by R. Lee Moore
“Anything else in here?” she demanded with a growl.
Three heads shook in a wild panic.
“Exit's clear. Get out,” she ordered turning on her heel to exit the room.
She clicked on the hand-Mic clipped on her shoulder on her way out the door to alert the vehicle keeping watch outside the loading dock of the situation, and left them to their fates. They'd either get out while they could, or they wouldn't. Either way, it wasn't her problem right now. There were still ghouls that needed to be put down. Civilians weren't a priority.
A sudden burst of sustained gunfire from the far end of the warehouse grabbed her attention. She bolted towards the sound, following the panicked shouts and the thundering chatter of rifle-fire weaving in and out of the scattered stacks of crates and pallets as fast as she could.
As she darted around a large box of machinery, Martinez swore at the sight in front of her. It was another office like the one she'd just cleared, only this time it hadn't been filled with civilians. O'Brien and the two men with him had been swarmed the moment they'd breached the door. Two of them were down on the ground desperately struggling to keep the ghouls that had poured from the doorway from tearing them apart. O'Brien himself was rapidly falling back emptying out his magazine with a full auto spray of bullets blazing into the ghouls rushing at him.
Martinez bolted forward and began squeezing off rounds as she ran. One round catching one of the ghouls wrestling with her teammate in the shoulder spinning it around. The next smashing through its exposed face tearing off the top of its skull. Without missing a beat, the man on the ground snatched up his weapon and began pouring fire into the rest of the ghouls charging into O'Brien, pushing them back towards the door under a hail of withering fire.
Martinez rushed past the man towards the other fallen soldier, and swung the butt of her rifle hard and fast at the back of the ghoul's head that was on top of him. The creature shrieked and lurched to the side. It wasn't enough to kill the thing, but it was enough to stun it long enough for the man on the ground to draw his sidearm and fire a burst up under the ghoul's chin. The rounds ripped its skull apart sending it reeling backward from the concussive force to slam bodily to the concrete floor below.
Once they'd seized the initiative back from the creatures, they made short work of the remaining ghouls. There were only a handful of them, and without the element of surprise they weren't any match for the concentrated assault. Martinez and her team tore them apart piece by piece until there was nothing left of them but chunks of rotting quivering flesh on the floor at their feet.
With that done, she checked on the two men who'd been taken to the ground. Their body armor had saved them, if only just barely. Both Kevlar vests had been gouged open all the way through. The only thing that kept the ghoul's from clawing them open had been the heavy mail they wore beneath their vests. They were alive, but they'd probably feel it when all this was said and done, she thought. They'd be lucky if all they got was bruised. More likely both of them had a few fractures, maybe even a broken rib or two. Ghouls were no joke to go hand to hand with.
“Lin?” Martinez called out over her shoulder.
“Clear on the right,” came back a shouted reply.
“Rally back at the dock,” Martinez ordered. She was already moving. The area was clear, and if they pushed much farther, they'd risk running into the other teams. “Eyes open. Nothing gets through.”
She clicked on the hand-Mic clipped to her shoulder. Her eyes never stopping their sweep of her surroundings as she jogged back towards the entryway.
“Steel-6, this is Steel-3,” she said. “Zone 1 clear. Pulling back to regroup at breach point.”
“Roger Steel-3,” the radio growled in reply. “Take up defensive position and stand by until Zones 2 and 3 are secured.”
Martinez didn't bother replying. It was standard procedure. She and her team would fall back to the loading dock and wait just in case any of the ghouls managed to slip away from the other two teams sweeping through the facility. Outside that unlikely event, her job was done, and with the exception of a few minor injuries, her team had made it out relatively unscathed. It'd been a good night.
CHAPTER TWO
It took several hours to fully clear the warehouse of any trace of ghoul infestation. Once the initial engagement was over with, most of the time was spent waiting for the specialized clean-up crews to arrive to deal with the remains. There was a specific protocol that had to be followed when dealing with this sort of undead. Once the nest was cleared out, you had to burn it. All of it.
When the Strike Teams were finally loading back up into their vehicles, men and women armed with flamethrowers were already moving through the area incinerating the corpses and setting the whole of the building ablaze. It was better to be safe than to let whatever diseases the ghouls were carrying get loose. Sterilization was the only option. When they were done, there'd be nothing left but a smoking crater where the warehouse once stood.
By the time the small convoy of vehicles rolled back through the well armed and fortified gates of the local Strike Team barracks, the sun had already started cresting over the mountains far off in the distance. The wind and rain persisted, but even that had lessened to a miserable half-drizzle by the time the first rays of morning light lit up all around them.
Once the vehicles were parked and the teams began to disembark, Martinez took the time to stretch out in the interior and let the stress and tension of the night slowly dissipate from inside her. She enjoyed the time alone to unwind while everyone else gathered their gear and stowed it away in their lockers that lined the walls. It wasn't much, but it gave her time to unwind. Time to let her mind wander and process everything that had gone on throughout the night.
