I Am Phantom (14 page)

I
decided it was best to tell them about Sykes later. “I ran into Project
Midnight.”

“They’re
still around?”

“Apparently.”
I glanced down at the small device, still blinking in my hand. “But I want to
know for sure. Can you look something up for me?”

“Industrial
park, east side off 3
rd
 
and Lillian.”

I
leapt off the building. Whistling air sang around my ears and the familiar
freedom of semi-flight made my stomach lurch pleasantly. I landed on the next
building and began a sort of dance with the infrastructure, using anything and
everything as my jumping off point; my partners for a millisecond as I grappled
and jumped from one roof to the next.

“Here,”
I said a few minutes later.

“Look
to the left. Now right. That appears to be the eastern side. The warehouse
you’re looking for is at the end.”

I
perched on precipice of a twelve-story building across the street, and surveyed
the industrial park below me. My legs dangled off the edge, my body leaned forward.
Up here was where I felt most safe.

Silent
supply trucks sat in a vacant lot to my left and an oily smell drifted up to
me. The harsh glow of spotlights did not look inviting.

Not
the ideal place to spend a school night.

“Drake,
we don’t know what’s in there,” Cody said.

“This
is where the coordinates on that transmitter I grabbed led us, right?”

“It
could be wrong. Even if it’s not you’re going to walk right to a bunch of
people who just tried to capture you.”

“I
wasn’t ready,” I admitted. “It won’t happen again. And I’m not walking in.
Stealth will be involved.”

Cody
sighed heavily, but he knew he couldn’t change my mind. Not about this. “Well,
let’s get it over with.”

I
stood and scaled my way to the ground. “That’s the spirit.”

The
warehouse was at the back of the lot. The lights were tricky to dodge; I’m sure
at least one camera saw me and I didn’t like all the open space, but eventually
I made it to one of the open side doors. I busted the lock and went in.

The
warehouse didn’t look like anything sinister. And maybe it wasn’t. But what
Sykes had said after he had…saved me (did that really happen?) wouldn’t stop
bothering me. He was wrong. The people that had done this were no more; we had
both seen the remnants of their work in that other underground lab.

And
yet…the feeling that maybe—just maybe—he was right, wouldn’t go
away. It was stronger than the pull of figuring out if he was lying about my
superhuman abilities.

I
peeked my head in the door. No sound. The wind picked up outside and a few
snowflakes fell. I made sure the door made no noise as it closed behind me.

Crates
were piled atop one another like Jenga blocks. Hooks and pulleys hung in the
darkened rafters. I climbed up to the suspended walkway and crept towards the
slightly lit part of the warehouse in front of me. Nothing. I leapt back to the
ground again and walked between the boxes.

“Rats,”
Cody said. “Empty and vacant. Oh, well, time to go.”

“Quiet,”
I said. “I need to listen.” For what I had no idea. I hated to admit it, but
Cody might have been right.

I
got further into the maze of boxes. All of them had Coleman Inc tattooed on the
side.”

“They’re
all the same company,” I said.

“I’m
not finding them listed,” Matt said. “That means they’re not a real company.”

“We’re
on to something,” I said, a second before the ground started shaking and the
sound of working gears came from one row over. I leapt to the top of the
nearest stack of boxes and peered over.

The
floor was gone where an open space had been. A mechanical hum brought an
elevator up to the top and a man got off. He wore the same uniform as the men
on the train. The man checked a clipboard and then pulled a dolly over to a
stack of boxes and loaded one on.

“I’m
going,” I said.

“Drake—”
The rest of what Cody was going to say was lost as I started running. The
Project Midnight guy had returned to the platform and started pressing buttons
on the control panel. The elevator began to descend.

There
was nowhere to hide on the elevator.

Good
thing I had no intention of hiding.

I
took a running start and leapt between the closing floor. The man looked up
from his sheet and tried to scream, but I struck his windpipe and knocked him
out. The ceiling slammed shut and the microphone in my ear began to crackle
with static.

Cody’s
voice was faint. “We’re losing—connection.” A pause. “What if—there
are others—down—there?” Cody said, his voice beginning to break up.

“I
know
there are others waiting down
there.”

“We’re
not going—sit here—watch you—die.”

“You’re
not going to,” I assured him. “But I’m not going to wait around for answers to
come to me.”

The
elevator was slowing. One wall opened up to three men waiting, guns hung at
their sides. Cody swore into my ear a second before the earpiece went dead.

I
hurled the box at one guard and leapt over another. The remaining two scrambled
to bring up their guns. I grabbed the barrel of one of them, pulled him to me
and punched him out. The other guard pulled the trigger.

I
had enough time to practically fall over. Bullets soared over me and before he
could re-aim I kicked his legs out and tossed his against a wall. He slumped
there and didn’t move.

Before
the gunshots had even faded off the web of pipes and concrete I had dashed down
the corridor and slid into a vacant room.

“Cody?”
I tapped the earpiece. “Cody, you there?” It was dead. No alarms went of as I
peeked my head out the door. The piping above my head ended just down the
hallway where the lights were brighter.

The
entire place felt too small to sneak around in. Hopefully there wouldn’t be
many cameras or guards or this joy ride would be over before it had even
started.

I
took a deep breath and ran toward the lights. The place was eerily vacant as
far as I could see down the featureless white hallways. The expansive groan of
machinery to the right. Something…to the left.

