The news of Red’s death came through social media first, then on the radio and TV.
He’d been killed by the Fury on the northern outskirts of Chicago.
Cassie and Trey both listened to the report in silence.
Cassie thought of her plainspoken half-brother who, when he could have become anything, had chosen to become a Chicago cop. However socially awkward he might have been, he’d always been genuine. It had made him a great cop and an honest brother. And now he was gone.
‘That’s four in the space of a morning,’ Cassie said. ‘Only four of us left now: Silvy, Gary, Blaine and me.’
‘Where do they keep Black now?’ Trey asked.
‘Nevada. At the Groom Lake complex.’
‘In a padded cell?’
‘A secure lab, at least that’s what the military call it. They say that the Fury’s fourth son, the Fury of Sevastopol, is also a genius who the Russians keep out of sight,’ Cassie said.
‘Is he psychotic, too?’ Trey said.
‘Black’s brain is supercharged but the human brain wasn’t designed to hold that many thoughts.’
‘When was the last time you saw him?’
Cassie said, ‘About a year ago. When he said this would happen.’
BLACK
GROOM LAKE MILITARY TESTING COMPLEX (RESTRICTED ACCESS), NEVADA
ONE YEAR AGO
Christine Cobalt was waiting in a sweltering-hot parking lot in the Nevada desert when Cassie pulled up in her beat-up Jeep.
Cassie wore a cap, sunglasses and a buff around her nose and mouth so that the guards wouldn’t see her face. They were at a heavily guarded military facility about forty miles outside Vegas.
Next to the great Cobalt was her husband and Cassie’s father, Professor Arnold Cobalt.
Arnie Cobalt had a horseshoe of hair around his otherwise bald head, bright curious eyes and an expressive face that was almost always smiling.
He sat in a wheelchair—as he had ever since the incident at their old north Texas home—but as usual, his spirits were high.
‘Hey there, kiddo!’ he said to Cassie.
Cassie hugged him warmly. ‘Hey, Dad.’
Her mother said, ‘He asked for you and me, but I wanted to bring your dad, too.’
‘Why me?’ Cassie said.
Her interactions with Black had been minimal over the years and for good reason.
Black was brilliant, sure, but also volatile and prone to nasty psychological attacks on his super half-siblings. It was thought best to keep Cassie away from him as much as possible.
‘Who knows how his mind works?’ Christine Cobalt said.
They headed inside the nearest building, passing four U.S. Army guards flanking the doors.
They met Cobalt Black inside his secure lab.
It had a dozen computers, countertops with chemistry equipment, whiteboards, blackboards, even a miniature wind-tunnel that he had requested, all of it contained behind a heavy steel blast door.
The blast door had ostensibly been designed to keep Cobalt Black and his remarkable brain safe from Russian kidnappers, although many said in hushed whispers that it had also been designed to keep Black in.
Cobalt Black paced behind one of his countertops. He rarely kept still. Rarely stopped muttering.
He was 30 years old, the second-youngest of the Cobalt children, and had long black straggly hair and wild eyes. His face was shot through with creases: worry marks caused by constant thinking and frowning.
Unlike his brothers, Red, Green, Purple and Golden Gary, he was not naturally muscular. He was lean and gangly, to the point of looking malnourished.
But that was not to say he didn’t have powers. Thin as he was, he was still strong, had enhanced hearing and smell, and could fly short distances.
His chief super ability, though, was mental.
He had an IQ of 275: a number that was literally off the charts.
Cobalt Black was smart. Really smart.
Too smart.
* * *
Cassie and her parents sat in Black’s high-tech lab.
Cassie noticed that even her mother, her powerful mother, was watching Black uncertainly. She was on edge, perhaps even afraid.
‘Hello, Mother,’ Cobalt Black said brightly, ‘you look like shit. How long have you got?’
‘Doctors say a year.’
‘I give you nine months, tops. Your body’s been writing cheques that your heart could never pay. And when you’re dead, he’s gonna come here and rip this country a new asshole.’
‘Now, Blaine—’ Cassie’s dad said.
Black’s eyes flashed. ‘I’m sorry. What powers have you got again? Wheelchair-pushing ones? His boys took care of you without breaking a sweat, so you don’t get to contribute, old man.’
‘Blaine. Manners,’ Christine Cobalt said.
Black stepped back, bowed his head. ‘Right. Yeah. Sorry, sorry. Gotta treat the lesser mortals with respect.’
