Basco had caught a bullet in the face. It would take weeks for the shattered bones around his mouth to heal, but luckily for him, his kind fed through a spike in their tongue so he wouldn’t go hungry. Gregor gave one last nod to his boss, and then his two lieutenants veered off. The last he saw of them was two shadows climbing up the side of a building to take to the rooftops. Gregor had picked up the scent of the college girls he’d fancied earlier and the two of them were going to track those girls down and have a little party. They’d earned it.
As for Marko, he savored the chaos as he strolled through the riot. There was a lot of fear stink over on the cop side. Their carefully drilled formations had fallen apart once they’d got word that one of their own had gotten shot, but there had been no more shots and no sign of the shooter. SWAT cops were spread out behind cover, rifles pointed at the surrounding buildings, scanning for threats. Now that they’d just found out that there’d been a massacre inside the building they were supposed to be protecting, they were really going to freak out.
He didn’t know how it worked, but one of the abilities he’d picked up since he’d turned was being able to sense when he was being watched. It was more of an instinct really, a certain knowledge of where humans were looking, and how to avoid being there. In that one instant, he knew there were eyes on him, but this time it was different. Normally he used the instinct to avoid the eyes of his prey, but this wasn’t food, this was another predator stalking him. Marko kept his head down and kept walking until the feeling lessened just a bit and the other predator kept scanning.
“Marko, you’ve got company,” his sniper warned. “One of the V-8 guys is moving your way.”
He froze in place, surrounded by fools and animals, in a fog of blinding gas and choking smoke, between the burning cars and the angry law, and took stock. The whole city was filled with anger tonight, but it was unfocused, cruel, lashing out stupidly, but piercing through that haze was another feeling, only this anger was the righteous wrath of a warrior, focused like a laser beam, and sharper than any sword.
Marko slowly turned until he saw his son.
Across the mob, Matthew Kovac was searching for him. He was wearing a bloodstained white T-shirt and had an assault weapon hidden under one arm, concealed in one of the protestor’s discarded red flags. The tattered bits were whipping in the hot wind behind him. The image made Marko think of a crusader for some reason. His boy was certainly dedicated enough. Brave too.
“I’ve got him in my sights. Want me to take the shot?”
Matthew hadn’t made him yet. He didn’t have the senses of a vampire. He was a strong man—a better man that Marko had been when he was still human, for sure—but he was still only a man, so he was out of his league, and he couldn’t pick out his target through this chaos, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to give up. The boy had never been a quitter.
Marko’s instincts had evolved. He’d been blessed to become something more. Vampires had existed before, but they’d failed because they had not had officers like him to lead them. His people, his true people needed Marko to survive, to continue training the others, until the day the vampire army was strong enough to rise up and take what was rightfully theirs. Matthew was one of the humans who would end that dream.
“Marko, I’ve got the shot. Say the word.”
Marko knew that if he let Matthew walk away tonight, his son would hunt him for the rest of his life. The smart thing to do was to end this here and now.
Except Marko had found an emotion in that pit he’d thought was empty.
Fatherly pride.
He let Matthew follow him into the darkness. The best would win and the other would die.
“Hold your fire.”
Marko Kovac faded back into the night.
PSYCH EVAL
This story first appeared in Joe Ledger: Unstoppable, published in 2017 by Griffin, and edited by Jonathan Maberry.
The bestselling Joe Ledger series is a lot of fun, and it is also a lot of books, so when I had a chance to write a story set in that universe I asked Jonathan what were some of the crazy urban fantasy things he’d not touched on much yet. Demons had shown up in “Weaponized Hell,” but he’d not really done anything involving them or anything like possession.
Say no more.
And yes, this story was written to a David Bowie soundtrack.
“WHY AM I BEING INTERROGATED?” she snapped as soon as Rudy walked through the door.
“Relax. It’s just an interview.”
“Then why does the sign say ‘Interrogation Room’?”
Rudy pulled out a chair and sat down across the metal table from one of the survivors of Bowie Team. She was obviously suspicious and frightened, but his goal was to help, not make this adversarial. Lieutenant Carver had been through enough already. Rudy’s plan was to be his normal, good-humored self, and help this brave soldier through the aftermath of her ordeal.
Unless Mr. Church’s suspicion was right, and she was a murderous traitor, because then her fate was out of his hands.
“This room is what the Army had available on short notice. Believe me. I’d much rather be having this conversation in a nice office.” As usual, he wanted to make his patient feel safe and comfortable. Only it was summer in Texas, the building’s air conditioner was dying, and it was muggy enough in these stuffy windowless rooms that sweat rings were already forming on his shirt. So comfort was out, but Rudy could still try to make her feel safe.
“We’ve not spoken before, Lieutenant Carver. I’m Dr. Sanchez. You can call me Rudy.”
“The Department of Military Sciences’ number one shrink. I know who you are, so I know why you’re here. But I’m not crazy.”
“Nobody said you were.”
“I’m not a liar. I know what I saw. I gave my report.”
