Gideon

“He’s healing much faster. Look.” Dr. Edwin Lang, the man in charge, vibrated with excitement as he handed his assistant a long, thick needle. Lang gave the appearance of a man of science. Intelligent blue eyes blazed behind dark glasses. His short, black hair was threaded with silver, and he wore a collared shirt and slacks under his white coat. Professional, smart, and scary as hell because he looked normal.

His assistant, on the other hand… Duane Smith held the needle Lang had given him like a prized treasure. Smith seemed to worship the ground Lang walked on. He appeared to be in his mid to late thirties. Flat brown hair, flat brown eyes, average in every way, until one really looked at him and saw the crazy.

The hypodermic needle he held would have ripped through a regular person’s vein with ease. It was sharp and thicker than normal. Yet Smith had to work to pierce Gideon’s newly layered skin.

Gideon would have appreciated the epidermal armor they’d genetically mutated into him if it didn’t hurt so damn much when they tweaked him.

As it was, whatever they’d just injected him with made it suddenly hard to breathe. Fluid built up in his lungs and he coughed it out, unnerved to see a black, tar-like substance hit the floor while his lungs burned, starved for oxygen. Rumor had it the last guy to cough up the black stuff had died after turning into something…not quite right.

Freaked out but determined not to show it, Gideon held onto his sanity by a thread.

How had a simple no-holds-barred fight turned into a scene straight out of Frankenstein? And how long had he been here? Time in this horror show seemed endless. Had his friends cared that he’d disappeared? Were they in another room being tormented by other white coats?

He resisted the urge to give in to the pain and pass out. He wanted to strike back, to take out the half dozen assholes surrounding him. But strapped as he was to the upright table, he couldn’t do more than glare at the butchers bent on cutting him open. He did manage to contract the muscles in his arm to shove out one of the tubes. A weird ability he now possessed, to use his muscles to manipulate foreign objects in his body. He instinctively sensed what would harm him, yet it took a while for the toxins they injected him with to ooze out from his pores.

Freed from one of the tubes in his arm, his blood spattered in an arc over the coats and goggles of the two doctors conversing on his left. Everyone scrambled back while the tube danced around like a cobra about to strike. An alarm went off, loud and insistent.

He knew exposure to his fluids, when undergoing treatment, was a no-no, ever since the last assistant doused with a spray had convulsed and died within seconds of it hitting his eyes.

Gideon sneered at the scientists racing around, doing damage control. “You wanted my blood? You got it.”

The steel door hissed open, and two people in hazmat suits, accompanied by two more guards, entered.

Gideon’s brain clicked into high gear. Assess the threat. Find a vulnerability. Attack.

A feral, inner voice suggested he rip out some throats and strangle the enemy by their own intestines. Not that Gideon didn’t agree with the sentiment, but that beastly voice scared him. Because it wasn’t his.

Sweat poured down his face while the hazmat guys caught the tube and plugged it up before the blood bag it had been attached to fully drained. Gideon’s arm didn’t need any repairing, though. Thanks to these douches, he healed at a rapid rate.

“What now, sir?” Smith asked, his expression grim. He gave Gideon a look that promised retribution, and the sadist knew how to wield a knife. Though Gideon no longer scarred, it still hurt like a bitch when Smith carved into him.

The hazmat group soon left, but the extra guards remained behind. To Gideon’s aggravation, the one to worry about had joined the crew.

The thugs Dr. Lang called security came in one size—freakin’ large. Muscular, disciplined, and inured to screams and the sight of blood, the guards did nothing more than watch the proceedings with disinterest. The one and only time Gideon had torn a reaction out of them had been on his first escape attempt, when he’d managed to drag sharp fingernails over a guard’s face. Yeah, he now had retractable claws, because destroying him from the inside out was no fun if his changes weren’t visible.

The guard hadn’t recovered. His buddies had returned later that day and beaten Gideon almost to death, back before he’d grown such tough skin and dense bones.

The only reason he’d come out alive—the gray-eyed bastard currently staring at him. The one guy who hadn’t tried to hurt him. They called him Palmer. He was different from the others, an anomaly, hard to figure out. Gideon hated him on sight, especially because he’d swear he’d once caught a glimpse of compassion on the dude’s face.

Palmer, Lang, and Smith were all obstacles to overcome. The other scientists and guards didn’t worry him. He intuitively knew how to take them out of the equation. But those three would be a problem. Dr. Lang had a real boner for finding out what made Gideon tick. Smith, the sick perv, got off on doing as much damage as he could, and he’d taken a real interest in trying to break Gideon. But Palmer worried him the most, because Gideon couldn’t read him.

“Dr. Lang?” Smith asked again. “Would you like me to reattach the line? Or maybe up the dosage of the serum?”

“What is that shit?” Gideon asked, not surprised to hear himself slurring. His tongue felt thick, and his sharpened teeth kept scraping his gums and lips. He tasted copper almost all the time now, and he hated it…as much as some new part of him craved it.

Again with the inner monster. His heart raced, and fear blossomed from the seed rooted inside him.

As usual, when he hit rock bottom, Gideon felt Palmer’s dark gray gaze on him. He raised his head and glared at the fucker, only to see dispassion on the guy’s face, which irritated Gideon even more.

Dr. Lang frowned in thought. “Try the blowtorch.” Blowtorch? “In his current state, I think the new composition of his cells might react even better now.” Lang nodded to Smith, then to Gideon. “You’re a real standout, Gideon. Do you have any idea how quickly you’ve progressed in the short month you’ve been with us?”

That answered one question. Time had no meaning in this place…wherever “this place” was. He had a feeling they’d left Philadelphia far behind.

“Where are the others?” Maybe if he kept them talking, they’d forget about taking a fucking blowtorch to his body. And maybe they’d finally tell him what had happened to his friends, because he had no memory of anything past getting dizzy in the middle of the fight, then this.

He didn’t expect an answer. He hadn’t gotten one since arriving. But Lang surprised him. “Your friends didn’t do as well with their injections.” Shit. They have Ollie and Rod. “Unfortunately, we had to dispose of them.”

Gideon felt his stomach drop.