The up-armored Humvee bumped over another pothole, and I wiped at a bead of sweat that hung just above my left eyebrow.
I wish I could take this vest off.
Despite how well-maintained the company vehicles were, it seemed that Humvee air-conditioners were a bit of a gamble in terms of how well they worked. Some kept their rigs icy-cool, while others put out just enough tepid air to keep the inside of the steel-covered boxes from turning into ovens. Wearing a thick bulletproof vest, camouflage fatigues, and with the afternoon temperature sticking to a balmy 86 degrees, I had long ago decided that I agreed with the contractors; Humvees sucked.
“You good, Kaba?” Our team leader, Aussie, called back to me from the front passenger seat, eyebrow raised.
My full name, Adhrit Veer Kabanagarajan, had proven rather difficult for most average Americans to pronounce. Since the mercs referred to each other by nicknames, they were more than pleased when I told them they could call me ‘Kaba’ for short. My father had moved us from Rajasthan to Ohio years ago to avoid a potential war between India and Pakistan. It had been hard at first, but I grew used to America, and had managed to find a good job for myself after graduating from university. The company had many fake titles, but the real name, the one we all knew as office employees, remained burned into the back of my mind.
The Environmental Liminal Space Alleviation and Reduction program.
I flashed a thumb’s up, and smiled to hide the grimace from how my guts whirled in protest at the bumpy ride that had gone on for close to half an hour. “I’m okay.”
“Good job, mate.” Aussie returned my thumbs up with his own, the ‘Rangers lead the way’ tattoo on his arm showing just under his rolled uniform sleeves and nodded at my canteen. “Keep drinking water though. Don’t want anyone falling out today.”
All fighters were supposed to use the code-names provided by ELSAR headquarters, a combination of letter and numbers such as R-Eleven, Aussie’s true designation, but the mercs hated those names and preferred the more personal call-signs. His was due to the fact that he’d originally come from Melbourne Australia before his US Army days, and Aussie’s down-under accent remained part of his speech to this day. I’d been incredibly nervous about working with the ‘grunts’ as my fellow office workers called them, firmly convinced they would beat me into a pulp right away.
As it turned out, nothing was further from the truth. In fact, in all my days in the US thus far, I’d never felt more welcome around a group of people than the bearded men of the Security Forces. Even though they had a sense of humor as dark as the midnight sky, they measured everyone who they came across by a standard based around actions. If you acted like an arrogant know-it-all, you could expect to be treated as an outsider who didn’t deserve the time it took to say hello. If you listened to their advice, and kept your head when they teased you, the mercs would all but adopt you as a long-lost brother in no time. It was a startlingly egalitarian culture, and I’d come to like it far better than the petty office politics of my old position.
If only it wasn’t so beastly hot.
Perched in the machine-gun turret above me, Tex leaned down and half-shouted above the dull rumble of the Humvee’s diesel engine. “Hey, isn’t this where Bronson’s platoon got wrecked by some freaks at an abandoned church?”
“Yeah, a few miles down the ridgeline.” In the driver’s seat, the tall mahogany-skinned Jamaican, Rocco, bobbed his head. “I guess he was trying to get some special capture for HQ and got bounced by a bunch of them all at once.”
I threw a glance to my left, at the one person who had yet to say anything for the entire patrol thus far. Despite my quick, discrete look, she remained motionless, and stared out the window on her side, rifle cradled in one arm like a steel infant.
The girl was slender and short, enough to make me look tall, a mean feat to say the least. She had the same sun-tanned Caucasian skin of everyone in this sleepy rural county, with brown hair the color of sandal leather. Hardly any of the contractors were women, and none of them local. This was by design, to intimidate potential adversaries, and to prevent family ties from interfering with official duty.
But Crow was both.
Like the rest of us, she wore a gray tactical uniform, hers sporting a green shield patch on her upper right arm, signifying the new Auxiliary program that HQ had initiated to draw more recruits from the local populace. Unlike the others, Crow’s nickname didn’t match anything about her. She wasn’t dark in any way, and I hadn’t heard her speak a word since I’d joined the team a week ago. Crow followed orders whenever Aussie gave them, albeit silently, and the team seemed to watch her with a strange mix of caution and sympathy that I had yet to figure out.
