The Grendel Affair: A SPI Files Novel

by Shearin, Lisa

  My first mission underground was going to be searching for a creature that was as smart as a human—and that had little ones to feed. Little ones that could eat enough human flesh to be adult-sized monsters within two days.

  We were in the team locker room gearing up. Earlier I’d worn a bulletproof vest, but this was my first time in full body armor. It was hot and heavy, and not in a good way. The thought of going into the claustrophobic sewers wearing claustrophobic armor made me want to hyperventilate, and I wasn’t even wearing the helmet yet.

  “This doesn’t bode well,” I told Ian who was helping me get strapped and buckled in. I gave him the condensed version of my phobic triggers.

  “Just think of it as a claw-resistant shell against grendels,” he said.

  “Yeah? Well, then I know how a lobster feels.” I poked myself in the chest. It did seem sturdy enough. “Not claw proof, huh?”

  “It’s not in the plan for you to be finding out.”

  “But what if the plan—”

  “Then you run.” Ian indicated a switch on the suit’s belt. “There’s an oxygen tank built into the back. Press this button here if you need a hit.”

  “Need?”

  “Air can get nasty down there with fumes that aren’t lung friendly. If your brain’s not getting enough oxygen, you can start seeing things that aren’t there.”

  “Just as long as I can still see things that are there.”

  “If you start seeing little flickering lights, flip the switch.”

  “And the tanks are safely under the bulletproof armor, right?”

  “Right.”

  “’Cause it’d really suck for a stray bullet to hit that tank and blow me up.”

  “I got news; it’d suck for the rest of us around you, too.”

  I was armed with one gun and one knife, both in shoulder holsters: the gun was loaded with silver-peppered bullets, the knife with silver-infused steel. And I’d been forbidden to use either one unless I found myself separated from the rest of the team with a grendel about to bite my head off.

  However, I had full permission to use my other weapon.

  My paintball rifle was slung over my back.

  Before she returned to the bull pen that would be the communications center for our mission, Vivienne Sagadraco had told the assembled teams what we could be up against in regards to the cloaking devices. Since we had no idea how many were in the adversary’s possession, we would not be taking any chances. I could see any grendel or ghoul that might be making use of the newfangled technology. The look she’d given the assembled commandos dared any of them to make a joke about my armaments. However, that didn’t stop the Scandinavians from ribbing their seer who was sporting a paintball rifle of his own. Poor guy. Ian had offered me paint grenades, but I turned him down. To say that I throw like a girl was an insult to girls everywhere.

  Ian noticed my wistful glances at everyone else’s Rambo-ready real weapons. “You’re not trained yet.”

  “And if I get gutted down there, I never will be.”

  “Your job is to see the monster, and mark it if we can’t see it. Our job is to kill it. You’re qualified to do your job; we’re not. We’re qualified to do our job—”

  “I get it. It doesn’t make me feel any less naked, but I get it.”

  He finished fastening my armor, his hands lingering on my shoulders. “We’re not going to let our seer get killed—and I’m not about to lose my partner. Speaking of which, you have a tracking chip in your armor.”

  I tried to smile. “Y’all are just afraid I’ll pull a Barney Fife and shoot somebody’s foot off.”

  “That, too.” He took my gloved hand and moved it to another switch on my utility belt. “And this is for your headlamp.”

  “I’ve got a light? Excellent.”

  Ian patted the top of my head. “It’ll be right up here, built in to your helmet. Low, medium intensity, and retina frying. The switch is there.”

  “Let me guess, when you have to wear something like that, it’s a given that your hands will have better things to do than hold a flashlight. Like hold a gun.”

  He gave me a flat look. “Right—for the rest of us. Nice try, though.”

  I shrugged. “I may not be trained, but I am persistent.”

  “That you are.” He continued with my equipment inventory. “You have an emergency light here, mounted to the forearm of your gun hand, which you will—”

  “Not be using for anything other than a paintball gun,” I said for him.

