Siege Line

by Myke Cole

  Schweitzer sighted him, had him dead to rights. Shooting a man in the back might be considered craven in Hollywood, but on a battlefield, it was standard procedure. An enemy who ran might be moving to a better position, or he might be bringing word to another force. In all his years with the SEALs, Schweitzer had trained to put the round on the target without any regard to which way it was facing.

  But now he hesitated. Death had been Schweitzer’s existence for so long now that he remembered less and less of what it meant to be alive. In the heat of battle, with the lives of his teammates on the line, killing had been simple, easy. Now that the immediate threat to the team was ended, he heard the pounding of the man’s heart, growing fainter as the distance between them grew. He knew it was time to still that pounding, to slide the trigger back, but Schweitzer found himself listening to that steady rhythm, each beat pushing warm blood through a body that could love and age and hurt and die.

  Crack.

  The man pitched sideways and collapsed. The heartbeat fluttered once, stopped. Schweitzer looked up. Reeves was kneeling, rock steady despite being soaking wet in the freezing weather, still sighting in through the smoke wafting up from his carbine. “He’s down,” he said, looked up at the confusion in Schweitzer’s eyes. What’s wrong with you? that gaze said. Why didn’t you take the shot?

  Schweitzer didn’t have an answer. He only knew that he felt a pang of regret, of something lost with the stilling of that heart. It was unpardonable. The lack of focus would cost him, cost the team. There was only one life he needed to save, Patrick’s. He would stop the Cell, make the Director pay, and then . . . and then what? He would worry about that later; for now, he had shivering people on the shore. He jogged toward them.

  The plane had finally broken up on the rocks, the halves dragged by the undertow, tumbling out to sea. The front was a crumpled ruin. The pilots were not on shore, and Schweitzer didn’t see how they could have survived. Most of the gear was gone. The team had managed to salvage their weapons and a few of the pelican cases. Nalren had one open at her feet, was distributing warming packs to the rest of them. “Stuff them into your gloves and boots,” she managed through chattering teeth.

  “The pilots . . .” Schweitzer began.

  Nalren raised her pistol. “Back off. Not one step closer.”

  “Stand down, Master Corporal!” Desmarais said.

  “No, sir,” Nalren said. “I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but our dear friend Jack has a buzz saw for a hand and I just saw him jump a hundred feet in the air without a running start while making a fifty-yard pistol shot. Now, either Jack is going to tell me what’s going on or your CIA buddy is, but I will take a court-martial before I go one more step.”

  “Damn it,” Desmarais began, “we don’t have time for . . .”

  But Schweitzer was already pushing the hood back, lifting his goggles, looking at Nalren with the burning silver of his eyes. To her credit, the Master Corporal met his gaze unflinchingly, a slight increase in her heartbeat the only indicator of fear.

  “Magic is real,” Schweitzer said. “I’m dead, and so are the bad guys.”

  Nalren blinked, exchanged a glance with Montclair, looked back to Schweitzer. She gestured at the cooling corpses along the shore. “Those guys looked pretty alive to me.”

  “That’s the B team,” Schweitzer said. “I guess they were hoping to shoot us down, kill us in the crash, and not have to commit their A team. But it’s not going to take them long to figure out that didn’t work out as planned. The A team is inbound, and they move every bit as fast as I do.”

  “What do we do?” Nalren asked.

  Schweitzer scanned the terrain. It was flat, windswept, and bare. He looked back at the team. They were all freezing, huddled in their sopping winter gear. He could feel the body heat draining from them, their core temperatures plummeting.

  “We can’t run. Not now. We need to get inside, get you warmed up. Preferably a fixed position, something we can defend.”

  “That’s the town,” Desmarais said. “Come on.”

  The Canadians led the way, putting up a good show of being alert and focused, but Schweitzer could hear their breathing, see the tremors in their steps. If the enemy came on them now, Schweitzer would be their only defense. The Americans were far worse, barely able to make even a show of doing anything more than freezing to death on their feet. Ice rimed their eyebrows, their beards, the fur edging of their hoods.

