The Riotfish were gathered in the early morning darkness of the camp, quietly comparing notes.

"Oliver and I got two," D'khara said, pausing to cough. "That's all we could find." He tried to shake the persistent dizziness out of his head, and shivered.

"Poke!" Roger said. "Poke! Poke! Poke! I poked many!"

"Excellent. Do you have a specific count for me, Roger?"

Roger stared at his hands, trying to work his fingers into some semblance of a count.

"This many!" he said, holding up a hand with his ring finger and thumb sticking out.

"Hmm. Little Timmy, were you able to get an accurate count?"

Little Timmy was uncharacteristically muted, ashen and quivering a little in the morning light.

"Uh, like nine I think."

"Nine? Really?"

"Yeah. Yeah. I'm pretty sure." Little Timmy twitched, and kept looking over his shoulders.

Fleer "hmm"ed and poked at his datapad.

"Is everything okay, Little Timmy?" Oliver asked.

"Uh. Yeah. Yeah, I'm good now."

"Well I dispatched one," Fleer said. "By my count, that's seventeen down, leaving twenty-five."

"Dey's t'ree more of dem fellows ain't goin' to be botherin' us no more," Daugereaux said, strolling up to the camp.

"Daugereaux!" Fleer called. "Glad to see that you're well. Want some breakfast?"

"Naw, I et me a big supper last night. How's Ma?"

"She's quite well. Had a scare, two of the black ops found the cabin last night, but she made it out alright."

Daugereaux hooted a laugh and slapped his leg.

"'Made it out alright', choo I jus' bet she did! I bet dem two fellows din't make it out alright."

"No. No, they did not." Fleer cleared his throat. "Three of them, you said. You killed three of them? Are you sure?"

"May, I ain't finish school past about eighth grade, but I can count dat high." He reflected for a moment. "One of dem ain't precisely dead, but he ain't goin' to be botherin' us no more."

"Oh?"

"Well, I axed him some questions, but he din't want to say me nothin' so I axed him again, only not so nice."

"Oh, Mr. Daugereaux, really, interrogation is something you should have left to--"

"And den he started answerin' me all kinds of questions, real friendly like."

"--but interrogation requires finesse, and the ability to discern--"

"Like, he tol' me where dey got no reserve, and dat dey got all them Ready/Impac' boys already."

"Oh. Oh, well done--"

"And he said me some frequencies and encryption keys dey was using before de jammin'. I wrote dat down for you," he said, handing Fleer a greasy slip of paper with numbers scrawled on it.

"That's quite--"

"And den he said a bunch about how much dey was paid and who hired dem all and den a bunch of numbers for a Swiss bank 'count, which don't make no sense, 'cause I ain't never even been to Swissland."

Fleer stopped talking and eyed the old Cajun shrewdly.

"And you don't think he'll be a problem any more?" Fleer asked.

"Nope!" Daugereaux' big, sloppy toothless grin resurfaced. "I think he is starting to get a taste for swamp livin'. He might decide to jus' hang around in de swamp for all de res' of his life, him."

Fleer had to take a moment to mentally adjust his opinion of Daugereaux again.

"Right. I see. Well, in any case, we've bloodied them badly. I think we may have rattled them enough to start talking concessions, but we don't have any real way of contacting them. I could hit up their corporate office, but with the communications blackout, they can't talk to their field operatives. It looks like we're locked into this thing until the blackout is lifted, or they surrender directly to us. Given all that, do we want to pause hostilities and start talking about an evac? Get you and Ma Daugereaux out of here?"

"I said I was goin' to put a stop to dat wickedness in my woods, and dat is what I am going to do."

"I really wish you'd reconsider," Fleer said.

"I really wish you'd stop axin'," Daugereaux replied.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"D'khara, you still with us?" Fleer asked. D'khara's head snapped up.

"What? Yes, sorry. Just a little run down from yesterday."

"You don't look well," Oliver observed.

"I'm fine," D'khara lied.

Oliver looked worried, but didn't say anything.

"I have to say," Fleer said, "we've all done very, very well. I'm proud of how far we've gotten. They're down to about half their original strength. So we'll do the same today: pair off, spread out, and meet back here tomorrow. Let's be careful. They weren't expecting anybody else out there yesterday, but they'll probably be on high alert now."

"Can I change pairs?" Little Timmy asked quickly.

"Sure, that's a good idea, let's cycle everybody around. Little Timmy, why don't you go with D'khara today. Oliver and Roger can pair up. Mr. Daugereaux, did you want to come with me again today?"

"I bes' see to Ma, help clean up some if I can. Black ops is one thing, but she is liable to be annoyed. I'll catch up wit' you later."

Fleer nodded.

"Alright men. Twenty-two left to go. Watch your backs, and let's finish this!"

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D'khara and Little Timmy were moving through the woods, arguing and making lots of noise and generally doing a poor job of being stealthy hunters.

"Would you stop coughing!" Little Timmy yelled.

"I can't help it!" D'khara roared back hoarsely. "It's not like I'm trying to!"

"You're going to bring every one of those guys right to us!"

"Well you're yelling louder than I could ever hope to cough!" D'khara retorted, straining his voice.

"Only because you suck at yelling, just like you suck at everything!"

"You suck!" said D'khara.

"You suck!" said Little Timmy.

