The Variant Effect

by G. Wells Taylor

  "And, now that Variant's back, the rules no longer apply," Borland insisted. It had begun to rain while they were in the house, and he expected the accompanying gusts of wind to fan the flames.

  "But protocol?" Beachboy insisted.

  "Ziploc. Gas. Burn. I know." Borland nodded. "Protocol's there to quarantine a site to give tech time to prove Variant presentation. We know what happened and you treated the only Biter at the site."

  "Treated?" Beachboy's eyes were wild as he hurried past the realization. "Why was he chained up?"

  "A stalker." Borland slapped at the door handle, opened it to the cool night air. "I know who did it."

  "Is that why Hyde was there?" Beachboy grabbed Borland's arm. "Does he know?"

  "No," Borland said, shaking his head-heart sinking.

  "So why do we keep it quiet?" Beachboy's fingers dug into Borland.

  "I'm ordering you to play along until I can prove it. I'll take the blame." As usual, and stalker talk will spook the squad. "Welcome to the day," Borland growled and yanked his arm away. "In the meantime, we found your friend there. He had already presented and you had to put him down." His expression softened, and he rubbed at his jaw. "Wait till you see Aggie's protocol on that one."

  He climbed out of the car and watched Beachboy's dark shape appear on the other side. Something about the set of the man's shoulders had changed, even in the dim light of reflected hood-lamps, he looked uncertain. He'll make it-just popped his cherry and needs a good cry.

  And Borland thought back on the scene in the basement, in the dark and dust of the stalker's lair. He remembered Beachboy pushing his .38 down and raising his own gun. He could still see the tragic revulsion on the younger man's face as he fired and fired and fired...

  "Borland!" Aggie's voice ripped through the dark air as she crossed the space between T-1 and the sedan. The bag-suit hugged her athletic form. A shotgun hung over her right shoulder from a strap that ran across her chest, dividing and accentuating her breasts. She carried another shotgun in her left hand.

  Behind her, the squad had formed ranks beside T-1. "We're ready to deploy. Hyde's still in there, but we can't raise him. Wizard says the weather's screwing with the electronics."

  As if to prove the point, the sky flickered and thunder rumbled. Rain pattered noisily on their bag-suits.

  Borland nodded, his fingers squeezing his vinyl hood and pulling it from his belt. Beachboy's palm-com had warbled seconds after they set fire to the stalker's house. It was Aggie calling, ordering them forward to Lazlo's position: the hotlink entry point. Hyde had made contact, a garbled messaged from his driver. Lazlo's crew was missing. The skinned squad captain and his corporal had entered the sewer in pursuit of survivors.

  One death wish leads to another.

  Borland watched T-1's ramp fold up. An ominous boom followed as the armored body locked tight. Mudroom would be secured away in the driver-socket. Wizard would be in the squad compartment, coordinating communications with her jury-rigged equipment.

  "Aggie," Borland said, gesturing to the transport. "How am I going to consult?"

  "First person." She stepped in close and pushed the extra shotgun into his hand.

  "Come on, Aggie. I can't move in those tunnels!" Borland snarled. "It's been 20 years. I'm not in shape for that."

  "I'd say you're about the right caliber for the hotlink," she said, glancing over at the sewer opening where it stuck out of the hillside like a gun barrel.

  Borland gave her that one with a shrug. She rarely teased.

  "You've been doing pretty well so far." She stared at Beachboy. Aggie could see he was far off. "We lost three baggies at HQ and at least one here. I can't spare anyone."

  "But..." Borland gestured to his physique. "I'll slow you down."

  "You better not, and if you get stuck in the hole we've got sparklers to go through you." She turned to Beachboy, and he snapped to attention. "What happened?"

  "Biters had entered the house at that address and," the young man's voice cracked, "we were too late to help. He-he presented."

  "Who?" Aggie's glare intensified.

  "Go easy," Borland grunted. "He had to..."

  "I shot Mofo!" Beachboy blurted.

  "Mofo presented?" Aggie's focus tightened. Borland watched her shoulder drop. "And you shot him?"

  Beachboy nodded, and Aggie punched him with a hard right to the jaw.

  He dropped on his ass, looked bewildered as Aggie extended a hand and pulled him back to his feet.

