SNAFU: Hunters

by James A. Moore

  People milled the streets, heading home from work or out for a Friday on the town. As one they gave the car a wide berth, eyeing both newcomers with open suspicion or naked hostility.

  Matt stepped up to his friend with his jaw clenched in frustration. “Dammit, Conor, we’re supposed to be scoping the place, not painting bullseyes on our heads.”

  A seven-foot tall bouncer, rippling with muscles impossible through normal exercise, eyed them from the front door across the street. Taking in the sea of Hispanics, all either staring or trying too hard not to stare, Flynn ran a hand over the stubble on his pasty scalp. “See, we fit right in, sunnies and all.” He put on his shades and sauntered across the street.

  Music trickled out behind the double-doors, Latin horns over a hip-hop beat, death-metal Spanish growling from a microphone. They approached, cop-casual, Matt two steps behind. The bouncer moved to intercept them. His voice rumbled an octave lower than a normal man’s, his accent a blend of Mexican and south Florida. “Can I help you, gentlemen?”

  “Yes,” Matt said. “We–”

  “Looking for a drink and twirl is all.” Flynn spun, an elegant pirouette that ended in a curtsey. He held the pose and looked up under his brow into the bouncer’s eyes. “Heard the Marquee had it happening, am I right?”

  “You’re not our target clientele, ese.” The bouncer put his hands on his hips so that his massive frame blocked most of both doors. Matt winced as Flynn’s eyes flashed, an almost imperceptible twitch that showed not the slightest hint of fear. The bouncer put his hand on Flynn’s chest, fingers splaying almost to his shoulders. “You’re going to have to leave.”

  “What, because I’m white? You discriminating here? You think the Irish haven’t faced–”

  Matt put his hand on Flynn’s shoulder. “We’re not here to pick a fight, Conor.”

  “–their share of discrimination, you racist prick? Why don’t you make me leave, big guy?”

  To his credit, the bouncer didn’t take the bait. Much. He extended his arm, slowly, forcing Flynn several steps back on the sidewalk. “Move along, little man. This isn’t the place for you.” He extended his fingers and Conor stumbled back two steps.

  Matt moved between them and Conor rebounded off of his back. “We’re sorry, sir. We’ll be on our way.” He stepped back, bumping Flynn toward the street, then turned and backed him off the curb and into the road. Through gritted teeth he mumbled, “The point was to maintain surprise, moron.”

  Flynn almost frolicked toward the car, locking eyes with anyone and everyone who dared challenge his right to be there. “Nah, there’s no fun in that, and he thinks we’re cops or feds or something anyway. The point was to size that meathead up. You see what I saw?”

  Matt recalled the scene, his eidetic memory enhancements bringing to crystal-clear focus details he hadn’t seen in real time. “Tracks?”

  “Right is right. He’s on the H, not just Jade. We follow him home, wait for him to snow out, bangers and mash,” he mimed tossing a flash-bang grenade. “Black bag over the head, voila. New toy for the intel department.”

  Matt tried not to smile as he gunned the engine. “Call it in.”

  “We could just–”

  “Call it in, Conor.” He pulled away from the curb and took a left toward the expressway.

  The dash shook as Flynn banged his fist on it. “Karle’s a pussy. We’ve got an opportunity here, and you know he’ll–”

  Matt sighed. “Twelve years a Royal Marine, decorated six times for valor, awarded the Victoria Cross for insane but admirable stupidity in the Kandahar valley. . . What rank were you when you left the force to join ICAP?”

  Flynn mumbled.

  “Say again, Corporal?”

  “Cor-por-al.” He emphasized every syllable. “And you know it.”

  “And why not a Sergeant? A Warrant Officer? Lieutenant?”

  They said it together. “A history of unpredictable behavior and violent tendencies uncurbed by disciplinary measures.”

  “ICAP wanted a killer,” Flynn mumbled again, “so they can’t complain when they get one.”

  “Right. But right now we need to be smart. We’re on US soil, and have limited mission parameters. If Karle sanctions the move, we–” His eyes widened as the whispers shrieked blood-soaked charnel houses into his brain. Before it happened a shadow separated from the wall, crushing the Impala and tumbling it end over end into the sidewalk grocery.

