I kind of wish I hadn’t because if I would have just laid on the floor, I’m sure I would have spared myself the vision of Marc’s sneakered foot as it flew at my face.
6:22 a.m.
“Ah, finally,” a voice said from somewhere across the universe.
I climbed a sheer rock face that was the mountain to consciousness. Every hand- and foothold was a slime covered hazard that threatened to drop me back down into the darkness.
“You really must have done a number on him,” the voice said.
To tell the truth, I wouldn’t have minded if I did slip and fall back into unconsciousness. It didn’t hurt quite as much there.
“Conor?” That was Carina’s voice.
I pulled myself to the top of the cliff and opened my eyes. I was halfway to my feet before I could see or even realize that I was in the process of standing. When the darkness finally receded a bit, the blurry face of a middle aged man waivered in my vision.
“It is great to finally meet you 624,” he said.
I tried to think of something to say, but nothing came to mind. Instead, I turned my head to the right. Carina stood there with a worried look on her face. Tear streaks lined her soft cheeks. Soft. She wasn’t in her rock form. She had her hands cuffed together in front of her.
That’s when I realized my own binds. My arms were bent and secured behind my back. I wondered how I had managed to stand without the use of my hands.
I scoffed at the thought of the cuffs. I had no doubt I could take care of them easily. In fact, I’ll just…I tried to yank my hands apart, but whatever bound me didn’t give.
“There, there,” the man said. “Save your energy. You won’t break those. Our friends at Sterling specially made those. Quite durable.”
I glanced at the man and gave another yank, intent on proving him wrong and wiping that smug grin off his face. I remained bound.
“Or keep trying,” he said with a shrug.
I glanced to my left. Nathen stood there, his jaw set in a hard line. His hands were cuffed, too. Why was I the only one who had my arms uncomfortably twisted?
“Who are you?” My question came out thick and slurred like my tongue had swollen twice its regular size.
“Now there’s a question.” He half turned and clasped his hands behind his back in a more dignified imitation of my own posture.
I glanced around the room. We were in a large, open space free of any furniture. The floor was tiled in a very generic cream color and the walls were cinder block. The room was lit by a dozen or so long fluorescent lights that hurt my eyes to look at directly. There were three closed metal doors on the other side of the room.
“I am the man responsible for you, I guess you could say,” he went on as he paced away from us. He stopped and half-turned to look back at us. “One of them, anyways.”
“Dad, please,” Carina whispered.
I turned to see Marc standing beside a single door a few yards behind us. A strange mix of fear and anger twisted inside me like stirring food coloring in pancake batter. My muscles tensed. I felt a burning need to charge the man. It’d be about as successful as before, but I needed to. Every ounce of my being howled for revenge.
“Up here, boy.” The older man’s voice drew my attention. “Mr. Hass is not who you need to worry about here.”
“And we’re supposed to worry about your wrinkled butt?” Nathen growled.
“Oh, yes you are, 598.”
Nathen screwed his face up in disgust. “The name’s Nathen. Try to remember it because you’ll be babbling it later when I mess you up.”
The man laughed. It was a thin, raspy sound. “Are we already on to the threats, 598?”
I tried to ignore Carina’s whispered pleas directed at her father. I needed to concentrate. Just thinking about him standing behind us rattled my brain.
“Right,” I cut in, “he’s 598. Who are you?”
“That’s right,” he agreed, ignoring my question. “And you are 624. The sooner you come to that understanding, the better it will be for you.”
This dude was nuts. I had no doubt about that. I just needed him to keep talking while I tried to figure out how to get out of there.
“Why don’t you cut the crap and tell us what we’re doing here?” Nathen said.
“Yeah, I’m getting kind of tired standing here.” I put in a bit of truth. I swayed on my feet. My back and face killed.
“All right, I suppose the quicker we get to the details here, the quicker you’ll realize what you were made for,” the middle aged man said.
I glanced at Nathen. He gave me a look like he really wanted to twirl a finger in a circle around his temple. I silently agreed.
“I am Vincent Lindström and you stand in my building. The one with a lobby you so kindly redecorated. It was a drab interior, anyways,” he said offhandedly. “I guess you can say you were created here.”
“I was born in the hospital you crazy, old—”
“Yes, yes, 598,” Lindström cut Nathen off. “But you were created here.”
“Why don’t you skip the exposition and cut to the point?” I snarled.
“Very well. Do you want the hard truth? I made you and you,” he glanced at Nathen, “and 602 here.”
I glanced at Carina. She barely recognized Lindström had indicated her.
“There’s no use in trying to get to your father. I am your father now, 602.”
