The Gathering

by Michael Carroll

  Butler sneered. “My problem? My problem is that you’re a nobody, Cooper. You don’t have any powers. Sure, your old man was something else in his day, but he’s doing the pine-box waltz now. And you put him there. I got sent to military school because I beat the crap out of a guy who was trying to mug me, but you murdered your own father and no one has done a thing about it.”

  “That was an accident!”

  Enough! Colin decided. He walked over to Butler and stepped between him and Danny. “I don’t know whether you’re stronger than me, Redmond, but we’re going to find out if you don’t back away right now!”

  “Hey, I’m not going to touch him! It wouldn’t be right, him being a powerless cripple and all.”

  “Hit the showers, Redmond,” Cord said. “You’re done for the day.”

  Butler looked around at everyone, then nodded. His force field disappeared. “Whatever you say, boss.” As he marched out of the room, he turned and winked at Niall. “See you, shrimp.”

  Danny turned to Colin. “I don’t need you to fight my battles for me!”

  “I was trying to…”

  But Danny just turned his back and walked away.

  Colin looked over at Niall, who was now standing next to Renata, holding her hand. “What did he mean about my dad being evil?” Niall asked.

  Dioxin woke as the car slowed to a crawl; it was approaching a pair of gates set into a four-meter-high steel fence. “Where are we, Laurie?”

  “Northeast Wyoming.”

  The unmanned gates swung open and they drove through, the car plowing furrows in the snow. They drove along a short treelined road and into a small town square. “There’s no people,” Dioxin said. “Stop the car a minute.”

  Laurie pulled the car over to the side and Dioxin got out. He took a deep breath, the ragged remains of his nostrils flaring. “Fresh-cut timber. Drying plaster. These buildings are all brand new.” He leaned back into the car. “You built this place?”

  “We did. Right now, there’s only a handful of people here. We’re expecting the first citizens to arrive in the next couple of months. This will be your base of operations while you’re dealing with the Paragon situation.”

  Dioxin looked around, his breath misting in the air. “I was expecting an underground lair at the very least. Man, this is one creepy little town…” He pointed toward the roof of a nearby store. “Hidden camera…Another one over there…High-tech alarms on all the buildings. Unpickable locks on the doors.” He walked to the nearest store window and pressed his hand against the glass. “Shatterproof glass.” He peered through the window into the empty store, then walked a little farther along the street, knelt and scraped the snow from a square meter of the pavement. Reinforced concrete slabs, probably six inches thick or more.

  Dioxin brushed the snow from his hands and returned to the car. “You’ve built this place to last and you’ve thought of almost everything. Phone lines, TV points and Internet connections in all the stores. Solar panels on all the roofs. Wheelchair access everywhere. Street signs all perfectly clear and legible. You even have smaller signs on every corner with the street names in Braille. Except…You know what’s missing?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t have many traffic signs. You know, parking restrictions and all that.”

  “We won’t need them. The citizens won’t park illegally.”

  “A town this size must have cost a couple of billion dollars. Who’s behind it?”

  “Get in. I’m taking you to him.”

  Dioxin climbed back into the car and they drove off once again. “So…You’ve built yourself a perfect, private town surrounded by an unscalable fence. You trying to keep people in or out? Or both?”

  “We’re just providing a nice place for the people to live.”

  “Why?”

  Laurie steered the car along a wide pedestrianized street. “Because if we give them what they want, they won’t leave. This town is just the first of many.”

  “Trutopians,” Dioxin said and laughed. “I thought you guys were just another dumb cult, but you’ve really got something here.”

  “There are over seventeen million Trutopians throughout the world,” Laurie said. “That’s a larger population than many countries. There’s almost a million Trutopians in the U.S. alone, and we’re growing at a rate of about seven percent a month. By the end of next year we’ll have enough people to directly influence Congress. Four years, maybe five, and we’ll have enough political strength to elect any candidate of our choice to the presidency.”

