Hunger Chronicles (Book 1): Life Bites (26 page)

I know the moment he wakes up. His shoulders tense, the muscles along his spine tightening and exaggerating the ridges that run parallel paths on either side of the bones. I have to drag my gaze away from this inadvertent, yet fascinating show of strength and back up toward his head. A head that is topped with slightly curly brown hair.

I can’t help the exclamation that comes from my mouth this time. “John?”

Naked guy shifts, pushing up off the floor until he’s sitting, his body turned half away from me. The lack of response has me grabbing for my knife, but then he twists his head, the evening light falling across John’s familiar, if a bit haggard, features.

“John.” It’s all I can say. This is an… interesting development.

“Hey.” He throws me a half- smile, but winces, eyes closing as he clamps his broad palms over the sides of his head.

I try valiantly not to stare at his rippling muscles. Fail. Even covered in dirt and crusty sweat, his body is superb. Far better than I thought; having only seen him in baggy cargo pants. Of course, the fact that he’s naked enough for me to study him like this drives home the fact that, “You’re a…”

“Werewolf, yeah,” he says, his hands still clamped like a vise around his temples.

A million questions pop into my head, like, say, how he became a werewolf? When? How many others are there? But he’s obviously in pain.

“You okay?” I ask, kneeling down cautiously beside him. Not sure if it’s the were thing making me inexplicably nervous, or the naked guy thing. John’s a were. A
naked
were.

“Just sore. The change isn’t kind at the best of times.” He drops his hands, draping his forearms over his knees and hiding the more…interesting…aspects of his naked self. I flush guiltily, dragging my gaze back to his face. He’s studying me intently, his gaze roaming over my blood caked shoulder that the black wolf had ripped into with its claws. “How about you? You okay?”

I reach up and swipe away the dried-on blood. Beneath the skin is creamy and smooth.

“You heal faster than a were.”

He sounds kind of jealous of this fact. I shrug, brushing off my right forearm as well. I did. As long as I’ve had enough blood. And last night I’d certainly gotten my quota. Too bad I’d lost so much of it during the wolf-zombie fight. A million more questions pop into my mind. Had John heard the fight when he came to my rescue? Had he, like me, been looking for a place to hole up and just happened upon us? And, more importantly, was that thing merely a sick wolf, or had it, too, been a werewolf?

“The wind seems to have let up,” John says. “We should probably try and make it back to the helicopter. They’ll be wanting to pick it up as soon as possible.”

I look around the cave, the rough walls and dim interior strangely homey. Even with the gluttony I’d partaken on, I wouldn’t have lasted the day outside. But John’s right, now it is time to leave. We have a lot of distance to cover between now and daybreak. My questions will have to wait.

I stare at his trembling hands, the sheen of sweat that has erupted over his body. Maybe it’s not me I should be worried about.

“You sure you’re up for a hike?” I ask.

“As if I have a choice.” He grunts, staggering to his feet. I immediately reach out to steady him, one hand falling on his arm, the other his ribs on his left side. The contact with his warm smooth flesh has me sucking in a breath, but I force my hands to remain.

This is John. Just because he’s naked and a were doesn’t mean he’s somehow changed overnight.

Okay, that’s stupid. He has in fact changed overnight. And back again. Point is he’s still John. There is just more to John than I ever thought.

“Over there.” He jerks his head toward the pool of water. “There is a slight depression on the other side. I stuffed my clothes and things in there.”

“Oh.”
Too bad.

I do a mental head smack. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. Walking naked through the desert during the cold night is not a good thing, no matter how much I may have enjoyed the view.

When I’m sure he’s not going to fall over if I let go, I hurry across the cave, skirting around the pool. Sure enough, there are John’s cargo pants, t-shirt, and boots stuffed into a dip on the other side. There is also his gun, though it has no magazine in it. I grab them up and head back to John, stopping briefly to grab my own tattered tank-top.

He takes his stuff from me with a thanks and begins to yank the clothes on. I try not to watch, concentrating on putting my arms into the proper holes of my tank—and let me just say there are a lot of them now.

