by Andy Remic
Carter sighted smoothly. The cross-hairs crawled up past the Mercedes grille, up the bonnet. He could see five shapes inside the vehicle - large men in dark coats, some with dark glasses. One window was down, allowing snow to blow inside the car - a gun appeared and began firing—
The cracks echoed up into the woods.
Carter trained on the driver; the Merc slewed left and right and Carter cursed, the figures inside the car bobbing madly, unsteady targets—
He breathed out. Squeezed the trigger.
The report was deafening to his ears, the stock punched his shoulder with a kick, and he saw the windscreen shatter like a crazy spider’s web; the bullet missed the driver and took one of the rear passengers in the chest, merging his body and blood with the Merc’s seat. With a scream of gears and engine, the Merc swerved left, smashing into the embankment and then righting itself; the front bumper was torn free, was crushed under the frantically spinning wheels—
The lane - and Carter’s killing ground - was running out.
‘Fuck it,’ snarled Carter.
He flicked the rifle to automatic and squeezed off a four-round burst. Bullets slapped up the bonnet. Another four rounds, and the windscreen caved in and the car veered again—
Carter was not there to see it. He left the rifle in the snow and sprinted for the house and the turning circle in front of the steps. Arms pumping, he heard the Mercedes pass on the roadway below him, engine whining, more gunshots ricocheting. The huge Mercedes flashed from view and Carter ground his teeth, pushing himself through the snow, the Browning HiPower in his hand, sweat stinging his brows—
More gunshots rang out from up ahead.
Carter pounded across the ridge and the world opened up ahead of him, backed by mountains and a picturesque view of falling snow, an idyllic romantic scene punctuated with the harsh full stop of—
Violence.
Natasha had swung the BMW around to form a barricade behind which she crouched, gun out and resting over the raised boot.
As Carter appeared, the Mercedes howled straight towards the BMW; Natasha dived out of the way with a yelp as the two cars collided amidst tearing noises of screaming steel and metallic crunching; the BMW was ploughed into the front of Carter’s house, buckled and broken, one of the windows shattering; the Merc’s doors were opening even as the collision took place and men tumbled from the vehicle, automatics and sub-machine guns drawn—
Natasha rolled to her feet, firing - in seconds bullets smashed across the space. One of the men was punched from his feet with a bullet in his cheek, ripping his face apart and dropping him in a flurry of blood.
A line of bullets scythed across the trees, drilled across the clearing—
Three smacked into the embankment behind Natasha in quick succession, their impact making dull slaps in earth.
The fourth bullet smashed into Natasha, puncturing her flesh and flipping her backwards, up and over diagonally, legs kicking out. She landed in a crumpled heap, wedged against the embankment, face to the ground, legs propped up and twisted against tree roots and icicles.
‘No!’ screamed Carter.
CHAPTER 7
DEEP RED
Spiral_H, London.
Headquarters to the Spiral mainframes; a massive, awesome collection of machinery used to coordinate worldwide Spiral affairs, from DemolSquads to financial deals, from the buying and selling of land, weapons and military hardware to the masterminding of Wall Street economics. Battles had been and were commanded from Spiral_H. The Battle of Belsen. The Attack on Poland Ridge. The transport of festering tanker-borne bodies to Siberia after the Grey Death ...
Those who knew of Spiral, or who worked for Spiral, would often wonder about finance: how had this organisation become so big? And how did it fund such huge worldwide schemes and plans?
There were no simple answers. Spiral had fingers in many pies - Spiral had the controlling shares of a thousand financial institutions, owned a myriad of businesses from rubber plantations to petroleum refineries. If there was money to be made - good money - then Spiral would be in some way involved.
Spiral_H could not be seen from the air; it burrowed under the ground, a massive 500-metre-wide shaft that had been sliced vertically from the rock and layers of the world. Above Spiral_H were rows of shops, houses; normal London streets made less normal after the vicious and bloody London Riots ... but delving deeper, below the tarmac, below the howling traffic, below the bustling shoppers and camera-touting tourists and gun-bristling JT8s, below the subways and underpasses and below the insanely heavily guarded London Underground ... Spiral_H existed...
