SNAFU: Heroes

An Anthology of Military Horror

Edited by Geoff Brown and Amanda J Spedding

Cohesion Press

Bendigo (Australia), www.cohesionpress.com

The Hungry Dark

Joseph Nassise

A Templar Chronicles Mission

CHAPTER ONE

The body lay unmoving in the middle of the street, partially covered by the inch or so of snow that had been falling since the sun set half an hour before. The lights of the SUV made it easy to see that the body was that of an adult male in dark clothing. The shadows looming over it, however, never mind the snow, made it difficult to make out any further details.

Knight Commander Cade Williams, the man in charge of that evening’s operation, slowly brought the vehicle to a halt a couple of car lengths away from the corpse. He stared through the windshield at the lightly falling snow on the body, then turned his attention to the two-storey buildings looming on either side of the street.

In the seat beside him, his executive officer, Master Sergeant Matthew Riley, was doing the same.

“What do you think?” Riley said, his usually deep and boisterous voice oddly hushed in the still confines of the car, almost as if he were afraid someone, or something, might overhear them.

Cade didn’t blame him; he’d started getting the creeps the minute they’d driven into town.

“Can’t just leave him there,” he said, his attention still on the buildings around them, watching for movement or some other tell-tale sign that they were occupied. “He might not be dead, just injured.” Besides, there isn’t any room to drive around him, even if I wanted to.

The village streets were narrow enough as they were; never mind with a body in the middle of them. There was no way to get around the body unless they moved it.

Which might be just what those who put the body there are counting on.

“Look alive. We don’t know what’s out there waiting for us...” he said, as he opened the door and cautiously stepped out. The others followed suit.

All four were members of the Holy Order of the Poor Knights of Christ of the Temple of Solomon, also known as the Knights Templar. Contrary to popular belief, the Order had not been destroyed at the hands of the king of France when he’d burned Grand Master Jacques de Molay at the stake in 1314, but instead had gone underground, hidden away, its members biding their time and waiting for the right opportunity. Resurrected as a secret combat arm of the Vatican in the closing days of World War One, the Order’s primary purpose was to protect mankind from supernatural threats and enemies. There were thousands of members worldwide, organized into local commanderies and led by a Preceptor that reported to the Seneschal at the Order’s ancestral home in Rosslyn, Scotland. Despite its size, the Order operated in secret, preferring to carry out its mission from the shadows themselves; fighting the darkness with nothing more than their wits, their skill, and their faith to protect them.

Cade was head of the Echo Team, the most elite of the Templar combat units, and the three men with him – Sean Duncan, Nick Olsen, and Matthew Riley – made up the command squad of his unit. While Olsen and Riley were seasoned combat veterans, having worked with Williams for several years, Duncan was a relative newcomer to the group, having transferred to the team from the Preceptor’s security detail a few months before. So far, though, despite his occasional need to be a stickler over the rules, he’d proven his worth to the unit and Cade was glad to have him.

The men had been at the Order’s headquarters in Rosslyn, Scotland, training a new class of recruits, when they’d been summoned to action. Reports of strange creatures and unusual behavior had been occurring for about a week near the remote village of Durbandorf, in the northern Black Forest region of Germany. The local parish priest had finally had enough and made a formal report to his bishop, noting that he, himself, had seen things he couldn’t fully explain. Such reports were monitored as a matter of course by the Order and the decision had been made to send a team to check things out.

Normally Cade would have assigned one of the local squads to handle it, but after two weeks he’d had his fill of training exercises. He was itching to get back into the field and this provided the perfect excuse for him and his team to do so. Forty-five minutes after the order had been handed down, the foursome was on a plane bound for Baden-Baden, Germany. They’d picked up a rental SUV at the airport and then driven north, into the heart of the Black Forest.

Durbandorf sat at the end of a long road surrounded by forest, a small isolated outpost with a population of just over three hundred in the midst of primeval territory. At least it seemed that way to Cade; the ancient pines looming over the road made it feel more like a rite of passage than a byway that saw regular use.

The feeling hadn’t dissipated when they’d arrived in town, either. In fact, it had gotten worse. The streets were narrow, with barely enough room for the big SUV alone, never mind two vehicles going in opposite directions. The buildings were tucked in close, not only to the edge of the street but to each other as well, giving them a sense of malevolence rather than welcome, as if they were crowding in upon a visitor with claustrophobic abandon.

They’d entered the village less than ten minutes ago and already they had a body to contend with. It wasn’t a good sign, by anyone’s reckoning.

Cade had a hunch things were going to get significantly worse before they got better.

He gently shut the car door behind him and paused to pull his HK Mark 23 from the holster he wore beneath his heavy coat. The .45 caliber pistol had enough stopping power to drop a bear dead in its tracks. Cade really hoped he wasn’t going to need it.

The buildings around them were silent and, for the most part, dark. A few lights shone here and there down the length of the street, but there were far fewer of them than he would have expected. It was only shortly after dinner time; the place should still be humming along like a well-oiled machine instead of being dark and seemingly deserted.

Where was everyone?

Beside him, Riley racked a shell into the Mossberg combat shotgun he was carrying. The sound seemed unusually loud in the surrounding silence. When Cade glanced over, the big master sergeant met his gaze and nodded grimly. Apparently he was feeling the strangeness of the place, too.

Cade stepped forward and the others fell into position behind him, with Riley standing watch at his back and the other two facing outward toward the buildings around them with their HK MP5 submachine guns at the ready.

Wanting to blend in with the populace once they arrived on site, the team had dressed down for the mission, forgoing their usual SWAT-styled uniforms in favor of heavy pea coats worn over jeans and sweaters, the latter big enough to hide the ballistics vests they wore underneath. The swords each man habitually carried, given to them on the night of their investiture into the Order, were still in the vehicle for the time being. They’d retrieve them if and when necessary.

Cade knelt beside the body and knew immediately that the man was dead. The exit wound in the back of the man’s skull was all the proof he needed.

He brushed the snow off the man’s back with one gloved hand, uncovering the fact that, whoever he was, he was clad only in a long-sleeved shirt and blue jeans. He had no sweater, no coat; nothing to ward off the cold that had settled about the town like a thick winter cloak.

That’s weird.

Cade didn’t see any tracks to indicate that the man had been dragged to his current position, which made him think that he’d come out into the street of his own accord before being gunned down from close range.

Who comes outside in twenty degree weather in just their shirt sleeves?

Slipping his hands beneath the torso of the corpse, he flipped the body over onto its back, only to jerk back in surprise. The man’s chest was torn open along the sternum, the broken ribs on either side sticking up into the light with casual indifference. The man’s eyes were locked open in death and ice crystals were starting to form over them. Given the fact that it was barely twenty degrees out meant that he couldn’t have been outside too long; maybe a half-hour was Cade’s guess.

“What the hell?” Cade muttered.

The injury to his chest was bad enough, never mind the round bullet hole in the center of the man’s forehead, but the fact that the pavement beneath the body was completely free of blood put the whole thing into the surreal category.

How do you rip open a man’s chest and keep him from bleeding all over the place?

Logical answer?

You don’t.

He was about to start going through the man’s pockets, see if there was anything on his person that might identify who he’d been, when Olsen’s voice interrupted him.

“We’ve got company, boss.”

Both Riley and Cade turned at the sound, then followed their teammate’s pointing figure to where someone was standing in the middle of the street about twenty yards behind them.

The distance and the thick parka the figure wore made it difficult to tell if it was a man or a woman, but if Cade had to guess he would have picked the former. Something about the man’s stance, or perhaps his utter stillness, set the alarm bells ringing in Cade’s head.

Something was wrong here.

Cade moved forward until he stood near the rear of the SUV, slightly ahead of his three companions.

“Hello?” he called. The figure didn’t verbally respond, but he began shuffling forward with an unsteady gait, clearly favoring his right leg.

“Hello?” Cade called again. “Are you all right?”

The figure kept coming.

By now the other three Templars had gotten a good look at the state of the corpse lying in front of their vehicle and knew that something wasn’t right in Denmark. They formed up behind Cade, their attention on the slowly advancing newcomer.

Cade focused on the other man’s injury. From a distance it was hard to tell what was wrong, but as the figure drew closer things became clearer and eventually Cade could see that the man’s right leg was broken just below the knee, the foot twisted at such an unnatural angle that it was pointing nearly in the opposite direction.

The pain had to be incredible.

And yet he’s on his feet. On his feet and moving toward us...

Those internal alarm bells were clanging full bore by now and Cade’s grip on his pistol tightened. As his arm came up, pistol in hand, the figure ahead of him abruptly stopped.

Twenty, maybe twenty-five feet, separated them at this point and from that distance Cade was able to get a much better look at the man standing opposite him. The man’s face was gaunt to the point of starvation, the skin stretched tight as a drum over the bones beneath, making it full of flat plains and sharp angles. His eyes were sunk deep in his skull, the tissue around them stained as dark as midnight. He resembled nothing so much as a plague victim straight out of the Dark Ages and Cade was instantly certain that he didn’t want the man to come even a foot closer.

“That’s far enough,” Cade called out, the muzzle of his gun now firmly centered on the man’s head. “Now identify yourself.”

Slowly, the man’s mouth came open.

In the next moment the slim hope Cade had that the man might actually cooperate with them was dashed as a horrible shrieking cry issued from the man’s gaping mouth.

The sound itself was a physical assault, clamping around Cade’s guts like a vice and sending a wave of fear sliding through the bones of his six foot frame that was nothing but pure, primal reaction to the sound, as if his body remembered something from man’s distant past that his mind did not. It instinctively made Cade want to turn heel and run, to get as far away from the sound as he possibly could.

Thankfully, Cade had long since stopped listening to any instinct that had him acting like a frightened rabbit; he was a Templar and the things he faced in service to the Order could make grown men weep just from the sheer sight of them. If he’d reacted to every horrific sight and sound he’d encountered, on duty or off, his time on the Echo Team would have ended long since.

It was a good thing, too, for the figure standing in front of him, the thing that had once been a man but was now both something more and something less, chose that moment to come rushing toward him with a speed that belied the injury to his leg. One second he was standing there shrieking and in the next he’d reduced the distance between them by nearly a third. Another few moments and he would be right on top of them.

Nothing human moved that fast, certainly not with that type of injury. Cade didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger of the weapon in his hand. But as the crack of his pistol filled the night air, the head of the creature before him slipped sideways on a suddenly elongated neck and the shot whipped past, missing its mark.

Thankfully Cade wasn’t the only one reacting to the thing’s hideous cry or its unnatural speed. Riley’s Mossberg went off nearly simultaneously with Olsen’s MP5, the roar of their weapons so close behind Cade’s that they sounded almost like an echo. The kinetic impact of their rounds knocked the creature clear off its feet while blasting chunks of flesh from its form. Riley’s shotgun was particularly devastating, striking the oncoming figure close to the hip and separating its already injured leg right from its body in a bloody blast of gore.

For a moment no one moved, their gazes locked squarely on the body of the thing lying on the ground in front of them as its blood stained the snow a dark hue.

“Is it dead?” Olsen asked, in a hushed tone.

As if in answer the thing’s head suddenly rose up on its stalk-like neck and howled at them.

The bark of Cade’s pistol sounded again.

This time he didn’t miss; the bullet slammed into the creature’s forehead and splashed the back of its skull across the ground behind it in a wet arc.

Cade wasn’t about to take any chances. He turned to Riley, told him to keep his eye on the creature, and then marched over to the SUV. Reaching into the backseat he grabbed his sword case and flipped it open. Inside, nestled on a bed of black silk, sat the sword he’d been given at his investiture ceremony when he’d become a Templar. The blade had been forged by the Order’s swordsmiths and consecrated at a special Mass before it had come into his hands. It had served him well through the years; it would do the same tonight.

Cade walked back over to the where the other three men stood, their weapons pointed at the monster’s corpse. Despite losing a limb and taking a bullet through the skull, the body was still twitching spasmodically. Cade approached cautiously; if it was still moving, it was still a source of potential danger. When Cade was within reach he struck out with his blade and slashed through the thing’s strangely elongated neck, severing the head.

Rather than turning away, Cade watched and waited some more.

For a long moment nothing happened.

“What are you looking...” Duncan began to say, but Cade cut him off with a raised finger and a quiet, “Shhh.”

The severed head twitched.

Duncan recoiled in surprise but Cade had been waiting for that very thing. He gripped his sword in both hands, blade pointed downward, and as the head moved a second time he brought his hands up over his head, preparing to strike.

“Be ready,” he whispered to the others.

No sooner had the words left his lips than something shot out of the gaping hole in the back of the corpse’s skull. Cade struck instantly, driving his sword downward as fast as he could, piercing the many-legged thing’s chitinous exoskeleton and pinning it to the ground.

“Now!” he yelled, as the blood-and-brain-splattered insectoid-looking creature twitched about, trying to free itself.

Riley’s Mossberg boomed again, blasting the thing to kingdom come.

When it was over, Olsen stepped forward and nudged one of the pieces of exoskeleton with his foot.

“Is that...?”

Cade was nodding grimly before Nick had even finished the sentence. “Yeah, it is,” he said, as he wiped the gore off the end of his blade and then redrew his pistol. “We need to get off the street; the noise is going to attract more of them.”

But it was already too late.

Figures were emerging from the shadows all around them, each and every one a new and different grotesquerie as the demons inhabiting the once-human forms reworked the flesh they’d stolen to suit their individual needs. Tentacles instead of arms. Multiple sets of legs instead of the usual single pair. Eyes and mouths and drooling snouts replaced the villagers’ once-tranquil features. In many cases there appeared to be no rhyme or reason for the changes aside from the need to pervert the original form and design, exactly what Cade expected from anything that crawled up out of the infernal realms.

A glance told him that his team was outnumbered by at least four to one. If they didn’t get out of there quickly, they were going to be in serious trouble. Seeing that none of the demons had reached the vehicle yet, Cade made his choice.

“Start withdrawing back to the SUV,” he told the others, even as he lifted his pistol and began firing.

CHAPTER TWO

Most of the supernatural creatures the Order regularly fought against were split into a hierarchy of classes based on their difficulty to kill. The demons Cade and company were facing now were no different. The Order might classify this particular breed as a minor variety, since they could be affected by ordinary firearms and regular melee weapons, but that didn’t mean that defeating them was a walk in the park. They were still demons, after all, and Cade kept that foremost in his mind as he pulled the trigger of his Mark 23 three times in rapid succession, putting all three bullets into a circle the size of a half-dollar in the center of the nearest demon’s face, dropping it in mid-stride.

By the time Cade turned to take up another target, his companions had joined the fray. The staccato chatter of the MP5s being used by Olsen and Duncan was punctuated repeatedly by the boom of Riley’s Mossberg and it was music to Cade’s ears as the demons before them were cut down one after another. In minutes the street around them was filled with the dead and dying. The demons were fast, yes, but the combined firepower of the Templars was enough to temporarily keep the creatures from closing the distance.

And that was all Cade was hoping for.

He checked to be sure the way was clear and then turned, shouting to his men as he did so.

“Back to the SUV! Move, move, move!”

They piled into the vehicle with Cade and Riley in front and the other two in back. Duncan was still pulling his door shut when Cade threw the truck into drive and stomped on the accelerator. The tires spun for a moment in the snow before catching hold and then they were off, bouncing over the body in the middle of the road and racing off down the street.

The demons gave chase, howling in anger and clambering over the bodies of their own dead to pursue the Templars.

Inside the SUV, Riley and the others switched out the magazines of their weapons then reloaded the empty ones they’d just removed, while Cade drove. He made several turns at random, driving deeper into the heart of the village, doing what he could to put some distance between themselves and their attackers.

In their altered forms the demons were fast, much faster than the average human, but they weren’t a match for the 300-horsepower engine under the hood of the Expedition Cade was driving. He gained a slight lead – maybe 200 yards, if that – and it might be enough to lose the demons if he could stay out of their line of sight.

At the next corner Cade cut the wheel hard to the right and took the turn without slowing. The SUV rocked, whipped around and Cade was still gunning the engine when a barricade appeared out of the darkness ahead of them; there was furniture piled at least ten feet high and across the entire road.

Cade’s reaction time had been honed by years of fighting the supernatural and could honestly be said to be near instantaneous, but that had very little effect when fighting the inertia of a 6000-pound vehicle moving at forty miles an hour. Still he tried, slamming both feet onto the brake at the same time and pulling back on the steering wheel as if that might somehow keep them from ramming into the barrier. It didn’t, of course, but his efforts slowed the vehicle enough to keep from severely injuring those in the front seat as the truck hit the barrier at twenty-five miles per hour, crumbling the front end and deploying the airbag into Cade’s face with an explosive whoosh.

The impact stunned him; for a minute he couldn’t remember where he was or what he’d been doing or why it was that all he could see was white.

Then Olsen was there, slashing at the airbag with one of his knives and dragging Cade from the front seat, shouting something urgently over his head to someone on the other side of the vehicle and it all came back to him – the mission, the dead man, the attack by the protean demons. Cade shook his head, like a dog shedding the water from his fur after a good swim, clearing the remaining fog from his mind, and then he took stock.

The SUV was nose-deep in the tangle of wooden furniture and discarded appliances that had been used to form the roadblock. Steam poured out from under the crumpled hood of the SUV and what looked like a tractor axle was jammed through the grill and into the engine compartment.

There goes our transportation.

On the other side of the vehicle, Duncan was helping a groaning Riley out of the front seat, while doing his best to keep looking behind them in the direction from which they’d come. It was the expression on the younger Templar’s face that caused Cade to turn and look back.

He could hear them coming, could hear that shrieking-howling cry that ground at the guts, but thankfully, the road behind them was still clear.

There was still time.

Olsen appeared in front of him, MP5 in hand. Cade was relieved to see the duffel bag that contained their swords slung around the sergeant’s shoulder.

“You good?” he asked.

Cade nodded.

“Another day in the life, huh?” Olsen grinned; he was always happiest when in the thick of things. “If we hurry, we might be able to get inside one of these buildings,” he said, pointing at the storefronts on either side.

But Cade disagreed.

“No. If we get caught on this side of the barrier we’ll have nowhere to go if we need to retreat. We’re going up and over and then we’ll find shelter,” he said, pointing at the barricade behind them. “Get going. Duncan will help Riley. I’ll be right behind you.”

“You’re the boss,” Olsen said, then cheerfully slapped him on the shoulder and moved to comply.

Cade meanwhile rushed around to the back of the SUV and grabbed the nearest of two spare jerry cans out of the rack attached to the outside of the rear doors, shaking it and then casting it aside when he realized it was empty.

Come on, come on.

He grabbed for the second and was rewarded with a healthy sloshing sound from inside the can, which brought a smile to his face. An emergency roadside kit was stored in the same rack as the spare gas cans and Cade took that as well. Turning, he hurried after the others.

The barricade was built well and it didn’t shift too much under the men’s weight as they clambered upward. Cade paused at the top, giving the others a few moments to get down the far side. When they were safely off the barricade he unscrewed the top of the can and poured the gasoline onto the barrier on either side of where he stood. Tossing the empty can aside, he quickly unzipped the emergency road kit and took out the flare stored inside.

Cade glanced back down the street and saw the first of their pursuers, a sleek dog-shaped creature with three legs on each side, come charging around the corner. He didn’t wait around to see any more. Igniting the flare, he climbed down the far side a few feet before turning back and tossing the flare onto the gasoline-soaked furniture at the top of the barricade. There was a loud whoomp and the gas ignited with a flash, flames racing across the length of the barricade and rising six feet into the air.

That should make them think twice. He turned his back on the flames and hurried down the other side. As he hit the pavement a terrible shrieking cry sounded from above him. He spun, simultaneously drawing his gun in one smooth motion, to find the six-legged demon standing at the top of the barricade, engulfed entirely in flames.

Cade shook his head; the demons might be hard to kill, but apparently they weren’t all that intelligent. While the thing was preoccupied with the flames writhing around its body, Cade put a bullet through its skull and then watched in satisfaction as it tumbled out of sight back down the opposite side of the barrier.

Time to get moving.

The street ahead of him was empty, however.

His companions had disappeared from sight.

Frowning, Cade headed onward. He knew he couldn’t stay near the barricade. The fire would only burn hot for so long; the minute it fell to manageable levels the hellspawn would pour over the top and begin pursuing them anew. He needed to be out of sight before that happened.

The buildings had seemed unwelcoming before he knew the town was infested with hellspawn; now they were downright ominous. Every hard-to-see corner and darkened shadow were potential hiding places where a demon might be lurking and Cade quickly discovered that he couldn’t keep his eye on all of them at once. His adrenaline was pumping from what he and his men had already been through and it took all his restraint to keep from putting a bullet through Duncan’s head when the young sergeant popped it out of the door of a nearby butcher shop as Cade hurried past.

“Commander! This way!” Duncan called softly and Cade needed no further urging to slip past him into the darkened interior.

The shop was small, fifteen feet square, if that, and the smell of twenty different kinds of meat assailed him the moment he came through the doorway. For a moment the location seemed an odd one for his teammate to choose, but then Cade recognized the genius behind Olsen’s choice – the hellspawn would have a hard time tracking them over the smell of all that meat.

Olsen stood by the deli counter, looking nonchalant as he took bites from a stick of hard salami, but Cade had known him long enough to know that Olsen wasn’t any happier about their current situation than Cade was. Riley had a bandage around his forehead to deal with the gash he’d sustained in the crash, but Cade was relieved to find him otherwise healthy and ready to go.

Turning to Olsen, Cade asked, “How are we doing?”

The other man grimaced. “Not great, but we’ve been in worse scrapes in the past. We’ve got enough ammo for one, maybe two more major firefights. After that we’re down to swords.”

Cade nodded; that was about what he’d expected. They came here to investigate, not to face off against a horde of demons all on their own. They simply weren’t equipped for it. If the entire village was infected, that lack of ammo was going to be critical before too long.

“This place have another way out?”

“Yeah, there’s a back door that leads to an alley running behind the building, which in turn curves back around to the main street about three doors down from where we are now.”

In other words, it wasn’t going to do them that much good from a tactical perspective. Still, Cade felt better knowing that they weren’t trapped in a rabbit hole with no way out.

Before Cade could say anything further, Duncan called from the front.

“Here they come!”

CHAPTER THREE

From his position at the front of the butcher shop, Sergeant Sean Duncan watched through a narrow opening in the wooden shutters covering the main window as the creatures they’d faced off against less than fifteen minutes earlier poured over the still-smoking barricade and came in search of them.

He shuddered as they surged forward.

Duncan had joined the Echo Team only a few weeks earlier and in that time he’d already seen enough of the horrors roaming the dark corners of the world to make him long for the quiet days he’d spent on the Preceptor’s security detail. It didn’t matter if they were at home or abroad; somehow Commander Williams, Cade, always managed to get them into the thick of things, and more often than not the creatures they encountered seemed to come straight out of someone’s nightmare. Tonight’s foes were no exception. Duncan knew the world was full of such things – he was a Templar after all – but he had discovered that knowledge and first-hand experience were two different things. Since facing off against the necromantic Council of Nine in the swamps of Louisiana, Duncan had come to learn just how little that knowledge prepared you for the reality of the twisted, perverted creatures that called the darkness their home.

Duncan alerted the others and then stepped back to give Commander Williams a chance to look out at the street and the creatures it now contained. The thought that just a pair of flimsy shutters and a few panes of glass separated him from those things out there made him more than a little uneasy, but he did his best to conceal it from the veterans around him.

If they can deal with this, so can I.

Still, it took all his nerve to stay silent and still as the creatures flooded down the street in search of them. A few paused in front of the building as if sensing the men were hiding inside, one going so far as to come right up to the door. Duncan kept expecting Commander Williams to give the order to evacuate through the rear door – an order he would have willingly followed if it took them away from the freakish things outside – but it was not to be. Cade merely put a finger to his lips, signaling for them to be silent, and waited for the intruder to give up and leave before he went back to watching the creatures pass by outside.

Eventually – it felt like hours later to Duncan – the street was empty and Cade signaled the all-clear.

The butcher shop and its contents did the job; the shutters hid them from view and the creatures hadn’t been able to smell them over the hefty scents of the meat and cheese that filled the shelves. The creatures might be back and there was no telling what they would do when they discovered the Templars had escaped their wrath, but for now, they were safe.

Duncan broke the silence first.

“What the hell are those things?” he asked, gesturing toward the window and the street beyond.

The gesture wasn’t necessary; everyone in the room knew what he was referring to. After a moment, when it didn’t look like Cade was going to answer the sergeant’s question, Riley chimed in.

“Protean demons.”

Duncan frowned. “Come again?” he said.

He’d spent most of his time in the Order on the Preceptor’s protection detail. He was pretty well-versed on the typical threats a knight had to face but he’d never heard of such a thing. For all he knew the big master sergeant was making it up just to mess with the new guy.

But this time it was Cade who answered instead of Riley. The usually reticent commander spoke softly from his place by the window. “Chimeras. Changelings. Flesh-twisters – they have a lot of names. What they’re called isn’t as important as what they are - hellspawn.”

Cade turned to face him and Duncan could see anger, rather than fear, burning in his eyes.

“Somewhere out there,” – he waved a hand toward the village outside the window – “is a summoning circle. Squatting in that circle is a class three, maybe even a class four demon that broke free from those who summoned it and it has apparently decided to stay here. To do that, it needs more power, so it is sending out its drones to corrupt anyone they encounter.”

“Corrupt them how?”

“The drone burrows inside the victim and attaches itself to the individual’s brain stem before spreading along his or her spinal column and nervous system. Once in place, the victim becomes an extension of the demon, just like the drone. The two have effectively become one, transferring the power inherent in the victim’s spirit to the demon. As it gains more victims, it gains more power and therefore becomes stronger. Wait long enough, let the demon gather enough power, and it can grow to the extent that it is virtually impossible to kill.”

The explanation did nothing to bolster Duncan’s confidence; in fact, it had the exact opposite effect.

How were they going to stop something like that?

Cade didn’t seem to notice his discomfort. Turning to Olsen, the commander said, “Get on the phone to the commandery in Nurnberg. Tell them we need at least three combat units, preferably with incendiaries and flame throwers if at all possible, plus whatever manpower it is going to take to close off every road within a twenty mile radius of Durbandorf. I want a blockade thrown up around this place and I want it fast. No one gets in or out without my say so, understand?”

“Roger that,” Olsen said, as he pulled a satellite phone from his pocket and began dialing. Duncan didn’t hear what was said, however, for Cade turned to address him and Riley next.

“Riley, I want your eyes out front. Those demons might not be the most intelligent things on the planet, but even they have to eventually figure out that we didn’t go far. Give a signal the minute they head back in this direction. Duncan, you’re with me; we’re going to check the second storey for anything that might be useful in dealing with this mess.”

What Cade expected to find in the butcher’s apartment was anyone’s guess, but Duncan dutifully followed behind him just the same as they ascended the back staircase.

They found the lights off upstairs and decided to leave them that way, not wanting to alert their pursuers to their location with a sudden burst of brilliance in the dark. Each man carried a small but high-powered flashlight on their belts and they pulled them out, shining their beams around the interior. The living quarters on the second floor were small by anyone’s standards; a bedroom not much larger than a walk-in closet, a bathroom containing a sink and a toilet, neither of which looked like they’d been cleaned at any point in the last six months, and a living room/kitchenette combination.

Cade started in the bedroom, leaving the other rooms to Duncan. The younger Templar ignored the bathroom and stepped into the living room. He began poking around, though he wasn’t even sure exactly what he was looking for. What he thought they needed was another vehicle, but he didn’t have any hope of finding one of those. Still, a set of car keys would be a nice start.

He began with the drawers below the counter in the kitchenette, reasoning that it might be a logical place to leave a spare key, but found only silverware and other assorted cooking utensils. The cabinets above the sink were all but empty but Duncan wasn’t surprised, given the pile of dirty plates in the sink.

Not finding anything in the kitchenette he moved into the living room. He ruffled through the newspapers and half-full glasses left on the coffee table, then turned and searched the couch behind it. As he was replacing the cushions, not having found anything beneath them but some moldy pieces of food that were no longer recognizable, something outside the window caught his eye. At first he thought it was just the reflection of his flashlight in the window glass, but after a moment he realized that it was coming from outside. He moved closer, careful to keep his body from being framed in the window, and looked out into the darkness.

At the far end of the street a church steeple rose above the surrounding rooftops and from its bell tower Duncan could see a light flashing on and off in an irregular pattern.

Blink. Blink.

Long blink.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

Morse code.

Since he’d spotted it in mid-message, he waited for the signaler to begin anew, then quickly deciphered what it said.

H-E-L-P U-S.

Duncan turned and called toward the other side of the apartment.

“Commander? I think you need to see this!”

CHAPTER FOUR

Cade stood beside Duncan in the shadows by the window and watched the light blink on and off in the church belfry at the end of the street. He could read Morse as easily as his companion and immediately recognized the plea for help, but something about it made him uneasy.

He looked away from the blinking light and focused instead on the buildings up and down the street, searching the windows and rooftops for signs of the enemy, concerned that the signal might be some kind of a trap, a ruse to draw them out into the open where they could be attacked en masse and overwhelmed. Lesser demons like those they were dealing with might not always be that intelligent, Cade knew, but they were clever bastards.

“Are you going to answer him?” Duncan whispered.

Cade didn’t reply, just held up a hand in a signal for patience as he kept watching the street. He could feel Duncan getting impatient beside him but he ignored it for the moment, wanting to be certain they were in the clear before he made a move.

