Agents of the Demiurge (15 page)

“I have been vaporizing meth in the open air
market. A few fights have broken out and at least one couple is
having intercourse in public. Nothing that warrants serious
attention from emergency responders. Fortunately, I managed to
convince a few people that agents are lurking in the market.”

Hess clenched his jaw. “You convinced the
people
how
?”

“I severed my arm and threw it into a crowd
of people,” Elza said.

“So now you're running from a mob?”

“Hiding. And most of the mob is stoned.”

“Elza . . . .”

“It was the best I could do under the
circumstances. I brought an acetylene tank from our garage, so I
will be able to burn down the warehouse I'm in if they find me.
I'll be fine. You have to focus on your main objective for
now.”

“We'll discuss this back at the garage,” Hess
said.

“Back at the garage,” Elza echoed, an odd
catch to her voice.

“Tell me the truth. Do I need to scrub this
mission to come after you?”

“No,” Elza said. “I may be improvising, but
things are under control.”

Hess released his breath. “Good. See you
soon.”

“Goodbye.” Elza hung up.

San cleared her throat. “Are we good to
go?”

“It's on,” Hess said, looking at the three
Observers with him. “Do not open fire before I do. Riding ATV's on
the secure part of the Church's campus is trespassing and rates
sending a few patrols after us. The second we start shooting,
orders will go out to lock everything down and outside
reinforcements will be brought in to help neutralize us.

“When bullets start flying, keep your heads
down. We don't have time to die and resurrect. Time is everything
in this operation. If you have to run through covering fire, cover
your head with your arms and sprint. Don't stop if you take hits.
And when they start nailing us with cover fire, that's when we toss
our bombs.”

Every eye widened at his speech. Apparently,
this was the moment his audience realized on a visceral level that
they were going to war. Hess smiled. “If you start to panic, I want
you to remember one thing.
This
is what I do best.”

While the others were still mounting up on
their ATV's, Hess rode down the hill and through the hole he had
cut, then coasted towards the path he knew from maps, studying
terrain he had committed to memory. The others were not an ideal
team for this mission. Drake lived in constant fear. San lacked a
functional sense of self-preservation. Jerome inhabited an
emaciated form ill suited to conflict.

If he could have traded any of the three for
Elza, he would have. But Elza was the only one he could trust to do
her part unsupervised. Indeed, she would handle her particular task
better than he could have.

He glanced over his shoulder to verify there
were three ATV's tailing him, then shifted gears with a tap of his
foot and twisted the throttle. They sailed past barracks housing
and administrative buildings, drawing curious stares from the few
Church employees outside at mid-morning.

Stares are fine,
Hess thought.
Scowls are the dangerous reaction.

Due to a combination of training and
self-selection bias, soldiers as a group were more likely to report
suspicious activity. However, most of the individuals they passed
were off duty and busy with their own activities. And there was no
such thing as an anonymous tip in the Church. If you called in a
report, there
would
be paperwork. Hopefully inconvenience
outweighed concern in the minds of their witnesses.

Hess led his group past an armory and glided
to a stop beside the row of concrete jersey barriers forming a
barrier between the secure region of the Church campus and the
ultra-secure sanctum where rogue Agents were held in a punishment
complex. He dismounted and waved Drake forward. The two of them
lifted the front end of each ATV and fed the machines over the
makeshift wall, moving with swift motions.

“What am I doing?” Drake muttered to himself.
“Stupid, stupid!”

Hess herded his group over the jersey
barriers, saw them remounted, then paused. “We go fast now.
Remember, I fire the first shot.”

When he looked over his shoulder, Hess saw
concerned faces peeking out of the armory. If they hadn't already
been reported as intruders, they would be now. No one had reason to
suspect they carried weapons, but soon they would demonstrate
otherwise.

Hess drove at the compound full throttle,
crossing the immaculately groomed yard and heading straight for the
side door of the classically architected building. There were
shouts in the distance as they skidded to a stop near the outer row
of white colonnades.

