Different Strong [Book 2]

  Different Strong

  Chosen Different Book Two

  By Nat Kozinn

  Text copyright © 2015 Nat Kozinn

  All Rights Reserved

  natkozinn@gmail.com

  natkozinn.com

  Recap

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  Excerpt

  Recap

  One year ago Gavin Stillman graduated from Section 26. Upon certification that he had control over his abilities, Gavin went to work as a human food tester, using his extraordinary control and awareness of his body to test recipe changes and artificial food additives. Dissatisfied with his job, Gavin began spending his naturally sleepless nights roaming the streets and delivering vigilante justice to criminals in the lawless slums of the Los Angeles Metro Area. Gavin’s activities eventually lead him to a trail of dead bodies, the handiwork of The Beast, a dangerous and powerful Different the world believed dead. At great physical and emotional cost, Gavin was able to defeat The Beast. Despite saving hundreds, Gavin was arrested for violating the anti-vigilantism provisions of the Different Acts of 1996. Gavin’s friend Nita, a powerful 13-year-old girl who helped him defeat The Beast, proved unable or unwilling to provide him aid. Gavin was released from prison on the condition he remains on parole.

  1

  Mark my words; the OEC Field Office Program is a terrible idea that is destined to fail. The law cannot sway back and forth depending on which way the wind blows. Differents acting as law enforcement agents was a bad idea before The Beast and it is a bad idea after the creature attacked the Metro Area. I will stand alone on this island even if it is swallowed back into the sea. The Field Office Program is a time bomb waiting to explode.

  “An Unpopular Opinion” by Roberta Clemens, Los Angeles Times

  My muscles are screaming for more oxygen. I don't have any to give. I'm breathing as deeply as I can, but it’s no use. I've been running too long. I am going to have to stop and catch my breath. I put my hand on an old, useless electric pole and take deep, slow, methodical breaths. I flood red blood cells to my lungs, gathering oxygen that I send all over my body. While I'm at it, I use my lymphatic system to clear out the lactic acid building in my leg muscles.

  Within a few seconds I feel ready to start running again, but before I can, I hear someone else behind me. It's someone who's moving faster than any human can, faster than I can. My partner, Victor Campos.

  "What are you doing?" Victor demands.

  "I had to stop and rest," I answer.

  "I thought you're supposed to have the perfect human body. You've been running for six or seven miles. There are a lot of humans who can run farther than that."

  What does he know about what the human body is capable of? He doesn't have a human body. He has something much better than that. He’s Physically Enhanced, Athlete Type. He has super dense muscles that make him stronger and faster than any person should be. He was five miles behind when we started running, and he still caught up to me with ease even though he’s six foot five and built like an extra-thick brick wall.

  "Humans can't run that long at full sprint. What's the point anyway? The kid is long gone. He moves so fast he makes you look like a snail," I respond.

  "Speedsters don’t have much endurance. They need to stop and rest for an hour after a few minutes of sprinting. They make you look like an ultra-marathon runner."

  "How do we know if we're still on his trail?"

  "Speedsters always run in a straight line, especially in the Metro Area. It's hard to round a corner at two hundred miles an hour. Look down at the street, do you notice anything?" Victor asks and points.

  The sidewalk is covered in debris. A mix of dirt, concrete, cardboard, and even old clothes. It looks like a landfill. There’s a path cut right through the filth.

  "Running at two hundred miles an hour generates a lot of wind. I'm going to the roofs and see if I can spot where he went. You keep after him down here.”

  With that, Victor takes a running start and leaps two stories up onto the roof of a half-collapsed building. I turn and break back into a sprint, a bit slower than before. I don't want to hear it from Victor if I have to stop and rest again.

  Victor is moving above me. Even though he has to jump from rooftop to rooftop, he's covering more ground than I am running on the street. The way he moves reminds me of The Beast. Power mixed with grace. I push The Beast out of my mind. He doesn't deserve my consideration. I put my head down and keep following the path the Speedster left in his wake. Victor seemed confident that we will catch up to him, but I'm skeptical. He was moving so damn fast.

  It's no wonder the cops couldn't catch him and had to call us. He’s a bolt of lightning. I thought this was going to be easy when we found him hiding in that corner of the kitchen, covered in spices. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so tragic. As soon as we talked to him, he stood up and shot out of the building like he came out of a cannon.

  It was only Arnold Chapman’s first week out of Section 26 and he just started his job as a delivery boy. I don’t think he’s keeping that job. I’m not sure if he took some drugs or had some sort of psychotic breakdown, and frankly, it doesn’t matter. It’s my job to catch him.

  I finally have the job I always wanted. The job I told everyone, including myself, I was perfect for. I'm an agent for the Office of Exceptional Cases. My duty is to apprehend dangerous Differents. Now I have to put my money where my mouth is and do the job. It's extra motivation that my own partner doesn't think I am qualified. And it just so happens, if I fail at the job-- I go back to prison.

  Victor drops down onto the sidewalk and waits for me to catch up. I make sure to focus and time my breathing so I don’t appear to be winded.

