Return of the Phoenix - 01

by Heath Stallcup

  Return of the Phoenix

  A Monster Squad Novel

  Book 1

  Heath Stallcup

  Edited by TW Brown

  Cover by Ronak Kothari

  Return of the Phoenix

  ©2012 May December Publications LLC

  The split-tree logo is a registered trademark of May December Publications LLC.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living, dead, or otherwise, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author or May December Publications LLC.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  For my grandchildren. Hopefully one day they will be able to pick this up and realize that their grandfather didn’t just dream of writing, but had the tenacity to see it through at least once.

  Acknowledgements

  You know, you see these acknowledgement pages and as a writer you ask yourself if anybody ever reads these pages or do they skip straight to the meat and potatoes and jump into the story? Well, regardless, I want to take the time to thank some people who, without their help, this story would never have seen the light of day, or definitely wouldn’t be the polished work that it is now.

  First off, I need to thank my wife Jessie. Without her encouragement and understanding, this project would have ended up like the fifty or so others that were started and never finished - >DELETED< from my hard drive, just another idea that was never seen to fruition. All the nights that she went to bed alone so that I could have a few hours of peace and quiet at the computer without distraction has finally produced this, the first in a short series of stories that she has continued to encourage me to finish.

  Next on my list would be Mark Tufo. Mark is a fellow writer who has a heart the size of Texas. I have been reading his works for some time now and fell in love with his style. It just felt natural to me. The main character in his Zombie Fallout series, I feel, is a reflection of him and according to my wife…well, we could have been twins separated at birth (sorry buddy, her words, not mine!). He became a mentor of sorts and has allowed me to learn from his mistakes and helped me to avoid many of the pitfalls that he had to learn of the hard way. And it was Mark who introduced me to the next person I need to thank:

  My editor, TW Brown of May December Publications. Todd has been…wow. Um, here I am trying to be a writer and I don’t have enough adjectives to describe the guy. He’s wonderful, honest, forthright, straight-talking, helpful to a fault…and just doggone easy to work with. And he makes for a great shrink, too! When I would start to feel overwhelmed I’d email Todd and freak out and with one reply, he’d have me calmed down and ready to go back to work. The guy knows all the right things to say.

  Last but certainly not least, I need to thank Ronak Kothari of http://ronkot.com for the wonderful artwork you see gracing the cover. Ronak understood what I wanted even when I couldn’t explain it very well with words. He took my weak descriptions and came back with some of the most awe inspiring artwork that I ever could have asked for. Thankfully, he agreed to do the covers for the entire series so you can see more of his talents as the stories progress.

  You know, there’s a whole long list of people I could continue to thank that influenced me as I grew up. From my high school English teacher Sandra Mantooth, all the way to the authors that I read today, but I’m told that I need to keep this short. I’m naturally long winded, so I’ll end here. But, if you look Ms. Mantooth…I did get your name slipped in there!

  -Heath

  Return of the Phoenix

  A Monster Squad Novel - Book 1

  By

  Heath Stallcup

  Mankind has always suspected that he wasn’t alone at the top of the food chain. Since time immemorial, he has had an innate fear of the dark, a fear of the unfamiliar, a fear that something evil lurked just outside his field of vision. Whether he lived in a cave, a mud brick house, or a Tudor mansion, man has been afraid of that noise in the darkness that signified that he was not alone, that something might be waiting to attack him or his family. Grown men could tromp into the woods and play hunter by day, but once the sun set and the moon lit the sky, the unfamiliar snap of a twig or rustling of a bush could make the deadliest of hunter’s blood run cold. Something was out there. He didn’t know what it was, but the hair on the back of his neck stood on end for a reason. Man’s sixth sense that warned of an unseen danger was alive and well and screaming at him; his fight or flight instinct was kicked into high gear.

  If that same man experienced nothing, he would of course nervously laugh it off as simply ‘nerves’ or too much coffee. Perhaps it was just an overactive imagination playing tricks with him. But sometimes things would occur that simply could not be explained by the ordinary. Sometimes people would get hurt or attacked by things that defied rational explanation. Sometimes people would simply disappear…never to return again.

  Those who did survive, if they dared speak of the horrors they experienced, were often ridiculed by others. Some were institutionalized. Some— the truly unfortunate ones—enter into a special level of Hell reserved for survivors of attacks that can only exist in dime store novellas or bad science fiction movies and horror comics. These poor souls were left to deal with their consequences on their own, all the while asking, ‘why couldn’t somebody do something about the monsters that were out there?’ Why can’t somebody do something to protect the innocent? Why can’t somebody do something to stop the things that go bump in the night?

  Somebody has.

  This is their story.

  1

  “OPCOM, this is Team Leader. We are approaching now. One click to target,” the disembodied voice whispered across the overhead speakers. “Zero tangos.”

