I’ve been flanked. My mind spins, delivering all available maneuvering possibilities to get myself into a better position. I focus on one group, knowing it will take me longer to kill them all than it will for the opposite group to reach me but willing to take the chance.
Just as I finish off the one group, I feel a sharp sting on the back of my neck. Before I can reach up and feel what it is, I’m tackled by two men. They are no match for my strength, and I quickly throw them off of me, rolling to a crouch and then jumping back to my feet. A third soldier grabs me from behind and tries to wrench my arms back. I flip him over my head and stomp in the center of his chest.
Riley’s voice continues in my brain, demanding my status, but something in my head overrides her command and keeps me on task.
Grabbing the assailant’s arm, I pull him to the ground and drop my knee to his chest. I fire twice, eliminating the first men who jumped me, then turn my gun to his face. Blood spatters over my chest, but I ignore it. I look to the last attacker, but he’s fleeing.
I duck back into the trees and make my way toward Isaac and Pike. I can see the group of soldiers engaging them, but I’m half a minute away from their location. I fire into the mayhem, and several men drop.
“Pike’s down!” I hear Isaac yell from the trees.
I glance over to the spot where Pike had been standing. He’s on the ground, still firing his weapon at the nearest group of soldiers. They continue forward. Even as the ones in the front drop to the ground, the rest of the group goes on. I can see Pike jerking with every hit, but I’m too far away to do anything about it but shoot into the group. There are so many of them. For every one I take out, another jumps from one of the transport trucks.
Finally, I break through the gunfire and reach Isaac and Pike. Pike isn’t moving, and there’s blood pooling on the ground beneath him.
Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Isaac, we drop soldiers left and right until they break off and run back to their vehicles. Some of them circle around and join another group dressed in black technical gear but not uniforms. They concern me, but Riley’s voice takes precedence.
“Sten, give me a status update now!”
“I’m with Isaac,” I tell her. “The rest are retreating.”
I reach down and press my finger to Pike’s neck. I already know he’s dead—I can feel the lost connection inside my head.
Isaac crouches next to me.
“We have to carry him back,” he says. “We can’t leave him here for someone to find.”
Isaac lifts Pike’s body over his shoulder, and we begin our retreat.
“They knew we were coming.” I look over to Isaac, and he nods.
“The intel on the defector must have been planted.”
“Who would do that?”
“No idea, but if I ever find out,” Isaac says, “there’s going to be hell to pay.”
“Status!” Riley’s voice sounds even more desperate.
“Pike is down,” I tell her. “We’re bringing him back. Mission aborted.”
“I understand,” Riley says. “Make your way back as quickly as possible.”
“Acknowledged.” For the first time, I’m not looking forward to seeing her. We’d failed miserably and lost a man in the process.
We make our way back to the riverbank. I’m trying to keep my focus on completion of the journey, but the mission’s failure is weighing on me. Everyone believed the information was sound, but we’d been led into a trap.
My neck throbs, and I reach back to the place where I’d felt something sting me earlier. I feel something stuck in my skin, and pull it out. It’s a tiny sliver of metal, but I can’t determine its function.
Poison?
Inside my head, there’s a rush of information regarding chemicals in my bloodstream, but nothing comes back as an anomaly.
There has to be a reason for it.
I look behind me, watching for signs of anyone following us through the trees but see nothing. I don’t hear anything, either. Isaac is ahead of me with Pike on his back.
“Do you hear anything?” I ask him.
“Nothing,” he says after a brief pause. “You think we got a tail?”
I shake my head, uncertain. I just know something isn’t right.
I glance back and forth between the trees behind us. I see no movement, but I’m sure someone is out there. We reach the riverbank, and Isaac pauses for a moment by a group of rocks to get a better grip on Pike’s body.
“Sten? You taking lead?”
“No.” I stare back into the woods, listening carefully.
“What is it?”
“Not sure.”
“Animal?” Isaac cocks his head to the side, trying to hear what I heard. He takes a step away from the riverbank.
“Keep moving,” I tell Isaac. “Get back to the base. I’m going to make sure no one is following.”
He nods and heads into the water as I slip back into the trees. I know I heard something back here that was too big to be a common forest animal.
I step slowly through the underbrush, watching my footing carefully to keep silent. I listen for further sounds but hear nothing. I can still feel someone out there—someone watching me.
Pausing, I bring my rifle to my shoulder and scan the area. I’m missing something—I can feel it. Concentrating, I try to pull together the data being fed through my eyes and ears to figure out what I should be noticing, but it’s not working. It feels like something is spinning in a circle inside my head, and I can’t make heads or tails of the information.
I reach up and rub my neck. The spot where the needle struck still throbs.
“Now!”
I turn toward the voice, weapon aimed. Movement from above catches my eye just before a large net falls over my head. I struggle against it for only a moment before my body jerks backward, and electricity flows through the net’s webbing.
Gloved hands cover me, pushing me down. I try to push against the invaders, but my body isn’t responding to my commands.
