Black Ops

by Alan Baxter

  The big door wasn't locked and Kharrn swung it open with a hiss of escaping air. He stepped into the room and approached the table.

  “You still have the axe, I see. Will you slay me here in my bonds?”

  Kharrn raised the axe and used it to cut the restraining straps. He said, “Go and join your brothers. Do what you want with the men in this place, but I won't let you kill the innocent islanders.”

  “No human is innocent. And you are too late, savage. For we are many.” The Deep One pointed over Kharrn's shoulder.

  It was a feint, of course. Kharrn shifted his head but not his gaze. When the deep one tried to attack, Kharrn knocked the creature away with a backhanded blow of one huge fist. The Deep One had been imprisoned for a long time and it posed no real menace. The same couldn't be said for the group of Deep One's crowding into the outer room. The carried spears and knives and swords. They rarely needed more advanced weapons, as humans couldn't stand against their mental powers.

  They wore garments that glittered like the scales of fish and all of them sported golden jewelry. Rings, necklaces, bracelets and anklets. It had been many years since Kharrn had seen the intricately worked golden creations of the Deep Ones.

  Kharrn stepped out into the lab. He said, “You brother is here. Take him and go.”

  He felt a dozen minds turn toward his own, seeking to take control of his actions. To seize his mind and destroy it from within. Kharrn grinned. He said, “Last chance to walk away.”

  None of the batrachian creatures answered. He doubted they could. These were not hybrids, born on land and raised as men until their time came to go down to the depths. These were true denizens of the sea.

  The Deep Ones brandished their weapons and began to stalk forward. Kharrn rolled his shoulders, preparing to hurl himself into the middle of his opponents.

  That's when the soldier Kharrn had spared on the beach came running into the room pursued by a horde of the mutant Deep Ones. The old Deep One had learned to control his distant cousins. The other Deep Ones had no such chance, and apparently the mutants didn't recognize their progenitors. True Deep Ones suddenly found themselves locked in combat with things created from their blood.

  And of course all of the Deep Ones, old and new, wanted to kill Kharrn. He raised the axe and waded in. He sent the head of the closest true Deep One rolling, then drove the heavy, double-bladed axe into the spine of one of the mutants. He jerked the blade free and the backswing tore through the throat of a creature that had attempted to spear him from behind.

  The soldier was in a corner and apparently down to his last few rounds. He fired off three shots, then pitched the gun away and caught up a heavy stool to use as a bludgeon. Kharrn liked the fact that the young man didn't give up. He began cutting his way toward the Spec-Ops guy.

  Four of the true Deep Ones converged on Kharrn, seeking to bring him down with swords and spears. The giant man bellowed in rage as he swung the axe in wide arcs. The blades of the Deep Ones' weapons shattered as they struck the axe and Kharrn hewed into the fish-men, cutting and hacking with the huge weapon.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Kharrn saw Jonathan Crowley enter through a door on the far side of the lab. He struck one of the Deep Ones in the side of the head, crushing its skull.

  * * *

  Crowley had no idea how many ways there were to kill a Deep One, but he was willing to find out. Adrenaline sang through his system and drove him into the conflict. There was a blend of hybrids among the creatures, but even with mixed heritages, they were always the same beasts. That was what the scientists had failed to understand. No matter what the Deep Ones mated with, man or fish or even, he supposed, an alligator, they always had the dominant genes. The end result was always a Deep One, just sometimes with a few genetic advantages.

  Crowley yanked the heavy spear from the hands of a monster coming for him and cracked it’s skull with the butt end. The sharp side was used on the next one to send it croaking in pain as it lost an eye.

  The claws on one of the nightmare’s feet cut into his calf and bare foot and he growled at it as he shoved forward, knocking the thing backward and into a few more. Three cuts from claws and teeth were his reward, but he threw his new toy and pinned one of the true Deep Ones to the wall.

