Empowered: Traitor (The Empowered Series Book 2) Read online

  “Somehow it’s generating heat,” Simon said. “This is not good.”

  No kidding.

  Coldie doubled down on the ice spear and jabbed again. The spear’s head flashed and the ice exploded, sending shards in all directions. She clutched her face.

  I hit the tree with my stunner, but the beam died. I slapped in my second battery pack while Keisha fired at the others, trying to keep them back.

  The tree-thing whipped its branches at Coldie, and she screamed as the barbed tips dug into her.

  I fired at it, but the stunner didn’t have any effect.

  Keisha waved her hands, and a buzzsaw blade grew out of the steaming air in front of her.

  She snapped her fingers and the buzzsaw spun at the tree, slicing through one of the bigger branches. It made a shrieking whistle sound and dropped Coldie, who sprawled on the ground, unconscious.

  I sprinted to her. I flung her over my shoulder and hauled ass back to Simon and Keisha.

  “We’ve got to get to the other side of the field.” I gasped out the words. We ran across the field, and reached the electro-barrier at the far side. The alien plant-creatures were maybe a hundred yards back, fanned out into a line, like wolves cornering prey, making that high-pitched ringing hum, barbed branches whipping at the air.

  Rain forest trees grew in a line about fifteen feet from the other side of the electro-barrier. I reached into the nearest one, pushed my power deep inside the tree, ignoring the tree’s rumbling moans swelling up in my brain, forced it to grow its limb, pulling nutrients into its roots and nitrogen and oxygen from the air. This was going to hurt like hell in about ten seconds, but so what?

  “Ophelia’s turning blue,” Simon said. “Blood reaction?”

  “Give her a medpack.”

  He slapped one on her neck. The tree branch was huge now, reaching past the electro-barrier and looming over us.

  Keisha and Simon both threw nylon ropes over the branch.

  Coldie moaned.

  Good. I turned her so that she hung over my back. “You hear me, Coldie?”

  No response.

  Simon scrambled up the rope and back to where the branch met the trunk. He fired past us.

  We scrambled up to join him and swung across the branch.

  Behind us, beyond the electro-barrier, the monster plant-creatures stood in a line, branches waving, the whip-like tendrils moving in time.

  I shuddered. Where had these nightmare things come from?

  Chapter 2

  We didn't stop until we were inside the trees, hidden from the field and whatever those things were.

  I put Coldie down. Her skin was still bluish.

  “Some sort of poison," Simon said.

  "Would another med pack help?" Like all Empowered, Coldie healed fast But this was poison. Maybe a normal would already be dead.

  Simon checked her pulse. He looked worried, which said a lot. He never looked anything other than cool and calm. "Couldn't hurt."

  I slapped another medpack inside her shirt, between her breasts. Maybe the medpack being over her heart would get the CureAll inside the medpack moving faster through her.

  Assuming the CureAll actually lived up to its stupid name.

  Her breathing deepened but she didn't open her eyes.

  "What the hell were those things?" Keisha said, squatting down beside Coldie's body. "They did a number on her." She shuddered.

  Simon looked at me. "What did you sense when you sent your power into them?"

  "Something alien. It was like trying to reach through a wall of black glass." I was going to have nightmares for weeks.

  But there was no time to worry about future nightmares now, especially when we were still in the middle of one.

  "Maybe those things are aliens!" Keisha's eyes widened. "God damn, aliens here in Colombia."

  "Seems unlikely," Simon replied.

  "Why the hell not?" Keisha demanded.

  "No time to talk about this," I said. "We've got to keep hauling ass.”

  Ashula had said zip about killer tree-things. I ground my teeth. Didn't matter that I ran a cell for her and the rest of the Scourge's inner circle, I was still a mushroom. Fed shit and kept in the dark. I fondled the necklace I’d taken from Mutter when I killed him, the one that let the Scourge reach me, and let me secretly talk to them. They had to call me. A one way line. I had no idea how it worked. But it did.

