His last conscious thought was for Kyle.
Only for Kyle and what might have been.
7
Outside the Wire
Everything hurt.
Everything always hurt when he healed.
Consciousness returned abruptly, fiery pain coursing through his entire body like a live-wire charge. Kyle had to fight to not move, to keep his breathing as slow and unnoticeable as possible as his body was jolted from the motion of a moving vehicle. He kept his eyes closed, listening to the world around him as he tried to reorient himself. His mind was a little sluggish in the way that spoke of major blood loss, but that was fixable, given enough time.
“<
“<
Wonderful, Kyle thought tiredly. Guess I get to cross off buried alive on my Situations I Have Been In And Wished I Weren’t list.
Sadly, it was a long list.
Kyle strained his hearing to figure out if there were more than two people in the truck. He could feel he was lying on the floor of the vehicle in the back, shifting with every turn they made. He was cold, and not all of that was due to blood loss. The truck bed was open to the air and the wind blowing across him felt icy in his wounded state. The two voices came from the front, which meant they were in the cab of the truck. Kyle couldn’t hear anyone else in the vehicle, so he chanced opening his eyes a mere fraction of an inch.
A clear night sky met his eyes, stars bright pinpricks scattered across its expanse, visible without light pollution. Kyle blinked slowly, the image blurring as he slid across the truck bed from a particularly sharp turn. He didn’t fight the motion.
Mountains. They’d been teleported into the mountains.
They.
Alexei. Jamie. The rest of the team.
Kyle would have screamed his fear and worry if the urge to do so hadn’t been beaten out of him in training years ago. Instead, he sucked in a weak, shaky breath and took stock of his particular situation.
He’d been shot. Rather badly, judging by the throbbing pain in his neck he was doing his damnedest to ignore. The hot burn of open skin told him the wound hadn’t closed yet, even if the deeper carotid artery had. Good. That would add to his cover of dead body even though he really wasn’t. They were descending, which meant the base they’d been teleported into was probably at a higher altitude. He couldn’t feel the weight of any weapons, which meant they’d stripped him of his gear.
Kyle closed his eyes, slowing his breathing and heart rate. He pushed through the pain with long practice, trying to prepare himself for what was to come. His lung capacity was shit right now, but he could work with that.
He had to.
Sometime later—he didn’t know how long—the truck braked to a hard halt. Kyle slid forward, his head cracking painfully against the front of the truck bed. He tried not to wince, despite the throbbing pain radiating through his skull. He took in a last deep breath and held it, letting his body go limp as the two terrorists got out of the truck.
He could hold his breath for six minutes at full strength.
He needed to try to match that repeatedly tonight while wounded.
Kyle didn’t fight it when they pulled him out of the truck, letting his head and chest take the impact on the ground without flinching. The throbbing ache spread through his body as two pairs of hands grabbed him by the ankles and wrists, picking him up and carrying him into a place that smelled like a forest. Logging had fallen by the wayside over the years once synthwood came on the market, allowing forests to bounce back from near annihilation. Still, urban expansion had squeezed the area where wild land existed.
Mountains, they speak Russian, and a base, Kyle thought as he hung limply from the terrorists’ hands while they carried him to his grave.
Most likely they’d been teleported into the Eastern European contested region. The terrorists he’d briefly got a glimpse of before Jamie stole all his formidable attention weren’t wearing any known uniform. So either they were Russian soldiers pretending to be terrorists on a Russian-backed base, or they were terrorists who’d taken over an abandoned base.
Or who the fuck knows, Kyle thought tiredly as he dropped to the ground.
He lay there for a long while, carefully breathing and holding his breath in intervals and trying not to be noticed as he did so. He could hear the terrorists complaining the entire time they dug a hole in the ground, their voices the perfect cover for Kyle as he regulated his breathing.
“<>”
“<
“<
Kyle took a last, deep breath and held it, counting down the minutes. Someone grabbed his wrists and dragged him over the ground before dropping him into a shallow grave. Kyle lay sprawled on his back, unmoving, lungs locked up, as dirt started to rain down on him. He had to hold position and not react, even when the dirt started to pour over his face.
It didn’t take very long for the two men to bury him, doing a haphazard job of it in their haste to return to base. For once, Kyle was grateful for a shitty work ethic.
He couldn’t tell if they were gone yet, but the fire in his lungs from lack of oxygen forced him to act. Kyle started to dig; the soil loose around him. It took effort to claw his way to freedom only because he was still healing from the bullet wound in his neck. Dizzy from lack of air and blood loss, Kyle fought his way to the surface. When he finally broke through the dirt, heaving for breath, the cool mountain air seared his lungs as he coughed out dirt.
Kyle sat there for several long minutes, half in and half out of a grave, no one else in sight, the forest surrounding him impossible to see in the dark.
“Fuck,” Kyle coughed, tiredly shoving at the dirt covering his legs, trying to free them.
He brushed dirty fingers against the tear in his neck, wincing at the sting. It was probably a mess of infection right now, but oh well.
