Uh, oh.
The mob switched tactics, turning as one and grabbing for him instead of clawing. Only in the movies did one man face ten and make it out alive. At least forty still stood. Matt backpedaled to gain some space, snapping limbs and crushing bones as he went, but he impacted a wall of flesh, and a tattooed arm wrapped around his neck. Matt dropped low, and his assailant dropped with him to retain his grip, just as Matt expected him to.
Matt extended his legs, his backward leap carrying the man into the bolted-down table with a crunch he both felt and heard. He flipped back and landed feet-first on the table. Across the room, Krick stood with his arms raised, black fluid leaking from his eyes.
Jim Chambers leapt out from under the table, driving a chef's knife toward Krick's abdomen. The captain swept his hand downward and Jim caught it against his own, drawing a deep gash in Krick's forearm with the cleaver in his other hand. As one the crowd bled, black ichor leaking from their wrists.
With a wince Krick ripped his left hand up through Chambers's neck, and his blood painted the captain in crimson.
Matt leapt from table to table, lashing out to pulverize organs and snap limbs of anyone who got too close. Exhaustion pulled at him as the poison worked through his muscles, slowing his reflexes to near-human levels. He surged upward, punching his hands through drop-ceiling panels, and grabbed the thin metal supports that held up the panels. Muscles straining, he heaved himself up and through the small hole.
The darkness slithered with cables, power and internet in galvanized steel, pale yellow PEX carrying water to and from the ship's bowels. He scrambled forward on all fours, careful not to put his weight on any tiles, an insane game of "break mama's back" that carried him thirty feet to Krick's position.
Tucking into a ball, he fell through the tile and landed with a crash on the ground behind the acting captain.
Krick whirled and swiped, his claw tearing through Matt's cheek and cutting his bottom lip in half. Matt choked down the blood gushing over his tongue and grabbed the man by the shirt, pulling him to eye level. Krick's legs dangled as Matt snatched a steak knife from the table and held it to a black eye.
"Call them off." The burning itch intensified, and concentration became harder through the gray-green fuzz filling his brain. Blood dribbled from his mouth, and he spoke through it. "BACK OFF!"
Krick laughed, a haggard, wet sound over the droning voices, and closed his clawed hands around Matt's wrists. "Why bother? You're already dead."
"You first." Matt pulled back with his left hand and punched forward with his right, jamming the knife through Krick's right eye, up to the hilt. Krick twitched once.
The moaning stopped.
Bodies fell to the deck in a single mass. Matt turned, still holding the captain up. Every crew member had collapsed, eyes wide, leaking—bleeding—a viscous black substance from the right socket. Muscles twitched, bodies jerked. Matt wrapped his arm around Krick's head and wrenched, tearing it from the body.
Black fluid sprayed the floor and spattered his face, hot and too sticky, reeking of soured vinegar. The crewmen stopped moving, their necks erupting in sprays of black ichor as their heads tumbled to the floor. The room spun.
Matt stumbled and held himself up with the table. His eyelids drooped, vision blurred.
Monica. He heaved himself up onto a table, above the growing black pool of pestilent rot. Adam.
He dropped to his hands and knees, and the world faded.
Chapter 4
Eight girls stood around him in a circle, holding hands, their sing-song chant an unintelligible nursery rhyme. The world stank of blood and shit and death, a putrid miasma that set his stomach churning, but Matt couldn't move to cover his nose. They stared at him with eyes the void between stars, their white dresses streaked with black and red. His head rang in tune with their babble.
Their gibbering almost-words slithered between his thoughts, coaxing him to—his head rang again.
"Wake up, dammit," Sakura said.
He opened his eyes. The girls disappeared, replaced by Sakura's dour, mannish face. The smell remained, and the memory of their chant danced in his ears.
Sakura rubbed her hand on her hip. "You have hard bones. Get up."
She stood, offered a hand, and hauled him to his feet.
