Heart of the Beast

by Sonia Nova

  Finally, after what seemed like a restless eternity, the lock of his cell door beeped from the outside and the door slid open.

  “Kira.” Xeegan grinned down at the female. She looked a little out of breath and a splash of bright red blood stained her sweatshirt. From the sour scent of it, it wasn’t hers. The blood smelled Krezlian, which only made Xeegan grin wider. “You escaped.”

  Kira cocked an eyebrow at him. “You let yourself be locked up?”

  His grin turned into a frown. “You told me to do as they said.”

  Kira grinned. “I can’t believe you listened.”

  “I shouldn’t have?”

  She shook her head. “No… You did good. If you had fought against them, who knows what they would’ve done to you. Knocked you unconscious or hurt you. It was better this way.”

  She paused to look down the hallway. About ten cells were already open, and a few prisoners stood in the hallway: Ezak-X and human females. Xeegan perked up, scanning the faces for Zeon. He didn’t see anyone he recognized – just a mix of scared and determined faces.

  Zeon wasn’t there.

  “For the record, I’m happy to see you too,” Kira said, turning back to him with a slight smile. “But I’m in a bit of a time crunch here. I want to release as many prisoners as I can before Krezlian backup arrives and things get more complicated.”

  Xeegan gave a quick nod of acknowledgement. “I’ll watch your back.”

  Kira nodded to him and moved on to open the next cell door. Xeegan strode to the other end of the hallway and stood watch beside the crumpled body of the Krezlian guard Kira had taken out.

  An explosion went off somewhere near the cellblock and a couple of the human females screamed. Xeegan watched as one of the females grabbed onto another and started crying inconsolably into her shoulder.

  Where was Kira to help comfort the females? Xeegan saw her all the way at the other end of the hallway.

  “It’s the Alliance,” Xeegan said gruffly to the females. “Don’t be scared.”

  The crying female looked up from her friend’s shoulder. She wiped her eyes.

  “The Alliance is here? Are you an Alliance soldier?”

  He wanted to laugh at the question, but he didn’t want to confuse the already overwhelmed female.

  “No,” he answered simply.

  One of the freed Ezak-X looked down the hallway, suddenly tense. He had clearly heard something while Xeegan was talking to the female. Xeegan listened as well. A group of guards was coming from the connecting hallway.

  “Down the hall!” Xeegan barked at the growing group of prisoners filing the cellblock. They turned their faces to him, waiting for more instructions. He just gestured down the hallway toward where Kira was unlocking the last two cells. “That way! Guards coming.”

  Kira heard him and started to wave the humans and Ezak-X out of the cellblock.

  “Let’s go!” he heard her yell over the sound of another explosion.

  Xeegan grabbed the gun off of the belt of the guard at his feet. After making sure the beam was set to the highest power level, he trained it on the spot of the hallway where it branched into two. Waiting.

  Two pirates rounded the corner into his view. The tall Mehelian was an easy target, and Xeegan took him out before he had made it a couple of feet toward him.

  The other pirate, a Ghelian, pulled out his weapon and slipped into an open cell. Two Krezlians jogged into the hallway, quickly taking cover in the open cells as well.

  Shit.

  He needed to find cover as well. Right now, he was out in the open. Xeegan glanced to his either side. The nearest cell was across the hallway. An Ezak-X was kneeling inside it. Xeegan dashed to join the male, dodging a volley of plasma shots on his way.

  “Go join the others,” he said to the Ezak-X. The male didn’t look so great: pale, his black hair matted and a chip in one of his horns.

  “I want to fight,” he growled.

  Xeegan just shook his head. “I don’t have a weapon for you. The best way you can help right now is to get the rest of the prisoners down the hallway. Find the human with the pink stripe in her hair and follow her instructions.”

  “You… You are going to fight them alone?” The Ezak-X asked.

  Xeegan shrugged. “Someone has to get rid of them. I don’t hear any more of them coming. I’ll be fine. I’ll join the group in a minute.”

