Stronger: A Super Human Clash (17 page)

He turned to Cosmo. “What about the nickel and iron already in the slag heaps?”

“That’s going to be a messy job,” Cosmo said. “I’ve been talking to the teams that work the electromagnet, and they figure that’s the best approach. We rig up some new electromagnets—a lot of them, really powerful ones—and pass every shovelful of slag through them. They figure that should get maybe eighty percent of the iron and nickel. Problem is, there’s more than thirty
years’
worth of the stuff out there, and the slag at the bottom has got thousands of tons pressing down on it. Sifting through the whole amount is going to take a lot of work, a lot of manpower. Right now, I can’t see it being a viable option.”

I said, “Actually, there
is
an easier way. But it’s dangerous. Should work, though.”

Hazlegrove said, “Go on.”

“First we run the new electromagnets over the entire surface to get the easy stuff. That shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. Once that’s done … we drill a few boreholes into the slag heaps and set charges.”

“Explosives? That’s
crazy
!” Cosmo said. “That’d never work!”

Emily Stanhope said, “No, he might be on to something there….” She reached over to Hazlegrove’s desk and grabbed a pencil and a sheet of paper, and started working out complex calculations. “The slag heaps are roughly conical, so that’s the height times pi times the radius squared, divided by three…. Give me a few minutes here.” She began to mutter to herself.

“We’d need someone who knows about explosives,” Cosmo added. “Though I still don’t think it’d work. And even if it did, I’m not sure the yield would be worth the cost.”

We discussed it for almost an hour, and then Emily produced the results of her calculations. “Right. I reckon it
can
be done, and it’s cost-effective. Using small charges we can blast down through each slag heap a couple of yards at a time. Like strip mining, I suppose. The explosions will spread the slag over a wide area, and then we simply keep running the electromagnets back and forth over it. Then we use a couple of diggers to clear away the loose slag, and move on to the next level.”

Hazlegrove drummed the fingers of his good hand on the edge of the desk. “Nickel sells for about twenty-eight thousand dollars per metric ton. How many tons do you think we have out there?”

“It’s hard to be sure,” Emily said, “and this could be way off, but if you’re forcing me to make a guess … Could be twenty tons. That would yield more than half a million dollars. And it could be a lot
more
than twenty.”

Everyone fell silent for a moment, and then Hazlegrove said, “All right. I need to think this over. You’re dismissed.”

We left Hazlegrove mulling over Emily’s sheets of paper, staring at the calculations we knew he had no way of comprehending.

Roman and Ashley and Emily returned to their teams while Cosmo and I glanced at each other and tried not to grin. Hazlegrove would find a way to make it happen. The platinum that was extracted from the mine was carefully monitored, but everything else was considered waste. No one was watching it because no one cared about it.

We knew that Hazlegrove would spend a lot of time thinking of the half million dollars’ worth of effectively free nickel ore that was his for the taking. He would come back to us with an offer: If we could work out a way to set up everything without the warden finding out, he’d increase the rations or allow the workers a few days off, some token gesture of that nature.

But that wasn’t the aim of our plan. Over the past year, we had been given more and more responsibility, to the point where we were running almost every aspect of the mine. We now had access to some very useful materials. Hydrochloric
acid, sulfuric acid, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of crude platinum …

And if Hazlegrove did agree to the plan, then pretty soon we would be getting our hands on the one thing a group of inmates should never have: explosives.

THE HIGH-PROFILE MANHUNT
that followed my encounter with Slaughter made me a little bit famous. That was not a good thing. Though the police were no longer blaming me for attacking that woman, and my version of the events was confirmed by the woman herself when she recovered, the truth somehow didn’t seem to matter. The newspaper, radio, and TV reports did mention that Slaughter was the real culprit, but they still kept up their campaign to “end the blue giant’s reign of terror.”

If all the stories were to be believed, I was responsible for a whole range of crimes throughout the country….

I’d broken into dozens of homes and stores and banks, frequently in places I’d never heard of, let alone visited. It didn’t seem to matter to the media that in almost every one of those cases the police immediately ruled out my involvement.

