The Variant Effect

by G. Wells Taylor

  Fifty feet behind him, a group of men and women cluttered up a crowd of steel folding chairs arranged in front of a bank of tool lockers across the back wall. They were in their twenties, wore gray and green jump suits. No insignias, nothing to mark the civilian or military organizations from which they'd volunteered. The recruits either saw him coming or caught the twinkle on Tinfingers hands because they all suddenly rushed to their feet and waited, not at attention, but at something like it. No one saluted.

  The activity startled Hyde, who looked around at the commotion. Then he anxiously grabbed at his wheels, ran himself toward Borland and Tinfingers.

  "What's all this for?" he rasped from under his hood. His shoulders shook and he flinched, glanced back at the volunteers. "Why's it happening so fast?"

  "Still feeling rusty?" Borland snarled, backhanding the need for a drink off his bristly pucker.

  "What do you know?" Hyde probed, as sharp as ever as he wheeled in close.

  "No more than you," Borland answered.

  Something about his hate for Borland pushed Hyde's anxieties aside, ramped up his faculty for persecution the way the Variant Effect could magnify normal human strengths and weaknesses. He broke with his personal protocol and grabbed Borland's jacket high enough on the lapel to get leverage and bend him forward.

  "That's you," he hissed. "Always, it's what's in front of your eyes." His tongue smacked loudly through the uncovered jaws. "Your mind never looks."

  Borland refrained from physically brushing the skinless fingers away, instead made a fanning gesture with his hands until Hyde released him. Then he straightened up beside Tinfingers, cheeks coloring, sensing some possibility.

  "No mystery. Brass isn't taking chances with what we found." He spread his arms, palms open. "Now they want us to teach the new recruits."

  "Obviously, on the surface, Borland that works." Hyde's hood shook. "But I see only enough volunteers for a single squad."

  "And we found three Biters." Borland frowned, glaring down at the covered head.

  "Think! Did we ever just find three Biters back in the day?" Hyde's voice ratcheted the words out mechanically. His skinless hands clenched the arms of his wheelchair: knuckles flexing, yellow-white cartilage, red muscle and scar tissue glistened. "Something else is going on." One of his hands slipped under his hood, rubbed his skinless chin. "I don't trustÖ"

  "Borland!" A woman's voice echoed in the stationhouse.

  They turned toward the bay doors and caught a partial silhouette. The set of the black woman's wide hips, muscular legs and full chest suggested danger and sexuality. She had a square chin, thin nose with flaring nostrils and dark penetrating eyes. Her hair was cropped close with gray dust at the temples. Her heavy duffle bag dropped from her broad shoulders with a clunk.

  "Aggie?" Borland said turning, so caught off guard he bumped Hyde's shoulder like they were friends at a pub. "Jesus, I can't believe it."

  Agnes Dambe strode across the stationhouse floor, her boots thumping time like the doomsday clock. She was the daughter of West African immigrants. She used to go on about her people, the Hausa of West Africa, usually while she was sipping tea and everyone else was cranking. A rookie back in the day, no more than 18 when she signed on.

  She walked up to Borland smiling, lifting a hand like she was going to shake, but at the last second she dropped her shoulder and punched him hard in the face.

  CHAPTER 22

  Borland's ears buzzed and roared; his vision blanked momentarily, but he was too heavy, too well set in his shoes to knock over that easily. He swayed back toward her, blinking.

  Agnes stood defiantly in front of him, fists up and ready. She was wearing T-shirt, a heavy horsehide jacket, elbow pads and bulletproof vest. The rest of her wore khaki pants and high leather boots. Agnes surveyed her former superior officer. Absurdly, Borland thought back and realized she was ready for promotion at the end of the day. He wondered what her rank was now. Thank God for painkillers.

  Borland rubbed his jaw, pressed the distant pain into numbness.

  Aggie turned to Hyde and did a little half bow. "Captain, it's an honor to meet you again."

  Hyde nodded, kept his head low. He muttered something unintelligible.

  Borland flinched when Aggie swung back to him.

