Age of Blood

by Weston Ochse

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. “You were pretty far gone. Frankly, I didn’t know if you’d make it.”

  YaYa nodded thoughtfully. “We now share something. Were you ever afraid it would come back?”

  “Every day.”

  “Even now?”

  “Even now. And you? Are you afraid?”

  “Terribly.” YaYa sat up straight and kneaded the sheet in his hands. “I can remember bits and pieces. There was a part where I remember barking and I wanted to stop but I had no control over my body. I can still feel the other being pushing me down. It was like it cut the strings of my ability to command my own body and then sat on me.”

  “You’re never going to forget.”

  “How do you deal with it?”

  Walker laughed. “For a long time I blocked it out. I forced myself to forget it had ever happened.”

  YaYa reached around and grabbed the cross from the wall behind him. “I don’t think I can ever forget.” He stared worriedly at the wooden symbol. “And this bothers me.”

  “Was it what I said?”

  “Yeah. You voiced something I didn’t know how to put into words. And you know what? It bothers me that my own belief has so little to do with it.”

  “Well, there’s hardly any empirical data to support what Laws and Vega said. They may be right. They may also be partially right. Ever seen a man walk on hot coals?”

  “At a luau in Hawaii once.”

  “Do you remember how he did it?”

  “Big guy. Talked about believing in his inability to get burned while firewalking.”

  Walker nodded. “I think I saw the same guy. It wasn’t like he skipped across the coals either. He stepped pretty firmly and didn’t get burned.”

  “And it was because of his belief,” YaYa added.

  “Exactly,” Walker said. “So there is something to the idea that what we believe makes a difference. Remember that.”

  “So it’s not just about what’s in our blood?”

  “I don’t think so,” Walker said, poking an index finger at his head. “It’s what’s in our mind. In our soul. Even skinwalkers like Ramon can decide when to change and when not to.”

  YaYa took it in. “Thanks, Walk.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Walker stood, feeling the aches and pains of the mission. “I’ll see you and Hoover upstairs when you feel up to it.”

  As Walker turned to leave, he saw YaYa rubbing at his left arm. Whatever it was, it was a stubborn healer.

  He left, walked down the hall, and paused. Two weeks earlier he’d returned to Quezon City. He’d returned to the Philippines to try and lessen its hold on him. Walker had thought about going back for years, but had always been afraid that his presence might bring back the things that had happened to him. But after the mission to Myanmar, he believed that there was little left of the grave demon which had once inhabited him except for an exceptional ability to detect the presence of something supernatural in others. They’d tried his powers on the two-hundred-plus years of trophies that adorned the walls of the Pit only to discover that they were copies, the real ones removed to the Salton Sea Research Center, where he eventually spent a week moving among the artifacts, fine-tuning an ability that had once merely been a nuisance.

  So standing on Flores de Mayo Street on a warm, misty Manila afternoon, he was at once struck by how different everything was and yet how similar it all seemed to him. For so long he’d been that terrified child of eleven who’d found himself living on the streets, his father dead, his brother far away, his mind enthralled by the vicissitudes of a demon laid upon him because of his father’s greed. Now the U.S. Navy had pulled out. No longer were there colorfully dressed hookers and garish signs, neon innuendos promising happy endings for all. The stench of garbage was slight on the wind, nothing like the terrible rot that had anchored his memories. Gone were the piles of trash. Gone was the gnarled old man he’d chased down the street. All that was left was a stain on the concrete where he and a million others had peed, slept, lived, wept, and prayed, a way station atop an impermeable concrete surface.

  He’d stayed at the Crown Plaza on Ortigas Avenue for two nights before he’d gathered the courage to seek out the orphanage. The Franciscan monks there had been fierce in their determination to mold him into something other than a Caucasian mutt with no future. Had he the wherewithal, he might have succumbed. But those years were so filled with a feeling of helplessness, he doubted he could have changed even if he’d wanted.

