The Variant Effect

by G. Wells Taylor

  A closet with metal shelves holding canned goods, bottled water and cleansers. There were towels and scrub pads, and a box with the Medcor Labs logo on it that Borland recognized from the envelope he'd pocketed. He flipped the box open with his gun and found a tangle of rubber gloves inside.

  Clunk. Bang. Clunk.

  They both turned to look at the gyp rock wall.

  "The basement's smaller than the first floor," Beachboy whispered and gestured at the stairs running down the gyp rock wall. "The kitchen goes on past the top of the stairs."

  "And all the other walls are cinderblock," Borland grumbled, then tipped his hood up and fanned some cool air into it. "Jesus..."

  "What?" Beachboy asked, covering Borland as he walked to the wall and set his hand against it. The painted surface was cool, but it wasn't cold the way the cinderblock would be.

  Borland glowered a question at the wall.

  Clunk! Bang. The wall answered.

  "Look along here," Borland said, scanning the base of the wall. "Look for marks. There'll be a doorway or..."

  He studied the couch opposite the flat-screen. Then he looked at the flat-screen, the shelves and even a couple pictures on the wall.

  "The couch isn't straight." He moved over to it. "Everything else is." He bent to give the couch a heave; his hernias throbbed and bulged painfully. "Agh!" He coughed, and stood up, pressing on his guts as he tried to nudge the couch out of the way with a knee. "Give me a hand."

  Together they slid the heavy couch aside.

  "Jesus, no," Borland hissed, his hand instinctively covering the photograph in his pocket.

  "What the hell is it?" Beachboy asked, pointing his shotgun at a flap of wood behind the couch. It was about three feet high and five wide, hinged at the top and painted the same color as the wall.

  Clunk! Clunk!

  "What is it, Joe?" Beachboy pushed at the corner of the wood flap, the door, and found it pulled upward easily enough.

  "A secret room." Borland knelt slowly, his gut heavy with pulled muscle. "For Ritual."

  "Biters?" Beachboy pulled the door up, found a hinged leg on the underside and snapped it down to hold the door up and open. Dust drifted out.

  "Not Biters." Borland shook his head, and pulled his hood up until Beachboy did the same, until they were face to face.

  "I gotta go in first and you don't ask any questions!" He wrinkled his nose to knock a drip of condensation off it. "You wait."

  "But, Captain..." Beachboy's expression was grim. He still managed a wry smile. "I'm in charge of rabbit holes."

  "Just shut up and wait!" he growled, pulled his hood down and lit his lamps. Beachboy frowned and reached for the toggle that would activate their intercoms, but Borland slapped the younger man's hand away and shook his head. He crawled into the opening.

  It was dark. Nobody home? He craned his head around, looked up and his lamps lit rafters, splashed across some bare pine joists where a room had been framed, removed or never built. Past it loomed an untreated cinderblock wall. He climbed to his feet. There was a large washbasin-more boxes beside it with the Medcor Labs logo. There was a small medical kit, a couple rolls of duct tape and a hunting cap on a table.

  Clunk!

  Nobody home but dinner.

  The noise came from the back under the kitchen where the dividing wall jogged out to accommodate a pair of support pillars, and more bare wood-framed joists.

  "Beachboy, come on," he grumbled, and then reached up to turn on his suit's intercom. "Hey, come in here."

  Beachboy grunted something on the radio and crawled into the darkness. He got to his feet in a cloud of dust.

  "Captain, you don't have to protect me. I know what I signed on for."

  "I'm not protecting you," Borland rasped.

  Clunk. Bang.

  In the dark space, the noise seemed to come from all sides.

  "Is that a dinner table?" Beachboy's headlamps pointed in the direction of the sound. The light fell on a table, showed them a girl doll, and a stuffed rabbit sitting there in chairs. The bunny had a booster seat. There was another chair-empty. The back of the fourth ran parallel to the false wall. A support pillar framed with pine obscured something past it in shadow. Beachboy took a step but halted when...

  Chewing noises. A splatter of fluid.

  Clunk and bang. And the wet ripping noises continued.

  There was a gasp of breath, more wet sounds-chewing-followed by a wheeze and quiet moan.

