Predominance (22 page)

Before long, Denali slid the window open and warned us we were getting close. Damian and I stuck our heads underneath the plastic cover and got ready.            

By the time we arrived at Damian's cabin, the rain had stopped, leaving behind nothing but a steady dripping and the sound of the wind rustling the giant firs surrounding the place. Denali eased to a stop at the right side of the house and waited. The place was similar to Denali's, only twenty years newer and with no adjacent water of any type. Naturally, Damian wanted to jump out of the truck as soon as we parked, but I convinced him not to. We needed to stick to the plan if we wanted to have a prayer of coming out of this alive.

After a while, Denali got out of the truck wearing his dad's overalls, which also had a very visible logo that read Johnson & Sons. A perfect disguise, if you ask me. But then again, our plan wasn't based purely on diversion, but also on strategy and timing—and we didn't have much of neither. I only had a few variables running in my head, and they didn't look very good.

Denali walked cautiously to the front door. The eerie near-silence made me nervous. I tried to focus my senses on my surroundings, hoping to trigger that special radar I'd used before, but I could see nothing—not because I didn't sense any imminent danger, but because something was blocking me. Somehow, Damian was radiating a strong energy that was keeping me from making full use of my powers. I could only assume that this was the dark energy Sarah had told me about, trying to
keep my brain from absorbing the energy that had sparked my powers before—but why, I could only speculate.

Denali stood on the porch, sweat dripping from his forehead. His eyes scanned the area just before he reached the door. He was trying to keep it together, but it was obvious he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. In the past few days, the poor guy had turned from limo driver to human smuggler to spy. I couldn't help feeling guilty for putting him through all of this—he was a really good man.

Denali finally knocked on the door and waited. After a few seconds with no response he knocked again, but nothing. Suddenly, my mind overcame Damian's jamming and began to branch out and scan the deceptively calm forest. “Wait,” I whispered. “Something's not right.” My words alarmed Damian, making him want to jump out of the truck again. “Wait!” I insisted, taking hold of his arm. “Can't you feel it?” He shook his head; I guess his troubled mind couldn't focus on anything beyond his wife. Yet the truth of the matter was that I couldn't sense her anywhere near the cabin.

“Tell me!” Damian demanded.

“Your wife isn't in the cabin.” I explained quickly.

Damian's forehead creased with a mixture of anger and confusion. A cloudy image flashed into my head then, making me flinch. At first I couldn't distinguish what it was; it took me several attempts before I could completely unveil it. When I did, I saw Captain Black leading an assault squad through the woods. Some of them were already aiming their weapons at the cabin, ready to open fire at the first sight of their target. I didn't need to see any more to understand we had just walked into an ambush. “It's a trap,” I snapped. “We have to pull back before it's too late!”

“NO!” Damian countered. “If my wife's not here, they must know where she is!”

“And what the hell are you going to do? Ask them politely?”

“We can take them, Victor.” His voice hardened. “You and me. Together!”

“No!” I objected, understanding all too well the consequences of using our abilities in a state of anger. “It's too risky! If we lose control, we'll lose ourselves. Besides, I didn't come here to start a war I can't win, Damian!”

“You've seen what we can do with this power!” Damian insisted, looking right into my eyes. That's when I first noticed that his eyes seemed to have changed color. They were now a light brown that, at first glance, seemed to be the result of the refraction of the sunlight through the plastic cover that concealed us. “What makes you think that we can't win?” he added confidently.

“The fact that I'm not willing to kill anybody, Damian.” I waited to see his reaction. “Are you?”

His eyes dropped as he let out an apparent sigh of despair. For a second I thought that I'd gotten through to him... But when his gaze slid back to mine I realized that his sigh of despair carried a painful yet unyielding decision. “Then I'm afraid this is where we part company, my friend.”

His words hit me like a truck. I knew what would follow, and the consequences of it all. But what rankled the most was knowing that there was nothing I could do to stop it. Still, realizing the repercussions his decision would have for all of us, I gave it one final try as Damian tossed the plastic cover to the side and readied himself to jump out. “Please,” I begged, taking hold of his arm. “Don't do this.”

