by Nat Kozinn
But they don’t trust me. One of them pulls out a pistol from his hip and opens fire.
“The other one is back up!” one of the other guys scream.
The five rounds from the soldier’s sidearm don’t hurt, not in the actually doing harm sense. What does hurt, is being lumped in with The Beast. I’m just the other one. I’ve been risking my life to help people for almost two years now and to these soldiers, I’m the same as The Beast because I’m a Different.
I have an urge to be the monster they fear, there’s no use in denying it. Somewhere in me there’s an instinct to say “I’ll show you a monster,” but I get to control my instincts. So instead I run away.
Most of the soldiers keep their fire concentrated towards The Beast, but a few decide they’d like to take a shot and what seems like the easier target, me. For now, they are right. The new stream of gunfire isn’t as heavy as the first, so I can manage to keep moving while only absorbing the occasional bullet. I try to take cover behind a canvas tent, but I realize how stupid that is when they shoot right through the fabric.
I finally find some form of cover by turning the corner on the lockup building. It is plated with Maceo Steel and that deflects the bullets as they chase me. The ricochet launches back towards the shooters, and I hear them hit the deck. There’s a helicopter closing in on this location. Things are getting a little nuts.
I take the moment to soak up as much sun as my cells can absorb. I know that every second I’m waiting here, more people are dying, but I can’t do anything about it if I can’t stand. After I patch up my new holes, I take a look back around the corner. I see The Beast, tearing into the chest of a man, ripping out a mouthful of organs. He found himself time for a snack even amidst the chaos. I suppose we both needed some calories.
A stupid brave soldier fires some erratic shots with a large machine gun, interrupting The Beast and his feasting. The Beast hurls the dead body he was eating at his assailant, knocking the soldier down. As he moves in to finish the man off, he’s blown sideways by an explosion. I think it was a missile.
The Beast wasn’t hit directly by the blast, but it was close enough for it to rock his socks. He gets to his feet, bleeding from shrapnel cuts. He looks dazed and confused. The helicopter swoops past and turns to make another pass.
Three army motor vehicles move in from the west, firing their large mounted guns. Two of them focus on The Beast, peppering him with gunfire as he scrambles to take cover behind his gladiator shield.
The third jeep, I’m pretty sure it’s called, moves past the fight and heads straight towards me, the soldier on the roof firing the mounted gun at me as they move. I scramble to press myself up against the corner of the jail structure. One shot does connect with my calf, blowing a baseball sized hole in the muscle. The truck keeps firing, eventually going behind me, before it turns around and charges back at me.
I’m forced away from the building, out into the open, and directly into the line of fire from the strafing helicopter. The massive shells tear into my body. I’ve been shot a lot lately, lots of different guns and calibers, but these shells stand in a class of their own. The bullets are the size of footballs, and the holes they leave are even bigger. My right arm is blown clean off, just above the elbow. My intestines, one kidney, my liver and most of my hip bone are completely obliterated by another shot. The third hit is just a glancing blow, which rips off most of my right foot.
By some miracle my head is spared any damage. But that might not last long as the jeep moves in and the helicopter turns around. I’m enduring injuries at a much faster rate than I can heal them.
Then The Beast moves in, the two trucks that were after him are flaming piles of wreckage left in his wake. Somewhere in the fight he lost his shield. He faces off against the last jeep, staring it down from 100 yards away. The truck accelerates, and so does he, zigging and zagging as he runs to avoid the gunfire. As they meet, The Beast leaps, keeping his knife hand down to sow sliced destruction as he passes. The car splits in half and the engine keeps moving forward.
The helicopter turns back towards The Beast. As soon as it’s pointed at him, it fires another missile. The Beast grabs a hunk of the car wreckage and hurls it at the incoming projectile, detonating the explosive. Then he charges, galloping towards the chopper as it tries to get a lock on him with its mounted machine guns. He lets out a hellacious roar and leaps up into the air almost 100 feet, higher than I thought he could go, and high enough to grab the bottom of the helicopter.
