Out-Breakers by Ed Vela

“We really need to get a better pin-point on his position at the moment.”

“Yeah, but as the Rolling Stones once sang: You can't always get what you want!”

Xan, of course had to sing that last lyric, and then do his best Mick Jagger, shaky dance after.

“If you're trying to make me laugh... Well, you're no Henny Youngman.” I said, knowing the reference would slide right past my younger partner.

“Look, Hoffbrow, we both know that he has more than the requisite skills to take us both out.”

“Separately, but not together.”

“Jeez-us, Hoff, the last time we tried to combine our powers we almost leveled a city!”

“That was mostly your fault, Xan. And I don't mean to try to combine our powers again.”

“The city, the county, and the state will thank you for that I'm sure.”

“I just mean when he ends up here, we make it a point to fight him together.”

“A coordinated effort between you and me? That would be more impressive than if we could actually beat him.” Xan said with the smirk I was more than accustomed to seeing.

“How's Fermyn coming along with that damping field?”

“Fermyn's a genius, but since... Rocco got killed...” Xan's voice trailed off.

“Yeah, I know. Rocco was always Fermyn's hands and fingers. Best tech we've ever had.”

“Had is right! As in past tense.” Xan snapped.

I had forgotten that Xan and Rocco had come up together. Xan booked field service, while Rocco stayed at home base and did tech work. Then she and our boy genius, Fermyn, teamed up two years back and the rest is Sci-Focus History.

To backtrack just a bit, Sci-Focus is a community of like individuals called Out-Breakers. My name is Alexander Hoffbrow, or Hoff to most at the bureau. The Sci-Focus Bureau is chock full of field agents like me and Xan, or Xanthus Minor, officially.

Xan and I are both Out-Breakers, a certain breed of human. We break out with some special power or other some time during puberty, which means there's still hope for young Fermyn, as the kid just turned eleven last month. Some Out-Breaker powers are minor, like slightly increased strength or speed, Rocco had the latter, which made her not only a good tech, but a fast tech. Some Out-Breaker powers were major, like Xan's ability to control water, or my ability to harness and redirect energy: electricity, gravity, wind, etcetera. And, yes, once attempting to combine our powers during a particularly tough battle caused a flood of biblical proportions.

Xan, like Fermyn and Rocco, was recruited young, as a teen when he first broke out, while I was already a seasoned agent breaking out after college, and ending up at Sci-Focus the next year. Xan and I had been paired up many times, but hadn't become permanent field partners till just about eighteen months ago. The difference in our ages put a bit of a strain on said partnership, but like an arranged marriage of old, we had been making the best of it, including our latest assignment, one Emil Oberon.

Oberon was an Out-Breaker, like us, but not one of the lucky ones that broke out in his teens and was discovered by a benevolent community like Sci-Focus, but a poor kid from the barrio that got caught up in... Stuff, and ended up in jail. It was there, while serving a seven year stint in state prison for armed robbery that he broke out. He found out that he could cause his body to spontaneously combust, take out about a half block radius, then reassemble with no ill-effects.

Discovering that you're a living bomb made it pretty easy for him to escape from prison, but not so easy to stay hidden, significant blasts like that tend to attract attention. Xan and I found him relatively easily, but knew we couldn't take him on with the same ease, as neither one of us has great defensive powers against shrapnel. And, yes, bone and sinew can produce some alarmingly effective shrapnel.

Before we met him in the field we enlisted the aid of Fermyn and Rocco, Delaney Fermyn and Jill Rocco officially. They were to create a damping field that they had designed and built before to negate the powers of other rogue Out-Breakers in the field. They thought they had come up with one to work on Oberon. Rocco had come along to deploy and make last minute adjustments to the damping field in the area where we had found Oberon to keep him from using his power.

It didn't work, and Rocco paid the price. Xan and I barely got out of there before Oberon could reconstitute his body, to try again, but he saw who we were. Since then, the two of us had been number one on Oberon's 'Who am I gonna blow to SMITHEREENS' list. The good part was we wouldn't have to track him down again, not that it would be that difficult, he tended to leave quite a mess in his wake. This time that arrogant lunatic would come to us, so at least we'd have home field advantage... Sorta.

While Xan checked in with our peeper division, who manipulated and monitored all the street surveillance cameras in the city, for any sign of Oberon, I went to see Fermyn. The kid had been taking Rocco's death pretty hard. He blamed himself, since if his damping field had worked that night, Rocco would still be his right hand person and we'd have Oberon in custody. He'd also been packing all the cops and civilians that had been lost since that night in his guilt bag.

When I walked into his lab the kid looked like a warmed over pig stool. Prepubescents shouldn't pull all-nighters, but the dark circles under his eyes told me that this boy had been up for at least the last forty-eight.

