The Last Hero (Book 2): Rise of the Ultras Read online

  But there wasn’t just one Mike Beacon. There were thousands of Mike Beacons, all crowded down there, all reaching up to me, dragging me down.

  “You killed me, Kyle,” he shouted; all of them shouted. “You did this to me. You did this to me!”

  I heard laughter, then. Looked up and saw Cassie standing there. Her face was covered in blood. Behind her were the two men with the long arms, the sharp teeth. Both of them were waving at me while Cassie danced on the spot, twirling like a ballerina.

  “YOU DID THIS TO ME!” Mike Beacon screamed in a high-pitched squeal. “YOU DID THIS YOU DID THIS YOU DID THIS!”

  Cassie danced.

  The sharp-toothed men waved.

  I wanted to fight. I wanted to get away. I wanted to be anywhere but here.

  I knew I was strong. I knew I could do this.

  But then I looked into Cassie’s eyes, so far away, and I felt my grip slipping.

  Mike Beacon dragged me down into the abyss below.

  I was surrounded by darkness.

  29

  I felt my lungs fill with water, but at least I knew I was alive.

  I opened my eyes. Tried to gasp for air. Someone was standing over me. Someone tall. A dark figure dressed in black. They were saying something. To me? I wasn’t sure. But it seemed familiar. It seemed like I’d been here before; like I’d felt like this before, a long time ago. I wasn’t sure what it meant. I wasn’t sure why I felt like I did. I just knew I was alive, and that was something.

  My eyes adjusted and I saw it was Orion standing over me.

  I coughed. Sat upright and spat out stringy phlegm on the concrete flooring beside me.

  Orion patted my back, hard. “That’s it. Get it up. Get it all up.”

  I threw up on the floor. My head ached like mad. I wasn’t sure what’d happened just before when I’d seen all those horrible things in the alleyway. I wasn’t sure what they meant.

  “It’s okay. You’re back with us now.”

  I realized Orion’s voice was echoing. When I lifted my head, I saw that I was inside. It was quite a small room, with no windows. Just a flickering light bulb dangling from the ceiling, swaying from side to side.

  But I wasn’t alone in this room.

  People stood around me. Men. Women. All of them… different, somehow.

  As Orion patted my back and helped me get the rest of the phlegm from my chest, I saw what these people were.

  “ULTRAs,” I muttered.

  “He’s awful weak for someone who’d s’posed to be our savior,” a man said. He was standing in the middle of the crowd. Well built, with a short buzz cut and bigger muscles than I’d ever seen. As I looked at him, I saw his hands turn to stone, then back to flesh again. He must’ve been in his twenties.

  “Give him a break,” one of the others said—a woman who shot around the room with radical speed. She had black hair and was dressed in white. She looked around my age. “We were all just scared kids once upon a time.”

  “But we didn’t have a planet to save,” another voice said. A guy, with a booming deep voice. He had dark, greasy hair and rounded glasses perched on his protruding bony nose. He looked a little younger than me, but his face looked hard, like he wasn’t a guy to mess with. I saw blades creep out of his skin, like he was some kind of human hedgehog. If I hadn’t already seen some weird shit over the last few months, I’d definitely have passed out right now. He looked familiar, though, and I realized I’d seen him—and the stoney guy—fighting in the sky when I’d been drinking milkshake.

  “Give the boy some peace,” Orion said, raising a hand. “He’s been through a lot. I told you to go easy on him with the nightmares, Vortex.”

  I saw who Orion was looking at. A rather small, slight girl with long ginger hair and a freckly face. She can’t have been much older than me, but she had a creepy look about her. I knew just from looking at her that she’d been the one to create those awful, nightmarish visions I’d had outside however-long-ago.

  “I don’t do easy,” she said. “Just hard. And painful. You were interesting. You have a lot of guilt in you. I can read it like a book.”

  She clicked her fingers and I flinched.

  “Ignore Vortex,” Orion said. “She can be hard to handle at first.”

