by John Dixon
He killed Dan just to get close to me?
Scarlett screamed into the meaty palm covering her mouth, fueled by rage and guilt and desperation. She was tempted to lash out telekinetically with the force in her bones, but it would probably do no more than bloody Jagger’s lip, and if she was going to strike, she needed to take his head off.
Jagger squeezed her shoulder and spoke in a stern voice: “Stop struggling, Scarlett.”
She felt energy at the back of her neck and head again, this time in a blast, as if someone had hosed her down with a flamethrower, and a buzzing heat sizzled within her skull, just as it had during Rhoads’s briefing. She shoved this force into her bones like a woman thumbing ammo into a magazine.
Jagger tilted his head. “This is more than interesting. It’s amazing. Honestly, I’m used to having my way. I tell people to jump, they don’t bother to ask ‘How high?’ They just jump as high as they can, trying to make me happy. But you…” He laughed. “Unfortunately, I don’t have time to crack this egg right now. The big show is about to begin, and I need you…or, more precisely, I need your power. I mentioned dream walking. As Rhoads might have told you, I have this nifty little trick where I learn other posthumans’ abilities. It’s pretty cool, but it’s also very taxing. I’m like a computer. Each program takes up space, and after a while, my system lags. Not enough RAM, right? Like I’m running on eight gigs and need sixteen. Well, that power of yours, now that you’ve learned to store and convert it, like I showed you, it’s not just sixteen gigs…it’s limitless RAM. Once I learn your ability, I’ll be able to absorb explosions, shatter eardrums with a shout, crisp troops with a blast of flame, lift a tank, walk into someone’s dream ten thousand miles away, and sweet-talk a rabid dog into licking my hand…all at full power, all at the same time.”
Jagger clapped his hands. “All right, folks. Nonessential personnel, please report to the auditorium. But don’t let the cadets see you until after my speech, okay? Clear out. That means you, Sadie, and you, Dalia.”
“But you promised,” Dalia said, touching Jagger’s shoulder. “You said—”
“I know what I said,” Jagger told her, brushing her hand away with barely concealed annoyance. “Now be a good girl and step outside. I don’t want to risk your getting hurt, all right? Once we’re finished, you can play some more.”
Dalia’s smile wriggled, and she blinked away tears. “Thank you,” she said, her voice thick with emotion, and she followed Sadie out of the Chamber.
No, Scarlett thought, not that; anything but Dalia…
She considered lashing out with the energy vibrating within her bones and striking Dalia with a telekinetic blast, but she wasn’t sure that she’d stored enough to really hurt her. Besides, as much as she feared Dalia, she wasn’t the main problem. Scarlett needed to absorb more, let it build, wait for Jagger to get close—after all, she wasn’t a telekinetic, so her aim was poor at best—and blast him right between the eyes.
At that moment, Jagger leaned closer and placed his fingertips on Scarlett’s forehead.
She couldn’t miss from this range, but she needed more force.
“Show me how this works,” Jagger said. “Kyle, please punch Scarlett in the stomach.”
Yeah, hit me, she thought, but she had the sense to feign fear.
The meathead kept one hand pressed over Scarlett’s mouth. With the other, he bent a few of the machine’s metal ribs aside. Then he drove a big fist into her gut. An explosion of kinetic energy rushed into Scarlett, flooding her muscles with burning energy, which she rerouted to her bones, where it joined the strange energy that Jagger had beamed into her skull.
Had she absorbed enough? Perhaps, but she had to be certain. She would get only one shot. She needed to crush Jagger’s skull, pulp his brain.
Jagger removed his fingertips from Scarlett’s forehead, a huge smile lighting up his face. “So that’s how you do it. Amazing. You pull the force into your bones, like sound.” He chuckled. “Okay, Kyle, hit her one more time so I can fine-tune things.”
Yes, she thought. One more time…and Steede hit her—hard. The force punched into her, carpet bombing her muscles with napalm, which exploded back out of her, bound to the force she’d been holding back, in a telekinetic shotgun blast.
Steede flew backward as if he’d been hit by a Louisville Slugger. The light overhead shattered, and debris rained down from the damaged ceiling, rattling off the metal ribs and pattering along her uniform.
Yes!
Her real target, however, just grinned down at her. “Fantastic,” Jagger said. “I feel so strong!”
Scarlett stared in disbelief and dawning terror. Jagger had absorbed the blast, just as she would have.
Steede rose, cursing, and glowered at her with a bloody face.
Jagger patted Steede’s huge shoulder. “Let’s go, Kyle. My audience awaits. It’s show time.”
Scarlett sputtered, helpless and hurting. She’d tried her hardest, put everything into her last-ditch effort, her final shot…and had failed. Nothing could stop Jagger now, and nothing could save her.
Of course, she didn’t understand then, suffering in the depths of her failure and misery, just how much worse things could get.
Then she heard Jagger speaking in the hall just outside the door. “Dalia dear,” he said, his voice oozing sweet syrup, “your toy awaits.”
