by Glen Frost
"Your body can be hurt, though I don't know if it can actually be 'killed' in the traditional sense of the word." Looking over the top of his spectacles, Niall had offered her a rueful smile. "Would you mind giving me your hand for just a moment?"
Anya did so, extending her arm as requested. Professor Walsingham peeled back the sleeve of her BDU shirt carefully, sliding it back up to the elbow. Then, as quick as a flash, he produced a knife from inside the pocket of his tweed jacket and jabbed the point into her forearm.
It may only have been a pinprick, but the wound burned white hot, sending jolts of pain along nervous pathways that Anya had thought to be long dead. She jerked her hand back reflexively, staring in wide-eyed disbelief at a necrotic black hole in her otherwise pristine flesh. A tiny wisp of smoke was curling up from the injury site.
"What the fuck was that?" Anya demanded, slightly shaken by the experience. It was no small thing to believe oneself to be invulnerable, only to find that you actually weren't.
"Silver," the academic explained, holding out the knife for her inspection. The blade was short, thin, and tapered to a wicked point. Picking up on Anya's hesitation, he reassured her that the weapon was perfectly safe for her to touch. She took it cautiously, allowing it to lay flat in the palm of her hand.
"I can be injured by silver?"
Walsingham nodded. "No surprise really. You've read the books, I imagine...or at the very least seen the movies. Silver bullets for werewolves. Silver blades for vampires. A lot of that stuff is actually rooted in reality, you may be surprised to hear. It's been twisted and distorted by horror writers and by Hollywood, but like every good story it does contain a kernel of truth."
Staring at the blade which had pierced her flesh and wounded it, Anya felt the boundaries of her worldview flexing again to accommodate this new piece of critical information. Even as a revenant, basically the walking dead, she could be hurt; just how badly, she had absolutely no idea, and neither did Walsingham.
"It gives me new respect for silver," she admitted, gesturing for him to put the blade away. The professor obligingly returned it to his pocket, buttoning his jacket up once more.
The seemingly endless hours of tactical and unarmed combat training suddenly seemed a great deal more valuable to Anya. She had been taught the difference between cover and concealment by her SEAL instructor, and how to handle herself in a fight where her opponent was armed with a bladed weapon and she herself had nothing. She had just developed an instant appreciation for her new skill set.
Walsingham wasn't present in Director Hubbard's office when Wilson escorted her inside, but neither was the director alone. Two men were standing next to the director's desk, conferring with one another in hushed tones. One was a military officer that she estimated to be in his early fifties; the other was slightly younger and wore a dark blue business suit that was so well-cut to his frame that it had to have been individually tailored. Both men stopped speaking immediately when the door opened to admit Anya and Neil.
A key part of Anya's training had drilled into her the habit of sizing up every room she entered in minute detail, gathering as much information as possible regarding any potential threats or benefits. She didn't spend much time assessing the man in the sharp suit, quickly realizing that there was little data to be had there. She turned her attention instead to the soldier.
The officer was on the shorter side and completely bald, his head having been shaved down to the scalp with a razor. Appraising the man's uniform, Anya determined that he was an army general. She recognized the insignia for special forces and airborne qualifications, along with the unmistakable RANGER tab worn on his sleeve. Based upon the jumble of colors that he wore on his breast, she guessed that he'd seen some shit during his time in the service.
"Anya, thank you for joining us. And before we go any further, please allow me to congratulate you on completing your training. I have spoken to each of your instructors individually, and all of them tell me the same story: That you have performed exceptionally."
"Thank you ma'am." Anya adopted a position of parade rest, hands lightly clasped behind her back. She still wanted to know just what the hell this was all about.
"To tell the truth, this couldn't have come at a more opportune time. As Commander Wilson may already have informed you, there is a situation developing in Utah that requires our intervention. Anya, Neil, this is General Fellon. He's with Army Special Forces. General?"
"Thank you, Director. As the director just said, we have a pretty bad situation developing in the Rockies. Please allow me to introduce Mr. Cromwell. He's with the Federal Bureau of Prisons." The other man nodded, his expression severe. "May we use one of your computer screens?"
"Be my guest." Gina Hubbard accepted a USB flash drive from the general, slotting it into a port on her desktop PC, then activated one of the two hi-res flatscreen monitors that were mounted on one wall of her office. Cueing up the only file contained on the drive, she handed the general a combination clicker/laser pointer.
All eyes turned toward the screen, which was displaying a photograph of some sort of prison facility.
"This is the United States Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX), one of the world's most secure prisons. It is located in the middle of nowhere, some one hundred miles from civilization on the flats outside Salt Lake City. It's the most impenetrable Supermax prison we have, along with its twin facility which is located in Colorado.
"The prison is home to the worst of the worst. Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives. Serial killers. Domestic terrorists. Gang leaders. Crime lords. To make it into this place, there has to be something pretty special about you...and not in a good way."
The general cleared his throat.
"The people who work there simply call it The ADX. Since it was first built in 1999, there have been precisely zero escapes from this facility. None. That record still stands today."
"Then at the risk of sounding obtuse, General, may I ask why we're all here?" Wilson was intrigued, but couldn't see where this was going. "If this isn't about prisoner recovery..."
