Lora Leigh - Primal

“Why?”

“I can’t stay here.”

He almost asked about that, too—and then he realized he knew the answer. They’d dug out the school the day before. No survivors. Not the children, not her coworkers. And so she wanted to run from the memories, still raw and fresh. He understood that impulse, though it was doomed to fail. No matter where she went, when she closed her eyes, she’d see their faces and suffer the survivor’s guilt.

“It may be rough,” he warned.

“That’s fine. I just want to get away from here. I can help. Translate for you, if you need it. And it seems like I’m safer traveling with you.”

Silas could never have imagined a woman saying that to him, seeing his size and demeanor as good things. Protector, not jailor. Could he switch roles, this once? He could never make up for what he’d done, but maybe he could balance some of the weight. Late at night, in that awful place, he had read their files. He remembered all their names: everyone he’d hurt, everyone who died. There had been nothing else to do, apart from watch TV. He left old shows on for noise and company, but they didn’t assuage the need for human contact.

But down there, he had been the enemy, a collaborator who inflicted endless torment. Often, he’d thought of ending it. That way, the Foundation could never learn the truth about him, and he could stop the pain. He’d tried, once. The chip overrode his nervous system and forced him to black out. After that, he accepted his fate, but resignation was a terrible mistress.

On the outside, Silas had only one goal now. He wanted to find the families of those who had perished at Dr. Rowan’s hand and give them closure. He just didn’t know how to go about it. For the past months, he’d kept moving, fearful of staying in one place too long. The fear of being hunted had driven him out of the country, in fact. Led him here, to this moment, with this gray-eyed woman, gazing up at him in hope he’d save her once again. How fucking unlikely.

And yet he heard himself say, “Sure. It would be good to have company.”

She fell into step with him. He set a slow pace, mindful of her knee, though she was moving better now. Over the last two days, she hadn’t complained, though her leg was black-and-blue below the cuff of her baggy cargo shorts. She ought to be worried about replacing her possessions, her identification, and finding a U.S. embassy that could get her out of the country before things got worse. As it stood, he had no idea of her intentions.

It took longer than it should to work their way out of town. Twice, he glared refugees away; they were armed with rusty pipe, bits of broken glass. God knew, the last thing he wanted to do was fight, and only the fact that they obviously had nothing discouraged the looters. People prowled through the wreckage of damaged buildings, not looking for survivors, but for anything they could carry away. It felt to him like crows devouring the dead before the corpses had cooled.

The day waned as they made it to the southern outskirts of town. Sunsets were spectacular here along the coast, all violence and blood, red sky dotted with black-purple clouds; they reminded him of pocket galaxies being born. If not for the devastation behind them, he could almost believe they were taking a low-budget vacation, as if choice—and not the lack of it—had brought them to this pass.

What kind of woman left everything behind like this? Went walking toward the horizon with a man she’d met two days ago? Her contradictions fascinated him.

“Where are we headed?” she asked eventually.

“Salango is six kilometers south of here. The infrastructure may be destroyed there, too, I don’t know. If so, we’ll keep moving. Puerto Rico, Ayampe.” He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “It’s a longer hike to Olon. Sooner or later, we’ll find someplace with working phones, and buses running to other parts of the country.”

“I don’t have any money.” But she didn’t sound concerned; it was more a statement of fact.

He smiled at that. “Nor do I. This should prove interesting.”

“Surviving on our wits?”

“Exactly so.”

“Mine are pretty sharp,” she said, and her smile hit him like a magnetic field, as if he had been flung up and outward, and then landed hard. Breathless. Yeah. She rendered him fumbling and awkward, as he hadn’t been since his undergrad days.

Full dark fell before they reached Salango. He didn’t think they could get lost, sticking to the road, but her steps had slowed to the point that they were making almost no progress. So he called a halt.

“I’m thinking we make camp for the night.”

She glanced around, brow raised. “Where?”

“What’s left of that palapa , a few hundred meters down the beach. It’ll keep any rain off us, if not the wind and the insects.”

The structure had been built of palm fronds—withered dry now—and driftwood. It looked to him like a squatter’s hut. Half of it had pitched down, doubtless because of the shocks from the quake, but it was such a simple structure that it wouldn’t take him long to shore it up. They’d have to sleep on the sand, but compared to the lab, it would be heavenly. The sea air alone made up for any number of deficiencies.

“Hungry?” she asked.

He nodded as he went to work. There seemed no point in whining about it, though. Without another word, she went off down the beach, stooping to study the sand every now and then. For long moments, Silas watched her instead of repairing the hut. Pure distraction, she was.

Eventually, she returned with a couple of crabs, beaming in the moonlight. She dumped them in his hands and pulled out a pocket-knife. Without visible fear or disgust, she took care of the cleaning, cutting away the inedible bits. She cut the meat and then pierced them with a sliver of driftwood.

“If you can find some more dry wood, I can build a fire.”

She hadn’t been kidding when she said she’d be a help. He’d resigned himself to privation during the long walk. Though Silas had traveled a lot, both before and after his incarceration, he’d never done so as a wilderness type. He’d preferred riding the bus—people watching; disconnecting from the high-stress university job for three full months, and staying in hostels. But he always had a duffel bag and money in his pocket. Not this time.

Nodding, he went down the beach to look for firewood.

The world had changed in five years, and he wasn’t equipped to deal with it. Maybe some day he’d apply for a job at a college again. Hell if he knew what he’d put on his resume about his long disappearance off the grid. God knew it bespoke a certain instability. Some academic types were prone to that, vanishing to live in a trailer in the Arizona desert for ten years and then popping up with some new earthshaking theory that made the erratic behavior acceptable. He didn’t have a new hypothesis. He couldn’t chance working in that place, though it would’ve offered some solace. He couldn’t risk giving away the fact that their experiments hadn’t ruined his mind, as they thought. No, he had to maintain the façade at all times.

As long as Rowan believed he was broken, he had some hope of minimizing the collateral damage. If they’d managed to re-create their success in him for mass production, his ability would’ve been weaponized. Unthinkable. He’d had no choice but to keep the truth from them: he wasn’t their biggest failure. In strictest terms, besides T-89, he was the most powerful subject they’d ever produced. He was also the only one who’d successfully prevented them from discovering what he could do.

The walk took him a far ways before he thought he had enough wood to cook on, not that he could be sure. He returned at a run, worried now about leaving her alone in the dark so long. Granted, she was more capable than most, but she’d come with him for protection. If nothing else, his size deterred trouble.