Chapter Seven
Chloe
"HEY, SOONER, brought a gift for ya."
Without lifting her head from her position of staring at the floor of the transport truck, Chloe closed her eyes for a long second and suppressed a sigh. "What is it, O'Neal?"
A paper airline vomit bag appeared in front of her face. "Really, it's a present for the rest of us, so we don't have to clean up the next time you spew."
Half-hearted chortles from the other Agents rolled around the truck.
Rolling her eyes, Chloe absently pushed his arm away. Nearly three weeks had passed since her first feeding, and still she was the butt of every gastric-themed comment. O'Neal's had been the most frequent and least witty. "I highly doubt you've ever cleaned up anything in your life, O'Neal."
"O'Neal." Payton interrupted before O'Neal could respond. "Isn't your dad a pilot for the air units?"
O'Neal rolled his eyes to the side. "Yeah, what of it?"
Payton shrugged. "Good man. I ran into him at the commissary the other day, talked with him a bit. He was picking up a whole stack of bags like that one. Said he can't seem to keep enough in stock. Apparently, he's got a son that keeps volunteering for all the air assignments with him. Said that's fine and all, but the seats on his chopper were starting to change color from all the stomach acid this son kept spewing all over 'em."
Turning to her right, Chloe could see O'Neal's face glowing red as laughter burst around him. He wrinkled his nose and crossed his arms, but thought better of talking back to a superior officer, especially Payton, who was the oldest and most respected member of their team.
Then O'Neal's partner, a freckly young man Chloe only knew by the nickname Mac, distracted him with chatter about their local football team, and he momentarily forgot about Chloe. Payton leaned back against the covered side of the truck and gave Chloe a tiny nod in response to her grateful sideways glance.
As they rode on, letting themselves be rocked by the bumping of the truck's worn suspension, Chloe turned over the events of that first feeding in her mind.
The scene came back to her dozens of times in the past few days, not because of the teasing over her vomiting, but because of one particular Taken she had seen that day.
An unusual shriek had stilled her queasiness, and she had looked up to see a male Taken, around in his 30's, kneeling on the ground and screaming, his knotted hands pressed to his head. The fresh blood on his face and hands showed he had recently eaten and should not be having the hysteria that her training had taught her to recognize in "hungry" Taken. Even so, he seemed to have had some kind of seizure and passed out.
At first, Chloe had assumed this must be a normal occurrence, but she had seen nothing else like it on the many other feedings she had been on since then.
"Hey, Payton," she muttered softly to her partner, trying to draw as little attention as possible from the others, "speaking of my first feeding, do you remember that one Taken? The one that was screaming?"
Narrowing his brow, Payton shook his head. "You're going to have to be a little more specific."
"You know, the one that was shrieking really loud and holding his head and fell on the ground?"
Payton pulled his mouth into a thin line and watched her askance. "They all start looking and acting the same after a while. Why?"
Chloe shrugged. "No reason. He just seemed different, in a way. Like he was in pain or something."
Snorting deep in his throat, he replied, "They don't feel pain. They may look human, but don't forget, they're not." At his rough outburst, the other Agents stopped their chatter and listened. "The only thing that drives them is the need to bite anything they see, to spread their infection. Don't start imagining them like people that feel or think. You start thinking of them as people, wondering why they do something, then you're going to hesitate at the wrong moment and become one of them. You won't even be able to wish you were dead, then." He flipped down his visor and muttered from beneath it, "Goes for all of you."
At that, they all turned their faces towards the steel floor and rode for many minutes in silence. They had just pulled up to the next feeding station and were stirring to prepare when a crackle over their radios announced a call from dispatch.
"Emergency, code seven-oh-one. Any and all units near quadrant two, respond. Code seven-oh-one. Respond. Over."
Some of the other Agents tilted their heads at each other in confusion, but all the codes were fresh in Chloe's mind from her many hours of memorizing them for the test.
Code 701 was a kidnapping-a healthy human grabbed by the Taken. A cold splinter stabbed the base of her spine.
Payton did not hesitate. Grabbing his radio, he calmly but forcefully spoke into the transmitter. "Dispatch, this is Payton, Unit 17. Acknowledge code seven-oh-one. We just arrived in quadrant two and are ready to respond. Over."
The momentary buzz of static between responses was torture on them all as the whisper went around to those that had forgotten what Code 701 meant.
"Acknowledge, Unit 17. Victim is a nine-year-old female. Caucasian. Brown hair. She slipped through a broken gap in the electric fence, approximately one thousand meters north of the gate. She was spotted by her father being grabbed by a female Taken." There was a pause. "He says the Taken is her mother."
