Age of Blood

by Weston Ochse

  29

  ALAMOS, MEXICO. KNIGHTS’ CASTLE. NIGHT.

  Walker left the room, but instead of continuing upstairs for a reunion with Jen, he turned left and found a private corner. His proximity to YaYa had brought back a flood of memories he’d rather have cut from his brain with a steak knife.

  Little Jackie Walker waiting in the pile of trash. The liquid from banana skins, coffee grounds, and rain-soaked rags seeping through his clothes, making him shiver. His teeth chattering. He feels what could be gravel or hardened chunks of dog shit against the soft skin of his bare chest. A piece of rubber he’d seen thrown away by the Hookers on Llollo Street in Barrio Barretto rests like a deflated sausage two inches from his nose. A wasp crawls inside, causing the rubber to wriggle and jump. He feels rats scurrying along the backs of his legs. When they sniff at his skin, he fights the urge to jerk as their whiskers tickle the soft underskin of his knees.

  Feral.

  Like a pig.

  Like a dog.

  He is wild and eager to gnaw on something that screams.

  Walker had been possessed for a time and it had almost killed him. Now, the blood-memory of the event was used as a supernatural early-warning radar, and as he’d sat near YaYa it had gone off like NORAD during a Russian multiple-nuclear-launch drill. He’d tried to define the strange energy coming from the SEAL. Walker had been unable to put it into context while he’d been close to YaYa, but now that he was away, he was able to define it. Malice. Pure. Concentrated. Malice. And for a young man whose joie de vivre was contagious, malice was the last thing Walker would have expected coming from him.

  But Walker had to be sure before he went to Laws and Holmes. He didn’t want to be wrong about this, so he tracked down Yank, who was trying to talk to one of the Knights about food.

  “Do you speaky Englisho?” he was saying as Walker jerked him away.

  “Follow me,” Walker said, without further comment. Hoover fell in beside the two SEALs as they went up the stairs. He saw Jen through a doorway, working, but didn’t go inside. She wore jeans and a simple white blouse, and had her red hair pulled into a loose bun. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to hold her. But that would have to wait.

  He checked the rooms on the right side until he found YaYa sitting on a bed, glaring at the floor with barely contained … malice.

  Walker and Hoover went into the room first. “Come in and close the door,” he said to Yank.

  Hoover’s ears were laid back. Her tail was between her legs. The hackles along her spine were at attention and her legs were bent, not to leap, but to cower. And if there was one thing Hoover had never done, it was cower.

  When the door was closed, Yank joined Walker at the foot of YaYa’s bed. The room was little more than a monastic cell. A cross hung on one wall beside a single window. The small twin bed pressed against the other. Beside it was a small table with a bible and several unopened bottles of spring water.

  “What’s going on?” Yank asked.

  “Ask YaYa.” Walker felt the buzz like an undercurrent of electricity. It set him on edge. He brought his upper and lower jaw shut to keep his teeth from chattering.

  It was clear that Yank couldn’t feel what both the dog and Walker had zinging through their senses. “What’s going on, YaYa?” Walker asked.

  YaYa had been looking at the floor this entire time. He turned his head slowly and appraised the two SEALs with glowing eyes. He pulled his mouth into an impossible grin, the edges of his lips almost touching his ears. But instead of speaking, he chattered like an insect.

  The sound sent shivers up Walker’s spine, shivers that were so painful, he wanted to cry out. But he couldn’t. Other than YaYa himself, Walker was the only one who knew what was going on and he had to keep his head about him.

  Yank’s jaw had dropped about as far as humanly possible. “The fuck is going on?”

  Walker pulled his headset from where it hung at his waist, and spoke low and quick. “Break. Break. Ghost One and Two, this is Ghost Four. Come to my location now. Bring flexicuffs.”

  A second passed, then, “Four, this is One. What’s your location?”

  “YaYa’s room. Second floor. Left of stairs. Sixth door on left.”

  YaYa had returned to normal. “What are you doing?” he asked with unnatural calm.

  “Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine,” Walker said. “Be ready, Yank.”

  “For what?”

