Stronger: A Super Human Clash (24 page)

“Or nine, if you include your own.”

Paragon said, “That’s enough! Titan, Brawn took on Krodin. Twice. If it hadn’t been for his help, we’d never have made it. And Brawn … You don’t get to question Titan’s motives, got that? And you
really
don’t get to suggest that he’s a coward. He’s saved my life half a dozen times. I trust him more than I trust anyone in this room.”

I nodded. “OK.”

Quantum asked, “Max, exactly how much of a threat is this Casey Duval?”

“Potentially … he’s
very
dangerous. We learned that in Krodin’s world. He was able to out-think all of us, planning his moves years in advance. He has a unique understanding of the energy that makes us superhuman, and in Krodin’s universe he used that to enhance his own abilities and to turn at least one human into a superhuman. The level of technology they had …” Max shook his head. “It was
decades
ahead of ours. Solar cells that worked with almost one hundred percent
efficiency, gravity-nullifying engines, advanced alloys, nanotechnology … He designed a portable machine that canceled out the powers of any superhuman within an eight-hundred-yard radius. And he created an armor that makes Paragon’s look like a tinfoil suit.”

“But the Casey Duval in
this
world,” Energy said, “well, he hasn’t done any of that.”

“Not yet.”

“We can’t arrest someone for something he hasn’t done.”

“I disagree,” Max said. “For the good of the human race, we not only can, but
must
.”

Just after sunset Roz and I waited in the copter with Max’s team, the former U.S. Rangers Oliver French, Antonio Lashley, and Stephen Oxford.

They seemed like OK guys. Very quiet—they usually spoke only when they had to—and always focused on the task at hand.

Roz was also quiet. I still wasn’t sure what she thought of me. Of course, given the way Max was always messing with her mind, I couldn’t be sure what Roz thought of anything. But she seemed nice enough.

Max’s voice came in over the radio. “Got the facility in sight … Possible minor problem: Our plans showed a lot of trees that we were going to use for cover. The trees are gone. There’s a good two-hundred-yard perimeter around the main building that’s going to be impossible to cross without being spotted. I can’t get close enough to read anyone.”

Lashley picked up the handset. “Max, this is Lash. Recommend
that you hold fire. I can contact the Beta team, send Quantum in ahead of you. He can move fast enough that he won’t be seen.”

“Negative, Lash. My instruments are showing that they’ve got the same warning device Termite used in Cádiz. It’ll detect Quantum’s presence and trigger an alarm.”

“He could still—”

“Can’t take that chance. We’re going in anyway. Thunder, create one of your shock wave force fields around us. I want it to move with us as we run. Abby, you take point, but don’t get too far ahead…. We’re heading for that entrance there. On my mark …”

I realized I was clenching my fists. “Man, we should
be
there!” I said to Roz.

“Max knows what he’s doing.”

“I really hope you’re right.”

Stephen Oxford—Ox—got out of his seat and called out to the pilot. “Ernie? Take us up. Hold position outside the one-mile perimeter, two thousand feet.” As the copter’s engines roared to life, Ox turned to me and Roz and shouted, “You two get ready.”

Over the noise of the engines we heard Max shout, “Now!”

Then the copter lurched into the air, and we could only guess at what was happening with Abby and the others.

Long minutes passed, and I found myself growing more and more anxious.

Roz shouted, “We should have heard from them by now!”

Lash nodded. “I know. Can’t break radio silence, though.”

I shifted toward the copter’s oversized hatch. “Heck with this—get me in there!”

“Not until Max gives the word,” Lash said.

“Look, either they’re pinned down and they
can’t
give the word, or they’ve been caught. Either way, I’m going in. And if I have to rip open the side of this copter and jump out, I will.”

Lash hesitated for a moment, then shouted to the pilot, “Ernie—go! Pass directly over the facility. One hundred feet minimum. Top speed.”

The copter surged forward, and Lash pulled open the hatch. As the wind whipped through, he yelled, “You sure you can do this?”

I grabbed hold of the hull on either side of the hatchway. Ahead, the four-story building was coming up fast. “Warn the pilot!” I yelled back to Lash. “Tell him to expect a sudden loss of balance!”

