Doomsday Exam [BUREAU 13 Book Two]

by Nick Pollotta

  A long metal barrel shattered a window and watery fluid splashed upon a pair of the undead. Crying in unbearable torment, the vampires melted into a puddle on the floor that was probably going to be hell to clean. Beyond the jagged glass, I saw Jessica. Guess she had forgotten to inform me that the stabilizing agent in her MSG/DMSO concoction was Holy Water. But the secret ingredient was not hidden from the vampire connoisseurs.

  Amid the ruin of the occult bookstore, Mindy was sword to sword with the vampire sushi chef, both opponents moving with blurring speed. A football player stumbled close and his body fell apart. The clothing of the beefy player was in tatters, exposing coaxial cables lining his arms and legs. Great, cyborg vampires, for this I graduated college?

  Sparks flying, the two martial artists swirled in a flashing whirlwind of clanging steel. A jade statue of Ra got a rude lobotomy, Buddha received an instant diet and a bookcase was cleaved in twain. I tried for a shot, but it was impossible. The two master swordfighters were going round and round each other like debating lawyers paid by the hour. A display case of crystal pyramids showed them inverted for a moment, before the two crashed though the front window and into the street. Neither slowed, nor missed a stroke.

  Silent in their concentration, the deadly duel raged back and forth along the sidewalk, a lamppost was cut in half and toppled to the ground flattening a Yugo and just missing our van. The fire hydrant lost its cap and a foamy white water geyser shot into the night air. Somehow the mailbox survived, but then disturbing one of those was a federal offense punishable by three to five.

  Suddenly from the side, the sagging front door to the store was kicked open and in strode a police officer, his pistol drawn.

  "What the freaking hell is going on here!” the cop demanded.

  "GO HOME!” Raul bellowed in a Voice of Command, while struggling with four vampires.

  Turning on his heel, the officer holstered his gun and ambled casually away while whistling a Beatles tune.

  Brocade curtains parted and Donaher came backing out of the cellar, hosing the floor, walls and ceiling with his flamethrower. Wriggling through the inferno of jellied gasoline was a horde of rats and cockroaches, the dark bodies barely discernible masked by the boiling orange flames. As the big priest cleared the jamb, Katrina shouted and the walls slammed together sealing the doorway shut. Two seconds later the flamethrower sputtered and died. Whew. In comedy, sex and war, timing was everything.

  Firing his shotgun at an approaching linebacker, Father Donaher slapped the release buckle on his chest harness and the empty tanks thudded to the floor. Turning around fast, he shoved his Bible into the snarling mouth of another vampire and its head burst into flames. Blinded by the fire, the undead pointed its laser beam wildly, slagging a candle counter, annihilating a hundred packs of Tarot cards, wounding Jessica in the knee and beheading another vampire before it died. I appreciated the assistance.

  A shimmering light beam lashed out at Raul, who dodged and sent a barrage of spiked ice balls into the group of undead. His lightning bolts crackled over their forceshields and their lasers beams were reflected off his ethereal hand barrier. Since the fight appeared to be going nowhere, I pulled the pin from a grenade without removing the bomb from my pouch, let the strap slip off my shoulder and tossed the whole thing behind the chest-high book rack. One football player, faster or smarter than the rest, tried to leap clear, but the resulting multiple blasts tore the lot of them into bloody gobbets and sent the cash register into the ceiling. Coins and bills sprinkled downward in a fantasy rain of monetary gain.

  Moving through the chaos and death, my M16 sprayed hot lead and silver at anything not a member of my team as I continued to ruthlessly search for MM. Twice I was hit in the chest by laser beams, chunks of my combat armor puffing into nothingness and clothes catching fire, but the bodyarmor held and I used a Holy Water pistol to extinguish the blaze. These guy's lasers had nowhere near the power of their bastard boss.

  A pair of the undead got the drop on Donaher and pinned the big priest behind a flipped over table. I started to assist when Katrina appeared and grabbed them by the arms. Instantly their lasers winked out. Grinning in triumph, Donaher rose and squirted each monster smack in the face with his Holy Water pistol. As they clawed at melting features, Katrina froze one solid with liquid nitrogen and the priest garroted the other with a rosary. Ouch. I couldn't even imagine what his penance would be for that!

