Tag: Criminals

Hot Iron: Part 3

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

5.

It was roughly 4 AM when Kennedy finally shoved her way into her apartment. She’d had nothing but complications through-out her shift, most related to establishing the team for her two, new patients. When she finally fell into bed an hour later, the sun was just beginning to rise behind her blacked out windows. Working the night shift had forced more than a few, anti-day behaviors on her, and covering her windows with blankets was hardly the most offensive of them.

She slept roughly two hours before her cell-phone vibrated beside her bed. It buzzed loud enough to echo through the wood. She slapped a hand for it, put it to her face, “What?”

A voice sounded, “Kennedy?”

She hated that voice. Everything about it. Especially now. He’d been gone a month with his new slut. Whatever he needed could wait.

“Kevin, I worked all night. Call me when you’re dying. Maybe then we’ll talk.”

“Kennedy don’t!” he pled.

“I’m hanging up now,” she griped.

“I just wanna’ get my–”

The phone cut out. She checked her watch, realized she was still dressed for work, then moaned.

He wanted his stuff back. The problem was, it was probably somewhere in Indiana by now, shoved into a landfill by garbage trucks and bulldozers. The same place he belonged. She managed to sleep a few more hours, and as usual, dreamed of him. Or rather, dreamed about him.

They’d been together for years, a decade almost. They’d finally decided to tie the knot one night, high on something Jamaican and more naked than not. She’d been entangled in sheets, coursing with fresh ecstasy when booze or grass made him finally pop the question. It was six months before they set the date. Another year after that and here they were.

Like before, she dreamed about saying no. Somehow seeing the future, she rejected the drunk, stoned proposal. The reality was, she’d said yes, then climbed atop him to pump their brains out. At least that part was good, anyhow. The rest was a nightmare– an even worse nightmare than the near-nightly dreams about being unneeded at work, only to come home and find him pumping someone else’s brains out on the kitchen counter. He was just lucky she didn’t own a gun. For that matter, so was the slut.

She tossed and turned while various incarnations of the “no” path of life melded with everything else the human brain could concoct. When she awoke, she’d only remembered a feeling of dread. The rest would settle with the hallucination-inducing chemicals common to sleep, if that’s what she could call it, anyway. She never felt rested anymore.

The same morning routine that followed Kevin’s departure from her life began her day; a quick shower, a few tears, coffee at the table, and an open laptop to surf the latest waves sweeping social media.

The first hints that something big had happened came from forums she frequented. The posts were days old by now, but that had only given the armchair detectives more time to work. Such was the nature of the internet that anyone with even a scrap of confidence and an ISP thought themselves an expert. Most of the time, this showed up in places where arguments were most easily driven by opinion– who was the latest, most popular celebrity, who’d win the next Stanley Cup, or whether well-done steak was truly an affront to the Gods. They were innocuous, harmless things.

This was different though. It was always easy to tell the speculation from the evidence-bearing news. When it was real, a site’s admins often got involved, usually pinning the post to the site’s front page for all to see. In some cases, even live RSS feeds would be linked to act as aggregates for all information on a given topic. Mostly those were reserved for dire situations still unfolding as posted. Everything from natural disasters to terrorist attacks were covered, and now it was obvious something had recently occurred.

The pinned post and dead RSS feed at the top of one of her frequent favorites was posted as someone posing a question: “Just heard an explosion outside work. Neo-C piers. Nothing obvious yet. Anyone?” The thread had been up forty hours. She must have missed it during her last, morning net-scour, but it was one of the big ones now. Hundreds of thousands of comments, millions of views; the sort of thing referred to as viral.

To scroll through the comments, she’d have had to miss the giant blotter comprising the first, full-page of the post. Bullet points with random times from the last two days broke up the otherwise mile-long wall of text. They were cold, hard facts, corroborated by a dozens of blue, external links.

She skimmed them, then read them over in depth. Together, a picture formed that became clearer when combined with her last shift: Something had happened on a pier, somewhere in new-Chinatown. The place had been established as a shipping port, then gravitated to for its open, bazaar-like qualities. Sometime in the evening hours two nights prior, an minor tremor registered on seismographs. The lone incident was inexplicably isolated to a small part of northern Chicago, and the armchair detectives had seized it as an opportunity to jump into action. Various private and public satellite and instrumentation sites confirmed some type of explosion with thermal, seismic, and eyewitness data.

The end picture was obvious; something had exploded underwater at the “Happy Fish” imports pier. Eyewitness reports had been suppressed on-scene by police and emergency crews, but a few had made it out. It was enough to tell of rumors of a SWAT raid. Men and women in riot gear had breached a facility, covered by a sharpshooter inside a police perimeter on the water, but nothing else tangible had been concluded.

Kennedy didn’t need years of med-school training to add two and two. All she needed was her two patients and the rumors. Only she could confirm what most suspected. While no-one on the net knew for sure what had happened, Kennedy did. She thought to post, then remembered she’d been bound by the NSA and FBI’s suits to keep her mouth shut. More importantly, HIPAA ensured if she opened her mouth she’d lose her license as well as end up in jail– probably for high-treason.

There was a certain, ominous tone to that thought. She liked it even less than she admitted. Whether from intuition or pure logic, she sensed things had only begun to go sideways.

