"Joe, do not re-enter the target area until we're ready to extract, do you hear? You're our ride home!"
"Joe here, Ivan, I do not see anybody on your hull, I repeat, no visual on a—"
"Ivan, he's in your cargo space—"
Timbob! Timbob? Edgeworth? Oh my God, don't—"
"Fuck me! What was that, Ivan? Ivan?"
"Ivan's not here, boy."
"Who said that? Who the fuck is this?"
"Shit! Shit! Shit! Oh my God! They're going down—"
Storch and Medina ran back to the windows and looked out. By pure luck, they had an excellent view. The Hind was spinning out of control over the less-cremated portion of Radiant Dawn. It's bomb racks were all empty, and the dangling assembly made the Russian chopper look more than ever like a vicious tropical insect. He stared in awe as he realized that the flashing flames he saw in the windshield were not reflections. The cabin was burning, and the chopper was going down like an anvil.
"Holy shit," Medina, Tarnell, Draper and the Black Hawk pilot all said as one.
The Hind hit a burning three-bedroom split-level tract home just across the wide avenue from the tower, knifed squarely through the center of its roof. The walls buckled and collapsed outwards under the terrific force of the impact even as the hurricane of rotors hacked them to splinters. The house and its neighbors were engulfed in a sphere of fire that quickly swallowed itself, leaving only a pillar of deeper black against the burning night sky.
"Major, this is Joe. I still have a signal from Ivan's black box. Do you want me to arm it?"
"Do that, Joe."
"What's the black box?" Storch asked. Medina shrugged.
"A-1, give me a sitrep on the ground."
"Like the surface of the sun out here, Major. Ain't nothing walking away from this. What happened to Ivan?"
"Tell you later. B-2—Bobby, what's it like down there?"
"Secure, Major. I think it's dead."
"Good man. Stay put. D-3, what do you see?"
"All quiet, now, Major. I don't see any—wait. Oh shit, you've got to be fucking kidding me. Major, he's walking away from it—"
"Major, A-1 here, we got fire in the lobby!"
"Somebody's shooting at you?"
"No, fire, real fire, he's—breathing fire—"
"Say again, A-1, your signal's breaking up—"
"There's two of 'em—AAAAAHHHHH!!!"
"A-1, come back! Speak, goddamit! B-2 what is your position?"
"We're in the stairwell on our way to support A-Team, but I don't hear any shooting. There's fire everywhere, shit, falling back into the stairwell, the lobby's torched. A-1's not talking back, Major, they—oh, no—"
"B-Team, come back! Bobby, come back…oh, Goddamit…D-Team, rally on the fourth floor at my position."
"Even us, Major?"
"Yes, all of you get here now. This is the primary objective, and something's moving up the tower in force. Assume A and B Teams are KIA, say again, A and B Teams are gone, there's just us. This gets done, we get to go home. How close, Witt?"
Storch and Medina, rounding the corner to come back to the computer room, almost shot Tarnell and Draper as they loped out of the stairwell. Both were blackened from head to toe, with their helmets off, and coughing like terminal lungers. Their eyes were like eggs, and their teeth were chattering. Nobody said a word, they just took up positions outside the door.
"I can fix its position in orbit," Wittrock answered after a long, deliberate pause, "but its interface is remaining aloof for the time being. None of the original RADIANT codestrings work, anymore. I'm uploading its tracking signature so that if we can't neutralize it tonight—"
"It gets done tonight, Witt, or so help me God I'll leave you here." Bangs walked out into the hall and looked over the surviving team. He clenched his fists like a man trying to hurt himself so he won't cry.
"See, Brutus? I tole ya. Some dumbass nigger's trynta make off wit our teevee." The voice echoed up from the bowels of the stairwell leading down from the roof. They'd been watching the down stairwell, and were caught by surprise, some more than others. Because the voice was the one they'd heard over Ivan's frequency in the moments before the Hind crashed.
Bangs, Medina, Storch, Tarnell and Draper turned to face a big man wearing nothing but ashes and carbonized scabs like the exoskeleton of a lobster, and a chopper pilot's helmet—Ivan's. Storch saw he was unarmed and was turning back to warn Wittrock when he made out the dog tags dangling from his corded neck. He looked harder. More from the posture than from what was left of his face, Storch recognized Avery Tucker.
