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  “Surround them!” he ordered. “I have the rear! Two take the sides! One head up front! We’re lighter than they are, so you should have no problem keeping up! Make a ring around them and tear them apart from all sides! Use the passing drivers as shields and take your shots when you can!”

  As ordered, the other three bikes spread out and positioned themselves around the sports car, swerving around the passing vehicles zooming by as they closed in on Nia and Alvarez.

  Alvarez released the gas as the bikers sped ahead, intending to evade them by slowing down, but they were on to his plans. The rider on the left also slowed and lined up with the car again, opening fire at once. Nia and Alvarez ducked in their seats, scarcely avoiding the bullets that flew over their heads and left spider web cracks in the front windshield. Nia returned gunshots but the biker was already out of the way.

  Nia turned to Jesús and yelled, “They’re on both sides of us. You know what to do!”

  Alvarez nodded as Nia crouched in her seat. He tightly grasped the steering wheel, flashed teeth and turned hard to the left, slamming into the biker on the left of the car. Alvarez repeated the action to take out the biker on the right. Both lost control of their bikes and skidded from the road, capsizing on their sides and skidding away.

  Nia sighed. “I’m sorry…that must have been murder on your paint job.”

  “Just worry about taking care of that one in front of us.”

  The soldier driving in front of them fired backward, his rapid-fire bullets ripping through the windshield, showering glass in all directions.

  Nia instantly stood in her seat, pressed her foot on the dashboard to steady herself and stuck out her arms, her dual pistol rounds tearing through the biker and his vehicle. His bike fell and spun on the road as Alvarez floored the gas and shot past, knocking the motorcycle aside. The spinning wreck grinded on the street, a pinwheel of sparks shooting skyward. It crashed into a guardrail and erupted in an orange cloud of flame.

  “Yes!” Nia shouted. “That’s all of them—ah!”

  Blood spattered on the passenger seat of Alvarez’s car after a gunshot; Nia’s blood. Billy’s attack grazed her across the edge of her left shoulder, leaving a burning gash.

  “It’s a good thing Casey isn’t like us,” Jesús said, glancing at her. “If his aim were better he might have killed you.”

  “I’m fine, thanks for asking!” Nia screamed. “I forgot about that punk-ass. If I was a hundred percent, he’d have never got that shot off!”

  “Well, you’re not one hundred percent, so pay attention!” Jesús barked. “This is not the time to be playing around!”

  Casey drove steadily behind them, holding his revolver with his wrist twisted to the side, aiming carefully with one eye closed. After watching his men fall in battle against Nia and Alvarez, he was more determined than ever to complete his mission, in as painful a manner as possible.

  Alvarez stepped on the brakes, swiftly closing the gap between Casey’s speeding motorcycle and the rear bumper of the convertible. Casey reacted swiftly and turned his bike hard to the right to escape Alvarez’s attack, his knee inches from the speeding ground.

  “It’s not going to be that easy, Alvarez!” Casey roared, firing his gun at the car. The bullets echoed with thundering booms that seemed to quiver the air. The car trembled as the shots struck.

  Alvarez sighed.

  “Miss Black…can you shoot, please? We’re running out of time.”

  “He got my good shoulder,” Nia replied, grasping her arm. “I can shoot with the right but I can’t promise I’ll shoot as straight.”

  “You’re left-handed,” Jesús ascertained. “But you frequently use two guns—rather accurately…”

  “I don’t ‘frequently’ get shot!” Nia screamed. “Just keep the car straight.”

  Nia climbed on the seat, leaning on Alvarez’s shoulder as she fired at Casey with her right hand. Casey weaved his upper body as the bullets zinged past him.

  Nia bit her lip. Her recovery from the muscle relaxants wasn’t as complete as she’d thought; she was more sluggish than usual, and the near drowning did not help. Nor did being soaking wet, the speed at which they were moving, the constant swaying of the vehicle, or the wound in her arm. Collectively, it was more than enough to disrupt her usual precision.

