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Gifted
Jul 29, 2013 12:07:45 GMT -6
Post by rvm45 on Jul 29, 2013 12:07:45 GMT -6
This started as just a way to scratch the old writing itch when I just can't seem to Focus enough for one of my better efforts.
Yet many people seem to like it.
Its a future dystopian world where fairly large numbers of people with Comic-Book Style Super Powers have been turning up for over twenty years or so.
Gifted
Chapter One
Jason’s Tale
I was sitting three cars back from the intersection at a four-way stop.
The black Humvee two cars ahead of me had just started into the intersection when an old green Ford Comet ran the stop sign and slammed into the heretofore-pristine Humvee.
There was a steep hill on the side street and a little old lady at the Comet’s wheel. I can’t imagine any good reason that she’d intentionally ram the Humvee. In all probability, her brakes failed.
The dude who leaped out of the Humvee looked about six and a half feet tall—though it was hard to be sure, sitting down and looking up at him through the windshield of my pick-up. He was big and thick though—like a strongman competitor.
When he raised his clenched fists to the sky and started shrieking like a banshee being raped by a sasquatch, I flashed on heavy weather ahead. Screamers are almost always a bad trip.
Then he transformed.
At that point my happiness was complete.
The scientists have no idea where the extra mass comes from when a transformer changes. There is a long list of things about the gifted that science can’t explain.
He screamed himself about eight feet tall with thick knotty slabs of muscle all over him. His shoulders were about a foot wider and each arm was over a foot longer than a proportional eight-foot human’s should have been.
He didn’t have fur, but he had a lot of body hair and a nice set of fangs.
I’ve seen transformers turn into far more fearsome things.
He grabbed the front of the wrecked Comet and flipped it end over end—long ways. The old lady started screaming and he followed and flipped the car a half a dozen more times—but sideways.
I grabbed one of his tree-trunk arms and pulled him around to face me.
“Don’t you think that’s enough?” I asked him.
Apparently he did not. He grabbed me and threw my three hundred and fifteen pound bulk clear across the street. I hit a wood telephone pole about fifteen feet above the ground and I swear that I heard it crack.
Maybe that was my ribs and spine cracking though.
I got up mad.
Okay dude, if you want to get it on, then lets…
But I choked down the berserker. I have almost eight minutes worth of charge, but sometimes a handful of charged seconds can mean all the difference.
I walked across the street to my truck. Well maybe I sprinted, but I wasn’t charging.
Question:
“Why did the charger cross the road?”
Answer:
“To kick some arrogant transforming mutant’s ass.”
Tow Chain, Master bicycle lock, mace, pump pistol—lets begin.
The transformer had knocked a fire hydrant over at some point during his tantrum. I used the Master lock to secure the eighty or ninety pound piece of cast iron to my chain.
He had his back turned and was straining to get enough leverage to turn over a concrete-mixer truck and paying no attention to me whatsoever.
I started charging and began to wind the hydrant round and around like an Olympic hammer thrower.
But I wasn’t limited to three or four turns in a relatively confining circle. I walked my ersatz hammer toward the mutant, all the while storing more momentum in the heavy weight.
I hit him square in his back.
What the hell?
“When you lack in strength and size, find a way to equalize.”
I can honestly say that I’m probably the biggest and strongest charger around—not to mention my relatively long burn time—and any charger is at an extreme disadvantage against a strong mutant.
I hit him so hard that his eyes popped out of their sockets and burst.
I just had a feeling that it wasn’t going to be that easy though.
That’s something else that the biologists and biochemists can’t explain: super rapid healing.
Sure any super soldier, dog soldier, charger, juicer and most mutants heal fast. I can heal as much in four or five days as I used to heal in six weeks.
What I’m talking about is wounds that should be instantly fatal, healing right before your eyes. That kind of healing power is rare—but the screamer had it.
I took out my mace. I’d started with a four-pound shot. Who puts a four-pound shot—elementary school girls?
At any rate, I’d drilled a one and an eighth inch hole through the shot, tapped the hole and then screwed in a two-foot long rod of good ole 4340 chrome-moly steel. Then I’d welded it so it would never work loose.
There was a four-inch spike protruding from the head, seven robust and very sharp-cornered vertical flanges, a wooden sleeve around the steel shaft on the handle end, and a honking big hex-nut on the handle’s butt.
Every time the mutant climbed to his feet, I smashed him in his face. Fighting a giant mutant is no time to be squeamish.
Each blow of my mace dropped him and crushed his skull, but he’d start to rise again almost as soon as he hit the ground. By the time I was cocked to hit him again, he was his big old ugly self once more.
I had used almost half my charge. I was getting older, but my tactical position wasn’t getting any better. I felt the rage start to build.
I was perilously close to discarding my mace and wrestling with him. I wasn’t born gifted like the mutants, but I’ll be damned if they’re going to lord it over me.
When the rage hits, I feel that I’m more than a match, hand-to-hand, in a grappling contest, for any strong mutant on earth.
A black teenager with long blond hair trotted nonchalantly up.
I don’t know how I knew that she was a mutant. Perhaps it was the casual way that she carried four welding tanks over her shoulder.
She had three oxygen bottles and an oversized acetylene bottle. She set them on the ground beside the screamer and quickly bound the bottles to him with a magic lasso.
People read too many comic books. They insist on calling the gifted “mutants” like they’re “X-Men” or something. No one knows what causes gifts. There is no evidence that it is a genetic mutation. But there you have it.
Some mutants—mostly weak mutants—carry a thin steel cable, fifteen to twenty, sometimes as much as thirty feet long. It will have a ball bearing an inch or two in diameter on one end, and a smaller ball—maybe three quarters of an inch—on the other end.
They use it as meteor hammer, bola, garrote and whip or grappling rope—whatever. In the right hands, it comes alive—able to stretch, change course in mid-strike like a snake, and it never breaks the user’s skin, no matter how hard they pull on it, though it is only about an eighth inch thick.
So of course people started calling them “magic lassos” like Wonder Woman’s.
The magic lasso stretched enough to circle the giant mutant about three times, binding his arms and binding the welding tanks to him. The terminal balls fused and disappeared into the tanks as if they’d been manufactured with a thin steel cable contiguous with the metal wall.
He couldn’t seem to break free. The lasso would stretch and then retightened when he relaxed.
The girl grabbed my hand.
“Come!” she said.
We ran about sixty yards and crouched behind an ornamental brick wall.
“I’ve never tried to breach an oxygen bottle with a bolt. If I can’t set them off, will that gun pierce one?” She rattled off quickly.
“Well I reckon,” I said.
The pump pistol had a twelve inch barrel and resembled the sawed-off witness protection shotguns, but it had a rifled bore and was chambered in .500 S&W Magnum. With my hot loads, it might have pierced all four of the bottles with one shot.
I didn’t need to waste ammo though.
She stood up all proud and pretty. She pointed her left index finger at the mutant and fired a bolt of lightning that momentarily blinded and deafened me.
I’m not sure either of us would have survived the over-pressure from the blast if she hadn’t shielded us with some sort of force field.
Force fields are something else the physicists can’t account for.
She hadn’t shielded my truck from the blast, but fortunately it didn’t seem too damaged. The mutant had worked himself a fair distance from my truck and the concrete truck was between the blast and the truck.
“The mutant patrol will be here any moment,” I said. “Do you have a ride?”
She shook her head negatively.
“Come on then,” I sighed in resignation.
“Well that blasted him into pieces small enough to hide, but it was a bit rough on any bystanders,” I commented as we drove away.
“I got everyone out of the area while you were clowning around,” She said.
“So I’m a clown then?” I asked in anger.
“Don’t you have any other powers beside brute force?” She shot back.
“I’m not gifted,” I said rather sourly.
“Mundane?” She said dubiously.
“Charger,” I answered.
“Juicer.”
“Chili isn’t soup anymore than sherbet is ice cream—even though you’ll find both in the frozen foods section of the grocery,” I stated dogmatically.
“And a charger is not a juicer.”
“Juicers” are civilians who buy black market versions of the super soldier serums. Sometimes they can’t get all the treatments and there are all sorts of ersatz substitutes for any or all of the serums.
Some black market labs are very good. Many juicers are as good, some even marginally better than the government super soldier. Some of the near misses and also-rans are still stronger and tougher than any human.
The charger conversion is a great deal different and it is harder on the candidate than the super soldier conversion.
A charger has been modified in a score of ways, to let his body store huge quantities of oxygen in its tissues and then supercharge the muscles during intense effort.
A charger is generally stronger and usually larger than a super soldier. That is, the charger is stronger the first three or four minutes until he runs out of charge.
Still, even a spent charger is more formidable than most unmodified humans. When his charge is gone, he’ll still be about as strong as the average weightlifting Olympic competitor of his weight class and able to run five and a half minute miles for a couple hours or more.
Recharging takes from twenty minutes to perhaps an hour. I can recharge while running at a good marathon pace, and I recharge relatively quickly.
Thing is, having humongous quantities of oxygen on hand is all well and good, but if you want super strength, your muscles have to be capable of generating and enduring super strength.
Even super soldiers need to do plenty of work and training to grow into full-powered examples of the breed. The super soldiers train for three years before the military considers them complete and they often continue to grow marginally stronger for years after graduation.
Charger training is five to eight years, or more. Supercharging the muscles is only part of it. The muscles have to be capable of generating great force and the muscles, tendons, bones and ligaments need to be capable of withstanding the stress of applying super strength.
As the body’s ability to transport oxygen to the muscles gradually increases the muscles have to be pushed brutally, right past the bleeding edge of their newfound capacity. They’re strained and damaged pretty severely.
Anabolic steroids speed healing dramatically and opiate-based painkillers ease the after-training agony. Chargers use doses of each that would kill a mundane.
That’s why many folks think chargers are really “out there”, and why chargers tend to be clannish—no, not me. I’m pretty much a loner.
A super soldier will need about 4500 calories a day to stay fit, even if he’s just loafing around; although while skills might get rusty, serum-built muscular systems don’t require exercise to stay strong, only to improve.
My own calorie requirements vary, but if I’ve charged heavily I may sometimes need as much as 15 000 calories in a day, to stay on top of my game.
I was hungry.
“I’m going to stop at the first convenience store I come across, and get me some victuals. Do you have any special requirements?” I asked.
Some gifted eat huge amounts of grub. Some others eat lightly—even less than mundane. Some have special metabolic requirements.
“I’m broke,” She sighed.
“I got it. What do you like?”
“I love milk and jellybeans rock!” She said.
Well, I did ask.
********************** ********************
I bought a dozen fried chicken breasts, all the potato logs that they had on hand, four gallons of milk, several two-liter cokes and candy.
I need a lot of calories. A jumbo Snickers bar has eight hundred and eighty calories, and it’s made from good nutritious stuff, peanuts, milk, chocolate and so forth. They’re not good for diabetics or dieters, but I’m neither.
The one bad thing about Snickers is that they melt in the summer, but I had a twelve-volt cooler in the truck.
I got some peanut M&Ms because they don’t melt in the heat. I bought my new friend several small bags of jellybeans and picked up a few bags of spice drops.
I couldn’t drive and handle a chicken breast, so I had a half a dozen tater logs and a Snickers bar then I stuck to the M&Ms.
“By the way, what’s your name?” I asked my passenger.
“Vanda. I just started manifesting a few weeks ago. I have a cousin who is a red spot and he’s been trying to teach me.”
She sounded as if it were a disgrace to be gifted and she was embarrassed.
“Red spot” means a mutant with only a trivial power, like projecting a virtual laser dot onto a wall—but the mental actions to call the power up is pretty much similar, or so they tell me.
“So you don’t know any other gifted or have a hideout?” She shook her head negatively.
“Well, I suppose I’ll have to do the Good Samaritan thingy and take you to one of my retreats,” I said with no great enthusiasm.
I like to be alone.
I decided that since I couldn’t be alone that I might as well take her to see Splicer at the gym.
I noticed that she ate three of the breasts, a few logs and washed it down with about a quart of milk. She nibbled on her jellybeans afterward.
That was a good healthy appetite for a young woman, but not anything extraordinary—which was good. There are times that I have trouble keeping myself in grub.
I went through the drive-through at Arby’s. They had a special on roast beef sandwiches, so I ordered fifty sandwiches, fifty orders of fries and one vanilla malt.
Past experience had taught me that the sandwiches and fries would keep for days, even without refrigeration and Splicer eats like I do.
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Gifted
Jul 29, 2013 12:09:31 GMT -6
Post by rvm45 on Jul 29, 2013 12:09:31 GMT -6
Chapter Two
Cooper’s Tale
My name is “Cooper”. My father named me after Colonel Jeff Cooper, the combat pistol guru.
My father had me mastering the 1911A1 from as far back as I can remember. He passed on before the gifted started manifesting. Even a weak mutant probably has skin as tough to shoot through as one of the old Level II vests. That won’t stop most serious combat rounds, but it slows them down and downgrades their performance.
But I honor my father’s memory, and I always carry at least one cocked and locked 1911A1—loaded with the hottest 10mm loads that I can get it to function with.
My main “Mutant Gun” though is a Ruger Redhawk loaded with some of the hottest Linebaugh .45 Colt loads—or an even more powerful weapon/load combination..
Not that I’d ever met a mutant before the day in question, at least not to know that they were mutants.
Like the old aphorism:
“Six muntz ago, I coodn’t spell ‘Gonneschmitt’. Now I R one!”
The Hornets had a brief fast-breaking scrap with the Krakens in the parking lot of the mall.
Mutant gangs, do you wonder why they almost invariably have their rumbles in public places? Why so many of their fights are so well covered? Why are there so seldom any casualties?
I’ll tell you a secret, if you want to take the red pill—or was it the blue pill? I always forget which was which. If I’d been Neo, I’d have taken both of the pills, along with a good stiff dose of speed and LSD-25, and washed it down with a pint of Jack Daniels. See what that would do for Morpheus’ Matrix.
But that was before I quit altering the old software by chemical means—pretty much.
I digress.
Anyway, though mutants are technically subject to arrest, indefinite detention and summary execution the govie tacitly allows them to roam free and flourish.
The unemployment is almost forty percent. Almost half the population is on the dole. Even most of the working are under-employed and will experience fairly long lay-offs from time to time. The standard of living plummets…
People stay glued to their computer monitors and root for their favorite mutants and mutant gangs with the fervor that used to be reserved for professional sports teams and soap opera dramas.
The govie doesn’t want to exterminate mutants, whatever their official position.
Well, lets just say that they don’t want to exterminate all mutants. The detention camps and executions are all very real—especially for mutants who are of little value, or worse yet, make waves.
Anyway, The Kraken and The Hornets had a high-profile gunfight.
The Kraken broke off and The Hornets walked nonchalantly through the parking lot reloading and bantering good-naturedly.
The big black woman—I thought that she was six foot and seven inches—I’m no Otaku, but you can’t help but know the names and stats of some of the major mutants…
And besides, notwithstanding her height and women’s bodybuilding physique (and more), I always thought that she was rather attractive.
I digress; her name is “Danielle” and the mutant that they call “Pong” is always hitting on her playfully. I didn’t hear what he led off with this time…
And off course they’re hamming it up for the cameras.
“I am a virgin, and I will be a virgin until my wedding night,” She says with some heat. “If you want me, you will have to take vows to stay faithful until death do we part.
“Do you want to marry me?” She challenged.
That shut Pong right up.
“Does anyone in this gang want to claim my hand?” She shouted.
You could tell that Pong had pushed it too far this time and really angered her.
“I thought not. None of you are man enough to handle me!
“How about you mundane? Any one of you can have my hand right now, just for being bold enough to step forward and claim it.”
Number one, she was sexy; number two—she made it a challenge; number three—I was curious if she’d follow through.
Mostly though, I have a built in compulsion to provoke things.
I stepped forward with all the panache of an Olde Tyme Confederate cavalryman meeting his arranged bride.
“I claim you, if you were in earnest,” I said.
She looked angry.
“What if it was simply a ruse? What if I kick your mundane ass for your audacity?” She roared.
“I’d regret that. I’d hate to have to hurt you. You’re too beautiful. Make no mistake though, if you attack me you will long rue the day—if you survive,” I said.
I was surprised at how well I kept my temper. Nonetheless the adrenaline was coursing through my veins and it made me tremble as if I had the ague. I hoped no one would take my over-amping for fear. I have no fear.
“You’re brave, but I’d tear you apart,” She started.
“Try it!” I snapped as I drew my Bowie.
I had guns and so did she. I’ve heard the axioms about taking a knife to a gunfight, but in my rage the Bowie seemed more appropriate.
“You misunderstand. If I married you, in the passion of the consummation, I’d rip your limbs from your body without meaning too.
“Anyone I wed will have to be a strong mutant.”
“Then why did you offer?” I snapped.
“You’re serious? Would you like to be gifted?” She threw the challenge at me.
“Do it to it,” I accepted the gauntlet that she’d cast at my feet.
“Perhaps I can swing that. Give me contact data. I’ll be in touch. I have to go now,” She said.
Being gifted is far from an unmixed blessing. Most folks would have bobbled and temporized—and failed the test she’d given me.
I never pined away wishing to be gifted, but I was not going to back down and I felt driven to see where this path might lead.
It never occurred to me to question her veracity.
Besides, I couldn’t force someone to marry me. Danielle would contact me, or she would not. I had to trust to my geas and my will.
The paparazzi ran up and stuck their digital video cameras in my face.
Dorks! If they want to be taken seriously as cameramen, they need to track down some of the old movie cameras that use film. There aren’t any real live photographers anymore—only digital pretenders.
They wanted to ask me all kinds of questions for the benefit of all the otaku watching and re-watching Danielle and my dialog over and over while honing Jenkin Horne.
I realized as I give the third of fourth pseudo cameraman the brush-off that I was still waving my Bowie around in my left hand.
Oops!
The Aborigines—you know, those dark-skinned Caucasians from Australia, not some other random “Aborigine”—have a saying:
“The more that a man owns, the more he has to pack.”
That is true in a metaphysical sense, even when you add in moving vans and rental storage.
