Stoke the Flames (Revolution Inferno Book 2) by Natalie Sloan

Author:Natalie Sloan [Sloan, Natalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Whitley Cox
Published: 2023-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

Olia

“What do you mean, poison-dipped bullets?” I asked Maxxon, well, more like yelled at Maxxon as Alaric rumbled us down the road toward only God knew where. We probably should have swept the truck for trackers and scrambled them with our maybe-working scrambler, but we didn’t have time. I also still had a tracker in me somewhere, so at this point, what did it matter? Our number one concern at the moment was saving Cypher.

Maxxon’s lips were pressed together tight for a moment as we rolled Cypher over to his belly and I put a folded blanket under his head. “The government has been trying out these new bullets that are dipped in a neurotoxin. Even if the bullet doesn’t kill you, the paralysis and eventual shutting down of your nervous system will.”

My eyes nearly popped out of my head. “What?”

He retrieved a pair of long, pointy tweezers from the medical bag, and after wiping away a bunch of blood, slid the tweezers into the wound. He wiggled them around for a bit, then finally pulled them free with the bullet between them.

“The damage is done, though, isn’t it?” I asked.

He nodded.

I tried to swallow past the lump in my throat. “Is there an antidote?”

“Don’t really need an antidote for your enemies, do you, Red?” he said grimly, pulling some gauze out of the first aid kit and pushing it into the wound.

“You need it if your bullet goes wayward and you hit the wrong person.”

He seemed to mull over that response, then finally nodded. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Dude, if he dies, we die,” Alaric said from the front seat, panic infused in every syllable.

I did another buggy-eyed stare at Maxxon. “What did he just say?”

Maxxon’s broad shoulders slumped, and his mouth did this resigned-to-his-fate kind of ironic half-smile. I found it as annoying as I did cute. “We have kill switches tethered to our spines that activate when one of us dies. Only, if one of us dies—meaning our heart stops beating—it automatically activates the other two, killing all three of us. It was a way to keep us in check and comply with our commander. Keep one of us from going rogue or committing suicide.”

Alaric snorted from the front. “They wanted us all to be psychopaths, but at the end of the day, it’s our humanity and compassion that they rely on to keep us in line. Sick motherfuckers.”

Maxxon merely grunted. “It also means that they only have to kidnap and kill one of us to kill all of us. It’s why they’ll send me out on missions alone and keep my brothers home and know that I’ll return, because otherwise, they’ll kill my brothers.”

“That’s sick,” I said, reaching behind him to the base of his neck and feeling around. I couldn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. “Can we not remove them?”

He shook his head. “They’re tethered too permanently and perfectly to our spine. We risk being paralyzed from the neck down if we try to take them out.

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