The Gathering: Quantum Prophecy 2 (11 page)

“It’s a simple move,” Cord said. “Just sweep your arm up and knock your opponent’s hand aside. If they punch with their right, you block with your left, sweeping to the right. Why? Because that’ll move your opponent to their left, which means that they can’t then throw another jab with their left hand. But it also means that you can’t easily hit them with
your
right hand. Later, we’ll look at ways around that. Now pair off: Renata and Butler, Steph and Razor, Yvonne and Colin, Alia and Mina. Danny, you’re with me. Take turns punching and blocking. And don’t actually try to
hit
your opponent—we don’t want any casualties!”

As he sparred with Yvonne, Colin kept glancing over at Danny; with only one arm, Danny was finding it tough.

Sol’s not going any easier on him
, Colin thought.
You’d think that—

Wham! Yvonne’s fist collided with Colin’s jaw, sending him staggering backward.

“Oh my God! Are you OK?”

Colin could see spots in front of his eyes. “Yeah, I’m all right. I think. My fault—I wasn’t paying attention.”

They were interrupted by the arrival of Niall Cooper, who was wearing a karate suit that had been cut down to size.

“I’m ready!” he announced cheerfully.

Cord said, “Sorry, Niall. You’ll have to sit this one out.”

“Aw! Just teach me some of the moves!”

Butler laughed. “Who feels brave enough to take on the shrimp?”

Niall gave him a dirty look. “I know I’m small, but I won’t always be! One day I’ll be a superhuman too, like my dad was!”

“Yeah, but your dad was one of the
bad
guys. How do we know you won’t be just as evil as he was?”

“That’s enough, Butler!” Cord shouted.

Oh hell
, Colin thought. To Yvonne, he whispered, “Didn’t anyone tell him that Niall doesn’t know?”

“Josh told us yesterday.”

“What are you saying?” Niall demanded, marching over to Butler. “My dad used to be
Quantum
! He was the best!”

“Kid, that man you call your dad was never Quantum. He was Façade. He worked for the bad guys.”

Niall clenched his tiny fists and made a run at Butler, but Danny stood in his way.

He put out his hand to calm his brother, then turned to Butler. “Tell him that’s not true.”

Butler smirked. “But it
is
true. He’s got a villain for a father and a murdering cripple for a half brother.”

“Redmond!” Cord said, advancing on him.

Butler turned to Cord and gave him a look of contempt. “Stay out of this, Solomon. This is between me and Lefty here.”

Colin moved closer to them.
If Butler’s as strong as he says he is, he could knock Sol’s head clean off his shoulders. He knows it, too. They
both
know it.

“What is your problem with me?” Danny demanded.

Butler’s force field suddenly appeared around him and expanded outward, forcing Danny to step back.

Butler sneered. “My problem? My problem is that you’re a nobody, Cooper. You don’t have any powers. Sure, your old man was something else in his day, but he’s doing the pine-box waltz now. And
you
put him there.
I
got sent to military school because I beat the crap out of a guy who was trying to mug me, but you murdered your own father and no one has done a thing about it.”

“That was an accident!”

Enough!
Colin decided. He walked over to Butler and stepped between him and Danny. “I don’t know whether you’re stronger than me, Redmond, but we’re going to find out if you don’t back away right now!”

“Hey, I’m not going to touch him! It wouldn’t be right, him being a powerless cripple and all.”

“Hit the showers, Redmond,” Cord said. “You’re done for the day.”

Butler looked around at everyone, then nodded. His force field disappeared. “Whatever you say, boss.” As he marched out of the room, he turned and winked at Niall. “See you, shrimp.”

Danny turned to Colin. “I don’t need you to fight my battles for me!”

“I was trying to…”

But Danny just turned his back and walked away.

Colin looked over at Niall, who was now standing next to Renata, holding her hand. “What did he mean about my dad being evil?” Niall asked.

Dioxin woke as the car slowed to a crawl; it was approaching a pair of gates set into a four-meter-high steel fence. “Where are we, Laurie?”

“Northeast Wyoming.”

The unmanned gates swung open and they drove through, the car plowing furrows in the snow. They drove along a short treelined road and into a small town square. “There’s no people,” Dioxin said. “Stop the car a minute.”

