Curve Effect (A BBW Box Set of Contemporary, Science Fiction and Paranormal Romances) (25 page)

"Not many traffic cameras in the boonies, and we’ve tried to stay out of the chains, and that’s a lot of territory to cover, Manito."

"Maximum rate of travel from the garage as a starting point...they’ve got algorithms for figuring that shit out. And the government bleeds computer processing power out its ass."

Cruz returned to biting at his nail.

"So we don’t agree to meet him?" There was an edge to Dominic’s voice that was like glass grinding down.

"We meet him, but he doesn't get to pick the location -- certainly not some place like Cedar City with probably less than thirty thousand. Did you tell him what direction we are coming from?"

Dominic snorted. "Like I’m that fucking stupid, Manito?"

"Then tell him we are coming in from the west, and I’ll meet him in Vegas."

Dominic sat up, put his feet on the floor and leaned across the gap between the beds. "What do you mean ‘you’ll’ meet him?"

"We’re not taking Tam in that close and they’ll sniff me out, anyway, right?"

Dom planted his face in his palms. "It’s not so noticeable now, but in the same building..."

"And you could just be getting use to it, too."

His hands still against his face, Dominic laughed. "Believe me, Manito. I’ve been living with that smell for six months. I knew the day you irrevocably fell in love with Tam, even if you didn’t. There’s no getting used to that odor."

Dominic looked up. "So, assuming we can convince Tam to let you out of her sight again, what’s the plan?"

Cruz eased away from Tamsyn, a deep whimper sounding in her throat, and reached across to grab the laptop. He took it to the table, carefully reattaching the air card. When it was running, he pulled up a map of the southwest.

"We tell him night after next, only let him think it will be the three of us." He pointed to a Nevada town just outside an Indian reservation and then Googled the location. "We’ve got plenty of traffic going in this way -- too much of an interstate crowd for anyone to try something. The two of you stay here...and if you have to," he pointed to the reservation itself, "you hike into here."

Dominic nodded. "Sovereign land, right. Harder for them to follow us. And you?"

Cruz had pulled up a bigger map for the area. "I get a ride from one of the truckers here into Vegas."

Dominic looked back to Tamsyn. "She’s going to be a hard sell."

Cruz got up, walked back to the bed and stood over Tamsyn, watching her. She was still in a deep sleep, had been the entire time. He could feel it each time she neared consciousness and sleep dragged her back.

"No, she won’t. You don’t tell her until I’m gone."

*****

"I can’t believe I slept so hard last night." Tamsyn handed the cabin keys back to the clerk in the rental office.

"We’ve got great beds," the woman answered, counting their room deposit back in twenties.

The woman had been reluctant to rent the cabin to them without a credit card or driver’s license until Tamsyn had started throwing around words like "graduate thesis," "social engineering," "feasibility study for living anonymously off the grid," and "would a five hundred dollar deposit work for you?"

The deposit, and agreeing to twice the going rate on the cabin, had clenched the deal.

A pebble hit the office window and the woman jumped. She rapped her knuckles on the glass and glared at two boys out in the parking lot. "Damn kids! I mean, we have a pool, playground, nature trails, and they gotta entertain themselves throwing rocks?"

"Great beds, my ass!" Cruz said once they were out of the office and heading toward the Ranchero. He rubbed his left butt cheek. "And I mean that literally."

"Yeah, but I didn’t want to hurt her -- ow, fuck!" Tamsyn’s left hand went flying to her face. She rubbed her cheek, her hand coming back with blood on it.

There was the scrabble of tennis shoes over gravel. One of the boys, his blond hair dusty from their rough play, paled. "Sorry, lady. Sorry."

Tamsyn grabbed Cruz’s collar before he could chase after them. "Chill, Medina. It’s not like they took an eye out or anything. And what did you plan, anyway? Opening a can of whoop ass on two ten-year-olds?"

"Uhm...march them back to their parents?" He answered and then grinned. "With a palm print on each of their butts?"