She was clearly agitated. Rudy had read her file on the way over. The DMS mission was so sensitive that every team members’ backgrounds had been gone over with a fine-toothed comb. Her record wasn’t just clean, it was spotless. Her service record was exemplary. Carver’s previous psych evaluation had made her sound as a rock, solid under pressure, but the poor young woman in front of him today had been reduced to an emotional wreck.
He’d watched her through the one-way glass before coming in. She’d spent the whole time staring off into space and occasionally muttering something incomprehensible to herself. Now that there was another person for her to focus on, she was demonstrating bad tremors in her hands. Her eyes kept flicking nervously from side to side. By all accounts Carver had been fine before leaving on this mission, but she’d developed several severe nervous tics in the last forty-eight hours.
“I’ve read your report, Lieutenant. Do you mind if I call you Olivia?” She didn’t respond, so he went with it. “Believe me, Olivia, I’m on your side. After some of the things I’ve heard from other teams over the years, I never assume anybody in this outfit is lying, regardless of what they say they ran into.”
“Do you believe in the devil, Rudy?”
Considering what she’d just been through, with most of her team murdered, and the only other survivors in critical condition, it wasn’t such an odd question. “I believe in good and evil. My small part in that struggle is helping good people deal with traumatic events and the horrors they’ve faced. I’m just here to help you.”
Carver stared at him for a long time. It was the first time her tremors had stopped. She responded like she hadn’t even heard his words. “I believe in him now.”
“You hungry? Want some coffee or something?”
The survivor lifted her arm to show that her wrist was handcuffed to the metal table.
“Yeah, well. Sorry. That’s not my call,” Rudy explained.
“No. It’s his.” She looked over at the mirrored wall and raised her voice. “Hello, Mr. Church.”
Rudy just shook his head, but he didn’t deny who was on the other side of the glass. He’d asked about the necessity of the restraints
already—it was hard to make somebody feel safe enough to open up while they were chained like a prisoner—but he had been shot down. Apparently it wasn’t clear yet who had done all of the killing. Lieutenant Carver could be the survivor of some kind of new chemical hallucinatory attack, or could have been the victim of an unknown terrorist bioweapon, or she could have just had a psychotic break, or even be a traitor who had simply murdered her teammates in cold blood and lied to cover it up. The fact was they didn’t even yet know what they didn’t know.
Say what you will about working for the DMS, it was never predictable.
“Let’s just talk. Tell me about the mission. Tell me about what happened in Mexico.”
This part of Sonora looked a lot like Arizona. She was born and raised in Phoenix, so it seemed weird to be rolling hot in an area of operation that looked suspiciously like her hometown. Only back home she hadn’t been worried about car bombs or cartel gunfights growing up, common threats the poor folks stuck here had to deal with on a daily basis.
Their convoy moved fast. The black government Suburbans barely slowed as they left the paved road and hit gravel. Carver was at the wheel of the second vehicle in line. The view out the window was creosote bushes and sun-baked rocks as far as the eye could see, just like it had been for the last hour. The only difference was now the ride got bumpier, and she began to taste dust in the air conditioning.
Captain Quinn got on the radio. He said something in Spanish, and the last three vehicles in their convoy broke off. Those were white and green pickups filled with Federales. They would be setting up a roadblock to keep anyone from getting in or out of the AO. From here on in, the DMS was on its own. The Mexican government and the US State Department had come to an agreement that all parties were cool with. This was DMS’ show. Everybody official was just going to deny that this op ever happened anyway.
Their commanding officer was in the vehicle behind them. Satisfied that they were now speeding toward the target by themselves, the captain switched to the encrypted DMS channels and addressed Bowie Team.
“We’re ten minutes out. You know the drill.”
There would be silence between their vehicles the rest of the way in. Intercepting even garbled radio transmissions could warn the bad guys something was up. Carver just concentrated on driving. The loose gravel turned to washboard, which threatened to rattle their armored vehicle to death. These pigs didn’t have the smoothest ride in the best situations.
Sandbag was riding shotgun. Gator and Corvus were in the back seat. Louie was serving as trunk monkey, ready to pop open the back window and open fire with a SAW.
“You really think there’s something to this intel, LT?” Sandbag asked.
“We know Hezbollah has an exchange program going with the cartels for years,” she answered. “One side has expertise, the other has more money than it knows what to do with. Smuggling people and weapons across the border is a piece of cake to the cartel, and terrorists get an easy way into the US. It’s a match made in heaven.”
“Yeah, nothing like sharing your cultural traditions with others, like beheading, or car bombings,” Gator interjected.
“Well, now DMS thinks they’re sharing something else. Word is a few days ago an unknown weapon was shipped from an undisclosed location in the Middle East to this little town. Once it is ready, they’ll send it north. We just don’t know what it is yet. Which is why we’re going to nab these bastards and find out,” Carver stated. She was trying to stay right behind the truck ahead of her without rear-ending it while blinded by its plume of dust. At least the dust was obscuring the view of cactus and endless nothing. “It’s one thing to look at this area on the map, another to see it in person. They picked a village so isolated that it’s making me worried they’re playing with something really nasty.”
