Death Makes Me Stronger 4, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Epilogue
End Notes
Chapter 1
“I can’t believe that he did this to himself,” Marty whispered more to himself than to anyone else in the room. “How can someone rip out their own eyes? Or their own throat. It should be physically impossible.”
“He had help,” I sighed.
Admiral Freedom’s body laid in a pool of blood underneath the chains that clinked above me like death chimes. The once-great superhero still clutched his esophagus in one hand and what was left of his eyes in the other as if the Mastermind had made him into some macabre representation of Justice herself, but now she was mute and not just blind. The corpse was still fresh enough that rigor mortis hadn’t set in, but the beefy man’s muscles had contracted like he’d been at war with himself at the end.
There was no doubt in my mind that the Mastermind was behind all of it. Admiral Freedom had never been one to wear one of the psychic blocking bracelets, and that had been his downfall. The evil super behind the Vis deaths in the city had taken another victim, and the superhero hadn’t stood a chance against the psychic villain’s powers.
The torn flesh around his neck and eyes were stark reminders of just who we were dealing with. Orion had made my team stronger psychic blockers, but I had every intention of having the inventor make more of them so we could distribute them to anyone who was likely to encounter the man. It was better to be overly prepared for the war on the horizon than not, especially with someone with seemingly unlimited mental powers.
Although if the Mastermind made Anora hurt herself the way that he had Admiral Freedom, then I’d tear him to shreds with my bare hands.
“Osiris,” my partner’s voice broke through the rage that pounded in my ears like a freight train. “Osiris.”
“I’m fine,” I said and then took a deep breath as I tried to straighten Admiral Freedom’s legs and arms. “I’m just going to check the body. He might have left us some evidence. We need to gather whatever we can and then leave.”
“What about the others?” Marty asked and then gagged as Admiral Freedom’s joints popped like bubble wrap. “Oh, no. I’m… I’m gonna be sick again.”
The young detective barely made it to the nearby wall before he started to heave, but there was nothing left in Marty’s system besides bile, especially after the scene in the breakroom.
I glanced over as the sandy-haired kid moaned like a frat boy after a kegger, but there was too much work to do to hold his hand. The smart cop was clearly better at the computer hacking side of the job, and he’d need to suck it up fast, because the war was only going to get worse from this point on.
“Get some water,” Detective Harper said with a shake of his head.
“From where?” Marty croaked. “Not the break room. I can’t… I can’t go back in there, Harper. I can’t.”
“I’ll go with you,” Golden Weaver said in the most patient tone that I’d ever heard her use. “You can lean on me if you want. But you need to rehydrate. We’ll grab one of the sports drinks out of the vending machine. And something to eat.”
“I’m not eating anything from that room,” the younger cop said with a firm shake of his head.
“Just do whatever Golden Weaver tells you to do,” I said and turned to watch the kid be led out of the room.
Silence fell on the concrete room the second that Marty and Golden Weaver were gone. The only sound was the faint clink of the metal chains whenever one of us brushed against them. There wasn’t much for Detective Harper or I to say, at least nothing that would add to the situation, and I couldn’t bring myself to mourn too much for Admiral Freedom.
His death had been gruesome, and I could only imagine the horror of being forced to rip out my own eyes and throat, but that was the exact reason that we’d told him not to go off on his own. If the proud superhero had just waited for us, then none of this would have happened. Still, I wouldn’t let the decorated soldier turned superhero die in vain, and that meant that we needed to examine his body for any more evidence.
“There’s not much that we can do from here,” Detective Harper said like the gruff cop had read my mind. “I have a couple of plastic baggies for evidence, but I’m not sure what you think you’ll find on his body.”
“I don’t know either,” I sighed and ran a hand down my masked face in frustration. “We know that the Mastermind was here. But it looks like he made Admiral Freedom do all the heavy lifting.”
“My question is why in the world he had Admiral Freedom kill so many of his men,” Harper said as he pulled out another cigarette. “There had to be at least eighty men in that break room. That’s a big chunk of manpower that he just murdered.”
“Maybe it was to see if he could make Admiral Freedom do it,” I muttered.
I carefully opened the superhero’s hand and gagged as the squishy remains of his eyeballs plopped into the glistening blood all around us. One of them started to deflate like a popped water balloon, but the other one was still intact enough that I could see the iris. I blinked a couple of times to make sure that I was seeing right, but there was no way to mistake the red ring around Admiral Freedom’s irises that looked exactly like the mind-controlled supers from the City Hall attack.
“Do you see that?” I asked and pointed to the eyeball. “I’m not hallucinating, right?”
“No, no you’re not,” the detective said and squatted down with an old man grunt. “I’ll take a picture of it for evidence later. I’m sure that the effect won’t last for long.”
“Probably not,” I said and then focused on the hand with the esophagus in it. “The Mastermind had to have used Vis to be strong enough to make Admiral Freedom do all this, don’t you think?”
