by Lee Doty
Fleet staggered back, managing to keep over his stumbling unresponsive feet, but as his vision returned, he still could not see well as some kind of milky substance was covering the right side of his faceplate. He noticed abstractly that the familiar taste of blood had joined the amazing distraction in his mouth. From this, he inferred that the distraction from the substance that had spattered his lips had been a taste… an amazing taste. Of course, never tasting food before, Fleet wasn’t much of a judge of how other tastes might compare. He also deduced that the impact with his face had been his own faceplate, as the chin straps were dangling, broken from the bottom of his helmet.
It had been less than a second since the first impact. Fleet was again raising his weapon when a dark shadow flickered again across the milky substance clinging to his visor and the world exploded again.
***
Jo exited the door from Miss Pollack’s apartment silently. She’d turned the lights off inside so there was no light that spilled into the hallway. There was no rattle or click from the lock on the door, as she had taped the lock plate so the bolt wouldn’t engage shortly after they’d arrived and while Jeremy was still explaining their odd situation to Miss Pollack. The door opened silently and she ghosted into the hall with the pistol again tucked into her jacket pocket and her primary weapon gripped firmly in her right hand.
The sniper stood in the doorway across the hall with his back to her as he helped cover the apartment his team was now clearing. She knew it was the sniper partly because she could see the DMR he was holding—snipers were the only Falcons that generally didn’t use the Kriss submachine guns for CQB oriented urban missions. Mostly though, she knew it was the team’s sniper because of his position covering the door. Most Falcon teams breached with the sniper covering the door.
When she was only a step into the hall, she saw the sniper’s weight shift. Somehow, he’d perceived her… whether she’d made a sound or he’d caught a moving shadow or a rustle in the smoky air, she’d never be sure, but he was now twisting to engage her.
She slashed her weapon at him, not yet close enough to hit him with it, but close enough to slap out the remaining Chicken Alfredo contained in it. The pasta flew true and slapped into his shoulder, and across his neck and faceplate as he continued his turn toward her. She closed the distance and delivered a two-handed strike with the heavy cast iron frying pan to his faceplate. The chin strap broke and the pan drove the faceplate of his helmet into his face. He staggered back, and Jo followed him forward, stepping left into a full pirouette that ended with another two-handed strike to the faceplate of his helmet with all of the power of both her entire body and the three hundred sixty five degree spin. With the chin strap broken, the pan delivered a much greater proportion of its kinetic energy into the sniper’s face and knocked the helmet completely off his head.
The sniper fell, still half twisted, back crashing into the far side of the doorway, his feet awkwardly placed because of the turn he’d not yet completed. With the helmet gone, she recognized him. It was Fleet, nice guy, excellent sniper. By extension, that meant that she was facing Delta in the apartment ahead of her. This was not good news. Delta had no love for—she veered away from that chain of thought, suddenly terrified and confused as to why.
Fleet’s eyes were defocused and blood from his lips and nose covered his face along with some of the creamy white pasta sauce. She had time to see him lick his lips absently as she reversed the direction of her flying iron and the pan struck him in the left temple. He crumpled to the floor inside Jeremy’s apartment.
She was pretty sure he’d be okay, as Falcons are tough. She’d likely cracked the skull, but she’d had her own skull cracked on a mission in Minsk and she was fine now… except that she was trying to fight a very capable Falcon team with a frying pan and she was now all out of pasta. But then Fleet was only fine… except that he was still a slave. She preferred the horrible odds with the frying pan.
Jo resisted the urge to drop a clever insult on Delta then, something intended to keep them chasing her rather than breaching Miss Pollack’s apartment as well. For some reason, the road runner’s “meep meep!” was what she specifically had to resist—so, not that clever or that insulting. Anyway, she said nothing and simply turned left and sprinted down the hallway toward the intersection with the elevator hallway. Delta was good—crazy good, in fact—and Jo knew that even if they didn’t hear her taking Fleet down due to all of the explosives they’d just used, she knew that they would be on her in seconds. She didn’t need to bait them, she just needed to run and they would follow. She knew they’d likely catch her, she knew they’d likely kill her, or worse—capture her.
