Storme's Match

  Storme’s Match

  ◆◆◆

  Grim Reapers Book 1

  J.R. Pace

  Storme’s Match

  Published by J.R. Pace

  Copyright 2019 by J.R. Pace

  Edits by Maxann Dobson (The Polished Pen)

  Cover design by Maria Spada

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Preview: Sawyer’s Mistake

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Gabriel

  Gabriel Storme flattened himself against the wall. He didn’t need to look behind him to know Sawyer and Kopf would follow, silent as ghosts. He counted to three in his head and took a deep breath, shifting slightly to look around the corner. He was surprised when nobody shot at him.

  The room beyond was lit softly by kerosene torches, much like the hallway behind them. Fuel was in short supply. They would have to take some with them when they left.

  Dark stone floor and walls made the large, cavernous room seem smaller than it was. Along the far wall hung heavy chains and multiple sets of iron shackles. Though currently unoccupied, rust-colored stains alluded to heavy usage at some point in the past. It also smelled wrong. Not just moldy, like most buildings now, but of pain and despair.

  The space was bare except for a rickety table and four wooden chairs, three of them currently occupied by male figures. Although he couldn’t see their faces from where he was standing, Storme knew they were human. They looked too short to be Remur.

  The Remur were humanoid in appearance and might pass for humans in a dark room, though a closer look would quickly dispel the illusion; they were bigger, for one—the shortest Remur Storme had ever encountered had been around his own height, six-three—and most were a lot taller and more muscular. Their flesh was the color of a light ash, their faces somehow flatter, as if their noses had been punched in. It was their eyes, however, that truly set them apart. There was something deeply unnatural about those sunken eyes, with sclerae as dark as the pupils, making the entire eye look black.

  One of the men at the table roared in laughter at something his companions had said, yanking Storme’s attention back to the present and validating his initial perception. Definitely human. He’d never heard a Remur laugh.

  “They’re Remur slaves,” Sawyer whispered, his green eyes shining with aversion.

  All three men sported a short hook where their left hand should have been, marking them as Remur slaves. The prosthetic hook, grafted onto flesh and bone by alien technology, was impossible to remove, short of amputating it. It mirrored the aliens’ own claw, though smaller, and was a sign to anyone who saw these men that they belonged to the Remur.

  Shuddering at the sign of subservience, Storme wondered—not for the first time—what it took to entice a man to betray his entire race in this way.

  At first, the Remur had killed humans indiscriminately and had succeeded in decimating the world’s population in a matter of weeks. Once they’d discovered that human women were biologically compatible with them and could conceivably carry Remur young to term, something most of their own females were no longer able to do, the aliens had become hunters.

  They now roamed the world, capturing as many women as they could while killing all human males they encountered, except those willing to become Remur slaves.

  In the last year, Storme and his team had secured the freedom of dozens of women held in Remur breeding facilities across the southern edge of the European Space, but no matter how many women they rescued, it felt like they’d always be one step behind the Remur. He knew it was only a matter of time until the Remur achieved their objective of turning human women into viable incubators.

  Storme used sign language to communicate with his companions, reminding them they needed the men alive. Kopf and Sawyer nodded their understanding as they all inched forward. The men had almost reached the doorway when one of the Remur slaves looked in their direction. He scrambled to stand, too shocked—or too cowardly even—to voice a warning to his friends.

  “That one’s mine!” Kopf said, racing forward. Kopf was strong and agile, a combat swimmer from Germany’s elite Special Forces. His target didn’t stand a chance when Kopf grabbed him and smashed him against the wall.

  Sawyer cracked his knuckles, his gaze on one of the men. “You’re mine, then,” he said quietly, cracking his knuckles. He wrestled the man to the ground in an elegant move, and then let his fists fly.

  Storme felt a measure of pride at the way his men fought, their moves an exercise in controlled aggression. They knew better than to let bullets fly in an enclosed space, where ricocheting projectiles might come right back at them. In the last fourteen months, since hospitals had become decommissioned, they had all become much more cautious when it came to avoidable injuries. Though they were lucky to have a great medic on the team, even Zander couldn’t perform miracles.

  Storme strode towards the third Remur slave, who was still sitting down despite the chaos going on around him.

  “Stand up!” he roared. “Where are the women?” He had little patience for men who hurt women as these men had done.

  He tossed the heavy table across the room. The Remur slave gaped at him from his seat. Storme lifted him easily by his shirt, straightening to his full height. The man’s legs dangled in the air.

  “Please!” he begged. Storme twisted the fabric, which tightened around the man’s neck. The man gasped, his face going red.

