Operation Honshu Wolf (2 page)

With each new arrival, Nick stopped being Nick, and bit by bit became part of the mob.

The crowd forming in front of Miller were a multicultural mingling of black and white, old and young. And they looked at Miller the way a spooked Doberman watches a stranger touching her puppies.

“Hey!” Miller yelled. “I have your guy hostage. Talk to me.”

One woman blinked owlishly at him, then another, then Nick, twisting around with his cuffed hands at his back, then the girl, then a tall black man... their focus of attention flooding across the mob in a wave, until every single one of them was standing still, staring at Miller intently. Just staring and breathing. They made half-vocalized nonsense sounds at the edge of understanding, muttered pieces of words, a constant murmuring babble that grew louder as they advanced.

Miller backed away a step. “Who’s in charge?”

They laughed at him.

All of them.

From Nick the hostage to the little girl hiding back at her trash can, every single one of them began laughing and stopped laughing within seconds of each other, even those who’d been well out of earshot of what he’d said.

“Nobody—” “Nobod—” “—ody’s in—” “Nobody’s—” “Nobo—” “—body’s—”

The chorus of answers spilled over, the mob talking across itself, unable to get the words out, stammering and stopping and starting over until they stopped trying to speak. The mob didn’t speak with one voice—it spoke with a hundred.

Sweat trickled down the back of Miller’s spine.

Consensus pushed one of the Infected from the front of the milling group, a guy not out of his college years. He spread his hands awkwardly, smiling as if he’d been caught unexpectedly on camera. “Nobody’s in charge!” he called after getting a good twenty feet away from anyone else—far enough he couldn’t see his friends, just Nick. Half-consciously he held his hands behind his back, mimicking Nick’s cuffs. “We’re all just going with it.”

A susurration of ‘yeahs’ and ‘uh huhs’ bubbled through the crowd, even Nick nodding along under Miller’s gun.

“
You okay, Miller?
” du Trieux asked, voice faint in Miller’s earpiece.

Miller reached up, as if scratching his ear, and hit the earpiece’s push-to-talk clicker twice—the acknowledgement signal.

“I—we—just want our guy back, okay? Lester Allen, the BioGen scientist your commune took. Is he okay? Still alive? Nobody has to get hurt.”

“You mean the poisoner? You’re with him? Nobody’s hurt anybody except you corporate freaks! Take your drug cloud machines and fuck off!” The spokesman’s anger rippled through the crowd like a Mexican wave.

“We
haven’t
been using aerosol dispersed drugs,” Miller protested, forcing down the fear-driven impulse to lift his gun and point it at the crowd edging in around him. “Lester works for BioGen, he’s only interested in agriculture, air quality, that fungus that started the New Dust Bowl, trying to
stop
it; we have nothing to do with medicine of any—”

The mob roared as one, an impassable press of bodies.

“Don’t give us tha—” “—lying scum—” “—course you did—” “—children can’t—” “—pumping poison into—”

Miller switched tactics. He jammed the Gallican’s barrel into the back of Nick’s skull and roared back at them as loud as he could. “Shut up! Shut
up
or I’ll kill Nick!”

Nick heard him; the others, probably not. But Nick’s fear bled over into them somehow—pheromones, parasite-overstimulated sympathies, it didn’t matter. Whatever the mechanism was, the entire mob shuffled back a half-step, as though Miller were pointing the gun at
them
.

“Who’s Nick?” one caught near the front asked.

They didn’t recognise his name, but when Miller ground the gun into Nick’s greasy hair, they cared. They cared like it was their best friend, their brother, their son.

“It’s okay,” the new spokesman said, hands up placatingly, drifting carefully towards Miller. “Lester’s just fine. It’s all cool, you don’t have to hold a gun to our guy’s head.”

Miller bit back a laugh. “Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t.” He spoke as if Miller was the crazy, dangerous one.

“No? I think I do.”

Another step forward, and the spokesman stopped, hands up, fearful as if the gun were on him, not Nick. “It’s all cool, man. Lester’s fine, he’s cool, he’s
gifted
now.”

Miller’s jaw tensed. “He’s what?”

“He’s right here,” a voice from the mob said, stepping forward with Lester Allen. Miller recognised him, bald spot and all, from the briefing’s employee records, but Lester looked feverish and sweaty, wearing a torn green t-shirt.

