“It’s… it’s SantosRocks69$,” Mickey said with a grin, and we all couldn’t help but burst out laughing.
“No shit?” I said. “That is some serious cheese right there.”
“Yeah, he’s kind of a moron,” Mickey said, tapping on her tablet. “I call him Johnny Deadhead… here we go. Okay… oh. Well, this has to be a mistake. Data entry error or something.”
“What?” Cass asked.
“Well, there’s no revival date. There’s a start date, but no revival date, but we only do that for…”
She stopped cold. Once again, Mickey’s eyes got big and she looked like she’d seen a ghost.
“What’s this?” Dread asked, looking over her shoulder and pointing at the tablet. “Control Subgroup Alpha? It says here we were assigned to Control Subgroup Alpha.”
“No,” Mickey said quietly, shaking her head. “No, that doesn’t… there is no subgroup Alpha, not that I’ve heard of, and you can’t be a….”
She clamped a hand over her mouth, looking up at Dread, then at Cass, before she finally continued.
“Oh, my God. This is so illegal. It has to be illegal.”
“What?” Dread asked.
Cass straightened up a little, as if she’d figured out a part of the puzzle. “We were… we were part of some sort of control group, weren’t we?”
“What does that mean?” Dread asked. “Mickey?”
Mickey seemed to pick her words very slowly and carefully. “You don’t have any signs of Revival Psychosis… because you were never actually Revived.”
“No, that’s not possible,” Dread said. “We were…”
“We were shot to pieces,” Cass finished for him. “We both were. No way we made it. We died. We had to have been Revived.”
“Sure about that?” Jolly said, gnawing his way through another Twizzler. “You could’ve just passed out. Or even if you did kick it, if a Healer got to you fast enough, you wouldn’t necessarily need to have been Revived.”
“Is that true?” I asked. I didn’t have a great Healing array, and I have to admit, my knowledge of that specialty was pretty sparse.
“Oh, yeah. Death is a process. Takes a few minutes before you’re too far gone. In that alleyway, I brought Hotness here back a good minute or two after Fly killed her with the Death Trick.”
Lysette sat up straight. “What did you just call me?”
Jolly’s eyes went wide. “What did I just call you? I called you Lysette, right? Your name is Lysette, and that’s… uh… that’s what I…”
He probably would’ve gone on spluttering like that, digging himself a deeper hole with every word, but luckily for him, Mickey cut back in.
“This is why they locked out part of the files,” she said. “This is what they didn’t want anybody to see. They’ve been running an off-the-books experiment… Dr. Adjani had a theory, that Revival Psychosis was partly psychological, that it was the shock of finding out that you’d been dead that was triggering the phenomenon. But you can’t lie to people and tell them that they’ve been Revived, just to see what they do, that’s… that’s…”
“Fucking sick,” Cass said. “Using us like lab rats? Telling us… making us think…”
“Cass,” Dread said slowly, like he couldn’t quite process the news. “Cass, the things we did… because we thought…”
“Because we thought we were walking time bombs,” Cass snarled, clenching and unclenching her fists. “Because we thought Revival Tech had doomed us to insanity.”
“But this is good news, right?” Jolly said. “I mean, now you know you’re not going to go crazy or anything. This is like, a whole second chance.”
“You don’t understand, man,” I said. “The whole reason Cass and Dread are this prison is because of that lie.”
“They stole our lives, Jolly!” Cass said. “They took everything from us… our careers, our freedom…”
“Each other,” Dread said.
“All because they wanted to wind us up like toys and watch us go. Sick bastards. Who did you say it was? Who set up the experiment?”
“It had to be Dr. Adjani,” Mickey said.
“Adjani… Adjani,” Cass said, nodding to herself. “Yeah. I know that guy. He was there before the whole Polonius thing. That piece of shit. I’m going to tear him a new…”
Across the room, there was the sudden sound of metal crashing under the impact of a heavy weight, drowning out whatever Cass was going to say and making us all jump a little. I scrambled to my feet and grabbed my weapon. Whatever the implications of Mickey’s bombshell news might be, it would have to wait.
