I decided to look first and throw spells second, so I turned around.
And for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, I found myself at the wrong end of a weapon.
Chapter 7
At least there was no way this guy was Army. He wore digital desert fatigues and combat boots, but it was hard to tell through the caked-on filth that covered him head to toe. His pants were torn in several places, and there was a blood-soaked rag tied around his upper left arm. He had drying mud smeared all over his burnt, peeling face, and the one washed-out blue eye peering at me was narrowed and bloodshot. A stained, makeshift eye patch that looked like the same material as the bandage on his arm covered the other one.
He was also threatening us with a pair of kitchen knives. Probably why Taeral hadn’t bothered blasting him yet.
The guy took a step toward me and flicked a glance back at Taeral, holding a practically useless knife out in each extended arm. “Couldn’t catch me out there, so you decided to trash my place? Not smart. That’s how I got the drop on you, because I knew you’d be back,” he said. “Your buddies in the jeep are buzzard meat, you know. And you’re next on the buffet line.”
“Whoa, hold on.” I held my hands up and suppressed an incredulous grin. Maybe something had gone right today after all. “You’re Rex?”
He bared his teeth at me. “How the hell do you know that?”
“Take it easy. We’re out here with Chester, looking for you. I think.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “With his arm, and your face? If you’re not one of them, then you’re aliens and probably working with ’em. You read my mind to get that name out, alien?”
I sighed. This was definitely Chester’s buddy — and exactly what was wrong with my face, anyway? I decided I didn’t want to know the answer to that question at the moment. “Look, we’re not aliens,” I told him. “Chester’s here with us. He came in through the back, so he’ll probably be up here any second.”
The guy I assumed was Rex hesitated. “Fine. If you’re Chester’s friend, tell me why he missed the third Roswell landing back in ’91.”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying not to roll my eyes. “Because there was a bumper crop of squirrels that year, and he was running low on jerky?”
“Because I was freezing my balls off in that miserable desert with you, asshole.”
At the sound of Chester’s voice, Rex whirled around and pointed both knives in his direction. “That really you, Iceman?”
“Coldest bitch in the box.” Chester grinned from the doorway at the back of the lobby, with Calla and Sadie right behind him. “I knew they’d never take you out. Now put those pig-stickers down, before you hurt somebody. They’re with me.”
Rex blew out a breath and made the knives disappear somewhere in the filthy rags he wore. Chester was already striding toward him, and he moved away from me to meet the other man at the end of the counter in a back-slapping bro hug. “You’re a crazy son of a bitch, coming all the way out here,” Rex said when he stepped back. “But I’m damned glad you did. We have to stop them this time.”
“What happened to you, man?” Chester frowned as his gaze settled on the bloody makeshift bandage. “You look like —”
“Quiet,” Rex hissed sharply, holding a hand out. He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. “You hear that? They’re coming back.”
Chester arched an eyebrow. “Hear what?”
“Helicopters. Two of them, coming this way,” Sadie said as she moved toward Taeral. “They’ll see us if we try to drive out of here.”
Rex stared at her. “Never met anybody with sharper ears than mine, except for werewolves,” he said. “You a werewolf, girl?”
Sadie shrugged. “Yeah. And?”
He swallowed with a dry click. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Iceman,” he said as he approached the wood panel wall behind the counter. “We’ll head for the bunker until they’re gone. I gotta clean up, anyway.”
Before anyone could ask what bunker, Rex touched the wall and part of it swung smoothly open onto perfect blackness. He reached inside, pushed something, and dull red light flickered through the space, illuminating a set of concrete stairs leading down. “Haven’t had time to get down there yet, but everything should still be intact,” he said. “You all go first. I’m right behind you.”
Calla came over to me and waited while Sadie and Taeral headed down. Her face was a careful blank. “Gideon, do you really think whatever happened here …” she half-whispered. “I mean, everyone?”
