Tag: (book) I am prophecy

Picture from freedigitalphotos.net

A light glow emanated from a twitching hand. A hand that was never supposed to move again.

Unnaturals did not heal when unconscious. Knocked down, all they needed was a final bullet through the brain to put them out of mankind’s misery. … A big bullet.

If they woke up again, Unnaturals were cranky.

Andros tore his fingers loose from the hot metal, leaving being permanent fingerprints, and tried to realign the ammo without taking his eyes off the freak. When she pushed up, the broken bones on her shoulder pushed out even further until she found her balance and stood on the rubble. Ice black eyes holding the heat of stars met his plain brown; both his eyes and hers had tears flowing freely from them. Dust and panic drove his body to produce the salty fluid; Andros could not guess what the Unnatural felt, but her face emotion mimicked compassion.

Rapid fire needles tore up the floor until finding target. Parker must have thrown the now useless rail-gun aside and gone for his secondary weapon. None penetrated the woman.

Her right hand had closed in a fist and the light was growing brighter. Fire started licking up her arm, baking off the blood pattern and scorched her flesh black. The Unnatural took steps, each terrible and graceful, until she was off the bricks, stones, and metal pile which had been formed when she had been blasted through the building mere seconds ago.

Green breams burned through the dust. Dreanna’s laser had a new power pack. A stream of poison, a quarter the volume previously used, joined the dismal response against the Unnatural’s forward movement as Maron brought his reserves online. Andros did not know what the other three were doing, hopefully running for their lives while the rest of the team laid down theirs. Someone had to get the word out.

Andros raised his overheated gun, mirroring the young woman raising her right arm.

Her shoulder was nearly healed. Charred flesh flaked off her arm with baby pink skin showing for a second before burning too.

Too bright to look at, Andros forced his eyes back to her hand again and again trying to make out the stone she had picked up. It was black winking through her fingers … no, not black, but lack of light. A black hole in the middle of fire.

Ignoring his tears, the whimpering voice his mind refused to process, the trembling of every portion of his body but his independent hands, Andros clicked full release and pulled the trigger. The explosion left his gun, condensed amadium, the heaviest alloy known to man, pushed out at Mach four. Time slowed as he watched his barrel shatter and the projectile race sound toward the target.

The fire streamed down her arm back to her hand, brightening the impossible light another magnitude, searing Andros’ eyes open. He saw his fatal projectile nearly reach her.

Then the Unnatural opened her hand.

(Words 496; first published 4/2/2014; republished new blog format 8/4/2019)

Photo from freedigitalphotos.net

Silence reverberated in Andros’ abused ears. He blinked rapidly to clear the spots from his vision. His team had thrown everything short of a nuclear bomb at the Unnatural, and if one included the rail-gun Parker carried which required the two-day output of a plant to charge, a fission bomb just might count. Maker bless the Taurusian energy technology.

Mortar and structural building pieces dropped with dull thuds onto the rubble from the destroyed walls and floors that used to make up the 33rd to 38^th floors, churning dust clouds that tried to force their way past his lips. Andros refused to breathe, because the plaster bits would set him coughing. His broken ribs couldn’t take much more. He wanted to reach for the emergency oxy mask in his backpack, but that would require taking a hand off his projectile gun and neither hand would leave the overheated weapon. His lizard brain was not yet assured of the Unnatural’s death.

He cautiously sidestepped through the debris, keeping his team and the broken body of the young woman in sight. She was the youngest Unnatural they had ever fought, and, strangely, the most experienced. The cleansing team had been on her as soon as she was sighted emerging–less than six hours from alarm to annulation. They chased her from a sprawling boarding school where the wealthy and powerful trusted their children to the soaring ‘scrapers of Trade Landing nearly three hundred miles from the point of origin, leaving four team members behind, dying or disabled. They never let her heal, never let her think. They knew what was needed to get it done. She was their fourteenth kill in three years. Not the most heavily active cleansing team, but not an inactive agricultural planet team either. They were sharp without burnout.

The clatter of the ejected cartridge sounded tinny, but clearer. He could need to retrieve the mildly radioactive container later; heavy metal from expended uranium was not easy to come by and their accountant would have his hide. He snapped the replacement into his right hand, the independent-minded extremity willing to move for a reload. It had its priorities in order, breathing second, killing first.

Andros’ eyes were drawn to the blood running down her arm. The bright red artery and nearly blue vein liquids traced rivulets from a shattered shoulder, where brilliant white bones poked out through torn skin and muscle, pooling at the indents along her knuckles, creating an interwoven tribal tattoo like Dreanna wore. Still more than fifty feet away, the swirling dust eddies fooled his eyes into thinking her hand twitched. Once down, Unnaturals never got up again.

The fingers stretched and gripped a stone on the rubble pile she had landed on, a light glow emanating from the hand. Andros heard a whine start. His mind knew he was too far from his teammates for his damaged ears to hear, but refused to acknowledge the whimpering was coming from him. Cooking flesh battered his nose as he started shoving the ammo into the still too hot gun.

(words 513; first published 4/1/2014; republished new blog format 7/7/2019)