Jade Gods

by Patrick Freivald

  The president nodded toward the chairs clearly set up for this meeting, and spoke before they'd finished sitting down. "Sergeant Rowley, you want to tell us what the hell is going on?"

  "Pardon? Mister President."

  "In here call me Bob." He turned his monitor around to show a map of the Earth dotted with red circles. "We've got insurrections in nine countries, each with supernatural support so it seems, and that doesn't even count Cholula or Nebraska. As the foremost expert on this shit, I was thinking maybe you could fill in the blanks."

  Matt exchanged a glance with Sakura. "Begging your pardon, but I get my intel from the same channels you do, only you get a whole lot more of it."

  The president looked at them, then at the general, then back at them. "Not anymore. Follow me."

  They marched out, down the hall to an elevator, and rode it down an unknown number of floors before hopping on a one-car tram and whirring through lightless tunnels. With a nod from the president the general passed them a pair of folders from his briefcase.

  "You've got clearance, but not for this. Well now you do, but you don't share it with anyone – we'll brief Janet LaLonde after this meeting. This is project FADE, the Federal Artefact Deconstruction Environment. I'm Major General Andrew Freudenberg, and I'm in charge. We've been around a long time in one form or another, about as long as the country, and…"

  Matt turned a halfhearted ear, using his eidetic memory to store the conversation unless he needed to bring any of it up later, and flipped through the folder. Photocopies of microfiche slides set four to a page, it outlined a covert government entity tasked with identifying, monitoring, and if necessary eliminating supernatural threats to the sovereignty of the United States of America. Over two hundred years they'd debunked far more than they'd found, but had found a few items of concern – Native American shaman with supernatural abilities, demonic possession with verifiable powers.

  As he read his ears picked up the subtle changes in pressure. They descended at least ten stories before he found their notes on a possible supernatural source for Jade.

  "Why didn't we know about this?" Matt realized he'd interrupted, and didn't care. "We had a right to know."

  Sakura flipped to the same page, read the slide, but said nothing.

  The general clucked his tongue. "FADE's primary mandate is to observe, Mr Rowley, and if you read further we had no idea the Watchers were involved. Or that they even existed. Most people still doubt that they're fallen angels."

  "Then what are they?"

  Sakura cleared her throat then looked back and forth at them wide-eyed, an obvious ruse.

  Freudenberg sighed. "Very old, very powerful beings that existed in prehistory until humans killed most of them off."

  "And they're coming back now, because?"

  "Because Gerstner, or whatever her name is, woke them up."

  Matt remembered the fear in Gerstner's eyes when he'd figured out the crack in her plan. Some of the Nephilim had been allowed to survive the Great Flood as bodiless beings, to tempt mankind. By taking human form and imbuing the drug – and Gerstner Augmentations – with her essence she'd violated the compact with God. Whether FADE believed it, or the president, or whether or not it was even true, Gerstner had believed it, right up to the point where he'd blown her to pieces.

  "Okay, that explains the egregoroi. What about the rest of this stuff?" The file filled in some details on recent unrest around the world, some of which held a kernel of truth. A cannibal cult had resulted in martial law across much of northern Australia; a string of unlikely earthquakes had buried towns all through the Ural mountains, and the survivors had been hacked to pieces; a charismatic preacher had gained an ever-larger following in the South through faith healing that actually seemed to work, and used it to buck local authorities and convert politicians; a neighborhood in New Delhi had drowned themselves in the Yamuna River, and reemerged to drown another before a military response reduced the bloated, walking corpses to inert pieces.

  And less than a week earlier, nine shadows had stolen a nuclear weapon right off a missile near Truckee, California outside of Lake Tahoe, killing everyone in the silo by stabbing, strangling, or bludgeoning their shadows.

  "Whoa, what is this?"

  "That," the president tapped the paper, "is why we called you in. They left a note, thought maybe you could shed some light on it."

  "A note?"

