“I’d really like to be able to warn you if I see something,” she said.
He shook his head. “No way. The risk of you distracting us at a crucial moment is too great.”
“Hopedale, two minutes,” Zim said from the driver’s seat.
“Wake up Felix,” Rico said from behind the passenger seat. The medium-build man with the perpetual five o’clock shadow and the dangerous demeanor stirred instantly alert. He didn’t miss a beat, unbuckling and loading up as he moved to the back of the van. He gave Krisan a nod as he passed her.
From what she could tell, he was their sniper—the only pure combat person on the team. They were all outfitted in digicamos for swamps and jungles. Their tactical gear, backpacks, even their weapons blended in together. On the street they would stand out like a sore thumb, but she imagined that in a swamp or jungle they’d be practically invisible.
“Why are we stopping here?” she asked.
“Airboat. We don’t know the trail they’re taking to get to the spot you told us about, so we have to go the old-fashioned way. Besides, this hunk of junk,” he said hitting the side of the van, “would get stuck in two minutes flat. Don’t worry, old Zim can drive anything made by man… or otherwise,” Zim said.
Bill shot him a look. Krisan had seen that look from many a superior. It was the “shut up” look.
“You were involved in the Th’un invasion?” she asked innocently.
“Zim talks too much,” Bill answered. “He also has an overactive imagination.”
Krisan nodded. “I’ll drop it, for now. But I want to hear that story at some point.”
“Not going to happen,” Bill replied.
“Now Master Sergeant Farrel, you know how I feel about ‘no.’”
Chapter 16
Absent access to camo, I opted for all black and my usual red scarf—which right then was around my neck. Thankfully, I had the foresight to order some mesh ones, silk in the swamp would be a nightmare. The one I wore at the moment was moisture wicking and easy to breathe through, almost as if it were made for me.
I parked the Hellcat in a little town called Hopedale, thirty miles northwest of where I was heading. Most people could only get into this part of the swamp via air boat or helicopter. I wasn’t most people.
I also knew the secret route the specially modified four-wheel drive trucks ISO used would be taking. I needed to hoof it but I could make it there in time, especially since the sun wasn’t up yet, I could just teleport and bingo bango. I already carried everything I was taking.
A change of clothes, a gallon of gas, and a plastic bag waited in the trunk for me to dispose of any evidence when I returned.
I wanted to make sure no one saw me, so I took off at a jog, heading for the darkest part of the swamp. Signs abounded warning of alligators and not to proceed on foot. Gators were a fact of life in Louisiana, like bears were in Alaska. However, I can see in the dark, teleport, and regenerate from gunshots; this won’t be a problem.
Once I was shielded from what little light there was, I stopped and crouched down. Reaching inside me I triggered my powers; allowing me to see in the dark and pick my target for shadow step… except nothing happened. What the frell?
I tried again. Nothing. This isn’t freaking funny.
I tried again. Still nothing.
I checked my cell phone, I had two hours to travel ten miles in order to intercept the trucks on their secret road. Another hour after that the boats would arrive with all the clean money. According to Peter, anyway. So far, everything he had told me before he died panned out one-hundred percent.
None of that helped me, of course, since my powers were refusing to work. Did it have to do with the conversation I had with Spice? Are they even powers? I shook my head, trying one more time to access them.
Nothing.
“Okay, fine. I didn’t go through hell with Joseph just to give up the moment my powers were on the fritz.” I took off running, right past the warning signs and into the swamp. I had a map on my phone telling me exactly where to go, even if there wasn’t a clear path. On even ground, I could cover ten miles in fifty minutes. Double that for the swamp and I would still make it with a whole ten minutes to spare.
Despite the cloud cover and occasional torrential downpours, the temp hit seventy as the sun rose above the trees. I was drenched in sweat and feeling my muscles in a way I hadn’t in a while.
