Stronger: A Super Human Clash (2 page)

We used picks and drills to extract ore from the four main mine shafts, loaded the ore into iron-wheeled carts, and pushed them up the winding tracks to the processing station, where the platinum was extracted. It was exhausting, debilitating work. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and most of it spent in the dark, claustrophobia-inducing shafts.

Another prisoner, Ferdinand Cosby—Cosmo to his friends—approached Keegan and me from the ore-processing station. “Who’s down there, do you know?” Cosmo was of average height but stick-thin. And I really
mean
stick-thin; even his bones were thinner than a normal person’s. His skin was a patchwork of gray and white, like a piebald horse.

Keegan said, “Jakob’s group. They were working alone when it happened—just our luck that none of the guards got caught in it.”

I said, “If they were deep enough, they could be just trapped. We have to—” I stopped when I realized that everyone’s attention was focused on the tunnel entrance behind me.

I turned to see four guards come staggering out of the B shaft in a cloud of rock dust, one of them half carrying another. Though they were coughing, gasping, and rubbing at their grit-encrusted eyes, they still had the presence of mind to stick together and hold on to their guns.

The man carrying his colleague collapsed to his knees, and I instinctively moved to help him—and found myself facing the raised guns of the other two. “Get away from him!” one of them yelled, his voice rough and wheezing.

From beyond the crowd I saw Hazlegrove coming out of the little prefabricated office that overlooked the mine, accompanied by the rest of the guards. Some of them were half out of uniform, as their shift too was ending. All of them were armed. Hazlegrove raised a bullhorn to his mouth. “Any one of you freaks takes one more step and we
will
open fire!”

Hazlegrove was short—well, to me
everyone
was short—bitter, and pudgy. He thought of himself as “hard but fair,” but from our side of things he was most definitely “hard but cruel.” He carried a swagger stick tucked under one arm like he was a British army officer in the Second World War.

Hazlegrove lowered his bullhorn and called his two cronies, Elliot Swinden and Donald DePaiva, to his side. As far as I understand it, they’d been his pals in college, and he’d gotten them their jobs. I don’t know if it paid well, but most of the time there was little real work for the guards to do.

“What happened, Mr. Swinden?” Hazlegrove asked.

Swinden slapped the dust from his uniform. “Ceiling collapsed. C shaft. Started pretty deep down. Looks like there’s no way through—it’s completely blocked. The damage to the other tunnels seems to be pretty minor. We’ll need to shore up the ceiling in a few places, but it could have been a lot worse.”

“The C shaft…,” Hazlegrove muttered. He glanced at DePaiva. “What’s the yield over the past month?”

DePaiva was using a gray handkerchief to wipe the sweat-caked dust from his face. “
Very
low—we’ve pretty much exhausted that seam. Probably should have abandoned it a couple of months back.”

Hazlegrove nodded, and pursed his lips for a moment. I could see him working it out…. It’d take days to clear the blockage—maybe weeks, depending on how deep it was—and Jakob’s team was only eight men.

I felt my stomach tighten as Hazlegrove briefly glanced at me. I knew what he was going to say.

“Close it up.”

The guards’ hands tightened on their weapons as an angry murmur rippled through the rest of the workers.

Hazlegrove looked up at me again. “You got a problem with that?”

“You bet I do. There are
people
trapped down there. Jakob Winquist’s team.”

“Chances are they’re already dead.” He squared his shoulders and looked around, staring at the assembled workers. “Everyone who’s supposed to be working, get back to it. Now.”

Keegan nudged me, and I looked down into her eyes. “Go on,” she muttered. “Tell him.”

“I was just about to.” Louder, I said, “Mr. Hazlegrove, you can’t just abandon them. At least let us dig long enough to find out whether they’re alive!”

He walked over to me, stopped two yards away, and looked up. Then—trying to appear casual—he took a few steps back so he could better see my reaction. There was the smallest trace of a smirk on his lips. “Go for it. But you’ll be wasting
your
time, not mine. Any rescue attempt is to be done off shift.” He turned his back on me, addressing the others. “Is that understood? Dig for your friends if you want, but as far as I’m concerned, they’re dead. That’s
official
. And since they are officially dead, if it happens that any of them are not, then they get no more rations. You feed them out of your own share. However you decide to do that, it’s up to you.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, at me. “So blame the giant Smurf here if you find yourself going hungry.”

