Savage Hunger (Project Nemesis) (8 page)

Jasmine didn’t want to admit to anyone that she was spooked by the wildness of the jungle, but after being attacked on the beach, her nerves were on edge.  There was only so much a woman could take before having a nervous breakdown.

She was proud of herself for handling an unbelievable situation as well as she had.  To think that the men she found herself first kidnapped by, freed, and then rescued by weren’t completely human?

It was a hard pill to swallow.  If she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes she would have thought she’d lost her damned mind.

She was pretty close to thinking she had anyway because of her willingness to go with them into the jungle, but she didn’t have many options available to her.

They were on the run and she knew it.  They didn’t have time for her to act like a frightened baby screaming at everything.  So she bit her tongue and ran after them and tried to keep up with them as well as she could.

Heavy vines and limbs littered the area, making the going rough and uneven.  It wasn’t like they could run straight through the jungle at any point.  There weren’t any visible paths for them to take.  She wished they’d had something to hack their way through, but Zach was at point and picking the clearest path through the jungle that he could.

Dante followed him.  She moved behind him, and Lucas pulled up the rear.  Given the misery that she was quickly being consumed by, she almost regretted begging them to take her with them.  Except the uncertainty she’d been faced with had been too much for her to bear.  Whatever had infected them, as much as she might fear and disbelieve it, she knew she was better off in their company than at risk on her own.

She couldn’t speak a lick of Spanish beyond hello and goodbye.

After what seemed like hours of stooping and bending and avoiding roots and vines, she was so exhausted, she could barely move without wincing in pain.

They finally took a break.

Tired but not stupid, she thoroughly checked the area to make sure there were no spiders or snakes where she wanted to plant her ass.  Satisfied at its safety, she collapsed to the ground, breathing heavily and feeling so grateful to rest that she wanted to cry.

She choked back her feelings, wincing inside.

“Drink this,” Lucas said, offering her some water out of a bottle.  She sipped it gratefully, feeling immediately relieved from the cool water sliding down her parched throat.  Her cracked lips felt better as well.

“Not too much.  We don’t know when we’ll find more water.  I’ve been keeping an eye out for bamboo,” Lucas said, scanning the jungle with his warm, hazel eyes.

She followed the line of his vision.  “Bamboo?”

“Holds water you don’t have to sterilize,” Dante said.  “It has a lot of uses in a place like this.”

Zach threw a pack of peanuts to her he pulled out of the bag he’d been toting.  “Eat that.  You need to keep your energy up.”

Jasmine nodded and tore open the package, eating slowly so she didn’t get sick.  At first, she didn’t think she could eat at all, but as she munched, she felt herself slowly returning to normal.  She must’ve used all her excess glucose moving through the jungle—running on empty.  No wonder she felt so horrible!

“If you need to go, now would be a good time,” Zach pointed out.

She grimaced.  “Great.  I hate pissing in the woods.”  She was a lot of things, but a country girl wasn’t one of them.

“Get used to it,” Lucas said, grinning.

“Easy for you to say.  You all have dicks and don’t have to worry about something crawling up your ass when you least expect it,” she said, feeling flushed that they were all looking at her.

They chuckled at that.

Nodding, she got up and found a tree to put her back on, relieving herself.  She was dehydrated.  She hardly had anything to let go.  Dripped dry and feeling irritated at the lack of sanitation available, she pulled her pants back on and returned to the men.

She missed toilet paper already.  And water and soap.

Jasmine sighed.

They returned to picking through the jungle, slower this time, almost as though they sensed she was near her breaking point.

The food and water had taken her mind off her misery for a little while, and she was able to think about the offer she’d made to the guys.  She’d been pretty much ready to do just about anything it took not to be abandoned, even giving herself to them if that would sweeten the deal.  Obviously, it hadn’t been needed since none of them had jumped at the chance.

Maybe they had too much on their mind to think about fucking at a time like this?  Maybe they weren’t as interested as she’d thought, or maybe she’d come across desperate or pitiful to them?

She’d like to think not.

If they’d been attractive to her before, that attraction had only intensified rather than dissipate with the knowledge of their tainted blood.  It wasn’t the animalistic nature of whatever it was that had altered them, but the fact that they’d showed no fear in coming to her rescue.