  The Ezak-X stared at him, clearly hesitant.

  “Go!” Xeegan shouted and shifted to the edge of the cell. He started to shoot at the guards rapidly to cover for the male’s escape.

  The Ezak-X finally seemed to listen. He got up behind Xeegan and ran to join Kira and the other prisoners at the end of the hallway.

  Xeegan narrowly avoided one of the guard’s shots and slipped back inside the cell – this time alone. He tried to see where Kira was, but couldn’t see her or any of the prisoners from his vantage point.

  Shit.

  Between the guards’ shots, he could hear the Ezak-X and human women shuffling by the entrance of the cellblock. It seemed like the group was filing out through the double doors and exiting the hallway in the direction of the docking bay where they had come from.

  He better hurry up. He didn’t want to fall too far behind from the rest of the group. He would have to finish this, and quickly.

  Xeegan moved back to the side of the cell just as the Ghelian pirate left his position and started to run toward him. The pirate fired his weapon continuously, but Xeegan easily sidestepped the bright plasma shots. He returned fire, and now that the Ghelian was no longer protected by the cell walls, he hit the pirate in his neck.

  Idiot.

  The Ghelian collapsed in the middle of the hallway, just a few feet away from him. Xeegan leaped into the corridor and grabbed the pirate’s lifeless body, holding it in front of him as a shield. He ran toward the end of the corridor where the last two Krezlians were hiding in a cell.

  The guards fired at him aggressively, but the dead Ghelian’s body covered him well. A plasma shot grazed his shoulder, burning his flesh, but Xeegan kept going. Once he was within ten feet of the Krezlians, he threw the pirate’s corpse at the lizards.

  The Ghelian’s stocky body hit the guard and the male fell backward under its weight. He dropped his gun and Xeegan kicked it aside and fired a series of shots through the lizard.

  Without a pause, he moved to stand in the doorway of the cell, filling the whole space with his body. He relished in the way the final Krezlian cowered in the corner of the cell. He was trapped, and he knew it. Xeegan took him out with a clean shot in the head, but he didn’t stay to gloat over the destruction of his makers.

  Taking the guards out had only taken a few minutes, but anything could have happened to Kira and the prisoners in that time. Xeegan picked up the huge long-range gun one of the Krezlians had been using, slung the strap over his shoulder, and jogged down the hallway.

  He glanced in each open cell to make sure no prisoners remained. They were all empty.

  The double doors to the cellblock were stuck open, the circuits of the lock spitting sparks from a melted hole. Someone had shot the mechanism.

  Xeegan ducked through the doorway and into the hallway beyond. It took him a moment to orient himself, but he was soon able to trace the simple path down a hallway to the left. He followed Kira’s scent, and soon found her at the entrance to the docking bay, ushering human females and Ezak-X through an open door.

  She saw him and waved.

  “Do you hear anyone nearby?” she asked as he jogged up to her.

  Xeegan paused. “The explosions are causing a lot of noise. I’m not sure, but I hear at least three or four guards coming from that way.” He gestured down the hallway to an area of the building they hadn’t yet explored.

  Kira grimaced. “Okay. Hopefully we’ll beat them out of here. Come on, let’s go!”

  She hurried the last few prisoners into the bay, and followed them in. Xeegan trailed her slowl
y, keeping an eye on the shadows behind them. Just in case there were any lingering pirates he hadn’t heard in the ruckus.

  The docking bay turned out to be a warzone. Half of the room was on fire and several agents in Alliance uniforms seemed to have made it inside the building. They were currently engaged in a plasma fight with a large group of Krezlian guards and pirates.

  “Shit…” Kira said as she took in the situation. There would be no way to get through the bay and to the open loading dock on the other side. “Let’s stick to the walls and try to find another exit.”

