“I’ve done some bad stuff,” Eddie said, not listening to him. “Broken a shit ton of commandments. Never killed anybody, but I’ve stolen things. I’ve lied. Adultery? I’ve dabbled. I know I’ve hurt people. You go to Hell for that stuff. That’s what the Book says, doesn’t it?”
“It says a lot of things,” Faust agreed. “Pretty sure it advocates stoning a guy for fucking your goat, which, come to think of it, sounds like a perfectly valid response. Why?”
Eddie chuckled. Then the chuckle became a trembling laugh, his shoulders shaking. Faust saw the tears track down his cheeks.
“I saw the future, Faust. I saw what happens next. I wish to fuck I hadn’t. I was wrong. The fear of uncertainty is a gift. Not knowing is a gift. Because now I’ve seen the future.” The gun swung up. He pressed the barrel to the side of his head. “I’ll take Hell. Hell is better.”
Eddie pulled the trigger and painted the neon cross in wet scarlet as his body tumbled to the floor. It was over in half a second, before Faust could move to stop him.
Eddie Sunday lay dead at his feet. Another casualty, another life snuffed out in Daniel Faust’s wake, another name for the bill he’d eventually have to pay. Whatever horrors Eddie had witnessed in that temple, he’d take them to the grave and beyond. Faust felt like he’d been submerged in ice water. Cold. Cold as the desert night, and numb at the edges.
Only one thing left to do. He stepped over Eddie’s corpse, and into the temple.
Eddie had built the new Opticron into the shell of a dollhouse, much as Damiola had described the original. It was perched on a three-legged stool. A dirty white sheet, tacked up on one wall, provided a screen for Eddie’s last movie. Now it only flickered white, a dead beam strobing through one of the dollhouse’s many windows. Faust knew how it worked. Each window offered a different angle of the world. He’d lied when he’d called time an arrow. That was just how we perceived it. It was much more complicated than that.
The house sat there, infused with the magic of possibility. He could feel it, like a living organism, urging him to reach inside, kindle its power, and see what Eddie had seen. It had worlds of wonder to show him. It had horrors unimaginable and all too real waiting to be exposed. It had lives not worth living waiting to be thrown into stark relief on the white sheet.
Eddie had called fear of the future the human condition. Fear of uncertainty. It was that same uncertainty that kindled hope, that sparked imagination and endless dreams of what might be. And here was the Opticron, promising to take that all away. To show him exactly what was coming for him—and for the entire world—in a few short years. It was tempting. Forewarned was forearmed. The machine might show him a crucial clue, or insight into the nature of his enemy. It was what he had wanted—what he needed.
But more than any of that, he needed his hope. He knew what he had to do.
A snow-white Audi Quattro idled at the curb outside the tenement. Faust climbed into the passenger’s seat.
The woman behind the wheel, her long hair braided into a scarlet twist, looked his way as she tugged the gearshift.
“I heard the shots,” she said in a faint Scottish brogue. “Did you find the answers you were looking for?”
Faust stared straight ahead, into the dark.
“Yeah,” he said. “I got my answers.”
“How much time do we have?”
“We’ve got tonight,” he said.
“And tomorrow?”
The Audi pulled away from the curb, and the city darkness swallowed them whole. Headlight beams blazed against the night, doing their best to push back the shadows.
“We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll see when we get there.”
Pig Roast
JOSEPH NASSISE AND SAM WITT
“They called themselves the Devil’s Swine, which, if you ask me, is pretty damned appropriate,” Knight Commander Cade Williams said as he tossed a set of surveillance photos down on the conference room table for the other members of the team to examine.
The first several images were classic look-down shots most likely taken by a drone and showed a group of rough-looking men in leather vests and jeans moving down a stretch of highway astride motorcycles. The bikes were a mix of classic Harleys and custom choppers, the club emblem—a tusked boar—prominently displayed on several gas tanks as well as on the backs of the men’s vests.
