‘Good work,’ he said. ‘Metal-idiot-boy.’
It was dark under the canopy. The trees grew crazily as if evolution had taken a sideways step; the trunks were massive, and the overhanging branches so overflowed with foliage that the ground was almost dark. Vines hung like giant spider webs. Red-and-yellow orchids lurked among ferns. Fallen trees, covered in green moss and orange fungi, cracked underfoot as Dan fought his way through the foliage.
Wiping his brow, he reached the base of a large tree. The humidity was unbelievable. Why didn’t I bring a drink? Then he noticed a small stream under some nearby palms. He thirstily drank a mouthful. Refreshing.
Continuing up a hill, he was beginning to wonder if these buildings were just a figment of Ferdy’s computer imagination when he spotted a gray shape among the foliage. He brushed aside some palms. A ten-foot concrete wall, smattered in moss, ran in both directions. He stepped back. Whoever had built this thing was serious about keeping people out. Picking a direction at random, he followed it to a clearing and the remains of an old road, hopelessly overgrown, leading to a pair of rusted metal gates.
What is this place?
The gates were locked, but the chain was rusty and quickly snapped when Dan applied his powers to it. He squeezed through and found an overgrown enclosure. An old jeep rusted in a corner; a fully grown palm tree grew from the back seat. A long, low building sat nestled under trees. Vines grew through the half-a-dozen broken windows running across the front.
Dan tried a door. Locked. Focusing on it, he snapped it open. The interior was a large, square room with a door on the other side. A broken light bulb hung from the ceiling. The place smelt like compost.
‘Do I really want to do this?’ he murmured.
It would be much easier to return to the ship. Back there waited Zombie Attack Squad and comfort, of a kind. But that would be running away, and Axel, Chad, and the others wouldn’t hesitate to enter. They would just march straight in.
He sighed. If they could do it, so could he.
Dan strode across the room. He was about half-way across when the floor cracked beneath him. It shuddered, gave a mighty groan, and collapsed.
Chapter Seven
‘Hold on,’ Old Axel warned. ‘This could get bumpy.’
He wasn’t kidding. No sooner had we entered the black rift than the ship tilted crazily. Crying out, we all crashed to one side. Ebony fell onto me, and I held her tightly for a few seconds until the ship leveled out.
‘Are you okay?’ Brodie asked, frowning at me holding Ebony. ‘I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘It isn’t as if—’
‘Cut the chatter!’ Old Axel snapped.
Oh boy, I thought. My older self is a real barrel of fun.
We were falling down a corridor filled with long pools of black oil, each ringed by a rainbow loop. The time ship itself was virtually silent, the only sound a gentle hum from the engines.
‘Shame they don’t put in more seats,’ Chad said.
‘This ship is a prototype,’ Old Axel explained. ‘The Agency lost half-a-dozen before they worked properly.’
‘Lost?’ I asked. ‘Where?’
‘Who knows? Some of them started by themselves and disappeared into infinity.’
Disappeared into infinity? I hoped they’d ironed out all the bugs. If something broke, we might end up fighting dinosaurs in the distant past. Or trying to survive in the far future when the sun has burnt out.
‘How long will this take?’ Brodie asked.
‘Only a few minutes, but there’s a couple of things we’ve got to cover before we land.’
‘Like what?’
‘The skies are a no-fly zone, but we’ll be arriving over the badlands. They don’t monitor the badlands.’
‘The badlands?’ I said. ‘That sounds...bad.’
‘It will give you a chance to see what the future is like. You’ll see why it’s important that James Price is stopped—permanently.’
The vessel jolted again. Ebony glanced at me, giving me a nervous smile. I liked Ebony. Not like I liked Brodie. I was in love with Brodie. I just wished she weren’t so jealous. I saw Chad give Brodie a sideway’s glance and my stomach gave a small lurch—not brought on by the movement of the ship. Chad was a friend, despite being a huge pain in the anatomy. He was probably attracted to Brodie, but he was attracted to just about every girl we encountered.
