surprised Matt, who fell back and landed heavily, jarring his head against the booth’s wooden edge and triggering a ripple of commotion that startled the drinkers closest to him and pushed them back a step.
Matt straightened up, his head throbbing from the knock, and staggered to his feet in time to glimpse Bellinger disappearing into the crowd, rushing for the door.
He bolted after him, ducking into his wake, into the clear path that snaked through the drinkers all the way to the bar’s entrance.
He burst out onto the pavement and stopped in his tracks at the sight of Bellinger being manhandled by two bulky men and getting dragged into the back of a van.
Matt shouted, “Hey,” and charged at them, only his feet had barely left the ground when he felt something heavy slam into him from behind, catching him at the base of the neck and across his back, pounding the breath out of him and sending him flying face-first onto the snow-speckled pavement.
He landed badly, his right elbow taking the brunt of his weight and lighting up with pain, and before he could push himself back onto his feet, two sets of strong arms grabbed him, pinned his arms behind his back, and shoved him toward the van before throwing him in through its open doors.
He landed—hard—on the van’s ribbed, bare-metal floor, heard the van’s doors slam shut somewhere behind him, and felt his weight slide back as the van took off. Jarring images and sensations were coming at him thick and fast and assaulting him from all angles. Still facedown, one eye squashed against the floor, he heard muffled shouts and angled his head up to glimpse Bellinger, the two bulky men over him, and the vague outline of—that couldn’t be right—a woman with a shoulder-length bob, seemingly attractive, looking back from the driver’s seat, her head silhouetted against the van’s windshield, backlit by the streaming lights from beyond. One of the men was sitting on Bellinger’s back, pinning him down, one hand covering Bellinger’s mouth and blocking his screams of protest. The other was bent down beside them and loomed over Bellinger. He held something that looked like an oversized electric shaver in his hand.
A vaguely familiar high-pitched whine, something powering up, pricked the edge of Matt’s hearing, but in his frazzled state, he couldn’t quite place it. He turned, trying to shift himself over and onto his back, but one of the men who had grabbed him stomped down heavily on his back and sent him splattering against the van’s floor again. A jolt of nausea rushed through Matt as the whine reached a fevered pitch, and his muscles seized up as he realized what it was.
Straining to raise his head an inch, he caught sight of the second man bringing his hand down onto Bellinger and branding him with what Matt now realized was a pocket Taser. Bellinger screamed out in agony as a faint blue light flickered inside the van. A two-second burst was usually enough to bring a fit man down with major muscle spasms, three seconds was enough to turn most men into the sobbing equivalent of a fish flopping around on a dry dock. Bellinger’s hit lasted well over five seconds, and Matt knew what the effect on the scientist would be. He’d been at the receiving end of those prods. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, especially not when they were wielded by neolithic prison guards. His skin bristled at the memory, the buzzing noise dredging up the pain of what felt like thousands of needles being shoved simultaneously into every pore of his body.
The van made a left turn, the shift in momentum allowing Matt a brief respite from the weight pinning him down, and he spotted Bellinger’s tormentor finally putting down the Taser and bringing out something much smaller, something that glinted at him in the jagged lights cutting in and out of the van, a syringe, which he swiftly plunged into the stricken man’s back, just below the neck.
Bellinger’s flopping stopped.
“He’s done,” the man announced without a hint of exertion or discomfort in his voice, as if what he’d just accomplished was no more than a routine chore.
The bulldozer sitting on Matt asked, “What about this one?”
The man who’d dealt with Bellinger mulled the question for a moment. “Same deal,” he decided.
Not the answer Matt was hoping for. Then again, none of the likely answers held much appeal.