by Lizzy Bequin
As she goes back to checking her gear, I study her silently from across the aisle. She’s small, even for a female, and that factor is enhanced by the size of the men in this aircraft. But her efficient movements and unshakeable demeanor make it clear that she’s not to be messed with.
Her hair is so blonde it’s nearly white, and it is buzzed close to her head in a military cut. I’ve never seen that kind of hairdo on a woman before, but there’s something fascinating and even enticing about the way it accentuates the delicate shape of her head and her elegant facial features.
While her body is athletic, it is also infinitely feminine.
As I focus my attention on her even more closely, I start to notice her scent, easily picking out her signature amid the mixture of masculine body odors filling the transit hold.
The first thing I notice is the clean simple smell of her soap, but underneath that, my nose quickly uncovers her body’s natural scent. It is raw and alive, a totally feminine smell that stirs my cock and tightens the crotch of my shorts.
I should stop, but I sniff again, taking in more of her odor.
That was a mistake.
Somehow, her scent seems to be growing even stronger, and the big whiff I just took instantly makes my dick as hard as an iron spike. I kind of hope no one notices my raging hard-on, but honestly I don’t really care if they do.
I’m too busy wondering how the hell her scent could be so powerful.
I’ve only ever encountered such an intense scent during my clandestine excursions into the Zone. There’s only one thing that can produce an aroma that speaks to my body that way.
An omega.
Sloane glances up, and a flicker of surprise crosses her face when she notices me looking at her. But she doesn’t look away. For a silent moment our eyes lock.
Her eyes drop to my crotch, where my hard cock is straining at my shorts, and her pupils dilate wide.
Those pretty blue eyes flick back up to mine. Her mouth hangs open in silent surprise.
The moment is broken by a sickening lurch of the aircraft. My stomach leaps into my throat as the hovership takes a severe dip in altitude. At first I think we just hit a particularly bad patch of turbulent air, but when the craft continues to plummet, I know something is truly wrong.
“Shit!” A marine shouts toward the cockpit. “What the fuck is going on up there.”
I lunge out of my seat and stumble toward the front of the craft, leaning against the bulkheads for support.
As I climb into the cockpit, my heart sinks.
Something is wrong. Seriously wrong.
The pilot is slumped against the controls. His face is pale and shot with diseased, black veins. His eyes are blank and his lips are bubbling with drool. I turn toward the copilot, only to find him in the same state.
What the fuck?
Through the windshield, the landscape of dense forests is looming up toward us with frightening speed.
I swing back toward the transit hold, leaning forward to climb the tilted deck.
“Does anyone know how to fly? I bark.
But I get no answer. Half the marines are now in the same state as the pilots, skin pale, eyes dead, lips drooling mutely. Their companions are desperately trying to rouse them, but one by one they are slipping into the same braindead state.
My first impulse is to check Sloane, and I experience a surge of relief that she is still okay.
For now.
“Oh fuck!” Donovitch shouts. “What the fuck’s going on, man? Oh God, we’re all gonna die!”
He’s right, of course. There are only seconds left before we slam into the ground.
Donovitch leaps out of his seat and races toward the rear of the craft, and I see his hand going for the latch that opens the jump door.
“Wait!” Sloan hollers, rising from her seat. “Our helmets!”
She’s right. Nobody has their helmets on yet, and as soon as that hatch opens, the entire craft will be exposed to the contamination of the Zone.
Donovitch pauses, hand on the latch. His eyes roll back white, and the blood drains from his face as he succumbs to the same sickness as his partners.
As his body slumps to the deck, his hand unwittingly pulls the latch, a rear door swings open, depressurizing the hold with a sudden, violent roar of rushing air. As Donovitch collapses, his ripcord snags on something, and his chute billows open, violently ripping him out of the ship and into the open sky beyond. His flaccid body sags in his harness as he drifts out of sight.
“No!” Sloane screams, her voice almost silenced by the whipping wind.
That’s when I have a sudden flash of intuition. I know what’s happening to the pilots and marines. They’ve already been exposed. The supposedly advanced shielding of the craft failed, turning everyone into beta mutants one-by-one.
The only one who hasn’t changed is Sloane.
A shudder of turbulence rocks the plummeting ship, and Sloane stumbles. I race forward to catch her. Even with the harsh wind sucking the air from the hold, I’m instantly assailed by her intense scent. She turns her face toward mine, revealing eyes that are unnaturally dilated.
Sloane has changed. She’s not a beta, but she has mutated.
There may not be any outward signs, but the contamination has gotten to her body, altering her in invisible ways—her physiology, her hormones, her needs…
She’s an omega now.
“We have to jump!” My roar is muted by the howling vacuum of wind sucking at the interior of the ship. “Now!”
I grab hold of Sloane’s body and shove her toward the open hatch at the aft of the craft.
“Wait!” she shouts, her voice ripped away by the wind. “We need rifles.”
There’s no time for that. We have bare seconds before the aircraft slams into the ground.
I shove her out into the open night sky, praying that she has the presence of mind to pull her rip cord. A split second later, I dive out after her, immediately opening my own chute.
