The Twisted Future (Teen Superheroes Book 4) (5 page)

Chapter Eleven

‘Excuse me,’ he yelled. ‘I’m looking for some directions.’

Fifty feet lay between him and the man they were about to execute. Chad waved in a friendly manner as he strode towards them. Turning at the sound of his voice, the men leveled their weapons.

‘Stay where you are!’ the leader commanded. ‘This is Agency business!’

‘I understand that,’ Chad said, continuing. ‘But I really need your help.’

Forty feet. A bead of sweat trailed down the side of Chad’s face.

‘Stop!’ A guard yelled. ‘That’s an order!’

Chad kept walking. ‘I’m so sorry. My hearing’s not so good. I haven’t been the same since someone dropped a building on me.’

Thirty feet.

A guard said to the leader, ‘We had reports of unauthorized mods operating in the area.’

Twenty feet.

Their leader fired a warning shot. It pinged off the road in front of Chad and he stopped, raising his arms in surrender.

‘I
apologize,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to cause any trouble. Someone shot me up with drugs a while back and turned me into a superhero.’

The leader aimed his weapon at Chad’s head. ‘Unauthorized mods are enemies of the Agency.’

‘I’ve had issues with authority figures,’ Chad explained. ‘I think it’s because I’m better than everyone else.’

Whatever the leader of the group was about to say was interrupted by the rock that slammed into the middle
of his forehead, knocking him unconscious. The other men fell back in surprise.

Chad nodded to Brodie who stood in a nearby alley, dusting her hands with satisfaction. ‘Nice shot!’ he yelled.

‘Thanks!’

Chad turned, raised his arm and fired blocks of ice at each of the armed men. He dove to one side as they opened fire. He rolled, their bullets narrowly missing him. He formed a wall of compressed ice. A hail of bullets started to demolish it.

Another guard fell as a rock struck his chest. Chad spent a micro-second admiring Brodie’s abilities. She had the abilities of three grown men—including their visual acuity.

I’m never playing baseball against you
, Chad thought.

He twisted again, firing a blast of intense heat at a guard. It knocked him flying. Chad shot a volley at the tail section of the rotor craft, severing it completely. The flying vessel immediately spun out of control, smashed into the sign hanging over the Toshiba billboard and exploded.

Good
, he thought.
We needed a diversion
.

Advancing on Samuel Taffe, he threw up another ice barrier to keep the guards away before freeze drying the handcuffs, and breaking them off. A guard screamed into his radio for backup.

‘Looks like it’s gonna get crowded,’ Chad said.

‘Get this neck brace off me,’ Taffe yelled. ‘I can get us out of here.’

Two more rotor craft swept along the city streets towards them. They would start firing at any second. Brodie took out the remaining guards, grabbed Chad’s arm and pointed at a dozen guards pouring around a corner. ‘We’ve got company!’

‘Take this thing off!’ Taffe said. ‘Quickly!’

Brodie shot Chad a look, and gripped the brace with all her strength. It gave a grinding sound and broke off. 

Samuel Taffe grabbed their arms. ‘Hang on. This will be disorientating.’

‘What will?’ Chad asked.

Then Chad saw a nearby building fly towards him—or did he fly towards it? He passed through where a family lived deep within the structure. They were eating beans out of a can. Then he saw empty rooms. A dilapidated restaurant. 

What the hell’s going on?

Brodie and Taffe appeared to be the only stationery things in the universe. Everything else was rushing past them. Brodie’s mouth was open in astonishment. Or was it horror?

They went through the rear wall of the building and continued along a street at super speed, passing wrecked cars, broken buildings, the remains of a crashed passenger jet. Chad saw them approach a homeless man. For one horrifying moment he thought they were going to crash into him, but then he was inside the man; he could see his blood vessels, his brain and the interior of his skull.

They continued on. Passed under a bridge. Across the murky sludge of what had once been the East River. Another building rushed at them—and they flew straight through it.

Suddenly they were passing streets filled with yellow fog. Chad tried to yell out, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t make a sound.

Samuel Taffe’s power was teleportation. Unlike them, he was able to move, and now he shot a cheeky grin at Chad.

Glad you’re enjoying yourself,
Chad thought.

Taffe was right about one thing; it
was
disorientating. Chad felt like his stomach had been left back in Times Square. A terrible thought occurred to him. Maybe it had. Maybe something had gone wrong and part of his internal anatomy
was
missing.

What a horrible way to die
, he thought. The Chad, the greatest superhero who had ever lived, strewn across New York City like a bag of trash. What would they say about him?

Here lies Chad. And here. And over here.

They slid through more buildings, now moving more slowly.

I feel sick
, Chad thought.
I’m going to vomit.
That might be a good sign.
You can’t vomit without a stomach.

Can you?