We were under attack.
***
Eight separate entrances fed into the hub; one from the main hallway leading to the front gate, the other seven leading to one of the many cell blocks radiating outwards from the hub. Each of those seven was sealed with a heavy steel door; two of those doors now buckled and deformed under an unseen, titanic assault from the other side.
“Who was supposed to be watching the cameras?” Peck said. “God damn it, who?”
The prison guards and Shifty’s Wreck Squad scrambled to grab up weapons and get into some semblance of defensive positions before the doors gave way under the impact of whatever was attacking them from the other side. The warden paced back and forth, away from the doors, then back towards his guards, then away from the danger, then back towards his guards again, as if unsure as to where he could go or what he should do.
“It looks like they removed the barricades,” one the guards said, looking over the camera feeds. “While we weren’t watching.”
“Can they get in?” Mickey asked. The doors under attack were on the other side of the hub, but she still squeezed in behind where Dread was sitting so she could use his bulk as a shield from whatever was trying to get in.
“We’re about to find out,” Cass said.
Her mind was still reeling from what Mickey had told her; not a Vive Job after all, but a lab rat in a maze instead. Jolly had been right; it was good news, amazing news, impossible news, but news that was still spoiled by the irony that she was locked in prison because of that very same lie.
Cass shook her head to clear it. As game-changing and mind-twisting as the revelation was, she couldn’t afford to deal with any of that right now. She had to focus on the moment.
She’d learned a long time ago how to compartmentalize her emotions when it came to the job. Bad guys didn’t care if you were having a lousy day or had a fight with your spouse or whatever other issues you might be wrestling with; they’d use the distraction to their advantage and wipe you out.
So. First things first. Survive the next five minutes, and then sort it all out later.
She stuffed away the unfocused thoughts and tried to assess the situation. The two doors under attack were spread out, slightly; there was one entrance between the two doors under attack that was left untouched. The guards and Shifty’s Wreck Squad bunched up near those two doors, readying themselves for a fight.
What’s Kel doing? Cass wondered. Why two doors so close together, where we can concentrate our defenses? Is this is a diversionary attack? Is another attack coming on this side of the room, away from those doors?
She didn’t have to speculate for long. One and then the other door burst away from their top hinges, twisting obliquely in the doorway. Instantly, ghouls pushed their way through the wide cracks left by the deformed doors, leaping into the hub and rushing the defenders.
The sound of gunfire was deafening in the close quarters of the hub. Bullets tore into the ghouls who pressed their way through the wreckage of the doors, heedless of the gunfire, widening the gap in the doorway further and further before they fell.
They dropped in ones and twos as the hail of bullets tore into them. More replaced the ones who dropped, coming on in a relentless wave, and soon, the tempo of gunfire slowed as weapons ran dry and clicked on empty chambers. The guards and the Wreck Squad scrambled to reload their
weapons quickly enough to get back into the fight, but the momentary lull in the firing gave half a dozen ghouls the chance to get through the doorway on the right and push into the hub.
Bullet sponges, Cass thought. The action was only twenty yards away, but still she watched with a detached calm as she examined the enemy’s tactics. Send in the first wave to use up everybody’s ammunition, then a few can get in to the hub while everybody reloads. And once those ghouls are in and amongst the guards…
She pulled hard against the handcuffs chaining her to the desk, helpless to prevent what she knew was about to happen. Cass could see it in her mind the instant before it occurred; the ghouls charged into the ranks of the guards, leaping onto their backs like mountain lions, tearing at faces and necks with the terrible black talons at the tips of their fingers.
The guards they leapt on screamed and fired wildly in a panic, sending bullets spraying around the room. Cass dove for cover, getting as close to the ground as her restraints would allow in a desperate attempt to keep one of the wild shots from hitting her.
