by Leo Romero
“No problem.”
Hassan gave him a thumb-up and a toothy grin. “A-okay!”
Dom chuckled. “Yeah, buddy, A-Okay,” he said as he climbed out of the car and into the shimmering heat of the Baghdad streets. He caught up with Trixie, dodging his way through the traffic, past the windshield wiping kids. He met up with Trixie on the sidewalk where, despite the headwear, they were immediately recognized as westerners and as a result were surrounded by street vendors. Trixie did her best to grin and shoo away all the trinkets and cloths that were shoved in her face.
“We gotta get off this street,” Dom suggested. They managed to drag themselves away from all the street sellers and dived into a side street. They soon found themselves amongst a residential area where it was quieter. A barefoot kid in a dirty Brazilian soccer shirt—similar to the one Gus was wearing back on the Amazon—was kicking a battered soccer ball up against a brown apartment building, which was riddled with bullet holes. Palm streets were scattered left and right, the surrounding buildings all either white or beige. Both the road and the sidewalk were dusty like there had been a dust storm and no one had cleaned up afterward. Dom arched his neck around in its socket, taking the whole area in. Again, it was kinda like South Side, just with more dust and beige buildings.
Trixie went straight up to the kid playing soccer. He stopped kicking the ball and stared at her like she was an alien.
She handed him some Dinar. “Hotel? Around here?” she said nice and slow.
The kid squinted against the sun and pointed over to a brown building in the near distance.
Trixie gave him a grin. “Thanks.”
She ushered Dom over, who gingerly walked along, a sudden feeling of discomfort rearing its ugly head. He could feel eyes on him from somewhere. They were being watched. He knew it. From where he had no idea.
That’s just crazy thinking again, buddy, he told himself. Get a grip. No one knows you from Adam here.
They walked along the hot cement road, Dom’s throat drying out again as if the very air was sucking the fluids out of him like a sponge. He popped the cap of his water and drank deep, wiping the sweat from his brow soon after. They passed a series of identikit apartment blocks that were straight out of a Soviet dystopian nightmare. Dom craned his neck up and now he spotted them: suspicious, frightened eyes on the balconies watching them go by. Dom didn’t blame them. The West had dropped bombs on their heads for years, so seeing a couple of reps walking through your hood was bound to get the nerves jangling. Thing was, he and Trixie were there to do no harm. In fact, it was the opposite, they were looking to liberate them from another form of parasite. They just didn’t know it.
He made sure not to stare at them for too long and instead looked straight ahead. His muscles tightened. The apprehension was palpable. It was real. Dom could virtually taste it. These people didn’t know what the future held for them. The near past had been nightmarish, so the projected future was anyone’s guess. Dom pitied them. Having to live on edge all day every day was something he’d only just learned about during his vamp hunting stint. Whether you’d make it to next week was a sensation he’d become most acquainted with. Hell, he was feeling it himself. But, to fear for your family in your very home was another proposition altogether. Dom sighed.
“What’s wrong?” Trixie asked.
“Ah, you know, it’s just these people have had it bad.”
“Yeah, I know,” Trixie said, looking up at an apartment block. A couple of kids were leaning over a railing and staring at them. One of them was aiming a toy gun at them. As they passed under, he began shooting. Dom grabbed his chest and acted like he was in pain, pretending he was getting shot. After a moment, he stopped and grinned. The kids turned and wheeled away from the balcony.
“Come on, stop goofing around,” Trixie said.
“Gotta goof around now and then. Breaks the tension.”
They reached the squat brown building with the red sign that read: Babylon Paradise Hotel.
Dom stopped and looked it up and down. “Classy.”
“It’ll do,” Trixie replied and stepped up to the entrance. Inside, standing behind the reception counter was a mustachioed Iraqi guy. A fan on the counter was on full blast.
Dom ripped off his shades, not wanting to look like a spook. They approached the counter and the guy stood up straight, that look of fear flashing in his eyes that a lot of the locals seemed to have.
“Salaam,” he said with an edgy grin.
“Salaam,” Trixie retorted.
