Perfect Mate

by Mina Carter

  Jack didn’t stop firing, even when the first RA was joined by others in an overwhelming press. He targeted limb joints. Knees, ankles, hips. If the things couldn’t run, they were easier to put down.

  “Thomas,” he yelled over the din. “RAs down, shotgun. Darce, get your fur on. We got runners.”

  Chapter Eleven

  If Lillian thought her life had turned into a horror movie before, then the reality of seeing real “live” zombies up close and personal rocked her to the core. Her eyes widened as the first one came into view. She’d dealt with patients from all walks of life and in all stages of mental illness. The shuffling gait and empty eyes were things she saw with highly medicated cases. But there was something else, something so inherently wrong about the man in front of her, that her brain instantly rejected the evidence of her eyes.

  He was walking and talking…if you could call the sound he was making speech…but he was dead. Totally and utterly dead, his eyes were devoid of life and starting to whiten.

  “Holy s—”

  The rest of her sentence was cut off as the soldiers around her opened fire. She’d never been in a firefight, only ever seen them in the movies. The real thing was nothing like it was onscreen.

  It was a loud, chaotic maelstrom of noises and smells. The thunder of weapons firing, spent casings hitting the floor combined with the smell of cordite and burnt, rotting flesh. It overwhelmed her senses as she cowered behind Jack, dropping her axe to the floor as she clapped her hands over her ears and hated herself for her weakness. She couldn’t see or hear anything.

  She’d wanted a gun? Ha! What a joke. She’d have dropped it in shock as soon as the shit hit the fan.

  Pulling her trusty fire axe closer with a foot, she bit her lip and tried not to whimper as she waited for the firing to stop. A shadow cast by the moonlight outside flitted across the floor in front of her. She frowned. There was only her, Jack and his team in the corridor, and they were all concentrating on killing zombies.

  It had to have come from outside, perhaps a cloud covering the moon. She looked up, and her heart almost stopped. There were more zombies outside. Her heart pounding in her chest, she clambered to her feet, back against the wall and axe in hand.

  This part of the corridor was outside the secure area. Which meant that the gates at the end Jack and his men were firing through were the start of the secure zone. It also meant that the French windows at the end of this corridor, just out of sight around the corner, weren’t barred.

  “Shit.”

  She edged a couple of steps down the corridor, trying to crane her neck enough to see around the corner without having to get too close to it. There was no way she’d hear glass breaking, not with the chaos behind her. Were the zombies intelligent enough to break the glass to gain entry, or would they mill about looking for an open door? The doors wouldn’t be open. They might not be barred, but they would be locked and bolted.

  The sounds behind her changed. The gunfire died down, replaced by shotgun blasts, snarls and growls. The sickening sound of tearing flesh reached her ears. Refusing to check behind her, she padded down the hall, one hesitant step at a time, with her axe raised high.

  She jumped as another shadow flitted past her. Shit, surely that was too fast for one of the zombies? Her heart pounded a frantic tattoo against her ribcage. Taking a deep breath to calm herself, she ventured another couple of steps closer. Even at a run, that first zombie hadn’t been that quick. The movement she’d seen had to have been an owl or something that time. There were a couple who lived in the trees on the edge of the hospital grounds.

  Fortifying herself with logic, she edged to the corner. Her arms ached, but she kept the axe high, just in case. Movement fluttered in the corner of her eye. She screamed and swung the axe wildly.

  The blade slammed into the wooden frame of the window, burying itself deep. The sharp blade had sheared the fluttering net curtain nearly in two, the bottom half falling away to hang like a dejected flag.

  “Fucking piece of shit,” she muttered as she tried to yank it free. Some Xena-type she’d made. Losing it as the first twitch of a curtain. Hopefully no one had noticed…

  “Okay, who let the civilian have the axe?”

  Color burned across her cheeks as the comment dropped right into a lull in the snarling and fighting. Typical, just typical. She’d fucked up, and the eyes of the world were on her. Swearing at the axe, she tried everything but putting her foot on the frame to jerk it loose. Knowing her luck, if she tried that, her foot would slip and she’d end up on her backside with her legs in the air.

