Different Strong

by Nat Kozinn

  “Gary, please! I just want to talk!” I yell, but I get no response.

  He’s furious and he has a right to be. I was beyond a jerk to him. That wasn’t a great way to thank him for helping after The Beast gutted me.

  “Okay Gary, you don’t want to talk. That’s fine, but I hope you’ll listen to me. I want to say that I am sorry. I was wrong for what I said to you. I was angry that I was in jail, and I wanted to blame everyone but myself. You were never anything but a friend to me, and I repaid your friendship with malice. I am truly sorry,” I say and make sure my voice trembles a bit so Gary knows it is hard for me to say.

  Even if I didn’t believe what I said, Gary wouldn’t know the difference. Unfortunately for my ego, it was all true.

  After a few seconds, Gary opens the door. He looks like he can barely fit through the doorway. You’d think they would have made it bigger. Anyone strong enough to lift an elevator is going to be huge. All Strong-Men are large. I should probably say something.

  “Hey Gary, you should make yourself a bigger door,” I finally say.

  “I busted open a bigger hole the first week I worked here. I got chewed out by the Head of Facilities because it violated some fire code or something. They took the cost of fixing it out of my pay,” he tells me.

  “They should really update the fire code to account for thousand-pound men like you.”

  “Whatever you say. What do you want Gavin? My elevator shift is about to end. I’ve got deliveries to make,” Gary says coldly.

  “Are you heading to the lab? Maybe you can check out Sarah for me. Let me know if she still looks fantastic,” I say and wait for Gary to smile. He doesn’t. “I told you Gary, I came here to apologize. I’m ashamed of what I said to you.”

  “Ashamed? Can you even feel shame? What does an apology even mean from you? Did you decide enough time had passed and a normal person would come apologize now?”

  “I probably deserve that. But believe it or not, I am capable of realizing when I’ve made a mistake. I’m sorry, Gary. It was unfair of me to accuse you of those things.”

  “I can’t even believe what you accused me of. You thought I became friends with you because Nita ordered me to? You thought I lied to you about Becky being dead on purpose? We all thought she was dead. Aside from you, The Beast had never left anyone alive,” Gary says.

  “When I hear you say it now, I know how crazy it all sounds. But when I was rotting away in a cell, my mind went to some dark places. I wanted someone to blame for what happened. I wanted to believe that I was in jail as part of some conspiracy, not because I broke the law and deserved to be imprisoned,” I say. “Then Becky broke up with me, and I had a fantasy that if I had known she was alive, I wouldn’t have gone after The Beast, and we’d still be together. Now I’ve accepted that it was all my fault. Not Nita’s, not Larry’s, and definitely not yours. I’m sorry it took me this long to apologize.”

  I watch my words sink into Gary. I can see them affect him; it was a good spiel. Maybe I was so convincing because I kind of believe it myself. I don’t want to admit it, but I know I might be wrong about Nita. I don’t really have any hard evidence that she was manipulating me and The Beast. I’ve got what Ben has told me and my gut. I need to pay attention, Gary’s about to say something.

  “You know what? I’m sorry too. Yeah, you accused me of some horrible and crazy stuff, but I should have let it go. I can only imagine what you’ve been through. I’m sure if I had spent a few months fighting The Beast, thinking my girlfriend was dead then finding out she wasn’t, and sitting in a jail cell, I might think some wacko ideas too. I forgive you.”

  “Thanks, Gary. You don’t know what that means to me,” I say with a big smile.

  Gary wears his own grin. Then he closes in and hugs me, his arms big enough to wrap entirely around me.

  “I have to forgive you. Who doesn’t want a famous friend? ‘The Beast Slayer,’ hah, we’ve got to go out some night. Everybody’s going to want to buy you a drink,” Gary says with excitement.

  “Sounds great, but I can’t. I’m still on parole. I had to lie to get here.”

  “Risking a parole violation just to see me, how can I still be mad at that? Still, even if you can’t enjoy all the perks of being famous, it must feel pretty good to be the big hero.”

