Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance) (25 page)

He coughed, heavily, into the receiver. Claire jolted a little and then Fury snorted a laugh at both of them. “Yeah, er, sort of. I mean, she’s with Draven back in California. I heard from him, not her. Good timing for once.”

“Jacques?”

“Yeah, he’s with them.”

For the past three days, the gang had been trying to find the rest of their little clan. After the run-in they had in the forest, Draven called in a favor and got the two humans the hell out of there. He well knew that when bear business goes bad, it can get dangerous. Real, real dangerous.

Still, Claire missed her new friend. Hell, she missed all of them. But she knew it was for the best.

As her feet dangled two hundred feet above the factory where her former employer was making living, breathing people into robot slaves, she thought about how badly she missed
all
her friends. And then she remembered that two of them still worked at GlasCorp, and one friend that she really needed to call again.

Her thoughts turned to Nick and his cute ginger face and funny smile.

Without thinking about it, she rubbed the toe on her left foot into the arch of her right. A chunk of dried-on dirt about the size of a dime worked its way free, and before she could lunge and grab it, the tiny brown disc began a fluttering, heart-stopping, gut-wrenching descent.

“Uh,” Claire looked down at the dirt, wondering how long they had before it made landfall. “Hey, is Eighty-Three around?”

Rogue fumbled with the transceiver and then with a staticky huff, Eighty-Three took it from him. “Did you drop something into the hole?”

“Hey Eighty-Three, I think, uh—wait, what did you just ask?”

“I asked if you dropped anything into the hole.”

“How’d you know?”

“Because your feet were dirty and you always rub them together. I’m hyper analytical, remember? The answer is that you have until the object in question intersects the crisscross of infra-red security beams which lie ten feet from the floor and prevent anyone from going out or in without being detected. That counts clods of dirt.”

The blaring siren just about split her eardrums in two. Fury jumped to his feet in panicked alarm, and started looking around for somewhere to go. “Did you not say you had a plan?” Eighty-Three asked in his obnoxiously calm, even voice. “I thought you said you had come up with a plan to infiltrate the place once you opened it up?”

“Yeah, well, that was before I had to come up with one right this second. I was thinking, you know, take the long way around. Get a rental car, take in some sights and then go in through my old office entrance. Sam, that’s the door guard’s name. We’re good buddies, I could have...”

“Claire?” Eighty-Three cut her off. “I know I am a very witty... whatever I am, but I am afraid this might not be the best time for joking. Unless they call that alarm off, you will be swarmed rather soon by some very unsavory types.”

“Clods?”

Eighty-Three made something approaching a snicker. “What they send will make you wish for Clods. There are particular models of sentinel guards that have air guns in their chests which fire syringes. They were initially made to control our bear friends, I think, but if they get ahold of you? First your skin will start to tingle, and then it will begin to liquefy from the inside out and then—”

“Yep! Got it, great! That’s fantastic, buddy!” Claire was still looking down nervously into the hole at her feet, but nothing seemed to be going on. Not yet anyway. She took another look at the phone and then decided to throw
that
down the hole, you know, just to test the waters. It couldn’t be much worse, after all, the alarms were already blaring. And this way she wouldn’t have to listen to anything else about the horrors that awaited.

Eighty-Three voice came crackling through. “Claire? I think I lost you!”

“Sorry! Dropped the phone!” she shouted, as her once prized possession careened down into the laboratory and exploded onto the cold matte gray tile.

“Two hundred twelve feet,” Fury said, with a surprisingly smug, sage-like tone in his voice. “I picked up a few science tricks in the lab.”

Something whizzed past Claire’s head. She felt a torrent of air and pulled back at precisely the right time so that instead of imbedding itself in her face, the dart only left a scratch on her forehead. It burned – oh God did it burn – but that was better than a head full of whatever shit was in that syringe.

Immediately she remembered Jacques’s wound and wondered if he’d had a taste of this stuff.

