The Post-Humans (Book 1): The League

by Bassett, Thurston

  The edges of the cube were curved, and she couldn’t feel any holes bigger than a rough texture on the ceiling that could have been pinhole sized hole for breathing.

  If she used fire to try and escape from this cell she would suffocate herself or burn off all her clothes, which would not be ideal, because she wanted some shred of dignity when her captors finally revealed themselves.

  ***

  Kiranda woke a second time in the glass cube, this time it was still, and outside she could hear voices, male voices. They had a mix of languages.

  “Hello,” she ventured. It sounded like her voice was a reverberating murmur in the tiny space, there wouldn’t be any chance she was heard.

  “Wake up!” A voice outside the glass case chimed in muffled tone. “Time to wake up PH scum!”

  Another voice. “Watch it, this one blew the shit out of that warehouse when we put bullets in her mates. Don’t wanna get her riled up. Damage the merchandise…”

  “Still scum…” the other said.

  One of the voices outside was definitely an Australian, the other could have been American, she couldn’t quite tell through the thick glass and the dark panels of the truck.

  Where is Nadya? Was she dead?

  The four of them had been followed back to the warehouse when they were attacked. Kiranda had thought they were members of a local gang that they had been trying to get rid of.

  But then she saw the people in uniforms, khaki with badges, like the military. Then there were the guns; not like the ones Indonesian gangsters had, ones that looked like they were military issue, but unlike any she’d seen on TV.

  There was a crunch and a squeal of metal.

  The big black tarpaulin was thrown back off the glass box that held her and the sunlight blasted her body like a warm spotlight.

  It was hot and it was bright, she couldn’t see anything through her squinting eyes, everything was white.

  “Eh, she’s Asian too! Did we get the right one?” a voice said in the bright haze.

  “It’s her. That’s Furnace, I’ve seen her picture. Vietnamese or something it said.”

  “Will she speak Australian?” a figure asked.

  “English, you idiot. Australian isn’t a language.” The other Australian replied.

  “Of course it is. Who cares anyway, as long as the U.S guys are sure it’s the one we are after.” The other voice finished.

  They were both Aussies.

  Who are they? And what do they have to do with PHC?

  It was then that Kiranda began to remember something Brad had told her when they were operating as The League in Melbourne. Don’t leave a trace. The PHC are the ones we run from. People always fear what they don’t understand, and people in power are always afraid of greater power.

  Were these Australians PHC?

  Kiranda’s vision began to clear and she could make out more and more of her surroundings through the glass cube. There were people in different kinds of uniforms and some in t-shirts and shorts, also another big glass case like hers, with someone inside.

  It had to be Nadya.

  “Nadya!” she screamed, but her voice must have been a tiny squeak outside.

  The man closest to her glass cell glanced at her and smiled, which made her whole body tingle with the goose bumps, the kind of goose bumps she felt before everything burned.

  She was trapped and they were quite confident with the cage she was in.

  “Little plane ride for ya sweet heart.” The tall blonde man said with a smirk. He was one of the Australians that she heard before. “Then they might get you a bigger box.”

  He was in an old blue shirt covered in sweat stains and a pair of jeans with a hole in the knee, and he was holding an AK-47.

  That was not a Government Issue weapon, it was old, and exactly like the ones gangsters in the outskirts of Jakarta would use.

  This guy had to be hired muscle, and probably thick as three planks.

  “They are takin’ you freaks to Melbourne.” The man smiled and gave her a wink. “Apparently you are useful to the big guys. None of my business, but I reckon something big is going down. See those dudes in the uniforms,” He gestured across the tarmac, “DPHR troops, makin’ the world a safer place for real people like me.”

  He was very casual, like he was surprised to even be there.

  DPHR.

  Department of Post-Human Relations.

  She knew what it stood for, but she called them Post-Human Collectors.

  She frowned and screwed up her nose. “So they are behind this.”

  They are taking her to a place she hasn’t been back to in many years.

  The thought of explaining herself to Athan was not good, she missed him, and she hoped like hell he was out to save her.

  She had walked away and broken his heart, why would he care now? The League was dead.

  Hours past in the heat.

  She watched helplessly from her cube as different people rushed around going about their business.

  They were in an aircraft hangar she decided, it was big and open with a few desks and big crates, as well as the two glass cases, one containing her, the other holding Nadya.

  The obnoxious Australian guy had changed shifts with an American in the DPHR uniform, and this man said nothing to her.

  She had decided that these people had hired the Australians because they were local mercenaries that could get to the destination faster than the DPHR unit that had now taken over. It was sad that Australians were living in Indonesia as mercenaries. She guessed they must have been those ex-military guys that get discharged for being a bit trigger-happy, or not following orders. These kinds of people were all over the world, clinging to lives of violence because it is all they knew.

  A bald man in a dark blue suit approached Nadya’s glass case and took some photos with his mobile phone.

  He confidently strolled over to Kiranda’s cage and smiled.

  “Furnace, I presume? I hope you don’t mind our kind of hospitality, it’s not as hot as yours, but at least you can look around and pretend you have an escape plan.” The bald man laughed, took out his mobile phone and aimed it at her.

