“I mean it, don’t move!” Her other hand sought out her phone, but it was out of reach.
She realized it might have been silly, reiterating he shouldn’t move. He hadn’t moved at all. It was as if he were not really there, just a reflection or a shadow.
“Put your hands up!” she tried.
The outline did nothing.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Damn it, she was running out of questions. She would have to get up out of bed, but she was afraid becoming distracted with maneuvering her body and keeping him in her gun’s sight would give him the opening he needed to…to do what?
“Talk up!” she called out, getting desperate. “You’re about to get arrested.”
Maybe the light.
Get a look at him first. Maybe blind him, get rid of his night vision.
She reached for the light switch right over her head. At least this one was close.
She felt around for the familiar toggle.
Finally.
Started to click it in the right direction…
As she did, thoughts gushed through her brain.
He could be armed. Holding a gun himself…
Too late to worry about that.
Click.
The light wasn’t great, but it was enough to dispel the deepest shadows in the room. She gripped the Smith & Wesson harder, ready to shoot if her intruder’s outline moved or otherwise threatened her in any way.
None of that happened.
No, she saw an image of an elderly man, but even as she stared at it, it seemed to fade in and out.
She was trembling by now, the gun shaking in her hand. If she fired, she’d probably miss. Her luck, she’d kill a neighbor on the other side of the apartment wall. She lowered the gun slightly. She could always raise it. The elderly man didn’t seem to be much of a threat.
“Who are you?” Then, when he faded again, “What are you?”
And why did he look familiar? She suddenly realized she had seen a photograph of him, somewhere. And he looked benign…
“Who are you?” she whispered again. “What do you want with me?”
He had to be an apparition. She could see through him. And she thought he looked about as old as her grandfather had when she last saw him, many years before.
As if a wired connection were being made, she suddenly heard his voice in midsentence.
“Don’t be afraid,” he was saying. “This isn’t—easy as it looks, but I need—send a message, and I’m afraid you’re—who can receive it—pass it along to—don’t know who else…”
“Christ’s sake,” she said, exasperated. “You’re like a bad connection. You’re here, you might as well communicate.” She lowered the gun. He was more not there than there, how could he hurt her? She’d been open to ghostly appearances all her life. Her grandfather had prepared her.
The outline spoke clearly. “I knew your grandfather. Joseph Badger, a good man gone bad. My name is Sam Waters.”
Joseph Badger. She hadn’t really started thinking of her grandfather until recently. It couldn’t be a coincidence, not with all those strange messages.
And then she knew where she’d seen the apparition’s photograph.
In Nick Lupo’s file.
And, for that matter, in a frame in his office, in a photo of him sitting on a wooden porch or deck outside some tiny cottage.
Chapter Eleven
Shooter
He didn’t dare leave the dingy, run-down motel room he had taken in the southern suburb of Chicago.
Even though his cocktail seemed to be holding him together, keeping his body from betraying him too much, he knew if he went out they would find him. They would capture him, and what he’d seen would happen to him. And, worse, he would become one of them!
No, even if he got hungry he wouldn’t go out. It was when he broke down and went out among the people that he soon started to see them, sometimes everywhere he looked. And then even the drugs couldn’t keep him from the panic attack, the rage, and ultimately the revenge. He would find them, root them out, and kill them much as his buddies had been.
Christ, it wasn’t hard to relive the day.
That fucking day.
It had been at least a hundred eighteen degrees in the sun, with a breeze that shifted sand around and drove the tiny, gritty particles into your clothing, your boots, your eyes, your mouth…there was sand everywhere, and your skin was chafed by the grit until you lost feeling in your outer layers of epidermis. You even stopped thinking of it as your skin, but instead as another layer of cloth.
The raging firefight that stretched into the endless battle of Fallujah, an ebbing and flowing action spanning summer through fall and thousands of “flags”—American troops—and contractors, had changed the shooter’s life forever.