I’d sabotaged a railway line, causing a train crash that “could have caused the deaths of hundreds of passengers.” That train did go off the rails, but only at about three miles an hour, no one was injured, and it was quickly discovered that the accident was caused by wear and tear on a poorly maintained stretch of track. Nevertheless, for a couple of weeks I was known as “the train wrecker.”

When a suspension bridge collapsed in Arkansas, one of the newspapers ran the story on its front page with a blurry photo of me next to a photo of the bridge. The article itself only named me as “one of the possible causes,” but apparently putting me on the cover boosted sales.

In the middle of all the “Brawn Frenzy” I spent a night lying on the roof of an apartment block, listening to a phone-in radio show that came through the open window of one of the tenants. The night’s topic was “Brawn: Monster or Villain?” which I felt was more than a little biased, and a bigmouthed local politician was the main guest. His long-winded argument could be summed up something like this: “Brawn is big and blue and has been reported as causing a lot of damage, so therefore you should vote for me.” It was all wrapped up in the usual fancy words and false promises, but that was the gist of it.

The show attracted dozens of callers, each with his or her own ax to grind:

“Brawn stole my cat! It must have been him, because I think it probably was.”

“I heard that there’s more than one of them and they’re aliens. That explains why there’s so many reports of him all over the country.”

“Dude, Brawn is, like, y’know, evil and stuff? If he isn’t, then, like, why would people
say
he is? No smoke without fire, dude!”

“Never mind about this man Brawn—I want to know what the police are going to do about that blue giant who’s been in all the papers! I’m a taxpayer and I know my rights, and if people don’t agree with me, well, then, we might as well be living under a dictatorship!”

“Hello? Am I through? Hello? Yeah, I saw him on TV an’ I got scared so that made me forget how many beers I’d had so I kept drinkin’ an’ then later the cops pulled me over an’ I lost my license an’ my boss said he hadda let me go. So Brawn cost me my
job
! How am I sposta support my kids now?”

“A creature like that is unnatural. An abomination. We should be doing everything we can to catch him
before he kills again
!”

Then the show’s presenter said, “
Riiiight
… Well, thanks for that, caller. Folks, near as we can tell, Brawn ain’t actually killed anyone yet, so don’t go having nightmares. The time is coming up to three fifteen and you’re listening to the
Late Hour
with me, Dancin’ George Punteri…. We’re still getting a lot of calls about Brawn and all these other freaks who’ve been in the news, but if you’re sitting there stabbing at the redial button trying to get through, hold off for a few minutes, because we’ve got a special guest on the line: Pastor Tobias Cullen of the First Church of Saint Matthew in Vermont. Pastor Cullen, you told my producer that you’ve actually
seen
Brawn, is that right?”

That made me sit up and really pay attention.

“That’s right, George. It was almost four years ago, the first
time anyone saw him. He attacked my church in the middle of Sunday service.”

“Four years,” the presenter said. “But Brawn’s been in the news for only about a year.”

“We were ordered to keep quiet. But there doesn’t seem to be any point now—everyone knows about him. He …” I heard the pastor swallowing. “He came out of nowhere. There was a flash or something and the creature just appeared in the middle of the choir. There was panic…. I did my best to get everyone out. When I tried to escape, he attacked me. He grabbed me and threw me through the air. I crashed into a police car. It was eight months before I could walk again.”

“No way! It wasn’t like that at all!” I said aloud before I could stop myself.

“He growled and snarled like an animal,” Pastor Cullen said. “One of the boys from the choir disappeared that day, and all they found of him were his vestments, covered in blood. The people of the parish spent months searching for him. No other trace was ever found.” He paused. “Look, no one’s ever said this out loud, but … I was
there
. I saw the look in that monster’s eyes. I didn’t see him do it, but I
know
he killed that boy—”

The presenter interrupted: “But you can’t be
certain
of that. If his body was never found—”

“Look, until you’ve seen him up close, you can’t even imagine how big this creature is. You
think
you can grasp the concept of a thirteen-foot-tall man, but, trust me, you can’t. Picture a household cat being attacked by a leopard. That’s what Brawn is like compared with the average man. The reason
the boy’s body was never found was that there wasn’t anything
left
to find.”

