Greyborn Rising

by Derry Sandy

  “I guess we know what the alarm does. They’re probably going to storm the house. I need you to cover us best you can. Also, call Kamara and Kat at Stone. Let them know that the mission has gone to shit.”

  “Will do.” Over the com, Rohan heard Richard chamber a round into Denise Belfon. He pictured Richard lying in the prone firing position, perhaps on a table inside a room, aiming the fifty-caliber sniper rifle out through a window at their enemies. The thought was comforting.

  This room had a window, and outside the window the blue-grey gloom of pre-dawn beckoned to Rohan. He attempted to open the window, but the moment he touched the sill, thick vines sprouted out of the wall and sealed off the portal. The vine looked like ivy but had wicked thorns.

  “I guess we will have to do it by the house rules,” he said to no one in particular.

  “And the house always wins,” Cassan chimed in glumly.

  From below came the sound of stomping boots and shouted orders.

  “We can’t afford to get boxed in up here,” Rohan said. The four men left the room as quietly as possible. The guards seemed to be doing a complete sweep of the house from the bottom up. As the four escaping men entered the hallway, Rohan felt a small pang of relief having made it even this far.

  His relief was short-lived. The hall had transformed. Where there were previously only two doors, one leading to Cassan’s cell and one to the guard’s room, there were now six.

  The four new doors flew open simultaneously and ten armed men poured into the hall and opened fire. Rohan and Cassan ducked back into the guard’s room while Wrise and Voss dove into Cassan’s holding room. Bullets perforated the walls and floor of the hallway. Rohan pulled the pin on a concussion grenade and tossed it into the hall.

  “Wrise, Voss get flat on the floor. Richard, I need you to kill everything standing.”

  The concussion grenade went off with a deafening bang that left a residual high-pitched whine in Rohan’s ears even thought he had covered them with his hands. Then Richard opened fire, targeting every image in the thermal scope that was standing upright. The massive .50 BMG rounds penetrated the cinderblock walls and tore the men apart. When the smoke cleared and the screaming stopped Rohan peeked out at the horror in the hall. There were grapefruit sized holes in the wall where the bullets had entered and the hallway looked like the aftermath of a paintball war in which the red team had won an overwhelming victory.

  “Where to now?” Cassan asked, as he toed aside a leg still in the boot.

  “Let’s see where one of these new doors leads,” Wrise said, as he exited the guard room. “The stairs aren’t there anymore, anyway.” Rohan looked at the place where the stairs used to be. There was now just a wall and he found it hard to believe that had ever been a staircase there.

  Suddenly there was a moaning noise in the guard room and the sound of shambling steps. Out of the room stumbled the corpse of the man who had pressed the emergency alarm. The bullet Wrise had put into his brain had left a gaping hole in the left side of his head, but the man didn’t seem to mind much. Behind him came the other four men each sporting fatal injuries. They stumbled towards Rohan’s team, their legs weak like newborn calves. This is not a fete in here, this is madness. Rohan remembered a line from one of David Rudder’s songs that seemed all too applicable.

  “This keeps getting fun-er,” Cassan said as he entered the nearest door. The other men followed quickly. Voss, the last man through, closed the door and bolted it. The corpses outside banged on the door, moaning and scratching like cats begging to be let in out of the rain.

  The room had a window, and although it opened on to another room instead of to the outside, they all went through to put some distance between them and their pursuers. The second room was a bedroom furnished in the style of the 1900’s East Port-of-Spain barrack yard. On the floor lay a battered, enameled chamber-pot stained brown by use. A rough-hewn cabinet occupied one corner, the small cabinet windows faced in chicken mesh instead of glass. A scarred rocking chair stood in another corner. Its wicker seat back had more holes that wicker and its left rocker rail was missing. A wooden box with a rooster painted on its side, had been re-purposed as a leg.

  Rohan tried to raise Richard on the com, but it seemed like the house had severed contact with the outside world once more. This room had no doors or windows except for the one through which they had entered. In the first room, Rohan heard the door begin to splinter as the re-animated guards continued to hammer their fists against it.

