by M. D. Massey
Now, level four SNEs and above… well, I don’t know too much about what they are, exactly. Tony and Lorena won’t talk about level fours, so I kind of think they’re a myth. I haven’t even killed a level three yet, so I guess there’s no need to worry about it. If there really are level fours, though, I’d hate to think about what sort of monster that might be.
It gives me the shivers, just thinking about it.
Anyway, the punters work with the SNEs, so we kill punters every single chance we get. The thing is, Tony and I have a cover story that allows us to go into punter camps and gather information. He’s been taking me out more and more with him lately, and people are starting to recognize us as our cover identities. So we can’t just kill any punter we come across, at least not out in the open. And we can’t leave any survivors, once we decide to take a group of punters out.
I guess it sounds weird for a teenager to be talking about killing people, but things are a lot different now than they were before the War. I sort of remember what it was like back then, but I try not to think about it. It just makes me sad. I don’t listen to music that was popular back then, and I don’t watch movies or recordings of TV shows from that era. In fact, I pretty much avoid anything that reminds me of how things used to be. Instead, I spend most of my time learning how to kill Them. And the people who help Them.
Killing Them and their cronies makes me feel better about losing my parents during the invasion. Not a lot, but some.
So, when we heard the punters coming up the trail and Tony gave me the signal to take cover and prep for an ambush, I was glad to have someone to take my frustrations out on. I was still upset about letting that ghoul sneak up on me, and wouldn’t mind ending a few punters to make up for it.
I know, I know; it makes me sound like a monster, or like I’m cold-blooded. Well, the real monsters took everything from me. They took my home, my family, my life. Since then, I’ve been living underground in a glorified fallout shelter for most of my life. I went from playing hopscotch and going to school like a normal kid, to learning how to avoid getting eaten by zombies and vampires. So if I have anger issues, I have my reasons.
I followed Tony off the trail and checked my weapons. I carried a small but powerful crossbow pistol, a silenced .22 automatic, and a Kabar fighting knife. Those were the weapons that Tony had trained me to use so far—all silent weapons that I was supposed to use to kill our enemies from concealment. Well, except the Kabar; that was supposed to be a last resort weapon. Tony said that eventually I’d be able to fight up close and personal, but I just didn’t have the muscle mass right now to even the odds.
Because I’d been treated with an experimental serum that’d altered my genes, I was faster than the average person. I had better endurance, sharper senses, and greater strength than someone my size normally had. But because the serum also made me age slower, I was much smaller than I should have been for my age. Basically, I was a sixteen-year-old trapped in a twelve-year-old’s body. Tony said I’d catch up by the time I hit twenty, but it still bothered me a lot. When we went into villages and settlements, boys my age wouldn’t pay much attention to me because I hadn’t really filled out yet. Not like Uncle Tony would let me have a boyfriend—but still, it’d be nice to have boys my own age talk to me every once in a while.
Tony told me it gave me a “tactical advantage,” because people would underestimate me. Tony could be a real pendejo sometimes. Like I said: if I have anger issues, I have my reasons.
We waited in the brush just off the trail, and I focused on listening to their footsteps, just like Tony had taught me. Tony was altered too, but he was different than me. I didn’t know how, but I did know that he was the most dangerous man I’d ever met. He could move without sound, and disappear into the shadows and undergrowth like a ghost. If he wanted to kill you, you’d never see him coming. He’d taught me how to use my abilities since they first developed, and it was always my job to figure out what we were dealing with—how many people or SNEs were in a group, what weapons they had, what their capabilities were.
You could tell a lot by listening to the sounds people made when they moved. I already knew there were three men coming up the trail, each armed with rifles and possibly pistols, and they weren’t well-trained. I knew how many they were by listening to their footsteps, and I knew what weapons they carried by the sounds their weapons made as they moved around and slapped against their bodies. That they made so much noise as they approached clued me in to their lack of training.
