Subject 12

by S. W. Douglas

  A trick, once learned, becomes a lot easier to do the next time.

  I threw myself sideways to avoid the next nearly-silent stuttering as one of the newer troops risked three-round bursts. Gas pressure building was a real problem during automatic firing on silenced weapons. Even ones manufactured with an integral silencer sleeve running the length of the barrel. Silenced MP5 variants were no different.

  I let the bullets fly as they had intended, but I caught myself and did a one-armed cartwheel to get back to my feet. The other hand I used to grab a stone from the driveway. Before I was fully upright I sent it spinning at the shooter nearest to me, realizing a heartbeat later that I really should keep one alive if I could. Instead of a head wound it smashed through his left knee, spraying blood and bone fragments behind it in an arc as it went on its merry way. The unlucky recipient of this wound screamed and fell, dropping his gun and grabbing his knee.

  Two down, one incapacitated, approximately thirty seconds passed since they started leaving the building.

  Once I righted myself I had to duck and weave to avoid bullets flying at me. Seven men with thirty-round clips had a lot of shots they could take.

  I felt one whiz by my ear a little closer than I felt comfortable with. I tracked it back to the firer and almost smiled as I saw him readjust his aim. He'd dropped into a crouch and was a lot steadier than the other remaining troops. He was too far away to deal with directly, though, so I turned my attention to the man I'd dodged closest to. The look of fear on his face was sharp. It offended me, so as soon as I got close enough --- by ducking under his arm as he tried to crush my skull with a quick, hard stroke from the gun's receiver --- I twisted his head a hundred and eighty degrees so he was looking behind him. He started to drop as I threw myself to the ground, rolling to my right to avoid the three slugs I could feel tearing towards me. They slammed into the falling corpse instead, jerking it sharply but not piercing the armor underneath. Not that it mattered, what with the torn spinal cord and all.

  Six became five when I rolled only to my knees and pulled the next guard down by his leg. He fell face-first and as soon as he hit the gravel I drove my elbow into his spine between his shoulder blades. The sound of shattering vertebrae was unmistakable, as was the sudden gasping breaths. He had five, six minutes tops.

  Five became four and four became three. Five lost his head when I ducked around four, kicked him in the back to knock him off balance, and went for the flattop. I hooked my fingers under his helmet, grabbed his hair, and dropped. Since I was stretched to the limit in keeping myself moving and away from the bullets and keeping the wannabe shouter from breathing, I couldn't do anything to him besides falling, but as he came down I bounced back up. I wrapped my other arm around him and yanked as hard as I could with the hand holding his head. As it turned out it continued holding his head even if his neck didn't.

  Blood geysered and the body went limp. I tried to ignore the warm rain that covered my face as I let the body fall to the ground. I threw the severed head at one of the guards at random and doubled over to avoid the expected hail of bullets. Number four had recovered his footing so I ran at him, launching myself into the air in a diving tackle that caught him in the ribs. We hit the ground and rolled, I for one being grateful that the remaining gunmen were either too busy reloading or too concerned about hitting their compatriot to fire on us.

  Four came out the loser in our tussle and my roll stopped with him facing down and me on top. One solid punch to the back of the head, splitting his bullet-resistant helmet as well as his skull, took him out out of the fight.

  Three men remained, and one of them was the veteran I'd been worried about.

  The other two had exhausted their submachine gun ammunition by that point, but the vet had realized the futility of firing and had dropped his gun, his knife appearing in place of it as I watched almost as if by magic. My opinion of him went up a notch.

