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

by Red, Lynn

  “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.

  *

  It 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?”

  “Because I was paid to,” Eckert hissed. His fear was turning to anger – a response Eighty-Three recognized from earlier. “But then once I started to turn out hundreds of you, and then thousands, I started to enjoy the screams I heard from the cages. I started to love the feeling of power I had when,” he put his hand to his neck, sucking another breath. “When I made more of you. And now, I’m the one with the power. Mr. Alastair has nowhere near the power I have.”

  Eighty-Three leaned closer and sucked through his nostrils. He smelled copper – he smelled fear. Eckert was hiding it, but there was plenty of fear on the air. “What am I?” he asked again. “Where did I come from?”

  “You?” Eckert asked, curling his thin, pale pink lips into a grotesque smile. “There’s no telling. Some of you were prisoners, some of you were indigents who died and I got the body warm enough to work with. Some of you sold yourself to me, and some of you... well, some of you other people sold. Angry wives, children who had nowhere to go, nothing to eat. I only need a few parts these days. A couple of parts of brain, a spine, some nerves. Past that, it doesn’t matter much.”

  Eighty-Three shook his head. “Eighty-Three. Who am I?”

  Eckert shrugged again, as best he could. “What do I care? You can’t hurt me, you’re still connected to the network. All I have to do is flip this switch and you’re helpless again.”

  “Who am I?” Eighty-Three’s hand went to Eckert’s neck. The fingers sinking in felt every bit as good as he thought they would.

  Eckert’s eyes began to bulg
e.

  Just like he thought. “Who am I?” Eighty-Three hissed again. From below, he heard Fury and Claire shouting – he thought in battle. And suddenly, he didn’t much care who he’d been before. At least, not as much as he cared about who he was right then.

  He squeezed harder. Eckert’s eyes bulged a little more, and began to go from jaundiced to pink around the edges. “Turn off the network,” Eighty-Three said. “The whole thing. Or I crush whatever is left of your throat.”

  Fingers clamped. Rotors in his knuckles began to whir.

  “There are files,” Eckert croaked. “I can find out... what you... want to know.”

  Thinking about this proposition for a moment, Eighty-Three squeezed harder. “I want you to let those bears go. Open the cages, turn off the network.”

  “Turn off the...” Eckert whistle-croaked. “You’re crazy, I... I can’t breathe, let me breathe!”

  Eighty-Three uncurled his fingers slightly, letting the man breathe.

  “I can’t turn off the network, if I do that, they’ll all go insane! They’ll tear this place apart!”

  Dispassionately, Eighty-Three tightened his hand. “Who am I?”

  “You’re a special one,” Eckert admitted, tongue hanging out one drooping corner of his mouth. “You weren’t like the rest.”

  “Meaning?”

  Down below there was another crash, more roaring. Someone was getting torn up, and it didn’t sound like it was Claire and Fury on the losing end. Eckert fumbled with something on the underside of his desk, and instantly, Eighty-Three shoved him backwards, rolling him away from whatever he was diddling. With one arm, the black-clad man tipped the huge desk and flipped it over. Eckert squealed as wires snapped.

  “What did you do?” the sweating scientist blubbered. “You broke the connection, you—“

  “I can fix it,” Eighty-Three said. “But not unless you tell me who I am.”

  Eckert sighed, or more accurately, whistled in irritation. “Dr. James Thurston. Harvard neuroscientist. You invented the method by which all of these beautiful creatures were made. You were burned in a lab fire fifteen years ago, and willed your body to us. Somehow, your brain, your heart, and about half of your liver were still functioning when they came to us. Your wife and kid are out there somewhere, but I don’t’ know anything about them. Didn’t need to. Is that enough?”

  Nodding slowly, it all started to make sense. The memories, the understanding of the neural network, the way he calculated every single action he made, and why he knew so much about the compound and everything else. “I... made myself.”

  “Machines made you,” Eckert sneered. “You just came up with the method.”

  “I,” Eighty-Three... no, James, said. “I did this? All of this?”

  “You were the third one made. The point of your donation was so that no one else had to be experimented on until the results were known. Martyr to your own god.”

  “I’d really like to choke you to death,” James whispered.

  “You used a contraction? That’s interesting, I—“

  James squelched the doctor with another squeeze. With the next breath, he lifted him out of the chair and stared into his eyes for a long second. “I don’t think I’ll turn that back on.”

  “You... you can’t! Everything will be ruined – me, GlasCorp’s plans for the future, you can’t just let the whole thing burn out of some sense of childish vengeance!”

  “Watch me.”

  James dropped Eckert, who plopped to the ground with a slick, wet thud.

  As his former experiment turned on his heel and strode confidently out the door from which he came, Dr. Eckert wailed, then coughed, then whistled, and then collapsed into a sweaty, heaving, yellow heap. As his heavy, watery eyes began to fall closed, he saw that bastard, that rogue experiment he never should have allowed, and he watched the creature stalk back from the door into his office.