“What exactly are you saying, Pastor?”

“Brawn ate him. Killed him, tore him apart, and ate him.”

My sixteenth birthday came and went with neither cake nor candles. I spent the day sitting in a cave in South Dakota, reading the first half of a torn-in-two spy novel that I’d found when scouring the local dump. I never did find out whether the brave hero managed to rescue the Serbian ambassador’s pretty daughter.

I lived in the cave for a further three weeks. It wasn’t a particularly nice cave, but it was reasonably warm and dry.

But I had to venture out eventually: I hadn’t eaten anything but leaves and grass for ages, and all I could think about was a large pepperoni pizza. Of course I knew that getting hold of one wasn’t an option, but I thought I might find a field of carrots.

I was still careful to travel only at night. I left the cave and strode west through the forest. There were a lot of farms in the county, and I was sure that at least one of them would have crops ripe enough to eat.

But I was out of luck. Most of them turned out to be dairy farms, and the only crop I found was wheat. Dry, rock hard, barely ripe, and tasteless.

Then something happened that I hadn’t anticipated. I’d been on the run for so long, rarely staying in the same place for more than a day or two, that it hadn’t occurred to me to
memorize any landmarks on the way from the cave. I couldn’t find my way back.

And I took too long searching for “my” cave when I should have just found the nearest one.

Dawn cracked the horizon as I was walking along a quiet road, and I was so busy noticing how pretty the sunrise was that I almost didn’t hear the two black SUVs with opaque windows racing along the road toward me.

They screeched to a stop about fifty yards away, and four men climbed out and marched toward me. Three of them were armed with large-caliber rifles and wearing combat gear. They looked to be in their forties, and from the way they deployed themselves, I could see that they’d had combat training: One stayed on the road, hunched down and aiming his gun at me, while the other two crashed through the hedges on either side of the road, spreading out to cover me from the sides.

The fourth man didn’t look to be much older than me. Twenty years old at the most. He was wearing a black two-piece uniform and staring at me intensely.

His stare turned into a frown, and then he briskly shook his head and resumed staring.

I looked at the soldiers on my left and right, then back to the young man. “What are you doing, exactly?”

I heard him say to the third soldier, “It’s no good. I can’t get through at all.”

“Say the word.”

The black-clad man nodded. “Take him.”

I flinched as all three of the soldiers started shooting, but
their shots did no damage whatsoever. It was like being hit by pieces of popcorn fired from a rubber band.

“It’s not working!” the man on the left said. “Lash, Ollie—use the Tasers!”

They unclipped their Tasers from their belts and I decided to play along, mostly to see what they were up to.

The Tasers’ twin-pronged darts hit me in the chest, and I felt a slight tingle. It wasn’t much more debilitating than a warm breeze, but I threw myself backward onto the ground and screamed.

All four of the men cautiously walked up to me as I lay there, twitching.

“This is so weird,” said the one in black. “I’m not getting much at all. I mean, there’s
something
going on in there, but it’s almost alien. Not like anyone else’s mind.”

“You can’t read him?” one of the soldiers asked.

“No.”

“Then what do we do? He’s not gonna be down for long, and we don’t have a way to bring him back with us.”

The young man nodded. “True. Ox, call in the chopper.”

I said, “Oh great.
More
helicopters.”

The four men jumped back. “He’s awake!”

I propped myself up on my elbows. “Yep. So, who are you guys and what do you want?”

“My name is Maxwell Dalton,” the young man said.

“The mind reader? I’ve heard of you. Well, don’t bother calling your helicopter, because you’re not taking me anywhere.”

He adopted an “I’m in charge here!” pose and tried to look tough. “You’re under arrest, Brawn!”

“Don’t make me laugh, you little tick! You can’t read my mind and your weapons can’t hurt me, so you’re hardly in a position to arrest me. And what makes you think you have the authority?”