Children of Evolution (The Gateway Series Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Excerpt from Journal

  Nature of Change

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Worlds Apart

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Enemy Within

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Wounds

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Old Breed

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Basics

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Mind Games

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Nightmare Walking

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Room for Growth

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Hounds to Hunter

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Choices

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Second Journal Entry

  Acknowledgements

  Books by Toby Minton

  Toby's Haunts

  About the Author

  Children of Evolution

  by

  Toby Minton

  Book Two of the Gateway Series

  Cover by Indie Designz http://www.indiedesignz.com

  Edited by Katie Lewis

  Copyright © 2015 Toby Minton

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 0989691233

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9896912-3-9

  Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person with whom you share it. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should delete it from your device and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is coincidental.

  For Tom Minton,

  the man I will forever be proud

  to call my father.

  I never thought of myself as a selfish person.

  Does anybody? Surely nobody says, “If I had to describe myself in three words, I’d go with ‘selfish,’ and…repeat it. Twice.”

  I’m not the most giving person in the world. I wouldn’t be alive if I were. You don’t last long in the free zones if you’re always giving away what you need. If you don’t look out for yourself, you don’t eat. That’s not selfish though—that’s survival.

  But it’s been a while since I’ve lived on the streets. I’ve had it easy for months. More food than I can eat, a warm place to sleep, money if I need it. I’ve been living the sweet life, in a way. But some habits are hard to break.

  Even after what Michael did for me—even after I promised to make him proud, I still catch myself looking out for good old number one, first and foremost. Like I said, some habits…

  Still, I thought that when push came to kick and the fate of the world was on the line, I wouldn’t hesitate to put myself aside and do the right thing. I thought I’d be able to follow Michael’s example without a second thought. I imagined myself quite the hero.

  I was wrong.

  -Nikki Flux, March 23

  From a partially burned journal

  found in the Wasteland

  Nature of Change

  Chapter 1

  Gideon

  After wrestling with visions of the end of the world for more than fifty years, Gideon wasn't surprised that those visions shaped his dreams. Finding himself in a dream version of a desolate ruin only vaguely recognizable as Earth was, for Gideon, a matter of course.

  When his subconscious woke to this dream, however, and started processing his surroundings, something tried to warn him this time was different.

  He was standing in the middle of an empty two-lane road, moonlight dusting the dark trees on either side as the wind brushed their long needles.

  He dropped his gaze to the pavement below him, to a patch of fabric that looked like a child's abandoned doll trampled into a crushed patch of asphalt. His gaze started to drift, but the indentation around the doll tugged it back. Whatever had trampled the doll had left an irregular print in the asphalt, an elongated furrow, almost like—

  A wave of energy slammed into Gideon from behind, knocking him to his hands and knees.

  For a second he saw nothing but darkness, heard nothing but the ringing in his ears. Then he focused on the tattered doll under him and the rustle and creak of the trees nearby as the wave moved on.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw a fallen billboard partially buried in the ground at the edge of the road, the light from its diodes slowly fading.

  The faint light tugged at Gideon's attention, distracting him. He wanted to focus on the doll, on the shape of the footprint around it, the familiar shape, but the harder he tried to concentrate on it, the fuzzier it became. His slumbering brain couldn't make a connection. Even in his dreams, exhaustion plagued him.

  For months he'd worked his mind to the point of failure analyzing where he'd gone wrong, what he'd misread, what he could have done differently with the twins. He'd pushed his body to the point of collapse searching for new leads, new ways of preventing the coming apocalypse.

  Or so he told himself.

  What he'd really been doing was avoiding the people he'd hurt, the people he'd failed.

  Gideon stood and surveyed the damage the wave had left in its wake. In addition to the billboard, a handful of trees had toppled on either side of the road, one missing him by barely a meter.

  He turned back toward the doll, toward the print, determined to force his mind to focus, but then he heard them. They were faint, distant, and short-lived, but they were definitely voices—terrified voices.

  Following the weak sounds, he stepped off the road into the trees. The woods were thin here, the trees familiar. The soft undergrowth had the same thick, loamy smell as the woods around the church. Wherever he'd come in this dream, it was close to home.

  Something about that thought triggered a stronger spike of alarm, but again Gideon's exhausted subconscious brushed it aside as he stepped clear of the thin trees to the edge of a sharp precipice.

