Abomination (24 page)

Ryan narrowed his eyes as he noticed the color leaving Derek’s
face. Faint blue streaks started appearing across his forehead and down his
cheeks to his neck. His captor began to breathe heavy through his nose,
resembling an animal snorting a warning to its adversary. Derek raised his hand
and pulled at his front teeth.

“Stop it!” yelled Jennifer, stepping in front of Derek.
“Both of you. Derek, I want you to go into the living room. Give me one minute
with him, please.” She put her hands on his face as her eyes were welling with
tears. “Please. Think about us on the beach in Bora Bora for just one minute.
After, you can do whatever you want with him. I won’t stop you, angel.”

Derek reluctantly turned and walked away. Jennifer had
won her minute. She opened the kitchen drawer and pulled out a pair of cooking
shears. She cut the cord around Ryan’s ankles and removed the cuffs from his
wrists. With a puzzled look on his face, she handed him his gun.

“If you’re not going to listen, put a bullet in us now,”
said Jennifer, defeated. “I’m so fucking tired of trying to convince him
there’s a way out of this. I’m so fucking tired of everyone hunting him like an
animal and not giving a shit about what
they
did to him. Before this
happened, he was the most gentle, sweetest man I’d ever met. They’ve made him
hate himself so much he’ll barely touch me. A man so full of love and kindness
can’t even hug me without feeling the pain of what he’s done. We’re on the edge
here and one tiny step from going over. You’re the only one that can give us
hope.”

Ryan watched the tears run down her desperate face and
felt enough sympathy to holster his weapon. “I’ll listen, Jennifer. I promise.”

“Thank you,” she said, as they both walked into the
living room. Derek jumped to his feet, alarmed at seeing Ryan free from his
restraints.

“Sit down,” ordered Jennifer. She was through with the
tears. Even Ryan was startled by the force of her command.

“Something tells me you should be more afraid of her
than me,” said Ryan.

“You have no idea,” replied Derek, taking a seat.

*****

A black Suburban pulled up to the curb at the arrival
gate for the airport in Atlanta. Colonel Brown and four men mounted the vehicle
being driven by Alex Tifton. They drove several miles before the Colonel spoke.

“No more mistakes, Alex,” said Colonel Brown. “Not only
did we miss the opportunity to end this, you managed to hand over the entire
Red Team to Ryan. I still can’t wrap my head around how badly you fucked up,
Marine. But I can’t dwell on that. I have to fix this myself. Right now, I’d
rather have a troop of fucking boy scouts running this operation. Is your head
on straight, son? Can I count on you to finish this mission?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Alex. “You can. I won’t fail again.”

“You can’t fail again. Do you understand me? You cannot
fail again.”

“What do you need me to do?” asked Alex, obediently. “Do
we take out Ryan and his team?”

“Luckily for you the Deputy Director of the FBI still
has no idea he has Dr. Anderson or our men. Ryan doesn’t know who to trust, so
he’s running the show under the radar. But that won’t last long. We need to
find Dr. Anderson, and we need to do it fast. If we take her out of the
picture, Ryan won’t have shit. He has absolutely no evidence against us. We can
still point the finger at the scientists who are crying like babies for us to
protect them. We’ll simply hand them over when this thing is through and you
and I will walk away.”

“Ryan has help,” said Alex. “The guys that set us up at
the decoy house were pros. She may not even be in the state.”

“They weren’t FBI, and that’s a good thing for us,” said
Colonel Brown. “We’ll know who they are soon enough and we’ll get our morons
back. But first things first, we need to get our hands on Dr. Anderson.”

“Do you think he’ll lead us to her?”

“As long as I have his daughter, he’ll do anything I
fucking tell him to do.”

Colonel Brown turned around in his seat and glared at Scott
Wilson. As soon as he realized Scott was feeding Ryan information, he had Alex
abduct his ten-year-old daughter from her bed. Scott sat motionless in the back
seat, staring out the window thinking about his child being held at the lab.
He’d do whatever it took to keep his little girl safe.

“Are the vehicles at the hotel?” asked Colonel Brown.

“Yes, sir,” replied Alex. “Stocked with weapons and
gear.”