“Hi,” Dom said with a grin.
“We’d like a room,” Trixie told him.
“Yes, madam,” the guy said. “Double?”
Trixie glanced back at Dom; he grinned back and gave her a double raise of the eyebrows.
“Yeah,” Trixie said with an unenthusiastic sigh. “Double.”
“Thirty thousand per night.”
Trixie pulled a wad of Dinar from her pocket and began counting.
“Mr. and Mrs...?”
“Dempsey,” said Dom.
Trixie stared at him sideways. Dom looked down at her and smiled.
“Mr. and Mrs. Dempsey,” Dom reaffirmed.
Trixie shrugged. “Dempsey,” she echoed to the guy.
The guy got a pen and began to write in his ledger. “Dempshee. D-E-M-P-SH...”
“No, no, no, buddy,” Dom said, waving his palms on the air. “D-E-M-P-ESS.”
“ESH?” the guy said and stared at him with confused eyes.
Trixie grabbed her mouth to suppress the laugh dying to get out.
“No. ESS!” Dom corrected. “Not ESH. ESS for ‘sea’.” He began waving his hand on the air, mimicking a boat bobbing on the waves. “ESS for ‘sea’.”
The guy’s eyes lit up and pointed his pen at Dom. “Ah, ESS for ‘sea’.”
“That’s right,” said Dom, nodding his head in an exaggerated fashion.
Trixie couldn’t hold her laughter in any longer and it burst out from her chest. She sprayed the ledger with spittle.
“Are you all right?” the hotel guy asked her.
She nodded, wiping the ledger down with her palm. “A-okay.”
“Here, let me write it down,” Dom offered. He took the pen, spun the ledger around and wrote in block capitals: MR. & MRS. DEMPSEY. He spun it back around and handed the pen back to the guy.
He immediately looked down at what was written. His eyes lit up. “Ah, Dempshee,” he said, nodding.
Dom let out an exasperated sigh. “Yeah, buddy, Dempshee. Can we get our key now?”
The guy turned and plucked the key off the wall behind him.
Trixie glanced back at Dom and twittered, her hand shooting up to her mouth.
“What?” Dom asked, giving her an agitated shrug.
Trixie shook her head. She turned away, and continued to suppress her laughter.
Dom gave her an unimpressed gaze, just as the guy returned with the key. Dom took it off him. “Cheers, buddy!”
The guy gave him a brief nod. “A’afwan.”
“Right back at’cha!” Dom said. He looked down at Trixie and grinned. “Come along, Mrs. Dempshee,” he said.
Trixie couldn’t hold it any longer. She burst into wild cackles. Dom moved ahead to the stairs, not looking back.
“Well, you gotta goof around now and then, Dom,” Trixie said after him. “Breaks the tension.”
Dom didn’t answer. He didn’t even look back. He rounded the corner, leaving her behind to laugh her ass off.
The room was a small, sparsely furnished hovel. The paint was peeling from the walls and the bed was rickety. The rug on the floor was frayed at the edges. The curtains were torn and barely covered the windows.
Dom looked around him, hands on hips. “Not exactly the Ritz,” he commented.
“It’ll do,” Trixie replied, dumping her bag on the old table to the right. Already sitting on it was an old cathode portable TV set; the kinda thing that was hot in the 80s. Dom fli
cked it on; a news report was playing. The news studio wasn’t exactly of the standard of Chicago True News Network, and the infobabe wasn’t exactly Janice Scott-Sinclair either; no blond hair, no pearls. Instead she was wearing a hijab and scant makeup. They switched to a scene on the streets of a city north of Baghdad where a car bomb had been set off. It was chaos.
Dom watched the TV agape. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed. Masked men were dragging people along blood-spattered streets, lining them up and machine gunning them. “My God!” Dom gasped.
Trixie nodded her head. “Yeah, that’s what’s going on here.”
Dom slowly turned to face her. “So, what the hell are we doing here?”
“Our job. Hunting vampires. Putting an end to crap like that.” She pointed at the TV.
