A puzzled look came over his face quickly, causing worry to rise in my throat, almost choking me.
“What? What is it?”
“I feel,” his brow knitted together, “strange…” he replied.
Suddenly, his eyes unfocused and he cried out sharply in agony, curling instinctively around his abdomen. My heart leaped as he writhed, and I couldn’t stop myself. He was in love with my little sister, and I couldn’t allow anything to happen to him that would result in his death. I rushed toward him, dropping to one knee and placing a hand on his shoulder as he continued to curl even further into himself with gritted teeth and eyes squeezed shut.
“Foreign…sub…st…” he roared loudly and fell onto his back.
I felt my eyes widen in horror as I watched him thrash. Then something utterly unexpected began to transpire. Something was pushing at his flesh from the inside, attempting to force its way out of his body. It pushed outward, and the skin began to slowly split from the force. A long, brown arm of human tissue and Nanos erupted from with John’s stomach and shot toward me. It gripped my throat tightly and squeezed, then slammed my head into the ground, and it was almost as if I was standing next to a missile when it went off. My ears rang, and my own startled cries were muffled beyond recognition, coming back into clarity slowly as the Nanos did their job.
The tendril began to widen and tear its way through John’s stomach, bringing louder cries of agony. It widened out even farther as I watched, almost all strength gone from my body with the lack of oxygen as I was slowly strangled. The mass swirled and formed into King, his dark suit, and hair perfect as he stared down at me with his hand around my throat.
“I told you, little girl. You would have to do better than that to even hope to stand a chance against me!” Laughter bubbled up from his throat like a thousand tiny razor blades slicing my skin. “Do you not realize, the two of you, just who I am? I am more than just a King. I am a god upon this planet! I am your god! Now,” he paused, reaching down to grab my throat again to slam me into a nearby lab table – sending papers floating around me in all directions, “daughter of the divine, you have lost your opportunity to stand by my side. You realize that, don’t you?”
Chapter
THIRTY-TWO
King took a brazen step toward me, but John interjected, coming to stand between myself and him. My entire body ached, and my head throbbed loudly in my ears, but I felt the Nanos rush to the injuries. John was clean, healed, perfect – just as if nothing had happened to him at all. Not a single scratch or smear of blood were noticeable.
My entire body trembled with adrenaline, fear, and hopelessness, but I would not give up. From what I could see of Baker, neither would he.
“You have a lot of balls to proclaim yourself a god, King. You had to try and make yourself just like Queen and me, and then you let Newton assimilate you to attempt to be better? You are completely…” John’s words were cut off as one of the hybrid’s tendrils closed quickly around his throat, silencing him.
“I was always superior to you, Mr. Baker,” King snickered. “You were a science experiment to get to what I wanted. The Invincible Heart. As far as Dr. Newton here?”
King reached up, using his thumb and index finger to tug at the flesh on his jaw, pulling it away to show vines wriggling beneath it like worms. They reached out toward the detached flesh, pulling it back into King’s face. Disgust so strong I could’ve vomited took over, but I swallowed it down – only able to watch King and John’s interactions as my body recovered. My ribs throbbed and I knew they were broken.
“Dr. Newton here is a part of my evolution. I simply made a choice to push evolution to the next level. Now, Mr. Baker, you may as well be Quentin Griffin again. Because you are…” King jerked his body, tugging at John’s throat, which caused John to fall to his knees – forced to look at King from the floor, “…obsolete.”
In an instant, King sent John flying in my direction, and I wasn’t strong enough yet to move out of the way. Baker slid across the lab table, slammed into me, and sent us skidding across the floor. Baker was on top of me, refracturing the ribs that the Nanos had yet to finish repairing, making it so much harder to breathe as I groaned in pain. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw John’s face heal, a great portion of it smashed up and misshapen from King’s attack. Slowly, he lifted himself up, and I stayed right where I was in an attempt to slow King down, thinking he had taken us down a few notches.
