by G T Almasi
I hide behind my human shield and rush the nearest pistol-packing militiaman. Panicking, he fires his weapon and hits his unconscious colleague, which leaves me at liberty to jab my knife into his crotch.
And so it is revealed that for generating pure and unadulterated perturbation, pyrotechnics are nothing compared to shanking a man in the balls. The pinhead screams and drops his Luger so he can use both hands to protect what’s left of his genitals. He bends down to see what’s happened to him, and it’s the most natural thing in the world for me to obliterate his central nervous system by stabbing him right in his fucking eye.
I bang too much gusto into the thrust, though, and my blade sticks in the dimbulb’s eye socket. I hurl my human shield at the final three dummies, nab the Luger off the floor, and unload an entire clip into their screaming faces. The insides of their heads splatter all over the wheelhouse’s windows, ceiling, and control panel. It looks like a raft to hell.
“Grey, my top deck is clear, but I have at least one more competitor down below.”
“Be careful, Scarlet. I found a few militia still in their bunks over here. Some kids, too.”
The small hatchway is propped open. A ladder leads down below. My infrared shows a warm square shape toward the boat’s stern. That’ll be the engine. Up front are two smaller blobs. Kruppe has company.
To retrieve my knife from Dead Crotch’s face, I stand on his head and heave the blade out of his skull, like King Arthur freeing his magic sword from the stone. At that moment, my F-S fighting knife earns the name Deathcalibur.
I pitch myself through the hatchway. My feet thwap the lower deck. I’m in the main cabin and galley. I clutch Deathcalibur in my left hand and the Luger in my right. I move forward and push a thin door open. The small cabin is unlit, but I see two red-glowing figures cowering on a V-shaped bunk under the bow. It’s a boy and a girl, eight or nine years old, like the kid at the dockyard who…Jesus, if they try the same suicide-grenadier move down here, we’re all dead.
The girl’s eyes flick to something moving—
—behind me!
I sling myself to one side. A man lunges into the space I’ve left behind and grunts. I crank around and jack my pistol into the face of—
“Johannes Kruppe,” I sneer through my chattering teeth. I fire at his head. He dodges the shot and slaps the Luger out of my hand. I slash at him with Deathcalibur, which he also evades.
That’s right; he’s enhanced!
“Grey, I’ve got Kruppe, but—” The rest of my comm is interrupted as Kruppe seizes me and we violently wrestle all over the cabin.
“Hang on, Scarlet,” Grey comms. “I’m on my way.”
We rumble through the kitchenette. I can’t find my Luger, so I throw anything that isn’t nailed down: glasses, dishes, teakettle, whatever. Very little of it hits him, and he keeps grabbing more of me each time he chases me into a corner. I swing my knife at his hands and jump over his arms, but when I come down, long shards of broken glass stab into my bare feet.
“AHHGH!” I collapse to the deck. My neuroinjector hits me with Overkaine as Kruppe hoists me like a sack of potatoes.
The beefy fucker tries to crush me in a bear hug. I club my forehead into his nose. This draws blood but doesn’t break his excruciating stranglehold. Kruppe squeezes me so hard that something inside my body snaps. My lungs strain for air, and my bloody bare feet kick at his knees. Finally, I switch my grip on Deathcalibur and jam the blade into Johannes’s gut.
He shouts and lets go of me. One of his hands covers the wound in his midsection. I back away and kick at him as he tries to grab me with his free hand. He drives me against a bulkhead. I grab a metal folding chair and swing it at him. His upper body leans out of the way, but the chair solidly clocks his kneecap.
Kruppe’s painful yell boomerangs around the cabin. He limps away from me, cursing a blue streak. His hand scrabbles a kitchen drawer open, and he hauls out an immense handgun.
This macho mental case had that the whole time?
He barely aims the beast before he starts blasting away. I jump across the cabin, slam into a small table covered with maps and papers, and stumble against the wall. I spin and draw my arm to throw my knife into Johannes’s neck.
Then something brushes my ankle. I slash Deathcalibur at this unwelcome surprise.
The little girl appears in the doorway to the front cabin. “Ach nein! Nicht mein kleines Pfefferchen!” No! Not my little Pepper!