  “Where. Are. The. Women?” When the Remur slave still did not answer, Storme shook him, none too gently. Unfortunately, the Remur slave’s shirt tore, and the man fell out of Storme’s grasp, onto the ground. His opponent scuttled away from him.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Reaching to grab the man’s shoulder, Storme used his momentum to spin the Remur slave around. He was careful to keep well out of the way of the hook. His right arm shot out in a hard jab, square on the man’s face, blood spurting from his crushed nose. Surprisingly, the man didn’t grab his broken nose. Instead, he settled into a defensive position.

  Yes, this might be fun after all.

  The two men began circling each other.

  Storme was disappointed a second later, when the man lunged at him clumsily with his hooked limb, slashing along Storme’s gut—or rather where his gut had been a second earlier, since Storme had jumped back just in time. While the man recovered his balance, Storme moved in and punched him in the face again.

  “Shit.” Storme rubbed his knuckles, which throbbed in a most gratifying way. Behind him, he heard Sawyer chuckle.

  The Remur slave roared and rushed Storme, grabbing him in a bear hug, trying to jab him with his hook. His opponent had a new strength to him, born of desperation. He used both arms to push the hook away from his own body, his muscles straining with the effort.

  His opponent either did not notice or, if he did, was unable to stop his momentum,
and the hook went deep into his own side instead of going into Storme’s back as he had intended. The Remur slave’s legs gave way immediately, and he fell, clutching the wound. It was clear from his glassy eyes that the hook had hit something vital.

  Storme watched, unaffected, as the man used his last bit of strength to free the hook from his gut. Blood pumped out fast for fifteen to twenty seconds then slowed to a trickle.

  He felt nothing. Not just because the man would have killed him without batting an eyelash, but because as far as he was concerned humans who helped the Remur were the scum of the earth.

  “I thought you said we needed them alive, Storme,” Sawyer chuckled, his green eyes flashing.

  Storme ran a hand through his short brown hair, not bothering to reply. He stood up to his full height and looked around him. Sawyer and Kopf had followed his instructions to keep them alive, and both their targets were standing against the wall, hands on the backs of their heads, fingers interlocked, looking on in horror at their dead friend.

  “Listen up, assholes. We only need one of you alive,” Storme told the Remur slaves. Sawyer and Kopf stepped closer, cracking their knuckles together. The bearded man clenched his jaw and kept his composure, but the shorter man whimpered. Bingo. The growing stain on his trousers confirmed they had found the weaker link.

  Not that he intended either of them to live long enough to warn the Remur. Storme walked up to the whimpering man, making a show of unsheathing his hunting knife. The curved blade was as sharp as it looked. He pressed the tip gently against his finger until he saw a tiny drop of blood well up then released it. His move had the expected effect. The man started sniveling. His legs gave out, but Kopf held him up easily.

  “Where are the women?” Storme asked.

  “What women?”

  “Wrong answer, asshole.” A flick of Storme’s wrist, and a slash appeared in the man’s sleeve, the fabric immediately stained red with blood. “You already lost one hand. Surely you won’t mind if I take the other one now, right? Perhaps your alien friends will give you a shiny new hook.” He raised the knife again, hoping the man wouldn’t take him up on his offer.

  The man moaned. His entire body shook.

  “I’ll ask you again. Last chance to save your miserable hide. Where are the women?”

  “The Remur took them as soon as the last shipment arrived.”

  “Don’t tell them anything else, you fool,” his bearded friend whispered harshly.

  “When did that happen? How many women were in this last shipment?”

  Now that he’d started speaking, the Remur slave couldn’t talk fast enough.

  “Please. We just held them here then took them to the appointed location. We didn’t do anything to them.”

  “How many women were in the last shipment?”

  “Five.”

  The number was right. Storme shared a look with Sawyer and Kopf, though they all kept their faces impassive.

  “What did they look like?”

  “Just women, man, you know. Dirty, thin, angry. They’re all the same these days.” He licked his lips. “One of them was a redhead. She and the blonde were the only ones even worth a second look.”

  Storme felt excitement building within him. Five women, one of them blonde, one a redhead. It had to be them.

  “Where did they take them?” he asked quietly.

  “The Remur took them to their new breeding ground about thirty miles north of here. It’s an abandoned complex, one of those places they used to keep animals in. Listen, you want women? They’ll be coming back with more eventually. We can share the next lot with you,” he added excitedly, as if he had just come across a solution to their problems.

  Storme thought he might throw up all over the man’s boots.

  “Shut up, you moron!” the bearded man shouted, struggling in Kopf’s grip. He was clearly a better judge of character than his friend and understood there would be no negotiation.

  Kopf looked at Storme, arching an eyebrow. Storme nodded. He watched his friend increase the pressure on the man’s shoulders, using his other arm to snap his neck. The body fell to the floor with a loud thump.

  The remaining man’s eyes grew wide with horror. He looked ready to piss himself again.

  “Are you here alone?” Storme asked.

  “Yes, we’re … I’m alone! Just waiting for the next shipment. I don’t know anything else, I swear.”

