The Doomsday Device (Teen Superheroes Book 2) (17 page)

I nodded. I forced some more of the mixture down Chad’s throat. Despite his coughing, it seemed like some of it was staying down. We half carried, half dragged Chad between us down the valley. A humid wind poured across the valley; I could smell the sea. I had already felt a strange impulse in my arm. It was where the chip had been inserted. Almost like a compass pointing north, I knew the invisible craft was located on the coast to our left.

The valley flattened out. Now we could see some farm houses on both sides. There was a family doing some work outside one of the houses.

Taking refuge behind a ridge, we surveyed the farmers. We needed to keep moving. It was still early morning, but I didn’t know how long it would take before the prison realized there had been a jail break. Possibly the other prisoners might realize an avenue of escape had been opened up and they might break out. There could be a mass jail break. I wasn’t too sure how I felt about that. Some of the prisoners were obviously dangerous, but many of them were probably innocent men. I supposed there was nothing I could do about it, so I pushed it from my mind.

I felt our escape plane was close by. Maybe only a couple of miles. We had to keep moving.

“What about your powers?” Drink asked, peering over at the farmers. “Can you use them to get us to your ship?”

“They’re a bit depleted right now,” I said. I didn’t want to say they were completely inoperative. “We need to do this on our own.”

“I say we go,” Zachary said. “Most people in North Korea will mind their own business. This is a government controlled state. Raising a fuss over seeing strange people in a field may not be in their best interest.”

“You’re probably right,” Drink agreed.

We started across the field. By the half way point we noticed the people at the farmhouse had stopped and were watching us. They did not wave or show any interest in communicating with us. Neither did we. Keeping on a straight line, we reached the end of the field where it met a tarred road.

Crossing over, we started across another field. This one dipped down to meet with the shore. I felt the strong pull of the GPS device as it seemed to pull us across the field.

“We’re almost there,” I gasped. Chad was getting heavier by the moment.

“I think I can hear an engine,” Drink said.

We paused momentarily. A truck was coming around a bend and heading down the road. We heard the screech of its brakes as we continued across the field. Now the low-lying plant life and dirt gave way to gravel.

A shot rang out.

“Hell!” Zachary said.

We hurried down an embankment and out of sight as a bullet pinged off a rock to our left.

“There it is!” I cried.

A modern looking fighter craft sat on the beach.

“Where?” Drink asked.

He couldn’t see it. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s there.”

We hurried across the rocky beach as quickly as we could, but it was slow going. Chad seemed to be getting heavier by the moment. Now the craft lay less than fifty feet away. More shots rang out and bullets ricocheted off the rocks around us. I tried forming a shield around us and nothing happened.

Damn!

“Take him!” I commanded.

Zachary and Drink grabbed Chad. I focused again on trying to get a shield up, but my powers were gone. Just as we reached the craft I saw the plane shimmer slightly. Zachary and Drink gasped in amazement. Obviously they could see it too.

A hatch opened automatically on the side. Bullets were flying everywhere now. Drink climbed in. I followed after him as Zachary helped to struggle Chad into the aircraft. As the hatch swung shut behind us, Zachary cried out in pain.

He and Chad fell to the floor.

“I’m shot,” he said, grabbing his leg.

“Get us out of here!” Drink yelled. “I’ll look after them!”

Getting us to the ship seemed to be the easy part. Now I had to work out how it worked. I climbed into the flight cabin.

“What the hell do I do?” I muttered.

“Flex fighter online,” the computer announced and the display came to life.

“Flex?” I said.

“Enter audio input,” it said.

“We need to get out of here,” I said.

“Destination?”

“We need to get back to the United States.”

“Destination inputted.”

I felt the craft lift off the ground with a mighty roar. I fell sideways as it lifted up into the air. Bullets were striking the side of the ship, but it seemed to be dealing with the attack with no problems. It surged forward and upwards.

Looking through a window, I saw the North Korean mainland fall away behind us.

“Yes!” I said, punching the air.