  I rose to my feet slowly, deliberately, and stared at one of the other two. Sweat glinting on his forehead, he swallowed nervously and gingerly fingered his sidearm. I caught his eye and winked. That was all it took and he bolted, the sling holding his submachine gun dangerously close to his knees. It didn't take more than a momentary shift in focus to send it between his legs and send him sprawling, something I could do even as I ran toward him since the guard I'd been keeping from breathing had stopped trying. As the runner fell I dove, my elbow crashing into his spine as we hit. I felt bone shift as I drove myself into him. His legs went limp as the pressure on his spinal cord increased past the level they could function in. I hadn't expected to hit the ground as hard as I did, but I still managed to turn it into a roll, bringing myself up further away than I'd intended, but facing the last two guards. The shrieks of pain from the one-kneed guy had lessened some in volume, though I didn't know if it was from blood loss or morphine. If he'd carried a battle-pack like he was supposed to and had had enough presence of mind to use the morphine ampoule he was feeling a lot better than either of the other guards were about to.

  I ignored the curses coming from the guy closest to me and watched the veteran carefully as I tried to still the burning in my left arm. I hadn't dislocated it but I'd jarred the nerve enough it was complaining. That I did not need.

  Their sidearms weren't silenced. That meant doctrine for an installation like this required they were used only as a last resort. Not that they weren't supposed to be anyway, but there was extra stress put on it during orientation and training. That meant when I heard the report of someone's pistol going off only after I'd felt the bullet flying my way I knew I'd pushed someone past the breaking point.

  I felt the bullet coming closer with a sense I couldn't describe to anyone no matter how hard I tried. Using that same sense I saw where it was going, what it was going to hit along the way, and without even thinking I made it loop and go back where it came..

  Of course, it didn't take as long to do it as it did to describe it, but few things do.

  I heard the gasp as the bullet rent bare skin and buried itself deep inside. The watery gurgle that started with the next breath told me it had hit lung. Tough luck, but those are the breaks when you fire a gun.

  I rose from my crouch and took one step toward the next to last guard. He looked around quickly in panic before I saw the muscles in his jaw clench. I didn't hear the crunch but I saw the red foam burst from his mouth and the tell-tale hemorrhage starting in his sclera. That left number ten.

  His face was a mask of grim determination as he gripped the knife in an underhand manner. He almost seemed to beckon me closer as he worked his guard pose.

  Oh yes, I respected this one.

  He didn't swing the knife as I'd expected, but he wasn't fast enough by far to have hit me with the pommel like he'd tried. The jab had power, though, and he corrected faster than I'd anticipated. In fact, as I ducked away I saw his other hand flash up and I barely got out of the way. A feint, then, but a risky one under normal circumstances.

  These were not normal circumstances.

  I spun around him and grabbed the submachine gun, twisted the sling, pulled it taught, and snapped it hard. He lost his balance and fell to the ground, his free hand flying to his throat in reaction to the nylon webbing cutting off his air supply.

  I walked around him and released the pressure on the sling as soon as I felt I had his attention.

  "You have any family?"

  "What?" he rasped. His voice was rough from his partly-crushed larynx.

  "Do you have any family?"

  "Yeah," he said, throwing the knife away.

  "You close?"

  "No," he said, shaking his head and rubbing his throat.

  "Open casket," I promised.

  "Thank you," he said, nodding. He understood.

  "Least I could do," I replied.

  My foot caught the side of his head. He went down, the light in his eyes dimming as he hit the gravel. I had intended to knock him out but I hadn't wanted to do any
more damage than I had to. Stunned was good enough.

  I took careful aim and fired at point-blank range. The bullet went in through his armpit instead of flattening itself on his body armor. It tore through at least one lung and with luck hit his heart. No exit wound meant no gaping hole to be filled and a chest wound meant he could be displayed at the funeral.

  That just left the guy moaning quietly where he'd fallen. As I approached him I realized any questions would be pointless. He had slipped from consciousness and would soon be beyond even sleep.

  I stepped on his neck and with a quick flexing of my thigh made a very loud crunch that almost masked the nauseating sound of meat and gristle getting flattened. His pistol lay where it had fallen after the bullet he'd fired at me had arced over his vest and lodged somewhere in one of his lungs. I saw it and nodded to myself.

  I wiped as much as I could of the not-quite-dry blood off my face and sighed at the thought of the shower I was going to have to take in a few hours.

