“Where is Margo Winter?” a fifth soldier screamed and kicked Creed in the ribs with his steel-toed boots, hard enough to break ribs.
Creed grimaced. He couldn’t hold a thought in his drugged mind. He opened his eyes and saw Meg gliding across the surface of the ocean with smooth, powerful strokes. They were back in Hawaii and he was watching the girl of his dreams through a set of high-powered binoculars. Her golden-brown skin glistened in the sunlight as she swam gracefully through the waves, one after another. She stopped swimming to tread water as she looked around. He saw her reach one hand up and instantly he was right in front of her. She was smiling—such a beautiful face. That’s when her hand roared around gathering water and creating a big splash right into his eyes.
The salt water stung.
His face stung.
One of the soldiers was backhanding him.
“You shit-head! You gave him too much!”
“I gave him exactly what Chaunders told me to,” the other was saying in defense.
“He’s coming around,” a third voice barked.
“Where is Dr. Margo Winter?” the first voice enunciated slowly.
The answer was right there on the tip of Creed’s mind, and that was just it. Whatever they drugged him with was causing him to teeter at the precipice of consciousness.
He opened his blue eyes but didn’t see the five heavily armed soldiers holding him down—he saw Meg sitting on his abdomen smiling down at him. The sunlight danced between her dark curls as they fell from the loose braid draped casually over her right shoulder.
“Don’t answer them, Creed!” Alik yelled startling Creed into biting his tongue, fighting against the drug clearly designed to loosen it.
Alik had been the last one still fighting off a half-dozen soldiers. Bodies littered the ground around him. No one had survived his calm frenzy as he stepped into each assailant delivering precise, close-quartered strikes.
The soldiers had given up trying to rush him. His massive size and strength were just beyond anything the metasoldiers had ever trained against. They weren’t attacking him anymore. Alik was yanking soldiers back and attacking them instead.
That is, until he was doused by soldiers with no fewer than three canisters of pepper spray designed to subdue wild animals. Alik was dripping in anguish now that he was on his stomach, arms pinned behind his back by multiple zip ties and more added even as he screamed to Creed.
Evan’s ringing, pounding head fought to remain sharp, but it was achingly difficult combined with the extreme fatigue. Through the fog of pain roaring in his head, he dreamed he saw a pale-faced Kylie peek around what was left of the wall to his left. He frowned at the vision, immediately worried about her getting caught up in the maelstrom of violence. He blinked and the image of Kylie was gone and his hazy thoughts slipped back to self-reproach.
He’d been so concerned about distancing himself from his family to keep from jeopardizing the vision of the future he was given all those months ago, he hadn’t learned to use his own gift. He realized the futility of his plan as he heard laughter in his ears.
Soldiers were screaming for his mother’s whereabouts. He heard Alik’s slurred words spat through chemically burned lips, screaming for Creed to tell them nothing. Cole was scarily quiet in the far corner. Two soldiers hovered over him like vultures.
Evan wiggled the numbing fingers of his left hand as they were crushed at a painful angle. Just then, he heard the crunching of debris under boots but couldn’t see from his position who had entered the living room.
The soldier at his back gripped Evan’s light-brown hair again and smashed his head into the wall for the third time. His laughter sounded distorted, as though Evan were underwater.
“Dude, check this out,” he called to someone else in the room. “Gives a new meaning to the term ‘face painting’,” he chortled at the bloody smears the Winter kid left on the formerly white wall.
“Shit, can’t any of you fight? Look at this mess. The Director is going to be pissed.” A shuffling sound followed by a thump had Evan visualizing a new soldier kicking one of the bodies, but he couldn’t see for himself. His face was mashed into the wall.
He blinked a few times and tried to concentrate.
“I hate to break up your fun, but has anyone gotten Dr. Winter’s location out of them?” the new voice snarled.
“Hollier, sir. We gave this one a dose of phenobarbital, only he’s not talking—at least not about Margo Winter. He keeps mumbling the name ‘Meg’.”
Again, Evan heard boots crunching and thumping across the room as the ranking officer made his way to where Creed was lying on his back, eyes threatening to roll back, and stay back.
“Which of them did all this?” the voice asked the room.