Corruption surrounded them. Black, liquid goo covered the floor. Clothing lay in disorganized lumps throughout the cafeteria amidst scattered trays of food, bolted-down furniture, and the dismembered bodies of Greg and Jim. Aside from the Shop guys, not a single bone or tooth lay anywhere. A pair of soldiers stood in the doorway, wide-eyed and green-faced, their wan complexions a perfect fit to Matt's state of mind.
"Forensics are on the way," Sakura said. "You shower, then we breach the closed-off section."
"There's a closed-off section?" He walked and talked, his shoes leaving sticky black tracks down the cramped hallway.
"You've been on-board three days and you didn't know?"
He shrugged. "Not a lot of unobserved time. For the most part I've been carrying pipe."
Sakura muttered something in Japanese, and ignored his pointed look as if she'd never spoken.
They wound their way to the crew quarters. Sakura found a black plastic garbage bag and opened it. "Clothes. Boots, too."
He stripped, peeling each disgusting layer from his skin and letting it fall into the open bag. He got to his boxers and hesitated.
"Hurry up." Sakura's mouth twitched, an expression that, in some alternate universe where Blossom Sakura smirked, may have been the beginnings of a smirk.
He dropped his drawers, eyes locked with Sakura. He held up the filthy, ichor-soaked underwear with a thumb and forefinger, and dropped them into the bag. Her expression never changed, even when she dropped her eyes to his groin and brought them back up.
"Acceptable, if unremarkable. Shower. Hurry up."
Sakura tied the bag as he walked into the bathroom.
He cranked the water as hot as it went and scrubbed hard, washing multiple times, scrubbing everything to eliminate any trace of the viscous black fluid. He leaned against the wall and let the clean water cascade over him, until it got too hot to breathe comfortably.
He got out reeking of lye and lavender, toweled off, and stepped into the common room. Sakura stood with her back to the room, arms crossed. A pair of used work boots in his size sat on the foot of his bed. He threw on deodorant, dressed, and approached, careful to avoid his own sticky footprints.
She half-turned at his footsteps, then took the lead. "Let's go."
Men and women in white environmental suits lumbered across their path, lugging test kits and electronics to the cafeteria-turned-abattoir. The techs had already stripped the captain's quarters, and strike teams had cleared the moonpool and bridge. That left only the rear hold, which they'd left for Matt and Sakura. Whether out of fear or respect, he couldn't tell.
A massive, rusted padlock secured the crossbars in the steel door, hinges hidden behind welded steel plates. A corpsman in full assault gear, one of six, handed him an Auto-Assault 12 combat shotgun. "Loaded for bear, sir."
He checked the drum magazine anyway and, satisfied, eyed the lock. "I don't suppose anyone has bolt cutters?"
Sakura held up a hand, and like magic a key appeared between her fingers. "In the captain's pocket."
It slid into the keyhole, and she popped the clasp with a smooth twist. She pulled out the lock, grabbed the crossbar, and looked at him, one eyebrow raised.
He half-turned. "What's on the far side?"
A marine stepped up with a tablet raised, displaying blueprints. "Engine room, sir, but there's no through access. Hull to port and starboard, one escape hatch in the aft ceiling we've got covered from above, awaiting orders."
"I'm in first with Sakura. We might have hostages inside, so check your fire and clear fast. If it freaks you out, kill it, but watch those 203's in confined quarters. Any questions?" The marines said nothing. Sakura dropped
her night-vision goggles, and the marines followed suit. He raised the weapon and nodded.
Sakura pulled open the door, and he followed the shotgun through the dark entrance, scanning left and right, checking corners in full spectrum, his augmented eyes rendering goggles unnecessary. Sakura appeared at his side, NATO-issue REC-7 assault rifle up and ready. The marines piled in behind them, efficient and smooth and almost silent.
Infrared picked up a vague red heat toward the back, and the dulled, purple ultraviolet showed him too many hiding places—crates stacked to twenty-foot ceilings or under oiled canvas lashed to metal knobs on the floor, neat rows stretching back a third the length of the ship. Machinery clanked louder here, the constant shudder of the engines vibrating through the floor and walls. It smelled of machine grease and dust.
