by Sean Deville
Where he was, he didn’t hear the cars out on the street at the front of his property. He didn’t hear the car doors open, didn’t hear the half a dozen men exit the vehicles and make their way to the front of his building. He didn’t hear the modified bus pull up thirty seconds later, didn’t hear the frightened sobs of some of those on board.
He heard the sound of his front door caving in though.
“What the fuck?” The sound was familiar, and yet completely alien, and he stepped up from where he was lying, walked back into his bedroom, and put his bathrobe on. Now there was a new noise, that of people moving around inside his house, and a whole host of scenarios played out in his head. Surely not? Surely, the corruption hadn’t grown to that degree. Standing there, he saw the shadows through the open bedroom door and started to back up. A figure appeared in the door, clad in green, armed to the teeth, a gun suddenly being pointed at his chest.
“FBI, DOWN ON THE GROUND, DOWN ON THE GROUND.”
Minutes later, still in his bathrobe, he found himself sat on the cold metal seat of the bus with a dozen other people, his hands cuffed to the railing on the seat in front. As the bus pulled out, he looked around at his fellow prisoners, saw the bewilderment and the fear in their eyes. Up front, three National Guard stood looking over their charges, holding their machine guns menacingly. So it had finally come, he thought to himself. Secretly, deep down, he always knew it would. But even if he had seen this day arriving with absolute clarity, he wouldn’t have changed anything. How could he? The pursuit of the truth was who he was; it was his very essence. Hopefully, this was some kind of temporary internment. Even with the powers the Federal Government had suddenly enacted, he really didn’t see this as anything more than a power play. How very wrong he was.
14.32PM GMT, 17th September 2015, Hilton Head, South Carolina, USA
“Under Presidential Executive Order, you are being detained on national security grounds.” The man on the floor was still groggy from the shock and awe of the home invasion. The air was thick with smoke, and the relentless screaming of the three-month-old child sliced into his brain. This time, the Feds hadn’t come in suits. They had come in combat gear, armed with Kevlar armour and machine guns.
Duke Lee, an Iraq war veteran and former Marine, tried to shake the stars out of his eyes. But the knee on his neck and the fact his arms were pinned behind him meant he could barely move.
“My daughter,” he tried to say.
“Stop resisting,” a voice screamed in his ear, and he felt something slap the back of his head.
“I’m not resis…” He failed to get the words out because a hood was slipped over his head. Blinded, he felt himself being lifted up, his hands zip-tied behind him. Hands slipped up under his armpits, and he was dragged out of his bedroom and through the internal geography of his single floor house. He wasn’t fully without vision—the sack allowed some light to get in—and as they dragged him outside, the bright morning sun did its best to show him the serene outside. Through the tiny hole in the material, he could see the three black SUVs with their lights flashing. Across the street two doors down, one of his neighbours was also being forcibly removed from his home. In the distance, he heard his wife screaming, and he craned his neck, trying to look behind him.
“Julie?” he cried, only to feel someone punch him in the kidneys.
“I said stop resisting.” With no other option, he tried to use his legs to help propel himself forward, better that than be completely manhandled. Nobody had yet told him what this was all about, and it would be another seven hours before the light of his infractions was revealed to him. During the day, he ran a very successful landscaping business, but at night, he ran an online blog that complained about the corruption in the Federal Government. With over a hundred thousand followers, he was deemed a subversive risk worthy of detention. He was ripped from the bosom of his family by soulless men all because he had chosen to write words on a website critical of the government. It truly was dangerous to be right when your government was wrong.
14.43PM, 17th September 2015, MI6 Building, London, UK
Rasheed had spotted the crowd of infected and had detected that somehow these were different from the ones he had encountered on his journey here. Despite his power, he was still cautious, and curiosity drove him to seek information. Why were they here, right where the voice had told him to come? And why was this, the place of hate and pain that so many of his kind had been oppressed by, why was the MI6 Building his ultimate destination? Why did the voice bring him here?
