The Whole Truth (The Supercharged Files Book 1) (31 page)

Rachel opened the pill bottle and
removed a thin purple square with her rubber-clad finger. “Hold her head
still,” she instructed Clint before she poked the paper at my lips.

When I refused to open my mouth,
she waved the paper enticingly. “It’s gra-ape.”

I tightened my jaw. Rachel tapped
me on the nose with the drug. “If you don’t take the amp, I’ll do an injection.
This is so much easier.”

The longer I resisted, the more
likely Samantha or Beau or somebody would find us. I fought, but between Clint
and Rachel, they pried my mouth open. She shoved the paper onto my tongue. When
I tried to spit, it had dissolved already.

“Swallow. If this is your first
amp, honey, you don’t want the injection,” Clint said.

Slimy grape coated my mouth like cheap
cough syrup. With rubbered fingers, Rachel pinched my lips shut. I could have
dribbled saliva out the corners, but I didn’t want her poking me with needles.
I swallowed. Then I nipped Rachel.

Rachel snatched her hand back and
glared at me. “That wasn’t nice!”

“Fuuu,” I said.

Clint patted my head. “Good
girl.” I wasn’t sure if he was complimenting me for taking the amp or biting
Rachel.

Herman rustled in his duffel bag
and withdrew several sets of bulky headphones, which he placed on the bale next
to his contraption. He snapped a set on.

“Cover up,” he yelled before he
flipped a switch on his supra burner.

A piercing, eyeball-splitting
whine shot through my skull. I sneezed.

“Jesus, Uncle Herman, give us a
minute.” Rachel yanked on her set before handing Lou hers. Herman grinned at
them both.

Clint stretched for his headgear,
one hand on my neck. He didn’t have enough reach and the earphones clunked to
the floor. Cursing, he bent to snatch them.

My torpor lifted even as my head
threatened to explode. I lurched forward, knees and palms absorbing the brunt
of my fall, and scrabbled for the exit. A sneeze nearly buckled me to the dirty
planking.

“Dammit, Clint!” Rachel tackled
me, clutching my lower legs. I kicked her in the gut. She rolled off with a
moan. This put her head within reach, so I let her have it, and I only held
back a little.

The wet cat maneuver was working.

As if in retaliation, pain
engorged my face and ears like the world’s worst sinus infection. My back teeth
throbbed. My vision blurred.

“You left the trap door open,”
Lou yelled at Clint. “Idiot!”

I rolled to the exit, took a deep
breath, and grabbed the first rung I could reach. Then I let myself slide.

My arms nearly wrenched out of
their sockets. Something may have popped, but I was moving too fast to dwell. I
banged into the ladder. A hand snatched at me from above, and my grip gave way.

I fell. My chin hit a rung, hard.
After another terrifying second, my feet nailed the floor.

Not being a cat or even
physically fit, I crumpled instantly, pain cycling between my head and my
ankles. My breath whumped out of me. I released it in a shriek I hoped to hell
was loud enough for somebody to hear.

As I screamed, I looked up. Clint
stared down at me with a grimace before he repeated my summersault, albeit more
adroitly.

“Fire! Murder!” I screeched.
“Help, Al, help!” I tried to crawl away but I didn’t get far. My palms and
knees were raw, and my skin tingled. I could feel the air on it. My hair hung
in my face in a tangled mess of straw and sweat.

“Cleo, honey, that’s a good way
to get yourself hurt.” Clint scooped me up. Where his bare skin grazed mine, it
was almost unbearable—hot, itchy, overly sensitive.

As soon as he was touching me,
the fight left my body and my vocal cords ceased to respond. My brain was still
feisty, but it hurt too much to concentrate.

“Is anything broken?” he asked in
a loud voice. He glanced at my knees. “You’re banged up.”

“Nuu.” I had no idea. My head
felt broken, but that’s what they wanted. To break me, to destroy me, for what?
To test some horrible machine? To train supra vigilantes? To force the supra
world to establish a police unit? I agreed we needed police. It didn’t seem
fair I had to sacrifice for the bad version of the greater good.

We needed police to protect us
from people like them.

My emotions swelled. A piteous
tear dribbled from the corner of my eye and tickled into my hair. I wanted to
scratch it, but my arms were boneless.

“Is Cleo close enough or do I
have to bring her up there?” Clint called up to the loft.

“What?” Herman peered down at us,
his head distending and retracting as my eyeballs pulsed.