Draper stitched bullets up Tucker's torso with his MP5, walking backwards and shooting as coolly as a man watering his lawn. The stream of lead washed up Tucker's neck and across his head, two shots going right through and blowing out a fluorescent in the corridor. It was a textbook kill—twenty-four shots, sixteen hits, every vital area a weeping crater. He shouldn't have been just dead; he should've been a wall mural. Avery Tucker stood there, looking down at the light coming through the holes in his body, and when he looked up, he looked to be well past pissed.
"You stupid fuckin hillbilly, ya crushed mah cigarettes!" Draper emptied his clip into the vet, who might've rocked back on his heels a little. "Yore mama's gonna hafta pay fer those, boy."
If Draper said something in response, it was lost in the whoomp of his shotgun. The exploding depleted uranium shells caught Tucker in the throat, but where they should've taken his head off, they simply sank out of sight. Veins stood out on his temples for a moment, and he bowed his head as if to gather patience, murmured, "Boy, I ain't gonna tell you again—" Then his head became a red cloud, and all the glass panels on the relays shattered and Storch's ears rang like amps at a Who concert. Draper was getting up off the floor and looking over Storch's shoulder and pointing and shouting something.
Storch started to turn when he saw something rise up behind Draper. He pointed, and yelled, "Behind you!" but couldn't hear his own words. Avery Tucker, very much alive from the shoulders down, clambered across the desk and fell on Draper. Oblivious to Storch, Medina and Bangs shooting him, Tucker's headless body pinned Draper's shoulders with his knees and fumbled around until he found Draper's neck. To his credit, Draper writhed and kicked and even bit into the tendons of Tucker's wrist as the vet took hold of his victim's head and wrenched it off. Storch and Bangs paused to reload, Medina remove his helmet and vomit on his boots.
Tucker held Draper's head high for a few seconds, steadying himself atop the bucking corpse. Then he set the head atop his own shoulders. A moment passed as the thing that wore Draper's head hooked itself up. When the eyes opened, they were not Draper's eyes anymore.
Bangs clapped a fresh clip into his rifle, spat, "Fuck this shit. Fall back. Witt, we're blowing this place up and getting the fuck out of Dodge."
Storch remembered Draper's warning and wheeled on the door and saw it was blocked by something like a weather balloon, or a parade float made out of liver, trying to force its way through the door. He turned back to Bangs, shouting, "What is that?" Bangs stepped back, tripped over a wheeled office chair and sat down hard.
Medina scrambled backwards and took cover behind a copier, loaded the grenade-launcher on his rifle. Tucker was still standing there, getting the feel of his new head. Wittrock continued to scroll through menu screens, Tarnell to reload his Jackhammer, as if none of this was happening, as if this was still a winnable battle, and not the most awful debacle any of them had ever witnessed. "I need three more minutes, Bangs," Wittrock said. "Three minutes, or we might as well stay here forever."
Storch approached the mass that protruded a good foot and a half into the room, a taut sac of flesh that filled their exit from floor to ceiling. Tiny cracks began to appear on the wall around the door. "Bangs, we've got another big fucking problem here—"
"Fix it, Storch. We got a plateful of shit to eat, already."
Storch looked back just as a giant he instantly recognized as Brutus Dyson loomed up behind Bangs with a length of chain stretched taut between his knurly fists. He seemed to grow two feet taller, and before Storch could make a sound, looped it three times around the Major's throat and yanked so hard that Bangs's head popped right off his body, rocketing across the room like a champagne cork. A gory fountain gushed out of the stump and Dyson's mouth closed over it. With an audible string of pops, his jaw unhinged and his mouth grew to the size of a manhole, engulfed Bang's corpse up to the waist.
Storch was not idle in this time, nor was he stunned to inaction. He emptied a full magazine of shotgun shells into Dyson, switched to the MP5 and stitched him up and down with hollow-point rounds, but none of it mattered. He might've been spitting at him for all the results he got.
Dyson's features flushed livid purple with the strain of eating another man whole, crumpled and ran like a waxwork in a microwave, twisted into suckered tentacles that flailed at Bangs's body, shredding it into digestible portions. One of them drew Bangs's Walther PPK from his belt holster and waved it around awkwardly, then blew itself off at the root.
