Fear the Survivors

by Stephen Moss

  Paul tried to comprehend her words, to wrap his head around them, and found himself morbidly curious as to where this was going. A whimper escaped his lips, an echo of the question that her statement begged for. But he could manage no more than that through his shock.

  She went on, “When she comes to see you, when Madeline Cavanagh comes to visit her old boyfriend in the hospital, tell her that she can end all of this, end all the slaughter and pain, by simply stepping out into the night. Tell her that all the people who have died at my hands have suffered because of her. Tell her I won’t stop. I’ll never stop. Tell her that by staying in hiding like a coward she has only caused more death. I will find her eventually. And when I do, all this extra suffering will have been in vain. A sad prelude to the one thing that could have stopped it all: her death. I tell you this now, because in a moment you may black out, and I want you to remember my little message.

  “Do you understand me, Paul?”

  He managed a nod through the grip around his neck, and Lana smiled, “Good.”

  Through his discomfort, a new feeling came like an unexpected whisper in a darkened room. A tiny tingling in the back of his neck where Lana’s fingers touched his spine. An itch in his very bones. He tried to writhe against it, but she held him firm, and his struggles washed pointlessly against the wall of her strength. Suddenly he felt the itch break through to his soul … and then fire. Fire in every bone, in every inch of his skin, in his mouth and ears and eyes, in his bowels, and under his nails. Fire like a thousand red hot needles coursing voltage into his veins. He screamed in his brain, the final image he would remember that night seared into his mind, along with her words.

  “Tell her I won’t stop. I’ll never stop.”

  His mind tried to close itself off. He prayed for death.

  - - -

  As the phalanx of helicopters came in over the treetops, Ayala went through her preparation ritual. Her team was split into two groups, each with three leads, each lead with two men running with him. The groups were travelling in heavily laden Black Hawk gunships, with high-caliber machine gunners mounted on either side for suppression support.

  Leading the two burly choppers were two latest generation Apache attack helicopters mounting a range of armory designed to blanket areas with hailstorms of lead in an instant. Their front cannons, like the side machine guns on the Black Hawks, carried depleted uranium shells designed to explode on impact. As much to mark their target as to try and kill it. The pilots were wired into a real-time network designed by Amadeu and his team. Soon enough they may be the first to start using the new spinal interfaces they were now so close to perfecting, but for now they sufficed with having shared views of the entire squadron mapped to a small square in their peripheral, feeding info to their left eyes, and notably thus the intuitive right side of their brain.

  The team came in low, their movements coordinated by an AWACS radar plane circling above them, its potent sensors scouring the ground for information, and updating the team’s net. The whole was passed over a degrading code encrypted network designed by John Hunt himself. Even if Lana could hear their signals she would not be able to interpret them.

  Sitting in the copilot’s seat of the left Black Hawk, Ayala saw the town first as a map on her visor, then as a black smoke stack rooted in orange. They broke the tree line and spread out wide, covering ground fast. The Hawks touched separately on opposite sides of the town, depositing the three-man teams and then immediately lifting to give air cover.

  The teams were clad in the second generation of conductive armor. Ribbed with bionic assistance, their every move was exaggerated by machine muscles. Sprinting away, they scattered through the town. One team leapt in smooth bounds across the rooftops, laying down fields of fire to cover their colleagues. The suits made them nigh on invincible against ordinary troops, but they were still no match for the pure machine that they hunted, so they stayed tight. Flanking each other in carefully coordinated maneuvers as they swept the town. Infrared sensors mounted on all their slender but almost indestructible helmets sought anomalies. They sought patches of conductive material. They sought the blackness that covered their quarry like it covered them.

  They hunted the shadow of Lana Wilson. In three minutes they were done. Perimeters were set and the greater team was already arriving. The meat wagons began rolling in. The team kept in constant contact with feedback loops to their comms that actively monitored the status of each team member. Even if they never called for help, Ayala would know instantly if any of them were in trouble.

  But it was quiet, as it always was.

  Jumping the twenty feet or so from her seat in one of the circling choppers, she landed and jogged lightly over to one of her team leads as they coordinated the last of their sweep with the ground forces now surging into the shattered town. They were finding children huddling in houses, teenage babysitters fearfully staring at the husk of the town hall. The place they had last seen their parents.

  “Status, Ben?” she spoke in Hebrew. Each of her six team leads were the survivors of the operation in Gaza City three months beforehand. They were on an extremely short list of people who had encountered one of the Agents, seen what they could do, and lived to tell the tale. Combine this with the fact that they had each grown up in various units of Israel’s special forces, and you had the beginnings of the hunting party that was tasked with killing the almighty bitch they knew as Lana Wilson.

  “Teams count fifty-seven dead. One wounded, looks like he was broken like the others, but he’s still alive.”

  She looked at him quizzically. ‘Broken’ was the only term they had found for the way Lana mangled her prey. But they had never survived before. “Wounded … but still alive?”

  He nodded, already starting to move in that direction, and they set off at a run.