She could be a statue for how little she moves.
“Figures.” Tex’s southern drawl broke me from my musings, and he went back to scanning the road behind his long-barreled 240. “Bronson was a royal prick anyway. He manned a desk for division supply back in Afghanistan, but the cocky POG bragged sayin’ he went outside the wire all the time.”
POG. Person-other-than-grunt. It was an insult awarded to anyone who hadn’t ever served in the combat arms portions of the military that tried to pretend they were some kind of war hero. POG meant you weren’t experienced in the ways of war, that you were foolhardy, rash, arrogant. All things these guys hated, especially in officers.
“All it takes is one mistake, and we’re in the same boat.” Aussie scratched at his curly reddish-brown beard, and made a slight headshake. “Bronson was a bloody moron though. You know the guy actually tried to get approval for ‘strategic camps’ to herd the locals into? Can you imagine putting some farmer and his family behind barbed wire at gunpoint?”
I said nothing. We’d heard about Bronson’s demise in the office. He’d been in possession of a high-value target, though his methods were less than satisfactory. When Bronson’s patrol got torn apart as a result, headquarters had decided to dispatch a ‘cooperate liaison’ with each security team to gather scientific samples from the field, before the mercs could kill everything in sight. As one of the newer members of the biological analysis team, I’d drawn the short straw along with many others, and had been sent to play the role of a beetle-catching nerd on behalf of the suits who rested safely in their cubicles over a hundred miles away. Now, I carried an M4 automatic rifle and several loaded magazines, a Kevlar helmet on my head, with my backup handgun digging into me from where it sat on my tactical belt.
Green trees rolled by, the red sun hugging the horizon as it sank and cotton-ball clouds drifted along in the cool breeze. It was gorgeous weather, what my mother would have called ‘a gardening day’ as her favorite pastime dictated.
She’s probably in the kitchen right now, making Sandesh for Lakshmi when she gets home from swimming practice.
“Contact front, white pickup truck, two hundred meters!” Tex’s cry rang out from the gun turret, and ice rippled through my blood.
Sitting up, I peered around Rocco’s seat to stare out the front window, just in time to see a civilian pickup truck take off down the backroad, leaving behind a cloud of dust as it went. I could barely catch a circular green symbol painted onto the door of the vehicle, and a few figures huddled in the back wearing black polo shirts, rifles clutched in their hands.
Moving too fast for us to catch up, the truck disappeared down the road, and above me, Tex cranked the gun turret from side to side. Everyone seemed on edge, as these men had been on the receiving end of an ambush at one point in their lives, and I could see them all reliving those memories in their eyes as they scanned the nearby trees. Even Crow sat up in her seat and flexed her slender white fingers on the grip of her rifle with a stoney expression.
“Should we try to catch them?” I coughed, staring into the surrounding foliage as hard as I could, looking for the glimmer of light on a gun barrel like they’d taught me to do.
“No.” Aussie bore a more serious frown, his eyes flashing over the gravel roadway, one hand on his weapon. “They could be trying to lure us in. Keep this speed, Rocco. Everyone else, watch your sectors, and stay frosty.”
He picked up his radio mic to mutter something into it for the other Humvees behind us, and I forced myself to breathe slowly.
The truck is bullet proof.
My hands were clammy and cold on the carbine tucked between my skinny knees. I’d received some basic combat instruction from the mercs when I’d joined them a week ago in preparation for this mission. Thankfully, I’d made a good enough impression on my squad-mates that they’d taken the time to train with me extensively, but I’d never been shot at before, and the thought that I might have to duck bullets soon gave me chills.
“Oh fu—hey, slow down, slow down.”
I whirled at the surprised gasp from Tex, and my jaw dropped.
We rolled past the point in the road where the white pickup came from, and found ourselves face-to-face with three burned-out MRAP Cougars, high-tech armored trucks that made Humvees look like jokes. Only frontline units got those, and since we were strictly recon, HQ hadn’t felt we’d need them. But these trucks were fire-blackened, their bulletproof glass windows pockmarked with impact holes, and three large craters in the road were ringed with chunks of rubber and scrap metal.
Hanging suspended from a nearby oak tree were the bodies.
