World of Hurt Read online

  “You’re going to want to make an exception for this. It’s something else we appropriated from the scuds during one of our missions,” Fincher said. “The honchos say it’s a substance called ‘Lazarus.’”

  “What does it do?” I asked.

  “Stops death,” Fincher said.

  I barked a nasty laugh, but Fincher was deadly serious. “Remember how they used Naloxone during the heroin epidemics back in the day? Well this is the same kind of thing, only it’s a death antagonist. Do you know what that means, Deus?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Neither do I,” Fincher replied. “But the folks that matter studied the fluid inside these needles and apparently it contains a special protein that can, under certain circumstances, bring you back into the land of the living.”

  “Are you joking?” Simeon asked.

  Fincher’s brow furrowed. “Do I look like the kind of guy who jokes?” Nobody said anything in response and Fincher continued, “the bottom line is, if you’re faced with a situation where you’ve been wounded and, in your best judgment, the end may be near, you have three minutes to pop the top on the syringe and jab it into your thigh or your neck.”

  “I’m a thigh man myself,” I said, searching for a smile from Fincher that wasn’t returned.

  I closed the case and inserted it into a side pocket on my cargo pants and saw Fincher glaring at me. I had a feeling the guy didn’t particularly care for me, and frankly, the feeling was mutual. For starters, he reeked of violence. I know that’s a silly thing to say, but I’d been around enough knuckle-draggers to spot the dudes who were well-versed in the ways of the gun and Fincher appeared to be one of those guys. In addition, in my experience the looser you were when undertaking any kind of mission, the better you performed. Fincher was wrapped too tightly for my liking. The dude barely blinked which I thought was doubly weird since he only had one eye.

  “What happens if we are hit by an explosive?” Sato asked.

  “Don’t get hit by an explosive and you won’t have to worry about it,” Fincher replied.

  “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men will definitely not be able to put Sato back together again,” Dru said.

  “If this Lazarus stuff does what you say, how come we just don’t shoot each other up before we attack the scuds?” I asked.

  “Because the honchos say it’s like LSD, in and out of your blood just like that,” Fincher said, snapping his fingers. “Any other questions?”

  I shook my head and Fincher leaned in close to me. “Tell me, Deus, exactly what did you do before the bugs came?”

  “Quarterbacked the Redskins,” I quipped.

  Fincher dropped to his haunches. “I can do without the snark.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  Fincher laughed, but it was a nasty kind of chortle. “I’m getting a vibe from you, kid.”

  “Yeah? What kind?”

  “The kind that makes me think you want more wag and less bark from me, but I’m staying on you. I think you might be a weak link. I also think you and me might have words when this operation is over.”

  “Well, I sure hope not,” I said.

  “Cause I’m beginning to dislike you.”

  “I’m devastated to hear that, sir,” I replied.

  He adjusted his patch again so that I could see the gnarly scar where his eye once was. A mound of welted flesh that looked like burned pig skin covered his socket. It looked as if somebody had scooped his eye out with a melon baller and then set the wound on fire, before putting the fire out with an ice pick. “Let me give you a word of advice, Danny Boy,” Fincher said, whisper-hissing the words through clenched teeth. “Never fuck with the man who packs your parachute.”

  He chuckled darkly and tapped me on the forehead, before moving back toward the rear of the plane. Gulping, I stood and spotted Richter in the other direction and moved toward him, the other operators following behind me. Dexter was visible along with several other personnel near the nose of the plane, all of them sporting headsets and manning laptops and electronic equipment, everyone seated in what looked like a mobile command post.

  Richter gestured to me and the other operators and we moved toward him. Dexter removed his headset and looked up. “As you may, or may not know, Vidmark and the powers that be have brought back online the old Scienta air-gapped cloud computing region. It’s the same thing that ran the top-secret workloads for the military and intel folks back in the day. What that means is you’ll be able to execute your missions using a common set of tools, information, and technology.”

