The Last Hero (Book 1): Ultra Read Online Free Page A

hugged me. The smell of her hair always took me back right to my earliest memory, when she was holding me in her arms, rocking me from side to side.
    “Sorry to bring you home from your friends.”
    “It’s okay. We were pretty much done anyway.”
    “You always say that.”
    “What?”
    “You always say that. You were pretty much done. Kyle, I’m… I’m sorry. I just don’t know how to handle him when he’s like this. You’re the only person who can get through to him.”
    I pulled back from my mom’s hug. Wiped her salty tears from my face. I smiled at her. “Don’t worry. I’ve got it.”
    “You’re a good boy, Kyle. A good boy.”
    I turned around and nodded. She was right about that.
    Just a pity the “good boys” didn’t get anywhere in life.
    I walked up to the living room door. Part of me just wanted to turn around and run away. Mom might think I was the only person who could deal with Dad when he was upset, but the truth was, I was just winging it too. I didn’t really know what to say. Didn’t really know what I was doing.
    I just felt like I should be there.
    Because I guess, I felt weirdly responsible for his misery.
    I let out that deep breath and lowered the handle.
    My dad was sat in the corner of the room. To the everyday bystander, it looked like he was just sitting there, having a rest.
    But I knew my dad. And I knew he was having what Mom called an “event.”
    An “event” that he’d been having ever since The Great Blast killed my sister.
    “Dad?”
    He looked up. He was usually bald, although his shaven head was growing pretty long. His beard was wispy and gray. His eyes were sunken, dark underneath. His smile was flat. Empty.
    Dad didn’t look healthy. But he hadn’t looked healthy for eight years.
    To say that this was the dad I knew wasn’t an easy thing to admit.
    “You should be out with your friends,” Dad said.
    I nodded. Walked over to him. “We finished. I—”
    “Did your mom tell you to come speak to me?”
    I paused. “No,” I said. “I just got back and saw the kitchen in a state. Figured something must’ve happened.”
    Dad tutted. Shook his head. “You’ve always been an awful liar, son.”
    I sat beside my dad. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
    We sat there in silence for a few minutes. Stared across the room at the television, which wasn’t switched on. One of the photographs on the fireplace caught my eye. One of Dad with Cassie on his shoulders at some summer fair. The photograph had faded a little in the sunlight. But I knew there were plenty other photographs Dad could switch it with if he needed another to look at; to remind himself.
    I tried not to remind myself too often. But in moments like these, I couldn’t deny the wandering of my mind. The wandering to a time that seemed an eternity ago; a time that already filled the history lessons even though it only ended when I was eight.
    Dad had been this way ever since The Great Blast. Some people doubted The Great Blast. Some people questioned whether it was really as deadly and terrifying as the teachers and the New York old-timers made it out to be.
    But it was. Because I’d seen it.
    I’d watched it take my fourteen-year-old sister away.
    Like Hiroshima and Nagasaki before it, The Great Blast was a bittersweet event. It marked the end of the Era of the ULTRAs. Now let me educate you on ULTRAs a little. ULTRAs were supposed to be the future. The First World War was a turning point for the planet. It fast became clear that full armies were not a sustainable way to fight. There was too much damage. Too much collateral. Too many scars. So the leaders of the world got to work on the ultimate arms race: a way to find an alternative to conventional warfare.
    It took time. There were harrowing human experiments by the Nazis. Nuclear explosions. There was the Cold War, the information war, counter-terrorism and drone strikes. But nothing was right for the purpose. Nothing replaced the