Accessing the side building had been child’s play, the door ripping itself off the hinges with invisible force. Four storeys up, he looked out of the window at the river bank, observing the thousands of infected that milled and swayed there. On the periphery, he saw several dozen coming and going, like ants exploring the outside of the nest. And then he saw it, a figure different from the others, separated by space and thought. Rasheed could almost feel the man, because that was what he was. This was no infected.
“Come to me,” the voice said.
“I am here,” Rasheed said in his mind, “but I need information.” He stepped back from the window, stopping in the apartment’s kitchen briefly to hunt for food.
“Come to me,” the voice demanded.
“Not until you tell me why I am here. Not until you tell me what is going on.” Opening the fridge, he found some cheese slices and used them to load the bread that he found still fresh in the bread bin on the kitchen counter. How long would the bread out there in the stores, in the homes last? A week, probably less. He made several sandwiches and walked back into the living room, where he sat down on a rather plush leather sofa. Western decadence, he thought to himself, how it fed upon itself.
“You must come,” the voice almost pleaded.
“And I will, but not until you tell me everything.”
“You are Two.”
“Yes, I know, you said. But you haven’t told me what that means.”
“I am One, I lead the way.”
“You lead shit, mate,” Rasheed laughed mockingly. “You are a voice in my head, for all I know a figment of my imagination. Perhaps you are the devil, here to tempt this soldier of Allah. Perhaps you are an angel. Who’s to say I am not presently insane, and this is all make believe?”
“Not insane, you are Two…you are Conquest.” Rasheed paused mid-bite. He hadn’t expected that.
“And the man on the riverbank? Do you know who he is? Why don’t the infected attack him?”
“He is Four….he is War. The infected are his to control.” Memory sparked in Rasheed’s brain. This was bullshit, remnants of the heretic Crusaders tales. He had always been taught that Christianity was a death cult, and here was the proof. Revelations, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But to be wrapped up in this sick and twisted theatre, how could this possibly be?
“You brought me here for this, to show me lies.” Rasheed screamed this in his mind. There was a pause.
“No,” the voice said. It sounded pained. “I brought you here to free me and to help me destroy this symbol of our oppression.” Rasheed, his temples pumping with anger, heard the only words that would have calmed him down. Finally, the truth. He breathed deeply, noticing a pain behind his right eye that had started abruptly. He felt dizziness arrive suddenly, but it was fleeting, and he quickly regained his sea legs. Something was wrong though, the pain intense and sharp. Dropping what was left of the sandwich, he brought his hand up to his eye. The pain reached a peak and then died away almost as quickly as it had started. Bringing his hand away, he found his vision blurred in that eye.
“Now will you come?” Rasheed ignored the voice. Instead, he rushed from the bathroom and nervously examined himself in the mirror. There was still vision from his right eye, but it was blurred, distorted, perhaps a fifth of what it had been just seconds ago. He was no doctor; he didn’t understand the intricacies of the human body, didn’t appreciate the toll his powers wer
e having on it. He didn’t know he had burst a vessel in his brain. But he knew that whatever had happened, the power had caused it, knew that it was his rage that had caused the damage.
“Tell me everything,” he said to the voice.
“No, not until you come,” came the response.
Croft was back in the control room. He looked at the monitors, looked at the image from the embankment across the river. “Who can get me what I need with these images?” A be-speckled man spoke up from across the room.
“I can, sir,” the man said rushing over to him. “What do you need?”
“Your name for starters.”
“Oh yes, sorry. It’s Peter.”
“Peter, can we zoom in on that scene across the river? I saw that crowd from the helicopter as we came in.”
“Yeah, sure,” Peter said, walking over to one of the work stations. It was abandoned so he sat down at it and began typing. The camera image zoomed in. “They’ve been there a while, but as they haven’t crossed the bridge, we’ve kind of ignored them.”
