Tooth and Claw

by Joseph Nassise

  He pulled a small laptop computer from his kit and opened it up. Seconds later, a signal went out to Preceptor Johannson. While Riley gave orders over the comm, Cade awaited the preceptor’s answer.

  It came in less than a minute, superior Templar technology finding, embracing, and scrambling the signal in all of sixty seconds.

  Johannson looked alert and tightly pressed in his uniform as he accepted the video uplink. “Knight Commander,” he said in a crisp tone. “What’s your report?”

  Cade detailed everything the team had witnessed and a complete debrief on the behavior of the ghouls.

  “Are you sure it’s ghouls?” Preceptor Johannson said with a condescending smile. “That is not how they are known to operate, Commander.”

  Unseen by his superior, Cade clenched a fist. “Yes, I’m aware of that. Hence my report before we take further action.”

  “What I’m saying, Williams, is how can you be certain it’s ghouls?”

  Cade hesitated. His psychometric ability was not a matter of record, and certainly wasn’t something he discussed openly, or even privately. To date, the only other living men who knew of his Sight were Duncan, Olsen, and Riley.

  But men talked, and Cade knew that. He'd heard enough of the rumors first hand. Did you know, the Heretic sacrifices unblemished lambs to generate a ward of protection?! Did you know, Commander Williams attends Black Mass to enchant his sword instead of having the blessing of the Church?! Did you know, did you know. . . ?

  But his Sight was another matter.

  The knowledge of such a skill could be deadly on a number of levels, and Cade wasn’t about to hand it over to the new preceptor with a big red bow on it. Perhaps Johannson suspected that, lacking any other evidence, using some infernal and forbidden art was the only way Cade would know their enemy’s nomenclature with any certainty.

  Johannson didn’t know about the Sight; couldn’t know; but Cade realized he was making a power play here, pushing him about the ghouls. He wanted Cade to talk about his “gift,” because entrusting it to the preceptor would give Johannson a certain type of control. Knowledge, after all, is power.

  It was exactly this sort of game-playing that kept Cade away from any desire to advance in the ranks of the Templars. He had no stomach for the politics of the command structure that plagued every organization, from the U.S. military to the board room, from the local Baptist church to the Vatican itself.

  “I’m certain it’s ghouls,” Cade said, straight-faced.

  “Perhaps, but how can you be sure?” Johannson asked.

  “I’m sure,” Cade replied curtly. His dislike and distaste of the new preceptor was growing by the second. “We’ll need backup.”

  “That won’t be possible for quite some time, I’m afraid.”

  Cade scowled. “Sir, we don’t know how many of these things are down there. It could be hundreds. It could be more than hundreds.”

  “Then you’ll just have to go down and find out,” Johannson said.

  Now Cade clenched his other fist. He could hear the politics in the preceptor’s voice. If Cade wouldn’t play the obedient little puppy, then he and his team could go to hell. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t faced the undead before; animated bodies like the revenants that had killed so many Templars so recently.

  He knew Echo could handle hell itself, but he wasn’t sure he could handle the new preceptor’s bullshit.

  “Understood,” Cade said stoically. “We’ll head in now and wipe them out. All the same, send that backup as soon as possible, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, sir. Because I don’t know how many we’re dealing with or why they’re acting the way they are. We might be onto something bigger out here.”

  “Commander—”

  “Williams out.”

  He slapped the screen closed. Riley, who’d maintained a discrete distance, closed in on his boss and muttered, “So that’s how it is.”

  “That’s how it is.”

  “Roger that.” The XO’s tone suggested the preceptor might not want to find himself off-post alone with Riley, as things might not go so well for the superior officer.

  Cade shoved the small computer back into his kit and led the way out of the house. Riley reported to him as they quick-stepped toward the school.

  “The other houses wae the same as here,” he said. “Holes in the floor, people gone while they were in the middle of whatever they were doing. A lot of them were having dinner, it looks.”

  “So, around sunset.”