They were already at the Ranchero, Dom sitting in the passenger seat with the window rolled down.

"That’s what I would have done." He hooked a thumb at the steering wheel. "You drive, Cruz."

Cruz stopped Tamsyn before she could climb into the Ranchero’s cab. He reached behind the bench seat and grabbed the first aid kit. He took an alcohol swab out and wiped her cheek.

"Shit, that stings!"

"Don’t be a baby." He took some Neosporin out and dabbed it on the cut. "It’s a little too wide for a band-aid."

Watching her climb into the cab, Cruz gave her bottom a proprietary pat and grinned at her when she looked back.

"So where are we heading?" Tamsyn asked once the three of them were in the car.

"Vegas," Cruz answered.

"I thought we were trying to avoid big cities? Is that where Beemer wants us to meet him?"

Cruz had already run the lie through his head enough times it felt like the truth. "No, we’ll pick up a new ride. State’s got thirty-day private party registration rules on vehicle sales."

"And then what?"

"On to California, where we know a guy who can get us all new IDs." That much was true. They had been living in California, Dominic studying at Occidental, when Lyrra died. Only, back then, they had been Michael and Neil Perez.

"Wait." Tamsyn twisted to look at him. "So what is your real name?"

"It’s Cruz. We went back to our first names."

"And your last name?"

When Cruz just shrugged, she looked to Dominic.

"Don’t know it."

Tamsyn settled back into place and stared out the front window. "Shit, and I thought I had a crappy childhood."

Cruz and Dominic laughed in unison. "Tam, you did."

Twenty miles on, they ran into the first road construction warning.

"Well, at least it shouldn’t slow down to a crawl." Tamsyn turned and looked through the dusty rear window of the Ranchero’s camper shell. "We have grandma and grampa out in a station wagon older than I am." She turned back to the front windshield. "And a church van full of little kids. Not exactly hillbilly rush hour."

The windows on the van were up, but she could see the kids bouncing happily in their seats as they sang some go-to-church song. At least they have music, she thought, looking at the radio that was useless after Cruz had stripped some wires out to make the air card work. "Can we try to get something with a working CD player? Oh, and some CDs?"

"Sure." Cruz was driving at the construction zone's twenty-five mile an hour speed limit with white knuckles. A payloader, its bucket raised, was trying to merge onto the road ahead of them. The church van passed it, followed by the Ranchero.

"There go the grandparents," Tam said as the payloader pulled slowly in behind the Ranchero. "Jerk could have let them go by."

Cruz and Dominic were silent. The construction zone was in the middle of a road cut through a hundred or more feet of layered rock.

"Guys?"

Loose gravel covered the asphalt ahead of them. A dump truck, big enough to block both directions of traffic, started backing across the road in front of them. A flagman, big and blond with short cut hair, let the church van through before he swiveled his stop sign in the Ranchero’s direction.

Beyond the truck, half a dozen more men stood with shovels and picks. Like the flagman, they were tall, built.

Looking at them, Tamsyn tilted her head. "I know this is Utah, but do they really have to have an all white crew?"

Still silent, Cruz studied the road crew, too. White, built, and wearing jeans that hadn’t seen a minute’s worth of road work.

"Go through, Manito."

Cruz hit the gas pedal before Dominic finished his sentence. The Ranchero, with its rear wheel drive train, kicked up gravel behind them. They shot forward, sliding left. Cruz corrected, pressed the accelerator all the way down.

The flagman hurled his sign at the front window, its metal plate shattering the windshield. Three shots sounded. The first was from a rifle and took out the Ranchero’s right rear wheel. The Ranchero spun out of control clockwise, the rear of the vehicle slamming into the rock facing in time for them to see the payloader driver fire his gun twice into the station wagon.

Dominic shouted, "Out, now!"

