SINdrome

by J. T. Nicholas

  We went another fifteen, twenty seconds, and then the second grenade went off. I had no doubt that it went off underneath Fortier, as the bad guys charged his position. Everyone winced when they heard it. Everyone, even the noncombatants, knew what it meant. But we were past the time for tears. Past the time for regrets. That would come later. Now, we just had to hope that Fortier’s sacrifice, that Silas’s sacrifice had been worth it.

  “Stairs on the left,” LaSorte said. His voice was tight with pain, and he kept one hand pressed tight against the bullet crease in his side. The other held his screen, out and at the ready, and the directions kept coming.

  We stormed the stairwell, half-expecting to find another security team waiting for us. Stairs were almost as bad as hallways from the shooting gallery perspective. But it was clear. The steps themselves were metal, zigzagging up a square concrete tube, lit by dim LEDs. “Five flights to the surface,” LaSorte said.

  We moved as fast as we could, given our state. At each landing we slowed, and either me or Al’awwal stopped to cover the door until the rest of the team was past, essentially switching spots at point and tail on every floor we passed. It was exhausting, sprinting up a flight of stairs, waiting in tense silence while everyone else passed you by, wondering if the door your weapon was trained on was going to be kicked in. Wondering if you’d hear booted feet rushing down from above or up from below. And then having to sprint back up to the others to catch up. By the time we’d cleared all five flights, we were all panting. Even Al’awwal, who had the stamina of an Olympic athlete crossbred with a horse, was sweating and short of breath. That did shitty things to marksmanship, but the odds of us surviving another firefight were getting longer with each passing minute, anyway. We couldn’t do much but hope that LaSorte had found a clear road out.

  “One hundred feet,” LaSorte said between gasps for air. “Straight shot. Emergency exit. Empties into an employee parking lot. Should be multiple vehicles in the lot. Even with the place being decommissioned, we know there’s security. Probably other employees, too.”

  We were risking a lot on a probably, but it was our only chance. I found myself missing Silas and his seemingly endless supply of battered cars that showed up when you needed them. I wondered if one of the “keys” LaSorte had was to that whole operation. Not that it was going to help us here, even if he did.

  “It’s going to be guarded,” Al’awwal noted. “Do we have any ordinance left?”

  “Help me with the pack,” Hernandez replied. Tia moved over and helped her get the straps off her good shoulder and then past her sling. “We probably should all ditch the packs, or at least get them down to bare necessities.” While she spoke she was tearing open the Velcro top and rummaging around. In the end, she came up with two tear gas grenades and one smoke.

  “We don’t have enough masks to get us all through the tear gas,” I said. “I wish we did, but it won’t do a lot of good if we incapacitate ourselves.”

  “Smoke?” Al’awwal asked.

  It was a tough question. Again, we didn’t have gear to see through the smoke. Only Thompson’s rifle had a thermographic scope. The rest of us would be just as hindered as the enemy. If they blindly opened fire once the smoke started, we’d be in trouble. But if they waited, we might be able to get the drop on them.

  I studied the map on LaSorte’s screen. It looked like a hallway lined with offices dead-ending at the emergency exit. If I was the bad guys, I’d have people posted in the doorways of the last couple of offices. I tried to remember how many of the bastards we’d dropped already. A dozen in the chamber of horrors. Another ten or so in the first guarded position. Three more in the ambush where Fortier had been hit. Plus however many Fortier had managed to catch in his last stand. Jesus. We’d dropped most of a platoon. How many guards could they have running this decommissioned nightmare?

  “Fuck it. Worth a shot,” I said. “We’ll pop smoke, then charge in two teams down the walls of the hallway. I’d put money on these last four offices,” I tapped the screen, “being where any shooters are, so focus there. But don’t ignore the other doors. We don’t have time to clear each one, so watch your ass.”

