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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 ac