Stronger: A Super Human Clash (21 page)

“It was the cops,” I said. “They got lucky.”

“The cops, wasn’t it? Yeah, I could sense that. I have a kind of sixth sense about us superhumans. Met this guy last year. Only about twenty, maybe twenty-one. He’s one of us too. But, y’know”—the Slayer tapped a forefinger against the side of his head—“his power’s all mental. The guy’s smart as a whip and says he knows all about the powers. Like, he knows
why
we have them. He wouldn’t tell me that, but he did tell me that he’s working on a way to boost everyone’s power. Well, not
everyone’s
. Just the people he trusts. He reckons he’ll be able to give powers to ordinary people, or take them away from the superhumans he doesn’t like.”

For the first time I was really paying attention to The Slayer. “What’s his name?”

“No idea. He found me in Cincinnati. I was hiding out in this apartment for a couple of weeks, lying low, and the guy just showed up at the door. Told me he knew who I was, and that he was working on something big and wanted to put a team together.”

“Do you think he was telling the truth? About being able to remove someone’s powers, I mean?”

“Sure, yeah.” The Slayer nodded. “Like I said, he knew the powers inside and out. Kept mentioning the blue lights.”

“The blue lights?”

“Said that it’s something to do with the powers, and that not many people can see them. They’re like big balls of energy that float around. You ever see anything like that?”

“No.”

“Pity. Probably still true, though. Anyway, the guy was supposed to contact me again after a couple of months, but then I got caught.” He nudged my arm with his elbow. “Did I ever tell you
who
caught me?”

“No, who was it?”

“Titan. How about that, huh? That shows you the level
I’m
at. Took Titan to bring me down.”

The Scarlet Slayer continued talking about Titan for the next ten minutes, which gave me time to think. The young man he talked about … I figured it could be the same one that Dr. Tremont had mentioned when he first showed up in Antarctica. The doctor had said, “I know for a
fact
that your people have recruited a seventeen-year-old boy who’s been gifted with intelligence that’s completely off the charts.” If that boy had been seventeen then, that would make him twenty-one now.

Dr. Tremont had proved to be a liar, but maybe not everything he’d said was part of his scheme to manipulate me. Maybe there was some truth to it.

I interrupted The Slayer’s story about his battle with Titan. “Listen, that guy who claimed to know all about the powers … You’re sure he didn’t tell you how to get in touch with him?”

The Slayer shrugged. “Not that I recall.”

“The team he mentioned, then. Did he name any other superhumans he was talking to?”

He leaned back and squinted into the distance as he thought about that. “Yeah … Well, no. He said that he was going to try to find Façade. You know that guy? The one who can change his appearance. Now, that’s a power I’d love.” The Slayer lifted his right leg onto the table and pointed to the chunky black bracelet fixed around his ankle. “See that? Stops me from flying. If I get more than fifty feet off the ground, it zaps me. I miss flying. It’s the
best
, let me tell you, but if I could, I’d trade it for the ability to change my appearance.”

“Anyone else?”

“Nah, don’t remember him mentioning any other names.”

My mind was racing. I knew I had to find that man. If he
had
found a way to remove a superhuman’s powers …

For the first time in four years, I felt something like hope. Hope that maybe that guy could remove my
own
powers. Maybe he could even turn me back into a normal human.

Three months after I arrived at Oak Grove, I was woken in the middle of the night by the sound of something very heavy crashing into a wall.

I sat up and turned on the light, but the sound didn’t come again.

Eventually I drifted back to sleep, and later I woke to find that it was already breakfast time.

Normally, I was woken by the guards an hour earlier.

But that morning, nothing. I wasn’t able to open the cell door from the inside, and there were no windows, so I had no idea what was going on. All I could do was wait.

At first I figured that maybe it was the bug going around: The previous day about ten of the guards had called in sick, and Mr. Chapman had said his wife had caught it too.

