The Atlantis Secret

by S. A. Beck

  “It would help if you gave me real grenades instead of flash-and-smoke bombs!” Otto shouted as he reloaded.

  “You want to kill people?”

  “No, but it looks like a lot of people want to kill me!”

  Otto had been on the run ever since the little band of mercenaries had sprung him from jail. At times, things calmed down, like a week ago when they’d spent a relaxing night in Tucson, eating Mexican food and learning about the Atlanteans from an old professor. But those guys in black suits, the government agents sent by General Meade, had located them again, cornering them in an old, crumbling gas station on a back county road.

  The agents had picked their spot well. All around the gas station stretched a vast, flat desert of rock and cacti. There was nobody for miles, not even a ranch house. The Atlantis Allegiance always drove the back roads to avoid getting sighted. That worked most of the time, but whenever they got attacked, they couldn’t hope for any help.

  It was just Otto, Grunt, and the half-dozen government agents outside.

  “When’s Vivian getting here?” Otto shouted over the sound of gunfire.

  “ETA one minute,” Grunt shouted back.

  More shots stitched a pattern into the back wall. Otto crawled to the next window over, kicking some old beer cans out of his path. Keep moving and keep them guessing. Grunt had taught him that. The building looked like it got used frequently as a local party place. Graffiti decorated some of the walls, and empty cans and cigarette stubs littered the floor. At least the partiers had broken all the windows already. If they hadn’t, Grunt and Otto would be getting showers of glass. Those agents’ aim was far too good for Otto’s comfort.

  Vivian and Dr. Yamazaki had driven off to open a cache of equipment hidden down the road while he and Grunt stayed at the station to open up a second cache containing some electronic supplies Edward needed. The agents arrived a minute after Vivian had driven out of sight. Otto hoped they hadn’t sent a second group after her. Getting saved by Vivian was Plans A, B, and C.

  There was no Plan D.

  At least Edward and Dr. Yuhle were a hundred miles away with the trailer. No way they’d get that lumbering vehicle out of the mess Otto was in. It went from zero to sixty in about five hours.

  “Outgoing!” Otto shouted, popping up and firing the grenade launcher. He barely made it back out of sight before a bullet cracked off the windowsill.

  A moment later, a flash and a thud told him his grenade had gone off. A second after that, a deep boom shook the entire building. The back wall of the gas station was illuminated in garish red.

  “Damn, Pyro, you hit one of their gas tanks!” Grunt shouted.

  Otto dared a peek outside. A mushroom cloud of flame billowed up from one of the sedans. The haze of smoke from his last bomb shrouded the whole area, weirdly backlit by the burning car. Agents scampered off in all directions to avoid the flames. For a brief second, Otto felt relieved no one had gotten incinerated, but his thoughts were soon swept away by the beautiful sight of the flames.

  Otto stared at the mushroom cloud as it dissipated twenty feet above the parking lot before his gaze drifted back down to the car. The entire vehicle was aflame, the biggest fire coming from the engine, the flames reaching higher and higher as oil and rubber lit. The initial boom, he realized, had been the gas tank exploding. He’d have to remember that. It was gorgeous.

  A screech of tires snapped him out of his daze and made him look to the right. A red Subaru Impreza swerved into the parking lot, the driver’s window open with an Uzi’s muzzle pointing out and flaring with gunfire.

  “About time she got here!” Grunt shouted. “I hate waiting on women, especially when I’m getting shot at. You ready to run, Pyro?”

  “If it means getting out of here, you can bet on it.”

  The Subaru squealed to a stop in front of the gas station. Otto grabbed the duffel bag full of gear they’d dug up in the backyard and hurried out the front door as Grunt provided cover fire.

  Vivian popped open the back seat, and he dove right in. A second later, he had the wind knocked out of him as Grunt landed on top of him.

  “Sorry, Pyro.” Grunt rolled off of him and slammed the door.

  “You boys have fun while I was gone?” Vivian asked, slamming on the gas and swerving the car around, making Otto fly to one side and bounce off of the wall of muscle that was Grunt.

  “Otto’s getting good with that grenade launcher,” Grunt said, slapping a full magazine into his Uzi. “He’s figured out how to blow up a car.”

