The Twisted Future (Teen Superheroes Book 4) (4 page)

Chapter Eight

I threw up a barrier and the building slammed into it, burying us under tons of brick, glass and timber. One more second and we would have been dead. I focused hard, expanded the shield and pushed the debris away. Sky appeared and we scrambled free. Chad still had Brodie, unconscious, in his arms.

‘Get her out of here!’ I yelled.

Ebony shoved me aside and I swung around to see the red man draw back his fist. He fired it at me, but Ebony had already constructed a metal shield. His fist slammed into it and I heard a resounding cry.

Good
, I thought.
I hope that hurt.

I pushed Ebony’s shield forward and used it like a battering ram, slamming it into the red man. He flew backwards into a building. I shot Ebony a smile.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I need all the help I can get.’

The red man scrambled from the front window of the building. ‘
Unauthorized mods are punishable by death!’ he said.

‘And I
thought we were in real trouble!’

I fired a series of air balls at him, and he buckled under the attack. At the same time, Ebony touched the ground and turned the road under him into air. He fell twenty feet to the bottom. I peered back to check on Chad and Brodie, but they were gone. The only person visible was Old Axel.

‘Come on!’ he yelled.

I’d forgotten all about him in the chaos. Ebony cried out and I turned to see the red man leap straight from the hole into the sky. We stumbled over debris to an alley on the opposite side of the street. Looking back, I looked for Chad and Brodie, but still couldn’t see them. 

‘They went the other way,’ Old Axel said. ‘They’re safe.’

I wasn’t sure I agreed with his definition of safe, but this was no time to debate it. The red man would be back in seconds. I glanced up. He was spinning back towards Earth—straight towards us. The fastest way out of here was flying, but taking to the skies was asking for trouble, so I fired another series of air cannonballs at him.

They hit, driving him sideways into a building, but he bounced straight out again, landing in front of me. He punched me in the stomach. The blow would have killed anyone else, but at the last moment I erected a shield around my body. Still, the impact threw me to the ground.

Ebony pointed at the air above the red man. A huge metal ball appeared. He had just enough time to see it before gravity took over. The ball slammed into him, pushing him into the ground. He disappeared from sight.

‘Did I kill him?’ Ebony asked.

‘I’m not sure.’ If he wasn’t dead, then he was
probably badly injured. I hated the idea of hurting anyone, but I didn’t have a choice.

Old Axel grabbed my arm. ‘Follow me.’

He dragged us towards an old department store. The front was boarded up, but he eased open a paling and pushed us through. I peered into the gloom and saw dusty shop fittings and mannequins. Then one of the mannequins moved.

‘You can’t come in here.’ It was an old man, unshaven and rough looking. ‘You can’t come in—’

‘Shut up,’ Old Axel snapped. ‘Is there another way out?’

‘A way out?’ His eyes darted about in confusion. ‘Have you seen my wife? She
left to buy flowers.’

He continued to rave uncontrollably. I felt sorry for him. He had obviously been driven mad.

‘We’re friends,’ Ebony said gently. ‘Is there a back exit?’

‘Quiet!’ Old Axel hissed. ‘They’re here.’

Ebony and I hurried to the front. Peering through a gap in the palings, we saw half-a-dozen armed men charging down the street with guns raised. I heard the old man behind us start to speak. Old Axel cut him off. The armed guards wore uniforms that were oddly familiar, similar to those worn by security guards at the Agency, but more militarized with epaulets and insignia. 

They grouped around the hole in the street. Something moved near their feet. Something red.

The hand of the red man. He struggled onto the footpath. Obviously he was in no state to pursue us. The guards spoke to him for a moment before he nodded, gathered himself up and leapt into the sky.

The guards
turned away; they were giving up. We breathed a sigh of relief as they disappeared.

‘They’re gone,’ I said quietly. ‘We should see if—’

Ebony’s turned and her face fell in horror. ‘No!’ she cried. ‘What have you done?’

