The New Heroes: Crossfire

by Michael Carroll

  That was one of the few German words with which Danny was familiar: he’d heard it often enough over the past few days. “I know. Sometimes even I don’t believe it.” Leaning against the side of her car, he pulled off his sneakers and put on his fresh pair.

  Lenita took another step back, her nose wrinkling.

  “Uh, yeah, sorry,” Danny said. “My shoes can get a bit pongy after a few hundred miles.” He pressed the velcro straps tight, then put the old sneakers into his bag. “Gerhard said you have some documents he needs?”

  She handed him a large envelope. “Now, you must make sure that he get this, yes? Otherwise it’ll be a whole mess trying to get replacements.”

  “No problem.” He stuffed the envelope into his backpack next to his sneakers. “OK. I’ll be back in Berlin in a few minutes. I’ll get Gerhard to phone you so that you know he’s got the documents.”

  He was about to slip back into fast-time when Lenita put her hand on his arm.

  “Wait… You’re the one from the news, aren’t you? Shortly before the war, you were talking about that place in Lieberstan. The prison camp for superhumans.”

  “Yeah, that was me. But, look, the war was nothing to do with that!”

  “I know. I just… You did the right thing. Places like that should not be allowed to exist. My grandfather was in Dachau during World War Two. It was a horrible, horrible place.”

  Danny wasn’t quite sure how to react to that. “Did, uh, did he survive?”

  “Yes.” She stared at him, unblinking. “He was a guard.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “When you spoke of the prison on television, you said that some of the people were there only because they had a connection to… How was it you put it? To someone the authorities considered to be a threat.”

  “That’s true,” Danny nodded. “They were the families and friends of known supervillains.”

  “Then you understand that people should never be punished for the actions of their ancestors.”

  Danny found his mouth had gone dry. “Of course they shouldn’t.” He fought the sudden urge to tell the woman about his own father. Or, rather, the former supervillain who’d spent eleven years masquerading as his father.

  Finally, she seemed to relax. “That’s good. Thank you. It is an honor to meet you.” She reached out her right hand toward him, then pulled it back. “I’m sorry… Your arm.”

  “That’s OK. I should go. It was nice to meet you.” He moved into fast-time, and left Lenita standing by her car, aware that by the time she even noticed he was gone, he would be dozens of miles away.

  Danny arrived back in Berlin to find Gerhard still standing in the same spot. He had his head tilted back as he drained the last of his tea from the thermos’s plastic cup, and his bright yellow hard-hat was in the process of falling from his head.

  Danny plucked the hat out of the air then moved a few feet back from the supervisor before he switched back to real-time. “Got it,” Danny said. “You have to phone Lenita and let her know that I made it back.”

  Gerhard lowered the empty cup and smiled, then frowned when he spotted his hard-hat in Danny’s hand. “What..?”

  Danny handed it back. “It was falling.” He slipped the backpack off his shoulders and crouched next to it on the ground as he opened it. “Got your documents here.”

  “Thanks. So, was I right?”

  “About what?”

  “Lenita. She looks like Nina Hagen, yes?”

  “I dunno,” Danny said, shrugging. “So, what next?”

  Gerhard opened the envelope and as he flipped through the pages he said, “When we’ve cleared the bridge we need to strip the surface and then check the underlying concrete for fractures.” He looked up. “Do you have any powers that can help with that? Can you see inside solid objects?”

  “Yeah, but only if the solid objects are made of glass,” Danny said.

  Gerhard grinned, and returned to examining the pages. “Everything is here, I think… Yes. We can proceed.” He led Danny to the iron fence and leaned over. “You see the stonework on the left, the scorch-marks? The Trutopians tried to destroy the bridge. They stole a boat and loaded it with canisters of propane, set it alight. But the boat sank before the heat was enough to explode the canisters. Still, we must check for damage.” He straightened up. “You and your friends saved the world from those crazy people.”

  “They weren’t crazy. They were just controlled by someone who was crazy.”

  “Perhaps. How many people died in the war, Daniel?”