  Borland moved forward quickly, his guts churning. Behind him Beachboy came, shotgun ready.

  There were candleholders on the table, stained plates, utensils and napkins. On the floor a wine rack. Beside that, a portable music player's power light glowed green.

  Clunk!

  Slowly, Borland turned.

  "Ah Jesus!" His voice echoed over the suit's intercom.

  Beachboy's headlamps glittered on the chrome chains where they clasped a pair of thick wrists.

  The face was barely recognizable, twisted with Variant and madness.

  "Ah God! What happened to him?" Beachboy stared at the mutilated features. The man was naked, his crotch, abdomen and thighs had been skinned to the muscle and veins. "He ate his own lips."

  "Jesus, man!" Borland said raising his gun and cocking it. "Somebody got you good."

  Beachboy pushed Borland's arm down. "You can't shoot him!"

  "He presented. It's over," Borland growled and shoved Beachboy aside. He aimed his gun.

  "Ssskin..."

  Borland swung toward the entrance. Beachboy leveled his gun, glancing at the opening. He'd heard it too.

  Nothing.

  "Ssskin," the word was whispered, quietly, intimately, then a repetitive clicking sound followed and: "Skin. Skin. Ssskin."

  Behind them?

  Their hood-lamps flashed around the basement as they started turning back to back.

  "Where is it?" Borland shouted.

  Nothing.

  "Where?" Borland bellowed, gun swinging at...

  "Ssskin..."

  "I don't know!" Beachboy's shotgun whipped toward the drifting shadows.

  "Ssskin... skin... ssskin."

  "Wait! Wait, Captain!" Beachboy tapped at his hood, looked down at the toggle controls for... "We're picking it up on the intercom." His eyes were wide with terror. "What's that mean?"

  The intercom. Built for short-range suit-to-suit communications.

  "Ssskin..."

  It means. It means...

  Borland bared his teeth at the thing on the wall. "It means they just got somebody else."

  He raised his gun.

  ****

  PART SEVEN: ALPHA

  ****

  CHAPTER 61

  There was a flashing flicker of light from behind as a low rumble of thunder rolled up the tunnel. It pushed at their backs, heavy and ominous, plunging the shadows before them into deeper darkness.

  Hyde paused 10 yards from the sewer opening and let his hood-lamps play over the dirty water at his feet. Something had wrapped loosely around his right ankle. Keeping the barrel of his magnum up and ready, he dredged the water by his foot with a backhand sweep of his cane.

  Something there.

  The metal tip cut through the murk and snared a piece of elasticized rubber with a steel snap button. Then, with sinking heart, he recognized the ragged foot-long strip of clear material-the flexible joint fastening from a bag-suit. It allowed the wearer to adjust the one-size-fits-all covering.

  Ssskin...

  "What is it?" The corporal's voice was shrill. In his anxiety he bumped against Hyde, who had to brace himself with his cane.

  "Carefully, corporal," Hyde whispered, raising his gun and moving forward. Their boots splashed in the ankle-deep water and shuffled over humps of sandy sediment in the shallows.

  The sewer gurgled and echoed, water splattered and dripped, reverberating, alternately amplified by the tunnel's shape. Hyde's audio receptors were distorting the noises, making
the confined space confusing. He paused to switch on his intercom, and motioned for the corporal to do the same.

  "Keep your head," Hyde said, suddenly crowded by the younger man's breathing over his earphones. He started forward again. "Twenty yards from us the tunnel branches east and west." He peered into the circular shadow ahead. A heavy mist diffused their hood-lamps, but he could see the textured wet surface of the concrete walls where they met the massive block-like juncture that formed the joint where the sewer forked.

  Hyde had studied Colonel Hazen's maps as a matter of course, and while the water drainage system was simple enough, there were complicated overlaps of ventilation shafts and maintenance hatches due to the army's installation of the underground storage area. Not rocket science, but Hyde knew such old architecture was prone to structural failure, weakness and there was also the possibility of unmapped renovations and additions. Decades of army engineers, plumbers and gas fitters could have seriously altered the original layout.

