Operation Honshu Wolf

by Addison Gunn

  That was if you believed the scientists who’d carbon dated the ancient eggs that hadn’t hatched, anyway. A lot of people didn’t, but a lot of people thought man-made global warming was a load of horse-shit because it still got cold in the winter.

  The locust armadillo swarms had eaten every stalk of wheat within a hundred miles of his parents’ ranch, but his dad hadn’t been the one who told Miller about them. He hadn’t learned about coffee and the locust armadillos from Brandon Lewis, either—the old man accepting the second cup of coffee when Miller joined him in the meeting room, at the far end of the table from the decision makers.

  Over there, talking to Gray and Harris? There was the woman he’d heard about locust armadillos from, back when they were only ruining a couple of plantations. The woman that had, over a stretch of years, fed Miller every detail imaginable from the species of civet that shat the best coffee in Indonesia straight through to the exact difference between espresso, restritto, and lungo.

  Jennifer Barrett.

  Barrett wasn’t just the company’s top coffee maven. She was Schaeffer-Yeager’s head of internal IT, and a delight to work close protection for. She understood that the weakest link in any chain of security were the people in it, and the sharkish, middle-aged woman didn’t complain too hard when one of her bodyguards got her the wrong drink instead of letting her traipse through unsecured coffee shops. But even though she was understanding about security, anything else that rubbed her the wrong way was at risk of getting its throat ripped out.

  Right now, her teeth were bared at Robert Harris, head of security and all around nice guy. You had to be a nice guy, didn’t you, to call down a helicopter gunship on an unarmed crowd?

  “It was necessary to preserve the life of one of our assets,” Harris growled. “We had nothing else in the area and those freaks would have torn open the limousine if we’d waited any longer.”

  “Tear gas, stun grenades, painbeams, water cannons; there is riot control gear on the books,” Barrett screeched, stabbing her finger onto the files displayed on a tablet in front of her. “There is such a thing as proportionality, Bob!”

  “Proportionality? By the time the chopper arrived the howling mob was three blocks wide. Tens of goddamn thousands!” He thrust out his stubbled chin. Generally, he looked lean. Right now, despite having more than enough to eat, he looked starved and desperate. “I don’t have a riot squad that can contain that, nobody does anymore! The non-lethal option wasn’t an option.”

  In theory, Miller took orders from Harris. In practice, despite Miller heading Cobalt-2, his direct superior was head of Cobalt-1, Brandon Lewis. Harris may have dished out the orders, but he didn’t know much about Cobalt’s special-case personnel security role.

  Lewis picked up his coffee after several moments listening to the big-wigs wig out at the far end of the board table, and shot a look at Miller. He put the coffee down without sipping any, rolled up his pantleg, and scratched at the stumps of his legs, the scars shockingly pink compared to the black skin of his thigh and hands. Lewis had been a marine, back in the Middle Eastern wars of the ’10s, and gotten his legs taken off by an IED. After he’d gotten a decent set of prosthetics and learned to work on them, he’d gone right back on duty. Now in his sixties, his current prosthetics were about the best unpowered models available, springs and tensile cables providing a more than adequate replacement for his missing knees. But when Lewis got nervous, his stumps itched.

  Miller slid in beside Lewis, and gingerly tried the half-and-half bastard coffee. He winced, and immediately regretted it.

  “Bad?” Lewis asked, voice barely a whisper.

  “Like somebody else drank it first, then pissed it through a burnt sneaker.” Miller took a second sip anyway. He’d acclimatize to it soon enough.

  Lewis glared down at his mug, steeled himself, and sipped. He immediately grimaced. “Had worse.” Wiping at his mouth, he set the mug down. “Not for thirty years, but I’ve had worse.”

  “Trouble in paradise?” Miller asked quietly, glancing up the table.

  “The President’s trying to backpedal on his support for us. Bob Harris made the call on the helicopter, his balls are on the chopping block.”

  When the famine started running out of control, the company had relied heavily on having the President’s ear. Sure, the Infected rioting and destroying soup kitchens made things tough, but without the government authorizing the mass movement of cargo and food across state lines, Schaeffer-Yeager would never have been able to help as much as it did. Now, of course, there wasn’t much left to stop anyone from doing as they liked, but having a President bought and paid for by the company had been helpful.