“Good. Are you listening, Scott?”

“Yes, I’m listening.”

“You’re taking this car after we reach the hotel and
driving straight to Ryan’s. I don’t care how you do it, but get him to take you
to Dr. Anderson tonight. The GPS transmitter will do the rest. Once we have the
doc, I make the phone call that sends your little girl home. Are you clear?”

“I am,” replied Scott. “What are you going to do with
Kristina?”

“You should be more concerned about what you’re going to
tell your wife if you fuck this up.”

Scott moved into the driver’s seat after they arrived at
the hotel. The Colonel gave him final instructions before they went inside.
Thirty minutes later, Scott pulled up to the FBI house.

“Hey, little buddy,” greeted Dallas at the door.

“I need to talk to Ryan.”

“Good to see you, too,” said Dallas. “But he’s not here.
Anything I can help you with?”

“Get him on the phone, Dallas. I need to talk to him
right now.”

“Okay, come on in,” said Dallas, dialing Ryan’s number.

“Hey, Scott,” said Tom, shaking his hand. “What’s going
on?”

“I really need to talk to Ryan first.”

“Sorry, Scott,” said Dallas. “He’s not answering.”

“Where is he?”

“He went to talk to some of Derek’s family out in the
boonies. He’s probably just out of cell range. I’m sure he’ll call back soon.
Take a load off. I’ve got some cold ones in the fridge. You look a little
tense.”

“Is Michelle with him?”

“No, she’s with Kristina at the safe house. Why?”

“Michelle’s the only one watching her? Are you people
mental? Alex is out there looking for her and you have one fucking agent
protecting her?”

“Whoa, chief,” said Dallas, putting up his hand. “She’s
got a little army around her.”

“A little army?”

“Yeah,” said Dallas. “A buddy of Ryan’s from his old
unit owns a top-notch security group. Those guys are better than some of the
FBI SWAT teams I’ve worked with. She’s in good hands.”

Scott immediately saw the opportunity to get his
daughter back earlier than he’d hoped. He excused himself to the back deck of
the house to make a phone call.

“He’s not here, Colonel. He’s going to be out of touch
for a while.”

“
Finally, a fucking break. Good work, Scott. You make
this happen tonight and you’ll be having breakfast with your little girl in the
morning. Listen, things are going to start jumping there in a few minutes.
You’re a smart guy. Use it to your advantage.”

Scott ended the call and walked back inside. “On second
thought, I’ll take that beer.”

Underneath a pile of splintered wood in Jennifer’s
dining room, Ryan’s shattered cell phone couldn’t alert him to the several
messages in the queue. He leaned forward in his chair as Derek and Jennifer sat
holding hands on the sofa.

“What do you know about the Didache Project?” asked Derek.

“In a nutshell, the military contracted civilian
geneticists to build super soldiers,” answered Ryan.

“Basically,” agreed Derek. “But it’s a little more
complicated than that. Five of us were selected out of about a hundred
volunteers. Every few weeks, we’d be injected with another round of gene
therapy designed to make us stronger and faster.” Anticipating his question he
added, “It wasn’t like steroids. We didn’t have to exercise any harder to build
muscle mass or keep what we developed. The way it was explained, our muscles
and organs were being enhanced at the cellular level. They were being
genetically mutated. It was important to them that we looked like typical
Marines, but with atypical abilities.

“They developed those abilities in a somewhat natural
progression. For example, one of the first rounds of therapy increased the
density of our muscles, but not the size. When I weighed in the day we received
the shots, I was 182 pounds. Two weeks later, I was 210 without any visible
size increase. After that success, they had to increase the density of our
bones as well to take the stresses of the stronger muscle tissue. After that,
they had to increase the density of our heart muscle to pump our newly enhanced
blood designed to carry more oxygen and fuel to support our stronger muscles.
After that, they had to enhance our respiratory system to intake more oxygen to
support our more demanding organs and systems. And that’s how it went for years.
They’d enhance one part of us and then have to adjust and tweak our other
systems to support the original enhancements. Are you still with me?”

“That’s actually a better explanation than the one I
received from the scientists,” said Ryan. “They just made what you already had
in you stronger.”

