Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1)(17)

“We were never able to find you kids after that! We never intended anything like that to—”

Mark gave the man a vicious crack across the mouth. “Shut up, General. The bill’s due. You Obsidian pricks are going to pay.”

Blood dribbled from Kitteridge’s mouth. “I will. Go ahead and hurt me. Not—not—my grandson.”

“Shhhh.” Mark placed his free hand over Joseph Kitteridge’s skull, winding his fingers into the boy’s hair. “How about if I collapse his skull and we watch his brain squeeze out? On second thought, that’s too quick. I want him conscious when I do this.” He reached down and grabbed Joseph’s balls.

Joseph screamed behind his duct tape and jackknifed frantically.

“Stop!” Kitteridge begged. “Stop! I’ll open the vault! Just put him down!”

“That’s the spirit.” Mark let go and Joseph thudded heavily down to the concrete floor with an agonized grunt.

Bonus. The kid was crying real tears. Mark almost wished he hadn’t let go so soon. He sighed and turned to the general. “Do it.”

The older man’s eyes darted to his grandson. “I will, but . . . but you can’t use it. No one could, not even me.”

“Explain, f*ckhead. Or your grandson gets something worse.”

Kitteridge talked fast, spewing out the words. “The weapons are keyed to the mods of the ultimate generation of enhanced slave soldiers, and they respond only to their specific mental commands.”

“Really. Well, I may be just a rough draft,” Mark said casually, “but I’m still curious to see the final product. Don’t make me wait. Joseph has a low pain threshold. Trust me on that.”

“I have to concentrate,” Kitteridge pleaded. “It’s not easy to use, and it’s impossible when I’m agitated! The system recognizes brainwaves generated while visualizing images, and if I can’t—”

“I understand the basic principles,” Mark interrupted. “I’m a GodsEye client myself, General, and I manage the brain/software interface just fine. Would it speed things up if I cut off a piece of Joseph’s body?”

“No! Just let me concentrate, please! Just give me a moment!”

Mark tapped his foot as he watched sweat roll down the General’s face. Payback was never as satisfying in real life as in fantasy. He’d cornered his first Obsidian target last year. Lydia Bachmann, CEO of a weapons manufacturing firm. He’d tried to compel Lydia to open a GodsEye safe for him, unaware of the safe’s unique biometric design. But the drug he’d used to lower her resistance to interrogation hadn’t worked right. She couldn’t summon up images strong enough to be read by the sensors.

The safe had stayed closed, to his intense frustration. For months, he’d been hauling the f*cking thing around everywhere he went.

Lydia had regretted her sins, but it hadn’t been as much fun as he’d hoped. Plus, she’d lost consciousness far too quickly. Silence was not what he wanted out of the encounter. Screaming provided measurable feedback during the infliction of pain. She’d disappointed him.

He was learning how to make agony last, build it into a crescendo as he killed these power-bloated bastards one by one. And then, ahhh. Taking their masterpiece from them, and bludgeoning the living shit out of everyone with it . . . that promised to be a f*cking blast.

No drugs for Kitteridge. He’d learned his lesson. The general’s mind needed to be crystal sharp. The kidnapped grandson was a more efficient stimulant.

Kitteridge squeezed his eyes shut, veins pulsing in his temples. Minutes crawled by. Mark drummed his fingers, monitoring the general’s sig for any sign that the man was stalling. All he saw was desperate effort.

Finally, the light panel on the vault door flashed green. The seal popped open.

Kitteridge sagged in his bonds, dangling his head between hunched shoulders.

In between the older man’s ragged, sobbing breaths, Mark heard nothing with his augmented hearing. Nothing moved in the desert for miles around other than small animals. He’d taken out the facility’s security personnel when he arrived. The place was strewn with their soon-to-be-desiccated bodies. How fortunate that they wouldn’t smell, considering that there were ten of them.

Now, it was just him, the two Kitteridges, and the quiet desert evening.

A quickie scan showed that neither Kitteridge was likely to inconvenience him at this point, so he took a leisurely inventory of the vault’s contents. Cutting edge weapons designed to be wirelessly synchronized with the newest gen of modified humans, who were basically a slave army awaiting the call to action, if and when it came.

Soon.

Mark was going to take their army and have bloody, noisy fun with it.

It took the better part of an hour to hump all that equipment into his vehicle. With his enhanced musculature, boxes that would take two normal men to lift were feather light for him. But he still hated wasting his time and energy loading f*cking crates like a dock worker.

He was better than that. He was one of the original prototypes, goddamnit. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of research and development had been plowed into producing supersoldiers. There’d been years of rough drafts, failed attempts, trial and error.

Now their worst error, their roughest rough draft, their biggest failure had come back to devour them, suck their living brains and tear at their warm flesh.