6.

Melissa Fannon, formerly Melissa Torres, was Juan Torres’ only sibling. His elderly sister by only a pair of years, she’d weathered time better than he’d managed to. She was a bombshell of Hispanic descent with something vaguely Italian mixed in. She held herself to the highest standard of beauty, spending upwards of three hours each day carefully primping, preening, and making-up her face. To any onlookers, she was Miss Universe without the plastic and a heavier head.

Which is why, when she entered to find her brother covered in bandages, her cries shattered the hearts of all those around. A feeling akin to a porcelain doll shattering on a floor swept through the ICU. There and then, the four guard-officers exchanged looks, fidgeted from the shrill cries emitting from Torres’ room.

Kennedy was already inside, standing at the bed, and watching the shattered doll’s make-up run. She swallowed acid to place a lone hand on Melissa’s shoulder as she wept. To the woman’s credit, her tears didn’t last long, but it felt like an eternity to Kennedy. She was frozen in place, too human to leave, too professional to cry. It wasn’t the worst thing she’d ever seen, but it ranked, and learning to compartmentalize work and emotions was the only thing that kept her in one piece.

Emotions were a good thing for a nurse dealing with the elderly, children, or clinical-work. In an ICU, ER, or Burn unit, emotions were a good way of killing someone. Most medical work was exact, a science of numbers requiring as much logic as clear-headedness. Emotion was its antithesis. A misplaced thought might incur a slight over-dose of a medication that turned lethal when combined with others. Anything more was a certain mistake to come. Being angry and misreading a chart could kill as easily as putting a gun to someone’s head. Kennedy didn’t like that fact, but she held herself all the more rigidly to its truth.

She retained her composure long enough to let Melissa ease out of her own grief, then pointed her toward a washroom. When she was certain the woman had gone, she exhaled a heavy sigh and choked down her emotions to keep focused. She gave herself a full minute to straighten out, then reset her face into its usual passiveness.

She and Kevin had fought about that for years; being been able to turn her emotions off and on meant she often did it without realizing it. Being in her line of work didn’t help. Perhaps it was the frequency with which she was required to do so that it so autonomous at times. Whatever the cause, he’d often insulted her as being “Robotic” and “Cold.” The truth was, when they fought, she flipped the mental switch and compartmentalized. Most times, she did become cold, logical, and right.

Kevin hated that, had never been able to accept being wrong, and was the type of person confirmation bias had been discovered from. He was always trying to find or twist facts to his point, able to turn a perfectly normal debate into a colossal argument when proven wrong. He was thick-headed, stupid to a fault, and narrow-minded. What else could he be if he expected to pound some whore in her kitchen without her finding out?

Kennedy hated him for that. She hated him for a lot of things. Most of all, she hated that he continued to creep into every facet of her mind.

She went about checking vitals as she considered it. The motions were autonomous, robotic in a way. That was the point; learn your job well, and be able to do it in your sleep. Problem was, it gave her time to think. Time to think meant revealing the roots of their relationship burrowed through-out her life as if some disgusting parasite. Its countless arms and small feelers extended and inlaid over the folds of her brain and life, attached via hooks that held on past death. She’d managed to cut away the beast itself by throwing Kevin out on his ass, but every now and then, disgorged feelers appeared, hidden in places she wasn’t even aware had existed.

I’ll still be finding ’em when he’s dead. Bastard.

The thought gave way to a check of the time as she thumbed Torres’ vitals into a charting tablet. The soft steps of heels clicked a syncopated rhythm over her thumbs as they made their way into the room. Kennedy was momentarily fascinated by Melissa’s recovery. She’d managed to reverse from nuclear fallout to bombshell with astounding quickness. Aesthetically, she looked better now than before.

Melissa sat in a chair beside the bed, held Juan’s hand in hers, “I’m sorry for my outburst.”

Kennedy feigned sympathy, an unfortunate necessity of having to compartmentalize, “I understand. Has the doctor spoken to you?”

She gave a small nod, “I know he’s being kept in a coma. You’re worried about some sort of shock?”

Kennedy was professional again, “Injuries of this nature require we keep the nervous system stable and unresponsive to the pain. At this stage, it would send him into shock and his vitals would go hay-wire. It’s safer this way.”

Melissa gave another small nod, eyes on her brother’s hand, “The doctor said as much. How long will he have to be like this?”

Kennedy’s mouth pulled into a half-grimace, “I honestly can’t say. We can keep a coma going as long as necessary. In his case, a few weeks, maybe longer. He’ll require skin grafts and other surgeries before he can be resuscitated.”

Melissa kissed Juan’s hand, then set it on the bed. She patted it, “I’ve been told to act as his legal proxy while he’s… like this. Will that be a problem?”

Kennedy considered it, “He has no spouse or other family?” Melissa shook her head. “Then no. I’ll be leading the team that sees to his needs, so if you need anything, it’s my job to help.”

She seemed to consider the question. There was a resigned look away that most would have taken for their signal to leave. Kennedy knew better. It was usually what family or patients did immediately before asking or relaying something vital.

Melissa suddenly met her eyes again, “Do you know– they won’t tell me– what happened?”