  Billy Casey laughed derisively. But, knowing what she was capable of, Casey knew deep down he was lucky to be alive. He couldn’t afford to give either Alvarez or Nia another moment.

  He carefully lined up a shot.

  I’ve got you now, you son of a bitch.

  A thundering boom preceded a crimson splash eruption in Alvarez’s back!

  “Damn it!” he roared, snatching his hands from the wheel as he grasped his wound.

  “Jesús!” Nia screamed, but it wasn’t a scream of concern for him.

  It was a warning.

  When Alvarez snapped his hands away from the steering wheel, the convertible swerved into the wrong lane.

  A pickup truck was barreling toward them, approaching far too fast.

  Nia flailed her arms, trying to grasp the wheel but she was too short to reach it over Alvarez in the driver’s seat…

  The blaring horn of the truck and Nia’s strident scream were both stifled as the truck smashed into Alvarez’s car, sending it twisting in the air! The pickup truck whirled across the road, knocking other vehicles around like bumper cars.

  Alvarez’s convertible flailed in the air like a centrifuge until it crashed back on the street and continued to slide unstoppably on its mangled tires, passing drivers frantically swerving out of the way. The world rapidly spun and bounced around Nia and Alvarez like a plane crash.

  Alvarez’s once beautiful red convertible eventually tore through the restraining gate along the side of the highway like a fist through a wet paper bag. It crashed into the woods below, rolling and bouncing downhill, coming to a horrific, crunching stop, lying upside down in the grass.

  Casey hit the brakes on his bike and turned sharply toward the edge of the road, driving through the breach created by Alvarez’s car. He leapt from the highway with the JTB-36 and landed on the soil not far below. Stopping the machine and leaping off, Casey drew his weapon and stepped toward the wreckage.

  “It’s a damn shame what happened to your car, Jesús!” Casey shouted aloud with a big smile. “You can have all the drugs and performance enhancers in you that you want, Alvarez. You’ll never be as good as I am. Just goes to show you; real warriors can’t be made in a lab. They’re born.”

  Casey walked closer to the overturned, mutilated car, the sounds of the dying engine and the endlessly spinning wheels of the convertible playing satisfyingly in Casey’s ears.

  “And now it’s over. I’ve been wanting to take you out for a long time, Jesús. You’re always looking down on everyone when you’re not even a real man. Now, while you’re lying there, polish your glasses one more time so you can see this bullet coming.”

  He yanked the door open and extended his gun inside, his grin so wide his cheekbones ached.

  Then, his jaw dropped.

  “No fucking way!!”

  Billy Casey’s angry roar echoed as he stormed away from the empty wreck.

  Twenty-Five

  Jesús Alvarez reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out fragments of the case he’d been carrying since leaving the storage room in Chelsea Romedrux’s island facility. The disc that was inside the case was now nothing more than shards of broken plastic…a result of the car crash.

  He sighed, defeat plunging down his face. But then he looked upon the couch next to him and smiled slightly as he looked upon the comatose beauty lying before him, watching her ample chest pulsing up and down as she breathed softly.

  The crash knocked Nia Black unconscious. Her once brilliant white leather cat suit was torn everywhere and caked in dirt and blood. Yet, despite the bruises on her body and her wildly mussed hair, the woman wearing what was left of the outfit
was no less alluring in her peaceful state, her curves pushing through the holes in her outfit and exposing supple brown skin underneath. Her pendant shimmered brightly as it reflected small glints of light, splayed across her nearly exposed breast like a beacon, beckoning him.

  Jesús Alvarez wanted to lie down next to her and sleep.

  Nia finally stirred, squirming around and pressing her palm to her forehead. Her vision came into focus and she saw Jesús Alvarez standing over her, facing away. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he had rags and gauze wrapped around his upper back, covering the wound from Billy Casey’s bullet.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m fine. You should know by now how hard it is to kill people like us.”