  Through the pointed tops of the trees below, he saw a familiar skyline silhouetted against the dusky sky, a city that had survived the Event and the years of war and neglect that followed. Seattle had more than its share of scars, but it bore them as badges of honor. It had survived and would continue to do so, or so its people believed. For a brief moment, the shadowed city Gideon saw before him appeared to be the same one he'd left in the waking world, stubborn and strong. Then it started.

  He saw the first building
shudder and start to topple in silence before the muted pop reached his ears. From this distance, the sound of tons of concrete and steel falling onto the street below was almost natural, like waves crashing against the rocks of the distant shoreline. Not so the weak shouts of the people in the path of the falling debris, or the thin screams of those riding the dying building down. Their cries were unmistakable even at this distance.

  Farther into the city, other buildings started dropping from sight one by one, falling from their places in the iconic skyline, each disappearance punctuated by the same muted pop and rumble. As each building toppled, the thick gray dust of its passing fed the growing haze shrouding the doomed city, a low-lying echo of the seemingly motionless dark clouds high above stretching to the horizon.

  He knew what he was watching. This was the end. Humanity's fall—the early days of it, at least. Gideon knew because he'd witnessed scenes like this one more times than he cared to recall. Inspired by his brief visions, Gideon's dreams were often filled with the worst the future had in store, making most nights as tortured as his days.

  The dreams varied, but some elements remained constant: the ever-present dust clouds in the stratosphere that made even the midday sun—what he'd mistaken for the full moon—a weak candle in the gloom; the crumbled cities with scattered pockets of survivors, some few still angry and desperate, most others starved of body and spirit to the point of numb resignation; and the screams, always the screams.

  This dream had everything Gideon was accustomed to experiencing when he imagined the fall, and one thing he wasn't.

  With a thought Gideon soared from the ridge to the city, flying just over the rooftops, never losing speed or crashing to the ground despite the persistent feeling of falling.

  He settled to the ground on one of the main arteries into the city, now nothing more than an endless parking lot of abandoned cars, around which the steady stream of people wove as they fled the crumbling city, clutching whatever possessions their shocked brains had told them they couldn't live without.

  Gideon drifted through the throng, ignoring the people as he searched for what had drawn him in.

  This time the pop came first, accompanied by a pulse of blue energy, and a section of the four-story building in front of Gideon turned to dust. The screams of the people around it were swallowed by a thunderous crash as the building collapsed. The dust of its fall rolled over Gideon like a wave.

  Something about the way the dust moved around him in swirling eddies tugged at Gideon's mind, but his curiosity wouldn't let the thought take hold. Even asleep he was a scientist first, and the mystery of the energy flashes had him firmly in its grip. Until he discovered the how and why of the destructive bursts, he knew nothing else would be able to hold his attention.

  Gideon had seen a similar effect once before, on the day of the Event. He'd seen matter vaporized when electricity met genesis, the element that had changed everything. But if these were pockets of genesis atoms, where were they coming from?

  His first instinct was to blame Savior. After all, for decades his visions had told him that his former partner would bring about humanity's fall. However, not even Savior could cause this phenomenon directly. Savior generated energy from his genesis-mutated cells, much more so now that he’d supercharged his abilities through Nikki, but he couldn’t create the element itself.

  As far as Gideon knew, genesis couldn’t exist outside the alien environment on the other side of the Gateway. The element was fundamentally unstable. In fact, it shouldn’t exist in the alien environment either, which had initially led Gideon to posit the rather unpopular hypothesis that the Gateway itself was the source of the element. Unfortunately, his chance to test that hypothesis, or any other for that matter, had never come. The Event had put an end to far more than just his career and set in motion a chain of events that would one day lead to…this.

  He looked around at the people climbing over the rubble, scrambling through the billowing dust toward the I-5. In the distance, the thundering deaths of other buildings echoed through the city streets.

  Gideon needed a closer look at one of these bursts if he were to have any hope of discovering the cause. If this were a real vision of the future instead of just a dream, he would chase the truth he sought without having to move himself. In the visions, he could will what he sought to appear out of the swirling eddies. The images that answered his call were not always clear, if they appeared at all, but at least there he knew what he saw wasn’t conjured by his own memory and imagination.

  The dust closed around him as if in answer to his thoughts, and again an uneasy feeling clawed at Gideon, like some suppressed part of his mind was struggling and failing to make itself heard.

