SNAFU: Hunters

Bonked Patrick Freivald

“Four bonks?” Lieutenant Washington ran a hand over the wispy stubble on his dark-skinned head. “Are they stupid?”

Matt Rowley tried not to sigh, and for the most part succeeded — the resulting noise more of a dissatisfied grunt.

Conor Flynn, just as bald as Washington but pale as milk, grinned at Matt across the giant conference room table emblazoned with the eye-and-thunderbolt logo of the International Council on Augmented Phenomena, the elite organization founded through UN-NATO cooperation to combat the threat of Jade and unregulated Gerstner Augmentation. “FNG got an opinion?”

Jeff Hannes froze in his thousand-dollar suit and glared at all of them, his thumb over the ‘advance slide’ button. “Are you implying there are non-stupid Jade users, Washington?”

“Point, sir. But they have to know they’re playing with fire. I mean, look what Gerstner Augs did to the Russian military. A gang’s not going to have that kind of firepower.”

Flynn spoke without taking his eyes from Matt. “Maybe that’s what the other three are for. One goes bonk, the other three take it down before it wrecks the neighborhood. Somebody else Augs up; lather, rinse, repeat.”

Washington pounded a fist on the manila folder that contained his mission briefing. “Are we equipped to deal with that kind of oomph?”

While avoiding Flynn’s unwavering gaze, Matt replied. “Yeah, we are, according to the analytics. If they don’t know we’re coming.” Matt turned to Jeff. “They don’t know, do they?”

Hannes threw up his hands. “Unless they’ve got a mole in this room, they’re clueless, just another Jade gang hopped up on power. The biggest, sure, and they’ve seized way too much territory, but they’re just a gang. And besides, to have a mole they’d have to know we’re operating on American soil.”

Flynn quirked an eyebrow at Matt. “Dibs for fun on the pointy one, New Guy.” His Irish mumble would have been incomprehensible if not for a decade’s friendship, which made the ‘New Guy’ treatment all the more absurd. Their units had fought together in overseas operations and they’d kept in touch in the years since. That Flynn had signed up for ICAP two years before Matt didn’t erase that history, so shouldn’t change their friendship.

Matt glanced from Flynn to the photo jacked from a nightclub security camera, splayed large across the white wall that served as a screen. The largest of the four bonks had augmented himself beyond anything Matt had seen before. At least ten feet tall with hands the size of Christmas hams, he loomed over the scene behind giant sunglasses, massive arms crossed over his naked chest. In lieu of hair, steel studs protruded from the top of his skull in a regular grid. Metal spikes protruded from his forearms, ending in cruel barbs sharpened to a razor sheen.

Flynn stroked his chin with an air of too much theater. “He’s prettier than me. I can’t let that stand.”

Turning to Jeff, Matt tapped the picture. “How has he not bonked out already? Nobody can tolerate that level of Augs.” Bonks had gotten their nickname — which Conor found particularly funny — from the inevitable psychosis that overtook chronic Jade users, the superhuman threat that ICAP had been founded to confront. The more you took, the bigger and badder you got, until the whispers drove you into a killing frenzy you never come out of.

And Jade is addictive, with a recidivism rate over ninety-nine percent.

Psychotics are bad. Psychotics that can shrug off bullets and throw cars are rather worse. The Russian military wouldn’t be a threat for at least a generation.

And now it’s a street drug.

Hurya al-Azwar answered with a roll of her pale-blue eyes. “It’s a matter of time, Rowley. You know it, I know it, he has to know it. Which just makes him that much more dangerous.” A scar ran from her left temple back into her short blonde hair. It, and the missing quarter-inch off the top of her ear, spoke of a life on the streets of Detroit before two tours as a Marine in the sand box, before Jade and augmentation and ICAP, before the regenerates that would heal any damage short of death without mark or scar and in seconds or minutes instead of months.

Five years his senior in ICAP, she’d seen dozens of her colleagues bonk out, had to put far too many of them down, and her first-generation regenerates put her at a higher risk than any of them. Augmentation protocols had improved as scientific understanding increased, but everyone in the room ran the risk of psychotic, ravening insanity. Everyone but their boss.

Jeff’s constipated grimace pulled them away from the picture. “Look, we’ve got four heavily-augmented threats and at least sixteen who might be normals, or might just not be showing. I’m bringing in Platt and Karle,” he raised his voice over their groans, “and giving Karle operational discretion on this one.”

“Why do you hate us?” Flynn asked.

Jeff ran his tongue over his teeth. “Karle’s got a better success rate than any of you. I want you all back alive, and there’s something about this,” he waved his hand at the scattered pictures, “I don’t like at all.”

Washington sighed without looking up. “Feel the love, man.”

Matt eyed the sunglasses in Flynn’s proffered hand and shook his head. “Those make me look like a cop.”

“You are a cop. Were a cop. Pretending to be a cop. Whatever you did in Tennessee.”

“No need to advertise it.”

“Eat your bones.” Flynn tossed the shades into the back seat and fastened his seatbelt, then ran his hands over the fake leather dash above the late-model Impala’s glove box. “Brilliant. These American-made autos really spice up the sex life, Rowley. We’ll fit right in.”

At two hundred and forty pounds and one percent body fat, Conor Flynn looked every bit the cop, or ex-military, as Matt. His skin-tight gray t-shirt did nothing to dispel the effect, and his square sunglasses screamed, ‘I am a Government Agent. Do not speak to or trust me.’

Flynn raised an eyebrow at the naked appraisal. “What?”

Matt just shook his head and put the car into gear.

They cruised through the suburbs, past an endless stream of one-story ranches and dingy, sun-faded plastic swimming pools. The smells of the city filtered through the air conditioning, street food and salt water and sweat and garbage rotting under the blazing summer sun. Matt considered grabbing the shades from the back seat, but wouldn’t give Flynn the satisfaction. Chain link replaced white pickets, and vinyl siding blurred into graffiti on decaying brick.

They pulled up to a stoplight and idled next to a cluster of young men, baggy street clothes and wary brown faces sweltering in the midday heat. This far south it took a special kind of stupid to wear pants if you didn’t have to, which might explain why half of them hung on their thighs or even lower. The pale yellow bandanas around foreheads, necks, wrists, or ankles identified them as Camino Reals. Heroin dealers and thieves, they lay outside ICAP’s jurisdiction even with their new domestic operations protocols.

Flynn held a hundred-dollar bill up with two fingers, but no one approached the car, their lack of attention as conspicuous as staring.

“Oy, boys.” Flynn waved the folded bill in the air. “I could use some information.” They glowered at the ground, at the sky, the telephone poles, anywhere but at the car. “Brilliant, lads. Thanks for nothing.” The light turned green and Matt pulled away, eyes on the mirrors, watching them watch him with wary eyes.

“No love from the South-Side Banana Hammocks.” Flynn chuckled and slipped the money back into his pocket. “Told you we look like cops.”

“If you’re so worried about it, why are we the ones going?”

“I didn’t say I was worried. It’s just going to be hard to pick a fight if they know we’re the law.”

“We’re not here to pick—”

Babbling whispers slithered through his mind, a mad cacophony of thoughts bent on murder and pain, the worst side effect of Gerstner Augmentation. Matt took the warning from the Late-Second Precognition but ignored the lurching desire to tear Flynn’s face from his skull and stuff it into his mouth. Jerking the wheel, he hit the brakes then the gas to bring them around ninety degrees, then floored it before the jeeps rounded the corner behind the run-down convenience mart.

Flynn laughed and reached down, but stopped when Matt shook his head.