Dom turned his attention back to the TV. Now they were showing a masked man, his eyes visible through a slit, brandishing a huge blade. Without warning, he turned and began hacking a man to death. His subsequent screams echoed off the walls of the hotel room.
Dom shuddered. “They’re showing this stuff at this time of day? I don’t believe it.”
“Probably desensitized to it by now.”
Dom continued to watch. The guy doing the hacking was now pointing his bloodied blade to the sky and shouting ‘Allahu akbar!’
“And they’re doing this in the name of God?” Dom asked in disbelief.
“Yep!”
Dom puffed his cheeks. “And that’s why I don’t go to church no more.”
“It’s not all Muslims, Dom. These are fanatics, crazies. Their ideology is in the minority. And remember, it’s guided by Rah.”
“So, where are the Iraqi authorities?”
“Give the guys a chance. They’ve just come back from a war against the world’s foremost superpower. By the time they had a chance to reorganize, the House of Rah seized the initiative and sent these guys in. They’re starting to take over. Region by region.”
“Christ...”
One of the masked jihadis on the TV turned around, hacked a piece of flesh from the body behind him and began chewing on it.
Dom went white. “Oh man, I can’t watch any more! These guys are sick!”
The news report cut back to the studio and the female anchor. She said a few words and they cut to commercial breaks. Thank God for that, Dom thought to himself, glad to be spared the brutal reality.
An Ambrosia advert came on, breaking that relief in half. Dom’s jaw dropped. “What the—”
A cartoon Arab guy in a headscarf was feeling sick, laid up in bed. A doctor in a lab coat sauntered up to him with a shot of green liquid in his hand. He jabbed it into the poorly guy’s arm and like a miracle he brightened up. He jumped outta bed and began dancing to the tune playing out of the TV. ‘Ambrosia, Ambrosia, Ambrosia,’ just like the commercials in the States, except here it was pronounced, ‘Ambross, Ambross, Ambross.’
“That’s insane,” Dom declared, staring at the TV with an open mouth.
“That’s globalism,” Trixie said.
The nasty, saccharine tune of the Ambrosia commercial began grating on his nerves. “I think I want the jihadis back.” He reached out and pushed the power button on the TV, killing the horrible din. Now, the traffic from outside filled the airwaves. “Ah, that’s better,” he said to himself.
Trixie had laid her stuff out on the bed. She was busy plugging magazines into dart guns.
Dom went and joined her. “So, what’s the plan?”
“We make our way to the outskirts of Baghdad to the Palace where Dad thinks Rah is hiding out. And you bet it’ll be crawling with those guys on the TV.”
Dom gulped even though his mouth was dry. “Great,” he said in a coarse whisper. He took a swig of water from his bottle. “How we getting there?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe we should look for a guide.” She clipped a magazine into a dart gun and shoved it in her belt. “Come on. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
They hit the streets of Baghdad once more. The sun was starting on its downward arc toward sunset.
“We better find someone who can get us to Al-Hurria fast before sunset. I wanna try and catch Rah while he’s asleep,” Trixie said in a low voice as they made their way back to the main street.
Dom wiped the sweat from his brow and pushed his shades up the bridge of his nose. “I hear you. Why don’t we try and get another taxi?”
“That didn’t work out too great last time. The roads are jammed. We gotta find another way to get there quick. We need to find someone who knows a fast route to the outskirts of the city.”
“All right. We could try asking some of those street vendors.”
Trixie nodded. “Sounds like a good idea.” A sudden chill ran up her spine, even though the temperature was soaring. She took a look behind her; the alley they’d just walked through ran off into the near distance. She caught a glimpse of a weird looking guy in traditional dress, a thick gray beard, and a patch over one eye. Once he spotted her staring at him, his one eye widened and he darted into a nearby nook.
Trixie sighed. “I think we’re being followed.”
“You mean the guy in the robes with the patch over his eye?”
Trixie stared up at him in mild surprise. “Yeah, you mean you saw him already?”
“He’s been trailing us since we left the hotel.”
“That’s very observant, Dom. I’m impressed.”
Dom shrugged. “I’m getting good at this crap now.”