  Three men kneeled, guns out, surrounding a body not far from the main square. A fourth knelt by the man, tending to his wounds with a field medical kit. Ayala followed Ben to them, using the bionic muscles that lined her own suit to keep up with the team lead.

  The nearest of the body’s three guards moved smoothly aside to allow them to pass, maintaining his field of fire, and then stepped around them to reclose the circle, returning smoothly to a one-knee position.

  Ayala looked down at the man on the floor. His arms and legs were warped and broken, just like the rest. But his face was relatively intact. Not swollen like the rest, the eyes still in their sockets, the tongue not forced out under the jaw.

  “Is this our target?” she asked Ben.

  “Hard to say at this time, ma’am,” said Ben, keeping his eyes outward to guard his CO, “but he fits the description, and he is the only one we have found tonight who has been manipulated. The others were all shot or burned to death.”

  This was a new tactic. She was sending a message. “Maybe she wanted us to find him. Or maybe we disturbed her.” But she shook her head at that. “No, then she would have just ended him when she heard us coming. She meant to leave him alive. She doesn’t make mistakes. If he has survived this, then it’s because she wanted him to.”

  Ben turned and looked at Ayala and she met his stare, seeing that he agreed in the way his eyes asked what the next steps were based on such a conclusion.

  “OK, whatever happens, I don’t want Madeline to know about this. She is on edge enough as it is. This was a gas explosion. All dead. Which means we need to get this one out of here and to a secure location, immediately.”

  Ben nodded, and she went on, “Get a med team in here, get him stabilized, and then get him evac’d to the fortress.” He nodded again and she turned to look once more at the unconscious man on the ground. He was quiet now, but his face showed the strain of the torture he had been subjected to.

  But it was not this new turn that bothered her. They had been coming for this man. Before they had even known about the attack, they had dispatched a team to take this man to safety, him being one of the last people left tha
t had known Madeline and Neal as a child and was not either locked away in their bunker in Colorado or already dead.

  But Paul had changed his name after getting on the wrong side of some dubious money lending types in his native Florida. Apparently he had managed to shake his past and convince another group people of his spurious good intentions. Until now he had even gone undiscovered by both Lana Wilson and the team that was trying to save him from her. But they had caught a break only two hours beforehand, a random friend that had met Paul at his grandmother’s funeral only two years ago remembering the last name that Paul now used.

  “I just can’t believe that we were this close,” Ayala said to Ben as they walked away. “The fire is still fresh, our friend’s wounds are still open.” They had placed roadblocks for miles around, but they knew that such things would not stop Lana. Not unless they had tanks, and maybe not even then.

  He nodded, saying, “We nearly had her. But we are getting closer. Next time we will make contact.”

  He was half-happy at the thought. He very much wanted a piece of the woman he had tracked all across America, but knew that it may actually be her that got a piece of him when it came down to it. With the battleskins, they were as close to superhuman as any man had ever been, but that may not count for much if they ever came into contact with their quarry.

  Ben had asked Ayala several times whether the same technology that made the suits possible would allow them to replicate the Agents’ machine bodies and indeed there was talk of such things. For Ben was not alone in dreaming of a platoon of Johns and Quavoces to enable them to truly take the fight to Lana and her two friends still hiding somewhere in Eurasia.

  But such things would be impossible until they had the spinal interface finished, and even then it would not be as simple as that. Agent John Hunt had managed to smuggle a veritable treasure trove of schematics, scientific data, and other information to help humanity take the technological leap it would need to make if it was to have a chance of defending itself against the coming Armada, but it was not limitless, and its focus had not been on ground forces. The Agents’ machine bodies would be possible to recreate eventually, but the more esoteric parts would need to be reverse engineered, and that would not happen anytime soon.

  Of course, talk of fighting the Agents was all moot if they could not find them, and therein lay the issue.

  “But that’s just it, Ben, we didn’t get close, we just happened on the same target at the same time. We were lucky, that’s all. Not lucky enough to catch her, but it wasn’t skill that got us here.”

  Ben was not used to seeing frustration cloud the face of the woman that led their team. Drive, yes. Unrelenting pursuit of the woman that was ruining Neal and Madeline’s lives, without doubt. But never frustration. She was too good at what she did, and that required a mastery of any emotions that might cloud your thought. But now she was clearly bothered by something.

  She grasped his black shoulder and stared into his eyes. As he had gotten used to, it felt not like a firm grasp on his shoulder but a gentle pull on his whole body, his suit transmitting the pressure evenly over its entirety. But he allowed it to stop him and turned to her. Her eyes were intense. Anger? No. What was that emotion flaming in her pupils?

  “Paul Karmen has eluded us for three months,” she said. “What are the chances that we would both find him, via different paths, on the same night?”

  “Slim to none …” he replied. “Unless we found him by the same path.”

  “Which means that either Paul’s old friend decided to tell Lana what he told us, even though he only remembered it after we already had him in custody … or …”

  He waited for her to finish but then came to the same conclusion as her by himself. “Or she got it from us.”

