[WARNING: THIS IS A WORK OF VIOLENT FICTION. IT IS DISGUSTING AND PROBABLY
INDECENT. IT’S CERTAINLY IN BAD TASTE. DON’T READ IT. GO AHEAD AND DON’T.]
Tetsuo Underground
By Chip Masterson
Tetsuo finally awoke from the deep slumber he sank into after forcing the space shuttle to burn its engines
out in his bare hands. The feat of humbling the world’s mightiest rocket, a ship capable of escaping the
gravity of the entire plant but whose power was no match for the muscle of his young arms, had taken
something deep out of the boy. His body lay inert, muscles twitching like a sleeping dog chasing rabbits,
while he went in and out of REM sleep with amazing ferocity. His brain activity during this “rest” broke
the needle on the EEG and fried the circuits. He was down so long we fed him intravenously. That didn’t
stop him from eating enough for three grown Coles when he appeared one morning, bright and alert and
trembling from hunger.
We tried to get him to talk but all he’d say is “Don’t wanna talk.” After he’d eaten so much even his iron-
band abs were stretching out, he fell into a kind of catatonia. He slumped on a camp stool, eyes half-open,
not talking or responding to anything. We could tell he was conscious, but something was eating him up
inside.
Danny’s insight, that something very bad had happened to him, seemed correct. What else could fuel so
much rage, hatred and lust for destruction in so young a boy? Combined with his almost planet-cracking
muscular strength, it was hard to conceive what COULD have hurt him. But gab therapy was out; his
defenses were too strong anyway. If he wanted to repress, nothing could break through, not even his own
will. Fortunately Salas was, among other things, a gifted hypnotist.
Tetsuo responded to forceful commands by stiffening into a kind of paralysis. So Salas used a more gentle
persuasion to tempt his eyes toward the swinging quarts spire he held before the boy’s eyes. He told him,
in words so soft we could barely hear, that through the crystal was the way back to his mother, to a time
when he was safe with her. She was in the crystal, waiting for him. And she would wait there forever, but
would grow so lonely, so lonely, so lonely, so lonely, so lonely….
The boy’s dead eyes flickered under the rhythmic chant that defined his condition, and the crystalline glitter
trapped his gaze as he tried to see inside the restlessly reflecting veils within it. As his eyes settled into the
same pattern, Salas suggested the way in was to go to sleep yet pay attention, for the guide will appear if he
is as still as a cricket awaiting the fall of night.
“Tetsuo, where are you?”
“Truck. Somebody’s jabbing my arm.”
“Before the truck. Let’s go back there. Where are you?”
“My room. The tide was out and the fishermen all at sea. My mother and I were alone, mending nets. She
was singing softly, an old song from the hill people. She was Ainu, and my father met her there on a
camping trip. She was taller than he and everyone laughed but no one laughed more than they.”
“What’s in your room?”
“My mat. They had a crib when I was younger, western-style, but I would break the slats and get out.
They were frightened, so they got one with iron bars, but I soon was able to pry them apart and get out, so
they gave up and let me sleep on a mat like they did. They knew I was different but accepted me and let
me be. The villagers did too.”
“How did you get into the truck?”
“Soldiers came. Someone had told about me, about how during a storm the waves were driving the boats
out and how I dove into the water and towed a fully-laden trawler that had foundered back to shore. They
said they wanted to run tests, and would pay mama a great deal of money for the trouble of taking me for
the weekend. They said they would bring me back. They were liars. I never saw my parents again.
“In the truck they shot a tranquilizer dart into my chest. I pulled it out but fell almost instantly. It had
been enough to kill a bull elephant. It held me under for a few hours but they had to keep injecting me.
“I woke up in a strange room. Outside a window were scientists, only they were Chinese. It didn’t take me
long to learn Mandarin by listening to them. I was somewhere in a secluded valley on the border of
Xinjiang and Xizang provinces, at a secret military installation deep underground. The region is
uninhabited otherwise. I had been sold by a covert security agency of my government to the Chinese.”
Jesus, I thought. No wonder he has it in for the military. Danny wrote out on the board that Xizang is the
Chinese name for Tibet; they were on the Tibetan plateau, a barren wasteland. And each province is under
different military commands.
Tetsuo kept talking in a near monotone:
“I tried to walk up to the glass but there was an invisible barrier. They had a superconductor, the world’s
largest, generating electromagnetic containment fields for all of us.”
Salas interrupted: “Who else was with you?”
“Nobody with me. In the facility were four Russian boys, Sergey, Andrey, Roma and Denis. One
American boy named Steven. They were all teenagers. I was the youngest boy. They were running
experiments to find out why we were so strong, so smart. But nothing was panning out. There was nothing
they could find in the genetic code, which they had not yet fully mapped. Our extreme muscle fiber density
told them nothing. Preliminary cloning attempts failed; all the blastocysts died at a certain point. They
even took sperm samples from the teens but the sperm attacked and killed the eggs. They were getting
increasingly frustrated, as our various tests simply revealed us to be in excellent health, but gave them no
more. Our brains functioned more fully than normal, but no mechanism could account for it.
“What’s more, they felt a clock ticking. Sergey and Steven each had succeeded in punching holes in their
containment fields. The scientists reconfigured the streams but these two were rapidly mastering the ability
to slow and alter the fields. Their bodies conquered all sedatives faster and faster, and attempts to starve
them had no measurable effect on their abilities. The white coats would sweat every time they came near
my window, could barely control their agitation.
