by G A Chase
He pulled off his helmet, revealing his salt-and-pepper close-cut hair glistening with sweat. “I’ll never complain about being beat by you, Sere. Let’s see what these lost-biker dudes have to say about their missing bartender.”
Her legs felt like they’d become a part of the motorcycle. Unwrapping them from around the curves of the gas tank was more intense than separating from a lover after sex. “Maybe you should go in first. Last time I was here, they weren’t too happy to see me or my snakes.”
He laid his helmet and gloves on the seat in the shape of a skull and crossbones. “Without their bikes and bartender, I suspect they’ll be a bit subdued. Just the same…” He reached into his boot and pulled out a long thin knife. “Best to be prepared.”
She patted the black handle sticking out of her gator-skin boot. “I’ll follow your lead.”
“That will be a first.” He pushed his way through the western-style swinging doors without waiting for her to respond.
Walking into the quiet dimly lit bar in their all-black riding suits made Sere feel as if she and Joe were the harbingers of doom. He continued on to the bar without giving the dozen forlorn men a second glance, but Sere knew he’d mapped out the establishment for threats and tactical advantages just as she had.
“Two ginger ales, a round for the house, and everything you know about the men who abducted your boss,” Joe said.
The barmaid leaned over the cypress counter, displaying her cleavage clear down to the nipple-covering flowers of the lace camisole under her tied-off men’s cotton shirt. “Sure I can’t interest you in something stronger? You look like you could handle it.”
Though Joe had the same woman-swooning charisma as Bart, at least the older man knew how to keep it in his pants. “What you have to tell me about Rampart should be plenty strong enough.”
Sere pulled the knife out of her boot and placed it on the counter as she sat on the stool. “We know he’s in trouble.”
The woman finally turned away from Joe. “Oh, it’s you. Didn’t recognize you without your snakes or your shotgun. What is this, Take Your Father to Work Day?” The barmaid quickly turned back to Joe. “Not that you don’t wear it well. Some men just naturally age to perfection.”
Barf. Sere tried to contain her revulsion at the woman’s outward display of lust. “Bart’s in trouble, and you’re wasting time, TT.” Tits and tips. She smiled to herself at the inside joke that had spread about Bart’s barmaid.
“It’s Edie, if you don’t mind. Ram might let you make up names for him, but I prefer my customers to be slightly more respectful. A woman has to stand her ground in a place like this.”
Sere nodded her acceptance of Edie’s chastisement. The woman had to have a strong spine to support those breasts—both physically and socially. “We both want the same thing—to save Rampart. Help us, and I’ll make sure Joe becomes a regular.”
The ex-Army Ranger leaned away from the bar. “The hell you will. I’m not just a pretty package, you know.”
Edie pulled down a couple of glasses, filled them with ice, and squirted ginger ale into them from the bar’s dispenser. “So long as I get a shot at displaying my skills.” The way her eyes played over Joe’s chest made it clear she wasn’t talking about her mixology talents. “We typically get two groups of customers in here: those on their way home from work and those coming over after dinner. You can guess which group has the heavier drinkers. By six, the changeover is usually complete, and my day really begins. This group came in at about four and milled around the pool table. I could tell they were trouble. Do this job long enough, and it’s not hard to figure out which customers are going to cause problems. I knew Ram was on his way, so I just tried to keep things civil until he got here. By the time my regulars had settled into their usual nightly routine around seven, the out-of-towners were good and sloshed and in no mood to hide it.”
“How many were there?” Joe asked.
Edie looked over at the pool table as if trying to remember. “Nine, ten—it’s hard to be sure as they kept moving around.”
“Could there have been twelve?” Sere asked.
“Maybe.”
Fat Fuck, who never seemed to leave the end of the bar, squealed his stool as he turned away from his beer. “Closer to twenty. A dozen wouldn’t have stood a chance against us.” From his slurring, Sere guessed he’d been seeing double for days—probably well before the demons had shown up.
“Bullshit.” Loud Mouth, at his usual table, appeared to have fully regained his voice after the busted jaw Sere had given him. “There were only seven of them.”
“It took me all day to clean up this mess,” Edie said incredulously. “Seven hoodlums couldn’t have created that level of chaos.”
“It’s simple.” Loud Mouth stood up as if preparing to give a lecture. “Seven of our Harleys were stolen, so there were seven in the gang.”
“Some of them could have ridden double,” Fat Fuck said.
Sere could tell she wasn’t going to get a definitive answer. “What happened?”
“As I said,” Edie continued, “I couldn’t get an accurate count because they kept milling around, heading out for a smoke, using the can—basically, casing the joint. In hindsight, they must have been staking out the most strategic spots for when the action started. I’m sure you understand that better than I do.” She raised an eyebrow at Joe.
You’ve got that right. Sere kept that thought to herself. Being snarky would only waste precious time. “They were waiting for Bart?” she asked to cover her irritation.
“Apparently. We heard his bike pull up, but he never made it into the bar. I don’t know how many they had outside to coldcock him, but there were enough of those assholes in here to keep my regulars occupied. It was bedlam—chairs, bottles, pool cues, blood everywhere. You have no idea what I had to go through to get this place open.”
