Operation Sea Mink Read online

  “This still doesn’t explain what the hell Tartarus is,” Miller said.

  “That’s on a need-to-know. Even I haven’t been told everything,” Lewis said, his face grim. “All I can say is that it has something to do with the results of those mouth swabs we took a while back. They’re separating some people out based off that.”

  “And why do they need a sniper?” Doyle asked.

  Miller could hardly believe what he was hearing. “They’re separating people inside the compound? What kind of McCarthyist bullshit is that?”

  Lewis held up his hands. “The order came from Harris, and Gray’s done nothing to combat it. Look, son, this is between them and neither you nor I can do anything about it. There’s no sense in putting yourself in the middle.”

  Miller dropped his arms and pressed his fingers onto the edge of Lewis’s desk. “I’m in the middle of it whether I put myself there or not. And now they’re playing poker with my men.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not running this show,” Lewis reminded him. “We’re soldiers. They point, we go.”

  “I’m not a soldier, I’m a fucking bodyguard. I never signed up for this shit, and Doyle didn’t ask for this either.”

  Lewis pressed his lips together. “You cannot make Gray stand up to Harris. He has to do that all on his own. In the meantime, we follow orders or desert and run for the hills. Nobody will stop you.”

  Miller shook his head, his face hot, blood boiling. “I don’t like this.”

  “Welcome to the club, son.”

  “I get him back when it’s done,” Miller said. “Whatever the hell it is.”

  “Understood,” Lewis agreed. “Now get out of my office.”

  OUT IN THE hallway, Miller and Doyle stalked toward the break room. The whole ordeal stunk to high hell, the worst of it being there was nothing Miller could do to remedy that.

  “What should I do, boss?” Doyle asked.

  Although Miller hardly considered him a subordinate, Doyle continued to relinquish command to him at every opportunity. He bit the inside of his cheek, thinking. “Report as ordered,” he said.

  Doyle arched an eyebrow. “What did I tell you about orders?”

  “Better yet,” Miller said, lowering his voice. “Report as ordered and then tell me what the hell the Tartarus Protocol is.”

  Doyle smirked. “Roger that.”

  THE BRAVO RUMBLED down the remains of 18th Street like a bulldozer in a library.

  It was fascinating to Miller how much the streets had changed, even a week since their last drive outside the compound. The thug behemoths had decimated the roads almost in their entirety, making the trek more of an off-road excursion than an actual drive.

  After the latest windstorm, the fungal growths had taken control of the skyline. Blooms wrapped around the buildings in thick coils all the way from foundation to tip, in and out of the broken windows, and blocking doorways.

  Evidence of human existence was less and less apparent. It now made more sense to Miller why the Infected had retreated underground. Above, there wasn’t room left for people.

  Du Trieux maneuvered the Bravo through the terrain while Miller rode shotgun, grabbing the support bar above the window for balance. Hsiung and Morland sat in the back, bouncing around as if on a trampoline.

  “We can’t go any farther,” du Trieux said, slamming the brakes and careening the Bravo to a full stop. “The roads.”

  “We’ll have to hoof it from here,” Miller said, snatching up his M27.

  Du Trieux nodded and grabbed her Gilboa—snapping the clip tight and pocketing another magazine from the Bravo’s console. Hsiung and Morland poured out the back and came around to meet them.

  They advanced on alert, du Trieux on point. Dirt and crumbled cement crunched underfoot. The noise echoed across the boulevard, bouncing from one broken building to the next with deafening clarity. From their vantage point, the area looked deserted, although the rat-things scurried in corners and crevices, skittering and squeaking.

  The building on their left had a blue wooden door that was boarded up tightly with splintered two-by-fours. On the right, the entire glass storefront of an old laundromat had been shattered. The shredded strips of the laundry’s awning fluttered in the wind—whispering into the hot fungal breeze.

  If their mission perimeters were correct, not far from their position a group of researchers had gotten stuck—for reasons unspecified—and had requested escort back to the compound. Lewis had sent them out to retrieve the civilians with a casualness Miller couldn’t help but distrust. He’d just stripped them of manpower, and now he was sending them back out into the wild. It was hard for Miller not to resent his old mentor.

