by Alan Baxter
“That’s Taipan,” Boss said.
Taipan looked up, nodded. “G’day. Good to meet ya.” His Australian accent was unmistakable.
“You people really say ‘G’day’?” Raven asked.
“Not at night so much.” He grinned and went back to reading.
Raven thought these people all grinned too damn much.
“And I’m Jet.”
Raven turned. Jet was not as short as Raven, but not a giant like the three men. Muscular, solid, with short black hair, olive skin and narrow eyes. She maybe had a decade or so on Raven in age.
“Don’t let this cockforest intimidate you.”
“I’m not easily intimidated, but I’m glad to see another woman.”
“We’re all ex-military.” Boss pointed around at each of them. “Australian Army, Israeli Special Forces, you already know I was SAS and Smoke was a Marine.”
“Hoo fucking rah,” Smoke said, and slumped into an armchair.
“Makes my time seem paltry,” Raven said.
“No way, you went into the US Army as a teenager, you’ve got quite a few years of training, and a hell of a record. That’s what we want.” Boss sat and gestured for her to do the same. “You see, after Smoke and I started Dark Squad, we were noticed by a global organisation called Armour. I’m not going into the long boring story now, but the short version is that Armour exists to take care of magical, unnatural, supernatural, etcetera threats to the non-magical, unsuspecting masses. They’re like a global magical army, outside any government. Because we have the crack skills with military hardware and the mad magical chops greater than most, and because our little Squad started making waves, we got pulled in as Armour’s special ops team. We’re their black ops, doing all the direct infiltration and wetwork they don’t want to see.”
“Along with our military and magical skills, we’re also all a bit behind on our anger management classes,” Smoke said with a wry twist of the mouth. “We work best when we’re allowed to kill the bad guys without too much supervision, you get me? But Armour decided we were best off with them instead of maybe, at some point, against them. It’s worked well so far.”
Raven frowned. “So Armour is a secret organisation and you’re a secret within Armour?”
Boss smiled. “Black ops within black ops.”
“The blackest ops,” Smoke said.
Taipan laughed. “None more black!”
Raven frowned. “Why do I suddenly feel like this outfit’s ill-fated fucking drummer?”
Boss shook his head, his face growing serious. “We’ve long established that five works best, it’s an occult number, you know.”
Jet waggled her fingers like a sideshow magician. “The points of the pentacle!”
“Stow that shit, Jet. Truth is, you’re replacing a dear friend called Blinder, who we lost on the last mission. He’d been with us a long time.”
Raven laughed, but there was no humour in it. “No pressure then. Dead man’s shoes?”
“You’ll be fine. I know how to pick my operatives. We’re dealing with the loss of Blinder, but the Squad comes first. And the fact you were prepared to be cut off entirely before you knew the real details of this permanent commission speaks volumes.”
“It’s not like I’m giving much up,” Raven admitted.
“Well, you’ve gained a lot, trust me,” Boss said. “But enough history, we have a pressing mission, which is why you’ve been called in now. It would have been nice to break you in gently, but there’s something to be said for hitting the ground running, yeah?”
“I’m ready.”
“Good. This one comes from Commander Giraud in the Paris Armour HQ.”
The others in the room switched, their attention total and serious in a moment. Raven smiled softly to herself. They might be a rag tag bunch, but they were tight and focussed. The smile faded as she wondered how long it might take her to fit in. Or if she ever would. Regardless, despite what she’d told Boss, she didn’t want to go back to the brig and serve out five years for assault of a fellow soldier. That dick had deserved it, though that was old news and no longer relevant. But she couldn’t be locked up, she’d go mad.
“We going to Paris?” Jet asked.
“No, that’s just where the orders are from this time,” Boss said. “Our target is a necromancer.”
And the full weight of her new position fell on Raven like a wet mattress. After a life hiding her magical powers, thinking she was a freak, she found herself surrounded by others with unnatural skills of their own who talked about it openly and without derision.