  “Right again. But as a point of instruction for the future, the more distance you can keep between you and your target and still take it out, the better.”

  “That’s why our spears are so damned long,” said one of the Scandinavians. He stuck out his gloved hand that wasn’t holding a spear. “Rolf Haagen. I’ll be with your team.”

  Ian shook it, then I did. It felt like shaking hands with a steel mannequin.

  “It’s not mine,” he said. “Neither is most of the arm up to my elbow. Finnish ice dragon took a taste of me a couple of years back. I took his hide for this,” he said cheerfully and kicked his gear bag. “Payback pays, or at least it makes a great set of luggage.” He held up his arm. “If I lose my hardware, I’ll just get a new one. I’m due for an upgrade. Maybe I can make a grendel choke on it.”

  An up-close look at the spear showed four thick hooks spaced around the shaft about ten inches below the point.

  “Keeps what you’ve got on the business end from pulling its way down to eat your face,” Rolf said with pride.

  “Helpful feature,” I said.

  “More than once.” He grinned and clicked the two sections of the spear’s shaft together. It was solid sounding.

  “That’d definitely hurt sliding through someone’s guts,” I noted.

  “We didn’t come here to tickle them. A lot of Old World monsters needed old kill methods. Tonight we make SPI history.” The Viking commando looked entirely too eager. “No one has ever killed a grendel in the dark—except for some Danish guy named Beowulf, and he just tore off the beastie’s arm and it bled to death at its mother’s house.” He snorted with derision. “That’s not a kill. So that ‘First Dark Kill’ position is open. I think my name would look good on that plaque in Oslo.” He gave us a maniacal grin and clapped Ian on the shoulder, hard enough to rattle my teeth. “Let’s go, kill, and return to drink to our victory.”

  Sounded simple enough, and the last part sounded fun, at least the returning part.

  My job was even simpler.

  If the grendels were wearing Tarbert’s cloaking devices, my job was to find them before they found us, point them out or paint them up, get the hell out of the way, and let the shooters and stabbers do their thing. If the grendels weren’t cloaked, just get and stay the hell out of the way.

  Yasha came over to us wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. I knew what that meant. The Russian would be going werewolf for our expedition.

  “Listen up,” Anderssen boomed and I jumped. “My people line up over here to get fitted with your comms. Our New York hosts have gear designed to work in the tunnels. We’ll all be on the same secure channel. Once we’re inside, no unnecessary chatter. Team leaders will check in with me every ten minutes. Report any sightings as they happen.”

  “Will a girly scream work?” Rolf asked.

  “It’s always worked for you in the past,” a huge, blond-bearded commando shouted good-naturedly. “Why change now?”

  Chatter was good. Chatter kept me from thinking about going down into unknown miles of tunnels to hunt down monsters that only I’d be able to see—armed with a paintball gun.

  “By the way, people,” Roy said, “try to avoid shooting anything vital that will cause maintenance people to come down to fix. That includes anything that looks like an electrical
switching box or anything with a pipe. We don’t need civilian company.”

  The Scandinavian woman leapt down from the back of the truck that’d brought their equipment from the airport. She’d turned wolf in the privacy of the back. Her fur went from dark blond to silvery highlights. Yasha smiled slowly, liking what he saw. The female wolf stood preternaturally still, regarding the Russian, her amber eyes glittering in what I swear looked like playful challenge. By now, everyone was watching. Yasha smiled, kicked off his flip-flops, and smoothly stripped out of his T-shirt, earning catcalls, wolf whistles, and applause.

  Then he dropped his shorts, and buck naked, turned right there in front of everyone. Muscles stretching, bones popping, claws extending, hair growing. When he’d finished, he threw back his head and neck—that had enough dark, rich red fur to qualify as a mane—and cut loose with a bone-chilling, triumphant howl.

  The Scandinavian woman had sat back on her haunches with a panting, wolfy grin to enjoy the show.

  Yasha the werewolf shook himself vigorously, settling his reddish brown fur around him, and grinned back.