Finally, satisfied that they weren’t under observation from a conveniently placed drone in one of the adjacent buildings, he brought up his own flashlight, pointed it in the direction of the church steeped and, using one hand cupped over the lens, sent back a message of his own.

C-O-M-I-N-G, he said, H-O-L-D T-I-G-H-T.

He paused, waiting to be sure the other had understood, and was getting ready to repeat his message when the signaler in the belfry replied.

H-U-R-R-Y

“Doing our best here, buddy,” Cade muttered beneath his breath even as he shoved his flashlight back onto the clip on his belt and turned away.

Duncan eyed him expectantly. “Are we going to get them out of there?” he asked.

“Remains to be seen if we can get ourselves out of here, but yes, we’re going to give it a try. Let’s go back down and rejoin the others, see if Olsen has any news for us.”

As it turned out, Olsen did have news, though none of it good.

“The choppers at Nurnberg are currently on lockdown due to the weather; seems they’re getting smacked by a bitch of a storm,” Olsen said. “They were surprised that we hadn’t been hit yet, actually, and said we should expect it pretty much at any minute.”

Cade could care less about the weather. What he needed was enough men to contain this thing before it got out of hand. “Ground units?”

Olsen shook his head. “Nurnberg’s CO basically said we’re on our own until the storm passes. Short of a direct order from the Seneschal, I doubt he’s going to budge.”

Cade cursed beneath his breath. For just a moment he considered getting the Seneschal on the phone and having him demand that the idiot in Nurnberg send him the men he needed but in the end decided against it. While he was certain he could convince the Seneschal of the necessity of the act – he was Cade’s direct superior after all – Cade didn’t think that the Nurnberg CO would actually comply. It would be too easy to make up some weather-related excuse for why he didn’t send out his men and Cade would have simply made another enemy in the process.

For the time being, they were going to have to make do.

Duncan cleared his throat, not so subtly reminding Cade of the other issue they were facing. Cade then quickly filled Olsen and Riley in on what had happened upstairs and what he intended to do about it.

“We move as a unit straight down the street to the doors of the church,” he told them. “I want the gunfire kept to a minimum. Use your blades first and only take the shot if you have to. We don’t want the noise to bring more of these things down on our heads.”

There was a chorus of “yes sirs” from the other three members of the team.

Cade knew that the church stood on holy ground and was therefore a natural sanctuary and boundary against the hellspawn. The only way those creatures were getting inside was to be invited across the threshold and that wasn’t bloody likely, in his view. If he could get his team inside without contact with the enemy, they’d have time to assess the situation and plan how to get the people inside, whoever they were, safely out of town.

If being the operative word; they might not be able to see any at the moment, but it was clear the village was crawling with demons.

Getting to the church was not going to be easy.

Cade moved first, slipping out the door with barely a sound. He headed down the street in the direction of the church, staying low and slipping in and out of the shadows cast by the nearby buildings to mask his passage from whatever might be watching.

One by one the others slipped out of the butcher shop and followed in his wake. They stayed close enough to be able to support each other if things went south but far enough apart that they wouldn’t get caught in a crossfire. Each man kept his attention on his area of concern, trusting the others to do the same. In that fashion they slowly made their way up the street.

Based on what he’d seen from the second floor window, Cade guessed that they had to travel about a quarter mile down the street they were on before moving a few blocks west to reach the church. The distance didn’t bother him as much as the tightness of the buildings on either side. Side streets and alleys between the structures were few and far between; if they came into contact with the enemy they would have little choice but to fight their way through to the end of the street and that could be some distance away.

Never one to shy away from a good fight, even Cade knew they wouldn’t last long if they got trapped in the middle and the enemy came at them in strength.

So don’t get caught in the open, he told himself as he continued forward, his gaze constantly sweeping the area around him, searching for threats.

They reached the end of the main road and had just turned west when the church came into view. Cade was about to point it out to the others when he thought he heard something. He sank to one knee and held up a clenched fist, the signal for the others to do the same, and then listened.

For a moment there was nothing, just the silence of the abandoned streets shouting back at him, but then he heard it again.

A furtive, scuttling sound.

It seemed to be coming from somewhere across the street.

He began scanning the buildings opposite him, methodically covering the area at street level before working his way upward, checking every door and window, searching for movement or a shadow that was just a hair out of place, anything that might indicate the presence of the enemy lying in wait for them.

When the sound came again, louder and clearer this time, there was no mistaking where it was coming from.

The roof!

Cade looked up to find that they were no longer alone.

A strange, insectoid-looking creature stared down at them from the top of the building directly opposite his position. The demon had taken its victim’s form and twisted it into something right out of a nightmare. Additional limbs sprouted from either side of its torso, allowing it to power itself along in scorpion-like fashion and its face had morphed into a canine-like snout with rows of glistening teeth lining its jaws. Dark, coarse hair covered most of the thing’s body but left the face exposed. If it hadn’t been for the brown eyes staring at him over that gaping maw, eyes that belonged in the face of a frightened teenage boy and not the visage of some hideous monster, Cade might not have even recognized it as having once been human.

His revulsion was so complete that he had his pistol up and pointed at the creature before he even realized it and as his finger tightened on the trigger he heard his own words echoing in his head.

Use your blades first and only take a shot if you have to.

So much for that idea.

The shot rang out just as the creature scurried back from the edge of the roof and Cade wasn’t sure if he’d hit it or not.  In the next moment it was clear that he hadn’t mortally injured it, however, for the night air was suddenly filled with the same shrieking cry that they’d heard earlier as the demon summoned its brethren to the scene.

Cade didn’t waste any time trying to get in another shot but turned instead to face the others.

“Run!” he roared.

CHAPTER FIVE

The men of the Echo Team responded immediately to Cade’s command, arranging themselves into a wedge-shaped formation with Olsen on point, Duncan and Riley staggered next to each other in the middle, and Cade pulling up the rear. They headed down the street at an accelerated pace designed to get them to their destination quickly without compromising their ability to defend themselves.

Behind them, the demon continued its shrieking call.

Cade and the others had barely covered twenty yards before demons started coming out of the woodwork. The first of the creatures to respond to the cry for help stuck its head out of a shop doorway a few dozen feet in front of the oncoming team. Before it could do anything more, Olsen snapped off a shot with economical precision that blew the top of the creature’s head clean off; the body collapsed back into the open doorway as the Templars went racing by.

But that was just the first of many demons. Moments later all four men were firing repeatedly as demons came bounding out of every hiding place imaginable – from behind doors, out from under cars, off of nearby rooftops – each and every one of them intent on sinking teeth and claw into the bodies of their foes. The chatter of the MP5s in the hands of Olsen and Duncan was a near constant sound at that point, and was frequently interspersed with the boom of Riley’s combat shotgun and the crack of Cade’s pistol while around them the demons roared out their rage and hatred.

For a time the Templars’ skill with their weaponry held the demons at bay and they were able to continue moving forward, but for every one of the enemy that fell two others seemed to take its place and it wasn’t long before the demons managed to surround them, forcing the squad to a halt.

We are less than a hundred feet from the doors of the church, but it might as well  be a mile, Cade thought, for all the good it will do us.

The demons had clearly figured out where the Templars were headed, for they were concentrating more of their numbers between them and the church with every second that passed. Cade and his men kept laying down a blistering stream of fire as long as they could, but they’d been low on ammo before getting into the current firefight and it didn’t take long before their weapons ran dry.

With the exception of Cade’s pistol, all of the firearms were outfitted with shoulder slings so as each weapon came up empty the knight using it simply let it fall by his side and drew his sword. Within moments the four men were standing in a square formation with their backs to each other, their weapons flashing in the moonlight as they hacked and slashed at their foes. Blood steamed in the cold night air and soon the ground at the Templars’ feet was littered with the bodies of the dead and dying.

Still the demons came on.

The four men fought with ruthless efficiency, each focused only on the foe that was directly in front of them and trusting the others to do the same, but Cade knew it couldn’t last. They were getting tired and if one of them fell, the rest were sure to follow.

Just when Cade thought they were going to be overrun, the doors to the church in front of them burst open and three men came charging out dressed in bright yellow chemical suits like those worn by exterminators, complete with hoods and respirators. On their backs the men carried round metal tanks, reminding Cade of those worn by scuba divers. Rubber tubes ran from the top of each tank down to some kind of hand-held spraying device in the men’s hands.

Cade was still trying to process their sudden appearance when the first of the newcomers pointed his gadget at the back of the demon closest to him and squeezed the trigger.

A four-foot gout of flame shot from the nozzle of the device and enveloped the demon in a writhing column of fire. The other two men joined the party half-a-moment later, triggering their own makeshift flame-throwers and sending two more scorching streams of flame into the line of demons before them.

In seconds the demons’ coordinated attack on the Templars devolved into chaos, with the infernal creatures trying to defend themselves on two fronts while doing their best to avoid being set ablaze by their already burning companions. The stench of scorched hair and fur and burning flesh filled the air, along with the shrieks and howls of the injured and the dying.

It was exactly the break Cade was looking for.

The demons in front of him were suddenly far more concerned with their own survival than they were in pressing the fight against him and his men. Cade took full advantage of the opportunity, shouting “On me!” over the din of battle and then forced his way forward into the fray.

His sword rose and fell repeatedly as he hacked and slashed his way through the demon’s rapidly disintegrating defensive line. His men did the same on either side of him, scattering the demons before them like leaves in the wind until they reached their yellow-suited rescuers.

“Head for the church!” the lead man shouted, his voice muffled by the masklike-respirator he wore as he jerked a thumb in the direction of the church behind him. “We’ve got your backs.”

Exhausted by the melee, Cade didn’t bother to argue. He waited for his men to hustle past and then fell in behind them as they all headed straight for the thick oak doors of the church directly ahead.

As they approached, the doors swung open and hands reached out to help them inside. Cade let himself be led through the darkness of the foyer and into the nave proper. Large candles burned in strategic positions throughout the room and by their light he could see twenty to thirty people huddled in small groups amidst the pews. They were a mixed group, mostly adults but with a few children and teenagers thrown in. Cade counted more than a few with makeshift bandages covering some kind of injury, most likely sustained while running the gauntlet to reach the sanctuary in which they currently found themselves.

Commotion erupted behind him and Cade turned in time to see his three rescuers rush across the threshold as the heavy oak door was slammed shut, locking out the demons that had been in hot pursuit.

The three men took a moment to catch their breath and then the leader stripped off his hood and goggles, revealing a mop of blond hair and a thickly bearded face stretched tight with tension.

The tension was expected; the clerical collar around the younger man’s neck was not.

Cade waited until some of the others had helped the men divest himself of the homemade napalm strapped to his back and then stepped over, offering his hand.

“My men and I appreciate what you did for us out there, Father...?”

The priest grasped Cade’s hand the way a drowning man would grab a life preserver but his voice was steady as he said, “Please, it’s Nils. Just Nils.”

Cade wasn’t certain if that was a first or last name, but he supposed it didn’t really matter. Nils would do just fine. “I’m Cade. Is there somewhere you and I can talk?”

Nils nodded and turned to one of the women standing nearby, watching the exchange. “Anna, would you get Cade’s men some water, please, and have Thomas see to their injuries. Their commander and I will be in the sacristy.”

Father Nils led Cade into the small room to the right of the nave normally used by the priests when preparing for Mass. He shut the door behind them and turned to face Cade with weary relief.

“Thank God you and your men have arrived, Captain. Things were difficult enough when Father Giesler first reached out for help, but now everything’s getting quite desperate. If we don’t get out of here soon...”

Cade didn’t disagree with the man, but that was neither here nor there at the moment. “And where is Father... Giesler, is it?”

The young priest glanced away then shook his head sadly.

Cade didn’t need to be told what that meant.

One more casualty added to the list. It was starting to get pretty long.

“But he told you to expect us? Before he...”

Cade wasn’t sure if the good father had fallen victim to one of the protean demons and perished, or became something else, so he just left the end of his question hanging, but Nils didn’t seem to notice.

“He said the archdiocese would be sending people who knew how to handle the situation, people who could help. He didn’t specify who, but... you are the men he was talking about, aren’t you, Captain?”

For the first time Nils looked a bit concerned over the fact he’d just let four armed strangers into the sanctuary with the wounded and the women and children; particularly one who looked as battle-hardened as Cade did, given his eye-patch and scarred face.

Cade held up a hand in mild reassurance. “It’s Commander Williams, not Captain, but yes, we’re the men he was talking about.”

Nils’ relief was obvious. “Good. When the rest of your team gets here, we’ll have to...”

“Rest of my team?”

“Well, yes, of course. We’re going to need a lot more troops if we’re going to get out of here in one piece. You’ve seen those hellish things!”

Again, Cade didn’t disagree, but sometimes the truth was a harsh mistress and he wouldn’t lie to the man, not after all he’d clearly been through. “I’m sorry, Father Nils, but you misunderstand. This is it; this is everyone I brought with me.”

The priest’s mouth dropped open in shocked surprise. “But surely you don’t intend to take on all those things with just four men!”

“Of course not,” Cade said calmly. He tried not to think about the fact that they might be forced to do that very thing before the night was over. Instead, he said, “All we have to do is hold out until morning. The storm will have passed by then and we’ll be able to get reinforcements in to help us with the situation.”

Cade’s reassurances seemed to buoy the young priest’s spirits and he stood a little taller as a result. “Morning?” he said, half to himself. “We should be able to make it that long, provided we stay inside.”

“Have the creatures made any efforts to get inside?”

Nils shook his head. “No, thank the Lord. If they did it would be a massacre.” He shuddered at the thought.

Cade remembered the women and children he’d seen when he’d first entered.

Quite.

Nils appeared to struggle with something for a moment and then finally just spit it out. “Father Giesler called them...  demons?”

Cade had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing at Father Nils’ hesitation to call the things what they were. He’d had no trouble describing them as “hellish” just seconds before, but having to face the reality that Hell was precisely where the things had come from was perhaps a bit too much for this modern priest.

If you only knew, Father, if you only knew...

“That’s as good a word as any,” Cade replied, which didn’t really answer the priest’s question but seemed to satisfy him nonetheless for he nodded as if he understood.

Just goes to show they’ll believe what they want to believe, even when the evidence was staring them in the face.

“I’d like to do an interior perimeter check, if that’s all right with you? Understand what we have to work with should the creatures change their minds about trying to get inside?”

“Of course, Commander. Whatever you need.”

As Father Nils led him out of the sacristy and back into the church proper, Cade couldn’t help but think that what he really needed was about half-a-dozen combat squads and some tactical hardware to go with them, but since those were unlikely to drop from the sky anytime soon he was going to have to settle for a perimeter check.

Somehow, he just wasn’t looking forward to it.

CHAPTER SIX

3 hours later.

Stefan Braun woke to a voice in his head, calling out to him in a language without words. He shook himself, thinking it was nothing more than a remnant of the horrible dream he’d been having, a dream full of hot blood and hideous creatures that gnawed on his very flesh, but was surprised to discover that it didn’t fade as the dream did.

If anything, it grew stronger.

Stefan.

He glanced about, wondering if anyone else was hearing what he was hearing.

Those around him were still sleeping peacefully, as were the others throughout the interior of the church. Even Daniels, who was supposed to be on watch over by the main entrance, appeared to be nodding off.

He winced as sudden pain flared along the ribs on the left side of his body, reminding him of his injury. He hadn’t told anyone about it after returning from the skirmish in front of the church; he didn’t want to take the chance that they’d force him out into the night the way they’d forced Hauppman out the day before. After making sure no one was looking in his direction, Stefan carefully unbuttoned his shirt and stole a peek at the wound.

It didn’t look good.

The claw marks the beast had left in his flesh were raw and inflamed and weeping some kind of yellow-green fluid that reminded him of the pus that had leaked out when the doc had lanced his infected finger the year before. That had been nearly a week after he’d slashed his finger on the rusty piece of metal at the shop; this was barely a few hours after he’d been injured.

It just didn’t make sense.

Of course, then again, none of this made sense.

He’d been here in town, picking up a few things he needed at the hardware store, when several of those hideous creatures had burst in through the plate-glass window near the front and slaughtered everyone they could get their hands on. Braun had snatched a set of pruning shears off the shelf in front of him and jammed them through the skull of the creature that lunged for him from around a stack of shelves moments later. After that it had been a cat-and-mouse game of survival out on the streets until he found his way to the church and the sanctuary it offered.

Stefan. Come to us, Stefan.

The voice was more insistent this time and with it came a strong compulsion to move. Before he had given it much thought, Stefan found himself on his feet, carefully stepping over the forms of those sleeping around him, and making his way down the length of the nave toward the doors at the back of the church.

Doors that led down to the basement.

Moments later he was standing in the darkened basement, wondering what the hell he was doing down there.

The answer came quickly.

Over here, Stefan.

The room was pitch-dark, but he crossed it in the direction that the voice was coming from without difficulty. He wasn’t even aware of the issue; to him, the room was as bright as if the lights had been flicked on.

He moved to the back of the room, where some old furniture had been covered with tarps and stored there. The voice was still calling to him, so he pushed the chairs and tables out of the way until he reached a large wardrobe that stood against the back wall.

Move it aside.

The voice was everything now and Stefan listened to it without hesitation. He didn’t think about what he was doing, didn’t think about the pain in his side or the way the voice seemed to be getting louder and stronger inside his head, didn’t stop to reason out what was happening to him – he just did as he was told.

The wardrobe hadn’t been moved in some time and he ended up having to heave it with his shoulder to get it to move aside, but move it did.

Behind it was an iron door set directly into the wall, reminding him of the doors on the furnace at the steelyard where he’d worked in his youth. The handle – a thick iron bar that you pulled down – even looked the same.

Open it. Let us in.

Stefan did so without hesitation.

CHAPTER SEVEN

One minute Duncan was sleeping peacefully, the next he bolted awake as screams of fear and pain exploded throughout the room.

He snatched at his weapon and lurched to his feet, only to stare in horror at the wave of demons that were flooding across the room in his direction, killing as they came. A half-dozen people had already fallen prey to the savage creatures and even as he watched another young woman collapsed to the floor beneath the weight of the demon that had just collided with her. Seconds later the woman’s blood spilled across the floor as the demon tore out her throat with its teeth.

Then Duncan had no more time to look as the first of the oncoming wave reached him and he found himself fighting for his life amidst a swirling dervish of claws and teeth, all intent on ripping the life from his form. For the next several minutes all he could think about was survival.

He did his best to keep his back to the wall, preventing any of the creatures from come up from behind. He caught occasional glimpses of the others as they fought their own battles. Once he heard Cade calling out for his men to form up on him, but he was unable to move or even respond to the summons, for even the lack of focus on his enemy for even the few seconds it would have taken him to do so was all that would have been needed for the creatures to make short shrift of him. He hacked and slashed and did his best to stay on his feet and stay alive.

Duncan had just finished dispatching a large protean demon directly in front of him when something slammed into him from the side with all the force of an NFL linebacker. The impact not only sent his sword flying from his hands but knocked him off his feet. As he toppled forward he frantically twisted about, determined not to end up with his arms pinned beneath him and an enemy on his back.

He hit the ground, slamming the back of his head into the stone beneath hard enough to make his ears ring, but the sight of the insectoid demon now perched on his chest, the same one they’d seen on the rooftop earlier, sent a wave of horror coursing through his system. The accompanying adrenaline that followed in its wake kept him from graying out.

Thank heaven for that, too, for no sooner had they hit the ground that the demon went for his throat.

As it thrust its snout toward him, jaws gaping, Duncan jammed his left forearm under its chin and against the creature’s neck, holding it back as he groped for the knife on his belt with his right. He fumbled with it for a second and then pulled it free, bringing it up and around in a wide swing designed to sink the six-inch blade deep into the demon’s torso, but it skipped off the thing’s hide as if it were made of solid steel. When he tried a second time the knife snapped with an audible twang, the upper half of the blade spiraling away over his head.

The hellspawn wasn’t sitting still for all this, of course, but was pushing itself forward, forcing Duncan’s arm back as it tried to reach him. He strained to hold it at bay, even as it clawed at him with its legs. If he hadn’t been wearing his ballistic vest the demon would already have ripped his torso to shreds.

He could hear the sounds of fighting going on all around him, but due to his position on the ground he couldn’t see past the frenzied creature on his chest to see how the others were faring. The sounds of the conflict told him they hadn’t yet fallen, but that didn’t mean any of them were in a position to lend him a hand.

Which meant he was going to have to get out of this on his own.

Trouble was, he was losing the battle and he knew it. The struggle was sapping his strength at an alarming rate. He estimated he could hold off the creature for another minute, maybe two, but after that all bets were off. His arms were on the verge of failing and the minute they slipped...

The creature pulled back for a second, rearing above him as if preparing for another strike, and Duncan snatched the chance the move afforded him to wrap both his hands around the creature’s neck, doing what he could to squeeze the life out of it while still holding it at bay.

The demon, of course, went berserk, thrashing back and forth, throwing its head from side to side and doing everything it could to free itself from his grip. Duncan knew he was a dead man if the thing managed to break his hold and he held on with everything he had, digging his fingers into the loose skin about the demon’s neck and praying to God that he could keep those teeth from reaching him long enough to figure a way out of this mess.

He needed to find another solution and he needed it now!

As the creature twisted about, their gazes met for just a moment and in those all-too human eyes Duncan found the answer he was looking for.

Before the demon could summon its strength to press the attack once more, Duncan reached deep inside and called forth the healing power at the center of his soul, the one that had been with him ever since he was a small child, the one that had made his life a living hell on more occasions than he could count, and he pushed it down his arms, through his hands and into the flesh of the demon he was holding onto so fervently.

As the power poured forth, Duncan prayed that the human in front of him would be made whole and healthy, just as he had with thousands of others in the years before he had joined the Order. He imagined the demonic presence as something akin to a virus and sought to ‘cure’ it with his healing ability. He’d never tried anything of the sort, but he was desperate and it was the only thing he could think of.

The effect was... surprising.

The demon threw back its head and let loose with a howling cry that burrowed deep into Duncan’s psyche like a knife to the soul. He wanted to curl up with his hands over his ears to shut out the hateful sound, but held on instead, grimly determined to keep the thing from tearing out his throat even as he continued to pour more energy into the link between him and the demon.

The creature’s flesh began to ripple and twist right before his eyes; the thick spider-like hide that covered it receding in a wave down across the demon’s flesh even as the extra limbs it had grown began to retract back into its torso like slow-motion video in reverse.

The metamorphosis must have been painful, for the creature’s cry rose to an ear-splitting shriek, the sound so powerful that it brought tears of pain to Duncan’s eyes as he struggled to hold on in the face of it all. He didn’t think it could get any worse, but the next moment proved him wrong as every other demon in the room suddenly gave voice to the same cry, the sound echoing throughout the interior of the church.

If the defenders hadn’t been all but immobilized by the tortuous sound of that cry, they might have had the opportunity to finish off their opponents then and there, but by the time their thoughts had cleared and reason returned every single demon in the room was in full retreat, swarming back the way they had come like the retreating tide.

Duncan looked up to find Cade staring at him from across the room.

“What did you do?” the Knight Commander asked in an awed tone.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“I didn’t do anything!” Duncan said as he climbed to his feet, but Cade barely heard him. He was watching the last of the demons disappear through the remains of a door at the rear of the church. They were fleeing the battle, returning the way they had come...

Returning the way they had come.

Cade took off at a run after them.

He crossed the nave and reached the door, which was barely hanging by its hinges. A stairwell lay beyond, leading downward, no doubt to the church hall or basement. He hesitated at the top of the steps, staring down into the darkness below and wondering if the enemy might be lying in wait just beyond the edge of the light, then threw caution to the wind, hit the lights, and plunged down the steps, knowing that this might be their best opportunity to understand just how the creatures had gotten inside.

Enough light spilled out of the stairwell for him to see a few feet into the basement beyond and he could see that the room was quite large. Cade could hear movement somewhere out ahead of him, but it seemed to be coming from a good distance away.

Had they gotten outside already?

Noise from behind him caused him to spin about with his sword at the ready, but it was only Riley and the others, come to back him up.

“Easy, boss,” Riley said, gently pushing Cade’s sword away from where it was pointed at his chest. Thankfully he’d left a few steps between the two of them. “We thought you might get lonely rushing off on your own like that, so here we are.”

Cade answered Riley’s levity with a grin of his own; sometimes, that was the only way to face the hellish creatures they regularly fought against. It might not save their lives, but it had certainly saved their sanity over the years. “It’s your funeral,” he replied, as he made room for Riley to join him at the base of the steps. Duncan and Olsen stepped up behind the two of them, ready to go.

Cade hit the light switch on the wall, flooding the hall before them with light. The four men advanced as a unit, each of them turning as they did so to guard one quadrant of the compass, waiting for the enemy to come rushing at them as the darkness fell away.

But the room around them was empty.

It hadn’t been moments earlier, though; that was easy to see. A trail of blood led across the floor to a pile of covered furniture on the other side of the room and as the four men drew closer it was easy to see the iron door in the wall just beyond standing wide open.

The trail of blood leading over the threshold and into the earth and stone tunnel just beyond let them know just where the demons had gone.

Cade stared into the darkness of the tunnel, considering. His instincts screamed at him to give pursuit, to hound the enemy when they were at their weakest, to take advantage of their difficulties, but reason prevailed. The narrow confines of the tunnel would make it difficult to fight with their swords and if the demons were able to use a side tunnel to come up behind them, they’d be cut off from the only known exit.

Prudence said wait for another day.

Cade had just come to his decision when Duncan spoke up from behind him. “You aren’t planning on going in there, are you?”

“No,” Cade replied, shaking his head. “Too many unknowns. Let’s at least get this door shut though and see what we can do about barricading it against another attempt to get inside. It won’t hold for long, but all the noise the demons will make trying to get in might give us some advance warning next time.”

As the four men got to work, Cade didn’t fail to notice the condition of the furniture piled near the entrance to the tunnel. If the demons broke inside on their own, the furniture, especially the older wooden pieces, should have suffered much more destruction. As it was it was barely touched...

Almost as if someone had opened the door.

But who?

The answer, as it turned out, was waiting for them upstairs in the nave.

The survivors had begun the awful task of collecting the bodies of the dead, carrying them from the nave and putting them inside the sacristy where Nils and Cade had met earlier. Cade pulled Nils aside and explained what they’d found in the downstairs.

“A tunnel?” Nils said, when he heard what had been hidden behind the stack of furniture. “Father Giesler used to talk of a secret passage that had been used to smuggle out Jews during the war, but I’d always thought he was just making it up.”

“The tunnel exists, there’s no doubt about that. And the demons used it to gain access to the church, though how they got that iron door open still remains to be seen.”

“Oh, I think I can help with that,” Nils said, and led Cade across the room to a sheet-covered body lying behind a nearby row of pews. Nils bent and pulled back the sheet – which Cade saw was really an altar cloth – and exposed the corpse lying beneath it.

Cade recognized the dead man as one of those who had wielded one of the homemade flame throwers earlier that evening. He’d never been directly introduced so he didn’t know the man’s name, but he rarely forgot a face.

Which was a good thing as the man’s face was about the only part of him that was still recognizable. The rest of the man’s body was frozen in the midst of metamorphosis; he must have been undergoing a protean phase-shift when the bullet that killed him had found its home in the center of his forehead. Cade squatted beside the corpse and looked it over carefully. The man’s limbs had stretched a good foot longer than normal, giving him a decidedly unbalanced appearance. He’d also grown a covering of rubbery flesh that looked more like the hide of a seal than the skin of a human being. Nubs of bone – possibly the beginnings of horns? – were jutting out through rips in his shirt along the top of his shoulders and others could be seen along both sides of his torso. Cade couldn’t see below the man’s waist – the cloth covered that part of his body – but he had no doubt that he’d find the same thing were he to expose the rest of the man’s corpse.

The man had clearly been ‘infected’ by one of the demons; the question was when.

Cade glanced up at Nils.

“How did this happen?”

A shake of the head. “His name is... was... Stefan Braun. He was a halfway-decent mechanic at the auto body shop here in town and one of the men who helped this afternoon. You know, with the flame-throwers.”

Cade nodded.

Nils went on. “He seemed to withdraw after our excursion, but he didn’t seem hurt or anything. Just tired, you know? One of the women said she saw someone go down into the basement about half-an-hour before the attack and thinks it was him, but admits that she was half-asleep and could be wrong.”

Cade didn’t think she was, though. The drones they’d been dealing with all night didn’t have the spiritual power necessary to cross that threshold uninvited, so someone had to have opened the door to the tunnel in the basement and invited the hellspawn into the church. If Braun had been injured when he’d come out with Nils to rescue Echo, he might have fallen under the demon’s influence without anyone knowing about it. A Judas in their midst. Then, when everyone else was sleeping, or at least when he thought they were sleeping, he made his way down into the basement and opened up the door, letting the demons inside.

Cade explained as much to Nils.

To say the priest was horrified would have been an understatement.

“I led this man out there to try and rescue you and your teammates,” Nils said, the anguish on his face quite evident to Cade. “I told him it would be all right; that we had the firepower to defeat the creatures. Now you’re telling me that I’m responsible for turning him into... that? And as a result he let those things in here?”

“It wasn’t your fault, Nils. Braun could have spoken up; he could have told us he’d been injured. There might have been something we could have done for him at that point, but not later, not once the demon had taken control. And once that happened, not even Braun could be blamed for his actions, never mind you.”

