by John Shirley
“We evac the uninfected survivors,” Reaper suggested, “and we blow this place back to hell.”
“…And orders to protect this facility,” Sarge said.
“We don’t have orders to kill innocent people,” Reaper persisted.
Sarge smiled thinly. “‘By any means necessary.’”
Reaper’s hand tightened on his weapon. Maybe, he thought, this was the moment, if Sarge was going to start deciding that anyone but him was infected…
He almost jumped when the door banged open. Duke came in, smiling ironically. “Look who I found under a pile of dead bodies…”
Pinky rolled in, behind him. He looked haggard, pale, scared. But also looking relieved to see Sam. “Boy, am I glad to see you guys. That thing cut through the door. I tried to use the ST grenade, but it malfunctioned. It followed right behind me through the Ark. Started killing everybody…” He swallowed. His voice became husky as he said, “It was horrible…”
Sam walked over and examined him, frowning over his neck. Nodded to herself. “He doesn’t have the wound on his neck. He’s clean.”
Sarge took ammo from his belt, began to reload his pistol. “I say who’s clean and who’s not clean.”
Pinky stared at the gun in Sarge’s hand. Those bullets going in. Did he really intend one of those—for him? “What are you doing? You shouldn’t have left me there. It wasn’t my fault…”
Sarge cocked the pistol.
Reaper looked at Pinky, then at Sarge. Was Sarge really going to shoot him? Right here and now?
“I’m not a soldier,” Pinky was saying, a hysterical edge to his voice, his hands scrabbling at his cyberchair, “you shouldn’t have left me…”
The Kid burst in then, breathing hard.
Sarge, Duke, and Reaper—all three of them nearly shot the Kid in reaction.
“There’s a storeroom to the south!” the Kid blurted. “Got like twenty people holed up in it!”
“Weren’t your orders to clear that sector?” Sarge asked him. That flatness in his voice; in his eyes…“Is it cleared?”
“I told them to stay put. They’re okay; they’re just scared shitless—”
Sarge shook his head. “We kill ’em all—let God sort ’em out.”
Seventeen
THE KID LOOKED desperately from face to face.
“Okay—” he said at last. “—I think this is wrong.” Having a hard time saying it. Wanting badly to please Sarge. But there were limits.
“Son,” Sarge said, “you don’t have to think—because you’ve been given a fucking order.”
The Kid seemed frozen with indecision.
“We are in the field, soldier,” Sarge reminded him.
Reaper said, “Sarge, if nothing’s found them yet—”
“We are in the field!” Sarge interrupted, speaking only to the Kid. “You will obey the direct order of your commanding officer!”
The Kid licked his lips. “No.”
“Now, soldier!” Sarge said. It was more than just insistence. In those two words was a warning and a guarantee:
Obey the order or you’re going to pay the ultimate price for defying a superior in combat.
The Kid was being offered a choice. He could still say Yes sir, and lead Sarge to that storage room and stand side by side with him as they cut all those people down together. All those scared, perfectly ordinary people…
He thought about those desperate faces in that room. Jenna Willits losing her husband, her baby. He seemed to see the face of his girlfriend Millie, who was a nurse—it seemed like a million years since the Kid had seen Millie, and now he imagined what she’d think if she could see him as he mowed down all those scared people. He imagined Millie looking at him—at him!—with disgust. And, worse yet, with fear.
The Kid shook his head at Sarge. He looked him in the eye. And he said it as clearly as he knew how.
“Go to hell,” the Kid said.
In one swift motion, Sarge swung his arm around toward the Kid, leveled the pistol, and fired. He shot the Kid through the neck.
The Kid spun, hit the wall, and slumped to the floor.
There was a moment of sickened silence. The Kid choked, fumbled at his ruined neck…then his whole body began to spasm.
Duke said it for all of them: “Holy shit.”
Sarge’s tone was all reason. Just…reason. “Mutinous insurrection in the field is punishable by death.”
Sam broke from her shocked paralysis and rushed to the Kid. “Oh God—someone get me a medikit!”