  No sooner had Yank asked the question than YaYa launched himself not at them, but toward the window. Glass crashed as his arm bashed through. Yank dove and caught YaYa’s feet with no time to spare and jerked him back inside. YaYa ended up on the floor, his right arm gushing blood, but that didn’t stop him from fighting. He lashed out with a leg and caught Yank downtown central. Yank fell to one knee, which brought his face closer to YaYa. Walker never remembered Jabouri being anything other than average in combatives, but the speed and energy delivered from his fists to Yank’s head were incredible.

  Feet pounded in the hall and the door swung open.

  Holmes and Laws braced in the doorway.

  “Possessed!” Walker cried. He grabbed Yank and hauled him backward as Holmes and Laws descended on YaYa. One grabbed his legs, the other his arms. The bed hit the wall and the nightstand overturned. Blood flew everywhere as YaYa barked and hissed, trying to shake loose as his teammates hogtied his ankles and wrists. He wouldn’t give up. His limbs rattled on the wooden, impossible drum rolls of leavemethefuckalone.

  “He’s going to break his back!” Laws cried. He turned YaYa onto his stomach and cinched the ankle and wrist cuffs together. Trussed as he was, YaYa’s hysterics were reduced, but his convulsions threatened to dislocate every joint in his body.

  Three Knights appeared at the door, Vega in the forefront. “What have you brought into our house?” he commanded.

  “We need a priest,” Holmes shouted at him.

  “I am a priest.”

  Holmes paused only briefly. “Of course you are. Get the fuck in here and do something about this.”

  “Not here. Not now.” Vega gestured for one of his men to enter.

  A slender guy with a plastic box in his hand stepped into the room. He slid to his knees and opened the box. He pulled free a syringe and plunged it into YaYa’s stomach like a pro. The effect wasn’t immediate, but about five seconds later YaYa’s limbs slowed and his howling dropped to a mere whimper. After half a minute, YaYa was as still as the dead.

  “What’d you do to him?” Holmes asked, sitting up and rubbing his jaw from where he’d been hit at least once.

  “Put him out. Can’t work with them this way. I never understand it either. They know they’re going to be found out, so why fight it?” The slender guy stood and left the room.

  Vega pointed toward YaYa’s still form. “Have your men take him and follow Rodrigo. We have a special cell for him. A place where he won’t get hurt until we have time for an exorcism.”

  “You’re not taking him anywhere without my permission.” Holmes stood, putting himself between YaYa and the door.

  Vega gave as good as he got. “Then you’re going to give me that permission. You brought this evil into my house. I cannot with any good intention let it go upon the free world. Now that he’s here, we’re going to try to get him out of his current state. SEALs or no SEALs, you must not try and stop us.”

  Holmes’s face was implacable when he said, “Fine. Laws, make sure he’s in a good place. We have to go out on mission, but once we’re done, it’s back here to see if we can save YaYa.”

  Walker and Laws grabbed YaYa and lifted him by his arms and legs. As they passed by, Holmes placed a hand on YaYa’s head. “You fight that thing inside you, YaYa. Fight it like you’ve fought nothing else in your life.”

  30

  ABANDONED ASYLUM. NIGHT.

  SEAL Team 666, minus Chief Petty Officer YaYa Jabouri, who was currently confined to a specially designed padded cell in the basement of the bui
lding the Knights of Valvanera called their castle, waited in the tree line outside the asylum for a word from J.J., who was atop the same building Walker had used earlier. Instead of Walker performing his duties as team sniper, he was detailed to provide direct support to the close-quarters battle (CQB) that they expected to transpire. Everyone was up-armored, wore MBITRs, had nines strapped to their right thighs, knives strapped to their left thighs, and carried their HK416s sunk deep in their shoulders, barrels low and ready. Outside their armor, they wore Rhodesian military vests because of the multiple pockets for storing extra ammunition. Protec skate helmets painted black did little to protect their heads, but strapped to each of their chins was a curiously alien-looking set of night-vision goggles with four lenses called QuadEye. Four 16mm lenses reduced the need to pan left and right by re-creating peripheral vision and incorporating the multiple feeds into a head-up display (HUD) similar to those used by combat helicopter pilots. The SEALs were uplinked through Special Operations Command to allow external monitoring of each SEAL’s feed during the mission. But only Holmes had the ability to receive commands, if and when someone in the cheap seats wanted to weigh in. Such a thing rarely happened, although if it did, it would surprise no one. Because they were moving to recover a serving senator’s daughter, there was interest at the highest levels.

