Survivor Reborn (Kieran Grey Psionic Hunter) Read online

  Survivor Reborn

  A Kieran Grey Psionic Hunter Novel

  By R. B. Fivecoat

  Copyright 2011 by R. B. Fivecoat

  Dedication:

  To my parents, who always believed in me even when I did not believe in myself. Yes Mom, you were right.

  Contents

  Title. 1

  Prologue. 4

  Chapter 1. 9

  Chapter 2. 37

  Chapter 3. 54

  Chapter 4. 67

  Chapter 5. 88

  Chapter 6. 108

  Chapter 7. 126

  Chapter 8. 140

  Chapter 9. 147

  Chapter 10. 160

  Chapter 11. 167

  Chapter 12. 176

  Chapter 13. 193

  Chapter 14. 213

  Chapter 15. 226

  Chapter 16. 243

  Chapter 17. 254

  Chapter 18. 260

  Chapter 19. 274

  Chapter 20. 289

  Chapter 21. 304

  Chapter 22. 320

  Chapter 23. 332

  Epilogue. 335

  Prologue

  The gunfire behind us was growing louder with each step. Bullets shattered the doorframe as I was unceremoniously thrown through. The three large men–my guards–shoved me up the stairs in front of them as we fled.

  I was woefully out of shape for fieldwork. It was a fine balance between attempting to breathe through the fire of pain growing in my chest, and trying to keep my feet underneath me as I was forced to keep moving. My guards paused only long enough to return fire at our pursuers before rushing on.

  I kept wondering why I was there. My psionic power was thermopathy. I could find heat sources–including hidden people–just by being near them. But, unlike telekinesis or something cool, thermopathy was not the type of paranormal ability to keep you alive in a firefight.

  I didn’t even have a gun. Not that I really knew how to use one anyway. I had been taught what it meant to be a field officer, what all I could and could not legally do, but no one had trained me physically yet. My weapons training didn’t start until next Tuesday.

  I’d been a desk jockey for the last ten years. It hadn’t even been a month yet since I had started doing field training. My duties in the field were simply to assist in interviews and interrogation, and to help identify any strange thermal patterns that might be a hidden body or some other sort of threat. It beat the hell out of getting yelled at for messing up paperwork back at the office. Filling out forms was not my forte. Of course nothing else really was either.

  My most recent blunder had been a simple little mistake I made on an insurance form. It ended up costing the GCP a few hundred thousand dollars because of some “accidental” property damage during a Psionic Hunt. Lucky for me, once you were hired by the GCP you never got fired, you had a job with them for life. But, if you messed up bad enough you’d find yourself transferred to a different department. If I hadn’t been getting transferred to fieldwork when I did, then my old boss would’ve had me demoted to the janitorial staff because of that mistake. Now I had to wonder what was worse; cleaning the office bathrooms, or running for my life as I was getting shot at?

  Probably the bathrooms.

  “Through here!” one of the guards yelled as he thrust me through the door on the second floor, then down another hallway. Even though I was fairly overweight, he tossed me around like a rag doll, forcing me to stay ahead of him. I was being shepherded by the collar of the bulletproof jacket I’d been stuffed into when the bullets first started flying.

  I swear, if I make it out of this alive, I’m going on a diet and getting in shape!

  Gunfire rained down the hall after us again. The guard pushing me kept going even as we heard the final screams of the others falling behind us. I turned to look back, but was spun back around by my one remaining guard. Their job was to keep me alive at all costs. My life had already cost two others theirs.

  Am I really worth it? After all I was just here as an adviser, and I screwed that up terribly. How was I supposed to know it was a setup? I can only sense heat patterns, not weapons! Will my bad luck kill all of us?

  “Keep moving Sir!” He shoved me around the corner, then turned to fire at our chasers one last time. I looked back in time to see his body riddled by bullets and collapse to the floor.

  Three dead now, just to protect me. I’m in way over my head! I never even knew their names.

