“One day, I’m going to need you to tell me why you have a secret broom closet hideout behind a dumpster in the middle of London.” Marcus whispered as they crept toward white tents.
“If your stubborn ass doesn’t get us killed, I’ll be more than happy to tell you.” She hissed back at him as they ducked between cars. “For the record, I think this is really stupid and we should have waited for you to recover.”
“File a complaint with HR.” If he said he was fine, it would be an obvious lie. They didn’t have time for fine, though. Echoing pain and steel resolve would have to do.
They took cover behind a car as a team in full hazmat gear fanned out from a large tent into a group of houses. Once they were out of sight, they kept moving, checking three more streets before they found what he’d been looking for. A fifty-foot trailer disconnected from its truck and full of hazmat gear.
“Looks like everything’s being checked out.” Marcus whispered, then jerked his head toward the houses. “Think we should just try to sneak through.”
“And when you catch one of those little fuckers and it pisses on you, what then?” She rolled her eyes at him and shook her head. “Just follow my lead.” Victoria stood her full height, pulled her hood back and strode toward the older lady sitting on a little chair at the top of the ramp leading into the trailer.
Marcus held out a hand and considered calling her back, but she was right. He sighed and got out from behind the car to follow. A short line had formed at the table, the old woman taking her sweat time handing out suits and making sure they were signed for. Each suit that left required government credentials. His nerces spiked when they got to the front of the line.
“I’m sorry, Ma’am.” Victoria said, her voice taking on a sweet tone he was certain could not come from her mouth. “I’m so embarrassed. My partner and I forgot our gear at the hotel. The guys said you mighjt be able to lend us some?” She reached into her jacket and pulled out an Arcanex Security badge.”
The older woman took the badge between knobby fingers and examined it, then looked up at him. “You alright, lad? Look a little haggard.”
“Yes ma’am.” He nodded, swallowing hard. “It’s been a rough day.”
She just nodded at him, adjusting fancy horn-rimmed glasses to the end of her nose to examine the badge more closely. “I can spare a couple of our suits. Not that fancy magitech stuff you all are using, though.”
“That would be so helpful. Thank you.” Victoria bowed her head. “We’re in your debt.”
“Nonsense.” The old lady meandered back behind a few racks and came back with two clothing bags, helmets hanging off the top. “You kids be careful out there.”
Victoria grabbed the bags and the two of them walked off as casually as possible in the same direction the others did before breaking off into the alleyway.
“You’re so embarrassed?” Marcus teased her. “Did a teen drama just fall out of the sky and hit you in the face?”
“Shut the fuck up and get dressed.” She snapped at him, but a grin tugged at her lips as she threw a bag at him.
After they’d both suited up, Victoria laid the map out on the hood of a car. “This is the NHS line.” She then indicated a much smaller circle. “This is the Arcanex line. About two blocks off. Once we get in there, this gets serious. You sure you’re ready?”
He definitely was not. “Of course. Let’s go.”
As they passed through the NHS zone, Marcus got a peek into one of their tents. Wall to wall with occupied beds, barely enough room to move between them. A few victims were being cared for by, presumably, doctors, but the vast majority were already covered head to toe with plain white sheets. He swallowed hard and diverted his focus forward. As much as he hated it, they were going to have to kill the blightshrews.
“Another one! Coming in!” A voice called out, distinctly American. He and another person in what looked like armored spacesuits were wheeling a gurney past the NHS tent and toward a fatigue green one with a bright yellow Arcanex logo on the flaps. As it zipped past them, Marcus’ stomach clenched at the gurney’s occupant. A kid, maybe eight or nine. They’d torn his shirt away and done some priliminary first aid, but the wounds on his chest and arms bled through the bandages.
“Easy…” Victoria whispered to him, her palm pressed to his chest.
She’d caught his muscles tense and his path divert toward the gurney before he had. It took him another second before the anger that had flooded his system was even noticeable to him.
“We get caught now we’re not going to make any headway.” Victoria whispered.
Marcus took a deep breath, but nodded and followed her. “Why didn’t they take the kid to the NHS tent?” he asked once they were out of earshot.
“I can’t say.” Victoria looked back at him through the visor of the helmet, obviously uncomfortable with the question.