Back in the day, I could have grabbed him, crushed him into a ball, and thrown him straight through the dome. But although I was still much stronger than an ordinary man, the old days were long gone.

Hazlegrove stalked away without looking at me for my reaction, because he knew me. He knew I was beaten. I’ve been a beaten man ever since I was first dumped in this place.

For the first few months after I arrived, I worked with some of the other prisoners on a dozen escape plans. And one time three of us almost made it out. But the guards … Well, it’s fair
to say they weren’t chosen for their kindness and understanding. They caught us in the act, and shot Diego and Catharina right in front of me. Then they shot
me
, square in the back of my head. But I was a lot luckier than the others in one way: My skin is tough. It’s not quite bulletproof, but it’s strong enough that even at point-blank range the bullets don’t usually penetrate more than a half inch.

So they shot me again, and again. Maybe two dozen times in total, until I collapsed. They gave me a few days to recover—left me chained up in one of the work sheds—and then it was back to work. As punishment, my shift was expanded from twelve hours a day to sixteen.

That was before Hazlegrove came to the mine, of course, when his predecessor DaLemacio was in charge. DaLemacio died a couple of years later when a crossbeam supporting the crushers snapped. One of the steel cables whipped back and caught him in the side of his head, which cracked open like a soft-boiled egg hit with a spoon. That was the closest thing we’d ever had to a vacation.

Hazlegrove was given the job on the grounds that he would cut costs. And he lived up to that promise: He reduced our rations and installed rain barrels to catch the runoff of rainwater from the dome. Rainwater is much cheaper than pumping the water from the river three miles away, and who cares if it’s stagnant and filthy? We were prisoners. We didn’t deserve clean water.

But those were only minor cuts compared with Hazlegrove’s greatest achievement. He’d concluded that the kids were a drain on the mine’s resources: They consumed food
but didn’t give anything back. Hazlegrove’s plan was simple: Any children under the age of five had to share their parents’ rations. Any kids older than that would receive their own rations—as long as they worked.

The younger kids swept up, dragged buckets of platinum ore to the crushers, and ran messages across the compound from one guard to another. If they didn’t work, or if they dropped a bucket once too often, they were beaten. Oh, the guards showed
some
kindness by beating the kids only with their hands and not their truncheons, but the first time I saw it happen … I lost control.

I grabbed hold of the guard—a fat man called Vamos—and punched him in the face. That one punch broke his nose and all of his teeth, shattered his jaw, and fractured his skull. Sadly, he lived, but at least he quit the mine soon afterward.

Hazlegrove punished me again for that. He cut my rations by three quarters, and I’m a big guy; I need to eat a lot. When after a few weeks it was clear that starvation hadn’t curbed my anger, he picked three of my friends and had the guards beat them within an inch of their lives.

Now, as Hazlegrove walked away from me, I had to suppress the urge to leap up and come down on his head, and keep jumping on him until every one of his bones turned to jelly.

Keegan saw the look on my face, and she reached up and put her hand on my arm. “We’ll get them out,” she said with a forced smile.

A couple of the others approached. “What’s the plan?” Cosmo asked. In the outside world, Cosmo would never have
survived. His weak muscles gave him just about enough strength to stand upright. Unable to dig or carry anything, Cosmo had been assigned the task of operating one of the crushers, and he couldn’t even do that for very long: He was barely strong enough to pull the machine’s levers.

“I don’t have a plan,” I said, and then added, “yet.” I sat down cross-legged and shrugged. “Maybe we can dig a side tunnel through from D?”

Keegan nodded. “Yeah, that might work. If the blockage isn’t too heavy, there’s a good chance some of Jakob’s team is still alive. So we pick a spot about seventy, eighty yards in—that should be past the blockage—and we bore through. The shafts are about twenty yards apart at that depth. It’ll take a couple of days, and that’s only if we don’t hit any bedrock.”