The flying machine struggles to maintain its altitude with the sudden and unexpected guest. Instead of slicing the copter open, he does a one-handed pull up, lifting himself to the door. He uses his knife hand to slice the door off, then he plants his feet on the base, and uses his good hand to reach into the cockpit, ripping the pilot out of the vehicle.
He holds the hapless man up, while he waits for the helicopter to plummet to earth. Right as it’s about to crash-land, he leaps off, jumping clear of the ensuing expulsion and keeping his pilot cargo intact. The man is limp but I don’t think he’s dead, just passed out from fear.
The Beast looks at me and grins, but his smile turns to fear as he hears the same thing I do, a whole lot more engines on their way towards us. The cavalry is coming and we barely survived the guard crew.
The Beast turns away from the sound and runs over to me. I’m struggling to stand because a hole in the hip has that effect. I’ve got so many injuries and so few calories to spare, I can’t heal the bone right now. I have to focus on my organ damage first.
“Come on Gavin, we got to get moving,” The Beast says to me.
His voice rouses the unconscious man he has flung over his shoulder. The man lets out a blood curdling scream; The Beast reaches up and snaps the man’s neck like he’s breaking a twig.
“Looks like you need a hand,” The Beast says.
He reaches down with his good hand and grabs me under the shoulder, I’m only about 400 pounds right now thanks to missing muscle and limbs, and he throws me onto his back, pressed up against the dead soldier. I manage to grab my severed arm before we go.
My instinct is to fight, to use this opportunity to take The Beast out from behind. I could probably get him in a leg lock around the neck. But even if I can manage to take The Beast out, I’d just be right behind him on the path to the afterlife. Those helicopters are coming and the military has made it abundantly clear that they are going to shoot to kill. A humiliating piggy back ride is the only chance I have at continuing to draw breath. On the plus side, my back is pointed directly up at the sun. I’ve got a stream of Manna flowing. All I need now is a little time.
16
Log of Notable Ultracorps/Nita Activity 239
Nita has taken control of the Manna Fields. Gavin has been incapacitated.
Theories: Nita will likely take custody of Gavin from the National Guard but either way it is irrelevant, he is out of the fight. Must move on to my secondary course of action, horrific though it may be. Only the military possess the ability to neutralize Nita, but that grows more unlikely by the day. She cannot be allowed to further entrench herself. The armed forces cannot be relied on to locate Nita in anything resembling a prompt fashion. They are going to require assistance.
“This vest is so uncomfortable. I feel like someone is sitting on my chest,” Linda complains.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to run a focus group and take feedback on the design. I was more concerned with how I could easily carry two bullet proof vests without being encumbered by the weight. You’ll just have to deal with a little discomfort.”
“ForteSilk weighs a lot less.”
“That’s true, and it also provides significantly less protection from concussive force injuries. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to worry about point blank shots, more getting caught in the crossfire, or blast radius. These vests are more versatile...”
“I’m just giving you a hard time, Ben. I know there’s a good reason be
hind everything you do, or at least a reason. Speaking of which, haven’t we waited in this room long enough? I haven’t felt a mind nearby in over an hour.”
“You’ve been using your abilities? What about possible detection?”
“After you said it was possible, you went on a long diatribe about how normal human minds lacked the capacity to make the intellectual leap necessary to alter the Cognitive Wave thing, or something like that. You made it too tempting not to try and see if you were full of it. Now, can we get out of here? I have to go the bathroom.”
“I told you, I have a solution for that…”
“Out of my way,” Linda says and pushes past Ben, turning the handle on the old metal door.
The door opens, and they are hit with a blinding flash of light. Linda covers her eyes while Ben slips past her, his eyes looking down. He approaches a small tube on the floor, light projects from it like a super intense flashlight. The door Ben and Linda just exited cannot be seen, the small projector puts up an image indistinguishable from the wall around it. Ben used the device to hide the door he and Linda hid behind when the National Guard checked the bunker after the military took Gavin into custody.
