SHE’S HUMAN, I tell myself. Not weak, just human. “Stay with me,” I mutter as I carry her back to my room. I sniff her hair, which is partially in my face. She smells enticing and that isn’t a good thing.
“Please put me down,” she requests when we’re halfway to our destination.
I slowly drop her legs and tilt her body upright. Breathing heavily, she grabs the wall and hangs her head. A few seconds later, she places her hands on her knees and takes huge gulping breaths of air.
I say nothing as I wait for her to gain control.
“It’s a panic attack,” she says after her breathing slows. “I get them occasionally.” She stands straight and closes her eyes for a moment. “You’ve given me a lot to think about. Please take me to my room so I can sort it out in my mind.” Sweat at her temple captures strands of hair and they stick to her pasty, soft skin. Incredibly soft skin.
“This way,” I point to the right and walk ahead of her to put distance between us. The sounds of her feet are sluggish behind me. Strangely, Beast is behaving. When I picked her up, he remained unusually quiet. I’m the one who had trouble seeing her in distress and having her so close. She’s human and I can’t ever forget that.
I owe her father. I do not, however, owe the Federation and there lies the problem. As it stands, I can’t trust her to leave with this information, yet. We aren’t sure what the Federation knows. Greystone kept a journal and through it, we’ve pieced together some things Secretary of Defense Church spoke to him about. It shouldn’t matter at this point, but it does. The Federation needs to give us all the information they have on the hellhounds. If we had worked together from the beginning, we might have a better way of destroying the enemy other than severing individual heads. We believe the first wave of hounds were those who died in the past fifty years. The next wave will be those who are older. Will they be stronger? Weaker? Smarter? We aren’t sure. From studying the creatures, we know they are intelligent on some level. They methodically test their restraints and when they discover they can’t escape, they stop trying and simply wait. This isn’t lost on any of us.
What we don’t know is if they can communicate with each other. We’ve been working on experiments that would prove or disprove the theory but so far, we’ve gotten nowhere. When they first attacked, they came in waves and this is why we are even considering communication skills. If they can communicate, we’ll find out how and use it to our advantage.
I believe the Federation has its own experimental monster collection. I wasn’t completely honest with Marinah. From documentation my Warriors found in the U.S., the old government knew what was happening long before the first electromagnetic waves hit. As far as the two U.S. governments go—new verses old—there’s not much difference. I need to ask Marinah a hundred questions she’s unlikely to answer. Or worse, she doesn’t know the answers.
What we do know is when the hellhounds die, their bodies or dust from their bodies contaminate the ground and any bodies in the path reanimate. The formaldehyde also leaks from coffins and contaminates surrounding plots. We are battling our own dead and the next wave will be worse because they are evolving into something else entirely. They’re watching us and calculating our weaknesses. It wasn’t this way in the beginning or none of us would still be breathing. Marinah thinks they’re coming. What she hasn’t figured out is they’re already here.
Waiting.
I leave her at her door with her guards and head to the outside training yard. My body is reacting strangely to hers and I don’t like the feeling. The clash of metal hits my ears as soon as I open the large door leading to the inner courtyard. Greystone trained us young and he never let up. I remember running fifty miles thinking my legs would fall off and him attacking me with a knife when I was completely exhausted. He was a sly man when it came to establishing ambushes for his trainees. Even knowing an assault would come from him at some point, predicting it was impossible. I miss him.
The Warriors I watch this evening are a product of Greystone’s forward thinking. He knew we would be fighting for our lives again. He knew a gentler, kinder, farming Shadow Warrior was not what the world would need. Before he died, he told me it was his survival instinct and nothing more that brought him to that conclusion.
“Whether on our home planet or Earth, history repeats itself. People think it won’t happen, but it eventually takes down every society in the great galaxies,” he’d often preach.
Greystone studied the failures we had on our home planet through our historical texts and knew Earth was not far behind when he looked at the two histories as a whole. I would give anything to have Greystone at the helm again. He was both the best and worst of us. He found a way to balance the two. I’ve failed at that. Hatred for humans burns inside me still. Maybe that’s why Marinah challenges Beast so much. My control is not as good as I thought and around her it unravels fast. She makes me feel unsettled and I don’t understand why.
I pick up one of the broadswords hanging from a rack and charge onto the training field. Beck sees me, says something to his opponent, and heads my way. I lift my sword and the fight is on. Sword fighting didn’t come naturally to us in the beginning. After we discovered separating a hellhound’s body from his head was the quickest way to eliminate the threat, we began training with broadswords. Our claws will do the job too, but there’s more chance of us taking a bite or scratch when we fight to close. A high-powered gun will do it if you can blast off the entire head, but as the war went on, having enough ammunition became a problem. Most humans don’t have the arm strength to wield the weapons we used in the beginning and sever the head in one blow. Marinah’s father was an exception. He couldn’t do it in one blow, but he was quick, and his second strike stopped the threat.
Our swords are now heavier than a medieval broadsword weighing in at double the weight. A big misconception about medieval battles was the sword weight. Five and a half pounds was the very top end for a sword that took two hands to wield. Ours weigh in at ten pounds and the length is longer coming in at fifty inches. This accommodates our larger bodies. We custom-made our own weapons after landing in Cuba using the steel from old cars and now it’s all we use for hand-to-hand combat when training. Too many of our warriors are hard to control when they first transition. It’s also becoming harder to control them the longer our Beasts are given free reign, which is what we now practice. It’s vital that we control ourselves for the sake of the women and children. My uncle may have thought history repeats itself, but I aim to prove him respectfully wrong.
In warrior form, we’re proficient with large firepower if the trigger guard is modified to accommodate our claws. Even so, swords are now our first line of defense followed by guns. When the shit really hits the fan, we’ll use our claws and teeth.
The biggest problem is the sheer numbers of hellhounds we face. We don’t expect this second war to be easier and know it will be far, far worse. More than fifty billion humans are currently buried on Earth. The genetically modified formaldehyde does not stop at only those embalmed with it. We’ve tested the ground hundreds of feet down and found the formaldehyde compound searching for the dead. We know this because greater concentrations are found around older cemeteries where the new formaldehyde wasn’t used. We’ve begun digging up remains and killing the creatures before they are completely transformed. The problem is that different countries and cultures had different ways of handling dead bodies. Even in the U.S., you could bury a loved one on your own land in most places as long as you had a permit. Here in Cuba the practice was used often. We can identify many cemeteries and destroy what we find, but we cannot find each person buried on private property.
The two hellhounds we currently have are newly made. We came across them about six months ago. They aren’t our first and we’ve been studying them since before the war ended.
I’m brought out of my thoughts of hellhounds when Beck’s sword comes uncomfortably close to my throat and I jump back. I realize I need my head in the fight or I’ll lose it.
“About time you woke up,” Beck grunts as he blocks my strike.
“The woman knows about the hounds and what made them.”
It’s Beck’s head that almost separates from his shoulders this time. “You told her,” he says and lays the tip of his sword in the dirt. I pull my next blow and do the same. “If fighting beside humans is to work, we must trust her.”
He places one hand on his hip and I almost smile at the prissy picture he presents. “But do you?”
“I’m trying.”