Cosmo said, “No, look, here’s what we should do…. Instead of digging a full-size tunnel from D, we just dig a bore-hole. Wide enough for me. That’ll be a lot faster. I can go through, see if there’s anyone alive in there.”

“Good thinking,” Keegan said, and Cosmo beamed at that. He’d had a crush on Keegan since the first day they met. She continued, “If there
is
anyone alive, you can bring them food and water while we work on widening the tunnel.”

By now, there were two dozen workers gathered around us. And they were looking at me to give them the go-ahead. They saw me as their leader. They always had. Not because I’m smarter than anyone else—which I’m definitely not—or because I’ve been here so long. It’s because I’m bigger and stronger.

I don’t like being a leader. I’ve
never
liked that. I’m much
happier following other people’s instructions. Actually, I’m happiest when I’m completely on my own, but it’s been a very long time since I was able to indulge in that luxury.

Keegan reached up to my shoulder and casually brushed the dust and tiny flakes of rock from my blue skin. “What do you say, Brawn?”

I nodded. “All right. Let’s get to work.”

I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD
when my world ended. Not
the
world, of course. Just
my
world.

It was Sunday morning, and I was in church, in the choir. Not by my own choice, mind you. My mother had made me join a year earlier. I came home from school one day, and when I opened the door, she was waiting for me with Pastor Cullen. “Here’s my little darling now, Pastor! Isn’t he adorable? Voice like an angel! Go on, sweetheart, sing something for the pastor!”

“Ma, no!” I pleaded.

“No, petal. You have to. Sing ‘Always on My Mind’—you love that one!”

That was embarrassing, and made even worse because my best friends Adrian and Jaz were right behind me.

I turned bright red and then Jaz nudged me in the back. “Go ahead, Elvis,” he said. “We don’t mind waiting.”

I spent the next year trying to live that one down. It didn’t help that I actually
was
able to sing. Pretty soon Pastor Cullen was giving me solos.

I didn’t want to do it, but I couldn’t say no to Ma. Well, I
could
have said no, but it wouldn’t have made any difference: When she set her mind on something, that was it.

Pastor Cullen was the same: No matter how much you protested, he did things his own way. That was why everyone in the choir had to dress up in a long white vestment. An alb, it’s called. Goes from your neck right down to your ankles. Not so embarrassing to be seen in when you’re with nineteen other choristers, but it’s horrible when you’re doing a solo and all your friends come along and sit in the front row just so they can make faces at you and try to get you to crack up, and then they rib you about it for ages. “Dude, how come you’re not wearing your
dress
today?”

The only concession Ma made was to allow me to wear my sweatpants and a T-shirt under my alb: It was bad enough to have to wear that thing without having to have a suit on under it.

But when I was twelve … It was the last Sunday in September. I was with the rest of the choir, and feeling a little nervous because I had to sing “God’s Glory Be the Highest” and wasn’t completely confident of the middle eight.

Pastor Cullen was at the pulpit in the middle of his sermon. He was about sixty years old, white haired, red faced, and jowly. He had far too much nose hair and ear hair for
one man, and he always smelled of stale sweat and laundry detergent.

The church was an old building, constructed back in the day when it was fashionable to decorate them with all the oak, marble, and gold paint the builders could get their hands on. I was standing off to the side, right next to the marble pulpit, which was a prized spot among the choir because the pastor didn’t allow us to have chairs—we had to stand for the whole service—and on really sweltering days we could rest against the pulpit and cool ourselves down a little.

That day Pastor Cullen was on a particularly long and rambling rant. “The spirit of the community is that of its individuals. The Lord tells us, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ If one person is unhappy, that brings us all down, so we must strive to bolster our community by enhancing the lives of those around us. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ This is not purely a Christian concept. Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and followers of many other faiths—even some that predate Christianity—subscribe to the idea of karma: You will be repaid in kind for the manner in which you treat others. ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’ That is as true for matters of the spirit as it is for matters of the community. Good and evil, selfishness and altruism, kindness and greed … These are within all of us. We choose the nature of our character, and that choice affects everything we do and infects those around us. We cannot choose our neighbors, but we
can
choose how we treat them.”