The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Chapter 25: Counterstrike

Once again the big man came away with a jerk. This time, however instead of finding a dark and quiet room surrounding him, he found himself staring at the business end of an automatic rifle. A dark and unblinking eye of absolute certainty that told him that if he made a wrong move, it would be his last. It was so close, he could feel the muzzle's metal cool on his cheekbone, the smell of lubricating oil and cordite sharp in his nostrils.

Slowly he let his eyes climb over the muzzle's business-like grimness to the equally grim face of the law enforcement officer staring down its sights at him. As he matched the officer stare for stare, the man quickly ran a self-diagnostic.

Last thing he remembered from when he was conscious before was the third bullet hammering into his body, biting brutally through muscle and organ, tearing and shredding its way deep into his person before its momentum was finally spent. It came to a rest against the back most curve of his third rib after having passed only millimetres from his pulsing aorta.

Together, the three bullets fired into his chest at close range had done their fair share of damage. If he had been any smaller or less powerful, they would've killed him. They did, however, leave him badly wounded and in a coma.

Both of which, much to his surprise, he seemed to have recovered from. Better yet, he wore some sort of overalls in the place of the smock he had worn before.

But, even as he marveled at his physical recovery, he felt a wave of disappointment wash through him when he found his mental abilities still missing. He didn't push them hard enough this time to elicit a trickle of blood from his nose or ear, but enough to send a sharp stab of pain through his cortex.

He turned his eyes away from the grim looking police officer to ponder that. He didn't have to feel with his fingers at the holes to know that they had been sealed by a force other than his own native healing abilities, though they were, in themselves, quite powerful. And that healing force had also done something to his brain, to the psionic cortex nestled deep within. Deactivated it, by the feel of things, giving his neural tissue the chance to regenerate without a psionic EMF to constantly deal with.

Deactivated? Him?? It wasn't possible! But another sweep of his psionic cortex, still very much alive but showing reduced activity revealed that not only was it possible, but it was already done! The question now, of course was what did he need to do to get it reactivated?

Without his own abilities on line, he wouldn't be able to work past the block that seemed to be in the way of his abilities functioning normally. Either he found the person who put the block in the way, or he could hope that the block itself would terminate once his neural tissues completed their repair cycle.

Abruptly his train of thought was interrupted when a second rifle muzzle poked itself into his face from the opposite direction. And then a man appeared out of the dimness near the foot of the bed he was lying strapped onto, as if a crazed psychotic. He hadn't even bothered to check the leather straps that pinned his arms and legs: they seemed solid enough.

A frown appeared on the man's face, as he looked the big man over, from head to toe. Then he was reaching into his belt.

"Undo him," the man commanded in a low voice, his uniform the same as the ones worn by the two men holding the guns on the man on the bed.

The dark eyes of the twin muzzles never wavered as two additional sets of hands appeared to undo the straps at first his hands and then his ankles. As the big man slowly brought his hands together to rub at where the straps had chaffed the skin raw, the two rifle muzzles brushed against his cheek, a not-so-casual reminder that he was being given absolutely no margin for error.