Mutant Chronicles Read online

  Mitch and Steiner looked each other in the eye, then dropped their arms at the same time. A silent agreement had passed between them. They might be enemies, but they were professionals too. They could put their animosity aside for the moment to deal with this new threat.

  Afterward, of course, all bets were off, but for the moment they would work as a team.

  Mitch stuffed his knife back in its sheath with one hand as he reached for his pistol with the other. He had it clear and pointed out toward the mists in a split second.

  It heartened Mitch to see that Nathan, El Jesus, and the two other Bauhaus troopers had all come to the same conclusion as Steiner and he. That proved the barest comfort, though, against the unknown threat coming at them from the all-consuming mists.

  Something moved in the shadows next to Nathan, and Mitch opened fire. The others did the same. Some fired at the elusive figure near Nathan, and others blasted away at ghosts of their own.

  Mitch couldn’t make out what he’d been shooting at, but he knew there was more than one. Dark, twisted shadows loped along the edges of the mist, barely out of sight. He felt like a sailor dumped into a dark and shark-infested sea, struggling to fend off the unseen predators, never knowing from which direction they might strike next.

  He fired at each shadow he saw, either single shots or controlled bursts, but nothing out there complained about the results. A few of the bullets ricocheted off something, and others blew back splatters of mud from where they smacked into the trench’s floor or walls.

  The sound of six guns blasting away at the mists rang in Mitch’s ears, and he cursed the noise. They might have had to deal with only a few of their foes at the moment, but if there were any others out there on the battlefield, the racket would be sure to bring them running.

  Somewhere in the mists, he heard a radio operator calling for evacuation. The man’s voice ended in a wet gurgle before he could finish.

  El Jesus’s shotgun blasted away holes in the mist, actually blowing the smoke back for precious moments, opening small windows into it. They closed nearly as fast as they formed, but they proved at least that the world didn’t end at the limits of the mists.

  Mitch wondered if this was what hell was like.

  He spied something moving fast past one of the gaps El Jesus had blasted open. Its skin was the color of a fresh corpse: pale, slick with rain, and bereft of the warmth of blood.

  Another blast sounded, and Mitch spotted a pair of burning red eyes staring back at him. He swung his pistol about and fired two quick shots at it, but the thing—whatever it was—had already disappeared.

  The mists closed in harder until Mitch could barely see a dozen feet away. Something long and sharp—another boneblade perhaps—sliced out of the glowing white mists and opened up El Jesus’s thigh. Mitch shot at where a man’s body should have been behind the blade, but the blade disappeared into the mists again.

  The big man grunted against the pain, shoving it away, and kept firing. Blood ran down his leg but did not spurt. He would live, Mitch knew, if that was the worst that happened to him this day.

  The odds on that, though, didn’t look good.

  A trooper standing near Mitch—not Steiner, who’d disappeared, it seemed—fell apart in a bloody burst as a blade reached out and sliced him lengthwise in two. Lifeblood geysered from the man’s remains as the pieces of him slid into the muck.

  Mitch opened up with his pistol, emptying it into the area from which the man had been slaughtered.

  “I’m out!” He dropped the useless weapon. He then spied a trench sword lying in the mud, still grasped in a severed hand, and snatched it up, prying the dead fingers from its grip.

  “Ah!” El Jesus was trying to move, and the pain nearly stopped him dead. “My fucking leg! My ankle!”

  As Mitch brought up the long, vicious blade, he spied a shadow rushing straight for him. Desperate not to end up like the last man who’d held the sword, he put all his weight into his swing and sliced straight at his attacker.

  The blade connected with something solid, and Mitch felt the impact jar his arms to his shoulders. The shadow moved away silently, even as something solid slapped to the ground before him.

  Mitch looked down and saw the end of a once-human arm lying at his feet. He picked it up and looked at it. Where the fingers should have been, a long, serrated blade of bone jutted out of the wrist, as if the forearm had somehow mutated into a new, savage form. Instead of blood, a viscous black fluid oozed from the open stump.

