Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance) (27 page)

“Because I was paid to,” Eckert hissed. His fear was turning to anger – a response Eighty-Three recognized from earlier. “But then once I started to turn out hundreds of you, and then thousands, I started to enjoy the screams I heard from the cages. I started to love the feeling of power I had when,” he put his hand to his neck, sucking another breath. “When I made more of you. And now, I’m the one with the power. Mr. Alastair has nowhere near the power I have.”

Eighty-Three leaned closer and sucked through his nostrils. He smelled copper – he smelled fear. Eckert was hiding it, but there was plenty of fear on the air. “What am I?” he asked again. “Where did I come from?”

“You?” Eckert asked, curling his thin, pale pink lips into a grotesque smile. “There’s no telling. Some of you were prisoners, some of you were indigents who died and I got the body warm enough to work with. Some of you sold yourself to me, and some of you... well, some of you other people sold. Angry wives, children who had nowhere to go, nothing to eat. I only need a few parts these days. A couple of parts of brain, a spine, some nerves. Past that, it doesn’t matter much.”

Eighty-Three shook his head. “Eighty-Three. Who
am
I?”

Eckert shrugged again, as best he could. “What do I care? You can’t hurt me, you’re still connected to the network. All I have to do is flip this switch and you’re helpless again.”

“Who
am I?
” Eighty-Three’s hand went to Eckert’s neck. The fingers sinking in felt every bit as good as he thought they would.

Eckert’s eyes began to bulge.

Just like he thought. “
Who am I?
” Eighty-Three hissed again. From below, he heard Fury and Claire shouting – he thought in battle. And suddenly, he didn’t much care who he’d been before. At least, not as much as he cared about who he was right then.

He squeezed harder. Eckert’s eyes bulged a little more, and began to go from jaundiced to pink around the edges. “Turn off the network,” Eighty-Three said. “The whole thing. Or I crush whatever is left of your throat.”

Fingers clamped. Rotors in his knuckles began to whir.

“There are files,” Eckert croaked. “I can find out... what you... want to know.”

Thinking about this proposition for a moment, Eighty-Three squeezed harder. “I want you to let those bears go. Open the cages, turn off the network.”

“Turn off the...” Eckert whistle-croaked. “You’re crazy, I... I can’t breathe, let me breathe!”

Eighty-Three uncurled his fingers slightly, letting the man breathe.

“I can’t turn off the network, if I do that, they’ll all go insane! They’ll tear this place apart!”

Dispassionately, Eighty-Three tightened his hand. “Who am I?”

“You’re a special one,” Eckert admitted, tongue hanging out one drooping corner of his mouth. “You weren’t like the rest.”

“Meaning?”

Down below there was another crash, more roaring. Someone was getting torn up, and it didn’t sound like it was Claire and Fury on the losing end. Eckert fumbled with something on the underside of his desk, and instantly, Eighty-Three shoved him backwards, rolling him away from whatever he was diddling. With one arm, the black-clad man tipped the huge desk and flipped it over. Eckert squealed as wires snapped.

“What did you
do
?” the sweating scientist blubbered. “You broke the connection, you—“

“I can fix it,” Eighty-Three said. “But not unless you tell me who I am.”

Eckert sighed, or more accurately, whistled in irritation. “Dr. James Thurston. Harvard neuroscientist. You invented the method by which all of these beautiful creatures were made. You were burned in a lab fire fifteen years ago, and willed your body to us. Somehow, your brain, your heart, and about half of your liver were still functioning when they came to us. Your wife and kid are out there somewhere, but I don’t’ know anything about them. Didn’t need to. Is that enough?”

Nodding slowly, it all started to make sense. The memories, the understanding of the neural network, the way he calculated every single action he made, and why he knew so much about the compound and everything else. “I... made myself.”

“Machines made you,” Eckert sneered. “You just came up with the method.”

“I,” Eighty-Three... no, James, said. “I did this? All of this?”

“You were the third one made. The point of your donation was so that no one else had to be experimented on until the results were known. Martyr to your own god.”

“I’d really like to choke you to death,” James whispered.

