Norah pushed up the dashboard and leaned her forehead next to it, her cheek slid while she took a breath and rested against her salvation.All of this for fucking water.She typed in the key code and closed her eyes.
The door zipped open next to her just as tears drifted from her eyes. She gripped the dagger in her hand and shuffled to the entryway, her eyes blinded by the interior’s bright LED lights. Her boots squelched. Mud and blood dripped down her body.
She wondered if she had actually made it to the ship or if this was the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. She took a step forward into the light, sparing a glance at the bulkhead beneath her.
I must be alive,she thought, as she saw the dirty tracks she was leaving in the ship.
Norah paused a couple steps into the ship. Her back stiffened.
Everything in her told her to seal the door, to save herself, to leave. She knew enough to fly a ship and even if she didn’t...she’d learn–and fast.
But something was behind her.
And it needed to die.
Chapter Fourteen:
***
Stryker felt it moments before it struck him. A lightning bolt, brilliant orange and yellow, arcing between him and the tree. He dodged, but it wasn’t enough, his circuits smoldered as an overwhelming jolt of electricity flooded his systems. It burned his clothes, charred his skin, and lit his hair on fire.
He seized. Smoke and his own carnage filled his nose. The smell made him gag just as he felt Norah’s weight fall off his back and the tree under them cracked and split in half.
A scream registered.Norah.And then it was gone, lost amongst the wild storm.
The branch broke and he followed Norah’s descent into the polluted flood below. Stryker shifted right as he hit the rushing water. He blinked down his second set of eyelids, glazed over, and twisted to search for his girl.
His head lifted above the surface.
“Norah!” he screamed. She didn’t answer. The wind whipped his face as he looked around frantically. Stryker fought through the pain that burned through him, the internal technology that had overheated, and the discomfort of brackish water enveloping his wounds.
Where are you?He spun in a circle, his legs hooked together into a tail that he stabbed into the ground. He spotted his pack drift away in the distance but didn’t go after it. He dunked his head and sped around the nearby trees, searching for her heat signature.
His processors went into overdrive as he felt himself go into a frenzy. Stryker pushed himself through the thick foliage and bushes that remained rooted below; his metal body ripped through them as he looked for her.
“Norah,” he yelled again as he came up for air. His voice got lost in the storm. He called out her name again and again and was only answered by the chaos around him. He felt things slide by his coiled body, he saw creatures lurking below, he felt the husks of drowned animals.
But he couldn’t findher.
He could still feel the imprint of her body pressed into his back and he would do anything to keep that feeling. The metal in his body vibrated as he lost control and the sizzling heat of the strike seared the inside of his flesh but all he could think about washer.
Stryker felt the fangs of his snake break through his gums and his human teeth pop out to collect and clink on the inside of his mask. He hissed and snapped. His head jerked as he struck out at everything and nothing, his heavy metal tail slashing and destroying whatever it came in contact with.
He couldn’t find her signature, he couldn’t smell her scent, and try as he might, he couldn’t hear anything but the devil’s storm and the perverse rattling when his tail thrashed in the water.
Stryker called out for her again as he followed the strongest current.
He spotted her bag, caught up against a split open tree. It was in his hands in a blink and the smell of Norah came back to him all at once, but it wasn’t from the bag in his hands.
Beyond the tree was a broken trail up a rocky ledge. It was subtle, but the broken twigs and the foliage were crushed and splintered backward and upward over a precise, flattened ledge that could only be man-made. As if a body had crawled up or had been dragged.
His nose twitched and he bent over the trail. He could smell a hint of blood and it wasn’t the blood of an animal.
His hands tore into the pack until it was ripped down the middle and the rest of the emergency supplies plopped into the water.
And then he heard it, the screeches that could destroy the sanity of a well man.
He was up and over the ledge before another burst of lightning came down from the sky. His body shifted as the shrieks continued and the armor he wore was forgotten, left in shreds behind him. The snake within him was free.
