Operation Wild Tarpan (2 page)

There was a yellowish tinge to the light—maybe the after-effects of the dust storm—but no sign of any drones plummeting down from the heavens. They’d lost one to bird-strike earlier, or titan-bird strike, but the drones typically flew too high to be seen, let alone be interfered with by the new wildlife. It had to be those fungal particles that the storm had kicked up. Helicopter pilots were spending more time picking strands of pinkish-red gunk out of their air intakes than flying.

Well, in the event that Cyclops-Northwind lost all their drones, Miller and his team had a decent overwatch position. They were two-thirds of the way up a mostly abandoned apartment block. Fungal masses in the basement necessitated the use of gas masks while they’d been securing the building.

The local residents, thin and emaciated, ran for it the second they’d seen the well-armed Cobalt-2 team in the hallways. Miller had yelled that they were there to help, but the fearful survivors hadn’t believed him.

He didn’t blame them, not with the city’s only remaining television channels broadcasting Swift’s ranting tirades and carefully cut footage of corporate atrocities. There simply wasn’t enough functioning bandwidth in the city to spread the now official story—that while the government strongly condemned the actions of a few out-of-control subcontractors, it supported Schaeffer-Yeager’s larger humanitarian mission. And that the attempt to take control of the city under martial law by Major General Stockman were the actions of a mutineer.

Stockman’s mutineers, advancing up the avenue towards Biogen’s Upper West Side Laboratory, weren’t wearing eye-patches and hobbling around on peg-legs, the mental image of a mutineer in Miller’s addled-by-Hollywood imagination. They were rolling in sand-coloured Bravo convoys and wearing forest-green camos—using vehicles built for Middle-Eastern wars but never deployed, and wearing uniforms only ever intended for peacetime.

When was the last time America sent her troops anywhere that
wasn’t
a desert?

Cobalt-1—Lewis, Hsiung, Mannon, and Crewe—stood ready to meet them in black combat gear and with weapons slung over their shoulders. Behind them, taking cover behind sandbagged roadblocks and inside Biogen’s UWS Laboratory, were all sixty men and women of security team Switchblade.

Not much to meet the leading edge of the five or six hundred soldiers making up the 11th Infantry Division’s Third Battalion. Schaeffer-Yeager’s forces made up—what—two or three platoons?

Lewis stepped out in front of them all, holding up his hands at Stockman’s advancing convoy. Thankfully, the lead Bravo slowed to a halt instead of cruising straight over him.

Behind it, two more Bravos turned in, blocking the head of the avenue with their slab-like armoured frames. The lead vehicle halted out front, while the rest of the convoy took the intersection’s right turn.

From the fourth floor window of the building they’d commandeered, Miller picked up his binoculars, and murmured, gently, “The 11th are throwing a cordon up between us and Central Park.”

“
I hear you,
” Lewis rumbled. He was still audible over the open com-link as he yelled at the convoy, “We’re here to talk!”

Two of the soldiers who’d gotten out of the lead convoy vehicle, a captain and lieutenant, judging by the stitched in insignia at their collars, moved forward in near-lockstep. Two more, and the driver—all enlisted men, by the looks of them—were barely two steps behind. “I’m here for your surrender and the peaceful handover of that building behind you,” said the captain.

Lewis’s face didn’t waver. “That’s something we’re going to have to discuss.”

“Awful well armed for a
discussion
,” the captain said.

“Right to bear arms is in the constitution,” Lewis shot back.

One of Stockman’s enlisted men piped up with, “Constitution weren’t writ for
niggers
.”

Lewis’s already dark skin darkened further with a flush of red. “The
hell
did you say to me?”

It had been awhile since Miller had been in the Army, but he didn’t think any private he’d ever met would butt into his commanding officer’s conversation like that, no matter how heartfelt the racism.

The captain and his lieutenant didn’t seem particularly shocked, however. In fact the lieutenant, himself an African-American, was nodding in vague agreement, as if Private First Class Klansman over there was the division’s official historian. “Constitution
was
written long before the abolition of slavery...” the lieutenant said.

“Long before slavery,” PFC Klansman agreed.

Another private chipped in with, “We own them now. Ain’t that what the Major General said?”

The captain followed it up with, “It’s what the Major General said.”

