SNAFU: Hunters

by James A. Moore

  A voice crackled in his earpiece. “Go ahead, Col.”

  “I’ve got blood here. A lot of blood. Is this part of the simulation?”

  “Blood?”

  “Yeah. Blood. Ya know, blood. That sticky red shit that’s quite important for the whole living thing. I know you have a passion for realism in these simulations, you mad bastard, but does it stretch to chucking a gallon of pig’s blood on the floor as well?”

  “Negative, mate. Negative.”

  “Then we have a problem. Scan for heat signatures. I think we might have a live one on our hands here, fella.”

  “Copy that. The captain’s getting Alpha and Bravo teams ready.”

  Colby pressed the squawk button again. “That’s reassuring. Arm up for warm bodies. I’ve got a really bad feeling about this…”

  Colby stood, the Glock now cradled in his hand. His Blackhawk combat knife pressed against his left hip. He had seventeen hollowpoint rounds and six inches of precision ground D-2 steel with a wickedly sharp edge. He patted the knife for reassurance. You might run out of bullets, but you never run out of knife.

  He flipped his goggles back down. The NVGs allowed him to see clearly in that weird, mottled-green monotone, but like any soldier he knew full well that they could distort things, especially depth perception. Objects seen through a pair of NVGs could be closer than they appeared, a bit like a police car in a wing mirror. And when you were talking about getting the jump on Taints, that was not a good thing. You wanted Taints to be as far away from you as possible. And preferably dead.

  Instinct kicked in. Since his first encounter with the granddaddy of the undead back in Turkey a year earlier, Colby Flynn had gone toe-to-toe with vampires of both kinds on numerous occasions. As part of the elite Alpha Unit, it was his job to keep London free of the man-made monstrosities that constituted probably the worst ever national ‘science project gone bad’ that the public didn’t know about.

  Taints.

  He thought about the first time he’d been briefed by Yolanda about the damn things. It had been quite possibly the single most bizarre PowerPoint presentation he’d ever sat through. And if it hadn’t have been for his experience with Micky Cox and Gary Parks back in that Turkish castle, he wouldn’t have believed a single word about vampires or any of that supernatural shit. But Flynn knew now there was a big dollop of fact behind the myth of Vampirism. It was real. It existed, and it sure as hell didn’t ‘sparkle’ like those Hollywood idiots portrayed it in the movies. It bit. It tore flesh. It devoured. And it was loose on the nighttime streets of London.

  Yolanda had explained to the team that the Old World vampires were bad enough. But these mutant vampires – these ‘Taints’ – were a whole different level of crazy. They’d been created in a lab, not in some draughty castle full of bats and bad memories. Taints had emerged from a single lineage – a ‘Lucy’ whose DNA had been tainted by a rogue gene – hence the name. A hiccup in a single piece of coding had produced a vampire with all the fury, the strength, speed and blood-lust of the Old World version. Only much, much worse.

  Lucy had been accidentally created by some stupid, science-y type morons who might have had PhDs in being bloody clever, but they had never apparently watched any horror film ever. They also didn’t stop to think that just because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean you should. So they’d happily wandered off down the road paved with good intentions and grant cheques, sciencing as hard as they could. They’d isolated a gene known as K307B they thought acted as a blood coagulant stimulator, and spliced it into a strand of vampire DNA they’d acquired as a result of Flynn and the boys’ expedition to Turkey. Then, ignoring every red flag, every internal ‘WOOP!WOOP!’ warning siren and that glimmer of common sense that kept pounding on the door of their consciousness shouting: “This is a really, really bad idea!”, they injected a willing volunteer with it.

  It didn’t end well.

  Within minutes the serum containing the mashed-up gene, which was meant to be a breakthrough cure for haemophilia, had sloshed its way up through the circulatory system and into the brain of the volunteer, simultaneously turning on every primeval ‘kill’ command at once. It also gave Lucy an unquenchable thirst for blood that would never, ever be sated.

  Nobody knew where Lucy had gone once she’d torn the throat out of the nearest scientist and then jumped out of the window, landing feet first like a cat forty feet below. She’d let out a scream that announced her existence to the world, then vanished into the night.

