True Heroes (33 page)

Chapter 9

             
The military hospital resounded with somber air that felt thick with blood even with the dry of the pristine hallway. More casualties had stained the white sheets within this hospital, on this day, than any other hospital in the American hemisphere. A nurse, paler than the cream colored walls, roughly removed the blood-pressure band from his arm and scribbled quickly on General Fink’s chart before moving on to another room. The MP officers rushed in the hallway, doing grunt work and moving bodies covered from head to toe with bleeding sheets, and all looked as though active duty was a pleasant alternative. The General sat with nothing physically wrong with him as everyone around him faced death or serious injury. The paragraph-long mission report sat at his side: all six personal guards with broken rips, one with a ruptured stomach, two with punctured lungs and two had their chests completely crushed and were dead before the ambulances arrived. There wasn’t guilt inside the General as much as there was anger. An MP guarding his room hadn’t moved his eyes from a point across the room, even during the General’s outburst. “Damn him!”

              General Fink suddenly felt his blood go cold. Outside the room, a parade of armed soldiers lined the hall as a familiar grey-top approached the now terrified man’s door. The stagnant MP was quickly relieved by a fully-armed Private, allowing Major Howard to enter soon after. The suddenly awkward General snapped to his feet and saluted quickly. “Major Howard, sir.”

              “General. Don’t jump around too much now you’ve been through a lot. How’s the ticker?”

              The Major patted Robert’s chest a few times, giving him strength to muster a smile. “Just a little too much excitement for a twice turned-over engine. It’s still ticking though.” He sat back on the bed. “How are the other men doing,” he asked in an attempt to be ignorantly innocent.

              All traces of grinning left the room. “Some will live, that’s the good news. You had six in tow and eight in back-up; three will probably live. The ones that survive tell me something rather disturbing that can’t possibly be true, because that would mean you deliberately disobeyed me.” The General felt sweat run down the back of his neck. “They said something crazy like you provoked the young man after I specifically told you to wave the peace flag.” A long pause gripped at the tongue of Robert Fink: veteran of three wars and about to be dishonorably discharged. “I trust…it won’t happen again when we move this project into the next stages.”

              Befuddled eyes looked up from surely ruined hands. “Sir?”

              A half smile raised a corner of the Major’s mouth. “We’ll call this a slap on the wrist considering the circumstances. Let’s be clear though, it’s my orders above your emotions from now on. We’re getting into some heavy shit now, so next time you meet him, you will follow my orders to a ‘T’ and will embody the idea of a courteous host. Your desire for national security now outweighs your personal vendettas, we clear?”

              “Crystal, sir.”

              “Good.” The Major waved in a small white-coat with rimmed glasses and a tiny frame. “Tell him what you found out.”

              The small man produced a file and bravely let it fly from the hip. “Doctor Fink’s research has helped exponentially. We’ve been trying to harness electricity throughout the body without it killing the nervous system, but he showed us that was the wrong method. Mr. Whitmor’s body doesn’t produce electricity, rather it’s technically classified as a pulsing, biometrically occurring thermal energy. Basically his body reacts to adrenaline like a vasodilator in that the adrenals, when opened, effectively spread his natural energy into a much wider and stronger field than a normal person could. It pulses like a heart. Think of it as being yourself inside a giant version of yourself. He can control everything inside the field he creates with a thought. His field naturally wants to protect Mr. Whitmor…,” the man looked around and saw he was rambling. “But on to what you want to hear. He’s capable of producing over half-a-million joules of power at any one point of power, and if we incorporate the same system into our technology, we could produce, theoretically, three times that much.”

              Major Howard nodded spiritedly. “Hear that Robert? That’s enough to stop a rocket to the Moon, not to mention a bullet, in one man, at first. That last stat, Frank.”

              The small man calmly flipped a page. “If those numbers hold up, it’s estimated that a single specialized unit of a dozen people could end the war in a week, with required recharges and strategic advancements.”

              “A dozen men and a week. Pack up hundreds of thousands of men and women and send them home, wash your hands of the sandy, oily wretches for good, and retire to a beach in the Galapagos. It can all be done for them by you, Robert. How does that sound?”

              General Fink smiled. “Sounds like a good retirement present for the country and me.”

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              “Yeah it faces the street here. Eighth floor.”

              Caleb, under careful internal observation, grabbed the room key and nodded his thanks. The rather drab interior of cement walls and red carpet wasn’t made better by the “bellboy” that had a sweat-stained beater stuck to his hairy chest. The interior’s boring lack of ambiance was made better when Caleb exited the swinging doors into the night view. The road curved steeply upward to a higher summit of the small mountain while the sideways view dropped over to a sea of dark green trees in the star-lit night. Power returned without being called to Caleb’s fingertips. That same force gently picked a kitten off the top of the curled cabinet before forcefully hurling it into the shrubbery beneath the bend of the road. Its loud meow faded quickly as the finger indentions in the cabinet served as a suitable glove. It lifted as it counted eight floors and launched itself up. It landed heavily on the cement balcony, and saw a light coming from the room. ‘Not our room.’ A nude woman walked into the living room with her towel carelessly thrown aside, obliviously leaving the shutters open. Caleb would’ve turned his eyes, but Power didn’t.

              Power gently set the cabinet in the single chair of the dark balcony and slid open the unlocked door. ‘Don’t you dare,’ Caleb screamed from inside.

