by John Conroe
Arkady, Trenton, and Lydia left in a rush of air, leaving me standing with Stacia just behind me. I sensed her turning and leaving at a regular pace, Awasos moving up alongside her. Grim kept mental overwatch as I picked my way through the crowd, ignoring the fearful eyes while I first pulled the bull spike from the cop car and then the other one from the remains of the pinned priest’s body, letting the corpse collapse to the ground, grotesque mantis arms beginning to melt. The Hell bull itself was steaming, popping, and sputtering as it melted into goo, taking its spikes with it. The two spikes I held, however, showed no signs of evaporating and my dark half wanted them.
I took a moment to look over the field of battle, my gaze pausing for a moment on the Chatterjee girl’s face before turning and following my people into the dark.
Chapter 17
“Welcome back to our special coverage of the events in Baltimore last night. You’ve seen the footage from our camera crew; some of you may have been watching it live last night when we interrupted normal programming to bring it to you.
“Our next guest was right in the middle of the events and she’s the first person to offer an explanation, although we’ll warn you right now that her ideas are beyond disturbing. CBS and its affiliates, producers, and officers want to make it clear that we are in no way endorsing her theories. Please welcome Miss Brystol Chatterjee. Brystol, welcome.”
“Thanks Keith, Melissa. It’s great to be here.”
“You’re a journalist, isn’t that right? With your own blog?”
“Yes Melissa, that’s correct. It’s called the Cryptic News. It’s what some call fringe journalism.”
“Fringe as in supernatural?”
“Yes, Keith. I investigate anything paranormal or supernatural. Most of it I debunk. Some turns out to be real.”
“And your investigation brought you to Baltimore?”
“Yes. I’ve been investigating a big increase in unexplained violent behavior in normal, noncriminal individuals that I feel is demonically influenced. A series of crimes led me to the individuals in the footage you have, first in New York City, then New Jersey, and finally, last night in Baltimore.”
“Brystol, you say demons like it’s an accepted thing.”
“Well, Melissa, it is to me. If you’d seen the crime scenes I have and witnessed the events in New Jersey and Baltimore firsthand, you might believe as well.”
“Let’s get back to last night. Most of the footage is too blurred to tell what’s happening at first, but at the end, we see an individual attack a police armored vehicle, basically a mini-tank, with just his bare hands and tear it open.”
“The footage you’ve shown is blurred because the action is taking place too fast for the camera to properly record. You have to record at ultra-high speed to make any sense of it, Keith.”
“And you’ve brought your own footage today that does just that, correct?”
“Yes, Keith. Brian, my cameraman, was filming the background with twin-mounted cameras. One high def and the other on standby, a high speed model.”
“He was actually filming you from across the parking lot and not the crime scene. Why?”
“Because, Melissa, I felt strongly that the people in question would show up and I hoped to contact them again.”
“Again? You’ve met them before?”
“Yes Keith, I met two of them, but before we talk about that, maybe we could show the footage. No one else has seen it yet, just me and Brian.”
“Of course. Let’s roll it.”
Brystol was sitting at a big, three-sided table with the anchors, a flatscreen set up next to her and her own set of video controls by her hands. The flatscreen showed a green-tinted camera view that had Brystol centered in the view. A different cameraman stood near her, his own camera scanning the crowd of onlookers and reporters. Suddenly he stiffened, visibly locking down on something. Brian’s camera view shifted toward where the other cameraman was looking and I recognized myself in my geek disguise. The flower van was visible behind me. The assassin in drag suddenly turned my way and started to draw his gun, then the footage blurred.
“Okay, here comes the high speed part. We’ve slowed it down as much as possible, and it took Brian a few moments to activate the other camera.”
The new scene didn’t have the green tint and was just a bit dark, but you could see me flipping myself over the bull monster and the flash of light from my coin, then the monster rolled.
“It’s hard to follow, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Melissa, it’s a little tough but after a couple of times through it, you begin to see what’s going on. See, what I think is happening at first is that person in the dress, who isn’t a woman, figures out that the nerd isn’t a nerd. That sorta kicks off all the action.”
“How did they figure it out, Brystol?”
“The camera guy next to me was running a thermal unit. Our mystery guy runs at a much higher body temperature than the rest of us, Keith. I think he alerted the dress guy with a micro radio.”
“How do you know that, Brystol?”
She bent down below the anchors’ desk and pulled up a battered camera.
“Remember the part where the old lady next to me knocked over the camera man and threw his camera at the armored car? This is that camera, and it’s not a standard camera.”
“Hey Carl? Carl? Come look at this unit. Carl’s one of our senior cameramen,” Keith said.
A balding man in khakis wearing a headset walked onto the set, a bit hesitant, but nonetheless examined the camera.
“She’s right. It’s been dressed up to look like a commercial camera.”