DARTING AMONG THE dappled shadows of cedar and aspen, Chloe could barely make out the mute gray armor of Payton, though he was running only an arm's length beside her. The occasional voices of the other paired Agents would ping their locations in her earpiece, but she could not see them at all. She breathed a little wish in her mind that the camouflage would be as effective against the Taken.
As they ran, a bizarre thought appeared in her head, pushing aside her frenzied worry over the little brown-haired girl lost in a looming forest, chased by the deadly juxtaposition of a ravenous disease in the form of her once loving mother.
Suddenly, all Chloe could think about was the bright clatter of birds. The branches above them as they zipped by were alive with the caws, warbles, and trills of birds. Chloe found herself obsessed with the image of being a bird-a robin, perhaps-going about her normal life, completely oblivious to the insane scrabbling of the creatures beneath her.
Suddenly, Payton's voice was in her ear, yanking her focus back to the ground in front of her. "We see her. Eleven o'clock by our position. O'Neal, flank to the left. Cutter, to the right."
"Copy," stuttered the series of responses on her earpiece.
Chloe could not see anything ahead of them at all except for more trees and shadows, but she followed Payton's lead. Then, with just a little flicker of sunlight catching some metallic thread, she saw them.
Nearly 50 meters ahead was a flurry of red and yellow fabric amid a brownish blur of movement. She could not make out anything that was happening, but a rumble of wordless groans and yelps reached her ears.
"Approach slowly," Payton muttered quietly. "She may be panicked, or not want to leave her mother. Don't frighten her away. Wait for my signal."
Another series of "copy" replied.
Payton slowed to a steady and silent creep, and Chloe imitated his movements. The closer they approached, the more details became clear.
A swarm of twenty to thirty Taken massed around a small clearing, all scrambled in a crude circle. Those on the outer edges swung their arms in wild arcs, clawing at those around them, each trying to reach the center. Tattered rags drained of color except for the rusty stains of mud and old blood hung from their emaciated bodies. None of the Taken seemed to notice as the Agents surrounded them, even when they drew close enough that Chloe could see her other teammates on the far side of the writhing mass. There was such a flurry of bodies that Chloe could not see any sign of the little girl, even the flash of yellow and red clothing she had seen just minutes before.
Payton held up one gloved finger so that all the Agents could see, and then pointed towards the group. Following his order, Chloe raised her tranquilize
r gun with the rest of them and aimed at the Taken nearest her. Though she had no intention of second guessing her partner, she wondered what he had planned.
All together, they were only six Agents, and she estimated there were at least twenty-five Taken in front of them. They could not possibly take them all down with tranquilizers.
"O'Neal," Payton whispered into his earpiece. "You and Mac fire when ready, then run like hell. Circle back to the gate. The rest of you, cover them. Sooner and I will get the girl."
"Copy."
Payton then turned to Chloe, pointed from himself to her, then to the circle of Taken. She nodded, realizing that he wanted O'Neal to draw the main crowd away. Every muscle a tight wire, she waited for the shot with her tranquilizer gun raised.
Two faint whizzes sang through the air, and two Taken on the far side of the gathering collapsed. For several seconds, the others kept clawing their way to the center of the circle, apparently not noticing the distraction.
Finally, a few turned their heads and started stumbling swiftly towards O'Neal and Mac, who turned and crashed loudly through the underbrush.
The commotion drew the attention of other Taken, and soon most of the crowd had dissipated to give chase.
At that moment, Payton waved his hand forward, and he and Chloe dashed into the clearing. Before they had even left their cover, she knew it was useless.
One Taken remained, a woman with a long nest of what had probably been vibrantly curly brown hair at some point. Fresh blood dripped from her face onto the dirt, which had become a slurry of dark-stained mud. Slumped at the Taken woman's feet was a small figure.
Chloe could only recognize the figure as human by the tiny, pale hand clenched in a death vice around the ear of a toy rabbit, and by the patch of brown hair trailing from a pile of trampled gore. Amid the overflowing flood of red flashed the bright yellow blaze of a coat collar, the rest of which had become completely soaked in blood.
The Taken woman stood up from the remains of her daughter's body and, with a frothy gurgle, ran towards Payton. Without a pause, Payton raised his pistol and shot one bullet directly into the Taken's brain.
Her eyes instantly emptied, she fell face-forward like a freshly severed tree limb.
He scooped up the little girl's massacred body, and ran all the way back to the truck, Chloe stumbling blindly in his wake.