“They devised upper-limit strength tests, to see if there was a measurable point of failure. The other three
Russians seemed be cooperating with these tests, but the scientists were suspicious. We were all kept
separated from each other; apparently they didn’t know we could all learn their language simply by
listening, so they didn’t know we realized we weren’t alone, but a potential fighting force. Our one
instinct, to survive, to escape, had made us all of one mind without knowing each other.”
“How old were you, Tetsuo?”
“I was five years old.”
We were stunned. Danny looked green, thinking of the fate he escaped.
“They found Steven, the American, because he pitched a shut-out season while a freshman on the Varsity
baseball team of his high school. Not a single hit, walk, balk or error. Right in the strike zone, all so
unhittable others gave up trying and the outfielders simply lay down. A local cop brought his radar gun
and asked Steven to throw it as hard as he could. The gun couldn’t register it, it went off the scale. The
ball powered by a baseball-sized bicep broke through the chain-link backstop and exploded against a
cinderblock wall at the edge of the field. The wall cracked and sank back six inches. The cop sold his
story. And Steven was drugged and kidnapped. His parents think he’s held by terrorists, being
brainwashed as a secret weapon.
“I never heard how they found the Russian boys, all rural peasants from across Siberia. The way it worked,
they would be tranquilized and quickly transported to other electromagnetic shielded rooms to have their
strength measured. They quickly destroyed dynamometers and treadmills and other machines. There
didn’t seem to be a thickness of steel the Russian boys couldn’t find a way of bending or breaking with
their bodies.
“Andrey took a solid block of carbon steel, a foot thick and three feet long, and holding it in his hands,
banged it down over his bent leg. The steel cracked in half. Then he took the two halves and fit them back
together, and pressed inward. He pressed so hard his hands sunk centimeters into each end, and when he
released them, the block was solid again. You could see the crack line but the scientists couldn’t break it
again; they put it in a die press and it broke in another place entirely under a pressure of many tons per
square inch. Andrey’s heart rate never even broke 100.
“One day the scientists seemed extra nervous. I heard something, something dim, a chanting sound.
Somehow, out of their soundproofed cages, the other boys were powering out a Cossack word, ‘Freedom.’
I took it up and the scientists outside my window went pale with fear.
“I heard the dim whining sound the massive generator makes move up a pitch, and I figured the boys were
trying to break through in a concerted effort. The ground rumbled from the effort of vast machinery as it
struggled against the boys. I lowered my shoulder and ran full force into the wall of energy and braced my
legs. The repellent force tried to throw me back but I dug into it, shattering the concrete beneath my feet as
it drove me down into the rubble. I pressed my hands against the direction it circulated. My knuckles
cracked and I could feel my tendons sing as they resisted a force like a dozen rivers channel through a
narrow chute. The whining grew higher and louder and in response the other boys must have really laid
into it because the pitch grew hysterical. Sirens began to sound and all sorts of other mechanisms began
moving and closing. The rubble around my feet vibrated from the entire facility’s rattling.
“I heard men shouting that the generator was at full power. One shrieked ‘He put his hand through!’ in a
backwoods dialect: so I dug down deep to put MY hand through. I could feel every muscle in my arm and
back, down into my foot, quivering against that force … and feeling IT wobble, feeling the energy waves
begin to flow around MY hand. I’d never felt such pleasure from my strength before. My blood caught on
fire and my heart raced with joy.
“But instead of beating it like I was hoping, I suddenly flew against the wall as explosions burped against
the floor and the field suddenly died. I sank into the concrete, breaking it with my body. My rage at being
kidnapped and poked and examined by these idiot strangers, heated by being cheated out of my battle with
the electro-cage, suddenly filled my fists and I pounded against the walls, screaming.
“The surface pulverized inches at a time, and the thick window set in it starred, cracked, crackled, lost a
few chunks, then shattered: but I kept pounding at wall. Chunks of concrete sprouting torn rebar flew away
from my fist, plowing into running scientists and breaking their legs. Men flew against the wall, flattened
by hunks of cement my fist dislodged.
“I could hear the other boys shouting ‘Here’ above the sirens and smoke and I followed it down a maze of
passages. People saw me running and pressed against the wall or skidded into their asses but I was too
intent to find my friends, others like me, and their voices were getting louder and more unified. I rounded a
corner and saw them congregated inside a room, the cheap steel door laying with a deep fist imprint near
the far wall.
“Like me, they were wearing just the uniform shorts, little better than underwear. They were bigger than
me, of course, and their muscles gleamed with sweat and heaved under the lights when they moved. They
saw me and their eyes popped: they hadn’t known I was so young. For my benefit, they spoke in Japanese,
which they already knew. There were teenagers, after all.
“We were in the main armory for an entire ground and air force, the Tibetan provincial command.
Apparently they were prepared for anything India might dish out in the ongoing border dispute. But they
were woefully unprepared for what we were about to dish out.
“There was a platform beneath the main hatch that opened into a hanger on the surface. Not knowing what
we would face, we carried boxes of missiles, grenades and other ammo onto the platform. There were
howitzers nearby, and Sergey shouldered two and walked them over, his massive biceps looking like the
giant balls those cannons might have fired in olden days.
“The electrical circuits had been shut down, or fried, so Denis leapt twenty feet up into the air, grabbed two
thick bars that ran parallel to the opening, and began forcing them apart. The machinery clunked and gears
grunted as his lats spread and his delts blew up like baking bread, and huge gates crawled noisily opened.
His arms burst harder, making the thick steel vee. Sensing it’s weakness, he quickly swung up into the gap
and his wiry arms grabbed the hatch edges. Bursting with strength he quivered as he pried them apart. The
grudging clanks and sighing pistons reverberated in the walls as they obeyed his commands.
