SINdrome

by J. T. Nicholas

  The corpses were unclothed and floating in some sort of transparent fluid. Whatever it was, it wasn’t alcohol or formaldehyde, or anything else that might deter microbial action. Bodies decaying in liquid were never pretty, and the bloated, discolored flesh that stared out at us from behind the glass was the stuff of nightmares. No. A single body like that was the stuff of nightmares. We had to be looking at hundreds. Maybe thousands.

  “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” Fortier gasped. Thompson was making a retching sound, reminding me that despite all the action he’d seen, in some ways he was still as green as any other rookie. Hernandez was taking it in stride, at least as much as I was, which is to say, not actively vomiting. I turned a worried eye on Tia, fearing the worst, only to find her pressed close up against the nearest cylinder, examining the contents with a professional eye. She’d been acting as a doctor to the living for long enough that I had almost forgotten her original calling was to minister to the dead.

  But as surprising as her interest was, the expressions on the faces of Silas, LaSorte, and Al’awwal were worse. All three wore the same expression. There was disgust there, but that only scratched the surface. Fear. Shame. Guilt. And beneath it all, a hatred so pure that it made me shudder to look at it.

  “What the fuck is this?” Thompson asked, wiping vomit from his mouth as he straightened back up.

  “This is Walton Biogenics at its finest,” LaSorte spat.

  “This is the ultimate perversion of my father’s life work,” Al’awwal added. I could see his fingers white-knuckle tight on his rifle.

  “This is how synthetics are grown,” Silas said. His voice was the calmest of the three, but there was something in that calm that was somehow all the more terrifying. It reminded me of arctic warfare training in Alaska and learning how to cross frozen rivers and streams. Those seemed calm, too. Right up until the point that the ice cracked and you were swept into the torrent of icy darkness that flowed just beneath the surface.

  “These are adults,” Tia pointed out, still studying the…contents. “Fully grown. It was my understanding that synthetics could only be grown no later than early teenaged years or certain…psychological problems would develop.”

  “So we’ve all been told,” Al’awwal said. “But who knows? Maybe that’s just another Walton lie.”

  “It is far easier to brainwash someone before said brain is fully developed,” Silas added.

  “Then why now?” Fortier asked. “Why start growing people to…to…fuck it. To adults?”

  No one answered for a moment as we worked over the problem. Then it hit me. “Soldiers,” I said. “Child soldiers aren’t much use. They probably started growing these a few months ago, when we began our little rebellion. Against a potential future need.”

  “I thought they attacked you when you went after Larson,” Tia said.

  “True. I’m not saying that Walton hasn’t had these soldiers for years. But maybe there were only small batches. Maybe even grown the traditional way, to children first and then trained.” I glanced around the vast chamber, at the hundreds of capsules. “It’s obviously more than a pilot program,” I admitted. “But if we’re lucky, there were only a small amount to begin with.”

  “A process which was accelerated with our actions,” Silas mused. “Perhaps when we took over the airwaves on New Year’s Eve, they implemented this new version of the program.”

  “And when Campbell turned himself in, and they opted for their final solution, they decided to…terminate?” Thompson asked. He still looked a little shaky, but at least he was able to look at the capsules.

  “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘abort,’” Al’awwal said. He rubbed one hand at the stubble on his face. “Most likely to start getting rid of the evidence. Same reason for the decommissioning of this facility, I’d guess. I doubt they would have done either if they didn’t have a more than adequate security force in place here, though.”

  “Lucky for us,” Fortier snorted. “If they had all these things active…”

  “Things?” LaSorte demanded at the same time Hernadnez said, “I don’t like relying on luck. We need to move.”

  As if on cue, the gunfire started.

  The crack of the first round sounded almost simultaneously with the shattering of the capsule by which we were all standing. Body and liquid spilled out onto the floor, more of it splashing on us than I cared to think about. The smell was awful, a mix of effluvia and rot that, under normal circumstances, would have twisted my stomach into a knot that could only be untied with violent emesis.