I turned on the radio, but my usual channel wasn’t on the air. I had to go all the way up and down the dial a few times before I found a station that was broadcasting. A woman’s voice said, “… last we heard, reports were coming in from all over the world of outbreaks of the flu-like plague. So far, it seems to be affecting only adults over the age of twenty.” She sneezed a couple of times. “Oh, please don’t tell me I’ve got it too! Hold tight, listeners. I’ll come right back.”

She didn’t come back at all. After a few minutes the silence broke up into static.

The walls of my cell were solid concrete, but I could usually hear some faint sounds echoing through the ventilation system. That morning there was nothing.

Then I remembered the noise that had woken me earlier, and I started to worry. Something had happened. And given that this was a prison housing a lot of superhumans, it probably wasn’t something good.

As loudly as I could, I bellowed, “Hey! What’s happening out there?!”

There was no response. I called out a few more times, but there was nothing.

I could go through the wall
, I told myself.
It’s pretty tough, but it shouldn’t take
too
long. Mr. Chapman would understand.

But I knew I couldn’t do that: It would reveal to the other prisoners that my powers were intact, and that would open up a great big can of worms.

So instead I waited. And waited. I decided that if no one showed up by nightfall, I’d go through the wall and to heck with the agreement I’d made with the DA.

After what felt like hours, during which my stomach began to seriously ache with hunger and I started to imagine that everyone else in the prison had died of the mysterious plague and I was the only one left alive, I finally heard something: the crash of metal on metal.

I jumped to my feet. “Hey! In here!”

I paused to listen, then a muffled voice came back: “Hello? Anyone there?”

“Yes! Yes!” I shouted. “In here! Thank God, I thought I was going to starve to death in this place!”

“Where are you?” The voice was louder now, a girl, clear enough to be outside in the corridor.

“Third room on the left. There’s a steel door!”

I waited anxiously for the familiar sounds of the door being unlocked, but it was taking too long.

“Hello?” I shouted. “You still there?”

She said, “Um … Listen … Do you know what’s going on?”

“A plague, right?” I said. “Pretty much everyone who’s over the age of twenty is infected. It was on the radio before it went off the air. Is that what’s happened?”

“Yeah. Look, it was done deliberately. There’s an organization called The Helotry who’ve done this for, well, it’s too complicated to get into it now. But I need to stop them, and I can’t do it on my own. So I need two things from you before I let you out. First, I don’t care what you’re in here for, but if you’re a superhuman, then I need your help. The Helotry’s plague is going to kill millions of people if we can’t stop them. So you have to swear that you’re going to help me.”

“I swear!”

“OK. And the second thing … you’re definitely a superhuman?”

“No doubt about that.” I was just about to ask her to find a couple of guys to help her unlock the door when I heard the mechanism begin to ratchet open, so I figured she wasn’t on her own.

But when the heavy bolts were drawn back and the door was pulled open, I was surprised to see that she
was
alone.

As soon as she saw me, she backed away.
Why is no one ever pleased to see me?
I wondered. Of course I knew the answer, but just once it would be nice for someone new to smile when they met me.

I did my best not to smile at the girl, though. She was African-American, about fourteen or fifteen years old, and absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. I’d never had any time for girls before I became Brawn, and few opportunities to meet them afterward.

“Remember the deal?” she asked.

“I remember. You know who I am?”

She nodded. “Of course I do. You’re Brawn.”

For once I didn’t hate that name. Not when
she
said it.

Her name was Abigail de Luyando. Though at first we stuck together only because of circumstance, looking back I can see that she was the best friend I ever had. And even to this day, I can’t think about her without my heart aching.

FOR A SHORT WHILE
—not nearly long enough—we were kind of a team. There was me, Abby, Max Dalton’s sister Roz, a guy called Thunder who could control sound waves, and a kid with no powers who somehow just kept tagging along. That was Lance. If he’d had a superhero name, it would have been Big Mouth.

The organization that Abby mentioned—The Helotry—had plans to take over the world. It seemed like that was
everyone’s
plan in those days. I remember thinking that anyone who really wanted to take over the world should be locked up for their own safety. I mean, most people can barely organize a dinner party without messing up some part of it.