  They rounded a curve in the road and the air turned putrid. The stench was so bad Miller felt the inside of his nose burn.

  “There,” Morland whispered.

  Miller swung around. To the right, sitting on what was left of the curb, sat a medical cooler, half opened.

  Swinging the muzzle of his M27 toward it, Morland nodded and approached the container. Using the edge of his combat boot, he tipped up the lid. “Shit!”

  “What is it?” Hsiung said, facing south to cover their backs.

  “It’s shit,” he repeated. “Literally. Petri dishes of the stuff.”

  “The researchers were collecting samples from the Infected,” Miller informed them. “They can’t be too far.”

  Without much by way of working sewers, finding and sampling faeces—which was generally disposed of a reasonable distance from the communes—would be the best option for testing the Infected to see if the latest dispatch of NAPA-33 was working.

  The whole idea seemed repulsive to Miller, but he was curious to hear if Harris’s latest scheme would bear fruit, and with no other way of telling, he supposed there was purpose to the nauseating exercise.

  That didn’t deter from the fact that by coming to escort the researchers, Miller and the remains of Cobalt had found themselves in the middle of an Infected septic tank. The stench was overwhelming. Miller’s eyes watered as he turned full circle, catching Hsiung, who walked with her arm covering her nose.

  Du Trieux, a meter ahead, had put on her gas mask and held up a fist.

  Freezing in position, the four strained their ears. Aside from the echoes of the rat things, movement and whispers could be heard inside a brick building on their right. They approached, weapons drawn.

  A woman’s voice said, “If you go after him too, then I’ll be left here alone, and I’m not leaving until the cavalry arrives.”

  “We can’t stay here,” a man’s voice answered. “We have to go after Lester.”

  “No. We don’t. Let the escort handle it.”

  “But...”

  “Just shut up, Linus.”

  Despite himself, Miller grinned. “Dr. Davenport?” he called softly.

  From the building’s interior, they heard more shuffling and whispering—panicked movements made as if someone had been caught with their pants down.

  “Wait!” the man’s voice said. “How do we know it’s them?”

  “They wouldn’t know my name, Linus. Honestly, for a man with doctorates in microbiology and immunology, you can be so dense.”

  Dr. Davenport appeared. Looking disheveled and covered in what Miller hoped was dirt, she cautiously peered out from a crack in a boarded-up window, saw him, and smiled. “We really have to stop meeting like this,” she said.

  Miller laughed and felt himself blushing.

  Du Trieux approached the entrance, a broken wooden door with peeling green paint. It looked as if someone had punched a hole through in order to open it. “Are you all here?” she asked, an edge in her tone. “We should go.”

  “What about Lester?” the man said. From beside Dr. Davenport, Dr. Winters appeared, also covered in splotches of dirt and road dust.

  Miller slung the strap of his M27 over his shoulder and gripped Dr. Davenport’s hand to help her out o
f the building, Dr. Winters following. “Lester Allen is with you?”

  Davenport shook her head as Dr. Winters nodded. “He was,” he explained. “He took off—that way.” He pointed east. “Then our guard called for backup and went after him. That was almost an hour ago.”

  “What do you mean, he took off?” Morland asked.

  Dr. Winters cleared his throat. “I don’t know, he just...”

  “He ran,” Dr. Davenport interrupted. “He started ranting and raving about how the ‘corporation’ shouldn’t be experimenting on the Infected. How we didn’t understand their gifts, and then he bolted. Ditched his cooler and then—gone.”

  “He said what?” Miller exclaimed.

  “It drew a lot of attention from the animals.” Dr. Davenport said. “We had to barricade ourselves inside that building to keep them from getting at us, but I guess after a while they gave up. Thankfully.”

  “What about your guard?” Hsiung asked.

  Dr. Winters shook his head, but Davenport answered. “He hasn’t come back—yet.”

  Miller turned to du Trieux. “Trix?”