  Nia looked around and took in her surroundings. She found herself inside a small room that looked like an apartment, with wood construction and lots of debris. She lay on a futon, the only thing in the room that was clear of package wrappers, empty water bottles or other junk. The room had two windows, both blocking incoming light with venetian blinds turned up. But enough illumination seeped in between the blinds to let Nia know that it must have at least been mid-afternoon.

  Nia saw her guns sitting on a coffee table in front of her. She quickly snatched one and aimed it at Alvarez. She felt its heft and realized the gun was still loaded. She flicked the safety switch off.

  He stood still, continued facing away from her, and folded his arms.

  “Are you going to shoot me, Nia?”

  Nia breathed hard, but tilted the gun away and put it back on the coffee table.

  “Where are we? Is this your place?”

  “No…but it’ll be safe for now.”

  “Good,” Nia grumbled. “Because we need to talk.”

  “I know.”

  Nia leaned back and crossed her legs.

  “So. Talk. What did you really need to get inside that facility for?”

  Jesús chuckled. “Sharp…you’re sharp, Nia. I wouldn’t have figured you could piece it together so easily.”

  “Well, evidently whatever you’re doing isn’t about killing or catching me,” Nia retorted. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have put yourself in harm’s way to get me out. So there’s something else you wanted out of there.”

  “It was a string of fortunate events,” Jesús answered. “It all started when you robbed Romedrux Labs. The weapon prototype you stole was Romedrux’s finest work, and it would have guaranteed him a position within the hallowed halls of Corp Hudson’s Research and Development department. But when you got away with the weapon, Hudson had Professor Kane Romedrux killed that same night for failing to guard it properly. By doing that, and by pinning the blame on you, Hudson turned an otherwise unassuming young assistant into your mortal enemy.”

  “That girl you told me about…Chelsea Romedrux, right?”

  “Right; Chelsea was her father’s apprentice—it turns out she had more of a hand in the design of that weapon than her father did. Now, she’s Corp Hudson’s head of R&D, a position that gives her significant power and prestige. The island facility, where Hercules were developed, was renovated to her specifications to begin a new generation of human performance enhancement experiments, and Hudson wanted to start anew with his most passionate project. They don’t know where Alexander Black is, or if he’s even alive, so they turned their attention to you. This was the key to my plan. I was there for Hercules.”

  “Why?”

  “Hercules is a defunct project, but I’ve been in contact with certain parties who would have loved to study its properties themselves. So my job was to get whatever data on the formula I could. As I told you, only the blood that flows through your veins—the blood of Alexander Black—works with Hercules. Interested parties want to know how they can make it more…accessible. But by Hudson’s own order, none of his regular subordinates is allowed to enter the facility, not even his security agents—no one except for his scientists and his Security Soldiers. This ensures his darkest secrets remain protected. The only way to get to the data I needed was to convince Chelsea to give me access to the facility’s storage room. To do that, I had to give her something she wanted.”

  Nia sighed. “Me.”

  “Yes,” Jesús nodded. “By personally taking you down, I received a bit of an ‘honor’ by being allowed to join the transfer team tasked with bringing you into Chelsea’s lab. Then I spoke with Chelsea and got what I came for.”

  “So it was never about getting Hudson, was it? You played me from the beginning. You just wanted to get your hands on the Hercules stuff.”

  “Not true,” Jesús shot back. “It’s just that I know it will take more than a brazen attack on the open road to defeat Maxwell Hudson. It must be done systematically…we have to utterly defeat him—make sure no one can rise in his place with equal or greater power and come after us once the fighting’s done. Now is simply not the time.”

  Nia grimaced. “There’s something you’re not telling me. You…you weren’t supposed to come back for me, were you?”

  Jesús looked down, and shook his head. “You were the decoy. You were meant to keep the attention off of me. And it worked.”

  “So, why did you come back then?” Nia wondered. “Why didn’t you just leave me there? You got what you wanted, didn’t you?”

  Jesús said nothing.

  Nia hesitated; then spoke again. “And that info about Hercules; where is it?”

  “Destroyed…I lost it in the crash.”

  “So you did all that for nothing?”

