The Battle for Earth (Teen Superheroes Book 3) Read online

  Not yet, anyway.

  I built up a burst of hurricane wind and flung it at the creature. It barely impacted the creature. In fact, its only response was to retract the gun barrels. A single, long barrel appeared and pointed directly at me.

  Oh, oh.

  The cannon fired. I had my shield up, but the blast of it still threw me backward. Colliding with a section of broken wall, I hit my head and my vision shuddered slightly. Whoever built that thing certainly knew how to pack a wallop.

  Clambering to my feet, I built up another concentrated burst of wind, but before I could fire it I saw pieces of metal rocket through the air toward the robot. Balls of fire began to batter it from the other. Obviously the others had begun their attack.

  The robot responded by swinging its head about and firing at them. Chad and Dan were beyond my range of vision; hopefully they were hidden somewhere among the enormous piles of rubble. I started forward again.

  Firing a blast of wind at the creature had not affected it at all. I wondered if a single, focused gust might be enough to do some damage. I created a sphere of air the size of a cannonball and aimed it at the head of the creature. This time I saw it shudder under the impact.

  Mind you, it shuddered. That doesn’t mean it rolled onto its back and died, because it didn’t. The three of us continued our attack, but the robot merely retaliated by alternating its fire between the three of us. I caught a glimpse of Chad taking refuge behind a pile of debris. Normally he acted as if he could take on the world himself – hell, sometimes I thought his head was the size of a planet – but even he looked concerned.

  “Chad!” I yelled. “Freeze the leg! The leg!”

  Chad looked up, saw me and nodded. He pointed at the leg nearest him and within seconds it had turned white. This was a new technique we had been practicing. Normally he just produced ice. Instead, he had been training to produce its companion – cold.

  “Do it!” he yelled.

  I fired another blast. Aiming for the leg, this time the limb instantly shattered into thousands of pieces. The robot stumbled. Discus-sized pieces of metal crashed into the other front leg of the creature. I still could not see Dan, but he had obviously guessed our strategy. Within seconds the second limb collapsed under the creature.

  Still, the monster had plenty of fight left in it. Whereas it had relied purely on its weaponry to take us out, now it turned to good old-fashioned brute force. It staggered straight toward me. I turned to jump out of its way, but one of its legs struck me a glancing blow and I hit the ground. It raised its leg again. I rolled out of the way just as its claw foot slammed down.

  Crunch!

  The limb lifted again and came crashing down. This time I rolled to the left. It missed me. I had to get up and get away from here, but there was debris on all sides. I formed a barrier as the leg arrowed directly toward me.

  I let out a cry. The claw foot was pushing against my shield. It was three feet from my face. Two feet. Now only inches –

  The entire robot shuddered and stopped. I heard the sound of an explosion; the leg lifted and I watched in amazement as the entire creature toppled to one side.

  What had happened?

  Dan appeared. “Did you see that? I must have hit its control mechanism!”

  “That’s good, Dan,” I said.

  Slowly rising to my feet, I felt a little embarrassed. Dan was the youngest of our group, but it looked like he had finished off the monster. I saw a row of disks had impacted the creature’s side. One of them must have hit a vital system.

  Chad raced over.

  “Did you see that?” he asked. “Frozen one second! Toast the next! Yet another bad dude brought down by The Chad!”

  The Chad?

  “Brought down –” Dan was speechless. “I’m the one who finished it off.”

  “You? Don’t be ridiculous, punk. It was me who –”

  This was one argument I wasn’t getting into.

  “You both did great,” I said. “Now we need to find the clown who was operating this thing.”

  That didn’t take long. Within minutes we had found a rear hatch to the robot. Dan used his metal manipulation abilities to wrench open the doorway. Inside, we found a small man wearing glasses cowering behind his control seat.

  “I’m Doctor Robot!” he screamed. “I’m the greatest super villain the world has ever seen!”

  “You’re an idiot,” I told him. “One of many.”

  We took him back to the street and handed him over to the police. The officers didn’t bother asking our names. They knew we wouldn’t tell them and it was a waste of time. I could see the media in the distance. It was best if we got moving.

  We headed in Brodie and Ferdy’s direction. It looked like they’d been busy. The tourist area was a scene of utter chaos. Debris all over the road was making it difficult for emergency service operators to get to all the injured. The fire on the burning bus had been put out and the passengers evacuated. I caught Ferdy’s eye. He was kneeling next to a man lying in a twisted heap on the street.

  I hurried over to them.

  “This man is hurt,” Ferdy said. “He is bleeding.”

  I knelt next to the stranger. He was covered in blood. It looked like Ferdy – or someone – had applied a makeshift bandage to his wound, but blood was still flowing. The man tried to speak and I gently took his hand.

  “Help is on the way,” I said. “The ambulance officers are almost here.”

  “Not…going to make it…not…” the man tried to speak.

  “You’re going to be fine. Just hold on.”

  It was a lie and I knew it. Within seconds the man’s eyes fluttered and a single tear ran down one side of his face. He stared up at the sky without comprehension.

