by Peter Clines
“I just flew close to four hundred miles at top speed. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and none of you is carrying anything that would even slow me down if I decided to walk into that building over there.” He pointed at a random office. “So could somebody please find Captain Freedom or Agent Smith?”
They exchanged glances and mouthed a few silent words. The gray-haired soldier stepped away and turned his attention to his radio. The first soldier gave St. George a polite bow of his head. “It’ll just be a moment, sir.”
“Thank you.”
He shoved his hands in the pockets of his flight jacket and looked around. He’d never been on a military base before, but Krypton looked a lot like what he expected from watching movies. Most of the buildings looked like they were designed for function more than form, and they all felt just a few years out of date.
Of course, everything was starting to get a few years out of date.
St. George turned his head and noticed one of the soldiers, the youngest one, was staring at his forehead. He reached up and tapped the goggles. “For flying,” he said. “It can’t hurt me, but getting a bug in your eye at a hundred and fifty miles an hour is still pretty gross.”
All of them grinned. “It wasn’t that, sir,” said the private. He was nineteen, tops.
“What, then?”
“I just … nothing.”
“What?”
The private shrugged. “Well … I always thought you were green. With a big fin on your head.”
St. George smiled. “That’s the Savage Dragon. I was the Mighty Dragon.”
“Was he your partner or something?”
“No, he’s a comic book character. I’m real.”
“St. George? That’s like, a knight, right?” One of the other soldiers gestured with his chin. “Is that why you’ve kinda got one of those pageboy haircuts?”
He sighed. “No, we just don’t have any good barbers left back in Los—”
“St. George,” called Freedom. The officer strode out of a building, towering over the woman who followed him. The hero recognized her from the Mount.
The soldiers around St. George stepped away and fell into a line. The officer crossed the gap in a few quick strides and grabbed the hero’s hand in a grip that would’ve cracked bones in a normal man. “It’s good to see you again, sir.”
“Good to see you, captain.” He tried to return the grip and realized Freedom had done that damned macho-leverage thing to lock St. George’s fingers.
“Your people are waiting for you at Dr. Morris’s new workshop,” said Freedom, releasing the hand. “It’s about a ten-minute walk from here if you’re up for it.”
“Sure. Good to stretch the legs after all that flying.”
“As you were,” Freedom told the soldiers. They snapped off a set of salutes and he turned to the woman. “I’ll meet you back at the office, first sergeant.”
She handed him the bundle she’d been carrying. Then she gave a salute of her own and a quick bow of her head to the hero.
“I’m never quite sure how things line up between officers and enlisted,” said St. George. “Is she your assistant or something like that?”
“First Sergeant Kennedy?” He shook his head and gestured in a direction to walk. “Easiest way to think of it is I’m the one in charge of the Unbreakables, but she’s the one who runs everything.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve got a small welcome gift for you,” said Freedom. He handed over the bundle. “I noticed your jacket was a little ragged. This is the newest Army Combat Uniform coat. Reinforced with a triple-layer Kevlar weave. A bit more durable than what you’ve been wearing.”
The hero shook out the coat. “Thanks.” It was a blur of tiny squares. Someone had stitched up a Velcro name tag that said DRAGON in bold letters.
“Let me know if it doesn’t fit. Sergeant Johnson estimated your size.” They walked in silence for a few yards before Freedom spoke again. “I also hope you’ll accept my apology, sir, for our hasty actions back in Los Angeles. It wasn’t our intention—definitely not mine—to start our association by throwing punches.”
“Tense times,” said St. George. “I guess it wouldn’t’ve been that out of the question for someone to take a shot in a situation like that.”
“You have no idea,” the huge officer said. “Regardless, I am sorry, sir. We were all on edge, and it doesn’t help it was the first serious action any of my soldiers had seen in close to six months. It sets a bad first impression.”
“Not a lot going on out here?”
“Oh, there’s lots to do,” said Freedom. “The proving ground is the largest military test facility in the world. We’ve barely reclaimed a third of the sub-bases and stations here. Even discovered two no one knew were out here. But it does get a little …”
“Monotonous?”
He grinned. “I think that would be the word, sir.” He raised his huge hands and flexed them into fists. “Dr. Sorensen’s enhancements feel like a waste when we don’t get the chance to do anything with them.”
“Yeah,” said St. George. “I know that feeling.”
They walked for a few more yards. The white brick buildings gave way to a series of more industrial-looking structures. St. George caught a glimpse of the distant fence line between two and saw sentries plodding back and forth.
“Would you mind if I asked a question, sir?”
“I guess that depends.”
Freedom had his fingers laced behind his back again. His eyes dropped below St. George’s chin. “What’s with the tooth? I noticed it in Los Angeles.”
He glanced down at his lapel. “Oh, that.” He ran his finger along the length of ivory. “Believe it or not, that’s a demon fang.”
“Come again?”
“A fang. From a demon. Honest.”
The corner of Freedom’s mouth twitched. “Pardon my language, sir, but bullcrap.”