“How's it going, Fermyn?”

“Not good! I'm still trying to figure out why it didn't work the first time.” Fermyn said, the anger and guilt in his voice quite noticeable. “I guess Rocco would be too, if she weren't in so many pieces at this point!”

“Damping fields for Out-Breakers are tricky. Oberon has a power we've never seen before. When was the last time you slept?”

“SLEEP?!” Fermyn growled, as though I had just asked him if he wanted to sip battery acid.

“Yeah, you know, close your eyes, relax your body, maybe even enter REM state?”

“To dream of what, Hoff? A damping field that actually worked against Oberon and a Rocco that was still alive?!”

“Look, Fermyn, Oberon's gonna be a tough nut to crack, cuz the only way to test any damping field is to test it in the field against him. And that kind of test always costs.”

“It's already cost! Ask Rocco! Oh, that's right, you CAN'T, can you?!”

Uh-oh, I thought to myself, the kid's teetering on the brink emotionally. It was at times like these I had to remind myself that despite having an IQ off the charts, Fermyn was still a little boy, a boy whose eyes were getting awfully misty behind his thick wire framed glasses. Xan and I always figured that Fermyn had been crushing on Rocco for months, but always kept it professional, since she was a grown woman and he was the nerdiest of nerdy kids.

“Fermyn, look... Maybe you should at least take a little break? Lemme take you down to the concession machines on the fourth floor, buy you a can of soda?”

Fermyn reluctantly accepted. He fell asleep in a chair about five minutes after we had walked down there. Kid started snoring like a tween buzz saw, at least that he did like an adult.

Xan came strutting into the munchie lounge, kicked the snack machine on the side, and out popped a bag of potato chips.

“Damn! I wanted corn chips.” Xan said as he grabbed the freebie chips and opened them.

“So what did the surveillance nerds have to say?”

“He was in the city a couple of hours ago.”

“They sure?”

“As sure as the residue of a blown up bank and two blown up cop cars can make them.” Xan said as he crunched away.

“How can you eat at a time like this?”

“The condemned shall eat a hearty meal.”

Xan noticed the noise coming from Master Delaney Fermyn.

“Jeez, the kid sounds like somebody's strangling an out board motor.” Xan said as he moved towards the boy.

“Don't wake him up!” I warned.

“Why not? We still need that damping field, don't we?”

“Just give him ten more minutes, will ya?”

Xan grimaced as Fermyn's snoring deepened.

“Are you sure he can survive the next ten minutes? Without a CPAP machine?”

Fermyn choked a little bit as he sprung awake.

“Unstable chromosome enzymes! That's it! That's it!! That's it!!!” Fermyn exclaimed with increasing intensity.

Xan walked past me and said in a low whisper. “This kid's lox has slipped off his bagel.”

“What are you talking about, Fermyn?” I asked trying to ignore Xan.

“So simple... So, so simple! Every damping field I'd designed before was aimed at suppressing an Out-Breaker's power by destabilizing the chromosomal enzyme you all have in common.”

“I follow.”

“He lost me at 'every damping field'” Xan said.

“But Oberon's chromosomal enzymes are already unstable because of the power he manifests. So the trick with him is to stabilize his CE's so that he can't...”

“Go boom?” Xan finished for him. “Hey, I was following along. The kid's a genius, but the basic concept is simple.”

“It would have to be for you to get it, Xan.” I looked at Fermyn. “But is it so simple, Fermyn?

“Well. I'll have to do a bit of reverse engineering. If Rocco was here it would be much simp...”

Fermyn choked up. I'd never seen him cry before, and he wasn't about to let me see him now. He quickly excused himself and bolted back to his lab.

Xan finished his last chip as he watched Fermyn leave. “We gotta get that kid a new Rocco. Maybe this time a guy, so he won't get all hormonal.”

“Are there any more Out-Breakers on site?”

“Nope. Everybody else is in the field, NOT trying to find Oberon. We sure pulled the short straw on this one.”

“No, Jill Rocco did, and tonight it's up to us to make sure she didn't do it for nothing.”

Xan got quiet, as the wise cracking bravado yielded to thoughts of his old friend. There was talk that they even had a fling back in the day, when they were both still in training, but it was just a rumor.

It was four hours later that we heard the blast that breached the front gate. Xan and I met Oberon in the quadrangle. A wide open space was good for us and bad for him. We managed to keep him busy for awhile, our coup de grace, or at least attempted coup de grace, came when I hit him with a bolt of electricity from a nearby transformer while cutting open a small opening in the water tower above Oberon's position. Xan took it from there making the water come out in a wave that momentarily flattened Oberon, but we Out-Breakers are made of sterner stuff than most so where a normal human would've been at least rendered unconscious it only temporarily stunned Oberon. Oh, and in case you were wondering, we're all bullet proof, so the guards with their guns were no help to us.

