PROJECT Z – A WITCH’S VENGEANCE

The door exploded inward with a single kick at Vaughn's boot. Dust and splinters erupted into the dim interior of the Red Lion pub, a once-respectable establishment now reduced to a husk of broken furniture and shattered. The stench hit him immediately; rot, blood, and something chemical that made his senses recoil.

"Six contacts, upper level," Rafe's voice crackled through the comm unit. "Three more in the basement. Tessa, Martinez, Chen, take the ground floor. Eric and I are splitting vertically."

"Copy that," Tessa responded, her daggers already in hand as she moved through the debris stealthily.

"Racing me again, Tank?" Eric grinned, checking the charge on his plasma rifle. The weapon hummed, its targeting system locking in with a soft pulse.

A low chuckle rose through the comms. “One of these days you're retiring that nickname, boss. But yeah, I'm in. Losers buys drinks for a month.”

"You're on."

Eric moved through the ground floor efficiently, his augmented musculature allowing him to clear obstacles that would have slowed an ordinary soldier. The enhancement serum had been pumping through his veins for three years now, transforming him into something between human and weapon. He'd stopped questioning which side of that line he fell on.

A mutant dropped from the rafters, all elongated limbs and translucent skin stretched over misshapen bones. Eric fired twice. The creature's skull snapped back, bioluminescent fluid spattering across the wall. One down.

"That's two for me," Rafe announced through the comm. Gunfire echoed from below, followed by an inhuman shriek cut short.

"Show off," Eric muttered, taking the stairs three at a time.

Behind him, he heard Tessa's even voice: "Ground floor clear. Moving to support."

Eric's eyes adjusted, picking out heat signatures in the darkness. Three distinct forms huddled in what had once been the pub's office.

They came at him coordinately,  smarter than usual. Eric's training took over. Duck, pivot, fire. The first mutant's chest cavity exploded. Spin, strike with the rifle butt. The second creature's jaw shattered, and Eric finished it with a point-blank shot. The third tried to flee through a window. Eric's bullet caught it mid-leap, and it tumbled three stories to the alley below.

"Four," Eric said into the comm.

"Five." Rafe sounded breathless. "And I've got eyes on number six. How many have you got up there?"

"Just cleared my sector. You said three in the basement, right?"

"Yeah, but one got past me. Check the…"

A crash from the rear of the building cut Rafe off. Eric was moving before his partner finished the warning, vaulting over a collapsed beam and racing toward the back exit. He burst through the door into the alley behind the pub, weapon raised.

The mutant was there, crouched beside an overflowing dumpster. This one was different, smaller, with more human proportions beneath the grotesque mutations. It had wedged itself into the corner where the brick wall met a chain-link fence, nowhere left to run.

"Got you," Eric whispered, taking aim.

But the creature didn't charge. Didn't bare its teeth or flex its claws for a final, desperate attack. Instead, it stared at him with eyes that held something uncomfortably close to intelligence. Then its jaw began to move.

Click-click. Click. Click-click-click.

Eric's finger tightened on the trigger, but he didn't fire. The rhythm was too deliberate, too precise. The mutant wasn't just snapping randomly.

Short, long, short. Patterns. The creature repeated the sequence, its misshapen head tilted as if waiting for a response Eric didn't know how to give.

"Eric? Status?" Rafe's voice in his ear felt distant.

The mutant clicked again. Different patterns this time. Shorter bursts, longer pauses.

"I said status, Vaughn. Are you good?"

Eric fired. The mutant's body slumped against the fence, fluids pooling beneath it in the moonlight. He stared at the corpse, that rhythmic clicking still echoing in his mind.

"Yeah," he said finally. "I'm good. Target neutralized."

The base's rec room smelled like cheap beer and cheaper victory. Rafe had won their bet: seven kills to Eric's six but he'd bought the first round anyway, claiming it was part of his duty as the winner of the bet. Their squadmates filled the space with the usual post-mission energy: laughter filled the room, the desperate need to feel alive after dancing with death.

Eric sat at the corner table, beer untouched, watching condensation slide down the bottle's neck.

"You're quiet tonight." Tessa dropped into the chair beside him, her own drink in hand. "That thing in the alley still bothering you?"

Eric looked at her sharply. "You noticed?"

"Of course I noticed. I had eyes on you from the street." She took a sip of her beer. "That mutant was doing something weird before you took the shot. It looked almost like it was trying to communicate."

"You saw that?"

"Saw enough." Tessa's expression was thoughtful. "The way it positioned itself, the jaw movements, that wasn't an attack. It sounded more like a…. rhythm.”

Before Eric could respond, Rafe joined them, sliding into the chair across the table. "What are we talking about?"

"The last mutant," Eric said. "The one in the alley. It was clicking. Its jaw. Like a pattern."

Rafe leaned forward, the celebration noise fading into background static. "What kind of pattern?"

"Something like a beat. Short, short, long, then a pause. Then it… kinda did it again." Eric glanced at Tessa, who nodded. "It was as if it was trying to say something."

For a long moment, Rafe said nothing. Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out a small notepad and pen. "Show me."

"Rafe, it's probably nothing….."

"Show me the pattern."

Eric sucked in a breath, feeling the weight of his partner's attention as he began tapping against the table, reconstructing what he'd heard. Short clicks, long clicks, the pauses between. Once through, then again when Rafe gestured for him to continue.

Rafe's hand moved across the notepad, marking lines and dots, organizing the chaos into structure. Tessa watched over his shoulder, her mind finally registering it.

"That's Morse code," she said quietly.

Rafe nodded, already working through the translation. His pen moved faster now, letters forming beneath the dots and dashes. "Okay, so we've got... K-E-L-M-A-P... some numbers mixed in... 7-2-5... then S-T-R."

Tessa leaned over to look at the notepad. "K-7-E-2-L-M-A-P-5-S-T-R. What does that mean?"

"Nothing," Rafe muttered, still staring at the sequence. "Just random letters and numbers."

“Let me see.” Martinez drifted over, beer in hand, pulled in by their focus. He squinted. “Yeah, that’s gibberish. Probably just muscle spasms that happened to sound like code.”

That was enough for them. Tessa and Rafe rejoined the others, the table erupting back into laughter and noise.

Eric stayed where he was, slowly turning the glass in his hands. The pattern of clicks kept replaying in his head. Still meaningless. Still wrong.

And yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d just walked away from something important.