by Jake Bible
“Not true,” Blaze argues. “The average mission into the Sicklands poses a fifty percent chance of survival. Sometimes as high as sixty, but rarely. It’s almost negligent the way GenSOF sends us out there.”
“I give up,” Paulo says and takes a seat on the concrete, his back up against the building. “Go kill yourself, man. Do whatever it is your fucking weird AiSP like brain is telling you to do.”
“Interesting,” Blaze smiles. “My thought patterns are similar to an AiSPs. I wonder if this is how Worm thinks all the time.”
Paulo frowns at Collette. “Is this not freaking you out?”
“I don’t know him like you do,” Collette replies. “But I’ve been around a lot of bipolar folks in my time. He seems to be in the manic stage right now.”
“Hmmmm,” Blaze mutters. “I don’t believe manic is the word. Close, but not quite.”
“I’m gonna just call it the cuckoo phase,” Paulo says. “It sums it up.”
“That’s not it either,” Blaze says. “Transformative phase, maybe?”
“Whatever you call it,” Collette says, her eyes on the mob. “I still don’t believe you’ll get through that. If we follow and you’re wrong then we die too.”
“I’m not wrong,” Blaze says.
“But if—”
“I’m not wrong,” Blaze insists. “My gut says I’m right.” He smiles and pats his belly. “Literally, my gut says so. I think my special bacteria is a lot more special than anyone thought.”
“Ya think?” Paulo snaps. “What fucking gave that away?”
“No more time to talk,” Blaze says. “I have a thirty second window to get in there before the dynamics of the mob shifts. After that I’ll have to recalculate, which could lower my survival percentage considerably.”
“We wouldn’t want that,” Paulo says, getting to his feet. He holds out his hand and Blaze takes it. “Good luck, man.”
“We’ll be right behind you,” Collette says.
Paulo looks at her then looks back at Blaze, nods, and gives Blaze’s hand a quick pump before letting it go. “Yeah. We will. Never leave an operator behind.”
“Wait until I have the corpses piled up,” Blaze says. “Then sprint as fast as possible and get right behind me. If you are more than four feet away from me, your chances of living diminish exponentially.”
“We wouldn’t want that,” Paulo says again.
“See ya in a few,” Blaze says then jogs away from the building and right at the mob.
“He’s so fucking dead,” Paulo says, looking about the area. “We should probably figure out a Plan B.”
“Good idea,” Collette says. “He’s not going to last long.”
35
“Holy shit,” Red says as he watches Blaze appear from the side of the building. “What the hell is he doing?”
“He’s doing exactly what his body is telling him to do,” Tanya replies. “To engage and fight his way through. By now, he’s calculated the best route and is prepping himself for the perfect offense. He’ll cut through them quickly. We should be ready to join him or we will lose our window.”
Everyone stares at Tanya.
“He’s going to cut through that?” Ton asks. “I’ve worked with Blaze a long time, but he’s not that good of an operator. No one is. He’ll get five feet before he’s taken down.”
“I wish you would listen to me,” Tanya sighs. “Just watch carefully, Lieutenant. My son is about to surprise you all.”
They watch as Blaze reaches the mob. Nearly everyone’s jaws drop as the man becomes a blur, moving so fast that he’s almost hard to see. The first dozen or so civvies he reaches are tossed aside like pieces of trash, flung away from the mob and out into the street, their bodies already broken before they hit the pavement.
The next dozen civvies and cooties slow Blaze down enough that the trained operators are able to track how he fights. None of them can even comprehend the skill, force, and speed he uses. Their training tells them the moves he’s utilizing, but the combinations of strength and agility used to execute those moves are beyond anything they’ve seen.
“Bastard has been slacking in the squad,” Ton grins. “Holy shit.
“He could never have done this in the squad,” Tanya says. “It has taken several chained events to trigger this. I must admit it is almost overwhelming to witness my life’s work finally come to fruition.”
“You must be so proud,” Jersey snarls.
