Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance) (26 page)

Behind the door, he heard a wheeze and a whistling. Grabbing the handle and steeling himself for whatever was behind it, Eighty-Three, the one soldier who had come to his senses, could not possibly have been ready for what he saw.

*

C
laire and Fury instinctually grabbed for one another as they skidded to a halt at the end of the massive bridge crossing the river of sludge that flowed beneath them.

It wasn’t the river that stopped them, or the thought that they might end up in it should one of them make a bad jump – it was the screaming of an extremely heavy door opening on heavy-duty hinges. Looking up, Claire noted the crisscrossing mess of catwalks and overhangs.

“There must be twenty of those paths above us. What the hell was that?”

She and Fury exchanged a glance. A heavy footfall hit their ears, and then a laugh. Syrupy, sickening, phlegm-lined and whistling.

“Eckert.” Both Fury and Claire said at the same instant.

“He found him, I guess,” Fury said. “And as much as I want to go join in the fun, we have something to do.”

“Something more important than revenge?” Claire asked. “From you, that’s almost like me saying I found something more important than chocolate chip ice cream. Besides you I mean.”

“We save them first, and then we go find Eighty-Three and Eckert. He promised us he was sending us where we needed to go, didn’t he?”

Claire nodded. “Do you think he meant for us not to find Eckert? Do you think he meant for us to lose his trail? Or is it something else?”

Fury looked up in response to another howl, this one followed by a clanging sound that carried down the metal walls. “I think he was sending us to our clan mates. I think he also knew where he was going to find out his answers, but from the way he’s screaming up there, I don’t think he was exactly aware he’d find Eckert. Or maybe he did, it’s hard to tell with him.”

“Yeah,” Claire nodded. “But I don’t think he’s disappointed about it.”

“Come on,” Fury said, grabbing Claire’s hand. “Let’s go. Don’t make me throw you over this river.”

––––––––

W
hen they rounded the final slight turn in the catwalk and got a real good whiff of the river running underneath them, Claire just couldn’t help herself. She leaned over the railing and tried to take a look. It was too far down to see very clearly, but there was a slight glimmer of pink, like a hellish dose of Pepto-Bismol underneath their feet.

“This sure isn’t
A River Runs Through It
,” she hissed. “God almighty what is this stuff?”

“He said not to ask,” Fury cocked a smile. “And I think the river
is
running through it.”

She laughed and was momentarily taken by the sweetness of his face, the beauty of her mate’s mismatched eyes and the way her heart sang when he looked back. The look in his eyes said he couldn’t stand to be so near her and not touch her, feel her, take a fistful of her hair and smell it, and pull it, and...

Calm down there, Hoss,
she told herself.
River of slime first, massive rescue second, and then we can all curl up in a big furry pile and get to getting’.

That phrase – get to getting’ – reminded her of some of the only good times at home with her dad, before he and her mom went sour and things just turned into a big mess. Claire looked back at Fury, who was tensing, obviously ready for a leap across a big disgusting river, and lay one of her hands on his bare shoulder. “Can I ask you something?”

“I have no idea what this shit is, but I think I could take a few guesses.”

She smiled again, despite the musky, coppery, piquant, cloying sweetness of the slime below. “Not about that. I’m pretty happy not knowing when it comes to that stuff. I mean about us.”

“Oh,” he said, looking a bit like he was wondering if this was really the best time to have a heart-to-heart. “Yeah, sure. Although, should we maybe get this over with first? Those things are after us. Eighty-Three said they’d be coming, and I can hear the boots.”

“Are we... a family?” she asked, staring earnestly into his eyes. “You, me, Stone – are we the real thing?”

All of a sudden, the bear’s eyes narrowed. “I lived my whole life in this place. Thirty some-odd years of life, lived underground with nothing but artificial sun to warm me and lab synthesized food to eat. That water we fell in? The stuff with so little flavor that it was creepy? That’s all we drank.”

Claire swallowed hard. She could hear the soldiers coming closer. It wouldn’t be long before they were overwhelmed, and against an entire legion of those things, not even the four alphas would have much of a chance – much less one of them and a girl who had just figured out she had some bear in her a few weeks ago... and still didn’t know how, or why.

