Authors: Wayne Batson
Rez switched her Cobra 2-way radio on and popped in the earpiece. There wouldn’t be much chatter until they were inside, but Rez didn’t want to miss a moment. Several heartbeats passed. There was a single click. Then, Armageddon.
Glass shattered. Flash-bang grenades overwhelmed the darkness with phosphorus white and ruined the silence like a host of wrecking balls. The next thing Rez knew, the tactical team had bludgeoned their way through the front door of the home.
“Den, clear.”
“Living room clear.”
“Kitchen and dining room, clear.”
“First floor clear.”
It went on like that for several seconds as the team scoured the home. But, with each territory cleared, Rez began to wonder. There were no shots fired. No loud commands of “Get down on the floor!” The icy finger of doubt slid down her spine.
“Bedroom one, clear.”
“Second floor, clear.”
“Wait,” someone said. “I’ve got an elevator shaft. Back of the kitchen by the pantry.”
Another voice: “Door’s stuck open on an overturned trash can.”
“Caution, Phipps,” Barnes said. It startled Rez because his voice was right behind her
and
on the 2-way. She hadn’t seen him circle back around the SUV.
“Roger that, sir,” Phipps returned.
Rez shivered from more than the chill in the night air. She could only imagine stalking around the home of serial killers in the dark.
“Elevator panel shows there’s a basement level.”
“No stairs?” Phipps asked.
“Negative. Take it?”
“Barnes?” Phipps asked. “Your call.”
“You have a plan?” the Deputy Director asked.
“Yes, sir,” Phipps replied.
“Do it.”
For nearly a full minute, Rez heard nothing but a few clicks.
Then: “Some kind of combination of turns,” someone said.
“Turning what?” Phipps asked.
“Key,” the other returned. “There’s a key in the lock. One moment. There, got it.”
Rez wondered why Lacy and Gainer would leave the key.
Thirty seconds later: “Basement clear.”
“House is empty.”
“But we got the cages,” Phipps said. “This is the right house.”
“You would not believe the tech gear they’ve got down here,” someone said. “It’s a freakin’—hold on.”
Rez tensed.
“I’m picking up some kind of…”
“…it’s cycling higher,” someone else said. “Do you hear that?”
He kept the channel open, and Rez heard something faint in the background. It reminded her of the cooling fan in her computer when it ramped up. “Barnes,” she said over her shoulder. “Barnes?”
“Phipps, get your people out of there!” Barnes yelled. He looked to Rez like he might crush the 2-way in his fist. “Phipps!”
“You heard the man,” Phipps said. “Clear out!”
“Dear God,” someone said. “…elevator’s locked out.”
“Run a by—”
FOOM!
The flash lit the entire suburban neighborhood. The explosion wasn’t a thunderous thing but rather a sudden vacuum of all sound.
Rez picked herself up off the ground and blinked stupidly at the scene. Bloody fire and a gargantuan vomit of smoke boiled up into the night sky. Rez’s ears rang so fiercely that she didn’t hear the chunk of burning debris that hit the sidewalk just a few feet from where she stood. She saw it though and leaped backward, crashing into the arms of Deputy Director Barnes.
She shuddered, turned, and backed away from him. There was blood on his forehead, dribbling over his brow and down his cheek. She could see his mouth working, but couldn’t hear him.
She turned back to the burning home. She’d seen all kinds of explosions before. She’d even caused a few. But this seemed different. The house had not exploded outward. The outer structure was still intact. But the roof was completely gone. It was as if the force of the blast had come from below and was channeled upward. Even now, the fire looked more like a focused torch, belching its fiery breath into the sky.
The ringing began to subside, and Rez heard a man shouting. It was Klingler. She turned and found him walking in slow circles, shouting the same question over and over again: “What happened?”
Rez strode to him and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Are you hurt?” she asked. He didn’t answer but blinked as if not recognizing her. “Are you hurt?”
“N-no,” he mumbled. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Give me the keys,” Rez demanded.
“What?” he asked. “Why?”
“Klingler, you give me the keys or so help me I will knock that sorry excuse for a hairpiece into the Gulf!”