  “Oui?”

  “Get them back to the Bravo. I’m going to sweep the area and look for Lester.”

  “Negative,” she said. “We both go. Too wild out here to solo.”

  Miller considered disagreeing with her, but saw no point in it. She was right.

  “Fine. Hsiung?”

  “You got it,” she answered without hesitation. “Come on, docs.”

  As Hsiung lead the two doctors back down 18th, du Trieux and Miller went in the opposite direction. After a solid ten minutes of silent searching, they turned up a terror-jaw, a school of rat-things, and one thug behemoth giving birth—but Lester Allen was nowhere to be seen.

  “If we find him, this could go poorly,” Miller told du Trieux.

  She gave no immediate reply, only pushed through a destroyed back alley, and stepped over the remains of a half-eaten terror-jaw. “He was hesitant,” she said carefully, “the last time we took him into custody. I’m not sure why we’re going after him now.”

  “Lewis told me he didn’t want any well-fed, well-informed people from the compound giving information to the Infected.”

  “So, we’re not here to find him. We’re here to silence him?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Didn’t have to,” she replied, tapping the sheath of her hunting knife on her thigh.

  He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. They’d taken Lester Allen into custody by force once before, they could do it again—even if he had to pistol whip him and drag him by his hair.

  This time however, they didn’t have the comfort of pulling him into the back of a transport vehicle or a dose of anti-parasitics laced with sedative to keep him complacent. They were exposed, even worse now than they’d been at the time of the helicopter massacre—and they both knew it.

  Up ahead, a thug behemoth pack had taken residence in the middle of the road. Turning a corner to avoid them, they walked down the center of what had once been Astoria Boulevard. Miller eyed the remains of a Cuban restaurant opposite a beauty shop. Straight ahead, a hardware store lay open and desolate; through the shards of the storefront window, Miller saw movement—the profile of a man slunk out of sight.

  “One o’clock,” Miller said.

  Crouching low and coming in fast, Miller bounded toward the storefront, his M27 feeling heavy in his hands. With du Trieux just behind, they entered the store and swung around, eyeing the corners and checking the shadows. The sound of something dropping caught their attention. Rushing toward the source of the noise, they saw him.

  Wide-eyed and wild-haired, Lester took one glance at du Trieux and panicked. In a blur of flannel and corduroy the scientist bolted like a shot—zipping from the store’s back door and disappearing down an alleyway, squealing like a frightened pig. He was gone before Miller could get out more than two words.

  “Stop! Wait!”

  Out the back door and down the alley was a chain-link fence and another store, an abandoned apartment building from the looks of it. Miller and du Trieux searched the apartments, but came up empty. It was too late. Lester had disappeared—again. It was as if he’d evaporated.

  “Dammit,” Miller fumed. He stalked his way back through the apartments and the hardware store to Astoria Boulevard.

  “Should have put a bullet in him the moment we saw his face,” du Trieux said.

  “Could you have done that? Just shot him for no reason?”

  “We had a reason. You said so yourself. Lester Allen was an asshole, but he also knows every inch of the compound, including the research Davenport and Winters are doing with NAPA-33 and the super wasps. If he joins a commune, we’re fucked.”

  Miller sighed. “Let’s hope not.”

  “I don’t know whether to pity your optimism or admire it.”

  “Six of one, half a dozen...” He didn’t finish his sentence.

  Ahead of them on 18th Street, just around the bend from Astoria Boulevard, huddled a pack of Infected.

  Dirt and cement crumbled underfoot as du Trieux and Miller skidded to a halt. Miller’s first instinct was to open fire. Shouldering the M27, his finger brushed the trigger. It was only when he saw a familiar face that he stopped.

  Samantha?

  She stood to the left of the group—her long brown hair braided to the side, her face gaunt but relatively unchanged. She wore the remains of a long, wide sheath dress with thinning yoga pants underneath. Her head tilted to the side.

  His chest tightened and the M27 dipped in his hands.

