Disciples of the Serpent: A Novel of the O.C.L.T.

by Williams, Sidney

  The bastard was well prepared and lucky too. With an arm over Kaity’s shoulders, she stayed down, giving it a few tense seconds. A piece of metal landed with a swish half a meter away. A piece of twisted gear, stabbed deep into the earth. It would have impaled one of them with just a little variance in its landing.

  Squinting against the rain, O’Donnell looked up. Nothing else seemed to be coming. She got on her knees and helped Kaity up. The chopper behind them was a smoking mess.

  They wouldn’t be going home that way. No time to think about that now. She gave Kaity a nudge toward the pilot, who looked on in a bit of shock and at a loss for a remark.

  “Stay with him. Stay close to Jimmy,” she said.

  She gave the woman a nudge then turned and headed toward the ruins, sidearm in hand, squinting, her eyes almost closed against the stinging rain. She was halfway to the wall, hearing some kind of shouted chants from the old man, though she couldn’t make out the words when what felt like a sandbag slammed into her side. Pain shot through her ribs, and she tumbled to the ground, stones digging into her side. One elbow landed hard on a piece of rock, bringing tears, yet she somehow held onto her weapon and started to swing it in the direction of the assault.

  Another forearm collided with hers, sweeping the weapon aside and then a fist smashed her face, flattening her nose and delivering the hard-pressure pain back through her head.

  Just before that forced her to blink, she caught sight of the woman silhouetted against the rainy sky. The woman they’d been looking for. Even as O’Donnell’s brain clouded, something reminded her, a little pulse deep in her thoughts, that the woman carried the deadly venom. She couldn’t afford to black out, couldn’t lie unconscious. An injection might be administered.

  Fighting the waves that seemed to converge on her brain, she raised her arms, got them in front of her, as punches came her way. Somehow, though she felt numb and as if her limbs weighed tons, she deflected.

  Then she found herself pushing into the ground with her heels, not quick scrambling but getting out of the way of the onslaught. Struggling upward. More blows came as she got into a crouch, and she kept her arms up.

  The cold bite of the slashing rain helped.

  Like a splash of water to the face.

  She straightened, took a step back and leveled her forearm in front of her, then moved forward, reflexive basic self-defense training kicking in. The woman was a little taller than she was. She could work with that.

  She put her weight into it, got the arm past the woman’s ready hands, slamming the forearm into the throat.

  Her side kick came next. She aimed for the head, the goal: unconsciousness.

  That didn’t work out. Her foot landed somewhere near the shoulder, staggering the woman off balance but not stopping her. In an instant, she’d regrouped, and she charged forward with a new rain of blows.

  Where the hell was Bullfinch?

  And, what the hell was going on on the wall while they played?

  Bullfinch had the sword at his side at that moment, ready but not poised in a defensive posture. His route to the ruins had been interrupted by the tall man stepping into his path just a short distance ahead, blocking the arched doorway on a ruined outer wall a few meters from the abbey where the old man stood.

  Behind the figure, Bullfinch could see the old man on the taller wall. He raised his staff as thunder off the bay beyond him rose in an escalating barrage. A sea storm was not out of the ordinary, but the deafening roar seemed louder than a typical event, and the electric feel to the air was powerful. As if to punctuate that, the charcoal clouds on the horizon were ripped by jagged lines of lightning.

  The professor planted his feet and sloughed off his coat and hat in spite of the wind and cold. He’d have to get past the tall figure. If the indications that the man was more than human were correct, perhaps this sword would prove helpful. It had been forged in a different age when knowledge of fantastic things remained at the forefront of men’s minds.

  He tilted the blade at a defensive angle in front of him and moved forward, summoning calm as the winds whipped at the figure’s coat. A gust caught the hood and pulled it back from his bald skull, but the round-lenses of the glasses stayed in place, masking part of his features, contributing to the quality of oddness that tightened Bullfinch’s throat. He’d sensed it on the video footage, and it was stronger still here. The pulp writer Rottman’s work had spoken of beings, emissaries crossed between men and the ancient figures legends had sought to describe. Perhaps they still walked.