  Schweitzer set out at a fast jog, careful to keep the pace brisk enough for the team to warm themselves in their effort to keep up. He heard their heartbeats rise a bit, their body temperatures cooling more slowly, but it still wasn’t enough. They needed to get inside.

  Fort Resolution materialized out of the white horizon, a scattering of plastic-sided shacks and trailers, dotted here and there with more solid construction that spoke of a municipal building, a church, a storehouse.

  It didn’t take Schweitzer’s augmented senses to know that something was wrong. Black smoke rose in a column from the center of the town, thick and greasy.

  “Oil fire,” Nalren said. “Burned out, mostly.”

  “I wonder if anyone’s still alive,” Desmarais said.

  “They’re still alive.” Schweitzer could hear the faint crunching of boots on snow, voices calling to one another. “I can hear them.”

  Nalren caught her breath, and he heard her heartbeat speed up, but she gave no outward sign. “How do you know it isn’t the enemy?”

  “The Cell’s trained operators. They’d be quieter. Whoever’s making all this racket is untrained, to put it charitably.”

  “Well”—Reeves’s teeth were chattering so badly he could barely get the words out—“at least that fire’ll thaw us out.”

  They kept up a brisk jog, and the town grew before them. It looked to Schweitzer like any of a dozen New England fishing villages he’d visited with Sarah, right down to the cedar-sided boathouses, complete with sagging roofs and peeling creosote. Log rafts lined with old tires were stacked alongside prefabricated metal shacks. Of course, no New England town had ever been in the grip of such a winter, and the layer of ice made the town a museum exhibit, a place dipped in preservative plastic.

  The streets were deserted. The ground was crisscrossed with tracks, military boot treads among others. “The bad guys were here,” Schweitzer said.

  “No shit.” Nalren jerked her chin in the direction of the column of smoke, its source screened by a low line of buildings.

  “Can’ we jus’ go in one of these?” Cort slurred, trying the door on one of the boathouses. The metal latch banged against the wood frame; it was locked.

  “We need to keep going.” Schweitzer was troubled by the slurred speech. “These aren’t heated. Probably almost as cold inside as out here.”

  “Can’t get it open,” Cort said, pulling on the door. His teeth weren’t chattering; he didn’t even appear to be shivering.

  “He’s got it bad,” Nalren said, taking Cort by the elbow and leading him away from the door. “He needs inside now.”

  “Follow me.” Schweitzer ran on toward the voices, toward the column of smoke, heedless now of the ground or the pace or the cover, knowing only that he had to get his team to warmth before he lost them. He could hear their heartbeats slowing under the onslaught of the cold. So many heartbeats had ceased since he’d become able to hear them. If it was in his power to keep a few more beating, he would. Compassion was the last inch of humanity, and he clung to it.

  The team was stumbling now. Schweitzer could hear their shuffling steps, their labored breathing. It was insane to approach like this, with no cover, with no idea what they were rolling into, but the sound of those slowing heartbeats drove him on. The least he could do was soak up fire if someone got the drop on them.

  The first round whined off the hood of a Bobcat, its bucket
filled with snow it had been plowing when it was abandoned. Schweitzer knew right away that the shooter wasn’t from the Cell. The shot was far too wide of the mark. A trained sniper would have missed closer, if they’d missed at all.

  “Friendlies!” he shouted, raising his hands, realizing too late that one of them was a jagged-toothed saw. “Don’t shoot!”

  He could see the shooter now, an obese woman with more gray hair on her chin than her head. She was perched behind the bed of a burned-out truck, far from the engine block that could actually stop a bullet. She wore a threadbare pink sweater hanging open to reveal a T-shirt advertising a tractor company. She was sweating despite the cold. “Fuck you, zombie!” she shouted. “You’re one of them things!” She sighted in again, and Schweitzer could tell from the wavering muzzle that he needn’t worry about it.

  “I’m a good thing,” Schweitzer said, keeping his hands high. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Fuck you!” the woman shouted again, and Schweitzer saw two more heads appear, both blinking at him in shock. They held guns but at least had the sense not to point them at him. She fired, the bullet breaking high and passing two feet over his head. He heard a distant thunk as it drilled through some unfortunate building’s second story.