  Finally he’d dared to go. He’d taken a jeepney across the city, wedged in between a woman with a live chicken stuffed into an admirably realistic Coach bag and a young man playing a first-person shooter on his iPhone. Several times Walker had closed his eyes to try and bring back the child he used to be, but try as he might, that boy had been exorcised along with his demon. The child who’d dreamed of his father coming back and saving him was gone forever. Where before he fit into Filipino culture like a native, he now felt foreign, only understanding every other word, whether out of mental spite or because he’d purged the necessary knowledge to translate.

  Then he was there.

  St. Francis School for Boys.

  The orphanage was smaller than he’d imagined, but then again, he’d been smaller too. The world had been smaller. But as small as it was, it had seemed immensely imposing. With a steepled center, two wings flowed from right to left. Three stories, each window had white painted wooden shutters that he remembered chattering during the many storms like his own teeth when the monks set their eyes upon him.

  Then a memory hit and almost drove him to his knees. The Filipino monks had tried to insist he speak Tagalog, withholding anything other than old rice and water for weeks until he was able to learn enough rudimentary words to please them. He could still picture himself hammering his little fists against the stout wooden door of his closet-sized room, begging for food, milk, his father, his brother, television, comic books … anything to sustain him and keep him from realizing that his parents were dead and he’d been ripped from everything he knew.

  Walker felt faint as the heat of the past filled him. He knew his face was red. A pair of Filipinas scooted away, avoiding him as if he were a common drunk. They hurried down the street, much as they would have had they known him when he was younger, wrapped in entrails and feces.

  His first year in the orphanage had been perhaps his worst. He was forbidden to speak English. The Franciscan monks were constantly watching to see if he’d lapse. They seemed eager for him to speak his native tongue. Punishment was delivered immediately whenever they even suspected that he’d slipped into the language of the colonialists, as Brother Sindep referred to any American or European dialect. The inability to communicate was one of the most torturous punishments he’d ever received. Not being able to explain that something hurt, not being able to relate his fears, not being able to socialize with the other kids, all of it left a hollowness in his chest as wide and deep as the hole created by the death of his father. So when Yevgeny Marcos arrived at the orphanage, Jack saw in the white-skinned, half-Russian, half-Filipino the possible antidote to his agony.

  At first they were kept separate. Jack would only get fleeting glances of the other from across the schoolyard, or in the hall between classes. There were 950 boys at the orphanage and they were but two specks of white in a great yellow melting pot of childish anguish.

  Yevgeny was a walking target. Small and frail, he had the frame of a girl rather than a boy. Jack would discover later that it was because of a year spent in bed from meningitis, but when he first saw the other boy, he’d been curled beneath the kicking feet of a dozen Pinoy boys. The second time was when they’d both hidden in the coal cellar. They’d rubbed the dust over their skin and pretended to be Pinoy, each of them speaking in broken Tagalog, pretending to be anyone other than who they were.

  They became fast friends after that. Although they weren’t allowed to spend time together, they’d
exchange glances and hand signals from across crowded rooms. They’d find reasons to sneak away, often returning to the same coal cellar that had brought them together.

  But ultimately they were found out. The Pinoy boys began to call them bakla, shouting it whenever the monks were out of ear shot. They made sexual gestures, often pulling down their pants and waving their childish peckers suggestively.

  Jack had already learned to fight. He had gotten better each time he was beaten and now was at the point where he could defend himself.

  But Yevgeny wasn’t so lucky. He was too small. He was too sickly. He just didn’t have the heart. It wasn’t long before he climbed to the fourth floor of the dormitory, the floor where the monks lived, found an open window and stepped out. He hit the ground face-first.

  Jack had seen it happen. In fact he’d called after the boy when he’d gone inside, but Yevgeny had ignored him. To this day Jack wondered if he had said something different, maybe gotten his attention, Yevgeny might not have killed himself.

  The monks had said that the boy had died because he couldn’t come to terms with his sexuality. It was a load of bullshit, of course, but they tried to make it a teaching point for the other kids. As if the death meant anything other than that the poor boy was dead.