I
went left. Locked steel doors punctuated white walls every so often. I had to
duck by a glass chamber full of more test tubes and beakers. A couple men in
lab coats were focused on mixing substances. Sykes was right, if that hadn’t
been obvious to me by now. This was definitely Project Midnight.

But
what were they working on now? Still trying to perfect the serum that had
changed my life forever? Or had they moved on to something more sinister?

A
scream came from behind me, before being quickly cut off. The scientists
continued working as though nothing had happened. An offshoot of the main
corridor took me deeper inside. Twice I had to duck around the corner to avoid
some lab assistants.

The
scream had come from around here.

The
corridor ended in a circular room. Some men at the other end had pinned someone,
the man who had been screaming, down while a man in a black suit and others
with clipboards watched.

The
man pinned to the ground was sobbing. He wore casual clothes though they were
so ripped and dirty it was hard to tell what they had once been.

“Pl—please!”
He said, partly gagging on his own tears. “I have kids!”

“We
haven’t been able to recreate all of the attributes of the original serum
without patient fatality,” the scientist standing over the man said loudly,
trying to speak over the crying.

“No!
You can’t—you can’t—”

The
scientist talked louder, “but we have been able to isolate each trait into a,
hopefully, more survivable strain. The previous subject lasted a whole two
weeks before death.”

The
man cried harder.

“Show
it, don’t sell it,” the man in the black suit said.

Before
I could understand what they were about to do, the scientist pulled out a
needle and jabbed it into the man’s side. The man shrieked and began to twitch
violently.

“Stop!”
I wrenched up a chair and hurled it at the guards holding the subject down. It
swept both of them up and I had grabbed the subject before anyone else could
move and dragged him back behind an overturned table.

Guns
went up. Three guards. Two scientists.

And
Carlyle, the man in the black suit.

My
mind whirled. Carlyle, the man who ran the Lab. Could the Lab be…

I
shook my head to clear the thought. Not now. I had to survive this first.

I
let go of the subject when he began to spasm and foam at the mouth. His eyes
rolled back and his fists clenched so hard veins bulged from his forearms.

Whatever
they had injected him with was killing him.

Carlyle
stepped forward, holding a hand slightly behind him as though to waive off the
guards’ guns.

“What
the hell are you supposed to be?”

“What
did you do to him?” I yelled. The subject twitched once more and fell still. I
hurriedly checked his pulse. “You killed him!”

“Another
one, huh?” Carlyle glanced back at one of the men with a clipboard. “Make a
note of that.”

“What
about the guy in the costume, sir?” One guard asked, gesturing towards me with
his gun.

“Fate
has smiled at us.” Carlyle opened his hands in a welcoming gesture. “Gentlemen,
I give to you the man we failed to catch on the train. This is Phantom.” He
smiled at me. “You’re very accommodating, I’ll have you know. Here we put all
this time and resources into finding you and you show up at our doorstep.”

I
checked the subject again. He really was dead. There was nothing more I could
do for him.

“I’m
not here to stay,” I said.

“I’m
afraid you are,” Carlyle said, almost sadly. He gestured to the body I crouched
next to. “Our latest failure to recreate what we did in you. I assume you
already know about your gifts?”

“I
was normal until you messed with me,” I said. Carlyle shook his head. A few
more guards ran in the door and started to circle around me.

“And
yet how little you still know. I have the honor of telling you that you are
more unique than you could ever have imagined.” He waved down the guards’ guns.
“Come on.” He offered a hand. “You have questions, I’m sure. We have answers.”

How
come every person that could give me answers was either evil or insane?

“Gee,
thanks, because I knew you just wanted to chat when you tried to kidnap me on
the train,” I said. “You’ve really given me a lot to think about but I think
I’ll pass for now.”

“Please,”
Carlyle said gently, as though speaking to a child. “Phantom, you have no idea
what I’m offering. When we lost track of our other experiments and lost the
data, it was a huge setback, I’ll admit. But you’re here now. You can help us.”

“Help
you do what? You can tell me what you’re doing here. What you did to him.” I
pointed at the dead man on the ground. Carlyle sighed impatiently.

“Don’t
be difficult. You don’t need to know everything right now, but in time, yes. He
was weak, you are strong. Now come on, we have a lot to work on.”

“I
want a cure. A cure for what you did to me.”

For
the first time Carlyle seemed genuinely surprised, like that was the most
unexpected thing I could have said. “A…cure? Why on earth would you want a
cure? It’s not like it’s a disease you’re stuck with. Why, look at what you can
do!”

“It’s
a curse.”

“It
is whatever you make it to be. And I am trying to help you make it something
glorious. You and me, together.”

He
must have thought I was as crazy as Sykes. And who knew, maybe he was right. It
hadn’t been the most rational thing to trap myself here.

 
“Phantom, we are wasting time—”

An
alarm went off and a red light flashed above our heads. Carlyle looked up at it
as though blaming it for something. He turned to one of the guards.

“Get
that shut off and checked,” he snapped. “We have the intruder here.” The guard
glanced at the readout on his wrist.

“He
didn’t trip the alarm, sir.” Carlyle dropped his hands with an exasperated
sigh.

“Then
who did?”

The
screams began from down the corridor.

Uh-oh.

Carlyle
seemed to have come to the same conclusion. Desperation filled his voice.
“Let’s go, Phantom! I can offer you all the answers, I can show you your
potential!”

“Do
you have a cure?” I said. At that Carlyle turned back to me instead of focusing
on the corridor.