Trouble Bruin (7 page)

Chapter Thirteen

Charlie’s ears popped as the chopper climbed. Perhaps she should be nervous about flying after her recent brush with death, but she wasn’t. She had so many other worries tangling her guts into knots that she barely noticed her stomach lurching at the change in altitude.

She could probably persuade Dr. Atkins that she didn’t know his plans…because she didn’t. Not in detail. And she desperately needed to. Would she be given the access she’d need? Would she be capable of decoding the dense jargon if she was? Professor Stanhope tended to assume that everyone else was just as brilliant as he was, so most of his documents took a PhD and six months of study to decipher. She didn’t have that kind of time.

And that was her bigger problem. Judging by the speed with which Art had gone from tossing feral wolves around to being unable to support his own weight, she didn’t have much time at all. Maybe not enough. He might already be past the point where Starweed was enough to save him.

She forced down her worries. She couldn’t think like that.

Professor Stanhope was absorbed in his papers. Dr. Atkins was involved in some kind of loud, flamboyant conference call, and was studiously
not
looking at Charlie. She glanced across at the burly man sitting beside her. She wondered if she was supposed to confide in him, weep on his shoulder about everything she’d learned about Dr. Atkins’ megalomaniac streak so the CEO could shout “Aha!” and reveal that he’d been listening all along. If so, they should have picked a potential confidant who did a better impression of a human being.

She nudged him with her elbow. “You can relax, you know,” she said. “I’m reasonably unlikely to leap out of the window.”

He didn’t even spare her a glance, just kept staring straight ahead. “I’m here for your own protection, ma’am.”

“Well,” she conceded, “I can be kind of a klutz. I guess it’s always possible I might
fall
out.”

He unfolded his arms and refolded them the other way. The size of his biceps and his broad barrel chest made it an awkward maneuver. Was that the twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth?

She sighed. “Come on,” she said. “In the last few days I’ve crashed a plane, been attacked by werewolves and
completely
messed up my moisturizer regimen. You’re my first contact with civilization. At least make a little small-talk.”

And to her surprise, he did. His name was Gary, he was an ex-cop, and he made the world’s best eggplant parm, though he’d never had any luck growing his own. Too many garden pests.

Charlie was explaining that slugs and snails were total party animals and could easily be trapped in a glass of beer, when the sprawling, shiny, glass-and-chrome Dynamic Earth facility came into view. The buildings spun beneath them as the helicopter circled, and Charlie had the sensation of a gravitational vortex sucking her down.

They landed with the gentlest of bumps, the chopper’s skids kissing the ground. It was certainly a stark contrast to the last landing she’d made. And yet, when she unbuckled her seatbelt and climbed out, feeling the familiar asphalt beneath the soles of her shoes, their textbook-perfect landing at a corporate facility felt a great deal more dangerous than her headlong crash into lawless shifter territory.

Gary escorted her into the building, despite the fact that she knew the way, and she signed in at the front desk. A guy who could have been Gary’s clone waved a metal-detector rod over her to check for any weapons. It beeped when it passed over the underwire in her bra. The guard opened his mouth, but Charlie skewered him with a look that said, without a word being spoken, that he would not believe how rough the last few days had been, and how happy she’d be to share the pain. Gary gave the other guy the nod, and he waved them through.

The first step on her journey, to her profound relief, was a shower room. The staff here worked with all sorts of chemicals and radioactive materials, so the facility was set up with decontamination showers, isolation rooms for staff exposed to contagious pathogens – even a decompression chamber. More to the point, though, they also had the standard, old-fashioned soap-and-water type of shower. Sometimes there were harmless chemical spills in the labs, or tomato soup spills in the cafeteria, and when the lab rats had been working for thirty-six hours straight, things started to get a bit whiffy anyway.

She stripped off her clothes and stepped gratefully under the warm spray, lathering herself all over. Even the cheap, unscented, bulk-purchased soap supplied felt like decadent pampering. As she rinsed away the grime and the aching knots in her muscles, her mind drifted to Art. To the way he’d touched her. The way he’d gazed up at her, eyes clouded with lust as she’d straddled him. How he’d driven inside her, filling her, his strong body burnished by the firelight, his mouth moving on hers, his kiss like a drug.

A shiver of lust ran over her skin, followed by a wash of guilt as she thought of him crawling painfully through the dust.

Hold on, Art. Hold on.

