Collateral Damage (Demon Squad Book 8)

by Tim Marquitz

  “Get down!” a dozen voices screamed at once, heavy footsteps stomping over the broken concrete with authority.

  I turned to see what must have been fifty soldiers in tactical gear swarming toward me. Garbed all in black, only the tiniest slit of skin showing at their eyes, they were loaded for bear. Several carried assault rifles and shotguns, and they all packed side arms. Some were even carrying bandoliers of grenades strapped around their chests.

  They were the trap that had been set.

  Having come out of nowhere, there was no way they were there by coincidence. They’d been lying in wait, and I could almost guarantee it had been one of their own that had put the bullet in my back earlier. I triggered my shield at that thought, vaguely wondering why they hadn’t tried to take my head off again. They’d plenty of opportunity.

  “Down on the ground!” they shouted in unison, training overcoming any fear they might have had.

  I stared at them, my mind slowing peeling back the layers of fury that stifled my senses. They closed on me, guns leading the way. Despite the men’s obvious military discipline, not a single one of them wore anything that identified who they worked for, but that was as telling as if they had. These guys weren’t SWAT or Army. Of that I was sure. They were clearly one of the alphabet agencies.

  I bared my teeth and glared at the men. Whoever they were, they were going to pay for their interference. They seemed willing to go down that road.

  Before I could do anything, they unloaded. My defenses held solid as bullets buzzed, ricochets peppering the already shattered concrete nearby with vicious pings. There were shouts of surprise and pain from the crowd behind me as shots went wild. Still the bullets came. My brain scrambled to find a gear that made sense of what was going on, but I was having a hard time putting it all together. Despite their composure, the soldiers didn’t have the barest respect of fire control. They weren’t shooting controlled bursts or even sighting down their barrels. Instead, they were going full auto and blasting everything they had at me.

  The police who’d clustered at my back fled for cover before the onslaught. Several of the unlucky ones lay on the ground, bleeding and groaning as bullets ripped into them. The crowd erupted into motion, screams wailing in their wake as they ran to escape, people around them twitching erratically before falling over. The agents just kept firing. These guys didn’t give a damn who they hurt, I realized.

  I saw one reach for a grenade and whatever restraint I’d managed dissolved beneath the fiery assault of my anger. The guy had just pulled the pin when I drove forward wrapped my hand around his. Bones crunched as I squeezed. He screamed.

  That was what I’d wanted.

  With a sharp twist, I bent his arm around and drove his own fist into his mouth, grenade and all. Teeth exploded and his jaw popped loose of its moors, blood spilling down his chin. His eyes went wide, and he struggled to tear his shredded hand free of his mouth, but I didn’t give him the opportunity. Karra clutched tight in the crook of my left arm, I headbutted the guy’s jaw back into place, nearly severing the hand stuffed deep in his mouth. A kick to his midsection sent him flying to into his companions. They scattered like bowling pins, desperate to be away from him.

  So much for camaraderie.

  There was a muffled whump a few seconds later, and the air was filled with a sheen of crimson, gray, and white, bits and pieces of grenade boy’s skull—and most of his upper torso along with it—pattered down in a grisly rain. The men closest to him were struck by the concussion and flailed about senseless. That didn’t stop the rest of them.

  Just as they had before, the agents sprayed rounds indiscriminately despite seeing how ineffective their attack had been. Bullets hissed and whined off my shield but not a single one broke through. Still, they just spraying.

  I glanced behind me to see the crowd had mostly dispersed, but there were dozens upon dozens of wounded or dead left behind. Some crawled, wailing desperately for help, while others lay still, dead or unconscious. Beneath the barrage of gunfire, though, they were on their own. Not even the police held their ground, choosing instead to wait out the battle behind the rows of cop cars and news vans.