  But I was very impressed with Katrina Sommers. That had been the finest example of making your disability into an asset that I had ever seen. Using the jamming factor of a mage to neutralize an enemy's weapon was going into the handbook, surrounded by stars, asterisks, exclamation points, underlined, italicized and in bold type. Helvetica maybe, 16 point.

  The tumultuous donnybrook spilled into the backroom of the store and Raul and I both spotted our quarterback at the same moment. He was struggling with the fire escape door trying to get out. A coward as well as a murderer.

  Gesturing with a single finger, Raul set the killer's clothes ablaze and I blew off his head with a 40mm shell. Then the mage disintegrated the legs of the vampire and I emptied a full clip into his spine. The monster's hands feebly clawed the air in a ghastly reminiscent manner. The next thing I knew, I was pounding the demon with my rifle stock and only ceased when Raul pulled me off the pulped oozing mass of very dead flesh.

  Catching my breath, Raul and I shook hands and rejoined the battle. For some reason, I felt much better now. Pounds lighter and infinitely cleaner.

  With the barrel of his Thompson machine gun bent, Ken was whirling the weapon about him in the manner of a Viking war hammer when three football players blindsided the Bureau giant. When he didn't fall, they sank teeth into his clothes, one broke fangs on body armor and the other two jerked away spitting and hacking. Eh? Our superduper soldier boy must have drunk some Holy Water just prior to the battle. Actually, I'm surprise it worked. But what else could have caused that weird reaction, garlic aftershave?

  Dodging laser beams and the falling cash register, Ken threw aside the Thompson and unlimbered his hydrofluoric spray gun. A drop of the acid steamed into his hand, but the wound healed even as I watched. Wow. However, the two vampires, the floor they stood on, a chair, a rack of astrological charts and anything nearby, completely dissolved in a hiss wave of destruction. Then a section of the terrazzo floor gave way, but merely sagged low and didn't break through to the cellar. The cellar. Hmm.

  "Where's Mystery Man?” I screamed above the turmoil.

  "Basement!” Donaher answered with a grimace.

  "You sure?"

  "Yes!"

  "Bad?"

  "I'm up here, ain't I?"

  True enough. “Little Big Horn!” I screamed and my team pulled into a defense arc, our rumps to the wall. The vampires took the opportunity to regroup and lick their many wounds. Black fumes from a hundred small fires made seeing difficult, and a ceiling mounted smoke alarm was keening loudly until I put a .44 silenced round into the noisy distraction.

  "Roarke's Drift!” I bellowed.

  We stopped firing and the vampires formed a neat attack line. What putzes. God, I hoped none of them was a history major.

  "R-14-9! Hut! Hut! Hut!” one called, licking his chops.

  As the idiots charged, the shorter members of my team dropped to a knee and raised their weapons. The taller member stood close and leveled theirs. In unison, we cut loose with everything we had. The noise was deafening, but somehow the death screams of the collegiate vampires came through loud and clear. Incredibly, they harmonized. A football team glee club? Huntsville must be a really weird town.

  "Cease fire!” I bellowed, waving smoke away from my face with an aching arm.

  Only carnage and conflagration filled the store. Burning books were everywhere, whole cases sheets of fire. On one shelf, a slim volume with tooled leather binding and gold leaf pages hopped to the floor and tried to scamper to freedom. Katrina snatched the runaway and t
ucked it into her blouse. Mages. Sheesh! I hope it bit her and raised a welt. Sometimes wizards have no common sense at all.

  Faintly from overhead, my helmet detected high-pitched stridulations and leathery rustlings. The rooftop fire must have expired and the bats were rushing in. Time to move.

  "Floor?” I asked fast.

  Dripping blood and sweat, Donaher's face said no. “Too high a drop."

  "Then it's the door!” George bellowed and blew away the wall with a LAW rocket, the fiery backblast blowing a hundred bats to kingdom come.

  We charged through the smoking hole and down the brick stairs.

  "Ken and Katrina on point!” I shouted. “George does clean-up and watch the freaking ceiling!"