  He advanced, reminding himself not to let his gaze lock on the smooth, dark lenses. He needed to keep the whole figure in sight, watch the limbs, to be ready to deflect any attack. He thought about issuing a warning, but that seemed fruitless.

  Careful with the placement of his feet, avoiding jagged stones and dips in the terrain, he moved forward. His progress didn’t seem to trouble the figure. The posture didn’t change, nor the breathing. No signs of tenseness affected the muscles.

  Not until the tight lips parted slightly.

  Then wider.

  And wider.

  And a tentacle-like appendage shot from the cavern the opening created, coming from somewhere deep in the throat.

  Bullfinch fought the shock of the contradiction. He’d seen all manner of strangeness, but the appearance of something outside the usual bounds of natural couldn’t help but disturb, triggering some racial memory of warning and danger.

  He’d read of aquatic snakes with vestigial tentacles, but those appendages were small, useless. The man-thing before him was incredible.

  As one of the writhing appendages stretched toward Bullfinch, the man’s coat was shrugged off. His body shuddered for a moment, and then more tentacles burst from behind him, stretching over his shoulders and around his abdomen.

  Long, dark red, slimy, writhing.

  Each ready to battle, not looking like it would succumb easily even to the bite of the sword.

  Behind the figure, as the old man continued his flailing shouts, a line of blue energy shot past him. Bullfinch could imagine it extending from one of the symbol-marked posts somewhere behind, stretching for the next stick, channeling energy toward the bay.

  Ready to rip open whatever lay beneath the water, whatever membrane long ago had sealed away something of legend more horrible than mythmakers had chosen to record.

  The voice came as a shout. Loud but barely rising above the tempest swirling around them.

  “I’m gonna have to ask you to hold it.”

  Rees spun to find himself facing the uniformed officer who had a new weapon leveled at him. As his gaze moved from the nasty-looking semi-automatic to focus on the man, he saw he wasn’t really in uniform at all, just wearing a few Garda accessories.

  “You’ve got to let us stop this.”

  “Sorry. My job’s to let it go on.”

  “Do you see that energy? Do ya think this is a normal afternoon shower?”

  “I’ve seen my bosses get into some weird territory. This one’s a little offbeat, I’ll give you that.”

  Something rumbled from beyond the abbey, deep in the bay.

  “We’ve found things where I work. Seen things,” Rees said. “Things you’d know at a glance didn’t belong in our world. Some are benign little orbs with funny feet. Some are like whatever’s beneath those waves out there. You’ve got to let us stop this.”

  “Sorry,” the man said, though he did give a second glance toward a waterspout becoming visible amid the haze and slashing rain over the bay.

  “You see that?” Rees asked.

  “Damnedest thing my bosses have come up with,” the man said. “I’ll give you that.”

  Fangs flared at the end of an appendage that stretched from the figure’s mouth.

  Bullfinch stepped to the side of its attempted strike and slashed downward with the sword. Ripples of blue, like electrical impulses, crackled around the steel as it sliced through the writhing coil.
The symbols on the sword summoned some kind of energy not unlike the sticks were doing. Perhaps it was made stronger in this area. Or maybe it was the proximity to the post, and the symbol – some unknown tie.

  At any rate, he’d struck it a quarter of the way up its length. The fanged tip dropped to the ground, and the professor swung the blade quickly upward, letting the blade point dip over his right shoulder. The blade stopped another appendage from the thing’s back. This one didn’t seem to have teeth, but it would have wrapped around him.

  He didn’t manage a blow that cut this time, but he used the blade to shove the grasping thing away. He jerked backwards then, several steps, out of range. He held the blade in a defensive diagonal, watching the various tendrils and the distorted face.

  The figure was definitely a hybrid of some type. Bullfinch recalled one of Rottman’s stories had been centered around a mysterious and almost-forgotten coastal town north of Blackpool, supposedly populated by hybrids.

