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I caught my breath, an irrational wave of fear washing over me, like when you wake up from a nightmare you’re on the cusp of forgetting.

All I could recall was my face burning before the dream faded like a sigh in a hurricane.

It took a moment to gather my bearings, but before long the Earth came back into focus, and I remembered where I was. Safely soaring high above the planet I’d sworn to protect with my life. To date, I hadn’t found anything that could even remotely harm me, except maybe old age. I do age, slowly, but eventually entropy even catches up with superheroes. Entropy is the real grim reaper.

The world’s beautiful from up here – just a big blue marble, with white swirls over odd-shaped patches of gray, brown, and green. I had a cat-eye marble that looked like it when I was a kid. Somewhere down there, it still existed. Maybe in a landfill, in the backyard of my old house, or even in the possession of some new lucky child, but it still existed. That’s the nature of matter and the law of conservation of mass. Entropy be damned. When I eventually cease being me, my molecules will become something else. Hopefully, something amazing.

But for now, and I expect for a very long time, I am the Golden Sentinel, sworn defender of Earth and her almost eight billion inhabitants.

I floated quietly, miles above the surface of the breathtaking blue planet, watching, listening. My pristine white cape floated loosely around me, as there was no atmosphere to disturb it, nor gravity to tug at its hem.

Let me tell you, when it rains, it most definitely pours. In my case, it usually hails, sleets, snows, and throws in some frogs and locusts for good measure. The world went from relatively quiet – you know, stuff the global police forces and militaries can safely deal with – to absolute hell in a handbasket in a matter of seconds. Only this handbasket is almost a hundred and ninety-seven million square miles. That’s a huge handbasket for Hell to eff-up.

You can plan and prepare, but much like the Spanish Inquisition, you can never actually expect the unexpected. That’s why it’s called the unexpected. Trust me, my life revolves around it.

As I was saying, the world went from quietly sleeping baby to colicky quintuplets in the blink of an eye.

It all started with a volcano erupting on the island of Nea Kameni, a tiny island in the cluster that makes up Santorini, Greece. Hundreds of tourists would be in the path of any resulting lava flow, and traditional evacuation processes would be too late, so it was a priority-one emergency.

Before I could fly in and save the day, though, the city of San Francisco, all the way over on the West Coast of the United States, began to shake like one of those tacky hula dancer figurines people put on the dashboard of their car. San Francisco’s car clearly had bad shocks and was driving through potholes.

To make matters worse, a massive sinkhole nearly a mile in diameter suddenly formed in the Sea of Japan. Midway between Japan and South Korea, the liquid black hole guzzled seawater like a beer drinker at a football game. Its gaping maw pulled in a luxury liner, the ship’s superstructure shuddering and groaning as it careened sideways.

As I formulated a plan of attack, yet another hero-sized event let down its unruly hair. A small, undetectable fragment of meteorite struck the JEM – Japanese Experimental Module – of the International Space Station. The damage was so minor, the naked eye could barely see it. However, in a very short time, that segment of the ISS’s artificial atmosphere would fail, and all the current residents of the JEM would suffer an unpleasant demise.

I could see all this happening from where I floated, but even with my awesome speed and strength, I’d never figured out how to be in more than one place at a time.

The space station was closest, but there were people on the western coast of Nea Kameni bathing in the tantalizing warmth of the natural hot springs.

Moving at speeds rivaling light itself, I hurried off to save the day.

~

I arrived on the coast of Nea Kameni a fraction of a second later, and not a moment too soon. The people in the hot springs were already shouting that the water suddenly felt uncomfortably hot. In mere seconds it would become toxic and start to boil.

As cool as my superpowers are, nature imposes some practical limits on how I can use them. I can only move as fast as whatever I’m carrying can handle. Too fast, and the friction would tear them apart, like a stack of papers flying off the roof of a speeding car, so no speed of light travel while carrying a person. I know what you’re thinking. Yes, I did learn that lesson the hard way. Cut me some slack though. It’s not like there’s a school for superheroes or anything!

