The beast opened its maw wide in one final yelp of pain, and Jack drew his arm back. He heard an echo of the dog’s yelp behind him, then another, louder crunch, followed by a muttered, “Take that, you low-rent Vader motherfucker” in Jo’s voice.
“Is everyone alright back there?” he called.
“Yeah, we’re good. Whatever you did to the dog hurt the magician, too, so he couldn’t hold us anymore. Then I bashed his head in. You okay?” Jo asked.
“Been better. Been worse. How’s Gabriella?”
“I’m fine,” came a hoarse croak. “As long as that fucker’s dead. I’m going to take the rest of the bombs. Jo’s coming with to cover me. Quicker that way. We’ll meet you at the stairs.”
“Aces,” Jack replied.
Watson gritted his teeth and looked at his arm. It wasn’t completely ruined, but it would be useless for several weeks, if not months. The major veins seemed intact, and he could move all his fingers independently, if not with any strength. He slithered out of his coat and used the dark wool to wipe off as much blood as he could. Then he cut away the sleeve of his shirt at the shoulder and fashioned a crude bandage from his shirt sleeve and strips cut from his coat. By the time he was finished with his field dressing and made it back to the stairs, the women were waiting for him.
Gabby held five electronic devices in her hands, and Jo carried her hammer loose. “Wanna help?” Jo asked, hefting the hammer.
“No, be my guest,” Watson replied.
“Fair enough.” With a nod to Gabby, Jo hoisted the hammer. The dark-haired woman set the electronics on the ground, and Jo smashed them to tiny pieces. After a few quick hammer blows, the detonators were blissfully inert.
“What did you do with the plastic explosive?” Jack asked.
“I left it there,” Jo said. “With no detonator, it’s completely harmless, and we can send a bomb disposal unit in here if we manage to save the world tonight.”
“And if we don’t, nobody will care,” Gabby added, the mad gleam returning to her eye. “Now let’s go to the park and see if Harker found something else to shoot. You and Jo killed the bad guys this time, so I really want to shoot somebody.” She spun around and took the stairs two at a time heading out into the night.
“Sometimes I wonder how much of that is an act…” Jo mused.
“Then you decide that if you knew the answer, it would terrify you?” Watson said.
“Yeah, exactly. How’s the arm?”
“Well, I fear I will have to postpone my piano recital, but I think with work and good whiskey, I will manage to make a full recovery.”
“Assuming we save the world in the next two hours,” Jo said.
Jack nodded. “Because if we don’t do that, I fear I shall have much more to worry about than an injured arm.” He turned and followed Gabby up the stairs to the next impossible task.
11
Luke stepped onto the concourse at the Georgia Dome, wincing at the roar of the crowd as the Falcons’ starting lineup took the field. “I can’t believe I allowed myself to be talked into this,” he muttered.
“Let’s face it, Luke, you’re a sucker for anything that kid asks you to do. You always have been.” Adam’s voice rumbled across into Luke’s ear from the Bluetooth headset he wore.
“It’s not so much the activity that I loathe as it is the disguise,” the ancient vampire replied. “You do understand that I have the ability to cloud men’s minds and make myself invisible to their perceptions, correct?”
“I remember,” Adam said. “I also know that clouding seventy-five thousand minds at once is probably a stretch, even for the Lord of the Undead.”
“You know I hate that name.”
“I do,” Adam admitted. “But not as much as you hate your disguise.”
Luke looked down at himself and had to admit that his old friend was correct. He was currently decked out in blue jeans, sneakers, a Matt Ryan jersey purchased from the team store, and a black Falcons baseball cap. “I feel as though the only thing missing from this ludicrous ensemble is a giant foam finger,” he muttered.
“You should have said something,” Adam replied. “We could have gotten you one of those, too.” Adam stepped up beside Luke, a giant cup of beer looking tiny in his massive hand. Adam wore his usual brown pants but added a bright red Falcons hoodie to his wardrobe. With the hood up to conceal his scars, he just looked like a very large fan walking around the concessions area.
