The Nightmare Unleashed

by J. J. Carlson

  A high-pitched creak echoed through the barn, interrupting his thoughts. He frowned, then peeked one eye around the edge of the tank. The sound was coming from the center of the room, behind a red tank marked with two block letters: Cl.

  Eugene’s eyes bulged. He took a deep breath and shouted, “They’re trying to release the chlorine!”

  Janson jumped onto the nearest steel tank, crouched, then leapt onto the catwalk stairs and ran. She was completely exposed, but she also had the best vantage point available.

  Eugene swore and ran forward, frantically searching for a target. He swept his rifle left and right, checking behind every tank. A shot rang out, then another. Clenching his teeth, Eugene sprinted forward, rounding the red tank of chlorine gas. A man with a bloodied shoulder was lying on his side, desperately trying to turn a round valve.

  Eugene pulled the trigger, sending a round through the man’s brain. The man collapsed, and his hand slid off the valve.

  A rifle barked somewhere behind Eugene. He flinched and spun on his heels, searching for the source. Time slowed down as his eyes passed over the rows of tanks and still couldn’t find a target. Something above him clanked, and his stomach twisted into a knot.

  Janson had collapsed against the steel railing, her head hanging loosely on her shoulders.

  Eugene’s throat tightened, and he croaked, “No!”

  Carried by momentum, Janson’s body drooped over the edge, then began to slide. The weight of her armor and rifle pulled her onward, and she slid off into thin air. She didn’t extend her arms or brace for impact. Like a bird of prey brought down by a poacher, her limp body dropped to ground.

  3

  Eugene wanted to scream. He wanted to charge across the room and empty his magazine into the bastard that shot Janson. But his training took over, and he ducked behind cover. With no one to watch his back, he had to move deliberately. Speed and overwhelming force wasn’t an option; he had to choose every avenue of attack based on how well he could guard his own back. He crept past a tank of ammonia, put his back to the barn’s outer wall, and paused to listen.

  Muffled shouts and gunfire outside masked much of the sound within the barn. Apparently, Ford had his hands full. Eugene was on his own.

  From his position near the rear corner of the barn, Eugene was safe from someone trying to sneak up on him. But if there was more than one enemy in the building, they might be able to pop up and shoot him before he could bring them both down. And at least one member of Katharos had shown suicidal tendencies by trying to open a tank of lethal gas.

  Hunkered behind a tank of liquid fertilizer, he waited. The seconds dragged by like overburdened river barges, each one slower than the last. He thumbed the volume up on his headset and strained to listen. The noise canceling earbuds served two purposes: to protect his eardrums from loud noises and to amplify softer sounds taken in through a microphone. Beneath the din of the firefight outside, there was a tiny scratch. Then another.

  Eugene bobbed his head like a bird, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound. It was as soft as a mouse scratching on a floorboard but frequent enough for him to establish a general direction. He set his jaw and gave a silent prayer. If Janson was still alive, she would need medical attention. And someone was moving toward him. If he didn’t act, one or more terrorists would get the drop on him. This was it. In the next few seconds, someone would die.

  Balancing on one foot, Eugene moved his opposite leg into position, coiling like a spring. He settled onto both feet, distributed his weight evenly, then sprang up.

  Beyond the tank of Chlorine, a single shooter stood completely exposed, his weapon up. His eyes widened, and he pivoted on his hips, racing Eugene in a life-or-death shooting match. The man was faster, pulling the trigger a millisecond before Eugene. Faster, but not as accurate.

  The high-velocity round whizzed past Eugene’s left ear, punching a hole in the barn wall. Eugene’s bullet entered through the man’s nose, tearing through the sinuses and demolishing the brainstem.

  Eugene didn’t pause to gloat. This man had not made the scratching noise—someone else was still hidden among the tanks.

  He sidestepped and crouched simultaneously, keeping his rifle level. Between the tanks of ammonia, at a distance of perhaps ten feet, a man lay on his stomach with his rifle cradled between his arms. A look of terror spread across his face, then faded into resignation.

