Stronger: A Super Human Clash (34 page)

“DePaiva, call the doctor!”

“He won’t come, Brawn. Once a month, that’s the arrangement.”

“Call him!”

DePaiva hesitated. “Hazlegrove will have my guts for soup if I …” He shook his head. “No. I can’t. Look, she might be OK.”

Estelle raised her head a little and looked up at me, tears spilling from her eyes.

“She’s a
human being
, DePaiva! A little girl!”

He glanced briefly at the phone on the far side of the desk, hen shook his head again. “No. Any call like that has to go through the warden, and there’s no way it’d be approved.”

“Give me the phone.”

DePaiva’s hand inched toward the pistol on his hip. “No.”

The office doorway was too small for me. I pushed in anyway, the frames snapping and splintering.

DePaiva pulled out his gun, aimed it at me with his hand trembling and his eyes wide. “Get back! I swear, one more step and I’ll shoot!”

“Won’t do you any good. I’ve been shot lots of times.” I bared my teeth. “Now gimme the phone!”

He swallowed. “Get back!”

There was a loud
crack
from the wall as I forced my shoulders through the doorway. “Last chance, DePaiva!”

His hand still shaking, DePaiva lowered the gun to his side …

… Then raised it again, the wavering barrel only inches away from Estelle’s head. “Please don’t make me—”

I jabbed at his face with my clenched fist. He crashed through the back wall in a shower of dust and splinters and rolled limply to a stop somewhere on the far side.

I didn’t care whether DePaiva was alive or dead: I grabbed the phone and almost immediately a woman’s voice said, “What is it, Hazlegrove?”

“Get the doctor. Now.”

“What? Who
is
this? Where’s Hazlegrove?” I threw the phone to the floor—I knew there would be no help coming.

Estelle said, “Brawn …”

I turned to see Hazlegrove and Swinden in the doorway, their guns aimed at me. A dozen other guards were behind them.

“If DePaiva is dead,” Hazlegrove said, “so are you. I don’t care how many bullets it takes to bring you down.”

Moving slowly, I lifted Estelle off the desk and set her down on the floor. “Go find your mom and dad, sweetheart.”

She looked up at me and nodded, then carefully squeezed past the guards.

“Hazlegrove … I’ve only ever lost control a couple of times before. Trust me when I say you don’t want it to happen again.”

They opened fire. I didn’t even feel the first few bullets striking me. I leaped at the guards, smashing the door frame completely out of the wall.

I reached Swinden first, grabbed his gun arm, and pulled back and down, wrenching it from its socket. Then I picked him up and threw him overhead into three of his colleagues.

I dropped to a crouch and spun, sweeping my outstretched leg into Hazlegrove. He flipped up and over, and landed on his back. I ended the spin directly over him, and jabbed down hard on his chest with my elbow. The cracking of his ribs was immensely satisfying.

Over at the gate I saw two of the guards raising their rifles, but they were running toward a group of prisoners.

I grabbed Hazlegrove by the ankle and threw him in their direction. I missed, but they skidded to a stop as their boss’s whimpering body awkwardly slammed into the ground in front of them.

All of the guards were running at me now, firing wildly. One shot caught me in the face less than an inch above my left eye; another actually passed in through my mouth and out through my cheek.

I knew I wasn’t going to get out of this alive, so I made the decision to cause as much damage as possible before I went down.

I threw myself backward into Hazlegrove’s office, picked up his filing cabinet, and heaved it out through the ruined doorway. It shattered as it hit the ground, scattering the mine with hundreds of files.

Then I straightened up, forcing the back of my head and my shoulders against the low ceiling. When I heard it crack, I swept my arms up, completely tearing through the roof.

I kicked out at the front wall and split it into two jagged fragments that shot out across the compound, one of them moving so fast, it swept up a guard and carried him with it.

And all the while the barrage of gunshots continued. My skin was peppered with bullet holes.

I crashed through the debris and raced at a quartet of guards standing between me and the main doors of the dome. They held their ground, firing over and over, and dodged aside only at the last second.

As I passed, one of them shouted, “Target his knees! And keep shooting until you hear the clicks!”