“I sure hope so,” the cop said and then took a long drag of his cigarette. “I haven’t heard of any psychic powerful enough to force someone into pulling out their own throat, but if the Mastermind can do that without Vis, then we’re in a whole lot more trouble than we originally thought.”
“Especially since he has some of the city council on his side,” I said and then studied the tube-like organ.
It had collapsed right in the middle where Admiral Freedom had torn it out of his body, and bits of tissue still clung to it like the strings on pumpkin seeds. I didn’t see any signs of hesitation anywhere on the body, but then again, it was such a mess that it was hard to see anything but torn muscle and flesh. The esophagus even had some skin stuck to it like the superhero had been in too much of a hurry to go around it.
My attention shifted from the corpse in front of me to the round cement room. I didn’t see any obvious exits anywhere except for the door behind me, but Marty hadn’t said anything about another person over the comms. There had to be another way out, and it took me a few seconds to spot the seam in the poured cement walls.
“There,” I said and pointed to the hidden passageway. “That has to be how the Mastermind got out.”
“Where?” Harper asked with a grunt as he stood. “Ah. I see it. Points straight toward the river. Bet whatever tunnel is behind there will take us all the way back to New Liberty.”
“We should check it,” I said and stood. “Golden Weaver and I can go that way when we leave. We might be able to pick up the Mastermind’s trail, and it’ll be less trouble for you and Marty.”
“Sure,” the cop shrugged. “But I’d rather join you. If the Mastermind is at the end of that tunnel, I want to be there when he goes down.”
I wiped some of the blood off my hands, and the dark red liquid quickly blended in with my black costume. The fabric was designed to keep anything from leaking in, so I didn’t have to worry about that, but I shivered anyway. I didn’t want to get on the Designer’s bad side by replacing yet another costume, but I wasn’t sure I’d want to wear this one again.
“What do we do with his body?” I asked and turned back to look at Admiral Freedom. “It doesn’t seem right to just leave him here. Or the guys in the break room.”
“There’s no way that we can bury them all,” Harper sighed and ran a hand over his bristly chin. “We could blow the place up and let the river bury them.”
“But then we’ll have to deal with Swampy,” I pointed out. “And we haven’t gone through all the rooms down here. There was enough Vis for an army in one of the storerooms. And the last thing any of us need is for the city’s water to be contaminated.”
“True,” the older man said with a nod. “Whole place has already started to fall apart just with what’s out on the street. And I’d bet my pension that the stuff we found is that new version that only kills non-supers.”
“Probably,” I said and started toward the doorway. “I’m going to check on Golden Weaver. They’ve been gone too long.”
“I’m still in the break room,” my partner said over the comms. “I wanted to try to collect evidence.”
“I’ll be right there,” I said as Harper followed me into the corridor.
The cool air in the hallway smelled like the river, and I gulped it d
But the more I looked at the volume of blood, the more certain I was that more than one human had contributed to the pool. Admiral Freedom had probably managed to land a few blows of his own, though I also had to wonder if some of the Mastermind’s goons had been dispatched here as well. If so, had the Mastermind moved them for some reason? The only reason I could come up with was that it somehow ruined the effect of finding Admiral Freedom alone in the room.
“What are you thinking?” the detective asked as we headed to the break room.
“I’m wondering just how many people the Mastermind has made kill themselves,” I said. “Admiral Freedom may have been an asshole, but he had an iron will. It would’ve been hard to force him to kill himself. Especially that brutally. And to murder all those people in the break room.”
“Maybe… maybe he had help,” Marty gasped over the comms like he was about to throw up again. “I mean… There are like eighty people down here. Even Admiral Freedom would have trouble with that. And it looks like no one fought back.”
“There wasn’t time,” Anora said. “Whatever happened, happened quickly.”
“Maybe the Mastermind fed Admiral Freedom Vis and then used mind control on him,” Marty suggested. “That would make a lot more sense.”
“Maybe,” I said as we came around the corner to see Marty outside of the break room. “But there would’ve been signs of Vis in Admiral Freedom’s blood. We saw the red around his iris from the Mastermind’s control, but there wasn’t any purple in his eyes, his veins, or in the blood all over the floor. And the blood is still wet enough that the attack happened recently. There wouldn’t have been enough time for it to metabolize.”
“Osiris is right,” Golden Weaver said as she walked out of the break room. “There’s no sign of Vis anywhere except for in those storerooms. But there’s enough there to power an army of supers. And even more guns.”
I leaned against the wall opposite the break room and looked in at the carnage. There were bloody streaks on the floor like someone had tried to get away and was dragged back, body parts with torn muscles and flesh as if someone had ripped them off, and faces forever frozen with horrified expressions. I wasn’t sure if Admiral Freedom could do that much damage on his own, especially since super speed wasn’t one of his powers, but the human body could do a lot more than we gave it credit for, and the Mastermind might’ve pushed the superhero to his limits before making him kill himself.
