25
“She’s seizing, get me the syringe now!” Dr. Melissa Averton rushed into the hut, flanked by General Rainier’s soldiers.
Caroline Cotter was bound to the cot, her entire body convulsing. Strings of foamy saliva dripped from the corners of her mouth and her eyes had rolled back in her head. If they didn’t dose her soon, her brain would rupture and she’d die from a massive aneurysm. “Dammit, who’s got the syringe? Now!”
Dr. Averton extended an open palm and the requested needle was placed in her palm.
“You three, get her arms and legs and pin her to that bed. I can’t afford to miss.”
The soldiers replied with a grunt, but they followed her command. Everyone knew the order to return Caroline Cotter unharmed had come straight from the general. He’d have their heads if they didn’t comply. The heaviest one lay across her chest and the other two each took a leg. Dr. Averton went straight for the bulging blue vein in the crook of her arm and injected Caroline with a cocktail of sedatives and serum. She’d seen it used on one of the soldiers in Project Mayhem before. It was the only thing that had brought him back from the brink of death.
“Is she going to make it?”
Dr. Averton turned to face the man she had begun to despise: General Rainier.
“I won’t know for sure until the medicine has had time to take effect. When Quantum reacted like that, he nearly died. And then John Dawson, well, you were there, weren’t you? You saw what happened to him.” She fought to keep the accusatory tone out of her voice and remain as level as possible, just like her mentor, Dr. Winters. But unlike her mentor, Melissa couldn’t distance her emotions from the pain and suffering of the soldiers she had been assigned to study.
The general waved a dismissive hand in the air and brushed past her, coming to stand directly beside the unconscious Caroline. “I don’t care about those men. She is the key. I’ll probably never get my hands on her twin sister again, and I have orders to fulfill.”
“These men and women are not stable enough to send out on their own. Can’t you see that?” And the thought of trading soldiers to other governments, another objective of the project, made her stomach turn. She had joined Project Mayhem to save lives by making the soldiers stronger and faster. Instead the instability and severe side effects had left them all with large, gaping weaknesses. “And we still don’t even know their full capabilities. We haven’t had enough time to perform all the studies.”
“I’ve seen enough to know these fuckers sure are a lot faster than normal. Reaper suffered a near mortal gunshot wound, but he walked out of this hut without so much as a limp. They’re healing faster than we thought. Good enough.”
Dammit, it wasn’t good enough. All the other subjects she’d run through the program, both men and women, had suffered debilitating seizures and breakdowns. And then the audio-logic trigger . . . she had to fight a fit of chills.
After Reaper killed Dr. Winters, Melissa had stepped into the role as lead researcher. She’d read all the data and watched all the videos, trying to familiarize herself with every single detail of the operation, and the things she’d seen had made her stomach churn.
Whether the soldiers were aware of it or not, Dr. Winters, Mankel, and General Rainier had conspired to implant a device near the subject’s brain that was triggered by a 20,000 Hz frequency—a frequency undetectable to the human ear. But it was a device implanted directly into the cerebellum that turned off their ability to control their most basic instincts to kill and stimulate violence. Melissa hadn’t quite figured out how the general triggered the implant, but the video she’d seen was proof positive—Reaper’s team had been turned into unthinking monsters. They’d been forced to slaughter an entire group of lab technicians, all while Winters, Rainier, and Jack Mankel watched.
Winter’s entire existence in life had been to study and dissect. Jack Mankel had been driven by revenge; he’d wanted to punish Caroline and Nightshade’s father and had ultimately succeeded. The senator was now dead. It’d taken Melissa a while to figure Mankel out, but it had taken her all of a day to understand the inner workings of General Rainier. His evil was simple—he was driven by an unholy thirst for power and money.
It was beyond her how he’d managed to rise to the rank of four-star general before his evil was revealed. Melissa had gone into Project Mayhem when it was still a government-sanctioned and funded program. After Rainier and Mankel had taken the program rogue, she’d stayed on as a buffer, doing everything she could to ensure the soldiers were protected.
Someone had to.
She needed more time to plan; she had just about figured out a new strain that was stable enough to allow the subjects to operate on their own without weekly injections of the serum, but she still wasn’t quite there. In order for her to complete her research, she needed General Rainier on her side. For now. “I’m assuming your buyers are high-ranking officials?”
She kept her voice cold, acting as if she didn’t really care.
The general responded by puffing up his chest like a peacock in heat. “I have presidents begging for my soldiers.”
Melissa tapped her chin and began to pace back and forth at the end of Caroline’s bed, forcing the few grunts that still filled the hut to move out of her way. “And these presidents are expecting a complete package? Completely undetectable enhanced soldiers who can operate independently?”
“Of course. You think they’d pay me billions of dollars for anything less?” His tone was scathing, like she was an ignorant child who needed instruction.
Melissa wanted to slap that look right off his face, but her soldiers needed her. She couldn’t risk getting put off the project. “And what will these presidents do when your men begin to break down and die? Without continuous dosages of the serum, they won’t make it more than a month at the most.”
“These people have been waiting months for me to fulfill my promise. They’re not going to wait another year so you can fine-tune your little study.”
Melissa stopped pacing and faced the general, shoulders square. She sucked in a breath and lied between her teeth. “I don’t need a year. I’ve had enough time now to go back through all of Winters’s data. I think I’ve figured out the key to stabilizing the dosage. With a fresh batch of Caroline Cotter’s blood, and enough time to create and test a new strain, I’ll have your solution. Give me a month, and I can fix the holes in the molecular bonding process that are causing the breakdown in the protein spiral.”
A flare of interest flashed in his eyes, but it was quickly banked. “English, please, Doctor.”
Oh, he’d understood enough of what she’d said to know the implications. “Without casting any aspersions on my mentor, she made a small mistake in her calculations when creating the dosage. It happens sometimes when researchers get too deep into their projects. They stop seeing the trees for the forest.”
“And you see the trees?”
Melissa nodded. “I see them, and I can fix the ‘bad’ ones. I can create a serum that will not only bond with the subject’s DNA, it will permanently alter it so that continual injections won’t be necessary. In turn, stabilizing the synthesis process should eliminate most of the unpleasant side effects, allowing the soldiers to move about society freely without pain.”