  “Stands to reason, yep. No bodies found. Why aren’t they, uh…consuming them on the spot, Commander? Why was the cop still upstairs?”

  “Why would you leave?” Cade said. He’d been considering the same question himself as soon as they’d left the police station.

  “Maybe ’cause I was full.” Not so much as a trace of humor could be found in the XO’s reply.

  “Or maybe you were ordered back to base.”

  Riley whistled low. “That’s not a pleasant thought, boss. These deadheads can think?”

  They reached the school. The men of Echo lined the street, waiting.

  “We’re going to find out,” Cade said, and moved to address the squad, who stood ready and waiting.

  “Guys,” he said, “lock and load. We’ve got work to do.”

  7

  Cade’s men faced him, expressions hard-set, eyes serious, as he gave them their sit-rep.

  “We’re dropping down into that hole and we’re going to clear out each and every ghoul we see. It’s very likely we’ll be in close quarter combat, so suppressors on. I don’t need any eardrums bursting from the noise when we make contact. We’ll start with triple-taps, two to the body and one to the head. If that doesn’t hack it, go to full auto, tear them apart. If that doesn’t work, switch to your blades. Remember, if they touch your skin or break it, you’ll drop and be useless, so don’t let that happen. Questions?”

  He’d said this for the benefit of Duncan who alone of the all men looked uneasy. He hoped Duncan would speak up; if he didn’t Cade would have to spend precious seconds addressing the lieutenant personally.

  Fortunately, Duncan had the guts to say what was on his mind.

  “Sir,” Duncan said, “these holes they made—it’s not like they were using some kind of excavation machinery. If they’d had to dig, there’s a good chance the people inside the houses, some of them anyway, would have heard them coming. But they didn’t. These things just burst straight up from the tunnels, all in one go, like an explosion. The kind of strength it would take to do that . . .”

  Cade nodded once. He’d thought the same thing. “It’s a lot. I know, Lieutenant. I hope you’re up on your swordplay.”

  If they’d been at one of their many training scenarios, the other men would have chuckled. Not this night. There was nothing amusing about this mission.

  Duncan gave an affirmative nod and retreated to silence, setting his expression to match those of his teammates. Cade was pleased to see the shift. Yes, Duncan was coming along nicely.

  “All right,” Cade said. “Let’s move.”

  The men jogged up into the school. Already Moro and one of his men were unspooling black static rope and rigging a horizontal anchor over the hole in the floor while two other men kept their weapons trained on the dark maw.

  “Ready, Commander,” Moro announced with a thumbs up.

  Cade gave him a sharp signal in return, and Moro slid down the rope without hesitation while his buddies covered him as best they could. As soon as Moro clicked his red-lens tac light twice at them, then next man went down.

  One by one the others slid down while Moro relayed his findings to Cade over the radio. “The lieutenant was right, sir,” Moro reported. “I’ve seen a lot of caves in my day and there's no way these are natural formations. I’d say our ghouls plowed right through the ground with brute force.”

  Not entirely brute force, Cade thought. Creatures like ghouls were made up of decaying flesh, an
d if merely that, they couldn’t have dug through a feather pillow, much less the rocky soil underground. They, like other undead, were powered by strong, animating magick—which, after another moment’s thought, was perhaps the equivalent of brute force. Or worse.

  “How much room do we have to maneuver?” Cade asked.

  “Eh, not much, Commander. We can go maybe two-by-two down here at the moment.”

  “Make it happen, Moro.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  By the time they’d finished this exchange, most of the team had descended. Only Duncan, Riley, and Olsen remained with Cade. Wordlessly, Cade climbed into the hole and slid down until his feet touched dirt. The rest of the team had already moved forward, weapons drawn, leaving a small pocket of space for the commander to maneuver in.

  He lowered his scope and raised his MP5. He could stand upright with only an inch or two of clearance; he might have otherwise smiled at the thought of the giant Moro up ahead, doubtless needing to crouch to avoid skinning his head against the rocky ceiling.

