Subject 12

by S. W. Douglas

  That left the bug-eyed bastard. I could see he was still breathing, so that meant I might be able to get some information out of him.

  I knelt by his head and checked his vitals. His heartbeat, if that's what it was, seemed strong. His breathing was solid except for a little catch at the end. Maybe I'd cracked a rib with the TV.

  I needed him awake, though, so I slapped his face till he started to respond.

  "Who sent you?" I asked.

  Light came into his eyes, he saw me, and with a slight squeak he clacked his jaws together. An instant later he began to thrash around, red foam coming from his mouth.

  I rocked backwards, away from the foam, and forced myself to stand up and step away.

  A suicide pill. That wasn't a good sign.

  The movies were full of spies and soldiers and whatever taking a suicide pill to avoid capture when I was a kid. Almost without fail, they crunched an effervescent cold pill that made them froth at the mouth as they faked a seizure for the camera. Anyone who's ever tried to emulate that has learned that those pills taste like shit and you really have to chew them up to get the foam effect right.

  Most suicide pills are tiny cyanide capsules. You swallow, you die, but it's not instantaneous. You also don't get the mad-dog look going for you as you convulse, but Hollywood doesn't care for such realities as long as it looks pretty.

  Cyanide also doesn't make red foam. It makes your skin turn pink from a reaction with hemoglobin if you're a Caucasian, can be treated if overall exposure was small with oxygen therapy, and is present in a surprising quantity in tobacco smoke, but it doesn't make a red foam froth out of your mouth.

  Only one thing does that and kills people with super powers that quickly. As far as I knew there was only one place you could get it. That meant Alpha Zulu was still looking for me. More than that, they knew I was in the city and had tracked either my friends or my movements to this building. If I was lucky there wasn't any backup coming and I'd be able to escape and the residue would dissipate before someone came to check on these losers, but most likely I had minutes at best. My handiwork was all over the floor, in the wall, and laying in a pool of toxic goo. There was no way the residue would dissipate before the detectors could be brought to bear.

  I was, in a word, screwed.

  "Don't touch the red foam; it has enough crap in it to kill a norm just from skin contact. Might not hurt one of us, but the pill he crushed has more than enough sea snail venom to kill an elephant or two." A slight orange steam started to rise. That was a new one. "We'd better get out of here before the body explodes or something."

  That's when I turned around and saw Posey and Brick both backed up against the wall staring at me. I'd forgotten that neither of them had ever seen me fight before. Come to think of it, very few people had ever seen me fight since I developed my powers and lived to tell about it.

  Brick might not have understood what was going on, but Posey was no fool. She'd seen me go through them like a chainsaw. I was the one always counseling capitulation, peace, anything to avoid a direct confrontation whenever a conflict became evident. The one time we couldn't avoid a fight I'd let Brick do the heavy lifting. Specifically a car he threw at the bangers trying to kill Posey.

  She really did have a knack for pissing people off.

  Speedsters were rare and very dangerous. They usually died of insulin shock, at a young age, because their bodies burned calories far faster than they could take food in if they weren't careful, and the body can only produce so much glucose at a whack. Run too far, too fast, and next thing you know you're in the middle of the forest, in a coma, and dying.

  On the other hand, they could move incredibly fast and they were incredibly steady because of the fine muscle control. They made excellent assassins and guns-for-hire for that reason, though the few that hadn't gone into the heroing or villaining business had found they were incredible artists and surgeons.

  A few more of the latter pair and a few less of the others and the world might be a better place, hey?

  "Posey, it's okay. I'm still me. We need to get out of here before something else bad happens. If you don't want me around after that, I'll understand, but for the moment we all need to leave. Please don't make me do it by force, because I can. For your safety, for my safety, and for Brick's safety, we have to get our asses out of her. The Rat, wherever he is, can fend for himself until he can hook back up with us or you or whatever. Alright?"

  "S-stay away!"

  Damn it.

  Just... Damn it!

  Maybe I'd stayed too long. Certainly I'd gotten too attached. I didn't even like her all that much, but Posey had been there so long, I didn't want to let her go.

  Didn't mean I wasn't going to, though. She was safer without me. Alpha Zulu would leave her and Brick and The Rat alone if I left the city. Targets of opportunity were only targets while the opportunity was knocking --- as soon as I was gone they'd be worthless. I hoped.

  Damn it.

  "Posey, Brick, listen to me. These thugs were working for a group called Alpha Zulu. They want me bad enough to kill both of you if they thought it would bring me in. They are very, very dangerous, so they might even try. If I leave, you'll be safe. You can come with me or you can stay in the city, but you have to get out of this building now. I'll clear the way. Posey, please make Brick understand."

  And with that I turned my back on Posey and Brick and The Rat, wherever the hell he was, and stepped over the still-foaming body. I kicked the door in and, without a backwards glance, I dove over the railing.

  No sense in hiding now.

  The faint tang of ozone grew rapidly into an unpleasant pong as I first sped and then slowed my descent. I was out of practice, though it was coming back to me quickly, and that meant I had to work harder to get anything done.