Clint gestured to his headphones,
and Herman lifted one side. “Are we close enough down here?” Clint yelled
again.

Herman let his headgear snap back
into place, and in turn, Clint lifted one side of his. They were being so
careful, it’s like the sound waves splitting my head open were dangerous or
something. Ha.

“Bring her up,” Herman yelled.
“When I get sub woofers installed, we should get sixty feet, but right now you
need to be within fifteen.

No more, no more! No stroke, no
coma. No dying. Come on. Wasn’t I normal yet? So ironic normalcy had been my
dream for years and now it felt like the hugest forfeit I’d ever made in my
life.

“Are you going to cooperate?”
Clint asked me.

Well, duh. No.

Rachel clambered down. Between
the two of them, they got me into a fireman’s carry on Clint’s back. When my
head banged the ladder, I only knew because I heard the thunk. I hurt so much
it made no impact.

My skin blazed where Clint’s
hands touched me, like branding irons. I whimpered and tried to struggle.

“Not much longer,” he told me.
“With the right frequency, it goes quick. Lou will make you forget the pain.”

“She’s so little.” Rachel picked
up one of my arms. “Look at those tiny wrists. You know who she reminds me of
from this angle? Samantha. Something about her profile.”

Clint seemed to understand Rachel
without removing his headphones. “Shut up.” He shifted me toward his back and
approached the ladder.

I think I blacked out for a
minute. Next thing I knew, Rachel was cursing, and I heard a low, dangerous
voice order Clint to put me down. Was that...Beau? As my head bounced, I could
see several sets of feet. One set had on Samantha’s flip flops.

“We’ve got company!” Clint yelled,
backing toward the other side of the barn. Feet circled him.

“Herman, you old bugger, weren’t
you listening for prowlers?” I heard Lou screech. “Flip the machine to
broadband.”

“You told me the twins had it
covered,” Herman hollered back.

Static. Yelling. The intense
whine of the supra burner escalated. Several people cried out.

“What’s that horrible noise?” It
was Samantha’s voice. I guess she was wearing her own flip flips. “Knives in my
eardrums.”

“I’ve heard that before,” John’s
voice replied. John was involved too? Had they drawn him into the investigation
or just the rescue?

“Muuh,” I said cleverly. I swung
to the side and realized I was face to face with a cow, who’d wandered into a
stall to check out the action.

“Muuh,” the cow responded.

“I’m touching her skin, Sammie,”
Clint warned. “Back off.”

A scuffle of feet, and he danced
to one side, moving lightly even though he was carrying me. I couldn’t see the
cow anymore. One of his hands smacked the back of my bare thigh, which stung
like crap. Amazing that I could sense it above the pain in my head, but every
inch of my skin was tender. The amp or the situation? I pinched his arm, not as
hard as I wanted because my fingers had no strength.

“Don’t you hurt her!” I’d never
heard Samantha so pissed. Or so loud. Everyone was bellowing like bulls to get
through Clint’s headphones. “Dammit, Clint, what’s going on? Is this because I
broke up with you?”

“Samantha, the world doesn’t
revolve around you.” Rachel, to my right. I twisted. She appeared to be
handcuffed to the wall, and her headphones were gone. “Nobody had to get hurt
until you showed up.”

“You don’t have a chance,
McAdams,” a male voice gloated. At top volume, of course. “There’s no way you
can get away with this. You’ve got too many witnesses”

“Fuck you, Berkley,” Clint
snarled. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

A door near the back of the barn
opened, and Lou stepped through. She’d discarded her headphones but not her
venom. “Witnesses aren’t a problem.”

Her statement was menacing and
all, but the real question was, how the hell had she gotten downstairs?

“Lou!” Samantha’s shock turned
her statement into a wail. “No. I don’t believe it.”

“Keep them in the radius!” Herman
yelled down the hole. “We’ll get all those fuckers.”

“No, shut it off!” Rachel begged.
“I lost my headphones.”

Herman disappeared, but the whine
of the machine continued. If this rescue took too long, they’d all be affected.
Permanently.

Was it too late for me already?

Footsteps pounded, running up
behind us from the pasture. People or cows? Legs. Denim clad, behind a stall. A
man, and he looked tall. My vision tunneled before I could make out more
details.

Samantha kicked a bucket toward
somebody out of my line of vision. “John, behind you!”