I put up a couple well-chosen sets of clothes, extra underwear and socks, a few guns and knives and so forth to be ready if and when Danielle contacted me.
The one thing that I was absolutely not going to leave behind was my little dog Rastus Alphonso. He was more Rat Terrier than anything else—twenty-six pounds of super charged muscle and bone.
If I hadn’t known the woman down the street who’d given me pick of the liter when her dog had an unexpected litter, I’d have wondered if he hadn’t been misplaced from some juicing research. He was that agile.
Most dogs like me. My father always said that if dogs and small children like someone, then he’s okay, but not otherwise.
But Rastus Alphonso was different. He absolutely worshipped me. Affection like that is contagious. I loved him more than I’d ever loved any of my other dogs.
Then five days later, the phone rang. It was Danielle.
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Gifted
Jul 29, 2013 12:11:15 GMT -6
Post by rvm45 on Jul 29, 2013 12:11:15 GMT -6
Chapter Three
Jason’s Tale
Splicer’s boyhood powerlifting coach had been rather strongly biased against anabolic steroids. He’d once told Splicer about the typical “steroid user’s gym.”
According to Splicer’s coach, the lights were low; people wore mirrored glasses and heavy metal music played loudly. You had to watch your six to keep from getting shanked.
It’s hard to imagine. I think that the old boy was letting his prejudice against the fruitful juice run away with him, but the image always stuck with Splicer.
Back when the government started really bearing down on gun ownership, Splicer was one of those people who believed that guns were more important than anything else.
He said that he’d rather make common cause with drug dealers and other outlaws than with a government bent on disarming the citizenry.
Splicer organized a gunrunning gang. There isn’t a lot of ethnicity in Middle America, but Splicer’s folks had come from Irish stock and he decided to call his gang “Sinn Féin” without knowing much about the real Sinn Féin.
Turns out that Splicer’s folk were Scots-Irish and any of them still back in Ireland were probably playing for the other team. The name of his gang stayed the same though.
Slicer was about thirty-seven years older than me, and I was one of the youngest members of Sinn Féin when the gang disbanded in the wake of the sweeping “Right to Bear Arms” laws that were passed.
Don’t be fooled. The government realized that Americans simply weren’t going to give up their guns. It would have led to full-scale insurrection to persist on the path they were on.
Modern day Americans are more than willing to go along with a lot of other Fascist nonsense though. A brutally repressive government that makes a fetish of allowing its citizens plenty of guns and ammo results in some fiendish firefights occasionally.
But that’s just more electronic circus for the otaku and helps keep the govie storm troopers on top of their game.
At any rate, when Splicer decided to retire from gunrunning he decided to open an underground gym—literally. The whole compound is forty feet beneath ground.
He remembered his old coach’s description, because parts of it appealed to him. Splicer’s gym is fairly well lit, but all the bulbs are all red. It kinda makes you feel like you’re working out on the bridge of the old “Battlestar Galactica”.
There are disco balls with red lasers directed at them. Ultraviolet posters along with their attendant UV lights are plentiful. There is lots of Graffiti Style Art on the concrete walls—also in fluorescent paint.
Mirrors are everywhere and there is always music playing—though Splicer’s taste runs more to pop music with a bouncy beat than to heavy metal.
Splicer is in his nineties and he’d probably be dead if it wasn’t for the super soldier program.
The first large-scale super soldier program was ran by the US Army. The idea was that if the program bore fruit, then the other services and some federal law enforcement agencies could start their own programs.
The government crayfished on that idea though. They decided that they would have more control over the program if there were only one—much to the displeasure of the Marines, FBI and Homeland Security.
A super soldier is committed for seven years after completing the process. About forty percent of the super soldiers still alive seven years later, opt to leave the military and there is a stiff competition to recruit them.
Some of them are also injured in some way that keeps them from being fit for military style combat—a stiff knee, for instance—but they might still make bang-up laws.
A few of the alphabet agencies almost certainly have small covert super soldier programs. The US Army runs a number of Marine officers intended to lead dog soldier units through their super soldier program and that’s pretty much the whole story…
Except that there are the washouts. While they may not have been quite up to super soldier standards, many of them are very strong and quick by human standards.
When they started the pilot program, they wanted all their men fairly similar to simplify comparisons. A candidate had to be six feet tall—plus or minus one inch. He had to be airborne qualified. He needed to weight one hundred and eighty-five pounds—plus or minus five, and he needed to have no more than twelve percent body fat going in.
There is no reason to be quite so specific nowadays, but somewhere along the line, they neglected to open the program up to other sizes and builds. There are more than enough applicants to fill the available spots and it does make super soldiers very uniform.
Splicer is six feet four and weighed a hard two-forty in his pre-juicing days.
There had been some speculation that the super soldier process might be rejuvenating for the old—should they survive it. There was also beaucoup speculation what a very heavy-boned strength athlete might turn into.
Splicer’s benefactor was a scientist authorized to try genuine government super soldier serums out on a select few oldsters and strongmen—not enough for any sort of statistically significant study, but just to give indications.
The Doctor knew Splicer and sought him out to offer him guinea pig number one slot.
I started taking the charger treatments about the same time that Splicer started the super soldier treatments. We worked out together in Splicer’s gym almost thirty years ago now.
Splicer is in a bit of a gray area. He didn’t go through the official super soldier program, but he used the government’s own serums with their tacit consent—so it’s not really accurate to call him a juicer either.
They shut the study down, but after Splicer had gotten his last treatment. The Doctor friend disappeared. He’d managed to keep the identity of many of his case studies secret and Splicer is still one loose end.
Splicer had some dorms in his underground compound and I knew I’d be welcome there as long as I wanted to stay. I’d given Vanda a general rundown on who and what Splicer was on our way to his hideout, so she’d know what to expect, and so she could bail if she wanted to, before we arrived.
When I introduced her to Splicer, he was coaching some dog soldiers. Vanda seemed fascinated by the short stocky muscle men.
“How old are you?” Splicer asked Vanda.
“Nineteen,” She said.
“You are turning into a dirty old man,” Splicer joked.
“Wait a minute,” I protested. “There is nothing between Vanda and me except that we fought a very strong transformer together.”
“Not yet anyway,” Vanda inserted.
“Vanda please!” I said.
“Can you shoot?” He asked.
She shook her head negatively.
“While you’re here, you will learn. Everyone ought to know how to shoot. That goes triple for us fugitives and proscribed persons,” He said.
“Are those dog soldiers?” Vanda asked.
Splicer explained dog soldiers to her. He wasn’t the least embarrassed to talk about them with two-score of them within earshot.
Get out your gene spinner. Start with a five-foot tall man and a woman of about four-nine.
From about the nipple-line downward a dog soldier has a skeleton in proportion to a normal five-foot tall man—though with much thicker bones and musculature. A male dog soldier’s arms, neck and shoulders are in proportion to a man of six-four—and very muscular.
They have tremendous chest expansion and the muscles of the upper chest and back are a blend in size between the over-sized shoulder girdle and the smaller lower body.
A dog soldier has dual hearts and the same physiology and muscle metabolism as a super soldier.
Although the body is very humanoid, the genetics aren’t even remotely human—deliberately so. The body amounts to an android body—and you can do all kinds of things with and to it that would be verboten with human material.
They’ve never created a satisfactory android brain though.
Animals turn out to be rather smarter than we’d long thought and a dog’s brain is uncannily similar to a downsized human brain—more so than you’d expect.
That is probably an unintended consequence of dogs living and working alongside humans for many millennia. The dogs that could empathize the best prospered and procreated.
What is a dog’s brain notably weaker at doing? Processing verbal information, counting and other arithmetical operations and extended logic are some of their weaknesses.
Cyber-punk writers had been speculating about splicing computer chips into human brains to upgrade them for over a century. If they’ve ever perfected the chip implanting for humans, they’re keeping it under wraps.
What if you chipped up a dog’s brain though? Strengthened all its weak parts?
They take puppy brains, chip them up to the max and use them to run dog soldier bodies.
The Marine Corp developed the dog soldiers in response to the US Army’s super soldier program. They have many divisions of dog soldiers. So does the US Army now. Many private firms sell them…
They’re not human so they can be experimented on, turned out in artificial wombs and be bought and sold like chattel. If you need to use them for cannon fodder, they leave no grieving relatives and few care.
Why do they make them short? They’re hardwired to be submissive to the taller—taller pack members. They’d have charged the eight-foot tall mutant that Vanda and I had fought with suicidal abandon if their pack was threatened.
Also, they tried making them sexless and/or all male. The results were less than satisfactory. They’re sterile and even if they weren’t, the android chassis comes without anything but a rudimentary brain stem, but they do cohabit with one another and it keeps them in good fighting fettle.
Most human men wouldn’t find the very short extraordinarily muscular females attractive—though except for some impressive fangs, mostly for show, there is nothing canine about their appearance.
But just for the sake of argument, it wouldn’t be a large problem if an occasional human male got it on with a female dog soldier. You would sure as hell want to head off any idea of dog soldier males cohabiting with human females though.
Almost any adult human woman would be taller than a dog soldier male. That would both be a giant turnoff to the dog soldier and it would make him impotent.
Sure he could be hacked—but neither easily, nor without leaving evidence.
Dog soldiers, like super soldiers are born owing seven years of service to their creator. A truly recalcitrant dog soldier could refuse to honor the assumed “Contract”. He’d end up with something like a “Bad Conduct”—but not as bad as “Dishonorable”—discharge.
Few of them opt out of their “Contract” though. They’re geared for conflict and seldom prosper as anything but soldiers or armed guards—exceptions duly noted.
Most dog soldiers tend to be hero worshippers and to need a human to serve and look up to—just like any dog. Free dog soldiers tend to look for humans to attach themselves to.
Oddly, they often tend to be very insubordinate and disrespectful verbally—but they obey their orders when it comes down to it. And they don’t argue during a crisis—only behind the lines.
Splicer generally has quite a few dog soldiers who’ve decided to be his dogs.
And having severe doubts about the morality of using puppy brains to create them, doesn’t keep me from liking individual dog soldiers as a general rule. It isn’t their fault.
“I need to get stronger,” I told Splicer.
“How long has it been since you last worked out?” Splicer asked me.
“Years.”
“Well, you won’t have lost any ground and after all this time, you can probably make some progress—maybe you can increase your strength ten or fifteen percent.
“Why go through the pain though? You’re never going to be a match for a strong mutant,” Splicer said.
“Vanda will need several weeks worth of training before she’s ready to rush one of the mutant frats. It will keep me from getting bored.
“Besides, sometimes every little bit helps,” I said.
“Well then, I reckon that I need to train too, see if I’ve picked up any more strength potential over the years.
“You better start your Boldenone as soon as possible,” He advised.
Boldenone or Equipoise is a training staple for me, but it’s relatively slow acting and I’d start tearing my muscles apart almost from day one. No matter, I’d front load it—taking double doses the first couple weeks and stack it with faster acting steroids like Anavar and Testosterone.
I didn’t like using much Test, but I’d work the Anavar into and out of my stack the whole time.
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Gifted
Jul 29, 2013 12:13:27 GMT -6
Post by rvm45 on Jul 29, 2013 12:13:27 GMT -6
Chapter Four
Cooper’s Tale
When I answered the door, there was a very normal looking black woman standing there.
“Yes?” I said in some confusion.
“It’s Danielle! Didn’t you know that I’m a transformer?”
“Frankly: No.” I said.
“What kind of fan are you?”
“I’m not a fan. I’m especially not otaku. I barely knew who you were before the other day.”
“Then why did you step forward so eagerly?” Danielle asked.
“It was a test of courage. Besides, the wise man always leaps before he looks,” I answered.
“Why is that?”
She seemed earnestly puzzled.
“When you take the time to look, everything seems equally pointless. Once you’re immersed in struggle though, action is its own justification.”
“You should be directing foreign policy,” She said. “We’ll take your vehicle. Mine is a rental. Does that dog have to come?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like dogs. What if he’s a deal-breaker?”
“Goodbye. I trust that you can find your rental. Been nice knowing you,” I said.
“I like dogs. I was teasing,” She said.
“Testing is more like it.”
She smiled.
****************** ***************** ***************
We weren’t ten miles from our destination, when one of those black Federale law cars pulled us over.
“Be cool,” Danielle said. “They won’t make me for a mutant.”
“Are you armed?” The black uniformed Federale asked.
“Of course,” I replied.
What a stupid question!
“Get out of your vehicle very slowly and place your weapons on the hood of your vehicle,” He said.
“Do it,” Danielle hissed sotto voice.
I climbed out slowly as he’d directed.
There were five of them. One came to within ten yards of me to cover me with his submachine gun.
I respected the weapon even if I had little regard for the laws who held them. It was an American 180 upsized to hold a slightly hot-loaded .30 Carbine load—getting about 200 more FPS out of that thirteen inch barrel than a non +P .30 Carbine got out of the original nineteen inch barrel—shooting a 115 grain steel jacketed truncated cone bullet.
It hardly mattered that the horizontal drum only held two-hundred cartridges as opposed to the old American 180’s two-hundred and seventy-five .22 LR Cartridges.
Of course it had a laser sight. Can’t expect laws to hold and squeeze while maintaining a sight picture.
Another sub-gun toting law faced Danielle at the same ten yards. Two others stayed back farther and kept their red laser dots centered on both of us—one each.
The fifth law came walking up with one of those sawn off Roadwarrior shotguns that the nidderlings find so intimidating.
It doesn’t matter how big a hole your weapon makes if you’re lying dead before you can bring it into play.
There went my cocked-and-locked stag handled 10mm 1911A1 onto the hood of my van, my four inch Ruger Redhawk in .45 Colt, a pair of S&W Chief’s Specials in .38 Special, a tiny five-shot, pearl handled .32 H&R Breaktop that I loaded with Silvertip .32 ACP and carried in a dedicated trouser pocket, and a .25 ACP Beretta Jetfire also pearl handled.
I hadn’t started with my knives yet. I didn’t think they meant to do much more than shake us down. If they thought we’d done anything, they’d have come at us shooting.
Then Rastus Alphonso stuck his little head up to see what was going on and the law with the Roadwarrior blew his head off.
The four laws with the submachineguns were at a prudent distance, but the shotgunner had come up close to rifle through our belongings.
I stepped close to him. Hopefully his companeros would hold their fire momentarily—long enough for me to do what I had to do. After that, it wouldn’t matter.
They wore armor, but there was a gap between the vest and the crotch protector—otherwise they couldn’t have bent forward at the waist at all well.
I stepped close, slapped his Roadwarrior to one side and slipped behind him.
My right hand reached around his waist and pulled his bulletproof vest as high as it would go. My left hand—the hand with the karambit in it gutted him.
I’m tempted to say, “Gutted him like a pig,” but even the dimmest butcher would make his cut vertically, whereas I cut horizontally.
One more instant, to reach inside and pull a big handful of intestines out, to be sure I’d cut deep enough—and it no longer mattered what happened to me—I had avenged my best friend.
Incredibly, I was still working inside their reaction times.
Try to take one more down with me!
I threw my Bowie as hard as I possibly could at the closer law, just as he started to level down on me.
I don’t practice throwing knives very often. It’s either a chuckleheaded tactic or a tactic of desperation.
Nonetheless, the Baraka was with me. I’d thrown at his head, knowing that even a perfect point-forward hit would be defeated by his vest, while any strike to the face with the heavy Bowie might be efficacious.
“Efficacious?”
Well, I reckon. It went straight through his left eye into his brain. He swung in a circle and his burst passed over my head.
Then the farther law hit me with about a twelve round burst to my midsection. It hit my spine and down I went. I’m surprised that I remained conscious.
I really regretted that I didn’t have even one of my pistols or revolvers. I could have practically guaranteed an eye-socket shot with any of my guns at that distance, except the H&R—and even with it, an eye-shot was still a distinct possibility.
As he brought the muzzle of his carbine back online, the headless body of one of the far side laws flew through the air and hit him hard enough to break many bones.
Danielle had literally ripped the man’s head off.
She came running up in her six foot seven muscle woman form.
She was in a rage, but when she saw my condition she became frantic.
“Don’t die,” She pleaded as she tried to halt the flow of blood out of my midsection.
“He got my spine. Let me bleed,” I said.
“Fool!” she hissed angrily.
And then the world went away.
**************** ***************** ************
I awoke on a bed. My first reaction was to try to sit up. My legs responded, but I got a tremendous cramp in my abdominal muscles that caused me to yelp in pain.
Weirdness.
My gut and back ached. My kidney’s screamed. I’ve never felt such pain—but there were no holes in me anymore.
Danielle came into the bedroom. She was flanked by a couple of the other Hornets. I recognized Pogo though I couldn’t put a name to the other.
“You’re going to have to take it easy for a couple hours. An hour ago your midsection was full of holes. Gifted healing can only do so much, particularly for the mundane,” She said.
“Bring him along,” Danielle told the two Hornets.
I “walked” with a mutant bearing me up on each side—practically carrying me.
They took me into the kitchen where an ancient black woman set at an old table with a gray Formica top, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since my boyhood.
She regarded me with a pair of eyes that were solid white. Nonetheless, she seemed to look me up and down.
“A white man,” She said.
Nothing negative in the way she said it, just cataloging a fact.
I’d never thought of it before, but all of the Hornets as well as their archrival the Krakens were all-black gangs. I wondered for the first time if that was mere happenstance or by design.
Everyone left both the room and the small house, leaving me alone with the white-eyed old crone.
“I can’t gift everyone who would be gifted. In some there is no place to attach the gift. Does that make sense to you? It is hard to express in words,” She said.
“Sometimes I could gift, but chose not to. Often I can only throw a handful of potential abilities at a candidate and we’re both surprised at what sticks.
“With you, I think I could give you almost anything you’re bold enough to ask for and more—so consider carefully what you choose.
“But first, tell me why do you want to be gifted? Why do you want to marry my granddaughter?”
“Why anything? You’ll have to excuse me. I lost my best friend today. Nothing seems to matter very much,” I said.
“Excellent! We can’t delay though. Gifters are the most rare of the gifted—save one. I am old. I could fail anytime.
