by Kenny Soward
She expected Anderson to go into a fit of retching, but he kept his composure.
Silence fell over the kitchen. Bess pointed the nose of her weapon into the hallway. She shot a glance over her shoulder. Anderson was backed up against the sink, looking terrified. It was then she knew he’d never been near an infested house. Probably spent his life in vans watching OPs from monitors. Well, it was time to grow up.
“Clear that room.” She jerked her head at the pantry door.
“What the fuck? How did you know?”
Bess never discussed her godsight, and she wasn't about to start now. “Don't worry about how I knew. Clear it. Shoot anything that’s still alive, and do it quick. Can you do that?”
Anderson shook his head, eyes focusing as he held up his pistol. “Yeah. No problem.”
Bess stalked the creaking hardwood floors without another glance behind her. The operation was going well, all things considered. If Anderson did well enough on mop up duty, Bess might break her record for clearing a den of nasties. A small brag, to be sure, but it gave her hope.
In the foyer, the low ceiling broke upward. Bess hesitated, cast her eyes around to detect any movement above the unlit chandelier. On her right, a set of stairs wound upward. Past the stairs, the open entrance to the sitting room. The dining room would be through the archway on her left.
She chose left.
In the dining room, she made for the curtained window, her senses alive with godsight. She cross-stepped while dragging the curtain behind her, dousing everything in morning light. Another reason she preferred doing this at dawn. Just knowing the sun was right there provided some comfort, considering how most fade rippers avoided it.
Bess crouched, glancing beneath the dining room table, a thick oaken thing that could seat a dozen people easily.
Nothing there.
She rose, eyes scanning. Chairs were unorganized, pulled back or turned sideways. Half-empty cups and chalices, their edges stained with dark liquid, rested on the table. A platter of something lumpy and smeared in red sauce sat in the center. Bess only needed a cursory glance to know it was a human corpse, or at least part of one. Her insides turned as she navigated carefully around the scene.
It wasn’t uncommon to find horrible messes in a whorchal’s lair. Grotesque displays of decadent debauchery, the evidence of some poor soul’s horror in the final moments of their life. Whorchals were the worst kind of ripper, never ceasing to amaze her with their creative cruelty.
That's why they needed to be destroyed.
An elegant, double-wide archway opened into the next hallway. Bess stopped at the threshold. She was about to check on Anderson when a shot rang out followed by another.
Bess’s lips pursed tight. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Anderson’s voice was breathy but in control. “Just took care of a couple, uh, looks like hoarbeasts.”
Bess nodded inwardly. Anderson had the required level of violence needed to complete this mission. If he made it through this job with his arms, legs, and life intact, Bess would be sure to give him a good report.
“Good. I’m going to search the rooms back here. Secure the hall and wait for me in the foyer. Keep an eye on the stairs but don’t engage.”
“Okay.”
Bess used her godsight as she moved, saying a quiet prayer in her head. Behold now, Thy servant hath found grace in Thy sight, and Thou hast magnified Thy mercy, which Thou hast shown unto me in saving my life.
Two bedrooms faced one another. The bathroom directly ahead. The doors were flung wide and Bess detected no shadows.
Still, she had to clear the rooms. Sometimes human familiars lurked, and they weren’t always detectable with her powers.
The bedroom on the left was messy. The bed unkempt. Clothes strung across the floor. Shoes tossed everywhere. The stale odor of old laundry and men’s body spray. It reminded her of the showers at the ECC Academy. A brush sat on a dresser, longish dark hairs captured in the bristles.
Bess caught an image of herself in the mirror. Her gun held steady as she made a tight circle of the room. Her body tense but not so much so that she couldn’t react quickly to a threat.
Her eyes stared back, flat and businesslike.
She turned away, exited this bedroom, and crossed to the next. A quick glance into the bathroom as she passed revealed dark streaks on the floor and walls.
While the first bedroom was disheveled, this second one was a canvas painted with gore.
