Revenge of the ULTRAs (The Last Hero Book 4) (8 page)

A
dam stood
on the corner of the dimly lit Staten Island street and looked through the window very closely.

He’d heard rumors that she lived here. She’d moved house after the showdown with Saint, of course, for her own protection more than anything. And outside the apartment block, there were well-built bodyguards. But they’d be no problem for Adam. Not with an army behind him.

He heard horns honking all around him. He had his hood pulled up to cover his face. He didn’t want to reveal his identity here, not yet. He was a national—
international
—overnight sensation. As much as he enjoyed the attention, this wasn’t a time for drawing attention to himself.

This was a time for planning the next step.

He rubbed his tongue against his furry teeth and tasted a little blood on his gum. He’d got it from Kyle when he’d fought back against him. The little shit had actually resisted the magnetic force of his ability to take powers away.

Bless him. It was just a temporary victory for him.

If word from the rainforest were true, they’d soon have him back in their possession anyway.

He thought about the call he’d got from that group in the Amazon. They’d told him they had Kyle and the rest of the Resistance, and that they would only hand them over if Adam promised to give them advanced powers of their own. Of course Adam had agreed. But that didn’t mean he was going to stand by his word. He had a group of his newly converted followers on their way over to the Amazon right now.

And diplomacy wasn’t exactly top of the agenda.

Adam was drifting from the whole purpose of his visit when he saw movement behind the window.

She was just as he remembered from the footage at the battle with Saint. Slim. Wore cute glasses that perched right on the edge of her nose. She looked quirky. Exactly Adam’s kind of girl.

And maybe she would be his girl when he finally got Kyle Peters out of the way.

Because Kyle Peters was nothing more than a distraction for her. Kyle Peters was not as strong as he liked to think.

Kyle Peters was a lie.

And Adam was going to exploit that lie for all it was worth.

He saw Ellicia Williams look at him as he stood there on the sidewalk, and he looked right back into her eyes from underneath his hood. He saw her chocolate brown hair. Those thick-rimmed glasses sitting on top of her nose. Her beaming blue eyes.

She held eye contact for a few seconds, and Adam worried that maybe he’d freaked her out. Maybe her guard would be up.

Then she looked across the street elsewhere.

She didn’t look concerned.

She had no idea.

She disappeared back inside the apartment.

Adam took a deep breath of the humid air.

Then, he walked towards Ellicia’s home.

I
t didn’t take
me long to find the compound where the Resistance were being held prisoner.

The scorching Amazonian sun burned down on the top of my head. Around me, classic Amazon rainforest things, like… well, trees. A hell of a lot of trees. I could hear birds singing and feel the humidity as I breathed in the sweet air. Sweat dripped down the back of my neck. No matter how much I tried to cool myself down with my icy abilities, it was still pretty damned warm.

The compound stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. It was an ugly metal structure, with wire fences and barbed wire around the top of it. I could hear dogs barking in the distance. Beside the compound, I could see people picking something from the plants that I assumed had to be some kind of illegal substance.

Standing at the door were many armed guards.

They weren’t just armed with the usual machetes and guns. They had those electromagnetic weapons, too. I figured it made sense that gangs had got hold of those weapons, which had the abilities to neutralize ULTRAs. It gave them a sense of power. They were cropping up all over the world, sold on the darkest corners of the internet. Once a weapon like that got into the hands of the public, they weren’t too easy to get off the streets.

I had to watch my step. I had to be very careful. I couldn’t put my friends at risk.

I activated my invisibility and edged closer to the compound fences. I watched my step at all times, desperate not to trigger some kind of system that’d alert the guards to my presence. I knew it would be only so long before they went looking for their missing colleague in the woods. And when they didn’t find him, I dreaded to think what they might do.

I hovered off the ground and drifted over the fence. There were serious numbers guarding this compound, sure. But they were nothing I hadn’t handled before. Nothing I couldn’t deal with.

I dropped to the other side of the fence, staying elevated just inches above the ground, and with my invisibility still activated, I hovered closer toward the building.

The closer it got, the more nervous
I
got. I knew these people weren’t ULTRA hunters, and it seemed like they weren’t totally with Adam either. They were just doing their job, and their job was to hand over my friends and me in exchange for powers of their own.

I knew how dangerous the greed for power could be. We had to be vigilant.

I was about to hover through the wall inside the compound when I heard the dogs beside me growling.

I looked around at them. They were massive, American pit bull style dogs. Studded chains were draped around their muscly necks. Thick saliva drooled down from their mouths.

