Stronger: A Super Human Clash, page 13
“What was that supposed to do?”
Slaughter smiled. “It’s supposed to draw some attention.” She screamed again, even louder, and started shouting, “Help! Help! Oh God, he’s killing them!”
All around the park, lights were coming on in the apartment buildings.
“You’re crazy!” I said. “Shut up!”
“Someone call the police!” she yelled. “There’s blood everywhere!”
I heard the wail of sirens and the screech of tires. I turned and ran to the far side of the park, jumped over the fence, and narrowly missed landing on a police car.
“It’s him!” one of the cops said, grabbing his radio. “Dispatch, we need backup! Now! Send all units!”
I didn’t wait around to hear any more. I leaped over the car and pounded down the street as fast as I could.
It took me more than an hour to shake the cops. I spent the rest of the night and all of the following day hiding under a low bridge, my head barely above the ice-cold water.
When I finally emerged the next night, I expected the search to have been called off. After all, I hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Apart from breaking into the store, that is. But at least the police would have searched the park and not found any bodies. So far, all they wanted me for was breaking and entering. Murder would be a whole different situation.
So I waded to the riverbank and climbed up onto the street. I rested for a while in the alleyway next to a twenty-four-hour Laundromat, warming myself on the hot air that pumped out of its vent.
I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew the area was awash with red and blue lights, and there were armed police officers slowly approaching me from either end of the alley.
One of them said, “Aw, no … He’s waking up!”
For a few moments, no one moved.
One officer took a few steps closer and held out his free hand, palm down. “All right, big fella. OK. Now, take it easy. My name’s Ridley. I just want to talk to you.”
I started to stand up, and they all backed away. “Relax,” I said. “I’m not going to attack you.”
“All right,” Officer Ridley said. “Why’d you do it?”
“I was hungry. Look, I know it’s wrong, but if I could pay for it, I would. But I can’t. And even if I had the money, who’d let me into their store?”
Ridley was breathing heavily, and it looked to me as though he was trying to figure out the best and safest way to get me into custody. “We’re not talking about the store, Brawn. That was wrong, and I’m glad that you realize it was wrong. But that’s not what we’re talking about.” He continued to speak softly, as if a calm voice would keep me calm. It wasn’t really working. “We’re talking about the woman. You remember her? From last night?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I remember. But she’s long gone now.”
Very slowly and carefully, he said, “Yes, she’s gone. Gone to the hospital. Where she’s recovering from a broken collarbone, a concussion, and two broken legs, just to name a few of her multiple injuries.”
“What are you talking about? She flew away!”
“Right. Flew away, as in ‘she flew away in an emergency helicopter.’ Is that what you mean?”
“No, she flew away as in ‘she flew away.’ Up into the air. That’s one of her powers. She can fly.”
The cop frowned. “Wait, who are we talking about?”
“Slaughter. You must have heard of her.”
“And you believe the woman in the park was Slaughter?”
“She was Slaughter! She saw me, we talked, then when I wouldn’t help her out with some job she kept going on about, she flew away. Right after she started screaming for help, like I was attacking her or something. I mean, I never even touched her!”
“I’m talking about the woman you beat up. Patrol officers found her in the park a few minutes after you were seen running away.”
“What? Well, that wasn’t me—I’d never attack anyone! It had to have been Slaughter. She set me up. After she flew away, she probably found this other woman and beat her up and left her in the park for you to find.”
“So it wasn’t you?” Ridley asked.
“No!”
Officer Ridley chewed on his lower lip while he thought about this. “I see. In that case I’m arresting you for criminal damage and theft. We’ll sort the rest out after we take you into custody. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney—”
“That’s it. I’m outta here.” I stepped around the policeman, and his colleagues flattened themselves against the alley walls.
Then I heard someone whisper, “National Guardsmen are still a few minutes away. You gotta stall him. Just keep him talking!”
I said, “I can hear you, you know!”
“Come back here!” Ridley shouted. “I’m arresting you!”
“Get lost!” I shouted over my shoulder.
“What about the store owner? How do you think he feels about what you did? How are you going to make it up to him?”
“I don’t care. Tell him to charge five bucks for people to see the hole I punched through the wall. Or he’s got security cameras, right? Maybe he can sell the tape to one of those home video shows. Maybe he’ll even make enough money to afford an alarm system.”
Ridley actually began to run after me. “You’re resisting arrest! You know that means I can use any force I deem necessary to stop you!”
“No it doesn’t. Anyway, if you shoot me, all that’ll happen is that you’ll spend the next week filling out paperwork and I’ll still be gone.” I turned and looked down at him. “Do you even have a cell big enough for me?”
“Probably not.”
“Then I’d let it go if I were you. I’m not waiting around here long enough for the army. They’d end up destroying half your town and I’d still get away.”
He stopped following me then, but he didn’t stop talking. “You’d better watch out for yourself, kid. Someone like you, you’re liable to get into big trouble one day.”
“Been there, done that,” I called back. “Have fun explaining this one to your boss.”