  “No one knows for sure. More than half a million, for certain. But it could have been a lot worse.”

  Gerhard leaned back against the fence and crossed his arms. “It is believed that one of your people was responsible for turning the world to crystal. The entire world. That level of power is frightening. My mother used to say that power should only be given to those who are too afraid to use it.”

  “It was the only way,” Danny said, trying not to sound defensive. “If she hadn’t done it a lot more people would have died. Billions, maybe.”

  “So you can move at impossible speeds, your friend Colin Wagner can fly and has great strength, Mina can transport herself instantly from one place to another. There’s a young man who creates a… what do you call it? A force-shield?”

  “Force-field.”

  “Yes. And there are others. It is said that the supervillain Brawn fights alongside you now. I remember him. A dangerous, evil man. A wild animal who rampages and kills at a whim.”

  Danny laughed. “Nah, Brawn never killed anyone. He’s never even hurt anyone who wasn’t trying to hurt him. Trust me on this. It was all fear and propaganda.”

  From the look on Gerhard’s face, Danny knew that the man didn’t believe him.

  “Anyway,” Gerhard said. “I don’t know where your friend Mina has disappeared to, but we still have a lot of daylight left. The work won’t do itself.”

  Danny spent the next few hours helping the workers strip the asphalt from the bridge, though he felt that he was close to useless. His speed was of no real use in this situation, and all he could really do was carry away the chips of asphalt one bucket at a time. Without his right arm, he wasn’t able to push a wheelbarrow.

  Chapter 3

  On the edge of the Appalachian Mountains, about forty miles west of Roanoke, Virginia, Colin Wagner darted through the air in pursuit of a sleek black aircraft.

  With its wings swept back and over-sized tail, it reminded him of a Panavia Tornado, but it was smaller and appeared to carry no armaments.

  Colin activated the microphone in his headset. “Sakkara, this is Colin. I’m tracking the craft now, staying in its wake, keeping my distance. It’s heading sort of northish.” I really need a compass, he told himself.

  “Colin, we’re not seeing anything out there apart from you. There’s a lot of background noise on the radar—the UFO could be jamming us.”

  “Well, I can definitely see it. And I wish you wouldn’t call it a UFO. I’m pretty sure there are no aliens on board.”

  “Is it an object that you can’t identify and it’s flying? Then it’s an Unidentified Flying Object.” There was a pause, then, “Colin, we’re reading you at MACH two. Can you confirm?”

  “I dunno,” Colin said. “I’m going very, very fast, that’s all I can tell you.” I need a compass with a speedometer built in.

  “An aircraft traveling at that speed shouldn’t be unknown to us. Get closer, see if there are any markings.”

  “Will do.” Colin increased his velocity, willing himself to slip faster through the air. He still had no idea exactly how his powers enabled him to fly, but he didn’t question it too much. He sometimes had the feeling that if his brain realized that human flight was impossible, logic would suddenly notice him and he’d no longer be able to do it.

  The aircraft’s engines flared and it began to pull away from Colin.

  “He’s speeding up… I’m going
to… Whoa.”

  Colin slowed to a hover. In seconds, the aircraft’s speed had doubled, then doubled again. “He’s gone. Man, that was fast!”

  The radio voice came back. “Colin, we’re getting the satellite feed now. There was definitely something there, but it was moving too fast for a clear image. You have no idea what it was?”

  “The only time I’ve ever seen an aircraft that fast was Victor Cross’s scramjet. But that was a lot smaller than this thing.”

  “All right… Regroup with the others—they’re almost at the target. Three miles out you’re going to want to rise up, high over their position, then wait until we give the command to proceed. Got that? We’ve no idea what to expect so keep your eyes and ears open.”

  Colin changed direction, heading west. The unknown aircraft had been spotted five minutes earlier by a commercial flight heading into Atlanta. Air Traffic Control had reported it to the air force, who in turn had contacted Sakkara.

  And I should have a camera, Colin thought as he soared low over the Blue Ridge Mountains, his path contouring the land. Low and fast, his parents had taught him. That was the best way to avoid radar unless your enemy was specifically looking for you.

