Different Paths
Page 3
It’s dark by the time I climb up the side of the old concrete building that has to be the warehouse the Eat-N-Go manager mentioned. It is one of the few intact buildings in the area, and the only one big enough to be a warehouse. I pause on the edge of the roof and turn my attention towards my ears. There is a metal jingle inside the building. An equipment belt. There must be security guards inside. Not shocking considering the Governor had the foresight to move the evidence of his crimes. It does sound like there are a lot of security guards in there, though. Am I hearing this right?
I step onto the black tar-covered roof to find a better place to listen, only the roof isn’t tar on concrete like I assumed, it’s latex on nothing. As soon as I step onto the material it collapses underneath me, and I fall through the roof. I get wrapped up inside the plasticy fabric as I fall, so I can’t get my feet underneath me and drop fifty feet onto my back and land, hard.
I try to fight my way out of the latex, but the more I struggle the further wrapped up I get. A loudspeaker comes on.
“Gavin Stillman, this is the National Guard. We have you surrounded. Surrender. We are prepared to use lethal force if necessary. Stay down on the ground.”
Staying on the ground is the only option I have right now. All I can do is wait and hope there’s an opportunity to make a break for it when they pull me out from under this latex straightjacket.
“I told you to stop moving! Lay down on the ground, or we will fire! This is your final warning!”
“I’m not moving. I surrender!” I yell, but as soon as I open my mouth the shots start ringing.
Bullets fly all over, a mix of small arms and machine gun fire that won’t necessarily hurt me and the occasional boom of a high powered rifle that definitely will do damage.
“I give up! I give up!” I scream.
It’s no use. These men don’t want to capture me; they want to kill me. Either they are under orders to kill me, or they are too scared to listen to me. Or maybe some of both.
I haven’t been hit by a bullet, yet. They can’t see me under the billows of latex. I roll into a ball, being sure to cover all my vital organs. A couple of ricochet shots tear into my body, but they are merely flesh wounds. Other bullets do just what I was hoping; tear holes in my latex swaddling cloth. One of the openings appears right above my face. I stick my finger through and rip a me-sized hole.
I slow time to a trickle and burst through the opening I made. I’m on the floor of the warehouse. The shooters are all up on a catwalk up above me, firing down. I bend my knees to jump back up through the roof—fifty feet is nothing to me now—but right before I let fly, I see a thin ForteSilk net they put in place over the hole. I’m not getting through there.
I’m out of time to think of options. The bullets are closing in on me. The slugs are moving up the register towards that one particular toned whistle of a bullet destined for my body. I sprint forward to make myself difficult to target. My massive frame moves like a ballerina on the warehouse floor. I get hit, but not anywhere vital. I’ve come to be rather blasé about gunshot wounds. It’s amazing what one can get used to.
What I haven’t gotten used to yet is my new body and its capabilities. I can dance ballet, but I’m not just faster, I’m stronger. I don’t need to jump my way out of here. I can burst out. I lower my shoulder and head towards the nearest concrete wall like a wrecking ball. The concrete gives way like it should, but there’s something underneath. I slam into a layer of Maceo Steel. I know it’s Maceo Steel because even diamond would have more give. My rotator cuff strains to keep my shoulder in the socket, stretching ligaments and muscles past their limits. I bounce and land flat on my back.
Then the bullets come flying. I roll back towards the wall, so I’m spared from one side of the gunshot square. I move into a crouch to get back to my feet. Then I hear a loud boom that hits that tone I was worried about. I try to scramble away, but I’m too slow. A bullet tears through my size twenty-five foot.
An inch further down and the injury would have been nothing, just a hole in my foot, but as it is, it tore through bone and some of the ligaments in my ankle. That’s not going to help my agility. The bullets keep coming, and I have to keep moving. Even the small arms fire is starting to add up. There’s a limit to how many gunshot holes I can dismiss as flesh wounds.
