Child of Recklessness (Trials of Strength Book 2)

by Matthew R. Bell

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, pushing the towel against the wound.

  ‘You need stitches,’ Chris replied as he squinted at my leg.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Nah,’ I muttered. ‘I’ll be fine by morning.’

  Thanks to my new abilities, I had insane healing abilities. Back in Greystone I had been shot twice through my torso, and when I changed, the bullets holes healed in no time. There wasn’t even a trace of the wounds left.

  We made sure the assassin was secure, and everyone left for the night. Brian promised to take a look at the drive the next morning, but I could tell by his voice that he wasn’t holding out much hope. We’d risked our lives for nothing, and the realization felt like someone had taken a pin to my balloon insides. I helped Anna into bed and looked at her helplessly.

  ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ I asked for what felt like the hundredth time.

  ‘I wouldn’t say I’m okay,’ she replied, ‘but physically, yeah, I think we are.’

  Anna rubbed at her stomach absently, but her voice trembled, and her eyes slid down.

  ‘What is it?’ I said, taking her hand.

  ‘We’re still no closer to my brother, Lucas,’ Anna whispered, trying to smile. ‘When we were younger, the house we were staying over in while our parents went out caught fire. It was some stupid electrical fault, and our babysitter was killed. I remember waking up in pitch black, smoke clogging the air…’

  Tears gathered in her eyes, and she rubbed at them as they fell.

  ‘Tony was seven, and I could hear him crying for help, but I couldn’t reach him,’ Anna gasped. ‘I thought we were both going to die, but, someone must have called Emergency Services, because a fireman appeared out of nowhere and lifted me out. I was out on that street terrified. I’d thought I’d lost my baby brother.’

  I grabbed her into my arms as sobs shook her body. When she managed to regain her composure, she continued on with the story.

  ‘Luckily they got him in time, but, I was so angry at myself. I couldn’t believe I’d failed him, and from then on I promised myself, I promised never to fail him again,’ Anna whispered. ‘Ever since that day all he’s wanted is to be a fireman, to help people the way someone helped him. I’m failing him Lucas, I’m failing him.’

  The full force of Anna’s emotions seemed to hit her. The tears slid fast down her cheeks, and her whole body trembled. I tried to reassure her as she wept in my arms. She hadn’t failed him. She wouldn’t fail him. I promised her with all my being that I would find us a way out of all that plagued us. I promised her we would have a life again.

  After a while Anna passed into the realm of dreams, and I lay awake counting my promises, hoping that I could pull each and every one of them off.

  The Gesture

  I let Anna sleep in the next morning as I showered and changed clothes. Sleep hadn’t helped the throbbing in my head, and I tried to work through the most pressing issues we had. Naturally, I was finding it mighty difficult to categorise our problems. I came back to the one we had tied up in the other room, and decided it was best to start there.

  Jessica Reed was a pain in my arse. I felt the honesty behind her words, and sensed that she was holding more back, but I still couldn’t count on the fact she was there to help, rather than hurt, and I knew we needed more to go on. The people who had hired her, the ones who were relentlessly hunting us down and had framed us for mass murder, had broken Jessica’s number one rule, if that rule could be believed. When she’d told us though, I’d felt pain, her pain.

  Once I was ready, I sat gently back onto the bed, and rolled up my trouser leg. The wound that had been gaping the night before was now a thin red line. I stood, rolled the trouser back down, and walked over and into the main room. Brian was at his array of computers, a laptop resting on his knees as he typed furiously. My eyes moved to the couch were Jessica should have been restrained.

  But she wasn’t there.

  ‘Coffee tough guy?’ Jessica’s voice, sweet and innocent, echoed from the kitchen.

  I jumped slightly, a chill shot up my spine and I grabbed for the gun at my side. But I hadn’t strapped it on. Jessica laughed.

  ‘Brian!?’ I chided.

  He tore his eyes from his work, and looked from me to Jessica.

  ‘I didn’t untie her,’ he said. ‘I came in and she’d done it herself, short of my inexperienced self, rushing a cold-blooded killer, there wasn’t much I could do.’