  I ran as fast as I could. Each foot slapped the floor as I forced myself to keep moving against the growing numbness in my legs. My heart was threatening to explode inside my chest. My lungs burned with each breath, like the world was on fire. Walls splintered around me as the gunmen cleared the corner firing wildly. I just knew I wasn’t going to make it.

  Checking the pockets of the jacket, I looked for anything I could use. Inside I found a small brick of explosive no bigger than my fist, a detonator core, and the detonator remote. I’d watched them use some explosives earlier when they blasted open the door downstairs. Blood pounded in my ears as I tried to force myself to remember how they had used it.

  Now how did they say it worked . . . ? Measure the explosive, activate the detonator, position, then press the button on the remote. How the hell do you measure the explosive? I shrugged my shoulders to myself as I kept running. Well, I have one detonator and one package of explosive, good enough measurement for me.

  As I activated the small detonator, I smashed it into the explosive, then tossed the bomb carelessly over my shoulder. Now all I had to do is press the button on the remote in my hand and kiss the gunmen goodbye.

  Suddenly my ass cheek flared to life with a searing pain. My butt hurt and my leg wasn’t working right. I’d just got shot in the ass, only inches below the bottom of the bulletproof jacket!

  That’s just typical of my life! Why can’t anything ever go right for me?

  Looking over my shoulder, I saw the five furious men with big guns charging down the hall recklessly firing at me.

  That made up my mind. I limped over to the window that had been shattered by errant gunfire. With one final deep breath I pulled myself up into the window frame and dove out for the river below, pushing myself away from the building so that I would miss the narrow sidewalk on the manmade concrete riverbank.

  On the way down I remembered to press the button on the remote, just before I hit the freezing water just a few feet from the riverbank. Even underwater I could hear and feel the explosive going off.

  I swam for the surface, working against the pain in my backside and leg.

  AIR!!! . . . the brisk late November air never tasted so good!

  Firelight illuminated the snowy midnight St. Carver riverfront. Chunks of burning debris were landing around me in the water along with the lightly falling snow. Then I turned to look behind me.

  The five-story office building I had so hastily left only moments earlier, was collapsing. The gaping, burning hole in the center of the building, filled in as the building imploded.

  Perhaps I used too much.

  Three Agents are dead, I just singlehandedly destroyed an entire building, and I was only supposed to be here as an adviser. The Council is going to be sooo pissed.

  I guess I’ll be cleaning those bathrooms after all.

  Chapter 1

  “Tomorrow is the first day of your new life,” a distant female voice whispered in the darkness.

  Those shadowy words echoed through my head as I slowly woke.

  I hate waking up in strange beds, nothing feels right and it takes a while to remember where I am. I moved my hair out of my face. Must’ve been awhile since I
had it cut. Has it been that long?

  I forced my eyes open to look around the room. It looked and smelled like some sort of a hospital room. Had I been hurt, again? I’d spent my fair share of time in hospitals growing up. Being a klutz will do that. The room had all white walls with a door open to the bathroom and another door on the wall adjacent to it. There was no furniture or anything else in the room but the bed I was on, not even a TV or windows.

  Why isn’t there a TV, or at least a window? Did I get stuck in the hospital again, in a room without a TV? And, why don’t I have an IV or something jabbed into an arm if I got hurt? What’s going on?

  I sighed and watched my breasts rise and fall.

  BREASTS?!?! What the hell happened to me?! I’m a guy, but I have breasts, is this a dream? It must be a dream.

  I ran my hands over my new chest feeling myself through the white sheet. It felt like my entire body was covered in something invisible, like a thin skintight invisible glove. I couldn’t directly feel my own skin. The breasts looked real, and as far as I could tell through the invisible glove and the sheet, they felt real too. Not that I had a lot of experience judging if breasts were real or not. I smoothed my hands down my body to my crotch . . . something was definitely different.

  Okay, I’m a guy, and I just woke up with some girl’s body. Yeah, I’m dreaming. I had to look. I slowly lifted the sheet to the first person vision of an utterly naked female body.