My mouth filled with the iron taste of blood, and I spit some out onto the floor beside my head, whispering, “John, what are we going to do?”
I was still weak, but the Nanos were doing their job. Just a lot slower than I preferred.
“We fight him,” John said coldly. “Fucker isn’t invincible. He isn’t unstoppable. He isn’t even evolution. He’s just another dead mother fucker. He just doesn’t know it yet. Look out!” he shouted, shooting up to his knees and throwing his arms out to catch the massive branch of hybrid tissue that came out of nowhere and attempted to crash into me.
John’s muscles strained against as it wriggled and fought with all its might to reach me. Wide-eyed, I watched with frozen terror, sweat dripping down my back as I shot into a sitting position in front of Baker’s struggling form. The struggle was a terrifying sight as what the King-Newton hybrid shot toward us almost gained ground on John.
“You…going…to…give me a hand? Or are you just going to watch me?” he smirked as he knelt there, lifted the tendril over his head, and slowly got to his feet.
Reaching forward, I gripped it as well, focusing my power into it. My mind’s eye shot down to its basic building blocks – made up of not just human cells and the same atoms you’d expect to find, but Nanos that worked feverishly to repair and strengthen during the battle. I poured as much energy into them as I could, and the smell of burning flesh, meat, and metal wafted into the air and stung my sinuses. I let my gaze leave John for a moment, turning to look at King, and what I saw before me was something I had wanted to see since this entire thing began. His face twisted in pain, lips set in a straight line as he held back his screams.
Slicing sounds and animalistic squeals joined the noise of sizzling meat, and I turned to see that John sliced a piece of the tendril off, an agonized screech ripping through the air. It fell to the ground but shot out a string of burning flesh toward King, taking itself back to its source. It didn’t make it. John stepped on it with his foot, causing it to squeal with protest and pain. He smirked and looked at King with defiance, and the expression I saw on King’s face shook me to my very core. Pure, heated rage.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Take him piece,” John sneered toward King with a look of hatred. “By disgusting fucking piece.”
His eye widened sharply, and he looked down toward the foot that was on top of the piece of King. I followed his gaze and almost gasped at what I saw. The thing, whatever it was, was working its way into John’s flesh through his pant leg – having slithered up without notice.
“What in the hell…?” he muttered past a clenched jaw.
His expression continued to change from second to second, and I knew he had to have been speaking with his Queen somehow. I didn’t know a lot about it, but I could feel a slight buzz in my skull as my power continued to bloom inside my belly and chest. It was a full assault of super-sonic energy that I wasn’t certain I could contain, but I swallowed it down regardless, harnessing it.
“John? What’s wrong?”
“My…Nanos…” he hissed, his flesh ripping apart in a spray of blood and tissue as if to try to grip the foreign body itself. “They’re trying to get it and….”
Baker howled with pain, his words falling away completely. The severed piece of King he had stepped on forced itself through his body with sickening, wet cracking sounds, so it could rejoin its original body still grippe
d in John’s hand. They came together and shot through him again, and I felt the Nanos within the mass come to rest in his chest. I cried out to him wordlessly, knowing what was about to happen before it came to transpire, the mass forcing me to let go and my power to slip. In a matter of seconds, the mass came barreling out of the center of John’s chest, leaving a large, gaping hole that dripped with blood and showed glistening bone. He fell to his knees, black blood oozing from between his lips, and then toppled to the ground on his back.
“J…John?” I shot forward onto my knees, hovering over him.
It didn’t take a genius to see that he was gone. The gaping hole in the center of his chest was proof enough.
Grief took hold in my chest, attempting to choke me as sobs began to rack my body. My shoulders and hands shook as I reached up to place my hand on what remained of his obliterated chest. Blood began to seep out from underneath him, spreading so that I knelt in it. It was warm and sticky, soaking into my pants and to my flesh beneath that would forever be stained with his life.