‘We’re leaving the rift,’ Old Axel said. ‘Hold on tight.’
Unfortunately, there was nothing to hold onto, but we braced ourselves against the bulkhead as the ship headed towards a thin line of blue. It grew larger until it filled the entire screen.
Then we were through.
A city lay beneath us—or what remained of it. It looked like a war zone. Skyscrapers were broken, derelict, and decaying, with not a single intact window. A lot of buildings had been destroyed by fire. Others were reduced to rubble. The streets were choked with corroded motor vehicles; chaotic traffic jams, decades old, blocked most streets. Weeds grew through the footpaths and roads. Small fires burnt from a dozen places.
I caught sight of what was once a harbor. The water had turned into soupy white sand. The sky was blue but unnaturally pale as if bleached. I thought I had never seen anything like this before, but then I knew I had. I knew this place. This was New York—the island of Manhattan. In the distance stood the Statue of Liberty, or what remained of her. The grand old lady had lost her head and both arms. A colossal wall enveloped the entire area. Beyond lay a hazy brown mist.
Old Axel cursed. ‘We’re over the city!’ he yelled. ‘I must have gotten the coordinates wrong.’
An object arced over the skyline towards us.
‘A missile!’ Chad yelled. ‘Watch—’
Old Axel yanked the flight stick to one side, and we slammed into the bulkhead. Brodie sagged, unconscious as the time ship spun completely out of control. One second I was on the wall; the next, I was against the ceiling.
Old Axel fought with the controls. ‘I’m taking us down!’ he screamed. ‘We won’t last a minute up here!’
A building filled the window; I thought we were about to die. At the last possible instant, Old Axel pulled the ship to starboard, and we narrowly missed it. I was supposed to be some kind of super-powered human, and yet I felt like a ball in a pinball machine. A narrow street, scattered with debris, appeared from nowhere. The vessel drew level with it, bounced twice, and slid along the road.
‘Everyone out!’ Old Axel yelled.
This was all happening so fast. We were a tangle of arms and legs on the floor. Chad’s armpit was in my face. Ebony’s foot was jammed in my groin. Old Axel climbed over us and shoved open the hatch. I fell out after him.
‘Hey!’ Chad yelled.
He was struggling out the door with an unconscious Brodie in his arms. A whine came from down the street. Something flashed down the narrow corridor of demolished buildings towards us.
A missile.
I flung out a hand and created a shield—just in time. The missile exploded, raining debris and shrapnel around us. Another missile curved down an alley. Ebony created a metal spear from the air and flung it at the weapon. It exploded before it could reach us.
‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ she yelled.
A bright red ball fell from the sky and plummeted into the ground. A shapeless lump of goo. Then it shimmered and expanded into a bright red statue of a man.
‘You’ve violated Agency airspace!’ he snarled. ‘Surrender yourself!’
‘Talk to my lawyer!’ I snapped. We had only been in the future a few minutes, and already everyone wanted us dead. If he were looking for a fight, then I was happy to give him one.
He flung an arm out, and the appendage stretched down an alley, around a tottering brownstone and back to him. It was like he was made from rubber. He pulled tight. The building groaned as he pulled it off its foundations—and straight onto us.
; Chapter Eight
I threw up a barrier and the building slammed into it, burying us under tons of brick, glass, and timber. One more second, and we would have been dead. I focused hard, expanded the shield and pushed the debris away. Sky appeared and we scrambled free. Chad still had Brodie, unconscious, in his arms.
‘Get her out of here!’ I yelled.
Ebony shoved me aside, and I swung around to see the red man draw back his fist. He fired it at me, but Ebony had already constructed a metal shield. His fist slammed into it, and I heard a resounding cry.
Good, I thought. I hope that hurt.
I pushed Ebony’s shield forward and used it as a battering ram, slamming it into the red man. He was thrown backward into a building. I shot Ebony a smile.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I need all the help I can get.’
The red man scrambled from the front window of the building. ‘Unauthorized mods are punishable by death!’ he said.
‘And I thought we were in real trouble!’
