Joe Ledger

by Jonathan Maberry

  All of the action was happening in the main room.

  And I walked into a weird tableau.

  Truly weird.

  There were ten people in that room. All dressed in black. All men.

  Well, all of the people left alive were men. There were three dead people on the ground in space around which ten men knelt. One of the corpses was a woman. From her clothes—satin shorts and a tiny halter—it was pretty evident she was a prostitute. The woman lay in a pool of blood. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear.

  On either side of her lay skeletons dressed in the rags of old black clothing. Even from where I crouched I could see that one of the skeletons was busted up—clear breaks in one leg and both arms. The other had a broken neck. From the condition of the bones and the scraps of old clothing, it was evident they’d been here for a lot of years. The vermin in the dark had been busy with them. Now they lay on either side of the murdered woman so that the pool of blood under her touched both sets of bones.

  The men wore nondescript clothes—black shoes, pants, and sweatshirts, but they also wore turbans with scarves covering the lower halves of their faces. The turbans were loose and wrapped in the same fashion. I’ve been in the Middle East enough to know that there are a lot of methods of wrapping a turban and that each method usually denoted a different ethnic or religious group. A Sikh’s turban and one worn by an Afghani village headman are entirely different. These guys, though, didn’t fit any group catalogued in my head.

  This whole thing appeared to be a weird kind of religious ritual and that matched no part of my mission objectives. The gathered men stared at the blood and bones with absolute intensity, wide-eyed, as if they expected something miraculous to happen.

  They watched.

  I watched.

  Not a goddamn thing happened.

  So far no one spotted me, and since the odds were ten to one I was thinking about the many benefits of running away. The woman was beyond help, and none of this made a lick of sense, so I backed out of the entrance corridor and crept a dozen yards down the walkway to call Mr. Church.

  Chap. 6

  I described everything I’d seen.

  “Cowboy,” he replied, “verify that there are two skeletons. Describe their clothing.”

  I did. I expected him to tell me to bag it and call this in to the locals.

  “Captain,” said Church very tersely, “listen to me very closely. The two skeletons are the remains of Red Knights. Confirm understanding.”

  I think I actually staggered. I remember the wall slapping me in the back.

  Red Knights.

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

  I’d encountered Red Knights before. Fought them. Killed some of them. Watched them slaughter some of my team.

  They almost killed me.

  It came close.

  So close.

  The Red Knights were genetic aberrations. Monsters. Not entirely human. They are the descendants of a freakish schism in the evolution of our species. Like Homo sapiens idaltu and Homo floresiensis, these were members of a race of cousins to Homo sapiens.

  They’re proper scientific designation appears in no medical or scientific textbook. It exists, as far as I know, in only three places—the archives of the Department of Military Sciences, in the secret traditions of the Red Order, and in the bloody history of the covert group called Arklight.

  That scientific name?

  Homo vampiri upierczi.

  Vampires.

  No, these weren’t pasty-faced noblemen in opera cloaks. They couldn’t turn into bats and they weren’t in any way supernatural. These bastards—the Upierczi, as they called themselves—were all too real. Relatives of humanity but set apart. First as slaves of the Church and assassins for the Red Order, later as their own self-governing shadow kingdom.

  The world doesn’t know about them. The truth of what they are, the fact of their existence, is buried beneath layers of false histories, folklore, myths, lies, and legends.

  Last year the DMS teamed up with Arklight to bring them down. It was not a war of our choosing. They started the game and were playing by some nasty rules. If they’d won…?

  Well, if they’d won, I wouldn’t be here up to my ankles in shit beneath Paris because there wouldn’t be a Paris. There wouldn’t be much of anything left except a wasteland suffering through an unending nuclear winter.

  The fact that the two Red Knights down here with me were dead—and had been dead for a long time—was no fucking comfort at all.

  When I could speak I said, “Any idea who the guys with the turbans are?”

  But even as I asked it, I think I knew. Church confirmed it, though.

  “Hashashin.”

  Yeah. Fuck me.

  The Red Knights were killers for the Red Order, an illegal and unsanctioned group operating on behalf of Christianity. They were formed during the Crusades. Their enemies—and in many sick and twisted ways their co-conspirators—were the Hashashin, a sect of superb killers formed in 1080, before the First Crusade. The Anglicized version of their name is assassin.

  You can see why I was sweating bullets.

  One of me, ten world-class assassins. The bones of two vampires.

  “What the hell have I stepped into here?” I demanded.

  “Something that should have been entirely past tense,” said Church, and there was definitely sadness in his voice. “It was a mistake not to have cleaned up the leavings.”

  I don’t know that I’ve ever heard Church admit to a mistake before. Rather than humanizing him, it gave me the chills.

  “I’m wide open to suggestions,” I said. “As long as they don’t involve me going back in there. I’d like to see the cavalry come riding in pretty damn soon.”

  “Is now fast enough?”

  It was not Church speaking in my ear. Or Bug.

  The voice came from behind me.

  There are very, very few people who can sneak up on me.

  But she….

  Yeah, she manages to do it all the time.

  And despite everything, I was smiling as I turned around.