Her only hope was to not directly engage with any of them until they were within pan range, and she didn’t like her odds if the remaining Delta Falcons engaged her in the doorway with their submachine guns… after all, she only had the one pan. If she had a corkscrew or maybe a garbage can lid… well, that’d be different. She smiled like a maniac as she ran for the stairwell near the elevator at the end of the hall.
***
Dr. Leo Hawkins, director of wetworks for the OSI, ground his teeth against the pain that the receding shock was uncovering. Well, he had to admit, the pain was bad, but the fear was truly what was making him suffer right now. He was alive, and ironically, that did not bode well for his future.
He was face down on the carpet with his hands and elbows bound behind him with heavy plastic riot cuffs. This was painful because it put pressure on the compound fracture of his left ulna, and he didn’t have the flexibility in his shoulders to take any of the pressure off the cuffs at his elbows. At least that agony masked the pain from the bullet in his leg. Always something to be grateful for in any situation, as his grandma had always said. Of course, none of that was the real problem. He and agent Gonzales had tried to ambush the Dragon team that had breached the empty apartment they’d been using as a command post. They’d hit them with stun grenades after they’d cleared the first room, then laid into them with their guns in the confusion.
It had gone about as well as he could have hoped. Hawkins was no creampuff, and Gonzales had worked with the teams for over a decade before coming to work for Hawkins—he was one of the top agents the OSI had in the field.
They’d gone down like chumps.
He and Gonzales had both been wounded, or maybe “winged” was the better word, as Hawkins was fairly sure that both of them were deliberately wounded in order to be taken alive.
After they’d been taken, bound, and dropped unceremoniously onto the apartment’s living room floor, the Dragons had reported in. They’d received some orders that Hawkins couldn’t hear, then one of the dragons had shot Gonzales twice in the back of the head with his pistol. Hawkins had been looking into his eyes as the man died. Gonzales was a good man, a brave man, and he’d met the end with a peace and a resolve that somehow transcended the fear that had been in his eyes before they’d gone hollow. Seeing him die had filled Hawkins with a terrified rage that had left him screaming curses at the Dragons and struggling in vain against his bonds. It had not taken long for the rage to turn to impotence and desperate pain, as every movement seemed to grind the ends of the broken bone in his arm together. It had not taken long for the fear to turn from a wave to a bottomless ocean because of what had come next: Nothing.
After executing Gonzales, they had not touched Hawkins. Somehow, they knew who he was. They were going to take him. There would be torture… again. Hawkins had been tortured in Liberia after being captured by a local warlord… two, hour-long sessions with a sadistic coward with a propane camp stove, a blackened spoon, and a generator with some jumper cables. The experience had been horrific, but it had ended well: Hawkins remembered what the coward had looked like with his spoon protruding from his eye socket.
Hawkins feared what would come next because he knew that this enemy was much more subtle, much more resourceful, and had access to all the heated spoons money co
uld buy. He was terrified because he’d known primitive torture: the horror, the degradation, the humiliation. He was terrified because he knew that once the Falcons took him out of here, there would be no coming back, no escape. He was terrified that by the end he would wish that the little coward with the spoon had been able to finish his job.
Hawkins pressed his forehead into the carpet, trying to think clearly, trying to recover himself, his will, from the forest of fear in which he’d allowed himself to become lost. He had to think about the now, about what he could still do. He had to think about Smith. She was less than a hundred feet away, down the hallway and around the corner. If they found her, they would take her too, and what could he do about it? He fought aside the fear, the desperation. He worked hard to clear it, then held his mind empty, waiting.
