Genesis Revealed
Book Two The Genesis Project
S.M. Schmitz
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Also by S.M. Schmitz
Copyright © 2017 by S.M. Schmitz
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Chapter 1
The ship docked at a port off the coast of Somalia and after almost two weeks at sea, I thought standing on dry ground would be a godsend. But as soon as my feet touched the dock, I wobbled and had to grab onto Cade’s arm to keep myself from tumbling into the water.
And that bastard just laughed at me.
“This is your fault,” I reminded him.
Cade shrugged and reminded me that he’d made the deal on my behalf and he was a fugitive now because of me, too.
“I never asked you to barter with an arms dealer,” I hissed.
“Got us weapons,” Cade pointed out. “And it got us inside the Project so we could destroy the computers that were letting them mess with your head.”
“So far,” I mumbled. I gripped the railing and wondered why Dr. Mike Parker hadn’t thought to program me with an ability to withstand being on water for weeks at a time. Cade seemed far less affected than I did. And he thought that was funny, too.
“I should just get a video of how completely useless you are after being at sea and send that to Parker,” Cade teased. “Maybe he’ll just lose interest in getting the Project up and running again and leave you alone.”
“Yeah,” I retorted, “because investors are generally cool with multi-billion dollar investments disappearing.”
I moved away from the water because even watching the waves hit the side of the dock made my nausea worse. Cade followed me and continued to give me a hard time, probably because I’d refused to shut up for the past two weeks about what a colossally stupid idea it had been to agree to retrieving Jake’s stolen cargo of illegal weapons. Granted, Jake had given us what we needed to get inside the Project and destroy Parker’s command center, which had bought me fourteen days of silence. Every single second I was awake, I waited for the commands to start up again, the incessant noise in my mind to remind me that I could never really be normal.
I’d been lying awake at night just waiting to receive that buzzing, those signals that Parker had managed to get a backup facility running and I’d spend the rest of my life running, too. Worse, so would Saige. I could never really free her because I’d been stupid enough to drag her into my Hell in the first place.
Cade grabbed my arm as I hobbled off the dock and pulled me toward the side of a warehouse. We watched a foreman direct the forklift operator as he moved crates either inside the building or onto a truck, and before Cade even told me his plan, I knew what he’d suggest. I may have been designed to be the perfect soldier, but my brain would never work around problems as efficiently as Cade’s. There was something so innovative and adaptive about his ability to find solutions where I only saw more problems.
We’d been sent to Somalia with only one mission and no idea how to really achieve it, but only two minutes after stepping off the ship, Cade had a solution.
I was still trying not to throw up.
“You speak Arabic,” Cade said. “Go ask them if they’ve transferred any pirated cargo lately.”
I blinked at him as I tried to figure out if he were joking or not.
He finally got tired of me blinking at him and rolled his eyes at me. “Kidding, Drake. And don’t throw up on me. I will kick your ass.”
“You’ll try to kick my ass,” I corrected.
Cade shook his head as he returned his attention to the dockworkers. “You’re seasick and can hardly stand up straight. I finally have an advantage on you.”
I leaned back against the building because he was right: I couldn’t stand up straight for more than thirty seconds at a time. “Do you have a Plan B that doesn’t include us blowing our reason for being in Somalia in the first five minutes?”
Cade nodded and gestured toward the trailer being loaded with crates. “Come back tonight after you can walk without looking drunk and steal one of these trucks.”
“Why?” I interrupted.
Cade sighed impatiently and shot me one of his looks that told me he was seconds away from actually trying to kick my ass for once. “Because I suspect this dock is shipping illegal cargo to several neighboring countries. We aren’t really sure who stole Jake’s weapons, but we know they aren’t here. By now, they’ve been delivered and we’re going to take one of those illegal shipments, deliver it wherever it’s supposed to go, and threaten to blow the shit out of them if they don’t give us a lead on where illegal arms are being directed.”
I grunted and pushed myself off the wall. “That’s your plan? Are you kidding me? Blow up a bunch of people who may not even have the information you want?”
“Do you have a better plan?” Cade countered.
“Yeah,” I snapped. “Find a hotel and let me sleep off this sea-hangover.”
Cade squinted at me and said, “You’re the lamest cyborg ever.”
“I’m not a cyborg,” I mumbled.
Cade arched an eyebrow at me and grabbed my left arm, holding it up as if I didn’t know about the one-inch scar below the black rectangle intersected with blue lines. “Sure, Drake. Most people have to cut computer ports out of their arms while their best friend is driving down a highway.”
I nodded just to be a smartass about it. “They should really wait until they’re not in a moving car though. It’s kind of a pain in the ass.”
Cade snickered and dropped my arm then glanced at the men loading the truck again. “I want something to eat. The sun will set in a few hours, and we’ll come back when the next caravan takes off.”