  But these weren’t normal circumstances, and I was in motion before I realized it. My first instinct was to give Tia a hard shove, clearing her from the line of fire. Only then did I dive for cover myself, scrambling to get my weapon into action. More gunfire was sounding now, some from the far end of the chamber, some answering fire from my companions. My dive had landed me behind another of the glass tubes. Intact, at least so far.

  I finally brought the subgun to my shoulder. I leaned out for a quick glance, taking in the situation. The lighting was bad, just a few LEDs far overhead. The far end of the room was mostly shadow, excepting only the blinding muzzle flashes. I felt a bullet whiz past my head and ducked back behind the glass.

  “Anyone got eyes?” someone shouted over the general cacophony. It sounded like Fortier, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “At least a dozen,” Thompson replied, his voice coming over the radio. It wasn’t much better than shouting, but it was slightly more audible over the thundering fire. The shakiness in his voice was gone, replaced with the same calm I remembered from the mats. I gave our side of the room a quick scan. Thompson had unlimbered his rifle, and was sighting down the scope, using a seated position with his legs in front of him and the rifle resting on his knees. The kid really did know his way around long gunning. Fortier and Al’awwal were shoulder to shoulder, each firing from opposite sides of shattered pylon, the rotting body of a half-grown synthetic draped over the glass between them. Hernandez was a little farther back, her pistol out, but not active. Given the ranges, she wouldn’t have much chance to hit anything from where she was. Tia was opposite me, across the corridor formed by the rows of coffin-like tubes. Her shotgun was trained downrange and while it may have been slightly more useful than a pistol, she was biding her time as well.

  “Shit,” Thompson said. “Two on the move.” Then the thirty-ought-six roared, the boom echoing in the room. “One down.” The words—and, presumably, the casualty—were answered with a barrage of fire from the opposition that made all of us hit the deck and grab as much cover as we could. With the echoing chamber, I couldn’t pin down the ordinance the enemy was using, but whatever it was, it could put a lot of lead downrange in a short time. Which meant they had plenty of resources for some of their team members to provide suppressing fire while the rest moved forward to flank and kill us. Now that Thompson had made the rifle’s presence known, I doubted he’d get to spot or take a carefully aimed shot again. The bad guys had to know that if they gave us that kind of time, we’d eventually whittle them down. No. They’d come for us now.

  Unless we went after them first.

  I caught Hernandez’s eye and using a mix of hand signals learned from the Army and the NLPD indicated that I was going to sweep around to the right and that she should head left. She nodded, gave me a thumbs up. I held up a single finger, indicating that she should wait, then keyed my mic.

  “Al, Fortier. Hernandez and I are going to move up the flanks and try to intercept their fire teams. We’re going to need some cover of our own. You game?”

  “On your go,” Al responded at once.

  “And get to say that I saved your ass?” Fortier replied. “You bet.”

  “In three,” I said, holding up three fingers for Hernandez as well. She was on the channel, and could hear me, but verbal communication could b
e dicey in the middle of a gunfight, even over the radio. “Two.” I dropped a finger. “One.” Just my pointer raised. “Go. Go. Go.”

  Hernandez swept left and I moved to the right, even as Al’awwal and Fortier popped out from cover. Neither had selective fire weapons, but they both had good trigger control and speed, and they managed to send enough of a barrage of firepower back into the face of the enemy that their fire slackened. We took advantage of the momentary reprieve, hopscotching forward from cover to cover.

  Thompson’s big rifle barked again, followed by the bellow of Tia’s shotgun. Given the circumstances, neither was likely to hit anything, but it gave us a little more covering fire, and even trained soldiers balked when they heard the roar of a sniper rifle. I slammed into one of the glass cylinders, breathing hard. I’d covered maybe half the distance when the enemy responded in kind. A hail of bullets tore through the air. More glass shattered. More bodies spilled forth.

  I heard a curse over the radio, male, but in the chaos, I couldn’t recognize the voice. At least if they were cursing, they weren’t dead. Then I saw a blur of movement, not at the end of the chamber. Closer. No more than fifteen feet away. The security team had the same idea, and had moved outward to flank us. Two hostiles. They’d taken the time to go wider, and were almost on my position. But they hadn’t seen me yet.

