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goremeridian

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Just a short one. Again, guys, thanks for the support. You have no idea how amazing your comments are.

 

Superior: Fifth Part

 

They heard the Alphas long before they saw them: metallic crashes, grunts, and raucous, heavy laughter, reverberating through the dusky bones of the ruined city. Lewis realised that his concerns over the noise of his crutch – and his inexperience in being sneaky – had been unfounded. Judging from the cacophony ahead, the bodybuilders would not have noticed had a million A-class tanks come whirling down through the yolk of the sky and impacted like an armageddon hailstorm. They were having too much fun.

 

“What are they doing exactly?” This to Holly, as she checked the map in the wavering yellow light sluicing in through the broken teeth of the window pane.

 

“Whatever gods do,” she shrugged, the tip of her cigarette dancing like a firefly. She was clearly not in the mood for idle chit-chat. Back in her Default Antisocial On-The-Mission Anxiety Mode.

 

His other companions weren’t much better conversationally. Clothilde, a petite Frenchwoman who in a former life had been an investment banker, was quiet as a shadow. And Martha, the fortysomething housewife-turned-Resistance fighter, just grunted at him to “shh” whenever he tried to engage her in dialogue. Even now in the near-dark inside the ribcage of the gutted supermarket, Lewis could sense her frowning at him. Distrusting.

 

“When was the last time you checked?” Her voice, deep for a woman’s, came out as a throaty whisper.

 

“About five minutes ago,” he replied. “Back at the junction.”

 

“Don’t you think it’s time you checked again – instead of sitting there distracting Holly?”

 

Lewis let out a long sigh. Full of charm, this one, he thought wryly.

 

But he let it go. No sense getting into an argument. Maybe anger and gruffness were just Martha’s way of coping with the tension. Besides, if he could detect and analyse the radiation from here, then it was mission over already and they could get back to the safety of the underground. And Martha could get back to…whatever his name was, the hefty man he had seen her sneak a hug with before departing.

 

Not her husband – Lewis had learnt that he and Martha’s three children had been hurled into space in their Audi Q5 four months earlier by a rampaging Ronny Rockel – just a fellow survivor. They had clung together briefly, firmly, like two tiny bubbles in a churning river, and Lewis fancied he had seen Martha’s grey eyes close for a moment, like she could shut out the whole damn world and all its pain.

 

“K, give me a second.” The scientist plucked the radiation scanner out of the sagging folds of his rucksack, fingers playing across the screen. He had done this so many times now he could have performed the action in the dark.

 

Again – just as he had expected – nothing. Just the chronal radiation from his goddamn vessel, like a fizzing blanket, blocking out any other readings.

 

He would be a liar if he said that worry wasn’t beginning to nibble at him. They were deep into the belly of the city now, far enough away from the time machine that surely – surely – something else should register on the device. He wasn’t expecting a complete analytical reading of the strange solar radiation, but he should at least be able to detect it. The device was clearly exceptionally sensitive by dint of the fact that he could detect his vessel’s output from miles away, yet there was not a whisper of whatever radiation had transformed the bodybuilders into gods.

 

“Well?” Came Martha’s dulcet tones.

 

Not for the first time Lewis felt the enormous pressure he was under as the only physicist in the Resistance. The theory about solar radiation was the one thing keeping Big Adam going. If results were incoherent, inconclusive, or – as it seemed they would be – inexistent, the muscled behemoth’s already strained psyche could splinter right down the middle. And the Resistance wouldn’t take long to follow suit.

 

Lewis was, in a very real way, carrying hope in his hands.

 

He switched the device off, the little rectangle of light shrinking to a pin-point before fading altogether.

 

“No. We still need to go further in. Much further in.”

 

“Funny,” said Holly, turning. He had almost forgotten she was there. The bright yellow of the day had faded to a rich gold, silhouetting her slim figure against the jagged window behind her. “There isn’t a ‘Much further in’. The Festival Hall is only two miles from here.”

 

She paused – for dramatic effect? – and gestured towards the noise. It seemed to swell in response, the deep-bellied booms of laughter and the screams of metal like howls dragged up from the very bowels of hell.

 

“In that direction.”

 

 

*

 

 

Minutes later the group ran into their first Alpha.

 

He was surrounded by a fly cloud of Zetas, buzzing and squeaking about his vast, bronzed form, shimmering with man-sweat in the dying light of day. Camera flashes illuminated the fingernail-deep striations between his glistening golden pecs, threw back the shadows of the clenched sweep of his symmetrical eight-pack, exposed the tight twin bubbles of his glutes, barely contained behind the thin, stretched black fabric of a posing strap. Questions filled the dusk air, hurried, desperate, sliced through by the occasionally deep grunt of a response from the big man himself.  As the figures scurried to keep up with the hulking brute’s steady, powerful gait, Lewis saw the metallic sheen of Dictaphones clutched in trembling fingers. 

 

Were they…journalists?

 

“Alexander Federov,” Holly whispered in his ear, pulling him back gently into the darkness of the alleyway in which they were crouched. “One of the smaller ones.”

 

Small he may have been, but he still towered a good head, shoulders, and nipples above the journos. Indeed, as much as it sickened Lewis that his fellow Zetas were granting this bodybuilder so much attention, he couldn’t help but admire their guts. He knew first-hand what one of these muscle freaks were capable of. And the men didn’t seem to be granted much in the way of special compensation just because they were journalists. More than once the scientist observed one of them knocked to the pavement by a swollen thigh the density of concrete, or clunked by an elbow as Federov raised an arm to flex his freakish bicep for the cameras. Simply because they lingered too long over a shot and were too slow to get out of the bodybuilder’s way. Dazed, it would take them a good minute to struggle back to their feet, snatch up their cameras and Dictaphone and stagger after the goliath once more.

 

Against the cacophonous backdrop of clangs and roars that thrummed through the twilight air, Lewis couldn’t make out what the journalists were actually asking the huge bodybuilder. His replies, grunted and thick with his Russian accent, were equally unclear. Loud though it was, his voice sounded more like the rumbles of some fantastical beast than a human.

 

If indeed he is human, Lewis mused. The jury is still out on that one.

 

Federov’s bulk swept past the opening of the alley and the small, cramped space filled with his raw, potent musk. Forcing himself to breathe through his mouth rather than his nose, Lewis choked out a quick question. He didn’t – couldn’t – take his eyes from the man’s monstrous, hyper-muscled physique, but he felt his companions pressed close to him.

 

“I thought the Alphas-” That term still felt strange coming out of his lips, but less so now, “Just killed Zetas on sight? That’s the impression I got from everyone.”

 

“They do.” Martha’s cracked voice sounded in his left ear. “Those are Epsilons.”

 

“Epsilons?”

 

Martha just sighed, the hot air unpleasant in his antihelix.

 

“Don’t you know anything?”

 

“He has amnesia,” Holly replied from somewhere behind him, then, gently in Lewis’ other ear, before he could object to being talked about in the third person; “Epsilons are what the gods call Zetas who are useful to them in some way. The media, doctors, people like that…” She cleared her throat. “Don’t know what’s worse. Being a Zeta and getting caught by the Alphas, or being an Epsilon and forced to serve them.”

 

Lewis shuddered. Holly must have felt him, for she placed a firm hand on his shoulder.

 

“Only a mile and a half to go now, physicist. How are those readings coming along?”

 

If only she knew.

 

"Let's keep moving," Lewis said, faux bravado masking the tickle of his rising anxiety.

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