  Xeegan nodded, and she started to lead them along the edges of the docking bay. Despite their obvious injuries, the Ezak-X prisoners helped protect the less-alert human females from any stray shots. They eventually made it past the rows of Magnocrafts – taking cover behind the ships every once in a while – and to the side of the docking bay, where they reached a large door.

  “Hopefully, this will lead us outside…” Kira said.

  She tried opening the door with a keycard she had snatched from a guard, but the locking mechanism blinked red.

  “Fuck…” Xeegan cursed. “The Krezlians must have put the lab on lockdown.”

  Kira nodded, clearly thinking the same.

  “Alright. Stand back, everyone!” she called to the group.

  Once the nearest females and Ezak-X had taken a couple of steps away, she aimed her gun at the lock and shot it. The locking mechanism sparked and smoked beside the door, and when she tried the door this time, it easily swung outward.

  The burst of fresh night air was strong enough for even Xeegan to feel it at the back of the group. Kira checked the perimeter outside the door and stepped away from the doorway to help the females and Ezak-X through the opening. She slowed the mostly panicked group down so a bottleneck didn’t form.

  Xeegan turned back toward the docking bay as he heard the group of pirates approach. They were just around the corner. Mehelians, based on their lack of tails.

  Thinking quickly, he ducked behind the long, cylindrical engines of a nearby ship and waited until the first pirate was visible through the dock doorway. He shot, hitting him in the stomach and revealing the pirate who was behind him. Xeegan pulled the trigger, again hitting the next pirate in the chest. He crumpled in the doorframe.

  The last two pirates ran away, realizing it was an impossible mission to try to get through that door without being shot. Xeegan listened to the footsteps disappear into the distance before looking back at the door to the outside.

  Over Kira’s shoulder, he could see several aliens of various races, all wearing the same familiar Alliance uniform. Every single one of them was heavily armed, but as they saw the group of prisoners approaching, they lowered their weapons. In the distance, Xeegan heard shots fired and explosions going off.

  “Are we all good?” Kira asked him as she strode back to the doorway.

  “Yes,” he answered. “The last few pirates ran away. They’re retreating.”

  “Hell yeah,” she said with a grin. “Go ahead and meet up with the Alliance operation. I’ll be out in a second.”

  Xeegan nodded, inhaling the cool night air as he joined the stream of prisoners moving out toward the Alliance agents. The smell of smoke and fire filled his nostrils. This all reminded him of the first time the Alliance had helped him out, but this time, he didn’t feel nearly as much negativity toward the organization.

  It was good to be free.

  CHAPTER 22

  KIRA

  Kira watched as Xeegan ducked through the door, making sure not to scrape the top curve of his horns on the frame. A few women lingered by the exit, clearly hesitant to walk up to the Alliance agents.

  “Let’s go,” Kira said to the last group of women. The three of them looked at each other and back toward the officers. They didn’t budge. “Come on. You’re the last ones.”

  “What if…” one of the women started, her voice faltering.

  “The Krezlians could be out there,” another woman finished the sentence. “This could be a trick. They could be waiting for us.”

  “Sometimes,” the last woman spoke up. The dark circles under her eyes made it look like she hadn’t slept in days. “They… They would inject us and we would see things. Things that weren’t real. How do we know if we’re even really getting out of here? This could be some horrible nightmare…”

  “No,” Kira said, keeping her voice stern but calm. “I’m going to stop you right there. That’s the Alliance. See that Ghelian man right there, with the curly hair? That’s Agent Grimmor, my supervising officer. All of these people are here to get you to safety as soon as possible. I trust them. Please, trust me.”

  The women exchanged looks again. They were clearly scared and hesitant, but finally, one of them nodded.

  “This is our chance,” she whispered to the others. “Let’s go.”

  The woman started to walk toward the officers and the two others followed.

  Finally.

  Kira could understand their fear and uncertainty after what they had been through. The women were obviously traumatized. But there were whole teams of Alliance officials who were trained to help newly rescued prisoners deal with the trauma of their situation, and she wasn’t one of them.