Nils wasn’t convinced, but Cade didn’t have time to waste on his feelings at the moment. Braun hadn’t been dead long, so there was still a chance Cade could get some useful information out of him. But to do so he needed to act quickly, which meant keeping Nils occupied...

“Either way, there’s nothing you can do for Braun now. But the same can’t be said of the rest of your flock. They must be terrified after all this. Why don’t you go do what you can to reassure them, check to be sure no one else has sustained any injuries we don’t know about, and then pray with them? My men and I can handle this,” Cade said.

Nils stared at him blankly for a moment, then blinked and seemed to come back to himself. “Yes. You’re right. Pray with them. Of course.”

Cade waited until Nils had started across the room, then caught Riley’s eye and called him over with a toss of his head. Once the men had gathered around him, he filled them in on what he’d learned from Nils and then told them what he intended to do.

“Braun hasn’t been dead for long,” Cade said. “There’s still a chance we can learn something from him via my Gift. I want the three of you to keep the locals away from me until I’m finished.”

“Roger that, boss,” Riley replied.

Olsen nodded as well.

Duncan looked a bit uneasy, but Cade didn’t really blame him. The last time he’d done something like this in Duncan’s presence, it hadn’t gone so well. He’d ended up biting the younger man’s forearm, if he remembered correctly.

Never a dull moment.

Cade knelt beside the corpse and removed the thin cotton flesh-colored gloves that he wore everywhere outside of his own home. The gloves were there to protect him from those around him, even his closest friends.

Seven years before, in an encounter with the supernatural entity known as the Adversary, Cade’s wife Gabrielle had been killed and Cade himself had been wounded. When he’d come to in the hospital, he discovered that not only had he been left horribly scarred and without the use of his right eye, but that he’d gained some unusual abilities in the process. One of which was the power of psychometry.

In short, he could read the psychic impressions left on objects just by touching them with his bare hands.

The gloves he wore ninety-nine percent of the time kept him from being exposed to feelings and memories he didn’t want access to, but there were times when knowing such could come in handy.

Like now.

He removed the thin cotton gloves he was wearing and, with a glance at the others to be certain that they were ready, he reached out with his bare right hand and laid it on the dead man’s chest.

CHAPTER NINE

At first there was only darkness and a lingering sense of unease, as if he knew something was wrong but wasn’t able to put his finger on what it was.

Then the images exploded across the theatre of his mind’s eye, hundreds if not thousands of them, one overlapping the other overlapping the next, a literal flood, until it was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. With them came a cacophony of sounds and voices, crashing around and over one another in their haste to be heard.

Within seconds Cade was drowning in the tide.

He couldn’t discern individual voices, but the tone of each was unmistakably the same – pure, unmitigated terror. Whoever these people were, they were in fear not just for their lives but for their very souls. The images were no better; Kodachrome snapshots of men, women, and children suffering hideous fates, images so disturbing that they burned themselves onto the backs of his eyelids for all eternity.

And behind it all, the sense that something dark was coming.

Something that wanted to rip and rend and tear his flesh, to devour him whole...

Cade pulled his hand back with a gasp, struggling to push the images out of his head and regain some sense of connection with the here and now. It was never easy coming back from the visions generated through his Gift and this one was particularly difficult as the sights and sounds he’d experienced tried to drown him with their savage intensity.

He shook his head, trying to cast the memories aside, but he knew that they were here to stay as permanently as if they had been engraved on the inside of his skull. Just one of the darker aspects of this thing he called his Gift.

More curse than Gift. Not the first time he’d thought this, either.

“You alright, boss?”

“Yeah... yeah, I’m okay. Just give me a second.”

Cade took a couple of deep breaths and then rose to his feet. He staggered, suddenly exhausted, and was thankful for Riley’s steadying hand on his elbow.

“Anything?” Olsen asked.

“Not really. Or, at least, nothing useful. There were plenty of images – more than I’ve ever seen before, to be honest – but there wasn’t any cohesion between them. Nothing to tie them together. It was as if I was watching the memories of a hundred different people at once, all wrapped about each other like some kind of twisted kaleidoscope of pain and misery. It was not pleasant, I can tell you that.”

Duncan looked away and Cade was reminded of his sergeant’s discomfort with his methods. For all his own secrets, Echo Team’s newest member could be damned stubborn when it came to stepping outside the Rule, the code of conduct that the Templars swore to uphold when they took the oath of investiture and became a knight of the Order. Cade’s personal philosophy was much simpler – use whatever means at your disposal to conquer evil wherever and whenever it reared its ugly head.

Like now.

Cade was disappointed the attempt hadn’t produced anything resembling concrete information about the extent of what they were dealing with.

They were back to square one.

And time was running out.

“So now what?” Olsen asked. “If this bloke was stupid enough to invite those things inside, we’ve lost what little sanctuary we had. There’s nothing holding them back now.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Cade replied. “This is still holy ground and its difficult for creatures of that ilk to trespass on it, invited or not. And given the way they ran out of here with their tails between their legs, I’m not so sure that they’ll try again tonight. If they do, we’ll be waiting for them, as always.”

Cade’s quiet confidence was just the thing his men needed to hear. They’d been through a lot together and hearing his determination to hold fast to their mission no matter the odds was somehow reassuring.

“I don’t want any more surprises, however, so we’re going to stand watch in pairs. Duncan and I will take the first watch and—”

Riley’s deep voice overrode Cade’s with ease. “Nick and I will take first watch; you need to rest.”

Cade opened his mouth to argue, but then shut it again without saying anything. Riley was right; the use of his Gift on top of the battle they’d just fought had stolen the last of his energy and if he didn’t get some sleep he’d be useless when he was needed.

He caught the stony look his master sergeant was giving him and smiled in his direction to show his acquiescence. “Right, as I said, Riley and Olsen will take the first watch. I want one of you by the main entrance and the other stationed at the top of the basement stairs. Leave the door open so we can hear anything going on in the basement; might give us a few extra minutes of warning if it comes to it.

“If you hear anything unusual, anything at all, wake me up, understood?”

“Roger that.”

Satisfied that his men knew their duties, Cade wandered over to the nearest pew and stretched out on the wooden surface.

Within moments he was sound asleep.

* * *

Cade.

Wake up, Cade.

The voice pulled him from his dreams as smoothly as a fish on a line, dragging him up from the depths to leave him lying open-eyed on the hard wood of the pew on which he’d laid down to rest.

He blinked the sleep from his eyes and slowly sat up.

Around him, the room was silent.

Still.

No one moved; no one even seemed to breathe. It was as if everyone but him was frozen in time; locked in the space of a single moment that stretched on and on into eternity.

Cade felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

The voice, one he knew all too well, came again.

Cade.

With his heart pounding in his chest and his pulse racing wildly, he jumped to his feet and looked around. It only took him a moment to locate her standing at the top of the steps, the door to the basement open behind her.

Gabrielle.

She was wrapped in a long robe with the hood pulled up to partially obscure her face, just as she’d been the last few times that he’d seen her, but he had no doubt that it was her. He would know her anywhere.

When she saw that she had his attention, she turned and disappeared down the steps.

Cade hustled down the aisle and over to the doorway. He was just in time to catch a glimpse of Gabrielle as she stepped off the stairs and into the darkness of the room beyond.

He hurried to catch up.

When he reached the bottom, he found her waiting by the iron door leading beyond the church. The barricade he and his men had erected only a short while before had been cleared away and light could be seen emerging from the depths of the tunnel beyond.

What the hell was going on?

This wasn’t the first time Gabrielle had appeared to him and when she had deigned to do so previously it had always been in his best interests, so he wasn’t worried about her leading him astray.

At least, not too much.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have some idea where he was headed.

“Where are you taking me?” he called to her across the room, his voice sounding unnaturally loud even to him in the stillness of the church.

She said nothing in reply, however, simply turning and walking into the mouth of the tunnel.

Cade followed.

Once inside the passage, he was surprised to discover that mining lights had been strung along its length at some point in the past; he hadn’t noticed them earlier in the evening when he and his men had discovered the entrance. The bare bulbs cast a dim light on the earthen walls around him, but at least he could see well enough to follow along in Gabrielle’s wake without tripping over the occasional pile of rubble that lay along the floor.

The air inside the tunnel was cold and smelled of damp earth and old decay, causing him to eye the walls and ceiling uncomfortably. They looked sturdy enough, but he’d be thankful just the same when he emerged at the other end.

Wherever that might be.

He tried to catch up with Gabrielle more than once, but no matter how quickly he hurried along, she always stayed just out of reach. He got close enough once to catch a glimpse inside the depths of the hood she wore and wished he hadn’t; the wet gleam of bone showing through on the ravaged side of her face was such a sharp contrast to the smooth, unblemished skin on the other.

After that harsh reminder of how he’d failed to save her the night the Adversary had attacked them, Cade wasn’t in such a rush to stay close.

Roughly ten minutes after he descended into the church basement, Cade stepped through a hole in the rear wall of the caretaker’s shed that stood at the far edge of the large cemetery that occupied the back of the church property. The door ahead of him was wide open, the harsh winter storm having pinned it back against the shed wall, and through it he could see Gabrielle winding her way through the gravestones toward the dense copse of trees just beyond.

Any chance of mistaking Gabrielle for a living, breathing woman was dispelled when Cade noticed the thick carpet of newly-fallen snow that the storm had deposited on the ground over the last few hours was completely undisturbed in her wake.

Bracing himself against the cold, he stepped out into the storm and followed his murdered wife.

CHAPTER TEN

Duncan awoke to find Riley’s hand on his shoulder and the other man leaning over him in the semi-darkness.

“Time to get up,” Echo’s executive officer told him. “Cade wants us ready to move in five.”

Move? Duncan thought. Move where?

He didn’t bother to ask, for he knew Riley would just tell him to wait for Cade’s briefing. He nodded instead and said he’d be ready.

When Duncan joined the others in an alcove off to one side of the nave a few moments later, he discovered they were as curious as he. For once, Riley didn’t know any more than he was telling, which was rather strange in its own right. As the number two man in the squad – in the entire Echo Team for that matter – Cade usually kept him pretty well up to speed, but not this time. After all they’d been through in the last twelve hours, the thought made Duncan uneasy.

That feeling only intensified when Duncan saw Cade approaching from across the nave. The Knight Commander was walking beside Father Nils, speaking earnestly to him as they came toward the others, and it was clear from the expression on the young priest’s face that he didn’t like whatever it was that he was hearing. Though they were keeping their voices down, the tension between the two men was obvious and Nils was repeatedly shaking his head in the negative. It seemed he didn’t want to do whatever it was that Cade was suggesting.

Good luck with that, Duncan thought. Once Cade made up his mind...

Duncan’s gaze dropped lower and that’s when he noticed that Cade’s boots were leaving wet footprints on the marble floor in his wake.

He’s been outside. Recently, too.

The plan had been for them to wait for morning and for the reinforcements due as soon as the weather passed. If Cade had left the safety of the church to scout things out, it meant either the reinforcements weren’t coming or that Cade had decided to take the battle to the enemy rather than wait for help to arrive. Neither one boded well for Echo.

When Cade reached them, he confirmed Duncan’s fears with the first words out of his mouth.

“I know where this thing is hiding,” he told them, “and we’re going after it.”

* * *

Fifteen minutes later Echo Team stood outside the entrance to the tunnel in the basement of the church. Olsen, Riley, and Duncan donned the makeshift-flamethrowers that Father Nils and his men had constructed and then listened carefully to Father Nils as he explained the operation.

Seems easy enough, Duncan thought. Pump this handle here, turn that knob there, and then squeeze the trigger.

Lighting the resulting jet of fluid seemed to be the only tricky part and he was reasonably confident that he could manage that without setting himself ablaze, so there didn’t seem to be too much to worry about.

Except for the horde of ravenous demons waiting to strip the flesh from our bones and feast on the remains.

Duncan reminded himself that it was probably best not to dwell on the minor details.

Cade turned back from his examination of the tunnel mouth and called them to order.

“All right, listen up,” he said, as they gathered around. “This old World War II tunnel leads beneath the church cemetery to the far side of the property before emerging at the edge of a thick pine forest. We’re headed for a cave system about three clicks inside the woods.”

Duncan glanced down at Cade’s still-damp boots and was tempted to ask how he’d discovered the thing’s hiding place, but then reason reasserted itself and he let the moment pass.

Sometimes, it’s better not knowing. Especially when the Knight Commander was involved.

“Conserve the flame throwers until we get to our destination; we’re going to need them more than anything else at that point and we don’t want to run out of fuel before we get there. As before, use your swords if possible, your guns if necessary. Understood?”

After receiving a chorus of nods, Cade took point, a fully loaded HK MP5 in hand. Behind him came Duncan and Olsen, with Riley taking up the rear. Father Nils attempted to follow, but Riley gave the priest a stern look and that was the end of that. Duncan didn’t blame him; he wouldn’t want to tangle with the master sergeant either.

The knight commander led them through the tunnel – cold, damp and decidedly uninteresting, Duncan noted, but free of demons, thank God – and out into the cemetery proper. It was still snowing, though not as heavily as it had been the night before, and the wind whipped through the gravestones with an eerie sound. Duncan did his best to ignore it his nerves were jangled enough as it was from what they’d been through already.

In addition to the flamethrowers, Father Nils had supplied them all with miniature headlamps of the type worn by the rescue crews who worked the ski slopes above Durbandorf during the year. The lights were small but powerful and should do quite nicely in the absence of their usual gear. Flipping on his lamp, Duncan followed in Olsen’s wake as they got underway.

They reached the tree line without incident and continued forward, slipping between the ancient trunks like wraiths. It was half-past nine in the morning but it felt like early evening; so dense was the cloud cover that very little light was getting through. Something about the darkness felt unnatural and Duncan had little doubt that the daylight was being held back in no small part by their infernal adversary.

Whatever the enemy has in store for this part of the world, it can’t be good.

No sooner had the thought passed through Duncan’s mind than Cade stopped abruptly and sank to one knee, a closed fist raised in warning.

* * *

As the others sank down behind him just as they’d been trained to do, Cade stared across the clearing at the spot where he’d seen his dead wife just seconds before. She’d only been there for a moment, but he was certain he’d seen her. She’d been standing amidst the trees, pointing at a spot between the trunks in the distance, and had looked back at him with an odd expression on her ravaged face.

He was staring off in that direction, trying to pierce the gloom brought on by the overhanging branches when a twig snapped somewhere out in the darkness.

It could have been a deer.

Or maybe a fox.

But he knew better.

“Hide yourselves! Quickly!” he hissed at the others urgently, afraid to raise his voice above a whisper.

Another glance that way showed several indistinct figures moving through the trees in their direction. Cade didn’t think they’d been seen, but it wouldn’t be long...

He scrambled to follow his own orders.

* * *

The thing that had once been Malcolm Heigler, the local butcher, and which was now a butcher in an entirely different sense of the word, followed the rest of his brethren as they made their way back through the trees toward the town of Durbandorf. Human vermin were still hiding there, somewhere, and it was Heigler’s job, along with that of the others, to root them out.

Heigler didn’t exactly think in those terms – he didn’t exactly think at all anymore – but the instinctual imperatives that he was following as part of the new creature he had become demanded it just the same, and he was happy to comply.

The group was roughly halfway across the clearing when something tugged at Heigler’s awareness. He paused, letting the others stumble,slither,lope, and walk around him, and then he glanced around.

Something didn’t feel right...

The clearing appeared deserted, the snow undisturbed except where his brethren had crossed it, and the thing that had been Durandorf’s butcher decided he had been mistaken. He turned and hustled after his brethren, eager not to be left behind.

* * *

In the creature’s wake, a moment passed.

Two.

Then three.

Suddenly the empty silence of the clearing was broken as a patch of snow near the base of several trees shifted and then rose, revealing the four men who had lain there for the last several minutes, pressed against the freezing surface with a half-a-foot of snow hastily thrown over themselves for camouflage.

They brushed the snow off and then checked to be certain that the flamethrowers hadn’t started to leak from being turned on their ends. Chilled but satisfied that nothing was amiss, the group got underway once more. As they did Cade thought he saw Gabrielle watching through the trees, but in the shadowed light he couldn’t be sure. Nor was there time to track her down and find out.

I’ll see you again soon, my lady, he thought in her direction, as he set out at the front of the squad once more, and that would have to be enough.

Hours earlier Gabrielle had led him through these very trees to a looming rock formation hidden deep within the depths of the forest. There’d been a cave at the base of that formation; a dark, brooding place that gave off a sense of evil so strong that it tied his stomach in knots and made him want to run away screaming.

Instead, he’d stayed just long enough to ensure that what they were looking for was inside and then he’d turned away, intending to return for the rest of his squad, only to find himself back in the church, lying on the pew where he’d settled down to rest just over an hour earlier.

At first he’d thought it had all been a dream, something brought on by his need to rescue his men and get out of this disaster alive, never mind his constant desire to see his wife again. But that notion only lasted until he’d swung his feet to the floor and discovered his previously dry boots were now suspiciously wet.

He didn’t know how or why his dead wife kept appearing to him, but one thing was for certain — he trusted her implicitly. He’d trusted her since the very first day they’d met, which was one of the reasons her loss had cut so deeply and had nearly drowned him in a sea of sorrow so deep that he might never have returned. Only his desire to avenge her death had brought him back from the brink, had driven him to track down the Templar Order and to rise though its ranks to his present position. And it was that position which allowed him to hunt creatures like this one — foul things that belonged locked deep in the bowels of hell, and not wandering free to terrorize other innocents like his beloved Gabrielle.

Her appearance now meant that time was running out; Cade was certain of it. They needed to get moving.

He checked with the others, making sure they were all right, and then set off again through the trees, moving as quickly as he dared without giving away their position.

So far, he was reasonably confident that the master demon was still unaware that they were coming. If it had known, the woods would have been teeming with so many demons that they wouldn’t have been able to move, never mind advance.

Unless, of course, it’s a trap.

The thought brought him up short momentarily and then he shrugged it off and continued on his way.

If it was, there wasn’t anything to be done about it now. They were going to face this thing, one way or another.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Duncan stared at the cleft near the base of the cliff wall in front of him and felt icy fingers scurry up his spine to burrow deep into the base of his neck. The very sight of the place unnerved him and he had no doubt it would be ten times worse once he was inside.

But inside was precisely where they were headed.

As they got closer Cade told them all that the entrance to the cave complex where the master demon was hiding was narrow. Staring at it now, Duncan realized that the knight commander’s comment was a contender for understatement of the year. It was barely more than a crack in the wall – wide enough to slip through, yes – but still barely a crack. Whoever was going in first would have to push his pack and weapon in ahead of him or wait for the others to pass it through once he was on the other side. Either way, for several agonizingly long seconds, that man would be defenseless.

Because of this, Cade would go first. He wasn’t the kind of commander who led from the rear; he would never ask his men to do anything he wouldn’t do himself and often assigned himself the duty of doing just that. Which is why Duncan found himself passing off the tank of his homemade flamethrower to Echo’s second in command and getting ready to slide into the cave mouth behind Cade.

How on earth do I get myself into these things? Duncan wondered.

Then there was no more time for wondering as Cade gave him a nod and then slipped inside the cleft, pushing his way through the narrow passage to the wider chamber he knew lay just beyond. Summoning his courage, Duncan did the same in his wake. Once the two of them were safely on the other side – and nothing rushed at them out of the darkness once they were there – Cade gave the ‘all clear’ sign. The equipment was handed through the gap and then Olsen and Riley followed in its wake.

The four of them found themselves in a small cavern with a tunnel leading into the depths from the opposite side. Cade waited for the others to re-don their homemade flamethrowers and then led the way toward the tunnel and into its depths.

They found the first body a dozen feet or so along the tunnel, pushed up against one wall as if it were nothing more than trash to be cast off and discarded rather than all that was left of a human being.

Or, at least, Duncan thought it had been human; the deformed nature of the corpse and the odd array of extra limbs, both insectoid and mammalian made it very hard to determine its original state.

After that, the corpses became more regular, until it seemed to Duncan that half of the town must have been lying there in that unholy tunnel, twisted into vile shapes that not even their creator could recognize. On more than one occasion he thought he might vomit; it was the thought of showing weakness in front of his battle-hardened companions that, more than anything else, kept him from doing so.

Shadows danced and writhed at the edges of the light cast by their headlamps, ratcheting up the tension with every step forward. Twice Duncan spun about, convinced that the enemy was sneaking up on them in the darkness, and it was only the steadying presence of the master sergeant that kept him from squeezing the trigger and sending a cascade of bullets into the darkness around them.

After what felt like an eternity, the narrow passage through which they were descending began to grow lighter, as if lit by something farther ahead and soon the men didn’t need their headlamps.

Travelers are often known to remark on how the yellow-red glow of a campfire can warm the soul before the heat from the flames ever reaches you, but there was nothing soul-relieving in the light that reached them from the depths of the tunnel at this point. It was a harsh, silvery glow, one that gave off the sense of being colder than the weather they’d recently traveled through and it slipped down the edges of the passageway to light their steps forward as they moved the last twenty yards to their destination.

At that point, the tunnel opened on a wide cavern and the stench of blood and guts and feces that swept over them as they crossed the threshold unequivocally confirmed that they’d found what they’d come to find – the location where the original summoning had taken place. It was here they would find the master demon controlling the protean drones they’d been fighting off all this time.

Duncan let his light drift across the floor of the chamber in front of him and immediately wished he hadn’t. A massive arcane summoning circle had been drawn in colored sand across the cavern floor and what he assumed was all that was left of the original summoners were scattered about within it. Limbs and entrails and a seeming ocean of blood filled the space wherever he looked. The remains were so strewn about that it was hard to tell which limb belonged to which body.

Using hand signals, Cade sent Riley and Olsen around the right side of the cavern while he and Duncan took the left. They moved slowly, stepped over the debris in their path, keeping an eye out for the master demon. Cade wasn’t often wrong, so if he said it was here somewhere, Duncan was convinced it was as well.

They had crossed roughly three-quarters of the cavern when a rustling sound reached them from behind a pile at the rear of the cave, an area that was all but shrouded in darkness.

Cade held up a closed fist.

Duncan gripped the barrel of his makeshift flamethrower tightly, his finger sweaty on the trigger. The lesser demons they’d fought so far had been bad enough, but he knew the thing that spawned them was going to be infinitely worse...

Before any of them could act, however, events took a turn of their own.

From behind the pile of rubble they were watching so earnestly stepped a young girl.

She couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve. Her blonde hair was in disarray and she had dirt stains on her face and hands. Her once-blue dress was now nothing more than a set of filthy, tattered rags that barely hung on her thin frame. She was shivering against the cold, or perhaps, Duncan thought, with fear at the sight of strangers standing before her with guns in hand, but her gaze remained steady and she stood before them without trying to run.

Seeing the young girl in this condition nearly broke Duncan’s heart. He smiled, to show that he meant her no harm, and started forward.

“Don’t worry,” he said to her, in his most soothing voice. “We’re here to rescue you.”

The child looked at him quizzically.

“Rescue me? Don’t be silly,” she said, with a laugh that should never have come out of a child’s throat. “What on earth would I need rescuing from?”

Then she lashed at his throat.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The moment the girl stepped out of the shadows Cade knew there was something wrong. His gut clenched, his skin crawled, and he could practically hear the screams of a thousand lost souls roaring in the back of his mind that she did not belong here, that her very presence was an abomination against nature itself.

She might look human, but Cade knew she was the farthest thing from it.

His gun came up, his finger already on the trigger, and from the corner of his eye he could see Riley and Olsen raising their weapons as well.

Trouble was, Duncan was in the way.

The sergeant had taken several steps forward the moment the girl-thing had come into sight and now he stood directly in Cade’s line of fire. If Cade pulled the trigger now, there was no way he could hit the creature without hitting Duncan in the process. But he couldn’t afford to let the creature escape either.

They had only one chance...

“Down!” Cade yelled, in his best command voice, hoping and praying that all the months of practicing to respond to commands delivered in that tone would bring about the unquestioning response that he so desperately needed.

Hoping and waiting to see for certain were at opposite ends of the spectrum however.

Cade didn’t hesitate another moment but opened fire.

* * *

Duncan heard Cade’s shout at the exact moment that the ‘defenseless’ girl in front of him lashed out at his throat with a hand that had suddenly grown claws several inches long. It was only his well-honed instincts for preservation that saw Duncan throw himself sideways out of the vile creature’s reach and, thankfully, out of Cade’s line of fire at the same time.

The roar of the knight commander’s weapon echoed in the cavernous space but Duncan was still able to hear the demon’s hiss of fury when it realized it had missed. He felt its claws slash through the space where he’d been kneeling a half-instant before and knew he wouldn’t have survived the blow had it landed the way the demon intended. He scrambled backward, trying to put as much distance between himself and the thing as possible, knowing as he did what came next.

The demon paused and roared at him, a sound that would have frozen him in place not three months before, but he’d come a long way in a short time. Since joining Echo he’d faced down spectres, revenants, even a cabal of necromancers with anger management issues; they’d all perished but he was still around. And major demon or not, he had every intention of surviving this one, too.

He heard Riley shout something over the din of battle and while he couldn’t make out exactly what was said he had a pretty good idea. He didn’t take the time to look, just threw himself flat and covered his head with his hands.

It was a good thing he did, too, for the jet of flame that shot out of Riley’s flamethrower passed mere inches over his head as it sought out its intended target. As if on cue, Olsen chose that moment to join the fray as well and soon it wasn’t one but two plumes of fire burning the spot where the demon had stood seconds before. Not to be outdone, Cade kept his finger on the trigger of his HK, sending a blistering stream of gunfire at the same location.

As Duncan slithered across the floor and out of the line of fire, he was confident that nothing could have lived through such an inferno.

He was wrong.

Cade gave the signal and the men stopped their attack, only to find the spot where the demon had been standing empty of any sign of the creature. If they hadn’t known any better, the evidence would have suggested that it hadn’t ever been there at all.

Into the stunned silence, a guttural voice spoke.

“Fools! Did you think me so easily defeated?”

As one the men looked up to find the girl-demon clinging to the ceiling of the cavern on her hands and feet like a spider with her neck twisted around 180 degrees so that she could look down upon them with ease. She had also grown three times her normal size, making her almost as large as Riley. Though her face had not undergone any obvious physical changes beyond the change in size, the evil that had consumed her was now plain to see in the nuances of her expression. As it hung there the demon seemed to flicker in and out of view, as if not entirely on this plane of existence, but that didn’t stop it from gloating at them.

And that voice...

“Your petty efforts would be considered nothing but simple amusements in the arenas of Hell. My drones have taken that festering warren of vermin beyond the trees and soon we shall spread beyond its borders, descending upon the rest of your people until they remember precisely why we were cast into the pit!”

That was as much as Duncan could take. Without waiting for orders he raised his flamethrower, sent a momentary prayer skyward that it hadn’t been damaged during his activities moments before, and then sent a stream of flaming liquid upward.

The demon made no move to avoid the flames. In fact, it seemed to Duncan that it actually leaned into them instead, and soon the smell of cooked flesh joined those that already occupied the cavern. Duncan kept it up until the tank all but ran dry, and then cut off the flames.

With horror he saw that the demon had not moved from its perch; had not, in fact, been damaged by the flames at all. It stared down in what he could only image was utter contempt and then began to move across the ceiling toward the tunnel through which they’d entered.

“Don’t let it get away!” Cade shouted and the Templars opened up with everything they had. Duncan tried firing his flamethrower again, getting a few weak spouts, while Riley and Olsen switched to their firearms, the boom of the former’s combat shotgun like exclamation points to the staccato chatter of the latter’s sub machine gun.

The demon shrugged off every bit of the attack, scurrying forward as if the men weren’t even in the room. In moments it would reach the entrance and, shortly after that, emerge into the outside world.

What were they going to do?

* * *

Cade watched this all unfold with genuine fear in his heart. He knew that if the demon united itself with its drones and disappeared into the surrounding forest, they’d never catch the thing. By the time they did it would be too late; it would have consumed enough souls and enriched its store of power so much that they would have to throw the might of armies at it to put an end to the horror.

He had to make do with himself and his three men.

And what good could they do, he asked himself as the demon reached the halfway point to the tunnel mouth. From the way it flickered in and out of sight almost as fast as he could blink, he could only imagine that the part of it that could truly be harmed was not in this dimension but in some other dimension beyond.

Still, his men would not quit. Cade watched Duncan’s flamethrower sputter and run dry, watched him unclick the straps that held it to his back and draw his sword, intending to chase after the creature, as much a member of his squad as Riley and Olsen, men who had been with him since he’d taken control of Echo. The blade of Duncan’s sword caught the light from his headlamp, reflecting it in a momentary beam of brilliant glory, even as Riley and Olsen drew their weapons as well.

Cade reached for his sword, intending to join them and fight to the last right there with them, when it suddenly clicked.

The demon’s flickering movement in and out of this plane.

The dazzling sparks of light glinting off the blessed blades.

Blades passed down from the Holy Father himself, blades that, unlike most other earthly weapons, were effective in both this world and the next.

... even in the Beyond…

“On me!” Cade cried, as he drew his weapon and rushed forward as fast as his feet would carry him, leaping over corpses and the remains of such, racing against time and hope to beat the creature to the entrance to the cavern while his men converged around him in a protective formation designed to help him reach his destination no matter the cost.

Luckily, the demon had already dismissed them as being unable to harm it and it paid them no mind as it made its leisurely way toward the entrance.

Cade got their first.

As one the Templar turned to face the oncoming creature.

Finally, the demon noted their unwillingness to surrender when it was not only more prudent but convenient and it intended to make them pay for their transgressions.

