Elite (20 page)

Horchoff
paused for a moment, as if contemplating what to say next. He lifted his eyebrows as if he could not think of anything significant.

“Well I guess we might as well just get to it,” he finally spoke. “Why don’t you come around up here?”

Daniel stood up from his cloud chair and made his way over to where Horchoff was standing. As he rounded the table he saw a barbell sitting in the middle of the floor – three large weight plates on each end. Richfield’s presence in the room had somehow prevented him from noticing it when he walked in.

Daniel took his place on the other side of the barbell, across from
Horchoff. Richfield sat in a chair in the corner, legs crossed and his hand on his chin, silently looking on.

“Now as we’ve talked about before,”
Horchoff began, “there are many documented cases of ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary feats of strength when face with a crises – For example, lifting a car in order to save a loved one.

“Now we understand the reaction in the brain and the body that allows this to happen, but while many have tried to recreate this in a controlled environment, all have failed. The reason is that it seems impossible to create that kind of biological response without actually experiencing some sort of desperation. This is an example of where we have seen the conscious mind effect neurological signals to the body, but for some reason humans have yet to be able to establish a sustained connection – until you.”

Horchoff stood and stared silently into Daniel’s eyes for a few moments, a very serious expression on his face, as if Daniel were missing the undertone of what he was saying.

“Daniel,” he spoke again, “this was the inspiration for my work.”

He pointed down at the barbell in front of them. Richfield remained silent in the corner, adding to the tension in the room. Daniel, feeling a bit awkward, didn’t know what to say.

             
Instead it was Horchoff who once again broke the silence.

“What we have here is a barbell with 300 pounds attached to it – three fifty-pound weights on each end.”

Daniel began rubbing his hands together, anxious to lift the incredible weight.

“I want you to curl it,”
Horchoff stated.

Daniel glanced up at him, smirking at the challenge that the doctor had presented him with. A deadlift would have been one thing, but curling that amount of weight was a horse of a different color.

Without hesitation, Daniel squatted down and wrapped his hands under the bar, preparing to lift.

“The world record is one-hundred and seventy-five pounds,”
Horchoff added with a smirk of his own.

This caused Daniel to let go and readjust himself. This was going to take a lot more psyching up.

“I believe the record here at the complex is something like one-sixty,” Richfield chimed in.

Horchoff
glanced at him questioningly.

“Big Mike,” he said, answering
Horchoff’s unspoken question.

Horchoff
nodded in agreement, then turned back to Daniel.

“Why not start there?” Daniel asked them.

Richfield chimed in before the doctor could speak. “The doctor originally wanted to, but I decided there was no need. I want to see what you can do now. Building up to it would contradict the whole point of this experiment if you ask me.”

Horchoff
gave Daniel a barely noticeable shrug in response to Richfield’s answer.

“Are you ready?”
Horchoff asked.

Daniel let out an audible sigh. “Let’s make history,” he said.

He once again bent down and wrapped his hands under the bar.

“Okay, now take a deep breath and absorb as much oxygen into your blood as possible,”
Horchoff coached.

Daniel obeyed, expanding his lungs and taking in a large breath of air.

“Now increase your heart rate and move the blood into the muscles in your arms, legs, and back,” Horchoff added.

Daniel closed his eyes and synced his conscious mind with the other areas of his brain. He made his heart beat harder and faster, increasing the necessary blood vessels and directing the oxygenated blood to the proper areas of his body.

“Open up your adrenal glands in your hypothalamus, and let the adrenaline and testosterone flow to your muscles.”

Daniel sent the signals from his brain to his glands, sending the chemicals soaring to his muscles, and nodded his head to let the doctor know that it had been done.

“Now lift!” Horchoff half shouted, suddenly transforming from a medical doctor into a personal trainer.

Daniel thrust up with his legs, keeping his hands on the bar, feeling the enormous amount of resistance from the force of gravity pulling down on the weights as he tried to lift them up from the floor. The small grooves on the metal bar began to dig into his hands as he pulled his body upward.

But the bar would not budge.

He let go, stood up, and let breathed deeply.

His first reaction was to glance over at Richfield. His expression remained surprisingly constant.

“That’s okay,”
Horchoff assured Daniel. “This time I want you to lift up slowly. As you start to feel the tension in each of your muscles, I want you to focus on sending the blood, adrenaline, and testosterone to those muscles, and give the command to contract to their full potential. Don’t hold back.”

Daniel nodded, his hands making their way back down to the cold metal bar for a third time.

He again closed his eyes, took a deep breath, expanding his lungs even further, pumped up his heart rate, sent adrenaline flowing, and slowly began to lift up on the bar.

He felt it first in his thighs and in his shoulders. He felt into the back of his brain, and told it to expand the blood vessels in those areas and send all of the oxygenated blood it could to those muscles as fast as it possibly could, the adrenaline in tow.

Then, he identified the part of his brain that was commanding his quads to contract, and when the command wasn’t strong enough, he pushed harder into his mind. The problem he had faced before was that the signal that needed to be sent for his muscles to contract past their normal function was one that had never been used before, but it did not take long for him to figure it out. It was the same feeling only more intense – like when the answer to a question is on the tip of your tongue, so you think harder to try and find it in the back of your mind.

Suddenly, he felt his leg, shoulder, and back muscles contract further, and before he realized what was happening he was lifting the bar up off the ground.