More of the guards fell or broke formation; either hit by friendly fire or simply trying to take cover from it, Cass couldn’t tell which. It didn’t matter. More ghouls pushed their way in through the doorway now that gunfire wasn’t holding them back, creating a deadly spiral where less and less guards covered the doorway and more and more ghouls were able to force their way into the hub.
Dread saw the same thing she did. “Cass…”
“Yeah, well, what would you like to do about it, Dread?” Cass said, lifting her chained hand up as far as the handcuffs would allow. “There’s nothing we can do from here. Lys?”
Lysette held up both hands, cuffed to a steel ring on a nearby table. “Mage restraints. With these on, I’m no different from any of you.”
“Mickey….” Dread said, looking around for the little Mentalist. “Mickey?”
“What?” she said, peeking out from her hiding spot behind him.
“You still have the keys. From before. In your purse. Nobody ever searched it.”
“Um, yes, I do have the keys, but… oh! The handcuffs!”
“The handcuffs,” Dread said. “Hurry.”
“Start with Lys,” Cass said. “Then Dread, then me. Jolly, are you with us?”
Jolly nodded. “Hell, yes, I’m with you! Let’s do this!”
“What do you want me to do once I get you all loose?” Mickey asked, undoing Lysette’s mage restraints with the keys from her purse.
“Hide under a desk and stay there,” Cass said.
“I like that plan,” Mickey said, setting Dread and Cass free before scurrying under a nearby desk.
Cass clenched and unclenched her fists a few times as she stood, forcing herself to come up with a plan before making her move. As bad as things were, as much as it would’ve felt right to rush into the fight as quickly as possible to try to turn things around, she first needed to sort out where their efforts would actually pay off, or they’d only add more random noise to a bad situation.
“What’s the plan, Cass?” Dread said.
Shifty’s Wreck Squad was holding down the doorway on the left; they were holding on by a thread, but at least that flank was holding. The right doorway was where the chaos was the worst; ghouls pushing their way through the doorway unopposed while the guards fought off the enemy amongst them hand to hand.
The old instincts kicked in, the rhythms that Cass had trained and drilled her entire life. She was back in action again, no longer dragged down by the dread of eventual insanity, but alive, alive, and she felt a surge of adrenaline kick in as she led her team on the attack.
“Dread and Lys, right flank!” she called out. “Jolly, hang back. Anybody drops, you’re on them!”
She ran to the left to reinforce where Shifty and the remnants of his Wreck Squad were barely holding off a wave of ghouls pushing their way through the cell block door. Shifty had the enemy pushed back with a shield, but Cass could tell he wasn’t going to be able to hold it for much longer.
“Shifty!” she called out to him as she rushed up to his side.
He barely gave her a glance, straining with effort to keep his shield up and the ghouls pressed back behind the barrier. A single ghoul managed to force its way around the edge of his force field, charging a short distance into the room before being felled by gunfire from one of the Wreck Squad.
“Cass!” he said, nodding down towards the rifle slung at his side. “Take it!”
Cass pulled the rifle off of him and shrugged the sling over her shoulders. Her hands were back into the old rhythms now, as well as her mind, and she checked the rifle’s magazine and flicked off the safety with practiced ease.
“Ryan, hold that side!” she said, then waved to the other two Wreck Squad shooters. “You two, on me!”
They glanced at Shifty, who nodded and said, “Do it! Cass, I’m fading! This shield is going to fold!”
Cass shouldered her rifle. “You two, pick your targets. Head shots. Shifty is going to start pulsing the shield holding the ghouls back. It drops, you fire on your targets. It goes back up, you pick your new targets. Then we repeat. Got it?”
“Got it!” they responded, leaning in to their weapons and choosing their targets amongst the ghouls trapped behind Shifty’s shield.
“Ready!” Cass said.
“Go!” Shifty said, and dropped the shield.
Cass and the others opened fire as soon as it dropped, firing rounds into the heads of several ghouls before Shifty raised the shield again. The surviving ghouls pressed up against it, slamming into it with inhuman fury, but the shield held.