GLORIOUS, JAGGER THOUGHT, PACING THE stage before his mesmerized audience. Absolutely glorious.
“Again,” he said, and spread his arms.
Steede interlaced his fingers, reared back, and lifted his doubled fist overhead like a man with an invisible sledgehammer trying to ring the carnival bell. And then, with a savage roar, the strongest man in the world swung the invisible hammer.
The hammer blow exploded into Jagger’s chest. The sound echoed through the auditorium, reminding Jagger of the heavy, hollow whump of an M203 grenade launcher.
He laughed.
Steede stared, still bewildered. The man was strong enough to punch a fist into a person’s chest and rip out the spine and had, in fact, done just that, several times, to people all over the world, at Jagger’s suggestion. Yet…
“It doesn’t even hurt,” Jagger said. He said it to himself, but he stood close enough to the mic that the High Rollers and future High Rollers—all the wide-eyed cadets and cadre in attendance—nodded and smiled.
His claim wasn’t entirely true, of course. The strike didn’t hurt on the surface, but deeper within him a beautiful agony now burned like a sun. Like a dozen suns. A thousand…
So much energy. So much power.
Scarlett Winter’s energy-channeling ability had proved the final piece in the puzzle, the key not only to using his various abilities simultaneously but to supercharging whatever power he used. How easy it had been to charm those in attendance. Rhoads assembled them, and Jagger said a few words in the mic before stepping into view. Now they were his.
And there was no fatigue, no fading, no sign of the blackouts he normally suffered after employing borrowed powers. At long last, he was fully awake and ready to set things right.
“Cadets,” he said, and nodded to Rhoads, who bent dutifully over the multimedia station. A second later, the towering projector screen at the back of the stage came to life, streaming a live feed of the West Point mess hall far above them, thousands of cadets and cadre just sitting down to their meals.
By this point in the spring semester, the West Point cadets were completely institutionalized. It was actually impressive to see how effectively West Point had managed to coerce a diverse population of superstars to surrender their individuality and dedicate their every waking second to operating as cogs in an incredibly complex, amazingly efficient machine, the highest purpose of which currently appeared to be the training of young men and women to cut desserts in the most challenging convol
utions. Such of waste of time, talent, and energy.
Especially energy.
Energy was everything.
That was clear to him now. Everything was clear, throbbing as he was in this supercharged state. This was incredible. His whole body thrummed with power. On a whim, he considered blasting Steede with a lightning bolt, reducing him to ash just for the fun of it. But that would be a mistake. Steede was still of value to him.
He had to remember that this euphoria was not the end. It was the means to an end. This was the Day of Reckoning, to be followed by the Days of Woe, aka the Era of Jagger Doing Whatever He Wants…and that was the end.
He smiled at his audience of slaves, savoring the sight of that self-righteous son of a bitch Rhoads, who had underestimated Jagger again and again, first at Bragg, patting Jagger on the head and writing him off as a nice guy with a few leadership skills, never suspecting that Jagger was, even at that early point in the development of his abilities, manipulating the colonel’s thoughts. Hilarious. Again in the field, again at The Farm, again and again and again since Jagger had decided to break free. And the underestimation continued, Rhoads thinking that he could defeat Jagger by training a bunch of kids here, as if wearing a West Point ring granted some kind of power all by itself, as if sitting up straight and taking Ivy League physics would mean diddly out in the field…against the High Rollers, for crying out loud.
A five-star fool, Rhoads. But not without his usefulness. Even he would play a role in this, Jagger’s moment of fruition. His vengeance, his reordering.
“Today is the dawn of a new age,” he told the rapt audience beaming up at him, “the dawn of our age.”
The auditorium thundered with applause and cheers and stomping boots.
“Look at them,” he said, gesturing toward the live feed of the mess hall streaming on the giant projection screen. “All those shiny West Pointers. Aren’t you sick of their stares and smirks when you enter the mess hall? Of course you are. Because you know the truth. They’re elitists, born into privilege, with parents who reinforced all that duty, honor, and country nonsense. Duty’s for slaves, countries aren’t real, and honor…? They wouldn’t know honor if it marched up and pinned a medal on them.
“Honor comes from here,” he said, and thumped his chest, stirring the bright flames within, “and here.” He rapped on his skull. “West Pointers don’t use their hearts or their minds. They follow orders, that’s it, just like they did in high school, doing what Mommy and Daddy told them, becoming class presidents and team captains and earning admission to their personal wet dream—West Point—their golden ticket to a life spent bossing people born without the same advantages.”
He shook his head with mock disgust. “Look at them. Look at their spiffy uniforms and perfect posture. They’re robots, not people. Is that what you want?”
The audience stared, waiting to be told what it wanted.
“No,” Jagger said. “You’re too real for that. And unlike these crisp young fascists, you don’t think you’re better than everyone else, which is actually kind of funny if you think about it.” He grinned at the cadets, who’d been grumbling after he’d explained that they were angry.
Now they grinned back.
