Mutation (6 page)

Chapter 8

Backwards, I flew across the garage like a shot from a gun.  I caromed off the windshield of a nearby car, smashing it as I ricocheted away like a wildly fired bullet.  Somewhat dazed and totally confused, I was still trying to get my bearings when my momentum was suddenly arrested by something like a rocket blasting into my midsection.  What little air remaining in my lungs came out in an agonizing gasp as my body wrapped limply around whatever had slammed into my stomach.

I still couldn’t think straight, didn’t know exactly what was happening, but one thing was certain:  I was under attack.  Instinct and training took over.

I went into super speed, a blatant attempt to buy time while I tried to assess exactly what was going on.  The world around me quickly decelerated, going into extreme slow motion like someone hitting the pause button on a DVR.  I took a deep breath and nearly screamed in anguish.  The pain in my chest and stomach were excruciating; sucking in air was like breathing fire.  I ignored the pain and looked around.

Off to one side, I saw a young couple, apparently headed towards their car.  The man was staring at me in shock, and had dropped the shopping bags he had been carrying.  From my perspective, the bags hung there, frozen in mid-air between the hand that had let them go and the ground.  The woman, whose mouth had fallen open, appeared to be in the process of raising a hand to her lips to stifle a gasp.

Not far away, I saw a woman in the process of putting a toddler into a carseat.  Although the woman, with her back to me, was oblivious to what was going on, the toddler was looking over her shoulder and pointing in my direction.  That suddenly reminded me to take stock of my own position.

I was still up in the air, but not flying.  Instead, I was being held there in the large, meaty paw of a giant.  The man was at least seven feet tall, and was dressed in a black muscle shirt and some kind of dark pants that seemed military grade.  He was clean-shaven and bald, making his age somewhat ambiguous, but from the wrinkles in his brow and creases in his face, I pegged him as early forties.  He was wearing a weird set of goggles over his eyes and an earpiece.

He was incredibly massive, with a broad, impressive bulk to match his height.  His neck was like a tire rim, and his biceps like tree trunks.  In short, over-sized and over-muscled, everything about him screamed super-strong brawler.  (Not to mention the fact that his grip on my midsection was like a set of steel pincers.)

From the angle and set of his body – as well as the manner in which he held me – I could tell he was preparing to smash me into the ground.  However, something didn’t make sense.

The giant holding me was, like everyone else in the garage, moving so slowly that he might as well have been a mannequin.  The blow that had first hit me had essentially come out of nowhere, but with such speed that I didn’t even have time to counter it.  That meant…

I looked around wildly. 
There! 
Motion over in the direction that I had come from – by my grandfather’s car.  With everything else practically frozen in time, it was easy to pick out.

It was a young guy, maybe in his twenties, with dark wavy hair.  He had on the same kind of goggles and earpiece as his brawny companion, but also wore some type of body armor.  From my perspective, he appeared to be jogging leisurely in our direction, but in real time he had to be moving at super speed.

So, this was presumably the guy who had initially hit me.  He must have been moving incredibly fast for me not to have seen him coming.  Angrily, I mentally marked a tally for him, but since I didn’t know his name, I dubbed him “Swifty.” Likewise for his muscular companion, whom I designated “Brawny.”

I reached for them both with my teleportation power, ready to put them on the dark side of the moon.  (Okay, maybe not the dark side of the moon, but some place remote, like Antarctica - a trip that would evoke the mantra of “know your enemy” the next time they thought about attacking someone without provocation.) I was just about to send them on their way when a few ugly memories reared up.

I had teleported people in anger before - unintentionally, on a couple of occasions.  Thus, there existed the very real possibility that I could indeed transport Swifty and Brawny somewhere completely inhospitable if I let my emotions run away with me.  If I couldn’t control myself, even with bad apples like these, I was dangerous to everyone around me - including innocent civilians.  I needed to take a second.

I switched back to normal speed, then phased just before Brawny smacked me into the concrete floor.  I went with the momentum of his motion, going straight through the floor to the level immediately below the one on which I had parked.  There was a dull but audible smack as Brawny’s hand must have connected with the garage floor above me, causing dust to billow out and scaring a group of pigeons into flight from the rafters.  People heading for their cars ducked and ran for cover, fearing the place was collapsing.

I had stopped myself before coming into contact with the ground on this level; now I rested there, floating in mid-air, taking a moment to make sure I had a firm grip on my temper before I engaged these guys again.  When I was certain that I wouldn’t do anything irreversible with my teleportation power, I got ready to zoom back up through the roof to the floor above.  Before I did that, however, I noticed someone else coming down - actually phasing through the floor as I had.

In actuality, there were four of them.  There were Swifty and Brawny, but also another man and a woman.  The other man wore the same type of body armor as Swifty.  Tall and slender, he had brown hair that was starting to go gray at the temples.  He had dark beady eyes and a beak-like nose that, all in all, gave him the semblance of a buzzard.

The woman was a different story entirely.  She had short blond hair cut into bangs that framed a face of soft, delicate features.  She wore a skin-tight, white bodice that accentuated all of her feminine attributes.  Finally, she was literally radiant - she was covered in a soft, fine glow that pulsed around her like an echoing heartbeat.

Like Swifty and Brawny, these latest arrivals also wore earpieces and the same odd goggles, which I now recognized as having IR lenses.  The four dropped down, in insubstantial form, until their feet touched the ground, and then they solidified and fanned out.

