Perfect Mate

by Mina Carter

  “The RAs aren’t active yet? I’m assuming we’re headed out by road?” She tapped the map idly. The hospital wasn’t too far from the camp. A couple of hours hard drive and they’d be there.

  Fitzgerald nodded and slipped his pen into his pocket. “Yes, air suppression teams are already in the air. Orders to shoot anything on foot and maintain a cordon around the hospital. Follow me. We’ll head to the activation area. I think you’ll want to see this.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  She hid her surprise and followed him without argument. This was new. Even as team commander she’d never been invited through to the activation area before, and as a Blood it was normally off limits to her, as were the Lycan labs. A feeling of unease filled her as she filed after them like a good little soldier. Whatever this was, it couldn’t be good.

  The sense of something wrong increased on the short walk through the maze that made the Operations building and had built into a fine crescendo as they entered the RA labs. By the time Fitzgerald opened the door to an observation room and gestured at her to precede him inside, not only had the hackles on the back of her neck risen, but the skin underneath was actively trying to crawl away as well.

  What am I missing? What game is Fitzgerald playing now?

  The room appeared empty, tables and chairs pushed against the wall behind the door. As always, she gave it a cursory glance before she stepped over the threshold. The look was a holdover from being human—these days, her enhanced senses told her the room was empty.

  Like a moth drawn to the flame, she approached the window down the opposite side of the room. One-way glass, it didn’t show the normal view of acrid desert outside. Instead she saw a darkened room below. For the people crowding in behind her, all of them human, it would have been impenetrable darkness. Not for a nocturnal creature. Her eyes had adapted to take advantage of the small amount of available light. Pupils dilating, the room below came into view. It was painted in shades of gray and black thanks to the darkness, but she easily made out the containment couches and the figures lying upon them.

  Details emerged from the monochromatic view. She could make out the darker gray of the body bags each figure lay upon. Her logical mind filled in the orange they used for the RA body bags. Orange for RA, white for Lycan, black for Blood. Even after death, the Project worked at keeping the three strains separate.

  Terrified moans reached through the thick plate glass. The lights snapped on, making her wince and squint. She cast a glance over her shoulder. Fitzgerald smirked as his hand left a bank of light switches. Her eyes narrowed as she contemplated killing him, slowly. She’d rip his throat out if she weren’t convinced that stupidity, like the three viruses, was transmittable through blood.

  “Oh my God, no. Please no. P-please…I beg of you. Don’t do this.”

  The terrified whimper from the room stopped Antonia dead. Filled with utter terror, it was familiar. A man’s voice.

  Garry’s voice.

  It took her an eternity to turn, as she prayed that she’d heard incorrectly. It wasn’t Garry. It couldn’t be her med-tech, the guy who had looked after her since her accident, strapped to a bed with the rest and about to be turned into the living dead.

  “Please…someone help me. There’s been a mistake. I’m Garry Stephens. I work here!”

  Her hope cut off dead as he said his name. He was in the middle, in full view from the window, flanked on each side by other couches. They were all occupied. Each had an orange jump-suited figure lying on an orange body bag. Color coordination, she liked it.

  The other subjects lay silently, barely moving, with their eyes wide and pupils dilated. Death-row prisoners. All drugged out of their skulls to mimic the humane death they should have undergone. Instead, the Project had appropriated their bodies for “scientific research”.

  She snorted to herself. The government had always concealed weapons research under that banner. Garry was different, though. He wasn’t drugged, still in the clothes she’d seen him in the day before, and terrified.

  Her gaze snapped to Fitzgerald as he came to stand next to her. “What’s he doing in there? He’s a member of staff.”

  “I’m aware of that.” The colonel turned his head to look at her, and Antonia read the answer in his eyes. Garry wasn’t in there because he’d done anything wrong. He was there because of her.

  He’d die for her mistake, whatever the hell it had been.

  “Oh, for fucks sake. You can’t do this.”

