Hostile Genus: An Epic Military Sci-Fi Series (Invasive Species Book 2) Ben Stevens (best contemporary novels txt) 📖

of standing back and encouraging her men to make the best use of their small-arms fire and spray the painted bitch with a sea of bullets.

Sofia headed straight toward Lucy, wading through the sea of men like a Lily Sapphire concert-goer attempting to rush the front row. The painted cyborg appeared not to notice her, not altering the rhythm of parry, dodge, riposte, slash, tuck, roll, shoot, rinse and repeat that she had going.

Pushing her way forward, Sofia drew closer and closer, circling behind her prey, until she was nearly within arm’s reach.

Ratt fell hard. His vision, along with his knowledge of who and where he was and what he was doing, faded in and out in throbbing waves of darkness. He wanted to cry uncle, to give up, but he found something inside himself—that same something that had gotten him this far, that helped him when his parents fell in the battle of Texhoma.

Ratt may not have been, and never would be, a big, strong warrior-type like Jon, but he was no coward. Tears of pain, rage, and frustration burned down his cheeks, the weight of impotence nearly crushing him. He struggled under the whole sum of it all. The world, the loss, the horror, and tragedy; it was almost too much to bear. Throw in the nerve-splitting pain of first a gunshot wound, then a five-meter drop to a hard floor, and the levee of well-meaning bravado had just plain burst.

Somehow, without even knowing what was going on or who he was, he breathed through it. In breath—ragged, shaky. Out breath—smoother, smoother.

There ya go, bud.

In times like this, in the thick of battle, under intense duress and pain, there comes a phenomenon. To one that has never experienced it before and been able to look back and reflect on it, it may seem like one is losing oneself.  Of course, the opposite is true.

In situations like the one that Ratt presently found himself in, one doesn’t lose oneself; one finds oneself. One only loses the identity that one has built up, the identity fettered to the circumstances of one’s life, the experiences, memories, ego.

What one finds in the space left behind in the ego’s swift departure is one’s authentic self. The you who was before you were named.

“Ratt” was gone, driven out by pain and fury. What was there now was the fox caught in the trap’s steel jaws, the seal twisting in the waters just ahead of the orca’s jagged tooth, the cybernetic angel of death who dips into the oncoming blade rather than shy away.

It could be argued by people cut from the same cloth as Lucy that, in times such as this, one is more “at one” with the universe than any other time in one’s life. It could not be denied that one is fully in the present when experiencing this phenomenon. It is the golden rush that athletes speak of, the frenzy of orgasm, the meat-over-mind.

Somewhere in that primordial no-self of now, the boy with no name just breathed and breathed until, slowly, the boy called Ratt returned, opened his eyelids, and saw through the dull blur of tears that he had fallen onto the stage and landed only a few feet from the goddess of song and Strange.

Even from his distorted vantage, he could see that he and Maya were both in trouble. There was no sign of Lucy, and many people were rushing the stage. His loyalty combined with adrenaline made him temporarily forget about the gunshot wound. He rolled over to his front and attempted to push himself into a standing position. He was maybe an inch off the ground when he quickly and painfully became re-acquainted with the shoulder injury as well as met some new friends—Hello, broken leg; nice to meet you, broken hip. Sprained ankle? Come on in! Ratt tried to curse his luck but only managed a muffled “Murghrpoh!” as he collapsed back down onto himself and the floor, his face mashing into the stage, drool and blood spilling out of his mouth and wetting his cheek.

Without breaking her song or even looking at him, Maya sidestepped a few paces to get closer to him, bringing her circle of light with her. Ratt felt the warmth wash over his body. Its comforting energy brought back long-forgotten feelings of safety, as well as subconscious, locked-away memories of being a swaddled babe in his mother’s arms. Unlike the sunlight that poured from the dozens of mini portals that Maya had opened in the stage lights, this light was not harmful to attacking vampires; it was a protective globe that prevented vampire and human, as well as their projectiles, from getting too close to Maya—and now Ratt.

Ratt watched with mounting relief as incoming bullets ricocheted off the sphere. A vampire, screaming with rage, leapt and clawed at the light, only to be repelled and pushed back a few inches. Maya’s Strange was strong, but her face showed strain from the effort. She sang non-stop and gestured with her arms, hands, and fingers, doing some interpretive dance, looking like a child making a cat’s cradle with invisible string.

How much longer can she keep this up?

As he studied the crowds surging and being repelled, he was likewise relieved to see that their “eye in the sky,” Carbine, was focusing his attention on them. Here and there, a vampire or human would explode in a cloud of red mist, followed by the familiar sonic boom a second later. Despite pulling a trigger as fast as he could, getting off a shot every two seconds, it seemed that Carbine’s efforts were a drop in the bucket. The human sympathizers would never get back up, but the vampires’ bodies began to regenerate before all the spray had even landed. Still, enough drops fall into a bucket, and the bucket will eventually overflow.

Ratt willed himself to roll back over onto his back. Above him and through the golden hue of Maya’s Strange circle,