The Indestructibles (Book 2): Breakout Page 7

  They didn't do that in the old days.

  Prevention walked in without knocking, her agents Lock and Rourke in tow. Sam had taken to entertaining himself by pretending he couldn't keep their names straight, despite Lock having a full head of hair and Rourke keeping his buzzed short. He had to figure out some way of entertaining himself while he was kept essentially behind bars.

  Behind bars in a prison he and his former fellow Department agents help fill.

  "You look like you had a great meeting with the kids," Sam said. Prevention offered a hard stare. "Did you know Straylight could detect psychic probes?"

  "We have never, ever known exactly what powers the Luminae give their hosts."

  "Answer the question, Barren."

  "I had no idea! I met Horizon a hundred times, more than that, and I never got a good read on his power. You know why?" Sam said. "Because he was one of the good guys, and his powers were none of my goddamn business."

  Prevention sat down at a table in the center of the room and motioned wearily for Sam to sit down. She looked tired. If she weren't so hell-bent on messing with the kids, Sam might feel bad for her — she was clearly under orders to rein in the five most ornery people on the planet, and it wasn't going well.

  "Well for future reference, yes, Luminae give their hosts psychic defenses," Prevention said.

  "You got busted?"

  "Oh I got busted. Little punk actually laughed at me," she said.

  "The boy is a bit of a showoff," Sam said. "Who agreed to meet with you?"

  "Solar and Straylight. The others were noticeably absent. Are you sure you have no idea where the werewolf went?"

  "No harm in telling you he went looking into his past. Other than that he didn't talk about it."

  "It is remarkably unnerving to know there's a werewolf on the loose and I have no idea where he is."

  Sam laughed.

  Prevention actually cracked a smile. Her agents, hovering around the room, looked somewhere between uncomfortable and relieved.

  "Which one of you has to deal with him if he shows up?"

  The agents looked at Prevention for approval. She nodded.

  "We've both dealt with shapeshifters before," Lock said. "Hand to hand and with firearms."

  "Don't kill the boy," Sam said.

  Rourke shook his head.

  "Only as a last resort."

  "The werewolf is a good boy," Sam said. "The other critter in that body . . . Just avoid him, if you can. You haven't dealt with a full-fledged werewolf?"

  "No," Rourke said.

  Sam nodded.

  "Don't poke the tiger," Sam said. "Or wolf in this case. You'll be thankful for it later."

  Prevention crossed her legs, rubbed her eyes.

  "Well, in any event, they won't play ball with us," Prevention said.

  "Solar shut you down?"

  "Not in so many words. Did she pick up the coy thing from you?"

  "Have to assume that was Doc," Sam said.

  "Doc Silence. Even dead he's still a pain in our backside," Prevention said. "What did he have against us?"

  "Us? Nothing," Sam said. "We never tried to tell him what to do."

  Sam slunk back in his chair. He felt very old, and very tired. He wasn't old enough to feel like this, and he was so tired of being sick.

  "How are you feeling, Sam," Prevention said.

  "Like I'm dying very slowly. How do I look?"

  "Like you're dying very slowly," Prevention said. "This is why I'm here right now."

  "Not to complain about the intel I didn't give you about the Indestructibles?"

  "No," Prevention said. "I told you we could help you."

  "What could you possibly do to help me at this point," Sam said.

  "I can't do anything," Prevention said. "But we have something that can."

  Prevention waved a hand at Rourke, who opened the door, and a dead man walked in.

  "You," Sam said.

  The man walked with the aid of a cane he didn't need before, his shoulder slumped to one side, hair gone gray at the temples.

  "Hey, Sam," the man said in a voice Sam Barren hadn't heard in years. The voice of a dead hero. "I see they've got you under lock and key too."

  Henry Winter, the scientist hero once known as Coldwall, stood in the doorway, when he should have been long buried in the ground.

  Chapter 15:

  Plague hospital

  Caleb Roth was beginning to think he had been going about this all wrong.

