Claire got out of the car and frowned at the roadblock in front of them. Strung between two posts was a chain across the road, with two frayed tires on the chain for some inexplicable reason. Claire's partner, Anita, got out a moment later and walked up to the obstruction. She checked the padlock, just in case someone had set it to appear closed when it wasn't. "Locked," she said.
She got to work on it, while Claire headed back to the trunk for her equipment. She didn't hurry, but she'd watched plenty of movies and worked with Anita long enough to know her lock-picking skills weren't always as shown on TV. Claire removed a large set of bolt cutters and walked up next to her work partner. Anita, who was still fiddling fruitlessly with the padlock, paused to frown mightily at the tool. Claire matter-of-factly clipped the chain in two.
"As my father always said to me," Claire espoused, "'Man: the tool user.'"
"I was using tools!" She held up her picks in exasperation.
Claire smiled. "Sometimes you have to use bigger ones." She waggled her eyebrows and hefted the bolt cutters, then walked back to the car.
Anita sighed and stomped to the vehicle. "Now they'll know we're here."
Claire closed the trunk, putting away the bolt cutter. "They're supposed to know we're here. It's not exactly a stealth mission, you know?"
Anita slid into the driver's seat, saying, "Your father is well known in the Company for not having any finesse."
"There are worse people I could be like," Claire grumbled as they got underway. Claire still hadn't gotten the hang of proper teamwork, despite several missions, a lot of coaching and a couple seminars on the subject. She and Anita continued to snipe at each other as they rolled down the winding track, into the woods.
They were in western Wisconsin in late spring, investigating a rumor of a family of people with abilities. Regeneration was the rumor. A woman and her daughter had been involved in an auto accident. Paramedics on the scene had confirmed the woman's death, though the daughter, a teenager, had suffered only bruises and being severely shook up. Before the paramedics could take them away, the mother had regained her senses, attacked the EMTs, and fled with her daughter.
An investigation was held and their vehicle led straight to their address, where an unidentified young man had assaulted the pair of policemen who had come by to see if the mother was there. He was shot several times, but recovered each time. One cop was battered to the ground and the other retreated to their car, only to see the whole family - mother, daughter, father and young man - run to the car in their driveway and escape.
The initial pursuit was bungled and the family managed to make good on their getaway, but the Company, with Molly Walker's ability, had located them in a remote cabin. Claire and Anita had the mission of finding them, identifying their abilities and if possible, bringing them in so the Company could handle them until the heat from the authorities died down.
They came up on the cabin suddenly, as the almost claustrophobic greenery gave way to a tiny clearing next to a stream. In the clearing was a small, rustic house that had seen better days. They killed the engine of their car, leaving it in the driveway, blocking the exit. When they got out, they found why their approach hadn't been noticed - the noise of a badly maintained generator had covered them.
Claire walked up on the porch while Anita circled to one side of the house, looking around. There was motion inside, then noise as people scattered, but there were no voices. The front door flew open and a large man, the father, crashed into Claire. Unarmed and taken by surprise, she was initially overwhelmed by the man's mass and strength. Her forearm made a gruesome snapping noise as she felt the bone dislocate. She wrenched it from the man's grasp anyway and kicked him hard.
He grabbed for her again, eyes vapid and expression blank and that was when she began to suspect something was wrong. She scrambled backwards as he made a feral groan and grabbed at her repeatedly. He got hold of her shirt and ripped it, then her left arm as she gave up on trying to backpedal and pulled her gun with her free hand.
She'd never shot anyone.
And she didn't now.
While she froze up with indecision over ending someone's life, he grabbed her throat and began to try to tear her left arm from her body by simple expedient of pulling in different directions. His expression was still fixed. He wasn't even breathing hard. In all the motion though, his mouth had fallen open and it remained that way. There was something decidedly inhuman going on here and not in a way that spoke of abilities. This was no regenerator like herself. She didn't know what he was, but he didn't even seem coherent. The pain in her shoulder was unbearable as it seemed he was strong enough to accomplish his aim - too strong.
