by PM Drummond
“Why am I—”
“Do you always answer a question with a question?” I stepped the rest of the way through the door and put my hands on my hips. He couldn’t see it, but I was pretty sure it carried through to my voice.
“I’m sorry.” His head was doing that homing-in thing again, trying to pinpoint my whereabouts.
“Stop moving your head around. It’s giving me the creeps.”
I knew instantly when I said that, it was a mistake. He jumped back almost tripping on his chain.
“You can see me,” he said. “You are in here. What are you?”
“I asked you first.”
“I . . . I . . .” He pushed his shoulders up and his back straightened. “I am a were-panther.”
“No shit? You guys come in panther, too?”
“No shit,” he said, but with his accent, it came out more like “No sheet.”
“Why don’t you just shift and kick these guys’ butts?”
He shook his foot making the chain rattle.
“There is silver in the chains. I cannot shift while it poisons me.”
“Oh, the old silver and werewolf thing is true huh?”
He made a face like he’d just eaten a stink bug.
“Were-panther. I am not a dog.”
“Sorry. So if I open the door and spring the leg shackles, will you turn furry?” The last thing I needed was to be running from heartless mercenaries, a lunatic scientist, and a were-panther with my traumatized mom in tow.
“Probably so, but you are not the one I will harm.” The lost puppy look from a moment ago morphed into an expression so malevolent, I took a step back.
“I’ll have my mom with me, too. Don’t hurt her either.”
“Your mother?”
“Ah ah. That’s another question.”
He raised his hand like a boy scout.
“You have my word.”
The camera in the corner whirred to focus on him.
“Put your hand down. They’ll see you.”
He put his hand down and glared at the camera.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Luke. And what is yours?”
“Marlee.” I said it before I thought. When was I going to learn not to share information? Sharing with Mike Williams is what I seriously suspected got me into this mess in the first place. I really stunk at subterfuge. Cross off international spy on my career goals.
“When will you unlock the door?”
“I don’t know.” I had to devise a solid plan first. No more half-cocked, ready-fire-aim fiascos, which pretty much dominated my life as of late. “Soon. Just be ready.”
“Marlee. You did not tell me what you are.”
“That’s because I don’t really know.” To heck with confession being good for a person. Saying that out loud wound up being more depressing than just thinking it.
I left Luke’s room and found the two caged animal rooms on my way to the toe-picker guy’s room. I sieved through his door, but as soon as I got a close-up look at him, I wanted to cry. He looked normal on the monitor, but in person, the damage showed. The front part of his head had hair, but the back of his head was bald and bulged in misshapen masses like they’d taken the back of his skull off and not put it back on properly. He still sat in the corner with his knees up. No longer picking his toes, he now sucked on his left knee. Not a good sign.
“Hello?” I got no reply.
“Hello?” I said louder.
He flinched but didn’t stop sucking.
“Do you want to get out of here?” I asked.
No response. Crud.
Horse walked in the room and nudged me, scaring me half to death—or wherever I’d go if I died in this form.
“What?” I asked Horse.
He shook his head.
“You telling me this guy is a no?”
He shook his head again and tapped his hoof on the floor next to my cord—which was almost clear.
“Crud. Why didn’t you tell me?”
He pushed me toward the door, but I was already heading there.
I made it to my body just as my cord faded out of view. At the edge of the bed, I leaned over my body to lay into it when the cord fizzled into oblivion. Vertigo hit. My astral body floated off the floor and away from the bed. Frantic, I grabbed for the sheets, but my hand went through them and the bed. Horse reared up behind me as I floated halfway to the ceiling. As his hooves came down, they struck my back and pushed me into my body like a child hitting a runaway helium balloon. I slammed into my body, but it didn’t “snap” right in immediately as it had every time before. I lay in what felt like a meat shell for a full thirty seconds before my soul settled and slowly clicked into place.
