“King?” he called softly, just loud enough for his pursuer to hear. “King, where the hell are you?”
He moved forward a good distance into the alley, then suddenly reversed his field, moving quick and sure back toward the entrance.
His pursuer was caught totally by surprise.
Bane reached the alley front just as a dark shape crossed into the blackness, drawing back too late for it to matter. Bane went for his wrist first because that was where the gun, a CIA standard-issue Browning, was, and the weapon more than anything else had to be neutralized. But he managed only a glancing blow as the man holding the gun pulled back, and when Bane tried again a fist slammed into his throat, just missing his windpipe.
The CIA man tried to free the gun and Bane let him, throwing all his force forward till his assailant was rammed against the jagged brick of the nearest building.
The man winced and lost his breath, but he still had the pistol and jerked the barrel for Bane’s head. Bane jabbed his whole body upward and slammed a knee into the man’s groin. A bullet exploded but the shot went wide. The CIA man twisted his body out and around, pulling from Bane’s grasp; went for the trigger again and found a second finger stuck there, wedging it in place.
Bane felt the sharp back of the trigger bite into his finger, chewing his skin. The CIA man pulled back hard and Bane lost his balance long enough for the man to smash his testicles with a vicious kick. He was dimly aware of the awful pain and of the bile rising in his throat when the CIA man’s free elbow pummeled his thorax.
Bane started to slip down. His assailant towered over him, Bane having misjudged both his size and strength. The man struggled to rip the gun free, yanked for it hard instead of trying to finish Bane with his hand.
A costly mistake.
Bane tightened his hand into a square and lashed upward with his palm, not for a killing strike because that the CIA man probably would have been able to fend off easily, but just for the front of the nose. The man’s timing was thrown out of sync, a batter fooled by a fastball pitcher’s change-up. Cartilage seemed to crack on impact. Blood started steadily out.
For a brief instant, the CIA man was blinded. Bane seized his chance.
There was still the gun to contend with, but he had too much of an advantage now to bother with that. His left hand kept it pinned low, the flesh of his finger still tearing, while his right hardened into a fist and went for the bone just beneath the man’s nostrils.
There was a sickening crunch and Bane felt he could have driven his fist right through the CIA man’s head with a bit more thrust. His grip on the pistol slackened and Bane closed his left hand around it and pulled, screaming from the agony of his torn finger.
The gun came free from both their grasps and sailed into the street.
The man tried for Bane’s eyes with a clawlike hand. But the move was slow, awkward, poorly timed. Bane caught the fingers out of midair and bent them backward until they snapped.
The man’s scream lasted only until Bane’s hand clamped over his mouth and drove his head back against the brick, to come away matted with thick blood as the CIA man slumped slowly down leaving a trail of scarlet ooze behind him.
King Cong stepped out of the alley.
“How many others?” Bane asked him.
“Three.”
“You take care of them?”
The King just smiled. “I knew there’d be action just as soon as you called from Penn Station. Had the itch.”
“Scratch it enough?”
“Fuck, no! Never can scratch this kinda itch nough.”
Bane realized for the first time how much his finger was hurting. “That’s good because we got a lot more ahead of us.”
“Now, you’re talkin’!”
“Ever been to San Diego?”
“Not ‘til tonight, Josh boy. You figure it’ll be safe for you to travel?”
“Safe enough,” Bane said, as they started down the street.
“Yeah, well if we meet up with any more of ’em ’long the way they gonna have to go through the both of us and the odds of that ain’t too good.” The King hesitated. “I lost that kid of yours, Josh boy. I owe ya for that.”
“Then let’s go get him back.”
Chapter Thirty-four
“The news is rather disturbing, Colonel.”
Teke stepped into Chilgers’ office lugging a load of computer print-outs and notebooks. Chilgers looked up calmly, unmoved. With Trench and Bane both buried under a mountain of rubble in Pennsylvania, he could stomach a little bad news.
“Something to do with Davey Phelps no doubt,” he advanced.
Teke nodded. “I’ve spent the last eight hours collating and analyzing the results of our stage-two experiment.”
“A splendid success, I thought.”
“On the surface, yes. The full extent of the boy’s power was finally revealed to us. However, the machines monitoring him have uncovered some rather severe drawbacks.”
“Specifically..”
“The drop-off points of the boy’s energy exertion level and energy concentration ratio were much sharper this time.”
“Explain.”
“He was forced to call upon more energy reserves to generate sufficient force, to a point where there were no more reserves to call upon. The task required of him was far greater in this instance than it was in stage one which accounts for a measure of the change. But the variation was present even at the outset. Simply put, the boy was substantially weaker than demonstrated in our first test and the energy he was able to summon did not maintain levels as high as long. He’s depleted.”
“For good?”
Teke shook his head. “No. Run a car battery down and it will recharge itself after a while, though to a substantially weaker level. And each time the process is repeated, the weakening continues until there is no juice left at all. That basically is what’s happening to the boy. You recall his complaints of headaches during the course of the experiments?”
Chilgers nodded, watched Teke finally sit down.
“His use of ‘The Chill,’ as he calls it, forces a massive concentration of blood to the area of the brain we believe his power is emanating from. The blood vessels have weakened substantially, raising the very real possibility of the formation of blood clots. Simply stated, Colonel, the boy suffers a stroke every time he uses The Chill. Oh, it’s nothing serious enough to impair bodily function immediately. But it does place a tremendous amount of pressure on all vital organs, which seem to be deteriorating from the strain, especially the blood vessels supplying the brain itself. The process is irreversible now. We’re looking at the possibility of a massive cerebral hemorrhage at anytime. The boy is dying.”
“All this because of our experiments?”
“They certainly accelerated the process, but it had been started even before. The mind, Colonel, is an infinite mechanism while the body is not. What’s happened to Davey Phelps is not a supernatural phenomenon, but merely an exceptional reaction to an outside stimulus in the form of Flight 22. The telekinetic power he generates, which his mind is a funnel for, proceeds at a rate far in excess of his body’s capacity to deal with it. The boy himself, then, is of no further use to us.” Teke paused, just long enough. “But his brain is another matter entirely.”
Chilgers looked closely at him.
“I want to remove it for close study before tissue damage destroys the nerve center of the boy’s power.”
Chilgers fingered his chin. “You have an end in mind, I assume.”
“Of course,” Teke acknowledged, leaning forward over his knees and squeezing the wad of computer print-outs. “Our experiments on the boy, while intensifying the deterioration process, have pinpointed for us almost the precise area of the brain where his power originates — in other words, the point directly affected by his experience on Flight 22. What we need to find out now is precisely how it has been affected, specifically what nerve centers and cells have been altered and restructured to account for his … capabilities. If we are successful, it’s possible that we’ll be able to synthesize chemically the same response to those nerve centers and cells to produce Davey Phelps’s abilities in human subjects of our choosing.”