Stronger: A Super Human Clash (35 page)

“Four of them, five of us,” Casey said as I set him down. “They don’t honestly think they’ll
win
, do they?”

Beyond the rear cars, Terrain was bombarding Josh Dalton with a stream of dirt and rock that flowed up from the ground around his hands and hit Josh’s telekinetic shield like the world’s largest sand blaster.

Nearby, Roz had Dioxin pinned flat against the ground with her own shield. Drops of his acidic venom pooled around him, burning through the road’s surface.

Above, Titan and Slaughter were grappling in the air, beating the living tar out of each other, while Energy zipped around them, unable to get a decent shot at Slaughter.

Casey said, “Huh. I’ve got a bad feeling we might have been outmaneuvered.”

“A trap,” I said.

“You think? Yeah, it’s a trap, and they’re not finished yet.” He took one last look around. “We’re outta here.”

But by then it was too late.

Paragon soared over the hill, followed closely by Abby and Thunder.

Apex came bounding along after them, his powerful muscles enabling him to leap forty or fifty yards at a time.

Then Impervia soared in from the other direction, wearing a jetpack identical to Paragon’s.

Octavian came next: He was a relatively low-powered guy that I’d heard had worked with Abby and Thunder on occasion. He carried a skinny young man I recognized as Thalamus, who was supposed to be even smarter than Ragnarök.

More of them came: Inferno. Zephyr. The White Wasp. The five members of Portugal’s Poder-Meninas team. And a dozen more whose costumes I didn’t recognize.

A twenty-strong squadron of Apache gunships roared over the hills to our east, and moments later at least twice as many were approaching from the west.

Above, Slaughter and Titan broke apart and hovered in place, while on the ground Terrain relaxed his assault on Josh, and Roz retreated to allow Dioxin to get to his feet.

I spotted a cloud of dust on the horizon, and then Quantum was standing in front of us. He looked from Casey to me, and said, “Surrender.”

“Give me a couple of minutes to talk to the troops.”

“Two minutes, and that’s it.” Instantly, he was gone.

Casey pulled out his communicator. “Guys … We’ve got an untenable situation here. Gather round.”

Slaughter dropped down out of the sky just as Dioxin and Terrain reached us.

“Didn’t see
this
coming,” Casey said. “You’ll notice that there’s someone missing from their ranks. If you’re listening, Max—and I think it’s a pretty safe bet that you are—well played. But we’re not going to surrender. And we’re not going to fight. You’re going to let us go.” He smiled, and winked at Slaughter. “Reckon we’re going to have to play our one-time-only Get Out of Jail Free card.”

He detached a small device from the depths of his armor. “Max, what I’m holding here is a powerful little transmitter. It’s got two buttons. The first one—which I’ve just pressed—summons my craft. You’ll allow it safe passage from this location. The second button, which I’ve also just pressed, has activated a software bomb that five years ago I planted deep inside the code of the computers that control this country’s entire nuclear arsenal. That software bomb is now counting down. When the counter hits zero, it’s going to start launching missiles. How’s
that
sound? Interesting? Scary? By now you’re already sweating and desperately ordering your minions to find and disable my little patch. I figure it’ll take them maybe six hours. Far too long. The counter will hit zero in fifty-eight minutes. I can disable it, but not from here. What I
can
do from here is trigger it to activate instantly. So for the next fifty-eight
minutes, if any of your people attempt to stop us or follow us … Boom! That’s it for life on this planet.”

I felt a knot twist in my guts.
No way,
I said to myself.
He wouldn’t do something like that!
But even as that thought ran through my mind, it was met by another:
If anyone
could
do it, it’s him.

A few seconds later, Quantum appeared before us again. “You’re bluffing.”

Casey said nothing. He just slowly shook his head.

“Ragnarök, this is insane! This is
not
how the world ends….” Quantum frowned. “Even
you
wouldn’t …” He stepped close to Casey, right up to him so that their noses were almost touching. “There is more to come. Much more. The future has shown itself to me. You’re not part of it.”

Casey smirked. “Man, you’re really losing it, aren’t you? You’ve gone over the edge already, Quantum. Sooner than I predicted.”

