by Lyn Gala
Hoffer nodded. “Before that, I never believed in demons. I thought the Petersons were getting Tank all screwed up in the head, but that day…. Sir, the lieutenant at the desk took my cell phone. Could you have him bring it in?”
“I’ve got it,” Clyde said, already out of his seat. The guard at the door took off at a run when Clyde ordered him to double-time it, and Clyde went back to his seat. “Captain, I’ve seen the impossible on a regular basis, so I can handle demons.” Or he could handle soul-sucking, son-of-a-bitch aliens fucking around with people’s heads, but po-tay-to, po-tah-to. It was pretty much all the same.
“Roger Fischer….” Hoffer hesitated, and Clyde clamped down on an urge to grab the man and shake the answers out of him. Finally the captain continued, “Fischer was seventeen—a regular American kid. He didn’t grow up in bombed-out buildings or deal with the Taliban, but he’d decided that life was too much. He was doing a spell to give him superpowers or immortality or both. After the fight, the altar was destroyed, so the Petersons couldn’t figure out exactly what he’d been doing. But the spell called for him to sacrifice what he loved.”
Clyde groaned as he thought about the reports he’d read and a girl with a slit throat. “Ellie Richmond.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who shot Fischer?” Clyde asked. When he didn’t get an immediate answer, he added, “You or Tankersley?”
Hoffer sat up straighter. “I take full responsibility for what happened, and I will not fight any legal charges.”
Yep, the Rangers did know about honor and falling on a sword to protect a brother. This Ranger, this war hero, considered Tankersley a brother worthy of that loyalty. “So Tankersley pulled the trigger,” Clyde said.
Hoffer’s expression twisted with emotion. They probably needed a headshrinker in here, but Clyde wasn’t a big fan of them. Besides, the only psychiatrist with the clearance to know any of this was in northern Alaska and would resent the hell out of being forced to come to New Jersey. The man did love his cross-country skiing.
“Necessary kill?”
“Fischer finished the spell. He would have been invincible.”
Clyde doubted that, but someone had sure done a number on these folks convincing them of it.
“And sir,” Hoffer added, “Tank loved Fischer.”
“Like a brother?” Clyde asked hopefully, but he already suspected the answer.
“Fischer was his lover. He asked me for information on gay sex, and we talked about being safe. He said they weren’t ready for some stuff, but when he described Fischer, he was… he was in love,” Hoffer finished, the misery clear in his voice. Hoffer considered the kid family; Clyde didn’t doubt that. He wondered how much of Tank’s decision to go into the military was because Hoffer had offered emotional support. Then again, Tankersley had killed his lover and friend. Running away offered some advantages even without a romanticized view of the military.
Clyde summed it up. “Tankersley loved Fischer, and they had a physical relationship of some sort, but Fischer loved Richmond and chose to sacrifice her to a demon by slitting her throat.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the falling wall?”
“My phone. I have pictures. When I saw what was going on, I put my phone on record to try to protect Tank’s legal position. I didn’t know… I couldn’t have known.” Hoffer scrubbed his hand over his buzz cut. Clearly he blamed himself for not figuring out the impossible.
General Zeller said, “I don’t understand why Private Tankersley refused to tell us this. Once he knew that we’d seen that technology, surely he understood that we would take the situation into consideration. Or he could have told us a half-truth and left out the death of Mr. Fischer.”
“He’ll want to protect Zhu and Marie,” Hoffer said quietly. He looked up at the general. “Sir, they’re good kids, and I don’t care what they have in their past, I trust them.”
That set off alarms in Clyde’s head, and even the general looked a little concerned.
“Zhu Chow and Marie Byrne. If you investigate, you’ll find they were the last two kids in the group. On the video, she’s the tall redhead. Zhu is the Asian man. He looks older than his age, but he was nineteen or twenty at the time. The older woman is Mrs. Peterson. She stays to one side working on a spell. The two men in the video are Mr. Peterson and Staff Sergeant Holmes.”
“Staff Sergeant?” the general asked.