The Helotry had worked in secret for thousands of years, worshipping a long-dead warrior called Krodin who was
apparently the first-ever superhuman. They brought him to our time, and, man, he was one tough opponent.

He was only average sized, but he was as strong as I was and much, much faster. He was a vicious fighter, too, and he was invulnerable. Not in the same way as, say, The Shark, who just couldn’t be damaged. Krodin could be hurt, but he healed almost instantly, and anything you did to him usually worked only once. His body could adapt to anything.

The Helotry had recruited Slaughter. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to take her on, and in light of what happened a few years later, that is my single biggest regret. They’d also recruited Pyrokine—that was why they’d attacked the prison—and used his power to help transport Krodin from the past.

But, with some help from Paragon, Quantum, and Max Dalton, we beat them, and we saved the world. It wasn’t without cost: Pyrokine switched sides, and sacrificed himself to destroy Krodin. It was a massive, powerful blast that, we later learned, wasn’t simply a big explosion.

After that, I returned to Oak Grove. It wasn’t really my choice: Officially I was still a prisoner, and since the whole Krodin situation was kept secret, having me wandering free would have raised far too many questions.

But three weeks later we discovered that Krodin hadn’t died in Pyrokine’s blast. Instead, he’d been sent back in time about five or six years. Without any of us around to stop him, he began to work his way into a position of power. He recruited Max Dalton, who used his ability to read and control minds to make sure that things went Krodin’s way.

Krodin became the chancellor of the United States of America, responsible for the nation’s security, and he used that position to build his own army.

Max and Krodin enlisted the help of a young superhuman genius called Casey Duval to create powerful weapons and advanced machines, and it wasn’t long before they had sealed off the United States from the rest of the world.

Casey later turned on them, mostly because Krodin kind of brings that out in people, but one of his inventions was a teleporter that would allow Krodin to transport his soldiers instantly to anywhere in the world. The technology was based on the method Pyrokine had used to bring Krodin out of the past.

Of course,
we
didn’t know any of this…. By sending Krodin back in time, Pyrokine had split the time line in two. In the “real” time line, we carried on as normal, but in the alternate one Krodin materialized five or six years earlier and set about creating his empire.

The first time Krodin’s teleporter was used, those of us who’d been present for the battle with Krodin were somehow dragged into that alternate version of Earth.

It was not a nice place. The people lived in constant fear, every aspect of their lives monitored at all times. Almost all of that world’s superhumans had either been killed or recruited by Krodin.

At his base in the swamplands of Louisiana, we fought Krodin alongside his former ally Casey Duval, who had taken on the identity of the armored superhero Daedalus. But Casey wasn’t fighting Krodin because that was the right thing to
do: His plan had been to allow Krodin to build his empire, and then Casey would kill Krodin and take it from him. I guess if you’re desperate to rule the world, that’s the way to do it: Let someone else do all the work, and then step in at the end.

But Casey’s plan didn’t take into account the fact that Krodin was much, much tougher than any of us had guessed…. After a battle that pretty much tore the base apart—and almost got me killed in the process—Krodin punched his fist straight through Casey’s armor, killing him instantly.

In the end, Krodin was defeated by his own technology. Because his body could adapt to anything, we couldn’t use the teleporter to send him far away. It had been used on him once, so it wouldn’t work again.

Or so we thought … But Lance turned out to be smarter than we realized. He set the teleporter’s controls to pick Krodin out of the past, from the very moment he materialized after his battle with Pyrokine. Back then, you see, Krodin hadn’t experienced the teleporter, so his body had no defense against its effects.

Lance sent him somewhere far away. He wouldn’t say where, just that Krodin would not be coming back.

The instant Lance activated the teleporter and pulled Krodin out of the past, the time line was corrected and everything went back to the way it should have been. Krodin’s empire vanished, because it never existed.

But, as before, those of us who were caught up in Krodin’s blast somehow remained unaffected by the shift in time
lines…. We stayed in the same place while the world restructured itself around us: We were suddenly stranded in the middle of a swamp in Louisiana.