Then, it went spookily quiet all around the woods. I held my breath and waited, but I wasn’t sure what was going to happen or what exactly I was waiting for. My breath was just suspended in my lungs and I was frozen in place. A disconcerting aura floated through the air.
I glanced down at my wrist instinctively. I lifted my chin and peered over at Maddie, who was inspecting her wrist as if she were certain it was going to start buzzing any second now.
“Oh, shit,” I groaned as the realization sunk into my mind.
I felt the raised bump of the sensor underneath my skin. All was quiet. The alarms had stopped. That could only mean one thing. The scientists had found a way to fix the security breach. Any second now, the microchips inside of our wrists would start shocking us like a dog with an electric collar. The microchips were embedded into our skin to track us if we ever managed to escape, much like this very situation we were in.
Pain began to surge through me. I arched my back and groaned. The fingers on my hand spread as wide as a web and I fell to my knees, the wind knocked out of me. My eyes went blurry with tears of extreme agony. The electrical current had started. It wouldn’t be enough to kill us, but it would render us immobile so that the guards would better be able to snatch us back up again.
The volts of electricity were ripping me apart. Then, in an instant, everything in my mind went blank. The last thing I remembered was falling to the soggy, cold ground and landing cheek-first onto a pile of wet leaves. “Don’t…” I choked… “hurt…us…”
5
Tara
I peeled one eye open and then the other. I was sore from head to toe, my entire body throbbing in agony. I knew that my pain was partly from my furious run into the forest, and partly, I assumed, from the electric shock I had received once the security breach malfunction was over. Was I even alive? Or was I in some kind of hazy afterlife dream that had been concocted out of sheer delirium?
I wiggled my toes and exhaled with wonderous relief after realizing that I wasn’t paralyzed. I touched my thighs and discovered I was still clothed, thankfully. I lifted my head, but it felt as heavy as if a thousand bowling balls were weighing down my neck and shoulders.
My throat felt gritty and dry. I coughed and managed to lift myself up, propping my upper body weight on my elbows. I blinked and glanced around, assessing my surroundings.
“Hello?” My voice cracked through the empty and silent room. “Is anybody there?”
At first, I assumed that I had been recaptured and the scientists were gearing up to start probing my body invasively for more tests. But even though everything in the room was stark white and looked as if it might be sterile, there was no medical equipment and it didn’t resemble the scientists’ labs back at the Home Base camps.
I raised myself higher into a full sitting position. Every muscle in my body protested. I groaned and clutched the top of my head, suddenly feeling extremely dizzy. The room blurred and fuzzed, and my eyes crossed. How could I have been so foolish as to assume that we wouldn’t be caught? At the time, I had made a rash, split-second decision which had clearly backfired.
What the hell was happening to me?
I heard the sound of muffled voices around me. Was I dreaming it? I pinched the sensitive flesh behind my wrist and closed my eyes, waiting until I felt steadier before reopening them.
I was alive, at least I had that going for me. The volts of electric shock hadn’t been enough to kill me, but they weren’t meant to be that strong in the first place. The sensor inside my wrist had two responsibilities. One, to send a surge of current through my body to knock me down and thus render me easier to capture, and two, to make me trackable by linking to the Fundamental Society’s navigation software.
Maddie!
Shit….
Where was she? Her face flashed in front of my vision. I hadn’t been alone. Maddie had escaped with me.
I had just remembered that my friend had dropped to the ground beside me when we were out in the woods. Panic pounded in my heart when my eyes darted around the room and I didn’t see her anywhere around.
“Maddie?” I croaked, still trying to regain a usable voice.
That’s when another observation suddenly jolted through my mind. I glanced down at my ankles and rolled my feet. I looked at my wrists. I was not shackled down. There were no ties binding me to the cot that I was sitting on.
That was an excellent revelation. I jumped up and then groaned as I remembered that my body was only working with half its normal strength.
“Easy does it, Tara,” I whispered to myself. “Take it slowly, one step at a time.”
I lifted my chin and looked in front of me. I immediately spotted an open door. Jackpot! I darted in the direction of the door, fully prepared to rush from the room.
“Wait, where are you going?” I heard a male voice call out behind me, but the sound was muddled. I turned around, panting hard. That’s when I realized that I hadn’t taken the time to look behind me when I was sitting on top of the cot.
I tensed up and placed myself in a fighting, defensive stance. In the back of the white room, I saw the same men who had been encircling me and Maddie in the dense woods outside of the Fundamental Society camp.
“Who…who are you?” I asked them. I inspected each of them carefully.
None of them had red eyes, which could only mean one thing. They weren’t Mutants, and they couldn’t be trusted. Mutants always had red eyes. It was one of our most dominating attributes, a way that you could always identify us.
The guys appeared to be younger than the guards or the Fundamental Society scientists. They were also wearing regular street clothes, which threw me off. Were they running some kind of scheme? Were they in hiding too? Perhaps they were disguising their appearances for a specific cause?
