Predominance (27 page)

I was about to tell Sarah to step on the gas when a sharp sense of danger spiked in my hyperawareness, making me turn once again to the gloomily-lit meadow. My eyes began to scan the field, looking for the source of what had alerted my hypersenses, but it was Yvette's warning cry to Damian that pointed me in the right direction: “Damian, look out!” she shouted at the top of her lungs.

One of the guards Damian had thrown against the wall had just come to, and he was pointing his sidearm at the lawyer. I saw Yvette trying to get Damian off his knees and out of the way when I heard the gun fire. Yvette and Damian both fell abruptly to the grass.

“That's it!” Sarah snapped, revving the engine. Her shimmering green eyes turned to me, looking for concurrence.

“GO!” I shouted. Sarah stomped her foot on the gas pedal as I thrust my hand into the air, connecting my mind to the lamp's tempered glass, which vaporized with one swift clench of my fist. The fluorescent above Walker's head went as well. A myriad of electrical sparks showered down upon the field, like a drizzle of fire that gave the meadow one final burst of light before plunging it into darkness.

Sarah raced the lightless truck across the field, heading straight toward the spot where Yvette and Damian had fallen. The truck kept bobbling up and down over the uneven surface of the meadow, making it difficult to maintain control, yet Sarah managed to keep it going in an unwavering beeline without missing her target destination—when suddenly, the bumpy ride came to halt... Or so I thought. Then I realized we hadn't stopped at all: I had merely entered that slow-motion trance in which I was able to see, with fine detail, everything transpiring in my surroundings.

The trance that occurred only in the deadliest of situations.

First I saw Damian, getting up from the field. His eyes were no longer teary, his stare no longer sad. He had turned all his pain to anger, his sadness to vengeance. If there was a threshold between us and our inevitable transformation, Damian had certainly reached his own personal borderline. He stood up and pointed his grabbing hands toward the guard who'd shot at him. The guard got to his feet to try to fire again, but his efforts were truncated before he could even lift his gun.

Watching what happened next, through my slow-motion trance, made it seem all the more gruesome. Damian took control of the guard, who was standing fifteen feet away from him, and
tilted the man's head ninety degrees to the side. He began to flex his finger in the air, as if kneading an invisible piece of soft clay. This began to gradually increase the angle of the guard's tilted head—or at least, that's how I perceived it through my trance. The guard screamed in pain and desperation as he tried frantically to stop his neck from straining any further. But all his efforts were futile. His neck finally snapped, causing his desperate hands to drop and dangle at his sides, like a puppet whose strings had been suddenly cut. 

The body began to fall as Damian turned his wrath toward Dr. Walker, who cowered behind his two personal guards as soon as he realized Damian had zeroed in on him. His eyes glowing bright yellow, Damian ran toward the warehouse, leaving Yvette lying defenseless on the ground. It wasn't until then that I realized she'd been wounded by the bullet intended for Damian. My slow-motion trance ended abruptly at the realization, returning my perception to its natural speed.

The next thing I saw was the dashboard, hitting me straight in the face. A blaze of blue and purple stars flashed across my eyes before I could open them again. When I did, I realized it had been the sudden drop of the truck's front end into a yawning pothole that had brought our race to an abrupt and unexpected end. I turned my disoriented head toward the driver seat, looking for Sarah. A trickle of blood dripped from her brow—apparently from bumping against the steering wheel—yet she seemed all right, just dazed. My eyes darted back to the warehouse and I saw Damian running decisively towards his enemy. He barged into the warehouse, thrusting his open palm forward into the air, like a football player ready to strike an opponent standing in his way.

The guards who shielded Dr. Walker raised their rifles and took aim. Damian switched his focus to the guards; with one upward movement of his hand, he lifted one of them from the ground and tossed him aside, as easily as a normal man would toss away a crumpled piece of paper. The discarded guard crashed noisily against the cylinder rack, knocking loose several oxygen tanks, which fell and rolled across the cement floor. The guard slid to the floor, unconscious and no longer presenting a threat.

