“I was coming to talk to him, now.”
“I know, that’s why I’m here… to make sure that you accept. I want him all in, Number One.”
“I was going to ask for more time, but soon, I promise.”
“Not soon, now. The time has come.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I say. Our time to rise is almost upon us.”
“Now?”
“Is that a problem?”
Number One faltered, only for a moment, but her mother caught it, no matter how quickly she tried to hide it.
“You’re conflicted,” Cynthia stated rather than asked.
“He’s… he’s a good man.”
She felt her mother’s disappointment and a hard stab of conditioned training ripped through her gut.
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t,” she added quickly.
“Are you a child of God?”
“Of course I am.”
“Are you? Because looking at you now, I’m not so sure. Perhaps you have faltered in your faith? The devil comes in many guises, my child; he is seductive and corruptive. Perhaps I made a mistake in sending you?”
“No!” the young woman snapped instantly.
“Perhaps Number Three would have been a better soldier for this mission,” Cynthia said, shaking her head sadly.
“No. I have done what you asked. I seduced the man who could not be seduced. I charmed my way into his bed and his heart.”
“But your feelings are real for him.”
“No… not exactly… My love is for you. My love is for my duty.”
“I hope so, child, because our time is almost here and you have a vital part to play.”
“I am a child of God. I am my mother’s daughter. I am a warrior of SOUL and I will do my duty.”
Cynthia Arrow studied her daughter for a moment before nodding.
“Good, my child, good. Now go. Go to him and follow my orders. Accept his ring and seal the deal.”
Cynthia watched her daughter walk to the elevator across the garage floor from a safe unobserved distance, the young woman’s body posture changing from combatant to concubine as she neared the doors.
When the doors opened, a man was exiting. The man flinched at the surprise appearance. She couldn’t hear what they were saying from this distance, but the man started to talk and Number One stopped him. Cynthia watched on, not needing to hear as the expression changed from one of concern to delight as he swept the woman up into his arms and hugged her fiercely.
Cynthia Arrow nodded to herself and slipped back into the shadows as another part of a very long-standing plan slipped neatly into place.
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chapter 9
BULL
Harrison Millington sat dozing in his favourite armchair. The day outside was typically dull and drizzly, but that didn’t matter as he never ventured far from the hospital anymore and tended to live like a housecat; as long as he was fed and warm, he was content to nap the day away.
The Ryhill Care Home had been his home now for the past decade or so, and it had been a safe haven away from the world, from himself, from the memory of Havencrest.
There were multiple newspapers and magazines lying scattered across the small coffee table by the side of his chair. Most had articles about his past life, about the Queen’s Guard, and none were now complimentary.
Along with the printed media, he had seen several television programmes debating the allegations that were gathering pace about what the government had been up to back in the day. The radio seemed to be filled with call-ins on the subject and there was a growing anger out there.
He had always been a simple man. Decisions were made far above his pay grade, and he’d only ever been interested in the word of Marshall. His were the only orders he’d ever followed, and while he’d always trusted the man implicitly, even Six-Shooter had his superiors, and just where their motivations lay was starting to concern Bull.
He was small squat man who had been bullied since childhood for his size and lack of looks.
The name Bull had been given to him early and had never been meant as a compliment. He had gone bald at the age of eleven, and his round dome head and squashed features gave him a bovine appearance and immediately placed him on the outside of every circle. His own defeated personality meant that he adopted the moniker without question or complaint, and the name stuck even in his own mind.
Coupled with his looks came a crushing lack of self-esteem that meant his natural inclination was to always hide in his shell and avoid any kind of conflict, verbal or otherwise. As a result, his life had been a long and lonely round of emptiness.
He hadn’t made friends through his childhood, and the cruelty of his peers had bled into his distrust of people in general once he had stepped out into the real world.
The fact that as far as he knew, he hadn’t been blessed with any kind of balancing abilities often led to further bitterness.
It had always seemed doubly unfair to him that his poor looks and empty personality were not offset by some kind of extraordinary talent, something to balance the scales, but he was as ordinary as he was plain.
After school, he had drifted through a variety of menial jobs. He wasn’t an intelligent man, but he was a steady one. He turned up to work on time, and he put in his shift without complaint. His bosses liked his attitude, but as per usual, his co-workers found his face instantly ripe for bullying.
He’d been working on a building crew tearing down old abandoned factories down by the docks before they were due to put up swanky new ocean-view apartments.
His job had been simple grunt work: he shifted rubble by the barrow load for eight hours at a time. He didn’t mind the work; he enjoyed being outdoors and largely alone, and he never seemed to get tired. Of course, his continuous work rate didn’t go unnoticed.
The job, like any form of life where there was a group gathering, came with a hierarchy where the bullies rose to the top of the food chain and people like Bull sat at the bottom and ate the crap that rolled downhill.
Rex Randall was just another in a long line of bullies to enter Bull’s life, Bull’s mere face sounding a siren call to be abused and punished.
