The Grendel Affair: A SPI Files Novel

by Shearin, Lisa

  It was urine at a level that couldn’t possibly be human, and blood that probably was.

  As we followed the tunnel downward, the air grew hotter. And stinkier.

  Rotten meat.

  “There’s a scent difference between things that wander down holes and die,” Rolf said quietly, “and things that are dragged down holes and slaughtered.”

  As food for grendel spawn.

  He shined his light on an object lying on the tracks.

  A running shoe. It wasn’t as bizarre as the office chair, but it made me wonder why only one?

  I wondered until I saw the bloody sock lying flat on the left rail, still in the shoe—and a snapped-off leg bone still in the sock.

  I flipped my oxygen switch and took a couple of deep breaths. I was having sparklies that didn’t have a thing to do with bad air.

  Roy keyed his mike. “Benoit to teams. We have likely grendel activity.” He looked down at his GPS. The other two team commanders had the same device. It showed the positions of all three team leaders with pulsing red dots. “We’re approximately one block from the center of Times Square.”

  “This is Anderssen,” came the Scandinavian commander’s voice through our comms. “I am being told that we can be at your location in twenty minutes.”

  “Roger that, Lars,” Roy said. “We’ll proceed, but we’d appreciate the company when you get here.”

  “Niles checking in,” Sandra said. She didn’t sound happy. “I’m thirty—repeat three zero—minutes from your location.”

  “Sandy, darlin’, looks like you’re gonna miss the shindig.” Roy’s expression didn’t match his tone. He wasn’t happy, either. “I’ll try to bring you a souvenir.” He took his finger off the mike switch. “Circle the wagons, folks. I want eyes on every patch of dark down here. If that mama monster laid her eggs down that tunnel, there’s a heap of meanness waiting for us. We’re taking this nice and easy.” He caught Rolf Haagen’s impatient scowl. “You’ll get your chance to play with ’em, son. Don’t jump the gun and you’ll get the fun of surviving, too.”

  “Unless you’re in a hurry to get to Valhalla,” Ian said.

  Rolf shrugged. “My ancestors can wait another day to meet me.”

  I was willing to wait until the other team got here and the cows came home, but the monsters weren’t so patient.

  Yasha raised his head and sniffed the air. He growled.

  A few seconds later, the rest of us smelled it, too. It was the dead-fish-at-low-tide stench from Ollie’s office. It wasn’t quite as overpowering, but it was definitely the same overripe odor.

  Rolf’s nostrils flared as he breathed in the scent, and a slow smile spread across his face. “Definitely grendels.”

  “Yasha, can you follow that stink?” Roy asked.

  The Russian werewolf didn’t dignify that with a response. He sniffed in a semicircle then started down a side tunnel.

  There were no steel and concrete columns where Yasha and his nose led us, just plenty of pipes and claustrophobia.

  “It looks like Hell’s jungle gym down here,” Ian whispered.

  The larger pipes, the circumference of fifty-five-gallon drums, were stacked two and three high, mounted on metal frames that kept them off the floor and separated from each other, creating what was essentially a wall of pipes. The aisle between them gave us enough room for three of us to walk side by side, but left us next to no room to maneuver. And I wanted room to maneuver worse than I think I’ve ever wanted anything.

  “Do grendels climb?” Roy asked Rolf.

  “And jump,” he replied, his sharp blue eyes sweeping the rafters of smaller pipes above our heads. He silently extended the spear to its full length, locking it in place with the barest of clicks; the other Scandinavian spearman followed suit.

  The tunnel broadened into an open area, if you could call something the size of two subway cars sitting side by side open. The pipes curved at various points, in seemingly all directions, basically turning the place into a maze. Beyond where we were standing, all I could see was a lot of dark.

  The tiny hairs on the back of my neck quivered, sending a shudder down the length of my body. I breathed through my nose, trying to stay calm.

  Roy’s attention never wavered from the shadows in front of us. Some of our people found that patch of dark mighty interesting, too. Experience must breed a sixth sense when it came to things that went bump in dark places.