  “Can you translate that into English, Dexter?” Richter asked.

  Dexter grinned. “You got all the bells and whistles now. Everything’s been downloaded into your machines. All you have to do is access it via your viewscreens and head-up displays.”

  “As an added bonus,” Richter said, “we’ve installed what we mentioned earlier. A holo-app inside your mechs which will allow Dexter and me to ride shotgun during the mission.”

  The air suddenly smelled of ozone and machine oil and I felt a current pass through the plane which began powering up in full. Soon the engines were roaring as lights flashed in every direction. Fincher and his people stomped past us as the ramp groaned and lifted up. The rear of the plane soon snapped shut and we were directed to move laterally and strap ourselves into a series of nylon and aluminum troop seats that folded down from either side of the plane’s walls.

  Plopping down onto my seat, I pulled a five-point harness down and secured myself, seated next to Jezzy and Sato, and across from Billy and Dru. The plane began taxiing down the runway and most all of us had nervous expressions on our faces. All but Ren and Sato.

  “You’ve done this before?” I asked Sato.

  She nodded. “That is how I came here. Ren and me, we were part of what you call an empowerment program at the United Nations. A government initiative sponsored by the military for women like us, the children of technologists. We were leaving the big airport in New York City in a plane much like this one when the aliens invaded.”

  “You shouldn’t have left.”

  “Spilled water cannot return to its tray,” Sato said with a flick of the wrist. “We made it up into the sky,” she continued, miming a plane flying with her hand. “We were more than twenty-thousand feet high when we were struck by what we believed was lightning. There were flashes of blue and orange light and then I remember we looked out our window and the sky was full of their machines.”

  “Alien gliders?”

  She nodded. “They knocked us out of the sky like a child striking a bird with a slingshot and a bit of rock.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We prayed for a quick death. We dropped so fast that most of the passengers fell asleep, y’know? There was a—”

  “Lack of oxygen,” Ren added.

  “Yes, that,” Sato said. “Hypoxia. The passengers passed out only to awaken when the plane started to break up. We crashed into a field in New Jersey but somehow twenty-seven of us managed to survive. I remember Ren grabbed my hand and said, ‘wake from death and return to life,’ and then we were off into a field.”

  Her eyes strayed to the ground and then she gaped back up at me. “There is a saying in my country that ‘the best sword is the one left in the scabbard.’ Do you understand what this means?”

  I nodded. “That is bullshit,” she snarled. “When you have been wronged, the sword cannot remain in the scabbard. If you do not enter the tiger’s cave, weapon in hand, how do you expect to catch the cub?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  “The only way you can do that is by attacking,” Sato said. “That is the only thing the aliens understand. I have seen this first hand. You attack and then you attack again until they are no more.”

  A fire burned in her eyes and I made a mental note: do not screw with Sato. Ever.

  Richter moved down the aisle between us, handing out water bottles and p
ackets of pureed bananas. “You’re gonna thank me for it,” he said, gesturing to the packets. “Only thing that tastes exactly the same coming up as it does going down.” He grinned and checked our harnesses.

  “As you can see from the infil instructions, you people will pop your first ‘chutes at twelve-hundred AGL.”

  I raised my hand and Richter iced me with a look. “Seriously, Deus?”

  I nodded and Richter groaned. “‘AGL’ means ‘above ground level.’ The second ‘chute pop will occur at or around eight-hundred AGL and then you will glide down for what we hope will be an error-free bounce and landing.”

  I pulled out my neural glasses and waved them at Billy who deferred. “I’m not reviewing any of that tutorial shit. You heard Richter. Fact that me and Dru are a little kray-kray works to our advantage.”

  “Don’t you want to know how to use the new weapons?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Too much planning messes with my groove. Besides, me and Dru are familiar with most of the systems on account of our work at M.I.T.”

