Twist (Book 1): The Abnorm Chronicles-Twist (12 page)

Chapter
28

The edge of the hurricane hit the island, hurling sheets of rain and adding chaos to the end of the mission. The rain was so thick, Adam could barely see the surviving team members.

He
ran. His rifle was wrecked. The unseen shooter had struck his scope, then two more bullets had slammed into the stock and barrel of the weapon in rapid succession before he bolted. Ducking low, using the whipping fury of the storm for cover, Adam had pulled one of his service pistols and gripped it in his right hand. Every detail around him was in crystal-sharp clarity, expanding outward, granting him a detailed overview as if he were a one-man surveillance center. His gift was working overtime, doing things it had never done before.

Heart pounding, adrenalin surging, breath like a pumping engine, he ran.
Focused
.

As he sprinted down the
muddy street of Castro’s Academy toward the beach, he caught tiny reflections of the upcoming corners. In a flash, his mind’s eye filled in the streets he couldn’t see, sketching a full picture. Ahead, thirty feet to his left, one of the Cuban nationals was waiting.

As he hit the intersection, Adam dove and rolled, coming up in a crouch and firing two quick shots
from his service pistol. The man’s head jerked back as bullet impacted skull. Adam didn’t pause or wait, didn’t check the body, didn’t feel remorse. Rising from his crouch, he broke into a sprint again.

U
p ahead, the SEAL team was pinned down and in a lot of trouble. Cuban soldiers blocked them from getting through either intersection, increasing their fire, closing in.

Adam turned to the right,
getting behind the Cuban nationals. He had no plan, did not think ahead, but somehow his brain built an entire picture and sketched out a blueprint of what to do. His subconscious took over—his Brilliant subconscious.

Somehow
, his brain wasn’t just picking up details and filling in imagery from what he could see in the distance—it was as if he had manifested a second avatar of himself, a ghost-Adam standing there with them, an analytical one as well as a physical one.

As his virtual self ran toward the Cuban soldiers, like an invisible scout, he
took quick stock of the SEAL team’s situation. Only one of the five SEALs remained uninjured. Two were dead, and the other two wounded ones kept returning fire, but the enemy was closing in, working together, exhibiting excellent—unnatural—skills.

Even as the realization stuck him, Adam was not surprised.
It was obvious that the Cuban soldiers had numerous Brilliants among them. Probably trained at Castro’s Academy—the same facility that this mission was designed to destroy.

Finishing the two-block sprint, ghost-Adam disengaged from the SEAL team
and ran back toward the physical Adam. He knew the positions of every single Cuban soldier hemming in the SEALs. He didn’t bother to take cover or approach with stealth. The storm and the gunfire gave him all the cover he needed.

Adam
yanked his second service pistol out of its holster and charged directly through the intersection, plunging toward cover on the other side. He twisted his body to the left, aiming both pistols down the street toward the nationals. His shots were barely audible over the hurricane and the firefight. He would have only a few seconds before the enemy realized they were under fire from another side. The Brilliants among them would put together the pattern of his attack in a flash.

Adam
squeezed the trigger again and again, using his hypervision to spot a target, draw a perfectly clear trajectory that accounted for distance, caliber, and gale-force wind. Not a single one of his shots missed.

From the second he was exposed, though, the
Cuban soldiers began shooting at him as well. Chunks of loose asphalt spat up as bullets peppered the street around him. One lucky shot caught him in the right shoulder, but he ignored it. He could still use the arm.

A second shot
grazed his hip. One. Two. Three. Enemy soldiers fell to the street as Adam fired, never stopping his forward sprint.

Adam’s fingers twisted in the sheets. The nightmare again, every single time he tried to sleep. Grunting, he tried to fight the dream, knowing all the pieces, as if his nightmare vision had the same reach and perfect focus, even if it delivered the snapshots in a random order. He had assembled those experiences before, over and over.

Later, after the firefight. The raft rocked as Adam tried to push it out into the surf and away from the beach, but an angry sea fought back. He shoved the body of Sergeant Oswald onto the raft, rolling him over the soft black side. Just thirty seconds ago, the sergeant had been wounded but breathing; somewhere in the last fifty feet, though, another shot had killed him.

B
ut Adam wasn’t about to leave him behind. Too many SEALs were already back there, dead, abandoned.

More s
hots from the distant sharpshooter hammered the beach, and tiny geysers of bullet impacts spat up from the sand. But with the hurricane, the rain, the wind, the debris in the air, the shooter’s visibility was nil. But maybe a lucky shot . . .

“
Come
on
! We gotta go!” Squirrel yelled from inside the raft. She was the only other one still alive. Waves tossed and tugged them like a rottweiler with a rag doll. She had managed to bring two bodies with her.

Taking quick stock, Adam counted.
He and Squirrel alive, three dead SEALs in the raft. None of the other three snipers had made it—so, one missing SEAL and three missing snipers.

He
yelled as he dragged the sergeant’s body. “Any word on the others?”

Squirrel
shook her head. “We can’t take out the target. There’s no way we will survive if we retrieve the others. There’s no way to salvage this. It’s a cluster, all right.”

Adam
’s vision spiraled in and spiraled out. He stared back at the Playa Larga, turned, ready to hop back out of the raft. “Maybe not.”

Squirrel grabbed him by his uninjured shoulder.
“Lee, this is an order. Gotta go—now.” Somewhere in his foggy mind, Adam laughed. He outranked her, but she was trying to keep the two of them alive. “Command will have to come up with a Plan B, send in another team.”