“Where should we begin?” Luke asked. “I have only a limited familiarity with explosives. My methods of dispatching enemies are typically much more… immediate.”
“I think we might need to look at a different idea than explosives,” Sparkles said in Luke’s ear. “I don’t know how much C4 it would take to bring down an entire football stadium, but it’s going to be much harder to kill all these people that way. The building is just way too spread out.”
“That makes sense,” Adam said, adjusting the Bluetooth device in his own ear. “Even if you collapse a whole end zone, you might leave half the people alive. So, what’s the other idea? How do we kill a stadium full of people in one shot?”
“A small nuclear device would almost certainly do the job,” Luke said, and both Adam and Sparkles fell silent as the truth of his words sunk in.
“Fuck me, Luke,” Sparkles said. “I don’t even have a body anymore, and I just got a chill down my spine.”
“Am I incorrect, Dennis?” Luke asked.
“No, no,” Sparkles said. “You’re right, it’s just… shit, a nuke?”
“It makes sense,” Adam said. “It’s about the only thing that could take down an entire stadium without having a plane to deliver the payload. And it’s not like Orobas is going to give a shit about what happens with the fallout since he’s trying to destroy the Earth anyway.”
“It also explains why Quincy sent the two of us here to handle this site and sent the three humans to handle the arena,” Luke said.
“Because you can bring down an arena with traditional explosives, and you guys wouldn’t be harmed by any leaking radiation,” Sparkles agreed. “Well, goddamn, boys, what do you want to do?”
Luke let out a deep breath, more for effect than any need. “Well, we were sent here to find and disable an explosive device. I suppose now it’s more critical than ever that we do so.”
“Agreed,” Adam said. “Now where do you suppose one hides a nuclear bomb in a football stadium?”
“That’s not something I’ve ever considered, Adam. As I mentioned, large-scale slaughter hasn’t been my forte for quite some time,” Luke replied.
“I have the plans called up,” Dennis said over their link. “There is an access tunnel underneath the stadium that circles the field. I’d start down there.”
“And how are we supposed to find this thing, Dennis?” Adam asked. “Do we just go around the underbelly of the stadium whistling and calling out ‘here bomb, here bomb’?”
“I thought we’d be a little more scientific than that, but not too much,” came the reply. “Let’s start by looking for anything or anyone out of the ordinary. People that don’t look like they belong at a football game. Or in this dimension.”
“Oh, so look for people like us?” Adam asked.
“Pretty much,” Dennis agreed.
The big man nodded and stepped over to a nearby service entrance. Finding it locked, he wrapped his huge hand around the knob and squeezed. The squeal of metal crushing in his grip was almost drowned out by the roar of the crowd as the opening kickoff spiraled into the air, but not quite. One particularly alert security guard walked over to the pair with one hand on his pistol and the other on his radio.
“What are you doing over here?” the rotund guard asked, his moustache quivering.
Luke turned to him and waved a hand in front of the man’s face. “These are not the droids you are looking for.”
The man’s eyes glazed over in a blink. “These are not the droids I am looking for.�
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“Go on about your business.”
“I will go on about my business.” The guard turned around and walked off.
Adam looked down at Luke. “Did you really just Jedi mind trick that guard?”
“Whatever works, my giant friend. Whatever works.”
The two descended the narrow stairwell into the bowels of the stadium, concrete pressing in on all sides. Luke opened his senses wide, listening for anything out of the ordinary, but the din of the crowd above and the bustle of an active stadium below were simply too much for him to sort anything out.
Adam pushed open the door into a wide curved hallway, big enough to drive team buses into. Several television trucks were parked in a loading area ahead of them with cables snaking across the floor to various ports and panels. People in headsets and baseball caps hustled to and fro, all at an almost-run.
“I think it’s safe to say we’re not going to find anything in all this chaos,” Adam said, keeping his voice low.
