Rick swiped hard at his nose with the full flat of his palm, the heel of his glove coming away with a sheen glistening like plastic wrap. Sherri met his eyes as he glanced up before he could fight himself to make sense of his sights that ducked and bobbed like buoys on bad water. Her confusion was the only thing he could understand, the only thing that came clear as a church bell in springtime as he hunched. The muscles of his abdominal wall balled into eight individual fists and pummeled his stomach like a heavy bag with no sand or cotton inside it. He wretched. His rifle fell from his hands, steel plated knees meeting the concrete of the warehouse floor in twin claps, the muzzle brake touched the glass and as he clutched in the space before him for a thing to stop him from completely doubling over his fingers caught the natural grip of his rifle, slipped behind the guard, and dumped the spring.
"I heard about him, too," Rick's breath hung in the air as he spoke. The humidity in Shalesboro was thick. The moisture already full in the air was enough to make a voice as small as his reverberate in little waves of stiffened sound and grant it a muzzled hardness it rarely possessed. Rick knelt on one knee, assault rifle balanced beneath his forearms, head turned away from the windows of the warehouse, the street, and Grantsfield park below. His finger rested against his trigger gaurd, the safety off, as he spoke into the orange and upward slashing lights from the lamps at street level. "You guys are talking about project Four Nine Kay?"
"Yeah," a grayed orange puff of breath obscured the black, thick padded, chin strap beneath Sherri's darkened face and up tilted night vision apparatus clipped to the black shell of her helmet. She knelt in similar fashion several yards further from the window, obscuring her line of fire to the street, but ensuring the same line would not catch her by surprise from the street to the armor plate lining of her pocketed, strapped, special actions task group vest. "Put that out Wellma," she said, spitting in Nestor's direction. Nestor, further removed from both Sherri and Rick, tamped out his cigarette with a black, brass knuckled, glove, his weapon on its sling across his back, night vision flipped down. Nestor smiled an apology, the only thing in his visage to be seen being a bridge of Cheshire gold teeth that glinted in the street light reaching his night blacked corner of space. "Project Four Nine Kay," she nodded to Rick, "is why we're here."
"Hey," the squad leader's square cut voice hacked through the air like the broad side of an oar against water, "shut it up over there," the blunt end of his rifle smacking against the floor hard enough for the vibrations to tang against their knees though he held his position at the opposite end of the warehouse floor dozens of yards away.
Sherri moved in a slow shuffle, not rising to her feet, but instead pulling herself with one combat booted foot in dusty scrapes across pebbles and loose and rusted bits of machines that once occupied the Water street warehouse. She lowered her voice, "you remember the synchro gear? The watches and tic players?" Her whispers shot out in deep orange arrow wisps.
"Of course. The whole soul power craze," Rick steadied his weapon, still unaccustomed to wearing full combat gear for a routine interdiction, "that gimmicky stuff ended years ago. Can't beat good old chemistry," his smile was a half crescent of mustache, the night light illuminating half of his face, the other folded into darkness. "Souls, even if they did exist can't be tapped for anything more than a weak flashlight," he touched a gloved fingertip to his synchrolized chest lamp without turning it on. "Everybody knows that it's a dead end and-"
Sherri held up a finger. "Wrong."
"Wrong?"
"Wrong," Nestor's gravel whisper bounded through the air like a plastic bead as he stood, strode, and came to crouch beside Sherri. They knelt like a pair of black garbed acolytes before scrolls, preparing to deliver a woeful incantation. "Synchro tech is a gimmick, where it exited public applications, but where it exited it re-entered research and development. Why do you think they issued us these," Nestor poked a thick finger at Sherri's forearm and the strapped squall box there.
"They gave us these," Rick answered, eyes rolling though only his left eye was visible, "because we were told to bring out everything on this one. We have to plan for the worst at all times."
"When was the last time," Sherri stung at his ignorance, "we had to include a squall box in our gear?" Rick's smile leveled off in thought.
