The New Heroes: Crossfire

by Michael Carroll

  Chapter 5

  Lying flat and face-down in the ditch that ran along the edge of a cracked-concrete road, Kenya Cho spoke softly into the battered cell-phone she’d stolen from the men marching ahead of her. “What does it matter how I got this number? I need help, and it has to be your people.”

  The man on the other end of the call said, “Kid, do you have any idea how many people need our help? We can’t just—”

  “Put me on to Mister Miller. He gave me the number last year. Told me to call him if I needed him.”

  There was a pause. “I’m listening.”

  “I’m in Northland, Somalia,” Kenya whispered. “I don’t know the exact coordinates, but—”

  The man said, “OK. Hold on… Got it. You’re in luck—we have a team traveling west over Libya. Diverting them to your location now. ETA is fifty minutes. Stay where you are, understood? Don’t put yourself in any more danger.”

  Kenya sighed into the phone. “Of course.”

  “All right. Now, you said that you took that phone from them?”

  “They’re moving single-file, on foot. I took the phone from the backpack of the last one in line.”

  “That was risky. They could have—”

  “They wouldn’t have heard me. I can move silently.”

  “What armaments are they carrying? Any insignia? Uniforms?”

  “Rifles, handguns, grenades. No uniforms. These are the same men who ransacked four refugees camps in the past few days. They’re killers. I counted at least fifty. Look, I’m fast. But not fast enough to stop them. And I don’t have good night-vision—I’m almost blind at night. That’s why I had to call you.” Kenya raised her head a little over the edge of the ditch, and peered into the darkness for a moment before ducking back down. “I can hardly see anything now.”

  The phone suddenly beeped, loudly, and Kenya quickly glanced at the screen. “Battery’s low.”

  “All right. Put the phone on stand-by—we can still track it. Our people will be coming in high, running silent. You won’t know they’re there until they reach you. It’s vital that we maintain the element of surprise—we can’t allow them enough time to bed down. So follow the targets but keep out of sight and do not engage. Understood?”

  “Understood. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Kenya. Be careful.”

  “How do you know—?”

  “I remember you. I am Miller. Put the phone on stand-by. We’ll talk again when this is over.”

  Kenya shut the phone down, and tucked it into her pocket as she climbed out of the ditch. She hated moving almost blind like this, and had to resist the temptation to use the cell-phone’s light.

  Ahead, she could see a faint glow on the horizon, and began to carefully walk toward it.

  She had been tracking these men for a week, and had finally come to the conclusion that—for the first time in months—she needed outside help. If the raiders kept up their current pace, by morning they would reach the village of Tukarodadhe. There, if they followed their established pattern, they would kill anyone who looked like he or she had the strength to fight back, and they would strip the village clean of supplies.

  She’d seen enough death and destruction to give her nightmares for the rest of her life, but still she couldn’t stop. She had a mission—self-appointed—and she would never rest. Never.

  A year ago, when the irresistible order came for them to fight, Kenya and her family and fellow Trutopians marched on Fianarantsoa and ransacked the city.

  Kenya had found herself almost burning with anger at the non-Trutopians. She wanted to kill them, to tear their heads from their shoulders and their hearts from their chests. They were evil, vicious, cruel things that didn’t deserve to live. She would wipe them out—all of them—or she would die trying.

  Kenya’s older brother Eugene had found a set of swords in an antiques store. They weren’t sharp, but they were heavy. She and Eugene raced through the city, smashing windows, torching shops and businesses, charging headlong at the city’s small, terrified collection of police officers.

  She didn’t slow down—she’d known with a certainty like she’d never felt before that this was the right path. She and her brother and parents and friends charged the police lines. And the police—left with no choice—opened fire.

  When the bullets tore through Eugene and showered her with his blood, Kenya’s fury doubled. The second volley took down her parents, but Kenya still kept running, faster than the other Trutopians, much more agile. She easily vaulted the hastily-erected police cordon and landed among the scared, desperate men with her antique sword swinging.