He held up a fist, turned and grabbed the switch on the wall. The marines—and Sakura—removed their goggles and he turned on the lights. Rows of fluorescent bulbs flickered to life, bathing the room in their stark, artificial glow. Aside from the added hum, no sounds greeted their arrival. He dropped his fist.
The marines fanned out to take the side aisles and they swept forward as one, shouting "Clear!" at each new row of crates. Matt slowed as he reached an open area, veering left as Sakura split right.
They stopped.
A huge chalk pentagram, thirty feet across, dominated the back of the hold. Brown-red symbols smeared across the plain steel floor, circling across riveted seams in a mad visual collage that hurt his brain to look at. Gray goose feathers lay scattered throughout the pentagram, random yet somehow part of the pattern. He glanced toward but not at Sakura, and fought down memories he'd rather not re-experience—emaciated men, thorned demons, and Akash Rastogi screaming as they tore him apart, Sakura cutting deep lines in her wrists to free the beast confined within the eldritch cage.
Gritting his teeth against the expected onslaught, he reached forward. Nothing happened as his fingers crossed the line. He stepped forward. Nothing again.
Sakura joined him, phone out, recording the symbols. "These are different."
"They are." Curved, swirling, these glyphs held nothing in common with the sharp, angular runes they'd encountered in the abandoned warehouse in Washington, D.C. Dark circles sat at every chalk intersection, crimson puddles blackened and solidified to a hard, dull mass.
He slung his AA-12 over his shoulder and dropped to a pushup to disturb as little as possible. Putting his nose millimeters from a stain, he inhaled. A sweet smell, like vanilla and old churches, it carried him to summer days on his uncle's farm. He looked up at Sakura. "Beeswax."
"Noted."
Matt pushed to his feet.
A marine yelled. "Rowley, you got to see this!"
Sakura kept filming, her jittery but somehow coordinated camera work the product of modern technology—catch it all, analyze it in slow motion or stills later. He trotted to the very back of the room.
The wall hummed, the mechanical throbbing of the drillship's engines pulsing right through it. All six marines stood, weapons down, staring at a leathery object hanging from a hook on the wall. Thick black thread stitched together pale scraps. Matt didn't have to search for recognizable pieces: ears, noses, hair tufts, eye sockets.
He swallowed and lifted it from the hook, trying not to recoil from the lustrous, well-oiled, almost slippery surface. Spread out it revealed a cloak for a large man, complete with a hood, made of sections of human faces joined with rawhide sutures. Behind him, someone threw up.
"We find our girls?" a marine asked.
Matt shook his head. "Most of these are male. From the looks I'd say adults, and some of this leather is pretty old, five or ten years, easy."
The marine straightened, his face pale. "That's pretty gross, sir."
He put the cloak back on the wall and turned around. "What's your name, Marine?"
"Hatfield, sir."
"All right, Hatfield, get that vomit cleaned up and search these crates. I expect an inventory before forensics finishes up with the cafeteria, but under no circumstances step into or interfere with that pentagram. Clear?"
Hatfield glanced over his shoulder toward the rest of the hold. "You think it's magic or something, sir?"
The doubt in his voice rankled Matt, but a year ago he'd have felt the same way. He'd seen weirder crap that he'd ever imagined, and still didn't know what to believe about any of it. No explanation would stop Hatfield’s nightmares.
"Just follow your orders."
"Aye, sir."
* * *
The crates matched the cargo manifest: engine parts, cam shafts, and spare bits. In three days of searching they found nothing else of interest, so the Navy turned the sanitized ship over to Cypriana crewmen flown in from Greece.
From the deck of a US destroyer, Matt watched the Imperator churn water toward the Mediterranean at full steam.
* * *
Janet LaLonde walked into Matt's sparse office chomping on pale green gum and smelling of wintergreen. He couldn't help but look.