Old Axel stood over the body of the old man. The stranger lay on the ground, his eyes open and staring. His neck had been broken.

Chapter Nine

‘I did what I had to do,’ Old Axel said. ‘He was trying to speak—’

Then I had my hands at his throat. ‘You maniac!’ I snarled. ‘You killed him!’

‘He was going to cry out! I had to stop him!’

‘You can’t just kill—’

‘Wake up!’ Old Axel struggled free. ‘This is not the world you used to know! This is the end times! Can you understand that?’

I fell back weakly. ‘He didn’t deserve that,’ I said. ‘He was just an old man.’

‘And now he’s a dead old man,’ Old Axel said. ‘But if you go back and change history then none of this will happen.’ He pointed at the body. ‘He’ll lead a completely different life, free of the horror caused by James Price.’

The old man was so still. I stared down at his body.
Have you seen my wife? She left to buy flowers.
Now he was dead and we didn’t even know his name.

‘There will be no more killing,’ I said. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. ‘You won’t kill anyone else.’

‘Change history and he won’t die,’ Old Axel said.

‘You don’t know that,’ Ebony said. ‘You don’t know what an alternative future will hold.’

‘It’ll be better than this.’

He told us we needed to keep moving; a resistance cell nearby would help us.

‘What about Chad and Brodie?’ I asked.

‘They’re resourceful. We’ll catch up with them later.’

What sort of answer is that?
I wanted to punch him in the face, which was pretty funny, really, because it meant I wanted to punch myself.
What is his problem?
He made it sound like they were lost at Disneyland, not forty years in the future.

But he was right. Chad and Brodie
were
resourceful. They could survive just about anything.

Old Axel went to the back of the store. Pushing aside some shelving, he revealed a door. ‘Looks like there’s an exit through here.’

I couldn’t believe we were leaving the old man here.
Does nobody get buried anymore?
My eyes scanned the counter. On it sat a dusty vase filled with plastic flowers. I placed them gently on the old man’s chest.

‘That’s very touching,’ Old Axel called out, ‘but we—’

‘Shut up!’ I snapped. ‘You may have lost your humanity, but I haven’t.’

We followed Old Axel
through the exit into an alley lined with rubbish. A year’s worth of trash was here.

‘This is disgusting,’ Ebony said, screwing up her nose. ‘Is the whole city like this?’

‘Some of it’s worse. At least we’re in a livable section.’

‘This is
livable?’

‘Walls enclose the habitable sections.
Most of the planet’s drowning in toxic gas.’

‘So what went wrong?’ I asked. ‘How did we end up here?’

‘The Agency had a lot of teething problems with the development of the time machine. We’re lucky we ended up here and not at the battle of Waterloo.’

Old Axel told us more about the badlands. Most of the major cities were protected by huge walls; outside them lay areas where the gas would kill you within hours. The mid-west was one huge storm, an out of control hurricane that had been active for over a decade. It even had a name. The Eye.

‘What caused the gas?’ I asked.

‘Another one of Price’s experiments,’ Old Axel snorted. ‘He had some insane idea about terraforming the planet into a new garden of Eden.’

Whatever James Price had done had messed up the world. Reaching the end of the alley, we hurried across an abandoned street. Before reaching the other side, I looked up and saw a poster of a man, fifty feet high, on the side of a building. The words below were old and rotting, but still readable:

The Agency is your friend

‘Is that—’ I started.

‘James Price,’ Old Axel confirmed. ‘The years—and plastic surgery—have been kind. He doesn’t look much different to that in your time.’

We started down another alley.

‘How did all this happen?’ Ebony asked. ‘How did one man take
over the Agency? And the world?’

‘I can’t say much for fear of contaminating the time line,’ Old Axel said, ‘but you should know that James Price is a genius. In terms of intellect, he’s a Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein. Unfortunately, unlike them, he is completely without morals. After joining
the Agency, he became obsessed with controlling it, then the United States and finally the planet.’