  “We’re ready, sir,” called out a voice from just inside the tunnel access doors. Two of our people each held a spray nozzle connected to a tank.

  I looked over and groaned. Others groaned and swore. The Scandinavians just looked confused.

  Roy grinned. “Time to get spritzed with some of that fancy New York City toilet water.”

  Back home, toilet water could mean perfume. Roy meant toilet water. Literally. Though with my luck, the grendels would think it was seasoning.

  Our people reluctantly lined up to get sprayed down front and back.

  Rolf caught a whiff of what was in those tanks. “What is—”

  “Eau de Sewage,” Roy told our guests. “Not the real stuff; it just smells like it. Can’t have the beasties picking us out from anything else down there. Least not until we’re close enough to give ’em a proper welcome to town.”

  “Okay, teams,” Anderssen said. “Let’s form up, get coated, and move out. The clock’s ticking.”

  • • •

  You could get anywhere in the city via the subway. Using the tunnels, so could monsters—and so could we.

  We boarded the two troop transport trucks SPI kept in its fleet for getting commando teams closer to where they needed to be without being seen by the public.

  The abandoned subway tunnel SPI had paved and adapted for its use led to the Hudson River in one direction, up toward Midtown in the other. The Midtown section ended just before West Twenty-third Street. From there, the tunnel narrowed, and we were on foot. Grendels were nocturnal, but in the New York underground, it was always night. Man-made electricity was all that held primeval darkness at bay. Topside it was just after eight o’clock on what’d been forecasted to be a bitterly cold morning. New Year’s Eve morning. Under Manhattan, it was always dark and warm, at least warmer than it was out on the streets.

  Ideally, we’d find the nest with the adult grendels in one of the nine target sites, catch them both by surprise, and the bionic Viking and his spear would do their thing and he’d get his name on a plaque back in Oslo.

  Roy Benoit led our team; Sandra Niles headed the second, and Lars Anderssen the third. Roy was a lead-from-the-front kind of guy—or as was the case now, a lead-from-beside-the-werewolf kind of guy. Yasha had tracked the male grendel earlier, so he and his nose had the point. I was behind Yasha and Roy with Ian at my left shoulder, Calvin at my right. Rolf and the second Scandinavian spearman, a third Scandinavian, and one of our commandos, a former Marine named Liz brought up the rear with the flamethrower. If anything tried to sneak up on us, Liz would turn it into something resembling the gooey center of a s’more.

  I’d been in subway tunnels before, but not in what was below. Yasha led us through the levels with the garbage, bizarre and otherwise, and into passages that looked like no one had been there since they’d been scooped out of whatever the underbelly of Manhattan was made of. The tracks in the subway tunnel we were in had been abandoned, but only by trains. Trash was expected. An office chair on casters sitting perfectly level in the middle of the tracks? Not so much.

  Over the next who knew how many hours, we paused for quick MREs and brief breaks for the trackers to scout ahead. We found one of the likely nest sites. Empty. Sandra’s team located two more. Likewise empty. At this rate, by the time we found the actual nest, we’d be too exhausted to do anything about it. As we continued the search, Yasha and Roy took us past tunnels that branched off into what could have been uncharted darkness, and around shafts in the floor that could have fallen all the way to Hell’s waiting room for all I knew. Left to my own devices, I would have been lost after the first two levels. Who was I kidding? I’d have been hopelessly turned around as soon as I got out of the truck.

  I didn’t know how far we’d gone or how much time had passed when Roy called a halt and keyed his mike that was linked to the comms we all wore in our ears. “We’ve got a junction here. Both eventually get us to one of the possible nest sites. Mac, I need your eyes and Yasha’s nose. Tell me if our visitors have recently used either one. Let’s go to low lights, people.”