Cade went on. “Intelligence has been tracking these guys for months now, believing them to be responsible for the cross-country transportation and delivery of certain stolen artifacts moving from one group to another. Word is that they’ve just taken possession of a particular object known as the Eye of Horus, and we’ve been tasked with getting it back.”
The next set of images were on-the-ground shots, taken by an undercover human operative with a long-distance lens. Surprisingly, they were grainier than the previous set of photos, making it hard to make out individual facial features despite the relative nearness of the subjects to the photographer. When Cade had first seen the photos his initial thought had been that someone should teach the photographer to clean his damn lens, but now he wasn’t so certain it was the photographer’s fault at all, given what he knew.
Cade’s second in command, Master Sergeant Matt Riley, held up one of the photographs.
“What happened here?” he asked, turning the shot so that the other two men at the table, Sergeants Nick Olsen and Sean Duncan, could see as well. It was one of the aerial photographs and it showed the line of bikers coming around a bend and entering a thickly forested section of the roadway only to be swallowed up by a thick black mass covering two-thirds of the image. “Guy get his thumb in the way?”
“Not exactly,” Williams replied, tossing a few more photographs onto the tabletop. All of them showed the same thing—a dark black mass and nothing more.
“Those pictures are why the four of us are sitting here right now,” he said, as they looked through the images. “And before you ask, there was nothing wrong with the drone that took them. Tech has taken the camera off the drone and run it through every test imaginable. It works perfectly.”
“Jamming, maybe?” Duncan asked.
Olsen, the stocky redhead who doubled as the team’s sniper in addition to being its electronics expert, shook his head. “If it is, it’s a type I’ve never encountered before.” He turned to Cade. “Do we know the extent of the anomaly?”
Using the touch-screen keyboard set into the surface of the conference room table, Cade called up a map of Missouri and displayed it via the wide-screen monitor hanging on the wall at the far end of the table. A section of the map in the corner of the state was highlighted in red.
“That,” Cade said, pointing at the highlighted region, “is Pitchfork County, Missouri. A lovely little backwoods kind of place and home base for our motorcycle-happy friends. And, amazingly enough, it also happens to be one of the few places in the whole damned country where our surveillance equipment fails on a regular basis, even when there is nothing wrong with the equipment itself.”
The others had been around long enough to pick up on Cade’s sarcasm and read between the lines. There was something in Pitchfork County, something unnatural, and it was going to be their job to root it out while they dealt with the bikers and located the Eye.
The four men gathered in the room were members of the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, otherwise known as the Knights Templar. Most of the world thought the Order had been destroyed in 1312 when Pope Clement V, in cooperation with King Philip IV of France, ordered its members forcibly arrested, tortured, and eventually burned at the stake. The two patriarchs had been after the Templars’ vast wealth, but the treasury, as well as many of the Order’s members, was never found and eventually disappeared into the mists of time and legend.
Cade and the others knew the truth, however. The Order had not disbanded but had instead gone underground, using their wealth to hide themselves away from the world while working to continu
e their sacred mission: protecting mankind from supernatural threats and enemies. When Hitler and his demonic allies had threatened the world in the 1940s, the Order had emerged from the shadows, reuniting with the organization that had given birth to it in the first place, the Catholic Church, and thrown all of its weight and power into the fight against the powers of darkness. In the wake of the Allies’ victory, the Order became the de facto combat arm of the Vatican, continuing their mission to this very day.
Williams led the Echo Team, one of six special operations units within the Templar hierarchy, and was responsible for dealing with all supernatural activity in the U.S. They were supported by several mainline combat units, but Echo was the best of the best; when everything went straight to hell, they were the guys that got called to make things right.
Which brought them to today’s briefing.
