Species II

by Yvonne Navarro

  She pushed through a door and found herself in a long corridor, unbroken by any doors or exits. It was either keep going or return to the lab, so she went forward, marching down the hallway with a purpose she’d never had while trapped inside the bio-environment. The corridor turned right at its end and Eve did too, then came up short when she found herself face-to-face with a male guard. She’d never been within touching distance of a man before and she froze for a precious two seconds, long enough for the sight of her to register on his angular face.

  “Hey,” he said in surprise. “Hold on a second. You’re not supposed to be—”

  Eve smiled and stepped up to him, hearing his words fade off in mid-sentence. He smelled . . . male, and that was good. She would have liked to pull off his clothes and see what was underneath—that would have been even better. But he was a guard and someone who would, if he could, stop her from leaving here. And that, of course, was bad.

  Still smiling, she gripped the lapels of his flak jacket and tossed him fifteen yards back in the direction from which she’d come. He landed hard and maybe he was hurt; this was not something about which she was concerned.

  Belatedly, however, Eve realized she should have been.

  She was hardly another thirty feet around the corner when she heard shattering glass—the cover on the alarm in the first corridor, back where the guard had landed. Obviously, she hadn’t hurt him very much.

  Alarm bells began screaming everywhere.

  “Whoa, man!” Patrick exclaimed as he pushed through the men’s room doors. “Listen to that racket—what do you think’s going on?”

  Both guards had snapped to attention. “No idea,” said the first gruffly. He grabbed one of Patrick’s arms and steered him back toward the testing facility. “Let’s go, Commander Ross. We need to get you back to the blood-work lab pronto.”

  “Sure,” Patrick said with a good-natured grin. He took two steps with the man, then reached up with his other hand and rammed the guy’s head into the wall as hard as he could. His other escort barely had time to register the smear of blood on the white wall, much less level his weapon, before Patrick had a one-handed choke hold around the man’s windpipe that instantly crushed his trachea. “Pathetic,” Patrick said. The agreeable expression never left his face as he tossed the body behind him and stalked away.

  Somewhere in here was Eve, and he was going to find her.

  “Damn it!” Laura flared. “I just don’t believe this—I knew something like this would happen!” The three of them had burst from the blood-work laboratory at the first wail of the alarms, and now she turned back, snatched the receiver off a phone by the door, and rammed a finger against one of the buttons on it.

  “What the hell is going on?” Press demanded.

  “Listen to me,” Laura barked into the telephone, paying no attention to him or Dennis. “Ten minutes, and no more. Ten minutes—if you don’t receive a cancellation telephone call from me within that time, you trigger the tether mechanism. Absolutely no one else has the authority to tell you not to do so. Do you understand?” She waited for a second. “Good.”

  “The tether mechanism?” Dennis asked with a bewildered expression. “What’s a tether mechanism?” He looked up at the ceiling as another round of sirens went off, ducking his head as though something big and horrible was going to swoop down on them.

  “Eve has escaped,” Laura said. There was a bitterness to her tone, an I-told-you-so undercurrent that was present but not directed at her two companions. “I never wanted to put her through the procedure that reawakened her alien genes. Only a fool wouldn’t have seen this coming.”

  “Burgess—” Press began.

  Dennis’s suddenly frightened voice cut him off. “You know what? Patrick should have been back by now.”

  “Come on,” Press said. “We’re wasting time. We all know Ross has probably whacked his guards by now and taken off.” He slammed a fist into his open palm. “The tricky little bastard set us up.”

  Laura’s eyes widened. “Wait a second—you’re right! He’s never been in this facility, only Dennis has. Orinsky did all his testing in another building.”

  “Somehow he knew Eve was here,” Press told them grimly as the three of them raced down the corridor and back toward Laura’s main work laboratory and Eve’s bio-environment. “He must’ve had a connection right back to her when she was tracking him. He knew she’d find a way to break out of her cage and he wanted to be here when it happened. We played right into his plans, right down to the fucking ride and the clearance we provided to get him here.”

