by Peter Clines
“Ummm, you were the one—”
“Just answer the questions,” snapped Sorensen. “How much energy can you put out?”
Barry drummed his fingers on his thigh. “In ambient heat or as directed bursts?”
“Both.”
“Ambient, a lot. Directed, a real lot.”
Sorensen made a fist around his pen.
“Hey, here’s a thought,” Barry said. “How about a demonstration?”
He flipped the switch in his mind.
Light blasted through the window and Sorensen and Smith both flinched back. The cot was incinerated and the concrete floor burned. The window flared again as Zzzap hurled a blast of energy at the massive door and a deafening hiss of static boomed from the intercom. He threw another burst and it sizzled against the steel.
Son of a bitch , the gleaming wraith said. That is a big door .
“As you yourself pointed out,” Sorensen said, “you are in a reactor core. It’s extremely heat and radiation resistant.”
Well, I had to try.
“It was foolish.”
Hey, do you have any idea how much damage those bolts can do? One of my small blasts is three or four times more raw power than a bolt of lightning.
“One-point-twenty-one gigawatts,” said Smith with a faint smile.
Points for the reference, but like I said, it’s a bit more than that.
“At breakfast you implied your focused energy was derived from your own mass,” said Sorensen. The doctor paused to tap his fingers against his thumb. He twisted his head back to look at Smith. “Remind me to check his follicles and nails when he reverts to human form. Why not shoot smaller bolts, then, and conserve your resources?”
Doesn’t work that way. It’s like a fire hose. It’s on or it’s off, and you do not want to be in front of it when it’s on. There’s no ‘light mist’ option. The wraith drifted over in front of the window. Quid pro quo, Clarice. What’s the point of all this?
“I would think that’s obvious,” the doctor said. Even through the glass, he managed to look down his nose at Zzzap. “You’re the most powerful superhuman in the world, Mister Burke. If I can figure out how to duplicate your abilities it could mean a rebirth for this world. Clean, limitless energy for America and its allies.”
Yeah , said Zzzap. And you’ll figure this out how? I mean, considering it’s already stumped a lot of really smart people?
“The usual methods. Examination. Physiological and neurological testing. If all else fails, we’ve been authorized for more invasive procedures. I’m sure we won’t need to go that far, though.”
The burning wraith hung in front of the window for a moment. Okay, then , he said. I think it’s time I was leaving. Thanks for the bacon and the massive dose of sedatives. Let’s not do it again anytime soon.
“You seem to be forgetting something,” said Sorensen, rapping his knuckles on the window between them. “You’re in a decommissioned nuclear reactor. This whole chamber was designed to contain energies like yours. You could spend the next six —”
Not like mine.
The doctor paused. “Sorry?”
Zzzap moved his head to the left, then to the right. This is a fission reactor , he said. In this state, I’m a whole different scale of magnitude. Thousands of times more powerful. It’s like saying a pair of sunglasses can protect you from the visible light output of a hydrogen bomb.
“I stand corrected,” said Sorensen. “As I was —”
I mean, I could just let ‘er rip and burn a hole straight up and out.
“You could,” said Sorensen, “except for all the soldiers.”
What soldiers?
“There is a military base above us with close to a thousand men and women. There could be a barracks right above that chamber. Or a mess hall. Perhaps a fuel depot which could explode and injure or kill dozens of people.”
Zzzap focused his attention on the ceiling. Maybe nothing.
“You can’t be sure, though, can you? The reactor shielding screens any x-rays or infrared that would tell you what’s above you.”
Yeah, you got me there. Not that it matters.
The doctor paused again, his mouth open.
You keep thinking of me in terms of a man. As matter. I’m pure energy.
“What do you mean?”
Look at all this. The wraith waved his arm around himself. The big door. The walls. You set this up thinking you needed to hold a physical person who lets off a lot of energy.
Smith pushed his way to the microphone. “I…I’m not sure we follow you.”