  Mitch bit back the vomit that rose in his throat and glanced around. The shadows had stopped circling them for the moment, perhaps because the soldiers had finally hurt one of them. Or maybe they were readying a final assault.

  Assessing the situation, Mitch glanced about and saw only Nathan, El Jesus, and himself. Steiner and his men had disappeared, either dead or fled. He had no inclination to go looking for them.

  We’re fucked.

  El Jesus nudged him and pointed with his shotgun toward the south again. At least it seemed like that direction. In the mist, still in the middle of a fight, it was impossible to tell how badly they might have been turned around.

  A pair of burning eyes stared at them from the edge of the smoke. Shadows massed behind the hidden creature, joining and leaving it at random.

  This was it, Mitch knew. Within the next few moments, the creatures—whatever they were—would attack, and it would be all over.

  El Jesus raised his shotgun. He couldn’t have had much ammo left in it, Mitch knew. Nor could Nathan, who still bore a smoking pistol in his fist.

  Mitch held the stolen sword before him like a talisman to ward off evil spirits. No matter when the attack came, or how, he vowed to take as many of the monstrous bastards with him as he could.

  Then a blazing light washed down on the three soldiers from above. With the gunfire still ringing in his ears, Mitch hadn’t heard the transport moving in. It scudded toward them, then hovered for a moment as the light played on the three soldiers.

  The shadows retreated before the light, scurrying back into the sheltering mists before Mitch could get a better look at them. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  Now that he could hear the airship’s engine, Mitch recognized it as belonging to a Capitol troop transport. It had probably come in from the rear echelon to see what had gone so terribly wrong and maybe to pick up any survivors.

  The airship moved off then, the light trailing back toward them for as long as it could. Soon, though, it was gone.

  Nathan slapped Mitch and El Jesus on their backs, shouting at them as the chopper moved off. They needed to get to the landing zone fast. “LZ!” he said in their ears. “Get to the LZ!”

  Mitch glanced over at El Jesus’s leg. The big man grimaced at him through gritted teeth and nodded that he’d be all right. Mitch grabbed him by the shoulder, and with Nathan on their heels, they sprinted for the landing zone.

  7

  Mitch got several steps ahead of El Jesus before he realized the big man was lagging behind. Without a word, he reached back and pulled the corporal’s arm over his shoulders, doing what he could to help support the man’s weight on the side of his wounded leg.

  Nathan stumbled up to try to help, but Mitch waved him off. The captain was already weak from the bullet that had creased his skull earlier, and Mitch knew he couldn’t carry both him and El Jesus at once. If Nathan managed to keep his own legs moving, that would be enough.

  Mitch remembered the last time something like this had happened to him. Then it had been Nathan carrying him through the jungles of Venus. They’d been part of an operation to free up a Capitol mining facility that Bauhaus claimed had been built on their soil.

  Of course, Bauhaus had unilaterally declared itself in sole control of the entire planet, so any facilities owned by someone else constituted trespassing in its view. The Capitol President wasn’t about to put up with that, so he’d sent in a brigade of the Capitol Ground Forces to make his
point.

  Mitch and Nathan had been unfortunate enough to be called on to serve in that action. It had been one of the first times they’d been on a real battlefield, and Mitch remembered how nervous they’d both been.

  “You’re just eager to flex those captain’s bars,” Mitch had said, ribbing his friend.

  Nathan had ignored him. The two of them had been involved in a terrible argument when they’d gotten the orders to ship out. Despite the vows the two friends had made to each other, it had been over a girl. A woman, really, but not just any woman.

  Adelaide.

  Mitch had loved her from the moment he’d seen her, and Nathan had too. Both of them claimed to have seen her first, but that hadn’t mattered. She’d seen Mitch first and fallen just as hard.

  For a long time, the three of them had been inseparable, a trio of pals united by their mutual adoration. In the end, though, Addy had chosen Mitch as the one to take to her bed.