The Dragons received more orders that Hawkins didn’t hear, and moved to him. He did not resist as they stuffed a gag in his mouth and secured it with a strap. He found it somewhat disturbing that the Dragons had an actual purpose-made gag—maybe it was even purchased from tacticalGags.com or something—among their equipment. It made him wonder what else these prepared little boy scouts had brought with them.
As the one who had spoken on the radio applied the gag, Hawkins stared into his bright eyes. What he saw there was a simple fervor, like you might see on an altar boy’s face, an altar boy at Disneyland for the first time. There was a primal blankness that seemed to keep him always a few feet back, behind his eyes, behind himself. He saw no malice, no spite, no ill will even. What he saw was a very disciplined child at play, and not just everyday play, play that only came once every summer, play to be relished, play that consumed his full conscious mind, his every thought.
Then it hit him, the reason for the prepared gag… if Jo was to be believed, then these were children, or at least they were people with only a few years of memory who thought they were playing a game… a religiously serious game, but a game.
Suddenly Hawkins wished he’d not wasted his breath on all the insulting profanity before they applied the gag. Suddenly, he wished that he’d tried to reach them somehow, given them reason to doubt this world they thought they were not in, this Hallow through which they thought they now moved.
At a gesture from the leader, two of the other Dragons lifted Hawkins to his feet and started moving him toward the door, flanking him on both sides, each with a hand around Hawkins’ arms, just above the cuffs at his elbows. When he tried to go limp, they simply held him up by the arms with grips that felt more like stone statues than people. Every time his weight rested on their arms, his broken bones ground and Hawkins swooned with pain. In the end, he limped between them like a sick child. He had to admit, he felt like a sick child. He wondered fleetingly what throwing up with a gag in his mouth would be like as his stomach rolled from the pain crashing into his brain from his damaged arm and leg. He truly hoped not to find out.
They led him out of the room and into the hallway. They turned toward the elevator bank as two bursts of automatic fire sounded behind them. It sounded like maybe it was coming from one of the halls perpendicular to this one. As it happened, the Dragons lowered in their stances and made small shifts in their posture to accommodate a threat from behind. They did it perfectly: quick, but without haste, fluid and without the twitch of surprise. They did it like shifting tactical situations were the only interesting thing they knew, the only thing they were born to do. Hawkins thought that this was likely the exact truth.
The leader requested orders, then hurried them down the hall toward the elevator banks. When they arrived, he punched the call button, then made sure his men were ready to receive threats from every side.
Hawkins tried not to show that he was feeling just the first glimmer of hope. When the elevator arrived, he tried to simulate a faint, dropping painfully into the dragons’ harsh grips. The pain almost knocked him out for real, and he swooned, but still threw a stomp kick sideways into the knee of the dragon on his left. The kick struck, and he threw a head butt at the dragon to his right. However, the kick had not phased the dragon on his left. He had simply shifted his knee into the kick and therefore had not taken any damage, and therefore had not slackened his grip on Hawkins’ left arm. All of this meant that his very earnest head butt ended in something akin to an earnest nod at the dragon to his right and a searing explosion of pain from his arm.
Through the fog of pain, Hawkins saw the dragon to his right staring at him with a furrowed brow behind his faceplate. “Really?” the dragon said, almost playfully. The stream of Hawkins’ cursing was entirely eaten by the gag.
They lifted him off the ground and the world browned out with a purple, rustling numbness as if he were being choked unconscious. He gave one last look back left, toward the unexpected gunfire, and his only irrational hope of salvation, but only saw an empty hallway as the dragons dragged him into the elevator.
Nearly unconscious from pain and exertion, he did not see it coming. His first clue that something was amiss was a loud, clanking thud, followed by a whirlwind of activity around him.
A helmet bounced off the wall and Hawkins was knocked to the ground. He wondered briefly where his handlers had gone, but then he noticed that he’d landed on top of one of them. The storm around him sounded like a frying pan dropping through a large, running engine.
Then he saw her in a flash of motion and crockery.