“Funny thing, it was all connected to the elevator, so we all felt a jerk as it started to rise up. Once we
realized this, we all jumped off the platform and started lifting, just as Denis got his arms as far apart as
they’d go. He swung his legs up and shoved with his whole body. Sparks flew out of the remaining
circuitry as pistons quivered and pipes rattled and bent under unrelieved water pressure. By the time the
platform was overhead we were able to get to the huge supports that rose out of the floor. Of course they
were covered with grease so we punched the tempered steel in to create handholds and yanked them up
while Sergey hung above us, bending down and ripping the steel and wire out of one corner so we could get
up once it was fully raised.
“The platform was nearly in place when it ground to a stop. We tugged and things that had bent behind the
walls only crammed further into their locks. It was only a matter of a few feet, but that wasn’t the point:
the point was the audacity of this machinery to defy us, even by breaking down.
Locking eyes, we silently agreed. Securing our hands, on a count of three we CURLED against the
resistance, biceps and pecs and abs straining while our quads became boulders of support. Everything
shook, and rivets began to zing. The walls cracked, puffing out cement dust and pistons or tanks ruptured,
gushing and geysering water that sprayed in a mist though the broken concrete walls. More wires sparked
and oil caught fire, we could smell the acrid smoke. But the platform rose and locked into place, which is
all that mattered. It could burn itself to death for all we cared.
“We jumped up through the corner hole, everyone but Roma, who had to showboat and shot straight up
against the underside of the platform. It dented and he punched his way through to the surface, curling
back inch-thick steel plate simply by squeezing it in each hand. Again were surprised when I could jump
just as high, and I hadn’t even jumped as hard as I could, but only exactly enough to make it. I think Denis
might have even been a little afraid of me but the other boys greeted this display with appreciation. I
finally felt like I belonged somewhere, with them. Where I wasn’t a freak. Steven clapped me on the
shoulder and it kinda stung, and I realized: that had never happened before. He’s the first man, beast or
machine who’d ever been able to come near to hurting me.
“According to our plan, we quickly spread out. Steven loaded up a transport with dozens of air-to-surface
missiles we’d brought up and drove off to the edges of the base. The air squad had just taken off and we
figured they were gathering in attack formation beyond the mountains to the north. Andrey and Denis ran
toward the rail yard and Sergey and Roma went off the intercept the ground troops. Because I was the
smallest, I was to go down and penetrate the command center. I told them I could hold my own but they
insisted this was the most important job of all. That made me beam with pride.
“Sergey, the meatiest of the boys and by far the most handsome, leaned down and put his heavy hand on
my shoulder. He was the natural leader of this band of peerless leaders. He fixed me with those blue eyes
and said, ‘We know we’re asking you to do something you should never have to do, but we have no choice.
They’ll never stop if we don’t stop them, right now. There might be other boys, like us, and who knows
what might happen to them. We’ll be here, all of us, when you finish. And Tetsuo,’ he said, lightly kissing
my forehead, ‘remain focused. Don’t let anything distract you.’
“Then he was gone, though I had a final glimpse of wet eyes as his hulking lats swung around and sped
away. I didn’t know why, maybe he’d wanted this for himself.
“I dropped back down the hole and stood quietly, listening, focusing, sorting the cries from the commands,
the panic from the plotting. I followed a certain voice that seemed to carry through the ducts in the halls
and finally found the command center. I battered against the door with my right fist. The first blow
cracked the yellow wood, the second impact made the door fold and pull out against the locking arms and
hinges, and the third shattered it. I shoved the hanging splinters away and jumped inside.
“They looked startled, stunned, then terrified at my arrival. I could smell ammonia fill the air and people
either began typing faster on their consoles or backing away. Looking up I saw huge video screens
relaying the action of the base. I ordered everyone to step away from their posts and back against the wall.
I wanted to see what my comrades were doing; I wanted them to see it, and feel their powerlessness against
our might.
“At the rail yards a train was huffing out, full of scientist refugees still clambering aboard. Denis ran past
it, out of sight. Andrey sped over and placed his hands against the undercarriage of the final car. His
biceps jumped up, bigger than most grown powerlifter’s shoulders, and a high tearing sound pierced the air.
Andrey stumbled a few steps forward as the train hit the thickening molasses-effect of taking on his
strength with only two diesel locomotives for propulsion. His triceps exploded with power, his pecs
mounded and began jerking the train back to the platform. The great engine wheels caught on the rails,
then spun to try to catch again as the engineers worked the gears to gain some purchase against the kind of
power they could conceive of coming from giant engines, not a boy’s hands. Andrey twisted his body as he
tugged back, his abs and intercostals locking and channeling power from his legs up through the widening
inflation of his upper body mass. The engines’ motors chugged in vain, the wheels threw off sparks as they
slid against the track, unable to gain any friction. Pistons pounded faster, their revving took on a desperate,
frantic quality, but Andrey just kept muscling the long chain of cars back into the station until his back hit
the stop post. Scientists began dropping from the doors and out of the windows. Andrey’s lats and thighs
competed to expand as the frustrated train jittered and shook from its own impotent rage.
“Suddenly he heaved, twisting his arms around, and I saw the train tilt up, then sink; then tilt higher, and
sink again. Andrey’s traps broke into thick cables as they shrugged the car over onto its side, dragging two
more up off the track and snapping the links in a shower of sparks that harrowingly missed arcs from
ruptured oil lines. The refugees screamed and scrambled out of the train and I saw, for the first time: they
weren’t all Chinese.
