by Addison Gunn
“Stop!” Miller yelled, hesitating with his rifle. He half-reached for the trigger, then made his choice—left the M27 to hang at his side as he tore George away, throwing the malnourished man to the floor and pushing Linda away from her husband.
The room exploded in panic. Maybe it had been George, maybe it was Linda’s terror at being pulled away from her husband. Her lips bloody, she fought Miller, punching at him, kicking him—no, those were her children at his legs—screaming, “You’re not one of us! You don’t know, don’t—”
Voices blotted her out, howls, anguish, anger. The only reason Miller could make her out at all—“You won’t take him away!”—was because she was screaming right in his ear whilst trying to tear it off.
Morland, praise the oversized lug, caught the back of the door and started pushing it against the flow of the crowd. Doyle backed up towards a side door, du Trieux flanking him as they opened up a gap with their bodies.
Miller managed to half-throw Alphonse in their direction. Alphonse stumbled, Doyle caught him and they backed through. Du Trieux had her weapon up, ready to shoot.
God help him, Miller had tried to keep this from turning into an armed conflict, but he’d never figured on a woman spitting her husband’s blood at him while her children tore at his legs. He hadn’t wanted to take things this far, but he didn’t see any other options.
He threw his elbow against her face, buying himself a moment’s grace, and palmed a compact stun-gun from his belt rig.
It turned her into a hundred and forty pounds of seizuring muscle, and she fell, puking. Her children screamed, but Miller couldn’t bring himself to use the weapon on them. He simply tottered, clutching at one Infected’s back for support while pushing the stun-gun’s electric probes against another.
Doyle cocked his shotgun and fired against the exterior wall—full-length plate glass windows—but the sound of shattering glass and gunfire did nothing to intimidate the Infected. There was a hate to their eyes, one that hadn’t been there before.
It was, Miller dimly realized, between flashing arcs of blazing electrical light as he missed his target, like the kids who’d called him ‘faggot’ in high school for being willing to try dating another guy. It was like they’d never wanted to see him as human, and that one date out of a dozen let them flip a switch to look past his humanity and turn him into vermin.
They hadn’t been violent in high school, though. Those two teenage boys had known that no matter how they felt, there were consequences—suspension, maybe worse.
The Infected didn’t give a shit.
George charged Miller, the poor spindly man transformed into something entirely other, wearing Linda’s feelings and the mob’s hatred on a face not really suited to either. But Miller wasn’t about to let him start gnawing off his ears.
The stun-gun crackled, and du Trieux was beating someone off Morland’s back with the butt of her rifle as he tried to get away. Doyle had given up on warning shots and had backed up, switching magazines to rubber buckshot. The pellets—slightly larger than a toy gun’s BB—stung across Miller’s legs. The Baxter children screamed and collapsed, bruised and bleeding but not seriously injured.
A second shot of rubber pellets at chest height made the screaming Infected back off long enough for Miller’s team to drag him through into the next room, and the Infected that followed them in before Morland managed to barricade the doors weren’t too much trouble after they’d been zip-cuffed.
Miller did his best to concentrate on blocking off the side-room’s other entrance, and to avoid thinking about the spots of blood on his pants from the children. Or any of what had just happened.
He certainly didn’t focus on Baxter, hovering over his hog-tied wife and rocking like a nervous Infected, blood streaming from the gouge gnawed out of his shoulder.
“We gotta fucking lock this thing,” Morland grunted, shoulders spread against the table tipped against the doorway—even with his weight it rocked against his back, rhythmically opening a crack and slamming shut amidst snatches of snarling and howling.
“Can’t,” du Trieux said, struggling with the room’s building systems console.
Miller grunted, and started pushing another table towards the doorway. “Why not?”
“Somebody burnt out control access to the locks.”
COBALT EVENTUALLY BARRICADED themselves in, and sheltered in place the way employees were supposed to in emergencies, waiting for the support of security team Bayonet to arrive. When they did, they took the building by storm with shock batons and Tasers, smoke and gas.