“Correct. And we were all fired up about it, too. There
was virtually no pain involved and the discomfort was minimal. And if we did
experience any discomfort, they’d stop everything and figure out the problem. Almost
overnight, I remember hitting the track one morning and they clocked me running
at nearly 30 miles per hour. I wasn’t even trying. The same thing happened in
the weight room. In a matter of weeks, I went from bench pressing 300 pounds to
pressing over 800.

“I will say, the weirdest enhancement was my vision. It
took a while to get used to the changes. Try walking around your house wearing
binoculars and you’ll have a good idea what it was like. It took our brains a
little while to catch up with that one, but eventually it did. Everything they
were doing to us we wanted. And after we started experiencing the results, we
wanted more. We felt like superheroes.”

“How did they make you guys sensitive to one another’s
pain or location?” asked Ryan.

“Nothing that we know of,” replied Derek. “They just
kept telling us it was an anomaly associated with the treatments. I mean, it
didn’t really concern us at the time. In fact, it made us feel more like
brothers than volunteers for biomedical research. It was kind of cool.”

“When did you start having the urge to kill?” asked
Ryan, changing the mood from light to dark. He could see Jennifer’s hand
squeeze Derek’s.

“About seven months ago,” answered Derek. “It happened
just like the other changes. There was a funny feeling almost immediately after
the treatment, but it really started kicking in a few days later. That’s when
the pain started. It was mainly in our mouths and hands, but then it spread
everywhere. About a week later, I woke up one morning with a toothache that was
making my head spin. I looked in the mirror and my gums were bleeding and I
could see bulges forming above my canine teeth. By late afternoon, the pain was
fucking blinding. We had to beg the doctors to pull out our front teeth. I’m
wearing dentures now.”

“That’s what made you want to murder women?”

“No, not the pain,” Derek corrected him. “That was just
an indicator that something went wrong with us. Well, all of us except Alex.”

“What do you mean?”

“A week before that treatment, they discovered a
hereditary disease in Alex’s DNA. They actually removed it and replaced it with
normal DNA, but they were going to wait a week or two to catch him up with our
treatment schedule. When things started going bad for us, they opted not to
give him the same juice. That’s why he wasn’t affected. He simply missed that
day of class.”

“As far as us killing, less than a week after they
yanked my teeth, I started having very weird thoughts. We all did. But the craziest
thing is, we were all having the exact same weird thoughts.”

“What were they?”

“Actually, it was more like urges than thoughts. There
was a twenty-three-year-old intern named Bethany. She was a medical student
working through a semester at the lab. She was a very pretty girl with blonde
hair and blue eyes. I think she dated one of the super geeks.”

“Super geeks?”

“Yeah, he was one of the four young genius scientists
running the show. Apparently, they were some of the smartest people on the
planet. They looked like teenagers. Dr. Kristina Anderson was the only one that
actually looked like an adult.”

“Okay, what happened with Bethany?”

Derek hesitated and looked over at Jennifer with very
heavy eyes. Ryan didn’t miss the significance. If Derek confirmed his suspicion
and talked about the details in front of Jennifer, it would change everything.

“Derek?”

“The urges, the thoughts I had were…” said Derek,
hesitating again. “Sweetheart, I don’t know if I can talk about this with you
in the room. You shouldn’t have to listen to this.”

“Baby, I have no idea how horrible this must be, but I’m
in this fight with you. It’s not your fault. I know it’s not your fault, but
you have to tell him. You have to tell me, too.”

Derek turned his eyes to the veteran FBI agent who had
witnessed some of the worst things evil humans could possibly do to another. If
Derek was trying to pretend he was a man in unbearable anguish, Ryan thought
he’d win an Oscar.

“I went to one of the therapists assigned to the Didache
team and told him about the urges. I told him Bethany was in danger from all of
us. At first, he dismissed it and tried talking me down with some psychobabble
bullshit. I shut him up when I told him about the things I wanted to do to her.
What we all wanted to do to her. I told him to think of Bethany as his own
daughter. Her internship was cancelled the next day. She was told she wasn’t
allowed back on the property.”