Blood Moon Eclipse (The Shadow Lands Book 2)

by Lloyd Behm II

  “Nope, just a hard-ass mother fucker of a job,” I said, making the circle up gesture to the team. Once they were in place, I outlined my plan. “Johnson, pull the moon roof from the Tahoe and mount your Maximini. Hiebert, you’re driving, and Holt, you’ve got Stinger and ammo duty.”

  “I know, wet dog,” Holt replied, shucking his sprayer of holy water. “I’ll transfer the spare ammo from the second Tahoe.”

  It took about fifteen minutes to set everything up, then we eased down Metric to the park. We’d just passed St. Albert the Great Catholic Church when the howling started.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” Dalma said, cocking her head to the side. “Are they trying to sing?”

  “Sounds like it,” I said. “Hiebert, hit play.”

  I’d taken some advice from Fred when we got back to Austin and consulted with the mechanics.

  “Immigrant Song” thundered from the speakers, drowning the howl singing.

  “Thank God for earpro,” Dalma said. I swear I heard her eyes rolling.

  “Contact!” Johnson shouted, slewing his gun on its improved, improvised mount.

  A figure ran from below the bridge over Walnut Creek toward us to the final riffs by Zeppelin. The girl wore nothing but her underwear, and fell half a dozen times in the process of running up the hill.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Baxter said as the figure fell for the third time. “What is this, bad horror movie theater?”

  “Mighty Mite, Wilson, bring her in,” I said. “Everyone else cover them.”

  “Last time I open my mouth,” Baxter said, grinning, as she and Wilson ran over to where the girl had fallen, again.

  They grabbed her under the arms and ran up the hill to where we squatted, watching for werewolves.

  “Dalma,” I said as Wilson and Baxter deposited the girl at my feet.

  “On it,” Dalma replied, pulling out an injector full of colloidal silver.

  “Oh, thank you,” the girl gasped, trying to sound like the rescuee in every bad horror film ever made. She eyed the needle. “What’s that?”

  “Colloidal silver,” Dalma replied, cleaning a patch of skin and hitting the girl with the injector. “If you’re not a werewolf, it’ll keep you from becoming one. If you are a werewolf, well, it’ll keep you from becoming one.”

  Dalma’s face wore one of the evilest grins I’d ever seen.

  “What makes you think I’m a…” the girl said, before passing out.

  “Fucking idiots,” Dalma said. “Who the hell trusts the good-looking girl in her underwear running from the monsters?”

  “Guys who think with their dicks,” Padgett said. “Not that she’d have fooled me.”

  That got him a look from Dalma.

  “What?” Padgett asked the look. “She’s blonde. They do nothing for me.”

  “Yeah, it’s her hair color and not the wrong plumbing that’s the issue,” Dalma said, shooting him the finger.

  “Love you too, hon,” Padgett replied, returning the gesture. “But shouldn’t we be, I don’t know, hunting werewolves or some shit?”

  “What about her?” Hovis asked.

  “Restrain her,” I said, grinning. “Goodhart said to bring someone back for the Pros from Dover to work on, after all.”

  Mighty Mite and Wilson picked the girl up and carried her over to a fence. They ran the chains from the restraints around the fence posts and shackled her to it.

  “This ain’t gonna work if she’s been implanted,” Wilson said, dusting his hands together as he and Mite rejoined the Tahoe.

  “I’m hoping this bunch hasn’t been implanted yet,” I replied. “Remember what Harvey said—they’re trying to earn their upgrades.”

  “That’s an awful slim reed to grasp,” Johnson said over Cheap Trick.

  “I’ll take what I can get,” I replied as a big werewolf came loping from behind an apartment building to our right.

  He was in wolf form—but I’ve never seen a wolf that was four-foot-high at the shoulder and weighing in at around three hundred pounds. The size is a giveaway every damn time.

  “Bad Wolf!” I shouted, pointing triumphantly. “Light him up!”

  The wolf ran into a wall of silver and lead, falling to the ground before he’d covered half the distance to us.