I turn back to find him frowning down at his boots. He’s managed to get on all his clothes and stuff his feet into his boots, but he’s trembling even worse than before, and it’s obvious the thought of bending down to tie them up is discouraging.

I bend and start to work on the laces. “So, you didn’t go down into the bunkers, I take it. Not if you managed to find this cave in time to take your clothes off before the moon rose.”

“Of course not. I’m not suicidal.”

I don’t say anything as I tie off the second boot. I wonder if he knows that I almost did. Go into the bunkers, that is, not commit suicide. Even if the end result would have turned out the same, it’s not like it would have been a conscious decision. “Did you come back after you’d found the cave?”

“Back to the warehouse?”

“The bunker,” I correct him. “I found the access ladder to the tunnels blocked off. I wondered if you’d done that or someone else.”

“Must have been someone else. I was a bit preoccupied at the time.”

“With the impending change.”

“Yeah.”

I stand, planting my hands on my hips. “What did you do after?”

He turns his face away, as if he can’t bear looking at me.

I reach up, placing my fingers along his jaw. He allows me to turn his head back but I see the pain buried deep within them. “John?”

“I ran. As far and as fast as I could. And then I hunted.”

I furrow my brow in confusion. “Hunted what?”

“Sheep, actually.”

I feel the corner of my lip twitch. I figure he means the big horn sheep native to the desert mountains, but the image of the wolf hunting the sheep is too much. “Really, and was it yummy?”

“Damn it, Eva, it’s not funny.”

“Why not?”

“Because I ran! Don’t you see? You guys were in trouble and I had to run.”

His guilt hits me in the chest like a sledgehammer. Of course. Of course he’d see that as a failure. The silence stretches between us as I try to think of what to say. I can think of only one thing.

“You saved me.” It sounds almost like a question coming out, like you did save me, right? Or perhaps, more importantly, why did you save me?

He reaches up, his hand cupping mine along his chin. “I’m not going to ask what you were still doing here. When I was on the hunt I swear I saw the convoy truck hightailing it across the desert.” His eyes narrow. “That was them, right? They did make it out of there, didn’t they?”

“Yes. They’re all good.”

He takes a deep breath, dropping his hand. It seems the signal for me to drop mine too, so I do. He places his hands on his hips, staring down at me with disapproving eyes.

I know what he’s thinking, and fold my arms across my chest, glowering back. “You said you weren’t going to ask.”

“So why don’t you tell me instead.”

“Why should I?”

“Because you’re my teammate.”

“So?”

“And for me, my team is my pack.”

His words make my guts cramp. Eh tu, Johnné? It’s obvious what he’s saying between the lines. Does he honestly think I’m that self-serving? Does he think I might have abandoned the others when the going got too tough? Or worse, that I might have been attempting to take off for parts unknown so I could hook up with the very vampires that had attacked Nellis? These were the things I expected from Convict, not John.

I swallow, turning my face away. “And you need to be able to trust your pack. I get it.”

He grabs my arm, his grip firm, almost bruising. “No, I don’t think you do.”

I snap my head back, blinking up into his fuming face. I’d say he’s really angry, but again, the smell is not quite right. Something is going on here, something I don’t understand. He has that same intense look on his face as the day we sparred in the training room. As it was then, I’m not sure how to deal with it now. So I go for what I know best. Turn the tables.

“Did you have a pack besides your team?” I ask.

The question has him blinking in confusion. He answers, though I suspect it’s more an automatic response than that he’s on the same page with me regarding the subject change. “Kind of.”

“Kind of?”

He drops his hand, looking at the ceiling of the cave. Immediately his eyes widen.

“Shit. We’re wasting time.” He jerks his head toward the narrow tunnel that leads out of the cave, his mouth turned down in a grimace. “Come on, we can talk while we walk. We’re actually further from the helicopter than we were at the storage facility.”

And isn’t that just great. I follow him out of the cave. There’s a lot of grunting, groaning and swearing as he shoulders his way out, leaving behind a couple swaths of skin, but pretty soon we’re popping out into the fading evening light.

“This isn’t too bright for you, is it?” There is real concern in his voice.

