“Well, I really ought to go greet the others now. Oh, by the way, I would not advise you to try your parlor trick on me again, not if you value the ability to create intelligible thought patterns. I’ll come back after a while. I have a special friend who is dying to see you! I’ll bring him by later. You’re not looking too well, Meg. Maybe you ought to rest until then?
“One last thing, I’m leaving this laptop here. You’ll want to press play and watch a very important message before I return. ” The Senator shrugged. “Or don’t. It really doesn’t matter to me either way.”
Arkdone turned and did a straight leap up into the air, landing gracefully on a ledge Meg hadn’t noticed before ten feet up the brick wall. He casually waved, opened a door there, walked through and slammed the door shut behind him. A metallic click echoed throughout the otherwise empty cell. Meg was suffering so badly, for a split second her tormented brain went where it should never have gone….
Chapter 40 Alik?
Alik stared at the black screen of the laptop. His new violet blue eyes flashed with fury.
“Oh, Theo what are we going to do?” Margo shook her head, feeling helpless.
“I honestly don’t know. I mean, we can’t show this to the police. He called the children metahumans several times. If we get police involved, everything will spin out of control. They’ll need to involve the FBI. There’s no way Greg Burns could help us once it gets out that there’s a new breed of humanoids. They’d collect Alik, Farrow and Danny to begin the testing immediately and we’ll never see the others again.” Theo was rambling, and he knew it. He just couldn’t wrap his head around this new villain.
“What’s a mind controlled Monarch?” Farrow asked. She’d started pacing the room gently patting Danny on the back and feeling more relaxed as he breathed against her neck.
“If it’s what I think it is,” Margo offered, “it is horrible. Children are tortured until their minds break. Then their handlers act as programmers and create multiple personalities separate from the core personality. Those dissociative states, the other personalities, are trained to be beneficial to their programmers. The handler uses some trigger to make that personality come out and take over the body to do their bidding.”
“How do you know so much about Monarchs?”
Margo sighed deeply. “The reason Donovan Arkdone looked familiar to me was because he was a guest speaker at my university. Part of his lecture was on the MK-ULTRA that evolved into the Monarch Program.”
“I read about this when I studied World War II. In the mid-1930s Joseph Mengele was an SS physician at the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz. He is credited as the primary developer of trauma based mind control. He performed horrific experiments on prisoners—children, too. He was known as ‘the Angel of Death’.” Alik spoke in a disconnected monotone. Farrow watched his lips turn a bright red against the pallor of his face. His eyes glowed angrily their new magnificent violet blue.
“Alik, are you feeling okay?” Farrow could sense something was happening to him.
“Ali?” Margo began, having stopped long enough to watch her son’s face.
“Maybe you ought to lie down, Alik,” Theo offered, the physician’s calming tone coming out in his voice.
“He and Williams have been working together to create Monarch slaves who are also Metahumans. And now he’s kidnapped half our family and is playing with them like expendable toys for his amusement!”
Alik stood, every muscle in his body tight, but not one tremble dared shake him. His bright eyes scanned the room slowly and he began to see the memories of the room superimposed with what was really there. He saw his sister sit on the sofa with a piece of paper and a pencil. Her mouth was moving, but Alik couldn’t hear what she was saying. He was only able to watch the memory vibrations the room was giving him. He saw Sloan sit down near her. Moments later his sister was up walking toward the kitchen. She came out with a wrench in one hand and hurried toward the front door—her mouth moving as though talking to the person on the other side. There was the contractor. Meg moved to hand him the wrench when another man, the one from the video, attacked the contractor with wicked speed, snapping his neck.
Then he saw his sister being jumped by another guy with a syringe in one hand. She was injected then flung to the ground. The puddle of blood there was his sister’s. Seven more men clamored into the house running in different directions. One grabbed Sloan, injecting her then tossing her aside. Four Monarchs ran down the hallway. Alik moved to follow them.
Outside his vision, his family was calling to him, panicked. “Alik? What are you doing? What are you looking at?” Margo was terrified at her son’s bizarre behavior. Farrow passed the drowsy baby to Theo and ran after Alik.