Free The Omicron Legion by Jon Land

weren’t armed, but had been killed in a similarly messy fashion. McCracken had the same feeling here that had struck him the day before when he and Johnny had come upon the bodies of the two Tupi boys. He backed out of the monitoring room ahead of Wareagle.
    In silence the two of them continued on their way. The narrow corridor gave way to a wider one. Four bodies in bloodied white lab coats lay crumpled at irregular intervals. Wareagle hesitated over the first; his face showed revulsion. Blaine could see it was a woman and got close enough to see something else.
    Her face had been torn apart.
    “Mother of God, Johnny! What the hell did this?”
    Wareagle gave no answer. He continued on to an open door from which a burning smell emanated. McCracken followed him inside what had been a conference room. Its chairs had been upended to clear a space in the middle of a floor now covered with embers and ruined tile. Against one wall a series of file cabinets lay tipped over and emptied. Obviously their former contents had fueled the flames. McCracken noticed the blackened edge of a page fragment wedged beneath one of the fallen chairs and retrieved it while Johnny surveyed the rest of the damage.
    “Anything, Blainey?” he asked. Blaine held the page up to the room’s single emergency light. “Too badly damaged to lift anything off. Except…Wait a minute…There is something. Not much, but…”
    He was able to trace four bolder letters at the edge of the page, all that had not been lost to the fire. O-M-I-C.
    “Mean anything to you, Blainey?” Wareagle asked from behind him.
    “Not a fucking thing, Indian.”
    They checked the room thoroughly, but could find no further fragments. Whoever had hit the complex had been thorough. Since the hit had come from the inside, though, the victims had quite obviously known their killers. He thought of Ben Norseman, wondering if for some reason this had been his work. This might not have been even Ben’s style, but there was no other logical explanation.
    “I can’t believe Ben Norseman and his men would do something like this, Indian.”
    “I don’t believe they did, Blainey. Outside the installation, their tracks indicated they returned here after the massacre, and they went out again.”
    McCracken put it together in his mind.” After whatever was responsible, a trail that took them to the area of the Tupi camp before we made our appearance yesterday.”
    “The camp was the Green Coats’ trap, Blainey, just as we suspected.”
    “Only whatever was behind this massacre didn’t go for it.”
    Wareagle’s stare grew distant. “The people here were killed from within,” he said.
    “By what, Johnny?”
    “Perhaps the installation can still tell us.”
    They proceeded on in their investigation of the facility, but everywhere the results were the same. Equipment smashed. Hallways, rooms, and labs littered with bodies. The killing had been carried out with brutal efficiency, no one spared, no mercy given.
    Wareagle looked to the walls as if they might provide some explanation. “The dead feeling present in the forest is strongest in the steps we have followed. It started here and spread outward.”
    “Then there’s something we can be sure of, Johnny. To take all these people out so quickly and systematically, there had to be more than one of these Spirits of the Dead, whatever they turn out to be.” His eyes bulged in realization. “Meanwhile, Norseman must still be after them. Seven Green Berets armed to the teeth who eat nails for breakfast.” McCracken looked at his Remington. “Better shape than we’re in.”
    “This complex would have been in better shape, too.”
    Close scrutiny of a rear wall revealed to McCracken a hidden door behind which were stairs descending into the bowels of the complex. The air instantly felt chillier, and Blaine imagined a breeze sifting by him as he and Wareagle headed down. The lighting here was brighter, and the first door on the