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Jonas locked down the ATV, then shouldered his rifle and said, “This way.”
“Have you been to this base before?” I had to run to catch up with him. He was moving fast, and with all the stealth of a hunter.
It was a stealth I didn’t possess.
“Once.”
“When?”
He glanced over his shoulder, his eyes bright in this shadowed place. “Does it matter?”
“It does in that it gives us pointers as to when this place was infested.” If it was infested, that is.
“It wasn’t when I was here. Not with vampires, anyway.”
That odd edge of anger was back in his voice, and I frowned. “Meaning what?”
“Nothing.” He paused, then added, “The ATV might have made a bit of noise, but you’re not exactly quiet yourself.”
“Given I’m not a trained soldier or ranger, that’s not surprising,” I snapped. “If you want me to be quiet, then we need to go a bit slower.”
“A vampire’s deepest sleep cycle hits at midday; if they are in that bunker, then that’s our best time to explore.” His voice was grim. “That gives us fourteen minutes to get there.”
“And how many miles do we have to traverse?”
“Only two.”
I swore softly, caught a glimmer of amusement in his eyes, and motioned him on. He instantly disappeared into the forest. I followed as fast and as silently as I could.
We made it to the base in thirteen minutes; it wasn’t the stuff of world records, but it was still pretty damn fast.
I stopped beside Jonas, my breath a harsh rasp that seemed to echo across the shadowed silence. The mountain slid away from our position under the trees, sweeping down into a low, cleared valley. The building that stood in the center of it was squat, long, and unremarkable. It was little more than an ugly concrete rectangle with no windows and very little in the way of distinguishing features. There was certainly no evidence that this place had once been a large and active military base.
And yet it had been from here that the humans—with several battalions of déchet—had brought the war to the shifter’s homeland in a last-ditch effort to defeat them on their own turf.
It was a move that had gone very badly not only for the déchet and the humans stationed here, but for the war itself. The base had lasted only five months before a retreat had been ordered, and that retreat had signaled the beginning of the end for both human hopes of winning, and for my kind.
“Is that the place?” I asked, feigning ignorance. “It doesn’t look like much.”
“Not on the surface it doesn’t,” he said. “But like most human military bases, the business end is mostly underground.”
“How do we get in?” There were two exits that I knew of, one at the far end of the building, and another in the trees on the opposite side of the valley. But given I wasn’t supposed to know anything about this place, I could hardly admit to knowing about either.
“Certainly not through the main entrances,” he said. “They’ll have security on those for sure.”
“Then how?”
“Through an old blast break.” He shifted his rifle from his shoulder to his left hand; the safety, I noted, was now off. “Keep an eye out. If someone in Central is working with the vamps, then it’s possible they’ve set up additional security around the perimeter.”
“Surely the shifter communities would have picked something like that up.” I unslung my own rifle and followed him down the hill. “They still do regular patrols around here, don’t they?”
He shook his head. “Not really. The packs and prides that call these mountains home tend to avoid the old bases, be they human or shifter.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “They are a reminder of a past most would rather forget.”
“If you forget the past, you only end up repeating it,” I said. “History is evidence enough of that.”