  “You know what? I think I believe you.” Storme signaled to Sawyer, who brought out his own blade.

  “No! Please, you said you’d let me go!”

  “I lied,” Storme said. Sawyer’s blade slid cleanly across the man’s neck. He fell, clutching the wound with his remaining hand as if he could somehow stop the flow of blood. Half a minute later he was dead, though his legs and his hook still twitched.

  “Let’s get out of here, guys,” Storme said, stepping over the bodies so as not to get any blood on his boots. They took a quick look around before leaving, but the only useful thing they found was a half-full kerosene drum in the corner. The Remur were good at cleaning up after themselves. Storme signaled to Kopf, who hauled the forty-gallon drum away as if it weighed nothing.

  They headed back along the corridor cautiously, in case the man had lied to them, though Storme doubted it. They could only just make out the outline of the winding stone stairs they’d followed on their way in, each step worn down by centuries of use. Some brown stains on the walls appeared newer than others, but they did not stop to examine them in detail.

  Reaching the top of the stairs, they were almost blinded by the light. Dawn had come and gone in the time they’d been underground, and the sun now shone on all surfaces of the enormous ballroom. Hundreds of mirrors on the ceiling and walls, most of them now cracked or lying in broken pieces on the floor, hinted at the extravagant opulence of days gone by. The most surprising thing, perhaps, was the contrast between this great room and the dungeon right beyond the paneled door.

  “The Sun King clearly liked having easy access to the palace dungeon,” Sawyer drawled. A Canadian by birth, and a member of that country’s Joint Incident Response Unit, Jake Sawyer was probably Storme’s only real friend from before the alien invasion. Fourteen months ago, he and Sawyer had been serving together on an international mission in Morocco, along with Magnus Zander and Javier Prado, two of the team members waiting for them outside. That was where they’d met Noam Meir, the last member of their team. Together, they’d watched the aliens’ first landing on their handheld screens, and together they’d seen the world around them go to shit and watched a lot of good people die. Though their team was now much smaller than before, they’d kept their name, GEOX, in honor of the men and women who had not made it back to the mainland European Space.

  Kopf chuckled lightly. “I do like the frescoes on the ceiling. They’d make for great target practice.”

  Broken glass crackled under their boots.

  Storme led the way to the exit, lost in his own mind. He did not pride himself on having a great imagination, but it was difficult to look at such opulence and not imagine what the Palace of Versailles must have looked like in the past. Not in the great days of splendor of the Sun King—he was no history buff—but just a year earlier, in 2078, before the entire world went to Hell. In the morning light, he could almost see the tourists queueing, parents warning hordes of happy kids not to touch anything as they ran circles around this great hall and out in the gardens beyond.

  Today, there was nobody else around, just them. And the three dead bodies in the basement.

  He raised his arm, bringing the small survival radio on his wrist close to his mouth. The radios didn’t have a great range, but they were easy to build out of parts found lying around from before the attack.

  “We’re coming out.” He stepped over a broken window, walking out onto a large terrace overlooking the gardens.

  “I see you,” Javier Prado said in his light accent. His country had fallen in the early
days of the invasion, like all the countries in the European Space, but he’d never lost that soft Spanish lilt to his voice.

  “What the fuck, Storme? You said ten minutes. It’s been fourteen. Prado and I were about to take off.” Noam Meir was a stickler for precision. His clipped tone betrayed his worry.

  “Don’t get your panties in a wad, Meir. We’ll meet you at the south entrance in three minutes,” Storme replied.

  Of the six of them, Meir was the one with the most extensive covert operations experience. Although Storme trusted Meir with his life, and was pretty sure the trust went both ways, he still had no idea what the ex-Mossad operative had been up to in Casablanca at the time of the alien invasion. They’d met in a bar, just days before the invasion, and it was Meir who’d looked for them afterwards, as they were fighting to leave the port. It was safe to say they might not have made it without him.

  “Did you find …?” That was Magnus Zander’s voice. The dark, muscular Dane was the last member of their team. He was bald, head shaved daily with surgical precision. He’d trained with the Danish Special Forces, but he was a medic first, and his focus was always on helping people.

  “The women were not here, but this time we have a solid lead,” Storme answered. Nobody bothered to reply. They all knew the longer they took to find the women, the less chance that they’d be in one piece. It had been almost a week since they’d been hired to find five women who’d been kidnapped outside the Residence, one of the remaining human colonies. Three days since they heard the rumor that the women might be held in Versailles. The aliens were cunning that way. Why waste any resources building something, when humans had already done the hard work centuries earlier and you could just move in?

  It was the kind of work the GEOX team did for free as they moved north through the European Space, but on this particular occasion, they’d been offered a reward: a black, sleek, stealth vehicle that had once belonged to the California ambassador himself. For days, the team had been busy pretending they actually gave a shit about the vehicle. It was easier than thinking about what the five women were going through at that very moment.