  She stood there. Lean, fox-faced, with erect posture and the slightly splay-footed stance you see in ballet dancers. Thick auburn hair pulled back into a pony tail. Black form-fitting fatigues. Lots of weapons.

  I said, “Hello, Violin.”

  She said, “Hello, Joseph.”

  Chap. 7

  Violin beckoned for me to follow her down the tunnel, away from the rusted door and the room filled with killers and death. I was happy to follow.

  In the shadows, as we stood precariously on a one-brick-wide ledge, she grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me into a ferocious kiss. It was immediate and scalding, and it filled all the dark spaces—inside my head and here in the tunnels—with fireworks.

  Then she pushed me back. I wobbled unsteadily and her strong grip kept me on the ledge.

  I said, “Wow.”

  She said, “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Violin shrugged. “My mother sent me.”

  I told her about the routine scut work for Interpol.

  She looked past me to where the dirty light splashed down over the metal door. “Do you know what’s in there?”

  “Some,” I said and told her what I saw. “What do you know about it?”

  Violin’s eyes are difficult to read at the best of times. I saw shadows flit and dance. Eventually she said, “A long time ago, when I was a little girl, my mother came down here.”

  “Your mother? Lilith? Why?”

  It was a dumb question to which I already knew the answer.

  But Violin answered anyway. “Hunting monsters.”

  She didn’t have to explain. The women of Arklight were survivors of the hell that was life in the Shadow Kingdom of the Upierczi. The vampires were all male. In order to breed, they stole women. The tales I heard about the immense suffering of women trapped in the undergrou
nd breeding pens still gives me nightmares. Lilith had been a prisoner for twenty years. She had ultimately led a rebellion and took more than thirty women with her to freedom. Some of the women left their babies behind, unable to bring themselves to suckle the children of rape. Others brought their children out.

  Violin had been born in captivity. Now she, like her mother, was a practiced hunter and killer. Part of Arklight.

  I’ve had a long, bad life, and I’ve suffered some terrible tragedies. But when I think about what Lilith and the other women endured, I am humbled. And I’m also filled with a dark red, murderous rage. Together, Violin and I had vented some of that rage when we stopped the rise of the Red Knights. But, like most wars fought against a concept rather than a nationality, the struggle continues.

  “Those are hashashin in there,” I said. “What are they doing with the bones of Red Knights?”

  Violin made a face. “They’re superstitious,” she said. “The Shadow War created by the Red Order and their counterparts in Islam is out of balance. The Red Order is in ruins, the Knights are scattered, the goals of the Shadow War are threatened.”

  “So?”

  “So, they think they can resurrect the Red Knights with a blood sacrifice.”

  “Tell me you’re joking.”

  “You saw it, Joseph.”

  “No, tell me that it can’t work.”

  She punched me in the chest. Hard. “Don’t be an idiot. Of course it can’t work.”

  I was relieved. Kind of.

  “But,” she added, “I sincerely doubt that blood ritual is part of their mission objectives. That’s something the assassins might think up, something fed by their own mystical beliefs, but if they’re here, then they must have been sent by their masters who in turn must have intelligence from Red Order operatives.”

  “Again…so?”

  “So, they want the bones of the Red Knights.”

  “Why?”

  “DNA. The Red Order has no intention of letting their pet monsters become extinct. Not if they can find a way through some avenue of science to strengthen the Knights they have left or somehow create new ones. My mother thinks they are planning on using gene therapy to transform human operatives into Red Knights. A new and improved model, so to speak. They want to borrow the best genetic qualities of the Knights and graft it to humans who can otherwise be trusted. After all…the Knights did ultimately betray the Order.”

  Five years ago I would have laughed at her. Gene therapy to build super soldiers was science fiction, right?

  Over the last few years I’ve encountered that kind of madness in several forms. Science was growing faster than sanity or common sense.

  I looked past her.

  “I don’t suppose you have an Arklight strike team back there waiting for a go-order?”

  She grinned. “I don’t suppose you have Echo Team locked and loaded.”

  We both smiled as if this was all funny. Like it was a sunny day and we were looking at kids playing on the beach. Like the world made sense and we were ordinary people.

  Except that neither of us would ever be ordinary.

  And the world was totally mad.

  I kissed her again.

  Who knows if I’d ever get the chance again?

  We crept back along the edge and moved to flank the rusted door. Quietly I asked, “Do you have a plan? ’Cause as tough as we are, darlin’, there are ten of them and two of us. I am not hugely sold on those odds, and last time I checked I did not have a big red S on my chest.”

  “It’s not about being tougher than your enemies, Joseph,” she said. “After all, the Red Knights are bigger, stronger and much faster than anyone. Certainly much more powerful than my mother, and she’s personally killed thirty-one of them.”

  “Christ.” I glanced at the closed door. “That still leaves ten of them, two of us, and an explosive environment, honey.”

  “The reason my mother has survived this long is that in combat she was always smarter than whoever she fought. Always.” Violin placed her palm on my chest, right between the two flash-bang grenades clipped to my Hammer suit. “One of these days, ask Mr. Church how he killed his first Red Knight.”