  There was a white-hot shock of pain in her side as a bullet passed through, but still she didn’t slow. She swung her sword directly into the face of the nearest officer, the blow strong enough to crush his skull.

  At the last second, as the blade was only inches away from the man’s face, she found herself thinking, What am I doing? This will kill him! And she realized that was what she wanted to happen. She allowed the sword to continue on its path.

  Within an hour, every non-Trutopian in Fianarantsoa, Madagascar, was either dead or dying.

  Kenya’s colleagues—now scarred, encrusted with dust and blood and sweat, their chests heaving with exertion and their fists and teeth clenched, their eyes narrow with hate and murder—instinctively recognized that she was the one to lead them.

  On her instructions, they plundered the city for food, weapons and ammunition, then they moved on to the next city, and the next.

  For three weeks, Kenya’s make-shift army slaughtered their way westward across Madagascar.

  Then, only a day from the coastal city of Morombe, the soldiers from the United Nations finally caught up with them.

  Kenya was the last to be subdued. When she finally regained consciousness, she discovered that she had been heavily chained to a massive concrete pillar, and was surrounded by a dozen or more soldiers, all of whom had their weapons trained on her.

  Kenya had ranted and raged and screamed as she put every iota of her considerable strength to the task of snapping the chains, and all the while the UN Commander pleaded with her to calm down, to listen to reason.

  “Fer cryin’ out loud, kid—it’s over! The war is over!” The Commander turned to one of his men. “How could they not know this by now? Duval’s been broadcasting just about non-stop since they caught her!” To Kenya, he added, “You get that? Your psycho boss has been ordering you to stop fighting!”

  The soldier replied, “Sir, her friends said they hadn’t heard the order. They haven’t slowed down long enough to watch TV or listen to the radio.” The soldier removed a small, battery-driven radio from his backpack and set it on the ground, just out of Kenya’s frenzied grasp.

  Minutes later, she again heard the voice of the girl who had ordered her to fight: “To all Trutopians still fighting. Stand down. You will not fight, you will not resist. The war is over. Your minds are your own once again.”

  Kenya collapsed heavily onto the ground, the chains around her wrists and ankles suddenly feeling heavier than anything she had experienced before. Her mind had been cleared—the rage was gone, completely.

  But she remembered. She remembered everything.

  Even now, almost a year later, every time Kenya Cho tried to sleep all she could see were the anguished, blood-spattered, tear-streaked faces of the people she had murdered. Though she remembered them all, she didn’t know exactly how many people had died at her hands: every time she tried to count them, the sense of horror and guilt overwhelmed her, left her sobbing and shaking.

  The representatives from Sakkara—when they reached Morombe a month after Kenya’s madness was taken away—had locked her up “for her own safety”: though the fighting was over, and though the cause of the war was Yvonne Duval’s mind-control and the Trutopians were not to blame, there was hardly a single person on the planet who had not lost someone in the war. And many—if not most—of those
people wanted revenge. They directed their anger at the Trutopians.

  Kenya and her fellow surviving Trutopians were held in a secure compound outside Andopitaly. Counselors and therapists were on-call at all times, and gradually, over the course of months, most of the Trutopians recovered enough to return to the world—or what was left of it.

  Kenya, however, was watched more carefully than the others. She had been identified as a superhuman and that made her a special case.

  Three months after the end of the war she was visited by a tall, slim white man who spoke with a faint mid-Atlantic accent. “They tell me that I’m the best person to speak to you, Kenya. You’re a superhuman. So was I. And you… You’ve done some things that you don’t think you can live with.” A pause. “Me too. My name is Hector Thomas Miller. When I was your age, my friends called me Heck. You can call me that, if you like. But these days, everyone calls me by the name I chose when I still had my powers. Façade.”

  Kenya had looked up at that. “I’ve heard of you. You were able to change your appearance.”

  “Right. I was one of the bad guys. But that’s where we differ. Sure, you’ve done some bad things—”

  “Bad things? I murdered people. I don’t know how many!”

