The New Heroes: Crossfire

by Michael Carroll

  “I can’t. I’m not like you and the others. I have my own mission. I have to do this alone.”

  “But you don’t have to be an idiot about it. Take a few days off—you’ve more than earned them. Stick with us for a while. We can give you food and equipment, drop you anywhere you want to go. Façade told me everything. I know what you did during the war. I understand that. But don’t let your principals get in the way of the greater goal. You want to make amends? Fine. Allow us to make your task easier.”

  Two hours later, as they watched the last of the UN trucks take the prisoners away, Renata approached Kenya again. “So what do you say?”

  “I can’t… I don’t want to be famous like you. I don’t want people looking at me.”

  “Because of your scars?”

  “Yeah, but not just that. The things I’ve done…”

  Again, Renata thumped her armor. “If you were wearing one of these, no one would see your scars. Or your misplaced guilt.”

  Kenya looked from Renata over to the other two, Alia and Grant. “How many more of you are there?”

  “Enough to make us an effective force, not so many that we get in each others’ way.”

  “All right. I’m in.”

  Chapter 8

  “Mina was last seen a few minutes after you left the Brandenburg Gate for Kulturforum,” Warren Wagner told Danny as he put away his phone.

  “I was only gone a few minutes,” Danny said.

  They were in Mina’s hotel room, having searched through all of her things in the hope of finding something that would lead them to her.

  Gerhard, the Berlin work crew’s supervisor, told Danny that one of the other workers had asked Mina to teleport him to the roof of a fire-bombed building so he could evaluate the damage. After she dropped him off, she teleported out. That was the last time anyone had seen her.

  According to Razor, Mina’s phone had appeared in the Baltic Sea about thirty minutes later. That was more than enough time for Mina to teleport herself that distance, even if she was only moving a couple of miles with each jump.

  Warren said, “What’s really annoying is that Mina’s the best one to find people who are missing. We don’t have anyone else who can do that.”

  Danny flipped through Mina’s diary. He’d been reluctant to even touch it at first, but as the hours passed and it became clear that Mina wasn’t coming back, he’d snapped the weak padlock and checked the most recent entries. He was a little relieved to see that Mina hadn’t been keeping her innermost secrets in the diary: most of the entries were no more private than, “Got up at eight. Had cornflackes. Played alot of Scrabble with Niall—beat him nearly every time! Hah! Looser!”

  “Nothing useful,” Danny said. “Except that her spelling is awful. I think I should search for her,” he offered again. “I could take it street-by-street, house-by-house.”

  Warren shook his head. “That would take forever, even at your speed. Think of all the doors you’d have to open. Your father was able to pass through solid objects, but you’ve lost that ability.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “No, Danny.” Warren moved to the window and looked out. “A long time ago Quantum covered pretty much the whole world in about a day of real-time. He visited practically every home on the planet.” He turned back. “Not many people know this, so keep it to yourself, OK? The human race came so close to extinction… There was a plague, and your dad carried the cure—a sort of anti-virus. It could only be passed by touch. The scientists at the Center for Disease Control were able to create an airborne version of the cure, and me and a few others spread it wherever we could, but your dad was the real hero that day. He saved billions of people.”

  Danny sat down on the end of the bed. “Wow. That’s… that’s amazing. The whole world? From his perspective, it must have taken years.”

  “Yeah. And then some. He started in America, and went back and forth, visiting every city, every town, every home. Then he moved north to Canada, across the Bering Strait into Asia… He was moving so fast he was able to race across water. You ever tried that? Give it a go sometime. You’re not as fast as he was, but it might work. He covered the whole world, Danny. Think about that. Not just the continents and islands. He tracked down ships, and submarines too. He said he spent a long time trying to figure out how to get to the people in airplanes before he finally concluded that the only way was to come back to each airport as the planes were due to land.”

  “But he couldn’t have reached everyone on the planet!”

