Page 2 of Craved By the Hunter
He didn’t purr.
Thank fuck.
Once freed from the shuttle, which sat in three pieces in the corner of the large, abandoned grocery store I’d turned into my shop, I made a beeline for the door. Our group lived in a strip mall that once boasted a large supermarket, several fast-food places, a pharmacy, a hardware store, and doctor’s offices on the second floor.
I stepped into the crisp winter air and took a deep breath, letting the cold fill my lungs. The parking lot of our shopping plaza home was blanketed in a sheer layer of white, and the sunglinted off the snow, making it sparkle. I tilted my face to the sky as snowflakes landed on my cheeks and eyelashes like tiny, frozen kisses.
There was a sense of peace. Of calm. And for a moment, lost in the magic of the first snowfall of the season, I almost forgot about the deadly space bugs that roamed our planet. I almost forgot about the alien spacecraft waiting for me to fix it, and most importantly, I almost forgot about the annoying and ungrateful purple warrior who owned the ship.
Despite it being late morning, I didn’t see any flyers in the air. Strange, since it was a relatively sunny day with just a light dusting of snow from a random passing cloud. Flyers usually loved days like these, even in winter, when they were the least active.
Fine by me. I hated those nasty critters. They were like giant flying scorpions, except instead of pincers they had a giant spike at the end of their tails. And when there was one, there were always more; they never traveled alone, only in twos or threes. Worse, they could call in swarms of scuttlers and spitters with a single cry.
Today, though, the sky was devoid of them.
I ducked back under the awning and hurried next door to what once used to be a pharmacy. It was now a large multi-purpose meeting-room-slash-cafeteria area they called the Hub.
The heady aroma of freshly brewed coffee filled my nostrils the moment I opened the door. That was the reason I was here. Sweet, sweet caffeine. The world still ran on it, even though it had ended. Talk about a lifelong addiction.
“Hey, Sam!” Heather waved to me from the long row of tables where the buffet-style breakfast was laid out.
“Hey, Heather. Any news on the gophers?” I scanned the buffet hopefully.
Most of the good stuff was gone since it was already late morning. I’d spent most of the morning working on Pip. Oh, well. My bad for waiting. I grabbed a slightly hardened breakfast burrito that had seen better days. We were fortunate to have eggs, thanks to the chickens we’d brought over from Franklin, although they’d slowed down their laying for the winter.
“Yeah.” Heather sipped on her coffee. “I got the go-ahead to release the ones we brought to the lab back into their burrows. And the rest of the colony responded well to treatment, so that’s good.”
That had been a recent scare. Some idiots had claimed that eating the gophers had infected them with the scourge’s fungus. Left untreated the fungus turned any living thing into a zombie, ready to be eaten by the scourge. Some victims turned into lumbering, dumb zombies. Others turned into rampaging, angry ones. Either way, once the sores started showing up and oozing everywhere, the smell drawing in the scourge, it was too late.
When the Xarc’n warriors caught wind of this rumor, they’d taken it seriously and gotten worried that the gophers had developed some sort of immunity and were now a host. Luckily, that hadn’t been the case. They were just infected.
“That’s fantastic,” I said, grabbing a big mug and pouring myself some java. “Space bugs are bad enough. We don’t need rabid, flesh-eating gophers too.”
Yikes. I shuddered at the thought. Many of Earth’s creatures were now extinct, or severely endangered. It would suck if one of the animals that actuallydiddo well in the bug apocalypse ended up switching sides. Personally, I was ready for the bugpocalypse to end, like, yesterday.
I understood why the Xarc’n experts had reacted out of the proverbial abundance of caution. The last big mutation on Earth had been the centicreeps, and that was years ago. We were long overdue for another one.
“Amen to that! Rabid, flesh-eating gophers would definitely suck. How’s Pip coming along?”
I huffed out a breath, then looked around cautiously to make sure Kan’n hadn’t followed me. Not seeing him, I said, “Honestly, I don’t know how I got myself into this. I’ve fixed little things on the shuttles here and there for the hunters back in Franklin. But this is different.”
“Didn’t they translate a bunch of manuals for you to look over? I thought they said the shuttles are super easy to fix since hunters are engineered to fight, not to understand and fix machinery.”
“They are. The normal ones, anyway. I have no problem repairing them. Pip’s…different.” I stirred in the long-expired, dairy-free powdered creamer substitute. It didn’t dissolve readily. But hey, lumpy coffee was better than no coffee at all.
“How so?”
Everyone at the base knew that PIP was what the Xarc’n military had called a “personality and intelligence prototype.” They had been working on the project at the same time as they played with scourge genetics. They’d tested it in several dozen spacecraft, but had eventually scrapped the project.
They had just started deleting the programming from the machines when they lost control of the scourge. Every PIP shuttle now in the galaxy was a copy of one of the few lucky ones that had survived the cull. Unfortunately, since every copyretained the memories of the original, they all remembered being terrified of getting deleted.
All of them includingourPip.
“Working on Pip is kind of like repairing a shuttle, being a therapist, and babysitting a third grader at the same time. I’m only good at one of those. The final part of the repair entails disconnecting the power source. The moment I try to do that, Pip freaks out. He thinks he’ll never wake up again.”
“Aww, poor thing. That’s actually kind of adorable.” Heather clutched her hand to her heart. “But hasn’t he been worked on before?”
“Yeah, the last time he was on the mothership. But that was before his secret was out and everyone thought he was a shuttle with normal AI, not a special PIP model. He allowed them to work on him because he had to, but he was terrified then too. Just now he tried to lock me inside the cockpit so I couldn’t get out to disconnect his power source.” I sipped on my coffee, which was unfortunately already lukewarm; no wonder the creamer wouldn’t dissolve.