But standing alone at night, without his father by his side, the city felt large and dangerous. He didn't have his father's guidance. He didn't have his suit. He didn't have any gadgets or weapons other than the small knife in his boot. And everywhere he looked, he saw them. The diseased.
Alliance members flew overhead, assisting the rebuilding effort, taking money away from his mother's business. Citizens afflicted with the disease were helping out too, using whatever wretched abilities they possessed to clear rubble or dig out survivors. He didn't think they should even be able to touch normal people, yet there they were, carrying people, holding babies, performing CPR. It was disgusting. And that's what pushed him forward.
He perched on rooftops, watching each group he came across, taking note of every disease he witnessed. He hoped he would find someone with an ability that would be easy to defeat, but he found that most of the people assisting the effort were either Alliance members or people with physical powers. He saw men and women with varying levels of super strength lifting rubble. He saw a woman blowing debris clear from a dig site. He saw a cube of acidic gel with eyeballs floating inside of it melting through the wreckage of a parking garage. He didn't even understand how something like that could live. How was he supposed to kill it?
He did this for hours. Watching. Observing. Gauging every possible weakness. As the night dragged on, his confidence weakened, and he wondered for a second if his father was right. Maybe he was too young. Maybe he was too small. Maybe he wasn't ready for hunting. But then he remembered the lesson his father told him was the most important part of being a good soldier, the key factor that would insure their victory in the war.
Never give up.
So he didn't. He moved onto the next work site, which at first appeared to have no one there with the disease, until he saw exactly what he had been looking for all night. Working alongside a group of firefighters, a woman dropped and pressed her ear to the ground. She moved, inch by inch, across the pile of rubble, until she stopped and waved her arm in the air.
“Over here! They're right below us, exactly four feet, seven inches down. Six heartbeats. One is a child. They're all breathing, but it's shallow.”
The firefighters scrambled over to her and lifted the cement blocks, using long metal bars as levers.
A fire chief clapped his hand on the woman's back and said, “Thank you. We might not have found them in time if it weren't for you.”
“No problem,” she said as she placed plugs into each ear. “Glad this dumb power could be of some use. Even with my ear plugs, it usually just gets in the way. Ever try sleeping when you can hear the spiders crawling in the walls?”
The fire chief was visibly discomforted by the thought, straightening his helmet and looking anywhere but at the woman. “Well, again, thanks for helping. I'm sure there are more places that could use your assistance.”
The woman yawned and said, “Hopefully they can hang on a while. I've been doing this nonstop for the last thirty hours and if I don't get a cup of coffee in me, I'm going to fall over.”
The fire chief pointed off in the distance and said, “Charlie's Cafe, about three blocks down on your right. Best cup of joe in the city. Tell him Pete sent you.”
The woman nodded, accepted some more thanks from the firefighters, and set off walking down the sidewalk. Miguel tried to act as nonchalant as he could, stepping out from the alleyway where he was hiding to follow the woman from a block behind. She glanced over her shoulder at one point, but his practiced gait must have come across as perfectly normal to her, because she continued at the same pace.
Miguel had to control every step he took, because inside his skin he was electric. This was the perfect enemy. She had the disease, one that was threatening the privacy of every neighbor she lived near and every person she passed on the street, but it posed no physical threat to him. She was just a thirty-something-year-old woman, who happened to hear extremely well.
When she stopped at the street corner before the all-night diner, Miguel continued his pace to keep up the normality of his walking. She stood on the corner for a long time, looking back and forth, as if she were checking for traffic. At that time of night, that close to the epicenter of Malignus's attack, the streets were empty. Unable to stop without attracting attention to himself, he caught up to her. As he neared where she was standing, he ran through the different scenarios in his mind.
He could stab her in the liver as he passed her and just keep walking. His father had taught him enough sleight of hand maneuvers that if someone was watching, they wouldn't see him do it. But he wasn't assured she would bleed out fast enough. He didn't want to leave the scene until he knew for sure that she was dead.
He could ask for her help, pretend he was lost, and when she offered to help him, he could lead her into an alleyway and kill her there. But it was possible that she could recognize him. Or she could own one of the new MajesTech mobile phones and call the police to help him, which would make everything more complicated.
He could walk past her and go into the cafe, which he knew she was headed to, throwing off any suspicion that he was following her. She would actually be following him. He could wait until she used the bathroom, follow her in when no one was looking, and take care of her there. But he was too young and it was too late at night for him not to raise suspicions when he sat down and ordered food by himself. And he would still need to worry about being recognized. His mother's fame was sometimes more of a curse than it was a blessing.
As the fourth scenario was manifesting itself in his mind, she turned around and looked right at him.
“What are you planning on doing? Mugging me?” she asked with a slight grin.
Miguel froze in place. He did his best to feign shock by her question, but he knew there was a momentary look of guilt that he let slip out. He tried to remember his theater training, everything his mother taught him about the art of deception. He created a character in his mind and he forgot about Miguel. He became that boy whose mother was sick and who just needed to find a store that was still open so he could get her some medicine.