I freeze my swing and avoid stabbing the kids’ small black dog by less than an inch. The mutt scurries up the ladder to the top deck. By the time I turn to Kruppe, he already has his nasty-looking pistol aimed at my chest. His chin and neck are streaked with blood from his nose, and more blood dribbles across the hand he holds over his knife wound.
“Scarlet,” Grey comms. “I’m bringing the other boat over. Do you need help?”
“Yes! Omigod, Grey, hurry before—”
“How much time do you—”
“NOW!”
Johannes draws in breath to speak, and then the world slams upside down.
I spin like a cat in a dryer. Shit flies all over the place, and everyone on board screams, including me. Nothing is where it was a second ago. It isn’t until I feel water gushing into the boat that I realize what happened.
If we were following proper ExOps comm-protocol, I’d transmit something with the words “situation report” and “competitor status.” Instead I comm, “Grey, you crazy fuck!”
“Did it work?”
“Yeah, it worked.”
What worked is that my maniacal teammate commandeered the other boat and rammed it into this one. My cracked-up craft lies on its side and sucks in water like a sponge. I have less than thirty seconds before this tub sinks into Cherbourg harbor. I slosh across the cabin to check on Kruppe. A grisly crater in his head stains the flickering water around his body a deep crimson.
Cause of death: killed by unhinged boat pilot.
It’s time to abandon ship, but my hasty exit is interrupted by the two kids bawling in the front cabin. I holster Deathcalibur and limp to the bow. When I barge into their room, the kids cry even louder.
I’m quite an eyeful. Soaked, covered in blood, and flush with killing rage, I must be an ice-white portrait of frozen ferocity. But there’s no time to dick around, and there’s no way to calm these kids down right now.
I reach out and glom one head of blond hair in each fist. The kids shout and try to pull my hands off them as I drag them across the flooding room and into the main cabin. I push them up to what remains of the deck outside. Then I follow.
Grey has guided his scratched and dented boat beside my sinking mess. I hand the kids to him. Then I throw him the damned dog, which somehow survived the aquatic T-boning. Grey reaches down and helps me aboard his boat as Kruppe’s demolished vessel gurgles into the sea. Brando will be psyched that we’ve re-created his favorite line from The Godfather by sending Kruppe to sleep with the fishes.
Speak of the devil, Brando comms in: “Grey, Scarlet, it appears things have settled down out there. Is it safe to move the Longstreet?”
“Affirmative,” Grey answers. “Come on out.” He then leans down to the frightened children and whispers something to them. They both vanish below the deck. Momentarily, their little hands hold up a bundle through the hatchway. It’s a pair of blankets. Grey drapes one around himself and gives one to me.
I wrap the blanket around my quaking body and say, “That was a pretty radical move for an Infiltrator.”
He grins. “Must be all the time I’ve spent with you outrageous Interceptors.”
Across the water, the Longstreet eases away from the dockyard. In the water, a small group of six men and three children swim toward shore. It looks like Grey’s side of things was about as lethal as my savage little fatality fest.
I plop into the navigator’s seat and clutch the blanket to me. Blood drips from my feet, and my ribs burn like cattle brands. Peppe
r the dog has already tracked bright red paw prints all over the boat.
My attention is drawn to a big plastic cooler full of beers. I grab a couple, give one to Grey, then crack the other one open for myself and chug it down. I help myself to a second brewski, chug that one, too, and let out a long, loud, rib-searing belch during which I rumble, “Ü-u-u-ber Alles!”
* * *
CORE
MIS-ANGEL-6133
Heavily encrypted intercept, source unknown:
START TRANSMISSION : ACTIVATE TERMINATION SEQUENCE : TRANSMISSION END
50
NEXT MORNING, FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 5:52 A.M. CVT
LONGSTREET, ATLANTIC OCEAN
Dear Lord Most High, please make this horrible feeling go away and I’ll never chuzzle eleven beers after prolonged immersion in winter-degree water again.
