Good luck with that, Duncan thought. Once Cade made up his mind...
Duncan’s gaze dropped lower and that’s when he noticed that Cade’s boots were leaving wet footprints on the marble floor in his wake.
He’s been outside. Recently, too.
The plan had been for them to wait for morning and for the reinforcements due as soon as the weather passed. If Cade had left the safety of the church to scout things out, it meant either the reinforcements weren’t coming or that Cade had decided to take the battle to the enemy rather than wait for help to arrive. Neither one boded well for Echo.
When Cade reached them, he confirmed Duncan’s fears with the first words out of his mouth.
“I know where this thing is hiding,” he told them, “and we’re going after it.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later Echo Team stood outside the entrance to the tunnel in the basement of the church. Olsen, Riley, and Duncan donned the makeshift-flamethrowers that Father Nils and his men had constructed and then listened carefully to Father Nils as he explained the operation.
Seems easy enough, Duncan thought. Pump this handle here, turn that knob there, and then squeeze the trigger.
Lighting the resulting jet of fluid seemed to be the only tricky part and he was reasonably confident that he could manage that without setting himself ablaze, so there didn’t seem to be too much to worry about.
Except for the horde of ravenous demons waiting to strip the flesh from our bones and feast on the remains.
Duncan reminded himself that it was probably best not to dwell on the minor details.
Cade turned back from his examination of the tunnel mouth and called them to order.
“All right, listen up,” he said, as they gathered around. “This old World War II tunnel leads beneath the church cemetery to the far side of the property before emerging at the edge of a thick pine forest. We’re headed for a cave system about three clicks inside the woods.”
Duncan glanced down at Cade’s still-damp boots and was tempted to ask how he’d discovered the thing’s hiding place, but then reason reasserted itself and he let the moment pass.
Sometimes, it’s better not knowing. Especially when the Knight Commander was involved.
“Conserve the flame throwers until we get to our destination; we’re going to need them more than anything else at that point and we don’t want to run out of fuel before we get there. As before, use your swords if possible, your guns if necessary. Understood?”
After receiving a chorus of nods, Cade took point, a fully loaded HK MP5 in hand. Behind him came Duncan and Olsen, with Riley taking up the rear. Father Nils attempted to follow, but Riley gave the priest a stern look and that was the end of that. Duncan didn’t blame him; he wouldn’t want to tangle with the master sergeant either.
The knight commander led them through the tunnel – cold, damp and decidedly uninteresting, Duncan noted, but free of demons, thank God – and out into the cemetery proper. It was still snowing, though not as heavily as it had been the night before, and the wind whipped through the gravestones with an eerie sound. Duncan did his best to ignore it his nerves were jangled enough as it was from what they’d been through already.
In addition to the flamethrowers, Father Nils had supplied them all with miniature headlamps of the type worn by the rescue crews who worked the ski slopes above Durbandorf during the year. The lights were small but powerful and should do quite nicely in the absence of their usual gear. Flipping on his lamp, Duncan followed in Olsen’s wake as they got underway.
They reached the tree line without incident and continued forward, slipping between the ancient trunks like wraiths. It was half-past nine in the morning but it felt like early evening; so dense was the cloud cover that very little light was getting through. Something about the darkness felt unnatural and Duncan had little doubt that the daylight was being held back in no small part by their infernal adversary.
Whatever the enemy has in store for this part of the world, it can’t be good.
No sooner had the thought passed through Duncan’s mind than Cade stopped abruptly and sank to one knee, a closed fist raised in warning.
* * *
As the others sank down behind him just as they’d been trained to do, Cade stared across the clearing at the spot where he’d seen his dead wife just seconds before. She’d only been there for a moment, but he was certain he’d seen her. She’d been standing amidst the trees, pointing at a spot between the trunks in the distance, and had looked back at him with an odd expression on her ravaged face.
He was staring off in that direction, trying to pierce the gloom brought on by the overhanging branches when a twig snapped somewhere out in the darkness.
It could have been a deer.
Or maybe a fox.
But he knew better.
“Hide yourselves! Quickly!” he hissed at the others urgently, afraid to raise his voice above a whisper.
Another glance that way showed several indistinct figures moving through the trees in their direction. Cade didn’t think they’d been seen, but it wouldn’t be long...
He scrambled to follow his own orders.
* * *
The thing that had once been Malcolm Heigler, the local butcher, and which was now a butcher in an entirely different sense of the word, followed the rest of his brethren as they made their way back through the trees toward the town of Durbandorf. Human vermin were still hiding there, somewhere, and it was Heigler’s job, along with that of the others, to root them out.
Heigler didn’t exactly think in those terms – he didn’t exactly think at all anymore – but the instinctual imperatives that he was following as part of the new creature he had become demanded it just the same, and he was happy to comply.
The group was roughly halfway across the clearing when something tugged at Heigler’s awareness. He paused, letting the others stumble,slither,lope, and walk around him, and then he glanced around.
