Authors: K C Alexander
“So, what, just because you slapped some metal in your headâ”
“It's more than metal,” Indigo said, again cutting her off.
Carter shook her head. As long as Ange kept shutting up when he spoke, she'd already lost. We all knew it.
“He's a linker,” I said, exasperation sharp on the feed. “You call 'em coordinators. He's hooked in to where we are at any given time, has a bird's eye understanding of the area
and
doesn't need to rely on verbal cues to get it.”
Ange's shoulders tightened beneath her racked gear. “What does that make you?” she demanded. Like it mattered.
“Not sure there's a word for it in c-speak,” I said, going for serious but ruined for it when Carter snorted again. I grinned inside my helmet. At least someone here knew the jargon.
Indigo let it go. “Are we done? Can we move on or do you want to waste another five of our hundred and seventy-two remaining minutes?”
I watched Ange, watched her wrestle the fight back into a closet, out of the way until it could be addressed later. It was a very good trick to learn on the street. I had
no
doubt it would be brought up again. “We're done,” she said tightly.
“Good. Falk on point, Ange, back him up.” Indigo pointed to the side of the ladder, where she'd have vantage while he climbed. “Hooker, stay up here and keep them clear until we're all down, then shack up with me. Riko, stay on Carter in the rear. Keep strays from getting too close to our munitions.”
“Sloppy makeouts for everyone if we get out of this,” I said lightly. Taking a deep breath, I slung the assault rifle into place â hand curled lightly around the stock in case I needed to move fast â and joined the rest of the team at the ladder.
“Riko.” An easy breath from Indigo, but my only warning. And I knew it. Fair enough. “Move out on three... two...”
Falk draped his Sauger across his meaty shoulders, swung out over the ledge and dropped, using the rungs between his hands and feet to slow his fall. The sounds were hard to conceal, but even if he'd gone rung by rung, the metal still creaked.
Ange was on the ladder before he hit the ground.
“So,” Carter murmured, the quality of the sound changing to one ear. Single-line in. “Was that
c
for âcorporate' or âcunt'?”
My grin colored my voice. “Sorry, is there a difference?”
“Sainted bitch,” Carter replied, but there was amusement there. I laughed softly.
“We got movement,” Hooker warned.
Carter flipped back to main feed. “I see them.” All humor faded as she raised the scope of her rifle to her eye. “One... no, two necros shambling down the center of the street. Drawn by the noise of the ladder, probably.”
“What are the odds we just happened to land near two of the twelve?”
I shuddered, the visual knife of Nanji's disjointed scuttle across that uplink lab floor less than an eyelash flicker away.
I focused the other direction as Indigo took his turn at the ladder. The helmet specifications filtered out much of the lowering sunlight merging with the smoke across the street, which made spotting motion in the darker pools of shadow easier. Once night fell, that's when things would get interesting.
“Make that one more coming in fast from the north,” I said. “What'd they do, spam invites?”
“All weapons at the ready. Riko, you're up.”
Like I needed the reminder.
Slinging my Sauger when I knew there were necros bearing down on me went against everything I was. I shuffled up to the ledge, looked down at the tight ring of the team, each faced outward to provide a circle of support.
A crackling pop through my right ear shot a wincing jolt straight to my spine.
“Riko?”
Biting back an impatient curse, I turned, slung my feet into the rungs, and skimmed down the ladder with as much speed as I could.
Gunfire peppered the silent street before I hit the ground. Amid the rapidfire spray of the Sauger 877s, a particularly solid
thoom
cracked through the cacophony.
Hooker's sniper rifle, a Sauger H2, sacrificed range for accuracy, and the kid didn't disappoint. By the time I turned away from the ladder, gun already in my hands, one of the necros had collapsed into a twitching heap.
My pulse hammered in my adrenaline-fueled, buzzing skull as I joined the outward circle.
This sound? Not what I'd hoped to hear again. I heard it, felt it, like insects crawling through my brain.
The sight in front of me didn't make it any better.
Necros up close are something nobody in their right mind ever wants to see again. A lot of everyday sinners assume going necro looks like a body just twitching out and going postal. Not even close. The thing is, when the tech takes over, there go all the feelings of pain and survival instinct. A body gets thrashed, and sometimes it gets fucked up by its own tech.