  “It’s not possible to eliminate the criminal class: if the Trutopians don’t allow criminals or undesirables to join, then the world will be seriously divided. On one side, the peace-loving Trutopians in their perfect, impenetrable communities. On the other side, the rest of the world in their polluted, crime-ridden cities. That won’t sit well with a lot of people. It’s basically apartheid.”

  “No, it’s not. Anyone can join the Trutopians.”

  “But those who don’t fit in are expelled. Trust me on this: you can’t save the world by turning all the criminals against you. You could be looking at civil war on a global scale.”

  “There’s no progress without conflict,” Laurie said.

  He drove the car down into the empty underground parking garage of a large apartment block and stopped close to a set of doors.

  Dioxin grabbed his bag and climbed out. “No welcoming committee?”

  “I’m the welcoming committee. Follow me.”

  Laurie led Dioxin through the doors, along a short corridor and into an elevator. He slipped a key-card into a hidden slot, then the elevator began to rise.

  The elevator doors opened on to a bright, well-decorated lobby. Laurie and Dioxin stepped out. “We have the top three floors,” Laurie said.

  “And who is ‘we’?”

  Laurie didn’t reply. He led Dioxin through the lobby, their footsteps echoing across the marble floor. They stopped outside a door that had a red light above it. “He’s recording,” Laurie said. Seconds later, the light blinked out. “All right.” Laurie opened the door and ushered Dioxin inside.

  It looked to Dioxin like a small television studio. One wall was covered in monitors, all showing different television channels. Against another wall was a podium backed by a set of dark blue curtains and the Trutopian banner. Two video cameras were pointed at the podium.

  In the center of the room, at a large cluttered desk, an overweight, bearded man sat typing on a computer keyboard. Without stopping what he was doing, or even looking up, the bearded man said, “Dioxin. The legendary poisonous supervillain. Took us a long time to track you down.”

  “Reginald Kinsella. The Trutopians’ new leader.”

  “That’s me,” the man said, still typing. “But I want to know more about you. As far as anyone in the government knows, you died ten years ago, dissolved into soup by your own acids. What really happened?”

  “I feigned unconsciousness, slipped away when I was sure no one was watching. There was enough of my skin and blood left behind that they assumed I’d just broken down into nothing.”

  “As simple as that?”

  “No. Every nerve in my body was in agony. My skin was peeling away. I lost a lot of blood. It took me months to recover.”

  “After Ragnarök’s last battle, the first report we have of you is when you helped assassinate a certain U.S. senator. You did a good job, made it look like an accident. Even today no one suspects. You spent the next few years in Europe, Asia and Africa, moving from one country to another. You left a trail of dead plastic surgeons in your wake—I’m assuming that you forced each one to do some repair work on your skin—but they were so far apart that no one realized there was a serial killer on the loose.”

  Dioxin moved around to stand in front of the desk. “Look, just stop typing—it’s distracting!”

  “Not to me,” Kinsella said. Nevertheless, he pushed the keyboard away and looked
at Dioxin. “I’m going to rule the world, Mr. Dioxin.”

  “I kinda picked up on that.”

  “And you are going to help me. I want the new heroes out of the way. But they’re strong: we can’t easily fight them on a physical level. So we have to fight them politically.”

  Dioxin nodded. “You want to discredit them, strip them of the people’s support.”

  “Exactly. Though if you can kill them, then by all means do so. Except one. I want one of them by my side. To guard against future superhuman threats.”

  “Discredit them, kill them, divide them. I can do that. But I want Paragon.” Dioxin held up his hands. “He did this to me.”

  Kinsella raised an eyebrow. “Really? I thought your own acids did that.”

  “As soon as I realized that I was no longer immune to the acid, I knew I had to get it off my skin. There was a fountain nearby. Water dilutes acid. I could have washed the acid off and got away with only minor burns, if Paragon hadn’t slowed me down.”

  “I don’t have much love for Paragon myself. You’ll get him. Not at first though. First, we’ve got something really special planned for him. Trust me: you’re going to love it.”