He was a Marine sniper, so his squad had nicknamed him Shooter—no different than a cowboy cook was referred to as Cookie, he used to say back when he had people to talk to—and he had a growing number of confirmed kills notched on his M40A5 rifle. He didn’t shy away from the war’s ugliest violence, having watched enemy heads explode while bracketed within his telescopic sights when his high-velocity rounds caught them just right.
But on this day, they’d been exhausted and were given a chance to stand down in somebody’s abandoned clay hovel. It was probably a mansion to these people, but it was not much more than a shed with a tin roof as far as he was concerned. But shelter was shelter, and just getting out of the sun had the effect of making one feel human again.
They’d been fighting brief, intense actions since the previous month, when a group of contractors—mercenaries—had been ambushed and killed after a massacre of innocents. They’d been dismembered in public and hung on a bridge, a stark message to the occupying forces. The incident had led to an increase in search-and-destroy patrols, turning the dry desert town into a kill-zone where both sides did their worst every chance they got.
In the slightly cooler interior of the empty house, they’d had water and some of their inedible rations, sandy grit crunching between their teeth, while keeping their weapons close to hand. Barely a half hour into their nervous rest, they’d heard screaming outside. It came from beyond the wall that surrounded the home’s small courtyard, a sort of lawn minus any living greenery. The screaming seared the young soldiers to their very souls. It was women and children, and it was blood-curdling.
“What the fuck is that?” said Karicke, a thin sunburned kid from somewhere near Chicago.
“Shut up,” hissed their commanding officer, Sarge Lockett. He waved his hand to quiet the inquisitive mumbling. “I’ll take a look,” he whispered. “Shooter, with me.”
It made sense, if they saw something happening the sergeant’s Colt SMG and Shooter’s sniper rifle would be sufficient to at least hold off an attacking force until the rest of the squad could rally and provide support.
They’d run at a crouch out the low doorway and crossed the courtyard, covering each other, becoming aware that the screaming on the other side of the wall was now mingling with the sound of growling, snarling dogs.
“The fuck…?” said Lockett, a large African-American from the Deep South. “Sounds like dogfighting shit.” They were hunched over between a ragged hedge of scrawny, starving bushes and a couple malnourished date palms.
Shooter frowned. It sounded nothing like that to him. It sounded like dogs against humans, and dogs were winning.
A howl drowned out the screaming before fading into some kind of bizarre growling. The Marines looked at each other and Sarge gestured a careful look-see over the wall.
They raised their heads cautiously. Shooter’s eyes focused quickly, one of the qualities that gave him his sniper’s skill.
A line of men, women, and children were roped together and held at gunpoint by a dozen mercenaries. The contractors wore the distinctive wolf’s paw patch on their black uniforms. Seeing those uniforms, Shooter always recalled his high school history class on World W
ar II and the pictures he had seen of the German Schutzstaffel—the SS—and the dreaded Gestapo, the secret police. The mercenaries always looked like Nazis to him. The locals were screaming because the mercenaries had started to kill them one by one. Two or three bloody bundles of rags were all that remained of the first victims, and huge splashes of dark blood had splattered the mud walls behind them like gigantic surreal tags on a train car.
“Jesus—” he muttered, and Sarge elbowed him in the ribs and widened his eyes, making their hand-sign for too many of them. Shooter nodded and bit his tongue.
At first Shooter thought the Wolfpaw scum’d been shooting their prisoners in the head, but then his breath caught in his throat and he thought he was having a stroke, because the blood seemed to drain from his brain and he felt his knees weaken.
He wasn’t used to feeling much of anything, not after all he’d done from behind a rifle sight.
But this, this was different.
This was way different.
No, this was completely inexplicable, completely alternate-universe unbelievable.
The Wolfpaw group leader and his hired guns held the screaming people at bay while one of their fellows squirmed out of his black tactical jumpsuit to reveal a nude, hairy body that was both muscular and lean. And with a gigantic erection Shooter could see from across the alley.
