Operation Honshu Wolf by Addison Gunn

against the exterior wall—full-length plate glass windows—but the sound of shattering glass and gunfire did nothing to intimidate the Infected. There was a hate to their eyes, one that hadn’t been there before.
    It was, Miller dimly realized, between flashing arcs of blazing electrical light as he missed his target, like the kids who’d called him ‘faggot’ in high school for being willing to try dating another guy. It was like they’d never wanted to see him as human, and that one date out of a dozen let them flip a switch to look past his humanity and turn him into vermin .
    They hadn’t been violent in high school, though. Those two teenage boys had known that no matter how they felt, there were consequences—suspension, maybe worse.
    The Infected didn’t give a shit.
    George charged Miller, the poor spindly man transformed into something entirely other , wearing Linda’s feelings and the mob’s hatred on a face not really suited to either. But Miller wasn’t about to let him start gnawing off his ears.
    The stun-gun crackled, and du Trieux was beating someone off Morland’s back with the butt of her rifle as he tried to get away. Doyle had given up on warning shots and had backed up, switching magazines to rubber buckshot. The pellets—slightly larger than a toy gun’s BB—stung across Miller’s legs. The Baxter children screamed and collapsed, bruised and bleeding but not seriously injured.
    A second shot of rubber pellets at chest height made the screaming Infected back off long enough for Miller’s team to drag him through into the next room, and the Infected that followed them in before Morland managed to barricade the doors weren’t too much trouble after they’d been zip-cuffed.
    Miller did his best to concentrate on blocking off the side-room’s other entrance, and to avoid thinking about the spots of blood on his pants from the children. Or any of what had just happened.
    He certainly didn’t focus on Baxter, hovering over his hog-tied wife and rocking like a nervous Infected, blood streaming from the gouge gnawed out of his shoulder.
    “We gotta fucking lock this thing,” Morland grunted, shoulders spread against the table tipped against the doorway—even with his weight it rocked against his back, rhythmically opening a crack and slamming shut amidst snatches of snarling and howling.
    “Can’t,” du Trieux said, struggling with the room’s building systems console.
    Miller grunted, and started pushing another table towards the doorway. “Why not?”
    “Somebody burnt out control access to the locks.”
     
     
    C OBALT EVENTUALLY BARRICADED themselves in, and sheltered in place the way employees were supposed to in emergencies, waiting for the support of security team Bayonet to arrive. When they did, they took the building by storm with shock batons and Tasers, smoke and gas.
    Cobalt’s barricade had been effective enough that the Infected had started breaking through the relatively thin walls instead. They were still trying when Bayonet came in through the second floor with breaching charges and ladders, like medieval raiders.
    Helicopters swept the early-evening sky, hacking the air into submission, and the roaming mobs of Infected fearfully avoided the area. The protection was going to be short-lived, though—the pilots were having trouble with their engines. Their air filters couldn’t handle the fungus—already two out of the five overwatch choppers had turned back to base before their intakes clogged entirely.
    With a satellite connection re-established, Miller stood in the building’s security room, watching the Northwind operator on the conferencing screen—a young Chinese-American woman—work remotely on the building’s systems. She was shaking her head.
    “ We can’t recover this without repairing each part of the system individually. The locks and cameras have all had their wireless links burnt out—someone used the reprogrammable circuits to short