Havoc Rising

by Brian S. Leon

  “This way should be quickest. Should get us to a spot in Iceland, and then we can move on to England’s southern coast,” he said, pointing.

  Among the moss-strewn oak trees, I could see the shimmering wave of energy that indicated a weak spot in the veil between our world and the Telluric Ways. Ab pointed it out as if a glowing neon sign marked it. He waved his hand as though shooing mosquitoes, and once again, a passage onto the Ways opened in front of us.

  The first step was warm, muggy, and peacefully slow like the very atmosphere of southern Mississippi, but the next became cold and harsh. A few steps later, we emerged into a cold, cloudy, rocky wasteland in the middle of what I assumed to be some desolate part of Iceland. We ended up walking for around forty-five minutes before Ab repeated the lazy-hand gesture and opened another door onto the Ways, which was good because the uneven terrain was causing the burns on my legs to ache. A few steps later, we were in England.

  Once we exited the Ways, I had to rest my legs for a minute, so I took the time to turn my phone back on and check its GPS to see exactly where we were. The cool, damp air made me shiver, and I could smell the sea nearby. I could tell by the manicured landscaping and open-grass field that we were in a park within some city’s limits. The buildings I could see had the typical asymmetrical, cross-gabled, steep-pitched roofs, half-rounded doors, and oversized chimneys typical of English cottages, but for all I knew, it was Cornwall or Liverpool. Once the map came up, I had to admit I was impressed. We were in Meyrick Park, right in the middle of Bournemouth.

  “There should be a country club that way.” I pointed southwest as I consulted my phone.

  “How’d this guy “Geek” get his name?” Ab asked.

  I wasn’t sure if he was genuinely interested or just trying to make conversation as we walked. “You know he was a former Royal Marine in the Special Boat Service and a hard-core electronics expert and computer nerd. He’s also hardcore into cryptozoology. All those interests earned him his nickname. His name is actually Will Elmsmore, and he runs a seriously state-of-the-art, high-end electronic security consulting firm, and the Royal Marines are one of his clients.”

  “Ah, gotcha,” Ab replied. “I was worried it was because he bit the heads off small animals for fun or something.”

  I glared at Ab.

  “Hey, as bad as we Peris were, you don’t see us doing that kinda crap. That was all human stuff,” he said, dismissing the activities of my species with a wave of his hand. “I mean with animals, anyway.”

  I didn’t want to know what he meant by that last part, so I just shut up and walked.

  I needed Geek’s help because I only understood enough about computers to play games and do my e-mail and maintain the website for my charter business, but Geek could practically build a city from his keyboard. Or destroy one. He knew electronic countermeasures, security systems, computer networks, and anything else that ran on chips, processors, and the like. Sure, I could have run the Op the way I used to, using only “eyes on” intelligence, but somehow, I doubted even Columbus would have refused a GPS if he’d had access to one. Plus, like Frigate, Geek had had his own encounter with a Paran, which he regularly wrote about on his cryptozoological website, and I was hoping that would make it easy to convince him to help us. By the time we got to his house, it was past dark. When I traveled by the Ways, skipping across time zones so quickly made jet lag seem like the changeover to Daylight Saving Time. A few hours ago we’d left San Diego at dawn, and now it was just past nightfall.

  Geek’s neighborhood sat right up against the southern edge of the golf course at Meyrick Park. Trees separated the links from the road on one side of the street, and stone and white-clapboard homes lined the other. Instead of front yards, driveways took up the space between the houses and the sidewalk, and low stone walls and various hedges separated the lots. The homes were all English-style cottages, and the wooden-shingled roofs lent them a classically English character. A few cars passed by on the streets, but other than a single jogger and an older couple walking their cocker spaniel, the neighborhood was quiet.

  About halfway down the block, we stopped in front of one house that had a roof covered in solar panels. Small whip antennas and video cameras sprouted from each eave, and spotlights occupied each corner and even the space over the door. This had to be the place.

