Page 55 of Her Eternal Mate

“You bet,” I said, patting him on the shoulder.

“Shh!” Will whispered from above. There was movement in the corridor ahead. It was a guttural sound, followed by screeching and dragging. It did not look like whoever was ahead was alive.

“What the fuck is that?” Maliha gasped, pointing her flashlight at the silhouette at the far end of the corridor.

It was alive, moving, and grunting. I raced ahead of the group to see what it was. It was a soldier, barely holding onto life, dragging his broken body behind him.

“How in the fuck is he still alive?” Vincent called out from behind.

“It’s not uncommon,” Will said, grabbing that half-dead, half-alive soldier from the collar. “Hurry, Vince.”

Vince went over to the soldier and pried his jaw open with his fingers. The soldier tried to struggle, but Vince prevailed and only stopped when he had taken the cyanide capsule tooth out of the soldier’s mouth, preventing him from committing suicide.

“What’s not uncommon?” Maliha squealed. “This entire place, this fucking body, it’s giving me the heebie-jeebies!”

“Focus!” I whispered. “He’s still alive. We have to get his blood and tissue samples. Can you do it?”

I watched as Maliha opened her backpack and took her sampling kit out. She inserted a syringe into the squirming body of the soldier and extracted blood. Then, she took a scalpel and tore off bruised flesh from his skin. The soldier writhed in pain and screamed at the top of his voice.

“Are we done?” Will asked.

I looked at Maliha, who nodded. It was as if Will was waiting for the signal. As soon as Maliha was done, Will stomped his foot on the soldier’s head and crushed it into a pulp of blood, brain, and bones.

“Fuck!” Maliha yelled in disgust.

“What? It had to be done. He was of no use to us. Besides, he was in pain. I only gave him mercy,” Will said. “Ah, and to answer your question, when soldiers kill other soldiers in war, it’s not uncommon for one or two defeated soldiers to barely survive. He may have feigned death earlier in hopes that he’d live. But unlucky for him, we were thorough.”

“I’m sorry, Will. I should have paid more attention,” Vince said.

“Don’t beat yourself up. He would have died anyways,” Will said, placing his hand on Vince’s shoulder.

On the other hand, I was entirely focused on what Maliha was doing. Her fingers were hovering and tapping on her laptop as she plugged in the sampler and ran her tests. Everything depended upon her right now.

We stayed put in that abandoned building, seeking shelter in one of the rooms while Maliha tapped away on her keyboard. The air stank of dead bodies and stale blood. The moonlight shone through the broken windows, creating a haunting scene reminiscent of every horror movie I’d ever seen.

“I don’t like this,” Maliha said after almost an hour. She looked up from her laptop, staring at the three of us. “Guys, this soldier…there’s more to him than just the bodily mutations. He’s got this neural link in his system that connects him to every other soldier. Nano-particles. Quantum computing. It’s nothing like I’ve ever seen before!”

“What does it mean?” Will asked.

“Okay, so it’s like a hive mind. These soldiers are controlled by one source. They have no soul of their own. It’s like they’re zombies. They don’t feel pain or remorse or any of the feelings we feel. They are controlled through a neural device. I’m guessing that’s Blair’s doing?”

“Holy fuck,” Vincent whispered, his fingers running through his hair.

I was at a loss for words. I had known that Blair was up to something menacing, but I had no idea that it would be this devastating.

“Hive mind?” Will asked.

“Yes. Someone is controlling all the soldiers through wireless signals that are caught by the neural antennas in each of these soldiers. Look. There are traces of Nano-devices within their bloodstream,” Maliha said, showing me the screen.

“An army of mindless, mass-controlled, mutated soldiers,” Will said, his hand covering his mouth.

“Will,” I said, suddenly getting up upon hearing the rumbling sound booming from right beneath us. “We’re not alone.”

It was too late when we all noticed it.

The floor burst with an explosion, and a hundred soldiers poured through from every direction, their red, maddened eyes visible from behind the visors of their helmets. They held guns in their hands, but from the sounds that they were making, I knew that these soldiers were no more than pawns controlled by Blair.

Barely a second after they had invaded the building, the soldiers leaped upon us in perfect coordination, proving Maliha’s theory about them being controlled through a hive mind.

---