The Pursuit (The Permutation Archives Book 2)

by Kindra Sowder

  Before anyone else had a chance to say a single word, an explosion rocking the ground beneath our feet, the large hanging lights above us swinging to and fro on their attachments. Then the gunfire started, rapid and in succession like when using a fully automatic weapon. Like King’s men had had in the forest and what was in our supplies before we lost them. Then the screams started right outside those bay doors, gunfire starting up again.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered as I listened, taking a step toward the doors and turning to look at Jameson, who was running to come next to me with a gun in his hand I hadn’t even noticed before.

  “Open the bay doors, God dammit!” he ordered, yelling at the top of his lungs back at the men behind the row of Humvees. “Now!”

  There was a beat of hesitation that was followed by the whirring sounds of the motors that pulled the massive doors open. I didn’t even wait. As soon as they were open enough for me to crawl under I was outside and staring into the fray of running, screaming people, and gunfire.

  Chapter

  NINETEEN

  I could sense the others following close behind, but I didn’t stop as they moved around me and out to engage our enemy soldiers. A soldier all in black was the closest to me, pulling the trigger and gunning down a man who I could tell wasn’t able to defend himself, running for his life against the onslaught of raining metal. My power uncurled in the very center of my gut, the pit of dread I had been feeling disappearing along with the release of energy. I cried out at the sight of the man falling to the ground, his dead eyes staring directly at me as if I could’ve done something to save him. Accusing. The soldier’s head swiveled on his head to turn toward me and, as I reached my hand out toward him, I let the power build in my palm and concentrated it on his body. Before I had the time to unleash Hell on his circulatory system, I was tackled to the ground, and another round of bullets punched violently into the ground. But I sensed that my savior wasn’t an ally right away. I felt his power, steady and pulsating against my back.

  Hot breath whooshed into my left ear as he leaned down and spoke to me through gritted teeth, his harsh words twisting his voice into something else entirely.

  “Well, hello, Mila.” I didn’t recognize the voice at all and I was certain it was one I had never heard before. And I was doubly sure that King was handing out my description and my name to his people, so they knew which freak to take into custody. He gripped my shoulders, pulled me up slightly, and slammed me into the ground, the soil gritty on my skin as I put my hands up my by face to attempt to stop the blow. He was too strong, doing it again when I couldn’t pull enough power into my hands quickly enough to halt the assault of the ground on my face.

  I felt the pinch of a needle in my neck, and I gasped, feeling the Paralisix I was injected with making quick work of my system. Or trying, at least. I didn’t have time to put two and two together and, as he whispered a curse, I jerked my head back and felt my scalp connect with his front teeth. A small gush of warmth followed searing, my scalp splitting from the impact. He screamed and fell backward, giving me the chance to turn onto my back, but he recovered quickly and was on top of me again. Straddling my hips, his hands came around my throat and began to squeeze. I felt the power within him, but couldn’t tell what gift he possessed, and he didn’t seem too keen on using it, but lucky for me, I was no longer afraid of what I could do. My own body was opening up to the potential all on its own, opening my mind as well. It was either he didn’t like to use it, or he had no idea how to control it. I had barely any control over my own, but I was learning.

  I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. Instead, I felt powerful as I reached my hand out to him and let the energy flow out of me and into him, focusing as best I could as I coughed. His hands squeezed harder even though I was sure King’s orders were to take me alive. He couldn’t get my power from me if I was dead, but little did they know I wasn’t going down without a fight. I had too much to do and too much to live for, for all that. I had an entire race of people to save from our ultimate enemy, and I wouldn’t stop until King was dead on the ground at my feet.

  My vision was beginning to blacken around the edges, causing me to lose focus so I could turn his blood into trillions of bombs within his bloodstream. I needed a new tactic, and I let my body guide me once again. It knew what to do better than I did. I clenched my hand into a fist, the power curling around the outer edges of my skin in a slightly shimmering shield that would not only pack more force into my punch, but protect me from any damage it could inflict on me. Once the small shield felt stable even to me, I lashed out and the punch connected with the apex of his chest, sending him flying to the ground as I felt his ribs crack from the pressure. He landed a great distance away and, when I sat up, he didn’t move. Even his chest had ceased rising and falling. He was dead. I jumped to my feet and the first enemy I came to was one of us, one of the people like me and Julius that had become a traitor to his own. Rage flared within me, causing the power to build even more in the center of my chest and threatening to climb my throat along with my rapidly beating heart.

  With one wave of my hand, he went flying, a scream of terror leaving him as his body slammed into something I couldn’t see past the building he flew by. I didn’t have to see him hit to know he was dead. The sound of flesh and muscle meeting something unforgiving was enough. A small woman dressed in the same military fashion walked out of the building across from me, a small mom and pop store now lay in ruins on the inside from what I could see through the window. Her strawberry blonde hair blew in the breeze that kicked up, sending dust and debris skittering along the ground at our feet. When she realized I was there, a smirk spread on her lips, and she made her way down the three stairs that led from the store as I moved toward her. The energy within her was intense and her muscles flexed in such an unnatural way as she approached, but I knew I could take her. I had the power within me even if I didn’t know exactly what it was she was capable of. And I didn’t care. I just had to stop her and her comrades from destroying King’s Forge.

