Meta 2: The Second Wave

by Tom Reynolds

  "How do I get down there?"

  "Follow me."

  Halpern leads me to a seemingly dead-end hallway where he presses his hand to a random section of the wall, revealing a hand scanner that authenticates his identity. I'm beginning to think that I'm the only one in this city that doesn't have a hand scanner and a secret compartment. No time to start feeling jealous, though.

  The wall slides back and reveals a very, very long ladder leading straight down. It’s so long that I can't even see where the bottom of it ends.

  "This will lead you down there. The elevator down has been destroyed. I thought it was due to other destruction to the building, but it's obvious now that Iris must have done that to prevent anyone from following her. She must not have known about this backup ladder. It's the only other way in or out."

  "Good. Find Sarah. Get everyone you can out of here. I'm going to do my best to stop Iris," I say before bringing my metabands up to full power and leaping down the ladder.

  It's not worth the extra time it would take to climb down versus just falling. Another perk of being nearly invulnerable. Even with nothing but gravity standing in my way to the bottom, the fall seems to take an eternity. I'm not sure exactly how deep this hole is, but judging by how long I've been falling, it’s deep. Most of the descent takes place in complete darkness before a pinhole of light below me grows rapidly before I fall through it and land on the steel floor below with a thud that echoes throughout the cavernous hall.

  The first thing I notice is that, aside from the quickly dissipating echo of my fall, there is no other sound. It's too quiet. I look around, quickly trying to spot Iris. In front of me is another deep, but not nearly as uniformly dug, hole. It’s the one Iris was digging. Approaching the hole, I cautiously peer over the side, expecting to see Iris still in there, digging away.

  She's not down there, but before I have a chance to look around again, I'm falling in the hole thanks to a kick to the back. Before I have time to turn around, I'm already at the bottom of the hole being pummeled repeatedly in the spine. I manage to get onto my knees and launch into the air, throwing Iris off my back and getting out of the hole and back onto solid ground.

  "What are you doing?" I scream at her while I regain my composure and prepare for her next assault. She stands opposite me on the other side of the hole, fists in front of her, ready to fight. "I don't want to fight you, Iris. You can't do this, though. These metas are dangerous!"

  "These metas are people. You think they deserve to just be slaughtered down here when the Alphas break through the roof?"

  "There has to be another way. We can stop them. Together. We can come up with something."

  "No, we can't. All we can do is give these metas what anyone deserves: a fighting chance."

  Before I have a chance to respond, Iris rushes into me with both fists in front of her. The force of the unexpected blow throws me hard into the wall behind me. I've never felt such a hard surface, at least as a meta. It must be made out of some type of metal alloy that's harder than anything else I've seen or heard of before. The perfect material to encase metas you want to keep away from the rest of the world. Except Iris is still somehow digging through it as though it were sand.

  Before I can stand back up, Iris is attacking me again. A flurry of fists and energy pulses from both her eyes and hands, battering me up against the wall. It's all I can do to summon the strength to block them momentarily in order to drop to the floor and sweep kick her legs out from under her, causing her to momentarily lose concentration and join me on the ground.

  "You have to stop this, Iris. I don't want to fight you!"

  "Too bad," Iris says as she levitates back into an upright position to continue her assault.

  There's nowhere to hide and nothing I can do other than attack her back. I unleash a blast of pure energy from my eyes, sending her flying backward into the opposite wall. This only seems to faze her temporarily, and if anything, just makes her more determined. She doesn't seem mad, just set on taking me out. Not killing me, just incapacitating me in order to finish her job.

  I don't want to kill her either, but I'm beginning to worry that this fight will escalate to the point where that's the only option other than to surrender, or if one of us kills the other accidentally. I need to do everything I can to get her to give up before we cross either of those bridges.

  Iris stands up slowly and adjusts her neck. She begins running at me, and I don’t back down. She’s faster than she was before. I’m not sure if she was holding back earlier, or if something else happened. She throws a punch that I try to dodge, but it’s no use. It feels like she’s knocked my jaw clean off my face. The flurry of punches doesn’t stop. Hundreds of them are coming at me at the speed of sound, pummeling my face and abdomen. There’s no hope in blocking them, and it seems like she’s not going to stop until I’m incapacitated.

  There’s a split second hesitation on her part, and I take advantage of it, delivering a head-butt directly to her nose as hard as I possibly can. This sends her flying back across the hall. It’s a dirty move, and I immediately regret it, but I need to stop her.

  Before she can get back on her feet, I fly across the room and pivot behind her, putting my arms through hers and behind her head into a submission hold where she can’t reach me.

  “Iris, please. Just stop, we can figure this out, together. I don’t want to do this,” I plead.

  There’s no response from her, or at least not a verbal one. Instead, I’m answered with a swift blow from the back of her head right into my chin, causing me to let go of my hold over her.