  Coldie groaned and sat up. Keisha fell back on her ass. "Crap!"

  "Yeah, I'm alive," Coldie said, and stood. Wobbled but didn’t fall over.

  "You going to be able to stay on your feet?" I asked her.

  “I’m on them, aren’t I?”

  Nice to know she was still an arrogant little jerk.

  Simon looked her over.

  "Hey, watch the eyes, creep."

  “Just a quick medical evaluation.”

  Coldie tilted her chin up and curved her lips back in an angry sneer. “Is that what you call it?”

  Simon didn’t say anything, just shook his head.

  “Enough,” I said. I pointed at the trail through the trees, heading toward our destination. “That’s where we need to go, not into some idiotic argument.”

  Coldie glared at me but kept her mouth closed.

  We walked between massive, leafy trees, and past brilliant flowers, some kind I'd never seen before, which wasn't hard to do. This was my first time in Colombia.

  I took the lead, making Keisha walk beside Coldie in case she needed help, which pissed them both off. Too bad.

  Simon was in back, listening for the sound of an approaching aircraft which might be security.

  Another twenty yards and we left the rain forest. A little asphalt road, ran ahead to where a group of metal-roofed buildings stood in the middle of a grove of some sort of tall green plants. Another road met it at a right angle.

  A figure walked down the second road. It was green, a man all in green. He shambled forward until he was only a dozen feet away. His eyes were unfocused. He wasn’t in green. He was naked and green. The skin glinted emerald green. I reached out with my sense, carefully like my hand was reaching to feel if a pan on a stove was hot.

  My eyes widened. His skin gave off the same static hum the killer tree-things had.

  I aimed my stunner at him. I still had charge left in the second battery. My mouth was dry. I got a better look at him. His eyes were black, with no irises, like a fish, and his mouth was open, like a fish, slowly gulping air. He shambled closer.

  Where his hair would be was green furry moss. Dark gray-green lichen covered his crotch and the front of his legs. My eyes watered and my stomach churned. He had a cat-piss stink to him. Ammonia stench made me gag.

  I wanted to vomit. The rest of my team looked like they also wanted to throw up.

  "A stinking nightmare on two legs," Simon whispered. He covered his mouth with a rag.

  Yeah, you could say that.

  I told my fear to go lie down in a corner, and I ran my power over the green fur and the skin.

  A strange piping sound ran through my head, and a feeling like the weird tree-things, of facing walls of glass with nothing beyond.

  "He's like the tree-things."

  "Oh my god," Keisha said.

  Coldie backed up, fear filling her face.

  I aimed the stunner at him, finger on the trigger.

  But he kept on walking down the other road, and headed off to our left. Frond-like things trailed from the backs of his legs.

  The green moss fur grew down his back. He wore faded flip-flops that smacked the asphalt as he shambled away.

  Bile filled my mouth.

  Behind me someone threw up.

  “Bloody hell." That was Simon.

  I lowered the gun.

  It hadn't seen us.

  "A zombie!" Coldie said.

  Keisha wiped her mouth. She looked embarrassed. I ignored the vomit on the ground. I wanted to hurl, too.

  Some mad scientist in a co
mpany lab down here, experimenting on people.

  I pulled out my data pad. The data pad showed the map of the area—and a satellite photo—according to Ashula. We had to reach the warehouse.

  "Let's get moving.”

  "All things considered, I'd rather be in New Jersey," Keisha said, the blood still drained from her face.

  Yeah, I'd rather be in the crappiest dive in Portland, but a job was a job.

  We walked down the road into the little village. What looked like giant sunflowers, the petals huge and triangular, glinted in the sunlight.

  Another green person was out there; a tall teenaged girl, her breasts covered with moss fur. I swallowed bile. Her black hair was covered with more of the green moss-like stuff. She was sprinkling water on the mutant sunflowers or whatever they were.

  Her eyes were black, like the green man’s. She was almost as tall as me. She could have been my sister Ava or Ella. I clenched my fists. She ignored me, went on sprinkling water.

