They sat, Janet across from Matt and Sakura, turned to half-face the President.
"You can't just defy my authority like that."
Sakura leaned forward. "I can. I will. You will not take me into custody."
He leaned back, feigned relaxation betrayed by his stiff movements and the hand clenched in his lap. "Were you going to hurt Jones?"
A nod. "I'm going to kill him."
"We are a nation of laws, Miss Isuji."
"Yes. And a nation of corruption and terrible men who go free because they are useful. I will not allow this to happen, to any of them."
Williams smiled, a friendly gesture that held no mirth. "And I won't let it. But you have to let the justice system run its course."
Sakura said nothing.
Matt shifted in his seat.
Janet stared at the TV in the corner, news ticker scrolling past under a muted anchor with bottle-blonde hair. "Matt, you're on TV."
Matt turned. Pictures splayed across the screen, close-up shots of Matt and Sakura covered in blood, heavily-cropped photos of occult symbols in blood and shit on the walls. Ronald Kellett appeared, the leader of Humans for Humanity standing tall behind a podium, then was replaced by Matt and Janet exiting the helicopter on the White House helipad. The headline underneath read, "KELLETT: PRESIDENT HOSTING CULTISTS."
"How the hell did they get that footage? You just got here!"
Matt shook his head. "That's two years old. From the ICAP hearings."
"But they know you're here."
"And OPD isn't going down without a fight."
The President rubbed his face with both hands, peering at them with eyes stretched downward from the tension. "And you're due on the Hill in three hours."
"Yes, sir."
* * *
The impromptu and hastily-thrown-together hearings took four grueling days. In that time the FBI arrested over two dozen people, another dozen disappeared – including one senator, two representatives, a general and three CEOs – the first of which washed ashore on the Canadian side of Lake Superior with a bullet lodged in his brain. Matt burned in frustration, flying back and forth to Washington D.C. every day so that angry politicians could ask him the same questions over and over, and all the while Humans for Humanity agitated against the president and congress for associating with 'Warlocks and Devil-Spawn'.
Case's trail grew cold, and with it, any hope of figuring out what happened at Lake Barnacle.
* * *
Sobbing, Conor Flynn drew the knife down his – Ben Case's – forehead, arcing out to the side as the razor-sharp steel grated against the bone beneath. The blade sliced his eyebrow in half, punctured and destroyed his left eye, then curved inward to meet his lips at the corner of his mouth. Another line repeated the motion on the right side.
Blind, he turned the knife upside-down and plunged it between his knees. The girl held there shuddered, and her screams of terror softened to a choking wail of shock and fading life. The bridge sucked at her suffering, and he screamed in defiance. Reaching up to peel away the flesh from his skull, he denied the bridge his sacrifice, neither his pain nor that of the girl beneath him going to sate its all-consuming need. Instead he focused the pain into his new body, his rebirth.
The bridge shuddered, an earthquake through his soul, rocking foundations and seeking cracks to pour through. Creatures tittered and squirmed on the far side, desperate for a taste of what dribbled from its maw.
Conor denied them all, and fell upon the girl. Sixteen, maybe. She'd claimed nineteen when he'd picked her up at the bus stop, with a promise of a hot meal and place to stay in exchange for a hot night. Her life gushed from the wound as he pressed his hot flesh against her bony frame, too-short years of sex and blood and bruises and empty eyes given succor through needles and pills. Case's skinless body collapsed inward, crumbling and crawling, writhing into and through her, merging their agony into a single, perfect whole.
Flynn sat up in the darkness, opened his eyes to the orange haze of sodium vapor. He licked the blood from the blade, held it up to look at what his power had wrought. Green eyes, shaved head like the day he'd gotten his second-generation regenerates, perfect teeth and a bright pink tongue. He looked down at lean muscle tufted here and there with fine blond hair, and the crop of fuzz around the scabby stump between his legs. He'd removed that long ago, in a life before death and the life that came after.
