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Come to think of it, why did my men, my brothers, allow her to come with them to New Orleans? She’s what Raptor wanted in the first place! They could have gotten her killed, or worse, kidnapped and tortured.
And who the hell is this Stealth guy who towers over me and has hands bigger than baseball mitts? Where did the guys get a military grade chopper—yeah, I can tell what kind of chopper it is. I’m blind, not deaf. We never got our hands on anything that nice up in Montana.
I’m about to start demanding answers, but Doc puts an oxygen mask over my mouth and nose.
“Breathe normally!” He has to shout to be heard over the chopper and wind noise. “This is just to help clear out your lungs! The air in that cell was awful!” He’s not wrong.
The chopper banks, tilting me sideways.
“We’re headed to Baton Rouge!” Doc tells me. “We set up base at a hospital there! I’ll be able to clean these wounds! See what we’re working with!”
He already tried healing me. I felt his hands moving over my face in that cell. It didn’t work. When it comes to Gifts, I’m not sure the old adage of “try, try, again” applies.
In the two years since Week Zero, I’ve seen Doc heal some grisly wounds, but they’re always fresh ones. I’ve never seen him grow back a body part, but then, we haven’t any injuries serious enough for him to try. Thank God. I guess if one of us was going to find the limit of Doc’s Gift, I’m glad it was me and not one of my men.
Still. It sucks. Not only is this injury too severe for Doc to heal, but it’s too severe for medicine, too. I don’t care what kind of equipment Doc’s got in this Baton Rouge hospital, he’s not going to be able to get my sight back. Not with pills or lasers or surgery or Gifts. Lazarus made good and sure I’d be crippled for life.
The memory shudders through me. A sensation of a thousand hands holding me down. A complete inability to move. I couldn’t even scream. But I could feel. Oh, hell, could I feel.
White-hot, searing pain. The scent of burning flesh warred with the pain. I couldn’t scream on the outside, so it all funneled inward. Helplessness. Hopelessness. Fear. Not just for myself but for Cora.
Lazarus—not Raptor, who we’d mistakenly thought was the leader here—kept crowing about getting his hands on her. And once he did, he was going to do so many sick things to her. After what that piece of garbage Leon put her through, I knew for a fact she’d rather die than suffer at the hands of another abusive asshole. My only comfort was that he didn’t have her. Our stand at Eagle Peak worked.
But was anyone else hurt? Or worse?
A tingle of unease breaks through the memory. It begins in the base of my brain, in that lizard-primitive place where instinct doesn’t give a shit about conscious thought. I tilt my head, listening, but for what, I have no idea. In the minute that follows, the tingle grows into a steady itch.
Something’s wrong.
Evil.
Evil is coming.
It’s my Gift!
Or is it?
My eyes are gone, so my Gift has to be gone, too, right? I mean, there’s at least one unfamiliar man in this chopper—this Stealth guy—and I can’t get a read on him. To be fair, I haven’t tried, but—
The itch becomes a blaring alarm bell. A headache. A drive to act.
If this is some kind of phantom pain, like amputees get with a lost limb, it’s too intense to ignore.
I can’t help myself. I struggle against the bindings holding me to the stretcher.
Doc’s hands try holding me down, but I’m not having it.
Maybe this is a phantom of my lost Gift. Maybe I’m making a fool of myself reacting to nothing. But Cora’s in this chopper. Doc’s in this chopper. More of my brothers might be in this chopper. And Evil is on top of us.
With a firm push, I get Doc off me, and I grab at the bindings of the stretcher. The one on my hips gives under my scrabbling fingers, but I can’t find the clasp of the one across my chest.
Doc is yelling at me, but I’m immune to it. I’m being called on to end an unspeakable evil, and I won’t deny the call.
I remember my Damascus. I dropped it when the New Orleans crew flung that net over me, but Cora returned it to me. It’s strapped to my left forearm.
Quick as a snake, I draw my familiar hunting knife and slice through the strap. Then I’m lunging off the stretcher. My body knows what to do, even if I don’t have any visual sense of the space around me.
Blade out, I launch myself toward the place where that alarm bell is pointing me. The cargo door of the chopper. I’m probably going to die. I know this, and I don’t care. Because there’s an evil there that needs to be ended. It has no place in the new world, and as the Judge, it’s my duty to snuff it out.