“Hey, I don’t blame you. If I hadn’t been there I wouldn’t believe it, either.” St. George pushed up the sleeve of his jacket, revealing a line of ragged scars. “That’s where it bit me. The tooth broke off in my arm.”
The captain stopped walking. “Are you serious?”
“You ever hear of a hero called Cairax?”
“The monster man? Yes.”
“Demon man, not monster.”
“I thought Cairax was a hero.”
He stopped walking and looked up at the officer. “Are you a religious man, captain?”
“Why do you ask, sir?”
“Because I’ve tried talking about Cairax with a few religious people and it doesn’t always go well. We can leave it at ‘monster’ if you like.”
“I’m comfortable with my faith, sir.”
“Okay,” said St. George with a nod. “Max, the guy inside the demon, was a sorcerer. An honest-to-God, Harry Potter sorcerer. As he explained it to me, he trapped the demon with a special medallion he made. Or in the medallion.” The hero shrugged. “I wasn’t clear on that part. Anyway, sometimes demons possess people and make them do evil things. He figured out a way to possess a demon and force it to do good things.”
They started walking again while Freedom mulled over the facts. “He died near the end of the outbreak, didn’t he, sir?”
“Yeah, he did. But we all know dying doesn’t mean what it used to. His ex was part of the group that attacked the Mount last fall. Which is how I got this.” He tapped the five-inch fang again.
“So he was … what, a zombie demon?”
“Yeah. Sounds silly, I know.”
“You beat him?”
St. George shrugged. “I cheated a bit, but yeah.”
“And the medallion, sir? What happened to that?”
He studied Freedom’s face. It was a firm face, but an honest one. “Destroyed,” said St. George. “I crushed it myself. The demon’s gone for good. So’s Max.”
The captain nodded. “Let’s hope so.”
The hero looked at him a
gain.
“As you said, sir, dying doesn’t mean what it used to. Your friends are in here.”
They’d reached an oversized garage. Or maybe a small hangar. St. George held out his hand again. “Thanks for the escort.”
“Of course, sir. I believe the colonel arranged dinner with Dr. Morris and Stealth at twenty-thirty hours. I’m sure you’re invited as well.”
He batted some dust from the sleeve of his flight jacket. “I don’t think I’m dinner-ready.”
Freedom smiled. “Good thing you’ve got a new coat, then, sir,” he said. “Wash up, shake the dust out, you’ll be fine.”
“Thanks again.”
“One other thing. Your friends have some news for you. We agreed it’s best they tell you, but I hope you’ll see where we were coming from.”
“Okay,” said St. George. He looked at the honest face again. “That doesn’t sound too ominous at all.”
St. George hefted the three-hundred-pound array of armored plates. “And you say they’ve got over a thousand of these … what, ex-soldiers?”
“At least,” Danielle said from inside the half-disassembled armor. “I did a sweep before we came back inside. Four other buildings in this section of the base have the same overpowered cooling units, and I saw two more near the far side. At a hundred and fifty per building …” She turned her head back to him and raised her eyebrows. “That’s a lot of exes on this side of the fence.”
He set the back section of the armor down on the work platform, nestling it into the foam cradle. “And this Nest thing makes them docile?”
“It activates enough of their brain to dominate the core behaviors that manifest, yes,” said Stealth. “Or so Sorensen claims.” She was sketching out circuit diagrams.
“If he’s lying he did a great job convincing the exes to fake it for him,” said Danielle.
St. George drifted into the air behind the armor and hooked his arms under Danielle’s shoulders. He lifted her out of the battlesuit and floated down to the ground. She shook out her legs and arms and took a few unsteady steps.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I was only in there a few hours. Barely had time to adjust.” She hobbled across the workshop in her bodysuit, each step more confident, and grabbed a thick power cable. She leaned into it, dragged it back with her, and plugged it into a hidden socket above the armor’s hip. “This is going to suck without Barry here. No quick recharges.”
“Another point for you to consider,” said Stealth. She didn’t look up from her notepad.
“Where are your pistols?”
The cloaked woman shifted her head inside her hood. St. George was looking at her. He pointed at the empty holsters.
“They were seized upon our arrival,” she said. “Standard military protocol for civilian guests, and by their definitions we are civilians.”
“It doesn’t bother you? Being unarmed?”
“It does not. Why do you ask?”
“I ask because I would’ve expected not having them to drive you into a rampage.”
She turned her attention back to her sketch. “Colonel Shelly asked for them to be returned to me. I am satisfied.”
He looked at Danielle. The redhead glanced up from the armored helmet and shrugged. St. George returned the shrug and nodded at the cable. “Where are they getting their power?”
“A large solar farm, three miles to the north-northwest,” said Stealth. She pointed her left hand without looking up from the diagram. “It was visible during our approach in the Black Hawk. No doubt an Armed Forces renewable resource project. I would estimate it provides the base with six to seven times the electricity of our own solar resources.”
“For less than a thousand people,” said St. George. “Not bad.”
“But twice the equipment and resources, at least,” said Danielle. She ran a second cable from the battlesuit’s helmet to her laptop. “It’s not bad, but not good. Definitely not great.” A third cable ran out from the laptop to the armored spine on the back section of the torso. The redhead’s fingers danced across the laptop’s keyboard.