  "I heard what happened, Joe!" said Lovelock's protégé, hand-to-hand fighter second only to him. "You murdered Marsh." Aggie worked basic fight training on the recruits back in the day.

  "Lovelock?" Hyde hissed from his chair, his body suddenly rigid with interest. "He murdered Marshall Lovelock?"

  "Not murder, read the reportÖ" Borland growled, shaking his head. "It was his haywire wife that started it all. And Marsh wasn't giving me a choice."

  "No choice?" Aggie stuck her chin out, sneered over the balled fist she raised under Borland's nose. "How many times he pull you out of the fire?"

  "Hey, I saved his balls a couple times myself!" Borland snarled. "I thought you'd be grateful for that." He frowned. "And you weren't there."

  "Lucky for you I wasn't, you fat son of a bitch." She looked at her fist and sucked on the knuckles. "That punch was for killing a friend."

  "He wasn't right anymore," Borland started. "Went nuts with his wife. They had Varion for Christ's sake!"

  "You forget already?" Agnes frowned. "Doesn't matter to Agnes why you did it. She's gotta give you a lick whatever the reason." She hefted her fist. "Just so we don't get comfortable killing friends."

  "Another thing Borland can't remember," Hyde said, his voice raw. "Lovelock must have forgotten who he was dealing with." He went quiet a second. "Or Marshall made the mistake of trusting him."

  Borland nodded, then shook his head and almost stepped away. His heart felt thick and heavy. The booze and pills numbed the damage to his face, but it weakened something deep inside. He felt pressure build behind his eyes. Grinding his teeth he turned to Hyde.

  "Shut up!"

  Hyde started to rise up in his chair like he was about to argue; then he dropped his chin, looked down to pick at his scarred palm.

  Agnes moved her gaze from one to the other smiling. Borland couldn't tell what that meant. He steeled himself for another punch.

  "You're like the Niagara Waxworks!" She frowned, every bit as beautiful as the last time Borland had seen her. Seasoned, that was the only difference.

  "I'm glad I never wasted time missing you two," she said finally and laughed.

  Tinfingers cleared his throat.

  "Now that we've got the pleasantries out of the way," he said, gesturing to the volunteers and witnesses in the stationhouse. "We have several things to discuss before Brass arrives." He nodded at the volunteers and started walking toward the big room at the back where the squads used to eat lunch, crank and hold meetings.

  The recruits had been standing there the whole time like the United Nations kids in the Disney ride, big round eyes watching the old guard arrive-unable to hide their excitement at the mix of notorious characters they'd read about in eBook histories from back in the day.

  "The recruits have been briefed," Tinfingers continued. "As far as training goes, we don't have time for simulations. They've got the basics, and have watched old orientation videos."

  "Why don't we have time?" Hyde rasped as he wheeled along at the kinderkid's side.

  "You'll soon see," Tinfingers said over his shoulder.

  Borland followed, wishing he had something to crank himself up a bit and he wasn't thinking coffee. His flask was half-full of whiskey, but he'd been running on cheap diesel fuel too long. That crap worked fine in peacetime, but if he were going to war, he'd need something to sharpen his edge. A glance at the volunteers showed him a couple of them were young enough and ethnic enough to maybe have the necessary connections. They had the look.

  CHAPTER 23

  It was not old home week; that much was for sure. Borland would never have survived waiting the 20 minutes in the stuffy and hot stationhouse lunchroom if he hadn't mana
ged to slip a stiff shot into his coffee under the table.

  It wasn't Tinfingers and Aggie's painful conversation that had him squirming in his skin. That was a stilted, and uncomfortable exchange that started up after Tinfingers' brief recap of events: Borland and Hyde's discovery of skin eaters at the Demarco furrier building, and the former finding an illegal cache of Varion at the Lovelocks' and their unfortunate demise.

  And it wasn't the army of memories that was clambering behind Borland's face until it felt swollen and explosive-crowding his throat and chest until he could barely draw a breath. He could take that.