Cobalt’s barricade had been effective enough that the Infected had started breaking through the relatively thin walls instead. They were still trying when Bayonet came in through the second floor with breaching charges and ladders, like medieval raiders.
Helicopters swept the early-evening sky, hacking the air into submission, and the roaming mobs of Infected fearfully avoided the area. The protection was going to be short-lived, though—the pilots were having trouble with their engines. Their air filters couldn’t handle the fungus—already two out of the five overwatch choppers had turned back to base before their intakes clogged entirely.
With a satellite connection re-established, Miller stood in the building’s security room, watching the Northwind operator on the conferencing screen—a young Chinese-American woman—work remotely on the building’s systems. She was shaking her head.
“We can’t recover this without repairing each part of the system individually. The locks and cameras have all had their wireless links burnt out—someone used the reprogrammable circuits to short circuit them with the power supply.”
Miller was vaguely familiar with the systems involved. In the event of an intruder attacking a building electronically, standard procedure was to command locks to short out their antennae. It severed them from the network, made them impossible to hack without literally cutting into the locks and soldering an access-port into the circuit boards.
But it was a last ditch option, to lock the doors and ensure they stayed shut. Locking them open? While mobs of the Infected were rioting across the city?
“I already know what happened, Northwind; the part I want to know is who did it.”
The Northwind operator kept shaking her head, like she didn’t want to believe it. “It’s that account with the S-Y internal security department again. Forty-six, seventy-two.”
Robert Harris.
6
L. GRAY MATHESON put down the first printout and picked up the second. He scanned the emergency plan’s instructions, and picked up the next, then the next... at last he simply flicked through them, only paying attention to the parts that changed. Name and address.
Nearly three hundred employees of various ranks and from various subsidiaries had been told to evacuate to the WellBeechBeck Washington Heights office block, and that security team Sabre would come to collect them.
Gray tapped his lip with the corner of the stacked sheets, gazing blankly at the surface of his desk, recently installed into his Astoria Cove office.
“I sent members of Switchblade to check a few of the employees’ homes, along with the Baxters’. Their building systems all crashed shortly after the meeting with you, Barrett, and Harris, last week. Just after the helicopter incident.” Miller crossed and uncrossed his legs uncomfortably—combat gear didn’t feel right for talking with his boss. He should’ve gotten back into a suit.
“How many were in the building?”
“Eighty-seven. They’d been losing people at a fairly rapid rate. Three died during the operation. Heart attacks or suffocation, we think.” Miller swallowed back bile. “The electroshock weapons. Some of them were too weak, malnourished.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
Gray stuck out his jaw, tapping his face one last time. He didn’t seem to be listening. “And where are they now?” He put down the papers.
“We cleared out one of the refugee quarantine blocks. They’re i
n there for now.”
There wasn’t any real doubt, not to Miller, but Gray had to ask. “You’re sure Bob’s involved?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have direct proof?”
Miller puffed out a breath. “That’s why I’m here talking to you, Gray, instead of marching over to shoot the man myself. He deliberately isolated people, our people, in that building. And then he blew the damn locks so the Infected could tear into them. He wanted a captive Infected commune, probably for those fucking bioweapons of his.”
“And the Baxters?” Gray asked, gently. “Why’d he put them on the Honshū Wolf list, then?”
Miller shook his head. “Only Alphonse was on the Honshū Wolf list. The emergency plan was addressed to his wife, I don’t think he was supposed to be there.”
Gray nodded, once. “I’ll look into it. You get back to whatever you were doing, Alex. I’ll let you know.”
MILLER’S BODY COUNT rose from three, to four, to twenty-seven.
Sure, he hadn’t killed those three unfortunates who’d died after being shock-stunned to the ground—that was Bayonet’s work. Even so, he was responsible. He’d led the operation to go into that building, he’d called in Bayonet, it was his fault. The hundreds who’d been cut down by the helicopter, weeks before? That was on Harris’s head; but this, this was on Miller’s.