  That's when I notice her entire body beginning to glow and pulsate in a way I've never seen before. Not from her or any known meta. Suddenly, I feel very dizzy and disoriented. The walls look like they’re melting. It's the last thing I see before I black out.

  "Come on, wake up!" a voice says to me as I slowly regain consciousness.

  I lift my head and try to focus through a gray haze of fogginess. Everything hurts as though I’ve been hit by a truck. My ears are ringing, but in front of me, I see Sarah's face yelling at me to get up.

  "You have to get out of here!"

  She's not actually here, though. Instead, I'm seeing her face through a monitor in the wall in-between two other monitors displaying emergency evacuation information in white text on a flashing red background.

  "How?" I ask her, not necessarily about what she's telling me, but more of a general “how” in regard to everything that’s happening right now.

  "There's a hole in the facility's Faraday cage if you can still teleport," she says.

  It's then that I notice a shaft of sunlight cutting through the concrete and steel dust in the air, hitting the ground in front of me. This must be the remnants of how Iris and the other metas were able to get out.

  "What happened?" I ask as I struggle to get myself to my feet.

  "That meta freed the high security captives. I was in the escape tunnel when I got the alert and saw you on the cameras. You have to get out of there; the entire facility is about to collapse."

  "I have to talk to Midnight," I say as I reach for the communicator in my ear.

  "Radio transmissions won't work down there. You have to leave, now!" Sarah yells.

  I don't ask again and begin crawling on my stomach toward the light. My metabands are still in place, but extremely low on energy. There won't be enough power to repair my injuries and teleport out of here so I choose the latter for now; I can worry about fixing all these broken bones later. They're not going anywhere.

  "Come on, hurry!" Sarah yells, her face shaking as she runs while holding the mobile phone she's using to patch into Silver Island's systems.

  There're only a few more feet to go, but they feel like miles. I hear a low rumble from above, and more dust and rocks fall through the hole.

  "The facility is collapsing, Omni. You have to get out of there now! Just teleport anywhere; it doesn't matter, but you need to leave n
ow!"

  "Okay, okay. I heard you the first time."

  If almost getting killed wasn't bad enough, now I've got my ex screaming at me too. Today's lining up to be an all-time high. Only another foot to go. I struggle to reach my hand toward the beam of light that’s slowly beginning to darken and shrink as the building collapses. All I need is a line of sight to get out of here, just enough of a connection with the outside world to teleport. My fingers are outstretched as far as they'll go; the low rumbling above me is getting louder and closer. Screaming in pain, I push down on my broken right foot and lean forward ever so slightly. It's enough to reach out and touch the sunlight and establish a connection.

  I concentrate the last remaining bit of energy I have left on teleporting and think of the first and most familiar place I can: home.

  Chapter 33

  When I thought about where I was going to teleport, I did what I always do: I imagine the area about five feet above where I actually want to land. This ensures that I don't wind up with my feet inside the floor or a toilet. Usually, this works really well for me. All of my limbs are still attached and none have ever found themselves stuck inside other matter occupying the same space, which is a sure recipe for an amputation.

  The problem with teleporting this time is that it takes almost everything I have left. When I pop back into existence at home, five feet in the air of the living room, I'm neither upright nor am I able to hover in the air before gently easing myself down to the ground. Instead, I wind up crashing directly onto the coffee table. It shatters into a million pieces of glass and wood under the pressure of my full weight coming down on it. Normally, that wouldn't hurt when I’m wearing my metabands, but since they're almost completely dead, it hurts like hell.

  I roll onto my back and off the larger shards of broken glass. I'm cut and bleeding, but the wounds seem to be mostly superficial. Thankfully, nothing is deep enough that I'll need stitches, because I'd have a hell of a time trying to explain what happened and why I'm wearing this suit to an emergency room doctor.

  "Connor!" Derrick yells from the hallway inside the apartment as he rushes toward the sound of my fall.

  I'm only able to groan in recognition. He's already on his way; no need to put too much effort into speaking right now.

  "Oh my God, what happened to you?" he yells from the entryway once he's seen what I look like.

  "Had a little accident," I reply, still trying to move my body into a position where it doesn't feel like every muscle is on fire.

  "We have to get you help, Omni," Derrick says.

  "No, I don't need any help. I just need to power back down, and I'll be okay. The bands need to charge before they can heal me, and they can't do that while I've got them active. Why are you calling me Omni?" I say, taking my arms up across my chest to bring my metabands together and deactivate them.

  "Wait!" Derrick yells, but it’s too late.

  I've already turned off the bands. The deep red Omni suit retreats back into the bands, and I'm once again a sixteen year old. The wounds are still there, but already beginning to close up now that the metabands can direct their full attention and energy to just putting me back together again.

