The Ascension: A Super Human Clash (5 page)

“Mom?”

“What was it
this
time? Stealing test papers? Selling forged hall passes? Honestly, Lance, you're going to have to learn to toe the line. If you don't, they will expel you. You know what that means—an automatic draft into the Youth Corps. I know they keep saying they won't be sending the Youth Corps overseas, but I don't believe that for a second. Is that what you want? To end up riddled with bullets and dying on a field somewhere in France or Spain? Why can't you be more like your brother? You don't see
him
getting into trouble every second day.”

His father said, “You answer your mother, Lance.”

Lance felt like he was going to faint. “I'm sorry….”
How can they be alive? I saw their bodies!
Then he shook himself.
No, I didn't. I saw three covered stretchers. The cops wouldn't allow me to identify the bodies—they said there was no need.

His whole body trembling, Lance stepped up to his mother and wrapped his arms around her. “You're alive!” The tears came then, and he didn't care. “I thought…They told me you were dead.” He turned to his father. “Both of you, and Cody. They said Slaughter smashed her way into the house and killed all of you!”

Mr. McKendrick shook his head. “I knew it. It's drugs, isn't it? You've taken something. What was it, Lance?”

“What? No!” He let go of his mother. “Dad, haven't you wondered where I've been for the past three weeks?”

“Why would I wonder that? You've been here or in school.” His eyes narrowed. “Why? Where have you
really
been?”

They really don't know what I'm talking about! But…
He looked around the room.
I was in here a few minutes ago—the place was wrecked.
He looked back out into the hallway—the front door was intact, and there was no sign of any damage.

“I'm just kidding,” Lance said. “No, there was a fire drill and we were all sent home. Something went wrong with the alarm and they couldn't shut it off.”

It's not them. It's
me.
Something happened to me…made me
imagine
that they were dead.

Then he looked past his father, at a photograph on the front page of the newspaper resting on the desk. For a second, he could only stare at the photo of the large, well-dressed man.
No…Please, no!

The room seemed to sway, Lance's knees weakened, and he had to put his hands on the desk to stop himself from toppling forward.

The newspaper was only inches away from his face now, and he couldn't help but read the article accompanying the photo.

THREE WEEKS earlier…

From Krodin's perspective the hairless blue giant was moving so slowly that he might as well be wading through a lake of honey. Krodin stepped to the side, easily avoiding the giant's clumsy attack, then lashed out with his right fist, a blow that would have crushed an ordinary man's skull.

The giant staggered, briskly shook his head, and resumed his attack. Curious to see what he would do next, Krodin allowed the monster to grab hold of his arm.

The giant pulled Krodin toward him, at the same time striking at Krodin's chest with his other hand.

Krodin weathered the punch, allowed the giant to strike again. The monster's clenched fist was as big as Krodin's head, the muscles in his arm as powerful as a rampaging elephant's legs. Krodin felt the force of the blows, but no pain.

Then Krodin twisted free of the giant's grip, slammed his own fist into the blue giant's jaw, immediately kicked upward with his bare right foot, and hit the giant in the throat.

The giant reeled backward, stumbled, landed facedown, and Krodin pressed home his attack. He balled his fists together over his head and brought them crashing down onto the giant's back, over and over.

The giant collapsed, his pain-filled, breathless groans attracting the attention of his terrified companions.

Krodin stepped back, looked toward the giant's friends. The pale-skinned young woman—the witch who appeared to be able to move objects without touching them—was crouched over the boy called Pyrokine.

Not long ago Pyrokine had been fighting alongside Krodin, but he had foolishly chosen to join the enemy. The boy's chest rose and fell in ragged gasps.

Impressive
, Krodin thought. In the strange language of this new land—this
America
—he called out, “The flame-boy still lives? He is stronger than I thought. Step aside, girl. I will finish him. He was a powerful opponent and deserves a quick death.”

The girl got to her feet, stood over Pyrokine. “No.”

The dark-skinned girl shouted, “Roz! Get back!”

Then Krodin was hit by something powerful, something invisible, like a sudden, ferocious gust of wind.
The girl's power
, he realized. “Still you resist me? You are a fool, girl. You will die next.”

As he forced himself to remain upright against the onslaught, Krodin saw two of the girl's companions try to pull her away.

Then he felt his body—his very being—shift, adapt to the invisible force, and he was free. He leaped at the trio, knocked the others aside, and locked his left fist over the girl's face. He lifted her off the ground, pulled back his right fist, ready to strike. “Little witch…You. Are. Next!”