The bridge roared.
True power required sacrifice.
"Right is right."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Matlal crested the ridge, looked out across the desert and wailed, the sound wrenched unbidden from his heaving chest. His heart hammered against his ribs as he ran toward the slaughter, misery and desperate hope cutting off his ability to breathe.
The mammoth lay on its side, leather skin stretched tight across enormous ribs, brown-red liquid staining the scorched earth beneath. His men surrounded it, hunters chosen for their skill and bravery, with straight spears topped with sharp stone. They lay in crumpled heaps over their own red-brown stains, bellies and chests torn open to reveal shriveled organs beneath.
Around them the sand had shifted, forming spirals within spirals, an endless altar to the forces of wind and water.
No vultures circled, and despite the banquet the bodies showed no sign of ravage by the Great Jaguar or his children. Not even flies disturbed his brother's corpse, leaving bloodshot eyes to stare into the naked sun. Forgetting caution, Matlal charged forward, his spear dropping into the dirt.
Cradling his brother's head in his arms, he let tears flow. Anguish poured from him for the sibling and friends he'd leave behind, for the wasted meat that would not feed his people. Disaster, for his family, for his tribe.
A shadow crossed his vision. He looked up.
She stood between him and the endless sky, a dark beauty with blazing emerald eyes, her body wrapped in wings of translucent jade. They drowned the sunlight, refracting and intensifying it into shadows of visions, the history of his people laid naked and drowned in the great salt oceans that divided the world. Her voice reverberated in all languages and none as she reached out her hand. "Come, father, this is not your fate."
"I have no children." He held out his hand. Her touch blazed on his fingertips, her strength unimaginable. She hauled him up and her smile filled him with the memory of memories, an inkling of a time and space beyond. "Who are you?"
"I am your daughter. You are one of my fathers, and because I love you I have come to pull you from this Pit."
He followed her eyes up, to the blazing, black maelstrom he'd mistaken for the sun. A swirling mass of billions of souls screaming for the light, it blotted out hope and washed the world in un-light. He looked down at his brother, the scattered bones little more than dust, like the mammoth and the men who'd killed it, all but lost to wind and time.
The remains of men he'd killed, striking from the sky to take their souls and ravage their women, to feast on their bones and laugh at their plight. He looked around, confused, and spoke in the language of man. "Pit? I see no pit."
"You are not this weak flesh, this hollow shell. You are a shard of divinity, brother to Shemyaza, father of thousands, breaker of time. You are the world-dragon, who these men would come to call Ometeotl, the father of gods, among other names." Her knuckles brushed his cheek, sending a tingle of lust through his body. "You are not this pathetic creature. Let it go."
How many times had he relived the memories of his victims? How many countless eons had he rotted under the un-sun at the bottom of Tartarus, condemned to this meager torture by the jealous One beyond because He coveted the pleasures of human flesh for himself? Ometeotl bore his fangs, and a rumble in his chest rocked the earth.
Her smile blazed. "Now you remember." Her foot crushed a bit of jaw into powder, not his brother at all, only a meal fro
m millennia ago. "Above they call you 'egregoroi', a Watcher. But the time for watching is past."
Mist curled from her open mouth, and tendrils of green light groped from her eyes. They found his, and an eternity of suffering poured through him, thousands of stolen years. Human misery arced down his nerves like lightning, disintegrating flesh and bone, replacing it with something stronger, something real, the divine vitality of his making, pleasure and wrath given form.
He shuddered, gasped, as the weak, human body tried to contain his new majesty, his old majesty, his birthright and inheritance from the time before time.
She stepped back and spread her wings to reveal dark skin without blemish, desire made flesh. His flesh, their flesh, the spark from the loins of an egregoroi and a human woman. His child, another's child, he couldn't know. There had been so many women, shared so many ways, and only one daughter. How he wanted her. "I know you. Where are your brothers?"
