by Red, Lynn
“What did you say?” Rogue shouted back, raggedly ripping his voice from his pained throat. He dispatched another of the strange soldiers with a backhanded swipe as the two newcomers ripped one straight in two. “King!”
The last man standing, the one Rogue was relatively certain to be the first one he’d heard speak intoned another series of odd numbers, and then fired one single shot before the golden bear and the black one barreled into him. One hit high, one hit low, and the black-clad trooper hit the ground in a pile.
“I... I got to her in time,” the half-shifted alpha was rasping. “I’m hurt but... I’ll heal. She wouldn’t have.”
When next Rogue saw King, blood matted the decreasing hair on his rear shoulder. There was a terrible wound, but Rogue could tell with a glance that it wasn’t silver – it’d heal quickly. But still, with a fairly long journey ahead of them, it wasn’t the best idea to have one of the bears bleeding all over the place, growing weaker and weaker.
“Is that all of them?” It was an unfamiliar voice that struck Rogue’s ears. And it, too, was ragged with pain. “Where did they come from?”
The other stranger shook his head as he rushed to King’s side, bear-form shrinking away. “From the ground,” he said, but distractedly as he took the girl from the ground near where King knelt. “Claire?” he whispered, before kissing her gently and cradling her in his arms. “Claire? Answer me. Please!”
“I think... the noise, or the gunfire... something terrified her.” King was holding his shoulder as Rogue prepared a bandage of shredded cloth from one of the strange things lying on the ground. “She’s unharmed, but...”
“What did you do to her?” The newcomer snarled, backing away. “Who are you, anyway? Are you with them?”
“Did you see any of those turn into bears, by chance?” Rogue shot back. When he finished dressing the gaping hole in King’s shoulder, he turned his attention back to the new bears. “We were looking for you, which probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise.”
“You,” the charred-gray fur receded completely as the heretofore silent bear approached. “You’re... not like them.”
Rogue scoffed. “For one thing, I don’t bleed motor oil, or whatever is in my mouth. For a second, I’ve got a question. Does the name Draven ring any bells?”
An immediate look of either awe, or indigestion, came over both of the men. Both of them were also completely naked, which would give away that something wasn’t quite right, even if somehow, nothing else did.
“No,” the grim-faced bear holding the woman said. “Means nothing.” He shot a warning glare at the other, who was obviously looser with his tongue, as he’d already started to say yes. “We know nothing.”
Rogue rolled his eyes. “Looks like you’ve just met your spiritual ancestor, King,” Rogue said with one of his semi-obnoxious smirks.
For a long moment, the four bears regarded one another. The two new ones were clearly younger than Rogue and King, but from the looks on their faces, not by very much. At the least, their experiences had aged them; these were not men who had lived easy lives.
“Taken?” King said simply. “Hm, come closer.”
As though the two knew what they’d encountered, the man holding the limp woman – Claire – took a step forward. “Let me see your eyes.”
At first, the younger man narrowed his eyes, but then when King didn’t break the gaze, he relented. Something obviously crossed King’s mind, though he stayed silent. Rogue would know the look on his face anywhere. He’d noticed something. And if it had to do with the eyes...
Thinking quickly, and wanting to avoid any further trouble until they’d had a chance to get everyone patched up, Rogue threw a bundle to each of the new men, who caught them. “What’s this?” the slighter of the two asked. “Sleeping bag?”
Claire stirred in the man’s arms, blinking furiously and then wiping at her eyes. She looked from King to Rogue and then back to the man holding her, who gave her a surprisingly gentle look.
“Clothes. You’re going to need them unless you want people thinking you’re on some kind of weird naturist trip. Wait, you’re not, are you?”
“Naturist?” the serious one asked.
“Nature...” it was the first time Claire spoke. She was sucking wind, but the inhaler she puffed was starting to work. “Naturist, like a nudist. He’s making a joke. And holy shit there are four bear men. And a bunch of guns, and...”
