It was then that he realized the constant rumble closing in on his heels was no longer behind him. In alarm, he slammed on the proverbial brakes, skidding to a halt across the wet streets just as Malkier tore through the lower floors of a building behind him.
“You cannot run forever, Brings the Rain,” he growled.
The rain continued to pound on the cement. The breaths of his enemy steamed in the cool air, each heavy like a rhino exhaling. Jonathan heard the thudding of his own heart. The beat strummed along, its pace accelerated by all the exertion, but the rhythm slowed, now, as he stood still. This seemingly invincible enemy wasn’t bringing panic—and he wasn’t going to make Jonathan change his course.
Jonathan drew himself up to his full height, and sighed. “Well, isn’t that just the truth.”
For a moment, he broke away from Malkier’s gaze, and grinned to mask the pain in his shoulder as he coiled Doomsday around the injured arm. When he looked back, Malkier’s veracity seemed diminished, his eyes having grown large with the anticipation. Finally—his son’s killer meant to stand his ground. The massive beast planted his feet, claws gripping into fists at his sides.
Jonathan remembered the morning he had killed the alien’s son—how he’d wrapped his fist with chain. He gripped the spiked metal end of the weapon in his palm, then wound what was left of the chain tightly around his hand. For a moment, he lingered on the act in front of the alien, holding his fist up, turning the metal over a few times as though inspecting his work. Everything about his body language said there was no hurry. Only when he was satisfied did he turn his attention back to the monster.
Malkier watched him now with a fascination beneath his eagerness for blood, his eyes narrowing when Jonathan raised the hand free of chain and pointed to a destination off in the skyline. The alien broke their stare, allowed his eyes to glance where Jonathan had pointed. Not too far away, the skeleton of a tall building stood, its construction still underway.
“Your son named me,” Jonathan said. “It was the last thing he ever did. When he’d lost the will to fight, I threw him from the roof. Thing was, he survived the fall.”
He watched as the Borealis within the Alpha Ferox flinched. The alien seeming unable to process Jonathan’s arrogance. Why, after all, would this man stand there and beg a superior being for the most gruesome death he could deliver?
“You see, I was tired, so it took me awhile to get to him. When I did, I found him reaching out with the last of his strength.” A pause followed Jonathan’s words. “You’re his father. What do you think it was—what was he reaching for?”
In a city brought to shambles, there was a moment filled with nothing but pouring rain and the growing sound of Malkier’s heavy breaths accelerating in anger.
“I think it was dignity,” Jonathan said. “He died wanting the respect you denied him.”
The alien took a step forward, planting his foot so hard the ground shook between them. “You seek my anger, human?” he thundered.
Jonathan’s stare grew deadly serious as he watched his enemy’s pupils begin to shift, the white gaze beginning to fill with the web of black veins.
“I do,” Jonathan said. “You see, my father and I don’t believe you know the meaning of the word.”
The length of three breaths passed in stillness before Jonathan made the first move. He stepped forward, then accelerated into a charge, and Malkier’s massive frame followed suit. Jonathan had been conscious of three thoughts, one for each of his breaths:
One, a head-on collision with Malkier would end like a bull charging a wrecking ball. Sure, the gesture would be epic and the impact would shake the city, but the wrecking ball would be mostly unscathed, though desperately in need of a bath to remove all the bull meat. Two, Malkier wanted the blindness of revenge—he wanted this to be the moment his vendetta story ended. Three, right now, Jonathan didn’t give a damn about any story other than the one that ended with them on that substation.
Jonathan never dropped Malkier’s gaze—the orange glow pouring from his eyes nearly did the work for him, made him appear as lost to the thrall of revenge as his enemy.
So it was, when Jonathan’s legs drew down to gather all the power they could into a final clash with his enemy, a different scenario played out in his mind’s eye. He broke Malkier’s stare, looking to the skyline behind the beast as his father’s training took hold and turned the vision in his head into a reality.