A quick check of the time told me I was on schedule; I just had to keep pushing myself. Having lived half my life with the threat of alligator attacks, I appreciated the signs of their passage—slightly disturbed water, sudden movement—and how to avoid the places they were likely to attack. Including soft, sandy beaches exactly like the one stretching out in front of me.
“You really going to make me do this, Spice?”
She didn’t answer. Not that I expected her too. The river here was a hundred feet across. I didn’t see any gators, but that didn’t mean anything with the muddy water. The shores were lined with trees, leaves, and logs. Nothing stretched over the water; it was swim or run upstream and hope I found a better crossing.
The way the river bent and how the road ran through the swamp meant that if I had to go up or downstream I would move away from my intended target; I didn’t have the time for that. The best bet would be to swim across as fast as humanly possible and hope for luck.
Luck isn’t a plan.
“Shut up. It’s all I have right now.” I ran forward into the water up to my thighs before I dove in and swam my heart out. I hoped that being early morning meant the gators were still sleeping off the night before—they tended to be active the most after dusk.
No such luck.
I felt it before I heard it, a rush of water hitting me from behind. I rolled over on my back drawing my sword just in the nick of time as a massive gator bore down on me. I kicked at it with my feet, hitting the open maw as it tried to swallow me whole. I managed to push off it and escape the snapping jaws, but it was back on me in a heartbeat. I jabbed the blade into the roof of his mouth as he attacked again. If he felt anything, he didn’t show it; he just recoiled, taking my sword with him. At least he wouldn’t be able to close his mouth for a while.
I turned and swam faster. Each second I was in the water I imagined those teeth rending me limb from limb. That is the stuff of my nightmares. I reached the opposite shore and dragged my weary limbs up the beach until I was a good twenty feet from the water. I stopped and leaned against a tree to catch my breath.
“Okay, okay, lesson learned. I won’t stop anytime soon,” I said. I shouldn’t have expected a response. Whatever was pulling my strings didn’t seem the talkative type. “Great,” I muttered. “A finicky spirit controls my powers. What next? Am I going to turn in to a werewolf?”
A few more deep breaths and I was ready to go again. This was tiring, for sure, but I had trained for this before I knew I would have powers, and this didn’t change the situation. If anything, it just meant I had to plan better and outwit the bastards.
By the time I reached the road, I was wet, exhausted, and raw from the clothes rubbing up against my thighs. This really sucked but I was in too deep now; there was no turning back.
I walked along the road for a few minutes, catching my breath, looking for the right kind of tree. The rain picked up again and the mud road became more of a mud river as it intensified. Typical New Orleans weather; if you don’t like it, wait five minutes, it will change.
The tree I was looking for would be an old one with a multitude of branches, some even going over the road. I passed several that nearly fit the bill, but I needed one with enough mass and with low enough branches that I could leap from it to the truck with little problem.
I still hadn’t found the right one when I heard the rumble of a diesel engine behind me.
They’re here.
I spotted one that would have to do. The lowest limb was fifteen feet up. It wouldn’t be a problem if my powers were workin
g, but as it was… I had a hard fall coming. I ran over to the tree, lodging my foot in the knotty side and hoisted myself up. Hand-over-hand I climbed until I was lying horizontally on the lowest limb, my own limbs wrapped around the branch to minimize my silhouette.
The first truck rounded the corner a few seconds later. No running lights or headlights to give away its position; nothing other than the noisy diesel engine. Special air intake pipes ran up the sides of the trucks and stretched up above the cabs; if I had to guess, I would say they were outfitted for fording. They were all massive GMC pickups, painted a flat black, with tinted windshields and hard shells over the cargo boxes. They looked almost twice as big as a normal truck. I didn’t know a lot about cars, but with tires that big these things could make short work of the swamp. The first one passed under me, then the second, and the third… I waited for the last one. It sucked because if I missed I was hosed. But I had no other choice.
