The Ghost Consigliere

Chapter 13: Hacker of Flesh and Bone

Twitch.

Roman’s gloved index finger moved slightly. Inside the dark loading bay, lit only by the small flashlight beams of his two comrades, the motion looked unnatural.

“Hold on, he’s still breathing!” one guard shouted, pressing at Roman’s neck, trying to find a carotid pulse. “His neck bones shifted, but, ”

Before the guard could finish the sentence, Roman’s hand shot upward and clamped tightly onto the front of the man’s ballistic vest.

“Roman? You’re fighting through the pa, ”

KRAK!

Roman’s corpse sat upright in an instant.

His head hung ninety degrees to the right, limp and dead because the supporting bones were shattered. But his strength was not dead at all. Using the last remaining blood flow in the host body, Elias forced Roman’s two hands to twist the kneeling guard’s head.

The crack of breaking bone echoed sharply through the darkness.

The guard died without ever managing to scream. His eyes bulged, and his body collapsed on top of Roman.

“What the hell!”

The second guard holding the flashlight stumbled backward in panic, aiming the beam directly at Roman’s face.

The sight was horrifying. Roman stood upright, his head still bent sideways, his empty eyes staring into the light.

Elias did not hesitate. He controlled the corpse with lethal efficiency. Roman ripped away the P90 from the comrade he had just killed, then fired a burst straight into the flashlight guard’s chest.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

Armor-piercing rounds punched through the Level IV ballistic vest from one meter away. The flashlight guard was hurled backward, blood spraying across the iron staircase, and died before his back touched the floor.

Two reserve actors now lay on the ground. The pawns had been prepared.

BZZZTTT.

The white fluorescent lights in the loading bay suddenly flickered back on. Emergency power had taken over after Sloane cut the main cable upstairs.

“Gunfire in the loading sector! Roman’s position! Kill whoever’s there!” shouted the red-beret commander from across the cargo room. He and two subordinates taking cover behind the truck immediately aimed their weapons toward the stairs.

Below them, Roman, his head still hanging sideways, instantly dove into a roll behind a thick concrete pillar, avoiding their return fire with agility no man with a broken neck should possess.

Inside the freezing cargo crate, Elias’s lips curled into a savage smile. He closed his eyes and split his concentration into three branches of necrotic signal at once. Heat spread through his brain, but adrenaline and bloodlust suppressed the pain. Elias had never felt this powerful.

He felt omnipotent.

He was a true hacker, and the dead bodies outside were nothing but binary code waiting to be rewritten.

Zzzzt...

The black wave struck the two guards who had just died near the concrete pillar.

In the blink of an eye, the first corpse, the one whose neck Elias had snapped, rose to one knee and immediately took a prone firing position. The second corpse, whose chest had been torn apart by bullets, also stood, head lowered and spitting blood, but its hands firmly gripped a P90.

Now three corpses were linked directly to the mind of one crippled man inside a frozen coffin.

Elias gave his enemies no time to breathe.

Roman’s corpse burst from behind the pillar and charged in an aggressive zigzag straight toward the red-beret commander, drawing fire.

“He’s not dead! Shoot his head!” the commander yelled.

Bursts of enemy P90 fire tore through Roman’s shoulder and stomach, but the corpse ignored it.

The moment their attention locked onto Roman, Elias’s other two corpses emerged from the blind spot at the left side of the cargo truck.

A perfect flanking tactic.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

Elias’s two puppets of death shredded the red-beret commander’s defensive position from the side. Armor-piercing rounds tore through the vests and stomachs of the last three guards in the loading bay. They fell, choking on screams, vomiting blood onto the concrete floor. Silence returned to the underground chamber.

Inside the crate, Elias steadied his breathing. He felt a strange euphoria. He did not feel tired. He did not feel pain.

Controlling three fully mobile bodies made him forget that he himself was nothing but a crippled lump of flesh in a wheelchair. Ghost Rot was burning through the veins on his left side, but for now, the intoxication of power covered everything.

“Loading area is clean,” Elias reported through his earpiece, his voice calm now, deeply arrogant. “Caleb, where’s the main vault door?”

“At the end of the north corridor from your position,” Caleb replied from upstairs. The one-eyed man sounded slightly stunned. “You killed all of them already? Damn, kid, you really are a monster. But watch it, the cameras in that hallway can’t be hacked. Independent circuit.”

“Doesn’t matter. Let them watch their god of death arrive,” Elias replied coldly.

He severed his connection to the other two corpses and focused only on the newly dead red-beret commander.

That body had high-level override access.

The commander’s corpse rose.