Leaving the ground as Malkier charged forward, Jonathan shot high and right, a bullet spiraling forward and denying his enemy the honest collision his words had promised. Malkier, not seeing the change quickly enough, was already off course when the time to adapt had passed. The alien’s claw grasped air as Jonathan spiraled past, his chained fist tagging the alien like a harmless slap to the face as he barreled through the gap over Malkier’s shoulder.
He was out of reach before the massive beast had time to dig his feet into the pavement and reverse direction. Jonathan angled himself to pounce off the rapidly-approaching building’s corner—became a cue ball ricocheting off one side of the street to another. When he was in free fall toward the substation, he had only a moment to take in the sight he’d hoped: the electrical grid feeding the city’s transit systems—a network of interconnecting wires and metal towers covering the station’s roof. Plummeting toward them, he was forced into an awkward aerial maneuver to dodge as many of crisscrossed wires as possible. He landed hard, making his tumble through the substation’s electrical towers difficult to control. He turned over and over, wincing in pain as his shoulder struck the ground again and again, before finally rolling onto his knees and coming to a smooth skid across the wet cement.
He had enough time to see the massive Ferox coming after him in the sky above. The alien crashed down, making none of the efforts he had to avoid the power lines and pulling down two of the towers with him as he landed. Wires broke—power arced off wet steel as they became exposed around them.
Electricity surged through them, and Malkier’s angry expression flinched, first in awareness of the discomfort, then from the voltage itself.
The blackening slits of his eyes twitched as his jaw dropped open and Jonathan saw the light of arcing currents between the metallic teeth. Jonathan shivered as well as power went through him. Though he had had some protection from the rubber soles of his shoes, his arm was still wrapped in alien steel and his clothes were soaked through. He had to resist the spastic pull of tensing muscles in his neck and force his eyes to stay on his enemy. Ignoring the electricity, Malkier began to come for him.
The change was sudden, hitting him no more than three steps into his charge. A muddled confusion surfaced on the alien’s face.
At that very same moment, a smile broke on Jonathan’s lips. He closed his eyes, he no longer needed to see his enemy—he knew exactly where the monster stood. The awareness, absent since Malkier’s arrival, was suddenly there in his mind. He could feel the portal stone’s signal—there were two tickets home after all.
His face grew certain then, his brow drawing down as he released the spiked end of Doomsday. The chain unraveled from his arm, falling to the ground as Jonathan rose off his knees. He opened his eyes, the killer’s predatory gaze focusing on the towering creature whose charge had staggered in its disorientation.
Jonathan threw himself into the air, spinning his body to let the chain follow around him as he arced over Malkier. He had to ignore all the pain in his shoulder, push it into the background as he launched the business end of Doomsday at its target.
A spiked edge of alien steel drove down into Malkier’s face, finding the long scar that ran down the monster’s cheek and neck. The alien’s forward momentum wavered, coming to a confused walk as Jonathan landed behind him. Finally, the monster stopped. His back, still turned to Jonathan, stiffened as he stood straight, hesitantly bringing a clawed hand to the side of its face.
Jonathan watched as the hand came away with tar-like black blood sti
cking to his fingertips, the scar along his face now a re-opened wound.
“1.21 gigawatts, asshole,” Jonathan whispered.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
THE NIGHT DOUGLAS died within The Never, there had been a storm. He’d been bloodied and cold, his clothes soaked through and heavy. No longer able to stand, feeling himself fading away, Douglas hadn’t understood what he saw when it happened—how he’d managed to wound the seemingly invincible enemy. Yet, Doomsday had drawn blood.
With his mind locked up somewhere on the fringe of his son’s consciousness, he’d been left a powerless observer without a body of his own, gaining a whole new outlook on the idea of I think, therefore I am.
Douglas would have rephrased this into, I remember and therefore I obsess.