  The swirling cloud parted in front of him, revealing a dead-end alley that he quickly realized was on the other side of the city from where he’d started. The rumbling echoes of collapsing structures were still audible, but they were approaching now instead of receding. Whatever the bursts were, they were traveling in the same direction as the wave he’d felt when the dream started, like ripples in its wake—ripples coming closer to where he stood.

  No sooner had that thought processed than a bright flare tore in the air in front of Gideon. Unlike the other he’d seen, this one didn’t strike in the middle of a building but in empty space a few meters off the ground, giving him an unobstructed view of the source.

  The flash dissipated almost instantly, leaving nothing but a purple afterimage in Gideon’s eyes, but it lasted long enough for him to see a red-tinted desert landscape through the hole in the air.

  He knew that landscape. Even though he’d walked it only once, he would never forget it.

  The bursts weren’t random blasts of energy. They were openings, gateways to the alien planet, but gateways with nothing to control or contain them. Gateways without the Gateway.

  Other pieces of the puzzle started falling into place and Gideon’s mind raced with possible scenarios. Waves like this one could account for much of the destruction he’d witnessed in visions of the future years beyond this night, which meant he might have just seen the very vehicle of humanity’s destruction, one of the many crucial elements his visions usually denied him. If only he could trust what he saw here. If only this were one of the visions instead of a dream.

  Another rift formed above him, this time cutting into the building on his right. A blue flash vaporized a wide swath of the building as the rift cut into the electrical lines, and the top three floors started to topple into the void with a growing roar of crushing brick and shearing steel.

  Gideon instinctively threw up a hand to shield himself, but the dust swirled around him, pulling him away from the scene, or pulling it from him. He stared at his hand as he lowered it. His right hand. His human right hand. It shouldn’t be human. It hadn’t been human since the Event, not even in his dreams. Even his subconscious had long since given up hope that he could be whole again. The right side of his body should have been the creature’s—lean, powerful, the skin hardened into a glossy black carapace—just like it was in the waking world.

  Gideon knew of only one place where his body appeared the way it had before the Event, and that realization chilled him to his core.

  This was no dream.

  Gideon rarely felt fear anymore. Since the day he first realized the visions he saw when he switched places with the creature's mind were Earth's future, he'd lived with an ever-present simmer of dread that made the wilder, shorter lived varieties of fear seem redundant and trivial. But the cold flash in his gut that was even now creeping out through his limbs could only be naked fear.

  His fear wasn't for himself. Here he was untouchable, even more so than in a dream. Here he was a watcher as ethereal as the cool eddies blowing around and through him. His fear was for the people in the physical world, the people at the mercy of his half-alien body now fully under the control of the predatory consciousness that belonged in this realm.

  He was afraid beca
use he hadn't planned this trip to the other side. He hadn't sealed himself safely in the vault, as he always did at the base. He hadn't chained his body down under armed guard, as he had every time he'd come here since he'd first discovered what the creature was capable of doing. He'd taken none of his usual precautions because he'd had no intention of trading places with the creature tonight. He wasn't even at the base. He was on the top floor of a gutted office complex in the Seattle free zone, where he'd been squatting for days, ghosting among the lowest levels of society by night, feeling nearly as isolated and dissociated from his own world as he did from this one.

  To his shame, he took some small comfort from the fact that his body was far from anyone he cared about. At least they weren't the ones the creature was hunting while he was away. Those few people, at least, were safe from him.

  Hardening his mind, Gideon pushed both fear and relief from his consciousness and prepared to step away from the vision and back into his body. The creature's will was no match for Gideon's—it never had been. To resume control, he had but to step back through the door in the darkest recess of his mind that separated him from the creature.

  He blocked the continuing destruction and swirling clouds from his awareness, cleared his thoughts of the crashes and screams, and focused his will on opening the door.

  But nothing happened.

  Chapter 2

  Nikki

  Nikki stood at the edge of the ledge, her arms spread wide, her eyes closed as the chilly March wind cut through her clothes and whipped at her hair. If she blocked out everything else around her, she could almost convince herself she was flying again—really flying.

  She knew what that was like now. She'd done it once. OK, it had been more falling than flying, and she'd been unconscious for half of it, but she'd felt clouds against her bare skin and had no ship, no chute, no gear of any kind holding her back, and she'd lived to tell about it. Not many people could say that.