Violet Eyes (26 page)

“Is there a contact at Innovative Industries, or am I starting cold?”

“Lawrence David is expecting you,” Stalvert said. “The project ran under his supervision. He’s eager to help since it was his team that closed the project—and guaranteed that it had been completely retired—over a year ago. He won’t give you any trouble. He’ll be useful.”

“And once I’ve gotten up to speed with him, where is my destination. Who is my contact?”

“You’ll work with Field Commander Bruce Gettys,” Stalvert said, and rattled off a contact number. “He’s waiting for you onsite already.”

“And where is that, sir?”

“He’s setting up a base right now. Not very far from where you started.”

Stalvert cleared his throat.

“You’re going to have to contain and erase,” Stalvert warned. “And do it better than Innovative Industries did with their lab last year on Sheila Key, or we’re going to have a real mess on our hands. A national emergency kind of mess.”

“The target is Passanattee, Florida.”

Chapter Forty-One

Monday, May 20. 8:58 p.m.

Anders drove Highway 75 down the west coast of Florida.

After dark, the state passed by slowly. Florida was a long slow tread through black sky and highway lights. He stopped off and bought gas and pop and a bag of chips, and as he stood there on the asphalt underneath the big white lights, he couldn’t help but think about how tired he was after the long week.

But he was determined to make it to the end of the peninsula by morning. He had lived alone for long enough, and he wasn’t going to do it any longer. He could sip another Mountain Dew and stay on the right side of the yellow lines for a few more hours.

Anders was going to bring his family home.

Whether they liked it…or not.

Chapter Forty-Two

Monday, May 20. 9:15 p.m.

Rachel pushed the sheets up to Eric’s chin.

“Are you comfy?” she asked?

Eric smiled and shrugged his head back and forth against the pillow.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m comfy.”

“Good.” She smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “Sleep tight, baby.”

She stepped away from the bed, and with one hand, thumbed the light off.

Rachel stepped back from the doorway, and Terry took her hand. “Do you think he’s okay?” she asked.

He nodded. “The key thing was for him to get beyond the drug that made him want to sleep. We got him there, and he was fine. When he wakes in the morning, he’ll be back to one hundred percent.”

“Okay,” Rachel said. She wanted to believe Terry, she did. Though her mother’s gene kept her worried for the boy, even after he seemed okay.

Terry took her hand and pulled her to the living room. “Come here,” he said and pulled her to the couch. I want to show you something.”

“What?” she asked.

“Something personal,” he grinned.

Turned out, what he wanted to show her was something Rachel couldn’t show anyone else.

But that was okay. After this day, she needed something that was just for her, not someone else. She let him pull her shirt off and then answered his kisses with a strong, agile tongue of her own. When he began to get so hard that he couldn’t contain himself, she reached around behind her and undid the clasps. She shrugged her bra off, releasing her breasts for him to fondle without problem. She hated it when guys fumbled about looking for the hooks on the bra or waited for the “permission” to go there. She would rather they just…did.

Terry didn’t seem to have a problem accepting her body. His hands moved all over her chest, kneading and caressing and pinching at just the right moments. She felt herself growing flushed and anxious in a way she hadn’t been since those early days with Anders. She opened her mouth to him and took his tongue inside her—the precursor to what she knew must come.

To what she knew she wanted.

“Not here,” he said, and reached out to take the TV remote from where it sat on the coffee table. He wasn’t going to take her on the couch, like some late-night lucky grope session. He wanted to spend the night with her. Every night. He wanted to be the man she called every time…not just to find her son, but always.

Terry lifted her from the couch and carried her down the hall to the bedroom. When he laid her on the bed, he bent to kiss her. She slipped her arms around his back and pulled him as tight to her as she could. She wanted to bring him so close that he was a part of her. His lips were warm on hers, and he was gentle and soft, not full of perverse demands like Anders. She slipped her tongue between his lips and let him know that she was okay with anything he wanted from her. Anxious to give.

