by Peter Nealen
“You want to know the real deterrent?” Father Pat chuckled. He held up the little gold crucifix on its chain that he never took off. “This right here. The nastier the monster, the more holy things drive it away. Sure, if it’s really set on eating you, and your faith wavers, it can still get you. A crucifix isn’t a talisman—if you haven’t got the faith in God, a physical object in His image isn’t going to help. But if you’ve got the faith, you can win, even against some of the darkest things out there.”
“Guns and blades help against the things with physical form, too,” I added. “Explosives would, but they’re a little trickier to come by, at least without getting on somebody’s radar as a terrorist. Good luck blowing up somebody’s barn and telling the sheriff that there was a wendigo in it.”
The conversation continued for a couple of hours as the sun went down and the evening took on its customary chill. Father Pat and I were careful to steer it away from some of the more dangerous subjects. Even so, Eryn got quite an education. Finally, Father Pat headed for bed, so I excused myself to head out to my truck. Eryn said her goodbyes and came out with me.
“Jed,” she said from the porch, as I stepped down toward my truck. I stopped and turned to face her. I couldn’t really see her face, as she was silhouetted against the light from Father Pat’s porch light.
“Yeah?”
“How did you get caught up in all this?” she asked quietly, coming down the steps to stand next to me. “I mean, living out of your truck, fighting monsters and people who summon demons? Did you always know about this?”
I shook my head as I looked up at the steeple, gathering my thoughts. To be honest, I hadn’t thought much about the first time I’d been thrown into this world of darkness in a long time.
Security was set, and the sun was going down over the Jordanian border. We had the Humvees in a circle, turrets facing outboard, in the bottom of a wide wadi. Most of the other Marines, who weren’t up on the guns, were already stretching out on the ground or the hoods and roofs of the trucks.
I joined the other Assistant Team Leaders and Gunny at the command truck, in the middle of the circle. There wasn’t much to go over; the op was going as according to plan as it was ever going to. That meant we hadn’t found any sign of the smuggling route that was supposed to be moving insurgents and munitions into Iraq from Syria. I’d pointed out during mission planning that up north along the Euphrates was more likely than out here in the middle of the empty desert, and while Gunny had agreed, there wasn’t much any of us could do about it. This was the mission, so we were going to do it as best we could. Comb the desert, aye, aye, sir.
We talked about some inconsequential BS for a while, peppered with cynical jokes and wisecracks that would have gravely offended anyone not familiar with the kind of twisted sense of humor you develop in combat arms, before drifting off to our trucks to get some shut-eye before it was our turn to take security. Nobody expected anyone to be out here in the daytime, much less night. Hajji slept at night; none of us had ever seen any sort of night operations run by the insurgents, and finding an Iraqi farmer out after dark was next to completely unknown. Not that we’d seen any farms out here; the most habitation we’d seen in five days was a single Bedouin tent three days before.
I pulled my iso-mat out of my ruck, which was hanging by a snap-link on the side of our truck and unrolled it on the ground, beside the rear tire. It was still way too hot to use a poncho liner, especially since I wasn’t going to take off my cammies or boots. Empty desert or not, bad habits were bad habits, and we weren’t going to stop being careful just because we hadn’t seen a soul besides each other for three days.
It was hot enough that I couldn’t go to sleep immediately, but just lay there, letting my mind wander.
After a while, I suddenly noticed that my thoughts had wandered into some seriously dark territory. A formless disquiet had settled on my mind, coupled with a sense of being watched. It was a feeling I’d experienced before, when I’d been sure there were bad guys close. I just called it the heebie-jeebies most of the time, but I always followed up on it, just in case. I sat up, grabbing my rifle from where it was leaning against the truck.
My first instinct was to check the perimeter. With the sun gone, the desert was nothing but empty darkness. The stars had come out, but the moon was still below the horizon. It wouldn’t be up for hours.