A few mall shoppers stood around, watching the spectacle as events unfolded.  Several of the smarter ones, however, recognizing that a battle between supers was brewing and about to bubble over, took off for the interior of the mall, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the prospect of wholesale carnage.

Although they were facing my direction, the four didn’t seem to be fully focused on me.  Quickly, I opened myself up empathically, reaching out to each of them simultaneously to see what I could sense.  Oddly enough, although they had varying feelings underneath, I detected almost the same emotional state coming from the surface of their individual psyches:  a high level of attentiveness - a sense of being completely alert, as if they were listening to something.

Still angry but feeling more in control, I reached for them, preparing to make them all next-door-neighbors with Emperor penguins, and found my power closing on…nothing.  They had vanished.

Or rather, three of them had - the men.  The woman just stood there, smiling at me with a sly expression that made my hair stand on end - as if she knew something I didn’t.  Willing to take what I could get, I focused on her, tried to teleport her.  Again nothing happened; this time, however, I understood what had occurred, as well as what the woman’s secret was:  she was a teleporter.

The entire gist of being a teleporter is that you can go or be anywhere you want.  By extension, you
don’t
have to go any place where you
don’t
want to be.  By way of example, if you could somehow transport a teleporter from Point A to Point B, their own teleportation power would immediately bring them back to Point A if that’s where they wanted to be.  In short, you can’t teleport a teleporter against their will, and there’s a null effect when one teleporter tries to do so to another.

All of this flashed through my brain in an instant.  Knowing her secret was out, the woman winked at me, then raised a hand in my direction.  Almost immediately, a focal point of light gathered at her fingertips, and then shot in my direction with laser-like intensity.

I phased, and the laser beam passed harmlessly through me, striking and scorching one of the concrete beams near the ceiling instead.  However, the use of her laser triggered something in my brain, and suddenly, I knew who this woman was.

Her name was Estrella; she was a well-known merc - a super who hired out to the highest bidder.  Coming so close on the heels of my conversation with Gray, she had to be working for him, along with the rest of her compatriots.  Her power set revolved around light and heat, and included the ability to fly.  She was not someone to take lightly - especially when you considered that she could also teleport.

Bearing that in mind, I shifted into super speed and flew at her, arm cocked back to deliver a punishing blow.  Not being a speedster herself, Estrella wouldn’t be able to avoid me; I’d be on her before she could even teleport.  At the last second, however, some chivalrous impulse took hold of me, making me abhor the idea of hitting a woman.  Thus, I changed tactics and instead tried to tackle her around the middle.  My arms, however, closed on nothing.

The miss threw me off-balance, and I banged against the side of a parked car before reversing my momentum.

What the…?

I didn’t know what had happened.  I couldn’t have missed her, and she hadn’t teleported.  In fact, she was turning to face me now, with that evil, I-know-something-you-don’t-know grin on her face.

Of course!  She had phased!

I’d completely forgotten that they had phased down from the upper floor of the garage just a few moments a–

A brutal shoulder hit from Swifty cut off my thought processes and sent me crashing into a concrete column nearby, where I smacked my head hard enough to get an immediate headache.  Suddenly, I heard a grunt and felt wild emotions surging near me, an almost palpable bloodlust.  Disoriented but recognizing the danger, I teleported wildly, popping myself about twenty feet away just as Brawny made a flying tackle at the spot where I’d just been.

He hit the garage column like a wrecking ball, the force of his impact sending tremors throughout the structure.  The column shattered, sending broken chunks of concrete skittering across the garage floor like pieces of eggshell as car alarms started going off like klaxons.

Somehow, I had foolishly forgotten about Estrella’s companions.  She had initially teleported them away from me, but I guess I’d gotten it into my head that she wasn’t going to bring them back - an idiotic assumption on my part.

The column Brawny had destroyed was obviously a load-bearing structure (or maybe he’d done more damage than I initially realized), because an ominous creak sounded, followed by a thunderous crack.  Part of the ceiling slab gave way, bending down at an angle that let two cars from above roll down with crushing force onto a sports car and an SUV.  Ceiling lights began to flicker all across this level of the garage; a pipe near the broken ceiling slab burst without warning, spewing water out in a wide arc.

This turn of events had an unsettling effect on the crowd of spectators.  From the moment Brawny took out the column, they’d all suddenly realized that they had pressing business elsewhere and scattered towards the exits, screaming.

It only took a few moments to take all this in, but the headache I’d picked up was making it hard to focus.  I teleported outside - up to the roof of the garage - as much to get away from Estrella and her crew as to clear my head.  But if that was my wish, it was in vain, because she immediately popped up next to me.

This time, I swung without hesitation, all thoughts of chivalry banished.  Again, I failed to connect because she was phased, and I stumbled, off-balance.  She took the opportunity to wallop me with a backhand that lifted me off my feet.  I didn’t travel far, though, as Brawny caught me, wrapping his arms around me in a crushing bear hug that made it feel like my ribs were dry twigs on the verge of snapping.  Screaming in pain, I teleported back into the garage, not too far from where the broken pipe was still gushing water.  As if on cue, Estrella and company teleported back inside as well.  I went invisible - something I should have done much earlier - then phased through a classic sixties Mustang convertible and lay down in the back seat, trying to get a moment to think.