The burning house reflected in Klingler’s uncertain eyes. He blinked and then held out the keys.
Rez snagged them from his hand and ran to the SUV. She rammed the keys into the ignition, cranked the engine, and got on her cell. “This is a police emergency,” she said to a 911 operator. “There’s been an explosion. There are multiple officers down, and the fire is still burning.” She gave the address and her best estimate on casualties. She ended the conversation by invoking all the authority of the FBI to get rescue and fire to the scene as fast as possible.
“This is Sanderson,” came a voice suddenly from the two-way radio.
Rez tossed her cell onto the passenger seat and snapped up the radio. “Go ahead, Sanderson,” she said.
“Phipps is down,” he said. “I repeat, Phipps is down. I’ve got Gray, Karchek, and Marks with me. Three more are on the east side of the structure.”
“I’ve got this, Rezvani,” Deputy Director Barnes said, his voice a little shaky on the radio. Rez stared out, and there he was, on his feet. She caught his eyes. “You sure?” she asked.
Barnes nodded, a little trickle of blood still oozing down his forehead. And then, Klingler was there at the window.
“Look after the Deputy Director,” Rez told him. “He’s hurt.”
“Wait a minute, Rezvani!” he whined at her. “Where are you going?”
“To see a man who can help us,” she said. “A man I had thrown in jail.”
Chapter 35
I counted five shots: three from one gun; two from the other. The screams were high on the register, strained, and cut ominously short. And then, the inmates started to scream.
“Shut up!” I roared, again projecting my voice. “SHUT UP OR YOU WILL DIE!”
I pressed my head into the space between two bars and tried to see up the hall. There was no way to turn my head, but in my peripheral vision, I could see the cellblock’s door. Maybe it was the angle, but I couldn’t see anything through the thick glass window on the door. Then, an inky blotch appeared in the center of the door and began to spread outward malignantly. The flowing black engulfed the frame of the door, and I saw glowing embers appear along its outline. No flicker of flame or tongue of fire. Just voracious bloody orange embers–they consumed the door. A gout of black liquid spouted from the center of it all like crude oil gushing from a vertical wound.
I’d been a fool. Legend or not, this thing was coming. And it was coming for me. I had no choices left. I’d need to unmask. But could I harness enough concentration? The crawling, itching, electrical aura of the thing intensified greatly as it drew near. I could barely think straight, much less call all of my body’s systems into perfect symmetry.
“No! NO!” It was a woman’s voice, shrill and desperate.
I slammed into the bars, straining to see, pushing my face until my skull ached. I saw the shadow form, a writhing, cloaked apparition. It stood before the first cell, and a searching, smoking tendril surged across the distance and drove through the cell bars.
There was a dire scream and then, a wet gurgling groan. Transfixed, I watched the smoky tendril withdraw and heard a sharp suck of air, a lifeless gasp, and a sound like a gallon of paint splashing across the floor. Then, the cell block exploded in a cacophony of shrieks and screams as the other inmates recognized the approaching cloak of death.
“What are YOU doing!” I cried out through the bars. “You came here for me!”
There came no answer, but the shadow figure, a storm that walks, came forward. I threw myself to my knees and gasped for air. I was dangerously close to hyperventilating. I needed to think, needed to find an inner calm…a void where I could transit to my unmasked form. It took form in my mind like an undulating blue horizontal plane. I could feel the pulses of energy begin to throb. I was almost there.
The man’s scream hit me like a physical blow. I fell backward, nearly popping the ligaments in my knees. Whatever calm concentration I had mustered, it was destroyed now. And the man continued to scream. It was the death cry of a big man, deep, wrenched up from his gut and wrung out of him until there was nothing left.
I picked myself up and stumbled once more to my knees. I sought the calm but did not find it. I heard another scream, this one more of a dry, wheezing thing. Then there were curses in English…and in Spanish, followed by a sudden, defiant yell. A single shrill cry came next. Then, a wretched, gargling throaty shout.
The walking shadow was killing the inmates one-by-one as it came, sluicing through the bars and leisurely ripping their lives away. In a corner of my cringing heart, I felt stricken with guilt. I’d given the inmates false hope. There was no way to hide from this thing.
