Joe Ledger

by Jonathan Maberry

  The two men smiled at him.

  Deacon felt the blood in his veins turn to ice.

  The intelligence reports, the rumors about the killers called the Red Knights…so much had been beyond belief. Horror stories. Crazy lies.

  Except….

  Except now the truth was like a punch over the heart. It stopped the world for a terrible moment. It tore the mind open and jammed in like daggers.

  As their lips curled back, Deacon saw their teeth.

  So white.

  So long and sharp.

  They had teeth like dogs.

  Like wolves.

  Like monsters.

  “They’re Red Knights,” screamed Lilith. “Deacon, they’ll tear you apart. For God’s sake…run!”

  Chap. 4

  He could have run. He was closer to the door than the Red Knights. He could be outside, reloading as he ran, safe in darkness.

  He should have run. This was Lilith’s fight. His government—even the small, clandestine groups that endorsed Deacon’s personal agendas—had in no way sanctioned any contact with Arklight. The few people in the U.S. government who even knew of Arklight considered it a borderline terrorist organization. So this was not his fight, and Lilith was not his ally.

  He would have run. But that would have meant that he was a different person than he was.

  Instead, Deacon let the empty assault rifle clatter to the floor.

  “No,” he said.

  The Red Knights—whatever they were—smiled with their wicked teeth. Their red eyes flared with the joy of a coming slaughter.

  One of them stepped closer to Lilith. He had black fingernails, and blood dripped from them. Was that the weapon that had torn the screams from Lilith? Deacon was sure it was.

  “I’ll finish the whore,” said that one, speaking in thickly accented French. He pointed at Deacon. “His blood is yours, my brother.”

  The second Knight laughed, every bit as coldly and cruelly as a villain from an old-time movie. A stage laugh, and it should have been comical, should have inspired laughter or groans from the audience. And, in any other place, under any other circumstances, it might have. But this was a monster laughing at the thought of red slaughter. An actual monster.

  A fanged killer.

  A drinker of blood.

  A thing that should not exist outside of fiction or nightmares or the tortured dreams of lunacy.

  One vampire said something to his companion, rattling off a few terse sentences in a strange language that sounded vaguely like Latin but wasn’t. It gave no clue to the nationality or ethnicity of these Red Knights.

  These things.

  Deacon neither needed nor wanted a translation. Death was coming for him. That was the gist; he didn’t require details.

  The Red Knight began moving toward him. Not fast, not using its speed. It stalked him, anticipation twisting the smile on its face. This was what it enjoyed. The hunt. Maybe more than the kill.

  The Knight held out his hands and flexed his fingers, displaying thick fingernails as sharp as bear claws. Claws for tearing the humanity from a person, claws for rending to the bone.

  Deacon began backing away.

  This made the Knight laugh. A low chuckle, echoed by his companion. Lilith sagged to her knees, blood streaming from between the fingers of the hands she pressed to her stomach.

  “Run,” she said weakly. “Run….”

  Deacon turned and ran.

  The Knight howled with delight and ran after him.

  It took only six steps for the monster to catch the man.

  Suddenly Deacon dropped to the ground, arms wrapped around his head, knees drawn up into a fetal ball.

  The Knight paused, confused.

  Not at that, but at the thing that floated toward him. Something his prey had thrown as he twisted and fell.

  There was only a fragment of a moment to react.

  The Knight said the same thing Deacon himself had said a few moments ago.

  “No.”

  It meant something entirely different.

  The object exploded.

  With a flash.

  With a bang.

  Six inches from the vampire’s face.

  The Red Knight screamed. Caught point-blank inside the blast zone, the Knight was slammed backward, blood bursting from his nose and ears. Red tears fell from its traumatized eyes. It staggered sideways, clawing at its face, shrieking in its strange, alien language.

  The second Knight was thirty feet away, outside of the blast zone, but even so, he staggered, too. Extraordinary hearing and eyesight were powerful tools in the quiet and in the dark. Less so in the presence of a light-amplified concussion grenade.