The image disappears when Ben hits a button.
“And all they had you do was connect people’s phone calls,” Linda says and shakes her head.
“In their defense, most of my inventions would be impossible to replicate on any sort of industrial scale, but yeah, they’re all stupid and wasting Differents’ talents. If they weren’t, no normal human beings would have a job. You didn’t know that?”
“It isn’t always so in my face. Excuse me,” she says and jogs off towards the room they were using as a latrine.
Ben heads towards the front, slowly. His WormLight lanterns were extinguished or taken. He has to use a small version attached to his wrist. He searches through the storage room; most of the supplies have been removed, no doubt to be examined by lesser minds. Ben assures himself any truly important invention was properly booby-trapped to self- destruct. And he still has his Cognitive Wave Detector attached to his back.
His scooter is still there though it is the worse for wear. The army simpletons rendered the device inoperable. Their feeble minds grasped the device only well enough to understand it as a crafted object in need of destruction. Not as a paradigm shift in the continuation of the automated mobile machine, evolving the combustion engine to its next iteration by successfully harnessing the overwhelming torque generated by utilizing Slugs as a fuel source. This engine could have been developed to power the next generation of war machines, which would be a bad thing, even worse than a wasted stroke of inspiration, Ben supposes.
“Was that our ride?” Linda asks as she watches Ben search through the pieces. “Are you going to be able to fix it?”
“Not without my spot welder. That they took,” Ben says with a shake of his head.
“I might still be picking the bugs out of my teeth, but that was our only hope of chasing after Gavin. Any idea how we’re getting out of here?”
“Chase after Gavin, yeah, that’s what we have to do… I have one idea, but you’re not going to like it, and we’re going to have to hustle. Good thing I’ve still got some makeup for our tattoos.”
#
<<
>>>Neither of us looks like we belong here, Ben. But at least you can pass for some scrawny kid who’s trying to prove he’s a real man to his dad. There’s no answer to what I’m doing out there. I’d have to get in the head of the entire division or there would be a lot of questions and no answers for why a middle-aged woman was out here.
<<
>>>I’m here to help if one of them spots you or two of them, or maybe three. But no more than that.
<<
Ben hustles through rows of tents filled with men with guns. The only thing keeping these soldiers from identifying him as an enemy is a thin layer of cover-up over the D on his hand. He turns his palm out as he walks, quickly. Fortunately hustle is at home amongst the armed forces. The information mentally forced out of the quartermaster proves true; Ben successfully navigates his way to the parking lot. A heart-attack is the greatest danger he faces.
He walks with purpose into the nearby tent, taking advantage of the fact that soldiers trust each other to do their own job. He picks out the keys to vehicle six, then acts like this isn’t the first time he’s driven a car.
He should have checked the vehicles before grabbing the keys. It’s a large truck with a canvas covered bed. Not exactly the most fuel efficient transportation, but he doesn’t want to chance getting a replacement.
He puts the key in what he’s pretty sure is called the ignition, shifts the transmission(?) into drive. Depresses the accelerator(?). And steers the steering wheel. That one is self explanatory. It’s a pretty cool experience and surprisingly intuitive, sure he almost takes a tent out on his first turn, but his second right is as smooth as butter. He soon points himself south, towards the hill where Linda is hiding.
He’s got a nice clear road ahead and he’s looking scot free, when a group of soldiers emerge from a tent on the right. Four of them step into the road, holding their hands up to stop the truck.
<<
>>>Too many of them.
One of the soldiers approaches the truck and opens the passenger door.
“I’m supposed to go load up the truck with…” Ben starts to stammer.
“You’ve got new orders son, General Reeves needs a ride to forward position,” the man says matter of factly.
Ben feels an urge to slam on the gas, but that would be stupid. Another group of soldiers exit the tent, including a tall, square- jawed sixty- year old man who is yelling as he walks. Ben recognizes him from photos in the paper, General Wallace Reeves, the head of the National Guard.
