The dulcet tones of AC/DC fought for sound dominance with a caravan of choppers flying low over crags thick with thistles and brush.

The glorious emblem of a scantily clad woman dancing with a fiery bird adorned each of the helicopters and the soldiers within were equally bombastic. Heads shaven to mohawks or grown to foxtails, their gear was a haphazard collection of bullets, trophies, and very little body armor personalized with fiery decals, emblems scratched in with kill counts, and always a tattoo somewhere visible reading “Firebirds.” Except one man flashing his teeth in a self-satisfied grin whose tattoo, running the length from his shoulder to his elbow, dropped the ‘s,’ and his arm alone might have the surface area of a whole man.

Nothing but lean muscle barely contained in black jeans and a vest, he took up two seats not because he needed the space, though his shoulders pushed that boundary, but for comfort alone, plus one to put his feet up and another for his boombox. No one, not even the soldiers sharing seats, contested his claim to them. A headband with “Firebird” printed on it, in case anyone neglected his tattoo or happened to stand on his right, normally keeping hair spiked to hell and back out of his eyes was lowered to a blindfold, and he let his vest fly open to show off more than just his muscles and scars. A device embedded in his chest opposite his heart pulsed with red energy in time with the music.

The pilot struggled to shout over the music, “We’re approaching the target zone! ETA, seven minutes!”

The firebird signaled “OK,” then turned up the boombox.

A song and a half later, a cave the convoy had no way of spotting among the crags stirred. A swarm of giant humanoid bats lacking hair and eyes alit on the helicopters before the first startled soldier could yell “Snatchers!”

The firebird raised his headband to see the augers live up to their name and grab his team out of their transports. Some took down helicopters by getting caught in the blades, others battered themselves against the sides until people fell out or they wrecked. The nearest chopper suffered a head on collision with one that smashed the wind shield and flew off with the pilot. His own helicopter shuddered at the sound of shredding metal, one of the bats attacking the noisy engine.

He grabbed a weapon which could have been mistaken for part of the helicopter. It looked like a rifle with no barrel, stock, or trigger, just a huge chamber on a grip painted up with hot rod flames. The fact it was blunt didn’t stop the firebird from impaling the bat on it. Being an auger, it was far more durable than that, but the device in his chest glowed red hot and energy surged up his arm into the weapon and the snatcher exploded in a ball of fire, but the helicopter blades were already slowing down.

The pilot was having a fit pressing all the buttons he usually isn’t supposed to press when the firebird grabbed his boombox and carried the pilot out of the cockpit by his flight jacket.

“Come with me for a sec,” he casually suggested.

Several snatchers foolish enough to target them were bisected after he jumped, he even had to fight over the pilot with one, they made it to a chaotic landing in the helicopter stalling out nearby. He deposited the pilot in the empty seat and reclined in the back while a chorus of gunfire cleaned up the last of the snatchers.

“Awe fuck! Hell!” a soldier gasped as he ripped his hand from the mouth of a dying snatcher. It was bleeding good, already turning brown. He growled, more annoyed than anything else, and drew his sidearm to his head, but the firebird put his hand over the hammer before it could fire.

“Bite down on something.” In one slash, he removed the arm below the elbow and cauterized the wound. If the infection made it further up, he would have swung again, but he didn’t need to. “Hope you’re ambidextrous.”

The soldier bit back the initial cry of pain and worked up to a chuckle. “Used to be.”

“Fuck yeah.”

The soldier enthusiastically received his firearm pried from his thoroughly gnarled, nearly animate right arm and the convoy continued barely any worse for wear.

They approached a stagnant lake full of black water, barely more than a pond surrounded dead land where even the thistles didn’t grow. At its center, a massive growth like the bulb of a flower with teeth and a thousand eyes turned to see what was making so much noise. Is shrieked and cooed curiously as it watched the helicopters circle.

“Target identified,” the pilot affirmed. “Waiting go-ahead.”

“Double its weight in lead!”