“You used a contraction? That’s interesting, I—“

James squelched the doctor with another squeeze. With the next breath, he lifted him out of the chair and stared into his eyes for a long second. “I don’t think I’ll turn that back on.”

“You... you can’t! Everything will be ruined – me, GlasCorp’s plans for the future, you can’t just let the whole thing burn out of some sense of childish vengeance!”

“Watch me.”

James dropped Eckert, who plopped to the ground with a slick, wet thud.

As his former experiment turned on his heel and strode confidently out the door from which he came, Dr. Eckert wailed, then coughed, then whistled, and then collapsed into a sweaty, heaving, yellow heap. As his heavy, watery eyes began to fall closed, he saw that bastard, that rogue experiment he never should have allowed, and he watched the creature stalk back from the door into his office.

He crouched and effortlessly punched a hole in the top of the desk, and fetched something from inside. Eckert burbled something that he meant to be “what the hell are you doing?” but came out more like a dying catfish trying to bark at the fisherman who caught it.

“James Thurston,” it said. “Someday maybe I’ll be James again. But for now? I think I’m fine with Eighty-Three.”

The static-laden voice from the respirator came again, but this time, it was a laugh. A real one – an honest, human laugh. And that’s when Eckert realized what the idiot had taken. He had the failsafe. In his idiot, robotic hand, was an electromagnetic bomb strong enough to fry every circuit in the entire compound, should he use it.

“You’ll die... too,” the toad-like scientist croaked.

“We’ll see about that.”

Whistling, Eighty-Three tossed the orb up in the air, catching it like someone playing idly with a baseball. “We shall see, old friend. We shall see.”

––––––––

“T
hat got out of hand quickly.” Claire dodged around yet another lumbering automaton. “At least they’re moving slow, for whatever reason.”

“It probably has something to do with our buddy upstairs!” Fury shouted back, clearing three of them from his path with a sweep of his paw. “But this place is heating up. We gotta get out of here!”

“Not before we find the rest of the bears.”

“Us,” Fury corrected her. “The rest of
us
.”

God, he’s right, isn’t he? Somehow, someway, I am one of them. When the hell did that happen? How the hell did it happen?

It didn’t matter though, in the end, the way it happened was just another detail in a long line of them. She didn’t care, not really, though she
was
curious, that’s all it was. She belonged, for the first time in her life, she really belonged. It didn’t matter that it was with a bunch of ancient werebears, she was a part of something bigger.

Overhead, a handful of fire sprinklers engaged and soaked the area below them. Droplets of water refracting the spider’s web of security lasers crisscrossing the whole place only a couple of feet above their heads. The water slowed the soldiers’ movements even more than they already were, and the blaring, violently loud alarm sent waves of nausea through Claire’s belly with every pulse of sound.

“Where
are
they?” she called out.

Fury was running along the wall of the enormous steel and concrete room in front of her, knocking on walls in between knocking off soldiers. “They’re close! I can feel Stone’s energy. Can’t you?”

“Yeah,” Claire called back, her entire person soaked through with the water that kept spraying out of the ceiling as the alarms blared louder and louder. Voices were coming through the speakers, but it was only a static rendition of those long series of disjointed, nonsense numbers. Orders to a legion who took them no other way, instructions to an army of mindless creatures intent on nothing but following orders.

Except, there was one of them moving in a different way from all the rest. The slower, the more plodding, the movements of the others became, the closer one of them drew.

“Claire!” it shouted. “Fury! They’re waiting!”

“Eighty-Three?” she clucked, whirling around. “Is that you?”

“My name turns out to be James, and I almost choked Eckert to death, but left him on the floor.”

“More for me,” Fury said with a growl in his throat. “What the hell’s wrong with the robots though?”

“I shut off the network. That would be the alarms and the sprinklers and everything else. I got through to Rogue on the way down here – they’re circling a field two miles from here. All we have to do is get your friends and get out.”

Something rumbled deep under the earth, what felt like miles below their feet. Like the earth rolling over in its sleep, the cracking, grumbling groan went back and forth twice, and then settled again.

That’s when the first scream caught their ears.

