Altered Ch. 05

Trackers naturally mask their aura so that it is next to impossible to distinguish a tracker from a human whom all have dull signatures. This does nothing about their "scent"; a tracker can still track another tracker if he has a DNA sample, they just can't tell that the person they are tracking IS a tracker. This makes them the ultimate hunters. Trackers abilities range from novice to master. When a tracker gets the "scent" of its prey, he normally loses it in half a day unless he has a constant source to "sniff". At the most, trackers can only focus on one prey at a time. If they pick up a different "scent" they forget how to track the last scent they were on. Now all these generalities have exceptions depending on how strong the tracker is. A master tracker can track more than one prey at a time and track a certain "scent" indefinitely. Master trackers can also see masked auras. Master trackers however are rare, maybe one in ten thousand trackers ever have a strong enough ability to become a master tracker. There happens to only be one known alive currently.

Mike started looking around, he must have felt me probing him, he wasn't impaired enough. No matter. I got off the bar stool and walked over to the group calling out to him, "Mike, Mike! It's me Bob!... Your brother?"

The sheriff and the deputy were both at ease but Mike tensed up and blurted, "I don't have a brother!"

"Really, Mike? Really? Is that the best you can do?"

The sheriff tensed up suddenly and reached for his gun, but the deputy was slower to react. I stiffened my fingers and slammed them into his side hitting a nerve cluster. His whole left side seized up and his face was a mask of pain.

I reached around Mike and grabbed the deputy by the scruff of his neck, pulling him off his barstool and over to face me. I could tell by looking at him that he was no killer, I doubt he had anything to do with Lisa's death but the sheriff did. I had been practicing different martial arts moves dealing with pressure point, nerve ending and found a particularly useful one that I used on the deputy as I performed a quick succession of three moves to his solar plexus, his temple and ended with a clap of both hands behind and around his ears. He fell to the floor deafened and unconscious.

Mike took the opportunity to run like hell out of there. I could have easily caught him however I wanted him to run. The sheriff was still seized up, half paralyzed as I unsnapped his gun holster from his belt setting it on the bar ten feet from us. I patted him down and found a small 9mm ankle gun above his boot, it was small enough so I put it in my pocket.

"Tell me Jim, why did you kill Lisa?" I interrogated. "I mean look at you... all laughing and joking around, having a good ol' time."

His eyes were like saucers and I could smell the fear leaking from his pores.

"Did they pay you A LOT of money to murder a pregnant woman? Or, did you do it just for fun?"

I could have probed his mind or even just read his conscious mind, but it was too satisfying getting it out of him the old-fashioned way. I had his right arm by the wrist pulling it out towards me shoving my knee into his chest pinning his back to the bar.

"Now Jim, what would you do to someone that attacked and killed your family?"

I saw his eyes flash in recognition as my face morphed before his eyes slowly changing back to look like the alias "John" I had been living as.

"You're dead Jim, we both know it. The question is - do I kill your family too? Jim?" I barked. I saw him resign himself to his fate.

"Please," he begged, "Don't touch my family, they had nothing to do with this."

"MY family shouldn't have had anything to do with this, you FUCK. Why the FUCK would I care about YOUR family... An eye for an eye Jim, don't you live by that motto? I've been to your house, you have that The Code of Hammurabi framed and hanging from your wall..." I saw, his eyes quickly look in confusion. "Oh, you pride yourself as a Christian and you thought that was from the Bible, ha, ha - fool!"

I took my other hand and grabbed his index finger and pulled it back snapping the bone in his hand.

"Arrrgh!"

"Now, tell me EVERYTHING Jim or your family dies!" I threatened.

I would never kill his family and he might have believed that but the more bones I broke the less he hung on to that hope.

Finally, with tears streaming down his face he broke down, "Fine, just leave them be! Promise me!"

"JIM, start talking, I promise you nothing! Tell me the truth and it better be verifiable or they die horrifically!"

"I'm a tracker, just like Mike! We were paid a hundred grand and ordered to distract you long enough so they could capture your girlfriends."

"Bullshit! They shot first, they weren't trying to capture anyone!"

"They probably were shooting at your mother, they don't give a shit about her and were ordered to take her out."

He gave me a few seconds to let this sink in before continuing.

"They don't even want those lab experiments, they just wanted their children. They wanted the leverage to control you. They are afraid of you."

"So, Jim. Someone tells you to jump and you say how high? Isn't there a commandment about thou shalt not kill? I'm only asking because you pretend to be a pious man."

"I serve my masters first and god second! I know it should be the other way around but my masters will kill me without a second thought... Oh god, they will kill my family too... HE is coming here to track you. He'll be here in a couple of hours."

"Who is this HE you speak of?"

"He? I mean none other than Geong Gio, the master tracker. They have a team of specialists on their way here. They are coming in some black SUVs tanked out more than the president."

"So? She didn't have anything to do with that fire, did she?"

"No! Of course not, that was all Mike... you can ask him all about it."

With that I snapped his neck, and I laughed thinking, "I killed the sheriff, but I didn't kill no deputy."

