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powerful as Titan.
    But Thalamus and the other scientists knew that they couldn’t keep Apex a secret. He was just too good, too powerful. At the same time, they couldn’t reveal what they had done.
    So they fashioned a costume for him to disguise his real shape. They gave him an opaque helmet so that no one would ever see his face.
    And they let experiment number twenty-four out into the world. They didn’t even have to change his name, because the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet is X.
    All in all, it’s a pretty good name for a superhero. Ape-X.
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READ THE JAW-DROPPING CLIMAX TO THE SUPER HUMAN SERIES IN
    STRONGER.
    COMING IN JUNE 2012.

AN AMPLIFIED VOICE bellowed out, “This will be your only warning! Get down on your knees and place your hands behind your head! You have ten seconds to comply!”
    â€œLook, I know you can’t understand me, but—”
    I noticed the flash from the tank’s barrel at the exact moment something slammed into my chest and knocked me back across the church’s parking lot.
    I crashed straight through the pastor’s beloved ’65 Mustang and hit the church wall hard enough to crack the bricks.
    And then I got up. There was barely a mark on me. The car was ruined, though, and that annoyed me more than the fact that the army had hit me with a shell from a tank. I’d loved that car too. Always wanted one of my own. Now it was just a scattered collection of blackened metal fragments.
    I couldn’t understand what was wrong with everyone. OK, so I was huge and blue and probably looked quite scary, but I still hadn’t actually done anything bad. What had happened with Pastor Cullen was an accident—why couldn’t they understand that? If I were a bad guy, wouldn’t I have done more? Wouldn’t I have attacked the cops when they shot at me?
    But this was years before I’d heard of the “arachnid response,” the automatic reaction a lot of people have to spiders: They react with fear and revulsion even when they know the spider isn’t dangerous. That was what was happening here: They were just terrified of me.
    Turning to face the tank again, I yelled, “No way was that ten seconds!”
    And then I heard the helicopters.
    Three of them, swooping in low over the town, heading straight for the church.
    Behind me, all the soldiers and cops and FBI guys were spilling out through the doorway, running like the devil was chasing them.
    Ahead, the rest of the cops and the army were pulling back—even the tank had shifted into reverse and was moving in a hurry. It clipped the edge of a parked car and then drove right back over the top of another, flattening it.
    Twin streaks of fire erupted from the lead copter, and the concrete in front of me was ripped to shreds.
    I did the only sane thing I
could
do: I turned and ran.
    With the copter’s bullets strafing the ground all around me, I raced around to the back of the church and kept going through the rear parking lot.
    The back wall was about fifteen feet high. I jumped for it, expecting to grab the top and pull myself up. Instead I soared much higher, cleared the wall by a good three feet, and came down so hard in the field behind it that I sank to my knees in the dirt.
    But even that didn’t slow me much: I surged through the soil as easily as someone running through a shallow pond.
    I knew the town well, of course. There’s hardly a twelve-year-old kid in the world who doesn’t know every secret nook and cranny in his hometown. I knew the shortcuts through the housing estates, the barely visible paths through the woods. And I knew the caves: That’s where I was heading.
    Back in the church, Harmony Yuan had mentioned thermal scanners. I’d watched enough cop shows and read enough comic books to know what they were: cameras that detected heat instead of light. And I knew that someone