Cass kept quiet for a few seconds, letting Shifty get it all out. She had to. The thoughts were there, in him, in herself, in all of the team. She knew it; she could sense it on them, and she knew it was no good trying to sweep it all under the rug.
Drag it out into the open, out into the light, and deal with it. It was the only way.
“What good does it do?” she finally said.
“What?”
“What good does all that do? Freaking out over how fucked the situation is? I hear you, Shifty. It shouldn’t be us. Every single one of us got torn up, just last week. We lost Stephen, just last week. What’s in that building is past anything that any of us have ever seen before.”
“This is what I’m saying.”
“But the job’s still there, Shifty. Whether we want it to be or not, whether we’re ready for it or not, whether it’s fair or not. It’s there. It’s got to be dealt with. People are counting on us, and there’s nobody else.”
“But maybe the feds…” Shifty began.
“They aren’t coming,” Cass said. “Right, Edison?”
Edison nodded. “I did put in a call to the local FBI office. But they say their team will take several hours to get together and get geared up.”
“The feds use bigger squads than ours,” Cass said. “And, they aren’t used to scrambling on a moment’s notice like us. They’re used to planning out their ops far in advance. So there’s only us. The job’s ours. We’re going to have to do it ourselves.”
Shifty’s shoulders slumped. “I… you’re right. I didn’t mean…”
“You needed to put it all out there,” Cass said.
“Yeah,” Shifty said, then shook himself like a dog shaking off water. “Yeah. Forget it. I’m good. Just needed to vent. Don’t look at me like that, Dread. Go bench press something.”
“Perhaps I’ll knit you a nice sweater instead,” Dread said. “Pussy.”
Shifty shook his head, but a smile was touching his lips as he said, “I really fucking hate you sometimes, Big Dog.”
“Unh-hunh,” Dread said, punching Shifty on the shoulder. “You ready to go kill something, or what?”
“Hell yeah, I’m ready. Let’s do this.”
“Well,” Edison said. “As it turns out, it doesn’t matter anyway about the feds. I’ve got your Healer.”
“Who?” Cass asked.
Edison looked at her as if the answer were self-evident. “Your Healer. Stephen Tawnborn.”
“Fine... what?” Cass said. “What are you talking about, Edison? Stephen was killed a week ago on our last....”
Cass interrupted herself. “A Vive? A fucking Vive? You want me to take a Vive along with me, when it’s a Vive who’s the problem in the first place?”
“He was only down for a few hours...”
“Absolutely no goddamn way! I am not taking my team into that funhouse with a half-rotten corpse, who I don’t even know if I can trust him or not! What if he wigs out while we’re in the middle of something hot? No way! You cannot, can not, trust a Vive Job.”
“Cass,” Dread said softly, nodding toward her back.
Stephen was there.
Cass
Edison was a weasel, a bastard, a slimy, no-good son of a bitch.
That’s not entirely true. I was just peeved over getting stuck with a lousy situation, a situation that could get my entire team waxed all by its lonesome; and to make matters worse, a monkey wrench had now been thrown right into the middle of the well-oiled machine that was my team.
It would've been bad enough to go in with a replacement, someone who had never trained with us before. Remember how important I said that unit integrity was to a Squad’s survival? So, to take a Vive Job in with you? Forget it.
You can not ever trust a Vive Job. My specialty ought to underscore that pretty well.
But here’s the thing. To go in without a Healer was suicide.
Okay, you could maybe replace a Striker mage with enough heavy-duty firepower, and no Defense Mage? Well, if you hit the enemy fast enough, maybe you don’t have to worry about them shooting back.
But I’ve never been on an op, or ever even heard of an op for that matter, that didn’t have casualties… casualties bad enough that you’d lose most of your offensive ability without a Healer. My personal bacon was saved twice by Stephen, Team Four’s Healer; and each of the others in Squad Four owed their lives to him at least once over.
