The two black-bands moved, crouching only four or so feet from me on the other side of the flower bed as they reloaded their ammunition. I needed to act fast. I was so close I could see the sweat beading on their foreheads and above their upper lips, and the way their chests heaved under their gear. I ignored the fact the man nearest me had green eyes that reminded me of Dani’s, and that he looked to be about my age. I ignored the fact that he had a tattoo on the skin between his thumb and forefinger. It’s probably his mom’s name…or girlfriend’s.
I took a fortifying breath. They’re probably already dead, I thought cynically and pulled the trigger. My entire body hummed with tension as my muscles absorbed the shock and recoil.
The green-eyed soldier fell to the ground, a bullet through the side of his neck. It worked. I blinked in disbelief before shifting my aim to the black-band beside him. As he leveled his assault rifle in my direction, I pulled the trigger again, missing once before shooting him in the chest. He dropped to the ground beside his comrade, still moving, but I could only focus on the man I’d shot in the neck. Blood was spurting from the wound. I killed him.
I pivoted and fell forward, dropping my gun and bracing myself on my palms while catching my breath. And then I heard footsteps beside me. I reached for my gun, but I was too slow.
Roughly, hands grabbed my hair, yanking me to my feet, and I shrieked. My scalp stung as my assailant tugged mercilessly at my hair, and the hot barrel of his handgun pressed into my temple.
“I thought I smelled a girl,” he said. “You should’ve shot me in the head, you little bitch.” He smelled of tobacco and sweat.
“Let her go!” a familiar voice demanded. Harper. The black-band spun, ripping me around with him and pinning my body against him with his arm. Harper’s eyes traced down the curve of the man’s arm, tight against my chest, and up to where his dirty hand gripped my throat. I winced as his exceptionally long fingernails dug into my skin.
A deadly glint flashed in Harper’s narrowed green eyes. “I will kill you,” he growled as he approached us, his steps steady and his rifle aimed directly at the man’s head. “Let her go,” he repeated without a hint of fear or hesitation in his voice.
“Fresh meat?” The man chuckled. “I don’t think so.”
Suddenly, I was being dragged behind a building. The man’s hold on me loosened while we moved, enabling me to maneuver my arm so I could pull Jake’s knife out of my pocket. My captor stumbled, making the knife difficult for me to unlatch, but as he caught himself against the building with his gun hand, I finally succeeded. I stabbed him in the side of his thigh.
The black-band howled in pain as I yanked the blade from his flesh. His grip loosened further, and I started to scramble away.
Seizing the opportunity, Harper pulled the trigger. Three gunshots sounded before the black-band started to fall, grabbing my hair and pulling me down with him. I struggled out of his grasp, but his hand latched on to my forearm.
I stabbed him again, this time in the neck. The muscles and tendons were dense, making it difficult to drive the blade in, and I felt a sickening crunch as the blade hit something more solid. Almost instantly, I jerked my hand away. I stared at the man’s body, wide-eyed and unable to move.
Everything after that happened so quickly, it was all a blur. More shots were fired, and Harper’s arms were around me. I heard footsteps and shouting and more gunfire, and then there was silence. I looked around at a graveyard of dead bodies—almost a dozen of them littered the street and sidewalks. Blood splattered their faces and fatigues. Their vacant eyes seemed to bore into mine, accusing me. I couldn’t look away.
Harper entwined his fingers with mine, tugging me with him as he headed back to the flower bed where I’d dropped my gun. Once I was rearmed, he checked me for wounds.
“I’m fine,” I told him. “Promise.” He swore softly, and I remembered my brother’s agonized shout. “Shit! Where’s Jason? Is he okay?”
Harper pointed his chin toward something behind me, and I spun around, seeking any sign of my brother.
Jake was striding toward us. “Sanchez and Chris are getting Becca and the horses,” he explained. “And Jason needs medical attention.” He pointed to another large flower bed across the street.
I followed the direction of his finger and found Carlos standing above my brother, reaching down to help him to his feet. Jason struggled to stand, favoring his right foot as he took a wobbling step over a dead soldier sprawled on the cement. Together, they limped toward us.