The living had been cleared away, but blood had pooled in the refugee quarantine cell, an expanse of chain-link fencing stapled to the concrete floor of a storehouse.
The fourth death on Miller’s head was Opal Dernier’s, also on the Honshū Wolf evacuations list, and also on the list for anti-parasitic drug implants. She had been lumped in with the rest of the captured Infected employees because Miller hadn’t been alert enough to realize that she, like Alphonse, like the children, like the injured, needed special treatment.
The guard who’d been on duty explained it all to Miller, his face drained of blood.
At first, nothing had looked wrong. The Infected—and Opal—had been herded into the huge wire-mesh cells that kept the refugees in place through quarantine and testing. They’d sat around, stumbled—they were still all zip-tied, hands behind their backs as they’d shuffled around. Stinking, filthy, sweaty.
They mostly stood around in a single mass, but one or two, sometimes three, broke away from the pack and moved up to the far end every so often. Like they were searching for an escape from their mob, but only a temporary one. They always came back to join the huddle. Except for one prisoner, not that any of the guards had noticed.
Opal had been sitting in the corner, as far away from the main mob as she could get. She shouted at the guards for attention a few times, but the whole mob was shouting, mumbling, moaning. Like bird-song. Twittering tones and sounds that could almost have been musical, if they weren’t made up from murmurs and howls and grunts. No one had heard her.
The longer they were in the cage, the more the mob’s individual members wanted to escape it, to get respite from each other. And when too many were trying to find solitude, that’s when things went sour.
The first Infected to get too close to Opal screamed at her, called her all kinds of filthy names, told her that she wasn’t one of them, wasn’t human, wasn’t real—that same disgust Miller had seen when the mob was on the attack.
With one of their number disturbed, a second picked up on it soon enough, a third, a fourth, until the whole mob were screaming at Opal. But it didn’t stop there. Their shared rage grew out of control, reflecting back at them from every face around them, until they simply charged Opal, crushing her against the fence with their weight and their shoulders and their xenophobic hatred.
And then, working with a single mind and near perfect coordination, sixty people pushed over the chain-link fence like bison trampling grass.
What was left of the wire fence was slick with blood, pieces of skin and hair caught in the weave. Her body lay, crumpled and bruised, her flesh raggedly cut by the mesh. Miller stepped back a little, keeping clear of the still-spreading pool.
Obviously she was dead.
So were the twenty-three Infected the guards had been forced to gun down before the mob within their midst had torn two of them apart—there had been more injured by gunfire, and by the Bayonet team that had re-secured the storehouse, but they were in a temporary infirmary. Only Opal, and the twenty-three, remained on the storehouse floor.
One of the Bayonet operatives, wearing a full-body exoskeleton that made him seem Herculean and inhuman behind his gas mask, awkwardly shook his head. “It was god-awful,” he buzzed through his personal radio’s external speaker, rather than leaving his voice muffled behind his mask. “Those Infected... they’re all monsters.”
HEADING UP TO Gray’s office in the elevator, Miller pulled the Gallican from its holster again. Just to be sure it wasn’t stuck in there—the belt rig was different from the little concealed holster he usually wore and he wasn’t sure if he trusted it yet.
He drew back the slide, making sure there was a round chambered, set the safety back on, and reholstered the gun. Then he pulled it free, checking for snags, and let it drop back down again.
Miller had never actually shot anyone. Never actually killed anyone, not personally. It made sense he’d be nervous.
Holly Moulin, Gray’s personal assistant, was at her desk. She looked up, smiling tightly. “You okay there, Mr. Miller? I’m afraid you can’t go in,” she said, with an awkward smile. “Mr. Matheson’s in a confidential meeting—”
“Gray doesn’t keep anything confidential from me,” Miller snapped, pushing by.
“Mr. Miller! I know you have a special working relationship with Mr. Matheson, but—”
Miller ignored her, and pulled open the office door. Special enough that Miller could murder someone in front of Gray? Just have to see.
Shutting the door behind himself, Miller looked up to see Gray and Harris blinking at him. They hadn’t expected to be disturbed from their meeting.
