by Clare Murray
They were three-quarters of the way to their destination when the man in the back began kicking up a fuss, groaning against his makeshift gag and kicking the sides of the vehicle. Rolling his eyes, Russ pulled over.
“Pee break,” he said. When Abby got out, stretching her legs a little unsteadily, he pointed toward the trees. “Go in there. There’s a crater on the other side of the road, looks pretty deep.”
“A crater?” She craned her neck.
“Yeah. See the cracks radiating outward? It’s not a giant hole, but it’s big enough. Either a spaceship crashed here, or someone bombed the area.”
“Or someone bombed a spaceship,” she offered with an irrepressible grin.
“Or that.” More amused than he let on, Russ strode to the rear of the Humvee where Cam was allowing the prisoner to swing his legs to the ground. The man groaned, glaring at them. Russ only shrugged. The guy was cuffed with his hands in the front. So he could take care of his own damn business.
“I think he objects to the color pink,” Cam said, turning aside politely.
“Nah, it’s the fluffiness he despises.”
The man glowered but climbed back inside voluntarily when he was ready. Russ taped his legs firmly together, not wanting him to attempt some harebrained escape plan. Fortunately, whoever had owned the Humvee seemed to have transported dogs regularly, so there was a wire mesh between the rear area and the backseats. Taped and cuffed as he was, the man wouldn’t be able to breach it.
“All right, let’s get moving. You want to drive?”
Cam shook his head, stopping at the open front door. “Nah, I’m good. Wait. Where’s Abby?”
Chapter Ten
Burrows. Fear of burrows had been her undoing.
Abby had enough time to let out a truncated yelp as the ground at the edge of the crater gave way, taking her along. Mingled dirt and pieces of road careened down the crater’s steep side.
She managed to break her fall by rolling, but lay breathless when she came to a stop nearly at the very bottom. Moving only her head, she looked at the mangled remains of a spacecraft and let out a small groan.
Well, nothing felt broken, and she hadn’t been knocked out. Carefully, she pulled herself to a sitting position.
“Should have peed in the woods like Russ told me,” she muttered to the length of metal in front of her. But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to step inside the tree line. Since she sure as hell wasn’t exposing her butt to a Shadow Fed, she’d opted to go at the side of the crater. She’d been finished and heading back when the fall happened.
No harm done, though. She just needed to get back up the steep side and back onto the road. With a grunt, she heaved herself to a standing position and took a step forward.
That small movement—and her manacles—saved her life.
A pale white tentacle snaked from the protection of the spaceship’s battered wing, striking the metal around her ankle with enough force to cause her to stumble.
With a yelp, Abby leaped up the slope, fumbling her gun from its holster. She whirled, sinking to her haunches, and took aim. Underneath the ship in the safety of the dark, an alien glared at her with its six black eyes.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Abby told it. “And I was afraid of burrows all this time.”
The two eyes on stalks rotated left to right, then back again as if fellow aliens lurked behind it. Which, come to think of it, was probably true. She kept her gun level, though fear made her a little shaky.
The Bark nursed its sunburned tentacle, cradling it against its pale white chest. The brief exposure to UV light had left a black, painful-looking stain on the appendage. Abby blinked, recalling part of the conversation with the Triplets. They’d compared UV sensitivity to leashes. It could be a form of control, they’d said.
But who’d want to leash a Bark?
The alien moved again. Was she still within striking range? Would it risk another burn?
Abby didn’t wait for an answer. She unloaded her clip into the thing, yelling as if she were demented. The alien jerked, absorbing the bullets into its jelly-like hide, and her yells turned into half-sobs. Didn’t these things ever fucking die?
“Abby!”
Before she could turn around, Cam was pulling her away from the wounded alien, briefly crushing her to his chest. The embrace lasted half a second before he frantically pushed her away. His hands searched her body, going over every inch. Next to him, Russ reached for her gun and flicked the safety on.
“It’s empty,” she said dully. “No more bullets.” Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the alien brooding under cover of darkness.
“Where did it sting you?” Cam demanded. “Where’s your wound?”
“It didn’t get me.” She roused enough to see the vast relief on both their faces. “It hit the manacle around my ankle.”
“Their poison can be fairly potent.” Cam bent to inspect her leg anyway, pulling up the hem of her jeans.
“How do they inject it?” She was briefly impressed with herself for asking such a pertinent question when all she wanted to do was crawl somewhere safe and cry.
“There’s retractable spikes inside each of their tentacles,” Cam told her.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Abby said for the second time that afternoon. “Their tentacles have teeth? Great. Can you…can you just kill it? Please?”
“Gladly.” That was Russ. “You want to turn away?”
“No.” She watched the Bark sizzle as Russ turned on his UV-saber, jerking in silent death-throes. When it was done, Russ motioned for her to step back as he strode forward. With a heave that would have taken three normal men to carry out, he tipped the crunched wing to its side. Whiteness writhed underneath and a series of ear-piercing howls made her flinch.
“That’s enough,” Cam ordered, turning her head away. “You saw one fry to death. Don’t need to see the others die as well.”
