The Indestructibles

by Matthew Phillion

  "No, I . . . no," Hyde said.

  "So why did you attack?" Kate said, still half-shrouded in the corner. "You were obviously calling us out."

  "I didn't. I wasn't . . . regular prison?"

  "Talk," Kate said.

  "No. No. You know what? I want a lawyer. You can't keep me here."

  Sam pulled a another device out of his rucksack and ran a second scan. The machine beeped twice, loud.

  "That's not the happy fun sound, is it?" Emily said.

  "Doc," Sam said. "I think you've got two problems right now."

  "Why are there always two problems?" he said. "Can't we just once have one problem instead?"

  Sam wasn't smiling, though. He showed Doc the scan.

  "It's okay. They're all fine, everyone can hear this," Doc said.

  "Well, for one thing, he's been tagged," Sam said.

  "Tagged?" Hyde said.

  "You've got a tracking device in you," he said.

  "A tracking what? Where?"

  Titus hopped up on his toes to peer at the screen over Doc's shoulder.

  "Oh man, you don't want to know," he said.

  "Not — not there!" Hyde said.

  "Worse," Titus said. He flashed a very strange grin at Hyde, Jane noticed. Cruel and predatory.

  "That's not the worst of it. This kid has a cortex bomb in his head," Sam said.

  "A what?" Hyde said.

  "We should've known," Billy said.

  "I'm so glad I didn't crush his brain," Emily said.

  "What's a cortex bomb?"

  "A bomb in your brain," Titus said. "Were you one of the lab rats?"

  "I was a supervillain," he said. "I wasn't an experiment. People were afraid of me."

  "Trust me kid," Billy said. "We've seen scarier than you."

  "You were one of their pet projects, weren't you?" Jane said. She leaned in toward the futuristic glass that served as bars on the cell. "You've got to be honest. Tell us."

  "I don't have to tell you anything," Hyde said.

  "Not to alarm everyone, but I'd recommend evacuating the room, pronto," Sam said. "For all we know they sent him as a Trojan Horse. Get him in the building and then blow his brain bomb."

  "Blow my brain bomb?" he said, voice cracking.

  "Doc, I was serious," Sam said.

  Doc pointed at Kate and Titus. "You two, out now."

  "I can handle — " Titus started.

  "Not everything, you can't," he said. "Humor me. Head up to the control center. Have Neal initiate a blast door lockdown on this zone."

  Titus nodded.

  Kate stared Doc down a moment, then left wordlessly.

  "Billy?" Doc said.

  "Shields up, boss, you got it."

  "Sam, you should go with the others," Doc said.

  "Doc, I don't have the gear to disarm a head bomb," Sam said. "This kid is — "

  "I'm working on it," he said.

  "Working on what? Working on what?" Hyde said.

  "Calm down," Doc said. "Were you one of the lab experiments?"

  "I — yeah, there was a bunch of us, a girl in a coma, a girl who set everything on fire, some guy with scales . . . "

  "How many were there," Sam said.

  "Nine, ten. Maybe twelve," Hyde said. "I don't know, they didn't let us talk. I'd see them walking the others around — get this bomb out of my head? I'm sorry! I didn't mean anything. Just trying to be a badass — "

  Jane walked up to the glass and put her hand on the surface. She was deliberately putting herself between Hyde and the others, hoping if he did blow up her invulnerability would protect Doc and Emily and Sam.

  "Stay calm. You don't know what might trigger it," Jane said. "Just take a deep breath."

  "I just didn't want to go to jail!" the kid said. "They bought off my parole officer! Said they could hook me up with these great powers — this stuff wasn't even fun, it hurt like hell every time I used them!"

  "Where did they keep you?" Jane said.

  "I don't know. We were on an island for a while," Hyde said. His eyes were welling up. "Then they moved us — am I going to die? Can you help me?"

  "We're going to try," she said.

  "I don't want to blow up."

  Jane turned back to Doc.

  "I can't have this happen twice in one day," she said.

  "Does anyone else hear beeping?" Hyde asked.

  "Oh no," Billy said.