  I couldn’t pick anything out from the shadows yet, but they were close enough that I could smell the leftovers of what they’d been eating—a sharp, coppery tang. Blood. Then I detected a shimmer in the dark, like a heat mirage on a road. It was too dark to see the actual grendel, but my seer vision was picking up the effects of the cloaking device.

  Oh hell. Here we go.

  “Cloaking device in use,” I said. “From ten o’clock to two.” The shimmer darted through the dark into the forest of pipes, so fast that my mind couldn’t confirm what or how many my eyes had just seen.

  Grendels are sprinters, Anderssen had said.

  I swallowed hard. “It’s moving.”

  Calvin and Rolf took up position with Roy on the front line. Yasha dropped back to stand with me and Ian.

  Ian had his gun up, tracking the shadows to our rear. “I’ve got a couple of ghouls playing hide-’n’-seek back here. I can see them. No cloaks or veils, so they’re not being too shy.”

  Liz immediately staked out that patch of concrete as her own, the nozzle of her flamethrower glowing with an eager blue flame. The second Scandinavian spearman joined her.

  Roy was perfectly still. “How many grendels?”

  “Just one that I could see,” I said. “Could be more.”

  “Adult?”

  I had no clue. I shook my head. “Moving too fast.”

  The Cajun actually shrugged under his armor. “We knew it wasn’t gonna be easy.” He already had a huge handgun in one hand; and with his other, pulled out the biggest Bowie knife I’d ever seen. He saw my eyes widen and grinned. “Gator gutter. In case one of ’em wants to slow dance. Calvin, lay down some light, both directions.”

  Calvin lit two flares, and with a major-league effort, threw one ahead and one behind, far enough to show us anything that’d be coming at us.

  With Ian and Yasha flanking me, I froze as an adult grendel—shimmering with the effects of Tarbert’s cloaking device—stepped out of the shadows and into the flares’ light. No one else could see it.

  Oh shit.

  It was the one from headquarters. The male. With no wounds, scars, or indication that he’d ever been in a dragon fight. His scales glowed like blood-dipped armor in the flares’ light. His gleaming yellow eyes were locked on me. I was the one that got away.

  My paintball rifle was pointing down, my index finger against the trigger guard. The grendel knew I could see it. I knew that if I so much as twitched, he’d be gone back into the shadows—or on top of me. I stayed absolutely still, kept my eyes locked on the grendel, and tried to speak without moving my lips. “Roy, male, dead ahead, twenty yards.”

  In one smooth and deadly move, Roy brought his pistol up and fired three shots precisely where the thing’s head was . . . had been.

  The Cajun snarled. He knew he hadn’t hit it, and that it’d been gone before his bullets even got there. “Faster than a speeding bullet,” he said between clenched teeth. “Bunch up, people. I want coverage in every direction. You’re now weapons free.”

  I’d learned that was military-speak for “If you see it, kill it.” Problem was, I was the only one who could see it.

  I held my breath and waited for the grendel to put in another appearance.

  I didn’t have to wait long.

  Four of them, six, nine, then a dozen and more. From every direction.

  Ghouls, not grendels. Nes
t guardians.

  They weren’t veiled, so everyone could see them.

  They were also smart, swift, and sadistic. Though with something that liked eating its dinner while it was still alive, that last one was a given. In my opinion, it also said a lot about an adversary who hired them as her thugs-on-call—and as nannies for newborn monsters. They’d ditched the white camo for black, and had likewise ditched any effort to disguise themselves as human.

  The team opened fire with enough silver to bring down double their number.

  Naturally, the ghouls fired back.

  Whether I heard, saw, or just felt the air get heavy over my head, my lizard brain told me to look up. Now.

  I did.

  A ghoul leapt.

  I didn’t think. There was no time. Suddenly everything went into that slow-motion thing that was your brain’s way of giving you one chance to figure out how not to die horribly. With roars and unearthly shrieks, the ghouls on the ground rushed us. I dimly heard the team opening fire all around me. My hand moved with agonizing slowness, going for my real gun, but hitting something else on the way there.