My energy level was so low, I couldn’t control the monitors, and alarms sounded, their shrill wails echoing painfully against the concrete walls. Moments later, footsteps pounded to the door, the keypad beeped and Clark and another man rushed in.
“She’s crashing again,” Clark shouted.
Someone shut the alarms off. Clark leaned over me to open my left eye, leaning his hip against my hand. He gasped before I realized my body’s survival instinct had kicked in. The strange coldness enveloped my head as it had in the quad the night I’d met Rune, but this time, instead of pulling power through the air into my head, the cold snaked down my body through my arm, drawing power from where Clark touched my eye and my hand. His eyes bulged and his body shook.
“Jenkins, what’s wrong?” the other man asked. When he got no reply, he touched Clark and added to the human circuit. His power now flowed through Clark and into me. My body heated, and Zamora’s spot on my chest burned with raw power. After a few seconds, the transfer stopped and both men dropped to the ground.
A walkie-talkie crackled to life.
“Murphy, what the hell’s going on in there?”
Crap. Crap. Crap. There went all my hopes of creating the perfect plan to get out of here. They had to know I was aware now. That probably meant different medicine or a brain modification.
I concentrated on the camera and flipped it around to wedge the lens against the wall. After tearing the wires off all the sticky pads connected to me, I jumped out of the bed and checked the two men on the floor. Relief washed through me at the feel of their weak but existent pulses.
The camera motor whined as someone tried to rotate it away from the wall. They’d be here in a matter of minutes. I had to get out of the room and the facility. No telling when my next chance of escape would be. I raised my hands to the closed door and shot a surge of power toward it. The center of the thick metal door concaved like a giant wedge had been hammered into it, and the handle edge of the door pulled away from the jam. After a few seconds of slack-jawed awe that the pulse had actually worked, I ran from the room.
As I ran toward Mom’s room, I thought of each door that led to rooms with animals or other patients and sent a wedge of energy to each. The resulting crashes and screeches echoed through the halls one after another like cannon fire. My mother’s door stood open, and I grabbed the door frame to stop my socked feet from sliding past her room. Mom stood hands to chest and white as a marshmallow next to her bed.
“Come on, Mom,” I said, holding my hand out to her.
Bless her obedient soul, she ran to me, and I pulled her down the hall to Luke’s room. Wild-eyed, he yanked at his chains, trying to pull them from the eyebolt in the wall.
His attention shifted to Mom and me as we skidded to a stop in front of his room.
“The chains,” he yelled, but I’d already raised a hand.
The shackles on his ankles split open, sending bolts like shrapnel across the room. Instead of running, he dropped to the floor on all fours. Mom reached out to him to get him to run, but I knew what was coming. His limbs morphed as he dropped, arms and legs twisting, his face elongating, fur erupting in puffs around his clothes, which he tore at with clawed fingers.
I pulled my stunned mot
her down the hall. Another pulse of energy and the satisfying sound of cage doors slamming open reverberated from the next hall over. Shouting and thudding boots rang out from the direction of my room. I twisted two more cameras as we ran past them to the stairwell Horse and I had taken earlier. My power yanked the door from the frame as we rounded the last corner. Mom yelped but kept running as I pulled her along by our linked hands. She paused a brief moment as we entered the stairwell, looking up the towering flights above us.
“I know,” I said pulling her up the first set of steps. “It’s twelve floors, but we can do it.”
I released her hand and started the long climb. After two floors, she was a half flight behind. I grabbed her with my power, She screamed as I pulled her up over the steps. I let her feet touch the landing before lifting her again and propelling her to the next landing, before I ran up to meet her. We continued—Mom walking a little, me lifting her up flights, then running to catch her—for several more flights. As we reached floor B-06, several men ran into the stairwell where we’d started. Peering down the square void that ran the center of the flights, I saw hands grasping the handrails as they ran up the stairs toward us.
I propelled Mom to the next landing a little too hard. A whomp of breath escaped her as she hit the wall.
“Sorry!” I called.