  I’d shrugged out of my own pack while talking, and made sure to top off my magazines. I had a few loose rounds, but I left them, along with the rest of the contents of the pack. I wished I’d had the foresight to bring some extra plates. As it stood, my carrier was next to useless. I dropped it too, pulling the lighter Kevlar from the pack and donning it instead. It wasn’t as good as the plate carrier, but it was better than nothing.

  “Okay,” I said as the others made their final preparations. “They can’t know we’re here, but they know something’s going on. Al, you’ve got the best arm. You throw the grenade. Hopefully, they’ll be enough on edge to think it’s the real deal and dive for cover. Once the smoke starts, we haul ass. If we’re lucky, we’ll take them like we did the guards we hit with flashbangs. If not…” I shrugged. “If not, we take them anyway. Questions?”

  The only response was some checking of weapons, and Al reaching out a hand to Hernandez for the smoke grenade.

  “Ready,” he said, holding the explosive in both hands, one on the body, one on the pin.

  I looked at each person in turn, got answering nods. I moved up to the doorway, grabbed hold of the handle. “Now!” I barked, yanking the door open.

  Al’awwal hurled the grenade down the hallway. I heard it hit the tile floor, bounce, slide. A few rounds rattled off as I slammed the door shut. They didn’t seem to be aimed in our direction. More like panic fire. Then I heard someone shout, “Grenade!”

  Good. Maybe that would slow them down. There was a sharp bang followed by a hissing sound. I opened the door once more and Al sprinted through it. I was on his heels, the others following close behind. I went down the left side of the hallway, Al down the right. Thompson was on Al’s six, then Tia. Hernandez and LaSorte followed me.

  Smoke had filled the hallway, thickest down near the end where the grenade had landed, but already drifting toward us. I heard coughing ahead, which was a good thing. Meant the security guards didn’t have masks and would be hampered by the smoke. So would we, but at least we had surprise on our side.

  The first shots started sounding from the enemy, but I didn’t hear any ricochets. I hoped that meant they were firing down the middle of the corridor, thinking we were charging right into the teeth of their guns. The muzzle flashes illuminated the white smoke in odd ways, casting orangish shadows, but it also helped give away the enemy position. They weren’t in the last four offices, but rather, only in the last two, one on each side of the hall.

  I opened up with the subgun, stroking the trigger as fast as recoil control would allow. I wasn’t aiming at the muzzle flashes on my side of the hallway. The angles were all wrong to do any damage there. Instead, I focused my fire on Al’s side, and by the sounds of surprise and the screaming, I found at least one target. Al’s team opened up as well, doing the same thing, spraying across the hallway at my door. They had a hell of a lot more firepower, between Al’s .556 and the twelve gauge Tia was operating. Even Thompson’s .357 packed a powerful wallop, and the fire from that side of the hall suddenly slacked. Then there was a scream behind me, and Hernandez dropped. LaSorte was on her in a heartbeat, and though every part of me wanted to check on her, I kept moving, kept shooting. I executed a combat reload, dropping the magazine and ramming in a new one so quickly that it barely broke my pattern of fire. I continued slamming round after round into the best approximation of the doorway I could picture, given the thick smoke.

  I saw the silhouettes of Al’s team closing on my point of fire, popped off a couple more rounds, then stopped shooting. The moment I did, they charged forward, breaching the room. I did the same, sprinting the last dozen feet or so, one hand training on the left wall until it found the doorway. I came in shooting, putting rounds into the forms ly
ing in the room. I needn’t have bothered. Between the slugs, the bullpup, and the heavy revolver, the place had been shredded. Three bodies were on the ground. All three dead. “Clear,” I shouted.

  “Clear,” came the response from Al.

  “Tia!” that was LaSorte, calling from somewhere up the hallway, where Hernandez had gone down.

  “Fuck!”

  I rushed back that way, coughing and choking on the smoke. I could see Hernandez on the ground, teeth gritted in pain and a low, steady stream of Spanish expletives falling from her lips. At least she was alive. Blood was pouring from a wound in her hip, and I winced in sympathy. From the angle, it had to have hit bone, which meant, at best, a long and painful recovery.