  “He did, pretty much. Every adult, anyway—the virus didn’t affect kids. I’m sure there were some he missed, but the airborne version of the cure caught them. There were very few reported deaths, and most of the world didn’t even know it had happened.” Warren held his breath for a moment. “Caroline worked it out… She sat down with a map of the world and a calculator and lots of sheets of paper. She figured that with all the trips back and forth, your father was on the road for the equivalent of about seventeen hundred years.”

  Danny shuddered. “Oh man… No wonder he…”

  “No wonder he went crazy. Yeah, that and the visions of the future he used to get. I talked about it with him once. He said that the worst thing wasn’t the loneliness. It was seeing the millions and millions of people that he wasn’t able to help. The poor, the starving, the disease-ridden. The only consolation was that because of the virus almost everyone was sick. At any given time somewhere in the world there’s a car about to crash, or someone being shot or dying from an accident. But most people were bed-ridden.” Warren shrugged. “The irony is that probably far fewer people died that day than would have if there hadn’t been a virus.” He turned in a slow circle, looking around the room once more.

  “Wow,” Danny said. “I wished I’d known him.” He tossed Mina’s diary back onto the bed. “When she does turn up, best not to tell her I read that. Look, Mister Wagner, maybe I’m jumping the gun here, but this isn’t good at all, is it? When Mina was under Yvonne’s control she almost killed me. She’s nearly as fast as I am and she’s much more agile. And she can teleport. She’s practically unstoppable. I mean, if she’s gone bad…”

  “If she’s gone bad, then we deal with it. But that is jumping the gun. Let’s assume that she’s not been taken or turned against us. She’s a teenage girl. Where could she have gone?”

  “If it wasn’t for her phone, I’d say she just went exploring. What are we doing about the phone anyway?”

  “It’s being picked up,” Warren said, then looked at his own phone to check the time. “In fact, you should probably leave now. You need to get to Poland. Follow the signs for Gdansk, then head north and follow the coast all the way around until you reach the southernmost tip of the Hel peninsula.” He tapped at the phone for a few seconds, then showed Danny the map. “Right there, on the beach. It’s about sixty miles from Gdansk by road. Unless you want to try running across the ocean? That way it’s only about twenty.”

  “I think I’ll stick to the roads. Back as soon as I can.” Danny slipped into fast-time, and went to his own room to collect his MP3 player and the large bag of potato chips he’d been saving.

  Sometimes he found it strange that no matter how urgent something was, he didn’t need to rush. From his point of view, he was strolling quite leisurely through Berlin, albeit a Berlin that seemed frozen in time.

  As he eased his way through a large throng of late-night shoppers, he spotted a young girl reaching her hand toward the open purse of an unsuspecting woman. Danny snapped the purse closed and moved on.

  At the German-Polish border-crossing he ducked under the barrier and sidled around a guard who was frozen in the act of tossing a peanut into the air to catch it in his mouth. Danny snatched the peanut out of the air as he passed, thinking, That’ll keep him wondering for a few minutes.

  He stopped for a few minutes on the road into Chojnice to examine a very expensive-looking open-topped sports car that was clearly tra
veling in excess of the posted speed limit, but he resisted the temptation to scrawl the message “Slow Down!” in the dust on the windshield as a punishment. He’d done that once before, in Canada, and was over ten miles away before he realized that the shock might cause the driver to crash. Instead, he pulled the keys out of the ignition and tossed them into the woods.

  When he reached Gdansk he followed the coast road to the Hel peninsula. Here, the streetlights were few and he got lost trying to find the beach, so he shifted back to real-time until he heard the waves crashing on the shore, then he followed the sound.

  He arrived at the beach just as a woman was emerging from the water.

  She was dressed in a white one-piece bathing suit and looked to be about forty years old, and in place of her arms she had long squid-like tentacles. That has to be Loligo, Danny thought. Brawn had told him about her: she was one of the few former superhumans whose powers came with a physical change. Before she lost her abilities, Loligo had been able to move through the water at an incredible speed.

