The Retreat (Book 5): Crucible

by Knight, Stephen

  I will never survive this, Zhu told himself.

  “Mortars.” Caruthers was stone-faced as he watched these goings-on from the hide site the twelve-man advance team had carved out in the pine barrens. “We can use the mortars, neutralize all of them.”

  “Fuck that, Captain,” said another soldier. “Call Wizard and have him put arty on target here. Wipe ’em all out. Fucking end this shit, right here, right now.”

  “Yeah,” Caruthers said.

  “Not...not our mission,” Zhu said. He had to struggle to get the words out.

  “What?” Caruthers didn’t look at Zhu, but his tone told the NCO everything he needed to know. The company grade officer was scandalized by the dissent. “How can this not be our mission?”

  “It’s the right thing to do,” Zhu said, as a screaming preteen girl was brought into the zone and her clothes were ripped from her. Knives glittered in the Georgia sunlight as the klowns below set about their work, flaying, cutting, chipping at her most private of parts. “But it’s not the mission. We wipe them out, we accomplish nothing. We have to enrage them, bait them, bring them out of here to chase us.” He paused then to swallow what little spit was in his mouth. “We have to pull them away from here and give life to the rest of the plan, not try to save those we could never help anyway.”

  “Are you fucking telling me we should turn away from this?” Caruthers snapped.

  “I’m telling you we have a plan to put in motion, Captain,” Zhu responded. To his ears, his voice was rational, calm, completely controlled. It was in no way a mirror of what he felt. The desire to attack, to kill, to savage was so overwhelming he marveled at how well he was able to hide it. He looked over the klown breeding ground, and he found he was full of a despair so deep and so dark that he feared there was no way back. His sanity had been fractured, and while he might be able to tape it all back together later, there was no chance he would go back to whom he had been only fifteen minutes ago. He was damaged goods now. Section Eight Express all the way.

  “The fuck you say,” Caruthers said. Zhu tore his eyes away from the blood-curdling vista below and looked at the officer. Caruthers’s own eyes were wide and full of fury, terror, and madness. He’d gone right off the deep end, and like Zhu, the ticket was one way.

  “Captain, you have a mission,” Zhu reminded him, and he called forth the voice of a senior non-commissioned officer of the United States Army, the voice that fully indicated you did not fuck with an institution that had hundreds of years of heritage of service behind it. “If you fail here, you fail the men who depend on you, the men of the battalion, and the nation that expects you to defend it against all enemies.”

  Caruthers turned and looked at Zhu then. He glared at him with wild eyes, then barked a short laugh. “Chinamen...always able to serve up lo mien, but never guts.” He reached over to the RTO lying beside him and snatched up the handset to the field radio. “Wizard, Inveigle Six. Fire mission for Thunder, unless you can get us access to bigger guns. Over.”

  “Coward.” Zhu spat out the word like a curse. Without waiting for a response, he pushed himself to his knees and shouldered his M4. Before anyone in the advance team could do anything to stop him, his finger worked the trigger. He blasted three rounds into the klown that was currently victimizing the young girl, then lowered the barrel slightly and fired another three into the girl herself. He raised it then and capped off another three into the klown who had been supervising the insemination, blasting off his jaw and hopefully separating his C1 and C2 vertebrae, leaving him at best a paraplegic for life. All three lay motionless on the ground within three seconds, courtesy of 5.56-millimeter ball ammunition delivered from a weapon that had been chosen first for its low production cost, and secondly for its ability to shoot and hit a target reliably over five hundred meters of distance.

  “What the fuck are you doing, First Sergeant?” Caruthers bellowed.

  “Fulfilling mission requirements...you white piece of shit,” Zhu replied. “You are in charge of a military operation—complete it, Captain, and do it now!”

  From the target area, a wave of laughter cascaded like a thundering waterfall. It was followed an instant later by a fusillade of bullets ripping through the pine trees. Zhu ripped off another three rounds and sent two infected to meet their maker.

  Inveigle had executed phase one of their tasking. They had the klowns’ attention.

  Now, they just had to survive it.

  TWENTY-FIVE.

