Storme's Match Page 2

  Chapter 2

  Eva

  Eva Carter had always thought of herself as a strong woman. Physically, she was stronger than most women she’d met. On bare feet, she stood at five feet ten inches; a couple years before the Remur invasion, she weighed 150 pounds and most of it muscle. Now, her clothes hung looser on her frame. The last fourteen months had been tough on everyone, and there had not always been enough food to go around.

  She still knew six different ways to kill a person with her bare hands and had already proven that at least a few of those worked just as well on the Remur.

  However, her greatest strength was her mind. From an early age, she had shown a surprising ability to focus under stressful conditions. When her father died and her mother moved them from California back to her native Norway, thirteen-year-old Eva took the changes in stride.

  Later, when she joined the Norwegian army and been selected for the elite Jegertroppen training, her mind had kept her going long after her body would have given in. She was one of only three women to finish the training and be accepted into the elite female Special Operations unit that year. She’d loved the army, loved spending her days with strong women and men who, by working together, made each other better. She’d loved the fact that, thanks to her job, she’d never had to worry about rent or laundry. She hated the aliens for taking that home away from her.

  She was on her own, on vacation in Paris, when the aliens attacked. The image of the large, gleaming mothership hovering behind the Eiffel Tower was one that would stay with her for the rest of her life, if only because the sense of wonder at the existence of alien life had so quickly been replaced with horror.

  When the attack began, and the aliens started shooting, she survived on her own for days, hiding in different basements, before making her way to the old California embassy, now known as the Residence. She had stayed for the last year, taking on a role as Security Office for the Maire. In this time, the Residence had welcomed hundreds of survivors, and while Eva hated the hiding, helping the Maire protect those people had given her a kind of purpose. She realized now that the job had probably saved her sanity, if not her life.

  Now, though, hour by hour, day by day, she felt that purpose unraveling. Someone moaned softly behind her. She turned to look at the four women and the girl who sat huddled together, near the back of the cage. From where she stood, she could literally smell their fear. It made her feel sick.

  Dressed in the white see-through shifts the Remur had forced on them, the women looked nothing like they had a week earlier.

  We’re ghosts.

  Eva’s breath hitched.

  “Come sit down for a bit, Eva,” Saoirse said softly. Saoirse was her best friend in the world, and the last person in the world Eva wanted trapped with her.

  Eva shook her head. She didn’t understand why Saoirse and the others didn’t blame her. They should blame her. Their safety was her responsibility, and she’d let them down. She should have been more careful, should never have let them leave the relative safety of the Residence that morning. But she knew what living in fear did to you, and she’d wanted the women to feel normal, if only for a couple hours, so she’d allowed the outing. It was a miscalculation they were all paying for dearly.

  She gripped the bars of the cage and looked out for the hundredth time, searching for a way out. Theirs was one of six cages opening onto a large central space.

  At least they were all together. Soon after their arrival, the aliens had unceremoniously dragged a small figure in with them. A tiny woman, or so they thought at first but then realized it was a girl, not more than ten or eleven years old. Her name was Bobbi, and she wasn’t saying much.

  The remaining cages were all empty except for one on the opposite end of the room, occupied by a heavily pregnant young woman. The woman had a vacant expression on her face and had barely moved from her cot in days. The Remur visited her often but rarely stayed more than a few minutes at a time.

  Eva clenched her teeth until they hurt. Bastards. At the start of the invasion, there had been a lot of philosophizing on TV—then on the radio once TVs died—about what to think of, and how to communicate with, the alien species. At the time, it seemed impossible to many that a humanoid alien race could have developed without the very values that made humans human. How naïve they’d been. How deserving of the extinction they now faced.

  All efforts to communicate with the aliens had been one-sided and doomed from the start. Even the name they’d given the alien species and which survivors still clung to now—Remur—came from attempts to interpret some faint markings found on the first spaceship. They still had no idea what the aliens referred to themselves as. Not that Eva cared. She’d seen one of the ten motherships herself and heard about the remaining nine, how they had all opened fire at the same moment. There was only one thing she cared about when it came to the Remur, and that was making them disappear.

  She shivered. The Remur didn’t like heat, so they kept the cells chilly, but it seemed to her it was getting even colder.

  Saoirse walked up to her and put her hand on her back, rubbing it gently through the wispy material of the dress. “Eva, you’re really cold,” she whispered. “Come sit with us.”

  Eva made no attempt to move closer to the other women huddling together in a corner. Her friend’s tender gesture made her want to cry. “It’s my fault we’re all cold,” she replied.

  “I don’t see how this is your fault, Eva,” Saoirse argued.

  “How are they all holding up?” she whispered.

  Saoirse paused for a second. “Rachel and Carrie are scared, but at least they have each other. Magda’s afraid for her babe, most of all, and worried about her husband back at the Residence. The little girl … I’m not sure. You’re the only one she’s spoken to, you know? You should try speaking to her again.”