Nestor drew himself to a seat, unshouldering the heft of his rifle and resting it across his lap beneath his heavy vested belly and spare grenade rounds. "Think about it, Staller," he bit out in a poor attempt at keeping his voice down, "if scanlon pressure, the wave bands of souls, are a gimmick, a low powered thing with no more pull than a weak battery," he turned the knob on his squall box to its maximum sensitivity and let the thin, high, and pure note, the wave fingerprint of their souls traced and huddled together against the throb of the Earth's electro-magnetic field, sound for an instant, before turning it back down to its minimum, "why would we need these at all? Whatever we are interdicting, whoever we are indicting, has got to be something special. I could visual contact a man miles before this thing went off. Day or night," he breathed in thick misted words. Rick could feel his deep set eyes piercing, though Nestor's insect eye night vision stood between them like a wide bladed fence.
"Four Nine Kay," Sherri swiped at her running hawk nose in the cool evening air, "is real. No two people are built the same. There's a baseline, sure," she tapped her chest lamp, "things like these will run at a baseline, easy and have the same output, but if you want more power then there's only so much a battery can offer."
"And Four Nine Kay has that battery?" Rick's thick eyebrow fell on his illuminated eye.
"Four Nine Kay is that battery."
"The facilities at Deermouth weren't slagged because of a runaway experiment. They were reduced to molten metal by a runaway," Nestor chuckled. Sherri scowled, her lips grimacing above her chin, absent save for the jut of her wide chinstrap. The orange light from the lamps one story below flickered once and then again, dying to nothing for several seconds before returning. The night air drew wire taught. Nestor thumbed the raised hashes of his heavily sprung safety. "One man did that," he rose to a knee, looking through Rick and the wide, multiple pane, window to the tree tops and sidewalks below, "our man."
A single figure walked along the bicycle path at the edge of Grantsfield park. The body did its best to hold a clean line, but stumbled with the weariness of the unfed. A trek that started days earlier in Deermouth was drawn only to its first quarter of completion. Jackson Howard wanted to go home. Jackson Howard wanted nothing more than to sit on Rockaway Beach and watch the sun settle itself to the west, but he still had miles to go.
Throughout the warehouse, squall boxes, at various stages of tune, began to sing. The hum was one unfamiliar. In training, the boxes all sounded alike as trainees fiddled with them and laughed through the earlier segments of screening. The typical soul signature would pipe a cool C when a person sat alone and melded and melted into the field lines of the planet's spinning iron core. In the wash of gently shifting waves like streamers of silk the sound was akin to the pull of a bow across a violin's strings when turned to its maximum sensitivity and held feet from a living human being or inches from an animal. Hundreds of yards away, Jackson Howard's soul crushed a booming A as though the hot hearts of mountain ranges bellowed and barreled through the chords tying him to mother nature. The members of the SATG struggled and fumbled with their boxes as the window panes of the Water street warehouse rattled against the harmonic noise. Howard did not notice the glittering rattle of the panes of glass against their wooden frames so far distant. He stumbled onward.
"Turn them off," the box cutter sharp voice of the squad leader bellowed over the yawning mouth of the sound of Four Nine Kay's approach, "all of them! Off!" Like a dozen headed chorus run short of breath and still too far to sea to see a shore the sound drowned away and was replaced by the ungaurded panting of twelve men and women garbed for war and knowing nothing of its parameters.
"Do you see," Sherri asked, her voice more hushed and blanketed than before, "that's it!" She fought to curtail her excitement, fought to keep herself cool as the air she breathed as her thumb pushed the dial of her squall box to the off position. The exclamations of her fellow troopers died down as she shuffled herself tightly to the center portion of the warehouse window and pulled her night vision sensor low to her eyes.
"Four Nine Kay," Nestor nodded, accidentally flipping his night vision suite upward as he slid and sidled himself to the opposite corner of the broad, dark, window at which Rick knelt. With a casual swoop of his forearm he returned his night eyes to his face and turned several magnification dials as he tried to draw a bead on where the interdicted was to appear. The low branches of Grantsfield park obscured his vision, but his nose for combat and the art of first strike told him Four Nine Kay would be there, beneath the late summer leaves, when the time came for engagement. With the care of a mother for its young he, with hard shelled, hands, hefted the black glinting body of his assault rifle, the magazine clipped tightly at its natural center of gravity, and rested it across his knee, the barrel contacting the glass of the window. The first bullet might stray, puncturing the plane, but the second would be true through the square frame.