Laurie pulled the car over to the side and Dioxin got out. He took a deep breath, the ragged remains of his nostrils flaring. “Fresh-cut timber. Drying plaster. These buildings are all brand new.” He leaned back into the car. “You built this place?”

“We did. Right now, there’s only a handful of people here. We’re expecting the first citizens to arrive in the next couple of months. This will be your base of operations while you’re dealing with the Paragon situation.”

Dioxin looked around, his breath misting in the air. “I was expecting an underground lair at the very least. Man, this is one creepy little town…” He pointed toward the roof of a nearby store. “Hidden camera…Another one over there…High-tech alarms on all the buildings. Unpickable locks on the doors.” He walked to the nearest store window and pressed his hand against the glass. “Shatterproof glass.” He peered through the window into the empty store, then walked a little farther along the street, knelt and scraped the snow from a square meter of the pavement.
Reinforced concrete slabs, probably six inches thick or more.

Dioxin brushed the snow from his hands and returned to the car. “You’ve built this place to last and you’ve thought of almost everything. Phone lines, TV points and Internet connections in all the stores. Solar panels on all the roofs. Wheelchair access everywhere. Street signs all perfectly clear and legible. You even have smaller signs on every corner with the street names in Braille. Except…You know what’s missing?”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t have many traffic signs. You know, parking restrictions and all that.”

“We won’t need them. The citizens won’t park illegally.”

“A town this size must have cost a couple of billion dollars. Who’s behind it?”

“Get in. I’m taking you to him.”

Dioxin climbed back into the car and they drove off once again. “So…You’ve built yourself a perfect, private town surrounded by an unscalable fence. You trying to keep people in or out? Or both?”

“We’re just providing a nice place for the people to live.”

“Why?”

Laurie steered the car along a wide pedestrianized street. “Because if we give them what they want, they won’t leave. This town is just the first of many.”

“Trutopians,” Dioxin said and laughed. “I thought you guys were just another dumb cult, but you’ve really got something here.”

“There are over seventeen million Trutopians throughout the world,” Laurie said. “That’s a larger population than many countries. There’s almost a million Trutopians in the U.S. alone, and we’re growing at a rate of about seven percent a month. By the end of next year we’ll have enough people to directly influence Congress. Four years, maybe five, and we’ll have enough political strength to elect any candidate of our choice to the presidency.”

“It’s not possible to eliminate the criminal class: if the Trutopians don’t allow criminals or undesirables to join, then the world will be seriously divided. On one side, the peace-loving Trutopians in their perfect, impenetrable communities. On the other side, the rest of the world in their polluted, crime-ridden cities. That won’t sit well with a lot of people. It’s basically apartheid.”

“No, it’s not. Anyone can join the Trutopians.”

“But those who don’t fit in are expelled. Trust me on this: you can’t save the world by turning all the criminals against you. You could be looking at civil war on a global scale.”

“There’s no progress without conflict,” Laurie said.

He drove the car down into the empty underground parking garage of a large apartment block and stopped close to a set of doors.

Dioxin grabbed his bag and climbed out. “No welcoming committee?”

“
I’m
the welcoming committee. Follow me.”

Laurie led Dioxin through the doors, along a short corridor and into an elevator. He slipped a key-card into a hidden slot, then the elevator began to rise.

The elevator doors opened on to a bright, well-decorated lobby. Laurie and Dioxin stepped out. “We have the top three floors,” Laurie said.

“And who is ‘we’?”

Laurie didn’t reply. He led Dioxin through the lobby, their footsteps echoing across the marble floor. They stopped outside a door that had a red light above it. “He’s recording,” Laurie said. Seconds later, the light blinked out. “All right.” Laurie opened the door and ushered Dioxin inside.

It looked to Dioxin like a small television studio. One wall was covered in monitors, all showing different television channels. Against another wall was a podium backed by a set of dark blue curtains and the Trutopian banner. Two video cameras were pointed at the podium.

In the center of the room, at a large cluttered desk, an overweight, bearded man sat typing on a computer keyboard. Without stopping what he was doing, or even looking up, the bearded man said, “Dioxin. The legendary poisonous supervillain. Took us a long time to track you down.”

