SNAFU: Hunters

“Whoa!” Colby threw an arm out to balance himself as his foot slid away. There was something greasy and viscous on the floor, as slippery as engine oil. The air had a strange metallic tang, mixed in with pungent top notes of shit and opened bowels. The hairs on the back of Colby’s neck rose, and he glanced at the floor. A smear, like a sauce flourish on a top-end restaurant plate, formed a crescent where his boot heel had skidded. The liquid was thick, dark, and in the iridescent light of a full moon Flynn could see vapour rising off it. So it was warm, then. And fresh. Very, very fresh.

He crouched, flipped his NVGs up and out of the way, and dipped a finger in the liquid. He rubbed it between his finger and thumb. As he pulled his thumb and finger apart, the liquid formed a hair-fine connection before snapping and creating two globules, one on each finger. Colby scowled. “Damn…” He knew that consistency. Only one fluid in the world felt like that – blood.

He pressed the button on his radio with his left hand. His right instinctively curled around the butt of a Glock 17 that sat in a holster strapped to his thigh. He flicked the safety off and disengaged the coiled lanyard that the Health and Safety lot insisted on attaching to the gun for no apparent reason other than that they knew it annoyed the ever living shit out of him. He cradled the butt in his hand, ready for a quick draw if necessary. “Micky, I’m in corridor two. Confirmation please, mate.”

A voice crackled in his earpiece. “Go ahead, Col.”

“I’ve got blood here. A lot of blood. Is this part of the simulation?”

“Blood?”

“Yeah. Blood. Ya know, blood. That sticky red shit that’s quite important for the whole living thing. I know you have a passion for realism in these simulations, you mad bastard, but does it stretch to chucking a gallon of pig’s blood on the floor as well?”

“Negative, mate. Negative.”

“Then we have a problem. Scan for heat signatures. I think we might have a live one on our hands here, fella.”

“Copy that. The captain’s getting Alpha and Bravo teams ready.”

Colby pressed the squawk button again. “That’s reassuring. Arm up for warm bodies. I’ve got a really bad feeling about this…”

Colby stood, the Glock now cradled in his hand. His Blackhawk combat knife pressed against his left hip. He had seventeen hollowpoint rounds and six inches of precision ground D-2 steel with a wickedly sharp edge. He patted the knife for reassurance. You might run out of bullets, but you never run out of knife.

He flipped his goggles back down. The NVGs allowed him to see clearly in that weird, mottled-green monotone, but like any soldier he knew full well that they could distort things, especially depth perception. Objects seen through a pair of NVGs could be closer than they appeared, a bit like a police car in a wing mirror. And when you were talking about getting the jump on Taints, that was not a good thing. You wanted Taints to be as far away from you as possible. And preferably dead.

Instinct kicked in. Since his first encounter with the granddaddy of the undead back in Turkey a year earlier, Colby Flynn had gone toe-to-toe with vampires of both kinds on numerous occasions. As part of the elite Alpha Unit, it was his job to keep London free of the man-made monstrosities that constituted probably the worst ever national ‘science project gone bad’ that the public didn’t know about.

Taints.

He thought about the first time he’d been briefed by Yolanda about the damn things. It had been quite possibly the single most bizarre PowerPoint presentation he’d ever sat through. And if it hadn’t have been for his experience with Micky Cox and Gary Parks back in that Turkish castle, he wouldn’t have believed a single word about vampires or any of that supernatural shit. But Flynn knew now there was a big dollop of fact behind the myth of Vampirism. It was real. It existed, and it sure as hell didn’t ‘sparkle’ like those Hollywood idiots portrayed it in the movies. It bit. It tore flesh. It devoured. And it was loose on the nighttime streets of London.

Yolanda had explained to the team that the Old World vampires were bad enough. But these mutant vampires – these ‘Taints’ – were a whole different level of crazy. They’d been created in a lab, not in some draughty castle full of bats and bad memories. Taints had emerged from a single lineage – a ‘Lucy’ whose DNA had been tainted by a rogue gene – hence the name. A hiccup in a single piece of coding had produced a vampire with all the fury, the strength, speed and blood-lust of the Old World version. Only much, much worse.