Savage Hunger (Project Nemesis) (2 page)

She cursed under her breath and caught herself, feeling a bruise form on her shin.

Someone was setting off fireworks in the distance.  It sounded like bottle rockets.

She turned and looked over her shoulder and caught a flashing burst of light, then realized it wasn’t fireworks she’d heard.

The beach was alive with men in ragged clothing, heading straight for her!

A flashing spotlight swept over the beach.  Men ran and ducked.  Someone with an automatic rifle let loose, covering the beach with bullets.

“Oh my god!” Jasmine shrieked, climbing the ladder the rest of the way and swinging over the railing.

She needed to disengage the anchor and find the keys.  Her brain reacted sluggishly.  It took her a moment to figure out how to disengage the anchor, and then she was stuck trying to remember where she’d put the keys.

Her shorts!

Men shouting caught her attention.  She looked over the rail and saw the men coming for her.

How had they gotten across the beach so fast?

They had to be refugees trying to leave Cuba.

Finally finding the key, she charged to the pilot deck, scrambling to push the key into the ignition.  She started the engine, hoping the sound didn’t draw attention from the boats and soldiers on the beach.

The boat roared to life, making her grit her teeth.

Behind her, she heard the smack of a body as it tumbled into the deck.

The hair on the back of her neck stood on end.  Three men had landed inside the boat.  They all had wild looks in their eyes and were panting and gasping.  Blood seeped from wounds on their arms and legs.

Jasmine muffled her shriek with her hand.

She might as well not have bothered.  Three heads swiveled in her direction, their gazes landing on her like a firebrand.

She screamed then, looking frantically around for a weapon.  She couldn’t have refugees or escapees from some military prison on her boat—especially with no good reason why she was out here in the first place.

She was going to get caught and go to some jail where she’d never see the light of day again.  Be tortured and who knew what else.

She made a dash for the cabin, hoping she could lock herself below and maybe the boats chasing them would just gather them back up.  But she had to run by the men first.

Jasmine moved, seeing the men seemed frozen momentarily by her presence.  Her movement snapped them out of immobility.

Her hope withered and died when some wild-eyed black haired beast grabbed her and snatched her back.  He manacled his hands around her arms, pinning her against the deck.

Simultaneously, gunfire erupted around them.  Wood splintered from the deck like pop rocks.

Jasmine screamed, certain she was about to be killed or wounded.

The man who’d grabbed her covered her with his body, crushing the breath from her lungs.  She grunted and gasped to recover some oxygen.  He soaked her skin and bikini.

More thumps reached her ears.  Her boat was being confiscated by more of the men!

“Did everyone get on board?  Good.  Take control of the boat, Lucas!” the man crushing the life out of her yelled.  Her eardrums rattled with his baritone.

The boat took a wide arc in the water, making them roll on the deck as Lucas took control of the boat.

The man holding her captive snatched her to her feet, scanned the deck, then dragged her down to leap through the open hatch she’d initially tried to escape to.

Jasmine grunted, feeling pain seep into her arms from misuse and unfamiliar action.

Dog tags hanging from his neck, the black haired stranger whipped his head around, scanning the cabin and sniffing the air.

He released her to drop onto one of the perimeter couches.  “You get hit?” he asked.

Jasmine just stared at him, at a loss for words.

His jaw tensed with impatience.  “I said are you hurt?  Nevermind.  You’re not screaming in agony.  You must be okay.  Stay down here and keep low.  I don’t want you taking a bullet or something.  We don’t know how long they’re going to chase us.”

The initial adrenaline rush had receded, leaving her to feel like every bone and muscle in her body had been dragged through a wringer and bruised.

She nodded shakily, watching as he bounded back up the ladder to the deck.  Bullets ripped through the boat, and she dropped to the floor, covering her head and hoping she didn’t get hit.

Terror erupted along every nerve ending, sapping her of strength and warmth.  Her outfit didn’t do a damned thing for protection from the elements except extreme heat.

She heard more thumps and yells from the deck above.

