Our descent was slowed considerably by the small chutes, but we regained velocity quickly. I felt the ribbed wings sliding out and finally heard them lock into place above me. The synthetic micro-silk popped as it caught air and offered me a few minutes of controlled flight. Through the rain, I could see the landscape was a mix of purple vines, downed trees, and mud. To the east, a river had burst out of its banks. I was well off course and entering the heart of the red zone, an area my suit’s AI identified with either lethal radiation, biological dangers, or both.

  I’d jumped out of a perfectly good starship for this. Pops was right. I am an idiot.

  My right leg was in mud up to my thigh. The other was naturally being encircled by the damn thunder vines. The day had quickly faded to night as the storm clouds raged Sumo watched from the relative shelter of a rocky overhang as I struggled to free myself.

  “Go ahead, laugh your ass off!” Yeah, it was a childish thing to say, especially to a dog—but what can I say? I’m a child.

  “Fuck!” I yelled as one stuck leg came free only to drive the other into more mud.

  “Hey, Sport!”

  Oh, God, not now. “Little busy, Pops.”

  “Yeah, screw that, Junior. I know you’re enjoying your semi-retirement. You’re probably relaxing on a beach, sipping one of those goddamn fruity drinks you love.”

  “It’s nighttime, Dad, and I’m nowhere near the beach.”

  I really don’t know why I engage in his bullshit. Mom said I was an enabler. More often, I felt like the underpaid straight man in his comedy act. I pulled again, and my left leg finally came free with a sucking pop. I fell backward into a bush as I used my knife to cut away the vines that were now encircling both legs and my lower abdomen. Sumo was off to my left taking a nap.

  “What’s on your mind tonight, Pop?”

  “Ah…”

  I heard sounds of a TV being turned down. He liked the old-style flat screen sets. Wouldn’t have one of the newer holostream high-def sets. Wait. How the hell would he be getting a signal or power?

  “I was just wondering why I ever had children, so I thought to myself I should just go right to the source.”

  “Because torturing strangers is illegal in most states,” I offered. “Besides, Mom was the source, why not talk to her?”

  “Don’t be an ass kid. Your mom was a goddamn saint, and she loved me more than she could ever express. She tried to give us a child we could all be proud of, but we got you instead.”

  I saw the flicker of eyes appearing in my field of vision. Ada automatically offered a full spectrum sweep of the area. Creatures were out there, some she could identify… others, not so much. I raked off as much of the mud as I could and eased up beside Sumo ready to move.

  “Pop, any chance we could continue this abuse later?”

  Something came darting out of the brush; my handgun had fired before I was consciously even aware of the threat. Whatever they had done to me had my reflexes and muscle memory optimized for killing shit fast.

  “That was a squirrel, Prowler,” Ada offered. I could hear the hidden layers of ridicule and scorn in her voice… I could. Hell, I didn’t know it was just a squirrel. It could have been one of those murderous, bat-faced monkeys or something worse.

  We had to get out of here; I was over ninety kilometers from the rendezvous point with Voss and had heard nothing from her since I landed.

  “Gotta run, Pops, duty calls.”

  “You mean you have to take a shit? That’s no reason to hang-up on your old man. Hell, where do you think I’m calling from? I come in here and sit down, and automatically I think of you.”

  “No… Dad.” I layered in the exasperation, as if he could get anything that subtle. “I have to be somewhere. You know, soldiering stuff—end of the world and all.” The man really seemed clueless that anything was going on out here in the real world.

  “Ah, yeah, ok–gotcha, kiddo. You’re heading after Nevis Carlson.”

  Goddamit! The man was infuriating, but just as much for his uncannily accurate knowledge as his verbal abuse.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked after trying to come up with something witty and disarming.

  Pops just ignored the question. He knew he was right and that I was stalling. “Nevis is a pointy-assed little pip-squeak. You think he could have pulled this shit off?”

