Free Operation Wild Tarpan by Addison Gunn Page A

pushing him forward.
    One step.
    The thunder of his heart and blood in his veins.
    A second step.
    He still had the slashing blade on his thigh. It was useful, it had a can opener in the cross guard. But he also had an eight-inch long spike of a weapon in his right hand.
    The ‘Charismatic’—the label had an almost totemic, dehumanizing power, as if the man were a radio antenna instead of a living being—had moved between fire teams behind the lines for nearly an hour. Running like a messenger, in a stolen camouflaged shirt that hung loose over his bare chest, sweat visibly trickling down his back.
    The procedure was easy for Miller. They came up with the worst scenario they could, as if they’d been protecting him as bodyguards, and picked their moment to strike.
    Miller and du Trieux caught up with him between two buildings, leaping out like frenzied animals. Miller pushed him down from behind, fell to his knees with du Trieux, together stabbing down through the man’s back over and over and the screaming ...
    Then they were off and running again, panting for air as the Charismatic died behind them, attracting a mob.
    As they sprinted, a door opened in front of Miller and du Trieux. Doyle, Morland and Hsiung waited for them with open arms, and then the five of them hid like children, sweating and silent, in an apartment’s middle corridor while patrols swept the streets around them.
    Blood drooled from Miller’s sleeve. His combat uniform’s artificial fibres wicked it away as easily as any other stain, but he felt the blood even after it was gone.
    Miller accepted the labels—Infected, Charismatic—and held them as tight to his chest as he could, gazing at du Trieux in wonderment.
    At them all.
    They’d committed the ultimate taboo.
    They’d murdered, and there was no punishment. No anger, no recrimination. No one blamed one another, or hated each other for it. They simply waited for the Infected to move on from their search, no suggestion from any of them that what had happened was wrong.
    It was a strange kind of love between them now. One built from the knowledge that every one of them had become the antithesis of what’d they’d once been.
    Protectors had become assassins.
    When Miller’s hands shook, Doyle tore a scrap of paper from the sheet folded up in its plastic baggie, and handed it to him. Miller rolled it up and swallowed the drug-infused paper like a pill.
    As his hands steadied, the anxiety did, too.
    By nightfall they had assassinated dozens and called out other squads from the compound with the same orders.
    Word of their efforts had obviously reached the Infected masses. In the darkness of their kills, the other Infected would sometimes run screaming, abandoning the Charismatics they were guarding, even before they knew what they were running from.
    It was gratifying, in its way. But as the Charismatics fell, more Infected came looking for them, with bigger groups of guards surrounding them. Piece by bloody piece, Cobalt-2 and Shank, a hodge-podge squad of Rats members, Switchblade survivors and refugee volunteers with military backgrounds, worked their way up the chain. From corporals and street preachers to lieutenants and generals, from gangs of pipe-wielding thugs to full platoons.
    The night progressed. Their killing spree continued. In the deepest part of the evening, their murdering shook a convoy loose from the FOB. A group of Bravos ran helter-skelter, including the officers, trying to hold the siege together.
    It was partly luck, but killing everybody who worked for Major General Stockman had forced him into either abandoning his forces or pushing his influence on the troops directly. Stockman’s Bravo ran straight into a pair of mines, and Miller’s group slaughtered the guards who spilled out.
    Stockman himself, so overpowered by the pheromones clinging to them, spilled out into the street, squealing in terror like a child as he gulped at the air, as if hyperventilating could