Paired Objective: Matched Desire, Book 2 (18 page)

Abby ignored everything else and typed a command. It was almost too easy to log in as Senator Green. The passwords were all there at her fingertips. The man would be fuming right now, helpless to do anything but stare at the login screen. Abby bent furiously to the keyboard, typing as fast as she could. Seventy seconds to launch. This was their last chance to stop things.

“Tell Russ to get away from the launcher,” she snapped. “Now!”

“What?” Cam turned to stare at what she was doing. “Shit. Okay.”

Addressing the drone pilot, Abby pressed
send
. Holding her breath, she stared at the message as it pinged onto the screen under Senator Green’s name.

CRITICAL FAULT. INTERCEPT MISSILE LAUNCHER WITH YOUR DRONE IMMEDIATELY.

* * * * *

Russ swore, pinning his prisoner to the ground with a ruthless boot to the throat. He’d been too slow. There was no way to stop the missile now that it had locked into countdown. The red numbers ticked down mere feet from him, taunting him in his helplessness.

“Goddammit!” he roared.

In fifty seconds, the missile would rise in a cloud of smoke and fire, shaking the wheels of its mobile launcher. In less than an hour, it would crash into Chicago, detonating its warhead against the City’s walls and leaving it vulnerable to alien attack.

“Russ, get away from the launcher. Now!”

His Twin’s thoughts roiled with urgency. Russ didn’t question him. He sprinted for the tree line, hauling his prisoner along for the ride. All the while, his mental countdown continued.

Thirty seconds until launch.

Russ set the still-alive prisoner on the ground, rolling his eyes when the man immediately attempted escape. With ruthless efficiency, he slammed the butt of the man’s gun against his temple, knocking him out.

About to demand answers from Cam, he looked up with a frown as the black shape of the drone streaked across the sky. Abby had done a damn good job of intercepting the pilot’s messages, but the jig was obviously up. Still, the thing was flying recklessly. It seemed about to—

“Holy shit.”

He ducked behind a tree as the drone slammed into the mobile missile launcher. A gout of flame licked the air. The drone disintegrated in a puff of metal shards.

“Detonation?”
Cam sent urgently.

“No, or I probably wouldn’t be standing here.”
The red numbers ticked into single digits, a warning beep shrilling across the clearing. The crash had tilted the launcher, but the vehicle remained upright.

“What’s the damage? I need to warn Chicago.”

“It’s still going to launch, but its coordinates will be all messed up. Looks like an older model from what I can tell. There’s a decent chance the missile will go off-course.”

He put his hands over his ears as the launch commenced. The mobile launcher quivered as the missile shot into the sky, black smoke trailing behind. Russ quickly raised his commtab to get a rough measurement of its direction.

“It’s headed north-northwest, approximately,”
he sent.

“Enough to tip it into Lake Michigan if we’re lucky. General Coniston’s evacuating the shore and setting up defenses on the wall.”

“Can he shoot it down before it gets near the City?”

There was a pause, during which Russ unholstered his gun and shot out four of the mobile launcher’s tires. Then he slung the still-unconscious prisoner over his shoulder and began the trek to the Humvee.

“Maybe,” Cam finally replied. “He says they haven’t concentrated on combating manmade weapons in a long time.”

“Fucking Shadow Feds. What was with the drone, by the way? That little crash might just have saved Chicago.”
Russ took one last dark look at the mobile launcher.

“That was Abby’s doing. She posed as a senator and tricked the pilot into messing things up. I wouldn’t want to be that guy tonight.”

Russ snorted.
“Excellent. I’ll be with you in two minutes. Prep the rear and rig me up some kind of restraints. I took a prisoner.”

By the time Russ arrived, Cam was ready. He and Abby stood outside, grinning to beat the band.

“What the hell is so funny?” Russ demanded. “I know we were partially successful, but there’s still a damn missile heading Chicago’s way, even if it’s projected to land outside the walls.”

Abby dangled a pair of pink furry handcuffs in front of his face. “You asked for restraints?” she asked sweetly.

“Fuck me.” Russ’s pent-up tension erupted in a laugh. “Seriously?”

“Purple duct tape as well. We found all this in the glove compartment.” Cam twirled the roll of tape around his index finger. “There was a butt plug too.”

Russ slung the unconscious man into the back. “We’ll skip that. Let’s get going.”

