Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King by Alan Grant (best books to read for self development .TXT) 📕

He ambled off down the marble floor, heading for the life-size diorama of a tribal group and their dwelling during the last Ice Age. Louie always liked to stand mere for a few moments alone, just thinking about what life must have been like for these people. Short, brutal, dangerous, and perishingly cold. And yet, against all odds, they'd survived. Without them, there would be no civilization now, no New York, no museums.

Thirty yards behind him, Don Bradley was still staring at the mask as if mesmerized, unable to tear his eyes away. For even as he'd started to walk on, he'd seen the mask's eyes light up with a brilliant cobalt-blue flare. Don opened his mouth to call to Louie, but he felt suddenly dazed and disoriented, unable to remember what he was going to say.

Slowly and deliberately, he reached out and unhooked the grotesque wooden mask from its hanging. The blue light shone hypnotically. Trembling slightly, knowing he was about to do something he shouldn't, Don turned the mask over and held it in front of his face. Vaguely wondering why he was doing this, he tied the plaited reed fastening behind his head.

Instantly, a ripple of energy surged down to flood through his body. His thoughts seemed to float a vast distance away, so far that he couldn't tell what they were. He felt his heart throb thunderously in his chest A terrible rage grew out of nowhere, filling his mind, so strong it turned the edges of his vision red. A low, guttural snarl escaped his lips as he snatched up a large flint-headed ax from the neighboring display table.

"What'd you say?" Louie Beltrani called over his shoulder, his attention still wandering back in the misty depths of human history.

Hearing a clatter behind him, Louie turned to see a figure from a nightmare leaping toward him, eyes blazing, stone ax raised high above its head. Then the razor-sharp flint edge sliced down through his skull, cleaving it in two.

Louie was dead before his body hit the floor.

Snarling and growling, Don Bradley held up the bloodied ax. His tongue reached out through the mask's mouth, licking off blood and flecks of gray matter. Then, with surprising delicacy, he used the ax to shave off several splinters of wood from the desktop. Piling them together, he struck the ax against a stout flint grinding stone. Sparks leaped from the impact

A dozen blocks away, Kyle Rayner was kicking back, taking it easy.

Stretched full-length on his living room sofa, a can of soda on the table and the football game on cable, Kyle felt life didn't get much better. Unless he had a commission. As a freelance artist, Kyle never felt secure unless he had at least three jobs lined up.

Or, of course, unless he was wearing his Green Lantern duds, using his power ring to blast some threatening supervillain.

Even super heroes deserve a night off, he told himself, quickly amending it to: Especially super heroes deserve a night off.

Kyle held the chilled soda can against his cheek for a moment, glad that he wasn't in Florida but here, where it was more than twenty degrees cooler.

On-screen, the cheerleaders had left the field and the players were running on. Kyle pointed the remote control and turned up the volume.

"–just joining us, this is Mike Dare live from the–" the commentator was saying, but the rest of his words were completely drowned out by the scream of sirens out on the street below his window.

Kyle groaned. Just one of Manhattan's constant irritants. He counted three fire engines and at least a half-dozen cop cars as they sped past a dozen floors below.

Something big, he thought, already mentally bidding farewell to two hours of sports. Maybe they could use my help.

Kyle strode across the room and hauled back the thin curtain across the window. Leaning out, he saw the flashing lights fade into the distance. A burning red glow lit up what little he could see of the night sky.

As fast as he took to think it, Kyle was soaring up the concrete canyon after them. Only now he was dressed in the dark, verdant costume of Green Lantern, his eyes masked, the power ring glowing emerald on the middle finger of his right hand.

He felt the air rush past him as the ring's limitless power carried him down the street fifty feet above ground level. Now that he was outside, he could hear the sounds of angry flames and cracking glass. Blazing sparks were drifting high into the night.

The ring reacted immediately to Kyle's mental impulse, carrying him over a block of higher buildings where he could actually see the burning museum for the first time.

The place was an inferno, the flames roaring like a maddened mob as they sucked in air from the surrounding streets to feed their growing intensity.

Instantly, Kyle sent a thin green beam shooting down from the ring to probe the conflagration for signs of life. Nothing.

Not surprising, he thought No human could survive in that heat.

Fire crews were already spilling over the pavement as police grouped to hold back the gathering crowd of evacuees from neighboring buildings, along with the usual assemblage of nosy spectators. Swiftly the firefighters advanced as close as they dared to the blistering heat before their hoses started to gush.

Kyle knew it would take them hours to bring this fire under control–and that was assuming they managed to prevent it from spreading to the rest of the block.

Another thought flashed through his mind, and his alien power ring produced another miracle. The entire museum was suddenly sheathed in a bright green bubble. As the flames licked in vain against it, a hole a yard in diameter opened near the bubble's base. The blades of a fan took shape in the hole, flashing emerald as they spun faster and faster, sucking out all the air inside the containment area.

With no oxygen to fuel its growing hunger, the fire died back