  Walker had to be careful. He knew what he was doing and it wasn’t healthy. Jen had counseled him on his idea that he had to fight to repay the dead. The dead weren’t owed anything, she’d told him in so many words. The living was who he should be fighting for. He should be fighting to make them safe. He should be fighting to return to them. To fight for something other than that was a rabbit hole from which he’d never return.

  34

  EXORCISM CHAMBER. LATER.

  Walker was gone thirty seconds before YaYa let out his breath. He hoped he’d put on a good enough show. What had happened was so terrifying that his toes were still curled and the muscles along the base of his spine were still clenched. If this had been anywhere near what Walker had gone through, then YaYa’s appreciation of his fellow SEAL skyrocketed. Flashes of the priests screaming at him and him screaming back were interspersed with rapid-fire images of torment, him in different poses as if seen by a third person—coiled and ready to strike, curled in a ball, standing empty-eyed, frothing at the mouth, barking at shadows, laughing uncontrollably. It was as if he’d become a mere passenger in his own mind. Whatever had taken him over had shoved him aside and taken control, and if it hadn’t been for the priest and the Knights of Valvanera, he’d still be in the thing’s grip. What had the priest called it? A little demon? YaYa couldn’t imagine the full power of a big demon.

  YaYa rubbed absentmindedly at his left arm as he thought about what his father would have done if he’d seen him possessed. The fact that he was a Navy SEAL was bad enough. To think that part of him had joined to impress his father, even though he knew the man would never be impressed, expressed the folly of his attempt. The formula for his father’s love was comprised of an equation he’d never been able to learn, which is why he’d continually done more extravagant and dangerous things. It had started with cross-country running in high school. Then he’d gone to half marathons, then iron man competitions, then full marathons. He’d won his first iron man at age nineteen and his first marathon at age twenty. Even after he’d joined the navy, he’d continued, finally discovering the glory of ultramarathons and thematic road races such as the one held in honor of Bataan Death March. He’d gone on leave after one such race, his feet bloody and his toes black with bruises. His father had seen them and merely commented that it was “the price you pay for doing the things you do.” If his father saw his arm or knew how bruised YaYa’s soul was from the possession, he imagined the old man would say the same thing.

  He frowned and shook his head. As he did, Hoover’s demeanor changed. The dog stared worriedly at YaYa, then slid off the bed. She found a place near the door and lay down, never once taking her eyes off him.

  Running had given YaYa a long time to think. Somewhere between the Bighorn 100 in Wyoming and the Zane Grey Highline in Arizona, he’d ascertained a truth about his father: The man would never forgive YaYa for joining the forces that had aligned themselves against the cause of the Koran. He’d heard his father drinking tea with the other men and talking about the state of Islam. He’d heard him yelling and them agreeing, at a table in their suburban American backyard, but he’d never allowed that information to become part of his own analogue.

  His father believed that the U.S. government had begun a pogrom against the Muslims and that it wouldn’t end until the last Muslim had been rounded up and sent to a camp or killed. The justice system, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. military were in the process of fulfilling this pogrom. The term came from Russian, to destroy, to wreak havoc, and was used to describe the Russian attacks against the Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How ironic that his father would use it to describe a supposed American design to attack the Muslims. And if the U.S. military was the tip of the spear used to conduct these attacks, U.S. Navy SEALs were the shiny blade of that same weapon.

  Yeah, if his father had seen him, the old man would have said the possession was something YaYa deserved. Just then, that piece of his heart he’d reserved for his father hardened. A son had an obligation to love his father, but he had no obligation past that. He’d spent what had seemed like an eternity trying to be something he wasn’t.

  35

  COMMAND CENTER, KNIGHTS’ CASTLE. MIDNIGHT.

  Laws and Holmes were already engaged in a heated conversation when Walker entered the twenty-by-twenty room. Pete Musso and two other techs Walker didn’t know where working furiously on a bank of computers. Jen held a pair of tablets, and she passed one to Walker as he came in and the other to Laws, who grabbed it without looking.

