Cold Hard Truths 1: Vices (7 page)

“You had better all remember where to check in, because I’m not repeating myself,” Carver told us before pulling the mask over his head. His body was primed, lethal, and ready. His shoulders were broad and the fabric of the black shirt was pulled tight over his lightly muscled arms and thighs. I lost myself staring at the expanse of his chest for a moment or two, remembering the feel of his taut nipples pressed against my damp back and his firm ass in my hands.

“Jones,” Carver snapped.

“I know,” I replied. My voice was shaky, barely sounding like my own.

Carver stared at me through his dark visor for a few moments. I wished I could see his face, even just his eyes, to know if he understood that this responsibility was weighing on me hard.

“Let’s go.” He turned and walked away.

Bruno came up to me with his mask still under his arm, put his big hand on my shoulder, and squeezed. I gave him the most reassuring smile I could. He understood what I was feeling, and for that I was grateful. As unidealistic the life of a soldier for ENAD was, living under the thumb of the state, it was the only home I’d known, and some of the people were the closest thing to a family I’d ever had.

When they’d all slipped away, Tanis gave me a salute and disappeared into the shadows at the corner of the alley. I put my mask on and calibrated my current location with the digital display on my visor. I could see the area around me, as well as where all my teammates were, including their heart rates and ammo.

I hauled myself onto a small building in the back of the alley, some business that had been abandoned for years. The broken sign on the front of the building read
Cyber Cuisine
, whatever that was. Two of the lights on the sign were busted and none of them were on. The brick of the building felt wet, slippery under my gloved fingers, but my grip was firm as I pulled myself up.

I stood on the roof and took in my surroundings. Everything was dark, but my visor helped to illuminate and clarify my surroundings. I ran and jumped off the roof to tuck and roll, catching myself on the adjacent building. I repeated this process, making my way toward our target location by hopping from one building to the next and occasionally using the ancient fire escapes as ladders.

Eventually I came to an unused electric train track. About seventy years ago the city had had electric train tracks installed over every street, swooping over the roofs of buildings and placing support beams right in the middle of the few parks we had left. Most of them were abandoned in the poorer areas of town where people couldn’t afford the fare, and the state had implemented a no-tolerance policy for freeloaders. Now the tracks were relics, beacons for the hope people in this city once had. A sad reminder, really.

Useless as they were for most, they’d become handy to me. Scaling the support beams was done easily enough with thick, magnetic rope and support wires around my waist. Once on top of the loose tracks, I jogged down the decaying metal beams to my desired building. My ideal spot was the taller building adjacent to T8’s den, so I moved back down the tracks, sprinted to jump on the roof, and tucked and rolled.

I took a breath and made note of the screen on my visor. Everyone was getting into their positions. Carver set up a timer in the top corner of the screen, indicating when each action should take place. I had approximately seven and a half minutes to align myself properly, set up my sniper rifle, take out the two men prowling around the building, and wait for Tanis’s cue for when she lifted the electronic, retractable window coverings. Apparently they were bulletproof, some fancy luxury only rich people and drug dealers could afford.

Crawling on the damp metal roof, I went to the ledge that had a decent view of the building and the appropriate windows. I was high up, at least twenty-six, twenty-seven stories, and I could see down to the people on the ground, or up and still have a full view of another thirty stories above me. There were lights everywhere, indirect and radiating harshly against the wires between buildings and the crumbling edges of the towers.

I rolled onto my back and began unpacking the bag I’d been carrying. Carefully, precisely, I pulled out all the parts of my sniper rifle and meticulously assembled them on a small, unrolled mat. Folding stock, for convenience, adjustable cheek-piece attached, magazine with magazine catch for quick cleanup, adjustable bipod, scope, and suppressor. Sometimes it was the classics that worked best, especially when it came to weaponry.

Rolling onto my stomach, I placed the sniper rifle bipod down on the roof and used the adjustment rings on the top and side to clear my sight through the scope. Down near the front door were two men, each filthy and tweaked out, unable to stay still and constantly looking over their shoulders. They were both packing guns, some unregulated, altered pistol I couldn’t quite make out from my position. I used my visor to do a facial scan on the two men. Both targets. So I continued to hold as still as possible with my finger resting on the trigger, tracking the men’s movements.

“J, in position?” That was Bruno’s voice coming from the left speaker inside my mask.

“Affirmative. Sights set on two targets, both known accomplices of T8. Confirm when to proceed,” I replied.

Less than a minute until the timer on my screen would hit zero and my team would sneak in through the back of the building.

Tanis piped up. “Tanis here, ready and waiting. Back window will open in thirteen seconds and close again in twenty-five. Be ready.”

I licked my lips and waited out the last thirteen seconds until they had confirmed entry, finger still poised on the trigger and eyesight still locked on my target.

“We’re in,” said Carver.

I waited until my target wandered off to the side of the building, away from the other target. I watched him rub his arms up and down feverishly, acting as if he were cold even though it was warmer than comfortable outside. The moment he turned the corner and came out of his partner’s sight, the crosshairs of my eyepiece zeroed in on his neck, and I pulled the trigger. Not the cleanest headshot I’d ever made, especially from that distance, but it got the job done. His dying body fell to the ground and landed in a pile of dead batteries and old needles.

The other target must’ve heard the sound, because his head whipped in that direction. A much cleaner shot this time, right between the eyes. He too fell to the ground instantly.

Tanis appeared from a side street and went right up to the bodies that were seeping red blood onto the concrete. She was small but definitely packed a big punch, I thought as I watched her put her thin arms under the armpits of each man and drag him off into a shadowed area behind a garbage bin. Her tiny body then slipped in through the side door, and moments later, the windows on the twenty-fourth floor were open.

I tried to refocus myself, squinting through the scope for my teammates. They were moving up the flight of stairs to the next floor, secure and moving quickly and seamlessly together.

The next floor’s windows opened at the same time the previous floor’s closed. Tanis worked fast; I was impressed. On the next floor there were at least seven people and two bots, and those were only the ones I could see from my position. The bots both appeared to be out of commission, left dead and unmoving, one against a wall and the other slumped over the back of a chair. I didn’t think they’d be a problem.

A few of the men moved their gazes to the windows, probably wondering why they were suddenly opened, probably too high to remember their protocol. Two of them were in the living room on a sofa, making out, the big one wearing a white tank top but naked from the waist down, with some naked girl riding him. Another one in the hallway stood there watching them. Fourth person had his back to the window, conveniently, and was talking to the fifth, sixth, and seventh, who were in a disgustingly unclean kitchen getting high. Two were crushing up bluish pills and snorting them; the other one was injecting. My scanner indicated it was likely Pentrox they were snorting. I’d scanned all their faces; all of them except the girl were associated in some way with T8.

Carver was up first. He’d likely used his visor scanner to locate all the life-forms in the room and then waited until no one was close enough to see him duck into a side room down the hallway. With this many people in a confined space, they didn’t have a lot of options for their plan of attack.

Seno slid out from the staircase, skimming on the concrete floor, holding his gun out in front of him and shooting one of the men in the kitchen.

The man in front of the window threw up his hands just before I put a hole through his gut. The angle was sloppy. I knew that, but I couldn’t risk shooting anywhere near eye level and blowing Seno’s head off.

After that, everyone collided in a burst of commotion. The guys at the kitchen table produced guns, aiming them at Seno. Before they could get in a decent shot, Seno rolled back and ducked behind a chair at the same moment Bruno swung around the corner and shot one of the men in the head. Seno reached around the sofa, shot the needle-user in the leg, and then Bruno finished him off with a bullet in the chest. The man stumbled back, still on his feet for a few seconds before he fell to his knees, then to the floor.

The third man had tried to run, frantic and definitely not fast enough. I put a bullet through the back of his head and right out the front just as he made it to the top of the staircase.

While this was all going on, Carver had slipped around the opposite room and come through another door I didn’t have in my line of sight. He shot one of the men on the couch in the chest, but the other, larger man took that opportunity to throw the woman on his lap at Carver. She scrambled around, trying to get to her feet just before Carver shoved her aside in time to be swung at by the ape. He missed, Carver ducking low and shooting him in the stomach, and then, once he’d doubled over, twice in the head.