  “I don’t know the guy, Dad. He’s just part of my mission package.”

  “Ah.”

  I heard the sound of him downing a drink along with his trademark sigh of contentment. Sumo and I were moving now, both our speed increasing as we raced into the blinding rain.

  “Man’s a total dick, always working the angles, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous. Watch your six, kid.”

  “Okay, Pop, what else can you…” The sound had changed. A simple nothingness fille my ears..

  “He’s gone, isn’t he, Ada?”

  She laughed before offering the same answer as every other time he had called. “I show no record of any recent communications, Joe.”

  “Contact!” Ada yelled just before something hit me from the right side knocking me clear off the old road.

  The suit’s sensors were useless this close, and darkness and rain prevented me from knowing what I was fighting. “Please, God, not more HappyBears,” I whispered. I felt something like hands on my arm, then a claw or blade down near my groin. Right… that was my thought, too. Protect the groin. Except that turned out to be a wayward tree limb, while whatever grabbed me was now rotating my arm joint in a way that would eventually rip my elbow and shoulder out of place.

  I am an idiot, but I’m not completely stupid. At the same time, I spun into the thing and brought my knee up. I felt soft tissue give way to bone, or cartilage, whatever the creature had underneath it, but it didn’t loosen its grip.

  “Ada, light it up.” I wanted to see what I was up against, although that would screw up my night vision, or maybe it wouldn’t, I hadn’t really checked that part of my upgrades yet.

  The built-in suit lights cut on. “Off, off…cut it back off!”

  “Holy fuck, holy shit, Jesus Christ, what is this thing?” To explain fully in one brief example of the differences between a human and an AI, Ada helpfully answered my stupid question by showing me a fully rendered 3-D image of the beast. Yes, she showed me a still image of the horrific creature that I didn’t want to see while I was fighting the same effing creature. “Goddamnit, Ada, get rid of that.”

  I have no idea what it was. Yes, I do—it was a fucking mistake. It was someone’s half-formed attempt at building an actual nightmare. I do mean half-formed. That much was obvious. Skin hung from exposed muscle tissue and a bony skeletal undercarriage as if it was still a work in process. The thing hit the side of my helmet hard enough to make me stumble backward. I heard Sumo and knew he was attacking but had no way of knowing where my partner was.

  That was when lightning streaked overhead illuminating the thing once again. Looked no better in silhouette… nope. Still the ugliest fucking thing I’d ever seen. That was saying something because Banshee team had been raiding bio-labs for years, and we’d seen some freaky-ass shit. This ugly asshat motherfucker looked like he’d stepped off the coroner’s table just to come hunt me down.

  My souped-up brain just sat there behind my face and said, “Huh.” Neither of us had a clue. I couldn’t make out a head, nor legs. Still, it looked kind of humanoid, but the way it moved was certainly not bipedal. In the darkness, it seemed to flow, or more accurately, shutter and shift from one position to another. I finally had a few feet of separation from Corpse Boy, which would have been an excellent time to go for a weapon. Instead, that was when the suit’s air filters cut out, and the aroma of this stinking pile of meat hit me.

  Rotten eggs, decaying fish, rotting bodies, and a thousand bean-eating sumo wrestlers farting at the same time would not have come close to this horror. I begged Ada to do something. My eyes watered, and I staggered. I felt a vice-like grip encircle my hip and something penetrating through the outer wall of my suit. That shouldn’t even be possible, but the smell was literally debilitating.

  Then I saw Sumo leaping up and over me to engage the creature. The pain on my hip eased up as it moved and dodged the combat dog’s vicious attack. My boy had had enough and was ripping chunks out of the thing. I had no idea if that was a good strategy, but I joined in. We both began tearing away body tissue, muscles, bones, anything we could tear loose. I saw a blur of movement as something else emerged through the creature’s insides and heard Sumo yelp just before I felt another blow that sent me careening back into the road.