“I am,” Tanya says, ignoring Jersey’s venom. “I truly am.”
36
A right elbow thrown to the right crushes a skull. A right fist brought forward shatters a ribcage, tearing into a man’s torso, ripping out his lungs in one hard yank.
A left fist grabs a man by the neck, snapping his head off. Still held by severed tendons, the head is swung out in a wide arc, cracking skulls one, two, three, four, five, before it becomes useless pulp and is tossed aside.
A forearm up to block a swing. A left leg extended to snap a femur. A right kick to pulverize an abdomen and all the unprotected organs inside. A spin and a blindingly fast swing, catching several cooties in a wide haymaker, a fist punching across face after face after face, leaving a trail of ripped open cheeks, torn off noses, shattered eye sockets, dislocated jaws in its wake.
Blaze doesn’t pause, doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t even think as he moves forward step by step, kick by kick, punch by punch. His body hums with a unity of focus and attention never before reached by a human being. His left pinky toes can’t wiggle without every other cell in his body knowing exactly what they are going to do. The sensation of an eyebrow raise is shared with each molecule of being. Thought is no longer separate from action; they are one and the same.
Blaze is at one with himself in a bacterially induced form of pure nirvana on Earth.
Not that he knows it. In fact, he knows very little. His conscious mind has ceased to be the forefront of thought as instinct takes him over completely. If anyone were to speak to him by name, he would barely comprehend that they were addressing him.
The man known as GenSOF Sergeant Courier Class Simon “Blaze” Crouch does not exist anymore. Someone new rips his way through the mob of civvies and cooties.Something new has arrived on the street before GenSOF Tower. Something with one single purpose.
Complete the objective and get inside the tower while killing as many affected people as possible.
Blaze takes to that objective like he is born for it.
A quick prompt from his subconscious mind, that bit that bridges his instincts and conscious thought, tells him to glance over his shoulder, even while in mid-decapitation of a screaming woman that has leapt at him from the shoulders of a sore pocked man.
Blaze comprehends the sight of Paulo and Collette hurrying across the street towards the opening in the mob he has created. He understands that this is part of the objective, but a piece of him refuses to tell him why.
Then a cold wave of fear hits him and he falters.
He falters enough that two men are able to get inside his reach and tackle him about the chest and legs, tangling him up so he ends up doubled over, bent at the waste and falling hard onto the pavement.
In less than a second, fifty people are piling onto him, their hands ripping at whatever exposed skin their fingernails can find purchase. Teeth are bared and bite down hard, trying to rip through his armor and into his flesh. When they can’t do that then the teeth and claws work together to rip the armor from Blaze’s body, only the crush of the mob keeping him from being stripped naked in seconds.
Yet even with the weight of the mob pushing down on them, the bottom cooties are able to get most of Blazes armor off and reach his exposed flesh. Blaze screams as fingernails dig into his skin and teeth start to bite hunks from his arms and shoulders.
The sound of Paulo and Collette screaming, yelling for him to get up, to keep fighting, slowly reaches his ears and some of that lost conscious thought starts to return. His name being shouted over a
nd over stirs something inside him. Then the shouting turns from the calling of his name to expressions of pain and panic.
“Never leave an operator behind,” he says.
Diseased fingers work their way into his mouth as he utters the words. He promptly bites them off, spitting them back at their former owners.
Blaze shoves with all his might, a ragged wail coming from his throat as the bites in his body rip open even more. He gets just enough space between himself and the cootie directly on top of him that he’s able to pull his legs up, bringing his knees to his chest. Then with all of his strength he kicks up and out, sending half a dozen cooties flying off of him and the rest tumbling to either side of his body.
He’s on his knees, gasping for air as the mob recovers and swarms over the top of him. But it is far too late for them to stop what is about to happen. His feet press against the pavement and he stands up straight, the violence of the cooties and civvies washing over him like a hard rain and nothing more.