“You made me walk for hours during the day thirty-six hours ago and you’re asking me this now?”

“Sorry about that. I was preoccupied at the time. And Brice was right, we needed to get the intel on Nellis back to base.”

I wave his apology off. “As long as the sun isn’t shining on me directly, I’ll be fine.”

“And if it does? What then?”

“It burns me like it would an albino on the beach. Plus any prolonged exposure will lead to severe dehydration.”

“That’s it?”

“Isn’t that bad enough?”

“I guess I expected a lot worse.”

“Like instantly turning into ash?”

“Something like that.”

I shake my head. “I would become comatose. After I’d gone through the dehydrated mummy stage, which, I’m told, is akin to walking through the fires of hell.”

“Okay, that does sound bad. Let’s try to avoid that.”

“Good idea.”

We take off down the same valley we’d killed the wolf-zombie in last night. The scavengers have already found it. Small rodents, large winged vultures. I avert my eyes and try to keep up with John. His comments about my superior healing ability aside, he seems to be making a rather remarkable recovery now.

“So, you were going to tell me about your pack,” I say as I scramble over another boulder.

He glances out the corner of his eye at me. “I told you, my team is my pack now.”

“And that’s it? No other pack? No pack before you joined up? What were you, born packless?”

He sighs. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

I wing my brow up in answer, a silent, “would you?” His answer must be no, he wouldn’t let it go, because the silence between us is not the tense I’m-not-going-to-tell-you silence, but the hold-on-while-I-gather-my-thoughts kind.

“First off, I wasn’t born a werewolf.”

I nod. I’d figured as much.

“It happened after the outbreak, but I guess to really understand you have to understand my before.” He glances over at me, his eyes narrowed as he considers me. “I told you how I was in BUDS training when the outbreak hit, right?”

“Yes. You said it was the same time as the stuff with the S-strain in San Francisco.”

“Exactly right. I guess I’m wrong, all you really need to know about before is that BUDS is intense. Your team, how well you work together, it’s the difference between your success or your failure. They are your brothers. Your thin thread on your sanity. They’re your life.”

“Wow, intense.”

“You have no idea.”

I curl my lip back. “And you tell me that a lot.”

“Sorry.” He shrugs, but I don’t feel like he’s sorry. I don’t say anything about it though because he goes on. “So here we are, going through BUDS and the whole zombie apocalypse is going down around us. Things were bad, then went to worse. We weren’t even done with the training when we were being yanked onto active duty. Normally SEALs work in small groups. But personnel was stretched beyond thin. It was just the four of us; me and my BUDS, our own little fire team. Of course, four seemed fine given how easy the mission sounded. All we had to do was extract a small group of survivors holed up on the top floor of one of the government buildings. We even had full air support.”

Easy, all we had to do. Yeah right. “Where?” I ask.

“San Francisco.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah. What we didn’t know was that some of the people we were retrieving had already been bitten, but weren’t showing signs yet. We loaded the first group on the helicopter. They took off and we headed back for more. Another helicopter was supposedly due to touch down in five. Then all hell broke loose over the com. Screaming, yelling, gunfire. The first helicopter went down, ball of flames. Control wouldn’t send in another. They’d already lost the high level official in the crash. And at that time they didn’t know what the S-strain was, ergo, they didn’t know the parameters of this new strain. Mission was compromised.”

“They left your team there to die?” All through his story my stomach has been sinking lower and lower, but now it turns into a ball of fiery fury.

His jaw tightens, the muscles bunching all the way down his neck and into his curled fists. “The official’s secretary was infected, had bitten one of my team. She acted afraid, remorseful. Stupid us figured she had just been scared and carried her out anyway. As per protocol, the wound was reported the moment we delivered her to the helicopter. When the helicopter went down two and two were put together and… well, let’s just say the guy in charge decided we were expendable. “What happened then?”

“We fought our way into a corner. Eventually we ran out of ammo and had to take to the ducts, finally reaching a room in the basement with a heavy metal door we could brace. Longest night of my life. We knew we couldn’t hope to make a break for it until day when the residents would go into slumber. Gary made it until three am. His last request was that we kill him quickly.”