We were all finished dressing and arming up by the time Tanaka finished loading the hovercart with various supplies that a real rescue team would carry with them. The blizzard was as bad as ever when we stepped out into the snow and started up the trail.
“This is gonna be a long walk,” I announced in a normal voice, letting the glasses we were all wearing transmit my words to their ears without yelling over the storm.
Cassie stood in the storm with the pink volleyball in her hands. She held it up to her face. “Floaty wake up.” The ball rose from her hands and changed into the flying robot before our eyes. Cassie tapped it right between the eyes. “Halo guardian mode, thirty feet on me.” The robot beeped an acknowledgment and rose into the air. A second later it started to make a circle. Always looking out as it spun around in the air above Cassie fifteen feet away. It only took five seconds for it to complete one trip around the thirty foot circle.
Tanaka strapped a harness over his parka that allowed him to pull the loaded hovercart behind him. As soon as he was ready he stopped to look us over. “So, who want’s point?”
“My sensors are limited by these meteorological events. Although perhaps not as limited as your own. I volunteer to lead,” Julie announced and took her place at the front of the group.
I fell in step behind her with Cassie, Darcy, and Ren. Floaty was still making circles in the air above Cassie, while Tanaka brought up the rear with the supplies whipping around behind him in the wind.
“Tanaka?” I called out to him.
“Yeah?”
“Wouldn’t a snowmobile or something be better in this weather than the hovercart?”
“No. The weight of the supplies would slow us down too much.”
Oh well! He’s the one fighting with it, not me.
* * *
Walking against a headwind, uphill, in the snow, was slow going. Just like the old joke about how bad our parents had it in their day. I laughed to myself and pushed on. For each step forward we took, we slid a half a step back in the freezing wind. After three hours of hiking through the blizzard I was startled as my watch started to shake and beep.
Damn thing never did that before.
I pulled back the sleeve of the parka and looked at the blinking alarm on the watch. Cassie’s vitals were flashing wildly as her heartbeat and respiration almost dropped to nothing.
“Cassie!” I screamed, turning around just in time to see the little parka crash into the snow. It took a second for me to reach her side. “Cassie! Speak to me sweetie! You alright?”
Julie dropped to her knees beside me and placed her bare hand on Cassie’s forehead. “She has gone into hypothermic shock. We need to raise her body temperature immediately.”
“Dammit! Kids loose body heat faster than adults. We should’ve taken a break and warmed her up a while ago.” Tanaka cut the power to the hovercart. It crashed to the snow under the weight of the supplies. He took out a plastic octagon the size of a dinner plate and placed it on the ground next to Cassie’s freezing body.
She was turning blue.
Julie pressed a button on the octagon plate. It started to unfold one piece at a time until it had turned into a low two-man tent and secured itself to the ground. She had to crawl on her belly to get inside the extremely low entrance. “Hand me the child. I will warm her.”
I scooped Cassie up and passed her off to the android inside the tent. By the time she sealed the door, Julie was emitting a large amount of heat in waves I could feel from a few feet away.
“We should all take a break and warm up.” Tanaka handed another plate to Darcy and took one for himself.
The tents folded out and secured themselves to the ground. Ren stood at Tanaka’s side, making it clear that they were going to share one tent together. It didn’t bother me anymore for them to be a couple, so I knelt down and slid on my stomach into the low tent next to Darcy. There was enough room for us to lie side-by-side on our backs, or even up on one side looking at each other, but that was it.
“Cozy.” Darcy looked down and found the button with her foot that sealed us inside the tiny tent and away from the raging storm outside.
“I was thinking more like claustrophobic. Damn this is small.”
“That’s probably why it’s called an Emergency Shelter. Because no one in their right mind would use them unless it was an emergency.”
I laughed, and smiled to myself. I was able to study her face up close in the glow from the tiny LED in the head of the tent that gave us light. Darcy was beautiful, no doubt about it. She caught me staring at her lips, and stuck her tongue out at me like a child.
“Very mature.” My watch stopped shaking and beeping. I lifted it up and we both took a look at it. Cassie’s vitals were suddenly back to normal. I let out a sigh of relief. “She’s alright now.”
“You sure worry about her a lot. It’s kinda cute.”
“So are you.” It slipped past my lips before I could stop myself.
She looked me over and blushed. “I didn’t look like this before I was turned.”
“You think I did?” I blurted out, one gloved finger tracing down the thick scar that still separated my face. “Look, I shouldn’t’ve said anything. I know you don’t want me sexually. It just kinda slipped out.”
All I got was a nod of her head and several minutes of silence. Suddenly she looked into my eyes.
“Do you trust me?”
“What?”
“Do you trust me?”
“Sure. I guess so,” I shrugged.
“Then close your eyes.”
“You’re not gonna do any weird vamp stuff are you?” I asked her suspiciously.
“If you trust me, close your eyes.”
Not wanting to make a scene and drive a rift between us since we were becoming friends, I closed my eyes. Nothing happened for several seconds. Then I felt the air change. A subtle shift in the pressure like something was moving through it. As tempted as I was, I kept my eyes shut and only tried to hear what she was doing. The only noise I could hear was the roaring blizzard outside the tent.