Kennedy swallowed hard. The words “National Security” came to mind. What did that mean in this instance? Melissa wouldn’t wait for her to figure it out. The longer she stayed silent, the more guilty she looked. She cleared her throat, did her best to evade saying anything specific, “The term is, “injured in the line of duty.” I can’t say more than that. I would like to, for your sake, but until I’m certain… I can’t risk my job. I’m sorry.”

Melissa frowned, “In the line of duty.” That’s more than I knew before. Thank you.”

Kennedy promised to return and offer any information Melissa might need then. She left the room, shut the door, then nearly doubled over with guilt. A stuttered breath made its way through her lips as she choked back tears.

Hot Iron: Part 2

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

3.

Kennedy Hart, a full-time nurse at Neo-Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center, had seen just about everything someone in her occupation could. Between the ICU and ER units in a metropolis, she’d tended to her share of GSWs, horrendous accident victims, every type illness and infection known, and more than an abundance of O-Ds. In short, she wasn’t the squeamish type and had the chops to back it up.

She fast-walked toward the E-R doors in teal scrubs. Her brunette locks were wound up in a bun under an elastic band that bobbed from the half-nod she gave the receptionists. The sea of non-emergency admissions were fixated phones, tablets, and the large flat-screens inlaid into the walls, there to steal attention from those unlucky saps that deserved it more. Comprising more than half the ER’s visitors in the night, it left the unit short-staffed, rushed, and half its patients unstable and spilling over into ICU when they should’ve still been in the ER.

As usual, Kennedy would have to deal with it. She shoved her way through double doors as a buzzer unlocked them at her approach. The RFID chip in her hospital I-D, and its readers stationed around the facility, were probably the most useless, advanced form of technology they had. Funds had been appropriated from various, other places to install the readers. In the process, short-staffed units got overtime when they should’ve gotten new staff. Such was the way of the “industry” these days.

Kennedy emerged from a long hallway for the nurse’s station. Station was a liberal term. It was a desk stacked with black-screen charting tablets, and a pair of flat-screen monitors. Behind it on the wall was a second pair, massive in comparison, and probably costing more then Kennedy’s car. Subdivisions of vitals read out the two-dozen patients’ states networked in from their rooms. From here, a nurse could watch and chart the various EEGs, heart and O-2 monitors before shooting off and up the hall. There, she’d draw meds, pass them out, then double chart and check the patients again for “posterity’s” sake– in other words, to keep from losing her job to a network error.

Given her enormous school debts, the amount of time it had taken to attain her RN status, and the general ire of those she worked with, she found it difficult to believe anyone walking into her field was sane. She certainly didn’t feel like it anymore.

She grabbed a charting tablet off the desk, engaged its screen to thumb at it. Two, equally over-worked, and underpaid women watched with general disapproval. She was too young, too inexperienced to be in charge, or so they felt, anyway. Evidently, their superior felt otherwise. Kennedy loathed her for that.

“Two new admits?” She asked the older, grayer of the two women.

“Mhmm.” Her fingers tapped information into a digital form. “Man and a woman.”

“Severe Burns?” Kennedy said, flipping through the pages. “Who the hell sent us burn patients?” The woman only shrugged. “Christ, clocked in five minutes and already screwing me over.”

“That surprise you?” The less-gray woman asked.

“No, it pisses me off.”

She rounded for the patient rooms, tablet in-hand as she skipped through the last few hours of charts. The new admits had been stuck across from one another, nothing unusual, but certainly not something she’d expected. According to the information, they’d been admitted at the same time, moved from the ER, and into the ICU with orders to treat as burn-ward patients. That was impossible, especially on an understaffed ICU.

She rounded the hallway for their rooms. A line of police officers speaking in hushed tones were clustered through-out the hall between the patients’ rooms. They were packed densely enough Kennedy had to force her way through with a command. She sidled past badges and body-cameras, pushed her way into the first room.

According to her charts, the woman had been placed in a medical coma due to the severity of the 3rd degree burns on her back and side. Kennedy couldn’t see them directly, but the bandage wrapped along her side, back, and angled forward over her shoulder and chest, left no doubt of the severity of her state. The bandages would have to be changed every four hours, the wounds scrubbed, and the anesthetic drip replenished.

Kennedy fumed. There was no way in hell they were equipped to handle a burn victim of this magnitude. They barely had enough people to administer meds on schedule. The kind of intimate care required for a lone burn victim was extensive. Several people and powerful meds were needed to keep them stable, even to clean and re-bandage the wounds. Caring for two was going to be impossible.

Kennedy growled futility, checked the woman’s vitals as quickly as possible, and entered the information into the tablet. She noted the name “Mendez,” under the time, then pushed out and through the crowd for the other room.

The man was considerably worse off– in a way that stung Kennedy’s usually hardened heart. The whole right-half of his face was hidden under bandages, the left side streaked with debris wounds that reddened his olive skin. Little else on him was visible, save random, small bits of unaffected skin between bandages.