"Brrrraaaaaaaap!" said the machine gun.

Little Timmy and D'khara both hit the dirt and rolled away from each other into the trees.

"We found one!" Little Timmy shouted excitedly.

"Shut up!" D'khara called back.

"Brrrraaaaaaaap!" said the machine gun again.

"Bupbupbupbupbupbupbup" replied D'khara's shotgun, shredding the greenery.

The woods were silent for a minute. D'khara visualized where he and Little Timmy had been standing, and where the gunfire had come from. Moving as silently as he could, he started trying to circle around behind where he thought the black op might be hiding. Moving quickly from tree to tree, he scanned the surrounding woods for anything that didn't belong.

With dawning horror, he felt another cough welling up. It began as a tickle in his throat, then scratched its way down into his lungs, burning and pulsing in its need to be expelled.

He jammed his face into the crook of his elbow. His chest heaved as he tried to force the cough back down, but it would not be denied. Despite his best efforts, a small, hoarse expulsion escaped him.

A deadly spray of gunfire erupted from behind him. He fell to the ground.

The black op was thirty feet away, down on one knee. He began quickly swapping out his mag. A fierce shriek pierced the woods, and Little Timmy charged the gunman, spraying his Kealans from either fist. The black op was caught completely by surprise. He caught two rounds in his right arm and dropped his rifle. Reaching behind his back with his left hand, he snatched out a handgun and tried to bring it to bear, but by that point Little Timmy was on top of him, and firing at a range from which even he couldn't miss. Little Timmy hammered the black op into the ground with the full contents of both his guns.

Breathing heavily, Little Timmy stared down at what was left of the soldier for a moment, then turned to D'khara.

"D'khara, are you okay?" he called, rushing over.

A weak cough answered him.

"I think I'm sick," D'khara replied, rolling over.

Little Timmy looked at the tree D'khara had been standing next to. A churned patch of wood in the tree showed where the majority of the black op's fire had landed, two feet above D'khara's head.

"He must not've been able to see you, so he shot at where he thought your head would be," Little Timmy said, pointing at the ruined spot on the tree. "Good thing you're short."

"I'd pull your face off for that comment if I felt better," D'khara said.

Little Timmy looked at D'khara, then back at the remains of the black op. He thought for a minute, and his face relaxed.

"D'khara, are you alright?" Dr. Navarre asked.

"Doc?" D'khara asked, and then coughed heavily.

"You look terrible," Dr. Navarre said. "We need to get you back to camp."

D'khara nodded miserably.

"Now. Um. Where are we?"

----------------------------------------

Holcomb and Burke moved through the woods, tense and nervous. Best practices dictated that they should have been traveling further apart from each other, but this morning's roundup had been sparse-- fewer than half of the men were there-- and the stories that came out were harrowing.

At least four of their men had been found dead with knife wounds, far more knife wounds than were necessary to do the job. Two had been found blown to jelly, and there had been screaming in the night; long, plaintive howls of terror, but the landscape and the unfamiliar woods and strange echoes from all the water made it impossible to pinpoint where it was coming from.

Not that anybody really wanted to chase that down.

More than half the guys had vanished, swallowed by the dark swamp, and the jamming was still in place, mandated by Operations One, and wouldn't be lifted until this afternoon.

The jamming had seemed like such a good idea at the time. Back before they'd realized they were up against a master force of assassins.

There were darker tales circulating, too. Tales of curses and monsters and malignant waters seeking to consume men. Sarge had tried hard to squash those as foolish superstition, but all he'd managed to do was force them to be told quietly.

Tapstrike was accustomed to being the terror, not the terrorized, and they were not handling the transition at all well.

A rustle in the brush brought both men's rifles to bear and they opened fire, twin sprays of autofire blatting out through the woods. A squirrel skittered madly up a tree, fussing at the two mercenaries.

They both stared at the squirrel for a moment.

Laughing nervously, they reloaded their weapons and resumed the search.

A tense half-hour passed as the sun climbed, blazing down the unbearable heat, the temperature steadily ticking upward as the sun moved directly overhead. The two mercenaries had calmed down some after their scare-- the ridiculousness of shooting at a squirrel, the bright summer day, and the sheer energy required to keep going in the oppressive heat forced out their foolish fears, and they fell back into their habits of training. They moved apart, still mostly within visual range of each other and swept the woods, moving more loosely and confidently as the day wore on.

As the sun steamed down and began to slip past its highest point, Burke turned to Holcomb.

"Hey, you want to grab some-- hello?"

Dense greenery filled his view. Nothing more.

"Holcomb?" he called, fear driving his voice up a few registers. "Where are you?"

Burke turned back to search for Holcomb, when the tip of Fleer's blade drove into the side of his neck and slid smoothly forward, severing a carotid artery and opening his windpipe. The knife was drawn clear as the arterial spray painted the foliage nearby. Burke fell forward onto the ground gasping, and quickly bled out.

"Much better," Fleer noted, whipping out a small cleansing wipe to clean off his hand. He re-checked his blade-- earlier, he'd jammed it between the vertebrae of Holcomb's neck, which guaranteed a more or less silent kill, but risked blunting the blade on the heavy bones of the spine.

Reassuring himself that the blade was still sharp, he vanished back into the forest to continue hunting.