“Right…” He looked back over his shoulder toward the tent, his mind racking with why this would be part of her contract. What would a magitech company want with people suffering from blightshrew bites? And what did it have to do with Norah?
He felt his body start to become uncomfortably warm, but the pieces were starting to fall into place. A rimeclaw with a near impenetrable immune system has her enclosure infested with a population of blightshrews whose toxin is fast acting and deadly. Marcus stopped in place as a near physical shock of realization hit him.
They were experimenting on Norah with the blightshrew toxin.
And he fucked it up.
It took a second before Victoria recognized that Marcus wasn’t behind her and quickly turned to gather him up again. She urged him forward, deeper into the quarentine zone, and his body simply followed without his mind to argue.
They were experimenting on Norah, and now they were experimenting on people. On children.
“Marcus, I need you to stay calm, alright?” Victoria must have noticed his breathing elevate and his muscles tense even through the suit as she slipped her hand in his, intertwining their fingers and tugging him along. “We’ve got a very specific task, and we’re hardly equipped for that.
Without prior knowledge of how Arcanex worked, identifying the line where the NHS circle ended and their quarantine began would have been impossible. Victoria had obviously been doing this sort of thing for years, though. She moved to a lamppost with a nearly imperceptible rune drawn on it and deactivated it just long enough for the two of them to slip through an invisible barrier.
She led him off the main road, through an empty house, and into its backyard. “Alright, I got us here. How do we track these things?”
Marcus grimaced and reached back to unclasp the helmet. “Follow the smell,” he said blinking hard as he pulled off the vital protection and took his first breath of unfiltered air. Inside the zone, the smell of stagnant water and human waste was overwhelming. “Fuck me…not that smell. Should be like rotting meat.”
She hesitated, but finally pulled her helmet off as well. Wiping tears out from the corner of her eyes, she squinted and looked around. “In and out. No distractions.”
He nodded, his vision finally clearing from the invasion of the awful scent. They hopped the back wall into the neighboring garden, then again after crossing the street and going into the next house. It was several more houses before the telltale smell was able to breach the already unpleasant air. Two more walls and the smell of rot was overpowering. They stepped through another back door and paused.
“How do we find them? They’re rats, won’t they just run and hide?”
“Normally,” he whispered, the memory of the forest floor chasing him out of Norah’s enclosure flickering through his mind. “Not these, though. They’ll find us. Put your helmet back on.” He gestured to the helmet under her arm with his chin and pulled his own into place.
It was only two more paces into the house before the blightshrew flew at him from the darkness. It collided with his head, claws and teeth gnashing at his visor with deranged, high-pitched squeaks. He tried to grab it, but the rabid little bastard just clamped onto his hand and tried to rip through the glove. Then another emerged, as if the frenzy were somehow coordinated. A swipe or two of claws or teeth wasn’t going to be enough to get through the suit, but it was only a matter of time.
Marcus finally got a grip on one of them and tried to get it into the duffel, but it twisted and curled, refusing to comply. Victoria was trying to pull the second one off the back of his head when the third arrived, landing on her back.
“Marcus…” Concern rang in her voice as she was now trying to grab the one attacking her covered neck. “This isn’t working.”
Another blightshrew shot out from the blackness of one of the open bedrooms, landing right in the visor of his helmet. Viscous yellow fluid spread over the faceplate and suit as the little bastard started pissing on him. They were disgusting creatures on their best days, but ordinarily they’d leave people alone.
“Fine. Plan B,” he growled out, a quick flash of Norah and her black veined eyes. The pain that racked through her at the end. Rage flared. He grabbed the shew on his faceplate by the head, swung it around a couple of times then hurled it as hard as he could to the far wall.
Unfortunately, putting down the poor creatures ended up being much louder than he’d anticipated. Victoria had just ended the life of the last one who’d been trying to burrow its way into his back when a voice called from the other side of the front door.
“Anybody in there? Report!”
Marcus’ eyes went wide. Victoria immediately went for cover, pressing herself to the wall of the kitchen that lead into the rest of the house. His instinct told him this was not a good spot to hide. Kane would have found him in an instant. They were hiding from a person, though, not a glimmerfang, so he differed to her and followed her lead. He pressed to the other side of the doorway and waited.