  Her words exploded out of her, escaping before she could censor them.

  “If I’ve done something wrong, punish me. Not him.”

  “I think you need to remember who you’re talking to, Major Fielding.”

  Fitzgerald’s voice seemed to whip out in the sudden silence of the room. Even Garry, on the other side of the thick plate glass, fell silent as though he could sense the standoff taking place mere feet from him.

  “Dr. Stephens violated one of our prime directives within the Project and allowed himself to get too close to his subjects.” Fitzgerald’s lip curled as he raked a scathing glance over her, leaving her in no doubt about his feelings.

  She barely managed to catch her answering snarl in time. Prime directive? What the fuck…? Did he think they were in some episode of Star Trek?

  “Subjects?” Voice light, she gave him a poker face to look at again. She only just managed it, the air around her virtually humming with her anger. “I thought the politically correct term was patients.”

  Fitzgerald’s eye started to twitch at the corner, a reddish purple flush blooming over his skin like a sunrise over the desert. Antonia didn’t drop her gaze like a good little minion. Just watched as the red turned redder and a wave of purple washed down his neck.

  His heart pounded out a furious and angry beat as his blood pressure rose, the heat of the red fluid within the thin casing between it and her fangs a siren’s call. Perhaps he’d do them all a favor and burst something critical. If that happened, all operations would be off. The cleanup would be shunted to another facility, the RAs wouldn’t be needed and Garry would be off the hook.

  Just long enough for her to get him the hell out of here.

  As she watched, Fitzgerald got it together. Rolling his neck, he closed his eyes for a second. A whiff of emotion-laden sweat assaulted her nostrils as he pulled at his uniform collar.

  He opened his eyes to look directly at her, and Antonia read her own death in his eyes. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but sometime soon he’d find a way to have her killed.

  This time for good.

  “Remember your place, Major.”

  This time his voice was calm as he turned back to the window. Lifting a hand, he flicked an intercom switch next to the glass.

  “Start the procedure.”

  She stood, frozen into place, as she watched the machinery in cradles on the ceiling swing into action. The virus delivery machinery. She’d seen it before, but in the Bloods area there was one machine per room rather than the whole-scale factory production line here.

  At the first whir of machinery, Garry’s head whipped around. Craning back, he watched as the delivery units rolled forward on the tracks. He paled, a wordless moan of terror streaming from his lips. Eyes wide with panic, he bucked and fought in the restraints as the unit crawled ever nearer. All around him the blank-eyed prisoners stared unseeing at the ceiling above.

  Antonia curled her hands into fists at her sides, nails biting into her toughened palms. She couldn’t let them do this…couldn’t let them infect him for no reason.

  Half turning, she caught the eye of the guard at the back of the room. Instead of watching the room below, he held her gaze. One forefinger tapped his holstered pistol pointedly. The message was horribly obvious. Suck it up, or deal with a hollow point.

  She turned back to the window, ignoring the colonel next to her, and forced herself to watch as the one person she counted as something approaching a friend was killed. Murdered.<
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  His fighting didn’t achieve anything. The gurney didn’t move. Exhausted, he stopped, eyes wide and pupils dilated as the unit trundled into place above him. It stopped with a click. As the needle started to descend, a dark stain spread over his pants at the groin.

  “Awwww, bless him,” Fitzgerald mocked. “So scared of the widdle needle he pissed his pants.”

  She grit her teeth so hard she was surprised they didn’t break. Fitz was a dead man. She didn’t know how, when or where, but she would make sure of it. And, his death wouldn’t be an easy one.

  The needle reached the end of its track. Garry closed his eyes. Antonia refused to. She refused to do him the dishonor of turning away.

  Fluid built up on the tip of the needle, and grew until it was a greenish-black ball. It fell. Garry flinched as it hit his cheek, making a little splash-mark.

  Go easy my friend, and rest assured you will be avenged.