We walked in silence. While I didn’t agree with his murder of the old man, I was starting to understand my older self. His life had been unbearably hard. Our lives
were difficult, but he had lived through the fall of civilization, the end of the world.

We descended
to a disused subway, climbed over rusting gates and continued down another flight of stairs. The gloom grew worse by the minute; I wished we had torches. I was just about to suggest this when Old Axel stopped at an empty vending machine. He eased a corner of it aside and I heard him exchange a few words with someone.

‘Come on,’ he said, turning to us. ‘We’re here.’

He pushed the vending machine aside and a faint glow sprang from a hole behind. We passed the gatekeeper, a dirty looking woman with matted hair and one arm, and continued along an old section of subway. A string of faint LED lights hung from the walls. On both sides of the long defunct rail line, people sat, engaged in different sorts of work: repairing clothing, cleaning guns, cooking foods on oil burners.

Ebony shot a horrified look at me. Was this how people lived? In the darkness? With little hope of survival? 

‘For most people it’s worse,’ Old Axel said. ‘Things would be better, but there’s not much collaboration between the different branches of the rebellion.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘There are traitors everywhere. Information dissemination is at a minimum. The less you know, the better, in case you’re captured and tortured.’ He grimaced. ‘Mind you, it’s different for Agency employees. They live in palatial accommodation in the city’s red zones.’

‘Red zones?’

‘Closed compounds guarded by Agency security.’

Old Axel led us into the basement of a building. The only light was through a tiny window high on the wall, but I still felt relieved. Feeble daylight was better than none at all.

An old black man with gray hair, and a long scar down one side of his face, sat at a table. He had been studying a set of schematics, but now he turned, his mouth falling open in astonishment.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘It’s not possible.’

I stared at him blankly.
Who was he?

‘Mr. Brown!’ Ebony cried, embracing him.

Mr. Brown.
The man who had first trained me at the Agency. A man who was as much a friend as he was a mentor. Open mouthed, I shook his hand and then went in for the full hug. He glared at Old Axel.

‘You weren’t supposed to bring them back,’ he said. ‘Why’d you do that?’

‘They were harder to convince than I expected.’ He explained what had happened. ‘So we’ve lost the time ship as well as the temporal resonators.’

‘Chad and Brodie will probably get picked up by the resistance,’ Mr. Brown said, thoughtfully. ‘The real problem is getting you all back.’

‘Back?’ I said.

‘To your own time. We’ve almost completed another time machine, but the big problem is the temporal resonator.’ I must have looked astonished because he smiled slightly. ‘
The time machine is a complicated device, but is based on a perpetual energy device Price developed years ago. We’ve had access to those plans for years. The difficult part is the resonator. It contains a rare element called Francium.’

‘You have contacts within the Agency?’ I asked.

‘Not everyone in the Agency is on board with their program. They leak information to us all the time.’

‘So how do we get a temporal resonator?’

Mr. Brown smiled. ‘Feel like a little excitement?’

Chapter Ten

‘Whatever made us do this?’ Brodie groaned. ‘We had a nice tropical island to explore. Days of lying in the sun. We could’ve eaten coconuts till we puked.’

‘The perfect life,’ Chad agreed.

She and Chad were in the hallway of a derelict building where
he had carried her after the red man had collapsed the building. By the time she had regained consciousness, the fight was over and armed security forces were roaming the streets.

Now we’re lost forty years in the future
, she thought.
And everyone wants to kill us.

‘I tried my
wrist communicator,’ Chad said. ‘It’s not working.’

‘I’m not surprised. The Agency probably uses a dampening field to kill communications.’ The city was a disaster zone. It seemed Old Axel had been telling the truth about the future. ‘I wonder how we’ll find the others.’

‘There must be some sort of resistance movement. We need to make contact.’ Chad thought for a moment. ‘Maybe we can put an ad on Craigslist.’