“Awww,” the King-Newton hybrid cooed sarcastically, grinning from ear to ear as he moved toward us. “No kiss kiss. No bang bang. No num nums. Now that we have him out of the way,” King stopped, grimaced slightly, and then two massive, brown-tinged, leathery wings sprouted from his back, unfurling to block out any light that gleamed behind him as he rose high up toward the ceiling, “what neither of you seem to be able to understand…” he continued with a smile, but instead of speaking, he did something I didn’t expect.
My breath caught in my throat as he swooped down toward me. Attempting to stand as quickly as I could to make a break for it, I realized I didn’t act quickly enough. His fingers gripped my arms painfully like sharp talons, and he lifted me up into the air – almost high enough to touch the cathedral-like ceiling. Sheer terror gripped me, but I didn’t let it show on my face. I couldn’t let him see weakness, which was what he would state my fear was proof of. No, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. His face was angry, but stoic all at the same time, and I wanted to spit in it just to prove I wasn’t his puppet no matter what he believed.
“I am the apex predator. I am the top of the food chain in every way, shape, and form. I am evolution personified! I will rule this world long after you’re nothing but dust thrown into the ground! Nothing that will ever exist in this world will ever stop me! Nuclear war? I will survive! Famine? I will survive! Drought? I will survive! Nothing can ever or will ever stop me! You, my daughter, for as magnificent as you are, are nothing compared to me! I can drop you from this height, and you will simply die! Those Nanos running through your body? Oh yes, I can smell them. They will not save you. And if by some small chance they do, I will stomp you into a paste until you no longer resemble anything human!”
Rage fueled me – all the grief, the death, the terror, and the anger I felt caused my power to flare within me again when it had just barely fled. My mind shot back down into his building blocks as a thin shield of shimmering energy emerged, hovering just above my skin. Focusing on the atoms that made up the disgusting creature, they began to rub together to produce the heat that would then lead to the fission reaction I caused. That was what it would take to kill him. That much I was certain of. The air around us began to crackle with energy, radiating around us so my hair began to flow softly around my head. Our clothes did the same, and King’s suit jacket rose just slightly above his waist. He chortled and smirked, eyes meeting mine, and all I saw there was pure evil.
“Oh…yes. I figured you would be doing…this…” King groaned in obvious pain that somewhat resembled pleasure – like he had won somehow. “Can…you…feel…my…Nanos fighting you?”
We hovered there in the air, and I sharpened my senses just enough to see that he was right. I could barely make out the sensation if I didn’t concentrate on it, but his Nanos pushed against my power. The pulsated against my mind and the energy, tingling and burning across my brain matter and my nerves. I tried to ignore his question, but I could feel his Nanos fighting against me as his wings flapped to keep us in the air. Hoping to somehow overpower the Nanos, I sent even more energy into King’s body, but they continued to work – faster and faster with each wave that hit them to keep up.
I had encountered something similar with John, but this was completely different – harder and unforgiving where John’s Nanos reacted much more slowly. The heat and friction and the force of my power easily overwhelmed them. These were another story. Nothing hurt them, and nothing stopped them. They continued to fluctuate and pulsate against me no matter how much power I fed into them that should have destroyed them. They weren’t just more powerful. They were building up an immunity to my ability.
“Even now, I can feel the power of Dr. Newton combining with my own. I can feel myself adapting to you. That little extra nudge of power from the good doctor is enough to…repel you so long as I…can…”
His speech began to stutter and his face tensed with discomfort. A tremor moved through his entire body as my power continued to build within him, causing even more suffering. Blood, black and dead, began to dribble out of his mouth, running down his chin in small, stringy rivulets mixed with saliva. It wasn’t long after that the whites of his eyes turned from pink to bright red, then sprouted with blackened spiderwebs of veins, letting me know my ability was finally having some effect on his body. In my mind, a few Nanos and his cells were having trouble keeping up.
I grinned widely, watching in my periscope vision as what was inside of him began to flake away.
“You were saying, Dad? You seem to be a little worse for wear,” I sneered.