“I'm not sure what you mean, ma'am. I was out looking for-”
“Do you have parents? Are you homeless?” The woman interrupted him, looking around the street before returning her attention to him. “You certainly don't look homeless. I mean, those are designer clothes, right? But I suppose you could have stolen all of that. Wait, do I know you? You look familiar.”
“I don't know you, lady, and I'm not homeless or a thief,” he said, angered by the sentiment. “My mother is-.”
“Look, kid,” the woman said as she chuckled to herself, “I've heard a million different heartbeats and just as many breaths. The combination that's going on inside you right now? It can only mean one thing. You're anticipating violence. And my eyes might not be as good as my ears, but I don't see anyone else on this street at this time of night, so I can only assume you were about to pull... what? A gun? A knife?”
Miguel could feel himself panicking, but he did his best to keep his face as still and unflinching as possible.
“That's it!” she said with a strange bit of excitement. “You've got a knife.”
“I don't know what you're talking about. I'm just trying to-”
“Don't bother lying. I heard the jump in your heartbeat when I guessed the right weapon. It's something that took a lot of practice, but it's second nature now. I can tell when people are lying too, or when they're just exaggerating, or hiding something from me, or when they're attracted to me. It's all in the combination of their heartbeat and the way they breathe. It's pretty fascinating actually. I'm thinking of writing a book about it.”
He hadn't anticipated any of this. She was using her powers against him in ways he hadn't expected. Would she be able to tell if he was about to grab the knife? Should he just do it now and get it over with? They were alone. And she wasn't very big. He could most likely drag her body wherever he needed to. He was ru
nning out of options.
“Oh my gosh,” she said, placing her hand on his shoulder, “your heartbeat is going wild. It's okay. Calm down. I'm not going to turn you over to the cops or anything. You haven't done anything yet, right? We can both turn around and go our separate ways. Use this as a learning experience, you know? You can bully your way through a lot of your life, but there's always going to be someone bigger than you. And when you meet that person, the whole bully thing doesn't really work anymore, does it? Go to school, kid. Get a job. Contribute to society like the rest of us.”
He felt all his acting ability fall from his face. The character he was trying to portray evaporated from his mind. He felt his own anger, his own hatred for the diseased, his own disdain for the mere existence of SPMDs return. All of it boiled over, flowing from his lips like a burst dam.
“Contribute? Is that what you think you're doing, you monster?” He knocked her hand off his shoulder and planted his feet into the cement. “You're not contributing. Your disease is putting everyone around you at risk.”
“My what?” The woman took a few steps back.
“Your disease. Your super power.”
“Oh,” she said, her annoyance dragging the syllable out. “You're one of those.”
“One of what? A normal person?”
“Yeah. Exactly. Someone without powers who calls themselves normal. Do you even know what you're saying, or did your redneck, bigot parents just teach you to hate us. You realize they're just jealous of us, right?”
“I don't-”
She waved her hand in the air to stop him from debating with her. “Don't bother. I don't have the energy to tell you why what you're doing is wrong. If you were going to hate-bash me, then you have some seriously messed up issues that are way over my ability to change. But kid, I just hear well. That's it. I'm not hurting anyone.”
“I know. Because I'm going to stop you.”
Miguel tensed, and she must have heard a change in his breathing or his heartbeat, because she tensed too. But it didn't matter. In one fluid motion, just like his father had taught him, he knelt down, snatched the knife from his boot, stood up with a spin, and stuck the blade in her rib cage. He yanked the blade out and stuck her again, this time in the kidney. When she fell forward, onto her knees, he slashed the blade across her neck, opening it like split leather. Her eyes widened as she choked, spurting out empty coughs as her hands grabbed onto the opening in her throat, desperately trying to stop the flow of blood that poured from the wound. With one final overhead swing of the blade, he drove the tip of the knife as hard as he could into the top of her skull. Her body shook a few times before going limp and dropping to the sidewalk. Blood continued to pour from the multiple wounds as Miguel looked down each street, hoping no one had seen the gruesome killing.
The night was suddenly more than silent. The emptiness of the streets encroached on him. He stood alone, his first kill laying at his feet, its blood pooling around his sneakers. He was expecting excitement. He was expecting a rush of adrenalin. He was not expecting the emptiness he felt. Everything was so practiced, it felt mechanical, as if he were just a machine, built to do this. It was easy. Too easy to feel satisfying.
“Now what?” a voice asked from behind him.
He spun around, slashing out with the blade, but a large hand grabbed onto his wrist and stopped him. With a quick twist of his arm, he was forced to drop the knife, and with another twist, he was forced to his knees. When he looked up, he saw his father standing over him, wearing his suit, his face blurred by the holographic collar. He applied pressure to Miguel's arm, and Miguel winced at the pain.
“Do you have a plan? Or were you going to wait here until an Alliance member flew overhead, or a battalion of soldiers drove by? Because I could have sworn we went over this. I could have sworn that I've trained you how to plan a setting for the attack. How to make sure there's always an appropriate place to not only kill, which is the easy part, but to finish the kill, to erase the body, to get away clean.”
“I'm sorry. I was only following her, planning out my strategy, when she used her super hearing to detect me. I had to act fast. I had to-” He looked down at the body. “I had to kill her.”