  This dream is getting a little too real.

  Diving out of bed, I rushed on somewhat wobbly legs to the mirror in the bathroom.

  I was greeted by a face that was not mine.

  Dishwater blond hair fell slightly curled to just below the breasts, with short bangs framing the sparsely freckled face. Two small gold hoop earrings hung off each ear. An ear-cuff was clasped to the upper part of the left ear.

  The hospital let her–uh–me keep her jewelry on? Just what type of place is this? What in the hell’s going on?

  Back in the mirror, teeth, perfectly straight and gleaming white, showed through the lightly parted pink lips. In the center of the face was a cute upturned nose covered with a sprinkling of freckles. The most distinguishing feature of the lovely face was the eyes, the electric-violet eyes so bright that they seemed to glow. I’d only ever seen eyes like those once before.

  The memories slammed into me like a freight train looking at those eyes.

  I had been a Psionic Thermopath for the United Nations Global Centurion Protectorate–the GCP–but a few weeks ago on assignment, the men I was with died, and in my escape I destroyed a building. As soon as I was healed up enough to travel, I was sent to New York to face the GCP Council themselves. I stood alone in that dark chamber staring up at the floating disembodied heads of the members of the Council. It was a visual trick they used to install control by fear. It definitely worked. I barely kept from messing myself as I answered their questions. After an eternity of nerve-racking interrogation–all fourteen hours of it–they decided that I was not acceptable as a field operative.

  It was their ruling that I was to be reassigned back to a desk job, a much lower level desk job than I’d held before mind you. But before I went to work at my new job I had to be decommissioned. That meant that they were going to go digging into my head and “selectively” remove any memories I had about field operations and classified materials. It was done through a process that could easily go wrong and permanently fry my entire brain. Not something I was looking forward to.

  I was sent back to St. Carver to the Archives for my selective decommissioning memory erasure and reassignment. Dr. Amelia Grey was the nice lady placed in charge of my decommissioning. She understood my hesitation about having my memories erased. At the time she was grieving the recent loss of her own sister. While on assignment her sister had been attacked and had her entire mind wiped away. No one had any clue who had done it, but Dr. Grey believed it had been done by another psionic. We talked a long time because I was stalling. During our conversations, Dr. Grey came up with a very crazy idea. She offered me a choice; be decommissioned with the standard “selective” memory wipe which could backfire and destroy my entire mind, or have my mind transferred unaltered into the body of her sister and hunt down the psionic that had erased her sister’s mind, essentially killing her.

  It was a chance to start over in life.

  A chance I took.

  There was no other way out of the memory wipe, so to me I had little choice. The transfer process was not fully guaranteed to work either, in fact it had only been successfully done once before. I was risking losing my mind either way. But, if it worked, my mind would be intact and unaltered, just inside the body of a girl.

  Looks like it worked. Thirty-four years as an overweight and unattractive loser of a guy, and now I’m a sexily cute, twenty-two-year-old female.

  This will take some getting used to.

  I made faces at the mirror testing out the new me. Giggling, I blew a kiss to my reflection. Giggling? I don’t giggle. The new body was already affecting me. It made me wonder what all I was going to have to get used to with this new life.

  Stepping back to view the full new me, led to a few pleasant surprises. There was a small charm in the shape of a teddy bear hanging from a bellybutton piercing. Cute. Also, the athletic body was flawless. At least I thought it was. I twisted and turned looking at every angle. I always liked girls with a nice backside and breasts, now I had that perfect tush. As for my breasts, two words, big and perky. By my perverted male standards, I looked like a fantasy girl from a beer commercial.

  If nothing else works out, I could at least be a model or something with this body.

  DING!!!

  The door chime scared the hell out of me.

  Door chimes in a hospital room? Why not? Nothing else seems normal around here either. After all, I’m a guy in a chick’s body.

  DING!!!

  Again the door chimed followed by a short knock.

