Pacific Station Vigilante (Book 2): The Negative Man [Stormfall] by Jeremy Croston Read Free Book Online Page A

confirmed anything, but each person’s development is unique.
    I felt good about Hammerspace being on the job.  Getting intel on those four would be easy and if he handled it well, I could move him on to the mysterious Titan.  An actual smile formed on my face, not one of those forced ones I use when talking to people.  Feeling alive again, I reached my office, ready to keep the good vibes going.
    As I pulled my chair out, I found a manila folder underneath on the floor.  That was odd, I never used them, so it couldn’t have come from my office.  I picked it up and opened it.  There was a bunch of faded papers, littered with notes everywhere.
    At first, I didn’t really pay much attention as I breezed through the stuff.  It looked like equations and other gibberish some scientist had been working on.  About three quarters of the way through, a name hit me, one I hadn’t seen in a very long time: Dr. Leonard Cooper.
    For a long time Dr. Cooper was in charge of my growth.  As a child, I’d been trapped in that research facility and experimented on.  The only person who gave two shits about me was Dr. Ellison Staley.  I respected him so much I even took his last name.  My mother, ashamed of her involvement in the electron generator explosion, never wanted me to live in the family’s shame.
    But Cooper, the man was an agent of evil.  He tried desperately to get them to terminate me on a number of occasions, only to be stone walled by Dr. Staley and the government agents.  When that didn’t work, he attacked the facility.  Many people died during his raid – he used hired contractors as his private army.  In the end, I was lucky to escape thanks to the only man who ever really cared about me.
    It was all for naught though.  A few years later Cooper found us.  In cold blood, he killed Dr. Staley and left him for dead.  Then like a coward he ran, not even sticking around to face me like a man.  Fate, and me, would catch up to him a few years later.  And when I did, I made sure his sins were paid in full.
    Cooper had always been afraid of what I could do, how I could harm this country’s way of life.  What he never understood, even when I found him years later and exacted revenge, is that he created the monster he feared.  If the foolish man hadn’t gone out of his way to treat me like dirt and murder my only friend, he might still be alive and The Negative Man wouldn’t be here.  So actually, I should’ve thanked him.  Without his hatred, I never would’ve embarked on this quest to save people from themselves.
    Seeing his name on the research caused me to dig a little deeper when reading.  From the looks of it, he was trying to work out a formula that involved an attack that broke the sound barrier.  All of his hypothetical experiments ended in failure until the very last one.  What I read, I couldn’t even believe.
    He wagered that if one super was fully charged at one hundred percent and was hit by an attack that broke the sound barrier, both powered people would die.  He went deeper, deducing that this was the only way to effectively kill a powered individual who contained an extraordinary amount of negative energy.  Only by using an attack that fast would it disrupt the electrical signature and cause his body to explode.  The fall out would leave a path of destruction for miles, almost like a nuclear bomb – only the energy released would arc out in the form of lightning.  He called this effect ‘The Stormfall.’
    The rest of his notes were random remarks trying to find someone with the skill to create such an attack.  His final reasoning was if someone either could fire off a projectile from a short range or gifted with extraordinary reflexes, that those would be the two best candidates.  Reflexes like The Dark Lion possessed by my guess.  And even he couldn’t do something like that, right?
    I fell into my seat, shocked at what I’d read; Cooper had created a surefire way to