Stronger: A Super Human Clash
STRONGER
ALSO BY MICHAEL CARROLL
The Quantum Prophecy Trilogy
The Awakening
The Gathering
The Reckoning
Super Human
The Ascension
MICHAEL
CARROLL
STRONGER
a SUPER HUMAN Clash
PHILOMEL BOOKS
AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.
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Copyright © 2012 by Michael Carroll. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. Philomel Books, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Published simultaneously in Canada. Printed in the United States of America.
Edited by Kiffin Steurer. Design by Amy Wu. Text set in 10.5-point Palatino.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carroll, Michael Owen, 1966–
Stronger : a super human clash / Michael Carroll. p. cm. Summary: Recounts the history of the misunderstood villain called Brawn. [1. Science fiction. 2. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.C23497St 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011022436
ISBN: 978-1-101-57221-4
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For Dani
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
PROLOGUE
THE MINE NOW
THIS MORNING, WHEN ONE of the medics from the U.N. was digging a bullet out of my arm—most of the time they fall out by themselves, but this one was a keeper—he asked me how many times I’ve been shot.
“I dunno,” I said. I was lying on the ground, faceup, as he worked on me. “Forty or fifty?”
“I can see forty or fifty bullet wounds right now,” he said, looking up and down my body. “I meant, how many times have you been shot in total?”
I couldn’t answer that. I’d stopped counting a long time ago.
I’ve certainly been shot hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. Maybe even tens of thousands.
A U.S. Army colonel once said to me, “Whatever doesn’t kill ya makes ya stronger.”
I guess it means that if you can get through all the bad stuff that life throws in your path, you come out the other side with the experience of having survived and the knowledge of how to get through it again. Or, as my dad always liked to say, “conflict builds character.”
Sometimes the conflict we encounter comes from other people, and sometimes it comes from ourselves. We all have weaknesses; we all make bad decisions. We’re only human.
Of course, the thing about bad decisions is that most of the time we realize they were bad only in hindsight. At the time, they seem right. I mean, only an idiot would think, “This is a bad decision, but I’m going to do it anyway.”
When I was sixteen, I made a decision that I knew was right. My friends didn’t agree with me, we fell out—to put it mildly—and as a consequence my decision changed not only my life, but the lives of countless others.
Far too many people suffered and died because I tried to do the right thing. And even now, almost a quarter of a century later, the echoes of my decision are still being heard.
My decision was only one link in a long chain of events, but—as another old saying goes—every chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If I hadn’t done what I did, the rest of the chain would have fallen apart.
Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think, If I’d known then what I know now … But I was trying to do the right thing. I have to keep reminding myself of that. We can’t know all the consequences of our actions before we take them. We can only act on the knowledge we have at hand.
So even though I sometimes dream about going back to visit my sixteen-year-old self and slapping him across the back of his head for what he did, I can’t blame him.
We have to make our decisions, and whatever the consequences of those decisions may be, we have to accept them. Suck it up. Live with it. Life goes on.
For some of us.
CHAPTER 1
THE MINE
FOUR YEARS AGO
I WAS NEARING THE END of my sixteen-hour shift in the main branch of the platinum mine’s oldest and deepest shaft, tunnel D. Because I couldn’t easily wield a pick or a drill to extract the ore, my job was to load the loosened chunks into the iron-wheeled cart and, when the cart was full, push it up through the shaft and out to the processing station.
I was on my hands and knees in the deepest part of the mine—the shaft’s ceiling was far too low for me to stand upright—using my bare hands to scoop the rubble from around Keegan’s feet into a pair of steel buckets. I’d already tossed the larger rocks into the cart behind me.
“Gotta be close to quitting time for you,” Keegan said. She was about five foot five, thin but wiry, and she kept her red hair long but tied back. She stepped back from the wall and shifted to the side a little to allow the weak yellow light from the nearest lamp to illuminate her work area.
“Almost,” I said. “One
more trip up, then I’ve got to bring down the new rails. Setting them will be tomorrow’s job.” The rails on which the carts ran were fifteen feet long and had to be set into the ground like railway tracks. It was a tough job made more difficult by the barely adequate ventilation, the poor light, and the shaft’s low ceiling. Right now the track ended about thirty feet from the wall on which Keegan and the others were working.