  “Huh?”

  “He and my mother would have made a very good pair.”

  She removed one of the flash-bangs.

  “Whoa, now. Wait, we can’t,” I said. “Too much methane.”

  Violin ignored me. She pulled the pin on the grenade but left the spoon in place. Then she carefully fitted the flash-bang into the space between the doorknob and the frame.

  It was so simple an idea that I felt like kicking myself.

  Violin stood on her toes to kiss my cheek. “Time to go.”

  We stepped slowly, softly and quietly away. We didn’t start to run until we were fifty yards down the tunnel. And then we ran like hell.

  It was just beginning to rain as we emerged from the darkness via a duct near the Seine. The water was stingingly cold, but it washed the filth from us.

  We knew exactly when the assassins left the chamber with their stolen bones. We could tell down to the second. The blast blew manhole covers into the air for twenty blocks. Towers of flame shot a hundred feet into the air, transforming the City of Lights into a city of fiery red and gold and yellow. The earth shook beneath us. Windows exploded outward all along the avenues. People screamed and panicked and ran as if the world itself was exploding.

  Violin and I sat on either side of the open duct as a fireball belched out between us. We were laughing like fools.

  Like lunatics.

  Like children.

  I tapped my earbud and called it in. Church only said, “Good work.” Nothing else. Some instinct told me that he wanted to say more, but I knew he wouldn’t.

  Bug said that he would make sure that no trace of DMS involvement hit anyone’s radar. As for the lab down in the sewers? Tomorrow someone would go in.

  The fire brigades, the police.

  Maybe the Brigade des Forces Spéciales Terre.

  Who knows, maybe even Interpol.

  They’d go in looking for the source of the explosion. If the right people went in, there was a marginal chance they’d find the bones. Many bones now. Charred beyond recognition. The DNA in the marrow utterly destroyed, and all the potential for corrupt science to borrow the unnatural power there gone.

  There would be nothing worth salvaging. And nothing worth learning. No secrets, no horrors, no nightmares.

  And for once I’d come out of it whole.

  It was a strange fact of my life that when I went to work I seldom came away with a whole skin. This time…I hadn’t so much as skinned my knee.

  It felt weird.

  When the flames died down, I crossed the open duct and sat down next to Violin. The night was alive with sirens and car alarms and shouts. None of that mattered. The danger was over for now, even if we were the only two people in Paris who knew it.

  “Look,” she said, pointing.

  Far above us a falling star carved a white line across the sky.

  It was so corny that we both laughed. So poignant that I sought out her hand and when I took it she gave me a squeeze.

  “Make a wish,” I said.

  I expected her to laugh at that, too. But instead she turned away, and in the light of stars and moon and Paris I caught the tracery of silver tears on her cheeks. I wrapped my arm around her and pulled her against me.

  “The war never ends,” she whispered. Softly, more to herself than to me.

  For that I had no answer.

  What response is really adequate when we both knew that, for us and those like us, the war could never really end? Ever. I thought about Lilith, the hell she lived in and the war she fought. I thought about Church, whose war was ongoing, fueled by some personal reasons I doubted I would ever fully comprehend.

  Violin was a child of conflict and atrocity, bred as a slave, forged into a weapon.

  I had been reshaped by horror and l
oss into a killer.

  People like us were meant for war, and that is a tragedy I can’t look too closely at or I start to really lose it. Four people who craved peace—and who understood both its cost and its vulnerability—but who would never be allowed to share in it. Even if we somehow managed to win this unwinnable war.

  Violin leaned into my arms, and I bent and kissed the silver tears on her face.

  We sat there on the edge of the river and above us the wheel of night turned from this day toward the next.

  ~The End~

  Inside The DMS

  THE GOOD GUYS

  JOE LEDGER

  Combat Call Sign: Cowboy

  Rank: Captain

  Brief Bio: Joe Ledger is a former Baltimore cop recruited by the Department of Military Sciences to head a team of special operators against terrorists with cutting-edge bioweapons. Joe is a dangerous man but a badly fractured one. The victim of terrible childhood trauma, Joe has three separate and distinct personalities inside his head: The Civilized Man—that idealistic and moral part of himself; the Cop—the investigator who is all about control; and the Warrior, also known as the Killer—who is savage and unforgiving. Thanks to years of therapy with his doctor and friend, Rudy Sanchez, Joe is able to use all three of those aspects and keep them under control. Joe Ledger is tough, resourceful, and a professional smartass. Ask anyone.

  First Appearance: Patient Zero

  MR. CHURCH

  Combat Call Sign: Deacon

  Real Name: Classified

  Rank: Director

  Brief Bio: The enigmatic man known variously as Church, the Deacon, the Sextant, Colonel Eldridge, Dr. Pope, St. Germaine, and a dozen other names, is the founder and director of the Department of Military Sciences. Brilliant, cold and dangerous, Church brings enormous financial and technological resources to bear in his crusade against terrorism. He is apolitical, ruthless, and well-connected. The running bet is that he’s a former Cold War era special ops shooter. But that might be simply another layer of cover.

  First Appearance: Patient Zero