Superhero (21 page)

“Forgive my intrusion,” he said, his helmet blinking red.

He began scanning the space. Veronica looked over to make sure Jerald was all right and saw his back as he sprinted through the emergency exit and into the parking lot.

The giant walked in, flipping over a table though the man that had hit on Veronica was still using it, and came directly to her.

He moved the chairs and sat down. Even sitting, he was taller than she was.

“Ms. Gables. I have come to offer you a proposal.”

She couldn’t talk. Her heart was beating so fast she thought she would have a heart attack. All she managed to do was swallow.

“No need to answer me now,” he said. “I have patience in abundance.”

She swallowed again. “What kind of proposal?” she managed to stammer.

“I need a chronicler. I have followed your work with some interest. Especially this news about a Dragon. Very fascinating indeed. I would like all the information you have about him, of course. But more than that, I would like you to call your camera crew and follow me. I assure you it is a rare privilege. But I am a man of the world and understand incentives. You, and the crew you choose, will have a major incentive to do what I say.”

“What?”

“You will be allowed to live while everyone around you dies.”

She didn’t respond. His eyes were large and penetrating, a pure white she had never seen before, only a dim outline of pupils in the center. They stared into her and she had to look away.

The giant stood up again. He flicked aside her table like it was an ant and held out his massive hand. “I assure you, this is the best thing for you.”

Trembling, she took his hand, and stood. As she followed him outside, he threw a mass of cash onto the floor. “For the damage,” he said.

They walked out of the coffee shop, and she was placed inside a van with several men. The giant leaned in close.

“If anything should happen to her, or she is harmed in any way, you will all regret it. Am I clear?”

The men nodded as the van turned on, and the door slid closed.

CHAPTER 47

Jack awoke after a long sleep and saw that another tray of paste and crackers sat before him. He ate everything on his plate and gulped down the cup of water. Habib was there, reading, and didn’t say anything as Jack rose and tested the bars of the cage.

“Reinforced steel,” Habib said, not looking up from his book. “With an electric charge. Were you to bend the steel, we would both be electrocuted to death. Quite inescapable.”

“Has anyone tried?”

“Everyone has tried.”

Jack shook his head. “We’re entitled to a trial, due process…”

Habib, for the first time, laughed. “You are dealing with national security. Anything labeled a national security issue is taken out from the system. There is no due process, no lawyers. They may do with us what they wish. Fear is a government’s greatest weapon. With it, they can convince a people that they need to abandon their freedom. In exchange, they get safety. Of course, you just trade one monster for another, but by the time the people realize this, it is too late.”

“You sound like you’ve had experience.”

“I am from Afghanistan. I have seen tyrants come and go and they always come under the pretense that they offer safety. But safety is the last thing people receive from them.”

Jack heard a metal door slide open and the gruff voice of a guard.

“You have two minutes.”

“Okay,” a soft, female voice said. It was Heidi.

Jack saw her turn a corner and come toward him. She was in a lab coat with a dress on underneath. She removed her glasses and tucked them into her breast pocket.

“I’m so sorry, Jack,” she whispered.

“How did you—”

“They offered me a choice: work for them or share a cell down here.”

“I’m not a threat to them.”

“I know that, and you know that. But we’ll never convince them. They’re frightened, Jack. They don’t know why you and Agamemnon survived the treatments and everyone else died or,” she glanced to Habib, “had issues.”

“You said I was the second one. There are hundreds of others.”

“No, what I said was that you were the second one to survive, which is true.” She leaned in close. “I just came to tell you, they’re going after Agamemnon.”

“When?”

“Today, right now. They know about the weapon. Jack, he’s going to use it on the city. He wants to destroy the city. You have to get out of here. This place can’t hold you. You’re a leap in evolution.”

“If I break out of here we’ll be electrocuted.”

“Do you really think any amount voltage will kill you?”

Jack looked back to Habib. “What about him?”

“You don’t have a choice. You have to do it.”

The guard shouted. “Time’s up.”