“Because you are the special ones,” he said. “But these cadidiots laugh every time you walk in the mess hall. They act like they’re A number one, God’s gift to the universe, the high and mighty West Point supertroopers.”
Lopez’s snort cut through the air.
Jagger had forgotten that snort, the way it startled people. Very amusing. He’d missed it, missed having Lopez around.
But no one here so much as flinched at the sound. They were locked on to Jagger. A bomb could go off, and not one of them would bat an eye.
“The only reason they’re sitting in that dining hall up there,” he said, “is luck. They were born with tremendous advantages. Internal and external. Nature and nurture. Sure, they worked hard, but what of it? They were wired to work hard and raised to work hard. At birth, they were dealt a royal flush. The way our world is set up, they could do anything. And with all that potential, all those choices, what do they decide to do? Cure cancer? No. Embrace a passion, become great painters or musicians or poets? No. Dedicate their lives to public service, rescuing the oppressed? Again, no. They come to West Point, because this is where they can get the two things that they want more than anything else in the world: bragging rights and the ability to spend the rest of their petty lives rubbing other people’s noses in their supertrooper status.”
His audience snarled like so many vicious dogs.
“So yeah,” he said, “they can sense that you’re different. They smell it on you. And they’re right. You are not like them. But they misinterpret the difference. They think you’re misfits, some ragtag outfit of third-rate losers who came here on the short bus. Well, fuck them.”
“Yeah!” someone shouted.
“Fuck them!” someone else hollered.
Jagger grinned, savoring the hateful clamor. Their anger vibrated and sizzled, pulsing off them like actual energy, and in truth, it was force that he could—and would—use. “You are so much better than them. Difference is, you were dealt mixed hands. You didn’t have perfect little families giving you pep talks every day. Your fathers were enlisted men, just like mine. Our fathers drank and had mood swings, and maybe sometimes they went upside your head or beat your mom and siblings in front of you.”
He paused, watching them nod. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, full of emotion. “I am sorry. I am so damned sorry. I wish that I could have been there for each and every one of you. I wish I could have stopped all that trauma and given your fathers the help they needed and deserved. I wish that I could have been there to tell you the truth. That you are far more amazing than those shiny assholes upstairs. You can do things that they could never dream of. You can kick through brick walls or stack the rubble with your minds. You can light fires with your eyes or heal third-degree burns with your hands. You can run fast as cheetahs or leap straight into someone’s dreams. But do we ever look at them the way they look at us? Of course not. Because we’re not a bunch of stuck-up, self-important elitists who love bossing people around. Am I right?”
The audience roared approval.
Jagger chuckled. “Wow…I guess we’re speaking the same language. Well, today is going to change everything. Today we’re going to send the golden children a message, and they in turn will become our message. Watch. You’re going to love this.”
The cadets nodded, eager.
“And when the president of the United States sees this footage…” He swiveled his gaze toward Rhoads. “We are recording, aren’t we, Colonel?”
“We sure are, sir,” Rhoads chimed.
“And we’ve contacted the major news networks?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Excellent,” Jagger said. “You could tell the mainstream media exactly what we’re about to do, and rather than try to stop us, they’d start running teasers. Well, we’ll give them the story they want, and they’ll show the whole world. The White House will demand answers, and thanks to our very own Senator Ditko—” He paused, gesturing to the far left of the stage, where Ditko took a little bow. “—we’ll be able to provide them. When the president interrupts programming to give an emergency State of the Union address, he’ll patch me in, and I’ll have a little chat with millions of viewers across the nation, thousands of whom have been waiting for this moment, the Day of Reckoning, for a long, long time. I’ll give them our message, and they’ll do what I say.”
The cadets roared.
Jagger cracked his knuckles near the mic, and the speakers gave what sounded like a twenty-one-gun salute.
“But first we have a little fun with the lunch bunch upstairs,” he said. “Watch this, kids.” He clapped his hands, and a pillar of fire ten
feet high roared to life on stage.
The cadets leaned back in their seats, oohing and ahhing.
Jagger spread his arms, and the columnar inferno curved and stretched, lifting slowly into the air like an uncoiling serpent knit of hellfire. Then, with a loud whoosh, the flames whipped over the audience in an airborne river of fire. Cadets cried out in surprise and fear and elation, then cried out again when the flames curved back over them and plunged straight into Jagger’s chest.
Yes!
He stiffened with the rush.
The flames rushed out of his back, arched over his head, and flowed again into his chest…and out his back again.
Out, over, back in…out, over, back in…
The flames cycled faster and faster, burning more brightly with each revolution, until Jagger spread his arms, impaled by an unbroken loop of blinding flame.
He straightened an arm, spread his fingers, and tucked his thumb, pointing the Crown of Glory at the ceiling, where a large overhead light wrenched away with a terrible screech, raining sparks. The unit crashed to the stage, making cadets jump and laugh nervously. Overhead, severed wires lowered, spraying sparks. They twisted and hissed like snakes, moving lower and lower until they struck, plunging their sparking ends into Jagger’s loop of flame, which swelled and quickened and shone brighter than ever, huffing flame.