Meta 2: The Second Wave

  The Second Wave

  Tom Reynolds

  Leonard & Calyer

  Contents

  Copyright

  Quote

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Social Media and Internet Things

  About the Author

  Also by Tom Reynolds

  Copyright © 2014 Tom Reynolds

  All rights reserved.

  Written in Brooklyn.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published 2014.

  ISBN: 1502574004

  ISBN-13: 978-1502574008

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  “But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

  Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

  Chapter 1

  Anyone who tells you that they'd choose invisibility over flying is an idiot, a liar, or a creep.

  Seriously though, what good is invisibility? It sounds good in theory, but what are you really going to do with it? Sneak into the girls' locker room? Do you have any idea how many people have that exact idea now that there are literally thousands and thousands of people on Earth who have metabands? In the first week the metabands fell from the sky, there were so many "incidents" that most of the gyms around the country had to temporarily close to retrofit their locker rooms so they would be harder for the new Invisibles to sneak into.

  The saddest part is that a lot of the incidents didn't just involve someone getting caught; people were actually hurting themselves. Being invisible sounds like a great idea until someone opens a door in your face, or walks into you from behind because they can’t see you, and both of you go toppling onto a wet tile floor. Nothing’s creepier than watching blood seemingly appear out of nowhere, pooling around a shower drain.

  So what about the Invisibles who aren’t huge pervs? Even they have very few legitimate reasons to use their powers for the greater good. Outside of being a creeper, the other popular use for invisibility is theft. The problem with that is, along with it being illegal, most Invisibles don't think ahead about what they're going to do with the loot once they've reached it. Unless you're not concerned about someone seeing expensive necklaces and rings floating themselves out of a jewelry store, you've got to find a way to hide them. You don't want to know where the best places to hide jewelry are if you're an Invisible who already has a mouth full of expensive watches.

  In the first month alone, there were three separate cases of Invisibles locking themselves inside a bank vault, and being forced to call the police before the oxygen inside the locked safe ran out. Again, you really don't want to know where they were keeping their cell phones. The lucky ones had the foresight to bring a cell phone. Some Invisibles weren’t discovered until someone tried to figure out why the bank vault suddenly had a pungent odor. Today, even the lowest budget banks have basic lasers set up to detect movement inside the vaults. They’ve had no choice but to install the lasers. Insurance premiums have gone up a lot because of the dummies who locked themselves in and weren't found until a bank employee tripped over their invisible body a week later.

  On the opposite side of the power spectrum, there's flying, and let me tell you: flying is awesome. Correction: flying, plus super-speed, plus some level of invulnerability equals awesome. The invulnerability thing speaks for itself, I think. Obviously, flying isn't as much fun if you have to spend the entire time worrying about colliding with a pigeon at five hundred miles per hour. The speed thing isn't one that a lot of people think about, but if you don't have the ability to move quickly, flying becomes real boring, real fast. Aside from being able to snap some great pictures of the city, you're basically relegated to being a human blimp if you can't fly faster than you can walk. Not that there's any shame in that. There are quite a few lucky metaband finders who are actually making very good livings holding up huge advertising billboards high above the city.

  I'm lucky because my metabands happened to give me all three of these abilities, along with a whole bunch of others. One of my abilities is enhanced vision, and it's the ability I'm currently using as I fly over Bay View City, looking for any kind of trouble being caused by the thousands of new metas attempting to use their new abilities to cash in somehow. It doesn't take long before I find some.

  About a thousand feet below me, I can see what is clearly a bank heist taking place. It’s probably the most cliché and obvious of all the moneymaking schemes that the more villainous metahumans have taken up. The bank itself is relatively small, but that actually makes it a better target considering most of the larger banks have installed an array of anti-meta measures beyond the laser-activated alarm systems. Most don’t even keep cash on the premises any more.

  Outside the bank, I can easily spot an eight-foot-tall Brute. Brutes are what the world has started calling metas whose abilities are mainly related to strength and invulnerability. Underneath his fire-engine-red, skin-tight suit is what looks less like muscle and more like poured concrete. His intensely mean-looking face appears as though it has been chiseled out of granite, and not by someone who was a particularly skilled sculptor. He stands, looking back and forth, cracking his knuckles over and over. He must be the lookout for whoever is inside, busy looting the minuscule bank of whatever tiny fortune is inside their vault. Regardless of the approach I take, I'm going to have to deal with this guy at some point, so I might as well get it out of the way.

  "Hey, Handsome!" I yell to grab his attention. “Up here. The guy wearing the red tights. Name’s Omni. What’s yours?”