  “It’s not bad,” I say with sly smile. “I’m going to a gala the Governor’s throwing at the Natural History Museum next week.”

  “Look at you, Mr. Fancy Pants. That’s some rough parole they got you on,” Gary says while he heads over to the crank that powers the elevator. He starts reeling the elevator up like it’s a jack-in-the-box.

  “The Governor likes to parade me around to show how serious he is about securing the Metro Area against other dangerous Differents. These things are always boring, but at least it means I get out of the OEC office for a night. Usually I’m trapped there.”

  “That part does sounds crappy at least,” he says as he finishes turning the crank. “Hey, I’ve really got to get going. You heading back to the Slug? Mind if we walk?”

  “Sure,” I say and head out of the maintenance room. “I’ve always wondered how you get the elevator down while you’re on it.”

  “I don’t. I’ve got to take the stairs, so lead the way.”

  We start heading down the stairs. It suddenly occurs to me that I didn’t come here just to apologize to Gary. I promised Ben that I’d ask about Nita.

  “So what is it Ultracorps has you delivering today?” I ask.

  “There’s some construction project by the train yards that I’ve been running deliveries to all week. I think I’m moving ForteSilk today. Shouldn’t take more than a few hours.” It’s a little hard to hear him over his deafening footsteps. That’s what happens when you weigh a thousand pounds.

  “Is that how you knew Nita? From making deliveries?”

  “Yeah, she really does everything with that super brain of hers, including handling my delivery scheduling sometimes. She’s not helping the unemployment rate,” Gary says with a laugh.

  “That is hard to believe. I guess she’s got her finger in every pot. What kind of stuff does she have you deliver?”

  “Manna and construction materials, mostly.”

  “That’s all? Nothing juicy?”

  “She had me deliver a huge cage full of rabbits to a lab once. I’m man enough to admit those things were adorable. I don’t like thinking about what happened to them,” Gary says with a shudder.

  “Ouch, that’s brutal,” I say. I have to keep prying. “Is that all? She never sent you to a secret lab where they perform alien autopsies?”

  I hear Gary’s footsteps come to a dead stop behind me. I turn around at look at him. He does not look happy. I never give him enough credit; he’s smarter than he seems. Being strong doesn’t make you an idiot.

  “You know what, Gavin? Maybe you need to find an excuse to stick around here and wait for the Slug behind mine. Nice seeing you, old friend,” Gary says flatly. Then he pushes me aside with his shoulder and continues down the stairs.

  I’m left standing there, wondering why I let myself listen to a lunatic like Ben. He just cost me a friendship and I don’t have many of those to spare.

  4

  Log of Notable Nita/Ultracorps Activity Week 207

  Large Walter deployment in West Covina, near the Slug yards. Deliveries of Maceo Steel, Styro, and ForteSilk without corresponding construction orders.

  Theories: Ultracorps has been assured of new construction project even though Metro subcommittee has not approved contract. Possibly an attempt to repair relationship after Governor Hayes overturned water contract. Will continue to follow.

  Colorful wax paper wrappers litter the floor of the dark, dingy basement, the result of many late nights filled with fast-food eating and many mornings with cleaning avoided. Ben sleeps on a bare, tattered mattress with a torn quilt coiled around him like a snake suffocating its prey. Beads of sweat adorn his face a
s he tosses and turns, fighting his vice-gripped blanket physically and his dreamed demons mentally. After a few moments of slumbered suffering, Ben sits up from his bed with a shout.

  It was the fire dream again, and Ben knows who’s responsible for the inferno. His unconscious mind creates the fire as ill-fitting metaphor; it’s control Nita desires, not destruction. It’d be more apt if the tortured souls in his dreams were riddled with puppet strings instead of flames, but Ben does not control his slumbering mind. Though he is surprised his unconscious brain isn’t a little more accurate.

  Ben reaches down for a large Pho-Plastic jug of water and takes several deep swigs. He’s determined to extinguish the flames, though they existed only within his mind. His stomach fills, and he has to stop drinking before the water level can climb to his head. His thirst abated if not satisfied, Ben takes stock of the room around him.