  Four seconds, that's all it took, before I landed softly and silently on the cement floor. The door at a touch, just as silent as my breaths. Behind it I spied two uniformed goons with their backs to me, assault rifles held loosely and the safeties obnoxiously disengaged.

  Then I saw the detectors strapped to their waists starting to blink faster.

  I closed the gap between myself and their backs in the blink of an eye, grabbing and slamming their heads together hard enough to shatter the plastic face shields on their riot helmets.

  I stamped on both detectors on general principles. They made almost as satisfying a crunch as the helmets had.

  Backup had been faster than I'd thought. It also meant that the steadily-rising needle on the elevator's gauge meant that some very armed and very nasty people were about to surprise Posey. That wouldn't do.

  I pulled the elevator doors apart and took in the mechanism. Simple pulley and steel cable arrangement, mandatory safety brake both above and below the car. Perfect.

  Fastest way to stop the car would be to destroy the pulley. Speed wasn't the most important aspect here, though. I needed to send a message.

  The cable was thick enough I couldn't get my fingers to close around it. That didn't matter. One hand on each cable was enough. I squeezed, friction started to burn my palms, and within two heartbeats the car screamed to a stop a floor and a half below where they were headed. With a grunt I let the cables go long enough for the car to start moving again, then I clamped down again, even harder. I'd misjudged the cable strength. Apparently it had been replaced at some point with a stronger model than this vintage would have called for. No matter. This time it snapped, dropping the car half a floor before the brake kicked in, stopping it with a screech and horrible shudder.

  I grinned, a final part of my wicked idea coming to mind and a moment later, fruition.

  I tied the cable in a bow.

  It was like signing a piece of art. It wasn't my usual style, to be sure, but it marked it. Maybe twenty people in the whole world were powerful and agile enough, but if you add in the level of intelligence, and (let's face it) just how strange enough you'd have to be to do something like
this and you only had five or six. Two wouldn't have bothered. They would have just killed everyone in the building. One more was locked in a mildly-radioactive prison to keep him under control, and another one was still hibernating. If she didn't get twelve years of sleep every fourteen she was just worthless. That left me. Alpha Zulu already knew I was here, but I didn't want Brick getting blamed for any of it.

  Nobody was coming down the stairs, damn it. That meant I needed to draw attention away from the building so Posey and Brick could make good their escape.

  Good luck to them.

  One of the guards had a radio. The other had a nasty jumble of electronics, broken plastic, and what looked like brain matter and blood. I had a hunch it wouldn't work very well.

  "This is Hammer," I said, using my call sign from another age of man. "The mission is no-joy. I repeat; the mission is no-joy. All units RTB. This is a Priority Six, Code Two order. Any failure to disengage may be fatal."

  I dropped the radio and went to step on it as well when a familiar voice crackled over the tiny speaker.

  "You never did play well with others, Hammer."

  That stopped my foot mid-stomp.

  I snatched the radio back up and backed into a shadowed corner. "Aren't you dead yet, Kinsey?"

  "Not for lack of your trying, no." He chuckled. "Follow-through isn't usually your problem. What happened? Lose your nerve?"

  I felt my lips twisting into a hate-filled grimace. "No. I just wanted to savor the moment. Show your ugly face and we'll see how long you keep the skin on it this time, you freak."

  "I think I'll try to keep it on for a little while longer. At least for now. I think Magda would rather I kept it too."

  Magda. That name was an intentional dig, designed to make me angry and foolish. It almost worked.

  Almost.

  "I think Magda can speak for herself. You did good, cornering me. Must have taken you months. Tell me," I said, moving quietly towards the front door, "did you hurt yourself trying to think? Or did you hire some more greedy dupes to do it for you?"

  "Be nice." I heard him sigh. "Actually, this is a stroke of luck. Someone with enough clout to make me listen told me to bring you back in, though how that prick knew you existed in the first place I don't know yet. So, I was going to offer you your old job back, welcoming you with open arms and all that dross. I prefer this way. This way I don't even have to capture you or torture anyone. You know how I feel about that."

  "Used to give you a hard-on. Is your dick working again yet? I tried to make sure that it wouldn't even after you healed up. Why the hell would I want my old job back? I left to get away from it." There were at least twenty armed guards outside the building. Most of them were in good positions to fire on the front door from behind their vehicles. Probably a few snipers tossed into the mix on distant buildings, just for flavor. "I just want to be left alone."

  "No can do. You're too powerful; you know that. If nobody controls you they're going to kill you. Rules of the game." He ignored my earlier comment, but I could hear the anger tinging his voice.

  "Fuck the game." I crushed the radio. There was no way to get out of here and clear a path for Posey and Brick without killing most of the guards. That left me a choice. Some, if not all, of the guards would be armed with guns firing darts loaded with the stuff that killed the thug upstairs with a cyclic rate around eight hundred rounds a minute. While a single hit from the gunk probably wouldn't kill me, it might slow me down enough for the stun wands I could see strapped to their waists to go to work. About a hundred hits in rapid succession would put me in a stupor I'd take a couple hours to recover from --- or kill me outright. I'd take a lot of them with me, but chances were I'd still be overcome.

