Cade had just returned from somewhere, most likely to eat lunch because it was almost two p.m. I’d only been given the order to kill him. How and when I did it was up to me. I stepped carefully on each concrete step as I replayed the directive over and over. It seemed stuck, like there was some reel in my mind and somehow, this one was trapped on repeat. I’d never killed anyone before and even though Dr. Parker felt confident I should have no reservations about my actions, I had so many, they threatened to paralyze me.
I didn’t tell him that either.
As I reached the landing, I stared at the faded brown door with the rusted numbers and letter on it. 14B. I thought I should have a better plan than kicking his door down and shooting him, but Dr. Parker had been sure to warn me about just how dangerous he could be. His entire file from his years first in the Navy and then as a SEAL had been transferred to those microchips. I knew everything about him, including his alcoholism and how he led a destructive, deadly raid against The Genesis Project and that he’d been working with a former SEAL who now smuggled weapons to terrorists all over the world.
I pressed my back against the far wall of the landing between the two apartment doors so he wouldn’t be able to see me if he looked through the peephole. It seemed simple enough. I didn’t doubt the knowledge in my mind that I’d be able to knock the door down—after all, I’d been specifically manufactured to be stronger than humans. I could do it. And I was faster. Even if he waited for me inside, I could pull my trigger before he had a chance to shoot me first.
The problem remained, though, that I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to kill anyone.
But the buzzing in my head would continue until I’d achieved my objective. I didn’t know how Dr. Parker would receive that information, but somehow, he would know. My own reservations became overshadowed by the repeated order to complete my mission and return to the house off of Lake Street.
And like the robot I still believed myself to be, no matter what Dr. Parker insisted, I obeyed.
I pushed myself off the wall and threw my weight into the old door, which splintered and broke apart. Movement in my peripheral vision made me pivot toward the living area on my right, my hands wrapped around the grip of the Glock 19, my finger lightly touching the trigger, ready to squeeze it as soon as I confirmed the man’s identity.
It couldn’t have taken more than half a second. It was just a facial recognition program, a simple match, and the confirmation I needed. Like a green light in my mind, I knew I had the man standing before me who’d led a raid against Dr. Parker’s old facility, who’d actively participated in the murder of thirteen guards, four fellow SEALs, and eleven Army soldiers outside of the Project’s headquarters in Virginia. A man who needed to be eliminated from this world in order to preserve our own safety and the security of Dr. Parker’s research that could eventually save lives.
But my mistake, what caused me to hesitate, was that he said my name.
“Drake,” he breathed. His hands rose and he sighed. “Then shoot me.”
I bit my lip and my finger twitched over the trigger. But for the second time, I stopped myself.
“How do you know my name?” I asked. As far as I knew, I hadn’t been given a name until a week ago.
“Because I’ve known your name for over five years,” he told me. “I know you can’t remember. I know Parker wiped your memory. But I was your… Hell, Drake, I don’t know what I was, other than your friend.”
I shook my head at him and tried to force myself to pull the trigger, but I still hesitated. “Dr. Parker warned me you’d do this.”
“What?” he snapped. “Mess with your head? If you were really just a goddamn computer, how could I possibly do that just by speaking?”
My throat hurt. When I swallowed, it felt too tight and narrow, like I would choke on my own saliva. “You killed people,” I said weakly. “You destroyed the Project.”
Cade rolled his eyes and sighed heavily this time. “Are you going to shoot me or what? I’m betting on ‘or what,’ or you would have shot me already. You hesitated because some part of you knows me.”
For some reason, hearing him accuse me of both hesitating—which was actually completely true—and these stories of a life I couldn’t remember just pissed me off. I gripped the pistol firmly again and retorted, “Wrong, asshole. Just a rookie mistake.”
“Drake, don’t!” a woman’s voice yelled from one of the back bedrooms.
I froze and took my eyes off my target—my second mistake.
A bullet shattered the cheap artwork that had been hanging on the wall behind me, sending shards of glass all over my arms and neck. I ducked back outside and tried to slow my racing heart, not from the altercation with Cade or him shooting at me but from hearing the woman’s voice. I’d never heard it before, and yet, it seemed so confusingly familiar, so full of promises I didn’t understand.
I pressed my lips together as I strained to hear sounds from within the apartment, but all I could hear now were the wailing of police sirens in the distance. I cursed myself for my stupidity before leaping over the railing. A sharp pain spiraled up my leg, but I kept running. The farther I ran, the less I noticed the pain until it disappeared altogether.
As soon as I saw the red and blue lights turn onto the street, I slowed to a walk. My car was fifteen yards away. One of the cruisers pulled over and the cop inside asked me to wait. I had no intention of waiting. I’d completely fucked up what should have been an easy assignment, and Cade Daniels could be headed anywhere by now.
I had to follow him.
I pulled out my pistol and shot each officer in the right shoulder, an injury that would likely confine them to desk jobs for the rest of their careers but at least it shouldn’t kill them. I’d just reached my car when another cruiser turned the corner, the cops inside immediately firing at both me and my car itself, or maybe they were just extraordinarily bad shots.