“I briefed the Complex,” Cam said, sliding into the passenger seat. “They told us to come straight back.”

“Won’t get there before dark.” Russ noted his curt words had little effect on Abby, who climbed in between them as stoic as ever. As if she hardly realized she’d saved Chicago’s bacon. Flying that drone into the missile had been a stroke of genius. He told her as much.

“Luck,” she said modestly. “The pilot believed I was Senator Green. And the drone was relatively large since it operated long-distance. It had lots of surface area for solar panels so I figured there was some chance of it screwing up the launch.”

Russ easily caught what his brother was thinking—the Complex would approve of Abby. Rather than putting him at ease, the thought annoyed him. He didn’t need a goddamn general
approving
of their woman.

“Gotta admit it’ll be easier for her to fit in if she scores a bravery medal,”
Cam sent.

“I’m more interested in getting home in one piece. Where do we stop for the night?”

“Fort Wayne, so keep heading northwest. We need to push it a bit to get there before sunset.”

Russ backed away from the roofless barn and began off-roading it back the way they’d come. It wasn’t a pretty ride for the guy in the back, but he figured the duct tape would hold him steady enough to prevent further injury.

Beyond a bruise or three, which he more than deserved.

Wasn’t it enough that the aliens had destroyed large swathes of humanity? What the hell possessed people to shoot missiles at each other in times like these?

“Sometimes I’m glad we’re not entirely human.”

Russ agreed with a quick nod. Checking his rear-view mirror, he made sure nobody was on his tail as he swung onto the cracked backroad leading north. His instincts said they were alone now. He hadn’t seen another vehicle, and the mobile launcher wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. The survivors would either have to walk or hole up in the disabled launcher’s cab for the night.

“How many survivors did you leave?”

“I killed three men.”
A kind of regret churned in his gut. Three hale and hearty men, who would have been useful in the fight against the Barks.

But another, deeper worry gnawed at him. He’d checked their ankles afterward. None of them had been manacled. Even so…

“We’ll ask the prisoner if this was voluntary,”
Cam sent. His normally upbeat vibe was diminished. Yet he remained even and steady, a counterweight to Russ’s dark, distracted musings. He took a deep breath. Cam was right—they could ask.

In any case, there was no way these men couldn’t have understood that they were shooting a missile at a City with the intention to mass-kill a bunch of people.

Slightly more at ease, Russ sped up, letting the Humvee’s prodigious shock absorbers take the strain of the rough road. He automatically scanned his side of the road, relying on Cam to scout the other and keep watch for potential ambushes or dangerous obstacles. So far, everything was blessedly clear.

“Ever been this way?” Russ asked Abby.

“Not here, specifically. I’ve taken the train through Ohio, though.” She looked up briefly from the stolen commtab, blinking at their surroundings. “This isn’t a very scavenger-friendly area, anyway.”

“Why’s that?”

“There’s too much nature here. Some would be all right with that, but I’m no good at catching small animals in traps, building fires or foraging mushrooms. I don’t get much sleep outdoors either, unless there’s a nice, safe wall in between me and the Barks. So no—I’d pass right through this area. The best places are those with Christmas decorations.”

“Huh?” Cam asked.

“It was a few days after Christmas that the aliens landed, so a lot of decorations were still up. So if you’re out and about, and you see a place with Santas and reindeer and baubles, that probably means it’s uninhabited. Not even the most hardcore Christmas freak leaves dusty decorations up for eleven straight years.”

Russ snorted. “Nice logic.”

“Kept me alive and fed.” She shrugged.

Russ read Cam’s thoughts easily, and they jived perfectly with his.
They
would keep her alive and fed from now on.

They were three-quarters of the way to their destination when the man in the back began kicking up a fuss, groaning against his makeshift gag and kicking the sides of the vehicle. Rolling his eyes, Russ pulled over.

“Pee break,” he said. When Abby got out, stretching her legs a little unsteadily, he pointed toward the trees. “Go in there. There’s a crater on the other side of the road, looks pretty deep.”

“A crater?” She craned her neck.

“Yeah. See the cracks radiating outward? It’s not a giant hole, but it’s big enough. Either a spaceship crashed here, or someone bombed the area.”

“Or someone bombed a spaceship,” she offered with an irrepressible grin.