My salvation is up above me, the catwalk. I jump up and stick to the bottom, bending the metal girders to get a grip. It’s not easy with my busted left shoulder, but I press myself flat against the grating. Soldiers up above try to shoot, but the bullets can’t make it through the gaps in the catwalk. After two guys get hit by ricochets, they stop shooting and start stomping on my hands and smashing them with the butts of their rifles.
My digits can take the abuse for a few seconds, so I take another moment to scan for a way out. There’s a door in the corner across from me, on the catwalk level. A few armored soldiers with large guns stand guard.
I start crawling along the grates, pulling myself along by my fingertips while the soldiers continue to hammer away on them. My bones are chipping, but I’d rather heal broken fingers than holes in my chest.
I make it to the section of catwalk kitty-corner to the door. The stomping and mashing has stopped. In fact, the entire section of catwalk is clear of men.
A soldier at the end unhooks something and my upside-down ladder becomes a giant metal swing. I slam backwards into the wall, hitting my bruised shoulder again and messing up some ligaments in my spine.
At least the section of catwalk is still keeping me protected from most of the gunfire. I dangle, pressed up against the wall. There’s a National Guardsman moving towards where the section I’m hanging from connects. I have to make a move before I’m dropped back down to the floor.
I press my feet, injury and all, up against the wall and push off as hard as I can. The section of catwalk swings like a trapeze, and I let myself slide down the length of it, holding onto the edge until the swing hits its apex. Then I let go, hurtling through the air like a circus performer, only they don’t usually take two bullets as they fly. I hit the ForteSilk net that serves as the makeshift ceiling, and it alters my trajectory. I land on the catwalk a few feet away from my exit, cover my head with my arms, and charge.
My arms get pulverized by machine gun fire, but I smash through the wall of soldiers as they dive to the side to avoid me. I continue right on through the door. I slam on the breaks as soon as I make it through the doorway, and it’s a good thing I did, because the exit just leads to a small section of an old fire escape. Down below me, a dozen national Guardsmen are waiting to act if I fall.
Even if I let myself think the worst, all of these soldiers can’t be trying to kill me because they are Different haters. These guys are just following orders. I don’t want to hurt anyone innocent, but I don’t want to die either. I need to get out of here before I’m forced to make a tough choice.
There’s that boom again, and it’s got that terrifying tone. I don’t have time to move; all I have time to do is lift my left shoulder slightly to protect my head. It’s a good thing I do, because the bullet sinks right into the meat of my shoulder. Another boom from another direction and a bullet tears into my side. My brain processes these actions because I’m stretching my sense of time, but that doesn’t actually make my body react faster. I’m zippier than I used to be, but still far from a speeding bullet.
Before more booms with the wrong tone come my way, I leap and jump off the edge of the old fire escape. The men below fire on me as I travel through the air, hitting me with some bonus shots. I land in a bloody heap on the roof of a building across the way. I have company, a sniper in army fatigues whirls around to point his massive rifle at me. I rip the gun from his hand and crack it in half like a baguette.
I take a moment to pick a direction for my next leap of faith, and while I ponder, ten little pops come from behind me. The bullets puncture the muscles in my back but don’t make it very deep. One hits an area tha
t was already bruised, making the bleeding ten times worse.
The sniper is reaching into his belt to pull out another clip for the pistol in his hand. I move in and grab the man, lifting him in the air by his throat. I should pop his head like a pimple. I start to squeeze, and I feel his pathetic muscles give way under my powerful hand.
Stop! I scream to my fingers. The rational part of me knows that’s still murder. And I always listen to the rational thoughts of my mind; it’s just not usually a struggle.
Swallowing down my blood lust, I drop the man and take a long running jump to a nearby roof. I break into the fastest escape I can manage considering the hole in my foot, and all the other gunshot wounds. I leap rooftop to rooftop until the shooting and shouting recede into the distance.