  I brought the silenced subgun up to my shoulder, and set the holographic sights on the first, squeezing the trigger twice before traversing to the next target. He was whirling in my direction, bringing his own weapon to bear when I squeezed off two more shots. I ducked back down as the target fell, not wasting time to make sure they were dead. “Watch your nine, Hernandez,” I hissed into the mic. “They’re flanking wide.”

  There was no answer, and no way I’d hear the pop of her nine-millimeter over the general cacophony. Nothing to do but keep going forward. “Two down,” I added.

  The thirty-ought-six thundered again. “One down,” Thompson said on the heels of my declaration.

  “Three more here,” Hernandez added. Her breath came in short ragged gasps. “I’m hit, though.”

  “Fortier’s hit, too,” Tia said.

  “I’m fine,” Fortier growled over the radio. “Or I would be if your girlfriend would leave me the hell alone, Campbell.”

  “Still operational here,” Hernandez said.

  I could hear the pain in her voice, and in Fortier’s. No matter what they said, and no matter what the vids would have you believe, there really wasn’t such a thing as getting shot just a little bit. Adrenaline might carry both of them through for a few minutes, but at a price, and it was a price that would have to be paid soon. We needed to finish this, and quick.

  “Moving,” I said into the mic.

  I put action to the words and made my way forward. If they’d sent two my way and three after Hernandez, that meant we’d taken down five. Thompson had put paid to another two with his rifle. No telling if Al’awwal or Fortier had managed to hit anything with their suppressing fire, but at least seven of the bad guys were down. That still left a half-dozen to deal with. We’d better than evened the odds, but we couldn’t afford any more injuries.

  Our suppressing fire had vanished, reduced to sporadic shots that I recognized as coming from Al’awwal’s bullpup. But the other side’s volume of fire had dropped as well. They were either hunkering down and waiting for reinforcements, or preparing for their own charge to try to finish us. My money was on the second.

  I stalked forward, body lowered into a half-crouch as I moved, stock secure against my shoulder. The stance looked awkward from the outside, but it ensured as stable a firing platform as possible when on the move. I was closing distance, scanning as far ahead as the shadows allowed, looking for any telltale motion to betray the position of the enemy.

  But this time, they were careful. And they were good.

  Damn good.

  I came within a half-inch of death. I saw the motion—the reflection of a barrel oddly distorted by the liquid-filled curved glass of one of the synthetic capsules—at the last possible second. There wasn’t time to do anything other than hurl myself forward. I saw the muzzle flash. I heard the whizz of the bullet as it streaked past my head, and then I was on the ground, rolling forward. I crashed into the metal footer of the container at the same time I saw a pair of boots step out into the open.

  I lashed out with my legs, scissoring them and catching the pair of boots, and the security officer to whom they were attached, in the sweep. He crashed down on top of me, something hard and rigid striking me just below the solar plexus. I felt the air driven from my lungs as I started gasping like a landed fish.

  Another pair of boots rounded the corner, and I knew I was done. Two on one wasn’t necessarily insurmountable. Unless, of course, the bad guys had guns, and you lying on the floor in front of them struggling to draw a normal breath. All I could do as I watched the second gun barrel come up was try to maneuver the security guard atop me into the line of fire. I heard a rapid pop-pop-pop but didn’t feel the impacts. Had the guy managed to miss from less than six feet away? No. The shooter was falling, and the guy on top of me, who had been content to keep me locked up so his buddy could end it, started to put his heart into the fight. There was another, closer, pop and the guy on top of me shuddered, then went still.

  Al’awwal appeared, moving in the same half-crouch that I had been, stubby bullpup shouldered. The shots had been from him—he’d dropped the shooter then put one round into the guy on top of me for good measure. That had been risky—the round could have easily passed through its intended target and had enough energy left to hurt me. But as far as I could tell, I hadn’t been hit, and it was a hell of lot quicker than trying to engage the fucker hand-to-hand.

  He reached down, dragged the body off me with one hand, still managing to keep his weapon at the ready with the other. “You hit?” he asked.

