The Nameless Hero by Lee Bacon Read Free Book Online Page A

once, the tanning bed shot forward, vanishing into the tunnel with a
whoosh
. The sound grew fainter until I couldn’t hear anything at all.
    “Our headquarters is located a half mile beneath our feet,” Brandy explained. “It takes the pod about a minute to get there.”
    Pod?
She must’ve meant the tanning bed. Before long, I could hear it again from somewhere deep in the tunnel—only this time the sound was growing louder. The pod must’ve been approaching. A moment later, the tanning bed shot back through the hole in the wall and came to a stop where it had been before.
    When Brandy lifted the top, the bed was empty. Sophie was gone.
    Milton was the next volunteer. Brandy helped him into the tanning bed, then lowered the top. I could hear his muffled voice from inside.
    “Hey, shouldn’t there be a seat belt in here? And where do the air bags come out in case of—
WAAAaaaaahhhhh
!”
    Milton’s scream vanished into the tunnel, along with the tanning bed.
    While we waited, I turned to the stranger from the bus. She had a birthmark below her right eye that was shaped exactly like a star.
    “Hi,” I said. “Have we—”
    “Met before?” The girl shook her head. “We haven’t.”
    “Well, my name’s Joshua.”
    A mischievous grin formed on her face. “I know.”
    I stared at her. First the out-of-control bus without a driver, then the tanning salon employee who could change her appearance, and then a complete stranger who knew my name.
    There’d been way too much craziness packed into one morning.
    I opened my mouth to ask what the heck was going on, but my voice was drowned out by the sound of the returning pod.
    “I’ll go next!” the girl volunteered. She fixed her mysterious smile on me for a moment longer, then climbed into the tanning bed.
    Once the pod had whooshed out of the room again, I glanced up at Brandy. “The way you transformed back there—that’s your power?”
    Brandy nodded. “It’s called Shifting.”
    “So that means you can be anyone you want to be?”
    “Pretty much,” Brandy said in a dull voice.
    “That’s awesome! The first thing I’d do would be to change myself into someone taller. And stronger. Or maybe I’d impersonate the president for a little while, just to see the looks on people’s faces.”
    Brandy smiled knowingly, like she’d done all that and a lot more. “Shifting can certainly be fun. The unfortunate thing is you spend so much time pretending to be other people, you start to forget who you really are.”
    I guess we had more in common than I’d thought. Like Brandy, I’d spent a lot of my life pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Maybe I couldn’t alter my appearance, but I’d been through enough false identities to last a lifetime.
Several
lifetimes, actually.
    When the tanning bed reappeared, Brandy said, “Your turn.”
    I still wasn’t 100 percent sure, but after seeing the others go before me, I couldn’t back out. I climbed inside the tanning bed and settled onto the soft cushion.
    “See you soon.” Brandy smiled down at me. Then she lowered the top, and everything went dark.
    Something clicked near my head: the sound of the pod locking closed. Next came the humming sound that I’d heard before—except louder now, pulsating all around me.
    I waited with my sweating hands clasped by my sides. And then—all at once—everything kicked into motion.
    It was like I was on one of the roller coasters back at AwesomeWorld. Except this time I was on my back, sandwiched inside a tanning bed. The pod swayed—first right,then left. The force pulled my body with each turn, but I was too tightly packed inside to slip around.
    After following a sharp curve, the pod began to slow down. Just as it seemed to be coming to a stop, an eerie feeling came over me. There was a moment of nothingness.
    And that was when the floor dropped away.
    My stomach shot up into my throat as I plummeted downward. The pod veered and twisted. All I could do was