Donald DePaiva—the second-in-command to Thomas Hazlegrove, the mine’s overseer—shone his flashlight in Keegan’s direction. “What’s the delay?” he barked at her.
“I was just—”
“Shut up and dig!”
Keegan examined the calluses on her hands for a moment, then picked up her pickax again and swung it at the wall. A tiny fragment of rock shot back and scratched her upper arm—she didn’t even notice. “Might not be worth the effort laying the new tracks,” she said to me. “We’re running dry here too.”
A few months earlier the mine’s C shaft had been almost completely abandoned. There was so little ore coming out of it that it was decided that only a skeleton crew was needed. The rails had been removed, and now only eight men, instead of the usual thirty or so, were working to extract the last possible lumps of ore from the shaft. They were bringing out less than four wheelbarrow-loads a day.
I was about to respond when I heard—no, when I felt—the ground trembling. We’d all felt it before, far too many times, tunnel and skiddedand we knew what it meant: One of the tunnels was coming down.
“Out!” I shouted. “Move! Now!”
Keegan and the others dropped their tools and ran.
I scrambled after them as fast as I could, squeezed past the almost-full cart, and saw that Keegan had stopped to help one of the kids who’d tripped and been left behind. “I’ll get her!” I shouted to Keegan. “Just go!”
Keegan hesitated for a moment, then let go of the little girl’s hand and ran.
Still on my hands and knees, I reached the girl and saw that it was the daughter of my friends Imyram and Edmond. She was five years old—I remember the day she was born—and her tears had carved clear lines in the dirt on her face.
Without stopping I snagged her up in one hand and kept her tucked under my chest. If the ceiling collapsed on top of us, there was a chance my body would protect her. I could feel her trembling as she clung to my arm, but I didn’t have time to offer her any words of comfort. “Just hold tight!”
Ahead, the guard DePaiva was facedown on the ground, pinned beneath a foot-thick wooden support beam. Two more workers rushed past me and leaped over DePaiva without giving him a second glance.
For a moment I was tempted to follow suit, but I couldn’t leave a man to be crushed to death if the rest of the ceiling collapsed. I grabbed the nearest end of the beam with my free hand and heaved it upward. DePaiva scrambled free, his flailing hands and feet throwing a fresh cloud of dust in my face.
A group of workers darted out of a side tunnel and skidded to a stop as they saw DePaiva approaching. “Run!” I roared at them. “We’re clear—I’m the last! Get going!”
By the time I emerged from the shaft’s exit, almost all of the workers had swarmed out of the other tunnels, their faces tight with panic. Imyram grabbed her daughter from my arms and said, “Thank you, thank you!”
I nodded to her as I looked through the crowd for Keegan, then spotted her standing to the side. “What was that?”
She pointed back toward the tunnels. “The C shaft. The ceiling collapsed about fifty or sixty yards in. Only minor damage to D, I think.”
Most of the platinum mine was covered by a huge metal dome—steel plates crudely welded together—that shielded us from not only the harsh weather but also the eyes of the rest of the world.
The dome was more than fifty yards high, about three hundred yards across, and easily twice as long. It was painted to match the surrounding landscape. From the ground, of course, it was pretty clear that it was a man-made structure, but from the air it was almost invisible. And being a dome, it didn’t cast any unnatural angular shadows that might draw attention.
This is because the mine didn’t officially exist.
And the reason it didn’t officially exist is that it wasn’t just a mine. It was a prison camp.
The mine was surrounded by a twenty-foot-high electrified fence, with cameras set on high poles watching everything. Nothing could get in or out without triggering an alarm.
It was home to almost four hundred prisoners and—in the improvised barracks that surrounded the mine shafts—fewer than two hundred beds. That wasn’t strictly a problem because there were two shifts every day, twelve hours each. We were not allowed any possessions other than the clothes we’d been wearing when we arrived. There was no segregation of men and women, or adults and children: Every prisoner was there to work, and if we didn’t work, we didn’t eat.
When I first came to the mine, all I knew about platinum was that it was expensive. I thought it was mostly used for jewelry, but Keegan told me that most of the world’s platinum was used in cars as a key component of catalytic converters, which cut way down on pollution. Given the conditions of the mine, it wasn’t much of a comfort to know our enslavement was making life a little better for people who didn’t even know we existed.