Then something crackled and sparked on the ground at his feet: The boy called Pyrokine screamed, “No!” He floated up from the ground, multicolored fire crackling over his broken body. “Let her go!”

Krodin forced his eyes shut against the glare, but he could sense that Pyrokine was approaching.

He started to back away—but he was too late. The burning boy crashed into his arm—a searing, impossible agony stronger than anything the Fifth King had experienced in his long life—forcing him to let go of the girl.

The boy somehow wrapped himself around Krodin's arm, and the fire began to spread. Krodin could feel his skin scorching, melting.
Resist this! I can resist anything!
He opened his eyes and saw the unearthly fire consuming his flesh faster than it could heal. The stench of his own burning tissue reached his nostrils and Krodin screamed, “No! Enough!”

Then, with the last of his strength, Pyrokine said, “No. You don't get to decide when you've had enough.
We
have had enough!”

The flame raced along Krodin's arms, enveloped his chest, his neck.

But it was more than just fire. The Fifth King felt something pulling at him from all directions. He had experienced this before, a few hours ago—and several thousand years ago—when he had been dragged through time.

For a brief moment, despite the pain of the fire, Krodin felt relief.
The boy's power brought me here. Now it is sending me back!

Then he heard the metal-clad man yelling, “Shield your eyes! Everyone get back!”

In an instant, Pyrokine's body was gone, consumed by its own fire, and Krodin knew that he would be next. In moments, he would be dead.

Krodin collapsed to the ground, his muscles spasming and twitching. He was certain that he was screaming, but he could hear nothing. Then a final, searing flash…

And the pain was fading. In moments he could feel cool, damp grass on his back.

Krodin opened his eyes, put his scorched hand up in front of his face, and watched as his wounds began to heal, the charred skin flaking away like fragments of sun-dried clay.

And he knew—in the same way that he always knew such things—that his attackers were no longer present. He was in the same place as before, but it was somehow different.

Krodin pushed himself to his feet and looked around. The large building from which he had come—the “power plant,” as the woman Slaughter had called it—was gone, and there was no indication that it had ever been there.

The Fifth King arched his back, stretched his newly healed muscles, and smiled.

He didn't know where he was, or what had happened. All he knew was that, for the first time, he had come within a hairbreadth of death. And he had survived.

“WE HAVE TO LOOK as though we belong here,” Solomon Cord told Abby as they walked along West Franklin Street back toward Abby's apartment building. “So stop staring at everything like you're a tourist.”

Abby had collapsed the bow and was now carrying it and the arrow-filled quiver under her arm, wrapped in her jacket. “Sorry, can't help it.” Everything around was familiar, but just a little different, as though the street had been built from the same plans but by a different designer. The buildings were cleaner, and there was less litter. At this time of the day there would normally be more people about, but now, there was almost no one, not even the usual gang of young men hanging around the corner of West Franklin and Jarvis. “What do you think is going on?”

“I wish I knew,” Cord replied. “I've never experienced anything like this before.”

“Those cameras look high-tech, so why do they have cables? Why aren't they wireless?”

“Wireless communications are much easier to block or scramble.”

“Yeah, but someone could just cut the cables.”

“Then whoever's watching would know exactly where the saboteurs are.”

They stopped outside Abby's apartment building.

“If everything's changed out here…,” Cord began.

“I was thinking the same thing. But we have to check, don't we?” Abby walked up the steps and examined the faded list next to the line of buzzers. “There are some names here I don't recognize, but there's de Luyando. At least it means I still live here.”

With Cord following, Abby pushed open the outside door and stepped into the lobby. Contrary to the appearance of the street, the lobby was less clean than it should have been. Two weeks ago—after an encounter between Cord and the daughter of the building's owner—a team of decorators had spruced up the public areas. Now, although the building didn't look anywhere near as bad as it had been before that, it clearly hadn't been renovated in several years. “Oh man, this is freaky. Could we have gone back in time or something?”

“That wouldn't explain the surveillance cameras.”

“The future, then?”

“Maybe. We need to find a newspaper or something that'll tell us the date.”

Abby considered that for a moment, then went over to the rack of mailboxes, fished her keys out of her pocket, and opened the one marked “de Luyando.” There were three envelopes inside. “All postmarked yesterday or the day before. So we're not in the future.” She stuffed the envelopes into her back pocket, then looked over at the stairs. “I guess we should…”

Cord nodded. “Stay behind me.”