He responded, twining his tongue with hers, and arching his back to bring his groin tight to her hip. She could feel the thickness beneath his pants and could tell how hard he was for her. Anders would have forced that on her instantly, slating his lusts without any concern for hers. Terry just let her know that he was ready, but his hands stayed concerned with massaging her back and butt and gently covering her mouth and neck with kisses.

After a while, she pushed him back gently, reached down, and unzipped his pants. “I feel like you’re a little too constrained,” she said quietly.

“I feel the same way,” he agreed. He lay back, smiling and watched her undo his belt and shorts, then helped her push the pants off. Rachel pressed her mouth to the gray cotton briefs he wore, and breathed against them, inhaling his scent and warming his hard cock beneath as she excited it with her touch. She looked up at Terry as she did, and he rolled his eyes back at her attention, keeping one hand on her back and neck, softly kneading. Showing her his appreciation.

She appreciated him back, slipping her thumbs beneath the waistband of his briefs and pulling them down to release that thing one of her old friends used to call, “the true eye of man”. It certainly was the eye that saw women…and she smiled as she saw its pink, sloped head for the first time. Terry wasn’t enormous, but he was built solid. And she was anxious to feel him inside her, holding him as close as she could while he moved. But first, she wanted to give him a kiss he would remember.

Fastening her eyes on his, she slowly lowered her mouth until she had blinded the “eye”. And seconds later, Terry’s other eyes closed, as he moaned and she sucked him deeper. He tasted earthy and rich, and she began to move her head over and around him, faster, sucking him into the very back of her throat. She wanted to taste all of him…she wanted his semen in her throat and in her pussy. And all over her. Rachel wanted Terry to use her and own her as his own, even as she was the one who was doing all the taking. It was a very different experience than a night with Anders, who usually grabbed her by the hair and pushed her face down to where he wanted it. Sometimes she had to admit, she had enjoyed that dominance. But now, she was enjoying being the taker more than she ever had enjoyed being with a man before. And Terry kept making noises and moaning deep in his throat. Finally as she worked his balls with her fingers and sucked him deep, he whispered, “That is the most amazing thing I have ever felt.”

The night only got hotter from there…as Rachel showed him how much more amazing she could be.

They didn’t fall asleep until after the blue LED of the alarm clock read 3:00.

Chapter Forty-Three

Tuesday, May 21. 12:43 a.m.

Innovative Industries managed a lot of micro-sites.

Most of them were clandestine. All of them were testing biological experiments. Many of them were contracted by the government, with a “no questions asked or answered policy”. Innovative Industries had lab sites all over the United States, ranging from island stations to labs quartered inside universities. But none of them had been as clandestine as the test site on Sheila Key. That project had been Top Secret. Even the scientists carrying it out didn’t know the full details of why they were doing it.

But the charge had been intriguing—combine the lifecycles of two completely different species. Make a spider give birth to a fly…which would give birth to a spider…

Peter Skiles skimmed the documentation that Commander Stalvert had forwarded to him and shook his head. The scientists who had made this mutation work for the government had never quite grasped why the government wanted it. They were too enraptured by the biology. The challenge of splicing the genes and creating a completely new species was what drove them to create what they did.

Sometimes scientists were worse than children, Skiles thought. They never looked outside of the beauty of the
theory
of what they did. That’s why we ended up with atomic weapons. And the reason the government had hired I.I. to perform this little experiment was crystal clear to Peter.

Biological warfare.

Release the flies into a troublesome nation, and let them sting their way through the populace and implant their tainted eggs beneath the skin of millions. The eggs would circulate in the blood of those that they had managed to sting and lodge in the head. There was something about the brain that drew their hunger, some latent chemical, and the eggs would be drawn there to hatch. If they hadn’t migrated there as eggs, the fledgling larvae swam their way to the brain on their own anyway, chasing the flavor. They’d grow there, around the skull, suckling along the victim’s braincase until it was time for the swarm to hatch. And when it was, the things took any path to reach the air. They could eat their way through the ear canal, make their way up the sinus cavity through the nose, or simply chew their way through the skull until they found the heat of the sun.