The pain overtook him, his face twisting into what I could best describe as agony, his wings flaps beginning to slow. We fell a couple of inches, causing my heart to lurch in my chest, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t care what happened to me. All I cared about was saving those that came with me, and saving the world that could very well perish if King were to make it out of Fuji-O’Hara alive.
“You…” he grunted, face falling and eyes rolling backward.
Then we began to free-fall, air whipping past me as we closed in on the ground. Putting my hands out, I sent out a burst of energy, using my invisible hands to attempt to slow our descent. The linoleum loomed closer, and King began to lose his grip on me. Enveloping me, my power helped me to land softly on my feet – the shield shimmering up from my feet and around my body with the contact – and King crashed to the ground. The Earth shook under the impact.
“Me,” I smirked as my ability folded back into my body, snapping into my chest and gut where it lived.
King lay before me, contorting around his stomach as pain wracked him. I still saw the Nanos and cells breaking away under my power, throbbing and pushing with all their might. He howled and gripped his abdomen tightly, curling around it as if he had suffered a massive blow. For all I knew, that was exactly what it felt like, and I reveled in the thought that I could cause him so much suffering. His blood began to congeal in his veins, turning into a roadmap of black and purple underneath his perfectly tanned flesh. A sizzle ripped through the air as he cooked from the inside out.
“You will rule nothing! You have won nothing! You…are…beaten, Mr. President!” I shouted furiously over the hissing sound of his insides turning into so much dead meat, my abhorrence for the man dripping from me like venom along with my power.
“I…am…never…” King groaned as his eyes opened, the congealing blood in his eyes turning from red to black.
A surprised look crossed his face, and I felt his Nanos beginning to work with him again – and against me. My own worked much harder, scrambling to keep up with the damage the use of my own ability caused on my body. The process of turning him into a dead husk on the floor was taking much longer than it should have, or ever had with someone normal. The biggest difference? Nanos. They kept this from transpiring the way
it typically did, which caused anger to flare even stronger inside me. King’s Nanos raced to undo the damage, catching up quickly.
“No,” I hissed while I pushed another surge of power outward and into his cells.
With the surge, a rivulet of blood ran from my left nostril, but I couldn’t stop. Not now when I was so close. King’s shaking body began to still, and he stood and released his stomach, the damage to his cells repairing – each blood vessel quickly disappearing underneath his skin again as my power dwindled.
“You are beaten,” King roared, a surge of power coming outward with his words.
I saw his cells absorb the kinetic energy I had thrown toward him. Then it rebounded, coming out in a strong wave that collided with my body, sending me flying backward with so much heat my skin began to burn with it. The Nanos buzzed within me as they rushed to the injuries, but before they could do anything to help, my back slammed into the far wall – sending a splitting crack up through the plaster. Pain exploded in every part of my body, and I fell to the ground. All of my will to remain standing left along with the energy my power had given me, and I couldn’t move. I could barely breathe through what I knew were numerous fractured ribs, among other injuries that the Nanos also attempted to repair. I could barely look up, and when I did, I saw King before me with a large grin plastered on his face. Maniacal laughter echoed off the walls and rang in my ears as King rolled his shoulders and neck, each vertebra popping. Turning his head, he spat out a glob of thick black blood onto the floor and took a deep breath, as if steadying himself.
His eyes settled on me as I lay there, shimmering with liquid fire.
“As I said, there is nothing in this world that has ever existed, or ever will exist that will ever be able to stop me,” he shouted, laughing all the while.
My entire body screamed with agony as silence stretched through the room, echoing the hopelessness that I felt as I stared up at my father. My insane, tyrannical father that I thought I had no true ties to, which was an illusion I had given myself. The strength and will-power I held in myself, he also had in him, and that was undeniable. Something shifted on the other side of the room, and when I slowly turned my head to look behind King, I saw John pulling himself to his feet, spitting bright red blood on the ground. The hole in his chest seemed to be closing rather slowly considering the strength of his Nanos, which caused me to me worry.
The Clash (The Permutation Archives Book 5) Page 27