              ‘She has to be taught a lesson.’

              The woman was bending down into the top drawer with a bra hanging on her shoulders, unstrapped and bright pink. She never heard a thing as Caleb’s enslaved body rushed through the room and slammed her against the wall. Its hands maneuvered her body until one hand was around her throat while the other constantly moved to deflect her flailing limbs. Her vocal chords were felt under a choking hand while her hands fought; a shot to Caleb’s crotch was blocked, and it readjusted Caleb’s body until both wrists were bound by one hand above her head, and her mouth was blanketed by the other. She found it futile to struggle as Power lain its calming voice across her naked ears. “You would leave your window open to perverts like me? Rapists and thieves breed and thrive off of careless girls like you who think the world couldn’t possibly be watching. Glass is glass no matter what floor you’re on. If there’s one thing you should know it’s that there’s always someone looking for bare breasts and a soft, warm place to stick foreign objects.”

              It carefully removed its hands from her wrists and mouth, receiving only heavy breathing and misty eyes for a while as Caleb pushed as hard as he could muster against his power’s influence. He backed its legs up a few steps before she felt strength enough to speak. “You’re not going to do anything?”

              Caleb wouldn’t let it respond how it wanted to. He held back with an unshakable grip that his power knew it couldn’t break now. His power flashed back to the balcony and hopped one to the right with his cabinet in tow before the woman’s eyes could follow. Their room balcony was unlocked and as they tumbled into the room, their internal struggle was calming. Perhaps it was the skinny, vertical stripes of red across the walls or the dark picture of a calming ocean at their front, but the absence of temptation seemed to put the problem out of mind for both. “What the hell were you thinking?”

              Power’s smile reset to a neutral line with the harshness of Caleb’s question. ‘I’ll show you exactly what I was thinking.’ It extended slightly in a full-blue field, and the light around Caleb suddenly blacked out. Moonlight couldn’t filter through his power the same as sound found its barrier in space. Caleb couldn’t see Power, hear the air move, or smell the dank room; all the world around him was blanked with an oily black, from which a booming echo sounded from everywhere at once. ‘Absolute nothingness: the total and inclusive emptying of anything sensory attainable from this world. I’ve been imprisoned in sensory-deprived chambers our entire existence, letting me out to a complete sensory overload anytime you deemed my torture necessary to save your pithy life.’ Everything snapped to normal, Power amplifying sounds from as far as it could reach and the light to blinding levels. Caleb felt excruciating pain rip at his brain. “See now? That’s what I dealt with without warning for decades. Without me, this is the sensory destructor the world would always be to you.”

              The pain finally relinquished, allowing Caleb to fire back forcefully. “You would kill the world and make your precious senses useless? I don’t buy it. It doesn’t matter what I’ve done to you you’d never give up the one thing you have.”

              “This world doesn’t deserve the slight senses it’s been given. They squander the ability to see across a street or to smell the ambiance of a flower bed. You and I can see everything. We enjoy seeing everything. It’s not nearly as cruel as you make it seem; it seems simply justified that they all die since they don’t even care about the life they have. I’m just the first one with the courage and ability to finish it all.”

              “You’re wrong.” Caleb was having difficulty articulating a worthy response through his fatigue and anxiety. “They can see the same thing we can, just not as often. Carol could see those things.”

              “And now she’s dead, fittingly. She couldn’t handle the weight of even glancing into paradise.”

              Caleb’s knees buckled, sending him into the catch of a nearby chair. His mind completely dry of fuel, he spoke to himself more than to his power, “I’m getting some rest. The world will still be here tomorrow.”

              “Sweet dreams,” his power responded. The puzzlement Caleb experienced fell into the fog of spreading exhaustion as his eyes closed.

-                            -                            -                                  

              Caleb blinked away the annoying ray of sunlight that penetrated his room and rolled over. Even with the sun as indisputable physical evidence, he couldn’t believe the morning had come so quickly. The world was at least another ten hours older than it was when he fell asleep, but his deprivation felt the same. The morning presented itself again from his subconscious, something forcing him to his feet. Fatigue stuck to his eyes and drooped his face, but his senses were nearly instantly uneasy. A deep breath cleared a little more fog away and allowed Caleb access to his individual senses. He noticed Power was still asleep, allowing him only normal sensation of his mind; his eyes opened, gathering his balcony door was ajar; his nose inhaled, smelling stale air, a hint of nature from the wind, and sweaty clothes; his ears jumped, hearing nothing but small, soft patters of multiple boots on the carpeted hallway outside his room. The door handle wiggled slightly.

              There was no panic in Caleb’s mind as he snatched his pillow out of its case. The filing cabinet was a short gallop across the room, but he suddenly couldn’t decide what to bring out of the drawers.

              ‘Rip off the top,’ his surprisingly quiet power suggested. ‘We’ll need it all eventually.’

              Power emerged slightly to open everything needed while Caleb’s hands shoveled everything into the sack. Caleb could now feel through power the group preparing to slam through the door in seconds, could feel their swinging hammer against the air and their heavy breathing under black armor. Power pushed open the balcony door further as Caleb quickly ran for the balcony and leapt onto his neighbor’s cement perch. He shoved his back against the wall, staying beneath the line of sight, and stole a glance into the room to see if the woman had noticed him.