Stronger: A Super Human Clash
Read Stronger: A Super Human Clash Online
Authors: Michael Carroll
ALSO BY MICHAEL CARROLL
The Quantum Prophecy Trilogy
The Awakening
The Gathering
The Reckoning
Super Human
The Ascension
MICHAEL
CARROLL
a SUPER HUMAN Clash
PHILOMEL BOOKS
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Copyright © 2012 by Michael Carroll. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. Philomel Books, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Published simultaneously in Canada. Printed in the United States of America.
Edited by Kiffin Steurer. Design by Amy Wu. Text set in 10.5-point Palatino.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carroll, Michael Owen, 1966–
Stronger : a super human clash / Michael Carroll. p. cm. Summary: Recounts the history of the misunderstood villain called Brawn. [1. Science fiction. 2. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.C23497St 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011022436
ISBN: 978-1-101-57221-4
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For Dani
PROLOGUE
THE MINE NOW
THIS MORNING, WHEN ONE
of the medics from the U.N. was digging a bullet out of my arm—most of the time they fall out by themselves, but this one was a keeper—he asked me how many times I’ve been shot.
“I dunno,” I said. I was lying on the ground, faceup, as he worked on me. “Forty or fifty?”
“I can see forty or fifty bullet wounds right
now
,” he said, looking up and down my body. “I meant, how many times have you been shot in total?”
I couldn’t answer that. I’d stopped counting a long time ago.
I’ve certainly been shot hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. Maybe even
tens
of thousands.
A U.S. Army colonel once said to me, “Whatever doesn’t kill ya makes ya stronger.”
I guess it means that if you can get through all the bad stuff that life throws in your path, you come out the other side with the experience of having survived and the knowledge of how to get through it again. Or, as my dad always liked to say, “conflict builds character.”
Sometimes the conflict we encounter comes from other people, and sometimes it comes from ourselves. We all have weaknesses; we all make bad decisions. We’re only human.
Of course, the thing about bad decisions is that most of the time we realize they were bad only in hindsight. At the time, they seem right. I mean, only an idiot would think, “This is a bad decision, but I’m going to do it anyway.”
When I was sixteen, I made a decision that I
knew
was right. My friends didn’t agree with me, we fell out—to put it mildly—and as a consequence my decision changed not only my life, but the lives of countless others.
Far too many people suffered and died because I tried to do the right thing. And even now, almost a quarter of a century later, the echoes of my decision are still being heard.
My decision was only one link in a long chain of events, but—as another old saying goes—every chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If I hadn’t done what I did, the rest of the chain would have fallen apart.
Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think,
If I’d known then what I know now
… But I
was
trying to do the right thing. I have to keep reminding myself of that. We
can’t
know all the consequences of our actions before we take them. We can only act on the knowledge we have at hand.
So even though I sometimes dream about going back to
visit my sixteen-year-old self and slapping him across the back of his head for what he did, I can’t blame him.
We have to make our decisions, and whatever the consequences of those decisions may be, we have to accept them. Suck it up. Live with it. Life goes on.
For some of us.
THE MINE
FOUR YEARS AGO
I WAS NEARING THE END
of my sixteen-hour shift in the main branch of the platinum mine’s oldest and deepest shaft, tunnel D. Because I couldn’t easily wield a pick or a drill to extract the ore, my job was to load the loosened chunks into the iron-wheeled cart and, when the cart was full, push it up through the shaft and out to the processing station.
I was on my hands and knees in the deepest part of the mine—the shaft’s ceiling was far too low for me to stand upright—using my bare hands to scoop the rubble from around Keegan’s feet into a pair of steel buckets. I’d already tossed the larger rocks into the cart behind me.
“Gotta be close to quitting time for you,” Keegan said. She was about five foot five, thin but wiry, and she kept her red hair long but tied back. She stepped back from the wall and
shifted to the side a little to allow the weak yellow light from the nearest lamp to illuminate her work area.
“Almost,” I said. “One more trip up, then I’ve got to bring down the new rails. Setting them will be tomorrow’s job.” The rails on which the carts ran were fifteen feet long and had to be set into the ground like railway tracks. It was a tough job made more difficult by the barely adequate ventilation, the poor light, and the shaft’s low ceiling. Right now the track ended about thirty feet from the wall on which Keegan and the others were working.