“That wasn’t a soldier,” Claire said. “It was coming from inside the wall.”

When she looked back to Fury, she saw a look of confused agony on his beautiful face. She saw him with his eyes closed, his lips pulled up into a snarl. He was fighting back tears he didn’t know he was going to shed.

“It’s them, Claire,” he said in something approaching a whisper. “All these years, and we’re this fucking close and all I can see is blank wall.”

“That’s because you can’t see what I can see. This is the holding cell. We blow this room, break the circuits that control it, and this place will be crawling with bears before you can say... well, pretend I said some witty bear pun.”

“But how could we do that?”

Eighty-Three tossed the baseball sized orb up, and caught it with a swift pass of his arm. “This EMP will blow every fuse in the place. Every shred of electronics will be fried to a crisp. About five minutes after that, the whole building will go up in a fireball.”

“What’ll happen to all of them?” Claire asked.

“They’ll probably be either freed from the network permanently, or...”

“What
are
they?” Fury asked.

Eighty-Three shook his head. “No time for explanations. The summation is that some of them – of us – have more human parts than machine. That segment will probably be fine. Those with more electronics than human bits will cease to function.”

Claire and Fury both exchanged a worried look.

“I know what you’re thinking. Not literally, I’m saying I can guess. They won’t die – they aren’t really alive in the first place. Those who
can
be conscious should remain so. It’ll just be a bit difficult reintegrating a bunch of cloaked, gasmask wearing figures into polite society.”

With the building heaving back and forth once again, cracks started to open in the walls. Small at first, and then larger as the seconds ticked by, the fissures opened and closed, opened and closed, as though the whole place was breathing.

“Will the bears be sane?” Fury asked, choking back emotion. “Or have they been... tampered with?”

“Not a clue. My guess is that there will be a variety of results. For certain though, King and Stone will be fine. They were taken only a short while ago, and science doesn’t move quickly, as you know, Claire.”

“And how do we get out?” she answered.

“One step at a time.”

Blaring again, even louder somehow, the alarm was dangerously close to deafening. Even shouting, Claire, Fury and Eighty-Three could barely make out what each other were saying. If they were going to do anything, it was going to have to be soon.

As the soldiers began another surge, Claire was almost overwhelmed. Fury too, almost went down under the tide. She fought back, as did he, and as the alarm heightened, and the soaking water became a torrent, the surge came again.

Fury batted one off Claire’s back, and she swiped one as it dove for her mate with some kind of sharp weapon. The knife or whatever it was caught her in a swipe across the forearm, burning her flesh and sending a sear of pain creeping through her. The sweet tingle turned to a tightening clench of muscles. Her stomach knotted, her arms twisted, and before she knew it, she was helpless on the floor, covered in black cloth so heavy and stifling she felt like she was drowning.

She tried to call for help, but the immense weight of the creatures above her crushed out any hope of drawing breath.

“Too many!” she heard Fury call out. “There are just too many of them!”

Her mate’s cry for help wrenched Claire deep in her guts, twisting them, pulling at her every fiber. She struggled helplessly, hopelessly. With every move she made, the pile of soldiers seemed heavier, with every breath she drew, the next was harder to take.

“No more time!” she heard Eighty-Three shout. “Only one thing left. I hope this works!”

She heard a high-pitched whine, then a click that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside her own head.

The weight lifted, the mound of soldiers seemed to evaporate, leaving mostly just suits, masks, and junk electronics. Claire pushed to her feet, sloughing off the pile of refuse she’d been buried under. She rose to see Fury with a mechanical hand clutched in his fist, and Eighty-Three standing absolutely stock-still, looking around. Just as he said, a few of the cloaked figures were still standing, although they weren’t doing much of anything else.

A couple milled around, one of them jabbing the other’s chest with an outstretched finger. The alarm had stopped, which was definitely a good thing, but there was a complete and total lack of bear.

Humming sounds from all around preceded more popping – the wires
inside
the walls were exploding from the unseen aftershock of the EMP. Lights burst one after another, until the entire room was pitch black. A generator kicked on somewhere, chugging along and bringing up low, sickly, orange lights – but at least they were enough to see by.