A cracking-crunching sound filled the air and multiple legs burst outward from the thing’s torso, spider-like and covered in dark, damp hair, allowing it to swing partially down from the ceiling to engage the man who dared defy it.

Cade waited until the last second, glanced down at the pool of fresh blood on the floor in front of them, blood that reflected the light from the headlamp he wore and for a split second became a sort of reflecting pool.

Without hesitation, Cade stepped into that pool, into that reflection, and slipped the bonds between this world and the next to enter the Beyond.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The demon hung there before him, just as he’d known it would, its true form impossible to hide in the mists and phantom eddies of the beyond.

The multi-eyed, multi-legged creature didn’t resemble anything particularly earthly and so Cade had a hard time looking at it, his mind constantly trying to fill in the blanks of what wasn’t there and driving himself slowly mad in the process.

He had not left the world of the living and the people it contained behind to replace them with a world full of creatures like this one.

It was time to finish the job.

The demon was startled to see him there, in the Beyond, the land between the souls of the living and the land of the dead, and as it reared it up in shocked dismay, Cade brought his sword up over his head and brought it slashing down on the thing that very well could have gutted the world of its humanity, both literally and figuratively.

The sword cut through the demon’s hide like softened butter, cleaving the creature in two in one fell stroke.

* * *

Reinforcements arrived just as the sun was breaking over the forest. The two combat units the Seneschal sent scoured the surrounding countryside, eradicating any of the drones that still lived. Many had perished with the demise of the master-demon that controlled them. The trauma team rounded up the survivors and began to treat their injuries.

The men of Echo watched them while resting beneath the overhang of a nearby building.

“What happens to them now?” Duncan asked, nodding toward the dozen or so individuals, including Father Nils, who had survived the night.

“The Order will give them a long-deserved vacation, caring for them and helping them through the ordeal. The physical danger might be over and their wounds will heal quickly enough, but their minds will be filled with trauma for a long time to come,” Cade replied. “We’ve got people who can help them deal with that. Eventually, if all goes well, perhaps their souls will heal and they can get on with their lives. If not, they can always join the Order.”

There was something in Cade’s tone that caught Duncan’s attention.

The question slipped out before he could stop it.

“Is that what happened to you, Commander?”

Cade turned away, staring off into the distance for a long moment, long enough that Duncan thought he might not answer at all.

But then...

“Hearts and bodies heal often enough, I suppose,” the Echo Team leader told him, “but the soul... the soul can be another matter entirely.”

Tarzan Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Weston Ochse

“Me Tarzan. You Jane.”

– Johnny Weissmuller, Tarzan the Apeman, 1932

The earth was rent as if a leviathan had burst free to sail the galaxy for better worlds to chew. Four miles long, hundreds of feet at its widest point, and more than a thousand feet deep, the Sonoran Rift was one of a hundred that had cleaved the Earth in the past three years. No one knew where they came from nor why they happened. Most had been kept a secret, but those like the Baltimore Scar and the Edmonton Crater couldn’t be ignored. But the Sonoran Rift was the largest of them all, and if it hadn’t been for a disenchanted soldier spilling his guts to the network, no one would have ever had an inkling about it.

Andy’s network had tried four times to get someone near enough to corroborate the unbelievable statements the dying soldier had made, and each of their reporters had failed to return. The idea that another rift existed would be a news coup for the network that could garner millions in advertising.

“Do you think what they say is true?” asked Leon, who rose from checking one of the seventy claymore mines in their sector.

That there are monsters in there? Andy didn’t even want to give voice to the thought, so he just stared.

“Hey vato, I’m talking to you.”

“I don’t know what to think,” Andy said.

“This isn’t a test, maricone. I was just asking your opinion.”

Looking at the way the sun sliced into the Rift, then met an impenetrable wall of shadow, Andy Friarson would have to say that yes, if there was anywhere in the world where monsters existed, this was the place. He’d been to Baltimore, Edmonton and even the tiny crack in the earth in France they called the Vallée de la Mort. All of them were interesting, but they lacked the sense of foreboding the Sonoran Rift had. There was a feeling about it that reminded him of the time he was in Croatia, hiding in a ditch with his camera clutched to his chest while Serbians lined up an entire village, shot them, and shoved them into a mass grave. Andy had known that at any moment he would be found out and added to the ditch. When one of the killers had turned to stare directly at his hiding place, Andy had known the end was near. He’d closed his eyes and waited to die, unwilling to meet it face to face. He’d inexplicably survived that day, but had been left with the memory of the certainty of death he’d felt — which he felt again now, walking so near the place where monsters were born.

* * *

The relief battalion had met in an old silver mine east of Bisbee, Arizona. There were three hundred of them. Many were ex-convicts, with the rest ex-military, fresh from the war but unable to stop killing. With the promise of $100,000 for six months’ work and the opportunity to protect the sovereignty of America, they showed up in droves. The advertisements were posted on the internet, Field and Stream, Gun and Rifle, and Soldier of Fortune. Everyone was vetted in Phoenix first. With the help of Sheriff Arpaio, the Network created a criminal history for Andy, and with it, a desire to get out of Arizona. With a faked military record, his bonafides fit right into the model of a modern redneck protector the US government was arranging to guard the Rift and the American way of life.

* * *

Everyone had their own responsibilities. Andy and his partner, Leon Batista, were in charge of maintaining the landmines in sector six, an area just north and east of the Rift and one of twenty-two sectors. The mines were the last line of defense. If anything or anyone fought its way free of the Rift, it would encounter seven rows of ten claymore mines, positioned far enough apart so that each row could operate independently, creating a cataclysmic explosion of ball bearings traveling at 4,000 feet per second if detonated.

But if anything got to the claymores, they were all in the shit. Andy had been issued an automatic pistol with the reminder that the bullets would be best used on himself so that when he was eaten, he wouldn’t know, or care.

The first lines of defense were right along the edge of the Rift. There was evidence where they’d tried to cap the crevice. Some of the steel webwork remained. But all attempts to cover the mighty hole had been stopped by the monsters. It seemed that as soon as anyone got within a few feet of the darkness, creatures would stir and come out to feed. Andy had been offered a tour of the area, but even his professional craving for information couldn’t defeat the fear that locked his joints and filled his guts with lead-heavy dread.

Many of his network colleagues thought he was a coward. He’d returned from Croatia three weeks into a three month assignment. He’d tried to explain to them what had happened, but they didn’t want to listen. They were reporters, they’d told him. Their job was to go into the mouth of hell itself and report what the devil was having for dinner. If you weren’t willing to do that, why be a reporter?

Why, indeed.

Towers with Vulcan Cannons were interspersed a hundred meters apart along both sides of the Rift. If anything tried to escape, the cannons could create a deadly web of interlocking fire. Each 20mm pneumatically-driven, six-barreled, air-cooled, electrically-fired, Gatling-style cannon was capable of throwing 7,200 depleted uranium rounds each minute into anything that moved. Each tower had their own specified field to fire within, which kept the gunners from aiming directly at another tower. The very idea that anything could survive such a fusillade was unimaginable, but as Andy reminded himself, this was only the first line of defense. By definition that meant the tactical experts who’d created the Rift Defense System planned on things getting through.

Above the towers flew Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with laser targeting for the offsite medium range missiles, as well as video cameras capable of operating in Forward Looking Infra-Red (FLIR), Starlight, optical spectrum and radioactive modes. As another line of first offense, each carried three AGM-114K II Hellfire missiles with High Explosive Metal Augmented Charges.

Satellites were rumored to be on station even farther above, capable of reigning down Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles if they became desperate. Andy occasionally found himself glancing skyward, but he could no more prove the existence of satellites than he could prove the existence of God. Still, he hoped that all the conspiracy theorists and evangelists were right and there was something watching over them other than the hot desert sun.

* * *

That night Andy dreamed of his childhood. Tarzan cavorted through the trees high above a forest, where he swung from vine to vine. Beneath him the earth was rent in much the same manner as it was in Sonora. But where in Sonora the darkness hid everything from the visible eye, Tarzan’s gaze pierced the shadow, revealing converging armies of Ant Men, Golden Lions, Leopard Men, Snake People and Winged Invaders, just as they’d appeared on the covers of his old, cherished paperbacks.

These creatures, first introduced to Andy from Edgar Rice Burroughs books and the unauthorized Barton Werper volumes, glittered in the darkness as they stared back at their Lord of the Jungle nemesis. But fear found home in their eyes. Tarzan was too much for them. He’d done battle with each of their ilk and cast them back into the dusty confines of their paperback prisons long ago.

Andy turned in his sleep and groaned happily, safe with the knowledge that as long as Tarzan watched over them, he’d be safe.

Then he awoke to screams.

He twisted free from his blanket and crashed from his upper bunk six feet to the concrete floor. The claxons and emergency lights had sent everyone into frenzy. He scrambled to his feet, grabbed his boots, and struggled into them as he tried to hop and run at the same time. The door to the bunker had been left open to let in the breeze. As he approached it, he bumped into the guy in front of him who’d stopped to stare at the sky.

A hundred black silhouettes shot from the Rift into the night, tracer rounds from the Vulcan cannons stabbing them as they rose. Great black insects with glowing orange wings; each was as large as a World War II Japanese Zero. Rising, falling and slashing sideways, they twisted and twirled to get away from the fusillade of angry rounds fired from the air-cooled Gatling cannons.

Transfixed by the aerial death match, everyone jumped as a Predator drone strafed the action, unleashing its payload of three Hellfire missiles that exploded in awesome tornadoes of orange, red, and green fire.

They stood for ten minutes watching the life and death struggle as the creatures tried to make their way free of the Rift. Each man wore only boots and underwear, expressions agog at a sight that only made sense to little boys with Tarzan dreams who spent their Saturday mornings watching cartoons.

While everyone’s eyes were on the creatures, Andy’s gaze rested on the darkness from whence they came. He felt the Rift watching him. The great gaping hole in the earth was like the eye of that Serbian soldier who’d held Andy’s life in his hands. The capriciousness of Andy’s existence wasn’t lost to him. He wondered if the soldier of his memory wouldn’t decide to fire, the bullet transporting through time to jerk him back to that moment where he’d die and be buried in the ditch with all the other villagers.

One minute the night was filled with unearthly screams and the sounds of battle, the next all was silent. Two Predators took off south after something, but otherwise everything was still. Sometime during the battle the claxons had been turned off but Andy hadn’t noticed until now. The desert was now eerily quiet. The only sound was the breathing of the soldiers standing in the doorway of the bunker, all in rhythm as they stared into the night.

Finally someone chuckled.

“Let’s get some sleep.”

They turned and headed back to their bunks. Andy remained motionless, unable to simply turn off what he’d seen. The others pushed by him, and as the last of them headed for slumber, Andy reached out and grabbed him.

“What was that?”

The man looked Andy in the eye and grinned. “The tarantulas exploded. No problem.”

* * *

Andy didn’t get any sleep after that.

Tarzan had returned to rule his dreams, but he was no longer the King of the Jungle. Where he had once strutted across the great branches of the forest’s ancient trees, now he skulked from shadow to shadow. It wasn’t the Leopard Men or the Ant Men that he feared, nor was it the Golden Lions or the Snake People that sent his heart racing. He was afraid of what he couldn’t see, what he couldn’t know.

A roar came from somewhere in the forest.

Tarzan crouched and peered sideways.

What was it that set him so on edge?

He squatted there for a time. When he finally moved, he was more like a monkey than a great ape.

* * *

“What the hell did he mean when he said ‘the tarantulas exploded’?”

Leon Batista looked at him and spat tobacco juice along the ground. “Where you from you don’t know tarantulas?”

“Upstate New York.”

“They no have tarantulas there?”

Andy shook his head.

Leon spat again. He said something in Spanish that was lost to the constant desert breeze.

Andy paused from checking the ignition line of the mine. He’d been to thirty-seven countries and forty states. He’d even been to Antarctica when he’d had to do an exposé on penguin rustling by Japanese fishermen. He felt the need to demonstrate his worldliness to Leon, but forced himself to hold back. He was supposed to keep his head down and his identity secret. As far as anyone was concerned, he was an Army reservist who’d survived Iraq, gotten into a fight with an off-duty cop in Phoenix, and wanted something more than a regular nine to five. He was a convenience store clerk with saving-the-world dreams.

“Tarantulas? You know... big fucking spiders?” Batista asked as if Andy were a child. He waggled the fingers of both hands like spider legs.

“Yeah. I’ve seen them.” Andy mimicked, “Big fucking spiders.”

Batista glared at him for a moment, then continued. “There are these wasps. They lay their eggs in the tarantulas. Tarantulas no move anymore, then one day poof! Tarantula explodes with baby wasps.”

Andy felt his grin slip into something akin to stupefaction. There was a wasp that laid its eggs in a tarantula? He felt his mouth moving before he could stop it. “What are these wasps called?”

Batista rolled his eyes. “Maricone. Where the fuck you been? These are tarantula wasps. Sometimes call them tarantula hawks.” Leon made flying gestures with his arms. “Big fucking spiders. Big fucking wasps.”

“Yeah,” Andy repeated, “big fucking wasps. And last night? Were those tarantula hawks?”

Leon Batista laughed and shook his head. He choked on a mouthful of tobacco juice and convulsed before he was able to spit it out.

“Last night wasps? Those were Rift wasps. Those were gigantesco. Like airplanes, no? You get bit by them, not like the real ones. You’ll walk around thinking you okay, then your stomach gets bigger and bigger and—”

Andy nodded. So if the wasps were increased in size because of the Rift, then he could only imagine how large the tarantulas had to be. He took one more look at Batista, who seemed to be reading his thoughts.

“Big fucking spiders.” The man nodded and waggled his arms. “Bigger than me. Bigger than you. Like Cadillac.”

Andy closed his eyes.

Spiders the size of Cadillacs.

Swell.

* * *

A sort of manic normalcy prevailed after that, if you can call regular sorties of giant tarantula wasps into the night sky normal. For someplace like Upstate New York, it would have raised an eyebrow. But for those around the Rift, a few wasps here and there were the least of their worries.

Every other night the wasps would escape containment and try and fight their way to freedom. And every other night, the combined might of the Rift battalion would hurl them back whence they came. During the battles, mine tenders like Batista and Andy would ensconce themselves in the emergency bunker, well away from the action. The first night they’d been too afraid to leave their sleeping bunkers. That one transgression was allowed. But since then, they’d always hot-footed it to the emergency bunker. It was bigger anyway. They quickly became inured to the shrieks and sounds of combat. Great games of spades, old Doug Clegg novels, and even sleep took up their nights as they waited for the battalion’s inevitable victory.

Then one day visitors came. When they heard the claxons sounded and made their way to the emergency bunker, they found it occupied by thirty-seven dusty Mexicans who’d gotten lost on their way to the border — Douglas, Arizona, and red, white and blue freedom.

Wide-eyed and certainly wishing they’d never left their homes, the Mexicans huddled together against one wall. Beside them were piles of belongings, a mish-mash of things they thought they’d need, but nothing even remotely capable of protecting them against what the Rift had to offer. Several shuddered beneath a blanket. An old man and woman clutched each other, faces buried in each other’s shoulders, eyes crammed shut. A child cried, his head pressed against the lap of his mother.

“What the hell?” asked one of the other mine tenders.

“When did the wetbacks move in?” Batista asked.

Andy didn’t miss the irony of his friend using the pejorative. “Technically, they aren’t wetbacks.”

Batista frowned.

“I mean, they haven’t crossed any rivers yet.”  Andy shrugged. “Can’t be wetbacks if they don’t get wet.”

Batista gave him a look. “You think too much, maricone.”

The others spread out and found places to play cards, read or snooze. A few of them watched the new guests, but with only cursory interest.

Andy and Batista found an empty space on the floor. They broke out a deck of cards and began a game of gin rummy. But it became obvious after the first hand that Batista was just going through the motions. His eyes were on one of the girls huddled next to an older man with milky eyes and a missing ear. A sly, hungry look had crept onto Batista’s face and taken control.

The girl couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Her dark eyes and skin told of Indian ancestry. Her long hair had once been luxurious, but was now more the color of dirt than lustrous black. The hair was twisted and bunched beneath an L.A. Dodgers baseball cap. Her legs were drawn beneath her. Her hands rested on the old man’s leg.

She reminded Andy of a girl who’d lived near him at Fort Drum. He’d never known her name, but the memory of her had made him who he was to this day.

Andy’s father hadn’t been in the Army, but the girl’s father had. He was assigned to the 10th Mountain Division. He was never home, always playing war games, or deployed to some far-flung country. When he was in town, she used to sit on the front stoop of their townhouse, waiting from him to come home. Her eyes were like the eyes of the Mexican girl: wide brown pools where hope shimmered above a surface-tension of fear.

Andy had been drawn to those eyes when he passed on his way home from school. He was sixteen and she was thirteen, and he wanted to stop and reach out to help her. “Me Tarzan. You Jane,” he’d said in his mind, every time he’d passed. Pounding his chest, he’d let out the famous Tarzan call, grab her by the waist and swing off into the trees like Johnny Weissmuller had done so many times. They’d live a life free of fear, high above the dangerous animals far below. They’d have the monkeys to entertain them and the apes to protect them. Living would be good. Life would be grand.

But not really.

Tarzan, that great mythical man who was the source of all courage, wasn’t real. He existed in the pages of paperback pulps, in comic books, in television and movies, and in the minds of every boy who’d sat down and plumbed the depths of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ imagination.

Andy knew this because of the doctors he’d been forced to see.

They asked him Do you really think you’re Tarzan?

Why did you do that to her?

What were you planning to do to her? And a hundred more questions, each as inane and embarrassing as the others. Why had he done what he had? What had set him off, making him believe that he could be Tarzan?

He’d run after it had happened.

An hour later the doorbell had rung. He’d pressed his ear to the closed door of his room and heard most of the conversations that had taken place. When it came time for his mother to confront him, he was sitting on the bed, prepared for the embarrassment. But the embarrassment never came. They hadn’t understood. What had been his vain inglorious attempt to save the girl had been misconstrued as some sort of attack.

“Why’d you scream at her? Why’d you grab her like that?” his mother had asked.

“But I didn’t—”

She cut him off with a chop of her hand. “Don’t lie to me. I just talked to that poor girl’s father. I convinced him not to call the police.”

“The police...?”

“He said you need help.” His mother hugged herself as tears began to slide down her cheeks. “I just don’t understand what happened.”

“Mom. I didn’t do anything.” He spoke quickly, knowing that he had one slim chance to diffuse the situation. “All I did was be Tarzan. I gave the jungle yell, I beat my chest and I tried to rescue her. I wasn’t attacking her, I was...”

His mother’s shoulders began to shake as she cried harder. Andy had stood and watched as the reality of his behavior and the insanity of it slipped past his excuse. What had he done? Why had he pretended to be Tarzan? What had come over him?

He’d gone to see some shrinks after that. He’d told his story, and they’d said that it was his father’s fault for not being there. They’d told his mother it was a combination of an active imagination and father issues. She thanked them, threw away all of Andy’s Tarzan books, and made him take the mind-numbing pills they’d prescribed.

It was all in his mind.

Finally they’d made him admit that ‘Tarzan doesn’t live here anymore’, as if saying it made it true.

Less than a year later, the girl’s dad was arrested for molesting her. Andy had been forced to walk home from school a different way since the day he’d scared the girl, but the day after the arrest, he couldn’t help himself. His curiosity had overruled the court order. He’d found the house vacant. The door hung open. Trash and clothes had been scattered as if someone had left in a hurry.

The emptiness pulled him inside. He went from room to room. Living room. Dining room. In the kitchen, a box of Fruit Loops had been spilled and was now a feast for roaches. Upstairs he found three bedrooms. It didn’t take but a second to figure out that the one with the balloons painted on the wall belonged to the little girl. Stepping inside the room, he’d stood there, trying to soak up the environment. But he’d felt nothing. Whatever had been left of the girl was gone. The closet door gaped and he went to it. The door creaked as he’d opened it and what he saw made him stop.

A picture had been drawn about knee-high in the left corner. It looked like the figures had been rendered with crayon. Even without knowing, Andy knew who had drawn the tableau. On the faded yellow wall knelt the stick figure of a girl. Standing over her was the hulking figure of a beast, made from slashes of greens and browns and blacks. The slash beast had yellow eyes that seemed to glow in the gloom of the closet. But the figure that most drew Andy was high above them. Hanging from what could only be a vine dangling from a branch was the figure of a man. His face was round, his eyes were tiny circles and his mouth was a larger wavy circle.

She’d known!

She’d understood!

Even though his mother and the shrinks and everyone else had thought he was crazy, this girl had known that all Andy had wanted to do was to save her — her Tarzan to his Jane.

He looked once again at the kneeling figure. Her head was round too. Her mouth was a frown. Her eyes were smaller circles, and although they were devoid of any emotion, Andy saw within them that strange mixture of hope and fear that had lived in the eyes of the real girl that day he’d taken her into his arms and screamed his Tarzan yell.

Now Andy recognized it once again within this slight Mexican girl lying beside the old man. Yet somehow it wasn’t the old man that seemed predatory. The way she clutched him was too much like a teddy bear or a kid hugging base during a game of freeze tag. No, it wasn’t the old man that Andy needed to worry about. Following her gaze to its end, he found the hungry leer of Batista. Like the King of the Jungle who found the spoor of a new animal, Andy knew this wasn’t going to end well. He thought about growling at his rummy partner, but knew that the man wouldn’t understand, just like his mother and all of the other adults of his childhood had failed to understand.

Outside the jungle, no one did.

* * *

Two days later the worms came.

Just after the last sortie of tarantula wasps was hurled back into the Rift, there came a rumbling that set off sensors all around. Twice it stopped, then resumed, strong enough so that even those in the bunkers felt the trembling of the earth.

All the mine tenders got the call to stand by. The mines were detonated remotely, by controllers using satellite and UAV imagery. But in the event the mines failed to detonate, the tenders would have to wade into battle to get to the hard-wired back-up controls. It was deadly dangerous with little chance of survival. Andy never thought he’d have to perform that specific function. At least he hoped he wouldn’t.

Andy stood in the open blast door staring into the night. The Rift was lit by sweeping spotlights. The air was clear except for lingering smoke trails from where Hellfire missiles had connected to bring down the wasps.

Two figures squeezed between him and the door. One was the Mexican girl, the other was her sister. They whispered rapidly to each other and pointed to the Rift. One of the senior sergeants pushed them back. This was no place for children.

Andy felt the heat of Batista’s gaze scorch him as it followed the girl back inside. He’d tried not to say anything, but his Tarzan vibes kept getting stronger and stronger. When he looked once again at his partner, he found Batista staring at him.

“You want a piece of her too, maricone?”

Andy shook his head and tried to look away. But Batista grabbed him and spun him back around.

“I know your kind. You like to watch.”

“I—”

“Next time we hit the bunkers I’m gonna do her. You keep look out and I’ll let you watch. I know you’ll like that.”

Andy didn’t have time to respond. Just then, a one-hundred yard-long worm broke free of the soil in their sector. Its skin was a mottle of purples and reds. Hair covered its upper half, or what Andy thought was hair. Each ten-foot strand moved individually, reminding Andy more of tentacles than anything else. Claymores immediately exploded, daisy-chained to deliver a conflagration over a broad area. Tens of thousands of ball bearings ripped into the creature, chopping it in half. Great gouts of blood and flesh flew through the air. It screamed, the sound like a train using its emergency airbrakes.

Then died.

Another worm came after.

Then another.

Then another.

But Andy hardly noticed. Instead, all he could think of was how he was going to keep the girl safe from the predator he worked with. He might have to go talk to her. He looked first at Batista, then at the girl.

Me Tarzan. You Jane.

* * *

Andy had been away from his Network for six weeks. He’d had longer assignments, but had always filed interim reports, sometimes calling every day just so his bosses knew he was doing what he’d been paid to do. Working with the Rift Battalion, he hadn’t even had the opportunity to make a phone call. He couldn’t take notes, he couldn’t record his thoughts on the recorder he’d stuffed in the bottom of his bag, he couldn’t even scratch hieroglyphics in the dirt. Absolutely everything was monitored by a special team of NSA signal interceptors.

So for all intents and purposes, he’d stepped off the face of the earth. And until his tour was up, he’d remain that way. The soonest he could expect to leave was at the six month mark when they were due to rotate out.

Yet even that was the subject of speculation. The other new guys couldn’t help but wonder if they were really going to be allowed to leave. Sure, they signed non-disclosure agreements and promised to keep the Rift and its denizens a secret, but since when was the government so trustworthy as to keep its side of any bargain?

Like the Mexicans for instance.

Andy had asked why they hadn’t been sent home. The looks he’d gotten had answered the question for him. He soon discovered the Mexicans would never be allowed to leave. They’d as easily tell the secret of the Rift to the Weekly World News as the Wall Street Journal if it meant they could enter the land of plentiful shopping malls. So they were here to stay. And if history was any reference, they’d end up being assigned to the black trailers where scientists were continually trying to breakdown the monsters’ genomes.

The knowledge brought twitches to Andy’s Tarzan vibes.

The next day came and went without as much as a monstrous whisper. As did the next and the next and the next. A full week passed without incident. It was to the point where new soldiers like Andy wondered if it was all over, if they’d won. But the old timers scoffed at the idea, and with more than a little condescension, explained the idea of gestation. They predicted two more weeks of inactivity before the Rift-shit hit the fan once again.

Just a lull before the storm.

The only one who didn’t like it was Batista. He’d had eyes for nothing but the emergency bunker and the young Mexican girl who waited inside. Until the monsters returned, he wouldn’t even be allowed to get close to her. So it was that every day when they were checking the mine controls and cabling, that he complained and griped and groaned. He’d wax graphically about what his plans were for the young girl. He’d detail the things he’d do. He’d wonder philosophically if she’d like him for what he did, perhaps even love him and beg for more.

Never once did he think that his partner thought otherwise, because Andy remained silent through it all. Andy prayed that it was all talk. In his mind, he might have been Tarzan, but intellectually he understood the difference between pretend and reality. When it came down to it, Batista was a ruthless killer and Andy only pretended to be one. If one were to believe his coworkers, then he was nothing but a coward afraid to do anything but lay huddled in a ditch, begging the universe not to kill him. If that was true, then what good would he be to the girl?

But things were looking up for Batista. Three days short of two weeks, he found his chance. A Hurricane had jumped the Baja Peninsula and was eating its way up the Sea of Cortez. In a divinely poetic set of circumstances, the storm was dubbed Hurricane Edgar.

As Batista voiced his plan, all Andy could think of was how he could get the courage to foil it. Looking at the bunkers with the wind picking up, Andy finally voiced the words that had been rattling around his mind for his whole life.

“Me Tarzan. You Jane,” he whispered.

And the words steeled him for what he’d have to do.

* * *

The UAVs were grounded. The satellites were blind. Winds were cresting at fifty miles an hour with gusts past seventy. Rain poured from a dark, hollow sky until the ground could take no more. The Hurricane had slammed ashore at 2A.M., annihilating shoreline homes, small boats and jetties in Puerto Peñasco. The storm didn’t tarry. With an angry fury, the hurricane grew legs and moved inland. Those not sane enough to stay inside found that Edgar was making life a wet, windy, miserable hell as it shuffled laconically across the land.

Batista made his move at 3A.M. Wearing a camouflage rain jacket, he slipped out of their bunker and into the storm.

Andy noted the sidearm Batista carried and strapped on his own before following. He waited a few moments, then cracked the door and slid into the night. Through the wind and rain he could just make out Batista running hunched over towards the emergency bunker where the Mexicans were being held. To Andy’s right was the minefield. Beyond that gaped the blackness of the Rift.

Andy hunched low and gave chase.

Running was miserable. Every third step he’d slip and fight for balance. The desert sand was already soaked with water. What remained slid away along paths of least resistance. The water, likewise, found its way into his cloak and seeped down his back and into the top of his pants.

But he kept on. The look of his neighbor and the Mexican girl in the bunker merged into one impossibly imploring gaze that pulled him forward through the squall. He fell twice more, once face first, the slick, cold earth coating his teeth.

Andy was so miserable with the weather that he was almost upon Batista before he noticed the man had stopped. Andy windmilled his arms, skidded half a dozen feet then managed to crash hard on his rump. The sound of his movements was lost to the stormy din. He quickly rolled over and tried to merge with the earth. Not ten feet ahead of him was Batista doing the same thing. From beneath their hooded brows they watched a file of black clad men marching towards the bunkers. Andy instinctively reached down to check his sidearm was still there.

The door to the bunker opened, the men went inside, then it closed behind them.

Andy waited.

So did Batista.

It seemed like an hour, but was probably only a few minutes. To keep from screaming, Andy recited the titles of the fifty-seven Tarzan episodes starring Ron Ely. He got stuck twice in the middle of the second season, but finally remembered the episode that had been troubling him — Creeping Giants.

Batista leaped to his feet and broke into a run.

Andy had become part of the soil, afraid to move lest he’d be seen. His vantage couldn’t be better, however. This he told himself to make his cowardice reasonable.

Batista reached the side of the bunker. He pulled his pistol and held it ready. As he slid into the shadows on the other side of the door, he pulled a knife out as well. Then he blended into darkness.

They didn’t have long to wait. Soon, the black-clad men exited the bunker, each with a Mexican in tow. Andy strained to see if the girl was one of them, but he couldn’t make out any faces through the rain and distance. He didn’t have to. If the girl had been taken, Batista would have made his move. Instead, he waited until the group was halfway back to their trailers before turning and opening the door.

