Child of Recklessness (Trials of Strength Book 2) Read online

  Child of Recklessness

  By

  Matthew R. Bell

  All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission from the author.

  Copyright © 2014 Matthew R. Bell

  Also by Matthew R. Bell

  The Trials of Strength

  Fear of God

  Child of Recklessness

  To my biggest supporters: Mum and Dad

  The Recap

  Greystone was a peaceful, idyllic town in the highlands of Scotland, a safe, secure place where I used to live. I attended college, led a normal life with a loving mother and a workaholic father. In my opinion, it was perfect, a life I was content with, a life I was positive would continue the way it was.

  I was wrong.

  The day it began started like any other. I woke and ate breakfast and headed for college. I remember feeling anxious that day, concerned, but like the normal guy I was, I ignored it. Then everything went to hell. I was told my father had had a heart attack, so I rushed home only to find my mother lying in a pool of blood. After that things got worse. The people in town changed, not all, but enough.

  At the time we weren’t sure whether it was the world or just our town, but it didn’t matter. Several residents of Greystone turned into mindless killers, animals with no recognition of their loved ones, of their friends, just an unquenchable thirst for blood and death. What they had lost however was replaced with increased strength, speed and other abilities that made them almost unstoppable.

  I was thrown into this world with my parents’ fates left unanswered and bundled with a suspicious group of survivors deep under the town in tunnels that no one knew about. We tried to escape, but the people behind the change had us trapped. The town itself was perfect, surrounded by mountains far away from civilisation, coupled with that was the bombs and snipers that stopped us from leaving, and we had no other option but to play in the sick game we had been forced into, even though we didn’t know the rules.

  During that time, I became increasingly close to a number of survivors. We became a sort of dysfunctional family in a short space of time. We opened ourselves up, albeit reluctantly, forced to hand over our trust, our lives, to survive.

  It turned out the group terrorising us used to be a secret science division of the government, they broke off after their experiments reached extremes and the results weren’t what were wanted. To top it off, my father, the man I was worried for was their esteemed leader, and the tunnels were an old testing ground. The town and people were just another experiment, another trial to perfect a drug that would change the world, a drug that altered DNA and gave the subject increased attributes. The only problem was people are more resilient than they anticipated, and it came with some downsides, the subjects gained those incredible abilities, but the mind rejected the change, leaving their bodies a warzone between old and new.

  Greystone was my father’s last chance, one last experiment that surprisingly revolved around me. Using the town as a sort of Petri dish, he created trials for me to struggle through, events that would enable me to overcome their drug and become the perfect little soldier he dreamed of. It worked. After a month their plans had come to fruition and I was changed into something far different from what I was before. I had that strength and speed and accelerated healing, increased senses. I also had a new determination to survive.

  In the end, a few survivors and I fought back, we battled the changed residents of Greystone and I personally went after my father. He escaped though, and I found out his group wasn’t the only one interested in the success of his plans. There were now two parties involved in this nightmare. The town was destroyed and buried by a bomb my father detonated, but we escaped with a new mission.

  Stop this group headed by my Dad, and make sure the events at Greystone never happened again.

  The Infiltration

  The moon was full and it lit up the night in silver. An icy wind blew around the rooftop I crouched on as I stared down through the huge round skylight into the room below. It was large, cylindrical like the window I stared through, but sparse. Its tiled floors and stone walls set alarm bells off in my mind. It was too empty. A single computer sat straight below where I stood, at the back of the room, and across from it was the wide entranceway that led in.

  I drew a deep breath, filtering through my thoughts. The test we were acting out would hopefully prove Chris’s fears correct or not. It was simple, wait for Anna to come into the room, and then enter the room myself, my way a little more destructive, and a lot more surprising.

  Come on.

  I wrapped my arms around myself. Two months had passed since we escaped Greystone, and the hunt for my father, Richard Bishop, was dismal. There was also Anna’s brother and perhaps, if Richard had been telling the truth, my twin sister to find.

  The wind stilled, and my ears honed in on a short, sharp sound. A normal person wouldn’t have heard it, but I was no longer normal. That saved my life. I moved, using my unnatural speed to shift out of the way of a bullet hurtling through the air. I was on my feet and sprinting when another hit the ground where I had crouched. I raced across the roof and hid behind the entrance out onto it.

  Damn it! Not another one!

  I didn’t dare peek around the corner. I knew I wouldn’t see the sniper anyway.

  ‘Lucas!’ Anna’s voice was muffled by the ground at my feet, but I heard her.

  Shit!

  We didn’t need this. We didn’t need more complications to add to the mix, but life wasn’t the way it used to be, I wasn’t the way I used to be. I threw myself out into the line of fire and barrelled at the skylight. I felt something whiz by my cheek, but it missed, and just when I started to panic, I jumped at the window and crashed into the room below.

  The Truck

  One Month Earlier

  I could hear the two heartbeats along with my own, Anna’s, and the baby’s in her body. It froze me for a second, as snow cascaded from the sky, as the televisions in the shop window blared and the truck jumped the pavement towards us.