Fresh blood dripped from the holes in his abdomen. He picked up his P90, checked the magazine, and marched firmly toward the thick steel door at the end of the loading chamber.

Elias swiped the blood-covered ID card across the scanner.

BEEP.

The steel door slid open slowly. A long corridor plated in bright white armor stretched before him. At the far end stood a gigantic circular door.

Meanwhile, Main Control Room, The Obsidian Vault

In front of rows of security monitors stood a powerfully built man in black tactical combat gear. A scar ran across his left cheek. His eyes were cold, sharp, calculating.

He was the Vault Master, a former Spetsnaz instructor paid half a million dollars a year by Vancroft for one purpose only. To ensure not a single cent left this vault without permission.

He stared at the monitor displaying the north corridor. On the screen, the red-beret commander was walking forward. His steps were slightly stiff, but he continued onward.

“Why did he leave his post?” the Vault Master muttered softly in Russian.

His eyes narrowed. He studied the screen carefully, refusing to look away. Something was wrong. The man in the red beret... was not blinking. Worse, the bloodstain across his abdomen was massive. A gunshot wound. No soldier with a fatal abdominal wound could walk upright without clutching the injury. The Vault Master was no fool. He had served in black operations theaters where impossible things were often just enemy technology not yet understood.

He did not believe in superstition.

He believed in sabotage protocols.

“Biometric anomaly at the outer guard post,” the Vault Master reported through radio to all remaining forces. “Intruder using remote control diversion. They’re using corpses or neural manipulation tools. Prepare second-layer defense in front of the vault.”

The Vault Master did not panic. He turned and opened a steel case in the corner of the control room. Inside was a military-grade high-frequency jammer. It was normally used to scramble suicide drones or remote bombs within a two-hundred-meter radius, but it could disrupt brainwave patterns when tuned to certain frequencies.

“Let’s see,” he murmured with cruel interest. “Can this puppet move without a signal?”

CLICK.

He turned the jammer dial to maximum.

In the bright white corridor, the red-beret commander’s corpse was only fifteen meters from the main vault door.

Inside the frozen coffin, Elias smiled. Victory was right in front of him. That vault would soon be his, money, medical equipment, power.

Then everything collapsed.

NGUIIINGGG!

A shrieking ultra-high-frequency hum exploded inside Elias’s head.

The sound could not be heard by his physical ears in the cargo room, but it slammed directly into his cerebral cortex through the necrotic cable.

The pain was a thousand times worse than when his connection had snapped before.

This was not a disconnection. This was forced severance by an external electrical wave. Elias’s brain felt as though it had been thrown into a microwave running at full power.

“AAARRRRGGHHH!”

Inside the wooden crate at minus five degrees, Elias screamed hysterically. He was thrown from his wheelchair, his back smashing violently into the crate wall. His oxygen tank flew away. Black blood burst simultaneously from his nose, eyes, and ears. His eyes rolled white. The black veins in his neck swelled until they nearly burst.

In the vault corridor, the red-beret commander’s corpse convulsed briefly, then collapsed face-first like a robot shut down by force.

The corpse became dead meat again.

Completely useless.

“S-signal... gone...” Elias whimpered, rolling on the freezer floor, clutching at his skull as if it were splitting apart. “I-I can’t touch them!”

He tried to send another brainwave signal, forcing his power outward. But every time he reached out, his mind slammed into a wall of razor-sharp electrical hum that instantly burned him. He was completely blocked. His godlike power of death had been crippled by a single button on a jammer.

At the same moment, red alarm lights flashed and sirens blared across the meat-packing plant above. The Vault Master’s voice thundered through the facility speakers.

“Lock down all sectors. Intruders are hacking the system using external waves. Seal every exit in the meat plant above. Sweep the electrical control room. Kill any technicians you find. They are the masterminds.”

Inside his coffin, Elias froze. Not from the cold. From the absolute horror striking his consciousness. He had trapped his own allies. Because of his carelessness. Because of his arrogance. With trembling blood-covered hands, he pressed his comm button.

“Caleb! Sloane!” Elias screamed hysterically, guilt tearing straight through his chest. “Run! Get out of there! They found you! My signal’s cut! I can’t help you!”

From the other end of the line, Elias heard only the deafening rattle of automatic gunfire from the upper floor.

Then, between the gunshots, came Caleb’s panicked scream, sharp enough to tear the heart.

“Sloane, behind you!”

DOOOM!

The sound of a point-blank shotgun blast shattered the rest of the communication into a long hiss of static.

The radio signal died.

Inside the cold, narrow crate, the false god of death finally felt human fear. He was trapped. Alone. And his bleeding right hand clawed at empty air in pure despair.