  Though she was now—like Brawn—mostly human, she was still a remarkable swimmer, more at home in the water than on land. Brawn had said that she could even breathe underwater.

  “Hi,” Danny said, as he walked toward her, trying not to stare at her tentacles or the gills on either side of her throat.

  She smiled at him. “Buonasera. Daniel, si?”

  “Yep. You speak English?”

  The woman shrugged and shook her head. “Non molto.” She raised one tentacle toward him, and it uncurled to reveal Mina’s cellphone. “Io non credo che funziona ancora.”

  As he took the phone her other tentacle reached out and gently brushed his right sleeve where it had been cut short and folded over.

  “Il braccio. Fa male?”

  Danny shrugged. “Sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”

  Loligo frowned for a moment, then asked, “The arm. Does it make… pain?”

  “No, not any more. But sometimes I still find myself reaching for things with it. And I can’t tie shoelaces or anything like that, which is really annoying. It’s like…” He stopped himself. What am I complaining about? At least I have an arm. He wished that he could speak Italian, or that she was more fluent in English. He wanted to ask Loligo how she coped. Had the change come on all at once, like Brawn’s, or had her arms become tentacles slowly over time? Had she been able to switch back and forth like some superhumans? How had her family and friends reacted when it happened?

  He smiled again and tucked the phone into his pocket. “Thanks. I mean, gracias. No, wait, that’s Spanish, isn’t it?”

  “Grazie,” Loligo said, returning the smile.

  “OK then.” He nodded back the way he had come. “I should get going. Thanks again. Grazie.”

  He felt it would be rude to just slip into fast-time and walk away, so he sauntered back up the beach at a normal speed. Every time he glanced back, she was standing in the same spot, watching him.

  Back on the coast road, he called Warren Wagner. “I’ve got Mina’s phone. I think it’s broken, though. Not sure what use it’s going to be.”

  “Bring it back anyway,” Warren said. “Maybe the data card is still intact.”

  “Will do.” Danny ended the call and shifted into fast-time.

  The journey back to Germany was not a pleasant one. He kept picturing Loligo on the beach. What must it be like for her? He wondered. To have the ability to travel to any ocean and swim at incredible depths, but not have anyone to share that with?

  But she’s alive, that’s something. Brawn said she almost died in the prison camp several times. Alive is better than dead, no matter which way you look at it.

  Is that the best we can hope for? That we get to live?

  Once, back in Sakkara, Razor had jokingly described the superhuman abilities as a curse, but at times like this Danny feared that he might have been right.

  Paragon was murdered by Victor Cross. Yvonne had betrayed the New Heroes and been shot in the throat. Brawn’s friend Hesperus had been killed by Slaughter before Danny was even born. After he lost his powers, Ragnarök had taken his own life rather than be imprisoned.

  And Quantum, Danny’s own father, had been driven crazy by his experiences and his visions of the future. And then, years later, he had died when Danny—unable to control his new-found abilities—struck him in anger.

  Danny looked down at the stump where his right arm used to be. One of the last things I did with that arm was kill my father.

  It was an accident. Everyone knows that. No one blames me.

  No, they just blame me for causing the Trutopian war.

  After the war, Colin’s mother, Caroline, had tried to explain it clearly to the New Heroes in Sakkara: “What I tell you three times is true. That’s from The Hunting of the Snark, by the Reverend Charles Dodgson. It means that if you tell a lie often enough, for a lot of people it becomes the truth. Everyone knows that back in the middle ages people thought the world was flat. That’s common knowledge, right?”

  Danny and some of the others had nodded at that.

  “No, wrong,” Caroline said. “Recorded history shows that people have known that the world is spherical for thousands of years. When I was in school we were taught that Christopher Columbus sailed west from Portugal to prove his theory that the world was round. That’s just nonsense! Columbus—and every other sailor of his time—knew that it was round. The purpose of his expedition was to find faster trade routes. It was all about money, not exploration. The point here is that enough people are saying that there was a link between the prison camp in Lieberstan and the Trutopians. We could deny the lies until we’re blue in the face—no offense, Brawn—but that wouldn’t help. So we let it go. You can only change people’s opinions when they want them to be changed.”

