by Naomi Lucas
He moved. She caught it. The wind-driven rain couldn’t hide it from her observation.
“Snakes?” he asked.
Norah licked her lips. “Most are water-based, from what I remember. Some, the longer ones, can climb the trees here. Those that prefer the bugs up above.” She watched as the Cyborg moved and dropped his pack, where it had hung limp and wet during their terrifying climb, and placed it between them. “We should be wary of them, we have a feast around us.” She lifted her gaze off of Stryker and eyed the tiny bugs taking refuge under the leaves around them. “Many are poisonous. We’ve made several antidotes but they’re...they’re on the ship now.” Norah followed suit and dropped her pack.
Everything is on that ship now. Everything but Robert’s corpse and me. Norah reached out and took the Cyborg’s hand. And him.
He squeezed. She kept them connected.
“We’ll make camp here, regroup, and then continue on to the landing zone.”
“But what about your ship in the sky?”
With one hand, Stryker uncinched the rope and stowed it away. He then fished out a wet medkit and an LED beacon.
“We have hours yet, and at this point, it really doesn’t matter. If the ship is there, we’ll be able to leave regardless if my ship remains in orbit and if it’s not, we come up with a new plan.”
Norah released his hand and wrung out the long waves of her hair, watching the droplets fall from her split ends. I really hope the ship is still here. I hope the rest of the team is still alive.
“New plan being we make it work here, hole up, learn to live on this alien world,” she thought back to her samples. “Until someone comes along and finds us. That could be–”
“–days, weeks, months. It’s doable.”
Norah brushed her hair through with her fingers only to have them get caught on twigs and grit. “Yes. Doable.”
The patter of rain and the veil of waterfalls around them served as a refuge from the horror of the last few hours. The thunder and wind dulled out the random barrage of the alien life, but the shriekers down below could still be heard.
Norah settled in and took off her shoes. Stryker pulled out his rifle and peered through his scope, checking their perimeter.
She had just started to wring the water out of her socks when he stood up, towering over her. “We can make this work. I’m going to scout around a little.” Another screech sounded, making both of them flinch. “And secure the area.”
“The shriekers…”
“What about them?”
Norah thought back to the fingers rising from the water, surrounding her frame, reaching for her. “Don’t go near them,” she whispered.
Stryker nodded. “Make use of the medkit, there is additional synthesized medication you can take, rations are in my pack, so are several weapons if you need them.” He prepared to jump. Her heart raced. “I’ll be back soon.”
“Wait,” she stammered, reaching out for him. “You don’t mind if I–” Norah licked her lips. “If I clean up?” She couldn’t wait to take off her constantly wet clothes and feel her own skin again. She just couldn’t do it if the Cyborg was adverse to it.
He looked at her, hard and heavy, his eyes unwavering and chilled over with frost. A moment later they warmed up and the nighttime blue charged with a streak of indigo. He raised his brows. She wished she could see the rest of his face to read his expression.
Stryker adjusted the rifle at his side. “I don’t mind. You’ll find cloth in the bag and an additional can of soap. They may be soaked.”
She smiled at his warning. The rain picked up. Neither of them moved.
Norah’s back straightened under his heated gaze, one that seemed to intensify toward burning. Something in her belly fluttered, her heart raced for an entirely different reason now, and the humidity that enveloped them all at once became suffocating.
The Cyborg dropped his gaze just before she asked him to stay. Her mouth dried up. He jumped down.
She lifted her shirt over her head and began to take inventory of her wounds.
I think you do mind, Stryker.
Chapter Eight:
***
Stryker swung down from the branch and clawed his way to the smaller ones below. The metal bones in his fingers grew out from their tips, allowing them to dig into the wood.
There were life forms all around them, dozens, hundreds, thousands, and when he focused and switched on his radar, he could locate them, but he still couldn’t sense the ship, nor any vehicles between them and their destination.
