One hand thrown up against the heat, I dashed for safety out of the circle of the spotlight. One of the crazies spotted me running for safety and gaped at me open-mouthed, making as if to cry out to raise the alarm. I brought my pistol up, pointed it at the crazy, and shot him in the face for all his trouble. As I ran I wondered if the crazy I had just shot was the only one to be paying attention to my fleeing. Shortly afterward, that proved to be that way. When reached a pocket of darkness, I glanced back again. All the remaining crazies just stood in the light with their heads tipped back, glaring up at the chopper hovering above the shattered window. The gunner kept firing at them, slaughtering one nutcase after another. Well, at least the helicopter leveled the playing field a shade for me.
The rounds danced around the woman, pinging off the floor. She was still surrounded by the hellish blaze, long orange plumes of fire chaotically swaying and jerking from side to side all around the woman, completely enveloping her, which made her pretty much indiscernible. I couldn’t tell whether or not she was hit by one of those .50-caliber bullets.
Out of the blue, from somewhere inside the blaze around the woman expelled a fireball about the size of a human head. It bolted skyward, en route toward the helicopter poised above the roof window, trailing fumes of smoke behind it. The pilot saw it and banked the chopper hard to the left to avoid the fireball. He didn’t succeed in accomplishing his goal. The fireball smashed into the tail rotor and exploded, demolishing it. However insane she was, the woman was a good shot, all right.
It took only one accurately-aimed fireball to do the trick. The helicopter went out of control and began spinning around losing altitude fast. It wasn’t long before the underside of the chopper crashed onto the roof. It held for a few moments, long cracks running in all directions across the ceiling, and shortly afterward a huge section of the roof gave way. The chopper dropped all the way down to the floor in a shower of roof debris before collapsing onto the unyielding floor with a horrible crash. Several crazies were squashed into a gory, pulpy mass. The helicopter commenced listing to one side, the tips of the still spinning main rotor blades getting closer and closer to the floor. The closest crazies who were hit by it disappeared in a red gory haze, bloody lumps squished down to the floor. The rotor blades ripped into the floor, breaking to pieces, disintegrating, and gradually shortening as the helicopter listed on.
My gaze swept rapidly around the area, looking for the woman. As she wasn’t ablaze anymore, it was dark inside the Walmart again, and it took me a few seconds to detect her. She lay in a slowly expanding pool of her own blood not far away from the chopper. As it turned out, she had been hit by one of those .50-caliber rounds. So much for the pyrokinesis.
The helicopter stopped listing, having come to a rest on the starboard side. The rotor blades, which were now just jagged stubs, were still spinning. Two soldiers clambered out of the crashed vehicle. One of them had his right shoulder injured. All the remaining crazies were now beside themselves with rampant fury. They were pissed off, really angry with the soldiers for having murdered their goddess. With their faces distorted with rage and pain, they screamed furiously at the soldiers. All at once all the remaining crazies bolted toward the two soldiers who opened fire in response to the nutcases’ aggressive actions, doing their best to take out the crazies before they got within reach of their blows. It wouldn’t take long for the two soldiers to croak the crazies unless those nuts reached them. If they failed to kill all the crazies in time, the tables would be turned on the two soldiers. Up close, the crazies would simply overwhelm them.
However, I wasn’t about to stick around to see how the things were going to play out. Although I was able to survive against all the odds, there was no sense in pushing my luck. So I decided to split the building while I had a chance to use the commotion to get the hell out of here. Neither the two soldiers nor the remaining crazies were paying attention to me, being too busy trying to kill one another. They seemed to totally forget about me. My senses in overdrive, I whirled around and zoomed off. I raced as fast as I could, not trying to make lesser noise as I would’ve done in another situation since the clatter of the assault rifles completely drowned my footfalls out.