  Danny knew that Caroline was right, but that didn’t make it any easier to take.

  Chapter 9

  The double of Colin Wagner struggled ceaselessly throughout the entire journey in the helicopter back to Sakkara.

  Colin wasn’t sure that taking him prisoner was the right decision, but the alternative was to let him go, and he was even less fond of that option.

  After the copter set down on the former military base outside Sakkara, Colin and Brawn dragged him out of the copter while Butler, exhausted from the strain of maintaining his force-field for so long, was barely able to stand upright.

  Colin had told the copter pilot to order everyone to stay away. “Until we know what we’re doing with him, I don’t want anyone else in the line of fire.”

  Now, the clone was face-down on the ground with Brawn kneeling on his back and holding onto his arms. “I can barely hold him! Stop squirming, you little punk!”

  Colin crouched down next to the clone. “You better calm way down or you’re really going to be hurt!”

  The only response was a wide grin.

  “What’s your name?” Colin asked.

  For only the second time, the clone spoke: “I’m Shadow.”

  Maybe he doesn’t feel pain, Colin realized. That’s why he kept fighting.

  In his mind, Cassandra’s voice said, “You could be right about that. Col, I don’t think he’s human. I mean, he’s a person, but he’s not like any of us. He’s more like… Like a biological war machine.”

  We need him unconscious. Are you sure you can’t tap into his mind?

  “I don’t even know where to begin,” Cassandra thought. Aloud, she said, “How can we keep him prisoner if he’s as strong as you are? Can you think of any place you couldn’t escape from?”

  Shadow suddenly spasmed violently, knocking Brawn to the side. Colin threw himself at the clone, and was met with a flurry of lightning-fast rock-hard punches to his chest and stomach.

  Colin responded in kind, wishing that Danny was here to help, or that Renata hadn’t lost her powers: her ability to turn anything into an immovable crystalline form would be ideal here.

  Shadow ros
e high into the air, with Colin’s arms locked around his waist. He kicked out, a vicious jab that collided heavily with Colin’s left knee and sent waves of pain rippling through his whole body.

  But the thought of Renata’s power gave Colin an idea: he concentrated on the clone’s body heat, drew it into his own body. In seconds Shadow’s breath was misting in the air. Frost formed on his eyebrows and around his mouth.

  Come on! Colin thought. Freeze!

  The clone’s movements began to slow. His cheeks and hands turned red with the cold, and Colin felt him start to shiver.

  Can’t freeze him too much—don’t want to kill him. But if I can slow him down enough…

  They were now several hundred yards above ground, and far below Colin could sense the others watching them. They can’t help—there’s nothing they can do.

  Shadow twisted and spun in Colin’s grip, slammed his left fist into Colin’s throat then immediately formed the fingers of his right hand into a point. He struck out, aiming at Colin’s eyes.

  Colin barely twitched his head back in time: Shadow’s fingers hit his cheekbone with enough force to send him sprawling.

  He was trying to blind me! I’ve got to find a way to—

  The clone brushed the ice and frost away from his face, then he looked at Colin and laughed.

  “You think this is funny? What sort of a sicko are you?”

  “I’m you. A better version. Stronger. Faster. Smarter.”

  Stronger and faster, maybe, Colin thought to himself, but there’s no way you’re smarter. “What do you want?” he asked.

  “We want you dead, brother.”

  “Why? Who are you people?”

  “We’re the future.” Shadow glanced down at Brawn, Cassandra and Butler. “You people… You’re maggot-food. Max Dalton was right—the age of the superhumans is over. And so is the age of the ordinary humans. This is the age of a whole new race. We are better than you in every respect.”

  Colin drifted a little closer. “Where do you come from? Why do you look like me?”