Authors: Celeste Anwar
“Are you mad!” Erin exclaimed, unable to contain
herself any longer. “You’ll kill him with that.”
Freda folded her arms over her chest, studying
Erin. “He’s become more and more resistant. He fights it every time.”
Erin had had time to regret the outburst. “What
you mean is he resists you,” she said tauntingly.
Freda slapped her across the cheek so hard it
jerked her head sideways. Erin was so stunned by the sudden attack, disbelief
shielded her from the pain. She merely turned her head to stare at the woman,
realizing Freda really wasn’t entirely sane.
Very deliberately, Freda hit the injection button
again. “Watch and learn,” she said cheerfully as she hit the button to release
the door lock.
The door of the observation room had already
closed behind Freda before Erin gathered her wits enough to realize she’d been
given the only opportunity she was likely to get to flee.
Her head was pounding from the blow. It pounded
worse as she bent over and began working at the bindings with her teeth.
Fortunately for her, they hadn’t been prepared for the order to bind her to the
chair. They hadn’t had cuffs and the chair certainly hadn’t been equipped with
manacles. The tape they’d used was hard to rip, but she thought she had a
possibility of tearing it loose.
It was tough, for all that, and wound around her
wrists several times. She tore several small pieces off and spat them out
before she managed to get a rip going. She’d broken a sweat from wrestling
with the stuff by the time she managed to get one wrist free.
Pausing to catch her breath, she glanced at the
screen worriedly, wondering how long Freda would be occupied with her pet.
The scene froze her. Jesse was fighting the
manacles. Blood dripped from beneath the cuffs, ran along his arms, dripped
onto the floor. Freda, just beyond his reach, had stripped naked. From the
camera angle, she couldn’t really see what Freda was doing, but she could see
the movement of the woman’s arm. Either she was masturbating, or she was
stroking his cock.
Erin suspected the latter. Unexpectedly, anger
surged through her.
Trying to shake it off, Erin focused on the other
binding. It was no easier to tear with her fingers, though. Bending finally,
she gnawed at the tape as she had the first until she’d started a tear. When
she caught it with her fingers the next time, she managed to tug it free.
Rubbing her burning wrists, she leapt to her
feet, mentally reviewing the layout of the facility.
The corridor beyond the room led up to the next
level. From there, she would have to traverse another corridor before she
reached the closest exit.
She glanced at the screen again.
She was never afterwards entirely certain what
thoughts went through her mind as she turned to the console. Partly, she
supposed she considered a distraction necessary. She knew part of it was the
certainty that as long as they held the beast they would hold her and that she
would be his to use until he, or they, decided to move on to something else.
Empathy for his suffering certainly figured into it. Hatred for Freda did,
too, and beyond that--she just plain didn’t like the bitch fondling him.
She hit the release on the manacles before she
had time to reconsider, slamming her hand down on the door lock release at
almost the same instant.
A shockwave went through her as she saw the
creature shift before her eyes from man-like to the horrific beast she’d seen
before in the tapes they’d made of his capture. She wasn’t certain whether she
screamed, or Freda screamed, or perhaps both of them as the nightmare creature
emerged from man’s flesh.
The beast seemed to have nothing on his mind but
escape, however. He thrust Freda aside as if she was no more than a cardboard
figure and raced toward the door. Screaming in rage, Freda scrambled to her
feet and launched herself at the beast, locking her arms around one of the
beast’s arms even as he yanked the door open.
Male screams combined with Freda’s as the guards
outside encountered the beast. Almost instantaneously, gun shots erupted in
stereo, coming from the microphone and filtering through the door at the same
time.
The ice freezing Erin to the spot left her
abruptly. She surged toward the door of the observation room, intent only on
escape herself. As she erupted into the hall, she heard a sickening gurgle.
It drew her gaze inexorably. Horrified, she watched as the guard slid to the
floor.
As if he’d heard her, or sensed her presence, the
beast’s head whipped in her direction. For several painful heartbeats, their
gazes met. Abruptly, he whirled away from her and charged down the corridor in
the opposite direction. Cautiously, Erin ran after him. The bodies of both
guards and Freda blocked the corridor. Freda had a stunned look on her face.
A black hole was centered in her forehead.
One of the guards had shot her.
There was blood everywhere. Erin slipped and
fell in it as she struggled over the bodies. Nausea washed over her when she
looked down at the blood all over her. She fought it. Scrambling to her feet,
she fled, nearly slipping and falling again from the blood coating her shoes.
In front of her, she heard more gunfire, more
screams as the beast fought his way toward freedom. She found herself
muttering under her breath. “Let him go! Let him go!”
Fully expecting to fall over his body each time
she encountered more bodies, she looked for him among the dead. He could not
be unscathed. Terrorized as the guards were, they were too close to miss.
She saw the blood trail and knew it must be him. From
out of no where a wall of pain and distress filled her. She didn’t want him
dead and yet she couldn’t shake the fear that she’d signed his death warrant by
releasing him. However powerful he was, he was never going to survive the
bullets they’d put in him.