I had a million questions racing through my mind at a hundred miles an hour, and I wanted answers.
“It’s okay,” one of the guys said.
He had dark hair, another physical quality that told me he couldn’t be a Mutant, because we all had silver hair, even the half-breeds like myself.
“We aren’t here to hurt you.” Another guy took a gentle step forward, but I matched him and took one step back.
“Get away from me.” I shook my head and extended my arms out in front of me. I balled my fists and prepared myself to fight off the enemy.
But the battle didn’t come. None of the men in the room lunged at me. They didn’t pounce on me or try to shoot me with a taser or a tranquilizer dart. They just stood there staring at me as if they were trying to figure me out.
“I’m warning you,” I said. I wasn’t confident, but I attempted to appear that way on the surface. “Don’t come any closer.”
“It’s okay.” The tallest one of the group gave me a smile that for a fleeting second appeared to be genuine. “You don’t have to run anymore.”
“I’m not running,” I fired back, maybe a little too quickly.
He raised his eyebrow, clearly doubting my statement.
“Anyway,” I began again and licked my lips. “I need to be going now.” I was behaving casually as if I were getting ready to leave a dinner party. But upon my exit, where exactly did I think I was going to go? I still didn’t have a developed plan, but finding Maddie alive and well was definitely my first order of business.
I didn’t want to mention Maddie just in case they didn’t have her already. I didn’t want to alert them to the fact that they should be hunting down another Mutant.
“You can’t go out there.” One of them shook his head defiantly. “They are out there.”
“Yes.” The guy beside him nodded in agreement. “They are everywhere.”
“Who?” I glanced between them skeptically.
There were five of them and one of me. Could I manage to escape? The odds were in my favor. They didn’t appear to be armed with any weapons of any kind, and I had taken out those guards when I was only eight years old before, and that
was after they had locked me in a pod and filled it with water in an attempt to drown me.
Suddenly, I had more confidence than before. I could do anything. These men didn’t frighten me. I would survive at all costs.
The guys began to slowly form a half circle around me again, creeping along and staring at me as if they were thirsty for the knowledge about exactly who I was. They still hadn’t answered my question about who they were referring to outside. Guards? Scientists? Maybe both? Or some other kind of threatening predator? Everything was up in the air at this point. Their eyes didn’t appear to be aggressive and their mannerisms weren’t hostile. I was confused, but still guarded all the while.
“What are you doing?” I asked of them, noticing immediately that my voice was slightly raised in a defensive pitch. “Stop it. Stop walking closer to me. It’s making me claustrophobic.”
“We aren’t doing anything,” one of the guys said with a chuckle, looking at his friend to his left.
“Yeah,” the friend on the left said with a grin. “We just want to talk to you.”
They stopped wandering in my direction though as if they were trying to persuade me to stay where I was.
“I don’t have anything to say,” I told them hastily and began edging closer and closer to the open door.
I still didn’t know what I would find in the hallway on the other side, though. They could be driving me right into a trap. There was no way to determine that in advance until I got there, but I was willing to take my chances. I certainly couldn’t stay in here with these strange men who were circling around me as if I were their prime meat and they hadn’t eaten in a week.
“Just calm down,” one of them said. “We aren’t your enemy. They are.”
“Who are you referring to?” I asked sharply.
The Fundamental Society,” one of them said.
I stopped walking. That threw me for a loop, but I didn’t remain out of it for very long.
“Who is to say that you aren’t just one of them in disguise?” I asked them in a shrill voice.
The guys exchanged a look with one another that was difficult for me to understand. One with short brown hair spoke next.
“We can assure you that we are most definitely not part of the Fundamental Society. Nor are we working for them as guards or any other team position.”
His friends snickered in agreement, nodding with sour expressions on their faces as if the mere thought of them being part of that group disgusted them.
I was clearly not getting anywhere with these guys. If they weren’t willing to talk to me and tell me what the hell was going on, then I was going to bolt out the door without a second thought.
“Just stay here,” one of them said with a promising smile that I wasn’t about to buy. “You will be safer with us in here than out there with them.”
That was pretty much my breaking point, where I went ballistic. If they were such tough big shots, then what was to stop them from harming me? I wasn’t going to stick around and wait for them to finish the job. I didn’t know who they were or who they were working for. I couldn’t trust anyone in this dangerous situation.
I kicked at the one closest to me. He was so startled by the action that he roared in pain and clutched the side of his injured hand. He crouched on his knees and took a few deep breaths, nursing the area.
I looked at the next one on my short list. I punched him in the face before he even had a chance to react. Fresh blood began pouring out of his nose as he groaned and reeled back, falling into a folding chair behind him.
“What are you doing?” another one asked hysterically.
I swiveled around and swung my leg up to kick him in the gut. He went down instantly, groaning as he clutched his wounded belly and probably his pride, too.
Who else wanted some action? I took down a fourth guy by grabbing him by the hair and throwing him into an empty bookshelf against the wall.