  Freudenberg handed them a glossy, low-resolution black-and-white photograph of a missile pad. Under the missile, blood smeared the floor in Japanese Kanji, the same poem left in bodies at Lake Barnacle. "What does that poem mean to you, Sergeant?"

  Matt closed his eyes. "The only thing it could mean is impossible. That Conor Flynn is alive. Again."

  "Who the fuck is Conor Flynn?" the president asked.

  The whispers urged Matt to tear off the President's head and beat the general to death with it. "Conor was my friend, or I thought he was. An Irish cop turned ICAP Aug, the best bonk killer that had ever lived. But he killed a lot of people, including his wife and child, and was heavily into the occult."

  "And what happened to him?"

  "I killed him."

  Williams cleared his throat. "I'm going to need to see the files on this man."

  "On it," the general said, swiping information into his phone.

  "Conor, one 'n'," Matt said.

  "Got it," Freudenberg deadpanned. After a minute he nodded. "Yeah, he's on our radar. His autopsy put him in the 'could have been dangerous but dead' file. What makes you think this is him?"

  "A hunch." Matt pointed at the Kanji poem. "Someone left that exact poem – in body parts – at Lake Barnacle, Georgia. It bears some semblance to the tattoos on Flynn's body, and ends with one of his favorite phrases."

  The general dropped his phone into his pocket. "And you didn't think to include this in your report?"

  President Williams rolled his eyes. "Come on, Freud. Would he have any reason to believe it? Or expect anyone else to?"

  The car lurched to a stop and opened to a chrome steel door six feet wide, fitted with a thick glass porthole and a keypad with a retinal scanner.

  Freud keyed in a password and let it scan his eye without getting out of the tram, then stepped back to allow the door room. As it opened metal claws grabbed the tram, preventing anyone on board from escaping in any kind of a hurry.

  They stepped through an airlock, bare metal polished to a reasonable shine rather than the stark white of countless sci-fi movies, and into a cubicle farm that could have been anywhere, USA. High-definition plasma screens covered the walls, serving as windows to skyscapes that didn't quite substitute for natural sunlight.

  Marcia Stein waited just inside the door, hands clasped in front of her. Her gray skirt-suit accentuated her femininity while projecting an air of 'don't push your luck'.

  She shook the president's hand first, then the general's, before turning and hugging Sakura. "Good to see you."

  Sakura returned the hug without expression, stepped back and bowed. "It's good that you're here. How long?"

  "Since ICAP fell."

  A hint of a nod from Sakura ended their conversation.

  After a shake for Matt she turned and led them through the maze of cubicles, perhaps a third occupied by an employee, most of whom didn't bother to look up as they walked past. Matt wondered if they didn't notice the president, or found his presence unremarkable.

  Marcia spoke while Freudenberg and Williams fell back to whisper behind them. "FADE consolidated into three nearly-independent divisions after an exhaustive review showed cryptozoology to be a waste of time – if the Abominable Snowman is out there, he's not a national security threat. That leaves Corporeal Phenomena, Incorporeal Phenomena, and Application. CorPhen deals with things that we can see and touch, goblins and ghouls and swamp monsters and whatever. Inco
rps handles your ghosts, witches, psychics, the kinds of things that pop up time to time and threaten to destabilize cities or regions. Application is the geek wing. They mostly try to harness, control, or kill things in the purview of the other divisions.

  "There's a lot of cross-work between them, and FADE brought me on to help manage interdepartmental process control. Except for a recent sabbatical, that's what I've been doing, and it's led me to one inescapable conclusion."

  Freudenberg frowned. "What's that?"

  "FADE is, for the most part, a giant waste of Black Ops money."

  The general bristled, but the president calmed him with a hand on his arm. "Go on."

  "In terms of intelligence, FADE is in the dark about almost everything. Massive occult libraries scanned into supercomputers have done nothing but show that almost all of it is garbage, hocus pocus, not worth anybody's time. Their track record at identifying genuine supernatural threats before they strike is pretty much zero, and Application has spent billions of dollars to yet develop a viable technology that couldn't be done cheaper and easier without magic. For every dollar—"

  "Why are we here?" Sakura's scowl could peel paint from the walls.