  It was now close to noon, and for the past hour Brawn, Butler and Cassandra had been making their way through the mountains to a location believed to be the stronghold of a gang-lord known only as The Keeper.

  In the weeks following the Trutopian war, when the country was in chaos and the forces of law and order had been spread wafer-thin, gangs had formed in every major city. Many were simply groups of ordinary people banding together for mutual help and protection, but some were opportunistic criminals taking advantage of the turmoil.

  Some of the gangs waged war on their long-time enemies, murdering each other over shipments of food and supplies. Others, like The Keeper’s gang, were far more cunning. They concentrated on scavenging the battlefields for weapons and ammunition, not caring whether the bodies they were stripping were those of Trutopian soldiers or the US military.

  An air force base close to Lake Cumberland in Kentucky had been overrun by Trutopians during the war, and then abandoned by them as they spread north toward Lexington. The prohibitive cost of repairing and resupplying the base had meant that it had been left idle, but recent intelligence suggested that The Keeper and his people were now stationed there.

  Sakkara’s current controller was Amandine Paquette, formerly a superhuman called Impervia. None of the teenagers liked her, but they knew she was good at her job. “You hit them hard and fast,” she had told them on the journey from Topeka. “Colin, they’re going to be watching the sky—if they see you too soon, they’ll tighten their defenses and that’s going to make getting them out a lot harder. So Cassandra, you take point. If The Keeper’s people are there, you should start picking up their thoughts from about four miles away. Or even sooner if there’s a lot of them. Butler, you stick with her. Never more than a couple of yards behind. Be ready to raise your force-field at any time, got that? And Brawn, you take the rear. You’ll be keeping to the forest so your blue skin is going to stand out. Your pack has two tubs of body-paint. Green and black. Camouflage yourself.”

  Brawn had argued that it would be a lot easier if they’d just supply him with camouflaged clothes designed for a thirteen-foot-tall man, but Impervia had come up with a simple argument against that: “We’ve already got the paint.”

  Colin crested a jagged-topped hill and shot straight up into the air. At a height that he guessed to be about a mile he slowed to a hover, and directed his superhuman sight at the air force base. At first it seemed to be deserted, but then he noticed fresh sets of tire-tracks in the dirt leading to a large hangar, and a glint of sunlight coming from a new padlock on one of the base’s side gates.

  He focused his hearing on the forest below: the snap of fallen branches, the rustling of leaves, Brawn’s labored breathing.

  Though the blue giant was still thirteen feet tall and extremely strong, he was technically no longer a superhuman. Over a decade ago, every superhuman—hero or otherwise—had been stripped of their abilities by a power-siphoning machine created by Ragnarök. Most superhumans—like Colin’s parents—still looked normal, but there were some like Brawn who had been physically changed by whatever it was that made them superhuman. Their powers had been stripped, but their appearances remained unchanged.

  Brawn was stronger than an ordinary person because of his size and bone-density, and while his extra-thick skin was no longer bullet-proof, it was a lot tougher than normal skin.

  Façade, Danny’s adopted father—also, like Brawn, a former supervillain—had explained that a normal-proportioned man who’s more than twice the height of the average person weighed a lot more than two people put together. “Think of it like this,” Façade had said. “You have a box ten centimeters on each side and it’s filled with water, OK? That’s ten by ten by ten centimeters. A thousand cubic centimeters, otherwise called a liter. A liter of water weighs a kilogram. But if your box is twenty centimeters on each side, the volume is twenty by twenty by twenty, right? Twenty times twenty is four hundred. Times twenty again is eight thousand. That’s eight kilograms. So Brawn is at least eight times the weight of the average person.”

  Many of the adults in Sakkara had little time for Brawn, but Colin liked him. In the prison camp in Lieberstan, Colin had fought alongside Brawn against the Lieberstanian army. Long after the average person would have quit, Brawn had kept fighting.

  The other prisoners had told Colin about Brawn’s life in the prison, how at the hands of the prison’s senior guard he had endured far more than anyone should ever have to suffer. Time and again, Brawn had been pushed far beyond the limits of human endurance, and still he’d kept going.