“Did you not hear what your man just
said?
” Lewis demanded of their lieutenant, gaping at them.

The lieutenant shrugged. “He didn’t mean me.”

“That’s right. You’re a nigger, and Lieutenant Phelps is white. On the inside.” PFC Klansman smiled crookedly. “I can see under his skin? And he’s a person inside. You? You black as a tar-pit.”

“So’s she,” the captain of Stockman’s convoy said, pointing at Hsuing, a purebred Han Chinese. “Fuck. Are all the ungifted like this?” he asked, boggling at Mannon. “Are they all so
empty?
”

Mannon clutched her belt just beside her sidearm holster ’til her knuckles were white.

From up in the building, Miller muttered, “They really are Infected. All of them. The entire division.”

Doyle, sitting at the empty apartment’s dining room table with his new rifle set up on top, eye to the scope, grunted. “Not exactly full of esprit de corps, are they?”

“Chain of command’s
gone
,” Miller muttered, using the corner window to get a look at one of the side streets. “There are civilians mixed in with the Army types.”

“Volunteer brigades?” du Trieux asked, looking up from the ruggedized tablet she was getting a feed from Northwind with.

“Don’t think so.” Miller handed her the binoculars as she got up.

Bands of roving Infected, some wearing filthy bloodstained clothes almost ready to rot from their bodies, with inky, bruise-like blotches eating into their skin, were gathering to meet the troops at the far end of the cordon. And where they did, there were embraces, as if they were civilian girlfriends welcoming their boyfriends home with a kiss.

A soldier handed his rifle to one of the local Infected, and they all crowded back into the Bravo together.

“Great.” Morland grunted from beside Miller’s shoulder. He hugged his weapon to his chest—a custom 3D-print-milled monstrosity of blocky metal and polymer wrapped around an assault rifle and integral shotgun. “Why couldn’t we be in a horror movie instead of this shit, eh? Zombies don’t run around sharing guns.”

“They’re sick. Not dead.” Miller patted Morland’s shoulder.

“So they get to be a terrifying horde
and
we get to feel terrible for shooting back?” Morland glared at him. “I don’t think bloody
Tasers
are going to work against the fuckin’
Army
.”

“It’s not going to come to that,” Miller said with more confidence than he felt. “This is peacefully resisting arrest.”

“Like
fuck
it is. That might be what Harris said to the media, but we don’t have escape routes planned because this is peaceful.”

Miller had to shake his impulse towards idealism. It was such an attractive lie, though—that peacefully resisting Stockman’s 11th Infantry would cause them to simply leave them alone. The reality wasn’t nearly so cut and dry, however.

Out in the avenue, Lewis and the Infected command squad continued to yell at each other.

“This here is
private property!
” Lewis shouted.

Stockman’s captain squared his jaw. “We will not let you criminals destroy the evidence of the illegal chemical weapons BioGen has been producing. We are taking control of this facility with immediate effect, and you and your men will stand down immediately!”

One by one, the lieutenant and the enlisted men stepped forward, striking the same posture, wearing the same glare.

Step by step, Lewis and the rest of Cobalt-1 backed away, down towards the roadblock. “We don’t want a fight! We’re private citizens!”

“Tar-black citizens,” PFC Klansman howled after them, joined by his African-American lieutenant’s cry of, “Empty-eyed terrorists!”

“Just give us time to call our superiors and ask what to do, okay?” Lewis held up his hands peacefully, backing up towards safety behind the roadblock. “Nobody has to get hurt, here!”

“
You
do, you fucks—” “—terrorists—” “—company stooges—”

The rest of the convoy fell over themselves to join in shouting obscenities against Cobalt-1—‘ungifted,’ ‘empty terrorists,’ ‘soulless’—the captain, struggling to keep up with his men, was pulled helplessly into the zeitgeist of the moment.

Miller swallowed, his dread growing. It was like the Parasite dug deep and brought up every flimsy wedge mankind had ever used to divide ‘us’ from ‘them,’ encouraging twisted prejudice in any way it could. Was that biological? He wondered. The stinking old justification for looking on anyone different with fear and hatred?

