The Ascension: A Super Human Clash

by Michael Carroll

  On Vienna’s upper arm was a cloth patch showing a blue eye inside a yellow sun.

  Standing between Vienna and her friend, smiling and with his arms around their shoulders, was a man Abby instantly recognized, even with his hair and beard cut short. It was Krodin.

  When the black-uniformed officers stormed into the apartment, the young couple immediately dropped to their knees with their hands behind their heads.

  One of the soldiers shouted at Roz: “Assume the position! Now!” The man’s voice wavered a little.

  Roz had been trained by her brother’s team, three highly skilled former U.S. Rangers. She took a moment to study the situation: The six men were still clustered in front of the door. They looked pale and nervous. That told her they were not experienced at something like this. They should have kept two men on her while the rest spread out to search the apartment for any other intruders.

  Each man was holding a large assault weapon of a type she didn’t recognize. The weapons were clearly heavy: The soldiers were using both hands to hold them. And behind them, they had left the apartment door open and unguarded, another rookie mistake.

  The fact that they hadn’t yet opened fire suggested to Roz that either they were extremely nervous or they had not been authorized to shoot. She might just have a chance.

  She dropped to the floor, facedown, with her palms flat under her. The soldiers had to readjust their weapons to keep focused on her.

  “All right. Cuff her and—”

  Roz pushed herself up and forward, aiming between the two nearest soldiers. At the same time she reached out with her telekinesis toward the man on her left and knocked aside his weapon just as he pulled the trigger. The gun coughed a muffled ptoof and something rattled off the wall behind her.

  Roz was now crouched in the center of the group: She slammed her left elbow into the side of one man’s thigh. As he staggered aside, she hooked her right arm around another’s legs and pulled hard. The man’s knees buckled and he toppled back into one of his colleagues.

  Now only two soldiers were aiming at her, one on each side—and she was sure they wouldn’t fire in case they hit their own men. She launched herself at the man on her right while using her telekinetic shield to strike the other in the face.

  The soldier she hit stumbled backward as the last man ducked aside to avoid her.

  Roz dashed out through the door and telekinetically slammed it behind her as she raced down the corridor. She’d lived in this building for years and knew it well. She turned left at the end of the corridor and pushed open the fire door leading to the stairwell. Down the stairs three at a time—she was already two floors down before she heard the soldiers rushing back out of the apartment.

  On every floor there was a similar fire door leading from the stairwell. As Roz passed each door, she used her telekinesis to pull it open. The doors’ hinges were fitted with slow-closing springs; she hoped that as the soldiers followed her down, they would have to investigate each closing door just in case she had stopped on that floor.

  On the twelfth floor Roz had gained enough of a lead to allow her to create another diversion: She ducked into one hallway and hit the call button for the elevator, then returned to the stairwell and continued her descent.

  Moments later she heard one of the soldiers shouting, “Elevator’s moving! You two, check it out!”

  Four left, Roz thought. But what am I going to do when I get to the ground floor? They could have more men stationed there.

  Roz was on the eighth floor when she realized she had overlooked something important: How did they get to the apartment so quickly? There couldn’t have been more than two minutes between the alarm going off and the soldiers bursting in through the door. Even if they’d been right outside on the street, they couldn’t have gotten up to the apartment that quickly.

  Either they were already on their way here for some other reason, or they’re stationed in this building.

  She was halfway between the seventh and sixth floors when two more soldiers appeared on the stairs below her. Roz almost stumbled and had to grab on to the rail to steady herself.

  The stairwell below had been empty: The men had materialized out of thin air.

  Roz barely had time to say, “How did—?” before the two men fired. A long red-tipped dart slammed into her neck, another hit her stomach, and her whole body was wracked with pain. She lost control of her limbs and toppled forward. The last thing she saw was one of the men reaching out to catch her.

  James Klaus knew that Faith didn’t believe anything was wrong with the world, aside from his sudden—from her point of view—appearance at the farm.

