Stronger: A Super Human Clash, page 6
“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.
CHAPTER 8
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.”
It took me a moment to realize that he was speaking Spanish. There wasn’t much I’d been good at in school, but I had always done pretty well in Spanish. He had said, “Hey, look! He’s alive. And awake.”
“This is the one the Americans were chasing?” another asked.
“Take a guess. Who else is out here?”
“So, what is he?”
The first man shrugged. “Blue.”
“That’s not a lot of help, Ricardo.”
I raised my head a little, and saw three bulky figures silhouetted against the low-lying sun.
The one on the left nudged the one in the middle. “You should talk to him.”
“Me? You’re the boss.”
“Correct. I’m the boss, and I’m telling you to talk to him.”
The man in the middle approached. He pushed back the hood of his parka, removed his tinted goggles, and pulled the scarf away from his mouth. “¿Hola? ¿Habla usted español?”
I nodded. “A little, yes. Um … Quién es usted? Wait, that’s not right, is it? Sorry.”
“English.” The man nodded. “We can do English.” He looked me up and down. “Los perros … The dogs. They found you. They like you, I think. They are trying to keep you warm.”
“OK.” I didn’t really know what else to say.
“Who are you? No, what are you? We have never seen a man like you before. You are blue. And very big.”
“I know.” I sat up, moving slowly in case I startled the dogs. The two on my chest slid off and immediately scampered around behind me, pressing against my back.
The man looked back at his colleagues, who shrugged, then turned to me again. “So … Where are you going?”
“Home. America. North America.”
He nodded at that. “OK. But it is a long walk. And a long swim. And then a much longer walk.” His eyes narrowed. “Do you know where you are?”
“Antarctica.”
“La Antártida, sí. But … How did you get here?”
“It’s a long story. Can you help me get home?”
“Sure. Well, we can take you to our base. But the Americans might find out. For the past week they have been looking for something. That is you, yes?”
“I guess.”
“They have helicopters, men in trucks…. But the blizzard must have covered your tracks, because they are looking in the wrong place.” He pointed off to the right. “They are one hundred, two hundred kilometers in that direction. My friend, we will make a deal, sí? You tell us everything about you—where you come from, how you are … like this … and why the Americans were keeping you here in this frozen hell—and we will do what we can to get you to Tierra del Fuego—Argentina—without your captors discovering you. Agreed?” He grinned and extended his right hand.
I couldn’t see any better option. I shook his hand. Even with the bulky gloves he was wearing, his hand was swallowed up by mine.
CHAPTER 9
THE MINE
COSMO’S PIEBALD SKIN was visible only through long scratches in a thick layer of mud and sweat-soaked rock dust. He was so exhausted that he almost passed out as he squirmed free of the narrow access shaft, and I had to grab him before his head cracked off the floor.
I gently lowered him to the ground, and Keegan passed me her rolled-up jacket to place under his head. She held her water bottle up to his mouth and poured a little in, then splashed some on her free hand and used it to wipe the grime from his face.
Donny DePaiva, Thomas Hazlegrove’s number-two man, was watching with three of his fellow guards. DePaiva was in his forties and never seemed particularly interested in the workings of the mine unless Hazlegrove was around, in which case DePaiva suddenly became the most hands-on and attentive guard you could imagine. “Well? Are they alive in there?”
Cosmo shook his head. “No trace of them. Nothing. They must have tried to get out when the cave-in started. If they’d stayed where they were …”
“So they got crushed.” DePaiva shrugged. “Well, we tried. All right.” He jerked his thumb at the narrow tunnel. “Seal it up.”
Keegan said, “Or we could just leave it. You never know—we might need to break through again one day.”
“Yeah, whatever.” DePaiva had already turned away and was walking back toward the surface with his colleagues.
When they were gone, Cosmo said, “They’re making progress, but it’s slow going. Jakob reckons it’ll take a month, maybe six weeks.”
Keegan said, “That’s not good. Their food and water will run out long before then.”
“So we bring them more supplies.” Even as I said that, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. On top of the difficulty of obtaining more food and water without the guards noticing, there was the secondary problem of actually getting it to Jakob’s team. Cosmo was the only one who was small enough to squirm through the access shaft, and he really didn’t have the strength to crawl through more than once a day, certainly not often enough to bring the necessary supplies to Jakob.
There was a solution to that, but I didn’t like it. Not one bit.