“Seriously?” Smoke asked.
“Seriously. He’s been raising rezzers and placing them in various positions of power, slowly securing all kinds of advantages in business and politics. He’s got them in a couple of European governments, several places of power in the Middle East, the CEOs of least three major US corporations that we know of. He’s getting way too much influence, playing both sides of wars, collecting huge sums of cash from dozens of conflicting interests. Clever bastard.”
Taipan held up a hand. “Wait. What’s a fucking rezzer?”
“Resurrected human.”
Taipan’s eyebrows shot up. “Zombies?”
“No, resurrected humans.”
“There’s a difference?”
Boss sighed. “They don’t teach you much in Alice Springs?”
“You know I’m from fucking Melbourne.”
“A zombie is a mindless revenant. It simply wants to eat human flesh, mainly brains, and staggers around with that single purpose, slowly rotting as it goes. And they’re not fucking real. A rezzer is a dead fucker raised up with magic. It doesn’t breathe or eat or sleep or shit, but it can pretend to do all those things, and it looks and acts like a regular person. Except it is entirely under the thrall of the necromancer who raised it. Regardless of any other influence, the necro’s will overrides everything.”
“So that’s how it infiltrates society,” Jet said.
“Exactly. This particular necromancer has either put rezzers into power or found people in power, killed them, and then rezzed them to work for him. They operate exactly like regular people. They conceal the fact of their deadness, and fulfil the necro’s orders.”
Taipan made a face of grudging respect. “Cunning fucker. But must be powerful as hell to control as many as you suggest.”
“Quite. Armour has put out a lot of his fires, taken out a lot of his rezzers, but his power is growing too widespread. Different Armour bases around the world are getting in on it and reporting his feelers reaching their jurisdictions. It’s been agreed the necromancer himself has to go down. When he dies, his influence dies with him. His rezzers will all just drop, nothing but empty corpses the moment the necro’s life is snuffed out. So Giraud at Armour Paris has taken on the gig and he’s deploying us.”
“Because this sounds dangerous as hell,” Smoke said.
“Exactly.” Boss spread a map out on a table and the Squad gathered around to see. “According to Armour intel, our man is holed up in here.”
“Is that a castle?” Jet asked. The map showed a hill surrounded by forest. Atop the hill blueprints marked out the rooms and walls of a huge square building with a large open space in the middle.
“Yep, that’s Castle ThisGuysFucked. We don’t need any more information than that. We’re being air-dropped in here.” Boss tapped the map, south of the hill.
“Right in the trees?” Smoke said.
“Definitely not Paris,” Jet said. “Where is this?”
“Somewhere in the arse end of Belarus, not far from where the border meets with Ukraine and Russia. Deep ancient forests, miles from any civilisation.”
“Getting in is one thing, but then how do we get out?”
“Gonna be tricky, but this necro is canny. He’l
l have transport we can secure, I’m sure, or we might be able to call for an extraction, depending on the lay of the land. No matter, we’ll worry about that later. We drop in, we mount the hill, gain the castle and find him. Kill him and somehow get home in time for tea and fucking crumpets. All good?”
“All good,” the others said in unison.
Boss looked down at Raven. “All good?”
“I guess so.”
He threw his overlarge grin at her. “You’re not here to prove yourself, right? You’re part of the Squad now, testing is all over, so just accept that and roll with it.”
“Okay.” Though she felt anything but okay. This was all a hell of a long way from tours of duty in Afghanistan.
* * *
They sat in the back of an Armour stealth helicopter, ten minutes out from the drop. Raven felt good back in full fatigues and pack again, weapons strapped across her body. Her knives were close, especially the jade ice dagger, always right there ready. Despite the issues she’d had with command, the trouble hiding her skills, she had loved the fight of active service. Anger management, Smoke had said, and she smiled. Maybe a little more complicated than that, but taking death to shitbags who deserved it was her jam.
