The World Cannot Forget Channing

“There he goes!” Sam called out, pounding away across the pavement as the man following him pivoted to chase. Trench coat flapping in the breeze, the older man drew his younger partner across the road, heedless of the cars and trucks screeching to avoid them both. Drawing his 9mm from a shoulder holster, he fired off two shots down the alleyway ahead, cursing under his breath as the malformed creature ducked around a corner. “Keep up Rook, this one can’t get away!”

Tom “Rook” Jacobs drew his own service pistol, hurrying to catch up to the burly police sergeant. He cast an apologetic glance at the confused and concerned motorists on either side as they both raced into the alleyway.

“We’ve got a breeder slipping the alley at Forty-Second and Elm, looks like a K-6 variant. Uniped, limited mobility and estimated sentience at ten” Sam barked into his radio, whipping around the corner with his gun leading. “Lock down all surrounding sewer gates and get me a burn team damnit, now!”

Trailing Sam, Rook nearly tripped as he rounded the corner, and got his first look at the K-6. No taller than a three feet, it had a grotesquely misshapen humanoid torso on top of a long slug-like “foot”, with skeletal arms, long, sharp-looking fingers, and a face that looked like it had been put through an industrial meat press – twice. Sharp yellow teeth bared in challenge before it dropped down into an open manhole, vanishing into the foreboding darkness within.

“Wait for the burn team Sam, who knows how many there could..” trailing off as the older man dropped down onto the first rung of the ladder inside the hole, Rook stared pleadingly at him.

“Stay if you don’t think you can handle it, but we can’t let this one go. Channing might’ve been before your time, but I remember it.” Something ugly flashed through Sam’s blue eyes, and without another word he dropped the remaining few feet to the dark tunnel below.

Channing. Even if it was before his time; Rook was still three years from being born when it happened; it still sent cold shivers down his spine. Humanity’s most recent reminder that the biological mutagens left over from World War Three had not been lost, and that there were still people out there desperate or cruel enough to use them.

Most of the biological supermutants constructed during the long war had been immensely powerful, but asexual; creatures the size and strength of tanks, flying raptors capable of stripping a jet fighter from the sky, even ocean-bound leviathans that could decimate an entire naval fleet. Even at the height of the genetic recklessness though, most scientists still recognized the danger of a self-propagating weapon. Genetically induced behavioral modifications tended to go haywire after a generation or two, usually resulting in a xenophobic band of mutants interested only in reproducing as much as possible and eliminating any threat to said reproduction; a category which humans fell under at least nine times out of ten.

Almost all of the breeder strains were destroyed at the end of the war, but twenty-four years ago, the world had found out that almost was not all. A mild infestation in the city of Channing, initially underestimated and incorrectly diagnosed, grew overnight into a legion of dangerous, violent, and worst of all, intelligent monsters. They took to the streets in the early morning, and by late afternoon, the city was declared a loss. Nuclear bombers saturated the city and surrounding countryside, irradiating enormous tracts of land into a desert of molten glass from which no living thing could escape.

When the fallout had cleared and the survivors counted, the world’s worst fears were confirmed. From a city of five million, less than six hundred-thousand had escaped with their lives.

As the shockwaves of terror and mourning coursed around the world, new legislation followed with unprecedented speed. Special police units were tasked with rooting out and eliminating any and all genetically modified creatures in any city’s limits, regardless of demeanor or behavior. Any human caught working with biological mutation was issued a death sentence, often handled “at the officer on the spot’s discretion”.

The world could not forget Channing. Sam Murcek would not let it happen again.

As the glow of his partner’s flashlight cut through the darkness below, fading as he splashed away through the tepid sludge, Rook jumped in after him. Wincing as he landed wrong, he fought to force his legs along, his eyes on the receding glow of his partner’s beam.

Sam must have slowed when he heard Rook following, because the younger man caught up quickly. “No doubt where we’re headed lad..” Playing his flashlight over the walls, he pointed out the thick layers upon layers of slimy mucus and other less desirable substances which coated the concrete in this passage.

“How many do you think there are?”

“More by the minute, and we can’t wait for the burners. One of these bastards gets away, and we’re done.”

Sam raised his hand in a gesture for silence as they rounded a corner, suddenly bathed in harsh light from up ahead. A barrel filled to the brim with burning debris stood in the entrance to one of the sewer’s large cisterns, partially blocking their path and hiding the interior beyond in a haze of shadows. “It’s a trap..” Heedless of his own words, he continued ahead, trailed still by the younger man at his back.

Rook reached one hand for his belt as the other, still holding the gun, triggered its magazine release. The metal case dropped into the water with a splash, while his other hand withdrew the extended engagement magazine from beside the gps tracker built into the tough belt. A dull green glow reminded him that even if they died here, at least the fire team would know exactly where to go. Slotting the bulky magazine into place, he checked the pistol’s action once more before looking ahead past the flaming barrel.

Harsh shadows danced in the light ahead, while sinister scrapings and scrabblings echoed from the thick concrete around them. “On three..” Sam whispered as they neared the barrel. “One.. two.. three!” He lunged forward as he shouted the last, one booted foot delivering a solid kick to the barrel, sending it tumbling forward and scattering burning rubbish in its path. Anguished hisses sounded as the would-be ambushers were met with burning cinders, and then they were through the entrance and firing almost blindly into the seething mass that awaited them.