Rick kept his position tight. Too tight. His rifle was not an extension of his arm, but a railroad spike of intent and he curled himself, still one knee down, around it like a tar drenched cat around a scratching post, claws out, eyes nearly closed, and every muscle tensed. His thoughts flew in every direction. The static potential of the moment ballooned beyond his understanding faster than he had algorithms to describe them. Four Nine Kay continued his approach. "What can they do," his breath caught the street light still tilting upward and colored his scopes a bright, quickly fading, green. He made an effort to control the pace of inhale and exhalation, but failed like a man prone to heady weekday drinking trying to keep his hand steady in the dry, focused hours, before a meeting too long in its coming. His voice cracked, "with power beyond," he flustered as he searched for the word, "power beyond us?"
A hard switch snapped into an on position, loud enough to be heard from the street level, followed by several more blunt thumps. "We open fire," the squad leader commanded as fourteen plasma spotlights, used for spotting aircraft miles away, brought the intersection of Water street and Grantsfield into a brilliance that put noonday in Shalesboro to shame, "when the ground team does. Hold," the squad leader spoke.
Four Nine Kay walked on beneath the cover of trees. All around him the world was nearer to a sun he never knew or before saw. Tears of adjustment began to roll along the corners of his eyes as he blinked and raised a gray sweater shirted forearm above his brow to deflect the onslaught of light. It poured from the roof of the Water street warehouse to his right and from several ground level emplacements at the intersection ahead of him. The light filled every gap and space in a shadowless breath snatching torrent as he stumbled.
"Project Four Nine Kay," a voice boomed over an amplifier from behind the lights so large they required mobile trailers to mount and transport, "we are here to protect you. We are here to help you." There was no line of sight between his position beneath the Grantsfield tree tops and the adjacent warehouse across Water street, but the troopers there stationed listened with pricked ears and tensed triggers. "Continue to walk towards the lights in front of you and we will assist you in whatever it is that you desire to do. Do not run," the bullhorned voice commanded, "do not turn back, and do not attempt to hide as we will be forced to take action. Continue on your course and we will be able to end this peacefully. No one else has to be hurt." A scant second of secondary voices and static caught the microphone before the operator closed the channel.
Howard stopped, turned his back to the lights, and breathed. The intensity of the light against his face was rib crushing like an Olympic pool filled to its brim with wet concrete and he the only one in it and trying to win gold in a 400 meter freestyle. "Four Nine Kay," the bullhorn switched again and called him by the only name he knew, "continue to walk towards the lights. Do not turn back or we will be forced to apprehend you. We are here to help you. Step away from the park grounds and into the street. We are not asking you to give yourself up. We are asking you to allow us to work with you and not force us to work against you." The bullhorn snapped off, echoing feedback rising like fingernails against a chalkboard before dying with it. Howard's ears rang. He turned back to the light brilliant enough to raise beads of sweat in the thick of his brown eyebrows.
"Zero high, take on," the squad leader asked, his voice assuming the drawl of combat zone radio info speech and shedding the back hand bark of drill and glorified baby sitting. Rick flinched against the coolness he was still unaccustomed to hearing pour through his ears. He swiped a gloved hand at his sweating cheek and cussed inward, his fingertips creating a paste of rust and plaster dust.
"Cut," Rick shouted, headlining the responses that ran through the line. There were no visuals. He pressed at his optic nerves from within himself, trying to feel his way through the greens of his night eyes and spread the shades of darkness apart like a flower in bloom. He coiled tighter around his weapon, the muzzle brake rapping sharply against the glass as he did. Flecks of his saliva came danced into focus as he pushed himself toward an awareness he knew Nestor must see the landscape down the empty circle and spike of the assault rifle's sights. He pushed and pulled at the fabric of night, wrestling to bring near and far into a communion of definition and detail that were mutually exclusive. Beside him, Sherri and Nestor offered no encouragement or direction as they settled and waited. His thoughts ran over the sound of his voice. "Am I rattled? Are they," he asked himself, his thoughts in a foot race with the loosed horses of seconds.
