Grace crouched lower, sinking into her nanovest, bracing her shoulder against the radiator. She checked the cuffs of her jacket, tucked them deep into the tops of her gloves. Outside, pale hands seemed to float, palms flat against the windows. They were laughing, a storm of high-pitched giggles.
They smiled. No training in the world prepared you for that. They smiled as they slashed and bit, tearing flesh off their victims in chunks. They smiled as they ran, a merciless full-out sprint, headlong, ravenous. They smiled right before you leveled the barrel and squeezed the trigger. Sometimes, if the shot was high enough, the caliber small enough, even when they fell back-smoke rising from a neat round hole in the forehead-they were still smiling.
Jacobs said it was neurological, an involuntary tic. He talked about them a lot, his language precise, his hands sketching neural pathways. It had been his idea to come up here, strike for the research complex near Rosewood. They were close now, a couple miles off, but the slopes were crawling with smirkers and everything had started to seem wildly impossible.
A window broke somewhere and the house was suddenly awash with a new influx. They poured into the little common room. One was wearing a Christmas sweater, red, sprinkled intermittently with green trees, white reindeer.
Against the other wall, Denton was cutting swaths through the mob-systematic, businesslike. His arms were massive, the muscles displayed in sharp relief as he swung the carbine up. The smirker in the Christmas sweater was closing. It moved fast, turning on him with hands outstretched.
“Semper Fi,” Denton said, but it sounded flat and ironic. He jammed the muzzle in the smirker’s face.
In the front hall, Private Sutter was shouting something. He was always shouting, hooting, whooping. Sutter, with the God-awful tattoo on his neck, upwards arrow pointing to the base of his skull. Corsican script said, in an incongruously graceful hand, Eat Me.
Smirkers did not, in actuality, express much preference for the brain over other organs. They seemed content to take any piece they could get, but the celluloid lore of old movies was hard to shake.
In the last few weeks, some of the privates had taken to painting targets on their helmets. Aim here in case of infection. Whitaker didn’t like it, but allowed the targets in the same indulgent way he allowed Sutter’s tattoo. Harmless, letting off steam. Grace thought it was morbid.
The window above her fell in with a glittering crash, and she rose and popped the first smirker in the face. It slumped forward and she turned to meet the two that came after, dropping them on the carpet. After that, the process became automatic. Her territory extended outward for two yards and ran the distance of the wall. Every other inch of the house was someone else’s problem.
Something moved behind her and she swung around, already reaching for her combat knife. It had been a boy, sixteen, maybe seventeen. The face still bore the faint interruptions of acne. He grinned and his teeth were coated in a thin veneer of blood.
The carbines were light, easy to maneuver, and the sidearm was more versatile still, but for such close quarters, Grace favored the knife. She slipped it from the sheath and brought the blade up. The throat first, and directly after that, the right eye.
Preferred it controlled, preferred it close. Some of the others couldn’t stand to let the smirkers get near. Instead, they ran themselves out, not keeping count. A dull, shocked look when the handgun clicked empty. They thought about themselves before they thought about the job. That was the secret; if you thought about the job before you thought about anything else, if you just did your job, you got out. She drew her hand back, let the boy drop, and stepped over him. She wiped the blade on her fatigues and then peeled the gloves off. They were soaked.
The shooting had stopped. Grace stood, contemplating the room. Her heart beat hard and fast in her ears, and she could not precisely reckon how much time had passed. Smirkers lay everywhere, sprawled out, tangled together on the floor. After a cursory check to make sure that none were still moving, she started for the doorway.
In the front hall, she found Emery, standing with his back to her. His rifle hung at his side and he was breathing in long, whining gasps.
He was one of the ones with a target, a concentric bull’s-eye painted in red on the front of his helmet. But when he turned toward her with a mystified expression, the bite on his shoulder already weeping yellow, she aimed for the eye socket. He whimpered and begged a little, but in her head, she had squeezed the trigger a thousand times, and it was no great effort to do it now, in the cramped cabin, with the daylight dropping away and the smell of bodies heavy in the air. The report was very loud in the narrow hall. At her feet, he lay still. After a moment, the blood began to pool out from under him.
Her progress through the house was slow. The floor was littered with debris, spent ammunition. Bodies lay with their limbs jutting at odd angles-smirkers and soldiers. They were mostly accounted for. She didn’t recognize Denton at first, except by his size. Someone had shot him in the face. There were bite marks all over his arms. His skin oozed with the thick, pestilential yellow of infection.
In the kitchen, she found Sergeant Whitaker. He was propped in a corner, shoulders wedged in the join between two cabinets.
He looked up at her-a hard, dignified look that stopped her in the doorway. The side of his neck had been torn away, leaving shreds of muscle, exposed tendons. His voice was hoarse and liquid. “Are they dead?”
She did not know if he was referring to their makeshift squad or to the recent barrage of smirkers. “Yes, sir.”
“What do you think those Washington fucks are doing right now?”
Dead, of course, all dead. Except the ones still shambling around smiling to themselves. Giggling their high-pitched giggles.
“They don’t pay me to think, sir.”
Whitaker laughed at that, a wet, clotted sound. “No one’s paid us to do a damn thing in months. Maybe you could take up thinking as a sideline. It wouldn’t have to be on the clock.”
He laughed again, viscous, close to choking. The stripes on his sleeve were the brightest thing in the room. The gold looked almost white in the failing light. The blood was seeping out of him, leaving his face gray. Infection imminent.
“You should’ve made corporal,” he said, and it sounded watery. “I’m sorry for that.”
“Don’t worry yourself, sir. I don’t imagine I would have cared for it.”
“You never know. Look at you now-you’re the one who’s going to walk out of here tonight.”
Blood and foul yellow seepage were running down the side of his throat, soaking into his shirt.
“Do you want me to take care of it?” she said, jerking her head in the direction of his sidearm.
He smiled at her, a slow, complicated smile. “No, I got this.”
She did not disbelieve Whitaker, even at the last. He was a good man, dependable. Already holding the 9mm to his temple. But she stood in the doorway to make sure. The report made her flinch. When he slumped forward and his hand let go, she turned and started back through the house.
A wooden pull-down ladder stood spindly and erect in the hall. It was fixed to the ceiling by a hinge, and led up to an open skylight. The angle of the ladder was stark, surprising. In the past weeks, the world had taken on an increasingly surreal cast and the ladder did not seem disconcerting now, but only natural and right.
“I’m coming up,” Grace said, to no one in particular-to whomever might be at the top, waiting to put a bullet in the first person to stick their head through the opening.
On the roof, Jacobs the medic was sitting with his legs drawn up and his elbows resting on his knees.
“How do they always know?” he said, staring off over the hillside, the dark trees. The sky was deep purple, already speckled with stars. “We go along, covering our tracks, moving in the daytime. And still, they always know.”