Joe Ledger

by Jonathan Maberry

  Everyone was shooting at everyone.

  I’ve never seen anything like it. Don’t ever want to see anything like it again.

  One team was dead. That left five teams of shooters, sent by God only knows who. Three were Middle Eastern, I could tell that much, and that made sense. Then I heard someone yelling in Russian. Someone else yelling in Spanish.

  I was yelling in every language I could curse in…and I am fluent in a long list of languages.

  I crouched behind the open door of the SUV, reached around with the M4 and opened fire. I wasn’t aiming. No-damn-body was aiming. But everybody was sure as hell capping off a lot of rounds. My hearing will never be the same. Ditto my nerves.

  I think I even screamed for a little bit. I’ll admit it, I’m not proud.

  I fired the magazine dry, dropped it, slapped in another, fired, swapped it out, fired. The effort of holding the gun was rattling the bones in my arm to pieces, and I don’t think I hit anything with the first four magazines. The mist was chest high now, and the men out there were crouching. It was like trying to fight in the middle of a blizzard.

  So I set down the gun and dug into the bag for one of Top’s ‘party favors.’ An M67 fragmentation grenade.

  “Come to papa,” I murmured.

  The M67 looks like a dark-green apple, but instead of juicy sweetness the spherical body contains six-and-a-half ounces of composition B explosive. When it goes boom, the body bursts into steel fragments that will forever change the life anything within fifteen meters. I lobbed one out through the hole that had been the front wall of the house. I never heard it bounce, never heard it land.

  Everyone heard it when it blew. A loud, muffled whumph.

  And everyone heard the screams that followed.

  Another thing I’m not too proud to admit. I enjoyed those screams. Part of me did. The Killer that shares my mind with the Civilized Man and the Cop. That’s the part of me that’s always waiting in the tall grass, face grease-painted green and brown, eyes staring and dead, mouth perpetually caught in a feral smile.

  The Killer wanted more, so I popped the pin on two more party treats and threw them out. More bangs, more screams.

  Then I was up, laying the M4 over the hinge of the open door. Hot shell casings pinged and whanged off of the SUV’s frame and smoke burned my eyes. All I could taste was blood and gunpowder.

  The smoke from the grenades wafted away on a breeze, and I could see one of the cars sitting on flat tires, its sides splashed with blood, windows blasted out. Two ragged red things lay sprawled on the gravel, and a trail of blood led toward the tall corn. The second vehicle was askew in the ditch that lined the driveway, its windshield and driver’s side polka-dotted with hundreds of bullet and pellet holes.

  “Hey, Cap’n!” yelled Top from upstairs. “I’m running out of wall to hide behind.”

  “I’m open to ideas,” I yelled back.

  I think I heard him laugh. Top’s a strange guy. Like Bunny. Like me, too, I suppose. As much as the Civilized Man inside my head was cringing and whimpering, the Killer was totally jazzed. I’m kind of glad I didn’t have Kevlar and a ballistic shield, or I might have done something stupid.

  Luckily, someone else did something stupid.

  No, correct that, a bunch of people did a bunch of stupid things, and that’s why I’m still here to tell you about it.

  It spun out this way….

  The team that came in on the ATVs were yelling something in Farsi and trying to cut their way to the house. No way to tell if the guys who came in the cars were their enemies or simply business rivals. In either case, the ATV guys came rolling in, firing over the handlebars with their AKs, chopping the cars to pieces and ripping up the last three car guys. If this was a two-way fight, or even a three-way fight, they might have won. They were the biggest team. Eight men on four ATVs.

  I leaned out and sighted on them and started to pick them off. I got both men in the lead vehicle with four shots, and the ATV twisted and fell over onto its side, slewing around with one of the men still in the saddle. The second ATV hit that one at about forty miles an hour and the driver and passenger tried to leap to safety. Tried wasn’t good enough.