Seeing him retreat, Cassie’s eyes suddenly narrowed.
‘Where are you, Blaine?’ she asked. It was a curious question and her parents frowned at it, not understanding.
But Black got it.
A reptilian grin spread across his face. ‘You are clever,’ he said. Cassie stood, walked over to Black and waved her
hand through his body.
Cobalt Black wasn’t there.
He was a hologram: a perfectly realistic hologram.
Cassie spotted a small silver disc sitting on the floor below the hologram, emitting the image. It had been out of sight, behind the countertop.
At that moment, the hologram winked out and a figure appeared behind Cassie and her parents, standing in the doorway to the lab: the real Cobalt Black.
He wore the same clothes as his hologram had. His eyes, Cassie saw, were still definitely crazy.
‘How did you know?’ he asked.
Cassie said, ‘I saw a flicker at your fingertips when you moved. You musta stepped outside the 3D camera.’
‘You’re the first one to spot it.’
‘I’m honoured.’
‘Dear sister, I have an IQ of 275. Yours is 140. There is nothing you can think of that I haven’t thought of first. I didn’t step out of the camera’s range unintentionally: I’ve done it every time I’ve used my display. It was a clue that only you saw.’
As she stood in front of him, Cassie poked Black in the chest, just to be sure that he was real. He was.
‘Is that why you brought me here? To test me?’ she asked.
‘To prepare you. For when she dies.’ He jerked his chin at their mother.
‘Meaning?’
‘Leave. Because he’ll find you. He’s very predictable, this Fury. He’s not just going to destroy this country, he’s going to eviscerate it, crush its monuments, murder its people, and piss on everything it holds dear. But he’ll save the worst for us, the children of Cobalt, especially you, the only one born out of love, not a test tube.’
Christine Cobalt said, ‘You’re the smartest guy in America, Blaine. Can’t you think of any way to beat him?’
‘I told you my plan, Mother—’
‘Other than blowing up an entire American city and its citizens with a nuclear warhead.’
‘Ten warheads. Ten. One isn’t enough, but ten should do it.’
‘What about the innocent civilians?’ Cassie said.
‘An acceptable sacrifice. He won’t believe we’d do such a terrible thing.’
‘Other than that,’ Christine Cobalt said.
Cassie said, ‘There has to be a way—’
‘There isn’t,’ Black said. ‘It’s simple math.’
Cassie shook her head. ‘How can you be so. . . emotionless?’
Black’s eyes were blank. ‘The most successful species on this planet—crocodiles and sharks—dispensed with emotion millions of years ago because it is an evolutionary handicap. Here are the facts: when she dies, the ultimate apex predator will come to this country. He will kill her children one by one and then he will install himself as a sadistic tyrant.’
‘Then we have to think of something—’
‘It’s math,’ Black declared again. ‘In the absence of our mother, the Fury will be unstoppable. As I said, I brought you here to give you the best advice you’ll ever get: leave before he arrives.’
Back in their kitchen, Trey said, ‘That’s what America’s greatest mind said? That the Fury is unbeatable and unstoppable?’
Cassie said, ‘Whatever his other flaws, you’ll always get the truth from Black. Planes, missiles, they’re all useless against the Fury. And now he’s here, moving steadily westward, heading this way.’
‘Hey,’ Trey said. ‘Remember, you and your dad once beat two of his asshole sons when they came to kill you.’
Cassie looked hard at her husband, remembering that terrible night.
NORTH TEXAS
TEN YEARS AGO
It was the night of the hundred-year storm. The rain fell in lashing sheets.
Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed.
And Cassie and her father, Professor Arnold Cobalt, were huddled behind the counter in their kitchen, fearfully watching the two hulking figures standing outside the kitchen’s glass doors, in the rain, peering in, searching for them.
They had floated down silently from the sky moments earlier, flying under their own power.
The Fury of Odessa and the Fury of Kazan: the Fury’s two youngest sons.
Here. Now. On American soil.
They were huge specimens: well over six feet tall and bulky, like linebackers, with thick necks and massive shoulders. And they both had overly wide yellow-rimmed eyes, just like their father.
Cassie was 19, her father 69. Arnold Cobalt was a small, sweet man entirely devoid of athletic ability. But he was the most popular history professor at the local university.
‘How did they get this far into the country?’ Cassie whispered.
