Species II (24 page)

“I wouldn’t be so sure—her face is pretty red.”

“She’s choking!”

“I thought she was eating something. I think I saw it.”

“I’m telling you, it’s bullshit. This babe’s never so much as coughed.”

“But look at her!”

Brea could no longer tell who was speaking, and she rose from where she had crouched next to the glass and hurried back to the control console. A quick flip of her finger sent her voice over the lab intercom.
“Med Alert, BioHazard Four. Repeat: Med Alert, BioHazard Four.”
That done, she hit another switch at the top right corner, this one marked in red. In the center of the main wall of Eve’s habitat, the outside set of steel bars across the entrance rose with a hiss of hydraulics.

“What are you doing?” demanded Vikki. “You can’t—”

“Shut up.” Brea faced the guard at the second console. “Open it,” she commanded.

“Sorry, no can do.” Just her luck, the guard with the turnkey was the one who believed Eve was faking an attack. The woman, tall and muscular with nearly black eyes, looked completely unaffected by either Eve’s illness or Vikki’s near hysteria. “Dr. Baker’s strictest orders. No one goes in without her present in the lab.”

“She’s choking, you metal-brained woman. See if you don’t end up watching the time tick away in a silo under northern Minnesota if Eve suffocates because you wouldn’t open the fucking gate!”

For a long moment, Brea thought the guard still wasn’t going to obey, then the woman reluctantly pulled the turnkey from her uniform pocket. It seemed to take forever for her to insert it in the keyhole, then twist it; finally, the inside set of bars hummed up. “I still don’t like this,” the guard said.

“You’re not the only one!” Vikki’s brown eyes were huge and terrified, and she’d taken a position behind the three guards hovering near the habitat entrance. “No one’s ever been in there without Dr. Baker being here.”

Brea ignored her and dashed inside the habitat. Eve was writhing on the floor now, soundlessly clawing at her throat and leaving long, red welts where her fingernails dug into the skin. “Eve?” Brea grabbed the alien woman by the shoulders and tried to stop her twisting. “Eve—what’s wrong? If you can’t talk to me, I’m going to have to try to clear your airway! Be
still!”

And just like that, Eve obeyed. She went limp and Brea found herself supporting the weight of Eve’s shoulders, heavier than expected, and staring into wide, vastly intelligent and not at all friendly blue eyes. She felt Eve’s hands close around her upper arms—

Then Brea was thrown out of the entrance to the bio-environment. She wasn’t the biggest of women, rather short and a little too round; her body acted like the world’s clumsiest bowling ball as she landed on the guards clustered around the entrance and they all crashed on top of the cowering Vikki.

And as they all came tumbling down, Eve just . . .

. . . walked out of the habitat, and then out of the laboratory.

“B
ring him in here,” Laura directed. She watched Patrick Ross carefully, noting the confident body movement, wary of the man’s apparent lack of resistance. There was something wrong here, something she’d missed. Press had told her over the cellular that Ross had surrendered without a fight, even to the point of showing up when they hadn’t had any idea where he’d gone, and more, expressing a willingness to come to the lab for the tests. What was she overlooking?

An instant before stepping inside the blood-work laboratory, Patrick Ross hesitated. “Say,” he said mildly, “would anyone mind if I used the bathroom?”

Press glanced at Laura and Dennis, then jerked his head at the two heavily armed guards flanking Patrick. “All right. But make it quick.”

I
t was so . . . easy.

I’m free, Eve thought. That’s what this is—the freedom to walk where and when I want and not be stopped by a wall made of something nearly invisible.
I’m free.

Two people in the lab area had tried to grab her, but no one had used their weapons; a few snappy punches—the moves learned from action and adventure programs on television—had made it immediately clear how ridiculously
fragile
these human beings were. Either that or she was like Superman or something, another character from a television show. Was he real? If so, she’d sure like to see him in person.

She pushed through a door and found herself in a long corridor, unbroken by any doors or exits. It was either keep going or return to the lab, so she went forward, marching down the hallway with a purpose she’d never had while trapped inside the bio-environment. The corridor turned right at its end and Eve did too, then came up short when she found herself face-to-face with a male guard. She’d never been within touching distance of a man before and she froze for a precious two seconds, long enough for the sight of her to register on his angular face.