  The orders to go to Venus had pulled Mitch from that precious place, a fact for which he knew he would never forgive his corporation. Weeks later, he and Nathan had found themselves part of the brigade that formed a protective circle around that damned hole in the ground the President treasured so much.

  It wasn’t as if the mine had all that much to offer. It was just a mine, a thousand miles from the Bauhaus metropolis of Heimburg. There were plenty of other places to put a damned mine, even on Mars, where Capitol’s people belonged.

  But the Board of Directors had decided to take a stand against Bauhaus’s hostile takeover, and they’d chosen to plant their proxies here.

  “What the fuck are we doing here?” Nate had asked as he hauled Mitch out of the jungle. “We’re a couple of smart, handsome guys. We could have made something of ourselves in the business corps.”

  “You can’t add,” Mitch had said through gritted teeth, trying to shove aside the pain that stabbed through his side where the bullet had passed through. Later, he’d find that it had missed any essential organs and that he’d heal fine, but at that moment he’d wondered if he’d seen his last Martian sunset with Addy at his side.

  “And you have authority issues.”

  “Says who?” The blood seeping out of Mitch’s side had started to run into his boot.

  “It’s in your record.”

  “You’ve seen my record?”

  “It’s not?”

  Mitch smirked through the pain. “What’s your point?”

  Nathan grunted as he shouldered Mitch over a rotten log that had fallen across their path. “We’d never survive in the business world.”

  Mitch thought of the three other soldiers they’d lost while out on patrol, not to mention the injury done to his side. “We’re not doing so well in the military, pal.”

  He heard a Hussar reconnaissance plane chug along overhead, trying to spot them through the dense canopy. For an instant, Mitch thought of trying to bring it down with his assault rifle, but the moment of madness passed. He laughed at himself, and pain lanced through his side, almost causing him to tumble to the ground.

  “You should go on without me,” Mitch said to Nathan. “I’m only slowing you down.”

  “And what would Addy say to that?” Nathan said. “I could never go back to Mars again.”

  “We’ll both get killed.”

  Nathan smiled at his friend. “Leaving together or not at all, so quit your whining and move your ass.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mitch knew that Nathan had every reason to leave him there in the jungle to die. Just before they’d left Mars, the man had confessed his love to Addy. She’d told Mitch, of course, and he and Nate had fought about it on the entire long trip to Venus. By the time they had touched down outside the mine, their CO, Colonel Santino, had ordered them to shut the hell up and get along.

  Mitch hadn’t been able to believe that Nathan could betray him like that, to go after his best friend’s woman. Addy was something special, sure, but not worth destroying a friendship over. Apparently Nathan didn’t agree with that exactly.

  Now, all Nathan had to do was let Mitch go and save himself. No one would have blamed him. Hell, Mitch had practically begged him to do it. Then he would have had Addy all to himself.

  But Nathan would have none of it. As far as Mitch could tell, the thought of abandoning his friend had never crossed the man’s mind. It was one thing, it seemed, to steal a man’s reason for living and another entirely to let him die.

  After a harrowing hour ducking the Bauhaus net of air and ground patrols, the two finally made it to the mine’s gate. Once they got there, though, they found the tall, steel doors locked to them.

  “You can’t come in,” Santino said, hollering down at them from the top of the gates. “We can’t risk letting the Cogs drive a tank in through the door while it’s open.”

  “So throw down a rope!” Mitch said.

  The CO just shook his head.

  “You set us up, you cheap fuck!”

  Santino smiled. “Just following orders, boys. The Board of Directors needs an intercorporate incident here to strengthen its claims before the Cartel arbitrators. You are that incident.”

  While Santino was still chuckling, Mitch pulled out his pistol and, in one clean move, blew off the man’s head. The corpse came tumbling over the top of the gate and crashed to the ground in a bloody tangle of broken limbs.

  The guards atop the gate trained their weapons on Mitch and Nate. “Thanks, pal,” Nathan said. “You just got us killed.”

  Mitch tossed his pistol to Nathan and let himself slump to the ground.