That was about all Claire was willing to process just then, as she slumped back into his arms.
Rogue chuckled. “Guess that was a little bit of a shock. How did she—?”
“Long story,” the one holding her said, as he climbed from his knees to his feet. He placed her gently on the ground and took up the bundle, nodding to Rogue as he dressed. “I’ll tell it later. I’m Stone.”
“You don’t say,” Rogue quipped. King glared at him. “Sorry. And you?”
“Fury,” the other one said, buttoning the plaid, flannel shirt. There was ample room in the chest, which apparently fascinated him. “How did you know? Even the hospital gowns barely fit when they’d tie them.”
“Our mate is used to buying clothes for us,” King said in his deadpan that would impress Bob Newhart. “Big and Tall stores. Really good for bears.”
For a second, thick, almost impenetrable silence hung in the air. Then Fury laughed, followed by Rogue, and King. Stone tried it out, but it seemed as foreign to him as it was to King way back when.
“Follow us,” Rogue said, helping King to his feet. “We’ve arranged for a pick up. Or, not a pick-up, that wouldn’t make much sense. We’ve got someone coming to get us. We’ve got about four hours to make it a few miles. Even with gimpy here, we should be fine.” Rogue nodded to King.
Fury gave Rogue a clap on the shoulder.
This one. I can tell I like this one already.
And he was close enough to see the color of his eyes. Suddenly it struck Rogue what King had seen. One green, one gold. Could it really be possible? No... right? The mark of a Broken Pine alpha – multicolored eyes – could it possibly have been that these two recent escapees were alphas?
Rogue filed the thought in the back of his head with a shake. “We’ve got to get going. We also have a lot to talk about, but I think that can wait.”
“He’s Rogue,” King said. “And I’m King. You’re the first of our kind we didn’t raise. We’re the alphas.”
“Leave it to him to be as formal as possible,” Rogue said to Fury, who laughed under his breath. I really did know I liked this guy. “Good to meet you, on and on with the small talk. Let’s get the hell out of here before any more of those things decide to say hello. Oh, that reminds me.”
With a slightly comical spring in his step, Rogue sort of pranced back to one of the fallen troops, and snapped off one of the hands, then collected a mask. As it happened, there wasn’t much under the mask. But, he couldn’t be sure of anything. In a world where werebears applied for mortgages in Santa Barbara, a disappearing soldier wouldn’t be anywhere near the strangest thing to happen.
“We’ll need this to study. Best to know what we’re up against.”
“How will we find our way?” Stone asked, of course very serious. “The forest is so thick, and you have no map.”
“GPS, my friend,” Rogue said, whipping out a smart phone that he had just about gone into bankruptcy over. “Even out here, we’ll pick up some kind of signal. Wait, what are you looking at?”
King sighed heavily. “You really bought that?”
“Contract was up on the old one. Traded up. What? What’s the big deal?”
King grumbled something under his breath about materialism and greed, but just rolled his eyes again.
As King decried his sworn brother’s undying consumerism, the phone beeped a few times, and the new bears both stared at it in utter amazement. “It’s a map... that moves?”
“Tracks us. Satellites. Don’t worry, you’ll catch up. It
took us a while to get used to the world too.” Rogue smiled. “Or, really it took him a while. I’m a much quicker learner.”
But King was already gone, too far ahead to hear the snarky quip. Stone followed shortly after him, carrying Claire’s unconscious body. Rogue went to follow, to bring up the rear of the group, but Fury turned and stopped him with a huge hand on Rogue’s chest.
“I don’t know if you are who you say you are,” he said slowly, carefully. “But if you hurt him, or her, I’ll rip your fucking guts out.”
Rogue regarded him coolly, measuring this fire-spitting young bear. “I think you mean that,” he said after a pause. “Or at least, I think you think you mean that. I saw you fight. I like what I saw. But before you start talking a big game about ripping my guts out, why not—”
“Learn if I can trust you first?”