Every man and woman with an arm and line of sight opened fire. The first few seconds, the bulb thrashed and screeched and tried to retreat under surface, but it was too big and the pond wasn’t deep enough. The next, tendrils emerged from the lake and swatted helicopters out of the air. The bodies that remained intact were grabbed by graspers at the end of the tendrils and even more tendrils erupted through them.

Anyone with the mixed fortune to survive a crash had to return to the wreckage or find a sizable rock, since standing on solid ground was a good way to be spontaneously buried to your waist and turned into a sprout of whipping tendrils.

“God dammit!” the pilot shouted. “We’re losing too many men and equipment! We’ll have to come back with reinforcements!”

“Like hell we will!” The firebird cranked the device in his chest like a dial and the others on his chopper shielded themselves from the head radiating off him. They didn’t have to bear it long because he jumped from helicopter, this time rolling into a sprint toward the nearest tendril, felling them one by one. When the grabbed bodies continued to seek prey, he gave them a proper cremation so the survivors could focus their efforts on putting holes in the bulb.

A tendril got a hold of the firebird’s leg, but he was burning too hot to hold for long, let alone infect, so it flung him into the air once, had its second grab disintegrated, then latched on again and tossed him over the lake. The bud blossomed into a flower of tongues lined with undulating teeth ready to receive a live meal, but got a mouthful of fire, steel, and someone having a pure, unadulterated good time.

The soldiers continued firing. Any bullets that would have hit the firebird vaporized in the air. When the heat became too much to bear, the creature retracted its tendrils and tossed him into the water. The burns left behind regenerated slowly, but the petals torn from its head did not grow back.

A rescue was called for, but just as quickly called off. The firebird grinned, plasmaic flame dancing off his body, the lake violently evaporating around him until only he and the sundered flower bud remained on the dry lakebed.

The sky began to change color when another pyre of fire scorched the dry lakebed, surprising none of the soldiers camped out in the shade of the helicopters. When the dust cleared, an unarmed soldier descended the slope toward the firebird standing over the charred remains of the bud pathetically attempting to regenerate.

“It’ll be dark soon,” the soldier informed. “The rest of us can’t survive out here after nightfall.”

The firebird sighed. “I don’t think this thing can die. Fuck!” He blasted the thing once more, then signaled for a helicopter. As he loaded up, the personnel on medic duty held up a scanner to the device in his chest.

“You’re really pushing it, Craid,” the soldier warned. “That thing has limits.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He twisted the device, releasing a jet of superheated air, stabilizing the erratic blinking.

It took most of the helicopters to uproot the thing, nearly all of which were loaded down with injured when they eventually got moving. Every single soldier flying out of that hole, intact or otherwise, reveled in another neutralized auger, buts the hero was sullen the whole flight back to base.

The bud grew back most of its petals and part of its root system when they crossed the perimeter. Patrols dispatching zombies with militant cattle guns through the chain linked fence gave an oorah to their triumphant return and even then, celebrated between prods.

Every trooper Craid passed clasped his hand, jostled him appreciatively, or whooped his praises, but his heart wasn’t in it. In his navigation of the main facility, he passed two individuals neither ripped nor scarred. Two very nondescript individuals in trench coats, one a middle-aged man Craid didn’t recognize and one with an uncanny resemblance to a much larger, very terrifying woman.

They passed each other wordlessly, but not without a flare of tension between them.

Craid ultimately ended up in an office overlooking an industrial facility. An older man in a crimson officer’s jacket watched with his hands behind his back as a mechanical arm carried in the bud auger, flame units curbing its regeneration until it was over a vat of molten lead. The glass dulled the hissing and shrieking as the abomination was submerged and the vat chilled to a block with liquid nitrogen which was then immersed in a tank of glufosinate solution and locked away with a dozen other blocks in various modes of storage ranging in size from water tower to coffin.

The man noticed Craid in the window’s reflection and glanced over his shoulder to confirm. “Hello, Craid. Congratulations on your safe return.”

“What the fuck is the goddamn ICC doing here?”