Above her, were who knew how many nearly naked men who’d either escaped from some prison or were refugees.  The way they were moving and being pursued, she thought the former was the likely prospect.  In that case, it’d probably been a while since any of them had had a piece of ass.  And she damned sure didn’t want any of them noticing her like this.

Her mama hadn’t raised an idiot.

Crawling across the floor, she decided to hide under the center table.  She pulled a blanket off the bunk and curled up, hoping some random gunshot didn’t take her out before her time.  If nothing else, at least she wasn’t cold anymore.

She was too scared to go in search of clothes in case she ran across one of the strangers in her search.  She knew her dad kept plenty of supplies on board, even though he’d never gotten to really use the boat like he’d wanted.

Outside, the sound of gunfire began to fade, and she wondered if they’d given up or if her boat had just outrun them.  Her daddy had had a love for speed and racing, and bought this boat model specifically for that reason.  She wanted to smile at the memory of her speed demon daddy, but all she could do was struggle to ignore the battering her body had taken in the short scuffle.

The boat bucked through the water, obviously moving at top speed, leaving her to wonder how many of the men remained above and what her chances were for getting out of this alive and free of jail.

Chapter Two

“What do you mean, they got away?” Dr. Wagner shouted into the phone.

Freda Dallas winced at his intensity.  She’d known this would happen eventually.  There was only so long you could hold a rat captive before they turned around and bit you on the ass.

“You haven’t picked them up on the radar?” Wagner said, listening to the other side of the conversation.

Freda shook her head in disgust.  “We can’t have a breach, Dr. Wagner.”

“You say this like I don’t know.  Look, check the coast off Haiti, Florida, and Brazil.  They can’t have gotten far.  Do I have to do your job for you too?” Wagner said, his brows drawn low over his eyes in anger.  He flipped the phone shut in disgust.

“Imbeciles.”

“I agree,” Freda said.

“Have you found where the breach took place?”

“We have and it’s been taken care of.  Seems one of the prisoner’s had a cousin we didn’t know about who was connected on the inside.  Both parties have disappeared.”

Wagner nodded.  “Good.  Now if we can just get the subjects under control, we can get back to work.  I’m ready to start testing Chimera.”

“I thought after this you would want to hold off on that,” Freda said, looking surprised.

“Why?  With all that has happened, I might not have much longer to achieve my goals.”

She nodded.  “True.  True.  I’ll see about readying another subject for injection.”

“You do that.  Make sure he’s a team player this time.”

“Yes, doctor.”

***

Lucas dropped beside Zach on the deck, breathing a sigh of relief and swiping a hand across his face.  “We should be dead right now, you know that, right?”

Zach nodded.  “At least we’ve got some distance on them.  How’re your wounds?”

Lucas rubbed his shoulder where he’d been peppered by bullets.  “Just blood left.  The bullets just push right out.  I don’t know what the fuck they gave us, how this shit works.  It’s no wonder they want us all dead.  We’re too dangerous to be left alive.”

“I know, right,” Zach said, marveling at his own healed wounds.  The blood remained, but that was the only evidence other than a slight stinging in the area, that anything had touched him.

“That girl didn’t look like Riker’s cousin,” Lucas said.

“I sure as fuck didn’t expect a chick on board, that’s for sure,” Zach replied.  “Riker, do you know anything about this?  Did we get the right boat?”

Ricker shrugged.  “Fuck if I know.  It’s ours now, ain’t it?  Why worry?”

Zach nodded.  “Yeah.  Yeah.”

“What we gonna do now?  It looks like we can add kidnapping to our charges, if they ever catch us….”

“Shit.”  Zach rubbed his eyes.  “I can’t worry about that.  We just have to stay alive and get the fuck out of here however we can, even if it means taking a hostage here and there.  We just have to be careful not to infect anyone else,” Zach muttered, looking at the healed wounds on his flesh and making a fist.  Something had happened to them out there in the jungle that night, so long ago.  Something had changed them.  They’d all been peppered with bullets repeatedly.  They shouldn’t have healed wounds on them.  They should all be dead.

