The other guard slammed his gun into the base of Reaper’s skull. His grip loosened, out of his control. Winters dropped to the floor, coughing and hacking, shielded by his dead teammate.
Reaper fought off the wave of dizziness and went for her again, but this time they were ready. The men converged as one, punching him without pause until he had no recourse but to retreat to find his footing.
Winters climbed to her feet, her hand around her neck and croaked. “Get him to the test room.”
“Sore throat?” He cast her a merciless grin. The bitch needed to suffer before she died. She might have escaped this time, but that was a temporary state. He’d kill her – sooner rather than later.
Guns trained on him, the guards backed to the doors at the end of the hall.
“Your men are waiting, Captain.” Winters kept Dawson between them and straightened to her full height. “Remember what I said about funding.”
He followed the guards down the hall and pushed open the door to the laboratory.
Blood covered everything. Tables, computers, the walls. Dead bodies littered the floor. Civilians in lab coats screamed. His men attacking them like vicious animals.
Terror crushed his sternum against his lungs.
His team, who’d vowed to protect innocents with their lives, was killing civilians.
A sharp, high-pitched screech penetrated his awareness and the bloodshed faded. Everything faded but the urge to kill. His mind snapped like a huge sheet of tin in the wind, flushed bright white with streaks of lightning and he could no longer see his men going savage. He couldn't see the scientist falling to the ground.
He saw himself, moving like a bullet. His hands around the technician's throat. The scalpel buried in the next man's chest. Grabbing another screaming scientist and breaking him in half over his own knee.
At some point, Reaper returned to conscious, ragged, deep, gasping breaths pistoning in and out of his chest.
Bodies on the ground. Death and destruction that was an orderly lab only seconds before.
His own hands were covered in blood. Blood from the innocents he'd just murdered.
A terrifying dread gripped him, and his bloodstained hands started to shake.
He didn't know when he woke up or how, but he was standing in the middle of the lab, covered in blood, his knife clenched in his hand. The only people left living were him and his team. The lab technicians who normally manned the research room lay in heaps around their feet, dead.
Reaper dropped the knife, horror creeping around his entire body.
And then a light flicked on across the room, highlighting a line of uniformed men and women standing behind a half-wall of glass, satisfaction on their faces.
Through the thick observation glass lining the back wall, Reaper met the satisfied gaze of his mentor, Jack Mankel, flanked by Dr. Winters and General Rainier.
With a thunderous clap of dread, he realized the high-pitched squeal hadn't been an alarm, it had been a trigger for devastation that had robbed his control and turned him into a cold-blooded murderer. Project Mayhem hadn't only been an experiment to enhance his team's capabilities, it had been a study on mind control.
His mentor smiled, tucked his hands into his pockets and walked away, leaving his team alone with their new reality.
Their dreams of saving others was demolished by their own hands. They were no longer heroes.
No longer soldiers.
No longer saviors.
…They were killers.
