James Moore - SNAFU - Hunters

Flynn quirked an eyebrow at Matt. “Dibs for fun on the pointy one, New Guy.” His Irish mumble would have been incomprehensible if not for a decade’s friendship, which made the ‘New Guy’ treatment all the more absurd. Their units had fought together in overseas operations and they’d kept in touch in the years since. That Flynn had signed up for ICAP two years before Matt didn’t erase that history, so shouldn’t change their friendship.

Matt glanced from Flynn to the photo jacked from a nightclub security camera, splayed large across the white wall that served as a screen. The largest of the four bonks had augmented himself beyond anything Matt had seen before. At least ten feet tall with hands the size of Christmas hams, he loomed over the scene behind giant sunglasses, massive arms crossed over his naked chest. In lieu of hair, steel studs protruded from the top of his skull in a regular grid. Metal spikes protruded from his forearms, ending in cruel barbs sharpened to a razor sheen.

Flynn stroked his chin with an air of too much theater. “He’s prettier than me. I can’t let that stand.”

Turning to Jeff, Matt tapped the picture. “How has he not bonked out already? Nobody can tolerate that level of Augs.” Bonks had gotten their nickname – which Conor found particularly funny – from the inevitable psychosis that overtook chronic Jade users, the superhuman threat that ICAP had been founded to confront. The more you took, the bigger and badder you got, until the whispers drove you into a killing frenzy you never come out of.

And Jade is addictive, with a recidivism rate over ninety-nine percent.

Psychotics are bad. Psychotics that can shrug off bullets and throw cars are rather worse. The Russian military wouldn’t be a threat for at least a generation.

And now it’s a street drug.

Hurya al-Azwar answered with a roll of her pale-blue eyes. “It’s a matter of time, Rowley. You know it, I know it, he has to know it. Which just makes him that much more dangerous.” A scar ran from her left temple back into her short blonde hair. It, and the missing quarter-inch off the top of her ear, spoke of a life on the streets of Detroit before two tours as a Marine in the sand box, before Jade and augmentation and ICAP, before the regenerates that would heal any damage short of death without mark or scar and in seconds or minutes instead of months.

Five years his senior in ICAP, she’d seen dozens of her colleagues bonk out, had to put far too many of them down, and her first-generation regenerates put her at a higher risk than any of them. Augmentation protocols had improved as scientific understanding increased, but everyone in the room ran the risk of psychotic, ravening insanity. Everyone but their boss.

Jeff’s constipated grimace pulled them away from the picture. “Look, we’ve got four heavily-augmented threats and at least sixteen who might be normals, or might just not be showing. I’m bringing in Platt and Karle,” he raised his voice over their groans, “and giving Karle operational discretion on this one.”

“Why do you hate us?” Flynn asked.

Jeff ran his tongue over his teeth. “Karle’s got a better success rate than any of you. I want you all back alive, and there’s something about this,” he waved his hand at the scattered pictures, “I don’t like at all.”

Washington sighed without looking up. “Feel the love, man.”

Matt eyed the sunglasses in Flynn’s proffered hand and shook his head. “Those make me look like a cop.”

“You are a cop. Were a cop. Pretending to be a cop. Whatever you did in Tennessee.”

“No need to advertise it.”

“Eat your bones.” Flynn tossed the shades into the back seat and fastened his seatbelt, then ran his hands over the fake leather dash above the late-model Impala’s glove box. “Brilliant. These American-made autos really spice up the sex life, Rowley. We’ll fit right in.”

At two hundred and forty pounds and one percent body fat, Conor Flynn looked every bit the cop, or ex-military, as Matt. His skin-tight gray t-shirt did nothing to dispel the effect, and his square sunglasses screamed, ‘I am a Government Agent. Do not speak to or trust me.’

Flynn raised an eyebrow at the naked appraisal. “What?”

Matt just shook his head and put the car into gear.

They cruised through the suburbs, past an endless stream of one-story ranches and dingy, sun-faded plastic swimming pools. The smells of the city filtered through the air conditioning, street food and salt water and sweat and garbage rotting under the blazing summer sun. Matt considered grabbing the shades from the back seat, but wouldn’t give Flynn the satisfaction. Chain link replaced white pickets, and vinyl siding blurred into graffiti on decaying brick.

They pulled up to a stoplight and idled next to a cluster of young men, baggy street clothes and wary brown faces sweltering in the midday heat. This far south it took a special kind of stupid to wear pants if you didn’t have to, which might explain why half of them hung on their thighs or even lower. The pale yellow bandanas around foreheads, necks, wrists, or ankles identified them as Camino Reals. Heroin dealers and thieves, they lay outside ICAP’s jurisdiction even with their new domestic operations protocols.

Flynn held a hundred-dollar bill up with two fingers, but no one approached the car, their lack of attention as conspicuous as staring.

“Oy, boys.” Flynn waved the folded bill in the air. “I could use some information.” They glowered at the ground, at the sky, the telephone poles, anywhere but at the car. “Brilliant, lads. Thanks for nothing.” The light turned green and Matt pulled away, eyes on the mirrors, watching them watch him with wary eyes.

“No love from the South-Side Banana Hammocks.” Flynn chuckled and slipped the money back into his pocket. “Told you we look like cops.”

“If you’re so worried about it, why are we the ones going?”

“I didn’t say I was worried. It’s just going to be hard to pick a fight if they know we’re the law.”

“We’re not here to pick–”

Babbling whispers slithered through his mind, a mad cacophony of thoughts bent on murder and pain, the worst side effect of Gerstner Augmentation. Matt took the warning from the Late-Second Precognition but ignored the lurching desire to tear Flynn’s face from his skull and stuff it into his mouth. Jerking the wheel, he hit the brakes then the gas to bring them around ninety degrees, then floored it before the jeeps rounded the corner behind the run-down convenience mart.

Flynn laughed and reached down, but stopped when Matt shook his head.

“You won’t need the pig-sticker, they’re just running us off.” He down-shifted to pick up speed, then jammed the car into higher gear, gas pedal to the floor. The motor whined, a cicada with an internal-combustion mating call.

Flynn took his hand off the hilt of his katana, leaving it on the floor between the seats. The titanium and carbon nanofiber blade had yet to see use in combat, but Matt had watched Flynn dice up a car in the practice arena without breaking a sweat. Why an Irishman fought with a katana Matt would never understand.

Flynn jerked his thumb toward the back. “You want me to get the trunk?”

Matt shook his head. The REC-7 carbine and Auto-Assault 12 combat shotgun could stay where they were, in the trunk under lock and key. If worse came to worse he had his personal Glock 9mm in the glove box. But it wouldn’t. They’d been made as cops in a no-go zone, but hadn’t done anything to justify a murder, even from a gang as vicious as the Camino Reals.

They blew through two red lights, the jeeps swerving and honking behind, but as they passed from one turf to the next the pursuit broke off and didn’t return.