by Myke Cole
He smiled, hoping the expression would force the dread out of him, but it hung on in the corner of his mind, a sick spike in his gut, so slight that he could almost believe he imagined it.
Almost.
“Fuck it,” he said, bending to turn the radio on. He made sure the road was clear before allowing his eyes to flick to the scan button, pressing it in the hopes of finding some Motown in the midst of the ocean of preaching, gospel, and country music that dominated the airwaves in this area. He tapped the button, looked back up to the road, as clear as before, the reflective paint of the stripes sliding along to his left.
He drove for a full minute before he realized that the radio hadn’t come on. No music, no static. Nothing.
He glanced down to see the digital numbers racing past, running up to the top of the FM spectrum before starting again at the bottom.
Which meant it couldn’t find a signal.
“The fuck?” He glanced over his shoulder, but the antenna was intact and extended, nodding in the breeze like a pillar on the verge of toppling over.
He punched the radio lightly, nothing. The sense of dread came roaring back into him, stronger than before, as if it had only waited for the moment to pounce. He slowed down, the feeling mounting to panic before sliding into the calm alertness that always came over him in a crisis. Jim had called it “bullet time” in deference to some video game, but it seemed that time slowed, his heightened awareness allowing him to note the waving of individual branches, the tiny flicker in his headlights. His peripheral vision expanded until he could feel the darkness at the side of the road clambering up the berm to either side of the road, as if it resented the light and noise his vehicle made, sought to swallow them to purify the gloom.
Chang steered with his knees, his hand instinctively dropping back to the unlocked Pelican case, feeling for the handle of the pistol. His mind clicked from hunch to certainty. Something was wrong. Something was dangerous. It was time to get off the X.
And that is when he saw the man.
He emerged from the woods, galloping on all fours like a silverback gorilla, head turned toward the headlights, coming level with the bumper before he leapt to his feet with the agility of a circus acrobat.
Chang only had time to take in the color of the man’s naked body, the gray-white of a beached fish long after the sun had its way with whatever color had marked its living scales.
The man stepped fully in front of the car, mouth opening, issuing a groan that sounded at once pained and angry, and Chang hauled the wheel to his left, crossing the empty oncoming lane and brushing the guardrail, sending a shower of sparks that would have done a metalworker proud. Chang knew better than to pump the brakes, applying gentle pressure until he felt the pedal tap against his foot as the antilock mechanism engaged. He pulled the wheel back right, but the mud at the top of the berm had his tire now, hauling him by his momentum deeper and deeper into the woods.
A gap in the guardrail opened briefly on his left, and the front of his vehicle swung into the empty space, a horse making a break for the hole in the fence. He tried the wheel again, felt the car slide further, then cursed and turned into the slide, the vehicle just missing the next guardrail segment, catching the metal against his right headlight, which exploded in a spray of colored glass.
The remaining headlight did its level best to give him a good view of the ground sloping down the berm and the near solid wall of tree trunks just beyond. Chang abandoned attempts to steer, brought his forearms up to cover his face, locking his elbows against the wheel, jerking himself forward in his seat belt, forcing the locking mechanism to engage. He closed his eyes.
Bang.
The thunderclap sounded just below a sound like paper crumpling and an ocean wave breaking at the same time. He felt the air outside rush in, powdered glass spalling across his forearms as the windshield shattered. The seat belt suddenly dug into his chest and gut, a malevolent constrictor snake that made his wounded chest scream. His head whipped forward and down, a motion that would surely have damaged his neck if he hadn’t braced his face against his forearms.
There was a smell of gasoline, melted plastic, and the wet night air. The engine died with a cough and a high screech as a rubber belt gave way and spun off its wheel.
Then, silence.
Chang opened his eyes. The remaining headlight had dimmed, showing the edge of a tree that now neatly bisected the front of his car, the fractured radiator bent around it, liquid spraying up in weaker and weaker pulses, a heart bleeding out its last.