  The hell had begun.

  The PowerPoint picture showing a screaming, slathering Lucy up close in the camera lens just before she jumped was one of the most disturbing images Flynn had ever seen. In the blurry, freeze-frame shot he had seen the bloodlust and madness in her eyes. And behind that madness the terror too, as the woman felt her last shred of humanity being obliterated. Colby felt sorry for the lass. Nobody should have to endure that.

  “We didn’t think this would happen,” was the only excuse the one surviving scientist could come up with at the emergency COBRA meeting two days later. He’d wrung his hands, nervously cleaned his glasses and muttered some hollow apologies about what was a ‘salutary experience’. Sorry about that. They had people out looking. They never found her.

  Lucy’s lineage had spawned a whole new generation. The gene had carried on mutating away merrily, turning those with the tainted blood not just into vampires, but into raving lunatics as well. Lunatics with super-human strength, speed, agility and an insatiable desire to feed constantly. The ‘off switch’ in their brain hadn’t just malfunctioned – it had disintegrated completely. So they’d gorge themselves, unable to stop until they slumped unconscious onto a heap of desecrated corpses and shredded body parts.

  The next part of the presentation had made Flynn and the lads want to throw up. Lucy had started breeding. The first time was a vile, disturbingly bloody echo of a normal pregnancy – a process that turned her into a cross between an insectoid egg-laying machine and a very angry woman with appallingly bad parenting skills. Initially, Lucy was so confused that she ate the first batch of Younglings she produced, reabsorbing their toxins back into her own body. Slowly, she developed less cannibalistic tendencies as the tiny part of her brain that still worked reminded her that, in order to reproduce successfully, it might be advantageous to avoid snacking on your offspring. She let batch two live and develop into fully-grown Taints – the first generation of their kind.

  The Old World vampires of the ‘Five Families’ had been furious. For centuries a relative peace had existed between the two species, again, largely unknown to the general populous. Now, thanks to mankind buggering about with genetics and generally screwing up in epic style, all bets were off. The Old World vamps had upped sticks and sodded off back to Europe, leaving the military and the Taints to battle it out on the blood-soaked, nighttime streets of London

  And then, of course, just to add a little extra spice to the dish, there was Vlad.

  Supposedly turned into pink mist when Gary Parks blew ten colours of crap out of both him and Tokat Castle a year earlier, the granddaddy of all vampires had in fact managed to avoid being obliterated by being remarkably quick on his feet for an old fella. That news came as a shock to Flynn and the lads. Yes, Yolanda had explained, he’d been seriously injured, but not, as they’d first thought, killed. After spending several weeks recuperating in the labyrinth of Tokat Castle, he had eventually managed to chew his way through enough local villagers to replenish his severely injured body with new cells, and then proceeded to snack his way across Europe. The Unit had tracked him. It wasn’t hard – they’d just followed the screams and the trail of dismembered body parts. Eventually he landed in Dover. The carnage he left behind in the Channel Tunnel took a week to clean up.

  Now, after a meeting of minds and – somehow – bodies between Lucy and Vlad (which was a sex tape nobody wanted to see, and thankfully there was no PowerPoint slide to reinforce that
particularly disturbing mental image), the second-generation Taints had a much more elaborate set of skills. Not only were they demented killing machines thanks to mummy, but daddy had also given them the ability to use tactics. Up until that point Taints were pretty moronic. They had one thing and one thing only on their minds, and that was the dinner gong. Once Vlad’s genes had blended with Lucy’s, the second generation Taints were intelligent enough to use some pretty advanced military tactics too.

  Any questions?

  Flynn and the lads had sat in silence, before Micky slowly raised a hand and asked, “Um, how do we kill ‘em?”

  All of that was academic, though.

  Right here, right now, in the winding, crumbling corridors of the kill house, if Colby really was facing a warm body, a real-life ‘Binky’ instead of Micky’s VR version, then he was in trouble. A shit-load of trouble…

  He glanced around. The blood trailed off into a side room, like a grotesquely sticky trail of breadcrumbs. Colby had that twisted, knotted sensation in the pit of his stomach. Warner and Moore weren’t armed up for warm bodies. The M4 shotgun capsules they carried were full of coloured water, not the organophosphur compound that would send a Taint into a heel-drumming, party-popping frenzied death throw. This was meant to be a relatively safe environment, so live ammo wasn’t issued to the candidates.