  I sat back. Leaned against the wall. My head hurt, and I couldn’t shake the taste and smell of sick. “Where… where am I?”

  “You’re at our base. Far, far away from the streets of New York.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  “You don’t have to know that,” Orion said. “Nobody does. Just meet where we met this morning and I will come for you.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “Yeah,” the speeding woman said. “We’ve mentioned that to him before too. Never listens.”

  “It’s the only way I can guarantee your safety. And even then, it isn’t an absolute guarantee.”

  I wanted to argue, to tell Orion that I thought his methods were shitty, but I didn’t have the strength in me.

  “Those things I saw. Why would you do that?”

  Vortex smiled, and I saw her yellow teeth. She let out a witchlike chuckle. “Really got to you, huh?”

  “We wanted to test your strength,” Orion said. “It’s all good and well having the physical ability, but the ability to face your nightmares, to stick them out and fight them instead of running away? That’s something.”

  “I tried to run away. Believe me.”

  “But something held you down. A part of your resolve held you down and kept you rooted to the spot. Even if you weren’t aware of it, the very fact that you remained in that alleyway for one reason or other is exactly the sign we were looking for.”

  “Mike Beacon’s damned hands held me down in the alleyway. That’s all.”

  “Huh?”

  I shook my head. “Never mind. Just… It’s not gonna be a regular thing, is it?”

  I saw a couple of the other ULTRAs smile.

  “Believe me, kid,” the guy with the rock-like hands said. “If it were a regular thing, I’d’ve been outta here a long time ago.”

  I saw some of the ULTRAs seemed to be chatting now, like they were accepting my presence. But others—like the man with the bladed hands and another guy with flames across his palms, also around my age—looked at me with disdain. I knew why it was.

  “What happened,” I said, clearing my throat. “To Spark. To… to Angel. I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t say you’re sorry,” a skinny woman with water dripping from her fingertips said. “You say sorry by action. Not by words.”

  “And Glacies being here right now is a start of that process,” Orion said, the impatience clear to hear in his voice.

  I looked around at the group. At Vortex. At the guy with the ability to turn his body to stone, the woman bolting around, the woman dripping water from her fingertips, who hadn’t spoken yet. I looked at the man with the blades sprouting from his hands.

  “Got something to ask?” the man with the bladed hands said.

  “I just…”

  “Go on,” he continued. “Spit it out.”

  “Well, the Resistance. When Orion—”

  “Vesper,” everyone said, simultaneously.

  I saw them all glaring at me, and I figured that even though everyone knew who Orion was here, we were all supposed to refer to him by his new name. Nice way to start. Way to go, Kyle.

  “When Vesper mentioned the Resistance. I just thought there’d be… well, more of you.”

  A few chuckles around the room. A few shakes of the head.

  “Well there were two more,” the flamed-handed person said. I could see flames flickering in his palms, and wondered what destruction he could cause with them. He was young, too, about my age. Dark hair, pretty good looking guy in truth, a lot better built than me. He was wearing a leather jacket and a white T-shirt underneath. “And you kinda let ’em down.”

  “There were others,” Orion said. “A lon
g time ago. But this is all that’s left of us now. All that’s left of us to fight the ULTRAbots, as well as stop the rogue ULTRAs in their tracks.”

  “Those rogue ULTRAs,” I said, standing now. “What are they all about?”

  Orion shrugged. He paced around the room. “We have settled on the theory that many of them are ULTRAs who have been imprisoned in a place called Area 64 for many years. They have escaped, and now they are attacking the very people who put them in there.”

  “But that doesn’t make total sense.”

  “Right,” Orion said. “There is something amiss. Something wrong. Some of those ULTRAs, I’ve never seen in my life. All I know is they are dangerous, and we have to stop them.”

  “I’m about ready to put my damned fist through their faces,” the rock-handed guy said.

  “We don’t kill,” Orion corrected him. “We imprison. We interrogate. We do not kill.”