We used picks and drills to extract ore from the four main mine shafts, loaded the ore into iron-wheeled carts, and pushed them up the winding tracks to the processing station, where the platinum was extracted. It was exhausting, debilitating work. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and most of it spent in the dark, claustrophobia-inducing shafts.
Another prisoner, Ferdinand Cosby—Cosmo to his friends—approached Keegan and me from the ore-processing station. “Who’s down there, do you know?” Cosmo was of average height but stick-thin. And I really mean stick-thin; even his bones were thinner than a normal person’s. His skin was a patchwork of gray and white, like a piebald horse.
Keegan said, “Jakob’s group. They were working alone when it happened—just our luck that none of the guards got caught in it.”
I said, “If they were deep enough, they could be just trapped. We have to—” I stopped when I realized that everyone’s attention was focused on the tunnel entrance behind me.
I turned to see four guards come staggering out of the B shaft in a cloud of rock dust, one of them half carrying another. Though they were coughing, gasping, and rubbing at their grit-encrusted eyes, they still had the presence of mind to stick together and hold on to their guns.
The man carrying his colleague collapsed to his knees, and I instinctively moved to help him—and found myself facing the raised guns of the other two. “Get away from him!” one of them yelled, his voice rough and wheezing.
From beyond the crowd I saw Hazlegrove coming out of the little prefabricated office that overlooked the mine, accompanied by the rest of the guards. Some of them were half out of uniform, as their shift too was ending. All of them were armed. Hazlegrove raised a bullhorn to his mouth. “Any one of you freaks takes one more step and we will open fire!”
Hazlegrove was short—well, to me everyone was short—bitter, and pudgy. He thought of himself as “hard but fair,” but from our side of things he was most definitely “hard but cruel.” He carried a swagger stick tucked under one arm like he was a British army officer in the Second World War.
Hazlegrove lowered his bullhorn and called his two cronies, Elliot Swinden and Donald DePaiva, to his side. As far as I understand it, they’d been his pals in college, and he’d gotten them their jobs. I don’t know if it paid well, but most of the time there was little real work for the guards to do.
“What happened, Mr. Swinden?” Hazlegrove asked.
Swinden slapped the dust from his uniform. “Ceiling collapsed. C shaft. Started pretty deep down. Looks like there’s no way through—it’s completely blocked. The damage to the other tunnels seems to be pretty minor. We’ll need to shore up the ceiling in a few places, but it could hav
e been a lot worse.”
“The C shaft…,” Hazlegrove muttered. He glanced at DePaiva. “What’s the yield over the past month?”
DePaiva was using a gray handkerchief to wipe the sweat-caked dust from his face. “Very low—we’ve pretty much exhausted that seam. Probably should have abandoned it a couple of months back.”
Hazlegrove nodded, and pursed his lips for a moment. I could see him working it out…. It’d take days to clear the blockage—maybe weeks, depending on how deep it was—and Jakob’s team was only eight men.
I felt my stomach tighten as Hazlegrove briefly glanced at me. I knew what he was going to say.
“Close it up.”
The guards’ hands tightened on their weapons as an angry murmur rippled through the rest of the workers.
Hazlegrove looked up at me again. “You got a problem with that?”
“You bet I do. There are people trapped down there. Jakob Winquist’s team.”
“Chances are they’re already dead.” He squared his shoulders and looked around, staring at the assembled workers. “Everyone who’s supposed to be working, get back to it. Now.”
Keegan nudged me, and I looked down into her eyes. “Go on,” she muttered. “Tell him.”
“I was just about to.” Louder, I said, “Mr. Hazlegrove, you can’t just abandon them. At least let us dig long enough to find out whether they’re alive!”
He walked over to me, stopped two yards away, and looked up. Then—trying to appear casual—he took a few steps back so he could better see my reaction. There was the smallest trace of a smirk on his lips. “Go for it. But you’ll be wasting your time, not mine. Any rescue attempt is to be done off shift.” He turned his back on me, addressing the others. “Is that understood? Dig for your friends if you want, but as far as I’m concerned, they’re dead. That’s official. And since they are officially dead, if it happens that any of them are not, then they get no more rations. You feed them out of your own share. However you decide to do that, it’s up to you.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, at me. “So blame the giant Smurf here if you find yourself going hungry.”