  We kept walking. Tall, conical plants lined the road and sparkled where the sunlight reached them beneath the tall trees.

  "Cycads," Simon said. "Very ancient plants.”

  "But these look almost like crystal," Keisha said.

  They did. They were crystal-like things soaring eight feet high. Fluid moved inside them. My stomach twisted again.

  Coldie had her stunner out, while Keisha's fingers were twitching, like she wanted to conjure steel.

  "No time," I said.

  We huddled on the path. Webbed fronds rustled, and another green man-thing moved, this one crawling along the ground, its fingertips and toes had sucker-cup like things on them.

  Who the fuck would do this? We were in the middle of a nightmare, a horror show.

  "God damn." Keisha's voice was a sharp whisper.

  "Indeed." Simon nodded.

  We reached the first hut—it was made of wood with a corrugated tin roof beneath a mossy carpet. I noticed tiny green threads running along the edges of the roof and dangling from the eaves like cobwebs.

  A little boy sat in the doorway of the first house, like a garden statue, only you could see his chest rise and fall. His skin was shiny green scales, like the bark of the weird-tree things.

  His eyes were all black, like the other people we had found. His mouth was open, and his tongue was covered in green fur.

  A little monster. A little victim. He couldn't have been more than five years old.

  His fingers held a sticky green-gray lump.

  Keisha and Coldie were both crying, while Simon looked away.

  I stepped up close to the boy. He didn't seem to notice me until my shadow covered him, then he got up and walked into the sunlight, stopped, and sat down.

  His scaled skin gleamed. My eyes watered at the cat piss stink. Yellow-green droplets covered his hands. I reached out with my sense and heard the same alien ringing in my mind, felt the same glass wall, with living energy just beyond it.

  I swore to God that I'd kill whoever had done this.

  We started walking again and found more green people, children and grown-ups, in the doorways of the shacks, and leaning against walls, their mouths open, scaled skins gleaming.

  When I was a girl, my grandmother read me the Island of Doctor Moreau because I wanted a grown-up story, and because I wanted to hear one of her favorite stories. Ruth said I was going to have nightmares, but she read the story to me anyway, about an island filled with monsters created by a nut job. I don’t remember having nightmares from the story, but I would after seeing this village.

  Simon turned to me. “I believe I know what the scales are for—biological solar cells."

  I unclenched my hands. "What the hell for?" The real monsters were the scum that had done this to these people. “Why would you do that to people?”

  “Perhaps because they could.”

  I wanted to tear the heart out of the bastard who thought up that idea.

  The sun was hot on my skin. My mouth was dry, and all I could smell was that ammonia stink.

  How could we save these poor people? We couldn’t. Not now. Not when I had no idea how to fix them, how to return them to what they once were.

  “Aliens!” Coldie looked around, wild-eyed. “That’s what they are.” She was having a major freak-out.

  I grabbed her shoulders. “Don’t freak. There are no aliens.”

  “These sure look like aliens. And you said the tree-things were alien.”

  “What they felt like was alien. Not that they were.”

  “Same thing!”

  Keisha shrugged. “She’s got a point.”

  “Let’s go,” I said through clenched teeth. When Ava and Ella were tweeners, they’d had a thing about aliens. They read books and stories about them, and always wanted Ruth to buy any tabloid in the grocery story with aliens on the cover. I had talked with Professor Insight, back when I was in the Renegades. He said there was no evidence. It was just wishful thinking.

  We continued on the path, and the village disappeared into the rain forest.

  Ten minutes later, we entered a clearing.

  Ahead of us, maybe a hundred yards away, a huge gray building rose up.

  Our target.

  Chapter 3

  The warehouse was a huge two-story gray building that looked like it had been dropped into the jungle from an industrial area in Portland or Seattle. It had no windows. There was a row of big doors and what looked like a standard person-sized entrance in the middle of the side facing us. Black glass blisters were perched on the upper corners of the warehouse.

  “Likely those are camera blisters,” Simon whispered to me.

  Great.