CHAPTER 18
THE MINE
THREE YEARS AGO
IN THE YEAR SINCE Keegan’s death, since Hazlegrove established the trustee system, the mine had become considerably more profitable, and not just because of the two new seams of platinum ore.
Cosmo and I worked hard alongside the other trustees to keep everyone’s morale strong. It wasn’t easy, and we faced a lot of resistance from the prisoners as well as the guards, but little by little the conditions improved.
We insisted that once a month all the machinery be taken off-line for maintenance. Hazlegrove wasn’t pleased about that at first, but he stopped complaining when we caught a potentially very serious fault in one of the ore crushers. Had it come to fruition, the crushers would have jammed solid and taken days to repair.
But thanks to us, the process of extracting the crude platinum continued without major interruption. It’s a complex and costly procedure, typically producing only a couple of ounces of platinum for every ten tons of ore.
That was why most of the guards were concentrated on the final stages of the process.
Before the trustee system, we were producing no more than ten ounces of platinum a week, but now—thanks to the new seams and more efficient mining—we had almost doubled our output.
I would have been proud, had we not been slaves.
And then the day came when we actually tripled the pre-trustee output. It was mostly happenstance, thanks to a particularly rich vein in one of the new seams, but it was enough to get Hazlegrove out of his office, something that rarely happened in those days.
Not long after this spike in production, he called the trustees together. The others crowded back into his office while I hunched down just outside the door. I could have squeezed my way in through the door, but it wouldn’t have been easy and there wouldn’t have been enough room for anyone else. “Today was a good day,” Hazlegrove said. “Roesler, can we expect many more like this?”
Ashley Roesler shrugged. “Maybe one or two more from the same vein. We got lucky. There could be similarly rich veins under there, but we have no way of knowing until we dig.”
“All right,” Hazlegrove said. He leaned forward over his desk so he could see me. “Brawn … I looked into your idea of selling the nickel and the iron. Good news and bad news on that one.”
Conveyors carried the discarded material outside the mine and dumped it onto huge piles, a decision that had been made long before the mine became a prison and had never been reversed. My idea was that the iron and nickel should be stored separately, as they were considerably more valuable than crushed rock.
“It should be profitable for the nickel, but not the iron,” Hazlegrove said. “So we need to find a way to extract one from the other.”
I nodded. “All right, but if we’re not going to sell the iron, we should still keep it separate from the rest of the slag, just in case it’s worth something in the future.”
He turned to Cosmo. “What about the nickel and iron already in the slag heaps?”
“That’s going to be a messy job,” Cosmo said. “I’ve been talking to the teams that work the electromagnet, and they figure that’s the best approach. We rig up some new electromagnets—a lot of them, really powerful ones—and pass every shovelful of slag through them. They figure that should get maybe eighty percent of the iron and nickel. Problem is, there’s more than thirty years’ worth of the stuff out there, and the slag at the bottom has got thousands of tons pressing down on it. Sifting through the whole amount is going to take a lot of work, a lot of manpower. Right now, I can’t see it being a viable option.”
I said, “Actually, there is an easier way. But it’s dangerous. Should work, though.”
Hazlegrove said, “Go on.”
“First we run the new electromagnets over the entire surface to get the easy stuff. That shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. Once that’s done … we drill a few boreholes into the slag heaps and set charges.”
“Explosives? That’s crazy!” Cosmo said. “That’d never work!”
Emily Stanhope said, “No, he might be on to something there….” She reached over to Hazlegrove’s desk and grabbed a pencil and a sheet of paper, and started working out complex calculations. “The slag heaps are roughly conical, so that’s the height times pi times the radius squared, divided by three…. Give me a few minutes here.” She began to mutter to herself.
“We’d need someone who knows about explosives,” Cosmo added. “Though I still don’t think it’d work. And even if it did, I’m not sure the yield would be worth the cost.”
We discussed it for almost an hour, and then Emily produced the results of her calculations. “Right. I reckon it can be done, and it’s cost-effective. Using small charges we can blast down through each slag heap a couple of yards at a time. Like strip mining, I suppose. The explosions will spread the slag over a wide area, and then we simply keep running the electromagnets back and forth over it. Then we use a couple of diggers to clear away the loose slag, and move on to the next level.”
Hazlegrove drummed the fingers of his good hand on the edge of the desk. “Nickel sells for about twenty-eight thousand dollars per metric ton. How many tons do you think we have out there?”
“It’s hard to be sure,” Emily said, “and this could be way off, but if you’re forcing me to make a guess … Could be twenty tons. That would yield more than half a million dollars. And it could be a lot more than twenty.”
Everyone fell silent for a moment, and then Hazlegrove said, “All right. I need to think this over. You’re dismissed.”
We left Hazlegrove mulling over Emily’s sheets of paper, staring at the calculations we knew he had no way of comprehending.
Roman and Ashley and Emily returned to their teams while Cosmo and I glanced at each other and tried not to grin. Hazlegrove would find a way to make it happen. The platinum that was extracted from the mine was carefully monitored, but everything else was considered waste. No one was watching it because no one cared about it.