  A few grumbles. A few shakes of the head. “About time we changed that rule,” the woman with water dripping from her fingers said.

  Orion walked up to me. Stood right opposite. “You have a choice, Glacies. A choice I have told you about many times before, but a choice you’ve held off making for so long.”

  “Because he’s a frightened little flower.” Vortex giggled.

  “You join our fight. You lead us to battle against the ULTRAbots, who are our most immediate threat. We have been trodden on for a long time. We have been stamped on, attacked. Our numbers are low, but together, we are more powerful than anything they can throw at us because we have the power of decision and thought. We can fight. We can defeat them. But we need you.”

  I looked around at the ULTRAs again. This world wasn’t for me. It was surreal. It was scary. It was unlike anything I’d ever had to adjust to.

  But if I wanted to survive—if I wanted to save the people I loved—I had a duty. A responsibility.

  I had to embrace Glacies.

  “What do you say?” Orion asked. “Is your heart in this?”

  I swallowed a lump in my throat. Thought about Mom. About Dad. About Damon and Avi and Ellicia and everything I’d fought so hard for.

  And then I thought about what happened to Mike Beacon, what happened to Spark, what happened to Angel, and what happened to my sister, Cassie.

  What I could do to prevent all those things happening again to other families, tearing more lives apart.

  “I’m in,” I said.

  For the first time, even though he was behind a dark mask, I got the sense that Orion was smiling.

  “Good,” he said. “Then let’s get started.”

  30

  “This isn’t going to be easy. It’s going to take everything we’ve got, and a little of what we don’t. It’s going to break us. It’s going to hurt us. It might well kill us. But it’s what we have to do. It’s what we’re here to do. And if we don’t do it, everything we care about will fall. Everything we’ve fought so hard for will fall. And I do not want that. None of us want that. So let’s not let that happen.”

  I stood amongst the ULTRAs now, right in the middle of the row of them. Orion was opposite, pacing side to side, giving a speech. He had a plan. A plan he wanted to talk about. A plan he wanted to execute today. Because time was of the essence.

  I couldn’t deny I was feeling a little shaky, the taste of sick still clinging to my throat. When I’d agreed to join the Resistance, I’d expected it to be much like it was in the movies—months and months of planning signified by dialogue-free dissolve cuts into one another—then a foolproof attack.

  But only an hour had passed since I’d agreed to help the ULTRAs fight against the ULTRAbots and we were gearing up for action.

  I looked along the line at the ULTRAs. I knew all their names now. The guy with the rocky hands called himself Stone. The man with the blades, Slice. There was Vortex. Aqua. Roadrunner. Ember. All of these people—these ULTRAs—and I wasn’t just staring at them anymore, like they were different. They were what I was. They were ULTRAs. They were the last remaining troops of the Resistance.

  Together, we were all that was left. The only force that could stop the ULTRAbots taking down every last ULTRA, and then tightening their grip on humanity in general, as Orion theorized they would, ushering in a new era of witch hunting, paranoia and increased security unlike anything the world had seen before.

  “Roadrunner managed to locate a compound where the ULTRAbots are being produced. Now we are well aware that there are several of these compounds around the globe, but we believe this to be their main hub. If we can strike there, we can severely limit their numbers and make our job a whole lot easier.”

  “Cut ’em by thousands,” Roadrunner said, still struggling to keep still, like a child after a load of Hershey's.

  “Destroying the production compounds where the ULTRAbots are created means we have a finite number to deal with, not an infinite number. We cut off the head of the snake, and then we deal with the body. We also believe that the compounds contain the very power source giving the ULTRAbots their strength. If we can destroy that source, then we can destroy the ULTRAbots. We can turn this battle in our favor.”

  I nodded, tried to look sure about myself. I wasn’t. Of course I wasn’t. How could anyone be?

  But now wasn’t the time for worrying about what might be, of what might’ve been.

  Now was the time for action.

