by Lucas Flint
Uncle Josh turned and began walking down the stairs as quickly as he could. Christina followed and I took up the rear, glancing over my shoulder every now and then to make sure that Benjamin hadn’t somehow survived the collapse and was following us. I knew he was probably dead, but it was better to be safe than sorry, in my opinion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The stairs descended beneath Lab #5 much deeper than I expected. It seemed to take us ages before we finally reached the bottom of the stairs, where we went through yet another doorway that led us into a massive underground tunnel that stretched on forever in both directions. The walls, floor, and ceiling were covered with shiny metal panels, illuminated by the bright fluorescent lights set on the ceiling at ten feet intervals. There were no Icon agents down here when we entered, but I did notice a security camera looking directly at us when we emerged from the doorway.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Christina, nodding at the camera. “Chaser probably already knows we’re here. No point in being stealthy about it.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said. “So where do we go from here?”
“Let’s see …” Christina looked up and down the tunnel. “North. That’s where the Tower is, so if we keep going north, we’ll eventually reach the Tower dungeons where your grandpa is.”
“That’s simple,” I said.
“Oh, trust me, it’s far from simple,” said Christina. “I bet Chaser already has guards set up to keep us from entering the dungeons from here. Keep your guard up.”
“Sure,” I said. I looked at Uncle Josh. “You ready, Uncle?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess,” said Uncle Josh. “As long as we don’t have to run into any more super freaks, I think I’ll be—”
Uncle Josh was suddenly interrupted by a loud ringing noise coming from his pocket, a sound which made all three of us jump when we heard it. I immediately drew three disks from my pouch, while Christina conjured two energy ropes in her hands which she held like whips, but then Uncle Josh said, “Hold your horses, you two. It’s just my phone. Let’s see who it is.”
Uncle Josh pulled his phone out of his pocket and said, “Hello? … Hey, Mack! How are you and Gina doing?”
I heard Mack’s voice over the phone, but it was too low for me to make out exactly what he was saying. But I could see Uncle Josh, who was nodding and tapping his chin in interest as Mack spoke.
“Interesting,” said Uncle Josh. “Well, call me back when you and Gina get the bomb set up. We just entered the tunnels and are on our way to the Tower. See you later.”
Uncle Josh ended the call and slipped his phone into his pocket, while I said, “How are Mack and Gina doing? Have they set up the bomb yet?”
“Not yet,” said Uncle Josh. “Apparently, our distraction is working, because Mack says that they’ve seen guards converging on Lab Five in response to our actions there. Looks like everything is going according to plan.”
I chuckled. “Those guards are going to be in for a nasty surprise once they get to the lab.”
“What about the bomb?” said Christina. “You told Mack to call you back when they set it up.”
“Oh, right,” said Uncle Josh. “Yes, they’re getting pretty close to the spot where the Gift is supposed to go. Once they get it in place, they’ll start the timer, but I made them promise to call me before they did so we could get ready.”
“Didn’t you say the timer can only be delayed for thirty minutes?” I said. “That doesn’t leave us a whole lot of time to escape once it starts.”
“Don’t worry,” said Uncle Josh. “By the time they start the timer, we should be well on our way to the top of the Tower where Icon keeps all of their helicopters. But if you really want to make sure we have plenty of time to spare, then I suggest getting a move on, because the quicker we save Greg, the quicker we can get out of here, bomb or no.”
I nodded and said, “All right. Let’s head north, then.”
I started walking in that direction, with Uncle Josh and Christina following closely behind me. I would have flown the entirety of the tunnel myself, but I didn’t want to leave Uncle Josh or Christina behind. I especially didn’t want to leave Uncle Josh alone with Christina. Despite everything we’d been through, I still didn’t trust her entirely. It might have just been our paranoia speaking, but I worried that Christina might betray us at the last minute. Of course, it was getting harder and harder to maintain that opinion, given how many times Christina had been given the perfect opportunity to betray us and yet had not every time.