On getting out of the Walmart, I looked around to get my bearings and to find out if there were any threats present nearby. Not having seen one, I commenced picking my way away from the Walmart. I had had my fill of the bloodthirsty crazies and the trigger-happy soldiers for today and didn’t want to encounter any more of them again, so I was making sure not to bump into either another cluster of crazies or a bunch of soldiers.
The Walmart was gradually receding into the night as I was making my way forward and after a while, I got so far away from the huge building it was finally out of my sight.
Chapter Five
I scooted away across the residential area for a few minutes, vaulting, scaling, and hurdling one-foot-high chain fences surrounding derelict homes. When I finally made certain that nobody was dogging me I slowed down and looked around to make sure that I was alone. There were no crazies around, no helicopters hovering overhead, no black vehicles with big fifties tooling around, no nothing. The whole block was quiet and illuminated only by the moonlight.
I came across a two-story house and got inside. Having stepped across the threshold, I immediately stilled myself to take in the interior. However, what with the lights being out, it took a couple of moments for my eyes to get used to the difference in light. After that, me still standing in the doorway, my gaze swept rapidly around the room to acquaint myself with the layout. I was also straining my ears, eager to pick up any telltale sounds that might indicate the presence of any occupants.
Nobody was in the room. Judging by the ubiquitous silence, the whole house was deprived of any occupants. I ascended the stairs to the second floor and checked all rooms to make sure nobody was lurking in the shadows of the dark corners. I picked a bedroom with a big unmade bed. Frank was right, what I needed was having a good rest. It might have been all those fighting with soldiers and crazies and running around the city that left me worn down. Or maybe those powerful psi-forces I had somehow caused took quite a toll on me. Either way, I felt completely exhausted. Still, before turning in I was willing to check my surroundings one more time, just to be on the safe side in case some crazies were prowling outside around the house.
Having crossed the room, I looked out the window. I was staring out into the street for a few minutes. Everything was silent in the street. A breeze slightly stirred the branches of the nearby bushes. Other than that, there wasn’t any movement outside at all. Having assured myself that all my pursuers had lost track of me, I shifted my attention back to the bed. However, I didn’t feel like sleeping in someone else’s bed even if residents of the house were long gone. Moreover, when I walked over to the bed and got a closer look, I saw a big dark-crimson stain on the bed sheet. It looked like a clot of blood. Somebody might have been slain in their own bed. Yet there was nobody to be seen in the room.
I split the bedroom, took a few steps down the hallway, and walked into a study. A desk was centered against the rear wall. There was also a big recliner looking quite cozy and comfortable. It stood in the far corner of the room, facing the doorway. I had spied it first on my having checked the second-floor rooms a few minutes ago. On entering the study, I swung the door close behind me, padded over to the recliner, and plopped down on it. I laid the Beretta M9 across my lap and went to sleep as soon as I closed my eyes.
I had a dream. I dreamed of a gorgeous-looking raven-haired woman. Somehow I did know who she was. Mother. It was Mother Frank had told me about. She lived in an alternate dimension. She hailed from a parallel universe where magic, sorcery, witchcraft, and stuff like that were just as usual things as cell phones in our world. Mother was a witch and a remarkably powerful one at that. She surpassed others in the witchcraft trade. It might have been her passion for the black magic that turned her into an extremely evil p
erson or she might have been this way before she started to learn the black magic trade. Either way, she had a wicked heart, malevolent spirit, and a perpetually vile temper. She took a malicious pleasure in hurting others. Her ultimate goal was to ravage, devastate, and desolate the entire world. And she was quite good at it. She really excelled at it. She wreaked great havoc everywhere she went leaving full-on ruins in her wake.
Other sorcerers couldn’t stand the sight of her destroying their world. They called a temporary truce, ceasing fighting one another for an amount of time needed to defeat Mother. However, they didn’t succeed in winning. Despite their having united, they just couldn’t take her down. Even joined up they couldn’t match her. By the time other sorcerers realized that she was a real threat to their world and teamed up against her, she was already too strong to be defeated.