Xan and I were exhausting ourselves just keeping him busy, and staying out of his blast range. But we were running on empty and Oberon had been saving himself since blowing up the central gate. We thought we were done for when Fermyn came in loud and clear on our embedded auditory communication links.

“Guys, get Oberon to the promenade in front of Sector Seven. I'm ready for him there.”

“What does he think? We got him on a leash?”

“Shut up, Xan! Copy, Fermyn.”

Xan and I were tired, but we used the last of what we had to totally piss off Oberon. He couldn't get close enough to either of us to do any real damage, so he kept pursuing us, until we had herded him into the area Fermyn had set up his new, and hopefully improved, damping field.

“Put on your infrared tech goggles, you'll be able to see the area marked off in spectrum light beams.” Fermyn said in our comm links.

Sure enough, as Xan and I put on the specs there was a perfect rectangle in front of us. We crossed it quickly and stood on the other side of it, just as Oberon entered the promenade.

“So! Are we ending this now?” Oberon bellowed. “You two are finally standing together. Bad move. I expected more from you.”

He was almost in position, and I knew he had to get closer to be certain to take us out with one blast, but then he stopped moving forward. It's a good thing he couldn't see how big our eyes got behind those tech goggles when he stopped just a foot short of the line of demarcation.

“He's not in the damn box.” Xan said to me in a pained whisper.

“Don't worry, he will be.” I whispered back to him, then I addressed Oberon. “Has your target radius increased that much since our last encounter, Oberon?”

“Not really, but I want you two to suffer. No instant death like that pathetic technician of yours. She died quick. But you two... You'll feel it, but you won't die! For minutes... Maybe for hours.”

I had to think fast, and there was one thing Xan and I had going for us... We had gotten Rocco's body out of the blast area before Oberon reconstituted. He only assumed that Rocco was killed instantly because she was still adjusting the settings on the damping field emitter closest to him. But he couldn't know for sure. So it was time to mess with his arrogant ass.

“Quick death? Oberon, you must be a wishful thinker. Rocco's not dead.”

“Yeah, she's on the mend.” Xan said, picking up on it. “The infirmary says they'll be releasing her in another week or two.”

“And back at work the week after that. So it kinda looks like your blast radius...”

“Truly sucks!” Xan finished for me.

“Impossible! I felt her die!”

“No, you felt her get wounded.” Xan said, then puckered up his lips and blew Oberon a kiss. That did it. As our living bomb made the fatal mistake of moving two steps forward.

“Now, Fermyn! NOW!” I shouted.

Fermyn hit a button on a remote and the entire rectangle glowed bright red.

“Oh, you're not going to try this idiocy again?!” Oberon said, in full memory of what happened last time with the first damping field.

“Not afraid of killing us too instantly anymore, Boom-Boom?” Xan said with a sickening lilt to his voice.

Oberon flexed his shoulders back, the bodily signal that he was about to use his powers. Then he got a quizzical look on his face, as though he didn't quite understand what was happening. His body began breaking up, but was crushing inwardly. It was the damnedest thing I'd ever seen. He went from six feet, two hundred pounds of violent arrogance to being... Nothing... Nothing at all was left, like he'd never been there to begin with.

“Noooooooo!” I heard Fermyn's scream from across the promenade as he came running up.

“Don't worry, Fermyn, we got him.” I said as I grabbed him. He was trembling.

“I miscalculated. My damping field didn't just keep him from exploding, but caused him to implode! I killed him.”

“And it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, Fermyn! Don't sweat it.”

If I had had a gag at that moment it would've gone into Xan's mouth. Fermyn was coming unglued. I knew that when he let me see the biggest cow tears I'd ever seen coming out of his eyes. He was making a piteous audible whine as he began hitching.

“Fermyn, don't take this one on too. You were rushed, you had no way of knowing...”

“But, I'm supposed to know, Hoff! I'm supposed to know... Everything!”

He broke away from me then, running back to the sanctum sanctorum of his lab. Xan and I looked at each other. We knew the kid was hurting, but were ill equipped to do anything for him. We were trained field agents, fighters, but not geared for emotional support. Fermyn was as much a part of the Sci-Focus community as anyone, and he needed us, and we let him down that night. What we didn't know then was that incident started Fermyn down a dark road, and when he broke out with an awesome power of his own years later, he broke away from Sci-Focus, and became the deadliest enemy the Out-Breakers ever had. So much for community.