  As he looked on, the figure’s most human-like arms stretched and extended, ripples pulsing beneath the muscles as long, blade-like nails inched out from the fingertips.

  Bullfinch drew in a breath and readied himself.

  On the wall, the old man’s machinations continued, and the energy flow through the visible posts seemed to grow stronger, or at least it glowed a brighter blue and the waterspout over the bay swirled and throbbed harder, the central column blossoming at the top into a massive black cloud, almost covering the water below.

  O’Donnell took that in while deflecting flailing blows from the woman, designed to tire and soften her. Her cheek was clipped. A hammer blow connected with her collar bone exploding agony through her shoulder and into her neck. Almost enough to topple her.

  She delivered another kick, aiming for the solar plexus.

  She connected, driving the woman back, providing a respite, time for her to shut out the pain. Time for her to look past the ruins again. The spout’s roiling black shroud cast a darkness over the bay and the land this side of it. Some odd middle ground, not quite night but far from day.

  An odd gray-black hour.

  And in the shrouded haze above the turbulent bay where waves pitched into high curls, something moved, something independent of the wind and water. She didn’t have time for a good look at it. She had to deflect blows from her attacker. A left arm up, then a right.

  Time to stop this.

  She raised a forearm as the next blow came and simultaneously drove a fist at the woman’s jaw. It connected hard with all the weight she could put behind it. Then she took a step back and delivered a snap kick. It connected to a hip.

  That jarred the woman a bit, and O’Donnell seized the moment and crashed a forearm into her neck, following that with a combo of punches, doing what the woman had been trying to do to her.

  When she went down, O’Donnell delivered another kick, this one to the chin. It snapped the head back and sent the woman spilling backward. Sweeping a hand back to her waistband, O’Donnell found handcuffs and after she’d flipped the woman over, she slapped them on.

  “Kaity?” she turned and shouted. “Jimmy? Kaity? Where are you?”

  “Here, here,” Kaity called. She and Ahlstrom jogged to her side.

  She pointed to the downed woman. “Keep an eye on her. Sit on her if you have to.”

  “Got ya. Where are you going?”

  “It’s time to upset the apple cart.”

  Rees held his hands up and extended from his body, letting the gunman see them well, then he complied with the fellow’s motion to move toward the outer wall of the abbey, then through a small arch.

  Rows of gravestones and stone crosses stretched along the narrow expanse there, between the small wall and the building ruins. The old man had moved up to the top-most point of the ruins now.

  His staff was raised as high as he could reach, and he shouted at the blackened heavens, facing toward the massive waterspout.

  “Insanity,” Rees said. “What do you think’s going to happen if we’re here and he really accomplishes something? That spout’s not natural. Not something that big in these waters. Hair-brained or not on your friends’ parts.”

  “We’ll find a place to hunker down,” Mike said. “Or I’ll go down with the mission.”

  “What were you? Special forces?”

  “Ranger. Military police. ’Till I was drummed out. Shit happened in Afghanistan. You shoot one rapist…”

  “That’s why you were so comfortable with a grenade launcher.”

  “I’m comfortable with a lot of things.”

  He glanced around, eyes cocked slightly upward.

  “Not a lot of shelter. Let’s just have you stand over there.”

  He gestured toward a small tree not far from a Celtic cross and another pocked gravestone. The spot must’ve been serving as a mini-base of operations for him. A tarp covered a couple of boxes over in a corner of the graveyard, but it wasn’t big enough to be sequestering the sticks.

  Those had been wheeled in from another area, and there was no telling how far they stretched along the invisible lines Bullfinch had been talking about. Perhaps miles and miles, tapping into energy from the heart of the country, channeling it all here, to the old man and the bay and whatever had started to rise up out there, whatever that waterspout was sucking back a path for.

  Rees let his arms drop just a little. His muscles needed a bit of a rest, and a couple of inches shouldn’t make his captor that nervous.

  Bullfinch took several paces back from the man-thing and felt his shoe sole slip on the ground. He dropped to one knee and felt pain shoot though his thigh as the kneecap made impact.