Her teammates readied their weapons. They were pumped. They’d done this sort of thing many times before, but it was always exhilarating. When they were only a few minutes out, Carver hit play on the sound system. This song was pre-raid tradition for them. Captain Quinn was a proud Texan, so when the DMS had set up a team out of Fort Hood, he had christened it Bowie Team. Of course, his boys had immediately decided that meant David rather than Jim.
“I’m afraid of Americans” began playing over the Suburban’s speakers.
Carver grinned. Good. The terrorist assholes they were hunting should be.
The Suburban ahead of them was slowing down. That didn’t make any sense—the village was still a mile away—but she slammed on the brakes fast enough to keep from rear-ending them.
“Get ready.” Something was up. It could be an ambush. It could be a barricade. Regardless, speed was their ally. Getting bogged down out here meant the cartel was more likely to see them coming and get ready. “What the hell, Zeke?” she muttered. He was driving the lead vehicle, and wasn’t the type to hesitate.
But nothing happened. The point vehicle maintained radio silence, only lollygagging for a few seconds before speeding up again.
“Yo, LT. Check it out.” It was Sandbag who first saw what had caused the point vehicle to hesitate. He tapped the bulletproof glass of the passenger side window. “There’s a—good lord . . .”
There were telephone lines running alongside the road. The poles were the tallest thing for miles, and so constant flashing by every couple hundred feet that she’d begun to tune them out. Only this one was different. Somebody had been nailed to it.
There wasn’t much time to assess. Hanging ten feet up . . . adult male, Mexican, mid-thirties, jeans and a flannel shirt, coated in dried blood. Arms extended above his head, dangling with multiple nails—no, spikes—through his hands and wrists.
Then it flashed by. She looked in her mirror, but the body was already obscured by the dust.
Since Louie was in back he’d gotten the best look. “I know the cartel leaves some brutal warnings, but crucifixion? Damn. Fucking barbarians.”
Then they passed another pole, and there was another body stuck to it. Female. Twenties. Vultures were perched on the crossbeam above her. There was more swearing and muttering. And then she too was swallowed by the dust.
The next telephone pole had another body hung on it. This one was elderly. Had she been somebody’s abuelita? And the next. And the next. Every couple hundred feet the spectacle repeated. Men, women, children. The soldiers quit talking. This wasn’t a warning. This was a massacre.
Numb, Carver concentrated on the road.
“All the way to the village?” Rudy asked.
“All the way,” she confirmed. “Every single pole.”
He swallowed hard. “That wasn’t in your initial report.”
Carver shook her head. “Considering what else we saw, it wasn’t that noteworthy.”
Bowie Team rolled into the village ready for a fight.
It was dead.
She’d been ready for the sound of gunfire, but there was nothing. There should have at least been a dog barking. There was no movement, no sound other than the wind. There were a few dozen small houses and other assorted buildings, but not so much as a curtain parted for the locals to spy on them. No matter how scared they were, nobody kept their heads down that well.
Ten seconds after dismounting, they stacked up on the little grocery market that their intel had said housed their targets, tossed bangs through the windows, breached the doors, and rushed inside.
“Clear!” Carver shouted after she swept through the back storage room. The smell of death assaulted her nostrils. There were dried blood puddles on the uneven wooden floor, big enough that it looked like they’d butchered a cow in here, but no bodies, and certainly no living terrorists or cartel members.
Somebody had set up a shrine inside the storeroom. She’d seen the painted skull faces in the briefings, Santa Muerte, popular with the cartel assassins. Corvus walked over to the shrine and started shoving around the flowers, papers, and dolls with the muzzle of his SCAR, checking if there was anything interesting
. All of the crucifixes had been turned upside down. He found a plastic dog bowl. Corvus gagged and backed away from the shrine. There was a pile of glistening, white spheres inside.
“I think those are human eyeballs, LT.”
A bunch of little devotional candles were still lit around the shrine. So the occupants couldn’t have been gone long.
“They must have bolted,” Sandbag said. “Did they see us coming?”
She shook her head. There was only one road out, and nobody had passed them. The terrain was rugged enough that they could have escaped on foot, horseback, or four wheelers, but she wasn’t getting that vibe at all. “My gut’s telling me nobody got out of this place.”
“Yo, LT. I’ve got something weird here. It looks really old.” Gator had picked up an odd-looking silver amulet. He was scowling at it. “Is that Arabic?”
She looked at the antique. It was the head of a goat, with ruby eyes. An unconscious shiver of revulsion went through her and she had no idea why. “Greek maybe? I don’t know what language that is.”
Gator was holding it in his glove. Suddenly, red droplets of blood appeared on the silver. She looked up to see that it was coming from Gator’s nose. He was just staring at it, and didn’t seem to notice the rivulet of blood running down his chin. It was like he was in a daze.
“Gator, you’re bleeding.”
It took him a long second to focus. He slowly looked up from the amulet. “Huh?”
“Did you hit your head or something?”
Gator seemed to snap out of it. He wiped the blood away with a sleeve, and looked at it in surprise. “Naw. Damned dry heat.”
Captain Quinn came over the radio. “Target’s in the wind. We’re splitting into teams and searching the town. Zeke, take the cantina. Carver, you’ve got the church.”
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