  “Jesus Christ, lady,” Schweitzer said. “Have any of the monsters talked to you before? Put their hands up? These people behind me are Canadian Army and they’re soaking wet. I need to get them inside before they freeze to death. We’re here to help you if you’ll stop shooting at me for five minutes.”

  Another woman appeared beside the shooter. Her wide face was placid, her eyes alert. A high-powered Alaskan hung across her chest, her finger properly indexed along the receiver, the muzzle pointed at the deck. She pushed the barrel of the other woman’s rifle down. “Come off it, Laura. He ain’t tryin’ to fight nobody.”

  The woman turned to Schweitzer. “What do you want?”

  “To get my people inside where it’s warm and into dry clothes.”

  “You guys are Army?”

  “That’s right,” Desmarais said. “I’m Colonel Desmarais, from Northern Headquarters. We’re here to assist you with your defense. Are you Sheriff Plante?”

  The people behind a barricade had a hushed conversation before the woman with the Alaskan shouted at them to pipe down. “That’s me. You guys got a defibrillator?”

  “We do,” Nalren said, raising one of the pelican cases. “Small portable one in the trauma kit. Why do you need it?”

  The sheriff looked at Nalren like she was an idiot. “Why the hell does anybody want a defibrillator? On account of someone’s heart stopping.”

  “Well, here it is,” Nalren said, stamping her feet.

  “All right,” the sheriff said. “Come on in, but I’m warnin’ you, if this is some kind of a false flag, you’re gonna be sorry.”

  “It’s not a false flag,” Schweitzer muttered, jogging toward the line of burned-out trucks.

  He cleared the barricade to find a clot of people, all armed with a patchwork of hunting rifles and high-caliber pistols. Each one of them carried a hatchet or a long knife slung in easy reach. Which surely meant they had faced the Golds. There was no other reason Schweitzer could imagine folks like these bringing knives to a gunfight. They clutched their inadequate weapons firmly, giving him a wide berth, nervous eyes locked on him, ignoring the living members of the team as they came stumbling in. They were all of them past shivering now, their eyes glazed, jaws slack.

  The hard-eyed woman tapped the woman with the rifle on the shoulder. “Laura, get these folks inside and warm ’em up.” She turned to Nalren. “Gimme that defib.”

  Nalren half handed, half dropped the pelican case as she stumbled into the small, scorched building that Schweitzer could only guess was the town’s police station. It was well fortified, the walls blackened and pocked with bullet holes. Brown smears that could only be old blood still darkened the frozen ground near the charred husks of trucks hastily assembled into a barricade.

  “Ollie!” the woman shouted. “Got a defib comin’ in! Get it on Joe right now!”

  “Oh, thank God,” came an older man’s voice, labored, the breath coming out at a steady rhythm, one every second and a half. Chest compressions. CPR. “My arms are ’bout to fall off.”

  Schweitzer made to follow and the sheriff raised the Alaskan, pointing it at his knee rather than his face. She definitely had some experience fighting Golds, then. “Not you,” she said. “You stay where I can keep an eye on you.”

  “I promise you, I’m not going to hurt anyone,” Schweitzer said. “You know what we can do. If I wanted to take you down, I’d have done it already.”

  “Well, maybe you would and maybe you wouldn’t, but you sure as hell don’t need to be warmin’ up in my office, and I bet you’d jus’ pass on a mug of coffee, so you can stay out here ’til I know what’s what.”

  “Sure,” Schweitzer said, taking a few steps backward to ease her mind. “No problem. Cold just keeps me preserved.”

  “You’re an ?eyune? I thought that only worked with animals.”

  Schweitzer gave her as much of a smile as his steel-and-corpse-flesh face would allow. “I thought it only worked with people. Nice to meet you, Sheriff Plante.”

  “People call me Mankiller.”

  “That’s . . . kind of badass, actually.”

  “Yeah, well. Mom named me after the first lady chief of the Cherokee. She was the real badass.”