When she emerged from the shower, she saw that someone had taken away her clothes – presumably for a much-needed laundering, or possibly a much-needed burning. In their place, they had left a white jumpsuit of the kind the lab rats wore as well as, thoughtfully, some plain white cotton underwear.

She dressed quickly, relishing the feel of clean clothes against her skin, and opened the shower room door to find Gary waiting for her.

“You look better,” he told her.

“You mean I smell better,” she replied.

“I’m sure you smelled fine.” Gary’s face remained completely expressionless.

Charlie snorted. “Horse manure,” she said.

“Oh, that’s what it was.”

Charlie looked at him in complete astonishment. “Gary, you have a sense of humor!” she exclaimed.

“That’s classified information, ma’am,” he deadpanned, leading her in the direction of Professor Stanhope’s lab.

Chapter Fourteen

The lab was a bustle of activity, with lab rats scurrying to and fro, squeaking with excitement as if they’d just learned how to solve a maze. Professor Stanhope was deep in conversation with one of the techs – Jeremy? Gerald? When he spotted Charlie, he beckoned her over, and she joined the huddle.

“Perhaps you’ll have some input on this,” he said to Charlie. He never addressed any of the scientists by name. Charlie wondered if he saw them as interchangeable. He was a polymath, brilliant in every discipline, and just assumed everyone else was too. Once she’d been doing a run for sandwiches for the lab rats and the mention of chicken salad had got her embroiled in a half-hour-long conversation on avian DNA sequencing. After that, she’d decided on the tuna fish.

“The Starweed serum is achieving permanent genetic alterations in the areas indicated by the resequencing,” he explained, and he actually bunched up his hands into small fists and shook them in triumph.

Then he frowned. “Unfortunately, there’s a thirty-five percent wastage rate. Our friend here thinks he might have solved the problem. Why don’t you let him run you through the formula changes while I check whether the ward sister’s ready for us?”

“The ward sister?” Charlie asked, but Professor Stanhope was already striding away. She turned to Jamie. Or Julian. “Please don’t run me through the formula. I won’t understand a word of it. In fact I barely understood a word of that. The Starweed serum’s working?”

Jiminy nodded. “Don’t worry – it’d take ages to explain all the chemistry, and I’m about to knock off for the day. Basically, we’ve achieved permanent increases in strength, stamina and healing ability. Single dose – no need for boosters or top-ups or repeat treatments. It’s a really exciting breakthrough.”

“And the wastage?”

“That’s the problem we’re working on now. In just over a third of test subjects, the changes are accompanied by massive increases in aggression, violence, hallucinations, bleeding on the brain, seizures and death. But hopefully we can get those numbers down. I think I might have cracked it with this newest batch.”

Charlie stared at him, horror creeping up her spine. “The wastage is
people
?” she said.

But he’d returned to his last experiment of the day, and as he carefully watched the bright blue fluid he was drawing into a pipette, he said, absentmindedly, “I don’t deal with the actual trials – I just send the serum in and get the data out.”

Charlie was dumbstruck. How could he not care what was being done with his research? Why hadn’t he made it his business to find out, to look beyond the narrow confines of his particular scientific specialty?

But then she realized she’d been guilty of exactly the same thing. She’d messed around happily in her greenhouses, tending to her Starweed seedlings. She’d flown out in her Cessna and gathered the wild-growing weed and brought it back to hand over to the lab rats or to hybridize with the laboratory-grown specimens…and she’d blithely accepted that what she was doing was going to help people, not harm them.

She’d thought she was going to be freeing bear shifters from the shackles of addiction – instead she was going to be helping to create super-soldiers. And if the serum wasn’t intended to cure the bears in the Badlands, what would happen to them when the Starweed was crop-dusted with the herbicide
she’d
helped to create? The same thing that was happening to Art right now. A slow, miserable death.

“I…I’m not a chemist,” she’d stammered that night by the light of burning Starweed. I don’t know…”

Art had leaned closer – close enough to kiss her. “Don’t you think you should
find out
?” he’d said.

And that was exactly what she intended to do.

“They’re ready for us in the critical care ward,” said Professor Stanhope. He didn’t offer any explanation, just began to walk away, expecting her to follow. That was like him – he was an absolutely brilliant man, but when it came to basic human interaction, he was a buffoon. For Professor Stanhope, small talk was a discussion about quantum particles. His funny little ways had their upside, though. Anyone else wouldn’t have been able to miss the sick fury she knew must be written all over her face, but he didn’t notice a thing.