She followed Cord up the three flights of stairs, but the closer they came to Abby's apartment, the more nervous she felt.
How could everything have just changed like that? And what
else
has changed? Did it just happen here in Midway, or is it everywhere?

“Prepare yourself,” Cord said. “There could be a lot of differences. Whatever you see, try to take it in your stride, OK?” He stopped outside the apartment. “Ready?”

“No. But we don't have any other choice, do we?” Abby turned her key in the lock and pushed the door open.

Mrs. de Luyando's voice called out, “Who's there?” and Abby let out a deep breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.

“That's my mom,” Abby said quietly. She stepped into the short hallway with Cord close behind her.

As they entered the sitting room, Alison de Luyando wheeled her chair over to them. “Abby! Why aren't you in school? What were you thinking, leaving school before five? You know better than to be out on your own. You're lucky you weren't stopped and arrested.” Then she saw Cord. “Oh. I see. What has she done
now
?”

Abby did her best to remain calm. “Mom, I'm not in trouble.”

Cord said, “Everything is fine, Mrs. de Luyando. I just have a few questions to ask you.”

Mrs. de Luyando rolled back from the door. “Better come in, then.”

They followed Abby's mother into the sitting room. When her back was turned, Abby allowed the bow and quiver to drop to the floor, then nudged them behind the sofa.

When she looked up, Cord was staring at a photo on the mantelpiece.

“Oh, that's my eldest, Vienna,” Abby's mother said, beaming with pride. “She's the one on the left.”

Softly, Cord said, “Yes, I, uh, I see the resemblance.” He glanced at Abby, then stepped aside so that she could see the picture.

“He'd turned up to inspect the troops and one of the girls asked him if they could get a picture with him,” Mrs. de Luyando said. She laughed. “They honestly didn't expect him to say yes!”

It was a recent color photo of Vienna standing with another woman and smiling for the camera, both wearing combat fatigues and helmets.

On Vienna's upper arm was a cloth patch showing a blue eye inside a yellow sun.

Standing between Vienna and her friend, smiling and with his arms around their shoulders, was a man Abby instantly recognized, even with his hair and beard cut short. It was Krodin.

 

When the black-uniformed officers stormed into the apartment, the young couple immediately dropped to their knees with their hands behind their heads.

One of the soldiers shouted at Roz: “Assume the position! Now!” The man's voice wavered a little.

Roz had been trained by her brother's team, three highly skilled former U.S. Rangers. She took a moment to study the situation: The six men were still clustered in front of the door. They looked pale and nervous. That told her they were not experienced at something like this. They should have kept two men on her while the rest spread out to search the apartment for any other intruders.

Each man was holding a large assault weapon of a type she didn't recognize. The weapons were clearly heavy: The soldiers were using both hands to hold them. And behind them, they had left the apartment door open and unguarded, another rookie mistake.

The fact that they hadn't yet opened fire suggested to Roz that either they were extremely nervous or they had not been authorized to shoot. She might just have a chance.

She dropped to the floor, facedown, with her palms flat under her. The soldiers had to readjust their weapons to keep focused on her.

“All right. Cuff her and—”

Roz pushed herself up and forward, aiming between the two nearest soldiers. At the same time she reached out with her telekinesis toward the man on her left and knocked aside his weapon just as he pulled the trigger. The gun coughed a muffled
ptoof
and something rattled off the wall behind her.

Roz was now crouched in the center of the group: She slammed her left elbow into the side of one man's thigh. As he staggered aside, she hooked her right arm around another's legs and pulled hard. The man's knees buckled and he toppled back into one of his colleagues.

Now only two soldiers were aiming at her, one on each side—and she was sure they wouldn't fire in case they hit their own men. She launched herself at the man on her right while using her telekinetic shield to strike the other in the face.

The soldier she hit stumbled backward as the last man ducked aside to avoid her.

Roz dashed out through the door and telekinetically slammed it behind her as she raced down the corridor. She'd lived in this building for years and knew it well. She turned left at the end of the corridor and pushed open the fire door leading to the stairwell. Down the stairs three at a time—she was already two floors down before she heard the soldiers rushing back out of the apartment.

On every floor there was a similar fire door leading from the stairwell. As Roz passed each door, she used her telekinesis to pull it open. The doors' hinges were fitted with slow-closing springs; she hoped that as the soldiers followed her down, they would have to investigate each closing door just in case she had stopped on that floor.

On the twelfth floor Roz had gained enough of a lead to allow her to create another diversion: She ducked into one hallway and hit the call button for the elevator, then returned to the stairwell and continued her descent.