He glared at the hand that held him down and said, “If you're not with me, then you just another snag in my way.” His eyes cursed at me as he shook my hand off his arm.

“Damian!” I called after him as he jumped out of the truck bed and ran to the cabin.

Another sharp perception shocked my brain, allowing me to hear voices coming from the woods; yet my distress limited my ability to pinpoint their exact locations.

“I've got a visual on one of them, sir.”

“Bellator?”

“No sir. The other one.”

“Wait for me to arrive at the site. I'm on my way.”

“No time, sir. I have a clean shot… I'm taking it.”

“I said wait, goddamn it!”

Though Captain Black seemed strangely opposed to opening fire, some of the soldiers aiming at the cabin had their own agendas—possibly retaliation for Damian's display of power back in the Lab, which I'm sure left some of them seriously injured, if not worse. Still, the advantage I had of knowing their next move gave me the opportunity to warn Damian and Denali before it was too late.

“Get down!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.

Damian's reaction to my warning was far quicker than Denali's, yet they both hit the dirt before the first bullets reached their position. Fuming at having missed, the squad opened fire with everything they had. The peace of the forest was shattered by an incredible uproar of gunfire in which Damian was the main target and poor Denali had become, once again, the unfortunate collateral.

The first round of bullets forced Damian to seek cover behind a huge stack of logs next to the cabin. Denali, on the other hand, dodging bullets, crawled and crept off the side of porch and headed back toward the truck. Knowing my presence would only worsen the situation, I kept my head down and away from their scopes. During a momentary lull, Denali was able to reach the truck, while Damian seemed to be cornered between the shed and the tall stack of wood. Meanwhile, I was trying desperately to scheme a way out of this mess—when another vision showed me the shooters advancing towards the cabin. Denali, still on the ground, opened the truck door, slid out one of his shotguns, and cocked it.

“Denali,” I called and shook my head at him, knowing that shooting back would only draw their fire. Denali saw me and stopped, nodding.   

“Shoot!” Damian's voice resurfaced from behind the stack of wood.

“NO!” I countered, looking at Denali. His face was scared and confused.

“We have a deal, damn it!” Damian insisted furiously. “Now, shoot!”

Denali, seemingly scare of him, obeyed the foolish command, and began to shoot at the squad from behind the opened truck door. One of the approaching shooters returned fire, just as I had expected, blasting out the window above Denali's head. He ducked down behind the door, cringing; I could see his eyes bulging with fear as his trembling hands reloaded his weapon. “Shoot! Shoot!!” Damian kept pressing, his voice filled with rage.

Denali cocked his shotgun and moved around the door to shoot. And though I could see the imminent danger in my head, there wasn't enough time for me to warn him, and the spark of my hypersenses hadn't awakened my ability to shield him. The shooter, who was a trained professional, had taken advantage and moved in closer while Denali reloaded the shotgun. He was now only twenty feet away and ready to shoot at his new target.

The slow motion trance I'd experience before suddenly took control of my senses, putting me in the first row of a horrifying spectacle. Denali's eyes widened in surprise when he realized the close proximity of the shooter. I saw him trying to lift the barrel of his shotgun at the same time the shooter was pulling his trigger. The last desperate warning I tried to shout out to Denali was drowned in the blast of gunfire, and the slow motion trance only made the horrifying event even more painful to watch.

The shooter opened fire before Denali could even aim his weapon. The next thing I saw was Denali being brutally riddled by the rapid fire of the Mac-10 the shooter held in his hands. Not even the slow motion trance allowed me to keep count of all the bullets that pierced his body. All I was able to see was the blood splattering from every wound inflicted, along with the expression of agony on Denali's face as he fell slowly to the ground.