His partner, however, took advantage of this two-second-window of opportunity to lock onto his target. Damian tried to raise his hand again toward the second guard, but it was too late. The guard opened fire, wounding Damian severely. The left side of his body was pierced by multiple high caliber bullets; I saw crimson blotches bloom on his leg, arm, and shoulder. He collapsed to the floor, groaning in pain, yet he still found the strength to drag his wounded body to the threshold of the overhead door and lean up against the wall.

I got out of the truck as fast as I could and ran to Yvette. She was lying on the grass, her hands keeping pressure tightly on her left thigh, face as white as paper. “Yvee!” I kneeled on the ground next to her.

“I'll be all right,” she gasped. “You need to help Damian. He'll die if you don't.”

“I need to get you out of here!”

“Victor!” she countered fiercely, “We can't leave him!”

“I have her!” Sarah appeared out of nowhere, placing Yvette's arm around her neck. “Let's go,” she said sternly, helping Yvette to her feet as she groaned in pain.

I looked back to the warehouse and saw Dr. Walker screaming into a walkie-talkie, calling for reinforcements. It was just a matter of seconds before the whole place would be swarming with soldiers. I knew there was no time to think; if we were to survive this, I had to move quickly. I let my instincts take over and tapped into my power, trying to pull energy out of the air and myself so I could limit the potential draw on the dark energy. Suddenly, my breath came in puffs of white frost as I ordered Sarah, “Get back to the truck and get it out of that hole! I'm going to get Damian!”

I turned and ran toward the warehouse, reaching out with my shield, trying to erect it around Damian's half-dead body. The guard who'd shot Damian was standing over him; he'd reloaded his
weapon, and was ready to finish the job he'd started. Walker screamed at him to shoot—when suddenly something unexpected happened.

One of the steel reinforcement bars that lay next to Damian's wife flew out of the stacked pile like a guided missile, piercing the guard's back and running him through; it stopped abruptly when it hit the weak wall I'd managed to erect around Damian. Mortally wounded, the guard dropped his rifle and clutched futilely at the half-inch-thick beam that protruded from his chest, before collapsing dead to the floor.

The shock of the scene made me stop in my tracks, close enough to be seen by the creator of my evil side.

“Victor!” Walker exclaimed, thinking that I was the one who had avenged Damian. But the truth is that I could never have brought myself to do something like that. Even Damian, who had already taken lives before, seemed as stunned as I was about the rebar piercing the guard; obviously, he hadn't done it. But if neither of us had done it, then who...?

That's when my eyes swung over to Sonya, and I realized that Damian had been avenged by his own wife. Walker's control hadn't been as complete as he'd thought. Sonya had developed the same telekinesis abilities Damian and I now possessed, and had used them against Walker to save her husband's life. Realizing this, Dr. Walker spun and ran towards the exit door up the stairs in the back of the warehouse.

“WALKER!!!” Damian shouted at the top of his lungs, his volume amazing for a man obviously mortally wounded. Walker stopped just a few steps away from the door, turned around, and threw a hateful scowl at him, as if saying: This isn't over yet!

But it wasn't over for Damian and Sonya, either. “If we die, you die, you son of a bitch!” Damian yelled furiously, pulling out the loaded .38 Smith & Wesson Special that he'd kept tucked in the back of his waist. Damian pulled the trigger several times as Walker wrestled with the doorknob. His final shot hit a spot on the door close to Walker's face. I'm not sure what it was; it could've been fragments from the shattered door or the bullet itself, but something bounced up and hit Dr. Walker in the face. His hand jerked up to cover his eye as blood began flowing profusely. Screaming like a girl, he managed to yank the door open and disappeared through it.

Damian's hand dropped to the ground, along with the empty revolver, the barrel still smoking. “Sonya…” he called, stretching his hand toward his wife. But they were at least fifteen feet apart.

Sonya's blank stare slid over to Damian. And though reflecting pure evil, her eyes still flickered with a faint spark of humanity. “K-K-Kill me…” she whispered feebly.

“No,” Damian choked out between sobs. “I can't.”