I fired a series of air balls at him, and he buckled under the attack. At the same time, Ebony touched the ground and turned the road under him into air. He fell twenty feet to the bottom. I peered back to check on Chad and Brodie, but they were gone. The only person visible was Old Axel.
‘Come on!’ he yelled.
I’d forgotten all about him in the chaos. Ebony cried out, and I turned to see the red man leap straight from the hole into the sky. We stumbled over debris to an alley on the opposite side of the street. Looking back, I searched for Chad and Brodie but still couldn’t see them.
‘They went the other way,’ Old Axel said. ‘They’re safe.’
I wasn’t sure I agreed with his definition of safe, but this was no time to debate it. The red man would be back in seconds. I glanced up. He was spinning back towards Earth—straight towards us. The fastest way out of here was flying, but taking to the skies was asking for trouble, so I fired another series of air cannonballs at him.
They hit, driving him sideways into a building, but he bounced straight out again, landing in front of me. He punched me in the stomach. The blow would have killed anyone else, but at the last moment, I erected a shield around my body. Still, the impact knocked me to the ground.
Ebony pointed at the air above the red man. A huge metal ball appeared. He had just enough time to see it before gravity took over. The ball slammed into him, crushing him into the ground.
‘Did I kill him?’ Ebony asked.
‘I’m not sure.’ We couldn’t see him. If he wasn’t dead, then he was probably severely injured. I hated the idea of hurting anyone, but I didn’t have a choice.
Old Axel grabbed my arm. ‘Follow me.’
He dragged us towards an old department store. The front was boarded up, but he eased open a paling and pushed us through. I peered into the gloom and saw dusty shop fittings and mannequins. Then one of the mannequins moved.
‘You can’t come in here.’ It was an old man, unshaven and rough looking. ‘You can’t come in—’
‘Shut up,’ Old Axel snapped. ‘Is there another way out?’
‘A way out?’ His eyes darted about in confusion. ‘Have you seen my wife? She left to buy flowers.’
He continued to rave uncontrollably. I felt sorry for him. He’d obviously been driven mad.
‘We’re friends,’ Ebony said gently. ‘Is there a back exit?’
‘Quiet!’ Old Axel hissed. ‘They’re here.’
Ebony and I hurried to the front. Peering through a gap in the palings, we saw half-a-dozen armed men charging down the street with guns raised. I heard the old man behind us start to speak. Old Axel cut him off. The armed guards wore uniforms that were oddly familiar, similar to those worn by security guards at The Agency, but more militarized with epaulets and insignia.
They grouped around the hole in the street. Something moved near their feet. Something red.
The hand of the red man gripped the ground. He dragged himself onto the footpath. Obviously, he was in no state to pursue us. The guards spoke to him for a moment before he nodded, gathered himself up, and leaped into the sky.
The guards turned away; they were giving up. We breathed a sigh of relief as they disappeared.
‘They’re gone,’ I said quietly. ‘We should see if—’
Ebony turned, and her face fell in horror. ‘No!’ she cried. ‘What have you done?’
Old Axel stood over the body of the old man. The stranger lay on the ground, his eyes open and staring. His neck had been broken.
Chapter Nine
‘I did what I had to do,’ Old Axel said. ‘He was trying to speak—’
Then I had my hands at his throat. ‘You maniac!’ I snarled. ‘You killed him!’
‘He was going to cry out! I had to stop him!’
‘You can’t just kill—’
Old Axel slapped my face. ‘Wake up!’ he said, struggling free. ‘This is not the world you used to know! This is the end time! Can you understand that?’
I fell back weakly. ‘He didn’t deserve that,’ I said. ‘He was just an old man.’
‘And now he’s a dead old man,’ Old Axel said. ‘But if you go back and change history, then none of this will happen.’ He pointed at the body. ‘He’ll lead a completely different life, free of the horror caused by James Price.’
The old man was so terribly still. I stared down at him. Have you seen my wife? She left to buy flowers. Now he was dead, and we didn’t even know his name.
