The Prospects (Book 2): Nothing Poorer Than Gods (14 page)

The light at the end of the wound used to be bright white, then it was pink. Now it was almost as dark as the rest of the inside of Vijay’s head. It clotted so thickly Deon couldn’t see a way out of it.

It also got smaller. No, wait. It wasn’t smaller, he was bigger. And he was getting bigger all the time.

Deon ripped two final dark red blood cells from the clot and ran through veins that seemed to be constricting. The olfactory nerve had to be straight ahead. That led to the nasal cavity. That led out.

He squeezed through a narrow joint in the bones. The edges were paper-thin and a few pieces came away before Deon felt a strong breeze. He grabbed the membranes around him to keep from being pulled down Vijay’s throat.

Then it hit him: Vijay breathed. That meant fresh air.

Deon grew noticeably larger with each breath. If he didn’t get out soon he’d become full-size inside Vijay’s head.

With a burst of speed Deon shot through Vijay’s sinuses. He bounced like a pinball through the slimy passages until he saw light at the end of a cavern. Vijay’s nose hairs looked like stalagmites and stalactites that got smaller as Deon grew.

Deon was barely visible to the naked eye when he dashed out of Vijay’s nostril. Professor Photon picked him up with two fingers from the field of hexagonal skin cells and circular pores and put him on the dusty floor.

Deon’s voice became lower and louder as he grew back to normal size. “That was insane. Couldn’t you have warned me?”

“We didn’t have time to argue.”

Gale Force took off her scarves and handed them to Deon.

“Why are you giving me these?”

Gale Force glanced down and back up.

Deon looked down. He was naked. He covered himself with the scarves. “Why didn’t my clothes shrink too?”

Professor Photon tugged his sleeve. “Only a proprietary molecular reactive material can follow the reaction speed. My helmet is made of it.” Professor Photon snatched the helmet from Deon’s head.

Trista came back into the room. “I called nine-one-one. The ambulance is on its way.”

Deon pointed to her bleeding head wound. “Want me to have a look at that?”

“I’d rather you get dressed before you get close to me.”

“Emily, take Calvin to the elevator and wait there.” Alex poked Noah’s jaw with the pistol and said quietly, “If I feel any heat or cold, I will shoot. You won’t be the first villain I killed.”

Noah growled but stayed still.

“Please don’t hurt him,” said Ruby.

“Gary, grab the nullifier and put it on his head,” Alex said.

Gary did exactly as Alex asked.

“Noah, get on the operating table,” said Alex.

“What are you going to do?”

“That bullet went into your intestines. You have minutes before the bacteria enters your bloodstream. The infection can be fatal unless you get on that table and let me stitch up the hole.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I’m the only one who can.”

“I threatened your family.”

“You have a prison sentence to serve. You will live long enough to do it.”

“Is this your way of being a hero? By forcing me to suffer?”

“You committed crimes, you deserve the consequences.”

“I’d rather die.”

Ruby covered her face with her crab-like claws.

Joey sobbed.

“You can’t,” said Gary. “Noah, we need you.”

“You betrayed me, you little …”

“I won’t kill innocent people, but even if you did, you saved us.”

Alex kept his gun pressed against Noah’s jaw as Noah got on the operating table. He submitted to Alex handcuffing him to the table and taping the psychic nullifier over his chin.

With a deep breath, Alex forced the hate from his mind. He took off his jacket and tie, rolled up his shirt sleeves, grabbed a first-aid kit, and started treating the wound with the care and precision he would give to any injured civilian or wounded hero.

Alex applied the last steri-strip to Trista’s head wound. “That should do it.” He made a peace sign. “How many fingers?”

“Two. I’m fine, really.”

“Candilyn went bad. If anyone has the right to say ‘I told you so,’ you do.”

“I didn’t think it’d happen that quickly.”

Four armed and armored MAB agents appeared at the medical ward’s door. “Agent O’Farrell? We’re here for the pick-up.”

Alex pointed to the gurney where Noah lay with bandages wrapped around his stomach. “I made arrangements with New York-Presbyterian's metahuman wing. Keep a security detail on him and don’t remove the nullifier for any reason.”

The agents pushed Noah’s gurney out of the room. Alex looked at Ruby and Gary. “Joey’s staying here because I don’t want to risk moving him. You two can go to the hospital or stay.”

“I’ll go.” Ruby pointed a claw at Gary. “Noah won’t want to see you again.”

Trista grabbed Alex’s wrist and made eye contact. He felt the cold tingling sensation under his skull. The words
Candilyn kicked my stomach
popped into his head.

Alex thought
, Does it still hurt
?

I’m worried about the baby. Can we find out if it’s okay?

There’s not much we can do if it’s not. I don’t have …

Emily said, “Uh, excuse me?” She waved her hand in front of Alex’s face. “I’m not happy about my husband staring into another woman’s eyes.”

Alex blinked. The psychic connection ended. “Sorry. We had something private to discuss.”

