by Sam Ferguson
I followed him and looked around. Most of the gravestones were old, faded and worn by time. Some of them had lichen and moss growing on them. The graves themselves were indiscriminate. There were no mounds of earth or borders to mark the actual area where the coffin was buried. Grass had grown up to overtake the grounds, with ferns and ivy invading from the north.
A large angel statue stood in the center of the cemetery. Her wings were folded in and her arms were outstretched. I noticed right away that her right hand had broken off. As I looked closer, I realized she was missing her nose as well. I know it wasn’t real, but for the life of me an old Dr. Who episode came back to me and I started to wonder if Weeping Angels were real. The very idea sent goosebumps down my forearms, and I found myself involuntarily staring at the statue, trying not to blink.
“Over here,” Hank said, ripping me away from my childish fear. The man was walking toward a large tree. I know what you’re thinking. Most trees are large in the lush forests, especially out so close to Olympic National Forest, and you’d be correct, but this one was different. You know those photos of massive redwoods that had tunnels cut through them to let cars pass? This one was that kind of large, except it was an oak tree. Its bark was gray with white splotches. Its branches stretched out, thick and strong, and its leaves grew bright and green. Hank moved to the tree and knocked on it.
Curious to see what was going on, I walked up to him. “So, is this like a secret tree or something? Is there a machine in the bottom that will suck fifty years of my life away?”
“Cute,” Hank said. The tree then opened up and Hank walked down a set of stairs.
My eyes shot wide and I stood there, staring at the open staircase and wondering how badly I had just insulted Hank. It took me a few moments, but I recomposed myself and walked in. I went down a few steps and then the tree closed behind me.
“Come on down,” Hank shouted from below. “I have some people I want you to meet.”
My heart jumped in my chest and suddenly I felt a bit nervous. The reality of what was happening was too hard to suppress any longer. I was in a magic tree, somewhere in the Olympic Peninsula, going into an underground lair beneath an abandoned cemetery.
What had I gotten myself into?
“Come on, Mills, time’s wastin’ and we have other things to do.”
I moved my feet. My shoes, a nice pair of sneakers that Hank had bought me just before my flight so I would have something other than the flimsy slippers I wore at the county jail, made soft echoing sounds as I stepped on each metal stair. I followed the spiral down until it opened up into a castle-like chamber. The walls were made of stone. Lights dangled from the low ceiling, but the bulbs weren’t the new daylight kind, they were the old, yellow light bulbs that gave the room a more gritty feel to it, like a nineteenth century mining shaft.
Hank was standing at the head of a rectangular table made of wood. How they had gotten the thing down the stairs was beyond me, but he motioned for me to sit in a chair at his left. I complied and sat quietly. I didn’t see any others present with us. I looked around the room again, and this time caught just a glimpse of a pair of swords hanging on a far wall with a shield covering them.
I sat there, nervously bouncing the heel of my foot on the floor. After another minute or two, a door opened somewhere in the back of the chamber, around a wall of stone. I couldn’t see them yet, but I could hear them chattering away. Hank gestured for me to stand up, so I did. I crossed my hands in front of myself and tried to put on a friendly face.
The group came around the corner and walked toward the table where Hank and I waited. As I looked at them, each and every one of them eyed me as well, as if second-guessing Hank’s decision to bring me in.
“This is Dan Schmidt,” Hank said, indicating a tall man with light red hair. He looked to be in his late forties. He was wearing a polo shirt that fit snugly around his chest and shoulders, but was very loose at the waist.
“Good to meet you,” Dan said as he offered his hand across the table. I reached out and shook it. The man had the grip of a bear! Not wanting to show any weakness, I smiled and tried to strengthen my grip against his.
“Dan is former HRT with the FBI,” Hank said. “He knows his stuff. He’s been called all over the world to handle problems.”
Dan smiled and sat down.
Hank then pointed to a short man that was maybe five foot five if he really stretched his back straight. “This is Robert Williams, our tech guru. You can call him Mack, though, as that’s what he goes by.”