  An American, and he didn’t look like a military man.

  “Don’t mind me,” he said as he fiddled with his phone, “but my bosses like to know that we are getting the work done. It’s how we demonstrate our aptitude at taking care of business. Like these guys…” he turned the phone around and there was a picture of one of her team, laying dead in the warehouse, then there was a photo of Gilang, also dead, full of bullet holes. “We aren’t proud of our work Miss Till, but we do what we do effectively, that is why the public still don’t know who we are.”

  “Let her go!” Furnace demanded, pointing towards Nadya.

  The man in the blue suit just smiled and put his phone back into his pocket.

  “That’s not an option, Miss Till. You and your friend are hot property. See what I did there?” He laughed at his own humour. “You start your merry journey in an hour and I know for a fact that there are some very important people waiting to meet you, Miss Till. And some fun toys waiting for your little friend, she’s worth a lot to these people, so you try and keep her spirits up, okay?”

  “Who are you people? We’ve done nothing wrong!” She pleaded.

  “Good bye, Kiranda Till. Have a good flight.” The American said grinning. He turned on the spot and marched away to the big opening of the hangar.

  Tears began to burn Kiranda’s eyes, she felt utterly helpless.

  Being trapped here, with her best friend unconscious in the glass case not far away, it reminded her of the night she had first lost control of her powers and burned her family home, and her family.

  She was that scared girl again.

  Chapter 14

  “LUCAS AND ASSOCIATES,” Athan declared, as he marched across the room.

  Brad, jumped out of his chair and looked at Athan in surprise.

  Belinda had
been sitting at her computer in the bedroom space, and hadn’t noticed him step out of her body into the space behind her.

  Brad glanced at his friend before walking over to a computer console to begin his search.

  “Where did you get this, old boy? You took awhile. I thought the trail might have gone cold.”

  “Andrew Campbell. He’s the last one, and I don’t know how long he’ll be breathing either. He’s got a plan to run away with his family on a tour of Australia till the heat is gone.”

  “Well, he’s probably safer than the rest of us, Sleepwalker, especially if the PHC have their Seeker.” Brad reminded him.

  “Seeker?”

  “That’s the name I’ve given to the young girl from Indonesia, the one who can detect the presence of Post-Humans.” Brad said, shrugging as he typed into the search.

  “Lucas and Associates came out of the blue with money and power and they’re pushing some of the tech that Dan was experimenting with in China.” Athan declared.

  “Leave a surprise for me! I do like a sense of mystery when I’m doing this searching…” Brad half smiled and shook his head.

  Brad scanned through some pages of text on the computer screen. He seemed very absorbed in his research so Athan sat quietly on the lounge and closed his eyes for a moment to relish the fact that he no longer had a headache.

  “Yes!”

  Athan was startled awake.

  “Yes, what?” he demanded rubbing his eyes. He couldn’t remember the last time he had had a decent sleep.

  “I found a bit on your Lucas and Associates, but it isn’t much.” Brad pointed to the screen. “They are international; somehow they have no real country of origin, none that is documented anyway. It was founded by a Clayton Lucas, Benjamin Fellows and Theodore Rose. An Australian, an American and a Brit. It is currently under the leadership of Dereck Lucas, the son of Clayton. It was started in the 1950’s sometime. It doesn’t say when exactly, but it does say they were doing some very dubious experiments with technology.”

  Athan nodded thoughtfully, then stretched his neck.

  “It looks as though its founders wanted to keep it under the radar. I did a regular net search, then checked some recent business publications.”

  “Business publications? I thought you said they keep under the radar.” Athan sat up to look at the computer screen.

  “Their recent stuff is flashy and public, very clean. No one keeps their dirty laundry in public. So I went backwards to pull together its origins. I had to use the Shadownet to locate some of the more private details. And these guys have been keeping very clean. I had to dig deep.” Brad swiveled on his chair to face Athan. “It also says that there was a fourth founding member named Ernst Schertel, who worked with the science and occult division during the rise of the Nazi regime. He experimented on people and Post-Humans during the Second World War. From the little information I could find, this name was associated with the experiments that were going on in China in the ‘70’s. These could be our guys.” Brad finished looking lost in thought.

  Athan crossed his arms. “This is getting big and crazy too quickly. And it’s not getting us any closer to stopping them from using this Seeker to find us, Brad. If she is turned into their sniffer dog, we are stuffed.”

  “And Furnace. Or have you forgotten about rescuing her?” Brad reminded Athan, knowing that thinking about the girl brought sour memories to both of them: Ian’s death, the end of The League.

  “Of course I can’t forget Kiranda, she is one of us.” Athan said rubbing his jaw.

  “You loved her once Athan. She was more than a comrade.” Brad offered soothingly. “And we will find her, somehow. This information may paint us a prettier picture than we originally had. Lucas and Associates has its primary offices in Melbourne, It’s a flashy place. It’s very public and probably very secure. If this company is the head of the snake we’ve been chasing they were smart. Hiding in plain sight. It will be even harder if this company is being used by the PHC. They will have it guarded by experienced officers who know how to spot a Post-Human snooping nearby.”