‘There’ll be no more killing,’ I said. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. ‘You won’t kill anyone else.’
‘Change history, and he won’t die,’ Old Axel said.
‘You don’t know that,’ Ebony said. ‘You don’t know what an alternative future will hold.’
‘It’ll be better than this.’
He told us we needed to keep moving; a resistance cell located nearby would help us. I tried my communicator but got only static. Old Axel told me they wouldn’t work here. Communicators these days used a completely different network.
‘Then how will we contact them?’ I asked.
‘They’re resourceful. We’ll catch up with them later.’
What sort of answer is that? I wanted to punch him in the face, which was pretty funny, really, because it meant I wanted to punch myself. What is his problem? He made it sound like they were lost at Disneyland, not forty years in the future.
But he was right. Chad and Brodie were resourceful. They could survive just about anything.
Old Axel went to the back of the store. Pushing aside some shelving, he revealed a door. ‘Looks like there’s an exit through here.’
I couldn’t believe we were leaving the old man here. Does nobody get buried anymore? My eyes scanned the counter. On it sat a dusty vase filled with plastic flowers. I placed them gently on the old man’s chest.
‘That’s very touching,’ Old Axel called out. ‘But we—’
‘Shut up!’ I snapped. ‘You may have lost your humanity, but I haven’t.’
We followed Old Axel through the exit into an alley lined with rubbish. A year’s worth of trash was here.
‘This is disgusting,’ Ebony said, screwing up her nose. ‘Is the whole city like this?’
‘Some of it’s worse. At least we’re in a liveable section.’
‘This is liveable?’
‘Walls enclose the habitable sections. Most of the planet’s drowning in toxic gas.’
‘So, what went wrong?’ I asked. ‘Why did the time machine land us in the middle of a fight?’
‘The Agency had a lot of teething problems with the time machine’s development,’ Old Axel explained. ‘We’re lucky we ended up here and not at the Battle of Waterloo.’
He told us more about the badlands. Most of the major cities were protected by massive walls; outside lay areas where the gas would kill you within hours. The mid-west was one colossal storm, an out of control hurricane that had been active for over
a decade. It even had a name: The Eye.
‘What caused the gas?’ I asked.
‘Another one of Price’s experiments,’ Old Axel snorted. ‘He had some insane idea about terraforming the planet into a new garden of Eden.’
Whatever James Price had done had messed up the world. Reaching the end of the alley, we hurried across an abandoned street. Before reaching the other side, I looked up and saw a poster of a man, fifty feet high, on the side of a building. The words below were old and rotting, but still readable:
The Agency is your friend
‘Is that—’ I started.
‘James Price,’ Old Axel confirmed. ‘The years—and plastic surgery—have been kind. He doesn’t look much different to that in your time.’
We started down another alley.
‘How did all this happen?’ Ebony asked. ‘How did one man take over The Agency? And the world?’
‘I can’t say much for fear of contaminating the timeline,’ Old Axel said, ‘but you should know that James Price is a genius. In terms of intellect, he’s a Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein. Unfortunately, unlike them, he’s completely without morals. After joining The Agency, he became obsessed with controlling it, then the United States and finally the planet.’
We walked in silence. While I disagreed with his murder of the old man, I was starting to understand my older self. His life had been unbearably hard. Our lives were complicated, but he’d lived through the fall of civilization, the end of the world.
Descending down a disused subway, we climbed over rusting gates and continued down another flight of stairs. The gloom grew worse by the minute; I wished we had torches. I was just about to suggest this when Old Axel stopped at an empty vending machine. He eased a corner of it aside, and I heard him exchange a few words with someone.
‘Come on,’ he said, turning to us. ‘We’re here.’
He pushed the vending machine aside, and a faint glow sprang from a hole behind. We passed the gatekeeper, a dirty looking woman with matted hair and one arm, and continued along an old section of subway. A string of faint LED lights hung from the walls. On both sides of the long-defunct rail line, people sat, engaged in different sorts of work: repairing clothing, cleaning guns, cooking food on oil burners.
Teen Superheroes Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 51