“What the hell do we do?” she asked Fury, who had already stripped off his shirt, and was unbuckling his tightly-stretched jeans. “Uh... are you nuts? You really want to—”

“Shift!” he shouted. “And jump!”

She opened her eyes wide, nodded, and then in one moment that represented a mixture of absolute clarity, undying duty to her friends, and complete, unabashed stupidity, she jumped first and shifted second.

––––––––

A
ll Claire knew when she hit bottom was she was
really
glad there was a tank of water down there, and that Fury saw it somehow before he jumped. Otherwise there would have been a couple of bear-shaped grease stains on the steel tiling where they landed.

The burst of adrenaline coursing through her ursine body was difficult to handle, but a crane arm snapping open and closed above her did the trick, especially when it caught a pinch of fur, ripping it out of her back.

She opened her mouth to squeal in pain, which gave her a mouthful of completely tasteless water, as though every single thing that once lived in it had been filtered, distilled, or otherwise somehow removed. She sputtered, grabbed ahold of Fury’s leg and yanked him free from the claw that had snatched him.

One deep breath later, the pair burst from the pool and landed on the cold tile-shaped steel they’d seen from above. The suits were marching slowly down their hellish conveyor, on to whatever horrible purpose they’d eventually serve. She looked at one of them, letting her attention fix for just a moment.

Were all of these... these bodies, were they all like Eighty-Three at some point? A person in some kind of horrible suit? A human being turned into some kind of brainless puppet?
Staring at the conveyor, which was still running on and on, a never ending march of horror, she wondered if they were ever
normal
or if they were maybe grown for this purpose?

“We’re not gonna end up there,” Fury said, nuzzling her side with his snout. “We’re getting out of here as fast as we can.”

She gave herself one more moment to look at the coats and the masks before she finally ripped herself away. “We have to find what he is,” she whispered. “We have to find out so we can tell him.”

“He helped us,” Fury said. “We’ll help him. That’s the way we are.”

Swallowing hard, Claire nodded her head and looked away. She had no idea where she was going, but that didn’t matter. Just the act of taking a step, one single step, was an act of determination. And just that first step was all it took to bring back her courage and her resolve. Having her mate beside her, and the other one missing? That was enough to make the rest of her decision.

The first step? It was hard. Painful almost. The second was easier. By the time she decided which hallway they’d follow – purely on the grit of her guts – both of them were running.

“Wait!” they heard, static words coming through their forgotten radio receiver. “Come back! Get your radio!” It was Rogue’s voice, clearly irritated.

They both skidded to a halt. Fury went back for the phone and came back naked, in human form. “Guess we better listen to him.”

Claire shrugged.

“What is it?” Fury asked.

“You’re going down the wrong hallway. Head east, Eighty-Three said he’d meet you at the bottom.”

“How?” Fury asked, looking slightly confused.

Rogue snickered. “He’s got a key. Jack ass left me up here as a lookout to make sure nothing else goes wrong. But... enough of my whining. He’s got a key.”

Claire and Fury exchanged one more glance, she sighed, he laughed, and then they were charging off in the other direction.

*

T
he smell of gas was strong in the air.

Not any sort of mysterious, magical, experimental gas – just plain old gasoline. Claire cringed as she and Fury dashed past an open vent which apparently was a pipe leading deeper into the compound, carrying a river of the stuff. What it could be doing, or fuelling, she had no idea, but it was a bit strange that this super-futuristic, underground complex needed
that
much raw gas.

But
God
did it ever smell.

“Left at the next junction,” Eighty-Three’s voice squelched through.

“Where are all the guards?” Claire shouted back at Fury, who was carrying the handset. Apparently it worked, because he answered.

“Off the grid. I cannot find them. They must have finally terminated my network access.”

“Which means they can’t—”

“See me,” he finished for her, or rather, was saying at the same time. “That means... Well, I am not sure what it means.”

“They can’t trace
you
either!”

“Well, I mean aside from that.”