* * *
I crouched down just outside the doorway to the rusting prefabricated cabin that served as Hazlegrove’s office. He was sitting with his feet up on the desk, leaning way back with a PneumatoDrill 400 maintenance manual opened in the middle and lying across his face.
I knocked on the door. “Sorry to wake you,” I rumbled.
Without moving, he asked, “What do you want, Brawn?”
“I have an idea. It’s a good one too. It’ll increase productivity quite a lot.”
“Go on.”
“But in return for the idea, we want better conditions. Bigger rations, new clothes, new bedding. Or at least get the current bedding fumigated. This blasted place is crawling with lice.”
“I thought that insects avoided you.”
“I think they don’t like the taste of my skin. They scurry away from me and make it all worse for everyone else.”
“Huh. So what’s this idea?”
“Put the kids to work in the mine shafts. Only a couple of hours a day, just to keep them from getting bored. You can assign some of the weaker adults to watch over them. With Jakob’s team gone we’re eight men down. This’ll more than make up for that.”
Hazlegrove pulled his feet off the desk, removed his makeshift eye shield, and sat up. “That’s a strange suggestion, coming from you.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not suggesting that they do anything too dangerous. But they could bring water down to the workers, help with clearing the loose ore. It’ll get them used to working in the shafts, and it means their parents won’t have to be worried that they’re not being supervised.”
He stood up and walked to the door. “I’m not scared of you freaks. You know that, right?”
“I never thought you were.”
“By rights you shouldn’t even exist. In older civilizations people like you would have been put to death.”
“OK.” I wondered where he was going with this.
“And yet here you are, alive and healthy. Something to think about, eh?” He waved one hand at me, urging me to move away from the door, then stepped out and looked around. “There are three hundred and seventy-two inmates of this mine, almost a hundred of whom are too old, too weak, or too young to be productive enough to cover the cost of feeding them.” His lips tightened and his eyes narrowed for a moment. “All right. We’ll give your suggestion a go. Any accidents or delays caused as a result will be your fault. But you’ll get what you asked for. Except the new bedding and clothing, but we’ll delouse everyone’s existing clothing at the same time we do the bedding.”
“Good.” I nodded. “Yeah, that’ll work.”
“But there’ll be a price, Brawn. And you won’t like it. I’ll need to work on some details, talk to the warden.
Agreed?”
“You want me to agree before you tell me what that price is?”
He grinned. “Correct. Agree to my terms and you’ll get your extra rations today. It’ll take a week or so to get enough lindane to delouse the beds and clothes.”
I didn’t want to agree, but we needed the extra rations to keep Jakob and his men going, and we needed the kids allowed in the mine shafts because they were small enough to crawl through the access tunnel and bring those rations to the escape team.
We couldn’t all escape, we knew that. But now that Jakob and the others were believed to be dead, they wouldn’t be missed. If they weren’t missed, no one would be looking for them.
But Hazlegrove’s price … I couldn’t even guess what it might be. All I could do was hope that it was a long way off. Long enough for Jakob and the others to tunnel their way to freedom, and—ideally—find someone who could get the rest of us out.
“All right,” I said. “It’s a deal.”
Time passed slowly in the platinum mine, but it passed even more slowly when there was something to hope for.
After two months of round-the-clock digging Jakob and his team broke the surface some hundred yards beyond the perimeter fence. Those of us who knew of the escape plans—and there weren’t many: even the kids who assisted had to be sworn to secrecy—crossed our fingers and prayed to any number of deities that the team would find help.
But we knew it was a slim hope. Even though we were all prisoners, not all of us were criminals. Some of us were there simply because we’d proved to be an inconvenience to our governments. My friend Keegan, for example, had never been a superhuman. She had never committed a crime. She was imprisoned because she’d been in a relationship with her country’s secretary of defense and he’d been careless enough to leave unprotected documents on his computer. Keegan found the documents by accident and, being naturally curious, read them. The documents proved that a minor election had been rigged. She mentioned it to the secretary, and a few days later she was here, in the mine.
Every new arrival was quizzed mercilessly by the other inmates: We wanted to know what was going on in the outside world. Did they know about us? Where exactly is the mine located?
Keegan, just like the rest of us, knew only that it had taken the best part of a day to reach the mine, and that she had been blindfolded throughout the journey.
But Jakob and the others would find out exactly where we were. As summer approached and the air under the dome became almost too hot to breathe, that was the only thought that kept us going.