“Nah,” Rogue said with an easy grin and a laugh. “Just get to know me. After that, you might want to rip them out anyway, no matter what I’m lying or telling the truth about.”
Nodding, Fury turned back away from Rogue to follow the group, but this time it was Rogue who stopped him with a hand on the shoulder. “Listen,” he said. “We thought you were all dead. Or, well, I always thought you were dead. King kept believing that one day we’d somehow find all of the cubs and women that were taken. Do you know?”
“Know what? If there are others?” Fury swallowed, and then tightened his jaw. His gold eye, and his green one, flickered under the quicksilver moon. “Yeah. Yeah, they’re alive. But I’ve never seen them. They kept us in a box way underground. They didn’t do anything to us – any experiments I mean. The others though, I’m not sure.”
His cheek twitched—a sign of anger Rogue recognized easily enough, as he did the same thing. He patted the man on the shoulder. “Fury,” he said. “It’s nice to meet another Broken Pine bear. It’s really, really goddamn nice. And I promise that as long as I breathe, we’re not gonna stop looking. And I promise one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“The revenge I can see you burn to have? I won’t rest until you have that, either.”
-10-
“Life is just... funny sometimes. Not funny ha-ha, but funny weird.”
-Jill
“Is that them?” Jill craned her neck to try and see through the densely canopied forest, to no avail. “Or a squirrel? I can’t even tell out here. And in midnight darkness?” In the intervening hours, the pair had swapped out the Cessna for a helicopter suitable for two pilots and five passengers. Jacques, turned out, had connections everywhere.
With her face pressed against the glass on her door, she could hardly make anything out down below. She stood next, to see if she could do any better to look out the huge swinging door in the passenger area.
“Sit down, Miss Jilly, let me take care of finding the bears. We got heat sensors, you know, we got movement sensors, and if all else fails, which it might, we also got them getting to the extraction point on their own, a little bit behind schedule.” Behind the ancient, gold-rimmed aviators that were from some point in the early 90s Jill could see the vague twinkle of those ghostly-blue eyes. One corner of his mouth turned up in a grin.
“Ain’t the first time Rogue’s been late,” he added after a moment of silence, when he felt her tension begin to mount again.
Jill let out a puff of laughter. “No it most certainly is not,” she said with a smile. “Not at all. But it isn’t like him to do anything that would worry me. And this is certainly worrying me.”
Something in the pit of her stomach gnawed at her insides – but it wasn’t just nerves or anxiety. It felt like something real was eating her up from the inside out. “Hey Jacques?”
“Mon ami?” he broke out his smooth, swamp-borne patois.
“Something’s,” she trailed off, laying her hand on her gurgling stomach. “You ever get motion sick up here? All the lurching and the swinging and swaying?”
“I got some diazepam, but I’d not use that unless you were gettin’ the shakes. If you’re getting to where you feel all dizzy, put your head between your knees and hug ‘em.”
She tried it, and like he said, the sensation of the world spinning out of control stopped for a moment. “That’s so strange,” she said as she slowly lifted off her knees. “After all these years, why the hell would I just now start to get motion sick? I never even had a problem with those janky old rides at Disney World. You know, the ones with the chairs that jolt you all the hell over the place while you stare at a huge movie screen?”
Jacques sighed unhappily, and patted his own stomach. “Ce qui est celui-la?”
Jill stared at him for a second. “Too much French. I got ‘what is’ but after that Mrs. Grubble’s junior year French has exited my brain.”
“Too many bears to keep straight, I’m guessin’,” Jacques smiled. “Means ‘what is that one?’ I’m trying to think of the ride. Awful, horrible damn ol’ thing, the one where you’re in somebody’s, er, body, and—”
“Body Wars!” Jill shouted. “We must’a gone to the Mouse around the same time.”