“So, who do you think he is? Claw Order?”
“Most likely.”
Trixie nodded. “So, they know we’re here.”
Dom nodded back. “I’d say that’s a fair assumption.”
“Well, that’s just great.”
“Wonderful, Trix. But, not unexpected.”
“All right, let’s just play it cool.”
“I was, you were the one who brought him up. And now he knows we’re onto him, so good job.”
“Hey! You could’ve said something.”
“I didn’t wanna scare you.”
Trixie gasped as if insulted.
Dom grinned. “Now, come on, let’s get back to the main street.”
They continued down the alley-like streets, conscious of the weird guy tailing them. They walked past housing blocks, where the sounds of kids who’d probably seen more in their short lives than most adult westerners would see for the duration of theirs, were shouting and playing raucous games of shooting and war and battle, most probably reenacting the horrors they’d been cruelly exposed to. One of them poked his head over a balcony; he had a toy RPG on his shoulder. Dom rolled his eyes up to meet him. The kid went ‘pow’, then ducked beneath the balcony. Dom didn’t react; instead, he carried on walking, way too mindful of the guy back there for fun and games. He wanted to turn and see if he was still tailing, but at the same time didn’t want to risk catching his attention. He kept it cool; they entered a thin, shadowed alley, and Dom focused solely on the other end.
They reached halfway when Trixie shivered and turned her head to the side. “Do you think we should just confront him?”
“Who?”
“The guy tailing us!”
“Nah.”
“Why not?”
“He might not be alone.”
Something appeared at the end of the alley. Dom stopped dead in his tracks. “Uh-oh.”
Trixie’s head snapped around. “What is it?” she asked in a hot whisper.
Dom nodded his head toward the end of the alley, and the guy dressed head to toe in black standing at the end of it, blocking the exit. Only his eyes were visible through the slit in the black cloth covering his head. A red scarf was wrapped around his forehead that dangled by his shoulder. The guy’s cold eyes stayed fixed on them both as he unraveled something and allowed it to hang by his side. Dom stared at the whip the guy was brandishing in trepidation.
Trixie’s eyes widened. “What were you saying ab
out that other guy not being alone?”
“Now you get what I meant,” Dom answered, his gaze fixed on the masked guy ahead of them. There was no escape left or right; they were sandwiched between buildings. The only exit was the way they came.
They remained staring at each other for a few seconds, while the drone of traffic somewhere in the distance continued, punctuated by babies crying and children shouting.
The jihadi stood there like a shadow, a black phantasm haunting them. He was soulless; a meat robot, programmed to act and react. A faceless pawn. Staring at him was like being confronted by those panthers back in the Amazon; no humanity, just an instinct to kill, those glassy eyes devoid of compassion.
He began to advance. He stormed along the alley toward them, cracking his whip on the air. The sound snapped Dom into action. He whipped out his tranq dart gun and went to fire. At the same time, the jihadi snapped his whip; it cut through the air, slapping against Dom’s gun hand. A jolt of pain rocketed up Dom’s arm; he yelled in agony. He watched helplessly as his dart gun was thrown from his grip. It hit the wall and landed on the ground.
Trixie got into action. She pulled out her own dart gun when the sound of running feet made them both turn. Dom’s eyes widened. Another masked guy was storming down the alley from the opposite direction, armed with a machete. He raised it high in the air as he sprinted toward them.
Trixie aimed her dart gun. Before she could fire, the whip cracked on the air from behind her. Dom flinched. Trixie screamed in pain; she dropped her dart gun, her free hand shooting over to the upper arm of her gun hand where Whip Guy hit her.
Whip Guy’s lash gave Machete Guy time to reach them both. His machete came slicing down through the air like a guillotine.
Dom’s eyes bulged. “Look out!” he shouted.
Trixie spun her body to the side. The blade carved though nothing but air. Machete Guy followed through, his momentum causing him to stumble forward. Trixie landed a karate chop on his back as he staggered by, helping him on his way. He lost his balance, hitting the dirt ground in a heap.
Whip Guy leaped over his fallen comrade.