  Nobody cared what happened at the mall, he thought. Nobody really noticed if everyone got sick at a diner. These were places of consumption, places of leisure. Nobody had much sympathy for them there, not really.

  If he wanted to raise a red flag, he had to go somewhere people cared about.

  Even if that meant going to the one place that terrified him.

  Caleb looked unwell enough that even among the broken arms and stomach bugs, the wounds needing stitches and accident victims, people took notice when he walked into the hospital's emergency room. He could see the panic in the eyes of the other patients — don't touch me, don't come near me, don't make me sick, I don't want what you have.

  Caleb smiled at a heavyset man with a graying mustache who sat holding an ice pack to his forehead. The man squinted back at Caleb, who decided to wink before walking up to the intake window.

  The man behind the counter, round-faced with a crew cut, immediately called for help. A middle-aged nurse appeared immediately, and Caleb could see it in their eyes — he's catchy, he's going to make everyone sick, we have to isolate him.

  They opened the security doors to bring him in, a doctor appeared with a mask on his face and rubber gloves on his hands. Caleb let them pull him inside, their attention so rapt on how ill he looked no one noticed the growing troubles in the lobby, the glassy eyes, the coughing, the faces turning to ash.

  The security door closed and both doctor and nurse helping him slowly fell to the floor. The doctor barely moved; the nurse called out for help, her voice raising the alarm, but Caleb's power, his gift, was already at work in the entire emergency department.

  A security guard, gray-haired and thin, reached out to stop him as he let himself into the main body of the hospital. As he wandered from ward to ward, from room to room, touching hands of patients, blowing a kiss to a pretty surgeon fresh out of the operating room.

  He took a security guard's passkey and made his way into the intensive care unit, his arms outstretched like an avenging angel, and passed through the oncology ward, smiling as he strolled. He danced in the elder services department, and caused havoc in the behavioral health ward. Of course he stopped for dinner in the cafeteria, eating soft serve iced cream directly from the spout, and poured himself a huge soda from the fountain, no one well enough to demand he pay for what he took.

  The pharmacy thought they were about to be robbed, but Caleb took nothing, knowing, through his own trials and experiments that no amount of pills would ever make him feel better.

  There was no one to stop him in the employee lounge, as his walkabout through the hospital halls had put all staff on high alert. He spent some time in the administrative offices, far away from the patients, just to make sure he found everyone. The hospital president was on the floor of his office, smart phone in hand, halfway toward completing a call he would never finish.

  Caleb meandered through the cardiology unit, marveling at all the broken hearts.

  And once he had seen everything else, walked up and down every hallway, Caleb headed for the nursery, singing as he walked slowly up the stairs.

  Chapter 16:

  My fault

  Jane and Billy arrived at the Tower to find Emily attempting to teach the dog fetch in the landing bay. Unfortunately for Emily, Watson appeared to figure out that Emily could fetch things with her mind and decided that watching her retrieve her own tennis ball was more entertaining.

  "So that's going well," Billy said, when Emily bubble o
f floated the tennis ball back into her hand.

  The dog just watched, sitting daintily in front of her.

  "He came ready with one trick," Emily said.

  "What's that?" Jane said.

  "Not going to the bathroom in inappropriate places."

  "Well," Jane said. "That's a start, at least."

  "Better than not knowing that trick," Billy said.

  Emily threw the ball again, and all four of them, human and dog, watched it bounce passively into the corner of the bay. Emily gave Watson a disapproving glance.

  "You know nothing, Jon Snow," she said.

  Emily drew the ball back into her hand. Billy took it from her.

  "Fetch," he said, and hucked the ball. It ricocheted around the edge of the landing bay and caught a corner, sending it careening down the hallway and out of site. This time, the dog launched himself into action to chase it, disappearing deeper into the Tower.