  Cade moved forward with the team as his three remaining command squad rappelled down behind him. Sound had a muted, stuffy quality here; they’d descended just shy of two meters, about the depth of a grave. With the tight quarters and the men ahead absorbing any possible residual noise, Cade felt the comparison to a grave was apt. The team inched forward, creating only the dimmest sounds of shuffling in the claustrophobic environment. Cade could feel the weight of the air around them cinching his lungs.

  The team remained silent as they moved; trading no whispers or radio communication. They needed every sense as attuned as possible, and Cade knew the men of Echo were picking up the same sick vibrations he was, the sixth-sense of pure malevolence that all human beings possessed, but which Knights Templar could not help but attune to after years of engaging evil in direct combat.

  “Contact!”

  Cade took a knee at the sound of Moro’s voice in his ear. Muffled gunfire rattled out in the tunnel ahead, a muted series of thuds as Moro and another Templar fired shots from their weapons. The other men in front of Cade knelt as well, MP5s raised but silent, having no shot past their comrades.

  The short series of three shots Cade had ordered lasted only seconds. Then the guns ahead opened up into full automatic, magazines emptying into the ghouls up ahead that Cade could see only in his mind’s eye.

  Then screams. Human. His men. Two at least.

  Cade swore and tried to force his eyes to look deeper into the tunnel, past the crouching men, past the limit of his scope. He was rewarded only with the backs of his team, all of them tense and prepared, waiting for an opening they could exploit.

  More gunfire, put-put-put! Beneath it, Cade realized there was something missing from the fight: the sounds of ghouls being struck. Lord in Heaven, were Moro and his guys up front even hitting the foul creatures?

  Then it ended.

  Cade stood up behind his men, weapon held to his shoulder. He inched forward and tapped the man in front of him. “Left wall, left wall.”

  The Templar nodded and scooted back just far enough for the man in front of him to veer left. The men continued moving in this manner, like a human zipper, creating space for the commander to follow the right tunnel wall up to where Moro had been leading. He knew his command squad was following behind.

  The process took over a minute, a lifetime in combat terms. When Cade finally reached the front of the line, he scowled angrily. Riley, Olsen, and Duncan took up positions around their commander, weapons poised for another attack as Cade assessed the scene.

  One of Moro’s team lay flat on his back, motionless. Moro was already kneeling over him, assessing the damage, and Cade followed suit, scanning the man for wounds.

  They found none.

  “Commander . . .” Moro began, but cut himself off. His unspoken question was clear: What the hell had happened to this man?

  Cade pointed to the Templar’s left wrist. “There.”

  Moro peered at the site, then sighed. A narrow strip of the Templar’s flesh was visible between his long sleeve and his leather glove. A thin scratch barely welled blood, a scant wound that could easily have been attributed to the scratch of an unbent paperclip or staple, the type of scrape routinely ignored by cubicle rats the world over.

  “That’s all it takes,” Cade said. “The ghoul barely touched him.”

  He leaned over the Templar’s face. The soldier’s eyes were bright and aware, his breath coming out in a reedy whisper.

  “Can you blink?” Cade said.

  The soldier blinked rapidly at him.

  “All right. Can you breathe? Once for yes, twice for no.”

  The soldier didn’t respond immediately, as if checking his own internal systems. Finally he squeezed his eyes shut once and opened them.”

  “All right, good man.” He turned to two soldiers kneeling behind Moro. “Get this man topside, and call in MEDEVAC. I don’t know how long the paralysis will last. You keep Moro posted on his condition.”

  The two men nodded and moved to their fallen brother as Cade and Moro stepped a bit farther down the tunnel to continue assessing the aftermath of the fight.

  “How many ghouls?” Cade asked.

  “Two, sir.”

  Damn, Cade thought. That didn’t bode well. Two enemy combatants, unarmed with distance or projectile weapons, and they managed to drop one of the Templars and make a handful more empty their magazines?

