1: New Beginning
[Dante Hicks is now Patrick Russell.]Daniel Cho stood in the frigid bay wind and stared at the graves of his parents and his sisters. It was September, three months after their deaths at the hands of the demons. Their estate handling had been done remotely because he’d spent the last three months preparing to avenge them. Today was the first day he’d actually been free to visit their graves.
He hardly recognized the man he’d been when they died. In the last three months, Jack and Sandy had run him and Patrick through a brutal “boot camp” to prepare non-combatant civilians for the battle ahead. They’d been whipped into the best physical shape of their lives, taught how to survive in wildernesses from the Appalachian mountains to SouthEast Washington DC. They’d been taught how kill with guns, knives and their bare hands. Daniel was the equal now of the best US Army Rangers, and had also refreshed his skills as a trauma surgeon. Those were skills his team was likely to need, considering what they’d be fighting.
Demons. Not the horned and pitchfork variety, but real, flesh and blood people who, as the result of nanotechnology no one had figured out yet, healed almost instantly, never got sick, never aged. They’d been living among humans for centuries–millennia–and interfering in the development of society, corrupting and poisoning things for their own ends. Wherever there was blood, strife, humans killing each others, there were demons behind the scenes.
Daniel had stumbled upon their existence and they’d tried to kill him for it. When that didn’t work, they’d killed his family. But in the end, Daniel and his friends had been able to get the truth out. The demons weren’t a secret anymore.
But neither were they acknowledged fact. The demons had caught the collective imagination of the public, but the United States government, along with most of the United Nations, still declared them a hoax. Daniel knew that this was because the demons had influence deep within the governments of the world. Even Jack’s former boss at the FBI had been working for them. Officially, an ancient conspiracy of immortals meddling with human history was every bit the wacko conspiracy theory it sounded like.
Only it was real. Jeff had died to bring the story to light, one of many wacko conspiracy theories he had favored. Only this one was real. The demons existed, whether they were acknowledged officially or not.
And they would be hunted. Jack’s team but just one of many the angels had started up in the last few months. The angels still hadn’t, for the most part, shown themselves. Only Uriel had been seen in public. But they’d thrown their considerable resources behind the human effort to seek out and destroy the demons, once and for all.
Daniel knew the mission was important. He believed, as Jack did, that humanity needed to be free. But really, he just wanted to destroy the creatures that had taken his family away from him. He wanted justice. If he couldn’t get it from his government, he’d take it himself.
“Are you ready?” Jack said behind him.
Jack turned and saw his new boss, both of them wearing jeans and leather jackets against the fall chill. They didn’t look much like soldiers. But Jack had fought in Iraq, alongside Sandy, before he joined the FBI. And while Patrick hadn’t been tested under fire yet, Daniel had fought the demon Batarel five times before finally killing the bastard, the last time just hand to hand, flipping the demon off a catwalk in a steel plant into a vat of molten metal. So far, he was the only human to kill an immortal in all of recorded history. That had to count for something.
Daniel didn’t look back at his family’s graves. “Yeah, boss. I’m ready.”
“Let’s saddle up, then.” Jack turned and led Daniel to the UH-60 Blackhawk they used to move around. They hadn’t come to San Francisco just so Daniel could say goodbye to his family. They were hunting. After Susan released the database given to her by Uriel with all the names and aliases of every demon, including their current identities, most of them had gone to ground, assumed emergency backup identities. It had taken a lot of legwork and Patrick’s computer skills, but they found one, living in the bay area. It was time to take him down.
*
Jack sat in the cockpit of the Blackhawk, going over the mission details one more time. Sandy was piloting, and Daniel was in the back with Patrick, trying to get Patrick’s little surprise ready. While he and Sandy had been teaching the young analyst to fight, they’d also been picking his brain about how to kill demons more effectively. They couldn’t very well carry around a vat of molten steel everywhere they went, so they needed another way to kill something that could heal almost any injury in seconds. Patrick had come up with a lot of ideas, including the one they were going to field test today. Just as soon as they found the demon.
According to their sources, the demon, true name of Oznael, was holed up in warehouse down in Hunter’s Point. Seemed as good a place as any to test out their tactics.
