Recoil (18 page)

Part Four

Chapter 20

Committed to Target

The first person I shot was a young woman.

She was dark-skinned, maybe twenty or twenty-five — it was hard
to judge ages once the rat fever took hold — and she was wearing the mismatched
remnants of a former life: the top half of a cheerleader’s outfit, the
knee-length pinstripe pencil skirt of an office suit, and a red velvet stiletto
on one foot. Her other foot was bare and filthy. Through the powerful
magnification of my eyepiece, I could see a torn nail bent back and bleeding on
one stubbed toe. While all of her clothes, like her skin and her matted hair,
were filthy, that one beautiful shoe looked as good as new as she stumbled and
mumbled her way through the litter and puddles of the back alley.

I finished assembling my rifle and weighed it in my hands. It
felt cold and heavier than the usual weapons we worked with. Was that due to
the suppressor fitted to its end, or the modifications that had been made to it
to fire the dissipating bullets? Or was it due to my dread at having to put a
tranquilizer round that looked pretty much the same as a small but live round
into an actual human being?

I’d been trained, along with Bruce who’d also been approved for
these missions, on two particular weapons. The first, the one we’d use to take
down the
terrs
, was a tranquilizer dart gun suitable
only for short-range distances. The second was this tranquilizer bullet rifle
to be used on M&Ms because it was accurate over much greater distances.
They didn’t want us getting anywhere near the infected plague-carriers,
especially as the “camouflage” we needed to wear for these jobs included
nothing more than an E97 mask and latex gloves. No helmets, no protective ear-
or eyewear, no flak-jackets and no full-face respirators.

“You need to blend in,”
Sarge
had said.
“That’s the whole point of camouflage. You need to adapt your look so that you
disappear into your environment.”

And while there weren’t many teens walking the inner-city streets
in jeans and t-shirts, it wasn’t so extraordinarily rare that anyone gave me
more serious scrutiny than a casual second glance. Though what they thought
might be in the big gym bag I was carrying was anyone’s guess. My hog’s-tooth
necklace was tucked under my T-shirt, where no one would see it, and Quinn’s
silver earring was in its usual place against my skin.

I was dropped off outside a four-story industrial building whose
roof overlooked an alley where an M&M had been sighted. Until now, our
ratting missions had all been in the suburbs and in the undeveloped, wooded
land outside the city, but this built-up environment reminded me of the
simulation arena at
PlayState
. It occurred to me now
that they’d probably built it with the express intention of training us for
sniping in urban areas.

The
comms
earpiece connecting me to
Sarge
, who was directing proceedings from the van down on
the street, crackled.

“Ready to go there, Blue?”

“Just taking my final firing position, sir.”

It was an awkward position, poised behind a small loophole in the
retaining wall at the edge of the roof, with my rifle angled steeply down at
the target below. She was clutching her head and walking in small circles now,
hobbling lopsidedly on that crippling crimson heel and her injured foot. I
wished that Tae-Hyun was here, spotting for me — he was the best at these
high-angle shots — but we’d been told that these take-downs would be solo
missions.

As
Sarge
had said: “Maximum
maneuverability, minimum attention, total success.”

What would Quinn think of today’s mission? He had obviously known
from his work in Intelligence what the ultimate purpose of our unit was. He
hadn’t freaked out solely because we were shooting animals, he had known we
were being trained to “shoot” humans. I needed to get him on his own, explain
why we were doing this, how it was better to bring in infected people for
treatment and containment. I needed to explain why I believed I had to do this
work. I needed to tell him about my father. But every time I passed him at the
compound, he was surrounded by a group of people — Sofia looked like she was
moving in for the kill — and he either gave me an unreadable look or ignored me
altogether.

“Soldier, are you in FFP and committed to target?”

I pulled my mind back from Quinn and my view back from the one
red shoe, training my crosshairs on the woman’s torso instead. We’d been
reassured that the dissipating rounds were constructed for minimal penetrating
power, and that it was safe to shoot at the usual target areas since the rounds
would never punch through to the heart or lungs. I was relieved about that.
During boot camp,
Sarge
had set up a terminal
ballistics training session where we’d fired high-caliber, high-velocity rounds
into blocks of ballistic gelatin — a tough, jelly-like substance that most
closely mimicked the consistency of human and animal flesh. Afterward we’d been
able to cut open the urine-colored blocks, to trace our bullet’s trajectory and
see exactly the amount of damage the rounds caused as they tore through the
substance, exploding into fragments of shell that radiated out from the wound
path.