  He gasped as the fluid disappeared into his skin. She knew how virulent the RA-17 virus could be, but even Antonia was surprised at how swiftly it killed. With seconds the room filled with gasping as Garry and those around him fought for breath with lungs no longer able to process oxygen. They spasmed, backs arching and heels drumming. One after the other, they slumped lifeless to the gurneys.

  Dead. For now.

  If nothing else the Project was an efficient machine. Within minutes of Antonia leaving Operations, a transport convoy was being assembled. Already in combat uniform, she made a quick trip back to her room for her tactical-rig.

  “Fuck!”

  Once inside the relative privacy of her room, she released the tumult of emotions warring inside her. She slammed her fist into one of the rooms support columns. Her head and shoulders were showered with powdered concrete from the force of the blow.

  They’d killed him. They’d killed Garry. All for talking to her. Fitzgerald was a dead man. She’d kill him slowly…tear his throat out and lap the blood up as he watched her with dying eyes. Or tear his intestines out through his ass, just to watch him whimper and scream like a little girl. She wrinkled her nose. No, scratch that last. She wanted nothing to do with that man’s ass.

  A heavy sigh on her lips she pushed away from the column. Right now she couldn’t afford wet dreams of killing that sniveling little bastard. She had a job to do. Her last. Then she was coming back and going on a hunt—for a full-bird colonel.

  She left the room completely in control. On the surface, anyway. Her tac-rig slung over her shoulder and rifle in her arms, she returned to the transport area to find the RA crate already loaded.

  Coming to a stop next to the transport officer, she looked around the assembled vehicles.

  “How we doing for time?”

  He looked up with a start. “Huh? Oh, sorry, Major, I didn’t see you there. We’re good. The payload is already strapped down. We’re just waiting on a driver, and then you’re hot to trot.”

  She nodded. “I’ll wait in the cab.”

  Chapter Seven

  “C-clean up team?”

  Hating the slight shake in her voice, Lillian followed Jack down the corridor. She tried not to look at the bodies on the floor. Faces stretched into hideous screams, their sightless eyes stared at the ceiling, and their backs were distorted into hideous shapes. A tide of nausea rose to burn the back of her throat. They must have suffered so much pain.

  “What happened to them? How did you ki…um, how did they die?”

  She fired questions at him as she skirted around the corpses. Her first thought as a member of hospital staff—hell, as a member of the human race—was to try and help them. Something, a survival instinct perhaps, warned her not to mess with things she didn’t understand.

  She pulled her foot back, making sure not to touch the ever-widening pool of blood. It was thick as tar, and her gut told her it was dangerous.

  “The second guard hardly has a scratch on him. How did you…what did you do to him? Just what the hell is going on?” she asked as she scurried after him.

  His long strides ate up the corridor. She tried like hell not to ogle his backside, still playing peek-a-boo through the flaps of the gown. How was a girl supposed to think with prime male flesh like that on display? Unbidden an image rose in her mind. Those firm ass cheeks clenching and relaxing as he drove into her…

  Color burned her cheeks as she banished the image. What was going on with her? She felt like she’d been dropped into a cross between The Twilight Zone and a bad horror movie, surrounded by corpses, and she couldn’t stop ogling Jack. She couldn’t lust after him, not at the moment. It was entirely inappropriate. Maybe if they’d met outside the hospital… No, she shook her head to herself. That still wouldn’t work. He looked liked a model straight out of one of the glossy magazines from the waiting room. She might have admired him from the other side of a bar, but she’d never have plucked up the courage to approach him.

  “I didn’t do anything to them. The Project did.” His lips pressed together as he stopped in front of one of the secure cells and studied the lock for a second.

  “They create us in controlled conditions. They don’t want random infections and creatures like me on the loose. So they pump their people full of shit to make sure it doesn’t happen.” He nodded back toward the twisted corpses. “That happens instead.”

  He looked back at the door. His strong fingers traced the shape of the lock, as though caressing the metal. “Are these double or triple locked?”