“You won’t need the pig-sticker, they’re just running us off.” He down-shifted to pick up speed, then jammed the car into higher gear, gas pedal to the floor. The motor whined, a cicada with an internal-combustion mating call.

Flynn took his hand off the hilt of his katana, leaving it on the floor between the seats. The titanium and carbon nanofiber blade had yet to see use in combat, but Matt had watched Flynn dice up a car in the practice arena without breaking a sweat. Why an Irishman fought with a katana Matt would never understand.

Flynn jerked his thumb toward the back. “You want me to get the trunk?”

Matt shook his head. The REC-7 carbine and Auto-Assault 12 combat shotgun could stay where they were, in the trunk under lock and key. If worse came to worse he had his personal Glock 9mm in the glove box. But it wouldn’t. They’d been made as cops in a no-go zone, but hadn’t done anything to justify a murder, even from a gang as vicious as the Camino Reals.

They blew through two red lights, the jeeps swerving and honking behind, but as they passed from one turf to the next the pursuit broke off and didn’t return.

“You sussed those out pretty fast. Precog, yeah?” Flynn asked.

Matt nodded without taking his eyes from the road.

“Brilliant, brilliant. They wouldn’t clear me for it, said I’d had enough. I’m thinking what’s the harm, right?”

“The harm is you go bonk and kill everything around you until other people like you put you down.”

Flynn chuckled. “That’s what I mean, right? The side effect is ‘fun.’”

“Just keep your pants on.”

“Aye, Sergeant.”

Ten minutes later they rolled past the Marquee, a modern glass-and-steel structure at odds with the dilapidated neighborhood. The fading day washed the neon lights to a pale glow but did nothing to hide the ultraviolet paint across the front windows, a cartoon shark swimming through a golden crown that would be invisible to unaugmented eyes.

“See that?” Matt asked.

Flynn nodded. “Fancy. You think the Shades don’t have blacklights?”

Matt shrugged. “One cop in fifty might have augged vision, maybe. Not like the Mako Kings don’t know the police know where they hang out, anyway. As long as they think we’re just cops, we’ll—”

Flynn popped his handle and stepped out, the car still rolling at fifteen miles an hour. He hooked a parking meter with his right hand and used it to spin himself around, stopping with a flourish with his toes balanced on the edge of the curb. As Matt slammed on the brakes and swore under his breath, Flynn took a bow to the wide-eyed onlookers. Flynn waited behind the car for Matt to pull over, put on the brake and get out.

People milled the streets, heading home from work or out for a Friday on the town. As one they gave the car a wide berth, eyeing both newcomers with open suspicion or naked hostility.

Matt stepped up to his friend with his jaw clenched in frustration. “Dammit, Conor, we’re supposed to be scoping the place, not painting bullseyes on our heads.”

A seven-foot tall bouncer, rippling with muscles impossible through normal exercise, eyed them from the front door across the street. Taking in the sea of Hispanics, all either staring or trying too hard not to stare, Flynn ran a hand over the stubble on his pasty scalp. “See, we fit right in, sunnies and all.” He put on his shades and sauntered across the street.

Music trickled out behind the double-doors, Latin horns over a hip-hop beat, death-metal Spanish growling from a microphone. They approached, cop-casual, Matt two steps behind. The bouncer moved to intercept them. His voice rumbled an octave lower than a normal man’s, his accent a blend of Mexican and south Florida. “Can I help you, gentlemen?”

“Yes,” Matt said. “We—”

“Looking for a drink and twirl is all.” Flynn spun, an elegant pirouette that ended in a curtsey. He held the pose and looked up under his brow into the bouncer’s eyes. “Heard the Marquee had it happening, am I right?”

“You’re not our target clientele, ese.” The bouncer put his hands on his hips so that his massive frame blocked most of both doors. Matt winced as Flynn’s eyes flashed, an almost imperceptible twitch that showed not the slightest hint of fear. The bouncer put his hand on Flynn’s chest, fingers splaying almost to his shoulders. “You’re going to have to leave.”

“What, because I’m white? You discriminating here? You think the Irish haven’t faced—”

Matt put his hand on Flynn’s shoulder. “We’re not here to pick a fight, Conor.”

“—their share of discrimination, you racist prick? Why don’t you make me leave, big guy?”

To his credit, the bouncer didn’t take the bait. Much. He extended his arm, slowly, forcing Flynn several steps back on the sidewalk. “Move along, little man. This isn’t the place for you.” He extended his fingers and Conor stumbled back two steps.

Matt moved between them and Conor rebounded off of his back. “We’re sorry, sir. We’ll be on our way.” He stepped back, bumping Flynn toward the street, then turned and backed him off the curb and into the road. Through gritted teeth he mumbled, “The point was to maintain surprise, moron.”

Flynn almost frolicked toward the car, locking eyes with anyone and everyone who dared challenge his right to be there. “Nah, there’s no fun in that, and he thinks we’re cops or feds or something anyway. The point was to size that meathead up. You see what I saw?”

Matt recalled the scene, his eidetic memory enhancements bringing to crystal-clear focus details he hadn’t seen in real time. “Tracks?”

“Right is right. He’s on the H, not just Jade. We follow him home, wait for him to snow out, bangers and mash,” he mimed tossing a flash-bang grenade. “Black bag over the head, voila. New toy for the intel department.”

Matt tried not to smile as he gunned the engine. “Call it in.”

“We could just—”

“Call it in, Conor.” He pulled away from the curb and took a left toward the expressway.

The dash shook as Flynn banged his fist on it. “Karle’s a pussy. We’ve got an opportunity here, and you know he’ll—”

Matt sighed. “Twelve years a Royal Marine, decorated six times for valor, awarded the Victoria Cross for insane but admirable stupidity in the Kandahar valley. . What rank were you when you left the force to join ICAP?”

Flynn mumbled.

“Say again, Corporal?”

“Cor-por-al.” He emphasized every syllable. “And you know it.”

“And why not a Sergeant? A Warrant Officer? Lieutenant?”

They said it together. “A history of unpredictable behavior and violent tendencies uncurbed by disciplinary measures.”

“ICAP wanted a killer,” Flynn mumbled again, “so they can’t complain when they get one.”

“Right. But right now we need to be smart. We’re on US soil, and have limited mission parameters. If Karle sanctions the move, we—” His eyes widened as the whispers shrieked blood-soaked charnel houses into his brain. Before it happened a shadow separated from the wall, crushing the Impala and tumbling it end over end into the sidewalk grocery.

Late-second precognition made Rowley and a select few other Augs impossible to surprise, at least while awake. The whispers gave warning, but not much. Matt swerved, taking the bonk head-on.

He squeezed his eyes shut as the airbags deployed, gritted his teeth against the impossibly loud crunch, and yanked the 9mm from the glove box. Two pulls of the trigger deflated the airbag and caused the massive shadow dwarfing his vision to stagger. His eardrums healed as fast as the explosions shredded them, and the car lurched sideways. Gasping in a breath of chalky white dust and the tang of gunpowder, he tore off his seatbelt.

Flynn had disappeared, his door hanging ajar on a crumpled hinge.

A monster lifted the car by the front, a wall of muscle and spikes with jet black eyes, teeth filed to cruel points, threaded steel studs protruding from its head in a regular pattern. The bonk roared and Matt’s world overturned, the roof imploding as it impacted the asphalt. Neck tilted almost to ninety degrees, he fired twice out the spider-webbed windshield.

Hot red blood exploded from the bonk’s enormous black sneaker, a chunk of leather torn free from the glancing shot. Matt pushed with his legs, straining against the seat as massive fingers gripped the hood under the car and lifted. If the bonk had felt the gunshot, it made no sign of it. Matt’s stomach lurched as the car raised up. He pushed harder, bracing his hands on either side of the steering wheel for leverage.