The biker cursed it before crying out his last. The next death, there was no scream at all; only a vicious tearing splatter. Now the shadow shape was visible, just a cell away from my own. The bodybuilder put up a fight, which is to say, he banged around in his cell before groaning and falling silent.
Legs of black vapor strode forward, and it was there just outside the bar. The writhing oily black smoke seemed to coalesce in part, becoming a being of scaly, silver-blue flesh. All doubt scattered and was gone. The legend was no more. The Nephilim lived and walked the earth. And now, it leered at me with pestilent yellow eyes.
The voice that warbled out from its lips might have been the sound of a locust swarm devouring a field or the bleating of a thousand lambs being slaughtered at once. It might have been the silent cries of untold millions of unborn killed in the womb. It sounded like all of those tragedies together and yet, I could understand the speech as clearly as my own.
“I…have brought you…your tool.”
His right arm rose, and I leaped backward. Then I saw: he had The Edge and held it out for me. I shuddered to think of what had become of the FBI agents who had relieved me of The Edge in the first place. But…why would the Nephilim give me a weapon? Mr. Scratch had been one thing, a bargaining chip or a favor to call in later. But I could not discern the Nephilim’s purpose.
“I…savor…the hunt.”
Sport
. The Nephilim wanted more sport from me than he’d gotten from the defenseless. I resigned myself that, it might be my very last act upon this earth, but I would give him a measure of sport before I went.
I darted forward, in one motion snatching The Edge from his hand, flicking it on, and slashing his upper arm. The ethereal blade flashed to life and neatly severed his right arm just below the shoulder. The limb fell bloodless to the floor but vanished in a column of roiling black smoke. When I looked up, its right arm was there as if I’d never landed the blow. The Nephilim smiled lecherously and backed away from my cell bars. He turned at an angle and leaned toward the cell across from mine.
“NO!” I commanded, but it was too late. Its right arm became a vortex of darkness. It spiraled into the cell and found the man beneath his cot. There was a strangled cry, several sharp cracks, and a pressurized pop. A tide of blood washed out from under the cot and spread quickly across the cell floor.
The rage burst from me like a solar flare. I lunged, dragging The Edge across the top of the steel bars. I spun, cutting across the bottom of the bars and continuing the momentum with a sharp sidekick that raked out the section I’d cut. I leaped through and slashed the Nephilim, executing a barrage that would have eviscerated and all but filleted a man. I whirled away and turned back…only to find the Nephilim seemingly unharmed, tendrils of vaporous darkness surging over every wound until the scaly flesh was completely restored.
“Long…have I searched for you…Horseman.”
“What do you want with me?” I asked, failing to hide the desperation in my voice. “I’ve done nothing to you!”
The Nephilim laughed, but it was a terrible, mirthless sound like the dry grinding of old bones. “It…is not what…you’ve done. It…is what you…are.”
In that moment, the most ridiculous thing popped into my mind. While on a mission in Japan, I had seen a sketch artist’s pencil cartoon that had left me aching with laughter. It was called Godzilla versus Bambi.
It was a very short cartoon.
I guess it came to mind because I faced a similar dynamic against a legendary power like the Nephilim. Given that, in the analogy, I was Bambi, there really wasn’t anything all that funny about my situation. But the memory and the inner laughter relaxed me. My breathing slowed. My heartbeat hammered out its regular rhythm. Even as I brandished The Edge, threatening another run at the Nephilim, I focused inwardly. I saw the endless blue plane stretch to the horizon and beyond. And this time, it raced toward me, crashing over me like a wave.
I saw golden light. I could unmask, at last.
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
Agent Rezvani roared onto Keystone Lane and came to a violent, screeching halt in the parking circle in front of the Pensacola Police Department. As she leaped out of the SUV, she expected to find at least a half dozen startled officers streaming out of the blocky building’s door. But no one came out to investigate the tire-burning ruckus she’d made.
“Well, it is 1:00 a.m.,” she muttered, taking the steps two at a time. “Maybe they relax things after midnight down here.”