At the center of one of the blocks was a large pig’s heart
sourced from a butcher or abattoir. Bruce had volunteered to shoot that block —
no surprise there — and
Sarge
had filmed the shot. We
viewed the footage in extreme slow-motion, watching the bullet punch into and
rip through the block, sending shock waves pulsing and rippling through the
gelatin as it discharged its impetus. The heart had exploded into bloody mush.

Watching the footage, the boys had whistled and cheered. I
hadn’t.

“Instantaneous incapacitation of any
mook
,”
said
Sarge
. “These .5 caliber rounds have total
stopping power.”

“Imagine what it would do to a person’s head — deep tissue
destruction!” said Mitch.

“Complete cranial evacuation, dude!” said Bruce.

“Decapitation,” said Cameron.

Destruction, evacuation, immediate suspension, target
suppression, immobilization. These were the terms we used instead of saying
kill, maim,
destroy
. Whatever we termed it, there
would be no recovering from a wound made by
those
rounds.

It was unlikely that there would be a return to health for this
poor M&M, either, but at least she would soon be comfortable in the
hospital. Clean and out of pain. I reminded myself of that, reminded myself
that I was only darting, not shooting, reminded myself why I was doing this.
But my mind kept bringing me back to the inescapable fact that I had a rifle
aimed at another human being.

My heart was racing, my mouth as dry as dust. I was in danger of
getting full-blown “buck fever” if I didn’t calm down or get this done as soon
as possible. I ran through the strategies we’d been taught to regain calm and
focus. I checked my high-angle calculations, adjusted the elevation turret on
my scope and steadied the rifle against my cheek. As I forced my breathing into
a slow, steady rhythm, I cleared my mind of anything but the here and now. I
stopped looking at the woman’s dirty, bruised face, stopped looking at her as
though she was a “her”, and locked my focus instead on the golden triangle of
her chest, adjusting my aim to the middle of the letter S on her cheerleader’s
top.

Failure — not an option
.

“Affirmative. Shooter ready,” I said, easing off the safety and
putting the tip of my index finger on the cool curve of the trigger.

“Field is clear and we are hot. Send it.”

I breathed out, paused, and squeezed the trigger, just as the
target angled her body sideways.

I missed. A splash of dust and debris kicked up beyond the woman
where the round had hit the ground. Damn! Static hissed in my earpiece, but
Sarge
said nothing. Maybe he thought I’d lost my nerve,
that I couldn’t handle these assignments. Maybe he was right.

I recalculated the angle, doped my scope,
slowed
my breathing as I tracked the torso turning circles below. Then I fired. The
woman dropped like she’d had her lights punched out — which I guessed, in a
way, she had. One hand fell across her chest, below where the small rose of
blood bloomed. She wore a wedding ring, I saw now. I sighed and disassembled my
rifle and collected my used cartridge cases as I’d been trained to do. Before I
was back down on street level, the specially equipped ambulance — they called
them “rabid hutches” — had arrived and taken her off to the hospital. All that
remained of the mission was a teenager with a gym bag climbing into an unmarked
black van. And a red velvet stiletto lying in a rain puddle against an alley
wall.

I was still rattled that evening, and the congratulations and
envy directed my way by the rest of the team didn’t help.
Leya
,
who could see that I was upset, finally pulled me aside to give me a talking to
— a verbal hug and slap combo.

“This is hard for you, I can see that. I can understand it. Shooting
people? That’s heavy stuff. But you can’t let it become personal. It’s
not
personal — it’s your job. We all have to do things we don’t like in our work,
but we have an obligation to do the best job we can. If feelings get in the
way, you have to shut them down.”

I tried to calm myself by picturing the woman lying calmly in the
Community General Hospital plague ward. I even asked
Sarge
if I could go visit her there — a request which provoked a sharp bark of
laughter in addition to an extra-maniacal grin.