Deep deep down: an underground base, an underground world.
The entrances were masked; hidden; only the elite few who knew of Spiral knew of the access points. One entrance was a wide rotating glass door leading into an insurance company’s single-storey complex. On this particular morning, the door spun slowly to reveal a beautiful young woman. She was smiling as she emerged, her expensive suit crisp and clean and neatly pressed, her security badge masking an extremely high-tech access tool to grant her passage to Spiral’s underground HQ.
She glanced up at the gathering clouds, watched by a group of armed policemen at the corner of the street, their eyes admiring her long legs and polished make-up.
Her gloved hand reached up, touched momentarily at her gleaming red lips.
And then she was gone—
Replaced by a ball of gas and flame that roared from below the level of the land, smashed up into the heavens screaming so loud that it was beyond aural appreciation; as in the aftershock of a nuclear explosion, the houses and shops and buildings were disintegrated in an instant, were stomped kicked smashed up and out and down into oblivion. Steel and concrete and glass and disintegrated rooms and furniture and computers were pulped and pulverised and the occupants of the buildings and houses and below the ground the heart of Spiral, its core, its soul -all were vaporised in an instant as explosives smashed and fucked and stomped all shape and mass from a wide slice of the world ...
Dust billowed up in a huge cloud, a clenched atomic fist of concrete dust with a twisted Tube carriage caught and spinning in its centre, a fist that seemed to gather as if summoning strength, a blossom of disintegration, a bloom of detritus - and then exploded and rolled out in a huge booming concussion wave that encompassed the surrounding broken buildings and rain-smeared landscape...
The explosion could be heard a hundred miles away.
With the dust came a blanket of silence.
Soon the screams could be heard.
And the aftermath took an eternity.
Feuchter lay on a beach of black sand, dark waves of pain washing over him like the waves of the ocean. In fact, he could hear the sea; struggling, he forced his head to the right and could see crests of gleaming white foam on the black waters. Feuchter groaned, his whole frame shuddering. He forced up his head, gazed down at himself. He was naked - a hole, a crusted bloody eye, marked a bullet entry low down in his belly.
What happened? he thought sombrely.
And then the words; the words drifted to him as if from a million miles away, buzzing insect noises in his brain, merging with the sounds of the sea, hissing and rolling, surging and slithering across the sand—
— He must be in great pain ...
— We have removed the bullet, but there are still pieces of metal lodged inside; the bullet shattered on entry, bits of metal scything out in all directions. This man should be dead, I am amazed we’re looking down at him in a bed and not in a coffin...
Feuchter groaned. He closed his eyes.
A cold breeze blew in from the black ocean.
He reached out inside himself, searching his bloodstream, searching his tissue; he found the rogue pieces of metal and despite carrying them in his shell, he knew they were doing him no harm; he could feel his body working, repairing itself, his veins buzzing with blood and something else. Feuchter smiled; he could feel the stran
ge chemical within him, nestling in his veins and organs, in his brain, in his spinal column. It took away his pain.
He thought back, Feuchter thought back—
Across the long hard years.
Pain lanced him.
He concentrated again on the wound; he felt the ebb and flow of chemicals in his system. He could feel himself getting stronger; could feel his body repairing the damage wrought by the bullet.
He floated for a while on waves of agony.
He listened to the sea.
Voices.
— Give him another ten mils of morphine; there, that should soothe his suffering for a while; or at least stave off death for another couple of days. Nurse, has he spoken?
— Yes, he cried out in his sleep.
— What did he say?
— He cried out for Maria. Who is Maria?
— The woman who was found dead and burned up in the castle at Schwalenberg; they brought in her corpse - what a fucking mess. She’s bagged up down in the mortuary awaiting an autopsy, although I’m not sure what remaining part of her they would like to fuck with... there’s not much left.