“What’s up?” Robert said with a nod as he moved to sit next to Dan. “You’re a Mormon right?” he asked while obnoxiously chewing on a wad of gum.
I nodded.
“Well, I’m an atheist, so don’t even think about trying to preach around here, or I’ll have to beat you down with logic and scientific reasoning. Got it?”
“Crap, Mack, the only one ever bringing up religion is you,” Dan said with a shake of his head.
“It’s all right,” I said with a laugh. “I hadn’t thought of this as a place to proselytize.” Mack gave a curt nod, as if he had won some sort of epic battle. So, just for fun I poked him a bit. “Though, honestly, doesn’t science and logic point to a higher power than our own?”
Mack threw his hands up. “You see, I told you. Mormons never shut up about this.” Mack shook his head and pointed at me. “Listen, I have heard all about intelligent design, but you aren’t going to change my mind. Not one bit.”
I shrugged. “I just find it funny that I am sitting in an underground chamber with a magic tree for a front door, and that you all hunt monsters from other worlds, and you are unable to admit that somewhere out there, there might be a higher power. You’re a tech guy right? So with all the advances of science on our own planet, isn’t it possible that somewhere, in the vast and unending universe, another civilization figured out how to unlock immortality? If they did that, then conceivably they could have plenty of time to unlock mysteries of physics that we can’t even approach at this point. Would not such a civilization be considered gods to people like us?”
Mack frowned. He looked at me and then smiled. “Well, that is a new angle I haven’t heard before.” He glanced to Hank. “Let’s just move on with the introductions.”
“Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle, I have never heard Mack shut down before,” Dan said as he put the back of his hand to Mack’s forehead. “You feeling okay buddy?”
“Stop,” Mack said.
“You ever watch the movie Independence Day?” Hank asked me.
“Sure, who hasn’t?” I said with a nod.
“Remember how Goldblum’s character stopped the mother ship with an old mac laptop?”
I nodded.
Hank thumbed at Mack. “He could do it with two paper clips and a rotary phone. Also, he wouldn’t ever admit it, but he’s a good operator as well. Used to run all the missions with us in the field.”
“Yeah, and then I took a horn to the chest,” Mack said as he rubbed the right side of his chest. “Lung never fully healed after that. So, now I sit back with the computers and fun toys while you guys do all the hard work.”
Hank then pointed to a tall black man with a shaved head. “That’s Marcus Brown. He used to be an army ranger. He’s been places most people couldn’t point to on a map. More than that, he’s one of the best field medics I have ever seen. He can cut down the enemy as well as anyone else I know, but if you’re bleeding out, Marcus is the only man you want to call on for help.” Hank pointed to Mack. “You ever hear of someone else living through being stabbed in the lung in battle?”
I shook my head. I was sure there were such stories, but I wasn’t about to break Hank’s momentum.
“Well, let’s just say that Marcus not only saved Mack’s life, he did it while fighting off three harbinger wolves.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s that big wolf-man creature you pushed back into the porta
l in Dallas,” Dan said quickly.
“Three of them?” I asked.
“Well, I had already killed their master,” Mack put in. “So I did all the hard work.”
Marcus offered a half smile and sat down next to Mack. “You keep telling yourself that, brother. Maybe I won’t be there the next time you get gored by a Borelian.”
“A what?” I asked.
“We’ll get to that later,” Hank said. “For now, just focus on remembering the names of the people here.
A tall, very fit man came around Marcus and sat down at the end of the table opposite Hank. He had thick, black hair and bright blue eyes, but unlike the others he did not smile or even nod toward me. He just stared.
“I don’t like you,” he said flatly.
You ever have one of those instant repulsions to someone for no apparent reason whatsoever? In that moment, I sure did. “The feeling’s mutual,” I said before I even knew the words were forming in my mouth.
“Shut your hole, Flint,” Hank said. Hank then turned to me. “Mr. Mills, this is Flint. Don’t let him get to you. He tells all the new people that he doesn’t like them. Uses it to size them up by their response.”