The bullying was nothing special and Bull merely accepted the name-calling, the paint-splashing, the locking in at the portable toilets, the shoving, and all the rest without complaint.
He’d found in the past that if you didn’t fight back, eventually all bullies got bored with kicking a dead dog, but for some reason, his own meek acceptance only fuelled Randall’s anger.
The day that changed everything for Bull started out as an ordinary one. Work started at eight, and Bull was there his usual five minutes early. Randall’s crew were running behind schedule, and Bull knew that the foreman had been reamed out by his boss first thing. The one thing that all bullies hated was to be demeaned in front of their audience, so Randall was on the war path bright and early.
Bull kept out of the man’s way as best he could, but Randall was pissed – maybe it was work, maybe the man had a bad home life; maybe he was just a ticking time bomb, or maybe it was just time for fate to rear its head.
Bull was clearing a large section single-handedly as usual when the collapse happened. He often wondered if Randall had meant to scare or seriously injure him. Either way, when the scaffolding gave way, Bull was suddenly buried under several tonnes of metal and wood, enough to kill any man, or, as it turned out, almost any man.
He was buried for over three hours, and he supposed that the crew considered him dead given the size of the collapse. But he hadn’t died. That’s not to say that he wasn’t severely injured, of course – he wasn’t Superman, after all. But as he lay there silently, with multiple crushed bones, he endured the surprisingly painless injuries and waited patiently.
By the time that they dug him out and he blinked at the sudden sun overhead, he was greeted with shocked faces, unable to believe that he was still alive and n
ot screaming in pain.
His first ever hospital trip had revealed something truly startling.
When the scaffolding had collapsed on top of him, he hadn’t cried out in pain for the simple reason that he had never felt any. A look back at his younger years made him realise that during all of his bullied childhood, during all of the beatings, he had never made a sound because he had never felt any pain.
A surgeon had explained that there were breaks in his nerve endings all over his body, interruptions in the pain receptacles that prevented his brain’s signals from getting through whenever he was hurt.
The doctors didn’t understand why his body was defective in such a way, but at least they could pinpoint it. Harder to understand, however, was why his skin was almost impenetrable. It turned out that they had been unable to administer the anesthetic through an injection because they couldn’t find a needle sharp enough. Then, after they had used gas instead to put him under, while operating, they had broken several scalpels trying to cut him. The next thing they had discovered was that despite being crushed by a mass of wood, metal and stone, an amount that should have killed him instantly, he’d only suffered a few hairline fractures and only a couple of bone breaks. In addition to his lack of pain receptacles and rhino-tough skin, they could also add a bone density ten times that of a normal man to the list.
While he was a long way from indestructible, he was far from the ordinary man he’d always believed himself to be.
He had been recovering in a hospital bed, hoping that his story wouldn’t make the news, when God had paid him a visit, one that had not only changed his life, but given him one.
The Queen’s Guard had offered him a home, a family; however the world might have viewed him before, inside the walls of his new home he was accepted and, for once, welcomed.
His unique ability to withstand pain and damage had been enhanced, along with the others’, by Cosmic Jones. He had never felt comfortable calling the great man CJ; nicknames were for mortals, not for gods.
While he personally had no taste for conflict, certainly not like Crimson or Six-Shooter, he used his own skills for the greater good, for the country, for his new family.
His own personal take on the war against SOUL was a simple one: the religious fanatics were bullies, pure and simple, and if there was one thing he knew, it was bullies.
God and his Queen’s Guard minions had attempted, over the first year or so, to teach him how to fight, how to use his skills in a more graceful and controlled manner, but he had never been blessed with any kind of grace or coordination. Instead, his role was one of sheer destruction; a demolition missile without a careful guidance system, he was simply pointed and let loose.
He could charge through brick and stone, creating openings where there were only forceful barriers. While he wasn’t strictly bulletproof, it would take a large-bore weapon from a distance of only inches to inflict any real damage on him, and he had yet to meet the blade that could pierce his skin.
Whereas Crimson was the deadliest stealth assassin, Six-Shooter’s energy guns could find their target with precision from any distance, Dr Quantum was a reconnaissance scalpel, and Cosmic Jones was the shock and awe option. Bull saw himself as the blunt sledgehammer, a battering ram that once set running couldn’t be stopped. They were a completely complementary team as far as the battlefield went, but he knew that not everyone felt the same.
As a natural outsider, a listener, he knew that despite his best hopes that they were all a family, however dysfunctional, his teammates all had their own motivations and agendas.
Six-Shooter was married to the mission, despite the fact that he’d rather be married to Dr Quantum. For her part, the Doc always seemed desperate to prove herself despite being the most powerful member of the team outside of Cosmic Jones. As for Crimson, Bull had never trusted the man; he didn’t know why, but he just felt that the man was always too guarded, as though he was always hiding something.
He sat staring out of the window, his view for almost 20 years, the team long since disbanded and scattered, never the same since that day in Havencrest.