  With my speed, I grabbed Anna, and using my right leg, jumped off of Chris, trying to get us all to safety. We were lucky. I landed on my back with Anna on top as the truck crashed into the shop window. Glass exploded around us, on us, and television sets sparked and ripped apart as the truck obliterated them. The vehicle came to a sudden stop as it hit something hard, the tail end jumping into the air and hitting the ground with an audible thud.

  People in our street screamed, others rushed over to see if we were alright.

  ‘Anna?’ I said.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she gasped. ‘I’m fine. Where’s Chris?’

  I scanned around us but couldn’t find him. My heart raced and my eyes widened as they shot back to the truck.

  No.

  ‘No!’ Anna repeated my thoughts.

  Tears gathered in her eyes and for a second all I could do was blink. No way after everything we had been through could this be the end of someone like Chris, Chris the hardened ex-army guy who had been instrumental in saving our lives.

  ‘Son of a bitch!’ a voice screamed.

  Chris rounded the truck and stumbled towards us, a nasty cut on his head. I sighed with relief, and Anna stood, surprisingly throwing her arms around him. I had always assumed Chris was in his mid-forties, his movements fast, flexible and frightening, but we’d learned, rather reluctantly from him, that he was fifty-four. It showed on his scarred and line marked face, a face that had weathered more than any of us. He had brown hair,
peppered with grey, and his eyes were a brown so dark, that it was like looking into oblivion.

  ‘Thank God,’ Anna said.

  ‘Takes a lot more than that to kill me, sweetheart,’ Chris replied, however relief filled his features. ‘Nice thinking. Thanks.’

  He nodded at me, and I nodded back, but it was hardly necessary. Saving each other was what we did. I stood up as more people began to gather and stare at the wreckage. A few were on their mobiles, no doubt calling for help. I wondered for a second what they thought had happened; an accident? Some poor driver, who was probably dead? I knew differently. I had watched the man behind the wheel deliberately jump the pavement, and intentionally aim for us.

  ‘Chris-’ I started, but he cut me off.

  ‘I know,’ he whispered.

  I walked towards the wreckage and my feet crunched the broken glass beneath them. As I reached the back of the truck, the driver’s side burst open, and a man fell from his seat. He was covered in blood; his arm cradled his side as he tried to stand. Eventually, he gave up, and collapsed with his back against the vehicle. I had to be quick.

  Chris and Anna followed as I faced the man and crouched. I stared into his one open eye, the other a shiny red mess.

  ‘Who sent you?’ I said.

  He looked at me and laughed with a choked sound that turned into painful coughs. Once the fit stopped, he glared at me.

  ‘Who sent you?’ I spat, my voice rising.

  I could hear sirens in the air, emergency services racing to the scene. We didn’t have much time.

  ‘Lucas, we have to go,’ Chris said and grabbed my shoulder. ‘We can’t stay here.’

  ‘We have to know!’ I said and pulled away.

  Our attacker continued to glare, a smile separating his lips. I brought my fist against his face, blood burst from his mouth and he spat a tooth onto the ground. He faced me again, that smug grimace never leaving his expression.

  ‘You’re… you’re wasting your… your time,’ he coughed, his face grimaced as he tried to draw in air.

  Before I could stop him, he brought a shard of glass up and stabbed himself in the throat. I gasped along with Anna as blood spurted onto us. It didn’t take long, the man stared into our faces as his body shuddered, and his final guttural breath left his lungs. The sirens in the air were almost deafening, and Chris swore. Bending down he riffled through the bloody clothes on the man. He came back with a wallet, a USB drive and a packaged syringe. I stared at the last item as something niggled at the back of my mind. A sense of déjà vu, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  I stood as Chris pocketed the wallet and drive. Dropping the syringe, we made our way out of the massacred shop. When we reached outside we were greeted with an audience of concerned faces. A few screamed as we emerged, and as I looked down I saw that all three of us were covered in the dead man’s blood.

  Shit.

  ‘Come on, we have to move,’ Chris asserted, leading the way through an alley off to the side.

  ‘What now?’ Anna asked.

  I shook my head. I had no idea what to do. Our plan sounded good spoken out loud, stopping my father was the most important thing we had to do, but how?

  And now we’re fleeing a crime scene, leaving a dead body in our wake. Great.

  We jogged further off, the sounds of sirens lessening and the world returning to some semblance of order. We had to move quickly, soaked in blood and looking the way we did would make us stand out.

  ‘Let’s just get back to the hotel,’ Chris belatedly answered Anna. ‘First things first, we get changed and regroup. We need to move, they’ll be looking for us.’

  I nodded. Now we had the police to worry about too, and with no one on our side but us, our chances were slimming.

  ‘Why did we have to run?’ Anna questioned Chris. ‘I mean we didn’t do anything wrong.’

  Chris grunted.

  ‘Think about it,’ I said. ‘A truck crashes into a store, we enter, and when we leave we’re covered in blood and a man’s dead.’

  ‘And to explain we’d have to tell them about Greystone,’ Anna continued, catching on. ‘We can’t do that because the government doesn’t want what happened to be related back to them. I get it. But now we’re screwed either way.’

