Shouting like a madman, Patrick struggled to his feet, again clutching his helmeted head. He picked up the steel pipe and turned on the first person he saw: the prone Chris Wohl. He raised the pipe like a woodsman getting ready to split a log and…
“No!” Briggs shouted. He pulled his.45 Colt from his holster, aimed, and fired three rounds, hitting Patrick twice in the back and once in the helmet. Patrick screamed, the electronically distorted voice sounding like the squealing brakes of a locomotive against the rails, metal on metal. He dropped the steel pipe and again clutched his head, writhing in pain-but still on his feet. He turned toward Briggs, screamed again, and charged.
“Patrick, stop!” Briggs fired five more rounds, emptying his Colt. Patrick fell to his knees after the last slug hit him. The air was filled with blue smoke and the walls echoed from the gunshots. The scene was surreaclass="underline" a costumed figure howling like an animal, writhing in pain, crouched on the concrete floor.
But he still wasn’t down. Patrick crawled to his feet, his chest heaving, his electronically amplified breathing heavy and labored. Briggs couldn’t believe his eyes. Patrick had just taken eight slugs from a.45-caliber automatic from no more than twenty feet away and he was still alive. Or was he really alive? Was this some kind of sick, homicidal automaton? Briggs dropped the empty magazine, pounded a full one home, and took aim…
“Wait!” Masters shouted. He ran over to Patrick with Heinrich, plowing into him from the right side and tackling him back to the floor. Patrick swung an arm, clubbing Heinrich painfully on the right arm. Heinrich cried out in pain and rolled free, clutching a broken arm, but it gave Masters enough time to touch a tiny hidden switch under the left edge of Patrick’s helmet. An invisible seam appeared, and the helmet popped open and clattered to the concrete hangar floor.
What they saw made their blood turn cold. Patrick’s face was contorted in agony. His eyes were bulging, his mouth wide open. The veins on his head and neck protruded so much that they looked ready to burst through his skin, and his neck muscles were horribly swollen. His maddened eyes rested on Briggs. He scrambled drunkenly to his feet, ready to pounce again, ready to rip Briggs’s heart out, ready to spill his blood. Briggs aimed for the contorted head and closed his eyes…
“Don’t, Hal,” Jon Masters said in a remarkably calm voice, holding up both hands. “He’ll be all right now. The power in the suit is deactivated. Just stay away from him.” He stooped to help Heinrich, who was clutching his fractured arm against his body. Patrick got to his feet and charged, but Briggs sidestepped him easily, pushing him away to keep clear of those pile-driver arms.
He watched the way Patrick’s eyes darted from side to side; he’d clutch his head and then they’d flash sideways again. He stumbled about, trying to regain his footing, before finally collapsing to his knees on the floor. “What’s he doing?” Briggs asked. “Why are his eyes doing that?”
“He’s trying to activate the eyeball sensors,” Masters explained. “Trying to activate the systems in the suit. He still thinks he has his helmet on. Don’t touch him, Hal. The effect will wear off, but you might set him off again. Look after Chris.”
Keeping a wary eye on Patrick, Briggs went over to Chris Wohl. The big Marine commando was moaning in pain, trying feebly to raise a hand to his head. He looked in very bad shape. “I think Patrick fractured his skull,” said Briggs, “but he’s conscious-though barely. He needs an ambulance.”
“I… I already called for an ambulance,” they heard Patrick say. His breathing had returned almost to normal. He was still on his knees, his head listing to one side as if he couldn’t hold it upright. “As soon as I hit him, I got on the VHF radio and called the security office for an ambulance. It’ll be here any second now.”
“What the hell were you trying to do, Patrick?” Briggs spat. “What got into you, man?”
“I… I don’t know, Hal,” Patrick said weakly. “It was as if I were… I don’t know, on speed or something. When Chris pushed me, I felt-I just felt like I had to kill him. He was the enemy. I could see everything so clearly, as if I were watching myself. When those bullets hit me, I wanted to rip something apart-anything. I wanted to kill you, kill Chris, kill anyone who came near me. I knew what was happening. I knew who you were, I knew where I was-and I also knew I had to kill all of you.”
“Jesus. I think that suit messed up your head,” Briggs said. “Jon, help Patrick out of here before the ambulance comes. I’ll stay with the doc and Chris.” Masters helped Patrick to his feet and supported him to an adjacent office. When the ambulance arrived, he went back to see Wohl safely loaded in, issued instructions to the security crews, and returned to look after Patrick.
He found him where he had left him, sitting on a bench with his elbows resting on his knees, looking down at the floor. He had opened the top of the suit so he wouldn’t pass out from the heat. Jon disconnected the backpack power unit, then helped him strip off the suit. Soon Patrick was sitting in a chair, wearing only a sweat-soaked light cotton undergarment. He was staring straight ahead, his lips parted, the expression on his face suggesting he was replaying the past twenty terrible minutes in his mind’s eye.
Jon sat down in front of him. Blood vessels had popped around Patrick’s eyes, and the muscles on his neck, shoulder, chest, and arms looked thick and chiseled, as if he had just finished a weight-lifting workout. He began to weep.
“Don’t worry about it,” Jon said. “I think they’re all going to be all right.”
“I was afraid I killed Chris. Are they on their way to the hospital? How are they?”
“Chris is hurt pretty bad,” Jon said, “but he was conscious when they took him away. Carl has a broken arm and rib. Hal has some broken teeth and a cut tongue, but he’ll be okay. He’s staying with Chris.” The two men sat quietly for a long moment, overwhelmed by what had happened. Then Jon cleared his throat and asked, “Patrick… Patrick, what did it feel like?”
“What?”
“Come on, Patrick, you’ve got to tell me. You got hit over the head with a steel pipe. My God, you were shot in the head and in the back by a big-ass forty-five automatic from point-blank range! The gun blasts almost knocked me over!”
“I… I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’ve got to, Patrick!” Masters retorted. “You know as well as I do that this program is dead. It failed with the airlines and the FAA, and after this neither ISA nor any other government agency will come anywhere near BERP. It’s over.
“But you experienced it, Patrick. You know what it’s like to survive something like that. I’d never have the guts to put that thing on and have a Hal Briggs fire live forty-five-caliber rounds at me! You’re the only one who will ever know what it felt like to be…” He paused, then went ahead and said it, “… be invulnerable, like Superman. What was it like? How did it feel?”
Patrick whispered something too low to be audible, then began to weep again.
“Never mind,” Jon said reassuringly, putting a hand on his shoulder. “It’s over. We’ll destroy the suit. I promise it’ll never hurt anyone else again.”
“Jon… dammit, Jon, it felt great, it felt wonderful!” Patrick exclaimed, his tears now more shame than pain. “When I felt that energy rush through the suit, I felt more alive than I’ve felt in months. The power is incredible, Jon, enormous. It’s like a drug, like a shot of adrenaline jammed right into the heart. But the energy surge did something else too-it made me a little crazy, like a berserker. Everything was running in slow motion. The gunshots felt like ocean waves hitting you-you get pushed around, and you can feel the force behind them, but then the impact is gone and you’re still left standing.”