The Skinner’s breaths came in surges, causing his chest to swell beneath the protective layers of leather he wore. Taking one last look over the side of the overpass, Rico nodded and said, “That’s the last of this bunch.” On his way back to the main group, he ended another Half Breed’s twitching with a straight downward blow that put a pair of wooden spikes through its brain.
The only remaining sounds were the clatter of empty magazines being ejected and replaced with fresh ones from the group’s supply. Rico’s weapon shrank down to its most compact form amid a subtle creak before he removed it from his fist and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Everyone all right?” he asked.
Sayers looked down at two of his soldiers. One was stretched out on the ground and the other knelt beside him. “Negative,” the Lieutenant said. “We have a casualty.”
Rico stepped close enough to get a look at the fallen rifleman. He recognized the young man but didn’t know his name. The soldier’s leg was torn apart so badly that his foot and part of his calf hung by a few stubborn tendons. All Rico needed to see was the bone that had been cracked like a dry twig to know it was all over for that young man.
“Better step away from him,” Rico told the slender man who’d opened a field medic kit and spread it on the ground beside the wounded soldier.
“I can stop the bleeding,” the medic hastily replied.
“Don’t matter if you stop it or not. He’s been bitten through the bone. He’s gonna turn.”
“If I stop the bleeding, I can get him back to base!”
“You ain’t takin’ him nowhere, dammit!” Rico snarled as he moved forward to drag the medic away. He barely made it three steps before he was stopped by two more of the riflemen. Rico glared at them each in turn, which wasn’t enough to convince them to let him go.
“Let him work,” Sayers said.
Looking over to the Lieutenant with even more fire in his eyes, Rico said, “What the hell’s the matter with you? Ain’t you been listenin’ to anything we’ve been telling you people? The Half Breeds infect us through bone marrow. If they get their saliva or blood into someone’s bone marrow, they’ll turn! Is that so fucking hard for you grunts to understand?”
Sayers put himself between Rico and the wounded soldier. “I know about bone marrow, but I also know these things are changing too fast for us to keep track. There’s a chance that they’ll start to infect us some other way.”
“If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” Rico snarled.
“He’s right,” said a demolitions expert who kept her blond hair pinned up tightly beneath her helmet. Rico knew her a little better than most of the other soldiers. Not only had she been the one to cover him a few moments ago, she was known for taking the occasional opportunity to flip the Lieutenant some grief.
“What was that, Lance Corporal McCune?” Sayers asked in a way that was similar to a parent using a misbehaving child’s first and middle name.
She cast her eyes down at the squirming rifleman with the savaged leg and said, “These creatures only evolve to adapt. They’ve damn near made humans extinct by infecting us through deep bites, so why would they switch to anything else? If we wait too long, hoping for—”
“We wait until he’s out of time,” Sayers told her. He then looked around to the rest of the unit and asked, “Does everyone understand?”
There were nods all around, but it was clear that Rico and McCune weren’t the only ones thinking it was time to cut their losses.
“I’ve stopped the bleeding,” the medic said after tying off the wounded leg with a tourniquet. Looking up at Rico, he asked, “What about the antidote? Haven’t you cooked up more of that treatment against a Class Two infection?”
“It don’t work too well on wounds that bad,” Rico warned as he dug into one of his pockets for a small vial of clear blue liquid. “But here. Give it a try.”
“You need to make enough for everyone,” Sayers said. “It should be standard issue for field units like this one.”
Rico shook his head. “This stuff worked well enough back when Kansas City was attacked, but it’s been less and less effective since then. Even on smaller wounds, it’s down to a fifty-fifty shot. Give it a try, though. Can’t hurt.”
Ever since the Full Blood known as Esteban set the shapeshifter epidemic into motion, the Skinner treatment against Half Breed infections had become all but useless. Against the more aggressively evolved werewolves, the blue liquid might as well have been window cleaner. Sayers had already been briefed about that, which did nothing to calm him down as he hurried to catch up to the Skinner making his way toward the fresh Half Breed carcasses.