Squirrel stood up to
tug the raft’s engine to life—and her back exploded outward, spraying Adam with blood that the hurricane rain washed away. Adam blinked as she collapsed in slow motion. He knew she’d been wearing thick body armor. The impacting bullet must have been at least a fifty-caliber armor-piercing explosive round.

He stared at
the crater that ran through her back and out her chest. How had anyone even seen her through the hurricane? How could any sniper have taken the shot?

Then he knew.
With his ability,
he
could have made the shot. It was another Brilliant.

Not giving his thoughts time or traction to strip away his courage,
Adam crouched and rolled Squirrel’s body aside as he fired up the engine. All he had to do was hit that button. The escape raft had an automatic guidance system—sophisticated black ops technology developed by Brilliant engineers—that would take them to the extraction point.

Sweat soaked through the sheets and blankets of Adam’s bed. His one arm thrashed, pushing against the mattress, rolling his dead-weight body around. Throat muscles clamped down on the primal scream he wanted to unleash, and all that came out was a whimper.

The hurricane lashed at the boat, fighting him as if it had taken sides. Staying low, Adam fought his way to the engine. With the roar of the storm and the angry surf, he couldn’t even tell if he was still under fire. He pulled Squirrel’s body away from the engine, grabbed the cord, and tugged.

His shoulder screamed with pain. He could feel the bullet digging in, but he ripped the cord again, trying to start the engine. Once the motor roared
to life, he could collapse, let the autoguidance systems take him away to the pickup point. With all that sophisticated tech on the raft, couldn’t they have installed an autostarting engine?

He pulled the cord again, but the
motor only coughed. The storm waves made the raft lurch up and down, nearly throwing Adam overboard. He clung, caught his breath, tossed his head to get spray out of his face, then pulled the cord again.

The sky was black overhead as the hurricane smashed clouds together. Freezing rain poured down.

Adam lay back staring up, aware of what he had to do. He couldn’t pull hard enough down here while lying on his belly. He needed to stand up, but he had seen what happened to Squirrel just a few moments before.

It was hard to muster the courage, but he had to stand
, knowing he would present a target to that deadly Brilliant shooter. It was the only way he could start the engine and get the raft away.

Adam rolled into a crouch, held the engine starter cord, then lurched up to give him
self the leverage he needed. He yanked on the rope with all his strength, and the raft’s engine turned over, roared to life. It was the sound of triumph.

He slammed his palm down on the navigation button,
then dove for cover—just as a flash of pain sliced across his neck, and then he didn’t feel anything at all.

Adam fought to control the dream. Every night he had to live this hell, every night the same result. The only difference was the journey, the order of events, but never the end result. Sometimes his mind showed him different pieces of what had happened on the mission. At some level, his dream-self was aware that this wasn’t reality, but that only served to amplify the experience—made it that much worse.

Back in time again, the beginning of the mission, all of them alive, enthused, determined.

“Yes, sir!” Adam stood at attention in the briefing room.

“Good,” Lieutenant Jenkins said. “The target is the Centro para el Desarrollo de Brillantes. It is the Cuban version of the Academy we send our Brilliants to, only much more militant. It’s Castro, so obviously, we don’t trust what he plans to do with his graduates.”

“I understand
, sir.”

The lieutenant paced
. “I cannot stress how important this is. One hundred percent of the targets must be eliminated. The Cuban Brilliant program must be shut down.”

“Understood, sir.”
He was one of the best snipers Special Forces had ever seen, thanks to his innate Brilliant skill. He would get the job done.

When Adam’s eyes jerked open, he felt wired, but at least this time his heart wasn’t racing. His sheets weren’t drenched with sweat. Something in him was changing. He lay back again and drifted into the clutch of the nightmare again. But on purpose. Living it all over. . . .

Inside the silent transport, the red light blinked green, and Squirrel leaped out of the open door. The light turned red again, and Adam hustled into position. The other snipers and the rest of the SEALs had already jumped into the night. He was the last one before Sergeant Oswald. Oswald stuck an unlit cigar in his mouth, a contraband Cuban cigar—for luck and for irony, he said. Grinning around the cigar, he slapped Adam on the shoulder, “Go get ‘em.”

The light went green
, and Adam jumped out into the void. In the dimness, he could barely make out the other parachutes descending in line below and behind him above the dark waters of the Bahia de Cochinos. He knew how important this mission was, and he was confident this special team would succeed.

They had been briefed on the
one-week operation. One week, then extraction. Adam was already thinking about what he would do when he got home and took some of the leave time he had coming. But he shelved those thoughts in the back of his mind. Mission first.

He pulled the ripcord
, his chute deployed and he drifted toward the isolated tropical island. Something gnawed at his gut—not fear, just worry. Anxiety. Pre-mission jitters, an imaginary suspicion that something was going to go wrong—or that something had already gone wrong, but they didn’t know it yet.

The nightmares insisted on haunting him with flashes of the jump, reminders of the moment that—if Adam had just spoken up about his premonition—he could have changed something. But he had been through it all an infinite number of times. Nothing could be changed.

And that finally
pushed Adam over the chasm into wakefulness. His eyes jerked open, and he found himself lying on damp sheets. With a sigh, he reached up to grab the triangle. His arm was trembling, but he steadied himself by pulling himself out of bed.

The nightmares
always made him feel so powerless, but over the past two days he had found a way to empower himself again. Once he managed to get back into his wheelchair, he quietly rolled out to the main room, angling toward the window.

It was the middle of the night.
Rodriguez was napping in Ingrid’s comfortable chair. Careful to not wake the detective, Adam took up his sentry position and stared out the window. He pressed his palm against the night-cool glass and looked out into the darkness.