I used hand signals to let Tony know what I heard, even though he’d probably figured out the same things already. His senses weren’t as good as mine, but he could still hear, see, and smell better than a normal human. “Parahuman” is what he called us. I called us freaks, but he’d never hear me say that out loud, because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But I felt like a freak all the time, and resented that I didn’t have a choice whether or not I got treated with the serum. Once you had it that was it. You were changed forever. Tony didn’t know how I felt. I kept that secret from him, because I knew he was just trying to help me survive.
As the men came down the trail, we listened to their conversation. I tightened my grip on my crossbow and pistol, but Tony motioned for me to stand down. I hadn’t been paying much attention to what they said, because I usually tried to ignore men like them. Punters were disgusting, and I didn’t need to hear about all the sick and evil things they did. Sometimes it got me into trouble with Tony when I missed information, but it helped me sleep better at night. But Tony didn’t want me to kill the creeps, so I figured they must have been saying something important. I tuned into their conversation as they approached our position.
A nasally, high-pitched voice pierced the quiet of the woods. “Van don’t want just any slaves? Why’s that, Colt?”
A gruffer, older voice replied. “Cuz he’s looking for someone. A woman, Kara something-or-other. Redhead, real good-lookin’, too.”
A third voice entered the conversation, this one flat and emotionless. “What are the delivery terms?”
Nasally voice spoke up again. “Speak English, Roy. I cain’t understand you when you use all them college words.”
Colt, the older one with the gruff voice, responded in a tone of contempt. “Well, Jake, maybe if you’d pick up a book sometime, you’d be able to understand Roy here.”
Jake with the nasally voice replied in a quieter voice. “You-uns know I cain’t read.”
The other two laughed at his response, and Colt spoke again once their laughter died down. “Van wants her alive, but he didn’t say we couldn’t have some fun with her. That good enough for ya, Roy?”
Roy grunted in reply. Jake spoke up again. “What’s so important about this woman, Colt? Why’s he paying so much if we can find her?”
“She’s a scientist of some sort. College education, knows about pre-War tech. They’re building somethin’ up there in Austin. Don’t know what, but it’s somethin’ they’ve been workin’ on for a while. Guess they need this redhead to help ‘em.”
I thought about what I’d heard. What could the SNEs be building in Austin, and why would this woman be so important to them? Everything I knew about Them had led me to believe that they were only interested in two things: killing humans, and eating humans. I’d never heard of any of Them planning anything, building anything, or kidnapping humans for anything other than a meal.
Weird.
Then again, Uncle Tony and Aunt Lorena were secretive as hell. Like, super-ultra secretive. I knew there were things they hadn’t told me about the serum, and the Cerberus project Tony always hinted at. Not to mention what we were really doing living fifty feet underground by ourselves, in a secret laboratory that could’ve come straight out of one of Lorena’s old spy novels.
I was lost in thought by the time they passed our position. After they’d passed, Tony slipped quietly out from hiding and shot two of the punters in the backs of their hea
ds with his silenced 9mm pistol. Then he choked the remaining punter into unconsciousness.
FOUR
SCENE
Shocked by how quickly he’d acted, I stepped out onto the trail with my mouth open wide enough to catch flies. I looked at the two bodies sprawled on the trail, their brain matter leaking out of their heads, and tried to keep a calm expression. I could never really get used to seeing the blood and gore, even though my uncle did nothing to hide it from me. But no matter how many times I saw a dead body, it still made my stomach flip a little.
Tony gestured at the bodies. “Help me hide these before he wakes up.”
I did as he asked, then helped him tie the guy up with zip ties and some paracord. Tony duct taped his mouth shut, just as he was coming around. “I need to interrogate him before it gets dark. Let’s carry him off into the woods, somewhere we won’t be heard.”