Now I had to make certain Zachary and Chad were okay. The others were in the main compartment. As I entered, I saw Chad on one of the seats. He had been strapped in. His eyes were slightly open and he was looking around in a confused manner.

“How did we end up here?” he asked. “Where’s the prison?”

“We escaped,” I told him. “We -.”

I didn’t get any further. At that moment I glanced at the others. Drink was strapped into one of the seats as well, but the person sitting next to him was not Zachary. It was a girl looking at me with a grimace of pain on her face. A ragged bandage was wrapped around her leg.

My mouth dropped open. “What-. Where-.”

“I’m sorry,” the girl said. “My name is Cecelia.”

“Where’s Zachary?” I looked around in amazement.

“I’m a shape shifter,” Cecelia said. “Zachary’s been dead for nine months and I’ve been taking his place.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

Ferdy liked puzzles. He looked into Ebony’s face and saw two blue eyes. A nose. A mouth. Blonde hair. Her face was a type of puzzle. It was hard for him to focus on all its features at the same time, but he knew when he put it all together it made up the person he knew as Ebony.

“Ebony,” he said.

“That’s right, Ferdy,” she said. “I’m Ebony and I need you to open this cylinder for me. It’s a code. A cipher.”

Ferdy looked down at the cylinder. He saw the rows of numbers and letters.

“E794…” his voice trailed off.

“What does it mean?” Ebony asked. “Can you tell me?”

Ferdy looked into her face again. The man next to her was named Jeremiah. Ferdy didn’t like Jeremiah. He was a bad man and he had known a few bad people. The first bad people had been back at the place they called The Agency. There was a time before The Agency. Ferdy could remember snippets of it. A man and a woman. His parents. A brother and sister.

There had been a car accident and after the accident he could not remember seeing them again. He remembered doctors and he remembered one of them quite clearly.

“This will not hurt,” the doctor said.

But the doctor had lied. It had hurt. A lot. After the drugs had taken hold his teeth had clenched together and he had almost bitten through his tongue. After that the doctors had placed a piece of rubber between his teeth.

When he had awoken the world had become both very small and very large at the same time. It was very small because he could only focus on one thing at a time. An entire human face was too complex. Too confusing. In comparison, math’s problems or books were simple things. He could read them and understand them immediately because he could see them all at once. They were easy.

Ferdy knew the entire periodic table of elements. He could recite them forwards or backwards or tell anyone that Rhodium’s atomic number was forty-five and its atomic weight was 102.905.

It was discovered in 1803 by a man named Wollaston. Usually when he told people information like this – even his friends – they often interrupted him or ignored him. People missed out on a lot of things.

They were stupid, he thought. Even his friends could be stupid, but that did not mean he did not like them. He liked them a lot.

Like Ebony. She was his best friend and she paid him the most attention out of anyone. Like right now as she stared into his eyes and said, “Ferdy, you need to listen to me. You need to open this cylinder. You need to crack this code.”

“A cylinder is a three dimensional geometric shape,” he said. “Its area is twice
pi
times
r
times
h
where
r
stands for radius and -.”

“That’s right,” Ebony said. “But we need to work out this cipher. Do you understand? We need to work this out or Dan is going to be hurt.”

Dan played computer games with Ferdy and they had fun. He was another friend.

“Cipher,” Ferdy said. “In early times it meant zero. Now it’s an algorithm used to perform either encryption or decryption.” He stopped. His stomach was making a strange sound. It was hard to focus on so many things at once. “I need chocolate.”

Jeremiah looked quite annoyed when he said this, but Ebony almost smiled. Almost. The expression on her face was something between a smile and looking sad.

“Ebony looks sad,” Ferdy said. Then he continued. “The Dorabella Cipher is one of the world’s most famous ciphers. It was developed by Edward Elgar to amuse his friend Dora Penny.”

“Ferdy -.” Ebony began.

“I solved in last Tuesday,” Ferdy continued. “What a funny thing for Mr. Elgar to say to Miss Penny. Who would imagine he would say -.”