  A heavy necklace of gold and stone marked one of the demons as a high ranker. Crowley jumped over the back of one of the things that had dropped to all fours and shoved it down to the lab floor even as he grabbed the elder around the neck with one arm and twisted. The spines from the elder’s back pushed against his chest and stung, but the Hunter wrenched the vast head of the thing sideways until bones snapped and it dropped, dead.

  So often he had to restrain himself, but not now, not this time. Whether or not he lived through the encounter, he would kill as many of the things as he could before he died.

  * * *

  Brent had run out of luck and ammunition. When the three fish-men had appeared from nowhere, Brent's only avenue of escape had been to run inside the facility and hope for the best. That plan had turned to shit pretty quickly when he ran into even more of the creatures. He fired off a few rounds and then dodged into a stairwell, and now he was trapped in one corner of a room filled with fish-men, some of who were wearing clothes and carrying weapons.

  He emptied the .45 without doing much damage that he could see, and then caught up the only weapon handy, a metal stool of the kind he remembered from college science labs.

  The big man from the beach was making like an escapee from a Schwarzenegger flick, chopping through the fish-men with an axe like Brent had seen in Viking movies. The guy was hell on wheels and he was doing heavy damage, but there were just too many of the things. They rolled into the room like a black tide of death.

  There was one way out, but it wasn't a good one. A primary component of any clean-up operation, though not one Brent usually handled – two team members had been carrying mass quantities of explosives. Captain Younger and Warrant Officer Mason Gentry. Gentry was dead and Younger too, probably. But when Brent had scavenged Gentry's ruck, he hadn't just taken ammo. Brent had a bag full of explosive devices if he could just get time to use them.

  Brent dug into the bag, and then dropped it as one of the big fish-men came charging his way. The explosive charges scattered on the floor as Brent took up the stool again. He jabbed with the legs of the stool like he was trying to push back an attacker with a knife. The fish-man slapped the stool aside and that was all she wrote. The creature snarled, and drew back one big, clawed hand.

  And that hand and the arm it was attached to went spinning away. Blood sprayed everywhere as a second blow from the big man's axe struck the fish-man.

  Brent said, “I thought you were going to kill me.”

  “Changed my mind. Can you set those charges?”

  “Yeah, though we'll die.”

  “Maybe,” the giant said. “Do it.”

  Maybe? Did the guy think he could survive ground zero of half a dozen explosive charges? Brent shrugged, he was out of options. He set to work, trying his best not to look up as he heard the big man chopping away at anything that came close. Didn't the guy ever get tired?

  “Kharrn, what are you up to?” Brent heard another voice call. He didn't look up. He almost had the charges daisy-chained together so that he'd only have to use one detonator.

  “Fire in the hole,” Kharrn called back.

  “Do you know how long it will take to heal up from that?”

  “Yes. Keep fighting.”

  Brent looked up. A man he hadn't seen before was fighting the fish-men with his bare hands. Who the hell were these people?

  Brent said, “I'm ready. Give the word.”

  * * *

  “STOP!”

  Kharrn heard the single word so loudly inside his head that it made him wince. He glanced over at Crowley, who gave a shor
t nod to show he'd heard it as well.

  The ancient Deep One stood in the middle of the lab. The other Deep Ones had stopped attacking. As near as Kharrn could see, all the mutants were dead.

  “I want to see the great depths again,” the old Deep One said. “I can sense what you are about to do. I would not survive such an explosion.”

  Crowley grinned. “Kind of the plan.”

  “Even you two might not survive.”

  “We'll take our chances,” said Kharrn.

  “I know that. I can't control either of you, but I can see it in your minds.”

  Crowley said, “And you know that even if you fried GI Joe's brain, Kharrn or I can work the detonator.”

  “Yes. Enough. We will go.”

  “And you won't slaughter the islanders,” said Kharrn.

  The old one shook his head. “No. But there are still men alive in this building. I want them.”

  Crowley smiled again. “I've got no problem with that. Kharrn?”