Moments later she heard one of the soldiers shouting, “Elevator's moving! You two, check it out!”

Four left
, Roz thought.
But what am I going to do when I get to the ground floor? They could have more men stationed there.

Roz was on the eighth floor when she realized she had overlooked something important:
How did they get to the apartment so quickly? There couldn't have been more than two minutes between the alarm going off and the soldiers bursting in through the door. Even if they'd been right outside on the street, they couldn't have gotten up to the apartment that quickly.

Either they were already on their way here for some other reason, or they're stationed in this building.

She was halfway between the seventh and sixth floors when two more soldiers appeared on the stairs below her. Roz almost stumbled and had to grab on to the rail to steady herself.

The stairwell below had been empty: The men had materialized out of thin air.

Roz barely had time to say, “How did—?” before the two men fired. A long red-tipped dart slammed into her neck, another hit her stomach, and her whole body was wracked with pain. She lost control of her limbs and toppled forward. The last thing she saw was one of the men reaching out to catch her.

 

James Klaus knew that Faith didn't believe anything was wrong with the world, aside from his sudden—from her point of view—appearance at the farm.

Everything he'd brought with him—including his costume—was gone. His room looked as though it hadn't been used in months. All he had left were the clothes he was wearing, his skateboard, and the gloves he'd made.

He'd spent an hour flicking through the old newspapers in the recycling bin, and was now certain that he had somehow been pulled into a parallel world. He made Faith promise not to say anything to his father. “Just pretend I wasn't even here,” he'd told her. “It's better for everyone, OK?”

Now he was skating along the winding country roads, almost forty miles from his hometown of Midway, but determined to get there as quickly as possible.

He had considered asking Faith if he could borrow her car, but his father would have noticed it was missing. He'd told Faith he'd walk to Smithfield and take the bus from there to Midway, but she'd told him there were no more buses. “Midway's in a different Habzone. You can't travel from one Habitation Zone to another without a valid permit.”

“Then I'll hitch a lift or something.”

“You can't. I just told you—travel is restricted. For everyone.”

The information James had gathered from the newspapers and from Faith was more than a little disturbing.

Krodin was alive and well.

The Fifth King had appeared seemingly out of nowhere about five years earlier and—somehow—had worked his way into a position of power. He was now the Chancellor of the United States of America, in charge of the nation's security.

Five years
, James thought,
and he's already changed the whole country.

One of Krodin's earliest acts had been to divert huge amounts of money into renewable energy resources, drastically reduce America's dependency on gasoline, and allow the nation to cut ties with other oil-producing nations.

And then Anchorage was destroyed. Almost the entire state of Alaska was now a radioactive wasteland.

According to the newspaper reports, the elusive supervillain Daedalus had been tracked to Alaska by Krodin and almost every other known superhuman. But Daedalus had triggered a nuclear weapon—only he and Krodin had survived the blast. Many people believed that Daedalus had been working for a terrorist organization, or a foreign power, but no one knew for sure.

With no specific group or country to blame, the president announced that they had no choice but to close the country's borders. International travel was forbidden. The land borders with Mexico and Canada were reinforced by a series of forty-foot-high walls, patrolled at all times by armed guards. Automated monitoring stations scanned the beaches and alerted the coast guard if anything suspicious tried to make land.

Krodin had been given the new position of Chancellor, charged with protecting the nation against any and all threats, foreign and domestic.

Three miles from the farmhouse James crested Ridley's Hill and took a moment to look back over the fields. From here he could see the forty acres north of the farm. This season the fields were supposed to be fallow—and yesterday they had been. Now they were the site of a huge military camp. Between hundreds of rows of identical tents countless soldiers marched in formation.

James focused his hearing, sampling sounds from all areas of the camp. He could hear orders being barked back and forth, soldiers on downtime chatting nervously about the coming campaign in Europe, the constant hum of electric motors.

Everything in the camp—the soldiers' uniforms, the tents, the vehicles, and the flags—all bore the same symbol: a blue eye inside a yellow sun.

Krodin
, James thought.
We thought he died…. We were sure that not even
he
could have survived Pyrokine's final blast. We barely survived it ourselves.

The Helotry used Pyrokine's power to open a wormhole in space and time—a tachyon well, they called it—and pulled Krodin out of his own time, more than four thousand years ago. So Pyrokine's final blast didn't kill Krodin—it somehow sent him back in time about five years. Then he did what he does best: He set out to conquer the world.

And he's succeeding.