  Despite the danger, Otto felt a flush of shame. For years, he’d struggled with his addiction to lighting fires, and now he had to do it to stay alive.

  But stay alive for how long? Otto looked out the back window as the gas station dwindled in the distance. Already, the agents were getting back together. One of the sedans pulled away from the fire.

  Dr. Yamazaki popped up in the passenger’s seat beside Vivian. She’d been hiding below the dashboard.

  “Oh, there you are,” Grunt said in a cheerful tone.

  The geneticist stared at him, her face pale. She was even more overwhelmed by all this than Otto was.

  “They’re coming after us,” Otto said.

  “Of course they are, honey,” Vivian said. “These guys never give up. Wonder how they found us this time.”

  “Maybe someone hacked into Edward’s communications,” Otto said.

  Grunt shook his head, the sweat glistening on the tribal tattoo covering most of his shaven scalp. “No one hacks Edward. Maybe they traced the Tohono O’odham. They’re careful but not as trained as we are. Someone might have slipped up.”

  “I told you we shouldn’t have helped them trash that uranium mine!” Otto said.

  The mercenary rounded on him. “Fighting General Meade isn’t the only war we’re in, Pyro!”

  Otto glared back at him. “You busted me out of jail to save Jaxon, and all we’ve been doing is running around the desert for the past few weeks getting shot at!”

  “We’ll get your girlfriend when we can, kid. Right now, we’ve got more pressing problems.”

  Vivian chimed in from the front seat. “Um, boys? Perhaps you should stop arguing and see what our friends are up to?”

  Grunt and Otto turned around in their seat to look behind them. The highway was empty. They looked at each other.

  “That’s too good to be true,” Otto said.

  Grunt craned his neck, looking out the window into the sky.

  “What are you looking at?” Otto asked.

  “Thought I spotted something. Damn, there it is. A drone!”

  “What! Where?”

  Grunt pointed. “There.”

  Otto spotted a small black X silhouetted against the bright desert sky. “Vivian, start weaving. It’s going to shoot a missile at us!”

  “Relax, Pyro,” Grunt said. “It’s just an observation drone. It’s too small to carry ordnance. It will keep after us, though. If we don’t shoot it down, we’ll never shake those guys. That thing’s got a camera they’re monitoring. They’re probably hanging back, waiting for reinforcements.”

  Grunt rolled down the window, pulled a rifle out from behind the seat, and lifted himself partway out the window.

  “Hold onto me, Pyro.”

  Otto grabbed him around the waist. Vivian didn’t slow down. They must have been going eighty.

  “Watch those hands, Pyro. I’m not phobic, but when I was in the service, the rule was ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’”

  “Shut up and shoot that drone!” Otto shouted.

  Otto would have never shouted at someone who looked like Grunt until a few weeks before. He’d never handled a grenade launcher either. A lot had changed in his life.

  The sound of a high-powered rifle shooting next to his head slammed his eardrums. Grunt fired twice more. Otto craned his head and saw the drone plummeting to earth. The mercenary wormed his way back inside the vehicle.

  “I hate d
rones,” Grunt said as he thumped back into his seat. “Damn things kill innocent people all around the world while their pilots sit back at base, thinking they’re playing some damn video game.”

  “They only use them to kill terrorists,” Otto said.

  Grunt snorted. “You keep telling yourself that, Pollyanna.”

  “Now what?” Otto asked, peering up into the sky to search for more drones.

  “Now we get out of here as fast as we can, ditch this Subaru, and grab another vehicle they won’t recognize, honey,” Vivian said from the front seat.

  “But where will we get one?”

  “Where do you think?” Grunt asked. “We’ll steal one.”

  Otto threw up his hands. “Whoa! Wait a minute. I’m not a thief, and don’t pull that ‘Yeah, but you’re a pyromaniac’ line on me. Just because I’ve done some bad things in my life doesn’t mean I have to keep on doing more bad stuff.”

  “If you don’t help us steal a car, you’ll be aiding and abetting a murder.”

  “Whose?”

  “Our own.”