The seat snapped and he fell back, his face sliding across the upholstered roof as the car smashed into the ground again, trapping him in a sandwich of crumpled metal.

Conor Flynn rolled right as gunfire peppered the sidewalk. His heart soared as civilians screamed, the adrenaline rushing through his veins in an orgy of pending violence while his augmented heart beat at a steady seventy beats per second. He hit the facade of the brick building at a full sprint and ran straight up it, using his momentum to gain traction on the vertical surface.

Twenty feet up he grabbed the roof lip and jerked, sailing over the top in a graceful arc. One knife had already left his hand, sinking to the hilt into his first opponent. Conor ignored the dead man as he drew and threw the second knife left-handed.

Shooter number two held his HK53 like a movie gangster, the stock collapsed, relying on arm strength to bring and hold the weapon to bear. He jerked as the knife hit, glancing off the gun instead of finding purchase in his flesh.

Conor landed, crouched low, grinning in the thrill of battle. Bullets zoomed over his head as the gangbanger’s weapon jerked high. Three steps brought Conor in range, so he drew the katana and spun. The ancient bone fragment hidden in the hilt sang to him, urged the blade forward, thirsted for the death that it had brought in life. He resisted and pulled back at the last second. The monofilament blade took the man in the bridge of the nose without the slightest resistance, a spray of red gore joining the near-silent steel breeze. Stepping in as the man dropped the weapon to bring his hands to his face, Conor shouldered him off the roof.

He fell with gurgling wail that cut off in a wet thump on the pavement.

Picking up the carbine, Conor looked down at the overturned car and the giant bonk slamming it into the pavement. “Oh, Matt, you silly boy. I called dibs.”

He dove sideways as the roof access door banged open, bullets tearing through the air where he’d just stood. Three men armed with ARs fanned out as Conor scrambled behind an air conditioning unit. They moved with an uncoordinated, nervous energy, to make room for a dark-skinned bonk in a black trenchcoat, like Wesley Snipes’s Blade enlarged on a photocopier.

A sharp itch shot up from his ankle, and he looked down to find his cuff darkening with spreading blood just above his boot.

The pain hadn’t hit him, and wouldn’t before the wound healed.

“Brilliant, lads. Let’s play.”

Automatic weapons-fire punctuated the mind-rattling crunch as the bonk beat the car into the ground. Matt squirmed to the back, popped down the latch to access the trunk, and pulled the case containing his AA-12 combat shotgun into the back seat. His stomach lurched as the car lifted and he ran his thumb over the biometric lock.

The car slammed down and a searing, white-hot pain shot up his leg into his spine.

He popped open the case and slid out the weapon, the drum magazine already loaded with fin-stabilized fragmentation rounds. He turned, his left leg making a sloppy ripping sound as it tore free from the jagged chunk of metal that used to be the gearshift, and took aim.

The car came up, and in the four-inch space between the dash and the remains of the roof the bonk’s abdomen came into view, rippling muscle barely contained in a baby-blue t-shirt. Matt fired, the roar deafening in the confined space.

He held the trigger as the bonk whirled to the side and only one microgrenade found its mark, the others deactivating automatically as they missed the intended target. As it exploded the world disappeared from view and the car crashed down onto the pavement with a final crunch. Matt squirmed back and crushed the latch on the trunk with a knife-hand, tearing it free with a wince. Ignoring the bloody mess he’d made of his fingers he launched himself out, weapon raised toward the rooftops.

He fired and swept right over three targets, wishing for his tactical helmet with its Friend-or-Foe identifier and smart projectile guidance system. A man’s head exploded, raining bloody brains and chunks of skull from the rooftop before pitching back out of sight, but the other two took cover, unharmed. Shots rang out from the roof across the street, though at what target he couldn’t tell.

Footsteps rang behind him. On his back, he rolled his head to take aim at the charging bouncer, eight-hundred-plus pounds moving at twenty-something miles an hour. He triggered the rounds to explode ‘downward’ toward the sky and pulled the trigger. The weapon barely recoiled against his shoulder, and a dozen shots flew in two seconds. The depleted uranium-tipped rounds punched into the bonk’s legs and abdomen and then erupted in a bloody mist. The massive thing stumbled mid-stride, left femur and part of its hip exposed by the rapid disintegration of intervening flesh.

Matt fired twice more, punching up under the fused bones of its ribcage to pulp the heart and lungs. With any luck the trauma would be enough to bring it down.

The whispers tittered in hateful glee and he jerked his legs up, but his injured left knee didn’t respond. The shredded remains of his Impala came down on top of it in an explosion of wet red pain, erasing everything below his lower thigh in a gory smear across the concrete. Black spots formed in his vision, but he jerked up the shotgun — and found no targets. Blue sky and scattering civilians filled his vision over the demolished car.

As the arteries pumping life from his body closed and meat formed around undeveloped bone, he lay back and panted, trying to circumvent the unbearable, itching agony of bleeding, knitting flesh. His vision darkened, but he forced his eyes to remain open and trained on the rooftop. His view remained empty, devoid of targets.

In the distance, sirens wailed.

He slid to a sitting position, his right hand on the stock of the AA-12, and looked down at the tattered remains of his leg. The muscle writhed, ropy masses weaving together only to split, bleeding, as the bone grew between them.

A shadow crossed his vision. He looked up.

Conor shook his head, frowning, every inch of him covered in bright red blood. He smiled, white teeth glinting like the metallic sheen on his sword in the fading sunlight. “You let him get away. You going to do your job or what?”

Biting back his vulgar reply, Matt allowed his head to drop to the sidewalk, filling his vision with clear blue sky. “Call it in. And put that damned sword away — the cops are en route.”

Hurya al-Azwar stepped down from the helicopter and surveyed the carnage wrought by Conor Flynn. Five dead men sprawled across the rooftop, policemen already marking evidence with little yellow tags — shell casings, severed limbs, discarded weapons. Red stains marred the gravel in an expanding spiral that ended in the shredded remains of a giant black man, a third of his head three meters further away, remaining eye wide open in unending shock, mouth open to reveal serrated steel teeth bolted into his jaw.

“How many did they get?” She nodded toward the corpse.

Sergeant Karle frowned down at the dead bonk. “Two, plus nearly a dozen normals. All fatalities. Conor’s unhurt, Matt will be fine in an hour or so if we stuff enough food in him.”

“This was recon. What the hell happened?”

Karle held up his hands. “Conor Flynn happened. Matt said he picked a fight.”

“Remind me to never do that.” She nudged the dead bonk with her toe. “Intel didn’t even know about this one. What’s a big black guy doing Augging-up in a Latin gang?”

Karle grunted. “Tell Platt and Washington to make nice with the locals. I’m going to see if we can’t get Conor and Matt out of custody.”

“Aye, sir.”

The map appeared on Matt’s HUD as Karle spoke in his ear piece. The Mako Kings controlled a nine-block area just outside of downtown, and ruthlessly crushed any and all opposition regardless of whether or not they were law enforcement, rival gangs, or even the cartels. Pioneers in nationwide Jade distribution, they’d partnered with Dawkins’s organization to spread like a virus from Chicago to both coasts and everywhere in-between. With an irresistible product and superhuman augmentation they destroyed their competition and carved out an empire from the ashes of burning ghettos.

A network of Dragonflies gave Matt real-time data of the Mako Kings’s turf, the quad-copter drones blanketing the area with sonar, visual, and infrared surveillance. Coupled with his own infrared and ultraviolet vision, the HUD removed the fog of war and replaced it with stark, robotic clarity. The overlay projected an image that saw through brick walls and even assessed the likelihood that any particular person was a target or a civilian.