The barrel’s debris was extinguished quickly under the press of the waiting horde, each one scrabbling to clutch at either of the two men with their sharp, strong fingers. Only their own disorganization kept the battle even remotely favorable, and Rook’s vision blurred as his eyes struggled to adjust between the thick darkness and the bright flashes of intermittent gunshots. A red mist, thick with blood and desperation, filled the air, casting the mutated faces of the revolting creatures into a nightmarish visage, and all the while the gunshots continued, on and on.

One creature lunged from the darkness, only to be blown down as the gun pivoted and pulled his finger down onto the trigger. Two more charged from the side, but the gun was ready, and it left their heads sprayed on the wall.

An extended engagement clip holds one hundred and one rounds. Only the empty clicking of his pistol brought Rook from the fugue of the past few minutes. He was surrounded by darkness; no longer the cold, clamminess of the sewers, but the hot, humid, and sticky atmosphere of a killing field. The clicking continued for several moments more until, with great hesitation, he slowly withdrew his trigger finger.

A sudden pounding of feet and infusion of bright light from behind momentarily staggered him. The burn team had arrived, lighting the way with spotlights mounted on their heavy armor and pilot lights on their arm-mounted flamethrowers, while the laser guides of miniguns and flechette launchers pierced the deeper darkness ahead. The scene they illuminated was one from nightmare; a charnel of gruesome death, and Rook was the only creature left standing.



Sam Murcek’s funeral was an austere one, as most police officers’ are. A stand of wilting flowers stood in the old funeral home; fewer and fewer police funerals were still taking place in churches. The modest casket stood at the head of the small gathering; Sam’s wife, her eyes dry but her face etched with lines of grief, their college-bound daughter, weeping openly but silently. Every man and woman from the police force, and several from other nearby precincts, were in attendance. With a detached awareness, Tom realized that not a single person had called him “Rook”, a derivative of rookie that had clung to him far longer than it really had any right to.

No mass was held, and no priest presided; two were there, but they kept mostly to themselves and whispered only words of consolation to no one in particular.

With a soft clearing of his throat, the chief quieted the gathering from their murmurings. Not a word was said, but he looked at Tom and nodded, and Tom knew the moment he’d dreaded had arrived. He looked to the casket, and to the heavy revolver held in the dead man’s right hand.

“There is only one man with the rights to take this from my cold, dead hands.” The attorney had read aloud, directly from Sam’s will in the conference before the funeral. Only Tom, the widow Murcek, and her daughter were there. He hadn’t said a single word to them; couldn’t imagine what he could say that would mean anything at all. “And that man is Tom Jacobs, in only his fourth year of service, and only his second as my partner. I know, though, that he has many more ahead of him, and this will be what I leave to help him along when I’m through. I have only two conditions. Firstly, this revolver cannot be laid to rest. I expect him to pass it along to a younger man when his time comes to leave either the force or the world. May it never be disgraced by placing it in a museum or on a mantelpiece. Secondly, I want him to take it from my own hands, as I would have preferred to give it to him when my own retirement came.” The rest of the will had been matter of fact and ordinary, and Tom felt embarrassed and unable to look at the widow beside him, who had received only the most basic of courteous goodbyes in the document.

Now he rose, legs steady despite his shaky mind. Blocking out the crowd around him, the words spoken (if indeed there were any), he walked to the casket and gazed down at his partner. Ex-partner.

Opening his mouth as though to speak, he found himself under another of those damnable lapses of words, and closed it quickly. Pausing a moment more, he steeled his resolve and reached out with both hands. Sam’s fingers were cold and stiff with death, but the mortician had been careful and prepared, and Tom slid the heavy revolver from the fallen policeman’s grip without difficulty. He lifted it, weighing it in one hand, then the other.

He’d seen this gun nearly every day for the past two years; Sam had almost never been without it, until that fateful day. He swore by it, refused any other gun even after the extended engagement clips were put out, offering dozens more bullets than even this specially made revolver could hope to carry. It had been apart from Sam only a handful of times in his entire adult life, ever since his father, a veteran of World War Three, had passed it along to him. Each of those times was only for a day or two, once every five years to have it re-machined, its tolerances checked and its action smoothed. The last day was the day Sam died, and the standard-issue service pistol clutched in his lifeless hand when the burn team uncovered him had expended only nineteen bullets before jamming.

Tom raised the pistol from the casket, his other hand rising to give the revolving cylinder a slight spin, the intricate-looking spiral pattern of bullet housings elegant in its simple, foolproof effectiveness. Still without hearing the words or meeting the eyes of others, Tom turned and walked away from the casket, and out of the funeral home.

The revolver felt far heavier than its sturdy construction could explain. Heavy with the weight of its purpose, perhaps, of an existence whose sole purpose was to end others’. A heavy burden to carry, but far lighter than the alternative. Weighed down by the twin chains of honor and duty, Tom walked out into the streets, urged onward by the purposeful metal instrument held reverently at his side.