  I nodded as we picked up speed.

  *

  We made it to the hotel at 3:00PM. The tension had mounted, and frustration had taken hold. One month had passed since we escaped Greystone, and the town had been buried along with my father’s secrets. We had hoped to formulate a plan, come up with something spectacular to take my Dad down and stop what had happened to us from happening elsewhere. It was becoming more and more difficult as time went on. Where the hell did we start?

  We dodged the people in reception and made it to our room without being stopped. Chris pulled the electronic card from his pocket and unlocked the door. The familiar feeling of having more questions than answers pained my mind, would it ever be different? Would we ever have those normal lives again?

  My life was never normal, just an experiment created by a sick man masquerading as a father.

  The room we had booked wasn’t large. It was really just one long, rectangle shaped space with two double beds and an adjoining bathroom. A television sat to the left as you walked in, facing the beds. The red painted walls and crimson carpet made our blood stains less imposing, and I cringed as the thought passed through my mind.

  When we had finally escaped from my father’s clasp, we had nothing more than the ripped and bloodied clothes on our back. Luckily, the car Chris had taken to help us out had contained a wallet along with a credit card. The credit card’s owner must have been one forgetful guy, as the pin number was on a piece of paper beside the card inside the wallet. It was unfortunate for him, even though he was likely dead, but fortunate for us.

  ‘Who was that guy?’ Anna spoke into the silence.

  I jumped slightly, dragged from my train of thought.

  ‘What guy?’ I said.

  ‘The one that just tried to nail us with his truck,’ she sighed, irritated. ‘I’m becoming mighty tired of almost dying.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know, but our downtime is done. We have to find my Dad and your brother,’ I said, Anna’s eyes drifted to the floor and she nodded.

  Anna’s brother was only ten. My father had taken him from her arms and used him to force her to watch me. He had wanted her to lead me to him when the time was right, to take me into one of his traps or she wouldn’t see her brother again. She’d done what was wanted from her, and still her brother was missing. He could be dead, left behind in town, but I was sure my father would have kept him. It gave him more power over us.

  ‘I think things have gotten a little more complicated,’ Chris chimed in. ‘It’s not like we can walk up to your Dad and take him out. There’s three of us against an entire army all working for him, and we don’t even know where to start.’

  I clenched my jaw and sighed, I was pissed.

  ‘Well we need to think of something, we can’t just wait around to be picked off by whoever is trying to kill us,’ I said.

  ‘It’s pretty obvious who’s trying to kill us,’ Chris grunted. ‘We escaped, and now your Dad wants us gone before we step on his toes, and that’s if we can even manage that.’

  I shook my head, annoyed at Chris’s attitude. I’d mulled that over on the way to the hotel. It wasn’t my father who was trying to kill us. It couldn’t be. Why, after all the trouble he went through to create me, would he have me killed? It didn’t add up.

  ‘It wasn’t Richard,’ I said convinced. ‘It’s not him. Right now, everything he’s worked for is going exactly to plan. I know it. ’

  Chris scoffed and shook his head. Anna listened, eyes glued to mine.

  ‘Then who, Lucas?’ she asked.

  We stood in silence for a few minutes. My head hurt like hell, and I hadn’t even brought up what, in my opinion, was the most importa
nt point. While no one spoke I listened again, using my advanced hearing to sift through the sounds. Almost perfectly in sync, I could hear our hearts, all four of them. Anna was pregnant. Did she know?

  ‘Okay,’ Chris sighed and planted himself onto one of the beds. ‘Say it isn’t your Dad trying to kill us, then who is?’

  I had a notion I knew, not who it was, but that it wasn’t the first time they’d tried something. I flashed back to the syringe we had pulled from our attacker’s pocket. That was it.

  ‘Bonnie,’ I said.

  Bonnie had been one of my father’s henchmen, in this case henchwoman. Intelligent, deadly and having an obsessive love of the colour violet, Bonnie had been ambiguous at best. We thought in the beginning she worked solely for my Dad, but she saved me from his men, and tried to stop the town from being destroyed. However after that failed she tried to murder me with only a syringe, letting slip in that moment her allegiance to someone else, someone who had no qualms over my death.

  ‘Chris,’ I said. ‘The man today, the syringe, in his pocket, when Bonnie attacked me she had a syringe and we know she didn’t truly work for my Dad.’

  Chris shrugged.

  ‘Whoever she worked for obviously wanted me dead, but, I think I know what else they want.’

  ‘What?’ Anna said.

  ‘The only thing that can be described as something good that came out of that town,’ Chris said as the gears in his mind turned. ‘They want your DNA. A sample of your blood might do.’

  I nodded. It was simple. Someone else wanted what my father created. The drug itself would be useless, with it being highly unlikely to succeed. So whoever was after us wanted me, or a sample of me, the one person who overcame the concoction and gained incredible new powers while retaining their sanity. Theoretically, my blood, my DNA could hold the key of perfecting the unstable drug my father made, guaranteeing someone the same abilities as I had. People had killed for much less.