Hidden Opekun: Prologue - Chapter One

[Cee-Jay Aurinko]

Hidden Opekun by Cee-Jay Aurinko: Prologue – Chapter One

© 2016 Cee-Jay Aurinko

Prologue

The day I flied for the first time, I was on the roof of a tall skyscraper somewhere in the business district of Sparc City. The roof was mostly flat and instead of concrete, it was covered in trimmed grass. It was a mildly hot summer’s day with only a few scattered clouds in the sharp blue sky above. The sun was a spiked white eye and I felt its heat mainly on the right side of my face. The building I was on stood at more than a thousand feet tall and had black tinted glass windows from top to bottom. From my left, a cool breeze occasionally brushed against me, but it did nothing to help with the heat in the end. The people I was with included a beautiful older woman dressed in a black business suit and high heels and, in a male variant of a black business suit, a tall and burly black man with gray hair and a gray moustache. The woman was Eliza, potentially my future boss for the rest of my natural life. As for the man, I had absolutely no idea who he was, but whoever he was, he was important. I could tell by the way he held himself. Sort of like Eliza. Like the world and everything in it belonged to him.

Eliza’s expression was serious as she looked at me, an eighteen-year-old kid dressed like a mercenary in a tactical black uniform. She had dark blonde hair, pulled backwards and ending in a long ponytail. There, just below the right corner of her mouth, was a small slit of a scar. From where I stood though, which was more than a couple of yards away from her, it wasn’t noticeable at all.

“What are you waiting for, Julij?” she asked me. “I’m not getting any younger out here on this roof you know. You should jump.”

I was standing with my back to Eliza and the other man. Maybe for the tenth time that day, I took a look at the street and everything else below. And for the tenth time that day, my intestines did a backflip, my legs became wobbly, and I immediately felt terribly ill. It was a long way down, and having a big fear of heights didn’t help my current situation at all. Down there, whether driving or walking, people were going about their own daily routines, completely oblivious to the fact that there was some idiot on a roof who intended to jump right off of it.

“I… I… I can’t,” I croaked out. There’s no way in hell I’m jumping off of the roof of this building, I thought to myself.

“I’m sorry, but could you repeat that for me?”

“Look Eliza, I’m not a freaking baby bird that you just nudge off of a cliff and see if it flies okay! I’m a person! I can’t do this! And you can’t make me!”

Instead of yelling at me as I stepped away from the edge of the roof, Eliza turned to the man to her immediate right. She didn’t ask him anything, but the man nodded all the same. Then, Eliza turned to me and in one swift, practiced movement, she had drawn her gun and was aiming it right at my face. It was a black Glock and she was holding it with her left hand only, like she absolutely intended to blow my brains out right there.

“You’re not serious,” I said, stopping right where I was—almost exactly in front of her. My dark blue eyes were looking directly at her pale blue ones, and even though I wasn’t looking at that nasty little scar below her mouth, I could see it.

“Oh, but I’m dead serious, Julij. I can’t have you living out a regular old civilian life while knowing what you know about us. I told you that the moment we met. On this day, your training will come to an end one way or another. It is your choice. Jump and become one of us, or don’t jump and become a headless dead kid on a roof. Make your choice. I don’t have all day.”

“But… what if it doesn’t work.”

“It will.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it has always worked.”

“But—”

“Jump, Julij! Or I swear to God I’ll blow your brains all over this roof for the birds to feed on!”

“Okay okay! Fine. I’ll do it. Geez. Just stop pointing that freaking thing at my head.”

Eliza lowered the gun, but put it away she did not.

Slowly, scared, and trembling like a death row inmate about to get dosed with a lethal injection, I returned to my former spot at the edge of that roof and once again experienced the aftereffects of looking down from a building that stood at more than a thousand feet. Closing my eyes, I took two deep breaths in an effort to clear my mind and render my severe case of acrophobia irrelevant.

You have to do this. It is the last thing standing in the way of you becoming more than what you were six weeks ago—a nobody. So jump, Julij. Jump and get it over with.

I opened my eyes and nosedived into what I sorely hoped was not my way into the hereafter, but rather the beginning of a better me.

Chapter One

Look—I had no idea where that tree came from okay. One minute it wasn’t there, and the next minute it was.

“Julij, watch out!” This was Germogen, my friend, warning me of the oncoming trunk of a sequoia tree.

But it was too late. I collided with the massive trunk, headfirst, and now I was plummeting down to the ground at an extremely fast speed. When I hit the ground, I lost consciousness for ten seconds. So there was no way for me of knowing whether a huge dust cloud ensued or not.

#

It was the awful scent of the prosnulsya salve Germogen had smeared onto his fingers that woke me. Jeepers. The stuff smelled awful enough to wake the dead and he was holding those cruddy smelling fingers right under my nose.

