Stronger: A Super Human Clash, page 25
“Me? What have I done? Not my fault if these people are following me!”
“What do you want?”
I couldn’t resist it: “What have you got?”
And then the press came: helicopters, TV vans, lone reporters armed with cameras and microphones.
A TV reporter and her camera crew darted up to the officer with the bullhorn and started badgering him with questions. “What are you going to do? Will this man be arrested? What’s the NYPD’s official position on blue-skinned people?”
The officer scratched his head with the edge of the bullhorn. “Uh, right now I’m not prepared to comment. Please, get back behind the barriers for your own safety.”
“Brawn is a known supervillain—why aren’t you arresting him?”
“Don’t have cuffs big enough. Now get behind the barriers!”
“Can I say something?” I asked.
It seemed like the whole square fell silent.
I crouched down and beckoned to the reporter. “C’mon, I don’t bite.”
She moved about an inch closer, and I figured it was the best I was going to get.
“You’re recording?”
“We’re going out live.”
“Live? Wow. Hey, everyone watching, sorry if this interrupts your cartoons or your sports bulletins or whatever. I just wanna say that I’m tired of running, tired of hiding. And sure as anything I’m tired of living in forests and eating leaves.”
“So … What is it you want?”
That caught me out. “Um, a job? Somewhere to live that has walls and a roof? What does anyone want?” I looked straight into the camera. “I’m twenty-three, didn’t finish high school, can’t drive, and have no experience. But if you need anything heavy lifted …”
Then a loud voice from above said, “Coward!”
I looked up to see Titan floating above me, his arms folded to better show off his muscles, his blue cape gently flapping in the breeze. He always did know how to make an entrance.
“You bring the fight to one of the most crowded cities on the planet—using the public as human shields!”
“What fight?” I shouted back. “What have I ever done to you?”
“You freed Ragnarök!”
“Yeah? Well, he wasn’t Ragnarök then, was he? He was just a guy. But he was Ragnarök all the times you fought him and weren’t able to catch him! So don’t blame me for your failures, you overhyped jerk!”
Another voice, deeper and stronger, laced with authority, seemed to come from everywhere at once: “Everyone—clear the area. Now.”
I was amazed to see that it worked. Almost immediately, the crowd began to disperse. Some of them took a few last photos, and quite a few of the reporters retreated several dozen yards. Even the police fell back.
Titan touched down on the street in front of me. A blur whipped through the air, and then Quantum was standing next to him.
They were joined by Energy, drifting down from the sky with crackles of electricity sparking from her eyes and fingertips.
“So,” I said. “It’s going to be like that, is it? Where’s your other pal? Where’s Paragon?”
Energy said, “Paragon is otherwise engaged.”
I nodded. “Maybe because he knows the truth.”
“And what’s that?” Titan asked.
“He knows that I’m not who you all think I am. I’m not a monster.”
The deep voice came again. “Oh, you are.” I realized that the voice was coming from behind me, and I turned to see Thunder—his build was even bigger than last time I’d seen him—standing next to Abby and a dark-haired teenage boy who looked vaguely familiar.
“Six against one,” I said. “But you’re going to have to throw the first punch. Which you probably will if Dalton has your brains sufficiently scrambled.”
The young man frowned and said, “If I what?” and I realized that he must be Joshua Dalton, Max and Roz’s younger brother. The last time I’d seen him, he was ten. But that was seven years earlier. I couldn’t help wondering what power he had developed.
“Josh, right? You’ve grown up. So, where’s your sister and brother? They decide not to play today?”
Abby said, “Brawn, stand down. This is your only warning.”
“How can I stand down when I haven’t done anything yet? If you want to talk, Ab— I mean, Hesperus, then we’ll talk. You and me. Thunder will listen in anyway.”
She drew her sword and her ax, and walked toward me.
I sat down cross-legged on the ground. “This isn’t a fight, Abby,” I said softly. “I’ve come to make peace.”
She stopped in front of me. “Peace. After what you did?”
“This was the only way I could think of to get your attention without being arrested. The cameras are still rolling. If you and your friends attack, the whole world will see that I’m not fighting back.” I smiled. “Max won’t be able to mess with all of their minds.”
Her grim expression melted. “Brawn, you’ve got it so wrong! Max isn’t like that. He never was. Can’t you see? You spent hours talking to Ragnarök that night—he got inside your mind, not Max!”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Abby came closer still. “All these powers, all these things we can do … It doesn’t change who we are deep down. You’re still just a kid, aren’t you? You’re still twelve years old—you never had the chance to grow up.”
“Have any of us?”
“Yes! Yes, we have! You’ve had practically no human contact for the past seven years. The rest of us … We’re adults now. Thunder has—”
Thunder’s voice interrupted. “Don’t tell him anything about me!”
I sighed. “Privacy is a thing of the past, isn’t it?”
Abby continued. “I’ve moved out. My brothers are all in college. My sister’s getting married next year, to Sol—” Abby stopped herself. “To someone we know. Heck, Lance is already married! Time has moved on for everyone except you!”
“You moved out? Who’s looking after your mom?”
“She has a new boyfriend. She moved into his house.”