He’d found himself with more than enough quiet time to painstakingly replay his final moments. A good thing, because the memory he’d had to start from wasn’t the clearest. His death was shrouded by adrenaline, fatigue, and pain. At the moment that mattered most, his focus had been pulling inward. Paying attention to what was happening around him had taken a backseat to the terminal state of his injuries. In the end, he’d had to pull the memory apart and reassemble it over and over again.
There hadn’t been anything unusual about the location, though he’d been on one of the taller roof tops in Portland’s skyline. Douglas remembered the light, so bright and white all around him that he’d been temporarily blinded. His body had stiffened; there had been this eardrum-collapsing eruption of sound that had rolled through the both of them.
He’d already lost the battle at that point—just saw no reason to admit it to himself. Of course, on some level, he’d known that the day had come. His best wasn’t going to be enough this time—his survival was past its expiration. He’d never encountered an Alpha—only knew what to call the thing because Mr. Clean had shown him footage of battles in the ancient Arena. Recognizing what the monster was, the thought had occurred to him that the Ferox leaders felt the death of Echoes the Borealis needed to be expedited. That would mean the Alpha was their weapon of assassination. It did not take long for him to realize he was fighting more than the flesh and bone of an experienced Ferox warrior.
He’d been on edge before he arrived, as he’d been unable to sense its location—only found the beast initially by watching the news broadcast after he found himself activated without sensing a target. What came to bother him more was how silent the Alpha was once he engaged it. Few of the Ferox were overly talkative—but none had ever been completely wordless. The Alpha’s quiet study of him, the peculiar manner in which it seemed separate from the violence it was taking part in had dug a deepening well of uncertainty in him the more he’d failed to do any sort of damage. The battle itself had lasted far longer than it should have—the Alpha had tortuously drawn it out.
He had always been skilled at dispatching the trespassers and Heyer’s training had taken him to a level of lethality few humans ever achieved, but nothing in his arsenal would have swayed the outcome. By the end, he was reduced to hoping for stupid luck to intervene on his behalf. He’d been crawling away when the Alpha Ferox lifted him off the ground by the throat. The claw might as well have been a steel shackle around his neck—he wasn’t going to break free of it. Yet, the massive creature wasn’t trying to cause him more pain. It held him off the ground but didn’t stop him from breathing, didn’t strangle him or crush his wind pipe, though either act would have taken little effort. The Alpha simply wanted him at eye level.
“You are unique, Echoes the Borealis. I feared I would find you undeserving of such a mantle,” the Alpha had said. “It gives me no joy that events should come to this. Your death is unjust, but one of purpose nonetheless. I will remember the sacrifice you made for me tonight.”
The words had been spoken in English, distorted somewhat by the vocal cords of Malkier’s Feroxian biology, but discernible. Not the obscure translation of meaning or his own inner voice speaking to him through the device.
“For what it is worth, human,” Malkier said as his free hand reached up to the collar of Douglas’s jacket and ripped it off, the fabric tearing like wet newspaper under the creature’s strength and exposing the soft orange glow of the device on his torso. “You will always be remembered by my people.”
Grunting through the pain, Douglas had resisted. Though it was agonizing, he had lifted the knee of his good leg, pressing into the monster’s abdomen in an effort to push them apart. Malkier watched the man with a mixture of admiration for what seemed to be a refusal to admit defeat, and at the same time, scorn for his willingness to be so disrespectful. As though the act of placing a limb on him under the circumstances was like walking through his home with muddy shoes.
“Stop strug—”
Malkier’s words were cut off as Douglas spit a mouthful of blood across his face.
The Alpha Ferox shivered in rage. He dropped the remains of Douglas’s ripped clothing and straightened his fingers, slowly raising the claws until they were like a spear between them. Seeing the Alpha meant to impale him with its finger tips, Douglas’s fist had tightened around the spiked end of Doomsday, knowing it would be the last effort he ever made. He stared into Malkier’s eyes, unwilling to give the alien the satisfaction of seeing him blink as he took aim. He’d figured, if this monster had a soft spot, the eye socket was his best bet.