  “Leave it, Lillian. We have more than enough weaponry.” Jack spared her a look over his shoulder as he reloaded. Beyond him, the formerly pristine corridor resembled a massacre. Moans, groans and things moving in the bloody mess made her turn away quickly.

  She heaved on the axe again. She wasn’t leaving it. It was her axe. The world had gone to hell in a hand basket, so if she wanted to carry it around like some lethal, sharp edged security blanket she damn well would.

  The hairs rising on the back of her neck warned her that something was amiss. Her gaze latched onto the tiny flutter in the severed curtain. The windows should be closed for the night. Where had the breeze come from?

  She froze, her gaze sliding sideways as she tried to look behind her without moving her head. Terror welled up in the center of her chest and threatened to overflow. A shuffle. A whimper of fear escaped her lips. There was someone…no, something…behind her.

  As if it could read her thoughts, the thing behind her moaned. A sound of animal, mindless hunger it grabbed the terror running rampant through her body, added a little imagination and took it on a joyride. Images of the things surrounding her and stripping the flesh from her body filled her mind.

  Visions of teeth and claw-like fingers digging deep into her unprotected belly to pull forth blood-covered gobbets of flesh tormented her. Her body stiffened in terror and her bowels fluttered, a precursor to loss of control.

  “Like fuck!”

  Grabbing the axe, she wrenched it from the doorframe in one almost super-human wrench. Swinging it over her head like some modern-day female Conan the Barbarian, she slammed it into the neck of the zombie standing right behind her. The force of the blow separated its head from its neck, thick black fluid splattering up the wall beside her. The body sighed as the remaining gas escaped dead lungs and collapsed in a messy sprawl on the ground.

  “These are new pants, asshole. I’m not pissing them for anyone!”

  The RAs in the corridor were dealt with. Mostly. The three part-turned wolves moved between the groaning corpses, decapitating those who still had heads. Most didn’t. Standard operating procedure with re-animates was to take out the leg joints, then pop the head with as much ammo as it took or a close-quarter shotgun blast. It wasn’t pretty and left bits of skull on your clothes, but it was the most effective way to kill the bastards. If you were out of ammo, then you had to get up close and personal with your claws, something none of the team liked to do. It took weeks to get the stink off your skin.

  Now he finally had time to draw breath, Jack looked around for Lillian, expecting to see her still struggling with the axe in the window frame. A smile curved his lips. He’d tease her about that later. His fierce little warrior woman.

  The scene that met his eyes all but stopped his heart right in his chest. A re-animate stood right behind Lillian, its hand reaching out to grab her hair…

  “Nooooooooo!”

  He was on his feet, and propelling himself toward her without conscious thought. His beast roared at the threat to the woman it had decided was theirs.

  “Stand to!” He heard but ignored the shout behind him. “RAs at the rear!”

  The change ripped through him in a quarter of a second, his body distorting and changing in the space between one footstep and the rest. His clawed feet, still human in shape, dug gouges in the floor.

  Ten feet. He wasn’t going
to reach her in time. She was going to die and all because he wouldn’t give her a gun. A roar of frustration and fury erupted from his massive chest.

  Five feet. She tightened her grip on the stuck axe, her knuckles white with the strain and ripped it from the wood. As he watched, she swung the thing like a pro.

  He hit the corner as the head rolled across the floor. Just in time. Another RA rounded the turn at a run, its dead eyes fixed on Lillian. He slid the last few yards, his claws squealing against the floor. Dropping to a crouch in front of his woman, Jack snarled, the sound low and deadly.

  The dead creature in front of him, a woman this time, just chittered hungrily. Her jaw worked as she stared at Lillian, as though she was already chewing on fresh meat, drool dripping from her chin to stain her blouse. She’d been dead a while, her skin green and her abdomen distended. Almost at the end of her usable life for the Project—any more decay and she would no longer be viable as anything other than fertilizer. For some reason the women always decayed faster than the men.