  Laura halted at a junction in the corridor next to a door marked STAIRS. “All right then. Dennis and I will check downstairs for Eve—she might still listen to me. You have to find Patrick and stop him from coming into contact with her. We have no facts at all about true alien physiology—for all we know, reproduction between two advanced aliens could happen simultaneously, like cellular division. Or a nearly pure mating could result in multiple live births—we could be overrun. We have got to stop them!”

  “Oh, don’t you worry,” Press said, clenching his fists. “Mating season ain’t about to begin.”

  The gunshots were, perhaps, like bee stings. Eve had never been stung by a bee of course, but she could imagine the pain—localized and hot, but generally not lethal. The wounds along her arm and rib cage smarted just enough to really piss her off. She took out her irritation on the two guards who’d fired at her by cracking their heads together. She found the sound actually quite pleasant, reminiscent of a lone person clapping their hands very sharply. She stepped over their bodies and kept going, her only direction being forward, and her only goal:

  Patrick.

  Eve had never been down here in her life, but when she found the stairs, instinct took over. Up, she thought. Up and away from this hellish hole of a prison they think they’re disguising with layers of white paint. She tried the handle of the door marked STAIRS—up and found it locked; when she peered at it, she saw one of the cardkey readers that were so prevalent around the facility. She’d never seen a cardkey up close, though; the staff in the bio-environmental laboratory weren’t allowed to bring them into the lower level.

  Eve looked at it and cocked her head. She had no card, nor was she likely to find one quickly enough to get her out of here. The only thing left to do was to simply break it.

  No problem.

  “Sir—Mr. Ross!” The sentry rushing toward him had an open, friendly face. His voice was frantic with worry. “Please, sir. You can’t come this way. We have an emergency on our hands, an escapee. If you could just go back where you came from—”

  Patrick gave him a reassuring smile, then punched him in the face. The guy went down brutally hard, his feet jerking forward and out from under him as his head snapped back. He hit the floor with a thud and a clatter of the metal weaponry he wore. Patrick stepped past him and kept going, using one fist to ram his way through a lock now and then as was necessary to maintain his pace. Sooner or later this weaving path would send him down toward the laboratory where Eve’s living quarters were and he’d finally get to meet his mate. His destiny.

  Patrick smiled wider, practicing this oh-so-important human trait.

  He was getting really good at this smiling stuff.

  Laura was right, Press thought spitefully. She should have known better than to agree to “grow” another alien, should have known they’d end up in a situation pretty much like the first one all over again. He’d thought she was smarter than that . . .

  Then again, that wasn’t it at all. She was smart—much more so than him. It was probably the one thing that she had that he didn’t that assholes like Burgess had found and played like a fucking harp: compassion. No doubt they’d used that line about “If you don’t do it, we’ll find someone who will. And that person won’t have near the heart that you do. Don’t you want to be in charge of the experiments?” And, of course, in the end all their inferences hadn’t meant
shit, because she’d been forced to do something to her test subject that she’d never wanted to anyway.

  And Eve—or Sil, as Press was still privately calling her in his head—where the hell was she now? Probably somewhere off in a closet with Patrick Ross, the two of them screwing their brains out in some kind of weird alien-sex thing that would really put everyone in a bind.

  Another corner up ahead in these seemingly endless turns and angled corridors—this place was like a damned rat’s maze. If it weren’t for the signs posted on the walls, he’d have been lost two turns after he’d left Laura and Dennis. And here was another one, making Press pause and listen before he crept around it. He couldn’t hear anything beyond the background hum of white noise that always moved in to fill the space between his heartbeats in the high-tension times of assignments. This was when he was at his best and he felt like his senses had heightened enough that nothing in the world could best him. Still, he went around the juncture cautiously—he would never be called a fool—

  —and came nose to nose with Eve.