Howard stepped from the sidewalk beneath the rustling trees to the long strip of scraggled grass and bare dirt to the curb and to the street gutter. He was thin. Paler than before. They fed him at Deermouth, but he never took the option of his own volition. Every hour he spent in the sychrolized wash of field lines outside of the Deermouth grids was an hour he was further depleted, but he did not know it, and what SATG did not know, what the Deermouth dead could have told them all were they still breathing, was that as he depleted, as his body washed away, his capacitance increased. "Who are you," he shouted, louder than he intended, but unable to see who it was he spoke to, he sent his voice.
Howard's voice came up hard against the brick sides of Water street and burned. Sherri groaned, clutching at her stomach with a free hand, her weapon held level in the other. Nestor ground his teeth hard enough to make Rick wince. Rick daubed at his face, his nose running in the cold air, and checked his glove for snot in reflex. The fingertip was slick with orange tinted blood. "Jesus, what?" A squall box not turned completely off burst its battery casing in a shower of expletives and skin itching acid while the trooper swiped at his neck.
"Are you from the facility?" Four Nine Kay stepped toward the double yellow dividing line, eyes without shield. His gait was difficult. The asphalt gripped every quarter of the soles of his sneakers with the tenacity of a maddened dog, but he worked his muscles harder, compensating. "I do not like the lights," the veins on his neck bulged as he shouted, pushing the words out against the crush of luminescence. High above in the warehouse several sychrolized chest lamps flared and died, their circuits overloaded in the field line flex emanating from below. "I do not need you in my way," he forced his hands into his pant pockets, his lips pulling thin against his teeth as his eyebrows fell low over his tired eyes.
"You may think you do not need us, but we need you to understand that we cannot leave you loosed. You do not know what it is you carry inside you."
"Zero high," the squad leader's voice came through Nestor's head like a fist breaking soundlessly against a stone wrapped in a wet bath towel. "Take," he shouted back against the rake of tremors racing along his spine in the fade of Four Nine Kay's voice echoing through Water street and finally settling as it did to a volume any one man could produce if he screamed at the top of his lungs until his throat bled. Nestor's target confirmation was rejoined by a handful of others, Rick and Sherri exempted.
Rick swiped hard at his nose with the full flat of his palm, the heel of his glove coming away with a sheen glistening like plastic wrap. Sherri met his eyes as he glanced up before he could fight himself to make sense of his sights that ducked and bobbed like buoys on bad water. Her confusion was the only thing he could understand, the only thing that came clear as a church bell in springtime as he hunched. The muscles of his abdominal wall balled into eight individual fists and pummeled his stomach like a heavy bag with no sand or cotton inside it. He wretched. His rifle fell from his hands, steel plated knees meeting the concrete of the warehouse floor in twin claps, the muzzle brake touched the glass and as he clutched in the space before him for a thing to stop him from completely doubling over his fingers caught the natural grip of his rifle, slipped behind the guard, and dumped the spring. The muzzle brake shattered the square foot of double pane glass and blew a .50 caliber round into the diamond cradle of the sky above Grantsfield park.
Howard froze as the crack of Rick's misfire tore into the sky and the still tree boughs. "Take," Nestor shouted again, louder. Within his head his voice sounded like it came from eight miles distant through serial telephone receivers. "Take!" Before the spent casing of Rick's misfire could ping against the floor, the squad leader was dead. In the swell and burst of Four Nine Kay's synchrolized power, the data monitor implanted behind his right eye went dead, burned out like a match head touched to the chemical accelerants printed to the side of a dollar store matchbook. The ignition was enough to flash steam one quarter of his tissues. He lay crumpled, bent backward over his knees, and bloodless.
"Four Nine-" before the bullhorn could finish Howard was turning. Though the ground beneath his feet gripped and sucked at the balls of his feet as he spun, his heart churned hard and pushed his muscles harder. His arm swept through the cool damp air as he struggled for balance and his eyes struggled to see the night again, the disfiguring strength of spotlights at his back. "Not again," he grimaced, "not again," the words shot out of him. High above, on the rooftop of the Water street warehouse, one of the spotlights gave out in stuttering hiccups.