Beyond the light was a solid wall of darkness, the slow rise of night sounds already filling the vacuum left by the stilling of the engine. Crickets chirping. Frogs calling for mates. Beetles foraging for food. The natural world raced in on his moment of weakness, answering the panicked crash with peace and softness. Chang felt the temptation to be lulled by it, to lean back into his seat and give the fog in his mind a moment to clear. But the alertness he’d conjured just before the crash came surging back.
A nude man stepped deliberately in front of your car. There was something wrong with the way he looked. He can’t be more than a few hundred feet behind you.
Get off the X. Go.
Bullet time again. Chang’s hand dropping down, yanking the handle of the Pelican case as his other hand thumbed the button on his seat belt. The button depressed halfway, then stopped dead, the tongue stubbornly holding fast.
He yanked once, the nylon still tight across his chest, then moved his hand to his pocket, pulling out the knife and flicking it open in one smooth motion, the click sounding loud and alien in the midst of the rising night sounds. A duller knife would have taken some time, but even a lousy SEAL kept his honed to razor sharpness. He slid the blunt edge along his belly, working the blade behind the seat belt and cut it in a single swipe. His weight was already leaning hard to the left, and he rolled out of the car and came up in a crouch in the thick mud at the base of the berm, his back solidly covered by the uneven hardness of the tree trunk behind him.
He threw the knife down blade first into the dirt and flipped open the case, pistol and tactical light almost leaping into his grip.
And then he was ready. His mind was clear, his situational awareness as good as it would get. Whatever that fucker had hoped to do to him, he was going to have one hell of a fight making it happen. Chang raised the pistol, bracing the backs of his hands against one another, tactical light pointed outward in his left hand, thumb flicking it on. The tension of his hands stabilized his firing platform, his eyes falling naturally onto the gun sights, his finger indexed gently above the trigger guard. All in a single smooth motion, in the space of a few breaths. Silent, expert, professional.
Maybe not such a bad SEAL after all.
He didn’t waste time with threats, idiot shouts of “Who goes there?” that would give away his position. His light flooded the side of the berm, washed up to the road’s edge, confirmed that, so far, no one had followed him to the crash site. Then the light was off and he was moving, defying anyone homing in on the illumination to locate him. He crab walked sideways along the tree line, back up to the road, feeling the comforting brush of the tree branches across his shoulders. Not cover, but concealment at least.
He slid sideways, up the road toward where the man had appeared. He briefly considered running into the darkness behind him but knew it was a fool’s temptation. The woods went on for miles, a pitch-dark run of ankle-turning mud puddles and tree roots, with no sign of human habitation. Whatever was going on here, it wanted to work in the dark of the woods. His best chance was to stick to the road, where the chance existed that a passing state trooper or someone out for a late-night milk run might stumble on the wreck and call for help.
After he’d gone at least thirty feet from his last position, he froze, listening. He didn’t risk the light again. He strained his ears, sorting out the animal s
ounds from the distant call of waves breaking on the shoreline, borne on the gentle but rising breeze.
The air was a gentle rushing sound, the soft, damp swishing he’d come to know from years in the Tidewater. Suddenly, the rushing accelerated, as if the wind strained to accommodate a large object shooting through it.
Chang had heard that sound before as he sheltered in place on a blasted hillside in Afghanistan. Indirect fire. A rocket.
He got low, crouching almost prone. If it was a rocket, he had no hope of outrunning it. The most he could hope for was for the shrapnel to pass overhead.
But it wasn’t a rocket. The dark silhouette of a man was outlined against the lighter gray of the starlit sky, hurtling through the air to land with a crunch on the hood of Chang’s car, his weight driving it down nearly a foot, crouching deeply and gracefully as a gymnast, arms out to his sides.
The man from the road.
Naked, showing no sign of pain from landing barefooted on the broken roof of a car.
He’d jumped. He’d jumped across hundreds of feet of road. He’d practically flown.