Carina cast Lindström a withering glance but didn’t reply.
“Once the three of you realize that like the others already have, things will be a lot better for you.”
Like the others? I remembered a few nights ago when I came across those other kids who seemed to have abilities. The one who was as strong as me. The one who could move stuff with his mind. My heart sank as I started to see our puzzle was a lot bigger than we thought. Lindström added more pieces.
“You see, the three of you are the product of decades of research. Those lovely abilities came about quite by accident. Back in the seventies, a man working for my company was researching the audible effects on hearing. The intentions were quite well-placed. We were studying the mutations the inner ear goes through during hearing loss.”
“Conor,” Carina whispered.
I ignored her, wanting to finally find out what was going on with me and the city.
“The man—I wonder why I can’t remember his name. Oh well, he’s dead, anyway. He was working on a drug to reverse that mutation when he discovered the research cells did something unusual after being introduced to the drug. I’ll spare you the details,” he paused.
“Too late,” Nathen muttered.
“Not that I completely understand them. I’m not a scientist or doctor. I’m a business man, after all. I’m sure Mr. Hass here could have done a much better job explaining all this. That was before he injected himself, that is.”
Carina’s dad did that to himself?
“Anyway.” Lindström waved away the digression with a hand. “That scientist discovered after introducing the drug we could manipulate the cells through the use of multiple sound waves. At first, we found that we could mutate the cells to change its genetic structure. Its DNA, if you will. Through some trials with multiple animals, we found that these DNA mutations were quite useful in behavior modification.”
“You talk too much,” Nathen said.
“That’s not the first time I’ve been accused of that,” Lindström said with a laugh.
“Conor.”
“You can imagine our excitement,” Lindström went on, pretty much talking to himself like we weren’t there. “To think, we could change the world. Eradicate nefarious and delinquent behavior. If our drug and audible therapy could rehabilitate criminals, well, the uses would be infinite. But, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t get it to work for the good. The only changes we could make were for the worse. The animals we tested on became vicious. Feral to the point they showed rabies-like symptoms.”
“C
onor,” Carina said more urgently.
I glanced at her and she jerked her eyes toward the ceiling. I frowned and glanced up. It looked like a normal, everyday office ceiling with foam tiles and bright lights.
“…the dosed rabbit attacked the other and killed it,” Lindström was saying. “Imagine that. For no other reason than it felt like it. We were quite disappointed. One day, we thought we could change the world and the next we were…disappointed.”
“Does this story have an end?” Nathen cut in. “Because The NeverEnding Story has already been done.”
Lindström glanced at him with irritation, his white brows folded harshly together between his eyes. “Fine,” he snapped. He turned on his heel, his shoe squeaking on the tile, and marched up to Nathen. “We figured out a use for the drug, you see. We went to human testing with the same results. Hiding it from the FDA was laborious, but we found that the younger the patient, the more susceptible they were to the audio mutations. So, we hid it in a labor and delivery drug that’s supposed to boost the baby’s strength for birth.”
He moved so he was about two inches from Nathen’s face. Nathen leaned away, but the old man kept pushing forward, his bright blue eyes furious for having to abbreviate his story because of Nathen’s comments.
“Conor,” Carina hissed.
She looked up again when I turned toward her. What was her problem? It’s a ceiling. Awesome.
“When absorbed through the mother, the drug lies dormant for years until activated by just the right combination and sequence of sound waves. It really is a beautiful piece of genetic engineering. We call the science Audiogenetics. The beautiful drug is Predexalidasone.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with us,” I said.
“It has everything to do with you, 624,” he said, still talking into Nathen’s face. “We hatched this little plan with Sterling and your father’s pharmaceutical company. We developed the drug. The pharmaceutical company hid it in immune boosting prenatal pills. Sterling rakes in the cash when we activated the mutations and caused panic in the streets.”
And it clicked for me. “You caused all this? You messed with our lives to make money? People were beaten to death on the streets so you could make money?”
“Money makes the world go round, 624,” he said. “Don’t be so naive.”
“You’re sick,” Nathen said with a curl of his lip.
Lindström shrugged and finally stepped away from my friend. “As we waited for the subjects to grow to an age they would be most effective; my company decided on a different course than we initially planned. We came across something fascinating. Some kids mutated in unexpected ways, like you three. We attempted to replicate what happened to you three and the other subjects, but with poor results.” He waved his hand at Marc behind us. “Barely even human. Oh, but such marvelous abilities you kids developed. We decided it was better to collect you special kids for our own purpose.
“Do you really think you three became friends with each other on accident? All of it was us. All of it! We put this all together. We did this for a purpose. For our purpose.”