  Eva knew they did not have much time. None of the women had started bleeding yet, but as soon as they did, the Remur would move them out of the holding cell and into different cells, for easier tagging and to make it easier to test them and impregnate them. She could not allow that to happen. Saoirse, Magda, Rachel, and Carrie had all trusted her to keep them safe. She’d failed at that, but she would somehow make it up to them.

  A bloodcurdling scream tore through the air. Eva started. She must have closed her eyes and dozed for a while, though she was still on her feet. Saoirse, Rachel, and Carrie stood up and joined her, crowding the bars of their cell as if compelled by an unknown force. Only Magda remained sitting, one arm around the terrified young girl, the other wrapped around her own belly.

  Three Remur hurried in and dragged the young woman out of the cell across from them. Two of the aliens wore burgundy-colored plates on their backs. Eva knew that meant they were medical technicians. The other was their head jailer. The plate on his back was silver. A soldier. All three aliens had claws where their left hand should have been, but the soldier’s claw was larger than those of the technicians, twice as big as a man’s hand. He was huge, a mountain of light gray flesh. He pinned her with his dark, soulless stare before moving ahead to look at the pregnant woman.

  The woman screamed again as she was dragged across the room. It was clear she did not have the strength to stand on her own. Her see-through white shift, similar to the one they were all wearing but stretched taught by her belly, was soaked red.

  They dragged her to a steel table in the center of the room, unceremoniously handcuffing her ankles to two bolts sticking out on the sides of the table, forcing her legs spread open. The woman wailed piteously, but the Remur took no notice.

  Eva had been watching the Remur for a while and felt she was getting better at reading their expressions. Behind their usual stoicism, she thought she detected faint traces of disgust on the part of the soldier and something like curiosity on the part of the medical technicians. They looked at the woman as if she were cattle—no, not even cattle, a chicken, perhaps. One did not contemplate the suffering of a chicken as long as it was still laying eggs every morning. This was the same, except the Remur had discovered the human women could actually bear their young, something their own females were apparently no longer able, or willing, to do.

  The woman lying in front of them was proof that the stories they had heard were all true, and that the alien experiments were progressing steadily.

  Although the soldier was larger, the older Remur technician was the one in command. He never touched the woman but directed the younger technician’s actions. It was the younger Remur who used his claw to tear the gauzy, bloody fabric of the dress away from the woman’s body. She now lay naked on the steel table, looking young and frail. So thin, except for the mountain of a belly. The woman’s belly strained. This was not the soothing movement of a baby kicking inside her mother’s womb, but rather the desperate throbbing of a life-form trying to find its way out of a place it should never have been in and one that was getting too tight to contain it.

  Blood leaked between the woman’s legs, a growing dark red puddle that dripped from the table onto the floor. There was something else too, a darker, more viscous-looking liquid that oozed out of her and onto the hard ground. Eva had spilled enough Remur blood over the last year to know their blood was rust-colored, but she’d never seen this dark mucus before. The older Remur grunted something, his expression becoming animated.

  The woman screamed. Eva wished with all her might that the woman might fall unconscious. That they would give her something for the pain or at least knock her out. But the Remur were unbothered by the screams.

  “What’s your name?” Saoirse shouted, standing beside Eva, her small hands clenched around the bars. Of course, it had to be Saoirse, calling attention to herself. The Remur soldier looked up at them.

  “Shut up, Saoirse,” Eva whispered. “She’s too far gone to answer you.”

  Saoirse ignored her and called out again and again. Suddenly, the woman turned her head towards them.

  “Your name, what’s your name?” Saoirse asked urgently.

  For a long time, it looked like the woman was not going to answer. She looked at them with unseeing eyes. Then finally her face cleared. “Laura,” she said weakly, her chapped lips cracking at the effort. “Je m’appelle Laura. My name is … Laura.”

  She repeated the mantra, as if it gave her strength, even as she started convulsing with another contraction. Tears rolled down her face, and she screamed, but she held on to the connection with the women in the cell.

  “You’re not alone, Laura!” Saoirse shouted, and Eva felt a burst of admiration for her friend whose compassion could literally break down the bars of any prison.

  The aliens in the room barely paid any attention to them. They were riveted by Laura’s pale, swaying belly as they waited for something to happen.

  She couldn’t bear to look away. In conversations with the Maire and the infrequent visitors to the Residence, she’d heard whispers of the terrible experiments the aliens were conducting, but seeing this with her own eyes and being unable to do anything to stop it was different.

  Do something! Help her! she wanted to scream, but she knew helping was the last thing on the aliens’ minds.

  Behind her, Magda hugged Bobbi tighter to her chest and started singing softly, a sad Italian song that seemed altogether too appropriate.

  The older technician brought out a large, curved knife. It looked like a Ka-Bar, only larger, designed for their enormous hands. No, not hands. Hand. The Remur held it easily in his right hand, keeping his other hand, which ended in a deadly claw, loosely by his body.

  He grunted loudly, communicating in their abhorrent language, clearly instructing his colleagues to hold the woman down.

  The knife shot across her body, slicing cleanly from her belly button through to her pubic bone, cutting through the woman’s skin and tissue like butter. For an instant there was no blood, only thick red muscle and white subcutaneous fat. Then the cut welled with deep red blood. Laura’s scream filled the air. The women next to her screamed as well, sharing Laura’s pain, fear, and despair. Only Eva remained quiet, her jaw clenched.