“We are to liaise with a guy on the ground by the name of Joe Hark. He knows his way around and we’ll no doubt benefit from his knowledge of the locals, but we’re to keep things as close to the vest as possible when dealing with him. The Preceptor was very clear. Priority number one is tracking down that biker gang and recovering the Eye before they have time to pass it on to its intended buyer. Priority number two is to make sure that the gang is no longer operational by the time we leave. If, and only if, we manage to accomplish those two objectives are we free to investigate anything that might be contributing to our inability to generate surveillance of Pitchfork County. We clear?”
The other three men nodded; they were veterans, they knew the drill.
On the other hand, they also knew their commander and not a single one of them had any doubt that he was going to do things his way, regardless of what the Preceptor wanted.
Such was life when working with the man the Templars called the Heretic.
Joe cupped his hands around the unopened can of Busch and let the chill soak into his palms. Though it was February, the temperature inside Smokey’s House of Meat felt more like high summer than midwinter. The heat intensified the shack’s accumulated reek from decades of smoke and spilled beer, but the burnt ends and pork ribs more than made up for that.
Joe hoped the New Englanders he was here to meet would feel the same way.
By the time a black Expedition rolled into the gravel parking lot, the unopened beer had slicked the Night Marshal’s hands with a layer of condensation that had warmed to room temperature. Joe didn’t wear a watch, but by his reckoning the city boys were more than a little bit late. He’d expected them for lunch and it was well on toward suppertime. He stood from the rickety oak table and hollered into the kitchen, “These boys are gonna be hungry, Smokey. Get ’em a couple racks of ribs and whatever burnt ends you can rustle up.”
Joe headed out into the cold winter air, drying his hands on the thighs of his jeans as he went to greet his visitors. They’re looking for someone, the Long Man had told Joe. Show them around, keep them from poking their noses where they don’t belong. Try not to start a fight.
That last would be easier said than done. The men piling out of the Expedition looked like they’d seen more than their fair share of trouble and were expecting even more. They weren’t displaying any obvious weaponry, which was a good first step, but their uniform gray coveralls didn’t even try to hide the bulges and seams of the body armor it covered.
Joe grinned as he approached the team’s obvious leader. The man wore an eye patch that covered his right eye and looked worn ragged and pissed, a combination that gave Joe pause. The Night Marshal stopped well back from the newcomers, giving them space. He shoved his thumbs into his front pockets to show them he meant no harm and said, “I reckon we’ve got two choices. We can tussle out here in the cold until we decide we’re both on the same team and ought to work together or you fellas can get out of the cold and enjoy the best barbecue this side of Texas.”
The eye-patched man kept right on scowling but jerked his head toward the door. “I don’t know about you, but we missed lunch. Let’s eat.”
Cade didn’t know what to make of the man they called the Night Marshal, but he had to agree this barbecue was something special. The five of them ate together in silence, tossing stripped rib bones onto a sheet of butcher paper in the center of the table.
Cade was irritated the trip had taken so long, and he couldn’t help but feel the Night Marshal had given them inadequate directions as a way of putting the “city boys” in their place. They’d driven for hours trying to find the right combination of gravel back roads and potholed state highways to reach their destination, wasting time they couldn’t afford to let slip through their fingers. But, as irritated as he’d been when they finally arrived, the barbecue had blunted the edge of Cade’s temper. It was hard to stay pissed with a belly full of perfectly smoked pig meat.
He sampled one of the burnt ends, and the glazed chunk of blackened protein buried the last of his anger. It was rich and savory and sweet, like a piece of chewy candy forged from smoke and sugar and meat so tender it almost melted on his tongue. For a moment, all Cade could think about was how much he was going to miss this when he went back to Connecticut.
He needed to satisfy his curiosity, still. He sat back in his chair and stretched. “I had a hell of a time finding this place. If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone didn’t want us here.”
The Night Marshal grinned, and Cade thought the expression would’ve looked more at home on a shark. “Maybe you don’t know better. Pitchfork has a way of keeping outsiders where they belong.”
Cade crossed his arms over his chest. “And where’s that?”