  I was vaguely aware that ‘M.I.T.’ referred to a college, although I couldn’t remember if the school was in Michigan or one of the other “M” states. Moreover, since the only degree I’d ever received was from the “School of Hard Knocks,” I didn’t want to seem like any more of a dumbass than I was, so I just stared at him.

  Billy’s brows converged. “What? You saw me and my brother and didn’t think we could make it into a school like that, Deus? That maybe, ‘cause of our appearances, we came from some jacked-up group home instead?”

  “Me? No – what? No, of course I didn’t – I had no idea,” I said, sputtering, fumbling for a response.

  Billy glared at me for several seconds and then his mouth pulled back in a broad smile. “I’m just fucking with you, man.”

  I exhaled, nervously laughing. “I was serious about the M.I.T. thing though,” Billy continued. “Me and Dru were part of a team at the Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center. We helped develop some of the TWS’s, the tactical weapons systems, that operate a few of the weapons Fincher and his people added to our rides.”

  “Any words of wisdom?” I asked.

  Billy pursed his lips. “Only thing I can say is, whatever you do tomorrow, do it with bad intentions. Leave it all out on the field. You feel me?”

  I nodded and slipped on my neural glasses, figuring that it couldn’t hurt to review how to operate the new systems that had been added to the mech. That’s when an icon appeared in the right lens. An image of a ghost in a white sheet. I clicked on this and a message from Dexter appeared: “U awake?”

  It’s strange that this simple message made me nervous, but it did. I looked over and sideways to see if the others were watching me. They weren’t. Then, without drawing attention to myself, glanced down the aisle to where I believed Dexter might be sitting. I couldn’t see him in the darkened plane. I replied “Yes,” and leaned back as his initial message vanished.

  “Let’s talk tmrw after the mission,” he wrote in reply.

  “What up?”

  “Just … we need to talk.”

  “U gonna keep me in suspense?” I replied.

  “I found out about something I think u might be interested in.”

  “Such as…”

  I waited for several minutes, but there was no response from Dexter, which was annoying. Who the hell sends a message like that on the eve of a fight against the aliens? I almost stood and marched over to demand that he tell me what was going on, but I figured that might piss off Richter, or rile up Fincher and the other operators, and besides, it was probably something mundane. It could wait. The most important thing was that I get ready to do battle with the scuds. I eased my head back and commenced watching the tutorial on the operation of the new systems.

  12

  “Up!” somebody shouted, grabbing my arm. “Get thee up, Deus!”

  I felt a terrific gust of wind and then my eyes opened to see green lights flashing on the ceiling. I’d fallen asleep during the flight and Billy was eerily bathed in the glow of the green light, looking down at me like a goblin. “Zero hour’s here, baby! Time to bump and pump and gain some manhood points!”

  He pulled me to my feet as the wind continued to howl. I saw the other operators to the left, standing, gear in hand. To the right were the mechs and the auxiliary ramp, which was being lowered by some of the plane personnel who’d been strapped in place. The wind from the open rear door buffeted us and I was worried that I might be sucked outside.

  Billy handed me a harness that fitted over my compression clothing. I slipped the harness on, and then he clipped a metal leader to the harness that was linked to a long length of steel channel bolted to the ceiling.

  “Now you’re free to move about the cabin,” Billy said with a sly smile.

  We grabbed our gear and moved down toward the mechs. I could see that the machines had been fitted with parachute contraptions that the plane personnel were checking and rechecking. I overheard Simeon mention that the mechs had been given two kinds of what he called specialized drogue parachutes (along with another ‘chute), which meant absolutely nothing to me. I just prayed that whatever was being wrapped around the Spence mech would get it safely to ground.

  Richter barked a few words of encouragement and then Jezzy and me slithered into the mech which was stationed horizontally on the auxiliary ramp. I spotted the Fusion rifle that was secured on the floor along with a cockpit repair kit (to repair any breaches in the canopy), several magazines of ammunition, and a leash, a length of carbon-fiber wrapped steel leader that we were supposed to clip to our belts. In the event the cockpit was blown open on the way down, it would keep us from getting sucked outside.

