Age of Blood

by Weston Ochse

  Laws snorted. He knew better than to upset a voodoo queen.

  2

  NAVAL SPECIAL WARFARE TRAINING CENTER, NEW ORLEANS.

  Triple Six sprawled in the briefing room chairs as they watched the training event unfold over and over and over on the flatscreen television. At first everyone laughed, pointing to where Yank had stepped into the guts of a zombie and almost fallen, or where Laws had missed the same old woman over and over, only to accidentally skewer her when he tripped. But by the fifth time through, no one was laughing. Sure, they’d survived the event, but they all knew they wouldn’t have if they hadn’t been wearing so much Kevlar body armor to protect them. They could also feel their collective breath cease when the thing in the crypt tried to get out.

  “Do we know what that was?” Walker asked.

  Laws, who was on his second Big Gulp, paused in chewing on the straw long enough to answer, “Don’t remember anything like that in the mission logs.”

  The logs went back to the Revolutionary War. Triple Six had existed in one form or another since its creation by the First Continental Congress. Their first existence was as the Light-Horsemen, a Continental Army special-mission unit under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Lee, the grandfather of Robert E. Lee. A special unit of Lee’s Legion, the Light-Horsemen worked behind the scenes to hasten Cornwallis’s surrender, most notably at Pyle’s Massacre, the first evidence of the British use of lycanthropes against the colony. Henry Lee’s son would command the Red Dragoons during the Mexican-American War, their greatest service coming during the bloody assault at Molino del Rey.

  Triple Six had also been known as the Roanoke Irregulars, Jefferson’s Order of the Mount, Roosevelt’s Special Brigade, and Wilson’s Warders. The names changed, but the missions remained the same—a dedicated group of men and a dog assigned a mission no one else knew about to recover, kill, disable, or remove something so far beyond the norm that the average citizen should never know of its existence.

  Walker was just beginning to read the mission logs, choosing missions at random, just to become familiar with some of the things the team had encountered before. Covering seventy-two volumes, the handwritten logs were lengthy accounts of the missions, sometimes grinding into excruciating detail about the men, the equipment, and the methods used to take down one supernatural foe or another. It was beyond interesting, and he’d have loved to make the reading of those who’d come before him a priority, but he had his fiancée, Jen, to consider, and he was eager to spend more time with her.

  “I do remember Madame Laboy, though,” Laws added, looking over at Holmes to see if the leader had anything to add. When he didn’t, Laws continued, “She’s mentioned several times. Hurricane Katrina and the Battle of New Orleans, for instance.”

  “The Battle of…” Yank gave Laws a look like he thought the other SEAL was joking. “Maybe it was a relative.”

  “Maybe so.” Laws sipped his Big Gulp, with a slight smile on his face.

  “But don’t count on it,” Walker added.

  “You really need to read the logs,” YaYa said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  Walker noticed that he was still sick. YaYa had been enduring a seemingly unshakable flu. With his jacket zipped up and his hands shoved into his pockets he looked positively miserable.

  “If I had more than eight seconds, I’d look at the damn logs,” Yank said, still unused to the pace and closeness of Triple Six. At times he seemed to get visibly angry, reacting as if they weren’t a close-knit bunch of brothers. “But that helmet shit fucking sucked. When are we ever going to be forced to wear those?”

  “Easy, Yank,” Laws said, trying to win the FNG over with a smile.

  But Yank clearly had something to get off his chest. He leaned forward and came just short of pounding the table. “What sort of team is this to put us with a bunch of fucking zombies? I mean, when you said it, I thought you were kidding. Fuck.” He gave the TV, which had been paused on the battle, an angry glare. “If I’d known, I might not have joined.”

  Everyone turned quietly toward Holmes. “Do you want out?” Holmes asked, his voice low but sharp as a razor.

  “No, I just want—”

  Holmes cut him off by sitting forward quickly, “I asked if you wanted out. I didn’t ask you for your opinion or for your favorite color. A one-word answer will suffice.”