  "Nobody else hears it?"

  "Sam, Emily, get moving," Doc said.

  "Not just them, Doc," Jane said.

  "What are you doing?" Billy said. "Is there anything we can do?"

  "If we had twelve hours," Doc said, rubbing his eyes. "Dammit. These things. Annie left us a machine but . . . "

  Sam walked up to the glass.

  "I'm sorry, son," he said. "These things aren't designed to be taken out."

  "Can we try to rush Annie's machine?" Emily asked.

  Doc shook his head.

  "It's embedded in his brain. The machine works very slowly to remove it, bit by bit . . . One misstep and it goes off."

  "Help me," Hyde said. "I'm begging you . . . it's getting faster. The beeping is getting faster!"

  "Out!" Jane said. "Everyone out."

  Doc eyed her. She shook her head. Then, leaned in to whisper in his ear. "I can survive the blast, Doc. And I'm not leaving him here to die alone."

  Doc nodded once, slowly.

  "Can I do anything?" Emily said. "Can I help? Doc? What can I — "

  He took her by the arm and grasped Sam on the shoulder with his free hand.

  "You might protect us with one of your bubbles, but you couldn't . . . I'm sorry, Em. We've got to get you out of here."

  Emily turned back to Hyde.

  "I'm really sorry I made those jokes," she said.

  Jane waited until the door closed. She could hear thumps and hydraulic sounds as the hallway was sealed tight. Then she noticed Billy had stayed behind.

  "Get out, Billy."

  He walked up to the cell door and tapped the release button. Hyde ran out, ran for the corridor door, pounded on it.

  "I know what you're doing, Jane, and you're not doing it alone," Billy said. "Kid. Hyde. Come here."

  "Screw you. I'm not going to die in here. I'm not!"

  Jane approached him, held her arms out. She saw that, despite his attitude, despite his anger, he was young, younger even than her, not much older than Emily.

  "Come here," she said again.

  Hyde walked into her arms.

  Jane hugged him. This close, she could hear the beeping timer of the bomb. Faster. Faster. Faster.

  The corridor filled with flames. Lights flickered. Then, Billy's body slammed against the wall with a thump. The concussive blast rattled Jane, knocked her off her feet, but didn't break her skin. Hyde didn't utter a whimper. He was there, and then Jane's arms were empty.

  She heard limping footsteps behind her, and felt Billy's hand on her shoulder.

  "Jane," he said.

  She stayed seated on the floor, shaking her head.

  "This has to stop."

  "Come here."

  "I can't let this keep happening."

  "Jane."

  "What?"

  Billy was one big bruise with lips split and an eye swollen shut — as if he'd spent the afternoon in the boxing ring. He spoke in a tiny voice, almost a whisper. "I really could use a hug right now."

  She climbed to her feet and wrapped her arms around him.

  Jane felt the raised bruises and lacerations on his back from the second blast. And there they stayed until Doc opened the doors and the others returned for them, two blackened, shadowed figures who had witnessed more death in one day than either had seen their entire, brief, lives.

  Chapter 42:

  Control issues

  Somewhere over the Atlantic, Valerie Snow was angry.

  The other entity, the storm, was angry too — Valerie could decipher its mood by the hail and lig
htning thrashing up the ocean surface. She'd given up trying to reason with it, yet that didn't stop her from spending hours talking out loud to the other thing. The chatter was meant to keep herself sane. She no longer hoped for a response.

  For no immediately apparent reason, the storm tugged itself quickly in a different direction. They fought over where they wanted to go sometimes; now, the storm seemed to resent that Valerie could push for control when she wanted to, but it exhausted her to try to maintain that much influence over the weather's movement, so she usually abandoned her efforts.

  She wondered what caught the storm's attention. Weary, she closed her eyes, wishing she could rest. The drifting fogginess of sleep started to cast itself over Valerie.

  And then she could see what the storm saw.

  Overwhelming, at first; she had no idea what had happened or why she was able to view something she shouldn't be seeing with her eyes closed. In the beginning, she thought it was a dream, but then she knew — she was envisioning a wide, panoramic vista of the ocean just outside the clouds. She could see for miles.