Around five to six hundred miles per hour is my max speed when carrying a human being unless they’re inside a structure that can withstand greater speeds. Then it’s on. We can go all sorts of fast. Like tens of thousands of miles per hour, depending on the structural integrity of the thing they’re enclosed in.

I don’t have some magical aura that extends out and protects anything I’m touching, like in the comics. That’s just silly. The laws of physics still apply, friends, just not to me. Why? Well, it’s a long story, but the Cliffs Notes version says I was gifted powers of a divine origin. Even I don’t totally understand my powers, but I know they don’t seem to have any upward limits. Strength, speed, flight, even healing. I’m a mixed bag of vanilla powers. The healing comes in handy if I’m too late to prevent injuries, but resurrection is impossible, even for me. Dead is dead. Doornails will remain doornails. As much as I desperately want to, even I can’t save everyone, everywhere, all the time.

There were about forty people in and around the coastal hot spring. I zipped past the captains of the tour boats, and told them in Greek – yep, I speak every known language, including a few forgotten ones for good measure – to turn west and move like hell!

As the captains shouted out their orders, I pulled people from the water, two by two, and deposited them carefully on the boats. There were a few bathing suits lost during the rescue. You think 500 miles per hour makes a face look funny! In a matter of seconds, I scooped up every person in immediate danger. With a half salute, half-wave I’m pretty sure no one actually saw, I rocketed towards the distressed luxury liner in the Tsushima Strait.

~

The ship was already buckling. She would need serious structural repairs once she was back in port.

An incredible assortment of seabirds circled the sinkhole. Morbid curiosity is clearly not a trait exclusive to humans and felines. It sounded as if the people on the ship were engaged in a screaming match with the seabirds.

Speaking of screaming, a few lifeboats had dropped into the churning waters of the strait. People foolish enough to hop in before their release were being sucked rapidly towards the ravenous expanse. I flew into the frigid waters and emerged with one of the lifeboats held over my head. I deposited the small craft on a deserted upper deck, and returned to the waters twice more, each time returning with another lifeboat full of terrified men, women, and children. Once the lifeboats were up and out of the way, I shouted for everyone to get below deck. I started to turn the ship’s nose away from the terrifying phenomenon. I had to turn the behemoth slowly, as she wasn’t built to withstand the strain of a sudden six hundred mile per hour pivot. If I tried that, the ship would snap in two, like the Titanic, and I’d have a brand-new disaster on my hands.

I felt the clock ticking as I turned the beast south. Once I was sure everyone was below deck, I found a structurally solid spot at the rear of the ship and began to push. The effort was more than a playground shove, but nowhere near what I could without the friction of the salt water in my way. Water is far denser than most people realize and moving a skyscraper sized vessel at any significant speed is no small feat. I was strong enough to hurl the ship into space with ease if I wanted to, but those pesky laws of physics still apply. Sending her flying like a jet engine would destroy her and kill everyone on board, so I had to go slower than dial-up internet to get the ship to safety.

You might wonder why I didn’t pick the ship up and fly her out of harm’s way, like I did with the lifeboats. Ever try to hold a wet paper plate full of food up with the tip of your finger? Too much area and too little support. The odds of pulling it off safely were too low. I’d risk either punching through the hull or breaking the ship in half.

I pushed as fast as I could without risking the lives of the passengers, well under a hundred miles per hour. Under normal circumstances, a ship like that never exceeded thirty! It took the better part of a minute to complete my rescue of the ship and her passengers. Finally, amidst the din of grateful cheers and relieved tears, I streaked skyward, directly towards the ISS.

~

I flew in with the grace and control of a hummingbird and hovered outside the JEM. I briefly studied the damage before flying to the edge of a series of stabilizer panels. Taking hold of the edge of a thin metal panel, I bent it back and forth, like folding a piece of paper before tearing it along a scored line. Then I tore the metal. The repeated bending created a weakened line in the metal that allowed me to achieve the tear with no additional visible damage. When the world was no longer on the brink of disaster, I could go back and repair or perhaps replace the panel.