Loud Mouth put his empty glass on the bar. “I know enough about military tactics to recognize a collapsing defense when I see one. They kept fighting but only to confuse us. By the time the last one was out the door, the others had the motorcycles hot-wired. With all the crap all over the place, we didn’t stand a chance of saving Ram.”
Edie refreshed his drink. “You guys were falling all over yourselves, but you’re right about the fight being planned ahead of time. I’ve seen a lot of bar brawls, but never one that well orchestrated.”
Joe pushed his half-empty ginger ale toward Edie with two hundred-dollar bills under the glass. “What did they take? Which way did they go? And how far behind are we?”
Edie smiled as she slid one of the bills into her shirt next to her breast. “Eight motorcycles including Ram’s Ducati. Lem and Kyle chased them north for ten miles, but that’s not going to tell you much. The only intersections along the swamp highway lead to residential areas or hunting cabins.” She checked the clock on the wall. “It’s nine now, so they’ve got a good twenty hours on you.”
33
Chapter 5
Sere worked out the math in her head while Joe took point. Twenty hours at, say, an average of fifty miles an hour puts them 1000 miles ahead of us. If we can average twice that speed, we’ll have them by tomorrow evening—assuming Joe can last that long and we don’t get pulled over. Shit. Better figure it will take twice that long.
But instead of winding his motorcycle up to full speed, Joe hit the brakes and turned into the parking lot of an all-night diner at the edge of town.
“What the fuck, Joe?”
“We need a place to talk.”
The light in Sere’s helmet indicating that Joe was online switched off. She pulled so closely alongside his motorcycle that her foot hit his rear tire then reached behind her helmet and ripped it off her head. “The time to talk was back at Bubba’s bar. This is the time to act. We’re losing precious minutes.”
He stepped off his bike and set his helmet and gloves down as if this wasn’t going to be a quick stop. “The demons are not a thousand
miles ahead of us. I’m getting a coffee.” He walked to the door so casually that she wanted to throw her helmet at his back.
Instead, she set her riding gear down as he had and followed him to a booth at the back of the café. She scooched in toward the wall. “Explain, and don’t leave out why we didn’t have this discussion at our last stop—or better yet, on the road.”
His look of cold disdain was one she knew well. Each time she failed one of his training sessions, silence was his initial response. “Think, little girl,” he finally said. “Have I ever advised you to spill your secrets in a room full of strangers—and in a place you’re known to frequent, no less? The demons were waiting for Bart. It’s reasonable to assume someone was feeding them information. There could be a mole among the bikers or just some stranger happy to get a free beer in exchange for information, but the demons must have someone in this reality gathering information. But that’s not why I stopped.”
Being told she was being reckless didn’t help with her desire to be back on the road. “They’ve got twenty hours on us, Joe. They could be clear across Texas by now.”
He accepted the cup of coffee from the waitress. From her glazed expression, she didn’t look to be paying attention to anything beyond the earbuds stuck in her head. “But they’re not,” Joe said.
“How do you know?”
“A fisherman doesn’t pull his bait out so far from the fish that she doesn’t see it. He keeps it right in front of her mouth where she’ll be constantly lunging for it. The demons are on this highway, and likely no more than ten or twenty miles down the road.”
Sere sipped the hot coffee. It tasted like a combination of hickory and road tar. “They don’t want Bart?”
“Of course not. He doesn’t mean anything to them. He has no information, no money, nothing. They only took him to tempt you to the chase.”
The coffee was slowly calming her doppelgänger side. “That’s why they didn’t simply kill everyone at the bar.” Her tactical analysis started kicking in. “If they had, Bart would have fought to the death for his buddies. So if they haven’t been running, they’ve had all that time to build their traps for us.”
“Probably, but that’s not all of it. What else did we learn?”
She felt like a little girl sitting in the Scratchy Dog while Joe taught her military tactics. “They hid their numbers, but that could have been simply to keep Bart off guard.”
“The Navy SEAL is good, but taking on any more than half a dozen demons singlehandedly would be suicide. For a moment, let’s go with Edie’s low end of nine doppelgängers and your theory of one dead to one demon. That last batch of hell’s escapees killed twelve before we put them down.”
Sere’s heart began a firm rapid pounding. “That would leave three unaccounted for. They could be following us as the back door to the trap. Once we’re in the demons’ kill zone, they could cut off our escape.”
Joe sipped his coffee. “Possibly, but even against nine demons, the two of us would be badly outnumbered, especially with them in control of the war zone. They don’t really need all twelve.”
Sere set the coffee cup down and stared into Joe’s eyes. “You think those three are headed to New Orleans, don’t you?”
“Their ultimate prize, at least according to you, would be to take over the lives of their reals. Say you’re right about an adversary in hell working on getting his demon horde into the land of the living. He’s already proven that they can escape hell. What would be his next question?”
She began to see where Joe’s logic was headed. “He wouldn’t know if a doppelgänger killing his real would result in a stable life for the demon. This breakaway force might be an attempt to test that theory. In which case, the chase we’re on to save Bart is nothing more than a diversion to keep me out of the picture. But what choice do I have? If we don’t save him, they’ll kill him just to spite me.” Sere couldn’t let that happen. She balled her hand into a fist next to her coffee cup, once again wishing they were on the road.