  The snarl spilling from his throat grew louder and became a growl. In the corner of his eye, he saw one of the guys, Palmer, retrieve Lillian from behind him. Good, he didn’t want her in the line of fire when he ripped this thing up. Just one slash of bodily fluids into any small cut she had and she’d be infected. If that happened, he’d put a bullet through her brain himself.

  They said the RAs didn’t retain their memories, that there was just hunger and the instinct to kill. Even so, it was a horror he was not going to subject her to. Not while he had breath in his body.

  The re-animate stepped to the side and tried to skirt around him to follow Lillian. Jack batted it back with a casual swipe of his claws. Dead flesh parted under the razor-sharp talons. The smell of putrefaction blossomed on the air. He wrinkled his nose in disgust.

  Jeez, these things needed a bath. Or a bonfire. Oh crap. He would not think of barbecue. He would not think of barbecue.

  Luckily for him, he didn’t get time. Seeing its next meal disappearing around the corner, the thing howled in frustration and rushed him. Jack met it at a run, his heavy thighs powering him forward. They collided in the middle of the corridor, and he wrapped huge, distorted hands around the thing’s ribcage. His talons slid into the rotten skin with a small snick he felt more than heard. Without a flicker of pain, it snarled and snapped at him with blunt teeth.

  He snarled right back, his lips curling from his muzzle and revealing all the wickedly sharp teeth within. With a heave of his inhumanly broad shoulders, he snapped the ribcage like kindling, tossing the broken halves against opposite walls. Decapitation may have been the approved method of dispatching a re-animate, but not having a body for the head to sit on worked just as well.

  She couldn’t stop shaking.

  Lillian sat curled in a little ball tucked between the wall and a heavy steel cabinet and concentrated on stopping the tremors raking her body. She tried, honest to goodness tried, but it appeared to be Mission Impossible.

  “I did it,” she told the kind-faced soldier who knelt down in front of her. He’d been the one who’d pulled her away when the wolfman—Jack—had come crashing to her rescue.

  She hadn’t even seen the second zombie. Before she could do anything about it, even with her trusty axe, Jack had been there, and Palmer had herded her back down the corridor. He’d even taken her axe from her, something they’d had a minor tussle over. In the end though, no matter how much of an ass-kicking, zombie-killing bitch she was, she couldn’t hold out against werewolf strength and he’d won.

  “I know, you did good,” he said with a smile. It wasn’t a patronizing smile, like the ones she’d seen earlier. His eyes sparkled with genuine pleasure.

  “Perfect swing, you took the thing’s head off clean at the shoulder. Do you know how hard it is to do that? We should call you Killer.”

  Unable to help herself, she matched his grin with one of her own. Even though she was horrified at what she’d done, taken the life of a “living” thing, she knew without a shadow of a doubt she’d do it again if she had to.

  Click click click. The noise of claws against linoleum filled the corridor and Lillian paused. She’d had pet dogs as a kid, so she knew the sound of paws when she heard it. And these sounded like some seriously large paws.

  Looking up, her gaze collided with Palmer’s. He reached down and picked up her hand. His eyes were human-green at the moment, but she knew that the same sort of creature that dwelled within Jack lived in him too.

  “Deep breath,” he advised, with a wry twist of his lips. “We can’t have Killer freaking out, now can we?”

  The words startled a laugh out of her as she looked around. The same concerned expression as in Palmer’s eyes looked back at her from the rest of them. They were all worried about her freaking out. Like, seriously worried about it. The concern from people she’d only known for hours touched her heart.

  She patted Palmer’s hand. “I just decapitated an extra from The Walking Dead. With an axe. I think I can handle a little doggy, don’t you?”

  There was what sounded suspiciously like a snort from behind Palmer, but the soldier ignored it. A twinkle of amusement in his eyes, he inclined his head.

  “Okay. If you’re sure.”

  He stood up, still holding her hands so she was forced to stand with him. It was that or be dragged. Despite her brave words, she was glad for the support. Apprehension didn’t just hum through her body, it was using her network of veins as a racetrack, urged on by the frantic beat of her heart.