  "Sure, he chases it for you!" Emily said, and she and Billy chased after the dog, looking, Jane thought, like the kids they actually were instead of the heroes they were all forced to be.

  I wish we had more time, she thought. Time to be themselves. Time to be with each other. She wondered if this was how Doc had felt, watching them, knowing how little time they had to truly be young. Wondering if he had missed his friends, or regretted not spending more moments with them.

  "He must have been so lonely," she said.

  "He was," an unfamiliar voice said, so close behind her it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Jane whipped around to face the stranger and found a pink-haired woman, tattooed from wrist to shoulder and wearing glasses just like Doc's, looking at her. She smiled at her.

  "Where — " the woman began, but she flickered like a hologram, and was gone, winking out of existence like a light bulb burning out.

  "What. Was. That," Jane said. "Neal, is Kate on board?"

  "Designation: Dancer is in library."

  "Am I alone in the bay right now, Neal?"

  "There are no other lifeforms in the bay."

  "Anyone on board who shouldn't be?"

  "It has been said that perhaps Designation: Entropy Emily might not be safe to have on board, and there is a small unregistered canine in the gymnasium right now chewing on the floor mats."

  "No one else?" Jane said.

  "No," Neal said.

  "Tell Kate I'm on my way up."

  * * *

  Jane found Kate pouring over reams of paper in the library. She wore one of Titus's hooded sweatshirts, a red one that had been stitched back together in multiple places — by Emily of all people, who mysteriously was both a skilled knitter and tailor. Titus in human form was about the same size as Kate, and so the hoodie fit a little too big, hanging awkwardly on her shoulders.

  "What have you got?" Jane asked.

  Kate didn't look up. Instead, she leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table so she could rub her eyes with the heels of her hands.

  "Do you remember what I told you about Wegener's lab?" Kate asked.

  She sounded tired, Jane thought. More tired than usual, and Kate had taken to being tired almost all the time these days. The usual edge to her voice wasn't there either, that hard vibe she gave off, particularly when speaking to Jane.

  "Yeah. Where you shut down the cortex bombs?"

  "And blew up all of his gear," Kate said. "I'm an idiot."

  "You set a bunch of teenagers free and got rid of the research that turned them into monsters," Jane said. "I don't see how that makes you an idiot."

  Kate finally looked up.

  "I also destroyed all the information we might have actually had on them," Kate said. "And the funny thing is that cyborg who gave me the grenade probably didn't even mean it that way. We both really thought we were doing the right thing."

  "Setting them free was the right thing," Jane said. "Look at Valkyrie. Look at Bedlam. Those were regular kids who were abused in unimaginable ways."

  Kate shook her head.

  "Jane. The names. Cretaceous Man turned out to be exactly what he sounded like," Kate said. "We keep getting reports of a humanoid shark down by the Keys, and I bet we know who that is."

  "We'll deal with it when the time is right," Jane said.

  "Jane, one of the names on that list was Plague."

  Oh no, Jane thought. Oh not that.

  "I could have killed him. Flip a switch, gone," Kate said. "Instead we've got hundreds of sick people and more than a dozen dead . . ."

  "We don't know it's him. Or her," Jane said. "For all we know this is some kind of swine flu. We haven't seen any evidence that it's a person doing this."

  "And if it is?"

  "We should investigate, find out, and try to help this person," Jane said. "Remember, none of the others we've met so far have been really malicious."

  "Hyde was a beast."

  "Hyde was a selfish little jerk on a power trip," Jane said. "Kate, I was looking him in the eyes when he died. He was just a kid. A kid with a mean streak, but he wasn't a monster. Neither was Val and look how much damage she caused. The girl made out of fire. We never even knew her name, but I saw her, Kate. She wasn't in control. She was scared, and she was sorry."

  Kate just watched her for a moment then returned to rifle through the papers. Jane joined her at the table.

  "What do we have here."

  "Older records," Kate said. "Early research, handwritten notes."

  "These are scorch marks."

  "I set off a grenade in the lab," Kate said.

