The voice of the helicopter pilot crackled over the radio link to Sheva's earpiece. Mumbaja One was inbound for assault team extraction, and orders were to assemble at the landing zone, and to kill as many enemies as possible along the way.
The mission location was code named "The Prison" in the briefings just before the assault. Sheva stood atop a platform at the apex of the hellish structure. Its interior spaces were grimy, foreboding, and rough hewn out of mountain stone punctuated by heavy iron doors and gratings that separated its various inner chambers. The view towards the outside was otherworldly. The Prison loomed above the crest of a remote mountain range shrouded in mist and ash. Some of the lower peaks in the distance leaked glowing, smoking streamers of lava. The terrain was impossible to negotiate even by foot with its unrelenting jagged slopes and intermittent and unpredictable natural hazards making it perfect for a maximum security facility: a helicopter was the only way in or out.
There hadn't been much trouble to this point, but Sheva unholstered her MP-45 machine pistol just the same. It was light and easy to move with, and considering the distance she had to cover to get to the landing zone, she was certain she'd have to put it to use before leaving.
No sooner had she rounded the first corner than she found herself facing a man who was stooping and swaying listlessly. For a moment it seemed that he would remain standing there, oblivious to Sheva's presence, but then suddenly the man looked up at her, and that was when Sheva felt a chill at the base of her spine.
It was his eyes.
Even at this distance-- 20 feet-- she should be able to see the whites of the man's eyes. Maybe the low light was playing tricks on Sheva's vision, but it seemed that the space between his eyelids was filled with indistinct reddish-brown smudges instead of normal human pupils.
He began to shout in an African language that Sheva didn't understand as he raised his arm, and pointed a crooked, bony, accusing finger directly at her, his voice rising and becoming shrill with contempt as he took a sudden sure-footed step in Sheva's direction.
The barrel of Sheva's weapon, resting comfortably at her hip, was already pointed at the man. She didn't hesitate, and squeezed off a string of five rounds from her submachine gun. They stitched an uneven line of red-dotted entry wounds that ran from just above his navel up to his right shoulder.
The man bent over sharply at the waist in pain, clutching the shattered bone socket that was once his right shoulder.
What the hell, Sheva thought to herself, this guy should be DOWN.
But he wasn't going down. He was beginning to straighten himself up, slowly and stiffly.
Watching the man pull himself together after absorbing so many bullets should have alarmed her, but instead Shiva felt pissed-off, and she charged the man, closing the distance quickly, then leaping off the ground nimbly with her rear foot, she kicked and hit the man directly in the center of his chest at the sternum using her lead foot with practically all the force a woman of her height and weight could muster.
The man's mouth let out a foul gust of air as his rib cage collapsed from the blow that lifted him off his feet and slammed him into stone wall behind him. The air that huffed out of his mouth smelled like death. It wasn't the clean, formaldehyde saturated smell of death that permeates a morgue. This was the rotting, organic sort that festered in open fields beneath a blazing sun.
But how could a man like that seem to be alive, and then to attack?
Something was very wrong indeed.