SNAFU: Hunters

by James A. Moore

  One of the torches winked out.

  Silanus blinked. Rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t been mistaken. Must have been the wind. The only light now visible was the orange flickering onto the snow from the next torch over.

  That, too, went dark.

  He crept to the door, fear flooding him as, one by one, the torches died.

  Then he saw it.

  A dozen yards away. Little more than shadow. It stood tall and stretched its arms high. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought it a tree.

  It vanished.

  It was coming for him. He had hurt it and it came to pull his lungs from his back and drink his blood.

  Knowing he shouldn’t but not caring, he slammed the door and ran to the corner of the house. Piss streamed down his leg as he pressed his back to the wall and gripped the yew tight. He trembled in complete darkness for several minutes, waiting for a thud against the door or a scratching on the walls. How disappointed his father would have been.

  The rough scrape of bone against wood.

  Silanus’s breath caught and he slid down onto the floor. It was in here. With him. How was that possible?

  The noise came again, frenzied now. Something brushed his foot. He ran. Colliding with the door, he tumbled out onto the snow.

  The clouds had parted and the moon shone brightly on the farm. He rolled onto his back and looked into the house. The Droch-fhola was pulling itself free from the wall as though it had always been a part of the wooden structure. Those empty sockets locked on Silanus as the thing’s feet snapped away from the house and came after him.

  It was out the door before he could get to his feet. I’m going to die here.

  A dark shape dropped onto its back. The Droch-fhola buckled but did not fall as Lepidus wrapped an arm around its throat. The soldier raised his yew dagger as the creature stood to its full height, thrashing and bucking like a rabid stallion.

  Lepidus fell from its back.

  It turned to him as Crispus slammed into its side. The two crashed to the ground, snow dusting the air, and the soldier brought his dagger down into the Droch-fhola’s thigh. It screamed that same awful scream and bent its head backward at an impossible angle, clamping its jaws onto Crispus’s face and rose.

  Crispus punched it twice, two solid blows that sounded like an axe striking oak, and then it shook its head viciously from side to side. A loud snap and Crispus fell limp to the ground.

  The snow exploded around Silanus as the others erupted from the ground. Crito and Antonius charged its flank as Marcellus and Gaius circled to its front. The two other soldiers, Titus and Lucius, charged toward its side, surrounding it. It crouched low, its head darting back and forth between the three groups. Crispus’s dagger was still sunk into its thigh but no blood flowed.

  Lepidus leapt from where he was thrown and jabbed it with his dagger. His retreat wasn’t quick enough and the thing’s claws gashed his leg open. Antonius made use of the distraction and stabbed its ribs. It whirled to strike but Gaius had stabbed its other side. Neither wound was deep but something flowed from each and danced in the wind. Titus made a quick jab – missed. Crito, Marcellus, and Lucius repeated the maneuver and some of what escaped the Droch-Fhola landed in front of Silanus. He hesitated a moment before snatching some and rubbing it between his fingers. It wasn’t blood. It looked like dried, crumbled leaves.

  Antonius stabbed it again but it spun as Gaius followed, slipping by him and rushing toward the house. Lepidus tried to roll out of its way but it hooked the back of the soldier’s armor and dragged him as though he weighed nothing.

  “After it,” Marcellus shouted and the men rushed the house.

  Silanus couldn’t make himself follow. A voice whispered in his head that he should run, that he owed these men nothing, and to stay here would be his death. It was a voice he had struggled with for a long time and he fought hard to ignore it.

  Rushing to the door, he saw the thing toss Lepidus against the back wall hard enough to shake the entire house. The soldier crumpled to the floor. Whirling on the others as they entered, the creature was a blur of limbs. For a moment Silanus could only see the indigo armor of the Hundredth and then, one by one, they fell. He would be next.

  He backed away from the melee.

  It roared, a sound of victory that reverberated like thunder, and then Marcellus was tossed from the cabin. Blood covered his face and Silanus was sure he was dead.

  The Droch-fhola ripped the door from the hinge as it stepped from the house. It roared again and leapt for Marcellus.

