Greig Beck - Dark Rising

The dry prairie air assaulted their senses and made them grimace after the Suburban’s air conditioning. Lorraine staggered and her face looked slick and waxy with shock.

As Frank went round to swing the car hood open, he spotted something lying on the road ahead. ‘What the hell’s that? That weren’t there before.’

‘Is it a deer?’ burbled Lorraine through a handful of bloodstained tissues.

The clouds were moving rapidly across the flat land all around, and as they slowly approached the mass, a long shaft of yellow sunshine illuminated the lump on the road. It looked meaty and slightly moist. Frank had to will himself to take a step forward; his animal instincts were screaming at him to get the hell out of there.

Lorraine held Frank’s arm and remained slightly behind his left shoulder as they neared the strange organic mess. ‘Oh my god, Frank, what is that?’ she whispered.

Slight tics and squeaks emanated from the lump, and as they got closer they realised that the sounds were caused by the mass thawing in the sun – a sparkling coat of frost dripped, twinkling, onto the road surface. Frank knitted his brows; the thing seemed to be sprouting up from the hard black tarmac. Not pushing up through it exactly, just… stuck.

‘This can’t be real,’ he said. ‘It’s some kind of sick joke.’

Half of the mass looked like a man wearing a white laboratory coat, but the other half was stretched out like elongated taffy. It looked like plastic that had been heated and then frozen solid again. The face was wet-raw, like the skin under a blister, and where the eyes should have been were just hollow, ragged sockets. The mouth was intact, and above it a blond toothbrush moustache twinkled with ice crystals. But what really made Frank’s stomach lurch was the pink organic matter that protruded between the bared teeth like a veined, deflated bag. It had to be the guy’s lungs – pulled or blown out.

Lorraine staggered to the side of the road and vomited. ‘Frank, I’m bleeding inside!’ she screamed. The mess of digested bread and donuts was streaked with blood.

Frank went to her, blinking rapidly to clear his stinging eyes. But it wasn’t tears running down his cheeks, it was blood. When Lorraine saw him, she started to cry.

Frank sat down heavily next to his wife. ‘I don’t feel well, Lainey.’

He looked over at the creature again and noticed something he hadn’t seen when he was standing above it. On the pocket of the lab coat was a small badge that was pulsing with a soft blue light.

United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) – Nebraska

Major Jack ‘Hammer’ Hammerson shouldered open the heavy panelled door of his office and headed straight for a hulking oak desk near the back wall. The impressive piece had once stood in front of the enormous set of double windows that dominated the room, but old warrior habits die hard and the Hammer never liked to have his back to a door or window. The desk, like most things the Hammer bumped up against, had to give way.

Major Hammerson was one of the hard men of the military. His face could never be called friendly; its deep clefts and creases hinted at too much outdoor living and quite a bit of blunt force trauma. You didn’t need to read the major’s background files to know he could incapacitate an enemy in less than seven seconds. Hammerson headed up the elite Hotzone All-Forces Warfare Commandos – HAWCs, for short. His uniform, except for rank, was insignia free. His only identification was a plastic card with a barcode and the lightning bolts and fisted gauntlet of the US Strategic Command.

Major Hammerson and his special unit had been reassigned to USSTRATCOM eighteen months ago, and it seemed a good fit. The United States Strategic Command was one of the ten unified combatant commands of the United States Department of Defense. They controlled the nuclear weapons assets of the US military and were a globally focused command charged with the missions of Space Operations, Integrated Missile Defence, Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Other Special Operations. The ‘Other Special Operations’ was where Hammer and his HAWCs came in.

Normally a blunt and brusque man, today the major was in a great mood. In just over three weeks, and for the first time in five years, he would be fly fishing in the land of the midnight sun. He was taking two weeks off to camp out in a little place he knew up high on the Kenai River bend in Alaska, where the tides from Cook Inlet washed in the biggest king salmon found anywhere in the world. Biting cold air that made the breath fog, and water so clear you could see the pebbles on the bottom at near any depth. Hammerson sighed and rubbed his large hands together. Just a few curious grizzlies for company and the odd bald eagle watching suspiciously from overhead. He knew that a record ninety-seven-pounder had been caught in those parts, and he reckoned there was a hundred-pounder with his name on it.

The Hammer was practising long, slow casting motions across his desk when the phone rang. He hit the receive button on the console and barked a curt ‘Hammerson’ while still jerking on an imaginary rod. When he heard the deep voice on the line, he sat forward immediately and picked up the handset.

‘Sir.’

He listened with the intensity he always gave the highest-level mission briefings. His face was like stone, the only movement his eyes narrowing slightly.

‘I agree, that size pulse could signify weap-onability,’ he said. ‘Yes, something a little more surgically precise would be best. We can be ready in twenty-four hours, sir.’

There was a click as the connection was severed. Hammerson held the phone in the air for a second before replacing it softly in its cradle. Time to reactivate the Arcadian.

Greig Beck

Dark Rising

WOMACK Army Medical Centre, Neuropsychological Unit – Fort Bragg

Captain Alex Hunter lay uncovered on a hospital cot in a room of steel, chrome and blinding white floor and wall tiles. His arms and legs were restrained by Kevlar cuffs attached by medium-gauge, pencil-thick wire cable to a special metal railing running around the outside of the cot frame. The room bristled with camera lenses, microphones and speakers.

Medical officer Lieutenant Alan Marshal stood behind the heat-tempered observation glass and looked at Hunter’s resting form. Although the soldier seemed to be sleeping peacefully, a storm was brewing behind his tranquil countenance. The tangle of two hundred and fifty-six electrodes and wires attached to his head showed that he was suffering both a migraine and an epileptic seizure simultaneously. Yet there was no external sign at all. Marshal shook his head. Alex Hunter was both medical miracle and mystery. Hunter was the US Army’s first super-enhanced warrior – part of a special military project codenamed Arcadian. The army wanted to know how this soldier could be so quick, so strong and heal so quickly. Alex Hunter was the project’s only success; all attempts to surgically or chemically reproduce his abilities had been an abject failure.

Marshal looked through the records he held in his hand. Several years ago on a clandestine military mission in northern Chechnya, Captain Hunter had been wounded by a single bullet to the head – he’d been as good as dead. His commanding officer, Major Jack Hammerson, had brought Hunter’s comatose body back home. There were two options: watch the young man wither away to a shrunken grey wraith as he lay trapped within his own body; or try something different… something experimental. And so Alex Hunter was entered in the Arcadian program. Two weeks later, Hunter opened his eyes, sat up, smiled and said he felt fine. He was more than fine; he was a new type of human being.