  Everything he’d brought with him—including his costume—was gone. His room looked as though it hadn’t been used in months. All he had left were the clothes he was wearing, his skateboard, and the gloves he’d made.

  He’d spent an hour flicking through the old newspapers in the recycling bin, and was now certain that he had somehow been pulled into a parallel world. He made Faith promise not to say anything to his father. “Just pretend I wasn’t even here,” he’d told her. “It’s better for everyone, OK?”

  Now he was skating along the winding country roads, almost forty miles from his hometown of Midway, but determined to get there as quickly as possible.

  He had considered asking Faith if he could borrow her car, but his father would have noticed it was missing. He’d told Faith he’d walk to Smithfield and take the bus from there to Midway, but she’d told him there were no more buses. “Midway’s in a different Habzone. You can’t travel from one Habitation Zone to another without a valid permit.”

  “Then I’ll hitch a lift or something.”

  “You can’t. I just told you—travel is restricted. For everyone.”

  The information James had gathered from the newspapers and from Faith was more than a little disturbing.

  Krodin was alive and well.

  The Fifth King had appeared seemingly out of nowhere about five years earlier and—somehow—had worked his way into a position of power. He was now the Chancellor of the United States of America, in charge of the nation’s security.

  Five years, James thought, and he’s already changed the whole country.

  One of Krodin’s earliest acts had been to divert huge amounts of money into renewable energy resources, drastically reduce America’s dependency on gasoline, and allow the nation to cut ties with other oil-producing nations.

  And then Anchorage was destroyed. Almost the entire state of Alaska was now a radioactive wasteland.

  According to the newspaper reports, the elusive supervillain Daedalus had been tracked to Alaska by Krodin and almost every other known superhuman. But Daedalus had triggered a nuclear weapon—only he and Krodin had survived the blast. Many people believed that Daedalus had been working for a terrorist organization, or a foreign power, but no one knew for sure.

  With no specific group or country to blame, the president announced that they had no choice but to close the country’s borders. International travel was forbidden. The land borders with Mexico and Canada were reinforced by a series of forty-foot-high walls, patrolled at all times by armed guards. Automated monitoring stations scanned the beaches and alerted the coast guard if anything suspicious tried to make land.

  Krodin had been given the new position of Chancellor, charged with protecting the nation against any and all threats, foreign and domestic.

  Three miles from the farmhouse James crested Ridley’s Hill and took a moment to look back over the fields. From here he could see the forty acres north of the farm. This season the fields were supposed to be fallow—and yesterday they had been. Now they were the site of a huge military camp. Between hundreds of rows of identical tents countless soldiers marched in formation.

  James focused his hearing, sampling sounds from all areas of the camp. He could hear orders being barked back and forth, soldiers on downtime chatting nervously about the coming campaign in Europe, the con
stant hum of electric motors.

  Everything in the camp—the soldiers’ uniforms, the tents, the vehicles, and the flags—all bore the same symbol: a blue eye inside a yellow sun.

  Krodin, James thought. We thought he died…. We were sure that not even he could have survived Pyrokine’s final blast. We barely survived it ourselves.

  The Helotry used Pyrokine’s power to open a wormhole in space and time—a tachyon well, they called it—and pulled Krodin out of his own time, more than four thousand years ago. So Pyrokine’s final blast didn’t kill Krodin—it somehow sent him back in time about five years. Then he did what he does best: He set out to conquer the world.

  And he’s succeeding.

  CHAPTER 6

  ROZ WOKE UP IN DARKNESS, to a gentle rocking sensation. Her body was completely numb and she couldn’t speak.

  Then a woman’s voice said, “Hold still, Rosalyn…. This will help you to recover.” There was a brief, sharp hiss, and almost instantly she could feel sensation returning to her limbs.

  “I can’t see,” Roz said. She tried to raise her hands toward her head, but something was holding them down.