  He was getting too old for this.

  He pressed his fingers into the wet ground and pushed himself up, sword ready as new tentacles reached around the man’s form from somewhere in the back. An endless supply seemed to be available. He drew in a breath. If each was equipped with fangs, this might be problematic.

  “Step back, Professor?”

  He jerked a glance over his left shoulder. O’Donnell’s voice.

  He did as she suggested even as he kept the sword at a defensive angle.

  She stood a few paces behind him. Her sidearm was raised. She braced it under a cupping left hand.

  “Stop right there,” she said.

  If the figure comprehended there was no sign of it.

  Muzzle fire erupted from O’Donnell’s weapon, and the report, louder than the thunder, made Bullfinch jump.

  Blam.

  The figure jerked back at one shoulder which still held a human shape.

  Blam.

  Jerked again.

  Blam.

  Again.

  Blam.

  Then the throat opened up in an explosion of blood and tissue.

  It toppled then, thudding backward onto the ground. The long appendages continued to jerk, but the twitches seemed involuntary.

  O’Donnell stepped to his shoulder, ejecting a clip from the weapon. She produced another from her coat, slipped it into the weapon’s handle then fired again. This shell blew the figure’s head apart in another explosion of blood and gray matter.

  The twitching didn’t end, but it didn’t get back up.

  “You OK?” O’Donnell asked.

  “OK,” Bullfinch said above the wind.

  “Let’s move.”

  She set off toward the wall at a jog as a new bolt of lightning cut a jagged pattern across the sky.

  From their position, Rees watched the bay. The dancing, writhing thing that began to emerge from the abyss beneath the waterspout was almost lost amid the water and the darkness, but he could make out an outline, something almost shaped like a head with distinct eyes.

  That seemed balanced atop a column like that of the waterspout--narrow, abnormal, serpent-like but with…arms? Arms with claws as long as blades. If he was seeing it right. A cold deeper than the bite of the outside elements gripped him, coming from somewhere inside. And
from behind what he could make out of the thing…more coiling shapes? He wanted to look away, but he couldn’t, even as mist and waves obscured it.

  It was the same for the man beside him. He was almost mesmerized, as if charmed the way legends always held serpents had the power to do, in awe of a dread he’d never believed.

  Rees entertained a notion of asking. The combination of shock and horror almost seemed powerful enough to melt the man’s resolve, but his loyalty suggested he wouldn’t give in easily.

  Rees jammed an elbow into his throat instead, trying to put the point into the Adam’s apple. It stunned the man. He gagged and air caught in his throat, and even as he started a swing with his sidearm, Rees jammed a fist into his head near the temple. Unconscious would be good. He’d settle for unconscious.

  That didn’t quite work. The man’s weapon raised, ready to angle in toward Rees’ chest despite the stunning blows. Rees grabbed the wrist and tried to keep the weapon pointed at the sky.

  A blast exploded from the barrel with a flash of orange muzzle fire and smoke, and a rattling sound jarred both of them. Pulling the trigger again wasn’t the most rational move, but another explosion followed in an instant.

  A slug bit into stone near the top of a wall. Rees grabbed for the yellow coat’s collar, dragging the man toward him. He wanted to get him in a clinch then spin and force him back against the stone.

  He didn’t have to.

  The butt of a handgun came down on the back of the man’s skull, seemingly disembodied at first in the slashing rain, but then he saw O’Donnell behind it.

  He let her take the stunned man who’d slumped into him. She caught him under the arms and slung him to the ground, kicking the weapon away as it dropped.

  “Do Aisteach officers carry cuffs?” she asked.

  “Got it,” Rees said, dipping to his knees.

  “We’ve got to interrupt the energy. Are there operatives out there who can break the posts somewhere along the line?” Bullfinch asked.

  “I’ll get on the radio. In the meantime, check under that tarp over there,” Rees said. “I think that’s where he put our surprise.”

  He rolled the man onto his stomach and found a wrist for the first bracelet.