When they realized that, they came up with some scheme. They created a powerful spell with which they managed to expel Mother from their world and confine her to the Void. The Void was vast space poising between parallel worlds, the enormous emptiness where such things as space and matter didn’t exist. She was stuck here for eons. Being inside the Void was a harrowing experience. There was absolutely nothing around her. There was no light, no sounds, no gravity, no jack-squat. Just total darkness and soundless emptiness. On top of that Mother couldn’t pass away in there, for the Void had no time, had no such a thing that could elapse and be measured in minutes, hours, days and years. However, her magical powers were slowly but surely vanishing.
It seemed to her like a way long time before Mother eventually found a way out. Still, contrary to her expectation, she entered not her native world but an alternate world called the Earth. All but instantly she encountered military forces. It wasn’t until she engaged them that she found out that her having been confined to the Void had inflicted exceptional damage on her magical abilities. She wasn’t nearly as powerful as before. Despite her current weakness, Mother fearlessly and violently assaulted soldiers, sending deadly, magical discharges flying in every direction. With her strength slowly dissipating, Mother was getting more and more tired and her attacks were getting weaker. In the end, she got so exhausted she couldn’t keep fighting anymore. When she, completely exhausted, passed out cold, soldiers that survived all her onslaughts seized and trussed her up.
She was taken into an enormous, underground facility dubbed the Object 17, which was situated in a desert a little way away from Vegas. She was being held hostage and subjected to a countless number of various experiments conducted by cruel scientists at the facility. They also invented some mighty gizmo to keep Mother’s magical powers in check, restrained. However, she was all too unbridled and uncontrollable. She tried to break free all the time. Mother caused too much trouble and made it all but impossible for the facility scientists to examine her and study her magical powers. So they came up with some kind of solution to the problem.
She was conceived by one of the facility security guards. Later on, she delivered two twin boys. They become the scientists’ new objects of inhuman experiments.
As my dream was continuing unfolding, I clocked a woman I easily recognized as Mother appear out of nowhere. In spite of her being a pissed-off, nefarious witch from another dimension, she didn’t stare daggers at me; on the contrary, she regarded me warmly and all in all, she looked like a nice and gentle person to me. Mother walked over to me, reached out with her right hand, touched the tips of her fingers to my cheek, and smiled kindly.
After that, the dream drifted away instantly and I awakened with a start to the first beams of sunlight crawling their way into the room through the window behind me. It was still and quiet. Dust hung in the shaft of light coming through the window.
I rapidly looked around. Save for me there was no one in the room. Yet I had this uncanny feeling that Mother had been standing right in front of me just a moment ago. It felt so real I realized it wasn’t just a dream. It was Mother herself telling me the story of what had happened to her while I slept. I could physically feel her standing before me in my dream. Hell, I still felt the warmth of her hand on my face where she had touched me.
I stood up, walked over to the window, and peeked out. The street was brightly illuminated by the sunlight and was as deserted as last night. As I was looking out into the street, I realized something else. Whether it had happened of its own accord or whether it was Mother who had come to my aid in my dream and helped me with this, I had all my memories returned to me. I knew everything now.
Mother gestated and delivered two baby boys, Frank and me. We had been taken away from our mother and reared by the facility’s scientists. While we didn’t display as strong and vicious magical abilities at an early age as Mother, we both, just like her, evidently bore all the signs of possessing magical powers. And the scientists were only too eager to master this unearthly power so they could use it themselves at will. However, Mother was completely out of control, she didn’t allow them to have her reined in. So after Frank and I were born, the scientists had Mother locked in a heavy-duty vault inside the facility and turned their whole attention to Frank and me. They hoped they could have us eating out of their hand and have full control over our magical abilities.
