Operation Wild Tarpan

by Addison Gunn

  The Infected were staying out of sight, mostly. Just recon by fire, two or three fighters popping their heads up from the rubble to make sure the machine guns were still working, to take pot shots and see what shot back. But they weren’t throwing away their lives. So what was the difference?

  It didn’t take long, staring at the bodies being torn up in the river, for Miller to feel sick. So he put down the binoculars and pulled up one of the drone imagery feeds, hunting through the recent imaging map for clues.

  The Infected in the river were emerging from between a set of buildings in good cover. Sheltered, shallow. There were a mass of soldiers nearby, hunkered down in an alleyway with a fire going, roasting a slab of flesh—Miller couldn’t tell if it was human or something torn from one of the Archaeobiome’s creatures.

  Lured in by the scent of food, maybe, Infected civilians wandered closer in ones and twos. If there were any more than that, the soldiers lifted their rifles and made them come in one by one.

  Flicking back and forth through the timestamped images and footage, trying to figure out what happened in the gaps, Miller couldn’t understand why the Infected citizens who were accepted into the group then left to go into the water. None of the soldiers did it. It was only after watching a thin, bedraggled specimen going down to the water, then coming back, and repeating the trip until at last three soldiers came along and watched the poor civilian swim out into the open, that Miller understood.

  The only Infected they sent out were sickly, thin, ravaged by famine. Almost all of them were covered in scabrous rashes, lichens and moulds blossoming on their skin. The healthy ones, the ones who could fight, were sent deeper into the city to join the fire teams and pick up weapons. The few sickly souls were left behind with dozens of single-minded soldiers around them.

  They weren’t being coerced. Not physically. Not tortured. Miller couldn’t know for sure, not without being able to listen in, but it looked like the Infected were peer pressuring the sickly, those who needed help, into wandering out into the water for Doyle’s gun.

  If they didn’t want to go, enough Infected brought them up to the shoreline that they couldn’t think for themselves, and they fell prey to the group’s desires.

  Hell, maybe it was about philanthropy. This was about killing off the weak.

  Racing through the other footage nearby, Miller also found a pattern in the boiling movement of the Infected through streets and alleyways. Here, there. A soldier being ‘protected’ from a larger mob of friendly Infected, a leader—often an officer—gathered up friendly faces to form a larger mob that swallowed up fire teams and spat them out at the compound wall for another round of recon by fire.

  The Infected weren’t telepathic. It was all pheromones and body language, the Archaean Parasite forcing them to respond.

  Jimmy Swift was very nearly his old, smooth self when he was separate from the mob. On television, Major General Stockman had been his own man at the far end of a table from Swift.

  Could the Infected be controlled? Not simply given orders by military leaders, but manipulated? Almost bullied into compliance, like those poor souls walking out into the water for Doyle?

  “Doyle?” Miller said.

  “Nngh?”

  “They’re using you.”

  “I know, suicidal little shits.”

  “Not like that.” Miller showed him the footage, tried to explain.

  Miller wasn’t certain about it, couldn’t be sure, but Doyle latched onto his half-theory, staring at an image of the soldiers around the fire with venom.

  “Bastards,” he growled. “Come on.”

  “Huh? We’ve got orders to hold the wall.”

  Doyle glared at him. “Did you never learn, in all the years of your Army career, how to interpret orders flexibly?”

  It wasn’t any particular demonstration of leadership, but Miller followed Doyle down from the wall, carrying his empty magazines and trailing along like a porter after the troublingly colonial image of Doyle the big-game hunter. Down onto the floating pontoons the Rats had set up as a temporary dock, and from there they could watch an unfortunate Infected paddling desperately through the water.

  The eel-like creatures thrashing around the dead bodies were shearing flesh off her, piece by piece. Doyle ended that with his first shot, before even flipping down his rifle’s bipod.

  Without the Infected’s screaming, just the watery rustle of the black serpentine lengths moving just beneath the surface, it almost felt like setting up for a peaceful day’s fishing.

