Infernal Affairs

by Declan Finn

  Freeman arched a brow. The corner of his lips quirked up in a smile. “You do realize just how insane that statement is, don’t you? There’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to take him alive. You’re dealing with forces that you barely have comprehension of. The levels of power we’re dealing with could be … unprecedented.”

  I frowned. I knew what Father Freeman was saying, but I had already done some of the math. “I don’t know if I’m going to survive this. But we’re going to have a few forces at our beck and call as well. If I don’t get him, someone will.”

  Freeman cocked his head to one hand. “I think you missed my point. How exactly do you think you’ll get him to stand still long enough for you to put the cuffs on him? For all you know, he could be as powerful as any sorcerer in fiction. He could have the proportionate strength and powers of the Greek Pantheon.”

  I cocked my head to one side, curious. “Are you saying that Baracus was lying? That Hoynes doesn’t need to keep making sacrifices to Hell to keep his powers?”

  Freeman shook his head. “No. That part is accurate. Power always costs something. After a while, a single soul will only buy so much power. I looked up the data on Hoynes being elected. Only 22% of New York City voted in that election. Now, 16% of the population voted for him. So we’re not exactly saying that he has clouded men’s mind over the entire city. In large part, he relied on the natural apathy of most New Yorkers towards their government. But that’s still a lot of people and a lot of minds. That makes him plenty powerful. And just because the bokor said that he was running low on power means nothing. He could be lying. Or if not, Hoynes’ idea of running low on power could be something very different from yours or mine.”

  I shook my head. Again, the math. “He has to run out of power sooner or later. If he wasn’t in danger of running on empty, he wouldn’t be doing this. Why do this now if he didn’t need to pay his debts in full? Why not wait? Or better yet, why not kill me months ago? If this were for revenge, he would have done this already. If it’s not for power, then the timing is arbitrary and capricious. If our enemy is that fickle, then we already have the advantage. But if I’m right, and he’s running on empty, then this might be our only time to force him to run out of power, arrest him, and throw him in jail.”

  Freeman shook his head. “Now you’re just on the point where things will get silly. What guarantees do you have that you’ll be able to keep him? Say that his power has been drained enough to prevent him from throwing fireballs at you, or choking you to death. What keeps him from getting out of all of this? Being a warlock isn’t a crime anymore. You’d have to get him to confess to actual crimes that are on the books. The assassination attempt on you. Money crimes. Something. Carlton already explained this to you. Because if you can’t keep him in jail while the prosecution goes on, there’s nothing to stop him from other sacrifices, other payments. He does that enough, he can sway the jury with a thought and be free to hunt you down, and we get to do this all over again. He can even kill someone in jail.”

  I winced. That was also a consideration. I didn’t like it, but I had to consider it.

  You may be curious about why I was so hesitant to just straight up murder Hoynes.

  I wasn’t hesitant.

  In fact, my orders were to kill the son of a bitch.

  Remember that for me, this insanity didn’t really start at the church shooting. It started when an angel awoke me from my slumber, demanding that I smite the agents of Satan. If the mayor didn’t qualify, no one did. As a person, he was garbage, and that was before one got into his demonic and criminal activities. To my knowledge, he had no good qualities. Any virtue he’d had was corrupted.

  The angel had called me a Judge. They had been warlords in the Bible, who rose up to deal with threats to Israel. The angel had demanded that I smite Hoynes. If I took the statements and orders literally, I was for all intents and purposes God’s assassin.

  But depending on how everything played out, I knew there was a slight possibility that I would have to settle for Hoynes in prison. For the time being, anyway. I would have preferred it if I could just up and assassinate him, but I may not have gotten that option.

  “Let’s just say I’ll leave it up to God.”

  The front door opened and closed. Alex came back in with a shopping bag. “I forgot the stuff we picked up last night.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Insurance,” I told Father Freeman. “We’re going to need a lot of it.”