At the intersection of Water and Sheffield the darkness behind the spotlights heaved like silk drapes before a gale. There was no screech of and hiss of turbines as it gave way, no twin torrents of skin searing exhaust. There was only the vibration of twenty five tons of reactive steel and ten feet of smooth bore gun barrel atop caterpillar treads pulling a monument to an ingenuity that died with Four Nine Kay's birth so many years before. The M2F's servos spun red hot behind the limb thick spokes of its twenty wheels, the batteries squeezed harder than gum in a lock jawed mouth until the driver brought them to a full stop and twenty five tons of death metal came to a skidding halt at the twin yellow dividing lines streaking away behind the cluster of head high spotlights still doing their best to draw a line in what was no longer sand.
Before the slab of the M2F could settle back on its magnetic coiled struts the barrel blew a blue flame and put the charge of two hundred rifles and twin nested electromagnetic rail gun sheathes into a fifteen pound slab of ferrous metal needle tipped to a point that could pierce woven carbon like the edge of a tongue through a square of toilet paper. The concussion blew out the two nearest spotlights in an ear drum destroying gust of plexi and retaining wire. The round hurtled, a steel bearing down a pipe of air, toward Howard's turned back and connected as he snapped his eyes around, neck twisting, to see the thing pulling at the earth as hard as the earth pulled at him.
"Take," Nestor stuttered. He ran his tongue over his gold toothed overbite. "Take," he breathed again, his eyes attempting to adjust to the neon green after image of the M2F's muzzle flash on the street below, a flash more intense than the doubled daylight of the spotlights. Rick dry heaved without ceasing, his stomach spent, but more than willing to rain check. Sherri steadied herself with a hard hand on Nestor's thigh.
"Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god," Sherri could not form a sentence. Her thoughts were blended so thoroughly it was all she could do to recognize the airy foam of her consciousness.
Nestor saw it all. Saw the crater, a dozen yards in width, two yards deep, in the middle of the street where Four Nine Kay once stood. Every inch of the nerve left in his arm told him to squeeze the trigger, but his mind and his eyes told him, reliably, accurately, and more capable than most who passed through the ranks of SATG, that it was over. Several troopers, thick soled boots kicking rusted fragments of metal and sodden corners of drywall, rushed to the crumpled mass of the squad leader in a concerted attempt to get him emergency medical attention, but he was several seconds beyond the threshold of death. "Take," Nestor murmured, his gun barrel falling away from the fire line he held, his voice in his own ears finally taking on the tenor he thought he knew so well. "Damn it," with a hand spent of it's strength he popped his night eyes from his forehead and rubbed his temples hard with thumb and index. His body felt as though he bedded every woman he ever knew in a single cocaine laced night. His ears, though able to perceive sound, felt as though he stood next to speakers loud enough to kill a prisoner during interrogation. Every nerve shook like a dew dropped pine needle in the morning after a hurricane that made landfall on the wrong coast and the wrong latitude, but a hurricane that could not care less where or how or why it was.
Below, on the street level, several men began to venture forward from between the enormous spotlights. Jackson Howard's demise had to be confirmed beyond any doubt. They gathered, slowly, but with growing confidence, at the crater's edge. Nothing stood beyond it's lip beyond broken earth and crumpled, layered, asphalt. Gloved hands patted backs and popped helmets. Elbows chucked ribs, and weapons fell from exhausted hands and stood like walking sticks with shoulder straps. There was no sign of Four Nine Kay. Until the crater began to sink.
The surface began to fall by fractions of inches and then by inches and then by feet. It widened as it fell. If the moon could have come near the Earth just close enough to nuzzle noses, but not quite kiss, the only record of their meeting could have been the crater as it blew wide and deep. A pickup truck nearest the whole fell and compressed against the asphalt plated bowl. Everything within it's circumference was crushed by a fist with more gravity than anything man made. The few troopers not fleet enough to escape its widening mouth were reduced to streaks of metal plating, tear resistant fabric, brief shrieks of agony, and compressed flesh. The field lines were bending in the chasm of depleted space. Four Nine Kay was dead, but his soul was far from departed.