“You have to do it, Jack,” Heidi said, walking away. “You have to do it for the greater good.”

Jack watched as she left and then turned back to Habib. He was still reading, seemingly oblivious to the fact that someone had just asked Jack to murder him.

CHAPTER 48

Veronica sat sandwiched between two men with shoulder length dreadlocks. They stunk of pot and sweat but she didn’t dare move. Two of the men in front of her held assault rifles between their legs and a third behind her had a large bowie knife that he kept dropping to the floor of the van, attempting to get it to stick straight up.

“Where are we going?” she asked. The men didn’t respond.

The van sped on the freeway to the point that it was rattling and she thought that the tires might just pop off and go rolling down the asphalt. She tried to reach behind the man next to her and pull out her seat belt but one of the men in front of her brought his hand down to the trigger guard of the rifle. She pulled out her hand, and placed it on her lap.

Coming off the freeway near Santa Monica, they pulled to a stop in front of a ramshackle apartment building that was well past its prime. In the courtyard, she could see her cameraman walking in front of two men, both of them with thick, greasy dreadlocks. One of the men next to her slid open the van door and her cameraman was pushed inside and shoved to the back of the van. Neither of them spoke to each other as the van pulled away again.

After another half hour on the freeway, they came to a one-story house in West Hollywood. Another two men pushed her soundman toward the van, carrying armloads of equipment. The soundman tried to say something to her as the door slid open and one of the men behind him slapped him on the back of the head.

“Ow,” he said, turning to him, “that hurt.”

The equipment was placed in the back of the van before the soundman sat in the back with the cameraman.

No one spoke. She couldn’t be sure how long they drove as she didn’t dare check her phone for fear of them taking it from her. Instead, she tried to see the clocks on banks and car washes. She guessed they drove almost three hours non-stop, straight into the Mojave.

After multiple dirt roads that seemed to go nowhere and a pit stop at a gas station, they reached what appeared to be an abandoned farmhouse. Several men were already there along with a large crane and tractor that were being used to pull up massive quantities of dirt in the middle of what looked like a horse stable.

The driver and passenger hopped out, as did the men seated next to Veronica. One man at the back of the van shoved her and her crew out and then threw them their gear, slamming the sliding door shut.

“Follow me,” one of the men said.

Walking through the hot dirt, Veronica was suddenly aware of how impractical heels really were and wished she’d worn her Toms.

They came to the main house and stepped inside. Her cameraman, Dillon, came up from behind her and whispered, “What the hell is going on?”

“I have no idea.”

The man with the dreadlocks leading them inside the house said sternly, “No talking.”

Following him inside, Veronica glanced back and saw the other men leaned against the van, staring at her. She hoped that they had taken the giant’s warnings seriously.

Shutting the door behind them, the man took them to the living room and had them sit down on the floor. All the furniture had been cleared out and in its place were monitors and hard drives and cables with fans set up to keep everything cooled off.

The giant was in front of one of the monitors. He looked back to them and said, “Thank you, Reese. That will be all for now.”

Reese hesitated a moment, and then stepped into the other room.

“Do you know why you are here?” the giant said. “You are here to witness history. Generations will be discussing and dissecting everything we do over the next forty-eight hours. We must not disappoint.”

Veronica waited to see if either of her crew was going to say anything. They didn’t.

“What are you trying to do?” Veronica asked nervously.

The giant turned toward her. “Set history on a different course. One separate from its never-ending cycle of founding, rise, decay, and destruction. That is the course for every nation and faith. We must not allow it to happen any longer. We can take that power back from the Gods.” He reached one of his massive fingers up to the monitor. “What you see is a map. The lines on it, as with all maps, are arbitrary. Chosen at random by men who didn’t care about the implications of those forced to live there. We will abolish these lines. We will change the map. Change one, and you can change any.”

The giant stood, his head almost touching the nine-foot-high ceilings. With each step he took toward Veronica, the house seemed to tremble. He stood in front of her and said, “You will chronicle this for me. Rest now, and eat and drink. When you are ready, I wish to begin filming.”