He’d heal.
He always did.
Kyle crawled out of his grave and lay down beside it, staring up at what he could see of the sky through the inky tree branches blotting out most of it.
“Status,” Kyle muttered, even though no one was around to hear him. “Half-dead, weaponless, and separated from my team.”
They better be alive. He’d fucking kill them if they weren’t. Starting with Alexei and then—well, Jamie wasn’t his to yell at. He’d made that pretty fucking clear in the ready room. And while Kyle could understand why Jamie wouldn’t want to risk them being together, some selfish part of Kyle wished he would. But no, Kyle would fall for an honorable man.
Just his goddamn luck.
But you’re not mine, he thought a little sadly.
Not in a lovers’ sense, not anymore, no matter how much he wished Jamie was. But his team captain? Yeah, Kyle wasn’t giving Jamie up to the enemy or the rest of the team. Alexei would never forgive him if he did. Hell, his brother was probably wondering where the hell he was right now.
Pushing himself to a sitting position, Kyle blinked away the bright spots in his vision as he waited for the head rush to pass. Once it did, he got to his feet.
Kyle had a fucking mountain to climb and a team to save.
That mission started now.
Jamie woke up half-naked and strapped to a lab table, mind reeling as if he were high. His entire body ached in a way he thought it couldn’t anymore. It threw him for a moment—three years into the past, screaming himself unconscious as Splice ravaged his body. Only this time there weren’t masked faces of doctors in biohazard gear to greet him when he woke up, just a dingy lab ceiling and too-bright lights,
the air carrying a dull quality to it that spoke of over-saturated filters in the environmentals which were in desperate need of a change.
“Tu es réveillé. Qui est inattendu.”
Jamie squinted against the searing overhead lights and carefully turned his aching head to the side. He blinked slowly, trying to get his double-vision to shrink down to one. The man who’d spoken wore a lab coat over a drab gray shirt and cargo pants, most of his attention on the blood he was extracting from Jamie’s right arm with a larger than normal syringe.
“What?” Jamie managed to get out, trying to say more but having a difficult time forming the words. His brain didn’t want to string more than a couple of words together, and none of them managed to stay long enough on his tongue for him to speak them. As for the rest of his body, it thrummed painfully with a peculiar edge of numbness that spoke of really, really strong drugs.
Jamie was certain that was a bad thing, but the reason why was slow to come.
The man in the lab coat pulled the needle out of his vein and didn’t bother to put pressure on the hole the instrument left behind. The trickle of blood over his elbow made Jamie’s skin itch. Blinking rapidly, Jamie moved his head the other way, trying to figure out where the hell he was, what the hell had happened, when movement caught his gaze. He instinctively tried to move, body heaving against the powerful restraints holding him down on the lab table by his wrists and ankles.
A series of small cells lined the circular laboratory, the doors reclaimed steel with transparent windows set in them, and strong enough to hold up against the pounding Donovan was giving his. Jamie tracked his bleary gaze over the cells, his head count coming up one short and he didn’t know why until the memory hit with the force of a spaceship breaking atmo.
Kyle was dead.
Kyle had taken a bullet meant for him and was dead.
Jamie squeezed his eyes shut, the after-image of Kyle in his arms with a ripped open throat seared into his brain. He felt sick to his stomach as he realized he wouldn’t get to explain himself to Kyle beyond that short conversation in the ready room.
Should have taken that chance, he thought.
They were in separate branches; they could have made it work somehow. A little too late for that realization, because it would never happen now. Jamie had lost that future on the battlefield the same way he’d lost a different one in Tripoli when he realized he wasn’t dying while most of his platoon was.
Regret was still a bitter pill and it never got any easier to swallow.
Jamie never liked losing people under his command. Losing someone he’d had a connection with, however short the time, was doubly difficult to deal with. As much as Jamie wanted to grieve that loss, he couldn’t, not right now. Later, when they were back on home soil, he’d give in to that black grief. At the moment, Jamie had to think about the rest of his team and how the hell they would get out of this mess. It’d be easier if his head didn’t feel like everything was spinning around him.
Neuro-jammer gun. I hate those goddamn things.
Right. Those fucking guns which were outlawed in America but which always ended up in hands that should never have them. He didn’t know where Durand had teleported them to, but he’d lay a solid bet on a contested region. If they were speaking Russian, then they were possibly somewhere along the Eastern European border, that swath of former Russian countries who’d been fighting assimilation back into the motherland for almost two hundred years now. Or they could be in France. The possibilities were endless.
Jamie tried to fight his thoughts from drifting and instead focus on the problem at hand. Whatever drugs they’d dosed him with after shooting him with the neuro-jammer were strong enough that his metabolism was having a hard time breaking it all down. His was a physical power, which meant containment would be harsher for most of the others except for Donovan and Alexei. Probably why Donovan was the only one on his feet.
“What are you doing?” Jamie asked, the words coming out jumbled together.