  “Take them,” said Kharrn.

  “What about that one?” The Deep One pointed at the soldier.

  Kharrn said, “Not part of the bargain.”

  “Don't depend too much on my weariness. You realize that even if you kill me, an army of my people would come here.”

  Crowley said, “You'd still be dead. Take your scientists to torture and go.”

  The Deep One said, “And then what?”

  “We'll give you half an hour to get out of here and then we're going to use this guy's explosives and blow this place to hell,” said Crowley.

  “Yes, I would not wish to see this building stand.”

  “You won't,” said Kharrn.

  “Someday, when I am whole, I would like face you again, savage.”

  Kharrn said, “I'll be around.”

  The Deep Ones began to file out of the room. The soldier said, “Were you talking to that thing? I couldn't hear it say anything.”

  “Be glad,” said Crowley. “It wanted to take you somewhere and kill you painfully over a long period of time.”

  “And you're really going to destroy the facility?”

  Kharrn said, “We are. Leave the explosives with us. We'll set them properly now and obliterate this place.”

  “What do I do?” said the soldier.

  Jonathan Crowley said, “You get to be a hero. The only survivor of an ill-fated mission.”

  “Probably my last mission.”

  “Probably wise.”

  “Mind telling me who you guys are?”

  “Better that you don't know,” Crowley said. “Trust me on that.”

  Crowley looked at the soldier and said the words he almost always spoke with witnesses. Later, if the man found another case where things that should not exist were attacking human beings, he would place a phone call.

  The soldier looked like he wanted to say something else, but he shook his head and left the lab. After he was gone, Crowley said, “I had thought the race almost wiped out, but there are apparently a lot of Deep Ones out there now.”

  Kharrn nodded as he gathered up the charges and the detonators. “In various places, yes.”

  “Sooner or later they'll come into conflict with humanity again.”

  “But not today.”

  “No not today. So what do you say, Kharrn? Let's blow this place up and then go get drunk and talk about old times.” He paused “And I need to find my shoes.”

  “Old times,” Kharrn said, “We're the men for that.”

  RAVEN’S FIRST FLIGHT

  Alan Baxter

  Raven sat on a hard metal chair and scanned the bare room. A huge mirror on one wall was obviously a one-way window. Otherwise there were two chairs and a square metal table, all bolted in place. The room itself lay buried deep in an otherwise normal office complex, on the top floor of an old brownstone on East 72nd Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. An office like a million others across New York. She thought she’d already agreed to join this strange crew, despite the lack of details, but it felt like another interview was imminent. Or maybe she’d misread everything and was being taken for a ride.

  Raven. She liked the new handle. She’d never really liked her given name anyway. Real identity no longer exists in the Dark Squad, she had been told. No names, no history, no family, your new life starts here and before that you were nothing. The old you is a ghost.

  It suited her fine. Being rid of her loser parents would be no trauma, she’d left them for the Army at sixteen, first chance she got. And they’d left the rest of her family behind in Korea anyway. She hadn’t seen any of them since she was five. Growing up Korean in America, a cultural mongrel, nothing had come easily to her. Estranged not only by distance and emotional coldness, but by her powers too, the odds had always been against much in the way of integration. Which was apparently a large part of why she’d been picked for this weirdo sideline. She was yet to decide if she could really trust the promises that had been made to her, but anything appealed more than a cell. A slight guilt hovered at the thought of her parents receiving a ‘Killed In Action’ notice, the funeral without a body they would have to endure. But still, what did she really care?

  A light burst out, blinding her. Raven ducked off the chair, rolled into a crouch by the furthest wall, standard procedure against an unexpected IED. Her Army training fired up and she slipped the automatic 9mm from its hip holster, squinted against the blur as her vision adjusted back to normal. Nothing to shoot at, no burn or explosive damage. A decoy blast? She switched the 9mm to her left hand, trained on where the light had seemed to emanate, and moved her right hand to the jade knife at her belt, slipped it free. Its icy touch emboldened her. Feeling suitably armed, she whispered the samjok-o into her presence. The three-legged raven, it’s jet black feathers glistening under harsh blue strip lighting, stepped as though through an unseen door directly onto her shoulder.