“As loathe as I am to insert myself into that fray, my friend, I have to disagree. Were I to plant a bomb under a venue such as this, the place where the most people would be rushing by is exactly where I would do so.”
“Because it would have the highest death toll?” Adam asked.
“No,” Luke disagreed. “If we are indeed looking for a nuclear device, it will kill everyone in the building regardless. No, I would hide something here for the simple fact that the more people rushing through an area, the less likely it is that a disguised package would be noticed. As long as it isn’t bright red with ‘BOMB’ on the outside in giant letters, a box could sit here for hours, and everyone would just assume that someone else put it there.”
“That actually makes a lot of sense,” Adam said.
“It’s the same method I used to smuggle coffins on freighters,” Luke said. “Just put one more box in a crowd of boxes and busy people, and no one ever noticed.”
“And here I thought it was some kind of magic.”
“Simply my near-mythic understanding of human nature, my oversized friend. Nothing more.”
“Well, I suppose if you live through enough centuries, you’re bound to pick up a thing or two. So, let’s go check things out.” The two stepped out of the stairwell and walked over to the nearest TV truck, striding across the concrete like they owned the place. Luke peeled off to the right and circled around the first truck while Adam turned left and walked to the back of the second. They met behind the trucks, and each shook their head.
“There’s nothing lying around. Nothing bigger than a Cheetos bag, anyway,” Adam said.
“I cannot smell any plastic explosive or dynamite,” Luke added.
“You can smell explosives? What are you, a TSA dog?” Adam asked.
“I have been around enough war zones to know that explosives all have a distinct odor that cannot be effectively masked,” Luke replied.
“I’m not picking anything up on any of the infrared scans or… wait… what the ever-loving fuck is that? You guys gotta move. I think I found what you’re looking for, and it is most certainly not a nuke,” Dennis said over their headsets.
“Where are we going?” Adam asked, already in motion toward the front of the trucks. He stripped off his hoodie as he went, getting rid of the too-small garment so his arms could move more freely. A man stepped out of the truck into his path, but Adam just swept the two-hundred-pound man aside as if he were a fly.
The man stared up from the ground as the scarred giant stepped over him. “I thought wrestling was in here tomorrow…”
“The thing you’re after is about halfway around the walkway from where you are,” Dennis said. “Go to the right and haul ass. If it’s putting off anywhere near the light that it is heat, you won’t be able to miss it.” Luke and Adam did as they were told, sprinting down the corridor to confront whatever awaited.
Luke quickly outpaced his bulkier friend, pouring on his enhanced speed and moving far past any human pace. He rounded a bend in the hall and came up short, almost toppling over in his haste to stop. “Dennis…” Luke said into his Bluetooth.
“Yeah, Luke, did you find the thing?”
“Oh, I found it… I’m just not sure what you think I can do about it.”
“What do you mean? You’ve got to kill it. Or destroy it, or something.”
“I can’t even get near it, Dennis. Remember? I’m invulnerable to many things. Garlic is a myth. I care nothing about running water. I don’t stop to count grains of rice or salt. I am no more affected by holy water or religious iconography than a human, and driving a stake through my heart will only render me unconscious, not turn me to dust. But there are two things I cannot, under any circumstances, come into contact with. One of those is sunlight. The other is, if you’ll recall…”
“Fire,” Dennis finished the sentence.
“Yes, Dennis. Fire. Now given that knowledge, what in all the hells am I supposed to do with that?”
The “that” in question was a six-foot walking bonfire. A fire elemental. And it was walking straight toward Luke. Luke did something he hadn’t done in a fight in literally centuries. He started backing away.
“Luke, what are you doing?” Dennis said over the comm. “I’ve hacked the security cameras, so I can see you. Don’t back up, charge that thing!”
“I can’t, Dennis. I’m hundreds of years old. I am the very definition of ‘highly flammable.’ If I get near that thing, I will burst into flames.”