  The plan was simple. They’d already had an NSW proprietary micro unmanned aerial vehicle (MUAV), the RQ-11B Raven, circling the target building at five hundred feet. Its lookdown radar was integrated into the QuadEye’s HUD, and could be monitored to detect movement or to track anyone leaving the area. The Raven was controlled in real time via satellite from SOCPAC headquarters in Hawaii, with local command authority detailed to Lieutenant Commander Holmes.

  In addition to the Raven, operators controlled two whisper-mode Draganflyer X6s, each carrying a multispectrum camera. These remotely operated unmanned helicopters had a six-rotor design, giving them the ability to hover in thirty-knot winds. The Draganflyers had spotted and assessed target sets through windows, helping to gather the data needed to most effectively rescue the senator’s daughter.

  There were a dozen Knights arrayed around the asylum to keep anyone from leaving. Reports from J.J. and the Knights indicated that there was little or no reaction regarding the missing Zeta sniper. If he’d been positioned to provide security, he must have been a singleton, or else they were a lot less organized than commonly believed.

  Employing Ramon in the attack would have been a plus, but he was nowhere to be found. Walker doubted he was out looking for a Zeta connection. More likely he’d decided to bail after they asked him about the Zeta presence. His inconsistency was one reason they wouldn’t make him part of the plan.

  Now that it was night, Triple Six would bring more technology to bear. The combined efforts of the Raven, Draganflyers, and J.J. combined with Walker’s observation through the IR function of his Stoner allowed them an almost complete understanding of the beegee positions. So far they’d counted fourteen warm bodies moving about and five lying prone. They could be sleeping, reading a book, jerking off, or prisoners. The IR resolution from this distance wasn’t exact enough to do any better than that. But four of the five were located on the third floor in the same wing, so that would be their first target. Holmes figured they had thirty seconds tops before all hell broke loose after they went in.

  The Knights of Valvanera had orders to shoot Los Desollados on sight. They didn’t have issue with that. Although they rarely crossed paths with the neo-pagan Aztec cult, the reality of them competing for the souls of the people of Mexico, the very idea that the Virgin could lose followers to a leprosotic Old World god drove them to accept murder as their divine right.

  Walker felt the familiar dryness in his mouth. He mentally inventoried his equipment. His weapons were ready. He wore ballistic forearm pads and gloves. His armor plates protected his kidneys, back, chest, and abdomen, and fit snug into the carrier. Other than the weight, he barely knew they were there. He also had three fragmentation grenades, resting in quick-release pouches.

  The team’s only odd uniform concession had been to wear hockey masks which covered their faces but left holes for the eyes and slits for the mouth and nose. The masks gave the SEALs the look of a group of tactical Jason Voorheeses. The SEALs normally wore the masks if they were concerned with video surveillance and for ballistic protection, but that wasn’t the case here. They wanted every edge they could get, and if that edge came from scaring the lepers, then so be it.

  Holmes’s mask was black with a white slash across it.

  Laws wore a mask with a green camouflage pattern.

  Walker’s mask was bloodred, to honor their fallen team member, Johnny Ruiz.

  And Yank’s mask, from the tried and true tradition to fuck with the new guy, was fuchsia.

  No telling what the beegees were going to think when they saw Triple Six enter the room. And they would see them, because Triple Six had decided to leave the power on so as not to give away their advantage of surprise.

  “Be ready in ten, nine, eight, seven, six…” Holmes went silent as each of the team counted down themselves. Silence was their ally, and all their rifles and pistols had suppressors.

  Their CQB stack included Hoover, who was in the fifth-man position. She wore tactical body armor that protected her sides and chest. Her eyes were protected by specially designed ballistic goggles.