“Andrey bounded past the front of the train and squatted down, gripping a rail in each hand. He stood up,
the heavy steel bending like licorice. Spikes shot up out of the ground and the rail ends pulled away from
their partners. His deep red pecs split into quarters as he twisted the rails toward each other, the screeching
steel barely audible over the riot of men struggling out of the disabled transport train. His mighty arms
bulged and writhed as he placed one rail across the other, then forced it to bend around that rail. He
worked the steel with his arms and hands like taffy, pulling the tortured rail under the other, then twisting
that rail back over itself to meet the first one. He tied thick steel into a knot with his bare hands, his body
glistening.
“There were three more sets of tracks and some of the scientists were trying to get those engines started.
Andrey scampered across the rail yard, ripping loose the steel and turning it into a catalogue of Boy Scout
knots. The men began to scatter and hide among the barren structures of the wind-swept plateau.
“Other cameras showed Denis, about five miles out (he ran it in about four minutes), doing the same to
other tracks that branched out in all directions, ripping the rails up and twisting them into shapes. To
prevent any incoming help, should any attempt to come in. A battery of tanks approached him and that’s
when Sergey and Roma appeared.
“The boys charged into armored assault and began swinging, attacking the fleet of tanks and personnel
carriers. Fists hammered depressions into the steel plating and sent huge vehicles bouncing backward or
listing onto their sides. Denis left off the rails and ran headlong into a speeding personnel carrier, caving in
the front and sending it careening around in a circle. The boys dodged and danced faster than the gunners
could aim, three boys stymieing an entire front line and shoving it back the way it came.
“Sergey leapt on top of one and the turret turned to knock him off: but he caught the big gun and the turret
screeched and ground against his biceps. It shuddered and began to smoke. Sergey laughed as his thick
arms bent the weaker steel of the gun up, collapsing the barrel and reveling in the stuttering resistance it
gave. He jumped onto another one while Roma kept pounding his fists, running faster and heaving the
troop transports fully onto their backs.
“The clanging and gonging of forged muscle gouging forged steel supplanted the grinding of wheels and
tread. Soldiers struggled out of hatches, vertiginous, ears gushing blood. Most of the them fell on their
faces, only to screech as a tank sent airborne by Roma’s powerful right arm fell out of the sky, smearing
them across the desert hardpan.
“The sobbing men able to stand screamed as they fled, unhinged to this spectacle of three nearly naked
muscle boys reducing the infantry to shards with their bare hands. Some testosterone-drenched fools tried
firing but bullets could find no targets: then Roma fell straight down upon them from a hundred-foot leap
into the air. He landed so hard the ground shook and their bones splintered from the impact. His fingers
crushed guns and bent rifles and flung broken still-living tangles of men thirty of forty feet over his
shoulder. That finished the hand-to-hand opposition.
“The three boys moved through the fleet of vehicles, shoving and punching them backward as if the army’s
most advance war machines were nothing but punks to be put in their place. Jaws dropped behind me at
the sight of three teens churning up a sea of twisted metal, roiling smoke and flame. No general retreat
ever sounded: nothing was left that could move under its own power, and the only soldiers left were
deafened brain-fried lunatics.
“Just then fighter jets began closing in for a strafing run from over the mountains, dozens of them. But
Steven was prepared. Hefting the very missiles they themselves were armed with in each hand, his high-
peaked biceps vein-throbbing and engorged, he hurled them with deadly precision, at greater speeds than
the pilots’ sensors could register. The front line was quickly obliterated as his blurred figured hurled a
dozen a minute with each hand, spinning and ‘launching’ them from stacks on the ground with unerring
accuracy. His brain and nervous-system easily catalogued individual planes, retaliatory strikes, bombs
released; and targeted them, blanketing the sky with explosions. It was like there was a force-field none of
the planes or air-to-surface missiles could pass.
“Steven’d throw two in a trajectory to explode against each other in the boiling inferno blazing in the sky.
The planes were forced to evade it, and splitting off into squads he had no trouble picking them off four at a
time, hurling the ordnance so fast they couldn’t outrun them without losing stability and spinning into
death-spirals. We heard crackling radio reports of hysterical pilots shrieking “How can he fire them so
fast? Where are they coming from? OH, GOD, HE’S JUST A BOY!”
“The airfight was over in minutes. Not a single plane escaped Steven’s counter-assault. Even the bullets
seemed to have avoided him out of mortal fear. And there were no survivors. Those in the rear who had
the good cowardly sense to bail out before their planes were destroyed by teen muscle fury thought they
were safe, but Steven clawed huge boulders out of the earth, ripping up tonnage of rock and hocking these
anti-meteors directly through their parachutes. Each massive boulder gathered two or three bailers as it
continued it’s bicep-and-lat fueled ascent into the upper atmosphere. The men whipped underneath them
like pennants, smashing against the rock and dying long before they even began their long arcing descent
into the mountains. Space satellites showed the craters they created were vastly deeper than the ones left
behind where Steven had pulled them up by the roots. He sped away to rejoin his colleagues, gleeful lean
muscles rippling with speed and power.
“Andrey heard something and went racing along the lines of broken tracks. The infantry had been defeated
by the others so quickly he felt gypped, and preferred to face the incoming threat head-on, instead of letting
it derail itself on the broken tracks.
“A satellite picked him up a mile along the track, closing in on a speeding troop train laden with equipment.
He was clearly running half again as fast as the train could muster itself along the tracks. Suddenly, Denis
left the ground and leapt feet first straight at the engine. The impact of his bare feet against speeding steel
exploded the front half of the engine and drove the remainder sideways and backward on the track at the
same speed the rest of the train was still going. Cars burst into bits BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM
BAM car after car after car after car of pulverized aluminum, steel, glass and men. Our view was obscured
by the pinkish cloud of atomized debris until he hit a major arsenal and the whole thing went up in a huge
fireball that STILL couldn’t stop Denis’ drive. He landed behind the smoking wreckage, hairs singed and
skin shiny and pink but otherwise intact. After a brief second, he got up and rushed to rejoin the others.