The fog disappeared and they went past another building into what was once a park. The trees were dead, and the grass, dust. They slowed and came to a grinding stop. For a horrifying moment Chad thought the teleportation had failed because now he was frozen solid.

I’m gonna be like this forever—

Then he felt sun on his face and the world snapped back to normal. They weren’t in Times Square; he had no idea where they were. His feet hit the earth and he toppled over. He was dimly aware of Brodie hitting the ground nearby. Chad sucked in great lungfuls of air. He felt dizzy. And sick.

‘That last bit is the worst,’ Taffe said. ‘I’ve got to create a perfect vacuum before we
rematerialize. That means pushing all the atoms aside. If I didn’t then you’d be sharing the same space with other matter. The result wouldn’t be pretty.’

Chad struggled to his knees. He tried to speak, but then his stomach caught up with him and he started to heave.

‘Don’t feel too bad,’ Taffe said. ‘That happens to everyone.’

Chapter Twelve

It was Dan’s belt buckle that saved him.

As the floor collapsed beneath him, Dan fell through the air, instinctively focusing on staying upright. His belt buckle jerked upwards, leaving him suspended in mid-air.  

The crash of the collapsing floor seemed to echo forever. Finally, it subsided and Dan allowed himself to peep downwards. Dust was still everywhere, but the debris had settled. He slowly lowered himself to the remains of the floor below.

‘Some superhero I am,’ he muttered.

He was glad the others had not seen this. Chad would have laughed at him, and it would have confirmed to Axel and Brodie that he was too young to be part of the team. And Ebony—

Well, she always barracked for the underdog. She would have been on his side. He sighed.
Anyone
could have stepped onto that floor. He was alive. That’s what mattered.

So now what? The floor had collapsed into some kind of lab. Benches were everywhere, covered in chemistry equipment and papers.  Most of them had been destroyed in the floor collapse, but some had
survived. Dan climbed over the debris to one of the benches. The pages were old and dusty, and covered in writing.

He tapped
his communicator and showed Ferdy one of the pages via the camera. ‘This is Japanese,’ Dan said. ‘Right?’

‘That’s correct, Dan.’

‘So the Japanese were here? Maybe during the war?’

‘The history of this island shows no details about Japanese occupation.’

‘Why do—’ Dan stopped. ‘Ferdy, can you hear that?’

Dan listened hard. A darkened corridor led away from this chamber. A murmur came from it.

‘Ferdy cannot hear anything unusual,’ Ferdy said, pausing. ‘Groundhog Day is celebrated on the second of February—’

‘I’ll get back to you on that.’ Dan disconnected the link and peered down the corridor. He listened hard. He could hear a distant voice. Could someone else be here? A shiver tickled his spine. Could a Japanese soldier still be here from the war? He had heard stories of soldiers fighting long after its finish.

But he would be as old as a dinosaur if he had fought World War Two. Or dead. Or a ghost. And ghosts weren’t real. Were they?

A faint light came from a skylight at the far end of the corridor.

‘I’m a superhero,’ Dan murmured. ‘Some old ghost isn’t going to scare me.’

He focused on a piece of steel pipe in the debris. It flew into his hand and he followed the corridor to a T-intersection. The voice was louder. On both sides of the corridor were cells, locked and empty, containing rotting bunks.

Dan sniffed. The smell down here was bad. Really bad. The mold had taken over years ago. It probably should have been the only living thing down here.

The sound had stopped.

Dan listened to the silence. Now he wasn’t sure what was more unnerving; the voice or its absence. He swallowed hard as he tightly gripped the metal pipe. It felt slippery.

‘Dan?’

Ferdy’s voice shattered the silence.

‘Yes! Ferdy!’ Dan said. ‘What do you want?’

‘Ferdy had not heard from you for some time. It seemed prudent to check on your condition.’

‘My condition is...fine. I’m investigating something down here.’

‘Ferdy has some new information regarding the time ship.’

‘What is it?’

‘The Liter8tor picked up a transmission when the ship first arrived. The systems dismissed it as interference, but Ferdy has been able to determine it to be an encoded message.’

‘And it says...?’

‘Ferdy has been unable to determine its meaning.’

‘You’ve got the most incredible brain in the universe and you can’t decode it?’

‘Ferdy is as surprised as you, friend Dan. Ferdy is possibly the most intelligent being to ever exist—’

‘And the most modest.’

‘—and yet the code is so advanced that even Ferdy is perplexed.’ He paused. ‘It can be solved, but only by knowing the correct encryption key.’

It all sounded very odd to Dan, but now the whispering had started again. Someone was speaking in English. It
sounded like they were reading. Dan signed off and listened hard.

The skylight in the roof was broken, with vines growing into the building. The corridor led to darkness in one direction, the other to a single cell where the roof had caved in.

Dan headed in this direction, the sound growing louder. By the time he reached the end, he could make out a huge hole in the ceiling. The rubble below had formed a natural staircase into the cell. Vines and palm fronds covered the rubble. 

