Hollow Read online

  “Why would I feel his hand?” Ash asked, but the possibility immediately moved into the center of her mind and pushed everything else aside. What would he feel like? The world started to dim… they’d been walking too long. She leaned against the wall, letting her head droop.

  “Come on, Ash, we’re almost there.” The Cleric pushed through the metal door, holding it open for her as she shambled through it and into the familiar mission planning room.

  ***

  Crow pushed the door of his apartment open and flipped on the lights.

  “Congratulations, Captain!” The Cleric said with an approximation of cheer. He stood in the flickering light on the other side of Crow’s scarred dining room table, beaming brightly.

  Crow rolled his eyes. “What’s the mission?”

  “The mode is assault, competitive. You’ll get Shadow and Tink, your competitors will be Delta, FatalError and HoldFire. Full second-tier support will be available: You’ll have artillery and a few armed drones, but it will largely be your responsibility to make a hole in their air defenses so that we can bring in a CAP. Deployment will be on foot.”

  The bursts of hesitant darkness decreased in frequency as the lights slowly warmed up, finally settling into a wavering pattern of harsh dimness that was unfortunately still too bright to hide the apartment’s squalor, or the increasing panic on Crow’s face. “What happened to Ash?”

  “She is fine, Captain.” The Cleric spread his hands in a gesture of conciliation, “She just has a different role to play in this mission.”

  “What role?” Crow asked, his panic more circling patiently than retreating.

  “She is an objective.”

  “The objective? How can a player be the objective?”

  “She is an objective, Captain.” The Cleric held up a hand to quiet Crow’s questions and continued, “The primary objective is the assassination of a high-level government official. Secondary objectives are the general destruction of the installation and personnel. The team that kills the primary will receive a 3x multiplier. If anyone pulls down the building, that’s a 2x multiplier, and if you can penetrate into the underground labs and destroy them, that’s also a 2x multiplier. Standard teamwork multipliers apply… 1.5x for each team. ”

  Crow cocked his head. “Will the other teams also be down a man?”

  “No, captain.”

  “Well at least they’ll have a chance to come out on top, then. What’s Ash’s mission?”

  “Her objectives are the same as yours, but she will begin the match inside the installation, restrained and unarmed.”

  “Ah.” Crow said, smiling, “will there be anything for us to do, or are we just going to get to watch her work?”

  “Unlikely, Captain.” The Cleric said, oblivious to the joke, like always, “I’m sure she will acquit herself admirably, as always, but there is one more mission parameter, one you will not at first like.”

  Crow gave him a dubious look, his fear circling in a bit closer, “And what is that?”

  “Ash will be returning from this mission, Captain. She will have a greater chance of safely returning than anyone on any previous mission.”

  “And why would I not like that?”

  “She will be returning from this mission in a slightly different fashion.”

  “And what fashion will that be?”

  “She will return only if she is killed in the Hallow. If the hostiles don’t terminate her, that job will fall to the four assault teams, once the primary and secondary objectives have been met.”

  Crow actually saw stars. Not like the blunt force trauma to the head stars he’d experienced twice in the Hallow … stars like the universe surrounding him: cold, distant, and wholly uncaring. In that hollow interstellar blackness, there was a deeper, darker hole next to him in the shape of Ash, the ghost of her absence.

  “…that you weren’t going to like it.” The Cleric was saying, “But this is a good thing for you and Ash… for Phoenix…”

  “Good? How is this good for anyone? She’s my best player—she’s your best player by far!”

  “This mission is different, Captain…”

  “What if we can complete the objectives and bring her back to the womb…”

  “The womb interface that she used to enter the Hallow has been destroyed, she will not be able to egress with the team…”

  “That makes no sense… why can’t…”

  “Captain.” The Cleric’s voice was stern, “Listen to me. Have you noticed that Ash has been slipping away?”

  That closed Crow’s mouth.

  “From you, from Phoenix, from the League.”

  Crow nodded.