Miguel's father let go and grabbed the woman's ankle, dragging her body into the nearby alleyway, the enhanced strength of his suit allowing him to do it with one hand as he asked, “Why? Why are you out here? By yourself? Why did you do this?”
Miguel stood at attention as he answered, “I did it for you. I did it to show you shouldn't give up on me. I did it to show you that I can still be an asset in the war.” He glanced down at the body again and added, “I did it because it was the right thing to do.”
There was a short pause before his father clapped his hand down on Miguel's shoulder. “I didn't give up on you.”
“I know I messed up. I know what I did wrong. But that's why I need to keep hunting with you. It's the only way I'm going to keep learning. Being locked up in that tower all of the time, training in simulations and exercises, I don't think there's anything left for me to learn up there. I think I need to start learning how to do all of this for real, in the real world, with real diseases, and real consequences.”
His father twisted the cover of his watch and pointed it toward the woman's body. The green liquid that sprayed out from the watch disintegrated the corpse in seconds. He twisted the watch head again, and sprayed a yellow mist across the blood trail.
He turned back to Miguel and said, “If you're going to be my partner, if we're going to fight this war together, then I'm going to hold you to a higher standard. And that means you don't go running off by yourself. We do this together. Always. Do you understand?”
Miguel wasn't sure he heard anything after the point where his father had called him “partner,” but he nodded, accepting everything he said.
His father looked down at the blackened stain on the ground where the blood once was. “You killed someone. You took this person's life.” He glanced back at Miguel and said, “How do you feel?”
“She wasn't a person.” Miguel hardened with confidence. “She was a disease.”
Hector smiled, but his MajesTech mobile phone vibrated before he could say anymore. He slid it out of his suit jacket and glanced down at the screen.
Miguel perked up, hurrying over to his father's side to try to see the screen. “What is it? What's wrong?”
“Nothing. Actually, everything is going according to plan. But we need to get you back to the tower and get you suited up, right now.” The black Lexus pulled up at the end of the alleyway, and Miguel's father walked off toward the car, calling out over his shoulder, “It's time to trade in our little gas cloud for a new weapon.”
33
AZAKOR
He exploded into the chamber outside the medical bay as his sister's cries of pain reached a crescendo that threatened to shatter the windows. He found his Mother and Padamir sitting with Domina Akiko, as well as an entourage of servants, but Dominus Takahiro and his grandson were nowhere to be found. Magda stood up and hurried over to Azakor, presenting a gentle smile to try to balance out the room filled with screams.
“It's alright. There's nothing to worry about.”
“Alright?” Azakor screamed, drawing the attention of everyone in the room. “How can you claim such a thing when your daughter sounds as if something is tearing her soul apart?”
The smile vanished and Magda opened her eyes wide. “Calm yourself. Now.”
“I will not,” he said, shoving her to the side and stepping toward the door to Sasha's room.
But he only took a single step before Padamir held up one skinny finger and said, “Now, now. Listen to your mother.”
Azakor froze. It was a command from his imperator. He knew that. And in front of Domina Akiko, he needed to show subservience. He needed to show that Padamir had control over his empire. He knew all of that in his mind, despite the fact that every other part of his body was telling him
to ignore the words and storm into the room.
“Yes,” he said, forcing the words from his lips. “Of course, my imperator.”
Magda smiled as if she had won some tiny competition. “Now, as I was saying, these elevated sounds are nothing to be concerned with. Your sister is being prepped for transport back to Neo-Nippon. There is a certain level of discomfort that is to be expected.”
“Discomfort?” Azakor asked his mother, then turned to Padamir. “You realize what's happening, don't you? You're letting Dominus Takahiro dictate not only what happens in the Fatherlands, but what happens in this very citadel. Perhaps he'd like to try on your crown, as well?”
Domina Akiko's docile demeanor broke and she looked up at Azakor in shock.
Magda's hand wrapped around Azakor's wrist and tugged on it, trying to pull him toward the door. “May I have a word with you?”
Azakor looked down at her, ready to refuse the request, but Magda spoke again.
“Please don't make me ask your imperator to demand it.”
Azakor growled under his breath, “Of course, Mother. Whatever you wish.”
He followed her out into the hall and as soon as the door shut behind thm, he felt her hand slap across his cheek.
“What has gotten into you?”
He held his clenched fists at his sides, restraining himself from using them. “I am trying to-”
“No!” she shouted. “You may be my son, but when you refute my husband, you are standing against me. And if you think I will stand by and allow that to happen, you are mistaken.”
“I'm not standing against you, mother. I'm standing against the Oshiros! Don't you get that? I'm standing against them for you, for our family, for our empire. We must show them our strength.”
Magda touched the tips of her fingers against her forehead and closed her eyes. “You sound just like your father.”
“You say that like it's a bad thing.”
“It is, Azakor. He was a blood thirsty warmonger who ran off and got himself killed because he couldn't understand the power of words.” She grabbed Azakor's arm and lifted his clenched fist. “He thought that this was all he needed to rule the empire.”
The Super Power Saga (Book 1): Super Powers of Mass Destruction Page 27
