Shifting in to High Gear | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Shifting in to High Gear | Previous Challenge Entry
By Art Westefeld
06/03/21
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Belinda Snow, a news broadcaster better known as the Speedster, was reporting from the state prison where a villain she had captured three years ago had escaped. Apparently Paul Levitz, known to the public as the Vindicator, had disappeared during shift change. Somehow he’d managed to cobble together a stun gun from the wiring in his cell, and stunned the maintenance worker who came to fix it. After exchanging clothes with the man, he simply walked out during the afternoon shift change.

When Vindicator was arrested, he had been after her old foe, Jester, whom he blamed for the death of his family. Vindicator’s statement to the press when he was sentenced had made Speedster aware of the shift in his focus. He screamed, “I’ll get Jester some day, Speedster, but I’ll get you first!”

After Belinda finished her shift, she switched to her costume and raced around the city looking for the vigilante. “He should be easy to spot in his costume,” she decided, remembering the distinctive outfit he wore. Just as she finished that thought, she heard a scream and looked up to see a man falling from the roof of a skyscraper.

Racing around in a circle, she created an updraft to slow the man’s fall. He landed in front of her, grabbed her shoulder and shouted, “You have to catch that lunatic! He tossed me out the top floor window and…”

Speedster murmured under her breath, “You’re welcome.” At normal volume she interrupted, “Did he say anything before he tossed you?”

“Yes. He said he plans to wear you out by getting you to run yourself ragged. His exact words!”

At that moment, she heard the sound of a tire blowing out. Knowing what a good shot Vindicator was, she feared that he may have shot out someone’s tires in pursuit of that goal. She raced towards the sound. A bus from the local convent was careening out of control, heading towards a pile of fireworks. “That man has no respect for innocent lives!” she fumed. She raced to clear the fireworks from the bus's path.

Speedster shifted her attention to stopping the bus from crashing. She raced in front of it and became superhuman brakes by stomping her feet ten-thousand times a second.

The bus safely stopped, she heard a child calling, “Fluffy, come down.” Then she heard the crack of a rifle and racing towards the sound of the child’s cry raged, “He better not have shot that kid, or he'll need the medical wing of the prison when I catch up to him.”

She quashed that thought as being unworthy of a Christian, just as she saw a bundle of grey fur hurtling toward her. Catching a cat was nothing compared to catching a person, though she was feeling hungry, which indicated that Vindicator’s plan was working.

She ran up the side of the apartment building to a girl crying at an open window and placed Fluffy in his owner's arms. She noticed bullet damage to the branch on which the cat had crouched.

After reminding the child to keep her cat inside, she left the building by the normal means of the stairs. Strolling down she mused aloud, “Catching a falling man, rescuing a cat, and stopping a bus full of nuns from running into a pile of explosives... Are there any comic book cliches I haven’t hit today?”

Speedster knew she’d have to shift from reactive to proactive, so she took an instant to investigate the trajectory of the bullets that blew out the tire and broke the tree branch. The angles of the shots indicated that they came from the direction of the rail yard.

As fast as she dared with the various obstacles, she caught a glimpse of her foe reclining in a train car that was pulling away. Speedster leapt into action, disconnecting the car, then pulling a switch in the yard to shift the car onto another track. Vindicator was a heartless killer, but he wasn’t stupid. As the train car slowed, his demeanor shifted from relaxed to alert. He taunted, “Feeling tired yet, dear?”

Speedster raced after him, confident, even as hungry as she was, that she was still faster than a speeding bullet. After she knocked him out, she raced him across town. The second shift at the precinct was getting off, so she handed Vindicator off to the third shift commander.

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