  “Kieran, you up yet?” a cheerful male voice called.

  Kieran? . . . Oh, that was the name of Dr. Grey’s sister. Now it’s my name, Kieran Grey. My old name was Kevin. They sound alike, so hopefully I’ll remember to answer to it. Ugh! This is all just too weird.

  “Just a minute,” I called back, smiling at my new voice. I sounded like someone who would give really good phone sex. Not that I would ever think of doing something like that. Well, not often anyway.

  Laughing at myself, I glanced back at the mirror.

  Naked!!! I’m still naked!

  Nudity had never really bothered me in my old life, but suddenly I was embarrassed for some reason I couldn’t understand or control. I looked around and found a short robe on the back of the bathroom door. The white silk flowed over my new curves down to my thigh, bringing a chill of excitement up my back. Satisfied with my now modestly covered reflection, I went to the door.

  There was no doorknob, only a small two-inch square on the wall about waist high. Touching the panel lightly with curiosity, the door slid away into the wall with a light pneumatic HISS, revealing the man whose voice I’d heard moments earlier. He was a well-built Asian with short spiky black hair, and tribal tattoos visible on his neck and arms. Jeans, hiking boots, and a two-sizes-too-small tight t-shirt covered his muscular swimmers build body. He was carrying a briefcase-sized box under one arm. My body reacted at the sight of him. When he smiled at me, a longing sensation deep within me wanted to pull him into my arms, to wrap my body around his, to feel his skin against my own.

  What the hell is going on with me?!?

  It took a second to shake the feeling of lust growing inside. Then I remembered seeing him with Dr. Grey before.

  Her assistant or something perhaps?

  Noticing that he was taller than the new me made me realize that I didn’t feel as tall as I used to be.

  How tall am I now?

  “Glad to see you up. We never were properly introduced before. My name’s Tanaka. Dr. Grey sent
me to help you get around and start adjusting to your new life.” He walked in past me without an invitation, nonchalantly taking a seat on the foot of the bed with a confident smile like he knew I wouldn’t object and throw his ass out. Of course I wouldn’t, I was too busy as I stood there fighting not to embarrass myself by grabbing him passionately, for reasons I couldn’t explain.

  The door had hissed closed by the time he reached the bed. He set the box down on the bed pointing at it. “I brought you some clothes. Nothing fancy, just a workout suit. As soon as you’re ready, we’ll go get some breakfast, then start your training.”

  “Training?” I asked as casually as I could, trying to cross my arms across my chest the way I did in my old body, but my bosom was in the way. Both arms ended up crossed underneath my new breasts. The move cradled my breasts, pushing them together and up, as if to put them on display with extra cleavage peeking out of the opening of the robe. I glanced down and ended up staring wide eyed at my own breasts like a starved man at a buffet. I couldn’t stop myself. It certainly ended up ruining the casual effect I was going for. Tanaka only lifted an eyebrow when I shifted my stance placing my hands on my waist and pretended nothing had happened.

  Just how do women move with these things? They sure do change my center of gravity. Of course without my old beer-gut, I’m sure that my center of gravity would be different anyway.

  “Things are different for you in this new body, that’s why you need the training. You now possess psionic powers that you are not used to. Also, your new body knows a number of different fighting styles that your old body didn’t. Muscle memory and such. You need some practice to understand what all you can do. The body can react without you thinking about it, but you have to learn to trust yourself. It’s all part of the deal you made with Dr. Grey,” he explained as a matter-of-fact with an emotionless tone.

  “Okay, so how long have I been here?” I asked crossing the room to the clothes box.

  “It’s been three days since your memory transfer. You’ve been kept sedated the entire time, to allow your brain to adjust to the new data. You know, personally I don’t mind, but . . . uh, you might want to watch just exactly who you flash with those. Someone might take it the wrong way and think you are offering an invitation to something you didn’t mean to.” He pointed at my chest. The robe had almost completely fallen open when I leaned over, fully exposing my pristine breasts.