As the last truck was about to pass under me, I let go. I hit the cab top with a thump, rolling back along the hard shell, grinding my ribs into the vent dome as I passed by. I scrambled for a hold and managed to dig my fingers into the same vent that I was pretty sure broke a rib.
I swore under my breath, trying not to give away my position as I rolled back on to the center line of the hard shell. Hopefully, they hadn’t seen me. They had to have heard me, but in the swamp I bet they got a lot of critters falling onto the top of the trucks from the trees. Just not one hundred and sixty-pound vigilantes. In any case, the truck didn’t pull over.
Grinding my teeth together to help me deal with the pain, I crawled forward with as much stealth as I could. I would have loved to have a sword right now, but thanks to that gator I was down to one gun and some knives. More than enough.
Now, if I were building a truck to drive through the swamp to pick up hundreds of millions in cash, I’d make sure the dang thing was armored like a tank. Which meant I couldn’t just shoot through the window; I had to get them to open the door.
Easy enough.
Wind and rain continued to pelt us as we moved on. For me, this was awesome, it reduced visibility to almost nothing and made them slow down to stay on the road. I seated myself on top of the cab, bracing for balance with one hand on the hard shell and a foot against the rooftop antenna; then I started banging on it with my foot.
The truck slid to a halt so fast I almost came flying off. I had to admit, I didn’t think they would respond that quickly.
“What the hell,” I heard the driver yell as the door opened. He stuck his head out to look and I blew it off. I instantly rolled over and down, hanging from my waist and viewing the cabin upside down. The second guy had barely cleared his holster; as he brought the gun up, I fired first.
He slumped over, screaming, and I fired twice more to make sure he didn’t die slowly.
As gracefully as I could, I fell off the truck into the mud. With my free hand I pulled the driver out and dumped him on the road then I climbed in, opened the passenger door, unbuckled the other one, and shoved him out with my foot.
“Fransisco, why did you stop?”
“Ah crap.” I muttered. They had GPS. Of course they did, Madi.
I hit the gas, plunging the beast of a truck forward into the mud while trying to steer and close the door at the same time. Once those were accomplished, I pulled on my seatbelt and picked up the handheld radio. “Sorry,” I muttered as indistinctly as possible.
“We’re on a time table here—don’t stop again.”
Once the threat of discovery had passed, I took a second to do an inventory. The passenger had a nice M4 carbine in a rifle holder, along with five mags of 5.56. He had also dropped his Glock 17 when he fell. The glove box had a roll of masking tape and two packs of Camels. Who the hell smoked anymore? I stuffed the gun into my back waistband and the tape into my jacket pocket. I looked back at the cargo hold and almost slammed on the brakes right there.
I didn’t know about the rest of the cargo, but the window was obscured by shrink-wrapped hundred-dollar bills.
I smiled, cold and predatory like. “Dolla-dolla-dolla bills,” I sang to myself.
♦♦♦
The airboat was loud; too loud. She had to plug her ears with both hands, and no one offered her hearing protection. It forced her to leave her cell tucked away in the waterproof pocket of her twenty-dollar jacket where it would do her no good.
She took the time to study every aspect of these men. They were operators through and through. Unlike some of her colleagues, she hadn’t embedded with the military in any of the recent wars. There was always a conflict somewhere; a seemingly endless amount of man’s inhumanity to man in which the US could get involved.
The last such war was in Russia; after the Th’un invasion they had seen the worst of the aftermath. Not only had their two primary energy plants suffered total catastrophe, most of their army was destroyed when the alien probes attacked, leaving them wide open for attack. Everyone from England to China took advantage; while it wasn’t an official war, the US found themselves in the unenviable position of trying to save Russia from total disaster.
However, Krisan wasn’t as interested in foreign affairs or politics as other journalists. In the grand scheme, those meant next to nothing in the lives of actual people. Crime, on the other hand—crime impacted their daily lives. That was why she followed the stories she did. Why she was determined to follow The Wraith wherever she went. There would always be a meaningful story just behind her vengeful friend.
