The New Heroes: Crossfire

by Michael Carroll

  He found the Trutopian soldiers in an office on the top floor. Four of them, each sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, weapons aimed at the door.

  The men were in their thirties or forties, he guessed. They were thin, their clothing ragged and their hair long and untidy. Their eyes had the crazed look that he’d seen far too many times since the war ended.

  The Trutopians had been ordered to fight and kill anyone who was not a member of their organization, and it was not an order they were able to resist. The order had come from Mina’s sister Yvonne, a former member of the New Heroes who—they had discovered far too late—had been hiding her ability to manipulate other people’s thoughts and emotions.

  After the death of the Trutopians’ leader Reginald Kinsella, Yvonne had made a televised broadcast that cut into every television and radio channel. Unable to resist Yvonne’s instructions, almost every member of the organization who heard her words found himself or herself grabbing anything that could be used as a weapon.

  Instantly, the world had erupted into war. Almost a million people died before Yvonne was captured and forced to reverse her order, but there were hundreds of thousands of Trutopians who were too busy fighting and killing to hear. So Yvonne broadcast the order to desist again and again, several times a day, for a month.

  Then someone—the New Heroes had never learned who or exactly how—managed to get close enough to Yvonne to shoot her in the throat. She survived the attack, but could no longer speak.

  Now, there remained thousands of Trutopian warriors—like the four men in the Kupferstichkabinett—who never received the order to stand down.

  Danny moved through the men quickly, unclipping the magazines from their guns, stripping them of knives and grenades. He took extra care when removing their guns from their hands, aware that if he simply grabbed the weapons from them he would break their fingers.

  He bound their wrists and ankles with the strong cable-ties he had tucked into his belt. The ties were already partly-closed, ready to be slipped over hands and feet: without a second arm, Danny couldn’t easily fasten the ties.

  The work done, he stepped back and looked down at the men. Though he knew that they had probably killed dozens of people, Danny couldn’t hate them. They had no control over their actions, and unless someone found a way to reverse Yvonne’s programming, they would never be able to break free of their murderous rampage, permanently wired to kill anyone who was not of their own kind. People like Herlind were the lucky ones, though Danny knew that they probably would be tormented with nightmares for the rest of their lives.

  After checking that there was no one else inside the building, he returned to the plaza and again crouched down next to Warren, then shifted back to real-time.

  The short businessman said, “and delicate artifacts that…” The man frowned at Danny. From his perspective, there had been nothing more than a flicker.

  “All done?” Warren asked.

  Danny nodded. “Four of them. Tied up, stripped of their weapons.” He gestured towards the building. “They’re on the top floor. See that window, third from the right? They’re in there.”

  “Good work.”

  “Listen, Mister Wagner… Look at this place. They—”

  Warren raised a hand to cut him off. “I know.”

  One of the German men looked up. “Was ist er?”

  “Nichts,” Warren said. “Es ist nicht wichtig.” He pushed himself to his feet, and led Danny away from the men.

  “Colin and Cassie searched this whole area two months ago,” Danny said. “No way those Trutopians were here then, and I don’t see how they managed to get this far into the city with all the police and security cameras.”

  “I think it’s pretty clear that they have help, Dan. I’m tempted to think that someone’s deliberately trying to make our job harder for us, but it’s more likely that it’s a combination of bribery and incompetence. Same as everywhere else. Go back to the gate, help Mina. I’ll see if I can get anything out of the prisoners.”

  Aside from the machine room, the gymnasium was the only place big enough in Sakkara to house Brawn. At thirteen feet tall, the blue-skinned giant could only make his way through the base’s corridors by crawling on his hands and feet, so to accommodate him one of the gym’s side walls had been removed, a huge door has been installed, and, outside, large steps had been constructed leading down the building’s sloping sides and to the ground below.

  The gym was where the New Heroes who were still in America tended to gather in the hour or so they had between going off-duty and getting the six hours’ sleep on which the base’s medics insisted.