“It’s his first mission!” Reaper burst out.
Sarge turned toward Reaper—who realized he’d let his surprise rob him of a chance to take the initiative.
“And it’s not gonna be my last. I need soldiers, I don’t need anybody else.”
“Fuck!” Reaper swore. He and Sarge stared at each other.
The Kid’s eyes were glazing; blood was bubbling from his mouth. Duke grimaced, looked away.
Sarge swung the gun toward Reaper—
Reaper was about to fire in response—
“Drop the weapons,” Pinky said, suddenly.
They turned to see him pointing a pistol at them.
Pinky was wondering if he was a fool to give in to survival instinct this way. He didn’t like his life much, and no one seemed to really care if Sarge killed him—though maybe they hadn’t much chance to react to the threat—and they were probably all going to be killed or converted into subhumans by Carmack’s little playthings within minutes, anyway.
Maybe he should’ve let Sarge execute him. Get it over with.
But he was a survivor. “Do it,” Pinky went on. “I didn’t come all this way to be killed…drop ’em now!”
They stared…and Pinky realized it wasn’t at him. They were looking past him now. At something looming behind him…he could feel it back there, breathing, the heat of its body. Hear its knuckles cracking, claws clicking in its talons…
“Oh no,” he said, in a small voice. “Is…something behind me?”
No need to answer—the creature standing behind Pinky closed its taloned paws around his neck and jerked him, wheelchair and all, into the air. The gun went flying as the genetic demon slammed Pinky from side to side, up and down, on walls and ceiling, Pinky screaming as he went—the thing was using the wheelchair as a bludgeoning tool, so that Sarge and the others had to hit the floor, but not before Reaper was struck glancingly in the face, sending him spinning backward.
Sarge and Duke fired at the imp, and Reaper—though stunned, firing through a blur—fired, too, trying not to hit Pinky. The hulking genetic demon retreated…
As Reaper’s eyes cleared, it appeared to him that rather than retreating, exactly, the imp was carrying off its prize…Pinky.
“On me!” Sarge yelled. “Let’s move!”
Despite having come close to a gunfight with Sarge a minute or two earlier, Reaper only hesitated an instant when Sarge gave the order. Training and situational urgency took over and he obeyed, running after Duke and Sarge, into the corridor, around a corner.
They got there in time to see the genetic demon drag the bleeding, moaning Pinky through an open nanowall—and into darkness beyond.
Sarge raised his hand for a halt as he assessed the situation…It was darker, around this corner. Dim here—with only the auxiliary lighting, faint and getting fainter. Up ahead, through the nanowall, it was dark as a cavern.
Pinky and his abductor were nowhere to be seen.
There was a smell coming toward him from that impenetrable darkness: rank, vinegary.
“Listen,” Duke said.
Many mouths breathing. Many hundreds of claws clicking on the floor, faster and faster…
And then another sound: a kind of chattering; a furious discussion but without a language. An angry discourse in grunts and clicks and sounds you might hear from a monkey in the last stages of rabies.
And then the throng came sprinting out of the darkness. A throng
of genetic demons, half-formed and misbegotten. All of them coming right at the squadron, with their jaws salivating in anticipation.
“What the…” Reaper muttered.
Sarge cocked his weapon. “You with me here, Reaper?”
Reaper cocked his light machine gun and fixed Sarge with a look. “I don’t know who’s more dangerous—you or them.”
Sarge gave out one of his rare smiles. “Sure you do, Reaper. It’s me.”
The sounds were louder now; they could make out a great moving mass in the shadows up ahead…coming toward them.
“Withdraw,” Sarge said calmly.
They moved back to the wider corridor they’d come through…and moved to the corridor the enemy was going to come from.
“On my command,” Sarge said softly, raising his weapon.
An instant later, the demonic undead were upon them—as if the imps had sent the half-turned as the first wave of attack.
“Okay motherfuckers,” Sarge yelled. “Let’s play!”