  I could tell by the sensors underneath each fixture that the lights were motion activated, but I didn’t expect to feel as if I’d just broken out of prison when they snapped on as I walked up to the front door. I told Ab to stay out of sight but to keep an eye out while I talked to Geek. I was worried about this conversation for the complete opposite reason I’d been concerned about talking to Frigate. This guy was going to eat up the idea of Paranthropoi and Protogenoi like a fanboy at Comic-Con.

  “No solicitors, please,” blared a tinny voice from a speaker hidden in the ivy next to the door even before I could knock.

  “Um, I’m not selling anything. I’m here to talk with Will Elmsmore about an event in East Africa in 2008. I was there, too.”

  “What’s your name?” came the metallic retort.

  “He would know me as Chief Petty Officer Steve “Demo” Dore, of the US Navy SEALs, though I wasn’t active when we met. Look, I just need to speak with him. I’ll only be a few minutes.” I was already tired of talking to a wall.

  The door popped open. It was heavily reinforced and set in a seriously heavy-duty metal frame. Yikes. Paranoid much?

  “Hello?” I called as I entered.

  The dim hallway was about forty feet long and ran the length of the house. There were two archways off each side, and the one farthest back on the right actually had a door in it, which was closed. In the scant light, the walls were a nondescript white. Other than a single narrow table and a mirror midway between the archways on the left, and a series of historical prints of mythical animals on the right, there were no decorations. Even the floor was bare wood. But there were more than a dozen video cameras set at all angles to record every inch of the space. I waved in no specific direction, figuring one of the damned cameras would get me head-on.

  “Back here,” came a disembodied voice. The lone door down the hall popped open with a slight hiss.

  I walked toward it, and lights I hadn’t seen at first popped on and off as I passed. The hum of electronics and a hot breeze around my head and shoulders and freezing cold around my legs assaulted me as I approached. As I pushed the heavy, reinforced door open, a wave of frigid air instantly chilled me, and the eerie sight of blackness lit up by video screens everywhere stopped me from entering further. It was a disturbing, unnatural light. Behind a desk on the left side of the room, a man with a pencil jammed between his lips was clicking away at a keyboard, his face lit up by the monitor in front of him. Every square inch of wall space was taken up by metal frames, wires, and electronic devices, all of which emitted tiny pinpoints of red and green light and a soft rhythmic hum.

  “You’re Demo?” he asked as he spit his pencil out and glowered at me through the eerie and indistinct glow of his computer monitor. “What about that day in Africa, mate?”

  “Can you turn on a light? This place is like a neon tomb.”

  “No, but we can go into the parlor.” He got up and grabbed a cane. He hobbled toward me, and he stopped when he noticed my surprise.

  Geek was just about my height and built like me, with sandy brown hair kept in a low-maintenance crew cut, like mine. He was dressed in khaki pants and a dark-colored polo shirt, and nothing about his appearance suggested computer nerd. He’d played rugby all through his days at university and at one time had actually entertained the idea of going pro, but for some reason joined the British Marines and then the SBS instead. But he’d had both legs the last time I saw him.

  “Caught an IED in Afghanistan two years ago. Blew my lower leg off. Thi
s is my light-duty prosthesis.” He rapped his left shin with the cane, producing a hollow tap.

  “Well, this changes things a bit,” I said, following him out of the dark, icy room across the hall to a comfy sitting area that lit up as we entered and resembled a drawing room out of a Victorian grandmother’s house. He flopped into a plush, high-backed armchair and pointed me toward an exceedingly formal couch on the other side of a rectangular coffee table. A matching chair sat to his right on the other side of a small table. He looked as out of place in that room as he did behind a computer.

  I sat down on the couch. It felt like wood covered in cement. “I was going to ask for your help, but…” I gestured at his leg.

  “I believe that’s called discrimination, Demo.” He flashed me a wry smile.

  “You’re right, but I need you for a combat op. Electronic support.”