  The voice of reason screamed at me to run, to get away. All I’d wanted was to recover the piece of Karra the holy rollers had so cruelly displayed for the world to see, but the situation had gone beyond that now. People were dead because of me, and more were dying every minute. The ghost of my mother would have implored me to do something, to keep her people from harm, but I’d come to terms with that part of my brain that lied about being my mother’s conscience. She was long gone, and I hadn’t known her as well as I thought I had. No, that imagined voice of compassion and restraint was long gone, buried as deep as the woman I’d pretended was still around to guide me even after all these hundreds of years.

  My psychosis wasn’t entirely wrong, though.

  I charged the men without another thought. There’d been no mercy in their assault, and I offered them the same. My fist punched a hole in the vest of the man closest, and I spread my fingers wide inside his chest, feeling his lungs make way for them. He gurgled behind his mask, a darker stain spreading across the blackness. I didn’t even let him die before I used his thrashing body to club one of his companions down. He crashed into his buddy, and the two crumpled to the ground in a bloody, crippled heap.

  More bullets sang past but their numbers diminished as I rode roughshod through the ranks of the agents. To my surprise, and morbid glee, they stood their ground. One by one they hit the ground: skulls crushed, arms ripped from sockets, and eyes gouged. As easy as it would have been to wipe them from existence with my magic, I needed more than that. I needed the creak of bone giving way, the thump of flesh impacting against my fists, the screams of agony as I tore them limb from limb.

  I held up a dripping trophy, an arm torn loose at the elbow, and shrieked at the last of the men who still had the courage to hold their positions. They vanished in a whirl of gray.

  Clouds billowed around me like a storm dropped to earth. Where the lights of the cameras and police cruisers had suffused the night, a featureless fog rose up, bleaching all the color from the world. It tasted of sulfur and approaching rain, electrical energy setting my hair on edge. My senses rang out with its presence.

  “Damn it, Frank! What are you doing?” I didn’t need to look to know who the bassy Barry White imitator was.

  I spun about. The look on Rahim’s face drew me up short.

  I’d seen him pissed at me before—a common enough occurrence—as well as disappointed more times than I could keep track of. I’d seen his look of pity often enough, too, not to mention the one where he was confused by me. This one was different, though, and it brought me to a halt, my power fizzling.

  He was afraid, but not of me. For me.

  I just stood there for a moment before realizing I was brandishing a half severed arm in one hand and Karra’s head in the other. I could only imagine what I looked like. The arm slid from my grasp as we stared across the intervening space he’d left clear of his spell that had cloaked us in mist.

  Rahim drew in a deep breath, his huge shoulders slumped, and let it out as though it pained him. His dark eyes took the whole of me in, but whatever he might have been thinking he kept to himself, choosing instead to focus on what he’d come there for in the first place.

  “We need to go.”

  He didn’t give me a chance to object. His power encircled me, and I let it. A moment later we were gone.

  Six

  “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  Rahim’s voice vibrated my ears with its insistence. He was almost always calm and composed, rarely sinking to my level and cursing even when he was pissed, but he clearly understood the basics of how to spit out an f-bomb. I felt like a child being reprimanded by a disapproving parent.

  To his dismay, I wasn’t the good son.

  “Those motherfuckers posted Karra’s head on the top of a pole like
she was some kind of fucking trophy,” I screamed back, clasping what was left of Karra to my chest. She was a cold, sullen lump that drove my anger to greater heights.

  Rahim dropped into Abe’s chair and ignored its pitiful complaint. He’d slipped his mask of control back on, the fear I’d seen banished, but there was still plenty of emotion slathered across his face. He stared at me for an uncomfortable moment before tugging open one of the desk drawers and plucking a remote from inside. He pointed the device at a TV mounted on the far well and clicked the power button. An instant later the television fluttered to life and I was staring at an image of myself, bloody and crazed looking. My hand was sunk deep in the chest of an officer.

  “They set you up, Frank.” The anger in the wizard’s voice parted to reveal his frustration. “Can’t you see that? Why else would the DSI be there?”