Four down, only one to go…
I slowly turned around, but my head began to feel numb. Then, there was a throbbing ache that pulsed through my neck. The fifth guy was wearing glasses and staring at me. He had tousled hair and his piercing glower penetrated me to my core.
I opened my mouth to ask him what he was doing to me, but my mental and physical condition was weakening too significantly to form words. My legs and arms dangled like limp pasta noodles by my sides. I couldn’t feel my hands or my feet.
I began to drool out the side of my mouth and my vision blurred. I wiped my mouth and grimaced against the current of this mysterious man’s power over me. I felt as if there was something heavy on my back. I knew exactly what was happening. This guy must have telekinesis or something. He was manipulating my mind and suspending my motor skills.
Suddenly, I began to feel giddy. I think I even giggled there for a second, but it wasn’t the way I wanted to feel on the inside. His control over my mind was aggressive.
I didn’t have the training or the strength to repel it, so I succumbed almost instantly. I knew that the Fundamental Society scientists were working tirelessly around the clock to gain mind control capabilities in their own right, but up to this point I knew that they hadn’t been successful. At least not at my Home Base camp.
Who was this mysterious man in front of me? I felt like someone had given me a dose of laughing gas. I waltzed around the room as if I were a puppet on a string. The room started spinning a few seconds later and caused me to become slightly queasy.
In the sedation of my mind, there was still a little flickering remnant of my brain that was screaming for me to wake up and snap out of it, but I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried.
After a few more seconds, I leaned over and propped myself up against the same cot that I had been lying on when I first woke up. I was wobbly and teetering on the edge of sleep. My eyelids felt heavy. I blinked and tried to stay awake, but my efforts were in vain.
This guy was trying to calm me down so that I wouldn’t beat up his friends and he had known that he was going to be next. He had gripped me in his mental claws before I had a chance to even think of the word mind control.
I glance down at the cot and hung my head. The last thing I remembered was my head slamming into the thin mattress on top of the cot. Then all went blank.
6
Gabriel
I was locked into substantially deep mind control with the feisty, sexy silver-haired Mutant girl in front of me. I was a Mutant too, as were all of my friends currently accompanying me. Of course, the beautiful girl with silver hair and red eyes didn’t know that yet. She was putting up a fight against my current, but eventually I was able to get her to yield. She was resilient, I would give her that much.
She didn’t get a chance to know that we were on her side because she had tried to resist us. Defiance was going to get her nowhere in this group. We had tried to reason with her from the very beginning. She had knocked down each and every one of my friends as if they were dominos falling in a line, and something had to be done about that.
I knew that we had our work cut out for us, but I was up for the challenge and I knew my friends would be too.
We had no choice but to save and protect our own. So, naturally, when the sirens from the Fundamental Society’s Home Base camp had stopped wailing shrilly through the night and we knew that the security breach had ended, we had had to act quickly.
The girl and her friend had been convulsing on the ground on top of a bed of forest leaves. We waited for the jolts from their wrist tracker devices to stop surging them with electricity. Once that happened, we’d raced up to the girl and I had scooped her up. The other girl had woken up faster. As soon as she saw us with her friend, she ran the other way.
We hadn’t had time to chase after her. The guards would soon be on their way and with a tracker, they were bound to find her unless we acted fast. We had brought her back to our safe house in the private seclusion of the woods. We knew that we wouldn’t be able to stay there for long, b
ut it was buying us time until the mysterious and elegant Mutant girl woke up.
Now here we were, trying to convince her that we were one of the few good guys in the world, when she started attacking us and knocking us down one by one like flies. Her fury had come out of nowhere, but I understood where she was coming from to a certain degree.
She had been locked up in that prison Home Base camp and she was like a deer caught in headlights, a frenzied wild animal who had just gained her freedom. She would come around once I calmed her down.
I was excited by her, thrilled by her presence as I continued to pour my telepathic thoughts into her mind, pacifying her and lulling her into a deeply tranquilized state. It was better if we discussed our next move when she was peaceful. We weren’t going to get anywhere with her while she was still locked into the doubts and reservations of her mind.
My friends began to stir around me, grumbling as they clutched their tender wounded areas and dragged themselves to their feet once again.
“Damn.” Liam and Nick, the token twins of our group, stared at her. “What have you done?”
I wasn’t able to respond because I didn’t want to break the union of my mind with hers, but I was able to hear them. I gritted my teeth and continued to concentrate, giving her a piercing stare.
“Easy, Gabriel,” Jude, another in our group, told me. “Don’t take it too far.”
I wasn’t going to hurt her, that was never my intention, but I was in too deep now. She was extremely subdued and crashing. I watched, unable to prevent the next thing from happening, my telekinesis powers taking things one step too far.
The girl fell onto the same cot that we had placed her on before. I snapped out of it, taking a deep breath and shaking my head to clear it. I rushed to her side and gently picked her up again, placing her delicately onto the bed.
Mutant Academy (The Fundamental Society Book 1) Page 5