“Yes, sir. After I talked to Tank about the importance of recruiting locals who could blend into the environment while gathering intel, he started befriending the local homeless until he found Eric. He’s homeless, but he’s still a soldier, and when he figured out what Tank was asking him to do, he refused to sit out the fight. Mr. Peterson is heavy and out of shape, so it’s not hard to distinguish him from the staff sergeant, even if the picture is shaky and out of focus most of the time.”
“And no one called the cops?” Clyde asked.
“Sure, Eric did. A homeless combat vet called them about teenagers fighting demons. That went as well as you’d expect.” Hoffer had a bit of a sarcastic streak to him. He added a belated “sir” and blushed, completely ruining a beautiful moment of insubordination.
“I’m more interested in why Private Tankersley would feel that this story reflected badly on his two surviving friends,” General Zeller said.
Hoffer flinched. “If you watch the video, you’ll see it. Marie… she doesn’t look human when she fights. It’s harder to recognize with Zhu, because he doesn’t have the strength, but his reaction times….”
If Hoffer believed he had fought demons, that would mean Marie and Zhu were either demons, part demons, or humans who had sold their souls for demonic power. Clyde had seen enough television to reach that conclusion. However, he had also spent six months on a gladiator ship where the ship-born humans had rather distinctive coloring and skills. John was stronger than any human Clyde had ever met. Another of the gladiators had legs like a fucking gazelle and could bounce around the ring like a flea. Clyde thought it was more likely that these kids were experiments.
He exchanged a look with the general. Yeah, this was fucked up beyond all recognition, and Sadler’s computer geeks hadn’t picked up on a single red flag. Time to rip through all their programming and figure something out.
Hoffer continued, “Marie’s father was the demon offering to make Fischer all-powerful. The wall came down when we fought him. We won, but the cost was too damn high, sir. And afterward, I couldn’t see any point in telling the authorities about a threat we couldn’t verify when the danger had been neutralized. If the kids had been in harm’s way, if I thought for a second that this war was going to continue, I would have called someone. I don’t know if they would have believed me, but I wouldn’t have abandoned them to fight alone. I still check in with Eric, cash his disability checks for him, and get him food. He said no one has been hanging around since we killed Marie’s father and Fischer.”
Clyde slid a notepad across the table to Hoffer. “Write down your phone’s passcode.” When Clyde figured out where the hell the phone was, he was writing up whoever was taking so damn long.
Hoffer hesitated for a second but then took the pen clipped to the paper and started writing.
“Your duty post is on base for the next few weeks. We’ll reassess once we figure out how big this leak is,” Clyde said.
“Yes, sir.” Hoffer didn’t even bother to hide his unhappiness, but Clyde wasn’t going to disrespect Hoffer by pretending this was anything other than a detainment.
“Give the quartermaster a list of necessary supplies from your apartment, and he’ll send someone to get them and assign personnel to do weekly checks on your place to maintain it while you’re on base.”
“Yes, sir.” The emotion was starting to vanish, and Clyde could practically see Hoffer build up that psychological wall. He was expecting the worst, and as much of a bastard as Clyde was, he couldn’t let a good man believe the military would rail
road him in order to keep a secret that several hundred people already knew about. Hoffer had proved his trustworthiness, and Clyde didn’t worry about him half as much as he did Tankersley. In the past, the military had held a number of people on base while they assessed the likelihood of that person talking. However, Clyde had never dealt with a wild card like the private. Back when Zeller had been base commander, they’d had a problem with a nutty reporter, but Zeller had ruined the guy’s reputation and then turned him loose to scream about aliens all he wanted. Tankersley might be a pain in the ass, but he didn’t deserve that.
“In a few weeks, we will either have you sign a shit-ton of paperwork promising to never discuss any of this with anyone, or give you the chance to get fully read into the program.”
General Zeller’s eyebrows went north, but he didn’t contradict Clyde. After all, Clyde got to run his base his way, and for the most part, Zeller kept his hands off. It made plausible deniability easier when Zeller had to kiss up to politicians.