  “I’ve got it!” Holt shouted, jumping from the back of the Tahoe and running to where the werewolf lay in a crumpled heap.

  “Damnit Holt, wait for it!” I shouted.

  Holt had pulled off his armor in the rear of the Tahoe, and hadn’t bothered putting it back on before dashing off.

  Sure as shit, the werewolf was faking it. Time seemed to slow as it did one of those cool karate flick pushups from the ground and grabbed Holt by the shoulders, biting him.

  “Fuck! I haven’t got a shot!” Dalma wailed.

  “Cover me!” I roared, charging the werewolf.

  Contrary to what Mel Gibson would have you believe, drawing a bladed weapon longer than about six inches while running at full tilt isn’t easy. I managed to get my bolo clear just as the werewolf, now in wolfman form, bit through Holt’s neck and shoulder and tossed him to the ground.

  “Here, doggie doggie,” I said as it lunged at me, arms extended to grab.

  I slashed left and right, severing the tendons in both arms, then stepped to the side, allowing the werewolf to pass.

  I owed the next bit to hours of practice under the tutelage of Henry Cornelio Salvación, one of QMG’s weapons masters. He’d insisted we learn how to use our entire body in the cut without overextending ourselves. I slammed my bolo into the base of the werewolf’s spine, severing it. The blade pulled free with a sucking sound as the werewolf fell forward to its hands. It’d recover from a severed spine, given time.

  I didn’t give it time.

  It snarled and snapped at me, but couldn’t figure out how to attack while its legs weren’t working. I struck again, partially severing its neck. A second chop finished the job.

  There were howls from the park.

  Dalma ran over with her medic’s bag and tried to work on Holt. I took one look and walked over, taking her hands gently.

  Holt’s neck wasn’t quite severed, but the difference wasn’t enough that he’d have survived if had he been in a trauma center.

  “Dalma,” I said, looking her in the eyes.

  “Damn it, Jesse, let go. I can…” she started.

  “You can what?” I asked. “Honey, he’s gone.”

  “I…I…” she stuttered before breaking down completely.

  Padgett led Dalma back to the Tahoe.

  “How do you want to handle this?” Diindiisi asked.

  I pulled out a silver injector and injected Holt, then turned to her.

  “Bag Holt, bag the werewolf, and move on,” I said emotionlessly. “We’ll mourn him after we kill the rest of the werewolves.”

  It took about twenty minutes to bag the bodies. I said a few words over Holt. I looked the team over—except for Dalma, they were pissed, but functional. Padgett had sedated Dalma in the back of the Tahoe.

  “How’d I miss that?” I asked Diindiisi, gesturing at Dalma.

  “Miss what? Oh, you think they were sleeping together,” she replied. “They weren’t. Holt wasn’t her type, too much of a, how’d she put it…fucking nerd.”

  “Then what am I missing?”

  “Dalma is, for all her protests to the contrary, a caring individual. She’s never lost anyone she was close to before, so…” Diindiisi said as we started moving toward the park again.

  “I think I get it,” I replied. “They were close, but not intimate. Combat will do that to you.”

  Diindiisi rolled her eyes at me. “Something like that, yes.”

  “Okay then, back to work,” I said as a pillar of smoke rose in the park. “Oh, look, they’ve lit a fire for us.”

  “Magic-using fire, never seen that before,” Diindiisi snarked.

  “You know, you’ve been hanging o
ut with Padgett too much lately,” I said with a smile.

  “I heard that!” Padgett said as the Tahoe turned into the park.

  “You were supposed to,” I called back, signaling for the Tahoe to halt.

  Through the trees, we could see wolfmen and naked humans dancing around a fire.

  “Fucking skyclad,” I said with a sigh. “Why the hell do they always have to be skyclad?”

  “Eh, that bunch isn’t too bad,” Johnson said from the sunroof. “We’ve seen worse.”

  “I know,” I said, rummaging in the back of the Tahoe.