Kennedy swallowed hard, felt her chest tighten, then lifted the chart to read “Torres.” Her knees turned to rubber from sickness curdling in her gut. A shaking index finger trembled against the tablet to scroll through the information: Torres’ entire right-side and back had been scorched extensively, it said. The images accompanying the report were grisly. Freshly charred skin mingled with the burned impressions left by super-heated armor plates. According to the O-R report, he’d been operated on for four hours to extricate melted fabric and plastic from his wounds. It was a wonder he was alive, to say the least, but what the hell happened to him, and when? The report was days old.

She ran her quick check, then returned to the nurse’s station to make a call to a superior. When the woman answered she was quick to tell Kennedy someone was already headed down to explain things. The call ended immediately after.

Kennedy was dumbstruck, put off by a finality in the woman’s tone that held something more beneath. The only thing she could place it as was fear, but what scared a burnt-out nurse in one of the busiest hospitals, in one of the largest cities in the world? Kennedy wasn’t sure, but it couldn’t be good.

She turned for the hall and straight into a man with a suit cut sharp it made her eyes bleed. She was stunned. He pulled out a bi-fold wallet, flashed a badge that vaguely registered as FBI.

“Missus Hart?”

“Miss,” she corrected habitually. “Yes? Can I help you?”

“Miss Hart, would you come with me please?”

Kennedy glanced at the other nurses behind the station. They stared up, open-mouthed. Kennedy cleared her throat, stammered out a reply, then followed with a curious amble. The FBI man directed her into a room with other suited men and women, extended a hand to a offer her a seat, and shut the door behind him.

Kennedy eased into her seat, and the room sat together. A man at the head of table examined her for a long moment. Then, with a lean, he interlocked his fingers on the table, “Everything you’re about to hear is a matter of National Security, should any of this be repeated outside this room, you will be jailed and tried for high-treason. Do you understand?”

Kennedy stared.

4.

There was a literal, full minute of silence before Kennedy’s mouth shut and she stammered out a response, “Wh-what’s this all about?”

The man at the head of the table, his face cloaked in dim shadow, cleared a gravelly throat. Someone flipped a switch below the table, and a projection appeared in the middle of it. Two images, side-by-side, were repeated in four places, like a three dimensional cube connected at its vertical faces with the table forming their base. Judging from the ID-like images, and the obvious collars of NCPD uniforms, the two people projected were her patients.

She almost didn’t recognize Torres. It only worsened her gut-sickness. Combined with the clandestine feeling of the dark room, its air, and the people in it, she guessed things wouldn’t be getting better anytime soon.

The gravel-throated man all but confirmed her hunch as he began to speak. “The two patients currently occupying your ward are members of NCPD’s SWAT team. Several days ago, Officer Juan Torres conducted a raid on a suspected heroin refinery. The exact location is classified. We’ve been fortunate to retain media black-out, but several officers were killed in the explosion. It is our hope that we may work together to ensure these two officers do not suffer the same fate.”

A woman down the table, whose only identity lay in the overt confidence of her tone, continued from there, “Miss Hart, we believe these patients may be targeted for retribution by certain suspects or their associates. Given their states, and the care required, it is necessary to reallocate them, as well as their care-givers, to your ward from others units across the campus.”

“Both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency hope you will accommodate us in this matter,” the man at the head of the table added. It sounded more like a casually veiled threat than anything.

The room settled back into a ringing silence. Kennedy still stared. She wasn’t sure what the hell was going on. Everything beyond “retribution” had been lost on her. Who the hell sought retribution against cops for something like this? And why’d she have to be worried about it? Moreover, why the hell did they choose the ICU of all places?

The questions kept coming. With no answers in sight, her mouth finally shut. She readied to reply as formally as possible, the situation evidently hinged less on her compliance than her job did. She let out a short breath, “I will, of course, do whatever I can to ensure the safety of my patients. But I’m charge-nurse… for tonight. My job, for tonight, is to act as liaison for the unit’s nurses and our superior. I don’t really have any power.”

“From here on out,” a man said nearer to her. His features were dark, eyes unyielding. He slid over a micro SD card, “You will act as liaison between us and those assigned to these patients. The staff directly in charge of them will take your word as ours. Your other duties are suspended until such time as the two officers make a full-recovery.”

Kennedy drew the tablet over with a hand, slotted the card to access it. A pair of folders appeared with patient ID numbers as the names. Those numbers were the same as the ones used by the various machines reporting their vitals and meds through the hospital’s network. Kennedy could ID both of the patients by them alone.

She gave an outward look to no-one in particular, “I can offer compliance in my case– I certainly can’t refuse anyway, but I have questions.” A resonant pause ushered her onward. “First of all, why have you assigned these patients here, instead of the burn-ward?”

A woman with slightly less confidence than the last explained, “We believe anyone seeking retribution will know to check N-C’s burn-wards. We hope placing them here will better obscure their presence and still allow for the care they require.”

The dark man nearer her added, “Upon closer inspection, you’ll see those files have been doctored. Their real names do not appear anywhere.”

She took his word for it, “Okay. Then my next question–”

The man at the head of the room anticipated her, “We believe the person, or persons, targeting these patients have access to internal NCPD and FBI intelligence. In order to draw them out, and ensure the officers’ survival, we must allow all agencies involved to believe both Torres and Mendez are dead.”

Her eyes widened, “There are thirty cops in the hallway, and you think you can contain this?”