  The news broadcast prattled on with the volume low, but I could hear every word. They went on and on about a supernatural menace declaring war on the very seat of El Paseo’s government, but the camera never once drifted from my visage to show what really happened. They’d made it all about me, and that was the pitch they were making to the public.

  Cameras followed my every move as I tore into the black-garbed agents, a good, clean focus on the death of each and every one as if the act had been scripted ahead of time. Multiple angles had been spliced together to add detail to those that lacked it. A warning to viewers flashed in bright red across the bottom of the screen. My mind struggled to engage as I watched it happen in real time. It was one thing to be there, in the midst, doing it. It was something entirely different to see it played out across the local news.

  The air left my lungs, and I slumped into one of the chairs set before the desk as it all came crashing down on me. “I didn’t mean…” I couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out. It didn’t matter what I meant to do. Only what I’d done mattered.

  I watched the TV as my deeds repeated over and over. Awareness having settled in, I could see the various camera angles that were being used. There was no way the news crews on scene could possibly have gotten those, backed up as they were behind the crowd. There’d been people in the nearby buildings waiting on me, ready to capture everything I did. Whoever planted Karra’s head there knew how I’d respond, and they’d pushed every button from the get go.

  The loop started over, and I shook my head at seeing how the video had been spliced. There was no hint of where I’d pulled Karra from the pole or had been shot. The footage came in right after I’d gotten back to my feet and caused the mini-earthquake, a severed head in my hands, and even the blood spilling down my back had been whitewashed from the screen. That was when the agents confronted me, clearly responding the only way they could to such an overwhelming, psychotic threat. I sighed and sunk deeper into the chair, tears once more spilling free as I clutched at Karra.

  “I’m sorry, Frank,” I heard Rahim say, but his voice was miles away as I stared helplessly at the lump of death in my hands that had just hours ago had been nearly everything in my life.

  The holy rollers had been true to their word. They were tearing my world down around me. There I was, on the local news—and worldwide shortly, if not already—ripping my way through an army of federal agents like a madman. Stained in blood and sporting a manic grin, I was a newsman’s wet dream come true. It was everything Abe had drilled in me not to become.

  As I sat there stunned, sickened by my actions, Rahim thumbed the volume back up. A familiar voice slithered into my ears, and I glanced back to the TV. Rebecca Shaw’s pale face stared back at me, grim resolve etched across her carefully sculpted expression. Dressed in a tan pants suit, an American flag pin conspicuously present at her lapel, there was no hint she was anything but a concerned government official.

  “Due to this brutal, unprovoked attack upon the citizens of the United States by an empowered entity from another plane of existence, the President of the United States has authorized the Department of Supernatural Investigation to take whatever steps necessary to eliminate the threat and ensure the public safety and welfare.” Her eyes bored into the camera as though she were looking straight at me. “We will hunt down and destroy this inhuman assassin before he can take any more innocent, human lives. We will not rest until we have—”

  Rahim muted the television, and I watched in silence as Shaw continued her tirade, threatening to use every asset at her disposal to bring me down, her words repeated in the ticker. After our last encounter in God’s prison realm, I had no doubt that she was a woman of her word. As she talked, a screen behind her played the scene at city hall over and over, my face clearly visible in every angle for the world to see. I swallowed hard as my assumed name appeared in big letters on the ticker beneath Shaw’s face. Any senses of anonymity I’d had went up in flames right then, scorched forever. I could have sworn I saw the ghost of a smile on her lips.

  “I’m sorry,” I said as I got to my feet, though I knew the words lacked the power to make anything better.

  The battle for Eden had brought the supernatural world under scrutiny in a way that hadn’t been seen since the Salem Witch Trials, confirming its existence to humanity. The storms that had arisen from that conflict razed huge swaths of the planet and killed way more people than I could lay claim to, but that had been unfathomable destruction, ruin from on high without a verifiable source. Humanity as a whole had laid that one on God’s shoulders since none of them knew He’d been gone for the last fifty years or that it was His absence that had provoked that situation rather than His presence. This time, however, the world had a face and a name to go with the massacre. Mine.

