Hope & Fury (Heroes & Demons Book 2)

The next morning’s light drifted through the slit in the curtains towards where a disturbed Sandy lay upon her soft comfy bed, the remains of her troubled sleep still clinging to her clammy skin. She had dreams and nightmares, twisting themselves in knots like her sheets around her tangled legs; they had torn her apart and put her back together again...just a little bit wrong.

She heard Cyvus’ scream of pain as she burnt the flesh from his chest, could smell the charred smell of roasting pork. His scream was one of many, one of the thousands that raced to her ears from all directions, each one distinct and clear and piercing the fire-light. She saw the face of a man, glaring at her with such sharp eyes, they seemed to tear straight through her. He saw her, she saw him. Then she began to awake, pulling through a sick red haze that misted her mind. Then it was gone and she was left with a messy bed and a rapidly beating heart and faded memories of what she had witnessed.

It would come back to her, eventually. And why wouldn’t the man surface once more? She had picked up some of Rick’s Freudian crap across their turbulent friendship. She knew the image, the fire, all of it, was somehow her unconscious mind warning her about her rage, the cost of the anger that burned inside of her. She knew it but she didn’t care in so many ways it was almost unbelievable. She believed every word she had told Angel – evil had to be fought not by weakness but with strength. Sometimes you did have to fight fire with fire, as clichéd as it may be.

She knew that she would be nothing but a hollowed-out husk in which only the ashes of her soul resided left when the fires rescinded and the battle was over. She knew it. But was she prepared for it? That...she didn’t know.

She rose from her bed, crossing the room completely naked despite the sudden coldness that had descended over Manchester and in turn the Biogenesis Building over the past few weeks. She cared nothing for modesty. For a moment she pondered at the door of the bathroom as to whether she should bother with the BioSuit when suddenly she caught the sudden sound at the door – the slightest shift of a heavily booted foot...and the heavy breathing of a post-adolescent male.

When the door exploded inwards in a shower of flying splinters, she was nowhere to be found in the room. She had to give something to the New Order bastards – they had ditched the stereotypical robe in favour of armaments. The five men who rushed into the room seemed more like a SWAT team from an American action movie...only she knew the truth.

“She’s not here,” one of them said, stupidly. He was the one she burned first as she dropped from the ceiling, naked save for the burning flames that covered her entire body. In a flurry of blows, she disarmed the two next to the poor lad she had landed on who now had her footprints tangled with the plastic of his vest burnt into each arm. The price you pay when you don’t have Kevlar sleeves.

“It’s her!” another yelled. No shit, she thought as she grabbed the gun from the nearest man, using his body as a shield, ignoring his screams as she pretty much emptied the clip on the two remaining grunts. Both of them jerked with the spasms of the bullets, then fell to the ground with sudden thuds. They weren’t dead, but they would have enough bruises on their chests to think they’d played Paintball with the Terminator.

Her blood thundered through her veins, the fire created a whirlwind around her as she stood over her five assailants. Unable to contain herself, she shrieked in fury, the power of the adrenaline forcing its way out of her.

Two minutes later she was fully equipped in her BioSuit, storming down the corridor. She had contained the flames, for now, retreating into the dark place inside of her. With the quiet around her ears, she finally heard the sounds of battle through the remainder of the building. She headed straight towards the source of the noise, picking up speed as she finally approached another battle, her adrenaline spiking once more.

A coldness stole over her as she whirled around one corner and towards the final stretch that led to the living area. A sudden depressive feeling. She felt the fire she had burning around her hands beginning to subside, to diminish. She frowned, unable to compute what was happening to her. She felt so cold...so cold.

The Man in Black stood at the end of the corridor, his grin the only thing she could make out. He wore an impeccable suit cut from fine black linens. His shoes were expensive wingtips that seemed to have a flourish rarely seen on the enemies they had encountered so far. And he was an enemy, that much was evident from the pain she felt throughout her body, the shocking cold that stole over her. Her thoughts seemed slower somehow as if someone had turned down a dial on her back and now she was moving slowly through tar. The lights dimmed, the happiness seemed to steal away to some forgotten part of her past where she couldn’t reach it again.

