His hand twitched toward his pocket.Old habits die hard.
Blake had said he didn’t think the Monkey Cats would have long life spans, and it seemed he was right. With their smallorgans and underdeveloped nervous system, they were quite literally created to be shot at.
This one lasted three days from the time Judd pegged it with a paintball. They couldn’t be certain when it was created, but that was as good a reference as any. Especially considering they never saw any scarred Monkey Cats. They either died on the battlefield or expired after their short lifespan. There didn’t seem to be any indication they aged or healed.
Thinking about Blake, how his eyes had brightened when Irving had agreed with him, made Gabriel’s chest hurt.God, he missed him.Home base had about as many comforts as any forward operating base, but it had Blake, and that was everything.
Three weeks. Threelong-assweeks without seeing his bashful little grin when Gabriel complimented him or listening to him go on about some trashy romance novel he’d pilfered from one of their scavenging missions. Or the sight of him all splayed out on their bed, his head thrown back, lip bitten between his teeth as he tried to hold back his cries when Gabriel made love to him.
Pressing the heel of his hand into his eyes, he shook off those thoughts. He couldn’t afford to get distracted here. Or a boner. If it wasn’t so cold, his dick would probably have bust through his zipper after being away from Blake for so long. Just thinking about that nose scrunching up nearly had him creaming his pants.
The clicking from the camera faded, and Gabriel looked up to see Victoria stuffing the camera and a handful of Polaroids into her backpack. He pushed off the wall and took a moment to look over the alien that had been the stuff of his nightmares for the last six months.
Its mouth was open, its creepy-looking bifurcated jaws spread. They curled into a wicked-looking backward hook. He’dseen it latch onto a victim, not just holding it in place but dragging it in, closer to its snapping rows of razor-sharp teeth. Standing this close, he could see the sheen of the eye coverings the thing had, like protective goggles. Under them, the eyes were small, recessed into its skull. So far, it was the only vulnerable part of the Monkey Cat.
Gabriel would know. He had an empty pocket and Monkey Cat eye goo on his sleeve as proof.
With the shifting pieces of scale finally still, Gabriel could see the skin was raised, like a callous. Now he realized they didn’t skate under the pale skin, but more shifted just above it, loosely tethered in place. Like an anchored ship in a storm. They made a clean hit damn near impossible when they were snapping their jaws and swiping their long claws at you.
And it wasn’t even the only extraterrestrial trying to kill them.
He never thought he’d have the luxury of choosing how he died, but he sure as shit didn’t think being eaten or immolated were two of the only options.
Cracking his neck, Gabriel looked up at the sky. It was gray, thick, and heavy with a storm. The kind that normally would have been nothing more than an inconvenience, but now would strand them in the last place on earth he wanted to spend another night. Not when he was so close to finally getting home.
“What do you think?” he asked Victoria when she stood and slipped her backpack back on.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, staring down at the thing. “When it’s just the one, it seems…killable. But when there’s dozens?” She didn’t answer her own question. It was obvious; they were unstoppable.
“Ever heard the story of the Hydra?” he asked.
“When Hercules cut off one head and two more appeared? Yeah. I saw the cartoon.” She crossed her arms. “You think that’s the case here?”
Gabriel sighed. That’s exactly what he thought. After all, if you had a technologically superior or even equivalent enemy, how would you beat them? With overwhelming force. You’d create cheap cannon fodder with razor-sharp teeth and claws, and you’d throw dozens, hundreds, thousands at them until there was nothing left.
But he didn’t say that.
“I think we need to go home.”
Victoria pressed her lips together. They were blue from the cold. “You call that place home?”
Gabriel picked up his gun and turned north, signaling for Judd and Phin to join them. They fell in line to head north, toward where they parked the truck.
I call him home.
The words on the page began to blur. Letters dancing to a rhythm that was closer to a car crash than anything on beat. Blake rubbed his eyes until the spots on his lids began to make more sense than any of the books opened on the table. Sighing, he sat back on the thinly padded chair and forced himself to take a break.
After staring at the stark white pages for so long, the rest of the room looked dim. The windows had been covered with blankets and pillows to keep the heat in, unfortunately that meant it blocked the light, too. Candles danced in the chilly breeze slipping in from between the cracks around the door, throwing more shadows than light. Blake watched a glob ofwax freeze before it had dropped halfway down the shaft of the candle.
Some of the guys had managed to locate and install an old wood stove. They’d run the pipe out of a hole in the wall. It helped. Marginally.
At one point, this had been a conference room of the Potomac View Motel. Now, the long glossy conference table had been carted away—chopped up for firewood—and in its place, several twin mattresses were laid along the wall farthest from the windows, heaped high with blankets. The thin carpet was irreparably stained with thick pools of browning blood, and in the middle of it all, sat Blake, hunched over a small card table piled high with textbooks he could never have begun to afford, let alone understand.
It had been Irving’s idea to salvage all these textbooks. He thought they would help. And maybeHarrison’s Principles of Internal MedicineorClinical Scenarios of Vascular Medicinewould be helpful to someone who hadn’t spent their life chugging energy drinks and frying their brain with too much TV. Or for someone who had graduated med school. They were so far ahead of what he’d learned in Paramedic school that it was closer to gibberish than anything he could comprehend.
Glancing around the room, he tried not to flinch at the white flash in the corner of his eye. The lab coat was hung on an old nail. One of the guys from Alvarez’s team got it for him. He’d done it to be nice. Called Blake doc and everything.
He wished it had been a joke.