  At that, Façade had nodded. “I do. At least, we’ve made what we think is a pretty close estimate. Do you want to know?”

  “Tell me.”

  “About six hundred and thirty.”

  Kenya had broken down then. For hours, she stayed on the floor of her cell, curled into a ball, sobbing, shivering, retching. And Façade sat with her the whole time, not saying anything, just watching her, letting her know that he was there.

  Finally, she raised her head and looked at him. “I can’t live with this. All those people…”

  “It wasn’t your fault. If I throw a rock and it breaks a window, who’s to blame? Me or the rock?”

  “It’s not that simple! That’s completely different!”

  “How is it different? Kenya, you’re as much a victim as the people who were killed. Yvonne was controlling you. Could you have resisted? No. You had no choice but to obey her orders. You’re just a rock that can remember what it was used for—that doesn’t change the fact that a rock cannot be held responsible for what happens when it’s thrown. And you say you can’t live like this? I say you can. And you must. You can’t give those people back their lives, but taking your own life would do no one any good. Least of all yourself. If you want to make amends—and most of your friends do—then you have to get over this, or at least come to terms with it.”

  Façade crouched next to her, helped her to her feet. “You’re not alone, Kenya. My son… My adopted son. He killed his real father in a fit of rage. He’s superhuman too, and he didn’t fully know how to control his powers when he lashed out at him. That’s Danny Cooper—I’m sure you’ve heard of him. Danny’s still going through a tough time because of what happened. He might never get over it. But he’s trying. And his friend Colin? Under Yvonne’s control he almost wiped out all of the New Heroes, plus hundreds of members of the United States’ armed forces. But they keep fighting, both of them, to make the world a better place. That’s how you can make amends, if you feel you must. Join the New Heroes.”

  Kenya told him that she’d think about it, but in her heart she was sure that wasn’t the right path for her.

  She knew she wouldn’t fit in. Her own abilities were laughable compared to theirs. She was pretty fast, and twice as strong as the average teenage girl, but her eyesight was weak, and her skin even weaker: when injured, she healed quickly, but not flawlessly. Her body was covered in a network of white scar tissue. Even the slightest scratch resulted in a fresh, permanent scar.

  Once, before the war, before her superhuman nature kicked in, she had been pretty. Everyone had told her so. Her first boyfriend, Lochlan, had said, “It’s ‘cos your dad’s Chinese and your mom is African—mixed-race people are always good-looking.” But now, from examining her body in the full-length mirror in the compound’s bathroom, Kenya knew that she was ugly. She didn’t want to join the New Heroes and be seen every day on the TV news.

  Besides, the only ability she had that might be any good to them was her silence: she could move around without making the slightest noise. And she wasn’t even sure that actually was a superhuman ability.

  “I have to do this my own way,” she’d told Façade.

  A week later she escaped from the compound—a simple matter of scaling the high fence in the middle of the night. The fence was patrolled, but Kenya had been able to walk behind the guards and start climbing only a few feet away from them. They never noticed.

  She used the same skills to hide out on a cargo ship to Mozambique, Africa, and since then she had traveled slowly north, doing anything and everything she could to repair the damage caused during the Trutopian war.

  She worked on farms, and helped construction crews, and repaired power-lines. She accepted nothing but a small amount of food and water in return, and never gave her real name, never spoke to anyone unless it was absolutely necessary.

  She traveled alone, but she was never lonely: she had her memories to keep her company.

  Chapter 6

  Colin Wagner stood with his colleagues on the edge of the forest. Brawn was hunkered down next to him as they watched the young man with Colin’s face struggling to free himself from Butler’s force-field.

  “Anything?” Brawn asked Cassandra.

  The girl shook her head. “It’s like when I’m trying to read you or Impervia, like I’m listening to a radio station broadcasting in a foreign language. I can tell there’s something going on, but I can’t understand it.”

  “So what’s the story here?” Butler asked. His voice was strained from the effort of keeping the double immobilized. “Your folks had another son they never told you about?”

  “He’s a shape-shifter,” Cassandra said. “He must be. Like Façade.”