  Alpha Zulu, being a paramilitary, quasi-government organization, believed in the sanctity of human life; specifically in the sanctity of the lives of Alpha Zulu members. That meant every employee, including the tech-heads and gadgeteers, had to check out on all four of the main battle arms and qualify with them every other month. While it was a fairly informal process, it meant everyone carrying an Alpha Zulu membership card was intimately familiar with carrying, cleaning, and firing automatic pistols, a standard-issue MP5 submachine gun, and the assault rifle and its carbine variant. Not everyone was a great shot, of course. The same was true of any group of people --- some would be able to hit a small coin halfway across town five times out of six, rain or shine, while some people could barely hit a paper target at twenty paces.

  I was a lot bigger a target than a small piece of paper with some rings on it, believe it or not.

  There was more, though, than just putting small holes in paper when it came to qualifying. Part of the training involved live-fire live-target drills. There were a total of three before initial certification was issued for prospective employees; full- and half- armors and vest-only. Full-armor involved shooting someone wearing a specially-designed bulletproof suit with a .22 caliber handgun three times. Half-armor, as the name implied, was similar except the target was only wearing half the suit. The weapon was changed to a submachine gun locked on three-round burst firing low-velocity slugs and qualification required eight out of nine bullets hitting the target. Missing the target was penalized only slightly more than hitting an area that wasn't covered by the armor. Vest-only certification was required only for combat troops, though it carried a twelve-percent increase in pay for anyone who qualified. The caveat with that, however, was that missing the target was grounds for disqualification no matter what your previous position. Hitting the target but missing the vest was grounds for dismissal unless a serious malfunction had occurred.

  Most people don't react too well to getting hit with a 12-gauge slug somewhere they're not covered by a bulletproof-anything.

  Needless to say, volunteers for half-armor were hard to come by and for vest-only were unheard of. It was usually assigned to people as a punishment. Fatalities... happened.

  The long and the short of it, then, was that every single person inside the enclave had not only proven some level of proficiency with any gun they might find in the armory but had proven their ability and willingness to fire said weapons on a living human being.

  Ordinarily this wouldn't bother me. It wasn't an ordinary situation, however. I still wasn't a hundred percent from the Dragon Breath, I hadn't slept enough --- the headache had returned and brought with it a taste not unlike chewing aluminum foil --- and there was a chance I was going to run into Kinsey in there. Kinsey was, by himself, no real threat to me; but I had few doubts as to the technology he'd be carrying with him. Since stuffing one of those suicide tablets into his mouth hadn't killed him, it was safe to assume he was immune to them. I wouldn't have put it past him to carry an aerosol version of it and to hell with anyone in his employ who got some on him.

  That was enough to make me hesitate. I was pretty sure I wasn't immune to the toxins, whatever my reaction to the Dragon Breath had been, and if I caught a blast of that in the face I wasn't going to be catching an antidote from a passing fairy and have a week in the sack to sleep it off.

  Was my blood feud with Kinsey really worth a permanent dirt nap for me?

  I considered turning my back on the building and flying away, trying to start my life anew one more time. It was tempting. If I flew far enough away I might just be able to do it, even if The Justice Fiend were to start looking for me. Alpha Zulu couldn't be everywhere, after all. Kinsey would grow tired of looking for me after a few years, and as long as I avoided all the major population centers for the rest of my life I wouldn't trigger their interest in me again. To hell with the serum in my blood.

  I looked at the sky and felt for the wind. Something felt different, though. This wouldn't be me trying to get away from Kinsey to get my life back, this would be me running because I was scared. Some voice inside me said to do so would be wrong.

  I listened to that voice as I stared at the corpses strewn around me. I'd already stepped onto the path. Might as well see where it leads, right?

  I closed my eyes and saw a pretty young woman with a big grin flashing a peace sign as she held on tightly to an unshaven brute of a man. A moment later she morphed into the broken and savaged cadaver I'd seen in the kitchen and my stomach lurched just enough to say it had.