  “Sorry, I had to restrain you so you wouldn’t remove the blindfold. One of the side effects of Cataxia is extreme light sensitivity. It’ll pass in a few moments, but if direct light were to hit your eyes now, you’d have a splitting headache for the next week.”

  Roz felt a gloved hand gently patting hers. “I know you feel wretched now, but you’ll be OK soon enough. You gave us quite a scare, you know, disappearing like that. We didn’t know you could do that. I hope you understand that my men were very disoriented after their trip. They wouldn’t have fired at you if they’d recognized you.”

  There was the sound of Velcro straps being opened, then Roz could move her arms and legs. “Who are you?”

  “Agent Amandine Paquette,” the woman said, “chief of the Manhattan Praetorian Division. We’ve met before, at one of Max’s social gatherings. We spoke for only a couple of minutes.”

  “I need to see him!”

  “We’re taking you to him now.” Agent Paquette paused. “I have to ask…Your teleportation…Was it deliberate?”

  “Uh, no. I don’t know how it happened. Never happened before.”

  “That’s what we thought. Max said the same thing. He was with the development team in Louisiana when he suddenly just disappeared and reappeared here in Manhattan. Either it’s an incredible coincidence or the machine itself triggered a latent ability in both of you. Close your eyes. I’m going to remove the blindfold.”

  Roz felt the thick cloth being removed from her face, then the woman said, “All right, you should be fine now. You can open your eyes.”

  Roz winced at the sudden burst of light, and it took her a couple of seconds before the jumble of blurry images coalesced into one. She was inside some sort of gently swaying vehicle, lying on her back, and a young woman in a black uniform was standing over her.

  “Now do you recognize me?” Agent Paquette asked.

  Roz wanted to tell the agent that they’d met dozens of times. Paquette was practically her brother’s girlfriend. Can’t say that, Roz thought. Whatever’s going on here, I can’t let her know how much things have changed. Roz nodded. “Yes, of course. Mandy, isn’t it?”

  The agent smiled. “No one’s called me that in years. How are you feeling? Any nausea? Dizziness? Do you think you might need to throw up?”

  “No, I’m OK, I think.” Roz sat up, stretched to pull the stiffness out of her limbs. “Max is all right?”

  “So I’m told. Teleported all the way from Louisiana to Manhattan. That I can understand, sort of. But you…That’s a complete mystery, Rosalyn. There’s no reason it should have happened to you too. We’ll need to run an investigation into this.” She inhaled deeply and let it out slowly. “The Chancellor’s going to want a full report.”

  “The Chancellor?”

  Agent Paquette nodded. “He was very concerned, but I can understand his reaction—I know how close he is to your family.”

  “I’m sorry, maybe it’s a side effect of the knockout drug, but I don’t know what you mean.”

  “He’s your brother’s best friend, Rosalyn.” She reached out and placed her hand on Roz’s forehead. “Your temperature seems normal…. You’re sure you’re not feeling sick?”

  Roz gently pushed the agent’s hand away. “I’m OK. Just tell me about the Chancellor.”

  “He and Max worked together…. You know this, Rosalyn! They reconstructed the government, set up the country’s defenses. If it wasn’t for them, America would have fallen to its enemies a long time ago. But we’re prospering now, we’re stronger than we’ve been in a hundred years. And it’s all thanks to your brother and Chancellor Krodin.”

  The name struck Roz like an electric shock. She collapsed to the floor, her stomach heaving. Clear bile spilled from her mouth. Then she felt Agent Paquette’s hand patting her gently on the shoulder, heard the woman’s voice say, “You’re OK, Rosalyn. You’ll be fine. It’s just the Cataxia. The Chancellor’s going to want to see you himself, I think. You know how fond he is of you and your brothers. You’re practically the only family he has.”

  Lance spent the next hour wandering through the house, looking at things, picking them up and putting them down again. He knew that his parents thought there was something wrong with him, but he didn’t care. Somehow they were alive again.

