Age of Blood

54

Walker remembered his first mission in the Chinese sweatshop with the women whose lips had been sewn together so they couldn’t tell anyone the secret of their craft—that they were creating suits from the many-tattooed skins of dead people. Then came the creatures. Too many and too different to count. Back when he was still green, he’d had a lot of thoughts working in his mind, not the least of which had been the introduction of not only the idea, but the reality that there were creatures and forces out there that had an intent to harm his great Red, White, and Blue. The U.S. Navy and SEAL training had prepared him to fight other men, only to have him discover that he was now fighting creatures whose existence could only be foretold in mythology of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. As a kid in the orphanage he’d dabbled in the game, creating a Paladin to fight the evil hordes. He’d learned about orcs and dwarves long before the Lord of the Rings movies made them popular. He’d chosen a Paladin because of the armor and the sword, but also because if he fought hard and did well, he’d have a chance to have a Pegasus as a steed. The idea of a flying horse had captivated his eleven-year-old mind and kept him playing long into the nights when he should have been sleeping. But the monsters and their evil had only been as powerful as his young mind could create, and no matter how inventive an eleven-year-old might be, he couldn’t conceive—nor would he want to—the absolute malignancy of a being whose only design was to see the human form be broken.

But the Aztec gods were different. They didn’t care about good or evil. Such ideas were human creations. Aztec mythology was based on rules of absolutes. If one wanted a good harvest, this is what you did. If one wanted to defeat an enemy, then this is what you did. There was no negotiation. Period. So it came as no shock to him to see the assembled Los Zetas middle managers being escorted one after the other from the Yopico toward the top of the pyramid. In the hotel they’d been big cheese, flaunting their power, ordering their minions around and flashing gold-toothed smiles, each and every one kings of their own particular trash heap. But they could be replaced. In the upwardly mobile world of narcotrafficking, any enterprising soldier could get promoted as long as he didn’t steal from his boss or sleep with his boss’s wife/sister /daughter/mother.

The Zetas in the hotel had ordered men to their deaths, women into their beds, and families to work harvesting the spoils of their war against the American anti-drug machine. Now they were sacrifices. Stripped of their clothes, they wore only underwear and socks, the sight as clownish as it was awful. Many of them were overweight. Some were hairy from head to toe. Others were in shape, their bodies not yet having the opportunity to become attuned to success. They came with scars, tattoos, and burns, all reminders of what it had taken them to get where they’d been. The only unifying trait they shared was the walleyed look of shock mixed with a stultifying knowledge of their inexorable death. Of the fifty Zetas, only one turned and ran.

The gold-and-red-robed men watched placidly as the obsidian butterfly that had been resting halfway up the pyramid rose into the air. It flapped its Damascus wings and soared after the pathetic man, even as he screamed and wailed, his lone voice speaking for them all. Then the butterfly was upon him. With a few beats of its flint-hard wings, it sliced him into several pieces, his torso hitting the floor before his head.

The others watched this, then turned to their own demise. They were either too stoned or too resolute to care.

Atop the pyramid, the priests of Xipe Totec began their terrible work. One after the other, they shouted toward the unseen sky then lopped the head off a Zeta. As blood began to coat the temple steps, the heads rolled to the bottom, were caught by two men, and placed in the skull racks.

The last man in line queued up. This one was escorted by a figure that was as instantly familiar as the man whom he was escorting. Senator Withers was naked from the chest up. He still wore ragged suit pants and shoes, but his belly hung over his belt. His face was a visual narration in misery. Both eyes were black and swollen almost shut. His face was yellow with bruising. More deep purple bruises dotted his chest and arms and back. Blood had dried at his nostrils.

The man escorting him was the immaculate opposite. Ramon wore his usual white linen suit. Walker couldn’t imagine him wearing anything else. It was as much a uniform as what Walker was wearing now, as was the look of calm contentment on Ramon’s face as he stopped the senator and motioned for him to wait.

The two men who had been recovering the heads wore similar clothing. Now that Walker saw Ramon, it was an easy guess that they were together with him, which also meant that they were most probably werewolves. Walker had something for them. Either his silver-tipped, 173-grain M118 match ammunition or the T101E armor-piercing incendiary rounds would do the trick. He had ten of the former and five of the latter. He also had ten SLAP rounds, which used a tungsten penetrator to punch through armor or stone to deliver the polymer sabot contained within the round. Walker had barely used the M948 round, but was looking forward to seeing what he could explode with it.