His dazed and unreliable eyes widened. No way, he thought, wondering. No freaking way.
***
OSI Headquarters, Rural Virginia, 2019
Crow threw the last smoke grenade and rolled onto all fours and began to crawl toward the small break in the foliage at the edge of the forest, toward where he’d last seen Shadow.
He’d had four IR smoke grenades on his chest rig, and he’d used them all. The smoke was engineered to block both normal sight as well as the infrared part of the spectrum. Here at the edge of the forest, the smoke was mingling with the trees, billowing about in the light breeze. With luck, between that and the forest itself, he’d have enough cover to avoid Fleet’s optics and his deadly accurate aim long enough for him and Shadow to get away.
After the smoke had gotten thick enough, Crow pushed himself to his feet and sprinted into the woods and up the small deer trail they’d followed to the fence earlier. He found Shadow less than ten yards later, sprawled on the ground with a large hole blown high on the right side of the armor on his back. As Crow rushed to him, he noticed that there was also a long furrow on the right side of his helmet. Fleet must have indeed been in a poor shooting position, because the two-shot of the one-two, torso-head shot he’d likely performed on Shadow had been a few inches off target, enough that Shadow’s helmet had managed to turn it and avoid penetration from the hypersonic armor piercing antipersonnel rounds all the snipers used.
“Shadow?” Chrome hissed, crouching over him. Shadow made a croaking sound that made a gurgling sound through the hole in his back.
Crow knew he only had seconds here, as he knew that Delta was now sprinting across the field inside the compound’s fences. He was only about fifty feet from the break in the fence, and Crow dedicated a portion of his mind to listening to see if he could hear as they made their way through the fence.
“Hold still, Shad.” He hissed as he pulled the medkit from the center of his chest rig. His own kit had been turned into a paperweight as he’d moved through the OSI’s EMP along with the rest of his electronics, but he’d had the foresight to take the kit from Tink’s rig after the Clerics had killed him. A hot, but fleeting burst of white-hot rage flickered through Crow’s mind as he thought of Tink, how he’d looked as his blood dripped from his eyes onto the clean white linoleum beneath him, and as he looked down at the hole in Shadow’s back. Crow brought out his knife and cut the shoulder and side straps of Shadow’s armor. He gently pulled the armor away and used the knife to cut away the shirt around the sucking wound just under Shadow’s right shoulder blade.
“Oh, this is nothing.” He whispered, hopefully not just to himself. He activated the kit, then pressed it onto the wound. He heard the many wire-like probes scratching out of the kit and filling the wound, hooking the flesh, coaxing it together, hooking into the shattered fragments of bone and pressing them together, all so Shadow’s natural healing ability would knit them back together. Shadow stiffened as the little torture device worked,
“That… stings… chief.” Shadow croaked, limbs twitching.
“Soon as the kit closes this, your nap is over, slacker.” Crow said with a small smile.
There was a tick of sound from the fence, someone moving through one of the two holes in the wire. Crow couldn’t tell which, but he knew the exact position of both holes in relation to his current position, even though the smoke kept him from seeing them. There would be no way to shoot them without seeing them, but this also meant that Crow didn’t have to worry about being shot until Delta got into the forest, or the smoke cleared.
Crow’s hands moved through a set of quick motions, almost too quick to see, and then he rolled Shadow on his back then pulled him up into a sitting position. Below, at the fence line, Crow heard Chrome and Zed shout “Grenade!” at nearly the same time, then there were two deafening explosions that Crow only saw as flickers of light through the smoke, but a piece of shrapnel snapped into a tree ten feet away.
“That you?” Shadow groaned, wincing.
Crow could see the medkit’s hooks through the exit wound in Shadow’s chest as they twitched and jerked the flesh closed. He nodded, “My last two frags.”
“Think you got them?” Shadow croaked as Crow hefted him over his shoulder and into a fireman’s carry.