  "Why did we stop?" I ask.

  "I saw the trail come to an end. He’s in a half-collapsed building up ahead. It looks like it was a school before the Plagues. It's big; it’s a good place to hide."

  "What should we do?"

  "What do you think we should do? You're supposed to have the ideal human mind too," Victor says sarcastically.

  "I guess we should split up; each take half of the school and search for him."

  "Wrong. Well, half wrong. What if you find him? You aren't fast enough to catch him, or strong enough. It takes big muscles to move that fast. Besides, a building this size is going to have a half a dozen different exits. You were right about splitting up though. And you should go try to find him. I'll stay on the roof and pounce down on him when he runs out."

  "What should I do when I find him? We're out of range of think.Net out here. I knew we should have brought Linda."

  "We don't need think.Net and we don't need Linda. How was a fifty-year-old Telepath supposed to keep up anyway? That kid is going to run by you so fast you won't have time to do anything. If you do get lucky and somehow manage to sneak up on him, yell so I know he's coming. You’re just scaring him out. I’m apprehending him. Don't try anything stupid. Are we clear?" He says with a look that tells me “yes” is my only option.

  "Clear."

  We go our separate ways. He climbs onto the roof
of a building overlooking the school, and I head inside the school, or what's left of it anyway. The entrance I walk through is missing a key feature of entrances, the doors. Inside is a war zone, there isn’t an intact piece of wall in sight. Many of them have been demolished on purpose, the work of salvagers.

  The walls are made of concrete. Concrete means rebar, which means steel. Steel is rare and valuable thanks to the Plagues. Cabot's bacteria could and did eat rebar, but the concrete often protected the metal from the little buggers. The remaining steel rods can be salvaged, but they need to be removed from their concrete casing. It is a difficult job that requires painstakingly smashing through the concrete with a sledgehammer. Ten hours of labor will earn about ten dollar’s worth of metal, but there is no shortage of desperate people willing to work on these terms.

  The missing walls make it easy to search through the barren rooms. Dozens of looters have been through this school over the years. They picked it clean of anything of value. All that’s left are papers, broken desks, and broken chairs. Whatever metal held them together was salvaged long ago. There’s a time worn children’s drawing still hanging from one wall, A Dog Named Lucky, by Brian age 8. Not bad for a kid that age, good sense of perspective.

  My hunt goes quickly. I clear all of the classrooms in short order and the gym and lunchroom are big piles of rubble, leaving only the auditorium. I step into the large room while stretching out my perception of time. To me, it will seem like I’m moving slowly and carefully almost in slow motion, but I’ll really be moving at normal speed. Great for making sure I can move quickly while still taking silent steps. I search through what's left of the rows of seats that used to fill the auditorium. The metal was eaten away by Cabot's bacteria, leaving behind piles of wood, which my Speedster could be resting behind. I get to the middle of the room and look back over my shoulder. Someone stands up and stretches. There he is! He’s covered in dirt and blood and shaking with fear. We lock eyes.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do it. I had to get them off my skin,” the Speedster pleads. His arms are scratched to shreds, the product of his own fingernails tearing red ribbons in his flesh.

  “It’s okay. Come with me, and we’ll figure it out,” I say in a soft friendly tone.

  His eyes are jitter bugging out of his head, and the pupils are fully dilated black pits. His carotid artery is pulsing so violently in his neck; his heart might jump right out onto the floor. He’s breathing short desperate breaths through a mouth covered in drool. That’s a weird mix of conditions for his body to display. I wonder what drugs he’s on? It looks like uppers, downers, and everything in between.

  “This isn’t fun. The drink is poison,” the desperate kid pleads.

  “Sure it is. Come with me and will make sure you don’t have to drink anymore,” I say with my hands up.

  I watch his deranged eyes move from me to a doorway that has an exit sign. I'm about ten times closer to the door than he is, but that still may not be close enough. He starts running like a bolt of lightning. I slow down my perception of time as far as I can and make a full speed charge to intercept him. I move at top speed, which is like a sloth compared to the Speedster. He's almost at the door. I'm close enough to stop him if I stick out my left arm.

  The radius and ulna bones in my left arm shatter into a thousand different pieces. Those pieces burst through my skin like shards of glass, tearing my arm open from the inside out. I'm thrown backwards into the wall, causing massive bruising to my left shoulder. Arnold goes flying too. He hits the wall headfirst and goes down. I run over to him and roll him over with my good arm. He's unconscious, bleeding from the head, and his left leg is bent like a pretzel, but there's a pulse. We have to get him help.

  "Victor! I'm in the auditorium; I need your help!" I yell as loud as I can.

  It takes Victor fifteen seconds to make his way to the auditorium. He sees my broken left arm hanging limply at my side and our suspect, bleeding from the head.

  "This counts as stupid," he says.

  #

  "I don't care if you thought he was going to get away. I told you to be careful and let me handle him. I did not tell you to clothesline him like a professional wrestler. You could have killed that boy. You're lucky it was just a concussion and a broken leg. He's seventeen. Does he deserve the death penalty because he’s a stupid teenager who took the wrong drugs and freaked out in public?" Victor yells at me.