A surge of relief floods through me as I see Sloane’s camo parachute blossom out of her pack, and she floats away in the darkness. Just two seconds later, and it would have been too late.
But my hope is wiped away when the backwash from the falling ship hits me, pushing me in the opposite direction and crumpling my own parachute. I’m spiralling out of control, plummeting way too fast.
The treetops reach up toward me like leafy claws.
A second later, and my world becomes a chaos of snapping branches ripping at my flesh as gravity pulls me toward the ground. I don’t feel any pain, however.
My mind is focused on one thing, and one thing only.
The omega.
Sloane.
I have to survive this.
I have to make her safe.
CHAPTER 5: TRUK
Once the fire has settled down into a nice bed of glowing embers lined with white ash, I place the freshly caught fish directly into the coals to cook. There is a sizzle, and a vortex of orange sparks swirls upward toward the stars. I sit back on the riverbed and listen to the purling stream flowing by in the night, clear and cold.
Even with the wall of dark trees on one side, this campsite is relatively exposed, but I don’t care.
The Farlanders know me, and they know better than to mess with me. And if they have somehow forgotten, I’ll be more than happy to remind them. Just let them try.
As for the ruin-dwellers, they hardly ever venture this far from their home.
Taking up my knife of chipped obsidian, I stab into the cooking fish to turn it. Something else, however, catches my attention, causing me to drop my half-cooked dinner back into the coals.
A sound, faint and distant.
At first it is a low, rhythmic throbbing. As I listen, however, the sound changes, becomes a prolonged, hawk-like screech, but much, much louder.
I rise, focusing my eyes in the direction of the sound. It only takes me a moment to find it—a dark speck moving across t
he starry sky, angling downward toward the earth.
By the Source.
An aircraft—An Outsider aircraft!
I have seen them once or twice before, soaring overhead like giant birds. But I’ve never seen one this close to the center of the Zone.
I squint, focusing in even more. With my highly acute vision, I can just make out the shape of the distant craft. As I watch, something emerges from the back of the ship and begins drifting slowly downward like a floating seed pod.
Another seed pod emerges, immediately followed by a third.
Not long after that, the falling craft disappears from sight behind the tops of the trees. A sudden orange glow flares on the horizon, and several seconds later, delayed by the vast distance, comes the rumble of an explosion.
I drop my stone knife into the fur sheath at my hip, and kick some riverbed dirt over my fire, extinguishing the embers and ruining my dinner. I say a quick apology to the fish for wasting his flesh like that, but there are more important matters to attend to right now.
Bigger fish, as the saying goes.
A moment later, my bare feet are racing over the earth, eating up the distance between me and the crash.
If I hurry, I can reach it by first light.
CHAPTER 6: SLOANE
The world comes back to me in bits and pieces.
First there is a sensation of something warm and wet trickling down the middle of my face, creeping along the side of my nose. Next I notice a strange, musical droning sound unlike anything I’ve heard before.
And weirdest of all, the pleasant, nostalgic sensation of swaying gently back and forth.
In my half-consciousness, an image comes to my mind of being small again, riding the swings at the dirty little playground in the cramped courtyard of the orphanage.
The trickle reaches my lips. Instinctively, I lick it, tasting the warm, coppery flavor of blood.
A sudden pulse of adrenaline surges through me, and my eyes flutter open with a gasp.
I am strapped into my jump harness, suspended from a treetop by dozens of nylon cords attached to the camo parachute caught in the limbs overhead. Other trees surround me, an entire dark forest. The gnarled branches bobbing in the cool night wind seem like hundreds of deformed hands reaching for me.
I look down.
It takes my eyes a few moments to adjust to the darkness, but when they do, my mind reels with a sudden sense of vertigo.
A good thirty feet below in the darkness lies the forest floor, littered with pine needles and dappled with pale moonlight poking through the upper canopy.
Now it’s all coming back to me.
Something happened to the pilot and copilot. Then the other marines all started changing too. We lost control of the ship and we began to crash. With Dog’s help, I jumped out at the last second.
After that, things get a little fuzzy.
My last memory is the violent jerk of the harness rig between my legs and under my arms as the chute deployed and inflated. I came down straight into a dense forest. I must have hit my head against the trunk of this tree and lost consciousness.
Shit. How long have I been out?
And what about Dog? He jumped as well, but I think his chute didn’t open properly. Did he survive? Assuming he did make it, how will I ever find him in all this wilderness?
And even if I do find him, how the hell will we get back to civilization?
I take a deep breath, calming my frazzled nerves so I can properly take stock of the situation.
I’m not completely helpless here. I have my sidearm—a lightweight .40-caliber polymer frame pistol with ten rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. In addition to that, there’s the combat knife tucked in the concealed sheath stitched into my boot.
It would have been better if I had a chance to grab a rifle before jumping, but it’s too late to worry about that now.
As for the cords of my tangled parachute, they are holding steady for now, but if those limbs overhead break or my chute’s canopy tears, I have a thirty foot fall below me. I need to act fast. I need to get out of this harness so I can climb down to safety.