  No. It was Hyde. He sat at the lunchroom table opposite Borland. Stripped of features, the remains were heavy. The black clothing and hood draped over him like negative echoes. Everything but the scars was missing. And the old goblin had canted his head in such a way that his shadowed hood fell partially open, the fold of dark material gaping at Borland like the black mouth of a rotten corpse.

  And he smelled like a bag of old meat soaked in turpentine.

  Borland's skinned hand throbbed through the haze of whiskey and painkillers. The missing strip of dermis on his chest flared like the lash of a whip.

  By the time Brass finally entered, Borland was close to exploding. He wanted to rush from the building or pull his gun and start shooting at his spooks.

  Brass was almost six-foot-six and all the extra years had done nothing to diminish the broad football player shoulders that pushed out the edges of his expensive gray suit. In fact, Brass seemed bigger, more robust than he'd been back in the day. Of course, back then he'd been young, an early twenties up and coming corporate liaison and security officer for the Varion company brought in to coordinate efforts with the Metro cops and the municipal administration.

  The Variant Effect first response was chaotic at best. Federal and municipal law enforcement agencies and emergency services personnel struggled to deal with what looked like a nationwide outbreak of insanity. First there was a rash of suicides that drew the eye. Law enforcement statistics showed a spike in violent crime at that time, but crime rates always fluctuated. It was easy to blame that increase on a hundred different things.

  Suicide rates, not so much. People just started killing themselves. The sky rained men and women as the Variant Effect distorted the impulse control of depressed and otherwise unhappy people. It presented in them as sudden suicidal extremity. Jumpers were the most spectacular at the start of the day. One city clocked the highest frequency at 65 in a single afternoon. But there were others, the showstoppers who had more spectacular answers to their feelings of hopelessness: ramming their cars into other cars, into crowds, into fuel trucks, into schools. Some of them had the forethought to load up their cars and vans and pants pockets with accelerants or explosives before doing themselves in.

  The first responders to these incidents were worried about homeland security, terrorists and criminals. They had no idea they were dealing with real 'suicide' bombers. These ones jacked on Variant just wanted to die and they didn't care who they took with them.

  So, there was an initial violent defensive reaction from law enforcement that was later massaged into a more sociological response by bleeding hearts that was later jackbooted back to violent when the true extent of the Variant Effect was realized.

  A flyer went around law enforcement agencies, emergency response centers and the military services advertising: Special duty. Hazard pay. First come. First serve.

  Borland always remembered that last part of it with a crooked grin or frown. That "First Come. First Serve," part like it was a huge opportunity a smart man wouldn't pass up.

  At that time, Borland was still swinging double shifts as a Metro cop: driving rounds all day doing traffic and ticket stops, and walking a beat until the wee hours-napping whenever he could lean his head against something. The double shifts barely kept him afloat, but kept him performing at a level that guaranteed against advancement. He needed the extra shifts for money to grease some palms he owed for personal loans and to calm the many wolves that were attracted to the door by his excessive lifestyle. He was no jetsetter, or lover of luxury cars but once the booze started flowing he stopped understanding basic accounting. And who cared about profit and loss, credit and debt, when any day a cop could find himself wrapped around a bullet. Especially a cop that was deep in debt to loan sharks, one that lost track of who was grafting whom.

  Walking the beat was best. It took him through some rough sections of town where he could chat up the locals over free shots-the hell with doughnuts-and where he'd learned the art of confiscating drugs in lieu of criminal charges. Hell, those guys always just ended up back on the street the next day. What was the point of the paperwork? And if an overworked and underpaid cop got a little extra in the process, who cared? At first it was confiscation and re-sale. That worked until he realized he could bust the guy he was reselling it to, so he started taking a touch from him. Then those guys wanted to pay him outright in cash, because their higher ups were worried that Borland would find his way to them. But by then Borland had already started using some of the confiscated products.

  In the end, he was taking a little of both. He had to. He owed money.

  He was just starting to get paranoid about Internal Investigations when the first unnamed Variant outbreaks began. Borland wasn't stupid. He had known it was just a matter of time before they put the cuffs on him.