He pulled free one of his pipe bombs, flipped
on a switch that had once belonged to a remote controlled car, used
a roll of duct tape to secure the device to the heavy metal door
between the door handle and the deadbolt, then dashed back to hide
behind a column. Hess dragged Jerome behind cover before powering
on the remote control in his hand and turning the toy's steering
wheel.

There was a thump from the explosion and a
squeal of twisting metal. Dark smoke drifted past the columns. Hess
tucked away the remote control and pulled his nine millimeter. The
others were still standing in place when Hess kicked open the
remnants of the shattered door. He ducked to the side and surveyed
the hall inside for two seconds.

“Get the gas,” Hess said.

“We got to get out of here,” Drake said.

Hess pushed Drake towards his ATV. “I told
you to get the gas. The door leads to a tight side corridor. It's a
perfect choke point.” When Drake still hesitated, Hess put his
finger in Drake's face. “You can grab the gas cylinders or you can
discover how I handle deserters.
Move.
”

While Drake moved to detach the cylinders
from their ATV's, Hess stationed San inside the building,
instructing her to assume a prone position with a rifle. He
directed Jerome to guard the approach from behind the colonnades,
telling her to lay down cover fire if she saw anyone.

Meanwhile, Hess stood ready with handgun
cradled in the palms of both hands, holding it low to conserve his
arm strength. Marching around with your hands held at shoulder
level like a movie character clearing a building was a good way to
fatigue your muscles. And even if the strain wasn't noticeable, it
would impact accuracy. The key was to hold low, stay relaxed, and
be ready to snap the weapon into position.

Before Drake finished with the final tank, a
security team consisting of three men on a golf cart arrived. Hess
stepped out of cover, aligned his sights on the driver, breathed
out halfway, and gently squeezed the trigger until the weapon
jumped in his hands. He slipped behind cover, noting that the
driver was no longer inside his vehicle and that the golf cart had
stopped moving.

Now, while they are still gathering their
wits,
he thought. Hess peeked around the column he was using as
cover and shot the man leaning over his downed comrade. The final
man returned covering fire until Hess put two bullets into the golf
cart. As he'd hoped, the sound of metal plinking convinced the man
to seek better cover.

Drake was pulling the final tank through the
door, so Hess followed him inside with Jerome. “Masks on,” Hess
said. When everyone had complied, he twisted open the valve on one
of the tanks.

“Do you think the guards will have masks?”
San asked.

“Doesn't matter,” Hess said. “Standard
filters don't remove chlorine.”

He handed the twelve gauge shotgun to Drake.
He'd set a modified choke on it and loaded buckshot. Drake didn't
have the marksmanship to merit using slugs, so the compromise was
sacrificing some kill power for a more forgiving spread. “Shoot for
the head,” he said. “Everyone else aim for center mass.”

Hess opened the valve on a second tank, then
toppled it onto its side and rolled it down the hall before them.
With hand signals, he sent Jerome and Drake to opposite walls and
moved San to the rear of their formation.

They jogged down the hall, kicking the
canister ahead of them. At every door, they stopped to check the
handle. If the door opened, they cleared the room. If not, they
moved on. The first three open doors led to unoccupied rooms. They
left the cylinder of chlorine to vent at the first intersection
they passed.

The fourth door opened on panicked office
staff. Jerome and Drake handled them with a volley of wild gunfire.
Obedient to their training, they checked each body to verify no one
had survived before returning to the hall. Hess scowled at the
goofy exultation on Drake's face, but refrained from saying
anything more than a command to reload.

Twice they caught someone in the halls and
gunned them down. Three more times they cleared an occupied room.
Hess let Jerome and Drake handle the rooms. Those two needed a
boost to their confidence and he didn't care to kill civilians
himself.

At the end of the hall a staircase led down
to an underground level. They approached cautiously and peered into
the open chamber beneath them. Hess recognized a wall of people and
started to duck back.

