Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(47)
When no further explanation came, Wojcik dared what the other recruits would not and spoke. “Sir? Care to tell us what this is all about?”
The helmet of Reeves’ suit tilted to one side curiously. “In about twenty seconds, yes.”
“That’s weirdly specific, sir,” Wojcik said. But Beck had a suspicion and opened up the dedicated Mesh that connected each suit. Even as the map blinked into existence, new dots began populating it in a dense concentration. Ah. That would be the armory, where the rest of the cohort was doubtlessly being shoved into armor at dangerous speeds.
Beck counted the dots once they stopped appearing. Just eight others. How lucky she was that her team all managed to get this far.
“Now that you’re all online,” Reeves said over the general channel, speaking to everyone in the Rez, “I can tell everyone the situation at once.” Though she couldn’t see his eyes, Beck somehow knew Reeves was staring at Wojcik reproachfully. He was just that talented.
“Fifteen minutes ago, we received notification of a bloom in progress at Rez Shān.” The words should have sent a ripple of horrified reactions across the channel—even Beck made mindless noises of revulsion—but Reeves had wisely muted everyone but himself. “We are one of the closer Rezzes to Shān, so it’s up to us to aid in any way we can. We have loaded the Loop cars with weapons and supplies, but this is primarily a rescue mission. Anyone inside home isolation chambers will be on borrowed time. We all know the twenty-four hours they’re supposed to last isn’t always the reality. Which means we need to clear the infected and sterilize the Rez before we release anyone.”
The lack of chatter was unnerving, but Beck nodded. So did the rest of her unit. It was odd to see the body language in armored figures.
“For this mission, Beck’s team will be with me,” Reeves said. “The rest of you will join up with Caleb and Guard Stockwell, who is our administrator here. It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: you will obey them. You do not know best in this situation. We do. And while this is not a test, if you’re under the impression your actions in the field won’t be weighed going forward in your training, you may not be smart enough to be here. When the rest of you arrive, load up with Stockwell and follow. My team and I are leaving now.”
He switched over to the team channel. “Come on. The Loop is ready.”
Shān was only about fifty miles away, a Rez tucked up against a mountain. The Loop got them there in minutes, which was just long enough for Beck and her team to arm themselves and receive instructions from Reeves.
“The seven of us will be the first outside help to show up,” he said. “Our orders are to act as an independent fire team. The local Watch will be going through their protocols, using the Mesh to locate survivors inside their isolation rooms and coordinating the overall response. We get the unfortunate duty of clearing any infected on the streets as we go, marking the bodies for incineration teams, and clearing homes as directed by the local Overwatch. I assume none of you have seen a bloom before?”
“No,” Beck said, as did the rest of the unit. She didn’t add how close she’d come. The constant barrage of training and exhaustion over the last six weeks left her little time for grief, a kind of survive-or-die emotional ultimatum that demanded she focus on what was in front of her or let what happened to her family consume the slim mental resources she had left at the end of the day and fall into a spiral. Letting her grief whither on the vine was not a conscious decision on Beck’s part; it was merely subsumed in the daily struggle. The need to survive trumped all else.
Yet now those ghosts rose up and spoke loudly. Flashes of that morning replayed in her mind’s eye as Reeves droned on.
“The dangers won’t be as severe as they would be if we were facing normal Pales,” Reeves said. “Which isn’t to say there won’t be any. Fade B accelerates the neurological symptoms, but the physical changes just take too long to manifest. The people we’re about to see haven’t had the years for their genes to alter, for their skin to calcify, or muscles get more dense. They’ll look mostly like normal people, but they’ll be insane, starving, and without a single memory of who they were. This won’t be like your training. At some point you’re going to see one of them look almost human, and in that moment you might hesitate. Don’t.”
Which was his way of telling them to kill every living thing not in an isolation room or a suit of armor.
Beck clenched her jaw and pushed down the tremor trying its best to shake her body right out of her suit.
*
“Two wings,” Reeves said as the exited the Loop. “I’m in the middle. Stay in formation if at all possible.”
They fell into an inverted V, moving as a group behind and to the sides of their temporary leader. So far there were no enemies, which Beck thought was odd until she realized that on any given day, almost no one would be in the Loop station unless travel was scheduled. Once the bloom alert went out, the tunnels would seal off to prevent any of the infected from escaping that way. The gate would only open for incoming members of the Watch.
The lack of moving bodies ended once they reached the surface. Shān was close to the Inners, an older Rez that would have been much more populated than its already impressive numbers if it weren’t so isolated. Still, there were more than twenty thousand people here, spread across a circle a mile and a half wide.