Chapter 15 - The Red Needle
"Make your choice, Mark," Richard said, cocking the hammer of the pistol with a crisp, mechanical click. "Set the boy on the table."
"Okay," I said, taking two slow, deliberate steps toward the glass table. "Just don't hurt him."
Elena smiled, leaning back against the couch cushions, tapping her fingers rhythmically against the iPad frame. "See? I told you he was predictable, Richard. He always folds when it comes to the boy."
I leaned down as if laying Toby onto the glass surface.
Instead, I ripped the red auto-injector from my jacket, dropped low, and drove the heavy needle straight through the leather of Richard’s handmade shoe, slamming the plunger down into the top of his foot.
The spring-loaded mechanism discharged with a violent hiss.
Richard let out a deafening roar of agony, stumbling backward, the gun discharging wild into the drywall ceiling.
"Shoot him!" Elena shrieked, scrambling off the couch.
The two armed guards raised their submachine guns, but before they could acquire their targets, the living room bay windows exploded inward in a shower of laminated safety glass.
Flashbang grenades detonated with blinding white fury and concussive thunder.
The shockwave knocked the guards off their feet, their weapons clattering across the hardwood.
State tactical officers flooded through the shattered windows, laser sights cutting through the smoke.
"Police! On the ground! Drop your weapons! Down!"
I shielded Toby with my body on the floor, my ears ringing with deafening static.
Through the haze, I saw Richard crawling toward the kitchen, screaming as his face and hands turned a violent, blotchy crimson, his veins swelling to the surface of his skin.
The red injector wasn't an immunosuppressant for a child.
It was a concentrated, lethal antagonist designed specifically for the adult carrier of the synthetic genome.
My mother had never designed that red vial for Toby.
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She had designed it for my father.
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