  “I’m okay,” I said in a strangled near-whisper. I was still struggling to breathe. “Wind knocked out of me.”

  He didn’t acknowledge the words. Instead, he dropped into a kneeling position, set his shoulder against the remains of the shattered cylinder, and started firing. There wasn’t much I could do, not until I could breathe again. I managed to use my legs and one arm to half-push, half-crawl a little deeper into the cover, focusing on trying to force air in and out of my bruised lungs. I took the time to pat myself down, looking for blood. I didn’t think I’d been hit, but sometimes shock and adrenaline played weird games with the mind. By the time I’d finished—no new wounds, anyway—I could almost breathe normally again.

  Al’awwal had stopped firing, executing a combat reload that was a thing of beauty to watch, pulling out a magazine left handed while using his right to drop the empty magazine. He shoved the new one into the well and had it seated and ready to go without ever bringing his weapon out of battery. But he held his fire.

  “How many?” I asked, my voice still a little bit strangled. I cleared my throat. Tried again. “How many?”

  “Maybe just a couple,” he replied, eyes still trained downrange. The thirty-ought-six sounded and Al’awwal threw me a grin, his perfect white teeth seeming to glow in the dim light. “Maybe just the one.” He glanced down at me. “You good to move out?”

  I grunted, pushed myself to my feet. My hands were shaking a bit, so my reload wasn’t nearly as smooth as Al’awwal’s had been, but I slipped a fresh mag in anyway, stuffing the not-quite-empty one into a pouch to reload later. I’d already burned through more than half my combat loadout. “Wait one,” I said, dropping down to the bodies at my feet. They were using subguns as well. A quick check revealed theirs to be a sleek-looking Brazilian model that, unfortunately, was chambered in forty-five instead of the nine-millimeter I was using. I thought about it for a moment, then unclipped one, securing it by its tac strap to one of the carabiners on my MOLLE gear. A quick pat down re
vealed a few extra magazines, which I stuffed into another dump pouch. The extra weight wasn’t great, but I’d rather be humping another fifteen pounds than run out of ammo in the middle of a firefight. “Ready,” I said.

  “We’re moving,” Al said into the radio.

  “I took down another hostile,” Thompson’s reply came back. “I can’t be sure, but I think we’ve got two more. This room’s as bad for thermal visibility as it is normal, but I think they’re right near the exit we want.”

  “Then we go through them,” I replied. I clapped Al’awwal on the shoulder as I moved out, resuming my leap-frogging from cylinder to cylinder. The fire from the enemy had flagged off almost completely. If they only had two shooters operational, there really wasn’t much they could do but hunker down and wait for a clean shot. But if we got overconfident or sloppy, we’d give them the opportunity they were looking for. Hernandez and Fortier had already been hit. No matter how much I tried to put that thought out of my mind and do the job before me, it kept creeping back in.

  We’d almost made our way to the rear wall of the chamber, having continued our wide sweep. The door was set roughly in the middle of the wall we were approaching. We were at most ten yards from it, and maybe twice that from the closest side wall. I saw motion, and immediately ducked into cover, Al close on my heels. The shots rang out a heartbeat later, smashing more glass and showering us with whatever rancid chemical soup filled the watery graveyard through which we traveled. I was long since past the point of being able to smell anything, for which I was eternally grateful. If my brain hadn’t decided that it had more important things to deal with, I’d probably be curled into a ball vomiting from the fetid stink.

  I leaned out and returned fire, stroking the trigger. I couldn’t see much in the sight picture, just muzzle flashes and flickers of movement, but I didn’t really need to see anything. I wasn’t trying to hit anything, so much as keep the attention of the bad guys directed on me. Al was moving, stalking wider, looking for a better angle. Somewhere, on the other side, Hernandez would be doing the same, provided she was still up. She’d been quiet on the radio, which worried me a bit. And Thompson was out there, rifle ready, looking for the shot. I had no idea where Tia and Fortier were, but I hoped the coroner’s assistant was too busy patching up Fortier to put herself in the line of fire.