Chapter 92: The End of a Joke
Nine left.
Mara counted them in the strobing chaos of the control room, because counting was the only thing keeping her hands from shaking off her rifle.
Rourke. Herself. Brandt. Honce. Ashby. Four more soldiers whose names she reached for and got.
Now only nine, out of the twenty who’d walked off the Ghostbird that morning, and eleven gone in under twenty minutes without a single enemy any of them had managed to see, let alone touch.
"LISTEN TO ME." Rourke had stopped trying to be calm. He’d found something better than calm, a hard flat fury that cut through the panic like a blade, and everyone turned toward it. "It’s just one thing... just one Infected that probably got some special power... probably because of the radiation. Like in the movies, you hear me? It’s just one thing... and it’s playing us. It wants us scattered and screaming and shooting at bullshit because that’s the only way one ’thing’ beats nine."
"Captain, the necks, there was nothing, there was nobody..." one of the soldiers spoke, voice quivering, and mind near breaking.
"It’s just an Infected... a fast one. Like those special ones we saw." Rourke grabbed the man by the vest, hard, and put his face close. "It’s a fucking Infected, and it’ll bleed if you shoot it. So keep your eyes up... we just need one clear shot!"
He turned fast, taking in the room, and Mara watched him do the thing that made him what he was, watched him stop being afraid and start being a professional again, dragging everyone up with him by sheer will. "Brandt. How long?"
"Eight minutes." The old man hadn’t stopped working. His technicians were dead on the floor around his feet, but he stood over their bodies and worked the panel anyway. "Eight minutes and this plant is safe. Buy me eight minutes, Captain."
"Then here’s how we buy it." Rourke moved fast, low, pointing. "One door. We block the other. Everybody in this corner, overlapping fields, and we light up anything that comes through the one door we leave open. So the next time it comes... it’ll come through a funnel, and we put everything we have into that funnel the second it shows up! Honce, Ashby, that’s your firing line. Voss-"
His eyes then found Mara. "Get yourself in a corner, with your back to a wall... You’re my precision. Everybody else is a wall of lead, but you, you put your rounds where they matter. First thing that moves in that doorway, you open its head."
They set it in seconds, because even now, even gutted, they were soldiers.
Blocking the second door, they kept the funnel door wide open with every gun trained on it. Mara up in her corner with the M110 braced and her eye down the offset red dot, her whole field of fire narrowed to that one lit doorway, her breathing coming down, slowing, the old cold focus settling over her, her whole world narrowing down to that one reticle.
For a moment, the control room was almost silent. Eight soldiers holding their breath behind their guns. One old man working a panel over the bodies of his friends while the pump kept throbbing in the floor.
Then something came around the corner of the corridor outside.
Around it, not off it.
Mara’s eye logged the shape before anything else in her had time to understand it, small and dark and cylindrical, about the size of a fist, and it did not bounce off the far wall the way a thrown thing bounces. It came around that corner in a smooth curve, five feet off the floor, holding the turn like it was riding a wire, then straightened out and floated through the open doorway into the middle of the room.
Every hour of every drill she had ever run came up her spine at once.
She shut her eyes, jammed her face into the corner, clapped both palms over her ears, despite the ear protection, and opened her mouth.
-BANG-!
Even through her eyelids the light came in red while the pressure hit her in the chest and the teeth and the sinuses, one hard shove of noise so complete that it stopped being sound at all, and the room behind her turned into screaming that she could not hear so much as feel, eight men blinded and deafened in the same quarter second while their guns went up at nothing.
And the very next second, the sounds came through the ringing like they were happening underwater, in another building, at the far end of the world.
-Crack-!-Crack-!-Crack-!
Three of them, wet and sharp, the exact sound of green wood being twisted apart, and she knew that sound; she had heard it three times already today in a lit room full of armed men, and she knew that three more people had just stopped existing.
-Tissh-!-Tissh-!-Tissh-!
Then came the three coughs. Softer than a man clearing his throat, softer than the shuffle of a boot, three little nothings, and between each one of them a body hit the floor and then-
-Thard-!
One real gunshot. Loud, flat, and close before silence finally descended onto the room.
It happened in under three seconds, all of it. She barely counted to three, and it was over.
Mara pushed off the wall and turned with her rifle coming up, half-blind with afterimage and wholly deaf, and something closed around her throat.
Not a hand per se.