Lester stumbled forward a step, a second. He stood, staring at the spokesman, at Nick. Bewildered, overstimulated.

“Lester Allen? I’m Alex Miller, I’m here to take you home.”

“I want to go home,” Lester murmured, flinching away from the closest of the mob as they began to repeat what he said. He covered his ears, stumbling away from them in fright. “Home!” he screeched.

“Ho—” “—oa—” “—mmmh!”

Miller shoved Nick to the ground, then pounced forward and grabbed Lester’s shirt with one hand, pointing the Gallican .45 at every face in sight with the other. He hauled Lester backward and hissed, “Where’s your phone? You have your phone?”

Lester patted his pocket dumbly, half hauled it out, and Miller stripped the phone from him, shoving it away inside his jacket.

“Trix!” Miller called. “Exit, now.”

“What’s going on?” one of the mob called, the last clear voice before a murmuring mass of noise erupted from them, stammering half-sounds, guttural ape cries. The sentries—those watching from the edges of the crowd—pointed and called as the limo neared.

It rolled near-silently, electric wheels purring to a halt directly behind Lester and Miller.

Miller backed away, shielding Lester, and like an oiled machine Morland opened the door behind him, pulling Lester inside with a yelp of surprise.

The Infected mob watched Miller holster the Gallican in his inside-waistband holster, smooth out the lines of his jacket, and slip into the limousine’s driver-side door, Trix having already crawled into the back.

Closing the door on the crowd and the blistering heat should have made the interior of the air-conditioned limousine into a blissful sanctuary. What Miller hadn’t counted on was Lester’s smell. He was almost as bad as Nick.

And now, Lester was panicking.

“Who are you?” he screamed in du Trieux’s face, before Morland yanked him back down to the seat. “
What
are you?”

Miller had heard about this. The Infected shared so many more cues of body language and scent that, to them, an uninfected human ceased to be entirely human. The uninfected belonged in the ‘uncanny valley’: mechanical dolls, unnatural homonculi. A mockery of what was familiar, and instinctively repulsive.

Morland smothered Lester against the back seat with du Trieux’s help, while Miller leaned back and handed Trix her bagged syringe and phial.

“I don’t like this! Who are you? Why aren’t I going home? I want to go home!”

“We’re Schaeffer-Yeager’s bodyguards. We’re
taking
you home!” du Trieux snapped.

“I don’t work for Schaeffer-Yeager, I work for BioGen—”

“Schaeffer-Yeager International
owns
Biogen. We’re your friends, everything’s alright!”

Miller settled himself into the driver’s seat, glanced once at the rear-view mirror, disengaged the automatic and steered the limousine around one of the mob members in the street. He tapped his earpiece. “Doyle. You good to get out on your own?”

“
Should do. Although you should know: there are more running your way.
”

“More?”

“
I think the Infected called in for help.
”

In the back seat, Lester stopped fighting for a moment, panting. “W-what’s that for?” he asked, pale and tense under Morland’s grip, staring at the syringe with dinner-plate eyes.

“We’re giving you Firbenzol,” du Trieux snapped.

Lester’s eyes widened. He knew the anti-parasitic drug by name, and he didn’t seem to want it, struggling to lash out at her from the midst of Morland’s bear-hug.

Du Trieux quickly, and very professionally, drew a measure of the drug from the phial, gazing at the syringe contemplatively as she held it up and squeezed the air bubbles back into the phial. She gestured, and Morland pinned Lester tighter, prompting a strangled yelp from the man. Du Trieux jabbed the needle into the meat of his shoulder. Lester struggled, twisted—God knew how she did it, but du Trieux got the full dose into him and pulled the needle free without him snapping it off in his flesh.

One of the mob, loping alongside the limousine, yelled as if they’d seen the syringe and didn’t like it any more than Lester did.

He clawed at his shoulder as if du Trieux had injected him with acid, his eyes growing ever more droopy.

Morland kept Lester down, pinning his arms to his chest. “Miller!”

“I see them,” Miller replied, swinging the steering wheel round, guiding the limousine up onto the sidewalk, speeding up past a clump of the crowd emerging from a side street.

Doyle was right. More and more of the Infected were coming out of alleyways and buildings—a brewing riot.

