C.O.T.V.H. (Book 2): Judgment

by Palmer, Dustin J.

  “Good advice.” Jake winked back. “I’ll talk to you later Grandpa.” He rushed down the stairs.

  “Hey Amber,” he said when he got close to her. “Uh, how’s it going?”

  “It’s going good.” She smiled. “Well, as good as trudging ten miles through melting snow and crawling through icy pipes can be.”

  “Crawling through pipes? Man that’s what they had you guys doing?”

  “Yeah, Lt. Perry is a monster. I’ve never seen such a hardnosed bitch in my life!”

  “Her and Drill Sergeant Ortega should get together then. It would be a match made in hell. Can you imagine their children?” Jake shuddered.

  Amber laughed. “That bad huh?”

  “Yeah.” He showed her his bloody bandaged hands. “We chopped wood for hours! My hands hurt, my legs hurt, heck even my blisters have blisters!”

  “Well, hang in there. You’ll make it Jake.”

  “What makes you so sure?” Jake asked.

  “I know things about people.”

  “Oh really? What things do you know about me?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I guess you’ll just have to wait to find out.”

  “Come on guys!” Donnie suddenly yelled. “Let’s get some grub!” They started walking slowly in that direction.

  "You know Jake, you're Grandpa is an interesting guy."

  "Yeah he is," Jake agreed.

  She lifted her hand up to move a strand of hair from her face causing Jake's heart to beat a little faster. "I had a nice long talk with your Grandpa yesterday too,” he said. “Seemed like a pretty tough customer."

  "Nah. He's a big ‘ole teddy bear," she laughed.

  "Not if he thinks you're interested in his granddaughter," Jake said, growing a little warm around the collar. Did I just say that out loud?

  "Are you?" she said, stepping in front of him stopping him in his tracks.

  "Uh, well," Jake said, nervously. He could feel his face growing redder by the second.

  She gave him a sly grin then turned to leave. "I'll see you later Jake. I've got to get back to my luxury cabin and get cleaned up. Let me know if you find an answer to that question."

  "Uh, yeah, um bye!" Jake yelled after her.

  Buck came up from behind and shoved Jake with his shoulder. "If you know what's good for you you'll stay away from Amber. She's mine."

  "That so?" Jake said, turning to face him.

  "Yeah it is."

  "Come on guys let’s get back and get cleaned up before dinner." Donnie stepped between them. "You guys can argue over who's not going to be dating my sister later."

  "Donnie's right," Chris said, coming up next to him. "We're all tired, dirty and just plain beat. Let’s try and enjoy a good meal and get some sleep. At least we will be warm tonight."

  Jake agreed and turned to walk away. He heard Buck say something he couldn't quite make out, which Donnie quickly answered with a punch to the gut doubling Buck over with a loud groan. "Talk that way about my sister again and the vampires will be the least of your problems. Is that understood Bucky?" Buck answered with a loud cough.

  Chapter 4

  Jake

  The Williams Ranch

  February 12, 1999 5:27pm

  Jake’s training continued for the next three months. Each morning Drill Sergeant Ortega, or El Diablo as the recruits called him behind his back, would wake them up at a different time. Sometimes he’d wake them at 4AM sometimes at 2AM, sometimes not until 8AM. Sometimes they wouldn’t sleep for days on end. The man seemed to revel in torturing them.

  With each new day came new punishment. The first month consisted almost entirely of chopping wood, moving wood, and running with heavy packs with their hated axes in hand. No matter how bad the weather, be it rain or snow, they would run.

  After the runs, they would receive unrelenting beatings at the hands of Sergeant Lucas. Under his tutelage, the group learned various fighting techniques and styles using not only their hands and feet but also weapons such as knives, axes, even common household items they might come across while breaching a house. His words of advice were: “In the right hands, anything can be used as a weapon.”

  Each day ended with more cuts, bruises, and blisters than the day before. But the blisters soon turned into calluses, the cuts into scars, and the bruises turned into even more bruises. Through it all Jake did his best to endure, to learn, to keep moving forward.