“And what about you? You seeing anyone?”
Abby nodded. “Yeah. For the past five months.”
I glanced toward Thunder. “Tell me it’s not him.”
“Definitely not. He’s not my type,” Abby said, and then smiled, and I realized what she meant. “You’d like Quinn, I think. If we can find a way through all this, you should come to dinner.”
“Maybe. Are you happy, though?”
“Yes. Very.”
We looked at each other for a few seconds, and then I said, “We don’t have to do this. I don’t want to fight anyone. I never have.”
“What do you want, Gethin?”
“I want to be human again. I want a normal life.”
Thunder said, “And you’ll stop at nothing to get that, right? Hesperus—back away.”
I stood up, stepped around Abby, and towered over Thunder. “Man, he really did a number on you, didn’t he? I’m the only one of us Max Dalton can’t control. Now, I came here peacefully. If you can’t accept that, then leave. Just go. But if there’s any part of you still in there who can see me for who I really am, then we can get past this.” I hunched down in front of him and extended my right hand for him to shake.
I don’t know what Thunder thought was happening, but I saw his eyes widen and his muscles tense a split second before he attacked.
A sonic bolt hit me square in the face, knocking me back onto my heels. It was followed almost immediately by another to the chest, hard enough to lift me a foot into the air.
Titan crashed into my back, locked his arms around my neck, and pushed me forward, slamming my forehead hard against the ground. I reached up and grabbed his arm, pulling him away.
Then Quantum was on me, zipping around almost too fast for me to see, his punches relatively weak but relentless, a barrage of flickering images that rained against my head, my arms, and my chest.
As I tried to swat Quantum away, Titan flew at me again and crashed shoulder-first into the side of my head. I staggered sideways, reeling from the pain, and reached out to a lamppost to steady myself.
Someone shouted, “He’s going for a weapon!” and the lamppost disintegrated into a white-hot spray of molten metal.
The air was heavy with ozone, and I knew that Energy had blasted the lamppost with a lightning bolt, but I had little time to consider what would happen to me if she hit me directly: Another tsunami of sonic blasts from Thunder smashed down on me, pinning me to the ground.
The sonic blasts eased for a second, but before I could rise, I realized why: Titan and Quantum struck simultaneously, Titan’s powerful fists hitting me like cannonballs, Quantum’s blur of kicks and punches pummeling against my torso, as unremitting and unpredictable as an avalanche.
I held my ground, tried to resist without hitting back. Then Thunder hit my eardrums with a pinpoint high-pitched shriek that sent me reeling, my head spinning. I was barely able to keep upright. And still the onslaught continued: Thunder, Titan, and Quantum all hitting me at once.
I broke out in a sweat, and at first I thought it was the friction of Quantum’s mercurial attack, but my body heat continued to rise. My mouth went dry, and the skin on my back and arms began to blister.
Four of them now, I realized. Energy had joined the attack, using her powers to channel heat into my body.
Thunder switched to a low-frequency sound that actually caused my skull to vibrate, and then I found myself lifting into the air, spinning and tumbling, as though I had been wrapped inside an invisible, incredibly strong net.
It felt like Roz’s telekinetic shield, but I hadn’t seen her…. If she’d been there in Times Square, she wouldn’t have remained hidden. It had to be her brother, with a power similar to hers.
He slammed me down onto the ground, hard enough to crack the asphalt, and held me there, trapped, while Thunder bombarded me with sonic pulses, Titan flew at me again and again with his clenched, iron-hard fists, Energy scorched the air around me, and Quantum was a circling, whirling haze of kicks and punches.
Don’t let go, I told myself. Hold your ground!
And then, through the haze of pain and the desert-dry heat, I saw Abby running at me, her sword and ax gripped tightly in her hands. She pulled her arms back, ready to swing both weapons at once.
“Enough!” I shouted. “I surrender!”
But my voice never reached anyone else’s ears: Thunder had blocked the sound.
I raised my arms at the last possible moment. A second longer and Abby would have buried the ax and sword deep into either side of my neck.
Instead, my forearms took the damage: The ax almost severed my left hand just above the wrist, and the sword completely pierced my right forearm, its blade scraping against my radius and ulna as it passed between them.
A spray of blood shot out and hit Abby in the face. She jumped back, shocked, as though only just aware of what she’d done.
The others stopped too, almost at the same instant.
I fell back onto my butt, cradling my arms, my entire body feeling like it was held together only by pain. Bracing myself for the agony, I shook my left arm, knocking the ax free. It clattered to the ground, the noise echoing around the now-silent Times Square.
Then I grabbed the hilt of Abby’s sword with my left hand and—with clenched teeth and more courage than I ever imagined I possessed—pulled it free.
There was a buzzing, murmuring sound all around me, and for the first time I realized that the crowds had come back, that every window in the square was filled with shocked faces, that the enormous TV screens hanging over the square were all showing my face.
I looked at Abby’s sword for a moment, then wiped its blade clean on my shoulder, flipped it into the air and caught it by the blade, and offered it to her, hilt-first.
She was unable to look me in the eye as she took it, then stepped back.
