An Ex-Heroes Collection

by Peter Clines

  “Wonderful. I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Dr. Emil Sorensen. We met at breakfast. I believe you already know Agent Smith from Homeland Security. I want to assure you you’re somewhere safe.”

  “Well, thank God for that,” said Barry. “Last thing I remember some nutcase had drugged my food.”

  “I apologize for that. The duty sergeant thought a Taser would be better, but I was afraid a surge of electricity in your nervous system would trigger the change.”

  “Yeah, and we wouldn’t want that.”

  “Precisely,” said the older man with a nod.

  “I was being ironic.”

  “Actually, you were being facetious,” said Sorensen. “But I was ignoring it, regardless. May I ask you a few questions?”

  “This is an old reactor, isn’t it?” said Barry. “You’ve got me locked up in the core chamber.”

  The doctor nodded. “One of the many projects the Armed Forces was working on. It was a breeder reactor, built beneath the proving ground to keep it isolated in case something went wrong. There’s no danger of radiation. The core never even reached the testing stage.”

  “Radiation isn’t a big worry for me,” said Barry. “It was an accidental overdose of gamma radiation that altered my body chemistry and caused this startling metamorphosis to occur.”

  “Really?” Sorensen picked up a clipboard. “Not the rubber band thing you mentioned earlier?” Barry sighed.

  Smith put his hand over the microphone and leaned forward to speak in the doctor’s ear. There was a brief pantomime between them. The government man stepped back and Sorensen glowered through the window. “Must you always speak with so many pop culture references?”

  “I must, yes, but no one’s making pop culture anymore, so I’m starting to feel dated. I haven’t seen a new movie in two years. And you know what else I just realized?”

  The doctor stared at him.

  “I’m never going to find out what the hell was going on with Lost. I mean, was it just sheer coincidence their plane crashed on the island or was it this Jacob guy pulling the strings all along? And how did most of them end up back in the 1970s with the Dharma people?”

  “Mr. Burke,” said Smith, stepping forward again. With the tinny effect of the intercom, his young voice sounded like a cartoon. “I know this is frustrating for you. Probably a bit scary, too. I’m sorry we had to do it this way, but if you work with us I think you’ll find we all want the same things here.”

  Barry pursed his lips and nodded. “Can I be honest with you, John?”

  “Of course, Mr. Burke. Can I call you Barry?”

  “Please do. The thing is, John, Danielle thought sex with you was mediocre at best. She told me so herself right after you showed up.”

  Smith’s smile became a tight line. He put his hand over the microphone again. The few words Barry could lip-read made him smile.

  “Well,” said Sorensen once Smith had stepped away. “Perhaps it would be better if we just went to the questions.”

  “You mean the interrogation?”

  “Are you the same Barry Burke who worked on the Pulsed Power Program at Sandia Labs in New Mexico from July 2002 to January 2008?”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “How did you get your abilities? Was it a deliberate process or an accident?”

  “I’m afraid that’s need-to-know information.”

  “Well,” said Sorensen, “I need to know so I can—”

  “Pass. Next question.”

  “Stop acting so childish, Mr. Burke.”

  “Or what? You’ll drug my dinner, too? Pardon me if I don’t feel like playing your little game.” Barry looked at Smith. The younger man was rubbing his temples.

  “Madelyn loves games,” said the doctor.

  “What?”

  He was looking past Barry at the back wall of the reactor core. “My daughter, Madelyn. She’s very competitive. Loves games. My wife, Eva, thinks it’s amazing we get along so well, even though we’re so different.”

  Barry looked at the older man. Sorensen’s face had gone slack, a body on autopilot. “Where are they now? Your wife and daughter. Are they here at Krypton?”

  “I brought them out here to save them. I’m always trying to protect her, even when her mother tells me not to. I keep doing things to keep her safe.”

  Smith put his hand over the microphone again. The two of them talked and Sorensen’s face became solid again. He leaned into the microphone and glared at Barry. “I would appreciate it,” said the doctor, “if you left my personal life out of this.”