Another man spoke, one that hadn’t yet. From his air of superiority and vernacular she suspected him a doctor, a veteran one at that. “That is why, once your team is in place, you will simulate a cardiac incident on both patients. We will prepare everything externally necessary. Otherwise, you will receive further instructions soon. For all intents and purposes, it will appear as if your patients have died.”

Kennedy’s eyes narrowed skeptically, her tongue sharp– the same way she was when she dealt with her ex that’d left her a week before their wedding. “You want me to fake their deaths!?” Another resonant silence. Awkwardness underlined it this time. Kennedy felt herself squirm involuntarily. She swallowed hard, “I… don’t see how I can refuse, but I’d like it noted I have reservations.”

“Duly noted, Miss Kennedy,” someone said.

She didn’t see them speak, was too busy wrapped in her thoughts. Losing not one, but two patients would look bad on her record. She could lose her job. More importantly, she could lose any hope of getting another if this assembly decided to take charade the next step and “investigate” her. If the media ever did get wind of it, she’d be black-balled faster than she could click a pen.

She spoke to this effect, “I can do what you request, but it will take time. More importantly, I can’t allow this to permanently affect my license. When this is over, any public knowledge must be officially retracted so my livelihood isn’t lost.”

The man at the head of the table replied firmly, “Your livelihood will not be permanently affected, but you may have to follow through with things. We will brief you in time on what that may require.”

With that, the projected image dissolved and the table rose together, save Kennedy. She was stuck in place for another, full-minute before she rose snatched up her tablet and followed after them. She stepped into the hall to find they’d disappeared. The one, confident woman remained behind to speak to an officer. Her hair was fine, golden threads in the lights that reflected off it in a wet-like sheen and gave her a glow that modestly accented tanned skin.

Clearly whatever she did officially allowed for more fun in the sun than being stuck in an ICU all day or night. Kennedy envied her for that alone.

She returned to the empty nurse’s station just as the uniformed officers began to disperse. Two men and women remained to stand guard on either side of the patients’ doors. The blonde woman clicked and clacked her way past along the hall, her face fixed with indifference, and her mind consumed by her work. Her heels sounded her progress past, then disappeared into a stairwell beyond a heavy, closing door.

The grayer of the two nurses appeared, snapping bright-orange, nicotine gum in her jaws, “S’that all about?”

Kennedy shrugged, checked her watch, “Hell if I know.”

Hot Iron: Part 1

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

1.

Coffee tainted the air with its rich scent through the steam from two-dozen Styrofoam cups. Most were held by uniformed officers, but plain-clothes cops, and suited detectives and admins didn’t escape the fold. Between the coffee, donuts, and field of blue, the room might as well have been a coffee-lover’s convention, or Donuts Anonymous. It hardly seemed like a serious, morning briefing. In fact, only one man appeared to be taking it seriously; he was clothed in pre-vest swat uniform, with “Torres” slapped across the left breast.

Juan Torres was built like a brick shit-house, some might say. Hell, Torres might agree in proper company, but here was no proper company for brevity. Everyone present was his subordinate, at least for this mission. Given he’d learned first-hand the folly coddling those below you, he found himself at odds with an entire room of gun-toting boys. The few men he didn’t include in his pointed, sweeping gazes knew their jobs, and they’d do them to the letter, just like Torres.

He mounted a small lectern at the front of the room, hands behind his back as though still “at-ease” a world away. He began with, “Good morning.” Then with another glancing sweep, he continued, “Some of you know why you’re here. The rest have some clue. I’m going to do this as quickly and painlessly as possible. If you have questions, direct them to your department heads after the brief.”

He nodded to someone and the lights went dark. A 3D projection between Torres and his audience splayed upward, then unfurled. It swiped right from an Neo-Chicago PD logo to large words that read “Operation: Hot Iron.” The words fizzled away, and a man in his late-fifties appeared. His short-cut, graying hair framed vaguely English features. He held a cell-phone to his ear, other hand on the door of a modest sports car meant more to blend in, rather than standing out.

Torres continued behind the image, “Approximately thirty-six hours ago, our undercover officers observed a deal between the local street gang Eighteen-Seven and this man, Kieran Walters. After being identified, the deal was allowed to proceed so our officers might tail Walters while a group of uniforms made the Eighteen-Seven bust.” Torres digressed for a moment. “Some of you are here today, and I want to say congratulations.”

There was a murmur and nodding from heads in the crowd. It was good to show appreciation for a job well done, but a lone sentence and nothing more or you risked inflating egos. Torres knew that folly too, and he wouldn’t repeat past mistakes.

He refocused and the projection shifted again, “What they found was this;” A car’s trunk appeared, loaded with wrapped, white bricks. “Three hundred kilos of pure-white heroin, likely freshly produced. We believed the shipment had come from Colombia, however, we now know differently.”

The projection slid sideways. A fish market appeared in a two-dimensional image. Around it, various harbors and piers made a jig-saw cut of the land that framed the darkened blue of Lake Michigan behind them; a usual scene for Neo-Chicago’s Chinatown.

The image fizzled to a narrower angle, and a warehouse focused. Rusted sheet-metal glared in contrast to the peeling paint of an aluminum sign that bore a large, pink salmon. Chinese script was plastered above the fish, a line of English reading, “Happy Fish Imports.”

