“Cade,” I called. He stuck his head in the open door and raised an eyebrow at me. “Don’t guess you have any tweezers?”
“Why the hell would I have a pair of tweezers?”
“I need something to pull the chip out,” I told him.
“You’re going to die from some flesh-eating bacteria or some scary shit like that,” he said.
“As long as this thing’s not in my arm anymore, I don’t care. Now help me find something to pull it out.”
“Why did they have to send me to the Project?” he muttered. He pulled the keys out of the ignition and walked to the back of the car so he could dig through the trunk. I watched him through the window and tried not to look at Saige as she climbed into the car and lay on the backseat.
“God,” she groaned, “you’re not done?”
“Almost,” I promised her.
“Doesn’t that hurt?”
“Yes,” I said. “But you have no idea how much I’ve always hated this thing. I’d handle any amount of pain to get rid of it.”
She rolled away from me and fell silent.
Cade slammed the trunk closed and returned to the driver’s seat, throwing a pair of needle-nose pliers in my lap. “That’ll have to do. And I was wrong: you’re not going to die from a flesh eating bacteria but tetanus.”
I shrugged again as I picked up the pliers. I’d have to make a slightly larger incision in order to use them. “If Parker was stupid enough not to vaccinate me against tetanus, then I deserve to die.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, dumbass,” Cade argued. “Parker would deserve to die for being stupid, not you.”
“He deserves to die for thinking he can create and control people then sell us to the military,” I said.
“That too,” Cade agreed.
The tip of the pliers hit metal and I carefully pinched the chip and pulled it from my arm. I wrapped my bloody t-shirt around the incision before picking up the pliers that gripped the small chip. Cade pulled back onto the highway but still had a hard time keeping his eyes on the road.
“What are you going to do with it?” he asked.
“Don’t know.” I rubbed it against the corner of the t-shirt wrapped around my arm and inspected it again now that it was cleaned off. Such an ordinary chip, so innocuous and harmless. Except I knew that wasn’t true. I’d never be able to remove the ones in my head, but I’d freed myself from this one. I held part of Parker’s power over me in the palm of my hand. I held part of my freedom in my hand.
I rolled down the window and threw it onto the highway.
I’d never be his slave again.
Chapter 13
The motel Cade stopped at in Fayetteville, North Carolina reminded me of the kind of place teenagers would sneak off to in some slasher movie before getting killed. He parked in front of the lobby and held out a hand. “Please tell me you have money.”
I handed him my entire wallet.
When the men from The Genesis Project picked me up outside of my apartment, they hadn’t bothered to take anything away from me. They’d checked to make sure I wasn’t armed, but they had no reason to think I needed to be separated from anything else. After all, they were only taking me in to fix whatever had gone wrong then had planned on sending me back to murder the woman I was in love with.
I watched Cade walk into the dimly lit lobby. Without him in the car, the silence quickly became overwhelming. Saige shifted in the backseat, but she hadn’t spoken to me again – not since I’d removed the chip from my arm back in Virginia. Hours had passed since she’d even spoken to Cade.
I pulled the t-shirt off my arm to check on the incision. A thin pink line ran below the black and blue rectangle. My first scar.
“What happened to you when they used that thing?” Saige asked.
Her voice startled me and I jumped a little. I turned around to look at her, and her pale gray-blue eyes lifted from my arm to my face.
“The chip served as a way to send messages directly to the control center in my brain. Parker basically wired it into my nervous system so that signals could be sent just like our nerves normally send signals to our brains. But when he forced them to communicate with his computer, it inflamed every nerve in my body.”
I stopped because I’d noticed her expression shifting from curiosity to horror, and she looked away again, staring out the window at the mostly empty parking lot. I didn’t know what else to say so I waited impatiently for Cade to return and save us both from the misery of being stuck alone together.
When he didn’t immediately, and miraculously, materialize by the car, I quietly told her the only thing I could. “I’m so sorry, Saige. I never should’ve accepted that first date, but even then, I thought you were the most extraordinary woman I’d ever met. I don’t blame you for hating me, but I escaped the Project to protect you, and I’ll always love you.”
I kept my eyes on the windows of the lobby, but Saige never responded.
Cade finally pulled the door open and hurried back to the car. “We’re all sharing a room, and we can’t stay here too long anyway. They can track Drake so they’re most likely already here, but aren’t sure what to do. But if Drake doesn’t shower soon, I’m ditching his smelly ass on the side of the road.”
I nodded in agreement. “Sounds reasonable.”
Cade snorted and drove to the back of the motel. None of us had any luggage and I didn’t have any clean clothes to change into so as soon as we got inside the room, he told us he was going down to the Wal-Mart we’d passed and if he wasn’t back in an hour, I should assume he’d been killed and get Saige out of there. I just nodded again and headed to the bathroom.
As I waited for the water to warm up in the shower, I ran my fingers over the black and blue rectangle on my arm. I pushed on it even though it still hurt – maybe from actual scar tissue now, just like I’d once told Saige – and when I couldn’t find the familiar hard lump beneath the tissues of my arm, I finally smiled.
