Chapter
46
SHIT.
Rogers slammed the white van into gear and drove off.
Luckily he had parked well away from the bar, and thus outside the perimeter the police had set up. He had managed to slip out the back of the bar before the police could get there.
Cops everywhere. People who had seen what he had done. Bodies all over the place. And the tall guy who had saved his ass?
John Puller. Army CID. Military cop.
Had his appearance merely been a coincidence, o
r had he fed Rogers a bunch of crap?
Yet Puller had saved his life.
Rogers wanted to go back and find out exactly who John Puller was and what he was doing here. Yet as more sirens filled the air he decided retreat was the better choice. He punched the gas and drove on.
He got to the motel, packed his few things, carried them out to the van, and drove off. His heart was racing so fast he thought it might explode.
He traced the scar on his head, pushing down hard where the thing was. He looked at his arm where he’d been wounded.
He’d lied to Puller. It was a bullet wound, not a blade. But it was in and out. He could feel no pain and he noted that it was already starting to heal.
He rubbed the thing in his head. He hated it, but he loved it for the things it could do like that.
I’m a science-fiction freak.
But with billions of dollars to burn through, even science fiction could become reality, however fleetingly, and with all sorts of side effects and adverse consequences.
Adverse consequences.
That’s how they had described it in the report. They hadn’t given him a copy. He’d stolen one.
And when they fully realized what they had created? How adverse the truly adverse could be?
He focused on the road up ahead. His short-term goal was to relocate somewhere. He couldn’t go back to the Grunt, but he had some money.
The next moment he had to pull off the road, slam the car into park, bend over the steering wheel, and throw up.
The pain seared through every one of his limbs. If ten was the top of the normal pain scale, this was a hundred.
Or a thousand.
Over the first twenty years it had happened only once a year.
When he’d been in prison over the last ten years the frequency had increased to once every six months.
But the thing was, the last time it had happened was less than a month ago. He’d been sitting in his cell staring at the wall. He didn’t know what time it was, only that it was somewhere in the stretch between late at night and the wavering darkness right before the dawn. It had taken all of his immense strength and self-control not to scream out loud.
He had gripped the bars of his cell and actually felt the metal begin to move a bit in his hands. He had immediately released them because the last thing he needed was the guards seeing that he was strong enough to actually damage the steel bars of his cage.
He had thrown himself down on the floor, gripped the concrete foundation that was his bed with a thin mattress thrown on top, and held on for dear life, his body curling into a fetal position in his silent agony.
He had emerged from that episode with every nerve in his body feeling like it was on fire.
Rogers did not feel pain. The thing in his head had taken care of that.
But this, this was beyond pain.
And he felt everything about it.
Ten minutes passed as his body convulsed without ceasing. Finally, he sat up and discovered that he had cracked the steering wheel in his hands.
He slumped back against the seat, his lungs heaving as he struggled to regain some sense of composure. But all the while he was thinking of only one thing.
Less than a month!
It had happened again in less than a month.
From year intervals, to six-month intervals, to less than thirty days.
What next? Weekly? Daily?
He touched his carotid and felt the blood racing through the vessel at a potentially lethal clip. He breathed in and out, deep, calming, settling.
Finally, he started to come out of it, his physiology going back to normal, or as normal as things got inside his skin.
He put the van in gear and awkwardly steered with the broken wheel. He would have to get some duct tape and fix that. There was some in the back of the van.
As he drove, his mind settled on another report, again one that he was not supposed to read but had. One line in particular had stood out to him.
The latest metrics strongly indicate that the underlying infrastructure does not appear to be sustainable long-term in a humanoid environment due to chemical, physiological, and biological incompatibilities.
Underlying infrastructure?
Sustainable in a humanoid environment?
Due to…?
“Fuck!”
He pulled off the road again and just sat there staring at his hands.
Infrastructure.
They were part of that.
He touched his arms and legs.
Them too.
His head.
Yep.
He knew exactly what that line of the report meant.
He was dying. It had been thirty years and the time was coming. Everything was accelerating. The piper needed to be paid. And he was the only one who could do it.
He was the dark side of Superman.
And his kryptonite was right inside him.
My kryptonite is me.
They had designed him to eventually detonate, spontaneously combust, fall apart, wither and dissolve. He didn’t know what it exactly would entail. And really didn’t give a shit.
The result is the same.
No more Paul Rogers.
It will be the end of me.
When the hand touched his shoulder he whirled and his fingers seized around the person’s neck.
It was Davis.
Rogers had rarely been more stunned in his life. Then he