  “We may have to go back out into the hall, shoot the dead guys again and try another room,” Wrise said.

  “They are jumbies, they won’t go down easy and we are likely to need every bullet. The door will hold them for a while, unless the house decides to let them in,” Rohan replied. “Search the room for a trap-door or something.”

  The four men began looking, knocking on floorboards and along the wall, listening for a hollow sound that might indicate an escape route. A female voice cleared her throat behind them and the men turned around in shock, guns raised.

  A woman now sat in the previously unoccupied rocking chair. She was voluptuous, dark, and wore a simply cut dress with a faded floral print. The low square neckline of the dress barely contained her ample chest. She had a broad face, attractive despite a hawk-like nose, but someone had slit her throat from ear to ear. The slash did not bleed and despite the fatal wound she tapped her small, bare feet impatiently.

  “Can a lady get a light?” she asked as she proffered a hand-rolled but unlit cigarette. Cassan reacted as casually as if dead women asked him favors all the time. He reached into his suit pocket and pulled out a gold cigarette lighter. Flicking open the cover produced a green flame and he held the flame to the tip of the woman’s cigarette as she inhaled deeply and blew a cloud of bluish smoke, a great deal of which exited through the slash across her throat.

  “Milady may keep the lighter if she can tell us how to get out,” Cassan suggested.

  “You have to pay more than that for a treat from me,” the woman said with a throaty chuckle and a wink. “Go into the cabinet and get me my tin of tobacco and some paper to roll another.” Cassan moved to comply even though the woman had barely begun smoking the cigarette he had just lit.

  “Gentlemen there is a tunnel back here!” he exclaimed. When he opened the cabinet and saw not shelves but the mouth of a square tunnel.

  “That happens sometimes,” the lady on the chair said. “And my price for showing you the tunnel? Tell the soucouyant that she must sleep, and that while she sleeps she must not shield her dreams. The dead need to talk to her.”

  Rohan wondered why so many specters needed to speak to Kat in her sleep. Cassan tossed the woman the gold lighter, she caught it, slipped it down her voluminous cleavage, and blew him a kiss, before vanishing. The men entered the low tunnel through the cabinet doors and did not spare a glance behind them as the sound of the splintering door in the adjacent room grew louder.

  ***

  Rohan could not guess which part of the house they were in, what with the house’s ever-changing blueprint and the lack of reference points he had lost all sense of direction. The men were in single file, with Voss in the lead and Rohan bringing up the rear. As they progressed, the tunnel narrowed and the ceiling sloped lower and lower, until they were forced to crawl. The only illumination came from the tactical lights mounted on the muzzle of the pistols Cassan and Voss carried. Rohan advanced in constant anticipation of the moment when a cold grip would close around his ankle.

  “I think we are almost to the end of it,” Cassan said in a sarcastically cheery voice.

  Then, without warning, Wrise dropped out of sight. When Rohan inched forward, he saw that the man had fallen through a hole in the floor that had apparently not been there when Voss had crawled over the same spot.

  The house always wins, Rohan mused.

  Cassan and Voss shone their flashlights into the hole in the floor. Wrise looked up at them, fr
om several feet below. It was a wonder that he had not broken his neck.

  “Looks like a room of some sort,” he said. “Best we all come down.”

  “I think we have to,” Cassan replied, shining his light into the tunnel. Where there was previously dark space ahead, there was now a smooth wall, plastered and painted white. When Cassan touched the wall, he came away with paint on his fingertips as if the dead-end had just been erected and white-washed. “I’m beginning to wonder if we’re having some sort of joint hallucination,” he said as he let himself through the hole.

  Rohan and Voss followed. When they were all through, they scanned the area.

  “Smells like dog in here,” Rohan said.

  “Kennels. We’re probably in the kennels,” Voss whispered.

  “Those cages look like they are built to hold something bigger than dogs,” Rohan noted.