“Who...are you?” she whispered, finding that a woefully inadequate form of communicating. For she heard his voice in her head, ringing through loud and clear. She could sense his malice, his evil...it seemed to seep from him with every step. And she hated him, mostly for how powerless she felt.

“I am become death,” he told her, without sound. “Now sleep, Sandy....go to sleep.”

Heaven help her, her eyelids began to grow heavy. She felt like sleeping. So, like the good little girl she was, she lay down on the carpet and slept. The Man in Black stepped over her, the grin still evident on his face.

* * *

The morning light spread across Angel as he sat in the lotus position on the roof of the Home Base, a site he used to think was assuredly reserved for him. He knew that Ruth disapproved of him being up there – the possibility that he would be spotted became almost intolerable to her. But he could not always keep himself away. He liked the feel of the wind through his wings and across his all too human skin. He liked the feeling that came with the approaching dawn and the banishment of the night.

It was early yet and the world around them had not begun to fully wake up. Anyone who saw him through their windows was likely to assume it was sleep-deprived hallucination or morning brain fog – the two extremes. It was amazing the human potential for self-deception when faced with what to them seemed extra-ordinary. They would not embrace the new...they would question.

His thoughts were interrupted as the doors to Ruth’s private elevator pinged open somewhere near. He knew she would arrive only moments later and yet had to wonder why she would even have installed a lift up to the roof. She didn’t like him being up there...he presumed she wouldn’t come up their either. But was that too much to hope for?

“Angel,” she greeted. He expected a short lecture on the threat of exposure he brought by his presence up there, but he was disappointed. “Angel, last night you seemed anxious to talk.”

“I would not have interrupted you, I did not realize you were busy with the detective,” he explained. “Please accept my apologies, I was always willing to wait. It was not an urgent matter.”

“What is it, Angel?” she asked him, rolling to a stop about five feet away from him. He recognised her warm eyes on his bare back, he could feel them burning through his feathers.

“It is Sandy,” he explained. “There was an incident yesterday during our brief interrogation of the prisoner, Cyvus. She...” He hesitated, unsure how to phrase what had happened, how to put it into context. Thankfully, Ruth seemed to understand the progression of his words and supplied the right ones for him.

“She seemed to ‘cross the line’?” she asked, “She went further in the pursuit of the information we need than you deemed was necessary? You thought she went so far as to torture the man?”

“She did,” Angel explained, although he didn’t like to correct Ruth, a wise woman as she was. “She burnt the skin on his chest in anger because she wanted to not because she needed to.”

She was silent for a moment and when she spoke she asked him something he hadn’t considered, hadn’t even remotely thought of, “Was it a wound you could have healed?”

“Yes, I believe I could have healed the wound, had Cyvus let me near him,” Angel agreed.

“Sandy would have known this,” Ruth told him. She paused again, thinking herself how best to put it into a way he might understand. “Some evil is necessary, Angel, to keep the world safe. When it comes to the interrogation of prisoners for information, they need to believe that we will sink as low as them – they need to believe that we will hurt them, torture them, kill them for information if needs be. Whether or not we are willing to go so far is a matter for our consciences.”

“I felt it, I felt her anger,” he tried to explain, “She truly believes that to beat them, we must be like them. I find no comfort in this.” He shook his head and looked back at the lightening horizon, “I fail to see how evil can ever lead to peace.”

“Welcome to war.”

He looked at her in a way he never had before, with a little fear that came with understanding. He understood a little more about the human being now, their capacity for true evil was great, as was their capacity for great love and kindness. But now he finally began to see that human love could lead to human evil...with the best of intentions. He could see the slope that they all stood on, but it was as if only he could see how steep the gradient actually was.

Before he could continue their morning philosophical debate, he heard the sound of screams coming from two floors below. He and Ruth shared a look, even as he rushed to the edge of the inner courtyard and searched for signs of the ruckus. He heard the whoosh of flames and finally he saw them,

“New Order,” he informed her, “They have automatic weapons. This is a well-organized strike team.”

“Do what you can,” she ordered him. Before he could agree, she turned and wheeled back towards the elevator. She just had time to see him turn back to the roof’s edge – and then dive off.