My tires spun in the gravel on the side of the road before gaining enough traction to get me the hell out of there. I couldn’t go in the direction of Cade’s apartment since too many officers were responding to the reports of gunfire at his complex. Of course, I couldn’t even begin to track him, not yet. Not with half the law enforcement in the city pursuing me now.
I pulled my cellphone from my pocket and was about to call Dr. Parker, but he called me first.
“What the hell happened?” he demanded. He sounded pissed. I couldn’t blame him.
“He wasn’t alone,” I answered.
“So?” Dr. Parker interrupted.
“I didn’t have time to determine who the other person was,” I said although even I realized it was a lame defense.
“Male or female?” he barked.
“Male,” I lied.
I’d never lied before. The fact that I could lie surprised me. What kind of a computer possesses the ability to lie?
“Gotta be Jake Donaldson,” he murmured.
“No,” I lied again. “I couldn’t ID him. That’s what gave Daniels an opportunity to shoot first.”
“And he missed?”
Damn it. It hadn’t even occurred to me until that moment that Cade shouldn’t have missed. His entire life scrolled through my mind. He was an expert marksman. One of the best.
He’d missed because he’d wanted to.
“He’d been drinking,” I said as his history of public drunkenness scrolled past. “He was quite drunk, actually, but I don’t think the other guy had been drinking so I had to get out of there. If you have any favors left, can you call off the cops? I’ll find him again.”
Dr. Parker groaned but finally gave me the news I’d been hoping to hear. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll communicate with you directly. Only call me if it’s an emergency.”
I grimaced because communicating with me directly meant sending orders to the chips in my brain. That shit annoyed the hell out of me. But I pressed the end call button and tossed the phone on the passenger seat. The rearview mirror ref
lected the swirling red and blue lights still behind me so I cut a hard right onto a wide, busy street that ran in front of the city’s only university.
Thanks to the computer in my head, I could maneuver in and out of traffic a lot faster and easier than the humans pursuing me. By the time I reached the loop, whomever Dr. Parker had called came through because the sirens turned off and the blockade surrounding the onramp the city police had created with their cars moved out of my way. Dr. Parker had told me this was his last chance to redeem himself after the catastrophe the month before in Virginia, but as I headed west, unsure of where Cade Daniels might be heading now, I found myself with more questions than solutions.
How did Cade even know about the Project if it had been such a secret? Why had he wanted to destroy it? And why did he seem familiar even though I didn’t possess a single memory of this man?
The orders to kill him kept repeating in my mind, forcing me to refocus on my objective and getting that incessant buzzing to stop. I had one job at the moment, and I couldn’t fail again.
I’d have to hope Cade Daniels still wanted me dead. I would wait for him to find me. And I would have to count on my enhanced speed so that I could kill him first.
By the time I returned to the house by the lake that Dr. Parker had rented, the sun had set and I’d come up with few solutions to draw Cade Daniels out of hiding. I slammed my car door and stomped through the garage, knocking too loudly on the door, but I’d never been so frustrated and confused. Of course, I’d only been awake for about a month.
An unfamiliar man opened the door and looked me over quickly before standing back so I could enter. I eyed him suspiciously but stepped into Dr. Parker’s kitchen.
“Any sign of them?” Dr. Parker asked. I shook my head, and he sighed, “I shouldn’t have sent you alone.”
The strange man in the kitchen with us just looked me over again before telling Dr. Parker, “Well, that’s why I’m here now.”
Dr. Parker nodded and waved a hand toward the tall man with broad shoulders. “Drake, this is Ethan, the SEAL I told you about. He’ll be accompanying you into the field from now on.”
I didn’t want some stranger going anywhere with me, but I couldn’t tell him that so I just nodded at him.
“You’ll be leaving tomorrow for Virginia,” Dr. Drake continued.
“Virginia?” I interrupted. “Why would we go there?”
“To see if any of our suspects are prowling around the old Project,” Dr. Parker answered, but I thought I saw Ethan giving Dr. Parker a funny look. I wanted to give him a funny look, too, because we already knew Cade was in Lake Charles. I doubted he’d be going far, but truthfully, I didn’t want to track him down anyway so I just nodded in acknowledgment again and headed toward my bedroom in the back of the house.
I pulled my clothes off and tossed them into a basket and just as I did everyday, I sat on the edge of my bed to examine the smooth pink scar on my thigh. Dr. Parker had told me I’d needed surgery to remove a blood clot, but it didn’t look like a surgical scar. And if we were really so sedentary for our entire lives that blood clots formed, how did we wake up able to move at all, let alone stand and walk?
Maybe I just knew so little about his research and how it worked, how I’d worked for most of my life, and how I continued to work now.
I suspected Dr. Parker liked it that way. He kept most of us in the dark about what he considered his Project. And the men he worked for only cared if I worked at all.
This was my fate then: No matter how human I felt, I would always be a machine, an experiment, a programmable piece of equipment. And Cade Daniels either knew something about my existence that Dr. Parker kept hidden from me, or Dr. Parker himself had been lying. But in the end, how would I ever be able to trust either of them?
