by Marie Jevins
The propeller slowed and the wind changed as the chopper hovered, then lowered Iron Man on to the industrial-strength motorized utility cart in the Futurepharm parking lot. His external video monitors showed him three lab techs in white coats and earplugs surrounding the cart. They unfastened hooks and cables, freeing him from the copter.
And then there was Maya, pointing and barking orders as the helicopter lifted skyward.
“Sorry it’s not a proper bariatric gurney,” said Maya, standing above Iron Man’s head and torso. “But I was afraid your armor’s weight would collapse it. We use this for moving heavy equipment around.”
“That’s okay, Maya. I am heavy equipment.”
She moved to take off his helmet.
“No…Maya…lift the visor, but not the helmet. My armor won’t come off until I deactivate medical protocols. And I can’t yet…it’s all that’s keeping me alive.”
“What? We need to get you to a hospital.”
“No…you have…unique medical facilities,” said Tony. “And this…” He paused.
“This is about Extremis.”
Mallen was a blur of dust, streaking across green-and-amber fields on his way through Arkansas. As he approached the outskirts of a small town, he slowed to a walk.
A teenage girl leaned back under a speed-limit sign alongside the village’s main road. She sat on a milk crate reading the morning news on a small tablet computer, her black-denim-covered legs stretched out in front of her.
TONY STARK FAILS, screamed the headline.
The girl tried to light a cigarette as Mallen approached.
She struggled with the match a second time and coughed. “Jeez…” She looked up at Mallen, her short, spiky, jet-black hair and multiple ear piercings partly in his shadow.
“What’re you looking at?” She was trying to appear intimidating and unapproachable behind her long, black leather coat and plum-colored lipstick.
“Nothing,” said Mallen. He stood above her.
“I come out here to smoke, okay? No one around to bug me or say no.” She coughed again.
Mallen hadn’t meant to threaten the girl. She reminded him of a girl from one of his foster homes. Probably the closest he’d had to a sister. At least, they’d fought like they were related. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m just passing through.”
She gave him a withering glance and looked away. Her gentle demeanor detracted from her attempted toughness.
“Keep going,” she said. “I come out here to be on my own. The crap I get in town. I need some time alone.”
Mallen stooped down so she didn’t have to look up into the sun to see his face. He wondered what she made of the deep scars he now bore from his battle with Iron Man. Her black steel-toed boots, he noticed, were carefully oiled. She worked hard on her appearance. Like Nilsen’s kid, the one in junior high. Would old Nilsen ever get his kids back, now that he’d probably been arrested?
“Got an extra cigarette?”
“Get him into the medical lab on sublevel 2! Go!” Maya barked orders at the Futurepharm lab techs. “Park him there and leave. This is classified—no one is to speak to the press. Refer any reporters’ inquiries to me, then tell them I’m not available. I’ll take it from here.”
The technicians wheeled the gurney carrying Iron Man into the lab, handed Maya the utility cart’s remote control, and backed away. She swiped her keycard through the pad to secure the door, then turned to look at her patient.
“That Extremis process of yours…it’s pretty good, you know,” Tony wheezed softly.
“I saw the news. He did this to you?”
“Incredible speed. Moved faster than I could operate the armor. And he gets better as he goes: Extremis evolves, has all the characteristics of machine-learning software—emergent tech, adapting with experience. All right, let’s get started. Jarvis: Deactivate emergency medical containment.”
The armor beeped and released with a hydraulic hiss.
“Now, Maya, lift my chest piece off.”
She grunted with the strain. “Damn, this is heavy.”
“Saved my life, I think,” said Tony. “I’m pretty messed up.”
“You should be in a hospital,” said Maya.
“I heard you the first time. Now get the boots. I gave some thought to the hospital…while I had a car on top of me. Hospitals are fine for most people, but they don’t have the thing I need.”
“And what’s that? Oh, God.” Maya pulled off the Iron Man shin guard. Blood poured out of it and on to the gurney. “Your leg’s a mess. How were you still standing?”