And then they would spread. Moving across the land to find other hosts to bite and lay their eggs in. From fly eggs hatched the spiders, who netted any biological thing left alive after the flies’ scourge…before their own movement slowed and their abdomens became a cocoon designed to hatch more flies.

For a government intent on disabling a nation, it was perfect. The things would spread as quickly as a virus. But unlike a virus, their radius was visible. Where the bugs were was obvious, since they weren’t microscopic.

And Innovative Industries had developed a failsafe mechanism to wipe the things out when they spread too far.

Because the cycle was all about the spread. At a certain point, they had to stop. They had to be contained.

The thing was, the containment spray that had been developed didn’t just stop the insects.

It stopped…everything. It was like an acid melt. Spray it at anything that moved, and you soon had just a puddle of blood.

Peter had abandoned Sheila Key and called in the containment plan.

But now, he was looking at reports that said the containment plan had failed.

The Innovative Industries mutant creatures had spread to the mainland. A town bordering the Everglades was now under siege.

Peter read the documentation and frowned. Containment was going to be difficult. These things could easily wipe out all of Southern Florida before anyone so much as blinked an eye. The cycle was designed to be virulent.

The bugs moved and grew that fast.

That only meant that he and his team had to move faster.

They had sterilized Sheila Key. But now they had to come up with a plan of containment…and sterilization…that impacted the fewest people possible yet stopped this mutant creation before it spread north. Where it could really do some damage.

If he had to, Peter Skiles was ready to wipe out the entire leg of Florida if he had to.

He hoped that wasn’t going to be necessary.

But if it was…he was ready.

He picked up the phone and called his contact in Panama City. It was time to set up containment. And they had to act now.

Sleep seemed like it was going to be a really long time away.

Chapter Forty-Four

Tuesday, May 21. 6:14 a.m.

She had really moved out to the sticks, Anders thought, as he wound his way off the highway and through the small town. The area appeared to be overrun with tent worms…or some such insect—he saw white cottony billows all over the place, extending from the trees to the gutters on the houses. The webbing was way bigger than what the tent worms that he was familiar with wove. Those usually just bound up a branch or two of a tree, while within a thousand little hairless caterpillars inched along and chewed off the leaves. Here, the webs wound around and around the entire leaf area of trees and bushes and extended long sheaths up the sides of some of the houses. If he hadn’t seen a few cars on the main road and in the parking lot of the supermarket, he would have thought the town had been abandoned to the bugs. Who let worms spin webs over the entire side of their houses? He would have been out there with a pressure washer and a big-ass can of insecticide! He noticed even here, on Rachel’s street, there were several homes that seemed enveloped in cotton. One, in fact, was right across the street from where she apparently lived.

Anders pulled up at the address he’d scrawled on the back of a junk mail envelope. He compared the numbers on the house next to the front door with what he’d written down. Yep, this was the place. Didn’t look like much, he thought. He’d given her a house better than this up in Crestview and what had she done? She’d picked up, packed up, taken their kid and left it behind.

That’s all right, he smiled, grimly. She couldn’t leave
him
behind that easily. She had never been able to say no to him for long. She’d gotten away with this one because he’d been working so much lately, and she’d gone to the lawyers and settled it all before he’d even known what was going on. Then she’d gotten the police involved, and he couldn’t do the things he knew would have nipped this all in the bud. Because it wouldn’t help matters at all if he’d ended up in jail. He’d had to bide his time, and wait for the opportunity. When everyone thought crazy ol’ Anders had calmed down and given up.

Anders never gave up.

Thing was, Anders knew she loved him. He remembered how she melted when he rubbed his hand across her lower back. How she moved against him when his hand slipped lower, and how sometimes, without him even asking, she’d kneel down, undo his belt buckle and take out his cock to suck. She’d look up at him like a girl with a lollipop, all doe-eyed and happy. Eager to please.