Okhchen sent his last bullet crashing through a leering face, then gripped his rifle by the barrel and swung it like a club to crush the skull of a second enemy with the wooden stock. The next tore his head off.
Kaminsky bellowed in defiance and rose to his feet, holding his smoking DP-28 waist-high as he raked the ghouls with slugs. When it was empty he threw it aside and swept out an infantry spade. One edge of the blade was sharpened so it could also be used like an ax — or as a weapon. Wielding it like a battle ax he hacked and slashed at the ghouls like a warrior of old, laughing and cursing them in Yiddish, splattering their gore on the rocks until finally they overwhelmed and dismembered him.
The magazine of Zakharov’s Tokarev service pistol held eight rounds. Seven he pumped into the nearest ghoul, bringing it down. Then, as three more lunged for him, he pressed the muzzle to his temple and pulled the trigger.
His gnawed bones, and the gnawed bones of his comrades, could not be seen by the aircrews flying high above the ridge a week later. But they could see the crater in the tundra, and the Tupolev bombers carried full loads.
The Secret War went on.
Outbreak
V. E. Battaglia
Rook was going to be sick.
He had always been susceptible to motion sickness. Reading in the car made his head spin, storm and wrack violently. Boats jellied his legs and turned his skin to sagging seaweed. Hell, even standing too fast could sometimes throw his head through a foggy loop. His stomach achieved acrobatic proficiency in those moments, all back flips and hand springs and harsh landings.
Now, as he sat tight in his seat with the constant whir of helicopter blades pounding above his head and harsh wind coming in at odd angles from the open hatch to his side, Rook remembered why exactly it was that he had opted out of joining the Air Force. He could barely breathe without a wave of nausea sweeping over him. He tried looking out at the city, tried to focus and found that it was a strange still-frame, a city floating on clouded air. High rises climbed endlessly, their windows blistering bright against the dread darkness of a dangerous night, lights flickering on and off and no inhabitants in sight. Fog had crept down through hollows and alleys, drifting towards street level in poisonous wisps that blanketed roads and dissolved short, squalid, razor-edged buildings into acidic vapor.
Acid. Dissolving. Melting. Decaying.
His stomach pushed up at his throat violently. He choked it back down. Bad idea to look out the window. He stared up at the ceiling with bulging, glassy eyes and started thinking through terms he had learned in training, reciting them to himself in no particular order. Revenant: angry revenge ghost, destroy remains. Imp: small servant of witches, dragon’s breath injected into the heart. EMP: electromagnetic pulse, disrupts poltergeists. It was the only trick that helped, albeit very slightly, when he felt sick or nervous.
“Looking a little green there, Rook.” Mouth’s voice chirped through Rook’s headset.
“First drop. Definition of green.” That one was Cypher. “Looking a little sick too.”
“You vomit, then you vomit outside my rig, Rook. I’m not cleaning that shit up.” Chopper. Definitely Chopper, that one.
“Clean?” Mouth chuckled, slapped Deacon on the arm and gave him a scrunched what the hell? look. “Clean what, Chop? My ass has been sticking to the same cum stains since ‘99.”
“Keep it up. I’ll leave your ass out here, Mouth.”
“Yeah, you promise?”
Deacon shook his head. “God help us.”
“Quiet.” And that one was the Boss. Sergeant Klinkhammer, but no one called him that. His name was Boss. And his word was law. When he said to be quiet, the he-lo took it down a notch. First rule of Shadow Team: Boss is God. Second rule: Do as God commands. Third: See Two. “Cypher. Access the south-side apartment’s computers. I want schematics and a guest list with running count.”
Cypher instantly went to work, pulling a laptop from her pack. Her fingers moved rapidly across the keys, the tapping silenced by heavy blades cutting the air. In seconds, she was done and had turned the screen towards everyone.
The screen scanned through a rapid-fire set of binaries and registry keys, then bisected into two windows. The top, a rotating graphic of a run-down apartment building with fire escapes running down its sides — a vertical slice of the building had been cut away like a piece of cake, showing a quick layout of the interior. The bottom window showed a running tally of guests currently registered to the apartments totaling 123.
“Alright, listen up and listen well because we’re ETA 4 minutes, max. Two weeks ago, during a routine scan of New York, Intel picked up on an anomalous energy spike.” Boss’ voice boomed over the headset. “PK and EM readings went off the scale for three hours without explanation. Then they stopped. Further scans throughout the day returned no results. In response, we bumped our alert status from blue to yellow and activated SAR Protocol 1. Leak was sent in the following day with instructions to maintain station for a month, investigate grounds and tenants and check in daily with Intel. Two days ago he missed his scheduled check-in time. Scans showed him still within the building and his vitals were steady. Continuous PK-EM sweeps of the building were ordered. Twelve hours later, he fell off the grid entirely. When he reappeared—” Boss looked to Cypher and she reached around the screen, tapped it. “—this signature surfaced, originating in or near his apartment.”
A small, dark mass appeared in the vertical slice on the 6th floor of the building, pulsing like a beating heart and radiating angry, jagged waves of red in all directions.
“This signature has continued since his reappearance. He has still not checked in. The job is simple. Standard SR&R. We are to evaluate current SAR status while inside, but our primary objective is to rendezvous with Leak in his 6th-floor apartment and get him out of there.”
Rook noticed that everyone had taken huddled positions by the he-lo doors, weapons strapped and slung. He followed suit, awkwardly bumping into Cypher, who stared at him with disgust. Had he just heard Boss say rescue was priority?
“We go in quiet. That means weapons slung, people. I don’t want engagement before we find our man unless absolutely necessary.”
“ETA twenty seconds, Boss,” Chopper cut in. “Sorry for interrupting, Boss.”
“Do not touch down on the roof, Chop. We’ll drop in. Stay local and stay in the air. We don’t know what’s down there and we’re not taking chances. This shit goes sour and we may need evac ASAP. When I call for dust off, be ready.”
“Boss,” Rook said tentatively. “Sir, I’m confused. Shouldn’t our priority on a Search, Recon and Rescue be to assess and contain threats in accordance with Supernatural Antagonist Response protocols?”
All eyes set upon him, pinning him in place like a butterfly on display. He could feel the needles in his skin.
“That’s what we were taught, Boss,” he added meekly.
“Rook, what I say is priority in every mission. Period. That’s what you should have been taught and you’d better learn it quick or we’ll all pay the price. We are one body. I am the mind. This is not a democracy.”
“We’re in place, Boss,” Chopper said and, with no more than a nod from Boss, the doors on both sides of the he-lo were sliding open, rappel lines thrown over the edge on either side, clamps attached then Shadow Team was gliding down the ropes towards the rooftop in perfect unison, with Rook trailing a few steps behind.