  Suddenly a shooter stood up out of the mist and aimed a pump shotgun at me. He caught me flatfooted while I was watching the ATV wreck. He was twenty feet away, right outside the shattered wall, and I saw his face crease into a wicked smile as he raised the barrel.

  Suddenly the fog around him changed from milky white to bright red. The shooter’s fingers jerked the trigger, and the double-ought buckshot blew harmlessly into the gravel. The man canted sideways and fell, and as he dropped I saw another figure move like a dark shadow through the mist. It was small, and at first I had the irrational thought that it was Simon Burke, but this figure moved with oiled grace.

  I aimed my M4 at him. Whoever he was, he belonged to one of the teams sent to take Burke. I mean, thanks for saving my life and all that, but this is one of those incidents where the enemy of my enemy wasn’t necessarily my friend.

  I unloaded half a magazine at him, but the bullets swirled the fog without hitting anything. The figure had faded out of sight.

  There was a crash behind me and I spun to see Bunny running in from the kitchen. A fusillade of shotgun blasts tore the back of the house to kindling. Bunny overturned the oak dining room table and crashed a breakfront on top of that. It would give him a few seconds of cover, but these guys had enough firepower to chew through anything.

  He threw me a wild grin. “America’s Haunted Holidayland,” he yelled. “We’ll scare you to death.”

  I nodded to the SUV. “That’s our last fallback. The armor should hold for a bit.”

  He made a face, but nodded. A “bit” wasn’t much.

  Bullets continued to hammer the house from all directions. But there were also occasional screams.

  I cupped my hands and yelled, “You’re my hero, Top!”

  His face immediately appeared at the top of the stairs. “Not me, Cap’n. They’re doing a good job on each other. Maybe we should try and wait this out.”

  Before I could answer, two men charged through the open doorway. Both were firing AKs, and I had to do a diving tackle to save Bunny from the spray of bullets. We hit the floor and rolled over behind the couch. There was an overlapping series of shots, definitely from a different caliber, and I peered around the edge of the couch to see the two shooters sagging to their knees, both of them already dead from headshots that had taken them in the backs of their skulls and blown their faces off. As they fell forward I caught another glimpse of the slim, dark figure vanishing into the fog.

  Only this time I saw the shooter’s face.

  Just for a moment.

  “Hey, Boss,” said Bunny, “was that…?”

  “I think so.”

  “He on our side or is he with one of the teams?”

  I shook my head.

  We crawled out, and I hurried over to the crumbling wall to recover my bag of grenades.

  Only it wasn’t there.

  The killer in the mist had taken it.

  “He took the frags!” I yelled, and suddenly Bunny and I were scrambling back, ducking behind the SUV. Bullets still hammered the back, and there was no cellar.

  “Oh man,” whispered Bunny, and now there was no trace of humor on his face. After a while even the black comedy of the battlefield burns away to leave the vulnerable human standing naked before the reality of ugly death. We were screwed. Totally screwed, and we knew it.

  When the first grenade blew, Bunny closed his eyes and clutched his shotgun to his chest as if it was a talisman that would provide some measure of grace.

  But the grenade didn’t detonate inside the house.

  The blast was close, but definitely outside.

  There was a second. A third. A fourth and fifth, and between each blast there were spaced shots. Not automatic gunfire. Spaced, careful pistol shots.

  Men screamed out
in the mist.

  Men died in the mist.

  I saw another shape move through the gloom. Not small. This one was big, but he was only a shadow within the fog. He turned toward me and I expected to see blue eyes.

  The blood froze in my veins.

  The eyes that looked at me through the fog were as red as blood and rimmed with gold.

  And then they were gone.

  I blinked. My eyes stung from the gunpowder and plaster dust. Had I seen what I thought I saw or were my eyes playing tricks?

  I didn’t want to answer that, but…my eyes don’t play tricks.

  We crouched, weapons ready to make our last stand a damn bloody one.

  But the battle raged around the house. Around us.

  “Top!” I yelled. “Talk to me!”

