Fireteam Delta, J. Halpin [online e book reading .txt] 📗

pain. Colonel Rivers wanted you looked at, so we’re going to be taking you to the medical tent, all right?”

Apparently, the colonel saw fit to actually help him. That was nice, at least. Maybe that last near-death experience had a silver lining.

“Yeah. Sure. Fine.” Summers lay back in the stretcher. He could feel the strain of the last few days finally setting in, with the danger past.

Hopefully now ,he could finally get some sleep.

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“Gah! Damn it!” Summers flinched away from the knife that had just stabbed into his back. One of the guards outside gave a worried look in his direction before he managed to quiet himself.

“Corporal, I’ve given you enough morphine to kill a man twice your weight. I don’t know what to tell you.” Jacobs gave Summers a worried look. He was still in a rubber suit, one that was now splattered with blood Summers assumed was his own.

He looked down at the IV in his arm. Summers could only guess that what Cortez had got him back in the city was to blame. The monster she’d taken it from was supposed to filter out poison, and therefore the hamr. Instead, it must have ensured he’d feel every cut while he was under the knife.

Summers was reminded that, as many benefits as he’d as gotten from his “condition,” it always found a way to bite him in the ass.

Jacobs moved toward the fluid bag at his side.

“There’s not much left in there, but I can up the dosage—”

“No . . . just do your thing.” Summers grit his teeth. Much as he wasn’t a fan of pain, he was less fond of the idea that a piece of metal could shoot up an artery and into his brain at any moment.

Jacobs hesitated only a few seconds before continuing.

And Summers immediately regretted his decision.

“Okay, that doesn’t feel like a scalpel!”

“I broke all my scalpels on this skin of yours.”

“Then what are you using?”

“I think you’d be happier if you didn’t know.”

“Shouldn’t . . . there be more than one person doing this?”

“If we had them, yes, and if it weren’t against orders. Colonel Rivers wanted to make sure you were taken care of, but we have priorities. And unfortunately for you, Sergeant Wendel’s high on that list.”

“Wendel?”

Summers only vaguely remembered the name they’d called out when they’d found the thin man.

“Right . . . you wouldn’t know.” Jacobs paused. “The Sergeant, the guy who nearly killed you back there, he’s what you’d call Patient Zero. He’s the whole reason we’re out here. And the reason we’re stuck here.”

“He’s the reason the walls are like that?”

“The walls are the least of it. I’m guessing you realized Wendel’s different from those other things?”

“Yeah . . .” Summers suppressed the urge to scream as Jacobs made another cut. “I sort of caught on to that.”

“See, the army found something back on Earth, something big, alien. We called it the Anchor. No one was sure what it was, but then this sergeant, he gets the genius idea to touch it. Next thing we know, he’s trying to kill us. They find something in his brain, take it out, and suddenly, that same idiot is a genius. You see the gate in Alaska, back when it was working?”

He wasn’t about to mention he was the reason it stopped working.

“Yeah, it looked like a satellite to me.”

“Wendel’s the one who made building that thing possible. That Anchor, it’s the core of the machine. That one was just a small piece of it. According to Wendel, it was supposed to act as a gate on its own. Where to, we didn’t know. But the army used Wendel to make a workaround. Then, one day, after one of his surgeries, he flips. Touches the Anchor, and next thing we know, there are these . . . things everywhere. His ‘people.’ Because he’s not Wendel anymore.”

“Right . . .”

Summers knew the hamr changed memories slowly. In his case, he’d only “remembered” what was different after he’d removed the mass from his brain. It was a sort of fail safe. Even if you managed to save someone before they were changed, they might not be entirely the same person.

“Anyway, after he turned traitor, another genius—and I mean with a capital G—does something to the gate. Slams the door right in Wendel’s smug face. All hell broke loose. Things appearing and disappearing . . . that’s what happened to the walls. We found men and pieces of those . . . things spread out for miles.”

“We saw a tank about a week and a half out. It looked like it had been embedded in a hill . . .”

“There’s more shit like that out there. But yeah, even after that, both of our gates were still working. We still had contact with Earth. Problem was, we’d just had a major containment breach, Wendel and most of his people were in the wind, and the brass couldn’t risk those things spreading to the rest of this world. Before you ask, we tracked one to Alaska.”

“And their job was to kill whatever had gotten out . . . ?”

“They figured out the way these things spread from body to body. If we let them have a foothold in this world, it’d only be a matter of time before they overwhelmed us. What we didn’t count on was that Wendel would do the same to us. Some time ago, he attacked the base, and the Anchor stopped working, along with our gate. He shut out our supply line, and he’s been waiting for us to die out ever since.”

“They still have the gate in Alaska . . .”

“If they could have fixed it, we’d have been saved by now. And if those things he