“You’re a mudang?” Jet said suddenly, breaking her reverie.
The question caught her off-guard. “Er, yeah, that’s right.” How much did the Squad know about her? She knew next to nothing about them and the disadvantage bothered her.
Jet nodded, like she knew exactly what that meant and respected it.
“The fuck is a moo-dang?” Taipan asked.
Raven glanced to the front and Boss and Smoke’s broad backs watching over the pilot’s shoulder. “We doing this now?”
“Got anything else to do? No offence, just wondering.”
Raven forced herself to lighten up. These people were her new family, the enemy was out there. The enemy was always out there, never inside. Remember the mantra. “It’s like a Korean shaman, you know. A folk magus. But I grew up in America since I was five, so I hate all that cultural purity bullshit. My magic is rooted in the culture of my birth, but I gathered all kinds of things over the years.”
Jet gave a casual thumbs up. “Same for all of us, really. Mixed like colours on an artist’s palette, right? Anything of use?”
“Something like that, I guess. What about you?”
“Can it!” Boss strode back into the cabin, Smoke on his heels. “Make ready.”
They switched mode in an instant, like Raven had seen before. Wordlessly they went through self-checks then checking each other, lined up, and the door opened. The sound-proofed cabin roared with the rush of air outside, icy cold and buffeting, the rotors chopping the wind into sound bites. They lined up, watched the light flick from red to green, and jumped in quick succession.
It was a low drop and black silk ‘chutes opened right away. The thick forest canopy rushed up, far too fast for Raven’s liking. She watched between her black boots, adjusted course a little left and right in the hope of coming in between trees and having the best shot at an easy harness escape.
From the sudden roar of the chopper into the cold fall, silence pressed in. She didn’t waste any attention on the rest of the Squad, drew hard on the ‘chute as her feet crashed into the foliage, drew her elbows in, tucked her heels against her butt. Crashing and snapping of leaves and branches filled her ears then she bounced and held up, hanging in her harness in utter blackness. She flicked down her night vision goggles and scanned below. The forest floor was about twenty feet down. If it was soft enough she could drop that far and roll.
Leaves and branches burst beside her and Smoke fell into view. His ‘chute snagged up a little lower than hers and he looked up, his wide grin pale in the darkness. Then he was gone. The harness hung limp, Smoke had vanished. She caught movement below, looked down and there he was, looking up at her again. Like he’d teleported from one spot to the other. She smiled crookedly. I guess that’s where he gets his name from then.
“Want me to catch you?” he called up.
“Fuck no!” She hit the harness release, dropped, tucked and rolled through leaf litter and came up into a crouch. It had been a little further than she thought and her heart raced at the prospect of injury, but she was fine.
“Ballsy,” Boss said, striding up beside her.
“A little help?”
Jet joined them and the four looked around until they spotted Taipan upside down some thirty feet off the ground, spinning in a gentle figure eight.
Boss sucked air over his teeth. “Fucking hell.”
“I got it.” Smoke took two or three paces forward then vanished. Several moments later he appeared without breaking strike along a thick limb only a few feet from where Taipan hung. In seconds, with a knife and rope employed judiciously, they were all gathered on the forest floor.
Boss checked his compass and pointed. “That way. No lights, use your night goggles, single file. If anything comes at us, use hand-to-hand if possible. We don’t want to warn anyone in that castle we’re coming by sending gunfire through the night. Quiet as church fucking mice, all right?”
Without waiting for a response he led the way.
Raven didn’t know her natural spot in the Squad, but Boss took point and Jet fell in behind him. Taipan waved her forward, then Smoke took the rear guard, so it seemed she was in the middle. She wondered if Blinder, the dead ex-member, had been in the middle too.
