by Marcus Wynne
“Uh . . . because we’re all connected?” I said.
“Oh, spin that happy New Age shit on somebody who doesn’t know better,” Dillon said. “Nice try, though.”
We sat for a moment and enjoyed it.
“So what does all this mean?” Dillon said. “For you and me?”
“Means we have to be careful, brother,” I said. “There’s only so much we know. What we do know, we’ve talked about.”
“Maybe we should develop the situation,” Dillon said. “Recon by fire.”
“We already did. Someone . . . or something . . . noticed.”
“That worries me.”
“Yeah.”
Jolene joined us.
“Where’s Sabrina?” I said.
“Outside for a cigarette,” Jolene said. “She said to tell Dillon to grow some and come join her. What does that mean?”
We laughed, Dillon most of all.
“More, you think?” I asked. “Or are we done?”
“I can’t fit anything else in,” Dillon said.
Jolene smiled. So did I.
“What about Sabrina?” I said.
“I think she’s ready to go,” Jolene said. “It’s been a long day and she’s ready for bed. Or bedding.” She winked at Dillon. “Dillon? Are you sure?”
Her wicked grin. Oh, Creator God, how I loved that grin.
Dillon just hung his head.
I held up my hand and Ev came right over.
“Ev, I need the check,” I said.
She was gamine all the way through. Grinned. “Sorry, Marius. Your money’s no good tonight. Word from the boss.”
“You tell him I accept with gratitude, okay? And I wish many blessings on him, you and this whole establishment. And Ev?”
I handed her a fifty.
“That’s for you.”
“Marius . . .” she said.
“Thanks for your great service.”
She dimpled. “And you for yours, Marius. You come back soon.” She winked at Jolene. “Make it be soon, Jolene? Okay?”
Jolene touched Ev’s tattooed sleeve. “Soon, my friend. Thank you.”
“Thanks, Ev,” Dillon said. “Marius, thank you. Jolene? You are the Goddess.”
“I honor the Divine Male in you, Dillon,” Jolene said.
“I’m not sure what that means, but I’ll take it . . .” Dillon began.
A high-pitched shriek shattered the harmony and calm of the restaurant. A woman ran towards the rear of the restaurant, sheer terror on her face.
“Oh, God!” she screamed. “Oh, God, oh, God!”
Jolene snapped her head around. “Sabrina?”
Dillon was already moving. That’s the true test of the Warrior Called; they run towards the danger, not away. He was moving fast. I hesitated, torn between Jolene and Dillon, and Jolene solved it for me by shouting: “Go! Fast!”
I went.
Fast.
Right behind Dillon.
Who came to a sudden halt, his pistol ready in his hand. I yanked my Glock out.
In the parking lot, Sabrina struggled in the arms of something vaguely humanoid in shape, if a human were ten feet tall and wore a dark veil over its head, wreathed in smoke to dim its outlines, and was surrounded by four men backing towards a van with the side doors open.
The customers in the lot fled in all directions.
The four men weren’t really men.
Goat-headed, with long nimble hands that seemed quite comfortable with the M4s tucked professionally into the sockets of their otherwise human-looking shoulders. There was at least one human, from the waist up anyway, sitting behind the wheel of the idling van.
“Goat-headed gunfighters?” Dillon said. “Marius, help me out here . . . do we need iron, silver or will just plain lead do?”
“I’m thinking go with what we got,” I said. “Federal HST.”
We lit up the goats.
Parenthetically, the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command once commissioned a study of the effectiveness of various ammunition. They decided the best source of data wasn’t ballistic gelatin but living flesh. But since shooting bad guys in a controlled fashion is frowned upon in the U.S. of A., they chose French Alpine goats.
Why?
A French Alpine goat has the same average thoracic cavity and configuration of the statistically average human male. So the testers tied up the goats and shot them, once for each goat, once for each type of ammo, and studied how long it took to incapacitate or kill the goat.
Before they finished it off—humanely—with a shot to the head.
And among the things the operator community learned was that goats aren’t easy to kill.