‘I don’t think—’

‘Joking.’

‘Okay.’

‘I’m a funny guy, but what else would you expect from The Chad?’ He stared at her. ‘What?’

‘There you go again. Spoiling everything.’

‘How do you mean?’

She
gently tapped his head. ‘There might be a nice guy trapped under that inflated ego. You should let him out some time.’

Chad shrugged. ‘We’re superheroes. That makes us better than the average person.’

‘I’m sure Hitler thought the same thing.’

‘He didn’t have super powers.’

‘No-one’s superior to anyone else,’ Brodie said, patiently. ‘Everyone deserves respect as long as they act decently.’ She peered down the hallway. ‘Let’s get moving.’

They left through the rear of the building and
maneuvered down a thin alley choked with mounds of garbage. There was not a person to be seen, but Brodie had the feeling they were being watched.

I wouldn’t come out either
, she thought. 

A flying ship
, resembling a helicopter, but with the rotors removed, passed overhead and disappeared behind a building.  

‘There’s still plenty of technology around,’ Chad said.

‘All owned by the Agency, I guess. Let’s see where that ship went.’

They navigated an abandoned street clogged with a decades old traffic jam and continued up another alley. Reaching the end, they gazed out at a familiar landmark. 

‘Is this Times Square?’ Chad asked.

‘It
was
Times Square. Now it’s just a mess.’

The once iconic area now lay in ruin. Some of the buildings had collapsed. The myriad of distinctive billboards were either broken or missing. A mammoth hole was at the corner of Broadway and West Forty-Seventh Street. The famous Toshiba billboard was long defunct. A huge canvas sign with an image of a smiling face hung over it. The wording beneath read:

Terrorists Will Be Shot

‘I wonder if that’s James Price,’ Chad said.

‘I bet it is,’ Brodie said. ‘What’s going on with that ship?’ 

The rotor vessel hovered over the middle of the square where a pile of rubble lay. Both sides of the aircraft opened and military personnel spilled out on ropes and abseiled down. Finally a man with a hood over his head, and cuffed hands, was lowered to the ground. Two of the guards picked him up and attached him to a large stake in the center of the rubble. 

‘I don’t like the look of this,’ Chad muttered. ‘It looks like they’re going to execute that guy.’

One of the guards whipped the hood off
the prisoner’s head and the man stood blinking in the hot sun. He wore a thick collar around his neck, some sort of electronic device. His eyes settled on the nearest guard and he said something. The guard responded by punching him in the stomach. The man doubled over.

A guard pulled a device from his pocket and pressed a button. A chime rang out
from the roofs of the shattered buildings. 

‘Samuel Taffe,’ the guard said, his voice reverberating around the quiet streets. ‘You have been found guilty of crimes against the Agency. These crimes include terrorism, theft of Agency property and the murder of Agency personnel.’

Incredibly, Samuel Taffe laughed in response and another of the guards stepped forward and backhanded him across the face.

‘This is terrible,’ Brodie said. ‘They’re going to kill him.’

‘We can’t do anything,’ Chad said. ‘We’ve got to look after ourselves.’

‘At the cost of someone else’s life?’ Brodie spun on him. ‘And you wonder why people don’t respect you?’

‘That’s not fair,’ Chad said, turning red. ‘We’re out of our depths.’

Brodie turned away from him and Chad fumed in silence.

Why does she have to be so pig-headed?
They were outnumbered and outgunned. And neither of them was invincible. No-one with brains would take on these guys.

Except...

Except Axel. But then he was the big Kahuna of the group. Axel would come flying in like a superhero and save that guy.

But this isn’t about Axel
, Chad thought.
It’s about me.
Do I have what it takes?

Do I?

The men stepped back from the makeshift stake, formed a line and raised their weapons.

Taking them on would be insane
, Chad thought.
Completely insane.

Chad stepped into the street.

Call me insane.