A shout stopped me before I could take another step forward: “Freeze!” a soldier ordered me from behind. Hands up, I turned slowly and saw him standing there with his rifle aimed at me, ready to shoot. I took a quick look around, and saw that least a dozen soldiers were surrounding the meadow. Two of them were covering Sarah and Yvette, who'd never had the chance to make it back to the truck.

I folded my hands on my head in surrender—when the situation suddenly turned for the worse. Another steel bar flew right past me, only inches from my head, and flashed through the soldier standing behind me. Eyes wide, I spun and watched him fall dead to the ground, even as more of these steel bars began to zoom through the cold, dark meadow, piercing and killing every single soldier in sight. One of the last surviving soldiers zeroed in on the origin of the silent missiles and began to shoot wildly into the warehouse. Meanwhile, I dropped to the ground and yelled to Sarah and Yvette to do the same, while Damian dragged his limp body behind a wall, looking for cover.

One of the first shots fired hit one of the stray oxygen tanks rolling across the floor. Unfortunately, this tank was too close to one of the platforms-supporting beams—the one casting the shadow over Damian's wife. When the bullet hit the tank it exploded, not only dismounting the supporting beam from its foundation but also imprisoning poor Sonya in a mess of broken crates and metal that twisted around the wheelchair to which she was handcuffed. The entire platform of steel grating then began to collapse with a slow but awful inevitability, brought down by all the enormous crates that it held on its second level. Ton of wood and metal were an instant away from crushing Sonya when I did the unthinkable: I jumped back to my feet in the middle of the hell of gunfire and ricocheting rebar and connected my mind swiftly to the platform to stop its collapse.

As I connected to the beam, like I'd done before with other objects, I felt an immediate strain on every muscle in my body, immediately realizing that the weight of the crates was beyond anything I could control. Pain exploded in my head as I counterbalanced the massive weight, which brought me to my knees. Yet somehow I managed to stop it just in time to save Sonya, who despite our dire situation wouldn't stop attacking the soldiers. The soldiers, on the other hand, kept shooting blindly into the warehouse, missing her every time. The same broken crates that were now imprisoning her were also acting as a barricade against their attack.

A sudden, sharp prick in my shoulder almost made me lose concentration. Whatever it was, it hurt like hell—like a mosquito on steroids, which instead of sucking on my blood had injected me with hot lava. I wondered if one of my veins had burst. But I didn't have time to worry about it; I hung on grimly until one of the soldiers shot into a crate labeled FLAMMABLE in the back of the warehouse.

A small explosion followed the shot, along with a chemical fire that began to spread, quickly, through the entire place.   

“Damian!” I called desperately. “I can't hold it any longer! You have to get Sonya out of there—now!” Damian began to drag himself toward Sonya, leaving a thick, dark red trail behind him as he crawled across the floor.

A disturbing silence made me realize that the gunfire had stopped, finally, and that Sonya was no longer launching lethal steel stakes at everything that moved. She had killed them all...and yet her blank gray eyes wouldn't stop scanning the gloomy field, looking for more of them to kill. I followed her eyes until they stopped and narrowed, as if locking on a new target. I looked over my shoulder and realized her glare had focused on Sarah and Yvette, who laid side side-by-side on the ground, arms clutched over their heads. But why would she feel any hostility against them? She didn't even know them.

But I guess she didn't have to. The answer was right in front of my face—or should I say, on Sarah's shoulder. The insignia 'R.C.' displayed on her arm patch had caught Sonya's attention as well as her desire to kill, and she was now ready to continue the job.

Damian stopped dragging himself across the floor when he saw three more of the steel construction bars being levitated out of the stacked pile. He turned his eyes to the meadow, frightened and confused. “She's aiming at the girls!” I yelled to Damian. “If she launches those bars, I won't be able to stop them without letting go of the platform!”

“NO!” Damian shouted, “Don't you let go!” Damian turned to Sonya then and tried to reason with her. “Honey… Baby, please! Listen to me. They're not the enemy. Listen to me… Sonya!” But all his pleas were unheard. Damian failed to realize that the person sitting in that wheelchair was no longer his wife. She was just the outer image, the shell, of the person who he once loved—a shell filled with nothing but evil, revenge, and a death wish.