Darkest Before The Dawn (The Second Dark Ages Book 3)

by Michael Anderle

  Mark had moved out of the Pod and was swimming in the direction of the concrete slabs that were strangely juxtaposed on top of each other. Jacqueline waited, holding her breath and trying to see through the water she was now completely immersed in.

  Mark placed the first charge, and then the second, then made a visual check that the other two Pods were a sensible distance back. He swam back to the Pod he had just left, hitting the button as he clambered back through the door. Immediately it started to slide shut, and a second after it had closed the water level started to go down. Within three seconds they had a small air pocket forming at the top. Both Mark and Jacqueline immediately moved to the top to breathe.

  “Piece of cake,” he told her, winking.

  Jacqueline shook her head. “Let’s just get out of here,” she told him, sending the signal to move as a click over the intercom Eve had given her.

  A moment later the Pod had whipped them out of the way, so Mark detonated the charge. The explosion blew all the Pods back, jolting them.

  Despite the disturbance, the Pod had managed to replace around two-thirds of the water with air, leaving Jacqueline just wet and pissed. She slapped Mark hard on his arm. “Your calculations were off!”

  Mark rubbed his arm while still standing and holding onto the grab rail. “Well, I thought it wasn’t bad. There was a risk we’d be out of range for detonating the explosion,” he protested.

  Jacqueline was in no mood to concede, and Mark was smart enough to let it go. “As long as you’re ok,” he said. He ceased rubbing his arm and clutched her arm as romantically as he could under the circumstances.

  They looked in the direction of the ingress they had created, but it was several more minutes before enough debris had settled enough for them to see what was going on. Even after that, there was a suspension of concrete and building materials which wasn’t going anywhere.

  Mark looked out at the mess. “Well, I think this is about as good as it’s going to get for a while,” he remarked, moving toward the door button.

  Jacqueline pushed her bottom lip out, readying herself. “Doing this without an air supply sucks ass.”

  Mark nodded. “Couldn’t agree more,” he said, looking at her. “Thank goodness for superpowers,” he added with a wink.

  Jacqueline bobbed her head anxiously. “Yeah, but we don’t know what we’re going to encounter down there. And it’s a long way back to the surface.”

  Mark grinned at her. “Nervous, Little Wolf?” he asked playfully.

  Her eyes flashed fiercely for a moment before softening to her true emotions. “Yeah,” she admitted. “It’s not like we can just tear through a bunch of Weres or low-lives and be ok. There’ll be no fighting a lack of oxygen.”

  Mark sighed. “That’s true. We’ll be ok. You ready? I think we just need to head in there and keep going in the direction of that pipe you see running along the outside.”

  Jacqueline looked at the red pipe that ran the length of the concrete wall. “Ok, let’s do it,” she agreed, her expression more determined now.

  The other two Pods had approached and were hovering next to them. Ichika had already managed to get hers open, and she and Haruto had exited and were making their way toward the blasted opening.

  “Ok, come on,” Jacqueline said, spying her competition. “Can’t be seen as pussies,” she added, hitting the button to open the Pod door again. The door slid up, flooding the airspace they had regained with water again. Jacqueline and Mark took deep breaths and ducked into the water to swim behind Ichika, who led the way.

  Jacqueline turned to see Riku and Akari leaving their Pod and following.

  In waterlogged silence, all six of them managed to get through the entry created by the blast. After they had swum deep inside, the man made cavern turned out to have an air pocket inside it. They surfaced, switching on the waterproof flashlights that Eve had distributed among them.

  “Over there!” Riku shouted, pointing in the direction of a stairway. “That looks like it leads to a higher chamber.”

  Mark nodded. “Think so. From the schematics Eve managed to plot from her scans, it should be intact and dry.”

  Ichika shined the flashlight in the direction he was pointing, and the team headed over, guided by the light.

  They hauled themselves up the steps and soon found themselves in a chamber that was more or less dry except for the water they tracked in.

  Haruto glanced down at the sleeve of his suit. “Wow,” he remarked, touching it with his hand. “Yuko wasn’t kidding when she said these suits were quick-drying.”

  Jacqueline huffed. “Yeah, well, would have been good to have something that was oxygen-providing too,” she grumbled, wringing the water out of her hair.

  Akari was doing the same, but Ichika with her short dark bob simply flipped her hair back behind her ears and then squeezed the water out by running the flats of her hands over her head.

  “Ok, this way,” Mark told them, leading them deeper into the chamber and lugging the plastic-encased battery required for the job with him.

  Peckham, England

  George walked into Harry’s office. He turned and shut the door quietly.

  Harry looked up and frowned. “What’s happened now?”

  George ignored the tissues that were in the trashcan by Harry’s desk. “Noah has gone dark.”

  “And another one of us falls.” Harry sighed. “It seems that Charley William is trying to get back up off the ground.”

  Harry thought back to the bully. “I hated that little pecker. Let’s lock down the building and start calling in favors. We can’t let two of our own plus all of our mercs, assuming they are all dead, go without a response.”