  "Well that explains the scorch marks."

  Jane pulled a piece of paper out, a rough sketch that looked like a precursor to the dinosaur-man hybrid they'd fought.

  "Huh."

  Kate slid another page across the table to her. A rough design for Bedlam's cybernetics. From the look of things, the final version was much more kind, leaving her far more human-looking than originally planned.

  "These people really are monsters," Jane said.

  "This is marked project Valkyrie, but it's just . . . a lot of math," Kate said. "I'm sure it's translatable, but I have no idea what it means."

  Jane shook her head. "I'm not our science expert," she said.

  "We don't have one of those. We should look into recruiting a genius."

  "We have a genius."

  "And she's downstairs playing fetch with a dog who refuses to play fetch," Kate said.

  "Better than the way she usually spends her free time."

  True," Kate said. "Huh."

  "Whatcha got?"

  Kate pulled a few pages aside.

  "Printouts with facts on different types of respiratory infections."

  "Anything we can use?"

  "No," Kate said. "It just looks like basic research. Encyclopedia stuff, nothing more."

  "It's a start."

  Billy walked in, Watson sitting in the crook of his arm like a teddy bear. Billy was still in uniform but had his half-mask coiled around his neck like a gaiter.

  "What's up?" Jane asked.

  "There's been another incident," Billy said. "Another outbreak."

  Kate pounded her fist onto the table. Jane took a quiet step backward.

  "How bad is it?"

  "Bad," Billy said. "It happened at a hospital."

  Chapter 17:

  Time stands still

  Titus could feel himself going feral in this place.

  Cold stream water to drink and bath in. Dirt and pine needles beneath his feet. Game to eat, caught by hand with Finnigan or Gabriel or sometimes even Leto, though she mostly would hang back and watch, not because she did not want to, but because, Finnigan said, she was so skilled it was an unfair fight for the prey.

  His lungs felt bigger here, filled with clean air. He became stronger from his sessions with Gabriel, faster, less afraid. His time with Finnigan and Leto gave him a sense of control he hadn't had in a long time.

  Still, when the sky was dark and the moon high, he w
ould sense the pull. Sometimes toward rage, but more often toward freedom. To give it all up, to run north and keep running, to find places where man had not laid waste, to grow claws and fangs and never go back.

  "I can see it in your face," Leto said one night as they sat around the fire, all four of them. "The call."

  "Everything is so ugly back home," Titus said. "You get numb to it. The stink, the yelling, the anger, the grime. What have we been doing to ourselves?"

  "Themselves," Leto said.

  She could see Titus had taken offense to her words, distancing them from humanity. She softened her voice.

  "We are not without our many, many flaws," she corrected. "But mankind . . ."

  "Humanity really knows how to screw things up, kid," Finnigan said.

  "What are some of our mistakes?" Titus asked. "I know what we've done wrong. What humans have. But why are we in such a bad way?"

  "Infighting," Leto said. "Arrogance. A terrible lack of self-awareness of our own mortality. Forgetting what we were here to do."

  "And what is that?" Titus said. "What were we here to do? You've said that a lot. Like we had a higher purpose."

  "We were meant to be the wolf at the gate," Gabriel said. He caught Titus off-guard — the dark-haired werewolf rarely spoke other than to offer advice while training. "We're the monster who keeps worse monsters at bay."

  "And for a long time, we were the monster who needed keeping out," Finnigan said.

  Titus rubbed his eyes, smoke from the fire dried them out.

  "And where do the Whisperings fit in with all of this? All of you talk about the Whisperings like they were special, but I don't see how I'm any different from you. Heck, Finnigan and I like the same cereal, so I know you grew up in a city."

  Finnigan laughed.

  "How do you know I didn't take a liking to chocolate rice puffs as a grown man?"

  Titus raised an eyebrow at him, and they both laughed, like old friends. Leto even smiled, though her tone was sad when she spoke again.