Having a Healer on the team isn’t only about saving lives, or getting someone back into the fight in the moment. That sort of capability also prevents a lot of serious injuries from becoming crippling or career-ending.
Think about your favorite sports team. How many people do they lose on a regular basis from injuries that the player can’t walk away from? It works the same way for the military or SWAT or anybody else that relies on healthy bodies to get the job done.
A shattered limb that would’ve side-lined one of our team for life, now was a mere inconvenience with Stephen around. He was that good. Years as a combat medic for the Army followed by working with the Wreck Squads had made him into a goddamn genius when it came to healing traumatic injuries.
Other squads lost people to attrition all the time. Before Stephen came on board, Six had lost two different troopers to eye injuries. It took them forever to get replacements assigned to their squad, much less get them up to speed.
Think of how long it takes to train someone like Stephen, or Shifty, or Dread, or anyone else on my squad. Even if they have the skillset, think how long it then takes to integrate them into the team, get them to move and think with the rest of the squad as if we all shared the same brain. Until they’re trained up to that level, the squad’s ability to perform is massively compromised. It isn’t like, oh, we’re missing one out of seven, so we’re down fourteen percent or whatever the math is… it’s more like you’re down forty percent.
And when it’s life and death, you can’t go in to the fight with your gun half-loaded.
That’s how valuable a good Healer was to a squad. And they’re freakin’ hard to come by, as well; forget everything I said about getting them to gel with a team, simply finding a Healer mage, period, was no easy task.
It’s supposed to be one of the more challenging of the basic schools of magic, what the mages referred to as an “array”. Mages who specialized in the Offensive Array… usually referred to as Strikers… or in the Defensive Array, were relatively easy to come by.
Something about the complexity of human physiology, though, made the Healing Array significantly harder. As rare as it was to find a person who was actually able to go the distance with learning any significant amount of magic, there were much, much fewer who were capable of building up a strong Healing Array.
Those who did, were scooped up pretty quickly in the private sector. Which meant, good luck trying to find a mage with a solid Healing Array and combat skills and who was willing to stick their neck into a meat grinder on a daily basis with the Wreck Squads, rather than kick back and make bank with an easy job at a high-end health clinic.
So it wasn’t that I didn't want Stephen back. On the contrary; I was desperate to have him back. Stephen was a five-star operator; a Healer with the skills of a damn action hero. He could keep up with any of the shooters on my team, Dread and I included, with guns or knives or his bare hands.
All that, and those Healer skills to boot. When he bought it, I remembered thinking how Squad Four would never be the same. If he’d survived...
But he hadn’t. And I don’t care what Revival Technologies, Incorporated says… all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t make the dead as good as new again. There’s always something off. Always.
I remember reading somewhere that, if you break the crystal creating a hologram, the hologram is still there in each piece… it’s just smaller, or maybe faded, I can’t remember which. I do remember the time I broke the full-length mirror in my bathroom, though… and even after I’d
meticulously glued all the pieces back into place, I still couldn’t get rid of the cracks marring what used to be a perfect, smooth surface.
I think of Vive Jobs in the same way. Broken holograms, shattered mirrors, Vive Jobs… no matter how you dress them up or paste them back together, they’re still nothing but shards of glass.
So I couldn’t help it. I turned around, and the living dead was right there, looking a little embarrassed to still be walking and talking and breathing in and out. He was wearing a turtleneck to hide the wound on his neck, the wound that killed him, but Stephen was still a dead man come back, and I couldn’t help staring at him like he was a leper. Everything got quiet; it was like the time that racist prick Lawrence from Squad Two was telling Mexican jokes, and Jerry Nons from Six told him that his mom was Mexican.
Okay, I admit it, I felt bad about talking about Stephen like that while he was standing right there. But this was life and death, and if I had to step on a dead guy’s feelings to save our lives, then so be it.
***
“Stephen Tawnborn,” the short man in the black turtleneck said quietly, “reporting for duty.”
After a moment of silence, Cass managed to speak. “Not with me, you aren’t.”