Something delicately soft and warm pressed against my lips in the lightest brush. Then it was gone. Seconds later it came back and pressed harder this time, but it was such a light and quick move that I had no idea what it was. I couldn’t help it. I made a fist with my left hand and opened it to create the shield-bubble that filled the tent with a violet glow only I could see. Even with my eyes closed, I could see Darcy’s face against mine as her lips tentatively kissed mine. The instant I knew what was happening, I shut off the bubble.
The tent fell back into darkness to my closed eyes as Darcy’s lips brushed against mine in another partial kiss. It was extremely erotic. The entire situation had me creaming in my shorts. Not that I was wearing any underneath the layers of armor though. I hadn’t responded to her kisses until I felt her tongue push through between her lips and give me the most fleeting of licks. My lips pursed up and met her’s full on in reaction to that.
She yanked back from my kiss. “You peeked!” she shot the accusation at me.
I opened my eyes and saw her face twisted with emotions. Guilt, excitement, disappointment, shock, and a little bit of lust were all there.
“Sorry. It felt so good I couldn’t help it.”
Her face turned sour. “Forget it!” she yelled at me and flipped over leaving me staring at the back of her parka.
“Darcy I’m sorry. I–”
The top of the tent ripped away in an instant, leaving me staring up at the skeleton smile of the immortal standing over us.
Chapter 26
I screamed at the top of my lungs at the horror looming above me. In less than a second the Immortal had torn the top half of the tent clear off and tossed it to the winds. The shock of being caught off guard had frozen me. But Darcy reacted.
She went from laying down with her back to me, rolled up, and forced herself up into a handstand. Her boots collided with the old man’s c
hin in a crunch as she pushed out of the handstand with a kick of her feet. He crashed to the snow and whipped his head around to glare at us.
“BBBUUUUURRRRNNN!!!” it roared at us and sprang up from the ground.
The metallic WHIRRING noise came an instant before the first blue line that exploded inside the Immortal’s shoulder. Floaty swooped in through the storm. Both guns had a steady stream of blue tracer lines erupting from them like fire. Piece by piece, the Immortal disappeared one basketball-sized hole after another. By the time I’d fished my sword out from under the parka and jumpsuit, the old man had been reduced to shreds, the robot’s guns clicked empty, and everyone else was out of their tents guns in hand.
“Everyone alright?” Tanaka asked as he approached the crater the robot had shot in the path where the Immortal had once stood.
“Define alright.” Darcy’s voice shook almost as bad as I was.
Fucker snuck right up on us in camp. Stupid! We should’ve seen that coming. But, I think the volleyball just earned its oil, for life.
“Do you think it was after us? Or just anyone who’d be in the woods?” Ren looked green, and her clothes were all open clear down to her crotch. She hadn’t bothered to zip up after whatever they’d been doing alone in the little tent. The sliver of skin showing her cleavage and bellybutton between the layers of armor and arctic gear was an erotic sight in the blizzard.
“I think you missed a button.” Darcy pointed at the detective’s chest, ruining my fantasy as Ren rushed to seal herself back into her armor.
A small hand slid into mine, and I was instantly calmer. Cassie was beside me, her cheeks a healthy pink flesh tone instead of the sickly blue they had been.
“You alright?”
She gave me a nod, but no words passed those solemn lips. Her eyes never left the crater, except to glance at the remains of the tent. That angelic face of hers had shut down to the emotionless all business glare she wore when she acted years beyond her age.
“Let us know if you need to stop and rest. I don’t like you getting sick like that.”
“Affirmative.” Her face didn’t change, and her voice almost sounded robotic, but the grip she kept on my hand increased just a little.
Is she scared? Pissed maybe?
“I have located the core,” Julie announced, pulling a straight blade from under her parka. It looked like she was performing surgery on the earth itself for several seconds before she handed something to Tanaka.
“Right. I’ll just put this in one of the lockers.” He passed me with a small glass bottle no bigger than my thumb. Inside it was half of the Immortal’s life giving brain core. Julie passed by a second later with another bottle, and the other half of the core. They put them inside different containers on opposite ends of the hovercart.
“We should get moving in case it had a chance to alert anyone to our location.” Cassie pulled her hand from mine so that she could reload Floaty’s guns.
“Are you sure you don’t want to rest some more?” I asked the child.
“Positive,” she said with a barely noticeable waiver of fear in her voice.
* * *
It took two more hours to reach the clearing with the cabin. Between the storm and the firefight, it took over six hours to make the trip that should have only taken one. Ren, Darcy, and Cassie had taken turns hiking next to me so that I could warm them up a little with my shields during the second stretch.
The log cabin stood out in the storm like a beacon of warm shelter with lights on and a generator running noisily in the night. Just seeing the fiery glow coming from the windows made me feel warmer. The thermal mode of my glasses showed the entire cabin as one giant blob of heat. Much more heat than I thought should come from a building. But it was the fact that the cabin was untouched by the snow that set off alarms in the back of my skull. The building was dry, snowless, just like the dozen feet of apparently dry ground surrounding it.
