Mergen

by Michael J. Mayak

Damn!

Mergen spun around too late as the rings surrounded his head like fallen halos.

They were screened somehow, still were. Even with Mergen’s advanced sensory powers he couldn’t make them out clearly.

He tried hitting them with a telepathic bolt and doubled over in raging agony, clutching his head, his fingers stinging with cold from the rings.

Damn, again! He’d known not to touch those things; the rings floated around his head without touching him, blocking the use of his powers.

“Who the hell are you?” Mergen yelled.

“William Gaynes Turner, Junior,” the first figure said. “You seem to have gone to the other side since your youth in Othcault.”

“Trying to stop guys like you!” Mergen yelled, his head throbbing.

“You were a very successful criminal at such a young age,” the second figure said. “They could call the movie ‘I Was A Teenage Mesmerist.’ But your powers were far more. Your telepathy and telekinesis made you a formidable foe.”

“That is our problem,” the second figure said. “You endanger our operation as you have been capturing our criminal operatives in the act, as it were.”

Mergen fought against the pain, aimed a psychic blast squarely at the mind of the second figure.

The pain nearly blinded him.

“I advise you not to try anything like that again,” the second figure said.

There was a clicking as blueish chips formed around his body, starting from the legs and moving up to his torso.

“In a moment you will be prepared for transport,” the first first figure said. “The blue shielding will hold you until we have you at our facility where you will be held in our suspension tube.”

Through a fog, Mergen could make out a smile where the face of the first figure registered as a foggy silhouette.

“The same tubes used to hold our adult colleagues incarcerated in Nix Olympica,” the second figure said.

“Understanding how these worked and making our own is crucial to our plan,” the first figure said.

Mergen, by now, was covered in the small blue chips. He felt cold and woozy as if he was falling asleep.

“You’re showing off that body just wearing a tight pair of cutoffs,’ his brother had said of his superhero costume.

That wasn’t what made him feel cold.

He was nearly unconscious and felt hands lifting him when his subconscious mind, long trained and programmed, sent out a fleeting, desperate telepathic burst.

No pain. Just the message which he realized had been sent, but where.

He remembered the god Mergen, where he’d gotten the name, was depicted as an archer.

His last conscious thought was of a poem: “I shot an arrow in the air…”

—end—

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Another excerpt from a larger work I need to go back and finish some day. I posted another bit of this right here https://authorjeffbaker.com/2016/10/24/unbreakable-monday-flash-fics/ about six years ago.—–jeff baker aka michael j. mayak