“Any sign of the driver?”
“Some blood on the seat and the steering wheel,” said Paul.
Ilya pointed at the spider-webbed windshield. “Bullet hole,” he said. “I bet they got shot running the roadblock, crashed, and then…”
“Then walked away from it, one way or the other,” the hero finished.
“The other,” said Lady Bee from the top of the cab. “If they were alive, they wouldn’t’ve left everything behind.”
Paul handed down a final bag and hopped out of the truck.
“Moving on, then,” said St. George. A few yards down the road he could see another, larger gas station with a shot-out sign. He could remember driving past it a few times back in the before days, back when he was just a college maintenance guy moonlighting as a superhero in a thriving Los Angeles, but he couldn’t remember if it had been an Arco or a Mobil or what.
Hector stepped up onto Road Warrior’s lift gate and paused. He looked back and forth up the street. “What is that? Is that…flies?”
Lynne cocked her head to the side. “It’s not flies. Bees, maybe, or hornets?”
“It’s not insects,” said St. George with a shake of his head. “Too steady. It almost sounds like…”
He rocketed thirty feet into the air. “Grab the flare gun!” he shouted down at them. “Red flare, fast!”
Jarvis fumbled in his pack. “What the hell is it?”
“No way,” said Lady Bee. Her eyes were wide and she smiled as the droning sound grew louder. “No way!”
“It’s a plane!” shouted St. George, going higher into the sky.
Chapter 4 - Signing Up
THEN
If your parents gave you a name like Augustus Phillip Hancock, you’d’ve joined the Army, too. Trust me. When I turned eighteen, I wanted to be anywhere but Little Rock, so when Eddie said he was going to sign up I did, too.
Now, I ain’t supposed to tell anyone about this. When I got pulled into Project Krypton last year, still a fuzzy right out of boot camp, they had us sign a bunch of waivers and security paperwork. Nobody with wives or kids. Nobody who was an only child. Then they shipped us off to Yuma, which I can say is dead center in the middle of nowhere. A woman from Broadsword company said she’d heard the whole project used to be based at Natick, like you’d expect, but it’d gotten so big they had to set up a whole sub-base out at Yuma for it. One of the fellas said the little base should be called Kandor, and two or three fellas thought that was really funny, but I didn’t get the joke.
One of the fellas in Broadsword also said all the paperwork we’d filled out was the same stuff they use for suicide missions, but I think that’s bullshit. Although, looking back at it, maybe it ain’t.
I was one of the lucky ones. Turns out my company, Greyhound, was the control group. We were eating sugar pills and getting shots of saline water. Apparently they can just stick that in you and it doesn’t do much of anything.
So, yeah, Greyhound was lucky. Angel and Devil companies, too. Well, kind of. They’re all getting dialysis or something for a few weeks. They weren’t getting sugar pills and saline.
Broadsword are the fellas that got screwed. Their company had the biggest concentration of the stuff the old doc was giving us. It didn’t go over well. I’ve heard them talking about all the stuff Angel and Devil are getting, plus marrow transplants and hormone therapy and stuff. None of them are complaining though. We all know what happened to Lucas and Jacobs, and ain’t nobody wants to go through that.
Well, none of us know officially. But we were all there for the start of it and Eddie works in the medical wing. He saw how they ended up. So we all know.
At first it seemed great. All of Broadsword company was bulking up, getting stronger, just like the old doc wanted. Then they all started getting cramps. And they were…swelling. You know those fellas who get crazy ripped? The ones who hit the gym every day and do contests and stuff? It was like that. Their arms and legs were getting bigger and stretching their skin so it was creepy tight and their veins stood out. And they weren’t even working out much.
It hit Jacobs first. He just got itchy. He tried to be a good soldier, suck it up and not let it get to him, but it kept getting worse. After two days his eyes were watering. Not crying, just watering bad.
Third day we told him he had to go see the doc. He was pissed at us and kept saying no and to mind our own beeswax. Yeah, he’s one of those southern weirdoes who says beeswax. But First Sergeant Paine had been specific about reporting any symptoms and I wasn’t going to disobey the First Sergeant. Finally Jacobs got up off his bunk, went to grab his shirt, and when he reached up his arm split open. There was a pop and his skin broke open like a hot dog popping on the grill. There was just too much muscle packed in there. It didn’t even bleed much because it was pulled so tight.
We got him down to the infirmary and Lucas came along, too, ‘cause he’d started to feel itchy and now he was worried the same thing was gonna happen to him. The docs were cutting him out of his wifebeater and it turned out his skin had split, too, right across the shoulders. They started calling for the old doc after that and we all got hustled out. But Eddie was still there. We heard it all from him later.
Apparently the old doc’s serum didn’t work like he hoped. Remember how I talked about the crazy ripped fellas? You ever see them when they’re so big they can’t put their arms down? I think that’s what they mean by muscle-bound. Well, that’s what was happening to Lucas and Jacobs. Their muscles were growing out of control. Four days after we took them down there, Eddie told us they couldn’t even move anymore. Their arms and legs were just big sausages of muscle. They looked fat because their abs were getting so big, and they couldn’t lay flat because their glutes and shoulders were twisting their backs up. And their skin was still splitting. It couldn’t grow as fast as the muscles were, so they were getting some kind of sharkskin grafts or something.
On the fifth day they started screaming. We heard it all over the base. Turns out their bones were growing, too, but they weren’t growing fast enough, either. They kept getting crushed between muscles or stretched apart as the muscles kept getting bigger and thicker. “It’s like their bodies’ve turned into torture racks,” Eddie said one night when he got back to the barracks. “They’re being pulled apart by their own muscles.”
They screamed for three days straight. Eddie told me over chow they’d gotten so big it took huge doses of painkillers just to make them stop screaming. The whole thing was freaking him out. He’d snuck his phone in and showed me a picture of this swollen red thing that looked like a fat grub. He said it was Jacobs, and that his skull’d been pushed off his neck by all the muscles, but he was still alive cause it hadn’t actually broken his spinal cord yet. “If they can fix him,” Eddie said, “he’s still gonna be a cripple for the rest of his life.”
On day nine they stopped screaming. All at once. On day ten we were told Jacobs and Lucas had died in the line of duty. They’d be given full honors. And the old doc was gone. Eddie said he’d heard Colonel Shelly and the higher brass were furious, and the doc had pretty much fled from the base.
Anyway, we all figured that was it for Project Krypton. Three-fourths of us out of commission one way or the other. One company left. We got three days to wonder about it and then we met the new doc at a big briefing. There was this young fella with him in a dark suit, Smith from Homeland, and he smiled a lot and gave this little speech and introduced us all to Doctor Sorensen.
The new doc’s the flipside of the old doc. The old doc was actually a young fella, not much older than any of us. He was some hot-shot scientist, and kind of an asshole, to be honest. The new doc’s an older fella who feels like he should be a cool uncle or something. He’s got a big gray beard and glasses and he talks like a teacher.