SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror

Much as I like Bug, he shares a single characteristic with Dr William Hu. The two of them have an absolutely unsavoury delight for any kind of bizarre or extreme technology. For Hu, the head of our Special Sciences Division, it bordered on ghoulishness. Hu loved to get his hands on any kind of world-threatening designer plague or exotic weapon of mass destruction. A few months ago, when Blackjack Team out of Vegas took down a Chechnyan kill squad who had a hyper-contagious version of weaponized Spanish Flu and were planning on releasing it into the water supply of a large Russian community near Reno, Hu was delighted. A total of fifty-three people dead and an entire water supply totally polluted for God knows how many decades, and he was like a kid with a new stack of comics. He actually admired the kind of damaged or twisted minds that could create ethnic-specific diseases, build super dirty-bombs, and create weapons capable of annihilating whole populations. I’ve wondered for years how much of a push it would take to shove Hu over to the dark side of the Force.

Bug, though, didn’t have a mean bone in his body. For him it was a by-product of a life so insulated from the real world that nothing was particularly real to him. Only his beloved computers and the endless data streams. Something like this lab was probably no more real to him than a level in the latest edition of Gears of War or Resident Evil.

For my part, I am not a fan of anyone that would put extreme weapons into the hands of people so corrupt or so driven by fanaticism that they would turn the world into a pestilential wasteland just to make an ideological point.

Fuck that. For two pennies I’d call the Black Hawk and see what twelve Hellfire missiles and a six-pack of Hydra-70 rockets could do to sponge this place clean.

“Where’s that proving station?” I asked. He sent a step-by-step to my mobile phone.

As I made my way along corridors lit only by the narrow beam of my flashlight, I thought about the work that went on here. During the flight I’d had time to go over some of the background on the Koenig Group. They were originally a deeply integrated division of DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is an agency of the Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technologies for use by the military. Koenig Group people worked on every aspect of DARPA before they went private, and that meant they had the opportunity to see not only what was currently in development for modern warfare and defense, but also what was being looked at for future exploration.

Of late, I’ve come to realize that when it comes to keeping out in front of the global arms race, there is virtually no line of exploration that’s definitely off the table.

So, without government oversight, where had the twisted minds here at Koenig gone?

I reached the end of one hallway and passed through a security door that led to another corridor lined with doorways that looked exactly like the one I’d just come from. So much so that I actually went out the door and stood looking at the previous doors and then turned around and looked at the new set. The absolute similarity was unnerving and disorienting.

I called up the floor plan on my mobile and studied it.

“Bug,” I said, “somehow I made a wrong turn.”

Bug didn’t answer.

I tapped the earbud.

“Cowboy to Bug, do you copy?”

Nothing. Not even static.

I tapped my way over to the command channel. “Cowboy to Deacon,” I said, trying to reach Church.

Still nothing.

I turned around and looked down the hall. The beam cut a pale line that pushed the shadows back, but not much.

Suddenly I caught the smell again.

Sulphur, human waste, and spoiled meat. And the aroma of perfume.

I don’t remember moving or pulling open my shirt, but suddenly my gun was in my hand. Even though the whole place was absolutely still and quiet, I yelled into the darkness.

“Freeze! Federal agent. I’m armed.”

My words bounced off the darkened walls and melted into nothingness.

Then, from behind me, someone spoke my name.

A woman’s voice.

Soft.

Familiar.

Achingly familiar.

An impossible voice.

“Joe…”

I whirled, gun in one hand, flash in the other, pointing into the darkness.

A woman stood ten feet behind me.

She was dressed in black. Shoes, pants, jersey, gun belt, pistol. All black. Dark hair, dark eyes.

Those eyes.

Her eyes.

My mouth fell open. Someone drove a blade of pure ice through my heart. I could see my pistol begin to tremble in my hand.

I stared at her.

I spoke her name.

“Grace…”

-5-

I don’t know what time does in moments of madness. It stops or it warps. It becomes something else. Every heartbeat felt like a slow, deliberate punch to my breastbone, and yet I could feel my pulse fluttering.

She held a pistol in her hand, the barrel raised to point at my chest, and I had an insane, detached thought.

You don’t need a bullet to kill me. Be her and I’ll die.