  Her eyes were an interesting clear emerald in color. Not hazel, but actually pale green, as if they were actually contact lenses. There was no madness in those eyes, but there was certainly a sense of supreme detachment. No fear, despite the sounds of combat outside, the crackle of small arms, the roar of artillery. Her skin was pale but in a creamy sort of way that spoke of genetics and not a lack of sunlight. Her hair was a deep, dark brown, and she had it pulled back in a ponytail. The straight line of her nose and the fullness of her lips spoke of a link to old European aristocracy, and her brows were perfectly arranged, hovering over those arresting eyes like finely sculpted guardians. Her lips were full and inviting, and her body was trim and muscular while still entirely feminine in its presentation.

  For a mass murderer, Cassidy thought, Doctor Courtney Moreau was absolutely hot as hell.

  The ASP was indeed sectioned off into different areas where various types of ammunition were contained. In a far corner was a secondary storage area, essentially a bunker inside a bunker. This was where Colonel Barker’s tactical operations center had been set up. Beyond that was a single door guarded by three civilians. These were FBI agents, two men and one woman. They regarded Cassidy and his lightfighters with some caution; after all, new guests weren’t something they had grown accustomed to since commencing their stay at Fort Stewart.

  Barker gave Cassidy access to the room, which was a small office consisting of a desk and two chairs. Inside was another female federal agent, who oversaw Doctor Moreau, the room’s second occupant, directly. With the two women, Cassidy, and Barker now standing in the office, space was at a premium. For a moment, Moreau and Cassidy simply regarded each other, and Cassidy knew she was sizing him up the same way he had done her.

  “Doctor Moreau?” Cassidy said finally. “Courtney Moreau?”

  “You must know who I am,” she said, and her voice was small and kind of breathy, like an affectation of some sort. It reminded him of the singer Jewel’s, from the 1990s.

  “Yes, ma’am. We’re going to take you out of here.”

  “What?” asked one of the FBI agents from his position at the doorway, an older man in his late forties with a receding hairline and lantern chin. His hair was going silver at the temples.

  “Lieutenant Cassidy has orders to remove this woman from this installation,” Barker said.

  “Orders from whom?” the agent asked. “I haven’t heard anything—”

  “Anyone in your chain of command still alive?” Boats asked. He stood right behind the agent in the doorway. A dark bruise was beginning to form on his face, courtesy of Muldoon’s ministrations during the team’s security check-in.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the agent shot back over his shoulder.

  “This discussion is over,” Barker snapped. “The order comes from General Reynolds, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Moreau is out of here.” He glared at the senior FBI man. “You can try and fight us on this, of course. But you’ll last about two seconds, and you’ll be the first to die.”

  The FBI agent glared at Barker. “You can’t be serious.”

  Barker said nothing, just returned the man’s glare.

  “Where are you taking me?” Moreau asked Cassidy.

  “To my unit commander,” Cassidy said, “and then overland to another destination.” That was about as much as he could tell her. The truth of the matter was, he didn’t know where she would wind up, and he didn’t much care.

  A soldier pushed his way past Muldoon and
Boats and called into the room. “Colonel, we need you out here!”

  “What is it, Tomlin?” Barker asked.

  “Getting a pulse from Wizard, sir. Armored unit rolling up near their pos, and Wizard needs to talk to you about putting up some steel rain.”

  Barker nodded and looked back at Cassidy. “Lieutenant, you and Moreau get better acquainted for a moment. Looks like we have to hit the pause button right now, but I’ll be back. Any issues with the FBI, let me know—my people will handle them.” With that, Barker shoved his way out of the room, herding the older FBI agent out ahead of him.

  “You can’t just remove her,” the man said.

  “The hell we can’t,” Barker said. “This is still a military reservation, I can do whatever the fuck I want! Your service is respected, but is now concluded—this woman is Lieutenant Cassidy’s problem now, not yours!”

  The FBI agent was outraged. He pointed a bony finger at Cassidy. “This guy is like twenty-three-years old!”

  “And he’s a commissioned officer in the United States Army. Discussion ended, Special Agent Travis. Your time is up.”