  My headlamp switch. Scalding bright light flash-fried the ghoul’s vision as I jumped aside, so instead of landing on me, the ghoul pancaked on the concrete floor. Ian double-tapped the ghoul in the back of the head.

  I barely heard the gunshots with all the adrenaline pounding through me. I tried to look everywhere at once, desperate to find the grendel, and my headlamp spotlighted another ghoul about to jump. Ian fired exactly where my beam pointed. I might not be a sharpshooter yet with a gun, but I could aim the hell out of a flashlight.

  “Stay together!” Roy shouted.

  Like I was gonna cut myself from the herd. I scanned the tangle of pipes for more targets. They were everywhere, but they were too fast. I panicked. Where the hell was the male?

  “Lars, we are under attack,” Roy said through his comms. “Ghouls and grendels.”

  There was a hiss then a roar as an arc of fire erupted from Liz’s flamethrower, sweeping flaming death across three of the ghouls. The things ran and leapt out of range, with no damage whatsoever. A pair of ghoul arms reached through the pipes, grabbed the second spearman by an armor strap, and jerked him repeatedly against the wall of metal. The man was flush against the pipes, too close to use his spear. He dropped it and drew his pistol, firing through the spaces at what had him pinned. Calvin snatched up the spear and drove it between the pipes. The spear jerked in his big hands, the point caught in something on the other side. Calvin pulled the spear’s trigger, immediately followed by a muffled thump and a high-pitched scream.

  One less ghoul.

  The floor shook beneath our feet. The still-cloaked male grendel landed squarely in the middle of the aisle.

  Behind us.

  I fired my rifle in a steady stream of neon yellow directly at the thing’s head.

  Just like with Roy’s real bullets, the grendel was gone before the paintballs arrived.

  Ian and Roy both followed the paintballs’ path like tracers. Before Ian’s first bullet reached him, the grendel’s armored scales flattened against his body and the silver bullets seemed to just bounce off. He roared in rage, not pain, and leapt into the rafters.

  Deep, raspy laughter drifted down to me.

  Ian had hit him, and it hadn’t done a damned thing but laugh.

  A black-gloved hand with razored nails protruding from the fingertips reached down and snatched Rolf Haagen into the air and into the dark nest of pipes over our heads. Several seconds of furious snarling, pounding, and clanging ended in a scream that rose into a gurgling shriek. Then there was a thud as Rolf landed in a crouch a few feet away, covered in ghoul goo, clutching a bloody spear, and grinning like the happy berserker he was.

  Another ghoul appeared, silhouetted in the dying flares’ light. It didn’t even crouch; it just sprung, covering the distance between it and Roy in one leap. Its feet hadn’t even touched the ground as the Cajun’s blade flashed in a blur of motion as it sliced cleanly through the ghoul’s wrist, missing its throat by less than an inch.

  We were moving toward the nest, but not nearly fast enough. I had no idea how long we had been fighting, probably less than two minutes. The twenty minutes it would take Anderssen’s team to get here might as well have been an eternity. We didn’t have twenty minutes. We might not even have ten the way things were going. Calvin had lit another flare and hurled it down the aisle toward where we thought the nest was. There was an opening in the fighting, and Liz took it, Calvin at her back with me right behind him.

  The flare’s red glow cast flickering shadows into the room. Liz swept the room with the flamethrower, hopefully making anything inside less likely to kill us for a few seconds. Our headlamps lit the space bright as day. It took my brain an extra few seconds to process what I was seeing.

  A mound of mud and trash with about two dozen indentations dug into it, like an egg crate made of garbage.

  They were all empty. No hatched eggs, no shell fragments. Nothing.

  The eggs had been moved.

  They’d known we were coming.

  It had been a nest.

  Now it was a trap.

  24

  THIS was bad.

  The eggs had been here and now they were gone.

