Between a Bear and a Hard Place(82)
A heaving rumble underneath, and more cracks opening up all along the walls meant this place wasn’t going to last much longer. “Come on!” Claire shouted back to Fury, to King and Stone, and to Eighty-Three and all the bears who were probably not listening very closely. “Just up ahead – I know the way, but I hope you don’t mind stairs!”
Stone squeezed one of her hands. Fury held the other.
For the first time in Claire’s life? She didn’t mind the stairs, and she really did know the way.
-25-
“A day without my bears? Sounds like a day without sunshine.”
-Claire
“Are you almost finished?” Draven was pacing back and forth in a room that strongly resembled a World War II intelligence bunker. A map was plastered to a wall in the back, florescent lights ran along the girders that made up the semi-open ceiling. Folding metal chairs – the sort that get used at conferences when all the “good” chairs are taken, made up the sitting space.
“How can this take so long?” he fished his pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and contemplated one of them before placing the cardboard box on the conference table. Really, it was just a few card tables placed together end to end and covered with a cloth, but it worked well enough.
“Because,” Jill said as she plucked a pair of needle-nosed pliers from Jacques’s outstretched hand, “this isn’t exactly easy. And you better not be smoking. Chew your gum.”
Her statement was so flatly voiced that it wasn’t a command, or a question, it was more of a bald explanation of the way things already were.
“Yes mom,” Draven grumbled. He thumped his cigarette pack wistfully and caught a stick of gum that came out. He’d been so sad about having to quit that Claire fashioned him a little gum carrier that looked like his old favorite Camel Filters. He put the stick in his mouth and let out a Wint-O-Green sigh.
The curtain encircling the makeshift surgery area fell back down, ruffling against the dusty stone flooring. There was a slight clatter of metal on rock, just a little ting of contact, before someone beyond the curtain bent to pick up the dropped instrument. Immediately, silence fell again.
Except for the tapping of Rogue’s fingernails muffled by the dampening effect of the rise and fall of bubbles in the plastic sheet covering the tabletop, and Draven’s absentminded smacking, the silence was absolute.
Oppressive even.
“He hasn’t breathed in a while,” Rogue said to an arching pair of eyebrows from King. Stone and Fury looked his way too, Stone lifting his head off the table for the first time in what seemed like hours.
On cue, a sputtered, rasped breath came from behind the curtain.
Jill and Claire, along with the pilot, who turned out to be pretty damn good as a nurse, began fussing around. “Is he okay?” Jill asked. “He looks sorta pale.”
“He always did,” Claire said in response. “Only difference is that he’s got a little color now. I’m not sure about that hole right there.”
There was a long moment of humming, a little bit of hawing, and then another sputtered breath. “I think,” Jill’s voice sounded reticent, but fairly confident, “he seems like he’s breathing okay. Good thing his lungs were mostly intact.”
“Yeah,” Claire said. “And good thing that he somehow had a cyborg owner’s manual programmed into his brain-computer.
“And,” it was Jacques speaking then, “that he managed to get it all out before we had to turn him off.”
The artificiality of their friend was upsetting, to be sure. The parts of him that were metal all had to be removed, or else the danger of his human body rejecting the additions was, in Eighty-Three’s words, “a rather unpleasant thing to calculate.”
A Clod – the very same bizarre, lab-grown parasite that had attached itself to Stone’s spine – was quivering on the metal tray, glistening in the overhead lamp. “Good thing for this too,” Claire said, jabbing at the spider-like lump with a pair of pliers. “Everything has its place, I guess.”
She wrinkled her nose under the surgical mask as the golf ball-sized lump twitched away from the prodding instrument. Jill laughed briefly at her, before digging into something else that crunched a little before she yanked it out.
The thumb-length piece of chrome twisted in the middle and then sparked slightly before fizzling out.
“The hell was that?” Claire asked.
“Mind control bug,” Eighty-Three said, unexpectedly, through his newly detached mouth. His voice was crackly, a little painful sounding, but worked just fine. Without missing a beat, he added, “did I just talk? With my own mouth?”