Bess swallowed, struggling to stay cool as she stepped over the bottom half of someone’s leg and entered. Aside from the foregone limb, this corner of the room was clean. The walls were a faint shade of yellow, the floor bare of furniture or decor.
Near the window rested a mattress saturated with blood. Splatters and sprays of it arced to either side and up to the ceiling.
On the mattress, a corpse. Barely more than a chest cavity, part of the head, and hair scattered across the pillows. The only piece of furniture was a nightstand upon which rested a lamp and a bloody arm taken off at the elbow as if someone had plucked it off the torso and placed it there for later.
The stench was overpowering, and Bess swallowed dry and put a clamp on her revulsion. Resentment swelled in her gut, and then anger. Where doubt might have struck a weaker person, Bess used the scene to fuel her fury and faith.
This mutilated person had been someone’s son or daughter. Maybe had kids of their own. Maybe even church-going. To fall prey to such evil was unconscionable.
“Bastards,” she murmured, allowing the vision to burn itself into her brain. She’d remember it when she was blasting Krag full of lead.
Anderson’s voice hummed through her earpiece. “I’m going to check upstairs.”
Bess put her hand to the side of her head, turned away from the blood-soaked scene, and moved towards the hallway. “Do not, I repeat, do not go upstairs, Anderson.”
“It’s cool. I peeked into the lounge and we’re good there. Going to start on up. Meet you at the top.”
“Damn it, Anderson. You—” Bess decided to just shut up and get there. It would only take her handful seconds to reach the foyer, and then she’d drag his ass back down the steps. And then she’d throw his ass out of the house altogether and damn beating her record for cleaning a house. Damn any mark. He’d disobeyed a direct order and could be stirring up a hornet’s nest of unfriendly beasties.
Bess entered the dining room once again. She was about to hustle to the other side when her training took over and she stopped cold, drawing her senses around her once more, casting her godsight into the hallway and foyer beyond.
Don’t let Anderson’s stupidity become yours.
Bess took a breath, saying, “Show me, Lord,” as she exhaled.
Nothing.
She maneuvered around the table and ducked into the foyer.
Bess peered across into the lounge, spying two couches facing one another, the room decked out with stuff that looked as if it been bought at the local IKEA. The hall to the kitchen was still clear. No sounds, not even on the stairs which turned sharply at a ninety-degree angle after three short steps. She'd have to poke her head up there to see what lurked.
“Anderson?” she called up. It came out louder than she’d intended it, edged with a panic she resented at once. Much calmer, she repeated herself but did not receive a reply.
Bess put her foot on the first step when static burst through her ear piece, Anderson’s voice a hiss. “Shit. I think. Oh, crap. Something’s up here with me. Ah—”
Bess glared up the tight space, lips pursed, sweat running into her eyes. “Anderson, get your ass down here now. I mean, it. Get your ass—”
“Agh!” Anderson’s cry came through her earpiece and fell from the upstairs at the same time. Something shifted and thumped up there. A struggle. The sharp firecracker sound of a gunshot.
“Shit.” Bess lifted the nose of her MP5 and charged up the stairs without thinking, finger poised on the tri
gger. Her senses were alive. No, on fire. Her teeth gritted as she moved up to the next landing toward the noisy, bumping tousling. At least there were still those sounds.
That meant Anderson was alive.
Near the top, it was dark, almost pitch black, and Bess cursed herself for not hitting the switch at the bottom. Only a thin swath of morning light cut through from somewhere above, a window on the wider landing. Not only was her partner potentially getting his guts ripped out, but she could mistake him for a nasty and fill him full of holes by accident.
Bess’s heart nearly leapt out of her throat when Anderson suddenly appeared at the top. Hair plastered with sweat, eyes wild with nervous fear, and his gun still tight in his hand. He was uninjured, not a speck of blood on him.
She relaxed her trigger finger. “Get behind me!”
But Anderson didn’t move. He leaned one arm against the wall and jerked his thumb back the way he’d come. “Hoarbeast almost got me, but I blasted the sonuvabitch. Should have seen it—”
“I said get your ass behind me. I could've shot you, man!”