— Were they close?
— I believe so; it was his niece, but she had lived with him, treated her like a daughter.
Feuchter felt a rage well within him.
He remembered: remembered Carter - remembered the bullet ... and he remembered the gun, black eye focusing on Maria, blowing her backwards across the chamber, her small silver gun clattering on the floor, her face slapping to the stone, her tooth cracking, blood pooling from her smashed lips ...
Maria; ahhhh, sweet Maria.
He remembered a time, from years earlier: sitting at the broad untreated-timber farm table. The sun was gleaming outside, casting strips of bright light over the tiled floor. He could smell rosemary, and the trees from the cherry orchard. Maria had only been young then; eight, maybe nine. She sat on his knee, a bowl of cherries on her lap fresh-picked only an hour before - both of them standing precariously on the small ladder and giggling as they reached out, plucking the ripe fruit from the branches. Now Maria ate the harvest of their daring, her fingers and lips stained red with juice, her eyes wide and gleaming and beautiful, her face a picture of delight.
Feuchter closed the door on the memory.
There was a bitter taste in his mouth.
Anger and... something more.
Cold and clinical.
He knew; knew he should feel something incredible for Maria; he knew that his emotions should flow thick and fast, and his anger was there, and a hatred for Carter that spoke of long hours of torture to come ... but he knew he should be weeping at her death. Weeping uncontrollably. His intelligence told him that much.
But something strange had happened.
Feuchter could not bring himself to cry.
His face turned to a grimace now; the bullet wound was healing and acid ate his flesh as it knitted together; in this dream state it seemed to be happening so quickly, almost instantaneously, strands of skin and muscle joining together, cells growing and repairing and replicating.
It hurt. It burned him bad.
Hans: a shame he’d had to kill the man. Feuchter remembered the indecision; and the orders typed on the white sheet before him. To murder his own brother, to murder a man he loved knowing full well that he would leave an orphaned girl with nobody to care for her—
He had carried out the orders. A single shot to the head.
And he had cried afterwards; Maria had come to him, asking what the matter was, and she had cuddled him and sat on his knee and accidentally smeared the speckles of her father’s blood on his face in her innocence and ignorance; and Feuchter had cried, cried long and hard and told himself to be strong and then on that dark bloody evening of murder he had risked everything to get Maria away from there, to get her away to safety and save her life—
Things had changed, he realised.
And then, bitterly: I have changed.
Now; now there were no tears. And he understood why - he understood the chemical processes that had altered his body but it still haunted him. He had thought that he would be strong; he had thought that he would be able to make the sacrifice for the good of the future; for the good of all things.
I am doing the right thing, he told himself.
The sacrifice will be worth it in the end.
The sea crashed against the dark shore; and Feuchter realised that the surf, the rolling sound of the surf and the hiss of the spray were voices once more, distant voices drifting from the infinite dark horizon:
— ... Will stabilise him in the event of an... hey, who are you, you can’t come in here, you’ve—
— Check him; are they using the right drugs? OK, substitute it for Methylperdazone, 15 mils, and make sure you inject it straight into the wound, through the healing tissue.
— Good; and for fuck’s sake, put your guns away.
Feuchter awoke. His eyes were gummed shut, and he waited for a while, listening to his own gentle calm breathing. His senses were alert, though; he could hear breathing, from another three men in the room. He could smell sweat, a hint of old aftershave, whisky, and somebody’s odorous feet. Feuchter did a system scan on his own body: it felt weak, the muscles tightened, taut with cramps, burned with fatigue. And his stomach: it was now nothing more than a dull throb where the wound had been.
He forced open his eyes, sticky and filled with crusts of sleep; he could see a fire-retardant tiled ceiling in the gloom. Yellow light cast spiral patterns across the tiles, which were quite new; a private ward, then?