  Now, Warren Wagner’s son Colin sat with his friends Cassandra Szalkowska and Butler Redmond as they listened to Brawn relating another of his adventures.

  “And after Spain, where did you go?” Colin asked. “Because that was like only a few weeks before the final battle with Ragnarök, right? How did you get back?”

  Brawn frowned for a moment. “Casey’s people picked me up. He wanted me there for the battle. Though I still don’t get why you keep calling it the final battle, Colin.” He inclined his head towards the nearest window. “Haven’t you been paying attention to what’s been going on the past couple of years?”

  Colin glanced toward the window. Though there was nothing to see of Topeka from this distance, he was all-too-aware of the damage the city had suffered.

  Butler yawned and leaned back so that he was stretched out with his hands tucked behind his head. He appeared to be floating a good six inches above the floor. “Must have been something, though, to have that sort of strength. I mean, you threw a bus over a hill!”

  A voice from the doorway said, “Forget that. Tell them about the time you held your own against me, Titan, Josh Dalton and Thunder.”

  They looked up to see Colin’s mother walking towards them with Colin’s baby sister in her arms.

  “Paragon and Hesperus were there too, Caroline,” Brawn said, and Colin noticed a look pass between his mother and the giant. The same look that all the adults had when their dead friends were mentioned.

  “She’s just not settling,” Caroline said. “Cassandra? I hate to ask again, but…”

  The fifteen-year-old girl pushed herself to her feet. “It’s OK.” She reached out her left hand and gently caressed the baby’s forehead. “She’s scared… But she doesn’t know why. She’s picking it up from you.” Cassandra looked into Caroline’s eyes. “Something happened… You were watching the TV news. You’re worried about Danny and the others. She doesn’t like it when you’re worried, Mrs. Wagner.” She leaned closer, pressed her cheek against the baby’s forehead. “Shh, little one… It’s OK. Everything is all right.”

  A few seconds later, the baby’s eyes fluttered closed, and she was asleep.

  Butler said, “Man, if you could bottle that…”

  “I’d buy it,” Brawn said.

  “Me too,” Caroline said. “She turned to her son. “Five more minutes, Colin, then go to bed. Even you need to rest from time to time.”

  Colin nodded. “Sure.”

  “You have no intention of sleeping tonight, do you?”

  “Nope. Me and Razor are working on the new armor.”

  His mother raised her eyes. “Of course you are.” She walked back toward the door. “Thanks, Cassandra.”

  As Cassandra sat down again, Butler asked, “What’s it like inside a baby’s mind? Is it much different than a person’s?”

  “Butler, babies are people too, you know,” Cassandra said.

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

  Colin couldn’t help liking Cassandra, even though—at first—he’d done his best to avoid her; he didn’t like the idea of someone being able to read his thoughts. But her telepathy had proven to be a great asset to the team and now it was hard to imagine not having her around. It helped that Cassandra had what Razor had called “read-only” telepathy: she wasn’t able to change people’s thoug
hts or emotions.

  A year ago, when the New Heroes rescued Cassandra and dozens of others from the prison camp in Lieberstan, she had been very quiet and nervous of strangers, but since then she had grown much more confident and was more than capable of holding her own against Butler.

  Butler asked again, “So what is it like inside her mind?”

  Cassandra shrugged. “Babies don’t think in words the way we do. Just feelings, really. In some ways it’s clearer than everyone else’s mind, though. When she wants something, she really wants it, if you see what I mean. It’s not all mixed up with other emotions.”

  Brawn said, “I know you can’t read my mind, Cassie, but can you pick up anything at all?”

  “Yeah, I can tell there’s something there, but I can’t make out any of your thoughts. That’s just the way it is with some people: I can’t read Impervia either. And Mina had problems reading your aura, didn’t she?”

  Under his breath—but still loud enough for the others to hear—Butler said, “Yeah, because there’s no such thing as an aura and Mina’s crazy.”

