Stronger: A Super Human Clash (7 page)

It was surprisingly simple, in the end, and I was annoyed at myself for not thinking of it sooner. It was merely a matter of living up to the beliefs my captors already had about me: I allowed myself to become a monster.

When the two guys let me out of my cell to give it its monthly cleaning, I grabbed hold of both of them. I locked my hands around their little heads and roared at the guards, “You let me go or I’ll kill these two men right here and now!”

All of the guard’s rifles were instantly raised to shoulder height, aimed at my head. One of them shouted, “Let them go! This is your only warning!”

“No!” I roared back. “You listen—”

Immediately a high-pitched, deafening siren began to
wail. Then a thick white mist came squirting through the ventilators—the two guys immediately went limp, unconscious—and the guards decided not to waste time trying to negotiate with me: They started shooting. I threw the two unconscious guys back behind the glass wall of the cell—I didn’t want them to get hit—and took a run at the guards.

A hail of bullets ripped into me, but that didn’t slow me down. I grabbed the nearest guard and threw him at his friends like a bowling ball. Took hold of another and used him as a battering ram to force my way to the end of the corridor, where a massive steel door had slammed down.

It took me almost a minute to punch a hole in the door and then tear the hole wide enough for me to climb through.

Another long corridor, this one absolutely
packed
with soldiers. All wearing white protective gear, all aiming their guns at me.

I paused for a moment, wondering whether it was worth the effort. I was pretty sure I’d survive whatever they threw at me, but I was already in a lot of pain: My entire body was covered in bullet holes, my clothes almost torn to shreds.

And then I thought,
They
can’t
open fire—they’d hit the guys behind me!

They opened fire.

It was like being caught in a sudden sandstorm, only with bullets instead of sand. Behind me, five or six soldiers died, shot by their own men, and I finally understood the seriousness of my situation: If they were willing to sacrifice their own people to keep me prisoner, then they were capable of anything.

I tore a large chunk off the steel door, then held it in front of me as I ran.

A crescendo of bullets ricocheted off my makeshift shield as I plowed through the soldiers, knocking them aside, no longer worried about hurting them. If they didn’t care about me or each other, why should I care about them?

I’m sure I even stepped on a few as I ran. Probably broke a lot of bones.

To my right, four soldiers rushed from an open doorway. As the doors were closing behind them, I had a quick glimpse of dozens of rows of computer terminals, all manned by scared-looking people bundled up in thick coats, gloves, and fur-lined hats.

The four soldiers immediately opened fire at me, but I was moving fast and protected by my shield. One of them was struck by a ricochet from his own gun, which served him right, but his colleagues didn’t try to help him: They just kept shooting.

At the end of this second corridor was another set of steel doors, but as I approached them, they opened, showing me daylight for the first time in a year.

Outside. The air was almost achingly cold, and breathing was already difficult with a hundred bullet wounds in my chest and arms, but the first deep breaths I took were heavenly.

I looked around, saw that I was on the edge of a large flat, open area surrounded by a high ridge, like the inside of a crater. It was maybe a couple of hundred yards across, with the doors at one side and a shallow ramp on the opposite side. Off to the left, three large white half-track trucks were lined up.
The ridge and the ground were dazzlingly white from the sunlight, almost blinding, but I refused to let that stop me.

Behind me, there was a deep rumble as the doors began to close once more, and my first thought was that they had decided it was safer to let me go…. And then I saw the massive white-painted anti-aircraft guns fixed to the ridge that encircled the compound. Three of them, all with their barrels turning in my direction.

All three of the anti-aircraft guns fired simultaneously—and uselessly. Maybe it was the frustration of being locked up for so long, or maybe my strength and speed had grown, but I saw the missiles coming, homing in on me as I ran, and at the last second I jumped up and sailed over them so that they detonated against the doors behind me.