  Almost.

  It took a few moments, but the instant the Infected soldiers came to the alley mouth with the next sickly ‘volunteer,’ Doyle had one’s head off. A second shot, maybe deliberate, maybe not, cut through a soldier’s thighs, sending them down, bleeding and helpless, barely in the open, screaming for help.

  Miller dimly watched as the Infected returned fire. White flashes followed by watery plops of bullets as they came up short and hit the water. The army’s carbines, shortened assault rifles, didn’t have the barrel length to take advantage of a rifle cartridge’s full power. Compared to Doyle’s custom .388, and at this range, it was like spitballs versus meteorites.

  “Why the bloody hell aren’t you shooting?” Doyle growled from the corner of his mouth, before the rifle.

  “I, uh...”

  “You aren’t going to leave all the killing to me, are you?”

  Raised on a steady diet of Hollywood violence, Miller thought the line had to have been a machismo-filled call to action. Like men comparing the size of fish caught. But it wasn’t that. There was an edge of mania to Doyle’s voice, an anguish.

  Beneath the brittle glass of Doyle’s enunciation, behind the words, Miller heard, Don’t make me do this alone.

  Miller’s M27 had the range. Its lengthened barrel eked out every foot-per-second of velocity out of the same rifle cartridges the soldiers were using, sending the solid copper slugs in a hail across the alley-mouth, ricocheting down between the walls.

  It didn’t feel good. Pulling the trigger felt awful, like dragging a knife into himself. Look, point, kill, look, point, kill. Fighting wasn’t supposed to work like that, but sending the sick and dying off to their deaths was evil. Killing those soldiers was right, wasn’t it?

  When the targets were all dead or hiding, and the last of the Infected sick had gotten away, Doyle got up and wiped his face with his hands in a very brief departure from cold decorum.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Miller swept his foot through piled bullet casings, sending them scattering into the river, and followed Doyle back into the compound.

  “There are two kinds of snipers,” Doyle said, as they moved through abandoned refugee shanties to reach the wall. “The ones who count, and the ones who don’t. The first kind... the first kind are psychopaths. The other kind don’t last in the job as long.” He shook his head, simply. “There’s a fucking reason I gave up on trying to join the SAS and became a bodyguard.”

  “I... I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault. You need people dead. You need someone to kill them. That’s the game, isn’t it?” Doyle ducked into the shadows beside one of the ramshackle stairways up to the wall’s walkway, and fumbled a small, torn-up square of paper from a pocket. He tore off a fragment, pushed it back into a plastic baggie, and chewed on the scrap, shaking his head. “Just...”

  “Just?”

  “Just don’t use me to do things you wouldn’t,” Doyle said, voice shaking. “Alright? Don’t force me to be the only one with blood on his hands.”

  “I won’t,” Miller promised. “I don’t—” He hesitated. “I don’t want that either. To be alone with blood on my hands.”

  “Good man.” Doyle slapped Miller’s back. “Smoke-break over. Hopefully no more swimming club.” And with that, he climbed back up the stairs, face cold once more.

  Miller watched him climb, and tried to understand the gallows humour that turne
d the Infected executions into a swimming club. And for that matter, why bother with swimming them into the river? Marching them into the heavy machine guns over the gate would have been just as good, wouldn’t it?

  He hesitated. “Doyle!”

  Doyle turned on the twist of staircase above, glancing down. “Yes?”

  “You haven’t seen any officers since we got on the wall, have you?”

  “Been too fucking busy with the swimming club.”

  Miller had been able to pick them out on the drone footage. They were everywhere, barely behind the front lines, coordinating the siege. The open, half-eaten mealpak in Miller’s waist pouch was evidence enough of how well that siege was going—the last food truck had gotten into the compound some time before Miller’s last full night’s sleep. He didn’t expect to be issued any more food for the rest of the day.

  The mob was coordinated, even with their radios down. They weren’t drifting around the city, or rioting in the uncontrolled mobs that had swept the city in weeks past. They were controlled.