  The Decanus squirmed onto his back and brought up his gladius. The Droc-fhola fell on it. The blade pierced its chest, but the monster didn’t seem to feel it. It pushed itself down the iron, dry leaves crumbling from its mouth and onto Marcellus’s face.

  “Go on, then,” the Roman said. “Send me on my way, you bastard!”

  It roared and jerked forward.

  Without thought, Silanus rushed forward. He slammed his yew dagger into the Droc-fhola’s back. It shrieked as the wood sunk deep and Silanus pressed harder, pushing it in further. It thrashed but he would not let go.

  Yes, he thought, ecstatic to bring it agony. Die you miserable thing!

  It shrieked louder. Something like a thin branch whipped up into his face.

  Everything went black.

  * * *

  When Silanus woke, the smell of smoke was thick in the air. He struggled to sit and almost threw up.

  “Slow down,” Marcellus said and placed a hand on his shoulder.

  Silanus lay back on the bed. They were still in the farmhouse.

  “Did it get away?”

  “No.” The Decanus leaned back in his chair by the bed. “You saw to that.”

  He didn’t know how to respond. For a moment when he woke, he thought everything had been a nightmare. The knowledge it had been real should have driven him mad. Instead, pride rose within – he had been the one to kill the Droch-Fhola.

  “We’ll be moving on soon. Likely tomorrow.”

  Silanus nodded and tried to think on which way he should travel from here; of what life held for him now.

  Antonius barked orders to the men outside as Marcellus watched them through the door. “You’re welcome to come with us. If you want.”

  “As a prisoner?”

  The older man laughed. It stretched the stitches in his face. “As an apprentice. Not every man can be a soldier in the Hundredth, boy.” Marcellus turned to him and slapped a hand onto his chest. “Not every man belongs to this life. There’s no shame in saying no. You’ve seen how we live.” He coughed once, a wet sound deep in his chest echoing it. “And seen how we die.”

  Silanus struggled to sit again. The room spun but he willed himself to steady. That voice again whispered that he owed them nothing, that he should leave here and run far from them. The voice was much easier to ignore this time.

  Bonked

  Patrick Freivald

  “Four bonks?” Lieutenant Washington ran a hand over the wispy stubble on his dark-skinned head. “Are they stupid?”

  Matt Rowley tried not to sigh, and for the most part succeeded – the resulting noise more of a dissatisfied grunt.

  Conor Flynn, just as bald as Washington but pale as milk, grinned at Matt across the giant conference room table emblazoned with the eye-and-thunderbolt logo of the International Council on Augmented Phenomena, the elite organization founded through UN-NATO cooperation to combat the threat of Jade and unregulated Gerstner Augmentation. “FNG got an opinion?”

  Jeff Hannes froze in his thousand-dollar suit and glared at all of them, his thumb over the ‘advance slide’ button. “Are you implying there are non-stupid Jade users, Washington?”

  “Point, sir. But they have to know they’re playing with fire. I mean, look what Gerstner Augs did to the Russian military. A gang’s not going to have that kind of firepower.”

  Flynn spoke without taking his eyes from Matt. “Maybe that’s what the other
three are for. One goes bonk, the other three take it down before it wrecks the neighborhood. Somebody else Augs up; lather, rinse, repeat.”

  Washington pounded a fist on the manila folder that contained his mission briefing. “Are we equipped to deal with that kind of oomph?”

  While avoiding Flynn’s unwavering gaze, Matt replied. “Yeah, we are, according to the analytics. If they don’t know we’re coming.” Matt turned to Jeff. “They don’t know, do they?”

  Hannes threw up his hands. “Unless they’ve got a mole in this room, they’re clueless, just another Jade gang hopped up on power. The biggest, sure, and they’ve seized way too much territory, but they’re just a gang. And besides, to have a mole they’d have to know we’re operating on American soil.”

  Flynn quirked an eyebrow at Matt. “Dibs for fun on the pointy one, New Guy.” His Irish mumble would have been incomprehensible if not for a decade’s friendship, which made the ‘New Guy’ treatment all the more absurd. Their units had fought together in overseas operations and they’d kept in touch in the years since. That Flynn had signed up for ICAP two years before Matt didn’t erase that history, so shouldn’t change their friendship.