A small boy was curled up on the moldy bunk with a book clasped firmly in his hand. Lowering it, he stared at Dan in amazement.

‘I’m Henry,’ the boy said. ‘What are you?’

Chapter Thirteen

The resistance had been busy. I realized this the instant we entered the heart of the base, a huge underground chamber the size of a football field. A thousand people lived there in a makeshift shanty town, lit by banks of fluorescent lights set into the ceiling.

‘We didn’t build this, but we had to fix it up,’ Mr. Brown explained.

‘What is this place?’ Ebony asked.

‘We think it started off as a naturally occurring cavern,’ Mr. Brown said. ‘Then it looks like the government set it up as an underground shelter in case of nuclear attack.’ He added, ‘That must have been during the cold war.’

‘And the Agency
doesn’t know about it?’ I asked.

‘We made certain all references to it were removed from Agency computers,’ he said, smiling grimly. ‘Like I said before, friends in high places.’

We crossed the cavern and I was reminded of the compound in Las Vegas where we had been situated. I felt a tinge of loss. They hadn’t been great times, but they hadn’t been that bad either. You don’t appreciate what you’ve got till you don’t have it anymore.

‘There isn’t anywhere else you can hide?’ I asked. Being anywhere near a major city seemed a bad idea. 

‘There probably are, but they don’t hold a thousand people.’

‘Why is James Price so intent on destroying the planet?’

‘He wasn’t always like this,’ Old Axel spoke up. ‘People welcomed his inventions in the beginning. They made life easier. He eventually became a techno hero. He seemed harmless enough, so the government gave him more power.’

‘So what happened?’ 

‘Under that geeky exterior was a psychotic interior. Price was willing to take terrible risks in the name of science.’

‘Like what?’

‘I can’t say. It would—’

‘Contaminate the time line. Yeah, I know.’

We entered another railway tunnel, colder here, the light weaker. I didn’t notice the door at the end until we were almost on it. The next room was shaped like a huge cylinder and well lit. Pieces of machinery lay everywhere. Men with welding torches huddled around a vessel in the center. Power leads ran from it to a generator.

They were trying to disguise the ship, but I would have been blind to not recognize it.

‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ I said.

Liber8tor
.

The years had not been kind to our old ship. The Tagaar warship had obviously been through a lot of battles. Sections of the hull, not disguised with new plating, were scarred and damaged. One support leg looked like it had been completely
replaced.

A thought occurred to me. ‘Ferdy. Is he still—’

‘Long gone,’ Old Axel said. ‘Price had him purged from the Agency computers years ago.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t ask.’

Ferdy. It was terrible, but I had not spared a thought for him since our arrival. So he was dead. Again. I wondered about James Price. Could killing one man really change the future of world history?

‘What are you doing to
Liber8tor
?’ Ebony asked.

‘We’re getting her ready for our mission. The old girl is not what she was, but she’s still able to get past Agency radar and into orbit.’

‘Orbit?’

He nodded. ‘The Agency’s main research facility—
Olympus
—is in orbit. We have access codes that’ll get us past security.’

I nodded at the new panels. ‘What’s with the disguise?’

Mr. Brown spoke up. ‘It’s highly unlikely that anyone is actually going to look out an
Olympus
window, but if they do they should see something that looks like an Agency vessel. Kind of.’

‘And who’s the pilot?’ I asked.

‘I am,’ Mr. Brown said. ‘For this you get the best.’

I felt a little better about the mission. He led us to quarters that looked more like a cell than a residence, but as least they were clean, containing two bunk beds and a bench. Meals arrived a few minutes later, stew made of a fine mea
t. Mr. Brown said it was rabbit, but I kept thinking about the rats I’d seen in the upper tunnels.

I ate it anyway.

Mr. Brown stopped at the door just before he left. ‘It’s nice to see you again,’ he said, his eyes misting over. ‘It’s so good to see you young...and strong and healthy. I’ve missed the old days. I’ve missed them a lot.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘For everything.’

Nodding, he pulled the door shut behind him. I turned off the light as we climbed into our bunks and stared at the black ceiling. ‘It’s been quite a day,’ I said. We woke up this morning in the present and now we were forty years in the future. ‘And the worst part is that I’m a douche bag.’

‘You’re not a douche bag,’ Ebony said. ‘
Your future self is, but...I mean...’

‘I get your drift. I think.’

‘You’re not like him at all. But this is a different world. I can see why he...you...want James Price dead.’ She sighed. ‘What should we do?’

‘About what?’

‘About James Price.’

I had already been through this once. I had been given the choice to sentence the Russian Premier to an equally terrible fate—and I hadn’t been able to pull the trigger. But this was worse. The fate of the entire human race could depend on us.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What do you think?’

But Ebony didn’t answer. She was already asleep.