“I wasn’t. Armor…injected me with painkillers. I can’t feel it. And I’ll be even better…once you shoot me up…with a reconfigured Extremis dose.” Tony coughed.
Maya stopped pulling off his armor and stared at him.
“You’ve gone insane.”
“He’s a biological combat machine, Maya…and I’m just a man in a weaponized alloy suit. I’ve spent months in my garage trying to increase the armor’s response time. Gotten as fast as is mechanically possible. And it’s still. Not. Fast. Enough.”
Tony turned his head and looked straight at Maya now. “I need to wire the armor directly into my brain. Extremis can do that.”
“Tony. No.”
“Maybe we could work in some kind of Tivo thing while we’re at it. My board would love that. Brain television.”
Maya didn’t laugh. “Extremis is untested,” she said. “Even its current configuration—”
“Seems to work fine. Just look at my face,” finished Tony.
“And the guy was presumably healthy when he took the dose. You look like you’ve been pushed through a wood chipper,” said Maya.
“Still wanna kiss me?” He puckered his lips and made smoochy sounds. Maya recoiled. Tony laughed, but it turned into a throaty gurgle. He gasped and recovered. “Extremis works through the healing center, you said. It’ll accelerate my recovery while it’s giving me an upgrade.”
She pulled off his right gauntlet. His hand had been crushed; blood spilled out of the glove. Maya quickly stretched a bandage around Tony’s hand and leaned forward, applying pressure.
“I don’t need the powers,” Tony continued. “The strength, the weapons—I have them. Best there are. Built them myself. And I don’t feel a compelling need to breathe fire. If anything, we’re talking about simplifying the payload. I need to be the suit. I’m not trying to grow new organs, though a new liver might help with the damage I did in my younger years. I want to grow new connections…
“This thing, my armor, it’s gotten too heavy. And too slow. I’m talking about speed of deployment…speed of operation…”
“Tony…” Maya stood back now, gesturing at his crumpled, bloody right hand.
“Thank God for painkillers, eh?” He smiled. “Get a computer in here. Let’s get to work, before I pass out.”
“They give you trouble around here?” Mallen lit the teenager’s cigarette for her.
“I like black clothes. I like a certain kind of music. I have a vocabulary of more than ten words,” she said. “What do you think?”
“Yeah, I was different when I was your age, too.”
“I swear,” she said. “Wear a long coat and everyone thinks you’re a psycho-killer. I’m on suspension.”
“I bet that went over well with your folks,” said Mallen.
“My mother didn’t mind so much, but her husband…man. He went ballistic. He doesn’t even want me here. But my mom has custody, y’know?”
“Where’s your dad?”
“Knoxville. He sent me back to mom after I came home from school with bleach splatters on my jeans and a Godzilla tattoo.”
“That sounds cool to me.” Mallen knelt down next to her, leaning his elbow on his knee. She finally offered a cigarette. He took it, then accepted a light. “No one wanted me, either. I always got thrown back, like a trout that’s too small. And I got in a lot of fights.”
�
�Did that get you suspended?”
“Nah,” said Mallen. “Everybody else was fighting, too. I got suspended for arguing with history teachers and showing off my replica weapons. They were just models, couldn’t even hurt anyone. Didn’t make any damn sense. Oh, and once I got thrown out for sharing my lighter fluid with the younger kids on the playground, but it was no big deal. Teachers were just jealous they couldn’t sniff it during school hours like I did. What’d you do?”
“Wrote a story in class about zombies attacking the town. They ate the city council. Then they ate the mayor. That’s my mother’s husband.”
Mallen chuckled. For a minute, he considered killing the mayor as a favor, but that would piss off this girl’s mother and probably make her situation even worse. Better to leave it. If the girl wanted to kill the mayor later, nothing was stopping her.
She continued. “They called it ‘terroristic writing.’ As if my zombie story could incite someone to do something they didn’t already plan on doing. Hmph. This country’s gone insane.”