Rocco slowed to a near crawl, and even Aussie seemed too stunned to reprimand him. Close to a dozen dead men hung in the late spring breeze, their clothes burnt and bloody, with bits of yellow nylon tow-straps wrapped around their bent necks. Small cardboard signs fluttered from orange plastic baler twine draped over their shoulders, the words daubed on in crude black lettering.
Go home killer, this isn’t your land.
Thanks for the ammo, jackboot.
Do you want to see your families again? Then leave ours alone!
“Three weeks.” Rocco gripped the steering wheel so tight his ebony knuckles tinged gray, a frustrated tone to his voice. “Three weeks ago, we rolled right down this road, handing out MRE’s and water bottles to the locals. One kid even saluted me.”
Aussie scowled at the signs and spat out his open window into the dirt. “It’s those blokes from New Wilderness. See all the copper shards on the road? Bet you anything they’ve got this whole road mined with EFPs.”
My brow furrowed, and I dared to lean forward in my seat. “EFP’s?”
“Explosive-formed-projectile.” Tex shifted on his feet in the gun turret, the barrel of his 240 machine-gun still trained on the shrubs. “Basically, you take a bunch or pennies or scrap copper, and pack it over some explosives in a concrete tube. When it blows, the copper turns molten, and can cut through anything, even hardened steel. Taliban used it on our convoys all the time.”
At that thought, I swallowed a dusty lump in my throat. “But why would they shoot at us? We’re trying to help them.”
“That’s what we said in Afghanistan.” Aussie sighed, his eyes staring right through the dead soldiers, and into some far-away place I couldn’t see. “Didn’t make a lick of difference there either. I think we’re done with this road, Rocco. Take the next left, and we’ll try to move around it.”
Movement blurred in the corner of my vision, and I turned to see Crow watching me, her coffee brown eyebrows raised in a cynical smirk. I waited for her to say something cutting, to berate me for my naïve questions, but as always, she just turned her head to stare back out the truck window.
We drove on in silence, leaving the dead men and their ruined trucks behind us. Aussie claimed we’d go back for them, but somehow, I doubted the corpses would even be there come the morning. I’d been briefed extensively on the anomaly situation in Barron County Ohio, and there were few things in these hills that would pass up a free meal.
A rare cosmic event . . . reality warp-plane breach . . . electromagnetic cellular mutation . . .
These words rolled through my head, and I tugged my green canvas knapsack off to pull open the top flap. Nestled beside my company-issue Geiger counter and electromagnetic scanner, the red folder glared back at me, like a wasp in a trap. Before this job, I’d loved biology, fascinated with examining the strange mysteries of nature and why things were the way they were. But now, with my textbooks effectively reduced to worthless toilet paper by the nightmares that populated this forsaken place, I’d grown to hate my chosen field.
Keeping the folder pressed deep within the confines of my bag, I peeled the cover open, and shuffled through the contents.
Type 1: The Oak-Walker
Origin unknown. Food source unknown. Largest Organic anomaly known to date. Highly intelligent bipedal organism, capable of telekinesis and short-range telepathy. Physiology resembles plant structures, such as trees and branches, though it retains a humanoid appearance. Has shown unique ability to create anomaly life forms from surrounding biological material. Extremely dangerous. Believed to be extinct at time of recording. See Persons of Interest file for individuals connected to sightings.
I swallowed a dusty lump in my throat, and peered at the artist-rendition of what corporate thought the creature looked like, an unearthly face made from a mass of tangled branches with no eyes, and a crown of sharp twigs. Even staring into the face of the thing felt wrong, despite the picture being nothing but a sketch, and I paged over to the next creature to avoid my nausea returning.
Type 2: The Echo Spider
The largest of the Techno family, this arachnid creature is made to look like a signal tower for radio or cellphone service, hibernating during the day, and prowling at night. Evidence suggests this is becoming less and less of an issue over time, as more Type 2’s have been spotted closer to daylight hours. Feeds primarily on organics and plant material. Travels in small groups of three to six, much in the same way as contemporary elephants might. Mid-range intelligence, similar to that of any large herbivore. It also has shown ability to manipulate certain species through a weaker form of telepathy than the Type 1. Vulnerable to magnetism, and sonic blasts. Current population estimates are 42 within the zone, 0 outside. Extremely dangerous, do not approach.