With a mysterious look on his face, the pilot’s eyebrows lifted. “What if we was in the same room, rumblin’ around, everyone under the age of thirty screaming and lovin’ every second and—”
“Everyone over trying to keep themselves from heaving their Mickey-shaped ice cream treats?”
Jacques shook his head, smiling fondly. “Them were the days, mon ami, good days. Good days full of... okay, can I admit something to you? Somethin’ deep and personal?”
“This isn’t going to be one of those weird Taxicab Confessions kind of admissions is it?” Jill took on a deep voice and feigned a drunk slur. “One time, I tell you what I did. You wanna know? One time I found a hobo in the alley behind my house and paid him to do it with me.”
She was fairly proud of her imitation of a wildly drunk New Yorker on the old HBO series.
“Nothing so fun as that,” Jacques said. “No, I was the one yurking my little kid guts on them rides.” Somehow, his pleasant accent made his use of the world ‘yurk’ even sound a little sexy. “It’s why I became a pilot in the first place, to get over my fear of heights.”
“Is that them?” Jill arched her neck again to look at one of the ten screens above her head. “You became a pilot to get over heights? Seems extreme.”
He turned hard on the yoke, bringing the huge chopper in a slow, patient circle to see if, in fact, the five blips on the heat sensor were their quarry. “Well, that was one of the reasons. Money ain’t none too bad, either,” he said with a glitter in his eye.
“I’m glad you did,” she said. “Otherwise I’d be covered in... what’d you call it? Yurk? That’s them, isn’t it?”
“Thinkin’ it must be, unless there’s some other group of four giants with enough body heat to make them look like white splotches, and one littler one that seems to be either sleeping or unconscious.”
“Same thing, right?” Even as she spoke, a little surge crept through Jill. She shuddered silently thinking about their raw, animalistic heat that warmed her every night.
“Just depends on how it is you got there, I s’pose. Hold onto somethin’, we’re going down.”
She didn’t know how he did it. Flying the Cessna was one thing, but the way Jacques managed to weave the twenty foot chopper they picked up to fetch all the bears between pine spires, between massive oaks and firs, and somehow not hit anything at all blew her mind. She made a mental note to ask him how he was able to navigate those spaces at some point, although she wasn’t sure she’d like the answer, given how much experimentation and weird, comic book stuff she’d found out was reality.
“Nobody seems to mind that Captain America was made by drugging the shit out of someone,” she mumbled.
Jacques, apparently, heard because he cracked a smile, though he said nothing in response.
Claire strapped on a pair of heavy, awkward, black goggles that hummed and
whirred for a second before flooding her vision with green light that let her see. Sometimes she hated being the one normal human in a field of superheroes. Other times, like when she got to play with stuff like this? She didn’t mind so much.
“It’s them, right?” she whispered back to the pilot, who had stuck his head out the same side as hers. “We’re not walking into a trap? We may or may not have had this experience once before.”
She heard the click of a revolver’s cylinder rotate twice and then set into place, ready to fire. Then, she felt the rubber grip press into her palm, which she accepted. The warmth of the rubber, the heft of the metal, even though she wasn’t sure why she had a gun, it did make her feel a little more secure.
“Indiana Jones never travelled without insurance. Didn’t someone say that to me?” Jacques said with a grin, recalling what Jill said when she appeared with an enormous pistol the first time she met Rogue and King – it seemed like an eternity before, even though it was actually only six months, going on seven.
Suddenly, just as she was laughing and checking the pistol for its safety, the telltale sign of a beeping radio made Jill spin her head. “Hey, Miss Jilly?” Jacques called. “We got some company.”
“How?” she asked. “There were only the five of them. And anyway, I can’t see anything. Not out—”
A whoosh of air, blasting past Jill’s pants leg, interrupted her. She spun, catching only a glimpse of something puffy, something furry, something...
“Lupines,” she hissed, recalling the name that Rogue and King had used to describe the feral, savage werewolves that lived in their forests. “But they’re not on the radar?”