She took a long, hard drag on her cigarette and coughed again, just a little this time.
“I know exactly what you mean,” said Mallen, leaning forward now. “What I don’t get is, cops and Feds can just kill us—but if we even think about defending ourselves, that’s called terrorism.”
“See my T-shirt?” The girl sat up on the milk crate now. She opened her long leather jacket to reveal the shirt underneath. The American flag was emblazoned across her chest. Mallen grinned. This girl was cute for her age, a young patriot who wasn’t going to follow the government’s changing rules without a fight.
Then he looked closer and frowned. The flag contained a swastika instead of a field of stars. The gray lettering above the flag on the black background said “AmeriKKKa.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mallen spoke icily now. He leaned back, away from the girl. “Is that how you see America?”
“Sure,” she answered. “A country of white men pushing around the rest of us. And now those men are trying to go back to old-fashioned values, the kind that kept women in the kitchen, immigrants working on railroads, and only white people in the seat of power.”
Mallen glowered at her. “You know, the Klan did good things, too. They defended Christian law in a lot of places.”
She furrowed her brow and stared at him now. Challenged him, just like his foster sister used to before he’d hit her in the mouth.
“I’m so sick of hearing about God all the time,” she said. “I’m sick of having to, like, pass a religion test just to live here. The Klan lynched people who didn’t look like regular white folks.”
Mallen stood up and tossed his cigarette down on the road. He ground it with his boot heel and leaned forward. This conversation had started to remind him of the discussions he used to have with his history teachers, right before they gave him detention.
“Regular white folks built this country,” he said sternly. “Without government or spies or regulation or people with badges who kill your family for fun.”
“Yeah.” She wasn’t backing down. “Except regular white folks did all that, too.”
“Don’t say that,” said Mallen. He wanted to help her understand, but she wasn’t making it easy. No one had ever listened to him, either, but that was changing now. “It all went wrong. I’m going to fix it. I’ve got this stuff in me, see? From the future they were going to make. But I stole it, and I’m using it to turn back the clock.”
She pointed at him and leaned in, close enough to his face that he could feel her spitting.
“Back to lynchings and giving smallpox-infected blankets to different-looking people? Back to women being second-class citizens? You ever notice they’re called Founding Fathers, with no mothers among them? You’re as bad as them. Go away. Leave me alone.”
He did leave her alone then. But first, he punched her. Hard. Right in the face. Hard enough that her head exploded. Like you’d kill a zombie if one invaded your town.
Her lifeless body jerked and fell with a thud, sideways to the yellowing grass along the shoulder of the road. Her head—what was left of it—hit the pavement and splattered.
The red of her bloodied brain oozed from the cavity that had been her skull. It stood out, contrasting starkly against the black of the asphalt, of her coat, jeans, and hair.
T H I R T E E N
“I cleared the section and killed the CCTV,” said Maya. Tony sat in a wheelchair now, holding his helmet in his lap, wearing only his blood-stained polymer circuit-skin. Maya rolled him down the hallway toward the Extremis research lab. “Can I talk you out of this? I mean, couldn’t the Avengers or someone deal with him? You don’t even know where he’s gone.”
“Yes, I do,” said Tony. “I know exactly where he’s going, I won’t survive without Extremis, and FYI, I am an Avenger.”
Maya wheeled Tony to one side of the lab door and handed him a card. She stepped over to the other side.
“Takes two people to open the Extremis vault. You use Killian’s keycard. Wait for me…ready?”
Tony tried Killian’s keycard a split second ahead of Maya, and the doors stayed shut.
“No, Tony. Same time. Are you okay?”
He looked tired. His face was pale.
“Other than being in a dizzy painkiller daze, Maya, sure, I’m doing great. Sorry. I can do it. This time, point to me when you’re ready. Okay? Let’s try again.”
