Stronger: A Super Human Clash (8 page)

It took me a moment to realize that he was speaking Spanish. There wasn’t much I’d been good at in school, but I had always done pretty well in Spanish. He had said, “Hey, look! He’s alive. And awake.”

“This is the one the Americans were chasing?” another asked.

“Take a guess. Who else is out here?”

“So, what is he?”

The first man shrugged. “Blue.”

“That’s not a lot of help, Ricardo.”

I raised my head a little, and saw three bulky figures silhouetted against the low-lying sun.

The one on the left nudged the one in the middle. “You should talk to him.”

“Me? You’re the boss.”

“Correct. I’m the boss, and I’m telling you to talk to him.”

The man in the middle approached. He pushed back the
hood of his parka, removed his tinted goggles, and pulled the scarf away from his mouth.
“¿Hola? ¿Habla usted español?”

I nodded. “A little, yes. Um …
Quién es usted?
Wait, that’s not right, is it? Sorry.”

“English.” The man nodded. “We can do English.” He looked me up and down. “
Los perros
… The dogs. They found you. They like you, I think. They are trying to keep you warm.”

“OK.” I didn’t really know what else to say.

“Who are you? No,
what
are you? We have never seen a man like you before. You are blue. And very big.”

“I know.” I sat up, moving slowly in case I startled the dogs. The two on my chest slid off and immediately scampered around behind me, pressing against my back.

The man looked back at his colleagues, who shrugged, then turned to me again. “So … Where are you going?”

“Home. America.
North
America.”

He nodded at that. “OK. But it is a long walk. And a long swim. And then a much longer walk.” His eyes narrowed. “Do you know where you are?”

“Antarctica.”

“
La Antártida, sí.
But … How did you get here?”

“It’s a long story. Can you help me get home?”

“Sure. Well, we can take you to our base. But the Americans might find out. For the past week they have been looking for something. That is you, yes?”

“I guess.”

“They have helicopters, men in trucks…. But the blizzard must have covered your tracks, because they are looking in
the wrong place.” He pointed off to the right. “They are one hundred, two hundred kilometers in that direction. My friend, we will make a deal,
sí
? You tell us everything about you—where you come from, how you are … like this … and why the Americans were keeping you here in this frozen hell—and we will do what we can to get you to Tierra del Fuego—Argentina—without your captors discovering you. Agreed?” He grinned and extended his right hand.

I couldn’t see any better option. I shook his hand. Even with the bulky gloves he was wearing, his hand was swallowed up by mine.

COSMO’S PIEBALD SKIN
was visible only through long scratches in a thick layer of mud and sweat-soaked rock dust. He was so exhausted that he almost passed out as he squirmed free of the narrow access shaft, and I had to grab him before his head cracked off the floor.

I gently lowered him to the ground, and Keegan passed me her rolled-up jacket to place under his head. She held her water bottle up to his mouth and poured a little in, then splashed some on her free hand and used it to wipe the grime from his face.

Donny DePaiva, Thomas Hazlegrove’s number-two man, was watching with three of his fellow guards. DePaiva was in his forties and never seemed particularly interested in the workings of the mine unless Hazlegrove was around, in which
case DePaiva suddenly became the most hands-on and attentive guard you could imagine. “Well? Are they alive in there?”

Cosmo shook his head. “No trace of them. Nothing. They must have tried to get out when the cave-in started. If they’d stayed where they were …”

“So they got crushed.” DePaiva shrugged. “Well, we tried. All right.” He jerked his thumb at the narrow tunnel. “Seal it up.”

Keegan said, “Or we could just leave it. You never know—we might need to break through again one day.”

“Yeah, whatever.” DePaiva had already turned away and was walking back toward the surface with his colleagues.

When they were gone, Cosmo said, “They’re making progress, but it’s slow going. Jakob reckons it’ll take a month, maybe six weeks.”

Keegan said, “That’s not good. Their food and water will run out long before then.”