They were looking right at me.

I checked to see I was still invisible. I was, so I knew they must be able to smell me somehow.

“What’s up, boys?” a man asked in Spanish. Yeah, I’d used my abilities to help me learn other languages. Didn’t all heroes? How meta.

I saw him, with a rifle in his arms, walk up to his dogs. One of them barked. One of them thrust against the leash.

I was about to quickly head inside when I heard gunfire in the distance.

The man turned around. “Shit.” He went running away from the dogs, in the direction of the gunfire.

A distraction. That was just what I needed right now. It was perfect.

I took the opportunity to avoid teleporting through the wall for fear of what might be on the other side and instead drifted down towards the main entrance. I held my breath, reduced my form so not a single atom would be detectable by any systems they had in place—hopefully—and I moved through the door.

The inside of the complex was vast and mostly empty. It was even hotter in here, the glass ceiling creating a greenhouse effect. It smelled of sweat, badly.

I didn’t have to look so far to find out why.

In front of me, masses of people worked away at picking leaves and mashing them up. Further at the back of the compound, I saw a machine working away, as more people chopped leaves into small pieces. The air reeked with a sour, unfamiliar smell. I had no doubts now, from some of the documentaries I’d seen on Netflix, that this was some kind of cocaine operation.

I looked around. The Resistance had to be somewhere in this place. I couldn’t see them on show, though, so it made me wonder.

I searched all around but couldn’t find them.

And then I saw the door at the back of the compound.

I looked over my shoulder. Outside, the gunfire was getting louder. Definitely some kind of battle going on.

I held my breath and started to open the door.

“Stop.”

My muscles tightened. My stomach turned.

I slowly looked over my shoulder.

A woman was standing opposite me.

She was holding a knife.

I started to open my lips to protest when I saw another woman appear beside her.

“I can’t stop.”

“You have to stop,” the woman said, putting a hand on the other woman’s back. “For your children. For your family.”

I took a deep breath and closed my heavy eyes. I was invisible. They couldn’t see me. I had to stay focused.

I moved through the door and made my way down some steps. The further down I got, the cooler it got.

I ended up moving through another door.

Then I saw them.

The Resistance—what was left of it—were in a cell.

Standing opposite them, five men.

All of them had those electromagnetic guns raised.

“You ever gonna let us out of here?” Stone grumbled. He was bruised. He looked like he’d taken a beating.

One of the guards grinned, revealing a golden tooth. “Oh you will. You’ll be outta here soon. Only we’ll have your powers, big man. See how many people you’re punching then.”

“Not so fast,” I said.

I appeared behind the men.

Right away, I activated a wormhole and started to drag them into it.

One of the men fired an electromagnetic pulse at me. I saw it getting closer. It was just inches from singeing my skin and rendering me useless for a short while.

I focused on it, as the men disappeared into the wormhole.

Then I froze it in midair, inches from my face.

It turned to ice. Then it melted and dripped to the floor.

I looked up at the men as they got further through the wormhole.

“You were saying?” I said.

“Please don’t—!”

I blasted the men through a wormhole.

Wherever they were going, at least they’d be out of my way for a while.

Careful what you wish for.

I deactivated my invisibility and walked over to the cell. “Come on. We have to get outta here.”

“You took your time,” Vortex said.

I tried to open the cell door, then stepped back and aimed my powers at it. “Yeah. I was unconscious too.”

“Wow,” Ember said. “The golden boy’s not so perfect after all.”

“Let me deal with that,” Stone said.

I was about to fire the cell door away when Stone grabbed it with his rocky hands and ripped it away without even breaking a sweat.

“There. Now what?”

I thought about disappearing.

Then I thought about those people working away in awful conditions upstairs. I thought about the woman crying, just desperate to make a tiny bit of cash for her kids. “There’s something we need to do first.”

I started to make my way up the stairs, the Resistance following closely behind.

I walked out of the door into the main room.

What was waiting for me wasn’t exactly what I’d expected.

The guards were all down.

In their place, Adam’s followers, no doubt about it.

There were fifty of them.

And they were surrounding us.

A
dam walked
up the stairs towards Ellicia’s apartment.

It was totally silent in this apartment block. He figured it was a bit of a downgrade from the family home Ellicia used to live in. But at the end of the day, safety was paramount, and Ellicia felt safer away from her home.

Quite cute that she stayed in Staten Island though. As if nobody would find her, eventually.