“The five boys joined forces. Sergey asserted his natural dominance and took command as they began
closing off all access to the underground portions of the base. They uprooted surface housing, tearing
corrugated shack walls apart and snapping elevator cables in their hands and teeth. They made a fire-pail
chain and tossed flaming tanks, jeeps and humvees down the line to stuff into narrow shafts and air ducts,
squeezing together the gates of the missile silos so their machinery could not force them open. Their
knuckles reddened and whitened as they kneaded heavy-gauge steel into lumps.
“I knew what was my duty now. I ordered all the people into one corner of the room. All the generals and
head scientists quivered but I barked my orders in a voice that forced their limbs to obey ME and not their
own wills. Someone tried to pull a gun and I ripped up an entire computer console and hurled it into the
group. They scattered and the gun man was crushed with a couple others, but I COMMANDED them all to
reassemble. I wanted them to know what it’s like to be forced to do something against your will, and then
be poked and prodded and tested.
“One of them spoke to me in Japanese, saying that I could return to my mother, that I should just go now. I
asked why they omitted my father and they all fell silent. ‘What about my father!’ I shouted, stamping my
foot hard enough to crack the floor. He started blubbering, saying that when he found out I’d been taken,
he pursued them on the road to the base outside Sasebo … and they shot him when he tried to run past the
guard house. He was dead.
“I totally freaked. I threw the worst tantrum, I went almost blind with rage. I don’t remember…”
Salas interjected, “Try to remember everything. Your breathing is calming down. You are simply viewing
what happened, you are not doing it over again.”
His breathing slowed down and his scrunched-up face seemed to relax a bit. “I hit my fist against a
computer bank and it crushed inward, sparking. I stamped my feet and the floor sank, cracks spreading
under the walls, and equipment jostled and slid. I kept stamping and screaming until the floor was a jigsaw
puzzle of concrete held together by creaking rebar. I started throwing my body into the computers that
lined the walls and tearing them out, throwing huge machines at the video screens. Fires started and the
men were screaming and trying to hang onto things as the floor caved in. We all fell into the room below.
“Concrete and twisted machines rained down on top of a bunch of guys but a general and a scientist were
still dangling from the broken edge of the floor. I knew they couldn’t hold on for long so I carved a path
through the wreckage, digging my hands into stuff and forcing it up. Sometimes metal would snag on
concrete and simply tear, which pissed me off so I’d pry up the concrete block and sling it deep into the
wall. Cracks keep growing up through the facility, floor by floor. I was looking for survivors.
“One scientist I remember seemed to get off on drugging me, so I asked him if he’d like to go to sleep for
awhile. His arm was crushed beneath a console and a mound of rubble and he was weeping. I put my
fingers around his skull and squeezed. ‘Getting sleepy yet?’ I asked as his begging turned to shrieking and
the bones of his skull began to crackle under my five-year-old fingers.”
We all looked at each other. Danny was ashen, looking at the floor. But Tet was not about to stop now.
His breathing remained steady and calm, his heart rate about 70, and a strange glisten appeared in his half-
lidded eyes.
“His head imploded and I found another scientist, who had taken a heart biopsy by jamming a huge needle
up between my ribs; they needed a pneumatic hammer to drive it through the muscle. He was face down,
his legs beneath a cracked pillar. I grabbed his shoulders and twisted him around. He actually tried to
resist, until the muscles tore and his spine cracked. Then his eyes widened and blood dribbled out of his
mouth as his skin tore around his waist. Blood and fat burst out of his spiraled-waistline. I looked into his
terrorized eyes and said ‘I want to see what your heart is made of.’ I chopped my hand against his sternum
to crack it. My fingers dug through the meat of his chest, pushing skin and flaccid pecs down around the
cracked bone-ends, and worked the crack open. I began forcing open his rib cage, slowly, listening to the
bones bend and the cartilage snap. His skin tore down the middle of his chest and blood spurted into my
face. He wailed like a lost ghost. Wrenching his ribs apart until they cracked off from his spine, I grabbed
his tossing head in my hand and forced him to look down at his own racing heart pulsing between his
hyperventilating lungs. ‘Look familiar? I thought it would be smaller.’ I reached down into the cavity and
punctured his diaphragm to grab a length of intestine. I pulled it out and looped it tightly around his head
to lock it in place so he could look into his own body as he bled to death. I even ripped his eyelids off so he
didn’t have that choice.
“I heard the two hanging men fall behind me and try to scamper away. I caught them trying to go different
directions by grabbing their arms and slamming the men back together, just hard enough to daze and wind
them. I jerked their arms out of the sockets just for good measure, then slammed them both up against the
wall. They each coughed blood. My short arms couldn’t reach around their bodies, especially the fat
general, so I used a jutting crack in the wall to help crush the two into each other. Their broken arms
splintered and punctured the other, and I concentrated on doing one big chest fly. I grabbed each man’s
pelvis for handles and kept squeezing. The men struggled and pleaded but I didn’t stop. Their mealy bones
cracked in my hands. I straightened my forearms against them and kept condensing them. Their bellies
distended and their chests heaved but I kept bringing my hands closer together, grinding them against the
wall. My legs shuffled, my calves driving me against them. Blood began to pour out of their eyes and ears
as I worked my arms around their waists just above the hips to try for a real bear hug, and then I
SQUEEZED!
