Joe Craig - Jimmy Coates - Power

BAM!

He’d hesitated too long. The door jolted open. The wood smacked against Jimmy’s shoulder and the handle stabbed into his ribs. Before he could react, an enormous figure barrelled into the room. Another followed—two huge policemen, made even more bulky by the Hawk-801 body armour. Jimmy was knocked to the floor, but his powers were already working, fizzing through him.

His fingers had locked around the door handle and as he fell he kicked out, jamming his heel into the lowest hinge. With a crack of splintering wood, the door came free from its frame and followed Jimmy down. Before the two policemen even had time to turn their heads, Jimmy jumped up, leaning his shoulder into the door. It battered the first policeman, then Jimmy kicked the bottom half of it up to crunch one edge into the second man.

Through their grunts and moans, Jimmy picked out two noises. One was the crackle of a police radio. Backup was on the way. The second noise was the click of a Sig Sauer P229 sidearm.

Jimmy didn’t want to wait to find out whether they’d really shoot a child. He couldn’t even be sure that they’d seen who it was in the room—that’s how fast Jimmy had moved. Instead he charged towards the empty doorway. If back-up was on the way, that meant there was probably nobody covering the corridor or the exterior of the building.

Then came the shot. To Jimmy the sound of it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t even shocking. All human responses had shrunk away, swamped in an instant by his programmed instincts. The small explosion of the gun was almost pathetic compared to how Jimmy had anticipated it in his mind. And the anticipation of an assassin had yet again saved his life.

Jimmy had already twisted the unhinged door to hold it behind his back. The bullet imbedded itself in the wood with a feeble thud. Another shot followed, but by then Jimmy had dropped the door and disappeared.

While his limbs pumped with such power and speed, Jimmy felt supremely calm. It was as if his nerves were coated in something that numbed them to the fear, but still heightened his alertness. He raced out of the building, feeling almost as if he was flying. The drizzle on his face felt refreshing. The sirens in his ears were like hunting horns, driving him on faster and harder.

Jimmy knew exactly where he was going. Hailsham was only a small town and his system had easily absorbed the layout of the streets. More than that, he was suddenly aware that his legs were powering him along a predetermined escape route. The assassin had already planned for this.

He pounded away from the high street, cutting through the stillness, a bolt of heat in the rain. His steps reverberated louder as he left the sirens further behind. He wove along the residential streets of endless, identical houses, then cut through an industrial estate and vaulted the iron fence at the back in one huge leap.

Now security lights gave way to darkness, but Jimmy had no doubt where he was. He’d found his way back to the playing field of All Saints School, where he’d arrived earlier that night. Despite the mud, his pace hardly dropped. In seconds he had crossed two football pitches and was climbing into the cockpit of a Tiger Hellfire IV helicopter, which was just where he’d left it.

His chest heaved, but every breath of cold air seemed to pull in more strength to keep him going. Before he’d even strapped on his helmet, his hands were already darting over the controls and the chopper rose several metres off the turf. He carefully balanced the roll of the machine, but at the same time he reached into his pocket and pulled out the crumpled ball of newspaper he’d snatched at the office. There was one thing he had to find: a doctor.

For a second Jimmy was mesmerised by his fingertips. A blue tint had bloomed across his nails and into the skin alongside. It seemed to glow in the faint light, reflecting the LED display on the chopper’s control panel. The sight made Jimmy feel sick. So far this was the only visible damage from the one thing that put him in more immediate danger than anything else. More than the police scouring the town for him, more than the British Secret Services, more yet than the assassin instincts inside him that were gradually overwhelming his human mind. As if all that wasn’t enough, he had radiation poisoning.

The French Secret Service had tricked him and left his body damaged by massive over-exposure to uranium and actinium. A fully human body would have been destroyed by now, Jimmy was sure. But he had no idea how the radiation was affecting him. He just knew he had to find a doctor who could help him as soon as possible. He scrabbled through the pages of the newspaper. His eyes scanned the text with the processing speed of a computer, letting each sheet fly away into the night when he was finished with it. At last he came to a directory of local health services.

By now he had brought the helicopter above the line of the buildings around the field. He hovered there. Where should he go? He studied the tiny print, his eyes’ natural night-vision enhancing the available light.

Jimmy knew it would take luck to find a doctor who would examine him willingly. He was an enemy of the State, and anybody helping him would surely be found and punished. But he knew that out there were other people against the system of Neo-democracy. Jimmy had to find a doctor who not only had the expertise to treat radiation poisoning, but wasn’t afraid to stand up to the Government.

A thought burst into life. If the doctor’s afraid , it hissed, use force .

Jimmy’s heart jolted at the violence in his own head. The power of the darkness inside him was growing and it shocked him, even though he knew that in this case it was right. He would probably have to at least threaten violence to convince a doctor to help him.

He scrunched up the last sheet of the Hailsham Gazette and hurled it out of the cockpit. There was only one place Jimmy had any chance of finding a hospital with the right, modern equipment—and the right doctor. He ran his fingers over the control units of the chopper and tore through the sky towards London. In seconds, he was away from Hailsham, soaring over open country.

Suddenly, Jimmy heard a sound. A distant thud. His eyes jumped to the horizon. At first all he could make out were the shapes of the clouds against the night sky. Then he picked out a tiny flash. Soon there was another just alongside it. They disappeared behind a cloud for a second, then emerged brighter. Not brighter , thought Jimmy. Closer .

Only then did the helicopter’s 2012 four-beam Doppler radar system confirm it. Two planes. It hadn’t taken long for the police to identify who had broken into the local newspaper, and these days the Secret Service kept a constant watch on the police. Jimmy’s only surprise was that it had taken them this long to send the Royal Air Force.

He felt a sudden swirl of panic that his programming quickly crushed. Forward , he heard throbbing in his brain. Faster . But the chopper wasn’t fast enough. His ears could pick out the sounds of the two planes ripping through the clouds towards him. He was exposed. A single shot would take him out.

With the flick of a finger he shut off the lights on his helicopter. The Nomex Honeycomb panels and Kevlar skin of the chopper made tracking it by radar almost impossible at the best of times. If Jimmy stayed dark and low enough he could escape precision guidance systems on the planes’ missiles. Now the pilots would have to rely on their own aim, and that gave Jimmy his chance.

The display on his control panel still glowed, as did the banks of LED lights and switches. Even that was too bright. Jimmy didn’t want to give the planes any chance of seeing what they were aiming at. His hands darted across the controls, overriding the onboard computer to shut off any system that gave off a light.