“If you don’t do something, the whole place will burst into flames! That red pipe over your head, the one that makes a right turn into the room beside you?”
“Yes?” Luke said.
“That’s the main gas line for the building! It branches out from that room to every skybox kitchen and every concession stand in the stadium. If the flame guy gets to that pipe, it could shoot fireballs out of every gas port in the place. The whole joint would go up in flames!”
“That doesn’t sound good.” Adam’s rumbling voice came from both Luke’s headset and his right ear as the giant man came to a halt right beside the vampire. “Dennis, can you tell from the video exactly what this thing is?”
“Not exactly, but I think it’s a fire elemental. It’s made entirely of flame, so there’s not really anything to punch.”
“That makes things a little more complicated,” Adam said.
“And also simpler,” Luke added.
The big man turned to him, a puzzled look on his scarred face. Luke continued. “If it’s an elemental, then something summoned it. If I can find that something, or someone, and dispatch it, then the elemental should return to its own plane.”
“Should?” Adam said.
“Nothing is definite, my large friend. Nothing except the fact that I cannot go near the creature, so I must render my assistance in another fashion.” With that, Luke dashed off past the elemental, farther into the bowels of the stadium.
“I suppose that leaves me to wrestle the man made of fire,” Adam said with a sigh.
“Bring back memories?” Dennis asked.
“Yes, and not good ones,” Adam replied. His mind flashed back to a crowd of angry villagers, pitchforks, the supposed death of his “father,” Victor, and a pretty blonde girl who died at the hands of a monster who didn’t know his own strength. Adam had spent decades working to atone for that one accidental murder, and it seemed that now, after all these years, the fire had finally caught up with him.
He rolled his shoulders, turned his head side to side, and cracked his knuckles. “Any suggestions would be welcome right about now,” he said.
“Sorry, big guy,” came the voice in his ear. “I’ve got nothing. I’m working to hack the sprinkler system and at least douse him a little bit, but so far no good.”
Dennis’s words sparked something in Adam, a flicker of inspiration that the heat and situation fanned into a plan. He looked around the immediate area, and finding nothing that fit the bill, grabbed a g
olf cart and tossed it into the path of the oncoming elemental. The man of fire barely slowed, just flowing around the obstruction like it wasn’t even there. Adam then grabbed a cart full of metal cylinders with soda company labels on them and shoved the cart at the monster.
The metal tubes exploded upon contact with the fire-beast, dousing the elemental in a spray of de-carbonated soda syrup. The monster shrank upon contact with the liquid, but slowed its approach only for a few seconds. Adam dashed a dozen yards back up the tunnel and smashed the glass cover of a nearby fire box. He pulled the fire extinguisher from the wall and marched into the path of the elemental, extinguisher in hand and a faint hope for survival in his heart. Whatever happened next, it was going to hurt.
Luke sprinted along the tunnel, looking for anyone who looked deep in concentration and testing every doorknob he passed. He finally found an unlocked electrical room and ducked inside. This was as likely a place as any to hold a summoner, and he needed to find and dispatch this magician before Adam was burned to a crisp. Luke wasn’t sure exactly how much flame his friend could endure before succumbing to the damage, but he was in no rush to find out.
His normally placid features split into a wide smile as he came upon a slender woman seated inside a protective circle, head bowed. She was obviously the summoner, and just as obviously vulnerable. Her magical circle would keep out any energy or mystical attacks, but it wouldn’t stop Luke from simply stepping across the line and snapping her scrawny neck. He opened his mouth to warn the woman that this moment was going to be her last when something large and heavy crashed into him from the side.
Luke slammed into a breaker panel, his head smacking painfully into the metal cover. He turned to see his attacker and found himself face to face with a demon. This was a Reaver demon, one of the smaller creatures Quincy and his friends had faced the day before, but it was still a vicious close quarters opponent. Its overlong arms and wicked claws shredded Luke’s overcoat but were unable to reach his flesh.
Heaven Can wait: A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Novella Page 8
