by Addison Gunn
An Abaddon Books™ Publication
www.abaddonbooks.com
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First published in 2016 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
By Malcolm Cross and Anne Tibbets (writing as Addison Gunn)
Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver
Commissioning Editor: David Moore
Cover Art: Edouard Groult
Design: Sam Gretton & Oz Osborne
Marketing and PR: Rob Power
Head of Books and Comics Publishing: Ben Smith
Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley
Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley
ISBN: 978-1-78618-006-3
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
1
DEAD PIGEONS WERE scattered across the streets and sidewalks in a threadbare carpet, baked dry, almost mummified by the heat in a matter of days. Say what you wanted about global warming and climate change: at least it had finally solved New York’s pigeon problem.
Sweat trickled down Alex Miller’s nose, despite the armoured limousine’s air conditioning.
Something the size of a Great Dane nosed through the crumbling bed of bones and feathers with its misshapen skull. The creature seemed to be all teeth, all jaw, built from evolution’s pre-mammalian leftovers. Ridges of bone knobbled its skull, leaving the creature’s leathery face looking warty and distended. It peeled its lips back, revealing snakelike fangs, and snatched something small and squealing from amidst the pigeons—it looked like a particularly long-bodied rat, but rats didn’t have armour-plated skulls like prehistoric fish.
The terror-jaw whipped the little thing side-to-side, muscular neck straining, and with one last flick the rat-thing’s spine snapped and the squeals ended. It looked back, as if for approval, toward Miller’s target—a dirty, scruffy, ungroomed white man in his late thirties.
You couldn’t tame the new wildlife. Everyone knew that—the damn things were as wild as lions, and a damn sight older—but that didn’t seem to matter to the target. He was filthy, with some kind of scabrous orange growth crawling up his shoulder.
Gingerly, Miller reached up and scratched his nose, safe behind the limo’s locked doors and parked in the shade of an alleyway. He had no desire whatsoever to grab the target, but there weren’t any other untried options on the table, and a hostage exchange wouldn’t work if Miller didn’t take hostages...
Miller leaned forward in his seat, pulling his Gallican .45 from its concealed holster under the back of his Louis Vuitton suit jacket. He hesitated, glancing across the limousine at du Trieux. “When this goes wrong, you be ready to pull my ass out of the fire.”
Du Trieux nodded seriously. Morland, behind her in the back seat, gripped his shotgun more tightly. Miller knew he could rely on du Trieux in a pinch—she was a French-Nigerian ex-jihadiyya, who fought back in the early ’30s to liberate Syria from Daesh and the rest of the false caliphate. She could be a cool-headed killer if she needed to be. But Morland? Morland was a kid, barely twenty, from the south of England. Sure, the ‘kid’ was an imposing six-foot-eight, but that didn’t change the way his hands were sweating. No experience at all—which was why Morland was in the limo, while the team’s second Englishman was on his own with a rifle on a rooftop.
Miller tapped his earpiece. “Doyle? Get ready to kill the dog.”
“It really isn’t a dog,” Doyle replied, his clipped Oxford English buzzing through the earpiece’s low-bandwidth encryption. “On target.”
Miller gnawed his lip, hovering a fingertip over the door’s lock. “Trix, you take the wheel. Morland, be ready to receive the hostage.” In other words, stay in the back seat and don’t shoot anybody.
The kid just about melted in relief.
Miller shared a look with du Trieux, and got out of the limo’s sweet air conditioning and into the oppressive heat. And the smell, Jesus. Maybe parking in an alleyway hadn’t been such a good idea. He clicked the door shut.
The terror-jaw out in the street jerked up, alert, twisting its head side-to-side, presenting its ears—fissures in its skull—to search for the origin of the sound. It saw Miller and bared its teeth. As he approached, leaving the stink of the alleyway for the stench of the street, it ducked its head and raised its rump, like a cat ready to leap. The abduction target twisted around, lifting his shaggy hair out of his eyes.
“Doyle?” Miller asked, finger on his earpiece, panic edging into his voice.
The shot tore open the asphalt inches from the terror-jaw’s forepaw. The animal backed up with a startled jolt, looking up toward the source of thunder... and then bounded for Miller, jaws wide.
“Doyle!”
“Sorry, not at my best.”
Miller got off two shots with the Gallican—a double tap, centre mass at the charging animal, but broken bones and blood hardly impeded the thing. Its wet throat was scarlet behind the grille of its fangs, ravenous, eager. Miller reflexively pushed his gun out at the terror-jaw, heart skipping a beat, then spasming as something hammered the creature’s head sideways. Blood was everywhere.
The creature fell, twitching, and didn’t rise.
Doyle’s second shot.
The only other time Miller had seen a terror-jaw from this close was around two years ago. His dad called, complaining about seeing weird things out on the ranch. At first Miller had figured it was just nerves, his parents weren’t used to rural life, they should’ve taken their retirement in the suburbs. Then he visited and saw a sickly little creature that one of the cows had stepped on.