  “Move,” Holmes ordered.

  In the tight bunch they called a stack, Triple Six moved forward in a single file—Yank, Laws, Walker, Holmes, and Hoover. They moved in a combat crouch, weapons alternating sides. Even Hoover seemed to creep forward on alligator legs. And they were fast. Like a single beast they moved to the front door, opened it, and stacked into the well-lit room.

  Yank buttonhooked to the left, searching for targets through his QuadEye. He found two, double-tapping each before they could even notice he was there.

  Laws entered next, buttonhooking right. A pair of beegees stood in the center of the room, uncertain of what was going on. These belonged to Walker, who did his own double-tapping.

  Holmes followed, checking the quadrants. “Clear,” he said.

  At first Walker thought the beegees were all wearing gilly suits—apparel worn by snipers with hanging pieces of material used to resemble foliage to help the sniper to blend in with his surroundings. But on closer inspection, he saw that it was skin … long lengths of skin. The skin appeared to be stitched into shirts and pants, draping the wearer in multiple layers. When Walker had learned about Los Desollados, or the leprosos as Juan Carlos had called them, and their penchant for wearing skin in honor of their god, Xipe Totec, he didn’t at all think it would be something like this. Not only were they terrible to look at, with some of the skin rotting and flaking, but the stench was unbelievable. Even the zombies they’d fought days earlier hadn’t smelled as bad.

  Triple Six had a choice to go up to the top floor and work down, or take the left or right wing. All but one of the prone figures were on the top floor, so they stacked up the stairs, moving against the walls and ignoring any targets in the hallways.

  When they hit the top floor, they moved right. They’d wanted doors to close behind them, but there were no doors to the hallway. So Holmes knelt and aimed down the hallway to the left while the rest of Triple Six stacked to the first door. Yank opened the door, then let Laws take up position one, buttonhooking into the room and taking out the beegee lying in bed. This one had removed his skin suit, which was draped across the back of a chair. He was just a man, thin, balding, old, and now very dead.

  They repeated the entry into three more rooms before someone decided to put up a fight. Just as Yank and Laws entered a room, a beegee exited a room two doors down. He wore very little skin and carried an MP5. He brought it up just as Walker was turning. Walker fired first and moved toward the man as he continued to fire. He kept moving and kept firing until he was standing over a dead man. He kicked the weapo
n away, then checked the room he’d come from.

  As he looked into the room, Hoover ran past him. Walker jerked his head back out and watched as Hoover leaped into the air, coming down on the face of another man. The dog buried her head in the man’s neck and ripped upward, coming away with a meaty length of throat, showering the wall and herself in a curtain of blood.

  But Walker should have been paying attention to his own piece of the mission, rather than watching Hoover. A leproso stepped from behind the door and stabbed at his face with a knife. The point of the blade hit his ballistic mask and slid sideways onto the buckle of his vest, across the side of a hand grenade, then down his chest, cutting through the material holding his chest plate.

  Walker jerked back and as he did, he felt the plate shift, then fall free, leaving his chest unprotected. His opponent kept coming and Walker swung the butt of his weapon up, catching him in the chin. The man’s eyes lost focus as he began to sag to the floor. Walker followed him down, took the knife from his loose fingers, and plunged it into the middle of his forehead. Then he reached down and grabbed his armor plate, using it to hammer the blade into the skull, once, twice, and just as it seemed he was done, he turned and hammered one last time, driving the knife to the hilt so that the blade pierced the wood floor behind his attacker’s skull.

  “Nice one, Ghost Four,” Laws said. “But you’re supposed to be wearing that armor, not using it like a hammer.”

  “Stuff it, Ghost Two. Ghost Four, clear the rest of the wing with Hoover, then on me. Two and Three, on me,” Holmes commanded.

  Holmes stood from where he’d been kneeling and made his way down the other wing, with Laws and Yank behind him. The Draganflyer operators gave Holmes guidance and the three SEALs moved down the hall until they were at the fifth door on the left. Walker reminded himself that he had his own mission and turned away just as the other three SEALs moved into the room and fired.