  "That's so you don't get comfortable killing friends." Her voice was heavy with emotion as she slapped the younger man's shoulders and helped him adjust his bag-suit.

  "Thank you, ma'am," Beachboy said, sucking on a split lip. "I won't."

  "What about the little man on the tape?" Aggie switched gears, turned to Borland.

  "Nobody else home." He shrugged. "Might be the individual that Hyde's trying to rescue from the Biters."

  "Who lived at the address?" Aggie asked.

  Borland paused, lifted his open hands and then shrugged. "I didn't have time to research it."

  "Mofo was infected during the attack?" Aggie shook her head. "Hyde would have said something."

  "Who knows? The old cripple's gone ape-going off half-cocked without backup," Borland said dismissively, before adding: "Oh, yeah and-there was lots of body fluid, and we had no way of ziplocking the place." He wheezed. "It's a residential area. The back doors were broken in. Neighbors could have entered so I burned it."

  Aggie pursed her lips like she was about to speak, hurl an insult or say something caustic. Instead she turned and walked toward the squad.

  CHAPTER 63

  Hyde pushed himself through the pitch black, his hood-lamps dimmed to a dark red glow. The last waves of adrenaline and hope had burned down to embers. He was exhausted and had already been forced to slide his gun away so he could use both canes to manage the slippery footing. It was a dangerous proposition but he had no choice. His right foot was cramping with every step, his lower back was seized with spasms as he shivered in the cold. The skin-shell suit had shipped water and he had no skin to insulate him. His coat was soaked and clung to his aching legs, tangled in his braces.

  The sewer's low ceiling forced Hyde into a perpetual crouch, not a stretch for a man on canes, but it did not allow a change in stance and so inflamed his aching hips. At times, the circular sewer opened outward where new construction replaced the old tunnel with flat walls and floor. For those short stretches, he could straighten up to allow some circulation into his cramped shoulders. But otherwise, there was no relief.

  He labored over his canes; drool hanging from his jaws. The silver pendulum swung each time he craned his neck or twisted his head up to catch echoes. Just water sounds, drips and splashing; but there were other things that he tried to identify. Voices?

  The suit's external audio system picked up the rapid movement of Biters in waves-and sometimes, dreamlike among them, he was sure he heard a woman's voice talking, at one point pleading, and then cajoling, insinuating. Impossible.

  No one knew what the early Biters were like before Ritual was fully formed. Were they more human...?

  SCREECH!

  The ear-splitting whine of a high-speed electric motor drowned out his eavesdropping-ahead, something small and shrill-a power tool-squealed. Then he caught a flash in the dark, as if amber light was boiling in the water. A silhouette appeared over it, hunched and backlit by hood-lamps. Some 40 yards from Hyde, near where the tunnel branched east and west, someone in a bag-suit was bent over something in the water. This far in, the liquid was flooding halfway up Hyde's calves at times. The rain was falling hard up on the surface and all those square miles of airport tarmac would be channeling the water down into the tunnels.

  The shrieking stopped and as Hyde moved closer, the stranger's hood-lamps showed activity momentarily above the water's surface before it sank out of view. It was just a glimpse, but enough. The stranger pulled the bra
in out of a red raw open skull and pushed it into a black canister that he then swung up over his shoulder on a strap, where two similar containers hung.

  Hyde hissed, hooked a cane over his top button and dug into his coat for his gun, but was forced by numb hands to search with his eyes.

  When he looked up with magnum drawn, the mysterious baggie was gone. Glimmering light shimmered from the tunnel on the right where Hyde knew the sewer stretched on to the east for half a mile to another cistern where water drained directly from the runways.

  Moving cautiously, uncertainly on his single cane, Hyde slowed as he approached the crossing. An upgrade to the sewer created a flooded space 10 feet across where the cramped main pipes intersected inside a massive concrete culvert.

  Hyde was able to rise out of his crouch near where the knee-deep water still glowed. Some source of light beneath the surface gave off a pinkish ambience, but sudden splashing sounds to his left kept him from giving it more than a glance. Then the word: "Ssskin" reverberated from the black hole that marked where the tunnel branched to the west.

  He glanced to his right and saw a silhouette in vinyl shrinking, splashing away on an eastern course. A black moving figure etched over a spark and then...