  Colonel Matt Mitchell was bent over the operations console observing an overhead view of the heat signatures of his assault team as they approached an abandoned farmhouse outside of Brownsville, Texas. The command center had switched to red light and all non-essential personnel had vacated the center. Communications techs, logistics personnel, weapons and tactics specialists and OPCOM’s lone civilian government representative, Laura Youngblood, sat anxiously near their respective stations waiting for the fecal matter to hit the atmospheric oscillator. “Keep your head about you, chief,” he answered back. “Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they can’t see you.”

  “Copy that,” came the whispered reply.

  “Be safe out there Phoenix,” Mitchell whispered to himself, a creepy feeling crawling up his back and settling in the base of his neck.

  Mitchell turned to peer at a countdown clock over the shoulder of one of his communications techs. The mission team had only been “feet down” in Texas for forty-three minutes, but it felt like this mission was already taking too long. The heat in this piss-ant border town was so intense during the day that it played hell with their satellite infra-red observation. Reading heat signatures in this type of heat, you actually watched for cold spots for your men. The colonel had practically begged for a bird with microwave visual capability, hoping that he could at least borrow one that had true-eye visibility, but none of the alphabet soup groups would loan him one regardless of the risk involved. He was stuck with the only bird he had, and tracking body heat was all he could do.

  Mitchell cursed again as his men faded in and out of view. “Fuckers promised me everything I needed to make this
unit work, and I have to send my men into the meat grinder with antiquated equipment.” Mitchell glanced up at Youngblood. “Any chance those assholes you used to work with would return your calls?”

  “Colonel, I tried to call in every marker I had,” Laura replied, her eyes not leaving her monitor.

  “What did those limp-wristed spooks say?”

  Laura sighed and finally made eye contact with him. “They laughed at me, sir.”

  Although Laura was still technically a civilian and didn’t have to refer to Colonel Mitchell as ‘sir’, she did so out of respect. Mitchell was a tough SOB, but he treated her as one of the guys rather than a ‘piece of ass’, and after all the grief she met climbing her way through the ranks at the CIA, she knew the caliber of man he was simply in the way he treated his people and the way he treated her. When she was assigned to him, he didn’t piss and moan about her being a woman or her being weak, he simply reviewed her file, accepted the accolades of her superiors and her mental, physical, and shooting scores for what they were and assessed her as he would any other member of his team. He placed her based on her merits. And she was now his second-in-command. Nobody ordered him to do it, nobody suggested he do it. Nobody pulled any strings and nobody coerced him because of who her family was. Hell, nobody knew who her family was, she had seen to that. And over the years, Mitchell had become much like a father figure for her. A brother in arms, but one she could go to if she felt she needed to air a personal problem that she didn’t feel comfortable sharing with anyone else.

  “I all but begged them, sir. I tried to express the importance of this particular mission without going in to details, of course, but it was like butting heads with a brick wall.” Half-Irish and half-Native American, Laura Youngblood stood a solid 5’ 11’’ with long mahogany hair. She looked to have a permanent tan, and her dark eyes gleamed with intelligent mischief. She was her father’s only daughter, the youngest of six kids. With five older brothers, she knew how to roughhouse with the best of them. She could definitely give as good as she could take.

  “Bastards. Let them hope they never need us to come clean up a mess for them or they’ll wish they had played a helluva lot nicer with us,” Mitchell swore out loud. “And yes, lieutenant, you can record that comment into the hard copy. Maybe when the powers-that-be sees that we aren’t getting the support we were promised, maybe…just maybe…somebody’s head will roll over this shit!”

  The communications officer cut a shit-eating grin at the colonel and simply uttered a “Yes, sir.”

  “Approaching the outer perimeter,” the disembodied voice whispered again.

  Mitchell returned to his post. Laura couldn’t help but notice that every time he assumed his duties in the command center, his stature seemed to grow. A Green Beret, Mitchell was an Army Special Forces soldier and a large man by nature. He kept himself in shape despite his age, but when his troops were ‘in-the-muck’ as Mitchell would say, he seemed to grow larger. Almost as a defensive move, like a mother hen fluffing her feathers to appear larger to a predator when her chicks are threatened.

  “Go easy, Phoenix. It’s daylight, so it should be like shooting fish in a barrel. But we know they’ll be somewhere deep and shadowed, and hopefully asleep. If they wake, cornered rats tend to bite.”

  “Copy that, OPCOM. Slow and easy until bingo,” the speakers responded.

  “Colonel, they still have four hours until dusk. No discernible weather noted. Blackhawk dispatched to LZ for pickup,” the logistics officer stated.

  “Noted and marked,” Mitchell responded. “Team Leader, you are minus four hours until bug-out.”

  “No problem, skipper. We should be mopped up long before that. We’re almost to the farmhouse. We’ll soon be going radio sile—” static came across the secured channel and was amplified through the command center.

  Mitchell stood instantly. “Sitrep! Now!” he commanded.

