“Clear. Walk.” Evan ordered.
“Forget walking, I’m running! Just like ripping off a Band-Aid, right?” And with that, Cole bolted the ten feet, stopping right in front of Creed. The green of Cole’s eyes glistened brilliantly. He would never admit it to a soul, but it was Meg he was imagining he was running toward.
“How do you feel?” Evan asked from behind him.
“About as good as someone could feel after being torture and nearly murdered.”
“Excellent!” Sloan blurted. “Take off your shirt and lie back.” She had awakened faster than the others from her shock.
“Kid you’re way too young to be saying that to me.”
“Shut up and do it!” Sloan wasn’t playing around. She still felt the pain of being zapped in the heart, but she also knew they needed to get the hell out of there.
Outwardly, he was acting nonchalant about the whole could-have-had-my-heart-blown-the-heck-up just now. Inwardly, he was a panting, quivering pile of goo.
“Ready, set, clear!” Sloan called and jolted Cole with the paddles.
In the first moment when he was coming to, Cole saw Meg—the disconnected stare in her eyes.
Please look at me Meg! Please.
He reached to touch her face, only to blink at the image and watch it morph into Sloan’s worried gray eyes watching him. He was holding her face in his hand.
“Hey, Cole. Are you okay?” The newly found sarcasm he’d taught her was completely thrown to the wayside as true concern chiseled its edges into her youthful face. Only her steel-gray eyes gave away the brilliance hiding behind the little girl’s golden locks.
“Yeah,” he said just as much by way of testing his voice as responding to the girl who’d just shocked his nanoweapon into short-circuiting. “You?” he asked.
She smiled widely, “Never better, Cole-ocity.”
“Great, let’s get the hell out of here.” His voice was scraped with pain as he worked to sit up. Creed held out a hand to him to help. They exchanged sad expressions, each knowing the other was aching for their missing Meg. With a nod of understanding, Cole reached up to take Creed’s help.
“What are we going to do about the coyote?” Sloan asked. “There’s no way he would survive the shock.”
“We don’t have to worry about it for now. He’s the only one with an active nanoweapon, so we’re all safe.” Creed reached down and carefully lifted his dark-eyed beauty’s best friend.
“Thank God for that,” Farrow blurted.
As they piled into the SUV, Evan’s mind was still thinking about the risky defibrillator trick he just lucked into and he was thanking God there was enough charge to finish everyone. He hadn’t wanted to worry the others, but getting four, fully charged jolts out of the battery on that mobile defibrillator was asking a lot of it.
Evan carefully loaded the machine in the back of the SUV and hurried around to climb into one of the back seats.
From the time they arrived at the vehicle until they were all able to get inside it, only fifteen minutes had passed. To everyone in the blue SUV, peeling down the vacant two-lane road, it felt like a week’s worth of torment was crammed into that span.
Cole, Sloan, Evan, Creed and Maze were all starved, dehydrated and beaten. They suffered cuts and bruises from the abuse at the hands of Monarch candidates, Senator Arkdone and especially the sadistic monster, Dr. Bjorn.
To collect them from their cells, candidates had thrown in grenades of knockout gas and waited for each to be completely incapacitated before they dropped stretchers on pulleys to get them out. They were anything but careful.
Once strapped in the wheelchairs, they awakened to stinging pain on their backs, and raw injuries all over. Each of their brands at the back of their necks had been altered with new cuts. Now they weren’t just Infinite symbols. The letter “M” was sliced deeply into their skin inside each loop. They were already marked as MetaMonarchs.
But only Meg was truly that now. Arkdone had every intention performing the same inhumane “Perfect Concussion” on the rest of them. If Farrow and Alik hadn’t rushed into the room when they did, things would have turned out very different.
Behind them, they could see smoke still pluming from the old college-looking campus that was Arkdone’s asylum.
Far in the distance, the beating wings of a helicopter pulled Meg further from her forgotten family.
Chapter 66 The Lost Winter
Alik was driving without a license, but after everything they’d been through over the past few days, this seemed like the least of their problems. Besides, he was retro-cogging for police as he drove. Creed sat beside Alik—Maze passed out from his injuries in his strong arms.
Evan, Sloan, Cole and Farrow sat lost in their traumas in the back of the SUV. A few times, Evan and Alik exchanged silent, tear-filled glances in the rearview mirror. They were missing their sister and so scared for her.