  Miller knew the Archaean Infected mobs could flip their emotional state like a switch, just add the right amount of anger, the right amount of xenophobic fear. He’d hesitated before, and PFC Klansman had spread his hatred to his commanding officer. Could the Infected really manipulate each other like that? Use the sick and weak to distract snipers and let them hide in plain sight?

  It was a question he’d already seen answered. The string of bodies being torn to pieces down-river were proof enough.

  And Wild Tarpan had been put on hold until the perimeter had been secured.

  “Doyle!” he called again. “Get down to the personnel hall and gather supplies for a full day outside the walls. Enough food and ammunition for the rest of Cobalt-2 and Hsiung. On my authority.”

  Doyle halted on the stairway, leaning out to look down on Miller. “But we’ve got orders to hold the wall.”

  “Y’all were the one talking about flexibly interpreting orders,” Miller drawled.

  JENNIFER BARRETT DIDN’T look happy being confronted in her office, or confronted at all, but she rarely smiled anyway. “We don’t have the resources to support a push—”

  “This isn’t a push into the city.” Miller bit his lip, angry at himself for cutting off the boss, but plunged on. “This is a five-man team.”

  “Our air assets are tied down, we can’t push Bravos into the city. Everything we’ve got is being prepared to push the army off the bridges. It’s the only way to get supply boats in safely. There’s nothing left to provide any hope of support.”

  “We didn’t have support in Harlem.”

  “If you just wait until nightfall...” She pinched at her nose, eyes squeezed shut.

  “It needs to happen now. This is Operation Wild Tarpan over again, hitting their communications infrastructure, but the nature of that infrastructure has changed. We need to capture or kill their Charismatics.” Miller leaned on Barrett’s desk, and pushed his phablet over to her. In a still image it was harder to pick out, but the looping clip showed it clearly enough: the Infected bubbled around individuals, protecting them from the thickest part of the mob. Sometimes a lieutenant, sometimes a private, sometimes collapsing to outnumber a smaller band.

  “Charismatics?” she asked, watching the footage.

  “I don’t know if there’s a better term. Ones like Swift, the ones skilled at manipulating the other Infected. Or the ones so emotionally overcharged they can swing the mob’s mood by themselves.”

  “I think I see the ones you mean,” she said, tracing a path with her finger. “You think this might break the siege?”

  “It can’t hurt.”

  “It can hurt you, Mr. Miller. We can’t get you out of trouble.”

  “The mobs forming out there aren’t like the ones during the riots, ma’am. This time they’re not going to wander home when they all decide they’re tired and shamble off in a group. We have to remove the Charismatics from the equation.”

  Barrett’s jaw tightened. “I thought you didn’t approve of ‘black ops shit.’ That is what you said this morning, isn’t it?”

  “It’s been a real long day, ma’am,” Miller muttered, bowing his head.

  KILLING A MAN with du Trieux was one of the most intimate acts Miller had ever experienced. Like stalking deer with his father, like discovering he wasn’t alone beside Doyle.

  Something inside him had broken. He knew that. He could feel it bleeding away in the parts of his soul that had believed things would get better some day. All of Miller’s faith in a brighter future had snapped into pieces and the brittle shards were grinding into the soft flesh of his throat, pushing him forward.

  One step.

  The thunder of his heart and blood in his veins.

  A second step.

  He still had the slashing blade on his thigh. It was useful, it had a can opener in the cross guard. But he also had an eight-inch long spike of a weapon in his right hand.

  The ‘Charismatic’—the label had an almost totemic, dehumanizing power, as if the man were a radio antenna instead of a living being—had moved between fire teams behind the lines for nearly an hour. Running like a messenger, in a stolen camouflaged shirt that hung loose over his bare chest, sweat visibly trickling down his back.

  The procedure was easy for Miller. They came up with the worst scenario they could, as if they’d been protecting him as bodyguards, and picked their moment to strike.