  "Hi Connor," a voice says from the hallway Derrick just came from.

  I don't recognize it at first, and I almost don't want to turn around to see who it is. The thought briefly enters my mind to just reactivate the bands and try to teleport back out of here to try to avoid exposing my identity. The thought only lasts an instant before I realize that whoever it is just saw everything anyway.

  I turn my head to look and find Veronica leaning up against the entryway, her arms crossed in front of her, watching. She doesn't look nearly as surprised as she should, considering what she presumably just witnessed.

  "I know what this looks like, but it's not. I can explain everything, Veronica," Derrick says, working his way from my side back to his feet.

  He's already doing that stutter thing he does when he's nervous and frantically stalling for time, hoping that his brain will come up with the perfect elaborate lie to make this not look like a metahuman just teleported into the living room, and then changed into her boyfriend's brother.

  "Yeah, Derrick will explain everything," I say, putting my right hand down on the ground as leverage to lift myself onto my feet as well.

  After what I've just been through, there's no way I'm in any kind of mental shape to come up with the kind of elaborate lie covering this up would take. Better to let Derrick try his hand at it instead.

  "Derrick, it's okay. I already understand," Veronica calmly says to Derrick before he's able to make his way back across the living room toward her.

  "No, no, no, no, no. I mean I'm sure you think you understand based on what this looks like, but it's not. It's just a joke. A trick. You see, Connor is friends with one of those metas and he, um, used his powers you see, to, um, make it look like Connor was a meta himself, but, um, really the whole time he was—"

  "Derrick. Shhh. It's all right. You don't need to make up some story. I know what's happening. I know what Connor is. I've suspected it for a long time, and I need to be honest with you. Well, with both of you. My name isn't Veronica," she says.

  "It isn't?" Derrick asks.

  I've already flicked my wrists out and am ready to reactivate my bands. They may not have much juice left in them, but Veronica isn't who she said she was, and usually that's a bad start.

  "My name is Michelle Hunt. I've suspected what Connor is for a long time, and it's the whole reason I'm here in the first place. We've been following you for a long time, Connor. Waiting to see with our own eyes if you are actually what we thought you were," the woman who up until two seconds ago I knew as Veronica says.

  "How did you know?" I ask, stalling for time myself now.

  If Michelle's intentions are bad, like I think, I could use all the time I can get for my bands to recharge before I take her on. Asking questions always seems to stall bad guys for just long enough in the movies, so it's worth a shot.

  "School records, cell phone tracking data, social media usage. All of these things were flagged for signs of erratic behavior typically associated with leading dual identity lifestyles. Your brother's interest and knowledge of metahumans was also another gigantic red flag. From there, it was just a matter of tracking you long enough in order to confirm it. You're good. A lot better than most at hiding what you really are."

  Just enough time. I feel my metabands hit the minimum level of recharge they need to reactivate, and without hesitation, I swing my arms together to activate them, except my wrists don't meet. Michelle has her hand in-between them, stopping them from touching.

  "Connor, I'm not here to hurt you, take you in, or anything like that. I'm here to recruit you," Michelle says.

  "Wait, so you were lying to me the whole time?" Derrick blurts out, finally joining the conversation.

  "Shh. Quiet, Derrick. Recruit me for what?" I say. Derrick. Always interrupting.

  "We're putting together a program. A kind of school, if you will. We were hoping to have more time, but the release of the high security metas at Silver Island today, along with the threat of the Alphas still being out there, has led us to move up our time frame."

  "To when? For what?" I ask.

  "To now. So I need to know, right now. Are you in?"

  * * *

  Thank you so much for taking the time read my book. If you enjoyed it and would like to leave a review about it on whatever Internet website you bought it from it would mean the absolute world to me and make sure that there’s more. The whole reason this book even exists is due to the amazing readers who supported Meta with reviews and telling their friends, so thank you, thank you, thank you.

  To stay in the loop on all things ‘Meta’ and otherwise with me, please sign up for my mailing list at http://tomreynolds.com/list. You’ll get the first chapters of any new books before anyone else and other fun stuff early. No spam either, I promise.
<
br />   You can find my online elsewhere at the following, or you can email me at tom@tomreynolds.com. Don’t be a stranger!

  Internet: http://tomreynolds.com

  Twitter: http://twitter.com/tomreynolds

  Instagram: http://twitter.com/tomreynolds

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sometomreynolds

  Podcast: http://tcgte.com

  About the Author

  Tom Reynolds lives in Brooklyn, NY with a dog named Ginger who despite being illiterate proved to be a really great late night writing partner. The Second Wave is, conveniently, his second book. He wrote this biography in the third person, unlike his books.

  @tomreynolds

  sometomreynolds

  tomreynolds.com

  tom@tomreynolds.com

  Also by Tom Reynolds

  Meta