  The two men took it outside, and Cassidy turned to the female agent who apparently served as Moreau’s guard. She was a portly, middle-aged woman in a dirty pant suit and battered leather low-rise shoes. Her face was sallow and lined, devoid of a trace of makeup. Cassidy was frankly less interested in her physical appearance than he was in the Glock 19 in a holster at her side.

  “Ma’am, are you going to give me any trouble here?” Cassidy asked her.

  She snorted and pointedly looked at his M4. “I think you have me beat in the trouble department, Lieutenant. You want to move her out of here? Be my guest.”

  “Lillian doesn’t like me very much,” Moreau said, and there was a smirk in her soft voice.

  “I tend to dislike mass murderers,” the FBI agent replied, and there was no shortage of hate in her eyes. “I’m just disappointed I can’t be the one who executes you.”

  Cassidy didn’t like that. “Yeah, okay. First Sergeant, remove this lady for me?”

  “Out,” Boats told the woman. “Rawlings and Campbell will take over for you, if we have to worry about being politically correct and wring our hands over a female prisoner being alone with a man.”

  “I don’t give a fuck what you people do to her,” the FBI woman said. “Just make sure it hurts like hell. As far as I’m concerned, the FBI is done with her.”

  “Trust me, I’ll make the bitch scream,” Campbell said.

  “Just send in Rawlings,” Cassidy said. He didn’t know Campbell at all well, but she looked ready to go active right then and there. He didn’t need to expend any more energy defusing another confrontation.

  “No, I’m good,” Campbell said. Light glinted off the braces on her lower teeth.

  “Another time, princess. Another time,” Boats said, glaring at the short Guardsman. “For now, you just stand ready to support the LT...from out here, with the rest of us.” With that he reached over and grabbed the agent’s arm and steered her out of the room. “Muldoon, your post is here in front of the door. No one in, no one out.”

  “Got it, First Sergeant,” Muldoon said. As soon as Boats had removed the female agent from the room, Muldoon motioned Rawlings inside and closed the door behind her. Rawlings looked at Cassidy, then at Moreau.

  “You good with this duty, Rawlings?” Cassidy asked.

  “No problems here, sir.” She looked at Moreau with an emotionless gaze, and Cassidy figured that was about as good as it was going to get. So long as she wasn’t going to open up on full auto, all would be well. He turned back to Moreau, who stood in front of the desk watching him.

  “Have a seat, Doctor,” Cassidy told her.

  Moreau sat obediently enough behind the desk and folded her hands before her. “So what does your general want with me?”

  “You’ll have to ask him yourself when you see him.”

  “Will he plead with me to help him, I wonder?”

  Cassidy sighed. “I don’t know, ma’am. Can you help?”

  “Can I? Maybe. Will I? I doubt that.” Moreau gave him a small, shy smile. “I mean, I played a role in all of this, after all. It’d be a shame to try and roll it back now, after we’ve made so much progress.”

  “Why did you do it?” Rawlings asked.

  Cassidy held up a hand. “Rawlings, no. We don’t need to go there.”

  “Why not?” Moreau asked. “You deserve some answers, after all. Don’t you? Aren’t you at all curious, Lieutenant? Or was Einstein right about a soldier only needing a backbone to go about his work?”

  “I’m not sure there’s anything you could tell us that we don’t already know,” Cassidy said. “Save it for General Reynolds, ma’am. We’re not interested.”

  Moreau turned back to Rawlings. “But you are, aren’t you?”

  “You have things to say, go ahead and say them,” Rawlings told her. “We’re not going anywhere for the time being.”

  Moreau looked at Cassidy, who just shrugged and sighed again. She seemed pleased to have an audience, and Cassidy had no doubt the agent who’d been babysitting her was even less thrilled to hear the woman talk than Cassidy himself was.

  “As a people, as a society, as a species, we’re sick,” Moreau said. “All of us. We’re destroying ourselves. Every day, we kill off more of our own kind than any predator that’s come before us. Governments do it. Police do it. People do it.”