He was probably right, she reflected as he hoisted her into his arms, carrying her up the slope easy as anything. Behind her, the alien’s howls ended abruptly, one by one. Over Cam’s shoulder, she saw Russ turn away and follow them, his expression stern.
Maybe he would ream her out when they reached the top, angry that she’d disobeyed him and gone near the crater. She braced for it, awaiting the lash of temper, ready to retreat within herself. She’d gotten good at that back at Headquarters.
But Russ only looked at her as Cam set her down. “Glad you’re all right.”
The caress he brushed across her cheek lingered so that she could feel it even after crawling back into the Humvee. Cam buckled her in, offering up his broad shoulder for her head. She leaned into it and closed her eyes. Sleep had always been a blessed retreat for her. She’d always thought herself fortunate to be able to drop off quickly.
Abby woke an interminable time later. The Humvee was still moving, which was good. The sunlight outside was growing dimmer, which was bad. Recalling the six black eyes of the alien, she shivered.
“Easy,” Cam murmured. He sounded distracted, his head moving from side to side as he scanned the area he could see from the window.
“We’re about a mile outside Fort Wayne’s walls now,” Russ said, nodding to a battered green sign on the side of the road. “Gonna be a bit tight on time.”
“How tight?” She rubbed her eyes and sat up straighter.
“Enough to get the guards grumpy when they have to open the gates again,” Russ said, steering around a gigantic pothole. The road had narrowed to two lanes. They drove past gutted fast food joints and roofless car dealers with rusting vehicles still in neat lines in their lots. Twilight’s cast took the harsh edge off the desolation. If she squinted, she could almost pretend they were driving along a normal, pre-Invasion street…
A huge bump shattered any half-formed illusion
s. Abby opened her eyes, blinking as they drove past an obviously occupied building. Lights burned in its high windows and it was surrounded by manmade reinforcements—barbed wire and rubble, mainly. Lots of rubble.
“What’s that?”
“Expansion. Fort Wayne’s doing well these days. They’re starting a new wall out here, so they built a few watchtower-type places like that one. That way the builders can retreat there at night and not lose time traveling back and forth.”
She’d heard of some Cities expanding, but it wasn’t a common scenario. The idea gave her a much-needed dose of hope, something that was nearly dashed by Cam next time he opened his mouth.
“Word came through that aliens are massing in several different places around the country. Seems likely they’ve chosen the spots where the female ships landed.”
“Wonderful. Alien orgies.”
Cam chuckled. “We were nearly ordered to turn around and return to Columbus, actually. A bunch of Twins are headed that way. But we’re the ones with stolen Shadow Feds commtabs, so we’ve been spared.”
“Are you…okay with that?”
“Yeah,” Russ said. “We’ve seen enough action for now.”
So have you, were his unspoken words. Abby might have bristled at the assumption, but her predominating emotion was relief. At this point, she really, really wanted a safe, place to stay—and to see Grammie again.
The former was on the cards, at least. The City’s walls were visible through the windshield, its gates open a crack as, presumably, the guards awaited their arrival. They rolled through as the sun disappeared over the horizon.
As Russ had predicted, the guards at the wall were grumpy, but they hastily waved them in, nodding at the government IDs the Twins flashed. Clearly, they were familiar with Twins passing through here. That made sense given the City’s proximity to Chicago.
Not for the first time, she wondered if Washington, DC’s neighbors got along with them, if they were loyal to the Shadow Feds who still persisted in holding on to their vestiges of power.
She doubted it. She’d seen too many raid reports. Power wasn’t the only thing the senators hung on to with their fingernails. They also demanded food, drink and the little luxuries of post-Invasion life, like tobacco, fine clothes, and alcohol.
Eleven years on, those luxuries were difficult to scavenge. So nowadays, the senators tended to steal it through raids. That course of action didn’t exactly endear them to anyone else nearby.
Fort Wayne’s streets were well-kept, but they didn’t have to drive long before Russ turned into a gated complex of prefabricated houses, their identical white exteriors arranged in a large square around a clipped lawn. It practically screamed military housing.
“Here we go,” Russ said, turning off the engine. “Quarter power remaining. We’ll need to let it charge for an hour before we set off tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll get the prisoner out,” Cam said, nodding to the pair of soldiers approaching the vehicle. He chatted with them for a minute before going around to the back and handing the man over. Abby heard the raucous laughter from where she was sitting.
“Guess they discovered the pink handcuffs.”
Russ nodded but didn’t smile. He was looking at her with a kind of intensity that should have made her run. She squared up to him uncertainly—just in time to be pulled into his arms and enveloped in a hard kiss. She wrapped her arms around him, hands brushing across his short-cropped dark hair as they came to rest on his neck.
He was the one to break off, caging her face with his hands when she would have pressed forward again. “Thought we’d lost you in that crater.”
“I was trying to avoid burrows, so I didn’t go in the forest.” She let the chagrin she felt scrawl across her face.
“Roots,” Russ muttered, but he pulled her to him for another few seconds. “Come on, let’s get you somewhere private.”
“To be continued?” She grinned at the way his face changed, reading both mild surprise and avid agreement.