The crack of a volley of gunfire reached him
just before the space around him erupted with ricochets and
shrapnel. Hess touched a hand to a sting on his scalp and it came
away moist. Beside him, Jerome lay in a puddle of blood, ominously
still. Drake scrambled back on all fours, shotgun abandoned.

San seized his shoulder. “Behind us, Hess!
They're coming down the hall behind us! What do we do?”

As the seconds ticked by, the wound on his
scalp became harder to ignore. It burned with a fierce intensity
and drizzled blood down his forehead to run into his eyes. Hess
shook his head, trying to bring things back into focus.

“Hess, hon, we need you now. Right now,” San
shouted.

Drake's voice cracked. “Shit, San, his
skull's showing! Man's useless!”

Hess shook his head again. It would clear in
a few minutes. He didn't think he had a few minutes. “Gas
cylinders,” Hess said.

“Right,” San said. “Drake, open those
cylinders up and roll them back the hall.”

Hess ripped his protective mask from his face
to empty his stomach.

“Mask back on, Hess! We're opening the
gas.”

“No, wait,” Hess said. He shook his head
again. “Stop, San!”

“We have to do it now,” she said.

“Cylinders down the steps. Bombs behind us.”
He paused to vomit once more. When he managed to gasp a messy
breath, he continued. “Gas will stay down there and stop
pursuit.”

“Right. Good thinking, Hess. Now put on your
mask.”

Hess collapsed onto his side. For moments,
there was nothing but the nauseating sense of vertigo. Then someone
pressed a mask to his face, making it harder to breathe. Hess
floated in a daze, barely aware of explosions happening nearby.
Gunshots followed.

Coughing came from next to him. “Did I
die?”

“Jerome! Get your gun! Cover fire now!”

“How long has Hess been down?”

“Too long! Start shooting!”

They need me to take charge,
he
thought. Hess pushed himself to a seated position. He touched his
scalp, winced at the pain, and squinted at the scene around him.
The stairs before him were blurry for some reason.
Gas. They
gassed the room below us.
Further from the steps, his comrades
fired wild suppressing fire back the hall.

Hess stumbled to his feet. “Down the steps,”
he said.

For a moment, it seemed he was going by
himself. Then boots pounded beside him. Hess seized the railing
with one hand and held his nine millimeter in his other. He raised
the handgun when he left the steps, turned in a slow arc, trying to
find an opponent to target, then lowered his hands.

There were plenty of people in the room, all
of them contorted in agonized death poses. Several stairways led
back to the upper floor, but every door leading deeper into the
compound stood sealed. The hazy room had signs everywhere
instructing people on where to register and where to sit for
mandatory briefings and where to wait for a proctor to escort
them.

Hess fought off a wave of nausea. This was
not a good time to fill his mask with vomit. He looked from one
steel door to another, trying to guess which one he should blow.
Have to pick one fast. Our masks can't stand up to this much
chlorine gas for long.

“Now what?” San asked.

Hess pointed at the door closest to the
designated waiting area.

San grasped the significance of the gesture
and ripped off her rucksack to pull free a pipe bomb and its remote
control detonator. As she worked, Hess winced at the pain of his
scalp. He reached a gore-covered hand towards his wound.

And the pain evaporated. Before his eyes, the
blood on his hand vanished. Hess relished the relief a second
before he registered the events around him. Jerome sat to one side
with her back against the wall, handgun in her holster. Drake had
his shotgun hanging from his shoulder on its sling and his arms
were crossed. Meanwhile, San prepared to blast a hole through a
door most likely separating them from armed and ready
opposition.

Hess had time to get his nine millimeter up
before him, but his shout to form up got lost in the roar of the
explosion. As the door rocked back and collapsed off of its hinges,
bullets whizzed at them. Hess fired several times, then jumped to
the side.

He pulled a bomb from his ruck, activated it,
and lobbed it through the open doorway. A twist of the remote
control's steering wheel brought a rumble and then silence.

Not more than three feet from him, Drake's
mangled corpse leaked red ichor. Jerome shook as she patted her
body, searching for damage. San stood frozen.