by J. C. Diem
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Chapter Seven
It took the men a quarter of an hour to set up the cameras and to return to the SUV. A pungent smell filled the vehicle as we drove through more swamp land on the far side of the city. After a forty-five minute journey, we ended up in dense, marshy woods.
While the trees were different from the ones in the compound in the Rocky Mountains, the fence was the same. Thirty feet high, both it and the gate were topped with razor wire. They provided an effective deterrent to keep any trespassers out. The barrier had the added security of being electrified.
Our trek through the woods was short and I was amazed to see a familiar two-story concrete building ahead. It was an exact replica of the compound in Colorado. It seemed that the PIA stuck to the same template with their buildings as well as with their cars.
We backed into the garage then we climbed out of the SUV and entered the same long hallway I was used to seeing in our usual home. Mark placed his hand on the scanner to open the door to the main area. “You’ll have to scan your prints on the computer before I can give you access to the doors,” he said over his shoulder as he pushed the door open.
I thought all of the compounds would be linked together through the computer system, but it seemed that I was wrong. The main room was exactly the same as the base in Colorado, except for the furniture. The dining table, chairs and coffee table were white. The bright yellow rug on the floor in the living room clashed badly with the brown leather couches.
The guys were probably happy that they still had gym equipment and a boxing ring to keep them fit and occupied. I just hoped there was a gun range so I could practice my skills.
We took the winding staircase up to the second floor and entered the communications room. It was identical to the other one down to the black leather L-shaped couch. Mark lined us up and we took turns placing our right hands on the computer table. Once our prints had been recorded, we returned to the ground floor again.
“I need coffee before you launch into your plan,” Kala said.
“I second that motion,” Flynn agreed. Out of the four shifters in the squad, he was the calmest in temperament. Snakes were usually fairly placid until they were provoked into an attack. Our blonde companion on the other hand was playful and affectionate, just like the cat she changed into. She could also be vicious when she was angry. So far, she hadn’t turned her anger on any of us and it seemed to be reserved for the bad guys. Reece was similar to me. We both tended to need time alone and were a little distant from the others. We were part of the same team, yet we didn’t quite feel as though we belonged. Or at least that was how it seemed to me.
We all wanted liquid refreshment, so I assisted in the kitchen. Kala couldn’t cook to save her life, but she was excellent at making coffee. An unknown person had stocked the fridge and cupboards for us. I put cookies on a plate in case anyone wanted a snack. My stomach was still unsettled from my first zombie sighting, so I stuck to coffee when we sat down on the couch. I could now gulp down my beverage while it was still hot, but chose to sip it slowly.
Mark picked up his coffee, decided it was too hot and put it down again. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was procrastinating. When he finally looked up, I saw that he was concerned. “What’s wrong?” I asked. Somehow, I knew that whatever was bothering him had something to do with me.
“When did you first sense the zombies?” he asked.
“I felt a sense of wrongness when we were about a block away from the cemetery,” I replied with a grimace at the memory of the spectral finger on the back of my neck. “The closer we drew to it, the stronger the sense of evil became.”
Kala looked at each of the men then huffed out a sigh. “Since none of them are brave enough to say it, I will.” She turned to me squarely. “You shouldn’t be able to sense them. They shouldn’t be able to sense you. Like vampires, they’re usually unable to function during the day, yet it woke up and hissed at you. That isn’t normal.”
While I appreciated her candor, I was shaken by her pronouncement. “What does this mean? Is there something wrong with me?” I was glad that I hadn’t mentioned that I’d felt it in my head. What would they do if they knew that I could pick up its thoughts? Would they turn me away, or possibly even lock me up? They’d never encountered something like me before and the thought terrified me.
Mark shifted uncomfortably on his seat. “I believe it has something to do with whatever else the voodoo priestess said to you. The part you haven’t told us about yet,” he added pointedly.
Kala had been right when she said there were no secrets in the Shifter Squad. I was going to have to come clean with them. “She said I’ve been bitten by two unnatural beings and my spirit is now at war,” I said with great reluctance. Reece’s shoulders hunched at being called unnatural and I immediately wished I could take the words back.
Mark picked up a cookie, but he only toyed with it rather than taking a bite. “That sounds dire.”
“It also sounds crazy,” I said. “I wasn’t bitten by anything supernatural when I was a baby. It was just a normal dog. You can call my Dad and ask him about it if you like,” I said in exasperation when they all stared at me doubtfully. “How can a dog bite from so long ago possibly be having an adverse effect on me now?”
Biting into his cookie, Mark chewed slowly and avoided my gaze as he took his time to wash it down with coffee. “Despite what Philip told you,” he finally said, “I’m not convinced that it was a dog that bit you. Whatever it really was that left that scar, the zombie seemed to react to it.” This wasn’t the first time he’d told me he thought that something other than a canine had bitten me, but he wasn’t any more forthcoming about the old scar on my right shoulder.
“Great, I guess I’m now a zombie detector,” I said wearily.
Flynn didn’t see that as a bad thing and sat forward excitedly. “This could actually work in our favor.”