  The remark seemed to send a jolt through the man. He abruptly turned to her.

  “No. Not for nothing,” Jesús said sharply. “I couldn’t bear to leave you there, Nia; not at the mercy of Billy Casey, not with that ditzy, revenge-crazed scientist and her scheming.”

  “Tell me why,” Nia demanded. “Why did you risk your life to save me even though you already had what you wanted.”

  “Because I…”

  Nia lifted herself from the futon, took hold of her outfit by the plunging neckline and dragged it down past her shoulders and back, letting it slide down until it collapsed at her feet.

  “If you can’t tell me…show me.”

  Jesús Alvarez looked upon Nia Black, standing before him completely nude except her golden necklace with its opal charm.

  He tossed off his spectacles and took her in his arms.

  Jesús kissed Nia’s breasts, took one hand and slid it down across her chest and belly until he felt the warmth coming from between her thighs.

  Nia moaned as his fingers grooved into her, stroking her clitoris up and down as she began to moisten. She wrapped her fingers around his back, threw her head high and gently leaned toward the futon, rubbing him between the legs, feeling his erect manhood fighting against the fabric of his pants.

  Jesús followed her. He held her back while laying her down, kissing her across her body until he reached her legs. He took hold of her calves and raised her legs high, spreading them wide open.

  Nia looked down at him with a smile.

  Jesús smiled back at her and went down, kissing and lapping her in pleasure as she began to gyrate and moan.

  He kept it up for what felt like hours to Nia. She hissed and howled, tears of ecstasy trickling from her eyes. Nia’s eyes shot open, no longer able to resist her screams of pleasure.

  Jesús pulled himself up and unbuckled his pants. He dropped them to the floor and leaned back toward Nia, planting her calves on his shoulders. He wrapped his hands around Nia’s curvy thighs and slowly slid inside of her.

  And Nia moaned, feeling pleasure she’d never felt before. This wasn’t like others she’d been with in the past. Jesús Alvarez was her equal. He was as strong as she was, fully knowledgeable about her power.

  Neither had any reason to hold back.

  Jesús practically threw himself into Nia, going back and forth like a piston, hissing and grunting as the futon rocked and shook underneath them.

  He let Nia’s leg
s down and rolled her over, lying on his back as Nia rode on top of him. He looked upon her splendid body with joy as she put one arm behind her head, leaning on his heaving chest with the other.

  Jesús clawed Nia’s butt with both hands, his muscles tensing up. She planted both hands on his shoulders, staring into his eyes.

  They climaxed together, screaming as loud as their lungs would allow, and then Nia collapsed on his chest, breathing hard. She stroked Jesús cheek and pulled his head to hers, and they kissed passionately.

  ******

  Nia and Jesús lay together on the futon, naked, his jacket serving as a makeshift blanket. Nia looked upon him, running her fingers through his long, curly auburn hair.

  “Jesús, can I ask you a question?” Nia muttered.

  “What is it?”

  “Why did you show those pictures of me and Bobby to Charlene?”

  Jesús quickly released Nia and sat up. “What?”

  “I want to know why you felt the need to show those pictures to Bobby’s girlfriend.”

  “I told you before, Nia, I had nothing to do with—”

  “Don’t try to kid a kidder, Jesús,” Nia groaned, sitting up on her knees. “I know you’re the one who arranged for them to be kidnapped. I know that Armstrong dude was your dog. I know you were just trying to trap me. That’s why you showed up at just the right time and got me out just before Hudson’s other goons got there. But you ain’t have to show Charlene those pictures. Kidnapping them was more than enough to get my attention. There wasn’t no reason to put my business with Bobby all out there like that.”

  “And you’re not angry?”

  “I was,” Nia said. “Then I started to realize that it was for the best. Bobby was holding me back. I know that now. My old man was trying to tell me something like that before, but as usual, I didn’t listen. He said ‘guard yourself’. I didn’t realize he meant guard myself from Bobby. I’m slowly getting over him though. I want to know what was going through your mind.”