  “This mission was specifically designed to bring her back. At the end of this mission, when she has passed through the veil of death in the Hallow, when she sees what it is like without her team, without you. She will return to us, to all of us—she will return to you.”

  “But, the shock of death in the Hallow…”

  “Not this time, Captain. This time her only safe way back is death in the Hallow. It’s the only way.”

  “Captain,” the Cleric said almost gently, “as you said, she is our best operator, not just in Chicago, but in the entire league.”

  A small flash of hope. Crow nodded.

  “What wouldn’t we do to keep our best operator with us, to bring her back if she strayed? What wouldn’t you do?”

  “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do.”

  “Then complete this mission, Captain. After this mission, everything will be different. You will see.”

  Crow nodded again, sitting a bit straighter in his chair. “How hard is the site?”

  “Unsurveyed.” The Cleric gestured for Crow to sit, “Right now we just have a general location. Not urban… it looks like it’s in the forest. We can’t task satellites there and our soft probes were ineffective. You can count on maximum resistance, maximum hardening of the facility and likely between fifteen and fifty lightly armed tier-one security. They’ll have ready access to light arms including shotguns, submachine guns, assault rifles, possibly grenade launchers.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem. Do they have a ready-response force?”

  “Likely. Best estimate is not more than fifty onsite… arms and armor shouldn’t be much heavier than a SWAT team.”

  “We hitting CIA headquarters?”

  “OSI.”

  “Thought they were merged with the Directorate of Science and Technology in 1963.”

  “It is a game, Captain.”

  “Whoa!” Crow said, stunned, “Now that’s new! Since when is a League Mission just a game!?”

  The cleric paused, “It’s a game.” He said, with what Crow clearly read as an extemporaneously constructed lie, “Meaning that the OSI’s merger with DS&T was a ruse.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Yes,” the Cleric pronounced, “it was a game to hide the agency’s darker purposes.”

  “Ya huh, gotcha.” Crow said, not wanting to debate the meaning of words like “is” with a machine. He shuffled to the table and eased his unresponsive body into a chair across from where the Cleric stood.

  “How much ordinance are we allowed?”

  “Whatever you can hump in, Captain. It’s likely going to be a hike.”

  ***

  Chicago, 2020

  Jackie took a deep steadying breath as she took the final two steps to the end of the block. Without slowing, she blew out the breath and turned right, rounding the corner and onto the street where Jo had leapt from the taxi. At the other end of the block ahead was the dual entrance to the underground blue line rail station where Jo had fled only moments before. The brown panel van that had pursued them was now parked across the street about half way between Jackie and the entrance to the blue line station. Jackie didn’t allow herself to look directly at the van, but in her peripheral vision, she could see the dark silhouette of the driver waiting with his hands on the wheel. The lights were off; the en
gine was running.

  She continued her brisk, purposeful walk down the sidewalk, keeping her chin tucked and her eyes mostly looking at the ground a few paces in front of her. Hard day at work, she told herself, got to get to that big date. As she walked, she willed the stress from her face, the wary tension from her posture. I belong here, I am part of the scenery, I’m not wary, don’t look at me twice, I blend in, I belong here. She let the chant fill her mind like a primitive prayer.

  Step after quick step, she had to force her mind away from what lay ahead—or at least from her fears of what lay ahead. She expected each step to be interrupted by a bullet from the brown van or the train station entrance. She didn’t know this team’s rules of engagement and wasn’t at all sure that appearing to be an uninvolved civilian would dissuade them from killing her. She also didn’t know how perceptive these dragons might be. Maybe the rifle on its sling under her long coat wasn’t as concealed as she hoped, maybe they had her face from the back seat of the cab. Maybe they had detailed files on her.

  Teams like the one she now stalked were the bogeymen of stories told to Special Forces teams the world over to convince them to train harder. She wasn’t sure that they weren’t bionic, or psychic—she couldn’t rule out vampires. Point was, she was afraid, and though hard to admit, there it was: not professional everyday afraid, not wary afraid—little girl walking home in a strange urban neighborhood long after dark afraid.