  He's been saying the same things for the past two hours. He said them as he carried the Speedster back to the Slug line, the whole ride to the hospital, when we were filing the report with the detective, while we rode our P-Train back to the office, and now, he’s saying them in front of our boss, Captain Murphy. He’s right. I was stupid. I let my desire to succeed overwhelm my good judgment. I told Victor that the first time he gave me the speech. It hasn’t slowed him down.

  While I listen, I direct my immune system to attack bacteria that entered my arm through the holes in my flesh caused by my own broken bones. It’s an infection smorgasbord in there.

  "That's right, Gavin. I know the whole ‘Beast Slayer’ thing has gone to your head, but we don't need that vigilante stuff here. We are officers of the law. Your job is to apprehend criminals so the justice system can deal with them," Captain Murphy piles on.

  "And how long is your stupid stunt going to put you out of commission?" Victor asks.

  "It is a bad break. The bones in my forearm are shattered. I basically have to regrow them from scratch. Still, it should only take me four or five days. And I won't be out of commission. I'll get a cast, and then I’ll be good to go," I answer.

  “I guess that's not so bad. Especially considering you basically stepped in front of speeding Slug-car," Captain Murphy says with a laugh.

  Victor shoots him a dirty look.

  “Are we going to get a toxicology report on Arnold? He seemed pretty messed up in the head. I couldn’t identify what drugs he had taken,” I ask.

  “Oh yeah, we’ll get forensics on this, cordon off the whole area, canvass for witnesses,” Captain Murphy says with a smirk. “It’ll be a misdemeanor vandalism charge or disturbing the peace. He’ll probably have to sweep some sidewalks. You don’t worry about him, you worry about doing your job, which means the next time Victor gives you an order, you follow it. We have a chain of command here, and it is not optional. Don't let that happen again. Now go see Linda. She can make you a cast while you file your report."

  I head out of Captain Murphy's office, picking fragments of bone out of my open wounds. I’ve lowered the blood pressure in my arm to a slow trickle. This will keep it from becoming inflamed and/or bleeding everywhere. I’m annoyed about Captain Murphy’s attitude but it was pointless to argue. The captain had to make a big show about respecting the chain of command, because he’s deluding himself into believing he runs this OEC Precinct Office, not Victor.

  After The Beast terrorized the Los Angeles Metro Area, people were up in arms. They wanted to know how the government could allow one Different to kill hundreds of people. There were protests in the streets calling for more laws to control Differents. The government response was to expand the Office of Exceptional Cases, the OEC. The OEC is a branch of the Defense Department and the sole organization legally authorized to employ Differents as officers of the law. It was designed to apprehend Differents who were too powerful for the normal police, or even the army, to handle.

  Before The Beast, the OEC rarely deployed agents in the Metro Areas. Differents here are all tested, catalogued, and tracked by Section 26, which keeps everyone under control. The OEC mostly operated in the Non-Assisted Areas, where powerful Differents were born outside Section 26’s clutches. There hadn’t been much reason to keep agents close to the Metro Areas until The Beast went on his rampage. It took the OEC several hours to scramble a response and send an agent to the Los Angeles Metro Area. By the time they arrived I had already stopped The Beast, but not before he killed hundreds of people. Victor was
the agent they sent.

  In the wake of the rampage, the government promised to station OEC agents in all of the Metro Areas so there could be an immediate response to another Different like The Beast. This meant Field Offices had to be created quickly, which meant that middle-aged police department bureaucrats, like Captain Murphy, were appointed as heads of the offices even though they have no real training or expertise in dealing with Differents. Every time Captain Murphy has to make a decision, his face turns red and he looks like he's about to have a heart attack. Usually Captain Murphy defers to Victor, who has been an OEC field agent for six years and is highly regarded within the OEC. Victor makes all the important decisions, and the captain couldn't be happier about it.

  I knock on the door of Linda's office.

  "Come on in. I'm already mixing the plaster for your cast," Linda says through the door.

  I open the door to see Linda's smiling face. She's always smiling at me. Apparently I remind her of her son, which is good for me because it means home-cooked treats. Linda works as the Telepath for our office. She used to work for Ultracorps as part of think.Net, but younger and more powerful Telepaths rendered her obsolete. Now she works for the OEC. She provides a secure connection to interact with the government Librarians, and she can help if we need to apprehend a fellow Telepath. She's also a trained nurse.

  "My God, that arm looks awful. What did you do to yourself?" she asks her voice full of concern.

  I open my mouth to answer, but she cuts me off.

  "Don't bother. I'll see it all when we make your report. Sit down. Put your arm on that table and try to keep it still. I'll have to wrap it in gauze before I put the plaster on."

  She works swiftly and silently, wrapping my arm then applying the plaster. This isn't the first time she's done this in the four months I've been with the OEC. Training with Victor can get a little rough. Soon, she's covered my whole forearm and made the cast.

  "You know how this works. Keep the arm still for twenty minutes so the cast can set. While we're waiting you can file your report. Open wide."