  “Oh, we won’t,” Harry agreed and stood from behind his desk. “Call for a lockdown, and make sure the crop in the dungeons are tied down. We don’t need any of those fuckers getting loose while we deal with someone coming in from the outside.”

  “You think they will be coming here?” George asked, pulling the door back open as Harry walked toward him.

  Harry left his office, and George closed the door behind them. “Two of our kill-or-capture squads went after them. I doubt they are feeling very forgiving.”

  “Why not just go to ground, hide?” George asked. “We’ve seen it in the past.”

  “When you are a king, on the top of a sand pile,” Harry answered, “you make sure to toss off anyone trying to get to you.” The two men turned toward the operations room in their headquarters. “They won’t run away from the sand pile or dig themselves a hole in it. They know we are after them now. Their egos won’t accept us running, I don’t think.”

  Harry opened the door to their operations room. His eyes swept to Thomas’ and Noah’s work areas, knowing neither one would ever be there to speak with again. “Call in everyone we can. Everyone we know who were friends with the people on those teams that were murdered.” A second later, he called back to his friend, “Power up the trap, too!”

  George nodded and turned to go make some calls.

  Saint-Genis-Pouilly, France

  The man was sitting behind a wooden desk in an office dozens of meters underground. His eyes glanced between two screens he had connected to his tablet computer.

  “I could never hate another as much as I hate Michael,” William whispered. He watched the video from one of his contacts, showing what was left of his chalet in France. In another window he had an open report about the attack outside his suite in Frankfurt. He didn’t doubt that there was other damage to his suite, more than the expensive vase that was listed destroyed in the report.

  More, his personal sanctuary had been destroyed by people rifling through his personal effects.

  “Gerard!” William called. A moment later, his number-one man stepped in.

  “Yes, sir?” Gerard motioned to the door with his head.

  “Leave it open,” William answered. “I need you to call the mercenaries and tell them their new location will
be in Peckham, England. They will wait for Michael to show up. If he walks out of the building, kill him. Let them know if they can confirm his death, I’ll pay double the agreed.”

  “As you wish, sir.” Gerard nodded and left, closing the door behind him.

  Peckham, England, Green Antlers Pub

  There were seven police officers in uniform and three other men in street clothes inside the room deep in the back of the Green Antlers Pub.

  Oscar sat down at the table. As the newest member, he had decided that keeping his mouth shut was his best course of action.

  Leo, Oscar’s partner, stood up so everyone sitting around the table could see him easily. “I asked you here to discuss the new information we’ve received.” He picked up a bottle. “But first, we toast to those of our people who have fallen.”

  “Toast!” Eight men and two women raised their drinks in salute and then took a sip before putting them back down.

  “We have good intelligence that Noah, may demons eat his corpse in hell, was killed during a kill-or-capture operation in Germany, and Thomas was killed the day before, also in Germany.”

  “Two down, two to go,” Josiah Williamson grumbled.

  Leo nodded his understanding and continued speaking. “That means we only have two of the leadership left, and we need to consider our next steps.”

  “Are we going to get a better time to take them out?” Mickie Clark asked. Her voice a bit gravelly as she chewed on a toothpick.

  “Our latest intel shows them locking the place down,” Leo told her.

  “Probably think they are about to be attacked by whoever took them out in Germany,” she mused. “Hell, I would.”

  Josiah rapped his knuckles on the table. “Watch and be ready to take the opportunity to rush them if a fight happens?”

  Leo looked around the table, gauging the response to Josiah’s suggestion. “How many could we get across all three shifts?”

  “Hell,” Mickie replied, “I’ll take my shift and sleep in our lookout rooms during the other two. I’ll grab a suitcase of clothes to be ready.”

  There were nods of agreement around the table. “Ok, let’s work out the details. Who’s closest to Judge Keeth to get the legal documents we need?”

  The discussions went on for another two hours before the ten broke up and went their separate ways to inform their members.

  The Green Antlers were going to war.

  —

  One of the reasons humans have survived the millennia is an ability to sense trouble at an unconscious level. Oftentimes science has been unable to ascertain just what caused the humans to react when there didn’t seem to be any obvious trouble about to occur.

  However, there would be many stories written about the fateful day in Peckham, England when the Dark Messiah and his followers took out the blood-baggers and rained fire down from the heavens to destroy their building.

  Many would argue that he didn’t bring any fire, but rather it was done by those in the police who had been secretly trying to dismantle the blood-baggers and help the victims they had grabbed over the years to escape.

  Here is what no one argued…

  It started at noon, the streets emptying as the blood-baggers’ headquarters was boarded up. Gun-wielding men and women, hard as sheets of metal and carrying weapons and ammunition, went into the building in the light.

  Then an advanced ship the likes no one had seen descended out of the sky, as if it had come down from the sun itself. It was black and made no noise that anyone who had been willing to stay near the black building could discern. When it hovered over the street three blocks from the blood-baggers, the canopy opened, and two people got out.

  One was a woman who had two pistols strapped down and her hair tied back.

  The other was a shorter man, Asian. He also had pistols, but reached inside the flying vehicle and pulled out a katana.