  Though she’d spent nearly twenty years now in “the life”, from Army Intelligence, to FBI field agent to her current Twilight Zone job as an operative for a supposedly nonexistent government agency—these dragon teams were the big, scary unknown.

  But, big scary unknown be damned. Ahead lay her duty, and she’d always known she wasn’t going to cough herself to death in a retirement home.

  Unless maybe the retirement home was under attack with nerve gas and she was out of bullets… wow, adrenaline really plays with the mind, she thought with a tight grin, but she noticed that her stride was more natural, her face more alive and less pinched than it had been with the fear chant.

  Ahead lay her duty and she was going to do every bit of it. Yet there was something else pulling her forward, she realized with a warm flush of emotion. Jo was alone and pursued by a team of killers. Sure, Jo had scared Jackie, probably more than this band of Dragons, actually. Jo had scared her, but that was long past. That was before Jackie had seen her cry in that stupid movie, before Jo had made her laugh for the thousandth time with her naïve mistakes and perverse optimism… it was before Jackie had come to know her, before she had become her friend.

  If there was one thing Jackie knew for sure, it was that she’d never outlive a friend on purpose.

  Across the street, the brown van’s lights came on and she heard the transmission thunk into gear. She hazarded a quick glance and saw the driver apparently shouting into the air, probably through a headpiece to his distant masters or maybe the rest of his team. She could hear the thin staccato of his voice muffled through the glass and across the distance. He cranked the wheel, stomped on the accelerator and the truck screeched away from the curb. For a blinding moment, the van’s headlights flashed across Jackie on the sidewalk and she had the premonition that she’d been made and was about to die. Before her mind was able to thaw enough to tell her that if she’d been made she’d never have known as the bullet that disassembled her head wouldn’t have been perceived by her, except possibly later from heaven or hell. The van’s sudden movement meant something else, something important had changed, but Jackie didn’t yet know what.

  The truck with the still-shouting driver rocketed past her under full acceleration as two dragons burst from the entrance to the blue line station, vaulting easily over the blue painted handrail from the stairwell. Watching them move was hypnotic, like watching a cheetah run or a hawk diving for its prey. Their movements were constructed of a graceful, easy efficiency. To see them in motion was to understand their purpose, to understand the true nature of the world. They were made to rend and tear, red in tooth and claw—they were made to kill.

  Maybe it was the fear that seemed to bloom from her heart, filling her body with a chill electricity that numbed her fingers and narrowed her vision. Maybe it was the terrible perspective of the prey as the two alpha predators ran with grace and power directly at Jackie, but a memory seemed to spurt from her mind, strobing across her perceptions, then fleeing away into the air. It was a few lines from a poem she’d studied in college—Tennyson, she thought:

  Who trusted God was love indeed

  And love Creation's final law

  Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw

  With ravine, shriek'd against his creed

  Great, Jackie thought, now these dragons have scared me past little girl and into coffeehouse beatnik. Awesome. In the nerf tornado of pre-death terror, Jackie imagined an angel in a beret asking her “How deep were you when you died, sister?” and it gave her an odd kind of comfort.

  The dragon in front continued his sprint, running flat out toward Jackie, submachine gun swinging on its sling, fists pumping, head down. The second dragon had his weapon in his hands, running fast, but somehow less committed to the sprint than his companion. He dropped to a quick jog, then turned around, continuing his jog backward, body coiled around his SMG. The weapon coughed out two-round bursts every second or two with a sound somewhere between a bullwhip and a tree trunk splintering. The quick, controlled bursts were directed toward the stairwell in what Jackie recognized as suppressing fire. He was trying to keep whatever was behind them pinned down in the stairwell while they killed Jackie… wait. Wait! The lead dragon wasn’t running directly at her, he was running for the van! With the strangest mental inversion, the entire meaning of the situation changed. These two dragons weren’t the predators, they were the prey. Jackie was not the prey, she was the dry-voiced British documentarian who narrated the scene from behind the camera.