The cold air of the motel room made tiny goose bumps break out all over my body. I only had the towel to wrap around me, but I’d grown tired of waiting in the bathroom for Cade to return. Even though Saige had seen me naked a hundred times, I suddenly felt self-conscious about being around her with just a hotel towel wrapped around my waist. I clutched it tightly with one hand as I sat on the other bed and feigned interest in the television.
She continued to ignore me, and I thought about going back to the bathroom just to avoid the uncomfortable silence. When she finally spoke, she startled me again.
“Cade is going to come back, right?”
I took a few deep breaths in a pathetic attempt to slow my racing heart. “I don’t know,” I answered. “He has twenty more minutes, and if he’s not back, we need to leave.”
Saige glanced at me and exclaimed, “How? You’re wearing a towel!”
“My jeans are on the counter. I don’t need a shirt to escape from the assholes who are watching us.”
“They can track the microchips in your head. You can’t escape from them at all.”
“True,” I admitted. “But assuming Cade lives, we need a chance to figure out how to get back to the Project and destroy the building.”
Saige folded her arms angrily and scowled at me. “First of all, how do you know they can’t see and hear everything you do?”
“They can’t,” I interrupted.
“How do you know?” she shouted.
“Because if they could, they wouldn’t have been surprised by Ramirez’s report of my relationship with you.”
Saige shook her head then turned her scowl toward the television again. “They’re able to control you, and you really expect me to believe they couldn’t pull up whatever you’re seeing or hearing or saying if they wanted to? They’re in your fucking head, Drake!”
“Yeah, I know,” I replied bitterly. “I’ve lived with it my whole life, remember?”
“And maybe they control your thoughts, too,” she sna
pped just as bitterly. “And maybe that’s all I was – an expendable experiment.”
“No,” I whispered, but now that she’d said it, now that the possibility hung in the air between us, how could I know for sure? How could I ever be certain that all of the doubts and anger I’d had in the past, those feelings I just knew were my own and only mine, weren’t part of Parker’s programming to fine-tune his future machines? And if that were true, then the love I’d been so convinced had transformed me and had guaranteed I must be human after all was simply a fabrication as well.
When I didn’t say anything else, she turned that angry expression on me one last time and spit out, “Exactly.”
A car door slammed outside and moments later, the lock on the door clicked and Cade pushed it open. He sighed as soon as he saw me and threw a plastic bag in my direction. “They followed me there and back, but no one even tried to make contact with me. Not sure what the point was.”
I shrugged as I dug through the bag. “Maybe they didn’t want to make a public scene by gunning you down in a busy Wal-Mart parking lot.”
“They could’ve abducted me and held me for ransom or something to try to get you to cooperate with them,” Cade pointed out.
“Without Saige, they probably thought that wouldn’t have worked,” I argued.
“Still an asshole,” Cade said.
I nodded and pulled a t-shirt out of the bag. “You bought a Tar Heels shirt?”
“So?” he asked.
“I don’t like them anymore,” I mumbled.
“Go get dressed,” he sighed again.
I wanted to tell him no just because I could disobey him, but I was cold. I retreated into the bathroom but stayed by the door so I could listen to him and Saige. Their muffled voices snuck beneath the thin aluminum door.
“How can you be so sure this isn’t a trick?” Saige hissed. “You’re right. It doesn’t make any sense that they would just let you walk away like this. I told you we shouldn’t have even gone to meet him. They’ll flip a switch any minute now and he’ll murder us both!”
“First of all, I came back here. I haven’t walked away from anything, and they probably knew I was coming back. And secondly, do you have any idea how many men he had to kill to get out of that place? If Parker were testing some new program or running an experiment, he wouldn’t have sent so many guards after him.”
“We’re talking about a man who builds people and controls them like robots! If he ever had a sense of morality, he abandoned it about thirty years ago!”
I pulled the Tar Heels shirt over my head and tugged on it. I wanted to storm out of the bathroom and insist I wasn’t a robot; I wasn’t being manipulated and I wouldn’t turn on the only people in this world I cared about. I’d dug the microchip out of the port in my arm and if Parker could control me still, he wouldn’t have allowed me to do that. I doubted it could be replaced. The magnets and the microchip had been implanted before I’d even fully developed as an infant. But I remained frozen near the door of the bathroom because I couldn’t even convince myself of my own words.
Cade’s footsteps approached the bathroom and he banged on the door, shouting, “Dude, hurry up! What are you doing in there?”
I pulled the door open and fixed him with a pretend-angry glare. Or maybe a real-angry glare, but I wasn’t angry with him. I thought I’d escaped. I thought I’d learned how to switch off this impulse to obey every command Parker sent, but maybe he was only allowing me to think I’d somehow won my freedom. And in the end, he’d press a few keys and I’d become the monster Saige feared I already was.
“Do you believe that?” I asked him. “Do you really think I’m capable of ignoring them now?”
“He still trying to command you?” Cade asked.
I nodded. The static in my mind had never stopped. A constant stream of orders continued incessantly. I didn’t even know what they all were anymore because I’d stopped paying attention and it had become annoying background noise that faded into the louder, more pervasive worries and fears I carried.
“What’s he telling you to do?” Cade asked.