  Yank breathed through his nose and his nostrils flared. His fists remained on the table, but they seemed to strain to stay there.

  Laws set his Big Gulp down and leaned forward. “I think you’d better answer the question,” he said softly.

  Walker didn’t know what everyone else thought as they stared at Yank, but no matter how mad and how mean he looked, Yank seemed more scared than anything else. Walker recognized it because he’d felt it himself. His first day at the orphanage, his first day at BUD/S (basic underwater demolition/SEAL) training, his first day with Triple Six. Walker’s life seemed to be filled with first days. Maybe that was the problem. Yank didn’t have many first days. And this was his first day embracing the reality of the Triple Six mission.

  Finally Yank shook his head. “No.”

  Holmes nodded and sat back. “Fine. Then stop telling us what you think and start telling us what you’ll do. I brought you on because you’re a weapons specialist and an expert on hand-to-hand.” He pressed the remote and the action continued. “See there,” he pointed. “Laws was using the same technique over and over. Although it worked, anything else but a zombie might have figured that out.”

  “Ouch. Damned with faint praise,” Laws murmured.

  “What we need,” Holmes continued, “are some moves we can transition to when we’re concentrating on not using any of our senses.”

  “Sounds like something out of Kwai Chang Caine,” Walker said. He’d been folding a piece of paper into an airplane and was finishing the creasing of the wings.

  Laws shook his head. “Nuh-uh. You mean Kung Fu.”

  Yank turned to observe the pair as they argued.

  “Wasn’t that the TV show?” Walker asked.

  Laws nodded. “Caine was played by David Carradine. Took the place of Bruce Lee, who originally came up with the idea for the show.”

  Walker nodded, dropping the paper airplane on the table as he leaned back in his chair. He remembered catching episodes of the show dubbed in Filipino when he was at the orphanage. “Yeah. For sure Bruce Lee was badass, but Carradine was cool. Guess they wanted cool.”

  Laws laughed. “Actually, they wanted white.”

  YaYa snatched the airplane from the table, lit the tail of it with a match, and soared it across the room. “Actually,” he said, mimicking Laws’s tone, “that white man died in a backroom brothel in Bangkok with a noose around his neck and his Johnson in his hand.” When the plane crashed into the wall, YaYa added, “Kaboom!”

  Everyone stared at the burning airplane for a moment; then Yank went over and stomped it out. YaYa’s face held a small smile as he watched the flames disappear, but nothing he had said had been particularly funny.

  Holmes snapped everyone back to the topic at hand. “Okay, enough about David Carradine. Let’s get back to it. So what do you think, Yank? Can you work something up?”

  As Yank studied the film, his fists relaxed. “Sure. Probably something Filipino or Chinese. Either silat or wing chun. I can work up some flowing-hands movement that will allow us to counter anything we need to.” He nodded as he thought it through. “Wing chun for sure.”

  “Good.” Holmes turned to YaYa and was about to say something when the door opened and Alexis Billings, administrator for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s (the Sissy’s) special projects division, of which Triple Six was a part, strode in. She wore a gray dress suit with black high heels. She was about thirty, slender, with red hair pulled back into a professional bun.

  Walker recognized the look in her eyes. He’d seen it the day she’d jerked him out of SEAL training, marching r
ight up to his drill instructors on the beach, handing over a letter from their commander, and marching away with him in her back pocket. There was a mission to be completed and she was delivering it.

  Holmes started to stand and take her into another room, but she surprised everyone and waved him back into his seat. “No time. We have a problem.” She handed a thumb drive to YaYa. “Plug this in.”

  While YaYa did as he was told, she addressed the team. “Emily Withers, daughter of Senator Christopher Withers, ranking member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence—my boss and the approval authority for the Top Secret funding line your unit has appreciated these last few years—has gone missing.”

  She let the words hang for a moment, then added, “Perhaps ‘missing’ is not the right word. Chief Jabouri, are we ready?”

  He selected a file and the zombie training scene was replaced with the black and white image of a beach somewhere. The perspective was from above, but not directly.