“Who do you trust to take point in New Orleans? We need to know for sure if there are demons headed that way.”
She forced her hand open and took another sip of the coffee. “Montgomery Fisher. He likes to joke that he’s my superhero sidekick. Kendell and the others would rather muck about with their science experiment, and that’s not going to save anyone in this realm. As a CPA, Fisher had the contacts that led us to the last gang of seven demons and pointed me in this direction. He can be a bit impetuous, though.”
“He’d have to be to follow you. I’ll get word to him of our suspicions. If he can identify the demons and get eyes on their reals, that’ll put us one step ahead when we get back to the city.”
But three demon steps behind. Once again, Sere felt like they were wasting time. “What are you expecting in terms of the trap we’ll be rolling into?”
“I go into battle prepared for anything but free of expectations.” He pushed his empty coffee cup aside. “You take point this time. Keep your speed to sixty. We want to have the punch to get away, but first, we’ll need to spring the trap.”
At sixty miles per hour, the BMW felt like a harnessed greyhound straining at his leash. “I feel like a sitting duck out here,” Sere said.
“That’s the point. Keep off the com and stay focused, but don’t just rely on the technology in front of your eyes. You’re based on the same stuff as our adversaries, making you our best indicator of their location.”
So what’s the point of all this bullshit in front of my face? With the display already in shades of red, Sere found it hard to tell when her irritation was allowing her demon side to kick in. “What do I do once I spot one?”
“If they’re on their motorcycles, lay into the gas and get in front of them. I’ll hang back and pick off what I can. Those Harleys won’t be able to manage much more than sixty on these curvy roads. Once you’ve got a little space in front of them, circle back. The hardest thing to attack is something attacking you—in humans, it causes a defense mentality to kick in. We need to reduce their numbers before they can mount a counterattack.”
“And if they’ve set an ambush?”
“Wait until they show their hand. Once they attack, get the hell out of there. That’s what the bike is for. They’re not going to risk losing sight of you. As soon as they give chase, I’ll start picking them off from the rear.”
After ten miles of creeping around each corner like a little girl afraid of turning into a dark hallway, Sere was tired of playing the victim waiting for her attacker. “Come and get me, assholes.”
She twisted the throttle, shooting the bike from a leisurely sixty miles per hour to one hundred twenty in the blink of an eye. The small display in the bottom right corner of her visor showed she had left Joe in her dust. Faster. Go faster. The desire was inescapable. As she set up for a hard right corner, the digital readout displayed a flashing 136 miles per hour.
An explosion under her ass blew out the tire just as she leaned into the curve. Instead of hunching over the bike as it hung onto the speed-demon corner with all of its g-force, Sere sailed straight off the road, over the trees on the embankment down to the water, and fifty feet out into the swamp. The screeching of metal meeting tree trunk behind her announced the end of the beautifully dangerous BMW just before the explosion lit up the night sky. Joe is going to kill me.
34
Chapter 6
“What happened?” Sere tried moving, only to find her arms and legs bound behind her like a stuck pig.
“My guess is you were acting recklessly again.”
The sound of Bart’s voice made her roll over on the wood-plank floor. He sat against the wall, buck naked, with his wrists and ankles tied together in front of him.
With a little undulating, she realized she too had been deprived of her clothes. “They didn’t leave much to chance, did they?” Looking around the room, she couldn’t find a stick of furniture, a picture frame on the wall, or even a p
ane of glass in the boarded-up windows.
“Apparently, our reputations extend all the way to hell,” Bart said. “How are you feeling?”
Everything hurt. She ran her analyses out loud so she wouldn’t have to deal with the individual pains twice. “My brain is fuzzy as hell. I must have a concussion, but I’m conscious, so it can’t be too bad.” Her right arm was securely tied, but her left arm moved a little too easily against the binding—just in the wrong directions. “Dislocated left shoulder and broken forearm.” Breathing hurt, making it impossible to lie on her left side. “At least three cracked ribs, but I don’t think they’re broken. The pain is sharp, but I’m not tasting blood.” She pulled her ankles under her butt and managed an upright, if totally undignified, position. “Legs are fine. I must have landed headfirst on my left side.”
“Good thing you’ve got a hard head. What are we looking at timewise for you to heal?”
With a psychic shot of Jennifer’s soul, the regeneration might take a few hours to get back to full strength, but out in some abandoned shack in the swamp, that wasn’t going to be possible. “The greater the damage, the longer it takes,” Sere said. “Without a little paranormal help, I’d guess three days for the internal breaks to mend. Sleep might cut that number in half, but this isn’t exactly a relaxing situation.”
“Damn. Sounds like we’re screwed.”
At least Bart had the good sense not to ask about Joe. Sere had no way of knowing who might be listening outside the door. She closed her eyes and tried not to focus on her body’s pain. If those doppelholes are anywhere nearby, I should be able to detect them. After thirty seconds she opened her eyes and grunted in exacerbation. “Professor Yates is so full of shit.”