I took her hand, hoping it was at least a little reassuring. “I don’t know,” I said. It was the truth — I only had a strong suspicion that the entire town was dead. “Let’s just find out what Rex knows, and we’ll take it from there, okay?”
She nodded, and we went after Taeral into the red darkness.
Chapter 8
Rex’s bunker probably would’ve given whatever secret lair the government had set up for the end of the world a run for its money. The huge, steel-walled underground space had a big central room that was a combination living room and kitchen, two bedrooms with bunk beds, a full bathroom, and a back room bigger than the central room stuffed with supplies, provisions, and weapons a lot more dangerous than a couple of kitchen knives. There was a generator running somewhere down here too, because the power was on.
After a few hasty introductions, Chester’s friend had given us the fifty-cent tour and vanished into the bathroom. We’d all heard the helicopters by the time he closed the door at the top of the stairs, so there was no question that the Army, or whoever, was still out there. By now I was convinced that ‘whoever’ was Milus Dei, and the soldiers manning the barrier worked for them inside the Army, like Calla with the NSA.
Still, with as much as I knew about the organization that had been hunting me since birth, I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that they’d wipe out an entire town. At least, not one full of humans. Milus Dei liked to pretend that their so-called mission to eliminate every Other on the planet was a humanitarian effort. Some of them actually believed they were saving the world. And some of them were just sadistic, power-hungry bastards.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure which type was more dangerous.
It wasn’t long before Rex came out of the bathroom, cleaned and dressed in a fresh set of fatigues. The skin on his face and hands looked worse without the mud. It was all nasty red, peeling and blistered with severe sunburn, especially on his scalp beneath the high-and-tight he sported. He’d taken off the grubby eye patch — but the eye beneath it was normal, the same faded blue as the other one.
“What the hell, Rex? You been out tanning in an oven?” Chester blurted. “Seriously, you look like shit.”
“And what was up with the eye patch?” Calla said.
“Oh, that. It was for night vision. Did you know that’s why pirates wore eye patches? So they’d have the advantage when they attacked in the dark.” Rex headed for the kitchen area, opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water. “Anyway, I’d just gotten back here not fifteen minutes before you all busted into my place. Had to hoof it across thirty miles of desert, and then I find my motel trashed and a couple of strangers in my lobby. Sorry about almost killing you, by the way.”
Taeral snorted. “You were nowhere close to killing us.”
“Hold on. What’s this thirty miles of desert shit?” Chester said. “You’d better start from the beginning.”
“Okay, sure.” Rex shrugged, twisted the top off the water bottle and drank deeply. “So yesterday morning I pick up this big hotshot at the airport in Roswell, a guy called Yusef. Didn’t give a last name. Tall guy, dressed in robes or some shit like he’s straight out of the Bible, and he’s cold as ice. Doesn’t say two words to me the whole flight, except when we’re ready to land.” He shook his head and took another slug of water. “He has me touch down in the middle of nowhere by a mountain. Nothing and nobody around.”
“That’s the guy fro
m Milus Dei,” I said. “You dropped him off in the middle of the desert?”
Rex leaned back with his elbows propped on the island kitchen counter and looked at me. “What do you know about Milus Dei?”
“We know enough to be certain they are not aliens,” Taeral said. “Merely humans, with far too much power.”
“Yeah, maybe. But the things they deal with, they aren’t human.” Rex pointed at him. “Things like you, Unseelie, and your girlfriend the werewolf there. Though I haven’t quite gotten the hang of picking them out yet. Iceman’s the werewolf expert.”
Taeral’s jaw flexed. “How do you know what I am?”
“I’ve been around. Seen a lot,” he said calmly. “F’rinstance, I know this lady’s a Fed, and she’s with you.” His gaze met mine again. “But I have to admit, I’m not sure what you are. Gideon, isn’t it?” A corner of his mouth twitched up. “First I thought Fae, but that’s not the whole story. You’re something else.”
