Stronger: A Super Human Clash Read Free

reaction. There was the smallest trace of a smirk on his lips. “Go for it. But you’ll be wasting
your
time, not mine. Any rescue attempt is to be done off shift.” He turned his back on me, addressing the others. “Is that understood? Dig for your friends if you want, but as far as I’m concerned, they’re dead. That’s
official
. And since they are officially dead, if it happens that any of them are not, then they get no more rations. You feed them out of your own share. However you decide to do that, it’s up to you.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, at me. “So blame the giant Smurf here if you find yourself going hungry.”
    Back in the day, I could have grabbed him, crushed him into a ball, and thrown him straight through the dome. But although I was still much stronger than an ordinary man, the old days were long gone.
    Hazlegrove stalked away without looking at me for my reaction, because he knew me. He knew I was beaten. I’ve been a beaten man ever since I was first dumped in this place.
    For the first few months after I arrived, I worked with some of the other prisoners on a dozen escape plans. And one time three of us almost made it out. But the guards … Well, it’s fairto say they weren’t chosen for their kindness and understanding. They caught us in the act, and shot Diego and Catharina right in front of me. Then they shot
me
, square in the back of my head. But I was a lot luckier than the others in one way: My skin is tough. It’s not quite bulletproof, but it’s strong enough that even at point-blank range the bullets don’t usually penetrate more than a half inch.
    So they shot me again, and again. Maybe two dozen times in total, until I collapsed. They gave me a few days to recover—left me chained up in one of the work sheds—and then it was back to work. As punishment, my shift was expanded from twelve hours a day to sixteen.
    That was before Hazlegrove came to the mine, of course, when his predecessor DaLemacio was in charge. DaLemacio died a couple of years later when a crossbeam supporting the crushers snapped. One of the steel cables whipped back and caught him in the side of his head, which cracked open like a soft-boiled egg hit with a spoon. That was the closest thing we’d ever had to a vacation.
    Hazlegrove was given the job on the grounds that he would cut costs. And he lived up to that promise: He reduced our rations and installed rain barrels to catch the runoff of rainwater from the dome. Rainwater is much cheaper than pumping the water from the river three miles away, and who cares if it’s stagnant and filthy? We were prisoners. We didn’t deserve clean water.
    But those were only minor cuts compared with Hazlegrove’s greatest achievement. He’d concluded that the kids were a drain on the mine’s resources: They consumed foodbut didn’t give anything back. Hazlegrove’s plan was simple: Any children under the age of five had to share their parents’ rations. Any kids older than that would receive their own rations—as long as they worked.
    The younger kids swept up, dragged buckets of platinum ore to the crushers, and ran messages across the compound from one guard to another. If they didn’t work, or if they dropped a bucket once too often, they were beaten. Oh, the guards showed
some
kindness by beating the kids only with their hands and not their truncheons, but the first time I saw it happen … I lost control.
    I grabbed hold of the guard—a fat man called Vamos—and punched him in the face. That one punch broke his nose and all of his teeth, shattered his jaw, and fractured his skull. Sadly, he lived, but at least he quit the mine soon afterward.
    Hazlegrove punished me again for that. He cut my rations by three quarters, and I’m a big guy; I need to eat a lot. When after a few weeks it was clear that starvation hadn’t curbed my anger, he picked three of my friends and had the guards beat them within an inch of their lives.
    Now, as