The wounds on Blaze’s shoulders, chest, neck, arms, body begin to bubble and pus. A rancid stink fills the air, masking even the stench of the mob. Bite marks disappear under a layer of yellow ooze and black lines spider web out from each and every one of Blaze’s wounds. His skin stitches itself back together at lightning speed, leaving angry red scars that pulse and throb to the beat of his heart.
Half of his left cheek was torn away while he was under the mob, but now the skin slowly grafts itself back together, looking like a stop-motion effect.
A scream gets Blaze’s attention and he turns to it, snapping two cooties in half with his bare hands so he can have a better view of what is happening to his friends.
Paulo struggles to fight off three cooties as Collette stands with him back to back, her right arm hanging useless and limp, blood pouring from her shoulder. She swipes at the mob with her left arm, barely able to keep some space between her and the attackers. But her swipes quickly become weaker and weaker and her knees begin to buckle.
As Collette collapses, she is caught by Blaze, his left arm gripping her tight to his side while his right arm smashes, slams, grabs, and destroys any that get within reach.
“Hey,” Collette says. “Thanks.”
Blaze just nods, the many parts of his personality unable to decide on how to respond with words. Collette’s eyes go wide as she sees the state of his body and the continually oozing liquids of various colors that seep from his wounds, seeming to glue him back together as he continues to fight.
“Hey, man!” Paulo says. “You still holding to that seventy-five percent chance of survival theory?” He risks a glance over his shoulder at Blaze and almost freezes in his tracks. His training is all that keeps him from just standing there and staring. “You got a little something on ya, bro.”
Blaze gives Paulo a curt nod and keeps fighting. He spins about and hands Collette to Paulo then turns back and cracks two cooties’ heads together. As their bodies fall, he kicks completely through a civvie, sending guts out the man’s back to join the broken bits of spine that spray across five others that come at Blaze. Those civvies quickly meet the same fate and are forced to watch as their arms and legs are ripped from their bodies, one by one, two by two, and flung over their heads as they collapse to the pavement, each of them limbless nubs of people.
Paulo watches in stunned silence as he holds Collette to him and stays as close to Blaze as possible without risking catching collateral damage.
In seconds, not minutes, the three operators are standing at the mangled entrance to GenSOF Tower, a sea of blood and bodies strewn about them.
Blaze takes a couple deep breaths and glances at Paulo out of the corner of his eyes.
“You…alright?” he asks, his voice a garbled rasp of phlegm and gravel.
“Um…are you?” Paulo asks, staring at the yellow, green, and grey pus that has hardened into tough scales, covering almost every inch of Blaze’s skin. “You look a little different.”
“Feel…different,” Blaze says. “Not good different.”
“Hey,” Collette whispers. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Blaze says. He hacks up a humongous amount of phlegm and spits it onto one of the many piles of corpses that surround them. “That’s better.”
His voice is closer to normal, and he’s about to speak, when anything he could possibly says gets lodged in his throat as he watches who is running towards him.
“Blaze!” Jersey screams then skids to a stop as she gets near enough to see exactly what’s happened to him. “Blaze…?”
“I warned you, dear,” Tanya says as she pushes past Red and Ton, who have followed Jersey into the sea of death. “Hello, son.”
“Mom?” Blaze asks.
“It has been a while,” Tanya grins. “It is good to see you’ve finally come into your own.”
Blaze shakes his head, pushing away the shock of seeing his mother amidst all the carnage, and glances down at his body and the metamorphosis that has occurred.
“Holy fuck,” he whispers.
“Yeah,” Ton says. “You can say that—”
“EVERYONE ON THEIR KNEES!” a voice booms from the tower as men and women stream out of the entrance, rifles to their shoulders, armor at full power. “THOSE THAT DO NOT COMPLY WILL BE TERMINATED!”
“Calm down, Captain Bryan,” Tanya says, holding her hands up. “A quick retinal scan will tell you I am now in charge of everything that happens from this moment on.”
One of the people with rifles pauses then lifts his visor. Captain Bryan studies Tanya for a second.