Pointy, as Conor had taken to calling him, had left a blood trail from the wreckage of Matt’s rented Impala through the back alleys to an abandoned shopping plaza now known as ‘Spanish City’, a lawless haven for derelicts, junkies and people who didn’t want to be found. A wall of wrecked vehicles surrounded the parking lot and included a crude gate made out of the burned-out carcass of a double-decker bus rigged to an old crane.

The reek of unwashed bodies, burning garbage, and urine combined into something not unlike ammonia-soaked charred bananas left to rot in the sun. Matt couldn’t imagine what it smelled like in the midday heat and humidity.

Dozens of people wandered the asphalt, or warmed themselves at fires set in rusted steel drums. Junkies lay on the ground, or on each other, sharing needles and pills and body heat in the midnight chill. Sentries wandered the rooftops, armed with long rifles and binoculars that may or may not be night-vision capable.

Too many civilians. A squad of Augs could make mincemeat of the hostiles without the use of heavy ordnance, but the civilians would pay a heavy toll. Besides, if Jade wasn’t involved it wasn’t their purview, and while some Jade dealers found their way to Spanish City it was not, according to their intel, a pipeline worthy of ICAP’s attention. Yet.

Karle had operational control — former rank meant nothing in ICAP — but ultimately the plan came from Washington. Washington, Karle, and Flynn would storm the gates, loud and proud, with flash-bangs and drone support to crack a hole in the wall. As the civilians ran and the guards engaged, Rowley, Platt, and al-Azwar would eliminate Pointy. Conor had complained, citing “dibs” which Washington ignored, mollifying him with a chance at the fifth bonk the Dragonflies had pegged near the gate.

Mission parameters authorized deadly force for the bonks and anyone identified as a Mako King. Between the baby-blue bandannas and facial recognition, the quad copters had added eleven human-sized targets in addition to the two bonks. Matt’s HUD outlined them with double red triangles, the suspected civilians with orange triangles, and his own team with green circles. In the age of Jade, collateral damage had become a price of law enforcement, and the DHS hoped the joint UN/NATO strike force would bring so much firepower to bear that they could minimize or at least contain the destruction. . but this somehow wasn’t a ‘military operation’.

Peace through superior bureaucracy.

The timer hit zero, and the bus-gate disintegrated in a roar, the fireball rising skyward as the drone banked toward home.

Screams. Panic. Weapons-fire pinging off the wreckage from jittery, untrained gangbangers wasting their ammo — and precious time reloading.

Pointy’s hulking form, bright yellow on the infrared, bolted from his mattress in the abandoned Macy’s sales floor, joined by several others. The huge blob raced through the open space toward the loading dock a hundred feet from their position.

Platt charged, screaming, before the bay door had opened. Matt opened his mouth to countermand, and closed it, angry. Platt came to a halt inches from the unmoving metal.

Pointy’s blob faded, then disappeared.

“What the hell?” Platt put his fist through the loading-dock’s side door, pivoted, and ripped it off its hinges. Staccato pops sounded from inside, and chips of cinderblock lashed into Platt’s face.

“Hold position!” Matt moved up, his HUD tracking for targets simultaneously on the Dragonfly feed and the helmet camera, the ‘Identify Friend or Foe’ lighting up at several weapon profiles sticking out from around pillars and decrepit, half-burned display cases.

He fired three times on approach, eschewing the Groucho technique he’d learned as a Tennessee police officer in favor of a thirty-mile-per-hour sprint and superhuman strength to keep the recoil-suppressing weapon aimed true. The fin-stabilized microgrenades auto-aimed toward the identified targets, skimming past the makeshift defilade and exploding downward and sideways. Men screamed. A pair of legs kicked out from behind a cracked marble pillar, the IFF fading from red to black as a pool of blood spread across the filthy tile.

He grunted as a round rocked his shoulder back, the gel under the dragon skin hardening to dissipate the energy before turning soft again. Behind him, al-Azwar’s NATO-issue REC7 chattered, spitting ceramic composite ‘bonk killer’ rounds with unerring accuracy.

Matt’s visor automatically dimmed over the continuous muzzle-flash as Platt fired full auto and swept inside, following the bullets through the doorway with a roar that carried over the intercom. Matt and al-Azwar came in behind, al-Azwar keeping their targets pinned down with tight, controlled bursts while Matt killed them with the directional grenades.

Seconds later the room fell quiet, the FoF indicating no living targets.

“Here!” al-Azwar cried, flipping up a metal access hatch with her boot. Without waiting she stepped in and dropped out of sight, carbine pointed down as she fell through the hole.

Platt and Rowley whirled as a pair of men ran in, gaped wide-eyed at the carnage then fled in panic. Matt stepped up and looked inside the hole. A series of rebar handles led into the darkness, which in the UV spectrum resolved into a ladder descending several stories to a concrete floor. IR signatures showed faint signs of passage, but the tunnels glowed too warm for much more.

Platt nodded at the hole. “You first.”

Matt stepped inside, pressing his boots against the walls to slow his descent enough not to break his legs when he hit the ground. Above him, Platt stepped in and grabbed a rung.

Platt hissed as his fingers separated from his hand in a flash of silver. He turned, groping for his carbine left-handed. Another flash and his helmet toppled down the shaft, his head still inside, neck spurting steaming red blood. A block of plastic bricks followed Platt’s dead body down the hole, a red light blinking in the darkness.

Matt fired a burst up the shaft and pulled his feet back, falling the last twenty feet before impacting hard on the concrete floor. He leapt. With a spin he just managed to pull himself behind a metal door before the room erupted.

Heat washed over him in a deafening, blinding white, crushing him between the wall and the door. His armor crackled, the HUD went dark. He held his breath for as long as he could, then gasped in air that seared his throat, scorched his lungs. Gagging, he stumbled to his knees and tore off his helmet. His hair shriveled in the fading heat, and he kept his eyes squeezed tight.

A moment passed, and a breeze tickled his skin as more air rushed back into the room. He gasped in a breath, cleaner now, and opened his eyes.

Flecks of blackened skin fell from his hands, the only part of his body exposed to the explosion. He flexed his fingers as the skin knitted over and through the damaged tissue — he’d have to cut it away later to let blemish-free skin grow. If there was a later.

Dust and smoke obscured his vision, but from his vantage point he could just make out the pile of demolished concrete that had once made up the shaft, and next to it the smoldering remains of one of Platt’s boots, a chunk of bone sticking out of the ruined meat. Matt stood and looked down at the bandoleer of drum magazines for the AA-12. The smoking leather had protected the munitions just enough. Had they detonated, he’d be a dead man.

He rounded the corner, weapon up, and left the room, his useless helmet lying next to Platt’s boot. “Hurya, do you copy?”

Static burst through his ear bud, intermingled with what might have been al-Azwar’s voice.

“I’m on your six. Platt’s dead.”

“—ay again, Rowley.” Karle’s deep voice reverberated through his ears. “Y— king up.”

“Karle, Platt’s dead, hostile unknown. We’re underground.” He rounded a corner and snarled at the uselessness of his IR; the floor and walls glowed a uniform red, an afterimage from the explosion, or perhaps from a subterranean heat source. “al-Azwar, I’m on your six, copy.”

The indecipherable noise that followed left him no idea whether or not they’d understood, or if Hurya had heard him at all.

Bullets pinged off of the bus-gate as Conor leapt through the holes left by the trio of AGM-176 Griffin missiles, the drone-capable, candy-ass little brothers of Hellfire missiles designed to limit collateral damage. His ears filled with the melodious sounds of rifle shots and screaming panic, and in his mind his katana sang of unending bloodshed as he drew it from its sheath.

