Project 731 (6 page)

“—we need to track down and eliminate anyone that has come into contact with, or is in a position to reveal, them. Understood?”

What I understand is that these men not only know about the BFSs, but like us, they are here to eliminate them, and anyone else who has evidence that the...Tsuchi, are real.

The number of vehement instances of “Yes, sir,” that reply is disconcerting. We have unknowingly led one army toward another, and we’re currently caught in the crossfire.

Hawkins catches my eye. We’re both laying face down, sniffing the wet earth beneath the curling fronds of a fern ceiling, cloaked in shadow, thanks to our garb. While the unknown force of men and the frenzied horde of genetic monstrosities close in from either side, he points in the direction of the voices, then stabs his finger into the soil between our heads. He etches a series of lines in the dirt, but I can’t see it. Then he slowly pulls his hand away, revealing a single word:

DARPA.

7

“Auto-turrets, here and here,” the man in charge says. I can’t see him yet, but the way he gives orders and the way the others follow them reveal his role. I can’t see anyone else, either, but now that they’re almost standing on top of us, their individual movements are clear. I count four, which is far fewer than I previously thought, and not nearly enough to face what’s coming, though the words, ‘auto’ and ‘turrets’ are promising. Granted, these guys might be part of Hawkins’s rogue DARPA group, but four guys with guns is preferable to an army of BFSs.

I breathe slowly, MP5 gripped tight, waiting for someone to trip over me. I keep my eyes locked in the direction of the men’s voices, assuming that Hawkins is doing the same.

“ETA?” the man in charge asks.

“Contact in thirty seconds.”

Hard metal presses against the side of my head. I glance toward it without moving and see the barrel of a gun. I look beyond it, toward Hawkins, and see nothing. Sneaky bastard.

“That’s just enough time for you to tell us who the hell you are and why you’re here.” The voice has a trace of a southern accent, but mostly it’s just intensely grouchy.

I take my hands off the MP5 and raise them above the ferns. No sense in lying, as anything short of the truth will likely result in a bullet punching a hole in my head. “Jon Hudson. DHS.”

“Get him up,” the man in charge says.

I’m lifted by the back of my shirt. Free of the ferns, I see the four-man team, all cloaked in black, head to toe, including armor like mine, but more futuristic looking and not partially missing. Their faces are covered with round, reflective goggles that I suspect are more than stylish.

The man in charge stands beside one of two devices that look like a Porsche had babies with a mini-gun. The barrel of the weapon sweeps back and forth, no doubt guided by an array of motion and heat detecting sensors. I can hear the second one behind me.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“You can call me Silhouette,” he says. “Why is the FC-P here?”

He knows who I am.
It shouldn’t surprise me. A lot of people know who I am, but I’m sporting the beginning of a beard now and my face is covered in dirt. That means he knows my name, which still isn’t impossible. But he quickly identified my name with the FC-P.
We’re on these guys’ radar
. Hawkins is right to be afraid of them.

“Reports of spider-turtles is kind of our thing,” I say, “though if I’m honest, I’m pretty far out of my element right now.” I motion at the sophisticated weapons and take the opportunity to glance at the other men. Other than size differences, there’s no telling them apart. “I’m sure as hell happy to see you guys. And I’ll be happy to lend my gun to the fight, which, by the way, will start in three...two...”

Silhouette nods at the man holding me, and I half expect to get a bullet in the head, but I’m freed instead.

An auto-turret kicks off a round, the sound muffled by a sound suppressor. I glance at the weapons held by the four men. I’m not really a gun guy, but it goes with the job. I recognize the weapons as KRISS Vectors, which are technically future weapons not yet available to the military. Definitely DARPA. The weapons, unlike the turrets, are not sound suppressed, and not raised. Clearly, they think the two turrets will win this fight for them.

Rounds start flying, the turrets snapping back and forth. I turn uphill, back the way I came, and I see a wall of living black flowing toward us, on the ground and in the trees. Rounds chew up the forest, killing more trees than BFSs, but getting the job done...slowly. The weapons are targeting the nearest BFSs first, taking down one after another, but the mass, as a whole, is getting closer.

When the first unsuppressed weapon barks to life, I jump, not just from the sound, but because the round fired punches a hole in a BFS dropping down from above—toward my head. There’s a loud crack as the shell is punctured. The round hits the far side of the shell and doesn’t exit. Instead, all that energy snaps the creature to the side. It lands in the ferns next to me, and I waste no time unloading ten rounds into it, only stopping when the writhing tail falls limp.

I turn to the shortest of the four men, who shot the BFS, and nod my thanks. In response, he points up. I follow his finger and see more BFSs overhead, leaping through the trees, out of the auto-turrets’ range. I aim up and fire, the rest of the mysterious four-man team joining me. While the MP5 rattles in my grip, I can’t help but wonder where Hawkins went.

“Too many,” the biggest of the four men declares without much emotion, before taking a precise shot that drops a moving BFS two hundred feet up.

Geez, these guys are good.

“Give me thirty,” Silhouette says, tapping his ear and turning away.

The other three continue shooting, and so do I, but it’s a losing battle. The BFSs are still closing in, from above, and now from the sides. They’re avoiding the auto-turrets. Smart little assholes.

