Levelling the base was something he didn't want to do, which was why he'd even made the phone call to the Russian President in the first place. Russia's special forces teams had much more experience and better gear for entering fortified bases efficiently and Winters had been hoping to rely on it to reclaim the base.
The room set about following the Presidents orders and he quietly slipped out to head back to his private office. He had another phone call to make.
##########
"That was a complete and utter failure!" came a sudden and loud voice over their radio. James and Frank both jumped at the sudden voice. The man in question hadn't contacted them since he'd been given full control over the launching of the missiles from the facility several days ago. The team had no idea what he was up to, so they'd tasked themselves with fortifying the facility.
Searching the base they found several heavy metal barricades and placed them at the primary entrance. Even if the men outside cut through the front door, they'd have another weeks headache to finish off the barricades. And the team had rigged some explosives on the other side set so they could remote detonate them at any time.
They hadn't managed to find any secondary entrances, meaning they were either blind or the designers had been incredibly short sighted. If it was the latter then it would work in their favour and allow them time to finish their plans before escaping.
They'd also disabled the elevators and fortified the stairways to help prevent movement about the facility just in case anyone managed to sneak their way in after all. All in all the base they'd taken over had never seen such fortification. It was more impenetrable than the rumored basement below Fort Knox.
"What happened sir?" Dawn asked over the radio.
"The missile flew off course and detonated over the ocean!" the voice yelled back at them. Everyone stopped at that and tried to imagine how that would be possible.
"Just launch another then." Frank said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Everyone else nodded their heads in agreement but said nothing. The man was going to pay them 8 figures of money each, so they didn't want to risk losing some of their money with any backtalk.
"Oh I will. But the targets changed." the voice said.
"What are you doing?!" Dawn yelled over the radio. "You son of a bitch I'll kill you!"
"What's going on Dawn?" James asked.
"That fucking bastard is about to let off a nuke inside the launch silo! He's gonna kill us all with it!" Dawn yelled over the radio.
"Well you've outlived your usefulness after all." the voice said. "Don't feel bad though. This was always the plan. I can't have anyone leading back to me alive. That includes you. I'm just sorry your deaths are in vain now."
Before any more words could be exchanged, the missile detonated. The blast tore through the base with abandon and ripped apart the insides. While the base was fortified from an exterior attack, an interior one, especially of the nuclear variety, had never been considered. All of which meant the base was decimated nearly instantly and very efficiently.
The blast tore through the barricades and exited over the top of the base, leaving a giant mushroom cloud in its wake. Everyone who had been working on entering to stop the terrorist plot was instantly killed and the radiation from the thousand plus un-detonated bombs bathed the area in an intense, scalding bath of energy, killing any and every living thing in the entire state and most of the surrounding states as well.
Nothing had time to adapt to the sudden and drastic change in the environment. Everything that didn't die instantly would die within the day as the radiation spread at nearly the speed of light across over a thousand miles of land.
##########
President Winters sat in his office and was about to pick up the phone to call President Vetrov when a massive rumble tore through the bunker. The entire bunker shook and felt like it had uprooted. When the quake stopped the President noticed the entire bunker was now leaning a little to one side.
He left the private office and, with a little balancing trouble, moved back to the conference room.
"Report! Now!" Winters yelled. Several people had to stop and cover their ears for a moment due to the loud volume in the enclosed space. After that they got to work trying to find the source of the rumbling. It took almost 5 minutes and came from a gate guard standing duty just inside the front gates.
"Sir, an object of unknown origins has impacted the white house lawn."
"Get men out there and find out what it was now!" The President ordered.
##########
"Sir, we've managed to identify the... body?" the medical doctor told the President, questioning the last part. The truth was, none of them knew if the person was even alive.
"And who is it?" the President asked. The person looked to be human from the outside, but he had to be sure.
"Her name is Emily Dawson, but for a little over 2 years she lived under the alias of Maximiliana Einhardt. She attended school in Brittlewall North Carolina until she was arrested for mass murder. She killed at least 6 people that the investigators knew of and is suspected of a 7th murder."
The President nearly froze. He'd heard about that case. Everyone had. Emily/Max had been found guilty of brutally murdering a number of rapists and other criminals. She'd even crushed the heads of a few of them, completely obliterating their brains. It had gained national attention very quickly and the girl had to be moved to a maximum security prison solely for her own safety.
"So what's been going on with her? I heard some strange reports while I was at the UN assembly." Winters said.
"Well, we're not sure. Nothing electronic works on her. EEG, MRI, fMRI, Xray, absolutely nothing works. We suspect she's alive because we can hear a heartbeat from our stethoscopes, but it keeps changing in frequency every second so we're not even sure what's going on. We've read it so high that the individual beats became indistinguishable and other times it was only beating once every 10 seconds.
