Super Human (20 page)

But that was a long time ago. There was no one left alive—save for Krodin—who remembered their names.

Krodin’s older brother Kurgal had left home when Krodin was six, and the last Krodin heard, Kurgal had a wife and five children. By now, Kurgal’s descendants would likely number in the hundreds.

For a moment, Krodin wondered how many of them he had killed in battle.

Below in the courtyard, the people of his citadel were gathering. They did this often: They stopped and simply stared at him. Sometimes they would kneel, praying to him. He had never requested this level of adoration, but it gave the humans some comfort to believe that they were in the presence of a god.

Alexandria approached him on the balcony. As always, she kept her head lowered in his company. He turned to her. Her once-lustrous hair was now gray, her fine skin mottled and wrinkled, her slender frame now weak and bent with age.

“Good morning, Lady Alexandria. Did you sleep well?”

“I slept.”

Krodin noted that she hadn’t answered his question, but set it aside. The wife of a king should be allowed certain liberties. He turned once more toward the city. In the dark courtyard below, many more people had gathered, and still more were coming. He wondered whether today was another of their holy days. They seemed to have quite a lot of them.

The sky to the east was tinged with red. “This will be a fine day,” he said to Alexandria.

“As you say.”

Krodin considered her response. It was customary for his people to always address him as “Lord,” but of late, Alexandria had taken to omitting that honorific. He didn’t care about that, but it troubled him that he didn’t know why her attitude had changed.

“Lady Alexandria . . . I have conquered the known world, united all the people under one banner.” He gestured toward the flags adorning the square below: Each had a white background with a blue eye inside a golden sun, the old symbol of the Azurite Order that Krodin had adopted as his own. “I am immortal, unaging, wealthy beyond measure. No man can match my intellect. I am fluent in a dozen languages, a hundred dialects, and I have a perfect memory. I am the greatest warrior and the greatest king this Earth has ever known. Out of all the millions of people under my rule, I chose you—and
only
you—to be my companion. I have named this city in your honor. You have everything you could ever want, yet you are not happy.”

“As you say.”

He turned to face her again. “What can I do to
make
you happy?”

“There is nothing you can do now. But in the past . . .”

“And what could I have done?”

“You could have stopped,” she said.

Krodin frowned.

Alexandria repeated, “Stopped. You
have
conquered the known world. But for what reason?”

“I . . . do not understand.”

“You have butchered countless thousands of people, set nation against nation, people against people, brother against brother. You have terrorized the human race with your pointless bloodshed.” She walked to the edge of the balcony and looked at the silent crowd in the shadows below. “It is very likely that every one of these people has lost a brother or a father or a son in one of your wars.” She stepped back. “I would like to know why you have done these things.”

Krodin’s frown deepened. “
Why?
I am the strongest, the most powerful—”

“That does not explain why. What have you achieved but immeasurable pain and suffering?”

“I have united the world!”

“You have united the survivors of your conquests. But what of the dead? We humans did not ask for your rule, Krodin. We do not desire it. And we do not need it.”

Krodin felt his heart quicken. “Be mindful of your words, Alexandria. If any man spoke to me in such a manner I would—”

“Yes,” she interrupted. She raised her head and looked into his eyes. “You would strike him down. Set your men on his family. Burn his village to the ground. You are strong, Krodin. Mighty. Fearless. Undefeated. But in so many ways you are weak.”

He couldn’t help but smile. “Weak?”

“Yes. Weak. You have taken so much, and it is not enough. But a man with a house full of gold that he does not spend is no richer than a man with no gold. You could have stopped when you took Egypt. None of the other nations would have dared to stand against you. They were not a threat, yet you still waged war on them. Whole nations have been destroyed simply because you feel that you must prove your strength. You are weak because you cannot exist without the reverence of the people. You cannot simply
be
.”

“You are old, woman. Your mind fails you; you say things you cannot believe.”

“No. I say things that
you
do not want to believe. But deep inside, you know, do you not? You know that every empire falls. Nothing is eternal, save death.”

He turned his back, stared out at the lightening sky. “Leave.”

Alexandria said, “Do not dismiss me. You are stronger than we are, this is true. But that does not make you better than us. Kill me for speaking and you will only prove my point.” She hesitated for a moment. “There is a woman who lives on the edge of the city. Some say that she has a second sight. The people go to her for guidance at times. She tells them of her dreams of their future. Like you, she is more than human. You are not alone.”

“Impossible. I would have heard of this woman before now.”

“You hear only what your subjects allow you to hear. These people below do not worship you, Krodin. They despise you. When they kneel in prayer, they are not praying to you—they are praying to their gods for an end to your reign.”

“And the people know of this woman, this future-teller?”

“Everyone knows, Krodin. She came to me months ago. She told me that there is an energy inside you—and inside herself—that makes you more than human. A sapphire glow that changes you, gives you your godlike powers. But you do not truly control this energy. One day it will break free. It will consume you. You will become a pillar of fire. The woman saw this in a dream, she told me. But it was a
true
dream. It will happen. You will die.”

“And how will this supposed death occur? When?”

“She told me that one day the light of the breaking sun will strike your face, and then we will be free of you forever. It will be a day of great celebration. And the world
will
continue without you, Krodin. In time you will be all but forgotten. For all your conquests and carnage, you are not significant.”

“It is superstitious nonsense, Alexandria. You should not believe such tales.”

“But I
do
believe, Krodin. And you should too.”