“Once we finish debriefing. I’d prefer not to have our arrival written up as ‘Ignored us and immediately jumped into the sack with their girl.’”
* * * * *
There was nothing brief, apparently, about debriefing. Abby paced restlessly within the confines of the prefab, looping between the two queen-size beds. Another ten paces brought her to the windowless wall, where a bare desk and chair stood against the corrugated metal.
Needing fresh air, she opened the door and stood on the steps. This City was perhaps the best kept she’d ever seen—and she’d seen plenty on her travels. Solar panels adorned every roof, there were no raucous cries from drunks, no junkies huffing Turq. She even spotted a woman walking a dog. Her arm lifted in a wave, and Abby waved back.
When had she last waved to a stranger so casually?
Not since before her stint at Headquarters, certainly. And she’d traveled through quite a few Cities where waving wasn’t the norm. She’d fled several the same day she arrived, preferring to chance sleeping outside rather than inside. In those Cities, rigid rules applied. Like women having to wear certain clothes and being forced to provide dowries upon marriage.
She’d always looked over her shoulder in those Cities, aware that if she were snatched from the street and forcibly married, it was unlikely a local would blink twice. Being tied to a man who only wanted her for offspring would have been a rough life. Arguably rougher than the one she’d briefly endured at Headquarters.
“Always look on the bright side of life,” she muttered.
The best Cities were ones with a mixture of free trade and strong community ties. Abby took a seat on the wooden steps, looking out over a kind of town square formed by other prefab dwellings. She saw a few lights on here and there, which set her at ease. Since her mom’s death, she seemed to have lost the ability to enjoy being alone. Most scavengers preferred being relatively solitary, working with one or two partners at most. But the thought of striking off on her own now made Abby want to puke.
Maybe it was the fear of winding up in a forced marriage. Maybe it stemmed from being an indentured servant, trapped in Headquarters.
Or maybe it had to do with never wanting to leave the Twins.
The stars seemed to shine brighter when she caught sight of them striding across the square, in step with each other. Cam held a tool in one hand and plastic goggles in the other. He nodded at her as they neared.
“Ready to get those manacles off?”
Abby was going to make a quip about how she ought to keep them since the bands had saved her life earlier by deflecting the alien’s strike. But her throat wouldn’t work right. All she could do was nod, tears in her eyes.
Russ moved behind her and sat on the steps, placing her sideways on his lap so that her legs stuck out at an angle. Cam donned the goggles, squatting next to her to examine the manacles. Then he switched his tool on and began grinding through the metal on each ankle.
Abby blinked twice when she realized he’d stopped partway through. Was he afraid of nicking her skin with the blade? But then he simply reached out and pried the metal apart with his bare hands until it broke at the point he’d ground away with the tool.
Lying there on the wooden steps, the twisted manacles seemed too insignificant to cause her distress. The tears came anyway. “Take them away,” she begged. “I never want to see them again.”
Russ stood, cradling her close as he carried her inside. He took her to the nearest bed, curling around her when she didn’t push him away. A few minutes later, Cam stretched out at her back. One of them—she couldn’t tell who, but they seemed interchangeable at the moment—stroked her hair, murmuring in a soothing baritone near her ear.
She was done. Done with Headquarters, with the corrupt men who called themselves senators, done with their uppity spouses who thought nothing of kicking a s
ervant in the ribs if they didn’t like the way the floor was scrubbed. She would no longer have to endure lecherous stares and Senator Green’s slimy touch, or drop her eyes when passing one of her “betters” in the hallway.
Abby let out a shaky sigh and relaxed into the softness of the bed. She’d never go back there. The Twins had promised her as much, and she would hold them to that.
Cam offered her a handkerchief. “You all right?”
“Much improved.” She managed a watery smile. She’d never been one for hiding her emotions. Besides, there was a lot to be said for letting it all out.
“Guess this means bondage isn’t on the cards.” Both Abby and Cam stared in mild shock at Russ, who immediately looked chagrined. “Sorry. Too soon?”
Abby pressed the handkerchief to her face and giggled through the fabric. “That wasn’t bad for a Russ-joke.”
“A Russ-joke, huh?” She heard the smile in his voice, then saw it for herself as he tugged the handkerchief away. It took her breath away.
“I love you guys.”
There was none of the formless terror she’d experienced after she’d expressed the same to Callum, no fear of them not saying it back. She’d known she was something to them—the way they’d scrambled into the crater with no fear of their own safety clinched it. Whether it was love, lust, or a combination of the two, it was real.
But they said it back with both actions and words, dazing her with kisses. Two pairs of hands stripped her with consummate ease until she was naked and at their mercy.
Or not quite—she caught Cam’s belt with one hand, holding him still as she unzipped his fly. Then she peeled Russ’s shirt upward, exposing a six-pack that would have made almost anyone stare in envy. She brushed a caress across the ridged muscles, huffing in surprised irritation as he shucked off his shirt and let it drift across her face.
It smelled of him, which nearly tempted her into keeping it there. She wouldn’t be surprised if this pheromone-attraction worked both ways, half-addicting her to their smell and taste. But she couldn’t rule out their personalities, which meshed with hers in a way that had her seeking them out almost every waking moment.