  And they were gonna make me pay for it.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated and stumbled for the exit, the world spinning around me. It felt as though it were closing in.

  “Where are you going, Frank?”

  “Keep my daughter safe a little longer. I need to bury her mother while I still can.”

  #

  As horrible as I was teleporting because of my lack of confidence, there was one place I knew better than any other. That was where I’d buried my mother so long ago. There was nothing in the Siberian Tundra to block my passage but ice and snow and frigid death so I’d nothing to lose if I fumbled the shift.

  I appeared just outside of the long gone village that had been home to my mother and me before she’d been killed and I’d been taken to Hell. The tundra had claimed the village eons ago, wilderness sprouting up in every direction, leaving only a barren patch of untouched ice in defiance of nature. I sighed as I sank to my knees in the clearing. It had been my presence that held the trees back, my blood souring the soil over the years until it became barren. The tiny vial of my blood that I’d buried as a beacon to light my way to the grave had turned the place as desolate as any cemetery. It was a fitting tribute to the sadness that dwelled there.

  And now I was adding the body of another woman I loved to the ice.

  The well of tears I’d thought long dry ran free once more. I’d always envisioned Karra living long after my stupid ass was gone, her teaching Abby how not to be like me for an eternity afterward. But there I was, clinging to a piece of her and getting ready to add it to the memory of my mother. It was a circumstance I’d never imagined even in the worst of my nightmares.

  Karra was gone and now it was on me to raise Abigail; alone.

  The weight of that hit me and I nearly went blind. That was so not how it was supposed to be. Abby having to grow up without a mother was more tragedy than a child deserved, but to have me as her father was the shit-flavored icing on the rabbit-turd cake. What the hell did I know about raising a kid? Dear ol’ Daddy Lucifer hadn’t exactly prepped me for the job unless you count letting me run amok and lying to me as examples of good character building traits.

  My mind drifted back to my childhood of its own accord, but I shrugged the memories aside. There’d be none of that. Nothing there prepared me for anything but death and destructi
on and a life of mistakes and frivolity. It was all I’d been trained for, even after I’d refused Lucifer’s demands that I become the Anti-Christ. Look where that got me.

  I should have paid more attention in Home Ec.

  My head aflutter with thoughts I had no interest in thinking, I scrabbled to my feet and drew in a frigid breath of air, the cold bracing my lungs. Then before I could change my mind, I loosed my power and felt my hand warm with its energies. My face flushed as I willed the magic free to form a giant, glowing point of power. I pushed the tip against the earth and heat began to melt the surface of the ice. A moment later the makeshift drill plunged into the ground and sunk deeper and deeper, carving a narrow trough in its wake. Once I felt I’d gone deep enough, I released my energies and let them fade, tendrils of white smoke spilling from the hole I’d just dug.

  I’d come to the moment of truth.

  With trembling hands, I turned Karra’s face toward me so I could see the empty windows of her hazel eyes. My heart sputtered and weakness washed over me, my body tingling from the misery that enveloped me. She was truly gone, and there was nothing I could do to bring her back. My powers weren’t strong enough and there was no way Heaven would find it in their heart to intercede on my behalf in order to raise the daughter of Longinus, the greatest Anti-Christ the world had ever known. No, this moment was everything I’d hoped to never know; it was goodbye, once and for all.

  She was lost to me forever.

  I bit back a sob and brought Karra’s face to mine, planting a kiss on her cold lips, holding it until I couldn’t breathe. I broke away with a gasp. All the words I wanted to say died in my throat before they could find their way to my tongue. How do you tell someone how much they meant to you as you lowered them into the ground? Did it really matter then?