The sound of a heavy fist banging against the door roused her from her reverie, and the doors swung open to reveal the grizzled face of an older man with short cropped salt and pepper hair. He wore the same black tactical uniform as she did, but where hers was covered in ash, mud, and gore, his was immaculately clean and heavily starched. Even the single silver bar on each collar looked as if it had been polished to perfection.
“Martinez,” he growled through the cigar in his mouth. “Captain wants to see you up in her office.”
Martinez slumped her shoulders and groaned. The night had gone so well too, she thought.
“I just got back,” she grumbled under her breath. “What I do this time?”
“How the hell should I know?” the man snapped. His eyes had narrowed into a sharp impatient glare. “Captain tells me she wants you in her office, all I care about is getting your ass standing tall in front of her desk, so I ain't gotta hear about it no more. So get moving.”
“Fine,” she grumbled, rubbing her temples. After a long night, all she wanted to do was get home, crack open a bottle and relax until she passed out. She didn't need this. Not now. “Lemme stow my gear and grab a shower, and I'll go and see what I did to piss her off this time.”
“Negative, sergeant,” he said with a curt shake of his head. “If she gave a damn about how you looked, I'm sure she'd have mentioned it. She didn't. Get moving.”
Martinez scowled and gave the man an aggravated look.
“I smell like a forest fire, I'm covered in mud, blood, and who knows what else,” she said. “Is it too much to ask to get all this crap off me before I get my ass handed to me?”
“Apparently,” he said with a less than empathetic smirk turning up the corners of his mouth. His tone and expression softened slightly, and he motioned for her to hand over her gear. “Go on. I'll get your gear sorted for you. Don't keep her waiting. You know how she gets.”
“Fine,” Martinez grumbled.
Dropping her gear, Martinez gave the lieutenant one last scowl as she vaulted up out of the back of the vehicle and started the long trudge through the parking garage towards the steps that led up to the company Admin area.
She felt her stress level rising with each st
ep forward, and she worked at taking deep breaths to calm herself as she climbed the metal stairway up to the second floor. This was always the one part of the job that always annoyed the hell out of her. She could handle the killing part well enough, but the administrative side of things always seemed to get in the way of the real job of going out every night and keeping the world safe from supernatural threats. It always seemed as if everything she did was being second guessed by someone up in some office somewhere who'd never been out in the field pulling a trigger. That didn't exactly apply to the captain, she told herself. Not really anyway. The people above her though, the people that she answered to, those folks were always causing problems.
The door to the captain's office at the end of the long hallway was already partially open when Martinez got there. She rapped her knuckles on the door frame and pushed her way into the office without waiting for a reply or an invitation. It was best to get these things over with as soon as possible she reasoned. She sauntered inside and stood in front of the desk and looked down at the woman poring over an overly large file folder. A file folder that had her name on it.
Captain Ramirez looked up from the paperwork in front of her, and Martinez could read her mood just from the hard look in those cold emotionless eyes. The woman's scarred face seemed to have been permanently carved into a perpetual scowl that only darkened whenever Martinez crossed her path.
“Doing some light reading ma'am?” Martinez remarked. It probably wasn't the smartest thing to say, but she couldn't help it. She thought it was funny.
The captain's eyes narrowed, and she leaned back in her chair crossing her arms tight across her chest.
“Going over your file,” she said. There was no amusement in the woman's eyes or the tone of her voice. “Sit down sergeant.”
Martinez turned behind her and pulled one of the chairs closer to the desk and flopped herself into it. She was tired, and really didn't want to go through this right now. Any sort of formality was kind out of the question. Her mood wouldn't let her.
“Really,” she said. “I'd have thought it would have been bigger.”
“This is just one of the many volumes bearing your name,” Ramirez retorted. “Kind of a greatest hits type of thing.”
Martinez gave a slight roll of her eyes and shifted back into the chair stretching herself out. It was going to be one of those types of conversations then, she thought. There were a few responses running around in her head to that sort of statement, but there was a line there that she didn't think it was a good idea to cross. At least not yet anyway. It was best not to push her luck and make the situation worse than it already was.
“You're being reassigned,” the captain said after a moment.
Martinez lurched up sharply to her feet and slammed both hands flat across the desk in front of her hard enough to rattle and shift everything on the surface.
“The hell!“ she raged. Anger had stripped away any sense of holding back. “You're taking my team away from me? The hell I do to deserve that?”
The captain's expression hardened, and she leaned forward to lock her fierce narrowed gaze with the enraged woman in front of her.
“Seriously? Let's see. Let's just look in your file here shall we,” Ramirez said with a low menacing tone to her voice. She began flipping through the pages in the folder and reading off the highlights out loud. “Insubordination. Drunk and disorderly. Repeated instances of disobeying direct orders. There are three pages of policy and safety violations here. Far too many negligent discharges of your weapon to even begin counting. Physical altercations with other Strike Team and Supernatural Affairs personnel. Threatening civilians. And most recently you threw a high level agent down a flight of stairs. Twice. Do I really need to go on here? I can if you want me to. Easily.”
Martinez slammed her hands down a second time on the desk causing several items to waver and fall off the edges.