“No, Goldilocks, you may not. Of all the sharp-eyed,
steady-handed bleeding hearts, I had to land you! Next thing you’ll be asking
if you can go scatter the ashes of your poor little rat-kills in the woods, lay
a rose at the kill-site, maybe sing
Kumbaya
. It’s a
job
,
soldier! Do you think you could possibly be a bit more professional about it?”

That stung. I resolved to dial down the volume on my
tender-hearted and sympathetic impulses, but while I could make myself be
coolheaded during the subsequent M&M missions in the city, afterwards I
could only fake hard-hearted. Beneath the tough outer coating of
don’t-give-a-shit was a squishy mess of confusion and doubt.

Chapter 21

Blondes in Pink Satin

I had completed four human-target missions by the time I was sent
on my first
terr
takedown. I thought it would be
easier. It was harder.

Partly, this was because I had to take the shot from close-up.
Partly, it was because despite all
Sarge’s
talk about
me being a professional soldier, they had dressed me like a little girl. They’d
stuck me in a pink dress, and Fiona had brushed my hair up into a high
ponytail. I even finally had patterned latex gloves — white with pink polka
dots to match the girly ensemble.

“What the hell is this?” I asked, aghast, when I saw myself in
the mirror. I looked about thirteen years old.

“Camouflage,” said Fiona, unfastening the hog’s-tooth thong from
my neck and laying it aside on my bedside cabinet. “No one will guess anyone
who looks like that might be about to shoot them.”

I suspected that the truth of why I had been such a valuable
recruit lay at least as much in my ability to pass as an unthreatening little
girl as it did in my marksmanship skills. They’d probably chosen me to be the
first sniper in human-target missions because I was the youngest and most
innocent-looking. How would they be dressing me when I could no longer pass for
a juvenile? I imagined Fiona styling me with a look somewhere between honeypot
and hooker, and shuddered.

Sarge
and Roberta Roth dropped in to
check me over before I set out, and
Sarge
let out a
cackle of glee. “Those
mooks
won’t know what hit ‘
em
!”

“You’ll do,” Roth said, giving me a sharp nod of approval before
turning to
Sarge
. “Wayne, a word?”

Down in the hallway outside the transport bay, the whole unit was
waiting. Mitch whistled when he saw me, Tae-Hyun and Cameron applauded, and
judging by his appreciative grin, Bruce seemed to have a thing for blondes
dressed in pink dresses.

“Shu-
weet
!” he said, stepping towards
me. “
Wanna
—”

“Stop right there,” I said, poking a forefinger into his chest to
hold him at arm’s length and giving him a death-stare. A movement in my
peripheral vision caught my eye, and I turned my head to see Quinn was standing
to my right, looking me up and down, from the tips of my pink-laced Hello Kitty
sneakers to the top of my ridiculous ponytail.

“You’re a real heartbreaker in pink,” he said, shaking his head.
“Literally.”

“Piss off,” said
Leya
loyally.

“Don’t let the douchebag dent your confidence, Blue,” said Bruce,
as Quinn walked away. “I think you look —”

“Bruce, if you say another word, just one more word, to me right
now, I swear on my
rifle
that I will break every single finger on your
shooting hand.” I spat the words out with such intensity that Bruce’s mouth
fell open.

He blinked. “Jeez, Jinx! Overreact much?”

“Actually, I don’t think I’ve reacted
enough
. Let me
correct that right here and right now. I’m sick of your stupid, sexist comments
and insinuations. That shit stops now! Get it?”

“Loud and clear,” he said in a mocking tone, looking around at
the other guys as if hoping they’d back him up. When none of them came to his
support, he muttered, “Can’t even take a joke,” and slouched off.

I let out an exasperated sigh. “Remind me why I’m doing this,” I
begged
Leya
.

“For the war against the plague. For the future of your country.
For us,” she said.

Again, I had that sense of the plague as a looming, evil foe. I
straightened my back as I marched past amused and interested stares, through
the
decon
unit and doors to transport bay C and into
the armory for my weapons and ammo issue. Juan handed me one of the new dart
guns. It looked like a semi-automatic pistol with a longer-than-usual barrel
out front and an internal dart magazine, loaded with three darts, protruding
out the back. There were sights on the barrel, but no optics — this was more
short-range sidearm than long-range sniper rifle.