He ignored the scattering civilians, and the whispers’ nagging encouragement to cut them down. They didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know, and there were bigger, more challenging prizes to pursue.

Karle and Washington took position behind the gate and fired short, controlled bursts from their M4s, letting the IFF targeting system guide the electronically-controlled flechette rounds to their targets. They couldn’t shoot around corners, but in Conor’s opinion, 300-meter shots without bothering to aim just scoured all the joy out of combat.

Conor leapt, taut muscle launching him twenty feet in the air and straight at the bonk charging their position.

Smaller than Pointy, the nine-foot monstrosity wore full body armor, matte black carbon fiber over enormous metal plates, and wielded a battered stop sign like an axe. A mane of black hair flowed down her back from a topknot that gave her a vaguely Mongolian look, though she bore the extended brow and thick facial structure of bonks everywhere. Enormous claws extended from her left hand, the gleaming metal bolted to or through the bone and stretching half a meter from her fingertips.

Conor swung, two-handed, but without purchase he couldn’t put enough force into the blow to threaten such a creature. She didn’t take the feint. Faster than he believed possible, Scratchy sidestepped and swung. He twisted to take the blow on his hip as the stop sign swatted him from the air. He took the landing on his left hand, cartwheeled, and came up swinging.

The monofilament blade sparked against the sign inches from his head, skittering up the handle to bite into the reflective sheet metal. Scratchy twisted, tearing the blade from Conor’s hands, and swiped low with her claws.

Laughing, Conor stepped into the swipe, using her elbow for a foothold to spin-kick her in the face. The steel toe caught her in the temple, the shock of metal on thick bone reverberating up Conor’s left leg as the blow arrested his momentum. The reinforced steel in his boot crumpled with the impact, crushing his toes.

Scratchy dropped the sign and stumbled back, shaking her head like a dog.

Conor dove into a roll, grabbing the hilt of his blade on the way by. The metal shrieked as he wrenched the sword free. He spun, weapon up, and gave her a nod of respect.

“C’mon, lassie. You’ve got some fight in you.”

Scratchy swept up the sign and advanced, makeshift axe and claw whirring almost too fast for his augmented eyes to follow. Metal clanged against metal as he backpedaled, limping, sword flashing to deflect the blows before either crushed or sliced him to pieces.

His back hit the wall. Scratchy swung.

Hurya al-Azwar closed her eyes, but heard only the soft trickle of water in the distance, the echo washing it out to white noise in the sewer tunnels. She muttered a soft prayer of thanks that sanitation services had long-since failed in this part of the city, and only the ghosts of odors remained to haunt her senses. All said, the sewers smelled much better than the mall above.

Her COMMs produced nothing but occasional static, like her GPS and the IFF linked through the network of Dragonflies, though because of intervening metal or deliberate jamming she couldn’t say. Pointy — despite Conor’s childishness, a lack of known identity had ensured that the name stuck throughout operational planning — had vanished down the twisting corridors, and the heat from the walls kept her from tracking him with IR vision.

The tunnels had rocked a few minutes earlier, in what she’d hoped had been a deliberate explosion set by Platt or Rowley, and since then her world had condensed to long, dark corridors rendered bright by augmented eyes, dripping water, and the desiccated memories of ancient shit.

She waited. Rats squeaked in the distance, their feet scrabbling across the stone-and-mortar hallways, too far and too quiet for human ears to hear.

Something Pointy’s size couldn’t move through these corridors without making noise, and her augmented ears could pick up a pin dropping at ten meters. A scrape of boot on the floor, a shoulder brushing against the wall. If he moved, she’d hear it, and she’d have him.

A bead of sweat trickled down the back of her neck, tickling from her hairline until it hit the collar of her undershirt, the white cotton soaked under her armor in the oppressive heat. She tightened her grip on the carbine, textured handle proof against her sweaty palms, and took one careful step, rocking from the ball of her foot to her toes. Silent, she regulated her breathing to the barest motion, letting not even that betray her presence.

Her ears pricked at a soft scrape. She turned, rotating soundlessly on the balls of her feet, breath held. It came again, closer, from a hall on the left. She lifted the REC7 and crept two careful steps back. The FoF highlighed a potential target, blue for an unconfirmed type. Another step back, and–

She jerked up, too late. The giant shape landed on her, thick, sinuous muscle crushing her arms to her chest. Pain exploded in her trigger finger as it snapped sideways in the guard. Hot runnels of fluid streamed to the floor as serrated barbs sank deep into her flesh. She stomped with the strength of a dozen men, driving her heel down onto the foot below.

Pointy only squeezed harder. Her ribs, fused as part of augmentation, cracked. Slamming her head back, she hit thick muscle instead of teeth or nose. She gasped in a breath, but her lungs wouldn’t inflate. Held in the air, she found no purchase. The grip tightened, and the fire in her chest strangled hope. Bones shifted, her infrared vision blurred.

Her fingers walked along the black leather of her belt to the loop holding the grenades. She fumbled for the pin, the spoon, any part of it, something she could drop and kick behind them, shred the monster from the back.

She groaned out the last of her air.

Her finger touched metal.

Blood and organs vomited from her mouth as her ribcage collapsed, the hot, meaty taste her last sensation before the world went black.

Conor spun right as the wall next to him disappeared in a puff of concrete dust, Scratchy’s claws reducing the brick facade to chunks and powder. He slashed downward, and the sword’s psychic scream pumped energy into his exhausted muscles. It drank deep, pulling blood and life from the bonk’s thigh, cutting through muscle and bone with an ease that technology couldn’t account for.

What ICAP didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

He danced away in a hot arterial spray, Scratchy’s muscles already knitting in ropy, purple masses. One mass formed a lump-like, writhing tentacle. Conor smiled. First Generation Regenerates had their own set of problems, so he decided to have some fun.

She charged, a limping rhinoceros’s trundling attack, brute force and sharp steel at forty miles an hour.

Eschewing the sword, he drew his 9mm pistol and fired, emptying the fifteen-round magazine into her face and arms in a series of little red holes and streaks of shredded tissue. Small caliber rounds wouldn’t do anything but annoy a bonk of her size, but it would tax her system just enough for his next–

— she slammed into him, carrying him to the ground in a gridiron tackle that blasted the air from his lungs, but he kept his blade pointed out and maintained his grip. She bit down on his shoulder. The armor absorbed the brunt of her iron hard teeth. The increase in pressure didn’t restrict his movements any more than her arms already had.

Fabric tore. The pressure increased.

He let her squeeze, and worked the katana back and forth across her exposed wrist. Even without leverage the razor-sharp blade sliced through the meat without effort. His teeth clenched against the growing pain in his shoulder; Conor worked the katana up and down in a rough sawing motion, the best he could manage with his arms pinned to his side.

She grabbed his thigh with her claws and squeezed. The bone gave way with a burning rush of endorphins and heat, and Conor fought to remain conscious through the unbearable, itching agony. He slid the blade up, and then down.

Up. Down.

Muscle parted. Metal scraped against bone. Scratchy dragged her teeth free then slammed her head into Flynn’s helmet, again and again, stars exploding across his vision. Something cracked, and cracked further, then white supernovas streaked through his skull. Still he sawed.

Her grip slackened against the blade, just enough to free his arm. Conor pulled a combat knife from his belt and jammed it between metal plates, through carbon fiber and meat into the junction between her leg and groin. He propped the pommel against the metal plate on his abdomen and used her leverage to shove it farther in. Hot, sticky fluid gushed over his hand.