Ruth hammered the button to the elevator with such force she cracked the plastic. She needed it to come and quick. There were things...secrets she and Rick had needed to protect for a long time now. Truths which the others didn’t know, but which others may - though she had no idea how.

When the elevator came she hit the button for the basement, waiting patiently as she began to hear gunshots and screams coming from the remainder of the building. The others were fighting a battle she hoped they were winning – she, however, had other things on her mind.

As the elevator passed through the second floor, she suddenly felt a large jolt that almost shook her from her seat. Then the lights flickered and went out. A second later she felt her stomach take a sudden plunge as the elevator began to shriek down towards the basement. Two floors later the ground suddenly connected with harder than she could have imagined. She banged her hip on the edge of the chair and cried out in pain as the rest of her tumbled to the ground, the doors separating with the force of the impact.

She felt flattened, though she knew it was just windedness (and probably a very bruised hip now). Foregoing the chair she crawled over to the crack in the doors, pulling it slightly open with her arms. She barely got a quarter of the way when the resistance became too strong and she had to leave them where they were.

Luckily for her, she wasn’t noticed as she sat in the remainders of the lift, peering out through the gap in the door. She felt him before she saw him, a kind of creeping coldness that slid along her spine and down to the small of her back which was throbbing with pain.

He was dressed in a black suit, his sharp pale features a stark contrast. He walked down the steps with a swagger, a confidence that she found completely stereotypical. He grinned relentlessly into the dim basement. He stood at the base of the steps for a moment, scanning the room with his eyes. Luckily he failed to spot her crouching in the shadows.

Something shook her about him, something she couldn’t explain. The shadows seemed to grow longer when he was around. He turned from the steps towards the cells where Cyvus immediately stood upon seeing who it was. She sensed his importance...and Cyvus’ fear, almost immediately. So, he was important and powerful.

The bars of Cyvus’ cage first bent and then dissolved before her eyes, the transformers giving only a sweet crackle of blue sparks before dying. Cyvus stepped out of the spot that was once his cage and bowed to the Master in Black.

“Next time, you should die outright rather than let yourself be captured,” the man sneered at him, his voice silky smooth and laced with sarcasm. Cyvus nodded. It was weird to see the bulk of the man trying to keep from whimpering and trembling with fear. Humbling. And a little bit funny alongside disturbing.

“Yes, sir.”

“Go now, kill any of them if you can, I have other business.”

Cyvus nodded and ran up the stairs, for the first time seeming to scarper. The Man, however, his job wasn’t done. He turned to the back wall, adorned with gardening equipment. With a nonchalant wave of his hand, the wall slid away to reveal the first room, the armoury. But it wasn’t weapons he was interested in. The second room, that which housed their specialist equipment and BioSuits, he likewise ignored that room, heading towards the brilliant white tiles of the back wall. A flick of the wrist and he found Rick and Ruth’s dirty little secret – a third and final room, unknown to the others.

He stepped in, opened up the two large chambers, seeming to spend a minute in their presence. He made his choice and left...and Ruth’s heart sank in her chest.

* * *

Ben had been awoken to the sound of gunfire somewhere else in the building. He’d run out of the bedroom they’d assigned him and towards the direction of the sound (even though in the back of his mind he was wondering who ran towards gunfire). The hallways seemed to resonate the sound of some distant battle, a few screams and the whoosh of fire before silence resumed once more.

Then he heard another sound, again the sound of gunfire, mingled with cries of pain. But this was coming from the courtyard. He rushed down an adjacent corridor, lost in the maze that was an unfamiliar home he’d supposedly not even known before he’d ‘died’.

A man rounded the corner before him, his automatic rifle pointed in front of him ready for action. Ben grabbed the end of the barrel and yanked it towards him, causing the man to stumble forward, disoriented. He brought one fist down onto the man’s head, rendering him unconscious in one shot. He frowned, his hand had become the colour of rough stone and had the same texture.

A slow smile spread across his face – he could get used to this.

