Blood and Stone (3 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

Chadwick Phillips had been shocked to learn that Mark Kenslir had been living in Florida for some time. When he had retired in 1989, Phillips was under the impression Detachment 1039 was being disbanded—a victim of budget cuts made by President Carter. The same President who felt having super soldiers was not a peaceful solution to the world’s problems.

Mark had explained the downsizing had quickly been reversed by the next administration. And that under Ronald Reagan, the military had redoubled their efforts to find ways to combat the parahuman and supernatural threats in the world.

In 2008, the solution to that quest, spanning multiple Administration and several wars, had been found. America learned how to make their own super soldiers.

“Not quite the way you remember it?” Mark asked as he wheeled Chadwick into the Fountain Chamber.

The vast chamber, nearly a hundred feet across, was filled with a fifty foot-wide pool of still water. That Chadwick did remember from his active duty days, when Detachment 1039 had operated out of the black glass office building built over the underground site. What was new was the metal, bridge-like platform over the Fountain of Youth, on which were four stainless-steel operating tables. The whole chamber was now filled with work stations, medical equipment, and storage cabinets. An observation room had been built overhead, twenty feet off the ground.

“Quite a difference from my day,” Chadwick said as he looked around.

Mark Kenslir stepped back from the wheelchair and checked his watch. “By my calculations, we’ve got eight and half hours until sunset. Care to join the men until then?”

Kenslir was referring to two men, turned to stone, lashed, immobile to handtrucks that were parked beside the edge of the Fountain pool. A lab coated female technician was maneuvering one handtruck over to the edge of the pool.

“That’s what happens?” Chadwick asked, noting the thick beads of glue holding the shattered men together. Kenslir had explained how the stone men had been broken into pieces a month ago then meticulously glued back together.

“That’s what happened to them,” Kenslir said. “The process doesn’t make you completely indestructible.”

“Sorry we’re late!” Josie Winters said, walking up quickly behind Colonel Kenslir and Chadwick. She was still wearing her gray sweats and sneakers. Victor walked quietly behind her.

“Where’s Pam?” the stone soldier asked, looking around.

Chadwick was amazed and stared at Victor intently. Victor moved like a regular person. But instead of flesh, his skin was made of a gray, almost concrete-looking material. Even his eyes were made of stone, with no visible pupils. His head was bald, a round stone atop his stone shoulders.

“Josie, Victor, this is Colonel Chad Phillips,” Kenslir said, motioning toward Phillips. “He’s going to be joining the team.”

Josie extended her hand. “Pleased to meet you, sir.” She was surprised. Colonel Kenslir hadn’t mentioned anything about this to her.

Chadwick eyed the slim, athletic girl with great curiosity. She was tall, pretty and looked remarkably familiar.

“Is it just me,” Chadwick asked, “Or does she look like you? Are you two related or something?”

Josie and Kenslir both exchanged surprised looks.

“That’s a bit complicated,” Mark finally said, still baffled at this first mention of a resemblance.

Chadwick looked back at Josie. The girl had Mark’s jet black hair, his high cheek bones, his nose and even green eyes—although hers were normal and not the weird green-black of Kenslir’s. The resemblance was more than passing.

“I’ll fill you in later,” Kenslir said.

At the edge of the Fountain, the technician had just finished undoing the straps that held one of the broken stone soldiers in place. She stepped behind the cart and tilted it, dumping the unmoving gray man into the water. Then she began working on the straps of the stone man on the other handtruck.

“Can I go in, Colonel?” Victor asked. “I wouldn’t mind a day in the flesh again.”

“Sorry,” Kenslir said. “You have to die to get de-petrified.”

Victor was startled to hear this. He’d assumed the Fountain could heal anything—even the curses that had made him a man of living stone.

Kenslir could see the boy’s confusion. “The Fountain heals and revives. As long as you’re alive, you’re stuck like that.”

“So they’re dead?” Chadwick asked, pointing at the pool.