Batista probably hadn’t counted on one tarrying.

He met a black-clad man face to face in the doorway.

Andy watched as Batista raised his knife and brought it down in one quick move. The other man blocked it by making an X with is arms. Then he grabbed Batista’s wrist and pulled him to the ground. The men rolled in the mud as each scrambled for traction.

Andy stood. He was torn by his fear and the idea that this might be his only chance. He took two steps, but was almost knocked down by a gust of wind. Rain stung his face.

Just then three small figures darted out of the bunker door and into the night. Batista was still struggling with the other man, and wasn’t able to stop them. Andy squinted through the gloom and spied one who had the shape of his Jane-girl running straight for the minefield. What sold him was that she also wore a baseball cap. Gritting his teeth, he took off at a run.

He had the angle on her, but she was fleeter of foot. He had to stop her before she entered the minefield. Once she tripped one of the monitors, there’d be no chance to save her. He poured on all the speed he could muster. He was almost to her when he realized he’d never make it. He opened his mouth to call to her but didn’t know her name. His only hope was to get her attention, so he used the only name he knew.

“Jane!” he screamed.

She slowed as she turned to look at him. She had the same Meso-American complexion and the same baseball cap, but it wasn’t her.

His heart sank. Still, he couldn’t let this girl die.

“Stop! Minefield!” he cried and pointed in front of her.

She caught some semblance of his meaning, slowed and finally stopped. She stood like a deer, ready to bolt, watching his feet and hands. He took a step toward her and she took a step back. She glanced around for a way to escape.

Andy put his hands out for her to stay where she was. Just as he gave her a warm smile, she was plucked from the earth into the sky.

“No!” Andy screamed.

A tarantula wasp had her in its grip a hundred feet off the ground. This close it was bigger than Andy had thought. Easily as big as a Cadillac, its shiny black body and orange wings glistened in the wet stormy gloom. It flew a few dozen feet away then dropped her to the ground. Andy felt, rather than heard the girl’s back snap. The wasp hovered for a second, then fell to its prey, stinger first, piercing the girl’s abdomen. Her mouth opened into an impossibly wide scream, but nothing came out. As Andy watched, several eggs pushed their way through the thin stinger and into the girl’s stomach. He thought he was going to be sick.

But then he noticed that the wasp had landed three rows into the minefield. Andy wondered what was taking so long. The girl’s back arched. Her hands reached into the air. Then the scene disappeared in a massive explosion as several Claymores fired their deadly cannonade. The ball bearings ripped through the wasp and girl with ease, adding a crimson mist to the gusting winds.

Andy turned and wretched into the mud.

Then he heard a scream.

Batista stood over a slender figure about fifty yards away. His hulking form reminded Andy of the slash monster in the neighbor-girl’s closet. A rage descended upon him that he’d never felt before. He no longer cared about his own safety. All he cared about was the girl.

Andy broke into a loping run. He pulled his pistol from the holster. From his mouth came the Tarzan yell that Johnny Weissmuller had made famous the world over, copied by kids from Chicago to China. But Andy was no longer a kid. He wasn’t even a man any longer. Finally, amidst Hurricane Edgar and the death of the girl at the hands of the giant wasp, he’d become that being he’d spent his whole life denying. He was the King of the Jungle, imbued with savage strength and animal instinct. His need to save superseded his desire to survive. He’d finally become that man Tarzan could be.

Batista heard him and turned towards the sound. The smile on his face faltered as he spied Andy rushing towards him.

Andy didn’t give him a chance to make a move. He raised his pistol and fired three times. At least one of the rounds hit, knocking Batista to the ground.

Then all hell broke loose.

From behind him, the Vulcan cannons opened fire. The gunners couldn’t have been able to see, so they must have been firing blindly. Mines were exploding all over the place. The signature explosions of Hellfire missiles accentuated the mines with their deeper concussive blasts.

Andy felt something coming towards him and dove for the earth. A wasp swooped past him, foiled by his instinctive maneuver. Andy rolled to his back, and took aim with the pistol. He fired four times as the wasp swooped and came back towards him. Each round found a home on the underside of the shiny black carapace. He managed to roll away at the last moment as the wasp crashed dead to the earth.

Clawing his way to his feet, Andy ran the rest of the way to the girl. He fell to his knees beside her. He felt her shoulders and her head to make sure she was okay. She stared at him in terror.

“It’s okay, Jane. Everything’s going to be okay.”

He smoothed her hair. Her expression softened a moment, then exploded into a preternatural scream.

Before he could turn, Andy felt himself buffeted by half-a-dozen blows on his back. He fell hard to the ground, his breath gone. Then something bit his leg. He kicked out and managed to free himself.

He rolled to his back and brought his pistol to bear. But what he saw froze him in place. Even his scream locked in his throat, blocking his breath.

Covered entirely in black and brown bristly hair, the tarantula stood ten feet tall. Its legs arched from the ground to a body with sections the size of VW Bugs. Its front two legs were poised directly above him. Andy drew his attention from the multifaceted eyes to the tips of the spiders fangs, poised to pierce his chest.

Finally his scream tore loose.

He fired the remaining bullets from his gun into the giant spider, but it had no effect.

Andy scrambled backwards.

The tarantula followed.

Out of the corner of his eye, Andy saw that the girl was stock still. Good — if she moved it might draw the monster’s attention.

He scrambled backwards again and threw his gun into the face of the creature.

The spider stopped. It shuddered once, then twice, then shuddered for a long time.

Andy scrambled to his feet just in time to get out from beneath the giant spider as it fell. He stood shakily. The girl ran towards him and threw her arms around him.

They both watched as the tarantula shuddered once more and then died. Who would have thought that he could have killed it so easily?

But then they heard buzzing coming from the spider’s back. Andy and the girl backed away. Horror dawned in Andy’s mind. Was it going to...?

A hand reached out and grabbed his ankle, pulling him off his feet. Batista! As he fell, the back of the tarantula exploded open and three wasps, each the length of a broom, clawed their way free. They appeared hungry and eager and mean.

The girl was transfixed.

Andy tried to scream, but a hand clamped around his throat.

“Fucking Tarzan puta!” Batista growled as he climbed on top of Andy. He clamped his other hand around Andy’s throat and began to throttle him. “Who the hell do you think you are to try and stop me?” Blood foamed at the corners of Batista’s mouth.

Andy struggled to break free, but no matter his newfound Tarzan desires, he couldn’t remove the other man’s iron grip from around his neck. He felt his vision dimming as Batista cursed him.

The hand suddenly relaxed. Light went out of Batista’s eyes. Abruptly his chest blossomed a long thin stinger. Andy watched, unable to move as a golf ball-sized egg pushed down the length of the stinger and squirted free of the end. It landed on his chest then rolled to the ground.

Andy screamed and heaved Batista backwards until they both fell, crushing the baby wasp to the ground.

Looking toward the girl, Andy felt his universe implode. Something bestial came over him.

He barely remembered breaking off the stinger from Batista’s chest and rushing over to the other baby wasp that had its own stinger deep inside Jane.

He barely remembered stabbing the giant insect with its brother’s stinger until it fell dead beside the girl.

He barely remembered taking her into his arms and heading away from the Rift, what was left of his battalion, and the miserable mess that Batista had left.

All he knew was that when he came to, he was carrying her, it was daylight, and he was past exhaustion.

* * *

The desert was nothing like he imagined. There were no sand dunes. No camels. No pyramids. Nothing to show the timeless mythic quality of the deserts he’d seen on television and the movies growing up. Nothing at all like he’d imagined from reading The Lion Man.

Just as Tarzan had been bringing a jungle cure for malaria to Jane in the famous desert Tarzan book, so was Andy taking his Jane to find a cure for the thing gestating inside of her. Somewhere in the distance over the border was a hospital. He hoped it was close, because her stomach had already begun to extend. He only prayed that he wouldn’t be too late.

She whimpered as he stumbled then caught himself.

He grunted and thumped his chest with his free hand. “Me Tarzan. You Jane,” he said.

Then he adjusted her weight against his back. He felt something move in her stomach. She whimpered. He had Batista’s knife. If need be, he’d use it. He thought about giving a Tarzan yell, but he hadn’t the strength. He just trudged on.

War Stories

James A. Moore

My grandfather was a good man. He raised his family well, and he raised my mother in a lifestyle that left her nurturing and caring. She did the same for me. But he and I had a special connection when he was alive, something my mother never knew about, and, if I have my way, never will.

He and I had both fought in wars on foreign soil. He fought in the Second World War and in Korea. I fought in Vietnam. We had both seen more than our share of combat, and we were both left scarred by what we’d been through. It’s hardly an exclusive club, even in this day and age, but it was definitely a connection.

Before I went to Vietnam he and I were not really very close. He’d show up, I’d spend the day with him and the family, and he’d leave. When I was very young, he’d tell me a few anecdotes about his time in the service, but he would never tell me about any of the combat he’d been through, and he would stop speaking of them if I came into the room.

He tried to shelter me from the horrors of war, and I guess a part of me just might have resented that. What kid growing up a baby boomer didn’t want to at least try to imagine what it must have been like to storm the beach at Normandy? Hell, half the movies made when I was growing up were about kicking Nazi butt. I almost felt that such stories were my due. So, yes, I suppose I did resent the loss of heroic tales that so many kids had. But I also understood that he didn’t like to speak of the wars, and I knew that my mother was glad not to have to listen to the tales. Both her husband and her youngest brother had died in Korea, fighting over ideals that meant a lot less when they cost a family member or two. As frustrated as I was by the lack of adventure tales from a man I knew had actually seen heavy combat, she was grateful, so I understood his reluctance. I just wasn’t thrilled by it.

We never spoke about his time in the wars, my grandfather and I, until after I came back from ’Nam. And when we did finally talk of the matter, it was in subdued tones.

I got home in ’69. They told me I could leave, that my term was done, and I went from the bloodstained rice paddies to the cool early October evenings of the family farm in Colorado. At least my body did. Harvest wasn’t really a problem. We lived on a dairy farm. So instead of losing myself in the frantic work of gathering the fall crops, I did what so many others did after they came back, I lost myself in resentment and cold, bitter rage. Every time I closed my eyes I found a different sight to haunt me. Sometimes it was walking through the steaming jungles, sometimes it was running for dear life from artillery fire that would have completely destroyed my little home town of Summitville, and praying the trees between me and the shells would be enough to save my ass again. They were, though only just.

Plenty of my friends and fellow soldiers died badly in that war and some of them did it only a few feet away from me. All of those movies I’d been weaned on hadn’t begun to prepare me for dealing with the madness. Surely they never said a thing about hostility on the home front when I came back. Just as often I saw the angry faces of strangers calling me hideous names when I stepped back on home soil. The names they called me too often reflected my own opinion of myself at the time.

Now and then, mostly when I closed my eyes, I got a nice flash back of growing up in Summitville. I got glimpses of Antoinette Sanderson’s incredible green eyes when we shared out first kiss or even a sight of her perfect breast the one time I’d seen it. I got a look at the Halloween Festival in Town Square, and remembered the fun we all had building the scarecrows that stood like sentinels around the festivities. But those were rare, just enough to keep me sane. Mostly I saw the dead and the dying in rivers of blood. It was ‘kill or be killed’ over there, as my sergeant was fond of saying, and I did far too much killing to ever be happy about having survived.

But I did discover a way to numb the pain for a while, a way to crush the overwhelming guilt of surviving when so many people who were braver or just plain more innocent than me died in screaming increments. I discovered booze. Beer was my preference and Budweiser the drink of choice. I didn’t sip and savor the beer I consumed. I drank it fast, hoping for numbness from the darkness I felt growing inside of me.

I never quite made it to alcoholic, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

My grandfather put a stop to that nonsense before it could go too far. I was sitting out on the porch about two weeks after I got home when he decided it was time to set me straight. Two weeks, and already all of my dreams had been shattered. Toni Sanderson was off in college, and even though I didn’t speak to her, it was made very clear to me that she was seeing someone else and it was serious. I’d almost managed to figure that part out anyway; the letters, which were so frequent when I’d first left for the war, were less common and often seemed almost too friendly. I could read between the lines as well as anyone else. She sent the last few either out of a misplaced sense of guilt or out of a need to keep me from feeling lower than I already did. I couldn’t even see her to put what was left of our relationship to rest with a proper funeral. Not unless I felt like driving to Denver, and I was afraid to do that because one of the faces I’d seen calling names when I got off that damned plane and looked around had looked an awful lot like Toni’s. If I’d found out she had been one of the protesters, it would have been too much for me. I was wise enough to know that much at least.

No girl waiting for me when I got back, not like in the pictures in Time and Life magazines. No victory parades, not even a hero’s welcome. I just stepped back into my life as best I could. I wasn’t very good at it, either; I started drinking and taking out my frustrations on the people closest to me. I roared at my mother when everything wasn’t just so, and it was seldom just so, you may rest assured. I glowered at my grandfather, feeling that he should have prepared me better for the madness of war, though the thought was never that well cemented in my head at the time. I ignored the rest of Summitville. They were not worth my time: they had not welcomed me back with open arms, but merely nodded and went on their way, embarrassed I suppose, to have a soldier come back intact.

So beer became my one true friend and I left the rest of the world to fend for itself.

My grandfather would have none of it. As I watched the sun do its slow descent toward Lake Overtree, he moved arthritically over to the chair next to mine and settled himself in. It took a while; though he walked very well on his fake leg, sitting and standing were still a challenge. I did my best to ignore him. He lit a Camel, blowing the smoke out with a satisfied gust of wind past his dentures, and then reached down next to me to take one of my beers. I wasn’t feeling too greedy just then, so I let him.

He finished two cigarettes and two more beers while the sun tried to hide behind the lake and mountains. It was properly twilight before he started speaking. “Reckon you’re feeling a mite sorry for yourself.” I looked his way. He hadn’t called me Eddie since I was old enough to grow peach fuzz on my chin.

“Maybe I am, Grampa. Maybe I’m just trying to get my balance back.” Oh, it was just the right sort of pop psychology my grandfather could understand. I’d picked up the term from him, after all. He most often used it to refer to someone who was in mourning for a close family relative. “Emma needs to get her balance back is all,” he’d say when someone made a comment about how poorly she was faring after her husband died in a bad car wreck. “She’s had a rough time, and it ain’t always an easy thing to start standing up again.”

He lit another Camel from the butt of the third, and cupped his hand around the cherry. He’d picked up that habit during WWII and had never stopped hiding that small source of light from potential snipers. “Yeah, I can see how you might need to. Everything I’ve heard says it’s a nasty conflict over there. They can call it a ‘police action’ all they want to, but you and I know better, don’t we?”

I nodded my agreement. Last I’d checked, police arrested people and locked them away for doing wrong; they didn’t drop bombs the size of VW Bugs on their houses and burn the forests away with Napalm. I took one of his cigarettes as he grabbed another of my beers. I was trying to quit, but it wasn’t easy. All of my willpower went to not blowing my top whenever my mother would look at me with a puzzled expression. She hadn’t been there. She couldn’t possibly understand what I’d been through. I had to remind myself of that fact everyday. She got that puzzled look a lot. It was her way of asking what was wrong without actually saying the words.

“It’s been two weeks, Eddie, and you aren’t getting calmer. You’re just getting quieter. I figure you need to get it off your chest before it crushes you.”

I knew what he was talking about, but I just didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know how to look at another person, let alone my grandfather, and explain how much I’d done, or how much I’d seen. I think he knew that, too.

He opened my beer with the church key he kept in his pocket and he took a long pull. “Maybe I should go first, just to break the ice?”

I blinked at that. He had never told me a war tale and I fully expected he never would. I guess then was when I realized that I had become a part of a rather exclusive club. ‘The Survivors’ Club. Off in the distance, I could hear my mother starting to prepare dinner. The radio was playing and I suspect she couldn’t hear a word we said to each other. That was maybe for the best.

He told me about Normandy Beach and the sheer volume of death and artillery that day. I shivered as I listened. The tale was very familiar to me, even if the location was different. I told him about the Ho Chi Minh Trail and he listened in silence. We drank and smoked some more, toasting the names and memories of people we’d known that never made it back from their fights on foreign soil. By the time I’d finished, we were both buzzing and the sun had set.

My mother finished setting the table for dinner, but she never called. I suspect my grandfather had warned her about what he was going to do. I suspect she understood well enough to know that supper could wait for a while.

We traded tales of combat and bloodshed, as I imagine many veterans have done over the years. Some were stories that were almost happy little slices of humor in the middle of Hell. Most were not.

My mind was tired and my tear ducts were sore; I had done a lot of crying, though the tears were silent ones. Finally, when I was almost ready to call it a night, my grandfather told me his last war story. Even now, so long after it happened and after it was told, it still gives me shivers.

We had moved on to the worst of the things we had seen and the worst we had done, pulling up the dregs of our experiences and showing them to each other with a morbid sort of fascination. I let him know what I and the rest of my squad had done in a little village where we suspected the locals were on the side of the enemy. He didn’t look at me differently when I was done and I can never put into words how grateful I am for that simple fact.

He reached for his cigarettes again, and discovered the pack was empty. He reached for another beer and learned that they too were all gone. He shrugged and settled himself more comfortably in the wicker chair. “I reckon I should tell you about the Château,” he said. And in his voice I heard a dread that made even Normandy seem like a pleasant story.

I looked over at him, and saw him close those bright old eyes of his. His face looked as strained as it had when my grandmother died and when he heard about my father. I swallowed the fear I felt when I saw that look, and I nodded in the dark. “I guess maybe you should,” I said, in a voice I barely recognized as my own.

“I wasn’t any older than you are now; might have been a year or two younger. I know I’d just barely gotten through basic training when I got over to France. It wasn’t like I’d expected at all. There were places where the war had made its mark, to be certain, but there were places where you’d have never known anyone was capable of even picking a fight. I’d seen a bit of both.”

He looked at me and his mouth smiled tightly, though his eyes stayed just as dark and stormy. “Met me a few fine women when I was over there, too. Some of them were very grateful to see a bunch of Yankees with supplies. But that ain’t what this here story’s about, is it?

“We weren’t all that far from Paris. We’d been in a few skirmishes and were lucky enough to come out of them with our hides intact. Mostly we managed to survive, but we weren’t winning very much. There were only a handful of us to begin with. Jenkins was the Sergeant, and he was the highest-ranking soldier we had left at the time. Lieutenant Price had gotten himself killed only two days before, and we were supposed to be heading back to the field command. Only problem was, we couldn’t figure out where we were trying to go. When Price died, he wasn’t alone. Billy Sinclair was on radio duty at the time and he and the radio both got themselves blown to pieces. We weren’t exactly enthusiastic about the way our week had been going, if you can catch my meaning.”

He stopped for a minute and without a word went back into the house. He came back out with more smokes but left the beer behind. “There were only five of us left: Jenkins, myself, Toby Baker, you’d have liked him, Eddie, he was a little butterball from Ohio, but he had a great laugh and he shared it a lot. After him there was Emit Springer from New York and there was one last fella, a man named Jon Crowley. Where he was from, I couldn’t begin to tell you and I hope to never find out. In the middle of this entire snafu, Crowley was the only one of us who wasn’t sweating bullets. He was as calm as a man could be, and normally about three times happier than he had any reason to be. He wasn’t even part of our squad. He was just a straggler we’d sort of adopted along the way.

“Came out of the west right after everything went sour, and started walking in the same direction as us. Crowley was just as happy as a clam to run across us, and it wasn’t long before we invited him to join in on our march. We were on the same side, and he had better food than the rest of us combined. He’d run across a nice supply of sausages and bread the day before.”

Grandpa looked me straight in the face then, his eyes lit only by the glow of the ember he cupped in his hand. “Eddie, no man before or since has ever scared the hell out of me the way he did. There was something about him that just wasn’t right. He didn’t scare me all the time, only when he looked directly at me, or talked to me… or smiled that nasty, evil grin of his. And Eddie, he smiled a lot. The worse things looked, the more he seemed to enjoy himself.

“He wasn’t right, is what I’m saying. There was something about Crowley that made me want to hide under the sheets or call for my mother.” He cleared his throat, maybe afraid I didn’t know what he meant, but I did. “Anyhow,” he continued gruffly. “There were five of us left and most of what we had on us had been almost useless. Maybe we had a hundred rounds left all told, and were as lost as we could be. Knowing that Paris was close by and getting there isn’t the same thing. We had one advantage going for us… we were the good guys in the eyes of most the locals. There were a few who maybe didn’t mind the Nazis so much, or maybe had a deal going to report anything unusual, like a small group of American soldiers, but we hadn’t run across any.

“It was only a matter of time before we could work everything out and be on our way safely. At least, that’s what we kept telling ourselves and that’s what Jenkins kept telling us too. Lord, but we wanted to believe him.

“Not long after the sun had set, we got to moving ourselves from the field where we’d spent the day. We had to move at night because the Nazis sure as hell weren’t going to ask us how we were before they started shooting. You know what I mean, I suspect.”

I nodded my agreement. There were times when maybe the Viet Cong were too tired to look for us and times when we were too tired to look for them, and then there were times when we hunted each other like hounds with a fresh blood trail to follow. Maybe it was the phase of the moon or maybe it was just a vibe you picked up after a while, but sometimes you could tell when something was going to go poorly. You could tell when the enemy was in a killing mood.

“We’d only gone a couple of miles, tops, when we heard the convoy coming. Crowley heard them first, and in the darkness, with the moon above, I could see his smile when he noticed the sounds of vehicles rumbling past. His teeth flashed like lightning and his voice was amused when he spoke. ‘I’m guessing that those aren’t the good guys, fellas. I think we might want to make ourselves scarce.’

“He was right. The trail of German trucks that came past our little hiding place by the side of the road were huge. If it was less than thirty vehicles all told, you could have fooled me. Most of us kept our heads down, but Crowley laid in that trench next to the road and watched like a kid at a parade as every one of those loaded machines swept past us. How he managed to not get spotted is something I’ve never figured out.

“When the last one was gone and the dust from their passage had settled, Crowley slid down with his back to the road and smiled from ear to ear. ‘That’s a lot of security going up the road. I wonder what they’re hiding.’ I reckoned we could do without finding out until we got reinforcements, and I know everyone else agreed with me, but Crowley lost his smile when I made that comment. I think I liked him better with the smile right then. ‘We’re lost, Finch. Don’t you figure maybe we should find out what those Jerrys are up to before it can come back to haunt us?’

“I asked him what he meant and he shook his head, a look on his face that said he felt like maybe I was a bug, and one he wouldn’t mind squashing under his foot. ‘They weren’t just trucks, old boy.’ He looked at me as he spoke and I had to look away. I figured if I’d kept staring I was likely to wet my pants. ‘All of those trucks had SS soldiers on them. They were hiding something, maybe something big.

“I hated him right then. I hated him because I knew he was serious, and I knew he was right. The Allies had just started making ground in France and, if the Nazis had something big planned, we had to let someone know as soon as possible. There were a few groans, but no real protests. We all knew what we were getting into when we volunteered for the war, but it seemed a little odd to me that Jenkins didn’t even try to take command. He just let Crowley lead the way.

“I’ll say this for the French; they know how to make a road accessible. I’ll also say I wish we could have taken the roads that night, but that wasn’t an option. Instead of taking the easiest route, we took the safest route and that meant a lot of climbing and hauling our meager supplies over some damned ugly surfaces. Springer, the boy from New York, had the worst time of it. He kept trying to get where he needed to be and falling, sliding halfway down the hills. He never was very graceful as I recall, but he was damned strong.

“There was one point when we were climbing up the side of a cliff that seemed to go on for miles. Oh, I reckon it wasn’t much more than a few hundred feet, nothing we hadn’t at least learned how to do in basic training, but it was dark and the ground was wet with dew and it was maybe the most scared I’ve ever been when I wasn’t looking at someone who was trying to blow my head off my shoulders. The only ones who made it look easy were Toby and Crowley.

“Well, we were doing our best to get up there, and had made it most of the way, when Springer slipped and started falling. He’d have surely fallen and split his skull wide if Crowley hadn’t showed a little initiative and snatched him. I know it sounds like a lie, and I still have days when I doubt that I saw it, but as Springer started to fall, Crowley grabbed hold of him with one hand and held him in the air. Springer wet himself right then and there, and I can’t say as I blamed him for it. He opened his mouth to scream and Crowley yanked him closer, until they were face to face. I was about ten feet below them, looking up and ready to do some screaming myself because the rock that man was planted on was starting to crumble. I figured if it went, I could pretty much call my life over unless it decided to float away. From where I was standing it was a sure thing that slab of stone would crush me like a bug.

“Crowley smiled brightly as he looked Springer in the face. His mouth was wide in a grin big enough to just about reach ear to ear. ‘Make one God damned sound, boy, and I’ll let you fall. Do you understand me?’ Those were his exact words. I can still hear them and I can still hear the pleasure he got out of saying them. Springer nodded so hard I though his head was just gonna fall off. Crowley brought him even closer to his face, like he was looking deep into that New Yorker’s eyes and studying him. He had a look like that, Crowley did, and most times I figured he didn’t much like what he saw. ‘I ought to drop you right now. I ought to let you fall and break and bleed. But I won’t. You might make too much noise.’ I think Springer would have cried right then, but he was too afraid. Crowley kept a hand on his jacket the rest of the way up the cliff and I think more often than not he actually carried the Yankee rather than risk him slipping again.

“It seemed like an eternity that climb to the top, but it wasn’t much more than maybe an hour. Crowley barely even looked at the rest of us. He just headed towards that big stone building like a man on a mission from God Himself. What else could I do? Let him go in alone? I followed him, cursing under my breath the entire way.

“Well, eventually we made it to the château. It must have been a beauty in its heyday, but there really wasn’t much worth looking at anymore. The Germans had already been through the place and taken anything worth having. What they left behind was a lot of broken furniture and lots of bare stone walls. They’d been very thorough in their search of the place. I wish I knew what they’d been after. I suspect that they found it.

“Crowley led the way again. There was something about him that made you not want to argue about who was in charge. And something that inspired confidence, though I can’t for the life of me say exactly why. Maybe it was because he never seemed scared of anything. He seemed more like he was waiting to hear the punch line to a joke, or maybe waiting to tell it.

“Whatever else I can say about the man, good or bad, he knew how to move without making a sound. I felt like an elephant waltzing through tin cans in comparison. But I guess I was quiet enough walking through those dark halls. We never ran across a guard or even a mouse. I kept waiting for them around the next corner, and Crowley just kept leading me through the maze of rooms and corridors like there was nothing to worry about.”

My grandfather looked at me for a moment. His eyes glittered in the faint light of his cigarette. Almost against my will, I looked away and went inside for another beer. I brought out a full six pack, and then I stole another of his cigarettes. When he started talking again, his voice was subdued and sounded… weaker than I’d ever heard it sound before. “That should maybe have been my first hint, in hindsight. I’d heard Crowley whistle in the middle of artillery fire, like there wasn’t the least little thing to worry about. And here he was, just gliding along and leading me into a darkened building. I wouldn’t have been too surprised if he’d started singing.

“Well, sir. We finally got where we were going. We found where the Nazis were, and we saw what they were doing. But I have to be honest; to this day I don’t really understand it all.

“There was this huge chamber down in the lower levels of the château, and I figure the Krauts must have torn down all the walls they could without actually making the foundation give away, just so they could set up everything they needed.

“There were all sorts of machines lining the walls of the room we found them in. Machines like I’d never seen before and don’t want to ever see again. They made noises like you’d expect from a power plant, that deep hum that rattles your teeth and sets your hair standing on end. I hadn’t even heard it until we were almost in the room, because the walls down there were solid stone. They had a sort of operating station in the center of the place, with seven separate tables. Each of these had a man on it, or what had once been a man, at any rate.

“Not one of them much looked human anymore. They looked like nightmares. Their skin was pale and bloodless, their faces drawn and withered, like those pictures you see of mummies, but with a little moisture left to them. Each and every one of them was strapped to the table while men worked on their bodies with scalpels and other tools, the sort you don’t really expect to see used on a person. There were places where the ones they’d been working on the longest were covered in metal, like armor almost, but actually bolted into their skin. I could see the way the metal cut into their soft flesh and could see the blood that welled around the rivets they’d used to drive the metal in. I could almost imagine the pain they must have been feeling, as surely as I can imagine the Nazis used the bones of their victims as anchors for those steel plates. Just like the studs in a wall, Eddie, they’d drive those bolts into skin and muscle and then down into the bone. Worst of all, there wasn’t one of those poor bastards that weren’t awake and screaming.”

My grandfather looked at me again; his eyes seeming to wander in my general direction, unfocused until he settled on me. I have seldom seen a man look so haunted, and that was unsettling for me, especially after looking in the mirror for the last two weeks. He reached over and popped a beer, drinking half of it down before he continued.

“Every last one of them was awake, and in all my years I have never heard screams like those before, or since. They weren’t the screams of the dying, or even the seriously wounded. They were the screams of men having their souls ripped out. I don’t know just why or how the machinery managed to do such a thing, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.

“I stared down there like I was looking past the opened gates of Hell. And I watched as one of those poor bastards was dragged from his table and set down in a glass cage. Crowley stood right next to me, his eyes narrowed down to slits, his whole body tensed and waiting to see what would happen next. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, Eddie. I turned away from the sight of that torn and bloodied prisoner and I saw him smiling as he watched the Germans flip their damned switches and read whatever devices they had to understand for what they were doing.