  The day after Christmas, while most kids their age spent their day relaxing at home with their families, Lt. Perry began firearm training. “Any idiot can fire a gun,” she said, shouldering her large caliber rifle. “But a smart soldier knows how to make each shot count.” She squeezed the trigger, hitting a two-foot target over fifteen hundred yards away.

  During the next few weeks, each member of the team was trained one on one with a variety of weapons from pistols to shotguns, to rifles, and crossbows. They became not only proficient in using them but learned how to load, disassemble and reassemble each weapon completely blindfolded.

  By week nine Sergeant Major Castle began their training in what was probably the most important aspect of their chosen careers; how to breech a house without getting yourself or your team killed.

  Three mock buildings were set up on the Williams’ property and as a team and individually, they would breach the house and clear it, doing their best not to get themselves ‘killed’. Each time the layout of the house would change and their instructors would be hiding in different locations. Sometimes the house would be pitch black and they would have to go in with night vision goggles, other times it would be rigged with traps; holes in the floor hidden under thin plywood, trip wires that would pepper them with bright blue paint. Jake couldn’t even count the number of times he’d been ‘killed’ while attempting to clear it.

  As the training grew more intense, it only made the team stronger, not only as a unit but also as friends. Bonds grew and relationships were formed.

  For Jake this was by far the best thing to come from this experience. Unlike with the kids he’d met back in Lubbock, here he could be himself. Not Jacob Griffin, or Jacob Riker, but Jake Bishop, the son of a vampire hunter; a kid whose mother was kidnapped and presumably killed by vampires. For once in his life, he could finally share how he felt with people that would understand and not think he was crazy, or a liar, or both. Because of this, his strongest connections came with Donnie and Amber. Like himself, they understood what it was like to lose a parent. Though they never talked openly about their dad’s death, it was an unspoken bond, a kinship they all shared.

  Jake had longed for something more with Amber, but he was happy to be her friend. They talked often, though Buck was never too happy about it. In many ways, she was the heart of the team. Everyone looked to her for a comforting word when the trainers had pushed too hard. She was also Sergeant Lucas’s prized student in hand-to- hand combat. No one could take her in the ring, not even her much larger brother.

  Donnie was like an older brother to Jake. Though they were only a year apart in age, he always seemed older than the rest of the group. More mature. In a lot of ways, he was similar to his Grandpa Billy. He took up the leadership role early on. Always leading the charge when breaching one of the mock-ups. The team respected and trusted his intuition and leadership. He’d built relationships with all of them in his own particular way, even with Buck.

  Chris was another friendship that Jake had come to cherish. He was like a brother to both Jake and Donnie. He looked up to them. Their combined support and encouragement gave him the much-needed self-confidence he needed to make it through each day.

  Tactically Chris was the weakest of the team, though he was also the best shot in the class. He had a natural ability for long-range targets and could easily hit them from hundreds of yards away. Lt. Perry took great pleasure in encouraging his gift, even going so far as to award him with the same model sniper rifle she used in the field. A Remington 700P, that according to Perry was
one of the best sniper rifles ever produced.

  Along with his training, for one week out of each month, Ben worked with him, introducing his son to connections in local law enforcement and various other government agencies. On his down time (what little there was) Chris was working with the computers in Billy’s safe room. He claimed to have plans to revolutionize how hunting took place by developing software that would create an online library on all Vampire activity within the past hundred years.

  Buck continued to be the outsider of the group, though he didn’t seem to realize it. Most of the others tried to avoid him whenever they could. All except Amber, who for some unknown reason, continued her relationship with him. He spent most of his training with Lt. Smart, learning different varieties of explosives and how to use them effectively.

  Whisper, given her Comanche name because of her shy and quiet disposition, was the more serious of the two sisters. She had a hard time talking to people and didn’t have any real relationships other than with Amber and Diana. She was easily the best tracker on the team. There wasn’t a man or woman other than her father that could match her. Especially Jake; he had the hardest time finding signs and following trails.