"I'm coming to that, Commander. The problem isn't that somebody has broken out; it's that one of the inmates has taken over the whole damned prison."
"Well, shit," Wilson let out a low whistle.
"My thoughts exactly." Fellon clicked to the next slide. It showed the front entrance to the prison, a massive wall of concrete and barbed wire surrounding a gate. Strangely enough for a checkpoint, it didn't appear to be manned. There were no guards. At least, there didn't appear to be at first. It took the eye a moment to catch up with the two human-shaped forms that were in the picture.
"What are those?" Anya frowned, pointing toward the two T-shaped figures.
"Those...are two of the guards." Fellon used a button to zoom in on the image, increasing its magnification. Anya's lip curled in disgust. The two figures were indeed human bodies. They had been crucified, one on either side of the entrance gate. Each guard had been disemboweled. Long ropes of intestine sagged down out of their filleted-open bellies. To make matters even worse, although the guards' bodies were facing toward the camera, their heads had somehow been twisted 180 degrees backward. Anya reflected that if their necks had been broken before their deaths, then that could only have been a mercy.
"Disgusting," Gina breathed, the word imbued with cold anger.
"I couldn't agree more," Cromwell broke in. The man from the Bureau of Prisons added, "Just to put names to the faces, these are correctional officers Lesley Bridge and Shannon Byers. Both female. Both very, very dead. Byers' husband works at the ADX as a guard too. We have no idea of his current status or whereabouts."
"Very sad indeed," General Fellon agreed. "Our purpose now is to prevent further loss of life. As you'll soon see, there have been a number of deaths inside the facility already."
The general began clicking through more slides, most of them aerial shots taken by either planes or high-altitude drones. "That
large open square at the center of the screen is the prison's rec yard," he explained, "and needless to say, it's not normally full of bodies."
Anya counted somewhere between forty and fifty human bodies sprawled across the yard. Some wore the bright orange jumpsuits that indicated they were inmates, whereas others --much fewer in number-- had to have been employees or guards.
"At least fifty dead that we know of right now," Fellon went on, "and that number is based purely on what we can see from the outside. Who knows exactly what's going on behind those walls?"
"How did this happen?" Anya asked, ready to cut to the heart of the situation.
"Because of this lady." The general flipped forward three slides to display the mug-shot of a female in her mid-thirties. She had shoulder-length black hair, and facial features that lay somewhere on the border between handsome and beautiful. The look she wore pushed her more toward the former than the latter: She appeared to have been drugged, her eyelids drooping to half mast and the muscle tone of her face presenting as slack and loose.
"Her name is Deborah Jovacs. She was a soldier in the United States Army until three years ago, when she was dishonorably discharged for murdering a superior officer."
"If she's former Army but not current, sir, then may I ask why you are involved?" Wilson wanted to know.
The General's expression changed subtly, taking on an uncomfortable affect. There was a long pause while he and Director Hubbard exchanged a wordless look.
"My people need to know," Gina said quietly. "You can trust their discretion. Besides, they're all security cleared."
"NOBODY is security cleared to this level," Fellon countered. Sighing, he went on, "Corporal Jovacs volunteered to be part of a special project. A highly experimental special project, the name of which I am not permitted to so much as breathe within the walls of this room. Suffice it to say that the project had some...very negative side-effects on those volunteer test subjects, so much so that we ultimately ended up discontinuing it."
"What was the goal of this project?" Wilson asked. "And what kind of side effects, sir?"
"Here's what little I can tell you, Commander. The project was designed to test various experimental therapies developed by the United States government; therapies that would, if successful, have given American soldiers decisive tactical abilities both on the battlefield and off it."
"Such as?" Anya prompted.
"Such as the ability to make an enemy do exactly what you want then to do, just by using the power of suggestion."
"Are we actually talking about mind control?" Wilson sounded incredulous. "Because if that's the case, you have got one hell of a powerful weapon right there."
"The scientists call it something different — don't they always? — but yes, that's basically what we're dealing with here, Commander. As hard as it may be to believe..."
"I think you'll find, General, that we here at The Agency have a very high threshold for what we're willing to believe," Hubbard said drily.
"Yes, so I hear. Your point is well-taken, Director. At any rate, Corporal Jovacs was our star candidate. The treatment didn't just work well on her, it worked too well."
"Please define 'too well,' General. Are we talking killing people with her mind, "Scanners'-style? Thought control? Moving objects telekinetically? Starting fires?" Wilson was checking them off on his fingertips.
"Nothing quite so Stephen King as setting things on fire or other physical effects, but thought control -- yes. It was always the goal of the project that our test subjects would be able to influence others, imparting some degree of their will in order to get the enemy to do precisely what we wanted them to do. What we didn’t bargain for was just how strong those effects were going to be.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, Corporal Jovacs is able to command instant obedience with every word she speaks. If she tells you to go jump off a bridge, you'll do it. If she tells you to put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger, you'll blow your own brains out without question. If she were to tell you to go and strangle your own child, you wouldn't be able to help yourself.