Hunched over the dead man, Dyson's impossibly broad back seemed to sizzle and pop, and he let out a pained roar that gave Storch momentary hope that he'd tried to go too far, and was about to die. Bubbles formed and burst in the liquefying skin and opened up, like the thousand pockets in the back of a mother Surinam toad, brimming with squirming larvae. Tiny, half-formed tumor-tadpoles reached out of Dyson's back and mewed like drowning kittens. And Storch, perversely, understood. Dyson was digesting Bangs's body already. His flesh had to do something, anything with the extra mass immediately, and it was going insane with the effort, as only a walking, talking cancer can go insane.
Nobody noticed Tucker was moving again until he tapped Medina on the shoulder. The enormous muscles and tendons in Tucker's neck surged out like a frilled lizard's, and Draper's stolen face contorted and cried boiling blood. His limbs froze up inches from Medina's face. Medina turned to look at Storch, shouted, "He's having a fucking coronary—" and the veins in Tucker's neck ripped themselves free, whipping through the air like runaway firehoses. Medina went into a crouch with his arm up to catch the shower of blood, but the veins latched onto his throat like crazed lampreys, bore into his own circulatory system and pumped Tucker's blood into it. Medina's eyes and tongue bugged out further with each thundering pulse of Tucker's heart. Storch could feel the throbbing tocsin of that muscle in the soles of his feet as if they were going to sleep. Tucker poured an ocean of blood into Medina before he burst. Then the flow from the monster veins seemed to reverse, and hoovered up every last drop of blood, his own and that of his victim.
Storch was on his last clip. He slotted it and turned once again to the blocked doorway just as the frame gave way and the third vet spilled into the room.
Gibby Holroyd looked and smelled like an avalanche of day-old castoffs from a slaughterhouse—a turgid mountain of diseased innards bound together in coils of intestinal rope, a mammoth digestive tract on legs. Noisome anuses blew out noxious gases from every fold in the gargantuan carcass, and thousands of fleshy cilia waved from patches on his body like some unspeakable new hybrid of sea anemones and jungle rot, presumably gleaning microscopic life from the air and eating it. Storch shot eighteen rounds into Holroyd before he could force the rest of himself through the door. Bilious yellow fluids erupted from the holes, burning craters in the concrete floor wherever they splattered.
Before Storch's horrified eyes, the offspring of Brutus Dyson matured, sprouted black membranous wings, and took flight. They orbited their sire like angry killer bees, though each was the size of a crow. Something like a frog, like a hornet, a maggot or a human fetus, they moved too fast to make out details.
Tarnell backed up until he was shoulder-to-shoulder with Storch. Behind them, Wittrock worked furiously at the computer, seemingly oblivious to the massacre. "If you can do it, do it now," Storch told him. "We're all about to die."
"Make more time, Sergeant. This is more complicated than I'd anticipated." By the strain in his voice, Storch knew that the scientist understood what was happening in the room. It also told him that the Mission, with all its awful surprises and sacrifices, was going to fail.
"That dog won't hunt, Sergeant," Dyson growled over the buzzing of his spawn. "Tell the geek there he can leave off."
"Wittrock?" Storch hissed over his shoulder.
"He's right, you know," Wittrock said, and Storch heard him spinning in the office chair, dropping his trembling hands like dying birds in his lap. "None of the primary command functions can be accessed from here, now. None of the viruses will upload. The system won't crash. The satellite is over Siberia right now, but it'll be overhead in about two hours."
"Then we're fucked," Tarnell shouted, his nerve finally going. "The whole thing—everybody dyin', was for shit!"
"Fuckin' A," Holroyd gobbled.
"Naw," Dyson said, and everyone turned to look at him, and most were sorry they did. The thing that'd been Dyson had doubled in size. Where his head had been, a cluster of muscular tentacles thrashed and coiled, glistening with the gore of Major Bangs. From somewhere inside that mass came a voice more or less like Dyson's. "You let us walk in Iraq, and took the heat for what we done to the natives. We owe you for that, and we hate owin' anybody. You can go, Storch. You an your pal."
"But there's three of us," Storch said, and immediately, painfully, understood.
"You got to pick one."
Dyson was letting him go only to headfuck him with officer's choices, to make him sacrifice either Tarnell or Wittrock. Storch hated the little fucker inside out, but the Major had charged Storch with protecting him, and if there would ever be a chance of knocking the satellite down, Wittrock would probably be the one to do it.