Ex-Patriots (24 page)

Danielle shook her head. “The sensors got a
little sluggish after I picked up that jeep. The response time was
just off enough that I could feel the lag, but the diagnostics are
coming up clean.”

St. George glanced at the legs and half-torso
standing on the other side of the work platform. “Do you want to
keep working on it?”

“No,” she said, “I want to get some food.
Let’s go to this dinner. Might as well thank our saviors and enjoy
our first meal as U.S. citizens in ages.” She grabbed her jeans and
pulled them up over the Lycra bodysuit.

“Aren’t you going to be hot like that?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Were you wearing it under your clothes when
you left this morning?”

“George,” she said, “focus.” She buttoned the
pants and reached for her shirt. “You know, I just figured out what
bugged me about all those exes.”

“What was that?”

“Well, it’s just...” Danielle stopped
buttoning and flapped the edges of her shirt. “They were all
wearing fatigues, right?”

“That is standard for military personnel
under these conditions,” said Stealth.

“Yeah, that’s my point. Did you find it kind
of creepy that every single one of them is wearing an Army
uniform?”

“They probably dressed them like that,” said
St. George. “Y’know, to make them look... well, uniform.”

Danielle adjusted her collar. “Are you
sure?”

“Sure of what?”

“That they got dressed like that after they
were bitten?”

* * *

Barry woke up with a splitting headache.
Which, he supposed, was better than waking up with his face in a
plate of scrambled eggs. And they’d been crap powdered eggs, now
that he thought about it. He’d just been so excited about the bacon
he hadn’t noticed.

Definitely better than not waking up at
all.

Wherever he was, the curved ceiling was
concrete with steel plates. Some fluorescent lights glared down at
him from recessed sockets. One had a flickering tube.

He sat up and shook the last bit of
blurriness from his eyes. He was on a simple wooden cot with a
passable mattress and fresh white sheets. Military corners, he
noticed. He was still wearing the pants and t-shirt they’d given
him outside. There was no sign of the coat. Or the wheelchair.

“Bastards,” he muttered.

He let his mind settle, focused, and reached
the trigger with no problem. He held off using it for now. Good
enough to know he could reach it if he needed it.

The room was a huge dome, over a hundred feet
across and a little over half that high. It was all concrete. In
front of him was a long window, curved to match the wall. The room
on the other side was dark. Way off to his left was a massive door
that looked like a bank vault. The wrong side of a bank vault.

It was familiar, but he couldn’t put his
finger on why.

He grabbed his legs and swung them off the
cot. Getting off the flimsy bed was a challenge, but he managed to
do it without tipping it or himself onto the floor. He paused for a
quick breather and looked around again.

Part of the concrete, a large circle around
the cot, was fresh and clean. The other stuff was older. He saw a
few clusters of rust-colored spots where bolts had been cut off and
ground flat against the floor. There’d been something here in the
center that had been taken out, and new concrete poured to make a
flat floor.

Just as he realized where he was, the lights
flickered on in the other room.

“Oh, sure,” he called out. “Wait until I’m
down on the floor. Real classy.”

Three men and a woman walked into the room
from a door he couldn’t see. The first man and the woman were in
Army uniforms. He couldn’t make out any ranks or names from where
he sat. He didn’t recognize either of them.

The third man was Sorensen, followed by
Smith.

Sorensen issued a few orders Barry couldn’t
hear, then leaned forward to a microphone. “Good evening, Mister
Burke,” he said. His tinny voice echoed out of speakers hidden
around the window. “I hope you slept well.”

There was a long pause and Barry realized the
doctor was waiting for an answer. “Great,” he said. “Like a
baby.”

“Wonderful. I don’t know if you remember me.
I’m Doctor Emil Sorensen. We met at breakfast. I believe you
already know Agent Smith from Homeland Security. I want to assure
you you’re somewhere safe.”

“Well, thank God for that,” said Barry. “Last
thing I remember some nutcase had drugged my food.”

“I apologize for that. The duty sergeant
thought a taser would be better, but I was afraid a surge of
electricity in your nervous system would trigger the change.”