It went on like that, Type 3 for the Osage Wyvern, a flying creature that resembled a creepy dragon made from a rotted tree, Type 4 for the Birch Crawlers, a bizarre combination of gorilla and crocodile with skin like birch bark, and Type 5 for the Auto-Stalkers, entities that resembled old cars, but walked on all fours like water buffalo. Strangest of all, however, was Type 6.
Type 6, labeled simply as ‘homo melius’ showed several grainy satellite photographs of a slender blonde woman moving in and around a white clapboard church. She had wavy golden hair, and eyes that matched, but aside from the odd luminescence of her irises, I couldn’t see anything threatening about her. Yet in a scaling system that ranked everything from most dangerous to least, corporate designated her kind as the sixth most dangerous, despite the fact that Type 7 was the white-eyed flesh-eating humanoid Puppets. Still, her profile was marked with the big, bold High Value Target etched at the top of the page, and I wondered if this had been the prize that Bronson died for.
How is some random girl more dangerous that a bunch of howling wooden cannibals?
“We’re here.”
Aussie’s voice broke me from my pondering, and I looked up in time for prickly dread to seep through me from head to toe.
Squat wooden buildings sat around a fenced in yard covered with old, dry sawdust. Various logs lay stacked in heaps, and a few pieces of heavy equipment stood frozen in between the piles, like rusted giants fossilized by the daylight. A leaning sign half-covered by brush read ‘Everwood Lumber and Beam Co’ in faded white lettering. The dark windows of the sawmill gaped with inky shadows, and even as the Humvees circled the center of the yard like pioneer wagons, a chill ran down my spine.
“Alright everyone, keep your eyes open and stay close.” Aussie reached to the shoulder strap of his plate carrier and clicked the mic on his radio. “Search team with me, everyone else maintain 360 security around the trucks.”
Grunted replies crackled over the radio, and Aussie threw me a nod. “Time to go.”
The sawdust muffled my footfalls, and somehow the entire yard seemed to be quieter than anywhere else I’d ever been, despite the idling diesel gun trucks behind me. With every step I took toward the main building of the sawmill, the world grew ever more silent, like it held its breath in abhorrent anticipation of what might come.
Readings. I need readings, for safety.
Fumbling with my gear, I dug out the Geiger counter and pressed the power button.
Tick . . . tick, tick.
It whirred and clicked in my hand, but the clicking didn’t rise to the level where I would need the bulky gray gas mask that bounced on my thigh. Various ELSAR research sites throughout the US confirmed that high or pulsating levels of radiation accompanied by erratic electromagnetic readings meant the presence of an anomaly. When it came to such things, the newer they were, the more dangerous, as they had yet to figure out their place in the environment and were thus much more defensive and hostile.
I scanned every vehicle in the yard, the silent cranes, the forklifts, even a rusted old pickup truck in the weeds.
Clear.
Aussie and Rocco followed not far behind me, rifles at the ready. I doubted their bullets would help much if anything bigger than a Type 7 leapt out of the woodwork, but it was a nice thought that at least I wouldn’t die alone.
Whiiirrr.
My counter cringed with clicks the instant I panned it over the nearby sawmill main building, and I suppressed a groan.
“You don’t have to go in there if you don’t want to.” Aussie trudged up next to me, genuine concern in his tone. “Our Blue Force tracker hasn’t worked since the county line, and there’s no air cover thanks to the high-altitude electronic interference. I could say we got lost, or bogged down in a minefield. It’s your call.”
True bravery is being willing to do hard things for the good of others.
My mother’s words echoed in my head, bits of wisdom from my childhood, so distant yet still so sweet. How I wished I could go back, back to being naïve and innocent, back to believing my parents when they told me there were no such things as monsters. Back to the normal world.
“I’m getting strong readings.” I coughed and spat into the dirt to avoid making eye contact with the sawmill. “If the satellite images were correct . . . then I have to be sure.”
Aussie flicked his eyes toward the sun, as if already worried about how much daylight we had left. “If you say so. Let us go first, just to make sure nothing’s waiting in there, yeah?”