A GenSOF operator glances at Captain Bryan and the man nods. The woman hurries over and places a small box in front of Tanya’s face. A red line scans across her eyes and the box beeps. The woman’s eyes go back and forth as she reads the results on her visor’s display.
“Identity confirmed,” the woman says. “Uh, Captain? Am I reading this right?”
Bryan taps at his wrist as the data is streamed into his visor display. He grimaces and then he salutes.
“Control,” Bryan says. “I relinquish command to you.”
“No need to do that,” Tanya says. “You seem to have kept GenSOF from being completely annihilated. Well done, Captain. You may retain command of GenSOF. I’ll just expect you to listen and carry out any orders I give.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Bryan nods. He glances past Tanya. “Ton?”
“Captain,” Ton nods. “You should listen to the lady. She seems to know more than any of us.”
“I am guessing that,” Bryan replies. “Let’s get everyone inside. You look like you can use some rest and some food. Supplies are limited since many of the AiSP systems have collapsed, but we should be able to rustle up at least one hot for each of you.”
“I am sorry, Captain, but we do not have time for rest or for food,” Tanya says. “I will need to see the command center this instant so we can strategize our assault on the Control dome.”
“Assault on the Control dome?” Bryan asks.
“I will explain as we ascend to safer surroundings,” Tanya says.
“Yes, Control,” Bryan nods. “I’ll show you the—”
“I am fully familiar with GenSOF Tower,” Tanya says as she walks past them all and heads inside the tower.
Tanya’s people are right behind her, followed closely by the GenSOF personnel. The unaffected civvies go next, leaving Coffin Squad to stare at Blaze.
“Did your mother just get called Control?” Jersey asks.
“I have no idea what’s going on,” Blaze says, shaking his head.
“But I didn’t hear that wrong, right?”
“No, you heard it,” Ton says, looking at Blaze. “Your mother has some explaining to do. And just when I thought I was out of questions.”
“Questions will have to wait. Come on,” Red says as he helps Paulo with Collette and they hurry the wounded woman inside. “We’ll figure it out later.”
Ton starts to clap Blaze
on the shoulder, an automatic movement he’s done a thousand times, then stops just before his glove touches the hardened pus.
“You alright?” Ton asks.
“Not sure,” Blaze says.
“You will be,” Jersey says, a fierce intensity in her voice. “You always are.”
Blaze only nods and gives her a weak smile as all of them turn and head into the tower.
38
“The city is lost,” Bryan says as he stands in the GenSOF Tower’s command center, pointing at a display showing the damage to Caldicott City. “It’ll be years before we can rebuild. We’ll need to evacuate everyone we can to one of the other cities.”
“No need,” Tanya says. “Those cities are lost as well. The Other is very thorough.”
“This Other you keep talking about,” Bryan frowns. “You’ve known about him for a long time, but you never thought to tell GenSOF?”
“Wouldn’t have made a difference,” Tanya says. “All of this was going to happen no matter what. A select few of us have been putting pieces into place so that when it did happen, humanity would have a chance to survive.”
“Survive what?” Red snaps. “None of us have any fucking clue as to what the hell you are talking about!”
“Calm down, Mr. Blakely,” Tanya says. “What is occurring is simply the ending of something that began a long while ago. Many of you believe the Unseen Wars are over. That we have lost to the Strains and learned to adapt. You are wrong. The Unseen Wars never ended, we never lost to the Strains. We have merely been in a holding pattern, a semi-truce between sides. That truce has ended. Apparently, humanity has been deemed unworthy to live and is now set for extinction.”
“By the Other?” Bryan asks.
“Yes,” Tanya nods. “Although, you may know him by a different name. Dr. Maurice Caldicott.”
“The guy that created the Static Reactor Shield?” Jersey asks. “The guy that saved humanity by inventing something that has protected us for decades from the Strains?”
“Is that what he did?” Tanya laughed. “Perhaps you should evaluate the data more closely, Ms. Cale. Think about it for a couple of seconds. Do you feel safe? Have you ever felt safe?”