  “I’m not going to shoot you, Mitch,” Nathan said.

  “Arrest me,” Mitch said.

  Nathan froze at the suggestion. “What?”

  “Arrest me. Press charges. I just killed a superior officer.”

  “That’s the death penalty.”

  Mitch just stared up at Nathan from where he’d fallen. “In the long run, we’re all dead.”

  Nathan signaled the guards to come down and take Mitch prisoner. Most of them had been good men, uncomfortable with implementing Santino’s scheme. Now that the man was dead, they saw no reason to keep his plans any more alive than he—especially since Nathan had provided them with a convenient excuse to let someone else decide whether one of their fellow soldiers had to die.

  “Fuck me, Top!” El Jesus said now as Mitch hauled his heavy carcass up the last hill. The transport sat there on the crest, the entire place lit up like a parking lot, waiting for them to come. It was a monstrous beast of a craft, almost impossible to put into the air, but as Nathan often liked to say, with enough diesel fuel you could move anything.

  As if to prove itself, the airship hovered there, just inches off the ground. This would have to be a lightning-fast recovery, and if the pilot caught a glimpse of what was following the troops he was waiting for, he’d climb his ship into the sky in an instant.

  “Come on!” Mitch said, shoving up under El Jesus as he pistoned his legs beneath him. “Just a bit further.”

  They passed an M89 heavy machine gun on a pivot mount as they made their way up the hill. The unit had set it up as a last line of defense for the landing zone, but now it stood empty, its gunner missing or dead.

  For a moment, Mitch considered taking over the gun to blast the beasts in the shadows, but he knew that would condemn all three of them to death. Nate was too weak to help El Jesus to the transport, and he would have refused to go on without at least one of them.

  He charged on past.

  As he reached the lip of the hill’s flattened top, he glanced back to see the shadows getting closer. With the transport on the other side of the clearing, he knew they’d never make it.

  Nathan came to the same conclusion. Mitch saw him hesitate there next to the rotary machine gun and then head for it.

  “Nate!”

  Mitch tried to stop, but El Jesus kept going. The big man could barely see straight. He could only keep his head down a
nd focused on the transport straight ahead of them. If he stopped, Mitch knew that El Jesus would fall over and never get up again.

  “I’m right behind you!” Nathan said. “Go!”

  Mitch cursed his friend, El Jesus, and every officer Capitol had ever had, but he kept the big man on his shoulder moving. As they lurched forward, he heard the M89 whir to life and then open up on the creatures chasing them.

  “Come on, then!” Nathan roared at the things coming at him through the mist. The gun’s long brrraaappp sounded like a never-ending crack of thunder rolling down the mud-slick hill.

  As Mitch reached the transport, he shoved El Jesus up onto the boarding platform. The copilot stared down at them, looking as white as a ghost, and Mitch feared to ask him what he’d seen.

  He didn’t have the time now anyhow. He had to go back for Nathan.

  As he turned to leap down from the boarding platform, Mitch heard the M89 fall silent. It couldn’t have run out of ammunition so soon.

  “Fucking mutants!” Nathan stepped away from the gun and pulled out his knife. “Come on. Let’s have it!”

  Mitch’s heart sank, but he couldn’t give up. Just as his feet were about to leave the transport’s platform, he felt El Jesus’s meaty hand wrap around his arm. He tugged at it, but the corporal refused to let go.

  “Lose the hand!” Mitch said, snarling at the pale shot-gunner.

  “Fuck you!” said El Jesus. “You’re not going back!” The man was so wiped, he could barely move, but his grip stayed on like a steel strap.

  Mitch punched El Jesus in his wounded leg, and the man let go. He turned to stare out at the open stretch of land between the transport and where the machine gun sat shrouded in the mists.

  “Nate!”

  Mitch knew he should leap off the transport and rush to Nathan’s aid. That’s what his friend would have done for him. At least that’s what he told himself.

  “Go!” Nate’s bellow echoed through the mists.