Superhero (24 page)

Jack leapt to his feet as the car was flung at him. Without time to get out of the way, he barreled into it with his shoulder, sending it flying back to Agamemnon who slammed his fist into it, the car breaking into pieces.

“So you are the Dragon. I have heard of you.”

“This isn’t the first time we’ve met.”

“No? I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve come across many interesting people in my time. Though none dressed quite so interestingly.”

“I could say the same.”

“So you could,” he said, beginning a slow circle around him.

“Where’s the bomb?”

“It is not a bomb. It is far more intriguing than that.”

“Where is it?”

“Quite safe.”

“Are you going to hold the city ransom? Is that your plan?”

“Don’t insult me, boy. Nothing so petty would even enter my mind. No, I am a savior. The true savior men have been waiting for, not a fantasy sown with miracles and love.”

“And what do you plan to save?”

“Humanity, my boy. Humanity can be a pearl, like me. Flawless. But they are far from pearls and more like swine currently. They need to be cleansed and only afterward will I grant them their perfection.”

“You don’t need to die. Tell me where it is.”

“No. I suppose you will simply have to get the information out of me.”

“Gladly.”

He sprang so quickly that he appeared like a blur. He struck Agamemnon hard, directly in the chest, before he could react. Flipping backward after the strike, Jack landed on his feet. He sprinted at him again, trying to take out one of his legs. This time Agamemnon was ready and swiped downward, striking Jack across the temple and causing him to fly to the side.

Agamemnon leapt and tried to drive his knees into Jack’s head. Jack spun to his feet and flipped backward just as the giant’s knees drove into the ground. Jack flipped upward and at the last moment before impact with Agamemnon dove and kicked him in the leg. Agamemnon leaned to the side as his leg gave out.

Jack spun and kicked at his face, striking with his heel. He spun again for another kick and felt Agamemnon’s vice-like grip on his ankle. Agamemnon lifted him in the air and swung him downward like a wet towel, smashing him into the ground. He lifted him again and slammed him down before throwing him into the house.

Jack flew through the exterior wall and into the living room. He exhaled from the pain in his back and ribs. The coppery taste of blood was on his tongue. As he rose to his knees, he felt an impact against his ribs like a truck and was flung through another wall into the bathroom, the pipes splintering and water exploding through the walls. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling when he heard the crunching of furniture as Agamemnon made his way through the house.

Jack got to his feet just as he felt the enormous hand on his head lift him into the air. He was staring at Agamemnon’s face, his chin lighting red as he spoke.

“Poor little fly couldn’t get away from the spider.”

Agamemnon smashed his head through the wall before flinging him through the window of the room next door and into the yard.

Jack felt the fractures in his ribs and sternum and shoulders as acutely as if they were on fire.

“STAND.”

The voice had an urgency to it he hadn’t heard before.

“STAND!”

Jack crawled to his knees, forcing himself up with a groan. He stood facing Agamemnon head-on as the giant broke through the wall of the house.

Pain rocketed through his body. But he didn’t fall, and he didn’t remove his eyes from the blank whiteness of Agamemnon’s.

“You are brave,” the giant said. “But foolhardy.”

He grabbed Jack by the throat and lifted him in the air, crushing the life out of him. Jack felt blackness overtaking him. He would be dead soon.

“KICK.”

He thrust out with his leg as hard as he could and felt the metal of Agamemnon’s helmet. The giant loosened his grip. Jack kicked again, this time cracking the piece attached to his voice box. A gas that appeared like steam but had a pungent odor began to escape. Jack kicked again, this time with both legs, using the momentum from the strike to flip backward out of the giant’s grasp.

The helmet was cracked and Agamemnon was gasping and choking. Frantic, he tried to piece the helmet back together. Jack could tell he couldn’t breathe. He sprinted at the giant and catapulted into the air, slamming down with his fist, knocking the helmet to the side. He struck again and again and again until the helmet, dented and bent, flew off the giant’s head, revealing a mass of hair and flesh.

The giant collapsed onto his knees. Pain still crippling him, Jack threw himself at him, crashing his elbow into the giant’s face and sending him onto his back.