  The woman broke out into a run, but I didn’t match her speed. Her blue eyes flashed with what looked like a shimmer of internal light. She was fast, but that speed was no match for what I could do to her insides. Or at least I hoped. When she was close enough, she pulled back a fist, and I did the same. My punch collided with her left cheek while hers met my lips. I felt it burst open and tasted blood, the impact of both forces sending the both of us into the air to land on our backs on the ground. I rolled over onto my stomach and rose to my hands and knees, spitting out the metallic tang of blood into the dirt. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and looked up at the woman who was already on her feet and making her way toward me, anger and frustration plain on her face as a bruise bloomed across her slender cheek.

  There was no time to react when she kicked out and her foot collided with my stomach, causing me to fly through the air again and roll along the ground to stop next to another building. Pain ran rampant through my gut, spreading outward from where her foot had come in contact and causing nausea to threaten to spill over and onto the ground. I rose to my hands and knees again, the tips of her shining black combat boots coming into view as the world swam around me and bile burned the back of my throat.

  “You know,” she said in a sultry, smoky voice, “I was told you were hot shit. From here you don’t look like anything special.” She crouched in front of me and my eyes met hers. I was seething with fury as an explosion rocked the ground, and more screams rose into the air.

  “What the Hell is so special about you?”

  My resolve resurfaced, and my fingers dug into the dirt beneath my flesh, curling into it with rage. Those words were all it took to cause my power to flare within me again, my heart skipping a beat as it took over. I let it, knowing at this point it would guide my actions just like it had before in the forest.

  “This is wh
y,” I spat, sending my power out and into her perfectly sculpted chin.

  She went flying through the air and rolled across the ground. I stood and stalked to her when she finally stopped, reaching out with an invisible hand to push her into the ground so she couldn’t move. She was strong, but she was no match for what I had to offer, and her wide eyes told me she knew it. I pushed my power into her body and focused on her blood cells, causing the atoms within them to shift just a fraction to inflict pain. A soft whimper like cry passed through her lips. Using only the invisible force I created, I lifted her from the ground and made her face me. Her face was twisted in fear and agony, a small trickle of blood running from within her right nostril from the small amount of damage that had inflicted inside of her body.

  “Is that all you’ve got?” she asked, attempting to look tough even though her expression said differently.

  “Oh, no,” I cooed as took another step toward her. She tried to squirm, but couldn’t move an inch. Not as long as I had my hold on her. “I’m just getting started.”

  The image of her blood cells floated into my mind again as my energy pushed into her body. She screamed as it slowly moved within her, spreading through her veins like cancer, taking every single part of her circulatory system into its mighty grasp. I raised my hand and began to close it, squeezing on her insides with a ferocity I hadn’t even realized I was capable of. I’d had enough, and I was finished being nice. It had gotten me nowhere, but the rage took me anywhere I pleased, and it would lead me to King’s doorstep if I let it.

  Rapid gunfire caught my attention, and I turned to see a man not even twenty feet away with a gun pointed in my direction, the bullets hurtling to meet my flesh. Determined to chew me up and kill me, spitting my soul out into the atmosphere. With my other hand, palm out and toward the tiny projectiles, I emitted my energy out to them. Their progression slowed, but they were still coming. With a grunt and another push, they finally stopped within mere inches of my face and torso.

  The woman struggled against my hold, so I closed it into a fist, tightening my invisible grip on her body. My focus split among two objectives, which was something I had never experienced before. Something warm ran out of my nose and down to my top lip and when some made their way past them, I tasted the iron tang of blood and knew I had to end this soon or risk some kind of damage I knew nothing about. Before I risked anything even more severe because I had barely any experience with my own strength, I forced more energy into the bullets, turning them and sending them hurdling into the man who had fired them in my direction. They pierced his body, sending sprays of blood into the air, a rivulet of gore seeping from the corner of his mouth. He fell to his knees and then face planted into the ground, sending a plume of dust into the atmosphere.

  Turning my attention back to the woman before me, I used the back of my hand to wipe the blood from my upper lip, only feeling it smear across my flesh. My attention was back where it had been before I was interrupted by a barrage of bullets, back on her blood cells within her veins and back where I had started. They were still moving, vibrating against one another as I increased their frequency. She screamed, black and purple bleeding out underneath her skin and the whites of her eyes turning a lovely shade of pink and getting darker as the seconds passed.

  A bomb went off in the distance, shaking the ground underneath me, but doing nothing to distract me from my objective. I was going to kill her, and no one could stop me. And I wouldn’t stop with her. The others that were tearing into King’s Forge and into the innocent people that lived within its confines needed to pay for the blood they spilled. And it wasn’t just for them. It was for those they had experimented on and even killed in the sterile walls of the compound. Then, once I found him, I would move on to King himself.

