How to Make a Butcher

Just Not His Fahkin' Friday

Fleet Criminal Investigative Service Field Office, III MIC Headquarters Building, Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz

Dededo Village, Guam County, State of the Marianas

Major Benningham Harkon, United States Marine Corps

Assistant Special Agent in Charge for Criminal Investigations, Marianas Directorate

2259 Local Time, APR 10, 2037

“Get fahking lost, Murhhk,” Major Harkon hissed at the group of FCIS agents crouched behind the desks in the blacked-out office. This was not a surprise party for a retiring colleague. It was actually less awkward than that for Ben. The mixed cohort of civvies, marines, and sailors didn’t seem interested in turning tail. “I didn’t stuttah. Get fahking going before I shoot yah.”

“What about you?” Captain Murklyn Gibbs asked.

Harkon flashed his “Are you stupid” glare at the chubby-cheeked, bushy-tailed investigator. Murk got the memo. With their service pistols drawn, the agents crept toward the exit in a silent conga line. Harkon unholstered his own service weapon. He looked at it with disgust as suppressed shots rang out. They’re getting closer.

The Mateba Model 6 Unica glinted gently in the dark. His wife had gotten it for him as an anniversary present. He always carried it despite his disdain for revolvers; it would have broken Stacy’s heart to know her “Boston Togusa” didn’t want it, not that he had a real understanding of who the fuck ‘Togusa’ was. The damn thing just was about too expensive to bring to the range regularly—.44 Magnum was expensive as Hell, and he wasn’t a man to waste money.

He snuck into the hallway. It was clear. He grabbed a fire extinguisher and a fire axe before he snuck back to his office, and the building shook as a ballistic missile strike made planetfall. The sky outside was briefly lit by reds and oranges, one of a hundred false rises this night.

He looted his office for what could kill: scissors, a pair of old KA-BARS, a Fairbairn-Sykes dagger, and two handfuls of polymer-cased .44 SLAP rounds. He unloaded and reloaded his pistol, thinking about how the Reverand Father Bertrand Flanagan, his father-in-law, had loaded these P+++ rounds himself. Harkon hoped the deranged Jesuit hadn’t just turned his gun into a pipebomb. At least it wasn’t some godawful Auto Mag with the mall ninja rounds—the trend after the PLA had shown off the LB-1 bipedal combat robot; “Lu Bu” was, of course, a piece of shit, but that didn’t stop the Neo Fudd Industrial Complex from capitalizing on the panic about “Cyber Red Dawn.”

He snapped the cylinder close.

As firelight danced through the windows, figures flooded the floor. Hushed voices speaking Mandarin. The soft whine and deep clomps of heavy exo-rigs. The voices grew louder, their words slurred. Feet dragged on the tile. He hid behind a pillar. He knew he’d be out of sight. It was the best place in the office to cry and/or scream. For the first time in a long time, he regretted leaving the Center. He hoped Laf and Val were still alive—before he realized that was a dumb thought. Of course, they’re alive.

They passed the frosted glass that lined the FCIS office. Some of the figures tried to look through the opacity before staggering along. Harkon could see cupped hands. One smashed out the window and gave the open-plan office a quick scan. They continued onwards.

Harkon slipped out the side door behind the section, Mateba tucked into the front of his pants, axe in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other. He took a breath and started running. He hurled the 20-pound extinguisher, sliding it like a curling stone across the tile. He put two SLAP rounds right through the face plate of a Can Opener as the trooper turned around. He put one more into the throat of the soldier next to him before putting a round right into the extinguisher. He dropped into a slide as a hail of gunfire tore the air above him. He saw the legs of another BK and swiped at them with the axe, catching the soldier in the shin.