  Alex smiled. “I also placed the Amazon order for same day delivery, but I’m going to see if I can find some stuff out in the wild.”

  I blinked. This time, I was confused. “What did you order from Amazon?”

  “Aluminum tape, iron oxide dust, and magnesium.” Alex smiled evilly. “Something for our bokor friend. He’s had two shots at me already. He doesn’t get a third.”

  Chapter 20

  Army of the Night

  ADA William Carlton showed up as planned, parking outside of the home of the former death cult.

  As planned, we brought him into the house … then out the back, down the yard, and into the waiting rowboat. That house would be no place for a lawyer that night.

  As expected, within a few minutes, the first members of the party started to arrive. They came in dribs and drabs, here and there.

  Three unmarked police cars showed up, but they stayed outside, parking at the far end of the cul-de-sac.

  Ten minutes after that, two large black vans showed up. They parked behind the cop cars. The drivers sported MS-13 tattoos on their faces. They also stayed outside.

  “Want to bet that Ormeno is in there with them?”

  “No bet.”

  We waited on the first floor, looking out over our makeshift barricade of furniture. Our guns and ammo were laid out on the couch. We had also raided much of the “collection” the WHC had stashed in the house. There had been no blood on any of them, so when my brothers in blue (and in forensics) had examined them, they decided that the collection wasn’t evidence, and left it in place.

  Which meant that, in addition to the shotguns, SMGs, handguns and rifles D left us, we were also now in possession of a small armory of edged weapons. Both Alex and I had gone for katanas. Because katanas were cool, sharp as hell, and probably something that could even take down a bokor.

  We waited as they waited. There was no reason we could think of for the corrupt cops and MS-13 to hesitate. By all rights, they should have come out of their cars and engaged with us.

  Then the big rig showed up. It was huge. Massive. I was almost afraid of what could have been in it.

  Then the passenger got out of the cab, and I didn’t even have to wonder.

  It was Bokor Baracus.

  The black vans with the MS-13 soldiers opened. Only Rene Ormeno got out.

  The lead car for the corrupt cops opened up, and one person got out. It was no one I knew.

  “Let’s get this party started,” Alex said.

  I concurred.

  I grabbed the bullhorn and said a little prayer. Once I knew that God heard and answered my prayer, I keyed the bullhorn.

  “This is Detective Thomas Michael Nolan. You have one chance to surrender and give yourselves up. If you put your weapons on the ground and surrender peacefully, I can ensure that no harm will befall you. If you decide to engage, we will have no choice but to meet you with deadly force. This will be your one and only chance. I suggest you consider carefully, lest you make the wrong decision.”

  Ormeno, Baracus, and the cop exchanged a look. Baracus shook his head, Ormeno scoffed, and the cop smiled. They weren’t going the surrender.

  Which was fine. I didn’t want them to.

  The angel that had awakened me from my sleep, before the SWAT team had tried to murder my family and me, had called me a Judge. It had called me a Prophet.

  Both were titles of biblical warlords.

  And most importantly, the angels had told me to smite the
agents of Satan. These people had decided what side they were on. More important than anything, they hadn’t sided against me. They sided against the One whose side I was on. Ormeno knew this. His men must have known this. And the cardinal sin of any cop, one which we all knew in our bones, was to kill another cop.

  The mercy of God required I at least make the offer.

  I had multiple plans. Each of them had been keyed to my specific abilities. Why? Because I didn’t want to so rely on God answering to my every whim that I took Him for granted. I had never once relied on God saving my ass because I didn’t want to treat these genuine miracles like magic missiles in D&D. Each miracle was a gift from God. And while Jesus Himself noted that if you harass God enough, he will provide (okay, that’s one way to read Luke 11: 5-13), I wasn’t going to tell God that “I want X to do Y.”

  My prayer as a grabbed the bullhorn was simple: God, grant me what I need to do your will.

  I had bi-located outside. While I talked, distracting them, my double outside went through plan A.

