Age of Blood

30

SEAL Team 666, minus Chief Petty Officer YaYa Jabouri, who was currently confined to a specially designed padded cell in the basement of the building the Knights of Valvanera called their castle, waited in the tree line outside the asylum for a word from J.J., who was atop the same building Walker had used earlier. Instead of Walker performing his duties as team sniper, he was detailed to provide direct support to the close-quarters battle (CQB) that they expected to transpire. Everyone was up-armored, wore MBITRs, had nines strapped to their right thighs, knives strapped to their left thighs, and carried their HK416s sunk deep in their shoulders, barrels low and ready. Outside their armor, they wore Rhodesian military vests because of the multiple pockets for storing extra ammunition. Protec skate helmets painted black did little to protect their heads, but strapped to each of their chins was a curiously alien-looking set of night-vision goggles with four lenses called QuadEye. Four 16mm lenses reduced the need to pan left and right by re-creating peripheral vision and incorporating the multiple feeds into a head-up display (HUD) similar to those used by combat helicopter pilots. The SEALs were uplinked through Special Operations Command to allow external monitoring of each SEAL’s feed during the mission. But only Holmes had the ability to receive commands, if and when someone in the cheap seats wanted to weigh in. Such a thing rarely happened, although if it did, it would surprise no one. Because they were moving to recover a serving senator’s daughter, there was interest at the highest levels.

The plan was simple. They’d already had an NSW proprietary micro unmanned aerial vehicle (MUAV), the RQ-11B Raven, circling the target building at five hundred feet. Its lookdown radar was integrated into the QuadEye’s HUD, and could be monitored to detect movement or to track anyone leaving the area. The Raven was controlled in real time via satellite from SOCPAC headquarters in Hawaii, with local command authority detailed to Lieutenant Commander Holmes.

In addition to the Raven, operators controlled two whisper-mode Draganflyer X6s, each carrying a multispectrum camera. These remotely operated unmanned helicopters had a six-rotor design, giving them the ability to hover in thirty-knot winds. The Draganflyers had spotted and assessed target sets through windows, helping to gather the data needed to most effectively rescue the senator’s daughter.

There were a dozen Knights arrayed around the asylum to keep anyone from leaving. Reports from J.J. and the Knights indicated that there was little or no reaction regarding the missing Zeta sniper. If he’d been positioned to provide security, he must have been a singleton, or else they were a lot less organized than commonly believed.

Employing Ramon in the attack would have been a plus, but he was nowhere to be found. Walker doubted he was out looking for a Zeta connection. More likely he’d decided to bail after they asked him about the Zeta presence. His inconsistency was one reason they wouldn’t make him part of the plan.

Now that it was night, Triple Six would bring more technology to bear. The combined efforts of the Raven, Draganflyers, and J.J. combined with Walker’s observation through the IR function of his Stoner allowed them an almost complete understanding of the beegee positions. So far they’d counted fourteen warm bodies moving about and five lying prone. They could be sleeping, reading a book, jerking off, or prisoners. The IR resolution from this distance wasn’t exact enough to do any better than that. But four of the five were located on the third floor in the same wing, so that would be their first target. Holmes figured they had thirty seconds tops before all hell broke loose after they went in.

The Knights of Valvanera had orders to shoot Los Desollados on sight. They didn’t have issue with that. Although they rarely crossed paths with the neo-pagan Aztec cult, the reality of them competing for the souls of the people of Mexico, the very idea that the Virgin could lose followers to a leprosotic Old World god drove them to accept murder as their divine right.

Walker felt the familiar dryness in his mouth. He mentally inventoried his equipment. His weapons were ready. He wore ballistic forearm pads and gloves. His armor plates protected his kidneys, back, chest, and abdomen, and fit snug into the carrier. Other than the weight, he barely knew they were there. He also had three fragmentation grenades, resting in quick-release pouches.

The team’s only odd uniform concession had been to wear hockey masks which covered their faces but left holes for the eyes and slits for the mouth and nose. The masks gave the SEALs the look of a group of tactical Jason Voorheeses. The SEALs normally wore the masks if they were concerned with video surveillance and for ballistic protection, but that wasn’t the case here. They wanted every edge they could get, and if that edge came from scaring the lepers, then so be it.

Holmes’s mask was black with a white slash across it.

Laws wore a mask with a green camouflage pattern.

Walker’s mask was bloodred, to honor their fallen team member, Johnny Ruiz.

And Yank’s mask, from the tried and true tradition to fuck with the new guy, was fuchsia.

No telling what the beegees were going to think when they saw Triple Six enter the room. And they would see them, because Triple Six had decided to leave the power on so as not to give away their advantage of surprise.

“Be ready in ten, nine, eight, seven, six…” Holmes went silent as each of the team counted down themselves. Silence was their ally, and all their rifles and pistols had suppressors.