“How?” Reece asked. He was masking his emotions, but I felt a trickle of concern for me and felt warmed by it. I reminded myself that the bond was to blame for any changes he might be feeling towards me. I dredged up his speech about how I wasn’t his type and that he didn’t want me. The warmth evaporated, leaving me feeling bereft and alone.
“If Lexi can sense them at a distance, then she can lead us right to them,” Flynn replied. “We won’t have to search every grave, crypt and mausoleum in town one by one. We won’t even have to search every cemetery in town to find them.”
“He has a good point,” Mark said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I’m more than just a pretty face, you know,” Flynn said with a grin.
His amusement was infectious and I couldn’t help but smile. A short yet strong sense of jealousy came from Reece and immediately quenched my grin. He picked up his mug, took a long swallow and avoided looking in my direction. I wasn’t an expert on bonding between werewolves, but this seemed like a bad sign. While I’d already been hopelessly attracted to him, he’d been indifferent to me before he’d been bamboozled by Lust. I’d had a crush on him from almost the first moment that we’d met, but the last thing I’d wanted was for us to be forced together by paranormal means. His jealousy could only be caused by our mystical link.
“Here’s the plan,” Mark said, snapping my attention back to him and thankfully diverting me from my inner turmoil. “We’ll wait until the cameras alert us that the zombies have risen, then we’ll move in and turn them to ash.”
I’d never burned anything to death before and I was frightened that I’d accidentally set myself, or one of the others, on fire. “What kind of weapons are we going to use?” I hoped it was something more advanced than lighting sticks on fire and waving them around like an angry mob from the middle-ages.
“Modified flamethrowers,” Kala responded. “Don’t worry, you won’t have any trouble using them,” she reassured me when she saw my unease.
“What do we do if the bokor turns up while we�
�re frying his minions?” Flynn asked. “He hasn’t caused anyone any harm so far, that we know of. Are we going to kill him or just incapacitate him?”
“Incapacitate,” Mark responded. “We’ll take him into custody and call the Containment Squad in to retrieve him.”
“We have a Containment Squad?” I asked. I was still sadly ignorant about the PIA. Few knew that the Paranormal Investigation Agency even existed. It was a clandestine organization that had been created to deal with the things that went bump in the night. Sadly, I was now one of the creatures that they normally did their best to eradicate.
“We sure do,” Kala said. “We might be the Track and Kill Squad, but we don’t always kill everything we track down.”
“We only kill the ones that have harmed or slaughtered humans,” Flynn explained.
“So, we’ll slap some handcuffs on the Zombie King and he’ll go to prison?” It seemed like an anticlimactic end for someone who had the power to raise corpses and force them to do his bidding.
Mark finished off his cookie before responding to my question. “It’s a special prison and the inmates will never have a chance of parole or escape.”
“I hope it’s more secure than the nut hatch where the seven psychics were held,” I said dourly.
“It is,” he replied firmly. “There has never been a successful escape from the PIA prison in the past hundred and fifty years.”
I was flabbergasted by that nugget of information. “The agency has been around for that long?”
He nodded, picked up his mug and slouched back against the couch. “That was when it officially became an organization, although it had a different name back then. I’ll give you access to the archives, if you’re interested in learning more about the PIA.” He sent a reproachful look at Kala and Flynn, neither of whom were even slightly interested in learning about the history of the agency.
“That’d be great,” I replied sincerely. The research would be fascinating, I had no doubt.
Finishing her coffee, Kala stood and beckoned for me to follow her. “Let’s get some practice in before we head out later tonight.”
My mug was still half full, so I took it with me. We entered the long hallway and turned left. She stopped halfway down the hall and put her hand on the scanner next to a door I’d never been inside before. I had a moment of disorientation when I remembered we were no longer in Colorado. It was going to take some getting used to being in a nearly identical facility to the place I’d almost come to think of as home, yet being so far away from the Rocky Mountains.
The door unlocked and Kala pushed it open. She stepped aside and allowed me to enter first. Like the indoor gun range further down the hall, this room was long, narrow and had five lanes for target practice. Humanoid targets hung from overhead tracks that ran the length of the room, but they were made of metal rather than paper. Several different types of flamethrowers were mounted on a wall. She reached up, took one down and handed it to me. It looked like a rifle, but shot flames rather than bullets.
A long row of metal cabinets with numerous doors sat below the flamethrowers. Kala opened a door and took out a small, red, rectangular plastic canister with a hose coming out from the top. “Plug the hose into the flamethrower, attach the canister to the hook, flick the safety off and you’re good to go,” she said.
I took the canister and it was full of liquid. The smell told me it was a mixture of gasoline and something else that was most likely highly flammable. Following her instructions, I attached the hose then threaded a small metal ring in the top of the canister through a hook in the butt of the gun to hold it stable. I flicked the safety switch on the side of the weapon off and turned to aim at the closest target.
Fire spurted in a twenty foot arc when I pulled the trigger. “Holy crap!” I exclaimed and took my finger off the trigger. If anything flammable had been in the area, I’d have turned it to ash. Luckily, the floor, walls and ceiling were bare concrete and Kala was standing safely behind me.