  Rolling back into a ready crouch, I scanned for the thing but only saw Sumo off to one side struggling to regain his own footing. The lights came on, and Ada ran full scans, but the Corpse Boy was gone, no sign of it at all. No sign of the thing, no smell… nothing. I crawled over to the dog and pulled him close. I checked him closely, and he seemed in better shape than I was. Ada triggered an injection on the dog’s suit that would hopefully counter any toxins or contagions having mouthfuls of rotting flesh might have given him. I sat there for long minutes holding him close, both of us trying to catch our breath and figure out what in the hell had just happened.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  “You look like hell, Kovach.”

  Why was that becoming the common greeting everyone had for me? “Has to be better than the last time you saw me,” I responded, walking up the overgrown road. My suit was covered with mud and blood and some other things I couldn’t even identify. The anti-fouling system seemed to have been knocked offline. That and the fact that I’d battled a corpse and a killer squirrel.

  With more than a little uncertainty, I stuck out my hand as a sign of peace, but she brushed it aside and embraced me, giving me a quick kiss. Doing that in a battle suit was awkward, but still, it felt good, despite my obvious hatred for this woman. Hey, it’s there, just buried under layers of ‘Damn, she still looks good.’ “How are you, Voss?”

  She cocked her head, and yeah, it still looked adorable despite my nearly complete lack of trust for the woman.

  “Still not good calling me Dami?” she asked in a cooing voice.

  “Some things are harder for me to get over. Like… you killing me.”

  “Yet here you are,” she said, stepping back and opening her arms. “Besides, Joe, I just shot you. Your own body is what killed you.”

  “You knew I would come back?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. “It was a fifty-fifty shot.”

  That did not make me feel better in the slightest.

  “I knew if your body sustained much more damage, you were beyond hope. One of your doctors, though… cute little thing named Jacobson, told me about a sort of biological reset that would flood your body with nanobots to repair damage at the cellular level. I know you don’t believe me Joe, but everything I did was to help you and Carol stay alive.”

  “Sounds like your little doctor friend shared a lot. You must have gotten close for him to open up like that. Jacobson… Jacobson.” It took me several seconds for the name to register, despite the fact that Ada had helpfully posted the guy’s ID badge in my HUD. “You fucked Lawnmower Man?”

  Voss snorted as the laughter erupted. “God, Joe, I have missed you.”

  Then she kissed me again, hard.

  “For your information, I never fucked Doctor Jacobson, although I would have if I’d needed… obviously,” She said.

  Whatever she was saying after the kiss could have been in another language. God, this woman was hot, dangerous, and confusing as hell.

  Sumo looked at me, peed on a nearby tree he’d been watching since we arrived, then eased over to Voss for an obligatory head scratch. Apparently, the master sergeant getting affection wasn’t good enough for the muddy dog.

  “You ready to go?”

  I knew she said we had a long hike ahead of us, but honestly, I was beat. The last twenty miles I’d had to carry Sumo. I am an augmented soldier in a battle suit. He is not. Well, he’s augmented, just not to that degree. We’d both been fighting nearly continuously for days. It had taken its toll.

  “Give us a few minutes, we landed way off course and ran all night to get here.”

  “The storm?” she asked.

  I just nodded. I didn’t want to let her know my suit had malfunctioned, or worse, someone up on the Stone Mountain might have sabotaged it. I was packing that little question away for another day. I knew Ada would be busy assembling the evidence without my intervention.

  We ate a cold breakfast from a supply Dami had already gathered. This was technically a red zone but not from radiation. The biologic lifeforms posed the major danger. The houses that lined the road were all dark and abandoned, as empty of people as the farms were devoid of livestock. The John Deere agrobots sat motionless in the fields where they had stopped. The food in those houses was still safe to eat, though. At least all the packaged foods, they would last for decades.

  She watched me eat — and eat, but said nothing. I knew my appetite had increased exponentially.

  “You’re different,” she said as we began packing up.