Something didn’t feel right...
The clearing appeared deserted, the snow undisturbed except where his brethren had crossed it, and the thing that had been Durandorf’s butcher decided he had been mistaken. He turned and hustled after his brethren, eager not to be left behind.
* * *
In the creature’s wake, a moment passed.
Two.
Then three.
Suddenly the empty silence of the clearing was broken as a patch of snow near the base of several trees shifted and then rose, revealing the four men who had lain there for the last several minutes, pressed against the freezing surface with a half-a-foot of snow hastily thrown over themselves for camouflage.
They brushed the snow off and then checked to be certain that the flamethrowers hadn’t started to leak from being turned on their ends. Chilled but satisfied that nothing was amiss, the group got underway once more. As they did Cade thought he saw Gabrielle watching through the trees, but in the shadowed light he couldn’t be sure. Nor was there time to track her down and find out.
I’ll see you again soon, my lady, he thought in her direction, as he set out at the front of the squad once more, and that would have to be enough.
Hours earlier Gabrielle had led him through these very trees to a looming rock formation hidden deep within the depths of the forest. There’d been a cave at the base of that formation; a dark, brooding place that gave off a sense of evil so strong that it tied his stomach in knots and made him want to run away screaming.
Instead, he’d stayed just long enough to ensure that what they were looking for was inside and then he’d turned away, intending to return for the rest of his squad, only to find himself back in the church, lying on the pew where he’d settled down to rest just over an hour earlier.
At first he’d thought it had all been a dream, something brought on by his need to rescue his men and get out of this disaster alive, never mind his constant desire to see his wife again. But that notion only lasted until he’d swung his
feet to the floor and discovered his previously dry boots were now suspiciously wet.
He didn’t know how or why his dead wife kept appearing to him, but one thing was for certain — he trusted her implicitly. He’d trusted her since the very first day they’d met, which was one of the reasons her loss had cut so deeply and had nearly drowned him in a sea of sorrow so deep that he might never have returned. Only his desire to avenge her death had brought him back from the brink, had driven him to track down the Templar Order and to rise though its ranks to his present position. And it was that position which allowed him to hunt creatures like this one — foul things that belonged locked deep in the bowels of hell, and not wandering free to terrorize other innocents like his beloved Gabrielle.
Her appearance now meant that time was running out; Cade was certain of it. They needed to get moving.
He checked with the others, making sure they were all right, and then set off again through the trees, moving as quickly as he dared without giving away their position.
So far, he was reasonably confident that the master demon was still unaware that they were coming. If it had known, the woods would have been teeming with so many demons that they wouldn’t have been able to move, never mind advance.
Unless, of course, it’s a trap.
The thought brought him up short momentarily and then he shrugged it off and continued on his way.
If it was, there wasn’t anything to be done about it now. They were going to face this thing, one way or another.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Duncan stared at the cleft near the base of the cliff wall in front of him and felt icy fingers scurry up his spine to burrow deep into the base of his neck. The very sight of the place unnerved him and he had no doubt it would be ten times worse once he was inside.
But inside was precisely where they were headed.
As they got closer Cade told them all that the entrance to the cave complex where the master demon was hiding was narrow. Staring at it now, Duncan realized that the knight commander’s comment was a contender for understatement of the year. It was barely more than a crack in the wall – wide enough to slip through, yes – but still barely a crack. Whoever was going in first would have to push his pack and weapon in ahead of him or wait for the others to pass it through once he was on the other side. Either way, for several agonizingly long seconds, that man would be defenseless.
Because of this, Cade would go first. He wasn’t the kind of commander who led from the rear; he would never ask his men to do anything he wouldn’t do himself and often assigned himself the duty of doing just that. Which is why Duncan found himself passing off the tank of his homemade flamethrower to Echo’s second in command and getting ready to slide into the cave mouth behind Cade.
How on earth do I get myself into these things? Duncan wondered.
Then there was no more time for wondering as Cade gave him a nod and then slipped inside the cleft, pushing his way through the narrow passage to the wider chamber he knew lay just beyond. Summoning his courage, Duncan did the same in his wake. Once the two of them were safely on the other side – and nothing rushed at them out of the darkness once they were there – Cade gave the ‘all clear’ sign. The equipment was handed through the gap and then Olsen and Riley followed in its wake.
The four of them found themselves in a small cavern with a tunnel leading into the depths from the opposite side. Cade waited for the others to re-don their homemade flamethrowers and then led the way toward the tunnel and into its depths.
They found the first body a dozen feet or so along the tunnel, pushed up against one wall as if it were nothing more than trash to be cast off and discarded rather than all that was left of a human being.
Or, at least, Duncan thought it had been human; the deformed nature of the corpse and the odd array of extra limbs, both insectoid and mammalian made it very hard to determine its original state.
After that, the corpses became more regular, until it seemed to Duncan that half of the town must have been lying there in that unholy tunnel, twisted into vile shapes that not even their creator could recognize. On more than one occasion he thought he might vomit; it was the thought of showing weakness in front of his battle-hardened companions that, more than anything else, kept him from doing so.