I was cautiously impressed. “I’m half Fae. Taeral’s my brother,” I said, not ready to launch into the DeathSpeaker explanation just yet. “And what we know about Milus Dei is a lot, but nowhere near enough, if that makes sense. By the way … what’s wrong with my face?”
Calla gave me a puzzled glance. She must not have heard Rex’s comment about why Taeral and I had to be aliens.
“You just have a lot of hard road in your eyes, kid. More than you should have at your age.” Rex nodded absently, as if he’d come to a decision he wasn’t going to share with the rest of us. “Anyway, back to my story,” he said. “So I land the plane, and there’s nobody and nowhere to take all this Yusef guy’s crap. Crates and crates of stuff. I offer to help unload, he says no, and then he hands me this burlap hood he just happened to have and tells me to put it on.”
Chester gave a low whistle. “Bastard was going to kill you. Keep you from talking.”
“You know it,” Rex said. “Me, I wasn’t about to wait around and get executed. So I play along until the guy gets out of the plane, then I slip out the other door and high-tail it in the opposite direction, across the desert. He’s not paying attention to me — and I happen to look back and see why.” He put the nearly empty water bottle on the counter and crossed his arms. “What I see is the whole damn mountain opening up, and a fucking fleet of armed assholes in Jeeps driving out.”
“Well, shit,” Chester drawled. “No wonder we could never find the New Mexico site on satellite. Those sons of bitches are holed up inside a mountain.”
“Yup. They’re dug in like hookworms in a pile of turds.” Rex let out a slow breath. “Of course, they noticed I was gone and sent some muscle after me. Three guys, one land crawler, like that would be enough,” he said with a snort. “I did have to blow up the jeep, though. That’s why I ended up taking the two-foot express home, ducking those damned choppers the whole way. And I had a close call about five miles outside of town.” He paused and stared into the distance for a moment. “They were out there with heavy machinery, burying something big,” he said. “Something … wet.”
My throat seized shut so suddenly that for a few seconds, I couldn’t breathe. The remembered echoes of all those screams rebounded through my skull. I knew exactly what they were burying out there in the desert.
The entire population of Basin Springs, minus one hardened survival nut.
“My God,” Sadie rasped as she looked at my face, and knew. “They didn’t.”
I couldn’t summon a response. Taeral and Calla caught on fast too — they both blanched, and tears welled in Calla’s eyes.
But it was Chester who finally said it out loud. “They killed everyone, didn’t they?” he said in cracked tones, looking from Rex to me with dawning horror. “That’s why it’s so damned quiet here. They slaughtered the whole town.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Pretty sure they did.”
Rex was silent for a full minute. When he eventually spoke, his eyes glinted with fury and his tone was pure steel. “Then I guess there’s nothing left for me to do but return the favor,” he said. “I know where those sick fucks are, and I’m going to take out every last one of them.”
“Not alone, you aren’t,” Chester said firmly, as if he suspected Rex would disagree. “We’re taking them out. Right, boss?”
Damn it, he’d called me boss again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in charge of this particular mission — but if somebody had to, I’d do it. No way I was going to let Milus Dei get away with a full-on massacre.
“Right,” I finally said. “Every last one of them.”
And that included Yusef the bigshot. I hadn’t come out here planning to kill him. I’d planned to neutralize this place, get the weapon away from him, maybe find out more about Dante if I could. But my plans had officially changed.
Besides, I could get more information out of him dead than alive.
Chapter 9
After a lot of spirited debate, we decided to drive the Hummer out into the desert — at least as far as we could make it before we were spotted. Chester and Rex were both opposed to the idea, and for some reason Calla was leaning toward their side. I guessed it was because we had no idea what kind of weapons those helicopters were packing. But if we came under fire from the air, Taeral and I could protect everyone. And we’d agreed that if they came after the Hummer, we would ditch it and keep going on foot.
I hoped to make some serious driving miles before that happened. Couldn’t count the number of times I’d been dragged across one desert or another by my former family, and though I knew how to survive a trip like that, I sure as hell didn’t want to.
