Operation Honshu Wolf
An Abaddon Books™ Publication
www.abaddonbooks.com
First published in 2016 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
By Malcolm Cross and Anne Tibbets (writing as Addison Gunn)
Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver
Commissioning Editor: David Moore
Cover Art: Edouard Groult
Design: Sam Gretton & Oz Osborne
Marketing and PR: Rob Power
Head of Books and Comics Publishing: Ben Smith
Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley
Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley
ISBN: 978-1-78618-006-3
Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
1
D
EAD PIGEONS WERE
scattered across the streets and sidewalks in a threadbare carpet, baked dry, almost mummified by the heat in a matter of days. Say what you wanted about global warming and climate change: at least it had finally solved New York’s pigeon problem.
Sweat trickled down Alex Miller’s nose, despite the armoured limousine’s air conditioning.
Something the size of a Great Dane nosed through the crumbling bed of bones and feathers with its misshapen skull. The creature seemed to be all teeth, all jaw, built from evolution’s pre-mammalian leftovers. Ridges of bone knobbled its skull, leaving the creature’s leathery face looking warty and distended. It peeled its lips back, revealing snakelike fangs, and snatched something small and squealing from amidst the pigeons—it looked like a particularly long-bodied rat, but rats didn’t have armour-plated skulls like prehistoric fish.
The terror-jaw whipped the little thing side-to-side, muscular neck straining, and with one last flick the rat-thing’s spine snapped and the squeals ended. It looked back, as if for approval, toward Miller’s target—a dirty, scruffy, ungroomed white man in his late thirties.
You couldn’t
tame
the new wildlife. Everyone knew that—the damn things were as wild as lions, and a damn sight older—but that didn’t seem to matter to the target. He was
filthy
, with some kind of scabrous orange growth crawling up his shoulder.
Gingerly, Miller reached up and scratched his nose, safe behind the limo’s locked doors and parked in the shade of an alleyway. He had no desire whatsoever to grab the target, but there weren’t any other untried options on the table, and a hostage exchange wouldn’t work if Miller didn’t take hostages...
Miller leaned forward in his seat, pulling his Gallican .45 from its concealed holster under the back of his Louis Vuitton suit jacket. He hesitated, glancing across the limousine at du Trieux. “When this goes wrong, you be ready to pull my ass out of the fire.”
Du Trieux nodded seriously. Morland, behind her in the back seat, gripped his shotgun more tightly. Miller knew he could rely on du Trieux in a pinch—she was a French-Nigerian ex-
jihadiyya,
who fought back in the early ’30s to liberate Syria from Daesh and the rest of the false caliphate. She could be a cool-headed killer if she needed to be. But Morland? Morland was a
kid
, barely twenty, from the south of England. Sure, the ‘kid’ was an imposing six-foot-eight, but that didn’t change the way his hands were sweating. No experience at all—which was why Morland was in the limo, while the team’s second Englishman was on his own with a rifle on a rooftop.
Miller tapped his earpiece. “Doyle? Get ready to kill the dog.”
“
It really isn’t a dog,
” Doyle replied, his clipped Oxford English buzzing through the earpiece’s low-bandwidth encryption. “
On target.
”
Miller gnawed his lip, hovering a fingertip over the door’s lock. “Trix, you take the wheel. Morland, be ready to receive the hostage.” In other words, stay in the back seat and don’t shoot anybody.
The kid just about melted in relief.
Miller shared a look with du Trieux, and got out of the limo’s sweet air conditioning and into the oppressive heat. And the
smell
, Jesus. Maybe parking in an alleyway hadn’t been such a good idea. He clicked the door shut.
The terror-jaw out in the street jerked up, alert, twisting its head side-to-side, presenting its ears—fissures in its skull—to search for the origin of the sound. It saw Miller and bared its teeth. As he approached, leaving the stink of the alleyway for the stench of the street, it ducked its head and raised its rump, like a cat ready to leap. The abduction target twisted around, lifting his shaggy hair out of his eyes.
“Doyle?” Miller asked, finger on his earpiece, panic edging into his voice.
The shot tore open the asphalt inches from the terror-jaw’s forepaw. The animal backed up with a startled jolt, looking up toward the source of thunder... and then bounded for Miller, jaws wide.
“Doyle!”
“
Sorry, not at my best.
”
Miller got off two shots with the Gallican—a double tap, centre mass at the charging animal, but broken bones and blood hardly impeded the thing. Its wet throat was scarlet behind the grille of its fangs, ravenous,
eager
. Miller reflexively pushed his gun out at the terror-jaw, heart skipping a beat, then spasming as something hammered the creature’s head sideways. Blood was everywhere.