So Dillon and I could consider our field test of Federal HST 9mm +P 124 JHP a continuation of that study, albeit flawed by multiple simultaneous body shots.
We advanced on the goat formation, our expended brass arcing in a brilliant spray out of our twin Glocks. Dillon had hooked me up with the Dawson Precision +5 Magazine Extension for my G-17 magazines, so I had twenty-two rounds of goodness in each of the three magazines I carried when armed. I fired at the two goat-headed operators on the left, keeping a solid cadence with no pause between shots, back and forth between the two who tracked us while Dillon worked the two on the right.
The goat-headed gunfighters sprang aside nimbly. Their legs angled strangely in their 5.11 pants. Goat legs, too? I hoped they had the same thoracic cavity and they weren’t running plates under their shirts.
I watched my rounds hit him in the chest, then furrow red along one forearm that certainly looked like a human arm. The goat staggered and had sudden difficulty bringing his M4 on-line. It was running an EOTech and a white light and what looked to be an IR laser on the rail. The implications of that didn’t sink in till the lights went out in the lot.
“Dillon!” I shouted. “They’ve got night-vision!”
My own night-vision in my Mark One Eyeball was shot between the parking lot lights (now absent) and the muzzle flash from the very hot rounds I’d been putting out as an instrument of goat extermination. A string of shots from a carbine-bearing goat came my way; apparently their goat night-vision was built in and they could track their IR lasers without the cumbrance of a head set.
“The bad guys get all the best toys,” I muttered as I crabbed sideways for cover beside a beat-up Nissan Sentra.
Dillon took two long steps and then proned out behind a very shiny brand new Dodge Ram dualie pickup, gleaming cherry red. He curled up in an urban prone and continued firing at the goats, one down, two advancing, one missing . . .
. . . but not for long.
First In Front led the way, Tigre and Burt hot on his heels, my guides attacking a cloud of black winged forms . . . a dark veil expanding from the black figure tossing Sabrina into the back of the van . . . First In Front pointed with his coup stick at . . .
The Dodge Ram, where a goat poked its head around, the square-shaped pupils narrowed in concentration as it aimed at Dillon’s back. I stepped around the truck and pulled the trigger . . .
. . . my Glock went click.
I dropped the dry magazine and plucked the next one from my Rogers single mag pouch and slammed it into place, then put eight shots—almost as fast as Jerry Miculek—in less than a second and a half into that goat, stitching it from upper chest (thoracic cavity) to right between those square-pupiled eyes, dropping it cross-legged where it stood. Then I turned and continued to fire at the last two goats till my pistol stopped—again—this time with a double feed. I stripped the magazine out and worked the slide, slammed my last magazine into place . . .
“Dillon! Ammo!”
He reached under his jacket and tossed me a spare magazine, one of probably a dozen he was carrying, knowing Dillon. I shoved it into my hip pocket and turned to the fight. One goat down and the other one hobbling backwards toward the van, still shooting.
It sprang into the back.
“Sabrina!” Dillon screamed
. “No!”
The van peeled away. The door slammed shut and the last thing I saw seared itself into my eyes: Sabrina, her hands stretching for us, snatched back in as the door shut.
Dillon aimed at the van, stopped himself.
“We gotta go, Marius!” he said. He slapped his pants for his car keys and ran for his Jeep Wrangler.
I turned and saw Jolene watching us.
“Go!” she said. “I’m fine. Go!”
First In Front was perched on the hood of the Jeep . . . “No go . . .”
Dillon turned the keys. Nothing. He tried again. The hood latches were loose. I lifted the hood. The engine was seared black, wires and hoses melted.
“What the . . .” Dillon said.
I slammed the hood down. The goat bodies began to smoke, then exploded into flame. So did their weapons. The flames became white-hot and incandescent. We had to shield our eyes.
After a moment, the flames faded. All that was left were three blackened smears and several puddles of molten metal in a parking lot littered with empty shell casings.
“We have to go!” Dillon said.
“We have to track them,” Jolene said. “We must shield ourselves first . . .”