“Damn! My bad. But it’s up here. It's awesome.” A goofy grin spread across his face, adding another level of surrealism to the situation.
Bess shook her head. This dumb ass was trying to celebrate his first real kill in the middle of a house full of monsters that would be on them in a second! It had been a huge mistake bringing him, and Bess reached up to grab him by the jacket and throw him behind her.
Anderson’s eyes flashed past her so fast she might have missed it if her senses hadn’t been so heightened.
And that’s when Bess knew.
She’d been so focused on saving Anderson’s ass, she’d forgotten the other monsters her godsight couldn’t detect. The human ones.
Something jabbed through her jeans and into her calf. A wasp sting.
Bess spun and faced a thin, dark-haired dude who had been crawling up the stairs behind her. He let go of the hypodermic needle he’d just stuck in her leg and backed away, fear lighting his eyes.
“Sorry,” he said before Bess lifted her boot and planted it squarely in his face with a crunch, sending him sliding and tumbling back down the stairs.
Her instincts about Anderson had been right. Something wrong with the guy since she’d picked him up at the rest stop earlier that day.
Betrayed.
She rounded on him, MP5 pointed at the landing above, intent on spraying the asshole full of holes.
But he was gone.
Dizziness hit her like a rock. She stumbled up the stairs, clutching the rail with her left hand to steady herself. Absently, she reached back and plucked the half-filled syringe from her calf. Tried to imagine what the sloshing liquid could be. Didn’t matter. Whatever it was worked fast. Bess’s ears rang. The numbers on the tube blurred, her head and shoulders growing heavy with drowsiness.
Bess tossed the needle with a grimace.
“Asshole!” she shouted, but her voice was a croak, hardly words. She thought she heard a satisfied chuckle from above followed by the snickers of other things far less human.
But where? Right or left?
She pulled the MP5’s trigger as she started up the last few steps, tugging off several three-round bursts from left to right and then back again.
She’d go right. Yes, that’s where Anderson had disappeared. That’s where he might be right now, waiting for Bess to fall.
She leaned forward, spraying bullets left to shred anyone who might be lurking there, rounds taking off pieces of the corner and sending plaster and hot casings leaping everywhere. She fell left against the rail, sprayed three more bursts in the opposite direction. The stock kicked against her shoulder. She bit sandpaper between her teeth.
The MP5 was all the power she had left in this world.
One more step and she arrived at the top where she tried to assume an assault stance as she lit up the empty hallway, but her legs betrayed her.
Bess dropped to her knees.
She had no idea how many rounds she’d fired, but at some point her gun stopped sputtering even though the echoes of those vibrations carried through her arms and shoulders like the ghost of an earthquake. The air was rife with plaster dust and the sickening scent of old death, corpses up here a long time. Bess’s nose was full of it, her body gone hot and drippy.
Head nodding, the MP5 slipped from her grip and hung uselessly.
A dark shadow stepped into the hall. A huge, wide, and ominous presence that should have sent a shock of fear through her. But in her drugged-out state, she felt only a vague sense of danger, a vague rage that she’d been made a fool of by some smarmy asshole who’d gained an iota of her trust.
Bess chuckled inwardly thinking of the black mark they’d put on her ECC record. No, it would be more than a black mark. It would read “deceased.”
A gentle hand settled on her shoulder, and Bess slept.
Chapter 3
Bess recalled the betrayal in fits and starts as she lay half conscious, picked up and carried somewhere, dumped on a cold, hard slab. A prick of pain in her left arm spurned the recollections, pieces of things that had happened earlier that morning. Things that should have tipped her off.
Like the second she saw Anderson cursing at the rest stop vending machine. Pounding it with the palm of his hand. Kicking it to knock out the stuck soda. Short, skinny, dressed in black (overdressed in black) with new-looking boots and shiny vinyl pants. Why did newbies think dressing gothic was necessary on their first mission? Sure, it was Bess’s favorite color of clothing, but vinyl? The rippers would hear this one coming a mile away. He was the epitome of racket.
