Dark Light--Dawn

by Jon Land

  He stepped out and fired four shots in rapid succession, going against the grain of practiced dogma by taking out the decoys with a pair of twelve-gauge blasts each. The return fire poured his way was incessant and immediate, Max already in motion away from its anticipated path toward the spot he’d just occupied.

  The blur and sound of the horses threw the enemy off just enough to buy him the time and space he needed to reach the gate of the hog pen. Throwing it open and herding those animals into the night as well. Crimped low and shuffling between them for cover, until another masked figure disturbed by their release popped up from behind an old-fashioned gazebo well.

  Max wielded the shotgun like a baseball bat and slammed the gunman across the face with the butt, blood spraying from his palm with each strike. He felt facial bones shatter under the blow, the man’s feet swept violently out from under him. Still alive and spitting blood when Max drew the now cracked butt upward and slammed it down across his nose and cheekbones.

  The man made a sound like a vacuum cleaner winding down. Max hit him again.

  And again.

  And again.

  The man’s sputtery wheezing ceased, his mashed face reduced to pulp that left only bone splinters amid the gristle and gore.

  Lightning flashed before Max’s eyes, illuminating the night for an instant that lingered from one breath into the next. Except there was no storm, no thunder, the lightning his and his alone. Finding the enemy for him like a spotlight.

  He crushed the heel of his boot into what was left of the dead man’s face, ground it around a bit. The sight in the sudden day-glow brightness recharged, refreshed him. He could smell and taste blood, felt its warm soak dotting his face.

  What was happening?

  His mind flashed back to Yemen, when the same inexplicable feeling had seized him. Everything again seemed to be happening a fraction of an instant ahead of itself, not a vision so much as a glimpse of the next moment as it unfolded. Not a measurable bit of time, so much as a gap between seconds that Max claimed as his own.

  The light shined around him, turning when he turned, illuminating all for him to see while the true blackness of the night cloaked him from the enemy. Killing the rest of them wasn’t enough, any more than killing this one had been.

  The dead man’s assault rifle had fallen just beyond his feet that had finally stopped twitching. Max could have picked it up, but chose not to, another strategy starting to form as jumbled pictures in his head tumbled together.

  He knew Laurie Whitlow was dead. Saw her lying in a bathtub with her wrists cut, someone who’d paid her a visit in the wake of Max’s trying to make it look like suicide. The same someone must’ve been behind these gunmen. Max did the math, the timing indicating no wasted time behind getting a fix on Kirsch’s location and a professional team being dispatched.

  No wasted time at all, Max thought. Someone with resources, then, unlimited resources, the same someone whose thug had visited Kirsch at CyberGen in search of answers about Max’s father.

  With no time to ponder that further now, Max lurched into motion, melting into the darkest reaches of the night. He felt the same way he did when a big wave took control of him while bodysurfing with his father as a boy. It swept you up and you went with it, because you had no choice, the power of even a small wave incredible, no man a match for it.

  Right now, Max felt swept up by a different kind of power, but one that felt equally relentless. An unstoppable wave of violence that brought with it not just a craving for blood, but also a love of it. A feast of killing, like he could gorge himself and never get enough of it.

  The wave again … Only he wasn’t getting swept away by it, he had become the wave, sweeping away all else in his path until there was nothing left to rise before him.

  The night took on such a surreal quality that he actually questioned whether this was happening at all. Detached from himself, as if a spectator to his own life, a movie reel unspooling before him, and he couldn’t take his eyes away, captivated and riveted by the sight. Feeling nothing as he watched.

  And moved.

  He was moving so fast and purposefully that it felt like gliding, virtually surfing the ground on a path that brought him to the next closest gunman. The man swung at the last moment. Max thought he saw the assault rifle barrel flare, before he clamped a palm over the gunman’s face and drove him backward toward an old birch tree. The man’s skull rattled on impact, his brain banging about his skull. Only the tree must’ve been rotten as well as old, because the force of Max’s thrust pushed the man’s head through the bark and buried it deep in the tree’s base. It literally disappeared, leaving only the man’s neck visible, craned backward over his twitching feet.

  Max ducked, and a bullet smacked the tree man’s torso instead of his. He twisted and a second bullet, seeming to move so slow that Max thought he could follow its flight through the air, buried itself in the birch bark. In the darkness he could estimate the positions of the gunmen from the fire angle that had probably changed already. In that surreal wave that had swept him up, though, Max felt himself dipping his hands to his belt and coming away with a pair of sharp-bladed military knives he must’ve plucked from the men he’d downed, even though he had no memory of doing so.

  He hurled them outward, snapping his wrists in perfect motion, going with the flow of the night wave just as he had the ocean variety so many times. A pair of gasps followed, splitting the night.

  Then he was on another of the gunmen, again with no gap in time recorded in memory, as if he had teleported here. The man’s legs folded up and he crumpled to the ground like a rag doll, spewing blood even darker than the night in all directions. Splashing Max with its coppery scent and wet, oozing warmth. He looked down and realized he was holding the man’s head in his grasp, with no memory again of how it had gotten there.