“Remember, the ideal range is less than five meters,” said Juan.
“After that, you start losing accuracy.”

I stuffed the weapon in the shoulder-strapped denim bag Fiona had
handed me and reported for duty. The take-down was due to happen on a street.

“It’ll be easier to take him when he’s on his own and outdoors.
Luckily, this tango is cocky. He doesn’t feel the need to exercise indoors on a
treadmill. He runs like a rat on the roads, as if the plague doesn’t apply to
him. Thinks he
owns
the city,”
Sarge
had
briefed me. “Doesn’t even bother to vary his route much, according to
intel
.”

Had Quinn supplied that nugget of information? Or Sofia?

“Did intel say whether he was likely to be armed?” I asked.

Sarge
paused a moment too long before
replying. “In the man-hunting game, it’s always a case of take before you’re
taken. You get me, soldier?”

“Message received, sir.”

Now I was grateful for my absurd outfit. Anything that would buy
me a few extra seconds’ advantage was welcome. I only hoped that the target
would be taken in by my girlish appearance, that he didn’t have his own intel or
a mole in our organization who had relayed our plans to him as efficiently as
his had been passed on to us.

“And why can’t we use the rifle with the dissolving
tranq
bullets for the
terrs
,
Sarge
? Then we wouldn’t need to get so close.” As a sniper,
distance was my friend.

“We don’t want to perforate them unless we need to, Blue. Time
they spend recuperating is time we could already be questioning, getting
information in time to stop their next attack. Doesn’t matter so much for the
rabids
— they’re going to be in the hospital anyway.”

The insert vehicle was a battered old tan sedan that fitted
inconspicuously among the two other rusting vehicles abandoned outside a
derelict McDonalds in an abandoned strip mall located in a rough part of the
city. I pulled up my small white mask, one of the lightweight surgical jobs
that Quinn had been wearing the first time I met him, climbed out of the car
and headed for an old playground nearby, directly on the target’s running
route. It was overgrown with tall grass and weeds, the purple-and-yellow
merry-go-round was rusted to a standstill and the see-saw had toppled off its
fulcrum, but a couple of the swings still looked functional. I seated myself on
the higher of the two and rocked back and forth, gritting my teeth against the
protesting squawk of the chains in their rings. The day was filthy hot and so
humid that breathing felt like drinking air. The metal seat of the swing burned
my butt and thighs through the light fabric of the dress. I sighed and
straightened the fabric. My feet itched to dig into the earth and propel me
higher into the air — to catch a hint of breeze, a moment of freedom — but I
resisted the temptation.

“Tango approaching from the southeast.” Fiona was calling this
mission, as she had the last two M&M take-downs. “Juliet, you are good to
go, we are live.”

From the corner of my eye, I could see him running, fast and
graceful as only a true athlete could be, down the road in my direction.
Thoughts raced through my mind, even as I dragged my feet in the dirt to slow
my swing to a stop. What if I missed? There were only three darts, not much
room for error. What if he did have a weapon on him, or a syringe like the one
they’d stuck my father with? What if some instinct told him I was dangerous before
I could take him down?

Fighting the urge to shoot too soon, I slowly blew out a deep
breath, wiped my right hand dry against my dress, then thrust it into the bag
and grasped my weapon.

As he ran up level with the playground, the man’s eyes scanned the
area and rested on me. His shoulders, which had tensed as he first registered
me, now relaxed. He wasn’t wearing a mask, so I could see his lips curve
slightly at the sight of a girl playing on a swing — such a normal, happy
sight. He waved at me, and I forced myself to return the wave. Perhaps it
looked off — it totally didn’t feel natural — or perhaps a warning bell pinged
in his brain that a lone kid playing in a plague-riddled city wasn’t so normal
after all, because moments after he passed by me, he turned to look back. This
time he wasn’t smiling, even before he registered that the swing-seat was
empty, that the little girl was now standing on the sidewalk, less than six
meters away, holding a weapon in a two-handed grip, firing it at him.

The dart hit him directly above the heart, and he teetered for a
second or two before he collapsed. His head cracked against the sidewalk with a
thud that made me wince.

I dropped the dart gun into my bag and walked away from the scene
while I waited for the extract vehicle to catch up with me.

“Good job,” said Fiona when I climbed in.