“Or that.” More amused than he let on, Russ strode to the rear of the Humvee where Cam was allowing the prisoner to swing his legs to the ground. The man groaned, glaring at them. Russ only shrugged. The guy was cuffed with his hands in the front. So he could take care of his own damn business.

“I think he objects to the color pink,” Cam said, turning aside politely.

“Nah, it’s the fluffiness he despises.”

The man glowered but climbed back inside voluntarily when he was ready. Russ taped his legs firmly together, not wanting him to attempt some harebrained escape plan. Fortunately, whoever had owned the Humvee seemed to have transported dogs regularly, so there was a wire mesh between the rear area and the backseats. Taped and cuffed as he was, the man wouldn’t be able to breach it.

“All right, let’s get moving. You want to drive?”

Cam shook his head, stopping at the open front door. “Nah, I’m good. Wait. Where’s Abby?”

Chapter Ten

Burrows. Fear of burrows had been her undoing.

Abby had enough time to let out a truncated yelp as the ground at the edge of the crater gave way, taking her along. Mingled dirt and pieces of road careened down the crater’s steep side.

She managed to break her fall by rolling, but lay breathless when she came to a stop nearly at the very bottom. Moving only her head, she looked at the mangled remains of a spacecraft and let out a small groan.

Well, nothing felt broken, and she hadn’t been knocked out. Carefully, she pulled herself to a sitting position.

“Should have peed in the woods like Russ told me,” she muttered to the length of metal in front of her. But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to step inside the tree line. Since she sure as hell wasn’t exposing her butt to a Shadow Fed, she’d opted to go at the side of the crater. She’d been finished and heading back when the fall happened.

No harm done, though. She just needed to get back up the steep side and back onto the road. With a grunt, she heaved herself to a standing position and took a step forward.

That small movement—and her manacles—saved her life.

A pale white tentacle snaked from the protection of the spaceship’s battered wing, striking the metal around her ankle with enough force to cause her to stumble.

With a yelp, Abby leaped up the slope, fumbling her gun from its holster. She whirled, sinking to her haunches, and took aim. Underneath the ship in the safety of the dark, an alien glared at her with its six black eyes.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Abby told it. “And I was afraid of burrows all this time.”

The two eyes on stalks rotated left to right, then back again as if fellow aliens lurked behind it. Which, come to think of it, was probably true. She kept her gun level, though fear made her a little shaky.

The Bark nursed its sunburned tentacle, cradling it against its pale white chest. The brief exposure to UV light had left a black, painful-looking stain on the appendage. Abby blinked, recalling part of the conversation with the Triplets. They’d compared UV sensitivity to leashes. It could be a form of control, they’d said.

But who’d want to leash a Bark?

The alien moved again. Was she still within striking range? Would it risk another burn?

Abby didn’t wait for an answer. She unloaded her clip into the thing, yelling as if she were demented. The alien jerked, absorbing the bullets into its jelly-like hide, and her yells turned into half-sobs. Didn’t these things ever fucking
die
?

“Abby!”

Before she could turn around, Cam was pulling her away from the wounded alien, briefly crushing her to his chest. The embrace lasted half a second before he frantically pushed her away. His hands searched her body, going over every inch. Next to him, Russ reached for her gun and flicked the safety on.

“It’s empty,” she said dully. “No more bullets.” Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the alien brooding under cover of darkness.

“Where did it sting you?” Cam demanded. “Where’s your wound?”

“It didn’t get me.” She roused enough to see the vast relief on both their faces. “It hit the manacle around my ankle.”

“Their poison can be fairly potent.” Cam bent to inspect her leg anyway, pulling up the hem of her jeans.

“How do they inject it?” She was briefly impressed with herself for asking such a pertinent question when all she wanted to do was crawl somewhere safe and cry.

“There’s retractable spikes inside each of their tentacles,” Cam told her.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Abby said for the second time that afternoon. “Their tentacles have
teeth
? Great. Can you…can you just kill it? Please?”

“Gladly.” That was Russ. “You want to turn away?”

“No.” She watched the Bark sizzle as Russ turned on his UV-saber, jerking in silent death-throes. When it was done, Russ motioned for her to step back as he strode forward. With a heave that would have taken three normal men to carry out, he tipped the crunched wing to its side. Whiteness writhed underneath and a series of ear-piercing howls made her flinch.

“That’s enough,” Cam ordered, turning her head away. “You saw one fry to death. Don’t need to see the others die as well.”