“If I failed to gift you, you might search in vain for another gifter,” She said.
“Is it excellent that the hobnail killed Rastus Alphonso?”
I was too drained to flare into anger, but I felt the fire start to gain heat.
“No. I grieve with you for your little dog. It is excellent that you have no clear goal or motivation. That is the beginning of wisdom.
“Now let me tell you a little about the gifts—not everything that I’ve learned over the course of a very long life—just the basics.
“Gifts flow from the mind. They are primarily mental. Why then, is super strength the most common super power, by far?
“The power flows easily through the nerves and then into the muscles. Part of it is localized telekinesis, but given such an abundance of vital energy, the bone and muscles prosper—even in what you call a ‘weak mutant’.”
I nodded my understanding.
“Almost all the other powers break down into Tepe, Teke or Peke.
“Telepathy, telekinesis or pyrokinesis.
“A pronger is a low-level telepath. One can make himself invisible by absorbing all light that hits him, bending light around oneself or telepathically erasing awareness of one’s presence.
“The first two methods are less than total. Most good vanishers use one or the other though and add in a bit of telepathy to make it totally effective,” She continued.
“So how do you explain transformers like your granddaughter?” I said.
“A very well controlled micro-telekinesis that re-weaves the body’s very constituents—and no, I can’t explain the added mass.”
“You are very well spoken for an old herb doctor,” I said.
“Is that what Danielle told you that I am? I have a PhD in Anthropology specializing in Ethno-Botany. I am also well over one hundred years old and truly, I am Danielle’s great-great-grandmother.
“Now what gift would you like me to give you?” She said.
She laughed aloud when I told her.
“That is well within my powers to grant and it will be a very different power—but remember, I warned you that you will get more than you asked or bargained for.
“I will ask one more time, do you wish to back out?”
“I swore to myself once, that I’d never let a last chance to back out go by. But I can’t take advantage of it.
“I have no choice,” I said.
“I know,” she said sadly. “I just wanted you to know that your compulsion is none of my doing. I’d let you slide, if I could,” She said.
It was the last thing that she said to me, or anyone else.
She took my head in both hands momentarily and stared into my eyes with her uncanny milk-white orbs. She touched my mind and instructed me to take the small drawstring bag from around her neck and place it around my own neck.
Then she died.
I walked out into the front yard where a bunch of Hornets and surprisingly, a large group of Krakens stood idling around.
Pogo walked up to me.
“I can feel that you are gifted now—strongly gifted. Would you like to join our brotherhood?” Pogo asked.
He saw me glance at the Krakens and laughed.
“We wouldn’t want it to get around, but the Krakens and Hornets—along with the Swamp Rats and the Colonels are all part of one big gang,” He said and laughed.
“Danielle, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but after your grandmother gifted me, she died. She said that she only had one last gifting left. And she gave me this,” I said, holding out the leather drawstring bag.
“What does this mean,” I asked.
“It means that you’re our new leader,” Pogo said in amazement and then he gave me what seemed a casual and joking salute.
When everyone else copied the gesture exactly, I realized that was how the gang saluted.
“What about Neumann?” I asked.
“Neumann was never the leader anymore than the Hornets and the Kraken were at war. He just plays our leader on TV.
“Good psy-op, what-say?”
“The old woman gave me several instructions, but first I need to bury Rastus Alphonso. Did anyone think to bring his body? Because if I need to raid the Federale evidence locker for his corpse, I will,” I said.
“You’d take on the whole government over the dog’s body, wouldn’t you?” Danielle asked.
“I am going to take them on.”
“Well, I brought your dog. You can lay him to rest in the grave beside my grandmothers. We will have a dual funeral if you chose.
“We can’t show any more respect than that,” Danielle said.
And then I—the newly crowned leader of one of the largest and most powerful mutant gang on earth—wept until I thought my eyes would wash away.
Several of the Hornets and Kraken were related to the old woman, and they wept as well.
I honored their sadness and I was sorry that I hadn’t known the old woman long enough to honor her passing with a single tear shed for her sake.
If I could have seen the future, I might have wept for myself.
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Gifted
Jul 29, 2013 12:16:14 GMT -6
Post by rvm45 on Jul 29, 2013 12:16:14 GMT -6
Chapter Five
Splicer Talks
Jason and Vanda had stirred up the hornet’s nest with their highly publicized fight with the transformer.
Of course it was captured on video. Almost everyone carries a fair quality video camera or two nowadays. Mutant sightings can be worth big bucks and there are other events that can prove very lucrative to capture for posterity.
Then there are the god’s eyes everywhere. Most of their data is supposed to be purged after six months if it doesn’t trip one of the Bayesian filters and no human comes looking for it.
Yeah, and if you believe that…
The god’s eyes are heavily hacked. There are multiple sites where you can view through any of them you care to. There are random routines that will take you on a tour of America or the world, stopping at each site for ten, twenty, thirty seconds—whatever your attention-deficit mind sets the controls for.
You can set them up to never repeat the same scene twice or to follow all sorts of protocols to guide them over a route as complex and convoluted as you care to make it.
So “god’s eye” is spelled with a capital “G”? I don’t spell it that way. There is only one God and he deserves the capital. Cyber spy-cams do not.
Hours after the battle of the fire hydrant, as they were calling it, some crazy gunslinger named “Cooper” killed a couple Federales—with knives yet—while his kill-crazy Amazon transforming girlfriend killed the other three.
And all of a sudden the govie was on the offensive again.
I watched diligently while Jason went through his routine prior to the big conference. It was his first workout in six years, but he picked up right where he’d left off—serum-altered muscle tissue is like that.
And of course, as a dedicated gym rat he remembered his exact poundages from six years ago, even if I hadn’t diligently recorded them for him.
He did the full squat—high bar, back straight and going down till his ass bottomed against his calves. Of course, he wore heavy-duty work shoes with a modest heel. A bit of a heel makes doing Olympic style squats noticeably simpler.
They don’t squat in the Olympics, of course—but those are the type squats Olympic weightlifters generally use to strengthen their legs.
A brief warm-up out of the way, he started with six hundred and five pounds. Jason had a thing for offbeat weights—not a simple six hundred for him.
To give you an idea how much that is: a one-hundred eighty five pound super soldier candidate will be weighing about one-seventy, or less, on graduation day. The super soldier metabolism eats all available fat relentlessly.
He will start the day with a 110 meter high hurdle segued into a 3000 meter steeplechase. He’ll have to complete the steeplechase fast enough to qualify for the Olympics.
Then after twenty minutes to rest and eat, he’ll start an Iron Man Triathlon: 2.4 miles swam in the river, 112 miles on the bicycle and then a marathon, 26.2 miles.
To be honest, he won’t be terribly weakened by his ordeal. He could lift a bit more fresh, but not a whole lot more.
Anyway, after a hearty meal and ninety minutes rest, that walking skeleton is expected to squat seven hundred pounds one to three times and bench press five hundred pounds one to five times.
They don’t test for more, because he’s passed the test and more isn’t relevant. For the record, most super soldiers lift close to their limits to pass—and about forty percent of the candidates still in the program on test day, don’t quite qualify to graduate.
So here is Jason, weighing well over three hundred. He hadn’t run a step that day and he had ninety-five pounds less on the bar than a super soldier candidate.
Of course Jason is in his sixties though he doesn’t look it.
Then Jason rips off fifty-three reps with his chosen weight—three more than he got six years ago. That’s progress of a sort.
Traditionally, one does the twenty-repetition squat and then does twenty pullovers with a “light” weight. So Jason does fifty pullovers laying across the bench and using a sixty-five pound dumbbell.
He has a fixed idea that his posterior chain is weak, so he does three sets of fifteen repetitions of stiff legged deadlifts with four hundred and five pounds—standing on a box and bending over with knees locked until the bar touches his toes. Then he spent a half hour doing leg curls.
Then he surprised me by loading fifty-five more pounds on the bar and ripping out thirty-seven squats with six hundred and sixty.
“Next workout,” He says. “I move up to six thirty-five and try hard for fifty.”
He’s insane. He’d been loading the juice for three weeks before he did this to himself, but his metabolism won’t be fully converted to full-scale anabolism yet. He’ll be in agony the next few days—and probably won’t miss a single workout because of it.
Then he started running the mutant girl through her paces.
Can you believe it? She’s almost strong enough to qualify as a strong mutant. She’s a level 3.4 bolter and 3.6 as a pronger and she wants to be a charger.
I never heard of any mutant taking the serums—much less a young lady well up in the threes. Three is major power, nothing bush league about mid threes.
Of course, strong mutant starts at 3.6, but strong mutants are a dime a dozen if super strength is their only power.
Pronging isn’t much of a power. A pronger can read and send crude emotions telepathically, but the main power is to reach into the autonomous nervous system and hack it.
A strong pronger can make you break into a copious sweat, shiver, salivate ruinously, make the eyes fill with tears, sneeze, cough, hiccough, urinate, defecate—like “Emergency! Dump All Ballast!” type defecate, projectile vomit, itch fiercely, fight or flight, or ejaculate—with or without orgasm.
Of course, everyone isn’t equally vulnerable in all avenues—so a pronger generally has to pick a couple or three areas of attack and stick with them. Prongers are relatively easy to resist if you know how.
And some trained fighters will still kill you even while slavering like a mad dog, ejaculating, urinating and soiling themselves.
My physicians checked her out and said that nothing about her metabolism ruled out the charger treatment—and she was adamant.
So Vanda stood with four hundred and five pounds across her back and Jason was fervently urging her on toward fifty repetitions.
By the time Vanda had finished her lower body, Jason was recharged to do his upper body.
Jason and Vanda had already gathered about thirty dog soldier admirers and surprisingly, an ex dog soldier officer—meaning a human super soldier.
Sometimes the craziness of it all makes me blink.
Of course the hobnails knew where my gym was. It was too big and too popular a gathering point for fugitives, people seeking conversions or wanting to buy top quality weapons, gear, and juice or just to hang out in a congenial atmosphere.
I had officials bribed both high and low. Computers were diligently hacked to erase anything that pointed to my location.
Some of our bribed were double agents though and the govie had gifted hackers too.
I could continue to operate so long as there was a quorum in mid-level places that it was convenient to preserve the status quo. While they knew where the gym was, they had a modicum of control over the situation.
It would take a lot of resources to penetrate my fortress. Some of my people would escape and then it would be deuces wild for everyone.
Representatives from several mutant groups gathered to make alliances and discuss strategy.
We cleared a bunch of marble tables out of the way, to have an auditorium.
When I was a boy, pool was a popular game of skill and poker too. Nowadays more gamblers and recreational players shoot marbles than shoot pool and play poker combined.
They play on a four by four foot table—can’t expect adults to knucky-down on the floor like children can you? The lips of the table are slightly raised, a half-inch of fine sand covers the surface and a there is three foot shooting circle.
There are dozens of variations: Turkish style, fudging allowed, steelie shooters allowed and/or holy-boly shooters allowed. There are games using only pee-wees and games using only giant marbles.
There are variations where the tables are tilted and one must shoot from each side in rotation. If you can think of a variation and others want to try it, and it won’t hurt my tables, go for it.
The mutants gathered before me. There were the Colonels—refined and educated men who fancied themselves gentlemen in the old antebellum southern tradition. And every one of them was a strong mutant with multiple other powers.
The Swamp Rats were supposed to be white trash swamp dwellers—but Stinky, their leader, is an Oxford graduate who has just a bit of a British accent when he’s not in character.
I knew that the Hornets and the Kraken were hand in glove, but I didn’t realize they were parts of a common super gang, much less that the Colonels and Swamp Rat’s were also part of their organization…
And they’d just assimilated the Magnolias too—a flashy debutantes gang.
And bring on the aspirin big time; the newly gifted gunslinger Cooper had been made the head of the whole damned organization.
Cooper was every bit as inflexible and reckless as Jason had been at his age—and still became occasionally…
And Cooper’s bride was a transformer who had a strength rating of 4.3 transformed and was also an acrobat. Acrobats have a sort of limited telekinesis that lets them throw their body at or away from things.
You see them defy physics like the actors in a cheap Kung-Fu movie.
They say that she is also a weak telepath and empath.
Then there were delegates from twenty other mutant, charger and dog soldier gangs. I’d never heard of some of them.
There weren’t many of the old Sinn Féin people left. We’d pretty much kept our word and disbanded when the govie kept its word. They passed the thirty-seventh amendment that stated American’s right to bear arms, any arms, outweighed all other considerations.
But Jason was there as my new Segundo with his new mutant/charger companion and almost a full platoon of dog soldiers, along with his own super soldier platoon lieutenant forming his own Praetorian guard.
Jason was the first to speak.
“They’re taking away people’s guns. I told you this would happen. I told you that the govie would simply bide their time, consolidate their power and then move against it. Did you listen?
“No!”
Quite a few folks roared their approval.
“Point of order,” I said. “Jason, you’re sitting up here with me, as my Segundo, to be on my side—not to help rake me over the coals.”
“You’re the cause of this!” one of the Partisan gang shouted at Jason. “You and the newly gifted dude. What powers do you have, little rooster, crowing all proud.”
He directed the last at Cooper.
“As I am a Holy Man, I will kill you if you ever insult me again,” Cooper shouted. “A rooster I may be, but only a blind fool would call me little.”
His new wife, in her transformed persona, placed a hand on his shoulder to placate him.
If he styled himself a “Holy Man”, then he was an initiate of one of the combat pistol orders. They were indoctrinated to demand a certain level of respect from people and kill or die, if need be, in the pursuit of it.
That made him half again as volatile as he might otherwise have been.
It is joy unspeakable…
“This is not my fault. It is not Jason’s fault. It is not Cooper’s fault.
“Yes Jason, you told me. I believed you. Machiavelli said that battles cannot be avoided, only deferred to another’s advantage.
“The govie deferred the battle to our advantage, for thirty years, allowing us to strengthen our position greatly. There are more gun lovers now than there ever were thirty years ago.
“In the days ahead, the uninvolved and the otaku will learn what it means to live under a taskmaster.
“They’ve been getting their pieces in position for thirty years, and so have I.
“Jason and Cooper were just a handy excuse. How about you mutants? You’re subject to summary arrest or execution. The govie officially declares you non-persons.
“Do you declare war on those who make you outcast, untouchable and locked on the outside?
“No, you fight turf wars or stage mock battles and live on royalties from the shoe companies, and sports drinks, or soft drinks, or threads or shades or whatever.
“And in days gone by, the govie winked at your exploits and encouraged them.
“You gave the otaku one more reason to sit glued to their computer monitors like wire-heads.
“Now the people are going on the march. We need to recruit some of them, or have them trample us under foot and then turn and rend us.
“Y’all are either fer us er agin’ us. Choose now. I’ll lie out our strategy for those who stay.
“Fare thee well, to the rest of y’all.”
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Gifted
Jul 29, 2013 12:19:09 GMT -6
Post by rvm45 on Jul 29, 2013 12:19:09 GMT -6
Chapter Six
Benji
Benji sat and watched his computer monitors. He had three; the center screen had been the highest definition screen on the market when he’d bought it five years ago.
There were better monitors on the market now, but Benji couldn’t afford to stay current. He’d used some of his student loan money to buy the best PC combo on the market. One can’t learn about computers on inferior equipment.
He’d kept his old screen. Then he’d took a little of his living expense money and bought a second hand duplicate of his previous monitor. Now the two older monitors flanked his center monitor, one on either side.
He’d also tied his old computer into his network to give him a bit more processing power. His new computer had sixteen four-processor chips and any one of the sixteen had more power than his old computer, but there were times a few extra megacycles might come in handy.
Not really though. Benji liked to read about the exploits of the star hackers—guys who just might find a use for any small increase in processing power—but truth be told, Benji wasn’t one of them.
Benji wasn’t much of anything really. He was just a dreamer.
He’d been out of school a couple years now. Jobs were few and far between. He no longer had the cash to upgrade and both his sixteen chip computer and his ultra high definition monitor were now far behind the curve.
It had been nice to ride the bleeding edge of technology for a few short weeks though.
Benji would probably have student loan deductions taken out of his infrequent paychecks and in-between job subsistence checks for most of his life.
He sighed to himself. For the same outlay of cash, he could have chosen to become a registered nurse. A registered nurse made four times as much per hour as a mediocre computer specialist—four times what all but the brightest and best computer specialists made…
And trained nurses were always in high demand.
Benji’s interest had been peaked by the ongoing story of Cooper and Danielle. Benji had never preferred black women the way Cooper said that he always had.
Benji, like many in his generation, was painfully shy around the opposite sex and had never been on a date.
That was why the story intrigued him so. The gunslinger Cooper had won himself a beautiful—if more than a little intimidating woman—and a position of power and influence, without having to have any people skills at all. In fact, if anything Cooper seemed to have negative “people-skills”.
Benji spent most of his waking hours in front of his monitor and he couldn’t hear enough about Cooper and his new bride.
But mutant sightings were becoming less frequent, now that the govie had discovered a newfound commitment to tracking down and locking up every last mutant.
The politicians were also working hard to pass some anti-gun bills and some drastic welfare reforms. Politicians and their bills interested Benji not at all.
His relentless searches for anything even remotely connected to the pair had brought him to footage from Splicer’s gym.
Jason and Vanda were another mixed-race team. Jason frequently stated that the two of them were only team members. But then Vanda always hinted otherwise.
He watched Vanda learn how to shoot and he watched the two lifting humongous poundages.
There was a lot of biographical data about Jason—a sixty-eight year old charger who’d fought with the old Sinn Féin gang decades ago. He was a close friend to Splicer, the gang’s leader.
Benji read and pigeon-holed everything that he could find about weight training, chargers, combat pistol shooting and the ”Gunrunner’s Rebellion.”
Benji was what the iron-heads called “skinny-fat.” He carried very little muscle while simultaneously carrying too much bodyfat, though without being morbidly obese.
He had never competed in any sport ever. He very seldom even went outside and he was very pale. He’ never done even the mildest of chores or manual labor. He was very weak and physically soft. In the modern world this was the most common condition by far and no one thought of it as a bad thing. No one thought of it at all. It simply was.