  Otto paused, trying to think of a way around that but came up with nothing.

  “There’s got to be a better way,” he said, his voice lacking conviction.

  “Wish there was, honey,” Vivian said. “But there isn’t. If they have one drone, they’ll have another. Let’s grab the first car we can, something fast and expensive. That way, the owner will be sure to have theft insurance. We’ll ditch it as soon as we can, and then the cops will collect it and give it back. Sure, we’ll be ruining someone’s day, but we’ll be saving our own lives.”

  Grunt punched him in the shoulder. Just a playful punch. A real punch would have shot Otto through the door.

  “Consider it a math lesson,” the mercenary said. “You gotta do a lot of math in this game. Here’s an equation for you. Are four lives greater than, equal to, or less than the value of one civilian’s ruined day? Hell, even if his car ends up getting trashed, four lives is greater than the value of one civilian’s car, right?”

  Otto sank back in his seat and closed his eyes. Being with the crew meant he was always on the run. Back in California, he was wanted for a prison break, not to mention the false charge of setting fire to the greenhouse at his group home. The one fire he hadn’t set was the one he got tried as an adult for. Just his luck.

  “I still don’t like it,” Otto grumbled.

  Grunt put a beefy hand on his shoulder, and Otto turned to him.

  “Good. I don’t want you to like it. You’re not a bad kid for a pyro, and I don’t want all this drama to turn you bad.”

  Otto caught a look of pain in Grunt’s eyes, quickly hidden. Something had happened when he had been in the Special Forces, something Grunt only hinted at. Whatever that was, it meant he would leave the Atlantis Allegiance once they saved Jaxon. As soon as Dr. Yamazaki and her old professor Dr. Charles Smith had decided they needed to go to Morocco to hunt down the original Atlanteans, Grunt had told them he was out.

  Whatever Grunt had experienced in North Africa, he didn’t want to face it again.

  Otto looked at him out of the corner of his eye. As annoying as the guy was, he didn’t want the mercenary to leave. Grunt wasn’t a bad guy, and Otto had a feeling that if they really did get Jaxon away from Meade’s people and ran all the way to Morocco, that wouldn’t get them out of danger.

  No, Otto thought as he put another flash-and-smoke bomb into his grenade launcher, the danger is just beginning.

  Chapter 3

  July 7, 2016, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  10:05 PM

  * * *

  The sounds of the night surrounded Jaxon as she stood in the shadow of a tree near the end of her street. That was always the most peaceful part of her day, waiting alone outside for Brett to pick her up.

  As usual, her foster parents didn’t suspect a thing. Stephen and Isadore Grant went to bed early and never checked on her at night, plus the lawn below her window was thick grass and soft soil. Jumping down made almost no sound. Even though her room was on the second floor above a high-ceilinged living room, the jump felt like stepping off a chair. Jaxon had unnaturally good strength and agility, and her knees barely bent when she landed from the twenty-foot fall.

  If only my mind was as strong and as quick as my body.

  Courtney’s jokes from lunchtime were still bothering her. Bullies made her want to curl up and blow away. It was so much easier when they physically attacked her because then she could hit them.

  Maybe this isn’t the best way to deal with that problem.

  She suppressed the thought as soon as it came up. It sounded like all the social workers and psychologists she had ever had. Easy for them to talk, none of them had been shuffled from foster home to group home and back again two or three times a year. They’d all grown up with loving parents in happy homes.

  Jaxon knew that for a fact. She’d asked every single one of them.

  No, the little adventures in the crappy parts of LA were good for her. She’d never felt so confident before, and being out put to good use all that aikido practice she’d been doing with her instructor, Marquis. She’d stopped dozens of crimes.

  The low rev of Brett’s Porsche caught her attention. He drove slowly and stopped a little past the tree under which she was hiding. She kept behind the trunk so she didn’t get caught in the headlights.

  Once the lights were shining farther down the road, she hurried over and got into the car, keeping to the shadows as much as possible. Hers was a quiet neighborhood, but there still might be eyes watching, especially that pervy neighbor she’d had to stop from beating up that prostitute.

  “You ready?” She buckled up as Brett turned the car around.