  The man who’d actually bought President Fredericks, not that Miller would ever say that to Gray’s face, was looking calm and collected. But L. Gray Matheson always did.

  There were two kinds of billionaires Miller had met in his life: the psychotics built on a foundation of poisonous ego, and the steely ones with ice in their veins. Gray was the steely kind, in public. With his kids—Miller usually provided live-in security for the family—he could warm up some.

  Maybe, before the famines, there could have been enough clout to quietly bury something like this. There had been armies of lobbyists on both sides of the aisle, and while Gray didn’t directly own any of the media conglomerates, there was enough financial incestuousness to squash things. Now? Now there wasn’t enough of a government left to authorize drilling in a national park.

  There wasn’t any law and order left in the continental United States. Even the National Guard had collapsed, since the famines had forced half of them to desert in search of food. And when a government couldn’t even feed its armed forces, it sure as hell couldn’t squelch a crime against humanity.

  That’s what the helicopter attack was, even if some wouldn’t view the Infected as human.

  “We. Had. To. Rescue. Our. People!” Harris roared from the table’s opposite end, getting up and slamming his fists down. “The response was legitimate!”

  Barrett was on her feet too, knuckles on the table, furious. “Stop trying to justify this, Bob. You didn’t give a shit about ‘our people,’ you wanted BioGen’s field research.”

  Harris blanched. “That’s a baseless allegation.”

  “Whose department did you hand Lester Allen’s phone to, Bob?” She bared teeth. “Of course I looked at what my guys pulled out of it. Why is genetic field analysis of air-trapped fungal spores worth killing that many people for?”

  “This isn’t going to stick in court. You can’t pin this on me.”

  “This isn’t going to court,” Gray said, speaking up at last. “We’re all friends here.” Robust, in his mid-fifties, Gray spoke with a honey-warm burr. But, as Miller had seen many times before, Gray’s voice could go from comforting purr to threatening growl in a flash. “There aren’t any courts left to throw you in front of, Bob.” There was that growl.

  Harris sat down, slowly.

  “So,” Gray went on, “let’s take it as given that your death sentence is temporarily suspended, and make the presumption that we’re all working toward the same goals, whether we are butchers, bakers, or innocent, bystanding candlestick makers. Tell us, Bob. Why?”

  Harris withered under Gray’s gaze, realizing his boss didn’t have his back to be friendly, but to be first one in with the knife. “Lester Allen’s team weren’t just tracking the spread of crop-killing Archaeobiome funguses,” he admitted, at last.

  “What were they doing, Bob?”

  “Testing an aerosolized anti-parasitic drug called NAPA-33.” Harris clawed his fingers over his face. “They loaded it into their air traps across the city, and dispersed it from there. It’s designed to interfere with genetic replication in the parasite—we don’t know if the drug works or not. Mixed in with the fungal genetic samples are samples his team pulled from the commune we were testing it on. It needs to get to what’s left of BioGen.”

  “For Go
d’s sake,” Barrett hissed. “You’re talking about bioweapons.”

  “Medicine!” Harris roared. “This is medicine! The Infected are the biggest threat to humanity out there; if we don’t stop them, they’re the ones that will survive the famines, not us!”

  “You can’t test a fucking genetic drug on an unwilling population—”

  Miller felt a chill in his gut. The Infected mob had been right. Dead right.

  Gray lifted his hand, halting Barrett in her tracks. “Hold on there, Jen. The damage has already been done.”

  “Yes, Mr. Matheson.” Compliantly, she sat down, but continued to glare at Harris.

  “Bob’s right, in a way. You could say this is a war.” Gray glared at him. “Thank God we’re not, though, Bob, because we shoot war criminals. However, these are hard times. We need soldiers, and every soldier needs something of the sociopath in him.”

  All three glanced down the table at Miller and Lewis. The weight of their gaze was uncomfortable.