Arnold Cobalt and his famous wife lived about thirty miles north of Amarillo, right in the middle of the Texas Panhandle in the far north of the state, over six hundred miles from the Gulf.
‘I don’t know—’ her dad replied.
Cassie grabbed his arm and yanked him across a short gap of open space, crouch-running quickly out of the kitchen just as one of the two Russian superthugs broke the door down.
As Cassie and her dad came into the entry vestibule of the house, Arnie Cobalt pulled out his cell phone and hastily texted to ‘Mom’: 911 HOME.
Cassie dragged him up the stairs—
—just as the Fury of Odessa emerged from the kitchen, dripping wet and calling, ‘Come out, Professor Cobalt! And your pretty daughter, too!’
They fled into her bedroom upstairs. It had a window that opened onto the garage roof. Maybe, Cassie thought, they could get out that way.
Cassie threw open the window—
—to see the Fury of Kazan hovering outside it, the rain hammering down on his head, smiling nastily.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Goodbye,’ another voice said from behind them and Cassie spun to see the other one, the Fury of Odessa, standing in the doorway of the bedroom, blocking the exit that way.
They were trapped.
‘At long last, we lay eyes on you,’ Odessa said. ‘The natural daughter of Cobalt. They hid you well. Our intelligence agencies know so little about you. My, you are pretty. Bet you’re tasty, too.’
Kazan said, ‘We thought we would give your heads to our father as a birthday gift.’
He took a step into the bedroom.
He assessed Arnie Cobalt and snorted. ‘Look at you, puny man. Hard to know what the great Cobalt sees in you.’
In reply, Arnie snatched up a baseball bat from the floor and slammed it into Odessa’s head.
The bat broke in two.
Odessa just blinked, completely unhurt.
Arnie said, ‘Damn.’
Odessa said, ‘I think I will knock out all of your teeth first. Then I will break your fingers one by one.’
He lunged at Arnie, swinging one of his huge fists—
—only to have the punch blocked.
At first, the Fury of Odessa reeled in shock, then his face lit up, impressed.
‘So. You have strength. But your father has none and there are two of us.’
Quick as a whip, he swung at Cassie but—just as Red had taught her—she ducked then bobbed and replied with a stinging punch right to his face, dropping the Fury of Odessa.
Then she grabbed her dad’s hand and fled past Odessa back into the house.
They scampered down the carpeted stairs, with Arnie in the lead. He reached the bottom when abruptly, the Fury of Kazan appeared, flying in from outside, and grabbed Arnie.
Cassie halted halfway down the stairs.
The Fury of Kazan now stood at the bottom of the stairs, gripping her dad.
Then the Fury of Odessa appeared at the top of the staircase, rubbing his nose.
She was trapped again and now they had her father.
Kazan growled: ‘One more step and I snap his spine.’
Cassie stood frozen on the stairs.
Kazan shrugged. ‘I think I will snap his spine anyway.’
And with those horrific words, he punched Arnold Cobalt in his lower back and a sickening cracking noise was heard. Arnie’s eyes bulged as he collapsed to the floor, crying out in agony.
The Fury of Kazan glared up at her. ‘Now, we have our way with you. Then we take both your heads.’
He took a step up.
His half-brother, the Fury of Odessa, still covered the top of the stairs.
Arnie Cobalt tried to crawl to his daughter’s aid.
‘No, you bastards!’ he shouted.
Caught between the two Russian superthugs, Cassie didn’t know what to do. She pressed herself against the wall.
Her father kept trying to crawl to her, to save her, but his legs were useless. ‘Get away from her!’
At the top of the stairs, the Fury of Odessa ogled Cassie’s body. ‘I’m sure you taste very nice indeed . . .’
Whoosh!
The Fury of Odessa was suddenly swept out of sight.
One second he was there, the next he was gone. Just gone.
‘Shit,’ Kazan gasped. ‘She’s here . . .’
A moment later, another figure stood in Odessa’s place at the top of the stairs.
Cobalt.
In full hero stance: boots spread wide, fists on hips. And anger in her eyes.
‘You came here to kill my family?’ she asked.
‘No, no . . . we . . .’ the Fury of Kazan stammered.
‘You came here to kill my family.’ This time it wasn’t a question.
‘Fuck,’ the Fury of Kazan said flatly.
They would be the last words he’d ever speak.
The next day, the severed heads of the two junior Furies were delivered to the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C., with a Post-it note that read:
RETURN TO SENDER