  “She’s not crazy,” Colin said. “Just different.”

  “We’re all different. And she’s crazy. Auras.” Butler shook his head. “What a pile of new-age hippie garbage.”

  Cassandra said, “Whether or not auras are real, Mina can see something. You said it yourself, Butler: It could be that her power is a form of telepathy or empathy and it affects her vision. When I listen to someone else’s mind I hear words. She sees colors. That might be the only difference.”

  “Aw, he’s just jealous,” Brawn said. “Mina’s faster and stronger than him, and she can teleport herself short distances. All Butler can do is make a big bubble.”

  “It’s a force-field!” Butler said. “Stop calling it a bubble. And what powers do you have? The power to be thirteen feet tall, blue and bald. Well, that’s useful!”

  Colin rose into the air. “All right, that’ll do. It’s nearly two o’clock in the morning, so get some sleep. We’re leaving at eight.” He floated over to the door, then out into the corridor.

  A pair of weary-looking soldiers nodded a greeting as he passed them, no longer even remotely surprised to see a flying fourteen-year-old boy.

  As Colin approached the base’s machine room, the door opened and Razor peered out. “What kept you?”

  The older boy held the door open as Colin drifted past him.

  “Brawn was telling us about when he was in Spain.” Colin looked around the room. “No one else on tonight?”

  “Nah. Apparently someone’s invented this thing call ‘sane working hours.’ They only work, like, twelve hours a day.”

  “Wimps,” Colin said. He dropped to the floor next to Razor’s workbench, and examined a blueprint on the over-sized computer monitor. “What’s this? More new armor? You’ve got the scale wrong.”

  “No, I haven’t.” Razor grinned. “New idea.”

  “I love it when you have new ideas. What’s this one?”

  Razor combed his hands through his long dirty-blond hair. “This is the one that brings everything to a whole new level. We get this working, we’re gonna be unstoppable.”

  Chapter 2

  At the short but wide bridge that marked the Western end of Unter den Linden, Danny slowed to a stop and shifted back into real-time. “See?” He held up a paper bag containing three jelly donuts. “And here’s the receipt. Charlottenburg, in less than ten minutes. That’s six and a half kilometers there and back.”

  The young German man with the stopwatch looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Hm.”

  “What?”

  One of the man’s two colleagues said, “Ten minutes?”

  “There were other people ahead of me in the bakery. I wasn’t going to push in line.”

  “But you moved too fast for us to see.”

  “That’s the point,” Danny said. “That proves I can do it.”

  “No, it only proves that you went from here to Charlottenburg and returned. We don’t know that you ran all that way. Perhaps you teleported, like your friend Mina.”

  “Well I didn’t. I ran,” Danny said. “And you owe me two Euros and fifty cents for the donuts.”

  A voice behind Danny called out, “Hey!”

  He turned to see Gerhard, the supervisor of this crew, staring at them.

  “You are here to work, Daniel Cooper!” The man said. “You are not here to show off!” He beckoned Danny closer. “You’re strong, right?” He pointed to the line of burnt-out cars on the side of the bridge. “We need the cars moved.”

  “Mina’s the strong one, Gerhard,” Danny said. “I’m the fast one. Can’t you tow them out of the way?”

  “The small truck is busy, and we cannot risk using the big truck until we’re sure the bridge hasn’t been weakened.” Gerhard took off his hard-hat and scratched his head with the corner of his clipboard. “Some of the workers here are saying that this is your mess, Daniel. You learned of the governments’ superhuman prison in Lieberstan and you told the whole world. You forced them to act.”

  Not this again, Danny said to himself. Aloud, he said, “Yeah, I did. But that had nothing to do with the Trutopian war. They’re two completely separate events. The Trutopians had no connection with the prison.”

  Gerhard smiled. “Perhaps. But you are really as fast as they say, yes? Could you travel from here to Bremen and back in an hour?”

  “Sure. How far is Bremen?”