  “In hard times,” Gray announced, as if making a presentation, “we need hard people to keep us safe, and there’s two of ours. Now, Bob’s fucked us over, gentlemen. What’s left of the government can’t prosecute us, or help us. The Infected are listening to old Jimmy Swift, with his axe to grind, and are sharpening axes of their own. Now what do we need to do to keep safe?”

  Miller waited for Lewis to answer, but all he got in the silence was an elbow in his ribs. He jolted straight. “Uh, well. I would imagine that Mr. Harris would be better qualified, as head of security—”

  “Having an imagination’s a wonderful thing, Alex, but I don’t want you to spin me a story.” Gray folded his hands one over the other. “Bob’s going to be busy cleaning up his mess. Ain’t that right, Bob?”

  “I’ll get this squared away with BioGen,” Harris murmured.

  “So I ain’t interested in what Bob’s got to say right now. What’s it gonna be, Alex?”

  Miller glanced at Lewis for help, but the old war-horse just smiled at him. “Go on, son.”

  “Well. The communes have already demonstrated they’re willing to attack us when we do nothing more offensive than distribute food and drugs. Currently a lot of our personnel are strung out across the city in their homes and the shelters we set up in offices. Running food and supplies to them is a mess already, let alone providing security to them with half the city after us.

  “It’d be helpful if we could gather employees and their families into a central, defensible location...”

  3

  THE PROBLEM WITH suggestions is, the guy who makes them? That’s the guy they pick to carry them out. At least, a week on, life was getting back to normal. Sort of. Miller was playing Armani again, anyway.

  For nine months out of the year, most of Miller’s time was spent watching over Gray’s two children, James and Helen, along with Gray himself. Most of the time it was a light duty, letting him manage his team’s training. He only handed off the family’s round-the-clock protection to another security team when Cobalt had a special security situation to handle—like covering Barrett when intelligence had the Russian mob after her—or during the summer, when Gray sent the kids to live with their mother for their vacation. This summer, their vacation had been cut short, and they’d brought their mother home with them.

  “James, Helen. Mrs. Williams.” Miller pulled on his Armani smile, backing away from the passengers flowing off the plane. Strictly speaking he shouldn’t have been in JFK Airport’s disembarkation area, but with the TSA a thing of the past, rules were for bending. He gestured to Morland, and the baggage cart. “So glad the weather didn’t affect your flight. If you’d like to give Morland your—”

  “Alex!” Helen, recently fourteen, eyes grey as her father’s, launched herself at Miller in a colossal bear hug.

  “It’s nice to see you too, Helen.” Miller lost the Armani, but kept his smile.

  She squeezed him tight, composed herself, stepped back, and pulled her candy-pink wheeled suitcase closer. “I missed you,” she said, with far less enthusiasm, cultivating the standoffishness that was the mark of a true teenager.

  Miller opened his arms to James, and the boy—nearly a man, sixteen now, Jesus—rolled his eyes before stepping into the hug. “Hey, Alex,” he said, begrudgingly.

  In theory, a close protection agent slipped into the role of the Armani to blend in with a high profile client’s life, providing as little disruption and comment as possible. A heavily armed fashion accessory, in essence. Miller was widely regarded to be very, very good at it—his natural inclination for designer clothes and spa treatments helped him appear to be nothing more than a friend or member of the family’s entourage—but sometimes, there was more to the job than being the Armani. Especially with the kids. Their dad was in his fifties, and Miller was a little young for a surrogate dad. Not quite thirty was perfect for a fun uncle, though. A fun uncle that carried guns and never ate with the rest of the family at the dinner table.

  Mrs. Williams, formerly Matheson, daintily shook his hand when he offered it. “Been a long time, Alex.”

  “Yes. I was told Mr. Williams would be with you...” Her second husband, closer to her age—fortyish.

  Mrs. Williams smiled tightly, almost wincing. “Harry’s been missing two days.” She ignored Helen’s worried glance back at her, went on, almost babbling. “He didn’t come home from work, the Army are looking into it, and they don’t have a lot of time, but—”

  Patting her shoulder, Miller nodded reassuringly. “I’m sure he’s fine.” Lying was easy, wasn’t it? “We need to get y’all back to the Astoria Peninsula compound before the storm hits, so if you could follow me...”