She fired the gun, downward, hoping to hit a leg. He didn't even react to the noise and apparently she missed, but she couldn't see because of the death grip on her neck. She fired again and again until suddenly he buckled and fell, not losing his grip on her, but losing the tension for a moment until he started trying to tear her apart once more. Her body desperately tried to heal as Claire realized he wasn't done. She brought the gun up to his arm, put the barrel directly against it and pulled the trigger.
Cold flesh splattered across her face and the grip on her neck ended. She twisted away, wrenching her forearm even more in the process, and rolled as far away as possible before leaping to her feet. The man, or the creature that looked like a man, struggled to stand, seeming perplexed as to why he couldn't with a shattered femur.
Claire stared at him. He wasn't healing. She wiped the tissue from her face. It wasn't fresh. It was ripe, slimy and almost… rotten. She looked back at the still-blank expression on the man's face. "Oh my God."
Gunshots from the rear of the house yanked her out of the moment, reminding her that her partner was out there somewhere and unlike Claire, Anita couldn't heal. She had no abilities at all, except being a bitch and a hardass. Claire sprinted for her, leaving the confused zombie behind.
She found Anita on the ground, being strangled by the young man as the teenaged girl watched in fascination and the mother stood by blankly, staring off into space. For a second, Claire took in the scene, from the blue skin of her partner to the smirk on the teenager's face. Claire put her gun to the young man's head and pulled the trigger immediately. Brains blown out, he convulsed and collapsed on top of his victim, but Claire was relieved to hear Anita suck in air.
The girl yelped in fear, staring at the man. Claire pointed the gun at her. The mother began to move towards her, but Claire yelled, "Make her stop or I'll shoot you!" After one more step and Claire's finger twitched on the trigger, but not enough, the older woman stopped.
Anita shoved the man's body off herself and rolled over, taking in great gulps of air.
"You can't regenerate," Claire said to the teen. "You can animate the dead; create zombies. You turned your family into undead!"
The girl trembled, eyes darting around as she tried to figure out what she could do with only one functional servant left and a gun pointed right at her.
"How did they die?" Claire demanded.
"My… my… my boyfriend… My dad had a heart attack. My mom freaked out. I didn't… and then… and so I didn't… but if they'd just done what I told them to do… I didn't… He deserved it!"
Claire resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She relaxed her grip on the gun and lowered it a little as Anita got to her feet and said, "What the hell? I shot him six times!"
"They're zombies, I think. They've already been dead for days. She controls them. She's like a puppet master of the dead." Claire grimaced and looked at Anita as the other woman bent to retrieve her own sidearm. She looked okay, other than the terrible marks on her throat.
But Claire had taken her eyes off the enemy and the next thing she knew, the mother slammed into her, taking her down. Anita had emptied her gun on her attacker earlier and now while Claire struggled not to be torn apart, her partner raced to reload. Claire expected Anita to blow out the older woman's brains and for a second, after the gun went off, that's what she thought had happened, because the body on top of her began to shake and fell to the side twitching, eyes rolled back in her head.
Anita had shot the girl and now shot her several more times, center of mass, just in case. Claire yelled, "NO!" and ran forward, but it was too late.
Anita rubbed her throat, standing over the teenager, and said, "Fucker."
Claire panted. "You didn't have to kill her!"
"Claire, that thing was going to tear you apart! I already tried shooting the other one. Didn't stop it."
"It did when I blew its brains out!"
Anita frowned and stared at Claire for a moment, having not caught that part. But it made sense. She'd been nearly blacked out at the time. At a noise, both of them spun to see the older woman had lurched to her feet and now scrambled off towards the woods like some manner of two-legged savage animal.
"Oh shit," Claire said.
Anita shot at it a couple times, but the bullets didn't slow the thing down. She disappeared into a wall of plants, lost in the woods.
Panicking, Claire said, "We need to get out of here!"
Anita glanced back down at their target, then at the woods. "Yep. I agree." She was shaken too. As they left, she stopped to shoot the man in the head, as the zombie had stopped struggling to stand and was instead trying to drag itself away. The head injury seemed to end it.
As they drove out, Anita said, "You were right. It wasn't exactly a stealth mission."
Laughter born of hysteria bubbled from Claire's lips.