I yanked the door next to me off its hinges and threw it a few stairs down, then wedged it sideways, bowing the handrails out with an ear-splitting squeeech. Climbing the next flight of stairs was torture.
“Mom, I’m low on juice. You’ll have to climb the rest on your own,” I shouted at her as I shooed her up the stairs.
We were two flights up when the men hit the wedged door. We were up another flight and a half when they stopped shouting orders at one another, and I peeked down the void to see them climbing on the rail and squeezing around the door one by one.
They were two floors below us when Mom and I reached G-01. It took two tries to dent the door enough to pull it open. I wrenched it open, and we ran down the tunnel. Fallen chunks of concrete teamed with the musty rotten air to slow our progress. Twice, Mom tripped, and I stopped to keep her from hitting the filthy tunnel floor. After what seemed an eternity, we skidded to a stop at the outer door.
I raised my hands, but my flagging energy barely thumped at the thick metal. Mom looked at me in horror.
“Open it,” she shouted, dancing from foot to foot and wringing her hands.
I tried again with less results than before. Pounding feet and shouts reverberated from the mouth of the tunnel. Mom, the back of her fist pressed firmly against her mouth, backed into the corner by the door and tried to make herself as small as possible. The nervous power she emitted replenished some of my reserves, but it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t touch her and pull more. I’d never be able to drag her depleted body from the tunnel and get her to safety. Waves of excited energy pulsed down the tunnel from the men running pell-mell toward us. In another few minutes, I’d gather enough from that to be able to pop the door, but we didn’t have minutes. We had seconds.
I rubbed the tingling spot on my chest where Zamora had marked me, and watched the first of Sarkis’s mercenaries round the nearest bend. One of the newbies that had taken me to my room held the lead. He thrust a small box in front of him and pushed a button. A wire shot from the device and hit me in the chest. My body convulsed as electricity from the stun gun jolted through me. The men stood a safe distance away waiting for me to fall.
But I didn’t.
After a few painful seconds, my body stilled and the power that had pushed into me I now pulled from the gun, draining it and the man who held it. Crackling arcs shot from the man to the three men nearest him, and I pulled their energy, too. The four men I’d drained hit the ground.
Shock had barely registered on the still-standing men’s faces before I raised my hands and blasted them backward. I spun and put my fingertips on the door, and it shot into the gulch beyond. When I reached for Mom, she cringed from my touch. She slinked around the corner of the doorway and almost fell outside.
Hurt battled with fear as I ran into the night. I reached for her again, but again, she shied away.
“Follow me then,” I said and ran into the gulch.
She cried out in pain as she tripped over a rock at the edge of the small ravine, and I turned to help her. Movement in the tunnel drew my attention. Sarkis and Mr. Smith walked out of the doorway. A few of his men followed behind them, looking dazed and frazzled but still lethal.
I grabbed my mom, not giving her another chance to cringe away from me, and hauled her to her feet. I dragged her to the other side of the gulch. Three feet from the obscurity of the tree line on the other side, she slipped from my grip and rolled back down to the bottom of the wash. Her head hit a suitcase sized bolder with a thud.
“Mom,” I shouted, but she lay immobile and unresponsive.
Sarkis and his men crested the edge of the gulch. The glint of moonlight on weapons sent shafts of ice through my system. I took partial shelter behind a low shrub and raised my hands again.
“I wouldn’t, Ms. Burns,” Sarkis shouted, and I hesitated. “Or my men will shoot your mother.”
My hands lowered a few inches, my ragged breathing and raging heartbeat making them shake in front of me. I might be able to get a pulse off before they pulled their triggers, but I might not, and the margin for error was my mom’s life. Her shadowed form remained unmoving among the scrubby vegetation and debris below. I might be able to move her clear of their aim and repel them at the same time, but again there was a margin for error.
“Walk down the embankment where I can see you better,” Sarkis said.