At the apex of the jump—which had to be thirty feet at least—I flung my crude shield at the nearest gun. It spun through the air like a giant misshapen Frisbee and crashed into the gun with enough force to shatter it into useless fragments that showered the area, raining down on the two soldiers who’d jumped out of the gun just in time.

The moment I landed, the remaining two guns fired again. I dodged the first shell, but the second slammed into the ground at my feet. The explosion sent me hurtling backward, tumbling head over heels. I crashed face-first into the back of one of the half-track trucks and kept going, straight through the truck’s cab.

I landed heavily on my back, the wind knocked out of me.

But I was on my feet again in seconds, running back to the ruined truck.

In the cell I’d read about Vikings going on a berserker rage, where they got so worked up before a battle that practically nothing could stop them…. That was what was happening to me: I was getting free and I didn’t care what it took.

I honestly believe that if I’d had to kill some of the soldiers, I would have done it without pause.

When I reached the truck, I skidded to a stop, crouched down beside it, and took hold of the chassis. It took very little effort to raise the entire truck over my head and throw it at another of the anti-aircraft guns.

The truck flipped as it arced through the air, coming down roof-first on top of the gun. But I didn’t stop to admire what a great shot that had been. I was already running for the third of the guns, racing up the steep embankment.

The guys working the gun had time to fire six shots before they panicked and ran. I dodged the first two shells, leaped over the third, ducked under the fourth. I swatted the fifth shell aside. I caught the sixth in my left hand, and then my face was only inches away from the barrel. On either side, the two soldiers were running like crazy.

“Yeah, you
better
run!” I yelled after them.

I put the shell nose-first into the barrel, drew back my fist, and punched as hard as I could.

The explosion was extremely satisfying, and I hoped that the guns I’d destroyed had cost a fortune.

I pulled the ruined barrel off my hand and looked back down toward the prison doors. There was no sign of activity, except for the six gun operators, all running in different directions.

I poked through the wreckage of the gun for something I could use as a weapon if anyone came after me, and found a small rectangular handheld computer. It was badly scorched, its plastic buttons had melted, and the screen was cracked, but its metal casing seemed to be intact. I was about to toss it aside when I spotted the date and time in the corner of the screen:
23:02 Dec 16
. But I knew that couldn’t be right—it was clearly daytime.

Then the time changed to 23:03, and I became aware that something was out of place, something my subconscious had noticed but the rest of me had been too busy to worry about.

Most of the soldiers had been wearing white. The truck and the anti-aircraft guns had also been white.

I looked around. The ground in the crater and the ridge on which I was standing … It wasn’t rock that seemed white because my eyes weren’t used to the light. It was densely packed snow.

I scanned the horizon. It was almost perfectly flat, and there was nothing but snow in all directions. There were no mountains, no trees, no fields or roads.

The sun was above the horizon. If the time and date on the computer were both correct, that meant there was only one place on the planet I could be.

Antarctica.

FROM MY VANTAGE POINT
on the edge of the crater I looked back down over the base. The massive doors through which I’d escaped were still closed—though now scorched from the explosions—and I wanted them to stay that way.

But my first task was to round up the six fleeing soldiers. Even though they’d tried to kill me, I wasn’t about to leave them out in the open where they might freeze to death.

The first one turned out to be the most difficult to catch: He darted across the packed snow like he was a native. Without slowing, he scrambled over ice ridges, leaped across seemingly bottomless crevasses, skidded down embankments…. He was great. I could easily picture him in an action movie, the plucky hero escaping from the giant blue monster. But he was still only human. I could run at more than twice his speed, and—so far—the cold hadn’t affected me much.

When I got close enough, I launched myself into the air and came down directly behind him, snagging the fur-lined hood of his parka. He immediately unzipped the parka and darted away, his breath misting in the subzero air.

“Hey!” I roared at him. “How long do you think you’ll last out here without your coat? I promise I’m not going to hurt you!” I called. “I’m just going to lock you guys up long enough for me to get away!”

