Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance) (23 page)

Her sides ached, partly from being whacked with a tree, but also partly from how she could
not
stop laughing.

“Wait here,” Eighty-Three said, and sat her on something cold and metallic. She felt her skin prickle a little, and realized that at some point, she stopped being a bear.

Claire watched, still laughing, as he glided to where Fury lay, and scanned him with the same whirligig-looking device. Two rotors on top turned around and around, to go along with the strange beeping coming from the handheld scanner. “What’s that?” Claire managed, in between increasingly painful fits of laughter. “Looks like something out of
Ghostbusters
.” She tried to quote a line from the movie, but in her addled state, only managed to say “Dr. Venkman,” before she gave up.

“Unbelievable,” the flat voice announced. “How can he live?”

Claire was still rocking back and forth, teetering dangerously close to falling into whatever it was she was sitting upon the edge of, but Eighty-Three was staring at whatever he was holding. He shook it a couple of times, and then tried the scan again. It was met with the same set of bleeps and boops as before, and just like seconds ago, he shook his head.

“It makes no sense. He should not be able to survive such an encounter. How can this be?”

He was completely absorbed in whatever he was doing, so much so that Claire’s continual calls for his attention went unanswered. He was still scanning, still staring. Finally he stood up and looked from Fury to his little scanner one more time before shrugging. “Machines do not lie,” he announced. “Usually.”

Even though the big bear probably weighed four hundred pounds, Eighty-Three just pulled him up and slung his prone body over his shoulder before slowly gliding back toward Claire. “He is alive,” that robotic voice announced. “Unbelievably, he is still alive. Something in this creature has kept him alive.”

“Where are we going?” Claire asked, looking over at Fury’s unconscious body and still inexplicably laughing, though it didn’t feel as good as it had moments before. She was starting to hate the laughs and wish they’d stop. “Who are you?”

“That,” Eighty-Three said, “is a very good question.”

––––––––

I
t didn’t take long for Fury to come to.

It
did
take him a good while to stop trying to kill Eighty-Three. What finally broke him is when the bear grabbed his mask, and the not-a-robot just lifted him off the ground like Fury was a child. He held him there, feet dangling and kicking, and said, “Please stop trying to kill me.”

That was that.

For the rest of that first day, Fury’s entire existence seemed slow and lagged. He was nursing a painful hip, but as the hours passed, his condition noticeably improved. Every so often, Eighty-Three turned around and scanned him, which always drew the bear’s ire. Although one time, he let out a whistling sound that, once again, sounded like someone had explained to him what a whistle was.

Claire laughed again, but that time, it wasn’t drug induced.

“I whistled in surprise,” he said. “Why do you laugh?”

She just shook her head, and grabbed Fury’s hand. He clutched hers, seeming to draw strength from her, stability.

And so they went on until dark. There was an argument about who was going to take which watch even though their strange, goggled companion said many times that he required no sleep. Fury insisted on taking second watch, although about five minutes into it, he got tired of Gasmask, as he called him, staring at him, and crept back over to where Claire lay. He wrapped his arms around her waist, kissed her neck, and when she murmured her comfort and snuggled backward against his body, the bear finally gave in and let sleep take him.

When they awoke, the shadowy figure was sitting in exactly the same place that he’d been when Claire fell asleep.

Fury rose first, tromping off to the woods to take care of his morning toilet needs.

Without a word, Eighty-Three stood. “Good,” he said. “Your need to sleep has always confused me. Not from a scientific standpoint – I understand the need for the brain to rest – but the things you do
while
you sleep.”

“Were you watching us all night?” Claire asked, feeling slightly embarrassed, though not really knowing why.

“Yes.”

“That’s... sorta creepy,” she said, instinctually pulling her coat closer around her neck.

“For instance,” he said, moving right past what she’d said. “He kissed you when he went back to sleep, and you made a sound. Then you got closer to him, and he smiled. He kissed you again.”