At age of six, we were subjected to an altogether different ordeal. For the sake of achieving the best result possible, the scientists started to treat us not in the same way but completely differently. While they continued to take good care of me and were being very nice to me those days, they began roughing Frank up, picking on him, and deliberately pissing him off. They also goaded us into clashing with each other. They cheered our fighting and even presented the winner with small gifts.
Of course, they changed their dealing with us and made us go against each other on purpose. Mother continued to mess with the occupants of the facility. She couldn’t break out of the vault she was locked in, but she still could employ her magical powers. She emitted bursts of dark, supernatural energy every now and then that not only overloaded electrical systems and either broke down or caused to malfunction various hi-tech machines but also badly injured everyone who was close to the vault. So scientists figured that constantly making Frank indignant would boost his magical powers and he would be able to bring Mother down for the scientists’ benefit.
However, when Frank and I turned sixteen, something happened in the facility. The scientists failed to foretell that something like that might happen at some point in the future. What happened was that Mother had been gathering up her magical power that had been reduced before, what with being for such a way long time in the Void, and once Mother accumulated enough magical power, which happened on Frank’s and my reaching the age of sixteen, she let loose an enormous surge of dark energy every which way. It wreaked destruction on the facility, crumbling walls, bursting electronics, blowing out hi-tech machines, and killing a lot of personnel. By doing chaos and destruction, Mother wanted to give us a chance to break out of the facility. Sure enough, we took advantage of it and got out giving our chasers the slip.
Unfortunately for her, Mother wasn’t able to make it out of the facility with us. The magical outburst so exhausted her it was quite easy for the facility sentinels to bag her once more. Frank promised that as soon as he would be as strong as Mother, he would come back and rescue her. It had been twenty years since that day and now I wondered what took Frank so long to get back here in Vegas to rescue Mother. Maybe he just wanted to find me first so we can go and rescue her together. But I digress.
When sixteen-year-old Frank and I had escaped from the facility, my brother started to dwell on what we should do next. Still, I wasn’t all that keen on carrying on fleeing our persecutors along with Frank. He was wicked and pissed, just like Mother. We had never gotten along all that well. This and the scientists’ constant harassing him and prodding him into clashing against me during the past ten years made relations between us even worse. So I ditched him.
After that, I enlisted in
the US armed forces. As things turned out, I was quite good at it. Having started as a private, I soon became an officer, and then shortly after my joining Delta Force I ended up a troop commander. I was in many of the world’s hot spots, battling various terroristic groups. Despite my troubled boyhood, being confined to the facility and subjected to the scientists’ constant, cruel experiments and trials, I came to love my country and wanted to serve and protect it.
I had been serving my country for twenty long years, all the time concealing my magical powers, which by that time reached full growth and development, expanding into a terribly strong power. I could feel the magical flow inside me. Its might was terrifying and at the same time awe-inspiring. Possessing that kind of power, I knew I could do all but anything. For all my common sense telling me I best not to reveal my magical ability, I felt like using it and then against my better judgment I began doing it sometimes. Not too often but from time to time. When push came to shove, I would resort to employing my magic. Thanks to it, I successfully accomplished several challenging operations in the ‘Stan, bringing down a few atrocious terroristic gangs. Of course, I used my magic on the sly so nobody could notice something out of the ordinary.
Still, shortly afterward the facility scientists hunted me down. I wasn’t sure as to how they managed to succeed in tracking me down. They may have had some gadgets to locate whereabouts of magical activity. Anyway, they spied a blip on a radar screen, revealing my approximate position and in order to bring me back, they dispatched the facility guards, all of which were experienced ex-military persons. I had my magical power full-fledged, so I was absolutely unstoppable, meaning that taking out the whole squad of the facility guard wouldn’t have posed much of a challenge. And yet they somehow were able to seize me. At the facility scientists’ request, the top brass either declared me persona non grata or according to Frank, they declared me to be a terrorist, all my military achievements be damned. Even now I still wasn’t sure which was the case.
Outbreak (The Outbreak Series Book 1) Page 5
