Bretdon lost his last thread of patience. He couldn’t let her walk away from him, and clearly, he couldn’t allow her take him to a hospital. It was time to get rough.
He raised his gun and pointed it at her. “Pick up the damn knife and finish the job, or I swear you won’t be able to do anything else,” he was bluffing, of course, but she didn’t know that.
She paled visibly, even in the dim light of the sunset. “There’s no need to─” she started saying, but she didn’t sound as scared as he expected.
In fact, she sounded enraged. “Yes, there is, you can’t leave me like this, bleeding and unable to access my control system,” he pointed out, in an ice-cold tone, handing her the knife again. “Just do it!” he snarled.
She grabbed the knife, and for a moment, Bretdon thought she would use it on him. She didn’t. Instead, she grabbed his arm and finished the job.
Ophelia was so mad at the man, she finished cutting his skin without even feeling sick. Who the hell he thought he was, threatening her that way?
“There, it’s done. Happy now?” she said, dropping the knife again.
“No, but I will be,” he mumbled, reaching the primary control system and feeling the buttons.
She looked at him intrigued. “What are you doing?”
“I need to enter some codes, but I can’t see what I’m doing,” he explained.
She looked at the small panel and back at him. She couldn’t believe she was about to say that, but what the heck. “Tell me and I’ll do it for you.”
He looked at her surprised. “I thought you couldn’t look at blood.”
“I guess your gun cured me,” she shrugged. “Tell me the codes, before I change my mind.”
Chuckling, he told her the codes, and she punched them in, one after the other, releasing him from the chains that enslaved him to the humans. Once she had punched the last code, he jumped to his feet and held the patch of skin against his body, and allowed the nanocybots to do their job. A couple of minutes later, the skin looked as if it was glued to his body.
“Thank you, you were quite helpful,” he said, picking his knife and his gun.
“You’re welcome.” She looked at her car, still against the tree and sighed. “Do you think you could help me out with my car? I doubt I’ll find a crane around this place.”
“Sure, why not? I need a ride out of this place,” he agreed.
She looked around at the growing darkness. “I’m not going anywhere at this time of the night. I just need you to take the car from where it is, and I’ll set camp right here,” she replied, shaking her head.
It was too dangerous to drive during the night. There were no lights, and no one ever knew when they’d hit a destroyed section of road.
He ignored her words and walked to the front of the car and pushed it away from the trees, as easy as anyone else would push a toy.
The vehicle was a bit damaged, but he was sure it still worked perfectly.
“We can’t stay here. This is my last known location, and if we stay here, we’ll be caught,” he said, putting the vehicle back on the road.
“What? Who would catch me? What the hell are you talking about?” she protested, looking at him with a deep frown.
“The soldiers. I don’t have time to explain, right now, so just get in the car and let us get the hell out of here,” he ordered.
“No, I’m not going anywhere. It’s too dangerous to travel at this hour,” she retorted, crossing her arms over her chest.
“It’s too dangerous to stay here,” he said, opening the passenger’s seat door and walking towards her.
Before she could guess what he was about to do, he picked her up in his powerful arms and carried her to the car, securing her in the seat and locking the door.
He was behind the driver’s seat in a blink of an eye.
“Hey, you can’t do this, this is my car, and I decide if I want to leave or not,” she protested, struggling to free herself from the safety belt.
He glanced at her, with such a grim expression on his face that she stopped what she was doing. “Consider your car seized. Now be a good girl and enjoy the ride.”
Ophelia looked at the man, furious. He had turned her into a virtual prisoner, in her own car. It was outrageous.
“You have no right doing this, it’s my car, not yours.”
“I believe we’ve been through this, already. It’s my car now, and you are my hostage, in case I need one,” he explained sternly.
She looked at him as if he had announced the end of the world, and started struggling again with her seat belt.
“We’re traveling at more than eighty miles per hour. If you jump out of this vehicle, you’ll die,” he said, in a stern tone.
“I rather die than become a toy in your hands,” she started saying.
“Oh, please, quit the drama.” He interrupted her, though the idea of playing with her was so hot he almost groaned. He hadn't been with a female for too long. “As soon as we get far enough away, I’ll give your car back, and I’ll let you go,” he interrupted her, impatiently. “I just need to get as far as possible from here.”
Ophelia looked at him, not sure she could believe him. So far, his behavior had been weird, to say the least. A sudden thought came to her mind. “You’re a deserter.”