Back then, four years after he’d left the army, the creatures of the Archaeobiome were still a scientific curiosity—it seemed that the entire ecology slumbered over hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of years. Researchers had called it a kind of migration, through time rather than space. Instead of travelling from place to place in search of food, the creatures just laid eggs or hibernated over millennia until droughts ended and deserts turned to jungles. Nobody had seriously considered whether or not the reawakening ecology could be some kind of threat. Why would they? At that point the biggest terror-jaws anyone knew about were maybe the size of a cat.
Now, two years on and a healthy chunk into Miller’s sixth year as a bodyguard, the only thing unusual about the massive beast lying twisted and broken in front of him was that it had a collar around its tree-trunk neck.
“You shot my dog.” The abduction target fell to his knees in dismay, crushing a desiccated pigeon-corpse. He plucked at the terror-jaw’s gnarled, leathery forefoot as though it were a puppy’s paw. “Why’d you shoot my dog?”
“Stay there,” Miller snapped, lifting the Gallican. “Just stay right there, and put your hands on your head.” He forced himself to relax his grip, stop trembling.
The man slowly raised his arms. “What are you? Some kind of cop?”
Miller didn’t answer, stepping around the cooling body to get behind the guy. The abduction target stank, and the longer he looked at Miller, the more disgust crawled into his eyes.
Oh, it was
obvious the guy was a commune-member. Infected with the parasite. It wasn’t the orange rash infesting his skin—though that kind of thing was common in Infected communes—it was the smell, the terror-jaw, the look in his eye.
“How’d you do it?” Miller asked, bundling up the guy’s wrists in a set of zip-tie cuffs.
“Do what?” He watched Miller from the corner of his eye, part afraid, part angry.
“The terror-jaw. How’d you get a collar on it?” Had the terror-jaw been infected too? Could the Archaean Parasite jump species?
“Dunno. It was eating our trash.” The guy shrugged. “Hey, Blondie. These are too tight.”
“Don’t call me that. I’m not even all that blonde,” he muttered. It had been months since his barber shop had closed; his highlights were almost gone.
“So what’s your name?”
“You don’t need to know that.”
“Guess I don’t. I’m Nick.” The prisoner laughed, a slow, rising laugh that ended in a racking cough. He hunched forwards on his knees in front of Miller, spluttering and drooling. “They’re gonna come and get me, you know. I can smell them,” he wheezed. “They heard the shots.”
“Don’t care,” Miller grunted, hauling Nick to his feet. The man’s sweat stained the cuff of Miller’s suit jacket—it was light silk, just bearable in the heat. And now it was stained, and where the hell was Miller going to find a dry cleaner? He shook out his wrist, grunting. “Where’s Lester Allen?”
“Who?”
“The BioGen scientist your commune abducted.” Miller shoved Nick into a shuffling walk, and tapped his earpiece. “Trix? Follow us.”
“Oui,” du Trieux responded.
Every few steps Nick stopped to look back at Miller and the limousine crawling along after them. “The scientist? You mean the guy who tried to poison us?”
“Nobody’s trying to poison you people.”
“Of course they are. They put drugs in the food aid packages—they’re trying to kill us, trying to destroy our gift!” Nick shambled forward, turning to glare one last time. “You’re trying to do it. The ungifted.”
“Uninfected,” Miller corrected.
Nick was more right than he knew. A completely separate subsidiary of Schaeffer-Yeager International was responsible for distributing the famine aid packages, but the CEO had insisted that every package contain a supply of anti-parasitics. It was a matter of principle, but one that had spooked the Infected into burning soup kitchens and aid stations across the city.
The lucidity drained out of Nick with each step closer to the commune’s territory. He stopped focussing on the ground, on the tightness of his handcuffs, and instead followed a little girl hiding behind a trash can with his gaze. After she was sure Nick and Miller had seen her, she ran away with a long hooting cry.
They melted out of the buildings like a troop of apes on the savannah. Roused by the alarm call, they slipped from doorways and appeared at corners. A lanky man, a wide-set woman, an old white man in a decades-faded Tea Party Republican shirt. There was a hipsterish guy with an old shotgun and a bedraggled beard, and two women nervously walking hand in hand as they came to investigate.
With each new arrival, Nick stopped being Nick, and bit by bit became part of the mob.
The crowd forming in front of Miller were a multicultural mingling of black and white, old and young. And they looked at Miller the way a spooked Doberman watches a stranger touching her puppies.
“Hey!” Miller yelled. “I have your guy hostage. Talk to me.”
One woman blinked owlishly at him, then another, then Nick, twisting around with his cuffed hands at his back, then the girl, then a tall black man... their focus of attention flooding across the mob in a wave, until every single one of them was standing still, staring at Miller intently. Just staring and breathing. They made half-vocalized nonsense sounds at the edge of understanding, muttered pieces of words, a constant murmuring babble that grew louder as they advanced.
Miller backed away a step. “Who’s in charge?”
They laughed at him.
All of them.
From Nick the hostage to the little girl hiding back at her trash can, every single one of them began laughing and stopped laughing within seconds of each other, even those who’d been well out of earshot of what he’d said.
“Nobody—” “Nobod—” “—ody’s in—” “Nobody’s—” “Nobo—” “—body’s—”
The chorus of answers spilled over, the mob talking across itself, unable to get the words out, stammering and stopping and starting over until they stopped trying to speak. The mob didn’t speak with one voice—it spoke with a hundred.