“That man in the centre, zoom in on him.” From this angle, it was hard to see, but Croft from the air had seen what looked like a buffer around the man. The man stood still, staring intently into the camera, or at least that was the way it seemed. Croft noted many things about the man, but the thing that stood out the most was he was the only one not naked. “Have you noticed that he is the only one wearing clothes?”
“Now that you mention it,” Peter said. “What do you think it means?”
“I think it means he’s not infected. Look at the way he doesn’t move like the others. Look how the infected around him have their heads bowed.” Croft turned around and surveyed the room. The lights flickered briefly, then again.
“Power brownouts, micro ones due to nobody controlling the power generation. The lights will go out soon, I reckon.” Peter looked at the man he had given the useful information to, but didn’t expect the response.
“Take me to the roof that overlooks that, and get your best sniper up there too.”
Something didn’t feel right. There was a new presence that felt oppressive and powerful, it’s influence descending like an all-consuming smog. It wasn’t the voice, of that Owen was certain. It held more power than that. The voice he could control, even threaten. But this…No, this was something else, and it was getting closer. It made him feel nervous, agitated, and he was surprised to feel his heart fluttering, the rhythm beating strongly in his chest and throat. His hands started sweating, and he reached down to the bag on the floor and extracted a fully loaded machine gun. Something was coming, and he was afraid.
He hated to feel afraid, and it was an emotion he was well-versed in. Most of his life had been lived in fear. The fear was not of the physical. Stepping up to someone toe to toe was exhilarating, empowering. Even when he lost, those fights never repeated because the opponent knew that Owen was crazy enough to risk everything. That was not the adversary your random street thug wanted to face. No, Owen’s fears were more spiritual than that. Until recently, he feared himself, feared what he would become on the path he had chosen. And now he was there. This is what the little whisper inside him warned he would become, the last vestiges of civilized humanity stripped from him. There was no turning back from this, no repentance that could save him from the madness that now enveloped his soul. And so he thought the fear had finally died. But it hadn’t, it just hid inside him waiting for the moment to seep out and reap its vengeance.
A minute later, and he felt the murmur in the minds of the infected, felt them recoil from something just out of his sight. Was it the undead, had they arrived drawn by the opportunity for a feast? He didn’t know why the infected feared their deceased cousins so much. They were strong enough and quick enough to protect themselves against the undead threat, but time and again, he had seen that they didn’t do this of their own accord. Owen often had to be the one to order such actions, and he could always feel the infected resisting somewhat, pushing back against his influence. But this felt different to that, and he saw movement at the very edge of his vision. He jumped over to a wall and climbed up to give himself a better vantage point, the infected scurrying away before him. There was a man walking through his army, the naked soldiers parting before him as if he was a spear slicing through flesh.
“What the fuck is this?” he said to himself.
Croft walked out into the cold afternoon air, Peter somewhat timidly behind him, a black holdall clutched in his nervous hands. Peter wasn’t an operative; he was a technician. He sat behind a computer for fuck’s sake. And yet Croft treated him with a respect that he had rarely encountered from men like him.
A third man stood looking out at the city, a man Croft had met before.
“So you’re the best sniper?” Croft asked, genuinely surprised, walking over to the individual who cradled a rifle in his arms.
“Yep,” Snow responded. “What are we after?”
“North embankment, one o’clock. There’s someone in that crowd of infected.” Snow nodded and moved over to the edge of the roof. There was a wall waist high, and he balanced the rifle end on it. Snow looked through the scope, trying to find the target. Croft stood next to him, a pair of binoculars now up to his eyes. They both watched as the crowd parted, a man running through them to jump up on a wall. He was looking north, away from where Croft and Snow now watched. Somewhere else on the roof, a shot went off, one of the infected down below obviously getting too close to breaching the perimeter.
“He’s not infected, doesn’t have the look of them,” Snow said.
“Or maybe he is and he’s like our friend down in the basement.” Snow cocked his head away from the scope so he could see the bigger picture. “That means he might be difficult to kill.”