I heard the remaining guards rush up to join them just as the first shots hit the back of my legs. I stumbled, tried to get up, and was hit again and again.

I collapsed facedown on the ground, my body twitching as they unloaded their handguns and shotguns into me.

The dirt beneath me darkened as my blood soaked through it.

Then, directly ahead of me, I saw Terrain looking at me with horror. I forced a smile. “They’re all outta ammo now, Lenny…. You’re never gonna … get a better chance to run.”

I woke up in darkness and agony, my hands and legs bound with chains so heavy that I could barely lift them.

A woman’s voice said, “I always knew you were strong, even without your powers, but I had no idea you were
that
strong.”

I looked around. All I could see was a thin, bright, inverted T-shape.

“You’ve caused a huge amount of damage and crippled eight guards. Mr. Hazlegrove will probably never walk again. DePaiva and Swinden … They’ll live, but it will be
years
before they recover. You’re going to be chained for the rest of your days, Brawn, and these chains are utterly unbreakable. We’ve constructed this special cell just for you. You will be supervised at all times, and you will never again have any contact with the other inmates.”

“Who are you?”

A shape passed in front of the inverted T, and I realized what it was: the outline of two closed doors that faced the sun. “I’m the warden. I’ve been in charge of the facility for two decades, and never once have I had to actually
visit
this
godforsaken place. You’ve embarrassed me in front of my superiors. This will not happen again.”

“Hazlegrove tried to punish me, to torture me, but he failed. If you think this is punishment, then you don’t know me at all!”

“But I
do
know you, Brawn. I’ve known you for twenty-seven years.”

And then I understood. “Harmony.”

THE POWER STRUGGLE BETWEEN
Ragnarök and Max Dalton was always fought on two levels: physically and strategically.

From Casey’s point of view, he was always at least one step ahead of Max. He once told me, “I set up the pieces like dominos and that idiot just keeps knocking them down, exactly the way I want. He thinks he’s clever, but the fact is, all he can do is channel other people…. He’s an idea vampire, at best. I don’t think the man’s had an original thought in his life. He can’t
create
. All he can do is react.”

Casey had built an empire of his own, albeit one that was so wrapped up in secrecy that I’m sure he was the only one who fully understood its extent. I was pretty sure he was supplying money and weapons to groups like The Chain Gang and The Hive, but I never learned why.

I also knew that he was in regular contact with guys like The Shark and Metrion, but the exact nature of those relationships escaped me. The Shark was said to be invulnerable—and I mean actually invulnerable, not just really hard to kill like me and Titan—and very definitely had his own plans, and Metrion was … Well, I’m not a psychiatrist, but I think I can safely diagnose Metrion as “nuttier than a bucket of squirrel droppings.” He once went on a rampage through the north of England hijacking ice-cream trucks and demanding that they take him to the nearest pub.

In some respects, Casey wasn’t much better. There’s a thin line between genius and madness, and sometimes I got the feeling that Casey was using that line as a jump rope.

In the caverns that served as his main base in Pennsylvania, Casey gathered Slaughter, Terrain, Dioxin, and me. “First up, I’m gonna need some more DNA samples from each of you.”

“Again? What’s this for?” Terrain asked. “Is this gonna go on a chart or something? So you can see how our powers develop?”

“A chart? You really don’t know how DNA works, do you?” He took a swab from inside our cheeks—he had to use a special swab made from gold thread for Dioxin—and stored them away. “In seventeen hours The High Command will be escorting a transport convoy bound for Washington. It’s going to pass within sixty miles of here. We’re stopping it.”

“What’s the cargo?” I asked.

“A prototype microprocessor.”

Slaughter raised an eyebrow. “A computer chip.”

“Yes. But not like any other. My spies tell me it’s a functioning quantum processor.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Apparently so. A couple of years back a team at JPL made some real progress and decided not to keep it to themselves. They started working with dozens of scientific institutes to perfect the idea. And three days ago they successfully created the first working prototype. But it’s not hooked up to anything yet—they need to ship it to a research team in Washington that’s built a motherboard fast enough to accommodate it. And we’re going to take the chip before it gets there.” To the others, Casey said, “Imagine a machine capable of computing the most complex calculations instantly. And I mean,
instantly
. The fastest computers in production today can decipher a genetic code in a couple of hours. A fully operational quantum-processing computer would be able to decipher the genetic code of every organism on the planet in less time than it’s taken for me to explain that.”