  “We should cut him loose right now,” Laws said. Although he was sitting, his body was coiled like a spring.

  “I shouldn’t have to tell you about old Chinese proverbs,” Holmes said. He was standing by a window, occasionally looking out at the throngs filling the streets. Even after midnight, the celebration of the Virgin was in full swing.

  “Ji Xi Nan Gai,” Laws said dramatically. “You want a Chinese proverb, try that one on for size.”

  Holmes sighed. “What’s it mean?”

  “Ji Xi Nan Gai. A leopard can’t change its spots.”

  Holmes turned from the window and nodded. “I agree. Wholeheartedly. But I’m thinking of another Chinese proverb. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

  Laws shook his head.

  “What? You don’t agree?” Holmes’s eyes were wide with surprise.

  “I agree with the sentiment, but there’s no evidence that it’s a Chinese proverb. It’s often attributed to Sun-Tzu, who said, ‘Know your enemy and know yourself and you will always be victorious.’ But it was Michael Corleone in The Godfather who said, ‘My father taught me many things here.’” Laws switched into an admirable imitation of Al Pacino. “‘He taught me in this room. He taught me—keep your friends close but your enemies closer.’ The character in the movie attributed it to Machiavelli, but there’s no evidence of that either. If one wanted to attribute it at all, then I’d either choose Mario Puzo, the writer, or Francis Ford Coppola, the director.”

  “I can always tell you’re pissed off when you began spewing Hollywood trivia,” Holmes said. “Keep that. Stay pissed. And if there comes a time we need to take care of Ramon, then let it fly. But until then…”

  Laws frowned but nodded. “I know, I know.”

  Holmes noticed Walker. “Good. You’re here. How’s YaYa?”

  “Good as can be expected. He seems like himself again.”

  “Excellent. We’ll give him some rest, then see if he can join us for the rest of the mission.” He turned to Jen. “The floor is yours.”

  She stepped forward. “Walker, if you can share your tablet with Yank, and Laws, yours with Holmes, we can
begin. I’ve synced them to mine so that you can follow during the brief. Let’s start with the BLUF—Bottom Line Up Front. Emily Withers is still missing. We don’t have a solid lead on her. We do have a tenuous connection with the Zetas. We also have a connection with Los Desollados, which we can trace back to her abduction. Regarding that, there’s been a development.” She toggled an image they all knew well. A still from Emily’s capture showing the sea monster grasping her in its mouth.

  “Don’t tell me,” Holmes said.

  “Sorry, but I have to. The picture and video are fakes.”

  Everyone sat forward and stared at their tablets as if they could discern this with the naked eye.

  “The whole thing?” Yank asked. “Even the girl? Does that mean she wasn’t taken?”

  “No, Emily Withers was taken. This we know. Given the time, we were able to pierce the sophisticated masking algorithm and the result was this.” Jen toggled a picture into view that showed two men in full scuba gear aboard a DSRV, one with his hands around her waist, the other driving the machine at high speed.

  “What the hell?” Laws sat forward. “And we’re just now breaking through?”

  “Couldn’t be helped. We pierced the algorithm as fast as we could. Thank Musso for even seeing that there was an issue.”

  As if on cue, Musso, a thin, geeky young man with a Star Trek emblem on the collar of his jacket, left his workstation and joined them. He took the tablet from Jen and began to scroll, which made the other two tablets do the same.

  “As you can see, looking at the raw view of the image, I noticed a slightly larger size of the image than should have been noted. Now, normally the size will be dramatically larger if an image had been superimposed. I’ve become used to looking for such things. In fact, I almost disregarded this except for my gut feeling.”

  “Hooray for Musso’s gut,” Laws said dryly.

  Musso didn’t respond. “What they did here was create an algorithm that reassigned quadrants of color. The increase in file size was due to the algorithm. The creation of the monster to replace the two divers was free of charge and apparently took no additional size value. Basically, they used colors already present in the original picture to create the creature. This is about as sophisticated as they come.”