  The corporal's breathing increased to an anxious whistle as they moved toward the east-west fork in the tunnel, as their hood-lamps created great black shadows to left and right.

  "Easy, corporal," Hyde hissed, wincing as his right calf cramped. His back was clenched by similar spasms, but he was committed now. It was only pain. He had to see this through. The Variant Effect was impossible to predict, and assuming the worst might damn someone he still had a duty to save.

  A chance you don't deserve.

  The water was deeper at the crossing. Hyde's foot landed on something soft and his balance shifted. He staggered and dropped to a knee, cane beating the water for purchase as he fell forward on his knuckles.

  And a face popped up out of the water. Skinned, bereft of character, two rolling dead eyes stared up into Hyde's.

  He snapped his teeth and hissed, heaving himself upward, feeling the corporal's hands lifting him, even as the younger man's shout cycled upward with terror.

  "God!"

  At their feet, a dead baggie, the exposed muscle and bone of its ribcage torn by three bullet wounds. Its lower half was draped with the remnants of a squad jumper and boots. By the size of the body and flare of its hips...

  "Shanju," Hyde breathed, studying the upper torso, a massive wound of raw meat and tissue; it was difficult to determine underlying structures. But there was fatty tissue, torn with the skin, and the distinct orange-sections of breast lobules. "It's Shanju."

  Thunder boomed up the tunnel.

  Then Hyde gasped. What's this? He levered her up with his cane.

  Remarkably, her skull had been opened and the brain removed.

  "What happened to her?" the corporal blurted, his hood-lamps focusing on the empty cranium. "Can Biters do that?"

  "Not Biters." Hyde shook his head, lowering himself over his cane to inspect the body. "This is a surgical wound from a Stryker saw." He pointed at the open skull. "Squad med-tech's carry a portable version for emergency amputations." Hyde looked up along the tunnel. "This was done without finesse."

  "Who did it?" the corporal whispered, hefting his shotgun at the darkness. "What's going on?"

  "I don't know," Hyde said rising. Somewhere his suit's audio had picked up the splashing of many footsteps.

  A group of them...distant.

  "Was it Lazlo?" the corporal continued. "Didn't Jailbird have a criminal record?"

  "And a meritorious police service record," Hyde said, tilting his head back to focus his hood-lamps on the young man. "Easy, corporal. Stay calm."

  "I'm just a driver." The corporal drew back from Hyde's skinless face, as his own voice echoed in the tunnel. "What am I doing here?"

  "Staying alive," Hyde said, turning back to the dead baggie, "so you will calm down." He reached for his chest-mounted high-resolution single-shot camera and tapped it a couple of times to detail the corpse and its open skull. Neither he nor the corporal was equipped with vid-com links. Bandwidth issues with uplinks kept video capture available to only a pair of designates per squad. There was always a Recorder too-a baggie who served as the squad's 'black box,' should the worst happen.

  "Brass' Science Units also carried Strykers back in the day," Hyde continued, glancing along the tunnel. "They collected samples after squads treated hunting packs." He growled wordlessly. "The samples were flash frozen in nitrogen thermoses. Time was of the essence." Hyde grunted. "We had to understand the Effect."

  "Ssskin."

  "What was that?" The corporal swung his gun to the left, then the right.

  That was on the intercom.

  Sounds of splashing and hissing echoed down the tunnel. But it was just sound moving toward them originating somewhere distant. Hyde heard a woman's voice, authoritative one moment, pleading near madness the next.

  She's alive!

  "We are in luck, corporal," Hyde said, barely pronouncing the words. "The captive is still alive." If it's her-but how?

  The woman's voice came again, echoing over the wet sewer noises. It was followed by the staccato splash of many feet running in the water. Then more echoes.

  Hyde dimmed his hood-lamps and ordered the corporal to do the same before they started pushing up the right fork in the tunnel toward the activity. The darkness closed in. Water was rising around his ankles.

  "Where are we going?" the corporal panted frantically.

  But Hyde pushed on silently, listening for sounds of hope.

  Then, clear and cold came the clicks and repetitions of the single word hissed: "Ssskin."

  Biters ahead-not far. Lots of them.

  Skin.