“Tell me you’re working on a new medicine to keep our men from getting infected,” the Lieutenant said.
“Course we are.”
“How close is it to being finished?”
Bending down next to a dead Half Breed while drawing a hunting knife from his belt, Rico told him, “It’ll be done when it’s done.”
Sayers squatted down so he was on equal footing with the Skinner. “Until then, it would be good for morale if you tried to at least appear more optimistic about our chances for survival.”
“We’ve learned the hard way that false hope don’t do anyone a bit of good.”
“But hope in general is about all that’s keeping us from rolling over and letting those goddamn nightmares tear our throats out and be done with it.”
When Rico stood up, he was holding a handful of bloody innards still partially attached to a chunk of skin. “You got a point there.”
Sayers nodded. “And you did a hell of a fine job taking out that other pack.”
“Sir!” the medic called out. “I think that medicine is working. The convulsions have stopped.”
“Is that a good sign?” Sayers asked in a quiet voice.
“Usually,” the Skinner replied. “I’ve been making that stuff extra potent to try and up our chances. Didn’t want to get anyone’s expectations too high, though. Far as I know, if he’s gonna change, it’ll be within the next hour. At least the shorter incubation times have cut down on all the waiting.”
“Finally, some good news.”
“If we’re done having our tender moment,” Rico grunted while holding up his bloody prize, “can you find me a baggie or something?”
CHAPTER TWO
Charleston might have been a nice enough city before the shapeshifters took over, but like most every other metropolitan area in the country that Rico had seen, it had become something else entirely; a bleak “after” picture only vaguely resembling the “before”. Since it was located so close to wooded areas and the Appalachian Mountains, Half Breed activity there was particularly bad. Street signs were reduced to broken metal posts protruding from concrete scratched to hell by countless clawed feet. Windows of nearly every building had been broken by so many waves of fleet-footed creatures that the shards of glass had long ago been swept away.
Since one of the infantry troops was helping the wounded soldier back to the pickup truck that had been used to carry the unit from base camp, the IRD presence in Charleston was down to five which included their Specialist. Sayers was near the front of the group with the light machine gunner on point. Signaling for them to halt, the Lieutenant turned to look over his shoulder. “McCune, where did that distress call come from?”
Now that she wasn’t in a firing stance with her assault rifle chewing up preternatural flesh, McCune seemed petite in stature. “Third Avenue, sir” she said in a reserved tone. “Whoever contacted us mentioned being close to Oakes Field.”
“Anyone know where that is?”
“I do, sir,” the medic said. “It’s just north of the interstate off of F Street.”
“Can you take us there?” Sayers asked.
“Yes, sir. We’re already headed in the right direction.”
“Just tell us when to turn, and keep in mind that we don’t have any street signs to go by.”
The medic walke
d over to the side of the road to get his bearings.
“We can catch our breath when we find some cover,” Sayers announced. “Quicker we get off this interstate, the quicker we can scout some of those buildings. That means we move out.”
The unit fell into formation and continued east along the side of I-64. A few ragged howls could be heard in the distance but weren’t the keening wails Half Breeds used to gather more of their own. They were just wild cries from animals that were constantly in pain and forever hungry.
Rico’s spot in the formation was on the periphery where he could get a mostly unobstructed view of any movement in the area. He slowed his pace until he was walking beside the IRD medic. “It’s Killebrew, right?” the Skinner asked.
The younger man nodded. “That’s right.”
“Shouldn’t you be with the wounded guy?”
“There’s not a lot more I can do for him. It’s better if I stay with the unit in case there are any more injuries.”
“Makes sense. You got access to drugs?”
Killebrew was about Rico’s height but much thinner and had a face that made him look just shy of enlistment age. “Drugs?”