“Something you couldn’t tell your wife?” said Emily.

“It’s nothing,” said Trista.

“Sure,” said Emily, “The girl whose name Alex says in his sleep has a secret conversation with him. I’m supposed to not care about that.”

Gale Force hobbled over. “Can you honestly say you don’t have any secrets from Alex?”

Emily turned white. “This isn’t the right time.”

“Oh?” said Gale Force, “Should I …”

“Everyone, stop it,” said Alex. “No more soap-opera drama. I just saved the life of the guy who threatened my family, and I’m still mad at myself about that.”

Gale Force, Trista, and Emily all looked away.

“I know how you feel,” said Deon. “I mean, I got nothing but hate for Vijay since he sold us out. But I still did my best to put his brain back together.”

“Vijay was a bad influence on you,” said Gale Force. “You’re much nicer when he’s not around.”

Alex asked, “Where is he now?”

“They took him to New York-Presbyterian for emergency brain surgery,” said Deon.

“There’s a chance he won’t wake up again.”

“Yeah, but thanks to me there’s a chance he will. Well, me and Professor Photon.”

“Harry didn’t ask before he shot you full of micro-macro particles, did he?”

“How did you know?”

“He does things without asking people first because he has no social skills. Mindy did all the talking, and apologizing, for him.”

Knockout Rose heard that when she, Pinwheel, and Arbalest arrived in the ward. She stopped and listened.

“He did that to me too,” said Trista. “Pig-Girl was already set up in his island land. I didn’t have a chance to say no before he ran electricity into her – or his - body.”

Pinwheel said, “I know what you mean about Professor Photon. He hopped in my ear without any warning back on Griffin Island. Hearing a voice in my head made me think I went nuts.”

Knockout Rose was about to ask Alex for advice. She stopped when Arbalest came into the ward and said, “Hey, Alex, we got to call a team meeting.”

“Yeah, I’m curious what Stormhead wants us to do next.”

“Actually, I think it’s time for a new leader. In under twenty-four hours we lost our island and had our skyscraper hit because we fell for the same trick twice.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it. Last month there was a riot at North Brother Island’s supervillain jail. While we fought there the villains broke in. The same thing happened today.”

“The police needed our help. What would you do, say no?

“We’re not in fighting shape. There are dozens of reserves and wannabe heroes who could’ve picked up the slack.”

“Our reserve members have secret identities. They have lots of responsibilities outside of super-heroing. We can’t count on them to show up on short notice.”

“Then we could’ve called one of the minor teams, like the Harlem Knights. Instead, we went out and left our base wide open for a break in.”

Alex pointed to Ujimushi, who shivered under a strapped-on electric blanket on the other side of the ward. “I’ll interrogate him after his body heat returns to normal to find out who planned it and why Candilyn was with them.”

“And maybe we’ll get attacked again before then. Stormhead made us circle the wagons. We need to make a move before anyone else dies.”

“A move against who?”

“We know the CIA is behind this, right? I say we visit their headquarters in Washington.”

“The CIA’s headquarters are in Langley, Virginia.”

“Whatever.”

“And I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear you because, as a MAB agent, I’d have to arrest you for advocating a metahuman attack on the government.”

“I didn’t say attack. It’d be more like a sit-in. We’ll go there and not leave until they give us information.”

“There’s no way we can go there with superpowers and weapons and not be threatening. They’d be justified in calling in the military, which would turn your bad idea into a god-awful one.”

“Fine. Stay here and babysit your kids. The other New York Guardians will get behind me.”

“I think it’s a bad idea too,” said Gale Force. “We don’t know how involved they are, and we don’t need to make any more enemies.”

“Well, of course you would agree with Alex. He’s the only one who thinks you belong on the team. I’ll talk it over with Harry. He’ll get Magna on my side.”

“The CIA isn’t behind this,” said Trista. “I read Vijay’s mind while he hacked. Their computers are also infected with spyware. The data trail led outside of their headquarters.”

“To where?” asked Alex.

“He almost found out.”

“Great,” said Arbalest. “I’m not sure if you checked the news, but a few other superhackers got bushwacked this morning. The rest are hiding, so no one will help us pick up that trail. And y’all want to sit on your thumbs until the spooks come after us again when we could be going after them.”

The PA system made Stormhead’s Norwegian accent sound mechanical. “New York Guardians, assemble in the conference room. The CIA is here with another survivor from Noah’s farm.”

Arbalest said, “I guess they came to us first.”

Alex grabbed his jacket and tie. “Knockout Rose and Pinwheel, keep an eye on the ninja prisoner. Emily, take Calvin downstairs. Deon, Trista, stick around.”

Stormhead, Professor Photon, and Magna were already seated when Alex, Gale Force, and Arbalest arrived in the conference room. At the head of the table was a man in a black suit. Behind him was a lean man with a hound’s muzzle, floppy ears, and a sparse coat of gray fur.