Anguish carved gutters into Dillon’s face. And Jolene’s.
And mine.
“I see loss, Marius. I see and feel sorrow and anger . . .” So she’d said.
She’d spoken true.
CHAPTER 15
My front room had become a war room. Dillon pored over the weapons he kept stored in my gun safe; while I wasn’t as well equipped as he was, I certainly kept enough for a serious fight. Jolene made tea in the kitchen and held her counsel.
For now.
I sat and tried to still my mind, to open the channel and work past or through the rage and sorrow and guilt that bubbled in me—as the attacker intended. All those emotions fogged the Light, robbed me of clarity, made me reactive . . . and reactiveness is what the Dark Forces were counting on.
What Sabrina needed—what all of us needed—was clarity and the calm marshaling of our forces here, in the world of arms and bullets and cold steel, and in the Other Realms, where our allies waited.
But I needed to clear my mind to call . . .
“We are here for you, Marius,” Tigre said. “As always.”
“Yes. You always are. You know what I need?”
“Yes,” First In Front said. “I can track her . . .”
Images . . . from First In Front to and through me . . . a road . . . no, a highway . . . the Interstate.
The road to Decanter.
A farmhouse. Dark. Only a single window lit. On the edge of the town, far enough away where the lights of the city were only a dim glow against the sky, but close enough to see that. A shimmering veil over the house . . . I was lifted above it, to see a whirlpool of black in the middle of the darkest ocean in the depths of the darkest night, swirling and drawing it in . . . and there, one brilliant point of light ringed by the darkness . . .
Sabrina.
Rage rose in me. My intention became . . . violent. I leaned forward . . .
. . . and was pulled back by First In Front.
“This is how they get to you,” he said. “You’ll rush in . . . there is much that is hidden there, and of a level beyond you. This is not just you, this is all of us. All in the Light. The rage you feel? That’s the weapon they’ll use against you . . .”
Tigre put herself between me and the vision. “All of us who walk the Path will walk with you. You must be wise in how you do this. Karma, preordination and the Great Mystery of God’s Plan . . . you must remember this, Marius. What you want, what you react toward, is not the deciding factor. It’s God’s Will. Not yours. Not ours.”
“It’s the oldest trick,” Burt said. He circled, the leader of a murder of crows swirling in a clockwise spiral above me. “Play on your love for another. The Light Warrior fights not because he loves the fight, but because he loves that which is behind him. Or on the other side of what he faces.”
“Love is your strength,” Tigre said. “And your weakness. Be strong in your love and measure twice . . .”
“. . . and cut once,” First In Front said.
I was back in my front room.
Jolene stood with Dillon. She offered me a steaming mug of tea.
“Tell us,” she said, “what have you seen?”
Dillon’s face was drawn taut in a war face. He was locked in a cycle of vigilance, scanning the room, looking out the window. He circled Jolene and me like the planet of war.
“Marius?” Jolene said.
She held her power in check and waited. She was concerned for me, but like a carefully banked flame, there was the fierce Dark Mother, the protective and destructive aspect of the Goddess.
“They took her to bring me running,” I said. “There’s a portal there. A farmhouse outside of Decanter. Rings of the possessed and Dark Beings. At the center is the place where they plan to rip the fabric between the Other Realms . . . where their allies are stacked up at the door.”
“How is she?” Dillon said.
“She’s alive,” I said. “Being Sabrina . . . she’ll fight them. But there’s a powerful Dark Being there . . .”
“That’s what took her?” Dillon said.
“Yes.”
“The goat things?”
“Soldiers.”
“Yes,” Jolene said. “From both Cabal and Dark Force.”
“Who’s controlling them?” I said.
Dillon backed up a step as Jolene’s power came on her and her voice deepened as she spoke. “The Fallen control them and the humans, who fool themselves into thinking they are able to control the tools of the Dark. The humans have made bargains, negotiated what they believe are deals. The Dark honors nothing. The Dark honors no one. The Dark lies and seeks to quash all that is good.”