Norah was clouding his mind and his hardware. He knew that they should remain together and her reasoning was sound, but he couldn’t bring himself to stay by her side.
Stryker could still feel her body pressed up against his back and her shallow breath at his nape.
The pressure of her breasts between his shoulder blades, all the while knowing that a few strips of cloth were the only barrier between them.
He pushed down his metal mask and snapped his teeth at the dewy air around him. Stryker ran his fingers through his short strands and shook out the water.
He jumped down to the next landing; the resulting impact snapped the wood. He wasn’t meant to bounce around in trees–he was a creature of quiet, camouflage, and surprise.
But times change, situations change, even his body had to adapt to accommodate those changes.
Nothing could keep him from his own personal Hell, not even the beautiful scientist up above. My hostage. In a sick way, the thought made his beast excited. It made his head jerk and his fangs descend to bite at the tree.
Stryker placed the band back over his mouth, annoyed with his impulses. If it were up to him, he would be a machine and nothing more.
But then the plates in his groin would shift when Norah’s smell filled his nostrils; it reminded him how wonderful it could be to be a man, too.
He looked down on the flowing death-trap of water. The constant rain created flash floods between the swamps and the edge of the nearest body of water. He had seen one on the way down to the surface, it had to have spilled over at this point, gushing its froth through a jungle that didn’t want it. The weather raped everything around him.
If he wasn’t careful, it would ravage them too.
Stryker lifted his gun and morphed his body, letting his lower limbs meld together, and spun his way down the tree, each turn had him aiming his gun at any nearby coilers, taking them out. Each twist chaffed a new design upon the trunk.
When he’d come within several yards of the rising tides, he shut off the compartment that enabled him to hear.
He waited.
He watched.
It wasn’t long before the ghostly tendrils of long fingers reached up from the water like long white worms, each digit swayed with shredded flesh hanging like Spanish moss at their ends.
Stryker scanned them as they rose from the depths, stretching, reaching, slithering toward him.
They were humanoid, human shaped, but longer, and far less dense. Their heat signatures remained unmoving below the currents regardless of what he saw.
Not possible. He lowered himself down until he was just out of their grasp. The scent of rotting flesh, beyond the stage of putrefaction, and the skin on the hands fell away from the bones underneath in a wrinkled, greenish mass.
He saw their mouths open but didn’t hear them.
Several wet heads with sprouts of hair popped up next. It was stringy and weak, floating out into the currents.
Stryker lifted his gun and aimed.
Several very human faces stared up at him. Stretched out lips filled with rainfall and blunted teeth snapped at him as he got closer. He moved down to get a closer look.
They had no throats, no tongues, merely an empty mottled hole terminating in blackness.
He captured pictures of them with his eyes, to look at and study later.
Three precise headshots had the ghouls sink within the mire. Stryker didn’t know ho
w long he hung on the tree, his lower half holding him up as he waited for the water-laden corpses to reappear. The strange, invisible heat signatures were still there, unchanging with the current and he had a notion that…
The dead don’t release heat.
One couldn’t kill what was already dead.
He thrust out his rifle and scooped up some of the gore that his shots had created and brought it close to his face.
Smells dead. But as he analyzed it, it heated up until it glowed red and had its own heat signature. Stryker dabbed it into his eye and scanned the anomaly.
Microbes. Alien and strange, it expanded as the rain water fell across it. He flicked the carnage off his gun and watched it float away.
When it was out of sight he broke his eyes away from the waters and looked back up the gigantic tree, searching for Norah, knowing he wouldn’t be able to see her.
He headed back toward their camp. If Stryker had learned one thing as he maneuvered up the pillar, it was that the shriekers needed the water. It took every fiber–muscular and optical–of his being not to dive back down and hunt them.
Twenty minutes later he finished scouting the area; several more coilers and two other strange beasts had entered the afterlife.