“Anyone else think something’s off here?” I asked standing at the clearing’s edge, staring at the cabin as plain as day from several yards away. If I looked over my shoulder in either direction behind me I could only see three feet at best. But the wall of snow parted around the cabin as if the very storm itself was scared of it. Or something inside it.
“I can feel the heat from here,” Ren gasped in wonder.
Sword collapsed yet still in hand – as it had been since the tent was ripped off from above me – I took a glance around and started across the clearing for the cabin. “The lights are on so someone’s home. I’ll just go knock. A cover story is only good if you attempt to use it.”
Cassie fell in step beside me with her hands shoved inside her parka. At first glance it looked like she was trying to warm up her hands under her arms, but when you were as close as I was, you could see the Walthers’ in her hands. Darcy strolled up to my other side, only the long dead tree branch she’d found and broken into a suitable walking stick in her hands. We almost looked like the innocent rescue team we were supposed to be.
“Snipes are up.” Tanaka’s whisper let me know that the others were watching our backs from a distance.
The heat coming from the small cabin was almost unbearable. Even outside the door it was just shy of being hot enough to spark the log walls into combustion. I lifted my empty hand and gave the door a knock. That tiny bit of pressure let the unlocked door swing open on its own with a wall of heat almost forcing us off the steps.
“Hello? Anyone home? MSRT. We’re looking for some people that went missing in the storm,” I called out into the one-room cabin.
From the front door, there were only a few places we couldn’t see. The largest of them was the loft above the kitchen. I stepped inside and had to force up more shielding to keep out the heat. Cassie and Darcy were both already drenched with sweat. Never thought we’d have to worry about heatstroke in the middle of a blizzard.
Nothing moved in the house except the leaping flames from the gas burners on the stove and in the open oven that were turned on high. Darcy gave me a signal, and I watched her back as she effortlessly pulled herself up with just one hand to peer over the edge of the loft floor above.
She dropped down with a shake of her head. “Nothin’. Just empty bedding.”
“Big Sister.” Cassie waved me over to her where she was crouched down a few feet away from a heater that was glowing white hot, threatening to melt away at any second with the waves of scorching heat it was producing. It was an industrial heater that I recognized from an old catalogue. The thing was designed to heat up spaces the size of an airplane hangar by itself. Having it running at all in the tiny 14'x16' cabin was overkill. I reached out with my shield-hand and pressed the off switch. It wined and groaned as the motor ground to a stop. With it off, the waves of heat started to die down as well.
“Tanaka, no one’s home. They had an airplane hangar heating unit on high in here. The place is worse than an oven.”
“Really? . . . Can you find any access to a basement?” his voice asked me in the tiny earpieces of my glasses.
“A basement? I didn’t remember anything about a basement. Anyone see a door to a basement?”
Darcy started scanning the floors, kicking over the throw rugs with her search. Cassie took the more obvious route. To me it looked like a closet door, and when she opened it there was an empty walk-in closet behind the door that appeared to have also doubled as a pantry. But the deep closet was missing a floor where someone, or something had ripped it out. The jagged hole was large enough that even Marsala could have squeezed through it. Firelight flickered from the cavernous room beyond the hole.
“Found a basement access. Someone punched a hole in the floor of the walk-in closet. Looks like they got a fire going on down there too.”
“GAWD!!! That reeks!” Darcy gagged over my shoulder. Covering her mouth and nose with her hand. Only then did I notice Cassie knelt beside me outside the door doing the same thing, gun in hand with the back of her hand presse
d tightly against her face.
“What smells?” Tanaka’s voice demanded.
I lowered my shields enough to take a sniff, and almost lost my dinner. Death, decay, rot, corpses, and a deep overwhelming musk like nothing I’d ever smelled before. It was so thick it stuck to the back of your tongue and coated your lungs. I gagged and backed away from the hole.
“We got a problem. I don’t know what all it is, but I know the smell of a rotting human body.”
“Floaty,” Cassie commanded the air behind her. A few feet from her head, the air began to shimmer as the flying robot de-cloaked. “Recon sweep. Identify and report. Do not engage.”
The ball of guns and circuitry darted past her and faded into nothingness as the robot went invisible again. The robot was a far cry different than he had been to begin with since he’d been reprogrammed. A few seconds later the shimmer returned as Floaty flew up out of the hole.
“One room. Forty round, twelve deep. Six targets downed. Humanoid. One molting. Reptilian. Four eggs. Presumed reptilian.”
“Bollocks!” Cassie cursed to herself.
“Watch your language,” I snapped at her.
“Bollocks means the same as crap. Can’t I say crap? You say worse things.” She backed away and started removing the outer layers of arctic gear.
She’s got me there. I need to watch my language around her better.
“Sure. Crap is fine, I guess. Or bull-whatever. So what’s going on?”
“Tobias Markum was here. His nest is under our feet.”
* * *
“That king cobra thing?” As soon as Darcy asked it out loud I heard Ren let out a squeak of fear over the comm.
“Yes. His eggs are here. He will return.” Cassie finished pulling off her arctic coverings and double-checked her guns.
Immortal Death (Kieran Grey Psionic Hunter Book 3) Page 25