Panic and disbelief swarmed in the pit of Chang’s stomach, but his training answered, surging through him and pushing it back down, keeping him suspended in the state of hyperalertness, of focused calm. Later, his mind told him. You can sort it out later. For now, stop the threat.
The man crouched on the roof, then raised his chin, sniffed the air. His head sawed unerringly in Chang’s direction, a low growl emanating from his throat, sounding more rottweiler than human.
Scary, sure. But the man made a perfect target, silhouetted against the night sky, spreading long-fingered hands to give Chang a perfect centerline for his shot.
He dropped his eyes back onto his gun sights and thumbed the button on the light. If that fucker was to die, let him die blind.
But the light washed over his target, and Chang’s battle bubble popped.
The man’s corpse-gray skin nearly reflected the light back at him, waxy and hairless as a store mannequin. It was crisscrossed with tiny scars, with yellow-white stitches clinging stubbornly to three puckered mounds over his left pectoral. Chang recognized them as gunshot wounds, carelessly sewn closed in the manner of an undertaker preparing a corpse for burial, knowing the rough work would be covered by clothing.
The shape of the man’s body showed Chang he was male though his manhood had been cut away, the site stitched shut with the same sloppy carelessness. Horns sprouted from his head, uneven spikes of bone, piercing the skin of his scalp, matched by a broken mountain range of spines running down his back. What Chang had assumed were long fingers were claws, as if the bones of his hand had sprouted tapered branches, making him a thing of spikes, a human porcupine.
Across his chest, marred by the wound scars, was the faded remains of a tattoo: an eagle, wings spread, perched proudly above crossed cannons on a waving American flag. A banner scrolled beneath: DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY.
The man growled again, his jaw unhinging like a snake’s, his gray tongue lolling out a foot long, weaving in Chang’s direction like a sentient thing.
His eye sockets were hollow, gray pits. Whatever meat had resided in those depths was long gone. In its place, twin gold flames flickered, tiny balls of metallic, malevolent fire.
The panic surged in Chang again, an electric jolt up his spine, the tiny muscles along its length seizing in horror, his brain sparking as it tried to wrap around what it was seeing, a flood of words selected and discarded in an instant. Zombie. Ghoul. Wraith.
Devil.
Chang’s conscious mind reeled, his subconscious mind did what it was trained to do. Devil or not, it had a man’s shape, and he knew how to kill men. The target went blurry, the front sight post came into clear focus, and Chang snapped the trigger back three times. The gun kicked, but he held it steady, his solid frame pushing it back into place between each shot, eyes never leaving the jumping sights.
The fear and amazement must have been getting to him; the first shot came in low, punching through the top of the man’s sternum, just under the hollow of his throat, but the next two shots impacted where Chang had intended, the first holing the man’s gray Adam’s apple, and the second pushing through his eye socket to explode out the back of his skull, carrying scraps of skin and fragments of bone with it.
Forty-five caliber rounds packed a hell of a punch. The man’s head snapped back, and he practically somersaulted off the car’s roof, landing with a thud behind it.
Chang wasn’t dumb enough to race around the vehicle. Instead, he dropped prone in the mud, lining up for another shot before flashing his light through the undercarriage. The white beam flooded over mud and clumps of grass. No body. Nothing.
The whooshing sound again.
Chang looked up just in time to see the man hurtling down toward him. He launched himself back, stumbling to his feet as the man landed, swiping out with one clawed hand, sharp bone tips of his claws singing through his shirt, tracing shallow, bloody lines across Chang’s chest.
This close, Chang could see the bloodless, black entry wounds his rounds had made. The bullet had passed through the empty eye socket without affecting the gold flame that flickered there, dancing hypnotically, as the man turned his head to follow Chang’s movements.
Chang’s brain had now switched monikers. Thing. Creature. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a man.