“You know. Outside.”
The Templar didn’t want to give credence to the idea that somehow the land itself had conspired against them, but he didn’t know how else to explain their trip into Pitchfork County. As soon as they crossed the county line the Expedition’s navigation system lost its signal and every chance they had to take a wrong turn, they ended up taking it. A trip that looked like less than an hour on the map had taken them almost three to complete. “I guess it didn’t get the job done. We’re here now. Were you briefed?”
The Night Marshal nodded. “Bikers, charms, or some such bullshit, blah, blah, blah. Just another day in fuckin’ paradise.”
“That does about sum it up. Where do you want to start?” Cade was itching to get the case resolved and get the hell out of here. There was something about this part of the country that made him uneasy. The sooner he could get his team back to the Ravensgate Commandery, the better.
“Yeah, there’s a few places we can hit up. You can ride with me, and your guys can follow us. Stick close. If you get lost, there’s no telling where you’ll wind up. I don’t feel like spending all day rounding up lost ducklings.”
Riley bristled at the Marshal’s tone, but Cade checked him with a glance. “They’re not going to get lost.”
Joe gestured at the empty plates and the mound of bones on the table. “All right, then. Looks like everybody’s fueled up, might as well get this party started.”
There was something off about Cade, but Joe couldn’t put his finger on it. It wasn’t just his eye patch, or his scars, or the weirdo serial killer gloves. Joe’d never seen anyone eat ribs with gloves before. It was fucking unnerving. Whatever the weirdness was, it went bone deep. Joe figured he’d be able to get to the bottom of it by giving the Templar a supernatural once-over, but that seemed a little rude, so he decided to let it lie. He’d keep the conversation light. “You believe this is Left-Hand Path work?”
The Templar didn’t respond at first, just stared out the window at the dense forest of leafless trees they were driving through. Then, “It’s supernatural, I’ll give you that. Perhaps even demonic. We’ll find out soon enough.”
Joe thought it over for a sec and then nodded. “Right. I forgot. You’re Catholic,” he said, as if that explained everything.
Which, in fact, it probably did.
He eased the truck onto a thin dirt tr
ail, pumping his brakes to flash the taillights so the Expedition wouldn’t miss the turn. He was impressed with the driver behind him; for someone not familiar with Pitchfork’s roads, the man was doing a good job of keeping up.
The road wound deeper into the forest and climbed up the side of a hill. At the peak, Joe killed the truck’s engine and turned to Cade. “We’re going to have to hike a little bit, so we don’t spook this guy. Just follow my lead, you’ll be fine.”
Joe grabbed his shotgun from the rack in the truck’s back window and climbed out into the cold. The rest of the Templars were waiting at the front of the Expedition. Joe raised his voice to be heard over the winter wind and creaking branches. “The guy we want to talk to is down at the bottom of this hill. We’ll walk the rest of the way in so he doesn’t hear the cars and get spooked. I don’t think we’ll have any real trouble, but you might as well gear up. He’s less likely to start shooting if we look like we’re ready to shoot back.”
Joe always thought he was a decent enough woodsman, capable of getting through the brush without raising a ruckus, but the Templars were damn near ghosts. He had to keep looking back to make sure they were still following him and always found them unnervingly close. Where his hobnailed boots made a trail of clear prints in the shallow snow, the city boys left faint tracks that would be hidden by the wind in a matter of minutes.
At the edge of the woods, Joe raised a hand to bring the Templars to a halt. From their vantage, they could see a rusted-out trailer with a makeshift shed grafted onto its side. He turned back to the Templars and drew them into a huddle so their voices wouldn’t carry on the wind. “This guy knows bikers; he’ll know where to find who you’re hunting. But he used to be a meth cook. His brains are . . . well, he’s not all there. He’ll act tough and might get weird. Try not to put a bullet through his brainpan before we have a chance to talk to him.”
Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Page 10