More than one hundred yards away, ahead of the scrambling SATG troopers clawing their way to understood safety, ahead of the spotlights, the M2F began to slide. High in the Water street warehouse, Rick's rifle pulled against its strap across his back, his body still hunched, before tearing loose. Nestor's rifle flew from his hands like an arrow from a long bow. To a man, each and every weapon came loose of its owner and tumbled toward the depression in the field like filaments to a lode stone. Manhole covers tore loose and flipped and spun like coins. Wiring tore free of the warehouse walls like rope sent whipping end over end through the night air. Two men were caught as it sought the shortest path from where it was to where it was being called and were split across their hips like a broom stick swung against the necks of garden weeds in full flower. As the depression in the street deepened, the spotlights atop the roof of Water street rumbled to the cusp and tottered over, children with their shoes tied together, but they did not strike the sidewalk at Water street's feet. They angled along the invisible lines and joined the crush of metal and mineral subject to electromagnetic flux in the street center where the hole in the field screamed and spun for Four Nine Kay in a hurricane of force with no eye.
The M2F slid sideways, its twenty five tons gouging the asphalt, one hundred caterpillar tracked fingers digging into skin and pulling it free like a leper's skin pressed by spoon edge. The crew fought the movement. Electric engines pulled tangential to no avail. The smooth bore cannon sounded another air splitting wail, but the shell traveled a grand thirty feet before slowing in the thick of the tangled field lines to a dead stop and then detonating, the fragments scattering with all of their might, but dispersing no further before gathering again, still glowing white hot in the night air void of any light for the collapsed street lamps and spotlights, and falling like stars and broken satellites to the event horizon of a black body.
Even as the motors of the M2f churned, grip gave way and it came free, a twenty five ton bowling ball turning end over end, into the gathering ball of mass. Fire hydrants even further removed came free and mowed men and women down like toothpicks before a flicked index finger. The crater ceased to deepen, but where it ceased to compress a thing grew violently upward and staggering, coughing, jump steps. Tubing and wiring and plate coalesced and clung to each other in an ad-lib evolution, learning it's own mechanics and reasons of force as it sprung upward. The entire mass was reconfigured in a dizzying dance of synchrolized beauty, parts, pieces, and shards that had no business being a part were becoming inseparable. The smooth bore of the M2F, the magazines, the manhole covers, the wires, the armor plates torn free of uniforms and the dead, the window frames, the water fountains of Grantsfield, they all tore away and became one. One being, One man.
The beast stood on two feet with hands as large as off road vehicles. The head was spun copper and iron and the eyes stood as open, empty, sockets. The entire figure was a mountain twenty feet high of scrap and flotsam and body part and it fell to its knees beneath its own weight. Howard took his first breath into the silence broken only by the rustle of Grantsfields trees and the rattle of metals and mineral too late to join his form, but skipping like rocks along a winter glassed lake for their own momentum. As Four Nine Kay held his position, multiple slots, yards wide, opened along his back and blew in a phlegmy electrostatic, gut heaving, cough hundreds of pounds of excess from the body.
All around, lengths of pipe, pie slices of manholes, sections of cars, and unprocessed shards of cement a hands breadth wide flew fast enough to injure, slay, and destroy neighboring buildings and their occupants with as much efficiency as any grenade round. Sherri ducked even as the hulk began to crouch. Nestor did not flinch as a third of a manhole came missile like through the window's bottom left corner and bit a fourteen inch chunk out of the brick work and threw Rick into the darkness behind them, leaving nothing more than an atomized cloud of moisture in the air already thick with it and the tang of blood in Nestor's sinuses as he knelt.
Four Nine Kay would make it home, whether his body held it's ground or not. Deermouth was a prelude. Deep within the mass of metal, among the assembled parts and pieces of machines that were set to destroy, there was incubated a nest of new body parts still thick enough with salts and fluids and metals to respond to the power of the undeniable call of a soul who could manifest across the depths of space if he knew he could, but his home was here and there were many hours and many more miles to go before Jackson Howard could see the sun rise and set against the lip of Rockaway Beach.
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