Stronger: A Super Human Clash (18 page)

“Simple. You’re one of the bad guys, and
my
job is to—”

“Says who? Who put
you
in charge?” I stood up. “Just because you can do things other people can’t, that doesn’t automatically make you their boss. Tell you what, though, I’ll go with you guys if you can give me food and a decent bed and somewhere I can take a shower. I’m getting tired of having to wash in rivers. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time and mine.”

Dalton took a few steps back and looked up at me, doing the stare-frown thing again.

“Oh please! If that didn’t work before, what’s changed that it might work now?”

Abruptly, the three soldiers turned away and started to run back to their cars.

“I get it—you were using your telepathy to talk to
them
. So what’s it like inside someone else’s mind? Do you pick up everything they think? Can you read their memories as well?”

Dalton said, “You’re going to be a problem, Brawn. I don’t like situations I can’t control.”

“And since when does what you like have any bearing on the real world? What’s your game, Dalton? What are you up to? I mean, with a power like yours you could do pretty much
anything you wanted. Is that how you’ve made your money, by reading people’s minds and second-guessing them?” I looked over toward the SUVs. The three soldiers were returning, and for a bizarre moment I thought they were carrying sections of drainpipe.

Dalton turned and ran, racing back toward the cars.

“Yeah, you
better
run!” I yelled. “You’re out of your league here, Dalton! You can go …”

And then, far too late, I realized that the objects that had looked like drainpipes were shoulder-mounted rocket launchers.

One flared, and I had half a second before it hit me square in the chest. The explosion lifted me off my feet and sent me tumbling backward through the air.

The second rocket hit me while I was still in the air: It slammed into my back and exploded with such force that I was sure that this was it, I was going to die.

I hit the ground hard, headfirst, gouging a deep trench in the road’s surface, and before I stopped moving, the third rocket exploded against the side of my head.

With pain coursing through every muscle and burning chunks of asphalt crashing down around me, I forced myself to stand up.
Got to run! Over the fields where they can’t follow!

Through the flames I caught a glimpse of another rocket zooming in. I threw myself to the side, and it missed me by inches.

The fifth and sixth missiles hit me simultaneously, erupting in a fireball that again sent me flying. I landed facedown in a
crater of burning tar that clung to my skin as I tried to stand once more.

I really should have fled, but all I could see was Dalton’s smirking face, and I desperately wanted to find out what it would look like after I’d smashed it into the road a few times.

So instead I ran
at
them. Another rocket scorched the air as it approached, but I had enough time to see this one coming: I somersaulted over it, came down on my hands, and flipped onto my feet, landing within striking distance of Max Dalton.

But I couldn’t do it. Much as I wanted to kick him into the next county, I knew he wasn’t strong enough to survive that.

I grabbed hold of him anyway, certain that it would prevent his soldiers from firing again, and bounded back down the road toward his cars. “Gonna be a long walk home for you, Max!”

Still holding on to him I jumped and came down heavily on top of the first SUV, completely crushing it.

As I leaped for the second, one of the rear doors suddenly opened and a fifth black-clad figure dived out.

I landed on the roof and flattened the vehicle. If the passenger hadn’t seen me coming … My stomach churned at the thought.

I climbed off the ruined SUV and lowered Dalton to the ground as I looked back toward the first car.

Dalton was furious, angrier than I’ve ever seen anyone. “You idiot! You thundering
maniac
! You could have killed her!”

I stammered out, “You were trying to kill
me
!”

Dalton helped the long-haired girl up from the ground, glaring at me. “She’s not even fifteen yet!”

“This is your sister?” I asked. The resemblance between them was strong, except that somehow she was very pretty and he was gangly and gawky.

The girl pulled herself free from Dalton’s grip and rounded on him. “You idiot! I told you not to attack him! All those reports about the things he’s done, they’re all bogus and you knew that!”

“Roz, he could have killed you!”

“You attacked him with rocket launchers! Max … You …” She ran her hands through her long hair as she let out a low scream of frustration and whirled away. “You tried to
murder
him!”

Softly, he said, “Roz. Roz, listen to me. Just listen. Brawn’s dangerous. He’s a monster. He hasn’t killed anyone yet that we know of, but it’s only a matter of time.”

Her rapid breathing subsided as she listened.

“He knew you were in the car and he didn’t care if you got crushed.”

“That’s absolute
bull
!” I roared. “How
could
I have known? I couldn’t have seen her through the blacked-out windows!”

Then she looked at me, a sneer on her face that mirrored her brother’s. “You low-life, filthy
animal
! Everything they say about you is true, isn’t it? You don’t care about anything or anyone! Max, call Ernie. Tell him to prepare the copter—I don’t care what it takes, but we can’t let this monster roam free.”

I decided I’d heard more than enough. I turned and ran, leaped over the tall fence into the field, and kept going.

That was my first encounter with Maxwell Dalton. My life would have been so much better if it had also been the
last
time I met him.

Something I didn’t know for a long time was that after a superhuman’s powers kick in, they sort of ebb and flow. There are days when you’re at your best and days when you’re not that much stronger than a human.

I guess that’s because it’s less noticeable for those who, like me, undergo a permanent physical change: I always looked the same, so there was no reason for me to suspect that my strength fluctuated.

Max Dalton’s men had shot me with live ammunition, but it had had almost no effect on me. The previous time I was shot at, in Norman Misseldine’s fortress, the bullets had penetrated my skin.

For some superhumans their powers settle down almost immediately, but for others it can take a very long time. I’d already been a superhuman for four years, and I was still having strong days and weak days.

My encounter with Dalton was on a strong day, possibly one of the strongest. But a couple of weeks later I ran into some trouble, and it was very definitely on one of my weaker days….

I was in a midsized town. It was early morning—dawn was still a couple of hours away—and I had been spotted by a police car.