By the time she reached the exit, he’d cleared a
path for her. Beyond the door were two more bodies. In the distance, she
heard gunfire as the guards gave chase. After only a slight hesitation to
determine which direction he had taken, Erin whirled in the opposite direction
and ran for all she was worth.
She made it all the way to the beach before they
caught up with her. When she felt the sting, she thought at first that a bee
had stung her. The world began to spin even as she looked down at the dart
protruding from her leg, however, and she felt a sense of anger and defeat wash
over her even as she began to fall into darkness.
Chapter Four
One year later.
There were no notable landmarks. The island
looked no different than a dozen other semi-tropical islands, and yet Erin knew
the moment she beached her boat and scanned the dense forest that edged the
sandy water front that she had found the place at last.
Tension coiled inside of her immediately. After
glancing uneasily up and down the beach, she dragged the boat higher, gritting
her teeth and fighting the weight as it left the water completely and she
didn’t have buoyancy to help her move it. Her hands were red and chafed from
tugging at the rope by the time she’d managed to drag the thing into the trough
of a dune and covered it with the fronds she found laying on the ground to
help to conceal it.
Very likely they already knew she was here, but
if they hadn’t detected her there was no sense in making it easy for them.
Moving along just inside the tree line, she
followed the white strip of sand until she found what she’d been looking for, a
narrow trail leading deeply into the heart of the island. It was deceptively
‘natural.’ If one looked closely, they could detect the hand of man in the
regularity of the trail, the arrow straight path it took.
It was unkempt for all that, and doubt flickered
through her.
Pushing it aside, she followed the trail
cautiously, her gaze constantly flickering to the woods on either side of the
trail in search of any movement. She wasn’t particularly comforted when she
saw no guards. By the time she reached the facility, she knew it had been abandoned.
The urge hit her like a slap in the face to
simply crumple to the ground and weep. She had been so certain that she would
find him if only she could find the facility again. She hadn’t been able to
think of anything else since she had finally managed to escape. It was
devastating to discover she had searched so long and she’d been wrong.
He had to be here. He had to! She didn’t know
where else to look.
Wiping the tears from her cheeks, she moved
cautiously toward the door, half fearing, half hoping, that the sense of
abandonment was as false as the natural trail--that she would find they were
laying in wait for her.
She didn’t care if they did capture her again if
she could be with him. She needed to touch him, to hold him and assure herself
that he was alive, that they hadn’t harmed him.
The door opened easily, giving the lie to her
hope. She stepped inside anyway, began to trot down the corridor when she
found only her own footsteps echoing back at her. Mindless in her desperate
quest, she searched the facility from top to bottom, refusing to accept that it
was deserted, trying to convince herself that she would find him every time she
opened another door and found only another empty room.
Despair crushed the air from her lungs when she
realized that there was no where else to look, that she had searched every
single lab and office and store room. He wasn’t here.
Too miserable even to think of any other
possibilities, she trudged out of the facility again. The blank camera eye
that stared down at her as she stepped outside again seemed almost like a slap
in the face. She glared at it, feeling fury surge through her. “Where is he,
damn you!” she screamed.
Her voice echoed through the trees, but no answer
followed it.
Lost in sorrow and her rambling thoughts, Erin
had no real idea of how long she stood in the same spot, simply staring blindly
at her surroundings. Slowly, though, she became aware that the sun had set,
that evening was closing in and as it did, the jungle around her had begun to
come alive with the whispering movements of its denizens.
She wasn’t going to make it back to the mainland
before it was full dark. A wise person would have found a place to settle for
the night, she knew, since she was risking getting lost in one of the bayous.
She found she didn’t care. The only thing that
she cared about beyond finding him was getting as far away from the facility,
and her memories, as possible.
The hair on her back crept even as she headed for
the trail again. She dismissed it. The facility itself was enough to give her
the creeps after everything that had happened there. The feeling didn’t abate
with distance, though. It became more pronounced. She realized after a time
that she’d been vaguely aware of other sounds around her, furtive movements in
the underbrush.
A short distance away, she heard the abrupt
baying of a canine. Goosebumps ran up her arms and down her back as she heard
the sound picked up by another throat, and then another.
A pack of wild dogs, or wolves. The former was
more likely, but she couldn’t rule out the possibility of the latter, not when
they’d captured Jesse in the bayous that surrounded the landward side of the
island.
It was stupid to run in either case. She
couldn’t outrun them if they were already on her trail and running only stirred
their hunter instincts.
She broke into a run anyway, hoping she was near
enough to the end of the trail to make it to the beach and her boat. The sound
of something heavy landing beside her registered a split second before
something slammed into her and drove her into the ground, landing on top of
her.
Too stunned by the impact to move or scream, or
even think, Erin didn’t even move when the weight lifted slightly away from
her. In the dimness, a face loomed above hers. She jerked all over, though, when
he leaned close and dragged in a deep breath.
“It’s her,” he said to someone nearby.
The brush rustled. “Where you goin’ in such a
hurry,
chère
?”
She recognized the heavy Cajun accent. She
didn’t recognize either voice. “I heard dogs,” she managed to say, still
breathless with both fear and exertion.