Just Cause: Revised & Expanded Edition (29 page)

“Not much we can do. These guys were twice as big as you. Maybe we can find a smaller guard somewhere,” Doublecharge said. “In the meantime, we’ll take the overt risks and you follow when the coast is clear. Jack, what’s the time?”

“Almost midnight,” he said. “Think they’re going to do a shift change?”

“Let’s wait and see.”

They watched out the windows of the dormitory, careful to remain in the shadows. Sure enough, outlying guards climbed or flew down from their towers and others came in from the perimeters. Replacements exited the dorms, yawning and flexing stiff muscles.

“Grab something to carry. We’re going to go straight across to the power station,” said Doublecharge. She picked up a box of supplies.

“Why carry something?” Sally asked.

“Old tricks always work the best,” said Jack. “If you act like you’re supposed to be somewhere when you’re not, and you carry something appropriate in a purposeful way, people tend not to notice you.” He picked up a clipboard that he found hanging by the door. “This thing is like a free pass to anywhere.”

 “We’ll signal you when it’s clear to come across,” said Doublecharge to Sally, and opened the door.

They walked across the hard-packed clay toward the entrance to the power station. Nobody stopped them or even seemed to pay any attention to the three heroes. At the door, Jack swiped the keycard he’d taken from the guards. Sally held her breath and it seemed like eternity before the green light on the security box clicked on. The meter-thick door slid sideways into the frame.

Doublecharge looked back in Sally’s direction and nodded. Sally bolted across twenty yards of open space in the blink of an eye and skidded to a stop just inside the corridor as the door slid shut. She glanced around and saw a security camera behind a Lexan bubble.

“Oh, shit!” She ducked.

Jack smiled. “No problem.” He held up a small device. “Already took care of it with this little baby.”

“Geez, this guy’s like Santa Claus,” Sally said to Glimmer. “Now what?”

“We go further in,” said Doublecharge. “Until we find out what this place is for or we can’t get any further with these.” She held up a key card for emphasis. “Sally, you make sure our back is clear. You’re fast enough to take down anyone who sees us before an alarm can be raised.”

They passed through the corridor into a nexus. The interior of the building was much smaller than the exterior, which implied a great thickness of shielding. Glimmer mentioned the discrepancy.

“Yeah, it’s making me pretty uncomfortable,” said Jack. “Like I might be about to find out the one thing I’m not invulnerable to is an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.”

The doors from the nexus were labeled in both English and Spanish. One led to the
Control Room
, one to the
Holding Cells
, one to
Medical
and the last to the
Reaction Chamber
.

“I don’t see any sign of more security measures,” said Jack after he checked the room. “Maybe they’re not expecting anyone to sneak into a camp full of armed parahumans.”

“You don’t believe that any more than I do,” said Doublecharge. “The Control Room is where we’re most likely to find an answer. There should be more people in here. I don’t like this one bit. Why would there be access into a reaction chamber?”

Nobody could answer her. Weapons drawn, they opened the door that led to the Control Room. A short corridor ended in a rising stairwell. Jack took the point as they advanced. The stairs ended in another door. Jack put his ear to it, eyes closed in concentration.

“I don’t hear anything at all. But if this is another foot-thick door, I wouldn’t. Jay, anything?”

Glimmer shook his head. “I can’t sense anyone there.”

“Why would a control room for a nuclear reactor be abandoned?” Jack asked. “Is Destroyer so bright that he can build one that runs itself?”

“Maybe,” said Doublecharge. “Be on your guard. I think this is a trap.”

“Then why are we still here?” whispered Sally.

Jack smiled. “Because we’re Just Cause, babe. It’s just what we do.”

He swiped the card and a motor hummed as the door slid into the wall. Beyond was a semicircular room lined with banks of computers and thick windows. Although they saw several duty stations, the room was empty of people.

Jack stepped forward to look out the windows. “You’d better see this,” he said, a funny note in his voice.

The others moved up to see what he did. Below them stretched a long, open room lined with metallic cots with manacles at each corner. A thick layer of ash coated the floor. Greasy soot blackened the walls and edges of the observation windows, which were smudged as if they’d been wiped without much regard for perfectionism. At the far end of the room, they saw a heavy industrial door marked with the universal symbol for radioactivity.