Behind them, the mob was following in fits and starts, jogging, sprinting after them. Someone banged on the limo’s back end when Miller was forced to slow down and swerve around an idiot trying to catch all two tons of the limousine with his hands.

“Dammit, Miller! They’re trying the doors!” Morland shouted.

Miller angled for the last gap ahead he could see, and stomped on the pedal.

Scarlet lights ignited, the car bawled, “
Emergency Stop! Alert. Emergenc—
”

“Get the override,” du Trieux screamed. “Miller, override the safeties!”

Miller already had. But even if the limo’s automatic braking system was disengaged, he wasn’t about to run over children. Miller wrenched the wheel to the side, teeth gritted, and slowed to avoid running headlong into a wall. The second he was clear, he started pumping on the pedal as if the electric vehicle still had gas to be metered out, staring at the filthy people climbing over the limousine’s hood. A little boy clambered up the car, stamping on the limousine’s armoured roof with hollow thuds, while a teenager started pounding on the windshield with a brick.

He nudged a woman out of the way with the limousine’s fender, rolling the wheel side to side, but the mass of humanity was too thick. Eventually the pounding fists ceased sliding past, and they all but held the limo in place. Each time he punched the accelerator, the car nudged forward, and then the crowd physically pushed it back.

Their screams were strangely hollow, distant through the armour.

“They can’t get in, can they?” Morland asked, nervous.

“I don’t think so.”

Du Trieux finished trussing up Lester’s limp arms behind him with a set of zip-tie cuffs, started on his legs.

The crowd parted briefly, and Miller tried to push the mob aside, only for the windshield to be covered in beating hands, hammering fists of all colours... an elderly gentleman helped hoist up a stop sign torn physically out of the ground, two younger people taking the post and stabbing the jagged end into the windshield like workers with shovels.

The windshield glass’s upper laminate layer spiderwebbed, and began to chip away.

Miller floored the manual-drive pedal again, again, but the vehicle wouldn’t move, grimacing Infected pushing at the back when he tried reversing it. The mob literally pulled the limousine deeper inside itself, the wheels scraping sideways with a hellish rubber-on-concrete growl.

They couldn’t escape.

The steady
schunk
of the stop sign into the windshield was joined by the shriek of metal as someone took a pry-bar to one of the limo’s door seams, and over it all, Lester mewling for help in a drugged haze.

Miller flipped open his phone’s casing, told it to dial work, and pulled his Gallican back out, setting the handgun on his lap.

“Miller?”

“Cobalt-1, this is Cobalt-2.” Miller flattened the drive pedal again, and the crowd lunged, pushing the car sideways until the wheels thudded against the curb. “An Infected riot’s brewing. The limo can’t move and they’re trying to get in.”

“
Fuck.
” Brandon Lewis, head of Cobalt-1, had been resolving to quit swearing for years. Today clearly wasn’t the day, though. “
Motherfucking son of a bitch, Miller. This is not what I need to hear. How many are there?
”

It was as easy as putting on the camera and holding the phone against the side-window. Miller got it up just in time for someone to smash a divot out of the armoured glass. Faintly, Miller heard a rising chant of “Kill the poisoners!”

“Lots.” Miller cleared his throat, bringing the phone back to his ear. “We need help. Immediate help. Tear gas, riot squad, whatever’s left of the NYPD, I don’t care, Lewis. Get us out of here.”

“
I don’t think there’s anything of the NYPD left
.” Lewis hesitated. “
I’ll get Bob Harris on the horn. We’ll bring in Bayonet if we need to.
”

“Roger that,” Miller murmured, wiping his face.

Miller silently watched one of the mob bring up a shotgun and unload it at him, point blank. The buckshot rebounded back at the shooter off the glass, where the pellets hadn’t embedded in the chipped upper laminate, causing screams and howls and blood to cover the windshield.

Miller’s phone rang. Robert Harris, head of site, personnel, and executive security for Schaeffer-Yeager International, was on the other end of the line. “
You have Allen?
”

“Yeah. He’s been infected like we thought.” Miller risked a glance back, wincing at the distant crunch of glass behind him. They were almost halfway through the rear window’s two-inch laminate.

“
You have his research? His phone?
”

Miller checked inside his jacket, pulling it free. Last year’s Apple phablet, but Miller didn’t think it’d be worth telling Harris that Lester’s phone was from the competition. “Yeah. Secured as requested.”