Feuchter’s hand moved down his body; he felt the fresh scar where the bullet had recently smashed into him; he probed it gently but there was no pain. He smiled to himself, then propped himself up on one elbow.
There were three men; they were all watching him. Two were heavy-set bruisers, carrying Sterling submachine guns concealed badly within their long coats; they were unshaven and looked weary. The third was a tall thin man, with a hawk face and a crooked, hooked nose. His hair was shaved close to the scalp, his hands heavy with rings. He wore a white doctor’s coat and a stethoscope. A small case was by his side and Feuchter knew exactly what items were in it.
‘It’s good to see you, Tremont. How long have I been out?’ he asked.
‘Three days, sir. A little longer than we expected, but you were nearly dead when we got to you. And you have to appreciate that in controlled laboratory conditions we do not replicate real-world random activities with such precision as when these incidents occur naturally.’
Feuchter nodded. ‘Can you get me a coffee? And a cigar? I am gasping - I feel like I’ve been unconscious for months!’
‘That is a side effect of the accelerated processes, sir.’ Tremont waved away one of the bruisers, who slid from the room. Outside the self-closing green door Feuchter caught a glimpse of a sterile corridor, with several waiting trolleys and distant lights.
‘Does Durell know that I am OK?’
‘He does, sir.’
‘Am I in a private facility?’
‘Yes. We had to work quickly; you had lost a lot of blood and although your body was already regenerating we had to give it a slight boost. This will stay in your system for the next two weeks, or thereabouts.’
‘Side effects?’
‘Exhaustion; but we have new drugs to combat this also.’
‘Good.’
Feuchter sat up. ‘There are still bits of metal inside me.’
‘Yes, we know; they are benign and can be removed at a later date; Durell said speed of recovery was of the utmost importance because of the developments with the QIII. He said to tell you that we have had advances with the location of the stolen schematics.’
‘And...’ A pause. ‘Carter?’
‘After the incidents in Germany, he has been traced.’
‘Tell me.’
‘He evaded several Nex operatives; nearly killed you.’
‘He’s be
tter than I thought - much better. Could almost be a fucking Nex himself!’
There was laughter; cold laughter; it contained little humour.
‘Units have been dispatched to remove him.’
Feuchter nodded. The bruiser returned and Feuchter lit his cigar. ‘Out of interest, my niece, Maria Balashev: she died, did she not?’
‘She did, sir. Nobody seems to know quite what happened in that room ... we were waiting for you to awake. The Nex got you out just before the explosion designed to remove the QIII development team and mask your disappearance, but Maria ... well, the bullet had clipped one of her lungs - she choked to death on her own blood. There was nothing they could do for her and didn’t have time to make snap decisions ... you were the priority.’
‘Priority?’ said Feuchter coldly, a dark intelligent twinkle in his eyes. ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’
‘One other thing, sir.’
‘Yes?’ His eyes glittered.
‘Spiral_H had set up a task force to remove Spiral_Q from operation.’
‘And?’
‘It had been successfully dealt with, sir. Spiral_H no longer exists, and many of their operatives and networks are dead.’
‘A downward spiral, you could say?’ chuckled Feuchter nastily, and closed his dark eyes and allowed the pain to wash over him and take him away to dark obsidian shores.
Natasha lay, broken and torn and smashed on the ground.
‘No!’ hissed Carter. His own Browning started to bark as he leaped from the ridge, both hands clasping the weapon. The man who had shot Natasha was slammed from his feet, bullets eating him whole like tiny metal parasites, and blood exploded from his mouth, staining his beard and nose in a crimson shower. Carter landed, rolling across the ice, grunting, his Browning on empty and his body sliding against the buckled BMW with a thud. He swiftly changed mags - checked inside the Mercedes.
On the ice, two men were still standing, retreating towards the woods; one was dead in the back seat of the vehicle from Carter’s sniper round; another had been shot by Natasha, and one lay on the ice with his face blown apart, Carter’s bullet in his brain.