“Hey,” he said in surprise. “Hold on a second. You’re not supposed to be—”

Eve smiled and stepped up to him, hearing his words fade off in mid-sentence. He smelled . . .
male,
and that was good. She would have liked to pull off his clothes and see what was underneath—that would have been even better. But he was a guard and someone who would, if he could, stop her from leaving here. And that, of course, was bad.

Still smiling, she gripped the lapels of his flak jacket and tossed him fifteen yards back in the direction from which she’d come. He landed hard and maybe he was hurt; this was not something about which she was concerned.

Belatedly, however, Eve realized she should have been.

She was hardly another thirty feet around the corner when she heard shattering glass—the cover on the alarm in the first corridor, back where the guard had landed. Obviously, she hadn’t hurt him very much.

Alarm bells began screaming everywhere.

“W
hoa, man!” Patrick exclaimed as he pushed through the men’s room doors. “Listen to that racket—what do you think’s going on?”

Both guards had snapped to attention. “No idea,” said the first gruffly. He grabbed one of Patrick’s arms and steered him back toward the testing facility. “Let’s go, Commander Ross. We need to get you back to the blood-work lab pronto.”

“Sure,” Patrick said with a good-natured grin. He took two steps with the man, then reached up with his other hand and rammed the guy’s head into the wall as hard as he could. His other escort barely had time to register the smear of blood on the white wall, much less level his weapon, before Patrick had a one-handed choke hold around the man’s windpipe that instantly crushed his trachea. “Pathetic,” Patrick said. The agreeable expression never left his face as he tossed the body behind him and stalked away.

Somewhere in here was Eve, and he was going to find her.

“D
amn it!” Laura flared. “I just don’t believe this—I
knew
something like this would happen!” The three of them had burst from the blood-work laboratory at the first wail of the alarms, and now she turned back, snatched the receiver off a phone by the door, and rammed a finger against one of the buttons on it.

“What the hell is going on?” Press demanded.

“Listen to me,” Laura barked into the telephone, paying no attention to him or Dennis. “Ten minutes, and no more.
Ten minutes
—if you don’t receive a cancellation telephone call from me within that time, you trigger the tether mechanism. Absolutely
no one else
has the authority to tell you not to do so. Do you understand?” She waited for a second. “Good.”

“The tether mechanism?” Dennis asked with a bewildered expression. “What’s a tether mechanism?” He looked up at the ceiling as another round of sirens went off, ducking his head as though something big and horrible was going to swoop down on them.

“Eve has escaped,” Laura said. There was a bitterness to her tone, an
I-told-you-so
undercurrent that was present but not directed at her two companions. “I never wanted to put her through the procedure that reawakened her alien genes. Only a fool wouldn’t have seen this coming.”

“Burgess—” Press began.

Dennis’s suddenly frightened voice cut him off. “You know what? Patrick should have been back by now.”

“Come on,” Press said. “We’re wasting time. We all know Ross has probably whacked his guards by now and taken off.” He slammed a fist into his open palm. “The tricky little bastard set us up.”

Laura’s eyes widened. “Wait a second—you’re right! He’s never been in this facility, only Dennis has. Orinsky did all his testing in another building.”

“Somehow he knew Eve was here,” Press told them grimly as the three of them raced down the corridor and back toward Laura’s main work laboratory and Eve’s bio-environment. “He must’ve had a connection right back to her when she was tracking him. He knew she’d find a way to break out of her cage and he wanted to be here when it happened. We played right into his plans, right down to the fucking ride and the clearance we provided to get him here.”

Laura halted at a junction in the corridor next to a door marked
STAIRS.
“All right then. Dennis and I will check downstairs for Eve—she might still listen to me. You have to find Patrick and stop him from coming into contact with her. We have no facts at all about true alien physiology—for all we know, reproduction between two advanced aliens could happen simultaneously, like cellular division. Or a nearly pure mating could result in multiple live births—we could be overrun. We have
got
to stop them!”

