Cyborg Nation Kaitlyn O'Connor (books to get back into reading TXT) 📖

through the jungle around them made the hairs all over her body stand on end. Gideon stiffened all over and went perfectly still, twisting his head in first one direction and then another. A volley of similar screams followed closely on the heels of the first.

“Gabriel! Jerico! Behind me!” he ground out, launching into a ground eating stride that instantly diverted Bronte to the only thing in her world that mattered at the moment—pain. Her heart was thumping with terror but she couldn’t think beyond the pain that was burning her alive. She’d begun to think she might have her wish, at long last, and faint when they abruptly burst from the jungle growth onto a wide sandy beach. Crossing it until they neared the water’s edge, Gideon lowered her carefully to the sand. As he straightened and turned, he reached behind his shoulder and Bronte heard the ring of metal as he pulled his sword from it’s sheathe.

Through the gathering darkness of twilight and the descending darkness of loss of consciousness, Bronte looked up to see that Gideon, Gabriel, and Jerico had formed a semi-circle around her, swords drawn, their feet braced in a fighter’s stance.

Chapter Seventeen

“If I give the signal,” Gideon said in a grim voice, “I want you to take Bronte and carry her out into the water, Gabriel.”

Bronte heard his voice as if from a great distance. The darkness had grown so profound, however, she couldn’t see anything. Giving up the fight even to hold her head up, she dropped her head against the sand and closed her eyes.

The screaming that had followed behind them as they rushed from the jungle grew louder. She could feel and hear the thump of feet against the ground as the trogs raced across the beach toward them. Unable to bear the suspense of not knowing what was coming at her, Bronte opened her eyes again. The darkness had lifted a little, just enough to wish it hadn’t.

A horde of horrible gray skinned humanoids was racing from the edge of the forest, their blades lifted as they ran as if they fully intended to hack all four of them to pieces. Almost as one, Gideon, Jerico, and Gabriel advanced toward the trogs, putting more distance between her and themselves. Gideon pulled his laser pistol from its holster with his free hand and fired at the oncoming pack of screaming demons, eliciting screams of a different tone altogether as it cut through their chests, or heads, and the stench of burning flesh wafted over the beach. He’d managed to bring down nearly a dozen before they were too close for the pistol to have much effect any longer. Dropping the pistol back into its holster as Gabriel and Jerico met those in the forefront, he swung at the first to reach him and took his arm off at the shoulder.

Bronte squeezed her eyes shut as a stream of dark liquid shot from the wound. She discovered she couldn’t block the sight, however, nor could she bear to lay helpless in the sand and not watch. When she opened her eyes again, a half dozen more trogs were writhing and twitching on the sand, or lying perfectly still. Gideon, Jerico, and Gabriel were all covered in blood but she couldn’t tell if any of it was theirs. They didn’t move as if they were injured. They continued to lay about them with the swords tirelessly, cleaving off whatever part of the body their swords made connection with—heads, arms—sometimes hacking them in two at the waist or cleaving them from shoulder to breast bone.

Slowly, inch by inch, they fell back and Bronte realized then why they’d advanced on their attackers—to give them more room to fight. If they had to drop back much further, though, she feared they were going to stumble and fall over her and it didn’t bear thinking on what the trogs would do if any one of them went down. Bodies already littered the beach in a thick layer and blood soaked into the sand and formed puddles, and they had shown no sign of backing down, apparently under the impression that they were a strong enough force to take down only three cyborgs.

Or they were just that vicious—too insane with blood lust to know or care that the three men had already cut their numbers by more than half.

It took all Bronte could do to struggle up on her elbows. If she hadn’t had fear driven adrenaline pumping through her she didn’t think she could’ve managed even that much, but the sheer ferocity of the trogs was terrifying. She knew she had to move. None of the men could stop fighting long enough to help her and they had dropped back by now until she knew any moment that one of them was going to stumble over her and lose his footing. Grunting with effort, she dragged herself a few inches, stopped to rest, and clawed at the sand again, heaving backward a few more inches. Every movement was sheer torture, the burning, tearing sensation inside of her reaching a point where she was no longer even conscious of the battle, unaware of anything except the fiery pain and the need to move.

She was too exhausted from the effort even to react when a hand caught her shoulder and stopped her.

“Bronte, stop! You will tear open your wounds!”

Relief flooded her when she realized it was Gideon. “They’re gone?”

“They are gone … for now,” Gideon confirmed, carefully slipping his arms beneath her and lifting her up against his chest. She couldn’t even find the energy to lift her arms around his neck or hold her head up. It fell against his shoulder. He shifted her slightly to support her head as it lolled weakly to one side. “You should not have tried to move,” he ground out angrily as he began to walk briskly along the water’s edge.

“Was afraid,” she gasped tiredly.

“We would not have allowed harm to