“Ferdy,” Ebony interrupted him again.

He looked at her. He saw her eyes, her mouth, her lips, her hairline. He thought about quoting Shakespeare again to her, but realized she was pointing at the metal tube.

“Can you solve this?” she asked.

He looked at the numbers and letters.

He laughed.

“So funny,” he said.

“What is?” Jeremiah asked.

Ferdy glared at him. He would not answer Jeremiah because he was a bad man.

“What’s so funny?” Ebony asked.

“A substitution cipher,” Ferdy said. “I like substitution ciphers.”

Jeremiah looked very serious now. He was staring quite intensely at Ferdy as was Ebony. Ferdy looked at them both and then he looked at the string of letters and numbers and now he started to recall the many books he had read.

There were literally millions of them. He could read an entire book in three minutes on an ebook reader. Some days he read hundreds and hundreds of them. That was not including all the books he read during his early days at The Agency.

He thought about all those books and he started to substitute letters and numbers and they were all like the colors of a rainbow. The books did not line up together. Rather they lay on top of one another and he could see through them all at the same time.

All those books.

There were the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Bible and a book about the lifecycle of woodpeckers and other books about music and now the letters were flowing like the water in a river.

“You can’t step into the same river twice,” he said gravely.

He was checking on how seats were laid out in commercial airplanes and the works of T. S Eliot and how they looked represented in Morse Code and the birthdates of thousands of famous people and a list of all the known stars and planets.

He laughed. “Pluto isn’t a planet anymore.”

It was all coming together now and that’s how he liked it. He was Ferdy and Ebony was his friend and she had asked him to work out the code. He was reading through the Washington Phone book and checking lines of longitude and latitude and checking the population growth for the countries of the world.

He reached out with a hand and started pushing buttons on the keypad.

“So simple,” he said. “Stephen Hawking was born on the eighth of January in nineteen forty-two.”

Ebony and Jeremiah stared at him in silence as he continued to push buttons. Finally he hit the enter key and the Doomsday device clicked. It slid open to reveal two vials filled with a pale blue liquid.

“I still like chocolate,” Ferdy said.

Chapter Thirty-Five

“But I know everything Zachary knew,” Cecelia said.

I felt ill in my stomach. “Such as?”

It was a terrible shock to realize that the person we had thought was Zachary Stead was actually an eighteen year old girl named Cecelia Watson. I couldn’t believe the person we had just helped escape from Yodak prison had taken his place. It didn’t seem possible. Yet here she was sitting in front of us, bleeding all over the floor.

“I’m a shape shifter,” she said. “But I’m only able to do it for people I’m with at the time of their death.”

“So where is the Sanctuary Compound?” I asked.

“Why do you want to know?”

“That’s my business. Where is the compound?”

“I’m happy to tell you,” Cecelia said. “But then I want to be allowed to go on my way.”

“After we make certain that what you’ve told us is the truth,” I said. “Then you can go.”

“I’m not satisfied with that,” she said.

“You’ll have to be.”

A beeping sound came from the console on the flight deck. I entered the room and slid the door shut behind me. A voice came over the speaker.

“This is Palmer,” the voice said. “Do you read me? Over.”

Agent Palmer had told us before we left that she would use her surname in any communications in case anyone else – like Zachary or Cecelia Watson – was listening. I peered down at the console. A lesson in how to work this thing might have been handy.

I put on the headphones and manipulated the microphone. After a few faulty attempts I had a successful conversation underway and explained the situation.

“Get Zachary – or Cecelia – or whatever she calls herself to pinpoint the location of the compound on the flight display,” she said.

“Uh, roger that,” I said.

I brought Cecelia onto the flight deck. She spent the next few minutes studying a swipe map on one of the display consoles. Finally she pinpointed an area in Montana. I kicked her out of the room and opened up the line again to Agent Palmer.

“I can see the area she’s pinpointed on your display,” she responded. “We’ll have agents move in immediately.”

“What’s happening with Brodie and the others,” I asked. “Have you heard from them?”