Because there was nothing there. Nothing in front of her, nothing touching her, but her feet came off the floor anyway while a grip wrapped around her neck as solid as a fist, and she went up, and then she went forward, dragged through the air across her own killbox with her legs kicking at nothing at all.
And just like that, she found herself facing him, a foot above the floor, both hands clawing at a throat that had nothing on it.
The first thing she registered was that he was a man.
Not one of the turned. Not a thing.
A man, six feet, in a tactical helmet with ear pro seated over it and a Level IV plate carrier strapped under a jacket, a rifle on a sling across his chest. He looked deathly pale, eyes bloodshot, and medical tape across one cheek and up through his eyebrow.
And on his right shoulder, riding in a pocket like it had been built for the job, sat a small calico cat, watching her with round, unhurried eyes.
The man’s blue eyes were neither angry, feral, or even excited; he was looking at her the way a man looks at the end of a joke he has already heard, and that was the thing that finally broke something loose in her chest, because it meant she had never been a threat, or an enemy, or a problem.
Out of the corner of her eye, Mara could see the rest of the room.
Honce, on his side by the doorway, head turned too far. Ashby folded backward over a console with half his head gone in a bloody pulp. Two more of them down together where they’d been standing shoulder to shoulder in the firing line, necks wrong, rifles still in their hands. One more face-down on the ground.
And Rourke, on his back, six feet from where he’d been standing, one hole in him and his eyes open at the ceiling.
None of them had fired. Not one round. Every gun in that room was still loaded, aimed at a doorway by men who died blind and deaf without ever once knowing what killed them.
Something opened up inside Mara Voss that she had no name for, older than fear, older than grief, the specific horror of understanding that the thing standing in front of her had never been in any danger at any point.
That the trap, the funnel, the eight guns, Rourke’s rally, all of it, had been about as relevant to this as weather.
Then her gear started coming off her.
Her sidearm slid out of the holster on her thigh, unclipped itself, and fell to the ground. Her knife left its sheath. Her plate carrier’s buckles popped one after another, snick, snick, snick, and the whole vest peeled off her shoulders and dropped to the floor at his feet, and there was no hand anywhere near any of it.
She thrashed, but it did nothing at all.
"You lot came from the north," the man said.
His voice was perfectly conversational, like he’d stopped her in a corridor to ask directions, and it reached her thin and far away through the ringing.
He then tilted his head with a widening smile.
"Let me guess... Fort Harlan."
And her pupils instantly shrank to points.
She did not say a word. She couldn’t have, with that grip on her throat, but she did not have to, because everything in her body answered for her at once, the shudder that went through her from her shoulders to her feet, and she watched him watch it, and she watched him get exactly what he had asked for.
"Yeah..." he said softly. "Thought so."
Then he turned away from her like she’d stopped being interesting.
Mara’s eyes went where his did, and her whole body went cold.
Brandt was still at the panel.
He had never turned around. Even through the flashbang, through the necks, through all of it, the old man had kept his back to the room and his eyes on the console, and he was still working, both hands moving over the switches faster than Mara had seen them move all day.
He was trembling so hard she could see it from across the room, a fine constant shake running through his shoulders and down his arms, and even from here she could hear his teeth going, clattering together in his skull.
But his hands never stopped while the man walked to him, his steps unhurried as though he was out on a stroll.
Mara tried to scream, but nothing came out of her but a thin, strangled hiss, and she thrashed harder, kicking at the air, hauling at the invisible thing around her throat with both hands while her vision started to grey at the edges.
The man reached Brandt’s back and stopped a foot behind him while he pulled a pistol off the front of his plate carrier, some big blocky thing with a compensator hanging off the front of it, and raised it, setting the muzzle gently against the back of the old man’s head.
Brandt’s teeth clattered harder, but his hands kept moving.
"Good man," the man said, and Mara heard him chuckle. "Worth his salt."
-Thard-!
And Brandt fell forward, his chest hitting the console and hanging there a second, one arm sliding sideways across the switches he’d been working, before slowly his whole body slid down the face of it and folded onto the floor among his technicians.
The panel above him went on glowing.
And it was at that moment, Mara stopped fighting the grip.
Her arms dropped while she hung in the air with her boots eight inches off the floor. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out of it. She looked at an old man, lying on the floor with his head blown apart, the man who had been four minutes from saving the entire south of the country, and her brain simply stopped.
Then, as though finally remembering her, the man turned around.
And he looked at her.