  Tia arrived. Took one look at the wound and pulled out a syringe. “This is going to feel really, really good,” she said. “We’ll get you up and moving, but I need you to stay as calm as possible. I don’t want you to have a heart attack on me, okay?”

  “Hurry the fuck up,” Hernandez snarled. “Just drug me already. And let’s get the fuck out.” At least she wasn’t spouting some nonsense about staying behind. Not when we were this close.

  “Al, take LaSorte and Thompson. See if you can find us a vehicle,” I ordered.

  “Roger that,” Al’awwal replied.

  They disappeared out the door as I put one arm under Hernandez’s good shoulder. “Up we go,” I said, lifting her by main strength. We both gasped as our respective wounds rebelled against the strain, but I managed to get her on her one good leg without us both falling over. Tia was dropping the syringe, and getting her weapon back in battery.

  “I thought you said I’d feel good…” Hernandez started to say. Then her eyes widened, glazed over a bit. “Never mind. You’re a nice lady. You should marry her, Campbell.”

  That took both of us by surprise and we shared a startled glance. “Gotta move,” I said, lurching forward in the world’s most awkward three-legged race. We hadn’t had time to bandage Hernandez, and she was leaving a fair amount of blood behind, but that could wait.

  A van with Walton’s logo plastered on the side pulled up to the door. I raised the subgun left-handed, ready to fire—and single-handed from my off hand, definitely miss by a mile—when I realized that LaSorte was sitting in the driver’s seat. The doors slid open, and we piled in. Before they had even started to close the van was in motion, sending us tumbling to the floor. Hernandez didn’t even scream, so good were the drugs Tia had given her.

  I did. Like a school girl.

  Back injuries sucked.

  Epilogue

  The three women could have been sisters.

  They didn’t look particularly alike, one being tall, lithe, blonde, another petite, dark-haired, and the third, red-haired and built with the compact muscles of a gymnast, but they shared similar mannerisms. They shared a familiarity with one another that was generally reserved for siblings. They sat, one next to the other, on a small couch, too small for three people. They touched hip-to-hip and shoulder-to-shoulder, but seemed to take comfort in the contact. All three had been among the first inoculated against what was now being called Synthetic Flu.

  They watched the screen in front of them as the news unfolded. It had been nearly three months since the assault on the Walton Biogenics facility now widely known as the Potato Farm. The names of those who had gone in, and the names of those who had not come back out, were widely known. Some hailed them as heroes. Some as villains. For others, like the three women, the relationship was even more complex.

  They had belonged, until very recently, to an NLPD detective by the name of Francois Fortier. He had not, in their estimation, been a good man. He had certainly not been a kind man. They had been subjected to degradation, humiliation, pain. And then, as they had watched from hidden places and secret screens the revolution spread, he had changed. Changed to the point where he had, according to a long message from none other than Jason Campbell himself, given his life to save a synthetic, a Toy.

  They had shared many a long conversation around that. It didn’t undo what had been done to them. There was no balancing of some cosmic scale where they could simply forgive and forget. But, they had concluded that, perhaps, a person, human or synthetic, man or woman or anything else, could be more than just one thing. Could be defined, should be defined not just by the bad they had done, or by the good they had done, but by all they had done, by the sum totality of their lives. Maybe, just maybe, a person could be an asshole and a hero.

  Certainly, people seemed to think as much about former detective Jason Campbell. While those who had helped him had been pardoned, the man himself was still wanted by several agencies for, if, no other reason, having orchestrated a jail break. There were those who called him a murderer. Others who felt he was an anarchist, seeking to tear down the fabric of society. Others still, who while they mouthed support for his cause, felt someone had to be held responsible for inciting riots and protests and countless atrocities. And so he was still wanted, still a fugitive, sought after by law enforcement agencies across the world.