The noise from his respirator was still even, but was quicker than usual. And, if she listened carefully enough, Claire thought she could hear the clicking of those strange knee-high boots he wore thumping away on something that rang out with every footfall.

“Are you running? Left here,” she said to Fury, who followed her direction, and somehow was keeping abreast with her. She took a fleeting moment to admire his nakedness, and particularly, the bouncing part of it that he seemed to not even recognize was bouncing happily with every step.

“No,” Eighty-Three said. “Yes.”

“Why did you lie?”

“Just trying it out.”

She would have laughed under any other circumstances. Under this one, she just chuffed lightly and asked, “What should we be expecting when we get wherever you’re going?”

“You will know it,” he said, cryptically. “We have two jobs.”

He coughed, which was very strange coming from a body that Claire had long suspected didn’t actually have any lungs, or much of a throat or a mouth. Still though, he was coughing, and then he started breathing harder again, to the point that it caused a slight bit of concern.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “Do we turn?”

“No turning. Yes I am all right. Keep going straight. You will come to a catwalk over a river of stuff which I will not describe. I suggest you avoid looking at it. Keep going straight and when the fork comes, jump straight off the end. There you will find a maintenance ladder that leads down into the river.”

“We’re jumping into the river?” she was starting to worry, which she should have been doing much sooner. “The river you won’t tell me what it is?”

“No, you are to jump over it. I suggest you not go in. Soon after you get to the ladder, I will come find you. Goodbye for now.”

“What are we going to find?” she shouted, but was cut off by the handset going dead.

“Fuck this,” Fury swore, hurling the receiver over the side. “Can you feel it? We’re close. Can you feel the energy?”

For just a second, she did. But then she realized what it
actually
was.

“I feel my mark,” she whispered. “He’s close.”

*

E
ighty-Three was running straight down the hall he thought he’d never see again.

Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure why he
did
remember the place. He’d never been there as far as he could remember, but something about it stuck out in whatever was left of his mind. Then again, he wasn’t sure if he even had a mind either, or if it was just his robot brain manifesting memories that were programmed into it.

“I am not a goddamn robot,” he growled, the words coming through his respirator in a quiet hiss. “Not a robot. I am a person, I have a f-family.”

Person.

Family
.

Those words hitched in his brain just like the hallway – the cold steel and tile hallway – where his boot heels thudded over and over in that rhythmic tune. When he went slower, he glided easily, but when he really got going, the fact that one of his legs was slightly shorter than the other became very apparent.

Parts of him that
should
have been perfect – his slight limp, the way one of his ears worked less than the other, those things had long since made him realize that he was unique. Or if not unique, at least he wasn’t exactly like all the others.

The one thing that really set him apart was his lisp.

It was always hidden by the static that came out of the mask. But it was there. Every time he spoke, he heard it if no one else did. And all that meant that he
couldn’t
be a robot. No one would program a lisp into a robot. No one would make one leg shorter than the other, or one ear a little less functional.

No, there had to be more than this. There
had
to be.

Closing his one good eye, he wove through a complex web of tunnels he shouldn’t have remembered, but did. In the distance, he heard the rush of water, and knew what it was. He also knew
who
was down there, so far below, and spared a moment to hope they’d make it across the river and into the place they were going.

With the next flicker of his mind, he thought how much he couldn’t wait to see them again.

No way I’m a robot. No way. Robots can’t care, they can’t... love
.

The further he ran, and the more he knew that whatever he found at the end of his trek, he wasn’t a robot... and he wasn’t alone.

In the distance, obfuscated by a thick, industrial haze that surrounded this end of the complex, was the door he’d been running toward ever since he escaped. Somehow – and he didn’t have the slightest clue how – he knew that behind that door lay the answer to his pain, the answer to the mystery of his existence.

Drawing up next to it, he breathed heavier and placed his hand flat on the door’s brushed nickel handle. He swallowed hard, his throat clicking painfully. That was nothing new though – his throat had always hurt, speaking always caused pain – at least, since the first time he opened his eyes... eye, to find himself seeing out through the goggle.