I stared at Flint until he looked away and gestured for Hank to continue.
“Flint was also an army ranger, for a while,” Hank said. “He completed six years with the army and then joined up with a merc group. You ever hear of Blackwater?”
I nodded. I had seen the name in the news a few times since the war in Iraq started.
“It was a group like that, but a bit more secretive,” Hank said. “He’s a bit rough around the edges, but you ever get into a place where you’re holed up against insurmountable odds, Flint is the one you want to come in after you.”
Hank then looked around the room. “Where’s Amber?”
“She’s out on a bounty with the three vikings today,” Dan said.
The three Vikings? With a group as rough as this one, how does someone earn that kind of title?
Hank sighed. “Amber is our resident sniper. No formal training, as such. However, her father spent thirty years as a marine forward recon sniper. He trained her up from the age of three.”
“Katya is going over the file one more time,” Dan put in quickly.
Hank nodded. “Katya, you ready yet?”
“Da!” a thick, sultry voice called out from the back room. A slender woman with black hair and a very fit, curvy figure came into the room with a small manila folder in one hand. I noticed she had a pistol strapped on the right side of her waist in a tactical holster that had a durable cordura strap around her leg for extra stability. I wasn’t much of a gun guru, so I couldn’t tell what it was she carried, but it looked bigger than the glock Briggs had pointed at my face.
“Katya is former FSB,” Hank said.
“That’s Russian intelligence,” Dan clarified for me. “Think KGB, but with better tech.”
I nodded.
“I don’t play those games anymore,” Katya said in her thick accent as she whacked Dan playfully on the top of the head.
“I’d know if you tried,” Dan said.
Katya winked at him and then handed the file to Hank. “No you wouldn’t. We Russians only get caught if we want to. How long did it take you to uncover the Great Seal Bug given to your ambassador in Moscow?”
“Seven years,” Dan muttered.
“All right, get a room you two lovebirds,” Hank said as he opened the file. “Now, on to business. Mr. Mills, think of this as a kind of placement interview, if you will. You have already been assigned instructors, but the people around this table, including myself, will be responsible for deciding which team you join upon completing your training.”
“Fifty says he washes out in three weeks or less,” Flint said as he leaned forward and put his head down on his hand as if extremely bored by being in the room.
“I’ll take that bet,” said Dan. “I saw the video. This guy has fight in him.”
“You saw the video?” I asked. “But how did you get it? I thought Section Four had the only copy?”
“Bah, Section Four, smexion four,” Mack said. “If I explained how I took it, you wouldn’t understand, but it’s enough to know that I did.”
“You hacked into their systems?” I asked.
“Hacked is such a dirty word,” Mack protested. “It sounds like I am just creating cheat mods on a video game or something. I prefer the term—”
“Nobody cares, Mack,” Flint said.
Mack huffed and folded his arms.
“All right, back to the issue at hand,” Hank said as he held up the folder.
Katya walked around Hank and moved to sit next to me. She smiled when I glanced to her. I smiled back, and then promptly turned back to see what Hank had in his hands.
“Here we go,” Hank announced as he opened the folder. “Born in ’84. Lived in Phoenix until he was four years old. Parents divorced during his early childhood. Moved thirty-eight times before his seventeenth birthday. Finally settled down long enough at that point to finish the last bit of his junior year, and actually all of his senior year at the same high school.”
I straightened in my chair. The file was about me.
“Suspended thirteen times for fighting, but never expelled because all of the fights were self-defense, save for one.”
“He lost that one,” Katya interjected.
The others chuckled and I just put on a smile. I hadn’t lost that fight. I just realized after the first punch that I was picking on someone who didn’t deserve it. I let him win. I had gone through a lot of teasing after that, but it had been better than living with the guilt of pounding some poor twerp’s face out of peer pressure. Besides, as Hank already noted, I moved around a lot anyway. I was outta that place only a few weeks later.