“Fun, right?” she said with a grin. “Just make sure you don’t accidentally point it at one of us before pulling the trigger.”
Shifters could withstand heat, but I doubted we were invulnerable to an open flame. “I’d better get some more practice in,” I decided. Shooting bullets was easy, you just had to aim and pull the trigger. Flames were unpredictable and a strong wind could easily create havoc.
I found it far easier to bathe the target in flames when I moved to within ten feet of it. I circled the metal man, sending short bursts of fire at it until I was confident that I wouldn’t torch one of my team mates by accident.
Kala took down one of the flamethrowers and kept me company until the door opened and the guys filed in. My canister was empty and the gun had grown uncomfortably warm by then. I put the flamethrower down on the floor and stood near the back wall while all three men took practice shots at the targets. My gaze returned again and again to Reece. He moved with lithe grace and something tightened deep inside me. His eyes flicked to my face and I was mortified to realize that he was picking up on my traitorous feelings of desire.
“I need coffee,” I murmured to Kala and left the room.
She was right on my heels and followed me into the kitchen. “Getting a bit hot in there?” she teased, waving a hand at my face to cool me down.
I turned crimson as I switched the coffee machine on. “Do you realize how embarrassing it is to have feelings for someone and to know with utter certainty that they don’t reciprocate them at all?” I asked her in something close to despair.
Her grin disappeared and an intent expression replaced it. “How do you know he doesn’t feel the same way about you?”
I hated to admit it, but the words tumbled out anyway. “Because I can feel it! I might be eighteen now, but he still thinks of me as a child. The only thing he feels for me is guilt for turning me into one of you.”
She mulled over my confession. “Are you saying that you know what Garrett is thinking and feeling? You can sense him the same way that he can sense you?”
I nodded miserably and poured coffee into two mugs. “I lied to Mark. I don’t know why. I guess I just didn’t want to admit that we really are bonded.”
Pouring cream into her coffee, she handed the bottle to me and stirred in sugar. “Is being bonded such a bad thing?”
“Of course it is!” I couldn’t believe she even had to ask me that. “Would you want to be psychically linked to someone who doesn’t even want you around? To know he knows everything you’re thinking and feeling and that he feels pity for you?”
She put her hand on my shoulder and I almost broke into tears. “I’m sorry, Lexi.” Her compassion was genuine. “I didn’t know it was like that.”
“Don’t say anything to Mark, ok?” It was bad enough that I’d blabbed to her. I didn’t want everyone else to feel sorry for me as well.
“I won’t,” she promised then linked her arm through mine and urged me into the living room. We sat down on the couch and drank our coffee in silence. Neither of us wanted to watch TV. We had a long wait ahead for darkness to fall and for the hunt to begin.
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Chapter Eight
Flynn cooked fish for dinner and Mark made a salad. I wasn’t hungry for a change and I was too tense to even think about eating. No one else seemed to have the same problem as me. When they sat down to eat at the dining table, I excused myself and withdrew to my bedroom up on the second level.
We’d chosen the same rooms that we used in Colorado out of habit. My door was the third one on the right. I’d only been inside long enough to dump my suitcase and sniper rifle just inside the door. I now had a chance to examine the room in further detail. The bed was queen sized, just like the last one, but it was blond wood instead of white. So were the twin bedside tables. I didn’t have an elegant dresser with a mirror and stool this time. I’d rarely used it anyway and wouldn’t miss it much.
A chest of drawers the same color as the re
st of the furniture had been placed to the right of the bed where the dresser had been in my old bedroom. Most of my clothes went into it and I hung my jackets in the closet. I stashed my backpack with the sniper rifle in the closet as well where it would be out of sight, but easy to retrieve.
Finished unpacking, I moved into the bathroom. It was identical to my previous bathroom, which made things easier. I unpacked my toiletries then glanced at my pale face in the mirror. My eyes were wide and frightened at the prospect of facing thirty or so zombies. It had been bad enough seeing a single corpse lying there in its tomb. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing a whole bunch of them up and moving about. I dreaded how awful it would be to have them inside my mind.
With fire as our main weapon, I thought it would be safest to tie my hair up into a ponytail. It made me look about fifteen, but that couldn’t be helped. I changed out of my white t-shirt and jeans, swapping the outfit for something more appropriate for zombie hunting. I chose a black t-shirt and khaki colored cargo pants. I didn’t bother with a jacket. It was doubtful I’d get cold enough to need one and my scars were hidden by the shirt. I decided to leave my holster behind and to carry my gun and ammo in my pockets instead. Thanks to my newly enhanced strength, I could carry a lot more gear now.
My pockets bulged with ammo by the time I was done stocking up. The window behind the bed was covered by a curtain this time. I shifted the gauzy material aside and glanced outside to see that the sun had set. All of the windows were heavily tinted so no one could see inside. They’d need a ladder to be able to climb up high enough to peer in anyway.
I left my room and Mark met me in the coms room when I emerged from the hallway. “You have excellent timing,” he said and nodded towards one of the monitors that were mounted on the wall above the computer table. The cameras in the cemetery had come to life as soon as the zombies had begun to rise.