A pair of jeans would have been fine.
At the time, Bess thought about putting in a text to her ECC contact to say the job was off, but she didn’t because she wanted to keep her flawless record. No, she had to go through with this. Had to make it work.
“Hey,” she called to him.
The guy (he was just the guy at the time) spun like a gun had gone off behind his ear. He looked surprised and twitchy but, when he saw it was Bess, his lips broke into a nervous smile. “Hey yourself,” he said, coming forward, hand held out for Bess to shake. “You must be Bess.”
“What’s the code?” Bess’s hand slid to her hip, poised to lift her T-shirt in the event she needed to draw her weapon.
The guy stopped, eyes fixed on her beltline. Her sudden, dangerous posture.
He stepped back and raised palms. “Whoa there. You’re a little twitchy, huh?”
“I was just thinking the same thing about you. Now what’s the code?”
The guy’s eyes fell and then rose in an “ah-ha” expression as he recited the code back carefully. “Whiskey. Zeta. Three-one-three. Apple. Crunch.”
“Apple crunch?”
He shrugged, giving Bess a smile. “Yeah, helps me remember if I can turn the codes into stuff I like to eat. So much shit to memorize, right?”
“Yeah, I know. It’s what we do. What’s your name?”
“Anderson.”
Bess wondered where they got these people. Usually some archbishop’s nephew looking to score points with ECC governance. Everyone in the ECC, even the administrators, were required to complete hands-on training to learn what being a Holy Avenger entailed. Still, no matter how many hours the desk jockeys put in, they forgot after a few months.
If only Anderson had been just another desk jockey.
On the drive into Riverside, he'd tried to peak glances at her coded message. Should have been another clue, because Holy Avengers never pried.
Anderson couldn't read the texts, but it still drew her frown.
“You shouldn’t text and drive,” he said.
“Part of my training,” she said, “to communicate while operating a vehicle. The trick is to hold the phone high enough to watch the road, too. Peripheral sight training. Every operative learns it. You didn’t know that?”
“Sure didn’t.”
She
turned the device away, fingers flying over the keypad in their secret code. “Almost there, Pops. Wish me luck.”
Her father waited patiently on the other end. It was tradition for them to touch base before an OP although he hated her being in the field.
After mom died, her father did everything he could to keep Bess out of the ECC. Made training off limits. Threatened to ban her from the ECC’s Lexington campus. Yet, Bess had been determined, even at sixteen, to get in. She took every opportunity to be in Lexington with him. Trained on her own. Made bold challenges to the other cadets, beating many of them in backroom brawls. An avid runner and lifter, she’d grown strong, muscular legs that helped her with grappling, even breaking three older boys’ arms before her father got wind of her little game and confronted her, eventually agreeing to let her train if she promised to hold back.
Bess agreed but didn’t go easy on anyone. Ever. It was for Mom. It was for God. And that was what made Bess one of the most potent operatives the ECC had ever known.
Bess’s phone beeped at the incoming message from her father. Her eyes scanned the strange symbols resembling something out of a science fiction movie. Bess had invented the code herself, much to her father’s pleasure. He not only encouraged her to develop it but had adopted it as the super secret code of the ECC. Only seven people could even decipher it.
“Any chance of this being your last job?”
Bess grinned. It was their inside joke. While Mark Winters appreciated his daughter’s monster hunting skills, it made him a nervous wreck. She was his only child.
“No chance, Daddy :)”
A minute later and, “The Lord be with you then. From your mother and me.”
Bess’s eyes watered. Might have shed a tear but Anderson was in the car and she’d never cry in front of someone she didn’t know. Instead, she clicked “End” and let her phone go blank.
From your mother and me.
Her mother. Dressed in black, strapping on her utility belt, checking her weapons and plugging her guns into their holsters. The places she put her knives. The way she stretched her kinky gray-brown hair back into a tight bun. The way she gripped Bess by her shoulders when she got serious.