He could have sworn he heard the leader call out, “Go, Jacko, all yours!”
Before he could process this new and unexpected sight, or really register the import of the twisted, brutal aspects of the scene, it changed again when the naked man blurred and like a CGI effect was suddenly an enormous gray wolf. Where the man had been now stood an impossibly large animal that had no right in any universe to be there. The closest Afghani man screamed incoherently, his sanity seeming to leak out of his eyes and nose and mouth.
And then Shooter saw what now haunted his nightmares despite the drugs he ingested to help him forget…
The wolf’s head approached the victim-to-be, lolling almost as if relaxed, but then its muscular jaws opened wide and closed down on the man’s head, crushing it between rows of drooling fangs. Blood squirted out in all directions. Shooter had the fleeting thought of a large grape, crushed between his teeth and the juice squirting and running out…
The body fell, legs twitching, dragging down the next victim in the hellish chain gang.
It was a child, and the high keening wail would stay with Shooter the rest of his life, as the same wolf took seconds by repeating his actions and crushing the child’s head, then ripping it off the blood-squirting neck, shaking it like a ball before tossing it to lie limply on the bloody dirt of the alley.
A different Wolfpaw asshole monster was already shedding his equipment and tac-suit, and turning into a different-looking wolf, killing the next screaming victim, the woman whose family had just been slaughtered.
Beside him, Sarge slipped off the ledge and fell in a heap inside their covering wall, but his moan was too loud and one of the Wolfpaw mercenaries turned just in time to see Shooter duck out of sight. It was enough.
“Flags!”
The group leader had seen them.
Dozens of 9mm rounds from Wolfpaw Colt SMGs sprayed the wall and the bushes behind it, showering Sarge and Shooter with sharp debris from both.
Shooter grabbed Sarge by the neck like a rag doll and pulled him across the courtyard, trying to handle both their weapons at the same time, but already the Wolfpaw gunmen were scrambling to pursue the witnesses. Only seconds later several large wolves leaped over the wall, skidded to a halt in the center of the barren courtyard, spotted their targets ducking into the doorway and leapt in that direction.
Shooter and Sarge flew into the dark house shouting, trying to rally the dazed Marines who had been sleeping and relaxing. Sarge barred the flimsy door but immediately it began to splinter under the wolves’ attack, and then dozens of rounds perforated the door and the walls around it, piercing helmets, vests, armor, and flesh.
Screams loud in Shooter’s ears were drowned out by the ragged bursts of automatic fire and the growling of wolves who wreaked havoc on the surprised Marines, biting off limbs and tearing out throats one by one, until there was only the moaning of a single Marine, whose throat was cut by a Wolfpaw gunman moments later.
None of the wolves had been affected by the gunfire.
Buried under Sarge’s dead body, Shooter played dead as the wolves nosed around among the corpses of his buddies and tore flesh from the dead in a gruesome victory dance. Their grunts and growls were as obscene as their gluttony with the human flesh and bloody organs they ingested. He was too dazed to even think of praying that they didn’t sniff out the fact that he was still alive. Maybe they were too inebriated by the taste and awful stench of dead flesh and spilled blood and feces, or maybe they were just too distracted by all the offerings on this most disgusting buffet. In any case, they did not find him.
Shooter heard the voice of the Wolfpaw officer issuing orders, then the sounds of gunmen and wolves leaving the charnel house and the tell-tale clicks of pins being flipped off grenades.
“I’m so sorry, Sarge,” he muttered through a veil of tears and acrid sweat that covered his face. “I’m so sorry…”
Desperately he rolled his dead Sergeant’s body over him as well as he could and cringed underneath it, crying tears of helpless rage and fear. And awaiting the explosions…
Chapter Twelve
Franco Lupo
On the Freighter Zeniča, crossing the Atlantic Ocean
December 1945
After an hour of playing scopa and other elementary card games, he had lost almost half the money in his pockets. They weren’t cheating him, exactly, yet he was unable to make a move that didn’t involve losing the hand.