  Matt glanced from Flynn to the photo jacked from a nightclub security camera, splayed large across the white wall that served as a screen. The largest of the four bonks had augmented himself beyond anything Matt had seen before. At least ten feet tall with hands the size of Christmas hams, he loomed over the scene behind giant sunglasses, massive arms crossed over his naked chest. In lieu of hair, steel studs protruded from the top of his skull in a regular grid. Metal spikes protruded from his forearms, ending in cruel barbs sharpened to a razor sheen.

  Flynn stroked his chin with an air of too much theater. “He’s prettier than me. I can’t let that stand.”

  Turning to Jeff, Matt tapped the picture. “How has he not bonked out already? Nobody can tolerate that level of Augs.” Bonks had gotten their nickname – which Conor found particularly funny – from the inevitable psychosis that overtook chronic Jade users, the superhuman threat that ICAP had been founded to confront. The more you took, the bigger and badder you got, until the whispers drove you into a killing frenzy you never come out of.

  And Jade is addictive, with a recidivism rate over ninety-nine percent.

  Psychotics are bad. Psychotics that can shrug off bullets and throw cars are rather worse. The Russian military wouldn’t be a threat for at least a generation.

  And now it’s a street drug.

  Hurya al-Azwar answered with a roll of her pale-blue eyes. “It’s a matter of time, Rowley. You know it, I know it, he has to know it. Which just makes him that much more dangerous.” A scar ran from her left temple back into her short blonde hair. It, and the missing quarter-inch off the top of her ear, spoke of a life on the streets of Detroit before two tours as a Marine in the sand box, before Jade and augmentation and ICAP, before the regenerates that would heal any damage short of death without mark or scar and in seconds or minutes instead of months.

  Five years his senior in ICAP, she’d seen dozens of her colleagues bonk out, had to put far too many of them down, and her first-generation regenerates put her at a higher risk than any of them. Augmentation protocols had improved as scientific understanding increased, but everyone in the room ran the risk of psychotic, ravening insanity. Everyone but their boss.

  Jeff’s constipated grimace pulled them away from the picture. “Look, we’ve got four heavily-augmented threats and at least sixteen who might be normals, or might just not be showing. I’m bringing in Platt and Karle,” he raised his voice over their groans, “and giving Karle operational discretion on this one.”

  “Why do you hate us?” Flynn asked.

  Jeff ran his tongue over his teeth. “Karle’s got a better success rate than any of you. I want you all back alive, and there’s something about this,” he waved his hand at the scattered pictures, “I don’t like at all.”

  Washington sighed without looking up. “Feel the love, man.”

  * * *

  Matt eyed the sunglasses in Flynn’s proffered hand and shook his head. “Those make me look like a cop.”

  “You are a cop. Were a cop. Pretending to be a cop. Whatever you did in Tennessee.”

  “No need to advertise it.”

  “Eat your bones.” Flynn tossed the shades into the back seat and fastened his seatbelt, then ran his hands over the fake leather dash above the late-model Impala’s glove box. “Brilliant. These American-made autos really spice up the sex life, Rowley. We’ll fit right in.”

  At two hundred and forty pounds and one percent body fat, Conor Flynn looked every bit the cop, or ex-military, as Matt. His skin-tight gray t-shirt did nothing to dispel the effect, and his square sunglasses screamed, ‘I am a Government Agent. Do not speak to or trust me.’

  Flynn raised an eyebrow at the naked appraisal. “What?”

  Matt just shook his head and put the car into gear.

  They cruised through the suburbs, past an endless stream of one-story ranches and dingy, sun-faded plastic swimming pools. The smells of the city filtered through the air conditioning, street food and salt water and sweat and garbage rotting under the blazing summer sun. Matt considered grabbing the shades from the back seat, but wouldn’t give Flynn the satisfaction. Chain link replaced white pickets, and vinyl siding blurred into graffiti on decaying brick.