  Colby, however, never went anywhere without a full clip and one in the pipe. And the Blackhawk. Obviously.

  Like Dorothy following the yellow brick road but minus the ruby slippers, he padded silently alongside the body-width smear of blood that led into a side room, his heart sinking further with every cat-like, crossover step. He kept the snout of the Glock up, ready and waiting to spit out a swarm of adapted hollowpoints packed full of organophosphur at the first bastard that moved. If it was human, it would cop a bullet wound accompanied by a pungent garlicky odour, which would probably disinfect the wound on contact. If it was a Taint, though, there’d be the whole blowing up shit with a side order of heel drumming and screaming, even if he only winged the bastard.

  A mess on the floor made Colby stop in his tracks. “Damn…” He crouched and saw straight away that the mess was what was left of one of the newbies. Which one wasn’t clear on first inspection. There was very little that was still recognisable as human. It looked like an explosion in a butcher’s shop. Trails of intestines were laid out like strings of sausages, while all that remained of the man’s liver was a few tattered shreds clinging to a flack jacket that had been sliced into ribbons. Colby scanned the room for movement and pressed the squawk button on his radio. “Man down. Kill house is hot. Repeat, kill house is hot.”

  Yolanda’s voice answered instantly. “Bugger. Casualty ID?”

  “Moore.” Colby glanced down at the remains and grimaced. “I think.” He saw a glint of metal in the mincemeat that was left on the floor and gingerly extracted a set of dog tags from the detritus of the Taint’s feeding frenzy. He squinted at the blood-smeared discs. “Yeah, confirmed. It’s Moore. Shit.” He curled his fist around the dog tags. The bobble chain draped between his fingers, skimming and jiggling across the surface of what used to be a lung.

  “Damn it. Colby, get out of there. We’ve got sweep teams coming in.”

  “Not yet, Yol. I’ve still got a man in here. I’ll tie up with the lads when I meet them. Give them a head’s up that there’s at least one friendly in here, hopefully two. I don’t want them friendly firing my arse into the morgue, okay?”

  “Copy that. You’re armed?”

  “Always.”

  “Live ammo?”

  “Of course. Get those teams in here, Yol. Fast. This needs to be contained. Get Bravo team to check the grounds and secure the exits. We don’t know how many we’re dealing with here.” Colby stood. The derelict old manor house that doubled up as the training ‘kill house’ had five floors including the cellars and the attics, a warren of corridors, dumb waiter lifts, rooms, and at least three ‘secret’ passages they knew about. Add to that the crawl-spaces between the walls, and you had a whole heap of places a smart Taint could hide out.

  They had nothing. No intel at all. This wasn’t a carefully planned operation. This was a blind bug hunt. And somewhere in this labyrinth was a man with no ammo and a very low opinion of himself who may or may not know that he was being hunted by a real Taint, and not just a VR simulation.

  Colby swore quietly, pocketed Moore’s dog tags, and slipped out of the room, leading with the business end of the Glock. If he called out to Warner, he’d give his position away. This was going to be a bitch of a job. Warner didn’t have a radio. Note to self; give the bloody candidates comms in future!

  Man, the debrief (if he got out of this alive) was going to be epic. Number one, how the hell did a cold kill house become red-damn-hot in the space of ten minutes? Number two, how the hell were Taints getting access to secure areas, and number three, what the actual, living fuck? Colby tried to suppress the feeling of guilt over Moore that threatened to wash over him. He didn’t have time to beat himself up right now. That would be the colonel’s job later on. He was the newbies’ training officer, so he was responsible for their safety. Yeah. Bang up job so far on that, Flynn. Colby gritted his teeth and tried to focus back on the job at hand, and not on the desperately sad meat puzzle that lay in the room behind him. He was fervently praying that he didn’t come across Corporal Warner in the same condition…

  * * *

  Terry Warner was scared.