Her squeeze became a squirming, frantic push, but he straightened his good leg to lift against her weight, jamming the blade deeper until it met bone, and then a little further. As the knife sank between the ball and socket he twisted with every ounce of his augmented strength. The joint popped free.

Roaring, she let go and rolled off of him.

He stood.

Tearing off his helmet and letting it drop to the ground, he whirled, blade slicing through the air and her mid-spine without slowing. Her claws tore into the asphalt, desperately scrabbling across the pavement, limp legs trailing behind.

Conor hobbled after her, unable to put much weight on his left leg. The sword bit down, slicing armor and meat once, twice, three times, tracing deep gashes across her shoulders and upper arms. Purple masses writhed across the wounds as she dragged herself away from him, legs twitching as her spine began to knit.

She rose to all fours.

He cut across the back of her knee, severing tendons and ligaments, the wound welling black under the sodium-vapor sky. As she fell he drove the blade into one kidney, leaning in to punch it through to her armor on the other side. He pulled it out and did the other.

She swung, an ineffectual batting with her claws that he hopped way from. He took several of her fingers. They fell to the ground in a gush, and as she reared to her knees he took her right ear. The contrast highlighted the difference between first and second-generation regenerates: his thigh itched as muscle and bone knitted under his armor, but it still wouldn’t take his weight. She healed much faster, but the unstable flesh molded and twisted her body into something less than human.

He stabbed her again, avoiding her heart to target her right lung. Once. Twice. Then her stomach, just to the left of her spine.

No reason to keep you down too long, darling.

She fell back to her hands and knees. He took the time to slice the side of her neck, just enough to prick the artery. Blood gushed in erratic spurts across the decaying asphalt, and she collapsed to her face, shaking, as the wound slithered and squirmed.

Her whole body shuddered, and a mad, keening growl erupted from her throat.

“There it is.”

The whispers slithered through his mind, calling to their sister, entwining her, embracing her in an unending maelstrom of madness and carnage. She thrashed on the ground, a half-ton child in a temper-tantrum, denied her favorite toys.

He glanced up long enough to see Washington and Karle advancing toward the mall without taking fire, then looked back down at Scratchy’s transformation. First-generation bonks made for the best bonk-outs. Tee-hee.

Tentacles oozed from her shoulder, and a mouth gnashed with serrated teeth from the wound in her neck. He limped back with too much theater for the benefit of the Dragonflies and took shelter in the shadows by the wall, his smirk hidden in the shadows.

Scratchy erupted in a mountain of writhing flesh, suckered tentacles and ropy masses of muscle almost obscuring her humanoid form. Her scream couldn’t come from human lungs, an animalistic rage purer and more potent than the worst that men could devise.

And better than most, Conor Flynn knew what men could devise.

Karle and Washington turned and opened fire as the bonked-out mountain of flesh charged them. His voice admirably calm, Karle called for air support and then addressed Conor. “Flynn, you alive?”

He coughed for effect. “Barely. Be a minute.”

“Well, step on it. We’ve got company.”

“Aye, sir.” From the shadows, Flynn smiled, and watched.

Washington drew a pair of combat knives and took the charge head-on. He disappeared in an avalanche of psychotic, ravening meat. Blood fountained up from the hideous abomination, though from his squad-mate or the monster Conor couldn’t tell.

He tried his leg. An electric jolt shot up his spine, but it held his weight and didn’t get any worse. Satisfied, he limped right, around the side of the building. Karle bellowed in the distance, and staccato gunfire echoed across the parking lot. Conor found a manhole, popped it up with his foot, and cocked his head.

Far beneath him, a bloody mess stained the ground, just hotter than the walls and floor. In what little streetlight hit the bottom he could just make out the remains of an ICAP uniform, too small to be Rowley or Platt. Organs and steaming chunks of viscera spilled out of the helmet, a viscous glob of jellied entrails that crisscrossed al-Azwar’s unmoving chest in a pattern his mind had to and wouldn’t recognize. The eldritch symbol lanced through his head, seeking a foothold he would never allow it to find. He snuffed it out and opened eyes he hadn’t realized he’d closed.

Overhead, streaks of orange fire lit up the sky. The earth rocked a moment before the explosions hit Conor’s ears, and Karle’s bellow of triumph brought a small shake to his head.

What’s your hollering about, big man? He’d never understand the valor in a drone strike, the glory in killing by remote control. The warriors of antiquity wouldn’t recognize this dispassionate barbarity. The bone shard hidden in the hilt of his sword cooed its agreement. He laughed, and it took that moment of empathy to attack.

Daggers of black thought lanced into Conor’s mind, seeking dominance and control, freedom from the eternity of death and the enslavement of soul. It surged forward, triumphant, exultant in the ease in which it invaded his mind. Instead of fighting, Conor let it in, deeper and deeper in its orgiastic triumph, until it came at last to the center of his being. He laughed at the panicked retreat from what it found there, then cut it off and strangled it with his will.

You serve me. And you will serve.

Cowed, the sword mewled in his mind, but it would find no mercy, no sympathy in its new master. A tremor of despair vibrated through the blade, and turned to a single, pathetic, razor thought: Hungry.

Conor patted the blade, a reflexive gesture with no emotion behind it. He grabbed a rung and climbed down, careful not to mess his boots any further on the slippery, stinking remains of Hurya al-Azwar.

Ten minutes after he found al-Azwar’s shattered body, Matt stopped with a mental grunt. Pointy’s bloody tracks marked the floor in the ultraviolet spectrum like highlighter, disrupted only by spotty patches of urine — rat or mouse by the look of it — and the acrid smell of the place. Pointy’s tracks led into a small room made of dark brick, and then straight under the steel door on the far side, a bulkhead-type monstrosity with a gasketed rim and a rusty, wheeled, double-bar lock.

Pointy had gone inside, so it couldn’t be flooded, but Matt doubted he’d be able to open it without giving away his presence. He sniffed the axle and detected no trace of WD-40 or grease, nothing to keep it from screaming like a banshee if he tried to open it.

If you’re going to be loud…

Matt pulled a fist-sized wad of C4 from his combat pouch, split it into two pieces and pressed it into and around the latching mechanism on either side of the door. The detcord came next, clothesline-like material impregnated with PETN that burned at four miles a second, not so much a fuse as a linear explosive. He pushed the nylon-like material into and around the gasket, as well as through the wads of C4. Last, he added a blasting cap and set the detonator to radio signal.

Sixty feet down the hall he rounded the corner into a side passage. He set the detonator’s remote on the floor twenty feet from the intersection, gripped his shotgun in both hands, and backed up. Then he ran.

A typical ICAP Aug could maintain a three-minute mile indefinitely, and run a hundred meters in eight seconds. Matt’s personal record topped out at seven point seven-two. Legs pumping, he tried to beat it.

The impact as he stepped on the red button rocked the world sideways, and the shockwave buffeted him back just before he reached the main hallway. Legs pumping, he ran halfway up the far wall, muscles straining to turn him ninety degrees at such speeds, and fired a three-round burst of fragmentary projectiles toward the remains of the door and anything that might lie behind it.

Still glowing from the aftermath, chunks of shredded metal and broken brick littered the small room, and the resulting hole opened up not into a sewer tunnel but a metro line. A pair of tracks led left and right, and hazy orange sodium-vapor lights dotted the walls amid generations of overlapping graffiti.

The whispers chittered in anticipation of the slaughter. As Matt rushes through the door, Pointy drops from the arced ceiling, a thousand pounds of muscle and brute force crushing him to the floor and pulping his head with one double-fisted crush.