“So we bring them more supplies.” Even as I said that, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. On top of the difficulty of obtaining more food and water without the guards noticing, there was the secondary problem of actually getting it to Jakob’s team. Cosmo was the only one who was small enough to squirm through the access shaft, and he really didn’t have the strength to crawl through more than once a day, certainly not often enough to bring the necessary supplies to Jakob.

There was a solution to that, but I didn’t like it. Not one bit.

* * *

I crouched down just outside the doorway to the rusting prefabricated cabin that served as Hazlegrove’s office. He was sitting with his feet up on the desk, leaning way back with a PneumatoDrill 400 maintenance manual opened in the middle and lying across his face.

I knocked on the door. “Sorry to wake you,” I rumbled.

Without moving, he asked, “What do you want, Brawn?”

“I have an idea. It’s a good one too. It’ll increase productivity quite a lot.”

“Go on.”

“But in return for the idea, we want better conditions. Bigger rations, new clothes, new bedding. Or at least get the current bedding fumigated. This blasted place is crawling with lice.”

“I thought that insects avoided you.”

“I think they don’t like the taste of my skin. They scurry away from me and make it all worse for everyone else.”

“Huh. So what’s this idea?”

“Put the kids to work in the mine shafts. Only a couple of hours a day, just to keep them from getting bored. You can assign some of the weaker adults to watch over them. With Jakob’s team gone we’re eight men down. This’ll more than make up for that.”

Hazlegrove pulled his feet off the desk, removed his makeshift eye shield, and sat up. “That’s a strange suggestion, coming from you.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not suggesting that they do anything too dangerous. But they could bring water down to the workers, help with clearing the loose ore. It’ll get them used to working
in the shafts, and it means their parents won’t have to be worried that they’re not being supervised.”

He stood up and walked to the door. “I’m not scared of you freaks. You know that, right?”

“I never thought you were.”

“By rights you shouldn’t even exist. In older civilizations people like you would have been put to death.”

“OK.” I wondered where he was going with this.

“And yet here you are, alive and healthy. Something to think about, eh?” He waved one hand at me, urging me to move away from the door, then stepped out and looked around. “There are three hundred and seventy-two inmates of this mine, almost a hundred of whom are too old, too weak, or too young to be productive enough to cover the cost of feeding them.” His lips tightened and his eyes narrowed for a moment. “All right. We’ll give your suggestion a go. Any accidents or delays caused as a result will be your fault. But you’ll get what you asked for. Except the new bedding and clothing, but we’ll delouse everyone’s existing clothing at the same time we do the bedding.”

“Good.” I nodded. “Yeah, that’ll work.”

“But there’ll be a price, Brawn. And you won’t like it. I’ll need to work on some details, talk to the warden.
Agreed?”

“You want me to agree before you tell me what that price is?”

He grinned. “Correct. Agree to my terms and you’ll get your extra rations today. It’ll take a week or so to get enough lindane to delouse the beds and clothes.”

I didn’t want to agree, but we needed the extra rations to keep Jakob and his men going, and we needed the kids allowed in the mine shafts because they were small enough to crawl through the access tunnel and bring those rations to the escape team.

We couldn’t all escape, we knew that. But now that Jakob and the others were believed to be dead, they wouldn’t be missed. If they weren’t missed, no one would be looking for them.

But Hazlegrove’s price … I couldn’t even guess what it might be. All I could do was hope that it was a long way off. Long enough for Jakob and the others to tunnel their way to freedom, and—ideally—find someone who could get the rest of us out.

“All right,” I said. “It’s a deal.”

Time passed slowly in the platinum mine, but it passed even more slowly when there was something to hope for.

After two months of round-the-clock digging Jakob and his team broke the surface some hundred yards beyond the perimeter fence. Those of us who knew of the escape plans—and there weren’t many: even the kids who assisted had to be sworn to secrecy—crossed our fingers and prayed to any number of deities that the team would find help.

But we knew it was a slim hope. Even though we were all prisoners, not all of us were criminals. Some of us were there simply because we’d proved to be an inconvenience to our governments. My friend Keegan, for example, had never been a superhuman. She had never committed a crime. She was
imprisoned because she’d been in a relationship with her country’s secretary of defense and he’d been careless enough to leave unprotected documents on his computer. Keegan found the documents by accident and, being naturally curious, read them. The documents proved that a minor election had been rigged. She mentioned it to the secretary, and a few days later she was here, in the mine.