  "Is this what you see?" she asked. "Is this your vision of the world?"

  Then, on the horizon, she spied what caught the storm's attention. Like a rabid animal, the entity latched onto anything it could strike out at, and Valerie knew what the storm wanted: a massive shipping vessel, like a floating brick, chugged along in the distance.

  The storm moved incredibly fast, too fast for Valerie to try to wrestle control from it again. They pounced, predatorily, onto the watercraft, swarming it with fog, hammering it with rain and wind.

  "Stop it!" she yelled. "Why are you doing this?"

  She heard the boat creaking and straining against the tempest. When she closed her eyes, she could zoom in on the decks to see the crew rushing around, hear their panicked voices in the wind.

  "They weren't doing anything!" Valerie screamed. "Leave them alone!"

  The vessel rocked on powerful waves generated by the storm. Huge swells threatened to tip it onto its side. Foam roared over the decks like avalanches.

  Valerie gritted her teeth and wrestled for control. She tried pulling the storm with her, but the entity fought back. For every few feet she dragged them away from the ship, the entity pulled it back with equal force.

  She watched in horror as the ship began to tip. Valerie held out her hand, a pathetic attempt to will the boat not to capsize. To her surprise, an intense gust of wind followed her gesture, shoving the boat in the opposite direction. The ship rocked back into an upright position.

  This caused the tempest to roar in frustration at her actions. Valerie smiled, thinking she'd finally taken back more control from the creature. Then she saw the lighting. One, two, three lightning strikes in quick succession lacerated the ship, then more, blue lances of light and sulfur bursting onto the vessel's frame.

  Desperate to stop the destruction, Valerie tried to force the storm to move, hoping, if nothing else, she could provide the ship with enough time to recover from the strikes. But she was worn-out, too weakened by the fight already, to be the victor in this test of wills. Exhausted, horrified, and furiously angry, all she could do was watch as the-container ship began to sink.

  "This has to stop," she said.

  And the storm drifted away to find some other victim to unleash its anger on.

  Chapter 43:

  The plea

  Billy found Bedlam walking down a deserted stretch of highway, still wrapped in an oversized coat that hid her cyborg features. She wasn't hard to find; one of Dude's alien powers, apparently, was the ability to identify and track unique energy signatures, which, Dude told Billy, was exactly what Bedlam's cyborg nature gave off.

  Billy landed twenty feet away; he kept his hands away from his body.

  "Hey," he said.

  "You've got to stop following me. I'm gonna get a restraining order."

  "You going to hit me?"

  "Looks like someone beat me to it," Bedlam said. "What happened?"

  Billy still had trouble seeing out of his right eye because of the swelling. Dude's powers allowed him to heal at a faster rate than regular humans could, but it'd be a few days before he didn't look like he'd just lost a boxing match.

  "This is why I'm here, actually."

  "You think this has enhanced your appearance and you're hoping I'll say yes this time if you ask for my number again?"

  "No," Billy said.

  His stomach fluttered a bit when she made the joke. Half of him was strangely curious about her and not the least bit put off by the chrome glinting on her face and hands; the other half had this terrible guilt about Jane, who had, one hug aside, mostly treated him like he was a dolt.

  Bedlam threw her arms out to her sides, frustrated.

  "You gonna stand there and stare at me all day? Or, do you wanna tell me why you're here?"

  "This happened when one of your fellow, um, experiments, ah. Um."

  "What!"

  "Hyde's cortex bomb blew up. Pretty much in my face."

  "Hyde?" Bedlam said.

  "You didn't know each other's code names, did you?"

  "No," she said. "I'm guessing he was one of the experiments with super strength they were playing with," Bedlam said. "Was he . . . a good guy?"

  "Kind of a jerk actually," Billy said, shrugging. "But mostly he was just scared and, I don't know, trying to figure out where he fit in with all this stupid business. He thought he was a super villain and then they blew him up by remote control."

  "Crap."

  "Yeah," he said. "We think he was sent to try to test us out. They released a firestarter too, at the same time."

