The Permutation

Apex (Part 5) Paul

The girl's statement was cut short as the feral men and women of Lancet Falls descended upon them. In the midst of their conversation, the parasites must have snuck up to their group catching them with their pants down.

Fuck what the millionaire says. These fuckers creep me out.

Paul set to work with his tendrils. He did not feel the need to administer any killing blows, he'd regained his control. His gift was meant for revenge and self-protection, and this certainly qualified as the latter. Paul sharpened the edges of his tendrils with his mind and reached for an altered human. He couldn't tell who it was, and was thankful for that fact.

The parasite Paul had set his sights on descended upon his neighbor. Paul had seen something on a nature channel about predators trying to focus on the weakest of a group, and all appearances said that was the girl. Her presence and the way she held herself bespoke a strength that was uncanny in one her age. The parasites were dead wrong.

Paul didn't know why he leapt to her aid, but his quick response surely saved her life. Tendrils sawed through both Achilles' tendons of her assailant, and proceeded to jab a needle point tendril into the synovial fluid of the elbows of both the parasite's arms. Without his limbs to support himself, the man collapsed to the ground. The others of its kind trampled over the body, unconcerned about their fallen comrade.

He noticed that Officer Durant, the surfer bum looking man, and the woman with purple hair, now holding a miniature schnauzer all had locked themselves in the black truck Paul had used for refuge from the parasites not even a couple of hours ago. Looking at the numbers of his adversaries, under the truck may not have been a bad place to be, but Paul doubted that would go over well with the assembled group of wannabe heroes.

The insufferable little boy that had probably been dropped on his head multiple times when he was an infant leaped into the air and just kept going rising. He soared above the mass of predators and taunted them.

"Hey look at me! Can't catch me!"

He's like a buzzing fly that needs to be swatted down.

Three of them broke from the back of the mass of subhumanity. The boy flew low enough to the ground as to make them feel like they had the chance to catch him. He let them get close enough that a well-timed lunge could make him a midnight snack, but he continued his foolish efforts luring them away from the main group.

The Asian woman and the millionaire charged towards the remaining group. There were six of them left. Paul snipped the joints in another, leaving the heroes five to deal with. Pau recognized this one from a series of mattress commercials. The Mattress King toppled to the ground his momentum making him do somersaults before he lay thrashing in the gravel. That didn't stop the predator from scrabbling against the dirt trying to pull himself back up, but his arms and legs could no longer hold his weight.

Paul felt a withering glare come from someone in the truck, but he didn't care.

I don't see them doing anything productive.

The millionaire had reached the group of approaching menaces and grasped one of them in his arm, a child predator, and wrangled the kid into a headlock designed to deprive the little monster's brain of oxygen until he fell unconscious. The move was foolish and left him exposed to the rest of the predators.

A bulky predator that resembled a grizzly bear more than a man lunged at the millionaire, and Paul formed a tendril into a blunt round object that he used as a billy club. The tendril smacked into the temple of the buffed up predator, and he toppled to the ground. He had felt the skull crack into bits of eggshell fragments.