Every new arrival was quizzed mercilessly by the other inmates: We wanted to know what was going on in the outside world. Did they know about us? Where exactly is the mine located?

Keegan, just like the rest of us, knew only that it had taken the best part of a day to reach the mine, and that she had been blindfolded throughout the journey.

But Jakob and the others would find out exactly where we were. As summer approached and the air under the dome became almost too hot to breathe, that was the only thought that kept us going.

In mid-June, the ventilator that pumped clean air into the deepest of the tunnels suddenly stopped working. Hazlegrove decided that it would be too costly to fix or replace, so we had to make do with the second ventilator being switched back and forth every half hour.

A week later, the second ventilator overheated. Sweat-drenched workers emerged from the mine shafts, pale skinned and hollow eyed, gasping for breath.

Within an hour, the last of the mined ore had been put through the crushers, and then no one—not even the guards—knew
what to do. For the first time since I’d arrived at the mine, work was halted.

We had grown accustomed to the constant humming of the ventilators, the whining of the drills, and the relentless growling of the ore crushers. Without them the silence was shocking, almost ghostly.

Hazlegrove found me lifting Loligo into her vat. Loligo was like me, a former superhuman whose powers had come with a physical change. She had tentacles in place of her arms, and gills in the side of her neck. She was a water-breather, and could live in the air for only a few hours at a time. There wasn’t a lot of work she could do in the mine, so she helped prepare the meals and looked after any new babies. Loligo was Italian, but unlike most Italians I’d met, she’d never learned to speak any language other than her own.

“You!” Hazlegrove shouted at me. “Get these people organized!”

“Organized doing what, Mr. Hazlegrove?”

“Something.
Anything
.” His eyes were wide. “It could be
days
before we can get the ventilators working!”

Loligo said,
“Abbiamo bisogno di riposare.”

He looked at her, his upper lip curled in distaste. “What?”

“She said we need to rest. She’s right. A few days off will do us good.”

“This is
not
a blasted vacation camp!” He stood there for a moment, seething, his swagger stick slapping furiously against the side of his leg, and for the first time I wondered what it was that drove a man like Thomas Hazlegrove.

Why would any sane person voluntarily work in this
place? Perhaps it was money. I had no idea what platinum was worth, but we extracted quite a lot of it, and the costs were minimal. Maybe the warden paid Hazlegrove hundreds of thousands of dollars to run the mine.

“All right … Brawn, spread the word. This time tomorrow I’m going to address the crowd. I want everyone there. Everyone. Understood?”

“Sure. What’s this about?”

“You’ll find out when everyone else does.”

Some of the younger prisoners had never experienced silence. They’d been born in the mine, where there had always been the ever-present rumble of heavy machines. That first night few of them were able to sleep. For the adults, though, there was almost a party atmosphere. We gathered in groups, talking, sometimes even laughing. The night was filled with a sense of hope, a feeling that this one simple change was a harbinger of better days.

And those of us who knew of Jakob’s escape were even more certain of that feeling.

I slept well that night, better than I had in more than ten years, and it was luxurious to be allowed to wake of my own accord and not because one of the guards was poking me in the face with the muzzle of his gun.

As I was waiting in line at the water barrel, Keegan called to me from in front of the guards’ dens, waving me over. I passed my water bottle to the man behind me. “Fill this for me, will you, Crisanto?”

He nodded and said,
“Tiyak.”

When I reached Keegan, she pointed over to the far side of the shaft entrances. “New people. Eight or nine, I think. Lift me up so I can see.”

I reached down and she sat in the crook of my arm, then I hoisted her onto my shoulder. “I see them. Hazlegrove is with them.”

“They’re not prisoners,” Keegan said. “What are those things they’re pushing? They look like lawn mowers. Can’t be, though. It’s been a long time since any grass grew under the dome.”