“A zombie is a mindless revenant. It simply wants to eat human flesh, mainly brains, and staggers around with that single purpose, slowly rotting as it goes. And they’re not fucking real. A rezzer is a dead fucker raised up with magic. It doesn’t breathe or eat or sleep or shit, but it can pretend to do all those things, and it looks and acts like a regular person. Except it is entirely under the thrall of the necromancer who raised it. Regardless of any other influence, the necro’s will overrides everything.”
“So that’s how it infiltrates society,” Jet said.
“Exactly. This particular necromancer has either put rezzers into power or found people in power, killed them, and then rezzed them to work for him. They operate exactly like regular people. They conceal the fact of their deadness, and fulfil the necro’s orders.”
Taipan made a face of grudging respect. “Cunning fucker. But must be powerful as hell to control as many as you suggest.”
“Quite. Armour has put out a lot of his fires, taken out a lot of his rezzers, but his power is growing too widespread. Different Armour bases around the world are getting in on it and reporting his feelers reaching their jurisdictions. It’s been agreed the necromancer himself has to go down. When he dies, his influence dies with him. His rezzers will all just drop, nothing but empty corpses the moment the necro’s life is snuffed out. So Giraud at Armour Paris has taken on the gig and he’s deploying us.”
“Because this sounds dangerous as hell,” Smoke said.
“Exactly.” Boss spread a map out on a table and the Squad gathered around to see. “According to Armour intel, our man is holed up in here.”
“Is that a castle?” Jet asked. The map showed a hill surrounded by forest. Atop the hill blueprints marked out the rooms and walls of a huge square building with a large open space in the middle.
“Yep, that’s Castle ThisGuysFucked. We don’t need any more information than that. We’re being air-dropped in here.” Boss tapped the map, south of the hill.
“Right in the trees?” Smoke said.
“Definitely not Paris,” Jet said. “Where is this?”
“Somewhere in the arse end of Belarus, not far from where the border meets with Ukraine and Russia. Deep ancient forests, miles from any civilisation.”
“Getting in is one thing, but then how do we get out?”
“Gonna be tricky, but this necro is canny. He’ll have transport we can secure, I’m sure, or we might be able to call for an extraction, depending on the lay of the land. No matter, we’ll worry about that later. We drop in, we mount the hill, gain the castle and find him. Kill him and somehow get home in time for tea and fucking crumpets. All good?”
“All good,” the others said in unison.
Boss looked down at Raven. “All good?”
“I guess so.”
He threw his overlarge grin at her. “You’re not here to prove yourself, right? You’re part of the Squad now, testing is all over, so just accept that and roll with it.”
“Okay.” Though she felt anything but okay. This was all a hell of a long way from tours of duty in Afghanistan.
They sat in the back of an Armour stealth helicopter, ten minutes out from the drop. Raven felt good back in full fatigues and pack again, weapons strapped across her body. Her knives were close, especially the jade ice dagger, always right there ready. Despite the issues she’d had with command, the trouble hiding her skills, she had loved the fight of active service. Anger management, Smoke had said, and she smiled. Maybe a little more complicated than that, but taking death to shitbags who deserved it was her jam.
“You’re a mudang?” Jet said suddenly, breaking her reverie.
The question caught her off-guard. “Er, yeah, that’s right.” How much did the Squad know about her? She knew next to nothing about them and the disadvantage bothered her.
Jet nodded, like she knew exactly what that meant and respected it.
“The fuck is a moo-dang?” Taipan asked.
Raven glanced to the front and Boss and Smoke’s broad backs watching over the pilot’s shoulder. “We doing this now?”
“Got anything else to do? No offence, just wondering.”
Raven forced herself to lighten up. These people were her new family, the enemy was out there. The enemy was always out there, never inside. Remember the mantra. “It’s like a Korean shaman, you know. A folk magus. But I grew up in America since I was five, so I hate all that cultural purity bullshit. My magic is rooted in the culture of my birth, but I gathered all kinds of things over the years.”
Jet gave a casual thumbs up. “Same for all of us, really. Mixed like colours on an artist’s palette, right? Anything of use?”
“Something like that, I guess. What about you?”
“Can it!” Boss strode back into the cabin, Smoke on his heels. “Make ready.”
They switched mode in an instant, like Raven had seen before. Wordlessly they went through self-checks then checking each other, lined up, and the door opened. The sound-proofed cabin roared with the rush of air outside, icy cold and buffeting, the rotors chopping the wind into sound bites. They lined up, watched the light flick from red to green, and jumped in quick succession.
It was a low drop and black silk ‘chutes opened right away. The thick forest canopy rushed up, far too fast for Raven’s liking. She watched between her black boots, adjusted course a little left and right in the hope of coming in between trees and having the best shot at an easy harness escape.
From the sudden roar of the chopper into the cold fall, silence pressed in. She didn’t waste any attention on the rest of the Squad, drew hard on the ‘chute as her feet crashed into the foliage, drew her elbows in, tucked her heels against her butt. Crashing and snapping of leaves and branches filled her ears then she bounced and held up, hanging in her harness in utter blackness. She flicked down her night vision goggles and scanned below. The forest floor was about twenty feet down. If it was soft enough she could drop that far and roll.
Leaves and branches burst beside her and Smoke fell into view. His ‘chute snagged up a little lower than hers and he looked up, his wide grin pale in the darkness. Then he was gone. The harness hung limp, Smoke had vanished. She caught movement below, looked down and there he was, looking up at her again. Like he’d teleported from one spot to the other. She smiled crookedly. I guess that’s where he gets his name from then.
“Want me to catch you?” he called up.
“Fuck no!” She hit the harness release, dropped, tucked and rolled through leaf litter and came up into a crouch. It had been a little further than she thought and her heart raced at the prospect of injury, but she was fine.
“Ballsy,” Boss said, striding up beside her.
“A little help?”
Jet joined them and the four looked around until they spotted Taipan upside down some thirty feet off the ground, spinning in a gentle figure eight.
Boss sucked air over his teeth. “Fucking hell.”
“I got it.” Smoke took two or three paces forward then vanished. Several moments later he appeared without breaking strike along a thick limb only a few feet from where Taipan hung. In seconds, with a knife and rope employed judiciously, they were all gathered on the forest floor.
Boss checked his compass and pointed. “That way. No lights, use your night goggles, single file. If anything comes at us, use hand-to-hand if possible. We don’t want to warn anyone in that castle we’re coming by sending gunfire through the night. Quiet as church fucking mice, all right?”
Without waiting for a response he led the way.
Raven didn’t know her natural spot in the Squad, but Boss took point and Jet fell in behind him. Taipan waved her forward, then Smoke took the rear guard, so it seemed she was in the middle. She wondered if Blinder, the dead ex-member, had been in the middle too.