  “We got new players, Cap’n.”

  “What can you see?”

  “Not a damn thing. No, wait…oh, holy—”

  Three more blasts rocked the side of the house and suddenly all the gunfire in the front ceased.

  There was a moment of silence from the back, too, but then shots started up again.

  A voice called out of the mist. “In the house!”

  I said nothing and waved Bunny to silence.

  After a pause the voice yelled again. “Hey…John Wayne…you got some injuns on your six. You in this fight or are you waiting for Roy Rogers?”

  I looked at Bunny.

  “Well…son of a bitch.”

  And that fast we were on our feet and running back to the kitchen, firing as we went. The incoming assault was less fierce, and we made it to what was left of the brick wall. A bullet plucked my sleeve and chips of brick dust flew past.

  We saw them. Three groups left, but only a few of each. Two burly Russians behind a stack of hay bales over to the left. Couple of Arabs across the back lawn, using a toolshed as a shooting blind. Three Latinos to the left, firing from behind a tractor.

  The voice called out of the mist. “Game on?”

  I grinned. “Dealer’s choice!”

  I thought I heard a laugh. “You guys take scarecrow and Tim Allen. I got John Deere.”

  Bunny frowned at me for a moment before he got it. Scarecrows are stuffed with hay. Tim Allen’s comedy is all about tools. John Deere makes tractors.

  Bunny said, “Yippie kiyay….”

  I swapped out for a fresh magazine. “Say it like you mean it.”

  He took a breath and bellowed into the fog.

  They had the numbers. We had the talent.

  I saw muzzle flashes coming from two points in the mist, catching the tractor in a crossfire. Bunny and I turned the toolshed into splinters. Top emptied four magazines into the straw.

  The white hell outside became a red desolation.

  The thunder of the gunfire echoed in the air for long seconds, and kept beating in my ears for hours.

  The mist held its red tinge for a while, and then with a powerful blast of thunder, the rain began to fall.

  When we went outside to count the living and the dead, we only found dead. Six teams. Thirty-two men.

  There was no one else in the yard. No one else anywhere.

  “Cap’n,” said Top as he came back from checking far into the cornfields, “that was Chief Crow and that Sweeney kid, wasn’t it?”

  I said nothing.

  The shapes had matched. One small figure, one big. The voice had matched Crow’s. Even the John Wayne reference.

  But we never found footprints. Not a one. I blamed it on the rain.

  The bullets dug out of the bodies of the shooters did not match any weapons found at the scene. When the service weapons of Chief of Police Malcolm Crow and Corporal Michael Sweeney were later subpoenaed for testing, the lands and grooves of their gun barrels did not match the retrieved rounds. Shell casings from a Glock similar to Sweeney’s and a Beretta 92F like the one Crow carried did not match the test firings performed by FBI ballistics. Witnesses put Crow and Sweeney elsewhere at the time of the incident.

  “I’ve never seen a cover up this good in a small town,” I said to Church ten days later.

  Instead of answering me, he stared at me for a long three count and ate another vanilla wafer.

  Then he opened his briefcase and removed a manila folder marked with an FBI seal. He set it on the table between us, removed a folded sheet, placed it atop the folder, and rested his hand over them both.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Still making no comment, he handed me the folded paper. It was a report by the National Weather Service for August 16. There was no report of a storm, no Doppler record of storm clouds or fog.

  “So? Somebody missed it.”

  “When the forensics team took possession of the crime scene,” he said, “their reports indicate that the ground was dry and hard. There had been no rainfall in Pine Deep for eleven days.”

  “Then we need new forensics guys.”

  Church said nothing. He handed me the FBI folder. I took it and opened it. Read it. Read it again. Read it a third time. Threw it down on the table.

  “No,” I said.

  Mr. Church said nothing.