Shadows danced and writhed at the edges of the light cast by their headlamps, ratcheting up the tension with every step forward. Twice Duncan spun about, convinced that the enemy was sneaking up on them in the darkness, and it was only the steadying presence of the master sergeant that kept him from squeezing the trigger and sending a cascade of bullets into the darkness around them.
After what felt like an eternity, the narrow passage through which they were descending began to grow lighter, as if lit by something farther ahead and soon the men didn’t need their headlamps.
Travelers are often known to remark on how the yellow-red glow of a campfire can warm the soul before the heat from the flames ever reaches you, but there was nothing soul-relieving in the light that reached them from the depths of the tunnel at this point. It was a harsh, silvery glow, one that gave off the sense of being colder than the weather they’d recently traveled through and it slipped down the edges of the passageway to light their steps forward as they moved the last twenty yards to their destination.
At that point, the tunnel opened on a wide cavern and the stench of blood and guts and feces that swept over them as they crossed the threshold unequivocally confirmed that they’d found what they’d come to find – the location where the original summoning had taken place. It was here they would find the master demon controlling the protean drones they’d been fighting off all this time.
Duncan let his light drift across the floor of the chamber in front of him and immediately wished he hadn’t. A massive arcane summoning circle had been drawn in colored sand across the cavern floor and what he assumed was all that was left of the original summoners were scattered about within it. Limbs and entrails and a seeming ocean of blood filled the space wherever he looked. The remains were so strewn about that it was hard to tell which limb belonged to which body.
Using hand signals, Cade sent Riley and Olsen around the right side of the cavern while he and Duncan took the left. They moved slowly, stepped over the debris in their path, keeping an eye out for the master demon. Cade wasn’t often wrong, so if he said it was here somewhere, Duncan was convinced it was as well.
They had crossed roughly three-quarters of the cavern when a rustling sound reached them from behind a pile at the rear of the cave, an area that was all but shrouded in darkness.
Cade held up a closed fist.
Duncan gripped the barrel of his makeshift flamethrower tightly, his finger sweaty on the trigger. The lesser demons they’d fought so far had been bad enough, but he knew the thing that spawned them was going to be infinitely worse...
Before any of them could act, however, events took a turn of their own.
From behind the pile of rubble they were watching so earnestly stepped a young girl.
She couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve. Her blonde hair was in disarray and she had dirt stains on her face and hands. Her once-blue dress was now nothing more than a set of filthy, tattered rags that barely hung on her thin frame. She was shivering against the cold, or perhaps, Duncan thought, with fear at the sight of strangers standing before her with guns in hand, but her gaze remained steady and she stood before them without trying to run.
Seeing the young girl in this condition nearly broke Duncan’s heart. He smiled, to show that he meant her no harm, and started forward.
“Don’t worry,” he said to her, in his most soothing voice. “We’re here to rescue you.”
The child looked at him quizzically.
“Rescue me? Don’t be silly,” she said, with a laugh that should never have come out of a child’s throat. “What on earth would I need rescuing from?”
Then she lashed at his throat.
CHAPTER TWELV
E
The moment the girl stepped out of the shadows Cade knew there was something wrong. His gut clenched, his skin crawled, and he could practically hear the screams of a thousand lost souls roaring in the back of his mind that she did not belong here, that her very presence was an abomination against nature itself.
She might look human, but Cade knew she was the farthest thing from it.
His gun came up, his finger already on the trigger, and from the corner of his eye he could see Riley and Olsen raising their weapons as well.
Trouble was, Duncan was in the way.
The sergeant had taken several steps forward the moment the girl-thing had come into sight and now he stood directly in Cade’s line of fire. If Cade pulled the trigger now, there was no way he could hit the creature without hitting Duncan in the process. But he couldn’t afford to let the creature escape either.
They had only one chance...
“Down!” Cade yelled, in his best command voice, hoping and praying that all the months of practicing to respond to commands delivered in that tone would bring about the unquestioning response that he so desperately needed.
Hoping and waiting to see for certain were at opposite ends of the spectrum however.
Cade didn’t hesitate another moment but opened fire.
* * *
Duncan heard Cade’s shout at the exact moment that the ‘defenseless’ girl in front of him lashed out at his throat with a hand that had suddenly grown claws several inches long. It was only his well-honed instincts for preservation that saw Duncan throw himself sideways out of the vile creature’s reach and, thankfully, out of Cade’s line of fire at the same time.
The roar of the knight commander’s weapon echoed in the cavernous space but Duncan was still able to hear the demon’s hiss of fury when it realized it had missed. He felt its claws slash through the space where he’d been kneeling a half-instant before and knew he wouldn’t have survived the blow had it landed the way the demon intended. He scrambled backward, trying to put as much distance between himself and the thing as possible, knowing as he did what came next.
SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror Page 6