The roar of the fan cut out suddenly and the boat settled into the water; the forward momentum ended so fast Krisan had to grab the side rail to keep from falling off her seat.
“We’re here, boss,” Zim said as he turned the boat to hit a small muddy berm.
“Rico, drones up, five mikes,” Bill ordered.
Krisan had traveled with highly skilled men before, usually swat or other types of police; they didn’t hold a candle to Bill’s team. Wordlessly, Rico broke out the boxes with the hi-tech drones and began assembling them. The quiet one, Felix, opened up long boxes and handed out M4 rifles to the rest of the crew, who immediately pulled the slides back to check their loads.
In less than five minutes Rico had four drones silently floating in the air, relaying images back to his handheld controller and another monitor in the boat. Everyone else was loaded for bear.
“Krisan,” Bill said, turning to her with his serious face. “Don’t leave the boat, don’t make any noise. If we’re not back in four hours, call the police. Understood?”
She nodded. “Be safe,” she replied.
He smiled. “Safe is not part of the job.”
As if they had telepathic communications the five-man team moved out, trudging silently through the swamp to their destination a mile away. Once they were out of sight, she watched their progress on the monitor and whipped out her cell phone to commit all her notes to the Internet.
She looked up from her phone for a moment when she sensed movement but it was only an alligator swimming slowly along the surface, searching for prey. Please don’t let that be me this morning.
Chapter 17
The trucks turned around an old gnarled tree and into a small clearing. Eloi Bay was a mess of swamp water and old trees. “Logs” moved in the water—clearly gators looking to eat. Whoever picked this place to exchange money was spot on; no one in their right mind would come here.
I followed the lead of the three trucks in front of me as they turned around and backed up to the water’s edge. I parked my truck in the same line perpendicular to the beach and last in the row. No one else exited their vehicles so I didn’t.
What happened next surprised the hell out of me.
The lead truck disgorged an occupant; a tall, fat, man with greenish hair and skin, and—I’m not joking—wearing a neon-blue tracksuit. He walked right to the edge of the swamp… and then into the water. No fear of the gators whatsoever. Has to be a super.
I was right. Once he was waist deep in the water, he raised his hands to his chest and pushed out his hands to the horizon.
The water solidified…
At first, I thought it was frozen, but no, it was just solid, like a dock. The rest of the little bay filled in with ocean water and in a few seconds it was clear of gators, debris, and as clean and clear as a Caribbean inlet.
Swamp control? That was a strange power.
I couldn’t imagine how long it took them to find someone who could do that. Then again, they probably had no problem recruiting him. It wasn’t like the superhero teams would clamor for a guy who could control swamps.
I checked my phone; ten minutes. Swamp-boy changed as he continued to work. Vines and wood circled him, growing on his body until I couldn’t see him anymore—just a giant swamp thing standing in the water. It was almost as if he were absorbing all the crap in the water onto his body.
I pulled out my Storm, loaded a fresh mag, and racked the slide. The pistol had a neat trigger system and it took me a minute to familiarize myself with it when I first picked it up. Joseph always said you were only as good as the equipment you carried; I made sure I knew how to work the action backward and forward.
I really needed to create some kind of armory. Mine was dangerously low but I had no idea how to buy black market weapons or who to buy them from—all I had were the people I took down and whatever weapons they had stashed around. After this I was pretty much out. It was certainly something I needed to look into.
Ten minutes later the dock was fully formed. It looked just like a regular dock stretching out fifty feet into the blue sea bay—except it was made of solid water. The leader of this little team walked out to the end of it, pulled out a flare gun, fired it once into the air, then waited. Swamp-boy finished his work and trundled over to the beach and sat down. He still looked like him but fifteen feet tall and half that wide, made of swamp stuff. He moved pretty slow, I hoped I wouldn’t have to deal with him.
Superhero by Night Omnibus Page 24