Gods of Manhattan (23 page)

Wasn't he America's Greatest Hero? Hadn't he killed a giant roc, escaped a maze of death, fought leopard men and made love to her on a heathen altar in the light of two setting suns?

How could it all come to nothing after that?

As dawn had broken over the city, Marcel had entered, bringing coffee, the morning paper and a bacon sandwich. Doc had smiled, made some strained, fractious joke about the devil that he instantly regretted. Marcel had only half-smiled, sadly, and placed a hand on his great, slumped shoulder.

"Sometimes it is only us, monsieur. Sometimes it is only us."

He ate the sandwich in silence, and didn't taste it. The coffee went untouched after a few sips. He didn't open the paper.

Eventually, he'd heard Maya rising, early, bustling around the bedroom, then walking down the stairs, past the empty gym. He heard her saying a brief hello to Marcel. Then she'd walked into the lab, wearing the long white ceremonial robe she'd worn when he first laid eyes on her, and told him that he'd lied to her.

"You lied to me." She said it once again, shaking her head, not looking at him. "I asked you for your true name and you gave me an alias. A pretend name. Your parents weren't Mr and Mrs Thunder. They didn't name you 'Doc'."

Doc sighed, shaking his head, feeling the length and depth of the chasm that had opened up so suddenly between them.

He loved her. He loved her for her wit, for her beauty, for the way her eyes changed colour in the sunlight from hard emerald to ocean water, for the things she said in restaurants, for the way she looked when she was asleep, for the way she walked through the city like a cat and was not touched by it, for a thousand thousand reasons and more every day.

He loved her, and the thought of her leaving him hurt. If he'd been given the choice, he'd have taken the lightning again. He'd have reached out and grabbed that conductor and held it like a long-lost friend, if it meant avoiding this for one more day.

He tried to think of something to say that would make her change her mind, and he couldn't think of anything. Finally, he spoke. "We don't always get our true names from our parents..." It sounded hollow. He let the words trail off and stared at the coffee going cold on the worktop.

Maya shrugged. She didn't consider that much of an explanation.

Nobody said anything for a long time after that. Idly, Doc played with a steel spanner, bending it this way and that with his fingers. He couldn't bring himself to look at her.

Eventually, Maya spoke. "I don't love you."

Doc nodded.

Maya sighed, sitting down on a stool next to a workbench piled high with hydraulics and copper tubes, spare parts from something long forgotten. "Maybe I don't love. I never did before I came here. It wasn't something I was ever asked to do." She shrugged. "Why should it be? Love is a relatively modern invention even in your world of a single sun. In Zor-Ek-Narr, we had other things to occupy our time."

Doc swallowed, shaking his head, feeling stung deep inside. "But you felt something for me."

Maya shook her head. "I felt something for Doc Thunder - something like what I assumed love must be. But it was easy to love Doc Thunder. It was like loving a picture of a man. A perfect fiction. And Doc Thunder was a wonderfully perfect fiction, because he never made any mistakes. That was the point of him." She sighed, tracing her finger through the dust on the bench. "And that's not you anymore, is it? The moment you heard Donner's name, you made error after error. And now it turns out you've been making terrible mistakes for as long as I've known you." She looked over her shoulder at him, and her voice was bitter. "How does it go? Your job is to be the example for the little guy? If one man looks at you and thinks he can try just a little bit harder, blah blah, and so on? And there you are, letting all your friends die and letting monsters take their place while you walk away."

She grimaced, not even wanting to look at him. "I don't know if I can trust you anymore, Stranger. How can I love you? You'll only break my heart."

Doc reached for his coffee. "What about Monk? Do you care about him, or have you changed your mind about that as well?" He could hear the bitterness in his own words.

Maya paused. "He made my heart laugh."

"Me too." He sighed, then scowled. "
Makes.
Damn it, he's not
gone,
Maya. He's stable, he's out of danger and the second he can be moved, I'm bringing him back to the brownstone. And then I'm going to give him a direct transfusion - supervise it myself. He'll be better than new."

Maya frowned, suddenly deep in thought. "Your blood. You think Venger managed to spirit it away before he died? You think he's responsible for what happened to Monk?"

Doc rubbed his temples. He didn't want to think about this now. "No. He was waiting for his chance. He's seen me give transfusions in the past to get people off the critical list, people with my blood type. He knew Monk and I were a match. It was a matter of time." He frowned. Something Venger had said - and something he'd remembered in the Omega Machine. He was having trouble putting the pieces together.

"Why would he want it?" Maya was looking at him, curiously, as if seeing him for the first time.

"The same reason Donner did." He shook his head, rubbing his eyes with a finger and thumb. He'd never felt quite so defeated.

"And why did Donner want it?" Maya turned, looking him straight in the eye. "Tell me, Stranger." She said it mockingly, her eyes looking deep into his. "If you can. Tell me your true name."

Doc looked at her for a long moment.

"My name is Donner. Hugo Donner. Heinrich Donner was my father."

Maya blinked. "But..."

"You need to hear it all. Everything I've been hiding my whole life. Then..." He stood up, looking down at her. "Then I'll help you pack your bags."

My story begins in 1935. Hitler had been Chancellor of Germany for two years. He was chafing against the restrictions placed on him by Victoria, as he has been ever since. At the time, he was already planning an expansion to the east - his doomed attempt to conquer Russia - but the plan was always to move on to America. They were the enemy. Karl Marx had fled to America to escape the dark arts of the Tsars, the trade deal with Japan was making New York one of the most multicultural cities in the world, and President Grimm was speaking out against Hitler as early as 1931. Hitler needed Russia, he was willing to deal with China while it suited him, but he wanted us.