He continued forward, now with the gun in his hand, although it felt somewhat redundant. As he rounded another corridor, the sounds of battle much closer now, he found Sandy on the floor, unconscious and dressed in her flaming red BioSuit. He rushed forward and knelt beside her.

“Sandy!” he yelled at her, shaking her viciously. She flipped back and forth like a rag doll until her eyes opened and her fist smashed into his cheek. He stumbled backwards a bit, “Sandy, it’s Ben!”

She looked at him, shook the cobwebs in her mind away and was on her feet in an instant.

“How long have I been out?” she snapped, “Who was that man?”

“What man?” he asked, confused. “You mean me?”

“No,” she snapped back, grumpily. She looked around them, “They’re still here.”

Before he could decrypt her unusual sentences she took off down the corridor. He had no choice but to join her, a few steps behind as they grew closer to the battle itself. In the distance, they heard the sudden loud crash that none of them realized was the elevator hitting the bottom floor a little harder than intended.

While Sandy continued straight on towards the main living room area, banking left into the sofa-section, Ben rushed through the door to the infirmary when he heard a somewhat familiar scream.

As soon as he entered the room he saw the lithe form of Dr Louise Bryan, legs flung out behind her, clinging onto the head of a man dressed in SWAT gear, who was firing all around the room with his gun, smashing up all the equipment Ben felt sure was quite expensive.

“Stop spinning!” she yelled at him, syringe held up high in the air in one hand. Ben rushed forward, diving under the gunfire and tackled the both of them to the ground. They fell to the smooth floor of the infirmary in a bizarre three-way tangle. As soon as he was mostly free Ben brought his rock-hard fist into the face of Louise’s attacker, who promptly fell unconscious.

“You know this syringe does have a humane amount of tranquillizer in,” Louise told him, “You didn’t have to be all violent.”

“And you were playing ride the SWAT guy? That’s humane?” he asked her, not sure if he was joking or serious, or some strange mix of the two with which he was rapidly becoming familiar.

“I’m just saying...” she defended.

“Who are these people?” he asked her, “What the hell is going on?”

“I’m thinking the New Order has stepped into the twenty-first century,” Louise said, giving their unconscious friend a little kick in the arm, “Well, mostly – they still have AK-74s which are like so much of a leftover from the Cold War. It’s almost pathetic, really.”

“A doctor who knows about guns? Why does that not surprise me?” he wondered out loud. Before Louise could throw back a probably witty reply, the door (and a little bit of the surrounding frame and wall) came bursting in, Cyvus following behind a split second later with a smirk on his face.

“I have been waiting for this,” he greeted.

“Okay, you can use your tranquillizer on that guy,” Ben told Louise, but she was already a step ahead of him. She held the syringe in her hand like a dart and flung it towards him. But Ben got another great taste of the freak show in which he’d been landed when the make-shift delivery dart broke upon the rapidly spreading metallic skin which seemed to consume the man’s more organic flesh. The man stepped towards him, a large grin spreading across his silver features.

“You beat me last time, it will not happen again,” Cyvus snapped at him. Then he charged. Ben didn’t know what hit him but it felt like a freight train loaded with pure lead. The two of them went flying back to the wall, crushing an innocent bystander gurney along the way. A moment later he felt brick at his back, smashed apart as the two of them went through into the living room where all hell it seemed had already broken loose.

“You two couldn’t use the door?!” Louise yelled at them, but her next words were cut off as she surveyed the scene before her. Ben and Cyvus scrambled on the floor delivering blows to one another that would shatter concrete; while behind them shards of glass littered the entire inside of the living room – the French Windows were now just gaping French Holes (something about which there would be jokes later). Sandy, wreathed in flame, stood in the centre of the room, grappling with a man who was trying to use his bayonet against her but failing miserably.

Angel, meanwhile was beyond the confines of the blurred line between indoors and outdoors, fighting with the three gentlemen who were grappling him in the courtyard. They drove him back into the fountain, but in a spray of water, the three of them were sent flying backwards as Angel burst back to his feet, water dripping from his drenched feathers. Yet through it all, he maintained his sense of eerie calm.