  A hollowness opened up within me. At the edges of that hollow feeling lingered hot anger. I didn’t know this man, but he was someone’s son. Maybe he had a wife and family. Now he would never see his family again because fate had placed him in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  I arranged the stranger’s hands on his chest and wiped the single tear from his face.

  The ambulance officers arrived a few seconds later.

  Too late. Far too late.

  I felt numb as Ferdy and I walked back to the Flex Fighter. As we drew near, Ferdy stopped and placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “The man died,” he said.

  “Yes. He died.”

  “Approximately one hundred and fifty thousand people die each day.”

  I nodded absently. “If you say so.”

  “You wiped the tear from the man’s face,” Ferdy persevered. “You straightened his clothing. You laid his hands on his chest.”

  I looked down at my own hands. They were covered in the stranger’s blood. I had seen people die before now – I had even been the cause of some of their deaths. Still, there was no getting used to seeing a person lose their life.

  “The man deserved respect,” I said. “He may have had a wife…a family…”

  “But he was dead.” Ferdy looked confused. “He could not know you would wipe the tear from his face. He could not know –”

  “Ferdy. How you die has got to be at least as important as how you live. It has got to mean something.”

  We made our way back to the Flex in silence. I wasn’t sure if Ferdy had understood me. We climbed aboard the aircraft. No one said anything much as the plane lifted up into the sky. I closed my eyes as we were swept away from the devastation and arced across the city toward the desert.

  Chapter Three

  “I heard it got rough out there,” Agent Palmer said.

  They were the first words she said after we landed. She had been monitoring the situation via news reports. The Flex Fighter had come in to land in a cave located at the southern end of a small valley away from the lights of Las Vegas. From here, a high speed transporter would return us to the heart of the city.

  “It was nothing I couldn’t handle,” Chad said. �
�I am, after all, a superhero.”

  “You are, after all, an idiot,” Ebony said.

  Chad shook his head in dismay. “My own sister mocks me.”

  “With good reason,” she said.

  Agent Palmer caught my eye. “How are you?” she asked.

  “Okay.”

  “Really?”

  “There was a lot of carnage out there today.” I couldn’t get the dead man’s face out of my mind. “A lot of people got killed.”

  “A lot more would have been killed if you hadn’t been there.” The agent turned to everyone. “Well done. These sorts of crazies seem to be on the increase.”

  She didn’t need to tell us that. Ever since the United Nations had announced that mods were on Earth – and had been for centuries – there seemed to be some new threat every day. It had made me wonder more than once if our existence wouldn’t have been better kept a secret.

  We made our way over to what appeared to be a normal elevator. I climbed in with a sigh. I wanted a shower; the dead man’s blood was still all over my hands. The others looked a mess as well. The lift started off with a slight pull; we were moving in a sideways direction at several miles per hour. How the thing operated without plastering us to the back of the lift was beyond me. It worked. That was all that mattered to me. Just as long as I didn’t have to walk back to town. Anything was better than that.

  Palmer drew me to one side as soon as we piled out of the elevator.

  “Twenty-Two wants to see you,” she said. “Just as soon as you clean up.”

  What would the alien commander want with me?

  “I have no idea,” Palmer replied when I asked her. “Could be the length of your hair. It is getting a little long.”

  Yeah. Sure.

  A few minutes later I was back in my hotel room and washed, dried and reclothed. My room was on the fourth floor of a hotel in the middle of Las Vegas. Beneath the building lay the infrastructure of The Agency – offices, training centres, communications rooms. It was a massive complex. Even I had only seen a small part of it. The hotel enabled us to carry out a normal life – or as normal a life as you can have when you’re working as a genetically modified superhero for a secret organisation.

  I climbed into an elevator and descended back down into the burrows of The Agency. Twenty-Two’s office was several floors beneath street level. It lay at the end of a concrete corridor where a female receptionist sat typing at a computer. I tried to remember her name. I couldn’t.

  “I’m here to see Twenty-Two,” I said.

  “Your name?” the girl asked.

  And here I was thinking I was famous.

  “Axel,” I said. “Smith.”

  She spoke into a phone for a moment. “Twenty-Two will see you now.”

  I entered his office.

  Twenty-Two looked about as ordinary as anyone else. He was tall, thin and bald. Possibly they forgot to tell him about hair when he was instructed on how to look like a human. I had no idea as to the true appearance of the Bakari. Whatever they really looked like, they probably bore little resemblance to a human.

  I had seen him around other parts of The Agency complex, but we had not officially met and I had never seen him outside the building.

  Maybe the Bakari were allergic to sunlight.

  Who knew?

  “Axel.” His voice was warm. He sounded so human. Still, I felt a shiver dance along my spine. I had only met one other Bakari. He was known as Twelve – don’t ask me about why they had numbers for names – and he had been responsible for the experimentation carried out on us. Later he had tried to kill us.

  I tried to remind myself that this man was a different alien and that was a different time.