I shifted my weight between my feet and forced myself to concentrate on the commands Parker sent me.
The longer you drag this out, the worse it will be for everyone in the end. Don’t you see you’re only making things worse for Cade and Saige? If you want to help them, go outside with your hands behind your head and let us bring you home.
I shook my head as if Parker could actually see me and know I had no intention of returning to the Project unless I was destroying that place.
But as I stood there arguing with a voice in my head that couldn’t hear my protests, I suddenly realized our key to getting out of this room alive was to play along and do exactly as he asked.
“I’m going outside,” I told Cade. “I’m going to let them think I’m surrendering. Be prepared to get back to the Plymouth as soon as the guards who approach me are dead.”
Saige gasped, but I wouldn’t look at her again.
Maybe I’d always been the monster she feared I’d become.
Chapter 14
I kept my hands behind my head and slowly walked toward the center of the parking lot. The static in my mind quieted and I became aware of the steady thrumming of the motel’s air conditioners, the plinking of ice from the dispenser down the walkway, the voices from someone’s television that must have been turned up to drown out whatever else was going on in that room.
Four men stepped out from vehicles at the edge of the parking lot and watched me carefully. By their stance and the rifles slung over their shoulders, I immediately knew they were SEALs. The Project wasn’t fooling around with their own inadequately trained guards anymore. They’d sent a team out for me from the same men I used to work with. I recognized one of them.
I wished Ramirez were among them.
“Stop where you are, Drake,” one of them called out.
I stopped.
The man I recognized spoke into a mouthpiece, and we all waited for a response.
It came to me.
Kneel on the ground, Drake. Keep your hands behind your head. Do not harm the men when they approach you. Remember: they are your brothers. They are on your side.
I knelt on the ground even though I wanted to tell them they could all go to Hell so they could relay that message to Parker.
The four SEALs began walking toward me. None of them carried a tranquilizer gun since it hadn’t worked on me the day before. But the Tasers they held in their hands assured me non-cooperation was going to be painful.
I couldn’t imagine it was any worse than being connected to Parker’s computer through the port.
As the familiar man got closer, he held out a pair of handcuffs and told me, slowly, as if I were incapable of comprehending English anymore, “I’m going to put these on your wrists. Just stay still and no one will hurt you.”
I stayed still.
He walked behind me and I felt the cold metal snap around my right wrist. And that’s when I wouldn’t remain still any longer. I twisted around and grabbed his arm, throwing him in front of me. The electrodes of a Taser snapped onto the cotton of my t-shirt and the currents traveled down my chest and arms, into my legs and my head until I thought I was back on that goddamn table in the Project connected to Parker’s terminal so he could evaluate me.
Even through the pain, I could make out the words Parker directed to me. Don’t be stupid, Drake. Calm down now. Don’t make this difficult.
If I hadn’t been in so much pain, I would have laughed.
I yanked on the wires that connected the electrodes to the gun and pulled it from his hands. Before I could turn it on him, I felt another set of barbs hit my back. I fell forward but I gripped the Taser in my hand. I was vaguely aware of shouting, but words were just words now. Perhaps they meant something, or maybe they were just more noise in the spectrum of a noisy world that made no sense. I held onto one thought and focused on it alone: kill
them all.
I pulled the barbs from my shirt and grabbed the familiar man from the ground, holding him in front of me so when the next Taser discharged, they fell onto his clothing instead. Someone may have cursed.
I grabbed the pistol from the holster by the man’s side and fired it at the closest SEAL before he could turn his rifle on me. But there were two other well-trained men who weren’t willing to die.
They aimed their rifles at me at the same time I pulled the trigger to kill the second SEAL. The third man still standing fell at the same time, and I didn’t need to turn around to know Cade had shot him from inside the motel room. I pushed the man away from me who I’d been holding as a shield from the TASERs and shot him in the head before running back toward Cade’s stolen Plymouth. He and Saige had just jumped inside when a bullet ripped into my thigh.
Of course I’d suspected we had snipers all around us, but I’d bet on Parker’s refusal to relinquish his only experiment that had survived. And considering that sniper had been ordered to shoot me in the leg, I’d been right.
I fell to the ground and heard the tires squealing as Cade threw the Plymouth into reverse. The car stopped beside me and a door swung open. Another bullet tore through the open door – a warning that they had no intention of allowing Cade and Saige to drive off with Parker’s investment. I forced myself to my feet again and threw myself onto the backseat.
Cade had slunk as far down into the driver’s seat as he could and before my body touched the seat, he hit the gas again. I rolled toward the seats in front of me and cried out in pain as I rolled onto my wounded leg. Another bullet shattered the glass in the windshield and I pushed Saige closer to the floorboard. She screamed and covered her head as the back windshield shattered and rained pellets of broken glass on top of us.
“Goddamn it, Cade, drive faster!” I yelled.
“I’m driving as fast as I can!” he yelled back. “But I can’t see where I’m going!”
As if to emphasize why he remained hidden, a bullet ripped through the driver’s seat and sent puffs of yellow stuffing onto the dashboard.
Genesis Rising (The Genesis Project Book 1) Page 10