The soldier wailed and collapsed to the ground. He put another round through the man’s head. Another soldier came charging through the white-powdery discharge. Harkon shot him through the heart. He stumbled forward and collapsed. With a flick of his wrist and fingers, Harkon grabbed the QSZ from a dead man’s holster. He disappeared into the extinguisher’s plume of aerosolized powder. He shot at the darkened shapes in the clouds. A massive metal man appeared from the powdered mist. Harkon rammed the pistol’s barrel into the man’s throat and pulled the trigger till it went click. There was a THUNK as the Can Opener collapsed to the ground.

One unlucky PLA-SOF officer got a KA-BAR in his windpipe. Harkon hurled another knife at a shape’s leg before he darted past the men struggling to orient themselves in the confusion. They shot in every direction, shouting incoherently in a mix of English and Mandarin.

As the cloud settled on the ground—leaving the floor a candy cane display of gore and white powder—Harkon was standing in between three wounded troopers, one on each side to his front and one behind him. They had eyes the size of dinner plates, purple lips, and a wobble in their legs.

The one to his right lunged forward and received the flat eye of the fire axe to his face for his troubles. He collapsed back to the ground as the one behind him and the one to the left charged. Harkon pulled the axe back, let go, and caught it near the shoulder, ramming the rubberized knob into the eye of the guy behind him before once again smacking the axe’s eye of the axe into the face of the final trooper.

He let the axe go for a second, catching it by the handle as the first trooper struggled to his feet. Harkon landed a blow powerful enough to sever the man’s leg just below the knee, pulling the axe back and slamming the poll of the axe into the face of the third man before driving the axe square into the helmet of the first man, much to Harkon’s surprise. There was a sickening crack as the man on the right stopped screaming. It was all one fluid movement, like the steps of a ballet—it seemed like Harkon was born with an axe in his hands. But really, he had just spent a lot of time in his youth wailing on snot-nosed rich kids with a hockey stick.

The staggering third man regained his composure in time to see Harkon leap on him with hands wrapped around the handle of his Fairbairn-Sykes. It was a decorative piece, a memento from his time with the red team before he left in the wake of the Coronado Crisis. It would still draw life’s blood. Harkon glared into the dying soldier’s eyes as he twisted the knife.

The second man stumbled forward, clutching his eye, trying to get to his feet. Harkon walked over to his service pistol and flicked open the cylinder, letting the spent polymer brass drop to the floor. Harkon loaded two SLAP rounds and drilled both of them into the PLA commando as the man regained his footing. He repeated the process and wordlessly reloaded the statement piece with a speed loader of .44 ball from his belt.

Figures breached the door from which the Chinese appeared. He fired two rounds of unsuppressed .44 Magnum. The pointman ducked back into the cover of the stairwell. The more noise he made, the more Percs he’d draw to him. It was better that way. Gunfire rang out from other places in the building—he could make out the sounds of Chinese rifles and machine guns set against pistols and PDWs. It was a concerto of different chattering and rattling tones, each with its own voice. He started to hear the noise of something else, something different, something familiar. It made his heart swell: smuzzled rifles and machine guns, American ones—and ones he knew well.

So they finally got their asses in gear, eh?

“Ben?” a voice called out from the stairwell. It was one that he knew all too well. “That you?”

“Laf,” Harkon replied without feeling. The better part of a troop from Marine Special Operations Reconnaissance Company 835 filed out from the stairwell, faces covered by PSQ-60 SPIDER-EYE NODs, decked out in full exo-rigs and with their antenna-strewn Night Hunter backpacks. An outsider would call them “Reapers,” but no one in the Operational Examination Center would be caught dead using that language. They were Rectors. SEAL Clubbers. Harkon’s right eye twitched. “Bunch fahkin’ cocksuckahs.” His old family. A kind of rolling thunder echoed, the distinctive report of someone doing a mad minute with a .416 bolt-gun, “Thaht explains where Val is.”

“Nice seein’ you too, cher,” Major Lafayette DuSaint said as he passed, patting Harkon on the shoulder. “Care to join?”

Harkon now wished that Laf had gotten himself killed, but only somewhat. “Do I look like I’m waiting for a hahnd-job or something?”