We knew that Hazlegrove would spend a lot of time thinking of the half million dollars’ worth of effectively free nickel ore that was his for the taking. He would come back to us with an offer: If we could work out a way to set up everything without the warden finding out, he’d increase the rations or allow the workers a few days off, some token gesture of that nature.
But that wasn’t the aim of our plan. Over the past year, we had been given more and more responsibility, to the point where we were running almost every aspect of the mine. We now had access to some very useful materials. Hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of crude platinum …
And if Hazlegrove did agree to the plan, then pretty soon we would be getting our hands on the one thing a group of inmates should never have: explosives.
CHAPTER 19
TWENTY-THREE
YEARS AGO
THE HIGH-PROFILE MANHUNT that followed my encounter with Slaughter made me a little bit famous. That was not a good thing. Though the police were no longer blaming me for attacking that woman, and my version of the events was confirmed by the woman herself when she recovered, the truth somehow didn’t seem to matter. The newspaper, radio, and TV reports did mention that Slaughter was the real culprit, but they still kept up their campaign to “end the blue giant’s reign of terror.”
If all the stories were to be believed, I was responsible for a whole range of crimes throughout the country….
I’d broken into dozens of homes and stores and banks, frequently in places I’d never heard of, let alone visited. It didn’t seem to matter to the media that in almost every one of those cases the police immediately ruled out my involvement.
I’d sabotaged a railway line, causing a train crash that “could have caused the deaths of hundreds of passengers.” That train did go off the rails, but only at about three miles an hour, no one was injured, and it was quickly discovered that the accident was caused by wear and tear on a poorly maintained stretch of track. Nevertheless, for a couple of weeks I was known as “the train wrecker.”
When a suspension bridge collapsed in Arkansas, one of the newspapers ran the story on its front page with a blurry photo of me next to a photo of the bridge. The article itself only named me as “one of the possible causes,” but apparently putting me on the cover boosted sales.
In the middle of all the “Brawn Frenzy” I spent a night lying on the roof of an apartment block, listening to a phone-in radio show that came through the open window of one of the tenants. The night’s topic was “Brawn: Monster or Villain?” which I felt was more than a little biased, and a bigmouthed local politician was the main guest. His long-winded argument could be summed up something like this: “Brawn is big and blue and has been reported as causing a lot of damage, so therefore you should vote for me.” It was all wrapped up in the usual fancy words and false promises, but that was the gist of it.
The show attracted dozens of callers, each with his or her own ax to grind:
“Brawn stole my cat! It must have been him, because I think it probably was.”
“I heard that there’s more than one of them and they’re aliens. That explains why there’s so many reports of him all over the country.”
“Dude, Brawn is, like, y’know, evil and stuff? If he isn’t, then, like, why would people say he is? No smoke without fire, dude!”
“Never mind about this man Brawn—I want to know what the police are going to do about that blue giant who’s been in all the papers! I’m a taxpayer and I know my rights, and if people don’t agree with me, well, then, we might as well be living under a dictatorship!”
“Hello? Am I through? Hello? Yeah, I saw him on TV an’ I got scared so that made me forget how many beers I’d had so I kept drinkin’ an’ then later the cops pulled me over an’ I lost my license an’ my boss said he hadda let me go. So Brawn cost me my job! How am I sposta support my kids now?”
“A creature like that is unnatural. An abomination. We should be doing everything we can to catch him before he kills again!”
Then the show’s presenter said, “Riiiight … Well, thanks for that, caller. Folks, near as we can tell, Brawn ain’t actually killed anyone yet, so don’t go having nightmares. The time is coming up to three fifteen and you’re listening to the Late Hour with me, Dancin’ George Punteri…. We’re still getting a lot of calls about Brawn and all these other freaks who’ve been in the news, but if you’re sitting there stabbing at the redial button trying to get through, hold off for a few minutes, because we’ve got a special guest on the line: Pastor Tobias Cullen of the First Church of Saint Matthew in Vermont. Pastor Cullen, you told my producer that you’ve actually seen Brawn, is that right?”
That made me sit up and really pay attention.
“That’s right, George. It was almost four years ago, the first time anyone saw him. He attacked my church in the middle of Sunday service.”
“Four years,” the presenter said. “But Brawn’s been in the news for only about a year.”
“We were ordered to keep quiet. But there doesn’t seem to be any point now—everyone knows about him. He …” I heard the pastor swallowing. “He came out of nowhere. There was a flash or something and the creature just appeared in the middle of the choir. There was panic…. I did my best to get everyone out. When I tried to escape, he attacked me. He grabbed me and threw me through the air. I crashed into a police car. It was eight months before I could walk again.”
“No way! It wasn’t like that at all!” I said aloud before I could stop myself.
“He growled and snarled like an animal,” Pastor Cullen said. “One of the boys from the choir disappeared that day, and all they found of him were his vestments, covered in blood. The people of the parish spent months searching for him. No other trace was ever found.” He paused. “Look, no one’s ever said this out loud, but … I was there. I saw the look in that monster’s eyes. I didn’t see him do it, but I know he killed that boy—”