  Deacon rolled out of his fetal ball and snapped a kick at the closest Red Knight’s knee.

  The scream of pain from the flash-bang and the scream of pain from the shattered knee hit different notes. The second was sharper, higher, and as filled with fear and surprise as it was with agony.

  Deacon came up off the floor and attacked the Knight. He did not enjoy fighting. There was no sense of style to what he did, he made no comments, he wasted no time.

  As he rose, he hooked an uppercut into the monster’s groin. That folded the Knight forward, and Deacon met the sudden bend by grabbing the thing’s head and yanking him face-forward onto a rising knee. As the Knight rebounded from that impact, Deacon punched him three times in the throat with the extended knuckles of both fists, left, right, left. Cartilage collapsed. Deacon did not know how strong this thing was; he didn’t know what kind of damage he could sustain or how fast he could recover. Centuries of lies and half-truths and myths masked the truth. All he knew, all that he had to work with, was that the Red Knight could be hurt and could bleed and needed to breathe.

  That was enough.

  He attacked the Knight, giving him no chance, no advantage, no mercy. He blinded him and broke his arms, he stamped again on the shattered knee, destroying the leg completely, then he used a kick-sweep to cut both legs out from under his screaming enemy. As the Knight fell, Deacon twisted and followed it to the floor so that his punch to the solar plexus landed at the same instant the man’s weight hit hard ground. The effect was to drive whatever air was trapped in the Knight’s throat upward against the wreckage of his throat. The extra force tore apart whatever was left of the structure of the throat—using the fragments of the hyoid bone as razors. Blood immediately began filling the Red Knight’s lungs; he began thrashing and flopping around with hysterical force.

  Deacon hurled himself backward and spun away from a dying enemy to face the other vampire.

  He froze at the spectacle before him, and he knew immediately that it would live forever in the darkest parts of his mind.

  The second Red Knight was down.

  Lilith sat astride him.

  She had not been at the point of death from the wound in her stomach. It was immediately clear that she’d been faking, exaggerating the severity in order to find a moment to make her move.

  In the confusion, while Deacon killed the first Knight, Lilith had attacked the other.

  Not with her hands.

  Not with her knives.

  She crouched over him, her mouth buried in the side of the vampire’s throat. For the oddest little fracture moment, Deacon thought she was kissing the Knight.

  But, of course, that was wrong.

  Everything in this moment was wrong.

  There was a feral snarling, tearing, ripping sound. The Red Knight thrashed beneath her, tearing at her clothing and flesh with his nails. Weakly, though.

  And weaker still with each pulsing moment.

  Blood pooled beneath the Knight’s head.

  Then, with a terrible spasm, the creature shivered and flopped and lay utterly still. Lilith still bent over him, her face buried beside the Knight’s neck, half-hidden by the corpse’s profile.

  “Lilith…,” murmured Deacon.

  Nothing.

  Only the sound
of a wild animal. Wet and awful.

  “Lilith,” he said again.

  Nothing.

  He bent and picked up his fallen pistol and the second magazine he hadn’t been able to use. He slapped it into place. The sound was loud, harsh.

  Lilith froze.

  The sounds stopped.

  “Lilith,” Deacon said once more as he raised the pistol and racked the slide.

  Only then did she lift her head. Her face was completely covered with dark red blood.

  And her eyes.

  Her eyes.

  They were entirely black. Without pupil or iris or sclera.

  Black within black within black.

  Deacon pointed the pistol at her.

  “Come back,” he said.

  His voice was gentle. The barrel of the gun was a promise.

  Blood dripped from Lilith’s chin and lips.

  “Come back.”

  She blinked at him.

  Once.

  Twice.

  And then her eyes were human again.

  No, thought Deacon, that was an imprecise way of understanding what had happened. She was not human again, not even more human.

