Well, these things were proving to be obnoxiously tough. Franks grabbed one of the kicking legs and dragged the monster away from Ledger while the first demon circled back through the pile of dead goats. Ledger would just have to deal with that one while Franks figured out just how much of a hellacious beating he had to administer to finish an Alghul for good.
7
Captain Joe Ledger
I FOUGHT THE DEMON the way I’d fight a wild animal. I’ve had some experience there. Wild animals and genetically-modified animals. Years ago I faced down mastiffs that had been transgenically altered to give them scorpion tails. I’ve faced genetically-engineered vampire assassins and some other rude and nasty shit. This was my first encounter with something supernatural, but if it existed and if it could bleed, then some of the laws of nature had to apply. That was useful, that gave me a firm piece of ground in this shit storm where I could stand. And Franks had bought me a moment. So I used it.
The demon tried to end it fast by rushing at me with those claws.
Fool me once, motherfucker . . .
As she darted in I twisted and marked her from wrist to shoulder with picks—short, hard taps with the wicked point of my knife that opened bleeders and ripped apart nerves—and with quick, circular slashes to the muscles for reaching and grabbing. The demon howled in pain and darted back. Tried again, got cut again, and darted back once more. Blood the color of red bricks flowed from a dozen cuts.
If this was a person, I might have used the effect of a pick or slash to close to killing distance, but the wounds were hurting it—just not enough. Those arms still reached, still moved with obvious speed and power.
“Stop fucking around,” growled Franks.
“I’m. Not. Fucking. Around,” I snapped as I dodged a series of vicious slashes.
“Don’t you have a big boy knife?”
“Fuck you.”
He laughed a cold, heartless, mocking laugh and tossed something to me. A knife. A Ka-Bar USMC Mark 2 combat knife whose blade flashed in the sunlight. I faked left and lunged for the blade, snatched the handle, dove into a roll to give myself time to grip it properly, rose and spun. I did a fast swap so the Wilson was in my left and the much bigger Ka-Bar was in my right.
“Silver,” barked Franks, then he had to concentrate on his own battle.
Silver. Did that work on demons? I had no fucking idea. What do I know about any of this shit?
The demon, though, she stared at the blade and hissed.
She knew.
Yeah. She absolutely knew.
I felt myself smile.
The Ka-Bar was bigger and heavier, but I’ve fought with them many times. You lose a fraction of your speed, but when you reach out and touch someone they get the message. I switched my grips on both knives so that I held them with the blades spiked down from my fists like the claws of a praying mantis.
“Come on, beautiful,” I said to the demon. “Let’s dance.”
Okay, it was corny but I was having a moment.
So was she.
With a banshee howl the demon flung herself at me.
8
Special Agent Franks
HE HATED WHEN DEMONS were strong enough to warp the flesh of the possessed. They always seemed to sprout claws and fangs, just to be pricks about it. This one had scratched him and tried to bite a hole through his armor before he’d slugged her in the head enough times to crack her skull and turn her brains to mush. Franks hoisted the dazed demon high overhead, and with a roar, flung her down, through the fence, and against the packed earth so hard that the snapping bones could probably be heard back at the convoy.
The Alghul lay there twitching, beaten, glaring at him with eyes filled with hatred. She opened her mouth and hissed at him in the Old Tongue. “Traitor.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Franks said as he reached down, got a handful of blood-soaked hair, and cranked the demon’s head brutally to the side. He’d been planning on twisting her head clean off to shut her up, but simply snapping the neck seemed to do the trick, and he felt the ancient malignant spirit driven from the possessed flesh.
9
Captain Joe Ledger
THE DEMON tried to end it by driving all ten claws into me like a storm of daggers. I pivoted and parried, using the little Wilson to push the outside of her left arm to one side while also hooking and trapping her wrist. I used the Ka-Bar in a hard, sweeping overhand slash that sliced through scalp, ear, left eye, cheek and mouth. I put muscle into it, using my inverse grip so that it hit like a heavy punch as well as a slash.
It drove her to the ground. Hard. Dark blood exploded upward, and everywhere a drop struck my exposed skin, I could feel it burn.
Even hurt she tried to turn, but I stepped on her elbow, pinning it and her to the ground to spoil the turn. I stabbed down into the base of her skull to sever the spinal cord. The silver-coated knife bit deep and hard.
The demon screamed so loud that it knocked me back. She screamed so hard that blood burst from my nose as I lay there, hands clamped to my ears. The scream made the palm trees shiver and tore fronds off of them. Debris rained down on me as the scream rose and rose and . . .
The silence was immediate and intense.
For a terrified moment I wondered if my eardrums had simply burst.
But, no.
No.
I got shakily to my knees and immediately vomited into the dust. Then I sagged back onto my heels, pawing blood from my lips and chin, blinking past pain-tears in my eyes.
Franks stood there, wide-legged, chest heaving only slightly, sweat glistening on his skin, eyes dark and intense and amused.
“What,” I said, “the fuck was that?”
His expression was ugly and unfriendly. “I told you, Ledger. Demons.”