I don’t blame you. It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around. I’m not physical. I’m a few bazillion trillion joules of energy bound into a human shape by my consciousness. Heck, the only reason you can even hear me is I learned how to excite air molecules to imitate sound waves.
There was a long moment while they stared at each other through the glass.
“You’re lying,” said Sorensen. “I have twenty-three confirmed reports of you causing sonic booms in my files. You did it just this morning when you arrived. You can’t cause a sonic boom without mass to displace air.”
Unless I’m displacing the air by some other means. He held up the gleaming arm again and wiggled the fingers. Inside the visible area of the energy form is a little over nine hundred and fifty degrees Celsius. I keep all that energy contained, but air still comes near me, gets heated, and pushes away. That’s where the sonic booms come from. I’m not solid, but the atmosphere acts as if I am.
The doctor stroked his beard. “Assuming I believe you, Mister Burke, what are you getting at with all this?”
What I’m getting at, Emil—Can I call you Emil? What I’m getting at is that to a being of pure energy, a big pane of clear glass is the same thing as an open door.
The shadows vanished as Zzzap flitted through the observation window.
Sorensen and Smith stumbled back. The soldiers drew sidearms. Zzzap raised his hand and the temperature shot up by twenty degrees. Don’t do anything dumb , he said to them. You can’t hurt me and I don’t want to hurt you.
Sorensen pulled off his glasses and stared at the wraith with wide eyes. “You could’ve done that at any time.”
Yup.
“Then why spend so much time talking?”
Because I wanted to hear what you had to say about all this. And I hate to be the one to break it to you, doctor, but your own personal Elvis has left the building, if you get my drift. Now if you’ll all excuse me, I think my friends are somewhere nearby and they need to hear that you people are a bunch of nutjobs.
He shot toward the door and there was a deafening crack. Zzzap flailed in the air, then rushed the door again. There was a second report, and the wraith was hurled away a second time. His outline blurred for a moment, then pulled back to a crisp silhouette.
The doctor polished his glasses on his shirt sleeve and balanced them back on his nose. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of a Faraday cage, Mister Burke,” he said. “They were very popular with scientists and espionage agencies because they block out all outside signals and interference. One as well-built as the one around this chamber can block any type of electromagnetic signal. Cell phones, television, radio waves— it can keep all of it out.”
The rumpled old man smiled at the gleaming wraith.
“Which also means it can keep anything in.”
Smith cleared his throat. “I know you don’t want to hurt anyone,” he said. “But I’d guess just hanging out in an enclosed space like this with you isn’t…well, it’s probably not healthy for any of us mere mortals in the long term.” He nodded at the soldiers. “Definitely not for these two who are going to be here monitoring you. Maybe you should go back into the core?”
Sorensen was still smiling. Zzzap glared at him. He didn’t have eyes, but they all sensed the glare. He drifted towards the window.
“If it makes you feel any better,” said Smith, “I just lost a
bet with Colonel Shelly. I was sure you’d get out.”
Yeah, thanks. That makes it all much better.
Chapter 19 - Sad Songs
THEN
I didn’t even want to be in the Army. I wanted to be in a jazz band. Get out of college, make a little money giving kids horn lessons, and spend my nights playing trumpet somewhere down in the Gaslamp district as Harry Harrison and the Starlighters or something like that. That was my real dream.
Yeah, I know. There was a writer named Harry Harrison, too. Only about ten thousand people have told me that, thank you.
Then the White House had to start this stupid war in the Middle East while I was in high school and it looked like I might get drafted. People were talking about the draft, can you believe it? That was what I heard all through college. There hadn’t been a draft in forty years, and the last time was for a stupid, pointless war, too. If the Repugs stayed in power after the election, everyone on campus knew they’d keep the war going.