  Brawn said, “Then why pick this shape? Why make himself look like Colin? No, I reckon he’s a clone. We know it can be done. Mina and Yvonne are clones.”

  Cassandra said, “Yeah, maybe, but… Who did it? Where did he come from? I mean, he looks about Colin’s age, so he had to have been made when Colin was only a baby.”

  Colin slowly walked around the stranger, unable to stop staring.

  Moments after he’d unmasked the young man, the fight had begun again, this time with even greater ferocity. The double was stronger than Colin, and faster, but he hadn’t been trained to fight, and he lacked Colin’s experience.

  Colin had fled at first, dropping down to the trees, and the double had immediately followed, through the heart of a powerful fireball Colin had launched. But he was moving so fast that the fireball barely singed his uniform.

  They clashed and broke free, over and over, equally matched, neither willing to back down. Colin had realized that he couldn’t use fire or lightning to hurt the attacker, and he didn’t have the strength to pummel him into submission. If he was going to win, he had to be smarter. Sneakier.

  So again Colin fled, swooping and banking through the air as fast as he was able, constantly releasing large fireballs in his wake. The double flew straight through each one without pausing.

  Colin spotted a concrete-surfaced road and dove down toward it at full speed, launching enough fireballs to obscure the double’s vision. At the last second he shifted direction, dodging to the side just as the double slammed straight into the concrete road with an impact that left him semi-conscious and groaning in the center of a three-foot-deep crater.

  Though his own energy supplies were almost exhausted, Colin was able to keep the double immobile long enough for Butler and the others to reach them. Now, they were waiting for the transport from Sakkara to pick them up.

  Brawn said, “If he is a clone, then maybe whoever did it found a way to speed up the process. Man, he looks exactly like you, Col. I’ve seen some weird things in my tim
e, but this is one of the weirdest. You said there were two others?”

  “I didn’t see their faces,” Colin said.

  “You think they were clones too? Makes sense, I guess. If you could make one, you’d make more than one.”

  “That’s not what bothers me most. Why me?”

  Cassandra said, “Because you’re the most powerful superhuman ever, Colin. You’re the perfect source material.”

  “I don’t know about most powerful ever,” Brawn said. “I reckon you’d have had a tough time against Krodin. But she’s got a point. Someone made these guys for a reason.” He shrugged. “I’m betting it’s not a reason that’ll be to the benefit of the human race. The good guys don’t tend to make clones of other good guys.”

  “Maybe we should,” Butler suggested.

  The double—or clone, or whatever he was—continued to struggle. Butler’s force-field was invisible most of the time, but now it had been in place long enough to collect a thin film of dust, revealing its outline. Butler had the flexible force-field wrapped lightly around the double’s arms and legs, but left his head free.

  He’s not that smart, Colin thought. Instead of trying to break free he could just fly straight up and drag Butler behind him. Colin knew he couldn’t say that to the others: there was no way of knowing how good the double’s hearing was.

  How are we even going to contain him when we get him back to Sakkara? And what if his two friends come back?

  Then another thought struck him, and he fought to suppress a shudder. How many more of them are out there?

  Chapter 7

  Ahead of Kenya, and a little to the left, there was a campfire. She saw it as a bright patch against the blackness, but couldn’t judge its distance, or see anyone around it—though she knew they must be there.

  In the Andopitaly compound she and Façade had discussed the nature of her superhuman abilities. As they’d strolled around the compound, Façade had said, “It’s not always a benefit, that’s what most people don’t realize. Whatever it is that changes us, sometimes it takes something away. Poor night vision isn’t the worst disadvantage you could have. Do you remember Thalamus? No? He was superhuman, extremely intelligent—hadn’t much of a clue about dealing with people, but he was almost unbeatable when it came to knowledge—but he was physically very weak. And there was no reason for that. He worked out as much as he could, he ate well, looked after himself, but he just could not develop his muscles much beyond those of a ten-year-old. It probably happens more than we know—there could be people out there who are superhuman without any positive effects.”