  The Brute slowly turns his gaze skyward, taking a second or two to find me hovering against the backdrop of the city. By the time he has a fix on my position, it's too late for him as I'm already flying as fast I can with my fists out in front of me, ready to barrel into him. And I do barrel into him. The only problem is that it doesn't seem to really have much of an effect. Bouncing off his chest, I stumble about a hundred feet or so down the quiet commercial street, past stores that have long since closed for the night. The Brute grins at me, showing me a mouthful of mangled teeth.

  "All right then. Let's try this another way," I yell down the street as I run toward him.I mean, I assume it's a him; if it's not, yikes.

  I strike him square in the ribcage with the hardest punch I can muster. He just laughs and punches me in retaliation, not putting any of his weight behind it. Again, I find myself tumbling down the street. Even for a Brute, this guy is pretty strong and might require a little more tact.

  He slowly marches toward me, and the city concrete trembles under the force of each step. My eyesight changes and a red haze comes over everything. It's not
anger that clouds my vision, though; it's heat. Heat that I release with just a thought, aimed squarely at the Brute's chest. He stumbles backward, almost falling to his knees, before once again finding his footing and marching toward me. I intensify the heat I’m directing at him, and while it seems to be slowing him down, it is certainly not stopping him.

  "You think your flashy powers can hurt Malfour?" the Brute asks in a voice that is so gravely and low that it'd be comical if he weren't trying his damnedest to kill me. But he's partially right. This guy doesn't seem like he has many powers beyond being incredibly strong and impervious to damage, but he's definitely stronger than me. I won’t be able to beat him in a slugfest.

  He's within twenty feet of me, still pushing against the heat vision I'm trying to bore through his chest, when I find a question to ask him.

  "All right, 'Malfour,'" I begin, my voice dripping with sarcasm at the stupid name he's chosen for himself. "You're strong, I'll give you that. But let me ask you this: can you fly?"

  "Fly? Ha!" Malfour laughs. "Why would I need to fly when—"

  "That's all I needed to know," I say, cutting him off as I lunge for the lapels of his costume.

  The look of confusion on his face is priceless as I bend my knees, gather my strength, and throw Malfour straight up into the air as hard as I possibly can. He's out of eyeshot before he even has a chance to scream. If I can't beat this guy up, I can at least throw him a few miles into the sky to keep him out of my hair for while I deal with whatever problem is waiting for me inside the bank. Maybe he'll use the time it takes to fall back to Earth to take a good hard look at the life decisions that have created his current predicament.

  I take a moment to quickly grab a couple of nearby traffic cones and cordon off a roughly ten-foot area where I know he'll leave a crater when he lands. He'll be fine, but if someone is unlucky enough to be under him when he lands, they're going to be pancaked.

  The bank itself is unusually quiet when I enter. The police scanner reported two Metas sighted at this location, so I know there’s at least one other in here with me. I'm not sure how much he heard of the commotion outside, but on the off chance he didn't hear my little skirmish, I decide to play it as quiet as possible. My patience pays off when I find him.

  He has his back to me, and he’s intensely focused on the steel vault in front of him. It's no wonder he didn't hear me outside. Blue and white-hot flames shoot out in front of him from the palms of his outstretched hands. The flames cause loud, metallic screeches and scrapes as they slowly melt through the steel vault. Great. An Elemental. Elementals are annoying. They're a dime a dozen now that there's thousands of metas running all over the place, but I've yet to meet one that doesn't think they're special just because they can control fire or water. Great powers for showing off at a party, but in the real world, their powers tend to be fairly limited. The knucklehead in front of me is demonstrating this by trying to burn his way through a foot of steel with fire that isn’t nearly hot enough, unless he has all day to sit here and wait. He'll catch the whole building on fire before he gets through three inches of that door.

  "Ahem," I cough to get his attention.

  The Elemental turns toward me, a little startled. As his gaze turns, so does the blue and white fire shooting out of his hands. Maybe all Elementals aren’t all talk, though, because the flames coming out of this one's hands just threw me straight through a loan officer's cubicle, the nearest wall, and into the street outside.

  Rising to my feet and trying to clear the cobwebs out of my head, I see the Elemental following me through the hole he, well I guess technically I, created. His face is expressionless as he walks toward me. I'm not too badly injured, but it's apparent that he sees me as little more than a temporary obstacle in his way to an easy fortune.

  "Wait! Please!" I yell as I work to scramble away from him. "Don't come any closer."

  He doesn't say a word. He just squints his eyes as though trying to figure out a calculus problem, or maybe it’s algebra in his case. But he can’t be that stupid. He knows I shouldn't be this scared of him considering I'm not visibly injured. Surely, he knows I must be trying to use reverse psychology in order to get him to come closer to me.

  What he doesn't know is that I know that he knows what he thinks I’m doing. I'm using reverse reverse psychology, which I guess is a double negative, and maybe it’s just “psychology?” I don't know. All I know is that he's exactly where I want him, and I only need him to stay there for a couple more seconds.