Hypothermia sucks ass! My bedsheets are drenched with sweat, the covers are tangled around my legs again, and I have to pee like crazy. Plus, it’s dark and the room smells like cheese. If it weren’t for my night vision, I’d never be able to see where I am: in one of the food larders on the cargo ship Longstreet, bound for America.
The ship’s regular berths are already stuffed with crew and passengers, so Captain Demet had to put us up in this supply room. Brando, Falcon, Grey, and I have been confined to our cots while we recover from the injuries sustained over the last two days of our ROAR Tour.
F-Bird’s leg has finally been set in a proper cast, but that isn’t the only broken bone our team has suffered. That bear hug Kruppe gave me broke one of my ribs, so I’m wrapped up tight to keep everything in place. I’ve also got puffy gauze marshmallows on my feet. Brando has bandages on his head and has been using an ice compress to keep down the swelling on his badly bruised thigh.
Grey and I are being treated for the severe loss of body heat we suffered while fighting the brownshirts on their boats. My hypothermia is worse than his, supposedly because I celebrated so much more than everyone else.
I gingerly extract myself from the blanket knot and hobble out to the bathroom. On the way back to bed, I check on F-Bird. He’s asleep, and his eyes move around under his eyelids as he dreams. His breathing is shallow, and his arms twitch. Looks like a bad one. I should know.
I climb into my cot, expecting to lie awake obsessing about my father and which circle of hell I’ll go to for killing that boy. Instead, I fall asleep right away.
It’s light out. I walk up to the deck of a ship. It’s covered in grass and trees, like a small park floating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. A group of children play on a little merry-go-round, laughing and calling to one another. I walk over to them.
The kids all stop and stare at me. The smiles drop from their faces like butterflies sizzling off a bug zapper. They stand still, staring at the ground. A few of them begin to cry. One boy, the tallest, frowns at me.
Wait. He’s not looking at me. He’s looking past me.
I turn around and nearly jump out of my skin. A desolate, brooding figure looms behind me, reeking of despair and ringing of pain. The grim spirit wields a heavy scythe and wears a black hooded robe. It’s the same height that I am.
I step away from the deathly apparition. My feet trip over something, and my backside lands on the grass near the frightened children. The nightmarish figure strides forward and throws off its hood.
Huh, I always thought Death was a guy.
Wait a minute. Her face seems familiar.
A thick black snake oozes out of her mouth and speaks in Trick’s voice.
“Scarlet!” the snake rasps. “Look out!”
“Whuh!” My forehead is slick with sweat, but my swaddled feet are like size-seven ice cubes. I push the covers off me and hold my side while I lie panting in the dark. Gradually, I become aware that I’m not the only person awake in here.
Falcon sways on his feet, ten feet from me. His arms twitch even worse than when he was asleep. Wait, is he sleepwalking? What’s he holding? My hand worms under my pillow for Li’l Bertha.
She’s not there.
She is always there.
“F-Bird? Can you hear me?”
The poor kid jolts in his skin like he’s about to come apart from the inside out. “S-Scarlet? I don’t want to.” He presses something against his stomach.
“Hey, relax, man.” I slowly place my feet on the floor. “Don’t want to what?”
He grunts, and a stream of spit dribbles down his chin. What the fuck is wrong with him? How is he even standing in his cast?
I comm on a private frequency, “Brando! Wake up!”
My partner has been awake for days, tending to his wounded comrades and filing reports about all the crazy shit we’ve done. I glance at his bunk across the room. He doesn’t stir.
This time I comm at maximum urgency, “PATRICK! WAKE THE FUCK UP!”
His head comes off his pillow, but he’s really disoriented. “Alixsh? Waz’sh?”
Falcon swivels to see who’s talking. Now! Madrenaline belts into my system, and I fly off the bed like I’ve been shot out of a cannon. The sudden motion fires a white-hot flare across my ribs. I slap at F-Bird’s hands and knock him over. A pair of objects clatter to the floor as I land on top of the kid with my hand at his throat.
“Falcon! What the fuck’s the matter with you?” My free hand gropes for the things he dropped. One of them is his pistol.
The other is my pistol.
“What the fuck were you doing with Li’l Bertha?”
Falcon writhes under me. Brando finally rousts himself, instinctively grabs his X-bag, and dashes to my side. “Alix, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Something’s wrong with Falcon!”
