Murray Hill || A Superhuman Tale - 1

Chapter Seventy-Five

The phone had begun ringing soon after they'd reached the test group level, and it had continued to ring since. Out of annoyance, and a hint of curiosity, Tommy moved toward the staff workstation to answer it now.

He'd left Sam back in the morgue. For about ten minutes the two had mourned together, but Tommy had faced much sorrow in his life. He would grieve more, later. For now, the living needed his support. As much as his sadness threatened to overwhelm him—and as much as he wanted to hurt someone, to kill someone—those who yet lived were his central concern.

He laid his hand on the phone but stopped. The men with guns waiting above almost certainly had deduced where he and Sam were located, but answering the phone would confirm it. Why give them the comfort or the benefit of knowing where he was, merely to appease his own curiosity about their intentions? Their intentions were obvious.

He silenced the phone and stood for a time waiting for Sam and stretching out his senses. It took him a moment to focus. His Gift told him that there was a cluster of individuals, about a dozen of them, waiting near the top of the stairs. Fifteen more waited at various places on the floor above them. None of these degenerates so far had dared venture down the stairwell, but why would they? There was but one way in or out of the detainee level.

As he ran the floor plan of the first floor through his memory, Tommy realized that there were three to four men placed at every intersection or turn in the hallways above. Likely there were more such people beyond his ability to detect—his Gift grew fuzzy with distance—but from the location of those that he sensed, he deduced one thing. All the people waiting for them were in positions that took advantage of clear fields of weapons fire. A Gifted fighter would need no such advantage.

"Just dealing with plain folk," he said aloud. As he spoke, several of the victims looked up at him, either from where they sat quietly on the floor of the hallway or from the doorways of the rooms that they still were too frightened to leave. All gazed at him with that wondering look. They want to leave, or at least to know what's coming next.

After another 10 minutes, Sam emerged from the morgue. There was a look on his friend's face Tommy had never seen there before. None of Sam's other friends were in the facility, save for a frightened Christy Sue, who walked beside him.

"Sam, we need to get out of here. I'll go clean out security from upstairs. Once that's done, we can find the control group people and get the fuck out of this madhouse."

For a moment, it appeared Sam would protest.

He wants to go with me, Tommy thought. He wants to hurt someone as badly as I do.

But Sam relented, and with a nod went to gather the victims together.

The stairs were no barrier. Tommy was up them in a few bounds and immediately was glad he'd left Sam below. The private security guards who waited for him had the awkward looking guns Sam had described as being the type that had injured him days before. To Tommy's surprise, the rounds from the weapon actually stung a little, though few of the bullets hit him.

He was not in the mood to be charitable. If the men dropped their weapons and fled, he let them go. Otherwise, he dispatched all who came in his path. Moving with unbelievable velocity, Tommy overcame one defensive position after the next, killing defenders and disabling their weapons as fast as he could move.

Most simply dropped their weapons and ran.

Within a very short time of Tommy's "all clear," Sam had moved the victims to the first floor of the now abandoned medical center. When they found the section in which the control group subjects were detained, they discovered the staff already had fled, leaving the 36 abductees locked in the dormitories in which they were housed.