At that, I didn’t protest.
We donned our gas masks, just in case, the men forming a small square around me, Aussie and Rocco on either side, Tex and Crow to the rear. The others watched with grave expressions from behind their trucks as we slowly stalked toward the closest man door on the sawmill, without so much as a peep over the radio.
“Check it out.” Tex stopped a few feet from the sheet metal door, and everyone froze in unison. “Never seen Skinnies do that before.”
The circle of handprints ringed a crudely painted stick figure, daubed in the same sticky black substance that always caused a stir amongst our researchers every time we put it under a microscope. To anyone else, it looked like black sludge, perhaps congealed motor oil or tar, but I knew better.
“Type 7’s.” I breathed through the filter on my mask, awed and shaken by being so close. “They paint with their blood. Handprints mark an important place for them, like nests.”
“So, what’s that in the middle?” Rocco edged closer and poked his rifle barrel at the blurred silhouette.
It had no face, just a blur of smears shaped like wriggling branches, and more twigs poked up over its head in a bizarre crown. Its arms were outstretched like a god from the walls of some ancient temple, and long thin lines, like vines, wove from its four-fingered hands to each encircling palm print, connecting them all in itself. A brief hum of static rippled through my head upon gazing into the picture’s hidden face, and I had to force a breath down my lungs to snap my eyes away from it.
“Not sure.” I lied and focused on wiggling my toes inside my boots. “Maybe some kind of territory marking.”
“If this really is a nest, then there could be hundreds in there.” Aussie growled beneath his mask, both brown eyes roaming over the dark windows, his gloved hands stroking the safety on his rifle. “We should wait for backup.”
He reached for his radio, but a part of me already knew what would happen. “Titan, this is Stalker Three Actual, we are on site. There is evidence of heavy anomaly concentration in this area. Requesting backup in order to secure and clear the building, how copy over?”
A stern voice blared through the headsets we all wore, cold and unfeeling, as those in charge always seemed to be.
“Stalker Three Actual, this is Titan, negative on the backup, all our available units are otherwise engaged at this time. Maintain your low impact status and continue observation. Titan out.”
Maintain our status. Fancy talk for ‘please don’t shoot the nightmarish creatures, we want to study them, even if they’re gnawing on your bloody windpipe.’
Aussie swore softly under his breath, turned, and made a small slashing motion across his throat, before pointing to his left eye.
As one, we all reached for the tiny cameras mounted to the molle webbing of our plate carriers and pushed the little power switches to the off position. This routine had been taught to me in secret, a tactic the mercs used whenever HQ wanted them to do something they knew was insane. It had saved the squad many times, even though it made corporate furious. Still, I wasn’t going to argue. If anything, the camera switching off made me feel slightly better, because I knew what it meant.
“Right gents, we’re going to do a hard knock.” Adjusting his weapon sling to give himself more room to operate, Aussie pulled out his rifle magazine to ensure it was topped off. “Once we’re through that door, you’re weapons free. We take it slow, room by room, until it’s clear. Got it?”
I stepped in line with the others as I’d been trained to do, fourth in the stack of five, with my carbine pointed at the dirt. My job was to take samples, but it would be much easier to take samples from corpses than live, snarling beasts.
Rocco twisted the rusted door handle and shoved it in with his shoulder.
The second my weapon light clicked on, I felt my intestines lurch.
Rusty red smeared the walls and clotted in the sawdust on the smooth concrete floor. Chunks of dried out skin lay scattered over everything, and clouds of black flies buzzed around the various tufts of hair stuck to bits of yellowed bone. Skulls had been heaped up in one corner like stashed toys in a child’s room, some small, some large, of rodents, cats, dogs, and deer. More than one looked human, and I noted the odd watch lying amongst the bones, or a discarded shoe, or a torn scrap of denim soaked in dried blood. More handprints adorned the walls of what had at one time been a small breakroom, but the room stood in empty silence, even as our boots shuffled to a crunching halt on the death-ridden floor.
“Clear.” Aussie grunted, and the word echoed across the lips of the mercs around me.
“Clear.” I parroted, and stacked back up on the next door with them, my heart roaring inside my chest. This had just been a small antechamber, a side room, a place where the fiends stored their kill and enjoyed throwing the scraps around like demonic monkeys. If they were still here, then the bigger room would have them, and have them by the dozen.