The man working beside him continued to ignore him. Jamie couldn’t decide what would be better, an evil monologue or the silent treatment. He struggled to string together his thoughts, gaze tracking over his team again. Donovan was on his feet still while Alexei sat in the middle of his cell, glaring at anyone who crossed into his vision. The rest of his team were seemingly hunched over in pain, which would make extracting themselves from the situation a damn pain in the ass.
Jamie shifted on the lab table and lifted his head as he tried to dizzily get a count of everyone else in the lab. Maybe one other technician and at least five guards carrying semi-automatic rifles. None of them were in uniform unless you counted apocalypse chic fashion as standard field dress. Which he didn’t.
The drugs were definitely making him loopy.
He flexed his fists and tensed his arms, trying to see if he could wrench them free. He couldn’t put enough force into the effort, and the second he attempted to try, that’s when the shady lab guy finally deigned to notice him.
“Ne bougez pas,” the man said, sounding more like Durand than the guards from when they were captured.
He picked up a syringe filled with a liquid in a shade of neon orange not found in nature. If anything, Donovan’s pounding on the cell door became even more frantic, his yells a dull noise through the sound dampeners in effect in the lab. Jamie turned his head and tried to tell Donovan to calm down and save his strength when the sound of a door sliding open finally got Alexei to react. The Strike Force soldier scrambled to his feet, his entire attention locked onto whoever had come into the lab.
Jamie frowned and tried to see who it was—maybe Durand or the shapeshifter they never got eyes on—when the prick of a needle in the crook of his elbow again made him flinch.
“Je suis occupé,” the man said over his shoulder.
Distantly, Jamie watched as the front of the man’s face exploded in a shower of red before he even got a chance to depress the plunger on the syringe. Blood and brain matter splattered over Jamie’s bare chest as the body slumped over him before gravity pulled it to the floor. The soldiers on guard duty and the other lab technician didn’t have time to react. In the span of seconds, the newcomer had taken aim and taken out every last one of them with extreme prejudice.
Jamie lay there for a moment, staring up at the ceiling, as he tried to wrap his mind around the sudden unexpected respite granted them. Even as he struggled to clear his mind, the lights were suddenly blocked out by a man dressed like the guards, except wearing a helmet and sporting a bandanna tied around the lower half of his face. Jamie stared into familiar green eyes and came to the only appropriate conclusion.
“I must be dead.”
Kyle unclipped and removed the helmet, tossing it aside even as he yanked the bandanna off his face. “Nah, you’re still alive despite all the blood you got on you.”
For all his attempt at a rescue, Kyle looked like shit, gray-faced and shaky, with a massive black bruise on the right side of his neck where the bullet wound should have been. Jamie drank in the sight, feeling almost giddy with relief that Kyle had seemingly come back from the dead. For a few precious seconds, Jamie basked in the fact that Kyle was alive.
Kyle disappeared again and Jamie had a heart-clenching moment of thinking he was gone for good before the familiar sound of hands tapping away at a computer reached his ears. Then Kyle swore in Russian for a few long seconds.
“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Kyle popped back into view, glaring tiredly at the body on the floor next to the lab table. “Inferno, the damn doors are retinal locked and I blew his goddamn head off. Get them out of the cells while I get Apollo off this table. We need to move. We only have about ten minutes before the shift change happens.”
Jamie saw a flash of fire out the corner of his eye. When he looked over at the cells, he was shocked to see Alexei controlling a ball of fire to overheat the locking mechanism on his cell door. It only took moments for Alexei to basically melt the damn thi
ng down and kick open the door, a wave of heat rolling outward, though he didn’t seem bothered by it in the least. He pointed an angry finger at Kyle, fire curling around his hand in fast little flickers that never burned his skin.
“You is late, Reaper,” Alexei snapped.
Kyle didn’t look up from where he was manually trying to open Jamie’s restraints. “Fuck off. I lost half the blood in my body, I haven’t regenerated all of it back yet, and they tried to bury me in an unmarked grave at the bottom of the goddamn mountain. You’re lucky I’m walking.”
“They buried you?” Jamie asked, unable to scrape the horror out of his voice completely. He’d experienced a lot of shitty things as a Marine, but getting buried alive was not one of them.
Kyle glanced at him, the steely distance in his gaze softening a little. “Only a little. I’m okay.”
“How?”
“I heal fast.”
“Is cat out of box,” Alexei told him as he burned the lock off Trevor’s cell door first.
“Think you mean out of the bag.”
“Is what I say!”
“Doors, Inferno. Doors!”
Alexei said something extremely rude in Russian that Jamie could understand only because Katie had used that phrase to insult someone in a bar once right before she threw the first punch.
Jamie blinked and his vision was filled with two people standing over him. Pale, with a spectacular black eye swelling the left side of his face, Trevor still managed to smile encouragingly down at Jamie. The shine of wires and embedded electrodes stretched over his head and locked into place by a collar around his neck caught Jamie’s admittedly wavering attention.
In the Wreckage: (M/M Sci-Fi Military Romance) (Metahuman Files Book 1) Page 10