“We’ve known for some time of illicit elements operating within Chinatown. However, the local gangs’ hydra-like operations has made going after any, one group a waste of resources. It has always been the policy of NCPD’s Narcotics division to seek the larger fish, if you forgive the pun.” There were a few, muffled chuckles. Torres wasn’t amused. He continued as such, “We know now that the source of drugs, and thus the gangs’ funding, is not local and headed by Walters.”

The projection changed again; this time to a three-quarter view of a 3-D blueprint of the warehouse, pier, and a curious, rectangular structure beneath the water outside them. “At our request, both State and Federal governments ran U-A-V thermal and topographical scans. Combined with satellite readings and local surveillance, we have a general layout of the warehouse and its surroundings. Due to the clandestine nature of this new addition below the water, we’re unable to gain a clear reading on its interior.”

He focused on the freshman, obvious from their clean-shaven faces and spotless uniforms. They were so green they still bore the factory-polish on their dress-shoes. They were utterly useless for anything outside parades.

“SWAT will position to breach while the U-Cs watch entrances from six points around the building. A three-man contingent will be stationed on a cutter off-shore with a SWAT sharpshooter for cover while uniformed officers will patrol the perimeter for any external threats.” Torres now addressed the entire room, heads of departments included, “You will follow SWAT’s lead on this one. We believe the under-water addition is a volatile heroin refinery, which means a probable civilian presence. Check your fire, and make your arrests, but don’t play hero. I want everyone coming back on this one, understood?”

A unanimous din affirmed his words. Then, with a quick dispersal of patrol-men orders, Torres ended the brief. The room cleared out in nearly half the time it had taken to fill, everyone freshly caffeinated and ready for the day ahead. Hot Iron wouldn’t commence for another eight hours, but by then everyone had to be ready.

A department head approached Torres as he keyed off the projection and gathered papers into a leather briefcase. Roberts was nearing retirement, and an asshole to boot. He’d gained more than a paunch over the years, and somehow managed to stuff it into the polyester rags he liberally called a suit every morning. Torres had seen his type a million times over. They were as much burn-outs as the pot-head teens he used to bring in before the M-R-A made pot legal again.

Roberts waddled more than anything, and right up to Torres, “You gotta’ lotta’ nerve pullin’ rank on this one, Torres.”

Juan zipped a pocket on his briefcase closed, “How long you run SWAT again? Twenty-five years? Then they stuck you behind a desk and fattened you up with benefits?”

“The balls on you.”

Torres lifted his case, swiveled to meet Roberts face-to-face, “How many men’d you lose in those twenty-five years? Fifteen? Sixteen? Most in the first ten years, right? ‘Til you got smart, cautious?”

A corner of Roberts’ mouth lifted in a snarl. “What’s your point?”

“Twelve years,” Torres said stiffly. “And not a man lost yet.” Roberts’ face hardened, his eyes ablaze. Torres readied to leave, “Next time you wanna’ blow smoke up someone’s ass, get a hose. I don’t have time for this shit.”

Torres turned and strolled from the room. Roberts’ eyes followed him, “Sonuvabitch.”

2.

Torres laced his boot tight and double-knotted it. He rolled a balaclava down over his face, and slipped on his AR glasses. A HUD flickered on with a boot screen, then splayed along the sides of his vision. He zipped his tac-vest shut over his dragon-skin armor, and rose to face his team from the front of the box-truck. Their call-signs and names appeared over their heads that he minimized with an flitting eye.

He steadied himself on a loop hung from the cargo-area’s ceiling, an MP5 slung across his chest. His free hand rested atop it as the truck lumbered forward, jostled its passengers to and fro. The self-contained driver-section held two undercover officers in Happy Fish jumpsuits. Their gray-blue cotton hid just as much body armor and firepower as Torres sported.

The truck rolled to a stop outside the warehouse, settled into a diesel idle that lasted all of thirty-seconds before Torres keyed his glasses’ in-built comm, “Alpha team at position-one, waiting for Charlie’s confirmation.”

A quarter-mile offshore, SWAT’s sharpshooter swept the building’s exterior with his bolt-action L96. Its digital scope called out a series of markers. He shuffled through them eye-movements, minimized all but the faintest ticks above the other officers. Its view shifted to infrared, outlined the hundred or so bodies shuffling about the pier and warehouse interior. With another eye-movement, he flicked away the officers, focused only on those unidentified bodies carrying weapons. He found none on the building’s exterior.

Charlie’s call-outs appeared in Torres’ glasses as the sharpshooter radioed in, “Charlie team copies, Alpha. You are go for advance to position two.”

Torres was at the van’s doors, his team behind him. He pushed out, followed by a line of fatigue-clad men and women whose only identity was the white “SWAT” across their backs. Torres and another man stuck a breaching charge to a door, stacked up against sheet-metal. A command was shouted.

The door exploded inward. Debris and dust belched from the hole. Torres’ HUD flashed. In a blink, the smoke was nullified. Skeletal lines of bodies rushing about appeared, highlighted, processed those armed and unarmed, minimized those that weren’t.