  Yasha and I moved forward, Yasha slightly in front, but still giving me a clear view. The Russian werewolf padded several paces into the tunnel—far enough to register scents that weren’t us—and stopped. His deep breaths frosted the air. I stood back far enough to give him room to work and took a good look around. The tunnel descended like a boarding ramp for an airplane and then curved slightly at about the same distance. If Yasha couldn’t smell it and I couldn’t see it, there was nothing there.

  I keyed my mike. “Nothing, sir.”

  Yasha growled low in his throat, which I took to be a frustrated no.

  We proceeded to the second tunnel. After about fifty feet, there was a concrete landing with metal stairs descending into darkness, stairs only wide enough for one person at a time. If we went this way, we’d have to go single file. Yasha stepped out onto the concrete landing and went perfectly still. I could just make out the fur bristling along the ridge of his spine.

  I stood off to the side. I didn’t need—or want—to go any farther. I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel it. Something was below. Waiting. That feeling had nothing to do with my seer ability; it was the primitive instincts of a human in the presence of a predator. I trusted those instincts. I turned my head toward Roy and nodded.

  Roy stepped between me and Yasha and onto the first stair. It creaked. It wasn’t loud, but for what we were hunting, it was loud enough.

  “Looks like the surprise party’s over, folks,” Roy said. “Yasha and I will take point. Calvin and Rolf, you and your pig sticker cover our six. Mac, wait until we’re at the bottom before you follow; these stairs don’t sound stable. Keep your senses wide open and sweep that floor for anything that even thinks about moving. The rest follow after you. When we reach the bottom, we’ll go bright. I want to see every rat turd down there.”

  They quickly made their way down the staircase. Roy and Yasha in the lead, Calvin at his back, followed by Rolf. I scanned below and beyond for any sign of ambush, but saw nothing. I started down, Ian protectively behind me, and the other three kept watch on the tunnel behind us.

  Our helmet lights pierced the darkness. The stairs went down at least two stories; the floor at the bottom mostly hidden in shadow. To our immediate right was a concrete wall; to our left a vast open space, interrupted midway by a catwalk roughly even with the halfway point of the stair. I couldn’t see where it came from or where it went. I aimed my light down and could just make out the shape of torn-up subway tracks. Still no visual confirmation, but I was still getting that primeval warning system thing that scrawny dinosaurs must have gotten right before a T-Rex came charging out of the trees.

  Or in our case, a whole forest worth of concrete and steel supports
.

  We all made it to the bottom without the stairs collapsing or walking into an ambush.

  Roy’s sharp eyes were determined to see where his high beams couldn’t. “Talk to me, Mac.”

  “Still no visible targets. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m sure that’ll change any second now. Yasha?”

  The Russian indicated the junction of the tracks with his nose.

  Roy gave a curt nod. “We’ll cover you.”

  Yasha moved silently to the center of the vast space, stopping where the tracks merged—and where he was in full view of the four tunnel openings. He faced each of the four in turn, letting the air, and the scents they carried, wash over him. Then without any indication of what he’d sensed, he quickly trotted back to where we waited.

  As Yasha approached us, his eyes glittered amber and gold. It was no trick of the light.

  A werewolf’s nose knew blood when it whiffed it.

  When he reached us, he turned in the direction of the tunnel opening in the left corner.

  The pitch-dark left corner.

  “Estimate of our location?” Roy asked Calvin.

  The big commando studied a device attached to his forearm armor. “Less than three hundred yards to the next possible nest site.” He nodded in the direction of the left corner. “That way.”

  23

  AFTER no more than fifty feet into the tunnel, the heat and humidity felt to me like they were climbing to sauna levels. Grendels might have liked it here, but I sure didn’t. I would’ve loved nothing more than to strip down to my tank top, but only Sigourney could survive a monster attack wearing nothing but her skivvies.

  We could all smell it now. A sharp odor, a combination of ammonia and copper. My nose instantly told my brain what those two smells were—and more importantly, what they meant, but to avoid scaring myself any more than I already was, I pushed the babbling realization into a closet in my head and slammed the door. Similar realizations were happening to the rest of the team—minus the babbling.