  “Emily Withers was in Cabo San Lucas on holiday. That’s her.…” She pointed at the screen and a young woman walked into the picture. The woman removed her shorts and made a pile of her things on the sand before running into the water. The room remained silent as they watched her swim to the upper edge of the frame. That the camera didn’t move with her indicated that it was probably a static security camera. She floated on her back for a few moments, then apparently felt something beneath her. She turned and looked around; then it happened again and she began to swim. Then suddenly she went beneath the water. Everyone sat forward. Yank audibly gasped when she shot back to the surface like a bobber.

  “What the hell was that?” Yank asked.

  “Wait for it,” Billings said, her arms crossed, a frown burying her face.

  The girl began to swim again, but was dragged down. Then their voices erupted as she rose from the water in the mouth of a creature that went on and on and on, nearly fifty feet in length, coiling and uncoiling across the waves until both she and the creature disappeared into the water.

  “And there you have it,” Alexis said, flipping the back of her hand at the screen before turning and giving Holmes a hard look.

  “Was that what I think it was?” Walker said.

  “If you mean a sea monster, it sure the hell looked like it,” Laws said.

  “We’re not sure what it is,” Billings said. “All we know is that it took the senator’s daughter.”

  “Then this is a body recovery,” YaYa said.

  “Not necessarily,” Billings responded.

  YaYa pointed at the screen, a look of disbelief on his face. “We all saw what happened. She was floating in the water, along came a sea monster, and she became a snack.” Realizing his own words, he gulped and looked down. “I mean … she was taken.”

  Billings had kept her eyes on Holmes the entire time. “What do you think?”

  Holmes sighed. “Although I tend to agree with YaYa, there’s a window of possibility.”

  Yank looked from Holmes to YaYa with visible incredulity. “Really? Please tell us, because I don’t see it. I’m with YaYa. I saw her taken. You saw her taken. Hell, we all saw her taken.”

  Holmes looked at Laws. “Do you want to explain it to them?”

  Laws nodded. “Sure.” He stood and walked to the screen. It had been rewound to where the creature was first revealed and zoomed in until it was almost completely pixellated. “What are the odds that in the whole wide universe, a single sea monster or whatever the fuck this is, just happened to be cruising the beaches of Cabo San Lucas, and just happened to find the daughter of one of the top five highest-ranking politicians in America?” He turned. “Walker, what do you think?”

  “Pretty long odds, sir.”

  “Pretty long, indeed.”

  “And you, Laws?”

  “What Walker said.”

  “Could just be coincidence,” Yank surmised.

  This answer engendered a broad smile from Laws. “Out of the mouths of babes. Coincidence, you say? That word is the reason Triple Six exists. We don’t believe in it. When someone else says it, we know it’s time to investigate.”

  “So you think someone could be behind this? Someone arranged to snatch her?” Walker asked.

  “Either that,” Laws’s smile faded and was replaced by complete seriousness, “or it’s mere coincidence.”

  “Doesn’t matter what it is. We’re on mission. Everyone get ready. We leave in an hour.” Billings stepped forward. “One more thing. On an unrelated matter, a shipment from the Salton Sea warehouse was hijacked. We need to track the load.”

  “You got GPS on it, right? Radio-frequency IDs?” Holmes asked.

  “We do, but this is pretty sensitive. Several crates of chupacabra bones. We don’t want some local cop shop involved. We want to keep this in the family.”

  Holmes thought about it and nodded. “YaYa, I’m sending you. Stop by Balboa after and get rid of whatever bug you have, then Charlie Mike and link up.” He turned back to Billings. “Anything else?”

  “No, except I don’t have to reinforce how—”

  “No, you don’t. If she’s alive, we’ll track her down. If she’s deceased, we’ll find her body.”

  “Thanks, Commander.”

  “Don’t thank me. It’s what we do. Come on, SEALs. Get your asses in gear.”

  3

  NSW TRAINING CENTER. LATER.