  Diana, who had never stopped trying to gain Jake’s attention, trained with her father and sister in tracking even on their weekly day off. If Talon wasn’t on a hunt, he was at the Ranch working with his daughters. Though she wasn’t at Whisper’s level, she continued to exceed above the rest of the class.

  By the end of the third month, it was more than clear to the trainers that of all the members of the team, Jake was the one having the hardest time finding his place. He wasn’t the team leader like Donnie, or the team explosives expert like Buck or a computer expert like Chris. He wasn’t a tracker like Diana or Whisper. He was one of the stronger fighters but had been beaten more times than he’d like to count by Amber. He was just himself, Jake Bishop, stuck somewhere in the middle. Not great in any one area, but not terrible either. It bothered him greatly and in his training, he had begun to struggle.

  It began to fade altogether, when Ortega introduced his obstacle course. Over a hundred yards of slippery ten-foot high walls, muddy underwater pipes, trenches filled with mud and razor wire, rolling balance logs, rope bridges, and through it all their axes had to remain somewhere on their person. It was a real beast of a course that Ortega had named Lucifer’s Playground. The recruits referred to it simply as The Playground.

  To make matters worse Jake could have sworn that Ortega was riding him harder than the rest of the group. Pushing him to the absolute limit.

  “Get off your ass Bishop! You worthless piece of vampire shit!” Ortega yelled.

  “Yes Drill Sergeant!” Jake yelled climbing to his feet only to trip in the half-frozen mud again. His lungs screamed in agony as he breathed in the icy cold air.

  “You’re worthless!” Ortega screamed. “You hear me worm! You ain’t shit! Why don’t you do me a favor and quit!”

  “No Drill Sergeant!” Jake screamed back, gritting his teeth.

  This course was by far the worst of the training for Jake. Worse yet was that he was the last of the group to complete it under time. Even Chris beat him by a good two minutes.

  Jake trudged through the waist deep mud, pulling a fifty-pound bag of weights behind him. His axe gripped tightly in his right hand. Jake stumbled out of the pit finally crossing the finish line. Dropping the bag to the ground, he rolled over onto his back coughing and panting, his breath pouring from his lungs as a fog.

  “Yeah worm! Lie there in the mud!” Ortega yelled kicking a wad of icy mud in his face. “That’s where you belong!”

  Jake tried to rise but Ortega shoved him back into the mud with his boot. “Sixteen minutes!” he exclaimed. “Are you kidding me?! I didn’t think it was possible but you are actually getting slower! Goddammit boy! Are you wasting my time?”

  “No Drill Sergeant!” Jake said, rolling over and pushing himself to his feet.

  “Bullshit! You’re worthless!” Ortega yelled standing mere inches from Jake’s face. “Worthless!” Bits of spit landed on Jake’s face.

  Jake stood still as a statue fighting the cough threatening to erupt from his lungs. It took everything he had to keep from knocking Ortega into next week. He wanted it more than anything in this world. More than he wanted to kill vampires. Even more than he wanted to beat Buck’s running time and wipe that shit eating grin off his face.

  Ortega continued to berate him for another five minutes in front of the other recruits. Amber, covered in head to toe with mud stared at him, her eyes filled with concern. He focused entirely on her. That was his strength. Even if she was technically dating the person he wanted to beat more than any other, he could still cling to the hope that one day she would see the light and he would have his chance.

  “Bishop!” Ortega said, breaking him out of his daydream. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes Drill Sergeant!” he lied.

  “What did I just say?” Ortega said, eyeballing him.

  Unable to hold it another minute, the cough came out shaking his body. “I’m worthless Drill Sergeant!” he managed between coughs. “Not worth the shit on your boot heel, Drill Sergeant!” Jake said, taking a wild guess.

  Ortega stared at him for several long seconds then turned his back. “Get out of my sight. Go grow a pair, then come back and see if you can run this course like a real man. Sixteen minutes!” He walked away spitting into the mud pit. “Training’s over for today! Go get cleaned up and get some chow! Tomorrow I expect each of you to do this in half the time! Is that understood?!”