That had been when the world went white around them. Douglas had struck down with Doomsday, just as he was hit with an explosion of sound, blinding disorientation, and an uncontrolled spasming of his muscles. He’d been convinced that death had shown him the form it would take. The light had been so bright, so familiar. Like the hard, white shock he experienced when closing the gates—so it had been somewhat of a disappointment when he realized this wasn’t the case.
Nerves had started to come back online and pain resurfaced, along with the cold that fell down all around him. His eyes finally focused, and he realized his back was on the rooftop. Malkier knelt over him with a look of startled disbelief on his face, his chest heaving as though air was suddenly in short supply, and his eyes beginning to blacken. The claw that had previously been on Douglas’s throat, now clutched at his own. Douglas felt himself struggling to breathe, a sensation like drowning surfacing in his awareness as he looked up from the ground at the injured monster.
He may have missed the eye, but Doomsday had drawn a line down the beast’s face—a tar-black gash where the point had torn through and somehow managed to cut into the monster’s armor. Yet it had done more than just that—it cut down the creature’s face, but also into its neck. The blood was surging beneath the monster’s hand, too much to be merely a flesh wound—he’d hit some kind of artery.
Douglas thought to move, to grasp at hope now that the monster showed weakness. Sharp agony went through him the moment he tried and was followed by a bout of coughing that he couldn’t hold in. His eyes tracked down to the monster’s other hand to see red dripping off its finger tips. Human blood. His blood. It was then that he saw the four holes from Malkier’s claws in a line down his chest, the wretched wounds made visible by the orange glow emanating from him. A glow that was fading. It was later that he realized that the feeling of drowning he’d experienced had been his own blood pouring into his lungs.
His head sagged back to the rooftop, his body no longer willing to expend the effort of holding it up. Malkier struggled to reach his feet, needing the hand covered in human blood to support him.
As the monster reclaimed his full height, Douglas’s memory had grown fainter. He didn’t truly comprehend it all, and his mind had not seen any further use for what his eyes could show him. Instead, he searched out thoughts of his wife and son as he lost hold of his life. Yet, he later realized that he had seen three lines of light emanating from Malkier’s chest—a device that looked like a brother to the one he’d seen on Heyer’s chest so many times before. One yellow line of energy on top of the other. Those lines had not been t
here before, or at least, their presence had been hidden from him while they fought, but now the familiar shape of the Borealis implant faltered in Malkier’s chest, fluttering without rhythm, flickering like a florescent bulb that couldn’t quite find the power to sustain itself—malfunctioning.
Every strength had its weaknesses, Heyer had said.
One could spend a millennium safeguarding against every contingency, and it would still be a mistake to believe yourself invincible. Heyer was humble enough to realize that his membership in the most privileged species in existence made him vulnerable to the same blind assumption that he was beyond being hurt.
Heyer had spent so many years breaking the encryption on the device, because the two remaining Borealis didn’t know how to kill one another, and only a man had ever gotten close.
That blinding white light, the sound like an explosion, the surge sent through them, Douglas had realized it could only have been lightning striking the rooftop. Malkier’s bare feet had been an inch deep in rain water, and the current had flowed right into both of them. Still, a surge of electricity was too simple, far too common a threat. The Borealis could not have overlooked such a glaring weakness in their devices. No, there had to be something else at play.
So, Douglas had continued to replay the memory over and over in his mind, tried to pick out the relevant variables, to see where the creative genius of an advanced race had failed. He looked for some environmental oddity, something else on the roof top, something about that storm. It was when he’d begun to lose faith that he could find the answer, that he realized he was going about his search for a weakness in the same manner that the god-like intellect of the Borealis would have gone about it. The Borealis would have built their devices to protect against any common danger to their species throughout history.
The Never Paradox (Chronicles Of Jonathan Tibbs Book 2) Page 57