Dad sat me down. He’d done a stint in the Navy right out of high school and he explained why. If there’s a draft, they decide where you go. If you enlist on your own, you get a lot more say in where you go. He spent Vietnam on board the Will Rogers , slept in a warm bunk almost every night, and never got shot at once.
So I went to the recruiting office just before I graduated college and the Army officer told me there was an Army band. They’d actually pay me to play trumpet for four years. I signed up and told Dad it was one of the best decisions I’d ever made.
Yeah, I joined Krypton right after I made sergeant. What better way to stay off the front line than to volunteer for a stateside experiment? And there was a decent chance I’d end up in the control group, so I wouldn’t even have to deal with side effects or anything, right?
Little did I know.
I made the cut. The surgery took. Three weeks later I raised my horn to lips, took a firm grip, and dented the outer cylinders. Gus and Wilson thought it was funny as hell. Wilson dug up a bugle for me a few days later, left it on my bunk.
Fucktards.
Of course, all this was all kind of moot. Turns out no one’s just a musician when there’s a war going on. First it was in the Middle East, but then it was everywhere. The main instrument I had to play was my rifle, and since the exes showed up I’d gotten very proficient with it. Solos, duets, I even led a few six-piece numbers that got rave reviews under the name Staff Sergeant Harry Harrison and the Unbreakable Twenty-ones.
When it all went really crazy, it had been six weeks since our first attempt into Yuma. Four weeks since First Sergeant Paine blew his own head off and most lines of communication went dead. The last one said the feds had flown some super-robot out to Los Angeles, and that made Captain Freedom furious. He’d been arguing we should be on the front line all along, and Project Krypton had just been lost in the chaos of the Zombocalypse.
Yeah, Zombocalypse. Neat, huh? Gus told me that one.
Thirteen days since the first of a small army of exes staggered across a few miles of desert to pile against our fence line and fill the air with the staccato chatter of enamel and ivory.
Hard as it may be to believe, that wasn’t our biggest problem at the time. It was part of the problem, yeah, but the real issue was how we could work around it. The big problem was Doc Sorensen. The doc was crazy worried about his family. Turns out he had a wife and a teenage daughter back home. We caught him twice trying to steal a Humvee so he could go get them. Freedom pointed out to the old guy there was no way he’d make it over a thousand miles and back, but the doc didn’t care. He argued they couldn’t order a civilian around and threatened to quit the program.
That was when Smith stepped in. The monkey-boy finally started carrying his own weight. God knows how, but he’d pulled some strings and gotten Sorensen’s family on a plane heading out here. Only problem was we didn’t have an airstrip on the Krypton base. There are seven here at the proving ground, including one nobody’s supposed to know about, and the closest one’s about nineteen miles west and north of us.
Unlike Krypton, it wasn’t fenced off. There were exes all over it. A lot of them were wearing tiger-stripe camo and flight suits. I knew it was on a list of priority areas to reclaim as soon as things stabilized. Thing is, we needed it now.
The captain came up with a plan. A pretty solid one. We were going to co-ordinate landing time with a mobile unit. Unbreakable Twelve under Sergeant Washington was going to drive a Guardian armored vehicle to the airstrip and hit the runway at the same time as the plane. They collect the doc’s wife, daughter, and the pilot as soon as they touch down, then bring them back to Krypton safe and sound.
This was the other problem, because going off-base meant we had to open all three gates. Twice. And we hadn’t opened them since the wall of exes got here.
Most of us were on the gates. My section, Twenty-two, and Thirty-two were inside the first ring of fences. Captain Freedom had issued us all M16s on single-shot. They felt like toys after carrying a Bravo for months. Too light and too small. Their volume didn’t even go to eight, let alone eleven. All we were going to do was walk back and forth, stick our rifles through the fence, and pop exes as they headed for the gates. The catch was we only had two magazines each. The quartermaster was already rationing ammo, just to be safe. So one for the exit, one for the return.