The weight training scenes and the martial arts videos were completely outside his frame of reference.
He did know a wee bit about guns though.
A few years earlier, he’d been impressed by a young woman who did fancy twirling with old west style single action revolvers.
He’d ordered a pair of EMF .357 Magnums online. In the wake of the Gunrunner’s Rebellion, mail-ordering guns was once again legal. They were nickel-plated. The guns had four and five-eighths inch barrels and stag grips.
He’d never fired either of the revolvers. In fact, he’d only tried the twirling training two or three times when he’d worn a blister on his right trigger finger that subsequently burst and had hurt a great deal.
Benji had put the guns away in horror.
Watching the simple way that the patient Splicer taught Vanda to shoot caused Benji to dig his old revolvers out and work along with them.
He was quite intelligent enough to insure that his guns were unloaded before he dry-fired them.
Strong wrists, fingers even reasonably strong shoulders were a requisite to shoot really well.
The idea of voluntarily enduring pain or hardship of any kind was foreign to Benji, but after a few weeks of watching the mad men at Splicer’s gym online, Benji decided that he too wanted to join a gym and build strength.
******************* *************** ****************
Jason’s Tale
Vanda was already very strong.
Mutants are rated on a scale of one to five—theoretically. Actually, the way the rating system is set up, you’d have to have infinite power to rate a “5”.
Most of the mutant powers are abilities totally absent from the mundane, but almost anyone can lift something unless they’re a quadriplegic or something.
A fit man can generally bench press his bodyweight or squat twice his bodyweight. That would rate a “1”.
For our stereotypical super soldier candidate—who would probably be stronger—that would be one eighty-five pounds for the bench and three seventy for the squat. Most gyms have more than one member who could bench press three seventy and squat five hundred and fifty five pounds.
He would be a “2”.
Only the very strongest of strength athletes could bench press tripple bodyweight and squat four times body weight. They would score a “3”.
A few very strong mundane might surpass “3” slightly—that is, they could peak and surpass it once or twice a year, with some specialized equipment, when everything was going their way.
A mutant, charger or super soldier can lift his rated weight on a very bad day, in street clothes and with no equipment but a weightlifting belt.
Given a ten or fifteen minute rest between attempts, he can lift those poundages twenty or more times in a day and do it day after day, indefinitely.
A few points—a “1” has to squat twice what he benches, but the two lifts get proportionately closer together as the ratings go up.
This is addressed above “3”, but it is a complex formula and not worth getting into.
There are also corrections for people who are much stronger in one lift and weaker in the other, and for people who can only lift a fairly heavy weight, but can lift it for an extraordinary number of repetitions.
Also, once you get to “4.0” the scale changes. “4.2” is what you’d have expected “5” to be. “4.4” is a “6”; “4.6” is a “7” and “4.8” is an “8”.
“4.82”=”9” “4.84”=”10” “4.86”=”11” and 4.88=”12”.
Then “4.882”=13 “4.884”=”14” and so on.
“Strong mutants” start at 3.6, but only because super human strength is so common. Super Soldiers are about 2.6. A charger will come in around 3 while charging and then drop to the low twos until recharged.
Dog soldiers are very hard to rate on that system. The short, but very thick legs that the dog soldiers have lets them squat heavy duty, but they’re not great for sprinting or leaping.
A dog soldier has arms as long as a rather long-armed human of six foot four. His long arms give him reach and leverage but it drags his bench press weight down lower than it would be if his arms were the same girth but shorter.
Then with his huge unidirectional airflow chest and his two hearts, his endurance will be off the charts.
At any rate, Vanda had worked up to five hundred and five pounds in the squat very quickly. Heavy twenty repetition squats are dynamite for the mundane, but they don’t cut it for gifted or would-be chargers.
We were aiming for fifty repetitions. That’s a crazy number of repetitions with a very heavy weight. Now add in that Vanda was a young lady, six feet tall and just recently bulked up to one hundred and seventy pounds.
Then it became outrageous.
But she’d hit 505 X 48 the last workout and we’d hoped to get fifty this time.
Instead of fifty, Vanda cranked out fifty-seven repetitions.
According to the techs, she still had less than three minutes worth of burn time. She worked fast to get them done in her charge zone—but when her charge failed; she had her mutant strength to fall back on.
And then she had mutant healing to help the small doses of Anavar and Boldenone she was getting.
“Vanda, I meant to raise you to five thirty-five if you hit fifty. Now I think that we ought to shoot hard at 505 X 65. When we get that, we’ll jump you up to five forty-five instead—okay?” I said.
It is deucedly hard to train a fast-healing mutant.
An hour after her workout, she bounded off to get more shooting lessons from Splicer and later she had a martial arts class to go to.
Business was slow. The Federales were doing everything within their power to catch mutants. Several well-known and well-loved mutant celebrities had been executed publically.
I’d been identified as an undesirable and it made it a bit awkward to make money as a bodyguard, bouncer or other job where being a charger was a big plus.
I stayed underground most of the time. I built my strength against a future time of need and I trained Vanda.
I picked up a bit doing courier work and working as a trainer in the gym. Splicer also had me on a small retainer as his Segundo and room and board for me and Vanda was included.
Then I got a job offer that promised to pay big bucks—just to make simple deliveries.
But first I needed to be rated. They don’t often bother to rate chargers or juicers—and as I’ve said, the ratings aren’t very useful on super soldiers and dog soldiers…
But my ability is getting into respectable strength levels, even for the gifted and my new client was anxious to have me rated before he trusted me to carry through a difficult assignment on his behalf.
I couldn’t walk into a govie facility and asked to be rated, of course. But there are black-market testing facilities that are well known and highly trusted in the underground circuit.
Cooper the gunslinger wanted his new mutant strength rated. He almost certainly had other powers but with the specter of war hanging over everything, he chose to keep his exact abilities well hidden.
I couldn’t blame him for that. Actually though, I didn’t know why he wanted his strength rated either.
And there was some dude named “Armstrong” who wanted to be rated too. So we all went together.
As a pack leader, I was expected to take along a minor entourage of dog soldiers. I took five and prevailed upon both Armstrong and Cooper to take one each as body servants/valets.
I had a vague premonition and having seven of my pack along seemed a prudent precaution.
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Gifted
Jul 29, 2013 12:21:52 GMT -6
Post by rvm45 on Jul 29, 2013 12:21:52 GMT -6
Chapter Seven
Benji
“Jason and Vanda do fifty repetition squats,” Benji insisted.
“You’re neither a charger nor a mutant,” Benji’s trainer replied in near exasperation. “The mundane equivalent would be the twenty repetition breathing squat.
“I assure you that it doesn’t look anything like what you see chargers doing on the web. There is a lot of standing with the bar across your shoulders while sweat runs into your eyes and you take multiple deep breaths between squats.
“But I’m not sure that you could do twenty deep knee-bends freehand without a weight.
“Do these 5 X 5 squats for six or seven months and then we’ll consider letting you do twenty rep squats for a cycle or two,” The trainer explained and not for the first time.
“I want to be a charger then,” Benji nerved himself to say for the first time.
He’d thought that bringing himself to say it was the hard part.
His trainer snorted.
“The charger treatment would kill your weak ass in your condition. Get a few years of good conditioning in before you even think about taking charger treatments. Besides, don’t you know that such things are against the law?”
The trainer looked around nervously and then shrugged. Almost everything one said was recorded and when and if the govie decided to move on one, they’d have more than enough damning statements—so there was little point in being circumspect.
“What about Anavar and Equipoise?” was Benji’s next question.
“You aren’t working anywhere near hard enough for the juice to work for you.
“Look man, you’re all into mutants? I’m not a mutant, but I can pretty much tell the future with my clients.
“You’ve never worked out before. When you roll out of bed tomorrow, you are going to have muscle aches from head to foot. It will hurt worse that you’ve ever hurt in your candy-ass life.
“Odds are, you won’t be back.
“Even if you make it back a few days later, if you last past the three week mark, you’ll be a boilerplate wonder.
“I’d almost bet that you won’t complete your first six week cycle.”
Benji finished his workout in petulant silence. But he did take his trainer’s words to heart.
He remembered how Cooper always quoted some aphorism:
“Live if you Can: “Die if you Must; “Always, Always Cheat.”
He knocked on the floor’s resident drug peddler’s door and bought a dozen of the timed-release “Opiluxe” capsules. Each capsule was guaranteed to kill all one’s pain and put one in an opiate-like stupor for twenty-four hours.
The man knew Benji by sight, since they’d lived on the same floor for several years. Anyway, there was no point in being too circumspect. If they wanted you, they had you.
“Can you get me Anavar?” Benji asked.
The dealer gave Benji a quick appraising look.
“Take a day or two to get it here, but yeah,” he finally said.
“I started lifting weights today. My trainer says the morning after soreness gets eighty percent of folks and they never come back.
“My name is ‘Benji’.”
“I’m Raven,” the dealer said after a moment’s hesitation.
Introductions weren’t standard in the drug world but the govie had his home address after all. It couldn’t hurt to give this pasty otaku his name.
Besides, the boy-man meant well and if he’d come from his first workout, at least he was trying to make something of himself.
“You ought to work out for awhile before you hit the juice,” Raven said.
“I know. I was just checking for later,” Benji agreed happily.
************************* ************ *************
When Benji awoke Tuesday morning, the pain was excruciating. He took one of the Opiluxe capsules and waited with baited breath for the Opiluxe to kick in.
There was still some pain even after the pill kicked in, despite the claim that the drug “Killed all Pain.”
Part of the problem was that the big blister on his trigger finger was the worst pain that Benji had ever felt, by far. Pain was a complete stranger to him and he had no mental practice blocking and enduring it.
He’d grown up in a culture that placed no value on toughness—at least real toughness, not the type toughness one developed watching rumbles on the web and playing video games.
If anything, the pain was a bit worse Wednesday morning than it had been Tuesday—so Benji popped another Opiluxe, but he kept his appointment with his trainer for workout number two.
Benji’s trainer laughed at him when he floated into the gym while half lost in an Opiluxe buzz.
“Well that’s one way! Look, I’m going to have to baby-sit you extra hard today, to make sure that you don’t hurt yourself in that state, but we can work around it—Friday too.
“You can’t really change horses in mid-stream, but training on painkillers is a short term expedient.
“When you come in Monday, I want you straight—okay?”
****************** ************** ******************
The second workout had worked some of the soreness out of Benji’s muscles just as his trainer had promised. He still took his Opiluxe Thursday and Friday, and over the weekend—but he was straight when he walked into the gym Monday morning to start his second week.
He bought another dozen Opiluxe, but he only took them the morning after a workout. By the time they were gone, he’d outgrown the need for them.
He still called on Raven occasionally though, now that he’d broken the ice and introduced himself. Raven’s apartment was the only one Benji had ever set foot inside.
Benji had never been introduced to any of the other tenants. In his mind, Raven was his best friend by default.
********************** ************** **************
Jason’s Tale
They put us through the same course as a super soldier candidate. Run the 110-meter high hurdles without knocking any over—if you knock any over, then you have to start over.
Then you round a corner and run the 3000-meter steeplechase. They time that.
A short rest and then it’s time to run an Iron Man Triathlon.
Swimming in the Ohio River is potentially very dangerous. It takes over two hours to swim the 2.4-mile course.
I’m no swimmer. I held tight onto my charge, lest I get caught in an undertow and desperately need it. I tried not to swallow any of the filthy polluted river water. Past experience had taught me that it made me sick, but that was before I became a charger.
I couldn’t help but swallow some of it. I hoped that my souped-up immune system could fight the sickness. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t get sick for a day or two anyway.
The next stage, we had to cycle 114-Miles. I’m no cyclist either, but the pace wasn’t terribly challenging. Armstrong, Cooper and I talked and ate bananas, orange slices and drinks fortified with whey protein and electrolytes, handed to us by our entourage of dog soldiers.
The Marathon—26.2 miles, had to be completed in three hours or less. I’m accustomed to running and while running a three hour Marathon may seem a ridiculous proposition for a three hundred and fifteen pound man of sixty-eight years of age, I was up to it.
I look just like a man in my prime and I grow stronger. I don’t know how long that will last. The charger treatments weren’t meant to be fountains of youth. I’m probably one of the oldest chargers still alive, so it is all unexplored territory.
Cooper had turned me onto a couple new serums. One gave better eyesight, particularly much better night vision. The other gave me the level II skin and doubled the speed of my neural impulses.
Reaction times are a few hundredths of a second. Halving that gives only a razor thin advantage—ordinarily. Still, every edge is welcome.
The treatment doesn’t double the speed of one’s thoughts—for a number of obscure reasons—but my thoughts were speeded up enough that in a fight, I had a subjective seventy-three seconds to ponder my moves, compared to my opponents’ sixty.
The better vision and the faster working of my brain let me enjoy the open sky and green summer countryside thoroughly throughout the bicycle ride and the run.
Then after ninety minutes to rest and load up on quick digesting, high-energy food, it was time for the test.
Since we were not super soldiers and hadn’t rained anywhere nearly as uniformly, they asked what starting weight that we wanted for the squat.
“Eight hundred and five,” I told them.
“Eight hundred and five? Super soldiers half your size squat seven hundred,” one of the lab techs sneered.
I hadn’t known that one of their functions was to hector and ridicule us.
I did fifty-seven squats. I could have done more, but something warned me to hold back.
Armstrong did sixty reps and then shrugged. He wasn’t exhausted, just bored. Cooper did thirty-seven.
I called for nine fifty-five, marginally over three times my bodyweight.
I grunted out a dozen repetitions. Armstrong got under the bar and quickly rapped out thirty repetitions. Once again, he quit because he was bored.
“I’m sorry to show you up so bad, but I’m a mutant,” Armstrong apologized sincerely.
Then Cooper, who’d been seriously holding back, stepped under the bar and rapped out twenty-four fast repetitions.
He put his hand on my shoulder as he walked by.
“I’m a mutant too, don’t feel bad,” Cooper said.
“Put thirteen fifty on it and lets end this farce,” Armstrong shouted.
I’d never attempted over nine fifty-five. Heavier weights destroy the strongest bars and I didn’t groove on the extra thick bars.
“Do you want a strong bar,” The haughty tech asked Armstrong.
Armstrong glanced at me.
“Olympic,” I said.
Thicker means less bruising to the shoulders, but I never used strong bars.
I went down having no idea if I could come up again. By now the spotters were used to me squatting until I had fully bottomed out, so they wouldn’t step in prematurely.
For people who strive only to hit parallel, that area below parallel is a dark and scary place where leverage is rapidly lost and tendons and ligaments, unaccustomed to the strain, are prone to tear.
For a full squatter like me, below parallel is where I live and thrive.
Once I’d risen to parallel once more, I knew that I had the lift. I got it five more times—the last squat wasn’t quite to the bottom, and very shaky.
My thighs had that ache that meant I’d stimulated them to actually grow stronger. Perhaps I needed some work on heavy-duty squats sometimes.
I lay on my back and gasped for air—not because I was breathless, but because I was anxious to get my charge back to full as quickly as possible.
Armstrong and Cooper both lifted the weight a ridiculous number of times and then added another two-hundred fifty pounds and did some more. I wasn’t watching them closely enough to give the exact figures.
The bench press was never my best lift, so the two mutants whipped me even more soundly than they had at squats.
No matter, I wasn’t there to compete with them.
They asked us to go wait in what had once been a modest high school football stadium, now used as a practice field for various mercenary groups.
It had a ten-foot tall brick fence all around. It was topped with concertina wire and surveillance cameras now.
The school formed one long sidewall while the concrete bleachers filled the other side.
The group’s testing facilities and reputation were top rate. They were newer at training mercenary groups and they were struggling to rise above bush league.
“Kill the dog soldiers, but take the mutants alive!” the public address system shouted with a nasal and metallic tones.
Dozens of second and third-rate juicer toughs started pouring out of the two bullpens and the stadium entrances.
Okay then.
It was reasonably clever. Tire us out as much as possible first and then get us into the stadium. Then they could use us as a training exercise for their troops.
It should have clued me in when I noticed that there were no dog soldiers among their ranks.
Dog soldiers loathe duplicity and won’t tolerate it—and they seem to have a sixth sense about who is a liar and cheat.
Well, if the testers wanted to catch us unarmed, they failed miserably.
One of my attendants rushed up to bring me a double shoulder rig with two high powered handguns and a shoulder bag with more firearms and ammo—and blades.
Armstrong and Cooper’s aides also ran to arm them as well. The three dog soldiers left over ran forward to the futile task of trying to stem the human tide.
“I held back that I was a transformer,” Armstrong said between gritted teeth.
He grew to about seven foot and his arms grew out of proportion to his new strongman physique.
I saw where he got the name “Armstrong.” He looked almost like a giant dog soldier, but even thicker and more muscular.
“I held back too,” Cooper said.
He grew half a head taller than Armstrong. He muscled up too. His head elongated and there was room for two more eyes where his forehead would have been and there was a fifth eye higher yet and centered vertically between the second pair.
“I wish that you could see the parallax available to five eyes Jason. You’d groove on the super stereopticon effect.”
And then there was no room to talk as the riff-raff charged us.
My dog soldiers went down fairly quickly. There was no cover and the juicers had orders to kill them. They did thin the ranks noticeably when they went.
The mercenaries must have been conditioned for absolute obedience. That gets you a loyal vassal, but it cuts into initiative a bit.
My mutant friends had fired their guns dry and were fighting the juicers hand to hand. None of the juicers were up to the lowest charger standards or super soldiers either, but they were stronger than mundane without exception.
“I have a plan!” Armstrong shouted. “Could you leap that fence with a hand-up?”
“Yeah, but what about you two?” I asked.
“Bring your pack. Bring Cooper’s gang and mine. Bring everyone Slicer will spare you and raze this place from the face of the earth,” Armstrong raged.
I shot him free and gifted him a loaded 1911A1—cocked-and-locked.
We fought our way to the fence. I took a short run and stepped into the interlaced fingers of the man who could bench press eight-fifty for high reps—even when he wasn’t transformed.