  Colin could hear Brawn’s massive heart now, pounding steadily as the giant followed Butler and Cassandra through the forest.

  He could also hear Butler talking: “So, after this I figure we’re way overdue for some R and R, y’know?”

  “Rock and roll?” Cassandra asked.

  “No, rest and recuperation. When was the last time we had a whole day off? It was, like, ages ago.”

  “But that’s exactly what I was saying the other day! You never listen to anyone else, do you, Butler?”

  “About a quarter past,” Butler said, then grinned.

  From behind them, Brawn’s deep voice rumbled, “Quiet!”

  “Who asked you?” Butler said, and continued talking to Cassandra.

  Idiot! Colin said to himself. He knew what Butler was up to; he’d had a crush on Cassandra for months and was always trying to come up with a subtle way to ask her out. Even though Butler knew that Cassie was a telepath and could see straight through his tricks, he kept trying.

  Colin’s radio buzzed. “What can you see, Colin?”

  “There’s been some activity recently, so someone’s definitely using the base, but from this distance I can’t tell if anyone’s there right now. If there is, they’re not making a lot of noise or using much electricity. Can’t see any signs of booby-traps or anything like that. How sure are you that The Keeper is using this place?”

  “Sure enough to send you guys in. Stand by.”

  If I was The Keeper, Colin thought, I’d know that sooner or later someone was going to come for me. So what would I do to defend my position?

  He’s probably not dumb. We’ve taken down enough gangs like his that he’ll be prepared for a superhuman attack. And if he figures I’ll be here, he’ll know that I can disable their electronic systems at a distance. So that leaves mechanical weapons. Guns, cannons, flame-throwers. And bows and arrows, if he has them. Colin grinned at that last thought. Lot of good bows and arrows would do them. I’m bullet-proof, Butler’s force-field can withstand almost anything, and they could stick Brawn with enough arrows to make him look like a porcupine and it wouldn’t slow him down.

  So what’ll he do? There’s nothing he can do. He’s out-matche
d. We’re so far out of his league that he might as well throw out his weapons and surrender. He must know that.

  The answer came a few minutes later. Colin was floating just above the treetops, trying to pick up the body-heat of the people inside the base. “I’m getting something,” he said into his radio. “There’s definitely people inside, but most of the heat-signatures are kinda weak. Maybe thirty-five, forty of them. Hold on…” He focused his hearing, concentrated on filtering out the sounds of the forest. “Sakkara, this is strange. There are forty or whatever people inside, but I can only hear the heartbeats of three of them.”

  He flinched when an amplified, feedback-drenched voice boomed out of loudspeakers set around the base: “We know you’re out there. We know who you are. So let’s make this simple. You back off right now, and you get to live.”

  “You get that, Sakkara?” Colin asked.

  “We got it. Colin… Hold your position. This doesn’t smell right.”

  “I know…” He shuddered. “The heat signatures are getting weaker. I think those people are dead.”

  Cassandra’s telepathic voice suddenly screamed inside his head: “Colin! Get down here, now!”

  Colin instantly dropped out of the sky, aiming for his friends. Thick branches splintered under him as he crashed down through the trees and came to a stop a few yards behind Brawn.

  At the sound of his arrival Butler had automatically thrown up his force-field. Now, a dense shower of leaves and twigs settled on an invisible hemisphere around him and Cassandra.

  “They’ve got superhumans,” Cassandra said. “I’m not getting anything clear, but there are three of them. There’s a lot of power there…”

  There was a sudden blur, and something—it moved too fast for Colin to see—streaked toward them, crashing into Butler’s force-field, pushing the flexible energy field deep enough that it slammed into the side of Cassandra’s head.

  Butler caught Cassandra around the waist before she collapsed. “Oh man, what was that? She’s out cold.”

  “Brawn, go left,” Colin said. “Keep out of sight until you have no choice. Butler, get Cassie out of here.” He activated his radio. “Sakkara, you getting this?”