Unstoppable

by Long, Heather

  With a firm hand on Joss’s arm, Drake drew her inside. A moment’s hesitation flickered through her expression, then she blanked again and put on what Drake had begun to consider her business face. A soldier through and through, she believed herself capable of handling anything. He only hoped she was correct.

  Machines beeped quietly in the shadow shrouded room. “Patient A has been in a semi-lucid state for the last six weeks. Although he was conscious when we rescued him, he slipped into a coma. The coma lasted seven days. It took me that long to identify the drug cocktail they’d been pumping into him. When faced with the decision of continuing their course of treatment or trying to wean him off the narcotics, I decided to wake him from the coma to ask him.”

  The muscles in Joss’s arms stiffened when Ilsa shone a light on the sallow skinned man. His whole body shuddered at the light touching him, but he had lost even more weight in the time since Drake last looked in on him. The skin stretched tautly against bones, paper thin. It gave him a skeletal appearance, his face an image of nightmares.

  “What the hell were they doing to him?” The quiet horror in Joss’s half-whispered words reaffirmed Drake’s opinion of her character.

  “An excellent question,” Ilsa said, turning the light off. “I see no point to what they’ve done to him except the fact that he is still alive, having survived a state which should have killed him. In harsh conditions, the average human cannot survive longer than three hours without shelter. Within three days, if you haven’t had water, you will perish. If you go three weeks without food, you will also die. None of these are a pleasant death.”

  The doctor paused. Even knowing what was coming didn’t ease the cramp in Drake’s gut.

  Ilsa touched one of the machines—adjusting something on the intravenous drip was his bet. “They pushed his limits…” She increased the dosage, and the machines began to beep with more earnestness. Flicking the light back on the man, she revealed his skin beginning to grow plumper and the wan look erasing. “He was practically a skeleton when we retrieved him, his muscle mass digested by his body. His internal organs shouldn’t even have been functioning, and his blood had become almost sludgy, which should have shut him completely down.”

  Joss swallowed audibly, and Drake gave her arm a gentle squeeze. She wasn’t alone in the nightmare.

  “They took a normal man and made it possible for him to survive the unthinkable. His mind, though. appears to wax back and forth between sane and completely shredded.”

  “So, why aren’t you doing something else for him? If he needs food or water, give it to him.” Outrage filled every syllable Joss spoke.

  “Because as soon as we do, he begins to need even more. It’s not just food and water he craves.” Ilsa changed the direction of the light to shine it on the second banana bag hanging next to the saline bag.

  “Blood.” Joss exhaled the word.

  A jerk on the bed drew all of their attention and Drake narrowed his eyes. If Patient A received too much too fast, he went feral. He could and had put the man down before. He would not allow the creature he had become to harm either woman.

  “It’s all right, Drake.” Ilsa assured him, then shone the light back on the man. His eyes were open, colorless and unfocused. The pupils shrunk to perfect pinpoints and Joss made a low sound in her throat. “I increased his sedation levels ahead of time.” To their guest, she added, “His hunger is even more brutal than his emaciated state. Before you ask, we did try to let him die…considering that a mercy.”

  “He can’t die?” For the first time, Joss sounded genuinely distressed.

  “No.” Ilsa shone the light on Patient A whose face seemed trapped in a rictus of tragedy. She made two more adjustments before motioning to the door.

  Drake guided a leaden footed Joss from the room and waited for Ilsa to secure it before they moved to the next one. The soldier didn’t want to enter. Her stiff muscles warned him of her reticence, yet when Ilsa opened the door, she began moving without any nudge from him.

  Patient B sat up in bed, a coloring book opened on the makeshift lap table, and a crayon shading it as he worked carefully through one of the sections on the page. Unlike Patient A’s room, B’s was full of light and color. The curtains were opened, offering him an unobstructed view of the gardens. Though they needed significant work of their own, they were a riot of winter colors with some splashes of evergreen here and there.

  The young man gave the doctor a shy smile as she entered, but the crayon didn’t halt its pace. Joss went still. When she shuddered, Drake knew she’d noticed that the crayon moved by itself.

  “He doesn’t speak, and it’s not because he lacks vocal chords. We checked.” Ilsa paused at the bedside to run a gloved hand over Patient B’s dark tousled hair. His deeply bronzed skin reflected his Mediterranean descent. Another shy smile kindled on the boy’s face—though he wasn’t a child. “His growth was stunted while he underwent a series of experiments we believe designed to enhance his telekinetic control.”

  Joss shifted a step then locked her stance. If not for his hand on her arm, he might have missed the jump in her pulse or how her respiration increased even as she seemed to try and regulate it. “He was born this way?”

  “With his abilities? Most likely. As far as I can determine from his blood work and DNA markers, he’s from somewhere in the Middle East, most likely on the Mediterranean edge. A refugee, but he hasn’t revealed to us how long he was held.” The crayon he’d been using settled back into a stack, and a new one lifted to begin coloring. “We don’t even know his name.” Sadness edged Ilsa’s voice. “He doesn’t remember having one.”