“So how long is this tunnel?” I said, looking over my shoulder at Christina.
“About half a mile long, I think,” said Christina. “Usually, I travel on the trolley, so I’m not exactly sure how long it is.”
“Trolley?” I said. “They have a trolley down here?”
“But I don’t see any tracks,” said Uncle Josh, looking at the floor.
“Trolley is just our name for it,” said Christina. “It’s more like a hover vehicle that we use to transport supplies and stuff between the Tower and the labs. It’s not very fast or comfortable, but it does the job.”
I suddenly looked down the tunnel. “Do you think there’s a chance the trolley might come down this way and run us over?”
“Doubt it,” said Christina.
“Why?” said Uncle Josh. “That would seem like a good way to kill us.”
Christina’s mischievous smile returned. “Because I may or may not have disabled its engines when I betrayed Icon, purely out of spite.”
“Ah,” I said. “Of course you would do that.”
“What can I say?” said Christina. “It’s what my mom always said: ‘If you’re going to betray someone, then take a dump in their salad while you’re at it.’”
I frowned. “Didn’t you say you have amnesia? How can you remember what your mom said?”
Christina suddenly looked away. “It’s not complete amnesia. I do remember a few things here and there from my past, but nothing definite. I couldn’t tell you what my mom’s name is or what she looks like. I just remember that.”
“You have amnesia?” said Uncle Josh, looking at Christina with interest. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, I do, but it’s not that big a deal,” said Christina with a shrug. “I’ve learned to live with it. I don’t know anything about my past and I don’t need to.”
Uncle Josh tapped his chin. “Hmph. In my experience, amnesiacs are usually very interested in learning about their past. They’re not usually as dismissive of it as you are.”
“Maybe I’m not like your average amnesiac,” said Christina. “Maybe I’m special.”
“Like a snowflake,” I said with a smile.
Christina shot me the most murderous glare she had ever looked at me with before, but I didn’t apologize. I’d gotten Christina there and she knew it. She would probably go to her grave never admitting it to anyone, but I’d gotten her with the snowflake comment and it felt pretty good.
“Snowflake?” said Uncle Josh. “Rather appropriate, given how frigid she is.”
“I’m starting to rethink the wisdom of betraying Icon now,” said Christina. “Maybe when we get to the Tower I’ll just hand you two over to the guards and claim you kidnapped me and forced me to help you or something.”
I shook my head. “Nope, too late for that, Christie. You’re with us, for better or for worse.”
Christina said nothing to that, but I could tell she was really starting to regret joining up with us. Either that, or she was planning her next comeback to me. I didn’t really care either way. As long as she continued to help us save Grandfather, I didn’t care how she felt about, well, anything.
The three of us walked together in silence for the next several minutes. I kept my eyes and ears open, keeping a careful eye out for any potential traps or dangers in here. But it was like the forest earlier: Eerily quiet, with the only sounds being our own footsteps and breaths as we
advanced closer and closer to the Tower. It was a lot nicer than the forest, though, mostly because we weren’t having to push through tons of tree branches and bushes.
As we walked, I thought about TW again. I wished he was still here with us. I was certain he would be happy to save Grandfather, but unfortunately he was not going to be around to see him saved. But if we succeeded in rescuing Grandfather, then perhaps he would be able to repair TW. After all, Grandfather was the man who originally programmed TW in the first place. If I gave him the Watch, then he might be able to bring TW back.
That thought filled me with hope, but I told myself not to get too excited just yet. After all, there was still a long way to go before we even reached Grandfather, much less saved him. True, we were closer now than ever before, but I couldn’t allow myself to get too caught up in my own excitement. Caution was still a virtue here, regardless of how quiet it may have seemed.
I was snapped out of my thoughts, however, when Christina said, “What was that?”
“What was what?” I said, looking at Christina in confusion.
“I thought I heard something,” said Christina. She pointed straight ahead of us. “I thought I heard something coming from up ahead.”