Man, I was getting demented.

I then ran out of the door before any other police showed up. I opened the back door of my SUV and pulled out my bow and arrows. Then I started following Mikes trail, he passed by his car realizing his tires were done and kept running. His trail led out of the parking lot and across the closed highway (that highway was always closed for the winter). I really didn't need to follow his "scent" most of the time as his tracks in the snow were clear as day.

Mike had a ten-minute lead on me but I was quickly closing the gap on him as I was faster than him and untiring. His tracks led him across and up a ski slope. Smart, the skiers would cover his tracks and he was hoping I would think he went all the way across the path. His trail then went over a few peaks and across some rocky outcropping near some streams. Finally, he must have gotten wise and tried backtracking to ambush me but I saw his trail and recognized the pattern following it to where I judged he would be hiding.

Only a master tracker can differentiate a muted human aura and a masked trackers aura they are so similar and since I too figured out how to differentiate his aura from that of a human, I realized I must be a master tracker. I could see his aura through the bushes and it was like he was outlined for me.

"Fssst," I let the arrow fly.

"Arrgh!" I heard him cry out as I hid behind a tree.

"Crack, crack, crack..." the sound of bullets randomly hitting trees and boulders.

"Click, click, click... Fuck!" sounded like he ran out of bullets.

I gave him a head start and I started singing, "Hey, Mike. You know, I've been noticing you've been having a lot of problems lately. You know, you should talk about it, you'll feel a lot better," I taunted, paraphrasing "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies.

I picked up a blood trail on the other side of the brush and strolled after him. I figured he'd be tired and drained from all the blood loss, not to mention running in all the snow. But his adrenaline must have kicked in because he was moving at a pretty decent pace - almost running. Judging by his blood trail, he was losing a lot of blood by running.

I felt like a cat playing with its food, I saw how cruel I was becoming and suddenly was disgusted. I could have made this quick and painless, what was the point of this other than to satisfy a sick sense of vengeance. Whether it was quick or slow, my vengeance would be sated, so why did I choose slow if only to satisfy a sadistic part of me. It was then I realized that I either had a sadistic streak in me or parts of my father's personality were trying to win dominance. I couldn't always blame it on my father.

I ran after him. He was going to pay but I decided I didn't need to be this other guy to do it. I quickly caught up to him, cornered at the edge of a cliff.

Mike had a snapped off Arrow stuck in his kidney. His face was pale and sweaty, he looked like he had been crying. He was pondering jumping; the cliff was only twenty feet so he knew he could survive if he jumped and landed wrong. He would have to dive down head first in order to escape. I wanted to see what he was going to decide, so I stopped and waited for him. He kept looking at me then looking behind him and down the cliff.

He didn't know that he had no choice - at this point it was futile to resist. I felt like a Borg. I was tempted to say "resistance is futile" but that was kind of corny and I needed to concentrate. Finally, I saw the look in his eyes like he was going to get one over on me, like he was going to get a small victory over me. And he put his arms up as if to do a swan dive and let gravity take him over the cliff.

His face was priceless when after falling over the edge he never made it past my line of sight as his downward acceleration reversed. He was still tumbling head over heels as he slowly flew up into the air. He looked a lot like a bloody astronaut, (literally bloody), as he seemed to twist and turn in the air endlessly with nothing to stop his torque. Eventually the friction of air would stop him but that would probably take hours.

I lessened the vector so that he was floating over the cliffs edge 7 feet above the lip.

"You thought you'd get away, didn't you Mike? What's the matter? You were laughing your ass off in the bar. I must be a buzz KILL for you," I said, emphasizing kill nefariously.

He looked like he was turning green and the blood streaks were making their way all over his extremities, no longer just down his pants but up to his shoulders, a few drops on his face.

"I'm going to be merciful to you and give you a choice. You're going to tell me everything. Then I can drop you, or you can face man's justice. That's your choice but know this. If you don't go to jail and STAY there I'll hunt you down once you are released."

"Fine, just stop this spinning... I can't talk to you while fighting the vomit in my throat."

I walked to the edge of the cliff and grabbed his foot as it came around and yanked him toward me. I sided-stepped as he passed me and released the force keeping him aloft once he was safely over ground. I stepped on his chest, not allowing him to get up, he was too weakened to put up much of a fight at that point anyway.

"Talk!"

He turned his head to the side and, "F - Fine, Urrrup," emptied the contents of his stomach off to the side.

"I killed them! I killed my wife and daughter!" he confessed.

It wasn't what I wanted to know but I thought he had a point he needed to get to.

"What's this got to do with Lisa?"

"Let me finish, please... it's hard for me to even speak right now," he begged, and I nodded. "My wife was cheating on me. I didn't realize it until later when my girl finally reached puberty. Her aura should have changed if she was Ataruian..."

"What? You dumb shit! You killed your wife because you thought your child wasn't yours?"

"Yeah," he cried, "I'm sorry, she didn't deserve to die - my baby she didn't need to pay for what her mother did but..."