  Everyone cleared the briefing room and headed to their bunks in the dorm. They’d been at the New Orleans NSW Training Center for nearly a week and had expected to stay a week longer, so no one was ready to go. Still, the nature of being in the military had taught the SEALs of Triple Six the ability to pack and move with little or no preparation. They had their go bags already packed and would most likely travel straight to the mission, which meant their personal items would be shipped back to their building on Coronado Island.

  Yank hurried after Laws. “What did that mean? What you said back there.”

  “What did I mean with what?”

  “When you damned the faint praise.”

  “Ah. That. ‘Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, and without sneering teach the rest to sneer; willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.’”

  “Sounds like Shakespeare.”

  “More than a hundred years too late for that. Alexander Pope said it.”

  “It talks about fear.”

  “Not like you think.” Laws cracked a quick smile. “It talks about one’s inability to criticize because of a fear of what someone else might think.”

  “Were you saying that about me?”

  “Easy, Yank. If you’re going to work in this team, you have to take it when we give it, and give it when we deserve it. Our trust and camaraderie are what makes us special. Our ability to turn that into the fuel to run an operation against supernatural forces is what makes us Triple Six.”

  “I hear you. It’s just hard. I’ve been fighting my whole life and this isn’t like any other team.”

  “The sooner you realize that we’re not the enemy, the sooner you’ll enjoy being a part of Triple Six.”

  “It’s been a long time since I trusted people enough to do what you’re saying.”

  “It better not be too much longer.” Laws reached out and shook Yank’s hand and held it. “Holmes is right. We don’t need any dissent or discontent. You want to leave, then go. You want to stay, then change.” He let go of the other man’s hand. “Period.”

  Yank watched Laws go. He knew the deputy commander was right. Yank had to rein in his reactions. They might have kept him alive on the streets of Compton, but there it was every man for himself. His existence as part of the team meant that he had to offer and accept a certain amount of trust.

  He went to his bunk and grabbed the kit bag labeled PETTY OFFICER SECOND CLASS SHONN YANKOWSKI. That name really said his entire story. He could have chosen the name of his father, who’d ended up doing life in Chino
. Yank had never met the man, but knew he’d been a thug for the Twenty-second Street Hustlers and part of the Bloods. His last name had been Johnson, but Yank had refused to take the name of a man he’d never met. He could have kept the name of his mother, who after spending his first six years clean and sober, had broken down into the sorry caricature of an L.A. drunk. Named Rennie Sabathia, his mother had called him Shonny, which went well with her last name. And he’d owned that name, right up until the day she’d died in the fire and he’d earned the burns on the side of his face. At thirteen, he’d met Joseph Yankowski, recently transferred from Chicago to Los Angeles as part of the longshoremen’s union. Uncle Joe, as Shonn learned to call him, ran a foster home in San Pedro, and Shonn soon found the first stable and safe place he’d ever known. Fostering turned to adoption and by the time Shonn turned eighteen and made his desire known that he wanted to join the U.S. Navy, he also changed his name to Yankowski, out of respect and love for Uncle Joe—not really an uncle, not even a relative, but more of a father than he’d ever imagined.

  “You daydreaming?” Walker asked as he passed, carrying his own bag. “Come on, let’s see the weapons sergeant and see if NSW has anything we can use.”

  Yank shook away the reverie and hurried after the team’s sniper.

  4

  NSW TRAINING CENTER. LATER.

  Holmes stared at the table with the empty chairs. His SEALs were getting ready for mission. He should be too, but he couldn’t help contemplating the empty chairs. Not only did they represent the current members of Triple Six, but those he’d lost as well. The deaths of Ruiz and Fratolilio were fresh in his mind. Ruiz had died at the hands of the demon Chi Long and Fratty had been almost beheaded by a chimera in the hold of a cargo ship in the port of Macau. Not only had they been incredible SEALs, but they’d been incredible men, too. Then, of course, there was Chong, the sniper whom Walker replaced. He’d spent a year with the team without so much as a scratch.