“What did it sound like?” I said.
“Footsteps,” said Christina. “Like someone is down here with us.”
“An Icon agent?” said Uncle Josh.
I looked ahead, but as far as I could tell, we were the only people in the tunnel at the moment. “I don’t see anything. Maybe you just heard our own footsteps echoing off the floor and walls.”
“Probably,” said Christina, folding her arms across her chest and frowning. “But I’m not sure. Those footsteps didn’t sound like ours. They sounded much heavier, like they belonged to someone bigger than any of us.”
Uncle Josh reached into his right pocket. “We knew it was unlikely that Icon would allow us to advance without any problems. It wouldn’t surprise me if one of their agents is somewhere in here.”
“Again, I don’t see anything,” I said. “I think that maybe you’re—”
I was interrupted by a low rumbling in the ground, a tremor of some sort. It was soft, almost imperceptible, but at the same time, it was quite noticeable.
“Why did the ground shake?” I said. I looked at Christina. “Does Iconia have earthquakes or something?”
“No,” said Christina, shaking her head. She looked as mystified as Uncle Josh and I. “I don’t know what’s up with the tremor.”
“Whatever it is, it can’t be any good,” said Uncle Josh. “We need to keep moving forward. The dungeons aren’t much farther now.”
Just as Uncle Josh said that, all of the vents in the ceiling suddenly opened at once. We all looked up just in time to see some kind of strange green gas begin pouring out of the vents toward us.
“What is that?” I said. “Gas?”
Christina’s eyes widened with horror. She looked at me and Uncle Josh and said, “We need to run. Now. Because if we breathe in any of that gas … we’ll be dead in seconds.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Normally, I would have questioned Christina about what that gas was and how it would kill us, but there was something about its green hue that made me feel the same kind of apprehension I felt whenever I saw a rattlesnake.
So I just ran after Christina, who ran ahead of me and Uncle Josh surprisingly fast. As we ran, more gas poured out of the vents on the ceiling, forming a wall of gas behind us that advanced in our wake. We had already put a good distance between ourselves and the gas, but we didn’t slow down at all.
“What is that gas?” I shouted at Christina as we ran. “Is it another one of Icon’s inventions?”
Christina nodded without looking over her shoulder at me. “Yeah. Benjamin made it. It’s a special blend called Benjamin gas, named after himself, obviously.”
“What’s so special about it?” I said. “Aside from the fact that it kills in three seconds, that is.”
“Look back and tell me what you see,” said Christina. “It’s easier to show its effects than explain them.”
Uncle Josh and I looked back over our shoulders, but I almost immediately wished I hadn’t, because through the thick green cloud of Benjamin gas, I saw that the floor, ceiling, and walls were rusting away. It looked like the gas was taking bites out of the tunnel, as if it was some kind of living creature that needed to eat metal to survive.
“It’s corroding the metal,” said Uncle Josh as we turned our attention back to Christina. “That can’t be good.”
“It isn’t,” said Christina, shaking her head, again without looking at us. “But that’s what it’s designed to do. It’s toxic enough to rust and corrode even the strongest of metals. It can also eat through human flesh in three seconds flat.”
“Oh my god,” I said. “That’s awful.”
“Oh, and did I forget to mention that it was specifically designed to kill supers quickly?” said Christina. “Benjamin explained it to me once. Said the gas interacts negatively with the altered genes of your average superhero and causes the target to explode, rather than just have their flesh eaten off their bones in three seconds like what happens to ordinary humans.”
I gulped and looked over my shoulder again. “You mean if we let that stuff touch us, you and I will explode?”
“Yep,” said Christina. “And I have no reason to think Benjamin was being his usual lying, weaselly self when he told me that, because he showed me the video they had taken of the test subject they had used the gas on and it worked exactly like how he described. He told me it took them hours to clean up all of the blood and gore from the resulting explosion.”