  Jackie stepped to the storefront at the edge of the sidewalk, trying to give the running dragons as much room as possible, trying to look as small and inconspicuous as possible.

  Then there was a sharp ping-slap that drew her eyes from the sprinting dragon back to the one who was shooting at the subway entrance. She was just in time to see him fall; his helmet tumbling across the street. The dragon fell without a twitch, as if the bullet that went through his head had snatched his ghost away. The sprinting soldier didn’t look back, he just poured on the speed, passing Jackie in the metronomic clomp of boots and controlled breath. He was really moving too, he was going to catch the van in a few more seconds.

  Jackie pressed herself farther back into the wall, not wanting to be caught between the dragon and whatever was coming. Her frantic mind had little time to think, which was great because if a team of dragons spooked her, she didn’t even want to think about what might spook them. Almost subconsciously, she raised her hands into the universal sign of surrender and started to slide with her back against the storefront toward the recessed entranceway a few feet back. Her hastily concocted plan was to not appear in any way bullet-worthy to whatever was about to exit the train station and to get out of his/her/its line of fire ASAP.

  The sprinting dragon cut between two parked cars, then angled directly toward the retreating panel van, sprinting diagonally across the street. With another ping-snap, the dragon’s head disassembled and he tumbled to the street like a discarded rag doll, finally skidding to a stop when his considerable inertia had all been absorbed by the concrete. Since Jackie had been looking directly at him as it happened, she realized the virtuosity of the shots that had taken the pair of dragons down. It was a two-round burst: the first round struck the helmet, knocking it partially up and the dragon’s head slightly forward, enough for the second bullet to enter under the lip of the helmet, in this case striking the fleeing dragon at the base of the skull.

  Jackie’s eyes returned to the entrance to the train station, where a tall figure sprinted, Kriss K-
20 submachine gun coming down from shooting position to ready position. Jackie’s blood ran cold as she realized he’d made that shot from fifty yards while running flat out.

  The man wore no armor, instead wearing the uniformly black shoes, pants, shirt and long coat with contrasting white collar of a priest. Jackie blinked twice and barely avoided the wasted effort of rubbing her eyes in disbelief. She made a conscious effort to not make the observation that she now knew what had put the fear of God into the dragons, but failed.

  The priest carried two weapons, in addition to the K-20 in his hands, he had another on a single-point harness that was slung over his jacket, indicating that he’d slung it recently and in haste, or it would likely have been slung beneath the jacket as Jackie’s was. Then she realized that both of these guns were the same model that the two dead dragons had carried and something else clicked. He was killing the last of this team with weapons likely taken from their teammates, which meant that he’d likely started this conflict unarmed or at least with much lighter weapons.

  With a move like most men might have used to jump to the side and up onto a curb during an urban jog, the stranger leapt to the roof of a sedan at the side of the street and began firing. In less than two seconds, he unleashed three 2-round bursts at the fleeing van. He then jumped down and to the street on the other side of the car and leaned into the weapon, emptying the magazine in a single long burp. Down the block, sparks flew from the back right corner of the retreating van, but the .45 caliber rounds weren’t capable of doing more than dimpling the van’s armored skin.

  The stranger dropped the empty submachine gun to the street, readied the gun that was hanging on the sling, and emptied it in one long burst. Jackie was again impressed as it appeared that all the full-auto rounds impacted the fleeing van’s right rear quarter in a pattern no wider than a dinner plate.

  Jackie then realized three things essentially at once: First, that the stranger could not see her: the car he’d just dismounted was now between them and mostly hiding Jackie from his view. Second, that she had just seen this stranger murder two people (or robots, or vampires—she still had no idea) and was unlikely to let any witnesses live to tell the tale. And third, she realized that the panel van was getting away.