Stronger: A Super Human Clash (5 page)

But even that didn’t slow me much: I surged through the soil as easily as someone running through a shallow pond.

I knew the town well, of course. There’s hardly a twelve-year-old kid in the world who doesn’t know every secret nook and cranny in his hometown. I knew the shortcuts through the housing estates, the barely visible paths through the woods. And I knew the caves: That’s where I was heading.

Back in the church, Harmony Yuan had mentioned thermal
scanners. I’d watched enough cop shows and read enough comic books to know what they were: cameras that detected heat instead of light. And I knew that someone of my size would be giving off a
lot
of heat—more than enough for them to be able to track me.

But not in the caves, I was sure. The caves were old and huge and went on for miles. And some of them held deep lakes where, according to the guide when my elementary class was there on a field trip, the temperature was the same all year-round. That would be the perfect place to hide.

All right, God
, I prayed.
If you’re not going to change me back, at least let me get away from these guys!

In some respects, that was a clever plan. For a twelve-year-old. But, being only twelve, I hadn’t quite learned how to think everything through. Sure, immersing myself in the underground lake masked my heat signature, but it didn’t occur to me that the soldiers would simply start looking in the place where the heat signature had suddenly disappeared.

They tracked me, they found me, and they caught me.

When I was about six or seven, Pa saw me kneeling beside my bed praying for a new bike. He’d picked me up, and sat down on the bed with me on his lap. He said, “The thing about prayer, son … Well, it doesn’t work like that.”

I said, “But Ma said that God answers
every
prayer!”

“Yeah, that’s right, Gethin. He does. But, sometimes, the answer is no.”

WE KNEW THAT HAZLEGROVE
was keeping an eye on us as we worked to dig the narrow horizontal passage through to the C shaft. Maybe he was curious to see whether any of Jakob’s team had survived. Maybe it was because an event like this had a tendency to bring people together, and the last thing a prison guard wants is his prisoners united in a common cause.

That was one of the reasons the rations were so meager: They fed us just enough to keep us alive and working, plus a little more so that we could argue over who’d received the biggest share. It was almost a science. If they fed us a decent amount, we’d have the strength to fight the guards, and if they starved us, we’d revolt.

But by keeping us on the edge of hunger at all times and allowing some prisoners certain privileges—longer breaks, showers with warm water, the opportunity to wash their
clothing, an extra blanket on cold nights—it sparked resentment among the other prisoners.

Hazlegrove knew that cruelty had to be tempered with logic: You can torture people, but only to a point. Once past that point the victim will turn on you, so the trick is to always keep a close eye on how far you’re pushing them.

As we worked to reach Jakob’s team, Hazlegrove sent guards down every hour into the D tunnel to watch our progress. The guards always came in threes, for their own safety.

But it was Hazlegrove himself who caught up with me as I was on my third trip down, followed as ever by Swinden and DePaiva. “You really think they’re still alive, Brawn?” He tapped his swagger stick against the side of his leg as he walked.

“I’m hoping they are.”

“Hmm … Hope. The prisoner’s friend. What else are you hoping for, I wonder? Freedom?”

I kept my head down as I pushed the cart ahead of me. Not because I didn’t want to look him in the eye, but because the tunnel wasn’t big enough for me to stand upright. “Why not?”

Swinden said, “It’ll never happen, you know. You’ll die here.”

“You’re assuming that I
can
die. Maybe I’m immortal.”

“But you’re not superhuman anymore, are you?” Hazlegrove asked. “You people all lost your powers. Maybe once, you could have torn this whole facility apart with your bare hands, but not now. Sure, you’re much stronger than a normal person, but that’s just because of your size. You’re still blue and still thirteen feet tall, but that’s all. You’re as human as every one of your friends here.”

“If you say so.”

He sighed. “What’s the point of saving them? Even if they survived the tunnel collapsing on top of them, they’ll die sooner or later. Malnutrition, another accident, infection, infighting … Or they’ll just reach the end of their usefulness and we’ll execute them.”

“Is that how it’s going to happen? When we get too old, you’ll just shoot us in the head?”

“Probably.”