“Guts gushed up through their mouths and the general spat out a lung. His belly popped like a balloon and
sausage-like intestines rolled out onto the floor. I locked my hands behind the two men and lifted them into
the air, shaking them as they gurgled and whined. Their ribs interlocked with a sick-making click, and
sheets of blood spilled down as they flopped and gasped. I dropped them into the wreckage and went
searching for anyone else who had survived.
“Eight scientists had pushed aside some cabinets into a service area. They were gathered under a hatchway
leading up into an escape ladder, where a workman far up was trying to burn his way through the shaft with
an acetylene torch, carving off bits of steel vehicles the boys and crammed down it. Somebody threw a
jeep fender down the hallway and a tire bounced against me. They didn’t see me; they were all focused on
the narrow hatchway and the crap falling out of it. I grabbed a still-hot bumper and ran at them with it.
“I trapped them against the corner, facing in. I wrapped my arms along the bumper and press it into their
asses. They tried to push back with their arms against the wall and each other but MY arms were stronger.
The metal warped in my arms, my muscle fibers dent it as they flexed, and I felt their muscles fail as they
collapsed into each other. Then I heard spines crackle and pelvises snap. Sixteen legs and sixteen arms
shoved and clawed but I PUSHED BACK and their arms snapped, shoulders tore apart and muscles ripped
loose. They had to be punished!”
Worried looks circulated between us. He was getting upset again. Salas tried to calm him down again but
he kept talking, a little bit faster than before. A bit of slather flew from his lips. We got ready to bolt in
case he freaked out again.
“I ground them together and grated the buckling bumper against them as they sobbed and choked. I heard
the guy in the shaft yell and start banging on the wreckage above him, shouting for help. Grunting, I gave
three hard CRAMS and they all went silent except for some harsh wheezing. I removed my arms from the
bumper but it remained stuck into the flesh of their butts. Blood was pooling around our feet, making the
floor slippery so I curled my toes to crack the cement for traction, reach up across them with my arms in a
V, and started pounding them. My arms sank easily into their bodies, fracturing ribs and scapulae and
puncturing their feeble bodies. Blood jetted and splashed. I didn’t even want post-mortem nervous
twitching so I pounded and pressed and kneaded them more tightly into each other, to shred their muscles
from their nerves and bones and render even their last dying electrical impulses impotent to protest.
I backed away and they all remained kinda mashed together. I peeled them away from the wall and they
came off in one big glop. I ripped the ladder out of the wall and pulled a good twenty feet down out of the
escape chute. I bent it in a spiral and around them to make sure they didn’t loosen and fall apart. Yanking
a large computer bank over onto its side, I dragged it over to stand on. Jumping up, I hefted the mass up to
the opening. It was too big to fit into the hatchway, so holding the eight-man-lump in one hand, I pulled
the hatch out of the ceiling, and chunks of concrete came with it, exposing the larger shaft. Then I started
stuffing them all into it, pushing the bending steel and dripping bodies tighter into the hole until the
workman’s cries grew harder to hear. I shoved them all up, higher and higher, until the whole mass trapped
him in there, a quarter mile from the surface. Teen-twisted and crushed vehicles blocking his way above,
impenetrable bones and flesh sealing him in below. For good measure, I jumped down and teetered the
computer bank up into the hole, twisting it around until a corner was shoved deep in it, like a rag blocking
up a bloody nose.
“I wandered through the tunnels, listening for any whimper or sigh or prayer that would lead me to other
scientists. Someone would cry “help me!” and I’d hurl a few tons of concrete off him, and watch his joy
turn to horror as I pulled his face against my chest and smashed its bones by flexing my pecs. Screaming
with terror, he’d try to get away, his useless fingers clawing against my body, until I let him go. He’d
crawl back into the hole, blinded and going into shock, and I’d reach out and grab the edge of a wall and
create a fresh avalanche of rubble down onto him. Or I’d see just a hand waving up through some
wreckage, and I’d rip the arm right off of the body and wait until the screaming died down: then I’d fold
the arm into eighths so he could hear his bones breaking, and shove the bent-over limb back into the hole.
But there was one more person to find, who so far had eluded me. He hadn’t been in the control room, but
I knew I could find him if I just concentrated.”
Tet’s breathing slowed down, as if he was listening for something. It made all our short hairs creep.
“I heard something start up, something muffled but still vibrating. I created a model of the base in my
head, from what I’d seen, and silently wound through the carnage until I came to what looked like a vault
door closing. I leapt and jammed my hands into the narrowing space, pressing the door back hard against
its hinges. An eerie whine sang and pneumatic pistons huffed and spewed steam. A deeper throbbing
mounted as I held the door in place, but the titanium still was difficult to sink my fingers into, I really had
to work to get the leverage. The vibrations increased and a siren went off, then an emergency bell inside
the chamber. Really breathing hard, I could force the door back open against its own pressure only in short
bursts. Yet my muscles seemed to grow stronger against the challenge each time they felt the door give a
little more, heard the steel crunch against itself, felt the creaking of things unused to resistance begin to fail.
“The door was about three feet thick and by the time I’d gotten it open far enough to see the locking bolts
that hadn’t been able to lock, the alarm stopped sounding and wheels began to turn again. Fluids spurted
from ruptured lines and I flung the door hard into the wall, shattering both. Inside was a vestibule before
what looked like an elevator door. I punched the doors open and they cracked and folded easily. In the
shaft I could see a car almost reaching the surface: somehow this must have been hidden inside the desert
rock, because the boys hadn’t destroyed it.