Rocketing back to the puncture in the JEM unit, I began rubbing the metal between my hands furiously, superheating the business card-sized piece to nearly three thousand degrees. I placed it against the puncture, pressing firmly enough to effectively weld the patch in place.

Satisfied the ISS was out of danger, I sped back to Earth.

~

Now, you might be thinking the citizens of San Francisco and Santorini would be toast by now, especially the tourists still on Nea Kameni. See what I did there? Volcano? Toast? Okay, that was probably in poor taste. But seriously, I’m fast. Reeeeeaaaaaly fast. I’m ‘saved the entire world in the time it took you to read the last couple of pages’ kinda fast, so bear with me. That was a long day.

As I raced towards the California coast, and ultimately that oh-so famous City by the Bay, I could see the region erupting into utter chaos. It wasn’t massive, around a 6.2 on the Richter scale, but the quake was centered closer to the city than any since the big one of 1906. There was going to be a lot of damage. I arrived over the South Bay just as all hell broke loose.

The Golden Gate Bridge was bucking like a bull in a rodeo. Cars crashed into each other as they were pushed precariously towards the edge. A two hundred and twenty foot drop would crush a car like a bug on a windshield and kill everyone inside. Like I said before, water’s harder than people realize. The seismic force tugged the support cables in directions they weren’t ever meant to be tugged. If even one of them broke free, it would cut through the cars like a steel bullwhip through a piñata.

I flew the length of the bridge shouting for everyone to put up their windows and convertible tops. Then I went to work.

I needed a safe place to deposit the vehicles as I removed them from the bridge. The grassy area at the center of Fort Baker, only about a mile north, would be perfect. A similar area at the center of Fort Winfield Scott existed roughly a mile to the south.

Going slow enough to avoid injury, I could pick up a vehicle, fly it to a fort, and set it down, about once a second. Return trips, at that close distance, were virtually instantaneous when viewed by the naked eye.

A mortal couldn’t follow the amount of disastrous activity going on in the city at the moment. Luckily, my powers let me take in everything around me and process it instantly. Every brick that tumbled, every crack that formed in every road, every broken pane of glass, every scream and shout for help, I heard it all. In between my deliveries of cars from the bridge to the grassy knolls, I crisscrossed the city like a sentient beam of golden light, catching people as they fell, shielding them from falling debris, and putting out fires as they erupted. I placed my rescuees in the safest possible places and zipped off to the bridge to collect more cars and trucks.

About twenty-five seconds after the devastating shaking began, it ceased. But the city still needed a whole lot of saving. For every person I plucked from the crosshairs of danger, there were hundreds, maybe thousands more, who were still in some sort of peril. It was going to be a very busy day.

I shot around the city for another few seconds, removing large sections of debris from atop trapped cars and clearing the way for emergency response teams to assist. You see, I’m not the only hero in town. There are firefighters, EMTs, police officers, doctors, nurses, and so many others, paid and unpaid, who are always instrumental in saving lives and property when disaster strikes. I get the parades and photo-ops, but honestly, those unsung heroes out there, who never share the stage or spotlight with yours truly, they’re the ones who deserve the recognition. They’re just as vulnerable as the people they save, yet they put their lives on the line just the same.

They’re the real heroes.

~

Before anyone could thank me, assuming they’d even seen who’d saved them, I streaked back towards Santorini. I still had a volcano to deal with.

I arrived back at the island to find the magma advancing over Nea Kameni like a wave of giant fire ants, if the ants were made of actual fire. Though the tourists who chose to visit the island that fateful day were all heading for coastal waters, the wall of molten death would overtake most of them long before they could get to any real semblance of safety.

