him.”
“Where?”
Barton turned towards her. “Locked in a cage.”
“What are you going to do?” She was scared of his answer.
“I’ll know shortly.”
“You’ll kill him. Won’t you?” She held back her tears.
“He may already be dead,” he replied calmly.
“But you’ll make sure,” she spit. “I hate you.”
“You’ll thank me when this is done. Trust me.”
“Trust you? I’d rather kill you.” She regretted it by how quickly he turned to glare at her.
“I am the only one you can trust!”
“Because we are alike now? You and I?”
Barton quickly stepped to the bed. “We are not alike. Not yet.”
“What else do you have to do to me?” she shivered.
“It’s me that has to change,” he growled. “Soon I’ll be just like you. Then you and I are leaving this hell.”
Adelle swallowed hard. “Why me?”
Barton’s smile was marvelous and genuine. “Because everyone else will be dead.”
Darryl sat upright at once, hearing slight movements coming down the hall. Turning, he saw the light shining this way, then that. Someone was searching, he realized. They were coming.
“Help.”
He started to speak but the dryness in his throat made it impossible to throw his voice far enough to be heard. He had to be patient. The light was getting closer.
He scrambled to his feet, almost falling in the process, and wobbled his way to the door. The person walking down the hall had entered a room. Darryl could make out the brightness flooding from the room as the person searched, then entered the hall once again. The light came for him then.
Darryl slumped against the iron bars and began to call the person over to him.
“Here.”
He saw the light stop as the person became startled, then it found him and he was turning away from its shine. Within a few seconds a tall man in a guard’s uniform was in front of him. His face bore a thousand questions.
“Who’s there?” The guard moved his light around the cell from one person to the next. He released sharp gasps as he found each person.
“Get us out.” groaned Darryl.
The guard tried to open the door, but it was locked. He shook it hard, but it failed to open.
“How’d you get in there?” The guard saw the condition their bodies were in and gasped. “Who did this to you?”
“Doctor Barton.” Darryl lost his strength and slid to his knees resting his head against the warm iron bars. “Hurry, before he comes back.”
Darryl heard the guard mumble something about the cruelty of his situation and that he would return to free them. Before Darryl could say anything else, the guard was racing into the darkness.
Darryl smiled.
Help is coming, Adelle.
Barton stood over his patient. It was time.
He inserted a needle into the patient’s arm and withdrew some blood. Using his small machine, he checked the blood. The strands had changed, as he expected. But something was still missing. It wasn’t Whitmere’s watchdogs, it was the chain itself. It wasn’t perfect.
What is it?
Barton pounded his fists into the table. He didn’t have time for setbacks. Looking at the structure of the chain, he knew what was missing. But the strands could not be created. It was a miscalculation, a huge oversight on his part.
“What was that?” Adelle asked. She spoke now, unable to control her nerves, already deciding that she would take her own life the first chance she had. She would not go on as one of them.
Barton didn’t look at her. “His blood. I checked it to be certain that the strands have all returned and nothing lingered.”
Strands of what?”
“DNA.”
Barton screamed at himself quietly. He had failed.
“You’re changing his DNA? What will that do to him?” Adelle’s voice was a whimper of defeat. “What about my blood?”
Adelle’s words opened a door for Barton. He turned to stare at her in a new light. Her blood.
He turned from the questions then, working fast to mix her blood sample with his solution. His heart was racing. It would work, he convinced himself. It had to.
When he was finished, he put his new solution in his small machine and watched the image of her blood appear before him. He laughed for several long moments.
Adelle’s skin curled. She was cold, sick with worry now. Barton’s happiness swept the ground from beneath her. Her mind raced with thoughts on how to end her life before he could touch her again.
Barton took a deep breath and held it for a second before letting it slip slowly past his lips. He turned to his table. The needle was ready. The serum was mixed and ready. He screwed in the long needle to his injection gun and placed it against his forearm. His index finger rubbed the trigger gently. He was just about to inject himself when Adelle spoke.
“So he’s like you now?”