Chapter 7
Only the foundation of a building with a few charred walls remained in the clearing surrounded by woods. Ethan explained that whatever could be salvaged from the Project’s headquarters had been collected already so there really wasn’t much else to see. I couldn’t imagine why Cade or anyone else would want to come back here.
It seemed like a useless trip to me.
“Want to check out the layout?” he asked me.
I blinked at him because getting closer to what was left of the Project’s building in Virginia seemed as useless a gesture as being here in the first place. “What for?” I asked. “It’s just a bunch of concrete and sheetrock.”
“Don’t know,” Ethan admitted. “Give us something to do though.”
“If Daniels or anyone else is out there in the woods, it’ll also make us easier targets,” I countered.
“Probably,” Ethan agreed, but he walked toward the shell of the building anyway.
I squinted at his back but followed him.
What else was I going to do?
Ethan occasionally paused by piles of debris as if trying to orient himself and then he’d move on. I had no interest in any of the trash lying on the concrete floor so to pass the time, I’d kick at the rubble to see how often I could get one of the guards standing around to shoot me annoyed glares. He finally paused by a particularly charred section of the foundation and gestured toward it.
“This is where it began,” he said quietly. “Where you lived most of your life.”
“How do you know that?”
Ethan shrugged and told me, “I’ve been here.”
I looked around at the guards watching us and lowered my voice, too. “How did I survive when no one else did? Dr. Parker brought a body with him to Mogadishu, but the man was brain dead.”
Ethan glanced at me and grimaced. “That’s pretty messed up. Why the hell would he do that?”
“Said he didn’t have the heart to let him go or some shit like that.”
“If he really cared about him, that’s exactly what he should have done,” Ethan argued.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “That’s why I turned off the ventilator.” I didn’t add that the main reason I’d turned it off was that I worried they’d figure out how to repair him and he’d be condemned to live a life as someone’s slave, just like me.
“Do you know much about his research?” I asked him instead.
“Not really,” Ethan replied. “Why?”
“Just been wondering how I could wake up able to walk and move. People in a coma for a long time often suffer from muscle atrophy, right?”
Ethan snorted and shot me a strange look. “Dude, I don’t even know what atrophy means.”
“If muscles aren’t used, they get weaker and weaker. If I spent my whole life basically in a coma, how was I able to walk and move when I woke up in Mogadishu?”
“Oh,” Ethan said. He scratched the back of his head and looked at the ground as if deep in thought. “Could he have just… engineered you differently?”
“I have no idea,” I answered. “I mean, he did change a lot of things, but the guy in Mogadishu… he didn’t look that different than me. Like he’d be strong if he woke up. Like he’d already been working out a lot.”
“Um…” Ethan murmured. “Drake, I don’t think that’s possible. The one time I came here before, everyone was stuck in some glass tube.”
“Including me?” I asked.
Ethan lifted a shoulder but wouldn’t look at me again. “Maybe.”
“What if,” I whispered, eyeing the closest guard carefully, “he could wake us up then make us go back to sleep? Put us back in those tubes until he was ready to send us out to the Navy or Army or whomever had contracted us?”
Ethan glanced at the guard, too, and kicked at a burned piece of support beam, sending a cloud of black ash into the air. “I think we should stop talking about this,” he whispered back. “But it sounds reasonable… at least as reasonable as anything that ever took place here.”
I swallowed and backed away from the blackened ground. For some reason, Ethan was willing to be honest with me, at least it seemed like he was telling me the truth, b
ut I didn’t want to get him into trouble. I bent down and moved a different piece of charred beam. Nothing lay beneath it except more ash. I raised my voice to a normal pitch so the guards wouldn’t get too suspicious. “And why are we here now? There’s nothing left. Didn’t someone already gather anything Dr. Parker might be able to salvage?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t hurt to look. And who knows? Maybe he thought you’d find this place interesting… like coming home or some stupid shit like that.”
I snickered and brushed some debris away from the concrete foundation so I could see it. “Doesn’t feel like coming home if I can’t remember ever being here.”
“True,” he acknowledged. “Look, I was just told to bring you here. You can’t expect me to explain half the shit I’m ordered to do.”
I stood up and brushed my hands on my jeans. “You said you’d been here before. What for?”
Ethan cast another quick glance at the guards around the periphery of the building. I kept thinking if we were alone, he’d be willing to tell me so much more than he was now. “I was supposed to work with the Project. Years ago. I was told to come out here and meet Dr. Parker so they could start training me how to work with you in the field. But my team got called out, and they sent someone else instead.”
“Cade?” I asked.
Ethan shrugged. “He had to have found out about the Project somehow, right?”
“But you said years,” I persisted. “What was he doing?”
I realized I should have asked What was I doing? because why would they have sent Ethan years before Dr. Parker was ready to wake me up and send me into the field?
“Hell if I know,” Ethan answered before I could correct myself. “Maybe they were training him to work with you one day.”
“He says he already did,” I mumbled.
Ethan looked at me curiously and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “What else did he say?”
Genesis Revealed (The Genesis Project Book 2) Page 5