He exhaled fiercely as he brought himself to stand upright, his hands gripping the bar that now hung down from his shoulders. Most of the strain had now moved from his legs to his arms and lower back.

“Very good,”
Horchoff said with encouragement in his voice. “Now curl it.”

Daniel took another deep breath. Lifting it off the ground was the easy part. Using his biceps to curl the bar up to his chest would prove to be far more difficult.

He redirected the flow of blood and adrenaline to his forearms and biceps, as he began his attempt to curl the 150-pounds that rested on each end of the thin metal shaft. It was then that he realized that he was actually dealing with more than 300 pounds. Horchoff had failed to mention how much the bar weighed. It was clear that the doctor was no weight lifter.

Daniel closed his eyes, and like he had done with his quads seconds ago, he forced his biceps to contract beyond their normal capabilities, increasing his heart rate even further to allow more oxygen to reach his contracting biceps.

His adrenal glands were now wide open as adrenaline and testosterone poured into his blood stream like a dam releasing the waters of the raging river behind it.

He exhaled as he moved the bar up just a couple inches. He felt a strong burning sensation shoot through his forearms as he did so. He opened his blood vessels in his forearms to make room for more blood, simultaneously opening his lungs to take in more oxygen and forcing his heart to beat even faster.

He lifted the weight another inch or two as the burning sensation spread up his arms to his biceps. His elbows were now at a forty-five degree angle. He tried to contract even further but could not. There just wasn’t enough blood and adrenaline in his body to accomplish such a feat. His muscles could not possibly contract any further.

He felt one of the veins in his neck about to burst.

“Let it go Daniel,” Horchoff finally said, fully aware of what was happening.

After one last push with no luck, Daniel gave up and let the bar crash to the floor with a huge
thunk,
hearing the concrete floor crack beneath the carpeting.

Daniel put his hands on his hips and turned away, breathing heavily, trying to recover some of the oxygen he had just used up. He could also feel his adrenaline level running low.

“You need to slow your heart rate,” Horchoff said. “Bring everything back down to normal. The body wasn’t built to handle that much stress. You did very well.”

The doctor sounded encouraging, but Daniel knew him well enough by now to be able to sense the disappointment within him. This was the final test – the spark that had ignited the fire that was his obsession with this project. If Daniel couldn’t accomplish this task,
Horchoff would never feel the operation was a success.

“Maybe next time remember to direct more of the energy you’ve absorbed through your diet to your muscles – use up more of the proteins and carbohydrates you’ve ingested,”
Horchoff suggested.

Daniel, turned to look at the bar, contemplating the doctor’s suggestion. There were just so many things he needed to concentrate on at once. But the doctor’s words made him think about lying in bed, working his muscles and burning energy before he slept.

That was it.

Daniel looked over at Richfield who had not moved throughout the entire ordeal, and smiled. A smile crept over Richfield’s face as well, as he began to understand Daniel’s intentions.

Daniel concentrated and inhaled, continuing to do so until he was absolutely positive that his lungs had fully expanded and had reached full capacity. He absorbed every last bit of oxygen into his blood, and began cranking up his heart rate to a pace he had never before pushed it.

Once he was certain he had absorbed every last bit of oxygen out of the air, he exhaled, and began taking repetitive, deep breaths to try and compensate for the high levels of O-two he was now providing his muscles. He opened up his adrenal glands and very quickly reached down for the bar.

He contracted his quads and lower back muscles just like before, and before Horchoff could realize what was happening, lifted the 300-pound bar. The task was much easier than the previous attempt. This could have been due to the fact that he already knew what he needed to do, or because he had done a better job of preparing his body this time around.

Daniel took several more deep breaths,
then directed his attention to his forearms and biceps, giving the signal to contract.

It only took a second or two before he was right back to where his muscle contractions had plateaued on his last attempt, and again he found himself unable to go any further.

This time however, he knew what to do.

Horchoff
had made him realize that his conscious mind had been the thing that had been preventing him from achieving his body’s full-potential. When he lied awake in bed telling his body to burn more calories, he had little use for conscious thought, so he would often drift away from it, focusing solely on the signals being sent from the back of his brain.

He had even found himself being asleep while not being asleep, if that made any sense. When the conscious mind shuts down to rest, the brain still functions on a basic level – telling the body to continue breathing and the like – while the conscious mind sleeps and dreams.

Only in Daniel’s case instead of dreaming, his consciousness hung out in the back of his brain controlling the functions normally left up to the rest of the brain during sleep. When Daniel would decide he was done and push his conscious mind back to where it belonged, it would feel as though he had just woken up from a nap. It was a bizarre sensation to say the least.

And he knew that when those people in the stories had rescued their loved ones who were in danger, conscious though was put aside while their primal instincts took over, allowing them to achieve unnatural strength.

Daniel planned to put that concept to use right now. He would not so much put himself to sleep, but abandon conscious thought for a moment in order to concentrate harder on controlling his biological functions.

He closed his eyes and let go of conscious thought, letting his mind wander from his frontal lobe, through the manmade neural pathways in his brain back to where neural impulses were being sent to his lungs, heart, adrenal glands, blood vessels, and muscles.

In the distance he could hear sounds – someone yelling at him – but he was unable to recognize the sounds at the moment, as his mind was not occupying his cerebral cortex.