There were smiles all around for the child—an unofficial mascot—and he gave as good as he got in the games, although the pot always seemed to elude him.
“Too bad we sailed at night,” said the brutish machinist’s mate Havlav. “You will miss seeing Gibraltar.”
“Not that there’s anything to see worth a shit,” said another grease-stained motorman. “It’s a rock. Like a wart on the ocean surface.”
They were speaking a mixture of Italian, rough German, Czech and native Yugoslav or dialects, and hand-motions in deference to their visitor. They had taken to the boy quickly, gregariously, and he wondered if they would have felt the same if they knew he had a loaded Beretta in his pocket and no shyness in its use.
Franco had rarely been so subtle, but he forced himself to grin and bury his true intentions. But finally he blurted out, “Do you know if there are any Nazis aboard?”
He wanted to ask about werewolves specifically, but recognized the topic would not be well-received. But his blunt inquiry had an effect—several of the off-shift motormen, those whose job is to maintain the boilers and the screws that propel the vessel, looked at each other before shrugging or shaking their heads.
All right, they know the ship sometimes carries escaping Nazis.
Do they benefit, or is their silence unwilling?
Franco pressed his questioning. “What about strange passengers? Are there any of those?”
Havlav laughed. “Some would say you and that priest are very strange,” he said, making an obscene gesture.
The glare Franco turned on him killed the laugh before it could cross his features. “He is not like that.”
“No one really knows what men have done with the excuse of war,” another grease-stained off-duty crewman pointed out. “I have seen it.”
“If I had seen what you describe, I would have cut off his balls.”
Franco was satisfied when he saw that the effect of his statement was a kind of horror. He believed in telling people the truth.
“And if I saw certain Nazis, I would do the same.”
“So you are a hunter of men, eh, boy?” the grease-stained mariner said, not quite joking.
“More a hun
ter of monsters.”
“Yes, monsters, it’s agreed. Scum of the earth, those Nazi bastards.” Havlav mimed spitting.
“So no one has any information to share?” He stared at the few crewmen still around—the others had drifted off to their bunks, apparently.
“We just ferry cargo, we don’t judge it,” someone muttered.
“Perhaps you should,” said Franco, emboldened by the spirits.
“Perhaps you—”
“Let him be.” Havlav stared down the complainer.
Silence descended on the mess hall. A ship’s clock on the bulkhead made the only sound, a loud ticking amplified by the metal wall.
The moment passed, and Franco ignored the complaint. The cards were dealt again, and soon a new rhythm had begun. He continued drinking as he played. He was not a natural, however, and he also continued losing until he declared he could lose no more.
“Watch out for Nazis,” someone called out as he slid his stool from the table.
Leaving the mess hall, he tripped slightly in the doorway.
Wandering the long corridor, teetering slightly with the ship’s rolling motion, Franco found his way back to the companionway and took the metal staircase up to his own deck. As he stepped out unsteadily, he heard a scrape behind and below, but he burped loudly and shuffled off the steps.
When someone came stealthily up the companionway, Franco was ready. He had silently doubled back a few meters and waited around the stairway corner. Although slight of body, he was all sinew and muscle, and his weight in a flying tackle was not inconsiderable. He took his follower off his feet and slammed him to the metal bulkhead, the Vatican dagger drawn and its blade poised on the man’s neck.
“What do you want?” he shouted. The metal bulkheads returned his words as an echo. Franco’s hand shook convincingly as he allowed his bared blade to nick the fat neck of Havlav, recently his friend down below. At the moment, Havlav was spluttering, albeit very carefully, since any great movement would slit his throat.
Franco dug the blade in and screamed in the motorman’s face, “Why are you following me? What do you want?”
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