  The sound of tires moving over gravel and dirt came from a short distance beside me, but I didn’t look away from the woman. Her lips twisted into a grimace, her teeth gritted as she tried to hold in her wails of agony, but it didn’t last, and I could barely hear someone calling my name over her screams.

  “Mila!” Julius’s voice broke through the other sounds around me.

  Ryder’s voice shortly followed, causing me to break eye contact with the woman I only wanted to see as a broken body on the ground, laying in a puddle of her dead and coagulated blood. They were all on the Humvee we would be taking to Kiawah Island, each one of them watching me with either fascination or terror with Jameson at the wheel. Both Ryder and Julius were in the back seats, Julius holding the back passenger door open and one foot close to touching the ground. Ryder leaned into his back and Caius watched it all from the front passenger seat. There was another Humvee following close behind, a smaller one housing Ajax, undoubtedly made for a smaller troop. But why so many were forced into the first, larger vehicle was beyond me.

  “Mila, come on!” Caius yelled as he rolled down. “Get in the damn car!”

  I hesitated for a moment, knowing that if I dropped the woman she could possibly be strong enough to come after me as soon as I turned my back. The uncertainty caused me to glance at her and, once seeing that her eyes squeezed shut, and she was in pure agony, I felt we could make it out without incident despite the sounds of battle all around us. I looked back at the men waiting for me in the Humvee and finally spotted Doctor Devi squished between the two large men in the front and practically in Caius’s lap. And I made my decision.

  Dropping my hand, the power flooded back into me and felt like the kick back from a rubber band that had been stretched beyond its limit, causing me to stumble a couple of steps, nearly falling until I felt a pair of strong arms come around me. I looked up and into Julius’s steel gray eyes as he put my arm around his shoulders even though he was much taller than me, and began to lead me to the waiting vehicle.

  “We can’t just leave them here to die, Julius,” I shouted at him over the constant gunfire and terrified cries. Before I realized it, we were next to the open back door of the Humvee, and he was pushing me inside. “King will kill all of them. Do you understand that? We can’t leave them!” Now I was yelling at all of them as I was pushed into the vehicle and into the center seat, Julius squeezing in beside me and slamming the door shut.

  Caius looked back at me and met my gaze with the same intensity as I felt boiling over inside of me. “It’s either we stay here and die with them, or leave and take King down. Your choice.”

  My hatred for our dictator overshadowed my compassion for those in the small town that would die surely die because we left them to fend for themselves. But nothing was certain. It was even possible those within the underground housing of one sect of the Fallen Paradigm would come out to save the day.

  Tears stung my eyes as I nodded and sobbed, “Just go.” I turned to look out the back window, Ajax following close behind.

  Jameson pushed down on the gas, and we were off and making our way through King’s Forge to put as much distance as we could get between them and us and we weren’t being followed. Or so we thought. Two large planes flew in line behind us and then broke formation to follow our flanks. Large barrels came out of hidden compartments on their noses, the inside of the dark barrels beginning to turn a bright red, a whirring sound like an engine revving to life taking over the airwaves as I looked back and watched in horror. Projectiles started to come out of what I knew at that moment were guns, slamming into the ground around us and sending dirt into the air. The metal pinged off of the surface of the Humvee we were in as well as Ajax’s, sending sparks outward in a small shower of light.

  “Shit,” Jameson cried as he turned the wheel slightly in an attempt to avoid a few shots to the frame of the vehicle. When it didn’t work, he straightened out and continued on our path despite the raining metal that threatened to punch holes in our metal cocoon. “It’s okay, these things are bulletproof.”

  “Oh, that’s reassuring,” Doctor Devi shot ba
ck, her voice even more high-pitched than usual.

  The sound of static came over the CB radio, causing me to whip my head around to see it. Ajax’s voice broke through and then was clear as a bell at first.

  “Evasion tactics, J-Man?” he asked, a few syllables breaking apart in the frequency. “Get at least one of those bastards off your tail?”

  “Ryder, what do you think?” Jameson asked as he stared at him in the rearview mirror.

  We didn’t have time for questions, only action. We were continuously hit with large rounds. That much I could tell from the constant sound of their metal bodies ramming into the outside of what kept us safe.

  “Do it.”

  Jameson picked up the receiver and shouted into it, holding down the button. “Evasion tactics are a go. I repeat, evasion tactics are a go!”

  “No,” I cried. I couldn’t stand the thought of Ajax leaving us, being alone to deal with whichever craft would follow him.

  “We can’t separate. That’s what they want,” Julius yelled toward the front, barely audible over the metal against metal grind.

  “It’s our only option,” Caius replied. “We can’t handle both crafts for much longer.”

  I turned around and watched as Ajax jerked the wheel, pulling off the road altogether and back into the encroaching forest that was beginning to surround us. The plane flanking our right followed, taking off with a burst of flame and energy at its back end while the one at our left continued to fire at us in rapid succession. Fully automatic weapons. That much I knew for certain.

  “Mila, can you get rid of the other one?” Caius yelled over the constant noise.

  I turned to him and replied, “Yes, but…”