Their CQB stack included Hoover, who was in the fifth-man position. She wore tactical body armor that protected her sides and chest. Her eyes were protected by specially designed ballistic goggles.

“Move,” Holmes ordered.

In the tight bunch they called a stack, Triple Six moved forward in a single file—Yank, Laws, Walker, Holmes, and Hoover. They moved in a combat crouch, weapons alternating sides. Even Hoover seemed to creep forward on alligator legs. And they were fast. Like a single beast they moved to the front door, opened it, and stacked into the well-lit room.

Yank buttonhooked to the left, searching for targets through his QuadEye. He found two, double-tapping each before they could even notice he was there.

Laws entered next, buttonhooking right. A pair of beegees stood in the center of the room, uncertain of what was going on. These belonged to Walker, who did his own double-tapping.

Holmes followed, checking the quadrants. “Clear,” he said.

At first Walker thought the beegees were all wearing gilly suits—apparel worn by snipers with hanging pieces of material used to resemble foliage to help the sniper to blend in with his surroundings. But on closer inspection, he saw that it was skin… long lengths of skin. The skin appeared to be stitched into shirts and pants, draping the wearer in multiple layers. When Walker had learned about Los Desollados, or the leprosos as Juan Carlos had called them, and their penchant for wearing skin in honor of their god, Xipe Totec, he didn’t at all think it would be something like this. Not only were they terrible to look at, with some of the skin rotting and flaking, but the stench was unbelievable. Even the zombies they’d fought days earlier hadn’t smelled as bad.

Triple Six had a choice to go up to the top floor and work down, or take the left or right wing. All but one of the prone figures were on the top floor, so they stacked up the stairs, moving against the walls and ignoring any targets in the hallways.

When they hit the top floor, they moved right. They’d wanted doors to close behind them, but there were no doors to the hallway. So Holmes knelt and aimed down the hallway to the left while the rest of Triple Six stacked to the first door. Yank opened the door, then let Laws take up position one, buttonhooking into the room and taking out the beegee lying in bed. This one had removed his skin suit, which was draped across the back of a chair. He was just a man, thin, balding, old, and now very dead.

They repeated the entry into three more rooms before someone decided to put up a fight. Just as Yank and Laws entered a room, a beegee exited a room two doors down. He wore very little skin and carried an MP5. He brought it up just as Walker was turning. Walker fired first and moved toward the man as he continued to fire. He kept moving and kept firing until he was standing over a dead man. He kicked the weapon away, then checked the room he’d come from.

As he looked into the room, Hoover ran past him. Walker jerked his head back out and watched as Hoover leaped into the air, coming down on the face of another man. The dog buried her head in the man’s neck and ripped upward, coming away with a meaty length of throat, showering the wall and herself in a curtain of blood.

But Walker should have been paying attention to his own piece of the mission, rather than watching Hoover. A leproso stepped from behind the door and stabbed at his face with a knife. The point of the blade hit his ballistic mask and slid sideways onto the buckle of his vest, across the side of a hand grenade, then down his chest, cutting through the material holding his chest plate.

Walker jerked back and as he did, he felt the plate shift, then fall free, leaving his chest unprotected. His opponent kept coming and Walker swung the butt of his weapon up, catching him in the chin. The man’s eyes lost focus as he began to sag to the floor. Walker followed him down, took the knife from his loose fingers, and plunged it into the middle of his forehead. Then he reached down and grabbed his armor plate, using it to hammer the blade into the skull, once, twice, and just as it seemed he was done, he turned and hammered one last time, driving the knife to the hilt so that the blade pierced the wood floor behind his attacker’s skull.

“Nice one, Ghost Four,” Laws said. “But you’re supposed to be wearing that armor, not using it like a hammer.”

“Stuff it, Ghost Two. Ghost Four, clear the rest of the wing with Hoover, then on me. Two and Three, on me,” Holmes commanded.

Holmes stood from where he’d been kneeling and made his way down the other wing, with Laws and Yank behind him. The Draganflyer operators gave Holmes guidance and the three SEALs moved down the hall until they were at the fifth door on the left. Walker reminded himself that he had his own mission and turned away just as the other three SEALs moved into the room and fired.

“Hoover,” Walker said in a low voice.

The dog padded over, wearing a rakish smile and half a gallon of blood. Together they cleared the remaining rooms, finding them empty.

The entire team met back at the stairs just as all hell broke loose on their coms.

“Ramon—he’s back,” J.J. screamed. “And there are others! They’re changing… they’re—”

“What the fuck?” came the Draganflyer operator, now witness to something that would require a nondisclosure agreement and a week of debriefing.

Holmes linked the team into the surveillance feed. They watched from the vantage of a hovering Draganflyer as the bodies of Ramon and two other men in front of the asylum remolded, bones snapping, hair shooting across skin, mouths lengthening and fangs descending. But what came next surprised the SEALs.