Donald DePaiva—the second-in-command to Thomas Hazlegrove, the mine’s overseer—shone his flashlight in Keegan’s direction. “What’s the delay?” he barked at her.
“I was just—”
“Shut up and dig!”
Keegan examined the calluses on her hands for a moment, then picked up her pickax again and swung it at the wall. A tiny fragment of rock shot back and scratched her upper arm—she didn’t even notice. “Might not be worth the effort laying the new tracks,” she said to me. “We’re running dry here too.”
A few months earlier the mine’s C shaft had been almost completely abandoned. There was so little ore coming out of it that it was decided that only a skeleton crew was needed. The rails had been removed, and now only eight men, instead of the usual thirty or so, were working to extract the last possible lumps of ore from the shaft. They were bringing out less than four wheelbarrow-loads a day.
I was about to respond when I heard—no, when I
felt
—the ground trembling. We’d all felt it before, far too many times, tunnel and skiddedand we knew
what it meant: One of the tunnels was coming down.
“Out!” I shouted. “Move!
Now!
”
Keegan and the others dropped their tools and ran.
I scrambled after them as fast as I could, squeezed past the almost-full cart, and saw that Keegan had stopped to help one of the kids who’d tripped and been left behind. “I’ll get her!” I shouted to Keegan. “Just go!”
Keegan hesitated for a moment, then let go of the little girl’s hand and ran.
Still on my hands and knees, I reached the girl and saw that it was the daughter of my friends Imyram and Edmond. She was five years old—I remember the day she was born—and her tears had carved clear lines in the dirt on her face.
Without stopping I snagged her up in one hand and kept her tucked under my chest. If the ceiling collapsed on top of us, there was a chance my body would protect her. I could feel her trembling as she clung to my arm, but I didn’t have time to offer her any words of comfort. “Just hold tight!”
Ahead, the guard DePaiva was facedown on the ground, pinned beneath a foot-thick wooden support beam. Two more workers rushed past me and leaped over DePaiva without giving him a second glance.
For a moment I was tempted to follow suit, but I couldn’t leave a man to be crushed to death if the rest of the ceiling collapsed. I grabbed the nearest end of the beam with my free hand and heaved it upward. DePaiva scrambled free, his flailing hands and feet throwing a fresh cloud of dust in my face.
A group of workers darted out of a side tunnel and skidded
to a stop as they saw DePaiva approaching. “Run!” I roared at them. “We’re clear—I’m the last! Get going!”
By the time I emerged from the shaft’s exit, almost all of the workers had swarmed out of the other tunnels, their faces tight with panic. Imyram grabbed her daughter from my arms and said, “Thank you, thank you!”
I nodded to her as I looked through the crowd for Keegan, then spotted her standing to the side. “What
was
that?”
She pointed back toward the tunnels. “The C shaft. The ceiling collapsed about fifty or sixty yards in. Only minor damage to D, I think.”
Most of the platinum mine was covered by a huge metal dome—steel plates crudely welded together—that shielded us from not only the harsh weather but also the eyes of the rest of the world.
The dome was more than fifty yards high, about three hundred yards across, and easily twice as long. It was painted to match the surrounding landscape. From the ground, of course, it was pretty clear that it was a man-made structure, but from the air it was almost invisible. And being a dome, it didn’t cast any unnatural angular shadows that might draw attention.
This is because the mine didn’t officially exist.
And the
reason
it didn’t officially exist is that it wasn’t just a mine. It was a prison camp.
The mine was surrounded by a twenty-foot-high electrified fence, with cameras set on high poles watching everything. Nothing could get in or out without triggering an alarm.
It was home to almost four hundred prisoners and—in the improvised barracks that surrounded the mine shafts—fewer
than two hundred beds. That wasn’t strictly a problem because there were two shifts every day, twelve hours each. We were not allowed any possessions other than the clothes we’d been wearing when we arrived. There was no segregation of men and women, or adults and children: Every prisoner was there to work, and if we didn’t work, we didn’t eat.
When I first came to the mine, all I knew about platinum was that it was expensive. I thought it was mostly used for jewelry, but Keegan told me that most of the world’s platinum was used in cars as a key component of catalytic converters, which cut way down on pollution. Given the conditions of the mine, it wasn’t much of a comfort to know our enslavement was making life a little better for people who didn’t even know we existed.