“So what’s to stop us from just dropping our tools and refusing to work? If we’re going to die anyway, why don’t we just let you get it over with?”

He laughed. “That brings us back to the prisoner’s friend. Hope.”

I said nothing for a moment, just kept pushing the cart. Then I turned my head to face him. In the weak yellow-orange
glow cast by the lights fixed to the walls, he looked almost friendly. “Mr. Hazlegrove, you’re right, I’m not as strong as I used to be. But you know that I could still crush your skull in one hand, don’t you? And I could do it faster than your friends here could react. I just grab, squeeze, and you’re dead.”

He didn’t seem bothered by this. “And my guards would kill you.”

“Not easily. I’m not superhuman anymore, but it would take a heck of a lot of bullets to bring me down.”

“You won’t do it. You know that if you did, the consequences would be severe. Remember?”

I remembered. Four years earlier I had tried my second escape attempt. One night I climbed up onto the dome where I figured there were no cameras, no guards watching. I was right about that—the dome covered almost the entire compound and was far too big to monitor—and I would have made it too except that Hazlegrove’s men heard me scrambling across the apex. By the time I reached the other side, he was waiting for me with four guards.

Each of the guards was standing behind another prisoner, holding a gun to the back of the prisoner’s head. Not a word was said: I slid down off the dome, landed on my feet, and walked back into the compound. Since then, I’d had a good half-dozen opportunities to get out, but I knew I couldn’t do it without someone else paying the price.

When we reached Keegan and the others, I started to empty the buckets back into the cart, two at a time.

Hazlegrove aimed his flashlight into the narrow shaft they’d dug. “You’ve a long way to go.”

“We’ll do it,” Keegan said.

“I’m sure you will. But for the next sixteen hours you’ll have to do it without your blue friend.” He looked at me. “Your next shift starts in eleven minutes.”

Cosmo, who’d been using his feeble hands to move the chipped-away rock one stone at a time, said, “But that’s totally unfair! Brawn’s been working twenty-four hours straight!”

Hazlegrove said, “I don’t make the rules. Oh, wait, yes I do.” He grinned at us, then turned away.

And immediately turned back. He stared at Cosmo. “You. You don’t
ever
speak to me in that manner, understood?”

Cosmo nodded, and looked away.

Hazlegrove lashed out with the swagger stick, catching Cosmo across the face, the blow hard enough to send the thin man crashing against the jagged wall of the tunnel.

As Hazlegrove pulled back his arm to strike again, I stepped between them. “Another blow could kill him. You don’t want that, do you, Mr. Hazlegrove?”

The tip of the swagger stick was waved menacingly in front of my face. “Are you
threatening
me, freak?”

“Just stating a fact.”

He sneered. “If you can work a sixteen-hour shift, then do another three or four hours down here, and still have the strength to
state facts
, Brawn, then it seems to me that we’re not making the best use of your talents. From now on, you do
twenty
-hour shifts.” He poked me in the chest with the tip of the stick. “Get the message?”

“Loud and clear.” I picked up two more buckets and dumped their contents into the cart.

“Good. Because I’m starting to think you’re more trouble than you’re worth.” Hazlegrove stalked away, followed back up the tunnel by his two cronies.

“You should get going,” Keegan said to me. “If you’re late for the start of your shift …”

“I’ll make it. You OK, Cosmo?”

He nodded. “Man, we’ve got to get out of this place.”

“What’s the word from Jakob?” I asked, glancing at the tunnel.

“They’re getting there. It’ll be a few more days, though.”

I dumped the last of the buckets and tossed them aside. “Good work. See you guys in about twenty hours.” I crouched behind the half-full cart and started pushing. Its steel-wrapped wheels screamed under the weight, and I felt like joining in.

The rockfall that had apparently trapped Jakob’s team had been no accident. It had taken months of careful planning and subtle manipulation of the rosters to get all of the strongest diggers—except me, of course—on one team. For weeks we’d been storing supplies of food and water in the depths of the shaft where the guards rarely visited.

The narrow tunnel we were digging to connect D shaft and C shaft wasn’t really so that Cosmo could squirm through and search for the others. It was a ventilation shaft that would provide fresh air to the sealed portion of C shaft.