The team advanced, a dozen voices all shouting at once. The wire-frame bodies dispersed, the warehouse’s innards wide-open. Low-tables covered in fish and chum made for sparse cover across the expanse. Workers fled, screaming. Torres ignored them, powered through the stink of dead-fish. He surged through the crowd like a locomotive, MP5 the cow-pusher.

“Move! Move!” He yelled to his team, “Keep formation. Push through. Don’t break ranks!”

Halfway through the warehouse, Brittany Mendez, shouted, “Contact!”

A second later she was in cover on the near-side tables with the others. Torres’ glasses called out red warnings. A reticle appeared. Muzzle flashes sparked beyond it. The chatter of Russian Kalashnikovs and Toporevs mingled with Sig Sauers and Glocks over workers’ screams. Blood splattered the air from errant rounds, cut down fleeing bodies, mated metal-on-metal behind the SWAT team.

“Charlie team, covering fire!”

The sharpshooter radioed back a “Roger.” He shuffled his digital scope to zero in on red targets carrying weapons. SWAT MP5s and Sig 551s joined the chatter across the warehouse. The last of the workers fled through a door while Gunmen moved in. Suits and military fatigues mingled with muzzle flashes, as if some mercenary-business meeting had been interrupted. New call-outs took cover behind pillars, tables, wall-corners and stacks of ice and fish-filled boxes to spray hopeful gunfire.

A man’s head exploded from a hole in the back wall.

Charlie team called in, “Tag one tango.”

“Bravo team, move in!” Torres ordered.

A double-wide pair of doors split open at the front of the warehouse. A grenade soared inward. The AR lenses blackened. Their comms screeched a painless frequency to muffle external sounds. The grenade hit, erupted with a shock-wave and lightning strike’s flash to anyone sans glasses. Several men across the room scrambled, blind and deaf from the grenade.

Bravo team filtered in from the far-side of the warehouse. Call-signs and names minimized with a blink as Torres and his people rushed the downed aggressors. One tried scurried to aim at Torres. His AR reticle went hot, and his MP5 barked off a round. Other bodies fell, cut down with identical, pinpoint accuracy and another explosive tag by Charlie.

In a moment, the fire fight was over and Bravo team were zip-tying incapacitated gunmen, their call-outs now blue. Torres and Alpha were already down an interior hall, headed for an access shaft and a ladder leading down. Torres advanced along a second hallway beneath the first. It was obvious they were underwater; concrete walls and floors were lined with heavy rubber to seal cracks between pieced-together sections.

The place felt like walking an underwater tomb before being filled, Torres thought. Somehow, he knew, things were about to go completely fucking sideways.

He pushed forward, sickness growing in his gut. No one down here seemed to know of the fire-fight upstairs– or rather, if there was anyone here. The AR lenses were idle, a desolate eeriness in them that tainted the air of the empty hallways. It only strengthened when they stacked up outside the place’s lone door that would lead to the refinery room.

Torres and another member readied a battering ram in place of a breaching charge.

Torres whispered beyond his comm, “Check your fire. There’ll be a lot of explosives in this room. A stray round will bury us all.”

He gave a quiet three-count, and the battering ram collapsed the door inward. It dangled half-off its hinges. The team filed in shouting orders and brandishing weapons. Red, explosive warning call-outs cluttered their vision across an empty room. The team went silent. A hundred or more barrels and industrial chemistry sets formed makeshift divisions of the refinement process across the room, but there was not a person to be found.

Torres’ stomach churned. Bile curdled, forced its way up his throat. He fanned the team out through the room, filed them through to search every nook and cranny. They all came up empty. The team regrouped in the room’s center, Torres ready to call the op a bust.

Their comms screeched. HUDS flickered and flashed with blinding images that Torres couldn’t decipher. The frequencies forced the team to their knees, then the ground, writhing. Torres’ temples throbbed as if about to explode. He jerked away his glasses, yanked out their connected comm, pulled Mendez’s away beside him.

A voice boomed from the air all around them. It shook Torres’ body, stabbed at his chest, “Checkmate, pigs!”

The voice apexed with a shock-wave that sent them rolling like rag dolls. Something bit the air with ozone. Torres’ gut lurched. He threw himself atop Mendez.

Off-shore, the sharpshooter’s lens met the underwater facility. The thermal view flared red-orange. A geyser of water and flame sprayed upward. Debris and water rained along the docks, chatter streaming from the radios. The boat came about, jetted toward the explosion to seek survivors. The sharpshooter had doubts they’d find any.

Short Story: Vanguard

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 3 Comments

A bright flash. A concussive boom. She stumbled in her run, blind and deaf. Her HUD had been knocked out. It flickered in her vision, spurting lines of colors. That meant her her optics had gone too. An EMP-flashbang. Bastards. EMPs, meant to disorient the cybernetically augmented and their tech, her. Getting out was important, but seeing was even more important.

She felt, rather than heard, the thump of boots. They flooded the narrow corridor behind her. She knew the place’s floor-plan from memory, but in her stumbling run, wasn’t sure she’d make the right turns. She booked it, both oblivious and fiercely aware of the platoon aimed to fire on her.