  “How so?” I still wasn’t comfortable opening up to this woman, although damn, she still felt as comfortable to me. A friendship that seemed to have years behind it but in fact only had a few tumultuous days.

  “Not sure, but I think I like it. Death becomes you, sweetheart.”

  Sumo was still sniffing at the same tree. I was fairly sure that was where the Wraith had posted up. It still amazed me that it could be around both me and my dog and remain completely undetected. Shit, the thing had hitched a ride with us for hundreds of miles, and we’d known nothing.

  “So, tell me about this thing that scared you last night.”

  Scared me. Scared me… that was how she was spinning this. Fine. Okay, yeah it scared me. I went through it all again. Even showing her the brief footage Ada had pieced together.

  Voss nodded and had heard rumors about them. “Some of the survivor groups have begun cataloging the creatures. I think this is one of the ones they call Culls.”

  “Odd name, but ok,” I said, leaning down to pull up my daypack. “We’re half a country away from the Rainier or Iron River facilities.”

  She nodded and pushed her hair back over one ear. “Those were obviously not the only facilities working on bioweapons, Joe. I told you that back then.”

  “Shit.” I’d hoped I had remembered that wrong. The Nightmare Factory had more than enough horrible shit. We didn’t need multiple versions all producing their own variants of the biological or mechanical terrors.

  “Rainier was a production facility,” she offered. “We are relatively sure they worked on the most mature projects, those creations they judged ready for production. Creations whose lethality and investment would make Hammer Industries more money than they could have ever hoped to spend.”

  “I don’t think it was about the money. Not totally.”

  “What was your mission at Ranier?” I asked.

  She ignored the question drawing my arm computer closer and scrolling back through the fight scenes of the previous night. “This poor thing doesn’t even look like it’s partially developed. Its lifecycle must have been interrupted much too early.”

  “Poor thing? Are you insane? The ‘thing’ very nearly took out a trained soldier in full battle armor and his dog.”

  She patted my hand dismissively, “And yet again, here you are.”

  I could see she was not unprotected, not wearing armor like mine, but more than the battleskin I’d gotten for her during our last trip. Slinging her weapon, she tapped my chest armor with a resounding thud.

  “Come on, tin man, grab Toto, time to go find the wizard.”

  It left me wondering if she was Dorothy or the Wicked Witch. Somehow, I was sure I was going to find out pretty damn soon.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Xero heard the woman before she came into view. One of Hauk’s men stood in the corridor blocking the tall blonde.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, I have my orders,” the young corporal said. His words were not harsh, but neither did they offer any hint of compromise.

  Xero didn’t recognize the woman but thought she was also a new arrival. Xero passed the soldier with a simple nod. Her current clearance got her access to virtually any section of the ship. The fading complaints of the other woman reminded her that not everyone would be so lucky. The increased access Kovach had granted allowed her to make some headway against the ship’s control system lockout. It felt good to be doing something productive again. The day before, she had eliminated all the limits from the sensor grid. That had proven to be both good and bad.

  Good, in that they could see anything approaching. Bad, in that they kept seeing an intermittent contact just on the edge of sensor range. A ship possibly hiding in the sensor shadow of what the ship could detect. Bayou wanted desperately to change position to make sure whatever it was just happened to be in the same orbit and speed. Xero knew the odds of that being the case were astronomical. Currently, the ability to alter their course was not an option. Whatever command codes the admiral had used seemed above god-level access for the ship’s systems.

  Opening the hatch into engineering, Xero smiled seeing the boy hard at work on his one pet-project. In less than a week, she had enjoyed Lux’s company far more than she would have thought. She’d never been around children and assumed her intolerance for most adults would have been even worse with their progeny. Lux had proven her wrong, though.

  “Hi, Zee!” he said without looking up.

  Xero smiled at his new nickname for her. It was the same thing Valyn used to call her. “How is she coming?” The boy had been working on it nearly every waking hour since she had been aboard.