Like hell this was ever about
peaceful resistance
. Stockman’s 11th Division seemed intent on finding incontrovertible evidence of Schaeffer-Yeager’s wrongdoing, supposedly bound up in that BioGen lab.

Thankfully, Miller knew every computer in the building had been remotely wiped and filled with garbage random-encrypted files by Northwind’s operators overnight. The labs were cleaned up and all equipment had been shipped out to some corner of the Astoria Compound.

This whole charade was about putting up enough resistance to make the Infected
really
want the damn place, to waste their time holding onto it before they figured out there wasn’t anything
there
.

It took time for the convoy captain to get back to his Bravo and start talking on the radio. He yelled bullshit into his radio, which seemed to Miller like it was a lot more important to the rest of his command squad than it actually served. It was minutes before the captain could sheepishly extricate himself and wander back as if organizing his forces was some dumb thing only a social pariah would ever do.

Lewis was back on the communication’s circuit almost instantly. “
Give me some good news about that cordon, Miller.
”

Miller gestured du Trieux over. “Trix?”

“They’ve blocked intersections a block further east on Duffield than we expected them to, so there’s a little room to play with, but you’re locked in tight.”

“
You inside the cordon?
” Lewis asked, worried.

She double-checked the drone footage on the tablet. “No, sir. We’re closer than expected to where they’re blocking you in, but outside the cordon.”

“
Good. Now plainly we aren’t going to need you, because in about an hour Mr. Matheson’s going to call Stockman and give this place up in exchange for our freedom, but you stay frosty up there. You’re our insurance policy.
”

“Yes, sir.”

“And remember,” Miller said, looking at du Trieux, Doyle, and Morland in turn—though Doyle didn’t look up from his rifle’s scope. “If it happens, suppressive fire only. Get them to stick their heads down while our guys muscle their way out in their Bravos. No one has to be killed, here; this is about wasting their time—not taking lives.”

So far as pep talks went, he could have done better. But Doyle looked up, at last, with a sceptical twist to his eyebrow, and Morland calmed down, nodding just a little too quickly.

“Yeah,” Morland said. “Just make them keep their heads down.”

Doyle ducked his head back to the rifle scope, biting his lip.

So far as Miller knew, Doyle hadn’t yet fired his new rifle in anger. The weapon was one of the first out of the engineering section set up in the Astoria Peninsula. The frame came out of the printer/milling rig in three pieces that fit together perfectly, after a little sandpapering, pinned together around the rifle’s barrel and internals.

Doyle had been using traffic signs across the East River to get the weapon zeroed, and by the time he was finished he could hit the dot over the ‘i’ in ‘FDR Drive’ at a distance of half a mile. That’s where Doyle’s training lay. Putting holes in heads, not keeping them down.

Miller lifted the binoculars, and sighted in on the section of the avenue where Lewis had confronted the Infected command squad. PFC Klansman was howling away at the top of his lungs, hardly aware that he was alone, the rest clustered around their Bravo and its radio.

Other troops had drifted closer, enough of them dismounted to start forming a sizeable mob. The captain’s interest in the radio looked to be dwindling bit by bit.

A chill sensation in Miller’s gut mingled with unpleasant foreboding.

“Doyle?” Miller asked, voice barely a whisper.

“Mmm?”

“See the screaming private out front? Left and low from the command Bravo?”

“At about eight o’clock? Angry fellow. What about him?”

Miller hesitated. It was just a feeling. You didn’t
kill
people on feelings...

“Target moving,” Doyle reported, voice flat. “He’s returning to the Bravo—they’re all getting angry now.”

The mob’s mood rapidly twisted. The hard blush of anger on Private Klansman’s skin flooded across his fellow troops, skin darkening, some looking around, mystified, unsure of
what
they were so angry at but willing to scream all the same. They were like emotional dominoes, Miller noted, primed and ready to tip over with a strong suggestion and a heavy dose of the Parasite’s signal pheromones flooding over them.

Some of his troops might not have known what they were angry about, but the captain, trying to talk his way through the situation with his superiors, seemed aware of what the problem was.

A few minutes later another two of Stockman’s Bravos pulled up, disgorging their troops and rolling forward to form a mobile barricade in front of Switchblade’s sandbags.

“
Merde
!” du Trieux yelped. “Stockman’s bringing in tanks!”