ruin his lab equipment. He was sitting in front of what looked like a very expensive microscope, and he had a tray with vials of my blood. As much as I wanted to make a point, I didn’t really want to get my blood drawn again because I destroyed the samples. Then again, I played shortstop, so I could probably nail him right in the head. Too risky.
Instead, I just pointed a pencil at him. Real threatening, Ariel.
“If any of you whip out your dicks in the Oval Office, I will smash them with Smurfette.”
“It’s hot when you threaten my cock, Ariel. Enough sexual banter. We do need to save the world. I know you want to see what’s on that flash drive.”
“Yeah, I do,” I said, cracking my knuckles.
Time to find out precisely what Doctor X was up to while I was in a coma.
Chapter 16
A
eron must have spent a lot of time in Doctor X’s bunker at that lab. Why hadn’t Aeron ever told me about him? If I had to guess, it was because he didn’t have the full story. He was at the lab looking for me, and he found it crawling with Rage Heads. He wouldn’t have sat there and asked him questions. He would have killed him, downloaded the data from his computers, and come to find me. He wouldn’t have looked at the data. He probably hadn’t even gotten the evil doctor’s name before he killed him. But he got everything off his computer because I had several flash drives laid out in front of me.
The first flash drive I looked at was his lab notes. I couldn’t even begin to understand what he was trying to do with my blood. His notes read like a movie villain monologue and some fraudulent motivational speaker who was really a dick in real life and had those enormous veneers on his teeth.
Whatever he was trying, he wasn’t succeeding, so his notes were pep talks and fucking blaming me for not being able to do it. It was somehow my fault as I lie there in a coma with my memories wiped, getting my blood taken without my consent, that it wasn’t cooperating with him. Asshole.
I wasn’t getting anywhere with his grandiose notes, nor did I have the patience to read any more of his long-winded rants about how amazing he was and that it was my blood that was the problem. Not only was it infuriating and made me want to set his pubic hair on fire, but I also wasn’t getting anywhere.
I tried another flash drive, but it was all scientific data about my blood which was way over my head and the experiments he was attempting to do. Leif might understand this information, but I didn’t.
All these flash drives looked exactly the same, and I had an idea. I got up and grabbed some medical tape from where Leif drew blood. I found one of his markers for labeling samples. I labeled the first drive I went through Super Villain Monologues. I just put Leif’s name on the second because he was the only one who would understand that shit.
I slid the next flash drive in, and that was when I hit the jackpot. I could just kiss Aeron. He downloaded all the emails between Doctor X and my father too. They were sent on an encrypted server, and luckily, it looked like Doctor X made no attempt to clean out his inbox. There were thousands of them—just the kind of evidence I needed.
I didn’t speak scientist, but I already knew from experience my father wouldn’t tolerate failure or some long-winded speech blaming others for it. I learned that pretty quickly living with him. I could remember that much.
It took some scrolling, but I got to the first email from Doctor X to my father.
“The sedation is holding, and everyone here still believes I’m working on a vaccine, but I can’t recreate the H2Z3 mutation without Patient Q’s blood. I only have a little bit of it. It’s enough to work with, but I’m not sure what you want me to do with her blood is entirely possible scientifically. It’s never been done before.”
I looked up. Leif was crouched over his table with a needle in his arm.
“What the fuck are you doing there, cowboy?”
“Comparing your blood to mine.”
“Doctor X was trying to do something to my blood to do something new with the Rage Mutation, but he only had limited supplies of