“There’s an output slot right next to the handgrip. Here’s a patch cord. I can show you what’s on it.”
Deftly connecting the cord that Brystol helpfully provided, Carl the camera expert turned on the camera and a new scene opened on the television monitor. Oranges and reds mixed with gray and black spread uniformly across the crowd, till one figure lit up the camera with whites and yellows. The figure is me.
“You can see how bright he shines. Makes disguises tough.”
“Who is he Brystol?”
“He’s a young ex-cop, Keith. His name is Chris Gordon and I think he’s the one the government keeps trying to kill.”
“Kill? As in assassinate? Brystol, that’s a serious charge to make. Do you have proof?”
“Do I have copies of signed kill orders? No Melissa, I don’t. I have now seen Chris on eight crime scenes like this one. And I believe he was brought in by law enforcement. Each time, he’s gone into scenes that have been locked down and treated like quarantine sites and when he comes out, the police flood in like he’s removed whatever contaminant was present. Many times, gunshots are heard when he’s inside with his crew. At the Jersey site, I spoke, off record, with several officers who witnessed all the events. NSA agents tried to take him into custody. They failed. Almost immediately, a US Navy sub launched a Tomahawk missile that should have blown that part of the Pine Barrens to dust. My eyewitnesses say that Gordon was the first to be aware of the missile and they believe he did something to crash it. Apparently so did the NSA agents, who stopped trying to apprehend him. Now you have this footage, Melissa.”
“So you think it was a trap?”
“Traps. One by the feds, the other by the priest thing and his pet. Both failed.”
“But Brystol, he threatened to kill police officers and federal agents. It’s on the tape.”
“Keith, when a country declares war, they should be prepared to lose soldiers.”
“They were cops, Brystol, not soldiers.”
“Semantics, Melissa. They dress like soldiers, carry assault weapons, and tried to shoot him after assassins poisoned his girlfriend. And despite all that, he still didn’t kill any cops. Even the one that was possessed is apparently alive and in the hospital.”
“So you believe that the priest somehow possessed the police officer?”
“Don’
t you, Keith? You’ve seen the footage. Let me roll the rest of our slowed down version and you tell me what you believe.”
The monitor played through the fight with the bull and the priest, then shifted to normal speed as Kirby pulled the demons to Hell, one at a time. The poisoning of Tanya and my altercation with the armored car rolled out, all from Brian’s vantage point.
“Can you slow down the part where he goes from back there to over by the tank thing?”
“It is slowed down, Melissa. We can’t get it any slower.”
“That’s incredible. One second, he’s over there and then he just appears over by the MRAP. Like he teleported or something. Tell me, Brystol, have you met him?”
“Yes, Keith, I have. I sat across a table from him a week ago.”
“He seems really intense in a serial killer way. How frightened were you?”
“At first I was pretty scared, but I think we are seeing his fighting face. Scary as hell. Normally, he’s surprisingly mild. Here, this is a photo I took right after our meeting as he was leaving.”
A still photo of me and ‘Sos with the kids outside the restaurant appeared on the screen. I was smiling, squatted down next to ‘Sos while the kids petted his thick fur.
“Whoa.”
“You’re right, Melissa. Look at the size of that wolf.”
“Wolf? Oh yeah, Keith, that’s a big wolf alright. Brystol, I don’t think I would characterize him as normal or mild looking, but that is a whole lot of a different look.”
“Brystol, what’s up with the wolf and the bear? Where do they come from?”
“Good question, Keith. But I’ll point out to you that the two animals have exactly the same markings and you never see them together.”
“You’re right about the markings, but what do you mean about being together?”
“No one ever saw Clark Kent and Superman together, or Peter Parker and Spiderman. Just pointing out that I often see the wolf, and sometimes the bear appears, then is gone and the wolf is back. Odd, right?”
“The whole thing is beyond odd, Brystol, including your use of comic book heroes. Tell us your real impression of what’s happening?”
“I think that demons and vampires are real. I used to think that he was part demon, but not anymore. I think he’s here to help us… to protect us from our own folly. I think that particle physics experiments have opened doorways to Hell and until they’re closed, we are all in danger.
“I think that religion has fallen out of favor at a time when we need it most. But he’s here and he can close the Hellgates and send the demons back to Hell. I think our own politicians are afraid of him, mostly because some group took a kid who’s important to him and he punished them… with a rock from space. I think the US government is trying to kill him, and we don’t have many chances left with him.”
“You think he’s somehow responsible for the asteroid that hit New Hampshire?”
“You heard the woman standing next to him, right, Keith? She flat-out says it. Then there’s the satellite that happened to fall out of space right into the same spot in the ocean where the sub launched the missile. Too many coincidences, don’t you think?”
“How could a human make an asteroid fall from space?”