  My eyes opened and I felt my determination renewed. I was going in after all. And I had to hurry. They knew I was coming.

  To describe stopping to shower and change clothing after killing sixty-two people (not including the ones I'd taken down outside) in under an hour as brazen would be an understatement, perhaps, but that's what I did.

  To be fair, twelve of the people had died because an over-zealous sergeant had shot them rather than let them be captured, but I had my hand in it. Another four, about twenty minutes in, had swallowed their suicide tablets. I wouldn't recommend the experience, judging by what I found when I broke into the room they'd taken refuge in. Death hadn't been instantaneous, but it had the benefit of having been very, very painful. One of them had actually cut his abdomen open with a piece of broken glass and pulled some of his intestines out to try to end the pain. The missing bodies were either on leave, on assignment, or out sick. Maybe they had a night shift on this post. It'd be weird but it wouldn't be out of the question. There weren't that many living quarters, really, so it was within the realm of possibility. Hot-bunking wasn't something Kinsey encouraged, but it still happened.

  The deaths didn't bother me. I'd killed as many or more in some operations, sometimes after being awake for nearly forty-eight hours, and in some cases in more pitched battles than I cared to think about. One time I'd choked a man half again my size to death with my bare hands, hiding in some tall grass, with guards walking by so closely I could have reached out and touched them. I could still see his pop-eyed stare and feel his bloody fingers slipping on my hands as he feebly struggled to break my grip whenever I thought about it.

  What bothered me was the fact that if I had arrived only a few hours earlier I could have caught Kinsey before he left to catch an expletive-deleted flight to parts unknown.

  I washed a little more of a file clerk who'd been too busy trying to shoot me to burn her files out of my hair and reflected on what I'd accomplished.

  The security system hadn't been flushed. That meant everything from the last thirty days was in on-site memory storage and could be retrieved by means of a simple command interface designed to let a couple of trainees and a chimpanzee access it. Mission files and command tables were a mess and probably unrecoverable --- my passwords and logins were recognized but everything I'd tried to pull up had been so badly corrupted I couldn't make heads or tails of it. The access log showed me that bit of handiwork was the result of a woma
n by the name of Haaji. I hadn't bothered to look at name tags to figure out if I'd killed her or the sergeant had. It didn't really matter. Dead was dead. Maybe the Guild techs could get something from it, maybe not, but it wasn't something I needed to worry about. Nobody with clearance to actually wipe the main and backup hard drives had been able to get close enough to the computer terminals they needed to gain upper-level access. That was nearly miraculous and I wasn't about to knock it.

  I worked a molar loose from the hair it had somehow gotten snarled in and sighed as it rattled against the tiled floor.

  The hand grenade had been a nasty surprise. I was lucky I heard it hit the floor so I turned in time to see it. If I hadn't, well, as tired as I'd been feeling I probably would be a red smear on the wall and some knobby bits hanging from the ceiling. The blast was easy to redirect once I knew it was coming, and the wall I took out with it had given me immediate access to a sub-armory on the second floor. Being able to grab some weapons had been a godsend. The man who'd thrown it hadn't reacted too well to having his head crushed against another wall. It had splattered nicely.

  Actually, the whole affair was a pretty big blur. Small things stood out --- an unarmored chest erupting from a shotgun blast at close range; a very surprised look on a face that was missing most of the back of its skull because of a ricocheting bullet; a bloody handprint on the wall when I'd slipped in someone and had to catch myself. The adrenaline had died down and I was feeling a little shaky but my brain was still going like a freight train on crack. It'd be a while, and maybe it'd take a meditation session or two, before I could remember all of it.

  Assuming I wanted to.

  The body wash I'd chosen from the rack on the wall smelled strongly of leather. I didn't mind the smell at all and was gratified when it and the fluffy sponge thing cut through the clotted mess clinging to my face and arms. I hadn't so much as pulled my shirts off as peeled them off.