for his cooling period to finish. He wondered why that was a

function of the buttons. The only reason he could come up with was that the powers

that be didn’t want the button pusher to be able to use his powers constantly. He

doubted he would be able to ask them why.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

There might be some kind of strain inherent in the powers that he had no idea how

to overcome. He did know that he had to eat if he wanted to not waste away while he

was flying around. Maybe the power would kill its user if they hadn’t put that feature

in.

He didn’t have enough facts to be sure, but he was willing to use that as a guideline

for future endeavors.

Fly around, eat a big meal. He could deal with that as long as he wasn’t paying his

salary out in food. He needed to find places that would serve big meals for a small

amount of money if he wanted to keep flying.

Did he want to keep flying?

He decided that yes, he did want to keep flying. He loved the way he could push

through the air like a bird. He couldn’t give that up now.

He checked the palm of his hand. It was warm again. He activated the flight and

headed west toward his home. He tried to call up every place he knew and mark them

with arrows. His internal navigator switched arrows as soon as he thought of a

different place than where he was going.

So he could only call up one arrow at a time, and only for places where he had been.

He looked behind him and thought of Last Stop as his destination. The arrow

appeared over the Welcome sign. He nodded at figuring that out before turning his

face and attention toward home.

He still had a lot of unanswered questions, but he could work on that while he was

trying to figure out what to do. He probably would never know why the meteor had

come down upstate, or if it was a natural thing or manmade somehow. On the other

hand, he could figure out what he could do with some careful testing, and keep it

under wraps as much as possible.

He wondered if he could reach the moon with what he had.

He had to check the distance flown first. He could maybe leave the Earth’s

atmosphere under his own power. He would still need air, and protection from the

void. He didn’t know what that would entail, and he doubted his power would protect

him from things floating in space.

He definitely knew when it cut off he would be floating in the same direction he had

been flying with no way to turn for the two minutes it took his power to recharge.

What happened if gravity took over and pulled him down while he was still waiting

for his power to kick on?

He didn’t want to fry while trying to keep from falling to the Earth fast enough to turn

him into a splotch.

It was a thought. He should read up on it to see how far he could push himself. There

had to be some astronomy books that would be useful for something like this.

Maybe some of the engineers in the company could tell him what to expect if he did

fly above the sky.

He wondered what Flanagan would say about all this. He had fought off a takeover

bid with the help of some purple knight guy. Would he fund another guy running

around in a mask?

Saxon doubted that. He smiled as his house came into sight. He landed in the

backyard just as the jets cut off. He rubbed his hands together to keep them from

shaking. He had no doubt in his mind he was incredibly fast in the air.

He looked around before heading inside. He didn’t see anybody, but that didn’t mean

much. He hoped his secret was safe from the neighborhood busybodies.

He poured himself some whiskey from a bottle he had hidden in his pantry. He took

a long sip from the glass as he tried to get his nerves under control.

He scrounged up a notepad and pen and carried them to the table and put them beside

the atlas. He sat down and closed his eyes.

Was he faster than a speeding bullet?

He wrote down the ten minute time, and the name Last Stop on the pad. He looked

up Idaville and Last Stop. He used the legend on the maps and figured he had flown

something like three hundred miles in that ten minutes. Last Stop was on the edge of

the Utah border on the other side of the map.

He wrote down sixty miles in an hour is a mile a minute as the first part of the

equation. So at sixty miles an hour, ten minutes would be ten miles. He thought about

it and wrote three hundred miles in ten minutes.

He looked at the numbers and didn’t like what they said.

It meant he was going about thirty miles a minute from his eyeball. That put his actual

flight speed in the hundreds of miles an hour, faster than any plane in the air. He

might be as fast the Mark was reported as being.

But it didn’t translate into any kind of personal speed. He was a bullet to his

destination, with a small ability to turn in flight.

On the other hand, he could reach New York in about five or six hops of ten minutes

plus the two minute cooldown. He could reach anywhere close to California in a

matter of minutes.

What good would it do him?

He needed to think about the possible uses other than never being late for work again.

Right now, he had only thought of it as a skill to reach other places. How could he use

it to better himself without causing more trouble? He didn’t have an answer for that.

He supposed he could volunteer for the Army Air Force to fly missions overseas.

Someone would take his place at the company. Flanagan wouldn’t hold the spot for

him.

Maybe he would hold a spot. Everyone said Flanagan was a soft heart under a

machine of steel. He had spoken with the man a couple of times. He seemed

concerned with work more than any other boss Saxon had dealt with over the years.

Saxon sat at his table and looked at the maps in front of him. Three hundred miles in

ten minutes was incredible. He smiled at the thought.

And he hadn’t felt the effects of friction on his skin while he flew. His body seemed

immune. Maybe something about the flight protected him while he was in the air.

It was another thing that he needed to figure out. Did friction work on him when he

wasn’t flying? When he knew that, he would know if he could move through the air

without worrying about how the air moved on his body.

The goggles had been a big improvement. He hadn’t felt wind pressure on his eyes

that much, but it had been there. Wearing the goggles stopped that cold.

And they would work as a partial mask if someone saw him in the air and reported

it. A man wearing goggles could be anybody.

He decided he should eat another sandwich before going to bed. His stomach

wouldn’t wake him up with demands if he did that.

Saxon made himself another big sandwich. He ate it quickly, putting the plate in the

sink to wash later. He put the atlas up on his way to his bedroom. He kicked off his

shoes and lay on his bed.

He thought about being able to fly. He had been looking at it as a strange gift. Could

he be wrong?

He decided he should wait until tomorrow before he tried to decide that.

He still had a lot to learn before he could say either way.