  “Ummm, you were the one—”

  “Just answer the questions,” snapped Sorensen. “How much energy can you put out?”

  Barry drummed his fingers on his thigh. “In ambient heat or as directed bursts?”

  “Both.”

  “Ambient, a lot. Directed, a real lot.” Sorensen made a fist around his pen. “Hey, here’s a thought,” Barry said. “How about a demonstration?”

  He flipped the switch in his mind.

  Light blasted through the window and Sorensen and Smith both flinched back. The cot was incinerated and the concrete floor burned. The window flared again as Zzzap hurled a blast of energy at the massive door and a deafening hiss of static boomed from the intercom. He threw another burst and it sizzled against the steel.

  Son of a bitch, the gleaming wraith said. That is a big door.

  “As you yourself pointed out,” Sorensen said, “you are in a reactor core. It’s extremely heat and radiation resistant.” Well, I had to try. “It was foolish.”

  Hey, do you have any idea how much damage those bolts can do? One of my small blasts is three or four times more raw power than a bolt of lightning.

  “One-point-twenty-one gigawatts,” said Smith with a faint smile.

  Points for the reference, but like I said, it’s a bit more than that.

  “At breakfast you implied your focused energy was derived from your own mass,” said Sorensen. The doctor paused to tap his fingers against his thumb. He twisted his head back to look at Smith. “Remind me to check his follicles and nails when he reverts to human form. Why not shoot smaller bolts, then, and conserve your resources?”

  Doesn’t work that way. It’s like a fire hose. It’s on or it’s off, and you do not want to be in front of it when it’s on. There’s no “light mist” option. The wraith drifted over in front of the window. Quid pro quo, Clarice. What’s the point of all this?

  “I would think that’s obvious,” the doctor said. Even through the glass, he managed to look down his nose at Zzzap. “You’re the most powerful superhuman in the world, Mr. Burke. If I can figure out how to duplicate your abilities it could mean a rebirth for this world. Clean, limitless energy for America and its allies.”

  Yeah, said Zzzap. And you’ll figure this out how? I mean, considering it’s already stumped a lot of really smart people?

  “The usual methods. Examination. Physiological and neurological testing. If all else fails, we’ve been authorized for more invasive procedures. I’m sure we won’t need to go that far, though.”

  The burning wraith hung in front of the window for a moment. Okay, then, he said. I think it’s time I was leaving. Thanks for the bacon and the massive dose of sedatives. Let’s not do it again anytime soon.

  “You seem to be forgetting something,” said Sorensen, rapping his knuckles on the window between them. “You’re in a decommissioned nuclear reactor. This whole chamber was designed to contain energies like yours. You could spend the next six—”

  Not like mine.

  The doctor paused. “Sorry?”

  Zzzap moved his head to the left, then to the right. This is a fission reactor, he said. In this state, I’m a whole different scale of magnitude. Thousands of times more powerful. It’s like saying a pair of sunglasses can protect you from the visible light output of a hydrogen bomb.

  “I stand corrected,” said Sorensen. “As I was—”

/>   I mean, I could just let ’er rip and burn a hole straight up and out.

  “You could,” said Sorensen, “except for all the soldiers.”

  What soldiers?

  “There is a military base above us with close to a thousand men and women. There could be a barracks right above that chamber. Or a mess hall. Perhaps a fuel depot that could explode and injure or kill dozens of people.”

  Zzzap focused his attention on the ceiling. Maybe nothing.

  “You can’t be sure, though, can you? The reactor shielding screens any X-rays or infrared that would tell you what’s above you.”

  Yeah, you got me there. Not that it matters.

  The doctor paused again, his mouth open.

  You keep thinking of me in terms of a man. As matter. I’m pure energy.

  “What do you mean?”

  Look at all this. The wraith waved his arm around himself. The big door. The walls. You set this up thinking you needed to hold a physical person who lets off a lot of energy.

  Smith pushed his way to the microphone. “I … I’m not sure we follow you.”

  I don’t blame you. It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around. I’m not physical. I’m a few bazillion trillion joules of energy bound into a human shape by my consciousness. Heck, the only reason you can even hear me is I learned how to excite air molecules to create sound waves.