Something made me turn around. There was a figure standing in the middle of the laager site. Any thoughts that one of the other Marines was walking around died instantly. This thing was taller than any of us, appeared to be wearing a cloak or thobe, and was blacker than any of the surrounding darkness.
Except for its eyes. Those were points of bright flame.
It stared directly at me for a second, while I was frozen in place, unable to process what I was looking at. Then its mouth gaped in a glowing, sulfurous grin, its teeth jagged black fangs against the furnace burning inside. Still looking back at me, it turned and brought a long arm slashing downward and smashed the command Humvee in half.
With a violent sweep of both incredibly long arms, it threw the two halves in opposite directions, sending them spinning through the air to impact with crushing force against two more trucks, reducing them to twisted metal and killing the men sleeping in and around them.
Gunny hadn’t been sleeping at the command truck; he’d been over near my vehicle. He was already up and moving, trying to get an angle on the thing. The sight reminded me of the rifle in my own hands, and I brought it to my shoulder, flicking the selector off safe and trying to pick up the thing in my ACOG in the dark.
It was too fast. In the time it took to blink, it was on the other side of the laager site, sweeping two more Marines off the ground by their throats. They burst into screaming flames in its hands, and it threw them out into the desert, shrieking out their last breaths as they burned.
Gunny opened fire at that point. I joined in a moment later, as my brain finally got out of the screaming lock it had been in since that thing had grinned at me. We might hit the Marines in that truck, but if we didn’t kill that thing, or at least drive it off, we were all going to die.
“Mac!” I bellowed over the hammering of our rifle fire, “Get that gun up and shoot that thing!”
Mackenzie, my gunner, had already started swinging the turret around and opened up with the .50, the hammering thunder almost driving me to my knees as it blasted just over my head.
The heavy rounds flashed and sparked, and the thing disappeared in a cloud of dust and smoke as the .50 was joined by the 240 on Gunny’s truck, hammering at the thing and the Humvee behind it. The men in that truck were dead, if not by the figure’s hands, then by our fire. But we had no choice. It was shoot or die, and none of us wanted to die in that godforsaken desert, at least not without a fight.
Finally, Gunny yelled, “Cease fire! Cease fire!” It took a couple of minutes and both of the surviving heavy guns going dry before anybody stopped shooting. I hastily shrugged into my vest and reloaded as I joined Gunny to carefully advance on the blasted wreckage where we’d last seen the thing.
There was no sign of it. Just smashed, burned bodies and a Humvee reduced to twisted wreckage.
“It was an ifrit,” I said quietly, staring up at the sky, not daring to look at Eryn, in case she saw the tears that the memory of that night had brought to my eyes. “A fire djinn. They’re almost indestructible without silver, and we sure didn’t have any. But we managed to hammer it hard enough that it ran.
“It got written up as an insurgent ambush. We didn’t tell anybody anything different. Two-thirds of a Recon platoon wiped out in a matter of moments.” I barked a short, humorless laugh. “They had forces scouring that area for six months afterward, looking for this mysterious insurgent cell that had popped out of the desert. Never found a thing.”
I felt her hand on my arm. “Jed, I…I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.”
I shook my head, digging my fing
ers into my eyes to dash away the tears. “What was left of our platoon was declared combat ineffective, and we got farmed out as attachments to the other platoons for the rest of the deployment. When we got back, most of us got out.
“I started digging. I had to know what that thing was. I started down some pretty dangerous paths, getting to know some people who were dabbling in things they didn’t understand, and shouldn’t have ever messed with. That was when Father O’Neal found me, and took me under his wing. Pretty sure he saved my life and my soul. It turned out he’d found Gunny only a little before. He’s hunting down in the Southwest, now. We still talk every once in a while, compare notes.”
I looked down at her. “So yeah, I had a hell of an introduction to this side of reality.”
“And there’s nobody you can really talk to about it?” she asked.
“Just the small community of Hunters,” I replied. “And we’re pretty spread out. There aren’t many of us, and a lot of territory to cover.” I shrugged. “And a lot of us aren’t really much of the ‘talk about it’ type.”