Everybody else wakes up. Raj and Grey run over and hold F-Bird’s arms and legs so I can get off him. The kid’s body thrashes against the floor like someone whacking the dust out of a rug.
“Is he epileptic?” Grey asks.
I sit down and gingerly press my hand against my ribs. “I don’t know. Dad isn’t.”
Raj pins Falcon’s wriggling wrists to the deck. “Dammit, he’s gonna self-destruct.”
Brando asks, “Alix, did he say anything?”
“He said, ‘I don’t want to.’”
“And he had your gun?”
“Yeah. Swiped her right out from under my pillow.”
My partner dives into his X-bag and retrieves his DOSE. He holds it against F-Bird’s arm. The results are immediate. Falcon goes limp and passes out. Saliva trickles across his cheek.
I say, “You know, every time you do that to somebody, I’m convinced they’re dead.”
“Well, no, he’s not. But he’ll be out for a while.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
Brando inhales, then puffs out his cheeks. “I think he’s a Sleeper. Given who sent him here, I’d say he was about to kill you, Alix.”
We gape at each other in shock. A Sleeper is an agent with a preprogrammed mission that lies dormant in the operative’s mind until his handler sends an activation signal. Once it’s initiated, almost nothing can sway a Sleeper from attempting to complete the assignment. The brainwashing is so severe that activated agents tend to eschew tactics or restraint. This leaves them with limited opportunities for a safe escape, which is why Sleepers rarely get second missions.
Raj recovers first. “Why would Fredericks activate him now?”
Grey rubs his beard. “A last resort, I guess. Maybe he thought Falcon could kill Scarlet and dump her body in the ocean. Make it seem like she’d fallen overboard.”
Brando sits on his bunk and wipes his face. “Or maybe Fredericks lost his connection with Falcon until tonight. We went offline for a while after we hooked up with the kid in Calais.”
Grey regards Falcon, who’s still unconscious on the floor. “What about when he comes around?”
Brando says, “We’d better keep him sedated until we’re home. The Med-Techs can flush the mission out of him.”
&nbs
p; “And then he’ll be okay?” I ask.
“I hope so.”
“What if he’s not?”
“Then…” My partner stares down at the floor and whispers, “I don’t know.”
Neither Grey nor Raj can look me in the eye. I contemplate F-Bird’s immobile form for a moment, then say a quick prayer:
Dear Father, please restore my crazy brother to full health by the power of your Holy Spirit, and may you, Lord, be glorified by how much he kicks ass. Amen.
* * *
CORE
INT-GG-4629
FROM THE DESK OF THE EXECUTIVE INTELLIGENCE CHAIRMAN
DATE: April 17, 1981
SUBJECT: Greater Germany
Dear Mr. President,
Per your request, I submit herein a summary of the developing state of affairs in Europe. In brief, it is extremely dynamic.
The German government’s abolishment of slavery has met fierce opposition from the political right and proslavery paramilitary groups like the Purity League. These groups are well funded by anti-Semitic institutions and may require aggressive neutralization. Nationalists from the former countries of France, Great Britain, Spain, Holland, and Italy, sensing an opportunity, have called upon their countrymen to liberate themselves from German rule.
Violent public conflicts have erupted across the German Empire. The fighting is especially pronounced in the “New Reich” states where slaves were most widely used. As we have discussed, slavery was restricted within Germany’s prewar borders to minimize domestic unemployment.
We forecast that Greater Germany will soon be embroiled in a full-scale civil war. A significant percentage of her citizens—including many high-ranking Reich officials—feel that slavery is a moral blight. This sentiment is shared by the majority of Americans, who will expect our military to join the emerging antislavery coalition. I’m sure you share my sense of irony at helping a German force reconquer Europe after we supported Germany’s enemies during the early 1940s.
Despite the ongoing turbulence, the mass migration of former slaves to Cuba progresses steadily. The U.S. Army has secured the goodwill of the native Cubans toward their new neighbors, the entire island swarms with American construction crews, and our media outlets tirelessly announce how this is the dawn of a golden age for Cuba and her people.