Between my run up and leap and Armstrong throwing me, I think that I soared twenty-five feet over the concertina.
I landed in a roll and ran for the river.
It was time to do the “Escape and Evade” thingy.
******************* ************** **************
Benji
Benji sat and watched the capture of Cooper and Armstrong on his high definition monitor and clenched his fists in rage.
Cooper was his hero. He rated Jason almost as high. He added Armstrong to his pantheon of role models.
He got online and looked for a handgun more suitable to fight with. He looked a good long while. Rumor had it that the govie was going to forbid mail-order firearms once more and everyone was stocking up on guns and ammunition.
Benji’s trainer taught him to work out six weeks and then take a sabbatical seventh week. He told Benji that his connective tissue needed time to catch up.
He said that taking a week off would cost some strength. He taught Benji to go through his regular routine on the seventh week, but with only half the weight.
That would postpone any strength loss and actually pump blood to the muscle tissue and connective tissue to help them recover.
He was in the middle of his third sabbatical week when his heroes were betrayed.
He went to see his new “friend” Raven.
“Did you see what they did?” Benji demanded.
“What? Who? Where?” Raven asked, thinking that they might be storming the building.
Benji directed him to one of the sites and Raven watched grimly.
“Well, it starts,” Raven said.
“ I’m going to a martial arts school tomorrow and start learning how to fight,” Benji sobbed. “Cooper is my friend.”
“You’ve never met him,” Raven said harshly. “The govie is moving again. They are a juggernaught. Throwing yourself in front of them will only get you smashed.”
Benji was not to be dissuaded. He insisted on ordering an eight-week supply of Anavar.
Raven gave him the name of a good street-fighting type gym, if he must go.
Then he called the sensei. The man was an old acquaintance and owed him a favor.
“Look, I gave a little otaku your address.
“Yeah, he’s been pumping iron and dry firing a pair of single action .357s for about three months now. He thinks he’s tough and he wants to join the revolution.
“No, I want you to kick his ass bigtime. Give him a bloody nose that will send him back to his computer monitor sniveling all the way.
“No, I don’t have anything against him. Don’t do him any permanent damage.
“Why? Because he’s naïve and I don’t want him ground up and spit out.
“No! I am definitely not caring about things once more. A single act of kindness does not a saint make.
“Drisco, he told me that I’m his best friend—his only friend.
“Why? I sold him some Opiluxe to get through his first few iron training sessions, that’s all I ever did for him—sell him twenty-four capsules and listen to his childish nonsense.
“No, I’m sure that it isn’t nonsense to him. That’s the problem.”
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Gifted
Jul 29, 2013 12:26:00 GMT -6
Post by rvm45 on Jul 29, 2013 12:26:00 GMT -6
Chapter Seven
Jason’s Tale
I hit the ground running.
There is something most people don’t realize about super human strength—very seldom can it be put to full use.
The human body is a bit underpowered—in that there are some halfway useful maneuvers that few people but little ninety-five pound gymnastics girls in the Olympics, circus acrobats and capoeira masters can perform.
Take a fairly typical American male—six feet tall, two hundred and forty pounds with a bit of a gut. Lets say that he drives a semi-truck for a living and he’s at least halfway fit and strong.
If you double his strength and give him a bit of training, all of a sudden he can move like a capoeira master. Triple his strength and he’ll be capable of moves that a ninety-five pound Olympic gymnastic girl can’t quite execute.
Past that, you rapidly meet the point of diminishing returns.
Think of high jumpers or broad jumpers. They compete on a clean flat surface, in a well-lit stadium and they use spiked shoes.
Just for the sake of argument, lets say that you could high jump twice as high as the Olympic champion. How often would you be able to find a good clean run up to leap fourteen or fifteen feet? And are you going to go through life wearing track spikes?
Two super strong combatants are apt to look like two mundane filmed fighting on an ice rink under lunar gravity and then played back at double or triple speed—particularly if both mutants have super human resistance to damage.
There is a continual lack of traction and leverage to bring full power to bear.
Still, watch a good parkour practitioner. He can travel through an obstacle rich environment almost as well as the old comic book heroes.
What if he had the spring in his legs to jump four or five feet higher, five or six feet farther, with faster reflexes to deal with slips and miscalculations? And what if his body could also take a lot more impact and abuse without significant damage?
That is where I live. When I’m charged, I can run up to a typical one-story house and leap onto the roof without breaking stride. Then I can run up one side of the roof and down the other.
I can leap from the summit to the ground without shaking myself up too bad. If I leap from the gutter, I don’t get shaken at all. Often I can leap from one roof to another. A suburban neighborhood isn’t a very challenging obstacle course for me.
After clowning around all day with the test, it was well after dark by now.
I hurdled six-foot stockade fences along with chest high chain linked fences. I broad jumped over swimming pools. I leapt from roof to roof as if they were stepping-stones. I took chances that I ordinarily wouldn’t take.
I hadn’t reckoned on how anxious the govie was to capture me though.
They had the black Federale Humvees driving everywhere shining flashlights as if they were trying to jacklight deer. There were helicopters with spotlights flying overhead and at least a company of dog soldiers searching for me.
There was a team of dog soldiers being led by a Bloodhound on a leash.
Dog Soldiers work well with canine units.
The dog soldiers can see as well in the dark as a dog. Their eyes have all the strong points of both human and canine eyes. Their hearing is better than human, but some acuity is sacrificed in order to make their hearing more directional.
Dogs don’t really “hear straight”. Their ears mainly tell them that something in the general area bears watching and/or closer investigation.
You can’t cram all of a dog’s olfactory receptors into even a large human-style nose, but a dog soldier’s smell is perhaps twelve times as acute as a mundane’s sense of smell.
They caught me within an hour. It wasn’t all that unexpected once I knew what I was up against.
I hated to take my frustration with life out on the dog soldiers. Talk about getting a crappy deal…
I asked for the charger serums and worked hard to bring them to fruition. No dog ever asked to be made into a dog soldier.
If it was my geas to slay dog soldiers, then so be it. It was a good day to die—for them or for me. One warrior respects another.
I fired my 1911A1s dry. A double tap with hot loaded 10mm 190 grain hollow-point at almost 1300 FPS generally settles even a dog soldier—at least three-fourths of the time.
A few weren’t quite so greedy and it took two double taps and sometimes a follow-up headshot was also necessary.
I wished that they could all be greedy enough to take a single center hit and be satisfied, but dog soldiers are noted for their frugality.
Guns dry—it was time for Bowie and tomahawken. I wished that there had been room to pack a sword. There is something elegant about dying sword in hand.
I’d gotten up to the unheard of level of over nine minutes of burn, but still all good things must end.
I give the dog soldiers credit. They had to know that I was charging and was due to run out of charge soon. They were also under the handicap of trying to take me alive, though I hadn’t fully realized that yet.
Good tactics would suggest trying to wait until my charge was exhausted.
Cowards theorize with the idea of surviving firmly in mind. Dog soldiers may be many things. I’ve yet to meet one who was a coward.
My Bowie was in my left hand. I gutted a dog soldier with a stroke that reminded me of my years working in an abattoir. Smash a temple with the spike on my tomahawken.
A dog soldier reached for me. I cut his hand off at the wrist with a quick movement of the Bowie. No artistry there. I used the big knife like a meat cleaver.
They hit me with pepper spray. Any juicer will be highly resistant to pain. My ability to feel pain is only about forty percent of what it once was. Forty percent of a face-full of pepper spray hurts like hell!
More importantly, it partially obstructed my vision.
They hit me with tranquilizer darts. They used Tasers and stun guns on me. They hit nerve centers with fat ball bearings on the ends of five eights inch steel rods. The dog soldiers twirled them around like cheerleader’s batons.
My charge was spent and the dog soldiers swarmed me like bees swarming a bear.
Then the world went away.
****************** ************* *******************
I woke strapped to an interrogation chair.
“What is your name?” the Federale in the black suit asked me.
“The June ball bifurcates coprophagic archipelagoes,” I responded.
He pushed a button and current ran from my nipples to my pubic area.
How droll…
“I ask you again, what is your name?”
“Incest lacks certain ‘B’ vitamins that are void when prohibited by law,” I replied.
Zap!
“Ice cream, maggots and funky weather,” I told him.
Word salad it’s called. It can be a symptom of insanity, but it was simply my refusal to offer him a straight answer.
It takes a bit of practice to do it well. When I first started practicing, I tended to spout long strings of nouns like a shopping list.
Zap! Zap!! A very long Zap!
“Plums deify.”
Got that one from a Stephan King book.
“Your knee salts the moon with irony and cacophony.”
When you’re blindfolded, you think that you’re in the dark. When you go outside on a sunny winter morning, does your gloved had feel that it’s in darkness?
How about your feet? They’re inside the blackness of your shoes much of the day. Do they ever complain of the dark?
Pain is a sensation. Existentially pain is of no more significance than the sensation of middle “C” or the taste “sour”.
That doesn’t tell the whole story though. We’re hard-wired to find pain highly dysphoric.
Eventually they gave up. They knew who I was, of course. They had simply led off with a simple non-threatening question, but it had turned into a contest of will…
Or not—it wasn’t a contest of any sort for me, because I knew that I wasn’t going to yield.
They left me in the middle cell on one side of cellblock of six rooms—three on either side of a narrow hallway. I was the only one in the cellblock. It was dimly lit and there were no windows.
As soon as they were gone, I started singing at the top of my lungs.
“Old McDonald had a farm.
“E-Yi-E-Yi-O!”
“Shut up in there!” the intercom shouted.
“You shut-up! Damn dude, I’m tryin’ to sing!” I spat back.
“Old McDonald had a farm.
“E-Yi-E-Yi-O!
“And on this farm, he had a Pig.
“Its fleece was white as snow.
“And to the Republic for which it stands,
“E-Yi-E-Yi-O!
“If you need an attorney,
“And cannot afford one,
“E-Yi-E-Yi-O!”
“I’m warning you one last time!” The intercom rumbled ominously.
“You caused me to lose my place dude. What’s the next line?
“O yeah!
“Batteries are not included.
“E-Yi-E-Yi-O!
“This offer void where prohibited by law.
“E-Yi-E-Yi-O!
“Please hang up and dial again.
“E-Yi-E-Yi-O!
“Four-score and seven years ago…
“E-Yi-E-Yi-O!
“He stuck in his thumb
“And pulled out a plum.
“E-Yi-E-Yi-O!
“Old McDonald had a farm.
“E-Yi-E-Yi-O!
“Slipped on a cow-pie and broke his arm.
“As he hit the ground he said,
“That’s warm!”
“Old McDonald,
“Where’s the harm?
“E-Yi-E-Yi-O!”
A half a dozen guards came bursting into the hallway.
They shot me with tear gas, capsaicin, Tasers and beanbags. They didn’t come into my cell though.
“Are you going to keep still now?” one of the guards growled.
It took a few minutes to get my voice back.
I figured that if I stopped singing of my own volition then they won. I wasn’t going to give them that satisfaction.
If they gave up or bound and gagged me or killed me—then I won.
“This old man, he played one.
“He played like he weighed a ton.
“With a Knick-Knack, Paddy-Wack
“Give a dog a smack
“This old man came rolling back.”
“This old man” was a bloody pervert and by the time I’d chronicled his exploits shooting smack and cohabiting with tranny whores and other dubious dealings, I declared it a victory for Jason the charger.
They delivered a very Spartan—though just barely adequate—meal twice daily. They never spoke to me and ignored any comments addressed to them and they left me alone to count my neuroses.
That was cool with me, so far as it went. I like to be alone.
I spent over a year in solitary that way.
******************* *************** ***************
Benji
“So you want to learn to fight?” the jockey-sized Sensei asked Benji.
“Yes.”
When he awoke, the little black man was sitting cross-legged beside him.
“That was your first lesson. Always be prepared for someone—anyone—to launch an unprovoked attack on you.
“Would you like your second lesson?”
“Yes,” Benji forced himself to say.
He half expected the daft wee man to knock him out him again.
“Attack me,” the Sensei said.
Benji hadn’t the vaguest idea how to attack someone. He absorbed three strikes to the gut that left him cramping and gasping for air.
Then the little man struck him shuto hand across his nose, breaking it and causing blood to flow down it.
Benji lost his temper and charged the little man screaming. He absorbed a knee to his crotch that while it left him in agony, wasn’t nearly as hard and damaging as it could have been.
After Benji had finished vomiting on the wrestling mat and one of the students had gotten his nose to stop bleeding, the Sensei spoke earnestly to him.
“If that hasn’t dissuaded you, come back Monday. We will train in earnest then.
“I didn’t expect you to be able to either defend or attack with no training. That is to test how determined you are.”
Benji mulled it around in his mind.
He already knew much more about fighting than he ever had before. He knew that it could be surprisingly painful. He’d experienced the taste of his own blood for the first time. He’d been angry enough to physically assault someone for the first time.
He wasn’t sure how many more broken noses and bruised balls that he could absorb and still persevere on this outré path he’d embarked on.
Maybe he only had a couple more broken noses inside of himself, but he decided that he could learn unless and until his will failed.
He didn’t tell the little Sensei how feeble his resolve was though.
***************** *************** *************
“Damned nation!” Benji’s trainer Ralph said. “You had to buy some anavar, against my advice. So you made some very good gains—but you can’t, or at least you shouldn’t stay on anavar indefinitely.
“So now most of your gains are going to evaporate. With luck, you just might be able to keep maybe thirty percent of the extra strength and muscle that the anavar gave you.”
“What is the solution?”
“Well, if you must juice, it is the coming off that causes problems—so you just never come off,” Ralph said.
“I thought that you said that I couldn’t juice indefinitely,” Benji said.
“I said that you shouldn’t take anavar indefinitely. There are drugs you can ‘Blast and Cruise’ on. In the old days, you couldn’t keep most of the ‘extra’ muscle that you built, over and above your natural potential.
“Today there are drugs to ‘fix’ the surplus muscle—and you can definitely reach your natural potential faster.
“You’re going to have to start working harder and more or the drugs aren’t really necessary or helpful.”
“I can do that,” Benji solemnly intoned.
“I know that you can, but will you?
“Next cycle, we start twenty repetition squats. Happy?
“By the way, what happened to your nose?”
“Maestro Blackthorne struck me. I’ve been studying capoeira for a week now,” Benji said proudly.
“O why me Lord?” Ralph asked while looking heavenward.
*************** ********************* **************
Jason’s Tale
I had lost track of time, but I had been in solitary for about fourteen months when they walked Armstrong and Cooper in.
They put them in the cell next to mine.
“How have y’all been?” I asked them.
“Do I know you?” Cooper asked.
“You should. We’ve shot marbles and wrestled enough times at Splicer’s,” I said.
I hadn’t said anything that wasn’t common knowledge knowing that the cells were certainly bugged every which way.
“Splicer’s?”
“You know, where all the mutants and juicers, dog soldiers and chargers hang out.”
“Am I a mutant?” Cooper asked. “Is that why I’m here?”
“You’re newly gifted,” I said pleadingly. “Don’t you remember?”
He shook his head sadly.
“How about me?” Armstrong asked.
“I don’t know you very well friend. You seemed like a decent sort of fellow. You’re a very strong transforming mutant. You came out about seven foot tall with arms this big around…”
I gestured with my hands.
I wasn’t afraid of death, pain, or even most kinds of maiming.
The idea of having my personality wiped like the minds of my two friends scared me to the core. It seemed a singular form of desecration.
I peered into the internal workings of my brain that I’d been exploring in the quiet of the cells. All at once, I became convinced that I could will myself to die. They might try to revive me, but to no avail.
My spirit was mine to command and if I refused to return to my body, all their resuscitations would be in vain.
But then I decided to wait. I could pass through the door to the other side any time that I chose. First I meant to see if there was a way out of this gaol.
If I got half an opportunity, I’d avenge my friends and my loyal dog soldiers seven and seventy fold.
Shortly after they brought Cooper and Armstrong into the cellblock and after I’d gazed long and hard at the door to the other side…
Shortly after that the dreams started.
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Gifted
Jul 29, 2013 12:31:16 GMT -6
Post by rvm45 on Jul 29, 2013 12:31:16 GMT -6
Chapter Eight
Jason’s Tale
As I said, I dreamed. In this dream, I was in a bit of a fog. I’d been arrested and shoved into a cell. I wasn’t quite sure who I was or how I got there.
I got into a strong horse stance and started slamming the concrete wall in the back of my cell with my fists, over and over. At some point the gaolers shouted at me to stop, but I ignored them.
One part of me knew damned good and well that I wasn’t gifted, that I was only playing a game with myself. But some other part of me believed.
In my dream, I thought briefly that I had a choice what powers that I wanted.
Bizarre as it may sound, for some dream reason I decided that I wanted to be Blob, one of Wolverine’s enemies in the comics. I just supposed that he’d be strong enough to knock the walls down and go free.
But I really started to hit the wall very hard—as hard as I possibly could. It didn’t hurt.
Then ever so gradually at first, every time my fist hit the wall, it grew slightly. Well before my fists were the size of volleyballs, I’d knocked a hole through the back wall.
There were a half a dozen men in the cell on the other side of the concrete wall.
“He’s interrupted the damping field!” one fellow shouted. “Our powers work once again.”
Then I was back on my cot. My eyes burned and my throat felt raw. I felt very groggy and bleary-eyed.
I have only heard tell of a couple of “double transformers”. They’re very powerful mutants who can transform into a more extreme form in times of dire extremis, when their first transformation form isn’t powerful enough.
Armstrong must have been a double transformer. His arms, from shoulder to palm were over eight feet long. When he stood on his mighty arms, his feet were a foot off the ground.
Understand, there was nothing shrunken or shriveled or weak about his legs either—they were just overshadowed by those massive arms.
His feet had turned into oversized hands in case he wanted to carry something while walking on his huge palms. His calves, thigh biceps and semitendinosus bulged with striated muscle tissue.
He was standing on his legs momentarily while he ripped a hole wide open in the concrete.
Then he seized the two-inch diameter bars on the front of his cell and ripped the whole section of bars off.