It was enough to make any red-blooded woman swoon.

Added to that was the fact that they were each devilishly good-looking, powerful, attentive, and concerned, and the combination was enough to wilt any woman’s resistance.

She’d thought she was progressive enough not to want or need a man to rescue her, or feel weak kneed at the thought of not one, but three interested men.

She was just a woman, however.  And it’d been long enough since she’d been with anyone appealing that having three handsome, muscular men ready to defend her, however reluctantly, was enough to rev up her engines and make her want to have a go at one or all of them.

Normally, she could ignore her body’s sensual demands.  She’d done it long enough she felt like a camel conserving water through a desert.  She’d been able to hold off on getting some for years at a time.  But now, she had this insistent urge in the back of her mind, niggling at her, wearing her down.  As much as she tried to ignore it, she had an achy spot in her body that needed to be poked.

She didn’t need love to satisfy those carnal urges.

On one hand, she hoped it didn’t come up again.  On the other, she kind of hoped that it did.

Lost in her thoughts, following Dante’s broad shoulders, she barely noticed that the forest was getting darker.  She’d been so absorbed with putting one foot in front of the other that she hadn’t taken much note in the change around her.

“We need to make camp,” Zach said, stopping and looking around.  They were surrounded by a grove of bamboo.  Beneath their feet, the floor of the forest had turned to a soft loam.  “It’s getting dark and this looks like as good a place as any to stay for the night.”

Zach began shaking the trees, putting his ear to them to listen for water.  He seemed to find something he liked and pulled a cleaver out of the canvas bag and started hacking away at the thick trunk.  Within minutes, he’d chopped the tree down and sectioned it out.  Sticking the corner of the blade in one end, he made a hole then put it to his mouth.

Water dribbled out, moving down his chin.

Jasmine was amazed.  She supposed they’d had training for this sort of thing.

Zach offered it to her and she drank her fill.  The water had a slight green taste to it, but it was otherwise delicious and clean.

“Start checking the other trees,” Zach said to Lucas.  “I’ll work on building a shelter to keep the rain off us if it rains tonight.”

“Probably will,” Dante said, looking up at the sky and sniffing as if he could smell or see something she couldn’t.

Jasmine sniffed the air but didn’t smell anything and could see less.  She busied herself pushing dead leaves out of the area.

“I’ll see if I can build a fire,” Dante said, going off to gather dead bamboo trees and moss.

He came back fairly quickly, fishing an orange lighter out of his pocket.  He looked at Jasmine’s hopeful face.  “It’s so humid out here.  No guarantee this is going to work.  If it doesn’t we’ll just have to huddle together under the shelter to stay warm.  It gets pretty cold in the jungle at night.  The ground leeches all the heat out of your bones, but we can lay down a blanket to keep it from happening too bad.”

She watched him strip the bamboo down then press a piece to his face.  “It’s cold.  Still has moisture in it.  We might not have fire tonight.”

“You’re not just saying that so you can cozy up to me, are you?” she asked, eyeing him suspiciously.

He grinned, making his dark face look that much sexier.  “Maybe.”  He laughed then worked at building a fire.

The lighter couldn’t spark.  After attempting to get it going for twenty minutes or so, Zach finally approached and told him to give it up and save the butane for another time.

Reluctantly, Dante agreed.  “Guess it’s gonna be the alternative.”

Jasmine swiped at him and that slow grin, sitting back to watch Zach build a lean-to.

“Anything I can do to help?” she asked.

“Not unless you can see in the dark.  You can gather a few of those ferns from over there and put them under here.  This is about as done as I can make it for now.  It’ll be a tight squeeze for all three of us, but I think we can manage.”

The darkness was so thick, Jasmine was afraid to move far beyond their camp.  She was terrified of stepping on a snake or a spider.  She pulled as many frond leaves as she could, her arms full, then returned to their shelter to lay down a bed of ferns for them to sleep on.

Utterly exhausted, she was ready to crash for the night.  They had a cold supper of some canned spaghettios.  She was just glad they’d grabbed canned food with pop-top lids, since they didn’t have a can opener with them.  She ate half the can and passed the other half to Dante.  He wolfed his half down in under a minute and still looked hungry.