  Along the far wall was a row of cinderblock cells with barred fronts. Each was about six feet high. The room was pitch black and the small flashlights the men held were insufficiently powerful to reveal the occupants, but they could hear heavy breathing emanating from the darkness. At first that was the only sound, but then Rohan heard a creak as the cell doors opened and out of the gloomy cages bounded three dogs of the same athletic and muscular variety as those that had secured the outer yard.

  “Wait!” Cassan shouted, but he was too late. Wrise stepped forward and opened fire with the shotgun, dispatching all three dogs.

  The dead dogs lay still, but only for a few seconds before their bodies began to quiver. Their flesh moved and twisted as if their hides were bags filled with angry snakes. Beneath their fur, muscles moved and bulged as the dead animals increased in size. The dogs stood, each now the size of a cow, their legs, necks, and shoulders armored in slabs of dense muscle. Their eyes blazed orange in the darkness and then they charged. Rohan instinctively knew that there would be no killing these beasts with small arms. Maybe if Richard was down here with Denise but not otherwise.

  Rohan broke left, running for his life. Cassan, Wrise, and Voss also scattered. No doors. They were trapped like martyrs on the sands of a Roman colosseum. One of the goliath hounds followed Rohan. The room was about two hundred square feet in size, so there was not much space to flee. He turned left sharply and the dog, unable to match the speed of his directional change, slammed into the concrete wall, its massively muscled shoulder leaving a dent. No doors. No escape. Rohan felt like a seal being pursued by a great white shark, lacking the horsepower to escape and hoping to remain agile long enough for his pursuer to tire. The matador’s game. Another of the massive hounds came at Rohan head on, slobber dripping from gleaming teeth, its deep-set eyes ablaze. With gritted teeth Rohan gathered himself to fight. The memory of his grandfather dying at the hands of the master lagahoo flashed through his mind but then there was the sound of someone singing. The voice was sweet and mesmerizing but Rohan did not understand the words.

  Dhyaayedaajaanubaaham dhritasharadhanusham baddhapadmaasanastham,

  Peetam vaaso vasaanam navakamala dala spardhinetram prasannam;

  Vaamaankaaroodhaseetaa mukhakamala milal lochanam neeradaabham,

  Naanaalankaara deeptam dadhatamuru jataa mandalam raamachandram.

  The dogs halted their chase so suddenly that one stumbled and fell forward in a roll. Then they raced toward Cassan, the source of the song. He was seated in a lotus pose on the other side of the room. Wrise and Voss stood behind him with guns drawn. The first of the dogs rolled around in front of them frolicking like an oversized puppy, its large pink tongue lolling out the side of its mouth. The other two dogs joined the first. They were hypnotized like a cobra bespelled by the music of a snake charmer’s pungi. When the song was over Cassan stood and went to the dogs. He scratched the first behind the ear. The others sniffed him and licked his face as if he had raised them with his own hands.

  “See? Good dogs.”

  “What was that?” Rohan panted still catching his breath from the near fatal chase.

  “Meditation hymn. My grandmother taught it to me. Works on all sorts of beasties. Would have worked on the creature from the box had Wrise not shot it.”

  “So they are yours now? You going to take them home, take them for jogs around the Queen’s Park Savannah?” Rohan motioned to the three cow sized hounds.

  “Yeah, why not.”

  “What the hell will you feed them?”

  “We have enemies enough to keep them full, I think.”

  Voss interrupted, “That’s all well and good, but there are no doors here and no dead women to show us the way.”

  “Don’t you feel that draft? There is a door in the back of one of these kennel-cages, I think,” Cassan said.

  The four men searched the kennels one by one. Cassan’s theory proved correct. Every kennel had an iron door in its back wall, assumedly for cleaning and feeding access. The doors, however, were all either bolted or rusted shut. In the last kennel they searched, the door was ajar and a cool draft blew through the crack though no light emanated from beyond.

  “Those hell hounds will not fit through this doorway,” Voss observed. He was right, while the hinges looked just fine and there was nothing jamming the door, none of them could make the door budge in either direction. There was just enough room for the men to squeeze through. House rules, Rohan thought.

  Cassan turned to his new pets. They whined, already anticipating their new master’s absence.

