Red Zone (Red Zone 1)

Something cracked around his heart. “Make sure it’s covered,” he said to his second.

Mace nodded as he frowned at Friday, who’d just added something else for him to puzzle over. “You take the bike. Sandi will be here any minute. I’ll hold down the fort until then.”

With a nod of thanks, Striker climbed onto the hoverbike. “Get on,” he ordered Friday, who stood staring at the machine.

“Do you have something against passenger pods?” she grumbled as she climbed onto the seat behind him.

Hoverbikes weren’t designed to take two on the seat, and it was a tight squeeze. He could feel her plastered flat against his back, her breasts pressed into his muscles.

“Be safe,” he said to his friend.

The big man nodded as Striker started the bike and headed southwest to the border wall, aware they had bare minutes of a h

ead start. There was no time to waste; he had to get Friday past the wall and into the Red Zone before they were both killed.

Or worse, captured.

Chapter Eight

They were heading into the desert. Munroe city lay behind them, and the border wall was a tall, gently glowing barrier on their left. Even at a distance, the wall seemed to loom over everything around it. A reminder that they were all caged in. Prisoners in the Northern Territory.

Sure, the wall had been built to protect the territory citizens from wandering into the Red Zone. At least, that was the theory when it had been put up a hundred years earlier after an experimental weapon had killed everything within the zone and rendered the area a no-man’s-land. History class had taught Friday that the red mist the weapon dispensed should have dispersed over a year or two. The scientists had been wrong. Instead of dispersing, it had grown thicker, heavier, and more condensed. It was unmoved by wind, unaffected by rain, and deadly to any human who touched it. She’d seen satellite images of the Red Zone. It looked like a long, red gash on the planet’s surface, a festering wound that wouldn’t heal.

And she would have to go through it to get to the antidote she needed.

That was, if they could get past the wall.

“Shouldn’t you enable the reflector shield on this thing?” Once again, she was communicating through the helmets they were wearing.

“Don’t have one.” Striker’s voice sounded far more intimate in the confines of her helmet.

“You don’t have one?” A reflector shield would obscure the vehicle and keep it from being visually identified. It worked by blurring the air around it and making it hard to see the machine. She would have thought it an essential item for a man who liked to stay under the radar.

“Don’t have anything unnecessary, chère,” he drawled. “Extra weight will slow us down, and we need speed to outrun Enforcement.”

“But wouldn’t a reflector shield mean we could hide from them?” Didn’t he realize that if they hid, they wouldn’t need to outrun them? Had she made a mistake in trusting Striker and his team? It was quite possible he wasn’t as smart as her contact had told her.

His chuckle unnerved her, making her body tingle in places she didn’t want to be aware of at that moment. Possibly ever. Her powers of denial were already stretched to the limit with pretending she didn’t notice there was a man wedged between her legs, pressing hard against her. She felt overstimulated—mentally and physically—and really didn’t need anything more to cope with.

“I know what I’m doing. If we needed a reflector shield, we’d have one. We don’t need it.”

“Why aren’t we heading for the wall? We need to get over it.”

“You say that like I wasn’t able to think of it by myself.”

She thought it wise not to answer that. “Everybody says the best places to get over the wall are in the crowded areas of the cities.” Although, not that many people had tried to get over the wall, and those who did tended to get swallowed by the mist, never to be seen again. It seemed the general wisdom on the best places to get over the wall stemmed more from speculation than reality.

“Everybody don’t know shit,” Striker said.

A horrible thought occurred to her. What if she was totally wrong? What if this man couldn’t get her where she needed to be? “You do know how to get over the wall, don’t you?”

“No faith,” he drawled.

Having no choice but to hold on and hope for the best, Friday tried to focus on the landscape rather than her fears. The desert wasn’t what she’d expected it to be.

“I thought it would be barren,” she whispered, more to herself than anyone else.

She felt his abdomen flex beneath her hands and regretted that she’d spoken aloud.