Genesis Rising (The Genesis Project Book 1) Page 14

  That would be his revenge – against them, against me, against his own failures.

  I kept a grenade tucked into the pocket of my jeans so I could pull the pin if I had to. He wouldn’t exact his revenge through me.

  But I would get mine even if he survived. All I had to do was pull the pin.

  The front entrance stood empty. Only bloody, shredded bodies guarded the doorway now. I stepped over them and entered The Genesis Project for the last time.

  The foyer was empty, but I couldn’t tell if the building was quiet or not. The noise inside my mind had intensified so much, I felt deafened. Unable to hear anyone approaching anymore, I kept my back to the nearest wall so no one could sneak up behind me. The long hallway that led to his office and the labs was lined with closed doors, and each would be a threat. I had just reached the corner and was about to turn down the hallway when movement in my peripheral vision made me spin around, ready to gun down whomever approached me.

  Fortunately, Parker had programmed me with restraint and the ability to quickly assess a situation because I’d been perilously close to shooting my best friend and girlfriend.

  Saige hurried to my side and looked me over. I had a hard time hearing her over the constant assault in my mind. “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Are you?”

  “I’m all right,” she assured me. “Almost pissed myself a few times, but that won’t kill me.”

  I wanted to laugh but our situation still seemed so desperately hopeless that I couldn’t. Cade motioned to the hallway. “Let’s hope that bastard is in his lab,” he said.

  I nodded and let him around me so he could enter the hallway first. “Stay between us,” I whispered to Saige. She gripped the Beretta tightly in her hands, and I felt nauseated. This shouldn’t be her reality. But as I watched her pass me so she could stay between Cade and me, I realized she was stronger and braver than anyone I’d ever known. She didn’t cower against me. She didn’t beg me for protection. She didn’t hesitate to follow in Cade’s footsteps in our attempt to secure our freedom.

  And I hadn’t thought it possible, but I loved her more than ever.

  I stepped into the hallway and the volume inside my mind amplified. I clenched my jaw and closed my eyes because I was certain my head would explode. I collapsed against the wall and took a few deep breaths, but I couldn’t move. Parker had rendered me useless and helpless with a few clicks of his keyboard.

  Soft fingers touched my arm and I forced my eyes open. Saige’s pale gray-blue eyes stared into mine, and her fingers tightened around my arm. She held my gaze as she pulled me away from the wall. “Always you, Drake,” she mouthed.

  I inhaled a deep breath and forced my feet to keep moving.

  How could a man like Parker understand the power love could have over someone? Maybe he’d simply forgotten to program me with an inability to fall in love. Or maybe it had never occurred to him since men like him weren’t governed by the emotions love evoked. Or maybe the part of me that had always been and would always be human had simply learned that there was no stronger force on Earth than this, and as long as I held onto it, no command or program could control me.

  Saige held my arm as we walked slowly down the hallway. I saw Cade glance over his shoulder so I looked behind us, too. Jake had finally caught up to us and motioned for us to keep going. He stayed by the entrance to the hallway to keep anyone from following us.

  Cade slowed down and leaned closer to my ear to whisper, “Jake already planted explosives around the south side of the building. Once we kill Parker and destroy the entire terminal, I’m going to plant the explosives he gave me and we need to get the hell out of here within two minutes. Got it?”

  I nodded. The relentless stream of commands was so loud, my entire body filled with the vibrations of orders I refused to obey. I couldn’t speak. It took all of my willpower and concentration not to collapse against the wall again. Saige never let go of me.

  We paused outside of a door with a simple, unassuming placard affixed to the ordinary brown finish. It simply read, “GENESIS.” Cade and I glanced at each other because neither of us had been in this room. At least, I couldn’t remember being in this room. He nodded toward it, indicating he wanted to see what was inside, but this room filled me with a sense of horror. I didn’t want to open the door, but I still had no voice. I couldn’t tell him not to shoot the lock off and push it open; I couldn’t tell him not to enter; I couldn’t tell Saige not to pull me inside.

  And yet, I found myself in the cold, sterile room, staring at long translucent tubs filled with a viscous fluid. But what was inside those incubators made me spin around and vomit for the first time in my life.

  “Oh, my God,” Saige breathed.

  “No,” Cade responded. “This isn’t God’s work.”

  Saige put her arm around me and helped me stand up again but I wanted to leave this room, my birthplace.

  Cade looked at me and shook his head slowly. “What do we do with them?”

  My eyes slowly roved over each incubator with a human growing inside, some infants, some children, a few close to the age I must have been when I awoke in a different room of Parker’s lab.

  I needed to speak. I had to speak for them since they had no voice.

  “Leave them,” I said. “But plant one of the explosives in here so that nothing remains.”

  “Drake,” Saige whispered.

  I understood her reservations. They were innocent lives, but if they survived, if they made it out of Parker’s incubators and awoke to the same world I had, they would forever be his monsters, whether he lived or not. I would forever be his Creature, his Abomination, the potential machine of a soulless enterprise.

  If we wanted to be Angels of Mercy, there was only one thing we could do for them.

  We had to destroy them.

  Cade seemed to understand this without forcing me to explain. He walked into the center of the room where he was surrounded by the sleeping Creatures and set the explosive against one of the incubators. He met my eyes then looked inside the incubator one last time, placing a hesitant hand on its surface.

  “God be with you,” he murmured.

  Then we left Parker’s lab filled with caskets and crossed the hall to where Dr. Frankenstein waited for us.

  At the end of the hallway, Jake continued to fire at anyone attempting to get close to us. Whether or not Parker knew what we planned to do to his lab, he knew we’d been in the room with his next generation of Creatures, and the pleading to stop my assault on the men in the building turned into a desperate plea to leave his experiments alone. He tried to convince me they were my brothers, and in a perverse irony, appealed to my humanity to let them live.

  I blew the door open and yelled, “You told me I’m not human, asshole!”

  But I was yelling at myself. The room was empty.

  I groaned when I noticed the door on the opposite wall – his escape route.

  Saige let go of my arm and approached the desk with several monitors still lit up, streams of data and coding scrolling through the screens. She nodded toward one of them and looked up at me. “The program’s repeating. He set it to continue the same commands before running.”

  Cade kicked over a table and shouted, “Goddamn it! How did we not know about this exit?”

  I slowly shook my head as I raised the machine gun in my hand. “It doesn’t matter, Cade. We’ll eventually find him. He can’t hide from us forever.”

  I squeezed the trigger and sent plastic and metal shrapnel sailing through his lab, the same room in which I’d first opened my eyes; the same room where I’d been strapped to a table and tortured so he could test a port in my arm; the same room he intended to use to destroy the man I’d become and start all over.

  And as the computers broke apart under the hail of bullets I rained down on them, the noise in my mind fell mercifully silent.

  Genesis Revealed, book two of The Genesis Project


  Also by S.M. Schmitz

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  For more information, please visit my website at smschmitz.com.

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