  I picked up the folder and opened it. Inside were several documents. The first was a report from a forest ranger who found a body in the woods. The second was a medical examiner’s report. It was very detailed and ran for several pages. The first two pages explained how a positive identification was made on the body. Fingerprints, dental records, retina patterns. A DNA scan was included. A perfect match.

  Simon Burke.

  He had been severely tortured. His wrists and ankles showed clear ligature marks, indicating that he had been tightly bound. There were also bite marks on his wrists consistent with his having chewed through the cords. His stomach contents revealed traces of fiber.

  According to the autopsy, Burke had managed to free himself from bondage and escaped from a cabin where he was being held. He made his way into the forest and apparently became disoriented. He was seriously injured at the time and bleeding internally. Forensic analysis of the spot where he was found corroborated the coroner’s presumption that Burke had collapsed and succumbed to his wounds. He died, alone and lost, deep in the state forest that bordered Pine Deep.

  That wasn’t the tough part.

  I mean…I felt bad for the little guy. He’d become a character in one of his own books. The intrepid underdog who outwits the bad guys and manages to escape. Except that this wasn’t a book. It was the real world, and the bad guys had already done him so much harm that it’s doubtful he could have been saved even if Echo Team had found him.

  But…that wasn’t the reason Church sat there, staring at me with his dark eyes. It wasn’t the reason that my heartbeat hammered in my ears. It wasn’t the reason I threw the report down again.

  The coroner was able to estimate the time of death based on the rate of decomposition. By the time he had been found on August 22, his body had passed through rigor mortis and was in active decay.

  The estimated time of death was irrelevant.

  It was the estimated date of death that was turning a knife in my head.

  When the forest ranger had found him, Simon Burke had been dead for ten days.

  Ten.

  “No way,” I said.

  Church said nothing.

  “Burke called the AIC on the thirteenth.”

  Church nodded.

  “I spoke to him on the sixteenth.”

  Church nodded.

  “It was him, damn it.”

  Church selected a vanilla wafer from the plate, looked at it, and set it down.

  The date of death written on the report was August 11.

  Mr. Church closed the folder, sighed, stood and left the room.

  I sat there.

  “God,” I said.

  My heartbeat was like summer thunder in my head.

  ~The End~

  Changeling

  NOTE: This story is set after the events in The Dragon
Factory. You don’t to have read that novel, but if you read this story first there are some spoilers.

  Chap. 1

  The world keeps trying to kill me.

  It’s taking some pretty serious shots and as the months and years pass, it hasn’t lost any of its enthusiasm. Or it deviousness.

  I keep sucking air, though. Each time I somehow manage to pick myself up and either slap off the dirt and stagger back to the fight, or someone medevacs me to an aide station or a trauma hospital and the doctors do their magic to ensure that I have another season to run.

  You know that saying how a bone is stronger in the place where it broke? And the thing from Nietzsche everyone and his brother always quotes—about the things that don’t kill you making you stronger? A lot of that is true.

  I’m stronger than I used to be. Less physically vulnerable. Not that I have superpowers. Bullets don’t bounce off my skin the way they do with Superman, and I don’t have Iron Man’s armor. I don’t have spider sense or adamantium bones.

  I’m stronger because each time I survive a fight, I learn from it. I become less trusting, less naïve.

  Colder.

  Harder.

  It takes more to kill me because as time goes on it becomes easier for me to take the first shot and to make sure that shot is the last one fired.

  This is part of the cost of war. A warrior may take up his sword and shield because his ideals drive him to do it, and his love of family and flag may put steel into his arms and an unbreakable determination into his heart. I was like that.

  That love, that passion, makes you dangerous at first, but it also bares your breast to arrows other than those fired by your enemy. The glow of idealism makes it easier for the sniper in the bushes to take aim.

  And so you get harder. You shove that idealism down into the dark, you dial the passion down because you don’t want to draw the shooter’s aim. It casts you into a kind of darkness. A predatory darkness. In those shadows you change from someone defending the weak—the prey—to someone who is as much a predator as the enemy.