  But the consensus among the vid reports and bloggers was that no one was looking very hard. The focus, instead, was firmly on Walton Biogenics and the empire they had built on the backs of their slaves. The women—they still hadn’t chosen names for themselves, but refused to think of themselves by the names he had given them—found it both sad and amusing that as much outrage, perhaps even more, was directed at the fact that Walton Biogenics had also suppressed medical research that could extend the lives of people, cure numerous illnesses, and generally lead to better health for all. While that was certainly criminal, from their perspective, it paled in comparison to what had been done to synthetics.

  Had been, being the operative words.

  In the wake of the revelation of the plague and the sudden appearance of samples of the retroviral cure at medical centers across the nation, country after country had passed emergency measures granting full citizenship to the synthetic population. The road to freedom had not been smooth, but it had not been quite as rough as some had feared. The attempted genocide by Walton officials had been a bucket of cold water on the anger of those who might object too strenuously.

  Walton was in the process of being dismantled. As was so often the case, it looked like only a few of the employees would see any real consequence beyond the seizure of their assets. The blame game had been played to perfection, and, miraculously, only a dozen or so people in an organization spanning tens of thousands of employees could be shown to have any true culpability. Those dozen would be sentenced. The rest would go free.

  But Walton was done. Every dollar of their assets and stock had been seized, every penny that could be shown to have come from their dealings, forfeited. That pool of money had been earmarked to be partitioned out among the synthetics, among the survivors. They had already seen some of it, in the form of a monthly endowment that, in addition to the BSL, would provide a relatively comfortable life, even if none of the three chose to seek other employment.

  The growth of synthetics had been outlawed, unanimously and universally. And some ground had already been taken in reversing the engineered sterility that had been built into them. No synthetics would be grown, but in the future, they could be born. The little baby Jacinda had been the first natural-born synthetic, but she would not be the last.

  This was all good news to the three women, the three former Toys. But it came with new burdens. They had never been free. They had never had the agency to act of their own free will. Quite simply, they didn’t know where they fit in society, didn’t know what to do with themselves. Programs were being set up, funded from the massive trust provided by the liquidation of Walton Biogenics. Counseling was available. Perhaps soon they would avail themselves of those services.

  But for the moment, they were content to sit here, watching the world change on the screens, in the comp
any of women who were closer, each to the next, than genetic sisters could ever be. They were content to walk slowly into their newfound freedom, and let others, like this LaSorte who was driving so many of the changes, plow the road.

  They would walk it, too.

  In due time.

  Meet the Author

  J.T. Nicholas was born in Lexington, Virginia, though within six months he moved (or was moved, rather) to Stuttgart, Germany. Thus began the long journey of the military brat, hopping from state to state and country to country until, at present, he has accumulated nearly thirty relocations. This experience taught him that, regardless of where one found oneself, people were largely the same. When not writing, Nick spends his time practicing a variety of martial arts, playing games (video, tabletop, and otherwise), and reading everything he can get his hands on. Nick currently resides in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, a pair of indifferent cats, a neurotic Papillion, and an Australian Shepherd who (rightly) believes he is in charge of the day-to-day affairs.

  For more info please visit www.jtnicholas.com, or find him on Facebook and Twitter @JamesTNicholas.

  SINdicate

  Don’t miss this thrilling installment of

  J.T. Nicholas’s New Lyons Sequence series!

  The Post-Modern Prometheus

  Synths were manufactured to look human and perform physical labor, but they were still only machines. That’s what the people who used—and abused—them believed, until the truth was revealed: Synths are independent, sentient beings. Now, the governments of the world must either recognize their human nature and grant them their rightful freedom, or brace for a revolution.

  Former New Lyons Detective Jason Campbell has committed himself to the Synths’ cause, willing to fight every army the human race marches against them. But they have an even greater enemy in Walton Biogenics, the syndicate behind the creation and distribution of the “artificial” humans. The company will stop at nothing to protect their secrets—and the near-mythological figure known to Synths as “The First,” whose very existence threatens the balance of power across the world . . .