“You just talked to me about it,” she pointed out.
I looked at her. She wasn’t looking at me like a crazy nut with delusions. There was kindness and understanding in her eyes. “Yeah, I guess I did,” I said. “Huh.”
She smiled a little. It was one of the most gorgeous things I’d ever seen. I was going to have to punch myself to make myself stop acting like a teenager. “Are you going to be okay?” she asked.
“I think I should be asking you that question,” I replied. “I’ve had eight years to get used to this. You just got kind of thrown into it today.”
She thought for a moment. “I think I will be,” she said, “especially knowing that you’re here fighting these sorts of things, and that Father Pat is, too. I’m not saying I won’t have nightmares; I’m sure it’s going to be a while before I sleep soundly again, but I’ll be okay.” She smiled a little. “I’m pretty sure I’ll be sleeping with a flashlight, a crucifix, and my Smith for a while, too.”
I chuckled a little at that. “I’ve been doing that for years, except mine’s a 1911.”
She smiled again, and I just basked in it for a moment. “Well, good night, Jed,” she said.
“Good night, Eryn,” I replied. I watched her walk to her car, then turned and opened the back of my truck. I needed some sleep.
Chapter 6
My sleep was blessedly dreamless. That doesn’t happen very often these days. That made it even worse when I suddenly woke up, as though somebody had hissed a warning in my ear. My hand moved naturally to the 1911 at my side and curled around the grip, my thumb finding the safety and my finger lying against the trigger guard by feel and long repetition.
I lay still, listening. I didn’t hear anything, but somehow I knew there was something out there, on the other side of the steel, plastic, and fiberglass that made up my little bedroom.
Slowly and carefully, I peered out the foggy, yellowed windows of the shell that kept the rain and snow off me while I slept. I saw nothing but darkness, pierced only by Father Pat’s porch light and the street light down the way. Everything was absolutely still. Even the tree in front of the parish house was motionless; there was no wind.
Still, I was pretty certain there was something out there, and while it might be risky, I’d been around enough not to want to be sitting in an easy-open can waiting for whatever it was out there to peel it open and scoop me out. Trying my best to keep quiet, I eased open the back flap of the shell, then lowered the tailgate and slid out onto the pavement.
The night was unnaturally still. It wasn’t just that there was no wind. There was no sound aside from the opening of the back of the truck, the hiss of my jeans on the tailgate as I got out, and the clump of my boots hitting the pavement. No breath of wind stirred through the tops of the pines, no cars moved on the streets, and no animals or birds made a sound in the woods or bushes. The hackles really started going up on the back of my neck.
As I scanned the parking lot, something caught my eye, something out of place. When I tried to focus on it, my eyes started to hurt, like I was looking at the sun, except this thing was black as midnight.
It first looked like a heap of refuse or mud, but then it moved. Five slit-pupiled yellow eyes opened on top of it, and it lunged toward me in a somehow unnatural version of a frog’s hop.
As I got a better look at it, as much as I could focus on the thing, it in fact looked like a gigantic, unnatural toad. Dark slime steamed and dripped off it to smoke on the pavement, and as it hopped closer, its gigantic gash of a mouth gaped open. A tongue as long as my truck, bright yellow, and covered in barbs and pustules lashed out at me, smacking with a sickening splat on the pavement as I dodged out of the way. I barely ducked in time as it whipped sideways at me, then slithered back into the thing’s mouth.
It hopped again, and I felt the thud as it hit the ground. Its entire body jiggled as it impacted. I was starting to bring my 1911 to bear, but before I could get the sights on it that wickedly fast tongue snapped out and I had to scramble to avoid it. I skidded around the side of my truck, trying to get something, anything, between me and that thing. I felt slightly nauseous just looking at it.