But still he kept running.

I caught him a couple of minutes later. The cold was already slowing him down. His face and neck were almost white enough to match the snow, but shot through with red lines and blotches. Lumps of ice had formed on his beard and eyebrows.

I handed him his parka. “Put that on, you idiot!”

As he struggled into the coat, I looked around to see how far we’d come from the base. It turned out that the guy had been circling around: About five hundred yards to my left I could see the columns of smoke billowing from the ruined guns.

I picked up the guy, slung him over my shoulder, and carried him toward the edge of the crater, and we reached it in time to see the five other gunners rushing across the crater’s floor toward the doors, which were now partly open.

“All right,” I said to the soldier as I set him down. “I’m letting you go. Go on. Run.”

He looked up at me for a moment, then slowly began to back away, as though he didn’t trust me. I didn’t blame him
for that—I figured that Harmony had told the soldiers all sorts of lies about me.

I watched as the soldier skidded down the side of the crater and raced for the open door. Then I slowly followed him.

From inside the base I could hear panicked shouts and the screams and whimpers of the wounded—not my fault—but I ignored them all. There were two more half-track trucks in the crater, as well as a bunch of one-man snowmobiles. They were all piled together in front of the doors—and, suitably crushed so that my captors couldn’t use them to follow me or even move them out of the way, they made a pretty good barrier.

For the next hour or two I ran in as straight a line as possible away from the base. With so few landmarks ahead of me, I had to keep checking over my shoulder for the columns of smoke to be sure I wasn’t drifting off to one side or the other.

And then the first blizzard hit. Regardless of how big and strong you might be, a snow blizzard is practically impossible to walk through. Not just because of the freezing temperatures, but because of the wind and low visibility. A steady gale, no matter how hard you try to fight it, will eventually push you off course. If you can’t see more than a few yards ahead and there aren’t any shadows to reveal the position of the sun, you can end up walking in circles.

If I’d been a normal human, the cold would have killed me in minutes, especially since I was wearing only a shirt and a pair of jeans, and they were both riddled with bullet holes.

I don’t know how long I walked, but it was probably three
or four days before I heard the dogs. Huskies, dozens of them, their constant barks and growls carrying far over the frozen desert. I kept moving, hoping that something would present itself before they reached me.

I had no plan other than to escape. I tried to remember something useful about Antarctica, but I kept coming back to one thing: a vague sense of relief that I was on the end of the Earth that had penguins and not the one with polar bears.

One of the things I remembered was that the closest other significant landmass to Antarctica was South America, but that would be useful only if I was on the right part of the continent. If I was on the other side, I could be walking for months.

The thought had occurred to me that my captors couldn’t have built that place just for me: Clearly it had already been established. So what was it? And why were there so many guys working on computers in a room that—judging by the way they were bundled up and the plumes of misting breath in the air—was kept almost as cold as the weather outside?

On what I figured was probably the fifth day, the hunger pangs pounded on the inside of my stomach like a prisoner with a sledgehammer trying to smash his way out of his cell, and my eyelids were going on strike: I had to stop and get some rest.

I could still hear the dogs, but it was impossible to tell how far away they were. They could have been a day behind me, or only a few minutes. Either way, I had to sleep. I found a shallow depression in the ground and lay down in it. It’d give me a little shelter from the wind, though there was the very strong possibility that I might never wake up.

Something wet and warm pressed at my face, my neck, my arms, and legs, and I woke to find myself literally covered in white and black fur. For a brief moment I thought that this was another change, that whatever it was that had turned me into a blue giant had now made me extremely hairy.

Then I noticed a pair of amber-colored eyes looking at me. And another pair, and another. A dozen dogs were lying across my body.

Voices caught my attention, and I raised my head a little to see three bulky figures silhouetted against the low-lying sun. One of the men was talking to the others:
“Oye, mira! Él está vivo. Y despierto.”