Myke Cole - Shadow Ops - Control Point

“Scylla,” Britton cried. “Please. I kept my part of the bargain. Take this thing out of my chest.”

She looked at him, her eyes distant, distracted, as if noticing him for the first time. “Indubitably. But first, let a girl stretch her legs.”

The SASS collapsed. The chain-link fencing shuddered, the polyurethane coating bubbling and cracking off, the metal first rusting, then melting, then blowing apart. The wooden towers sagged, wet-looking, and finally collapsed into black sludge that pooled in stinking bogs. The schoolhouse collapsed with the wet sound of a smashed cantaloupe. The guards writhed, then stopped screaming, their flesh turning transparent, then black, then fluid, seeping into the ground to leave purple skeletons, which soon followed suit, dissipating into a runny yellowish slime the color of turned egg yolks. A few fell from the heights of the parapets, silent, rotting as they went, splattering on the hard ground in sulfurous puffs. Britton tried to count the dead. Had they said she’d killed twenty? There must have been fifty gone at a stroke. The Suppressor he’d kicked into unconsciousness was reduced to a puddle of human sludge. Not a guard was alive as far as he could see. Britton’s stomach spasmed in horror.

You did this, he said to himself. You let her go.

The Quonset huts, with the enrollees inside, so far as Britton could tell, were untouched.

Scylla strode toward Salamander, still whole and vomiting on the ground, clawing at his belly.

“I told you,” she crooned to him. “I told you, didn’t I? I told you that this was coming.”

“Oh, God,” the major managed, his feet kicking out. He vomited again, all blood this time.

“Scylla!” Britton shouted. “Stop it! Jesus! This wasn’t the deal! You were supposed to take the bomb out!”

“And I will,” Scylla said. “Just as soon as I’m finished here.

“I’m going to leave you alive,” she said to Salamander. “Do you know that? First, I’m going to mix up your guts so that no Healer can ever fix them quite right, then I’m going to waltz out of here right in front of your face, so you can see what comes of trying to hold your betters.”

Salamander’s mouth worked, he was trying to speak, but nothing came out save for the thick liquid, black now, leaking from the corner of his mouth.

Britton shuddered. You knew this would happen. This is your fault. His eyes swept the fetid pools that had once been people, his mind already stretching to accept their deaths on his conscience. The only thing he could do was put a stop to it. Did the rest of the FOB yet know what had happened here? Would they set off the ATTD? At this point, would it be more than he deserved? How many dead because of him? He couldn’t permit himself to think about it.

He gathered his magic and threw it out toward her, Suppressing the flow that flooded into the major. He felt for the string of magic, Scylla’s outward flowing current, where it connected to Major Salamander’s weakly stirring form, and directed his own current there, trying to override it. For a brief moment, he felt Scylla’s magic roll back, then her tide surged through his, gripping the major ever more tightly. Her head whipped toward Britton, and she snarled.

“I told you to wait until I was finished.”

“No way,” he said. “I can’t let you kill him.”

“You can’t stop me either, you idiot,” she said. “You don’t fucking get it, do you? I am not in the habit of sparing cockroaches, Oscar. Nor do I take kindly to those who interfere with my efforts at extermination.”

“If you kill him, I’ll never gate you out of here.”

Scylla threw back her head and laughed. “I don’t need you to gate me out of here, Oscar. I never did. All I needed was for you to get me free of the Suppression, and in that capacity, you have performed admirably.”

Britton gasped as his own gut clenched. He was overcome with nausea so intense that he felt his stomach was lurching inside him, kicking, expanding, struggling to escape. His throat hitched, trying to expel the burning bile that was rising within, but nothing would come out. He struggled to breathe, his knees going out from under him, and he fell on his side, the frozen mud blessedly cool against his cheek. A few feet away, Major Salamander was curled in the same posture, his eyes staring into Britton’s own, seeing nothing.

“I understand,” Scylla’s voice was untroubled, as if nothing had happened. “It’s Stockholm syndrome, or something similar. You’re identifying with your captors, sympathizing with them. You just need a moment to see reason. You just need a reminder of what you are.”

She reached toward him, clenching her fist. He hadn’t thought his stomach could get any worse, but he was wrong. His body locked, the nausea so powerful that it coursed through him until it felt as if the pores of his skin would vomit blood in an effort to vent the illness. He made no sound. Through his graying vision, he saw Major Salamander’s head slumped in the mud, a thin trickle of bloody drool sliding down his chin.

“Feel that? That’s your reminder. That’s what you are, what I am. It’s what’s in us both. Can you feel that?” She paused, seeming to wait for an answer, but Britton could barely hear her, suffused as he was by a nausea that far transcended pain.

“That’s power, Oscar. That’s your birthright. Now, you understand what it is. You think the SOC has taught you anything? That Dampener has castrated you, Oscar. You have no idea what you’re truly capable of. And now that you have a sample of it, can we kindly dispense with the moralizing and get the hell out of here?”

Just as quickly as her magic had gripped him, it was gone, and Britton sigh-retched his relief, shuddering with the taste of the fresh air, feeling his muscles slowly unclench. Major Salamander lay opposite him, perfectly still.

“We’re wasting time, Oscar.” All kindness was gone from Scylla’s voice. “Let’s go. I can still take the ATTD out once we’re quit of this place. Show me that you’ve broken through their efforts to brainwash you. All you have to do is move us.”

Britton reached out a trembling hand toward Salamander, brushed his nose with his fingertips. No reaction. The major was dead.

“Come, Oscar,” she said, kneeling, “let me help you up.”

Britton looked around him, leaning briefly into her hand under his upper arm. The SASS was completely laid waste. Only the Quonset huts where the enrollees lived stood untouched. Beyond them, the rotted wreckage was strewn around in the eerie silence, buildings, equipment, people.

Everywhere, puddles of vaguely man-shaped purple-and-black sludge. Those used to be people.

He shook off her arm. “Fuck off. Kill me if you want to. I’m not opening shit.” He was still too weak to open a gate or try to Suppress her again. He could do little more than rise shakily to his knees.

“Don’t be silly, Oscar,” she said, her voice matronly, chiding. “Even now they’re coming. What do you think they’ll do if they find you here?”

“Fucking kill me, I hope,” he said. Her magic had released its grip on him, but his stomach still writhed with horror and guilt. Escape was only her secondary motive, he thought. Revenge was the first. “I’m the idiot who freed you, who let you do this. Here’s hoping they kill you, too.”

Scylla threw back her head and laughed. “Pretty, but not too smart. They’re not going to kill me, Oscar. If they were going to kill me, don’t you think they would have done it already? They put a bit of explosive in your chest, and you quail and beg and do whatever they tell you. You never got it, did you Oscar? I explained it plain and simple. They’re not going to kill you unless they absolutely have to, unless you give them no choice at all. Only the tiniest fraction of the human population comes up Latent. We’re too precious to kill. The corpses I left behind are all lost in the cost-benefit analysis.”