#
I’ve finally managed to stop bleeding. There’s a real catch-22 when it comes to healing the human body. I need blood to provide nutrients and oxygen to the cells around my wounds so that they can perform mitosis and create new cells to repair the injuries, but that means I lose a lot of the blood I’m sending to the open wounds at those sites. I have to walk a fine line between sending enough blood to heal, and not too much that I bleed out. It helps that I can direct my bone marrow to create new plasma rapidly enough to just about replace what I lose at the same rate. But I need to mix that plasma with water in order to make blood, and I’ve just about used up my stores. I need to hydrate soon or things are going to get ugly.
Good thing home sweet home is just another couple blocks away. Even though the building is abandoned, Ben managed to restore its connection to the water main, so I’ll be able to drink my fill. I have to give credit to the Metro Area, and I suppose that means Khan. He’s managed to keep the water flowing without using Differents, and that’s no small feat.
I round the corner and walk directly into a man. He bounces off my chest. We stare at each other for a moment, trying to decide what to do, and I see my left arm shooting out towards the man, throwing a powerful haymaker which will utterly destroy his skull when it connects. My fist has too much momentum to stop; I can only redirect into the old concrete wall to my side. It lands with a thud, knocking off a chunk of the wall and chipping the bone in my knuckle.
Why did that happen? I didn’t tell my hand to throw that punch.
The man’s own hand moves down to his waist, grabbing for a gun, which he carries because he’s a police officer. I am a lot faster than he is and reach out, beating his hand to the gun, which I grab and toss aside. He opens his mouth to scream, but I wrap my massive hand around his face, muzzling his shout. I have to stop my fingers from squeezing so hard they crush him.
I manage to keep the officer quiet, but it’s a moot point considering I just hit a building like a wrecking ball. Other officers are shouting and running towards me. I have to move. There’s no time to take out the officer in my hands short of smashing him to smithereens, so I drop him and turn to run. Or the closest thing to a run I can manage, considering I still have a hole in my foot.
“The Beast Slayer! He’s here!” the officer shouts, a lovely thank you for my magnanimity.
The shots start flying, a low chord at first, but as more officers join in it quickly turns into a symphony. Their handguns lack the power to do any serious damage, but they do tear my back to shreds, springing bloody leaks I can ill afford. If I wasn’t injured, I could outrun these officers with ease, but in my current state, my getaway is painfully slow.
I try to leap up onto the roof of a nearby building, but my muscles are growing weak from lack of water. I end up falling short and doing a belly flop onto the street. I get hit with more bullets as I get to my feet.
I head in to an alley and, luckily, the alley leads to another where there’s a fork. I go left, which leads to another fork, where I go right. I don’t think the police officers will split up to come after me, so there’s only a one in four chance they’re going to come this way. Which is good, because all of my muscles are cramping. Lactic acid has built up, and because my blood pressure is so low, I’m not clearing the toxins out quickly enough. I need to hydrate to get my blood pressure up.
I see my salvation in the alley, and it is disgusting. There’s a puddle of water in a pothole in the ground. Although garbage-filled swamp may be a more apt description than puddle. I start upping my production of white blood cells and other antibodies. Something tells me there’s going to be a whole lot of nasty stuff in there. Then I lean down and take a few deep sips, sucking through my teeth so that at least I don’t swallow the largest bits of debris. I go ahead and ignore my olfactory and taste receptors. I don’t need to hear their opinions on this drink.
Just when I’ve drunk about the minimum I need to keep going, I feel a Telepath trying to connect with me. Linda. I let her in.
>>>We heard the gunshots. I’m assuming that was you.
<<
>>>Ben’s security system told us the cops were coming, and we booked it. We’re at the backup base. We turned on the warning light, you didn’t see?
I look up at the sky in the direction of the old hideout, and sure enough there’s a bright red glow I missed when I was nearby. I’m never going to hear the end of it from Ben.