  He eyed me suspiciously as I continued. The conversation progressed much as it had with Frigate, at first. Understandably, Geek thought I was pulling some kind of elaborate prank because of his belief in odd and unexplained things. Even my explanation of the situation in Africa that he and Frigate and their respective squads were involved in was met with skepticism. It struck me as incongruent, considering the guy had Web pages devoted to the existence of garden fairies and the Loch Ness Monster.

  “So, you’re saying that thing back in Africa was a supernatural creature?” he asked, squinting his eyes at me.

  “No, it was real enough, just not normal, and it was being controlled by a wizard. I know this because I was there to kill it and the wizard when I ran into you guys,” I said, starting to regret my decision to recruit him.

  “But do you have any proof?” He suddenly sat up and leaned forward, jabbing his cane in my direction for emphasis and staring at me intently. “And what do you mean, wizard?” His eyes opened wide as he said the word “wizard,” and he cocked his head and sat up ever so slightly straighter.

  “Proof?” I tossed my hands up. “No, not really. And by ‘wizard,’ I mean exactly what you think. A person who manipulates energies for various purposes, including throwing fireballs, if he wants.” I rolled my hands around absentmindedly as if would somehow help me explain what a wizard was.

  After trying to stem the inevitable inundation of questions that followed the attempt to establish my genuineness, I finally managed to turn the conversation to the bombing in New York and the theft of the Cup. Geek instantly insisted that he had picked up chatter that an obscure terrorist group out of Iran had carried out the attack, and he dismissed the theft as a simple consequence of opportunity. Once I brought up Medea’s name in connection to the terrorist cell, however, he practically buzzed at the idea that a mythological figure could be real.

  Then he asked me who I really was, and my truthful response prompted him to suggest I somehow prove it. That was precisely the reason I hadn’t revealed my identity to more than a handful of normal humans—ever. They’d either think I was nuts, or they would go nuts. Frustrated, I screamed for Ab at the top of my lungs. Given that I was known as the “Lord of the Battle Cry” at Troy, I knew my voice would carry.

  Predictably, Ab assumed there was trouble. He smashed into the armored front door so hard that part of the wall around it collapsed in a deafening blast. The door landed just outside the entrance to the parlor with an impact reminiscent of a three-car pileup on a freeway. Geek’s eyes were wide with a mixture of shock, disbelief, and amazement, and his mouth hung open like I’d just whacked him with a bat.

  “Back here, Ab. We’re safe,” I called.

  “Shit, D, I thought you were in trouble. Don’t do that again, please,” he said, walking into the sitting room and examining his dragon-skin gloves to make sure they were unharmed.

  “Bollocks,” mumbled Geek. He stared, slack-jawed. His eyes traveled back and forth between Ab and me repeatedly as if he were watching a tennis match, and his face was drained of color and devoid of any emotion. For a moment, I thought he was going into shock, and then his face flushed with excitement.

  “Oh, I’m in, mate,” he screamed. “Whatever it is, I. Am. In.”

  “Great!” I said, and Ab shrugged and arched one eyebrow, clearly not understanding a thing that was happening.

  “So, when do we leave?” Geek asked excitedly.

  “We’re moving out within twenty-four hours,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’ll need to know the gear you’ll require ASAP. Communications, surveillance—the works. But seriously, knowing what I told you about us going after Medea, if you think that leg is going to be an issue, then I’ll find someone else. It’s just I know you’re the best at this stuff.”

  Geek’s shoulders sagged and his smile disappeared, replaced by an expression of serious intensity, though his eyes were still alive with curiosity. “Like I said, I’m in, mate, but on one condition: you gotta answer some questions.”

  “Fine, but off the record only, or you can kiss your already unstable reputation goodbye.”

  “Ah, right,” he said, suddenly sheepish. “A list of gear it is, then, yes?”

  He walked past us through the parlor back toward his darkened office, pausing briefly to assess the damage that Ab had caused in the hallway. He looked back at Ab, grinned, and shook his head as if he had just discovered an unknown vein of gold in his backyard.