  “I wonder what the connection is there…” Athan pondered aloud.

  “Well, we know that Lucas and Associates used to experiment on Post-Humans, and we know that the DPHR, or PHC as we say, was responsible for making Post-Humans go away. And the U.N approved their establishment as a private sector department to quell the spread of Post-Human related fear. But it appears that Lucas and Associates had the DPHR working for them…” Brad rubbed at his short beard and ran his hand back through his shoulder length hair, his standard thinking gesture. “…Dan did say if you climb the ladder, there is always further to go, and someone uglier the higher you get. If businesses own enough of a country’s resources and revenue, they effectively run the government. Maybe these companies own the governments of the world, and Lucas and Associates has united them. The only way you could unite multi-billion dollar corporations like that is if you had leverage or something they all wanted.”

  Athan thought for a moment. “Us.”

  “It has to be. Why else would they be using the Indonesian girl and threatening you?” Brad said.

  “Well, there is the radiation…” Athan remarked. Remembering Andrew Campbell’s career responsibilities.

  “What radiation?” Brad asked.

  “Sorry, didn’t I mention that? Andrew said the Lucas and Associates had been sending techies around the world to different communication companies and technology giants doing stuff to their telecom towers or their control programs.”

  “Doing stuff?” Brad said with a raised brow.

  “Umm… Upping the output to some crazy amount for the internet and mobile phones.” Athan shrugged.

  “You didn’t think to mention this as you walked in?” Brad jumped back on his computer.

  “The Lucas and Associates part seemed like the more fun part. Mr Campbell also mentioned that this tech originated in China during the late ‘70’s” Athan smiled. “Sorry.”

  “Well we have to assume that this radiation output has something to do with Post-Humans. Maybe it makes us more visible to special scanners they’ve made, or to our Indonesian Seeker.” Brad mumbled as he typed.

  Athan shrugged and came to stand next to his friend. “Well it had something to do with the deal made by the united companies, Brad, that’s all Andrew told me. He said Comm Tech International, Spears, NTLU and Takahashi were some of the companies that had approved the merger.”

  “Interesting.” Brad said with brows raised. “There are some big players there.”

  “I had a feeling they might be.”

  Brad sat back and ran his hand through his hair. “I think we need to get into the hornet’s nest and find the source of this. We need to visit Lucas and Associates in Melbourne.”

  “Yeah, Melbourne is where this all seems to be going down. All the people that were abducted were taken in Melbourne. It was only after I woke a few up, that they turned up in the Ballarat hospital,” Athan said, crossing his arms. “They must have been moving them away from suspicion.”

  “At least Lucas and Associates are based in Melbourne. Bad luck if they were operating from their Boston or Beijing branch. I hate travelling by plane.” Brad said as he sat back and looked up at Athan.

  “I don’t like travelling by car,” Athan said remembering how tedious the drive to Hawkesdale had been with Brad, the day before.

  Brad looked about his room in search of something while Athan collapsed onto the lounge. “Will you take Belinda?”

  Brad stopped for a moment and stroked his beard. “I would, even just to look like an inconspicuous couple, but if we are pushing ourselves closer to this ‘new weapon’ of theirs, it would be for no good reason.” He looked in the direction of the room where Belinda would be typing her assignments. “I don’t want her hurt.”

  “I agree. We will need weapons, Brad, like the old days, things might get rough.”

  “Not if they
don’t find us. We will be like anyone else, unless we bump into your friend from the metaphysical plane, the figure in black.”

  “Well I call dibs on the brass knuckles,” Athan said smiling ironically.

  Brad and Athan were not the muscle in The League, they were the brains and the operative for behind enemy lines. Brad always had the intel and control of the tech and Athan could jump from mind to mind and open up the way for the real speed and muscle.

  “This is going to be hard without the others, Apollo.”

  Brad looked back from a cupboard he had been raiding, and his eyes glazed slightly.

  “I know, Sleepwalker. I feel like we are running blind. Without Whirlwind, Furnace, Cal or Deadfall we are like the tender nerds trying to break into the girl’s dorm on one of those ‘80’s teen movies.”

  “What?” Athan laughed.

  “You know in those old movies where the nerds keep trying to see the girls naked, and as soon as they get close one of them always end up triggering some catastrophe or another and they get caught or they hurt themselves.” Brad smiled.

  “I think I might remember seeing one of those.” Athan shook his head and smiled. “If only it was as easy as all that, my friend.”

  “If only, indeed.”

  Athan looked down at his suit. At least he could pack light in the clothes department.

  “We cannot kill.” Brad said as he came back to the lounge holding a bundle. “At least we must do our best, not to.”

  Athan was a bit miffed about Brad having empathy for the PHC, or whoever the enemy was. “What if we had no choice?”

  “There is always a choice, Sleepwalker, it may not be an easy one, but there is always one there nonetheless,” Brad said with finality.

  Athan looked longingly as Brad unwrapped the bundle. A bone handled Bowie knife was the first item he withdrew.

  Really, he didn’t want to have to stab someone, but he knew that they were up against people who had killed before and would kill again.