Matt tucked into a roll as he flew through the doorway, pulling the trigger as Pointy’s gigantic form came into view. Two slugs impacted on the ceiling. Three found flesh.

Gore spattered Matt’s face as he finished the roll and spun, firing again. Pointy slapped the shotgun out of the way and punched, telegraphing the move without the slightest bit of finesse. Matt rolled with it, taking the impact on his shoulder. His armor stiffened with the blow, reducing the punch to a solid hit with a Louisville Slugger.

He backpedaled as Pointy advanced, the hole in the bonk’s leg knitting closed even as he picked up speed. A center-of-mass burst failed to penetrate skin, and the fragmentary rounds shredded Pointy’s pectoral muscles to expose a gore-covered solid mass beneath. Half-blind, face streaming blood from a thousand gouges, the bonk dove, arms outstretched to catch Matt as he tried to flee.

Instead, Matt dropped prone and rolled left. He screamed as Pointy stomped, crushing his knee to the ground right through the ceramic composite. Matt fired, and two rounds caught the bonk in the stomach before he slapped the AA-12 hard enough to dent the barrel and send it flying from Matt’s grip.

Chunks of meat and organs sprayed them both.

Matt scrambled back, his shattered knee a bonfire of itching, squirming flesh. He drew his official-issue pistol, a .50 caliber Barrett WildStang with ICAP-custom SLAP rounds. The depleted uranium core and tungsten carbide tip combined with a nanofiber composite sabot and fifty grains of powder to produce a bullet that would go through just about anything. It kicked like a mule, and took superhuman strength to fire with any accuracy.

Two shots took Pointy in the bloody meat over his heart, and another two ricocheted off of his forehead.

Pointy charged, strings of intestines flopping out of his abdomen to trail behind him.

Matt fired four more times as he rose to his feet, and two more before the bonk crushed him against the wall.

Blood erupted from Matt’s mouth as his ribs imploded. A giant hand smashed the gun against the wall, denting the metal in a shower of brick dust.

Pointy stepped back for another body check. Matt let his knees buckle, dropping to the floor, and tore at the exposed viscera, fingers digging into slippery organs, wrenching them out to splatter on the ground.

The dark tunnel exploded in stars as Pointy’s knee caught him in the side of the head. Deafened by the ringing in his ears, he scrambled to the side and whirled, pistol raised. A six-car double-decker train shimmied down the tunnel at forty or so miles an hour, its light catching Pointy’s right side, washed in bright red gore.

The abomination’s abdomen had closed, cutting off the dead intestine and sealing over with fresh skin. It took a tentative, wobbly step forward. The train’s horn reverberated through the tunnel, too loud.

Matt took inventory: three combat knives, two 32-round magazines for a broken gun, no functional firearms. His knee no longer itched, but Pointy stood moments from full health.

As the train flashed between them, Matt bolted alongside, grabbed a handle and jerked himself aboard. He landed with his toes on the lip of the entry, pried the door open left-handed, and stepped inside. A half-dozen shocked faces gaped at his blood-spattered face and body armor.

“Go to the front car.” They stared, wide-eyed, but nobody moved. “NOW!”

The train lurched.

“GO!” Matt tore a stainless steel pole from the car and ran toward the back of the train. Ignoring the squeals of panic behind him, he stood alert, ready for bear.

Pointy’s head appeared in the rear window. Matt moved to dive forward, and the whispers chittered their approval as his body crushed into the rails, his brain splattering into the ground. Instead he backpedaled, shouldered open the door between cars, and gripped the handle to the coupling mechanism. The back door came off in a shriek of twisted metal, and Pointy threw it to the side.

Matt heaved, and the cars separated with a lurch.

The bonk pulled himself up onto the trailing car, quickly falling away into the distance, an almost quizzical look on his blockish face. Matt sighed in frustrated relief, alive but without his quarry.

And then the train braked, hard.

Matt shifted his weight to maintain balance as the other car gained ground, momentum carrying it forward as the train slowed to a stop. If the conductor didn’t have the sense to keep going, Matt would have to lead the bonk from the civilians on the train. He looked down at the pole, the best weapon he had, and suppressed a grimace. Better than nothing, but not by much. Not against that.

As the train ground to a halt he leapt out the back then darted left toward a side tunnel.

Miguel Salido watched the man in black armor fade into the distance, wielding a metal pole like a Ninja Turtle. He growled in curious frustration.

The high pitched squeal of brakes brought a low tremor to his throat; a laugh. The whispers rejoiced, a slithering, pernicious cacophony of psychotic bloodshed that got harder to ignore with every passing day, and though he couldn’t understand them, they urged him to slaughter every man, woman, and child on the train.

He crushed them to a disappointed mewling, forced himself to think like a rational person.

The man in black armor, the woman he’d crushed, Miguel had never encountered anyone like them. Through years of street fighting, standing guard over drug deals, rising in the ranks of the Mako Kings despite being Cuban, not Mexican, Miguel had always been bigger, tougher, more of a cabron than any bastard around. When Jade hit the streets and everyone started getting bigger, Miguel pushed the limits of musculoskeletal enhancement and backed it up with surgically-added barbed spikes in his wrists and titanium alloy plates under his skin.

But this man, not much bigger than most, had almost taken him down. One crazy gun and some kickass bullets helped balance the score, almost too much.

Since growing up in the shantytowns of Arroyo Naranjo, swiping fruit from stalls at the mercado to stave off scurvy and starvation, he’d come to appreciate the big things in life. In coming to the United States, his time with the Mako Kings had given him almost everything: a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Miami — despite his size he’d never had the team spirit for football — a mansion, three cars, all the gold, drugs, and pussy he could ever want. But since Jade, since augmentation, they couldn’t give him a challenge.

Sometimes it took the little things to bring a smile.

Miguel took off at a run. At twelve hundred pounds he couldn’t sprint much faster than your average Olympian, even with no body fat. But he knew these tunnels, had operated in Spanish City for two years, and his prey hadn’t. That had to count for something.

He slowed, approached the train at a jog, and cut left at the smell of the man, subtle deodorant and gun oil and blood tinged with an underlying spice he couldn’t quite place, like Jade but not. He followed the scent until it reached an access door, and stopped. Sized for normal men, it would constrict him, keep him from using his reach or bringing his full strength to bear. A perfect place for an ambush.

Conor Flynn watched as Pointy approached the doorway. The hulking monstrosity moved with a smooth grace at odds with its blocky form, silent in giant, almost comical basketball shoes. It cocked its head and waited, one hand on the door, listening or feeling for vibrations or something.

Stepping to the side, it pulled open the door, which squeaked on old hinges. It winced, waited again, and after a long, long pause, went inside.

Conor followed through the open door, sword drawn. Darkness swallowed him.

Something thrummed through the floor and walls, a breathing shudder too low-frequency for even Matt’s ears to hear. He drew a mental map to al-Azwar’s body. Her REC7 carbine didn’t pack the punch of his AA-12, but it beat the hell out of combat knives, and he wasn’t likely to beat Pointy with his fists and elbows.

He jogged down the dark hall until it ended at a T intersection, on a hunch took a right, and a few minutes later when the hall took another right, farther away from al-Azwar, he backtracked to the intersection and headed left.

Miguel paused. The man’s scent tracked in both directions.

The right-hand path led back to the railway, and past that, deeper into downtown. The left-hand path led to Spanish City, the Mercado Royale, and a warren of smaller access tunnels under the city’s west side.

Where are you going?

He chuckled, a low rumble with more growl than mirth. A smart man would try to get back to his allies, back to whatever blew the gate to the parking lot, back to guns and backup. With a shrug, he turned left — if Miguel caught him before he got out, it wouldn’t matter.