  I clipped myself in and craned my head to get a look at Jezzy. “Can you believe we’re actually doing this?”

  “I’m still praying that we’re not,” she replied.

  “Do you ever wonder what your life would have been like if you’d never met me?”

  “Immeasurably better in a number of ways,” she said.

  “Name one.”

  “For starters, I’d still have my leg and I wouldn’t have been blown out of the sky in a hoversurf, and oh, yeah, I wouldn’t be on the verge of being shot out the back of a plane to fight a bunch of pissed off aliens in a desert!”

  “That’s more than one thing.”

  She held my look. “Just … tell me we can do this, Danny.”

  “Course we can. We already are. It’s in the wind,” I replied, holding a hand out. She took my hand and squeezed it, and then the plane personnel were climbing over the cockpit, making last minute inspections. I watched one of the men slap the cockpit glass and give us a thumbs up. Then he and the others disappeared and the lights on the ceiling changed from green to red. Something began thrumming under the mech and then there was a puff of smoke or gas (I couldn’t tell which) and the first mech, Simeon’s, was catapulted out of the back of the plane.

  Before I could fully process this, the next mech was shot out into the inky blackness of the sky, then the next and all too soon it was our turn. It felt like being at the peak of a rollercoaster track, just waiting to plunge down the other side. My mouth peeled back in a silent scream and then—

  BOOM!

  There was a burst of air and we were jettisoned out of the plane, shotgunned into the darkness, tumbling toward the ground like a falling star.

  I wasn’t fazed at all by the descent.

  I was a rock as we pitched down through the murk, sitting there silently, taking everything in and—

  I’m lying of course.

  I peed my pants and cried like a little baby!

  You have not experienced true, ass-puckering terror until you’re blasted out of a moving object at thirteen-thousand feet on a cold winter’s night.

  My world spun a hundred times and I hyperventilated, staring at a wash of stars overhead. Dizzy, my eyes swam, my life unwinding before
me.

  What the hell was going on?! I thought, closing my eyes. Wasn’t a parachute or three supposed to deploy?!

  There was a sound, a loud WHUMP!, but our descent didn’t stop.

  “THE ‘CHUTE’S TANGLED UP!” Jezzy screamed.

  Fighting gravity, I opened my eyes and looked back, surprised to see that (unlike me) she was the very picture of calm. She was pointing to the cockpit, but I couldn’t see anything, it was so damned dark.

  Reaching over, Jezzy activated the exterior lights and that’s when I saw it.

  One of the parachutes.

  One of the partially-deployed parachutes.

  It was caught on a metal knob on the mech’s turret!

  “WE NEED TO GO OUT THERE!” she shouted.

  “EXCUSE ME?!”

  Rather than respond, she shoved past me and I noticed she’d released herself from her metal leash. “Never send a boy to do a woman’s job,” she muttered.

  “Where the hell’s your leash?!” I asked.

  “Excuse me?!”

  “I didn’t mean that in a sexist way!”

  She didn’t respond, bracing herself instead against the top of the cockpit. Gritting her teeth, she muscled open the exit latch. Gusts of frigid wind filled the cockpit as we continued to violently spiral down. Her body began moving up toward the open latch.

  “GRAB MY LEGS!” she shrieked.

  Jumping up, I grabbed hold of something.

  “THAT’S MY BUTT!” she shouted.

  I reached lower and wrapped my hands around her prosthetic leg and it was as cold as the frame on a bicycle in the dead of the winter. The chilled metal transported me back to the moments after I’d lost the use of my own legs. I remember the feeling of complete hopelessness that came with paralysis, which had only been temporary. I realized then, that I had never really contemplated the impact that losing her leg had on Jezzy. It was too late at that point, but looking up, I wanted to console her, to tell her that everything was going to be okay, and all I got in return was her screaming, “ANY DAY NOW, DANNY!”