"I've spoken to her former CO, and by all accounts Deborah Jovacs was a damned fine soldier. Unfortunately, whatever the scientists did to her, it messed up her brain very badly. Turned her into a card-carrying psychopath. She murdered seventeen men and women before we got her back under control again."
"So the Army got a little more than it bargained for," Wilson said, "but surely you put some safeguards in place?"
"We did," the General confirmed. "Our options were pretty limited. As a serving soldier, we couldn't simply...erase our mistake, if you will. Killing her was out."
"I hope so, sir, considering that Uncle Sam is responsible for making her the way that she is." Wilson sounded less than happy with what he was hearing. "So you stuck her in a jail cell?"
"Not exactly. We put her in a medical coma, snowed her with sedatives and shipped her to the Supermax."
"Why not Fort Leavenworth?"
"In a word, Commander, plausible deniability. We couldn't hide Corporal Jovacs in the military system. Everything goes on record, even when it comes down to black ops and black budgets. That was something we just couldn't risk. The Federal Prison system, with all due respect to Mr. Cromwell here, is just a little easier to lose somebody in, particularly when that somebody is comatose. It's not like she was going to be able to tell anybody who she was or where she'd come from. The Supermax has doctors on call twenty-four seven, so we'd always have a medical professional around to monitor her vital signs and keep administering the sedatives. It should have worked perfectly."
"How many times has that been said before?" Hubbard asked rhetorically.
"Right after the shit hit the fan," agreed the general, sounding rueful. "We have no idea how exactly, but Corporal Jovacs has woken up. Panic alarms started going off inside the prison facility late yesterday. The B.O.P. guys weren't able to talk to anybody inside. Nobody's picking up the phones or answering their radios."
"How do we know for sure that it's your girl?" Wilson asked. "There are some pretty bad hombres locked up in that facility. Surely it could have been any one of them?"
"Theoretically possible, but highly unlikely." Cromwell stepped in. "The Supermax prisons are designed to be the most secure incarceration facilities in the world. There's a very good reason for the fact that there have been precisely zero escape attempts from either of the two ADXes: they're locked up as tight as a drum. Escape is impossible...without inside help."
"You think that's what happened? An inside job?" Anya asked.
"Again, doubtful. One of the reasons why Corporal Jovacs was chosen for the program was her lack of any immediate family. She was a loner with few friends," General Fellon went on. "She had no links with any terrorist organizations, obviously. Plus the fact that nobody from the outside world had any idea of her whereabouts, let alone of her status."
"All of the guards and staff are vetted to a very high standard before being assigned there," Cromwell added. "We run rigorous background checks on every potential applicant to make sure there are no skeletons hiding in the closet."
"So for whatever reason, the corporal wakes up from her coma. What happens next?" The SEAL commander wanted to put them back on track.
"As soon as she regains consciousness and meets another human being, they'll do exactly what she tells them to do," the General said. "Her abilities work in a very specific and limited way: She has to have direct contact with you in order for her powers to work."
"Direct contact meaning what?" Anya probed. "In the same room? In physical contact?"
"She doesn't need to actually physically touch her target," the General clarified, "but at the same time, if she called you up right now and gave you orders, it wouldn't work. The same goes for radio or any other means of communication that we were able to test. Only the direct sound of her voice has this effect. And frankly, our scientists have no idea why that is."
"Sounds like a l
ucky break to me," said Wilson. "It's a limitation, and one that we can work with. So now we have what sounds a hell of a lot like a super-villain straight out of a comic book wandering the halls of a prison, getting everybody to do what she wants them to do. She needs to be stopped. I get that. Why not just have special forces assault the place?"
"Two reasons." The General counted them off on his fingers. "Number one, the loss of life would be unacceptably high. I could give a flying fuck about any of the inmates, but you've seen the specs of this place: it's a god-damned fortress, by design. We'd lose a lot of good men storming it, even with an air-mobile assault. As for number two..."
"You couldn't keep it quiet," Wilson said quietly, folding his arms across his chest. "That many military funerals is going to raise questions."
"Plus the families of the dead guards," interjected Anya. "We know for sure that several have already been lost. More would be killed in a firefight."
"Correct." General Fellon sighed. "It would be a media circus. The press would have a god-damned field day. Which is why we need you." He looked Anya square in the eye.
"A covert insertion. You'd go in alone, dressed as an inmate. Infiltrate the facility. Locate Corporal Jovacs."
"And...?" Anya just let the word hang there for a moment.
"And you bring her back under control, Anya," Director Jovacs said, interlacing her fingers in front of her on top of the desk. "By any means necessary."
"Alright, let's call it what it is. We're talking about killing her, right? Terminating with extreme prejudice?" Wilson eyed each of them in turn. "For the record, I have no problem with that. Doesn't sound like our girl's going to come quietly. But we ARE talking about executing an American citizen, soldier or not. Where do we stand on that, legally speaking? Is Anya immune from prosecution?"
"Yes. Absolutely she is," Hubbard answered immediately. "Corporal Jovacs falls under the same umbrella as any other non-human or supernatural threat, thanks to the type of powers she has. How she got them is beside the point. It's in the interest of national security to bring her under control. Are we all clear on that point?"