  Eugene squeezed the trigger once, adjusted his aim, then squeezed again. The man jerked and collapsed as the back half of his skull was carried away by the 5.56mm rounds.

  Eugene exhaled, then ducked behind cover. After composing himself, he crept forward, checking every conceivable hiding place. He picked up the pace as he grew more confident that no targets remained. Once he checked around the last tank, he ran toward Janson and keyed up his radio. “Ford, this is Eugene. Are you clear?”

  Eugene’s radio clicked, and Ford gave a whispered response. “For now. Are you ready to blow the payload and get out of here?”

  Checking Janson for a pulse with one hand and keying the radio with the other, Eugene said, “Negative. Janson is down. I’ll need a few minutes to place the charges and haul her out of here.”

  Eugene felt a thrill of relief as Janson’s carotid artery pulsed against his fingers. He waited a few seconds, then clicked his push-to-talk and said, “Do you copy?”

  “Yeah, I copy.” The voice came from directly over his shoulder, and he jerked in surprise.

  “Dammit, Ford, I told you not to sneak up on me like that.”

  Ford’s face was grim. “Is she…”

  “Alive,” Eugene finished for him. “I think a round glanced off her helmet, and she hit the ground pretty hard. Check her for spinal injuries while I set the C-4.”

  As Ford leaned over his wounded teammate, Eugene dashed to the tank of Chlorine and began placing rectangular green blocks around its weak points. He molded the explosive around valves and pipes, then stacked two more blocks on the top and bottom for good measure. When he returned to his teammate, Ford held out Janson’s share of the C-4.

  “Here’s the rest. You might as well use it.”

  Eugene nodded. “Is she going to make it?”

  “I’m not sure. Her spine is intact, but her face took a beating, and she suffered a bad concussion. We need to get her to a hospital, ASAP.”

  “Get to the Evac point,” Eugene said, scooping up the remaining C-4. “I’ll make sure there’s nothing left of this place.”

  Ford nodded, carefully lifted Janson, and disappeared through the open barn door.

  “Good luck,” Eugene mumbled. He consoled himself with the belief that, if anyone could survive taking a shot to the helmet and falling fifteen feet onto her face, it was Janson. Unwinding strips of detonation cord, he knelt beside the chlorine tank and connected the additional C-4 to the rest of the explosives. Then, he attached the primary and secondary detonators and popped the fuses. A smoldering burn traveled along the inside of the fuse cord, making it swell and give off acrid smoke.

  Bringing his rifle to his shoulder, Eugene set off at a jog. He had cut the fuses at a predetermined length earlier that day, using a test burn to establish how long they would last. Unless a Katharos agent arrived and snuffed out both fuses, the barn would disappear in a cloud of smoke in exactly two minutes.

  Eugene swept through the barn door with his rifle up, checking for hostiles. As he rounded the corner, his eyes widened and his mouth went dry.

  Dead bodies littered the yard between the barn and the forest—the remnants of a failed assault on Ford’s sniper position. Eugene slowed to a trot as he passed the corpses, expecting to hear the groans of wounded combatants. But the farm was ghostly quiet. Every Katharos agent he encountered had a single bullet wound to the skull with an entry point either in the face or the back of the head. From the arrangement of the bodies, it seemed a large assault force had left the farm house and attempted to flush Ford out. Then, as the agents suffered
heavy losses, the remaining force turned to flee, only to be gunned down before they could make it to cover.

  Eugene shivered and picked up his pace. Ford was, without a doubt, the most impressive marksman he had ever met. And Eugene knew from experience that losing teammates to an unseen sniper was one of the most harrowing things a man could go through. These agents must have been terrified in their last moments.

  But they were terrorists, he reminded himself, heartless bastards that would have unleashed toxic gas upon innocent men, women, and children. Their deaths were…necessary.