"You dumbass!" I interrupted. "Didn't you know that your kid having Ataruian traits were only a 50/50 chance? Ataruian are so diluted now that not all of their children have psionics. That's why there's so much inbreeding in the Ataruian community - so much racism. You can't tell she wasn't yours just by her not having an Ataruian trait."

He turned white in realization, "Oh God, what have I done?"

"Regardless! They didn't deserve to die. What the fuck did that have to do with Lisa? Why was Lisa blamed and killed?"

"We trackers don't work alone! We work in pairs, always a novice is paired with a more senior tracker. Jim was my mentor and needless to say he found out about what I did. Recently a price was put on your head, you were to be taken alive and all trackers, even ones in retirement, were called in to hunt for you. We had very specific instructions to report in anything unusual. Then recently we were told to look for pregnant women, with bright glowing bellies. Apparently, they have one of your baby-mommas under their thumb."

I didn't like where this was going but I needed to hear it, "Go on!"

Lisa was pregnant with your baby, that was never a secret, but soon I noticed a bright aura emanating from her belly. Lisa is not Ataruian, yet her baby was glowing. Not only before puberty but before it was even born! Its aura was brighter than any I had ever seen. That's when I realized who YOU were."

"Oh my god!" I thought, "I exposed the women I loved by getting them pregnant."

"So, I reported in to Jim and he called in a strike team. He wanted to capture you himself so he didn't move it up the channel like he should have. Jim was a cocky bastard."

"Why did they frame Lisa?"

"That was Jim's idea, he was keeping tabs on you and he wanted to pull you away from the main fight so that he could capture your girlfriends and use them as leverage. I must admit that I didn't want anything to do with Lisa after I found out she was having YOUR baby."

"Why? What did you realizing who I was have anything to do with it?"

"To a lot of Ataruians you are like a Christ figure. Think about it. Would you want to fuck Jesus's girlfriend the rest of your life?"

"So, you just let her be killed."

"Yeah, it killed two birds with one stone. It would not only help capture YOU - from which I would receive an enormous reward and be able to start over, BUT she would also take the blame for my family's murder. And, NO, I didn't know they were going to kill her. But, when they did I WAS relieved."

"She didn't deserve to die," I moaned, tears streaming down my cheeks.

"Jim had orders... someone got wind of what we were doing. You don't pull 220 active Illuminati out on the field and not have someone notice."

"Whose orders?"

"Your father's orders, he wanted your mother dead and any human woman pregnant with your baby."

I realized then that if he made such orders that Anya and Tanya were also in danger. I needed to get to them.

"What do I do with you?"

"Let me die! You have my confession. I know you have a camera on me. I saw your footage on the Dark Web. The authorities can confirm that I was paid a hundred grand for something... I don't want to face the justice system. You said you'd give me a choice. I choose death."

"Fine, have at it then," I said, growing impatient as I needed to get out of there in a hurry.

Mike stood up, turned, then ran and dove off the cliff like he was diving into a pool of water below. With a crunch and sickening thud sound, he faced his final justice. I looked down the cliff and saw his aura blink out.

*

The big black Humvee looking limousine pulled to the side of the road. Cops from all around were swarming the steakhouse 200 yards away. They waited there, engines running for ten minutes as if deciding what to do.

Suddenly there was a tapping at the window, "Uh excuse me sir," someone called, befuddled.

The bullet proof window rolled down a crack and a crowbar made its way inside, it twisted and was pulled with such force that the window cracked and broke apart. There were three people in the back seat. One was dressed very dapper and appeared wealthy and well-to-do. He couldn't seem to be bothered by the whole scene and his flanking bodyguards pulled their pistols, pointing them at their attacker.

The bodyguard farthest from the breached door suddenly shrunk in fear and the driver seemed to be oblivious to the whole affair. The bodyguard closest to the breached door was suddenly yanked out of the car like he was a lightweight waif before he could get off a shot. It was only then that the rich man seemed to pay attention, a glimmer of fear flashed across his eyes. He couldn't see what happened to his man but there was a series of loud thuds, a gasp and silence. A hand reached in the door and pulled the handle opening it.

A man slid in besides the rich man and said, "So, you've come here to hunt me, have you? Here, take this," he said, placing a grenade in his hand.

His other hand was quickly seized and crushed by the infidel's impossibly strong grip. The grenade appeared to have some sort of adhesive all over it as it would not leave his hand.

"Don't let go of that handle, Mr. Gio. I know you've lived a couple of centuries but the pin has been pulled and believe me when I say. Even you won't survive a grenade blast at this close range."

Suddenly the rich man was pummeled mercilessly and he realized his mind was being probed. The physical pain was breaking down his resistance as his mind was suddenly probed. He finally was able to kick the invader out of his mind, but he realized his attacker was no longer there. He also realized that he was no longer concentrating on holding the grenade handle.

The attacker seemed to vanish from sight before the limo exploded.

*

I finally broke through a sea of FBI and local cops being borrowed from towns all around. I had to use psychic trickery and change my face three times before I was on my way towards home. I had some bad news to tell the girls. I needed to leave. I needed to save Tanya, Anya and maybe even Isabella.