“I just don’t get why he would leave it all here,” I frowned and started to tap my foot. “It doesn’t make sense to waste that much Vis or that much ammo. Let’s put aside the fact that eighty of his men are now dead… Why would anyone planning a war leave that much behind?”
“Maybe we caught him off guard,” Marty said and then downed an entire sports drink like it was air and he was suffocating. “I mean… You said yourself that this happened recently. Maybe he didn’t expect us to find the bunker at all, and he had to make a quick escape.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But we didn’t hear any screams, either. So, whatever happened here happened long enough ago that we didn’t catch Admiral Freedom in the act, but not so long ago that the blood would’ve dried.”
“We had to have been minutes behind the Mastermind,” Golden Weaver said as she leaned against the wall opposite of me.
“My thoughts exactly,” I said and tried not to look at the gory scene in the break room. “My question is how did Admiral Freedom get here before us? I know that he said he had a lead, but Marty tracked that phone here within the hour.”
“What if he figured out who the Mastermind is?” Marty asked in a shaky voice. “I mean… we all think it was the mayor, right? What if Admiral Freedom just figured that out.”
“Does this property have any links to the mayor?” I asked and crossed my arms over my chest. “I thought that it was just abandoned.”
“I’d have to look,” the younger cop said.
The color started to return to Marty’s face as if the sports drink had finally refreshed the kid, but the coppery stench that filled the hallway seemed to get stronger with every passing minute. Everything in me just wanted to go through the hidden corridor and follow it to wherever the Mastermind had escaped to, but the underground bunker was huge, and we’d only been able to go through a few of the rooms. Of course, there was a very high probability that we’d run into more corpses, but those might actually give us some evidence since Admiral Freedom and the guys in the break room hadn’t been able to.
“We should try to find an office,” I said as a heavy silence fell on all of us. “Marty, you and Golden Weaver go looking for it while Detective Harper and I take another look at all of the weapons. There must be something in here that’ll point us in the Mastermind’s direction, or at least, where he came from. And we need concrete evidence if we’re going to point a finger at the mayor.”
“I think that I saw an office down the hall next to the bathrooms,” Marty said with a small triumphant smile. “Give me ten minutes, and I’ll be able to hack into any computer that was left behind.”
“Sounds good,” I said with a thumbs up. “We’ll meet back in the room with Admiral Freedom’s body.”
“Why?” the younger cop asked with a horrified look on his face. “We should just leave everybody here and go back upstairs once I’ve gone through the computers.”
“Because I think I found the passage that the Mastermind must’ve used to get out of that room when he was done with Admiral Freedom,” I said. “And we’re going to follow it.”
I pushed off the wall and looked down the hallway as if one of my powers was x-ray vision, but it didn’t take that particular ability to see Admiral Freedom’s corpse laid out in a puddle of blood. That image was seared into my brain for the rest of time, just like the rage that followed it. I hadn’t liked the brawny superhero, but no one deserved to die like that, and I’d make sure that the Mastermind paid for his crimes with his life.
“I like my plan better,” Marty whispered like a little kid talking back to their mom.
“We have the psychic-blocking bracelets, kid,” Detective Harper said and slapped his partner on the back. “We’ll be fine. Vera assures me that Orion is the best tech super in the city. Maybe the world. If he says it’ll block the Mastermind’s powers, then it will.”
“Unless he’s taken Vis,” the younger cop said with a stubborn expression. “And then we’re all doomed.”
“I won’t be,” I reassured the worried man. “And I won’t let you guys kill yourselves. Now, come on, we need to hurry before the Mastermind enacts the next phase of his plan.”
“Come on, Marty,” Golden Weaver said in an encouraging tone that was strange coming from the usually strict woman. “We have a world to save.”
My partner slapped Marty on the shoulder like an affectionate older sister and then strolled down the hallway. Anora had been a little different since she’d returned from the trip to the spider-like woman’s old friends in the south, but there hadn’t been a red ring around Golden Weaver’s eyes, and the psychic-blocking bracelet was still around her thin wrist. Whatever was going on with her, it wasn’t because she was being controlled.
I still watched her for a few seconds, though admittedly it was more to follow the sway of her curvy hips than out of worry. It had to be hard to go back home and talk to the same people that had known the superhero before the slaughter of her entire clan, especially when she was still a target for the local government.
I decided I’d talk to her about it later, but for the moment we had work to do. As long as she wasn’t being controlled by the Mastermind, then she could drop the tough outer shell as much as she wanted if it meant we could finish the job.
Marty gave us one last look like he wanted to argue the point again but then sighed, tossed the empty sports drink bottle in the nearby trash can, and followed after Golden Weaver. The kid may not have had the stomach for all the gore, but there was no doubt in my mind that he’d be able to hack into any computers that were left behind, and that might even help him to regain some composure. There was nothing like work to force the mind to focus on something other than fear.