The scent grew in intensity, the sharp tang of Old Spice, the underlying notes of blood and gun oil. He froze at a realization. In the chemical miasma that permeated his enhanced nose he noted the lack, the utter absence, of anything approaching fear. Running, hunted, through unfamiliar tunnels, the man smelled of predator, not prey.

A tingle of excitement ran up Miguel’s spine, a shiver of apprehension. How are you not afraid?

Matt knelt over al-Azwar’s shattered body, ignoring the pungent reek of shit to rifle through her kit. Someone had stripped her of her carbine, pistol and combat knives, but had left her first aid kit, which all ICAP agents carried in case an innocent or suspect needed saving. That it had soaked with urine when her system had let go had probably discouraged close inspection, and he gladly took the morphine autoinjector.

He looked up at the ladder embedded into a short tunnel that terminated in a round steel hatch. Heaving on it bent a rung on the ladder but did nothing to budge the portal.

He tried the COM again. “This is Rowley, come in.”

Nothing. However they built this place, it made far too good of a Faraday Cage.

He climbed down, listened for any signs of pursuit then hatched a plan.

Conor Flynn let Matt creep off, waited a full minute then approached the body. Matt had hidden the tripwire under Hurya’s exploded viscera, a clever move that would reduce detection but make it less likely that Pointy would trip it in the first place. Matt had wrapped his remaining det cord around the magazines for his ridiculous shotgun, thirty-two-round drums loaded with smart, direction-triggerable microgrenades, enough raw explosives to make mincemeat out of anyone who tripped the switch.

He knelt, ran his finger just above the wire, and pulled the detonator from the cord.

“What the hell are you doing?” Matt’s whisper clawed down his spine like fingernails down a chalkboard.

Conor plastered on a half-grin, the charming mask he’d worn for over thirty years. Matt gave him a slack-jawed stare, trust and suspicion warring in his eyes. The sword begged him to cut Rowley to ribbons, and the whispers cajoled their elated agreement.

“Not now,” he growled.

Matt hesitated. “What do you mean?” His wary stance betrayed too much caution, and Conor suppressed a chuckle at the misunderstanding.

He whispered back, “I called dibs. Not my fault you blighters don’t listen, is it? So let’s kill this thing.”

“Are… are you insane?”

Conor hid the truth behind the truth. “That’s why they hired me, am I right?”

“Put it back,” Matt said. He took a step toward his friend, for the first time wary around the enthusiastic psychopath.

“Oil of palm, Rowley.” Flynn replaced the detonator, though Matt had no idea what ‘oil of palm’ meant in these circumstances. His wife, Monica, had said that rhyme slang was much more of a cockney rather than an Irish thing, but either way Matt had yet to find Conor’s flippant word games particularly comprehensible.

“Are you—” he cut himself off from asking the same question again. “Get over here and watch our six. These bastards killed Platt and al-Azwar, and I’m not about to let them get away with it.”

Flynn sauntered over, thumbs hooked in his belt loops, katana slung at his waist in exactly a non-Japanese manner.

“What have you got for weapons?”

Flynn pulled his pistol, identical to Matt’s. “Just this and the sword. Couple knives. Here, take it.” He held it out grip-first.

Matt took it and holstered it.

Flynn smiled, but kept his voice at a barely audible whisper. “I’ll go up. You can be bait.” Before Matt could argue he’d scampered up the ladder to crouch in the darkness overhead, wedged in place like a movie action hero, left palm pressed against one wall, feet against the other. He drew his katana and winked. “Run along, little birdie. And tweet a little, would you?”

Chirp, chirp.

The scents mingled, the man’s combining with someone else’s, sharper, a cold, metallic bite reminiscent of dentist’s offices and morgues. Miguel hesitated, then peeked around the corner. The body still lay where he’d left it, though her weapons were missing. Nothing moved, and nothing registered in the infrared.

He stepped out, approaching the body in a silent walk, and the cold smell grew stronger, more dominant. An infrared glow filtered down from the access hatch, normal in the daytime but out of place at night. Miguel tried not to roll his eyes at the soft scrape from the end of the hall.

There had never been a time, not since puberty, that people hadn’t underestimated his mind. Only Calloway had seen through the lump of meat, lifted him up and made him a true player in her organization. The Mako Kings had no idea what they’d gotten themselves involved in, and she kept them rolled in enough cash to keep them blind, but she trusted Miguel, and used his shrewd mind to cement her ties with the Latin gang.

If you want a bull…

Miguel charged, as they’d expect him to, but at the last second leapt, punching into the overhead tunnel, driving his massive fist and barbed metal spikes into hard armor and soft flesh. The hidden man let out a strangled grunt as his abdomen imploded, and as Miguel tore away he went slack. Miguel’s foot came down, slipped on the body, and the world went white.

The whispers cooed their disapproval as Matt rounded the corner too late for the explosion to shred his flesh. The bonk had stumbled to one knee, a mass of charred skin smeared with red where the mass of fragmentation grenades had sheared through. Pale metal shone through the injuries, an enhancement Matt hadn’t expected.

Conor dropped from the shaft, hairless skin golden and shiny from the intense heat, and hit the ground on his knees and elbows, too hard. And stayed there, gagging.

Matt fired, a single round straight to the forehead. The bonk jerked sideways and the bullet ricocheted off, gouging the skin but otherwise doing no damage. As burnt flesh knitted over metal, it looked healthier than when they’d started.

Holy shit.

The bonk leaned forward and drove a fist down, crushing Flynn to the floor. His pelvis shattered and his legs twitched, but he didn’t scream.

Matt charged, firing, as the bonk raised his fist again. The impacts should have driven it back, but instead it lunged forward, rising to its feet in an athletic leap. It stumbled as Flynn lashed out. His composite blade caught it in the knee, slicing through the meat to lodge in the joint.

Flynn held on, two-handed, as it dragged him another half-step and then fell, unable to drag its other leg underneath it.

Matt stepped forward and aimed, point-blank, at the top of its head. The single shot rang out and the bonk dropped, hot red fluid pulsing from the hole. He let out a breath, pointed down, fired twice more into the fractured skull.

Kneeling, Matt put his hand on Conor’s shoulder. “You alive?”

Conor’s hand twitched, and his thumb extended.

Matt patted the top of his head. “Sorry about the dibs. You maniac.”

Six hours later they landed in D.C., Karle and Flynn still on stretchers, al-Azwar, Platt, and Washington in body bags. Matt shook Jeff Hannes’s hand on the tarmac, Jeff’s tie lashing in the downwash from the propellers.

Jeff pinned Flynn with his eyes and spoke as the chopper lifted off. “What the hell was that, Flynn?”

Karle held up a hand. “We already discussed it, sir. Flynn thought he’d taken down his target, so once he’d recovered from his injuries he’d redirected to assist in the hunt for, um, for Pointy.”

Jeff looked from Flynn to Karle, his anger fading to his familiar grimace. “We lost three Augs taking down four, with drone support. How did that happen?”

Matt licked his lips. “We’re still not sure. Something ambushed us on the way down, killed Platt and isolated al-Azwar so that Pointy could take her out. We looked at the Dragonfly feeds, and IR picked up a signature, but not much of one, and it disappeared into the crowd before we’d finished the sweep.”

“What are you saying?”

Karle answered. “We… we don’t know, sir. Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie squads came in on cleanup, and we vetted everyone before we released them or turned them over to metro PD for warrants. Nobody flagged, not even as suspicious, though way too many tested positive for Jade — nothing serious yet, just junkie-level cut crap.”

Jeff looked at each of them in turn. “Well, in that case, I think you have a new mission.”