  For a single, breathless moment, she seemed not to even see him. So close he could touch her, the alien woman’s flesh was bubbling arid distorting beneath its surface, as if something inside were trying to re-form itself and escape. Her blue eyes burned into Press’s like shards of arctic ice, but she made no move to attack him.

  Press found his voice around what felt like a lump of sandpaper in his throat. “Eve, you have to—to go back to the cage. You can’t stay here, and you can’t leave. We can’t let that happen.” His Glock was out though he had no inclination to fire it; he wanted instead to move back and away, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the hideous movement that was churning along wherever the woman’s creamy skin was exposed.

  Still, Eve stared at him, not moving, not speaking. Her only acknowledgment of his presence was a deep, sudden inhalation that finally put a stop to the revolting undulations. Abruptly she just seemed like a woman to him, young, frightened and beautiful, like some country college girl lost in the big city. Blond hair, clear blue eyes and full lips in a heart-shaped face that didn’t have a single imperfection—it was hard to believe that this gorgeous gal could be anything like the creature he knew she was.

  Eve must have sensed a change in him, some sort of shift in his pheremones or something. Instead of fighting or running, she smiled and licked her lips, then ran the fingers of both hands up and down the buttons on her shirt in a stripper’s move that she had no way of knowing about. Her technique, however, was much more direct. No fancy music here, just the sounds of fabric tearing and plastic buttons hitting the floor as she wrenched open her blouse and revealed flawless breasts.

  Speechless, all Press could do was shake his head and stumble backward when she would have reached for his free hand. He had an idea, all right, of what she planned to do with it and he wanted no part of her—the memory of Stephen Arden’s mutilated body was enough to smash down any jolt of desire this life-form might be able to generate in him. Stephen had been a Harvard Professor of Anthropology and part of the team that hunted for Sil before she’d convinced him to have sex with her. Thanks, but Press preferred his lays to be human. “Eve—”

  “Freeze!”

  Thank God—the backups had finally arrived. He might be tough and good at what he did, but experience was a bastard and he had no real desire to face off with an alien by himself. At least this time the troops consisted of more than an extra two or three guards so scared they were crapping in their pants—the guy leading them was as true a hard-ass jarhead as Burgess if Press had ever seen one. “We’ve got you covered, lady,” he announced in his gravelly voice. “If you so much as move a muscle the wrong way, you’ll be splattered all over this floor. Your choice.” And no doubt she would be, too—beyond the full auto M-16s, every last man and woman was wearing a hydrochlorine canister as a shoulder pack.

  Eve turned her head and glared at the squad’s leader, but he didn’t back down, holding her gaze like a watchdog focused on its upcoming target.

  “Eve,” Press said to pull her attention away from the knot of solders. “These guys mean business. Even if they weren’t here, you’ve forgotten something really important.” He gestured vaguely in the direction that he thought would take them back to Laura’s laboratory. “Down in the lab is the tether mechanism. Remember that? You take one step off these premises or you kill one person, then Laura or someone else is going to trigger that thing and you’ll be dead. You don’t want to go down that way, do you?”

  Eve’s gaze flicked from him to the row of guards staring at her, their fingers so very close to squeezing their triggers. He could see in her eyes that no, she didn’t want to “go down that way.” He was willing to bet she was thinking that now she had too many things to do with her life, an entirely new realm of it to explore and find a way to expand to its fullest. And Press would have to be stupid not to think that her prime objective was still to find and mate with Patrick Ross. He was, all told, damned glad it wasn’t himself, and let’s not forget that no one in Monroe A.F.B. had any intention of allowing that coupling to happen.

  Lulled by the presence of the backup squad, Press must’ve let his defenses slip just a hair too much, because abruptly Eve had him. He struggled but he couldn’t get free, couldn’t get his gun arm up and between them—hell, if he squeezed the trigger now, he’d probably blow off his own big toe. Shocked, he realized that she was kissing him—full mouth to mouth, and all he could think of was the way the now-dead Sil had had that wonderful tongue . . . yeah, the one that had shot down the throat of a rejected mate and eviscerated him from the inside out.