  The basement was dark, so we roughed a couple of flares into life and tossed them about. With everything distorted in the reddish light, I had a glimpse of a new furnace, old water heater, melted plastic window decorations, hundreds of burned rodent corpses, a charred ladder, and an ajar manhole cover. Then the army of rats hit us, a squeaking squalid tidal wave of dirty diseased teeth supported by mindless hunger.

  The bitter blue spray of Katrina's liquid nitrogen froze dozens into crystal statues that shattered under the anguished squeals of their dying brethren. Unlimbering his hydrofluoric acid spray gun, Ken dissolved hundreds, the melting bodies spewing noise and hate.

  Silent and invisible, George's microwave beamer spoke its 30-second charge, baking more of the furry freaks solid. But another wave swarmed over the first, the second, the third, fourth, until an ocean of the snarling rodents filled the floor. A living carpet of snapping death.

  "Musketeers!” Sanders yelled.

  We closed ranks, with everybody protecting everybody. I had just been about to order the same thing myself. The cockroaches crawled over us, but were merely an annoyance, as their bites only stung. But I made damn sure not one got inside the breech of my weapon. Stomping rats, I stabbed Jessica in the back with my knife, the blade rebounding off her body armor as it speared a rodent. Mentally, she thanked me and shot another off my boot. Ken crushed a rat in his gloved hand while George sprayed four off of Katrina's helmet. Good grouping!

  Gritting her teeth, Jessica clenched both hands into fists and stared at the boisterous horde. Half of rat bastards went stiff and keeled over dead from the Brain Blast. Donaher bounced a Willy Peter grenade into the manhole and in a strident flash, the flow of rodents slowed noticeably. The Pied Piper of Hamlin had nothing on us. A flute? Piffle. Gimme good ol’ Army issue anti-personnel grenades any day.

  Hooting a roar, Raul was wrestling with an alligator and two swamp monsters waddled at Katrina. Reaching over my shoulder I grabbed a LAW from George, prepped the tube and aimed real freaking careful in both directions. Pressing the button on top of the tube, a lance of flame shot from the front and the rocket annihilated the oncoming two enemy suitcases. Plus, the backblast blew the head off the angry swamp denizen trying to consume my buddy. Raul's helmet was discolored, his visors cracked and flak jacket charred to black flakes, but he was alive. Merely smoking mad.

  Barking dogs poured down the stairs and a river of bats flowed along the ceiling knocking off a hailstorm of cockroaches. Boldly stepping forward, Katrina sprayed the contents of her canister on the sagging hole in the wall. Working her way from the top, she formed an impenetrable seal of supercold ice. Several dogs and bats had been caught midway in the barrier, their bodies cleanly snapping in half as they struggled to get free. Yuck.

  A low hum filled the building and I checked the furnace. Nope, it was turned off. Then a brackish light began flickering from underneath a door in the far wall, illuminating the inverted pentagram on the riveted metal panel.

  "Charge!” I screamed and we advanced into the cellar stomping, crushing, shooting, and burning our way across the dim lit basement.

  Reaching the door, Katrina shouted something unintelligible and a stonework wall materialized cutting the basement in half. Then her wooden wand went limp in her hand as overcooked pasta. Tenderly as if it was asleep, she slid the dowel into a special holster at her hip and snapped a protective flap firmly into place. One mage drained. But it only took us a couple of seconds to kill the handful of rats, dogs, bats, insects that were on our side of the barrier. I hated acing the dogs, innocent animals summoned to their deaths by the vampire part of Mystery Man. But I took great delight in rubbing out the rest. Bats were only rats with wings, rats were only cockroaches on steroids, and what big city dweller didn't hate cockroaches? They were nothing more than grounded pigeons.

  Using powders and potions, the mages disengaged the magical seal on the metal door, George removed the detonator switch for the explosives hidden under the floor, Jessica cut the wires feeding straight electrical current to the latch, I picked the lock, Ken ripped the door off its hinges and then threw it ahead of us as a rude calling card while George typed our signature with the .30 rifle rounds of his M60. Ding dong, Bureau 13 calling!

  Inside was a totally ruined alchemists laboratory. Both walls lined with smashed jars, broken beakers and cracked retorts seconds ago filled with every conceivable color and manner of substance; dust, jells, liquids, mud, dust, hair, fur, spices, canned goods, bones, blood and brains. Most of it was on the floor, or slowly headed that way. A complex array of destroyed pestles and mortars, steaming beakers, dripping tubing, glass spirals and boiling retorts filled a workbench alongside a totally undamaged microwave oven.