“This port does a lot more legitimate business than illegal smugglings,” I argued. “How can you be so sure we’ll even follow the right trucks?”
Cade sighed heavily like he was stuck with a five-year-old child again. In some ways, he was. I might be a grown man, but I’d only been awake for five years.
“Because the legitimate businesses don’t send armed guards to drive or watch the cargo,” he explained slowly. He shook his head at me and added, “Dumbass.”
“We are so going to get killed tonight,” I mumbled.
Cade just smiled at me and reiterated, “Let’s eat. I’m starving.”
I followed him to a street vendor not far from the dock where he immediately ordered sambusas and tried to get me to eat one. I wasn’t at all convinced I’d been designed to withstand food poisoning, so I stubbornly refused. By the time the sun dipped below the dark blue waters of the Indian Ocean, we’d returned to the dock and had been watching the trucks that entered to determine which one we’d steal in the hopes Cade was right.
Just after nine p.m., a box truck pulled into the loading area and an armed guard immediately jumped out from the passenger side of the cab. Cade nudged my arm like I would have missed the guy carrying an AK-47 around a busy port. Oddly, though, no one stopped working to look at the man as he approached the back of the
van and pulled the doors open.
“I’d rather not end up in a gunfight right now,” I told Cade. “To be honest, after the last few, I’d rather not end up in one ever again.”
Cade shrugged as the armed man began to yell orders at some of the workers bringing crates to his truck. “What’s he saying?”
“Remind me again how you got into the SEALs when your foreign language skills suck so badly?”
“Translate, Robot,” Cade replied.
I flipped him off before translating. “He’s telling them to load carefully and not to pile the crates too high.”
“Gotta be more smuggled arms,” Cade murmured.
“Probably,” I agreed. “If there are explosives in any of those boxes, you don’t want that shit moving all over as you’re driving.”
“And I’m pretty sure they don’t have girls in those crates.”
I snorted then realized he was serious. He shrugged at me again.
“More girls are smuggled in and out of this country than just about anything else,” he said. “I’ve been here before. Few years before I got assigned to you. This place is a total shithole.”
“And we’re not doing anything about it?” I asked stupidly. Most of my questions seemed naïve and stupid. Fortunately, Cade had gotten used to it.
“What can we do?” he answered. “Fix the majority of this continent? I think only a time machine would do that.” He paused and looked me over quickly then grinned. “Maybe that could be Parker’s next experiment.”
“That would be a much better experiment.”
“You didn’t turn out so bad.”
“I turned out,” I reminded him quietly. “That’s the whole problem.”
Cade bit his lip and returned his attention to the box van and armed guard watching his cargo being loaded. We’d had this argument before: I still believed I should have never been created, and he still insisted I could be grateful for the life I’d been given if we could permanently destroy the Project’s hold over me.
I couldn’t share Cade’s faith in any sort of eventual gratitude. He couldn’t seem to understand that my issue with my existence stemmed solely from the fact that I existed at all. Parker had been playing God, and I was his Adam.
“They’re almost done,” he said just as quietly. “You take the guard. I’ll drive.”
I shot the Beretta in my hand a disgusted look before sighing. “I miss my MK13.”
“If we’re right about this truck, you can upgrade soon enough, RoboCop,” Cade responded.
“Stop calling me that.”
“Never going to happen.”
“Jake’s an asshole,” I reminded him.
“That asshole is keeping your girlfriend alive right now,” Cade reminded me.
He walked away from me so he could sneak around to the driver’s side of the cab while I killed an armed guard with the rather feeble hope there weren’t dozens more surrounding the dock. Just because we’d had this part of the dock under surveillance for a few hours didn’t mean they weren’t here. And we didn’t exactly blend in with this crowd.
The closer I got to the truck, the stronger the smell of dried fish became. I didn’t really like fish. There were few ways to prepare it that paired well with ketchup.
Great, I thought. I’m about to help steal a truck filled with dead sea animals.
I definitely didn’t like anything with tentacles. I didn’t even want to open the crates and find anything with tentacles.
And yeah, these were seriously my thoughts as I silently approached the man I was about to kill.
He turned around when he heard someone asking me what the hell I was doing there, and I immediately raised my pistol and fired. On the other side of the van, I heard one shot followed by a muffled thump as a body was pulled to the ground. People shouted all around us and the first bullet that wasn’t mine or Cade’s narrowly missed me. I stayed beside the truck in the hopes it wasn’t filled with dead fish and they wouldn’t risk firing into the cargo.
They still fired at me though. Bastards just aimed at my feet. I ran to the passenger side and jumped in. Cade took off before I even closed the door, and I had to grab onto the torn upholstery of the seat to keep myself from falling out.
“Might want to duck,” he told me.