  They looked at each other. They couldn’t be certain, but they had to assume she had hacked into their network somehow. While their field equipment was infallibly encrypted, it was impossible to secure every piece of data in a search effort as widespread as theirs. That hadn’t stopped them from trying, and their operation was phenomenally secure. But not secure enough, apparently.

  “We need John or Quavoce, and we need them now,” said Ayala, quietly. “We have a leak in our security, and we need to find it.”

  Ben nodded, “Until then, I’ll have all teams go systems silent, even back at base camps. We can unplug everything until the leak is patched.” They had set up bases in Washington, DC and Salt Lake City. From one or the other they could be anywhere in the country in less than two hours on the jets they had permanently fueled and waiting. Ayala ran the primary team in DC, the Northeast being the center of most of the attacks, while a secondary team operated out of Utah.

  But Ayala was shaking her head, “No, Ben, don’t shut things down. If she has found a way to listen in on us, then shutting down our systems will just alert her to the fact that we know about it.” She took in a deep breath and then resigned herself to her next comment, “Let’s face it, Ben, we’re never going to find her like this. She is too quick and too good at staying underground. I mean, maybe we’ll get lucky, but it’s unlikely. But if we know where she is getting her information from …”

  Her eyes narrowed and he nodded. They may be able to set a trap. Of course, they still had no evidence they could actually kill Lana even if they got hold of her. They may just be grasping the lion’s tail. But at least if they had some notion of where she might be, they might be able to get both John and Quavoce away from their duties protecting the spaceport and Research Group’s laboratory and onto their side of the fight.

  “I’ll contact John and ask him when he might be able to conduct a communications sweep,” said Ayala. “Until then, this conversation stays between us. Is that clear, Ben?” The agent nodded his assent and they returned their attention to the mutilated man on the ground behind them. Ayala only hoped she had made the right choice. If Lana had hacked their systems, then she may also know who the members of her teams were and where they were located. That made them all targets as well. Hopefully she wouldn’t come after them, but Ayala had to assume that it was a possibility. She knew Ben understood this too. He was cold to such things, but others on the team had families, wives at home, friends … vulnerabilities.

  - - -

  Despite their ardent search in the smoldering wreckage of the town, Lana is, in fact, only half a mile away, sitting in a tree, covered from head to toe in mud and dead leaves, hiding her energy-absorbent skin from the helicopters and planes circling above.

  She listens to their chatter, frustrated at the encryption hiding their voices from her. More because she longs to hear their anger and fear than any need she has to hear what they are saying. No doubt they are trying to figure out how she got to Paul first. No doubt they will try to find some bug or other method by which she might have hacked their systems, but they won’t find what they seek. It is far simpler than that. She found one of them instead. Mr. Moskowitz had proven most cooperative. Not through her usual coercion; she needed him alive if he was to remain useful to her. No, she had simply found his home and placed in its basement the black bag that had once been her lifeline. It didn’t bother with hacking his systems, they were too well encrypted for her to break them without setting off the alarms the traitor John had no doubt helped build into them.

  But if she couldn’t hack into their systems, she could listen to and watch Saul as he did. For two days now Saul had carried with him a tiny robotic spider lurking in his clothes. Sliding out of sight on nimble legs, it listened diligently to his every move. It never transmitted until he had gotten home in the evening. It remained passive and invisible all day as he went about his business. So it never set off the plethora of sensors and proverbial trip wires that now surrounded the White House and a growing number of technologically secure facilities across the world.

  She had hoped to get a bead on where Neal and Madeline were hiding, and maybe she still would. But for now she had gotten only the gift of lis
tening in on a scrambled phone call to Saul in the middle of the night, saying that they had found another of Madeline’s old friends. Saul had left for the Pentagon immediately to help coordinate operations.

  Lana, meanwhile, had set off herself. From that day’s hiding place in a sewer under a town near Pittsburgh, she had converged on Paul’s small town ahead of the crew coming to take him into protective custody.

  Now she watched. Looking at the team working to secure the area. She saw how they moved and knew that they had the beginnings of the encounter suits that her race had once called battleskins, before the advent of machine avatars like the one she now inhabited. She studied the weapons and sensors on the helicopters scouring the area and knew that they had armed them with bullets that would sting her thick skin. Burn her fibrous armor. Weapons that could, if fired with enough accuracy and persistence, actually kill her.

  She raged at the rare feeling of vulnerability. She couldn’t help but bring up visions of the fight in King’s Bay. The thousand bullets tearing into her. Her synthetic humanoid outer skin that had allowed her to walk amongst her prey flaying off her. The long weeks waiting while her systems recovered.

  As she pondered that fateful day, her machine mind continued to monitor the activity over in the devastated town. Sifting radio signals, tracking the Apaches and Black Hawks overhead, watching the black-suited personnel moving over and around the buildings. Through the noise, her mind notified her of something interesting. Over the networks a story was emerging. Not about the town, the airwaves were notably silent about that still. A press conference was being held in Washington. It was being mirrored by conferences in the UK, France, Germany, Japan, India and Brazil. It was discussing a new space project.