“Yeah, and we wouldn’t want that.”

“Precisely,” said the older man with a
nod.

“I was being ironic.”

“Actually, you were being facetious,” said
Sorensen. “But I was ignoring it, regardless. May I ask you a few
questions?”

“This is an old reactor, isn’t it?” said
Barry. “You’ve got me locked up in the core chamber.”

The doctor nodded. “One of the many projects
the Armed Forces was working on. It was a breeder reactor, built
beneath the proving ground to keep it isolated in case something
went wrong. There’s no danger of radiation. The core never even
reached the testing stage.”

“Radiation isn’t a big worry for me,” said
Barry. “It was an accidental overdose of gamma radiation that
altered my body chemistry and caused this startling metamorphosis
to occur.”

“Really?” Sorensen picked up a clipboard.
“Not the rubber band thing you mentioned earlier?”

Barry sighed.

Smith put his hand over the microphone and
leaned forward to speak in the doctor’s ear. There was a brief
pantomime between them. The government man stepped back and
Sorensen glowered through the window. “Must you always speak with
so many pop culture references?”

“I must, yes, but no one’s making pop culture
any more so I’m starting to feel dated. I haven’t seen a new movie
in two years. And you know what else I just realized?”

The doctor stared at him.

“I’m never going to find out what the hell
was going on with
LOST
. I mean, was it just sheer
coincidence their plane crashed on the island or was it this Jacob
guy pulling the strings all along? And how did most of them end up
back in the 1970s with the Dharma people?”

“Mister Burke,” said Smith, stepping forward
again. With the tinny effect of the intercom, his young voice
sounded like a cartoon. “I know this is frustrating for you.
Probably a bit scary, too. I’m sorry we had to do it this way, but
if you work with us I think you’ll find we all want the same things
here.”

Barry pursed his lips and nodded. “Can I be
honest with you, John?”

“Of course, Mister Burke. Can I call you
Barry?”

“Please do. The thing is, John, Danielle
thought sex with you was mediocre at best. She told me so herself
right after you showed up.”

Smith’s smile became a tight line. He put his
hand over the microphone again. The few words Barry could lip-read
made him smile.

“Well,” said Sorensen once Smith had stepped
away. “Perhaps it would be better if we just went to the
questions.”

“You mean the interrogation?”

“Are you the same Barry Burke who worked at
the Pulsed Power Program in New Mexico from July 2002 to January of
2008?”

“Guilty as charged.”

“How did you get your abilities? Was it a
deliberate process or an accident?”

“I’m afraid that’s need-to-know
information.”

“Well,” said Sorensen, “I need to know so I
can—”

“Pass. Next question.”

“Stop acting so childish, Mr. Burke.”

“Or what? You’ll drug my dinner, too? Pardon
me if I don’t feel like playing your little game.” Barry looked at
Smith. The younger man was rubbing his temples.

“Madelyn loves games,” said the doctor.

“What?”

He was looking past Barry at the back wall of
the reactor core. “My daughter, Madelyn. She’s very competitive.
Loves games. My wife, Eva, thinks it’s amazing we get along so
well, even though we’re so different.”

Barry looked at the older man. Sorensen’s
face had gone slack, a body on autopilot. “Where are they now? Your
wife and daughter. Are they here at Krypton?”

“I brought them out here to save them. I’m
always trying to protect her, even when her mother tells me not to.
I keep doing things to keep her safe.”

Smith put his hand over the microphone again.
The two of them talked and Sorensen’s face became solid again. He
leaned into the microphone and glared at Barry. “I would appreciate
it,” said the doctor, “if you left my personal life out of
this.”

“Ummm, you were the one—”

“Just answer the questions,” snapped
Sorensen. “How much energy can you put out?”

Barry drummed his fingers on his thigh. “In
ambient heat or as directed bursts?”

“Both.”

“Ambient, a lot. Directed, a real lot.”

Sorensen made a fist around his pen.

“Hey, here’s a thought,” Barry said. “How
about a demonstration?”

He flipped the switch in his mind.