Even now, Jakob and his men were working furiously, probably nonstop, doing exactly what years of prison life had trained them to do: They were digging. Heading slowly but steadily to the surface. Tunneling their way out.

ABOUT TWICE A MONTH
Harmony Yuan visited me in the cell block. I didn’t know
where
the cell block was—somewhere underground, I assumed, because there were no windows—but I guess they treated me pretty well. Three solid meals a day, a TV set that showed two old movies every evening, a dozen new books every month and a bed made from four thick mattresses laid side to side. The cell was a cube, thirty feet on each side—just enough space for me to walk around a little, but not enough for me to build up speed if I decided to take a run at the walls.

All but one of the walls were solid stone: The fourth wall was glass, with a small door that opened into the cell and had beveled sides that prevented me from pushing it out, and nothing on the inside that provided enough grip for me to pull it open.

The very first morning, I woke to find Harmony standing outside the cell. “You’re going to try to break out. You’ll fail.” She rapped on the glass with her knuckles. “This is a metallic glass, one of the toughest substances in the world. It’s so new that its inventors haven’t even come up with a clever name for it yet. We don’t know the limits of your strength, but we’ll be very surprised if you can even make a scratch in this.”

I tried, of course. Again and again. I slammed into the glass with my shoulder, punched it, kicked it, slammed my oversized steel chair into it so often that by the time I gave up, the chair was nothing but a mangled pile of metal bars.

They’d given me clothes: three pairs of blue jeans, three white T-shirts. Harmony said that they’d been specially made by a guy who worked as a costume designer in Hollywood—he’d been told that they were needed for a new movie adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel
The Shrinking Man
. Harmony even gave me a copy of the book.

Harmony always sat in the same place, on a wooden chair in front of my cell’s glass wall. On some visits she spoke, telling me a little of what was going on in the world, but a lot of the time she just sat and looked at me. It made me feel like I was an animal in a zoo.

Occasionally, she would speak about the missing boy, telling me that his parents were sick with worry, that a lot of people were petitioning the governor to have me tried and executed.

She told me that Pastor Cullen was now using a wheelchair and probably would be for the rest of his life, and that Gethin Rao’s parents had been utterly broken by the loss of their son.
“There are still search parties every weekend,” Harmony told me. “They’re hoping that the boy was scared and ran, and that he’ll eventually turn up safe and sound.”

But they never gave me anything to write with, despite all the different ways to mime “give me a pen!” that I could think of. I figured pretty early on that they knew what I wanted, but just weren’t going to give it to me. Once, I even spelled out my name with books on the floor, but no one seemed to care.

My memory of how they’d caught me was a little fuzzy for a long time. I was able to recall lowering myself into one of the deep, cold underground lakes in the caves, and I clearly remember waking up in the cell, but what they did to me in between those events I had no solid idea.

Eventually, Harmony told me that the soldiers had dumped a hundred gallons of liquid nitrogen into the lake. They’d then chipped me out of the ice and were astonished to discover that I was still alive. That, apparently, had changed everything: They had to learn more about me. “And so we brought you here,” Harmony had said. But she refused to tell me where “here” was.

Aside from the two guys who brought me my meals and books and once a month herded me into another cell so that mine could be cleaned, and the bunch of guards with guns and gas masks who always accompanied them, Harmony was the only person I saw for months.

Then one day, as she sat watching me in silence, a pot bellied middle-aged man wearing tan-colored slacks and jacket came
from the corridor carrying a fold-up chair. He set it down next to her and lowered himself into it, then folded his arms and looked at me. “Remarkable. He’s clearly intelligent.”

Harmony stared at him for a moment. “And
you
are … ?”

“Intelligent? Yes, I am. Very. Gordon Tremont, from UCLA. Expert in linguistics, communications, and microprocessor design. Your boss invited me, which is a generous way of saying that I was press-ganged. Threatened with all manner of distasteful events should I refuse, blindfolded and taken in the middle of the night. Two days traveling with not one clue as to where we are. How very paranoid of him. He told me to see if I could, as he put it, ‘make some sense outta that creature’s language.’”