“KILL HIM.”

Jack bent down and took the giant’s head in his hands. He began to twist to snap the neck.

“No!”

It was a female’s voice, but not Veronica’s. Jack looked up to see Heidi running toward him. She pushed him aside and wrapped her arms around the giant’s head, reaching for the helmet and placing it back on. She was pressing the chin piece over his mouth.

“Move, Heidi.”

“No, you can’t kill him.”

“He’s too dangerous. Move.”

“No, you can’t.”

“They can’t contain him. He’ll get out again. I don’t have a choice.”

She looked up at him, tears glistening in her eyes. “You can’t kill him, Jack.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s my husband…and your father.”

CHAPTER 56

Jack stood over the broken giant as Heidi pressed the device to his chin. He was sucking in breath in short gasps, barely able to keep his eyes open.

“Heidi, move away from him.”

“It’s the truth, Jack.”

They exchanged looks but said nothing for a while as she bent over Agamemnon. Jack felt the air rush out of him but knew it wasn’t just from the pain. He sat, feeling the cracks in his ribs pinch and pull. He didn’t speak.

“You think I just randomly picked you?” she said. “I just exposed myself and the program that I’ve devoted my life to for one stranger? You’re my son, Jackson. When I saw the video of you at the bank on the news…I knew it was you.”

Jackson
. No one had ever called him that in his adult life. It had never occurred to him that Jack was short for that name. But somewhere in the recesses of his mind it brought up fragments of sounds and images from a childhood he had long since forgotten. A female voice that shouted for him to come home, prayers at a dinner table, a worried mother shouting at him not to run into the sea…he knew what she said was the truth. He was her son.

“Why did you leave?” he whispered. His voice barely responding to him.

“We didn’t leave. When the experiments with berridium reached their fruition, everyone had a vested interest. They thought it was going to be a miracle drug. Something that cures everything from MS to Alzheimer’s. But only the rich would have access. They would charge upwards of two hundred thousand dollars for a single dose. Your father wasn’t going to let that happen. There was an…incident, and they began looking for us. All of us. It was better that you start a new life and thought we were dead.”

“What incident?”

“One day I’ll answer any questions you have but right now—”

“No, you don’t get to say that.”

She exhaled. “I know. I’m sorry. But your father is dying, Jackson. Please, I need your help.”

“Why is he dying?”

“You never bothered to ask who the entities were. I spoke to them. My father, your grandfather, learned to communicate with them.” She gently stroked Agamemnon’s cheek. “One of our probes landed on Venus in the last decade. We were expecting oceans of methane and instead we found solid ground. It was charred from volcanic eruptions. We had no idea Venus had any volcanoes.

“There are two things that absorb enough carbon dioxide on a planet to make it habitable: rocks and oceans. Venus had oceans at one point, but very few rocks. Not enough to absorb all the carbon dioxide being released from its volcanoes. The oceans eventually evaporated and with it, life. That’s what occurred on their planet as well. The oceans dried up over centuries. They did what they could to stop it but it didn’t help. Once you reach a certain point of environmental degradation, you can’t go back.

“They couldn’t stop their planet from dying so they adapted the best they could. That suit you wear is their suit. It adapts like they did. Berridium is, literally, a part of their blood. They developed a synthetic that could bond with the thrombocytes in the blood. In small doses, it’s the fountain of youth. In large doses…” she said as she stroked Agamemnon again, his eyes half open.

“You have to help me get him to a methane source.”

“Where?”

“There’s a military installation not far from here. I know someone that will give us clearance if we can get him there.”

Jack looked down to the giant. He appeared frail now, weak. “What happened to him?”

“Our program was covert. Congress can only cut or defund covert programs, not alter what the money is spent on. So they just cut, not knowing what it was they were cutting. Our division was the second program cut. The remaining berridium was going to be destroyed. Rather than let them take it, your father injected as much as he could into himself. He was…obsessed. He thought their civilization was far purer than ours. The berridium that was left went into you. It’s done now.”

Jack felt like a child again; helpless and weak. His limbs wouldn’t respond to his commands to rise, and despite all the lies this woman had told him to get to Agamemnon, only one burning question was inside of him that had to get out.