  There was a long moment while they stared at each other through the glass.

  “You’re lying,” said Sorensen. “I have twenty-three confirmed reports of you causing sonic booms in my files. You did it just this morning when you arrived. You can’t cause a sonic boom without mass to displace air.”

  Unless I’m displacing the air by some other means. He held up the gleaming arm again and wiggled the fingers. Inside the visible area of the energy form is a little over nine hundred and fifty degrees Celsius. I keep all that energy contained, but air still comes near me, gets heated, and pushes away. That’s where the sonic booms come from. I’m not solid, but the atmosphere acts as if I am.

  The doctor stroked his beard. “Assuming I believe you, Mr. Burke, what are you getting at with all this?”

  What I’m getting at, Emil—Can I call you Emil? What I’m getting at is that to a being of pure energy, a big pane of clear glass is the same thing as an open door.

  The shadows vanished as Zzzap flitted through the observation window.

  Sorensen and Smith stumbled back. The soldiers drew sidearms. Zzzap raised his hand and the temperature shot up by twenty degrees. Don’t do anything dumb, he said to them. You can’t hurt me and I don’t want to hurt you.

  Sorensen pulled off his glasses and stared at the wraith with wide eyes. “You could’ve done that at any time.”

  Yup.

  “Then why spend so much time talking?”

  Because I wanted to hear what you had to say about all this. And I hate to be the one to break it to you, doctor, but your own personal Elvis has left the building, if you get my drift. Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I think my friends are somewhere nearby and they need to hear that you people are a bunch of nutjobs.

  He shot toward the door and there was a deafening crack. Zzzap flailed in the air, then rushed the door again. There was a second report, and the wraith was hurled away a second time. His outline blurred for a moment, then pulled back to a crisp silhouette.

  The doctor polished his glasses on his shirt sleeve and balanced them back on his nose. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of a Faraday cage, Mr. Burke,” he said. “They were very popular with scientists and espionage agencies because they block out all outside signals and interference. One as well built as the one around this chamber can block any type of electromagnetic signal. Cell phones, television, radio waves—it can keep all of it out.”

  The rumpled old man smiled at the gleaming wraith.

  “Which also means it can keep anything in.”

  Smith cleared his throat. “I know you don’t want to hurt anyone,” he said. “But I’d guess just hanging out in an enclosed space like this with you isn’t … well, it’s probably not healthy for any of us mere mortals in the long term.” He nodded at the soldiers. “Definitely not for these two who are going to be here monitoring you. Maybe you should go back into the core?”

  Sorensen was still smiling. Zzzap glared at him. He didn’t have eyes, but they all sensed the glare. He drifted toward the window.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” said Smith, “I just lost a bet with Colonel Shelly. I was sure you’d get out.” Yeah, thanks. That makes it all much better.

  I DIDN’T EVEN want to be in the Army. I wanted to be in a jazz band. Get out of college, make a little money giving kids horn lessons, and spend my nights playing trumpet somewhere down in the Gaslamp district as Harry Harrison and the Starlighters or something like that. That was my real dream.

  Yeah, I know. There was a writer named Harry Harrison, too. Only about ten thousand people have told me that, thank you.

  Then the White House had to start this stupid war in the Middle East while I was in high school and it looked like I might get drafted. People were talking about the draft, can you believe it? That was what I heard all through college. There hadn’t been a draft in forty years, and the last time was for a stupid, pointless war, too. If the Repugs stayed in power after the election, everyone on campus knew they’d keep the war going.

  Dad sat me down. He’d done a stint in the Navy right out of high school and he explained why. If there’s a draft, they decide where you go. If you enlist on your own, you get a lot more say in where you go. He spent Vietnam on board the Will Rogers, slept in a warm bunk almost every night, and never got shot at once.

  So I went to the recruiting office just before I graduated college and the Army officer told me there was an Army band. They’d actually pay me to play trumpet for four years. I signed up and told Dad it was one of the best decisions I’d ever made.

