Elite 2: The Wrong Side of Revolution

by Joseph C. Anthony

  “Get in,” he instructed her. Jordan did as she was told and got in the car.

  Daniel closed the door behind him and ran over to where the driver of the car still lay on the pavement. He searched his pockets and found the key to the car along with a pocket knife. He looked up and saw the flashing lights making their way through the congested traffic as he ran back to the car.

  He jumped in the driver’s seat and cut Jordan’s hand binds before starting the car. Seeing the police cars and ambulance pull up to the scene in the rearview, Daniel put it in drive and took off down the road with the rest of traffic.

  Chapter 10

  “Where are we going?” Jordan asked, her voice quivering with fear.

  “We have to ditch this car soon, before Demérs…er, Gordon finds out what’s happened,” Daniel responded, not quite answering her question.

  “Daniel!” Jordan yelled in his ear, “What the hell is going on?”

  Daniel looked over at the woman in the seat to his right, realizing that she was nothing more than an innocent bystander; friends with the wrong people at the wrong time.

  “Gordon wants me dead,” Daniel replied. “Or at least he did. Now I think he wants to study me.”

  Jordan turned to face forward in the passenger’s seat and swallowed harshly. Tears were beginning to trickle down her soft, wintery pale cheeks.

  “This has to do with you being so strong now, doesn’t it?” She asked Daniel almost accusingly.

  Daniel exited the expressway and headed toward the nearest train station. He contemplated how much he should tell Jordan about the last several months. He had promised never to reveal the secret of his extraordinary transformation, but to hell with it. Jordan was now a part of this whether he and Richfield liked it or not. She deserved to know the truth.

  “That’s only a small part of it,” Daniel conceded, determining how to explain the bizarre set of circumstances they were now faced with. “They did something to me—a procedure—it gave me total control over my body. I mean everything. I can make myself stronger and faster, I can heal myself, I can digest my own food however I want to—and that’s only the stuff I know how to do.”

  He looked over at Jordan and saw her staring blankly out the windshield, as though she were deciding whether or not to believe such an outlandish story.

  In the silence, he decided to continue, “Gordon wants my abilities. He’s part of some society of rich nutjobs who want to create an army of super people like me so that they can start a war and overthrow the government. Gordon Demérs is a bad man.”

  He turned again to gauge Jordan’s response. This time she began shaking her head violently in anger. That part of the story had broken through her barrier of tolerance.

  “Let me out,” she said quietly yet aggressively.

  Daniel remained focused on his driving, unsure of how to respond to her request.

  “Let me out!” She screamed as she grabbed the door handle and began banging on the side of the door.

  Daniel pulled the car onto a side street and slammed on the brakes. She reached for the handle to open the door.

  “Jordan,” Daniel spoke, trying to remain calm.

  She pulled the handle and started to open the door. Daniel leaned over and grabbed the interior of the door and pulled it shut.

  “Jordan! Listen to me!” He ordered, both frustration and fear beginning to set in.

  Jordan paused, then threw herself back into her seat deciding it best to listen to what Daniel had to tell her.

  “Listen, I’m sorry but you cannot go out there,” he explained. “Gordon knows now that you’re one of my biggest weaknesses. He’ll only come after you again to get to me.”

  Daniel leaned back and felt himself overcome with sadness. His face scrunched in an unattractive fashion as he felt moisture begin to well up in his eyes. This was all his fault. Because of his decisions he had put someone he cared about deeply in great danger. He had spent the last two days blaming everyone else, but it was his need to be a “better” man—to be bigger and stronger and richer—it was his greed that had led them down this road.

  “I’m so sorry,” he managed to tell her before losing his grip on his emotions.

  Jordan maintained her pissed-off glare as she turned to Daniel, her eyes full of tears as well.

  “Well if what you’re telling me is true,” she said to him, “this isn’t entirely your fault. I was the one who got engaged to a psychopath who would threaten to kill his own fiancé to get superpowers.”

  Daniel somehow managed to laugh at Jordan’s take on the situation. When she put it like that it sounded absolutely ridiculous.

  “We have to get you, and me, to safety,” he told her, looking up to stare out the windshield.

  “I’ll call home,” she said, reaching for her cellphone before realizing it wasn’t there.

  “Even if you had it you couldn’t use it,” Daniel reasoned. “He knows where your parents live. He won’t hurt them but he can have someone monitor the house, and he is undoubtedly more than capable of tracing your cell phone.”

  The thought of Demérs knowing everything about her and being able to get to her family put Jordan into a tizzy.

  “My family…How do we know he won’t…”

  “It’s too risky,” Daniel cut her off, not entirely believing in his words but trying to calm her down. “He doesn’t want to risk exposing himself to the FBI. Besides, it’s ultimately me he wants, not you.”

  Jordan tried to gain control over her now spastic breathing.

  “So what about your family?” She asked pointedly. “Won’t he risk going after them if he wants you so badly?”

  Daniel chewed on the answer for a brief moment. He knew she was right. As long as both Daniel and Demérs were both alive the ones he loved would never be safe.