“He’s the only Healer we could find this quickly,” Edison said.
“Then we wait until you can find a... live one,” Cass said, finishing the sentence with difficulty.
“Oh, that’s great,” Edison said. “Hey, why don’t we just wait until we can find a Maestro for you to take in with you?”
“Yeah, good luck finding one,” Shifty grumbled under his breath, glancing sidelong at Stephen before lighting up a cigarette. “Seeing as how there’s maybe like, three on the entire East Coast.”
“Hey, no offense, Stephen, but we are not going in with a Vive,” Cass said.
“Yes, you are,” Edison said. “There's nobody else, you're going in with him.”
“Forget it. Fire me.”
Edison looked like he wanted to explode. “Don't think I won't. I'll put Harrison in command.”
There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation from Dread. “No, sir.”
“What?” Edison seemed to stand on his tip-toes, but he barely managed to get below Dread’s face, much less directly in it. “You listen to me, all of you! I will not have any more of this insubordination! I expected more from you, Harrison! This renegade Vive is a mortal threat to the people of this city, the people you have sworn to protect..."
“Sir, please step out of my face.” Dread’s words were calm as a placid sea, but there was a strong undercurrent of implied violence beneath the surface.
Edison’s voice spluttered to a halt. He looked back and forth from the giant man calmly staring him down to Cass, clearly trying to find something to say to save face, finding nothing.
“You just said,” he finally got out, “that we have to go now. There is nobody else. You just said that.”
Cass folded her arms across her chest. "Going in half-assed and getting ourselves killed isn’t going to save anybody. In fact, it may set Polonius off worse than ever.”
“But...”
“They’re right,” Stephen said, dragging Edison’s protests to a halt.
“What?” Edison said.
“They’re right. There’s no point going in with someone that you’re not one hundred percent sure of, and frankly, if the situation was reversed, I wouldn’t take a V... Revived Individual... in with me, either.”
There were a few moments of silence; people looking at their shoes, fiddling with hands that suddenly seemed to need something to do. Nobody seemed to want to look straight at Stephen; it was as if he were a reminder of a past sin or indiscretion best left buried.
“It’s nothing personal, Stephen,” Cass said at last.
“I know,” he said. He almost sounded apologetic.
The hand-wringing silence returned, filled with more stolen glances at the no-longer dead. The subject of those glances kept his eyes low, never meeting anyone’s gaze, looking like a kid standing on stage at a recital he wanted nothing to do with.
"How, um... how you doin', Stephen?" Peter asked, as if compelled to shatter the stifling quiet.
Stephen seemed about to answer, but a chorus of excited voices drew everyone's attention.
“What’s all that commotion over there?” Shifty asked, nodding toward the van that was being used as SWAT’s command vehicle. A small crowd of cops were gathered around the open doors, all of their attention focused inside the vehicle.
Cass led the team over to the van, secretly thankful for a reprieve from the stifling awkwardness of Edison dumping a Revived Stephen right in her lap.
There were a number of TV screens and monitors going inside the vehicle, and the evening news was running on one of them. The words LIVE REPORT spun slowly near the bottom of the screen.
Squad Four couldn’t hear the voice-over, but they caught the gist of the report quickly enough. Maestro Polonius had struck again.
The live feed showed a burned-out apartment building, burning brightly enough to make the TV screen’s image shimmer like a will o’ wisp in the faces of the nearby police officers. Bodies were scattered everywhere; emergency personnel swarmed over the ground surrounding the flaming building, trying to decide who was too far gone and who was still salvageable.
Cass elbowed her way through the crowd of onlookers to get a better look at the screen, watching as terrified tenants trapped inside the building leapt from the sixth story windows in their desperation to escape the flames. Someone was saying her name, but Cass couldn’t hear it; she was focused on a scrap of burnt blanket, covered with pictures of cartoon animals, left by some child to be trampled underfoot. Her nephew had one like it.
“Where is that?” she asked.