  The knife went through her belly once more, this time in a wide, sideways incision. Laura opened her mouth to scream once more, a scream that was cut off as her brain shut down from the trauma. There was a collective gasp among the women, combining horror and relief. Relief that Laura would not be awake to see what happened next.

  The Remur heaved, using his claw now to rip into the woman’s uterus and drag out the abhorrent life-form. The injury was so severe by now, the blood flow so excessive, it was clear to Eva that Laura would never wake up again. Her eyes went glassy as death claimed her.

  The women gasped as the Remur young was pulled out of Laura. It was larger than a human baby, almost the size of a newborn calf, its head flatter than that of the adults. She could see the shiny, almost unformed claw that would later become a terrible weapon. The newborn was covered in Laura’s blood and that disgusting dark mucus and looked deathly gray.

  Beside Eva, Saoirse sobbed, sliding down on her knees, her hands still clenched on the bars of their cage. Someone behind her dry heaved. None of them had enough inside their stomachs to vomit.

  Only Eva remained standing in the cage, still as a statue. She watched in shock as the three Remur adults stroked their new young, their actions quick but almost tender as they covered him in a strange metallic looking fabric. Tenderness was not a word she’d ever associated with the aliens but the best one she could think of to describe their current behavior. They looked … elated and for a moment almost human in their excitement.

  Eva wondered why, until she suddenly saw the young’s legs move. She gasped in surprise.

  Oh my God, it’s alive. That’s why they’re rushing.

  She’d never heard of a live birth before.

  She watched the three Remur rushed out of the room, one of them cradling the young protectively in his arms.

  The lights turned off behind them. For once, the dark was a welcome distraction. There was enough moonlight coming in through the window of their cell that, if she concentrated, she could still see the outline of Laura’s torn body, but at least could no longer see the blood.

  As she sat in the dark, thinking of what the Remur were doing, of what they wanted to take from womankind, she found herself finally getting angry. It was a welcome relief from the terror she’d been feeling since they’d been taken.

  Chapter 3

  Gabriel

  The Remur camp turned out to be exactly where the Remur slaves had said, in an abandoned complex on the outskirts of Paris. Storme had heard of places where animals were held captive in cages for their entire lives so that people, particularly children, could look at them. Forty years earlier, the complexes all over the world had been made illegal, but not all buildings had been easy to repurpose.

  They’d stashed their vehicles three miles away, hidden under some shrubbery. Better to walk the rest of the way than risk being trapped or having the Remur burn their vehicles.

  “Did I tell you guys what I saw while we were out there waiting for you?” Prado asked.

  Zander sighed. “Only about ten times, J., but please tell us again.”

  “A full-grown black bear with her baby. The mother was huge! Absolutely unbelievable,” Prado insisted.

  “You’re not an outdoors kind of guy, are you, J.? With people out of the way, it makes sense that wildlife would thrive,” Meir argued.

  Nobody replied to that.

  Storme looked around at his team. He couldn’t have chosen a better group of men to face the end of the world with. However different they might be, they all had two things in common: they were survivors and determined to take the world back from the aliens, no matter what.

  “I hate walking,” Kopf complained.

  Kopf was tall and muscular, and his legs easily ate up the distance. They all knew he didn’t really hate walking. What Kopf really loved, true to his Germanic origin, was complaining. As loudly and obnoxiously as possible. In the last fourteen months, they’d heard him complain about the heat, about the cold, about the walking, the driving … they’d all know to worry if the complaints ever stopped.

  “You hate lots of things,” Prado answered, good-naturedly, and they all chuckled.

  Jake Sawyer, Storme’s second-in-command, took off his black leather jacket and stuffed it inside his backpack. “You’re dusty, man,” he told Kopf.

  Kopf flipped him the bird. “Is that what passes for an insult in your neck of the woods?”

  Although Sawyer had lived in the European Space for many years, he’d never lost his soft Canadian drawl, and his choice insults came from a unique regional repertoire. Although Sawyer never lost his easy smile, and his green eyes often twinkled with good humor, Storme knew his friend had family back in Toronto, including younger twin sisters he hadn’t heard from since the invasion, and that thoughts of them kept him up at night.

  Next to Sawyer stood Javier Prado, known to all as J. He was a few inches shorter than the rest of the men in the team and was lean and long-limbed with the build of a long-distance runner—which he was, if one took into account the miles he’d put in with a long-range rifle strapped to his back. He’d grown up in Spain, and joined that country’s Special Group of Operations, becoming an expert sniper. As a hobby, he’d taken up lock-picking and loved bragging about his skills.

  They climbed a small hill, from which they could see a large part of the complex. They took in the high fences, the multiple storage sheds, the cages. Storme was impressed despite himself. It looked like a great place to hide in plain sight.

  “So where are they?” Prado asked, reading everybody’s mind. There was nobody around.

  Zander shrugged his huge shoulders. “Maybe they’re rounding up some more prisoners.”