Perfect Mate (13 page)

“Don’t go too far,” Jack called out as he continued what he was doing.

Lillian ignored him. She wasn’t going far, just to the nearest fire point. Every wing had several of them, each containing different types of extinguishers, a first-aid kit and, locked away safely in a cabinet, a fire axe.
 

Sliding her jacket off, she wrapped it around her fist and punched the glass.
 

“Fucking
hell!”
 

Pain shot up her arm as her fist connected with the glass. Glass which remained stubbornly in place and whole. She glared at it as she shook her hand, shoving it under her armpit as she waited for the pain to dissipate. If looks could kill or shatter glass, she’d be fine. But they didn’t, so she needed to channel her inner Bruce Lee.
 

Sighing, she re-wrapped her jacket around her arm and concentrated on the karate moves she’d learned as a kid. Sure, the lessons were nearly twenty years ago, but muscles remembered these things, didn’t they?

Taking a deep breath she closed her eyes and moved before she could think about it. Using her elbow, she slammed it against the glass. Her reward was a satisfying crack. The safety glass broke up around her arm, falling harmlessly into the bottom of the cabinet in small cubes.

Crowing with triumph, she reached in and snatched the axe off its bracket. A couple of practice swings only increased the broad grin across her face. Screw Jack, she didn’t need his guns. She could arm herself quite nicely, thank you very much.

“Good. You’re bac—where the fuck did yo…” Jack paused for a moment to look at the heavy red axe in her hands. He shook his head. “Never mind. We have company.”

Darce hit the stairs at a run and thundered down them three at a time. Adrenalin pumping through his body, he raced down the corridor and slid around the last corner and into place between Nic and Sanders. Drunk on the power of his Lycan body and the fact he’d at last scented his true-mate, he grinned at the pair of them.

Sanders lifted an eyebrow but didn’t make a comment. Nic looked at him as though he’d grown another head, her ice-blue eyes fixing him with a hard stare. He suppressed a shiver. That was the one thing he would never get used to about Nic’s transformation.
 

Before she’d turned Lycan, her eyes had been the softest green he’d ever seen. The arctic blue was from her wolf. Unlike the rest of the pack, who could play human easily enough if they needed to, Nic’s eyes didn’t change back to green anymore. He missed her eyes…actually, he missed the softer, laughing Nic he remembered from their days in basic. Then memory smacked him around the back of the head as he recalled his mate outside. He grinned again.
 

Oh yeah, he felt
good.

Nic frowned, her gaze flicking over him in assessment as her nose twitched slightly. He’d always found that cute. He’d have reached out and tweaked it…if he didn’t know she’d take his arm off at the shoulder for doing it.
 

She stilled, her expression deadening. Slowly, her gaze marched down to his groin. He didn’t bother to hide the tented fabric at his crotch. His scent would give him away anyway.

She lifted her brow, lips pursed. “Impressive. Weird but impressive. Didn’t know RAs got you off this badly.”

He snorted and waved a hand dismissively. He was in too good a mood to be brought down by her sarcasm.
 

“She’s here!”
 

He had been going to keep the amazing news to himself, but instead he found himself blurting the words out without any apparent intervention from his brain. Once they were out, there was no taking them back, so he stood in the middle of the corridor grinning like a fool.
 

The two other wolves froze. There was no question what he meant. A wolf only meant one thing when he said “she” in that tone of voice. He was talking about the other half of his soul, his perfect mate. The woman made especially for him.

“One of the RAs? Man, that sucks. I’m sorry,” Sanders, a man of few words, spoke into the silence.
 

“Oh. God, no. She’s not an RA. She’s one of the troops that came with them—”

Nic speared him with a look so icy he was surprised his blood didn’t freeze. “She? With the troops? There’s only one woman with them and she…” Her lip curled in disgust. “She’s a Blood.”

Darce grinned and nodded like a fool. He knew what she was, and he didn’t care.

The female werewolf’s gaze stabbed toward his groin again.

"Seriously, Darce? We’re about to be overrun by RAs and you’ve got a boner for some Blood bitch?” Her anger radiated out from her like a porcupines quills. If she’d been in wolf form, her fur would have stood on end. “That’s all we need…a new and improved way for them to slaughter us. Send in the hot Blood bitch so you all stop thinking with the big head and follow your dicks around. Fucking heat-seeking missiles!” She shook her head. “Sick, just sick!”

Power filled the corridor. Darce caught his breath as it wandered up his skin, tingling as the pressure grew and grew. It felt like the pressure in a plane cabin as a plane took off. He wriggled his jaw to try and equalize his ears, but before they could, there was a
pop
. Not so much a sound as a feeling against his skin. Where Nic had been standing, there was a two hundred pound white-furred wolf glaring at him in anger instead.
 

Darce admired her for a moment, careful not to get caught doing it. Nic had a hair-trigger temper and no issues with trying to take down a member of her own squad. Sometimes he wondered where all her rage came from, then he remembered how they’d been made into what they were, and the pieces all fit into place.
 

If he thought too much about it, all the anger and bitterness locked somewhere deep inside tried to escape and overwhelm him. The difference between him and Nic, hell Nic and most of the squad, was that they didn’t let it. They preferred to live in the here and now, and play the hand life had dealt them.

Today, despite the fact they were about to face down a horde of re-animates, Darce felt as if he’d hit the jackpot.

Should he have given her a gun? Jack didn’t have long to ponder the question before his sensitive nose got the first whiff of incoming re-animates. His lip curled, even the slightest hint of flesh just starting to rot and blood gone black was enough to curdle his stomach, and set the creature within off.
 