  We crouched in a grove of not-plant things, cylindrical in shape, wood colored, topped with flower-like green-black petals.

  I tried not to reach out to the not-plants, but it was like a fire you just had to touch. An electric tingle, no noise, the feeling of black glass everywhere, harder than anything I knew, but nothing else. I pulled my sense away, biting down on the anger rising up in me. This place was as much a twisted freak show as those bizarre tree-things back in the field.

  “Why aren’t there any signs on the building?” I asked Simon.

  He looked at the building. “I don’t know. I suppose why hang a sign on your secret installation?”

  There was a wooden hut on the far side of the paved road across from the warehouse, next to a tall pole with all sorts of communications stuff on it.

  I glanced at Simon. “That has to be a guard shack.”

  “Clearly. But where are the guards?”

  Keisha looked around warily. “I want to know what the guards are.

  Good question. No sign of vehicles, either. But why have a guard shack if your guards weren’t people? The guard shack had polarized windows, so it had to be for human guards.

  “Let’s go see what the back of the warehouse looks like.” I led the others through the not-plant grove, trying to avoid brushing against the cylindrical plants, but still touched one with my hip. An electric shock shot through me. My legs and arms jerked and my jaw clenched. I staggered away.

  “What the fuck?” Keisha shot me a worried look. “Are you okay?”

  “Those cylinder-shaped plant thing are real live wires.” I shook myself. “They’re packing serious voltage.”

  The rest of my cell gave those a lot of room after that.

  We got to the near corner of the warehouse. No doors along the side of the building. A narrow paved path ran around to the back. It was probably for goon guards in a goon golf cart. Assuming there were any actual goon guards.

  We stayed in the not-plant grove, creeping along until we reached the rear of the warehouse. The rest of the ground was covered with little white stones. It must have been a real pain to keep the forest and all the plants from growing closer to the warehouse, and getting tangled up with the not-plant grove. But even without trying I sensed the rain forest’s fear. It was afraid of the not-plants.
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  There were no doors along the back at all, either.

  The whine of an electric motor approached from behind the opposite end of the warehouse. On cue, a golf cart with two uniformed goons riding in it came around the far end.

  Shit. “Get down,” I hissed at the others.

  We crouched in the not-plant grove. “Who has charges left in their stunners?”

  “I do,” Coldie said quietly.

  “Take these guys out,” I whispered as the cart came closer. Our jungle suits’ camo should make us hard to see, and the two goons looked bored. Stupid to not pay attention, but they must have done this a million times with nothing to see.

  She handed me her stunner. “No, you’d better do it.” Now I knew Coldie wasn’t back to normal. She should want to pop these guys. She sure as hell wouldn’t have given the stunner to me.

  But I didn’t argue, just handed the stunner to Simon. He and Coldie were the snipers in the cell.

  Simon held the stunner two-handed, aimed.

  The golf cart hummed toward us.

  Simon waited.

  “Fire anytime,” I whispered.

  He ignored me.

  Keisha scowled at him, but Simon ignored her, too.

  My muscles tensed. Bored guard goons suddenly woke up when they saw us crouching in the not-plant grove.

  The golf cart braked suddenly, the goons fighting to stay inside, grabbing at their guns.

  The stunner went zap, zap! The two guards slumped out of the cart like cooked spaghetti. Electric motor cut off. The little vehicle thudded against the warehouse, and stopped.

  “I did not want the cart to crash,” Simon said, like he was telling us the weather for a nice day.

  Keisha and I duct-taped the guards’ mouths and zip-tied their hands together behind their backs. I was betting they wouldn’t be left like this too long. But hopefully long enough.

  Simon pointed up at the glass blister on this corner of the building above us, like the ones around the front. “Another camera.”

  Great. “Then we need to haul ass.” Again. I wasn’t waiting any longer. We jogged down the access path, back to the front of the building.

  “Simon, check the guard shack.” If the video feed went someplace other than there, we’d have company real soon. Simon ran over to the shack at a crouch.