  He picked his way through the forest, moving as fast as he dared on the uneven terrain. His watch beeped, giving him the thirty-second warning. He took a few long strides, then slid into a depression in the forest soil. Tucking his chin, he curled into a ball with his helmeted head facing the farm. In the remaining seconds, his mind flashed with the bodies of fallen Katharos agents, and the faces of men he had killed over the years. He took no joy in ending another man’s life, and he felt a burning disappointment every time he was forced to do so. He wasn’t disappointed with himself or even the “higher-ups” who sent him on dangerous missions; he was disappointed with humanity. Mankind, endowed with free will and the capacity for love and kindness, too often chose the path of selfishness and evil. If Eugene held hatred in his heart, it was directed squarely toward the dark, unseen forces that took pleasure in seeing men turned into monsters.

  With his chest on the ground, he felt the tremor first. Then the air split with a crack of thunder. He paused for several seconds, waiting for debris that had been launched skyward to settle. Then he crept through the forest, returning to the open field. The only sound was the leaves fluttering on a gentle breeze.

  At the edge of the farm, he crouched beneath a low-hanging branch and assessed the damage. A smoldering crater lay where the barn had been, surrounded by the skeletons of the chemical tanks. The red chlorine tank was nowhere in sight, undoubtedly vaporized in the explosion.

  Satisfied, Eugene backed away from the field and resumed his trek through the forest. His feet picked through the dried leaves, instinctively searching for soft patches of soil that would muffle his steps. He rotated the infrared night vision into place and swept the forest for warm bodies. The trees and shrubs glowed a dull blue through the optics; he was alone.

  As he put distance between himself and the farm, he chose his steps less carefully. His pace quickened, but his heart rate slowed to a steady rhythm. Thanks to years of hiking and backpacking through wilderness areas around the world, the forest felt as comforting as an old friend. The deadly search-and-destroy mission was over, and he finally had a chance to let his thoughts wander.

  Concern for Janson nagged at the back of his mind, but he pushed it away. She was probably halfway to the hospital by now, with Ford tending to her and Daron Keeler, the team commander, driving at twice the posted speed limit. They would check her in under a false identity and have her treated by a doctor on the CIA’s payroll.

  In any case, Eugene wouldn’t hear from the rest of the team for days. He couldn’t contact them through normal lines of communication—every phone call, email, and text message on earth was scrutinized by the all-seeing eyes of Katharos—he would have to wait until they could meet face-to-face.

  A smile tugged at the corners of his lips. The team had established primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency rendezvous points for this exact situation, but he wouldn’t be stopping at any of them. After twenty-eight days of non-stop action, he deserved a break. Besides, he was long overdue for a steak dinner with a beautiful woman—a woman who had no way of knowing if he was still alive.

  4

  Birmingham, England

  Jarrod Hawkins sat six seats away from the center of the bar, listening to dozens of conversations and sipping cheap vodka. Due to a mid-century squabble over property rights, the Legless Raven pub was nearly as long as a bowling alley, but only ten feet wide. This meant that the customers sat elbow-to-elbow when the bar was busy and fights broke out with little warning. Because of the Raven’s rowdy reputation, it became a hotspot for drug trade and prostitution. Pimps and drug dealers would seat themselves in the center of the bar and ply their perspective wares to eager customers. Law enforcement rarely ventured more than a few feet into the cramped building. It was too easy for a dangerous criminal to plunge a knife into an unsuspecting officer, then disappear into the crowd.

  Because of the modifications he’d received in a top-secret DARPA facility, Jarrod was able to hear everyone in the pub and filter every conversation for keywords. His enhanced senses of taste and smell allowed him to detect trace hormonal secretions in the air and discern a person’s emotions without even looking at them.

  These augmentations, given to him through gene editing and nano-machine injections, were part of an effort to create the perfect soldier. The experiment failed, however, when Jarrod proved to be too dangerous to control. He escaped, and his very existence was disavowed. Free from government oversight, he chose his own targets and selected his own missions. The tasks he would have received from a three-star general were supplied by the ghost of his former self, the old Jarrod Hawkins.

  A tingle ran up his spine as the growled words of a jealous boyfriend reached his ears. His grip tightened on the vodka glass, and a preprogrammed response in his mind cautioned him to remain calm. He took another sip of vodka and relaxed, waiting for the domestic dispute to come to its conclusion. He heard the woman respond with a few calming words, and the boyfriend grew silent. A few moments later, the jealous man’s anger subsided.