“Sir,” Hoffer said, “I left active duty because I couldn’t believe in the mission anymore.”
“My mission is a hell of a lot easier to believe in,” Clyde said. He stood, and Hoffer shot to his feet. “But whether you want to get back into the fight will be up to you. My concern right now is making sure my unit’s not compromised and this incursion is dealt with, but I will get back to you as soon as I figure out how big of a mess Tankersley has landed in. Killing these guys is rarely the end of the story.” He didn’t explain biological machines or human replicas the aliens used to interact with the native earthlings. Killing the avatar wasn’t going to do shit about the asshole alien behind the remote control. And the more Clyde heard, the more convinced he was that these kids had been part of a sadistic experiment. Clyde planned to shut it down with extreme prejudice.
Zeller stood. “Someone will come in to show you to your quarters,” he said before he headed for the door. Clyde followed, leaving behind one very miserable captain who probably expected to get thrown in the stockade. It was a little disconcerting that he wasn’t demanding a lawyer or invoking his rights. It certainly suggested a level of guilt that Clyde didn’t expect from an officer. Deaths happened in war, and he had to know that this was war. But then again, he’d come back from the front lines seeking something normal, and Tankersley had pulled him into a battle neither of them had understood.
When they reached the general’s office, Zeller turned on the privacy equipment while Clyde shut the door.
“You have a mess on your hands, Colonel. First things first, we have to deal with this incursion.”
“Yes, sir,” Clyde agreed. “Permission to call for my field team so we can all view the video?”
“Granted. Get them here. I want to know what these aliens are doing to our people, and I want them off my planet.”
“Yes, sir,” Clyde agreed. After all, that was the mission. Now he needed to bring the rest of his team in, and God have mercy on him because Lev would not take this well. The man had too much sympathy and too little common sense to see that he’d just invited an emotional bomb into his bed. Unless Clyde missed his guess, those bad jokes and shocking grammar were hiding a raging case of PTSD. Tankersley was used to fighting for his life, and he’d done it without any significant training or backup.
The pieces all fit, but it meant that Lev had stepped into the biggest pile of steaming emotional shit Clyde had seen since… well, since Clyde had gotten off that slave ship and had his own private version of a nervous breakdown.
What a fuckup.
Chapter Thirteen
CLYDE ALLOWED the team to choose their own seats. The military personnel would always choose chairs based on rank, but three of the team were civilian contractors, like Lev, who tended to do what they wanted and ignore the military rules. Like right now. Lev knew he’d been called to a meeting, but judging from the grease stains, he’d taken a detour out to the motor pool to check on some of the toys his unit had installed on the local vehicles. A soldier would never show up to a meeting with the general looking like that. Clyde didn’t exactly run a tight ship, not when he needed his people to be creative thinkers.
Sadler chose the chair next to him, only to have Lev shove on her shoulder and urge her over. She looked over at Clyde, and he nodded. Let Lev torture him through the briefing. It would save Sadler some aggravation. She moved down a seat, and John took the chair next to Sadler and pushed it into the corner so he had his back against the wall. Surprisingly, Van Agteren chose the seat closest to John. Van Agteren was Lev’s second. He had a damn good understanding of the tech, but the sound of gunfire sent him into a full meltdown, so Campbell took up the slack in the field. Van Agteren seemed happy enough to get ignored and play with his alien toys.
On the other side of the table, Sadler’s second in the computer department, Reed, sat closest to the head of the table. The man was an arrogant ass—and worse, a civilian ass, so Clyde couldn’t make him do extra PT. However, he was good with code. Captain Black and Lieutenants Cooper and Washington made up the rest of Clyde’s military first-response team, although when the team needed to move quickly, Clyde would go in with only John, trusting him to do the jobs of all three of them.
General Zeller walked into the large meeting room, and all the military personnel jumped to their feet, as did John and Lev. Clyde was proud of teaching his favorite geek a few manners—Van Agteren and Reed never budged. With John it wasn’t a matter of manners as much as a refusal to ever let someone hold higher ground. If anyone was on their feet, so was he. It made a lot of women incorrectly assume he was either chivalrous or chauvinistic.