“For the Half Breed antidote I’m workin’ on. Antibiotics, anything you might use for sterilizing, anti-toxins, that sort of thing.”
“What would you do with those?”
“Eh, you know,” Rico said with a wink. “A little trial and error. In case you haven’t figured it out, I ain’t exactly been to medical school.”
“Uh-huh.”
“A lot of what Skinners do is trial and error. Do you know how many men died before we came up with the medicine we use right now?”
“No,” Killebrew said.
“Well neither do I, and I don’t wanna know. All I know for sure is that we eventually came up with something. Until we find one of us that knows their way around a chemistry set, I’ll have to test a few things out.” Grinning as he set his sights to the horizon of low buildings and damaged fences, Rico said, “Makes me feel like one of the pioneers of our craft. Back to the roots, you know?”
“I’ll see what I can scrape up for you,” the medic told him. “But it won’t be much. We don’t have a lot of extra medical supplies designated for…experiments.”
“Gotchya.”
For the rest of the walk, Killebrew distanced himself from Rico. He did his best not to meet the Skinner’s eye and sped up his walking speed to drift farther and farther away from him. Fortunately, it took a lot more than that for Rico to feel anything close to uncomfortable. They didn’t have much ground to cover before reaching a thick cluster of train tracks running through a sparse couple of blocks. Even before things had gone to hell, it could have been a rough part of town.
“That’s F Street right over there,” Killebrew said while pointing just beyond the tracks.
“How far until Oakes Park?” Sayers asked.
“Oakes Field, sir. I used to play football there with my brothers when I lived here.”
“Sounds great. How far?”
Whatever nostalgia Killebrew might have felt didn’t go down very well considering the current condition of his city. “No more than two or three hundred yards, I think,” he said.
“All right, then. We’ll make our way down from here. Keep alert for any Shifters.”
The unit broke out rappelling gear and dropped the short distance from the overpass to ground level. From there, they moved northwest into an area that was equally divided between industrial parks and small, single-family houses. The homes that weren’t hollowed-out shells were closed up tight behind locked doors and boarded windows. Apart from the grinding rumble of generators scattered throughout the neighborhood, the only other sounds were soldiers’ footsteps, the rustle of windblown trash and the ever-present howling of Half Breeds elsewhere in the city.
“You know anything about this part of town, Rico?” Sayers asked.
“I barely know what we’re doin’ here. Apart from some distress call comin’ in, I figured it was just another hunt.”
“That’s about all we heard.”
“What about that call?”
“It came through on the short wave,” Sayers told him. “Gave half an address and that there were a bunch of people looking to be extracted from Charleston. We tried to get more than that, but the transmission went dead.”
“Half Breeds ain’t exactly smart enough to cut a signal,” Rico said. “Unless it sounded like the people making the call were mauled when talking to you.”
Sayers shook his head. “The transmission was cut at the source. I made sure to double-check.”
“That means their equipment either failed or they were cut off for some other reason.”
“Or by something other than Half Breeds. Aren’t Class Ones smart enough to know to keep a distress call from being sent?”
“Yeah,” Rico said, “but Full Bloods don’t exactly fear the cavalry being called in. I been spending most of my time scouting Huntington. You know of anything other than Half Breeds around here?”
“Negative. I could have briefed you on some of this before we left, you know.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because you never show up for the briefings.”
“Oh, right,” Rico said. “I suppose there’s that. After I received my fourth packet of documents that were mostly a bunch of lines blacked out with magic marker, I kind of gave up on the whole shared intelligence thing.”
“That’s just the brass being cautious. Don’t forget, you did hook up with Unit Seven after serving with those Vigilant terrorists. Besides, a lot of the classified bullshit was chucked out the window after the apocalypse.”
“And if I ever do forget about The Vigilant, I’m sure some of you soldier boys will remind me,” Rico said while chucking the Lieutenant on the shoulder.
“You never did mention why you decided to switch sides.”