“The guide chains from the bottom of the car were almost pulled taut against the counterweight. Planting
my feet, I grabbed fistfuls of chains and pulled hard. The motor groaned and squealed and my arms shook
just a bit as they met the motor’s increasing force with true biceps power. The car shuddered and the man
inside screamed “Oh, no!” with an American Southern accent. The car stopped with a high whine, which
lowered and quavered as began dragging the car back down the shaft. The counterweight grudgingly began
to ascend so I yanked harder, trying to break the hold the motor had over the car. I fought and struggled,
hoping the chains wouldn’t break, while the occupant seemed to be mashing various override keys. I could
feel the motor still trying to increase it’s power, link in to other sources in the complex. Flickering lights
down the hallway went out as more energy was diverted to the elevator. It started to rise again and I
planted my feet far apart and bent my back, stopping the car a second time and trying to think what I could
do if it broke free.
“Because I was selfish. He’d hurt the other boys too, but I wanted him for myself.
“The motor began to spark, unable to compete with this boy’s muscle. My muscles generated more power
than most nuclear power plants could even dream of, even then. The motor gave one final spurt and I
spread my arms apart, my triceps supplying more power, and suddenly the car ripped in half. The bottom
of the car came plummeting a quarter mile down toward me, with a man’s curdled scream rising above the
fireworks of the burnt-out motor.
“Of course I caught it and it mostly disintegrated around me. The bottom of the car bobbled in my hands
and the broken-legged man inside flew out into the vestibule. He gaped about at the vault door, ripped
open by kid muscle. He looked down at his own broken legs, a couple ribs poking out to obscure his view.
Then he looked at me with a strange mixture of terror and sadness.
“‘It was to help you all,’ he said. ‘To find a way for you to be useful to society. Think what you could
accomplish if you only...’ but he fell silent under my gaze. I may have been only five, but I could still
smell bullshit when it stank. He stuttered out, ‘What are you gonna do to me?’
“My fists bunched and flexed, as I considered all the ways I could hurt him before he got near death. He
pissed himself watching me. I thought of what he’d done. Others had prodded and poked, and I’d dealt
with them by prodding them and poking them. But this was the head scientist, the guy in charge, the one
who organized the kidnapping and the confinement. Trapping us in cells like animals. I needed him to
know what that was before he died.
“I walked out and grabbed the vault door where it sat, embedded in the reinforced wall. I grabbed it’s
immensity and fury gave my fingers the strength to really grip the titanium. I wrenched the door up,
breaking the hinges, shattering more wall and ripping it loose. The shred and snap of titanium steel
bending, tearing and cracking open made him vomit. I carried the door, which must have weighed five
tons, into the open so he could see me, my kid body supporting it. Then I slammed it down to the ground.
“By now the entire complex had become so shaken, cracked, and shattered by my virulent fury that the
rock walls began to cave in. I could hear creaks and crashes, floors sinking into floors amid sparks, flames
and flooding. I hadn’t a whole lot of time if I wanted him alive; not that I couldn’t blast my way out if I
had been buried. I guess you guys know that.”
A kind of grim smile went around the group; I thought I’d be sick.
“But I worked quickly. Hopping up onto the underside of the door, I reached down to where one of the
layers of titanium was joined to another, and began peeling it away. My fingers worked fast to bend up and
separate the heat-pressed layers, and the steel made an ungodly cat-mating screech as its very structure
shattered under my muscle-compulsion. I ripped the solid tempered steel away in a gently-curving sheet,
and carried it over to the scientist. His eyes compulsively watched my muscles work as if he were still
taking notes and measurements and readings. I picked him up, lay him on it, and began folding it up
around him.
“At first he didn’t understand, but then it dawned on him and he lost his bowels. I bent the inch-thick steel
up and around his legs, torso and arms. Only I wasn’t just making a shrink-wrap coffin for him: I was
making it precisely three millimeters smaller than he actually was. By working from the inside out, I made
sure the pressure remained in his limbs, and did not get forced into his torso. I wanted every inch of his
body to feel like it wanted to explode, the way I had every day since I’d arrived.
“As I wrapped him up, the building agony made him gag and finally shriek and wail. Even his fingers and
toes were outlined, the metal pressed around them just too tightly. He tried to jerk and quiver but he
couldn’t, there wasn’t room. I gently tucked the compound fractures back under the skin and sealed him
up, leaving his head for last.
“His face was bright red, but not too red, because his neck was sealed off in its own cavity. The pressure of
the steel on his cranium would cause various seizures and spasms that his body couldn’t perform, but I left
a small molded opening for him to suck breath through, though I made sure his teeth were pressed in a
millimeter or so. Even his eyes were pressed down into his skull, not enough to burst but enough to really
hurt.
“I realized the crashing and shaking all around me meant my time was nearly up. The last supports of the
structure were given out against all the chaos I’d caused. This last emergency shaft was still mostly
straight, and the boys, hearing the mechanism self-destruct against my brawn, had blasted the rocks away
and exposed the opening. They called down and I yelled up that I had a present. ‘Catch!’ I shouted, and
hurled him up to their waiting arms.
“I stepped into the shaft, squatted down, and jumped. I shot straight up, amazing the teens with my speed
and control. I’m pretty sure besting a quarter mile by another hundred feet pretty much knocks to shit the
world record for a standing high jump. I landed with a thump that make rocks jump. The boys gaped at me
a minute (I forgot I was covered in gore), then picked out the biggest boulders to wedge into the shaft.
“‘This is the guy, the key guy,’ I told them. ‘He alone had access to this elevator, and admitted his
responsibility. He’s still alive; I wanted to keep him to myself, but felt you all should share in his fate.’
They nodded.