“NOOOOOO!!!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, popping up from beneath the plastic cover. The shooter, who didn't let go of the trigger until his magazine was exhausted, recognized me the second he saw me. My slow motion trance ended the second my feet touched the ground. I held Denali's mangled body in my arms while the shooter hastened toward me.

Denali gargled blood for a long second before his eyes closed forever. A lone tear escaped the corner of one eye, and in that moment I hated Damian more than I had ever hated anyone in my life.

New heights of pain and anger roared through me. I tried to control my rage, but it was useless; I could feel it soothing my pain, taking control. My eyes began to burn again, this time with the same intensity they had back in the Lab during my first escape. I directed my blazing gaze toward the shooter, who was now just a few feet away from me. “I've got Bellator,” he said, pressing his earpiece. The empty magazine he'd used to kill Denali dropped to the ground as he reached for a new one behind his belt.

Everything I saw from that moment on I saw as a spectator only, sitting behind my eyes, with absolutely no control of the actions my body took—or of the secondary reasoning I felt gearing up in the back of my head. My hand rose before the shooter, who was just about to fire his weapon. I glared at him and clenched my fist tightly, so hard my arm trembled with the strain. The shooter dropped his gun then and brought his hands to his throat, as if trying to remove invisible hands from around his neck. With his face reflecting nothing but pure horror and desperation, he began to gasp like a fish out of water. I could feel the connection that my mind had established between my hand and his windpipe. And though my anger was in control of me now, I still understood the consequences of what I was planning to do, and how easy it would be. All I had to do was squeeze a little tighter, and my friend would be avenged.

But something blocked me, resuming the game of mercy in my head once again. Suddenly, I found myself stuck in the middle of a mental conflict. Part of me condoned the change I was undergoing and even saw it as just, while the other part dreaded and hated it. Should I fight it? I asked myself. Why? It's going to happen anyway. And if I let it go now, I might just be able to avenge all the innocents who had suffered at the hands of Dr. Walker and R.C. Labs. As these thoughts stoked my anger, my fist tightened. The shooter's eyes turned bloodshot as tiny vessels burst in the whites.

It was then that Damian's voice caught my attention—a growl, similar to the one I'd used to address the guard during my first escape from R.C. Labs. “Ready to kill yet?” he asked as he emerged from behind the woodpile, his eyes an opaque sulfurous hue—a color that no longer seemed human, but rather a representation of pure evil.

As my glare returned to the shooter, I caught my reflection in the truck's wing-mirror—and saw that my eyes had changed too. A dark and unnatural cloud of gray had erased all the humanity from the honest brown eyes I'd inherited from my father, and a streak of my dark hair had turned dead white, as if part of the innocence of my youth had been taken away by the unnatural anger I felt.

“NO!” I snarled to myself, refusing to accept what was happening to me.

The imploring look on the shooter's face sparked a hint of mercy that made me stall—if for only a moment. Then I thought of Yvette, and the promise I'd made to my father flashed into my mind. Their voices began to echo inside my head…

“I love you, Victor.”

“You have to live, son. You're destined for something greater than you can possibly imagine. I've known it ever since the moment you were born; since the very first time I held you in my arms...”

My fist released the soldier then, allowing him to gasp in a huge lungful of much-needed breath. He dropped to his knees as soon as the connection was broken. I lowered my hand and breathed slowly myself, feeling the burning sensation in my eyes slowly subside. The soldier was frozen in fear, yet he kept glancing at the machine gun in front of him, undecided about what to do. I looked into his uncertain eyes and uttered one word that helped him make his decision. “Run!”

He looked at me, frightened and confused, then opted to follow my suggestion and got back on his feet again, his eyes wider than any I'd ever seen in a human being.

Damian, who was watching from the corner, didn't seem too happy about my decision. “What are you doing?” he shouted. “Finish him off!” Another look from me was enough for the shooter to flee like a whipped dog. A quick glance into the wing-mirror proved that my eyes had returned to normal. I slowly laid Denali's lifeless body on the ground while Damian kept screaming at me, like a kid throwing a tantrum. “What's wrong with you? He's getting away! “