  Jarrod glowered, staring down at the bar’s glossy surface. He still wasn’t used to the internal dialogue—the war of logic against emotion. The scientists at the secret DARPA laboratory—the Hillcrest Trauma and Rehabilitation Center—had used a process known as Mental Conditioning to rewrite synapses in his brain. They wrote a lifetime’s worth of military tactics, hand-to-hand combat, subterfuge, and psychological warfare into his neurons in the span of a few short weeks. The training became instinct, and instinct guided his every decision.

  Until he began to remember.

  At first, the old Jarrod Hawkins exerted subtle influence over the creature he had become, assigning objectives and providing mission parameters. The enhanced assassin accomplished the directives without question, as long as his self-preservation wasn’t at risk. Then, when the lives of his best friends were threatened, the old Jarrod fought to reestablish complete control.

  Now, the darkest parts of his former self were in command. Jarrod, the former security contractor and brutal vigilante, took possession of the most advanced weapon in human history, and the Mental Conditioning that once held sway over his body now served in an advisory role. Jarrod could choose to disregard the most logical course of action at will and let his emotions take over.

  But these were uncharted waters, and he still relied heavily on the cues that were written into his brain during Mental Conditioning. If he didn’t, his most ambitious plans would fail. He needed to rely on his programming to take down his greatest enemy—a woman named Emily Roberts. She had been instrumental in his rebirth as a human weapon, and she had manipulated him in order to accomplish her own treasonous goals. After stealing the best technology DARPA had to offer, Emily fled the country and took her place at the head of the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world.

  Jarrod took a deep breath, tilted his head back, and swallowed the rest of the vodka. For months, he had done little to pursue Roberts. There were…other missions on his agenda. He hunted down the man responsible for killing his family and slaughtered hundreds of other men and women that deserved to die. Here, in the oblong pub that smelled like a pit toilet, he did not expect to find Emily Roberts or any of her criminal agents. His target was a pimp that had forced dozens of women into prostitution. Jarrod had contacted the pimp through a free advertising website and solicited pictures. What the pimp sent made his blood boil. Most of
the women showed signs of abuse and neglect, and several of them were minors. He scheduled a meeting at the Raven, where the man would receive his death sentence and execution.

  Jarrod knew he should be focused on the meeting, but his emotions raged at the evil around him. If he tried to intervene to stop a looming date-rape or incidents of domestic violence, his primary target might not show. Any sensible person would avoid the Raven if a fight broke out, and even pimps had survival instincts.

  Jarrod clenched his teeth as he heard a man with a deep voice mutter a sadistic threat. Turning his head, he saw the man gripping a smaller, younger man by the arm. The younger man nodded, salty tears rolling down his cheeks.

  “Can I get you something?” an overly-friendly voice asked. “Another vodka?”

  Jarrod rested his gaze on the bartender’s soft features. He pushed the vodka glass toward her. “Make it a double. And a pitcher of water, too.”

  “Sure thing, hon.”

  Jarrod noted her American accent, her lingering glance at his bulging forearms, and the mixture of chemicals she exuded that betrayed sexual attraction. He noted the peculiarities, then dismissed them. This woman was of no consequence to his mission. To Jarrod, people were either innocent or not. And he spent as little time as possible interacting with innocents.

  The bartender returned a moment later with a glass filled to the brim with vodka and a pitcher of water. Jarrod thanked her and paid in cash, leaving a generous tip.

  “You’re too kind,” the bartender said, flashing him a perfect smile.

  Jarrod waited for her to leave, then mumbled, “You have no idea what I am.”

  Because of his ability to disappear and his penchant for torturing and killing criminals after dark, the witnesses to his exploits had dubbed him “The Nightmare.” Jarrod had embraced the moniker, using it as a means for psychological warfare. Hundreds of criminals in the eastern United States and thousands across the continent of Africa knew and feared the name. Before long, his reputation would spread to the North Atlantic.