  “So now you tell me about yourself,” Dioxin said. “I don’t like working for people I don’t know. If I don’t know someone, I can’t trust him.”

  The bearded man stood up and moved around the desk. He pulled off his jacket and tossed it to Dioxin.

  “Padded,” Dioxin said.

  “Right.” Kinsella unbuttoned his shirt and slapped the fake latex beer belly that had been strapped around his waist. “The beard is fake too. I’d prove it, only it takes half an hour to get the damn thing off.” As he buttoned his shirt up once more, he said, “The old guy who set up the Trutopians was pretty smart, but he didn’t have the vision it takes to make the organization really work.”

  “How did you get the job?”

  “It wasn’t hard. I persuaded him to take me on and hand over control. He wanted someone intelligent and absolutely honest.” Kinsella smiled. “I’m intelligent enough to be able to fake the honesty.”

  “And the reason for the disguise?”

  “I’ve encountered the new heroes before and I don’t want them to know that I’m running the Trutopians.”

  He reached out his hand to Dioxin. “My real name is Victor Cross.”

  11

  AT SAKKARA, LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, Colin sat in the machine room chatting with Razor.

  “Right,” Razor said, switching on a computer monitor. “Your first real training session is tonight. So here’s what you’ll all be wearing.” The monitor showed a rotating three-dimensional image of a black, tight-fitting costume.

  “Aw! You mean I’m not going to be wearing my Titan costume anymore?”

  “Josh wants everyone wearing matching outfits. A leftover from his days with The High Command, I suppose. Anyway, these things are knifeproof, bulletproof and fireproof. They’re a matte-black finish, so they don’t reflect much light, which will make it easier to hide in the dark. And they’re insulated too, which is just as well because it’s going to be absolutely freezing out there tonight.”

  “That’s not a problem for me,” Colin said. “I don’t seem to feel the cold much these days.”

  “Well, not everyone is as lucky as you are.” Razor reached into a drawer and pulled out a lump of something that looked like a cross between leather and rubber. “This is what it’s made of,” he said, handing it to Colin.

  Colin twisted the material around in his hands. “Oops. Tears easily.”

  “For you maybe. I need a hacksaw to get through it! Your helmets will be made of this stuff too.”

  “Helmets?”

  “Yeah.” He tapped at the keyboard and another screen appeared, this one showing a rotating head wearing a one-piece cowl. “Covers most of your face, so that’ll help keep your anonymity. Not that there’s any point with you because I doubt there’s a person on the planet who doesn’t know what Kid Titan really looks like.”

  “It’s Titan, not Kid Titan.”

  Razor grinned. “Whatever you say.” He tapped at the monitor with the end of his pen. “The helmets have a two-way radio built in, so that you can communicate with the others or with us here.”

  “No cape?” Colin asked. “I want a cape! Capes are cool!”

  “Colin, each one of these suits costs about half a million dollars. It’d cost nearly that much again for a cape. So. No capes.”

  “But we’re all going to look the same! Can’t we all have a different symbol on the chest? I could have the T from the Titan costume. Renata could have a diamond.”

  “You’ll have to talk to Josh about that. He’s very into the whole image thing.”

  “What about weapons?”

  “You don’t need any weapons. But I’ll show you some of the cool stuff we’re working on for the new Paragon armor.”

  Razor led Colin over to another workbench, this one covered in odd-looking equipment. “We’re trying to fit most of the weapons right into the suit. That’s one of the things that’s been slowing us down.” He pointed to some of the items in turn. “Gas-powered grappling gun, with a fifty-meter line. The line can hold about half a ton. It’ll fit into the suit’s left wrist. The right wrist will have a Taser. Let’s see…” He picked up a bundle of pebble-sized black objects. “Knockout-gas pellets. We’re building a launcher for them that’ll go on the suit’s right forearm. Oh and there’s this beauty!” He grunted as he lifted up a football-sized object. “We call it a blackout bomb. It’s way too big at the moment—we’re trying to get it down to about the size of an apple.”