  She knew what she was going to see as Palmer pulled her away from the wall. Focusing her eyes on the edge of the cabinet, she watched as her view of the corridor rotated. The expanse of wall panned to the left and the window came into view. The net curtain hung lifeless, like a sail on a windless sea.

  Comforted by that, she looked along the floor. A pair of clawed paws came into view first. Her breath caught. They were huge, ending in vicious claws designed for slicing and rending, covered in the black blood she was coming to associate with the zombies.

  She followed the paws upward into legs and farther on into broad shoulders. A muzzle dropped down into view, and she found herself face to face with the biggest wolf she’d ever seen in her life. He’d changed from the weird half-man, half-wolf thing that had attacked the zombie into a creature any human would recognize.

  Fear exploded and held her captive. Her natural instincts screamed at her to run, to escape. Although her conscious mind told her that this wasn’t a wolf, that it was Jack, her survival instincts knew a predator when it saw one. Instincts that had shaped the human race’s evolution over millennia and were hard as hell to suppress.

  But suppress them she did, keeping her gaze locked onto the creature in front of her. He didn’t move, just looked back at her as her mind argued with itself. This was Jack. Just at the thought of him, the image of his face presented itself in her mind. A sense of safety and security accompanied it. Biting her lip, she tried to reconcile that with the massive beast in front of her. She trusted Jack, and this was Jack. Just another version of him.

  Oh, don’t be so damn stupid! You’ve seen zombies ready to snack on your brains. He’s a werewolf, for heaven’s sake. Probably buttering you up for dinner later!

  She squashed the nasty little voice, shoving it into the smallest box in the back of her mind. Disengaging her hands from Palmer’s, she took a step toward Jack. Her eyes were everywhere, from the claws to the tufted ears to the broad expanse of his back. Hell, he was so big he could double as a pony for a small child.

  Could she trust him? She’d only met him yesterday and it had been a whirlwind ride ever since. As soon as she thought it, her gaze collided with his and she had her answer.

  Warm amber radiated concern and worry in a mirror image of the expressions his men had worn. Concern for her, and worry…worry about what? He shuffled his feet, dropped his head a little. At the despondent line of his shoulders and the littl
e whuffle he gave, it hit her. He was worried about what she thought. Of him.

  “You silly thing,” she breathed and rushed him. She closed the gap between them within a heartbeat. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she buried her face in the heavy fur. It was softer than she’d imagined, like silk against her skin.

  “You’re beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Silence filled the corridor as she stood with her face buried in the thick fur at Jack’s neck. His fur was soft and fluffy underneath, with coarse hair on top, and smelled of pure Jack. Closing her eyes, she burrowed her fingers under the coarse hair to the soft and just rested against him. The rest of the world fell away for a few precious seconds. She knew when she opened her eyes it would all still be there. The blood-splattered corridor, the destroyed corpses and the silent, not-human soldiers. She didn’t care. Just for a moment she wanted to block it all out and pretend she was safe.

  Claws clicked on the floor behind her. Lots of claws. Jack whuffed softly and moved under her hold. She lifted her head and turned, peeking out from behind Jack’s scarred ear. Three more wolves walked up the corridor, padding through what remained of the zombie bodies. Paws black with zombie blood, two were easily as big as Jack was, but the third was smaller. With white fur and ice-blue eyes, she was easy to identify.

  “Nic?”

  The white wolf dipped her head as though nodding and looked up at Lillian through thick lashes. The anger Lillian had sensed in her in human form was still there but muted, as though she were happier as a wolf.

  The wolf on the left was the leaner of the other two, and much smaller than Jack. His dark-gold eyes weren’t familiar, but the sandy-blond fur and the way he hunched his shoulders tipped her off.

  “Sanders.” It had to be, and he was just as quiet as a wolf as he was as a man.

  Shifting from foot to foot, she looked at the last wolf and met warm amber eyes that sparkled with mischief. She grinned in reply. “And you have to be Darce.”