“Why are we going to the critical care ward?” she asked as she trotted to catch up with him. She’d never been in the medical wing of the facility before. She knew Dynamic Earth did a lot of work with shifters with genetic disorders…

Ha. Yes. Like bears who are super-strong (and loyal and brave and kind…) but dependent on Starweed to survive.

“I’m afraid there’s been another attack by a berserker. Dr. Atkins has asked me to take you to see the young man. He’s being treated by our critical care personnel.” Professor Stanhope ushered her through a set of heavy double doors.

Every surface was spotlessly gleaming white, and it had the sterile, antiseptic smell of hospitals everywhere. Nurses in crepe-soled shoes moved soundlessly across the floors. Charlie couldn’t help but notice that most of them were large men whose biceps strained the sleeves of their scrubs and whose eyes were wary and alert. She had no doubt they were qualified – Dynamic Earth didn’t hire incompetents – she just wondered what
other
training they had. They didn’t look like they spent a lot of time kissing boo-boos and mopping fevered brows.

They came to a stop outside a closed door and Professor Stanhope fished in his pocket for his inhaler, rattled it, then took a deep, wheezing draft. Then he walked into the room, leaving Charlie to trail behind him.

Dr. Atkins was in deep, serious conversation with a nurse – this one female, plump, and pretty in a wholesome sort of way – she brought to mind gingham aprons and home-baked apple pie.
Stage dressing
, said the new, cynical part of Charlie. She didn’t like it – it didn’t feel like her – but she thought maybe she needed to listen to it.
Art
needed her to listen to it.

“Thank you, nurse,” said Dr. Atkins. “Remember – the best of care. Whatever he needs to help his recovery, Dynamic Earth will provide it. Expense is no object.” He turned his attention to Charlie and Professor Stanhope. “Thank you for coming,” he said gravely. “Charlotte, it’s important for you to see this, but please don’t stay too long. Rhys’s health is precarious. His parents are being flown in and we can only hope…” He shook his head, clapped Charlie on the shoulder in a fatherly way, and left.

The nurse finished checking a beeping readout on a high-tech looking machine, and followed him out.

Charlie turned her attention to the bed, where a young man lay unconscious, his thick lashes fluttering against his high cheekbones as if he were suffering a bad dream. A sandy scruff covered his strong jaw and his lips, though pale, were full. She thought that under other circumstances, he would be devastatingly handsome. But at the moment he just looked…broken.

Professor Stanhope picked up a clipboard from the end of the hospital bed and flipped through the thick sheaf of notes. “Fractured ribs, punctured lung, ruptured spleen,” he said. “Compound fractures to both legs, dislocated shoulder, spiral fracture to the left humerus. Subdural hematoma, multiple fractures to the skull… Even for a lion shifter…” He trailed off, not out of delicacy, but because there was no need for him to finish the sentence. They both knew this might be the kind of damage it was impossible to heal. Whoever had done this to him had broken damn near every bone in his body, then crushed his skull.

And it all just confirmed for Charlie, if she’d had any doubt left at all, that this was more stage-dressing. Poor Rhys’s injuries were real enough, but he wasn’t the victim of a berserker. That part was fake.

He
looked
like someone who’d been attacked by an enraged, drug-fueled psycho of a bear. And he was supposed to, to the layman. She thought about how the movies couldn’t film winter scenes when it was snowing, because the real snow didn’t
seem
real to audiences used to special effects. About how bottles and windows in movies were made of sugar, because the average man on the street didn’t have any instinctive understanding of how much damage glass could do to a human being’s skull. This was the same thing.

Rhys looked how the average human – even the average shifter – might
imagine
the victim of a savage attack by a deranged bear. But the truth was, he was in far too good shape. Oh, he was seriously hurt. Charlie really didn’t know whether he’d survive for long enough for his parents to see him. And lord knew the poor guy was injured enough – but not as injured as he would have been had someone like Art been trying to kill him in a drug-fueled fury. If a bear with the berserker strength and the blind rage of a drug high had wanted to pulverize Rhys, they’d have had to scrape him up and bring him back to the facility in a bucket.

Charlie looked at the broken young man for another long moment. Then she mentally steeled herself and said, “I need to talk to Dr. Atkins.”

Professor Stanhope nodded. “He’s waiting for you.”

She’d known he would be.