He was probably right, she reflected as he hoisted her into his arms, carrying her up the slope easy as anything. Behind her, the alien’s howls ended abruptly, one by one. Over Cam’s shoulder, she saw Russ turn away and follow them, his expression stern.

Maybe he would ream her out when they reached the top, angry that she’d disobeyed him and gone near the crater. She braced for it, awaiting the lash of temper, ready to retreat within herself. She’d gotten good at that back at Headquarters.

But Russ only looked at her as Cam set her down. “Glad you’re all right.”

The caress he brushed across her cheek lingered so that she could feel it even after crawling back into the Humvee. Cam buckled her in, offering up his broad shoulder for her head. She leaned into it and closed her eyes. Sleep had always been a blessed retreat for her. She’d always thought herself fortunate to be able to drop off quickly.

Abby woke an interminable time later. The Humvee was still moving, which was good. The sunlight outside was growing dimmer, which was bad. Recalling the six black eyes of the alien, she shivered.

“Easy,” Cam murmured. He sounded distracted, his head moving from side to side as he scanned the area he could see from the window.

“We’re about a mile outside Fort Wayne’s walls now,” Russ said, nodding to a battered green sign on the side of the road. “Gonna be a bit tight on time.”

“How tight?” She rubbed her eyes and sat up straighter.

“Enough to get the guards grumpy when they have to open the gates again,” Russ said, steering around a gigantic pothole. The road had narrowed to two lanes. They drove past gutted fast food joints and roofless car dealers with rusting vehicles still in neat lines in their lots. Twilight’s cast took the harsh edge off the desolation. If she squinted, she could almost pretend they were driving along a normal, pre-Invasion street…

A huge bump shattered any half-formed illusions. Abby opened her eyes, blinking as they drove past an obviously occupied building. Lights burned in its high windows and it was surrounded by manmade reinforcements—barbed wire and rubble, mainly. Lots of rubble.

“What’s that?”

“Expansion. Fort Wayne’s doing well these days. They’re starting a new wall out here, so they built a few watchtower-type places like that one. That way the builders can retreat there at night and not lose time traveling back and forth.”

She’d heard of some Cities expanding, but it wasn’t a common scenario. The idea gave her a much-needed dose of hope, something that was nearly dashed by Cam next time he opened his mouth.

“Word came through that aliens are massing in several different places around the country. Seems likely they’ve chosen the spots where the female ships landed.”

“Wonderful. Alien orgies.”

Cam chuckled. “We were nearly ordered to turn around and return to Columbus, actually. A bunch of Twins are headed that way. But we’re the ones with stolen Shadow Feds commtabs, so we’ve been spared.”

“Are you…okay with that?”

“Yeah,” Russ said. “We’ve seen enough action for now.”

So have you
, were his unspoken words. Abby might have bristled at the assumption, but her predominating emotion was relief. At this point, she really, really wanted a safe, place to stay—and to see Grammie again.

The former was on the cards, at least. The City’s walls were visible through the windshield, its gates open a crack as, presumably, the guards awaited their arrival. They rolled through as the sun disappeared over the horizon.

As Russ had predicted, the guards at the wall were grumpy, but they hastily waved them in, nodding at the government IDs the Twins flashed. Clearly, they were familiar with Twins passing through here. That made sense given the City’s proximity to Chicago.

Not for the first time, she wondered if Washington, DC’s neighbors got along with them, if they were loyal to the Shadow Feds who still persisted in holding on to their vestiges of power.

She doubted it. She’d seen too many raid reports. Power wasn’t the only thing the senators hung on to with their fingernails. They also demanded food, drink and the little luxuries of post-Invasion life, like tobacco, fine clothes, and alcohol.

Eleven years on, those luxuries were difficult to scavenge. So nowadays, the senators tended to steal it through raids. That course of action didn’t exactly endear them to anyone else nearby.

Fort Wayne’s streets were well-kept, but they didn’t have to drive long before Russ turned into a gated complex of prefabricated houses, their identical white exteriors arranged in a large square around a clipped lawn. It practically screamed military housing.

“Here we go,” Russ said, turning off the engine. “Quarter power remaining. We’ll need to let it charge for an hour before we set off tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll get the prisoner out,” Cam said, nodding to the pair of soldiers approaching the vehicle. He chatted with them for a minute before going around to the back and handing the man over. Abby heard the raucous laughter from where she was sitting.