“Why did you leave me?”

“Jack!” Veronica ran over, wearing William’s button-up shirt. “The bomb. They left with it.”

He looked to Heidi. “What is that thing anyway?”

“It’s an electron bomb. The magnets on the outer layer have small perforations with the magnetic fields pointed inward toward the bomb. They pull in electrons from the atmosphere. It’s designed to fire straight into the air, directly at a ninety-degree angle. Its purpose is to light the nitrogen in the atmosphere on fire.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I told you, he was obsessed. He thought that if we had to go through something like they did, we would become pure like them. The fire will burn away all the oxygen fairly quickly. We’ll have to adapt. He’s going to turn this planet into theirs.”

Jack forced himself to his feet. “Where’s the bomb going?” he said to Veronica.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you?” he asked Heidi.

“No. But I know it needs a water source. It fuses water molecules together with such force that it propels its energy upward into the atmosphere. They have to be headed toward the ocean.”

“One of the men,” Veronica said, “one of the men had a…like a surf shop T-shirt. It said Venice Beach on it.”

“We don’t have much time,” Heidi said. “If you’re wrong, the bomb will detonate.”

“No,” Jack said, “she’s right. I can feel it.”

“Feel what?” Heidi said.

“The bomb. I can feel it. I don’t know how to explain it better than that.”

Jack bent down and lifted his father. He carried him to the bed of the truck just behind the barn and placed him in, the truck dipping low from the weight. When his mother, William, and Veronica had climbed in, he walked to the front of the truck and looked to them one more time. He had a feeling this might be the last time he ever saw them again.

He jumped, and was gone.

CHAPTER 57

The air was warm but the sunlight, somehow, didn’t overheat Jack’s body. The suit deflected it perfectly and inside he remained cool.

He could see the ocean now, a vast crystal-blue separated from the golden sand by a thin white film of foam. Jack could feel tingling in his body, directing him where to go. He landed on asphalt, burying his metallic feet several inches through, and leapt again to the south. Somewhere underneath him was the bomb. Veronica had told him it was in a white van but there were so many cars on the roads it was hard to decipher them with sight. He closed his eyes. The prickly sensation on his skin intensified. He was directly above it now.

Dropping like a stone directly downward, he landed on the sand just feet from the water. His ribs screamed to him from pain but the pain had subsided greatly since even a few minutes ago. He was healing at an incredibly fast rate. He wondered, briefly, if that could be harnessed for the healing of others.

It was then that he saw the van tucked between two buildings in an alley. Out of the open back, several men pulled out a silver sphere with black attachments. He sprinted for them. One of the men, a younger one no older than sixteen, saw him and shouted to his friends. They pulled out their weapons.

Jack could sense the bullets leaving the gun, the metal slugs flying toward him. He ducked and jumped and twisted, easily avoiding them. Leaping again into the air, he landed on top of the van, blowing out its tires.

“Fuck you!” a man shouted from underneath him. He was holding a shoulder mounted grenade launcher.

The grenade fired and slammed into Jack, the explosion throwing him off the van and into the building next door. He slid down to the pavement as the men loaded another grenade and pointed the weapon at his head.

“NO.”

Without so much as a thought, Jack had spun off the ground and buried his fist into the man’s face, his knuckles protruding through the back of the skull. A flurry of legs and fists, and three other men died at his hands, the final one tossed so high in the air it took him several seconds to fall back down to his death on the pavement.

The sixteen-year-old ran for it.

“NO SURVIVORS.”

Jack leapt at him like a puma.

“No!”

He flipped himself over, landing hard on his shoulder a few dozen feet away from the boy. The Dragon flung him to his feet but Jack forced himself back to the ground, holding down his legs, straining against himself until the boy was out of sight.

He stood up, his head pounding and his muscles feeling like they had just been beaten with a baseball bat. He limped over to the bomb lying on the ground. It was small but as he attempted to roll it back toward the van, he felt that it easily weighed over half a ton. His breathing was labored; the grenade had shattered his already weakened ribs.