I’ve been hit with electrical charges before as part of training, but it’s nothing like this. I can hear and feel a slow, deliberate throbbing as the impulses hit. Every hit goes right to my head. I feel no burns on my body—I could have forced myself to ignore those. Whatever is happening now is all in my head, focusing on the right temporal lobe where my primary implant is located.
“Sten, status! Sten!”
I can hear her words in my head, but I can’t respond. The next jolt drops me to my knees, and I am completely surrounded by the gloved hands. For a moment, the impulses stop. I grab through the net’s webbing for the nearest person and slam the heel of my hand into his nose, sending bone into his brain. He drops as I feel another intense shock through my head.
They’re all over me. Between pulses, I swing and kick. I know I kill several of them, but for every one that drops, two more take his place. I feel myself being lifted into the air.
“Sten!” Riley’s voice is muffled, full of static.
“Give it up, Superman.”
I wrench my shoulders back and forth as I’m strapped to a flat platform—a stretcher of some sort—still wrapped in the net. My vision is failing, but I feel someone unwrapping the net around my legs and trying to strap me to the platform, I kick out at those trying to hold my legs, but I can’t seem to make contact with them.
I’m completely immobilized. The electric impulses stop, but I’m left feeling disoriented. My thoughts are disjointed and confused. There’s only one thing I know for sure—I’ve been captured.
Riley’s voice is no longer in my head. I’ve never had so many people around me at once, and I feel more alone than ever.
Chapter 13
I can’t move.
I’m naked and restrained on a thick, flat wooden platform. My arms and legs are extended outward, almost as if I were being crucified. Metal clamps keep my arms, legs, and torso restricted, and there’s also a strap around my forehead. My h
ands are splayed out with shards of metal between each finger, immobilizing them as well. Circular pieces have been inserted into my eye sockets, forcing my eyes to remain open, staring up into a blinding light.
“How many specimens survived the transformation?”
“Where is the medical facility located?”
“How many officers are involved in the project?”
“What do you know about monorail technology?”
I know the answers to some of their questions but not most of them. Either way, I remain silent. I can’t identify any of my captors by sight with the light shining on me, but I can identify four voices, all men.
Water is splashed in my face. It’s salty and burns my eyes, but the pain is easy enough to shake off. Someone slaps me across the face. Another slaps me on my balls. I have no idea how many times they’ve done that. Normally, my primary implant would make it easy to calculate, but I have no desire to do so. My head hasn’t worked right since they threw the net over me.
“Time to up the ante, boys.” There’s a slight accent in the man’s voice, but I can’t identify it. He’s the one giving most of the instructions.
I feel a hand on my thigh and a slight prick, like a needle. It’s not puncturing my skin though. Someone is just holding it there.
“Ready?”
“Go for it.”
A sharp thwack hits my ears at the same time the slight prick in my thigh turns into a deep puncture. I grit my teeth against the pain radiating from the middle of my leg. I feel the same slight pressure on my other thigh, and I realize they’re hammering nails into my muscles.
Both thighs, both calves, and my biceps are all pierced. The crucifixion image strengthens. I wait for them to start hammering in more nails, but they stop. I can feel tugging around the area where I’m impaled and the scrape of metal on metal.
“Light him up.”
My muscles go stiff as electricity is pumped through the nails and into my body. I can’t stop myself from screaming. The net had incapacitated me—messed with my implants until I couldn’t function—but this is nothing but pure agony.
I scream again as another shock is delivered.
More questions. More screaming.
Questions.
Screaming.
Everything is blurry. I sense the light still in my eyes, but I can’t actually see anymore. My arms and legs pulse with pain. I can smell my own charred flesh where they’ve burned me with the shocks. My lips are dry, cracked, and probably bleeding. I’ve been beaten unconscious several times, but the reprieve never lasts. The shocks revive me, and it starts all over again.
One of the voices—the leader of this merry band of torturers, as far as I can tell—speaks into my ear.
“Found who your doctor is,” he says. “Riley Grace, right?”
I swallow hard, but say nothing.
“She’s a pretty thing,” he says. “I bet you would have volunteered for all this if you’d known you’d get to bone her as much as you like.”
I lick my lips, but there isn’t enough moisture on my tongue to make any difference. For all I know, I did volunteer for that reason. Either way, I’m not saying anything to this asshole.
Another jolt flows through me, and I bite the inside of my cheek, tasting blood. The voice is beside me again.
“We’re going to get her, you know.” He hums the words into my ear. “I bet she’d be a sweet fuck. Have you fucked her ass? I bet it’s tight. Can’t wait to get my hands on her and find out.”
I try to clench my fingers, but I can’t move them. I want to wrap my hands around his throat and choke the life out of him for saying the words. I grit my teeth, wanting to tell him exactly what I’d do to him if he ever laid a hand on her, but the words don’t come.
Footsteps echo through the room.
“You aren’t going to be able to break him like that.” This voice is new to me. “He’s too conditioned. Maybe once the drugs are out of his system, but that will be weeks.”