  “People lives matter, right?” Cassidy tried hard not to roll his eyes. He didn’t want to hear this shit. He was a millennial too, but the last thing he wanted to die listening to was some over-entitled anarchist going on and on about how sick society was.

  “Not anymore,” Moreau said with a smile. “Myself and my colleagues, we decided to take things into our own hands. We were already working on a bug for the government, for people like you to use against an enemy. Who would it have been? The Palestinians, maybe? Iran? Maybe even finally Russia?”

  Cassidy shrugged. “Got me.”

  “You decided to release something like this that causes infinitely more death than anything we could have done to ourselves?” Rawlings asked.

  Moreau nodded. “The planet deserves something better than us, Sergeant. Something that’s more durable but less self-interested. But we didn’t really cause anything to happen, we just removed the roadblocks that stood in the way. At their core, everyone likes to kill. It makes us happy. So we just found a way to combine the two by introducing a microorganism that could remap neural pathways. Bypass the censors thousands of years of breeding and theology and society have put in place, and voila! we’re all ready to go back to the Dark Ages. Problems solved.”

  “As if there would be anyone left, you stupid bitch,” Rawlings said, and there was more than a little snarl in her voice.

  “Oh, but there would be,” Moreau said, her tone earnest in counterpoint to the hard-edged hostility Rawlings had offered. “People would still carry on. Much, much smaller numbers—a few hundred thousand, at most. Sustainable, and the virus would prevent overbreeding. You see, the people of the future will be able to cull their own. None of that pesky morality and self-involved grandeur like what we have today. No one will be convinced of their own superiority. Because the second they do, they’ll be hacked to pieces.” As she spoke, a smile so lovely it was almost beatific spread across the woman’s face.

  This lady’s off her fucking rocker, Cassidy told himself.

  “That means you too, asshole,” Rawlings said. “Maybe we should give you the plague, watch you giggle as you shit yourself and carve an old boyfriend’s name into your own forehead.”

  “Won’t work,” Moreau said. “I was one of the first people exposed to it.”

  Cassidy raised his rifle so fast it was like he was a spring-loaded toy. Rawlings did as well. Moreau smiled again and slowly raised her hands.

  “I was the first exposed to the final viral specimen that was relea
sed,” Moreau said, “but only after we’d exposed a dozen others, and then developed a vaccine from their blood. After a few trials, I was the one chosen to receive what we felt was the antigen that would have the most potential to counter the virus itself.”

  “So you’re not infected?” Cassidy asked. As he held his rifle on her, he began to wonder if he could possibly slip on his mask in time before she did something crazy, like spit in his face. He didn’t doubt for an instant she wasn’t a carrier of some sort, and here he was, duped into close-quarters proximity.

  “No. My body produces the antibodies necessary to keep me safe from the primary effects of the virus. Don’t get me wrong—it’s made me freer than I ever was before. It still produces some effects, in that I don’t have to put everything through a bullshit filter. I can kill people without feeling a thing, if I wanted to.” Moreau smiled that lovely smile of hers again. “And I’m not afraid of being killed, either. It’s liberating.”

  “Rawlings, mask up,” Cassidy said.

  “Not a chance I’m taking a rifle off this nut job,” Rawlings said.

  “Then get out of here. Send in Muldoon.”

  “Cassidy, what the fuck for?”

  “Because I need someone in full MOPP while I tie this murdering whore up like a pig,” Cassidy said. “And just in case she manages to infect me, I’m going to need someone to pop a round into my brain and pick up where I left off.”

  Moreau sighed and shrugged. “Didn’t I just tell you I’m not infected? Did you not hear me?”

  “Yeah, you mentioned that, right after describing how you and your buddies willingly engineered a virus that’s going to eventually wipe out the human race as we know it. I got it all very, very clearly.” Cassidy glared at her for a long moment. “Rawlings, you in or you out?”

  “In,” Rawlings said, and she slowly lowered her rifle and reached for the face mask hanging in its pouch from her belt. “Yeah. Like totally in.”

  “Now I know why Reynolds wants you,” Cassidy said as Rawlings went to work.