  “Whatcha looking for?” Dalma asked in a brittle, glassy voice.

  “Thumper,” I replied, finding the case and drawing it out onto the tailgate.

  Thumper was something that wasn’t supposed to exist—one of the semi-mythical second run of China Lake grenade launchers the manufacturer reported as destroyed. To make matters worse, its serial number was a duplicate of another weapon in the QMG Armory, which drove the bean counters nuts.

  I popped the case and pulled the launcher out. Someone had painted a picture of Bambi’s rabbit partner in crime on the barrel since the last time I’d taken the weapon out of its case.

  “Holt did that,” Dalma slurred. “He said since it was named, it should look purty.”

  I didn’t have a good answer for that. I paused and patted her arm before pulling out the tray and grabbing the ammo vest. I swung the vest on over my armor and pouch combination. It was going to be a stone-cold bitch if I needed to get at ammo for my submachine gun.

  “Jesse?” Diindiisi asked, watching me load Thumper.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you sure that’s how you want to play this?” she asked. “There are humans out there, after all.”

  “Humans involved in a ritual with werewolves who aren’t attacking them,” I replied, reloading the four empty slots on the ammo vest. “But we’ll do this right. Hiebert, patch me into the speakers.”

  “You’re live,” Hiebert replied.

  “Werewolves and…others,” I said. “As a duly designated representative of the city of Austin, Travis County, and the State of Texas, I order you to cease any and all supernatural activity. Drop to your knees and we will place you in custody.”

  My statement was met with howls of derision and a couple of ‘Fuck You’s from the idiots circling the fire.

  “Right, then,” I said, moving to where I had a clear shot at the bonfire. The wolfmen and their groupies had added obscene hand gestures to their dance step.

  Compared to the last time I’d used Thumper, this was going to be a walk in the park, pun intended. I pulled the trigger.

  Choonk!

  I stroked the slide and reloaded with a ca-clack.

  Choonk!

  Ca-clack.

  Choonk!

  Ca-clack!

  Just as I felt the trigger release on the fourth round, the first one exploded—dead center in the fire, scattering burning wood everywhere. I flipped Thumper and started reloading from the bottom row of grenades on my vest.

  The werewolves, to misquote Queen Victoria, were not amused, and those left standing leapt through the remnants of the fire toward us.

  Two were down—one flailing and trying to rise on three limbs, while the second was assuming ambient temperature—he or she had managed to intersect the trajectory of one of the grenades just as it went off.

  “Light them up!” Diindiisi shouted as the werewolves charged in.

  The first wolfman recovered from his leap, and his legs had bunched to make his second, when I center-punched him with the grenade launcher. Unlike the first grenades I’d fired, these were buckshot—twenty silver-washed buckshot. We were under forty meters, so the buckshot hadn’t dispersed that much, and blew a fist-sized hole through the werewolf, center mass. He went down, and I shifted targets.

  All of the werewolves were down. The surviving cultists had decided discretion was the better part of valor, especially in the face of superior firepower, and had dropped to the ground, hands in the air. It was either that or they were abasing themselves to us. I believe it was the first, not the second, for personal reasons.

  “Padgett, Mighty Mite, pair off and make sure of the werewolves,” I said, dropping Thumper to hang by its sling. “Hovis, Wilson, y’all got the cultists. Everyone else is on overwatch.”

  There were single and double shots as Padgett and Baxter worked the werewolves over. Hovis and Wilson got creative with the surviving cultists—they daisy-chained them to a bollard after applying first aid.

  “Mostly nicks and cuts,” Hovis said when they got back to the Tahoe. “They’ll survive until the cleaning crew gets here.”

  A round bounced off the Tahoe. Everyone but Johnson sucked earth. Johnson horsed his gun to the north and let off a burst on general principle.

  “Cease fire unless you’ve got a target!” I said.

  “There’s someone on the roof of that apartment complex across the street,” Johnson said.

  I skooched around so I could see the complex.

  “I don’t see anyone,” I replied.