“Oh, don’t you worry,” Press said, clenching his fists. “Mating season ain’t about to begin.”

T
he gunshots were, perhaps, like bee stings. Eve had never been stung by a bee of course, but she could imagine the pain—localized and hot, but generally not lethal. The wounds along her arm and rib cage smarted just enough to really piss her off. She took out her irritation on the two guards who’d fired at her by cracking their heads together. She found the sound actually quite pleasant, reminiscent of a lone person clapping their hands very sharply. She stepped over their bodies and kept going, her only direction being forward, and her only goal:

Patrick.

Eve had never been down here in her life, but when she found the stairs, instinct took over. Up, she thought. Up and away from this hellish hole of a prison they think they’re disguising with layers of white paint. She tried the handle of the door marked
STAIRS
—up and found it locked; when she peered at it, she saw one of the cardkey readers that were so prevalent around the facility. She’d never seen a cardkey up close, though; the staff in the bio-environmental laboratory weren’t allowed to bring them into the lower level.

Eve looked at it and cocked her head. She had no card, nor was she likely to find one quickly enough to get her out of here. The only thing left to do was to simply break it.

No problem.

“S
ir—Mr. Ross!” The sentry rushing toward him had an open, friendly face. His voice was frantic with worry. “Please, sir. You can’t come this way. We have an emergency on our hands, an escapee. If you could just go back where you came from—”

Patrick gave him a reassuring smile, then punched him in the face. The guy went down brutally hard, his feet jerking forward and out from under him as his head snapped back. He hit the floor with a thud and a clatter of the metal weaponry he wore. Patrick stepped past him and kept going, using one fist to ram his way through a lock now and then as was necessary to maintain his pace. Sooner or later this weaving path would send him down toward the laboratory where Eve’s living quarters were and he’d finally get to meet his mate. His
destiny.

Patrick smiled wider, practicing this oh-so-important human trait.

He was getting really good at this smiling stuff.

L
aura was right, Press thought spitefully. She
should
have known better than to agree to “grow” another alien, should have known they’d end up in a situation pretty much like the first one all over again. He’d thought she was smarter than that . . .

Then again, that wasn’t it at all. She
was
smart—much more so than him. It was probably the one thing that she had that he didn’t that assholes like Burgess had found and played like a fucking harp:
compassion.
No doubt they’d used that line about “If you don’t do it, we’ll find someone who will. And that person won’t have near the heart that you do. Don’t
you
want to be in charge of the experiments?” And, of course, in the end all their inferences hadn’t meant shit, because she’d been forced to do something to her test subject that she’d never wanted to anyway.

And Eve—or Sil, as Press was still privately calling her in his head—where the hell was she now? Probably somewhere off in a closet with Patrick Ross, the two of them screwing their brains out in some kind of weird alien-sex thing that would really put everyone in a bind.

Another corner up ahead in these seemingly endless turns and angled corridors—this place was like a damned rat’s maze. If it weren’t for the signs posted on the walls, he’d have been lost two turns after he’d left Laura and Dennis. And here was another one, making Press pause and listen before he crept around it. He couldn’t hear anything beyond the background hum of white noise that always moved in to fill the space between his heartbeats in the high-tension times of assignments. This was when he was at his best and he felt like his senses had heightened enough that nothing in the world could best him. Still, he went around the juncture cautiously—he would never be called a fool—

—and came nose to nose with Eve.

For a single, breathless moment, she seemed not to even see him. So close he could touch her, the alien woman’s flesh was bubbling arid distorting beneath its surface, as if something inside were trying to re-form itself and escape. Her blue eyes burned into Press’s like shards of arctic ice, but she made no move to attack him.

Press found his voice around what felt like a lump of sandpaper in his throat. “Eve, you have to—to go back to the cage. You can’t stay here, and you can’t leave. We can’t let that happen.” His Glock was out though he had no inclination to fire it; he wanted instead to move back and away, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the hideous movement that was churning along wherever the woman’s creamy skin was exposed.