Sweat trickled down the back of Miller’s spine.
Consensus pushed one of the Infected from the front of the milling group, a guy not out of his college years. He spread his hands awkwardly, smiling as if he’d been caught unexpectedly on camera. “Nobody’s in charge!” he called after getting a good twenty feet away from anyone else—far enough he couldn’t see his friends, just Nick. Half-consciously he held his hands behind his back, mimicking Nick’s cuffs. “We’re all just going with it.”
A susurration of ‘yeahs’ and ‘uh huhs’ bubbled through the crowd, even Nick nodding along under Miller’s gun.
“You okay, Miller?” du Trieux asked, voice faint in Miller’s earpiece.
Miller reached up, as if scratching his ear, and hit the earpiece’s push-to-talk clicker twice—the acknowledgement signal.
“I—we—just want our guy back, okay? Lester Allen, the BioGen scientist your commune took. Is he okay? Still alive? Nobody has to get hurt.”
“You mean the poisoner? You’re with him? Nobody’s hurt anybody except you corporate freaks! Take your drug cloud machines and fuck off!” The spokesman’s anger rippled through the crowd like a Mexican wave.
“We haven’t been using aerosol dispersed drugs,” Miller protested, forcing down the fear-driven impulse to lift his gun and point it at the crowd edging in around him. “Lester works for BioGen, he’s only interested in agriculture, air quality, that fungus that started the New Dust Bowl, trying to stop it; we have nothing to do with medicine of any—”
The mob roared as one, an impassable press of bodies.
“Don’t give us tha—” “—lying scum—” “—course you did—” “—children can’t—” “—pumping poison into—”
Miller switched tactics. He jammed the Gallican’s barrel into the back of Nick’s skull and roared back at them as loud as he could. “Shut up! Shut up or I’ll kill Nick!”
Nick heard him; the others, probably not. But Nick’s fear bled over into them somehow—pheromones, parasite-overstimulated sympathies, it didn’t matter. Whatever the mechanism was, the entire mob shuffled back a half-step, as though Miller were pointing the gun at them.
“Who’s Nick?” one caught near the front asked.
They didn’t recognise his name, but when Miller ground the gun into Nick’s greasy hair, they cared. They cared like it was their best friend, their brother, their son.
“It’s okay,” the new spokesman said, hands up placatingly, drifting carefully towards Miller. “Lester’s just fine. It’s all cool, you don’t have to hold a gun to our guy’s head.”
Miller bit back a laugh. “Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t.” He spoke as if Miller was the crazy, dangerous one.
“No? I think I do.”
Another step forward, and the spokesman stopped, hands up, fearful as if the gun were on him, not Nick. “It’s all cool, man. Lester’s fine, he’s cool, he’s gifted now.”
Miller’s jaw tensed. “He’s what?”
“He’s right here,” a voice from the mob said, stepping forward with Lester Allen. Miller recognised him, bald spot and all, from the briefing’s employee records, but Lester looked feverish and sweaty, wearing a torn green t-shirt.
Lester stumbled forward a step, a second. He stood, staring at the spokesman, at Nick. Be
wildered, overstimulated.
“Lester Allen? I’m Alex Miller, I’m here to take you home.”
“I want to go home,” Lester murmured, flinching away from the closest of the mob as they began to repeat what he said. He covered his ears, stumbling away from them in fright. “Home!” he screeched.
“Ho—” “—oa—” “—mmmh!”
Miller shoved Nick to the ground, then pounced forward and grabbed Lester’s shirt with one hand, pointing the Gallican .45 at every face in sight with the other. He hauled Lester backward and hissed, “Where’s your phone? You have your phone?”
Lester patted his pocket dumbly, half hauled it out, and Miller stripped the phone from him, shoving it away inside his jacket.
“Trix!” Miller called. “Exit, now.”
“What’s going on?” one of the mob called, the last clear voice before a murmuring mass of noise erupted from them, stammering half-sounds, guttural ape cries. The sentries—those watching from the edges of the crowd—pointed and called as the limo neared.
It rolled near-silently, electric wheels purring to a halt directly behind Lester and Miller.
Miller backed away, shielding Lester, and like an oiled machine Morland opened the door behind him, pulling Lester inside with a yelp of surprise.
The Infected mob watched Miller holster the Gallican in his inside-waistband holster, smooth out the lines of his jacket, and slip into the limousine’s driver-side door, Trix having already crawled into the back.
Closing the door on the crowd and the blistering heat should have made the interior of the air-conditioned limousine into a blissful sanctuary. What Miller hadn’t counted on was Lester’s smell. He was almost as bad as Nick.
And now, Lester was panicking.
“Who are you?” he screamed in du Trieux’s face, before Morland yanked him back down to the seat. “What are you?”
Miller had heard about this. The Infected shared so many more cues of body language and scent that, to them, an uninfected human ceased to be entirely human. The uninfected belonged in the ‘uncanny valley’: mechanical dolls, unnatural homonculi. A mockery of what was familiar, and instinctively repulsive.