  Suddenly there was another man with them. He had on a long coat and was carrying a black leather hat. Many swore they couldn’t see any hair on his head as he looked around, taking in the street.

  The Pod took off, rising into the sky and disappearing, leaving the three on the ground. The man in the duster put on his hat and took the middle as the Asian man went to his left side and the woman took the right.

  All had checked their pistols, sliding them back into their holsters and preparing themselves.

  —

  Michael looked up at a window and nodded before returning his attention to his surroundings.

  “You don’t have to go with us.” Michael looked at Sabine, who was busy ignoring him for the fifteenth time since they left Germany. Finally, she turned, Michael thought her eyes would have been fire-red if she were a vampire.

  “If you tell me one more time you don’t want me to go with you, Bethany Anne is going to be waiting awhile for you to heal from me sticking the Jean Dukes special up your ass and pulling the trigger!”

  Michael’s eyebrows raised as he turned to Akio. “What’d I say?”

  Akio kept his face passive, but he was laughing on the inside. “I believe your effort to keep her safe is being taken as you telling her you don’t believe she can do the job.”

  Michael turned back to Sabine, his mouth open. She was pointing to him. “Just one more Gott Verdammt word, Mr. ArchAngel.” She pointed toward the black building. “You can use my skills right now, and if I die in there, then I’ll fucking die taking down yet another level of dickheads that need taking out. You need to realize that you can’t do everything. You need a team.” She moved her hand to her pistol. “Even if any of your team die, we’re fucking doing it because we wouldn’t be any-fucking-where else than right by your side.”

  Michael reached up and pulled the brim of his cowboy hat down just a bit. “Sabine, I’m proud to have you fight with me.” He turned and started walking down the street. Akio to his left, Sabine on his right.

  “Damn right you’re proud,” she told him.

  Then she added a moment later, “Now let’s work on not dying, ok?”

  —

  The first shot was fired from inside the building. Well, at least that is what is universally assumed. The sheer amount of firepower unleashed by the three people on the street immediately after one or more shots came from the building, so overwhelmed those inside that no one could determine anything after that first shot.

  —

  “Wait until you see the red in their eyes,” Harry directed the men and women peeking through the shutters over the windows. “I’ll give the signal.”

  “How the hell are we going to see any red in their eyes?” George asked. “It’s fucking noon outside, full sun, and these guys and girl are vampires. We sure about them being vamps?”

  “Hey, didn’t you see what’s-his-face with the hat just appear?” someone called from the hallway near the south wall.

  “Could be dust in my eye,” came a reply.

  “We’ve got forty guns, they have three.”

  “Six,” George corrected.

  “Whatever,” Harry told him. “Just wait until I say ‘go.’”

  “Go?” someone asked.

  Harry jerked around. “No!”

  Too late; the man had fired a shot down the street. SHIT! Harry turned back, but it was in motion already. The wall erupted in explosions as if those people were using machine guns that were chambered with .50-caliber rounds.

  Mercs hit the floor, and no less than three bodies exploded near Harry in a torrent of blood and guts as rounds found them.

  It was all anyone could do to roll backward away from the windows and walls and make their way toward the stairs to go down into the center of the building where the weapons wouldn’t be able to penetrate.

  “WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?” Terry yelled, an arm over her head as she raced down the stairs after Harry.

  “Goddamned better guns than we got!” he fumed.

  —

  Leo was watching between the blinds in his little apart
ment. He had seen people leaving the street and not coming back for the last hour. At first, he thought it was his group that had caused the concern.

  However, news came down that a lot of mercenaries were moving into the blood-baggers’ building, and they had closed their protective window covers. They were getting ready for a fight; everyone could sense it.

  “Hooooly shit,” he muttered when the spacecraft came floating down into the middle of the street right in front of him. “Oscar!” In a few seconds his partner hurried into the room, tucking his shirt in.

  “What?” he asked, coming up to the window and looking down through the slats. “Who the hell?”

  “I think we know just who killed Thomas and Noah.”

  “Fuuuuuuck meee,” Oscar whispered when a third person, a man in a long coat and a hat, just…appeared next to the other two. “You ever hear of someone who can be invisible?”

  Leo was shaking his head, but his mouth said, “Yes…”

  Oscar looked at him. “Who?”

  “Oh my God,” Leo whispered. The man seemed to look right at him and tip his hat. “Tell everyone to stay the hell away from those three.”

  “Why?” Oscar asked, and Leo looked at him. “Hey, I’m not saying I won’t, but a guy’s got to learn sometime, right?”

  “Because,” Leo pointed down to the three on the street as the vehicle lifted off again, “if I’m right, that is the baddest motherfucker on our planet.” Leo looked back outside just as they stopped talking and started down the street. “All we need to do is cleanup and stay out of their way.” He added a moment later, “Not necessarily in that order.”

  “He got a name?”

  Leo’s head nodded. “Dark Messiah. Before that, ArchAngel. Before that, the Patriarch. But his first one was Michael.”

  Oscar watched them walk down the street. “That’s a lot of names.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN