Orpheus (2 page)

The older man nodded as if he'd seen the same kind of thing, then turned his gaze to Tim's face. He was almost entirely in shadow, but Tim still felt like he was getting an x-ray. “And?”

“And I want to pay them back, sir. I'll never know who they are, but I want to do something with the second chance they gave me.”

That x-ray feeling intensified, and Tim knew that this man in front of him was scanning for bullshit.

“Good. Your motives are pure enough to let me trust you. That's all we have: trust in each other. If you feel like it's too much, you let me know up here, and we'll have no hard feelings. Down there, if I feel like I can't trust you, if I think that you're putting the team in danger, I'll shoot you myself.”

Tim actually smiled at the threat upon his life. He knew that it really wasn't personal. “Yes, sir.”

Orpheus turned sideways just enough to offer his hand. “Welcome to Scalpel.”

Tim accepted the offered hand and gave what he hoped was a firm pump. Orpheus didn't seem to be the type who'd be impressed by such things, but it couldn't hurt. “Thank you.”

"One mission from now you won't be thanking me. Now, did Sam give you something for me?”

Tim panicked for a moment when he couldn't find the tubes right away, but they were safe in his cargo pocket.
Whew.
He handed the tubes over.

Orpheus uncapped one and slid out a cigar. Tim thought that this might have been his cue to leave, but he hadn't been dismissed, either. He had no idea what to do.

“You smoke cigars, Tim?”

“Umm, never have.”

“Well you do now.” With that, he slid out the second cigar, clipped them both, and handed one to Tim, who awkwardly put it in his mouth. Orpheus produced a lighter, lit his slowly and methodically, then handed the lighter to Tim. The novice mimicked the older man well enough to get his lit. The smoke tasted bitter at first, and he inhaled a little, but he fought back the urge to cough. The next few pulls were smoother, and he thought he could get used to it.

They spent the next forty minutes or so on the rooftop, overlooking the city, the silence only occasionally broken by a question from Tim. Orpheus was very patient and he answered every inquiry, if curtly.

When they were both down to nubs, Orpheus told Tim to get some sleep. As he got to the stairwell door, Tim said, “Sir, I have one more question.”

“Go ahead.”

“The reason you do this...does it have something to do with your name?"

"It's just a nickname that Fish gave me, Tim...nothing more than that. It's what he does."

“I know a bit of mythology, and Orpheus was the guy who went into the underworld to rescue his wife. It didn't turn out well.”

The man known as Orpheus showed Tim his back, dropped his cigar to the roof and ground it beneath a booted toe.

Chapter 2: New Twist on an Old Mission

“This is it? This is the whole team?”

“What were you expecting, Bait?”

Tim didn't know what he was expecting, except that he figured there would be more of the team. “Five of us? I just guessed that the team would be bigger, that's all.”

Fish chuckled. “Doing what we do as a big team would get us all killed.”

“Truth,” Mutt agreed.

Orpheus entered the locker room and said, “Gentlemen.”

“Hey, Bossman, just in time. Bait here was questioning your decision to keep the team as small as it is. He thinks we should be a battalion.”

An increasing look of horror dawned on Bait's face. “I did not! Uh, sir. I just, I...”

“Relax. He's playing with you,” Sam said.

Tim forced a laugh and muttered, “Fucker” in Fish direction. Everyone else laughed. Tim slung his AR15 (liberated from a local gun store during Scalpel's first mission) over his head so that the sling ran diagonally across his chest.

“Oh, boy, don't do that,” Mutt warned.

“Why? What did I do?”

His answer came in the form of Orpheus wrapping his hand around the rifle and yanking him back forcefully. He moved his face closer and showed his teeth. “Now, imagine me chewing your face off.”

“Okay! I get it!”

The rest of the men in the room were trying to stifle their laughter when Orpheus snarled, “And the rest of you...maybe I missed the part where this all became a fucking joke to you, when we decided that looking out for each other should take a back seat to laughing because the new guy's doing it wrong. So help him out.” He looked around the room, pausing on each face. “You want another one on your conscience?”

There were a few mumbles in response.

“What was that?”

“No, sir,” was the next response, and it came in much clearer this time.

“Good. Because if I'd taken the same approach in the beginning, you'd-” He was interrupted by a chirping noise coming from his hip. He unclipped the walkie and said, “Holt."

A female voice responded, “Hey, Cam. Trager wants to see you.”

Orpheus sighed. “He does realize that we're ten minutes away from an insertion, right?”

“Yep. He says it's important.”

“Of course it is. Thanks, Lena.”

“Welcome. Out.”

He pointed at Mutt. “Remind me to finish my point when we're not hip deep in dead people." He didn't wait for Mutt to say anything before he walked out.

Mutt laughed and said to the door, “Yeah, I'll do that, boss.”

Fish said, “Wow, he might have been a little perturbed.”

“He's right, though.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Tim, who had remained silent since Orpheus had finished his quick lesson asked, “What did he mean? When he said 'another one on your conscience'?”

Fish said, “Let me field this one.” He out an arm around Bait's shoulders and said in a surprisingly warm and conversational tone. “Ever see the movie Spinal Tap?”

Bait thought for a second. “That fake documentary? Bits and pieces, why?”

“Well, a running theme throughout the movie was their drummer. See, the band couldn't keep one; they kept dying in weird ways. I remember that one guy choked to death on someone else's vomit. Another died while he was gardening. One actually exploded on stage! It was freakin' hilarious.”

Bait just looked at him for a second when he got the point. “I'm the newest drummer, right?”

“Yup.”

“How many before me?”

Fish made a show of counting on his fingers. Tim started worrying when it went to a second hand. “You'll be the fourth.”

“What happened to the other ones?”

“All sorts of weird shit. The second one that we had freaked out when he saw a few Sprinters and ran off the first floor of a building that was under construction. Normally, not that bad a decision, except he landed on exposed rebar. That was not pretty. Another guy got eaten by his own uncle when he strayed too far from the rest of us. His uncle was a Jekyll, and the idiot got too close. Tore his throat out by the time I got there and put them both down.”

“What's a Jekyll?”

Mutt stood up. “During your training, we showed you the two common kinds of zombie: Sprinters and Shufflers. There's no difference between them but time or exertion, really. If a zombie is relatively fresh...”

“That's exactly why we should call them Freshmen and not Sprinters! 'Fresh men!' Get it?"

“Shut it, Fish. If a zombie is new, recently turned, those bastards can move as fast as they ever could. However, their muscles can't regenerate, so as they exert themselves and deteriorate because they're, uh, dead, they get torn down pretty quickly. They become Shufflers." Fish opened his mouth but Mutt cut him off. “Shut it, Fish.”

Tim nodded. “The slow ones.”

“Yes.”

“And the Jekyll?”

“That's the third type, and it's the one we can't prepare you for. You can either handle it or you can't.”

“You're not even going to tell me?”

“Bait, you probably won't have to wait long to see it with your own eyes.”

Tim switched gears. "I don't suppose you'll stop calling me that."

"What? Bait? Not happening right now, because until you prove otherwise, that's probably be what you're best at." Fish adopted the same conversational tone he'd exhibited earlier. "Tell you what, though. Live long enough, prove yourself, and I will personally give you a real nickname."
 

* * *

Orpheus sat in the chair on the subordinate side of the large mahogany desk and couldn't believe what he was just told. “Say that again?”

Martin Trager, CEO of Lost Whaler General, repeated himself. “You need to capture, not kill, a Jekyll and return it here. More than one, if possible.”

“You're joking. I've lost more men to Jekylls than the other two combined!”

“I know, I know, but hear me out.” He said nothing for a few seconds while he fiddled with some papers. “We think there might be a cure.”

Orpheus snickered. “Yeah, a cure for dead. Sure.”

“Don't be an ass,” Trager snapped. “Those people are gone, naturally. They need to be exterminated before we can start over here. And we will start over. This is my island, and I intend to hang onto it.”

“Can we get on with it, Marty? My team's waiting on me.”

“As I was saying, Dr. Vincent insists that there might be a cure. Maybe 'cure' is the wrong word. Let's go with 'inoculation' instead. History has shown us that plagues of all kinds eventually come back. We thought we wiped out polio, but isolated cases are starting to pop up again. And in the case of this infection, an isolated case is all that might be needed to start a full-blown outbreak again.”

Orpheus stood up and rested his hands on the desk. He leaned forward, all controlled aggression. “Where does a Jekyll figure in?”

Trager mimicked the stance, giving the standoff a physical manifestation. “You've seen them. They're somewhere between life and unlife. My researchers think that those poor saps contain something inside of them that fights off the infection, if only in short bursts. They'll eventually die and change, but their makeup makes the process last a whole lot longer. If we can isolate it and synthesize it, we can maybe avoid this same kind of horror in the future.”

Orpheus rubbed his palms together while he thought about it.

"You can say, 'Sure, Mr. Trager' anytime now."

"Hold on, I'm still figuring out your angle."

Trager didn't like the delay, or the implication. “If I've given you the impression that this is a request, I apologize. Get me some Jekylls, or your little field trips are over. That's a promise.”

“And all the survivors?”

“You mean if there still are any? Collateral damage, I'm afraid.”

Orpheus fought the urge to slap the other man in his head, and said, “Fine. We go in, grab one, and extract like normal, but I get to go back in before the reap if I think I've missed anything.”

“Done.” He sat down, satisfied.

Orpheus turned around when he got to the door. “Threaten to take your resources away from me again, after all I've been through, and I'll fuck you up.”

“Feel free to slam the door behind you on your way out.” Orpheus left it wide open, and Trager was glad to see him go.

* * *

“You've gotta be kiddin' me,” Mutt said.

“Yeah, that's what I said. But they think they might be able to pull some good out of it, so we have to try. We've come up dry on the last two runs, anyway.”

“Don't remind me. Do you think there are any more survivors on the island?”

Orpheus wrestled with whether or not to lie to his new best friend. He decided against it. “Honestly, no, but I have to know for sure. I'm not in this for much more, but I'm in for that, at least. After that, well...yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Where's the team?”

“On the pad, waiting for us.”

Chapter 3: The First Run

Tim wondered if the sweating would ever go away. Then he wondered if he ever wanted it to. He was on edge and as alert as he'd ever been. The roar of the helicopter rotors barely registered as he checked, double-checked, and triple-checked his gear. He watched the others, and it was obvious that they'd worked together for a long time and had their routines down. Up near the pilot, Orpheus and Mutt handed their gear back and forth to be checked by the other man. Fish and Sam did the same in their seats opposite of Tim's.

So where's my buddy?
he thought as he checked his gear for a fourth time. Sam seemed to read his thoughts, or his expression, and started checking Tim's gear. Tim was thankful, and tried to say as much over the cacophony.

He patted Sam on the shoulder and yelled, “Thanks!” Sam responded with a thumbs-up and continued. He tightened up a few straps on the jumpsuit and was finished. He settled back into his seat and closed his eyes. Meditation, prayer, or both. Tim wished that he was relaxed enough to be able to do that.