  Williams turned to her. "You're here because we're transferring the STB budget and authority to FADE." He held up a hand to stall Matt's objection. "You can still work from Nashville if you want, but in light of recent events we've decided to keep a lower profile with the public."

  Matt snorted. "Kellett's got you running scared."

  Williams flushed. "I don't think you understand the damage those tapes did. You had policemen shooting children, for God's sake."

  "I didn't."

  "On those tapes you did."

  Managing not to put the president through a wall, Matt spoke through gritted teeth. "Those were chopped edits. I told them to run, and stopped them from firing. If you'd seen the entire feed—"

  "I have. But the public hasn't, and the damage is done. This isn't a demotion, and you'll have the same operational authority you had before. Only difference now is that you'll work through General Freudenberg's office instead of SACLANT."

  A lightbulb went off in his mind. "Oh. You're consolidating in-house. Does the UN realize this? NATO?"

  Feet shuffled in the uncomfortable silence. Williams scowled. "Not yet."

  Sakura crossed her arms. "There are two Augs. The United States only has authority over one."

  "We were hoping you'd be on board, Miss Sakura." Freudenberg kept his face strictly neutral, something that wouldn't work at all on Sakura's ability to read microexpressions. "While our main focus will be the security of the United States of America, we know we're more secure when the world is more secure. As Bob said, you'll have the same operational authority you had under the STB. All we ask is complete transparency in your dealings with the supernatural."

  President Williams – Bob – cleared his throat. "I'd hoped this would be a foregone conclusion. We have a missing nuclear weapon, and it looks like your dead friend took it."

  Sakura raised her eyes from the floor and bored them into Williams's. "For this, yes. After, we'll have to see."

  Freudenberg tipped his nonexistent hat. "Deal. Meantime, let's show you how to kill shadows."

  Matt interrupted. "After I take care of my family."

  * * *

  "We are not moving to Washington, DC." Monica pushed away from the counter and stomped into the living room, flopping down on the couch to stare at the fireplace her husband had built. "This is our house, our home, and there are, like, thirty guards outside. We ain't going to be safer for moving."

  Matt let an angry reply roll over him unsaid, then spoke. "The government's not going to maintain this much security, and God knows we can't afford it on our own. There's a safety in anonymity that guns can't provide."

  "I ain't stupid, baby, and I hear what you're saying. I'm just saying 'no' to it."

  Okay, time for the nuclear artillery.

  "Have you talked to Steve Laako lately? Or his mother?" She flushed and looked at the floor so, feeling like an asshole, he pressed it. "They're dead because we're a danger to be around. We didn't ask for this, and we sure as hell don't want it, but we have to look at what is—"

  "—not what we want to be." She finished her dad's favorite saying as he dropped on his knees in front of her.

  "I'm sorry, Mon. I don't want this, either."

  Her tears tasted like eyeliner as he kissed them away, and he let her squeeze his neck hard enough to hurt a normal man, and bawl. Eventually the sobbing stopped, and she pulled back, eyes red and puffy.

  "I don't appreciate your using other people's safety to manipulate me. But I get it, and you're right. We'll go away, at least for now, let this whole thing blow over a while. On one condition."

  Oh, boy. "What's that?"

  "When he gets out of the hospital, I want Aaron Walters to run our security."

  "I'm sure I can make that happen. He's a good man, and already cleared." The rising church spire across the road reflected in her eyes, and he kept his thoughts on 'a while' to himself. Two thousand fanatics from all over the country now lived in White Spruce, and worshipped in the unfinished church going up just off their property, and grew more fanatical with every passing week. "I'm sorry, babe."

  "Me too, baby."