  “You’re looking at the wrong complex,” Johnson said, dropping into the safety of the Tahoe. “It’s the one across the creek, across the street.”

  Another round ricocheted off the Tahoe and whistled off to points unknown.

  I unloaded the three rounds in Thumper, rolled over, and reloaded with rounds from the top four pouches on my vest.

  “Y’all ease back to the road and distract Charles Whitman over there,” I said, crawling toward the tree line that separated the Park from the parking lot.

  “What’re you going to do?” Diindiisi asked.

  “Stop him, I hope,” I called back over my shoulder.

  Once I was in the trees, I paused. I could still hear the marksman taking potshots at the Tahoe—most of them screeching off into the distance as ricochets. I rose to my knees, and when the next shot didn’t violate my personal space, I crouched and ran along the tree line to the creek. Taking no chances and thanking God for Texas weather, I crossed the shallow creek and followed the bank under the bridge on Metric, where I surprised one of the local homeless.

  “What the fuck, dude? Did the aliens invade or something?” he asked, looking askance at how heavily armed I was.

  “Yeah, something like that,” I replied, easing around him and trying to see the shooter on the roof of the apartment building.

  “Dude, I need my hat,” homeless guy screamed, digging through his pile of belongings. “They’re after me!”

  “The rebar in the bridge should protect you,” I said. “It’s well known that the aliens can’t read the signal through a Faraday cage, and the rebar forms one of those.”

  “You sure?” he asked, pausing his frantic scrabbling momentarily.

  “Positive man, positive,” I replied.

  “I’ll take your word for it. You want me to do anything?”

  If I’d thought it would help, I’d have had him try to knock the shooter out with his body funk, but even my ethics wouldn’t stretch that far.

  “Stay here under the bridge and watch out for alien breakthrough,” I said as another round boomed from the roof.

  “Got it, man,” Homeless said as I eeled around the bridge abutment.

  From there it was a quick scramble up a bank of crumbly limestone to the path that wound through the park. I still couldn’t see the shooter, but I could hear him.

  “Johnson,” I called over the radio.

  “Send it.”

  “From the bridge, what building is the shooter on?”

  “First one I can see,” came the helpful response.

  “Roger that,” I replied, working my way along the tree line.

  I got a glimpse of the building and the shooter. The building was a long shot away, and the wind wasn’t quite right, so I wormed my way into the central Texas scrub jungle Austin Parks and Recreation had provided and crawled through the cat briar until
I was certain I was in range. I kneeled and punched all four rounds into the building—three through the open door on the balcony, and the forth to the roof.

  The rounds went off in a series of sharp cracks. I hadn’t been fucking around when I chose the rounds I was going to fire, either. They were all thermobaric grenades, and set the building on fire.

  “Uh, Jesse, the target is down, but the building is on fire,” Johnson called over the radio.

  “Roger,” I replied standing and walking to the street. “Let’s just say its Holt’s funeral pyre.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Holt, it turned out, was another Episcopalian, of the much-lapsed variety. He had left instructions and requests for his internment, which included me doing the service, if I survived him, or if I felt so inclined.

  Which is why, two days after he’d died, we were standing in the company columbarium, putting his ashes to rest. For once, I was in full fig—black cassock topped with surplice and white stole. I also had a copy of the funeral rites from the 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer—Holt’s note said he preferred the language to the more modern version, and who was I to go against his final request?

  Dalma came in, carrying a bronze colored, three-band urn. The funeral home that handled cremations for QMG—and everyone with QMG agreed to cremation when they died, even those whose religious teachings prohibited cremation—had done their usual quick job with the remains of a hunter. Now we were here to place his remains and honor his time on Earth. I waited while Dalma placed the urn in its niche.

  “Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of John Holt, departed, and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ,” I intoned.

  Dalma was weeping as she stepped back from the niche. Father Miller, who’d joined us for this ceremony, crossed himself.

  “At whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the earth and the sea shall give up their dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his own glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself,” I finished, as Hovis and Wilson stepped up with the cover for the niche.