Undaunted, Fury continued. “We were tied up, beaten, injected with God-knows-what. And all for what? To test and make sure that whatever they were doing to our clan mates was safe to use on people. We didn’t shift, we couldn’t. They gave us some kind of drug that kept us in bear form. We had collars on, these shocking things that detected the nerve twinges of a shift and shocked us so hard that we fell unconscious.”

“Wait,” Claire said. “Did I see you up on my floor? Chasing mice around a lab?”

Fury cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t think so...”

“How the hell did you get the collars off? A shifter-controlling shock collar sounds like something that’d be pretty locked down.”

Those thick eyebrows knitted together. “You know,” he said, obviously thinking back. “I’m not... I don’t remember. All that comes to mind is seeing you in the doorway when you came in, and then I felt the burning in my chest. I thought for a second it was heartburn.”

He grinned in a safe, warm way that put a flutter in Claire’s stomach.

“Anyway, that’s all I remember. Waking up, seeing you, and being free. I remember shifting, and ripping into Eckert, but nothing else. So...”

Another howl from above shocked both of them back into action. “Do you think he had something to do with it?” Fury tilted his head upward toward where Eighty-Three was screeching like a banshee.

“I think we might have him to thank for more than just this little trip,” she said. “But if you weren’t upstairs, then you’re also not the only bears who got out that night.”

Fury stared at her for a moment, eyes a storm of green and gold. After he processed for a split-second that they might not be as alone as he thought, he turned back to the ladder. “I can barely see this thing.”

She took the hint. The time for wondering and thinking was over. It was time to jump.

“On three?” she asked.

The rhythmic pounding of jackboots was closer. Claire turned back toward the darkness and saw that it was only when the world was dark that the soldiers became as creepy as they possibly could. Their eyes – goggles glowed red in the darkness, no doubt to illuminate the world in infrared so they could see just as well in the dark as in the day.

“We’re gonna do this, and then we’re going up to help,” she said. “We have to help him find his answers.”

Fury nodded. “I wouldn’t let him down.”

“One,” Claire said under her breath.

“Wait, do we jump when you say three or do you say three and
then
we jump, like you’re really counting to four? One-two then jump on three, or—“

“You’re stalling. Two,” Claire couldn’t help but smile.

She wasn’t afraid. Not one bit. Never once in her life had she been anything but a semi-ambitious scientist who kinda hated working more than forty hours a week, but did it anyway. Now, here she was, about to make some ridiculous leap, and save a bunch of bears.

“I’m not stalling,” Fury said. “Three!”

Turns out, Claire meant count to three and then jump. Fury meant to jump on three.

She got a whole lot closer to that river than she ever wanted to get.

*

I
t only took fourteen kicks and one shoulder butt that clanged so loud in his digitally enhanced ears that Eighty-Three thought he was going to fall unconscious. When his brain rang with that metallic sound, he vaguely remembered being in a massive crowd and watching some very lithe, very skinny man shimmy back and forth behind a microphone.

His ears had rung then, but it was a different kind. There was a pleasing tune accompanying the dancing man. As he sat there, regaining his nerve – which is another way he knew he wasn’t a robot, or if he was, that the operation didn’t take fully – the first few bars of
Sympathy for the Devil
played in Eighty-Three’s brain. Then he began to recall the words, the poem that came behind the music.

He couldn’t place it, but at least today’s flash of memory was a pleasant one, and didn’t at all involve faceless men cutting into him and putting metal in his chest.

Eighty-Three’s finger joints whirred softly as he grasped the handle on the door, and squeezed. Once he reached the limit of his natural capacity to grip, the rotors in his hands took over. The steel bar dented slightly where each of his fingers were.

“Give me your hand!” he heard from down below. “I got you! Just swing the other one up!”

Oh no,
he thought.
I bet they jumped at different times. That’s always a problem. Just like with playing paper-rock-scissors.

The handle kept collapsing, but Eighty-Three paused at that second memory as well. Paper... rock... He looked down to find the first two fingers in his non-door-crushing hand were extended in a horizontal peace sign. He was ready to cut someone’s paper, should they be dumb enough to pick it.