More likely where his men could get a better shot at me with tranquilizer darts. My luck being what it was, I couldn’t count on the drug being one of the ones I was already immune to. I only counted six men—Sarkis, Mr. Smith, and four others—in the waning light, but additional, crackling energy emerged from the left. Someone else was coming to join the recapture-Marlee party. Oh joy.
“Step down now, or I’ll have Mr. Smith here shoot your mother in the leg.”
A rifle chu-chunked. Crap. Even though I’d brought his sorry butt back to life in Montana, Smith would do it.
So much for having a conscience or just being human. No, come to think of it, he was human, and the humans I knew were, for the most part, sorrier chunks of life than the nonhumans.
I let my hands drop the rest of the way and a whoosh of breath escaped me. I’d gotten away before. Maybe I could do it again. I stepped from behind the bush just as a blur shot from the left, and all hell broke loose.
Two of the five men behind Sarkis disappeared. They stood there one moment looking frayed but deadly, and the next moment, gray blur, and nothing but kicked-up dirt and leaves settling back to the ground.
The remaining three men and Sarkis sprang into defensive stances, their weapons tracking in all directions from the trees above to the shrubbery below, looking for something to shoot. Their initial shock led to shouts and commands, but once their training kicked in, they silenced and communicated with hand signals.
While their attention was off me, I pointed one hand at my mother and lifted her a few inches off the ground. I pulled her toward me slowly to avoid drawing Sarkis’s attention. As she neared, I scanned the dark line of trees, the other hand out, tensed and waiting for the gray blur to come and take me as it had the men. No telling what I’d let loose back at the lab.
Red light filtered from the tunnel and blended with moonlight, sifting through the clouds and creating a darkroom effect of blood-hued shadows. A slight breeze rustled leaves. A twig snapped to my left, and a low growl crept like fog through the night, winding through the trees and drifting past to echo down the gulch.
Fear shocked through me. The electric pulses of it along my nerves sped my breathing and dilated my pupils, sharpening my vision. Two sets of gold eyes reflected from the darkness to the right. I clo
sed the remaining inches to my mom and crouched over her, shielding her from whatever was out there.
I was contemplating pulling my mom into the tree line when another blur shot from right to left. Two more of Sarkis’s men disappeared, leaving only Sarkis and Smith.
“Fall back,” Sarkis commanded, but Smith was already halfway to the tunnel door.
Sarkis felt his way backward to the entrance where Smith now waited, rifle aim jerking a different direction every few seconds. When Sarkis reached the door, the two of them backed a few steps into the tunnel.
A feral scream reverberated through the tunnel behind them, and they froze. Before they could turn, a low black form streaked from the heart of the tunnel, hit Smith, and propelled him back outside. Smith screamed once before the panther bit down on his head with a crunch and silenced him.
Sarkis fell onto his butt and scrabbled on hands and feet down the tunnel. His hand hit the rifle of one of the men I’d knocked out earlier. He sat and pulled the rifle, pointing it at the panther who hissed and crouched. Sarkis aimed, but before he could pull the trigger, a man appeared beside him, yanked the weapon out of his hands, and sent it clattering down the tunnel. Too fast for my eyes to track, the man pulled Sarkis to his feet and in a flash, bit his neck.
Rune.
Sarkis’s scream muted to a gurgle then stopped. Rune lifted his head and grabbed Sarkis’s face. With a wet wrenching sound, he tore Sarkis’s head from his body and hurled it from the tunnel.
Mom stirred under me, and I pulled back to see her eyes flutter open. When her senses returned, she tried to bolt up.
“Marlee, we have to—”
“No. It’s okay. They’re dead.”
She stiffened and pulled away from me, a slight movement but perceptible and damning. I helped her sit up and brushed the hair from her face.
“I didn’t do it.” I made sure she could sit on her own, and then I stood. Far be it for me to force my affections on anyone, even if they were my flesh and blood.
I yelped and scrambled back as a large mass appeared behind my mother.
Griss smiled and bent to help my mother up.