Through the gunfire, I catch two words spoken by Silhouette. “Scorched earth.” I don’t know who he’s talking to, but as someone who has dealt with a three-hundred-foot-tall monster capable of creating its own scorched earth, I understand the concept. They’re going to torch the forest, which means they also know what kind of danger these things present. And since there’s nothing I, nor the vanished Mark Hawkins, can do about this many BFSs, it’s the right call. In fact, so far, I’m glad these guys are here. Without them, Hawkins and I would have already given birth to our own small broods.

More words filter through. “One mile radius,” and “Three mikes.” His voice is suddenly clear when he turns around, once again addressing the group. “EVAC in two mikes, boys, payday in three.” As he says the words, he points his handgun at my chest. “Sorry, Jon, scorched earth includes you, too.”

“Ahem,” a familiar voice says. I turn to find Hawkins standing behind the short man who saved me, knife blade against the man’s throat. Hawkins’s face is now slathered in mud, no doubt to protect his identity.

None of the four men seem ruffled by this turn of events, including the man with a knife to his throat.

Silhouette looks at his watch and lowers his weapons. “We don’t have time for games, Specter.”

The small man gives a faint nod. “Shadow, Obsidian, you’re with me.” The trio heads downhill, leaving the expensive, and still-firing auto-turrets behind. All around, the BFSs close in, focusing on the three people present rather than on the three leaving. “Specter, catch up when you’re done.”

I look at Hawkins, his confused expression no doubt matching my own.

“Buddy,” I say to Specter, “Your pals just sold you out, so if you know a way to—”

Before I can finish speaking, the man’s foot comes flying up, slips past his own head and connects with Hawkins, who spills backwards. The blade pulls across the man’s throat, but doesn’t cut through his suit’s fabric.

The
tick-tack
of sharp feet punching through bark grows louder all around. I ignore it and fire at the man, nearly point blank. Each shot is a hit, straight to the chest, but the rounds don’t even faze him. With normal body armor, the rounds are absorbed, but the impacts are still powerful enough to crack ribs and bruise skin. Whatever this guy is wearing diffuses that energy, allowing him to do what happens next.

The short version is that he kicks my ass.

The long version is that he kicks the weapon from my hand, follows that up with a spinning kick to the side of my head and then a second spinning kick, in the opposite direction, to my legs. The effect is that I’m spun through the air, onto my back, dazed and breathless, all in about the same time it took me to fire three useless shots.

Hawkins fares no better. In fact, he’s still recovering from that single kick to the forehead. We’re at this guy’s mercy, and as his handgun comes around and draws level with my forehead, I’m pretty sure there isn’t much mercy to go around.

But then he pulls the trigger and proves me wrong. The bullet punches into the dirt beside my head. He’s either a horrible shot, or he meant to miss. When he fires again, without adjusting his aim. I know it’s the latter. But why?

Before I can ask, he pistol whips his own face, twice, drawing blood and shattering the goggles over his head.

What the hell?

Without a word, he turns around and pulls the goggles off his head, tossing them over his shoulder. When the goggles land beside me, he takes off running, like a little lightning bolt. He’s out of sight in seconds.

“Hawkins,” I say, scrabbling to my feet. The static click of an approaching tree-scaling army grows louder. They’re just seconds way. “Run!” I snag the goggles, then grab the man and hoist him up.

With a shake of his head, Hawkins’s wits return, and he shoves me ahead. “Go!”

I start running without any real sense of where I’m going. What I do know is that this whole place, for a mile all around, is going to be scorched earth in less than three minutes, and there is no way we are getting outside the target area in time. “Which way is the river?”

A springing BFS, eight arms outstretched, stinging tail reaching toward my gut, is cut down by a spray from my MP5. It writhes on the ground as I run past, and it nearly strikes me. “What?” I shout back to Hawkins, whose reply was drowned out by the gunfire.

He points past my head and to the right. “That way!”

We turn together, running downhill now, picking up speed. But we’re not alone. BFSs give chase on all sides, including in front of us. Five of them come at us, too many for the MP5 to handle on its own. “Hawkins!” I shout and move to the side. Taking the lead, Hawkins unleashes seven rapid-fire shots from his AA-12 shotgun. The incredibly loud weapon sounds like thunder for a moment, and sets my ears to ringing, but the effects are undeniable. The five BFSs have been reduced to sludge. We run through them, the river now audible, the air growing moist.

Over the sound of the nearby river and the ringing in my ears, I hear something new. A distant, but growing roar.

A jet, unlike anything I’ve seen before.

It streaks overhead just as I’m about to shout my warning. Something small falls from its gullet, dropping toward us. Eyes flicking between the small object and the path ahead, we explode out of the woods and into the clear, stone river bed.

“Find a sinkhole!” I shout, searching the area, but finding only shallow pools and the waterfalls that feed them.

Above, the single projectile coughs and shatters, turning into multiple bombs, spreading out over a large area. Just then, a second bomb falls from the jet. And a third. This whole area is about to get wiped clean.

“Here!” Hawkins shouts, and yanks my arm. Before I can see what he’s found, he throws us both over the side of a waterfall. All I can see below is frothing white. If we hit stone, at least we’ll probably be dead or unconscious when the bombs hit. But we don’t hit stone. Instead, we plunge into a ten-foot-deep pool, barely big enough for two, and we’re held there by the force of the water dropping down above us.

That’s when the very earth around us shakes, and a wave of pressure crushes the air from my lungs. I fight the urge to surface and breathe, not because I don’t need to, but because the surface of the water now glows bright yellow.

The world above us is burning.