“Only one way to find out.” Croft detected something else and moved his vision slightly. “Hold it, something else. To your right slightly.” Snow took the scope off the target and moved around. Within five seconds, he spotted the other thing out of place. Another clothed man, walking through the infected as if they weren’t even there.
“Yep, another guest to the party. Hang on.” Snow lifted a radio out of his pocket and spoke into it, still looking through the scope of his rifle. “Control,” he said into the radio, “this is Snow. Zoom in on the crowd at the Riverside Gardens. Have Mother run the two clothed individuals through her database.” Mother was the supercomputer deep in the heart of the MI6 Building with full access to every file and every piece of data known to Britain’s intelligence services.
“You know them?” Croft asked.
“Not them, him. The second guy. He looks familiar. Can’t tell for sure though, not at this range. Mother will know.”
The supercomputer took the image presented to it and ran the biometrics the high-definition cameras were able to record. It pulled in data from the street cameras directly surrounding the infected gathering, making billions of calculations within seconds. It didn’t take long, partly because the huge computer wasn’t being asked to do anything else.
“Mother has a match on both of them,” the voice over the radio said. “The Caucasian is a little shit known to police. Lives in Hounslow. Name’s Owen Patterson. Low-level crime, although suspected of various other nasties.”
“And the other?” Snow prompted.
“That’s interesting. Rasheed Khan. Suspected Jihadist. The Watchers have been keeping an eye on him. There were plans to bring him in today as it happens. Intelligence had clocked him as a potential threat.”
“Thanks,” Snow said, disconnecting the radio. “Thought that face looked familiar. Had a memo about him a few weeks back.”
“Peter,” Croft said turning to his new willing helper, “give me that directional microphone, will you?” Peter extracted it from the bag he was carrying.
Owen watched as the newcomer walked up to him, a grim look on the Asian man’s face. Owen held up his gun menacingly.
“That’s far en
ough,” Owen ordered, pointing the gun at the man’s central mass. His hands were still slick with sweat, and his heart still pounded in his chest, so much that he could almost hear it. But he wasn’t afraid of this Paki, refused to be. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I am Two. And, apparently, you are Four.” Croft listened to the conversation over the headphones he had donned. What the fuck was this?
“How the fuck did you know that?” he heard Owen say.
“You hear the voice too, don’t you? The voice that told you to come here.”
“Oh, I hear the cunt alright. And nobody, NOBODY tells me what to do,” Owen shouted angrily. “I came here because I wanted to.”
“Yes,” said Rasheed, “that’s what I tell myself as well. You have quite the fan club here.”
“They’re mine. This whole city’s mine.” Owen sounded petulant, like a child almost.
“You’re welcome to it. I’m just here for what’s in there, and according to One, you’re going to help me get in.”
“Snow, radio.” Croft threw a hand out and waited for the man to fumble the radio to him. Croft hoisted it to his lips. “Control, this is Croft. I want every sniper available to take aim on the north embankment. And contact NATO, see if they can give us any kind of air support.” Lowering the radio, he turned his head to the sniper next to him. “Snow, take the shot.”
Rasheed took a confident step towards Owen, only for something to suddenly hit him with force in the lower abdomen. Falling to the floor, the shock of the assault hitting him almost as badly as the bullet had, he was surprised when the infected swarmed him, covering him with their bodies, but not smothering or attacking him. His initial reaction was to lash out, but he quickly sensed that they were protecting him, forming a shield. His vision a mass of naked flesh, he felt strong hands grip him and his body was pulled along the gravel and then over grass. Over the howling of the infected, he could just hear more gunshots off in the distance, and he witnessed several infected get hit, some falling to the ground, some seeming to shrug off the wounds inflicted on them. In seconds, he was dragged behind a wall next to a cowering Owen. When the first shot had fired, the infected had swamped their leader as well and dragged him to this spot also, using themselves as a human barrier. Now the two were protected by a concrete wall no sniper’s bullet could ever penetrate.