  Miller led them out to the Bravo—a military-style utility vehicle, somewhere between one of the old Humvees and an armoured personnel carrier, thanks to its uprated armour. StratDevCo manufactured them by the container load. This one had luxury fittings and a civilian paint-job, but after days of getting pelted with dust off the New Dustbowl—almost everything between Oklahoma to Iowa had been ruined by fungal blights—it looked like it’d been rolling in the mud. And there wouldn’t be a chance to clean it off before the next load.

  A dust storm was coming, a real dust storm.

  The plane had barely come in ahead a hazy red-and-tan wall that swallowed the western horizon and stretched up to the clouds. The storm was moving fast. Miller could feel the wind on his face as he waited to get into the Bravo, and he didn’t like it. Du Trieux was shifting over to the passenger seat from the driver’s, picking up an old Gilboa Viper II and laying it over her lap. She smiled at the kids, Mrs. Williams, and Morland in the back.

  “Hey, what’s that?” James asked, leaning forward—obligingly du Trieux lifted the weapon, a monstrous little thing, most easily described as a pair of assault rifles welded together side by side and remachined for a single stock and grip. “Cool!” James’s eyes bugged out, but Mrs. Williams, realizing the implications, nervously settled back.

  The new wildlife was getting friskier.

  And bigger.

  Miles later, caught in the urban sprawl, they found a terror-jaw picking through trash just off the corner of 109th Avenue and Lefferts Boulevard. It was the size of a horse. Big one. Clydesdale, maybe. Man-high at the shoulders.

  Another terror-jaw picked its way between two abandoned looking houses, close-packed and double-storied. One turned its lumpen head to scan the Bravo, spurs and bone-ridges under the flesh giving it a decayed, ghoulish look. The other grinned at the car with a mouthful of dagger-like teeth that would’ve made a saber-toothed tiger back down in the day.

  The one rumbled to the other, and the leathery creatures both trotted forward, dipping their heads to peer at the Bravo’s narrow windshield contemplatively. A third joined them, bigger than the other two, stretching a little to lope over a garden fence, its miniscule nostrils flaring as it took a better look, as if it could see them all inside.

  “Jesus. They don’t
get that big,” James murmured authoritatively from the back. “They just don’t.”

  Miller slowly and carefully backed the Bravo up, eyeing the houses to either side of the street. Not many cars around. He hoped the neighbourhood had all evacuated for somewhere else, with things that big prowling around. He headed down one sidestreet, and another, then he had to dog-leg the route around a known commune occupying the edge of Forest Park, and by the time they got anywhere near a straight route to the new compound, the dust storm hit.

  It was like the hand of God passed over them, from the west to the east, left to right. The dust had seemed red, but the reddish haze of light lasted only a few moments before the full fury of the storm rolled over them, eating the sun with a howl of wind. Visibility dropped to thirty feet, then five, the headlights doing nothing more than creating murky blobs of tan and grey light in the murk. Thankfully the Bravo was fitted with smoke-piercing laser scanners. Even if Miller couldn’t see, the car could, and he set it back to automatic drive.

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said, leaning around the driver’s seat. “We’ll just be a little late getting you to the Astoria Compound.”

  Helen was holding her nose. “What’s that smell?”

  “I’m sure it’s just the dust, baby,” Mrs. Williams said. “Could you turn on the air conditioning or something, Alex?”

  The Bravo had something better than air conditioning—NBC grade HEPA/active carbon air filters. Miller toggled them on, just before he started to catch the scent too—something rotten, decaying. Mushrooms and, very faintly, the burning sting of ammonia. The filters cleared it quickly, thank God.

  They didn’t have the roads to themselves, even if the city seemed deserted in the murk. Just two intersections after their route straightened out, they encountered a knot of stalled traffic. Most of the cars were abandoned. A long queue led to the intersection—a chain of automatically driven vehicles had halted behind one empty car—but ahead of them were vehicles physically blocking both sides of the road. A few of the stopped cars’ interiors were lit, passengers nervously looking ahead...