Page 100 of Unnatural
He tripped and then pulled himself to his feet. He ran again, weaving through the forest he’d been left in alone.
Exhaustion quickly overcame him as he huffed and stumbled and tried to pull his body forward, but it was as if he were running through molasses. He let out an enraged grunt. Who haddareddo this to him?
The things behind him were crashing through the woods now, though he had the impression they were merely walking, footsteps heavy but unhurried as he struggled and sweated.
He tripped again, yelping, just as the first of them appeared through the trees, the others mere seconds behind. His monsters.Hiscreations. They surrounded him.
“Stop now!” he ordered.
They continued forward as though they didn’t recognize him at all.
“I demand you stop now. Do you know who I am?” he screeched.
There were eight of them, no, ten. All the ones who had survived the surgeries and were still alive, except Sam and Morana. He knew who they were, each one of them. He’d named them after all—after monsters and fiends. He’d opened them up with scalpels and saws. He’d administeredpharmaceuticals, both experimental and not. He’d charted and observed and compared and calculated data about their bodies and their minds. Hecontrolledthem. So why weren’t they listening? He looked from one face to the next, expressions blank. They had no emotions. He’d made sure they did not. All machine, no humanity left.
Again, they advanced, a few of them stretching their hands as they drew nearer. He shook with terror. Who knew better than he did what they were capable of?
“It was for the greater good,” he screamed. “You should be grateful to me. I made you! Stop now! Cease!”
A menacing growl. A grunt. He saw the savagery in their eyes. They meant to tear him apart with their bare hands.
“Please!” he begged. He put his palms together in the praying position, tears running down his face. But he had not taught these monsters about prayers or pleas.
A hand wrapped around his throat, squeezing, lifting him off the ground as though he weighed no more than a feather. He shuddered, a gargled cry coming from his throat as the rest of them descended.
“Make it quick,” he begged.
But they didn’t make it quick. They’d been ordered to drag it out for hours, and they were eager to oblige.
And when it was over, when their bloodlust had been satiated and the doctor was nothing but a pile of ruined flesh and broken bones, they too followed the final command they’d been given.
Chapter Forty-Six
The official story was that patient 1043, a male, and patient 1201, a female, both died on the rocky portion of shore ofthe Hudson River that day. The woman’s body had been recovered, though the man’s had been dragged into the water by the rising tide and likely swept into the ocean. They’d been thoroughly brainwashed, fed a lifetime of lies that led to the follow-through of that final command.
But before she’d died, patient 1201 had collected ten terabytes of classified files from Mercy Hospital for Children, working in conjunction with Tycor Labs, information that painted an appalling and gruesome picture of experimentation on the most helpless patients possible: indigent orphans. Abandoned by their parents, victimized, and horrendously abused by the state. They’d been used as science experiments to enrich others, their innocence exploited, their humanity disregarded.
Patient 1201 had forwarded the proof of the widespread corruption to media outlets both small and large, independent journalists, to the whole of Congress, among many others. Some might have ignored it or hidden the information ontheir own—after all, the corruption ran far deeper than anyone knew—but it had been too widely distributed for that. The genie was out of the bottle.
A genie that raised its trumpet and blasted the heinous tale of crimes against humanity.
A bevy of human rights lawyers had descended, offering their services pro bono to the remaining ADHM kids, of which there were far too few. A handful. Most had succumbed to the disease itself or more specifically the tumors it caused. Others had surely died of the medication or a diabolical mix of the two. Likely it would never be proven either way.
Tycor Labs negotiated a settlement with claimants, and then the company filed for bankruptcy, though the owners were still worth billions.
Autumn was asked to testify before Congress, and she did, but then she returned to her sleepy little town in the mountains, the one where the townspeople protected her from the news cameras that attempted to disrupt her requested privacy. And her grief.
It hadn’t only been doctors and pharmaceutical executives who’d known of the lies and abuses and done nothing, it’d been nurses and administrators, too afraid to put their careers or pensions on the line, too fearful to stand alone in the face of giants.
The extent of the experimentation done on the children later sent out into the world as hired assassins, false flag operators, and agents provocateurs was mostly kept classified. After all, the crimes they’d committed, though driven by years of mental, physical, and psychological torture, were only slowly being uncovered. Jak had been meant to be one of those assassins before his grandfather essentially endedthe experiment. Sam had not been so lucky. Neither had the rest of them, some of whom were surely still out there, doing their captors’ bidding and believing they worked toward some form of greater good they did not care about nor question.
While the global conversation regarding the ADHM babies and those who’d been falsely diagnosed as such mainly surrounded medical ethics and pharmaceutical corruption, the greater story, to Mark and the small group of men and women he worked with, was about the mastermind who continued to evade capture. Dr. Swift, who preyed on innocence and sniffed out other morally empty individuals looking to enrich themselves on the backs of children, remained at large. And with him, the names of those who were malevolent enough to purchase their services.
Autumn paid attention to some of the coverage, but mostly she didn’t. After all, she’d lived it. Instead, she focused on her patients, her family, her friends, and the small garden she’d planted at the back of her house.
Most mornings, she woke slowly, a memory, aknowing, skirting through the rooms of her mind, telling hersomethingwas wrong but not exactly what. An inborn coping mechanism, that brief delay. A biological kindness.Brace, it whispered.Brace.And then reality came flooding in, like the tide she imagined had delivered his body to the bottom of the ocean.
He was gone.
