Chapter 20 Luke
LUKE
Luke’s attention was suddenly split between two places at once.
He was dimly aware that he had fallen on Inga, and her arm was around him, but he had no attention to focus on that because he was also, somehow, on the deck of the ship.
And people were shooting at him.
It was dim and confusing. There was water everywhere, rain coming down sideways, but he barely felt it.
And there were people around him, men in black fatigues and rain gear, but they were smaller than they should be.
And they were shooting at him. He dodged and went much farther than he should have, a few long strides carrying him halfway across the deck—
Oh. He was a bear again.
So how was he a bear here when the human part of him was there with Inga? Something was really wrong. Even more wrong was the fact that the bullets didn’t seem to be hitting him, even though there was no possible way they could miss something bear-sized that had nowhere to run to.
It was only when he stumbled into something large on the deck, a big mooring cleat, and felt himself go into it that he realized he wasn’t entirely there.
There was some slight, strange resistance when his body touched and then stumbled into the solid object, as if it was dragging on him somehow, but wasn’t fully able to interact with him.
What is happening?!
Whatever was going on, they very clearly could see him. His appearance on deck, and his further resistance to going down even with men firing assault rifles at him, was causing ripples of panic and confusion around him.
The more attention he could keep on them up here, the less concern they would have for Inga and anyone else down in the boat. Luke reared up on his back legs with a roar. The men in front of him fell back, yelling.
“What in the hell is going on here?”
Even as a bear, and a bear who seemed to be in some kind of in-between ghost state, Luke felt his stomach go cold at the sight of Major Brockton.
Although he hadn’t terrorized the facility’s inhabitants in the same way as the Colonel who had run the island prison like his own fiefdom, Brockton had been his right-hand man, the enforcer of punishments, feared and hated by the research subjects under his control.
Brockton was a heavyset man, not tall but broad. He walked on deck like he owned it, which Luke was going to guess he did. Whatever his history with this ship, he must be using it as a base of operations now that the island facility had been destroyed.
“Sir! There’s a bear! I think it’s one of the research subjects—”
“I know it is,” Brockton growled. He raised a gun to aim at Luke. “I want him taken alive, if possible.”
“But sir, that’s the problem. We don’t know how. We’ve been shooting at him. It hasn’t done anything.”
Brockton gave the man the sneering look of someone confronted with the idiocy of a useless subordinate. “Have you tried a net?”
Luke dropped to all fours. The sight of Brockton, who had tormented him and so many of the other research subjects, who had been responsible for the deaths of Luke’s comrades in arms, was driving him into a frenzy.
And now that man was here, threatening Inga and everyone she cared about.
Without thinking about the consequences, he roared and charged.
To Brockton’s credit, not many men would have stood their ground while being charged by a polar bear. He braced his bulldog-thick legs, held the gun perfectly steady, and fired several times. Luke felt nothing, but there was a yell from someone behind him.
His fury was so all-consuming that he had completely forgotten he wouldn’t be able to touch Brockton until he had already charged through him.
As before, there was a sensation of resistance, but this time it came with something else, a shivering frisson down his nerves and a sudden flash of .
.. he wasn’t sure what, some vague memory or emotion that was not his own, and that was enough to shock him out of the haze of rage that had come down over him.
He stumbled to a stop and skidded around to see Brockton staring at him.
The man rarely showed emotion, but his eyes were wide and he looked more shocked than Luke had ever seen him.
“What are you?” he demanded.
Luke growled. Several of Brockton’s men closed in on them from both sides, and Brockton held up a hand to stop them. “No! It’s not going to work. He’s a ghost, somehow.”
He took a step closer to Luke, who had to force himself to stand his ground.
His nerves were still vibrating from that strange experience.
Luke had been inside Brockton’s mind somehow, for their brief instant of contact.
Although he remembered nothing of it except the sensation of having thoughts in his mind that were not his own, he felt as if he needed a shower.
“Some of our researchers thought the test subjects had gained more than just the shifting abilities we were after,” Brockton said.
He kept the gun leveled at Luke, although he had to know by now that it wouldn’t do anything.
