EverChange

Chapter 21

I touched my earrings, a small ache starting at the back of my head. 'Gidget?'

The noise on her end was static, and rolling waters. 'Hawthorne?'

'Yeah, Boss?' the man replied, his voice gravelly.

'How goes the recon?' I flipped through the tablet, and Gidget's icon was still there.

'Well... One sec.' Hawthorne said, and I looked at the medical information. I found Linden's information, and grit me teeth. They had him in isolation, anesthesia, and I kept scanning. I felt sick.

My palms were sweaty and clammy, and my heart was feeling tight in my chest. I paused at a medicine station, reaching for the cabinet. It was locked, and beeped in protest to my movement. I looked at the lock, and saw a blinking red light. I took out my badge, and slid it through the card reader. I grabbed two ampules and a handful of syringes.

I shoved them into my lab coat pockets, just as someone walked up to me. A man in a coat just like mine. We talked for a moment, swapped tablets then went on our separate ways.

'Hawthorne?'

'Gidget is offline.' he said, voice hard. 'They found her software and are trying to back track to locate the main hub.'

'What does that mean?' I hustled to the elevator, breaking into a light sprint while trying not to look too worried.

'Our time frame has been narrowed and we need to evac ASAP.' The man growled and I felt the agitation in the back of my head, and the metallic taste of anger on the roof of my mouth.

I used my card and was lowered into the basement of the hospital.

'Get as many people out as possible.' I said, words slipping out my mouth in a hushed tone. 'How many people did you all tag?'

The twenty-two other operatives named off high numbers well into the triple digits. Gidget had said there were only a few hundred people here.

'On my mark, we commence Operation: Shock and Awe.' I relayed to Hawthorne.

'Aye aye,' he said, '....Be careful Ma'am.'

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Linden was awake, the anesthesia worked to knock him out and dull the pain. Thing was, it was not the right medication. He was immune to certain pain killers. Specifically, things in the Dilaudid family. They did jack shit for him and he was sure that was exactly what they had given him in the IV solution. Thick salty tears fell from his eyes, his lips cracked and throat parched.

They were monsters. They had arrested, and taken in hundreds of people like him. Many of them were under the age of eighteen. They were as young as his sister Ro, and if they fought they were met with needles or electro-shock. One unlucky bastard was beaten into submission until a 'doctor' screamed at them to stop.

The guy's leg bent the wrong way and he spat blood complaining he couldn't breath.

So Liden lay still, waiting for something. He didn't know what, but he felt something was about to happen.

He would maim that red-headed bitch, and that blonde who had walked in. The thought of them had him gritting his teeth and fighting back a shift. The cuffs they slapped on him were little more than steel handcuffs, and he was sure if he changed, they would slice his hands off at the wrists. Even if he went in the opposite direction, and went for something small, barbs in the cuffs sprung out and would shred the nerves to hell. They hadn't done it before because he was in too much pain to move let alone shape shift into a giant tiger that--