  He turned up the gain on his suit's external audio to confirm that indeed it was a woman's voice he also heard. Yes! There was a pleading tone to it, but it bore a commanding central core as it spoke, the content garbled by distance.

  "Corporal," Hyde whispered over the intercom. "Are you familiar with the expression: Tactical withdrawal?"

  "Retreat?" the younger man answered quickly.

  "I want you to fall back to the sewer opening and contact the squad." His voice shook, as another anxious explosion of sound and repetitions of the word skin scattered up the tunnel. "Captain Dambe should be here by now."

  The corporal grunted, "But you..."

  "Do not have as much to lose as you, driver," Hyde said. "And I am not defenseless." He turned to the corporal. "Get the squad! Tell them, I will attempt to rescue the captive or captives and retreat along the east tunnel. Hurry!"

  The corporal didn't hesitate. As his splashing footsteps receded, the dim light from Hyde's hood-lamps fell on a patch of curly brown fur floating on the water at his feet-the partly chewed skin of a small dog.

  CHAPTER 62

  The scene in front of the sedan was swept into clarity by the windshield wipers before melting in the steady rain-only to reappear briefly with the next pass of the rubber blades. The cycle continued. T-1 loomed ahead. All around it, hood-lamps flickered as the squad deployed and prepped. They'd be setting out portable welding kits, collapsible grating and razor wire. After the squad was in the hole they'd seal it shut. Then as they moved forward they'd search out openings and hiding places and seal those too. All temporary, none of it airtight, but the idea was to force the pack out into main tunnels or open ground where individuals could be treated.

  As long as there were shadows and nooks to hide in, the squad would be vulnerable to ambush, and a single Biter in full presentation could do a lot of damage in close confines, attacking when the baggies could not fire without hitting other baggies. It was why they shied away from automatic weapons. Pick your target and kill it.

  More than one squad had been whittled away in a tunnel fight back in the day. The attrition rate could be brutal against a large hunting pack. Their high card now was they were after a fresh pack-inexperienced Biters still orienting themselves to Ritual.

  "Give me another blast, Joe," Beachboy said as he stopped the car well back of T-1's mammoth outline. Past it Borland saw Lazlo's van. It was wrapped
in plastic and yellow tape. Bad. That's bad.

  "Sure." Borland handed the bottle over, and the younger man drank until he coughed. He had steered Beachboy toward the whiskey in the car since he didn't want to tap into his reserves. There was no knowing when he'd get another top-up, and he was banking that Aggie hadn't found his backup bottle in the T-1 sleeping berth. She had already confiscated the box of cranking materials from the trunk and was unmoved by Borland's story that they were for celebrations after, should any of them survive.

  "What the hell happened?" Beachboy's eyes pleaded as he handed the bottle back. "I can't believe I did that."

  "You'll be surprised what you'll do by the end of all this," Borland drawled and tipped the bottle, washing down bits of peanuts and granola. He'd eaten an energy bar on the way over. The snacks were clipped into various pockets in his bag-suit. He ordered his companion to do the same, but the younger man was too thirsty to eat.

  "But I..." Beachboy faltered. "I should have let you."

  "I was doing it," Borland said, remembering the scene, lifting his gun to treat the Biter, the baggie chained to the wall, and then Beachboy pushed his arm down. "But it was your call. He was your friend."

  "He took three shots to the head-point blank! That's impossible," Beachboy's voice broke as he reached out for the bottle again. There was an ounce left and he drank it.

  "Variant overrides natural responses." Borland took the empty bottle back and threw it on the floor. "So we have to do the same."

  "Is that why you burned the house?" Beachboy asked. "I know what you said, but tell me again. And why didn't we call the fire crew in to do it?"

  "Beachboy, we aren't in wonderland any more." Borland's voice was harsh. He remembered clambering out of the stalker's lair and digging a butane barbecue lighter and spray can of Lysol out of the basement's storage closet. They shoved the couch under the wooden stairs, buried it with newspaper from the recycle bin and soaked it with Lysol. The cleanser burst into harsh orange flame as they hurried out of the basement. Smoke was rolling across the main floor as they drove away.

  Without keys, they had to abandon Hyde's Horton. Let him explain it.