  Astrological charts adorned the wall and a poster of the human anatomy was situated prominently above a coroner's dissection table. There was a ten foot tall spice rack, a case of antique books and even a medieval anvil and hearth with bellows. It was a fairly standard mad wizard laboratory. I wondered where Igor, the hunchbacked, semi-human, assistant was? Maybe polishing the coffin for mummy's day.

  Amid the decimation was the mandatory black iron caldron set in the middle of a freaking great pentagram, its shining lines, thick silver rods embedded into the flagstone floor. A duplicate pentagram was sunk into the concrete ceiling. Behind the bubbling caldron stood Mystery Man, reading aloud from the Aztec Book of the Dead, his words forming visible symbols in the air that then dropped into the caldron with tiny rainbow splashes. He appeared exactly as he had been at the Holding Facility, except there was no gray at his temples, and no tux.

  "Abraham Lincoln!” I cried, snapping the arming bolt of my M16. “To the max!"

  The team cut loose with everything we had, but neither our physical nor magical weapons could penetrate the shimmering forceshield Mystery Man had erected about the pentagram. From top to bottom and side to side, we probed for a weak spot, an entrance; the ricochets and rebounds destroyed the rest of the room in vainglorious fury.

  "Crack cocaine!” Jessica shouted and we tried there, but again our weapons failed to undercut the base of the pentagram and topple our foe. The silver lines were actually slabs of the precious metal which seemed to descend forever. Damnation, there had to be a way to stop him! Death spell? Earthquake? IRS audit?

  Unperturbed by our attack, Mystery Man continued to drone on, occasionally gesturing, or pouring into the cauldron tiny vials of colored fluid taken from a bulky vest under his kimono. A brisk wind began to build in the basement and I felt a painful tingle of static electricity crackle across my skin. I didn't need my sunglasses to tell me that this was the darkest sorcery; major league magic and totally evil. Scratching wildly, Raul popped the top on a bottle of calamine lotion and poured it inside his body armor.

  "How close is he to completing the World Mage Spell?” George demanded, determinedly firing irregular bursts at the alchemist.

  "Nyet!” Katrina spat, her beautiful face scowling.

  Thumbing in my last 40mm shell, I dropped the bandoleer. “Its not the World Mage Spell?” I asked puzzled.

  "Da."

  "Then what is it?” Jessica asked.

  With difficulty, Raul swallowed. “He's doing the Big Drain!"

  In spite of
the adrenaline rush of battle, I went icy calm. The Big Drain. Oh no. Even worse than the World Mage Spell, the Big Drain was an insane effort to siphon off all of the magic from the entire planet and store it in a single living person. The World Mage Spell we could fight, had fought successfully once. But it the Drain worked, humanity won't have enough magic remaining to light a candle in hell. We would be totally helpless and MM could do with the world as he willed. The very notion of Mystery Man as ruler of the planet was like eating glass. Impossible to swallow.

  A small vortex of force started to form above the cauldron, tendrils of misty fog masked the floor and the wind buffeting us became a miniature storm, with tiny raindrops and small lightning bolts crashing around us.

  "How long?” Father Donaher demanded, wet hands ramming fresh shells into his shotgun with grim intentions.

  "We got about one minute,” Raul shouted over the screaming winds.

  Trying to get a clear view, I wiped rain from my face. “And then?"

  The Russian mage moved a finger across her throat.

  Hoo boy. “Okay! Hit'em again!” I ordered.

  LAW and a HAFLA rockets impacted on the magical barrier to vanish without a trace. Silver throwing stars bounced off. Bullets musically ricocheted. Arrows splintered. Streams of acid, MSG/DMSO and liquid nitrogen pooled about the pentagram, forming a crude moat of bio-chemical death.

  "DIE!” Jessica screamed, fisting each temple.

  Incredibly, the man actually faltered for a second, then went on reading and chanting. Totally exhausted, my wife slumped to the floor, gasping and heaving for breath from the attempted Brain Blast. It had been a good try.