Kenslir turned to face his friend. “If your head is destroyed or comes separated from your body, you die. You turn all the way to stone. Then you have to come back here.”

Chadwick considered this quietly, then turned and watched the water of the Fountain intently. The ripples from the first stone man’s plunge had been replaced by a churning, as though something was boiling beneath the surface.

The technician dumped the second stone man into the water.

“What’s it like?” Chadwick asked Victor, still watching the water. “What does it feel like?”

“I don’t feel much,” Victor said. “It’s like my body’s asleep.” He wondered what exactly the old man in the wheel chair was going to be doing for the Detachment. He didn’t look like he was in very good health.

A hand came out of the water, grabbing at the edge of the pool. Then another hand, as the first stone man, now turned back to flesh, pulled himself from the water.

Josie looked away, embarrassed as the formerly stone man stood slowly. The female technician handed him a towel to wrap around his waist.

“Welcome back, Captain,” Colonel Kenslir said, walking forward.

Daniel Smith, a very dark-skinned black man with a shaved head and the body of a long-distance runner, saluted with one hand while he held his towel with the other. “Colonel!”

Kenslir returned the salute. “You keep dying, you’re going to catch up with me.”

Daniel looked around at the Chamber, at Kenslir, the man in the wheelchair, at Josie and Victor. “Where’s Jimmy?”

“I’m right here,” Jimmy Kane said, pulling himself from the water. The second formerly-stone man was skinny and pale, with sandy-blonde hair. Like Smith, he was of average height. He blushed suddenly as he realized he was naked.

The technician handed him a towel as well and he hastily wrapped it around himself.

“Jimmy!” Josie exclaimed, rushing forward to embrace the skinny teenager.

Daniel Smith walked forward, past the two eighteen year olds. “I take it we won?”

“We managed to kill one of them—for good this time,” Kenslir said. “But the other one got away.”

Kenslir turned to Chadwick. “This is Colonel Phillips, Parallel, from the old days.”

Captain Smith’s eyes widened in surprise. He saluted the old man in the wheelchair. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir.”

Phillips shakily returned the salute. “So you don’t know what’s been going on since your last death?”

“No, sir,” Smith replied. “When you die as a stone soldier, everything goes black. It seems like it was just moments ago that I was killed.”

“Sorry about that, by the way,” Jimmy said.

“You were under telepathic control,” Smith said. He spoke so gruffly it was difficult for Jimmy to tell if that meant he was forgiven or not.

“Telepath?” Chadwick asked.

Josie and Jimmy walked over, holding hands. The technician followed them, moving beside Chadwick’s wheelchair.

“The shapeshifters gain powers as well as memories when they consume a heart,” Kenslir explained. “The black-haired one got my telepath in Arizona.”

Chadwick gulped. Being stone only made you partially unbreakable and left you wide open to telepathic assault. It didn’t sound as wonderful now as Kenslir had made it out during the drive back to the Tower.

“You ready?” Kenslir asked.

Josie was surprised. “He’s going in?”

“Yes, we’re going to petrify Colonel Phillips tonight, with Jimmy and Captain Smith.”

As always, Jimmy blurted out what he was thinking. “Why? Isn’t he a little old?”

“It’s the Fountain of
Youth
, Jimmy,” Colonel Kenslir said.

He reached down, putting a hand behind Phillip’s knees, and the other under the old man’s arm, and around his back. He gently lifted Phillips from the chair, then carried him to the edge of the water.

“I remember that time you lost your leg and I had to carry you,” Phillips said. He was trying not to wince in pain from being carried. His old bones didn’t like being manhandled.

“I thought we agreed not to mention that ever again,” Kenslir said. He reached the edge of the Fountain pool and gently lowered Chadwick to the floor, seating him on the edge, so his legs dangled into the water.