“What happened?” I asked, trying hard not to vomit and with a head feeling like it weighed a ton. “Where are we?”

Germogen wiped the prosnulsya off his fingers with a white handkerchief he had taken out of a small brown leather bag fastened around his right thigh. Like me, he was wearing the standard black uniform of the Hidden Opekun, a clandestine group of super agents funded by the Severian Government to hunt down and arrest supers who use their powers for unlawful purposes. Unlike me, Germogen was completely bald, extremely tall, and thanks to spending countless hours in a gym ever since he was ten, he outranked me by a gazillion in the muscular department. “Well, we were on our way to apprehend a male version of a wicked witch when your dumb ass flew straight into a tree. Now we are in a place that I really don’t want us to be right now.”

It took a while, but the memory of me looking at a male reindeer humping the crap out of a female reindeer when I should’ve been paying attention to what was happening in front of me eventually came rushing back into my head, causing me to burst out laughing.

Germogen raised an uncertain eyebrow. “You find something funny?”

I stopped laughing, stood up, and dusted myself off a bit before replying. “No, Germogen. Me laughing is just a side effect of flying into a tree.”

Germogen rolled his eyes. He wasn’t the type of guy who would laugh if I told him what I’d just witnessed. He was the type of guy who watched the business part of the news with a bowl of cheese curls mounted on his lap. Always serious. Always such a bore.

“So, how far are we from Enya?” I asked, mainly to break the silence.

“Not far. Two or three minutes’ flight away. But we have to get back into the air before the horrors of this forest decide to throw us a little welcome party. And you know me—I’m not one for parties.”

No kidding, Jack.

I wanted to nod but my head still hurt. I hadn’t even touched it yet to check for boobs.

Doggoned Forest. That’s where we were. Over 20,000 acres big, this rainforest was surrounded by tall sequoia, firs, and various other types of vegetation. More than anything else, it was known for being home to endangered oboroten, creatures that were neither man nor beast, but something in between.

We had been flying just underneath the tops of the firs because it was still daylight and we didn’t want to risk anyone spotting us that we didn’t want to spot us. A dangerous criminal currently resided in Enya, a picayune town home to under three hundred people. It was our job to find him, arrest him, and if he didn’t feel like being arrested, kill him.

That was if the oboroten that was still alive in this forest didn’t kill us first.

There were eyes on us though. All the way from H.O.H.Q (known as Hoq to us), the official headquarters of the Hidden Opekun. Courtesy of our very own satellite, paid for by the generous taxpayers of Severia of course, those eyes could see exactly what we were doing and where we were doing it. Because we were inside a forest at the moment, they couldn’t exactly see what we were doing, but the microchips implanted in our arms could at least tell them where we were doing it. Which made a phone call to Germogen from “up high” inevitable.

“Yeah,” Germogen said into his phoneband, a smart phone-like device strapped onto his left wrist. I had one too, but because everyone at Hoq repeatedly made the mistake of thinking he was the highest-minded one of our partnership, they usually called him first. At least he put it on speaker so that I could hear exactly what was being said.

“Did Julij seriously just fly right into a sequoia tree?” This was Dina, our one and only cyber agent. I had no doubt in my mind that Eliza, our psychic supervisor, was currently breathing hot and angry steam down Dina’s neck because of us.

“I have a phoneband too Dina!” I shouted back at Germogen’s left arm.

“Yep,” Germogen sighed. “That’s the agent you office junkies assigned me to work with alright.”

“Well, he is your partner and I have some really bad news for both of you. You guys need to get out of there and fast. I’m picking up a horde of heat signatures heading your way. They’re coming from the north and there looks to be more than a dozen of them. And judging by their speed, I’d say that they are very, very hungry. Germogen, tell Julij that Eliza just told me that if the two of you don’t get your assess over to Enya in the next two minutes, she’s going to kill him.” There was a pause before Dina added, “Slowly”.

“Will do, Dina,” Germogen said, shooting me a you’re-dead-dude glare along with a you’re-absolutely-dead-dude smirk on his face. “By the way, tell Eliza not to worry. We’re as good as out of here.” The sound of a soft beep coming out of his phoneband meant the end of the call. “Dude, Eliza’s going to kill your ass.”

In all my time of knowing Germogen, he rarely used words like “dude” or “kowabunga”, which could only have meant one of two things. 1.) Germogen only pretended to be this big boring muscular guy because he was one of those people who liked to keep things professional while working, or 2.) He was really happy that I had a coffin waiting for me back at Hoq.

#

“C’mon,” I said, already beginning to rise into the air. With my hands tucked away in my pants’ pockets, I hovered just a few meters off the ground.

Germogen nodded and did the same thing. He looked at me with his reddish brown eyes and smiled. “You hit that tree pretty hard. I’m surprised you don’t have a horn or two growing out of your head.”