“Really?” I snapped. “I thought I’d just stick my head out of the goddamn window, Cade.”
“You can try that,” he said, completely deadpan, “but they’ll probably blow it off. And I don’t think even you can heal from that injury.”
I grunted at him as I slid off the seat to hide below the dashboard just as a bullet shattered the glass in the window where my head had been a second before. I grunted at the broken window instead. “Again?”
“People do like to shoot out windows,” he observed smartly.
“Usually while you’re driving,” I observed just as smartly.
“Because you’re a shitty driver,” he retorted. “Parker forgot that program?”
“Where’d the bullet land?” I asked. “You’re not hurt, are you?”
“Do you really think I’d still be driving if I’d just gotten shot?”
“Yes,” I insisted. “Because you’re stubborn enough to go through with a plan even if you’re about to die.”
Another bullet shattered the driver’s side window so Cade flinched as the shards of glass blew into his face but just slipped lower on the seat and shifted the truck into third gear as he sped up. The engine protested so I felt the need to point out he’d blow the transmission if he didn’t shift into a higher gear.
I also felt the need to point out his face was bleeding.
“Drake, I swear to God, if you don’t shut up, I’ll shoot you myself,” he warned.
“Don’t think that’s a smart move,” I told him. “Then you’re stuck in East Africa by yourself trying to track down a potentially crazy man’s illegal shipment of illegal weapons from smugglers who probably constitute their own small army.”
Cade shot me a hard look and snapped, “Get off the floor and shoot back, dumbass.”
I pulled myself up and reminded him, “You’re the one who told me to get down there.”
“Drake, just shoot!” he yelled.
I wasn’t exactly sure how I was supposed to shoot at the vehicles following us since there was no rear window. Parker had thought he’d designed my brain to function like a computer’s—input codes and commands and the machine carries them out—but he’d failed with his design just as he’d failed in so many other areas. My brain worked just like anyone else’s when he wasn’t forcing directives into it that I was compelled to obey.
And with no directives, I felt completely lost and useless to my only friend.
I licked my lips and decided there were worse ideas than just sticking my head out of a window that had been shot out… like lying to the only woman I’d ever loved and dragging her into my irretrievably damaged world.
As soon as I leaned out the broken window, Cade started yelling at me. “Drake! Are you out of your goddamn mind?”
“Probably,” I yelled back. I fired at the only car I could see through the clouds of dirt our tires were creating. I heard the splintering of their windshield and ducked back inside before the buzzing of more bullets sailed past my door.
Cade shot me another exasperated look and warned me, “Do that again, and I really will kill you myself.”
“You told me to shoot back!”
Cade groaned and swiped his sleeve across the left side of his face where blood still trickled from the abrasions the glass had caused. “Just give me a few minutes and let me think.”
I waited about twenty seconds before pointing out, “Your original idea was to follow a caravan. I think you’ve blown our cover.”
“Asshole,” he mumbled.
I lifted a shoulder at him and waited only ten second this time. “Even if you lose the guys following us, we’re just going to drive around Somalia aimlessly now. This was a t
errible plan.”
Cade reached up to the CB radio’s microphone and pulled it down then handed it to me. “So I lied. I never intended to follow anyone because I doubt they travel in caravans. We’re going to lose the bastards trying to kill us then wait for whomever is expecting this shipment to contact us. They’ll come to us hoping they can get their cargo back.”
I stared stupidly at the microphone in my hand because I was certain now this had to be the worst idea Cade had ever come up with. And he’d known if he told me the truth, I would have refused to go along with it.
“Do you have another secret plan to get away from the assholes shooting at us?” I asked.
“Actually, I do,” Cade replied. “Put your seatbelt on.”
I groaned but yanked on the belt and clicked it into place. I had a horrible suspicion as to what his other secret plan would be.
Cade slammed on the brakes and my chest smashed into the belt as it locked. The impact took my breath away so I couldn’t even curse at him. Behind us, I could hear the tires spinning in the dirt as they attempted to maneuver away from the van that was either carrying dead marine life or an entire arsenal of stolen weapons.
If we had a van filled with dead fish, I was going to be seriously pissed at Cade for the rest of my life—even if the rest of my life was only three minutes because the guys who’d been following us were armed with more than a practically useless Beretta.
I yanked the belt off and slid down from the seat again. The dirt and gravel on the service road we’d taken couldn’t hide the footsteps of the men as they approached our cab. Cade had dropped down to the floorboard beneath the steering wheel, his elbows resting on the seat as he focused on the shattered window. He held his own Beretta ready to shoot the first person to appear in his view.
The footsteps on my side of the van slowed down. Even though the chips in my brain weren’t currently directing my thoughts and actions, I held onto the programming Parker had given me over the years, including the ability to gauge distance by sound.
Genesis Revealed (The Genesis Project Book 2) Page 1