  “I was born ready, baby,” he said, giving her that stupid grin of his.

  “Lame.”

  “What? It’s original.”

  “No, it’s not original.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  He looked sidelong at her. “How about, ‘You’re the only friend I have worth having?’ Is that original?”

  Something inside Jaxon shifted. No one had ever said that to her before. Otto had said all sorts of nice things to her during the few precious weeks he’d been her boyfriend, but he’d been a messed-up kid sharing a group home with her. Brett was a popular rich kid, deliberately losing his popularity to hang out with her and take her side in arguments.

  She glanced at him and caught him looking at her. Why didn’t she give him a chance? He was a bit of a dork, and the golfing thing had to go, but he was cute and kind.

  Was she still holding a torch for Otto? She guessed she was. He’d been her first boyfriend, and she had needed some time to admit to herself that she’d never see him again—maybe she should move on.

  “Ah, you’ve gone all quiet!” Brett said. “My charm stuns all the girls into silence.”

  She broke out in laughter. “I knew you were going to ruin it by saying something dumb!”

  But he hadn’t ruined it. Even his dumbness had become charming.

  Brett stared at her, a wide smile deepening the dimples on either side of his mouth.

  “Watch the road,” Jaxon said.

  Brett chuckled and turned back to look where they were going. He’d gotten onto an access road to the highway, where there were plenty of cheap bars and motels. There’d be good hunting here.

  After a moment, he spoke, quietly and thoughtfully, as if he’d practiced what he wanted to say.

  “It’s just that everything is more real with you, Jaxon. Even when we’re just goofing off, eating lunch, you say stuff that makes sense. You’re way smarter than most people I know, and you’re pretty too. Oh, don’t go rolling your eyes. You always do that when I say you’re good looking, but you are. You’re good looking in a different way. It’s like you’re a combination of all the best features of all the different races. Too bad you don’t know your parents—I bet they have a ton of stories
to tell. Don’t be too hard on them for leaving you. They might have had good reasons. It’s better not to have parents than parents who don’t want you. But what I’m trying to say, Jaxon, is that it doesn’t matter if you want to go out with me or not. I’ve really loved these lunches and the crazy stuff we’re doing right now. I want you to remember that. This won’t last, you know, and I want you to remember that.”

  Jaxon didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. They drove in silence for a while, Jaxon looking straight ahead, not daring to turn to see if Brett was looking at her.

  Brett slowed the Porsche as they passed a strip mall containing a bar, an all-night liquor store, a few cheap shops all closed and shuttered, and a run-down motel with a garish neon sign from the sixties, which offered hourly rates. Beyond that, Jaxon spotted the dim lights of a cheap housing development.

  Jaxon felt a mixture of familiarity, guilt, and disgust. She’d lived in a few neighborhoods like that herself. She knew how they could be.

  “Pull in here,” she said in a soft voice.

  Her emotions from a moment before got drowned out by the electric thrill of the hunt. It wouldn’t be long before they faced danger again, stopping some innocent person from getting hurt or drawing out some robber or perv who deserved to be punished.

  In the back of her mind, Jaxon knew that this was just some coping mechanism for all her problems. She’d been talking to psychologists and stuck in group therapy with basket-case kids all her life. She knew all the tricks the mind could play. Jaxon felt powerless and awkward in her regular life, the life where she had to obey the rules and had to deal with people who knew her.

  Out here, she faced a different reality. She could be whoever she wanted to be. Nobody had any preconceptions of her, and the rules were simple—win or lose. Losing wasn’t an option when she considered just how badly she’d get hurt.

  There was another level to it, though, one none of her shrinks could ever guess—here she could reveal some of her extraordinary powers. She looked like a petite teenage girl, just five foot three and one hundred twenty pounds, yet she was stronger than an adult weightlifter and as fast as Bolt, and thanks to her martial-arts training, she had become one of the best fighters she’d ever seen. She had to pull her punches with her triple-black-belt instructor just to keep him from catching on. These adventures were no real danger to her, even when she had to pull back on her abilities to keep Brett from thinking she was some sort of mutant. She’d never told him about her powers and figured he thought she was just some martial-arts prodigy.