I grabbed his legs and helped carry him several hundred yards off, down into a depression within a thick stand of trees that would muffle any sounds we made. Although he wasn’t a tall man, he was older and fat, and that made it hard work. I wondered why Tony hadn’t made him walk, but figured he probably wanted the guy good and scared before he started questioning him.
Once we came to a halt, my uncle immediately began asking questions. It turned out the guy he picked was the apparent leader, Colt. Whether that was by design or by luck, I had no idea, but when Tony didn’t get the answers he wanted he went to work on Colt with a knife. Within less than a minute I couldn’t watch anymore, so I walked off into the woods and sat on a large rock. I still couldn’t tune out the muffled cries, the sounds of Colt begging for Tony to stop.
The noises went on for a long time, and then they faded as Colt’s breathing became more and more labored. Finally, all was still. Uncle Tony cursed quietly as I heard his footsteps approach. He gave a deep sigh of frustration and his brow was furrowed as he emerged from behind the thick foliage of a juniper tree.
“Come on, mija. Let’s head back before it gets completely dark.”
Without a word, I stood up and followed him back to the Facility. I looked at my uncle, wondering how a man could torture another human in the worst ways possible, and then speak so tenderly to his only niece, knowing that I’d heard it all as it happened. Who are the real monsters, Uncle Tony? Is it Them, or us? As tired as I was, I was going to have a hard time getting any sleep once we got home.
It took us a bit less than two hours to run the twenty miles or so back to the Facility. When we went out on training missions, we tended to range far from what Tony called our “base of operations.” This was mostly to prevent people from finding our little hideout. And by “little,” I mean freaking huge.
I sometimes felt guilty for keeping the Facility a secret, because living here allowed me to know comforts that few people had in the outside world. The Facility was a completely enclosed and self-sufficient underground area that was many times the size of the elementary school I had attended before the War. We had clean water that came from underground streams, filtered and purified of anything that might make us sick. We had electricity created by several different means, most of which I didn’t understand. And, because the Facility was underground, it stayed at a near constant temperature, comfortably cool during the hot Texas summers and warm enough to keep us from freezing in the occasionally harsh but short winters.
We also had tons, literally tons, of stored food and supplies. We had guns, ammunition, and thick steel doors and concrete walls well hidden from prying eyes. And most of all, we had the “pest control system”; or, at least, that’s what Tony called it. I didn’t know how it worked, but Lorena said it was based on the signals that level three and greater SNEs put out to control level one and level two creatures.
The government had done a butt-load of research into supernaturals before the War, and they had figured out a way to mimic that signal somehow. It kept us from being overrun by herds of deaders, and it also kept us from being found by level three and higher SNEs as well. They tended to avoid coming near the territories of the stronger supernatural creatures, mostly because of the survival of the fittest mentality they had. Or so Aunt Lorena said. I guess the pest control system made them think a serious badass lived around here. All I knew for sure was it kept us safe from Them.
After we entered through one of the hidden entrances—never the same one, always a different route—I dropped my gear off in my room and headed down to the research level to find Lorena. Captain Lorena Perez was my other adopted parent; she’d helped Uncle Tony raise me after he’d brought me here. She was also the person who gave me the serum, because she was one of the few people left who knew how to make it. Lorena spent most of her time down in the research levels, making more serum and trying to refine the effects, so one day we could make people who were powerful enough to drive Them back where they came.
At least, that was what I assumed the plan was. Not like they would clue me in or anything.
I ducked into the hidden entrance to the stairs that led to the sub-levels, and snuck into the labs as quietly as possible. This was a game Lorena and I had devised when I was younger, both as a way to keep me from going out of my mind with boredom, but also to teach me how to move silently. Rarely did I ever sneak up on her, but I’d learned that when I did it might earn me an unintended glimpse at the things she kept down there.
If you’re going to extract DNA from monsters in order to inject it in humans, you need to have monsters to take the DNA from, right? Well, down on the sub-levels is where the containment areas were, and in all my years there I’d never been told exactly what was living right below us. I’d guessed that there were things living down there that were much worse than anything I’d seen, and I’d been punished severely several times for trying to find out what they might be.