#
I’m hurting my still-wounded ankle, but I don’t care. I couldn’t stay in that basement any longer. The pitying smiles from Linda and lectures from Ben are growing tiresome. Worst of all, Ben is probably right. It is looking like time to give up on trying to expose Governor Khan. We have precisely zero evidence against him, and even worse, my failed attempt to oust him has backfired: he’s getting more popular.
I could just go take him out. Charge through his security, find him, and tear his head off. I can imagine grabbing him by his fat neck and twisting him around until I hear a snap. There are those violent thoughts again.
The truth is, if I wanted to take out Khan, I wouldn’t just have to kill Khan, I’d have to kill more than a few police officers, maybe even some National Guardsmen. I’d have to hit as hard as I can; I’d have to be vicious. Maybe I can perform the moral gymnastics necessary to justify killing Khan, but I can’t justify killing all those other men. They had nothing to do with the bombs.
I decided to go for a walk to clear my head, at least that’s what I told Ben and Linda, but it was a lie. I can’t lie to myself though. I’ve found myself drifting in a singular direction, towards the location of my other recent failure, Billy the Kid’s base of operations. Or what’s left of the warehouse after he blew it up.
My brain wants to look through the rubble to come up with some excuse for why I lost to Billy the Kid. It’s hoping to find something, I don’t know what, that will somehow demonstrate that Billy just plain got lucky when he managed to litter the Metro Area with bombs without me noticing. My ego wants, it needs, an excuse that explains how Billy only got one over on me by some strange turn of events. If that’s true, then maybe I didn’t deserve this latest failure either. If I got unlucky once, it stands to reason it could happen again.
The mind is capable of amazing feats of self-deception in order to keep its fragile ego intact. My brain’s natural inclination is to throw out all the evidence that leads to the conclusion I failed because I’m impatient, because I refuse the help of others, or because I’m arrogant almost to the point of delusion. My ego would rather believe I was just unfortunate, even though I would be better served by accepting the truth and trying to correct my mistakes. I have a hard time forcing myself to internalize these facts in the name of self improvement, so I can only imagine what it must be like for the average Joe who doesn’t have my abilities. He must lie to himself all day every day in order to get through his life.
There’s police tape around the perimeter. I told Maria about this place, and she in turn told her fellow officers, but they couldn’t get any heavy lifting machines out here to move the rubble and conduct a proper search. Eventually, the National Guard moved in with trucks and bulldozers. They said the
y didn’t find anything, but now I know to be skeptical of how hard they were looking. Maybe that General Reeves told them not to try too hard, since he isn’t a fan of Differents.
It would explain how they missed Billy the Kid’s body. It’s in this pile somewhere, not all that deep. I can smell it rotting. Not that digging it up would provide much in the way of evidence. He was covered in explosives, so whatever is left of him won’t be identifiable.
I need to find something that not only proves Billy the Kid was responsible for the bombs, I need proof that he worked with the Governor. The map I spotted is the one thing I’ve been hoping to find in all my searching, although I’m not sure what it would prove. We already know where all his targets were because they were the places that exploded. Not only that, I remember the image of the map with crystal clarity, and it didn’t say “Plan for working with Governor Khan” on top.
I start tossing aside chunks of rubble. It hardly looks like the National Guard did any searching at all. Billy lived lightly, but even still, there are bits of old clothing and furniture that would have been collected if someone was serious about a terrorism investigation.
After a good bit of digging, I find the remains of what looks like a book case. There’s the tiniest corner of a scrap of paper peeking out from underneath the smashed old wood. I carefully lift the case and pull out a tattered old notebook.
June 6th
Sit-ups: 836
Pushups: 1,075
Pull-ups: 287
Running: 17.34 miles, 96 minutes total, 5:31 average mile time
Diet: 2,575 calories, 193 grams protein, 290 gram carbohydrates, 72 grams fat…
I need to get this to the police; luckily, there’s an officer I know I can trust.
4
Log of Notable Ultracorps/Nita Activity Week 236