“RAs inbound,” he whispered to the woman at his side. The re-animates were too far away for her to hear yet, and she didn’t have the enhanced sense of smell the rest of them had. The low level growl emanating from all around told him the rest of the squad had already picked up the same scents.
 

Bloods he could deal with. Although they were vicious-fast and liked their food on the rare side, there was at least intelligence there. Some semblance of humanity left. Not much when the bloodlust hit them, but there was some.
 

Not so with re-animates. They were the zombies Lillian had called them. An experiment into increased regeneration gone wrong, the RA-17 serum had had unexpected and disastrous effects on the test subjects.

It had killed them outright. No argument or confusion. As soon as the serum had been injected it spread through their systems with an ease cyanide would have envied. The subjects had all cocked their toes up there and then, right on the tables. The exact opposite of the intended result.

The bodies zipped up and carted off to the morgue, the experiment had been deemed a failure. Until the next morning. First shift in the morgue had found the night guard, or what remained of him, and five docile, shuffling dead people.
 

The project scope was quickly altered, and RA-17 was hailed a success. So effective, it was used during cleanup of infection sites. Mortality rates of normal troops against Lycanthropes were high, almost a hundred percent. Those same rates didn’t count with re-animates. You couldn’t kill something that was already dead.

“What, now? Where?”
 

Her eyes were wide with a mixture of apprehension and determination. Her knuckles whitened on the shaft of the axe she held. He didn’t tell her that he had absolutely no intention of letting her near enough to the RAs for her to use it.
 

“Side window.”
 

He nodded toward it and checked his weaponry again. Like most soldiers, it was a compulsive need. Move, check weapons. Breathe, check weapons. Fart, check weapons. It was ingrained deep into his psyche.
 

A shuffling noise reached his ears. The sound of feet dragging against the linoleum. A sound that exasperated the mothers of young children and put Jack and his men on high alert.
 

Through the window next to them, he looked out across the small grassy area outside to the windows of the corridor that intersected theirs. With all the gates opened, it was the path of least resistance. RAs were dumb, they’d go whichever way they were herded until they couldn’t go any farther. After that, everything was up for grabs. If they were left alone, they’d mill about in confusion. If they were stimulated by prey or hungry, they’d kick up a storm.
 

Indistinct shadows moved behind the barred windows. It could have been a trick of the light, but he knew better. The low moan that followed, like a chorus from asthmatic organ pipes, confirmed what his nose was telling him. The re-animates were here, and they were hungry.
 

Lillian caught her breath as she saw them. At this distance, there was no way she could see detail. Which was a blessing in disguise. Even if this lot had re-animated just before they left the nearest Project base, the journey in a closed container, the only safe way to transport re-animates, wouldn’t have done them any favors. The heat and minor wounds caused by rattling around in the thing meant they were starting to degrade and, by the smell wafting up the corridors, they’d already started to snack on one of their number.

“That’s them?” she whispered.
 

Jack didn’t get time to answer. The groan increased, gaining in pitch and volume. The shuffling separated out into the patter of running feet.
 

“Incoming,” he yelled, bringing his rifle into his shoulder. “Fire at will!”

All hell broke loose. The first RA into the line of fire had been a young man. A prisoner, by the looks of the jumpsuit. These days, lethal injection was the least of your worries if you were stupid enough to end up on death row. Thanks to a governmental mandate, if you were sentenced to death your ass belonged to science. Or, more specifically, the Project. Just more grist for the RA mill.

His eyes were fixed on where Darce, Sanders and Nic stood. Drool dripped from his chin and he moaned hungrily, lurching toward them with a single-minded intensity common in re-animates. Once they got an idea fixed in their decaying heads, that was it.

He didn’t make two steps before the air was alive with bullets. They slammed into him, his dead body jumping and jerking like a marionette on speed. The projectiles tore through his clothing, shredding flesh, muscle and bone as though it were paper. They didn’t leave wounds, just ragged holes that leaked corrupt blood.

Jack didn’t stop firing, even when the first RA was joined by others in an overwhelming press. He targeted limb joints. Knees, ankles, hips. If the things couldn’t run, they were easier to put down.
 

“Thomas,” he yelled over the din. “RAs down, shotgun. Darce, get your fur on. We got runners.”

Chapter Eleven

If Lillian thought her life had turned into a horror movie before, then the reality of seeing real “live” zombies up close and personal rocked her to the core. Her eyes widened as the first one came into view. She’d dealt with patients from all walks of life and in all stages of mental illness. The shuffling gait and empty eyes were things she saw with highly medicated cases. But there was something else, something so inherently wrong about the man in front of her, that her brain instantly rejected the evidence of her eyes.
 

He was walking and talking…if you could call the sound he was making speech…but he was dead. Totally and utterly dead, his eyes were devoid of life and starting to whiten.
 

“Holy s—”
 

The rest of her sentence was cut off as the soldiers around her opened fire. She’d never been in a firefight, only ever seen them in the movies. The real thing was
nothing
like it was onscreen.
 

It was a loud, chaotic maelstrom of noises and smells. The thunder of weapons firing, spent casings hitting the floor combined with the smell of cordite and burnt, rotting flesh. It overwhelmed her senses as she cowered behind Jack, dropping her axe to the floor as she clapped her hands over her ears and hated herself for her weakness. She couldn’t see or hear anything.
 

She’d wanted a gun? Ha! What a joke. She’d have dropped it in shock as soon as the shit hit the fan.

Pulling her trusty fire axe closer with a foot, she bit her lip and tried not to whimper as she waited for the firing to stop. A shadow cast by the moonlight outside flitted across the floor in front of her. She frowned. There was only her, Jack and his team in the corridor, and they were all concentrating on killing zombies.