  "Ssskin." Click. Click. Click. "Ssskin. Skin. Skin." Click. Click.

  The hunting pack!

  Hyde swept his gun around to the west and aimed into the smothering black circle of shadow. His hand came up to his hood-lamps but froze as his eyes adjusted, made out a single distant circle of dim light. And movement. Black shapes lurching across the orange-brown opening. The cistern. Then stronger light flashed and flared chaotically behind monstrous shapes.

  "Ssskin!" The word hissed across the darkness, growing louder with excitement and anticipation. Ssskin. Ssskin. SKIN!

  "Be good! Be good!" A voice, a woman's.

  She's alive!

  Hyde gasped, quickly pushed a sleeve back and tapped a combination of commands into his skin-shell's display controls. Immediately, the illusion of skin appeared on his hands and arms. It gave off a faint glow that warmed the tunnel walls. He pushed his hood back, then snatched at the buttons to open the cloth coat that hung from his shoulders.

  Hyde looked past his nose; it was obvious, right there where it used to be between his cheeks-his nose. And then...

  Look at me! My God! Look at me...

  Tears welled in his eyes as he...

  Skin wrapped over his swelling chest muscle and defined the contours of his abdomen and groin before flowing away to cover his thighs and legs. Everything down to the hair follicles. My God! He gasped and looked away. It all looked normal. He had skin!

  I can't take it!

  He was human!

  It's illusion!

  Hyde's vision blurred. You fool!

  Why did he have to despise himself for coveting some humanity?

  Don't fall for it.

  Even Borland in his toxic cocoon of flesh was more a part of the human race than Hyde. Was that why he could never forgive the drunken fool? On top of everything else, did Borland simply make it easier for Hyde to despise his own humanity? Or was it envy?

  Wake up!

  Envy was emotion. Emotion destroyed rational thinking, and rational thinking was all Hyde had left. But the dream-the dream of envy would always tear at the rational, would always seek to bring him down. Envy made the truth unbearable and the truth was simple: He was a thing that should be dead. He should have died with his squad. That would have justified abandoning his responsibilities to life.

  Abandoning Jill...

  "Be good..." The woman's voice echoed close again, pulled Hyde from his agony.

  "I'm coming," he whispered in answer.

  He closed his coat over his spectral flesh, and started forward. He threw one cane aside and hefted his magnum as a new surge of adrenaline pushed him quickly toward the dim light where the Biters moved. "I'm sorry..."

  The Biters continued to leap and scuttle across the circular opening where the tunnel connected to the western cistern-the hellish image growing larger as he approached. The skin eaters were splashing and leaping-chanting the object of their obsession: Skin. Skin. Ssskin!

  Hyde stepped out of the tunnel and onto a flooded walkway. It was a yard wide and circled a pool five yards across.

  "Ssskin!" the hunting pack screamed in terror or desire, startled by his sudden appearance. Their skinned, monstrous, and pathetic forms drew back crouching, hissing. Teeth snapping.

  There were 10, no, 12 in the group: eight adults or near-adults and four children. As they backed away, he saw that one wore a circle of head-lamps where his tattered hood and tunic hung from skinned head and shoulders. Partial faces looked back at Hyde, enough features among them to form expressions: Fear. Anger. Desire for...

  Ssskin!

  The pack pulled back to the far side of the cistern and crouched snapping and slashing at the air where they gathered around a woman's legs. She was beautiful, with dark hair, dressed in khaki pants and top. She stood with her back against the wall by another opening that would lead south through the western side of the loop. The squad would come that way.

  Thank God!

  She appeared unhurt...

  "It's me!" Hyde choked the words out as he turned up the light on his hood-lamps. His skin-shell display adjusted. "It's daddy, Jill. It's me!"

  The woman's-his daughter's-eyes were round with terror, near madness as the hunting pack cringed at her feet, as this sudden apparition appeared.

  "Are you hurt?" Hyde kept an eye on the pack.

  "Ssskin!" a big male hissed.

  "Ssskin, click, click..." answered the others, as their naked eyes focused on Hyde's face, at the dark skin there.

  "Daddy?" Jill shook her head. "Impossible."