“Armstrong!” He roared in a huge bass voice.
He roared off in search of gaolers with a half-a-dozen mutants flying fighter support.
“How did you do that?” Cooper asked.
“Do what?” I asked.
“You’re definitely not gifted, yet you reached into Armstrong’s dreams. You restored his memory. You not only revive his gift, you turn him into a double transformer. I mean, I know you’re a charger, but you’re supposed to super-charge yourself,” Cooper said.
“Armstrong isn’t a double transformer?”’
“Well, he is now and a bit ungrateful, I’d have to say. Don’t hold it against him. Those radical transformations generally suppresses intellect and verbal skills, especially the first few times one does it—or so I hear.”
Since I was across the hallway from Armstrong and Cooper, I was still as trapped as ever.
“Come on, if we both pull on the same bar, I think that we can bend it enough to let you squeeze out,” Cooper said.
“Come on, there’s a small armory around the corner,” I said once I’d wriggled out.
Cooper raised an eyebrow at me.
“How could you know that?” He asked with smile.
“I don’t know. Trust me,” I said urgently.
“Trust me,” Cooper said.
He pulled a double shoulder rig with a pair cocked-and-locked 10mm 1911A1s in the holsters—right out of the air as if by sleight of hand. Then he handed me a gun-belt with a 4” Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum, along with several extra 10mm magazines and a row of .44 Magnum cartridges—not to mention a Bowie.
A moment later he handed me a pump action .500 S&W like the one I’d had custom made for mutant busting.
“It’s not magic, sleight of hand or teleportation. It’s more like transmutation of nearby materials into a strongly held image,” Cooper shrugged.
“Can you hoodoo us up some warm clothes? It’s cold out and these fluorescent orange jump suits are gonna be rather conspicuous. That is if we can get down. We’re seven stories up,” I said.
“How could you possibly know that we’re seven stories up? Or how could you know that it is cold outside?” Cooper said while laughing.
“Never mind,” he added.
He took me to the jagged edge of a huge tear in the wall.
“Behold my mount!”
A Giant Hellhound materialized from nowhere.
It looked like a three-way cross between a wolf, bear and giant hyena. He had a saddle and he gestured me to mount behind him.
“I didn’t create him. I summoned him. Did you ever wonder why only humans seem to be gifted? One of my strong gifts is that I can gift canines. Once I gift them, they wait in a very special place until I summon them,” Cooper said.
“How is that different from what they do to dog soldiers?” I asked.
“I always give them a choice if they want to be gifted,” He said.
He sounded in dead earnest.
“You can’t fall off, but you’ll probably feel better if you hang on,” Cooper said.
Okay. Cooper’s mount could get a gecko-like grip on any surface, no matter how smooth. He could also change his subjective “Down” to whichever way was convenient for him.
We stuck to him like his fur was Velcro. In fact, we couldn’t fall, but our subjective down didn’t change as the Hellhound changed his orientation.
So it felt like we were running down the sheer side of a seven-story building until we hit the ground. Then the Hellhound took us down the street about fifty miles an hour, while taking forty foot bounds and changing directions abruptly like a broken field runner.
We ran up the side of a couple buildings and leaped long-ways over a Greyhound bus.
“How can you enjoy your ride if you keep screaming like that?” Cooper queried.
Gosh and gollies Cooper! I really hadn’t realized that I was screaming out loud old buddy.
“You can shoot at the Federales if you want to. They’re shooting at us after all,” Cooper added encouragingly.
*********************** ************* **************
Benji
Benji had been on equipoise for about eighteen months. He’d take twelve hundred milligrams per week when blasting along with three hundred to five hundred milligrams of testosterone and an occasional six to eight week cycle of anavar added into his stack.
After two or three months, he’d cut back to about six hundred milligrams of equipoise and no more than two hundred milligrams of testosterone for a few weeks until his system had recovered a bit.
He wouldn’t lose any muscle or strength during the “cruise” phase—in fact he continued to make modest gains.
The strain of coming completely off the juice and jump-starting the body’s own testosterone production was one of the riskier and more debilitating aspects of anabolic steroid use.
By keeping his hand in, it meant that he’d only have to come off the juice once and they were making all kinds of strides in better post cycle therapies to get things back online.
“Roid rage” was largely imaginary. The extra assertiveness that came from getting far tougher, stronger and more skilled at assorted forms of mayhem was very real.
Benji was becoming more outward orientated, but he hadn’t left his otaku persona completely behind either.
His online heroes were still very real and immediate to him. They mattered—and they were being used pretty hard of late.
Benji saw Jason and Vanda’s reunion online and it put him into a near rage.
***************** ******************* ************
Jason’s Tale
Vanda threw her arms around me as I walked into Splicer’s.
“Jason, I didn’t think that I’d ever see you again,” She sobbed.
“I wasn’t sure that I’d ever see me again either,” I said.
But something was bothering her besides just being glad to see me.
“What is wrong?” I demanded.
“There is a new mutant power going around. They call them ‘grabbers’. The word is that the govie had a hand in developing them somehow.
“Grabbers are mutants who can steal other mutant’s power. Leaves them as flat and ungifted as the plainest mundane who ever lived,” Vanda said.
“I hadn’t heard.”
Then she broke down and cried and cried.
“She took my power. I barely got away with my memory. She took my power,” Vanda bawled.
“Who?” I demanded.
“No one has actually seen her and escaped with their mind intact. She’s a grabber. They call her ‘The Red Witch.’ “
“I’m not gifted. She can’t steal any powers from me. When I meet her, she will be the red corpse,” I promised. “Don’t mean to be insensitive, but while we talk, she’s wasting God’s good air.
“I’ll talk to you in a bit.”
I dragged Cooper and Splicer into one of the clean rooms.
“Have you heard anything about these grabbers?” I asked them.
“Why do you think Armstrong and I came up blank?”
“You two were wiped by a grabber?”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but yes,” Cooper said.
“You know something that you’re not sharing,” I said.
“Yes, I’m holding some stuff back from you. It’s need-to-know,” Cooper said.
“Fair enough. Splicer, find me the Red Witch.”
“What are you going to do?” Splicer asked.
“I’m going to hand her ass to her, or die trying,” I said.
“How?” Splicer demanded. “She has every ability and all the power that she’s stolen—and that’s a bunch. She is the closest thing to a 5.0 that we’ve ever seen—5.0 across the board.”
“I’ll need some very specialized gear. We’ll discuss exactly what after Cooper leaves.
“Sorry Cooper. This is need-to-know between Splicer and me. What you don’t know can’t be read off your neural pathways,” I said.
“No offense taken, but when you’re ready to attack call me. I don’t intend to wait for the bitch to come to me—and I owe you,” Cooper said.
I briefly explained to Splicer what I wanted.
“You want what? When? And I have to keep a tight wrap on who knows about it?” Splicer said. “Tell me again, I need a good laugh.”
A lot of the online taunts and interplay reminded me of the old Professional Wrestlers.
Nonetheless, if I could get the Red Witch angry enough to attack, it would simplify finding her, him or it—whatever.
************************** *********** ******************
I taped my challenge and broadcast it every which way that I could:
“I am Jason the charger. I recently turned seventy years old while in unlawful detention.
“I have been a charger for over forty years now. I’m a 3.6 on the mutant strength scale at a height of six-two and a bodyweight of three hundred and thirty five pounds. I have over eleven minutes of charge and I lead an elite pack of dog soldiers.
“Red Bitch…er, Red Witch, Itch…whatever…
“You can come to me and die bravely or you can dig a hole and pull it in after you.
“Either way, your days are numbered.
“I am not afraid to die.”
I didn’t quite have a full platoon of dog soldiers when I made the challenge.
Within a month I had two full companies of dog soldier volunteers and almost enough super soldiers to command a company.
*********** *************** ************************
Benji
The government was finally starting to flex its muscles. One of its new policies was using the unemployed on public works.
The infrastructure became increasingly thread worn. Unskilled and very unenthusiastic labor wasn’t going to make much difference—especially with a deficit of usable raw materials…
But that was hardly the purpose.
The job details were three six-hour days per week with an occasional short week or even a whole week off.
Putting people who’d never worn a blister in their lives to picking up trash or shoveling in the winter cold or hot summer sun was extremely effective at breaking their spirits—some of their spirits.
Informers got the choicest job assignments and those deemed troublemakers fared the worst.
Benji had learned to keep his mouth shut and the work wasn’t that hard for him, so he managed to stay in the upper third without any snitching or brown-nosing.
That is until one of the GCBs (Good Citizen Bastards) started joking and laughing about how some of the best known mutants had been stripped of their powers and had their hard drives wiped.
A soft-bodied otaku took exception and soon the GCB squad had pulled the man into a deserted building.
The government stressed, “peer-pressure” as a means of assuring social cohesion.
“Peer-pressure” could range from a mild slapping around to being beaten half to death and/or sodomized.
Benji was curious how acts of violence could achieve peace. He followed the blanket party into the ruin and buried the blade of his shovel in the occipital region of one of the would-be rapists as a sort of controlled experiment.
The man’s brains couldn’t have been packed into his skull all that firmly or they wouldn’t have spewed every which way in response to such a mild tap.
The GCBs looked at Benji’s brain-spattered shovel in pure horror. They backed away from him as if he had the worst case of morning breath in the history of mankind.
Benji helped the victim to his feet and even yanked the man’s pants up for him, but he drew the line there. If the man couldn’t summon the will to fasten his pants for himself, then so far as Benji was concerned, he’d just have to walk around with them open.
The fellow did fasten his pants and then he rushed of as quickly as the GCBs.
It was kind of peaceful in the old building now that everyone else had left. Maybe there was something to the idea of “fighting for peace” after all, though he wasn’t sure that he could counter every possible objection that a skilled debater might raise—at least not yet anyway.
He shrugged and tossed the shovel cavalierly away. He supposed that there would be some sort of inquest.
As he understood the subject, lethal force was justified when faced with death, maiming or a fate worse than death. He was also justified in using lethal force on the behalf of an innocent third party.
So far as he could see, it was pretty well cut-and-dried.
Nonetheless, he decided to visit his friend Raven, just to make sure that he understood all the subtle details.
**************** *************** **************
“You what?!?” Raven exploded. “Why didn’t you tell your supervisor?”
“He knew what was going down. He didn’t care—but it will all be recorded through the god’s eyes,” Benji said.
Raven’s fingers flew over his keyboards erasing any trace of Benji coming home to the apartment house and especially any electronic record of him coming to Raven’s apartment.
It wouldn’t block the govie’s far greater hacking power, but it should give him a few moments.
“Benji, did you get you a bug-out bag set up like I advised you to?” Raven asked.
“Yes but…”
“Listen and don’t argue. Sometimes the explicit rules say one thing—like you have a right to self-defense—yes?
“By the explicit rules, the GCBs were wrong, but everyone is operating under another set of implicit rules that are diametrically opposed to the explicit rules.
“You think that this is not only unjust, but a violation of their own damned protocols.
“You think that if you can simply bring the light of day to the problem, that it will be resolved.
“You know, this is what they call being ‘a gaolhouse lawyer’ or a ‘barrack lawyer or a ‘sea lawyer’ or whatever.
“Understand: They are all in on it, all the way to the top.
“They don’t care what their own rules say, when the rules are in your favor.
“They aren’t into justice, they’re into preserving the status quo.
“There is no way to make them care. There is no way to force them to play by their own rules when it doesn’t suit them.
“They won’t. They never have. They never will.
“Get your bag. We need to split,” Raven finished his diatribe.
“We?”
“I’m on record as your friend. Guilt by association is one of those implicit rules.”
“Sorry Raven.”
“Don’t be, it was time to take sides in this damned cluster-bump,” Raven said.
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Gifted
Jul 29, 2013 12:39:58 GMT -6
Post by rvm45 on Jul 29, 2013 12:39:58 GMT -6
Chapter Nine
Jason’s Tale
“You asked me if I’d ever met a mutant who was also a charger,” Splicer began. “I told you truthfully that I had not. Let me introduce you to the only mutant that I ever met who became a super soldier.
“Raven this is my Segundo ‘Jason’. The mundane is Raven’s Segundo. His name is ‘Benji’.”
Benji was tall and muscular. I could smell boldenone coming out of his pores. No, you can’t smell it, but my nose has always been a bit “gifted”—if that’s the right word. It tells me things.
“It is indeed an honor to meet Jason the charger,” Benji said.
Handshakes are a rarity among the resistance underground, but he snatched my hand and shook it heartily.
Lot of weird stuff in my head since the months in solitary and the dreaming—which hadn’t even considered stopping once I was free.
I could feel the man’s sincerity flowing through his nerves and across the skin of his palm and fingers.
Raven gave me a puzzled glance and then smiled broadly.
I recognized Benji belatedly. I couldn’t help but burst out laughing.
“Do I amuse you?” He demanded.
“Nah, ‘those brains couldn’t have been in there all that firmly…’ Your debut went viral dude, ” I finally managed to gasp out between guffaws.
“As a mutant, I’m mostly a mentalist,” Raven answered my unasked question. “I wanted muscles, like this one wants,” He gestured at Benji.
**************** ************ **************
Raven’s Tale
I’d have my seven years in soon. I was a captain now—mainly by surviving where others had perished. Having the ability to read minds and sense things had helped, but there was a lot of luck in my surviving too.
I had five full platoons of dog soldiers, each with it’s own super soldier second lieutenant. Second lieutenants are considered newbie screw-ups most places, but not the dog soldier platoon lieutenants.
They’re the best of the best.
I had a first lieutenant as an XO. My original dog soldier platoon still had eighteen members and they served as clerical staff and a sort of Praetorian Guard.
My XO still had over twenty of his first platoon, so we had plenty of support staff.
We’d all have our seven years in a matter of weeks. They try to keep short-timers together.
I’d worked hard to keep my mutant status hidden, but I’d been lucky that way too.
I meant to get out at the end of the contract. Not too many company commanders do that. My subordinates would follow me into civilian life of course. Dog soldiers are loyal.
I’d been considering several very lucrative contracts in private security. As the commander of a whole battle-proven company, it was a seller’s market.
******************** ******** **********************
“Raven, order your dog soldiers here, here and here,” the Colonel said. “Tell them to make a full-frontal attack.”
My understanding of the tactical situation hit me an instant before I read it in his thoughts.
“You’re deliberately destroying my command,” I said.
“Can’t have too many dog soldier companies floating around the mercenary market at one time can we, good fellow? It would be too destabilizing.
“You’ve made no secret of your plan to leave the military,” He said.
“So why would I go join a mercenary unit, Dickhead? I was going private—high pay, low risk,” I said.
Two squads of the super soldier military police rushed into the room. The double-dealing POS had a healthy regard for my abilities.
“Tell the officers to report here. No need to sacrifice humans with the animals.
“Give the order,” The Colonel said.
“I refuse,” I said.
“I thought you might. Your troops have witnessed the last few moments.
“You dog soldiers will do as ordered or I’ll execute your commander for mutiny,” he said into the god’s eye.
“Disregard,” I said. “To me…”
One of the MPs knocked me out with some sort of stunner.
When they revived me an hour later, my troops were dead—including their officers who’d refused to desert their men.
“Take off these restraints,” I ordered the closest MP.
I wasn’t the least bit careful about damaging brain or mind. He’d hold together long enough to carry out my command.
I seized control of all of them there in the room with me.
“You men, I want you to pair off and gut each other. Make sure that you all die slowly and in great pain. Keep a knife to hand, but don’t cut your throat until someone arrives who might aid you,” I said in a voice as dead as last year’s ashes.
“These men aren’t to blame,” a very strong-willed staff sergeant managed to gasp out.
“That isn’t a mitigating factor, but an aggravating one,” I told him. “Never speak again.
“Colonel, would you do something for me? I’d like you to live as long as possible while continually experiencing the worst sort of agony and terror that it is possible for a human POS to feel. Will you do that for me?” I asked him sweetly.
“No, please no!” he begged.
“Can’t leave you sane or with a shred of dignity can we, good fellow? It would be too destabilizing.”
I walked out of the field headquarters. Anyone who stood in my way got the irresistible mental command to first castrate himself, then disembowel himself and only then to cut his own throat.
So far as I know, the Colonel may still be alive in some military hospital somewhere.
****************** ************** ******************
Jason’s Tale
I was back in my own mind once more. No longer was I the hate-filled and vengeful Raven’s persona.
Somehow, experiencing how he held the mental reins of power had further joggled my mind.
“You are quite the dark soul, aren’t you?” I asked him.
“I might say the same. I won’t go with you when you attack the Red Witch. I don’t think that she could rip your plan from my mind, but why put it to the test?” he said.
“If you fail, then we’ll pit the Red Witch’s scarlet power against Raven’s black,” He mused. “My money is on you though.”
“What color is my power?” I asked.
“Silver-gray—a color that can’t be fully explained in terms of light and retinas,” He said.
I had a few of my dog soldiers with me, as always. They seem to thrive on being underfoot. They are dogs after all.
“Your dogs were always willing to lay their lives aside for you. They could not have been unaware of your true nature and they would not reproach you for their fate,” My sergeant major said and laid a hand on Raven’s shoulder.
Benji looked pale and shaken. Apparently he hadn’t experienced Raven’s startling flashback before either.
“Do you still wish to be my Segundo Benji?” Raven asked.
“Yes,” Benji said.
He said it quietly as if it was hard for him to find his voice.
“I’m sorry. The truth is unnerving and largely depressing. Would you prefer to have remained as you were?
“Like the otaku that you rescued from peer group therapy by mutton-dagger?”
“No. If you have any other unsettling truths, please hasten to reveal them to me,” Benji said.
“I have this. You should now be well on your way to becoming an excellent hacker. Please devote yourself to studying strategy and searching for the Red Witch,” Raven said.
“What did you do to him?” I asked once he was gone.
“Grafting abilities doesn’t work at all well,” Raven said. “But he is intelligent, determined and very stubborn. I gave him a glimpse at how a hacker’s mind worked.
“He is not a natural at deconstructing into component sub-assemblies and eventually parts, but now that he sees how it works, he will be very good at it.”
