The Bloodless (29 page)

              “That’s another thing,” I said. I stopped and turned to Emma, “you seem fairly young still, why did you stop working for the government. Seems like that would be a cushy position.”

              “Oh it was,” she said with a smirk, “very cushy. A little too cushy. Don’t get it twisted Dan - niel,” she added when I raised my eyebrows, “I loved what I did and I was very good at it. Too good, some used to say. It wasn’t easy getting out of there. I had to do it, though, you see. I felt a moral obligation to my fellow man.”

              “That’s fucking bullshit,” I said right away. “No one is that wholesome anymore. What’s the real reason?”

              “Fine,” she said and slowed herself down a bit, “the real reason is that I wanted to see all this for myself. I’ve been told all my life what I can and can’t do and that’s mostly consisted of people telling me I’m too small to effect any change.” Emma let out a mirthless chuckle, “I designed some of the biggest and most destructive weapons the world has never seen.”

              “What?” I asked confused.

              “None of my designs ever made it into production,” she explained, “There was never a need for them, the payloads were too great.”

              “Right,” I said and resumed walking back to my tent. “So did you lose family?”

              “No.”

              “Friends?”

              “No.”

              “Okay, then why do you want to fight?” I felt myself becoming aggravated. Nobody just fights for the sake of fighting, there’s always a motive behind it.

              Emma resumed her energetic talking pace, “I just want to fight, okay? I want to prove all those people wrong. I am NOT too small to effect change. The Armed Forces would never let me fight. I figured you would. Now I’m here. Fuck, so many questions man. Just take my help and be happy about it, okay?”

              I laughed, “Okay, okay. We’ll give you a tryout.” I shook her hand as we arrived at my tent. “So this is it,” I said feigning pride. “I used to have a shack but it burned down.” I motioned towards one of the chairs I had found on a recent scavenging run, “Have a seat, I need to bring you up to speed on everything.” Emma sat down and I went into a rambling exposition about everything that we had encountered up to that point.

              She asked questions here and there about some things that didn’t make much sense but mainly she was a really good listener and I could tell she was a fast learner too as she picked up on a lot of the things I was explaining to her. I intentionally left out details about Crist and the role she played because I still couldn’t handle getting into that subject and also because she didn’t really need to know about it. I know, hypocrisy at its finest, but the rules didn’t apply to me so I didn’t care.

              “Well that sounds about right,” Emma said in regards to the nest, which is the last thing I explained to her.

              “Does it?” I asked skeptically. “How much do you actually know about the enemy? The Bloodless,” I clarified when she looked confused.

              “I know that they killed a whole bunch of people and started a regional war, but that’s about it. I’m just trying to sound smart here, give me a break,” she said. “However, yes, from the way you described them, nesting sounds like it would be a natural tendency.”

              “How do you figure?” I asked surprised by her conclusion.

              “These are still organic life forms, even if they have been genetically modified.”

              “Well, technically the grunts aren’t genetically modified,” I explained.

              “Grunts?”

              “That’s the term we use for Bloodless that have been reanimated and are still without souls.”

              “So they’re soulless?” Emma asked. I nodded. “Couldn’t you call them the Soulless then?”

              “I suppose we could,” my mind was boggled that we had never thought of something so simple. “But, why is nesting such an obvious thing?”

              “Because it’s a natural process that almost all living things participate in. Everything needs a place to rest,” she said.

              This was all making sense now that Emma was explaining it, at least it made sense biologically. It didn’t seem very practical, however. Why would creatures like the Bloodless need places to rest? Their advanced healing attributes should make such a thing irrelevant. That’s when it hit me - they don’t have an advanced healing attribute, not the grunts anyway. The Bloodless with souls did have that but I doubted there were enough of those to patrol at dawn.

              “How many nests do you think there are?” Emma asked, breaking my contemplative silence.

              “It’s hard to say,” I responded, “it probably depends on how many Bloodless are actually out there, size of the nest, things like that. Damn,” I said as a new thought crossed my mind, “we’re going to have to destroy these nests. I hope Crowder and Buggs had the wherewithal to do that.” I took my communicator off standby, “Recon Team Zulu, this is HQ, do you copy?”

              A few moments passed, “This is Recon Team Zulu, we copy,” it was Crowder.

              “How’s it goin’ out there?”

              “Well we’re alive, so it could be worse I suppose.”

              “True. Hey, just curious, you did eliminate that nest, right?”

              “We are cooking s’mores on it as we speak, sir.”

              “Well done guys. Eat up and make your way back to base, Got some new things to cover with you, new objectives. How copy?”

              “Good copy. We’re on our way. Out.”

              “Out,” I said and switched my com back over to standby. “Oh, by the way Emma,” I said as she started looked nervously around the area, “you’re on probation.”

              “Probation, what does that mean?” she asked.

              “It means you are not to be on your own when you are here at HQ and you will remain by my or Fox’s side during any mission. This is so we can vet you out and make sure you’re not just here to kill us all in our sleep. Understood?” Emma looked at me for a few seconds, searching, before she responded.

              “Yes. Understood, sir.” 

              I was just about to go into my tent to grab my canteen when the thing that stirred in my brain earlier finally clarified. I whipped my gun from its holster and returned it to its resting spot on the back of Emma’s head.

              She held her hands up in the air, “Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you? Are you bipolar or something?”