He carefully shifted his body back into his bipedal state as Norah came into sight. He stopped in his tracks and pressed himself within the thick ovaline leaves as his body stiffened from toe to tip.
Stryker narrowed his eyes, losing focus to everything but the partially undressed beauty before him. A woman grooming herself became the most erotic, sexual sight he had ever been privy to. His eyes trailed the curves of her body, wavy and precise, heated caramel that melted the steel nerves inside of him.
Norah was sitting atop the extra poncho he carried, her shirt and pants strung up on a nearby branch, scrunched and wrinkled from continuous squeezing. Tiny drops of water fell from their ends. She was bare before his gaze except for plain, black undergarments.
Her fingers slid over her scrapes and cuts with his medical salve, every flick of her finger frayed his reserve. Stryker felt his mouth dry up as she continued to touch her glistening skin. The plates in his hands shifted, his teeth bit into his tongue, metallic blood filled his mouth.
She caressed the ointment over her legs, bringing her feet up where she rubbed the reddened skin under her fingertips. Norah massaged her feet, her palms cupped her in-steps as she made an almost indiscernible moan, low enough that only a Cyborg could hear.
Her long, curling hair was tied atop her head, leaving coils and ringlets to frame her face and tease her ears. Ebony black hair against smooth cinnamon and mahogany skin. A dessert.
Delicious. His tongue threaded between his bestial teeth to hiss between his lips.
Stryker let his gaze drift over every inch of her that he could see, knowing that what he was doing was wrong. He couldn’t help himself, his dick sprung erect between his legs. A sword, a hidden weapon that only wanted one thing.
He looked down at himself, confused at what was happening to his body.
Where is my control? He tried to shift his erection down, and when that didn’t work, he tried to shift it back into his body. The pressure that put against his metal groin was beyond uncomfortable.
He let himself free with an unprecedented thrust.
Stryker couldn’t remember a time when he reacted this way. He was sure he had been with a woman before, at least a sex bot, but he couldn’t recall the footage in his mind. He had either made it up or deleted his past experiences with women.
What he did find was a warning. One that flashed red and bright that said, Don’t be stupid. Don’t trust yourself. You wear a mask over your mouth for a reason. That last part yelled at him in the back of his mind.
Stryker clenched his eyelids shut. I can’t achieve perfection if I have no control.
His dick remained painfully hard. Thunder boomed in rapid succession. A lightning bolt haloed Norah’s lush and lean outline. Just think about baseball. He chanted internally.
She raised a cup of water she had collected from the rain running dripping down a hole in the canopy and splashed her neck. She sprayed her body with a sheen of soap. He watched as she looked around, peering through the veil of water, leaves, and humid gloom to see if he was around. Her eyes ran over him without seeing him.
Stryker turned away when she lifted her bra and stepped out of her panties. He wouldn’t invade her privacy like that, not as a peeping Tom waiting to see what he wasn’t meant to.
He leaned his head against the trunk and counted to a hundred. When he was done, he had regained enough control over himself to approach her. Stryker leaped to her side.
A startled scream met him.
“You can’t just do that!” Norah scuttled back a foot. Her hand went to her heart, she was wrapped up the poncho now, all her clothes hanging wet and limp beside her. “If I didn’t know better I’d think you were trying to kill me.”
Stryker smirked and sat beside her, leaning his back into the trunk and resting his gun over his knees. “How are you feeling?” He eyed the thin plastic that covered her.
She gaped. “I’m terrified, stressed, and how much caffeine did you give me back there? I can’t stop twitching.”
“100 milligrams. A little over a cup of joe.”
Norah brought her hands down from her chest and rested her palm over his dagger. Stryker pretended not to notice. The roars of the storm, partnered with the ever-darkening skies, created a bubble around them. I might have to forage. His eyes remained on the scientist. The winds whistled around them.
If the ship is gone we could…
He couldn’t bring himself to finish the thought. If there was ever a woman for him, he wouldn’t need to be the only man left on the planet to tempt her.