“Again!” Cass said. “Ready?”
“Ready!” the Wreck Squad shouted back.
“Go!” Shifty said.
Once again, their gunfire tore down the front ranks of the ghouls. More of the enemy tried to charge through the doorway, only to be stopped cold by Shifty’s shield. A moment ago, he had barely been able to hold on from the exertion of trying to keep his shield up constantly. Now that he could pulse the shield off and on and get a short break in between, Shifty was able to catch his breath and sustain the effort.
To their right, Dread and Lysette charged straight into the melee of guards and ghouls fighting and tearing each other apart. It was chaos; the panic fire had stopped, but the guards were running back and forth in an almost random fashion, trying to fight off the ghouls that were on them, trying to come to the aid of their friends, trying to be everywhere at once and ending up nowhere. None of them were guarding the doorway, and more ghouls were able to push their way into the room to add to the madness.
Dread tore a ghoul off the back of a nearby guard. With a shout, he slammed the ghoul to the ground, pinning it to the concrete, ignoring the slashing claws as they tore open scratches on his face and shoulders.
“Kill it!” he shouted to the guard. “Kill the head!”
The guard stared at him for a second, blinking in confusion at the sight of the huge inmate who had just saved his life and pinned his attacker to the ground. Then, he shook himself and dove back into the fight, smashing in the head of the ghoul with his rifle butt.
“Thanks,” he said to Dread with a nod, turning to help another guard who was fighting off a ghoul hand to hand.
“No!” Dread said, pulling him back. “I got him! Cover the door!”
Dread didn’t wait for the guard to respond. He grabbed the next ghoul under the arms in a full nelson, forcing it down to the ground. It struggled against him with a crazed, desperate strength, and Dread strained every muscle fiber he had against it, until the guard he’d just rescued had recovered enough to crush the ghoul’s skull with the butt of his weapon.
Dread looked up in time to see Lysette lift a ghoul over her head and hurl it into two others coming through the door, knocking all three to the concrete floor and momentarily blocking any other ghouls from being able to get through. She glanced over at him, and a little grin touched the
corner of her mouth.
Dread shook his head. “Showoff.”
He continued to move amongst the guards, pulling ghouls off of them and holding them down long enough for the guards to crush their skulls with their rifle stocks. Once a guard had recovered, Dread pointed them over to the door, to add to the growing number of prison guards holding back the enemy still trying to force their way into the hub.
Soon, the tide began to turn. Fewer and fewer guards were caught up in desperately trying to fight off the ghouls hand to hand, and more and more were able to push back the enemy trying to get through the mangled door. Any of the ghouls that did manage to force their way through the door and get past the guards’ gunfire were immediately intercepted by Lysette, who threw them against the wall hard enough to shatter their spines.
Jolly moved from casualty to casualty. Deep lacerations, broken bones, severed arteries, all were sealed and patched and put back together, and once the guards were healed, Jolly gave their shoulders a little shake and helped them back to their feet so that they could rejoin the fight.
Dread was starting to feel confident that they had the situation under control when Mickey’s voice shouted his name. It was sudden, jarring, impossibly loud; it practically filled his entire consciousness. He looked around, confused for a moment, before he realized her voice was in his head and not in his ear.
He looked over to where he’d left her. The little Mentalist was still curled up in a ball under the desk, hands over her ears to keep out the close thunder of the gunfire.
The door! her voice said in his head. Over here!
Next to her, another steel door began to buckle under heavy blows from the opposite side. Dread swore. Just when he thought they had this all beaten, Kel was attacking them from the rear flank.
“Cass!” he shouted. “Six o’ clock!”
Cass caught his gesture and saw they were about to be hit from behind. She waved him toward the new attack, saying, “Go!”
Dread called out to Lysette as he picked up a rifle off a dead guard. He checked the magazine on the run across the room, meeting Cass and Ryan on the way.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 38