“We don’t have that kind of time,” the leader with the accent says. “We need information, and he’s got it in his head.”
“Is there something we can do to flush his system?” It’s the voice of the man who hammered nails into my legs.
“No, but maybe we can interfere with the implants,” the new voice says.
“How?”
“Get Errol in here.”
For a few minutes, no one says anything. There are no questions and no added pain. I focus on my breaths, counting each one as I try to slow down the autonomic systems in my body and relax myself.
Errol. He had to have meant Errol Spat, the man I had been sent to bring back to the Mills Conglomerate base. He’s here, and they’re bringing him to me.
A hundred possible ways of escaping and bringing Errol Spat back with me run though my head, each less plausible than the last. I have no advantage now, but I will find it eventually. I will find it and exploit it.
Unless they kill me first.
Footsteps off in the distance get louder.
“So, this is the product of my life’s work?” The footsteps approach the side of the platform, and a face looms over me, partially blocking the light. I try to focus on his features, but all I can really make out are dark eyes and a long moustache that curves around his mouth.
“Proud of yourself?” the leader asks. His condescending tone is ignored.
“Looks like it’s all working as planned,” Spat says. “I assume he hasn’t said a word.”
“Got some screams out of him but only when we hooked him up to the car battery.” I feel a hand on my thigh, near one of the nails. He taps it with his finger, and I flinch.
“There’s no way that’s going to work,” Spat says. “You see, the implants are designed for just this kind of thing. As soon as the system recognizes the body is being harmed—tortured—it shuts down his verbal output. He literally can’t talk to you. Run current through him, and the system gets overloaded, so you’ll get some screams out of him, but you’ll never get any intel.”
“You built him,” the leader says. “You tell me how to break him.”
“No, no—let’s get this straight,” Spat says. “I didn’t build him. I designed the cybernetic implants and the interface between them and the implants placed around his body. It’s the doctors who link them up to his brain and administer the drug treatments that are the real builders. I can only tell you about the interface and the programming. I’m a tech, assholes, not a doctor.”
“So, what do we do? Take the implants out and run them through the computer?”
“If you want to kill him, sure—go for it. I’m pretty sure Merle was hoping to get him to turn though. Does he even know what you fuckers are doing out here?”
“He hasn’t arrived yet.”
“You don’t have any authority here, Spat. Don’t get shitty with me.”
“I’m just telling you how it is.” There’s a long pause before he speaks again. “Let me give something a try.”
He places an interface disk to the side of my head. Though Riley has done this several times, the intent was always to add information. Whatever this man is doing, it’s not the same. Instead of bright flashes of information inside of my head, I sense a dull whirring and a brief vibration through my brain.
“Weird,” Errol says.
“What’s weird?”
“This doesn’t look right. Something’s fucked up.”
I shift my eyes to the right as much as I can. With the light in my eyes, I can’t see much other than shadows, but it looks like Spat is holding a hand-held computer. I hear him tap at the screen. He adjusts the disk behind my ear and then taps again.
“There’s some squirrely shit showing up when I run the diagnostic. It looks like there’s some leakage.”
“What does that mean?”
“Maybe nothing, but it isn’t right. I don’t think they’ve used the usual drug regimen—the levels are all off. It also looks like the
rear implant has shifted. He’s been through multiple surgeries, which isn’t normal either. It should be one and done.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It means I can’t really tell what’s going on here.”
“But can you break it? Make him talk? Read whatever shit is in his head?”
“It doesn’t work like that. We might be able to force it to cycle power, but that wouldn’t give you much time. Maybe if we can disable the primary implant, some of its functioning will be deactivated. Never actually tried to do that, but it might work.”
“What might work? Stop with the tech talk, and give me something to do here.”
“If you can slow down the implant enough without putting it into torture-resistant mode, he’d at least be physically capable of talking. Not sure if he will, but at least it’s a possibility.”
“How?”
“The implants operate best at a hundred degrees. Part of the drug treatment keeps his temperature high. If we can cool him down to ninety, the implants will be impacted.”
“In what way?”
“He won’t be able to access the information from them. A lot of his training and programming would go right out the window. I can’t tell you if that method will work or not, but it would leave him vulnerable. That’s assuming his body can stand the cold.”
“So, just freeze him?”
“Basically.”
“And he’ll live?”
“He should. Well, he might. I don’t know how the drug treatments have been changed. He’s supposed to be the best of the best and all that shit, so he’s got a chance.”
There’s a pause before the leader speaks again.
“Put him in the box.”
I struggle as they release me from the platform and haul me backward. My eyes adjust quickly, and I search for an opportunity. I’m in a large, mostly empty warehouse. I don’t see anything I can reach to use as a weapon, so I’ll have to rely on my own strength, assuming I have any left.
The man holding my left arm glances behind him, and his grip falters slightly. I twist my wrist backward, grab his hand, and break two of his fingers. He screams and jumps back, freeing my arm. I slam my fist into the head of the man closest to me. He drops to the ground, but my freedom doesn’t last.