“First—and don’t take this the wrong way—but fuck you and your demons.”
He shrugged.
“Second—since when are demons an actual thing?”
“I thought DMS knew all this stuff.”
“No, we goddamn well don’t.”
There was a twinkle in Franks’ eyes. “Your boss does. What’s he call himself now? Mr. Church? You should ask him.”
I tried to get to my feet, failed, and he caught me under the arm and jerked me upright. I slapped his hand away and stepped back.
“Who are you? How do you know about Church? How do you know about demons, for Christ’s sake? And, just in general, what the fuck?”
“The fuck,” said Franks, “is that ISIS has gone old school.”
“Meaning what?”
He pointed into the desert. “The answers are out there. If you want in, you need to come with me now.”
“No, first I get answers.” I stepped away from him and tapped my earbud to get the channel for the tactical operations center. “Cowboy to Deacon.”
“Go for Deacon,” said Church.
“Two words,” I said. “Franks and demons.”
He said, “Ah.”
He gave it to me in bullet points, but they hit like real bullets. Agent Franks. Monster Control Bureau. A group that responded to supernatural threats in the same way that the Department of Military Sciences responds to terrorists with high-tech science weapons.
Real.
All real.
If there was a note of apology in Church’s voice for not having read me in on this earlier, I sure couldn’t hear it. As I listened, Franks stood apart, checking his weapons and trying to look as casual as a towering freak of a monster killer could look.
“Franks is in the family,” said Church. “You can trust him. He’s one of us.”
“One of us? Is he even human?”
Church paused. “At this point, Captain, would that even matter?”
10
Special Agent Franks
“HOW DO YOU KNOW Mr. Church?” asked Ledger.
“We’ve met,” Franks said. “He offered me a cookie.”
“Yeah. He does love his vanilla wafers
. We have a pool going that there’s some kind of code in that whole cookie thing. What he eats, how he eats them, what he offers to other people.”
“You’re overthinking it.”
“Pretty good chance,” said Ledger. “Equal chance we’re not. He’s a spooky bastard.”
They walked. The sun was an open furnace.
“Most soldiers, even SpecOps, would have died,” Franks told him.
Ledger cut him a look, but only shook his head.
“You fight okay.” By Franks’ standards, that was a huge compliment.
“I intend to go home and cry into my pillow,” said Ledger. “Maybe wear sweats and eat a whole thing of Ben and Jerry’s. Or get drunk. Drunk is a real contender for how I intend to process this shit.”
11
Captain Joe Ledger
I’m a big, tough, manly man, but there are times I just want to go and hide. Like when I’m in the middle of the Iraqi desert, having just waded through a brutal fire fight and some Frankenstein-looking cocksucker tells me that demons are real and we have to go chase one of them.
It doesn’t help one little bit for me to remind myself that no one drafted me. I signed on for this stuff. Well . . . maybe not this stuff, but a good soldier doesn’t get to choose his wars.
But, really, man . . . demons?
There is not enough bourbon in all of Kentucky to make that fit into my head.
Franks asked, “Have you heard of Alghul?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s a monster from Arabian folklore.”
“They’re more than that.”
I glanced over my shoulder in the direction we’d come. “Oh,” I said. “Shit.”
“One Thousand and One Nights has some truths. Alghul exist. They’re mostly female demons who haunt graveyards, digging up fresh corpses to feed on. They lure men to remote spots and attack them. Like mermaids.” He cut me a look. “Yes. Mermaids are real. They love human flesh.”
“Jesus. Disney got that wrong.”
“Alghul are ferocious, but rare. Most were imprisoned. Until now.”
“So . . . ISIL is doing what? Recruiting desert demons?”
“Of course.” He said it so matter-of-factly that it jolted me. I studied his brutish face, looking for some trace of humor or even irony. Nothing. He was as frank as his name.
“Okay, okay, so they are recruiting desert demons. How, though? If these Alghul are so vicious that they were imprisoned, why don’t they chomp on the ISIL dickheads? I’m sure they’re every bit as tasty.”
“I don’t do cultural evaluations,” he stated. “Dark magic probably.”
“And they can shape-shift? When I saw the first one she was an ordinary girl. Sixteen, seventeen, maybe. Then suddenly she wasn’t a girl.”
He nodded. “They prefer to use virgins as hosts. Demons enjoy corrupting the pure.”
There had been a lot in the papers about ISIS fighters kidnapping women, forcing them into marriages with their people, or consigning them to rape camps. As insane as it was, I could see the ugly shape of it. ISIS was fierce but it wasn’t massive. It did not really have a home country. It couldn’t put a million-man army in the field to oppose the growing coalition of international forces. Even though many of ISIL’s leaders were former Saddam officers and the equipment they used was stolen advanced tech, they were still comparatively small. They could fight a guerilla war but there was no way they could achieve a decisive win or hope to hold their territories for very long. They needed a wild card. I was dealing with some of this stateside with ISIL teams stealing technologies like portable EMPs and drone tech. This was new, and if it was something they could repeat over and over again, then this was a game changer.