She must have been commending me on staying cool, because the
shot itself had hardly been difficult. It would take an effort to miss at that
distance.

I twisted in the car seat to stare out the tinted rear
windshield. An unmarked car had pulled up beside the downed jogger, and three
men who I presumed were police officers were hauling him into their vehicle.

“You okay?” Fiona said, scrutinizing me with her sharp eyes.

“I guess.”

Truth be told, I wasn’t sure how I was.

That didn’t change over the next two weeks. I was determined,
squarely committed to fighting this plague in the best way I could — even if
that meant shooting people with tranquilizer darts and dissolving
sleep-bullets. Images of my father, suffering and crazed, would flash into my
mind at the oddest times — over lunch, or while I was brushing my teeth — and
I’d feel a swell of rage surging through me, a craving for revenge. Then I’d
catch Quinn’s eye across the cafeteria, and doubts would kick in. Damn him. If
he was so opposed to what we were doing, then what the hell was he doing
working here? Waves of irritation at the pirate were almost always followed by
riptides of heartache which knocked me off my precarious emotional balance. I
missed his warm hands massaging my back and his soft lips closing over mine. I
missed the way he laughed from his whole body and got me to do the same. I
missed how whole and safe I had felt with him. I missed his good opinion.

I missed Robin, too, and felt guilty every time I remembered how
he still didn’t know what had really happened to our dad. I had written and
rewritten a letter to him explaining what I’d discovered, but it still sat
unsent in my draft email folder. It was something I had to tell him in person.
Then again, perhaps he would be better off never knowing. He was such a gentle
dreamer, this might crush him. One thing I was certain of, I would do anything
I could to prevent him seeing that horrific footage. For the first time in my
life, I understood a little what it must be like to be my mom. Huh.

Adding to my all-round un-okay-ness were the flashbacks and
nightmares I got from the missions. That red shoe, walking around and around in
uneven circles. The small blooms of blood on chests and necks and backs. The
runner’s friendly wave. The crack of his head against the sidewalk. And over
and over again, that damned photo propped against the cage with the hopping,
chirping canary.

That image got burned into my brain in my second
terr
-takedown, on an unusually cool and rainy day in early
August. The setup for this one was to send me to deliver ordered groceries to
the target’s apartment. At least I didn’t have to wear the girly getup this
time. I wore jeans, the store’s orange branded t-shirt and an unzipped hoodie.
Sarge
instructed me to cover my hair and face as I entered
and exited the apartment building. As he put it, “We don’t want word getting
out on the street that a young blonde has been seen in the vicinity of recent
hits, or they’ll put two and two together and set a bounty on your head. I
don’t want to think about what the goblins would do to you if they got a hold
of you.”

Great. Something else that had been omitted from his and Roth’s
sales pitch.

“
Sarge
? There’s something I wanted to
ask you.”

“Yeah?”

“You’ve shot … I mean, you were in the wars, as a sniper. What
was it like for you — to shoot people?”

“I didn’t shoot people. I shot tangos.”

“Okay then, what did you feel when you shot tangos?”

He stared at me for a long moment then shrugged and replied,
“Recoil.”

There was nothing to say to that.

The apartment building was in a run-down part of the city, and
the elevator groaned and creaked ominously as it lurched up to the ninth floor.
I pulled my hood off my head, fluffed my hair around my face, and fitted my
mask into position, staring at the girl in the speckled mirror opposite the
button panel. I was on my own on this mission; my closest backup was down on
street level.

“We can’t have a horde of armed men marching into the lobby. I
can guarantee the entrance is being watched. Their spotter would call up to the
tango before you’d made the first floor, and he’d bolt to some other rat-hole
before you got near.”

I wasn’t even wearing a
comms
earpiece
— I’d be getting so close that wearing one might get me found out. When the
elevator doors dragged themselves open, I hoisted the three sealed bags of
groceries up and held them close against my chest, where the dart gun nestled
in an inner pocket of my hoodie.

The door number of apartment 903 was missing its last digit, but
someone had scratched a number three in ballpoint pen into the soft, cheap wood
of the door. I rang the buzzer, listening hard above the thump of my heart for
the sound of feet on the other side. A shadow behind the peephole told me that
someone was peering out at me.