Over Carver’s shoulder, he watched the tail end of the woman’s hair flying down the stairs.

“T, open the lower-floor windows,” he said over the headset system.

The windows opened and I could see the girl panicking, grabbing and holding on to door frames, barely able to stand on her own two feet. She had blonde hair, real pretty, but thin as a bundle of wires, likely because she hadn’t ever eaten enough in her life. Couldn’t have been any older than nineteen.

“J, take her out. You have one floor,” Carver said.

“She’s not on the associate list, Carver,” I struggled to say, still eyeing her through the crosshairs. I was trying to reject the visual of bright red flowers of blood blossoming on her pretty blonde hair.

“She’s seen us, J. Do your god damn job,” Carver snapped at me. He didn’t yell, he never yelled, but he definitely had varying degrees of clipped words and harsh tones. And I knew how mad he was as I watched that girl fall once and get back up, almost to the next set of stairs. I didn’t want to do it. No part of me wanted to, but every part of me knew I had to. Civilians couldn’t know who we were or what we were capable of. Anything caught on the wrong end of one of our guns during a mission, if they were guilty or not, had to be put down.

I sighed deep, zeroing in on the side of the girl’s head, silently cursing Carver for assigning me this task. I held my breath and prepared myself for what I was about to do, for the person I was about to become.

Was that the kind of person I had to be for Carver to accept me, to want me the way I needed him to? Did I have to become cold and hard like him, killing without batting an eye, steamrolling over innocent people to move forward? Did my eyes have to lose their light too?

Sweat ran down the sides of my face, pearling over my cheeks and down my neck. With only a few seconds left before she was completely out of view, I had to decide. I had to decide the type of man I wanted to be.

I shot the wall directly behind her head, knowing that it wouldn’t hit the mark that Carver wanted it to. The girl screamed and ducked as best she could at the sound of the shot impacting the wall, but feverishly continued to scurry away from the scene.

I prayed that she was too drugged up to remember this or at least smart enough to know to keep her mouth shut.

“Target lost. She gave me the slip,” I said into the headset but received no instant reply.

“She gave you the slip?” Carver’s voice sounded in my ear a few moments later. “People don’t give you the slip, Jones. Civilians don’t give
you
the slip.”

“She was fast.” My words held no weight.

Again, silence.

It sounded like a quiet sigh through the headset, and then Carver spoke again. “We’ll be discussing this later.”

Corp would always tell us that a bit of bloodshed was necessary when fighting for the bigger, better cause, even if the blood spilled wasn’t deserving. Unfortunately, it got easier every time, got easier each time you put someone down. It was a sick feeling knowing that you were getting used to killing people. But I still couldn’t force myself to take innocent lives, even though my fellow soldiers had had to do so on a few occasions. Maybe that was another reason I’d fallen so hard for Carver—he was capable of doing the real tough things that I couldn’t.

They were already heading up to the next floor. All the window coverings closed except those on the twenty-seventh floor; our goal floor. I pressed my cheek firmly against the cheek rest, ignoring the few speckles of sweat dripping down the sides of my face and the back of my neck. They must’ve been louder than they’d hoped on the previous two floors, because there were men on the twenty-seventh floor, waiting for them with guns and knives in their hands.

The den was old, rotting, yellowing, much like the rest of the complex. There were tables along the one exposed far wall that I could see, covered in guns and metal boxes. Pills and powder were also scattered around the table, some of it loose but some of it covered. We must’ve interrupted their afternoon high.

T8 was standing near the back, as the ringleaders always did, long, laser machete in hand. Those were dangerous; the sight of it alone made my heart skip a beat. Sharper than any knife, and could cut or burn through practically everything. It was almost beautiful, the blade glowing an electric blue with a darker hue near the base: the brighter it was, the hotter it was. And of course, they were illegal and extremely hard to come by. He had about six men that I could see around him, all stuffed into the main room. The hallway from the staircase they used was deserted, as was the other small room that had a door open.