“What the hell is this?” Doublecharge asked.

Glimmer motioned to a console that looked like a video monitor. Jack stepped up to it and played with the controls for a few moments. “Ah, here we go,” he said as words filled the screen.

24-February 2004

Test #0117

Subjects: 102

Rads: 7,500

Duration: 3.0 seconds

The words were replaced by four video images of different angles from the interior of the room below. They saw people chained down to each of the bed frames. Most struggled; many screamed in fear. Figures wearing radiation suits bustled through the room, checked locks, and set up equipment. A digital readout in the corner showed a countdown of two minutes. As the clock wound down toward zero, the suited figures evacuated the room to leave only the men and women in the beds. When the clock ticked down to five seconds, the large door at the end of the room slid into the roof, which revealed a complex apparatus glowing with unholy radiance. At 0:00 a bright flare emitted from the device that lasted for three seconds and blanked out all video screens.

When the cameras came back online, several seconds later, all the bed frames were empty and fresh ashes swirled through the room. A few seconds later, the recording ended.

“Oh my God!” Sally whispered.

Jack tapped a control and a compact disc ejected from the machine. He handed it to Sally. “Here,” he said, his voice rough. “You take this. You have the best chance of getting it out of here if things go badly.”

“Let’s go,” said Doublecharge. “We’re pushing our luck as it is.”

They returned to the lobby below.

“
I’ve got a bad feeling about this
,” Jack said.

The large door slid open and they found themselves face-to-face with what looked like the entire camp with scores of weapons leveled at them. Some soldiers’ fists glowed with various deadly energies.

Sally spun around and saw more soldiers crouched in the doorways of the lobby, likewise armed and ready for anything.

Heinrich Kaiser stepped into the ring of soldiers, followed by the ancient black man who hobbled with his cane and cackled quietly to himself. Kaiser sized them up with the air of an entomologist who regarded particularly choice insects pinned to a card. “Old tricks always work the best, Mr. Raymond. Wasn’t that what you said?”

With a whine of servomotors, Destroyer stepped around from the edge of the power station. “
Y
OU
J
UST
C
AUSE LOSERS ARE SO PREDICTABLE
,” he said. “
D
ROP YOUR GUNS AND DON’T MOVE.
”

Jack gave a wry half-grin. “Well, which is it, drop our guns or don’t move? They’re mutually exclusive actions, smart guy.”

“The intention is clear enough, Mr. Raymond,” said Kaiser.

Jack and the others dropped their guns. A soldier teleported to the heroes, collected the weapons, and then popped back to the others in a series of rapid reports like gunfire.

“How’d you catch us?” Jack asked.

“Him,” said Jay through clenched teeth as he glared at the old man with the cane.

“Bertram has been with me for many years,” said Kaiser. “He is very skilled at psionic disciplines. More so, I believe, than you, Mr. Road. He has kept you from seeing our true movements since you came to the camp.”

“How’d you even know we were here?” Sally asked. A figure stepped out from behind the blond man.

Diego
.

White hot fury filled Sally which blinded her to everything but the smiling boy. She took a step forward. A sudden pain ripped through her entire body and made her gasp in agony. The icy burning was strong enough to double her over.

“Stop it! Leave her alone!” shouted Jack.

“
D
ON’T MOVE,
C
RACKERJACK!
” Destroyer said. “
Y
OU MIGHT BE BULLETPROOF, BUT YOUR FRIENDS AREN’T!
”

“Bertram, please,” said Kaiser. “That’s not really necessary.”

The old man licked his lips with a gray tongue. “A lesson must be taught. She will join us eventually, as will they all, Heinrich. I will see to that.”

A voice in Sally’s mind cut through the pain, like a spot of pure white on a red wall. In spite of the agony, she locked eyes with Glimmer.
Sally… run!
 

Time shifted into the syrupy slowness of accelerated perceptions. She tried to scream “No!” at him, but it felt like her vocal cords were frozen.

