Chapter No.90. Fury.

It was a dark and dreary night when Sparky was the first to notice that something bad was going to happen. He alerted Baby Jack, who in turn alerted the others.

Robert sensed that a large army unit was approaching their house. He and his family changed into their superhero outfits and prepared for war. They appeared outside their home in full battle gear as a group of tanks, accompanied by solders approached.

Robert stepped forward, raised his hand and shouted. "Halt or I will destroy all of you!"

They did.

"You are trespassing. We cannot allow that. We don't know why you thought you could defeat us. None of your weapons will function. In fact, I will make them disappear." He waved his hand and the tanks disappeared depositing their crews on the ground. The soldiers' guns disappeared.

A flight of F-35's approached. Robert waved his hand at Baby Jack and Sparky, and they flew away at over Mach-3 to take them out.

A solider, wearing insignias that identified him as a general, approached. "We had no choice, The president ordered this."

"We are not happy with this. We had a deal that prevented this from happening. Now, I will make all of your weapons disappear, including all of the nuclear devices, and all of them all over this planet. However, I will allow the other countries to keep their conventional weapons."

"You will make us vulnerable to attack!"

"Your president should have considered that before he tried to attack us. I will send you back to where you came from." He waved his hand and they vanished.

"They must be delusional to think they could attack us like that," Janet said.

"I'm sure this won't be the end of it," Robert said. "We might have to move to a more secure location."

The next surprise occurred after the Steris family went back inside their house. Janet noted that there was a recorded message on the landline phone. She played it and her face went from disgust to outright fury. "They terminated me from the credit union! They didn't offer a reason!" She went to her computer and logged on to her account. It indicated that her account was empty of funds and had been closed. "They're not going to get away with this. They can fire me, but they are not going to get away with stealing my money."

Robert elected not to interfere. He realized that she was upset and it's best not to argue with an angry woman.

"Do you think that they'll try to hit us again?" Amy asked.

"I don't think so," Robert said. "At least not tonight. Let's just wait and see what happens."

Nothing did. Janet decided to go to the credit union in the morning and have it out with the administrator, a man she didn't like because she knew that he was a misogynist.

"I want to know why you emptied my account!" she said, her eyes displaying fire and brimstone.

"We decided that your account had been manipulated to add funds that were not legitimate"

"I never added illegal funds to my account. You're accusing me of criminal actions. I've worked here for over twenty years and never did anything illegal. I've helped build up the reputation of this credit union and serve its customers with honesty and fairness, and now you accuse me of committing a crime without any proof. I will not tolerate this. You will restore my account, or I will have your head."

He gave her a sly smirk. "You are no longer affiliated with this organization, madam, and have no right to demand anything."

Janet decided to get physical. She rushed forward and smacked her fist into his face, breaking his nose. He fell to the floor crying out in pain and bleeding.

"You will do as I say, or I will smash you to pulp!"

Two police officers arrived and moved to restrain her, but she made them freeze in place. "You cannot stop me. If I wished I could make a blood vessel in your brains explode. You will be dead before your bodies hit the floor."

She turned back to Helen Wells, the Credit Union's financial administrator. "I have the ability to wipe this institution off the Earth, but I will not do that if you restore my funds, so that I can transfer them to another institution."

"I'm sorry about this," Helen told her. "He forced us to do this. I will restore your funds."

Janet sighed. "I hate this. I didn't want to stop working here, but now I'm forced to leave a job I truly enjoyed."

Helen sat down at a computer and restored Janet's funds. Janet used her phone to transfer them to an online account.

Janet pointed to the two officers. "Tell these two to forget what happened here. If they try to do anything they will suffer an ugly fate."

Helen nodded, realizing that she was dealing with one of the superheroes, someone who could easily carry out her threats.

Janet returned home. Her family was there to welcome her.

"Way to go, Mother!" James exclaimed.

Baby Jack raised a fist and Sparky offered a bark.

Janet sighed. "I really didn't want to use violence, but he gave me no choice."

"I understand," Robert said. "It appears that we've reached a point at which we must take more control of our destiny."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"The first step is to move our house to a more secure location. I have acquired a plot of land out in the Marlin district. We'll place a force field over it that will render it invisible and protect it from any attack. All of us must imagine this location and then simultaneously transfer this house to that location."

They did, and it did. The location was more forested with no actual road leading to it. James created a specially designed antenna to pick up a cellular signal, but none of this was good enough to solve the main problem.

Robert sighed. "Now, I must go to force a truce."

"How are you going to do that?" Janet asked. "They attacked us, not the other way around."

"I'm going to employ your technique, my dear."

"Sock it to them, Dad!" James exclaimed.

Baby Jack and Sparky added their approval. They others just stared at him with concern showing in their expressions.

Robert materialized in the Vice President's office, startling him. Vance Prescot was politically moderate compared to the President Fenton's more strongarm approach. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was also there. Ned Wells had been an Army General with combat experience in the Iraq War.

"Good morning gentlemen. I am most disappointed with this latest attempt to attack us. That was tried before without success. We will not tolerate any further attacks."

"We don't have any weapons to attack anyone," Wells said.

"I will restore those, but the current President must go. Either you do it, or we will. The choice is yours. Once that is done, you will formulate a new operations deal that will allow us to continue our work with you. Without this contract, we will have no other choice but to wipe this country off the map."

"I thought you weren't supposed to destroy life," Vance said.

"We have been given the choice to kill, and we will do it if we do not get an operational deal. We don't want to resort to violence, but there appears to be no other way to stop this nonsense."

"What sort of deal do you want?"

"We had two FBI agents that used us to solve crimes. They retired when they realized what you were going to try. The head of NASA and we had a working relationship. Now he is gone because of the attack. We need to reestablish a working relationship with both organizations."

"If we do as you wish, will you restore all of our weapons?"

"Yes, in fact, I will restore them now if you agree to do as I wish."

The two men exchanged glances before the Vice President turned back to Robert. "We agree, but you must realize that getting rid of the president requires an impeachment, a proceeding that takes time."

"We do not have that time," Robert replied. "I think you know what I mean."

"We can't just eliminate him. It would bring all sorts of ugly congressional inquiries."

"Okay, I will simply make him vanish, and you can tell them that it was the only way to solve this problem. You can explain to them that if they don't agree with my plan, we will eliminate all of them. Look, we don't want to resort to violence, but we must force this agreement to restore peace between the government and us. It's the only way we can coexist."

"We understand," the Vice President said.

Robert returned home to his concerned family.

"Hopefully, they will comply with your demands," Janet said.

"They will, trust me."

The latest news was astounding. The president had disappeared, and no one knew where he went. The government had no other way to solve the problem and they agreed in principle to Robert's demands. Vice President Prescot became president, and the congress began work on a law that would spell out the means to deal with the superheroes.

Sometimes good old anger works, especially when dealing with knuckleheads. Unfortunately, the superheroes had to hunker down in a protected bunker in order to avoid attacks from a hostile world. Janet could no longer go to work, at least not in a normal job. She was the superheroes last undetected contact with normal people.