  Liz’s swearing was doing her Marine training proud; it was almost poetic. I wanted to scream a few choice words myself, but it’d be like throwing out a dirty limerick after a Shakespearean sonnet. I’d just embarrass myself.

  Not only was the room empty, it was also worthless to us. It would have been a good place to barricade ourselves in until reinforcements arrived. However, the room didn’t have a door—at least not anymore. It was metal, thick, and should have been standing until the second coming. It wasn’t standing now. It’d been ripped off its hinges by something that had sunk its claws into the steel, gotten a good hold, and let ’er rip.

  Like a certain female grendel desperate to get her eggs out before we got in. I looked around. This didn’t strike me as a particularly good nesting spot. I shrugged inwardly. What did I know about monster maternal urges? Compared to a Norwegian ice cave, this place might have looked like a five-star resort. Odd behavior aside, the bottom line was that she’d known we were coming. Though she could’ve easily heard or smelled us. After a certain point in the tunnels, stealth was no longer at the top of our list of concerns.

  “Sir!” Calvin shouted to be heard over the fighting.

  Roy finished hacking the head off the ghoul closest to him before sparing a quick glance back at us.

  We’d thought that the ghouls had been protecting the nest, but judging from the lack of eggs and the number of ghouls, it appeared they’d been funneling us down to this room. My helmet light showed me that going past where we were would only get us so far. Beyond the dark was a dead end.

  It was an ambush.

  The fighting was entirely too close to the empty nest room. Ian and the others were being pushed back with the intent of forcing them into this room and then turning where we stood into a death chamber.

  I looked down. Other than our boot prints, there were no tracks leading in or out.

  “Anything?” Liz called back. After her initial crème brûlée treatment of the room’s interior, Liz had stationed herself at the door, lighting up any ghoul her flames could reach.

  I scanned the room with my light, making sure nothing waiting to eat me was lurking in a dark corner. Dark, dank, and mildewed. I sneezed. Great. I had everything I needed to survive a monster attack, but I didn’t have a Kleenex to my name. And encased in body armor the way I was, I didn’t even have the option of using my sleeve, disgusting as that would have been. I just sniffed and carried on. I moved around the room, searching for some sign or smudge of slime to tell me the way those eggs had been taken out. Even though they weren
’t here anymore, I didn’t want to turn my back on that nest, even if it was empty.

  Then I saw it. A seam in the concrete wall that didn’t line up, and dirt that had been scraped away when this section of wall had been opened. Not that long before, it seemed, due to lack of new dust. Hopefully it was a way out.

  “Bingo,” I whispered.

  Calvin quickly joined me. “Find something?”

  “Possibly.” I crouched down to get a closer look. A tiny piece of broken pipe had gotten stuck down near the floor, keeping it from closing completely. I wedged my fingers in between the slabs of concrete and pulled.

  It didn’t budge.

  One of Calvin’s big hands reached around me and took a try. Even he had a hard time getting that loose section to move. It ended up taking both of Calvin’s hands and all of his effort to open it, confirming that whatever had carried those eggs out—or played doorman for whatever did—was probably stronger than Calvin. I shoved that thought aside, and pressed my back against the wall next to the opening. Calvin stood opposite me, using the door as a shield, and when nothing jumped out, he stepped quickly into the opening, shining both helmet- and gun-mounted lights inside, showing an area even smaller than the room we were in, almost like a bomb shelter. With Calvin covering me, we went inside. There weren’t any cracks or seams in the wall indicating anything remotely resembling another way in or out. Just crumbling and flaking concrete.

  I took a step back from the wall, snagged my heel on a chunk of concrete, and not used to the extra weight of body armor, fell flat on my ass. The floor cracked and broke beneath me. I yelped and kept falling—at least part of me did. Next thing I knew, I’d plugged a hole in the floor with my butt, floundering like I was stuck in an inner tube float—from my chest up and my knees down were the only parts of me sticking out.

  I looked up at a surprised Calvin. “Found something.”

  • • •