He brushed past them and ducked low to make his way through the double doors leading into the back garden.

“I still don’t know what we’re filming.”

“Death, Ms. Gables. You will be filming death.”

CHAPTER 49

“YOU MUST KILL HIM TO STOP AGAMEMNON.”

Jack woke with a start. He felt sweat trickling down his face and neck as he stared up at the ceiling from his cot. He had been dreaming of Agamemnon. Of being crushed by his girth and having the light of life stamped out of him. In his dream, he still had his legs. He reached down and felt the metal, ensuring the metal wasn’t what was actually a dream.

“How did you lose them?”

Habib lay in his cot, his back to him, his head resting on an old pillow.

“A man crushed them and they had to amputate them.”

“Must have been some extraordinary man.”

“You could say that.”

Habib rolled over in the bed. “I used to work with him.”

“Who?”

“The man who took your legs. Agamemnon. Though that’s not what he called himself then. Believe it or not, you remind me much of him. He was strong but insecure about his strength, and brilliant. Perhaps the most brilliant mind I have ever worked with and I have worked with all the most brilliant minds.”

“What did you do?”

“I worked in a laboratory. We were exploring the conversion of haploids to gametes in individuals with insufficient chromosomal pairs. Aggie thought that was the key to health. That if you could sequence the correct pairs, you could cure disease. All disease. Regions of the human genome once thought superfluous we found to be akin to switches. The switches directed the genes in their work. If a switch is malfunctioning, so we theorized, then the gene itself would malfunction, leading to disease.”

“What happened with it?”

“Aggie wasn’t satisfied with curing innate diseases. As I said, he wanted to cure all disease. He thought the switches could be manipulated to make us…superhuman. That we could become resistant to all disease and even cell degeneration. He thought he had found immortality.”

“With berridium?”

“Yes.”

Jack sat up, staring at the old man. “Who are you?”

“I have told you.”

“They just randomly stuck me in a room with the old assistant to the man I’ve been chasing. Bullshit. Who are you?”

“Mr. Kane, everyone here worked with Agamemnon at some point. He was the central figure in the Boulder Project. That is the designation the military gave our work with the genome, and later with berridium. We are all cogs in the same wheel. Even you.”

In a movement too fast to see, Jack had sprung from the cot and lifted Habib into the air. He spun him down onto his back against the cement floor. Habib struggled and attempted to push Jack off him, his face contorting and twisting into those of people Jack didn’t recognize.

Jack placed his forearm against Habib’s throat and pushed hard enough to cut off his air. Habib began to choke.

“I want answers now. No bullshit.”

Habib couldn’t speak, but he managed a nod. Jack pulled up, the old man coughing. When he was through, he picked himself up and sat back on the cot.

“They wanted me to get information from you.”

“And what were you going to get in exchange?”

“Freedom. I have been in this pit so long I do not remember what it is like to be outside, Mr. Kane.”

Jack could hear the stomping of boots outside in the corridor and men shouting. They were headed this way.

“Who is Agamemnon?”

“He is insanity incarnate. He has no reason or purpose. He wants to destroy for the mere pleasure of destroying, though he doesn’t realize this about himself.”

The doors flung open and men in uniforms rushed in and over to the cell. They began shouting at Jack to get back but he didn’t move.

“How do I stop him?”

“You don’t. He is more powerful than you. Or at least he believes he is.”

“There must be a way.”

The door to their cell opened and the men rushed in, slamming a dart into Jack’s thigh. Another went in his neck and one in his cheek. He pulled them out softly, the narcotics slowly taking effect.

“There is a way,” Habib said. “You must die.”

The men grabbed the old man and threw him against the cell, slapping plastic cuffs on his wrists and ankles. They began hauling him out of the cell. Jack considered fighting, but felt the effects of the narcotic slowing him to the point that he was unable to move. Even standing fatigued him and he collapsed onto his cot. He had let them catch him with his guard down. A mistake he wouldn’t make again.