IN THE INCREASINGLY RARE MOMENTS
when my mind was fully alert, I knew that I was dying, just as I knew that I had no choice. If I didn’t keep working, Hazlegrove would punish the other prisoners.

But most of the time I wasn’t aware of anything other than pushing the full carts of ore up the winding tunnel to the processing station, then returning once the cart was emptied. Over and over, day after day.

Lack of sleep and food combined with the eternal struggle, and I was wasting away. Desperate for sustenance, my strained muscles began to wither. My skin lost its healthy blue pallor and started to turn gray.

Occasionally Hazlegrove stood in the doorway to his office watching me. Sometimes he’d follow me into the shaft, always at a safe distance, just watching in silence.

He wanted me to break, to collapse to the ground and beg him for mercy.

But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t let him win.

Two months into the torture, Hazlegrove called me over to him. The hundred-yard distance between his office and the processing station seemed like a hundred miles, but I slowly shuffled over to him.

I stood in front of him, swaying, and hoped that whatever he had to say would take a very long time. This was the first break in the routine I had been granted.

He looked up at me. “You’re lasting a lot longer than I ever imagined, Brawn.”

I didn’t have the energy or the will to reply.

“We had a pool going. All the guards chipped in. Fifty American dollars apiece. I had you down for forty-two days. You beat that. And right up to yesterday, Swinden was looking like the winner. He had sixty-three. But you beat that too.” He grinned. “The funny thing is—you’ll like this—we had a sort of running joke that if you outlasted all the guesses, the money would be yours. So, well done: You’ve won two thousand, three hundred dollars!”

In the office behind him, I heard Swinden and DePaiva laughing.

“Of course, you’re a prisoner, so we can’t actually give you the money. What do you want us to do with it?”

I looked at him for a moment, not quite sure that I understood what he was saying. Then it gradually filtered through that this was all a joke to him.

“Well? Any suggestions?”

“Charity,” I said. “Give it to the prison guards’ Widows and Orphans Fund. When the time comes, your wife and kid will appreciate that.”

His smug grin instantly faded. “Why don’t you just die?”

“Because I don’t feel like it.”

“Yeah? Well, you
will
. DePaiva? Get out here.”

I heard the scrape of metal on wood as DePaiva jumped up from his desk.

Hazlegrove pointed past me, to the processing station where two prisoners were about to hook up my cart to the hoist that would tip its contents into the crusher. “Get over there and tell those two to stop what they’re doing and leave the cart where it is.”

As DePaiva hurried over to the processing station, Hazlegrove said to me, “On my last inspection I noticed that the rails were looking a little loose. They need something heavy to tamp them down into place. Something like a full cart run the entire length of the tunnel. A full cart, from this end of the track to the other. Two hundred times should be a good start. Get to it, Brawn. Come on. Chop-chop!”

I returned to my cart, my feet dragging from the effort.

Behind me, I heard Swinden say, “Boss … That’s … You’re not serious, are you? That goes against what you wanted—he won’t even be productive now!”

“You have a problem with the way we do things here, Swinden, feel free to quit.”

That was all I heard. When I reached the cart, DePaiva was lowering his radio and looking toward Hazlegrove with an expression of disbelief.

The other prisoners were unable to look me in the eye as I started to push it back toward the entrance to the mine shaft.

DePaiva followed me, and into his radio he said, “Boss, are you
sure
about this?”

Hazlegrove’s voice came back. “Yes, I’m sure. Don’t question me again.”

At least going down will be a little easier,
I told myself. When I reached the entrance, I ducked my head and kept pushing.

DePaiva caught up with me a minute later. “How long does it take you, usually, to get the cart up from the end of the tracks?”

“Used to be an hour,” I said. “Now it’s nearer two.”

“And how long to bring it back down?”

“Ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Full one will take longer. Forty minutes.”

“So that’s about two and a half hours,” DePaiva said.

I grunted as I pushed the cart past a slight kink in the track that I’d come to think of as The Logjam. “Yeah.”

“Then stop. Brawn? I said stop.”