St. George peered over Stealth’s shoulder. “Almost done?”
“I believe so,” she said.
“You did all that from memory?”
“Of course.”
“That’s kind of amazing.”
“Thank you, George.” The cloaked woman set the diagram in front of Danielle.
The redhead stopped typing. “Did you just thank him?”
Stealth straightened up. “Yes. What of it?”
“What’s going on with you? You’ve never thanked me for anything.”
“You have never paid me a compliment.”
“Oh. Yeah, fair enough.” She shrugged and traced the circuit patterns with her eyes. “Like I said before, it’s pretty simple. Just a monitored power source for the organic components.”
“From the slight variations in the two we saw,” said Stealth, “I would reason the Nest units are individually assembled.”
“Makes sense,” said Danielle. “They’ve got raw materials and tools, but not much in the way of actual manufacturing facilities.”
St. George glanced at the diagram. “So what’s bugging you two about this? Isn’t this a good thing?”
“Perhaps,” said the cloaked woman. “However, Cerberus and I were both struck by how simple this technology appears to be.”
“Is that bad?”
“Maybe,” said Danielle. “It’s not like these things do miracles, but they’re right on that edge of being too simple. I’m not skeptical it works because, well …” She jerked her head at the door and the Tombs across the road. “… it does. It’s just hard to believe something so small could do so much. I mean, have you ever seen anything brain-related in a hospital that didn’t need its own cart, at least? Usually its own room?”
Her laptop sang a few bars of Wagner at her. She muttered to herself and slid her fingertip back and forth across the mouse pad.
Stealth’s head tilted inside her hood. “Is there a problem?”
Danielle shook her head. “The sensors got a little sluggish after I picked up that jeep. The response time was just off enough that I could feel the lag, but the diagnostics are coming up clean.”
St. George glanced at the legs and half-torso standing on the other side of the work platform. “Do you want to keep working on it?”
“No,” she said, “I want to get some food. Let’s go to this dinner. Might as well thank our saviors and enjoy our first meal as U.S. citizens in ages.” She grabbed her jeans and pulled them up over the Lycra bodysuit.
“Aren’t you going to be hot like that?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Were you wearing it under your clothes when you left this morning?”
“George,” she said, “focus.” She buttoned the pants and reached for her shirt. “You know, I just figured out what bugged me about all those exes.”
“What was that?”
“Well, it’s just …” Danielle stopped buttoning and flapped the edges of her shirt. “They were all wearing fatigues, right?”
“That is standard for military personnel under these conditions,” said Stealth.
“Yeah, that’s my point. Did you find it kind of creepy that every single one of them is wearing an Army uniform?”
“They probably dressed them like that,” said St. George. “Y’know, to make them look … well, uniform.”
Danielle adjusted her collar. “Are you sure?”
“Sure of what?”
“That they got dressed like that after they were bitten?”
Barry woke up with a splitting headache. Which, he supposed, was better than waking up with his face in a plate of scrambled eggs. And they’d been crap powdered eggs, now that he thought about it. He’d just been so excited about the bacon he hadn’t noticed.
Definitely better than not waking up at all.
Wherever he was, the curved ceili
ng was concrete with steel plates. Some fluorescent lights glared down at him from recessed sockets. One had a flickering tube.
He sat up and shook the last bit of blurriness from his eyes. He was on a simple wooden cot with a passable mattress and fresh white sheets. Military corners, he noticed. He was still wearing the pants and T-shirt they’d given him outside. There was no sign of the coat. Or the wheelchair.
“Bastards,” he muttered.
He let his mind settle, focused, and reached the trigger with no problem. He held off using it for now. Good enough to know he could reach it if he needed it.
The room was a huge dome, over a hundred feet across and a little over half that high. It was all concrete. In front of him was a long window, curved to match the wall. The room on the other side was dark. Way off to his left was a massive door that looked like a bank vault. The wrong side of a bank vault.
It was familiar, but he couldn’t put his finger on why.
He grabbed his legs and swung them off the cot. Getting off the flimsy bed was a challenge, but he managed to do it without tipping it or himself onto the floor. He paused for a quick breather and looked around again.
Part of the concrete, a large circle around the cot, was fresh and clean. The other stuff was older. He saw a few clusters of rust-colored spots where bolts had been cut off and ground flat against the floor. There’d been something here in the center that had been taken out, and new concrete poured to make a flat floor.
Just as he realized where he was, the lights flickered on in the other room.
“Oh, sure,” he called out. “Wait until I’m down on the floor. Real classy.”
Three men and a woman walked into the room from a door he couldn’t see. The first man and the woman were in Army uniforms. He couldn’t make out any ranks or names from where he sat. He didn’t recognize either of them.
The third man was Sorensen, followed by Smith.
Sorensen issued a few orders Barry couldn’t hear, then leaned forward to a microphone. “Good evening, Mr. Burke,” he said. His tinny voice echoed out of speakers hidden around the window. “I hope you slept well.”
There was a long pause and Barry realized the doctor was waiting for an answer. “Great,” he said. “Like a baby.”