  Late-second precognition made Rowley and a select few other Augs impossible to surprise, at least while awake. The whispers gave warning, but not much. Matt swerved, taking the bonk head-on.

  He squeezed his eyes shut as the airbags deployed, gritted his teeth against the impossibly loud crunch, and yanked the 9mm from the glove box. Two pulls of the trigger deflated the airbag and caused the massive shadow dwarfing his vision to stagger. His eardrums healed as fast as the explosions shredded them, and the car lurched sideways. Gasping in a breath of chalky white dust and the tang of gunpowder, he tore off his seatbelt.

  Flynn had disappeared, his door hanging ajar on a crumpled hinge.

  A monster lifted the car by the front, a wall of muscle and spikes with jet black eyes, teeth filed to cruel points, threaded steel studs protruding from its head in a regular pattern. The bonk roared and Matt’s world overturned, the roof imploding as it impacted the asphalt. Neck tilted almost to ninety degrees, he fired twice out the spider-webbed windshield.

  Hot red blood exploded from the bonk’s enormous black sneaker, a chunk of leather torn free from the glancing shot. Matt pushed with his legs, straining against the seat as massive fingers gripped the hood under the car and lifted. If the bonk had felt the gunshot, it made no sign of it. Matt’s stomach lurched as the car raised up. He pushed harder, bracing his hands on either side of the steering wheel for leverage.

  The seat snapped and he fell back, his face sliding across the upholstered roof as the car smashed into the ground again, trapping him in a sandwich of crumpled metal.

  * * *

  Conor Flynn rolled right as gunfire peppered the sidewalk. His heart soared as civilians screamed, the adrenaline rushing through his veins in an orgy of pending violence while his augmented heart beat at a steady seventy beats per second. He hit the facade of the brick building at a full sprint and ran straight up it, using his momentum to gain traction on the vertical surface.

  Twenty feet up he grabbed the roof lip and jerked, sailing over the top in a graceful arc. One knife had already left his hand, sinking to the hilt into his first opponent. Conor ignored the dead man as he drew and threw the second knife left-handed.

  Shooter number two held his HK53 like a movie gangster, the stock collapsed, relying on arm strength to bring and hold the weapon to bear. He jerked as the knife hit, glancing off the gun instead of finding purchase in his flesh.

  Conor landed, crouched low, grinning in the thrill of battle. Bullets zoomed over his head as the gangbanger’s weapon jerked high. Three steps brought Conor in range, so he drew the katana and spun. The ancient bone fragment hidden in the hilt sang to him, urged the blade forward, thirsted for the death that it had brought in life. He resisted and pulled back at the last second. The monofilament blade took the man in the bridge of the nose without the slightest resistance, a spray of red gore joining the near-silent steel breeze. Stepping in as the man dropped the weapon to bring his hands to his face, Conor shouldered him off the roof.

  He fell with gurgling wail that cut off in a wet thump on the pavement.

  Picking up the carbine, Conor looked down at the overturned car and the giant bonk slamming it into the pavement. “Oh, Matt, you silly boy. I called dibs.”

  He dove sideways as the roof access door banged open, bullets tearing through the air where he’d just stood. Three men armed with ARs fanned out as Conor scrambled behind an air conditioning unit. They moved with an uncoordinated, nervous energy, to make room for a dark-skinned bonk in a black trenchcoat, like Wesley Snipes�
��s Blade enlarged on a photocopier.

  A sharp itch shot up from his ankle, and he looked down to find his cuff darkening with spreading blood just above his boot.

  The pain hadn’t hit him, and wouldn’t before the wound healed.

  “Brilliant, lads. Let’s play.”

  * * *

  Automatic weapons-fire punctuated the mind-rattling crunch as the bonk beat the car into the ground. Matt squirmed to the back, popped down the latch to access the trunk, and pulled the case containing his AA-12 combat shotgun into the back seat. His stomach lurched as the car lifted and he ran his thumb over the biometric lock.

  The car slammed down and a searing, white-hot pain shot up his leg into his spine.

  He popped open the case and slid out the weapon, the drum magazine already loaded with fin-stabilized fragmentation rounds. He turned, his left leg making a sloppy ripping sound as it tore free from the jagged chunk of metal that used to be the gearshift, and took aim.