******************** ************ ******************
Benji
Raven had taken up permanent residence at Splicer’s underground compound.
Occasionally Raven’s affairs took him to the surface, but he didn’t take Benji on those forays.
Benji’s life had shrunken to hard steroid-driven workouts in the gym, long days spent at the keyboard of a network that made his old computer system appear ridiculously primitive by comparison and workouts on the mats.
The dog soldiers were happy to train Benji and to train with him.
Any training partner can reveal something to a skilled observer and dog soldiers were always eager to learn.
They weren’t particularly good at taking it easy on a weaker opponent. Benji broke several bones training with the little men.
The trainers laughed every time they injected him with the nanites that sped healing. Eventually they assured Benji, the nanites would take up permanent residence in his bone marrow and he wouldn’t need the injections anymore.
As he grew stronger and more skilled, he started to rack up more time against humans—or at least non-mundane in human form.
He also practiced the forms and maneuvers that Maestro Blackthorne had taught him.
Raven had only attracted a half a dozen followers—or that’s all he’d allowed to join him. He seldom needed Benji’s physical presence as second in command.
Raven was disarmingly frank with Benji. Although he was, and would continue to be Raven’s Segundo, at the moment he was more of a liability than an asset—but Raven had every confidence that he would grow into his position.
Benji drove himself relentlessly to learn and grow stronger and to repay Raven’s confidence in him.
He’d picked up his own dog soldier without meaning to.
He’d started training alongside Vanda. Since she’d lost her mutant powers, she drove herself relentlessly to become the strongest charger ever—at least the strongest female charger ever.
Her mutant healing had gotten her years ahead of the curve. Her powers might be gone, but not the changes that the powers had helped to establish in her muscles.
Joining Vanda’s tiny training group was excellent tactics—if one wanted to push himself beyond all sane limits.
The medics assured him that he wasn’t advanced enough to start the charger treatments, but there were “mild” juices that made the old anabolic steroids look tame by comparison—not that Benji ever lay off his beloved equipoise.
He was turning into an extraordinarily strong mundane—and as a major mutant lieutenant’s Segundo, he was fairly high ranking as well.
And a dog soldier bitch named “Laura” took a shine to him.
Benji’s mind wandered from his hacking. He was staring at Laura again.
“It’s all right, if you want to,” Laura said.
“No, it isn’t right. We’re different species,” He said.
“Why do they make it so hard for the males to desecrate your females, but place few obstacles to you desecrating us? It’s because it doesn’t matter terribly much if we’re desecrated,” she said.
“You don’t desecrate those you love,” Benji said.
Good Lord! He thought to himself. Had he just said that? He loved a dog soldier bitch.
The pinging of his computer took his mind off his horrified introspection.
He’d located the Red Witch.
“Come, we need to find Jason,” He said.
He watched Laura as she walked. She was four foot eight inches tall and weighed one hundred and eighty pounds. Her arms hung to her knees as she swung them freely.
She was strong enough to snap his neck like a twig, if he were fool enough to fight her strength to strength. He asked himself what about her could any sane person find appealing?
But she had full breasts, shiny jet-black skin, long red hair and fangs that showed fetchingly when she laughed.
********************* ************** ************
“I did you a service,” Benji asked Jason. “I ask a reward.”
Jason was astonished at Benji’s request.
“Do I look like the blue fairy? I’m not even gifted. How in the seven burning Hells can I turn your dog soldier into a real girl?
“Be for real! Talk to Cooper. Maybe he can help you. Tell him I asked.”
“You are not mutant, as the term is commonly meant. That doesn’t mean that you aren’t gifted.
“Cooper the Marble Bearer told me that you have the power, not he.
“Raven the Betrayer told me to show you this…”
Benji was no mentalist, but his brain had room for a psychic message from his sponsor.
Jason, Benji, Laura and a half a dozen of Jason’s dog soldier minions reeled from the cutting undercurrent of dark despair and malevolence that was omnipresent in Raven’s mind…
But the message was delivered.
“Well okay then. I can’t leave any of you behind now. You do realize that you’ve just volunteered for a suicide mission, if this doesn’t work?
“Hell’s belles and cockleshells and skeletons all in a row!” Jason said and shook his head sadly.
He looked sadder yet when Vanda forced her way into the room.
“I would not miss a chance to confront the Red Bitch again,” she said.
“Take a pair of metal trashcan lids,” Jason told his dogs. “Walk the length of this compound beating them together and inquiring if anyone else wishes to take part in my suicide assault on the Red Witch.”
Even the literal minded dog soldiers laughed aloud at Jason’s sour jest.
When they were outside of Jason’s command center, Laura grabbed Benji and kissed him.
“I love you too,” was all she said.
Much to Benji’s surprise, he wasn’t even a little bit embarrassed to be seen kissing a dog soldier bitch in the public hallway.
***************** ***************** ***************
Cooper’s Tale
We attacked the compound over five hundred mutants, chargers, dog soldiers and super soldiers…
And at least one love-stricken mundane. Love goes hand-in-hand with the most egregious sorts of idiocy, but idiocy makes brave men’s folly even more worthy of the story and song writer’s sagas though—so…
Notwithstanding all of Jason the charger’s bold boasts, he fled in abject terror when the Red Witch’s form greeted us.
“You have great power,” the Red Witch greeted me. “I will enjoy sucking you dry and leaving your lifeless husk.”
She gloated.
“Go ahead, if you’re able. You may be tied up sucking for some time,” I said with a smile.
I bore the crone’s mojo, her marbles, around my neck. The marbles were no heap-big juju. They’re made of semi-precious stones and very pretty—but they’re nothing but a keepsake.
I’ve used some of them for shooters at the marble tables. They are source of my power?
What a ridiculous idea!
The power was in me—and it was inexhaustible.
I let the witch suck greedily. She didn’t realize that she had a problem until she started to get too full and tried to disengage.
“No, no. Pay no attention to the fat woman behind the curtain,” my mental command went out to my team. “Keep her attention up front and let Jason deal with the horror.”
****************** ************* *******************
Jason’s Tale
Brave Jason the charger fleeing in terror?
Ha! And Ha!
It took a very strong implanted suggestion implanted with my permission by Raven the betrayer and even I’d believed it momentarily.
I was like a midget with a poisoned lance who has managed to get inside the evil witch’s hoop skirt.
Only I wasn’t a midget. Neither was she.
The actual Red Witch was a giantess too fat and too feeble to stand. Consuming too much power had done that to her.
She must have been fifteen foot tall and she weighed tons. They had her floating in an above ground pool full of very saline water.
Her fist-sized eyes rolled at me as I thrust my lance deep into her enormous chest.
My lance?
They made a dagger for a while, I think that it was called “The Wasp” to fight sharks.
Stab it, push the button and it injects most of a CO2 canister—the kind they use in some airguns—into the stabbed instantly.
It purées a chunk of tissue the size of a basketball and much of what is left behind is frozen and has beaucoup gas embolisms.
The knife couldn’t quite drain the canister with one stab. It left enough for a baseball sized follow-up.
They were expensive, but if I had to travel in grizzly territory, I’d carry two or three on my belt.
What? Yeah, I’d rather shoot a bear at a distance too, but if I end up with one mauling me, I’d rather give him a blast of the CO2 than a cylinder full of .44 Magnum.
My lance carried thirteen needles with thirteen canisters of CO2.
The world’s five most neurotoxic snakes live in Australia. Five of my needles had one each—enough of each type of venom to kill a platoon of dog soldiers.
Hemotoxic snake venoms, brown recluse venom, ricin, puffer fish venom, jellyfish toxins, black widow venom, and beaucoup LSD-25 filled the other needles in my lance.
Heal this bitch and do it with a head full of hallucinogens and your bloodstream chock full of venom of every conceivable kind.
Some of my toxins only caused pain, but in the quantities and the manner of injection, it should be incredibly intense.
I give the bitch credit. She almost climbed out of the pool when I hit her with my lance.
I only had one multi-lance. It was a wooly-bear worm to machine—especially in secret.
Laura had a quiver full of CO2 canister arrows. Her longbow—no dog soldier would ever lower himself to use a compound bow—pulled about two hundred and fifty pounds. Each arrow had a different toxin.
She hit the Red Witch in her eyes, throat, arms and shoulders.
Vanda had one of the Cold Steel two-handed Viking axes while Benji bore a great sword. They climbed right on top of the whale-sized woman and started hacking and slashing at her.
I felt the Red Witch give up the ghost—but as she did, she rolled and Vanda was rolled beneath her.
I had a sick feeling. Vanda might very well be drowned, crushed or suffocated before we could get the sea cow off of her.
Then I felt all the accumulated stolen power flow out of her.
What was it the crone told Cooper?
“Throw gifts at them and see which ones stick—to both our surprises.”
It was the largest gifting in the history of the world. People all over the world who’d had their gifts and their memories stolen by the Red Witch—people who’d long forgotten that they were ever gifted…
They got their gifts and their memories back—and a few other gifts and random memories as well.
You’d laugh at the mummer’s grab bag full of gifts that I, who had little need of mutant gifts, received.
But one of Benji’s gifts was a very strong telekinesis.
He lifted the Red Witch’s body off of his friend Vanda.
And then in his rage, he crushed the Red Witch’s body into a ball of compacted matter that would fit into a fifty-five gallon drum.
As power flowed through me, I remembered my promise.
Laura wouldn’t thank me for shortening her arms or decreasing her strength or musculature.
I changed her into a roughly human woman of six-four. She still had arms that reached to her knees and fangs along with muscles any bodybuilder would envy—and she could bear children.
She’d already picked up enough mutant gifts to make her welcome on any mutant gang on earth.
She beamed her thanks telepathically.
Could Cooper gift canines? More power to him then.
At least while the power flowed through me, I could gift dog soldiers.
Dog soldiers aren’t a species—they’re chimera, part silicone and sterile.
Dogs served man well. They still serve him well. Turning them into dog soldiers seemed a rotten way to repay them.
But dog soldiers were.
Dog soldiers weren’t a species. Some of them are now. My power reached out to every dog soldier within six or seven hundred miles.
To each that wished, I gave a whole organic brain, fertility and freedom.
Some of them snagged mutant gifts as well.
They still have their essential nature. They still run in packs and look to a selected human to guide and rule over them.
But it is frightening what they might become if people don’t learn to respect them.
Raven the betrayer says that my extravagance may lead to the eventual extermination of mankind…
And then he laughs long and loud.
To Raven the betrayer, who once had his command of dog soldiers destroyed by a mundane, the end of mankind isn’t all that bad a thing.
The battle of the Red Witch didn’t mean the end of the govie.
They’re turning out more dog soldiers, super soldiers and grabbers than I can shake a multi-lance at…
But so far they haven’t turned out anything quite as scary as the Red Witch.
No, they leave the scary stuff to us.
Want to hear something really scary?
Laura is pregnant.
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Gifted
Jul 29, 2013 12:42:41 GMT -6
Post by rvm45 on Jul 29, 2013 12:42:41 GMT -6
Chapter Ten
Jason’s Tale
We stood in the gym of Splicer’s underground compound.
“Cooper, how did the Red Witch drain your powers and wipe your memory the first time around,” I asked him.
“She did not. I was playing along because the time wasn’t right to oppose her. That’s why I didn’t fully answer your question about my apparent mindlessness,” Cooper said.
“Benji, you rate 4.7 at telekinesis—one of the most powerful tekes ever rated—and a good 4.1 at telepathy, along with several minor abilities.
“How can you possibly train to be a charger? Why train to be a charger?” Splicer asked.
Benji shrugged.
“I can learn to repress the teke when I’m training the muscles. It will be good control training. I think that some of the effects of having super-oxygenated blood leads to something,” He trailed off while glancing my direction.
“Show me what you got,” Splicer said to me.
As I said, I got a grab bag of gifted abilities.
Elastic or rubber men are very rare. They’re far more rare than transformers. A transformer re-weaves his protoplasm once at the outset. Every time a rubber man stretches, he has to re-weave his protoplasm.
Also, a ten-foot long arm would be very fragile and the leverage against it would be incredible.
There is almost certainly a very finely controlled telekinesis both to preserve a stretched body part’s integrity and to allow it to do anything.
My left arm stretches—not my whole body, o no—just the left arm.
The forearm stretches about twice as far as the upper arm and the fingers stretch even more.
The left arm extends my reach about twenty feet. One finger can grasp a handhold quite well enough to pull the rest of my body up behind it. I can crack it like a bullwhip or use it to give me a very spectacular left jab inside ten feet. Also, you can’t trap or break it.
My neck is much less flexible, but I can elevate my view about eight inches briefly although it hurts a bit. I’m that much harder to knock out. My head wobbles around like a bobble-head to absorb momentum when I’m struck.
My right arm apparently absorbed some transformer’s ability. It gets about a foot longer, and covered with horny scales like a pangolin when I call on it. It is incredibly strong although the rest of my body is often incapable of giving it a stable enough base to fully utilize it.
Of course, the super-sized arm has enough teke to keep it from being the least bit of a burden to carry.
It can strike incredibly powerful blows though and it has retractable knuckle spikes, elbow spike and about three and a half inch retractable claws.
The claws are ironic. Chargers and super soldiers have a continual problem of damaging fingernails with their extreme strength. Like many serum-enhanced, I’d had my fingernails permanently removed.
With my healing powers, the hollows filled up and it looks as if I’d never had nails.
That’s most of it.
It’s rather gross, but I can spit a hen-egg sized phlegmy lump of burning napalm—but it’s only good for about five shots and then my mouth gets mighty dry for an hour or two.
If I don’t transform the right arm, I can get a medium-powered plasma torch from my right thumb. It wouldn’t be much for fighting. It would be a big help breaking out of gaol though.
Like most people with pyrokinetic powers, no reasonably hot flame will burn me.
I have a vertical leap that is in the realm of impossible, physically speaking and a useful, though bush-league level of telepathy.
So there you have it: teke, tepe and peke in a single artificially gifted.
“Damn!” Splicer said. “I wish I’d have been there. Looks like I missed out.”
“Would you like to be gifted Splicer?” Cooper said.
He clowned around and said it like a woman would ask a man if he was in the mood.
We all laughed.
“No, I’m serious though I clown around. I’ll gift you right here,” Cooper said.
I saw Splicer’s face. He was scared, but he wasn’t going to back down. There was no “back down” left in Splicer. The years had claimed and thoroughly obliterated whatever little “back down” that he’d ever had.
“What did I get?” Splicer asked a moment later.
“You’ll have to wait for your abilities to manifest. They should be along shortly.
“I really can’t tell you what you have. Two, three maybe four gifts in the mid to high 2.0’s.
“I can tell you what two of your most powerful gifts are though.
“Have you ever heard of a fetish?”
Cooper paused while we all allowed that we hadn’t.
“Fetishes came to be, the day that Jason stuck his harpoon into the red whale.
“A fetish multiplies the powers of friendly gifted within his immediate vicinity.
“A good strong fetish would multiply his friend’s power thirty or forty percent.
“There are only three world-class fetishes that I know of at the moment,” Cooper said.
“World class” refers to the top five gifted with any particular power. Sometimes there are ambiguities and there may be as many as a dozen or more technically classified as “world class” with a given ability.
“You can multiply friendly gifted powers about two point seven times,” Cooper said.
I struggled to grasp the concept. Just by having Striker along, everyone on the team would be over twice as strong.
Cooper looked at me.
“You’re the next most powerful fetish walking planet Earth. You can raise gifted powers a bit over three. I’m the third,” Cooper said.
“How much can you do Cooper?” I challenged.
Cooper turned to face me. His eyes glowed eerily in the red-lit room. I mean they positively glowed—enough that all features became indistinguishable and the eyes shifted colors rapidly, experimenting with ever color of the rainbow briefly.
“I warned you once in the presence of the Red Witch. My power is inexhaustible. My cup has no bottom.”
I took that as a challenge and I bristled.
“Calm yourself. I represent a certain degree of danger. What about you?
“I am one of thousands—perhaps ten’s of thousands of gifted.
“You are the first of your kind and I don’t refer to your gifts. Those are mere toys that you amuse yourself with,” Cooper said.
“I’m a charger. I’ve been charging for a very long time. Chargers grow stronger over time,” I explained.
“What you did to Laura and the new dog soldiers wasn’t charging. It wasn’t remotely like charging.
“And it doesn’t come from the source of gifts either.”
“What’s my other power?” Splicer, who seemed to have missed the troubling implications of our exchange blurted out.
“You are a super soldier,” Cooper told him. “Have you ever seen a super soldier who could charge?”
Splicer shook his head.
“It’s not possible. Some of the changes to the muscles and nerves, to allow super strength are the same, but some of the changes are diametrically opposite. It won’t work,” Splicer objected.
“It will work with you. You’ll be able to super charge your super soldier strength and your gifts for almost as many seconds as your friend Jason,” Cooper told him.
I left them. I had a lot to think about.
As I walked past a closed door, something prompted me to look within.
“Shut the damned door!” Raven demanded.
Raven sat cross-legged in the middle of a padded floor wrestling-room. The room was about twenty-five feet square. The room was dark.
Raven absorbed every ray of light that came near him, even as the door let in light. I could feel him trying to probe my mind to erase what awareness of him that had gotten past his shield.
I shrugged off the telepathic probes and relied upon gifted ears to sketch in what Raven was up to by sonar.
I knew Raven back in the old Sinn Féin days. He was gifted, with very good strength. But I’d never guessed that his strength came from being a super soldier back then. As I say, many mutants are strong.
I did know that Raven’s power was almost exclusively telepathic. He could teke enough to turn the tumbler of a lock or open handcuffs with his mind. He could alter an electron flow enough to get a free coke from a vending machine, but that was about it.
Raven sat cross-legged and juggled a dozen twenty-five pound Olympic barbell plates all around him in all sorts of complicated cascading patterns.
“Get out!” Raven hissed.
“No. I shut the door for you. Show me what you can do,” I challenged.
He started hurling the twenty-five pound plates at me almost as fast as a slow bullet.