“Reginald Kinsella. The Trutopians’ new leader.”

“That’s me,” the man said, still typing. “But I want to know more about you. As far as anyone in the government knows, you
died ten years ago, dissolved into soup by your own acids. What really happened?”

“I feigned unconsciousness, slipped away when I was sure no one was watching. There was enough of my skin and blood left behind that they assumed I’d just broken down into nothing.”

“As simple as that?”

“No. Every nerve in my body was in agony. My skin was peeling away. I lost a
lot
of blood. It took me months to recover.”

“After Ragnarök’s last battle, the first report we have of you is when you helped assassinate a certain U.S. senator. You did a good job, made it look like an accident. Even today no one suspects. You spent the next few years in Europe, Asia and Africa, moving from one country to another. You left a trail of dead plastic surgeons in your wake—I’m assuming that you forced each one to do some repair work on your skin—but they were so far apart that no one realized there was a serial killer on the loose.”

Dioxin moved around to stand in front of the desk. “Look, just stop typing—it’s distracting!”

“Not to me,” Kinsella said. Nevertheless, he pushed the keyboard away and looked at Dioxin. “I’m going to rule the world, Mr. Dioxin.”

“I kinda picked up on that.”

“And you are going to help me. I want the new heroes out of the way. But they’re strong: we can’t easily fight them on a physical level. So we have to fight them politically.”

Dioxin nodded. “You want to discredit them, strip them of the people’s support.”

“Exactly. Though if you
can
kill them, then by all means do
so. Except one. I want one of them by my side. To guard against future superhuman threats.”

“Discredit them, kill them, divide them. I can do that. But I want Paragon.” Dioxin held up his hands. “He did this to me.”

Kinsella raised an eyebrow. “Really? I thought your own acids did that.”

“As soon as I realized that I was no longer immune to the acid, I knew I had to get it off my skin. There was a fountain nearby. Water dilutes acid. I could have washed the acid off and got away with only minor burns, if Paragon hadn’t slowed me down.”

“I don’t have much love for Paragon myself. You’ll get him. Not at first though. First, we’ve got something
really
special planned for him. Trust me: you’re going to love it.”

“So now you tell me about yourself,” Dioxin said. “I don’t like working for people I don’t know. If I don’t know someone, I can’t trust him.”

The bearded man stood up and moved around the desk. He pulled off his jacket and tossed it to Dioxin.

“Padded,” Dioxin said.

“Right.” Kinsella unbuttoned his shirt and slapped the fake latex beer belly that had been strapped around his waist. “The beard is fake too. I’d prove it, only it takes half an hour to get the damn thing off.” As he buttoned his shirt up once more, he said, “The old guy who set up the Trutopians was pretty smart, but he didn’t have the vision it takes to make the organization really work.”

“How did you get the job?”

“It wasn’t hard. I persuaded him to take me on and hand over control. He wanted someone intelligent and absolutely honest.”
Kinsella smiled. “I’m intelligent enough to be able to fake the honesty.”

“And the reason for the disguise?”

“I’ve encountered the new heroes before and I don’t want them to know that I’m running the Trutopians.”

He reached out his hand to Dioxin. “My real name is Victor Cross.”

A
T
S
AKKARA, LATE IN THE AFTERNOON
, Colin sat in the machine room chatting with Razor.

“Right,” Razor said, switching on a computer monitor. “Your first real training session is tonight. So here’s what you’ll all be wearing.” The monitor showed a rotating three-dimensional image of a black, tight-fitting costume.

“Aw! You mean I’m not going to be wearing my Titan costume anymore?”

“Josh wants everyone wearing matching outfits. A leftover from his days with The High Command, I suppose. Anyway, these things are knifeproof, bulletproof and fireproof. They’re a matte-black finish, so they don’t reflect much light, which will make it easier to hide in the dark. And they’re insulated too, which is just as well because it’s going to be absolutely freezing out there tonight.”

“That’s not a problem for me,” Colin said. “I don’t seem to feel the cold much these days.”

“Well, not everyone is as lucky as you are.” Razor reached into a drawer and pulled out a lump of something that looked like a cross between leather and rubber. “This is what it’s made of,” he said, handing it to Colin.