Claire was nodding slowly. “Is this like a cataloging thing you do? I mean, I’m a scientist too, don’t get me wrong – but it seems like you’re very surprised by things that you shouldn’t be surprised by. You’re human, right? One way or another?”

Eighty-Three emitted a humming sound. “Why does he groan with such vigor while urinating? You would think that Fury was having some kind of sexual climax from the way he carries on.”

Claire listened for a second, and chuckled. “He
is
getting really excited about it,” she said. “It feels good, I guess.” For some reason, while having him watch them sleep gave her the creeps, clinically discussing the pleasure of a good pee didn’t bother her at all.

When Fury reappeared, Claire went off and took care of her needs and when she made her way back, the camp had already been completely erased. Not like someone kicked ash on the fire – the whole thing was just wiped out. If you didn’t know there had been one, it was indistinguishable from wilderness. Hell, she
knew
it was there, and still couldn’t find any traces that anyone had been there – bear, human, robot or otherwise.

After checking something on his little whirligig, Eighty-Three simply walked off.

“Where are you going?” Claire called after him, shooting a quick glance to Fury, who shrugged. “Wait up!”

“No time for waiting. We have to find your other friends. I hope the other one was as stalwart as your mate.”

It took a moment before the two of them realized that he intended them to follow, and took off in his gliding, impossibly smooth wake.

*

T
heir trek took them across two days, over a mountain ridge, and through a pair of unsettling dales. The fact that the dales were unsettling didn’t really enter Claire’s mind until they crept into the second one just as dusk was beginning to fall, and she happened to brush against a fir tree.

“Are these fake?” she asked with a start.

Fury looked back, his eyes burning in the darkness. “Fake trees? Why would—?”

“Yes, they are fake,” Eighty-Three said.

He chose not to expound on that, instead just gliding forward, legs moving with that impossible deftness. He didn’t even seem to disturb the grass as he went, more like he was water flowing through everything. Only once or twice did he bother to duck out of the way of a low-hanging branch, but even then, the ducking motion was silky smooth.

“Stop here,” he said, straightening his normally hunched back. When he did he stood taller than either Claire or Fury – he was about the same height as Stone or King. “We are close.”

Claire took the opportunity to sit down and pluck a piece of fake grass from the ground. It was
all
fake. The trees, the vines, the grass underneath. She stuck her fingers into the ground and pulled up dirt made of some kind of packing material – that green foam you can use for sticking fake flowers into and making an arrangement.

Speaking of that, over to the left was a bush of fake flowers. She didn’t bother to touch them, but could see from the way the light caught in the threads that they were carefully crafted, silk roses.

“Why?” she wondered aloud. “Why does this exist? Why go to all this trouble? I just can’t wrap my head around what the hell someone would have to think to come up with putting a fake forest inside of a real forest.”

“Makes it much easier to hide all the other things,” Eighty-Three said. “Quiet. They are close.”

By “they are close” what he actually meant was “look out, because here they are.”

“Where is
King
?” a roar – Rogue’s roar – burst through the trees and slammed into Claire’s ears. “Where did you take him?”

“Uh-oh,” Eighty-Three intoned. “I think they got here first.”

The crunching sound was sickening, deafening, and somewhere near the top five most grotesque noises Claire could recall hearing. Breaking bones as Rogue flew backwards into an ancient live oak, and bent around backwards were muffled only by the deep thud of his flesh smacking the bark.

She expected a howl of pain, but the silence that came instead was far worse.

“I. Am. King!” the creature, who looked almost exactly like the one which had taken Stone’s place, screeched. Right down to the taut purplish-blue skin-muscle combination and the patchy, matted, knotted-up hair that ran from the crown of its head halfway down the creature’s back it was indistinguishable from the one Eighty-Three had so easily dispatched.

From behind, Claire heard Fury pull a deep breath through his nose, and then immediately, he flew into a rage.

“That is not a very good idea,” Eighty-Three criticized reasonably. Of course he was reasonable. He’s
always
reasonable. “Though you did survive the last one, so perhaps this one will not—”

As much as a gasmask can wince, the black-clad figure winced. Fury was batted aside with a careless swipe of a half-mutated paw as the beast turned, drooling, toward Claire and her lanky friend.