  Press heard the sound of weapons shifting and just as quickly, Eve let him go. He swayed backward to get farther away, but she didn’t reach for him again. The smile she gave him was odd—part girl just experiencing her first kiss, part woman who wanted so much, much more. “Magically delicious,” Eve said softly, then held out her wrists. She didn’t look at him again as the soldiers leaped forward with handcuffs and hustled her back down to the bio-environment level.

  It wasn’t until she and the squad were out of sight that Press sagged against the wall and gasped for air, and realized that he’d had the muscles of his throat locked in what would have been a useless attempt to stop the alien woman’s tongue.

  Too late.

  Patrick’s long-legged gait pulled up short and he stopped in the middle of one of the never-ending hallways. He knew immediately what had gone wrong—Eve had been overpowered and returned to the BioHazard 4 area, where they kept her imprisoned. He didn’t know why, but he was certain that she’d made the decision to surrender based on all the circumstances—she was not afraid of any of the people around her and most of their weapons would do little to harm her. Something else must have weighed heavily in the decision, something over which she’d had no control and also deemed too hazardous to combat.

  This changed everything. She would not be able to meet him, and even as strong as he was, he’d have to be a fool to try to fight his way down there. At this point he was only one, and there were others—his children—to take into consideration. They needed his nurturing and his protection until they had fully matured and could mate and take care of themselves. While he doubted that anything existed on this base that could kill him without taking out everyone else and most of the building, it was not inconceivable that he would be captured and, like Eve, locked in a facility from which it would be difficult to escape. He couldn’t let that happen.

  Patrick whirled and went back the way he’d come, intent on finding a stairwell that would take him up and out of here. Always in tune, he heard Dr. Baker and Dennis long before they would have seen him, heard the elevator doors open in response to the plasticized slide of her security card.

  “Go on, Dennis,” Laura urged.

  The elevator was only a few feet from an L-shaped bend in the corridor, and Patrick sidled up to the edge of the wall and watched them. He could smell
Laura from where he crouched, a not unpleasant mixture of perfume and laboratory chemicals over the starch of her cotton lab coat. She was an extremely attractive woman, with her strawberry-blond hair and blue eyes, and exceedingly intelligent—that, especially, made her a good choice. Slender and in good health . . . yeah, she’d do in a pinch.

  He watched Dennis step into the elevator, then Laura started to follow. Before she could get all the way inside, the elevator doors began to close. Before that could happen, Patrick shot around the corner and yanked her out of the elevator.

  “Laura!” Dennis cried, but it was too late. The doors were closing, and they weren’t the forgiving kind found in downtown civilian office buildings. They might not crush your hand if you didn’t get it out of the way in time, but they’d retract only a half inch or so, just enough to let you get free; if you wanted them to open again, you needed that security card. “Shit! Let me out!” Alas, pounding on the inside of the doors, as Dennis was doing now, would accomplish nothing. Another two seconds and his former friend’s shouts faded to nothing as the elevator descended.

  When Patrick turned, Laura Baker was already backing away. He grinned and began pacing her, step for step; it wouldn’t be long before she realized that the corridor came to a dead end twenty feet behind her. “What’s the matter, Dr. Baker? I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Just . . . stay where you are,” Laura said shakily. “Don’t come any closer. I mean it.”

  That almost made Patrick laugh. A great act, but she was defenseless—not even a pistol in her pocket, much less anything that would really work. She might have some measure of influence over Eve, but Patrick felt no such compulsion to obey her orders. Speaking of Eve—

  “So where do you keep Eve? I’ve gone through so much trouble, I’d really like to meet her.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Laura replied. Her gaze flicked over her shoulder and registered the wall only a few feet away. There was a shadow of panic on her face, then she forced it away. That was good—Patrick liked strong women. Very much. “You should turn yourself in,” she persisted. “It’ll be easier for everyone.” Despite her predicament, the doctor’s voice had turned calm and rational, persuading.