“Who, Melissa, ever said he was human? Can a human rip open a tank with his hands? Can a human move so fast that it takes ultra-high speed recording to see his movements? Can a human banish demons with nothing but his will? I find that harder to believe than the fact that he somehow did them.”
“If he’s not human, what is he? Surely you aren’t going to say he’s a vampire?”
“No, that’s what his girlfriend is. He’s something else. I don’t know what, but I’ll tell you this… if demons and vampires are real, what else is, too? Werewolves? Witches? Angels?”
“You’re suggesting he’s one of those?”
“Then you tell me, Keith. You tell me.”
They stared at her in silence before Melissa suddenly flinched and touched her ear, turning back to the camera.
“Our guest today has been Brystol Chatterjee. You can catch her blog at the Cryptic Review. Thanks, Brystol.”
“Thank you, Melissa… Keith.”
“When we come back from break, we’ll check in with our very own Chuck Upton at the White House, where he’s awaiting the news conference by President Garth.”
Lydia clicked off the volume and turned back to where Tanya and I were lying on the motel bed. The drapes were all shut tight, keeping out the slight gray of light that was an October morning in Maryland. We had driven till we were only miles from Baltimore, finding a rundown motel in the middle of nowhere. Trenton, in a hasty disguise, had rented two rooms with a connecting door under an unused alias and credit card. Tanya was leaning back against me, a small trace of my blood on her lips from her third feeding. Woozy and weak, she was nonetheless on the mend from the silver solution that had been pumped into her neck. Arkady filled one small desk chair, his bulk threatening to crush it flat. Stacia sat on the other queen bed, which she had shared with Lydia while we watched Brystol’s interview. Trenton was asleep in the other room, having spent the last few hours on watch. ‘Sos took up the space between the beds, noisily crunching the chicken bones from the four KFC buckets that Stacia, he, and I had consumed.
“That was about as good as you could hope for,” Lydia said before turning a thoughtful gaze on Stacia.
“What? I thought she might be useful,” the wolf girl said.
“Oh, that was useful. More than useful. She was brilliant,” Lydia said.
“Explain, smallest one,” Arkady rumbled.
“For once, we are slightly ahead of the curve against an enemy. The President has declared war on Chris and, by default, the rest of us. Actually launching attacks against us. They’ve failed and that Chatterjee girl has put us out there into the realm of public opinion in the most positive light you could… as defenders of the people. I think we can expect an image attack in the President’s speech, one designed by Alexis Bishop to discredit and alienate Chris and the rest of us. Chatterjee actually preempted that.”
“We need to proceed with the rest,” Tanya said, stirring sluggishly.
“I will contact Nika and tell her to let Chet off his chain. He had a whole bunch of videos edited and cued up for release to social media before we bolted. I’ll have him send some anonymously to Brystol and put some up directly on the web,” Lydia said, rummaging in her small travel duffle and producing a small black pouch. Unsealing it, she pulled out a prepaid cell phone, turned it on, punched in a text, and hit send.
“Hashtag that beeoch,” she said quietly, turning off the phone and pulling its battery before resealing it into the pouch.
“Can’t the NSA track stuff like that?” Stacia asked.
“I tweeted a bland message on a fake Twitter feed that has all of five followers. All of those followers will retweet the message, which will be picked up by about twenty followers each, all of whom will retweet to their followers. Somewhere down the line, maybe ten passes in, it’ll be read by one of our people and get to Nika and Chet by word of mouth. If the NSA can figure out that it was a significant message from their most wanted fugitive, backtrack to the thirty-second interval where the phone was active, then they should be here already,” Lydia said.
There was a knock on the door as she finished talking.
Chapter 18
Almost instantly, I was standing beside the bed, my vampire in my arms and checking Grim’s 3D mental radar. The others were all equally alert, looking at me expectantly.
“Two people, alone. Neither is human, but I’m not sure what they are. Both armed, but I think blades, not guns. Male and female,” I reported, my voice Grim deep.
“Put me down, Christian,” Tanya said, “They aren’t NSA.”
I hesitated and she gave me a look. I put her down, but did so in a manner that left her slightly behind me. Looking at the others, I saw that Arkady had a sword in h
and, Trenton was standing by the pass-through door, a tomahawk in his right fist, and Stacia had produced a small, sawn-off double barrel shotgun from her clothes bag. She saw my look and smiled.
“It’s all about the accessories, Chris,” she said.
Still Grim-faced, I moved forward a step, mono-edging my left hand while my right hand pulled a pair of quarters off the nightstand. Ready, I nodded at Arkady, who strode to the door and pulled it open, the thin wood shuddering under his grip.
Two people stood in the doorway. The man was slightly shorter than I, maybe five-nine and lean. The female had to go six-one and was built like a professional wrestler. He was black and she was olive toned, maybe of Mediterranean descent.