“He was smiling. His mouth was stretched wide and he had the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen, I half expected the sonuvabitch to start laughing then and there. But he didn’t. His mouth was smiling, but it never reached his eyes. His eyes, they were dark brown as I recall, but they looked black as a coal mine at midnight right then.

“I looked back just as the glass chamber they’d put that man in was filled with a green gas. It wasn’t just green. It had specks of light in it, like fireflies seen in a heavy fog. Whatever it was they’d put in that little glass cage, it was enough to stop the tortured screaming I’d been hearing. The man’s body was barely revealed through the dark gas that floated in the area with him. I think part of me was happy for his silence, or maybe just relieved. Either way, it didn’t take long for me to get over that. I stopped feeling much of anything but a lump of fear in my throat when I saw his body start twitching.

“When the gas cleared—and by cleared I guess I mean when it had been absorbed into his flesh—I saw the bloodied, torn body lying flat on the ground in that little glass cage. And I saw the way he didn’t breathe anymore, and the way the eyes had rolled into the back of his head. I felt my blood ready to boil over at the very notion of that sort of torture just to kill a man. To actually peel back flesh and muscle, to bury screws in skin and leave a man in that state, only to gas him to death… I couldn’t believe it, and I whispered as much to Crowley as I started checking my rifle. I was gonna end this madness, and I was gonna kill me a few dozen Nazis in the process.

“Crowley looked over at me and for the first time since we’d entered the château, I could see the humor in his eyes as well as on his face. He leaned in really close to me, close enough that for a second I was afraid he was going to kiss me, and he whispered back. ‘I’m betting that thing down there might not be so easy to kill with a bullet, old son. I’m betting that maybe he would take a bullet from you as an insult and maybe decide to kill you for your trouble.’

“I had no idea what he was talking about, but he pointed toward the glass chamber and I looked in that direction. And all that rage I’d built up, all that anger I’d focused to help me with the idea of killing so many people… died away. I went from angry to terrified in about as long as it takes me to blink my eyes.

“The man they’d killed was standing, and he looked even less human than before. The skin on his body had turned green, a little lighter in color than the gas he’d been forced to breathe, but not by much. And his eyes, which I had seen roll back into his head until all I could see was the whites, looked around with pupils that glowed with that same firefly light I’d seen earlier. He looked around, and his mouth I’d seen screaming earlier closed with a snap like a bear trap slamming down on a deer’s hind leg.

“I stood there looking down at the thing in the chamber. It barely resembled the man they’d dragged in there minutes earlier. One of the men, the one wearing a Gestapo uniform under his lab coat, barked out orders at the thing in German. It stepped forward, leaving its cage and moving with all the precision of an honor guard presenting itself to the President of these United States. That poor, tortured soul knew how to follow orders, and it was ready to follow its new master for as long as it saw fit.

“Crowley tapped my shoulder, and when I looked at him, he winked. ‘You want the green guy, or do you want the soldiers? Your choice.’ I answered him by leveling my rifle and putting a bullet through the head of the Nazi who was barking orders.”

I barely heard my grandfather speak his next words. They were so faint I had to strain to make them out. He spoke them in a hurried whisper, a dirty confession that he had to make, but didn’t want to speak. “That was the first time in my life I ever enjoyed killing a man, Eddie. But before the night was done, I’d enjoyed the feeling over a dozen times.

“Jonathan Crowley, slick-sleeved soldier in the US Army, looked at me and set his rifle down next to me. He grinned like a kid at Christmas, and said to me, ‘You’re a good man, Ben Finch. Don’t let them take that away from you.’ Then, before I could even say a word, he was running. He moved like lightning down the hallway, and I thought for sure he was abandoning me to get my ass killed by a bunch of pissed off Nazis. I didn’t see as I had much choice, so I picked off the next one.

“By the time the second one hit the ground, trying to scream through the hole I’d made in his throat, the rest of them were calling out in German and one or two of them were pointing at me. The ones that had guns started shooting. I ducked for cover, and watched as two of them made for the stairwell, ready, I’m sure, to meet me head on and put a few hundred rounds into my sorry ass. I’d ask if you ever had bullets coming at you, Eddie, but I already know the answer. It was all I could do to look up from time to time from my prone position. I just knew I was a goner as soon as those soldiers made it to the top of the stairwell. I’d be a sitting duck, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.

“I was thinking about that and how full my bladder felt, when I saw the two guards who’d come up the stairs go right back down again. I could tell by the way they fell that they were dead. You can’t move like that and be alive. Next thing I saw was Jonathan Crowley walking down those steps and looking around the room. Everyone was so busy looking for me that they never even saw him come into their little torture chamber.

“It didn’t take him long to rectify that situation. He strutted right on up to the first of them and lashed out with a foot that moved so fast I barely saw it. The Kraut dropped just as sure as if I’d shot him, his mouth bleeding and teeth flying. I shot the next one over, and then I saw most of them turn toward Crowley. He should have been terrified, I know I was scared for him, but he was smiling again, looking happier than any man has a right to look during a war.

“One of them shot him from fifteen feet away, and missed. I was watching, you understand? I was watching that man shoot, and I was calling out a warning, and Crowley managed not to be there when the bullet left the muzzle of that pistol. I don’t think he actually dodged the bullet, I don’t think that’s possible, but I know he wasn’t where he had been by the time the bullet met that spot. Instead, he was right next to the man with the gun. And the man with the gun was screaming because his shot had missed and more than that, it had hit one of his comrades.

“Crowley slipped his arm around the man’s neck like he was gonna say something confidential to him, then he twisted his body and the man fell dead. Even from where I was, even over the shouting and the gunfire, I heard that man’s neck snap like a twig. Before the soldier hit the ground, Crowley used him like a springboard and leapt high into the air. He landed on another Nazi a few feet away and I reckon he killed him as soon as he hit, but just about then I looked in another direction. I looked at the green man them Germans had made. I looked that way because someone else was shouting a command in German, and that fella turned at the sound of the voice and then turned to face Crowley.”

My grandfather looked away then, rubbing his grizzled chin with one hand and staring into the darkened field where the cows grazed. He kept talking, and I kept my mouth shut. “I know I sound crazy but I swear that thing had grown bigger while I was watching Crowley. Not just the flesh on its body, but the metal as well. It looked to be almost seven feet in height. It moved right at Crowley like it was a freight train and he was a piece of rail it meant to run over. Every last one of them Krauts jumped out of its way, too. Like they knew it would be a bad idea to be between that monster and its target.

“I took the opportunity to shoot the thing in the head, opening up and squeezing four rounds into the green scalp. I saw the holes they punched into that thing, and I saw the way its head was knocked sideways by the impacts, but it never even slowed. It just moved at Crowley.

“Crowley saw it too. He saw that thing coming at him, and he looked away long enough to stare me in the eyes. His smile was as broad and wild as it could be and he winked at me and said, ‘I’ve got him, Ben. Get the soldiers.’

“Well, I figured he was a nut case, but I was also riding on a combat high right then. I did what he said, and I promised myself I’d see he got a proper funeral stateside. I took down three more Nazis then I dropped my rifle and grabbed for Crowley’s, because the third man I shot at should have died and instead he just stood there. My weapon was out of bullets.

“Right then I felt pretty damned invincible, I must say. I was above the actual combat, and I was shooting them as easy as a man could shoot a fish in a barrel. They were shooting back, and if you look closely you can still see the scar under my right eye where one of them bullets hit the wall near me and a piece of that stone flew off and punched me in the face. I felt it, but it didn’t matter. I had the advantage. I still figured I was a dead man and too dumb to know it, but it was one hell of a fine feeling right then. I reckon maybe I was a little crazy at that point. I shot four more of them, and was ready to aim again, when I saw one of the Gestapo types hit the switch on the wall.

“There were alarms going crazy a second later. The air was filled with a sound like an air-raid siren, and I was so shocked I actually dropped Crowley’s rifle. I looked around, my heart in my throat and beating way too fast, and I saw Crowley and the green thing struggling against each other. That thing was swinging its huge hands at Crowley, and Crowley was swinging right back. I saw Crowley take a fist in the gut, and I saw his body lifted off the ground by the force of the hit, but when the monster pulled its fist back, Crowley landed swinging as hard as he could.

“Like I told you before, Eddie, I hit that damned green man with four bullets from my rifle, I saw them break into its skull , and I saw at least a couple of them leave the other side of its head. I didn’t figure it could be hurt. What I hadn’t counted on was that Jon Crowley seemed to be just as tough. I saw that thing throw him halfway across the room, and I saw Crowley bounce off a wall with enough force to fly another five feet on the rebound. I figure most people would have been dead after that, or at least unconscious. Crowley came off the ground like a scalded cat and reached out to one of the soldiers standing too close to where he landed. He grabbed the man by his hair and yanked him hard enough for the man to shriek. Then Crowley grabbed the needle gun in the Nazi’s hand and fired every round he could into the monster coming at him. Somewhere along the way he got the thing where it was vulnerable. He shot out its eyes. Lord, the mess! And its blood was green too. I don’t know what they did to that poor man, but I swear I hope the secret is never discovered again.

“Any living thing that had its eyes shot out would very likely fall to the ground screaming, or probably even die, what with the brain being right behind the eyes. Not the green man. It kept coming, tilting its head and listening to every sound. It might have worked with someone else, but Crowley could move so softly you wouldn’t even know he was there if he didn’t decide to let you know. I pretty much forgot about the Germans then, and I reckon they forgot about me. We were all too intent on watching what was happening. It was sort of like seeing a car wreck… you don’t really want to slow down, but there’s this part of your mind that makes you look, if you understand what I’m saying.”

I thought about that for a second and nodded. I’d had that same compulsion a few times in ’Nam and stateside as well. Some things are just too extreme not to stop and ponder.

My grandfather lit another cigarette, and then opened another Budweiser for himself and for me. When he started again, his voice was a little calmer. “I guess maybe not all of the Krauts forgot to do something productive. That Gestapo fella called out in barking German and I guess he told that thing where Crowley was, because it turned sharply and it grabbed him by his arms. That thing pulled him close in a bear hug and squeezed him like it was trying to get juice from an orange. Crowley almost howled, and I reckon I would have too, ‘cause I could hear his ribs breaking.

“I remembered the rifle sitting in front of me as that freak dropped Crowley on the ground. I shot the man in the fancy uniform. I figured that way maybe he wouldn’t have a chance to pull any more stunts with calling out warnings. Also, I didn’t like his face. He was smarmy and full of himself.

“Well, he died in a bad way, with a bullet that clean blew out his spine just around the same height as his belly button. He screamed a lot. And I confess I enjoyed hearing him scream. I took a shot at another one, and heard that empty clicking sound. I was out of bullets. I figured it was about time to meet the Almighty and beg His forgiveness for my sins.

“I was pretty sure things couldn’t get any worse. They were about as bad as they were likely to get in my estimation. That was when I learned that the green thing standing over John Crowley wasn’t the first one the Nazis had made. I guess wherever they’d been put, they responded to the alarm. They marched into the room in perfect unison, wearing outfits that made it clear they were designed to be as scary as possible. They wore SS uniforms and the guns they carried would have looked better on a tank than in their hands.

“That was it for me. I had my limits. I was alone and I had no weapons. I got up from my spot on the ground. I was one story above all of those freaks, and I figured if I stayed I’d either end up dead or like one of those green giants. One of them German boys called frantically to the things and they stopped where they were, falling into formation. The blind one stayed where it was, and the remaining soldiers—living soldiers that is, not zombies in Nazi clothing—breathed a sigh of relief. I took one look down at Crowley, deeply saddened that I’d have to leave his body behind for them to mess with.

“And I almost fainted when he looked back up at me and winked. That grin of his stretching even wider than I’d have thought possible, like he was just having the time of his life. Last I saw of him he was rising from the ground, and he was starting to laugh.

“That laugh of his was worse than the sounds those men had made when they were being operated on. Worse even than the sight of the monster battalion walking into the room. I swear the sounds that came from that man’s mouth shaved five years off my life.

“I went ahead with my plan, and I ran like the Devil himself was on my ass, with the sound of that laughter following me all the way to the entrance of that damned place. I got lost four times trying to get out of the building. I stumbled and I fell and I got up and I ran some more, and through it all, I heard Crowley’s laughter and the screams of the Germans.

By the time I’d reached the door, I saw the rest of my squad looking at me with pale, shaky faces and eyes that were close to mad. Every one of them was hurt, and badly. Between the three of them they’d managed to get one of the green men down and incapacitated. It was still alive, but it was so shot up and torn that it couldn’t move more than to shake and flop like a fish out of water.

“I looked at them in silence for a few seconds while they shot questions at me. Then I looked at the monster they’d stopped; its clothes were torn and shredded like they’d been in a hurricane, and on its forearm I saw a series of numbers. They’d been tattooed in place. I didn’t know what that tattoo meant then, but I figured it out later, after Auschwitz. I saw the fat face, with eyes that looked around and glowed in the darkness, and I shivered. I wondered if the poor thing could still feel and could remember what it had been before the Nazis got their hands on it. That thought still gives me nightmares sometimes.

“Finally, I looked at Sarge and I told him there were more of those things inside and that Crowley was probably dead by their hands. That was enough to get us moving. We didn’t even try looking at one of the trucks the Germans had rode up in, we just started walking, taking turns helping Toby Baker, who’d had his leg crushed by that thing when it came up on them.

The next morning we were trying to hide away again and it would have been easier to do, but even from a couple of miles away we heard the explosions coming from the direction of the château. We didn’t talk about it. We just kept going. Walking when the sun fell and sleeping away the days when we could sleep.

“It was three days before another squad found us. By then we were all in bad shape. I was still doing better than most, but I think my mind was trying to shut down. It didn’t like what it had seen and I guess maybe I ain’t as strong up stairs as I’d like to imagine I am. They have fancy names for what happens in wars. Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and I’m sure a few others. Whatever the case, I was almost as numb as I hoped those green men were. Poor Toby lost his leg. The surgeons couldn’t help much after the infection set in properly.

“We told our stories to the commander just the same. We told him where we’d been and what we’d seen. He might not have believed us, except for the trophy Springer had brought along. He’d sawed at one of the monster’s hands, and taken it with him, wrapped in a blanket and tied in place with the sling of his rifle. The major took one long look at the hand and decided we weren’t as crazy as we sounded. The hand was still twitching, trying to do something about where it was. The major looked downright calm as he poured a fifth of scotch over it and set it to burning. His face was pale, his disgust obvious, and his hands shook when he struck the match.

“Two days later one of the men who’d gone up to the château told me about what they had seen, which was mostly a lot of nothing.

“He said ‘The whole building was in ruins, Finch. There wasn’t a part of the walls that wasn’t broken and burnt. We found a lot of bodies, but they were all in bad shape.’ I asked him to elaborate and he did, I also bummed three cigarettes off him while we talked. ‘We went down into that cave you talked about, the sub-basement. There was a lot of stuff down there that had been busted all to hell. I don’t know what those machines they had were supposed to do, but they were melted and shot and a couple of those things that had been bolted to the ground were knocked over and smashed so bad you could barely tell what they were supposed to be. Finch, some of those Germans were damned big men. Like over seven feet tall and that was after the fire got done roasting them. You know how meat gets smaller when it cooks too long? I don’t want to know how big they were before that fire.’

“‘Did you see any Americans?’ I had to ask, Eddie. I had to know if Crowley was down there and dead or if he’d escaped.

“‘I don’t know for sure, Finch. All I know is that nothing was alive when we got there.’ He put a hand on my shoulder as he stood and got ready to leave for his shift. The man looked like he’d seen things he never wanted to think about again. You know the look, Eddie. So do I.

“A week after that I was reassigned. I got my orders and it was back to duty for me, and that was fine. They wanted me on one of the companies heading for Germany and I wanted to be there, because I wanted to lose myself in something other than my own miserable thoughts. I couldn’t take being alone with my memories any longer. I’d have killed someone, I’m certain of it. I kept feeling bad for all the men I’d killed and I kept feeling even worse for the folks they’d made into those things.

“As I was heading for my new squad, being driven down in a truck, I looked out at the sides of the road and tried not to think about the monsters or what I had done. I tried to forget how I’d abandoned Jonathan Crowley. I was thinking about him a lot, and hating myself for leaving him behind, for not even being able to give him a proper funeral like I swore I’d do.

“I wasn’t paying too much attention to the sights, but I always waved to the other soldiers I saw walking along with their gear and those lost looks on their faces. Just a little courtesy to let them know we were all in it together. About halfway to the post they gave me, I spotted another small group walking along the side of the road and I looked up from my hands to wave, and I froze as surely as I would have if I’d fallen into a pit of angry rattlesnakes.

“I looked right into the face of Jonathan Crowley, and I know I must have turned dead white. He looked right back at me and he smiled that nasty smile of his, and he winked.

“We weren’t driving all that fast. It wasn’t possible to drive over the roads in the area at high speed without throwing half the soldiers out the back of the trucks.

“Jonathan Crowley got a running start and caught the back bumper of the truck I was on. I thought I was going to wet myself when he climbed over the gate.

“One of the sergeants tried to question him, but Crowley shut him up with a look and then walked over and sat next to me.” My grandfather shook a bit as he spoke.

“You ever have to leave someone behind, Eddie? Someone you wanted to save and couldn’t?”

I allowed that I had, and tried not to think about Corporal Murphy, who begged me to come back for him just before the napalm eradicated the spot where he’d been bleeding out on the jungle floor.

“I swear to you, Eddie, I thought he was going to kill me right then and there. I hadn’t seen what was left of the château, but I’d seen the people who came back from it and they came back haunted by what they’d seen as surely as I was.

“‘Finch,’ he said to me. ‘Finch, I thought for sure you got yourself killed up there.’

“I think I whimpered. He was smiling, you see, and that smile of his, damn, Eddie, that smile of his was a frightful thing.

“He reached out and touched my lapels, straightening them as he looked me over. ‘Glad you made it, old son. Listen, you ever need me, you give me a call. I’ll come running. And if not, who knows, maybe I’ll come see you in Summitville. I’ve heard it’s a nice place.’

“He stood back up and climbed over the side of the truck, easy as you please. I watched him as we rumbled by and he gave me a proper salute and then winked at me before the truck took a bend in the road and he vanished from my sight.

“That was the last time I saw him.

“I don’t know what those things were that the Nazis made. I don’t know if they used some science no one knows about, or if they used magic to make them. I heard a lot of rumors about the things Himmler was into, and after what I saw at the château, I don’t know if I can honestly doubt anything like I used to.

“I sure as hell don’t know how Jonathan Crowley survived that place and, frankly, if I never meet him again or find out what he did, it will be too soon.”

My grandfather rose from his seat as he crushed out his last cigarette. He looked around the farm and smiled faintly. “It’s good to be here, Eddie. It’s good to have survived that whole damned war. I still have some memories I don’t like to think about, and now and then, when it’s dark outside, I still have moments when I’m almost sure that the people I killed are waiting for a chance to get back at me for stealing their lives. I did a few things I’m not so proud of, but I did them for the right reasons. I reckon maybe you did, too.”

He said his goodnight, and I saw that my mother had gone to sleep already when my eyes followed him into the house. I shouldn’t have been surprised. My watch let me know it was after midnight and life on the farm starts early.

We never spoke of the wars we’d endured again, but I pulled myself together after that. I’d survived, and I’d done things I was not proud of, but I was alive and that meant I had to get on with living.

My grandfather died three years later. He died in his sleep, and I hope he died with a good dream playing in his mind, but I suspect I’ll never know for certain.

At his funeral, I saw many an old man from around Summitville. They’d been his friends in some cases, and in others they were just paying their regards to another fallen soldier, one who had survived the war like they had. I saw one young man, too. He was of average height and lean, with brown hair and brown eyes.

When the funeral line was arranged and all of the visitors were saying their condolences to us, the stranger looked at my mother and took her hands gently in his own. He spoke softly and solemnly and said to my mother, “Ben Finch was a fine man. He was a fine soldier. They don’t make them like him any more. He will be missed.”

When he came to me, he spoke just as softly and his hands held mine in a strong grip until I looked him in the eye. “Your grandfather was strong, Eddie. Make sure you honor that. Do wrong by his memory, and we will not be friends.” He smiled when he was done talking and I was the only one that saw it.

He had a smile that looked like it belonged on a killer. He only flashed that smile once after that, when I was looking at him, and either he winked at me, or the wind blew something in his eye.

That night I looked through the register of names from those who’d attended my grandfather’s funeral, prepared to send thank you notes. I noticed the name Jonathan Crowley, but he left no address.

For just a few seconds I wondered if maybe the man I’d seen smiling was the same man who’s smiled at my grandfather so long ago in a château in France. But that just wasn’t possible. He’d have been older, certainly; old and gray and frail.

But I thought about that smile, and I thought about that wink, and I remain uncertain. Like my grandfather, I think if I never meet that smiling man again, it’ll be too soon.

Changeling

Jonathan Maberry

A Joe Ledger Adventure

Author’s note: This story is set after the events in THE DRAGON FACTORY. You don’t have to have read that novel, but if you read this story first there are some spoilers.

-1-

The world keeps trying to kill me.

It’s taking some pretty serious shots and as the months and years pass, it hasn’t lost any of its enthusiasm. Or its deviousness.

I keep sucking air, though. Each time I somehow manage to pick myself up, and either slap off the dirt and stagger back to the fight, or someone medivacs me to an aid station or a trauma hospital and the doctors do their magic to ensure that I have another season to run.

You know that saying how a bone is stronger in the place where it broke? And the thing from Nietzsche everyone and his brother always quotes – about the things that don’t kill you making you stronger? A lot of that is true.

I’m stronger than I used to be. Less physically vulnerable. Not that I have super powers. Bullets don’t bounce off my skin the way they do with Superman, and I don’t have Iron Man’s armor. I don’t have spider sense or adamantium bones.

I’m stronger because each time I survive a fight, I learn from it. I become less trusting, less naïve.

Colder.

Harder.

It takes more to kill me because as time goes on it becomes easier for me to take the first shot, and to make sure that shot is the last one fired.

This is part of the cost of war. A warrior may take up his sword and shield because his ideals drive him to do it, and his love of family and flag may put steel into his arms and an unbreakable determination into his heart. I was like that.

That love, that passion, makes you dangerous at first, but it also bares your breast to arrows other than those fired by your enemy. The glow of idealism makes it easier for the sniper in the bushes to take aim.

And so you get harder. You shove that idealism down into the dark, you turn the dials on passion down because you don’t want to draw the shooter’s aim. It casts you into a kind of darkness. A predatory darkness. In those shadows you change from someone defending the weak – the prey – to someone who is as much a predator as the enemy.

Your motives and justifications may be better, cleaner, but your methods are not. But while fighting monsters you risk becoming one. Nietzsche warned about that, too.

And yet…

And yet.

There is a line in the psychological sand that any person fears to cross, yet which pulls us toward it.

Loss.

Grief.

Call it what you want.

On this side of the line, you feel the full horror of a love lost. A friend, a brother in arms, a son or daughter. A lover. Someone who means the world to you. You will burn down heaven to protect them. You believe – truly believe – that you would march into hell to keep them safe. No matter what happens to you.

You take those risks because you believe that after all of the gun-smoke clears, and if you’re still alive, then you and the person you love will have a life together afterward. Both of you the same as you were before. You believe that even while the world and the war try to make you a monster.

But when the person you love is taken and the war goes on.

Damn.

That’s where the real monsters are made. When you have nothing left to love and the enemy still stands before you, grinning at your pain, feeding on your loss. In those moments, the grief can kill you. It can drive you to a final act of passion in which you throw everything away. You attack without skill or art, merely with fury. And you die without balancing any cosmic scales, without inflicting punishment.

Maybe you spend the rest of eternity in your own private hell, feeling your loss and realising your defeat.

Or…

Or you don’t give into the passion of hate.

Instead you let that hate grow cold, and in the secret dark places of your soul you crouch over that unsavory meal and feed on it. You become a monster dining on the manna of the pit. On cold, cold hate. Knowing that with each bite you are less of the person who once loved. You are less of the person who, had you and your love survived, would have reclaimed joy and innocence and optimism.

That version of you wouldn’t know this dark and rapacious thing.

But it is the monster that survives.

It’s the monster that can survive.

I loved twice in my life. Really loved.

The first time was Helen. My first love, when I was fourteen and the world was filled with light and magic. Four older teenage boys trapped us in a deserted field and taught us about darkness and their own brand of sorcery. They beat me nearly to death, and while I lay there, bleeding and almost dead, I saw what they did to Helen.

Her heart continued to beat after that, after hospitals and surgeries and counseling. But she was dead. Years later when I found her at her place, the empty bottle of drain cleaner lying where it had fallen from her hand, I felt the darkness begin to take root in the soil of my soul. Flowers of hate have blossomed since.

Then last year I fell in love again. A woman named Grace Courtland. A fellow soldier, a fellow warrior against real darkness. A woman who saved the world. The actual world.

And died doing it.

I held her as she left me. I breathed in her last breath as all of the heat left her through a hole an assassin’s bullet had punched into the world.

My friends and colleagues tell me that I’ve made a great recovery since then. That I’m my old self again. That I look happy.

Which is all the proof I’d ever need of that philosophic belief that we each exist in our own reality, each separated inside an envelope of a completely separate dream.

I will never be my old self again.

Can’t be. That ship has sailed and it hit an iceberg.

And happy?

Sure, I can laugh. So do hyenas, and it means about as much.

My enemies don’t think I’m a happy guy. When they look into my eyes they see the truth that my friends can’t see.

They see what I’ve really become.

I know this because I see the fear in their eyes when I kill them.

I used to be a nice man.

The world used to be a place of sunshine and magic.

Monsters, though, don’t thrive in the light.

-2-

My boss, Mr Church, called me into his office on a May Tuesday. It was one of those days that seem tailor-made for baseball, hotdogs and cold beer, and I was taking a half-day to see if the Orioles could earn their paychecks. I had on new jeans and an ancient team jersey, sneakers and a pair of Wayfarers up on my head.

As I entered the office, Church slid a file folder across the desk toward me. It was a blue folder with a red seal. It looked official.

I said, “No way. I have tickets for a double-header, and as far as all of our billions of dollars of intelligence surveillance equipment says, it’s a slow day for the bad guys.”

“Captain…”

“Get someone else.”

He sat back and studied me through the lenses of his tinted glasses. Mr Church is one of those guys who never has to say much to either piss you off or make you want to check that your fingernails are clean. Frequently both.

“This requires finesse,” he said mildly.

“All the more reason to get someone else. I am finesse-deprived today.”

“This requires your particular skill set.”

I stood there and glared at him. I could almost hear the crack of good wood on a hard ball, the roar of the crowd, the howl of the announcer as the ball arced high toward the back wall.

Mr Church said nothing.

He opened his briefcase and removed a packet of Nilla wafers, tore it open, selected one. Bit off a piece and chewed while he watched me.

The blue folder lay where he’d put it.

I said, “Fuck.”

Mr Church asked, “What do you know about the Koenig Group?”

“Yeah, a little.” I shrugged. “It was a think-tank based in Jersey. Cape May, right? Alternate Technologies… am I right about that?”

“They called it Alternative Scientific Options. ASO.”

“Which means what?”

“A bit of everything,” he said. “They were originally a division of DARPA, but they went private as part of a budget restructuring. Private investors propped them up during the economic downturn in ’09.”

“But they closed, right?”

He tapped crumbs off his cookie. “They were shut down.”

“Why and by who?”

“They were under investigation by a number of agencies, including our own. Aunt Sallie had some people on it, and she lent a couple of agents to a joint federal task force that is a prime example of too many chiefs and not enough Indians. It’s become a jurisdictional quagmire.”

“Typical.” American politics are fuelled by red tape. Anyone who says differently isn’t on the inside track.

“As to why this has happened,” Church continued, “we’d gotten some word that the administration there was a little too willing to consider offers from foreign investors.”

“Like…?”

“North Korea, China, Iran.”

“Yikes. So we shut them down?”

“So we shut them down,” he agreed. “The task force made arrests, cleared out the staff and sealed the building. Aunt Sallie has been assembling a team of special investigators, forensics experts, and scientific consultants to do a thorough analysis of the work done there and a full inventory of research and materials. Until then, no one is allowed inside, regardless of federal rank. Every agency in the alphabet wants in on it, and as a result the whole place has been sealed for months, pending the outcome of the jurisdictional knife fight that continues as we speak.”

“But the bad guys are out of there?”

“Yes. And that was enforced with fines, termination of licenses, confiscation of some research materials and computer records, charges against two administrators and one senior researcher, and a pending court case that will likely result in prison for at least one of those persons, if not all three. There are also fourteen members of the senior scientific staff who are as yet unaccounted for.”

“A second site?” I suggested. “Another lab elsewhere?”

“That’s the thinking, but so far we haven’t been able to get a line on where that lab is, and even if it’s on US soil – though none of the missing scientists have taken flights out of any domestic airport. In itself, that means little because there are too many ways to export people from this country without raising a flag.”

“They could be in North Korea for all we know.”

“Agreed. As far as the Koenig facility, the building has been under constant surveillance since the doors were shut. Two-man teams, alternating between foot patrols and in-car observation. That responsibility has been shared on a rotating basis. Every five days another agency takes the job. Currently it’s ATF.”

“Okay. Why am I warming up my helicopter?”

“Our agents were first in the door, so we’re the organization of record that shut it down. By default, it’s up to us to sweep up any debris.”

“So, I’m what? A janitor?”

“Let’s face it, Captain,” Church said dryly, “it’s not the worst thing either of us has been called in this job.”