They chased me, as they usually did. There had been a
couple of occasions when I was spotted by the police and they had done absolutely nothing, though I was never sure whether that was because the officers didn’t believe what they were seeing, they just didn’t want the hassle, or they were actually on my side.

This time, though, the cops were particularly keen. They gunned the car’s engine and roared down the main street after me, sirens blaring. Normally I’d have been able to outrun them pretty easily, but this time I just couldn’t seem to get up any speed.

Within minutes three more cars were in pursuit. I darted down an alleyway and saw that the other end was sealed off by a high brick wall.

I made a leap for the wall, and only just caught the top. I pulled myself up and over, and landed on a completely empty street.

I kept running, left down another side street, then right, then left again, trying to put as much distance as possible between myself and the law.

But they knew the town much better than I did…. I emerged on a long, narrow road and saw the rapidly approaching blue and red lights at one end, so I turned and raced away. I glanced behind me as I prepared to take another left, and ran headfirst into the back of a garbage truck.

The impact shunted the truck forward a couple of feet and knocked me flat on my back.

Then the garbagemen, at first startled by what had happened, quickly recovered and decided to be heroes: They reversed the truck over me.

Normally I would have had more than enough strength to push the garbage truck aside, but that day I just didn’t have the energy. All I could do was lie there and struggle as the police cars screeched to a halt nearby.

And just like that, I was caught.

I SPENT THE DAY IN A CELL
in the local jail, watched at all times by at least twenty armed guards. Their handcuffs were too small for my wrists, so they had to use chains and padlocks.

Most of the cops were terrified of me, but they couldn’t stop staring at me, like when you find a particularly big spider in the backyard. You don’t want to go near it, but you can’t help looking.

The officers muttered to each other out of the corners of their mouths, and I caught enough to learn that there was a media frenzy going on outside the jail. It seemed that every newspaper and TV station in the country had shipped their reporters to the town.

I was sitting in the cell, on a steel bunk that had already bowed under my weight, when beyond the bars I saw the
door open and a young, pale-skinned woman entered. She stammered that she was my lawyer and that she’d be representing me. She paused, and for a second I thought she was going to turn and run, but she took a deep breath and composed herself.

But she refused to come within twenty feet of the cell’s bars, so our conversation was shouted back and forth. “I’m Claudette Rooke, of Bartlett, Fitz, Dear, and Botham,” she half yelled, with her pen poised above her notebook. “For the record I, uh, I need to know your real name.”

“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “It would put a lot of people I know in danger. Just call me Brawn. I hate that name, but it’s what everyone calls me.”

“Address?”

“United States of America, Earth.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Well, what’s the address of this jail? Because this is as close as I have to a home.”

“Brawn, do you fully understand the reason for your arrest?”

I thought about this for a second. “Actually, no. I don’t. No one’s told me.”

She looked up from her notebook. “You haven’t been formally charged?”

“Nope. What
is
the charge, anyway?”

It was her turn to pause. “I’ll have to get back to you on that….”

One of the police officers said, “Resisting arrest.”

When I looked at him, he went pale and took a step back.
“You arrested me for resisting arrest? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Well, you were running away.”

“You were chasing me.”

Another officer said, “You’re supposed to stop when asked to do so by a police officer.”

“No one asked me.”

Ms. Rooke lowered her notebook and the ghost of a smile appeared on her lips. “If you’re not going to charge my client, I’ll have to ask you to let him go.”

The first officer said, “No can do. We’ve got orders.”

“Then tell me why you were chasing him. Is there a warrant out for his arrest?”

“I dunno about that. He, uh … Well, everyone knows that he’s guilty.”

“Guilty of what?” she asked.

“I mean, you just have to
look
at him to know!”

I got up off the bunk and, half crouching under the low ceiling, approached the bars. “You know what this is? Racial profiling. They assumed I must be guilty of something because of the color of my skin.”

Some of the officers took great offense at that and shouted their disapproval, while Claudette Rooke slowly turned back to face me, her face grim. “You think that’s
funny
?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“If you had ever
really
faced racial discrimination, you wouldn’t make comments like that.”

“And if
you
had ever faced it, you wouldn’t automatically assume that I was Caucasian before I changed into this.”

“
Were
you?”

“I’m not saying, because it’s not important. I was a human, now I’m something else. I’m a superhuman-American. A minority. And that’s why I’m being treated like this.”

The door behind Ms. Rooke opened, and a well-dressed old man with a pure white comb-over hairstyle walked in. He must have been important, because all the cops suddenly stiffened and pulled in their guts.

He slowly turned on the spot, looking every officer in the eye. “One of you officers has deliberately left his radio on, broadcasting the conversations in this cell to the reporters outside.”

From somewhere to my left there was a sharp
click!
and the old man turned in that direction. “Officer Hamblin. You will immediately report to Sergeant Colliver and hand in your shield and sidearm. You are suspended without pay pending a formal investigation.”

The officer was shaking and couldn’t look anyone in the eye as he slunk past his colleagues.

The man walked right up to the bars and stared at me as he addressed everyone else. “This is a mess, bordering on a fiasco. Charge this man with reckless endangerment, willful destruction of property, burglary, theft, and resisting arrest. In view of the circumstances and the unprecedented media interest, I’ve requested that Judge Khan convene a special sitting of the county court within the hour.”

The white-haired man regarded me for a few seconds, then said, “All right, Mr. Brawn. I know you understand the charges against you. What do you have to say for yourself?”

I moved closer to the bars. “Who are you?”

“District Attorney Philip Olafsson.”

“So you know the law inside and out, right?”

“As far as you need be concerned, yes.”

“Well, what if I told you a secret that would change everything?”

His eyes narrowed. “Everyone out. Now.”