Sections Eleven and Thirty-three had the second ring. When the gates opened they formed a single lane into the base. They were in charge of any exes that slipped in there. Sergeant Monroe, the new platoon sergeant, was with Eleven and itching for a chance to take out some of the dead.
And above us all, in one of the watchtowers, the captain was conducting the orchestra with a Mk 19 grenade launcher. They’d stripped off the vehicle mount and he had three or four cans of ammo with him. He could almost use the damned thing as a pistol. He was going to make a lot of noise away from the base. In theory, the exes would follow.
Colonel Shelly wasn’t too keen on any of this, but he and Smith had a talk and monkey-boy convinced him taking care of Sorensen was in all our best interests. Maybe there was still final testing to be done and if the doc left we were all going to explode or something. Smith talked with the soldiers from Twelve for half an hour, too, impressing the importance of this on them, asking them again and again if they were sure they were up for it, if they knew how to handle different things that might happen. I think in the end they were ready to smack him.
Actually, I know they were ready to smack him. Britney told me so when we met up for a good luck fuck in the armory before she left. Yeah, it’s frowned on, but believe me, once you’ve had superhuman sex or enhanced sex or whatever you want to call it…well, we weren’t going to give it up until they ordered us to. Besides, at the time I was pretty sure First Sergeant Kennedy didn’t know. She was serious about her new rank, and I’m sure she would’ve had us both over the coals. I found out a little later that she did know, and it was an awful way to find out.
Squad Twelve left with no problem. It all went smooth and by the numbers. Captain Freedom dropped a cluster of grenades about a hundred yards from the fence and half the exes wandered off to see what was making all the noise. They were halfway there and he dropped another cluster to keep their attention.
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t he just use the grenades on the exes. I asked that, too, when we were going over the plan. Kennedy smacked me upside the head and reminded me the dead things were already dead (her exact words). The blast might mangle them, might even destroy one if it got caught just right, but odds are it’d just be wasting grenades. A mashed-up, slashed-up torso will kill a person pretty quick, but all it does is slow down exes.
In five minutes our teams in the outer ring had picked off about two hundred exes that wouldn’t leave the fence. The posts on the gates got pulled and Twelve got escorted out. They had one of the base’s five Guardians and Adams was behind the wheel. He floored it and kicked up a fan of dirt
and dust as they shot across the desert. In theory they’d reach the airstrip in about thirty minutes, just as the plane was touching down.
Two hours passed. A long intermission.
We still had radio contact, and Kennedy made sure we got the updates she thought we needed. The plane had been twenty minutes late. Enough time for the armored vehicle at the airstrip to attract a lot of undead attention. It took a lot of close-quarters fire to get Mrs. Sorensen and not-yet-legal Sorensen into the Guardian. Sergeant Grant didn’t make it. Neither did the pilot. Another Twelve had been bitten hard and was bleeding, but we didn’t know who. But they had the package and they were heading home.
Sorensen was about halfway between the gates and the helipad. I could see him through the fences. His hair was pretty thin on the top and I remember wondering if he had any sunscreen on. When Kennedy told him the news he applauded.
About fifteen minutes later we saw the cloud of dust where the Guardian was coming across the desert to us. Everyone took their places. Squads Twenty-one, Twenty-two, and Thirty-two loaded fresh mags in our rifles. The two inside gates opened.
In the past two hours, most of the exes had wandered back to the fence. They were pretty determined to get in, what with all these tasty soldiers standing right on the other side. Freedom sent another volley of grenades out across the desert, about ninety degrees off from where the Guardian was coming in. A bunch of the exes at the back of the crowd turned and staggered towards the noise. Not as many as last time, but still a good chunk of them. He sent his second cluster and it attracted a few more.
Then the Guardian stopped. It was still a good two hundred yards from the outside gate. We heard the engine cough and give up under the clicking teeth. It was against protocol, but I switched over to the command channel.
“It’s got a fifty gallon tank,” snapped Kennedy’s voice. “How the hell are you out of gas?”
