Chapter 8
Every step felt like a mile.
The blue glow from her left arm illuminated the dirty hallway leading to the back.
Just as I reached out to hit the crash bar on the exit door, a horrifying sound echoed through the diner.
It was the sound of a heavy body being thrown violently into a glass display case.
Glass shattered. Wood splintered.
And then, total silence.
The struggle at the front of the diner had completely stopped.
I froze, my hand hovering an inch over the metal bar of the door.
The mother stopped breathing beside me, her glowing arm shaking uncontrollably against my side.
We waited for the General’s voice. We waited for a sign that he had won.
Instead, we heard the slow, heavy, deliberate crunch of boots walking over broken glass.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
The footsteps were moving slowly, methodically down the aisle.
Coming straight toward the back hallway.
“No,” the mother whimpered, shrinking against the wall. “No, no, no.”
I pushed the crash bar on the door with all my strength.
It didn’t budge.
I slammed my shoulder into the heavy metal, panic surging through my chest.
It was padlocked from the outside.
Terry, in his infinite cheapness and paranoia about people skipping out on their bills, had chained the emergency exit shut.
We were completely trapped in the narrow, dead-end hallway between the restrooms and the chained door.
The footsteps stopped right at the entrance to our hallway.
The man in the trench coat stepped into the blue light radiating from the mother’s arm.
He looked like a demon.
His face was severely bruised, blood streaming down from a massive gash above his left eye, staining his collar.
He was breathing heavily, a terrifying, ragged sound.
In his right hand, he held the General’s military-issue sidearm.
The General was nowhere to be seen.
“That old man put up a hell of a fight,” the man said, wiping the blood from his eye with his thumb.
He didn’t sound angry. He sounded almost impressed.
He slowly raised the heavy black gun, leveling the barrel directly at my chest.
“Step away from the package, local,” he ordered.
I couldn’t move. My legs literally refused to function.
“I said,” he repeated, cocking the hammer back with a sharp, metallic click, “step away.”
The young mother suddenly pushed me aside with a strength I didn’t know she had left.
She stepped directly in front of me, putting her body between the gun and my chest.
She shielded the strangely quiet baby, raising her glowing, heavily tattooed left arm toward the man.
“Don’t hurt him!” she screamed at the man in the trench coat. “He has nothing to do with this!”
The man smiled, a cruel, bloodstained grin.
“I don’t care about him, Subject 8,” the man said smoothly.
“I only care about what’s in your blood. And the download is almost complete.”
He reached into his pocket with his free hand and pulled out the metallic device again.
The blue lights on the device were flashing furiously now, almost matching the erratic pulsing of the jagged ink on her arm.
“What did you do to me?” she sobbed, holding her arm as if it were a foreign object attached to her body.
“What is this?”
“We didn’t do anything to you,” the man laughed, stepping closer.
“We just unlocked what your father buried inside you twenty years ago.”
The mother gasped, stepping back until she hit the padlocked metal door.
“My father is dead,” she whispered.
The man in the trench coat stopped just three feet away.
He slowly lowered the gun, looking deeply into her terrified eyes.
“Is he?” the man asked softly.
He reached out and grabbed her glowing, tattooed wrist, violently pulling her arm toward him.
The mechanical humming spiked to a deafening, agonizing pitch.
The blue light flared so bright it was blinding.
And right before my eyes, the jagged black lines on her arm stopped shifting.
They locked into place.
The chaotic mess of ink suddenly formed a perfectly clear, incredibly detailed image.
The mother looked down at her own arm, and a sound of pure, shattered heartbreak escaped her lips.
Because what was burned into her skin wasn’t a weapon. It wasn’t a code.
I stared at the glowing ink, my mind completely unable to process the impossible truth of what I was seeing.
Everything I thought I knew about this terrified, exhausted woman was wrong.
And the man in the trench coat wasn’t here to kill her.
He was here to collect.
CHAPTER 4
The jagged black lines on her arm completely stopped shifting.
They locked into place with a sickening, final mechanical hum that vibrated right through the soles of my shoes.
The chaotic, ugly mess of thick black ink that everyone in the diner had been so quick to judge was completely gone.
