Stronger: A Super Human Clash by Michael Carroll Read Free Book Online

screamed under the weight, and I felt like joining in.
    The rockfall that had apparently trapped Jakob’s team had been no accident. It had taken months of careful planning and subtle manipulation of the rosters to get all of the strongest diggers—except me, of course—on one team. For weeks we’d been storing supplies of food and water in the depths of the shaft where the guards rarely visited.
    The narrow tunnel we were digging to connect D shaft and C shaft wasn’t really so that Cosmo could squirm through and search for the others. It was a ventilation shaft that would provide fresh air to the sealed portion of C shaft.
    Even now, Jakob and his men were working furiously, probably nonstop, doing exactly what years of prison life had trained them to do: They were digging. Heading slowly but steadily to the surface. Tunneling their way out.

CHAPTER 6
TWENTY-SIX
YEARS AGO
    ABOUT TWICE A MONTH Harmony Yuan visited me in the cell block. I didn’t know
where
the cell block was—somewhere underground, I assumed, because there were no windows—but I guess they treated me pretty well. Three solid meals a day, a TV set that showed two old movies every evening, a dozen new books every month and a bed made from four thick mattresses laid side to side. The cell was a cube, thirty feet on each side—just enough space for me to walk around a little, but not enough for me to build up speed if I decided to take a run at the walls.
    All but one of the walls were solid stone: The fourth wall was glass, with a small door that opened into the cell and had beveled sides that prevented me from pushing it out, and nothing on the inside that provided enough grip for me to pull it open.
    The very first morning, I woke to find Harmony standing outside the cell. “You’re going to try to break out. You’ll fail.” She rapped on the glass with her knuckles. “This is a metallic glass, one of the toughest substances in the world. It’s so new that its inventors haven’t even come up with a clever name for it yet. We don’t know the limits of your strength, but we’ll be very surprised if you can even make a scratch in this.”
    I tried, of course. Again and again. I slammed into the glass with my shoulder, punched it, kicked it, slammed my oversized steel chair into it so often that by the time I gave up, the chair was nothing but a mangled pile of metal bars.
    They’d given me clothes: three pairs of blue jeans, three white T-shirts. Harmony said that they’d been specially made by a guy who worked as a costume designer in Hollywood—he’d been told that they were needed for a new movie adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel
The Shrinking Man
. Harmony even gave me a copy of the book.
    Harmony always sat in the same place, on a wooden chair in front of my cell’s glass wall. On some visits she spoke, telling me a little of what was going on in the world, but a lot of the time she just sat and looked at me. It made me feel like I was an animal in a zoo.
    Occasionally, she would speak about the missing boy, telling me that his parents were sick with worry, that a lot of people were petitioning the governor to have me tried and executed.
    She told me that Pastor Cullen was now using a wheelchair and probably would be for the rest of his life, and that Gethin Rao’s parents had been utterly broken by the loss of their son.“There are still search parties every weekend,” Harmony told me. “They’re hoping that the boy was scared and ran, and that he’ll eventually turn up safe and sound.”
    But they never gave me anything to write with, despite all the different ways to mime “give me a pen!” that I could think of. I figured pretty early on that they knew what I wanted, but just weren’t going to give it to me. Once, I even spelled out my name with books on the floor, but no one seemed to care.
    My memory of how they’d caught me was a little fuzzy for a long time. I was able to recall lowering myself into one of the