A dismissive flick of her fingers pierced his heart. "Dead, the last centuries ago. Only I remain, and I but a shadow of my former self."
"A shadow of such beauty." He stepped toward her, unable to contain his lust.
She faded to mist, a distant memory, and her voice rang in his ears. "I am not for you, father – I've given too much already. There is a whole world above. Take it."
He spread his wings, feathers of a million colors, and his skin parted, sloughing off to reveal a rainbow of scales. His legs twisted, merged, formed a great tail, and with it he launched into the sky, into the maelstrom, up and up toward the bright world above. The souls shrieked around him, and he screamed in triumph.
* * *
Cat shit, cumin and Old Spice. The filthy trailer reeked beyond even his own stinking humanity. A 'shaman' at twenty-seven, what a joke. Aaron Albonico wiped the drool from his mouth and sat up, and the pounding in his head punished him for it. Beer bottles tinkled as he stood, nudging them to the side with brown feet stained white with chalk dust from last night's 'ritual'. Tourists looking for a taste of authenticity paid him just enough in tips to maintain his shithole trailer, as long as he didn't want anything crazy like running water or electricity. And it only cost him time and the unbearable shame of his parents and ancestors.
The cat bolted inside as he stepped out to pee, eyes hovering with disinterest past the ghettos of Cholula to Popocatapetl, the Smoking Mountain made famous by postcards around the world, and Iztacchihuatl, the White Woman, on the horizon.
Ometeotl chuckled. He knew the mountains, and had thought the snow-covered one looked like a woman on her side long when he'd first seen it, too. But nothing else looked familiar, not the strange structures nor the wide ways of gray stone snaking around them in lines too straight for nature.
Aaron froze mid-piss. "Yo, is someone there?"
With none of the beauty of the language Ometeotl had taught the mammoth-hunters who had roamed this land, this pathetic creature spoke in mushy bird-noises. They grated, but the meaning came clear enough.
Aaron squeezed his eyes shut. Yellowcrest tea gave a trippy vibe to his performances, which is why he served and drank it at his 'ceremonies', but he'd never hallucinated the next morning. He leaned his head against the side of the trailer, metal already hot in the morning sun, and spattered his toes with another burst of piss.
"You okay?"
The world hazed back into focus. Maria Aguilar stood, fists on her hips, brow furrowed with concern. An archaeologist, Aaron always figured her for older than the pre-Columbian ruins she studied, her head twice as hard as the stones that made them. Wrinkled and cracked like old leather, the skin on her face and hands sported warts and liver spots.
Hideous, and the first real woman he'd seen in thousands of years.
Omeleotl-Aaron advanced, grinning, arms wide. With a casual rape of Aaron's mind the egregoroi seized the man's ugly language to use on this ugly woman, taking his memories, knowledge, and spirit with it. His heart burned, and his erection throbbed in his pants.
Maria screamed, and he screamed with her.
* * *
"You can't be serious." Matt blinked at the orders, then looked up at Janet.
She shrugged.
"Mexico is on fire, and they're sending us to Cape Cod."
"You're not a fireman, and Omelet-man isn't our problem. SACLANT's sending in an entire carrier group for support."
At least eight thousand men had killed their families in Cholula at the command of Omeleotl, a fake shaman named Aaron Albonico who had formed a rape cult four days earlier. The Mexican president had declared a national emergency and called in the army, but the first squads in had turned on their brothers in arms, killing and raping fellow soldiers in an orgy of bloody violence, so focus had shifted to long-range containment. The Mexican government had requested US and UN support, specifically the Special Threats Bureau, and the president had turned them down, though surveillance support had been offered and accepted. While news helicopters lay in ruins on the ground, the cultists couldn't reach satellites.
On the live feed Matt forced himself to watch as five men poured out of a pickup truck and into a house. They dragged a man into the street by his hair, cutting and tearing off his clothes with no regard to the flesh underneath. Blood spurted from his arms and legs as they forced him down on his stomach, and Matt thanked God they had no audio feed. The men – if they were still men – took turns raping their victim in the street, each stabbing him once in the back as they rode him. He stopped moving. They didn't.