She stared through me, no longer completely Jolene, the love of my life, who lay with me all through the nights, but an avatar of all that is powerful and procreative from the Goddess Herself.
“Marius,” she said. “This way is fraught with danger. But you must go. Dillon, you must go, too, and you must be careful . . . your anger is how they will trap you and you must follow Marius’s lead, no matter how strange it appears. You must both go now. They expect you. Sabrina cannot hold out alone against what is gathering there. She needs us. We will be aided . . .”
I couldn’t hold the words back. But I tried. “Jolene . . . you can’t come with us . . .”
Ever kneel in front of a wood-burning stove and open the door when the flame is at its highest and hottest? Ever feel the gentle warmth turn into a raging blast of heat right in your face? Take that feeling and multiply it by, say, ten thousand or so . . . then double it again.
That would be a rough approximation of what I felt blaze out of Jolene’s eyes.
“You do not decide.” Her voice was overwhelming. “The Goddess decides. The Goddess will have me remain here, in the flesh. I will support Sabrina till you arrive. And all of us will travel with you.”
What she was saying was she’d go into the Other Realms while Dillon and I raced, heavily armed, to Decanter . . . and that she’d hold off all the Dark Beings, including at least one of the Fallen.
By herself.
“Uh, Jolene . . .”
Try a blast furnace with a megaton yield H-bomb. In your face.
“The Goddess commands.” The voice that came through her came from a place and a being much further than my front room.
There is no arguing with the Divine.
I bowed my head. “In accordance with the Divine Plan.”
Dillon trembled. He didn’t understand or see what was going on. He just needed to run to the fight.
“Marius?” he said.
“Let’s rock and roll, gunfighter,” I said. “We’ll leave everything else to the Goddess.”
She didn’t smile. Her face was shadowed like the graven image of every av
atar stacked back up and through Mother Mary to Isis and to the fierce flame that burns in the hearts of all mothers.
“Go, warriors. Go with blessings as you go in harm’s way. Bring our sister home.”
We went.
* * *
My 4Runner rattled like Arjuna’s chariot on the eve of battle. Jolene’s car had fried and died in the parking lot outside Bella Italia, but mine had been parked safely in front of my house, so it was still running and had a full tank of gas.
Our chariot was ready.
We were gunned up and ready to roll.
I ran a Glock 17 with a Dawson +5 in the mag-well and three reloads on my belt; in the foot well behind my seat was a semiauto Daniel’s Defense M4 with an Arredondo dual mag coupler holding two PMAGs of Hornady TAP 5.56 goodness. That would do for Middle World baddies. I had a five-inch Smith & Wesson 627 revolver, the Jerry Miculek Custom with the eight-round wheel, in a shoulder holster, and a small dump pouch full of speed loaders for it. Each wheel contained bullets of silver and iron and lead for those baddies from the Other Realms, prancing around on backwards legs or otherwise. I also had a Super Soaker full of holy water: natural water infused for twenty-four hours with the peelings of nine oranges, blessed in the name of Jesus and Mother Mary. It was like napalm to Other Realms bad guys, especially vampires or werewolves or the genetic clones of those used by the Cabal.
Dillon ran his full war belt. His Glock rode in a Talon Tactical dropped-and-offset speed holster; the Glock itself wore a Trijicon RMR milled into the slide with suppressor irons, a Dawson mag-well to fit his customary Dawson +5; he had a speed rack with four reloads on it, and what was left of his belt space held two spare PMAGs in Kydex speed pouches, a blow-out kit, a dump pouch and a seriously big Bowie knife. He wore a simple Eagle three-mag pouch across his chest, the Velcro folded back for speed, and the war bag at his feet was full of spare magazines for his LMT SBR—completely illegal, chopped and seared for full-auto, a thirty-inch bundle of “I don’t give a fuck” with a white light mounted on one side of the rail and an IR laser on the other. He had NODs mounted on a beat-up skateboard helmet and an identical one—his backup—for me. Mine had a decal of a red arrow pointing forward that said DANGER IN FRONT.