12
Special Agent Franks
THE SUN BEAT DOWN on their heads, and then the rocks beneath them radiated the heat back upwards. They were travelling cross-country to avoid being spotted. It was a brutally hot day and he was sweating profusely beneath his armor. Franks didn’t mind. Discomfort was one of those mortal concepts he had never really grasped. Compared to the endless void of Hell, a little mortal suffering was a small price to pay to have a body.
Captain Ledger was human and must have been dying in the agonizing heat, but he didn’t seem like a complainer. They’d set a tough pace across rugged terrain, as fast as Franks was willing to risk without further aggravating the bullet hole in his leg, but Ledger had kept up. In fact, he seemed to enjoy the challenge.
So Ledger could fight extremely well, hadn’t been scared of an Alghul, and was tough. It was too bad he was with a different agency, because Franks found himself thinking that he could use a man like this . . . But unfortunately, it turned out Ledger was also a smartass.
“So, Franks,” said Ledger, “my people tell me you saved the world once.”
“I heard the same thing about you.”
Ledger shrugged. “Hasn’t everybody?”
“No,” Franks stated flatly.
But Ledger was undeterred. “That sea monster off the California coast with the nuclear sub. That was one of yours, wasn’t it?”
“Classified.” Franks had been working with tough guy secret agents of the US government since Benjamin Franklin had performed his first exorcism, so Franks was used to the inevitable dick measuring to see if an agent’s rep was legit. “How’d you like the Red Order?”
“No comment.”
“Thought so.”
They made it less than half a kilometer before Ledger tried to make conversation again. What was it with mortals and their need to break perfectly good silences?
He was a little out of breath from the climb, but he kept pace. Ledger tapped his earbud. “I’m getting a lot of nice backstory on you, Franks. Here’s a fun fact. My intel guy says that people who work with you have a tendency to die horribly.”
Franks snorted. If Ledger wanted to talk, they might as well talk about the mission. They would be there by sundown. “We’re only a few clicks from the target. The ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud.”
“I heard ISIL bulldozed it. I guess that’s the sort of thing psychopaths do.” Ledger snorted, seemingly disgusted by the thought. “They’re destroying priceless historical relics because they think it’s an insult to their skewed view of their religion. The word ‘fucktard’ comes to mind.” He paused. “Though, I suppose something out there raised a flag, otherwise my boss wouldn’t have sent me here.”
Franks thought that Ledger was probably talking about intel pinged by the DMS’ fancy secret super computer, MindReader. The DMS used it to predict problems by looking for patterns in the massive information streams gathered by the various covert intelligence networks. Franks wasn’t sure how well that actually worked for them, but it had brought Ledger here, so maybe there was something to it.
“MCB got a tip. Terrorists found the lost Prison of Shalmaneser. It was built in 1240 A.D. to house the king’s enemies.” Franks snorted. The mortal ones had turned to dust a long time ago. It was the immortal ones he was worried about.
“Which is why you’re here, I suppose. Church tells me he intercepted communications from an ISIL tactician who’d cut a deal with someone at Nimrud for a new super weapon. You know, man, we gunslingers in the post 9-11 federal agencies are supposed to share information about stuff like this.”
Franks just grunted. He’d never been good at sharing.
“Let me guess,” Ledger persisted, “this lost prison holds more of those Alghul. How many are we talking about?”
Fourteen thousand corpses of the desolate plains, an unholy army that was legend among all the jealous Fallen, until King Shalmaneser had found a way to cast them from their physical bodies and entomb them in the Earth, but Franks couldn’t tell Ledger that or how he knew about it, because there was classified, and then there was classified.
“A lot,” said Franks.
“So much fun hanging out with Chatty Cathy.” Ledger sighed.
13
Captain Joe Ledger
WE REACHED THE ANCIENT PRISON of Shalmaneser just as the sun began sliding toward the western horizon. Long fingers of darkness seemed to reach out toward us from the shattered rock walls, broken trees and parked vehicles. Our approach was cautious and circumspect. I reached Bug at the TOC and asked for whatever an eye-in-the-sky could tell us.
“Read forty heat signatures, Cowboy,” he said, using my combat callsign. “Thirty-four are steady, six are variable. One minute they’re normal, then they shift from low-temp to really hot. Not sure how to read that. Maybe they’re underground and thermals can’t get a solid lock.”
I told Franks and he shook his head. “As the Alghul takes over, they burn hotter. The variations in thermal signature mean that the demons haven’t fully taken hold. Human spirits are hard to destroy. Even assholes like these.”
I had the impression that an explanation that long caused him actual physical pain. Getting trapped in an elevator for six hours with this guy would be a hoot.
We made maximum use of ground cover and came in on a line the satellites said was as close to a dead zone as we’d get. Franks never seemed to tire as we crawled over rocks and through dry washes and up sandy slopes. I felt like I was melting.
There was a small camp built inside the remnants of a medieval building that had collapsed centuries ago. The ISIL vehicles were hidden under desert camo tarps, but we saw a half-dozen empty slots where the vehicles from the fight in town had been parked. We hunkered down to study the layout while Bug fed me what intel he could grab from the satellite.
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