The tongue dented my hood, smashed both headlights, and shattered the windshield. Apparently deciding that it wasn’t going to get me that way, the thing then started to hump itself around the front of the truck. That was when I popped up over the hood, leveled my pistol, and emptied the magazine into the thing.
Now, I don’t have any fancy night sights on my 1911. As much as I drooled over a Springfield TRP or a Nighthawk Custom, all I could afford had been this old, worn Colt. It had been re-blued several times and the walnut grips still just had the “US” visible through the wear and tear. The sights were still the old-school low-profile sights that it had had in Korea, where it had first seen service. The only thing I’d done with it was to put an ambidextrous safety and work the trigger a little.
But even in the dark, I was pretty good with it, and it was hard to miss that thing, especially as close as it was. The pistol roared in the unnatural stillness, flame stabbing from the muzzle, but managing to fail to illuminate much of the monster.
It also didn’t even slow it down. It seemed to be steaming or smoking a little bit more, probably from the silver jackets, but it continued to slump toward me. Its mouth opened like a cave, and it laughed at me, a horrible, liquid croaking sound. I jumped backward, stumbled, and fell on my back as that tongue slammed against the side of the truck. As it slithered back again, I saw that whatever it was coated in was eating away the paint. I definitely did not want to get touched by that thing.
I scrambled to my feet, and was just able to reach in the bed, grab my Winchester and bandolier, and run before the tongue crushed my taillight and missed me by a hair. I headed for the steps of the church.
I didn’t look back as I ran; that was a good way to trip, fall on my face, and get eaten. I could hear the thing hopping after me, a series of increasingly fast, wet thuds as it pursued its prey. I was praying like mad under my breath. The Trinity and Saint Michael featured fairly prominently.
As soon as I reached the church steps, I spun, dropped to a knee, stuffed the empty pistol into my waistband, and snapped the Winchester up to my shoulder. It was still loaded with alternating silver and steel jackets, but it would have to do. I centered the gold bead, barely visible in the gloom, in the ghost ring, and laid it on the toad-thing’s center eye. I waited until it landed from its latest hop, whispered another brief prayer, and squeezed the trigger.
The rifle boomed, flame stabbed, and the center eye’s loathsome glow went out in a splash of foul fluid and putrid smoke. I vaguely noticed that I didn’t hear an echo of the gunshot—everything seemed muted by that oppressive stillness.
The thing let out a gurgling scream that almost drove me to curl up in the fetal position right there on the steps. It tore through my head with a blind
ing pain that I hope to never experience again. It humped backward, its head pulled back, and its tongue lashed in front of its face. I’d hurt it. I didn’t congratulate myself too much, though. It was still there, and after a moment, it lifted its head to glare at me. I could feel its malice intensify.
Oh, crap.
I levered another round into the chamber, aimed, and fired again, but missed. The thing moved way too fast for something of its bulk, and the bullet scored its side instead of splashing another one of those repulsive eyes. It hopped closer, covering almost fifteen feet in one lumbering bound. I frantically chambered a third round, and fired again just as it opened its mouth and lashed its tongue at me. The bullet went into the top of the gaping maw, and the thing howled again, a gurgling cry of hate and pain. The tongue missed my face by inches, but little droplets of its fluid splashed painfully on my cheek. I dashed the stuff off as fast as I could, but felt it eating into my skin like acid. If I lived through this, I was going to have some pretty nasty burns.
That was close enough. Slinging the bandolier around my shoulders, I turned and ran, heading around the corner and toward the back of the church. I could hear it hissing as it hopped after me.
Now, a churchyard might seem a little counter-intuitive if you’re going to fight, but let me tell you, there is no better high ground for this kind of fight than holy ground. Unfortunately, that isn’t always enough. I didn’t know what exactly this thing was—I’d heard of toad monsters, but never anything quite like this. Just getting on holy ground hadn’t stopped it, so that meant it wasn’t entirely demonic, though there was definitely something from the Abyss involved with it. That meant I needed physical barriers to hold it off me while I tried to whittle it down. Provided I could.