Nathan never liked hunting animals. But hunting demons was another story. Ngu’Tinh was still out there.
Warm Bodies
An Alpha Unit story
Kirsten Cross
“Taints are, without doubt, the biggest threat facing us today. As a result of our ignorance, our arrogance, and our misguided sense of scientific endeavour, we have created a serious threat to the safety and security of this country and its people. This committee therefore recommends the immediate formation of a specialist unit made up of elite members of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces with the expressed duty of combating this threat above all else. We also recommend that the unit include experts in the field of science, military tactics, and Vampirism.
May God help us all.”
The trouble with night-vision goggles is that the slightest flash of any bright light and you’re effectively ‘blasted out’. And when you’ve got some dirty little bastard Taint intent on chowing down on any soft tissue it can find about three feet from your arse then being blind, even for a split second, is not an option.
“Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all the little saints, these sons of bitches are fast!” Robbie Moore, trying to find his bearings in the eerie green glow of a room seen through NVGs, aimed the adapted M4 Benelli pump action shotgun straight at the snarling face of the Taint. He fired. And missed. “Fuck!”
“Seriously? From six feet away? Who taught you to shoot? Your grandmother?” Terry Warner screamed abuse at his oppo and fumbled with his own M4. As inanimate objects are wont to do at the most inopportune moment, the damn thing stubbornly refused to co-operate. “Shit! Shit!”
“Okay, ladies. We all knew this was coming. Breathe.” The calm voice of Colby Flynn cut through the screaming and mayhem. “Terry, stop panicking. Safety off. Rob, prime and squeeze the damn trigger, don’t yank on it. You’re shooting a Taint, not giving yourself a hand job.” Colby wanted the newbies to get their first kill for themselves this time, rather than having to step in for them yet again. And preferably before the rest of the pack of slathering, wild-eyed Taints came barrelling through the door and tore them all to pieces, if you don’t mind lads, thank you very much.
An M4 blasted out a cartridge filled with liquid, spraying a fluorescent pale-green mist into the air, like someone had shaken a can of soda and pulled the tab. Colby checked the two men. It was Robbie Moore who had finally got his shit together and managed to fire off a second shot. “Adda boy.” He melted back into the corner of the room and watched how the two men handled a close-quarters confrontation with one of mankind’s most terrifying creations, a second-generation Taint with an appetite and an attitude. After the initial god-awful fumbling and general fuck-uppery, the two men started to get themselves organised. Their training — if it was ever truly possible to ‘train’ for your first full-on Taint attack — finally kicked in.
The Taint recoiled as the fine mist drenched it from the top of its oozing scalp to the large hole the M4 projectile had punched through the middle of its chest. It took a few microseconds for it to realise it had been hit. The Taint looked down at its chest, and then back up at Robbie. “In three… two… one…” Colby counted down, ticking the seconds off on curled fingers. “And…”
The Taint went rigid and splayed its arms out. Orange lines snaked through its body, visible under the surface of the skin, like rivers of lava flowing through its veins. Its skin started to bulge and blister. The Taint threw its head back and let out a wail. The incensed creature started to convulse and dropped to the floor. The spasms grew increasingly violent, and there was a loud crack as it twisted so savagely its spine snapped. It thrashed on the floor, screaming like all the souls of Hell were crying out as one voice. The creature’s fists smashed into the concrete floor and its heels drummed violently. The orange rivers became a tsunami of fire roaring through its body.
The explosion, when it came, was a bit of a relief to be honest. All that thrashing and screaming always gave Colby a headache. The liquid-filled projectile finally did its job, but it was more of a wet fart rather than a proper ‘boom’, rather like a damp feather pillow splitting. A shower of sparks and ash mushroomed upwards and filled the room.
“There ya go!” Colby grinned at the two men. It was their first close-quarters incendiary. They’d done decapitation, which was shocking enough, but relatively drama-free. Decapitating didn’t cause all that noisy thrashing about and exploding. But a blast from a M4 adapted to deliver a deadly organophosphur payload was a whole different story. It was always interesting watching the newbies react to their first full-on, heel drumming, concrete punching ‘party popper’, as the lads called them.
The two men stared at Colby. Through their night vision goggles he looked like a very muscular, very menacing green goblin. This particular grinch, though, wasn’t interested in ruining Christmas. He was focused on training the new kids to stay alive beyond their first sortie.
Flynn’s relaxed posture and nonchalant expression verged on the ‘seen it, done it’ arrogance that all the veterans of Alpha Unit had. But both newbies knew he was perfectly entitled to at least a certain level of arrogance. After all, the guy had, in fact, both seen it and done it. For real.
Colby grinned at his charges and pointed to the open door. “Um, incoming?”
Warner and Moore spun around. “Ah, crap…” In the green landscape created by their NVGs the men could see a set of long, sinewy fingers curling around the doorframe. Ragged, razor sharp nails that no French manicurist could ever redeem tipped off the insectoid-like digits. They dripped with venom. The latest generation of Taints had evolved yet again, developing tubes that ran underneath the skin and ended at the base of each nail bed, delivering a toxin that would paralyse the victim in seconds.
This new development meant that getting ‘up close and personal’ with a Taint had a whole new level of risk. Q division was working on clothing made from a Kevlar-mesh cloth that would protect the teams from accidental scratches, including gloves, full combats and balaclavas. But they were still a few weeks from going into production. Right now, all it took was one slash, one tear through the outer layers of skin and into the subcutaneous tissue beneath, and you were flat on your backside, paralysed rigid but still fully aware as Taints started to rip into your flesh. Never had the term ‘keep the buggers at arm’s length’ been taken so literally.
Right behind these toxin-laden fingers emerged a face that only a mother Taint could love. The skin on its face was lacerated into tramlines, and every wound was infected. A glimpse of white bone shone behind one particularly broad slash that stretched from its eye socket to the corner of its mouth. A mouth that, as to be expected, was filled with needle-sharp teeth also dripping with toxic juices.
It locked its gaze onto Terry Warner, two eyes filled with hate, vitriol, and probably even more damn venom. These second-gen Taints weren’t just mutant vampires — they were walking chemical factories as well.
Colby waited to see how Warner would react. Eye contact was one of the toughest tests anyone wanting to join the Unit would face. That whole thing about vampires having the ability to mesmerise their victims wasn’t a myth. The Old World vamps had it, and now, so did the Taints. That blood-curdling, bone-chilling gaze could stop even a fully trained member of the Unit in their tracks. It froze your soul. It coursed down your veins and nerves like crackling ice. It touched a primeval fear that every human being carried in their subconscious. That ‘look’ could crash though centuries of evolution and turn the most hardened, fully-trained and combat-experienced soldier into a gibbering, pitchfork-waving idiot villager in a second. It was the same cold fear that a human feels when they stare into the eyes of a wolf. That realisation that guess what, buddy, you’re no longer the apex predator. However, the bugger in front of you with the golden eyes, snarling face and big, fuck-off fangs most certainly is.