A red glow illuminated the interior of a troop chopper loaded with two spec-ops fireteams and two agents dressed more for the rain than a military operation.

The older agent was asleep with his collar pulled up and feet propped on the opposite seat. The other was the freshest face in the helicopter, young and anxious, loading clips for her sidearm to steady her nerves.

The helicopter weaved between towers, the streets below an undulating, grey mass like grass in the wind. When the target building was identified, it ascended to reach the roof and the red light in the holding bay flashed. There was a stir of fabrics and clicking of firing mechanisms moving into place as the soldiers prepared to move out.

After the bump of a touchdown, the light went out and the soldiers streamed into the rain. Only then did the older agent see fit to stir and accompany his partner after their contingent. After blowing the lock, the fireteams moved in with mechanical efficiency. The elevators inoperable, small arms fire rattled down the stairwell until the fireteams reached the hundred and ninety second floor. At that point they split, one set up a barricade between them and the lower floors, the other cleared the floor.

At their brisk walk, the agents didn’t see more than bodies and muzzle flashes in the dark. The leader of the primary fire team stopped them at the entrance to their destination with the warning of a hit on the heartbeat monitor.

The agents drew their sidearms and the fireteams worked with hatchets and knives moving forward for the sake of discretion, losing no efficiency in spite of it. The first sign of anything other than the dead was a light shining through a cracked door.

Peering in, the older agent identified a tall man typing at a massive monitor. He wore a dark duster damp with the spatter of the bodies littering the floor and a black helmet devoid even of eye holes, obscuring everything above the neck in a smooth obsidian skull. The agent signaled his fireteam to circle around. A nervous nod from his young partner and he threw the door open, but did not expose himself.

“ICC, identify yourself!”

Without looking away from the monitor, the figure unloaded a hand cannon into the wall, nearly nicking the agent with bullet fragments and thoroughly dusting him with wall fibers. The younger agent opened fire, but the older one warned, “you’ll hit the mainframe!”

At the sound of gunfire, the fireteam blasted through the wall of an adjacent room and fired blindly through the dust.

Unperturbed, the figure turned from the monitor, whipped out a machine pistol, and suppressed the fireteam’s movement. He dropped the empty hand cannon in favor of an sub-machine gun concealed in his coat and the agents took advantage of the brief pause to take up positions with a better angle.

A dozen shots glanced peppered the figure, but they were little more than an inconvenience until one of the soldiers unloaded a shotgun into his arm, nearly severing his wrist, and then into his leg, taking him down to one knee, but not removing him from the fight. A direct shot to the head and a plume of grey matter only incapacitated him long enough to remove an injured soldier and relocate to structurally sound cover before bullets started flying again. There was a pause when the monitor declared a completed task, with his good hand the figure removed a memory card and emptied a magazine into the computer.

With a panicked cry, the younger agent charged from cover into the figure, carrying him through furniture, two walls, and a printer with all the subtlety of a locomotive, ending in a bone shattering impact with the high rise’s reinforced windows. Between collisions, the figure grabbed the agent’s own knife and jabbed her, doing little to slow her down, but giving him a point of leverage to further stress the clear gap in skill. If not for the Kevlar weave of her coat, the three shots he put into her after tossing her aside would have ended her.

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The fireteam’s sergeant appeared with fresh shells. The second shot broke the window and the third knocked him through it.

“You alright?” the older agent asked, helping his partner to her feet.

“I’m fine,” she sputtered through the shame. Turning so the knife faced him. “How’s it look?”

“You’ll live.” The older agent whistled and a soldier tossed a spray can. He dusted the area twice then returned the knife with barely a dribble of blood in its place.

The figure was still falling when they got to the window, rag dolling occasionally off the building’s taper. His landing wasn’t audible at that height, but infinitely more disturbing as they watched the barely coherent mangled mass of limbs pull itself from the car it landed in and hobble toward an underground accessway before the hoards could close in around him.

“The hell was that?” the younger agent asked.

“An escalation of urgency.” The older agent returned to the mainframe room and spoke into his wrist. “This is agent Holt, we encountered a humanoid hostile entity, suspected operator: Revenant. Over.”

“Repeat, agent Holt. Confirming presence of operator Revenant?”

“You heard me! Holt out.” The older agent swore as he attempted to access the damaged computer in vain. “Hardware’s blown to shit. Pack up the hard drives.”

They hauled the city mainframe’s suitcase sized hard drives up to the roof and took off before the second fire team ran out of bullets in the stairwell.

Down below, the dark figure dragged himself deeper into the subway tunnels. When he was sure the roaming dead lost interest in him, he sat down and worked his arm until it faced its original angle, then flexed the fingers until they regained their shape. With a newly operable hand he snapped his severed wrist which had begun to heal in its dangled position and held it in place until it could support itself, then let it hang limp. He twisted his head until it was no longer locked sideways and pushed his vertebrae into place, sometimes snapping tendons first if they’d already healed incorrectly. By then the nerves in his other hand reconnected, allowing him more dexterous corrections.

Drawn by snapping and tearing, a straggling dead staggered nearby. If its dragging did not give itself away its involuntary haggard breathing did, but the figure disregarded it until it was nearly on him. A single shot above the left eye, not even worth a glance. Just a momentary distraction between him and getting on his feet.

Upon their return to basecamp, the agents were flagged down to the command tent where the coordinators were patching up a conference call. They hadn’t been in the tent long enough to shake the rain from their coats before the officer on the other end impatiently called them over.

“About time. I thought your chopper went down in the storm. Talk to me, Holt.”

“The mainframe was sabotaged before we could access it. Maybe the techies can recover something, tell us what happened after the bombs went off.”

“Gather all the evidence you can. Councilors want to hold someone accountable and it’s our asses until we figure out why nothing worked.”

“You mind telling us what Revenant was doing and what he wanted with the mainframe, major?”

“That’s above your clearance level, agent.”

“I lost a man and two more will be medically discharged.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t lose your whole team. Get those hard drives to operations, Holt.”

A field operator burst into suddenly burst into the tent with a plastic wrapped tablet in his hand. “Agents, major! We’ve located agent Rickles’ tracker!” Unbidden, he linked the screen footage to that of a drone hovering beneath a highway where a once human torso laid in a clearing of the dead. The rain had yet to wash away a trail of refuse linking it to two smashed cars.

“I thought contagion blue didn’t make augers,” the younger agent remarked.

“Someone put that here,” Holt replied.

“Who killed it?” the field operator nervously asked.

“Perhaps a meeting with the commander is in order,” the major solemnly stated. “I expect you both at headquarters as soon as you finish your investigation. Major Simmons out.”

The tension in the tent alleviated the instant the feed cut, except the younger agent, who sighed to herself a soft yet course, “dammit.”