The cage he wore around his head felt heavy.
“I don’t believe you.”
He canted his head. “What?”
“About the caffeine.”
Stryker laughed but it came out hollow. “I have more if you want more.” He offered. “If one could be addicted to anything, it would be caffeine.”
She narrowed her eyes. He missed her full ebony irises immediately. “Why?”
“Caffeine is energy–albeit stolen energy–and energy is life. Addiction to life is not such a bad thing, is it?” he asked as he scrutinized her, monitoring and reading her bodily functions through his scanning tech. Fever is down. Stryker rested his head back against the tree. Her functions are normal.
“Why do you have a band around half your face?”
He closed his eyes.
The one question he hated, yet the one question that was always asked. He had noticed Norah eyeing it since the laboratory but circumstances had left conversation...lacking.
Maybe she won’t care. Won’t judge me. Will see me as a man instead of an abomination.
He opened his eyes and looked at her, the last crystals of rain still caught in her hair glittered at the end of her loose curls.
“You’re a scientist. You’re smart. You have to be to work on a colonization expedition.” Stryker leveled with her. “I’m sure you’ve seen things...things that don’t make sense. Creatures, plants, abominations.”
“The shriekers.” She nodded and kept her eyes on his face.
“Yeah, those. You know I’m a Cyborg already.”
“Yes. And a damned hard one to kill at that.”
Stryker smiled under his mask. “Ever heard of Project Lycan?”
Her curls moved as she shook her head. “No. Are you a werewolf?” They both laughed at the absurd question.
Until a tense quiet stopped them. He noticed Norah’s hand grip the dagger and shuffle it under the plastic crinkles of her poncho.
“No,” he gleamed and set his rifle aside. He kept his radar spinning around them. “Werewolves are not Lycans. Werewolves can’t shift on command while Lycans can. Lykànthropos. They date back to Ancient Greece. So far back in human his
tory, none of that civilization remains in existence. Project Lycan was undertaken after the first waves of Cyborgs were produced. Top secret at the time.” The memories came flooding back.
Unthinking machines. Wires. IVs. White rooms and vats. Humans everywhere in shrouds of white.
Stryker continued, “Until it was a success.” He pointed his thumb at his face. Success tasted bitter on his tongue. “I’m a product of that project.”
Norah’s hands moved from beneath of her poncho. She crawled several paces closer to eye his deformity better. His metal spine stiffened under her perusal. The smell of sweet berries and soap filled his nostrils.
Control. Control. Control.
“You can shift? Like a lycanthrope? I thought I saw something back there, when your flyer was sinking into the mud and when we crashed. What do you shift into?” Scientific curiosity and awe filled her voice.
“I have a compacted metal frame, enhanced with nanocells that are spliced with man and animal. Or reptile in my case.” He held her eyes, pinned her to her question and to the spot, letting her know that if she tried to run, there was no place to go but down. And down was death. “I’m a snake.”
A bubbly giggle came from her lush lips. Stryker sat forward.
“A snake? Really? Why the hell would they need a snake Cyborg? I mean, really, Stryker, I’m not a fool. Just lift your mask.”
“You don’t believe me? What happened to our trust?” he played along.
“Oh, I trust you with my life now, you’ve proven yourself beyond a shadow of a doubt. But believing you blindly is another thing entirely. And you haven’t told me why you wear metal around your head.” She hitched another step toward him. They were only a few feet apart from each other and the band on his head had never seemed more necessary than now.
He was a snake. And snakes liked to strike.
His lips peeled back behind his teeth. His eyes kept the rest of his face secret.
“I guess I have to prove myself once again to you.” He rose up and kneeled before her. His erection was semi-hard and right in front of her eyes but he didn’t try to hide it. Make of it what you will, little Norah dove. The drums of the turbulent storm raged around them, a constant symphony to remind them that at any moment, their lives could be snuffed out.