“You think we’ll work for you?” Nathen barked. “That’s about the dumbest thing I ever heard.”
“Conor, you idiot, look!” Carina hissed.
I looked again and finally saw what she had been trying to get me to see. I looked at her with wide eyes.
“I can’t change my skin,” she whispered and glanced at the ceiling again.
“If you want to talk about barely human,” Nathen was saying, “maybe you should take a look at your wrinkled self in a mirror.”
The old man was in his face again. “You will do what we tell you or we will make you!”
Nathen leaned away again and looked at me. “Has he been monologuing long enough for you to figure out what Carina was trying to point out to you?”
“What?” Lindström’s eyebrows rose in confusion.
“Yup!” I rushed at Lindström. It felt like I was moving through water. Carina had figured it out and had been trying to tell me. He was controlling us, dampening our powers, through sound waves coming from speakers in the ceiling. Just like the little black boxes controlled the crazy kids outside.
Nathen rushed past me to stand behind Carina.
Without my abilities to make me faster, I thought I’d never reach the old man. I felt slow, tired—normal. When I finally reached the crazy man, I knocked him to the floor.
A shot rang out and echoed around the bare room. I glanced up as Nathen squeezed off another shot and another speaker in the ceiling exploded.
With several of the speakers taken out, that meant…I yanked on the bonds again. They snapped. My first thought was to beat the dude silly, but I remembered Marc. He was the first priority.
I looked at the door, but he stood there, his face covered in a sheen of sweat. His hands flexed like he wanted nothing more than to wrap them around somebody’s neck. Was he fighting the urge? It looked like Carina’s pleas had sunk in at least for the moment.
“Stop!” Lindström yelled.
I did just that, one hand around his neck and the other raised and balled into a fist.
“I would direct your attention to the first door over there.” Lindström jerked his eyes across the room.
I looked up and was confused by what I saw. The door on the right was open. Standing inside a little room, huddled together, was my family. Mom, Dad, and the twin brats.
Chapter 37
6:35 a.m.
I’m sure Vincent Lindström had a certain response in mind when he revealed my family. I’m equally sure his expectation wasn’t a fist in his old face. Too bad for him, that was what he got. I planted my balled hand on his nose, disregarding the splatter of blood, and launched myself across the room toward the door.
The way I figured it, each of us worked on different sound waves. Somehow, the little black boxes we used outside the building only worked on the creepy kids who just inherited the altered disposition. For the weird kids like Nathen, Carina, and I, we had a different wavelength. Whatever sounds he was pumping through those speakers held us back. With them going out, thanks to Nathen’s shots from the handgun I gave Carina, I was slowly gaining my strength bit by bit.
I turned my attention to Marc, but without my full range of abilities, he was faster. It seemed like the effect of Carina’s pleas had worn off. Back in full freak mode, he barreled into me, sending us both to the floor. I spun on the slick tile and kicked him in the face. He didn’t even blink.
Instead, he grabbed my foot and lifted me up as he stood. Hanging upside down, I punched him in the thigh. It was like striking a brick wall.
I found myself flying through the air. I hit the ground and skidded across the tile until the far wall stopped me. My mom cried out from the other room.
Another gunshot sounded and another speaker went out, drawing Marc’s attention away from me.
“Nathen!” I yelled a warning.
He looked from his handy work to the hulking monster turning his attention on him. I could see in Nathen’s eyes that he considered using the gun, but he hesitated.
Marc charged him.
“Hey, freak!” I yelled in a panic, trying to draw the man’s attention. It didn’t work. I pushed myself off the floor and ran after him, but I knew I’d be too late.
Something deep inside me hoped Nathen would use the gun on Marc. I didn’t want to think of what that would do to Carina. All I wanted was for the behemoth taken down.
My heart sank as Nathen lowered the gun. Marc was going to tear him apart.
Then Nathen fired. I watched the bullet chip the tile before the soundwave hit me. It was strong enough to lift me off my feet a few inches. I landed hard on my tailbone.
There were a few moments of complete silence before a loud squeal filled my ears. I grimaced and looked up at Marc. He still stood but held the sides of his head in pain. The only ones not affected were Nathen and Carina, whose stone skin included her
eardrums as well.
I pushed myself to my feet but nearly fell over again. My balance was severely compromised with the ringing growing louder in my head. I hoped Nathen hadn’t done any lasting damage. I took a step toward Marc but swerved to the right like a drunk.
Nathen yelled something and pointed. I turned, rocked back on my heels, and focused as best I could. Lindström disappeared out another of the doors on the far wall. Marc hadn’t missed the man leaving either. He stumbled for the door, still holding his head.
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