As Jake drew nearer and focused on me, his eyes widened. I glanced down at my clothes. They were covered in blood, and my face felt sticky and wet. No wonder Harper was fussing over me. When I glanced up again, Jason was closer. He had a deep gash spanning from his hairline down to his jaw and blood smeared pretty much everywhere.
“Jason! Are you okay?” I ran to him. “What happened?”
He waved me away. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You need stitches, and I’ve got to—”
Jason put his hand out, gripping my arm as he hobbled closer to sit down on the ledge of a flower bed. “Is any of that blood yours?” he asked.
I shook my head as horses clopped up the road. It was Sanchez and Chris. They stopped the five horses in front of us and jumped down, Sanchez walking with an evident limp. Behind them, I noticed Harper moving from dead black-band to dead black-band, collecting their weapons and searching their bodies for anything useful.
“Are you alright?” I asked Sanchez, searching her leg for blood.
“It’s just a twisted ankle, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me,” she said. When her gaze landed on Jason, I felt a swelling of concern radiate from her. Taking a hobbling step closer to him, she began to ask, “Are you al—”
“I’m fine,” Jason said dismissively, and Sanchez hesitated. Her face was almost expressionless, but I could feel her torment.
Shaking off Jason’s apathy, she said, “Carlos, help Chris get Jason up on his horse. We need to get the hell out of here. This goddamn place is cursed.” She glanced at Harper and Jake. “And Becca’s gone.” She shook her head and rested her hands on her hips. “There goes our leverage.”
Harper joined us, carrying an armful of weapons. Weapons…Oh! My knife. I reached into my pocket, but my knife wasn’t there.
Turning around, I looked at the man I’d stabbed. My knife was sticking out of his throat and covered in his blood. I hurried over to him, snatched it out of his neck without a second thought, and wiped it off on his sleeve. My eyes lingered on his black armband. I cut the band off both sleeves and stuffed them into my pocket along with my knife.
“We should collect all the armbands,” I called. “They might come in handy.”
Out of nowhere, my head started throbbing, and I grew dizzy in the thrall of the most intense storm of despair and fury I’d ever felt. My body tensed as the rushing swirl of frenzied emotions swept over me.
“Agh!” I screamed and fell to my knees, panting. I recognized the source of the emotions. “Dani…”
10
DANI
MARCH 16, 1AE
In a room filled with someone else’s things, in a house given to me by one of the three people whose death would inspire me to dance a merry jig—Herodson, Clara, and Cece—I paced. I’d been walking from the window to the dresser and back for the past two hours, ever since I woke up in the bed…which led to the question of when and how I’d ended up in the bed in the first place. The last thing I remembered was screaming out my pain as all of the memories and heartache of the last four months burst to life in my mind. It doesn’t matter, I told myself. The only thing that matters is tearing apart the bastard who tried to control me.
Each step solidified my hatred for General Herodson. Each step also brought to mind a new, more idiotic plan for destroying him, or at least allowed me to add some creative embellishments. As I approached the expansive oak dresser and envisioned acting out my most recent sch
eme in Operation: Kill General Dickhead—to march straight into his office with a butter knife hidden in my bra and shank him in the eye—I felt the urge to scream and punch something simultaneously. I’d been riding a nonstop wave of fury and adrenaline, and as a result, I couldn’t stop shaking.
General Herodson’s revolting charity surrounded me…taunted me. I was in the Colony, comfortable and encased in luxury—not just because he allowed it, but because he wanted it. Sure, I might have been freed from his mental control, but I was still doing exactly what he wanted. I was still wearing the ridiculous yellow armbands he’d given me, like I’d been marked as his property. Goddamn bastard. Dead goddamn bastard.
I kicked the dresser, hard. It knocked against the wall, shuddered, and stilled. Just as I pivoted to march back toward the window, the bedroom door opened. I spun to face the intruder.