Sandy signaled him. They were almost at the LZ. Out the port side he saw the blue of San Francisco Bay, gray industrial buildings below and to starboard. They were coming in fast.
Jack turned and signaled to Daniel and Patrick. They moved to turn off all their electronics. Jack started shutting down everything he could in the cockpit without interfering with Sandy keeping the bird in the air. They’d have to be quick.
Sandy pointed at a building, started a countdown with his hand. Five, four, three…
The instant the Blackhawk hit the roof, Jack and Sandy scrambled to shut down the remaining electronics. They had three seconds. Two, one…
Dante hit the EMP and Jack heard a loud pop from the back of the Blackhawk. All the control screens were black. He glanced at Sandy. “Did we make it?”
“Won’t know until we try to start it again.”
Jack shrugged. They had other concerns at the moment. “Let’s move, everybody!”
The men jumped out of the Blackhawk, rotors still swinging above their heads from sheer momentum. They ran for the roof access door, Jack spraying the doorknob with bullets from his MP5. He kicked the door down and they rode it like a surfboard down the first flight of steps before jumping off in the landing and continuing down. The staircase opened out into a catwalk above a warehouse floor. The lights were off, a side effect of the eletromagnetic pulse they’d set off. If they were lucky, the nanites in the demon’s blood would be disabled as well.
They fanned out across the catwalks along the north and west sides of the building. Each man was dressed in black coveralls, combat boots and bulletproof vests. They wore kevlar helmets and could have passed for SWAT officers but for the lack of the word POLICE in bright white letters on their vests. Each carried an MP-5 submachine gun, plenty of ammo, grenades, and a light backpack containing the tools of their specialty. Sandy carried handheld napalm bombs and other ordinance. Daniel had their medical kit, Patrick a computer that could connect to just about anything anytime someone hadn’t just set off an EMP. Jack’s backpack held surveillance gear, and he reached into that pack to pull out a lightweight set of night vision goggles. He put them on.
The warehouse flared into a monochrome gray, brighter and better detailed than what he’d been able to make out by eye. He was the spotter in this scenario, directing the other men towards the target. If they could find the target. The warehouse was full of eighty foot shipping containers, some stacked five high. A single demon could hide in here for a long time without being spotted, especially if he could get into one or more of the containers.
Jack saw something dart off to the side on the warehouse floor. He whistled to the men, and pointed. “Southeast corner!” he said.
Carefully, they all started down the metal stairways towards the floor. Patrick had formed up with Jack, Daniel was covering Sandy. With any luck, they’d catch the bastard in a crossfire.
Jack turned and glanced at Patrick. “You sure this is going to work?”
The former FBI analyst shrugged. “In theory, it should work,” Patrick said. “The nanites are too small to have any appreciable EM shielding. The EMP should have turned Oznael into just another human being, at least for a while. If we shoot him, he should stay dead.”
“That’s an awful lot of “shoulds”, Patrick.”
“I know, sir.”
They crept down the floor. As soon as Jack stepped down to the concrete, he heard the distinctive chatter of an AK-47. He grabbed Patrick by the scruff of the neck and threw them both to the floor. Bullets ricocheted off the metal staircase behind them.
“I think he’s on to us, sir,” Patrick said.
“Figured that out, did you?” Jack said as heard answering MP-5 fire coming from the left. Good, Sandy was already trying to pin him down.
He slapped Patrick on the shoulder. “Come on, Patrick. We have a job to do.”
Patrick covered Jack as Jack carefully sidestepped around the shipping container where he thought the AK shots had come from. Sandy and Daniel were no longer firing, so they must have lost Oznael too, assuming they ever saw him and weren’t just shooting at the sound to drive him back.
“Oznael!” Jack shouted, echoing in the vast warehouse. “We know who and what you are. There’s no way out of here except through us!”
“Sir is that wise?” Patrick whispered. “Taunting him?”
“If he hides,” Jack whispered, “and we have to search crate by crate, it’s much more dangerous and we have a higher risk of losing him. He thinks he’s invulnerable still, and is only avoiding us because it’s easier to pick us off one by one. If we can make him angry enough to charge us…”
“He’ll run right into the bullets, thinking they won’t harm him.”