“You get on the horn with Governor, whatever the hell his name is now, and tell him I don’t want so much as a Metro janitor in the building. Too many of those officers have a sweat spot for “The Beast Slayer.” That facility is now under the control of the National Guard and only my soldiers are allowed inside,” Reeves orders a terrified looking young man. “Nichols, you’re with me.”
Nichols gives a slight nod to Ben and piles in next to him on the bench seat. Reeves takes the window.
“Onward to the forward position,” Nichols orders without looking at Ben.
Ben doesn’t know exactly where that is, but the front should theoretically be easy to find.
“I swear to God if I see one badge at that lockup I’m going to blow a gasket,” Reeves says. “That new Governor is a freak lover. I don’t trust him or any of his employees. It’s a shame too, that Khan was a man you could count on.”
“You might be reading too much into the new guy’s actions, sir. He’s just using the Differents that didn’t go on strike. It’s desperate times in the Los Angeles Metro Area,” Nichols replies, keeping his voice low and even so as not to be mistaken as actually challenging Reeves authority.
“When you’re training a dog you don’t let it sleep in your bed no matter how cold you are. You have to teach it its place in the house. And if it ever snaps at you? You come down on it like the hammer of God. You come down so hard it feels you every time it opens its mouth wide and that reminds it never to try anything like that again.”
“But those Differents stayed behind. They weren’t the bad dogs.”
“Maybe so, but I bet more than a few of them know just what’s going on and where all their former friends are. I’d like the chance to ask those questions but the damn oversight committee won’t let me. It was my mistake asking for permission. I should have just done wha
t needed to be done. How were the pencil pushers going to stop me? I won’t make that mistake again.”
“Even the bad dogs just want a better life, uh, sir,” Ben says. He couldn’t help himself.
“I don’t recall asking you, private,” General Reeves answers. “And there’s a reason for that. You don’t know squat. You think those freaks are on strike? A strike is for a teacher or a factory worker. If your job is important you don’t have the option of going on strike. Tell me something son, do you always love your job? Do you love your turn cleaning the latrine, or digging trenches, or chauffeuring your superior officers? I’m guessing not. How about your paycheck? You happy with that? You think it’s fair? I know I wouldn’t mind an extra zero or two. But are we walking off and demanding we get just what we want? Of course not, lives are on the line,” Reeves says with a wave of his hand. “The freaks, we need them thanks to Cabot. Lives depend on them doing their duty same as you and me. They don’t get to strike. Hell, you know what I’d do if one of my boys ever decided he didn’t approve of his working conditions and walked away from his unit?”
“No, sir,” Ben answers.
“I’d blow his brains out all over the dirt.”
#
“He meant it too,” Ben says to Linda, who is sitting next to him in the front seat of their caravan truck.
“Sounds like an intense man,” she says.
“Yeah, between him and Nita, we’ve got quite the pair doing battle.”
“That’s why we need Gavin. And I’m no geography expert, but aren’t we east of Los Angeles, and the sun still sets in the west, so why are we going north?”
“Oh, um, because Nita isn’t going to keep Gavin in Los Angeles when she gets him,” Ben says, turning his gaze towards the window and conveniently avoiding eye-contact.
17
It won’t be a war between nations. No we’ll long for the moral clarity that came with slaughtering the bastards that live over there. It will require the disintegration of our own families. We have already asked the mothers of America to stand silent as their child is tested and possibly torn from their arms, but those children still have lives. Imagine what happens if the results of that test lead to death not employment. How many mothers will do what is natural and right and hide their children? How will we as a society punish those women who simply want their babies to live? What will we do to those who refuse to submit? That is the path the hard-liners put us on. The path of those who talk about teaching their fellow human beings obedience like they’d speak of training a dog. It cannot be a war of us and them, because there is no us and them. There is only us.