  “Just double. Hey no, you can’t—” she protested, reaching out to warn him. The secure cells housed the most dangerous patients. Oh yeah, the little voice in her head sneered, more dangerous than a guy who grows claws and slices bits off people?

  Too late. He drew his arm back. Claws glinted in the dull light as he slashed at the locks. Metal screamed and parted, cut through as cleanly as though he’d taken a laser-cutter to the door.

  Lillian’s jaw dropped. Cutting someone’s hand off was hard, but she knew how fragile the human body could be, how little force it took to damage it beyond repair. But cutting through a solid steel reinforced door was something else entirely.

  “What are you…Wolverine?”

  His lips quirked as he slid her a look. The amber leeched back into his eyes again. The sight took her breath away. She was beginning to realize that meant the thing inside him was beginning to emerge.

  “Yeah. Something like that. Better looking, though.” He threw her a wink.

  She snorted. Men, all ego.

  “Yeah, right. Sure you are.”

  “Stay here.”

  He yanked the door open and disappeared into the cell. Stunned, she didn’t argue. She jumped and snatched her hand back from the door. The cut mechanisms within lost their balance and tumbled down within the metal frame with a loud clatter.

  Worried, she glanced quickly up the corridor. Someone had to have heard that. Any minute now the rest of the military guards would be hot-footing it down the corridor.

  She needn’t have worried. Snarls erupted from the cell, drowning out the small noise she’d made and creating even more noise. Her heart slammed into her chest again, setting up a frantic rhythm as the sounds of a struggle reached her ears.

  Wheels screamed in protest, followed by a metallic thud she recognized as a bed being slammed against a wall. Over it all was an angry snarling that increased in volume and malevolence. A meaty smack reached her ears, quickly followed by a yelp.

  Not caring about what she’d been told, she shoved the door open. The windows on this wing were all barred, but that only stopped the inmates escaping. It didn’t stop moonlight streaming in as strong as the light of day.

  Like a spotlight, it picked out the two men in the middle of the room. Jack, grim-faced determination etched into every line of his large body, had another heavily built guy in a chokehold.

  She gasped, her hand flying to her throat. The man stiffened, his head thrown back as he howled. As she watched in horror, his body chan
ged shape. The sounds of bones popping and cracking filled the cell as his knee joints switched direction, stretching the skin around them in a sickening display. If she didn’t know better, she’d think she was on the set of a horror film.

  A sense of the surreal and insane surrounded her. She fought the giggle as it tried to escape her lips. Only last week she’d complained to her friends about her boring life. Right now, with a patient claiming to be a werewolf, she’d be quite happy with boredom. After this lot, sanity would be an optional extra.

  Within seconds, the hideous sounds stopped and his knees finally decided which direction they wanted to face. He went from sagging against Jack, with his head bowed, to straightening up until he stood on his own two feet. Finally he lifted his head, looking through the dark curtains of shoulder-length hair, and she gasped.

  He had the same strange amber eyes as Jack when he was…not fully human. Unlike Jack’s eyes, these were not warm and patient. In this man’s eyes, she could clearly see the beast within, and it scared her.

  The next few seconds all happened too fast for her to process. One moment the guy was standing next to Jack, the next he lunged for her, hunger and lust in his eyes. She screamed. Back-pedaled fast. Her ass hit the door, and she went down hard, her feet scrambling uselessly against the floor as she tried to get away.

  He was almost on her, his breath hot as it fanned against her neck and the big bulk of his body looming over her. She tensed and turned away. Any moment now, the same vicious claws as Jack’s would tear into her soft flesh. He was too fast, she couldn’t fight, and she couldn’t move fast enough to get away. Her legs shook, fear making her weak and heightening all her senses. Her heart thundered in her chest yet over it she could hear the tick-tock of the clock in the hallway as it marked the seconds to her death.

  Seconds stretched out into years, but the blow didn’t come. Instead there was a yelp. The angry presence and hot breath over her disappeared. Yanked away with the skitter of claws on the linoleum.