  “What’s it do?”

  “It’s basically a smoke-bomb, but instead of smoke it pumps out billions of tiny black particles that just drift about in the air. The cool part is that the labcoats here have come up with a way to generate a small electrical field that’ll prevent the particles from dispersing too far.”

  “Which means?”

  “If you activate one of these, you get a sphere of solid darkness that’ll fill a large room. It only lasts a few minutes, but even your enhanced night-vision probably wouldn’t be able to see through it. And then there’s the hushbomb. We don’t have a working one yet. The idea is that it takes in all the sound waves around it, and broadcasts them back inverted, canceling out the real sound waves. Throw one of them at someone and he’ll be temporarily deaf. It should be very effective if we can combine it with the blackout bomb.”

  Looking around the workbench, Colin spotted a device that looked like a complex handgun. “What’s this?” He grabbed it and started aiming it at various objects around the room.

  “That’s a glue gun,” Razor replied.

  “Wow! How’s it work?”

  “It’s not a weapon, Col. We use it to glue things to other things.”

  “Oh.” Colin squeezed the trigger and a long stream of glue squirted out, landing all over a large wrench that was resting on the bench.

  “Damn!” Razor said. “Grab it quick before the glue sets!”

  Colin took hold of the wrench and picked it up. The heavy steel bench rose in the air, its contents crashing on to the floor. “Strong stuff.”

  Razor looked at him. “You or the glue?”

  Colin bent down and began picking up the fallen items. “Sorry about that. Hope I didn’t break anything.” As he replaced everything on the bench, he noticed that one of the items looked like a steel glove. “Part of the new Paragon suit?”

  “Yeah. Here, let me show you how it works…” Razor pressed something on the inside of the glove and it split open along the palm. “See these little pads? They’re pressure switches. They can sense how much pressure the wearer is applying. There will be hundreds of these all over the suit.”

  “What for?”

  “The suit’s too heavy for someone to move around in it as it is. These switches read the wearer’s movements and send that data to the computer, which
uses the information to decide how to control the motors and miniature hydraulic pumps.”

  Colin nodded. “Clever. Sol said that the suit will be like a robot that you wear.”

  “Exactly.”

  “That gives me an idea…”

  At that moment, Colin’s parents and Solomon Cord were in Sakkara’s Operations Room—called Ops—to plan the coming night’s training session.

  Joshua Dalton had spread a map of Topeka over the large table. “On a night like this I’m not expecting them to run into any trouble, so they won’t be out long. It’ll be a test of their new uniforms and equipment as much as anything else.”

  He pointed out various locations on the map. “We’ll drop them off here, get them to move to here, here and here, then back to their starting point where Renata can do her thing.” He glanced up at Caroline. “You talked to her about that?”

  Caroline nodded. “She’s OK with it.”

  “Good. Let’s hope it works.” Looking back at the map, he said, “If everything goes well tonight, I’m going to put Colin, Yvonne and Butler on the Alpha team. Sol will lead Renata and Mina on the Beta team.”

  “Colin and Renata have been here only for a day,” Warren said. “I’m not sure they’re ready to go out yet. They’ve never even seen the city.”

  Cord said, “The world knows they exist now. It won’t be long before they’re called to help out in some crisis. We need them ready as soon as possible. And I’m not just talking about the superhumans: I want to fully train my daughters. And Razor.”

  “No,” Josh said. “They’ll be a liability.”

  “I’m with Sol on this one,” Caroline said. “What if someone else figures out a way to strip their superhuman powers? After Ragnarök’s machine was used a lot of us would have died if Sol hadn’t been there. We need ordinary humans as much as we need superhumans.”

  “Right now,” Cord said to Josh, “your people are working around the clock on the new Paragon armor. It’s still months away from completion, but once the prototype is up and running we will be able to replicate it. We could have more than just one Paragon.”