  In that moment, as Lilith stepped back from the edge of the abyss, it was simply that for now she was less of a monster.

  They stayed like that for a long moment. She, kneeling astride a savaged corpse, he standing with a gun in bloody hands. The world ground on its gears around them.

  Lilith spoke a single word, and it came out thick, and wet and harsh.

  “Deacon.”

  His heart beat many times before he lowered his gun.

  Part Two

  Now

  Les Égouts de Paris

  Chap. 5

  I was ankle-deep in water that smelled like shit and garlic.

  Charming.

  It had been dry in Paris, and the only thing sloshing around in the sewers came from toilets and bidets. Which made me weigh my pay scale and benefits against the benefits of saving the world. I’m pretty sure I was being shortchanged.

  And I was pretty sure I was lost.

  The Paris sewer system was a bitch. It would have given Daedalus a boner.

  I tapped my earbud. “Bug, where in the wide blue fuck am I?”

  Bug said, “Two turns to go, Cowboy.”

  Although this was in no way a high-profile mission we were using combat call signs. Well…I was, at least. Bug was Bug at all times.

  “You said that before the last turn.”

  “No, that was a bend, not an actual turn.”

  “Yeah? When I get back I am going to bend your head and shove it up your actual ass.”

  Bug chuckled. He’s the computer guru for the Department of Military Sciences. And a world-class geek.

  And a friend, so the threat was only half serious.

  If I couldn’t find my target soon, it was going to get a lot more serious. I’d been down here in the smelly darkness for too long, and I was beginning to suspect that this whole thing was a wild goose chase.

  The mission briefing went like this….

  My boss, Mr. Church, received intel about a new player in the international black market for stolen technologies. The guy’s actual identity was unknown, but the rumor mill said that he was paying top dollar for certain kinds of software, bulk research, or hardware. Interpol had formed a task force to hunt the guy, but so far he’d been as elusive as Professor Moriarty. A few associates had been bagged, but the big man himself always seemed to vanish like smoke. Barrier, the British equivalent of the DMS, reached out for our help—mostly to have our super-duper computer system, MindReader, interface with their computers and collate data from a dozen enforcement agencies in Europe, looking for useful patterns. MindReader got a whole bunch of hits, and since then every police department and intelligence service on three continents had been running down leads.

  I got into this because I was on vacation at Argentière in the French Alps and was therefore officially “not doing anything.” Vacationing shooters get no respect. No respect at all.

  Thirty-one hours ago I was swooshing down a ski slope.

  Now I was sloshing through French poop.

  Happy? No, I wasn’t.

  Mr. Church had called me to ask if I could check a place under Paris that had once been used as a processing facility for bioweapons and similar threats. The place had been emptied of anything dangerous and sealed off and, apparently, forgotten and left to rot way back in 1983. I was learning how to play with Legos in 1983 and never thought that I’d grow up to be a spotless hero for truth, justice, and the American way. I kicked a dead rat out of my way and plodded on, wishing all kinds of horrible deaths on Mr. Church.

  “Fifty feet and left,” said Bug.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  I’d asked Church why I had to go and not the French Brigade des Forces Spéciales Terre. This was, as I remembered it, their fucking city. Church took a moment before answering, and when he did that I knew that he was sorting through all the things he knows about something to decide what little sliver of the truth to tell me. Especially about things that happened—or that he might have been involved in—prior to his forming the DMS. I don’t know a lot about his past other than that he was some kind of spook and almost certainly either Special Ops or the equivalent for some deep-cover black ops group. You know the expression “he knows where the bodies are buried”? I made that joke to him once, and he gave me a sad, old smile and told me that, indeed, he should know where they’re buried…he’d buried a lot of them. Anyone else makes a comment like that, you think they’re talking trash.

  You never—ever—think Church is talking trash.

  I don’t know that he’s ever outright lied to me, but if I had to live on the tiny scraps of information he fed me…I’d starve to death.