Aussie gave Rocco the signal, and he kicked the next door in with all his might.
Inky shadows swirled with dusty before my eyes, darker than it should have been with all the windows on the building. I blinked, letting my corneas adjust slowly, and as they did, my heart did a flip-flop inside my chest.
Macabre fires were strewn all over the wood-chip-covered floor, some piled on top of one another, a few with pale limbs still twitching. There were close to three dozen of them, eerie, white-eyed Puppets with their pale grayish skin and ragged clothes, hauntingly human in the dim glow of our weapon lights. Hazy eyes gazed sightless at some far-away scene, their horrific faces still, jaws hanging open in rigor mortis to reveal their stubby wooden teeth. Black spatters of blood cooled on the sawdust, and everywhere my light shone, I caught the glimmer of hundreds of spent brass rifle casings. Flies hummed greedily at their feast, and I swept my light over the corpses in a mix of relief, and disappointment.
“Looks like New Wilderness bit off more than they could chew.” Aussie nudged one of the few bodies in the room that wore a tattered black polo shirt with his boot. “This patrol must have gotten cornered and ran out of ammo. I figure the freaks who survived moved on before sunrise this morning. Smart little buggers.”
A soft rustle echoed behind me, and I turned to find Crow shining her weapon light on a body slumped in a far corner, half covered by a mound of dead Puppet’s.
The figure’s head bobbed . . . and it coughed.
All four of us stared at the torn, shattered girl wheezing through shredded lips, her bite-mark ridden arms refusing to move as she dragged each gargled breath down. Like the other members of the New Wilderness Ranger force, her empty gun lay not far away, and dark red stained the wood chips around her. She was scrawny and pale, almost gray from blood loss, and there were patches of her mud-colored hair that had been torn out by the roots. Despite this, I couldn’t help but notice how small she seemed, how young, and something in my chest twisted in pain at seeing the name ‘Melissa’ stitched on her blood-soaked polo shirt.
I lowered my rifle, both arms shaking with bewilderment.
She could be Laksmi’s age.
“Crow, wait don’t—”
Aussie’s low warning cut out as Crow threw herself on the wounded girl with startling speed. Her eyes blazed with a dark fire I hadn’t seen before, and the auxiliary fighter flung her rifle aside like she’d been starving for such a moment all day.
Frozen in horror, I could only watch her grasp the wounded ranger by her dark hair and tip her skull back against the cold sheet metal.
Slurk.
Steel flashed in the light, and fresh red blood sprayed across Crow’s gas mask visor.
She brought the knife down again and again, spraying blood with each stroke, and beneath the black rubber of her blood-soaked gas mask, Crow shrieked in a guttural exertion that dripped with hatred.
The wounded girl’s one remaining eyes flew open in shock and pain, and she stared at Crow in a pleading agony, while rivers of red drained down her shirt front from the trench in her neck. Crow pinned her to the wall, abyssal fury in her gaze, as if willing the ranger to know what she was doing.
Seconds later, the girl’s eye glazed over, and both her shattered legs stopped twitching.
Oh my God.
I shook my head to try and drive the panic from my brain. What had I just watched? Secretive or no, ELSAR had sent us in to protect people, to stop the anomalies from migrating, to contain the effects of the Breach. This wasn’t our mission. This wasn’t what I’d signed up for. This wasn’t war.
This was murder.
Crow’s head lowered, and she sucked in deep, slow pants, as though she’d exhausted herself.
“Crow.” Aussie crouched a few feet away from her, his tone soft, almost like someone dealing with a wild animal. “Private, hey, look at me.”
Tex and Rocco shifted on their feet, and I couldn’t move, too stunned to think or speak. Crow shook like a leaf, one hand still clutching the bloody knife, her panting ragged as if she fought waves of nausea with every breath.
Slowly edging close enough to give her shoulder a squeeze, Aussie pulled her upright on the balls of her feet. “Sarah.”
My mouth hung open. I’d never learned anyone else’s name here, only ever sharing my own with the squad, and something about the way he said it made Crow seem less like a statue, and more like . . . well . . . like a person.
