AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I hear you.” There wasn’t enough time to say anything else.
The men in the black clothes were at the cell. Hard faced, their eyes so flat and cold, without mercy or compassion.
The metal door slid open soundlessly.
“Come on, you’re in transfer,” the tallest one announced as he moved to Judd. “Turn around.”
Judd turned, not even flinching as they strapped the hard plastic cuffs around his wrists.
Turning, Cat put her hands behind her back as well.
Both men laughed. “Yeah, you’re a real threat,” the shorter one scoffed before slapping her against the head painfully and pushing her to the door. “I’m not wasting my restraints on you.”
That was a mistake, but she wasn’t going to tell them that.
She was tiny. She looked frail. But an animal lurked inside her. One they wouldn’t expect and wouldn’t be
prepared for. One determined to live.
FOUR HOURS LATER
SOMEWHERE IN THE PENNSYLVANIA MOUNTAINS
Judd wondered if he should be in shock.
He stared at the guard who had gotten into the back of the van with them. He was sprawled out on the floor, the side of his neck ripped open as he stared up at the ceiling of the van sightlessly.
Cat hadn’t been messy about it. She’d moved so fast, with such deadly precision and sharp little teeth and claws, that at first Judd was certain he’d imagined what he was seeing. Until she’d reached into the guard’s belt, retrieved the releasing device and loosened the restraints on Judd’s ankles and wrists.
She’d returned to the narrow bench, huddled in the corner and stared at the narrow window where the scenery passed by in a haze of midnight shadows.
“G said I had to be ready,” she whispered. “We’ll only have one chance to run.”
She still believed Gideon had been taken from her. No one had been able to convince her that Gideon had escaped and left her and Judd there alone until he could arrange for Dr. Bennett, the new director of the center, to have them transferred to the euthanasia facility.
What would she do when she realized Gideon was really alive?
“Cat, listen to me.” Kneeling next to her, carefully Judd reached out, touched her dirty face and turned it to him.
Gideon was going to go ape shit. The lab techs hadn’t allowed Cat to properly bathe since Gideon’s escape. Her hair hung in dirty strings and dirt marred her face and hands.
“Gideon will be here . . .”
She shook her head fiercely. “He wouldn’t leave me like that.” Tiny fingers curled into fists. “He wouldn’t leave me, Judd.”
“To save you, he would have left you, Cat.”
A feral snarl and snap of tiny incisors had him jerking his head back instinctively, staring back at her in shock.
“G wouldn’t do that!” The pain in her face, in her eyes, broke his heart for her. “He wouldn’t leave me alone. Never. And he wouldn’t take my teddy from me even if he did.”
But he would have, if he’d hidden dozens of nano flash chips in it that he’d filled with information he’d stolen over the years. Generations of experiments, genetic coding and Breed research had been hidden in that tattered little bear.
There was no time to explain all that, though.
He was out of time.
Gideon’s warning shot sounded and lit the night sky like the fourth of July.