I hunched lower, continued pushing. “Hazlegrove said—”

“Hazlegrove is losing his grip. What he was doing before was bad, but this … This is torture. It’s inhuman. I know I’ve done some bad things, but I won’t be a party to this. So sit down. Get some sleep. I’ll wake you in two and a half hours.”

DePaiva and Swinden saved my life.

They took turns watching me whenever Hazlegrove was on duty. As far as he was aware, I spent twenty-three hours a day pushing that cart full of ore up and down the mine shaft.
In reality, every two and a half hours I pushed it out of the entrance, up to the processing station, then back down through the entrance and stopped just out of Hazlegrove’s sight.

And when he wasn’t on duty, Swinden and DePaiva left me alone to do what I wanted. Mostly, that was sleep.

Once, Hazlegrove entered the mine shaft shortly after I sat down. Swinden saw him coming and started kicking me in the side. “Get up! You lousy, lazy pile of trash!”

As I pulled myself up, he said to Hazlegrove, “Collapsed, boss. I think we’re pushing too hard even for him.”

Hazlegrove said, “Is he still alive, Swinden? Well? Is he?”

“Well, yes, sir.”

“Then we’re
not
pushing him too hard. Keep watching him. If he collapses again, kick him harder.”

After about forty days of this, Hazlegrove stopped me as I emerged from the mine shaft. “Why are you not dead yet? If anything, you look stronger than you did before we started this.”

“Second wind,” I said. “Or it could be that I’m immortal.”

“Productivity is down,” Hazlegrove said. “The warden wants to know why.”

“Not my problem. You’re the one who ordered the murder of the other trustees and halved everyone’s rations.”

“Productivity will increase by the end of the week, or I will start feeding the weaker prisoners into the crusher. Do you understand?”

“I understand that if you do anything like that, Hazlegrove, you’ll suffer a fate that’s considerably worse. Don’t ever forget that the welfare of the prisoners is the only hold you have on
me.” I straightened up and stretched, rolling my shoulders back. “You know, one way to increase productivity would be to allow me to get back to work instead of pushing the same bunch of rocks around all the time. And increase the rations again.”

“We can’t afford that.”

“You can’t afford
not
to.”

He scowled at me for a moment, then turned on his heel and stalked away. He came back a few seconds later with his face red and his teeth clenched. “All right. Let’s decide you’ve taken your punishment. You get the other inmates motivated and things go back the way they were.”

It was a minor victory: Hazlegrove hadn’t been able to break me, but I’d broken him. “Got it.”

“I want productivity up by the end of the week.”

“There’s one thing I need to know before I can promise that,” I said.

“What
now
?”

“What day is today?”

THE INSTANT I DROPPED
from the copter toward the large, barely lit building, a thought occurred to me:
What if
this
world’s version of Casey Duval has also created a power-nullifying device?

But I didn’t even have time for panic to set in: I crashed down feetfirst onto the roof. For a fraction of a second it held—then it collapsed under me.

I tumbled down into the cavernous room below in a shower of dust, bricks, and crumpled aluminum sheeting, landing in a crouch.

Directly in front of me Abby was swinging her sword at a large, fast-moving, complex piece of machinery. She was standing over Thunder, who was lying facedown on the ground, unmoving.

“Brawn!” Abby shouted. “Need some help here!”

I raced toward her, coming almost within reach of the machine before it sprang into the air and passed over my head in a blur of metal framework, cables, and limbs.

I spun around to face it just as a heavy weight shot out from within the framework and slammed into my head with such ferocity I was almost knocked off my feet. The machine was moving constantly, not on wheels but on three powerful pneumatic legs, the whole device ceaselessly bobbing and weaving, shifting its considerable weight around with all the grace and power of a champion heavyweight boxer in prime condition.

I made another grab for it, and two strong claws instantly locked onto my arm and pulled me forward just as its pneumatic legs launched it up and over me. I pitched forward, stumbled, and it crashed down into my back, flattening me.

Before I could recover, it had tumbled to my left and a claw shot out again, this time with enough precision to grab hold of the tip of my ear and give it a sudden sharp twist. The pain was excruciating, and as I tried to pull myself free, I lashed out blindly with my feet and fists. A lucky kick hit the machine’s foremost leg, knocking it aside, and the machine let go of my ear and staggered back as it regained its balance.