  I slipped hand grenades into the wheel well next to the gas tank of each car.

  My double had disappeared (reabsorbed?) before the first explosion.

  The cars with the cops disappeared, killing all of the corruptibles in blue. The flames even caught the one who stood outside.

  The grenades for MS-13 didn’t even get a chance to blow up. The ignition of the gas tanks from the first cars had created a fireball that ripped through the first van, flipping it onto the second.

  The explosion of the second MS-13 van smacked the cab of the truck to one side. The cab twisted and landed on its side before it too exploded. The trailer tipped over, falling in the street.

  The trailer doors burst open, spilling men out onto the street. They had been stacked in there like cordwood. They each came out, armed to the teeth, with a variety of automatic weapons. They were dressed in camouflage gear, war paint on, each of them in full kit.

  Professional killers.

  I looked a little closer, at their eyes. Each of their eyes had a milky film over them. Their eyes were always straight ahead, locked on the house. It took me a moment, but I figured out what they were. All it took was for me to look at Bokor Baracus’ face-splitting grin.

  The gunmen were all revenants. They had all probably been well-trained soldiers when they had been alive. Their bodies had remembered what their souls had forgotten.

  I turned on the external floodlights. “Shoot for the head, Alex.”

  “When don’t I lately?” he asked, and opened fire with the M4.

  I opened fire. The M4 was in my hands, with the shotgun right next to me. We fired on full automatic, but unlike the firefight in Monmouth, we aimed from a stable platform. And using rifles to fire across the street might as well have been point blank range. Besides, we had only so much of each type of ammunition. If the revenants broke through our metal storm, we were never going to make it to the MP5 ammunition.

  So the motto when it came to bullets was “use it or lose it.”

  Most of our bullets never found their marks. Sometimes they struck the revenant behind the target, or they caught the target in the throat or the chest. However, that didn’t matter, since the first impact stopped the revenant’s forward momentum, and the second impact was more or less to the head.

  While the bokor’s powers were impressive enough to keep the dead mobile, even with a headshot, he didn’t have enough brain power to guide each and every one of them to the target directly. He still needed the revenants to have a brain to process instructions.

  We kept firing as they kept coming. There would be no remorse or stopping them. If we were lucky, one magazine would last long enough to bring down ten revenants.

  We had forty magazines. They had a tractor trailer full of revenants.

  Alex fired the M4, corralling the revenants into a tight cluster.

  Then I opened fire with the Tommy gun.

  Looking back on it, I couldn’t tell you how fast we burned through all of the ammunition. But at the time, it felt like it took forever. We ran dry with at least three dozen revenants still out there.

  Then a flaming dragon’s foot came straight down on top of the small army of the undead.

  Alex looked up, eyes wide. “Aw crap. Not again.”

  I smiled. Whoever operated the dragon had been so eager to get their hands on the bounty, he had sabotaged Baracus’ little army. The dragon swiped down at the front of the house, sweeping away the entire front of the building. The operator wanted a clear field to get at us—either because he didn’t want to chase us into the house, or because he was working in conjunction with another team. I couldn’t tell.

  I didn’t hesitate, because I had already thought something like this would happen. It wasn’t a trick you could only use once, especially if one could afford it.

  Once again, in the middle of the flaming dragon was a small drone. I dropped the gun, swept down, and grabbed the fire extinguisher, and spun, hurling it at the drone. I fell into a crouch, picking up the Tommy gun.

  As I expected, the fire was so hot, the extinguisher shell melted, spilling fire-retardant form all over. It briefly dispersed the fire construct.

  Both Alex and I opened fire at the drone. It went down with little fanfare.

  If all of these people were going to continue to get in each other’s way, then we were going to survive this handily.

  “Ha!” Alex barked. “Try throwing something else a little more difficult at us next time, assholes!”

