“Where are their weapons? They damned well didn’t leave the cave without them. Nobody is that stupid,” she pointed out tightly.
“Maybe an animal attacked them?” Pvt. Morgan said uneasily. “Somethingtore them to hell and gone!”
“I didn’t hear no explosions,” Pvt. Clancy seconded him, “and laser fire wouldn’t have done that to ‘em.”
Danika seriously doubted a beast had wandered up on the men. If was hungry, it would’ve eaten them after it killed them and, despite the carnage, it looked to her as if everything was still there.
A horrible thought congealed in her mind just then, but she refused to consider it.
Master Sergeant Felton didn’t have any such qualms. Leading a small group up to where they were, he studied the scene for several moments with a look of rage and disgust. “Cyborgs.”
“We don’t know that!” Danika snapped, surging to her feet when the other soldiers joined them.
“Four of the men are missing their gun arms!” Felton snarled at her. “That doesn’t seem significant to you?”
Feeling a fresh wave of nausea, Danika turned to study the scene of carnage more closely. That was when she discovered that one of the bodies wasn’t human—the only one of the five that wasn’t missing its gun arm.
And it had been buried.
And the reason she could tell that it had been dug up and it was cyborg was because several large pieces of flesh had been carved away, leaving the cybernetics plainly visible.
“Oh my god! They were …. They were taking the flesh!”
“It’s meat,” Felton growled. “In case you haven’t noticed, Cpl. Hart, we need food.”
Danika stared at him, trying to quell the urge to throw up. “Yousentthem?” she gasped disbelievingly. “But that’s … cannibalism! They’re as human as we are!”
Danika discovered when she surveyed the other men that most of them were looking a tad green.
“It’s a cyborg,” Felton snapped. “Shut the fuck up! Somebody get this moron out of here!”
When the men merely gaped at him, he roared at them. “Clancy, get her back to base and see to it that she keeps her mouth shut!”
Clancy seized one of her arms, but he still looked confused. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“Tie her and gag her if you have to,” Felton growled. “Just make sure she keeps quiet … and that goes for the rest of you that might be feeling a little squeamish!”
Danika was too stunned to struggle when Clancy gave her arm a hard jerk and began ushering her back to the cavern. Her mind was in turmoil, so many disjointed thoughts churning through her that she couldn’t make sense of any of them. One thought hammered louder than all the rest, though. Felton could try to dress it up all he pleased. He might convince the men that the cyborgs weren’t human, but the fact remained that their fleshwas.
They were halfway back before it finally congealed in her mind that Felton had considered her expendablebeforeshe’d called him on his order to requisition ‘meat’ from the cyborgs who’d fallen taking Slaughter Ridge. How long before he decided it would just be safer all the way around to eliminate anybody that could get him imprisoned for issuing that order?
Because there was no doubt in her mind that Command would be looking for scapegoats in this horror and they would be forced to do something, to offer up a sacrifice once it got out—and it would. All the dirty secrets always got out.
As that realization settled in her mind, adrenaline flooded her system. She’d executed an evasion maneuver before she even realized, consciously, that she meant to do it, catching Clancy completely off-guard. Abruptly dropping all of her weight, she swung her right arm upwards, catching Clancy under the chin with her palm. His head snapped back at the blow. His grip on her arm was wrenched loose by her weight and Danika scrambled from her knees to her feet even as he began to tumble backwards—unconscious, she hoped, from the pinching of the nerves at the base of his skull.
In the back of her mind, she knew she was dead whether she succeeded in escaping or not. There was nowhere to run to, no shelter that she knew of beyond the cavern the cyborgs had cut for them. But the survival instinct had nothing to do with logic. It compelled her to fight her way free and run while she still had a chance to do so.
Behind her, she heard shouts. She ran faster, as fast as she could manage stumbling through fresh powder that she sank in almost to her knees. The sound of a laser, followed by a cacophony of others, blasted in her ears and she dove for the ground, scrambling on her hands and knees. She thought she heard the sound of pounding feet. A few moments later, someone grabbed her and hauled her up. She swung at him. Pain shot all the way from her fist up her arm when she connected with his arm.
“It is I, Seth!”
Danika was instantly torn between relief and dismay when she realized she’d run in to her returning squad. “Run! We have to get out of here!”
“Yes.”
He was already running, however … back toward the ridge. “Seth! Not this way! Damn it!”
He ignored the complaint she managed to grunt out. Before she could catch her breath and force anything else out by way of complaint or orders, he launched both of them airborne. They landed on the top of the ridge hard enough to knock the breath out of her.