“Be seated,” Zeller said, and everyone settled back down. Clyde took his seat and waited for the general to begin.
“Technicians have cleaned this footage up as much as possible, and I’d like to begin by having you all watch,” Zeller said. Clyde had seen the cell phone footage once, but he was anxious to see the improved version on the big screen. He used the remote to lower the lights and start the recording.
“Clyde,” Lev whispered.
“Shh.”
Clyde got an elbow in the ribs for that, but he’d expected it. Lev always wanted a verbal rundown so he knew what he was looking at before he looked at it. For a man who made a living out of figuring things out, he did prefer a bullet-point briefing.
Hoffer had put the phone on a shelf so that most of the screen had a nice view of the ceiling of a burned-out brick building. However, after a second, the action in the corner was enlarged thanks to the technical department, making it easier to see. Clyde paused the grainy video and used a pen light to identify the characters.
“Up front we have Roger Fischer and Marie Byrne’s unidentified father. Tied up on the table is Ellie Richmond. And everyone knows Private Tankersley.” He pointed at a small figure clearly challenging Fischer. “We have two military assets in the fight. This is Captain Hoffer.” Clyde pointed his laser at the back of a man in an AC/DC T-shirt. He had his weapon drawn, but small-caliber weapons weren’t worth much against aliens. “This is Staff Sergeant Eric Holmes, currently homeless. One of our mission goals is to find him and offer him assistance or reenlistment.” Holmes was swinging an enormous machete, which might actually do more to damage alien avatars.
After Clyde had seen Holmes’s record, the homelessness made some sense. He’d spent eight months in Taliban-held territory and was listed as probable KIA before he’d walked himself out. Living too close to other people without proper cover probably gave him hives, but Clyde had a huge old alien ship sitting mostly empty, and he had military assets who needed to learn about surviving impossible odds. Clyde’s unit worked well because he ignored so many of the regs, and he wanted Holmes.
“That’s a secondary goal,” Zeller said mildly, but Clyde heard the rebuke. Aliens first, recruitment second.
“This is a civilian teacher who should have done something to protect his students,” Clyde said as he pointed his las
er at Mr. Peterson’s head. He moved the pointer to the other two young people. “The tall redhead is Marie Byrne, and the model-handsome Asian is Zhu Chow.” In reality both were stunningly attractive, which was a point in favor of alien tinkering. They did like to show off their genetic finesse. Before Lev could start peppering him with questions, Clyde turned the video back on.
Clyde had no idea how this would look to people who believed in demons and magic. As a frontline fighter against alien incursions, it was fairly terrifying. Fischer was focused on Ellie Richmond, and Clyde was really happy something had happened to the sound because it was clear that she was screaming through the tight gag. Hoffer moved forward, his weapon high, and fired several times. The bright flashes showed where his bullets hit an energy field that slowed them, but the alien avatar/demon waved his hand as though making the bullets magically lose their energy. Hoffer hesitated, and Tankersley threw himself forward—straight at the alien.
“He’s making himself a target,” Lev said. Clyde felt like patting Lev on the back and congratulating him on noticing something as unmathematical as field tactics. Lev had pulled that same move more than once, although Clyde was fairly certain in Lev’s case it was straight-up obliviousness.
“He’s distracting the bad guy,” John said, his tone admiring. With the video slowed down to half speed, it was easy to see that. The bad guys looked at Tankersley while Marie Byrne made an impossible jump to a fire-seared rafter above. She sprang forward, and then the shield failed for some reason that made absolutely no sense to Clyde.
“What?” Lev leaned forward. “What just happened?”
Clyde answered, “According to our source, their witch cast a counterspell to nullify it.”
Lev turned his chair all the way around to glare at Clyde as if he had made that up. Clyde held up both hands in surrender.
Sadler saved him by saying softly, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”