I studied the situation for a moment and decided my original plan was still the best. Diving under the crystal waters on the northernmost side of the island, I continued down until I reached the seabed, more than thirteen hundred feet below. Once there, I dug furiously into the centuries old lava rock that made up the base of the island, punching through Earth’s crust to the mantle below. I dug in and upwards at a forty-degree angle, turning lava rock, and pockets of iron, nickel, and diamond into dust with my bare hands. I punched, grabbed, crushed, and brushed aside chunks of the mantle as I bored upwards, eventually reaching the magma vent that fed the volcano. The torrent of molten lava that suddenly flooded my makeshift tunnel would have destroyed most anything in its path, but to me, it barely registered as warm. The magma immediately began to flow down the tunnel, and as it did, I followed it back towards the sea below. As I returned to the opening of the tube, I widened the tunnel’s diameter, allowing more lava to flow, and ensuring it wouldn’t cool too soon and impede upon the lava’s new direction.

I returned to the surface and watched for a moment as the magma flowing into the sea began to form what would one day be a new island. It was rare, but occasionally even I could be impressed.

I spent the next few minutes healing tourists who’d been too close to the advancing lava and suffered first and second degree burns by sheer proximity. That’s one thing I have to slow down to ‘mortal time’ for. The time it takes to lay my hands on someone and heal them isn’t as trivial as most tasks. Besides, even if only for a moment, it’s nice to look into the eyes of someone I save. It wholly reminds me why I do what I do. Every time.

A young girl from Ireland and her father were the last to receive my gift. The man was in his early thirties, and thankfully in excellent health. He and his daughter, who was about five, had been exploring the rim of the volcano when it erupted. They’d been at a safe distance under normal circumstances, but the coast was just too far for him to carry his daughter ahead of a rampaging wall of liquid heat. I’ve been too late before, too late to heal. Thankfully, this family was going home unscathed.

The man, Errol, had been running from the advancing wave, carrying his daughter in his arms, clutching her tightly to his chest. The heat left his back blistered and raw, bleeding in some places from the scorch marks, like Blowtorch Man had been chasing him. Yeah, he was a thing for a minute. But archenemies are a story for another time.

As painful as I knew his wounds were, Errol insisted I heal his daughter, Marjorie, first. Since her arms had been wrapped around his neck, her tiny hands and wrists were also heat blasted and raw. I held Marjorie’s hands in mine and felt the power flow. Healing is as close to truly experiencing the divine nature of my powers as I ever get. It’s transformative for the recipient of my gift, but almost as much for me. See, I haven't felt real pain in a very long time. When I heal someone, I can feel their pain. It’s a brief flare, quick, like a paper cut, but for a moment I feel it all. I can lift buildings all day but healing actually drains me a bit. Marjorie’s hands healed quickly and beautifully. She wouldn’t even have a scar to remind her of her terrifying visit to Santorini.

As I placed my hands on Errol’s back, I could still feel the tingle of Marjorie’s burns in my fingertips. Then, for just a moment, my back flared like someone poured boiling oil over it.

In seconds, Errol’s back was as good as new. I even fixed a bulging disk at L5-S1 he probably hadn’t been to the doctor for yet, just for good measure.

The father and daughter looked at me with pure gratitude and awe. Marjorie touched my face, tracing my cheek with a tiny, perfect fingertip, and Errol placed a hand on my shoulder. There were tears in the man’s pale blue eyes. “I can never repay what you’ve done for us,” he said. “Bless you, friend.”

He took Marjorie’s hands in his own, and hefted her up, back into his arms. As they strolled towards the rescue boats in the western harbor, Marjorie waved goodbye.

And then the moment was over.

Many more moments lay ahead, though. San Francisco was still in dire need of assistance, and there were countless more people there to heal.

~

I was in the Bay Area for almost an hour; healing, digging, and rescuing. Between Santorini and San Francisco, it’s amazing there were no fatalities. I take my job as sworn defender of Earth seriously, folks. Any day I can pull off rescues like that, and whisk a few fatally injured people away from the Grim Reaper with my healing in the process, is a good day at the office. Even with superpowers, I can’t take all the credit. Those local heroes, the mortal ones, they help humanity bounce back just as much as me when disaster hits. The human spirit would give iron or diamonds a run for their money when it came to sheer durability. Times like these proved it.

Once I finished in San Francisco, I had one last task to complete before returning to the ISS and fixing the stabilizer panel that had served as a...