  What’s here? Raven mentally whispered to the familiar, the source of her new operative name.

  It ducked and blinked, hopped up and circled the room with one wing flap, then settled back to her shoulder. Nothing, it thought at her.

  Raven frowned and slowly rose from her crouch. The bird faded back to whatever plane it chose to inhabit once her attention on needing it had drifted. It was never far away, even if it wasn’t always physically with her. A word would bring it every time.

  With a sense of disgust, she cautiously lowered herself back onto her chair, slipped the 9mm away, but kept the icy dagger reversed in her grip. The blade pressed coldly against the underside of her forearm. She preferred blades to firearms anyway.

  What kind of pointless test was that?

  The door behind her opened and she was out of the chair and over the desk in an instant, her small, wiry fame belying her athleticism and strength. Many had underestimated her physical ability to their detriment.

  “It’s all right, settle down.”

  The voice was deep and accented Scottish, but nothing like anything she had known before. Maybe some country accent, or the remnant of an older dialect. Regardless, it wasn’t broad enough to give her any trouble understanding, but was instantly recognisable. The man who had recruited her, who she knew only as Boss.

  “The fuck is going on?”

  He smiled at her, wide and open, teeth bright and large in his grizzled head. The man was massive, at least six and half feet, wide as a barn door. His iron grey hair was cut almost to the skull, his stubble a sparse snowscape across a square chin. He looked to be about fifty or maybe a little older, but Raven had rarely seen anyone, of any age, as imposing and dangerous. He put her teeth on edge.

  “We’re testing you.”

  “The fuck for, you already recruited me.”

  “Sure, but we don’t have to keep you.” He held up a hand to stay her burst of outra
ge, grinning again. “I just wanted to see if you went for hardware or magic first.”

  “Did I pass?” She felt the twist of her mouth that reminded her of a teenager, not the twenty-five-year-old military professional she was supposed to be. This guy really put her on edge.

  “You went for a gun, then a maged weapon, then called your familiar. Perfect response sequence, really.”

  “Being in the army taught me to rely on mundane gear first, and only, if I could. Otherwise too many questions got asked.”

  “Exactly, and that applies here too, even if I did see your power and invite you in. So, you ready to meet the Squad?”

  She shook her head. “You’ve hardly told me anything about this lot. You don’t have to keep me, you said. Do I have to keep you? I want to know more.”

  “If you don’t ‘keep us’, it’s right back to the brig for you.”

  She shrugged. “Might be a better option.” She didn’t believe it for a second, but he didn’t need to know that.

  “Fair enough. I like your attitude. Come on, I’ll talk on the way.”

  Outside the door was another man, clearly waiting for them. He was nearly as big and wide as Boss, his dark skin almost ebony in the low light. His head was shaved bald, glistening, and his smile as wide and welcoming as Boss’s had been.

  “This is Smoke,” Boss said. “He’s my right hand man. We started Dark Squad together after I spotted him doing some freaky disappearing act in a rat-infested Middle-Eastern shithole.”

  “We’d both had enough of orders and military discipline,” Smoke said. “And we began to question our directives. I was a Marine, Boss was SAS, we saw a kindred spirit in each other.”

  Raven walked between the two of them, feeling like a child. She didn’t reach either man’s shoulder. “But this isn’t military, you told me.”

  “Not officially, no.” Boss gestured into a side room off the corridor and she went in. Comfortable sofas and armchairs littered the space, a large screen TV was turned off in one corner. A tall guy with sandy hair and piercing blue eyes sat reading a book. Though nearly the height of Boss and Smoke, he was skinny as a rake handle, but exuded taut strength. He looked to be maybe late-twenties.