Alpha Contact by P.K. Hawkins

Author:P.K. Hawkins [Hawkins, P.K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2017-07-28T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Johnson slapped Bernhard across the face. He took it, accepting that he probably deserved it.

“You bastard!” Johnson yelled in his face. Her cheeks were wet from tears, but she had already stopped crying. Instead, her eyes were full of the fury of someone who had thoroughly fallen for a nasty bluff. “I actually thought you were going to kill them!”

“I may put my country and my daughter above everything else,” Bernhard said as he rubbed the red mark on his jaw. “But I’m not so heartless that I would blatantly kill innocent people. I just needed the Nerve to think I would.”

Houston picked himself up from where he’d been unceremoniously been thrown to the floor. “Wait a second,” he asked. “Where the hell did Dufresne go?”

“They took her with them,” Teng said. “There’s no chance to save her. She is probably already part of the Nerve.”

Bernhard saw several worms trying to work their way out of the mouth of Xiang’s corpse. He had no choice but to smash the man’s head with his rifle until he was certain that nothing else was going to come out. Once he was done, he finally had a chance to take stock of everything around them.

The room was a mess of bullets and casings and blood. None of their shots had actually gone into the walls, but whatever material they were made of had thankfully absorbed the impact and prevented ricochets. Chow, McNeil, and Hodges had already grabbed their weapons once more, while the weapons left behind by Hatch, Sorensen, and Stroebel were distributed among those scientists who had any experience at all with firearms. Li, the only one among the Chinese scientists that was still alive and human, stood where she had been against the wall, still too shell-shocked to move. Teng went over to her and gently coaxed her to join with Johnson and Houston where they could continue examining the dead worms.

Johnson, however, wasn’t quite finished with Bernhard yet. “That was a really shitty thing to do, you know.”

“I said I was sorry,” Bernhard said. “It was the only way I could think of that might smoke out the Nerve.”

“So you were never really going to shoot them?”

“No.”

“But what if it hadn’t worked? What if you got to three and nobody had moved?”

“Then we wouldn’t have been any worse off than we were before. It was a chance I needed to take.”

“But how do you know for sure that the Nerve didn’t leave one of its bodies behind to keep up the charade?” Houston asked. “There’s still a possibility that someone among us could be an alien spy.”

“Yes, it is possible,” Bernhard said. “That’s why we’re not going to let our guard down anymore, and why we all stay within each other’s sights at all times from now on.”

“Where the hell did they even go?” Hodges asked. “You’d think the Nerve would stay behind to try killing us. I mean, it’s not like it actually cares if it loses any bodies it takes over, right?”

“No, it probably doesn’t,” Bernhard said.

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