  “By road, almost four hundred kilometers. So you can do it?”

  “I could do it in a couple of minutes. Why?”

  “My company has some documentation to send here. Authorization to close the bridge for two days. My colleague was going to bring the documents by car, but she would have to drive through the night, so we won’t be able to start until tomorrow. If you were to collect the documentation, we could begin this evening.”

  Danny nodded. “Sure. Which way is it?”

  The supervisor pointed to the west. “Follow the signs.” He scribbled an address on a blank page on his clipboard, and handed it to Danny. “Bremen isn’t like your American cities with the roads in straight lines and at right-angles. It’s more like Berlin—so you go here, to the stadium on the west of the city. It should be easy to find. I’ll phone my colleague, ask her to meet you there.”

  “OK. When she gets there, let me know and I’ll leave. Tell her to wait about five minutes. Just in case I do get lost.”

  Danny spent the next half-hour working with the young German men trying to clear the wrecked cars off the bridge, but he knew he wasn’t much help. He was no stronger than an ordinary teenager, and having only one arm made everything a lot more complicated. In the end, the others told him to steer while they pushed.

  Anybody could do this, he told himself. They don’t need me.

  As the Germans shouted instructions to him—“Links! Nien, Ihre andere links!”—he started to wonder whether he’d be better off going home. I’m supposed to be a superhero, not a laborer! I helped save the world, and now here I am sitting in a burnt-out car trying to remember the German words for left and right. “Links is left, yeah?” he shouted out.

  “Ja! Left!” A voice called back, followed by a muttering that sounded very much like “idiot.” Then, louder, “They both begin with L! It’s not difficult!”

  Not for you, Danny thought. You’re bilingual.

  Danny awkwardly steered the car as the others pushed, and as they reached the far side of the bridge Gerhard told Danny that it was time to go. “My friend is waiting for you in Bremen. Her name is Lenita. You’ll recognize her—she looks a little like Nina Hagen.” He unscrewed the top of his thermos flask and poured a measure of sweet-smelling milky tea into the cup.

  Danny climbed out of the car. “I’ve no idea who that is,” he said, brushing gray fragments of charred seat-cover off the backside of his pants.

  The supervisor sighed, and sipped at his tea. “No one listens to the classic
s any more. She will be standing by her car. A white Toyota.”

  “OK. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Danny switched to fast-time mode—or slow-time, he was never sure which way to think of it—and began to jog back along Unter den Linden, heading west.

  Though he was happy to help out, he sometimes felt that others took his powers for granted. More than once, he’d had to explain how they worked to the other New Heroes: “Look, guys… If I’m in fast-time and I travel thirty miles, it might only be a second from your perspective but from my point of view it feels like about four hours.”

  Now, with Bremen two hundred and fifty miles—or more—from Berlin, Danny faced a round trip of five hundred miles. To him, that was going to take the equivalent of about four days. He sometimes worried that by the time he reached the end of a long journey he might have forgotten what he was supposed to be doing.

  After he passed through the Brandenburg Gate again he took a slight detour to the hotel in Tiergarten where he, Mina and Warren Wagner were staying. Seconds later he was back on the road, with his spare pair of sneakers stuffed into his backpack—he figured he’d worn out over eighty pairs in the past year—and his MP3 player on shuffle.

  When he reached Helmstedt he left the autobahn and zipped through the town until he saw a public restroom, then, relieved and refreshed, he returned to the road.

  In Bremen he followed the road signs to Weserstadion and spotted a middle-aged, dark-haired woman waiting by a white car. He checked that the car was a Toyota—Danny had never had much interest in cars and tended to categorize them by color and size rather than make—then shifted back to real-time.

  The woman shrieked and jumped back when he appeared right in front of her.

  Man, I’ve got to remember not to do that! “It’s OK, it’s me. Danny Cooper. Gerhard sent me, from Berlin. You’re Lenita?”

  She nodded. “The way you appeared like that… Unglaublich!”