“Everything okay in here?” MG—or, rather, Gabe—asked. He’d poked his head through the gap in the doorway and was watching me, his eyes filled with some heavy emotion—worry, or possibly guilt. Did he bring me back here? Did he put me to bed?
I remembered being under the General’s control. I remembered practically throwing myself at Gabe. I remembered him injecting me with the neon liquid, and I remembered screaming and screaming…and screaming. And then, nothing. That liquid must’ve been the “neutralizer” he’d been talking to Dr. Wesley about. So…the “neutralizer” must do just that: neutralize the General’s Ability. Gabe saved me from the General’s mind control. Finally, the doubt which had made me hesitant to trust Gabe, the doubt I’d felt ever since overhearing that conversation between him and the doctor, evaporated.
When I didn’t say anything, instead opting to stand and do my best impersonation of a marble statue, Gabe entered the room the rest of the way.
“What do you remember?” he asked as he drew closer, shaking his head. “Christ, Dani…do you have any idea what you did?”
Huh? What I did? I shook my head slowly. “I didn’t…you’re the one who…what are you talking about?”
Gabe raised his hands like he was reaching for me, then pulled them back and shoved them into his pants pockets. “After I gave you the neutralizer and Herodson’s hold wore off, you started to scream…do you remember that?”
I nodded.
He cleared his throat. “Well, when you screamed, you used your telepathy.” He rubbed his hand over his smoothed-back hair. “From what I can tell, everyone in the damn building heard it…felt it. There were even a few bloody noses, and one person supposedly fainted.” Taking a deep breath, he watched me, assessing. “Did you know you could do that…hurt people with your Ability?”
Eyes wide, I shook my head.
He rubbed the faint stubble on one side of his jaw. “I, uh, don’t think he can track it back to the source, so you should be safe enough, but if he finds out you can do that…” He was shaking his head slowly. “Shit. He’ll weaponize you in a heartbeat and use any means of motivation necessary.”
Taking several dazed steps, I sank down onto the foot of the bed. “I didn’t know I could…I’ve never…holy crap.”
It was Gabe’s turn to start pacing. “Use your Ability. Try to sense the minds around you.”
“Right now? Why?”
He shot me the briefest possible glance. “Because—just do it. It’s important.”
Frowning, I did as he directed, focusing on the part of my brain that enabled me to speak in other minds. And there was nothing. “I…I can’t.”
Gabe was nodding. “Burnout. Interesting,” he muttered.
I stood and placed myself in front of him on his way back to the window. “Burnout? What do you mean, burnout? Did I…oh God, did I destroy my Ability completely?” I reached for him and squeezed his arm. “What does that mean?” I was panicking. God, I was sick of panicking.
Gabe placed his hands on my elbows and bent down to meet my eyes. “I’ve seen burnout a few times, and it’s never been permanent. But”—he hesitated—“each consecutive time the same person burned out their Ability, it took longer to return. You need to be more careful.”
My voice was small when I said, “I didn’t mean to do it.” I looked away. There’d just been so much pain…too much to contain. And it was still there.
Gabe raised his hands to my face, gently turning it back to him. “What made you…was it the neutralizer?” There was no mistaking the guilt in his eyes.
“I suppose.” I stepped away from him, from his touch, and crossed to the window. Looking down at the neighborhood street from the second story of “my” house, I could almost imagine the world was normal…almost. “When he did what he did, he made me forget just about everything that’s happened to me since this whole nightmare began. And then you injected me with that…that stuff, and I remembered. Everything. It’s like it all just happened again—everyone dying, my trip here, Jason—everything.” I paused, taking a deep breath. “I killed people, Gabe.”
“It can be like that when his hold is broken, especially if he included a command to forget,” Gabe said, rambling. “It’s a lot to handle, I know, but—”
“You know? Really?” I retorted, spinning to face him. “You’ve been here—hiding from what’s really going on. So what could you possibly know?” I was fully aware that Gabe had done nothing but help me, but I had to lash out at something. I felt like a mindless, wounded animal. “Do you know about the man I killed with a shovel? Or the one I shot in the head? How about the cult freaks—the Prophets of the New World—do you know about them? Do you know about anything going on out there? How’d you even end up in here?”