  Her role was to make sure that they survived and made it out of the lab. From now on, they were better off in the hands of someone else.

  “Is that everyone?” A young Alliance operative Kira didn’t recognize walked up to her, peeking through the doorway.

  “That’s everyone,” Kira answered, giving the docking bay one last visual sweep. There were no more stragglers.

  The operative walked over to a woman in an Alliance uniform fiddling with what looked like settings on a tablet. The way she hung back near the Alliance van and didn’t look up from her tablet made Kira think she was probably a technology specialist. The operative gave her a thumbs up and said a couple of words Kira couldn’t hear.

  “Drone protocol initiated for the east wing,” she called out.

  “Get out of the building!” the young Alliance officer yelled back to Kira. “We’re sending in drones armed with explosives to finish the mission!”

  Wait, what? Drones?

  “Wait!” Kira ran up to the operatives. “You’re sending drones to this part of the building? Isn’t anyone checking there were no prisoners left behind?”

  The young operative looked confused. “I thought you did. You said that was everyone.”

  “Yes…” she said slowly, her heart suddenly racing in her chest. “That was everyone I found, but that doesn't mean...”

  She froze at a sudden realization, not finishing her sentence. In her mind, she could picture how the cellblock had gone down one hallway and then branched into two separate hallways. She had looked down one hallway and hadn’t found any more cell doors, but had there been cells in the other corridor?

  She didn’t think so, but she couldn’t say for certain. It had all been a blur with the rush of adrenaline after she had shot the first guard and taken his keycard. She couldn’t remember what had been in the second hallway.

  Shit.

  Kira didn’t wait to see what the two technical operatives did. She turned on her heel and took off sprinting as quickly as she could back toward the docking bay.

  “Wait! You can’t just–”

  The drone operator’s voice faded in the distance. Kira hardly even heard it. The only thing on her mind was getting back to the cellblock as quickly as possible and ensuring no one had been left behind.

  Drones were one way to make sure the Krezlians could never use the lab again to do whatever horrible experiments they had been running, and they had clearly been used in other parts of the building already, judging by the earlier explosions. But they couldn’t just send them to the cellblock without checking there were no more prisoners!

  They had trusted her word…

  Trusted she had done her job and gotten all the prisoners out. But had
she…?

  Right now, she wasn’t sure, and her uncertainty could turn out to be costly.

  There could be who knew how many more cells. And each cell could have a prisoner – or more than one – inside.

  Her heart pounding in her chest, she rushed back into the docking bay. The battle was still going on in the bay, but the Alliance agents clearly knew of the drones, because they had all moved to the other side of the area. Unfortunately, so had the Krezlians. But at least that left Kira clear passage through the room.

  She ran through the docking bay and into the hallways of the building, hurrying over the bodies of the pirates who Xeegan had killed. The short pathway to the cellblock was now burned into her memory, after being taken there against her will and then crossing through not much later to rescue the prisoners.

  There could be more.

  A whole hallway more.

  Kira picked up her pace. Her training on drone technology rushed through her mind. In the worst-case scenario, if the drone operatives hadn’t canceled the launch, she had anywhere from five to ten minutes time to make it to the cellblock and out.

  The drones were programmed to bring the explosives to the most tactically advantageous location of the building or structure they were meant to destroy. That meant that Kira had just as much time as it would take the drones to fly through the hallways and find the center of the Krezlian lab, wherever the most Krezlians were lurking, or whatever other location the drones computed as the most strategic to initiate the explosion.

  Please let them have canceled the drones…

  The doors of the cellblock came into view and she ran through them, breathing deeply to keep up her pace.

  She thought she heard footsteps of a group of guards some distance behind her. Her instincts told her to duck into the nearest open cell for cover and hide from them until she could catch them off guard. Maybe that would have been the right call before the drones were launched, but right now there was no way she was going to slow down to face them. There was nothing that could slow her down now.

  She had one priority, and one priority only: to check that hallway.