Barton paused. His angry eyes turned to find hers. His words were quick and harsh. “I saved him. As I did you.”
“By turning us into you?” She held back her tears.
“You don’t know anything about me!”
Adelle cried then. “I know you’re not like us! I know you’re…”
“Less than human?” Barton snarled and set the needle on the table. His face was vivid with rage. “Want me to tell you what you are? What I am?”
A slight creak in the door changed everything. Barton’s head turned quickly. Too late.
Adelle screamed and cried so hard she couldn’t see nor hear. She barely recognized the door open and a man enter. She watched two men lock together in battle until she made out only one form.
Everything slowly became a blur. Her mind raced with paranoia and delusions, infusing them with her grim reality. She drifted into someplace safe within her mind and laid shivering as her vision became a subtle sway of images smeared in fog.
.
F O U R T E E N
Her head pulled off the broken-glass covered dashboard, shards shining in her disheveled blonde hair as the blinding light flooded into the car. Disoriented, she saw only in fragments. She allowed her body to slump back into the seat, finding great pain in her chest. Doing so allowed her to see Darryl in the seat next to her. His head lied flat against the wheel, his body unmoving, lurched forward into an awkward position. The windshield had shattered; glass was everywhere. The light outside became obstructed with movements; voices were rushing towards.
Then she remembered the crash.
The lights…
The ditch…
Glass shattering snapped Adelle from her flashback. Her hazy vision cleared slowly. Two men were fighting across the room. Fists moved faster than she could follow. The gruesome sounds of flesh striking flesh filled the airwaves between the grunts and groans of the match.
She realized what was taking place before her. Barton was fighting a man who came to save her. Everything came back to her then.
The guard knocked Barton to the floor. His nose was broken, discharging his blood down across his cut lips. His eyes gleamed wildly. “It ends here.”
Barton rolled and sent a hard kick to the other’s left knee, folding the guard to the floor in anguish. Barton moved quickly to his feet. Sweat covered his face in a dim shine. He hovered over the withering guard.
“We own you,” the guard coughed.
Barton’s eyes were embers in the dark. He placed his foot onto the guard’s neck.
“Your kind is weak. And you know that. That’s why you try and adapt, to be like us. You’ve studied us and mimicked us, but there’s one thing you fail to duplicate: our passion. It can’t be created or imitated. And it cannot be found where you can steal it.”
Barton patted his chest. “It’s in here!”
The guard coughed blood. He couldn’t speak clearly. Barton raised his leg.
“And you’re right. It does end here. You all do.”
Adelle closed her eyes as Barton sent his foot crashing down. The sound she heard made her imagine a head of lettuce being ripped in half.
Barton looked at his table. It was a mess. Vials and tubes were scattered and broken. Liquids spilled together in small pools. Work kept in secret for so long was now gone with no time to replace it.
He pounded his fists into the table and screamed for several minutes. The serum he was saving was in a vial, broken on the floor. Most of the solution had spilled. He quickly snatched the gun off the floor and tried to save what he could, pouring what was left into an empty vial, capping it, and putting it into his gun. Everything else was useless. All the samples, all the proof—gone.
“No!”
Barton threw the table over onto the floor. His hopes had slipped back into a deep hole. He stared at his patient in the bed. Lifeless. The guard had killed him, knowing what it had meant.
His eyes closed tight. Anger boiled within.
“Is he dead?”
Barton opened his eyes to find Adelle waiting for an answer. He gave her one. “Everyone is going to die.”
His cold glare cut into Adelle and forced her to look away. “I hope they kill you first.”
Her voice was a mere whisper, but he had heard it. Then he realized that they all didn’t need to die. Not her, in fact. She needed to live.
Adelle was confused as she watched Barton untie her legs. He would kill her now, she knew. She hoped. But he began pulling her, dragging her towards the doorway.
“What are you doing? Where are we going?”
Rushing towards the door, she saw the guard’s dead body on the floor. His throat was crushed with a pool of dark liquid surrounding it. Adelle jerked back, stopping Barton. She fought to escape.
“We have to
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