              “Weapons design,” I said, anger back in my voice, “Armed Forces.”

              “Um yeah, that’s what I said.”

              “The Cloud, was it your design?”

              “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she lied.

              I flipped the gun and balled my fist around the handle and punched her in the back of the head. The gun fired into the air and she fell face first into the dirt. “Don’t fucking lie,” I yelled and resumed pointing the gun at Emma.

              It was a couple moments before she stirred and for a second I was scared because I thought I had hurt her, bad. I’ve always been that way. No matter how mad I got, I would still feel bad for displaying my anger. “Ugh,” she moaned as she rolled over onto her back. She looked down the pitch black barrel pointed straight at her face.

              “You better start doing some serious explaining if you prefer an open casket funeral.”

              “All right, fine,” she said, her tone very different from before, “just let me sit up.”

              I backed up and took the seat I just knocked her out of and sat down on it. I leaned on my legs, the gun still aimed at Emma’s face. “Okay. Talk.”

              She sat up and rubbed the back of her head and when she pulled her hand away there was blood on her fingers. “Damn, that hurt.”

              “Not as much as a bullet to the knee is going to hurt if you don’t start talking,” I growled.

              “Okay, okay, chill. I’m not here to hurt you, you know.”

              “Talk!”

              “Right,” she said calmly. “The military lobbied hard to have GoD Laboratories develop some weapons for them, but GoD wasn’t too keen to agree to anything. Apparently they had some moral objections to weaponizing their genetic research. I guess the CEO was convinced by some of his executives to refuse our offers.”

              “Yeah, that would be thanks to me,” I said. “But I was head scientist, not an executive. Which I was told explicitly.”

              A look of shock sprang up on her face, “That’s you?” she asked. “I don’t understand, if you were the head scientist, you should know all about The Cloud. Oh wait,” apparently some level of understanding came to her and she changed tact. “Well anyway, we eventually convinced Mr. Jefferson to develop something for us.”

              “How?” I asked.

              “We offered him more money than he could refuse,” she said simply. “That guy loved money. Also, he apparently found some other scientist willing to do it on the extreme down low. Something Strayer, I can’t really remember.”

              We sat in silence for a few moments as she tried to think of the name. I felt a ringing unrelated to any anger or aggravation growing steadily in my ear. “Jack Strayer,” I said quietly, lowering the gun.

              “Yeah, that’s the name,” Emma said excitedly. “You know him?”

              I didn’t respond right away. I couldn’t believe it, I felt like it was me who was punched in the back of the head by a gun reinforced fist. As unbelievable as it was, it would certainly explain how my research was used without my knowledge. Jack was the only other one in the building with access to it. Not even Alexander Jefferson, the head of the company, had access to my research.

              “Are you okay, Daniel?” Emma asked tentatively.

              I looked at her and a lot of my anger dissipated, “Yeah, I knew him. We worked together. He helped me develop the Theory of Reanimation.”

              “Yeah! That’s the one! We leaned heavily on that one during development. That’s yours? He said that was his. Jack,” she added.

              “Technically it was both of ours, but I guess he didn’t see it that way,” I said.

              “Oh,” she said apologetically.

              “It’s fine,” I said waving a hand in the air, “he’s dead now, so it doesn’t matter. Go on,”

              “Okay,” Emma said hesitantly. “You sure?” she asked and when I nodded she continued. “All right. Well after Mr. Jefferson set us up in some auxiliary lab we started right away with research and development. A lot of the research had already been done,” she nodded at me, “so it was just a matter of developing a way to weaponize it. However, my bosses wanted to make sure it had the right effect on their desired targets.”

              “What I don’t understand,” I said interrupting Emma, “is why you guys set out for genetic weaponry but settled on biological.”

              “It’s basically all the same, isn’t it?”

              “It’s related but it certainly isn’t the same.” I said with a condescending chuckle.

              “Ah, well I don’t think the weapon ever really got finished. We were in the final stages when the compound was attacked. Luckily for us we were far from it when it went down. Most of us got away.”

              “What do you mean, most of you?” I asked.

              “Somehow the attackers knew where we were. They came after us,” Emma responded. “I, along with a few other weaponists, managed to escape. Some of the higher ranking officials weren’t able to get away.”

              “So the research fell into their hands and they had captives who could explain it to them?”

              “Basically,” Emma said. She reached around and touched the back of her head gingerly. “Then a few days later The Cloud was set off. I’m sure you know the story from there. However,” she said before I could say anything, “to answer your question: No, The Cloud was not my design. The Cloud was a derivative of what we were actually designing.” Emma let out another mirthless chuckle.

              “What?” I asked. “What’s so funny?”

              “The weapon I was designing was much more destructive than The Cloud. What The Cloud utilized was our delivery system,” she said.

              “And the basis of my life’s work,” I added.

              “Well, yeah, that too.” Emma said. “We never set out to design anything that would bring the dead back to life.”

              “Tell me then,” I said leaning back in my chair, “what did you set out to make?”

              “Super soldiers,” she said, a smirk on her face. I had to hand it to her, her spirit was hard to break.

              “Super soldiers already exist,” I said. This was true, super soldiers were engineered, not by GoD but another lab, for the Russian Conflict and they were an instrumental part of our victory.

              “Right, but those super soldiers were still human,” Emma said.