  * * *

  Matt loaded the last of the suitcases in the black panel van and tried to ignore the roars of screaming adulation from across the street. A quick guesstimate put the throng at a thousand people, maybe more, packing every inch of church grounds, plus the new sidewalks right up to the white-and-orange construction sawhorses serving as a police cordon. They chanted and sang songs, wailed and cried, held signs about Jesus or Adam or Armageddon, but mostly yelled and screamed in a desperate attempt to draw any of the Rowley's attention.

  He didn't know who had leaked the news that they were leaving White Spruce, which was probably for the best – he didn't much feel like killing anyone today, at least not in front of his wife, and knowing the responsible party might have made that happen. So instead he closed the rear door and banged on it, then gave the driver a thumbs-up in the side-view mirror. The van rumbled to life, so Matt stepped back to the SUV backed up to the porch steps.

  The twenty-year-old Ford Excursion had sixty thousand miles on it. With a thousand pounds of armor, inch-thick polycarbonate laminate windows that wouldn't roll down, and run-flat tires, it had protected American diplomats in Cairo for most of its life before being retired stateside for high-profile Witness Protection duties. He requisitioned it on STB's budget, one of the last official acts before DHS shut the Bureau down, at the cool price of two hundred grand.

  He opened the rear door and waved at the house.

  As Monica opened the front door, Ted in her arms, Adam at her heels, the crowd surged. Sawhorses fell, and policemen in riot gear stumbled back. Canisters tumbled from black-gloved hands, and Matt could only express thanks that the police were there – his guards carried no gas, no stun guns, only pistols designed and purposed to cripple and kill. They pushed back against the crowd and forced a path out of the driveway.

  Monica hurried down the steps, then plopped Ted on the floor as Matt lifted Adam and put him in his seat. They got in, and she buckled their son in before the cars rolled.

  The crowd broke as the choking gas dispersed through the air, and the masked policemen had to drag retching bodies from in front of the lead vehicle. A few die-hard fanatics braved the gas and pawed at their windows, red eyes wide and full of tears, mouths ululating nonsense cries of religious elation or gasping pain.

  Matt scowled at the lone figure blocking the road, his black shirt unadorned with a white priest's collar, blue jeans torn and stained like he'd spent the week camping. His normally-shaved head sprouted tufts of dark hair that avoided his forehead and the circle on top. J
ason stood with his arms crossed, ignoring the gas, ignoring the approaching police even as they drew their batons. Even choking on the gas he found a way to shout.

  "YOU HAVE A DUTY TO BRING PEOPLE TO GOD!"

  Matt opened the door and jumped out, slamming it before too much tear gas could discomfort his family. The irritants, a combination of aerosolized OC and CS – pepper spray and tear gas – couldn't assault his mucus membranes and eyes as fast as his body healed, so the unpleasant itch did nothing but turn his foul mood ever fouler. The car was insulated but not quite air tight so Ted would likely suffer the worst, and he had no tolerance for anything that hurt his dog.

  "Get out of the road, Jason."

  Head held high, Jason spread his arms wide. "You have a duty to the Almighty. Here, in White Spruce. You can't leave."

  "We're leaving, so get out of the way."

  "I can't do that."

  Matt advanced, hands balled into fists.

  "I've seen it, Matt. The Lord will not let—"

  He broke into a run.

  Jason stepped back, then backpedaled, as Matt closed the distance at breakneck speed. Jason's defiant, righteous expression fractured as Matt turned his shoulder, and vanished upon impact. Pulling the hit at the last moment, Matt left just enough 'oomph' to maybe crack something non-vital.

  The fallen priest landed on his back, limbs askew, and skidded ten feet across gravel and stone. Matt didn't give him a chance to stand on his own.

  Matt's fingers tangled in greasy hair, and Jason came off the ground before grabbing Matt's wrist to mitigate the pressure on the sparse roots. Feet kicking open air, he grunted and squirmed but offered no significant fight even as Matt tossed him over the ditch into a gaggle of his followers. They fell in a heap, and Matt waved the cars past.