“Bitch was in my way,” she stated angrily. “She's lucky I didn't pop her one for the dumb shit she was doing. You can't do this. I'm the best damn team leader you got.”
Ramirez gave a short barking laugh.
“Not even close,” she said. “Sit down sergeant. As much as you may deserve to get bounced out on your ass, That's not what's happening. This isn't a punishment.”
Martinez didn't move, and her angered glare didn't waver. The Captain rose up just a bit more in her seat, moving herself in close enough that her hard eyed stare bore into Martinez' eyes.
“Sit. Down. Sergeant.” she ordered with slow deliberation.
Martinez tried to hold Ramirez' gaze as long as she could, but the other woman had a force of personality, not to mention enough rank and authority that trying to stand up to her was a losing proposition. That didn't mean Martinez was going to give up easily. She held her position just long enough to prove her point and to show how unhappy with the situation she was. It felt childish, but that wasn't going to stop her until she was satisfied.
She dropped back down into her chair with an angered huff of breath and crossed her arms tight across chest. She turned her eyes way from the other woman across from her for just a moment to calm herself before returning her barely controlled glare back.
“That's what I thought,” Ramirez said archly, sinking back into her chair. “Just to be clear, this isn't open for discussion. But I'm going to be nice and explain things to you using small words in hopes that something will get through that thick damn head of yours. And you're going to sit there and listen. Quietly. Any more outbursts and I'm going to knock your ass around this office like we used to do in the old days. You get me sergeant?”
Martinez grumbled under her breath, hunched into her shoulders and tightened her arms around her chest. She looked over at Ramirez and mulled over her response. Ramirez wasn't the type to say something like that without both the ability and willingness to back it up. Martinez was relatively certain she could hold her own in a fight if it came down to it, but it wasn't worth the risk of getting her ass kicked by a woman twice her age. Going down that road was a one way trip with no way off. Best to try to keep herself calm and in control. At least hear the woman out before hauling off and cracking her across the mouth, she thought.
“Roger that, Ma'am,” she grumbled.
Ramirez shook her head and slowly relaxed back into her chair.
“Supernatural Affairs just got a new regional director,” she said. “Came in with the new administration. He's not happy with how things have been run out here, and he's looking to shake things up and sort things out. We're the first step.”
Martinez groaned and rubbed at her temples in an attempt to stave off the migraine she just knew was coming. Leave it to politicians to come around and screw everything they didn't understand all the hell up, she thought. Someone in some office a thousand miles away from the action who'd never been on the ground in their lives were always making decisions for the people who got their hands dirty. Never for better, always for the worst.
“Captain, we've been going all out for months cleaning up after those idiots downtown,” she grumbled. “We've been burning down ghoul nests, taking down feral shapeshifters, and dealing with vampire bullshit all over the place. What's their problem? Someone look through a bunch of spreadsheets and decided we're not meeting some arbitrary quota or something?”
Ramirez gave a light smirk. It was probably meant to convey amusement, but the way the scars on her face shifted when she smiled just ended up making it look sinister.
“We're not the problem,” she said. “We're apparently the solution. Or at least part of it.”
“You lost me,” Martinez retorted. “Thought you were going to use smaller words.”
The captain's eyes hardened, and she gave Martinez a threatening look that was enough to make her avert her eyes just to be able to at least pretend she wasn't being given that look.
“Shut it,” Ramirez ordered. “New director thinks that the folks downtown are the problem. Too many people
at on that side of the Department aren't doing their jobs. They're either too concerned about internal politics, too afraid of upsetting the vampires, too afraid of how things look in the media, or just to busy worrying over their own careers to get anything done. That means that everything they should be taking care of just gets left out fester and rot. And because of that, eventually Strikers like you and me gotta gear up and take care of things that have gone on far too long and have gotten way out of hand. We get to run into the fires that downtown wouldn't put out when they had the opportunity. New guy wants to put a stop to that.”
Martinez thought about that a moment. It was a pretty accurate description of how things went down. Diplomatic Officers who worked in the Vampire Preserve were always looking over everyone's shoulders. Telling Investigators and Treaty Enforcement what they could and couldn't do. Tying their hands behind their backs with what they could and couldn't do without repercussions so much that everyone was terrified of actually doing their jobs. When that happened, small problems that could have easily been dealt with turned into big problems, and then the Strike Teams got sent in to burn everything to the ground. It gave the Strike Teams a lot to do, which she really didn't mind all that much, but there had to be a better way. Otherwise, people were gonna start burning out real quick.
“What does that have to do with me?” Martinez demanded. “What does this have to do with taking my team away from me?”
“Oh that's the fun part,” Ramirez said with an almost mischievous grin. “I said this wasn't a punishment, and it's not. It's an opportunity. New pilot program. Director is grabbing people from the Security Forces, Strike Teams, Air Units, basically anyone who's doesn't spend their time in an office and who's got experience pulling a trigger. They want me to send someone over from the 18th over to Investigations. You know, someone who isn't going to let themselves be all tied up by the politics. Someone who's able to assess the situation, adapt and improvise. Violently if need be.”