Walker glanced to the side to make sure Jen was okay. She was busy trying to get communication with the home base as well as the other team. Walker’s orders were to wait for the command to attack unless it looked like the senator’s life was in danger.

Then came the biggest surprise.

A tall African American with dyed-blond hair and a goatee walked stiffly from the Yopico toward the pyramid. As he began to ascend, Walker recognized him in a moment of shock—Jingo Jones, alive! Walker sighted through the scope and the image leaped forward. Correction. The former SEAL was dead. Dead as the zombies in Madam Laboy’s cemetery. What made him alive was anyone’s guess. But what they were going to use him for was obvious to Walker and any other of the SEALs of Triple Six. He’d found the missing tattooed skin suit: Jingo Jones was wearing it. Pieced from the skins of a hundred tattooed people and stitched together by seamstress slaves owned by the Chinese Snakehead mafia, the suits were designed to allow the wearer to not be affected by whatever supernatural entity it channeled. The businessman who had become a demon god during their mission to Myanmar had been proof of the suit’s magic.

The others moved aside as Jones climbed up the pyramid. When he reached the top, the Los Desollados gathered around him. They raised their arms and began chanting.

Whatever god or goddess they were about to resurrect, it wasn’t going to be good. Walker might be the only one available to stop them. He laid out his rounds on a cloth by his right side. He’d have to load and fire quickly. He loaded the SLAP rounds in their own twenty round magazine, then did the same with the armor piercing rounds. A SLAP round was like no other and could easily be recognized. The incendiary round had a yellow tip. The silver-tipped rounds he placed in a third twenty round magazine, which could easily be distinguished by the gleam of the precious metal. Finally, he prepared two magazines of regular 178-grain match rounds.

Gunfire suddenly erupted from somewhere near the other side of the pyramid—the pipe. Everyone turned their gazes toward the sound. The men at the base of the pyramid snapped up weapons and aimed. MP5s appeared from beneath the robed-men’s red and gold. Whoever was fighting up there would be surprised when they reached the opening. Which is where Walker came in.

He and the Stoner were going to even the odds.

He doped the scope to 10 + 2 and sighted on the most obvious target atop the pyramid. Jingo’s eyes were bone white. His face was slack. But there was no doubt that there was some sort of undead life within him. Walker counted to three and squeezed the trigger. At 2,571 feet per second, the round was there so fast it was as if Walker had reached out and split the man’s head asunder. Zombie or not, the threat in the tattooed skin suit was dead—for good now. Jones fell to the ground, his body nothing more than a cage for bones.

As Walker fired again, he began to hum the chorus to Jingo’s unasked-for namesake, Jingo was his name-o. Walker shot the Los Desollados to the right and to the left of Jingo. He fired again and killed another. His next shot failed to find a home. He fired again with the same result. He couldn’t tell at this distance, but his gut told him they’d thrown up a force field.

The last two Desollados stared in his direction and pointed. That caught the attention of everyone else in the temple area. It didn’t really matter. There were enough targets.

Walker shifted his aim to Ramon’s men at the base of the pyramid. He slipped in the magazine with the silver-tipped M118 rounds, doped the scope down, and shot each of them through the chest. They turned toward him as their bodies began to shudder and bend into a wolfine form. He put a round through each of their heads and watched with satisfaction how they fell in midchange, never to complete the transformation.

Ramon howled, pulled free a pistol and fired in his direction. He might as well have been throwing rocks. Walker was too far for the weapon to have any effect. From his vantage point he might as well be invincible.

But he spoke too fast.

A squad of Zetas ran from the lower temple. Seven of them carried FX-05 Xiuhcoatls, which translated into classic Nahuatl meant “Fire Serpent.” The weapon was the Mexican military’s homegrown assault rifle and fired the same rounds as his SR-25. Not as grand a weapon, but the rifle was very capable of putting the rounds on target—in this case, him.

Walker shifted fire and took out two of them before they were able to get their weapons to bear. Then came an eighth squad member carrying an Ultimax 100 machine gun with an ammo drum capable of holding a hundred of the same rounds as the Fire Serpents, and capable of delivering the rounds in less than ten seconds.

Walker pulled back and covered his head just as 5.56 × 45 rounds chewed savagely at the ceiling above him. Behind him he heard Jen scream. He couldn’t move to look and could only hope that she wasn’t hurt too badly.