“That’s the plan,” Jack said. “Now we just need to flush him out.”
Jack turned on the comlink hooked over his right ear. “Sandy, report,” he said as quietly as he could.
“Nothing here, boss,” Sandy said. We converged on where it sounded like the AK fire came from, but there’s no sign of him.”
“Roger that,” Jack said. He waved for Patrick to follow and moved down the aisle between the massive containers. Bastard had to be here somewhere.
“Oznael!” he said. “You’re not getting out of this.”
Jack heard the demon speak behind them, a rough Aussie accent. “I beg to differ.”
Oznael opened fire, and Jack felt a couple of the rounds hit the plate on the back of his vest. Patrick cried out and went down immediately.
“Shit,” Jack said and returned fire. He hit the demon square in the chest with at least five rounds. The demon fell down under the hail of gunfire.
“Medic!” Jack screamed. “Daniel, get over here!” Jack saw a pool of blood spreading under Patrick, and it was getting way too big.
As he heard Sandy and Daniel doubletime over to him, he saw the demon getting back up.
*
Daniel saw Patrick slumped against the side of a container as Jack leaped over him and opened fire on the demon again. “Sandy, I need some help here!” Jack said.
As Sandy and Jack drove the demon back, Daniel whipped off his pack and tended to Patrick. “Stay with me, buddy,” he said. “We’re gonna get through this.”
“F–First time out,” Patrick said. “And I get tagged.”
“Could have happened to any of us,” Daniel said. He saw that most of the bleeding was coming from Patrick’s left leg. Daniel took a knife and sliced open the leg of Patrick’s pants. The bullet had gone deep into his thigh, and the blood coming out was bright red, arterial. Probably nicked the femoral, Daniel thought.
“Okay, Patrick, this is going to sting a bit,” Daniel said. He grabbed a clamp out of his pack, and a retractor. “Got to do a little spelunking.”
“In my leg?”
“Just lie back and think of England,” Daniel said. “Don’t pass out if you can help it.”
“I’m getting dizzy, Daniel.”
Daniel reached in with the retractor and pulled the wound open. Patrick screamed and thrashed.
“Patrick! Keep still!”
“Fuck!” Patrick said through clenched teeth.
There was blood everywhere, pumping hot over Daniel’s hands. But he could see where it coming from. He reached in with the clamp, and closed it over the artery.
“Shit!” Patrick said. “Fucking Christ, that hurts!”
Daniel broke an ice pack and put it over the wound. “Hold that there as long as you can. I’ve stopped the life threatening bleeding, but we need to get you to an OR as soon as possible.” He wrapped some bandages over the ice pack. “I’ll be right back.”
Daniel grabbed his weapon, jumped up and ran towards the gunfire.
*
Jack emptied his clip, ejected it, and slammed another one home. Oznael was off balance from the continued gunfire, but he was healing visibly. They had him backed up and pinned down, but Jack didn’t see how they were going to keep this going. As soon as they ran out of ammo, the demon would counterattack and it would be over. They needed a lot more practice before trying to take one of these things down.
Jack heard another SMG open up behind him, and saw Daniel adding his firepower. He was firing in three-round bursts, focusing on the demon’s knees.
“Good thinking!” Jack shouted. “Sandy, we need some heat!”
Sandy pulled back and reached behind him. He pulled out what was essentially a small flare attached to a plastic container of jellied gasoline. It was a slightly more sophisticated version of a Molotov Cocktail, in that it used napalm instead of gas or kerosene, but it would do the job. Sandy lit it and tossed it just above the demon. The flare ignited the napalm, which melted the plastic and rained down on the demon, In an instant, the demon was covered in fire. Oznael turned and ran, faster than Jack thought possible, for one of the warehouse exits.
“Won’t kill him,” Sandy said, “but it will take him out of commission long enough for us to evac.”
“Let’s do it, then,” Jack said. Daniel already had a collapsible stretcher unpacked and unfolded. They set about moving Patrick to the stretcher as gently as possible, and then carried him to the nearest staircase.
The first battle in the war against the demons hadn’t exactly been a rousing success.
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