Free Stronger: A Super Human Clash by Michael Carroll Page A

we want better conditions. Bigger rations, new clothes, new bedding. Or at least get the current bedding fumigated. This blasted place is crawling with lice.”
    “I thought that insects avoided you.”
    “I think they don’t like the taste of my skin. They scurry away from me and make it all worse for everyone else.”
    “Huh. So what’s this idea?”
    “Put the kids to work in the mine shafts. Only a couple of hours a day, just to keep them from getting bored. You can assign some of the weaker adults to watch over them. With Jakob’s team gone we’re eight men down. This’ll more than make up for that.”
    Hazlegrove pulled his feet off the desk, removed his makeshift eye shield, and sat up. “That’s a strange suggestion, coming from you.”
    “Yeah, well, I’m not suggesting that they do anything too dangerous. But they could bring water down to the workers, help with clearing the loose ore. It’ll get them used to workingin the shafts, and it means their parents won’t have to be worried that they’re not being supervised.”
    He stood up and walked to the door. “I’m not scared of you freaks. You know that, right?”
    “I never thought you were.”
    “By rights you shouldn’t even exist. In older civilizations people like you would have been put to death.”
    “OK.” I wondered where he was going with this.
    “And yet here you are, alive and healthy. Something to think about, eh?” He waved one hand at me, urging me to move away from the door, then stepped out and looked around. “There are three hundred and seventy-two inmates of this mine, almost a hundred of whom are too old, too weak, or too young to be productive enough to cover the cost of feeding them.” His lips tightened and his eyes narrowed for a moment. “All right. We’ll give your suggestion a go. Any accidents or delays caused as a result will be your fault. But you’ll get what you asked for. Except the new bedding and clothing, but we’ll delouse everyone’s existing clothing at the same time we do the bedding.”
    “Good.” I nodded. “Yeah, that’ll work.”
    “But there’ll be a price, Brawn. And you won’t like it. I’ll need to work on some details, talk to the warden.
Agreed?”
    “You want me to agree before you tell me what that price is?”
    He grinned. “Correct. Agree to my terms and you’ll get your extra rations today. It’ll take a week or so to get enough lindane to delouse the beds and clothes.”
    I didn’t want to agree, but we needed the extra rations to keep Jakob and his men going, and we needed the kids allowed in the mine shafts because they were small enough to crawl through the access tunnel and bring those rations to the escape team.
    We couldn’t all escape, we knew that. But now that Jakob and the others were believed to be dead, they wouldn’t be missed. If they weren’t missed, no one would be looking for them.
    But Hazlegrove’s price … I couldn’t even guess what it might be. All I could do was hope that it was a long way off. Long enough for Jakob and the others to tunnel their way to freedom, and—ideally—find someone who could get the rest of us out.
    “All right,” I said. “It’s a deal.”
    Time passed slowly in the platinum mine, but it passed even more slowly when there was something to hope for.
    After two months of round-the-clock digging Jakob and his team broke the surface some hundred yards beyond the perimeter fence. Those of us who knew of the escape plans—and there weren’t many: even the kids who assisted had to be sworn to secrecy—crossed our fingers and prayed to any number of deities that the team would find help.
    But we knew it was a slim hope. Even though we were all prisoners, not all of us were criminals. Some of us were there simply because we’d proved to be an inconvenience to our governments. My friend Keegan, for example, had never been a superhuman. She had never committed a crime. She wasimprisoned because she’d been in a