As I glance down at my dangling body, I freeze.
My black protective body suit is torn, ripped by the sharp tree branches as I crashed into the forest. The upper part of the right sleeve is gashed open, and the material covering my legs is slashed with many holes as well, revealing my bare skin beneath.
I don’t even have my helmet. I wasn’t wearing it inside the dropship. Nobody was.
“Oh no,” I whisper.
My pulse quickens, and a ball of panic rises in my chest. I am exposed to the contamination of the Quarantine Zone. In fact, I have been ever since Donovitch opened the hatch of the ship.
It’s only a matter of time before I turn into a slobbering, mindless beta.
I’m fucked. I’m well and truly fucked.
That mysterious chirping sound rises and falls like strange music throughout the forest again.
It takes me a moment to realize the source. Bugs. Cicadas, I think they are called. It’s a weird sound, but kind of nice.
Shit, the only bugs we have back in the city are cockroaches, and those disgusting things don’t sing.
Doesn’t matter, since I’ll never see the city again. Not now.
I tilt my head back, letting the light breeze flow over my short hair. and I relax into the gently swinging harness as the peaceful music of the night fills my ears.
I want this to be the last thing I remember before I lose my mind to the beta mutation.
The mutation, however, doesn’t come.
With each passing minute that I remain alive and clear-headed, a sense of hope and relief grows inside me—a hope that I am somehow immune to the contamination of the Zone.
This is soon replaced by another terrifying thought.
What if I’m not immune? What if I already have mutated?
What if I’m an omega?
Oh God, that must be it. There’s no other explanation.
I’m an omega now.
A new sound echoes through the forest, so distant and imperceptible, that at first I think it is only a trick of my stressed-out brain. But a moment later it comes again, closer and louder, and my blood chills at the sound.
It is a low, moaning howl, not quite human, but not entirely bestial either.
The cicadas leave off their singing. The silence is ominous.
My first instinct is to go for my rifle, but I remember I don’t have one. It was left behind on the ship when I bailed out.
At least I have my .40-cal and my boot knife.
Another howl, closer this time.
I need to get into a better position, and fast.
There is a sturdy-looking branch jutting several feet to my right. Swinging my legs, I manage to rock my harness back and forth until I can grasp the limb with my arms.
The howls increase. They are coming from all directions now. There are sounds of snapping twigs and trampled underbrush as the creatures close in.
I clamber onto the branch, keeping my weight near the trunk where the wood is the strongest.
My hand flashes to the knife on my boot, drawing it. The cold steel glints as it catches a stray moonbeam. I cut away the strap holding my left shoulder, then I switch hands, cutting loose the right strap too.
I swing my body up into a seated position on the limb, leaning my back against the rough trunk.
Down below, the chorus of howls has become a cacophony.
The Alphas are here.
They emerge from the depths of the forest, loping on all fours like wild animals. There are five of them. They circle the base of the tree, licking their drooling chops and snuffling the air, picking up my omega scent.
They bark angrily. The beasts are confused. They can smell me, but they can’t find me.
Then one of them looks up, and even from thirty feet up in the darkness I can see the fires of animal lust lighting up his eyes. He grun
ts excitedly and then belts out a deafening, bone-chilling howl of triumph. His companions raise their heads and join in the terrifying song.
They’ve spotted me.
I just hope these freaks don’t climb trees.
Luckily, the giant tree that I’m trapped in is devoid of branches for the first fifteen feet or so, and the girth of the massive trunk is too great even for the enormous arm-span of these Alphas.
For a moment, I watch the figures below as if in a trance. They are revolting. Their naked bodies are grotesque and twisted, and their faces are horribly disfigured by a combination of mutation and battle-scars. Foaming saliva flecks their ugly lips, and they pop their jaws like rabid dogs.
But the worst part of all are the monstrous, misshapen erections jutting from between their legs. Ugly, twisted members that are hard and oozing with arousal.
I wonder how I can see so well in this darkness, and it occurs to me that it must be part of my omega mutation.
Right now, it’s more of a curse than a blessing.
The beasts are enraged, lost in a mindless mating frenzy, and I’m the object of their desire. The thought of them sating their sick urges with my body turns my stomach.
One of the Alphas tries to scramble up the trunk of the tree. He makes it about ten feet before his limbs lose their purchase, and he slides back down, seemingly oblivious to the way the rough bark scrapes his naked body and abrades his exposed cock.
I hold my position, straddling the branch and keeping my weight on the crook of the limb and the trunk.
I run through my options. Briefly, I consider opening fire with my pistol, but I nix that idea. I need to conserve my ammo, and for the moment at least, I seem to be safe.
Down below, the horny Alphas are growing increasingly agitated, yipping and snarling as they take turns trying to scramble up the tree. Their attempts are futile. In their bestial frustration, some of them start fighting with each other like mad dogs.
“That’s right, you ugly freaks,” I mutter to myself. “Good luck getting to me up here.”
It immediately occurs to me that I’m now just as much a freak as the horrid creatures swirling and howling below me. I push that thought out of my mind.