“Oh, so you do have a sense of humor? And here I was thinking that you didn’t even know the meaning of the word. Go figure.”

Germogen seemed to have forgotten all about me though. He was looking at something below us. That slaked smile of his from just two seconds ago was gone and replaced by his usual all-for-business demeanor.

Looking down myself, I could see exactly why: the horde of oboroten Dina had been talking about earlier showed up barely seconds after we were airborne. I took quick stock and concluded that there were at least fifteen of them. Monsters so horrendous that they’d give Dracula a run for his money. Of course, as far as the world knew at least, Dracula was nothing but a myth. But these creatures were very real. Driven almost to the point of extinction by poachers who killed them mainly because some wealthy folks liked to put oboroten heads on their mantles instead of the heads of reindeer.

From afar, and much higher than the height at which Germogen and I were currently floating, they could easily have been mistaken for being people. They were not. Their bodies were covered in ugly grayish fur; their eyes were yellow and reptilian; their heads were round-shaped with pointy ears at their sides; their hands and feet were human in appearance; and with razor sharp teeth, their mouths looked almost exactly like bear traps. Only with forked tongues flicking out of them.

But did they scare me? Hell no! I lived for and dreamt of moments like this. Using my powers to battle ugly monsters, super criminals, megalomaniacs, and mad scientists intent on world domination, or destruction, is why I joined the Hidden Opekun in the first place.

Well, I might need to rephrase that last part as no one could actually join them. Hidden Opekun agents were handpicked by Eliza herself. Besides the fact that I was a super, I had absolutely no clue as to why Eliza handpicked me, but what I did know is why I stayed. To fight. To keep testing myself. And if I saved a few people’s lives every now and then as a result, then it was all fine and dandy by me.

I took my hands out of my pockets and made two tight fists at my sides. As soon as I did this, a look of concern washed over Germogen’s face. He knew exactly what I was doing—I was powering up.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Germogen asked.

“What does it look like? I’m going to have myself a little fun.”

“What? Julij, are you crazy? You heard what Eliza said. We have a job to d—”

I was on the ground in a heartbeat, surrounded by oboroten with dripping mouths. Smiling, I looked up at Germogen in the sky and asked, “So partner, are you going to join me or what?”

Before Germogen could open his mouth to yell at me some more, I greeted one of the oboroten by punching its bear trap with a fist coated in dancing red and pink sparks. He spun around like a merry-go-round a few times before collapsing to the ground with a body surging with electricity. Even though its eyes were clothes, its limbs and upper body shot up every now and then as if he were suffering from a severe case of torrets.

“C’mon you uglies,” I said, sure that my eyes were just as red as my fists right now. “Let’s fight.”

They came for me. All fourteen of them. The adrenaline pumping in my blood made me smile with glee. It had been a while since I had a good fight. The town of Enya and the criminal we needed to apprehend there would just have to wait. The way I saw it, having a little fun with the oboroten right now was a much needed warm up exercise. Who knew what awaited us in Enya when we got there. If Germogen didn’t want in on the action, that was his problem. So, powering up my hands some more, but not so much as to kill any of them, I prepared myself to knock a few more of them straight into happy land.

Just as I was about to punch one of them, I felt a tiny prick at the back of my neck before I fell unconscious for the second time that day.

#

When I regained consciousness—again—I was in the sky but I was not flying. Someone was carrying me like a baby.

“Germogen?” I hoped out loud.

Of course. Germogen had the ability to shoot tiny little spikes laced with a moderate level of adenosine out of the palms of his hands. In other words, he shot me in the neck with his own natural version of a tranquilizer dart.

Germogen smiled, but kept his focus on his flying. “As I was saying earlier, we have a job to do.”

Note To Readers:

Dear Reader. Thank for taking the time to read my work. Every Sunday, I’m going to post 2 to 3 chapters of Hidden Opekun on OnlineBookClub, a young adult fantasy novel that I’m currently writing. In the meantime, if you wouldn’t mind sticking with me through this entire first draft of my novel, I would truly appreciate any feedback you can give me. Please don’t hesitate to tell me what you like or dislike. You may even give a few pointers to areas that you think needs improvement, or point out inconsistencies that you find along the way. Regards, Cee-Jay.

[jward]

I enjoyed reading Hidden Opekun. Julij seems to be a typical teen, with powers, as in the comment," “I have a phoneband too Dina!” I shouted back at Germogen’s left arm." That gives you a lot of room to grow him as a character. His companion Germogen seems to be filling they role of the Father/older brother. The attention to details allows me to visualize that I am there, feeling the sun and the breezes. Keep up the good work. I am looking forward to your next installment.

[Cee-Jay Aurinko]

Thank you jward. I've been struggling to find time to write this past week, but your words make me eager to see this project through.