The front door opened. A beam of light penetrated the darkness, briefly pausing on the corpse of a blightshrew lit up through the kitchen’s threshold. “Report!” The voice called again, a mixture of demand and plea. Slow, methodical footsteps followed every time the flashlight swept past the kitchen doorway. The rifle came through first, sweeping in Victoria’s direction. The flashlight at the end lit up her face for the slightest moment as he elbow came up to redirect the barrel into the air. Several shots fired, lighting the room briefly as the burst through the ceiling.
Whatever primal part of his brain took over in that moment burst into action. He saw Victoria’s face lit up, and he lunged forward, palmed the back of the helmet, and drove it forward with all his might into the door frame. His fingers gripped the helmet through the synthetic material and pulled his head back, just to bash it into the frame again. Victoria had wrestled the gun from his grip, and his mind told him to stop…but he didn’t.
Again and again, he drove the helmet into the wood until the faceplate cracked and the man’s legs went limp beneath him. Before his eyes could follow the body to the floor, Victoria redirected his helmet in her direction.
“Run,” she snapped at him.
They jumped walls, wove through houses, and skirted through gaps in fences until their magically enhanced speed had taken them what Victoria deemed a safe distance. She stopped, hands on her knees to catch her breath, and Marcus stumbled to a stop beside her.
He took in a sharp breath and pointed back. “Did I kill that guy? Please say I didn’t kill that guy.”
She swatted a hand at him in a casual gesture. “He had a helmet on. I’m sure he’s fine.” Her lack of eye contact with him did not inspire confidence. “Besides, he was trying to shoot us. I’d call that self defense.”
Marcus’ hands shook. His breath came out in short, jagged bursts. He’d gone too far. Why hadn’t he just choked him out? Put him to sleep so they could get away. When he’d fired that gun at her, though… He looked up at Victoria, who’d caught her breath and pulled out the map again.
“I doubt that was all of them.” She mumbled, gesturing to several more spots on the map. “Probably more in each zone.”
“They’ll…” Marcus blinked a few times, driving the sounds of the man’s skull ricocheting off the front of the helmet out of his mind. “They’ll be expecting us now.”
She looked up at him, studying his face for what felt like an eternity. “Deep breath.” She stepped toward him and gripped his shoulder in one hand, forcing him to stand up straight. “You’re freaking out. I get it.” Her eyes flicked back and forth between his. “You might have killed that guy.” She raised her eyebrows at him, utterly unbothered. “But do you think he would have thought twice about offing either of us?”
He took a few slow breaths, his eyes still locked on hers, before shaking his head. “No.”
“No,” she reaffirmed. “He was ready to fire no matter what he found around that corner. You did the right thing.” Her hand slid down his arm before she let go. “Now we need to figure out what to do next.”
You need to be smarter. Stronger. Faster. You don’t wait for them to catch up. Not ever. You stay a step ahead.
“They’re going to be searching for us now,” Marcus spoke mostly to himself.
“Yes, we’ve established that.” She turned back to the map as if she were going to find something in it they hadn’t seen before.
“So we go where they won’t be searching.” Marcus knelt down across from her at the map. “I don’t think we can safely clear the…specimens.” He caught himself as a hot sensation pulsed through him. “But if we can get into their tents, we can figure out what they’re doing.”
Victoria raised an eyebrow at him, nodding slowly. “That’s a good idea, but are you alright letting the critters run amok?”
“I don’t think we have much choice.” Marcus held up the hand of his now essentially ruined hazmat suit. “Besides, I met Mr. Arcanex. I don’t think he’d risk his or his family’s lives. There has to be some kind of extraction plan.”
“You’re putting a lot of faith in the heart of a corporate slimeball.”
“I’m putting faith in his sense of self preservation.” He shrugged. “Same way I’d consider any animal.”
“Except yourself.” Her voice was soft, not like her normal banter. Like she was reciting something she’d always thought of fondly. “Alright, back to the tents to get whatever information we can get.”
As predicted, gun-toting, armored Arcanex guards were sweeping each area house to house. He and Victoria skirted around, just inside the marked area, until they found another fatigue green tent. They crept toward it and the murmuring voices inside. Calm and clinical.
“She’s showing advanced signs of toxicity.”
Another voice, older, called a question back. “This one was a witch, right? How old?”
“Nineteen.”