Her head craned upward, and Crow’s shoulders slumped in an apologetic, half-ashamed grimace. “Sergeant, I—”
“I know.” Aussie patted Sarah’s back and nodded toward the door we’d come through. “Take a minute. Go get some air, we’ll finish this.”
He offered her a hand up, but Crow shook her head, climbing to her feet all by herself, and snatched her rifle to slowly shuffle out the door. She never so much as looked our way, and stepped callously around the other bodies as if they were stones lining a garden path.
“That’s the third time this month.” Tex kicked a clump of sticky red sawdust, his words spoken through gritted teeth. “Seriously, how long are you gonna let this go?”
“She lost everything, Tex. You were in Collingswood when the rockets came down.” Aussie gestured at the dead ranger with a weary sigh. “Can you blame her for hating them?”
Tex’s eyes narrowed into angry slits behind his visor mask, and he threw a frustrated hand into the air. “So we’re tolerating war crimes now? This girl was barely old enough to drive a car, she wasn’t a threat. We have to get Crow transferred before she kills more people.”
“And when she gets promoted?” Aussie’s tone turned angry, and he jabbed a finger at the door, oblivious to the fact that I stood, wide-eyed, watching the whole interaction. “You know how the suits are. Command won’t help her, they’ll feed her worst side, and turn her loose. I’m not shipping her off to some corporate hack so they can turn her into a killing machine.”
“Why bother?” Glaring at them both, Tex spun on his heel, and headed for the door. “We already have.”
Rocco started forward, as if to say something, but Aussie caught him by the arm. “Leave it. I’ll talk to him later.”
Grudgingly, Rocco sauntered off, and Aussie slung his rifle to one side to beckon me closer. “Kaba. A moment?”
My knees almost knocked together, but I crossed the few yards to stand next to Aussie, the two of us standing over the murdered girl in anxious silence.
Aussie said nothing for a few moments, his toffee-colored eyes heavy with sadness.
“Corporate can’t know.” He met my gaze and swept an arm at the macabre room around us. “Not a word, about any of this. As far as we’re concerned, this building was empty when we got here.”
My lips stuck to each other under my mask, and I wished so very badly for a glass of water. “But what the government? What if they find out? Congress would never stand for—”
“Kaba, who do you think gave ELSAR rocket-trucks?” Something in the way Aussie spoke made pain snake through my chest, as though I were watching a super-hero fall from the sky. “Why do you think we haven’t shelled New Wilderness into oblivion yet? Why do you think we haven’t just evacuated the rest of the county? This isn’t a rescue; it’s an experiment. A test to see what happens to a human anthill when it gets kicked. All we’re here to do, is keep the ants from figuring that out.”
Fury built in me, indignation welling up as hot tears in my eyes. “But you . . . you saved people. You tried to stop Crow. Why can’t we say anything?”
He put a heavy hand on my shoulder, as if Aussie could sense my torment, and hated to see me suffer as well. “If we try to stop them, they’ll glass the entire region with more warheads than God, and there won’t be anyone left to save. Crow wants vengeance, and corporate will let her cut throats if it means they get access to the freaks out here. But if she’s with us, she’ll only kill one or two each month, instead of a few hundred.”
Controlled murder.
Shame burned across my face, because deep down, I knew Aussie was right. Horrifying as it was, we had to keep Crow contained, just like the monsters roaming the countryside, instead of doing the right thing and putting a stop to the bloodshed. All because somewhere, in some high-rise office safe in the big city, men in suits wanted to harvest Barron County for all it was worth.
Giving me a light slap of encouragement on my upper arm, Aussie trudged past me toward the lumber mill doorway. “Let’s get go, mate. Gotta keep moving. Nightfall will be here soon.”
Standing alone in the shadow of the mill, I paused, and looked down one last time at the dead girl.
True bravery is being willing to do hard things for the good of others.
Shrugging off my pack, I pulled out my notepad, and met the hazy eye of the corpse.
Melissa. I wrote in the best cursive I could muster and scribbled the date beside her name.
Everything was upside down, but that didn’t mean that I had to be. I would remember her. I would remember them all, so that when this finally ended, the world could know the truth.
Monsters can never be so terrible as man.