  "It's the suit display. Not real," Hyde explained and shrugged. "I was told you lived in Parkerville, but I already knew. I wanted to get you out."

  "You're all right..." Jill leaned forward, shaking her head. "You came for me?"

  "Ssskin!" the big male hissed again, and snapped a glance at the other adults. A trio of them broke off and started circling toward Hyde from around the far side of the cistern. The others started slowly forward-directly, only yards away.

  "Yes, honey, I love you," Hyde croaked, struggling to get the words out. He shook tears from of his eyes to watch the pack. Their hunched and bloodied forms were moving closer.

  "I'm in trouble, daddy," Jill said, her hands coming up to her mouth. Her eyes were wide, childlike.

  "Not any more. I'm going to draw them away and then you run. Help is coming," he said and then, holding her gaze: "I'm sorry I let you down."

  Hyde opened his coat and threw it aside. Immediately, the skin-shell's display cast an amber glow about the cistern as Hyde's naked body was revealed.

  "SSSKIN!" the Biters screamed and hurtled forward. Hyde shot the biggest in the face. The large-caliber bullet removed most of its head. It staggered and fell.

  The pack paused, startled by the noise and flash. Hyde took that moment to cast a final look at Jill. He hurried back into the tunnel, staggering toward the east.

  "SSSKIN!" Click. Click. Click. "Skin!"

  The pack's obsession quickly overpowered their fear and they followed, moving fast. Hyde fired a shot over his shoulder. The flash blinded them and bought him a little time.

  But they were close.

  CHAPTER 64

  A stroke of lightning sizzled in the air and thunder cracked against the pavement drowning out the background rumble of the T-1's engine.

  Borland stood by Aggie. She'd just answered her palm-com.

  "More bad news, Captain," Wizard's voice crackled over the link. Lightning flickered and the radio buzzed. The communications tech was still struggling with the cannibalized T-2 equipment and donated army issue. "Colonel Hazen has relayed a report that one of his M.P. units patrolling the highway found an extended passenger van parked on the soft shoulder. The vehicle belongs to
Metro Trafalgar High and was bringing a basketball team home from a tournament. Triple-A received a call about a breakdown around six this evening. No one in the van. Room for 12. Footprints lead toward Parkerville."

  "What about Brass?" Aggie asked before Borland could react. "Does Midhurst have anything for us yet?"

  "What about Brass?" Borland blurted.

  Wizard continued. "Brass' helicopter left Metro five minutes ago. The storm front puts him here inside of 20 minutes." She paused like she was checking something. "Inspector Midhurst dispatched a transport with the squad that searched the area around the Demarco Building. ETA from Metro is 50 minutes."

  "And Hazen's crew is in place by the tunnel under the runway?" Aggie pushed.

  "Yes ma'am." Wizard's voice buzzed. "And his squad of army issue baggies is prepped and helping Hazard fix T-2-the damage was worse than he thought. They'll come as soon as they can."

  Borland reached out to get Aggie's attention but her head snapped toward him before he could touch her.

  "Brass is coming to assess the situation," she snarled. "He's talking to the Feds about military action. He thinks this Effect's too virulent for us to handle."

  "He thinks?" Borland sighed and shook his head. And Midhurst is sending a wrecking crew to cover their retreat...or stop it. "Fine then, Brass can give the orders."

  "What are you talking about?" Aggie started adjusting her bag-suit. "Our orders stand: Protocol."

  "But Brass trumps protocol, and if he has backup..." Borland said and groaned, mind turning. A military team from a different jurisdiction...to kill everything.

  "He'll need to know the situation under the ground." Aggie shook her head. "Joe, are you just lazy or a coward?"

  "Lazy sure," he grumbled. "But I don't have a death wish either."

  "Then stay sharp. Don't worry, these tunnels are too cramped to allow for speed anyway." Aggie toggled her intercom on. "Okay squad. Time to go down in the history books." She walked across the front of the group that had formed ranks shoulder to shoulder beside T-1.

  Borland recognized Cavalle in her bag-suit. She was carrying a blue med-pack in one hand and a shotgun in the other. She'd be backing up the med-tech Gordon. He was standing a few baggies down from Cavalle and looking like a stick insect wrapped in cellophane.