He shook his head to clear his thoughts – robots didn’t need to do that.

“I got it!”

“Thank everything!” he heard Claire shout. “Remind me to ask him what my foot almost went into when we get out of here.”

The heart that Eighty-Three wouldn’t have had if he were actually a robot felt like it welled up. Moisture pooled in his one good eye and ran down his face before being automatically dried by the moisture stabilizing unit in his mask.
My friends are okay
, he thought.
Everything is going to work. We’re all going to be fine.

He realized, just then, that his enhanced fingers had just about made wadded up tinfoil out of the handle. He tried it once more.

It swung open, bending backward around hinges he’d mangled with his assault on the door.

Inside, there were lavish decorations – a large, and very soft rug only a few feet from where he stood. A panel of massive screens that tracked movement all around the installation. Above, a ceiling fan beat a slow whop-whop rhythm that reminded Four of the beat of a helicopter’s blades and, oddly, of the groove of another song that the skinny dancing man had sung.

Sparsely placed paintings lined the walls, and then, as his eyes fell on the mahogany desk, and the round, bald-headed man behind it, with his throat wrapped in a scarf, Eighty-Three felt a surge of hate in his throat. It tasted sour and sweet at the same time, but the more important thing is that it
tasted
.

He was regaining memories day by day, and now regaining
senses
?
Like real senses? Not digitally processed? Not run through computer filters? Not part of a complex neural network that connected me to a million others just the same? Real, honest-to-goodness senses. Human senses
.

Two clicking, squishing, and then scrunching over carpet steps toward the desk, toward Eckert, his creator, his condemner. Eighty-Three could already feel his fingers pushing into the flab around the man’s neck. He fantasized, momentarily, about the warmth as they sunk into the flesh, and the pleasure he knew he’d feel when Eckert’s eyes bulged in their sunken, watery sockets.

Eckert hadn’t moved – if he even could – he’d just been coolly regarding the new guest in his office with the detached fascination of a scientist watching an experiment.

An... experiment? Oh no
, a feeling of panic surged in Eighty-Three’s throat. The sour taste in his mouth was replaced with something bitter and awful.
Is this fear?

His heart beat faster, faster, faster still.

Beads of sweat popped up on his forehead, and were wicked away by the fans behind the mask.

Love, fear, hate, all in one day. What else was there to learn?

“Hum,” Eckert whispered. Eighty-Three drew closer. “You made it all the way here. That’s,” the man paused to hold something to his neck, which whistled as air rushed out, fluttering the scarf. “Not entirely my hypothesis. Interesting nonetheless.”

“What am I?” Eighty-Three heard himself say. His voice was distant, but he recognized it as his own. The lisp was there, after all.

Eckert continued to regard him coolly, scarf moving out, then in, sucking against the gap in his neck.

Eighty-Three took another step toward the desk. A great booming came from below, and then a crash. He tilted his head to listen for a moment, and sensed just the slightest tinge of upset in the beads of sweat that appeared on Eckert’s face, which in the light of his office looked to be about the same pale yellow color as old scrambled eggs.

“You’ll stop now,” Eckert said.

There was another pinching sensation in Eighty-Three’s chest, but that was all. His steps were heavier, but he was still taking them.

“I said you’ll stop.” Eckert’s voice was barely a whisper, but it was commanding nonetheless. He pulled some hand-held device out of the desk in front of him, pointed it at Eighty-Three, and pushed a button. “I said you’ll stop.”

“What am I?” Eighty-Three repeated. “Why am I the way I am?”

“I said you’ll stop!” the whisper got a bit ragged and irritated, but it was still a whisper. He pressed the button over and over, to no effect. “This isn’t possible,” Eckert was sweating more profusely, which was saying something. “Enough! You will follow commands once again.”

Eighty-Three laughed – a real one, not the static laden attempt at one he’d used for so long. He took another step forward, curled his fingers into fists, and leaned on the desk. His surprisingly dense frame caused the wood to creak as he did. Cocking his goggled face to one side, Eighty-Three studied the old scientist’s pale face. “Why did you do this to me?”