  “Your mom or this chief?”

  “Both.” Mankiller smiled. “Mom never got into politics or anything, but she once shot a chargin’ grizzly without even tryin’ to get out of the way.”

  “My name’s James Schweitzer. People call me Jim.”

  “Didn’t know ?eyune had names.”

  “Well, this one does. Dying didn’t change it.”

  “Okay, Jim. Good to meetcha. Sorry you died.”

  “Thanks. I’m kind of over it.”

  Mankiller smiled, said nothing.

  “Well, anyway, I guess I am a . . . whatever you said. I heard your granddad makes things like us.”

  Mankiller nodded. “He says it only works with animals, and it has to be bedáyíné. Like, for sélat’in.”

  “I have no idea what the heck you’re saying. I only speak English.”

  “’S all right,” Mankiller said. “Anyway, I never met a ?eyune that could talk. The ones that’ve been comin’ here may look like people, but they’re more animals than the ones Grampy makes.”

  “Honestly? I’m amazed you survived. I just watched a few of those things take out most of a team of hardened operators. I wouldn’t think you could stand up to them. No disrespect,” he hastily added.

  “None taken.” Mankiller finally lowered her rifle. “I was in the Army. EOD. Afghanistan.”

  “So, how many have you taken down?”

  “Three, though one took itself down. Blew up one of the trucks while it was standin’ next to it.”

  “They’re not too bright.”

  “Animals.” She shrugged.

  “The other two?”

  “Well, I figured it out. You can’t jus’ put a hole in their heads, on account of ’em bein’ dead already. I guess you just gotta chop ’em up fine.” She paused. “Yeah, real fine.”

  “Or you can burn them.” Schweitzer indicated the black smear by the burned-out truck.

  “Yup.” She nodded. “So, don’ try nothin’ stupid.” But she was smiling now, warm and open. The silence stretched.

  “So, Mankiller, huh?”

  “Yup.”

  “You ever kill a man?”

  “A few. Nobody who didn’ need it.”

  “Look, can we please go inside now? I want to see if . . .”

  “We got a pulse, Sheriff!” came the man’s voic
e from inside the station. Mankiller immediately turned, leaping over the splintered remains of a tiny staircase and up into the station. Schweitzer followed, figuring he was off the hook.

  “Joe!” Mankiller was kneeling beside a small folding table, sagging under the weight of an enormous man with a shock of wet black hair. His skin was gray and his eyes had the shadowed look of a corpse. His soaked parka was thrown open and his shirt cut through, the defibrillator leads still attached to his chest. An old man squatted beside him, tall and thin, with tears running down his face. “He made it,” he said. “Praise Jesus, Sheriff, he made it.”

  Mankiller swallowed, her eyes misting, but not so badly that she showed tears. A leader, then, maintaining her self-control in front of her people. “Well, that’s jus’ fine, Ollie,” she whispered.

  The old man looked up at Schweitzer, reached for his gun.

  “It’s all right, Ollie,” Mankiller said. “He’s a good guy. I think.”

  The old man stayed crouched, frozen.

  “What about her?” Schweitzer asked. Beside the folding table was a military cot. A woman lay on it, her face gray and drawn. A bloodstained blanket was thrown over her mid-section.

  “Gutshot,” Mankiller said. “We couldn’t get her medevac’d. Ollie, recharge the—”

  Schweitzer shook his head. “She’s gone.”

  “The fuck can you know that?” The old man was on his knees, recharging the defibrillator. “She could be comatose.”

  “I can hear heartbeats, breathing,” Schweitzer said. “She’s gone. I’m sorry.”

  “I ain’t givin’ up,” the old man said, hiking up the woman’s shirt and clearing her chest to attach the leads.

  Schweitzer left him to it. Mad hope was better than none at all.

  The American and Canadian teams were slumped on the floor, huddled together, shivering again now, which was a good sign. Schweitzer could hear their heartbeats, steady now, could feel the warming temperature of their blood. “Everybody okay?” he asked. “We can feel all our fingers and toes?”