I grabbed a forty-five pound plate off the floor with my left arm. My left hand filled the hole—but not quite all the way through, while my palm became a giant suction cup filling the entire hollow side of the plate.
My right arm transformed. I batted plate after plate away from me with my manhole cover sized shield or my scaled right arm.
After a few moments, Raven’s anger subsided. He used five twenty-five pounders and lashed out in complex and controlled patterns. There was a beauty to it, like a Shaolin form or a Tae Kwon Do Kata.
As I tired, I reached out with my feeble teke and tipped his plates just enough to destroy his timing.
“Raven, that’s enough. If you don’t quit, I’ll have to charge. Charging gifts is a chancy thing. I don’t want either of us hurt,” I said.
“How many forty-fives can you juggle?” I said.
“No more than three, and then no more than twenty or thirty seconds,” He said.
“Try this,” I said and unleashed the fetish power.
Soon he had five forty-five pound plates going through several complicated patterns and then he added in three of the twenty-five pounders.
“What’s this stuff?” He asked.
“It’s a power called ‘fetish’,” I said and then explained how it worked.
“So it isn’t permanent?”
“Only when you’re on my side and within perhaps a quarter mile,” I said. “I can feel your power. You’ll be able to do five forty-fives on your own someday, maybe a bit more.”
“Or maybe I should ask Cooper to gift me,” he said.
“Cooper didn’t gift me,” I said.
“I know. It is hard not to know things when you’re a powerful telepath and I’m a lot more powerful now than I ever was,” Raven said.
“But you weren’t there. You said that she might read my plan from your mind,” I said.
“Yeah, but when those powers flew by, I reached out and snagged my share even from afar,” Raven said.
“Raven, have you heard of any mutant who had lost his powers and come back weaker the second time around?” I asked.
“No. Every one that I know of is stronger,” Raven said.
“That is suggestive. Maybe the Red Witch had a huge store of powers all her own. Maybe the surplus is from gifted that died and weren’t around so their powers just kinda divided roughly between survivors…” I began.
“Or either you and/or Cooper and/or the Red Witch was tapped into the source of all gifts. That is heavy!” Raven finished for me in a rush.
“Cooper says that his source of power is infinite. He says that my true powers come from another source entirely and my gifts are trivial by comparison to my true powers,” I told him.
“I honor what you did for Laura and for the new dog soldiers. It’s more than I ever did for my dogs. I’m sorry that I lost my temper at you,” Raven said.
“It’s cool dude. I had fun. Get a grip though. You’d have killed a mundane.”
*************** **************** ******************
Benji
Benji studied his computer monitor.
He didn’t know of any gifted with below normal intelligence. It would be very reckless to put someone who was mentally slow on any of the booster serums.
Then as the serums—whichever series of serums one was using—did their job, neural efficiency went up. Benji had a rather large handful of extra subjective seconds in every minute to think things through.
It wasn’t solely that his thoughts were faster though; his mind had expanded and became capable of greater complexity and subtlety as well.
Raven had given him an unprecedented glimpse into how some brilliant hacker’s minds worked and saved him both years of learning, and a means of approaching some puzzles that he might never have tumbled onto on his own.
What was turning Benji into one of Sinn Féin’s top hackers though was a mild “computer telepathy” that let him literally feel his way through the virtual twists and turns of cyberspace.
Almost any reasonably strong telepath could reach into the net to a degree, but good strong cyber-telepathy was rare. Benji’s gift was nowhere near world class, but it multiplied many of his other abilities. They multiplied each other.
He was sure about something now and he sent a summons for several of the high-ranking resistance fighters to join him in his hacking room.
***************** ************* ********************
“Isn’t that the same oversized transformer that you cold-cocked with the hydrant?” Splicer asked Jason.
“Either that’s him, or he had a twin brother,” Jason said.
“We blew him to smithereens,” Vanda objected.
“Weird stuff going down,” Jason said. “Maybe he can regenerate from a few cells. Maybe the govie got enough DNA to clone him. Maybe he had a twin. Bad craziness.”
“This mutant is seventeen percent taller and proportionately thicker than the one you fought,” Benji told Jason. “Also, he’s noticeably more graceful and quicker. His neuromuscular efficiency has improved markedly—if it’s the same mutant.”
“It’s worse,” Splicer said. “He’s a wiper. Grabbers are very rare, thank God.
“So far as the govie is concerned, a wiper is the next best thing. A wiper wipes away gifted powers and memories without seeming to gain the powers for himself—though each wipe seems to give him a little extra vitality,” Splicer continued.
They watched Benji’s monitor as the elite Mutant Patrol loaded over twenty blank-faced former gifted into the black windowless bus. The black BDU clad Federales looked smug as all Hell.
“When was this?” Vanda asked.
“Three or four hours ago. They’re long gone from there now,” Benji said.
“Find out everything you can about this dude,” Jason said. “I want to know everything that I can about how he fights and I want to know how to lure him in without being obvious.”
“What are you going to do?” Benji asked.
“Gonna stomp his ass,” Jason said.
“Jason, this dude has the closest thing to total invulnerability that I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen him shrug off LAW rockets. If you somehow do manage to wound him, he heals almost instantly.
“He’s stronger that our top six or seven strong mutants put together. He’s mean and he can take your powers.
“What can you possibly do against that?”
“Cowards theorize with the goal of staying alive firmly in mind. I cannot be defeated, because I refuse to concede defeat,” Jason said.
“He’ll kill you,” Benji objected.
“Maybe. What difference does that make? I said that he couldn’t defeat me. He’s welcome to kill me—if he’s able,” Jason said.
The smile that Jason wore scared Benji and he’d become very hard to scare of late.
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Gifted
Jul 29, 2013 12:44:58 GMT -6
Post by rvm45 on Jul 29, 2013 12:44:58 GMT -6
Chapter ElevenJason’s Tale We’d managed to anticipate the Wiper and get ahead of him. There was a mutant gang that called themselves “The Girl Scouts”. They were all grown women, or at least teenaged, but they all dressed like risqué versions of the 60’s Brownies—with brown spandex leotards and sealed “Cheerleader” skirts—otherwise their continual tumbling would have been pornographic. Yeah, why did they wear Brownie outfits? And why not call themselves “Brownies”? You got me. It’s mutant logic. Anyway, they had two-dozen women on their team, with a few alternates. They were all at least rather strong, as mutants go and fair to good telekinesis was a big plus for anyone wanting to join. Although few of the girls qualified as full-fledged “Acrobats”—in the mutant sense of the word—with their super human strength and reflexes, and with at least some of the girls capable of giving telekinetic spots or assists—they put on some hellacious tumbling shows. “Shows?” Well yeah, mutants have to eat too and for a long time the mutant laws were winked at. Some hadn’t quite made the mental transition yet. And still one has to eat. The Girl Scouts were putting on a show in the parking lot of a rather large Baptist church. The church may or may not have been complaisant in putting on the show. Either way, they’d deny it vigorously. Someone had to have gotten the word out though. You don’t get flash-mobs like this one in suburbia without malice of forethought. Now not only did the Girl Scouts do all sorts of tumbling and acrobatics; they had juggling and fire-eaters and knife throwers. They even had a couple animal acts. It was in fact, a small travelling circus. All the while, a few supernumerary girls passed the hat and one kept up a steady patter with a voice that had gifted volume. I’ve seen the “soccer-playing dogs” act both in person and on TV since I was a little boy. I was surprised to see that the Girl Scouts had added the act though. I was really surprised to see Thumbelina as the trainer. All the Girl Scouts were slim and attractive, but they’d made an exception for Thumbelina. She was about six feet tall and almost as broad. I guess that she’d weigh about three hundred pounds if you could somehow divorce her weight from her gift. She looked like a female sumo—if you can imagine such. On top of everything else, she had an extra large turned-up nose. Her main gift was an almost limitless amount of pseudo inertia and momentum. She was at least as mobile on her feet as an NFL lineman in uniform and if she didn’t want you to stop her, she could give herself the apparent momentum of a semi truck, maybe even an onrushing freight train. She was very hard to damage and she had a slap like a giant Kodiak bear. Apparently she also had enough animal telepathy to make her a wonderful animal trainer. Every telepath can read animals to a degree. Many can communicate. The fine control Thumbelina was using was rare though. I could sense the mental bonds between her and each dog. Usually the Soccer playing dogs are Boxers, but Thumbelina had six oversized Rottweilers—three to a side—and what looked like a giant Bull Mastiff wearing a stripped referee’s shirt. The Girl Scouts weren’t hurting a single soul. Anyone who wasn’t grooving on their little talent show was free to go on their merry way… But the govie didn’t see it that way. One of the rubes started screaming. In mere seconds he’d screamed himself eight feet tall with a physique that would astound any iron athlete. Girl Scouts tried to run, but there was a ring of government super soldiers and dog soldiers moving in. Some of them had flamethrowers. I started to charge. God knew how many seconds that I had. It kept growing. I could meet the wiper at full charge for over a quarter hour. Not a good thing for him. Wiper grabbed a Girl Scout. He sucked every bit of mutant energy out of her and then slammed her body onto the rough asphalt like a wide receiver spiking a touchdown. Then he headed toward Thumbelina. She rushed him. She actually managed to knock him off his feet. His slap sent her reeling off balance and then she fell. Wiper kipped back to his feet and headed toward her. The Bull Mastiff stood snarling above her as she scrambled awkwardly to her feet. Six Rottweilers attacked the Wiper from all sides. She hadn’t asked them, they loved her and moved to protect her. Wiper swatted one dog aside so hard that all his insides were broken. He grabbed a dog by the throat—one in either hand. He quickly broke one Rottweiler’s neck with a vicious shake and tossed it aside. He made a big show of ripping the second dog into two halves. He kicked a fourth dog hard enough to kill it. The other two circled warily, but with murder in their eyes. I halted for the brief moment that it took to yank Thumbelina to her feet. “Stay out of it!” I hissed. I did a dive forward roll and hit Wiper low. We went down in a tangle of limbs. I got a good hold of one arm—the man had zero skill as a ground fighter—and broke it and broke it and broke it. He rolled one way and I rolled the other as we came to our feet. “How dare you challenge me?” Wiper roared. “You’re not even gifted.” Dream on dude. For right now I’ll let you believe that. “I am Brave Jason The Charger,” I told him. “And you’re not long for this world dude.” I tied him up for a good ten minutes using nothing but charged muscles and fighting skill—something this bezonian sorely lacked. Then he slammed me down on the asphalt hard enough to break both my arms and all my ribs. He stomped me once. He went for twice, but he’d forgotten the last two Rottweilers. One of them tore the Achilles tendon loose on his support leg. When he fell, the other Rottweiler quickly snapped off four fingers on his left hand. In the few second that it took him to regenerate so he could rise, Thumbelina did a belly-dive on top of him. You could hear her “Splat!” two blocks away. Then she rolled far away from him. She was light and nimble on her feet, but off her feet she was like a turtle on its back. Wiper regained his feet depressingly quickly. Three companies of my own new dog soldiers attacked. They fought the govie dog soldiers and super soldiers and assorted Federales to a standstill. Cooper came walking across the parking lot, six foot seven or eight with those three extra eyes forming an equilateral triangle above his human pair of eyes. Cooper had dogs too. A pair of dogs that were litter-brothers and who had been Pit Bulls, came tumbling out of otherwhere. The dogs were about a fourth the size of a human, and about a third as powerful as a full-sized human gifted with their gift would have been. Cooper had much more success gifting his playmates with gifts that he’d actually seen at work. This pair was his tribute to my gifts. They both walked on their back legs and had hands like tiny little hair-covered humans. Rub had the power of an elastic man. Brawn was a tiny strong man covered with pangolin scales. They grabbed each other’s ankles and rolled toward wiper like a hoop-snake wheel of death. They broke apart and one went left while the other went right, just before they would have slammed into Wiper. Thumbelina’s Rottweilers took heart and resumed stalking. “Little Ole David,” Cooper shouted. A tiny Yorkshire Terrier materialized about five feet off the ground. Little Ole David had good teke, but that wasn’t his main power. He barked and directed a sonic blast at Wiper that would have shattered a three-inch thick lexan plate. It knocked Wiper head over heels and then Little Bitty White Dog appeared. She only weighed about twenty pounds, but her jaws could expand to about three feet long and three feet deep. I’d seen her snap a railroad rail in two. Fury and Sting were also litter brothers, though I think that they had different sires. They were both humanoid bipeds. Fury was a medium-sized dog that could shoot a steady flamethrower sized flame from either hand—apparently without limit. Where did the napalm come from? How in Hell would I know? Sting was a big dog—maybe a third of the weight of a human. He shot lighting bolts like Vanda—at maybe half her maximum power. Raven stepped onto the asphalt. I turned on my fetish power. Its curious how closely my ability to amplify other gifted’s powers closely approximates Pi: 3.1415927… That’s how much more powerful Raven, Cooper and Cooper’s dogs became when I turned it on. Thumbelina regained her feet huffing and puffing all the while. She was hot to reenter the fray, but Raven held her inconceivable momentum back with a nonchalant gesture and a mild bit of teke. Wiper grabbed Little Ole David. Raven prevented Wiper’s hand from closing enough to squash the dog as he’d meant to do. He started drinking the little dog’s memories and vital energy instead—only as fast as he drained it, Cooper renewed it. Wiper started feeling satiated. He wanted to stop. He went to fling the Yorkie away, but the Terrier clamped firmly on the web of his hand. It became a question of who had who. Wiper gathered himself and flung the dogs wide to one side. Cooper and Raven attacked Wiper simultaneously—with fists and with gifts. It looked good for a few moments, but Wiper managed to damage both of them badly enough that they couldn’t carry the fight on anymore. Cooper’s raging Hell Hound raced through the carnage and when Raven and Cooper were both on board, he carried them to safety. That’s when I started to rise. Yeah, I hit the ground hard enough to break both arms—but I didn’t. The rubber arm flexed slightly and the strong arm knew nothing of breakage. A few ribs broke. That never feels good—but Pogo was hanging back in the crowd. The man is a world-class gifted healer—and I was magnifying his power by Pi. I attacked like I’d never attacked before. My strong arm was actually stronger than Wiper’s arms. Pity that I couldn’t have went pangolin all over like Brawn—I’d have whipped Wiper handily then. I jabbed at his face with my left when he was medium close, and cut his face to the bone like a whip when I was farther away. I kicked. I used my leg’s spring power to leap over him like a kangaroo—but after the first couple times, he’d see it coming and would be waiting for me right where I landed. My hooking lefts and spiked rights had taken his eyes out a dozen times, but he just grew them back. There was no time to conspire with Thumbelina, but she stood Straining against the mental block I was keeping her under. All I had to do to get her involved was to release the restraint and charge her powers. She could generally be counted upon to knock Wiper down and give me a moment’s respite. The last time I used her, Wiper caught her though. He started his wipe. I hawked and spat a hen-egg sized ball of hot burning napalm right into Wiper’s face from perhaps ten yards. Wiper’s face burst into flame all the while Thumbelina was slapping his head on first one side, then the other. Not surprisingly, he dropped her. Wiper wasn’t that hard to beat. The problem was, with his damnable regenerative powers he just wouldn’t stay beaten. I started towards him to scuffle a bit more. Just then a govie dog soldier came up behind me with a flamethrower and gave me the whole seven and a half seconds worth. Okay, I peke—pyrokinesis. I spit burning napalm and my right thumb is a plasma torch. Most pekes are immune to fire. Actually, the flame felt good to me—warm, soothing my aches and cleansing all the sweat and oily grime away. I didn’t expect my clothes and weapons to endure. They came out spotless and they didn’t even smell of smoke. That was cool. It wouldn’t do much for Brave Jason The Charger’s image to be seen fighting evil with my Wee Willie Winkie hanging out—course I might get a lot of fan mail… It was time to spring the trap on Wiper. He should be as wiped out as he’d ever get. “Do it to it!” my telepathic command went out Fifty of my new dog soldiers ran to me. Many of the new dog soldiers were gifted. Every one of these had mutant strength—over and above the ordinary dog soldier super strength. They had good teke and they could use the magic lasso. I snatched my pump pistol from its over the shoulder quiver. A .500 S&W Magnum bullet between the eyes discomfited Wiper long enough for my lasso wielders to close in. One magic lasso was around his neck. He had two on each arm, elbow and wrist—and two on each leg, knee and ankle. The magic lassos had the ability to stretch rather than break and the new dog soldiers holding onto the end also had some give. Wiper was momentarily trapped, because his bonds were too elastic for him to break. Several of my people made great haste to spray paint a large pentagram on the asphalt with fluorescent paint—along with beaucoup arcane symbols. The paint meant nothing. It was just a psy-op on the govie armchair profilers they’d bring in. Eye-wipe, if you will… Then Splicer came out. Spicer’s fetish power is about equal to “e”: 2.71828 He charged me—made me almost three times as strong as ordinary. Then I used my fetish power to charge him. When two fetishes charge each other, it isn’t exactly multiplicative—or even additive—but it does build. And one of Splicer’s other power? Teleportation. After we made Wiper vanish, we had to clear out fast. When they saw what went down, they dropped a neutron bomb right in the center of that parking lot. Then they had the balls to blame it on some mutant power gone out of control. If one of the Girl Scouts hadn’t been a world-class shield and if she hadn’t been willing to sit on a nuke and damp it as long as possible, the civilian casualties would have been much higher. Congratulations govie! You killed a Girl Scout and turned over fifty powerful mutants into hard-core rebels. Way to go! *********************** ************** *********** “So where is Wiper?” Benji asked. “If things went as planned, somewhere on the surface of Venus,” I said. “Can he live there?” Benji asked. “I doubt it. If he does, he’ll be too busy regenerating to get up to any other meanness,” I said. “Why not the Sun, or space?’ “The Sun was too far. He might aestivate and survive space, or the moon. He just might end up back here. We’ll hope he doesn’t return from Venus.” .....RVM45
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Gifted
Jul 30, 2013 11:48:04 GMT -6
Post by hardtrailz on Jul 30, 2013 11:48:04 GMT -6
Really liking this one.
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