Authors: Lynn Viehl
A body.
She squinted in the dimness, trying to see who it was, where she was. Short black bristles of hair no more than a quarter inch covered a scalp, curved over an ear. She shifted her gaze down, and saw part of a cheekbone, the tapered end of a wide black brow, the jut of a hard jaw.
A man was on top of her arm. A strange, unconscious man.
A
naked
man.
Lilah swallowed against her dry throat, her head swimming with sensory overload. “Help.” It came out like a cough, short and wheezing. She tried again. “Help. Me.”
The head next to her face turned slowly, exposing more of his face. He opened his eye slowly, only partway, and stared at her. From the one she could see he had dark eyes, framed by lashes beaded with drops of water. Sweat streaked his skin and collected in little pools by the bridge of his nose and the corner of his mouth. He tried to pull back, only to go still. A muscle throbbed in his cheek as his jaw shifted.
“Drugged,” he breathed out, his voice more air than sound. “Taken.”
“Me?” She watched his head move in a small nod. “You?” Another nod. “God, no.”
The man didn’t say anything, but she felt something move against her neck. His fingers, stiff and clumsy. He was trying to reassure her.
Lilah didn’t dare close her eyes again. “Where? Who?”
“Truck.” The lines beside his mouth deepened as he tried again to move, and managed to slide a little of his weight over her right arm. “Men. Two.”
Lilah went still, listening. Now she felt the motion of the truck beneath them, heard the hum of the engine. The truck traveled at a steady speed, but she didn’t hear any signs that there were men around them. She didn’t dare move until she knew for sure.
She gazed at the man beside her and swallowed against the dryness until it receded. “GenHance?” He nodded again, confirming her worst fears. “Where are the men?”
He shifted his eyes up toward the sound of the engine.
Lilah felt his rigid body tremble, and saw pain in his eyes before he shut them tightly. He was in worse shape than she was, perhaps having some reaction to the drugs he’d been given. She moved the lead-weight of her left arm until she felt the back of his arm under her hand and held on as he shook.
“Easy,” she said, over and over.
Gradually the convulsive movements slowed and then stopped, and he released a breath against her cheek. A moment later his left hand moved from her neck, his fingers sliding up until he cupped her cheek.
He opened his eyes, blinking away the beads of sweat that trickled down from his hairline. “Must. Escape.”
Her heart constricted. “You’re too sick.”
Now he moved his head slightly from side to side. “Better. Stronger. Soon.”
Lilah understood the string of words. He wasn’t convulsing, he was fighting the drugs—or they were wearing off. She watched him as he rested, although like her he kept his eyes open and on her face. She tested her limbs, grimacing as her right arm began to wake with a wave of pins and needles. She managed to ease it out from under him and flexed her hand, touching his fingers in the process and making a new discovery.
“They handcuffed us together.”
He nodded slowly.
“Damn them.” She tried to touch his fingers with hers, but could only rub the back of hers against his knuckles. He had huge hands.
“My name is Lilah,” she whispered. She glanced down at his neck where the only thing he wore, a length of chain with two metal tags, lay against his skin. She could read one of them. “Walker Kimball. U.S. Marine Corps” She looked into his eyes. “You’re a soldier.”
His expression turned curiously impassive, as if he were waiting for some negative reaction. From the beginning the war had never been popular, but Lilah knew the troops who were sent over to fight in the Middle East were never consulted as to whether they thought it was worthwhile or not. They were sent there to fight, many of them to die, in a conflict that probably made as little sense to them as it did to the rest of the world.
“Were you home on leave?” Lilah asked.
“No.” He struggled to get the next word out. “Afghanistan.”
“They took you from there?” He nodded, and Lilah felt sick. “How?”
“Wounded. Dying.” And then he said one last word that chilled her to the bottom of her heart. “Sold.”
Aphrodite and her other Takyn friends had told Lilah about GenHance’s plans to harvest their DNA and use it to create a superhuman vaccine, one they intended to sell to factions and governments for use on their covert operatives and soldiers. Walker must have been purchased for use as a test subject—who better to experiment on than a real soldier who had been left for dead? No one would ever know what had really happened to him. The military would simply list him as one of the missing in action.
“We have to get out of here,” she told him, gripping his arm. “Now.”