I sighed. Church shoved the cookies toward me, but I shook my head. There’s no moral justification for a vanilla cookie when every store in the free world sells a variety of chocolate-themed cookies. Like Oreos. It’s closer to an American icon than Mom’s apple pie ever was. Church didn’t have any Oreos, so I sat there cookie-less.

“If this place has been sealed for a couple of months, what’s the hurry?” I asked.

“Apparently, when we shut them down they didn’t entirely take it to heart.”

“Naughty, naughty,” I said. “But this sounds like something the FBI should be doing. I know for a fact that they love this kind of bureaucracy. It gives them that tingly feeling in their nice gray wool pants.”

Church gave me a look that could best be described as pitying. “They haven’t yet won the toss of the bureaucratic garter. If they go in, then someone in congress will be accused of favoritism.”

“Jesus H Christ.”

He nodded. “There are times I envy drive-through window employees at McDonalds. Red tape isn’t a factor when ordering fast food.”

“No joke.”

We gave each other small, bland smiles.

I folded my arms. “Again I ask – why now?”

“There was a police report of lights on inside the facility late last night. Officers on scene found the rear door broken open, but a quick search of the premises yielded no results. The intruders must have fled.”

“Could the intruders have been some of the missing scientists?”

“Certainly a possibility.”

“But why break in? What’s left to steal?”

“Unknown. When the Koenig senior staff realized the hammer was about to fall they tried to clear things up in a hurry. A lot of material was destroyed to keep it from falling into our hands and, by association, a congressional committee. The task force recovered a lot of melted disks, destroyed hard-drives and that kind of thing. Bug put his team on it to see if there was enough left to determine whether they trashed the actual records or if what we recovered was pure junk. Computer records are small, and easy enough to hide. The task force might have missed a flash drive or some disks. If someone was there last night, it’s likely they removed whatever was hidden. However, we do need to check.”

“Swell.”

“What little we did recover,” Church continued, “tied into something that’s clanged a few warning bells for MindReader.”

When the DMS was formed it was built around a real mother of a computer system that was entirely owned by Mr Church. Aside from being enormously powerful and sophisticated, MindReader had two primary functions. First, it collated information from all of the major intelligence networks, including some who didn’t know their data was being mined, and then looked for patterns. Often different agencies will have gotten whiffs of things or obtained pieces of information, but MindReader sorted through all of it and began assembling fragments into whole, actionable pictures. A lot of our effectiveness is built on being able to spot trouble before it literally blows up in our face.

MindReader’s other function was actually its scariest aspect. It could intrude into virtually any other computer system, poke around, take what it wanted, and then rewrite the target’s security software so there was absolutely no record of the intrusion. All other intelligence software leaves some kind of scar on the target system; MindReader is a ghost.

“What bells?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

“Sadly, it’s vague. The North Koreans and Chinese were both providing funding for a project codenamed ‘Changeling’. We don’t know the nature of the program, but when nations who don’t always have our best interests at heart are willing to transfer funds in excess of fifty million…”

He left the rest to hang.

“Have you talked to Dr Hu about this?”

Hu was the head of the DMS science division. He was both a super-genius in multiple disciplines and a world-class heartless asshole. We have failed to bond on an epic level.

“Dr Hu is intensely interested in it because he feels it may be connected to a project we caught wind of last year that dealt with transformative genetics.”

“I don’t even like the sound of that.”

“Neither do I. It’s a radical branch of transgenics in which animals of various kinds are given gene therapy in order to provoke controlled mutations. We saw some of that in the Jakoby labs.”

“Ah,” I said, loading that syllable with as much scorn as I could. The Jakobys were a family of brilliant geneticists. Immeasurably dangerous. Their Dragon Factory laboratory was used to create animals that, at least, looked like mythical creatures. Big game hunters paid millions to hunt unicorns and centaurs. It didn’t matter that the animals were genetic freaks whose DNA was now hopelessly corrupted. Nor did it matter that the resulting mutations were often painful for the animal and virtually guaranteed a short and agonizing life. None of that mattered. The novelty market allowed them to raise money for more destructive projects, including ethnic-specific pathogens intended to fuel a new genocide.

We shut them down. Hard.

And it was there at the Dragon Factory that Grace died.

“Do these Koenig assholes have the Jakoby research? ‘Cause if they do I’m going to find them and remove important parts.”

“It’s unlikely. MindReader would have flagged that. But it seems that their scientists were working along dangerously similar lines. To what end we don’t know. Once the red tape is sorted out I intend to have our people be first through the door to do a thorough examination of any materials left intact.”

“Must be pissing you off that we’ve had to wait so long.”

He said nothing, and nothing showed on his face, but there was a palpable feeling of tension buzzing around him. Yeah, he was pissed.

When he finally spoke, it was a shift in topic. “Last night’s police report opens a door of opportunity. We have a chance to put someone in the building. Not to remove anything, of course, but to have a quiet look-around without eyes on him. I’d like that to be you.”

“And I suppose if there was a file conveniently labelled ‘Changeling’ I shouldn’t let it lay there and gather dust.”

Church snorted. “If life were that simple, Captain, we would be out of jobs.”

“I thought the ATF had feet on the ground there.”

“They didn’t see anything last night.”

“And the cops did?”

He spread his hands, and I had a sneaking suspicion that he had something to do with that police drive-by and any subsequent report. Made me wonder if there was anything to see. ATF boys are usually pretty sharp.

“Besides,” added Church, “the ATF team has declined to break the seal and enter the premises.”

“Why?”

“Because if anything is disturbed or if there is any procedural error when someone does step inside, then that agency takes the political hit.” He shook his head. “If you look too closely for logic you’ll injure yourself.”

“Okay, I get that the bullshit factor is high. But why me? Why send a shooter?” I asked.

“Because you were a cop before you were a shooter. If nothing else, you should be able to determine if the place has been broken into. Work it like a crime scene.”

“And if I find someone poking around in there?”

His smile was small and cold. “Then you have my permission to shoot them.”

Nice. You can never really tell when he’s joking.

“One more thing,” said Church as I reached for the doorknob. “Our friends in the UK have expressed some interest in this matter. They red-flagged some of the negotiations between the Koenig Group and North Korean buyers, and they’ve been hunting for any possible information on Changeling. They’re sending a special agent to liaise with you. Her name is Felicity Hope. Expect her call.”

“She’s with MI6?”

“No,” he said, “Barrier.”

Barrier was Great Britain’s so-secret-we’ll-bloody-well-shoot-you group that was the model for the DMS. Church helped set it up, and once it proved to be invaluable against the new breed of 21st century high-tech terrorist, he was able to sell Congress on the Department of Military Sciences. But just hearing that name was the equivalent of a swift kick in the nuts for me.

Grace Courtland had been a senior Barrier agent. She’d been seconded to the DMS at Church’s request and for a few years she was Church’s top gun. Maybe the world’s top gun. I worked alongside her, respected her, fell in love with her. And then buried her.

The pain was too recent and too real.

Church adjusted his tinted glasses. I knew that he was following my line of thought and gauging my reaction. I also knew that he wouldn’t say anything. He wasn’t the kind of guy who engaged in heart-to-hearts. What he gave me was a single, brief nod, just that much to acknowledge the memory. He loved Grace like a daughter. His pain had to be as intense as mine, but he would never show it.

It cost me a lot to keep it off my face.

-3-

Twenty minutes later I was in a Black Hawk helicopter, heading away from Baltimore’s sunny skies, heading toward the coastline of southern New Jersey.

The rest of my team – all of the two-legged variety – were scattered around the country looking at potential recruits. We’d lost some players recently and we had the budget and the presidential authority to hire, coax, or shanghai the top shooters from law enforcement, FBI hostage rescue, and all branches of Special Ops. For guys like us it was like being turned loose in a candy store with a credit card.

We flew through sunlight beneath a flawless blue sky.

When the Koenig Group had gone private a few years ago, they moved out of a lab building on the grounds of the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, an air force base sixteen miles south-east of Trenton, and purchased several connected buildings once occupied by a marine conservation group that had lost its funding. I pulled up the schematics of the place on my tactical computer. The place looked like it had been designed by whoever built the Addams Family mansion and the Bates Motel. The centerpiece was a faux Victorian pile that was all peaked roofs, balconies, widows’ walks, gray shingles and turrets. Almost attractive, but overall too austere and grim-looking. To make it worse, the conversion people had added wings and side buildings to the main structure, all connected by covered walkways that gave the whole place a haphazard, sprawling appearance. Unlovely, unkempt and supposedly unoccupied. Seen from above via satellite, it looked like several octopi collided and somehow melded together and were then covered with shingles and paint. Charming in about the same way as a canker sore is appealing.

The files on the research being conducted at the Koenig Group were sketchy. On the books, the teams there were collating and evaluating data from several thousand smaller biological and genetic projects from around the world. Dead-end projects that had either been canceled because they were too expensive when measured against predicted benefits, or because they’d hit dead ends. The Koenig teams had scored some hits by combining data from multiple stalled projects in order to create a new and more workable protocol, largely influenced by recent advances in science. A transgenics experiment that was infeasible twenty-five years ago might now be doable. The original hypotheses were often well in advance of the scientific capabilities of the day. The Koenig people sometimes had to sort through mountains of old floppy disks – back when they were actually floppy – or crates filled with digital cassette tapes, and even tons of paper to put a lot of this together. It was painstaking work that was often frustrating and futile… but which now and then yielded fruit.

Shame that those bozos didn’t share all of that fruit with the US of A.

Dickheads.

The frustrating thing for us, though, was that we really didn’t know all of what they’d discovered. When the task force kicked the door in, they found a lot of melted junk and very little else. And the management team at Koenig apparently kept their employees compartmentalized so that few of them knew anything of substance. Probably because most of them would have made a call to Uncle Sam if they were in on it. Or they’d want the Koenig people to pad their paychecks. Either way, from what I read in the file, there were only three genuine villains and they were under indictment and under surveillance.

So who was messing around inside the building? And what were they looking for?

Church didn’t think this was anything more than a look-see by someone who used to be a detective. He didn’t offer back-up except for a Barrier agent who would ‘liaise’ with me. Whatever that meant, given the circumstances. Maybe whenever she landed Stateside we’d compare notes over diner coffee and that would be that.

But as I looked at the satellite photo of the sprawling, ugly building I began to get a small itch between my shoulder blades. Not quite a premonition, but in that neck of the woods. What my grandmother used to call a ‘sumthin’’, as in ‘sumthin’ doesn’t feel right’. My gran was a spooky old broad. In my family no one laughed off or ignored her sumthins.

I gave myself a quick pat-down to make sure I’d brought the right toys to this playground. My Beretta 92F was snugged into its nylon shoulder rig; the rapid-release folding knife was clipped in place inside my right front pants pocket. There was a steel garrotte threaded through my belt and I had two extra magazines for the Beretta.

The sad part of it was this was how I dressed all the time. I had this stuff on me when I went to Starbucks to read the Sunday papers. I would have had it on me at the ballpark watching the Orioles spoil the day for the Phillies. I would like to be normal; I’d like to have a normal life. But when I joined the DMS, I left normal somewhere behind in the dust.

The Black Hawk flew on through an untroubled sky.

-4-

While I flew I read some reports from Dr Hu. Even though he hadn’t yet gotten concrete information on the Changeling Project, MindReader had compiled bits of information that added up to a pretty disturbing picture of what they might be doing at Koenig.

Transformational genetics is a branch of science that scares the bejesus out of me. It has some benign and even beneficial uses, but the DMS doesn’t go after doctors trying to cure a genetic defect. No, the kind of scientist we tend to encounter is often best visited with a crowd of torch-and pitchfork-bearing villagers.

Here’s an example, and this is why my palms were sweating as I read those reports. Hu found clear evidence of several covertly-funded studies to create an ‘elastic and malleable genetic code’. One that was able to ‘withstand specific and repeatable mutagenic changes within desired target ranges consistent with military applications’. These programs have an end goal of ‘at-will theriomorphy’.

Yeah.

Short bus version of that – included courtesy of Dr Hu, who has little faith in my ability to grasp basic concepts – is that the North Koreans and Chinese have been funneling money into research for practical science that would allow a soldier to change his physical structure at will and at need. To transform from a human into something else.

Hu could only speculate on what that other shape might be. His speculations included an insectoid carapace, gills, resistance to radiation and pollutants, retractable feline claws, enhanced muscle and bone density, night vision. Stuff like that.

True super soldiers. But not entirely human super soldiers.

You see why I occasionally have to shoot people?

Before I joined the DMS this was science fiction stuff, comic book stuff. No, it was nightmare stuff because the science was out there. All it required was enough funding, little or no oversight from either congress or human rights organisations, and a flexible set of morals. Sad to say, all of that is possible.

We are living in a science fiction age. Or, maybe it’s a horror story.

Mad scientists like Frankenstein? That’s almost a joke. Frankenstein, at least, was trying to do some good for humanity. He was trying to conquer sickness and death.

Guys like the Koenig Group…well, what the hell do you even call men like that?

-5-

I had the pilot do a slow circle of the Koenig place and then set me down in the parking lot. The building extended out onto a wharf in the bay, and there were slips for six small boats and one large one, but nothing was currently tied up. No cars in the parking lot, either. The left-hand neighbor was an industrial marina for craft that serviced the big dredging platform six miles off the coast, which kept pumping sand back to shore to replace what Mother Nature and global warming were taking away. The right-hand side was protected marshland. A billboard proclaimed that an exotic animal park would be opening soon, but the paint was peeling and faded, and the board looked twenty years old. The only exotic animal I could see among the marsh grass was a Philadelphia pigeon looking confused and out of place.

There was a single car parked on the street, a dark blue Crown Victoria. It was unmarked but it was so obviously a Federal vehicle that it might have had FEDS stencilled on the doors. One of these days the government will grasp the concept that plain-clothes and undercover should include a component of stealth. Just a tad would go a long way.

I jumped down from the open side door and then bent low and ran through the rotor wash as the Black Hawk lifted away. The pilot would take the bird to a helipad near the Cape May lighthouse and wait there. We have several Black Hawks at the Warehouse, and we used this one for jobs that required less of a shock-and-awe effect on the locals. It was painted a happy blue and had the logo of a news wire service on it. No visible guns or rockets. Not to say they weren’t there, but this was not a time to show off. We already had some rubberneckers slowing their cars down to look at the big blue machine.

I let the helo vanish into the distance and silence return before I approached the building. The ATF agents were standing beside their car, both of them in off-the-rack suits and wearing identical expressions of disapproval. They both began shaking their heads as I approached.

“You can’t be here,” said the taller of the two.

I held up my identification. The DMS doesn’t have badges or standard credentials. When we needed to flash something we picked whatever would get the job done. I had valid ID for CIA, ATF, DEA, FBI and every other letter combination. The one I showed them was NSA. It was as close to a trump card as you can get, and they were the only organization that didn’t have boots on the ground during the raid on the place. Church was working with the director to use them as referees for the jurisdictional dispute.

The ATF boys glanced at the badge and at my civilian clothes—jeans and an Orioles home-game shirt—and gave me looks that said they didn’t give a cold shit.

“Need to go inside,” I said.

“Show me some paper,” said the shorter of the two.

I dug into my back pocket and produced a letter Church had prepared for me. It was a presidential order allowing me access to assess the integrity of the scene. They read it carefully. Twice.

“You can’t take anything out,” said the tall one.

“Don’t want to,” I said.

“We’ll have to search you when you come out, you know.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Don’t fuck with anything in there.”

“I won’t.”

“We don’t want trouble,” said the short one.

“I’m on your side, guys,” I told them as I pasted on my most charming smile.

The short one gave me another up and down inspection. “NSA recruiting ball players now?”

“It was my day off,” I said, leaning on ‘off’ enough to convey irritation. Not at them, but at the system. “I had tickets for the double-header.”

That did the trick; they relaxed and nodded.

“Sucks to be you,” said the tall one and gave me half a mean grin.

“We have the game on the car radio,” said the short one. He wore the other half of that same grin. “Phils are up by two in the second.”

“I’m from Baltimore.”

“Like I said, it sucks to be you,” said the tall one. Laughing, they turned and walked back to their vehicle.

“And a hearty fuck you, too,” I said under my breath as I headed over to the building.

It was no less ugly from ground level, and perhaps a little less appealing. It was bigger than I expected. Three-storeys tall in parts, with lots of shuttered windows and reinforced doors. A discreet sign on a pole read, THE KOENIG GROUP, with a phone number for information.

I removed a small earbud, put it on, and attached an adhesive mic that looked like a mole to the side of my mouth. Two taps of the earbud connected me to Bug, the computer uber-geek who provided real-time intel for all field work. Even though this was a low-profile job, DMS protocol required that I use my combat callsign.

“Cowboy’s online,” I said.

“With you,” said Bug.

“What’ve you got?”

“We did a thermal scan on the place, but it’s cold. No one home.”

“That’s what I want to hear.”

I walked around the building. It really was a large mess. The additions and walkways looked almost like they’d grown organically, expanding out of need like a cramped animal. The paint jobs didn’t match section-to-section, and for a company with a lot of private funding the exterior of the joint was poorly maintained. Weeds, some graffiti, trash in the parking lot.

“Place is a dump,” I said.

“Better inside, from what I hear,” said Bug. “Some cool stuff.”

A red DO NOT ENTER sticker was pasted with precision to the center of the front door. I ignored it and used a preconfigured keycard to gain entry.

“Going in,” I said quietly.

“Copy that,” said Bug. “Watch your ass, Cowboy.”

“It’s on the agenda.”

The entrance lobby was small and unremarkable. A receptionist’s desk, some potted plants and the kind of frame pictures you can buy at Kmart. Bland landscapes that probably weren’t even of places in New Jersey. The lights were out, which was surprising since the key-reader was functional. The entrance hall was dark, and daylight didn’t try too hard to reach inside. When I tried the light switches all I got was a clicking sound. No lights.

I tapped my earbud. “Bug, I thought the power was still on.”

“It is.”

“Not from where I’m standing.”

“Let me check.”

I removed a small flashlight from my pocket and squatted down to shine the light across the floor. The immediate entrance hallway had a thin coating of damp grime on the floor – a side effect of the building’s position near a bay and a swamp. There were footprints in the grime, but from the size and pattern it was clear most of them had been left by responding police officers. Big shoes with gum-rubber soles. The prints went inside and then they came out again. If there were prints by an intruder, they were lost to the general mess left behind by the cops. Pretty typical with crime scenes, and pretty much unavoidable. Cops have to respond and they can’t float.

I tapped my earbud again, channeling over to Church. “Cowboy to Deacon.”

“Go for Deacon.”

“Did anyone have eyes on the cops who came out of the building last night? Are we sure they weren’t carrying anything? Or had something in their pockets?”

“The ATF agents on duty last night searched each officer,” said Church. “It was not well-received.”

“I can imagine.”

And I could imagine it – responding blues getting a pat-down by a couple of Federal pricks.

“Why didn’t the ATF agents accompany them inside?” I asked.

I could hear a small sigh. “The ATF agents had left the scene to pick up a pizza.”

“Ouch.”

“Those agents have been suspended pending further disciplinary action.”

“Yeah, fair call.”

“Which is why the ATF is rather prickly about your being there.”

“Copy that.”

I channeled over to Bug.

“Where are we with those lights?”

“Working on it,” he said.

The lights stayed off, though.

There was a closed door behind the reception desk, so I opened it and entered a hallway that was as black as the pit. There was no sound, not the slightest hint that I was anything but alone in here, but regardless of that I drew my pistol. It’s hard to say if, at that moment, my caution was born out of a concern not to accidentally disturb any evidence left behind, or because the place was beginning to give me the creeps.

The hallway hit a t-juncture. Each side looked as dark and uninformative as the other, but I took the right-hand side because that was my gun-hand side. I know, I’m a bit of a superstitious idiot. Sue me.

The side hallway wasn’t straight, but jagged and curved and turned for no logical design reason that I could see. Maybe there was something about the foundation structure that required so unlikely a design plan, but I couldn’t imagine what. The result was something that – as I walked through the shadows – triggered odd little thoughts that were entirely uncomfortable. The unlikely angles combined with the mildly-curving walls and low gray-painted ceiling to give the whole place a strangely organic feel. Like a building that hadn’t so much been designed but rather allowed to grow. Like roots of a tree. Or tentacles.

Yeah, I shouldn’t be in here. I should be out in the bright sunlight watching a bunch of millionaires in white, black and orange stretch pants hit a small white ball around a grassy field.

“You’re a fruitcake,” I told myself, and I had no counter-argument.

I followed the flashlight beam down the crooked hallway until it ended at a set of double-doors that were made out of heavy-grade plastic. The kind meant to swing back when you pushed a cart through them, like they have in meat-packing plants.

A charming thought.

I pushed one flap open and peered into the gloom. The beam of the flashlight swept across a storage room that was still stacked high with boxes of equipment and office supplies. There were bare patches on the floor where I assumed boxed files once stood, but they’d been confiscated by the task force. Motes of dust swirled in the glow, spinning like planets in some dwarf galaxy. They looked cold and sad.

As I began to let the flap fall back into place something caught my attention.

Nothing I saw or heard.

It was a smell.

A mingled combination of scents, pleasant and unpleasant.

A hint of perfume, the sulfur stink of a burned match, old sweat and spoiled meat.

The movement of the swinging door somehow wafted that olio of scents to me, but it didn’t last. It was there and gone.

It was such an odd combination of smells. They didn’t seem to fit this place. And they were transient smells that should long ago have faded into the general background stink of dust and disuses. Except for the rotten meat smell. That, I knew all too well, could linger. But this was a research facility not a meat packing plant. There shouldn’t be a smell like that in here.

My brain immediately started cooking up rationalizations for it.

An animal came in here and died.

The staff left food in the fridge when the place was raided.

And…

And.

And what?

I tapped the earbud.

“Bug, what’s the status on those damn lights?”

There was a short burst of static, then Bug said, “—er company.”

“You’re breaking up. Repeat message.”

“The power is on according to a representative of the power company.”

I moved through the swinging doors and found a whole row of light switches. Threw them.

Stood in the dark.

“Negative on the power, Bug. Call someone who doesn’t have his dick in his hand and get me some lights.”

He paused, then said, “On it, Cowboy.”

The storage room had two interior doors, one of which opened into a bathroom that was so sparkling clean it looked like it had never been used. The only mark was a smudged handprint on the wall above the toilet. The smell hadn’t come from here.

The other door opened onto another jagged hallway that snaked through the building. The walls were lined with closed doors on either side. A lot of doors. This was going to take a while.

Dark and spooky as the place was, it seemed pretty clear that nobody was home but me. I snugged the Beretta into the padded holster, but left my Orioles shirt open in case I needed to get to it in a hurry.

For the next half hour I poked into a variety of rooms that included storage closets of various sizes, a copy center, a staff lunchroom, offices for executives of various wattage, and labs. Lots and lots of labs.

I entered one at random and stood in the doorway, doing what cops do, letting the room speak to me. There were rows of black file cabinets sealed with yellow tape that had an ominous-looking federal seal from the Department of Justice. A dozen tables were crowded with computers and a variety of scientific instrumentation so sophisticated and arcane that I had almost no idea what I was looking at. The floor was littered with papers, and here and there were fragments of footprints on the debris.

Watching the room told me nothing.

I backed into the hall and did a quick recount of the laboratories just in this wing of the building. Nine.

“Bug,” I said, tapping the earbud.

“Cowboy, the power company insists that there is no interruption to the Koenig Group facility. They are showing active meters.”

I grunted and filed that away. Maybe it was something simpler, like breakers. To Bug I said, “How many labs are there in this place?”

“Twenty-two separate rooms designated on the blueprints as laboratory workspaces.”

“Jeez…”

“And one designated as a proving station.”

“Proving what?”

“Unknown. None of the employees interviewed by the task force had ever been in there, and the three executives under indictment aren’t talking.”

“So we have no real idea what they were doing there?”

“Not really,” he said, and he sounded wistful about it. “I wish we could have gotten those computer records. I’ll bet there was some cool stuff there.”

Cool.

Much as I like Bug, he shares a single characteristic with Dr William Hu. The two of them have an absolutely unsavoury delight for any kind of bizarre or extreme technology. For Hu, the head of our Special Sciences Division, it bordered on ghoulishness. Hu loved to get his hands on any kind of world-threatening designer plague or exotic weapon of mass destruction. A few months ago, when Blackjack Team out of Vegas took down a Chechnyan kill squad who had a hyper-contagious version of weaponized Spanish Flu and were planning on releasing it into the water supply of a large Russian community near Reno, Hu was delighted. A total of fifty-three people dead and an entire water supply totally polluted for God knows how many decades, and he was like a kid with a new stack of comics. He actually admired the kind of damaged or twisted minds that could create ethnic-specific diseases, build super dirty-bombs, and create weapons capable of annihilating whole populations. I’ve wondered for years how much of a push it would take to shove Hu over to the dark side of the Force.

Bug, though, didn’t have a mean bone in his body. For him it was a by-product of a life so insulated from the real world that nothing was particularly real to him. Only his beloved computers and the endless data streams. Something like this lab was probably no more real to him than a level in the latest edition of Gears of War or Resident Evil.

For my part, I am not a fan of anyone that would put extreme weapons into the hands of people so corrupt or so driven by fanaticism that they would turn the world into a pestilential wasteland just to make an ideological point.

Fuck that. For two pennies I’d call the Black Hawk and see what twelve Hellfire missiles and a six-pack of Hydra-70 rockets could do to sponge this place clean.

“Where’s that proving station?” I asked. He sent a step-by-step to my mobile phone.

As I made my way along corridors lit only by the narrow beam of my flashlight, I thought about the work that went on here. During the flight I’d had time to go over some of the background on the Koenig Group. They were originally a deeply integrated division of DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is an agency of the Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technologies for use by the military. Koenig Group people worked on every aspect of DARPA before they went private, and that meant they had the opportunity to see not only what was currently in development for modern warfare and defense, but also what was being looked at for future exploration.

Of late, I’ve come to realize that when it comes to keeping out in front of the global arms race, there is virtually no line of exploration that’s definitely off the table.

So, without government oversight, where had the twisted minds here at Koenig gone?

I reached the end of one hallway and passed through a security door that led to another corridor lined with doorways that looked exactly like the one I’d just come from. So much so that I actually went out the door and stood looking at the previous doors and then turned around and looked at the new set. The absolute similarity was unnerving and disorienting.

I called up the floor plan on my mobile and studied it.

“Bug,” I said, “somehow I made a wrong turn.”

Bug didn’t answer.

I tapped the earbud.

“Cowboy to Bug, do you copy?”

Nothing. Not even static.

I tapped my way over to the command channel. “Cowboy to Deacon,” I said, trying to reach Church.

Still nothing.

I turned around and looked down the hall. The beam cut a pale line that pushed the shadows back, but not much.

Suddenly I caught the smell again.

Sulphur, human waste, and spoiled meat. And the aroma of perfume.

I don’t remember moving or pulling open my shirt, but suddenly my gun was in my hand. Even though the whole place was absolutely still and quiet, I yelled into the darkness.

“Freeze! Federal agent. I’m armed.”

My words bounced off the darkened walls and melted into nothingness.

Then, from behind me, someone spoke my name.

A woman’s voice.

Soft.

Familiar.

Achingly familiar.

An impossible voice.

“Joe…”

I whirled, gun in one hand, flash in the other, pointing into the darkness.

A woman stood ten feet behind me.

She was dressed in black. Shoes, pants, jersey, gun belt, pistol. All black. Dark hair, dark eyes.

Those eyes.

Her eyes.

My mouth fell open. Someone drove a blade of pure ice through my heart. I could see my pistol begin to tremble in my hand.

I stared at her.

I spoke her name.

“Grace…”

-5-

I don’t know what time does in moments of madness. It stops or it warps. It becomes something else. Every heartbeat felt like a slow, deliberate punch to my breastbone, and yet I could feel my pulse fluttering.

She held a pistol in her hand, the barrel raised to point at my chest, and I had an insane, detached thought.

You don’t need a bullet to kill me. Be her and I’ll die.

Not, be her, and I think I’ll die, too.

She licked her lips and spoke.

“Who are you?”

The accent was British. Like Grace’s.

But…

But the tone was wrong.

It didn’t sound like her.

Not anymore. It had a moment ago when she’d spoken my name. But not now. Not anymore.

“Grace,” I said again, but now I could hear the doubt in my own voice. “I…”

She peered at me over the barrel of the gun, her eyes dark with complex emotions, fierce with intelligence.

Very slowly, very carefully, she raised her gun so that the barrel pointed to the ceiling and held her other hand palms-out in a clear no-threat gesture.

“You’re Captain Ledger, aren’t you?” she asked.

I kept my gun on her.

“Who are you?” I asked, but my voice broke in the middle, so I had to ask again.

“Felicity Hope,” she said. “Barrier.”

I stood there and held my gun on her for another five seconds.

Then…

I lowered the pistol.

“God almighty,” I breathed.

She frowned at me; half a quizzical smile. “Who did you think I was?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Felicity Hope holstered her piece and came toward me. “You called me Grace.”

I said nothing.

“You thought I was Grace Courtland, didn’t you?”

“Grace is dead,” I told her.

“I know.” She stood there staring at me.

Up close, I could tell that it wasn’t her. This woman’s hair was paler, her eyes darker, her skin had fewer scars. But the height was the same, and the body. The same mix of dangerous athleticism and luscious curves. The movement was the same, a dancer’s grace. And the keen intelligence in the eyes. Yeah, that was exactly the same.