The forest floor was dense with undergrowth and tree roots, reaching up to trap an unwary ankle. The going was slow, machetes deployed left and right. Several times they had to double back and cut a new path when the vegetation became too thick even for chopping. After half an hour, Raven’s muscles had a nice burn happening, sweat soaked into her black fatigues. The sixty pound pack wasn’t a burden yet, but it would be if they had to keep up this pace and exertion for too long.
A deep moan rose up, drifting through the trees from somewhere ahead. Boss’s fist shot up and the Squad froze. Something moaned again, then another off to the left. A third joined it, then a fourth and then there were too many to place and count.
The Squad split their line out wide, scanning left and right through the darkness. Crunching and cracking of leaves and twigs joined the melancholic laments as several somethings shambled towards them.
“Two o’clock,” Smoke said, then vanished. He reappeared moments later behind the silhouette of a man and took its head from its shoulders with a single machete stroke.
Then there were figures everywhere, pushing out between the tree trunks, faces slack and groaning, the stench of rotten flesh filled their nostrils.
“They fucking zombies now?” Taipan asked
Jet stepped forward and said, “Sit on the floor.”
Her voice was deep, powerful, and the compulsion to drop her ass to the leaf litter was almost too much for Raven to ignore. And the command hadn’t even been directed at her.
“Sit down!” Jet ordered again, clearly using more than mere sound, the waves of her voice something beyond the simply auditory. “Not working!” Jet told the Squad, but they could see that for themselves.
Smoke blinked in and out again, machete flashing. Heads rolled.
Taipan crouched, made complicated gestures and barked a short word. Flame shot from his outstretched fingers and engulfed an approaching figure. The attacker went up in flames, flesh and clothes crackling, but didn’t slow for a moment.
Taipan pulled a machete free and hacked the burning man down. “Fuggen hell! Flaming zombie attack!”
“Engage and destroy,” Boss shouted. “Decapitate for your best chance. Questions later.”
Raven chose to ignore the nature of the enemy, treat it like any other, and fell into the dance. Her jade dagger was more than a simple edge, its magic froze everything it cut. Limbs and heads shattered to
flesh cubes when they hit hard roots or branches, or she hit them with fists and feet after a stab or slice. The machete in her other hand carved bigger wounds, her ambidextrousness making her into a whirling, scything tiny tornado of death. This is what she lived for, to get in close, to move, dive, duck and weave, cutting anything that strove to interrupt her movement. Nothing was as pure as the slice of a sharp edge.
She caught glimpses of Jet, expert strikes of hands and feet, fighting like some master from a movie, not speaking at all. Smoke popped in and out of sight, appearing randomly to decapitate, then vanish again. Taipan reached and lunged, wiry and fast, chopping two-handed with his machete as though it were a sword. When he took out a leg and the thing fell, he’d lob flame at it to burn it where it lay. Boss slammed all around himself, sometimes lifting the revenants high to smash them down over a bent knee. He left more alive than dead, disabled with destroyed spines and necks, reaching and dragging themselves over the rough ground. The Squad’s magic pulsed and flashed, quick-fire spells of speed and protective wards, deployed smoothly with fists and feet and blades. Raven used combat magic of her own, practiced surreptitiously in theatres of war around the world, but realised dimly that she had so much to learn from these people.
In minutes it was over, silence settling but for the gasping of breath as the Squad re-joined one another.
“Anyone hurt?” Boss asked.
“One of the fuckers bit me,” Jet said. She held up her left arm, a deep crescent in her wrist leaking thick blood that looked black in the night.
Boss started to dress the wound, rinsing it with saline and disinfectant first. “Anyone else?”
Taipan leaned forward, stared hard at Jet’s eyes. “Er, Boss… Were they zombies?”
“There’s no such thing, you fucking idiot, I already told you that,” Boss said. “She’s not going to become one of the walking dead.” Something moaned near his foot, a broken man twisted in all the wrong directions, dragging itself one-handed over the ground. Boss slammed a boot into its head, stoved the skull in. The stench of rotten meat swelled in the air.