  “Don’t worry, ladies. I know you can get out of here and find me.”

  Rohan observed that at least one of the dogs was in fact male, but he let Cassan’s collective salutation slide.

  “In the meantime,” Cassan continued, “if anything comes through that hole in the roof, tear it apart, and when you escape, come to me.”

  The lead hound barked as if in response. The deep sound rattled Rohan’s chest.

  Voss looked confused, “They understand English?”

  “They understand Cassan,” Cassan replied.

  The dogs bounded off and sat in a circle staring up at the hole in the ceiling through which the men had originally come. They looked eager. Rohan felt sorry for the next being that fell through.

  Chapter 18

  A memory nagged Clarence and, unlike the numerous concerns that were additional cause for general worry, this was something specific. He could not put a finger on exactly what that concern was however and the insubstantial memory which refused to coalesce into a cogent idea was like a line of ants crawling down his neck.

  While he drove, he searched the corners of his mind trying to bring this nagging thought into focus. They had been to Lisa’s home at #400 Belle Eau Road in Belmont. The little woman, however, had not been there, nor did it appear that she had been there in days. The bed was made, the shower and sinks were bone dry and a thin film of dust coated the dining table. The little pink and white house in Belmont was tidy but had already adopted that feeling of emptiness that houses acquire when their tenants have been away for a while.

  The visit did produce one thing however. They had her scent. Nathan had made the obscene and unnecessary point of sniffing a pair of panties from Lisa’s underwear drawer. Now they were tracking her on the wind. Clarence had no idea how they could follow the days old spoor but they could. Through the mental link the others, caged and confined in cells and dungeons all around the country, were also testing the air and helping to guide the way.

  The smell was faint but it was there and traceable. His team was more pliable now that the sun was on its way up, it was easier to get into their heads. They resisted him less, except for Fifty-seven whose mind was still behind a psychic wall. As he drove, Rebecca hung her head out of the window like an excited dog, sucking the air deeply and giving directions even though they could all follow the scent. Then without warning, his brain assembled the strewn components of the nagging thought. The men they had crashed into, Lisa’s smell had been on them. They had been in her presence and recently. How
coincidental?

  The men had had another interesting aroma, as if they had been in death’s presence so many times the smell clung to them and had, over time, become part of their own. Two men and a boy. And there was something strange about the dog too. The men had not looked alike, one was a tall, lean, dreadlocked man and one was of Indian descent. But he knew what they were, their smell gave them away, that and the wary, cynical look in their eyes. They were merchants whose wares were death and violence. Clarence made a note to stay alert for that group. Perhaps this kidnapping would not be as easy as he thought.

  They were in east Trinidad now, in an upscale neighborhood of well-designed modern houses. The ghostly pre-dawn light leeched the colors out of the land, giving everything a mystical cast.

  As they drove through the neighborhood, the individual houses grew further and further apart. Each house in this part of the neighborhood occupied acres of land. Then they came to a mansion that stood about half a mile from the roadway, perched atop a rise like a hunting raptor.

  “She’s in there,” Rebecca said, pointing to the mansion. “I smell her.”

  “We can all smell her Rebecca,” Nathan growled. “What is the plan, oh mighty leader?”

  Clarence’s heart rate had increased the moment he realized that they were at the house where their target was. If he displayed any fear or hesitation in front of this crew they would eat him alive.

  “Nathan, the next time you speak out of turn, I will force you to eat your own thumbs. Rebecca, I want you and Damian to go ‘round the back. Secure the door so she does not escape through there. Girl, you and Nathan will go ring the bell and see if you can trick someone into letting you into the house. Tell them you have car trouble and your mobile isn’t working. I will be here keeping the engine running. Get Lisa, bring her back here swiftly. Remember, she is not to be hurt.”

  ***

  Kamara was awake and alone in Rohan’s room lying on the bed on her back staring at the roof. At this hour Lisa would still be asleep and so would Imelda and Jonah. Kamara knew this even as she lay in bed. Ever since being marked she could tell when the woman was near.