Glimmer’s head turned and his eyes focused upon the old man. His brow furrowed and the pain wracking Sally’s body vanished. He grunted with effort and his eyes turned blood red as capillaries burst throughout them. Something powerful passed across the intervening distance to Bertram from Glimmer, with an anticlimactic effect. Bertram’s eyes rolled up in his head and he toppled. Blood poured from his ears and nose.

At the speed of thought:
Sally… run!
 

Sally pushed herself to her feet and ran to the edge of the clearing before she dared glance back. Destroyer’s guns roared with a sound like thunder to her accelerated senses. She averted her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see the exploding shells tear Glimmer apart.

Flame blossomed under Destroyer’s boots as he took to the sky in pursuit of Sally. She saw a familiar flash as Diego transformed into the bullet-fast winged snake and raced toward her like an organic missile.

Half-blinded by her own tears, Sally turned and ran into the dark jungle, frantic to find the road. She dodged past shadowy tree trunks and mercifully avoided stepping in any more holes. In a few seconds she found herself at the road which led back to Porto San José. She glanced back and saw a distant rising star in the darkness that must have been Destroyer. Movement flashed in the corner of her eye and she ducked backward as the Quetzalcoatl’s razor-sharp tail lanced through the air her head had occupied a moment before.

Sally dodged the winged serpent as it pursued her, hissing and spitting. The tail flashed so fast that even with her sped-up vision she could hardly see it. She stepped on a loose rock in the road and lost her balance. The tail flashed downward toward her eye and she barely jerked her head aside in time. The razor-sharp tail cut a stinging bloody furrow down her cheek instead.

She rolled and twisted to avoid the tail as it whipped at her with dangerous ferocity. She scrabbled across the road, desperate for a tree branch or anything she could use as a weapon. Her fingers closed around a fist-sized rock and she swung it at the serpent with all her might. She missed its head, but connected solidly with one wing. Diego whirled in midair to try to stay in flight, but he lost all momentum. Sally saw her opportunity. In a blur, she grasped his tail, whipped him around with a strength she didn’t know she had, and smacked him into the ground. Her other fist looped down and smashed the stone into the snake’s belly with a sickening crunch.

Light flashed and she was straddling a naked Diego in an obscene parody of lovemaking. She recoiled and rolled backward and leaped to her feet, ready to fight again. He didn’t move and drew a ragged, forced breath. She stepped closer, stone raised should she need it.

One of his arms twisted at an unnatural angle; a shocking white knob of bone protruded from the place his forearm met his elbow. His broken torso looked as if it had been ripped apart and then sewn back together with crude, uncaring hands. He was dying in the most painful way Sally could imagine.

“Señorita,” he whispered through the blood that bubbled on his lips. “Help me…”

“I liked you.” Sally found her voice. “I even trusted you, you little shit. And you lied to me. You lied to all of us! My friend is dead because of you!”

 “Not my fault.” He coughed.

A distant sound made her raise her head. The star that was Destroyer had developed several bright trails of flame and smoke that rushed in on her position.

She felt like she should have said something to Diego, but there was no time left. She bolted down the road only a second before the missiles converged on the site. A tremendous explosion tore through the nighttime sky. The heat washed across her back as she fled. She couldn’t trust anyone in San José. She didn’t know anyone else, and could only think of one place to go.

Chapter Twenty-One

My greatest fear is an all-out parahuman war. The minor fights that take place in the streets and the skies are nothing compared to the devastation that would result from a full-scale battle. It is my greatest hope that by properly training these heroes, they can prevent such a tragedy.

-Lane Devereaux,
Time Magazine
, December 4, 1999

February, 2004

Phoenix, Arizona

Bruised, filthy, Sally crawled onto the dark porch of the house. Her clothing was torn into rags and even her accelerated healing hadn’t been able to keep up with all the damage she’d done to herself in her flight. She had faint memories of tree branches slapping at her, falling down steep and rocky slopes, and crossing a river fast enough that her feet didn’t sink into the water. Her feet had gone numb inside the remains of her boots and every muscle in her legs threatened to seize up in the most painful cramps imaginable. Her face was covered with dust and road grime. She shivered like someone freezing, despite the warmth of the surrounding darkness.