She felt bad for having eaten at all.  No doubt they needed more nutrition than she did.  They were all bigger than her.

“We need to hunt tomorrow.  We’re just going to get weaker if we don’t get some meat in us.  And something about changing to a wolf leaves me starving,” Dante said as he rubbed his rumbling stomach.  She was right.  He hadn’t had enough.  But a night of being hungry wouldn’t kill any of them.  At least they’d found clean water that they didn’t have to purify with fire.

“Agreed,” Zach said, nodding.

“You think they’re going to find us?” Lucas asked no one in particular.

“Well, the others should ditch the boat in the ocean, but with that massacre we left on the beach, there’s sure to be some notice from someone in the area, if not local military or the project.  Hopefully the jungle is thick enough to keep them from tracking us too easily, but I don’t want to give them an easy target to follow.  We’ll keep traveling as fast as we can and put as much distance between us and the attack as possible.”  Zach finished and gave a stretch, eyeing their sleeping space behind him where a blanket had been laid over the fronds.

“We’ll dismantle it in the morning.  Scatter everything as best we can,” Lucas said.  “Man.  I hate this shit.  What I’d give to just go back home.  What about you?  You got anyone that’s going to miss you?  Be out searching?”

Jasmine looked up.  Their faces were indistinguishable in the dark.  “No.  Not really.  I mean, I have Aunts, Uncles, and cousins, but they’ve never given two shits about me and my family.  My family turned their back on my mother when she married my father.  A lot’s changed in the south, but some families are still prejudiced.”

“What do you mean?” Zach asked.

Dante nodded his head.  He knew what was up.

“She was white and married an older black man.  He was ex-military.  They dated for years before finally getting married and having me.  Mom already had my brother from a bad high school relationship, so they already looked down on her for that and thought she was trash.  Dad and mom dated for years before I think they finally stopped caring what people thought about them and decided to do what made them happy.”

“Well, what about them?  Wouldn’t they be looking for you?” he asked.

Jasmine sighed, feeling choked up.  Some days were harder than others to talk about it.  “I haven’t always been this size.  I used to be big as a house.  We all were.  Mama always thought she’d get gotten by a heart attack.  She used to joke about her weight and needing to change her ways.  Breast cancer took her.  She wasted away to nothing.  In some ways, it made her happy that she wouldn’t be buried in a coffin the size of a piano box.  That crazy heifer,” she said, giving a watery, choked up laugh.  “Bubba had always had a problem drinking.  He was my half-brother and born twelve years before me.  It bothered him that none of our family wanted anything to do with us.  He self-medicated with alcohol, amongst other things.  Esophageal cancer had spread through his body, but his kidneys failed before the cancer could finish him off.”

“Jesus,” Zach muttered.

“That’s horrible,” Dante and Lucas echoed.

She shrugged, hugging her knees.  “Dad.  Well, I think he died of a broken heart.  Him and mom had been together for … I don’t know.  Maybe eight years before they even got married.  My grandma tried for years and years to break them up without success.  Mama always wanted her mother’s approval, but she finally realized she wasn’t going to get it and married my father a few years after she had me.  They didn’t want to take a chance on dying and having one of her family raise us.  And me, well, I guess something good came out of all that tragedy.  I was terrified of following in their footsteps and dying before my time.  I’ve worked my ass off to eat better and exercise.  I know being overweight puts you at greater risk for these things and a Southern diet doesn’t help.  I changed everything about myself to avoid that fate, but it’s still always in the back of my mind.  It’ll never leave me.  None of it.  I’ve been lonely for a very long time.  It’s hard not having a family that cares about you.”

They were all quiet for a moment, absorbing everything she’d said.  Finally, Zach wrapped an arm around her shoulder, giving her some of his warmth.

“It shouldn’t be forgotten.  They live on in your memory,” he said.  “Fuck the rest of them if they don’t care about what a good and amazing person you are.  They don’t deserve to know you and you’re better off without them if all they care about is what color your skin should or shouldn’t be.  You’re a beautiful woman.”