  “Yes Drill Sergeant!” Everyone but Jake echoed.

  Jake bent over coughing up wads of phlegm. He breathed in as deeply as he could then pulled the rope holding the weights from around his shoulders and dropped them into the mud before slowly making a beeline for the makeshift showers near their cabin. Donnie came walking up beside him and started to say something. Jake held up his hand stopping him. “Donnie . . . not now,” he said, continuing his walk. Violent coughs began tearing through his body as he walked across the frozen ground.

  Stepping through the flap of the boy's shower tent, he angrily threw his axe down on the ground, before stripping out of his muddy clothes. Balling them up in his fists he tossed them into the dirty clothes bin then stepped into the closest stall. As an afterthought, he reached back out, grabbed the handle of the axe, and leaned it against the wall next to him. It was absolutely freezing inside. His teeth chattered as he turned the red knob for the hot water. It poured over him burning his skin, but Jake toughed it out until his body grew accustomed to the temperature. For some reason, he just could not seem to get warm. Steam rose around him as it hit the freezing cold air. Buck, Chris, and Donnie entered and showered. Long after they were gone, Jake still stood with the steaming hot water pouring over his shoulders.

  He’d never felt so defeated in his entire life. Every bone in his body was telling him to quit, to give up. He could still be a Hunter. He could probably get a spot with one of the lesser groups not associated with the Coalition. It wouldn’t be up to par with Billy’s crew but it was better than nothing was. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He angrily wiped them away turning his face into the hot water. No! He screamed inside his head. No! No! No! No!

  A rage began to build inside him, an uncontrollable storm that threatened to rip him in two. No! He would not join some lesser crew. He had what it took! He would be the best! Jake grabbed the dial soap from its perch and rubbed rigorously at the remaining mud caked to his body. He can’t break me! Riker couldn’t break me! No one can break me! I’m a Bishop dammit! A long string of coughs escaped his lungs and Jake spit out a mouthful of phlegm.

  Angrily he finished washing then rinsed off. Turning off the water, he barely felt the cold air as it stripped at his flesh. Grabbing a towel he wrapped it tightly around his waist, snatched up his axe then exited the tent and stormed into the cabin. Without saying a s
ingle word to Buck, Chris, or Donnie he dressed as quickly as he could, ran back outside. As he exited, he heard Buck say, “What the hell’s gotten into him?”

  Jake ignored him and marched across the half-frozen grass to the Instructors’ cabin. Taking a deep breath to clear his throat he knocked on the door three times with the flat side of the axe then waited.

  Lt. Perry opened the door with a steaming cup of coffee in hand. “Bishop? Can I help you with something?” she said then took a sip.

  “Yes Lt.” He dropped his axe head to the ground and leaned on the handle for support. “I’m looking for Drill Sergeant Ortega.” He coughed a ragged cough. “Is he available?”

  “Recruit! Stand at attention when you address me,” she ordered.

  So much for not being trained as soldier, Jake thought, standing up straight, his axe gripped at his side.

  “Why are you looking for him?”

  “Lt. I would like to run the course again.” He wheezed painfully. “I feel I’m up to it.”

  Lt. Perry looked around before taking two steps out onto the porch closing the door behind her. In a quiet voice she said, “go get some sleep. Come back tomorrow when you are well rested. You don’t want to do this right now. If you fail the course one more time, Ortega is kicking you out of the program. He has already spoken to the Sergeant Major about it.”

  “But Lt. I know I ca . . .” Jake started to say.

  “That’s an order Bishop,” she said, her face going serious. “Now get some chow and get some sleep and have Lt. Smart check out that cough.”

  “Yes Lt.” Jake turned on his heels and marched back to his cabin.

  He was almost there when a hard, but gentle hand on his left shoulder stopped him in his tracks. Jack turned around ready to swing his axe. “Dammit Chef!” He cursed when he saw the tall, overweight man with a NY Yankee cap that just barely fit his large pale white head, standing behind him. “You can’t just sneak up on someone like that! Say something next time!”