  I followed him back into the warren of electronic machines and computers. When I crossed the hall and noticed the damage, I frowned at Ab and hung my head, shaking it. I grabbed the contorted metal door, wrenched it free from the wall it impaled, and handed it to Ab while I silently mouthed “clean this up,” pointing from the Peri to the hallway. Ab’s massive shoulders sank, and his chin fell to his chest.

  Just inside his office, Geek stood watching me, wide eyed and slack jawed once again. “That door weighed nearly two hundred kilos…”

  “Yeah, substantial,” I said while dusting off my hands. “Sorry. Ab’ll clean this up some before we leave.”

  “No, mate. I mean, you just pulled that thing out of the wall like it was a piece of plywood,” he said, fawning.

  “Right. Uh, the list of gear, please?” I didn’t know what else to say.

  Suddenly animated again, Geek scooted around to the chair at his desk and started typing. A few seconds later, a printer whirred and he stood up, grabbed the sheet, and handed it to me.

  “Excellent,” I said, examining the page.

  “Standard communications and electronics package with a few optional extras. Some of that stuff may be bloody hard to come by. I may have access to alternative gear if needs be.” Geek was all business again.

  “Not a problem. I can get it. And, uh, again, sorry about your door and the hall, Geek.”

  “No worries, mate,” Geek said, the cold blue glow of the light from his monitor gleaming off his white teeth. “Ab is bloody strong, isn’t he? That door was supposed to withstand nearly thirteen hundred kilos of force. And you! You picked it up like it was nothing!”

  “Sorry. I’ll try to stand it back up for you,” Ab shouted from down the hall, amidst sounds of rending metal and falling bricks and clatter.

  “We’ll see you tomorrow at roughly 1200 Zulu. Meet us in Meyrick Park, on the southeastern edge. It’ll either be me or Ab, and we may have an American with us you may remember from Africa. No one else.” I headed into the hall.

  Geek followed. We watched with amusement as Ab tried valiantly for a few minutes to stand the rent door back in its twisted reinforced frame, but the best he could do was lean it against the wall.

  Ab and I took a more direct route home and made it back to my house in less than twenty minutes without incident, just after two in the afternoon. That gave us about twelve hours before we needed to head out to my staging area to prepare for our assault on Medea.

  CHAPTER 26
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br />   Back at my house, I told Ab and Duma to get their gear ready while I talked with Athena about what she’d discovered about Medea. Then I collected the equipment Geek had requested. I knew the brothers would have their armor and weapons in that ugly SUV Duma drove, but I wanted them to make sure they were ready, too. I was tired of playing catch-up. It was time to go on the offensive.

  While I collected the needed gear from the Dvergar quartermaster at one of the Metis Foundation’s storehouses in Mission Valley, Athena informed me of what she’d learned about Medea and her whereabouts. Fakhri had told her that Medea’s base of operations was indeed in Iran, on Mount Alvand, outside of Hamadān. The Old One whom I knew as Hecate, the Goddess of Witchcraft, was helping Medea with a complicated ritual to harness the power of chaos and then unleash havoc in a directed attack.

  According to the wizards Athena had on staff at the Metis Foundation—all full members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—our entire universe tended toward chaos, making its energy readily available, but disruption of a system’s equilibrium created significantly stronger forms of power. Riots, arson, terrorist attacks, or anything that caused hysteria among people could generate massive amounts of localized chaotic energy, but any attempt to harness enough of it to use as a weapon would first require capturing the energy in a vessel strong enough to store it. Fortunately, the Metis wizards couldn’t identify any container on Earth strong enough to do so—outside of Pandora’s Box, which was actually a bronze jar that had been, fortunately, destroyed. Of course, they also couldn’t conceive of how she could direct such an attack efficiently. No offense to the wizards, but I was more concerned with making sure we didn’t find out.

  Unfortunately, the girl couldn’t help us locate the chain she said Medea wanted. Apparently, its location changed constantly, and her ability only allowed her to divine where it was at the present moment or where it had been in the past. While I desperately wanted to throw a kink in Medea’s plans—and finding that chain before she did would definitely do that—I had to settle for hitting her as hard and as fast as I could before she could accomplish her goals.