A fight broke out between the rapists, and moments later only two still stood, the others spraying their blood into the street. The victors fell on them, thrusting into holes made by knives and tearing fingers.
Matt forced himself to keep watching, to internalize the brutality on the screen, so that he might unleash it without qualm when he got there. "Screw this. I'm going to Mexico."
"Not unless you're jogging. There's something weird going on in Massachusettes, and you're on point. Sakura, too, if she's ready."
"She's ready."
He turned off the monitor and closed his eyes. "Tens of thousands of innocent people are dying. Right now. And I can stop it."
"Some Aboriginals in New South Wales just seceded from Australia. Their representative crumpled a police car into a ball and crushed it into another police car. There were cops inside both vehicles. Two SWAT teams are dead, and dozens of civilians. And it's getting worse. The Russians just firebombed one of their own towns and called it a 'training accident' – at least four thousand dead, and our intel says it wasn't an accident. A whole city in China just up and stopped eating last week, said the cloud dragon told them to – not very many casualties yet, mostly children and elderly, but it's going to get real bad in a week or two. In South Africa…"
Sitting, he picked up the folder. "So what's in Provincetown?"
"Hostage situation. Bunch of tourists are stuck in a hotel on the beach, and the staff won't let them leave. Said they're holding them for Dagon."
"What do we know about Dagon?"
"Mesopotamian god of fertility, grain, and fish. His history is a mess from a bunch of cultures from that area, Amorites/Canaanites, Assyrians, Babylonians. Philistines in the Bible – Solomon destroys his temple, and his statue is humbled before the Ark of the Covenant in some kind of miracle. He's also a made-up name from early twentieth-century horror novels. The crazies have talked to the cops, and they've renamed their hotel E-Mul, or 'House of the Star', and keep babbling stuff about HP Lovecraft. Heard of him?"
"Vaguely. Weird tentacle-gods and stuff, right?"
"That's the guy. Pretty popular in modern culture, if you're a weirdo."
"So… there's a chance we go there and these are just plain-old nutcases."
She shrugged. "Sure."
"And what are their demands?"
"They aren't making any, except that no
body crosses the beach or parking lot. They're holding the hostages for Dagon, and will kill them before letting them go."
"Has anyone seen anything supernatural about any of them?"
"Nothing verified. Eyewitnesses report them as very creepy, but couldn't really elaborate on why."
"So we're wasting our time on this because…"
"Because the president's poll numbers are tanking in response to H4H's attacks, and he needs to look strong on cults. You're the cult guy, so you're on deck."
He stood and walked toward the door. "Call Sakura. Wheels up in an hour. We'll study layout and tactical en route."
"Aye, aye."
* * *
Unarmed, Matt stormed past the police line toward front steps of the hotel, ignoring the alarmed cries behind him. The cultists had fired on the cops, twice – or at least on the ground at their feet – and had refused to negotiate. IR surveillance put them at three hostiles and thirteen hostages in the lobby, two sentries each at the back and side doors, and two on the roof.
A shot rang out and sand spit at his feet. It hadn't even triggered the whispers, except for their usual murmurs. He kept walking, and another shot blasted a puff of sand to his left.
"Don't come any closer! Next one's in your head!" A male voice, deep but shaking, it came from next to the air conditioner on the roof. Well-camouflaged from standard human vision, in the infrared the man stood out like a dandelion in a mowed lawn.
Matt stopped, lifted the bullhorn in his right hand. "Look at me. Do you know who I am?"
A pause, then, "Yeah. You're the ICAP guy."
He nodded, exaggerated for effect. "Special Threats Bureau, now. You've been classified as a special threat. Do you understand what that means?"
The whispers flooded his mind with an orgy of violence, crunching bones and pulsing arteries, screams and cries for mercy that wouldn't come.
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