Her body is outputting massive amounts of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum. The highest and most powerful frequencies are in the IR and UV range but she's outputting in every range imaginable at amounts we never even suspected were possible. We had to create a faraday cage room just for her because she was fucking with our equipment even at a mile away.
The 5 air conditioners inside the modified room are running overdrive but the average temperature is over 110 degrees fahrenheit and several of our nurses ended up with minor burns from being in the room for only 5 minutes with her. Since then we've had to use special suits just to check on her.
We're also seeing random electrical discharges from her body. Occasionally a small static spark will jump a 2 foot gap to the lightning rod we ended up having to put next to her."
As if on cue a discharge jumped from Max's body to the rod, lighting up the room in a bright flash. The people on the other side of the exceptionally thick observation window had to shield their eyes from the flash and took a moment to blink the spots out before continuing their conversation.
"We can't penetrate her skin to get an IV inside of her body either. It's extremely tough and even a scalpel dulled and bent without leaving a scratch. We're pretty sure she's invulnerable.
Our best option has been using a tube to feed her a blend of liquids through her throat. Her stomach seems to be working fine in that regards. But we're not entirely sure what's happening to her.
When the men brought her in, she had no skin or muscles. She was just a rather disgusting lump of bones and some soft tissue. Less than 24 hours later her entire body had fully regrown and that's when our problems began. We thought she was dead until the first electrical discharge cost a nurse her arm and career.
To put it mildly we're only sure she's human because of the identity. Whatever happened to her, I'd say that she's something more. Sort of a modern, real life super human." the doctor finished up. He looked entirely flustered as he stared at the girl through the window. No one who'd looked
at her in person had any clue what to make of her.
The doctor had, under the orders of the head of the government, flown in every specialist in every field he could think of. None of them could make heads or tails of the girls case.
"Keep me posted of any new developments. I have to go prepare for my speech." Winters said. Without waiting for a reply he exited the observation room.
Chapter 25:
Explanations
Max felt herself floating in... nothingness? She wasn't sure. She couldn't see anything or hear anything. Or feel anything. She floated along for a long time before she dared to try and move.
As she tried to move her arm she found it wouldn't respond. She tried again but still nothing. Panicking, she tried the rest of her body. But again nothing. She was alone and couldn't even move her body.
After a time longer than she could count, Max began to feel something. She couldn't tell what it was or where it was coming from, but feeling anything was better than feeling nothing. She basked in the feeling for a long time, but soon began to crave more. She wanted to feel more. To know more. To see and hear and move again.
As soon as she began to crave feeling, the entire world and all of its feeling flooded back into her mind with so much force she felt like she was going to pass out and lose herself back into nothingness. So she fought as hard as she could to stay conscious.
As soon as she opened her eyes she saw a hand pass over her face. A moment later the sting from her cheek registered and she instinctively punched straight up. The yelp that followed stirred Max a bit more and she found the strength to sit up.
When she looked across from her she saw herself.
'No that's Milia.' Max thought as the memories of the girl flooded into her mind.
"Glad you remembered me after punching my arm off." Milia said. Max looked down slightly and saw that she was missing an arm, but it was quickly regenerating.
"Sorry." Max said. "So what happened? Where are we?"
Before Milia could respond the memories flooded to her mind once again. She could remember everything up to the nuclear explosion, including the white hot sting of the radiation.
"Yep." Milia said, already anticipating Max's response.
"So what? We lived through a nuclear explosion?" Max asked.
"Seems so I think." Milia said. "And there are some people who'd like to have a word with us about it."
Max stared at her and soon found that new memories, ones that weren't hers, were entering her head. She began to stumble around a bit as a wave of nausea overwhelmed her, but she managed to stay on her feet. Once the feeling stopped Max tried to process the memories.
Apparently they were the memories from when she'd been unconscious. She 'remembered' suddenly being in an odd room in the hospital. There was a lightning rod next to her and the walls were covered in some kind of mesh. There wasn't much more than that though until another memory made itself known.
She saw herself being watched over by a group of people she didn't know. More memories processed and she saw more people and heard them talking over her body and reading off of various charts. After a long while the memories stopped processing and Max finally returned to the 'real' world inside her mind.
"Well that's just fucking great." Max said. The last memory that processed was the one that explained everything. She was being held by the secret service at the behest of the President of the United States. As best as she could tell she was inside a special containment room inside a hospital somewhere.
"So what do we do?" Milia asked. They both thought for a long time but Max came to the only conclusion she could think of.
"I guess we answer their questions." Max replied.
"Why?"
"Because if we do we might be able to twist it to our advantage. After all we have super powers, so we could get them on our side. Live a good life free from prison or worry. Right?"
Milia thought for a moment, but the smile on her face betrayed her thoughts instantly.
"Yeah, I think you're right."