“Nope. I sure didn’t.” Nodding to a spot further down the street, Rico said, “Looks like something’s been going on in that warehouse up ahead.”
Signaling for the entire group to stop, Sayers squinted at a sprawling building with white walls and a pointed roof. A few seconds passed before he spotted the hint of movement along one of the building’s corners. The Half Breed approaching that corner kept its body low and its nose pointed straight ahead.
“It smells blood,” Rico whispered. “Could be one of the guys who made the distress call.”
When Sayers dropped to one knee, the rest of the unit followed. “Is that warehouse close to Oakes Field?”
“Yes, sir,” Killebrew replied. “Oakes is straight ahead and over that fence.”
Rico could only see a shabby brick house on the corner and a shabbier wooden fence further down the street. There were some rolling hills in the distance, but he wasn’t about to question the local boy’s geography.
“Wright, was the L115 damaged on that overpass?” Sayers asked.
Private First Class Steve Wright was a tall guy with a round face and a severe dislike for covering long distances on foot. His sweaty features broke into a tired grin as he said, “No sir. I protect this baby with my life.”
“Then get up here and take out that Class Two.”
Handing his assault rifle to Corporal Marsh, Wright removed the long-barreled rifle that had been slung across his back. The ORD L115 didn’t pack as big a punch as some sniper rifles, but most of the IRD marksmen swore by them. They could be modified to take just about any sort of round the Skinners could dish up, which made them standard issue among every field unit currently in operation. When the rifle was slung, Wright cared for it like a newborn baby. When it was in his hands and ready to fire, he touched it as delicately as he would a woman.
He made his way over to a car that had been parked along a curb long enough to have been rendered useless by the Half Breeds that had swept through Charleston. Sitting with his back against one of the tires and his legs bent, Wright placed the rif
le’s stock against his shoulder and rested an elbow against his knee for support. He held the rifle steady, sighting through the scope and adjusting his aim using movements that were almost too minute to be seen. Finally, he said, “Give the word, sir.”
Both Sayers and Rico were watching the warehouse. “You see any more of those things?” the Lieutenant asked.
“Nope,” Rico replied.
“Take the shot, Wright.”
For a moment, it seemed the sniper hadn’t heard the order. Then, his rifle sent its round toward the warehouse with a sharp crack. The Half Breed staggered a few steps and dropped.
“Plus ten points for a head shot,” Rico whispered.
“What was that?” Sayers asked.
“Nothin’. Just an inside joke with an old buddy. I’ll move in and make sure the coast is clear.” Without waiting for acknowledgment or approval from the officer, Rico drew his Sig Sauer and headed for a break in the chain link fence surrounding the warehouse.
Now that he was using his wooden weapon more often, Rico could feel a whole new level of reaction within the scars on his palm. Every time he wanted to use the weapon for anything more than the chunk of wood it was, the spikes embedded in the grip needed to pierce his skin. The varnish that allowed the weapon to shift into different forms was a mixture of shapeshifter blood and Nymar extracts perfected centuries ago. Once saturated within a Skinner’s scars, the varnish also reacted to the presence of shapeshifters and Nymar.
Ever since the Full Bloods had claimed the world for their own, feeling the prickly burn of a shapeshifter’s presence wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. All Rico felt as he approached that warehouse was background static from the Half Breeds scattered throughout the city and a stronger twitch from the one spitting its last breath after being drilled through the cranium.
Kneeling down beside the dying Half Breed, Rico drew his hunting knife from its scabbard and grabbed the creature by the ears to lift its head. In earlier days, he might have started a collection of trophies for each Half Breed he’d killed. Times being what they were, however, racking up a bunch of Half Breed kills wasn’t such a rare thing. He settled for finishing off the Half Breed by driving his blade up under the creature’s chin and opening its throat like it was about to be pinned to a dissection tray.
Forged From Ash - Book #7 of the Skinners Series Page 3
