Norah fell into his arms like a broken angel, struck down by the elements, wholly in a situation she was not prepared for. He steadied her until her feet sunk into the muddy ground as her body slid down his.
She’s in pain.
She trembled as he lifted his hands to her forearms and waited. “Are you okay?”
She’s sick.
She dragged the back of her hand across her nose. “Yeah, I’m okay.” She stepped away. The rain beat hard upon them, as if the drops were pebbles.
Stryker scanned his surroundings again and discerned the heat signatures of several others in the building.
Strangely, they hadn’t moved from their locations since his initial scan. Not an inch. Nor a breath.
“Where’s the entry to this place?”
“On the other side,” Norah answered him with a cough. “But there’s a door around the corner.”
They rounded the building, his hand remaining on her arm as they traversed the mud until he found it and broke in. Stryker closed it behind them just as a nearby tree exploded from the touch of lightning.
He examined the interior with his light. Four heat signatures were within, still unmoving. Stryker looked back at Norah and placed his finger over his mask, signaling silence.
She didn’t need to be told. Her pistol was already within her hand.
“How many others were there? When this place was attacked?”
“Four, maybe five. We were packing up to leave before the tempest. Half the team was at our ship. They didn’t answer my distress call. I don’t know if they were attacked as well,” she whispered.
“Attacked?”
Norah wiped her face, pushing her drenched brown hair off of her cheeks. “The lights went out and the sprinklers went on. Robert and I were finishing up in the lab, putting together my last box of samples.” She sniffled and rubbed her nose again. He reached into his bag and found a piece of cloth to hand her. “We were leaving. It was the last day.”
“Why?” he asked. The facility was built soundly, the piping, interior, and overall build were composed of some of the best materials on the market for otherworld colonization. Who would leave all this behind?
The wind shook the metal door.That’s why.
“Our data was...not encouraging. Too many dangers, too much water. Axone is rich, uncharted, and quite beautiful, but with the aggressiveness of the environment our efforts were halted. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I guess,” she answered softly, shrugged and looked up with a blank stare out into the dark hallway. Her voice lowered, “I didn’t see what took us down, it was sudden and we weren’t prepared. Almost everything we had been given for an emergency situation had already been packed up.”
Stryker watched as she wiped her face off with the cloth, then her hands, trembling with sickness throughout. Her honey brown skin fought her every step of the way.
The more she tried to dry herself the more water trickled from her drenched hair and back over her skin. It was like the water was claiming its right to be on her. It refused to be taken away.
He took her free hand, having to bend down to reach it, and squeezed reassuringly. “Could it be human?”
She didn’t tug her hand free.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so? But if it wasn’t, whatever attacked was intelligent. Robert wanted to investigate. I wanted to stay put and hide–hole up.” They began to walk further into the building. Stryker let her continue to talk. Four life forms couldn’t hurt them. “We were immobilized before we could react. There was shrieking,” her voice wavered. “It was horrible. It was like a dagger to the brain and I thought my ear drums were going to burst. There was blood and even though I’m not a doctor, when blood leaks from the ears, and from the nose, it’s not good.”
The first two heat signatures were just down the hallway and in a room beyond.
“No. It’s not,” he whispered and placed his finger on her lips. “Be quiet for a moment, there’s something in the next room.”
The hush that fell was as frightening and as tense as the anticipation before a battle.
Stryker crept forward without making a sound and Norah, his charge, steeled her nerve and silently followed him. He pushed his back against the wall, his arm-light off. A dagger appeared in his hand, and a pistol was raised in hers. He ducked his head around the corner and peered into the gloom.
A bedroom. Empty. An empty bedroom with two heat signatures.
He ran his gaze everywhere at once; nothing clung to the ceiling, nothing hid in the shadowed corners. Only the storm roared outside.