The body splayed ten feet away, still convulsing as sparks shot from what looked like nerve threads laced through its limbs. A female. The stringy hank of hair clinging to her scalp was black, although I couldn't tell if it was filth, blood or naturally dark. She still wore the remains of a pair of shorts, one untied boot and the shredded ruins of a tanktop to beat the heat. One earring still clung to the torn flesh of her ear, winking obscenely amid the carnage.
Not the clothing or the location I'd have expected to find nerve tech in. That was expensive stuff.
Blood coated her flopping, jerking limbs. Smeared the ruinous cavern where her mouth had been. For all her limited visual tech, I couldn't imagine what the hell put her in this condition. Did necros fight each other?
Teeth gleamed, bared through her torn cheek and crusted with gore. The sound coming out of her wasn't human. Just the frantic, dying gurgles of a set of lungs that wouldn't function around the double-fisted size hole Hooker had left in her chest.
Not that it was strictly necessary for a necro to breathe.
Not far ahead of her, closest to Ange, a boy â maybe sixteen â had been cut down. His leg from the knee down was tech. Not anything sleek like my arm, but base model functionality. If the rest of him had been augmented in any way, it was lost to the butchery he'd become. Most of it couldn't even be blamed on us.
At least that one stopped moving.
Grimly, I lowered my weapon and riddled the convulsing girl with half a clip, obliterating her still-struggling body until there was nothing left for the tech to operate.
When the flesh no longer trembled, a surge of relief filled me. And with it, a stab of pain through my temple.
Fuck. My head felt stuffed full of glass. Angry wasps and glass.
“Search me this,” I said, slow and thick through the noise. “Why are teenagers staggering out instead of lab techs or security?”
“A damn good question,” Indigo said tightly.
“Heads up.” Falk, nice and calm. Good man.
The others moved, shifting focus as a strangled, wet gurgle announced the arrival of one more necro â a body not so much crawling as pulling itself out of the shadow-dipped alley between two complexes.
It grabbed the ground with torn, ratty fingers seeping brown fluid, dragged itself towards us, its mouth moving like it would have begged for help if it could.
I squinted through the mental fuzz. “Is it missing legs?”
Hooker touched down in our circle.
“They must be drawn by the gunfire,” Indigo said. “Up the street, then head west. Let's go!”
As one, Falk and Ange filled the dragging, writhing tech-fueled corpse with caseless bullets. The others sprinted away from the landing zone. I hesitated, my gaze pinned to the juddering, pathetic figure, its toothless, bloody wound of a mouth wide in a soundless scream I felt to my bones.
I didn't understand. Nanjali had looked like her usual self, give or take lost weight, hair, and the shit they'd spliced into her back. What had damaged these necros so badly?
“Hey.” Falk's big hand enveloped my shoulder and most of my bicep. “Come on.”
I looked up, saw nothing but broad faceplate.
Did he see the boy scream, too? Did he hear it, fill in that awful silence as easily as I did?
Or was he numb to the horror already?
“Move it.” Ange's voice, and a sharp slap upside the back of my helmet.
I turned wordlessly and followed the others, Ange and Falk keeping pace.
Smoke enveloped us in a gray, clinging cloud. Even the filters couldn't sift it all out â ash and melting paint and a sweet, smoky fragrance that made me think of the Rat Cafe.
My footing skidded on nothing.
Carter caught me by the synthetic arm I windmilled in frantic over-correction, righting me as if I weighed nothing. “You okay?”
“No,” I said tightly, but didn't explain. Stopping was not an option. Taking a moment to share some hard feelings was definitely out of the question.
My first run-in with a real necro and I was losing my shit. Nothing was what I expected. Three of the known twelve necros were
people
. Not sec monkeys. Not lab techs likely to catch the virus from a wire.
Just people.
The crackle lancing through my ear leaked into the other, stacking uncomfortable pressure behind my eyes. Gritting my teeth hard enough to compress my jaw seemed to ease some of the tension, but this was not the kind of sign I needed anyone to pick up on.