The creature fell, twitching, and didn’t rise.
Doyle’s second shot.
The only other time Miller had seen a terror-jaw from this close was around two years ago. His dad called, complaining about seeing weird things out on the ranch. At first Miller had figured it was just nerves, his parents weren’t used to rural life, they should’ve taken their retirement in the suburbs. Then he visited and saw a sickly little creature that one of the cows had stepped on.
Back then, four years after he’d left the army, the creatures of the Archaeobiome were still a scientific curiosity—it seemed that the entire ecology slumbered over hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of years. Researchers had called it a kind of migration, through time rather than space. Instead of travelling from place to place in search of food, the creatures just laid eggs or hibernated over millennia until droughts ended and deserts turned to jungles. Nobody had seriously considered whether or not the reawakening ecology could be some kind of threat. Why would they? At that point the biggest terror-jaws anyone knew about were
maybe
the size of a cat.
Now, two years on and a healthy chunk into Miller’s sixth year as a bodyguard, the only thing unusual about the massive beast lying twisted and broken in front of him was that it had a collar around its tree-trunk neck.
“You shot my dog.” The abduction target fell to his knees in dismay, crushing a desiccated pigeon-corpse. He plucked at the terror-jaw’s gnarled, leathery forefoot as though it were a puppy’s paw. “Why’d you shoot my dog?”
“Stay there,” Miller snapped, lifting the Gallican. “Just stay right there, and put your hands on your head.” He forced himself to relax his grip, stop trembling.
The man slowly raised his arms. “What are you? Some kind of cop?”
Miller didn’t answer, stepping around the cooling body to get behind the guy. The abduction target
stank
, and the longer he looked at Miller, the more disgust crawled into his eyes.
Oh, it was obvious the guy was a commune-member. Infected with the parasite. It wasn’t the orange rash infesting his skin—though that kind of thing was common in Infected communes—it was the smell, the terror-jaw, the look in his eye.
“How’d you do it?” Miller asked, bundling up the guy’s wrists in a set of zip-tie cuffs.
“Do what?” He watched Miller from the corner of his eye, part afraid, part
angry
.
“The terror-jaw. How’d you get a collar on it?” Had the terror-jaw been infected too? Could the Archaean Parasite jump species?
“Dunno. It was eating our trash.” The guy shrugged. “Hey, Blondie. These are too tight.”
“Don’t call me that. I’m not even all that blonde,” he muttered. It had been months since his barber shop had closed; his highlights were almost gone.
“So what’s your name?”
“You don’t need to know that.”
“Guess I don’t. I’m Nick.” The prisoner laughed, a slow, rising laugh that ended in a racking cough. He hunched forwards on his knees in front of Miller, spluttering and drooling. “They’re gonna come and get me, you know. I can smell them,” he wheezed. “They heard the shots.”
“Don’t care,” Miller grunted, hauling Nick to his feet. The man’s sweat stained the cuff of Miller’s suit jacket—it was light silk, just bearable in the heat. And now it was stained, and where the hell was Miller going to find a dry cleaner? He shook out his wrist, grunting. “Where’s Lester Allen?”
“Who?”
“The BioGen scientist your commune abducted.” Miller shoved Nick into a shuffling walk, and tapped his earpiece. “Trix? Follow us.”
“
Oui,
” du Trieux responded.
Every few steps Nick stopped to look back at Miller and the limousine crawling along after them. “The scientist? You mean the guy who tried to
poison us
?”
“Nobody’s trying to poison you people.”
“Of course they are. They put drugs in the food aid packages—they’re trying to kill us, trying to destroy our
gift!
” Nick shambled forward, turning to glare one last time. “
You’re
trying to do it. The ungifted.”
“Uninfected,” Miller corrected.
Nick was more right than he knew. A completely separate subsidiary of Schaeffer-Yeager International was responsible for distributing the famine aid packages, but the CEO had insisted that every package contain a supply of anti-parasitics. It was a matter of principle, but one that had spooked the Infected into burning soup kitchens and aid stations across the city.
The lucidity drained out of Nick with each step closer to the commune’s territory. He stopped focussing on the ground, on the tightness of his handcuffs, and instead followed a little girl hiding behind a trash can with his gaze. After she was sure Nick and Miller had seen her, she ran away with a long hooting cry.
They melted out of the buildings like a troop of apes on the savannah. Roused by the alarm call, they slipped from doorways and appeared at corners. A lanky man, a wide-set woman, an old white man in a decades-faded Tea Party Republican shirt. There was a hipsterish guy with an old shotgun and a bedraggled beard, and two women nervously walking hand in hand as they came to investigate.