  More scared than he’d ever been in his life.

  Shit, this was worse than watching his mates and their supposedly indestructible Mastiff get vaporised by the mother of all IEDs in Helmund. It was worse than walking into that pockmarked, mud-brick hovel and finding the decomposing bodies of an entire family of ten rotting away into putrefying slime puddles. It was way, way worse than the sandflies, the heat and the hell of an Afghan tour. And this particular terror was right here. Not in a faraway land, well away from the people he loved, but on their damn doorstep. His wife. His young son. They were just a couple of miles away in the soulless brick semis of the garrison’s married quarters. This horror was just two fucking miles away from his family! It was creeping around in the leafy, tranquil surroundings of Hampshire, and the crumbling old manor house that had been re-commissioned as the unit’s training centre. In a place that was supposed to be ‘safe’.

  Up until two weeks ago, when he’d reported to the old barracks for ‘specialist training’, the thing that was chasing him through the dilapidated corridors had, as far as Terry was concerned, been confined to the pages of penny dreadfuls, and the blood-soaked landscape of nightmares. Now it was hunting him through the same corridors that were supposed to act as a training ground to turn him into the hunter.

  When Terry and Rob had first come across the Taint as it snacked on a rat, they had believed it to be part of Micky Cox’s training VR program. So, in an effort to redeem themselves to the faceless watchers who they believed were spying on them through CCTV cameras, they’d played along. Both men had pumped two rounds each from the M4s into the beast. They fully expected it to do the whole ‘party popper’ routine in front of them. It should have dropped to the floor, thrashing and screaming. There should have been drumming heels and crackling skin. It should have died.

  It should have.

  It didn’t.

  It dropped the half-eaten rat. It glanced at the minor four flesh wounds the projectile casings had inflicted on its sinewy body. And then it stood slowly, flexing its venom-tipped talons. A slow, evil smile oozed across its twisted face, giving both men a dazzling display of a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. Massive muscles and snaking veins made its elongated arms seem even more out of proportion to its emaciated body. This was a second-gen Taint, and a fully grown one at that.

  And it was real.

  Very, very real.

  This was no VR simulation created by the evil genius that was Sergeant Michael Paul Cox, ex-REME and SAS lu
natic. This ‘Binky’ was the real deal.

  Terry was the first to snap out of the trance. The damn thing couldn’t mind-fuck them both at the same time. But poor old Robbie Moore stood limply staring into its hideous yellow-gold eyes, utterly mesmerised. In the training exercise it had been Robbie that tried to save Terry’s arse from this exact same scenario. Now it was Terry’s chance to return the favour. He swung the M4 up and pointed it at the thing’s head. The capsule may not have real organophosphur in it, but he was betting a dollar to a doughnut a shot between the eyes would at least give the thing a nasty headache, and them the chance to exit stage left and run like hell.

  The M4 misfired.

  The click was enough to attract the Taint’s attention, and it snapped its head towards Terry. Warner dug deep and his training kicked in. He was a seasoned soldier. He knew now what he was facing. And he knew what this son of a bitch was capable of doing to a human body. Warner snarled. “Oh, hell no!” He spun the gun around, hoisted it up to shoulder level and pounded the butt straight into the face of the grinning monster once, twice, three times. A series of sickening cracks indicated that at least two nasal bones had shattered. The creature let out a yelp and recoiled from the makeshift battering ram slamming into its face. It was enough of a diversion to break the hold it had over Robbie Moore, and the man let out a gasp. “Jesus!”

  “Fuck religion, mate, just run!” Terry grabbed his friend and pulled him towards the door.

  If they had been running from a normal opponent, they might both have made it out. But this was a Taint. A big, ugly and very angry Taint. And Robbie Moore was just one step too close.

  “Terry, go! For fuck’s sake, go!” Warner heard Robbie gasp as the Taint’s venom-filled talons grabbed his neck and curled around his friend’s throat. The tips of the talons punctured the man’s skin. One slid like a needle into his carotid artery, pumping toxins directly into Robbie’s bloodstream and straight up to his brain. His eyes rolled in their sockets and his oppo slumped straight into the welcoming arms of the Taint.