Besides, I wanted to get to the burial site as soon as possible. I had to know for sure.
Rex had said that he only got by them because when he saw the excavators and the bulldozers, they were wrapping things up and heading back toward the mountains. He’d just out-waited them. Now that they were hopefully gone, we should be safe to stop for a few minutes and try to figure out what they’d done.
“They’re saying on the news that Basin Springs was evacuated because of this bullshit toxic spill they cooked up,” Chester said, his voice thick with contempt as he hunched over his phone. He and Rex had taken the middle seat with Sadie so that Rex could navigate, while Taeral had ungraciously agreed to squeeze his lanky ass in the back. “Who’s going to buy that, when none of these people’s families ever hear from them again?”
“They’ll buy it for long enough.” Rex, who’d let me heal him after I promised he wouldn’t get any urges to start dancing naked in the moonlight, kind of looked like Clint Eastwood under the sunburn. “Besides, most of their families are right here with them. At least … they were, anyway.” The angry light flashed in his eyes again, and he pointed at the windshield. “It’s right up ahead there. You see that arroyo? That’s where I waited ’em out, and they were digging to the left of it.”
Calla, who was still driving, squinted ahead. “What the hell’s an arroyo?”
“It’s a dry creek bed. Basically a big ditch,” I told her. “Just pull up next to it on this side.”
As she nodded and started slowing down, Rex regarded me with a slightly raised eyebrow. “So, kid. D’you just know a lot of words, or do you have some experience in terrain like this?”
“I’ve been in a few deserts,” I muttered, not paying much attention to him. This close to them, the voices of the dead were back. The same chorus of screams I’d heard before, but muted and distant, like a malevolent ocean. “I need to get out,” I said as Calla stopped the Hummer and threw it in park. “Find out what happened to these people.”
“What are you gonna do, dig ’em up?” Rex said. “We don’t have time for that.”
I was already halfway out the door. “Not exactly,” I said. “I’m just going to ask them.”
He didn’t have much of a response to that.
Everyone piled out after me as I headed for the arroyo, looking around while I walked. The ditch was a fairly big one,
probably six feet across and at least as deep. And the ground on the other side showed only slight signs of disturbance. The scant evidence that it was actually a mass grave would vanish after a few windy nights out here. Those bastards had covered their tracks well.
A sudden thought froze me in place. Tracks. We’d already covered five miles of ground, and I hadn’t seen a single sign of human activity, even though a whole lot of people had come through here recently. But I suspected our passage was leaving plenty of evidence.
“Gideon, what’s wrong?” Calla caught up to me fast, concern etched into her face. “Is it the … voices?”
I shook my head. “Tracks,” I said, pivoting toward the Hummer. Sure enough, twin lines of what were unmistakably tire treads trailed back from the wheels across the sands as far as the eye could see, no doubt all the way from here to Basin Springs. “We’re making it way too easy for them to find us.”
“Damn. The kid’s right,” Rex said as everyone stopped to look back at the tire marks. “Okay, Iceman and me’ll go grab some sagebrush and sweep this out. Once we get —”
“All the way back to the town? Nonsense.” Taeral rolled his eyes and strode toward the Hummer. “I will handle this.”
Both Rex and Chester watched him warily. “What’s he doing?” Chester said.
“Handling it.” I wasn’t sure exactly what he was planning, but I knew Taeral could do some interesting things with dirt. I’d seen him shift enough earth to dig out graves and tunnel under fences in seconds.
He stopped and knelt beside the tracks, then reached out with his metal arm and placed his palm on the ground between the tread marks. The runes etched into the metal shimmered and glowed blue, and a pulse of light raced off down the center of the tracks toward Basin Springs. The sand surged and parted behind the light like the wake of a speedboat, washing waves of loose dirt over the tire treads.
After holding his position for a few minutes, Taeral pushed up and headed for us, brushing the sand off his pants. “Come on, then,” he said. “We should not linger here for long.”
Hand of the God Page 5