They told her this would happen; her friends, family. Not the blood kind of course. Shitty parents and siblings had long been an epidemic in this brave new world. Her family particularly, were corp through and through, Aries SC, Guardian LLC, Arc Systems, or one the other big ones, it didn’t matter who belonged to which. Wage-slaves and tin-soldiers were all there was room for these days, and she knew her family was a conglomerate of half of them.

She had meant her real family. Not her blood, but the people down at The Green Fairy, one of the slum-bar-hotel combos where she lived, worked, survived and thrived. Even running blindly from corp-sec down a hallway, optics half-fried, she remembered the first time she’d walked into the place.

She was still a teenaged hell-raiser in those days. Short, spiked, platinum blonde hair accented ever-present facial piercings, and self-satisfied smugness. That was before her eyes had the neon glow of optic augs, but even then she couldn’t have been called innocent, however definite an air of naivete hung about her.

She stumbled again, pictures ebbing back into her eyes. She slid around a corner, felt the thunder of a hand-cannon split the air. It barked after her. Metal on metal grated her teeth.

How the hell’d she get here? She’d showed up at the Fairy to stay the night. With no creds, or even corp-cash, she was forced to slave away mopping floors. They’d lost their only janitor a few weeks before in a gang-raid. It wasn’t the first, and she’d seen her fair-share since. It was how she got the name Cutter; she’d been attacked like everyone else, but by a guy that wanted more than a piece of her ass. She gutted him like a fish with his own knife. The sheer atavism made the other gangers freak. The Fairy’s people took advantage of it. A few more gangers went down in gunfire. The rest bolted.

She still remembered feeling the guy hard against her. He’d grabbed her from behind in a room she’d been cleaning. He stank like month-old ashtrays smothered in grease and piled with stale butts. She managed to wriggle from his grip, slip out and behind him. As he turned to grab her again, she gave his testes a full, hard kick. The force staggered them both. He toppled onto her, screaming. She fought to get out from under him, somehow grasped a knife he had hanging from his belt.

She remembered everything clearly, like it had only just happened, but not the murder. Her first blood. She only remembered standing just outside the room, covered in blood, bile, and stinking of the guy’s bowels. The knife trembled under her white-knuckles as Den Mother found her. The Old lady was a whore, running the place as a brothel– among other things. That Cutter’d drawn blood, nearly been killed defending the place, made her one of the Fairy’s Vanguard from then on.

That’s why she was here now, in this damned corp building. She’d actually been fooled into believing the place was home. Hell, maybe it was by now.

She hurled herself around another corner. Her vision had almost fully returned. Her optics were still going haywire, but she saw the double-doors leading to the loading bay. Its internal storage room stretched out behind a wall beside her. She could feel the van waiting, already running. Too bad her augs were scrambled, or she might’ve called for suppressing fire.

Den Mother had sent her here– all of them actually– but the rest weren’t forced to come inside. Den Mother had long been paying-off corps to keep the Fairy in business. One owned the deed, another the land. As much as they wanted to, they couldn’t take it from her, no matter the amount of illegality going on. Sure, they could send in corp-sec, but Den Mother had made it well-known that she’d blow the place apart with her in it before she’d let them take it. Cutter’d seen the C4 stacked in the basement. It wasn’t a bluff.

Until now, corp-sec had stayed away from the Fairy and its people. In fact, aside from a few skirmishes and narrow escapes after petty theft, Cutter’d never had any trouble with them. But sure enough, after someone in a suit showed up in the Fairy– a weasel-looking guy too sharply dressed for usual, Fairy business– Den Mother pulled the Vanguard in to a pow-wow. Cutter’d never been sure what that really meant, but she knew, when it it was over, that she was about to infiltrate a corp. With the aid of a remote receiver and the Fairy’s resident tech-genius, Dan “The Man”, she’d been tasked to locate and delete all deed information relating to the Fairy and Den Mother.

Cutter watched one of the doors open. Jack the Ripper appeared. Ripper was lethal at any range, and the aimed baby-eagles in his hands said he was all business. The door beside him divoted from rifle fire. Cutter pumped her legs. Ripper stood stock still, damn near invincible with his Kevlar-woven skeleton and armor-plated torso augs. The baby eagles barked and spit lead at corp-sec that dodged for cover at the far end of the hall.

Cutter dove past Ripper into the van’s rear, landed half-in. The Man yanked her the rest of the way. Ripper’s eagles barked. He back-stepped confidently, unrushed and unswayed. He fell in backwards, rolled to come upright, still firing. The baby eagles clicked empty. The Man hit a key on his laptop. The auto-van growled, tires spinning, and tore off into the night.

“You alright?” Ripper asked reloading his eagles.

The Man was too busy hacking the autopilot, spoofing its travel information. A sign on the side of the van said “Aries Security Corp,” so the corp they’d just hacked would have no idea who’d really done the job.

Cutter’s chest heaved for air. Her hands ran along herself to check for holes. Other than a splitting migraine and some wonked-out optics, she was fine. Fine? Alive, more like. She’d probably never been fine, never would be really. At the very least though, her home was safe, secure. The Vanguard had prevailed again.

She swallowed hard, “Yeah. Five-by-Five.” He handed over a canteen and she drank deep. Then with a breath, “Vanguard always wins, right?”