  The command center was suddenly abuzz with activity. Techs were adjusting the contrast on their screens trying to discern their operators from the heat of the day. Unfortunately, it was nearly impossible in the scorching Texas heat. Communications techs were trying every frequency, adjusting their equipment, going for every band available for any kind of signal. Suddenly one of them cried out, “I got them!”

  “Big screen!” Mitchell ordered, and the operator switched his monitor to the overhead screen so that all could observe the team’s heat signatures in the dry Texas scabland. But rather than seeing the seven special operators, they saw dozens of higher heat signatures running rampant at high speed, three and four attacking individual heat sources at a time, literally tearing it to shreds, then moving to assist another group that was tearing up another target.

  Through the overhead static that nobody had thought to turn off, a gurgling voice tried to yell ‘trap’ but it sounded as if the owner of the voice had gargled with broken glass. Automatic gunfire could be heard, but the static made it sound as if it was just a bad connection and it didn’t last long. The heat signature picture indicated why.

  The attack didn’t last long; the heat signatures all scattered in different directions and left the scene. Quickly.

  “Good lord…what was that?” somebody asked quietly.

  “Get me that Blackhawk. Redirect them to a half click from that site. I want my boys picked up. Tell them to look for survivors,” Mitchell said in a calm and even voice through clenched teeth. He knew there were no survivors. He could tell from the quickly cooling pieces of what once was his team on the screen above. “Tell those chopper boys to look for any kind of evidence of what might have done this. No matter how crazy it might appear. I want it. All of it. Every hair, scrap of clothes, everything.”

  “I’ll scramble the clean-up team as well, sir,” Laura didn’t sound well as she said it.

  “Make it so,” Mitchell said as he turned to leave the command center.

  “Sir?” Laura asked as he turned to go.

  “What is it?”

  “Where will you be, sir?”

  “I’ll be in my office. I have some calls to make. There are some answers I need and some fucking heads I want. And I won’t rest until I have them.”

  *****

  “He said what?” Laura asked, shooting up from her chair in Colonel Mitchell’s office.

  Mitchell poured her a short glass of single malt scotch. His brow furrowed in deep thought. “Yeah, that was my reaction, too.” Mitchell said, reclining behind his desk. His eyes probed her, reading her reaction and wondering if she would have beaten the shit out of the congressman, then choked the very life out of him had he been here in person. That was the colonel’s first instinct. “When he placed the blame on our training and lack of preparedness, I was pissed. When he said that I was inept and shouldn’t be in command, I went past pissed and straight to livid. But when he said that my biggest mistake was making you my second…I told him that if he ever darkened our door again, I’d personally gut him and mail his balls back to his kid.”

  Laura paled. “God, you didn’t really say that, did you? He’s on our appropriations committee, Matt.” Though she was glad that Mitchell had stood up for her. She knew that Senator Franklin had never liked her and often doubted her ability to lead. She just didn’t know if it stemmed from her record with The Company or because she was a woman.

  “The man’s a liberal turd. He’s hated us from the git-go. The only reason he’s on the committee is so that the others will have somebody to keep them in check and so that the president has somebody he knows will go whining to him with everything that is decided when they’re in session. Besides, I had already called the other three congressmen and they assured me that heads will roll for us not having had the support from NSA and CIA that we were supposed to have. We also got heartfelt condolences for the men and their families. But the honorable Senator Franklin was the only one to go off the deep end, so fuck him.” There was obvious venom when he said ‘honorable’ and that was one thing that Fr
anklin would never be.

  Mitchell had dealt with enough politicians over his career to know that there are bad ones, there are mediocre ones and there are damn few good ones. The one in question here was a certifiable nutcase; laughed at by his colleagues, ridiculed in the press, and somehow re-elected by his constituents. Franklin had been rumored to have gone off the deep end a long time ago, but that didn’t stop someone from putting the dumbass on their Oversight Committee and making him a permanent pain in their ass.

  The ‘Monster Squad’ as they were known, had a congressional oversight committee of four politicians who could either make them or break them at a whim. They approved their budget, appropriated the equipment, manpower, support personnel, and made everything possible for their entire operation to exist. Their operation was, for all intent and purpose, a ‘black op’, meaning that nobody outside the four man congressional oversight committee and the president himself even knew that they existed. Oh, their records reflected that they were military or government employees, but they ‘officially’ existed as clerks or cooks or field officers, not here in the center of the United States working out of an old defunct hangar at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City protecting this end of the world from things that go bump in the night and that mommies and daddies tell their little kiddies don’t really exist.

  Placing the command center here at Tinker was JC Watts’ idea. It was, pretty much, the center of the continental U.S., and it did provide a pretty good cover. The team could deploy from there and traverse the country easily and in equal time from this location. Nobody would expect a group of monster hunters to operate out of an unassuming hangar that used to be used for overhauling old aircraft.