Renegades
Bronsen Hawkins
Copyright 2013 by Bronsen Hawkins
Renegades
(A Specters’ Short Story)
“You’re under arrest #3932 Leonardo Petta; don’t make this any harder on yourself.”
As the guard yelled the words, an eerie silence fell over the class. I couldn’t believe that they barged into my classroom, in the middle of the day. On the other hand, I do hate math. However, I was sure that the Attix Foundation was smarter than that.
Above everything, they never wanted to make a scene, but it seemed the tides were shifting.
First things first, my name is Leon and I’m a Specter. “What is a Specter?” you might be silently whispering to yourself as you sip on your overpriced coffee? Well, Specters were what the Attix Foundation decided to call their little science projects gone wrong. Nothing good ever comes out of playing God, and the Specters were far from good. Most of them were little kids with big attitudes and abilities to match. After the events leading up to William Attix’s untimely demise the Specters were thought to be long gone, wiped out by the corporation’s “special” military. Now, the Specters are just a myth. A ghost story you would tell your children.
The dirty secret that the Attix Foundation doesn’t want the general public to know is that they created nothing. The Specters appeared naturally, they are a genetic mutation that has occurred in the general population. Scary thing is, if the entire world were to find out that the Attix Foundation’s entire operation was based on a lie, who knows what would transpire?
There were three guards pointing automatic rifles at me, probably five more in the hallway. God knows how many were down stairs. They were smart. They thought I wouldn’t make too much of a scene if they showed up all forceful. They obviously don’t know who they are dealing with. The left side of the classroom is made up of four large glass windows. The guard nearest me hesitates a little and cocky smirk appears on my face.
“Do you really want it to go down this way?” I ask as the guards move in closer.
Their cautious, they should be.
My eyes faded to black. I can feel the tension building up in my legs. My arms are locking into position. I know how this is going to go down. The first guard lunges at me. He isn’t reckless enough to fire a weapon in a classroom full of kids. He trips making him easy enough to dodge. His head hits the edge of metal desk as he falls. The second guard isn’t as stupid, but he still throws a front kick. Bad move when your opponent is half your size. Just makes it easier to throw him off balance. I shove his leg up, he almost instantly crashes into the desk behind him. The last guard puts a gun to my head. “You’re under arrest.” He screams into my ear. As if I didn’t hear him the first time. By simply nodding my head back, I allow him to blow a few holes in the window closest to me, a parting gift that I’m grateful for as I slam my palm into his nose dislocating it. The other guards are now flooding into the room. They probably thought that those three buffoons could take me. They now know better.
“Don’t move.” One of them screams, but I’m already in motion. The room around me becomes a blur. The bullets aren’t moving fast enough. The remaining glass in front of me shatters breaking into a million pieces. The shards rain down upon the street in front the school.
I’m aiming for the rooftop across the street. If I can get to it, I’m in the clear. While I’m soaring through the air, I search my mind for every possible way that this could go down. Only in three instances do I break my legs from this leap, in 22 outcomes my pants tear, in 10 outcomes I roll into a nearby air conditioning vent, in 1 one of those I break my back, in 18 outcomes I scraped some part of my body hard enough to bleed out, but three out of 56 possible outcomes seemed like a safe bet.
As I land on the rooftop I feel a sudden shift in the weather around me. In my experiences with Attix, when something unexplainable happens, you don’t ask questions you just run. There are several scattered buildings in front of me. Getting away from the guards shouldn’t be too hard. It is whatever else that is out there that scares me. So, as the tension builds up in my legs again, I allow myself to take to the sky. I took a moment to go over what could happen next. Time seemed to stop all around me as I explored the world with my eyes. In that scattered second I felt him. His energy was in the sky, among the clouds which have gotten considerably darker since I escaped the school. There was no time to ask questions, and I had already cleared a few streets before I felt the air around me start to thin.
“Alright, you’ve made your point!” I screamed into the distance as I landed on a rooftop. I didn’t know where he was, but I only needed him to reveal himself once in order to take him out.
Nobody was dragging me to the Prep, even if that nobody included a souped-up Specter Agent with a few tricks.
“It would be in your best interest for you to stop running.” Cloud called out from behind me. All of the Attix operatives had corny codenames. The corporation felt that using the agents real name didn’t present an air of professionalism. In actuality it just made them seem colder than they already are.
“And you are?” I asked the guy hovering in front of me. Agents always loved to show off.
“Cloud, Agent Cloud. And you’re coming with me.”
“Is that so?” I replied as I got ready to react to whatever he was going to throw at me. Guys like this always threw something first, even if it was only for effect.
As if he wanted to prove me right, he hurled a lightning bolt at my face.
I should have seen that coming a mile away. In actuality, I did. So while he was busy charging his fingers, I was already sidestepping. Before he could fire another one off at me, I back flipped off of the edge of the building.
I needed to get this guy into a closed area so I can deal with him out of his element, in a building or compact space.
His skill seemed to be drawing in the air around him in order to make concentrated blasts of lightning. While sliding down a ladder on the edge of that building, I broke off a loose piece of metal and chunked it at him. Deflecting it, he taunted me. “Why not face me like a man!”
I could not care less about his taunts; I just needed him to follow me. While bolting down an alley way, two guards decided to cut me off. Jumping over the first guy I tripped the second one and allowed my fist to slam into the first one’s lower jaw. This normally wouldn’t have been a smart move, but I put so much propulsion into my fist even Mike Tyson would have been laid out. The guard went flying back into Cloud who had hovered around the corner, knocking him into a building.
“Didn’t deflect that one?” I mocked as I headed for the first open door that I could find.
This guy wasn’t going to let up, and I was counting on it. As I entered the ground floor of the empty office building I reached for the first metal object I could find, and to my luck it just so happen to be a heavy chain.
“Enough running!” Cloud screamed as he flew into the building, the wind around him was so powerful that it slammed the door shut behind him. As he looked down upon my shadowy figure I swung the chains and wrapped them around him. “You think a simple scrap of metal is going to stop me!” He screamed as he fed electricity threw the chain as I dropped it. The chains returned the favor by electrocuting Cloud right back.
“The hell!” Cloud screamed.
“You’re not that bright are you?” I said as I leaped off of the ground. His body was still buzzing from the shock, and I wasn’t about to miss my opportunity to finish him off. He was afraid to try and shock me again, and it was to my advantage because another blast like that and those chains were done. So taking his head I brought him back down to my level by slamming his skull against the concrete floor. He wasn’t dead though, not by a long shot. Even if he h
ad slight brain damage they had people that could fix him right up and I didn’t want to be around when those people got here.
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