Of course, it didn't take a strategist like Rommel to figure out that as soon as he'd done the hard work of taking Russia, Victoria would swoop in from the west and hammer him while he was weakest. Then she'd get everything, and deal with a diplomatic thorn in her side into the bargain. He needed a strong military - much stronger than anything he had - so he could take Russia, hold it, and still be strong enough to stay on the bargaining table against the Empire.

He needed soldiers who wouldn't tire, who could see for miles, who could hear a pin drop fifty feet away. He needed soldiers immune to bullets and shells. Soldiers who could kill with their bare hands, travel in leaps of a quarter of a mile or more, punch out a traction engine.

Sound familiar?

That was Project Gladiator. The transformation of ordinary German soldiers into supermen capable of winning wars on as many fronts as he needed. He'd had people working on this since before he was elected, and by 1935 he finally had a serum - albeit one that had to be injected
in utero,
into the amniotic fluid, while the foetus was growing. It was the only way Professor Strucker could get it to work on the rats, and they weren't about to start injecting that stuff into prisoners. They needed a human test subject, and one loyal to the Fuhrer.

Which was where Heinrich Donner came in.

My mother's name was Anna, and she was two months pregnant with me when Donner decided that giving his unborn child up for medical experimentation was a good way to rise in the party machine. Anna didn't agree; not until he made it clear that if she went through with the birth without getting the injection, he'd strangle me in my swaddling clothes, cook me and make her eat me.

Yes, really.

She went through with it.

Things didn't work out too well. Strucker had a massive heart attack right after injecting my mother. It turns out the only copy of the formula was in his head, because, like most people in the Reich, he was worried that if he stopped being useful for ten seconds, they'd kill him. Still, no problem. They could reverse-engineer the serum from my blood as soon as I was born, maybe even make a version that worked on adults. It would have bonded to my bloodstream. I was just the test animal they were looking for.

Heinrich Donner volunteered to slit my throat himself.

That was enough for Mother.

Don't ask me how she managed to get away from him - she never did tell me the details - but she was in the Netherlands before the week was out. Four months later, she was coming into New York city on a fishing trawler and she thought she was finally safe. She never did contact the authorities, she just disappeared into a tenement on the lower East Side.

That's where I was born.

I wasn't the only kid on my street with a German name, but my build marked me out early. I grew like a weed and tore through books like a woodworm. By the time I was ten, I was as tall as a boy of fifteen and twice as broad, and I could pass tests college kids failed. Eventually, mother had to tell me why I was so different. That's how I first learned about Donner, my father. What he did. I asked her why she didn't change our name when she got here. She said it was because she hoped he might still come around. She was willing to forgive him, even after everything he'd done and threatened.

"He was a good man, before the Reich. A good man." she used to say that with a little wistful smile on her face. I never did understand it.

Especially not once he found her.

While I was growing up, Hitler was trying to take Russia, and we all know how that turned out. When he finally threw in the towel in 1945, after a year of bloody stalemate just trying to keep his own borders from being overrun by every horror you couldn't imagine - and I've fought a few things from that region, I know what he was up against - the whole idea of taking on Victoria at her own game via conventional means was over.

It was Donner who suggested the unconventional.

Untergang. A criminal organisation with total deniability, sponsored under the table by Germany via black budget, but in such a way nobody could ever possibly prove it. A destabilisation tactic. A way to harry local law enforcement, strike out against the government, disseminate propaganda and perform covert assassinations and sabotage, while Uncle Adolf tut-tutted at the preponderance of crime in America and held up his clean, clean hands. Asymmetrical warfare. Terrorism on a massive scale.

Since it was Heinrich Donner's idea, he was sent over as the organisation's leader. Oh, he had a cover in place, and a decoy to take the blame for him, but it was him behind everything.

And he hadn't forgotten the promise he'd made to the Führer.

On my eleventh birthday, I came back from school to find my mother had been murdered by a group of four Untergang black-ops specialists. They'd dragged her to the bed and suffocated her with a pillow, before rigging the apartment with incendiary explosives to cover their tracks. Then they'd waited for me to return. Their plan was to stage an armed ambush and take me down as quickly as possible. They had intelligence reports about how strong and quick I was - the same ones that had verified my mother's identity - and they were confident that, between the four of them, they could incapacitate me without difficulty. If it became necessary, they would simply kill me as they had my mother.

Following which, they would steal the blood either from my unconscious body or my corpse.

They thought they could surprise me, but they'd forgotten my hearing. I could hear them moving around, I knew something was wrong, and... well, I came through the wall. Just crashed right through it. That's how I got the first one; he was leaning against it. The others didn't last much longer.

The apartment - my home for the first eleven years of my life - didn't survive the battle. My mother's body went up in the flames, along with every remnant of my life up until that point. I lived on the streets for a year, dodging attacks from Untergang agents who literally wanted my blood.

Eventually, I fell in with the police - Commissioner Coltrane was in charge back then. Danny's grandfather. I wish I'd thought to lie about my age, but we managed to work something out anyway.

That was the last time anybody called me Hugo Donner. I wanted nothing to do with that name. I remember the desk sergeant - a guy called Bud O'Malley - asking me what my name was, and one word boiling up in my head...

"Thunder," I told him.

"Kid Thunder."

Maya blinked. "
Kid
Thunder?"

Doc shrugged, embarrassed. "Well, I didn't get my first doctorate until I was sixteen. Anyway, that's the story. Even after my skin got as tough as it is now, Donner still wanted my blood, and he was still willing to do anything he could to to get hold of it. And now... well, he's got it. After all these years. Much good may it do him."