  "Not the little blonde girl."

  "I don't know," Billy said. "When we found her she was like, lava, like walking lava, y'know? But . . . "

  "She's dead too?"

  "Yeah," he said.

  Bedlam flexed her fingers a few times.

  Billy heard the soft whine of motors, the clicking of artificial joints.

  "They just threw them away to see what you guys would do?"

  "I think so," he said. "I don't know. Maybe they were . . . "

  "Making room in their new lab," she said.

  "Look," Billy said. "We've got this machine, I guess it's from the future or something, it can take the bomb out of your head. It takes hours, so you'd have to stay for a little while, we can't just pop it out like a car tire, but, y'know, if you wanted to get rid of it just in case."

  "Why not just blow me up yourselves and get me out of the way?"

  "We're trying to develop a no-blowing-up policy. It's been a little hard to implement but it's become part of our strategic plan."

  "You make no sense, you know that?" Bedlam said. "Be honest. You're just doing this so I don't demolish a McDonalds somewhere and become the next news story."

  "I know you think I'm a jackass. Pretty much everybody does, it's okay, that's cool. I'm used to it. But . . . When you're not headbutting me, I like you, and I think it'd suck if you blew up. So I'm just saying."

  "You don't like me. Nobody does," she said.

  "From one fellow misfit to another, Bedlam. We've got to stick together. If we don't like each other, who will?"

  She laughed, a short, barking chuckle.

  "Fine," she said. "I've got to take care of something first. Where can I text you when I'm done?"

  "Did you just ask for my cell?" Billy asked.

  "Don't push your luck, alien boy," Bedlam said. "Just tell me how to find you, and if I haven't blown up by then, I'll let your magical machine fix my brain."

  Chapter 44:

  On the defensive

  The first thing Kate noticed was Billy's absence.

  She'd been curious to see how well he'd recovered from the explosion; after he walked out of the holding area, it was pretty clear his alien force field was far from invulnerable. She also wanted to know what had transpired with the firestarter girl. Kate believed she could get the whole story out of
Billy because of his tendency to run his mouth off. Jane hadn't said a word, she'd taken on a miserable, quiet air since the events of that day.

  And, Kate couldn't hold it against her. They'd both experienced things they hadn't wanted to lately. Though she would never admit it out loud, she empathized with Jane.

  Doc sat at the head of the debriefing room's table and tapped a few keys on a console embedded in the tabletop. A screen lit up behind him. The faces of the known experimental teenagers — two deceased, one crazy, and one a hypothetical living storm — appeared.

  "Where's B — Straylight?" Emily asked, eyeballing the old man across the table.

  After Hyde's death, Sam Barren decided to hang out — much to Doc's visible relief. Kate figured the responsibility of keeping five inexperienced heroes alive all by himself had begun to fray on his nerves.

  "Went searching for Bedlam," Doc said. "He won't be back for a bit."

  "He what?" Jane said, her voice sharp.

  "Wants to try to bring her in again," Doc said. "She's in danger. If the Children of the Elder Star, or whoever is working for them, decide she's worth throwing at us, we should know where she is. And even if they don't, she's in jeopardy. They may decide to terminate her the same way they killed Hyde."

  "More civilian deaths, too, if that happens," Titus said.

  "But — did he volunteer?" Jane said.

  "She'll talk to him," Doc said. "It's our best bet. He's in no shape to do much more than that anyway right now."

  "If she attacks him he won't stand a chance, Doc," Jane said. "You should have sent someone with him."

  "He'll be fine, Jane," Titus said. "Don't worry. She can't catch him if he decides to fly away."

  Doc cleared his throat.

  "Here's what we know," he said. "The Children have commissioned the creation of their own set of metahumans. Some have worked out better than others. All seem to be designed for maximum environmental destruction. Fire, weather, urban mayhem."

  "Why kids, though?" Emily said. "I don't get it. Why kids?"

  "Back in the old days," Sam began, "the Children would work with whatever they could get their hands on. Maybe they just thought these young test subjects would be more available. Or controllable. Perhaps they were less expensive."