  Miller and du Trieux caught up with him between two buildings, leaping out like frenzied animals. Miller pushed him down from behind, fell to his knees with du Trieux, together stabbing down through the man’s back over and over and the screaming...

  Then they were off and running again, panting for air as the Charismatic died behind them, attracting a mob.

  As they sprinted, a door opened in front of Miller and du Trieux. Doyle, Morland and Hsiung waited for them with open arms, and then the five of them hid like children, sweating and silent, in an apartment’s middle corridor while patrols swept the streets around them.

  Blood drooled from Miller’s sleeve. His combat uniform’s artificial fibres wicked it away as easily as any other stain, but he felt the blood even after it was gone.

  Miller accepted the labels—Infected, Charismatic—and held them as tight to his chest as he could, gazing at du Trieux in wonderment.

  At them all.

  They’d committed the ultimate taboo.

  They’d murdered, and there was no punishment. No anger, no recrimination. No one blamed one another, or hated each other for it. They simply waited for the Infected to move on from their search, no suggestion from any of them that what had happened was wrong.

  It was a strange kind of love between them now. One built from the knowledge that every one of them had become the antithesis of what’d they’d once been.

  Protectors had become assassins.

  When Miller’s hands shook, Doyle tore a scrap of paper from the sheet folded up in its plastic baggie, and handed it to him. Miller rolled it up and swallowed the drug-infused paper like a pill.

  As his hands steadied, the anxiety did, too.

  By nightfall they had assassinated dozens and called out other squads from the compound with the same orders.

  Word of their efforts had obviously reached the Infected masses. In the darkness of their kills, the other Infected would sometimes run screaming, abandoning the Charismatics they were guarding, even before they knew what they were running from.

  It was gratifying, in its way. But as the Charismatics fell, more Infected came looking for them, with bigger groups of guards surrounding them. Piece by bloody piece, Cobalt-2 and Shank, a hodge-podge squad of Rats members, Switchblade survivors and refugee volunteers with military backgrounds, worked their way up the chain. From corporals and street preachers to lieutenants and generals, from gangs of pipe-wielding thugs to full platoons.

  The night progressed. Their killing spree continued. In the dee
pest part of the evening, their murdering shook a convoy loose from the FOB. A group of Bravos ran helter-skelter, including the officers, trying to hold the siege together.

  It was partly luck, but killing everybody who worked for Major General Stockman had forced him into either abandoning his forces or pushing his influence on the troops directly. Stockman’s Bravo ran straight into a pair of mines, and Miller’s group slaughtered the guards who spilled out.

  Stockman himself, so overpowered by the pheromones clinging to them, spilled out into the street, squealing in terror like a child as he gulped at the air, as if hyperventilating could bring his senses back.

  For a brief moment, Cobalt watched him, dumbstruck at how such a powerful man had been brought to this by the very parasite he’d fought to spread.

  Slowly, Miller left the protection of his position, and walked dead centre into the middle of the street.

  The only indication that the wailing Stockman recognized the significance of the situation was when he met Miller’s gaze. For a moment, the general’s eyes were clear.

  Without ceremony, Miller raised his weapon, rested the muzzle against Stockman’s skull as if he were a rabid dog, and shot him in the head.

  AT THE NEW dawn, for the first time since the artillery barrage, a boat made it safely into the compound’s docks. Army units on the bridges had been set up with SMAWs and machine guns, leaving a small supply fleet baking away in the Long Island Sound waiting for safety, but a push by security team Dagger had cleared the way for them to arrive, at first in a trickle, then a rush that forced the Rats to deploy more pontoon docks.

  The crewmen had wild stories of sea serpents, and Miller believed them. Snakes as thick around as garbage cans, coiling away in the deeps, didn’t seem unlikely after watching those bodies get torn apart in the river.

  No more Infected wandered out into the river for snipers to kill. Recon by fire slowed, then stopped entirely. The military fire teams broke down into armed mobs with a natural size that hovered between a dozen and twenty, agglutinating together into a mass of humanity that attacked vehicles and fled before the helicopters arrived.