“So it’s worth a lot of money, then?” Dioxin asked.

“Dioxin, that chip is the single-most precious object the human race has ever created.”

Slaughter asked, “What do you need it for?”

Casey grinned. “Something I’m working on.” He looked at me and Dioxin. “The cure.”

Casey analyzed the convoy’s route provided by his spies, and we quickly pinpointed the best location for an ambush.

The transport convoy comprised two armored cars in front,
a large panel truck in the middle, and two more cars at the back.

As we watched from the hillside, Slaughter said, “They might as well have painted ‘Top Secret Convoy’ on the side of the truck.”

Casey didn’t respond. He was busy climbing into his powered armor, a complex framework that very much resembled the robot he’d built when he was working with Gordon Tremont. I’d seen him using it a couple of times already: It greatly increased his strength and speed. Not to the point where he was a match for someone like Titan, but it certainly put him on a level with most of the superheroes.

Dioxin said, “We could just destroy the whole lot of them. Be a lot quicker and easier than trying to find a single computer chip.”

“No,” Casey said. He flexed his right arm and the motors of his powered armor whirred softly. “It’ll be a much more effective message if they know we have the processor.”

“Yeah, but we could—”

“I said no.” Casey turned to face Dioxin. “Understood?”

“Sure, yeah. Whatever.”

“And
you
don’t come within ten feet of it, you get me? It’s the only one of its kind, and if your acid splashes on it … I’ll rip off your own arms and feed them to you. Now, you and Brawn get down there and cause some damage.”

As Dioxin and I raced down the hill toward the convoy, Terrain collapsed the road directly beneath the two armored cars at the front. Behind us, Slaughter carried Casey in a high arc.

The truck swerved to avoid the crashed cars, went off the road, and smashed through a wooden fence into a field of wheat before it shuddered to a stop.

With a loud
whoosh
the walls of the truck instantly melted into a spray of white-hot fragments and I skidded to a stop to avoid being caught in it.

I had half a second to see Energy floating in the smoldering ruins of the truck, her skin crackling and glowing, before twin bolts of lightning sprang from her outstretched hands directly at me. I threw myself to the side at the last instant, pivoted on my hands, and launched myself at her feetfirst.

But Energy was too fast: She dodged my kicks and zipped around me in a wide circle with fire spilling from her hands. In seconds the wheat was ablaze, a growing ring of fire with me trapped in the center.

They knew we were coming!
I closed my eyes and raced through the flames, then vaulted the fence in pursuit of Energy. She saw me and doubled back, her hands glowing with a built-up charge of electricity.

I saw her prepare to launch the first bolt and dropped down into Terrain’s crater next to the crashed armored cars just as the bolt seared the air around me. But I wasn’t fast enough to avoid the second: It hit me in the chest, so powerfully that I could feel my flesh boiling.

I ripped the roof off the nearest armored car and threw it at her like a Frisbee—Energy ducked below it, and was preparing to fire again when she suddenly stopped in midair, hesitated for a moment, then darted away.

I looked down and saw two of Max’s Rangers—Lash and
Ollie—desperately trying to free themselves from the wreckage. If Energy had attacked again, her lightning could have killed them.

“Hi guys,” I said. “Stay put and you’ll probably be safe.”

I hauled myself out of the crater in time to see Roz and Joshua Dalton launch themselves from the rear armored cars, both of them heading straight for Terrain. That made sense: Physically he was the weakest of us, but his power made him the most dangerous.

Overhead Energy was streaking toward me, and just beyond I saw Titan dropping from the sky like a meteor.

Slaughter yelled, “Brawn! Catch!” I looked up in time to see her let go of Casey and alter course to intercept Titan and Energy.

I raced forward, leaped high over the crater and plucked Casey out of the air, then landed in a half crouch on the road.