  He knows he should clean the jumbled mass of filth. Not out of any misunderstandings of which qualities are closest to godliness, but because of the unstoppable, furry juggernaut known as the common street rat. Ben worked diligently to turn this old concrete basement into a fortress, sealing any cracks in the old concrete with B-Crete and installing an impenetrable Maceo steel door at the entrance. Still, he has no illusions concerning his buttressing prowess. He may have made the place nigh-impregnable to any human enemies, but no matter his intellect, or how diligently he worked to secure the space, the rats will inevitably find a way in as they have with every previous safe house. If rats ever unified and turned violent against mankind, the human race wouldn’t stand a chance. The one thing worse than bowing to a thirteen-year-old little girl would be bowing to a rat overlord. At least Nita wouldn’t demand to be fed garbage as tribute.

  Ben begins the herculean task of picking up his room. He gathers merely a few drops of the garbage ocean before he stops in his tracks and lets the small amount of refuse he picked up trickle out of his hands. A thought has struck him, and it is infinitely more valuable than vermin prevention.

  Just a few inches from his bed there is a large slab of B-Crete balanced precariously on a pile of old bricks. This ramshackle piece of furniture is Ben’s desk, and it has been the location of many feats of ingenuity. Today’s stroke of genius revolves around a hearing amplifier he makes frequent use of. He’s had an idea to rework the circuits of the device, which should lower the electrical power required, allowing for a smaller battery and an overall decrease in the size of the gadget. An important breakthrough considering that the hearing aid is often employed in situations where discretion is prudent.

  Ben grabs a pen and a water-stained old paper notebook and begins furiously mapping the new circuit design. He draws resistors and transistors and calculates ohms and amps. He performs what some would consider complex arithmetic seamlessly, moving without pause. His hand is slowing his mind down, not vice-versa. Despite the loss in speed, Ben learned long ago that his ideas needed to be transferred from the mental world to the physical one. It’s not that Ben needs a way to remember the circuit; his brain never forgets a single thought. No, the notes are needed to force Ben to remember the very act of the thought occurring in the first place. Moments of inspiration overtake Ben frequently, and it’s quite easy to move on to the next brilliant notion, completely losing track of the previous profound revelation.

  Ben finishes his circuit map and tears out the piece of paper. He places it squarely in the middle of the desk, one of the few areas not already covered in previous notes of fevered insight. Shrinking the hearing aid must be recalled later because Ben does not have time to implement his changes at the moment. It is the third Thursday of the month, the day of his scheduled meeting with Gavin. That hearing aid serves an invaluable function. It will ensure that Ben can have his conversation with the boy without being overheard by any of Nita’s lackeys.

  Gavin should have news on Santa Fe, and when Ben remembers that fact he gets so giddy he stomps his feet like a little boy. Ben is sure Gavin found something. It has been way too long since he had any good luck following Nita’s trail; regression to dumb luck predicts better results eventually. Sure she’s smart, but she she’s also a child crippled by the arrogance accompanying her age. She left a track somewhere. Ben just needs to find the right thread, pull it, and the whole web will unravel. Then everyone will see the folly of giving Nita all that power. She’s too young; it doesn’t matter if she’s the smartest human on the planet, experience and maturity mean something. They’ll all see how crazy it was to give her Ben’s old job.

  Ben is feeling a tad encumbered by the weight of the lies he told Gavin about The Beast being held in Santa Fe, but really, he was talking theories more than lies. If The Beast somehow survived an almost certainly fatal three-hundred-story drop, and Nita was able to miraculously remove The Beast from the Metro Area without being discovered, and there is, in fact, a secret Ultracorps facility near Santa Fe, then The Beast could conceivably be held there. Even with all those suppositions, Ben still doubts it.

  Nita is too smart to keep such a dangerous weapon around even under those improbable conditions. The Beast is a toy she can’t play with any more. If someone spotted the creature, the government would be exposed for lying about The Beast being dead for the second time. The government would deny it, and it would not take long for the government investigators to turn their eye towards Ultracorps. Ben hopes it is true, because if the public found out, it might actually mean the end of Ultracorps. Secretly keeping a mass-murderer alive is something that cannot be undone through public relations and campaign donations.

