She accepted that far more rapidly than anyone with half a brain should have. Then again, she was standing right between them, so questioning reality didn’t seem like a very smart idea, either.
“What do you want with them?” she asked, with haunting calm. That time though, it was her own emotion, rather than whatever it was that made her feel so serene. “Why them?”
“Serums,” Eckert croaked as she twisted again. “They... the military, they want... Ow!”
One of her bear guardians tensed, as though he was preparing to move; as though he was about to pounce. “Talk,” she said flatly. “Details.”
“I don’t—ah!—I don’t know, Claire, I don’t know! I just do what I’m told!”
A million thoughts ran through her head like an old timey reel-to-reel. It all made a perverse sort of sense. The secrecy, the uniformed visitors, the daily clipboard copying, the ridiculous security. She shook her head, smiling despite herself. “You know more than this.”
Her voice was low and dangerous.
“No! I don’t! I have no idea what the military wants with the samples. I can speculate, but what’s the point of that? We lost one of them earlier this year, he... escaped. Ended up dead. The wilderness doesn’t treat things that shouldn’t be very kindly.”
Another growl. Something was about to happen.
“These are unnatural creatures, Claire,” Eckert’s voice had gone from disdainful to desperate. Was that begging she sensed? The start of a plea? “They’re unearthly, they’re not normal, they have to be studied, they have to be understood!”
In a short, violent burst, the tension she felt on either side of her erupted. One of her companions snatched Eckert from her grasp, the other buried teeth into his shoulder. Eckert let out a scream, but only very brief, before he was silenced with a sickening crunch.
“Unnatural,” one of her companions said in a voice that seemed to hurt, as though it hadn’t been used in a long, long time. “Did you hear that? We’re unnatural.”
The other presence grunted a short laugh. “Whatever we are, we have to go. And she has to come with us.”
“What... who are you?” Claire asked, her voice trembling for the first time since she’d entered the lab. “Why me? And did you just kill him?” She already knew the answer, but was slightly surprised at her complete lack of emotion at what had just happened.
“Crimes... unspeakable crimes. Unspeakable pain,” the one with the deeper, more somber voice said. “Unspeakable horrors.”
“Come on,” the other one said. “We can worry about that later. If we’re going to find the others, we have to get the hell out of here before the damn army shows up. And you know they will.”
“Claire, he called you?”
She nodded, absolutely dumbfounded, but still with that feeling of calm.
“Is there anywhere we can hide? We’ve been in here for,” he trailed off.
“Too long to know how long,” the other one finished.
“Yeah,” she said. “Woods about a mile from here. Pretty dense. I guess that’d work?”
“It’ll have to. Get on.”
Without thinking about it, Claire slid onto the back of one of the bears, and felt his heart thudding against her chest. His fur, thick and heavy, and warm, surrounded her, eased what little remained of her nervousness.
“Which way is out?” the other asked. “And the elevator’s still working, right?”
“D-down the hall to the left is out. And the elevator worked when I came down it about five minutes ago.” She seemed like she was about to say something else, but trailed off.
“Good enough. We’ll keep you safe.”
And somehow, against all reason, against all logic and sense, she knew he would.
-4-
“Look, I don’t have time for this. I have two cubs who just discovered parties and a mate who wants me to pick milk up on the way home. Can we hurry this along?”
-Rogue
Standing on an overpass with twenty-five feet of distance between the bottom of his boots, and the desert below, Draven thumped the bottom of a pack of unfiltered Camels, stooped down and pulled one into his mouth.
The paper stuck to his wind-blown lips as he lifted the lighter, and took a breath.
In all black, as he usually was, the only visible part of the aged, grizzled bear were the graying ends of his hair that flapped in the midnight wind.
He took another drag, and blew a plume of smoke out of his nostrils.
At least this time the wind isn’t chopper blades.
Two cars passed underneath him, engines quieted by the distance, and the dust cloud hanging low to the ground that muffled everything from car tires to night birds. He squinted, glaring through the smoke trickling up into his eyes from his cigarette, and watched.