  "Where's Malfour?" the fire Elemental asks, looking around the street.

  "Oh, don't worry. He'll be back in ..."

  There's only a hint of a scream before Malfour comes crashing out of the sky. He lands right inside the cones that I’d set up, and right on top of his would-be bank-robbing accomplice. A huge plume of concrete, dust, and debris flies twenty-feet into the air, hitting a nearby traffic light and sending it into a nearby building.

  Malfour's created a pretty large crater, and both of the metas are out cold.

  "...no time flat,” I finish. There’s no response from the hole, and certainly not a laugh. “Dammit! I thought I had that timed out perfectly! 'He'll be back in no time flat.' Get it? He's huge, and he landed on you. Now you’re squished flat ... like a pancake? Man, that would have been so perfect. Ugh. That's really going to bother me all night, guys. Thanks a lot," I say into the pit.

  With a sigh, I concentrate and will part of my suit to retreat from around my pants pocket. I pull out a small metal and plastic electronic device with a numeric keypad. It looks more like an old school pager or calculator than a high tech security device, but I suppose that's partially the point. Tapping on the side of my cowl, I hear a beep, and I'm connected.

  "Silver Island. Challenge code: 53252143," a voice on the other side of the connection says into my earpiece.

  I tap the numbers into the electronic security cog I just pulled from my pocket and hit Enter. The display instantly updates with a new set of numbers.

  "Omni. Response code: 93213532," I say.

  "Access granted. Ready for incoming teleportation. Bay C, quadrant three, seven."

  It might not seem very impressive, but the system works. There hasn't been one successful break-in to Silver Island since the second wave of metabands began appearing. Basically, once a “friendly” meta verifies his or her identity to security at Silver Island, a set of coordinates is given in return.

  There are four bays located at each corner of the island's main security facility. Inside each bay is a grid of one hundred individual squares of solid steel columns. If a meta is cleared for access, one of the four hundred columns is lowered into the ground, and its coordinates are relayed to the meta. The meta teleports themselves and their arrest to the now-empty space. Once their identity is visually verified, additional columns are lowered to allow their entry into the receiving area of the facility.

  Teleport yourself to a coordinate at random, and you've got a three hundred and ninety-nine in four hundred chance of finding yourself stuck inside a steel wall. Try to teleport yourself anywhere else inside the facility and the electromagnetic Faraday shield surrounding every building will bounce you right back out. For metas who can teleport, it's the quickest, easiest, and safest way inside Silver Island, and when you're transporting prisoners, those three things count for a lot.

  Chapter 2

  "Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in," Halpern says to me as the steel columns lower to offer a path to the receiving area. This is the place in Silver Island where all inmates go first. The room itself, if you can even call it that, is cavernous in size with a ceiling at least twenty feet high. Sounds echo endlessly against the unadorned steel walls. Hovering over the receiving area like a control tower is a glass-encased room full of computers and technicians. Their job is keeping an eye on the inmates already here and making sure new residents are “welcomed” without incident.

  Halpern, or rather Agent Halpern,
works for the M.O.N.I.T.O.R. What does M.O.N.I.T.O.R. stand for, you ask? Good question. Metahuman Observation and New Investigation Tactical and Operational Response. They're the multi-national government organization tasked with all things metahuman. Most people just refer to them as “The Agency” because for a long time, when the first metahumans arrived over a decade ago, they were so secret they didn't even have a name. If you ask me, nowadays, they keep the name “The Agency” around just because it lets every other government organization know exactly how important the world considers them in comparison.

  Halpern is a white guy in his late forties who looks exactly like you would expect a government agent to look. While not especially tall, Halpern is in pretty good shape for a government agent. Must take advantage of the gym benefits. He might be in better shape than most guys his age, but a head full of graying hair shows the stress the job has put on him over the years.

  The Agency is actually composed of many different organizations that all fall under its umbrella. Halpern works for Containment, the group in charge of confining rogue metas. Not an easy task by any means, but things have come a long way in a short time. Since the second wave of metabands began appearing, no prisoner has escaped from an Agency facility. Well, there hasn't been one that the rest of the world knows about, at least. That's the other thing about the Agency; they're very, very good at keeping secrets.

  "Figured you were getting bored working these overnight shifts and you might want some new company," I say to Halpern as I drag Malfour and his Elemental partner behind me through the receiving area.

  "Wow, two in one trip? Very nice work." Halpern gestures over to a dozen, heavily armored guards who move quickly to surround the metas I've dragged in.

  "They've both had a pretty rough night. Metaband power levels should be down to stand-by mode," I tell Halpern. One of the few things known about metabands is that if a meta sustains enough damage while powered on, they’ll be temporarily weakened until their bands have a chance to recharge. Then, the bands must be reactivated to fully bring them back online.