  Riley, Olsen, and Duncan followed their commander as he and Moro searched for the two ghouls’ remains. A few steps later, they found them.

  The ghouls were still alive, or as alive as undead monsters could be. Moro and his front line had cut the legs from under the creatures, which lay prostrate on the floor, using their clawed hands to creep toward them. One of the beasts was missing an arm as well, yet still it crawled, digging its supernatural claws into the earth to pull itself toward the Templars.

  Cade’s lip curled at the stench of the two monsters, though this reflex was more a comment on their nature than their actual smell. The veteran had smelled death and decay on any number of occasions, and had grown as accustomed to it as a human being could. But the odor coming from the ghouls was more tangible than that, a thing that spawned from its supernatural origin than its actual decayed flesh.

  But that wasn’t what bothered the commander; it was their silence. Cade and his men had faced enormous demons, ravenous revenants—sick cousins to these crawling corpses—and all manner of evil magic. But those enemies had all made sounds. Much of it horrifying, yes; he’d seen more than one newbie Templar freeze up at the sound of a demon’s bellow, and never faulted them for it. But the ghouls made no sound at all. Their sharp teeth gnashed and their clawed hands made eerie tapping and digging sounds in the ground as they tried to reach their prey, but they themselves issued no noise. They were as perfectly silent as the corpses they were. Cade would have preferred it if they’d roared or moaned or gave some other indication of their animation apart from their movement. Their silence unnerved him.

  Both ghouls had taken dozens of shots to their bodies and heads. None of those hits slowed them. Only the severing of their legs gave Moro and the men up front leeway to disengage.

  “Sir,” Duncan whispered, keeping his tone low and dark.

  Cade tilted his chin enough to acknowledge the other man.

  “You said you saw two at the police station, when you used your Sight?”

  Cade gave him one nod.

  “And now these two,” Duncan went on whispering. “Pairs. Teams, sir. They’re working in teams.”

  Instantly, Cade activated his jaw mic. “Kirkland, do you have a signal down here?”

  Kirkland replied quickly. “No, sir. Dead zone.”

  “Take Olsen and go topside till you get one,” Cade ordered. “Then find me every military or Templar installation within fifty klicks of this location.”

  “Copy. On our way.”

  Cade heard th
e men moving off up the tunnel. Now he was down five men, and so far all they had to show for it were these two crawling corpses.

  Those same two crawling corpses crept unerringly toward the group of men, who had continued moving backward apace with their advance. Now Cade unslung his sword, which seemed to pulse in the darkness around them. Keeping the blade pointed downward, he raised it in the air and brought it smashing down into the skull of the nearest ghoul.

  The blessed blade crunched into the monster and pierced the earth. The ghoul stopped moving. Cade pressed the sole of one boot into the monster’s face for leverage and yanked out the blade. He muttered Riley’s name and gestured toward the second ghoul; Riley dispatched it with his own blade.

  Cade touched his mic again. “Gentlemen, conventional weapons aren’t doing us much good down here. Keep your swords ready, and use the MPs to cut the legs out from under them, that’s about all they’re good for. Go medieval with the blades, you won’t have much room to maneuver. We move forward from here.”

  The team began strapping their firearms to their backs with Velcro strips and replacing their left-hand gloves with tight-fitting mittens woven of Kevlar chain. Contrary to most movies, sword edges in the dark ages weren’t all that sharp, and were used primarily to hack and stab rather than to slice, unlike their East Asian siblings. Medieval knights were just as likely to hold both the hilt and the blade of their swords to attack and defend in cramped spaces. The Templar blades combined the best of both Eastern and Western swords, with razor-sharp sides and a wicked point. Wearing the chain mail gloves, each man could safely hold the blade of his sword as readily as the grip, and use the powerful weapon as sort of short, edged quarterstaff, allowing for tighter thrusts and strikes than they would use out in the open.

  Cade gave the men about thirty seconds to make their preparations, then turned toward the darkness of the tunnel ahead. “Riley, Moro.”