“Alex?” Gray asked.
“I’m killing Harris.” Miller yanked the Gallican free, and nudged off the safety.
Robert Harris didn’t seem to believe it. Looking at the gun, at Miller... at Gray, as if this were something the CEO would have to sign off on first, maybe after running it past the accountants.
“It’s a complicated situation, Alex.”
“No, it isn’t. He ordered the helicopter attack, he released biological weapons on civilians, he turned innocents into monsters.” Miller held up the gun. “Because of him, dozens more people died today.”
“What happened, Alex?” Gray asked, gently.
“There was a riot in the refugee zone. Twenty-three, twenty-four... Jesus, that’s not even counting the guards they killed. I can’t even fucking count it. There are too many dead!”
“You’re upset, Alex, I can see that...”
“This has to stop. Someone has to stop you, Mr. Harris. And nobody else will,” Miller said, levelling the Gallican at him.
For a heartbeat, Miller registered Robert Harris’s shocked recognition that Miller meant it, and then Gray stood in the line of fire. Miller looked at the gun, looked at where it was pointing, and took a step to the side, aiming at Harris’s face.
“Don’t. We need him.” Calmly, Gray sidestepped with Miller. “It’s a complicated situation,” he repeated, firmly.
“How?” All the strength left his arm, and the Gallican dropped to his side. “How?” Miller begged. “He fucked us, Gray. He turned us into the enemy. Don’t you understand that? We’re the ones locking people into cages, poisoning people. We’re the monsters. Because of him.”
“We’re not the bad guys, Alex. We’re fighting to survive.” Gray cocked his head ever so slightly. “That parasite’s going to kill us all if we let it.”
“The Infected aren’t evil! They’re sick, they need treatment—they’re people.”
“And that’s why we have to stop the parasite, Alex. Pa
ss me that tablet you were showing me, Bob.”
“Here,” Harris said, passing it up.
“This,” Gray said, coming in to stand beside Miller, “is a scan of one of those people’s skulls. You see this row of little blobs?”
They started inside the eye. Small white marks, tiny pinpricks of light, were clumped around the retina—but they weren’t the parasite-cysts the quarantine teams checked for with ophthalmoscopes. From the retina, a thin line of them seemed to be marching in single file through the little gap in the bone around the tear duct and into the sinuses, then the nose. From there they squeezed into holes pockmarking a plate of bone behind it, and then... they were right up against the brain, dozens of them.
“Yeah,” Miller replied. “I see them.”
“Those are wasp larvae.”
“Wasps? In the guy’s brain?”
“You probably met some yourself. Most are tiny little fuckers, not much more than an eighth of an inch long.”
The Gnats! “Fuck!” Miller whipped a knuckle to his eyes, scrubbing furiously. “I got one in my eye—”
“Hold on, there, you’re probably fine,” Gray said, taking Miller’s shoulder. He leaned in, checking Miller’s eye. “You blink? Eye watered?”
“Y-yeah,” Miller stammered, glancing again at the pad, the larvae in the guy’s eyes and brain, laying on the desk.
“Damn little bastard probably didn’t lay anything in you,” Gray said. “But if you were infected with the Archaean Parasite? It’d be a whole other story.”
Harris steepled his fingers. “The Infected don’t blink the wasps away. According to the research, the parasite weakens the blink reflex and forces you to let the wasps lay as many eggs in you as they want. It’s part of the life cycle.”
Miller couldn’t shake off the nagging need to find a doctor.
“The parasite is like toxoplasma, that thing in cat-shit. It can’t reproduce properly in humans—it just splits up and divides, cloning itself. For it to breed, for the little single-celled fuckers to have sex, our best guess is that they have to get eaten by this wasp. Now, there’s a lot we still don’t understand about this thing,” Harris went on, warming to his topic, “but the parasite loves living in your nerves. In your skin, in your gut, in your brain. And it wants to goddamn feed your skin, your gut, your brain to these wasps.”