  Max licked the blood from his lips, then swiped another spray from his eyes and forehead and licked it from his fingers. He wasn’t sure how many more gunmen there were, only that they’d all been reduced to steaming mounds atop the ground, his actions lost to the night wave. The lightning was gone, replaced by a strobe light that caught only bits and pieces of the night, leaving the bulk of it as blanks to be filled in.

  Max felt the warmth of more blood soaking him, his palm feeling as if somebody was sticking a knife into it now. He remembered thinking this had to be a dream, because all he felt was glee, buoyant in the night wave he found himself welcoming now, surrendering to.

  My clothes …

  He couldn’t leave the farm like this, had to change clothes at the very least and started back toward the farmhouse to see what he could find. Halfway there, he spotted a body askew on the ground, hand extended as if to reach for the home’s front steps. Max knelt and recognized Kirsch’s farmhand Teek from a face left whole by the barrage of bullets that had obliterated the rest of him.

  I told you to stay in the barn.

  And now the young man was dead, because he hadn’t followed Max’s instructions. Teek lying dead out here, Kirsch upstairs. Two more innocent victims, to go with Laurie Whitlow.

  He rose back to his feet and swept his eyes one more time about the blackness around him, checking for any lingering movement and drinking in the stench of blood that hung heavy in the air.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Galveston, Texas

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the big man said to Dale Denton, standing rigid over the drainage ditch dug to protect the nearby, mothballed natural gas pipeline.

  Denton swung back toward him, his face looking red and shiny in the spill of the floodlights installed to ward against vandalism. The chopper sat nearby on a flat patch of ground, turned makeshift landing pad, its dull black finish barely reached by the glistening bulbs.

  “That all you have to say, Spalding? First, the mess at the nutso palace and now this, and you can’t do better than that? How many shit storms can you unleash in a single week?”

  “I’m confident
the damage can be minimized,” Spalding said stiffly. “The operators weren’t carrying ID and, even if the Canadian authorities manage to identify them, there’s no link back to us. I made sure of that.”

  Denton nodded, gnashing his teeth. “These would be the same men you assured me were reliable. Up to the task, you said. Big, bang, boom was the way you described it. Big, bang, bullshit is what I ended up getting. One man, how hard could it be to take out one man for these special operators of yours?”

  Spalding started to swallow, then stopped. “Maybe Younger wasn’t alone. The reports I’m getting from the scene in Vancouver…”

  “What?”

  “One man couldn’t possibly have done it. At least, no one man I’ve ever come across.”

  “You’re the one who told me Max Younger, or whatever he’s calling himself, is a Navy SEAL now.”

  “What happened on that farm wasn’t the work of any SEAL I’ve ever known.”

  Spalding sighed audibly, standing at attention out of habit. He stood as close to seven feet as six, even without combat boots, though his 5.11 Tactical gear made him look even bigger. He was strangely, and utterly, hairless, not from birth, Denton had read in his dossier, but from the heat wave loosed from a terrorist bomb. He had no eyebrows or hair, and his arms bared beneath a tight short-sleeve T-shirt looked slathered in oil. The heat had been so intense that it had burned off Spalding’s tattoos as well, something Denton hadn’t thought possible, leaving a patchwork of embroidered scars behind. Denton liked the fact he’d been dishonorably discharged for acts of brutality against civilians; specifically, torture to make members of an Afghan village give up Taliban fighters hiding in their midst. It showed he was a man with an edge, willing to go to extremes when called for.

  Denton had never stopped looking for Max Younger after he’d disappeared a decade before, knowing even if those efforts failed, someday he’d return to New York with his mother committed to Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. While it had taken far longer than he’d expected, the patience he’d displayed by keeping certain security and reception desk personnel there on the payroll had finally paid off. At long last, Max Younger had shown up, even more fortuitously after-hours since it meant he had to return the following day, giving Spalding time to get a team together.

  “It was the woman’s birthday, you know,” Denton told him, stepping out of the spill of the floodlights into the shadows.

  “No, sir, I didn’t.”

  “I did. Celebrated too goddamn many of them, while my partner was still alive.”

  After the attempt on Younger’s life failed at Creedmoor, Spalding got his chance for redemption when a handsomely paid contact in the NYPD’s Intelligence Division got a hit on Max Younger’s photo through facial recognition software keyed to the city’s security cameras. A series of those shots captured Younger standing outside a fancy brownstone on the West Side. Once the address was confirmed, Spalding dispatched a team to, of all people as it turned out, the daughter of Dr. Franklin Kirsch, learning the missing doctor’s location where Younger must’ve been headed.

  Talk about killing two birds with one stone, Denton had mused at the time, blessing the same fortune he was now cursing.

  He pointed Spalding’s attention toward the natural gas pipeline. “Protests by so-called environmentalists led to its shutdown. Cost me millions. Know why I’m telling you this, why I wanted to meet here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Because the only thing I hate more than setbacks are failures. I hired you, because I like a man willing to play by his own rules, if that’s what it takes to get shit done. Problem is, Spalding, you haven’t been able to get this particular shit done, have you?”

  “I will, sir.”

  “That a promise?”

  “A guarantee.”