  Jessica’s smile was beginning to annoy me, she found everything hilarious. I turned my gaze on her, and she shrugged and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Blame your big old tough soldier guy,’ she complained. ‘He’s the one that can’t tie a girl up proper. Now, how about that coffee?’

  I walked over and kept my eyes trained on Jessica. She held my gaze and handed me a cup of steaming liquid. I instantly poured it down the sink, which only made the smile on the assassin that much brighter. I opened the bin beside the counter, dumped the cup, and retrieved a new one. I thoroughly washed it out as Jessica sipped her own brew, before making my own.

  ‘I’m not here to kill you, Lucas,’ Jessica said. ‘Trust me.’

  ‘If you think I’ll ever trust you, then you’re not as smart as I gave you credit for,’ I replied, but strangely, I did trust she wasn’t planning on killing us, but I couldn’t be too careful.

  Jessica nodded and said, ‘Touché.’

  Chris slid into the room and walked straight past us. He stopped, turned slowly, and shot daggers in my direction.

  ‘Explain?’ he growled, incredulous.

  I shrugged and rolled my eyes, then while filling Chris in, I followed him over to Brian. Chris wasn’t pleased, and his hand hovered over the gun he had remembered to strap on.

  ‘How’s it going, Brian?’ I asked, hopeful.

  He shook his head and continued to type. Jessica prowled over and moved in front of him. She removed her jacket slowly, and peered seductively at Brian, batting her eyelashes in time with every stroke of his hands on the keyboard.

  ‘Can I help in any way?’ Jessica purred.

  I sighed, gritted my teeth and pinched the bridge of my nose. Brian kept his eyes on the screen in front of him, seemingly unfazed by the assassin’s advances.

  ‘Oh,’ Jessica playfully huffed, before her mouth curved into a smile, ‘I had a suspicion you swung the other way.’

  Brian blushed that time, and I’d had enough.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ I growled. ‘Are you really here to help or slut us to death?’

  Jessica stuck out her tongue and walked over to the kitchen. I grasped Brian’s shoulder.

  ‘Tell me you have something, Bri,’ I pleaded.

  He slammed the lid of the laptop shut, and then stood and threw it across the room.

  ‘Someone’s touchy,’ Jessica said.

  I shot her a glare.

  ‘There’s nothing,’ Brian said as he ground his teeth together. ‘Anything that transferred onto the USB was corrupted by being disconnected wrong. I couldn’t recover any of it.’

  My insides dropped with disappointment, but I tried to console Brian. He just shook his head and moved to retrieve his now broken tech. Jessica laughed.

  ‘This broad is pissing me off,’ Chris muttered.

  I turned to Jessica and said, ‘Something to share?’

  ‘How about a gesture of trust?’ she replied. ‘Brian, baby, could you dig into the right pocket of my jacket please?’

  Brian did so, pulling out a dark red object that looked like a lipstick container. He popped off the top, revealing the end of a USB drive. I looked sharply at Jessica.

  ‘I was Danny’s back-up to begin with,’ she explained. ‘I retrieved the information from Digilock, quite easily I might add, and gave him the files most pertinent to learning more about all of you. I only started hunting you once I knew he’d failed. All the information on that computer I destroyed is right there in Brian’s hand.’

  Brian
set it down quickly, as if the drive might explode. We all stared at it. It was what we’d been waiting for, that big break that I’d thought we had lost. It was there, sitting beside Brian, its secrets screaming to be told. The door to the corridor opened, and Paul joined us by the computers. He looked at our intense faces and asked what was up. We told him, and his expression matched ours as he stared.

  ‘This is it!’ Paul shouted with his face alight with joy. ‘This is what we’ve been waiting for! This nightmare could be over soon!’

  I knew that was unlikely, but I didn’t burst his bubble. Brian, with shaking hands, picked up the drive. He sighed at the broken laptop, before he booted up one of the desktop computers and plugged in Jessica’s ‘gesture of trust’. If the drive really did have what we needed, then I might not shoot Jessica with a tranquilizer when I got my hands on one.

  Anna waddled out from our bedroom, muttered morning and walked to the kitchen. She yawned, and poured herself a coffee. I watched exasperated, as she smiled at Jessica and picked up her mug. I had to stop myself from reminding everyone that the night before, that assassin had tried to murder us.