It was madness, chaos. But as she looked onto the mayhem before her, a silent gong seemed to sound that only Cyvus and the remainder of the men could hear. As if calling them away. The man who was grappling Sandy tried to break free, but she held him in her grip. He drove his bayonet towards her stomach in one final spasm, but as if the blade passed through some invisible heat barrier, the metal melted away to nothing before it even touched her skin. She threw him to the ground, yelling out the nonsense of fury that seemed to provide an outlet her muted ability to fight could not provide.

Cyvus kicked Ben in the chin, hard enough for him to see stars, breaking his grip. He ran through the hole where the French Windows used to be, passed Angel who stood there, pacifist. He and the remainder of the attackers were gone, and even though they didn’t know it at the time, the Man in Black had left with them – perhaps even initiating the retreat.

“Fuckers!” Sandy spat, her anger still bubbling over, “What the hell were they doing here? What did they want?”

“Besides getting Cyvus back?” Louise asked. Ben, Angel and Sandy gathered in the remnants of the living room and frowned at her. She looked back sheepishly, “Well, that’s all they might have wanted. They must have known they could kill all of us.”

“I sensed something behind this,” Angel explained, suddenly. He seemed troubled, his brow furrowed in thought, “There was a presence...”

“The Man in Black,” Sandy agreed, “I saw him in the corridor. He was going in the direction of the stairs to the basement.”

“You think he’s the one who let Cyvus out?” Louise asked innocently.

“Probably,” Sandy nodded.

The four of them made their way down the corridor towards the stairs and then down into the basement beneath. They saw the ruins of the cell block to one side, clear evidence that the Man in Black had been the one to break Cyvus out of his cell. The transformer continued to spark as if re-enforced by their presence but it was useless now with nothing through which to channel its energy.

Ben moved over to the cracked doors of the elevator shaft, frowning into the darkness.

“Looks like they messed with the power, I think your elevator is no more,” he said. Suddenly a hand reached forward from the darkness and despite himself, he shrieked a girly scream that had the others frowning in his direction.

“Little help here?” Ruth asked. Ben reached down and took her by the hand, helping her to pull herself through the doors which Sandy and Angel propped open and up onto the concrete floor of the basement where she sat, skirt dirtied by the dust, leaning against the back wall.

“Are you okay?” Louise asked her, kneeling and scanning her body with her eyes – searching for any signs of hurt or damage.

“I may need some painkillers for a bruised hip,” Ruth explained, “But otherwise I’m fine. Although we may not all be...”

She indicated to the smashed remnants of the armoury doors and the rooms beyond.

“What did they take?” Sandy asked, “What did they come for?”

“I think they came for Cyvus, for the most part,” Ruth explained, “But I think they came for something else as well.” She looked away, clearly uneased by what she was explaining. “Something Rick and I didn’t tell the rest of you about.”

Sandy, Angel and Louise each looked at her with a new look, something they hadn’t ever looked at her with before...a look of distrust. It was true she and Rick had hidden some things from the remainder of the group – but always in the interests of protecting them, from keeping them safe. Of keeping all of them safe, even the world beyond Home Base. Only Ben did not look at her in judgement, he couldn’t – he didn’t know half of what was going on. If any of them even did.

“There is a third room,” Angel explained, looking through to see the broken back wall. Ruth nodded, unsure whether she should explain the truth to them or whether she should tell them with Rick present – so they could better explain the reasons that led the two of them to do what they did.

“It started after Rick stabbed Stacey on the executive floor,” she told them, “Rick and I knew that the police would never understand. Even if they did, even if they finally ruled it self-defence – it would mean the exposure of everything that had happened and everything that was still happening. Mass panic. The world might tear itself apart – even more so after the Blackout.”

“What are you saying, Ruth?” Sandy half-snapped at her, “What did you and Rick hide down here? What did they take?”

“At first we kept them in frozen storage units Biogenesis has for cryogenic research,” Ruth explained, “But after we bought this building, we had a third room built – a stasis room if you like. It’s Janet, Sandy. Janet and Stacey – we kept their bodies in the third room....to keep anyone else from getting their hands on them...and to cover up their deaths.”

“And they took them?”

“No, they just took Stacey.”

“What for?”

“I honestly don’t know.”