  The car came up, and in the four-inch space between the dash and the remains of the roof the bonk’s abdomen came into view, rippling muscle barely contained in a baby-blue t-shirt. Matt fired, the roar deafening in the confined space.

  He held the trigger as the bonk whirled to the side and only one microgrenade found its mark, the others deactivating automatically as they missed the intended target. As it exploded the world disappeared from view and the car crashed down onto the pavement with a final crunch. Matt squirmed back and crushed the latch on the trunk with a knife-hand, tearing it free with a wince. Ignoring the bloody mess he’d made of his fingers he launched himself out, weapon raised toward the rooftops.

  He fired and swept right over three targets, wishing for his tactical helmet with its Friend-or-Foe identifier and smart projectile guidance system. A man’s head exploded, raining bloody brains and chunks of skull from the rooftop before pitching back out of sight, but the other two took cover, unharmed. Shots rang out from the roof across the street, though at what target he couldn’t tell.

  Footsteps rang behind him. On his back, he rolled his head to take aim at the charging bouncer, eight-hundred-plus pounds moving at twenty-something miles an hour. He triggered the rounds to explode ‘downward’ toward the sky and pulled the trigger. The weapon barely recoiled against his shoulder, and a dozen shots flew in two seconds. The depleted uranium-tipped rounds punched into the bonk’s legs and abdomen and then erupted in a bloody mist. The massive thing stumbled mid-stride, left femur and part of its hip exposed by the rapid disintegration of intervening flesh.

  Matt fired twice more, punching up under the fused bones of its ribcage to pulp the heart and lungs. With any luck the trauma would be enough to bring it down.

  The whispers tittered in hateful glee and he jerked his legs up, but his injured left knee didn’t respond. The shredded remains of his Impala came down on top of it in an explosion of wet red pain, erasing everything below his lower thigh in a gory smear across the concrete. Black spots formed in his vision, but he jerked up the shotgun – and found no targets. Blue sky and scattering civilians filled his vision over the demolished car.

  As the arteries pumping life from his body closed and meat formed around undeveloped bone, he lay back and panted, trying to circumvent the unbearable, itching agony of bleeding, knitting flesh. His vision darkened, but he forced his eyes to remain open and trained on the rooftop. His view remained empty, devoid of targets.

  In the distance, sirens wailed.

  He slid to a sitting position, his right hand on the stock of the AA-12, and looked down at the tattered remains of his leg. The muscle writhed, ropy masses weaving together only to split, bleeding, as the bone grew between them.

  A shadow crossed his vision. He looked up.

  Conor shook his head, frowning, every inch of him covered in bright red blood. He smiled, white teeth glinting like the metallic sheen on his sword in the fading sunlight. “You let him get away. You going to do your job or what?”

  Biting back his vulgar reply, Matt allowed his head to drop to the sidewalk, filling his vision with clear blue sky. “Call it in. And put that damned sword away – the cops are en route.”

  * * *

  Hurya al-Azwar stepped down from the helicopter and surveyed the carnage wrought by Conor Flynn. Five dead men sprawled across the rooftop, policemen already marking evidence with little yellow tags – shell casings, severed limbs, discarded weapons. Red stains marred the gravel in an expanding spiral that ended in the shredded remains of a giant black man, a third of his head three meters further away, remaining eye wide open in unending shock, mouth open to reveal serrated steel teeth bolted into his jaw.

  “How many did they get?” She nodded toward the corpse.

  Sergeant Karle frowned down at the dead bonk. “Two, plus nearly a dozen normals. All fatalities. Conor’s unhurt, Matt will be fine in an hour or so if we stuff enough food in him.”

  “This was recon. What the hell happened?”

  Karle held up his hands. “Conor Flynn happened. Matt said he picked a fight.”

  “Remind me to never do that.” She nudged the dead bonk with her toe. “Intel didn’t even know about this one. What’s a big black guy doing Augging-up in a Latin gang?”