“Off Bryant Street,” Dread answered from her side.
She breathed out her relief. Her sister didn’t live anywhere near Bryant Street.
“That’s not all,” one of the SWAT troopers monitoring the various screens said. “Check this out.”
He hit the rewind on the feed. The images shimmered and shifted, and began moving in reverse as the recording ran backward. Bodies stood up and ran backward into the building, emergency personnel fled the scene in reverse.
“We got a call from some reporter,” he explained. “About fifteen minutes ago. Guy said he heard a voice in his head ordering him to get to this building with a camera crew. Here it is.”
A sudden flare of flame, and then the camera angle pulled back, shrinking the relative size of the apartment building in the image, and the flames were gone, banished through the magic of technology. The video image shifted and stabilized, and then proceeded to roll forward in normal time.
Cass checked the time on the video. They were now watching what had happened ten minutes ago. The apartment building that was about to be completely burned out now stood unmarked, unknowing, unsuspecting of its imminent demise. Shadows moved past windows… the same people who would soon be leaping from those windows to escape smoke and fire… and then it happened.
A column of fire, a brilliant pillar of flame, reached down out of the sky, smashed through the roof of the apartment building, and began running along its length. It forced its way down to the first floor and began to spread out, like a hungry liquid licking at every wall and window and surface. It seemed to drain into the building as if it were a drink poured from high above. The tail of the pillar fell into the apartments, and the attack was over… but the damage was only beginning.
“Just like the two squad cars who first responded on the scene here,” Dread said.
“Polonius.” Cass said, turning away from the screen, as the trooper switched the image back to a live feed.
Dread’s eyes were locked on hers. “Looks like he’s not going to stay quiet.”
She wanted to argue with herself, to wrestle with the decision, but she knew every second of deliberation was another second closer to Polonius’s ne
xt attack on innocents. She couldn’t afford to wait.
“Shifty?” Cass asked loudly.
“Yeah, boss?”
“How long will it take you to prepare for our teleport above the roof?”
“Minute or two,” he said.
“Good. We go in fifteen.” Cass began walking toward the weapons truck, pausing when she passed Stephen.
She looked the walking dead over once, her face inscrutable. “You coming?”
Cass
Some people want to know every detail of a Wreck Squad, down to our equipment and procedures, as if they can become a surrogate trooper or otherwise vicariously experience an op if they study the details.
It’s pretty straightforward. We wear Kevlar body armor vests with flat metal plates that are slid into pockets on the front and back of the vest, similar to what regular SWAT wears. That may seem strange, seeing as how we mostly deal with magefire and conjured creatures, but rogue mages do use guns, too. I don’t want to get shot any more than I want to get eaten alive.
As far as weapons go, we’re loaded a little more on the lethal side than the rest of SWAT. Even our sidearms are different… our Glock pistols are select-fire, meaning we can go full-auto with them, and they have special cuts in the top of the slide to help compensate for the extra recoil.
We also carry some experimental, niche weaponry that’s been created pretty much exclusively for Wreck Squads. Incendiary grenades, for example. Normally, white phosphorus… that’s an incendiary explosive… only comes in the jumbo size; that is, artillery or aerial bombs.
But necessity is the mother of inventions, and so some enterprising folks came up with a way to miniaturize it enough for a hand-thrown package. They’re ridiculously expensive, like most of our niche gear, but when you want an incendiary grenade, you really, really want one.
Another example was Dread’s weapon of choice, the F-shok assault shotgun. Before the threat of rogue mages with their conjurations, and Revived wizards wrecking havoc all willy-nilly, the idea of a fully automatic, belt-fed shotgun was, well, pretty silly. And even now, the F-shok is not exactly a super practical weapon. It’s ridiculously heavy, as is the ammunition for it, but Dread was a monster, and he would carry an anvil into battle if I asked him to. For all its faults, the F-shok did perform as advertised… sustained, fully automatic twelve gauge fire at close range will tear an entire mob to pieces.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 6