  ‘I need a password,’ Brian called out, and Jessica picked up her coffee and slouched over.

  ‘Did you get something?’ Anna asked. She moved over as fast as was possible for her, her eyes wide and innocent.

  ‘We didn’t,’ I replied. ‘Jessica did.’

  Anna looked at the woman in question. Jessica herself smiled sweetly, not the mocking grin she hit us with, but a gentle and sincere one.

  ‘Thank you,’ Anna said.

  ‘You’re extremely welcome,’ Jessica replied.

  ‘Password?’ Brian said, tapping his foot.

  Jessica bent over him, deliberately pressing her torso into the groove of his neck as she typed her password. Once she was done, Brian got to work. I instantly told him to focus on anything that related to Anna’s brother, to ignore everything else. I couldn’t escape the memory of the night before. The way Anna had broken her heart. I’d promised to do everything I could, and I was going to.

  ‘Here’s what I always wondered,’ Jessica broke the silence. ‘You guys wouldn’t have had any access to toilets down in those tunnels, right? So where the hell did you do your business?’

  I flinched.

  ‘We-’ Anna started.

  ‘Anna!’ I gasped. ‘I didn’t think about it then. I sure as hell don’t want to now.’

  ‘Oh come on,’ Jessica teased, ‘one survivalist to another.’

  I shook my head, disgusted.

  ‘The tunnels had an abundance of rooms,’ Anna smiled, ‘we used those. When Chris went out to scavenge for supplies he always brought toilet paper and an extra collection of bottled water for us to clean.’

  ‘Oh,’ Jessica said. ‘You even pooped?’

  ‘Can we please stop talking about bowel movements!?’ I cried a little too highly. ‘And while we’re on the subject of revealing things, let’s change subject with how did you get over to Digilock so quickly? I mean your bullet came from quite a bit away, an opposite building if I had to guess.’

  ‘Kudos to you tough guy,’ Jessica beamed. ‘I had a wire connecting the two buildings. If by some miracle I missed you, something that doesn’t happen often I’ll add, I knew I’d need a quick way over.’

  ‘Huh,’ I said, glad the conversation was over.

  We all hung around. I paced back and forth, and for two hours Brian searched the drive, filtering through hundreds of files. The majority of it was useless, indecipherable notes and shorthand, questions without answers. There was a bit about the experiments conducted when my father was still employed by the government. Those piqued my interest, especially when Brian told me that video files had been connected to them.

  ‘Can we see them?’ I gasped.

  ‘No, I said they had had videos connected with them, not anymore,’ he replied.

  I looked over at Jessica.

  ‘Don’t look at me tough guy,’ she said. ‘If those files aren’t there, then someone removed them before I got a hold of them.’

  I sighed, exasperated. That would have been a huge win for us. I flashed back to the earlier conversation I’d had with Chris a while ago, his plan to blackmail the government to keep them off our tail. We needed something irrefutable, something that couldn’t be drowned out. Video files of past experiments would have been grand. Simple words like the ones Brian sifted through were useless.

  Everyone had dinner, bar Brian, who sat sweating as he searched for Anna’s brother. The sun dipped, and finally vanished from the sky. The silence and tension in the air sent energy through my body, and I started to pace again. I finally walked over to where Jessica had sat next to Anna, and made a list of questions.

  ‘The group you’re a part of,’ I said, and before she could protest, I cut her off. ‘I don’t want to know about them, I just want to know, that if you’re not going to kill us, will they send another?’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘If I haven’t done the job, then they’ll know why.’

  Her eyes dropped to Anna’s stomach, and glazed over.

  ‘So we don’t have to worry about more of you?’ I pushed.

  ‘Technically I still have the contract,’ Jessica said. ‘No one will touch it while I still have it, and no one will come near you if I haven’t killed you. They wouldn’t dare unless they wanted to forfeit their lives at my hand.’

  ‘You have a lot of faith in yourself,’ I pointed out.

  ‘They won’t come near you,’ she stated in return.