“Guess they discovered the pink handcuffs.”

Russ nodded but didn’t smile. He was looking at her with a kind of intensity that should have made her run. She squared up to him uncertainly—just in time to be pulled into his arms and enveloped in a hard kiss. She wrapped her arms around him, hands brushing across his short-cropped dark hair as they came to rest on his neck.

He was the one to break off, caging her face with his hands when she would have pressed forward again. “Thought we’d lost you in that crater.”

“I was trying to avoid burrows, so I didn’t go in the forest.” She let the chagrin she felt scrawl across her face.

“Roots,” Russ muttered, but he pulled her to him for another few seconds. “Come on, let’s get you somewhere private.”

“To be continued?” She grinned at the way his face changed, reading both mild surprise and avid agreement.

“Once we finish debriefing. I’d prefer not to have our arrival written up as ‘Ignored us and immediately jumped into the sack with their girl.’”

* * * * *

There was nothing
brief
, apparently, about
debriefing
. Abby paced restlessly within the confines of the prefab, looping between the two queen-size beds. Another ten paces brought her to the windowless wall, where a bare desk and chair stood against the corrugated metal.

Needing fresh air, she opened the door and stood on the steps. This City was perhaps the best kept she’d ever seen—and she’d seen plenty on her travels. Solar panels adorned every roof, there were no raucous cries from drunks, no junkies huffing Turq. She even spotted a woman walking a dog. Her arm lifted in a wave, and Abby waved back.

When had she last waved to a stranger so casually?

Not since before her stint at Headquarters, certainly. And she’d traveled through quite a few Cities where waving wasn’t the norm. She’d fled several the same day she arrived, preferring to chance sleeping outside rather than inside. In those Cities, rigid rules applied. Like women having to wear certain clothes and being forced to provide dowries upon marriage.

She’d always looked over her shoulder in those Cities, aware that if she were snatched from the street and forcibly married, it was unlikely a local would blink twice. Being tied to a man who only wanted her for offspring would have been a rough life. Arguably rougher than the one she’d briefly endured at Headquarters.

“Always look on the bright side of life,” she muttered.

The best Cities were ones with a mixture of free trade and strong community ties. Abby took a seat on the wooden steps, looking out over a kind of town square formed by other prefab dwellings. She saw a few lights on here and there, which set her at ease. Since her mom’s death, she seemed to have lost the ability to enjoy being alone. Most scavengers preferred being relatively solitary, working with one or two partners at most. But the thought of striking off on her own now made Abby want to puke.

Maybe it was the fear of winding up in a forced marriage. Maybe it stemmed from being an indentured servant, trapped in Headquarters.

Or maybe it had to do with never wanting to leave the Twins.

The stars seemed to shine brighter when she caught sight of them striding across the square, in step with each other. Cam held a tool in one hand and plastic goggles in the other. He nodded at her as they neared.

“Ready to get those manacles off?”

Abby was going to make a quip about how she ought to keep them since the bands had saved her life earlier by deflecting the alien’s strike. But her throat wouldn’t work right. All she could do was nod, tears in her eyes.

Russ moved behind her and sat on the steps, placing her sideways on his lap so that her legs stuck out at an angle. Cam donned the goggles, squatting next to her to examine the manacles. Then he switched his tool on and began grinding through the metal on each ankle.

Abby blinked twice when she realized he’d stopped partway through. Was he afraid of nicking her skin with the blade? But then he simply reached out and pried the metal apart with his bare hands until it broke at the point he’d ground away with the tool.

Lying there on the wooden steps, the twisted manacles seemed too insignificant to cause her distress. The tears came anyway. “Take them away,” she begged. “I never want to see them again.”

Russ stood, cradling her close as he carried her inside. He took her to the nearest bed, curling around her when she didn’t push him away. A few minutes later, Cam stretched out at her back. One of them—she couldn’t tell who, but they seemed interchangeable at the moment—stroked her hair, murmuring in a soothing baritone near her ear.

She was done. Done with Headquarters, with the corrupt men who called themselves senators, done with their uppity spouses who thought nothing of kicking a servant in the ribs if they didn’t like the way the floor was scrubbed. She would no longer have to endure lecherous stares and Senator Green’s slimy touch, or drop her eyes when passing one of her “betters” in the hallway.