“Too weak. Rest.” He moved his hand to stroke his palm over her hair. “Soon we will go.” He gave her a small, grim smile. “Very soon.”
The truck’s brakes squealed as it slowed down and came to a stop. Lilah listened to opening and slamming doors, and the fainter sound of two male voices arguing. They were too muffled to make out the words, but they drifted around the truck toward Lilah’s feet.
“Coming,” Walker said at once. “Check us. Quiet. Don’t move.”
She nodded, closing her eyes and holding still. The sound of the truck door being raised made her heart quake, but Walker turned his hand and pushed his stiff fingers through hers, holding them tight.
“See?” a young male voice said. “They ain’t moved. I told you.”
The truck bed dipped as someone climbed in. Lilah held her breath as she heard footsteps thump across the floor and the light over them was blotted out. Something prodded the plastic, a jabbing finger. It struck the knob of her elbow, which she instinctively held in a rigid position.
“It’s like nine degrees back here,” the young voice said. “They’re ice cubes now, man.”
“Yeah, I guess,” the man standing over her said in a deeper, disgusted voice. “I coulda sworn I heard voices, though.” A hand scraped against the plastic and then took a handful of it.
“You’re just tired, Bob,” the younger man said. “Let me drive for a while. You can catch some zees.”
Silence stretched out as the man hovered. Lilah didn’t dare breathe, and her lungs felt as if they were going to burst. Finally he released the plastic and moved away.
“You better wake me before we cross into Mississippi,” Bob said as he climbed out of the truck. “If we’re gonna get there before this storm hits, we’ve gotta head north and take seventy.”
The truck’s sliding door slammed down, and Lilah exhaled, tears of terror and relief flooding her eyes.
“Don’t cry.”
He had shifted his head so that his lips brushed the edge of her ear, the words breathed without voice. If she had woken up alone, Lilah realized, she would have called out loud for help until the men had stopped and come for her. They’d already stripped her out of her clothes and had done God only knew what to her while she was unconscious. She didn’t want to think of what they’d want to do to her if they’d found her awake.
His hand was moving again, brushing over the hair at her temple, not as awkward now. She had never understood exactly what it meant to be trapped, to be helpless in the face of indifference and cruelty. The men who had drugged and abducted and stripped her had no mercy. To them she wasn’t even a person. Her feelings, her needs didn’t matter. They had denied her even the most basic decency, the right to die with some dignity.
It had to be worse for Walker. Left for dead while serving his country, alone and suffering, perhaps making his peace with the brevity of his life, only to have his body stolen and sold like a piece of meat . . . it was too much.
“Lilah.”
She hadn’t realized that she was silently weeping until she opened her eyes and looked through the shimmer of her tears. They softened his stern features, and for the first time she realized how handsome he was, like some dark angel, the light in his eyes glowing in two slivers, as if reflecting some flaming sword.
“Sorry.” She gulped back a sob, aware that she had to guard against making any sound that might be overheard again. “Where are they taking us?”
“Denver.”
From what the older man had said she guessed they were somewhere in Alabama. She’d driven straight from Lake Gem to Tupelo, Mississippi, once, and that had taken her twelve hours with two short rest stops. Since drugs rarely affected her as strongly as normal people, she guessed she had been unconscious for six, maybe eight hours. That put them in the center of the state. With roughly fifteen hundred miles between them and Denver, they had maybe twenty-four hours left.
In another hour or two Lilah felt sure the drugs would wear off completely, and she’d be able to attempt an escape. Walker wasn’t Takyn like her, however, so he would need more time to recover. She might be able to free herself from the cuffs, but abandoning him was not an option. Everything depended on how fast he could shake off the drugs they’d used on him.
“Soon,” he murmured, as if he were reading her mind.
He flexed his fingers between hers, and she bent her arm, bringing up their bound hands between them so she could see the cuffs. They were police-issue, and had been cinched too tight to work off. She couldn’t even hold their hands up longer than a minute before her muscles began to tremble.
“I’m afraid,” she whispered to him.
“I know.” He shifted his arm down so that he was holding her in a half-embrace. “I will save us. Protect you.”
He could barely move, and she was still so listless she could barely think straight. “How?”
“The door.” His gaze shifted toward her feet. “They forgot. To lock it.”
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
“Asilomar and Recombinant DNA,” August 26, 2004 (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/articles/berg/)