##########
Max awoke and tried to open her eyes, but found she couldn't. She tried again and felt them slip open a bit but there was some kind of resistance. Whatever it was it felt dry and crusty, but she eventually managed to fully open her eyes despite whatever it was.
She then tried to move her arm up to wipe out her eyes but found it was restrained. Without thinking she flexed and found the restraint disappeared and she was able to freely move her arm. Then she heard the clicking of at least 3 guns as they whipped into position.
"Stand down." came a voice to her left. Or was it her right? Her senses were a little scrambled at the moment. She tried to sit up and look around but found more restraints around her midsection. She flexed her body again and found the restraints once again disappeared.
She sat up and looked to her left, finding nothing. So instead she turned to her right and saw a man sitting on the chair next to her bed. She had to look down to see the chair though.
"Hello." Max said to the man.
"Hello. Max I take it?" the man asked.
"Yeah." Max replied. "Where am I?"
"You're in a hospital. You had us worried there after taking a nuke to the face."
"Yeah I think I worried myself more honestly. I mean, those things burn a lot." Max joked around. If she seemed friendly they would be more open to her demands. Or at least she hoped they would.
"So I hear." the man replied. "Before we go on, could I ask you for a favour?"
"Uh... sure?" Max half questioned. She was unsure as to what favours the man could possibly want given that they'd just met.
"Could you stop that?"
"Stop what?" Max was now thoroughly bewildered. She had no clue what the guy was talking about. The person just gestured down below her and Max looked down. She saw her bed below her and squinted at it. It appeared to be tiny.
At the exact moment Milia began to speak in her head she realized what was happening. She was quite literally floating over her bed by a good 3 feet. Milia stopped before uttering more than a small noise as she heard Max's thoughts echo around inside her head. For a moment Max pictured a thoroughly bewildered Milia with a hand on chin like she was thinking.
"Um... I'm not sure how to do that exactly." Max replied. "I've never done this before."
"Well what were you doing when you started floating?"
"I don't know when I started floating either..."
"You started right after you destroyed the restraints holding you to the bed."
Max thought for a moment but the only thing she could remember doing was flexing to remove the restraints. With a thought she tried to relax her midsection muscles.
She let out a yelp as she fell back down onto the bed.
"Well I think you figured that out." the man said.
"Good. Now for a question of my own." Max replied. "Who are you?"
"My name is Matthew Winters. I'm the brother of President Zane Winters." Matthew said as she extended his hand. Max looked at it and gently grasped it, letting the man take over the action of shaking it.
"Nice to meet you. My name is Max."
"I know." Matthew said with a smirk. "And you can just call me Matt."
"So what's going on here?" Max asked of Matt.
"I'll answer that question later on. We're waiting on my brother to arrive first." Matt said. "In the mean time, would you mind telling me more about yourself?"
Max thought for a long time silently. After she decided that telling Matt the story would be the best way for her to get what she wanted she discussed it with Milia. Milia agreed for the most part but said that they should keep parts of the story hidden, like the fact that Milia even existed. Max agreed and she looked Matt in the eye.
"Well, it's a long story. I hope you have time."
"All the time in the world. I'm a sucker for a good story."
Max smiled politely and began her tale.
##########
/> "And then I woke up here." Max finished her story.
"My that's an interesting tale." Matt said. "I love it really. It's so full of emotion, my favourite kind of story."
"You wouldn't be saying that if you had lived through it."
"You have a point. But regardless I don't think you should tell anyone else about it."
"And why not?"
Suddenly the door opened and in stepped, of all people, President Winters.
"Because, miss Einhardt, I don't think the world is ready for an actual real life superhuman." the President said. "And yes I was actually outside listening to the story the whole time."
Max frowned at the man, but made a serious attempt at not showing any anger. She hated being tricked but she needed to maintain her composure if she was going to have a way out of this situation that didn't end with her being a fugitive. Milia deserved a happy life and Max would go to any lengths to ensure she got one.
"But I'm curious about one thing. Why would you tell all of this to us? Why bother trusting us?" President Winters asked. Max paused for a long time and stared at the man. He was certainly perceptive, a skill which she didn't doubt had earned him the presidency.
"I'm doing it because..." Max paused, uncertain of if she could continue. "I want a better life. So far my entire life up to this point has been hell quite frankly. I want out. I just want something simple and peaceful for once."
Max felt a few tears flow down her face as she spoke. She tried to stem them but she couldn't. Every time she tried they just flowed faster, so she gave up completely and let herself cry. She cried for a long time before finally running out of tears. After that she took another 10 minutes to compose herself.
"I think we can make a deal." President Winters said. Max jumped slightly as the man spoke. She'd completely forgotten that he was even standing in the room. And she was floating again, she realized a moment later. This time it took less concentration to set herself down, but it hurt more because she missed the bed and hit the floor.
Chronicles of the Supers (Book 1): Born From Darkness (The Story of Max) Page 14