“Steven led me over to a firehose by the train station that still had a little pressure, to wash the blood and
flesh bits off my body. He held the torrent in his hands and I leaned into the flow and it blasted my body
clean in a fine pink spray. The sun was still bright but we were so high up the temperature was in the 30s;
still, the heat I generated dried me off in no time.
“We wandered back. Roma admitted his most terrifying test was the vacuum chamber, where they tried to
see if he could survive in outer space without a suit (minus the radiation); he’d lasted five minutes in a full
vacuum before they got scared and reinflated the chamber. So he positioned his mouth over the scientist’s,
and sucked all the air out of the man’s lungs ... and held it for two minutes. He pulled away and the steel-
cased man sucked and choked on his gulps.
“He was nearing psychosis but seemed to still know us, as he tried to plead for his life. ‘What good did our
pleading do?’ asked Andrey. He’d been tortured with extremes of heat, withstanding temperatures above
160 degrees. He grabbed one leg and began giving the steel an Indian burn, rubbing it harder and harder
until the steel began to heat up and glow red ... then white. It softened and dimpled in, and the man
screeched in pain as his body burned, the pressure of his leg bubbling it up into the molten metal.
“Denis had hated the flexibility testing, especially since he’s ‘double-jointed.’ So he began spreading the
man’s legs up into splits. His pecs and shoulders rippled along with this arms as he forced inches of
titanium steel apart, and with them the man’s cramped and broken legs, until they were at 180 degrees: and
then inched them higher, his tremendous strength easily controlling the steel. We could hear more bones
break and snap, and the steel tore open along the crotch just as the legs were V-shaped. He left them there.
“Steven had hated the sperm extraction most of all. He had the most developed equipment of any of us,
and apparently they’d drugged and ‘raped’ him more than the others. I had a technical understanding of
such things, but I was only five, and didn’t exactly get everything on the same emotional level as Steve.
Steve grabbed the torn-open spot in the metal, through which a dark stream trickled, and closed it up,
kneading the steel with his fingers around the man’s testicles, flattening them and then deftly twisting the
steel back out again, like a glass-blower. He managed to create a kind of suction with it that herniated them
man’s abdomen down into his ball-sac. The scientist’s eyes were white and jittery, and he gargled in his
extreme, humiliating agony.
“Sergey was last. Being the most physically developed of all the boys, he been put through various
strength-tests before he rebelled and spent his time working against the magnetic field. They’d applied all
sorts of loads and air and water pressures to him, seeing how much he could withstand ... but he’d always
been stronger than anything they could test him with, and they regretted everything they tried. Sergey
picked the man up in his steel casket, spun him around on one hand to scramble his brains permanently,
then pulled him down behind his neck. Those heroic traps ate up into the steel as he bent the man
backward, the steel creaking and groaning in this further torture. Eggshell cracks began forming all over
the titanium surface as its molecular structure began to break apart under the violent stresses these boys had
put on it. Me included.
“Yet Sergey had such great control that not only did he not break a sweat, he managed to warp steel so that
it did not split open along the bend: it stretched. The man’s gurgles as his spine dislocated and vertebrae
cracked and bit into his spinal cord signaled the end. But the steel was too weak for Sergey’s strength and
crackled into pieces, exposing pulsating blobs of vessel-burst skin that streamed with fluids and blood.
Sergey dropped him amid the broken bits of steel and we realized with a shock: his heart was still beating.
Sergey lifted him up and using a large hunk of steel for a pad, hocked him straight up into the air. We
followed his track: with Sergey’s arm involved, he was flying faster than any man-made rocket ever could.
Once in the stratosphere he exploded from his own body pressure and vanished on the wind.
Nobody said anything, and nobody needed to. We’d all suffered horribly and, in response, done terrible
things. What was most shattering of all, we knew we’d enjoyed it. Some animal part had reveled in the
triumph of our power over every obstacle, the literal crushing of every foe.
“We peeled off our humiliating little shorts and nabbed some army uniforms the guys had scrounged up
(not bloody). None were small enough for me so we had to tuck and improvise. Sergey spoke for the
others when he told me they’d die to protect me and see me home safely, and we set off through the desert,
south toward Kathmandu.”
After a moment of silence, Cole asked, softly, “You crossed the Himalayas in poor clothing at five years of
age?”
The new voice broke him out of the trance and Salas grimaced at Cole, who made an oops face.
“I TOLD you I don’t wanna TALK about it, so get outa my FACE,” Tetsuo snarled. He pouted. He looked
around. “How’d I get here?”
“It’s a long story,” I said, and Danny smiled grimly, and took him outside to throw rocks at the hills.
***
The guys and I had a talk while Danny and Tet took turns launching boulders at blades of grass on hills a
couple miles away.
“Well, that was enlightening,” I said. “In a I-have-to-vomit-now way.”
“What do we know about these other boys?” said Cole. His uneasy trust of Salas put a strain in his voice.
“They’d be adults now, this was five years ago and they were teens then. Whether they split up or hung
together is anyone’s guess. My sources in the government, if they know anything, haven’t told me. I’ve
never heard or read anything so they must have escaped our notice, at least. Not that that’s a great feat.
Tetsuo went back to his mother, these memories clearly repressed by the time he got home. Which is why
his rediscovery, as it were, of the limitless aspect of his strength and intelligence touched off the new round
of showmanship, one fueled with subterranean fear and hatred.”
“Hatred of scientists, authorities, the military,” said Cole.
“Americans,” I added.
“And why he came after Danny instead of seeking out these other guys,” I added. “He forgot all about
them.” There was a moment of tense silence. I broke it: “Should we find them?”
“Who knows what effect that would have on his rehabilitation,” said Cole. “It’s gonna be damn difficult as
it is.”
And don’t I know it.
The End
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