We ran for five minutes, hauling ass and our gear as the last of the daylight faded to a thin seam. Indigo led the way, led by the data uplinked to him from the contact team, and Hooker took up the rear.
The farther we ran, the thicker and angrier the wasp nest in my skull got.
“Heads up!” Hooker called. I turned, too late. Gnarled fingers skated across my chestplate, and I looked into the empty, staring remains of gelatinous eyeballs boiled over onto clawed cheeks. The shriek inside my brain maximized the softer echo of its nails across diamond steel.
Carter cursed as she swung her gun around, but another cracked
thoom
and the necro's head erupted like rotten fruit. Gobbets of brain and the hard crackle of teeth pattering my armor didn't bother me nearly so much as the juddering, frenetic seizure gripping the thing as it splattered to the street at my feet.
I hadn't even seen it coming out of the alley beside me.
“That sniper rifle is a thing of verifiable beauty,” Carter panted as she half-hauled me back in line. “I'd kill to get my hands on it, but Hooker's a jealous bastard.”
Rattled, I could only nod.
Indigo rounded a corner. “Vid Team, checking in on the quarter,” he said, his voice winded but steady.
Carter let me go. “You need a minute?”
“Copy, Vid Team.”
“No,” I grunted. Yes. But we didn't have one to spare. I felt like there were a thousand whiskey-raw voices shrieking at me. Adrenaline never used to hit me this hard. “My head justâ”
“
Shit
.” Indigo's voice cracked. He came hauling ass around the corner he'd taken. “Back up, back!”
Like the well-trained group we were, we fanned outward, Hooker and Falk facing back the way we came and leveling ground fire as Ange called, “Carter! Twenty-five degrees!”
I could hear her grin through the helmet feed. “You got it.” She unhooked one of the mines from her heavy harness, armed it and darted out into the street. Ange fired over her head, giving her space from something I couldn't see as I concentrated on the second figure creeping along the same alley its shredded pal had briefly occupied.
“Don't do it,” I told it. “This is
not
the best idea of your... uh?”
“Unlife?” suggested Hooker, a nanosecond before his gun fired. Damn, that sound. Like a fist to the chest. I was surprised it wasn't blowing him off his feet the same way it obliterated the heads of the necros he dropped.
Smart move, too. No chipset, no working tech.
“Three!” Carter barked into the headsets. I didn't need training to know what that meant. I darted closer to Hooker, away from the corner. “Two!”
On a soundless
one
, an auditory detonation lashed through the streets, now full of the rasping, laborious grind of desperate flesh still trying to function and the intolerable hum in my helmet.
The ground shuddered. A sonic wave only bumped us where we were standing, which probably sucked more for the critters nestled around that mine.
“Timer?” I asked.
“Wireless detonation.” Carter's amusement crackled fiercely through the feed. “Can control it on the bandwidth. I love it so.”
“And I'm weird?”
She laughed.
I didn't.
Five. I'd seen five. There were more than seven around that mine.
What the fuck had happened in here?
“Move,” Indigo ordered. “Before any more come running.”
Falk took point, leading us through the carnage the mine had left behind, heedless of the splashing, viscous pool of brilliant red picked out in the last vestiges of a dying sun.
My gorge rose as my feet found passage through the grotesque tangle of limbs, scattered tech parts, and still-twitching bits I couldn't identify.
The pressure on my head had eased, but not by much.
“Two blocks, huh?” I gasped.
Ange crowed, “Pussy,” and I briefly considered kicking her helmet in.
“Why are there so many?” Falk, unlike me, showed no sign of slowing, distaste, or effort. He jogged like he could do it all day long, gear or no gear, through blood and guts or mud and rain.
Indigo replaced his clip smoothly while running. “That was, what, fifteen all told?”
“Eighteen,” Carter piped in.
Fuck me. “I thought conversion was rare,” I said through measured breaths. “What the shit happened to twelve?”
“Yeah, it's supposed to be rare.” Falk slowed. “This many people aren't likely to wire in at the same time.” He paused. “Soon as the light goes, we're going to have to switch to night vision. Seeing these things come at me from the dark is going to give me a damned heart attack.”