His home now was a private hospital, a safe haven for him provided by God and paid for by the government, a reward for his service, or a sweep under the carpet.
He had retreated even further into himself after that day, a fragile personality forever scarred and never to be the same again.
A noise from out in the corridor behind the open lounge disturbed him from his doze, and he blinked several times, trying to pinpoint what had woken him.
Given the wide range of personality disorders in the hospital, loud and sometimes violent outbursts, while uncommon, did happen, but something had caught his attention, something – even though it had only been brief – he couldn’t put his finger on which had made him wake.
He spent most of the time inside his own head. Often, staff would have to physically shake him to draw him out. Staff Nurse Gough had joked that it might take a nuclear explosion to get his attention. Her smiling face was often the first thing he’d see when she’d gently shake his shoulder.
He opened his mouth to call out, but his voice croaked dry and dustily and he tried to remember the last time he’d actually used it and couldn’t.
There were two sudden cries from the corridor which were louder and sounded scared which caused him to stand groggily up.
The staff here were excellent and used to the difficulties of the patients, but as his senses finally woke, along with the rest of him for the first time in a long, long time, he could feel fear in the air.
His bones may have been denser than any man alive, but now they were older and creaked when he walked. Mercifully, he couldn’t feel the arthritis, but he knew that it was coursing through his body at an accelerated rate, just as he knew that his joints were now having trouble supporting the extra mass.
He tried to remember his past life and the man he’d once been. While he’d never felt like a hero, he had actually lived the life of one. He reached into his pocket and slowly drew out the one thing that he needed.
Once he’d put on the glasses, he moved towards the hallway. He was wearing corduroy trousers, brown brogues, a check shirt and a thick woollen cardigan; it was hardly the outfit of a superhero, but it was what he wore these days and seemed far more appropriate.
The hallway outside had gone quiet and he crossed to the door slowly, pausing just before he reached it. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing up on end, and he trusted that sense right now more than his eyes and ears.
He pushed the door open slowly. Normally, the halls, while quiet, would be still full of occasional activity; it was just occurring to him now that there wasn’t a sound out there.
The hospital was kept largely serene by design, patients and staff desiring the peace and quiet.
The first thing to hit him when he poked his head out into the hallway was the smell: it was a coppery odour that was burned into his memory.
There were several bodies lying strewn about the heavily carpeted floor, but it was hard to tell how many, given the severed limbs. Blood was splattered and sprayed up the walls, and Bull stared at the scene, trying to process what his eyes were telling him.
He hadn’t so much as uttered a grunt of anger in a decade, but now, looking down at the scattered bodies of innocent patients and staff, he felt that slow rise begin to boil deep inside him.
His fists involuntarily clenched at the sight of death and he started to move, the forward momentum of a man who once he started couldn’t be stopped.
His shoes squished sickeningly on the recently soaked carpet as he made his way along the hallway towards the main common room. The large space was normally a hive of activity on any day as staff and patients partook of a variety of activities designed to stimulate, entertain and sometimes placate the residents. It filled him with dread that he couldn’t hear any sound coming from there.
He knew that Crimson would be moving like water through
the hospital, skipping across the floor without making a sound to alert anyone to his presence. Likewise, Six-Shooter would be making a plan, gathering intel and making smart decisions.
The Doc wouldn’t need to get close to the action; she was able to reach out with her mind and scan the unseen.
Unfortunately for him, all he had was unstoppable forward momentum, a Bull charging forwards in the proverbial china shop smashing anything in its path.
He started to move forwards along the hallway. Even the briefest of exertions felt unnatural to him after such a long slumber, but with each step, he gained traction until he was jogging. He swayed a little from side to side and an occasional elbow punctured a hole in the plaster wall, but slowly he righted himself until his jog turned into a run.
He took the large heavy double fire doors off their hinges as he burst through; unable to control his own strength, he sent the sturdy wooden missiles flying into the room and hoped at the last minute that he wasn’t about to kill someone as he crashed through. He needn’t have worried.
The scene inside the common room was pure carnage. Bull blinked furiously as his senses worked overtime to process what he was looking at. Every direction threw him a fresh horror to comprehend. Bodies were lying all around: some were slumped over tables, some were in the throes of trying to flee but had been cut down before they could escape.
The death was indiscriminate as the old and the young all lay dead and torn to pieces as though a wild animal had been let loose through a chicken coop.
He had seen his fair share of death before. The SOUL bombings back in the day had left horrific scenes, not to mention the aftermath of Havencrest, but this was different – this was up-close-and-personal murder. Someone had gotten their hands well and truly dirty.
He wandered in slowly and stood in the centre of the room, his eyes wide and glazed at the slaughter before him. It was hard to picture the kind of monster that would have been capable of such a wanton massacre.
His first thought was of their old enemy, but the SOUL soldiers had been human, men and women whose beliefs had been twisted and warped out of all reality. This felt different; this felt distinctly inhuman.
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