Adam looked over his shoulder at the doorway. The guards that had stood there lay still, their necks twisted and their eyes bulging. He felt a twinge of sympathy inside. He hadn’t enjoyed doing what he did to them. Of course, he hadn’t done it firsthand. He didn’t have the strength to do things like that, not yet. But one of his followers had done it for him.

But even so, he still felt like he’d been the one to snap their necks. It sparked a strange sense of guilt inside, even though he knew he was fighting the good fight.

He never enjoyed taking anyone down. It just didn’t fit in with the ethical code he’d had instilled in him from a very young age. His mom had always told him when he was annoyed or mad at someone, to get inside their heads and imagine why they might be acting the way they were. When she’d first told him that, Adam found the idea pretty cool. Getting inside someone’s head was like a superpower, and Adam had always wanted superpowers.

But the older he’d got, the more truth he saw in his mom’s words. When you get inside someone’s head, when you put yourself in their shoes, you can truly understand their actions. Maybe not understand them fully sometimes, but at least
empathize
with them.

As the years passed by, Adam fast realized a dark secret. A flip side to the coin his mom had introduced him to when he was being bullied by Mike Hart back when he was eight.

Nobody thought they were the bad guys.

In their own minds, everyone was doing the right thing.

And right now, knowing he was going to enjoy what awaited for Kyle Peters—what he was going to take away from him—he wasn’t sure whether or not he was the good or the bad guy.

But he was going to do what he had to do anyway.

He got further up the stairs. The steps creaked beneath his feet. The closer he got to Ellicia’s apartment, the more he could smell her perfume in the air. He knew her parents were away. He’d been sure to visit at a time when he had fewer people to get past and deal with.

It was just Ellicia, all alone.

Adam reached the top of the stairs. He wasn’t sure how exactly Ellicia was going to fit into his plan just yet. But he knew that she would. He had ideas. Lots of ideas. And all of them involved getting to Kyle somehow.

He didn’t want to be cruel to Ellicia, though.

It’d be much more satisfying to him if Ellicia joined his side by choice. That would hurt Kyle even more.

Not only would Adam have Kyle’s abilities, but he’d have his girlfriend, too.

He walked further down the corridor towards Ellicia’s room. He’d not always had such a downer on girls. He was a typical eighteen-year-old really. He’d had his relationships, most of which had fallen apart. He’d been betrayed one too many times. So that didn’t exactly instill him with confidence.

But Ellicia was going to be different. Ellicia was going to be special.

He stood outside Ellicia’s door and listened to the gentle sounds of her footsteps walking around in there. His hood was still up. He pulled it back, shuffled his dark locks around.

Then he took a deep breath and reached for the handle of the door.

“I’m through with him, Ellicia. I’m through with being afraid. And you should be too.”

The guy’s voice took Adam by surprise. He wasn’t expecting Ellicia to have company.

“He’s my boyfriend, Damon.”

“And he’s my best friend. Or at least he
was
my best friend, before all this… this…”

“He’s just doing what he thinks is right.”

“Don’t make excuses for him, Ellicia. You were the one who said you were worried about him in the first place.”

“I
am
worried about him. But that doesn’t mean I’m turning my back on him.”

Adam shuffled closer to the door. He heard a sigh.

“Kyle’s made his bed. For the first time in his lazy life, he’s actually made his bed. Now he has to lie in it.”

“Damon, please.”

“I’m sorry, Ellicia. It’s been… it’s been nice. Knowing you. Being friends with you. And I hope we’ll stay friends for a long time. But you should see sense while you can and get far, far away from Kyle. He’s dangerous. He’s going to get us all in trouble. He’s going to get us all killed.”

Damon’s footsteps got closer to the door.

Adam stepped back and leaned against the wall, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible.

“You really believe what the media are saying?” Ellicia asked.

“What about the media?”

“Adam. The people rising up. You really think that’s the right thing? For the Resistance to have their powers taken away? I mean, for every mistake they make, they save ten more situations. We just hear the bad stuff because the news always tells us the bad stuff. But there’s more to it than that. You know there is.”

Damon didn’t respond for a while. The silence stretched on, intense and unbearable.

Then, “Maybe Adam has a point. Maybe it is time someone else had a go at looking out for the world.”

“You can’t really think that.”

“Well, I do.”

Silence again.

Adam smiled.

“I’m sorry, Ellicia. Really. I… I hope you find your way.”

He opened the door and stepped out into the corridor.

Adam watched Damon walk away. He watched him walk towards the stairs, big rucksack on his back.

He watched him, and he smiled.

He didn’t need Ellicia anymore. Not yet.

He had a better idea.