Dominic and Cruz were shifting as they moved, their clothes ripping. They weren’t the only ones. The flagman, his coat a streak of brown and blond, slammed his claws through the Ranchero’s hood. He peeled it away, flung it behind him, and jumped onto the steaming engine block.

When a hairy, clawed hand reached through the driver’s side door to pull her out, Tamsyn screamed.

It’s okay, baby.

Another voice growled in her head.
NO IT’S NOT, BITCH!

Cruz launched himself at the flagman, three of his claws digging into the shifter’s chest and shredding the fur and skin. As Cruz fought the flagman, a second shifter landed on the Ranchero’s roof, crumpling it. He was tackled a heartbeat later by a shifter with the same shades of Cruz’s coat.

Dominic! Tamsyn hadn’t seen him in anything other than human form.

The Ranchero’s shell had been knocked off and the ground around her was littered with their gear. A can of bug spray rolled toward her and she scooped it up. The shifter that had landed on the roof had Dominic pinned, what was left of the flagpole in his hand and aimed at Dominic’s heart as blood bubbled from a deep gash in Dominic’s stomach.

"Hey, fucker!" Tamsyn shouted, her arm straight out with the can of spray.

The beast glanced her way a second too long. She pressed the spray nozzle, blinding the thing as Dominic rammed his claws through its throat with a straight hand chop to the neck. It fell to the side, lifeless.

Something slammed her against the rock face. She lifted her head, saw the flagman shifter standing over her.

CUNT! FUCKING CUNT! GONNA KILL YOU FOR THAT!

Cruz jumped onto the shifter’s back, his claws digging into its face before pulling to the sides. Beneath the snarling and howling, Tamsyn heard the running boot steps of the rest of the men on the road crew. Fully human, they ran with rifles raised, moving forward with tactical precision.

Dominic launched himself up from the ground, his stomach still bleeding. One of the rifles fired. In horror, Tamsyn watched Cruz leap from the flagman's back towards Dominic, saw him spin as the bullet meant for his brother tore into his side.

She screamed, stumbling toward the brothers, her right leg folding from where she’d been slammed into the rock wall.

"Cease fire! You’ll hit the female."

Through the chaos, an old man walked with a cane. He was tall and hunched over. He wore khakis, like he was on safari and the three of them were the game. When he reached Dominic, he raised the cane and pointed it at Dominic’s chest. Taser wires shot out, embedding themselves in Dominic’s chest as he fell to the ground.

As Dominic’s convulsions stopped, the old man kicked him once in the ribs. "Didn’t I say I’d meet you in Cedar City?"

The men moved in on Dominic and Cruz. Cruz, bleeding a thick trail, dragged himself along the ground, snarling as the old man turned toward Tamsyn and pulled a smaller Taser from his pocket.

She tried to scoot backwards, her right leg useless. "No, pl--"

*****

Tamsyn woke, her wrists and ankles fastened to a hospital bed with nylon restraints. Someone had dressed her in a hospital gown and covered her from the waist down with a light knit blanket.

"Awake, are we?"

She turned her head to the side to see the old man, this time wearing a white smock. He held an x-ray in one hand and gestured at her leg. He slid the x-ray into a light box. "I was sure it was broken, but apparently not."

With a sneer, he looked at the swell of her stomach. "All the padding on you, no doubt."

Ignoring him, she lifted her head. She was in an open med bay. The beds were spaced far apart, maybe six feet on each side, with curtains separating them. Directly opposite her bed was the flagman in human form. A metal cage, shaped like a globe, covered his ravaged face. A thin sheet covered his lower body but she could see that he was naked from the waist up and attached to the bed by metal cuffs on his wrists and ankles. The gash Cruz had torn through the man’s chest was nearly healed.

He was trying to stare her down, his chest rising and falling in angry pants. Inside her head, between his deep throated growls, she could hear him screaming at her.
REMEMBER ME, BITCH?

Next to her, the doctor chuckled. "Hamilton’s not too happy about Reggie dying. Afraid we had to muzzle him for our own protection -- and yours."