  “So, you just call him Patient B?” The moment the words left her mouth, Joss grimaced. “My apologies,” she said to the young man, but he didn’t even look in her direction or act as though he acknowledged her.

  “We call him BB, actually.” Drake answered for Ilsa, then caught the ball which suddenly lifted from the side table and arrowed straight at them. Not hesitating, he threw it back. The kid caught it without ever looking up, the ball holding right in front of him before firing once more. “He loves basketball, and he loves to play ball.”

  “He only uses his…” Her question ended when BB shifted in the bed and she got a clear look at his forearms—and where they ended just above the wrist. “He has no hands.”

  “No,” Ilsa said. “He doesn’t. BB, that’s enough ball for now. We’ll come back later to play, all right?”

  The kid didn’t look up, but the ball settled back into its place and the crayons continued to color on the page. Ilsa jutted her chin toward the door, so Drake turned Joss and walked her outside. Once the door was closed, the doctor focused on Joss.

  “He’s a victim, just like Patient A. They were taken and unspeakable things were done to them. Unlike Patient A, BB is still in there somewhere. He’s relatively happy, well-adjusted, and maybe he’s simply blocked out the torture, but that young man isn’t a child. He also isn’t an adult.” Even with the surgical mask on, the unhappy twist of her mouth seemed visible through the sadness in her eyes. “Our last patient is neither of those things. He is angry, and he wants to hurt anyone who comes inside the room. We can introduce you, but I would prefer to only let you observe. It might be safer.”

  Drake didn’t disagree, but it had to be Joss’s decision. He would protect them both. The man in that room packed a ton of anger into his punches, anger which fueled his strength. So far, they’d been fortunate, because Drake could take those hits.

  “Why is he so special?” Once again, Joss surprised him with her relative grasp of the right question to ask. “The others were experimented on, too. They underwent torture—disfigurement?”

  Ilsa curled her fingers in invitation and led them down the hall. The third room they’d transformed into a holding cell slash medical room. It included an observation window, reinforced with plexi-adaptive-steel. It wouldn’t shatter, no matter how hard it was punched.

&nbs
p; “Gabriel Alexander, Sergeant, U.S. Marine Corps,” Ilsa said without much ceremony before she turned the window on. If Drake was correct, the doctor only turned on the one way viewing. They could look in, but Gabriel couldn’t look out. Joss stepped up to the window and studied the man inside.

  He did pushups one armed and had a steady pace going, despite the gallons of sweat pouring from his muscles. The man exercised relentlessly.

  “One coping mechanism we’ve found for his rage is to workout. We’ve tried to begin adapting him to life outside the room, but it doesn’t end well.” If by not ending well, she meant putting Drake through one wall before Drake had been able to corral him again, then the doctor was the master of understatement. “Adrenaline stimulants have given him a hyper awareness and dangerous levels of testosterone which begin to pump into his system. He has to maintain a certain level or he begins to get ill, but the higher he goes, the more impaired his cognitive and reasoning functions become.”

  “A berserker.” Joss turned away, a sick expression on her face. “Who the hell are the monsters who did this?”

  It was the question Drake had been waiting for. “Your employers.”

  She glared at him then shook her head. “I only have your word for this.”

  “We can show you the files we were able to extract,” Amanda stated as she circled the corner to join them. “Or I can tell you without reservation that they did the experiments on them because they were being held in the same place I was.”

  Joss pivoted to face the blue haired member of the Infinity Team. Though Amanda and Simon were now a unit, the spitfire still did things her way, and she definitely knew how to deliver a shock with her entrance.

  “I can tell you how they implanted a chip in my brain, stripped away my self-control, and took me over. They made me a drone in their mad plans. I can tell you about the people they forced me to target and the damage I inflicted. I can tell you how I wanted to die over and over again…and they didn’t care as long as they got results.” Standing before them, Amanda put her hands on her hips. “I can even show you my scars.”

  For the first time since he’d captured her, Joss actually backed off a step and bumped into him. Worry flooded him as the look of stubborn resistance on the soldier’s face melted away to be replaced with something akin to fear.

  “What?” Amanda had noticed it, too, and she glanced from Joss to him then back again.

  “I know you.” Her response was the last thing any of them expected. “Fuck me. I do know you, and you used to work for….” Then she stopped talking, clenching her teeth together as though in a visible wrestling match with herself to keep silent.

  “We’re not lying to you, Joss.” Drake grasped the opportunity, turning her away from them to face him. “And we need your help.”

  * * *

  Joss couldn’t believe the blue-haired enhanced was standing right in front of her. The woman was dangerous at best, deadly at worst. “You have that—” She reconsidered the unspoken word thing based on her current circumstances. “That woman, and you need my help?” Her week began waking up kidnapped with a concussion and hadn’t slowed its rapid descent down the rabbit hole. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am.” Drake answered her in that same steady tone she found herself alternately craving and hating.

  “You know me?” the blue-haired demon asked in the same breath. “How do you know me?”

  “That’s classified,” was the first answer that came to mind and probably the last one she should’ve said out loud. Raising her bound hands, she spread out her palms as though asking for a moment’s respite. “I’m sorry, that was out of line.”

