He clicked his claws together.
“I will tear every last one of these mothers from their sternum to their asshole,” Tate said. “They’ll regret the day they turned me into a Hybrid.”
O’Neil tried to take some solace in Tate’s attitude. Maybe he was right.
The brass would be sending someone else to finish the job. Someone else to find out what had happened to them.
And when they inevitably came, then he would be ready.
Of course… if the Russians were winning, taking over Europe and using the Skulls and Hybrids to their advantage, maybe…
No, he refused to believe they could win.
“Who the hell do you think they’re going to send?” Loeb said. “We’re the best the US got, and, well, this is what happens.”
“Nah, man, they’ll do it,” Tate said.
“Yeah, sure,” Loeb said. “Maybe they’ll send the Hunters. Those mercs seem to be getting their hands dirty all over the world. Why not here? Or maybe Santa and his fucking reindeer will show up to fly us to freedom. Just as believable.”
“Quit it,” O’Neil said. “Remember, it’s not just the United States in this war now. Hell, Khalid said the Moroccans are in it.”
“Khalid?” Loeb asked.
“The guy that we questioned at the villa,” O’Neil said. “We’ve already seen other countries banding together to fight these monsters. There has to be someone outside these walls ready to break in. Ready to end what we started.”
“We hardly started anything,” Loeb said.
“Jesus, man,” Tate said. “We showed the Russians that they aren’t untouchable. We showed them we know more about them than they realized. We are gonna show them they fucked up, too.”
“You’re damn right,” O’Neil said. He wiped his claws on his soiled uniform. Or at least what was left of it. “There will be an end to this.”
Loeb shook his head, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, cleaning off some of the juice from the rotten meat they had eaten earlier. “You know when I decided to become a SEAL?”
“Nah, man, I don’t,” Tate said.
Loeb traced his claws down the steel bars. “I used to do rodeo. Always dreamed of competing in the Las Vegas Rodeo or the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. Those were the big-leagues.” For a moment, his cracked lips and jagged teeth broke into a grin. “I used to rope calves with my dad when I was a kid. Wanted to eventually ride bulls like my brother.”
“No, shit,” Tate said. “You are crazy, man.”
“I was,” Loeb said. “Watched my brother compete. Then he got thrown off a bull bad one time. Broke his back. He was out of the rodeos for a year, but you know what he did when the doc said he was healed?”
“He didn’t,” Tate said.
“He did. Made it another couple of years before he broke his wrist. Didn’t care. Kept competing until… he took another bad fall. Fluke accident really. Didn’t clear the bull. Fell under its hooves. I can still remember the snap. The ambulance sirens.” Loeb closed his eyes. “I can tell you he never got on a bull again after that. Only thing he rode was a damn wheelchair.”
“Shit, man, I’m sorry,” Tate said.
“For me?” Loeb asked. “Don’t be. When I saw that, I lost every desire I had to be like my brother. Figured I’d take a different route. Joined the Navy.” He let out a low laugh. “I think my parents were relieved. Thought it would be safer than being a wannabe rodeo cowboy.”
Loeb shook his head. “Guess they were wrong, huh?” he asked.
“You did the right thing,” Tate said. “No one could’ve known this shit was gonna happen.”
O’Neil almost forgot his pain for the moment. Almost forgot how much death they had seen. How one of the members of their team was missing.
He relished the distraction. If he ignored the grunts and growls of the other prisoners and just listened to his swim buddies, he could nearly pretend they really were just shooting the shit back on the beach in Virginia.
“Tate, what’s your story?” O’Neil asked.
Tate scratched at his bulging ribs with his claws. Then he gritted his teeth for a second, pinching his eyes closed.
“You okay?” O’Neil asked.
“The pain,” Tate said. “One of those waves where you feel like every nerve is splitting.”
O’Neil cringed. He knew the feeling only too well. “Maybe you should sit down. Get some rest.”
“That ain’t happening,” Tate said. “You asked me about joining the SEALs. I’ll tell you. Simple story. I went to a charter school, southside of Chicago. When I grew up, I heard people calling my city Chiraq. Talking about all the violence, the gangs.
“All I knew was that it was my home, right? I loved the city. But man, all these people talking about shit, I realized I never left the city except for swim competitions. I was pretty damn good at those, but when I was out for a competition, I didn’t exactly explore the places I went to. My mind was on winning, know what I mean?”
O’Neil knew. There was that competitive streak. That striving to do be the best so many SEALs shared.
“I got a scholarship to swim in college, but it was just to some place in the middle of the cornfields in Southern Illinois,” Tate continued. “I figured, if I was going to leave the city, I should really leave the city. Dumb kid that I was, I thought riding big ships around the world in the Navy might be good. Then I’d learn to really handle guns, how to fight. All the assholes on the block who though they were hot shit would be scared of me when I came back to visit my ma. And shit, I was good at swimming, so naïve as I was, I thought the Navy would just welcome me right into the SEALs.
“Wasn’t that easy, but I cut my teeth in EOD and, well, you all know the rest.”
Those stories provided only a brief diversion from the pain.
The screams rocketing through the facility, the shrieks of Skulls outside brought him back to the hell they lived in.
Every time O’Neil heard a gunshot, he wondered if that was the beginning of a rescue op. If maybe someone was trying to infiltrate the Russian base.
But as time wore on, he grew used to the gunshots. He grew used to feeling the rage of the monsters and the chemical signals that he had to fight back, to prevent from succumbing to them.
He grew used to the idea that no one was coming to save them.
That they were going to rot in this cell.
He could hear constant hammering around the base, and the rumble of engines, like the Russians were working to reinforce the base’s defenses. They even installed key cards on the prison cell doors.
Even if someone was coming, it was going to be a lot harder to get into this base than before.
As the Russians continued working on their base, they also took an endless stream of Skulls through the lab facility. Almost as if they were processing them for slaughter. Rumors flew between the prisoners about what they might be doing. More lab studies. Butchering them for parts. Using them to make the Oni Agent.
No one truly knew, but O’Neil lost track of how many beasts had passed between those walls after he had counted into the hundreds.
Occasionally the Russians would take one of the prisoners from the cell.
Screams would come from the operating room. O’Neil was no exception. The prisoners, when they weren’t being tested on their abilities to influence the Skulls, were cut open and sliced so the grizzled doctor could examine their transformations. The doctor scraped off pieces of the bone growing over O’Neil’s body or sliced off chunks of flesh to run experiments on. He poked and prodded at O’Neil, inflicting pain with every touch.
And other times, O’Neil found himself strapped onto that pole in that dark room again. Asked to fend off a Skull or two using only the power of that chip they had implanted against his brain. It got easier and easier to force the Skulls back. To convince them to leave him alone.