He frowned and glanced at her, throwing ice droplets from his metallic gray eyes. “I wouldn’t call me that, since I was never asked if I wanted to become a soldier,” he explained. “I was sent to war before I knew what the world looked like and my opinion wasn’t asked for. So, I would say I’m escaping the enslavement imposed on me by your race.”
It was her time to frown. “You are machines built to fight on wars for us,” she said as if reciting a lesson well learned.
He laughed, but there was no amusement in his laughter. “Is that what they say about us?” he asked, with deep disdain in his tone. “Yes, we are part machines, but we’re also human. We come from an egg and a spermatozoid just like you and the rest of your kind. We have hearts, minds, and souls, just like you.”
“That’s not what we are told. They present you as improved androids, with artificial intelligence, able to fight battles for us,” her words now lacked conviction.
The man next to her didn’t look like a machine. It was obvious he had feelings, temper, sense of humor and all things she associated with people. She had never seen machines act like that, not even the most advanced ones she had seen in her line of work. She was a system engineer and she dealt with all kinds of machines, but not cyborgs.
Only a carefully selected group of people worked with the cyborgs and now she was starting to understand why. They had to keep their humanity a secret.
The car suddenly turned left, forcing her to his side, as he avoided a huge crater on the road.
“Damn,” he mumbled.
Struggling to get back to her seat and touch him as little as possible, she huffed. His skin felt hot, smooth, and too damn touchable. The jumpsuit he still wore had been torn to rags, mostly on his chest.
“This is what I was telling you about. Most roads are destroyed at some point and you usually have to make a lot of detours,” she explained, when she finally managed to get back to her seat, though she instantly missed the warmth of his body. She had to be losing her mind.
He stopped the engine, taking a deep breath. Feeling her soft body against him made his cock grow hard in his pants. Her sweet scent didn’t help at all and he had to make a huge effort to focus on what was more important: getting out of there.
He scanned the roads ahead looking for the one less damaged and found a small mountain road, not far from where they were. It would take them further up the mountains and then down on the other side. It would be perfect.
“I can see that,” he turned the car around and headed to the road he had found.
She looked at the vehicle’s GPS and let out a small cry. He was setting course away from the one she had been following. “Hey, I need to get home as fast as I can, you can’t go that way,” she protested.
He glanced at her, with a cold look. “I wasn’t kidding when I told you I had seized your car.”
“God! My mother is going to kill me,” she muttered, rubbing her face.
“Tell her the truth, once I set you free,” he said shrugging.
“Yes, sure, and she’ll believe me.” She snapped sarcastically as she considered jumping out of the car again, but he was right, she wouldn’t survive the fall. And despite what she had told him, she had no death wish. “You could escape following my route,” she suggested.
“No, this is the only road I found with no visible damage. You can restart your route once I consider I’m far enough away from pursuit.”
Her cell phone started buzzing and she groaned when she saw her mother’s face on the screen. She was about to take the call when he ripped the phone out of her hands and threw it out of the window, making it smash against a rock wall.
“What? Why the hell did you do that?” she protested, too surprised for anything else.
“Cell phones can be tracked. I’m not taking any risk.”
“God! I can’t believe this is happening to me. I should have gone through you when I saw you in the middle of the road,” she grumbled, crossing her arms over her chest, furious.
He chuckled but didn’t say anything.
They traveled a few more minutes in silence until her curiosity got the best of her. “I guess I helped you escape back there when I gave you access to your main control system,” she said, in a thoughtful tone.
He nodded. “You did. So, you might prefer to keep this encounter a little secret between the two of us. The military police might consider you an accomplice if they discovered your participation,” he replied gravely.
“You forced me to, they would have to understand that,” she retorted earnestly.
“They only understand what they want to. You’ve had unauthorized contact with a cyborg for a long period of time. I’m sure they wouldn’t like that. You could start talking about us,” he explained, concentrated on the dark road they were following. It was very narrow, and it looked as if no one had used it for ages.
“Even so, they couldn’t charge me for helping you, surely?”
“Yes, they could and believe me, they would,” he assured her. “You would be taken to one of those camps where they take enslaved people after they are freed from the Taucets. Unlike what they say, those camps are little less than concentration camps.”
She had heard about those camps. She had tried to believe they were just rumors, but a colleague from work actually knew a woman that had been abducted by the aliens and then freed by the militaries. Even after she had been released, she hadn't been able to return to her past life. ‘For security reasons’ they said.