“What
are
they?” she asked, breathlessly.

“Clods. That is what we call them anyway. The actual model name is a Graftable Service Automaton.”

Eighty-Three and Claire just watched the creature as it watched them. None were willing to commit to any movements. “Move slowly. This is an older model. They are graftable, but they are largely brainless.”

“That... sounds disgusting.”

“It is,” he said. If he could smile, he was smiling. “Very. You shoot them up with platelets from a subject, and they can take their form, but only for a limited time. It gets longer with each iteration, though.”

The thing started tugging at its own skin. “Jesus,” Claire swore under her breath. “All this time I worked at the place and thought all they did was make overpriced drugs. How the
fuck
is all this going on? And anyway, what
are
they, though?”

It twitched, gurgled, and took a halting step toward them. The creature did have a face, but not much of one – really it was more of a slack jaw and a pair of drooping, watery, yellowed eyes. There wasn’t much form to the creature, past the vaguely humanoid, muscular lump that made up its body.

Eighty-Three shrugged. “Company secret. They never told. I always thought they were more zombie than anything, though... that is a poor comparison. They are crafted in a lab that has one door in and one door out, and the guards are stationed there for life. I have a feeling that... whatever I am, I am not so far from that. As far as how? Money makes the world turn, as they say.”

Fury stirred from his little skid mark in the dirt. He sat up, holding his head in both hands. The clod didn’t move much, just glanced at him dismissively before returning its bulging, dripping eyes to Eighty-Three.

“You... unregistered,” the wad groaned. If a meatball could talk, Claire was staring at a talking goddamn meatball. “Out of... warranty?”

“It is trying to reason,” Eighty-Three said. “They can be vaguely cute, do you not think?”

“Cute as a pit-bull with half a jaw and no skin,” Claire said.

“Exactly.”

“You’re a weird son of a bitch.”

“I will take that as a compliment.”

In a burst of speed that rivalled anything she’d ever witnessed, her companion seemed to blink out of existence and then reappear immediately beside the surprised meatball. “Sorry,” he said, before extending some sort of rod from the wrist of his left arm, and thrusting it upward, through the creature’s neck.

Immediately, it slumped to the ground with a squeaking sound, then a hiss, and finally a wet burble. Eighty-Three walked over the bubbling corpse unceremoniously, approached Rogue and ran his scanner up and down the body, which had somehow begun to straighten out.

“Unbelievable,” he said, awe marking his electronic voice. “Un-fucking-believable.”

“Trying out swears to sound more human?” Claire asked.

“Yes, did it work?”

“Try contractions, you damn weirdo,” Fury grunted as he pushed past both of them and knelt beside the fallen comrade he’d met only briefly, but liked all the same. “But first come over here and give him a shot of your laughing gas. Don’t matter how fast we heal, this shit is gonna hurt.”

––––––––

“W
hy am I tying you up?” Claire was confused, but doing what she’d been asked to do. It had been a week since the unlikely group had found Rogue and come together, and he was only just then starting to regain consciousness. Jill and Draven were still missing, but before any reasonable search for them, they needed to lick their wounds.

“Because,” Eighty-Three said, “that bear will not trust me. If I appear weak and helpless, as though he is in command of the situation, then he will be more comfortable. Here, use this.” The black clad figure produced a thin chain from a hidden pouch on his side.

She shook her head, laughing under her breath as she looped a chain around the rubber neck covering. “Does this hurt? And where did this thing come from?”

“We have many pockets. And does what hurt?”

“No, your whole get up. I mean, do you feel pain? Do you remember anything about what you were before?”

He cocked his head to the side and for a flash of an instant Claire thought she caught a glimpse of an iris through the black goggle lens. “I try not to,” he said plainly. “I hurt because I cannot remember. My life is a hole and I am unsure why I am the only one who seems to have come to any kind of understanding.”