  They pulled up to a stoplight and idled next to a cluster of young men, baggy street clothes and wary brown faces sweltering in the midday heat. This far south it took a special kind of stupid to wear pants if you didn’t have to, which might explain why half of them hung on their thighs or even lower. The pale yellow bandanas around foreheads, necks, wrists, or ankles identified them as Camino Reals. Heroin dealers and thieves, they lay outside ICAP’s jurisdiction even with their new domestic operations protocols.

  Flynn held a hundred-dollar bill up with two fingers, but no one approached the car, their lack of attention as conspicuous as staring.

  “Oy, boys.” Flynn waved the folded bill in the air. “I could use some information.” They glowered at the ground, at the sky, the telephone poles, anywhere but at the car. “Brilliant, lads. Thanks for nothing.” The light turned green and Matt pulled away, eyes on the mirrors, watching them watch him with wary eyes.

  “No love from the South-Side Banana Hammocks.” Flynn chuckled and slipped the money back into his pocket. “Told you we look like cops.”

  “If you’re so worried about it, why are we the ones going?”

  “I didn’t say I was worried. It’s just going to be hard to pick a fight if they know we’re the law.”

  “We’re not here to pick–”

  Babbling whispers slithered through his mind, a mad cacophony of thoughts bent on murder and pain, the worst side effect of Gerstner Augmentation. Matt took the warning from the Late-Second Precognition but ignored the lurching desire to tear Flynn’s face from his skull and stuff it into his mouth. Jerking the wheel, he hit the brakes then the gas to bring them around ninety degrees, then floored it before the jeeps rounded the corner behind the run-down convenience mart.

  Flynn laughed and reached down, but stopped when Matt shook his head.

  “You won’t need the pig-sticker, they’re just running us off.” He down-shifted to pick up speed, then jammed the car into higher gear, gas pedal to the floor. The motor whined, a cicada with an internal-combustion mating call.

  Flynn took his hand off the hilt of his katana, leaving it on the floor between the seats. The titanium and carbon nanofiber blade had yet to see use in combat, but Matt had watched Flynn dice up a car in the practice arena without breaking a sweat. Why an Irishman fought with a katana Matt would never understand.

  Flynn jerked his thumb toward the back. “You want me to get the trunk?”

  Matt shook his head. The REC-7 carbine and Auto-Assault 12 combat shotgun could stay where they were, in the trunk under lock and key. If worse came to wo
rse he had his personal Glock 9mm in the glove box. But it wouldn’t. They’d been made as cops in a no-go zone, but hadn’t done anything to justify a murder, even from a gang as vicious as the Camino Reals.

  They blew through two red lights, the jeeps swerving and honking behind, but as they passed from one turf to the next the pursuit broke off and didn’t return.

  “You sussed those out pretty fast. Precog, yeah?” Flynn asked.

  Matt nodded without taking his eyes from the road.

  “Brilliant, brilliant. They wouldn’t clear me for it, said I’d had enough. I’m thinking what’s the harm, right?”

  “The harm is you go bonk and kill everything around you until other people like you put you down.”

  Flynn chuckled. “That’s what I mean, right? The side effect is ‘fun.’”

  “Just keep your pants on.”

  “Aye, Sergeant.”

  Ten minutes later they rolled past the Marquee, a modern glass-and-steel structure at odds with the dilapidated neighborhood. The fading day washed the neon lights to a pale glow but did nothing to hide the ultraviolet paint across the front windows, a cartoon shark swimming through a golden crown that would be invisible to unaugmented eyes.

  “See that?” Matt asked.

  Flynn nodded. “Fancy. You think the Shades don’t have blacklights?”

  Matt shrugged. “One cop in fifty might have augged vision, maybe. Not like the Mako Kings don’t know the police know where they hang out, anyway. As long as they think we’re just cops, we’ll–”

  Flynn popped his handle and stepped out, the car still rolling at fifteen miles an hour. He hooked a parking meter with his right hand and used it to spin himself around, stopping with a flourish with his toes balanced on the edge of the curb. As Matt slammed on the brakes and swore under his breath, Flynn took a bow to the wide-eyed onlookers. Flynn waited behind the car for Matt to pull over, put on the brake and get out.