  “Every hour, Roadrunner observed that the ULTRAbots switch shifts. Half of them go in for servicing and recharging; another half leave to attack. During that window, there’s a ten-minute lapse in security where the ULTRAbots in for re-charging are too weak to report any anomalies, and the ULTRAbots sent out are technically cut off from the main hub. We strike when the first half go back for their recharging. That way, they’re at their weakest. Glacies will teleport us all there, and we’ll strike as effectively as we possibly can. Subtlety would be nice—sneaking past these creations and destroying the source would be preferable—but we have to prepare for the worst.”

  Orion walked us through the Plan A. I teleported everyone over there. Roadrunner ran Stone into the middle of the compound, past the cameras and the booby traps, where he would change his form and take on all the heat from the weapons and the bullets. After that, the rest of us would make our move to sneak inside the compound itself, and in our own ways, we’d fight off whatever stood in our way. We’d battle through the ULTRAbots, who should be weakened. And then we’d destroy the power source, thus destroying the supply chain and every ULTRAbot produced at this facility.

  “Any questions?” Orion asked.

  Nobody said a word. There was something niggling at me, though. Something I felt the need to address. “Your powers,” I said. “You said… you said they’re weakened. Are you going to be okay out there?”

  The silence around me reassured me that I wasn’t the only one worried about Orion.

  “Trust me, Glacies,” Orion said. “I’ll give it everything I’ve got.”

  He kept his stare on me for a few seconds. I got the feeling he wasn’t so convinced by his own abilities anymore.

  “No more questions?”

  “Yeah,” Stone said, his fists and body turning to stone. “Who wants a bet on who’ll smash up the most ULTRAbots?”

  “I’ll challenge you on that,” Aqua said, spraying water out of her palms so fast and so powerful that she hovered into the air.

  “Me too,” Slice said, sharp knives unfurling from his skinny hands, covering his arms.

  I watched the rest of the ULTRAs reveal their powers. I watched them all standing there beside me, freaks like me. Except I was different. I had many abilities. Teleportation. Telekinesis. Strength. Speed. The ability to heal.

  I’d never believed Orion when he said I was different; that I was special.

  Now, I started to wonder if maybe it was true.

  “Make peace with the lives you’re leaving behind,” Orion shouted, as the ground began to shake with the powe
r rattling against it. “Say farewell to the existences you thought you knew. There is no time for sentimentality. Not anymore.”

  He put on his black coat and bowler hat, covering up who he really was.

  “We are ULTRAs,” Orion said.

  “We are ULTRAS!” the group echoed.

  “And we are going to fight for this planet.”

  “Yes we are!”

  “Link hands, Glacies. Link hands with your people and do what you have to do.”

  I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to teleport all of us away from here. But then I remembered I didn’t have to be. Because Orion could teleport, too.

  And the power in this room was tangible. I’d never felt more excited and afraid at the same time in my life than right now.

  “Link hands!” Orion shouted, reaching for my hand.

  I held on to Vortex’s hand. Squeezed my grip around it as the rest of the group kept their powers charging up. I saw Cassie in my mind. Ellicia. Everyone back home who I was doing this for. The life I’d left behind to protect those people.

  This wasn’t for me. It was for them.

  It was what I had to do.

  “Hold on!”

  I looked at Orion’s hand. Saw heat simmering from it. A blue hue rising from it. I felt his power. Couldn’t explain it, but there was just a feeling to it. A strength and a force to it unlike anything I’d ever felt.

  I closed my eyes. Listened to the shouting, to the powers raging all around me. I felt the floor shaking. A tear rolled down my cheek.

  “Hold on,” I whispered.

  I took a deep breath.

  Let in all my anger, all my pain, every last bit of it.

  Then I reached out for Orion’s hand and an enormous explosion rippled through the room.

  31

  Paul Wilkinson always thought there was something different about himself ever since he was a little boy.

  It started when they first got a cat. A ginger tabby called Brutus. She never liked him, even though he tried loving her, stroking her, giving her attention. She always spat at him, scratched him, like there was something threatening about him that nobody understood.