Talk about mixed messages. First they told me to try to sneak up on them, and then they punished me for sneaking around the place. I guess I was supposed to be sneaky, but just not too sneaky. How screwed up was that?
As I entered one of the lab areas next to a containment section, I noticed that the security door between the lab and the containment area was open. I padded silently through the lab and snuck along the wall, just outside the door to the containment cells. I held my breath as I peeked around the corner and into the containment room, and nearly gasped at what the dim light inside revealed.
FIVE
MIEN
As my head popped around the edge of the massive steel security door, it took a second for my better-than-human eyesight to adjust to the low light in the room beyond. The room was long, spare, and lined on both sides with the same uniform enclosures, five to a side. As the scene came into focus, I saw Lorena leaning forward with her hands on the thick, bullet-proof glass of the last enclosure on the right. Every other enclosure had a sliding shutter made from half-inch steel plate that was locked down over the floor-to-ceiling observation glass. But the steel shutter of the enclosure in front of Aunt Lorena had been opened to reveal what was hidden behind the glass.
The woman who had helped raise me was pressing her hands to the window in front of her while her forehead rested gently against the glass. Her breath slightly fogged the window as she took slow, shallow breaths. Her eyes were half-closed. It looked like she was trying to communicate with whatever was inside. It was dark on the other side of the enclosure, and deep shadows concealed whatever was held captive in the steel and glass box. I continued holding my own breath, not even daring to exhale for fear of letting her know I was watching. Moments of discovery like this were rare, and I was determined to see what was in that box.
Without warning, an insect-like face lunged into view beyond the glass. The face was humanoid, but in place of human eyes there were eight pairs of black orbs positioned in a cluster on either side of its face. Some were larger, some smaller. The thing’s jaw split into two large fangs, and each twitched as they rubbed against each other, dripping with wha
t I assumed to be venom. A row of small, sharp, more human teeth lined the upper jaw and the mandibles to which the fangs were attached. Its dark, shell-like skin was sort of hairy but smooth and segmented, dotted with small gray flecks in odd patterns. It was the most alien creature I’d ever seen, and just looking at it made me gasp and pull my head back around the corner.
As I ducked back out of view, I heard the click of a large button being depressed, followed by the hydraulic sound of the security shutter dropping into place over the observation window. I stood there for a moment, leaning up against the huge, cold vault door, my breathing shallow and my skin clammy. The panic and fear created butterflies in my stomach, and my heart was beating like crazy. Never in my life had I felt so grossed out, or so afraid at just at the sight of an SNE. I realized that I was shivering, and pushed myself off the door. Rubbing my arms, I drew a deep breath to calm myself.
My adopted aunt hadn’t even flinched when that thing lunged into view.
“Gabby? I know you’re out there, so you may as well come in. Anyway, it’s high time I showed you how to operate the emergency security measures in here.”
Her voice sounded so human and warm. I had to remind myself that this was the woman who’d helped raise and nurture me for the last eight years. But the look on her face; had she been communing with that… thing inside the enclosure? I decided not to think about it, and closed my eyes as I took another deep breath and let it out. Get your shit together, Gabby.
Before I’d even finished releasing the air from my lungs, the touch of a cold, firm hand on my arm made me jump at least three feet in the air and several steps away from the door. I let out a little shriek as I did, opening my eyes and landing in a crouch with my Kabar in my hand.
As I scanned the area for threats, I realized it had only been Lorena. She stood in the doorway in her usual uniform, which consisted of combat boots, military cargo pants, a black t-shirt, and a white lab coat. Her thick black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her dark, almond-shaped eyes looked at me with a mixture of amusement and concern. As I gazed into those dark brown irises and large black pupils, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the glossy black eyes I’d seen on the creature just moments before. I gave a small shiver and sheathed my knife.