Sarge and Reaper and Duke were rushed by at least a dozen walking dead men, their eyes uniformly red, their mouths streaming black blood, their clothes tattered, their faces contorted with the hunger to kill—there was not the faintest remnant of their former humanity in their expressions—some of them with overgrown foreheads, the beginnings of talons.
Hoping to disorient the enemy, Sarge sent a burst of fire into the ceiling lights, plunging the room into semidarkness illuminated by bursts of automatic weapons fire: a deadly strobe-light show.
The living-dead seemed to dance in the “strobe lights” as the thudding gunfire rocked them, making them spin and jump. But they kept coming, forcing the men to step back and back and back, hurling furniture about as they came.
An imp came hulking in the doorway, then, an unusually big one having to bend to get its head through, slashing the air with its talons, knocking some of the undead out of the way—the blows splashing the creatures bloodily against the wall—as if they were minor irritants between it and its prey.
Reaper could spare only a glance for his sister—saw her huddled against the wall behind them, her fist crammed into her mouth.
Should have armed her, he thought. We’ll need every last weapon we can get working.
Another imp rushed at Reaper, slashing at him, raking his right arm—Reaper shoved his gun into the imp’s mouth and pulled the trigger. The top of its head joined the ceiling and its body met the floor.
“Field of fire!” Sarge bellowed.
The men emptied their clips with a deafening barrage of concerted automatic-weapons fire, chewing the living-dead up, spraying the walls and floor behind the creatures with blood and bone fragments—but only opening the way for the big imp.
Sarge had led the attempt to drive off the enemy, and now he led the retreat, turning and bolting to find another, more defensible position. Reaper’s gun emptied and he went to follow Sarge, both of them slapping fresh clips into their weapons as they ran, Reaper shouting for Sam to go on ahead of them—his warning unheard over the roaring of their pursuers.
Duke ran out of bullets a half second after the other two, and was last to run—trying to cover their retreat—turning, taking one step, only to be caught by a great shadowy paw, the dark bulk of the big imp grabbing him the way a grizzly would, pulling him close—
“Duke!” Sam shouted, seeing him caught up and hurled at the wall like a toy hurled by an agitated child—he struck an overturned table and screamed as the splintered table leg went through him, back to front.
Reaper turned in time to see his sister running to Duke.
Damn her—she should be getting out of here!
Reaper turned and fired almost point-blank at the imp—it raked its forepaws in front of its face as if warding off a swarm of bees. Reaper used its momentary distraction to get to Sam, skidding as he went in a pool of black blood, having to leap over a feebly clutching, dying half-turned.
“Go,” Duke was telling her, his voice barely audible. Blood running from the corners of his mouth. “Get out of here…”
Sam grabbed Duke’s gun—Reaper thought she was going to put Duke out of his misery and Duke thought so, too, closing his eyes—
Just then, Reaper had to turn away and fire at an imp and one of the undead, keeping them back—the bigger imp stalking back and forth, roaring and slashing frenziedly at the undead who’d gotten in its way—and turned back to see his sister pulling Duke to his feet, as he wailed in pain. She helped him stagger toward the door.
“John—help!” she shouted, as the creatures came at her and Duke.
Sarge had turned, and he and Reaper laid down a withering cover fire—as all four of them retreated through the infirmary’s nanowall. Sam helped Duke into the room.
On the other side, Sarge smacked the nanowall control panel, just as the first of the half-turned started through it—three of the living-dead screamed as the wall solidified around them. An arm and leg jutted out of the metallic gray nanowall, writhing and kicking.
A dead end—the demons had raged through here and the way out was blocked by fallen debris.
Reaper and Sam had escaped—into a trap.
Reaper turned to see that Sam had gotten the big splinter out of Duke, stopped his bleeding with a medikit spray. Duke might live—the wound was low on his chest, looked like maybe below the lungs, above the liver.
A massive thud from the nanowall—the creatures were hurling themselves against it—made them all step back, reflexively pointing their weapons at the thumping gray rectangle.