He raised the pistol again, but the thing stepped forward quicker than a cat and brought its forearm down like an iron bar on his wrist. He felt the bones snap, his body barely registering the pain in the rush of adrenaline. The gun went tumbling from his limp hand.
And now his training betrayed him. His conscious mind understood that the thing before him didn’t respond to the tools in his toolbox. A high-powered round through the eye wouldn’t put it down. The only thing to do now was run. But his body wouldn’t let him. Years of training had put it on autopilot, so that all he could do was stand and watch himself as he stepped into the attack, close as a lover, hooking two of his fingers over the thing’s sternum, pushing in and pulling down, seeking the nerve cluster that he knew would have no effect because the thing was dead, and pain was nothing more than a distant notion.
His knuckles rocked into the entry wound as his fingers sank deeply enough that a living man would have dropped screaming in pain. But, of course, the thing showed no reaction, leaning casually aside and forward, the extended jaw clamping over his shoulder, the mouth bone dry. He felt the teeth sink into him, grinding against the bone beneath. No man’s teeth were that long, that sharp. It gave a quick jerk of its head, like a hunting cat, and Chang felt hot blood spray up his neck. His arm went numb.
His blood. His arm.
Nonetheless, his body was in full control now, the training driving him even as his conscious mind acknowledged the fact that it was useless, that he had lost, that a dead thing could not be killed.
He twisted, feeling the flesh of his shoulder tear, ripping clean of its mouth, the agony still a distant thing. He rolled across its shoulder, bringing his elbow down hard against its short ribs, felt the satisfying crack beneath that would have put any living man out of the fight. His face slid along the thing’s triceps. It smelled of hospital antiseptic and something spicy that reminded him of the Arab suqs he’d been to in Qatar, Yemen, and Oman.
The thing lifted its arm, and Chang saw a dark scrawl down its side. He couldn’t read it in the dark, but he knew it was tattooed lettering: blood type and serial number. He had it, too. Most operators did.
Not just a zombie. A zombie of one of his own.
And then his body did register the pain, and the claws slid up under his rib cage, rising through his lungs, his heart, beyond. He felt the hand follow, drilling into the wound, and all his strength suddenly left him. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. His knees buckled, and he sagged in the creature’s arms
. It held him like a baby, its face hovering over his own, close enough that he should have been able to smell its breath. But it wasn’t breathing.
The gold flames of its eyes bored into his own and it croaked something, a few words in a language that sounded like Hebrew, garbled and truncated, wind blown through an ancient chimney.
His vision went gray, collapsing into a tunnel that shut out all except those twin burning fires. His mind clung to a single thought, that he had been going somewhere, that this losing fight was all the more a tragedy because it had stopped him from something important that he needed to do.
Sarah, he thought as he slid further into the dark, even the light of the golden fires fading.
Oh, Sarah. I’m sorry.
CHAPTER XIX
ALIVE
Schweitzer and Ninip went in on foot.
The helo set them down around three klicks out, on a slope of broken scree that spoke of a rockslide in months past. The larger stones had all been carried off, which let Schweitzer know that there was a settlement nearby. If his memory served him, it was likely to be farther up the slope, back to a harder piece of the mountain, hidden and defensible.
Bring up the map again, Schweitzer sent to Jawid.
His vision went white as the Sorcerer reached out to him, channeling his own vision of the screen in the briefing room. Schweitzer could see Ty out of the corner of Jawid’s eye, looking at the Sorcerer with something akin to fear.
Beyond him, the screen showed a drone’s camera image of a large compound. It was built around a low house of at least three stories, judging from the tiered balconies. A higher wall ringed the open space beyond it, enclosing two smaller buildings and two towers. White dots clustered in a corner. Goats, most likely. A few darker points were likely people. Cars were parked in neat rows just outside one of the gates.
The bodies glowed bright white in the thermal-imaging lens. Two of the cars glowed white up front, the heat from their running engines lighting them up for the camera. The building corners glowed in stark relief, so brightly in some spots that Schweitzer could tell where the generators were stored.