A struggle. Fists thudded against
flesh. John, maybe Alex, defending my honor, and I didn’t even get to see. A
body thudded to the floor.

“Is Cleo all right?” John asked.
My best guess, they’d pummeled one of the twins. “Come on, McAdams, put her
down. There’s more of us than there are of you.”

“And I’ve got a taser,” Samantha
added happily.

“Hey, that’s mine!” Clint joggled
me, moving sideways. More cows entered the barn. But so had more people, with
the cows. Did I have double vision or were there multiple human legs? How many
conspirators had Lou sucked into this thing?

“Luuu,” I said. It didn’t sound
like, “Look out!” but it was the best I could do. My stomach churned with my
continued upendment. If the dribbles tickling my face were brain melt oozing
from my ears and nose, it wouldn’t surprise me. I had no idea how burned I was
at this point, but if my headache was anything to go by, I was grill bits.

I suddenly felt ashamed I’d been
shitty to Beau when he’d had his run-in with the evil machine. If he’d felt
like this, man, was I ever insensitive.

“Nice taser, Sammie. But I’ve got
a gun,” Lou said. “Now get in the tack room or I’ll shoot somebody.”

Samantha’s flip flops inched
toward Lou. “You won’t—”

The gun fired, and John cried
out.

“Juh!” I croaked.

Clint whipped me around. My head
swam like an eel. “Dammit, this wasn’t part of the deal, Lou. You can erase
what they remember, but you can’t erase a bullet hole.”

“I can’t believe you shot him!”
Samantha said. A garbage can clanged.

“I’m okay,” John gritted out.
From this angle, I could see him slumped against a silver trash can, clutching
his thigh. Blood trickled down his leg in rivulets. Samantha, beside him,
checked the wound.

Lou laughed, a hearty chuckle at
odds with the fact she’d just pegged somebody. “You’re the one who taught me to
shoot, Clint. You three, into the tack room. March!” she barked.

Three? I’d counted four, but I
hadn’t heard or seen Beau since the beginning of the scuffle. The two? four?
human legs clambered over the stall gate, and a deep, rumbly voice said, “Do
what the lady says.”

“You’re next, Berkley. I won’t
wing you,” Lou said. The bleat of the machine had risen so far it was close to
inaudible. Still painful. I hoped the higher frequency didn’t mean a coma was
imminent.

Samantha and Alex, supporting
John, marched. A door slammed.

“Somebody handcuffed me here, and
it wasn’t one of them.” Rachel’s voice was thin and shrill. She pressed a hand
to one ear, the other side of her head to her shoulder, and tugged at the
handcuffs to no avail. “Beau Walker, I think. Took my headphones. Tell Herman
to shut it off!”

“What?” Clint adjusted his
headgear.

Rachel repeated herself, and he
said, “I don’t see him. Can he—”

“Do what I do? Obviously. Can you
pick the lock on these handcuffs?”

“In a minute.” Clint hastened
across the room until his back, and me on it, was to the wall instead of a
stall. The second tall man remained next to Lou. “Can Walker shift what he’s
carrying? Can he hide anyone he’s with?”

“No idea. I warned you about him,”
Rachel said louder, to Lou, who was near my rescuers’ temporary prison. “He
shouldn’t have recovered. Herman’s machine doesn’t work.”

“User error, Rachel. Junior,
check your brother.” Lou slammed open the tack room. “Where’s Beau Walker?”

Samantha positioned herself in
the open doorway, her fingers plugged in her ears. “Did you say Walker? Last I
saw he was in the dunking booth.”

Over Samantha’s shoulder, I
blurrily noticed a second ladder inside the tack room, presumably to the loft.
So Lou didn’t have the power of teleportation. Thank God.

“Tell me the truth or I’ll blast
your foot.” Lou jabbed the gun.

“I am telling you the truth!” I
couldn’t see Sam’s face and might not have been able to detect a mask even if
she’d been lying.

“Don’t fire that gun again,”
Clint warned Lou. His shoulder bounced me as he adjusted his headphones. “You’ve
already screwed things up enough.”

“Quit bitching. I have a plan.”

“And what might that be?” Clint
asked.

I twisted so I could see better.
Dizziness whirled the scene like a merry-go-round, but at least I could check
out the faces of the speakers. Just in case.

“Arlin’s in it up to his
eyeballs.” Lou was not masked. “Everyone will assume his cover got blown and he
got shot.”