  I resumed my agitated pace. We needed something, anything. I couldn’t take it any longer. My father had to be stopped one way or another. The government had to be taken off our backs. We needed Anna’s brother, we needed my sister. I wanted my life back, a life with Anna and our baby. I could have a son or daughter on the way, soon by the look of it, and they’d be born into a nightmare.

  ‘Where did he learn all this?’ Jessica asked Anna. ‘The guy’s a whiz kid.’

  ‘He’s always loved computers,’ Paul answered, coming up behind them. ‘It started out just playing games, before I knew it, he was making his own. I remember two years ago on his sixteenth birthday, I bought him a new laptop, top notch stuff. I walked in on him dismantling it, tweaking it into something better.’

  Jessica looked genuinely impressed. I thanked the Gods Brian was on our side.

  ‘How’s your leg?’ Anna inquired.

  ‘Yeah it’s healed,’ I answered, pulling my trouser up to show her.

  Anna smiled thankfully and patted my thigh, but Jessica stared, her eyes snapped open wide and her mouth dangled. She jumped to her feet, and spun, staring incredulous at Anna’s stomach.

  ‘Christ,’ she whispered.

  ‘What?’ Anna gasped as her hand raced to where Jessica was burning holes into.

  Jessica stood there gawping, her eyes shooting from me to Anna. Chris and Paul shared a confused glance, and the hairs on my neck rose at Jessica’s expression.

  ‘How can you brainy idiots not have put it together!?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Put what together?’ I asked.

  ‘I know what happened in Greystone,’ Jessica said. ‘I know what your Dad did to you, and what you are now. I know what you can do. I know why Anna’s stomach grew. Think about it!’

  We all just looked confused. Jessica sighed.

  ‘Your leg, the cells regenerated, healed,’ she said and I nodded.

  That’s when I got it.

  ‘What?’ Anna cried.

  ‘Anna,’ I whispered with eyes wide, ‘what if the abilities I have, what if, what if our baby has them?’

  ‘So what if he or she does?’ Anna asked. ‘Is that likely?’

  ‘More than likely,’ Jessica said. ‘Lucas’s DNA is in your baby.’

  ‘But Lucas didn’t change until after we…’ Anna said and stopped.

  It was true, but it didn’t matter worth a damn. My father had been prepp
ing me slowly, injecting me with miniscule amounts of his ‘miracle’ drug over time. But it didn’t stop my DNA from changing. It just took longer for it to fully affect me and for my system to reject it. I was at the height of the drug when Anna and I conceived our child, and it was moments after that I changed.

  ‘Your child has the same regenerative abilities its father does,’ Jessica whispered. ‘Who knows what effect that has on the pregnancy? This could be one of them.’

  Holy shit.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Brian gasped, echoing my thoughts.

  ‘I know,’ Chris said.

  ‘No,’ Brian turned, his face pale. ‘I don’t mean that. Anna, I know where your brother is.’

  Anna flew to her feet.

  ‘I found him,’ Brian concluded.

  The Rush

  Anarchy erupted. Anna’s voice merged with Chris and Paul’s as the shouting match got under way. I stared speechless. Brian’s information could be it, the very thing that could lead me to my father. Desires and hopes flashed through my mind. Stopping my father, getting some semblance of normal life back, removing the threat to us all… It wasn’t going to be easy, but if we could pull it off, if we could move on the information before it was too late…

  ‘You’re nuts!’ Chris screamed.

  ‘This is what we’ve needed!’ Paul chimed. ‘This could finally be over. We need this to be over!’

  ‘If you think we are seriously going to sit on this, Chris, then yeah, you are nuts!’ Anna replied.

  Brian rocked nervously in his chair, while the shouting continued. Jessica had taken up a passive position beside Anna. The vein in Chris’s neck popped, and Paul shook, dripped with sweat and gritted his teeth. Each of them was right in some way. Chris was a forward thinker, prepare, perfect and attack. It was logical, rational and all the other things that go with a good plan, but we didn’t have the time. Who knew how long the information would be right?

  I waded into the argument, and everyone hushed, turning their gazes at me. Anna pleaded with her eyes, Chris glared with his. Brian took up interest with his shoe, and Paul almost hopped from one foot to the other at light speed.