The older voice man grunted. “Keep examining, but prepare for a postmortem. Haven’t had one that old survive yet.”
“Initial qounds have escalated quickly, breaching and festering in subcutaneous layer. Supression sigil?”
They stopped just outside the flaps of the tent, and Marcus shook the cobwebs from his head. Victoria looked him up and down, assessing his readiness, before giving him a nod and counting them down.
Three.
Two.
One.
They burst into the tent. Only one guard had been left behind, and Victoria disarmed him in moments, bashing his faceplate in with the but of his own rifle.
Unlike the NHS tents, this one had a single metal table in the center. Racks of boxes and jugs and filing cabinets lined the outside with a single desk on the far side of the tent. On the table, a young woman laid out, stripped completely naked with a fist-sized stone sigil jammed into an open wound in the center of her chest.
“Okay,” Marcus held his hands up to the doctors who had both retreated to the desk in the back. “We’re not going to hurt you.” He said as the sound of a ziptie fastening around the guard’s ankles interupted him. “Just need you to tell us what…” He gestured toward the woman’s chest. “All this is about.”
“Research. It-It’s just research.” The younger of the two blurted out in a shaky voice.
“Shut the fuck up.” His counterpart hissed.
“Whats the sigil?” Marcus asked, looking over the woman on the slap and then checking the monitors to the side as if he had any way to decipher what any of this meant.
The younger doctor looked ready to answer. “Not a word!” The older hiss again. “We aren’t telling you anything.”
Victoria level the gun on them, taking a few calm steps over to examine the clipboard that had been abandoned in their retreat to the back of the tent. “Somebody said something about witches not surviving?”
“WE ARE NOT…” The young doctor reared back and punched his partner as hard as he could. He dropped, groaning and holding his jaw.
“I’ll tell you whatever you want. Please don’t kill me. I have a wife and kids. This is just a job.”
“Why aren’t the magical people surviving?”
While Victoria handle the questioning, Marcus started gather paperwork. Files on previous cases, some kind of chart that he couldn’t decipher, drawings of prototype sigils that matched the one in the woman’s core.
“We aren’t certain, b-but that’s not what he meant.” The younger doctor move over to the woman and grabbed her chart to give to Marcus. “We’ve identified a compound in magical children that fights off the toxin. Some non-magical children seem to have it as well, but i-it’s been in all the magical adolescence.”
“Until a certain age?” Marcus asked.
“Fifteen, from what we can see.”
“What’s the sigil?” Marcus moved over to the slowly rising and falling chest of the woman, ragged breathes barely whistling through blackened nostrils.
“P-prototype suppression sigil.” He stammered out. “It’s supposed to slow the spread of the disease, but it isn’t working on everyone.”
Marcus knelt down, pulling an ice chest from beneath the table and popping it open. Eureka. “What are these?” he ran his fingers over the top of several sealed vials. Some of them filled with blood, but a few on the end had a florescent yellow substance in them.
“T-test cures, and samples taken from the victims.”
The radio from the downed guard sounded. “Checking in. We found Porter. He’s dead. Extracting the body, then continuing sweep.”
A cold sweat took him and his stomach twisted. He killed a man. Marcus’ jaw quivered. He’d bashed a man’s brains in with his bare hands. Puke splattered the inside of the hazmat helmet, running down his neck and torso.
“Is he okay? Was he bitten?” the caregiver in the doctor overtook fear settling as he started toward Marcus.
Victoria raised the gun again, bracing it in both hands, finger hovering over the trigger. “He’s fine. Back up.” She gestured with the gun for him to back up, which he did. “Last question. Do you know why this area was chosen?”
He shook his head. “N-no.. Well, not for sure. We had theories, but no one told us for sure.”
“You seem like a smart guy. What were your theories?” She asked, moving over to set a hand on Marcus’ back. While the gentle circles she rubbed on his back were soothing, the smell was starting to make him want to puke again.
“We weren’t sure until the smell started. It’s l-likely sewage backup. Which means this place could have been chosen because they could isolate the sewage system in the area so the blightshrews couldn’t spread naturally through the water source.”
Marcus heard the words. Somehwere in his mind he may have even understood and made connections. All he could see was his hand. Planted on the back of that helmet. Bashing it against the wall. Over and over. The cracking bone. Squelching of flesh and blood.