Gabe shook his head. “Dani—”
I held up my hand, cutting him off. “The woman in charge of the cult, Mandy, she was like General Herodson with that mind control crap. She controlled hundreds of people—forced them to kill—raped them and made them think they liked it.” I thought back on everything Carlos had told me over our weeks of horseback travel, recalled all the twisted things that bitch had made her flock do.
My gaze was steady, locked on Gabe’s pale blue eyes. “Mandy’s dead, and I’m glad I was there when Jason put the bullet through her skull.” And I’ll do everything possible to make General Herodson just as dead.
Recognition filled Gabe’s clear eyes. “Dani, with the General…you can’t—”
“He’s dead,” I hissed, stalking toward Gabe. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”
Gabe scoffed. “And what are you going to do, just walk up to him and shoot him? Or maybe you’re planning to stab him instead, hmmm? Make it a little more personal?”
Actually, yeah, that’s the current plan. I said nothing.
“Listen to me!” he shouted. His hands were on my upper arms, his grip demanding. “Going after him like that…trying to assassinate him…that won’t work. I agree—he needs to die—but he’s too powerful for whatever you’re planning to work. You can’t do this alone, and you can’t do it now. We need time…people…resources.”
Unwilling to let his words permeate my thick skull, I shook my head.
“Damn it, Dani!” Gabe yelled, shaking me. “You don’t believe me? Then I’ll show you. If you still want to go all kamikaze after you see everything, I won’t stop you.”
I glared daggers—no, broadswords—at him until he let me go.
“Take a few minutes to get yourself together, then come down,” he said as he stopped in the doorway. “There are only a few hours until curfew, and there’s a lot to see.”
Not quite slamming the door, Gabe left me alone with my unsettling thoughts. I would see what he had to show me, use it if I could—and then I would kill the General.
~~~~~
“There are people here now,” I noted as Gabe and I walked through his lab to his office. Unlike this morning, the place was a veritable scientific anthill, teeming with efficient men and women in white lab coats with yellow bands around their upper arms. What’s the deal with the armbands?
Gabe s
hot me a brief glance. “Yeah, well, I couldn’t close the department down for very long.”
“Why did you close it down? Because you’ve been with me? Can’t they function without you?” I asked.
Gabe herded me quickly through the lab and into his office. When the door clicked shut, he explained, “They can, but sometimes they get a little too enthusiastic about their work and harm their test subjects. I try to be here as much as possible to keep them under control.”
I lowered my eyebrows. “Harm people? Why would they want to—”
Gabe raised his eyebrows.
The General, I realized. He probably commanded them all to get results using whatever means necessary. “Oh…got it.”
Gabe picked up a manila envelope that had been resting on his keyboard. He opened it and slid some colored plastic cards into his hand. They looked like hotel keycards attached to navy blue, nylon lanyards. Handing me a bright red card, he explained, “These are from Wes—Dr. Wesley. Red means you’re still recovering—not healthy enough to work.” He cut off my impending protest with a raised hand. “Think of it like a doctor’s sick note. Keep it with you at all times. It’ll keep people like them”—he nodded toward the door—“or that guard at headquarters, or anyone else wearing a yellow armband from getting ahold of you and doing something you’re not okay with—like, um…hurting you.” A flash of concern lit his eyes.
I glanced down at one of my own yellow armbands. “What do they mean—the armbands?”
“Different things based on the color. Yellow means mind-controlled. Black indicates someone who’s following Herodson willingly.” He held out his own arm, drawing my attention to the white armbands he was wearing. I hadn’t noticed them during my first day here; they hadn’t stood out against his white shirt. “White means the wearer has a leadership role—in charge of a department or is one of his advisors.”
I watched him slip the other lanyard over his head. The attached card was plain white, like his armbands. “And a white card is like a free pass. It means I have an excuse not to work and can pretty much go anywhere on base—at least, anywhere that’s not restricted.”
The Ending Series: The Complete Series Page 61