“Are you even really here?” To himself, he added, “Could he make us hallucinate?”
Was he? Luke wondered. He had no idea how it worked. He was pretty sure that he was actually there, or some part of him was. He could feel the deck under his paws, the rain lashing at him—but dimly, as if through a thick layer of cotton batting.
“Johnson!” Brockton snapped at one of his men. “Where are the prisoners? One of them might know. Bring me the one in charge, the old woman. We’ll ask her.”
Prisoners? Luke’s ears pricked forward. When the soldier left the deck, Luke simply went after him, walking through the wall and the stairwell.
This was harder than his brief contact with a simple object on deck.
He could feel it dragging at him, trying to push him back. He had to force himself forward.
“Major!” the soldier yelled, raising his gun. “It’s following me!”
“All to the better,” Brockton said from behind him. “We don’t have to bring her to it. It’ll go to her.”
Luke absolutely hated the trapped feeling of being belowdecks in his bear form.
He was too big for the stairwells and hallways, so parts of him were literally inside the metal walls, giving him a cold, sluggish, unsettled feeling.
He couldn’t help thinking of what would happen if he were to become suddenly all the way here, his ghost-bear body becoming his real one. Would he be torn apart?
Meanwhile, he was conscious of his human body still limply draped on Inga in the smaller boat.
They were now being chased down by a speedboat from the ship.
Luke was aware of the other boat gaining on them, but he couldn’t do anything about it.
He tried to will himself back to his body, but nothing happened.
He realized that he had stopped at the bottom of the stairs in the hallway and was currently blocking everyone from going in either direction.
Even though people could walk through him, they didn’t seem to want to, which—okay, fair.
He moved forward to follow the soldier, who unlocked a door that led into what looked like some kind of lab.
As with seeing Brockton, his response was visceral and unexpected, a cold rush of panic through his entire body that nearly sent him scrabbling out into the hallway. Several people in the room erupting into screams at the sight of him didn’t help.
With an effort, he managed to calm himself. This was not the lab complex of Black Rock Island, where he and others had been experimented on. It didn’t even look like it; the similarities were superficial.
While he was getting over his panic, the room’s occupants had all fled to the far side, including several people in disheveled civilian clothes and an armed soldier who was now pointing a gun at him.
“Hey, calm down,” said Johnson, the soldier who had come in ahead of him. “Orders from the boss. I know this looks weird—”
“Weird? It’s a fucking bear, mate!”
“It’s a bear that’s sort of—not really here. I know, it doesn’t make much sense to me, either.”
“Huh?” the other soldier said.
While Johnson tried to explain—incoherently, since he had little idea what was going on either—Luke looked curiously at the civilians flattened against the wall behind the soldier.
There were three women and a man. The older woman with gray hair must be the one Brockton had been talking about.
She had glasses and wore a lab coat. The others were somewhat younger, and all had the slightly scruffy, rumpled look of people who had been in the same clothes for days.
They looked fit and outdoorsy, but not dangerous in the slightest.
Prisoners, Brockton had said. These people are the researchers from the ship, Luke thought. They’ve hijacked it and taken it over.
He growled at the idea, which made the civilians start screaming again.
“Shut up!” Brockton yelled from behind him.
Then, with a level of either fortitude or stubborn stupidity that Luke couldn’t help reluctantly being impressed by, he pushed through Luke’s mostly intangible bulk.
There was once again that creepy and wrong sensation of someone else’s thoughts in Luke’s head, which Brockton must have felt too, because Luke was also aware of a sudden but mercifully brief flash of discomfort coming from the other man. Then Brockton was through.
Seeing him emerge from a bear did nothing for the level of panic in the room.
“Calm the fuck DOWN!” Brockton bellowed. The civilians shut up, apparently more afraid of him than of either the bear or Brockton’s recently manifested ability to appear out of nowhere. “Now,” he said more calmly, “Dr. Park, I’d like you to—”
Luke never heard the rest of that sentence. He snapped back to his human body with a shock so abrupt that it left him dazed. He was wet, the boat was tipping, Inga was furiously yelling something, and they were being boarded.