  Karle grunted. “Tell Platt and Washington to make nice with the locals. I’m going to see if we can’t get Conor and Matt out of custody.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  * * *

  The map appeared on Matt’s HUD as Karle spoke in his ear piece. The Mako Kings controlled a nine-block area just outside of downtown, and ruthlessly crushed any and all opposition regardless of whether or not they were law enforcement, rival gangs, or even the cartels. Pioneers in nationwide Jade distribution, they’d partnered with Dawkins’s organization to spread like a virus from Chicago to both coasts and everywhere in-between. With an irresistible product and superhuman augmentation they destroyed their competition and carved out an empire from the ashes of burning ghettos.

  A network of Dragonflies gave Matt real-time data of the Mako Kings’s turf, the quad-copter drones blanketing the area with sonar, visual, and infrared surveillance. Coupled with his own infrared and ultraviolet vision, the HUD removed the fog of war and replaced it with stark, robotic clarity. The overlay projected an image that saw through brick walls and even assessed the likelihood that any particular person was a target or a civilian.

  Pointy, as Conor had taken to calling him, had left a blood trail from the wreckage of Matt’s rented Impala through the back alleys to an abandoned shopping plaza now known as ‘Spanish City’, a lawless haven for derelicts, junkies and people who didn’t want to be found. A wall of wrecked vehicles surrounded the parking lot and included a crude gate made out of the burned-out carcass of a double-decker bus rigged to an old crane.

  The reek of unwashed bodies, burning garbage, and urine combined into something not unlike ammonia-soaked charred bananas left to rot in the sun. Matt couldn’t imagine what it smelled like in the midday heat and humidity.

  Dozens of people wandered the asphalt, or warmed themselves at fires set in rusted steel drums. Junkies lay on the ground, or on each other, sharing needles and pills and body heat in the midnight chill. Sentries wandered the rooftops, armed with long rifles and binoculars that may or may not be night-vision capable.

  Too many civilians. A squad of Augs could make mincemeat of the hostiles without the use of heavy ordnance, but the civilians would pay a heavy toll. Besides, if Jade wasn’t involved it wasn’t their purview, and while some Jade dealers found their way to Spanish City it was not, according to their intel, a pipeline worthy of ICAP’s attention. Yet.

  Karle had operational control – former rank meant nothing in ICAP – but ultimately the plan came from Washington. Washington, Karle, and Flynn would storm the gates, loud and proud, with flash-bangs and drone support to crack a hole in the wall. As the civilians ran and the guards engaged, Rowley, Platt, and al-Azwar would eliminate Pointy. Conor had complained, c
iting “dibs” which Washington ignored, mollifying him with a chance at the fifth bonk the Dragonflies had pegged near the gate.

  Mission parameters authorized deadly force for the bonks and anyone identified as a Mako King. Between the baby-blue bandannas and facial recognition, the quad copters had added eleven human-sized targets in addition to the two bonks. Matt’s HUD outlined them with double red triangles, the suspected civilians with orange triangles, and his own team with green circles. In the age of Jade, collateral damage had become a price of law enforcement, and the DHS hoped the joint UN/NATO strike force would bring so much firepower to bear that they could minimize or at least contain the destruction . . . but this somehow wasn’t a ‘military operation’.

  Peace through superior bureaucracy.

  The timer hit zero, and the bus-gate disintegrated in a roar, the fireball rising skyward as the drone banked toward home.

  Screams. Panic. Weapons-fire pinging off the wreckage from jittery, untrained gangbangers wasting their ammo—and precious time reloading.

  Pointy’s hulking form, bright yellow on the infrared, bolted from his mattress in the abandoned Macy’s sales floor, joined by several others. The huge blob raced through the open space toward the loading dock a hundred feet from their position.

  Platt charged, screaming, before the bay door had opened. Matt opened his mouth to countermand, and closed it, angry. Platt came to a halt inches from the unmoving metal.

  Pointy’s blob faded, then disappeared.

  “What the hell?” Platt put his fist through the loading-dock’s side door, pivoted, and ripped it off its hinges. Staccato pops sounded from inside, and chips of cinderblock lashed into Platt’s face.

  “Hold position!” Matt moved up, his HUD tracking for targets simultaneously on the Dragonfly feed and the helmet camera, the ‘Identify Friend or Foe’ lighting up at several weapon profiles sticking out from around pillars and decrepit, half-burned display cases.