A leggy brunette prone to scandalous dresses and high heels, she hid a stunning intellect behind a white trash exterior calculated to keep people off-guard. And it worked. Her presence in the Estes Kefauver Federal Building drew too much attention, but all of it the harmless kind. Matt admired the shrewd, analytical reasoning behind her brazen disregard for dress code, even as he chided himself for falling for it and admiring the view. She pulled it off far too well.
She tossed a manila envelope on Matt's desk, blasting him with vanilla perfume tinted with pine. "So your swervy-curvies are a riff on paleo-Semitic languages, but nothing we’ve seen before. The grammatical structures are more modern, and it can't be paleo-anything anyway."
"Why's that?"
She opened the folder with a plastic, bright green fingernail and shuffled through the papers, still shots taken from Sakura's video interspersed between pages of linguistic analysis and translation, until she found the one she wanted and jabbed it with a finger. "That. The forty days of St. Martin."
Matt skimmed the information. The Quadragesima Sancti Martini became "Advent" in much later years. St. Martin of Tours lived from 316 AD to 397 AD, a Roman soldier-turned-priest who spent much of his youth razing pagan temples in the name of Christianity. A late pacifist symbolized by a goose, he'd hidden in a goose pen in a failed attempt to avoid appointment as a bishop, and at one time had clothed a freezing beggar with half his centurion's cloak, which he'd cut off with his gladius. After his death, his cloak became a relic, and the priest who wore it became the cloak bearer, or chaplain.
"So these whackjobs are invoking the patron saint of soldiers to do weird black-eyed stuff with little girls?"
Janet smacked her gum. "Looks that way."
"Do we know to what end?"
She sat down and leaned her chin on her folded hands. "Thought you'd never ask. Based on the incantations in that pentagram and the placement of the candles, seems those guys were binding demons into those little girls, and using the saint's body to do it."
"Why would they bind demons in little girls?"
Janet sat back, frowning. "How'd you know I was going to say that?"
Matt furrowed his brow. "You just—"
But she hadn't explained anything. He'd heard it before she'd said it.
"That's . . . interesting." Janet crossed her legs. "When did precog come back?"
"Uh . . . right now. And just that so far."
Her eyes drilled through him. "Whispers?"
"No." Not yet.
She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, hands splayed flat on his desk. "Don't shit me, Rowley. I need to know who I'm working with."
"No." He held her gaze. "No whispers, not since Italy."
"If they come back—and based on the rest of this stuff I think they're going to come back—you tell me. Maybe we can figure something out."
"Why would they come back? Gerstner's dead."
She stared at him
for a long, uncomfortable moment. "You weren't precognitive a minute ago, now you are. How dead do you really think she is? Dead doesn't mean what it used to."
Her eyes flicked to the desk, then the wall, then out the window, anywhere but at him.
He leaned forward, drawing her eyes back to his. "What does that mean?"
She didn't flinch, didn't lean away, just chomped on her gum. "A minute ago I tell you—well, I sort of tell you—that some whacked-up cult is possessing little girls with demons, and you don't so much as blink an eye. Your augmentations came back, just yours out of everyone in the world, and she was the source. What do you think it means?"
Her pupils dilated just a hair, and her facial temperature increased under her makeup. He didn't have anything close to Sakura's talent for identifying lies, but under her tutelage he'd learned how to make use of his augmented eyes for more than just night vision. Maybe not an outright lie, but not the full truth.
"You think she's still alive."
"I think she might still be alive, or whatever passes for alive for a Nephilim. Not the same thing. But if she is, she's got her talons so deep in you . . . ." She leaned back and booped his nose with a green fingernail. When he didn't respond, she stopped chewing and leveled him with her best all-business look. "I don't want to have to put you down."
* * *
Janet ignored the leers and glares on the way to her office, slipped inside, closed the door, and locked it. The server towers crowding her desk put off too much heat, and to compensate, the air conditioner cranked full blast. With the lights off, multicolored chaos from four screen savers blanketed the room in ethereal clown makeup.
She grabbed a roll of paper towels from the cupboard behind her desk, and set them on the floor. She opened a black plastic trash bag and set it on the floor, then kneeled in front of it.
Black_Tide Page 5