“I am deputy director Howard Knapp of the Central Intelligence Agency,” said the man in black. “The gentleman behind me says his name is Lou. The New Jersey state police found him and didn’t know what to do. We heard you have a few of his friends here.”

“Noah isn’t in our custody anymore,” said Alex. “He tried to escape by taking my family hostage and took a bullet to the stomach. The MAB is watching him and Ruby at the hospital.”

“I didn’t know about this,” said Stormhead. “What happened?”

“I’ll tell you later,” said Alex. “Mister Knapp, is Lou a, what you call, live one?”

“I am.” Lou lifted his shirt and revealed a birthmark similar to Alerion Incorporated’s stylized bird logo under his right armpit.

“We can make room for him.” Alex pulled out his cellphone. “Knockout Rose, come to the conference room. I need you to escort a farm survivor to the medical ward … Good idea, bring Gary.”

Lou’s ears perked up. “Gary’s here?”

“He and Joey. We don’t know what’s going on, but we will protect you.”

They sat in silence until after Knockout Rose and Gary arrived and led Lou away.

Knapp said, “This all started back in World War Two. Since Sergeant Hammer was a founding member of this team, I assume you are familiar with the super-soldier program that created him.”

“We read the comics,” said Alex, “but everything in them is a lie.”

“What you may not know is we weren’t only working on soldiers. We also developed super-pilots, super-propagandists, and super-spies.”

“Super-spies?” said Arbalest. “You mean like James Bond?”

“No, nothing like that. Real spies don’t wear tuxedos and drive fancy cars. They hide in plain sight and gather information that seems inconsequential in its various pieces and assemble it into a useful plan of action. One of our other successes was someone intelligent enough to develop long-term plans, ambitious enough to try huge schemes, yet patriotic enough to do it for the nation instead of personal gain. We called him the Handler. Like Sergeant Hammer, he has barely aged a year since the end of World War Two.”

Stormhead said, “And he works for you?

“He did, but we recently determined he went rogue.”

Alex said, “You recently determined this?”

“Spy handlers have a lot of autonomy. Due to the sensitive nature of our work, we give our operative the freedom to achieve their objectives by any means they see as necessary. They often don’t let us in administration know what they’re doing. That's mostly for our protection, because if they fail we can honestly say we know nothing about it.”

Professor Photon said, “I believe you call that ‘plausible deniability.’”

“Exactly. The Handler started as the mastermind who helped us recruit many genetic scientists from enemy forces during World War Two under Operation Paperclip. Later, during the Cold War, he organized a spy network to keep track of how Communist forces used metahumans. He learned they built an army of cloned mutants, so he initiated something called …”

Stormhead interrupted. “Project Cold Warrior. You customized monsters. We know about this.”

“The operation was the Handler’s baby. He concealed the scope of the program by using several companies, such as Griffin Industries, to develop different components of the army, from DNA to clone body to weapons, and then bring everything together in a hidden military base. As I said, all separate small parts of data that wouldn't make any sense unless you saw the big picture.”

“But this was discontinued in the seventies, yes?” said Stormhead.

Knapp inhaled sharply. “We restarted it six years ago.”

The New York Guardians were too shocked to say anything for a moment.

Knapp continued. “We updated the cloning equipment from the seventies, but we reused the old genetic formulas. That’s why some have the Griffin Industries birthmark and others have one for Alerion Incorporated.”

“Wait,” said Jenny. “Joey looks like he’s about ten, and Lou is fully grown. How can they be under six years old?”

“We learned from the Russians’ mistakes. Our clones age at an exponentially accelerated rate to make them usable faster. After two years they look ten, and at three they are fully grown, complete with normal cognitive capabilities and an immune system strong enough to endure common viruses. At five they begin to fall apart. Their language development abilities also develop quickly so they can communicate well, but if you try to have a conversation with one you’ll see they barely know anything.”

Professor Photon asked, “You created an army of hideous living things with sentience but unnaturally short lives. Why?”

Knapp said, “We knew superhero teams like yours publicly supported the measure while privately building bunkers and stockpiling weapons. Your team, in particular, has quite a few hidden caches and rooms throughout the city.”

“Now how did you find out about that?” asked Arbalest. “We kept everything super-secret.”

“The only ones who knew were the New York Guardians,” said Stormhead. “The construction was done by Professor Photon's Micro-Sapiens before they turned on us.”

Stormhead and Arbalest looked at Professor Photon.

“Don't be ridiculous,” said Professor Photon. “I don't trust the military-industrial complex. I would never share anything with the government.”

“Well, everything was built under the old Arbalest, so don't blame me,” said Arbalest.

“And you know I am against government intervention in our affairs,” said Stormhead. “I don't want this nation to become as restrictive to mutants as the European countries are. So it must have been James Griffin, Sergeant Hammer, the former Arbalest, or …”

“That's not important right now,” said Knapp. “Even if you figured it out, I wouldn't be able to confirm it. Besides, we both know you weren’t the only team preparing to revolt.”