  “I doubt it, but I wouldn’t put it past him either.” Daniel turned to face Jordan, his expression changing from grief to anger. “Although it’s not necessarily me he wants. He’d be just as happy with me dead and out of the way. He wants the ability to create more like me.”

  Jordan’s eyes began to show signs of sorrow, as though she suddenly felt pity for Daniel.

  “So what do we do now?” she asked.

  “Now,” he said, turning off the car, “we ditch the car.”

  He reached back and pulled a black leather wallet from underneath himself. Daniel had taken it from the driver of the car when he took the keys off of his unconscious person on the highway. He opened it up and began examining its contents. Inside was a fifty-dollar bill and a twenty-dollar bill. It would be enough for a cab ride back to Elite.

  He opened the car door and got out, leaving the keys in the ignition. Jordan followed suit exiting through her own door.

  “Where are we going?” Jordan inquired.

  Daniel took a few steps up the street and held his right arm up. A cab driver saw him from a block up the street and started toward his future fare.

  “The only place we’ll be safe,” Daniel responded.

  The cab ride to the Elite complex was mostly silent. Jordan seemed to be content to sit quietly and digest all of the information Daniel had told her about her current fiancé and his plans for world domination, and about how he needed her old college boyfriend’s superhuman abilities to do it. Any questions she might have had in regards to where they were going would be answered soon enough.

  Slowly, the cab pulled up in front of a large, plain looking warehouse. The fare for the cab ride was forty-two dollars and change. Daniel handed the driver the entire seventy dollars he had taken out of the wallet in the black sedan.

  “Keep the change,” Daniel told the cab driver.

  “Gee, thank you sir!” The cab driver responded gratefully. “Have a great day!”

  As Jordan and Daniel stepped out of the cab Daniel took his coat and threw it over her shoulders. She looked up at the building and thought about asking, but figured she would just wait for Daniel to vol
unteer the answer instead.

  “This is the Elite training complex,” he explained to her, right on cue. “It’s also where I’ve been living the past seven months.”

  Under normal circumstances Jordan would have been able to come up with some sort of reaction to seeing Daniel’s home for the first time, but at the moment she could feel nothing. Not the cold bite of the air outside and certainly not the shock of everything she had learned in the past hour or so—she wasn’t even sure how long it had been. She had become completely numb with shock, both inside and out.

  Daniel put his hands on both of her shoulders and guided her up the steps and through the front door. Inside the doors was a plain white waiting room with an older black gentleman sitting behind a desk in a security guard uniform.

  “Hey Frank,” Daniel said, nodding to the man as he led Jordan past the desk and toward the double doors on the other side of the room.

  “All visitors need to be signed in and checked out by Mister Richfield!” the man at the desk shouted at Daniel.

  “Tell him I’ll be in his office in a minute!” Daniel called back, pushing one of the heavy fire doors open for Jordan to walk through.

  Through the doors Jordan found herself in a large open space, a retractable dividing wall on her left and a variety of fitness equipment on her right. Using the fitness equipment were a dozen of some of the most athletically cut individuals she had ever seen.

  “Come on,” Daniel said softly into her ear, placing his hand on the small of her back before leading her across the room. “We need to get you to my room as quickly as possible.”

  Rather than ask questions, Jordan did as she was told and picked up her pace. She was now in way over her head and had made the decision to follow Daniel’s instructions without asking why. At the moment she trusted no one—not even Daniel—but she didn’t know what else to do. She did believe that whatever he was doing it was his intention to keep her safe.

  As they marched across the large fitness room, it seemed every person in the room stopped what they were doing and stared as Daniel guided Jordan to the other end. Each one of them looked confused as to what she was doing there.

  Upon reaching the other side Daniel led her through another set of fire doors, and she stepped through into a long, narrow, white hallway with a glass wall on the opposite side. Daniel turned Jordan’s body to the right and started toward the end of the hall, but Jordan couldn’t take her eyes off of the large arena on the other side of the glass, an octagonal ring at its center. Thankfully Daniel was there to stop her before she ran into the wall at the end of the hallway.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Daniel reach forward and push a button on the wall, but the majority of her focus was on the large leaderboard on the near wall of the arena. On it was a long list of names. The name at the top read “D. Hart.”

  Through the numbness, Jordan managed to feel a twinge of surprise at seeing Daniel’s name at the very top of the list. She had known already that he was the top-ranked agent at Elite, but to see it in writing, above all of those others, and after seeing all of those hard bodies in the other room, made the accomplishment seem much more impressive.

  Suddenly, Jordan heard a ding come from the wall in front of her. She turned her neck to the right, removing her gaze from the arena for the first time, and saw that the wall in front of her was an elevator. She hadn’t even bothered to notice.

  The doors slid open and two very fit females in workout shorts and sports bras made their way out of the car, both taking a second glance at Jordan as they walked by. She felt like the new girl at a high school, and worse, everyone else was prettier than she was.

  Daniel gently pushed Jordan into the car and followed in behind her. He then spun around and pushed the second button on the panel. Daniel seemed nervous as he waited for the doors to slide shut.