“Do
not
presume to tell me what I should believe, woman!”

“Ah, belief. . . . You once asked me if I believed in the gods, in the paradise to come and the underworld for the evil. I was uncertain then. But I have learned much in my time with you.
This
is the underworld, Krodin, a place where evil rules and the innocent suffer. An underworld created by your cruelty and selfishness and weakness. But the paradise will come, when you are gone.”

“Enough!” Krodin bellowed, his voice echoing across the courtyard. He stepped toward her, raised a powerful fist.

Alexandria stepped back, though her face showed no sign of fear. “Our marriage is over, Krodin.”

“
You
do not decide such things, woman!”

“No, it is not my decision. It is the decision of the fates.” She looked away from him, and faced the east. “Good-bye.”

Krodin stared at her, thinking that his wife had finally lost her mind. But her eyes glinted in the dawn light and there was a smile on her face, and he realized that he had never seen her smile before. Not once in thirty-five years.

For the first time in his long life Krodin felt something close to fear. He turned toward the city. The sun rose; its light spilled over his face. Far below, the crowds began to cheer.

And Krodin looked down at his body and saw that it was aflame.

Something slammed nearby, and Abby opened her eyes. For a moment she had no idea where she was. She was looking through dust-streaked glass at a dark path that seemed to stretch off into an infinite blackness.

Then she felt the warm vinyl of the truck’s seat beneath her and she remembered that she was a superhero on a mission.

The truck had been pulled over to the side of the road, and from the sounds outside, Thunder and Lance were arguing again.

Abby slid over to the door and groped for the lever, then pulled the door open and jumped out. The only real light came from the truck’s headlights—the streetlights were out and the sky was overcast.

She followed the voices to the far side of the road. A pair of weaving flashlights showed the others beside a small car that had run into a streetlamp.

Lance was holding one of the flashlights on Thunder and Roz as they helped a middle-aged woman out of the driver’s seat. The second flashlight was hovering a few inches above Roz’s shoulder, its beam swiveling to point to wherever Roz looked.

They lowered the woman to the ground and Thunder checked her pulse and airway. The woman was moaning, her limbs flailing weakly. Her eyes and nose were streaming, and her skin was drenched in sweat. “I don’t think she’s injured,” Thunder said. “She’s sick, though. Got it pretty bad.”

“She can’t have been going fast, at least that’s something. If she’d been speeding . . .” Lance shook his head, then aimed his flashlight at the hood of the car. “What do you think? Streetlights went out as she was driving and she couldn’t see where she was going?”

“What about her car’s lights, then?” Abby said.

Lance’s flashlight swiveled in her direction. “Oh yeah.”

Thunder took off his padded army jacket, wadded it up, and placed it under the woman’s head. He unclipped a radio from his belt. “I’ll see if I can raise anyone on this thing, but I’m not expecting much.”

“We didn’t want to wake you,” Roz said to Abby. “This is the fourth one we’ve found. It’s getting crazy. There were warnings all over the radio and TV not to drive, but when we were passing through the last town all the lights went out and the local radio station went off the air. One of the last things we heard was that the plague is still spreading and there’s rioting and looting breaking out in all the worst-infected areas. The cops and the army are trying to keep order, but most of them are already infected and they—”

Abby interrupted her. “Wait, where’s the army guy? Corporal Redmond?”

Roz and Lance looked at each other for a moment, then Roz said, “The infection got through to him. One minute he was fine, the next he was coughing his guts up. He told us to pull over, then he said we were to go on without him.”

“You left him
behind
?”

“Abby, he insisted,” Lance said. “He said that we were going to have enough to worry about without having to look after him too.”

“So . . . who’s driving the truck?”

“I am,” Roz said. “We’re about forty miles from the prison. We’ve been trying to contact them but no luck yet. The prison should have its own generators so it probably still has electricity.” She led Abby around to the front of the car and unfolded a map on its crumpled hood. The flashlight floated away from her shoulder and hovered over the map, its beam directed at a long, winding line. “This is where we are now, roughly. The prison is here. . . .” The flashlight moved a few inches to the right. “And
this
”—the flashlight’s beam zipped across the map to a circled area—“is a nuclear power plant.”

“So
that’s
what The Helotry are doing,” Abby said. “Sabotaging the power plants.”

“No, we don’t think it’s that,” Lance said. “Not exactly.” He explained about the pages he had found—stolen, Roz corrected—and how the final page seemed to indicate that the Windfield power plant was The Helotry’s next target.

“They couldn’t find what they wanted in the first one, so they’re trying this one?” Abby asked. “That doesn’t make much sense, though. If
this
power plant has been up and running for months, why wouldn’t they just go there first?”

Roz said, “Clearly there was something in the Midway plant that this one doesn’t have. But Midway wasn’t operational. It didn’t have a core.” She shrugged. “It barely has a paint job.”

“Ah, I think I’ve got it now!” Lance said, grinning. “It’s not what the Midway plant had that this one doesn’t, it’s what Midway
didn’t
have. They keep these places pretty secret, right? They don’t want too many people to know exactly what they’re like on the inside. So I’ll bet you a million bucks that both of the power plants were built to the same plans. The Helotry waited until the Midway plant was mostly finished, and they attacked before it went online. It’s an old trick: If you can’t case the joint itself, you case an identical one. Now they know the layout of the place, what equipment will be used, the types of computers. They know everything they need to take over Windfield.”