Not a man, the thought hit me. A thick hide hung over a towering seven-foot frame. The fur of arms and legs sat flat against powerful legs and muscled arms.
The three-inch thick, bristled coat towered above his shoulders, and a round open-jawed skull sat atop his head with white canines the length of my damn hand.
But the hide he wore was no wolf.
This was a bear.
“Jesus,” Alpha whispered. “There’s more…so many fucking more. All the way back to the first. Operation Immortal, and the first poor bastards they infected.”
He flicked through the pages as I stared at a man who made the even the Guardian Zadoc look fucking tiny. I turned the image over, scrawled in neat writing were the words…Berserker, savage, bear-shifter. Clan exterminated. My gut clenched with the words.
“Fuck this shit was primitive. Listen to this…the young male subject seemed to accept the transmission of Class 1 DNA until he started to show signs of regression to his baser instincts.” He wrenched his head upward, brow narrowed. “Baser instincts. What the fuck does that mean?”
Gunny leaned close and raised her hand to flick through the images affixed to the front. “Looks pretty straightforward to me. The guy went bat-shit crazy and tried to eat his own face off.”
“Not until after he ate three others.” Alpha winced and looked away from the photos. “Jesus, that poor bastard.”
“So he was the first?” I murmured, trying to piece it all together.
Alpha nodded, lifting the image to scan the document. The word Condemned splashed boldly across the front in red. “Yeah seems to be. This whole place was the first…very black fucking ops then. Started Twenty-eleven, complete with underground bunkers and a goddamn elite training camp. Until they were attacked by Berserker’s...Jesus, I’ve heard some crazy ass stories about them, they’re one fucking species I do not want to meet. They attacked…”
An icy breath blew against the back of my neck, puckering the airs on my arms. “Don’t tell me February nineteen, right?”
“Yeah.” He lifted his head to the tiny slip of paper in my hand and then turned to the file with a little more determination. “Jesus, yeah. Killed them all. The doctors, Marines…the subjects. That’s what it says, subjects. They mean the people they were experimenting on, don’t they? This place has to mean something, right? Subject X,” he murmured. “Young male candidate. eighteen years old.” He leaned close and flicked through the images. “Sorry sonofa—”
He froze. The paper in his hand shook. “Gunny…Gunny.”
She whipped her gaze around the room, and then narrowed on the male.
My brother’s eyes were wide as he lifted the file. “This kid, he look familiar to you?”
I stepped close, staring at the geeky looking kid. He was shirtless, ribs stuck out of a scrawny frame. His skin was sunken, dark circles under his eyes below the inch-thick glasses across his face.
I knew that kid.
I fucking knew that kid.
“Hiccups.” The name bloomed from the dark recesses of my mind. Back from when we were nothing more than recruits, and a mess of skin, bones, and fucking snot.
“Hiccups,” Alpha murmured. “Yeah, that’s him. That's fucking him. He came through with us, right?”
I tried to resurrect those dark times, all the pain and the agony. “The kid started hiccupping whenever Sergeant asked him a question.”
“Pissed his pants too, didn't he?” Alpha’s brow narrowed. “Yeah, that was him. Felt sorry for the kid.”
“You beat the shit outta Bruno for making fun of him. First time I ever noticed you,” I murmured and that moment returned in a vivid display of blood, snot, and tears—and none of those were Alpha’s.
He was the perfect little recruit—buff, steel-jawed motherfucker. No one wanted to mess with him. Not with a name like fucking Slater. I glanced back at the open cabinet with its shimmering ribbons and medals. His uncle hadn’t been a Major General then, but he had a name as one hard-nose bastard—one you didn’t want to mess with.
And no one did. Not until that day. The day Bruno and his buddy Strep decided to pick on the weak and Alpha stepped in.
“Hiccups,” Alpha muttered and lifted those dark eyes to mine. “They beat him bloody, cracked his glasses, bruised his damn back. The kid pissed blood for days.”
I wanted to remind him about Bruno, who when he went to the infirmary, was never seen again. Alpha put a target on his back that day. One that made every half-brained, testosterone ape-looking sonofabitch take a nice hard look at the kid with a name.
And that’d always been his problem. He was the knight in shining armor. The blazing white flag in the face of all the heavy shit that went down…
They were waiting for him one night. Fresh from the shower he walked straight into the ambush. No one liked the kid with a name, not after sending their buddy Bruno packing. We’d been force-fed pain from the very first day we arrived. Every ten-mile run, and every minute you struggled in that damn pool with your hands tied behind your back.
Fear was nothing more than a shadow. One to sidestep in pursuit of the light. So when they came for him—they came hard and fast. And white knight here went down—hard.
I was the complete opposite.
I was the fucking shadows—the one they never saw coming—not until it was far too late.
And come I did, with silver, crimson, and finally, black.
An ex-druggie from the streets, and Mr. Fucking Perfection himself.
No one expected us to stand shoulder to shoulder.
No one expected us to be a force.
And yet here we were, rock-fucking-steady all these years later.
“They took him,” Alpha muttered. “They took him and they tortured him.”
“Says multiple abnormalities present on this report from the MRI. Swelling in the Amygdala, showing as hypervigilance, increased stress and manic episodes resulting in self-destructive behaviors. Says he attacked a nurse, ripped her apart with his bare hands before tearing through the research center and howling like a wolf.”
“It sent him mad. Sent him fucking mad.”
“There’s more,” Gunny murmured and flicked through the stack of pages. “More men…lots more men—names, dates…causes of death. Jesus.” She swallowed hard. “The last one was a woman. Shows signs of increased cognitive behaviors previously unattained in prior subjects. They recommend more clinical trials with females.”
“She was the first one,” Alpha muttered. “Ground fucking zero. Jesus Christ who are these people? Who the Hell takes men and women, and little fucking girls, and does this?”
The same men we fought for, bled for…the Military. The Government. That was who.
“Where is this place?” I nodded to the file in his hand.
He shook his head, flicked through the rest of the pages until he came to the very back. “Ridenhouse. That’s all that’s written.”
Gunny skimmed her finger across the screen of her phone and pressed the handset to her ear. She moved away, relaying what information we had to Irwin, and then quietened. “What, no. Artemas? What did he have to say? No…nothing here. Send me the link.”