Jonathan Maberry - SNAFU - An Anthology of Military Horror

Monroe pivoted his head, taking in the other bar room patrons; some of them had been drinking with the man Raptor had just brutalized. No-one looked at either of the two men. Raptor’s brutal and efficient violence had made them invisible.

Monroe’s pocket buzzed. He frowned. It was extremely rare to get called on down time. He and his team belonged to an internal military body simply called Defense. They operated on orders issued from a few generals, and the president himself — they didn’t exist until they needed to. He pulled the disc-reader. Something big must be going down , he thought. He read the message: POSSIBLE NT INCURSION. He grunted.

NT.

Non Terrestrial.

Monroe clicked his fingers and headed to the exit. Raptor followed, but at the door he paused to look back. Not a single person looked up, their drinks now the most interesting thing in the world.

“Victim’s name is Doris Sömmer — at least we think it’s her.” Sergeant Artur Amos led Detective Ed Heisen of the Kripo — the Kriminalpolizei — the through the stinking, dark apartment.

“Based on an imprint of the driver’s license at the check-in desk, we got a twenty six year-old female, approximately five-eight tall. But… fingerprints gone, weight unknown, hair and eye color also unknown.”

“Unknown? I thought you said you had a body.” Heisen followed the older policeman, squinting to try and improve his vision in the semi gloom.

Amos half turned and shrugged. “Meh.” He handed Heisen a sheet of paper with some basic background information and a copy of the girl’s driver’s license. A small photo showed a healthy young woman beaming at the camera.

“What about other prints?” Heisen asked while reading the page.

“Millions of ‘em.” Replied the short cop.

Heisen looked up as Amos slowed at the doorway to a room floodlit by halogen lamps and bustling with several shapes in white biohazard suits. Amos flipped a page from his notebook, and read some more.

“Evidence of a metallic band on the fourth ring finger indicating a possible engagement, but the diamond is gone, and there’s evidence she was with someone. So we’re still looking for trace.” He snorted and stood aside. “And yeah, we thought we had a body too.” Amos pointed with his pen.

Heisen stepped past the smaller man and looked down at the carpet. There was an ash outline, almost too perfect in detail. He didn’t know whether to laugh or stagger from the room screaming his head off.

“Jesus Christ! What’d they use, a freakin’ blowtorch?”

The body, or what had once been a body, was just a thin layer of grey-brown ash in the shape of a figure holding an arm up, either warding off a blow or trying to shield her vision from something.

Amos pointed again with the pen. “No idea what caused it. But whatever it was, it was fucking hot. We think the ring…” he leaned forward and indicated a darker area on the end of the ash-arm pile on the carpet, “once had a diamond. Well, we think that’s what it was, as the lab boys tell me that there’s a small trace of mineralized carbon ash denser than that rest.”

Amos looked up at Heisen. “Do you know how hot a fire needs to be before a diamond burns?”

Heisen shook his head. “I didn’t even know they could burn.”

“Me neither, but I looked it up. It usually takes about fifteen hundred degrees. But this must have been even hotter and faster, cause if you heat girl’s-best-friend up slowly, it explodes. We reckon this was a burn of about two thousand degrees, and it occurred over a few seconds.”

“That’s incredible.” Heisen squatted beside Amos.

The cop waved his pen around. “That’s nuthin; look around, detective.” Amos swiveled his head theatrically, and then faced Heisen, his eyebrows raised. “Nothing else is burned. The heat happened right here, right on her, just on her, for a few seconds, and then just as miraculously, turned itself off.”

Heisen grunted and looked up — the ceiling was also unharmed. He nodded. “Well, wasn’t a flamethrower, that’d fry the plaster overhead, or at least leave a helluva stain.”

He sniffed. There was a strange smell, but not the greasy odor he expected when a body was cooked. He’d seen people burned up before and the fact was, Joe or Jane Doe contained a good percentage of fat, women more so. Even a healthy woman carried about ten percent body fat — burning it should have filled the room with greasy smoke and the smell of fried pork. Instead, there was nothing but a sharp metallic odor.

Heisen pulled on his lower lip as he thought for a moment, and then clicked his fingers. “Microwaves.”

“Huh?” Amos looked at him as if he had just started to speak in another language.

“Microwaves. You know, like what you get in a microwave oven. I hear that the military is working on some sort of device to project the waves that’ll cook you from the inside out — leaves all the buildings intact.”

Amos’s expression didn’t soften, but his head tilted by about half a degree and one of his eyebrows went up by just as much. “Rays? Army fucking mi-cro-waves? Is that your deduction, detective?”

Heisen half shrugged. “Well, what’ve you got?” He didn’t really think that. He’d also read that the devices were as large as a good sized refrigerator — not exactly something you’d cart up to the first floor of some back-alley flea-pit, use it to fry a young woman, and then slip out the back door with it hidden under your coat.

As Amos turned to speak to a couple of uniformed policemen, Heisen stepped back to look down at the outline again, trying to imagine how the girl had been standing before she had fallen back or been pushed to the ground. One arm was up, appearing as if she had the arm across her face at the moment of death, perhaps trying to protect herself from whatever killed her.

Heisen tried to twist himself into the right shape. With his legs splayed, one arm out and the other over his face. He let his eyes move to a doorway on the other side of the apartment. She would have been facing that room. Whatever had killed her had come from there. The door was closed.

The shove to his back nearly threw him to the floor. He spun to see six enormous human beings, all dressed in plain black coveralls, push into the room — five men, one woman, all with faces hard enough to dent a steel door.

One calmly started giving orders, and immediately the group began to spread out, some waving strange devices, the rest joining the guys in hazmat sits and taking their reports from them. Heisen noticed all had powerful looking sidearms strapped to their thighs.

“Hey, who the fuck are you guys?” Amos charged over waving his arms, flanked by two young policemen. The senior policeman went to grab one of the men by the arm. The effect was immediate and alarming — like lightning, Amos’ hand was grabbed and twisted. The senior cop screamed, and the two policemen went for the guns. Before they could even get close to drawing them, five weapons were all aimed at the policemen. The young cops swallowed; behind them the technicians froze. The policemen’s eyes slide to Amos.

Heisen recognized the guns — all Heckler & Koch USP Tacticals. What caught his attention was the modified o-ring barrel with polygonal bore profile and taller sights for using sound suppressors. It also had a slide rail for laser sights — these were not your standard kit, even for the Kommando Spezialkräfte .

“Let him go,” the leader said softly.

Amos was released, and he rubbed his hand, looking like he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to walk away or go for his own gun. The leader, and the only one who hadn’t bothered pulling a weapon, touched something at his ear and spoke a few words. The cop’s phone began to ring.