Thunder was the first to speak. “Oh my God. What have we done?”
No one seemed to know how to answer that.
I tried to keep my legs from shaking as I got to my feet. “I’ll tell you what you’ve done, you little punk! You attacked me for no reason. Again.”
The other heroes closed around me.
Quantum began, “Look, Brawn, we—”
“Shut up! When you people get home tonight, when you’re cozying up with your loved ones in your warm and dry apartments, watch the news. And watch it carefully. You’ll see that I didn’t make the first move. I didn’t even throw a punch.” I turned to Titan. “You. C’mere!”
He floated toward me. “I’m sorry, man, I don’t know what—”
“Turn around!”
Tentatively, he did as I instructed. I reached out and pulled the cape from his back. I tore it into two strips and tied one around my left wrist, the other around my right forearm.
“I want to know two things,” I roared at them. “Why you did that, and what made you stop!”
A voice from behind me said, “I can answer both of your questions.”
I turned to see Paragon walking toward me. To his left and about a step behind was Max Dalton.
“Thunder,” Paragon said, “I want a sphere of silence around us.”
Thunder nodded, and instantly the noise of the crowd was hushed.
Paragon put his hand on Max’s shoulder. To anyone else watching, it would have looked like a friendly gesture, but it was clear to us from Max’s expression that Paragon was putting a lot of pressure into that grip. “Our friend here did it. He came here with Josh, and watched from the rooftops.”
I stood over Max and peered down at him. “You’ve gone too far this time. They would have killed me!”
Calmly, Max said, “You didn’t fight back. That’s really remarkable. But none of this was entirely my fault, Brawn. They’re all scared of you. Terrified that one day you’ll turn against them. They know how strong you are. All I did was nudge them a little.”
Paragon pulled his hand away from Max. “What are you saying? That you did this?”
Energy shook her head. “No way. That’s not Max’s style.”
I sighed and looked at Max. “You’re doing it again, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Paragon here realized what I was doing, and threatened me with some pretty serious consequences if I didn’t make them stop. If I hadn’t been too busy focusing on the others to notice him coming, this particular scenario would have had a much different ending. You probably owe him your life.”
“Wait, wait…,” Paragon said. “Max, are you saying that you played some part in this?”
Max smiled. “In a few minutes all that they’ll remember is that you were about to attack them and they retaliated. Maybe you were under someone else’s control. Yes, that’d be a nice irony.”
“What’s to stop me from tearing your head off right here and now?”
“You’re not a killer, Brawn.”
“I’m willing to learn.”
Paragon said, “Hold on…. Something’s going on here. Max, do you know more about this than you’re saying?”
Thunder clapped Joshua Dalton on the back. “You did good, Josh. If you hadn’t figured out that an adrenaline rush would break Ragnarök’s hold on Brawn, he might have leveled the city.”
Max’s smile grew. “And that’s the official story. That’s what it’s going to look like to everyone watching, once my public relations people start doing their magic. You can’t beat me, Brawn. You have to acknowledge that. I win. You lose. That’s the way it’s always going to be. I’ll always come out on top, and you’ll never be anything but a giant, blue, pathetic freak of nature.”
He shouldn’t have gloated. If he’d just walked away, it all might have ended there.
But he had to keep pushing, had to rub it in that he had won.
I flicked out my right arm, caught him with a backhanded smack in the middle of his smug sneer.
That was a mistake. I should have hit him harder, should have knocked him clear across the square. Instead, it wasn’t much more than a light tap. Just enough to break his nose and hurt like crazy, but not enough to knock him out.
If he’d been knocked out, the others might have let it go. But Max glared up at me, his own blood spattered over his costume.
That was when all hell broke loose.
CHAPTER 37
TITAN STRUCK FIRST. He slammed into my side, locked his arms around my waist, and kept going, lifting me into the air. We were already above the rooftops before I knew what was happening.
Energy and Thunder came streaking after him. Thunder hit me with a rapid-fire stream of sonic blasts so strong that it felt like my muscles were tearing away from my bones.
Energy roared at Titan to let me go. For a second I thought she was on my side, but the instant he let go, she launched a lightning bolt that struck my chest and emerged through my back, only inches away from my heart.
Titan grabbed me again, this time from behind with his arms around my neck, trying to choke me as he dragged me upward and eastward.
I caught a glimpse of Paragon below me, flying upside down, and again I had a moment of hope that was shattered as he launched a volley of small missiles straight at me.
Titan let go once more, and Paragon’s missiles struck home, exploding against my torso, wrapping me with clinging fire: napalm. Even through the searing agony, I could hardly believe that Paragon had used napalm against a living being.
The fire coursed over my skin, triggering every pain receptor in my body. Then it reached my face, but I couldn’t scream, couldn’t open my mouth, because I knew that if I inhaled, the fire would be sucked into my lungs.
I arced through the air, a burning, flailing figure that trailed thick black smoke and rained fragments of charred flesh over the East River.
Even as I was falling, the assault continued. Thunder’s sonic blasts hit me again and again, some from below, some from the right, and through the blistering agony of the napalm I understood what he was doing. He was steering my fall.