  The blue-haired enhanced stared at her, raised her eyebrows then laughed. The crazy almost joyful sound of it shocked her so much that Joss could do nothing but gape.

  Drake seemed equally surprised and cut the other woman a sharp look. “Amanda, why is that funny?”

  Amanda. It sounded much nicer than blue-haired demon. Clapping her hands together, Amanda flashed Drake a broad smile. While it wasn’t flirtatious per se, Joss really didn’t like the image. The other woman raised her hands again a little higher and shook them. “It’s funny because she has her hands tied, and we kidnapped her, or at least you did Drake. And she’s apologizing.” The emphasis she put on the word apologizing drew a reluctant smile from Joss.

  The doctor tugged off her surgical mask revealing her face. “I can’t say that I disagree with Amanda.” The doctor gave Drake a chiding look then turned to Joss. “We understand the situation you’re in. I think I might understand it better than anyone else here. I worked for R.E.X. labs myself. They rescued me.”

  “I don’t work for them directly,” Joss admitted, despite her intentions to keep the information to herself. She’d always prided herself on being able to disseminate between the truth and bullshit.

  While bullshit might have elements of the truth, it always possessed an agenda. These people had an agenda, but if that agenda involved spinning a yarn so fantastical it involved time travel, scientific experimentation, heroes with capes, heroes without capes, and mad scientists… No. Whatever was going on here, it was time she started listening with everything she was and not just in the role of victim.

  “You have my attention.” She pivoted to face Drake and held up her bound hands toward him. “Take these damn things off.”

  The tall man gave her a long hard look, then said, “Do you give me your word you will not try to escape as soon as I remove these?”

  She met his determined gaze with one of her own. “When I say you have my attention, it means I’m ready to listen to you.” Taking a step closer to him, she waved her bound wrists toward his face. “If I’m ready to listen, it means I’m not ready to go.”

  Drake studied her. He seemed to be as deliberate with his actions as he was in his choices of words. On the one hand, she could truly respect that. On the other, she was really done with being tied up. Zip ties chafed.

  “I believe her,” Amanda said, but at Drake’s sharp reproachful look she added, “Just saying.”

  The doctor seemed to have no such objections. “Drake, we’ve made our point.”

  “Thank you for your assessments, ladies. I will, however, make the decision myself.” His eyes took on a somewhat distant look. Considering how focused he had seemed in every other engagement, Joss could only watch him with a hint of worry beginning to creep into her soul. Why his belief in her had gained such importance, she couldn’t begin to explain. Maybe it wasn’t Drake’s approval she required, but her own. Seeing the patients, hearing their stories, and then seeing…

  Amanda. A woman’s whose power she had witnessed firsthand, and having them all tell her the same thing.

  Joss had seen evidence of experiments to enhance during the war and, as much as she didn’t like to admit it, she had probably participated in her share, now that she realized what had been done.

  No way would she participate in it again.

  “Simon agrees, but Garrett isn’t so trusting.” Drake spoke the names of his brothers in arms as though the decision had already been made. Leaning partially to the side, she studied his head, and saw no communication device. He must’ve noticed her looking, because he gave her a small smile. “Telepathy.”

  Oh, fuck no. “Nope. Just no. I’ve had my share of powers today. We can talk about experiments. We can talk about security. But no more powers. Got it?”

  Amanda started laughing all over again, and this time Drake and the doctor joined her. Joss didn’t find it particularly funny, but when Drake snapped the zip ties on her wrists, it mollified her irritation. She glanced back in the room and found the former Marine staring in the mirror as though he could see them.

  The look in his eyes—she’d seen that look before. His eyes told her he’d walk through hell. Worse, he was still there. Not looking away, she said, “Are you sure that the company I work for—or should I say the company who contracted the security compan
y I work for?—really did all of this?”

  “As sure as we can be,” Drake said, though his tone offered no comfort. “We’ve been fighting this war for very long time. It may be that we have not been fighting it correctly. It may even be that we are making things worse.” That he took the time to acknowledge her challenge to his time traveling story eased some of the jitteriness populating her veins. “All I know for sure is my brothers are missing. This company… Organization… Whoever they are, whoever they turn out to be, they are hurting people. They are using them for their own purposes, without regard for how it affects them or what state it leaves them in.”

  The big man clenched his fists and paced away from them. It was the first time since she woke that she didn’t have his full attention. The tactical side of her acknowledged if she truly wanted to escape, now was as good a time as any. Joss didn’t move. She would sort out the emotions later, if there was a later. He’d made a compelling argument and, more, he’d given her cause.

  “I can’t tell any of you what our world was truly like.” Drake faced them once more. “I can tell you this sinking feeling in your guts, this worry and fear… We lived with it every single day. We never knew whom they would come for next. We never knew what we would have to give up. It’s easy to think someone else knows better, and it’s even easier to believe that those in power got there because they cared. I know better.”

  “Power corrupts,” the doctor said. “So does hate and fear. We have to make sure that we do not become victims to the latter as we fight against the former.”

  Drake nodded then extended his hand toward Joss. “I never lied when I said we needed your help. You’re ready to listen now. Does that mean you’re also ready to help?”