They both swiped their keycards simultaneously. The doors slid open. Inside, Tony saw monitors, keyboards, sensors, and a convertible reclining chair that doubled as an operating table.
“Very cozy,” said Tony.
“All set up to run an Extremis process we never used,” answered Maya.
“Well, you will now.”
Maya’s phone buzzed. “Excuse me,” she said. “Maya Hansen here. Oh, yes. I’ll be right there.” She clicked off. “How much money do you spend on planes? A package has arrived from your office. I’ll be right back. We’ll start you on tube feeding when I return.”
“Mmm, sounds tasty.”
“Lay back on that chair and make yourself comfortable. If you can, I mean, given that you feel nothing.”
She left the room. Tony slowly lifted himself out of the wheelchair and on to the operating table. He leaned over to one of the computers nearby, browsed through some files about Extremis, punched a few keys and scanned the results, then used his left hand to pull a retractable cable out of his Iron Man helmet. He plugged it into a monitor.
The words IRON MAN HUD PLAYBACK flashed across the screen, superimposed over a video recording of his point of view of Iron Man’s fight with Mallen. Tony watched his repulsor beam slice the Econoline in half, then he zoomed in on Mallen inside the van’s back section as it tumbled off the interstate exit ramp.
“Magnify top-left quadrant. Times 100. More. Zoom. Zoom. There.” A road map lay half unfolded inside the van, to Mallen’s left.
“That’s how I know where you’re going,” said Tony aloud. The monitor lit up with a map of the southern United States, with an interstate route mapped out from Houston to Washington, D.C. “If I need three days to process Extremis, you’ll be there before me. Even without the van.” He turned back to the keyboard, tapped out a sequence, and studied the results some more.
Tony choked again and spat up more blood. “God…that’s disgusting.”
Maya returned, holding a case. “This is it?” She stood silhouetted in the doorway.
“Yeah, experimental unit. Bring it over here,” said Tony. “I’ve been trying to get the Iron Man back to a collapsible model, but the more I add to it…it’s overcomplicated, you know?”
Maya set the case down on a table next to the recliner. Tony opened the lock with his left-index fingerprint, and the case sprang open to reveal a collapsed portable Iron Man suit.
“This version is made out of memory metals and single-crystal titanium, custom-grown. An electric charge makes it snap
into shape. And the molecular structure collimates into super-hard planes. Most of the interior elements compress to about 90 percent of their working volume.
“It’s tougher and faster than the current unit. But I couldn’t miniaturize the control systems. I still needed the undersheath, the hard upper torso, and the helmet system.
“We can reconfigure Extremis to do all those jobs. Make me Iron Man inside and out.” He snapped the case shut.
Maya punched a code into a console. She wouldn’t look at Tony.
“Or kill you,” she said. “This is our last live dose, here in the Extremis compiler. We have to instruct the compiler what to do to you. The computer will recompile the dose—reprogram what it does. One mistake, and it will kill you.”
“Well, let’s not make any mistakes,” said Tony. He tried to stand up, to see what Maya was doing at the compiler. “You better type. I’m down to one hand…”
He collapsed, and the world went black. Some time later—he didn’t know how long—Maya faded back into view. She was standing above him.
“Tony?”
He vomited blood, then sat still for a minute. “The rest of the package—the nutrients and suspended metals—you know what I want to do with them?”
“Tony,” said Maya quietly. “There’s no way in hell you’re going to survive an Extremis dose.”
He looked up at her. “I have to,” he said. “Or my internal injuries are going to kill me.”
She helped move him back on to the operating table, then pulled off his circuit-skin shirt.
Tony winced. “So that’s how it feels to not be fed a constant drip of painkillers.” His knee was still getting local anesthesia, but before too long, his hand would be in excruciating pain and his chest would start to ache.
“You can still not do this,” said Maya as she applied electrodes to Tony’s chest. She used a hypodermic needle to puncture one of the veins in his working arm and began intravenous fluid-replacement therapy. “Call the Avengers.”