Light blasted through the window and Sorensen
and Smith both flinched back. The cot was incinerated and the
concrete floor burned. The window flared again as Zzzap hurled a
blast of energy at the massive door and a deafening hiss of static
boomed from the intercom. He threw another burst and it sizzled
against the steel.

Son of a bitch
, the gleaming wraith
said.
That is a big door
.

“As you yourself pointed out,” Sorensen said,
“you are in a reactor core. It’s extremely heat and radiation
resistant.”

Well, I had to try.

“It was foolish.”

Hey, do you have any idea how much damage
those bolts can do? One of my small blasts is three or four times
more raw power than a bolt of lightning.

“One-point-twenty-one gigawatts,” said Smith
with a faint smile.

Points for the reference, but like I said,
it’s a bit more than that.

“At breakfast you implied your focused energy
was derived from your own mass,” said Sorensen. The doctor paused
to tap his fingers against his thumb. He twisted his head back to
look at Smith. “Remind me to check his follicles and nails when he
reverts to human form. Why not shoot smaller bolts, then, and
conserve your resources?”

Doesn’t work that way. It’s like a fire
hose. It’s on or it’s off, and you do not want to be in front of it
when it’s on. There’s no ‘light mist’ option.
The wraith
drifted over in front of the window.
Quid pro quo, Clarice.
What’s the point of all this?

“I would think that’s obvious,” the doctor
said. Even through the glass, he managed to look down his nose at
Zzzap. “You’re the most powerful superhuman in the world, Mister
Burke. If I can figure out how to duplicate your abilities it could
mean a rebirth for this world. Clean, limitless energy for America
and its allies.”

Yeah
, said Zzzap.
And you’ll figure
this out how? I mean, considering it’s already stumped a lot of
really smart people?

“The usual methods. Examination.
Physiological and neurological testing. If all else fails, we’ve
been authorized for more invasive procedures. I’m sure we won’t
need to go that far, though.”

The burning wraith hung in front of the
window for a moment.
Okay, then
, he said.
I think it’s
time I was leaving. Thanks for the bacon and the massive dose of
sedatives. Let’s not do it again anytime soon.

“You seem to be forgetting something,” said
Sorensen, rapping his knuckles on the window between them. “You’re
in a decommissioned nuclear reactor. This whole chamber was
designed to contain energies like yours. You could spend the next
six —”

Not like mine.

The doctor paused. “Sorry?”

Zzzap moved his head to the left, then to the
right.
This is a fission reactor
, he said.
In this state,
I’m a whole different scale of magnitude. Thousands of times more
powerful. It’s like saying a pair of sunglasses can protect you
from the visible light output of a hydrogen bomb.

“I stand corrected,” said Sorensen. “As I was
—”

I mean, I could just let ‘er rip and burn a
hole straight up and out.

“You could,” said Sorensen, “except for all
the soldiers.”

What soldiers?

“There is a military base above us with close
to a thousand men and women. There could be a barracks right above
that chamber. Or a mess hall. Perhaps a fuel depot which could
explode and injure or kill dozens of people.”

Zzzap focused his attention on the ceiling.
Maybe nothing.

“You can’t be sure, though, can you? The
reactor shielding screens any x-rays or infrared that would tell
you what’s above you.”

Yeah, you got me there. Not that it
matters.

The doctor paused again, his mouth open.

You keep thinking of me in terms of a man.
As matter. I’m pure energy.

“What do you mean?”

Look at all this.
The wraith waved his
arm around himself.
The big door. The walls. You set this up
thinking you needed to hold a physical person who lets off a lot of
energy.

Smith pushed his way to the microphone. “I...
I’m not sure we follow you.”

I don’t blame you. It’s a hard thing to wrap
your head around. I’m not physical. I’m a few bazillion trillion
joules of energy bound into a human shape by my consciousness.
Heck, the only reason you can even hear me is I learned how to
excite air molecules to imitate sound waves.

There was a long moment while they stared at
each other through the glass.

“You’re lying,” said Sorensen. “I have
twenty-three confirmed reports of you causing sonic booms in my
files. You did it just this morning when you arrived. You can’t
cause a sonic boom without mass to displace air.”