  And waking up from that kind of stupor was very, very painful.

  "Fuck the game in the ear," I whispered to myself.

  Dravin T. Kinsey was a nightmare of a human being. He was many things, including a survivor of both world wars, the French Revolution, the War of the Roses, Rome's conquest of the Gauls, and numerous wars before that.

  He was notoriously hard to kill.

  He was also a rather grandiose sadist. He conducted interrogations himself whenever possible. Many subjects never made it out. Any that did were damaged in some way.

  I'd hated him from the moment I'd met him. He'd sensed that and used it to his advantage. Right up till the night I'd decided I was through. Some of the things I'd done to him would have made him proud if he'd thought of them first. But I hadn't killed him because, simply, I hadn't known how at the time.

  A mistake I wouldn't repeat.

  At least I'd made sure he'd never be able to fully enjoy his hobby ever again. That was something to be glad of.

  Bullets didn't bother me as long as I knew they were coming and from where. Altering their ballistic curves was easy if I was willing to exert myself to do so. Since hiding was no longer an option, exerting myself wouldn't be a problem.

  What was a problem was the presence of snipers with silenced weapons. My ability to split my focus was limited to some extent, and silent weapons were tricky. Especially when I had to focus on more than half a dozen other sources.

  Alpha Zulu units tended to be high-mobility, high volume-of-fire specialists. That worked in my favor if things went on for any length of time because they didn't carry a lot of reloads. The problem was coming through the first part without getting holed repeatedly.

  Never a pleasant prospect, a plan was therefore in order. Simple instinct might get me through, but it might also get me put down. A hit-and-fade seemed best. Blast out of the building, take out two or three AZ soldiers, maybe a sniper if one takes a shot, and then take to my heels. Or jump and fly, if the opportunity arises. That would be better, actually, unless someone out there was packing more heat than they should be. I didn't want to know what a shoulder-launched missile exploding somewhere in the region of my kidneys would feel like.

  I might be better off to blast through the line rather than hitting a glancing blow. Converging fields of fire might cover my ass better than trying to dodge or redirect concentrated fire. In fact, there was this ugly sucker I thought I recognized with an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth, leaning lazily against a black SUV that obviously had brought him there. He was almost exactly halfway between the two extremes of what I could see outside.

  And that's when something screamed trap.

  Those SUVs were too big for the number of soldiers I was seeing. Even if they'd hauled the jerks upstairs as well as those in front of me, there were about four too many of them. Even with AZ's penchant for proving they had the smallest dicks in the world with every vehicle they bought, these were a bit extreme. That meant cargo. Heavy cargo.

  An almost subliminal flicker at the corner of my eye made me turn my head. I could just make out some black boxes stacked at the edge of the view allowed by the window I was looking out. Boxes with cables running from them and into each other. I imagined I could hear an ominous hum.

  Now what, oh what, could that be?

  It wasn't a detector setup because they already knew I was there. That meant some kind of field projector, most likely. Judging by the size of the boxes I could see and the probability that there was a matching set on the other side of the building to keep things contained, the field wouldn't be too focused. Probably something passive, then. That narrowed it down to three, maybe four possibilities. Two were right out the window because for them to have any kind of affect on my altered systems they'd have to be insanely powerful, and that kind of juice wasn't readily portable. The fourth possibility was some kind of sonic device, but since something like that would affect the monkeys waiting for me to come out more severely than me I didn't think it was likely. That left the third and, without a doubt, the most likely.

  A goddamn resistor field. Were they counting on me to be running scared, totally insane, or just so out of practice that I'd just launch myself at the first target I saw?

  Still, un
derestimating Kinsey was dangerous. That was Rule One and he taught it to anyone who tangled with him. Of course, overestimating anyone would leave you paralyzed, unable to act. So take a second, catch your breath, and watch the assholes moving around outside. Observe them. Are they careful about where they mill? Wearing something unusual? Do they move extra-slow or extra-fast? Is there anything that they're doing that tells you anything?

  On the other hand, I didn't have enough time to really observe. No doubt Kinsey had already alerted them that I was on my way out. So why weren't they taking up more defensive postures? Were they the ones being overconfident? No, it wasn't that simple. They weren't moving much at all, come to think of it. Why not? Illusion or reality? Reality. Ugly cigar dude went to swat a fly that landed on his face and it stopped halfway there.

  Check. Resistor field. Damn strong one, too.

  Excellent.

  A resistor field was the net result of long-term research into a defense field designed to stop bullets and explosions. It was a combination of an electrical projector system and rapid-fire sensors wired through a computer. All motion measured by the sensors were fed through the computer, cataloged, and compared to a set value. Anything that exceeded said value for a certain size was slowed. Drastically.

  The actual physics of the field escaped me, as did the finer points of the programming, but the overall result was that anything that moved too fast for the CPU's liking was met with a slightly greater force, generating resistance. Try to throw a punch and it'll feel like you're punching through air, water, gelatin, wet cement, and finally a concrete wall if you have enough strength to overcome all the resistance before then.