Damn it.

When the universe wants to fuck with you it has no problem bending you over a barrel and giving it to you hard and ugly.

I cleared my throat. “Did you know her?”

She nodded.

“Was she… a friend?” I asked.

Felicity shrugged. “Actually, we weren’t. Most of the time I knew her I thought she was a stuck-up bitch.” She watched my face as she spoke, probably wondering what buttons she was pushing. Then she added, “But I don’t think I really knew her. Not really. Not until right before she died.”

“How?”

“What?”

“How could you know what she was like right before she died?”

“Oh…we spoke on the phone quite a lot. She was officially still with Barrier and had to make regular reports. I was the person she reported to.”

“You were her superior officer?”

She looked far too young. Grace had been young, too, but Grace was an exception to most rules. She’d been the first woman to officially train with the SAS. She’d been a senior field team operative in some of the most gruelling cases on both sides of the Atlantic. There was nobody quite like Grace and everyone knew it.

Felicity shook her head. “Hardly. I was a desk jockey taking field reports. I know I’m not in Major Courtland’s league.”

“No,” I said ungraciously. “You’re not. Tell me why you’re here.”

She said, “Changeling.”

“Which means what exactly? The name keeps popping up in searches but no one seems to know exactly what it is.”

“What do you know about transformational genetics and self-directed theriomorphy?”

“Some,” I said, dodging it. “What do you know about it?”

“Too much,” she said.

“Give me more than that.”

“They’re making monsters,” she said.

I shook my head. “Not in the mood for banter, honey, and I’m never in the mood for cryptic comments, especially not from total strangers I meet in dark places. This is American soil and a legally-closed site. Spill everything right now or enjoy the flight home.”

She took a breath. “Okay, but I’ll have to condense it because there’s a lot.”

“So,” I said, “condense.”

“Can you take that flashlight out of my eyes?”

“No,” I said, and didn’t. The light made her eyes look very large and moist. If it was uncomfortable, then so what? I was deeply uncomfortable, so it was a running theme for the day.

She said, “Ever since the dawn of gene therapy and transgenic science it’s become clear that DNA is not locked. Evolution itself proves that DNA advances. Look at any DNA strand and you’ll see the genes for non-human elements like viruses hard-wired into our genetic code.”

“Part of junk DNA,” I said. “What about it?”

“Transformational genetics is a relatively new branch of science that is searching for methods of changing specific DNA, and essentially rebuilding it so that a new tailor-made code can be developed.”

“That’s not new,” I pointed out. “The Nazis tried that, and the whole Eugenics movement before that.”

“That’s selective breeding. That’s cumbersome and time consuming because it requires eggs and host bodies and so forth. This is remodeling, and recent advances have opened developmental doors no one imagined would be possible in this century.”

I didn’t say anything. During the firefight at the Dragon Factory we’d encountered mercenaries who had undergone gene therapy with ape DNA. And there were other even more hideous monsters there.

“The word ‘theriomorphy’ keeps showing up. What’s that?”

“Shapeshifting.”

“Shape…?”

“The ability to change at will from one form to another.” She smiled through the blinding flashlight glow. “From human form into something else.”

“At… will?”

“Oh yes.”

“Like from what to what? You’re making this sound like we’re hunting werewolves or something.”

Her smile flickered. “Who knows? Maybe we are.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I know.”

“Wait… hold on… are we really standing here having a conversation about werewolves? I mean… fucking werewolves?”

After a three count she said, “No.”

“Jesus jumped-up Christ in a sidecar, then why—?”

“Werewolves would be easy,” she said, cutting right through my words. “Werewolves would be a silver bullet and we’d take the rest of the afternoon off for a drink. I wish it was only werewolves.”

I gaped at her.

Seriously… what do you say to that?

-6-

“Okay,” I said, “before I pee my pants here, how do you know about this and what can we do about it? This facility is sealed.”

She flashed her first real smile, and it looked so much like the battlefield grin Grace used to give me that I almost turned away.

“When your task force shut down this place,” she said, “they made a thorough video inventory of everything. High-res footage that showed where every piece of paper was all the way down to the way pencils sat in a pot on each desk. Everything, with a second camera filming what the first camera was doing in order to firmly establish the integrity of the scene and contribute the first real link in the sacred chain of evidence. Am I right?”

Church had told me about that, but I hadn’t seen it. I nodded anyway.

“So we can’t take or touch anything recorded on that video.”

“That’s the size of it,” I agreed.

“The federal order sealing this place contains an authorized copy of that video.”

“Yup.”

“And the teams who were here agreed that absolutely everything has been documented – at least in terms of its existence and placement.”

“Sure.”

Her smile brightened. “Therefore, anything that isn’t on the video technically doesn’t exist in terms of that Federal order.”

“Sure,” I said again, “but how does that put us back in a discussion with werewolves? ‘Cause, quite frankly I’m having a hard timing shaking loose of that conversation.”

The smile dimmed but did not go out. “Not werewolves,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“They’re not werewolves. That’s not what they were doing here.”

Felicity turned and walked a few paces away, going along the hall in the direction I’d come. She stopped, looked through the shadows. “You were in the storage room?”

“Maybe.”

“You were in the storage room,” she repeated, not making it a question this time. “Did you look inside the bathroom?”

“Sure. Nothing there.”

She sighed audibly.

“I wish I could say you were right about that, Captain.”

Without another word she began walking down the hallway toward the storeroom. She didn’t have a flashlight and my beam was currently pointed at the floor in front of me; however she seemed quite at home in the dark.

I felt like I’d walked into the middle of a play for which I had no script and no stage direction.

She paused once in the very outside edge of the light and looked back at me. I had seen Grace turn that way, stand that way.

Look that way.

Then Felicity Hope turned and vanished into the black.

My eyes tingled at the corners and I knew that given half a chance I was going to break down and cry.

“Oh, Grace… ” I said very, very quietly.

-7-

I caught up with her at the entrance to the storage room and followed her over to the small bathroom. As she approached the door she drew a small gun from a shoulder rig.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Getting ready,” she replied crisply, “and I suggest you do the same. I don’t know exactly what’s down in there but things could get very bad very quickly.”

I almost smiled. “In a toilet?”

“I trust you have enough faith in Barrier agents to know that we don’t typically feel the need to arm ourselves to take a piss.” She opened the door and we looked inside. Toilet, sink, white-tiled wall, plastic trashcan. And the partial handprint on the back wall.

I said, “Secret door?”

“Secret door,” she agreed. “And your Federal task force missed it.”

“Balls.”

With her pistol in her right hand she placed her left on the back wall, right over the partial print. She moved her hand to one corner and pressed. The tile tilted inward and there was an audible click.

The whole rear wall swung inward on silent hinges revealing a set of metal stairs that went down into blackness. A smell wafted up at us.

Rotting meat.

Human waste.

And… something else.

A fish stink. Not actually unpleasant, like the way an aquarium supply store smells; or the kitchens at a low-end fish and chips restaurant.

There were sounds, too.

Machines. Whirring motors. Rhythmic pumps. Other mechanical sounds, all soft, all muted.

“How do you know about this?” I asked quietly.

Felicity shrugged. “This information was hard-won, believe me. Literally blood, sweat and tears.”

She moved to the top of the steel steps.

I drew my Beretta. “What’s down there? I mean really, no bullshit about werewolves or boogeymen. What the fuck are we going to find down there?”

Felicity turned toward me. In the crowded confines of the bathroom she was very close to me. I could smell her perfume. It was the same brand Grace used. What the hell was it, standard issue by Barrier? Or maybe it was the top-selling scent in England and I was out of the stylistic loop.

Her body was achingly familiar and devastatingly female. It was the kind of body that no matter how well-balanced and normally un-sexist a man is, he can’t help but be profoundly aware of it. Of hips and breasts, of long legs and a slender, graceful throat, of animal heat that was purely, inarguably, powerfully female.

And yet…

Standing this close to her, there was something wrong about her.

Maybe it was because she was so like Grace that knowing she wasn’t Grace made her feel fundamentally wrong. It was meeting a deliberate fake, a double or stand-in for someone I loved. Everything similar suddenly felt like a cheat, like a fraud perpetrated on my broken heart by a cruel and vindictive universe.

And beyond that, there was one other quality. One other thing that was not anything my senses or my personal pain perceived. This woman, this Special Agent Felicity Hope, seemed strange. Sure, I was still rattled by her sudden appearance in the dark, and by her similarity to Grace, but there was something else. She had a quality that made her not…

Not what?

I really had no idea how to finish that thought.

And no time.

Felicity moved away from me and began descending the steps. She moved well in the darkness and if her feet made any sound at all on the metal stairs it was beyond my senses to hear it. With great reluctance and confusion, I followed.

The stairs zigzagged down two levels and I realized that we had to now be at least twenty feet below sea level. Cape May is pancake flat and houses in the center of town had basements. Certainly nothing built this close to the bay would normally have a cellar. But the stairs went down and down.

With each step the smell of rotting meat increased.

I almost said, “There’s something dead down there.” But it would have been inanely obvious. Something was not only dead, it had been dead for some time.

Felicity slowed her pace and took her gun in a two-handed grip.

Sweat was beginning to run down the sides of my face and pool inside my shirt at the base of my spine. It would be nice to lie and say it was because the stairway was oppressively humid, but that would have been bullshit. I was scared. Really damn scared.

Changeling, whatever it really might be, in whatever horrific form the madmen at Koenig had conceived with their perverted science, was down here somewhere. Hopefully it was dead, or it was nothing more than samples of transgenic animals that had died without food and water. I really didn’t want to have to euthanize some kind of mutant rhesus monkey or lab rat. I like animals far more than I like people and I’ve seen what scientists do to chimps and dogs and pigs in labs. Dead animals would be easier to take. Sure, that’s a cowardly view, but fuck it.

Changeling.

What was it? Where were these guys going with research to allow deliberate shapeshifting? Where could they go?

Since signing onto the DMS my optimism for common sense and bio-ethics has taken a real beating. That thing Michael Crichton said in Jurassic Park rang true every time. We spend so much time wondering if we can, we don’t stop to think about whether we should. Or words to that effect. I’ve encountered monsters and mutations already. I wasn’t sure how many more I could face before something inside my head snapped. How long did you have to fight monsters until you really became one?

And how long could I dance at the edge of the abyss?

Bad questions to ask yourself in the dark.

Bad questions.

As we descended, though, the darkness changed, becoming cloudy and finally yielding to the glow of a security light in a metal cage mounted on the wall beside a big metal door.

It was a massive door as solid and ponderous as a bank-vault. There were several high-tech scanners beside it and even though I had plenty of gadgets for bypassing all kinds of security systems, I could see that I wasn’t going to need any of them.

The door stood ajar.

It was held open by a corpse.

I think it had once been a man.

But it was impossible to tell.

The body was swollen and black, the tissues distended by expanding gasses as putrefaction ran rampant.

And… it had no face.

The flesh had all been torn away to reveal the striated remnants of muscle and the white of naked bone.

This hadn’t been done by a knife or any kind of weapon. The flesh was torn in very distinctive ways.

By teeth.

Not small rat teeth, either. And it didn’t look like dog or cat teeth. The flesh was savaged by very large and very sharp teeth. Not fangs, but rows of teeth. There was enough left of the throat to see that much.

“Christ,” I said. “What did that?”

Her voice was very small.

“Dear God,” she whispered. “They’re out…”

-8-

“What’s out?” I demanded, but she shook her head.

“I… don’t know exactly. We’ve only had rumors. But…” Felicity shook her head and set her jaw. Tiny jewels of sweat glistened on her forehead. “Cover me.”

“Hey, wait, dammit…”

But she was already in motion, stepping over the corpse, squeezing through the opening, disappearing inside. With a growl I gripped the edge of the massive door and hauled on it, swinging it wider to give me room to follow.

There was light inside and I ran forward, gun up and ready, into a lab that looked like it was born in the fevered mind of Dr Moreau. The chamber was vast and it must have stretched hundreds of yards under the streets of Cape May and outward under the waters of the bay. The ceiling was twenty feet high and supported by massive steel pillars. The floor was pale concrete that was stained by dried seawater, rust-red old blood, and a dozen chemicals of various sickly hues. There were ranks of computers – the high-end super-computers used for gene sequencing – tables of arcane scientific equipment, and a dozen stainless steel dissecting tables. There were also bodies in the room.

Many bodies.

Most of them were human and none of those were whole. Legs and arms, ragged torsos, bodiless heads, were scattered across the floor.

I knew without counting that the bodies down here and the corpse blocking the door upstairs would add up to an even dozen. The missing scientists.

Not working at a separate site or in another country.

All of them here.

Forever here.

Each missing scientist… but not all of any of them.

Felicity and I stood nearly shoulder to shoulder, gaping at the slaughter.

But then, even with all of that carnage around us, our eyes were drawn to the far wall. How could we not look? How could anyone not stare at what was there?

Row upon row upon row of glass cylinders, each ten feet high and as big around as elm trees. Each filled with murky water that smelled of brine and decay.

And in nearly all of the tanks a body floated.

They were all naked.

Men and women.

Tall. Powerfully built, with corded muscles under layers of gray-green skin.

They floated in the water, tethered by cables and wires attached to electrodes buried in their chests and skulls. Pale hair floated around their faces. Pale eyelids dusted their cheeks.

There were at least fifty tanks.

Three of them were empty, the glass shattered, the wires hanging limp and unattached. Every other tank was full.

Each of them was naked.

None of them were human.

“Holy Mother of God,” murmured Felicity.

I felt myself moving forward, taking numb steps like a sleepwalker. My eyes were wide, burning from not blinking. The sight before me was hideous, appalling in its implications, but I couldn’t look away. I stopped in front of one of the tanks and reached out with one hand to touch the glass. The body inside floated on the other side of the thick glass, inches away from me, but worlds apart in so many ways,

The people – the things inside the tank – did not have hands.

Not as such.

They had long flat panels of flesh in which were segmented bony structures that had once been fingers, and each was connected by rough webbing. The feet were the same. And all along the waterlogged limbs the flesh glistened with scales.

In movies, in Disney pictures, creatures like this are beautiful.

In these tanks, here in the real world, they were hideous.

I looked up into the face of the body that floated inches from me. The mouth was little more than a slash with rubbery lips, between which I could see row upon row of serrated teeth.

The eyes of this creature were half open. There was a trace of white around the irises that were large and black.

On the side of the creature’s face, below where stunted and useless ears hung, were gills.

The sound of a footfall in water startled me and I suddenly whirled, bringing my gun up, but it was Felicity.

She was standing ankle deep at the edge of what I’d first thought was a large puddle, but as I hurried over I could now see was a pool. It ended at a wall and when I shone my flashlight at the water, we could see that the wall ended a few feet below the surface of the pool. Tendrils of seaweed wafted back and forth and there were small fish in the water, darting here and there.

“It must lead out to the bay,” said Felicity.

We looked from it to the three broken cylinders and then at the decaying bodies.

“Three of them must have escaped somehow,” she said. “They killed the staff and escaped through the pool.”

I nodded. And though I was almost too sick to speak, I asked, “Do you know what this is?”

She gave me a quizzical look. “I should think it’s effing well obvious.”

“No… I can see what they’re doing. Transformative genetics… theriomorphy… they’ve turned test subjects—”

“—or volunteers,” she cut in.

“—or volunteers… into monsters. Into water-breathing…” I fished in my mind for the word.

“Into mermen,” said Felicity Hope. “And mermaids.”

“I thought mermaids were supposed to be beautiful.”

She gave a short, ugly laugh. “You don’t read your folklore. The mermaids of legend were monsters who lured men to terrible deaths. They drowned them and fed on them.”

“So these madmen created genetically-engineered… what’s the word? Mer-people?”

“Close enough.”

“But... for Christ’s sake why?”

She cocked her head appraisingly. “What is your nation’s primary weapon of response to deliberate aggression from either China or North Korea?”

“Generally-speaking, lots of missiles.”

She shook her head. “Which are launched from…?”

“Ah,” I said, “our fleet.”

“Top marks. The US fleet in the Taiwan Strait is the most powerful weapon of war in existence. Aircraft carriers ready to launch the world’s most sophisticated and lethal fighters and helicopters, battleships and cruisers, and nuclear submarines capable of launching nuclear and non-nuclear missiles. China is working on building a blue-water fleet, but beyond hype, they are many years away from anything comparable, and it’s doubtful they ever will build anything comparable. That’s why they’ve worked so hard on their missiles and on a submarine fleet capable of slipping past your surface ships. It’s why North Korea is developing its nuclear capabilities and building long-range weapons of mass destruction.”

“What’s your point?”

“No nation on earth can face your fleet in any version of a surface battle. You have more ships and better military technology, and you can call in more – far more – resources. Everyone knows this. But consider how the Taliban has been able to wage so long and costly a war with your army in Afghanistan, and how they fought the Russians to a standstill at the height of Soviet power. They have no army, no technology. So what do they have?”

“Hit-and-run terrorists who hide among the civilian population and comes at us in small and very mobile groups.”

“Bloody right. It’s the exact kind of warfare that greatly helped you Yanks fight off our larger and better-trained armies during your Revolution.” She spread her arms to indicate the massive saltwater tanks, and the bodies floating inside. “Now imagine the hit-and-run terrorists needed for a war against a fleet. A fleet that can detect any metal ships and which can sweep away any network of mines. Imagine teams of Merpeople who could swim undetected into the heart of your fleet, carrying with them small satchel-charges and non-metallic limpet mines. Enough of them, with the right equipment, could destroy your fleet without North Korea or China launching a single missile. And what defence could you offer? You can’t patrol beneath the surface for something this small and mobile. It’s impractical to the point of impossibility.”

I wanted to tell her that she was out of her mind. That she was delusional. That such a plan was far too wild to ever work.

But the faces of the dead scientists mocked my denials. The powerful bodies floating in the brine told me that my view of the world was relevant to yesterday. Today was a different and much more terrible day.

“I have to call this in,” I said. “I need to get someplace where I can get a clean signal and get every-fucking-body out here.”

She looked at me with her dark eyes.

“Captain,” she said, then amended it. “Joe… you do understand that if this technology is acquired by our people – yours and mine – they’ll do the same thing, continue the same research.”

I said nothing.

“They’ll make monsters, too,” she said, “because the proof is right here that monsters are the next viable weapon of war.”

“Monsters,” I said, echoing the word. It tasted rancid in my mouth. “But what options do we have? The Koenig people are in custody, their research is either slag or it’s in these computers, and we don’t know if they’ve already shared their secrets with the Chinese or North Koreans. If our enemies have these weapons, won’t we have to…”

I heard what I was saying and knew that it was absolutely true and absolutely wrong. It was the trap that has escalated warfare since the invention of the longbow. Since the gun. Since the first nuclear bomb.

It was keeping up with the Joneses in a very real and very ugly way, and unless everyone suddenly came to their senses then how could we avoid committing sins of conscience in defense of our people?

What’s the answer to that question?

Where’s the path that leads us away from ever escalating the arms race?

“Joe,” she said as she walked over to the bank of super-computers, “the Koenig people haven’t sold the information yet. The secrets are all here. The research that was burned was a decoy. All of it is here.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Yes, I can. I do know it.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Without turning she said, “I’m sure, Joe.”

And she said it in Grace’s voice.

Exactly Grace’s voice.

My mouth went dry.

I took a small step toward her. “Grace…?”

“If we destroy these computers, it stops here.”

I licked my lips. “The senior Koenig people are—”

“It stops here. This abomination goes no further.”

I wanted her to turn around. I wanted to see her face. I needed to see the light of Grace’s soul shining out of her eyes. If that was an impossible wish, who cares. We stood in an impossible place.

“Grace…” I whispered again.

And then a sudden violent sound of splashing water broke the moment into pieces. I spun around as three monstrous shapes rose  from the pool.

Gray-green skin.

Black eyes.

Rows of teeth.

And webbed hands that ended in terrible claws.

Two of them rushed at me, and one launched itself at Felicity Hope and slammed her back against the computers. Felicity screamed in a voice that sounded like the call of a wounded seagull.

I heard myself yelling. Screaming, really. But the sound was lost beneath the roar of the Mermen who ran at me, and thunder of my gun as I fired and fired.

One of them abruptly spun sideways, his face torn away by a bullet that went on to strike a glass cylinder. The glass shattered in a spray of jagged pieces and gushing water. The occupant of the tube tore loose of the wires and fell heavily to the floor.

I saw this only peripherally as the second creature slammed into me.

He was enormously strong and he drove me ten feet backward and nearly crushed me flat against a concrete wall. Even with the impact I managed to keep hold of my gun, but the monster twisted its head and clamped its jaws around my forearm. Blood exploded and I heard my wrist-bones break. Pain burst with inferno heat inside my arm and I almost blacked out.

But there is a part of me that is as cold and inhuman as these monsters. It’s the part of me that survived the trauma of my childhood by being too vicious to die. It’s the part that somehow allowed me to complete the mission that Grace had died to accomplish, even though it meant facing impossible odds. It was the part of me that could kill despite idealism and compassion. It was the part of me that, on some level that I have never wanted to examine with total clarity, enjoys all of this. The pain, the violence.

The killing.

As my flesh ruptured and my bones broke, that part of me shoved the civilized aspect of my mind to one side. In that moment I stopped being a man and became the thing I needed to be in order to survive this encounter.

I became a monster.

With a snarl as inhuman as the thing that attacked me, I drove my knee up into its crotch, then head-butted the thing so hard I could hear cartilage and bone shatter. I drove my stiffened thumb into its eye, bursting the orb. Then I kicked its screaming, writhing body backward.

My right arm flopped bloody and limp, the fingers feeling like swollen bags of blood. My gun was gone — I had no idea where.

I ran at the monster that now lay twisting on the floor, hands pressed to its bloody eye-socket. Its other eye stared at me with uncomprehending horror. It had killed the scientists in this room. It was a predator thing, designed for slaughter, and now it was hurt and helpless and being stalked by something that did not fear its power.

It raised one hand in defence and I kicked it away, then stamped down hard on its throat.

Without even pausing to watch it die, I whirled toward Felicity.

But she was not there.

Instead I saw the third Merman sprawled in a growing lake of blood, its whole body torn apart so savagely that its arms and legs were attached by strings of meat.

Something bulky and gray shot past me, brushing close enough to strike my uninjured arm. It moved so fast I could barely see it.

It plunged into the water and was gone.

It was not a woman, that much was clear. It looked like an animal.

Almost like an animal.

Its gray fur was criss-crossed by jagged cuts and streaked with blood. Within a moment all that was left was a stain of blood on the eddying waters.

I stood alone in the cavernous lab.

Twenty feet away, the Merman who had fallen to the floor when my bullet smashed its tube was beginning to stir.

I bent and picked up the pistol dropped by Felicity Hope.

With blood falling from my shattered arm, I walked over to the creature as it struggled to get to its misshapen feet.

I raised the gun.

Fired.

For a long, long time I stood there. Arm cradled to my body. Pain and adrenaline washing back and forth through me like tidewaters.

There was no sign of Felicity Hope.

I knew there would not be.

Though… I did not understand why.

As the monster in my mind crept back into its cave and the civilized man staggered out again, the mysteries of this place – of this afternoon – rose up above me like a tsunami and threatened to smash me flat.

In my mind I could still hear the echoes of her voice.

“Joe… it stops here.”

I looked around at the computers. And at the tables piled high with equipment.

And chemicals.

And reams of paper.

With my good hand, whimpering at the agony in my arm, I reached into my pocket for my lighter.

-9-

The fire burned the building to black ash.

I leaned against the fender of the ATF agents’ Crown Vic and watched it burn. They both yelled at me, demanding to know what happened, threatening to arrest me, trying to get me to react to them in any way. But all I did was watch the place burn.

When the firemen and cops asked me how it started, I spun a bunch of lies.

I was taken in an ambulance to the hospital where they had to do surgery to repair my arm. The doctors had a lot of questions about my arm. I told them that there had been a moray eel in a tank and that I was dumb enough to put my arm inside. They didn’t believe me. Mostly because they weren’t stupid enough to accept that story. And because the wound signature was wrong for an eel. Then Mr Church showed up and people stopped asking me questions.

The only one who heard the real story was Church.

He listened the way he does – silent, without expression, cold. When I was done, he used his cell phone and, with me sitting right there in the ER, ordered a full battery of physical and psychological tests for when I got back to Baltimore.

Even a lie detector test.

Our forensics people lifted blood samples from my clothes. Dark brick-red blood from my shirt. The blood of the Mermen.

And brighter red blood from my sleeve.

Her blood.

They also lifted a full handprint from the back wall of the bathroom. The techs promised DNA and other lab work back as soon as possible.

Dr Hu spent days picking through the ashes of the Koenig building, his face alight with expectation, hoping to find something he could play with, but I’d built a very hot fire.

He finally gave it up, defeated and mad at me.

The doctors and the shrinks ran their tests.

I passed them all. No hallucinogens or alcohol in my system.

The shrinks ran and then re-ran their tests, and when they got the same answers they began looking at me funny. Then they stopped making eye-contact altogether.

On a warm summer evening ten days after the fire, Mr Church called me into a private meeting. There was a plate of cookies – Nilla wafers and Oreos – and a tall bottle of very good, very old Scotch. There was also a stack of folders colour-coded from different departments. I didn’t touch them, but I could see that some folders were from other agencies.

After we sat and ate cookies and drank whiskey and stared at each other for too long, Church said, “Is there anything you would like to add to your report?”

“No,” I said.

“Is there anything about the report you would like to amend?”

“No.”

He nodded.

We sat.

We each had another cookie.

Church picked up two FBI fingerprint cards and handed it to me. I looked at them and read the attached report. The conclusion was this: “Both sets of prints are clearly from the same source. They match on all points.”

I sighed and set the report down.

“Fingerprints can be faked,” said Church. “There are various polymers which can be worn over the finger tips, and even the whole hand, that can carry false prints.”

“I know.”

“The FBI report is therefore inconclusive as far as we’re concerned.”

“Okay,” I said. He studied my face but I was giving him nothing to read. My face has been a stone since the fire. I didn’t want to show anything.

Church removed a report from a DNA lab that we often used. He studied it for a moment but didn’t pass it to me.

“The lab says that the blood sample from your sleeve was contaminated. They pull two blood types from it, one human and one animal.”

“Which animal?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

“Halichoerus grypus,” he said. “Commonly known as the Atlantic gray seal.”

I said nothing.

“The blood was thoroughly mixed,” he said.

“Yes.”

“So thoroughly mixed that they were unable to pull entirely separate DNA strands. In fact the only complete DNA they’ve recovered is an even mix of human and seal genes.” He placed the report on the desk and laid his palm on it. “The scientists are floating various theories that could account for that level of genetic degradation. The leading theory is that the heat somehow fused the DNA.”

“Is that even possible?” I asked quietly.

He smiled. “No.”

We sat there.

The wall clock ticked away two full minutes before he spoke again.

Church said, “There’s a legend in Ireland and elsewhere about a magical creature called a selkie. They’re mysterious women who are actually seals.” He selected a cookie but didn’t eat it. Instead he rolled it back and forth on his desk top. “But that’s myth and legend.”

“Yes.”

“This is the real world.”

“Yes.”

“And we don’t – or can’t – believe in the impossible,” he said. “Can we, Captain?”

I said nothing. Three more minutes burned off the day. The office was absolutely quiet. Beyond the big picture window, the brown waters of the Baltimore Harbor flowed and churned as boats passed by.

“She’s dead,” murmured Church after a while.

“I know.”

“As much as both of us want her back, as much as each of us wants it to be untrue, Grace is dead.”

“I know,” I said.

Church finished his whiskey, got up and walked over to the window and stood there, hands clasped behind his back, staring out at the water.

I looked at the fingerprint card.

The partial palm print was matched against the official fingerprint ten-card that was used to record the full set of prints when anyone enters government service. The card they’d compared the partial to was old. Someone had affixed a small gold star sticker to one corner. They don’t give gold stars when you do something great or if you score on a test. They add that to your record when you die.

The name on the card was a familiar one.

Looking at it twisted a knife in my heart.

The name was Grace Courtland.

I poured myself another glass of whiskey.

Thanks for reading SNAFU: Heroes

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SNAFU SERIES

SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

Featuring original works by:

Jonathan Maberry

James A Moore

Weston Ochse

Greig Beck

And many more

SNAFU: Heroes

SNAFU: Wolves at the Door (2015)

Werewolf Military Horror

Bonus novella by James A Moore

SNAFU II: Survival of the Fittest (2015)

Featuring original works by:

Jeremy Robinson/Kane Gilmour

S.D. Perry

Bob Mayer

Weston Ochse

Joseph Nassise

And many more

Also From Cohesion Press

Horror:

SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

– eds Geoff Brown & Amanda J Spedding

The Gate Theory – Kaaron Warren

Carnies – Martin Livings

Sci-Fi/Thriller:

Valkeryn 2 – Greig Beck

Crime:

Ronnie and Rita – Deborah Sheldon

Family:

Magoo Who? – Anne Carmichael

May I Be Frank? – Anne Carmichael

Coming Soon From Cohesion Press

SNAFU: Wolves at the Door

SNAFU II: Survival of the Fittest

Dark Waters – Deborah Sheldon

Guardian of the Sky Realms – Gerry Huntman

Blurring the Line – ed. Marty Young

Content

SNAFU: Heroes

The Hungry Dark Joseph Nassise

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Tarzan Doesn’t Live Here Anymore Weston Ochse

War Stories James A. Moore

Changeling Jonathan Maberry