  Ben needs to hurry up and get moving. There are only three hours until his lunch meeting with Gavin. He goes over to his basement “bathroom,” which consists of a bucket in the corner for his business and a cracked mirror on the wall. He turns the knob of his WormLight, releasing the Manna to feed the bacteria which produce the light that illuminates Ben’s face. He opens up a rectangular makeup case, revealing a smorgasbord of colors. He picks up his brush and begins applying a smattering of greys and beiges, mixing tones, hues, and shades to craft the perfect disguise. Soon his face is covered in pockmarks. His healthy, if not overly attractive, face now looks like it was scarred by one of Cabot’s Plagues. That Plague was designed to mark the “Forgotten Sons” and remind them of the Lord’s disappointment with them. It turned out that most people who had chicken pox were immune, so a small percentage of the United States population actually received the scars, which makes for the perfect disguise. The scars aren’t uncommon enough to draw excessive attention, but they are unique enough that anyone giving a description of Ben would focus on their existence.

  His face obscured, Ben heads over to a pile of clothes in the corner and starts digging. As he searches, he performs mathematical permutations in his head to determine a new combination of clothes that he has not previously worn; he wore the Slug conductor uniform last time, so it’s out. The calculations lead him to a red t-shirt, grey pants, and grey boots.

  Properly disguised, Ben takes one last look at himself in the cracked mirror, turns and climbs the ladder out of his basement abode. He opens the Maceo Steel door that leads to the ruins of the house that this basement was once a part of. The non-subterranean parts of the structure collapsed long ago. Cabot’s Plagues ate the metal pipes inside the building, spilling water everywhere, weakening the structure, leading to its eventual collapse. This left the basement with a vacancy Ben filled some thirty years later.

  Ben walks down the cracked and crumbled sidewalk that surrounds his neighborhood. He’s heading towards the C 26 Slug line. There’s an E 22 stop that is much closer, but he used that station last week, which means Nita could have found the route. The extra bit of walking is more than worthwhile if it keeps Nita off his trail.

  After twenty-five minutes of traipsing through depressingly dilapidated streets, Ben is foiled just before he reaches the train stop. A Walter stands in front of the entrance, mindlessly and dutifully sweeping trash off the st
reets. Ben’s heart nearly leaps out of his chest and he decides this is the end: Nita has finally found him. The cops will soon surround him and arrest him. Probably not even that. Nita wouldn’t want Ben in jail asking all manner of inconvenient questions. She’ll probably eliminate him. Ben frantically scans the rooftops around the station, expecting to catch a glimpse of the sniper who will finish him off. But there are no snipers, and the only real person he can see is an elderly man slowly making his way up the staircase to the Slug station. The old man is about twenty years past retirement age, so it’s unlikely he’s a secret Ultracorps operative.

  Ben exhales as he realizes he may have jumped to a faulty conclusion. This might in fact be a Walter performing its assigned cleaning task, not the current eyes and ears of Nita. Still, prudence would be wise. There is always the possibility that Nita is watching through its eyes and biding her time before swinging the axe down on Ben’s neck.

  There isn’t any way past the clone janitor, so Ben will have to go to plan B, another long walk. This time to the F 17 line. He’ll have to move quickly. He can’t afford to be late again. Gavin was extremely upset the last time Ben was tardy, and Ben is already balancing on thin ice with the boy.

  5

  Gavin Stillman is a criminal in the technical sense. There’s no denying that. But is he a criminal in the moral sense? This young man was willing to risk life, limb, and freedom in order to help people he had never met. That sounds like the description of a hero, not a criminal. If there was ever an individual who deserved leniency, who deserved compassion from our legal system, Gavin Stillman is that man. That is why I’m lending my voice to the already raucous crowd calling on the Governor to push federal prosecutors into granting clemency to “The Beast Slayer.”