“My back will never forget carrying your heavy ass,” Chadwick said. He started to say something else but stopped, his mouth open. The water around Chadwick’s feet began to roil, as though it were bubbling. And he could feel the water. He hadn’t felt anything below the waist since his stroke.

A feeling of cold swept up the old man’s legs as Kenslir stepped back. The cold was followed by a tingling sensation, like the feeling of having the circulation return to a limb that had fallen asleep.

The coolness and tingling swept up Phillip’s body, to his neck and finally his face and scalp. The tingling was replaced by a feeling of warmth, like the sun on his skin. Phillips closed his eyes.

The warm feeling finally faded and Phillips opened his eyes again. His vision was sharper, clearer than it had been in years. He looked down at his hands—the wrinkles and age spots were gone. His skin looked fresh and young.

Phillips put his hands down on either side of him and looked into the clear water of the Fountain. He wiggled his toes. It was fantastic.

Chadwick slowly pulled his legs from the water and stood. He turned around to face Kenslir and the others. The water from the Fountain had soaked his pajamas and they clung to him now, dripping onto the floor.

“Why am I so skinny?” Chadwick asked, trying to suppress a grin. He couldn’t ever remember feeling this good. This alive.

“We’ll pump you up tonight,” Kenslir said. Then he held a hand up, in front of his chest, fingers splayed wide. “Hit me.”

Chadwick raised his right hand slowly, flexing his fingers. No trace of the arthritis that had plagued him for years remained.

Josie and Jimmy exchanged amazed glances. For all they’d seen the Fountain of Youth do, they hadn’t seen anything as miraculous as this. The decrepit, frail-looking, wrinkled old man from the wheelchair, who looked as though he might die at any minute was gone. Now he was a thin man, slightly shorter than average, with brown-blond hair, and vibrant blue eyes. He was handsome, with a boyish charm.

Phillips suddenly snapped his arm out, as though pushing at the air. Blue-white streaks of electricity flashed from his fingertips, twisting and spiraling around each other as they leapt across the room and burned into Mark Kenslir’s stomach.

The pulse of miniature lightning lasted only a half second, but left behind the smell of ozone and a black, smoking hole in Kenslir’s shirt. Through the hole, the Colonel’s skin had turned gray, then quickly resumed flesh color.

Kenslir frowned, looking down at the hole in his shirt, then back up at Phillips. “You were supposed to hit my hand.”

“Sorry,” Phillips said, grinning. “I’m a little out of practice.”

***

“Everything is okay,” Ted Proctor said into his radio. He was gripping it tightly in one hand, his eyes staring vacantly into the distance. Blood dripped from his nose, onto his lips. But it wasn’t his blood.

All around Ted, bodies were torn and ripped apart. The bodies of the inmates of Alcatraz, dead in the exercise yard, their hearts removed. The blood on Ted’s face had come from one inmate, killed in front of him and sprayed on Ted like mist from a breaking wave.

Ted didn’t mind the blood. He didn’t mind anything. He was mesmerized, locked into an almost hypnotic trance. Every time there was a call on his radio, Ted simply gave the same answer. “Everything is okay.”

Inside the prison, Tezcahtlip still wore the form of the guard from the dock, Brad. His magically conjured uniform was soaked in blood. It dripped from his sleeves, absorbed from the dozens and dozens of hearts he had torn from inmate chests and consumed. Several guards inside the facility had noticed this. When they questioned him, Tezcahtlip had simply turned them to stone. He didn’t want their hearts—they were just mortals, nothing special.

The special people on Alcatraz were all prisoners. Most of them had been in the exercise yard. A collection of magic users and mild psionics. Few of them possessed real power. Even without the drugs to suppress their abilities, most lacked the ability to draw in enough energy to do much with their powers. Spoon benders and prognosticators for the most part.

Tezcahtlip could draw in power. From living hearts. This gave him an energy reserve far greater than the inmates. He could do things with their powers they never dreamed of. But the lifeforce of the average parahumans wasn’t enough. He wanted more.