Instead of turning and converging on the asylum together, the three skinwalkers launched themselves at each other. Then Walker saw it. Not each against the others, but two on one. The two slightly smaller and lighter-haired skinwalkers were attacking Ramon, who rose on his hind legs, much like a human, and slashed one of his assailants across the face.

“What do I do?” J.J. asked breathlessly.

“Nothing,” Holmes said.

Walker agreed. Ramon wasn’t one of them. It might be because he was a born traitor and an assassin, either of which shared qualities with the lowest examples of humanity. How could the SEALs trust someone whose loyalty came from being a traitor to someone else? It just didn’t feel right. And even as he thought it, Walker added to himself that it was more than the feelings generated by the man’s supernatural ability to walk in the skin of a Mexican gray wolf.

One of the smaller skinwalkers circled around behind Ramon and leaped on the back of his neck, trying to bite down and crush the spine with his massive human-wolf-beast jaws. But Ramon, who already had one talon-tipped fist around the neck of the other skinwalker, grabbed the creature on his back and flung him bodily over his head and onto the ground.

The skinwalker landed, stunned. Ramon brought both hands to bear on the skinwalker in front of him. He adjusted his grip from the neck and placed both hands on the side of the beast’s head. Even from the top down vantage of the remote-controlled helicopter, Walker saw the talons pierce the skin and skull of the smaller skinwalker. They all then watched as Ramon’s muscles bunched impressively and in one quick move, he snapped the neck of the beast. But it didn’t stop there. Ramon roared into the sky, the sound carrying both through the feed from the Draganflyer as well as in real time, echoing up the stairs. Then he twisted harder, ripping the head from the body. Blood exploded from the force of the manual decapitation.

The second smaller skinwalker had made it to his feet, but instead of fighting, he fled, hunched over and afraid.

Ramon roared after it, shaking the head of the first skinwalker, then hurling it after the creature who wouldn’t dare face him.

Yank shifted nervously.

“Steady,” Laws said.

“What if it comes up the stairs?” Yank asked.

“Then we kill it,” Holmes said.

Yank nodded. “Good.”

Ramon turned toward the asylum. His arms hung at his sides, each talon seemingly longer as it dripped blood. His head was down and his eyes and mouth were hidden. Walker remembered a cover of a Golden Age Batman that had a similar creature in a similar position, shrouded in shadow, but somehow darker than the darkness.

Then someone from inside opened fire. The camera on the Draganflyer caught several muzzle flashes coming from the open door to the asylum. Los Desollados had finally decided they were tired of all the noise coming from outside.

The rounds caught Ramon in the chest but had little effect other than to knock him backwards.

“On me, Triple Six,” Holmes commanded.

He moved downstairs and the others followed, stacking down. They surprised three beegees wearing other people’s skin who were converging on the stairs, looking down as if trying to figure out what someone could be firing on. The beegees should have been looking up, because the stack of SEALs didn’t even pause as they put rounds into the men, sending them crashing to the floor before they knew what hit them.

As they approached the first floor landing, they saw four beegees, two barely wearing any skin, alternating fire at Ramon. Holmes ignored them and moved down the left hall. The others followed suit.

“J.J., take them out,” Holmes said.

“Do I have to? I’m having fun watching them try and figure out why their rounds aren’t working.”

“Just do it.”

The sounds of the automatic weapons fire faltered as Walker’s Stoner opened up from where J.J. was situated on the roof.

Triple Six stopped at the door to the room that held the remaining prone form. On the count of three, Laws kicked it in and the SEALs charged inside. The thing on the floor was a man, his own leprosotic flesh revealing muscle, bone, and in one place on his arm, tendon. He didn’t need a suit to be a leper. He was a leper.

He sat up and growled and Holmes put a single round through his head. The beegee fell back on his pillow.

“What now?” Laws asked.

“We search the whole fucking place until we find something,” Holmes said.

They moved out of the room and were confronted by an immense skinwalker. Walker remembered now—Batman #255. Moon of the Wolf.

The SEALs snapped their weapons up and aimed them into the face of the great beast. Hoover stood her ground and growled. The beast was easily a full head and shoulders taller than Holmes, the largest member of Triple Six. J.J.’s words echoed through Walker’s head. Having fun watching them try and figure out why their rounds aren’t working. Yeah, the rounds wouldn’t work. They were made of lead, not silver. It seemed that some of the legends were true. He thought of his grenades and his knife and began devising a plan to slice and stuff, hoping that silver or not, an internal explosion of the TNT sort might do enough damage.

Thankfully he didn’t have to get that desperate.

Unfazed by their weapons pointing at his head, the skinwalker pointed toward the floor. “Down,” it said in a voice that came from the roots of the earth.

Holmes stared at the floor. “Damn. The basement.”