I shuddered at the thought of Christina and I blowing up via exposure to that gas. “Why would Icon unleash such a dangerous gas in their own tunnels? Don’t they realize they’re going to have to fix all of the damage it’s causing?”
“Chaser obviously wants us dead,” said Christina. “And, given how everything else he’s thrown at us has failed so far, he’s probably getting desperate. He probably thinks killing us off is worth rendering one of his tunnels unusable for a few weeks or months or however long it might take to repair it.”
“He’s insane,” I said.
“No, he’s the Superior,” said Christina sarcastically. “That means he’s smarter than everyone else in Icon put together, including yours truly.”
“Can you two stop talking?” said Uncle Josh, who was huffing and puffing worse than either Christina or me. “We can speculate on why Chaser is ruining his own island later. Right now, we need to outrun that gas.”
Uncle Josh was absolutely right. The gas cloud behind us had grown so thick that I couldn’t even see through it anymore. Not to mention it seemed to be gaining speed, slowly but surely catching up to us. There was still a chance we could outrun it, but that was less and less likely every second. It didn’t help that all three of us were dead tired from the events of the night. The adrenaline was probably the only thing keeping us from failing entirely, though how long even that would last, I didn’t even know.
That was when a new idea occurred to me. I looked at Uncle Josh and Christina and said, “I have an idea about how we can outrun the gas.”
“What is it?” said Uncle Josh, glancing at me as we ran. “You don’t happen to have super speed as one of your abilities and you just didn’t mention it until now?”
“No, it’s better than that,” I said. “I could fly all three of us the rest of the way. I can fly faster than I can run, so this might help us.”
“Can you even carry us both?” said Christina, glancing over her shoulder at me with a disbelieving look on her face. “We might just slow you down.”
“That’s what my super strength is for,” I said. “I can carry both of you in my arms like you weigh nothing.”
“It’s worth a shot,” said Uncle Josh. “I’m starting to get tired anyway. Let’s see how it does.”
I nodd
ed and flew into the air, grabbing Uncle Josh and Christina around their waists and lifting them into the air. With my super strength, it was indeed easy to pick up both of them, though I was still unused to flying with more people than just myself, so I found it hard to balance the two at first due to the stark difference in Uncle Josh and Christina’s weight. Uncle Josh weighed a lot more than Christina, nearly unbalancing me, but I managed to shift their weight around enough that I could stay upright as I flew.
With Uncle Josh and Christina held securely in my arms, I flew the rest of the length of the tunnel as fast as I could. Behind me, I could hear the sizzling noise of the gas as it ate through the metal panels of the tunnel, but I didn’t dare look back. I just flew across the tunnel straight and true, focusing entirely on getting to the end, where the entrance to the dungeons was.
There it was. A large set of double doors stood set against the end of the tunnel on top of what looked like a loading platform of some sort. An odd-looking vehicle with no wheels or other visible forms of propulsion sat next to the loading bay, a vehicle I recognized as the trolley Christina told us about earlier.
“We’re almost there,” said Christina, who sound positively giddy. “Just a little father …”
All of a sudden, I heard the sound of gears creaking and then, not too far ahead, a large metal wall began to descend from the ceiling toward the floor. The metal wall was descending quickly, and if it fell onto the floor, I realized that we were going to be trapped between the wall and the gas. Chaser must have wanted to make sure we didn’t make it to the dungeons, so he was activating the wall in order to keep us from escaping the gas. And worse, I wasn’t sure I could fly fast enough to get to the other side.
I looked at Uncle Josh and Christina. “Guys, I can’t make it to the other side of the wall fast enough, but I think if I throw you guys, you should be able to make it.”
“Throw us?” said Christina, looking up at me in alarm. “Oh, hell no. You are not going to throw—”
I never got to hear Christina finish her sentence, because at that moment I threw both her and Uncle Josh at the rapidly closing gap between the wall and the floor. I even used my perfect aim powers to ensure they made it, though I wasn’t sure if my powers worked on people like they did on objects.