Quantum shook his head briskly. “Do you understand? The future does not belong to you!” He hesitated for a second, then added, “It does not belong to any of us. The future belongs to those who’ll come after us. To the superhumans not yet born. To the new heroes.”

“
Right
… Well,
you
tell—”

But Quantum was already gone.

Terrain said, “Is it just me, or is everyone else creeped out by that guy? He is
not
normal.”

“And we are?” Dioxin asked.

Casey looked up. “It’s here.” From directly overhead, a
bulky silver aircraft was descending. I’d seen the plans on Casey’s computers: It looked like a large helicopter without the rotors. I’d no idea what kept it aloft, but it moved in almost complete silence.

Louder, Casey said, “Clock’s still ticking, Max. Are you going to let us go, or will you allow your pride to destroy the human race?”

Thunder’s voice boomed all around us. “Ragnarök, Max Dalton’s military contacts have confirmed the presence of your software bomb. So go. But this isn’t over. You’ve put the lives of every human being on the planet in jeopardy—there’s no going back from this. No forgiveness. You understand what I’m saying? Sooner or later we
will
find you, and when we do, you’re dead. All of you.”

Thunder’s words seemed to hang in the air for a moment, then Casey shrugged and gestured toward the craft. “Should be plenty of space inside for all of us. Dioxin, there’s a square lined with gold leaf. Stand on that and try not to dissolve
too
much of the craft before we escape.”

The others climbed on board and I squeezed in after them. Before the craft could rise, Slaughter nudged Casey and pointed back out.

Casey said to me, “
Your
friend, I think.”

I looked out to see Abby slowly walking toward us. She’d put her sword and ax into their scabbards on her back, and was approaching with her hands up. “Wait, please! I just want to talk to Brawn!”

Casey idly fiddled with the trigger device in his hand. “Sure. Why not? But we’re not hanging around. You’ll have to
fly alongside us. If you can keep up—this thing moves pretty fast.”

The craft lurched into the air, and in seconds the heroes were just dots on the ground. Abby launched herself after us, flying in parallel with the craft. “Brawn, you’ve got to come back to us. These people are killers!”

“Six of you attacked me in Manhattan, Hesperus!
You
tried to kill
me
!”

“It was Max. You know that.”

Casey leaned past me and said, “Of course it was. It’s
always
Max. Hesperus, when are you going to learn that he is much more of a threat than I am?”

“Shut up,” she said. “This isn’t about you. Brawn, please. Come back. We’ll sort everything out and we can be a team again. When I freed you from Oak Grove prison, I took a chance on you. Now you have to do the same. Trust me. It’s not too late.”

Slaughter peered out the other side of the craft. “We’ve got a couple of folks on our tail. Titan and Energy, I think. Pretty far back, but they’re matching our speed.” She pulled her head back in and nodded at Casey, grinning. “Goes against the rules! Do it! Set the missiles flying!”

Casey shook his head. “No can do. I was bluffing.” He held up the device. “The software bomb exists, but all it will do is shut down the missiles. There’s no way I can launch them remotely. What, you really think I’m
that
crazy?”

Abby looked at him for a second, her eyes wide, then darted away.

“Slaughter!” Casey yelled. “
Stop her!”

“No!” I screamed. I made a grab for Slaughter, but I was too slow.

She launched herself out of the craft, straight down at Abby.

Abby didn’t see her coming.

Slaughter swooped down and pulled the ax free from Abby’s back.

Far below, Energy saw what was happening and zoomed up toward them.

Abby turned in midair, but Slaughter was fast, and stronger.

Energy blasted Slaughter with a lightning bolt so powerful that for a few seconds there was nothing but a blinding glare.

And when my vision cleared, Abby was falling, her own ax buried deep into her side.

I saw Energy catch my friend in her arms. But she was too late. Nothing could have saved her.

At the age of twenty-four, ten years after I met her, Abigail de Luyando died because she tried to save me.

TEN MONTHS LATER
, in the enormous cavern deep below the base in Pennsylvania, I was helping Casey’s people assemble one of the giant engines for his latest project, a mobile fortress that—when completed—would be more than a hundred yards long and completely bristling with weapons.