  At that point, with a wave of horrific stench, Rene Ormeno slammed into me, lifted me off of the couch, and hurled me to the back of the living room. I slammed into drywall, leaving a dent the size of my back in the wall.

  Ormeno scruffed Alex, lifted him up off the floor, and through him the length of the living room, nearly to the other side of the house. Alex landed on a couch.

  Standing in the doorway of the backyard to the living room, was Bokor Baracus. And Alex was on his own.

  But so was I.

  Chapter 21

  Castle Doctrine

  Alex started by opening fire into Bokor Baracus. He emptied his MP5 at full automatic, at point-blank range, into his stomach and chest. It should have opened him up like a zipper. The impact drove him back a whole one step.

  When the MP5 ran dry, Baracus took a single long step forward and plucked it from Alex’s hands.

  He waved it at Alex like it was a toy confiscated from a naughty child.

  “If you cannot be responsible with your toys, you cannot have them,” he said jovially in his deep Jamaican voice. He flung it casually aside. Alex clamored up the length of the couch to escape the bokor.

  Baracus continued. “I control all things that are dead.” He raised his hand. “The epidurals of the skin? All dead skin cells. It is a simple matter to make them hard as armor when facing pistols.”

  “How about fire?”

  Baracus laughed. “Still curious about how I escape from the fire pit when last we fought?”

  “Kinda.”

  With a big grin, he said, “I don’t feel like telling you.”

  Alex’s eyes narrowed. He reached into his jacket pocket. “Well, let’s see how you like this.”

  He hurled a clear plastic packet at Baracus. The bokor caught it easily. He studied its contents. He raised an eyebrow. “Did you just throw metal dust at me?”

  “Rust dust. And magnesium. And aluminum tape.” He shoved off of the couch, flipping over the arm of the couch. “Thermite.”

  The packet began to smoke, then ignited in Baracus’ fingers. He cried out and leaped back from the fireball.

  Alex hurled two more packets of thermite at Baracus. The flash powder inside set off each packet as it smacked against Baracus’ chest. “Chemistry. My kind of magic.”

  Alex charged, pulling out his sidearm, jammed the muzzle of his gun into the bare patch burned away by the thermite. It fired three rounds into Baracus’ gut.


  The bokor shot forward and grabbed Alex’s throat. He ground his teeth and growled, “You think bullets alone will kill me, little man?”

  I fell out of the wall, landing on my feet right next to the kitchen. I was dazed but still had my weapon. I raised it level with Ormeno. Ormeno grabbed it out of my hands and tossed it across the room, away from Alex and from me. It skittered along the floor of the kitchen, landing next to the oven.

  Ormeno backhanded me across the face, twisting me around, and loosening three teeth. Just because he wasn’t supernaturally strong when this close to me, didn’t mean that he became a weakling.

  Ormeno drove his fist into my stomach, doubling me over. He reached down to grab my hair and yanked back. His fist lifted over my head to crush my throat, and leave me to suffocate on the floor.

  I pulled my folding knife and stabbed up into his elbow. Ormeno gasped and fell back, reaching for the knife. I held onto it as he stepped away. It yanked out of him as I fell to the floor on my hands and knees. I needed a moment to catch my breath…

  Oh screw that, you don’t have one.

  I snapped my head around and locked onto his legs. I braced on my hands and my left leg, pulled my right knee up as far as I could, and kicked out. The sole of my foot drove right into his knee, bending it backwards. Ormeno screamed in pain and collapsed.

  I scrambled to my feet and lunged for Ormeno, piling on top of him and driving my elbow into his face. Ormeno punched me in the ribs, bending them so hard they may have creaked. I grabbed his wrist and forced all of my weight down on his arm. I forced the arm down across his chest, pinning him to the kitchen tiles.

  I looked into his eyes. He was angry. He was insane.

  He was terrified.

  Not surprising. He had, after all, had a small sample of hell. He had only started to grasp exactly what his life of depravity had in store for him.

  “Repent, Rene. Before it’s too late.”