  What he actually said was, “Captain Ledger, there may be nothing left of value to anyone. However in the remote chance that there is something to find at that lab, we need to put eyes on it first and then either retrieve it or destroy it. This needs to be handled with secrecy, immediacy, and finesse.”

  I have seldom been accused of possessing finesse, but I understood his point. This was never going to make it into an official report—even for the eyes-only crowd; and I suspect that his initial involvement back in the eighties likewise was never filed.

  I came to the end of one branch of the sewer system. There was a big tank-like chamber from which six side tunnels branched off.

  “Bug,” I said, “talk to me.”

  “Take the second tunnel on your left,” he said. “Follow that for a hundred and twenty meters, make another left and you’ll be there.”

  “You’re sure?” I put just a little edge in my voice. Bug was like a little brother to me, but if I got lost one more fucking time I was going to feed him to the tigers at the zoo.

  “The intel’s rock solid,” said Bug.

  I followed the second tunnel, took that second left, and found myself in another chamber, this one a reverse of the one I’d just left. Dozens of smaller tunnels seemed to converge here into a larger waterway. If there had been even a light rain, this would probably be a fairly brisk stream. As it was the filthy water merely rose above my ankles to midcalf. Thank Christ, Church gave me enough of a heads up so that I wore a waterproof Saratoga Hammer suit. It was a biohazard rig designed for combat troops. I wasn’t wearing the hood, though, because I needed to see where the hell I was going. As a result I had the full snootful of the aroma of human waste smacking me in the face with every step.

  I know, my life…just like James Bond. Beautiful women, clever gadgets, dinner jackets, and martinis.

  I climbed onto a narrow stone ledge that ran along the edge of the water. It was wider here than in the tunnel, allowing me to be on moderately dry land. Less noisy, at least. I knelt at the shadowy edge of a spill of yellow light thrown by a bulb in a rusted cage. There was a niche in the wall with a door set into a frame of bricks. Black mold an
d lichen coated the bricks, and the door was completely covered in dark red rust. The door was at the far end of a small concrete pad just big enough for half a dozen people to stand on, though right now I was the only person down here who wasn’t a rodent or cockroach.

  “Cowboy to Bug,” I said. “Target acquired.”

  “Proceed with caution,” said a voice in my ear. Not Bug this time. Church.

  “Roger that, Deacon,” I said, using his combat call sign.

  “Good hunting, Cowboy,” he replied.

  Yeah, I thought, hunting for what? E. coli?

  I squatted, studied the ground in front of the door, and felt the first tickling of alarm.

  A fine sheen of moist grime covered the light gray concrete, and as I bent close I could see the impressions of shoes. Several pairs of shoes, the prints overlapping and partially obscuring each other. Impossible to tell how many.

  “Rut-roh,” I said in my best Scooby-Doo voice.

  Then I heard voices.

  Men’s voices. And, I think, a woman.

  Muffled, distant. Impossible to understand.

  Any sewer is an echo chamber, and the sewers of Paris are virtually endless stone tunnels in which sounds are distorted, carried for miles, buried, or combined into an auditory mélange that can drive you nuts. I cocked my head to listen, trying to determine from which side corridor or tunnel the voices were coming from.

  Then I realized that they were not coming from the tunnels.

  The voices were coming from the other side of the rusted door.

  I crept toward it, and as I did so it was clear that the door, though closed, was not shut tight. It was slightly ajar, not even enough to slip a business card through but enough for voices to slip out. As I drew closer I could tell why.

  The voices were shouting.

  Yelling.

  And, then one of them started screaming.

  The woman.

  Before I knew it, my knife was in my hand. There was too much raw methane in the foul air to risk sparks from a pistol.

  I pushed the door open and moved inside, fast and quiet, keeping low, taking in everything I could. Church had given me the basic layout of the lab: a short tunnel and then a larger chamber, with many small cubby holes used for storage, bathrooms and utility.