That they’d survived after this many attacks, after going through countless experiments at the facility….  As much as he’d wanted to deny that they’d changed forever, to deny it now was just stupidity.

They would never be the men they once were, and they all knew it.

The one question remained in their minds, however, was if it had been intentionally set upon them or if they were all just the unluckiest bastards in the world.  It was something they’d probably never know and would always be haunted by.

Lucas nodded, sighing.

Zach frowned.  He wearily stood, his body feeling heavy and tired from the long swim, the run through heavy jungle, the escape from prison.  He felt ten years older than he was.  “I’m going to talk with the woman.  See if she knows anything.  If she ain’t with Riker’s cousin, then she sure as hell was in the wrong place at the right time.”

“It’s a helluva coincidence,” Lucas agreed.  “You think she’ll know about fuel reserves?  We can’t have too much, not with the speed we’re going,” Lucas said.

“Maybe.  She should at least know how to get back to where she came from.  If she isn’t a complete moron.”

“This…this virus that we’ve caught.  Do you think it’s from that drone we picked up in the jungle?”

Try as he might, Zach couldn’t remember shit about what had happened to him.  It was almost like they’d been reborn into the facility they’d found themselves inside of.  Memories of their life before were still there, but he couldn’t remember anything after their mission to pick up the pieces of a crashed drone.

He wondered how much the government knew about any of it.  Had they been setup when they’d been sent out into the jungle?  It sure seemed that way, especially since there’d been a special facility set up to handle them.  It looked like it’d been there for years, but he’d never be certain.

Had they been setup to get infected with an unknown virus capable of changing them into inhuman beasts?  Giving them the capability of enormous strength and rapid healing?  It seemed exactly the sort of thing the government would want—superhuman soldiers at their beck and call.  He had to wonder if they’d infected some of the locals first, or if it had come from there by accident, passed along to them, and then moved into the hands of the government.

Maybe they’d experimented on prisoners and they’d managed to escape.  Fuck, he’d never know the truth, and he didn’t plan on sticking around to find out if the chicken or the egg came first.

He couldn’t know, but he knew how they liked to experiment on soldiers when they thought they could get away with it.  He’d been in it long enough to know better than to fuck with them.  They were lucky they’d escaped from the prison with their lives before they could be exterminated for their unruliness and lack of control.

“It’s like they were waiting for us to see what happened.  I just wish I could remember what happened to us.  It’s driving me crazy not knowing how this all happened,” Lucas said.

“We’ll probably never know exactly what happened.  It doesn’t matter anyway.  Our new life begins right now, not in that fucking science experiment.  Anyway, y’all get some rest.  I thought we would have papers and supplies on board, weapons, but it doesn’t look like we’ve met the right boat, or Riker fell through on some of his promises.  We’re lucky we’ve gotten away.  We don’t know what’s in store for us.  We need to have our energy up.  See if you can find some food, a cooler or fridge.  There’s got to be something to eat or drink on here.  Ration it out if you find anything.”

“Too bad those bastards hadn’t let us rest in…Fuck.  How long have they had us in those torture chambers?”

“I don’t know.”  Zach looked up at the sky.  The moon was just a crescent.  “Weeks?  Months?  It doesn’t really matter now, does it?”  Time had a way of disappearing when you never saw daylight, never saw the changing of the moon.

They’d felt the change of the moon.  In fact, he could remember being unable to resist changing that first full moon.  He’d felt out of control since it had happened, always aware that it could happen at any moment in time when he least expected it.  His anger, rage, and resentment seemed to bring it on easier, but given the circumstances they’d been in, he hadn’t exactly had a chance to relax.  Was stress a major factor in that?

The hell if he knew.

All Zach knew was that they’d been poked, prodded, sliced open, and tortured without seeming end.  They’d taken god only knew how much blood from them.  The scientists had been outright gleeful when they saw what the men were capable of doing and withstanding.

It didn’t matter that none of them knew how to control it.

He’d heard hushed whispers of Nemesis when they thought he was passed out.  Whatever the hell that was.

Maybe they’d been given their own project name.  Not that it mattered.  He’d rather die than allow himself to be caught again.