  Then came the flyer.

  They had him at hazard pay.

  CHAPTER 24

  Brass had coffee-colored skin and only the slightest haze of gray in his hair that he wore trimmed tight to his scalp. The design opened his ears up like car doors, but he wore enough African-Celtic handsome in his face to make up for them. He smiled broadly at the table after he shut the door, and then turned to Hyde. He had to bend at the waist to speak to the cripple.

  "Captain Hyde," Brass said in his broad Mid-western accent. "We are fortunate to have you on board to meet this threat." He extended a hand to shake. Hyde kept his hood low and juggled his empty, scarred palms before Brass reached out and took the skinless right hand in both of his.

  Borland watched this with a scowl. Brass, like other Varion liaison officers, was a slick operator who could talk his way out of his own grave. He was the public face for Borland's squad and others back in the day. There was grudging admiration in the ranks because he protected them. It wasn't until years later that pensioned soldiers like Borland came to realize that Brass' sugar coating did not follow them into retirement and that back in the day the same silver tongue often shaped the orders that sent them to their dooms.

  And Brass worked for the people who designed the Varion molecule. By proxy, so did the squads. Who can you trust in a set up like that?

  Numbered companies bankrolled by Bezo, the Varion parent corporation, created the Variant Squads. The squads were then leased to cities and states to deal with the Variant Effect. Squad members were termed contractors.

  Democratically elected governments could not handle the legal ramifications of city police gunning down Variant Effect victims: skin-eating schoolboys, suicidal priests wrapped in C-4 or bulimic runway models gone cannibal. There was no way to make it look good for the six o'clock news and the voting public. And with a pack of Variant Effected obsessive-compulsive lawyers filing civil suits with rabid judges suffering from manic messiah complexes, no one with any real authority wanted the responsibility.

  It was a lot easier to hire civilians that you could feed to the wolves. If the civilians responsible even survived the 'legally actionable event.' Bankruptcy protected the individual squads, and the Variant Effect's wider impact on the legal and political system absorbed the moral outrage. Any squad members that were responsible for indiscretions could be fired and their motivations blamed on the Variant Effect. It wasn't until halfway through the day, and after, that the Variant Effect Squads started being properly recognized for the work they did. Borland knew most veterans would stop short of s
aying 'honored.' But after the day, society came awake with the mother of all hangovers, and viewed the excesses of Variant Effect Squads as necessary evils-and any criminal behavior an unfortunate side effect of fighting a toxic enemy. POOs were deployed to identify insane squad members and help to build back-stories to explain the extreme answer to the extreme outbreak.

  The Variant Effect was like gangrene, and the squads dealt with it like frontier doctors. As it grew and spread, amputation became the only answer.

  "It is good to see you again," Brass said, studying Hyde's lowered hood. "I know we didn't see eye to eye back in the day, but I have always admired your fortitude under the grave circumstances that ended your career."

  Hyde hissed something and snatched his hand away.

  Brass continued smiling, his eyes gleaming slightly at the show of disgust. He turned to Agnes. She was standing rigidly at the end of the table with a hand extended. They shook.

  "Captain Dambe I am pleased that you could come. We need your help more than ever."

  Borland frowned, realizing that Aggie must have been promoted somewhere back near the end of the day, which meant she might have led her own squad. But things were pretty hazy near the end.

  Agnes responded the same way women always did when shaking hands with Brass. She giggled, recovered quickly and then pumped his big sinewy hand long enough to suggest she was unconsciously thinking of pumping something else. That was the way Borland saw it, anyway.

  Brass retrieved his hand finally, nodded to Tinfingers and turned to Borland.

  "Well, Joe, I read the report." His features melted with empathy. "Terrible."

  This new glance at Brass in such a familiar old setting had Borland pressing at his hernias and adjusting his new jacket as he got to his feet. The trouble at Lovelock's had left his last new jacket a mess, so he'd helped himself to another one out of the evidence locker. He was wondering if the juvies had knocked over a Big and Tall store, because it fit.