  He crouched and effortlessly punched a hole in the top of the desk, and fetched something from inside. Eckert burbled something that he meant to be “what the hell are you doing?” but came out more like a dying catfish trying to bark at the fisherman who caught it.

  “James Thurston,” it said. “Someday maybe I’ll be James again. But for now? I think I’m fine with Eighty-Three.”

  The static-laden voice from the respirator came again, but this time, it was a laugh. A real one – an honest, human laugh. And that’s when Eckert realized what the idiot had taken. He had the failsafe. In his idiot, robotic hand, was an electromagnetic bomb strong enough to fry every circuit in the entire compound, should he use it.

  “You’ll die... too,” the toad-like scientist croaked.

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Whistling, Eighty-Three tossed the orb up in the air, catching it like someone playing idly with a baseball. “We shall see, old friend. We shall see.”

  -24-

  “I can’t believe it’s all over. I really, really can’t.”

  -Claire

  “That got out of hand quickly.” Claire dodged around yet another lumbering automaton. “At least they’re moving slow, for whatever reason.”

  “It probably has something to do with our buddy upstairs!” Fury shouted back, clearing three of them from his path with a sweep of his paw. “But this place is heating up. We gotta get out of here!”

  “Not before we find the rest of the bears.”

  “Us,” Fury corrected her. “The rest of us.”

  God, he’s right, isn’t he? Somehow, someway, I am one of them. When the hell did that happen? How the hell did it happen?

  It didn’t matter though, in the end, the way it happened was just another detail in a long line of them. She didn’t care, not really, though she was curious, that’s all it was. She belonged, for the first time in her life, she really belonged. It didn’t matter that it was with a bunch of ancient werebears, she was a part of something bigger.

  Overhead, a handful of fire sprinklers engaged and soaked the area below them. Droplets of water refracting the spider’s web of security lasers crisscrossing the whole place only a couple of feet above their heads. The water slowed the soldiers’ movements even more than they already were, and the blaring, violently loud alarm sent waves of nausea through Claire’s belly with every pulse of sound.

  “Where are they?” she called out.

  Fury was running along the wall of the enormous steel and concrete room in front of her, knocking on walls in between knocking off soldiers. “They’re close! I can feel Stone’s energy. Can’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Claire called back, her entire person soaked through with the water that kept spraying out of the ceiling as the alarms blared louder and louder. Voices were coming through the speakers, but it was only a static rendition of those long series of disjointed, nonsense numbers. Orders to a legion who took them no other way, instructions to an army of mindless creatures intent on nothing but following orders.

  Except, there was one of them moving in a different way from all the rest. The slower, the more plodding, the movements of the others became, the closer one of them drew.

  “Claire!” it shouted. “Fury! They’re waiting!”

  “Eighty-Three?” she clucked, whirling around. “Is that you?”

  “My name turns out to be James, and I almost choked Eckert to death, but left him on the floor.”

  “More for me,” Fury said with a growl in his throat. “What the hell’s wrong with the robots though?”

  “I shut off the network. That would be the alarms and the sprinklers and everything else. I got through to Rogue on the way down here – they’re circling a field two miles from here. All we have to do is get your friends and get out.”

  Something rumbled deep under the earth, what felt like miles below their feet. Like the earth rolling over in its sleep, the cracking, grumbling groan went back and forth twice, and then settled again.

  That’s when the first scream caught their ears.

 
; “That wasn’t a soldier,” Claire said. “It was coming from inside the wall.”

  When she looked back to Fury, she saw a look of confused agony on his beautiful face. She saw him with his eyes closed, his lips pulled up into a snarl. He was fighting back tears he didn’t know he was going to shed.

  “It’s them, Claire,” he said in something approaching a whisper. “All these years, and we’re this fucking close and all I can see is blank wall.”

  “That’s because you can’t see what I can see. This is the holding cell. We blow this room, break the circuits that control it, and this place will be crawling with bears before you can say... well, pretend I said some witty bear pun.”

  “But how could we do that?”

  Eighty-Three tossed the baseball sized orb up, and caught it with a swift pass of his arm. “This EMP will blow every fuse in the place. Every shred of electronics will be fried to a crisp. About five minutes after that, the whole building will go up in a fireball.”

  “What’ll happen to all of them?” Claire asked.

  “They’ll probably be either freed from the network permanently, or...”

  “What are they?” Fury asked.

  Eighty-Three shook his head. “No time for explanations. The summation is that some of them – of us – have more human parts than machine. That segment will probably be fine. Those with more electronics than human bits will cease to function.”

  Claire and Fury both exchanged a worried look.

  “I know what you’re thinking. Not literally, I’m saying I can guess. They won’t die – they aren’t really alive in the first place. Those who can be conscious should remain so. It’ll just be a bit difficult reintegrating a bunch of cloaked, gasmask wearing figures into polite society.”

  With the building heaving back and forth once again, cracks started to open in the walls. Small at first, and then larger as the seconds ticked by, the fissures opened and closed, opened and closed, as though the whole place was breathing.