  Du Trieux didn’t lower her Gilboa, but she didn’t fire either. Her face shot back and forth between Miller and the Infected. Rocking on her heels, she took a step backward, then reset her feet firmly in the crumbled cement.

  The mob, unlike every other Infected horde they’d ever encountered, stood perfectly still. They weren’t running at them, trying to tear their limbs off their torsos. Nor was there a Charismatic in the center of the group, or odd fungal growths budding across their faces and skin. They had rifles slung over their shoulders or loosely clutched in their palms. Their clothes were ragged, but not completely filthy. They were just a gathering, a group of people, as if out for a stroll. They looked almost human.

  “Sam?” Miller breathed. He wanted to go to her. The relief at seeing her was immediately replaced by a dull dread. She was Infected, obviously, yet—

  “Hello, Alex,” she said.

  The sound of her voice hit him hard. He swallowed the lump in his throat and shifted his fingers on his rifle.

  Samantha’s dark eyes trailed down to his hands, then back up to meet his gaze. “Aren’t you going to shoot us?” she asked.

  “I’d rather not.”

  Du Trieux altered her stance. He could hear her breathing. To her credit, her rifle never budged an inch.

  “Were you, by chance, chasing that man?” Samantha asked.

  “What man?”

  Samantha’s eyebrows raised. “Do we look stupid to you?”

  “He’s one of ours,” Miller answered her.

  “Then why was he running away from you?”

  He didn’t bother to answer that.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of him for you. Just like we take care of all our own kind.”

  The group around her nodded their agreement and Miller’s stomach roiled.

  “I think you and I have very different opinions on what it means to take care of each other,” he said.

  “That was obvious from the beginning,” she answered. “Wasn’t it? Now, is she going to put down her gun, or is this going to get nasty? You’re outnumbered, two to one.”

  Miller raised his rifle again. “Thanks, but I’d rather die than become Infected.”

  Samantha laughed.

  The sound struck a chord in the hollow of his belly. He’d heard that laugh before, early in their relationship, before things had turned
south and she’d come to resent him. He hadn’t realized he missed it until he heard it again.

  “Why would we bestow our gifts upon you?” Samantha asked him. “You’re doing more for our benefit from your little compound than you could do in our ranks.”

  Miller blinked.

  “Oh, come on now,” she continued. “Haven’t you noticed? There are different variations to how a host reacts to the parasite. That’s why some of us are immune to your pathetic attempts at distributing anti-parasitics.” She shook her head at him like a disgruntled schoolmarm. “And here we thought you were smart. You haven’t put the pieces together yet?”

  “Enough to know I don’t want any part of it,” he admitted.

  “Have your compatriot point her weapon down, and we’ll go into more detail.”

  “I like it just where it is, thank you very much,” du Trieux said.

  “That’s not very hospitable of you,” Samantha scolded her. With the slightest flick of her wrist, the Infected surrounding her snatched up their weapons and pointed them at du Trieux.

  Miller’s trigger finger flinched but stopped short of pulling.

  “Put your weapon down, Alex,” Samantha said. “And we won’t shoot her. In fact, we’ll even promise to let you both go.”

  “I don’t believe promises from the Infected,” Miller said. “No offense.”

  “Smart man,” she said. “But unlike you, we follow through on our promises—so when we say we’ll let you go, we will. Isn’t that right, everybody?”

  The group surrounding Samantha all agreed.

  Miller glanced around, searching for an escape. If they ran back to the hardware store they could jump the chain link fence in the alley behind it and disappear in the labyrinth of backstreets, just like Lester had. But they couldn’t outrun a bullet.

  “Put it down, Trix,” Miller said, lowering his M27.

  “Are you mad?” du Trieux snapped.

  “If she wanted us dead, we’d already be dead.”

  Du Trieux reluctantly lowered her Gilboa.

  Two of the Infected ran forward and collected Miller and du Trieux’s rifles, as well as their sidearms and knives. It was like being strip-searched at a prison—humiliating and dehumanizing. Not to mention the smell. Even if they were a different kind of Infected, as Samantha claimed, they still stank the same.