Sparks and arcs of electricity spurted from the nanowall. It undulated, as if struggling to keep itself defined as a rectangle, and the arm that was reaching through was able to push a little farther in, clutching at the air.
The wall began to disfigure, then, showing the outlines of other demons trying to force their way through, like impressions coming through a sheet of clay, howling and roaring and chattering as they struggled with the nano material.
“There’s too many,” Reaper said.
Sarge nodded in grim acknowledgment. Too many of the half-men, the transfigured, forcing through at once would break the nanowall’s interior organization down, interfere with intercommunication between the microscopic machines that composed it. The wall would reach a certain level of entropy and collapse. The creatures roared in triumph as they sensed they were breaking through…
Sarge laid the machine gun aside, and swung the BFG around, got a good hold on its grips, aiming it at the wall. This was the place for the Big Fucking Gun—where he could see where to focus it, and the others were safely behind him.
The nanowall was bulging in toward them now, rippling, more and more of the demonic forms pushing through, clawed hands, taloned paws…half a snarling face, a fierce rolling eye.
“It’s not holding!” Sam blurted, seeing more nightmare faces pressing through. It was seconds from breaking down.
“Here they come,” Sarge said, matter-of-factly.
“Oh man,” Duke said, disgusted—Reaper could tell he was reacting to something besides the wall’s breaking down.
They turned to see that Duke was standing on a grate in the floor—and raw, skinless, ropy arms had bent the grate’s bars and reached through to grasp Duke firmly by the ankles.
There was a moment of shock as the implications came home to them.
“Duke,” Sam said, trying to aim her gun at the arms gripping his ankles. “Hold still!”
Duke smiled sadly—all resignation, and then the creature jerked one of his feet through the grate, something down there chattering with wordless glee. Duke quivered with pain—trying to pull free but too weak from his wound to do so.
In two seconds, before they could try to help him, the rest of Duke was pulled sickeningly down, his mouth working soundlessly to express a pain that was beyond screaming as his body was forced through the grate with a repellent sound of flesh bursting wetly, sliced into segments as it went. Stoppin
g briefly at his chest—Duke giving everyone a last, long, imploring look…
Until with a final vicious tug he was pulled the rest of the way through the grate—he exploded into bloody fragments and Sam, watching in horror, bit down so hard on her fist that her own blood flowed.
Sam was wracked with silent sobs. Reaper went to her, pulled her away from the grate—which was mucky with torn flesh, bone splinters, and part of a face, still trembling—and pushed her into a corner, hugging her as he brought her there, giving her shoulder a commiserating squeeze as he forced her back into the closest thing he could find to safety in the room. It was all he could do for her, just then.
Sarge’s expression was inscrutable except for a bitter determination in his eyes as he turned to the weakening nanowall, raising the BFG.
“Bring it on,” he growled, stepping close to the nanowall to give the powerful weapon full play. Electrical arcs crackled the air around him, as if expressing his checked fury, and more limbs flailed through the barrier.
Then he looked down to see a monstrous arm sweeping from the nanowall, its taloned paw getting a vise grip on Sarge’s leg—and yanking him violently back into the weakening wall.
“No!” Sarge yelled, dropping the BFG as he was jerked off his feet, twisting his whole body so he was spun about as he fell, slamming him onto his face.
Instinctively—despite the fact that he’d been thinking he might have to kill Sarge—Reaper ran to him, hunkering to grab his body armor. He pulled with all his strength, trying to drag Sarge back from the wall. But the genetic demon, pulling from the other side, was far stronger than Reaper. Sarge slipped farther into the wall.
They needed Sarge to fight these things—even if it was only putting the conflict with him off—and now they were losing him.
Sam ran up and joined Reaper, helping him pull. They strained, groaning with the effort, feeling like their joints were going to pull apart. Sarge helped with his elbows, but they only managed to slow him a bit—he was still being inexorably pulled through the wall, into a room filled with demonic creatures who lived only to kill him—or make him one of their own.