  It wasn’t easy.

  “Please take a seat,” Twenty-Two said.

  I slid into a chair. “What’s this all about?”

  “I wanted to keep you apprised as to developments regarding your family.”

  It took a moment for this to sink in. My family. That’s right. A million years ago Agent Palmer had said The Agency was trying to track down information regarding our true identities. Maybe even reconnect us with our families – if we had any.

  I had been told I had a brother, but I had driven this information as far from my mind as possible. After everything that had happened to us, the possibility of a brother was too much to hope for.

  Still…

  “What have you found out?” I asked.

  “Our enquiries have been inconclusive, but we are following a trail of information to its source.”

  “What sort of trail?”

  “As you know, most of the records regarding the Alpha Experiment were destroyed by the scientists involved and then later by Twelve.”

  I nodded. Evil aliens don’t like leaving a trail.

  “However,” Twenty-Two continued. “It appears there were some hard copies of documents that were missed. We have people examining them now.”

  “Do you think –” I found I could not speak. “What are the chances –”

  “We don’t know,” the alien said. “It will take some time to sort out.”

  “I see.”

  “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know.”

  I looked up and realised the meeting was abruptly at an end. Fine. I stood up, shook Twenty-Two’s hand again and left the office. Ignoring the girl at the desk, I made my way through the complex to the main concourse of The Agency. This level had been redesigned the previous month. It was now the size of a football field, with communications screens surrounding the exterior. A park, complete with artificial trees and lawn, filled the centre. It had been christened The Hub.

  My phone rang. I glanced at the display.

  Brodie.

  I had forgotten all about her. Hitting the receive button, I realised she had sent a message with an attached file.

  What was this all about?

  Not more handbags, I hoped. The Agency gave us an allowance and Brodie’s handbag collection had been increasing at the rate of one per week. If I had to look at another handbag –

  I opened the first image. It showed Brodie lying still on a floor. After staring at the image in horror for what seemed like an eternity, the image was replaced by a series of words. They began:

  You will follow our instructions to the letter if you want this girl to live.

  Chapter Four

  Brodie awoke to find her face pressed against a cold metal floor. Her head hurt. Why did her head hurt? It was hard to think. The last thing she could remember was walking down East Charleston Boulevard. Someone had come up behind her. She had turned around, thinking it was some mugger, and then –

  Then everything had turned green.

  Green.

  That was not a good sign. She slowly sat up. She was in a metal room. A grimy metal room. It was obviously some sort of cell, and judging by the sway of the chamber, she was on board a ship.

  How the hell had she ended up here?

  And why?

  There was no window in the room so it was impossible to tell if it was day or night. She checked for her phone. Gone. So there was no way to call for help.

  Still, whoever had kidnapped her may not know about her enhanced strength or fighting abilities. She went to the door of the cell. Also constructed from metal, it had some sort of complicated electronic locking mechanism. She had never seen anything like it.

  Brodie peered around the cell, her eyes finally settling on a metal box set into the wall near the lock. Burying her fingers into the groove around the edge of it, she pulled hard and broke off the cover. A series of blue and orange leads wrapped in translucent silver filaments filled the box. She dragged at the wires.

  Bang!

  A shower of sparks erupted from the interior and Brodie released the wires.

  “Kids,” she murmured to herself. “Don’t try this at home.”

  She grabbed the wires again and dragged them across to the electronic lock. Keeping her hands free f
rom the ends, she took a deep breath and touched the ends to the electronic display. This time there was no sound, but the display flickered a few times before failing completely.

  “Yes!” She dropped the wires, pulled at the door and opened it easily. “Escape à la Brodie!”

  She peered into the hallway. Despite the grimy appearance of the flooring and walls, this was obviously some sort of high tech ship and she was stuck in the bowels of it. She would have to try to get above deck without being seen and then steal a rowboat or send a mayday.

  Great.

  And all she wanted was a new handbag.

  Still, no one ever said the life of a superhero was meant to be easy. Not that she really thought of herself as a superhero. She just happened to be an Australian girl with three times the strength and speed of a normal man, a multitude of martial arts abilities, and an employee of a secret agency operating within the United States.

  If that made her a superhero, then –

  Actually, she thought. That probably does make me a superhero.

  Still, she wished Axel were here. A pang of emotion gripped her chest. She might have superpowers, but she was also a girl. She found herself thinking about Axel all the time although she was not sure he felt the same way. He often seemed preoccupied with other things.

  Brodie drove the thoughts from her mind. Now was the time for action, not for girly-girly-mush-mush. She hurried down the corridor. There seemed to be doors on both sides – possibly other people were imprisoned within – but she couldn’t do anything about them right now. She had to focus on escaping.

  The corridor ended with a set of stairs heading upward. Racing up them, she found herself facing another set of stairs and a passageway identical to the one she had just left. Up had to be the best direction. Brodie ascended again and reached another corridor, but now the stairs had run out. Making her way along the passageway, she sighted an elevator at the end. There were strange symbols on the display.