  Yeah, I joined Krypton right after I made sergeant. What better way to stay off the front line than to volunteer for a stateside experiment? And there was a decent chance I’d end up in the control group, so I wouldn’t even have to deal with side effects or anything, right?

  Little did I know.

  I made the cut. The surgery took. Three weeks later I raised my horn to lips, took a firm grip, and dented the outer cylinders. Gus and Wilson thought it was funny as hell. Wilson dug up a bugle for me a few days later, left it on my bunk.

  Fucktards.

  Of course, all this was kind of moot. Turns out no one’s just a musician when there’s a war going on. First it was in the Middle East, but then it was everywhere. The main instrument I had to play was my rifle, and since the exes showed up I’d gotten very proficient with it. Solos, duets, I even led a few six-piece numbers that got rave reviews under the name Staff Sergeant Harry Harrison and the Unbreakable Twenty-ones.

  When it all went really crazy, it had been six weeks since our first attempt into Yuma. Four weeks since First Sergeant Paine blew his own head off and most lines of communication went dead. The last one said the feds had flown some super-robot out to Los Angeles, and that made Captain Freedom furious. He’d been arguing we should be on the front line all along, and Project Krypton had just been lost in the chaos of the Zombocalypse.

  Yeah, Zombocalypse. Neat, huh? Gus told me that one.

  Thirteen days since the first of a small army of exes staggered across a few miles of desert to pile against our fence line and fill the air with the staccato chatter of enamel and ivory.

  Hard as it may be to believe, that wasn’t our biggest problem at the time. It was part of the problem, yeah, but the real issue was how we could work around it. The big problem was Doc Sorensen. The doc was crazy worried about his family. Turns out he had a wife and a teenage daughter back home. We caught him twice trying to steal a Humvee so he could go get them. Freedom pointed out to the old guy there was no way he’d make it over a thousand miles and back, but
the doc didn’t care. He argued they couldn’t order a civilian around and threatened to quit the program.

  That was when Smith stepped in. The monkey-boy finally started carrying his own weight. God knows how, but he’d pulled some strings and gotten Sorensen’s family on a plane heading out here. Only problem was we didn’t have an airstrip on the Krypton base. There are seven here at the proving ground, including one nobody’s supposed to know about, and the closest one’s about nineteen miles west and north of us.

  Unlike Krypton, it wasn’t fenced off. There were exes all over it. A lot of them were wearing tiger-stripe camo and flight suits. I knew it was on a list of priority areas to reclaim as soon as things stabilized. Thing is, we needed it now.

  The captain came up with a plan. A pretty solid one. We were going to coordinate landing time with a mobile unit. Unbreakable Twelve under Sergeant Washington was going to drive a Guardian armored vehicle to the airstrip and hit the runway at the same time as the plane. They collect the doc’s wife, daughter, and the pilot as soon as they touch down, then bring them back to Krypton safe and sound.

  This was the other problem, because going off-base meant we had to open all three gates. Twice. And we hadn’t opened them since the wall of exes got here.

  Most of us were on the gates. My section, Twenty-two, and Thirty-two were inside the first ring of fences. Captain Freedom had issued us all M16s on single-shot. They felt like toys after carrying a Bravo for months. Too light and too small. Their volume didn’t even go to eight, let alone eleven. All we were going to do was walk back and forth, stick our rifles through the fence, and pop exes as they headed for the gates. The catch was we only had two magazines each. The quartermaster was already rationing ammo, just to be safe. So one for the exit, one for the return.

  Sections Eleven and Thirty-three had the second ring. When the gates opened they formed a single lane into the base. They were in charge of any exes that slipped in there. Sergeant Monroe, the new platoon sergeant, was with Eleven and itching for a chance to take out some of the dead.

  And above us all, in one of the watchtowers, the captain was conducting the orchestra with an Mk 19 grenade launcher. They’d stripped off the vehicle mount and he had three or four cans of ammo with him. He could almost use the damned thing as a pistol. He was going to make a lot of noise away from the base. In theory, the exes would follow.