“Continuing on,” Hank said as he cleared his throat and lifted the file to the light. “One fight was actually with a computer science teacher in the seventh grade.” A few of the guys laughed at that too. “Last recorded fight in the file was your sophomore year at a new school.”
Yeah. I remembered that one well.
“Says on your second day at Allbright Academy, you took it upon yourself to stop a group of kids, all of whom were part of the local gang, the Lucky Sevens with extensive rap sheets, from picking on another student.”
“It was more than that,” I said quickly.
Hank nodded. “Yes, the file mentions that you claimed the students were trying to pull a young lady into a restroom with them.” Hank tilted his head and looked back at the file. “Out of eight young men ranging from fourteen to nineteen in age, three of them were unconscious, two had broken arms and noses, one had a switchblade stabbed into his backside, one was vomiting blood, and the last one was barely coherent, but missing several teeth.”
“Holy –” Mack started, but was cut short as Hank continued.
“Also found at the scene were two additional knives, a semi-automatic .22, and drug paraphernalia.”
“That record is supposed to be sealed,” I said. “The police said they wouldn’t reveal my involvement to anyone.”
“Yes, it says that too,” Hank stated. “Apparently six of the eight you pummeled were under investigation for an unsolved murder at the time.”
“Pay up,” Mack told Marcus.
“Gentlemen?” Hank said.
I looked over and saw Marcus shake his head. “You don’t know you’re right,” he said.
“Yeah I do. You heard that and you still think Hank got him here with the ‘come see the world and explore the universe speech?’” Mack shook his head and looked to me. “Hank suckered you in with the whole, ‘come and help us protect the little guys’ line, didn’t he?”
I looked to Hank.
“You can settle this later.” His tone had shifted noticeably. Mack and Marcus straightened up and fell silent.
“Now, also says Mills played football. Started out as wide receiver, had a 4.6 forty—
”
“I still run that in 4.4,” Flint said.
“Nobody cares,” Mack said sourly. Dan and Katya laughed. Marcus smiled and patted Flint on the shoulder. “I care about ya, Flint, I care.” Flint shook Marcus’ hand off of him and grunted.
“Broke his hand in freshman year, then was team captain the last three years of high school after gaining forty pounds and switching to defensive end. Placed third in state powerlifting meet senior year. Also ejected from wrestling for body-slamming his opponent.”
“What, like the wrestling on TV kind of body slam?” Mack asked.
I nodded. “He tried to grab and squeeze something he shouldn’t have, so I picked him up over my head and then slammed him down. He deserved it.”
Mack whistled.
“Apparently that move was quite a popular one,” Hank continued. “Mr. Mills worked in security after the age of eighteen. He caught someone trying to steal auto parts from the service shop and chased the man down. The thief pulled out a socket wrench and Mills did the same body slam, only this time the opponent suffered a fractured neck afterward.”
“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” Dan said.
Hank nodded. “He also served on the local search and rescue unit, and helped to find a young six year old girl that had gotten lost in the woods. Served a mission for the LDS church in Russia, where the fights continued.”
“I’m sorry, but where are you getting all of this?” I cut in. “Most of that stuff I don’t talk about. Some of it was sealed, and the stuff in Russia… nobody knows about that except the other missionary who was with me at the time. I mean, I reported it to the mission president, but that’s it.”
Hank smiled and pointed to Mack.
“Anything the government has, I can get a copy,” he said. “Sealed records, expunged records, classified records, it doesn’t matter. I can dig up all sorts of bones.”
“Well, that’s enough to make a guy turn into a conspiracy theorist,” I said with a shake of my head.
“I’ll cut this short,” Hank said as he set the file down. “Four fights during your mission. One started by a group of skinheads who tried to mug you. Your companion at the time had a sprained ankle, so your choice was to run or fight. You fought. Second fight was a pair of drunks you saw slapping a homeless lady on the street. After knocking them out, you escorted the woman to a shelter of sorts. Third fight was a mafia enforcer.”