  And so was Krodin.

  The past has been changed. At first, he thought that perhaps Pyrokine’s blast had sent Krodin back to his own time, but he quickly realized that couldn’t be the case: If Krodin had ruled for a further four-and-a-half-thousand years, the world would be a lot different. As it was, the differences—so far—were relatively small.

  On the sitting-room shelves he found a few books and movies he’d never seen before, none of which were more than five years old.

  In his bedroom, Lance flicked through his schoolbooks. It appeared that in this world he was a more conscientious student than he had been back home: His notebooks showed that he had made considerable effort to complete the work. They also showed a reasonably high level of concentration—for the most part his notes were neat and concise. Lance was more used to seeing his notebooks filled with barely coherent notes and hundreds of half-finished doodles.

  His social studies textbook was the most unsettling. There was a whole chapter on Krodin’s rise to power, and it was heavily biased toward presenting the Chancellor as a loyal citizen who wanted nothing more than to see his country “reclaim its rightful place in the world.”

  The photos of Krodin showed a tall, well-built man wearing an ordinary black suit. His hair had been cut short, and his beard neatly trimmed. But his eyes were the same: they had a look of dark animal cunning and strength.

  So Krodin was sent back in time five or six years. Without anyone to stand against him, he worked his way into a position of power. Or maybe he just fought his way to the top.

  Lance realized that his mother was calling him. “Coming!”

  He went down to the kitchen, where he found his parents giving him the “now you’re in trouble” look.

  “So you lied to us,” his father said. “Again. There was no fire drill. Your principal just phoned. You didn’t show up for chemistry. And they found your backpack just lying in the middle of the corridor. So what happened?”

  “I think I have that bug that’s been going around.” Lance felt that he was probably on safe ground with that excuse: There was always a bug going around. “I didn’t want to say anything because I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “You don’t look sick,” his mother said, her eyes narrow with suspicion. “What are your symptoms?”

  “I feel a bit queasy. Kinda dizzy too. I didn’t mean to leave school—I just wanted to get some fresh air. Then I couldn’t face going back in so I came home.”

  His father said, “So you just walked home? How’d you get out
of the school? No, don’t tell me—I don’t think I want to know. Look, you can’t do things like that, Lance.” He held up his hand with his thumb and index finger about an inch apart. “As it is you’re this close to getting conscripted! Or don’t you remember what happened last month? They would have taken you right then if you hadn’t promised to keep your head down and really put the work in.”

  Lance didn’t like the sound of that. “OK. I’ll go back. I do feel a little better now anyway.”

  His mother removed a small booklet from the cupboard next to the fridge, flipped open the cover, and began to fill in a form. “You have to go straight to the principal’s office,” she said. “Apologize for walking out and tell them whatever they need to hear to make sure they don’t report you.” She tore off the top sheet and handed it to him.

  Lance took a quick look at the form before he folded it and stuffed it into his pocket. It was titled “Emergency Curfew Violation.” His mother had signed and dated it, and in the section marked “Reason for Violation” she had written “Unexpected illness (temporary).”

  What is going on in this place? Lance wondered. Conscription, curfews, America on the edge of war? What mad universe is this?

  As he turned to leave, something on the television caught his attention. He walked over to it and turned up the sound.

  “Lance!” his mother warned.

  “Yeah, hold on a second…. I have to see this.”

  On the screen was a grainy photograph of a blue-skinned man who was more than twice the height of an ordinary human. The newscaster’s voice was saying, “…reports that the creature somehow appeared in the middle of the prison’s main building. The Oak Grove prison is not equipped to deal with superhuman prisoners, and the guards were unable to prevent the creature from smashing its way through the walls and escaping into the countryside.”

  So it’s not just me, Lance thought. The same thing happened to Brawn. And we’re both connected to Krodin. Maybe it happened to all of us.