As I stepped back to check my work, a voice behind me said, “Hey.”

I felt my blood turn cold, and I forced myself to keep calm as I turned to face Slaughter.

She hovered in the air in front of me, a slight smile on her starkly beautiful face. “So … I understand why you were mad about what happened with Hesperus.”

I walked toward her and she floated back, maintaining the same distance between us.

“Brawn, listen … She would have told the others that Ragnarök
was bluffing. They’d have come after us…. We were outnumbered, outgunned. I
had
to stop her!”

“And you thought that killing her was the
only
way to achieve that?” I snarled. “You’re sick. Twisted.”

Casey came running, skidded to a stop between us. “Stand down, both of you! If you’re going to fight, you’re not doing it in here. I’ve worked too long and too hard to have it all destroyed because you can’t set aside your differences!”

I glared at Slaughter as I addressed Casey. “How much longer?”

“Soon. A year, maybe two.” To Slaughter, he said, “Leave us.”

As she darted out of the cavern, I said to Casey, “It had better work.”

“I can’t promise you that. I’m certain I’ll be able to permanently strip the powers that make someone superhuman. But … I don’t know if I can change your appearance back to human.”

“Then what’s the point of me even being here? I’ve spent the past
fifteen years
like this.” I sat down on the ground so our eyes were more or less on the same level. “I want to be able to walk down the street without people running and screaming. I want to be able to go into a store without having to crawl on my hands and knees.”

Casey nodded. “I know. There might be another solution. I’m thinking that maybe I can give you another body. A clone. I’ve already had some success in that field. Problem is, I haven’t yet found a viable way to accelerate a clone’s growth. So if we start growing one now, it’ll be another eighteen years
before it reaches adulthood. Of course, we’ll need those eighteen years to find a way to copy your brain patterns to the clone.”

“Suppose you
could
do that,” I said. “Then what happens to me? To this body? There’d be two of us, right?”

“We’d dispose of your current body.”

“That’d be murder.”

Casey shrugged. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

“And if the clone body reaches eighteen years, well, it’ll have a mind of its own. So wiping that mind would also be murder.” I shook my head. “No. We’re not doing that.”

“Then you’ll have to resign yourself to remaining the way you are now. It could be worse, you know. You could be in Dioxin’s situation.” Casey walked around behind me and put his hand on my shoulder as we looked over toward the skeletal structure of the mobile fortress. “This is costing nearly every cent I’ve stolen in the past decade, but it’ll be worth it. It’ll bring the so-called heroes running. The more of them we have in one place, the more energy we’ll be able to siphon from them.”

“They’ll try to stop us,” I said. “They’re going to throw everything they have at us.”

“It’s the right thing to do, you know that.”

“It’ll be all-out war.”

“I know,” Casey said. “It’s going to be
great
.”

EVERY DAY AT DAWN
the guards wake me. They release the mechanisms holding my chains to the wall, then the massive doors rumble open and they escort me out.

I work for eighteen hours, hauling the raw ore from the new mine shaft, without a break. I receive food and water only when my shift is over, and only if I have surpassed my quota of ore.

Sometimes, I think I could snap through the chains if given enough time, but I am watched every moment of every day.

After my rampage through the mine eight months ago Harmony Yuan told me, with glee in her eyes, that I would die here. I am certain that she is right.

Around me the guards are assembling, preparing to once again take me out into the daylight, and I remember one
of the last things my father said to me: “You have to be a
good
man. You have to always do the best you can for other people.”

It kills me that I’ve let him down, that I was so willing to follow Casey Duval, to believe his lies. He used me, just as Harmony and Gordon Tremont used me. Just as Max Dalton did.

For all his faults, at least Max was working to make things better for everyone. Though he was greedy, and vain, and misguided, ultimately he put the human race above himself. But the ends do not justify the means. Despite everything he did, that did not make him a good person.

And I wasn’t a good person either. I’d been selfish. I wanted to be cured…. I wanted a normal life, but now I see that I did little to deserve that. A normal life is not a
right
, it’s a privilege that each of us must earn, by helping others, by putting their needs ahead of our own desires.