“It’s nice to see you too. I worry about you, sometimes.”

“Reeve!”

“Relax. We just made a field op in one of their cities without their permission.”

“They don’t send agents over ‘just a field op.’”

“Have you visited the med bay yet? You should probably head to the med bay. Get a checkup, a test done. The last supply run brought a case of candy! They have lollipops!”

“I swear to God, Reeve, if you don’t give me a good reason in the next five seconds, I will immolate them both!”

“Take a seat, Craid and cool off,” he admonished. He hit a button on his phone and said, “Send nurse Qillian to my office. And tell her to bring the sizzler.”

Craid didn’t sit down, but his clothes stopped smoking. “All right. What did they want?”

“Standard ICC affair. They want to know everything, but don’t want to share anything, but that’s not important. What is important is why we staged a mission on their turf.”

The nurse entered the office with a device like a bar code reader attached to a tablet under her arm. “Good evening, Mr. Craid.”

“Janet.”

She turned him so his chest faced the light and told him to sit since the device sat half a head above her. A stern repeat of the command got him to comply, and she plugged her device into his.

“A few months ago,” Reeve began, “One of our operators assisted an ICC field agent. Got her out of a hot zone and back into ICC territory.”

“Who’s the bastard helping the drones? Was it Ike? I already owe that guy a broken nose.”

Nurse Qillian quickly drew her hands back as the device began glow and she reprimanded Craid for getting worked up.

“You’re not going to touch Ike,” Reeve asserted. “You’d lose your arm if you did, and I don’t think you’ll want to after hearing who he helped the pup get away from.”

“What, Rust Devils, SpireTech, Hedron?”

Reeve shook his head with each suggestion. “Gennex.”

Craid’s eyebrows briefly went up in surprise and his grin rolled out a slow laugh. “I might kiss Ike full on the mouth next time I see him.”

“Thought so. He kept tabs on the agent after they split. Said she was carrying something important.”

“Can’t be good if Gennex wanted it. Any idea why?”

“None, but a few days later, a whole ICC city, the one Ike believes she went to hide, went completely dark.” He made a cutting motion over his neck. “No survivors.”

Craid looked at Reeve as if he was expecting him to punctuate a morbid joke with a punchline that never came. “…Shit. What did we find?”

“A metric fuck ton of C-blue dust and not much else. But we know two things for sure thanks to our ‘friends’ you saw earlier: Gennex isn’t the only group after the asset, and anyone who does want it doesn’t have it yet.”

“Any guesses who or where?”

“None. This whole thing is a powder keg ready to blow and everyone’s in a mad scramble to find the match.”

“We aren’t going to let anyone beat us to it, are we?”

“Don’t think we can help it. We kill things and we’re good at it. Cloak and dagger, not so much. But you bet your ass once that asset turns up we’ll blow it to hell before another city goes to shit.”

“God help anyone who tries to stop us.”

Nurse Qillian unplugged the device and shook her head. “There is only one known way to damage corterrum, and you are using it to sustain the least stable variant of that very reaction. If that engine fails in an excited state it will go critical.”

“If I’m in an excited state and this thing stops working, we’ll have bigger problems.”

“The casing embedded in your chest represents one tenth of the world’s supply of the single rarest metalloid known to man. We don’t have any more, we can’t make any more. Unless you can find fresh corterrum, my professional opinion is that you should get it removed and plug it into a city reactor for the next ten thousand years. But knowing you, I’ll just say… try not to blow your top near a population center.”

“I’ll do my best, but if anything bigger than a type two appears, I won’t have a choice.”

“Thank you, nurse,” Reeve replied.

“My pleasure.”

Reeve saw his visitors out with hardy reassurance. Before closing the door behind him, he cast a glance at one of the chairs in front of his desk. His vision would have passed through a bug hidden beneath the cushion, but his expression was neither surprised nor confused.

In a borrowed officer’s dorm across the facility, Holt decided the door closing and subsequent silence meant he wouldn’t miss anything by taking out the earpiece.