  As soon as they began to close, Jordan saw two older gentlemen burst through the same doors they had come through. One was wearing a faded button-up and outdated corduroy pants, and the other wore a grey trench coat and a matching fedora. Just before the elevator door finished closing, Jordan saw through the crack both men turn toward the elevator as if trying to burn it down with their vision.

  “Don’t ask,” Daniel remarked as the car started downward.

  She had just been kidnapped and held hostage in order to coax her superhuman guy friend into turning himself in to her power hungry fiancé who wants to take over the country, but that came nowhere close to comparing to the bizarre feeling she had gotten after being in the Elite complex for less than five minutes. She now had a lengthy list of questions to ask Daniel when the time was right.

  “There are a lot of really attractive females around here, huh?” She half-jokingly asked Daniel.

  He stared forward but a small grin began forming on his face. “Did you not notice the men?” He countered.

  Jordan did not answer verbally, but in her head she was thinking, I most certainly did.

  Just one floor down the elevator door slid open to a concrete hallway filled with doorways on each side. Up and down the hall were more perfect bodies moving in and out of different doors. As they started down the hallway Jordan couldn’t imagine how Daniel had made it through his first couple months there. She had never felt so insecure and insignificant in her life.

  At the end of the hall they turned right down an adjacent hallway. Daniel stepped in front of her and stopped in front of the second door on the right. He turned to face her as he opened the door.

  “This is my bunk. Stay in here until I get back. Watch TV, take a nap, whatever you want. There are some snacks and drinks in the mini-fridge. Do not trust or talk to anyone, okay?”

  Jordan’s head began spinning at all of the instructions. She did not like the way he had delivered his orders, but she would do what Daniel asked. She honestly had no desire to walk around a strange place filled with a bunch of people that could kill her with their pinky finger anyway.

  She nodded her head and stepped inside. Daniel quickly closed the door behind her.

  As soon as Daniel closed the door to his room he saw Blank and Richfield charging around the corner. Blank moved with an expression of concern while Richfield looked flat-out angry.

  “What the hell do you think you are doing?” Richfield demanded as he approached Daniel at his door.

  “You managed to break her out, did ya Danny Boy?” Blank asked as if Richfield weren’t even there.

  “Yes,” Daniel stated, speaking to Blank. “And now I need to keep her somewhere safe,” he said, turning back to Richfield.

  “You know I need to approve everyone who walks through that door,” Richfield grumbled.

  “I get it,” Daniel acknowledged, “but I didn’t have time. I need to hurry if I’m going to get the jump on Demérs.”

  Richfield paused. “What do you mean?” he asked, evidently no longer concerned with Jordan’s presence in the building.

  Daniel felt proud to have somewhat won an argument with the big bad boss, but he quickly put his pride aside to continue explaining his plan. “By now Demérs, knows that his plan to bring in Jordan and I has gone terribly wrong, which means he’s probably just started formulating a plan for retaliation. I need to get at him before he can hurt anyone else.”

  Richfield and Blank glanced at each other, both making sure they were understanding Daniel correctly.

  “And by get at, you mean…?” Richfield inquired.

  “Kill him,” Daniel clarified.

  “You ever kill a man before, Danny Boy?” Blank interrupted. “Knocking a guy out is one thing, but taking a life…you sure you’re ready for that?”

  Daniel took a breath, feeling as though he should take time to think but knowing that he needed none.

  “We’re talking about a man hell bent on starting a war that would tear this country apart so he can rule over and basically enslave everyone that he deems beneath him. Beyond that, he threatened the life of someone close t
o me and as long as he and I are both breathing there’s no reason to believe that he won’t do the same thing again. I sure as hell don’t plan on dying anytime soon so yeah, I think I’ll be able to sleep just fine,” Daniel responded with the most confidence he had ever felt in his life.

  Blank smiled and gave a single nod. “’Atta boy, Danny,” he said.

  “First thing’s first though,” Daniel instructed. “Where’s Doctor Horchoff? I want him to look at Jordan real quick and make sure she’s okay.”

  Richfield squinted his eyes and turned his gaze downward. “Doc’s not here.”

  “What do you mean, not here?” Daniel asked in disbelief. As far as he knew Horchoff never left the complex.

  “He kept going on about Demérs coming after him next or something like that,” Blank explained to Daniel. “I tried to stop him but next thing we knew he was gone. Musta snuck out the back door.”

  “Well where did he go?” Daniel questioned.

  “No idea,” Richfield answered plainly. “I have my sources keeping their eyes out for him, but he hasn’t surfaced.”

  Daniel let out a hefty sigh. It wasn’t crucial at the moment. Other than being tied up and thrown to the ground when Daniel pushed the car toward the Brit who was holding her Jordan had stayed mostly out of the fray. The only way to get the doctor back now was to carry out his attack on Demérs.

  Without a word, Daniel began walking down the hallway back in the direction of the elevators. Both of the older gentlemen he was talking to turned to follow.

  “I’m going to need some tactical gear,” he instructed Richfield. “Like what Jitters had on when they picked me up, only I won’t need the mask.”

  “We’ve got that in the armory,” Richfield acknowledged.

  Before turning the corner, Daniel noticed Charlie walking out of the locker room.

  “One minute,” he told Richfield and Blank, changing direction and heading toward his friend.