  “Money back and all that? Save that shit for somebody who cares. You think I haven’t had other men like you on the payroll from time to time? You think maybe this pipeline holds a whole bunch of bodies under all that corrugated steel?” Denton grinned, as much to disguise the accuracy of his statement, as make light of it. “Use your imagination, Spalding, use your resources. Just get me another body to bury.”

  FORTY-NINE

  Western Iraq

  Mohammed al-Qadir stood in the spreading shadows cast by the sun setting over the desert landscape beyond. From this vantage point, at dawn, the sun looked blood red, as if it wasn’t rising so much as about to crash into the Earth and paint the planet with the blood it was leaking.

  He was convinced his entire life’s work had been building toward the moment that was coming now, and a lot faster than he’d ever imagined.

  It was worse than the voice on the other end of the satellite phone had intimated, in part because the situation in the Middle East was dissolving further by the minute. If initial reports were to be believed, contact had already been lost in parts of the region. So too reports of outbreaks, attacks, and spreading swaths of dead zones had come in from Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt just for starters.

  The pathogen his holy reverence had delivered unto him years before had mutated into something it was not supposed to be. He had borne witness to this in the form of the trusted New Islamic Front commander who’d returned from the facility from which the disease had escaped carrying it inside him. And now al-Qadir understood the crucial role he was playing in the grand plan for delivering the End of Days, rubbing the arm covered from wrist to shoulder by a flesh-colored sleeve normally concealed beneath his robes. At long last, he grasped the true place set for him years before, a great puzzle finally falling together.

  By guiding his transformation, al-Qadir believed Allah had taught him that the ends were all that mattered, the means generally irrelevant. Being spared death filled him with a sense of purpose that was first realized in the hatred he felt for Westerners. But that child from the refugee camp was a stranger to him now, a relic from a different world and different life. He knew nothing then of how his initial exposure to violence and hate would ultimately turn him toward God. All fated, every bit of it, to make him into the man he was today.

  Allah did indeed work in mysterious ways.

  Al-Qadir thought he understood his role in this. Now he realized the total view of Allah’s grand design was obscured even to him. Something else had been created in southern Lebanon and now it had been unleashed on civilization to punish man for his sins and failure to accept God’s true word.

  Al-Qadir watched the rising sun continue to brighten, creating a blinding shimmer over the endless desert around him. His work was not done yet. He could feel a flutter inside his head he took for God whispering in his ear, speaking of enemies who still posed a threat and needed to be vanquished.

  The dry, stifling air prickled with static, supercharged with sparks he could feel snapping against his skin. Al-Qadir felt Allah’s touch in each and every one of them. He didn’t want to return to the cold dark of the cave, wanted to stay out here until the blistering sun melted his skin, so long as he could feel God so close and so strong.

  Something was coming.

  And al-Qadir would rise to meet it, standing, undaunted, by Allah’s side in the final battle that was to come.

  FIFTY

  George H. W. Bush

  Red’s government-issued Gulfstream was equipped with a tailhook that allowed it to snare one of the arresting wires on the deck of the George H. W. Bush. Being jolted to such a sudden stop was like nothing Jimenez had ever experienced before, and he realized in that moment the reason why each seat was outfitted with an entire restraint apparatus, instead of just a seat belt. His feet hit the deck in wobbly fashion, to find an officer waiting nearby to escort them to a ready room that had been transformed into a command center with both electronic and paper maps filling the walls amid current troop deployments and units in transit.

  Units making up tens of thousands of troops, the progress of their mobilization charted the way the news stations follow that of Santa’s sleigh
on Christmas Eve.

  “Father Pascal Jimenez,” Red said, after escorting him up to a man wearing admiral’s bars on his uniform’s shoulders, and more ribbons than Jimenez could count under his lapel, “may I present Admiral Keene Darby.”

  Darby nodded, an unlit cigar in his mouth, and didn’t bother to shake hands. “He know why he’s here?”

  “Not yet. I thought it best for him to hear it in the proper context.”

  They moved through a door into an adjacent larger room, a conference table squeezed in before a single wall-mounted widescreen television.

  “I told you we’re facing an unprecedented threat to the future of civilization,” Red said.

  “Not in those words.”

  “Then let me be more specific, Father,” Admiral Darby offered, working a remote control to bring up a map of the Middle East on the widescreen television. “Take a look.”

  The map was dominated by a mass of colors scattered in patches and swatches across the region: a mix of blue, red, and yellow across a white background; actually just a smattering of blue amid much larger swatches of yellow and a pale red color having usurped the bulk of the white.

  “Ninety-six hours ago, the World Health Organization received a report of an outbreak of an unidentified, potential pathogen in Jordan,” Red started, sounding almost casual. “Within twenty-four hours, their efforts had uncovered all the blue you see on the map, denoting areas where an outbreak in its initial stages was detected. The yellow patches indicate the spread of this potential pathogen over the past seventy-two hours, and the red denotes our estimates on the reach of the spread within the next seventy-two hours.”

  Jimenez blinked several times to reset his vision, hoping that might change the sight before him. “The entire Middle East, virtually.”