Queen of wands

CHAPTER TEN

“This whole caving thing is throwing off my sense of time,” Barb said as she dragged her aching body out of the cave opening above the Boone house. It was nearly three in the morning and raining.

“Ah, clean water,” Janea said as she stood up gratefully. With the exception of the serpentine keyhole passage, the entire trip had been either crawling or on hands and knees. “I need a shower, a real meal and about two days’ sleep.”

“We’ve got all three available,” a voice above her said.

“Holy Freya!” Janea snapped, raising her weapon and triggering the light.

“Ouch,” the ghillie-covered man said, raising an arm to shield his eyes. “That smarts. Mind taking that light out of my eyes?”

“Who are you?” Barb asked, pointing her own light to the side.

“Just a passing stranger who wondered what might come out of the cave,” the man said. “We’ve basically taken over the neighborhood. You can get a shower, and a meal, down the hill. Oh, welcome back, by the way. Although I just lost some money.”

“Delta Force,” Graham said to the first question asked when the team found him. “They’ve sent in a full squadron and are covering this opening as well as a couple of others. There’s a battalion from the 82nd that’s setting up in Goin, a SEAL team on the way from the Little Creek, and the National Guard is in the process of fully clearing the area. We’ve taken residence of most of the houses in the neighborhood. There’s even another SC team here. You can head over to their house for showers and some rest. What happened? Did you find the Gar?”

“I don’t think we even got close,” Randell said. “But we were running low on ammo.”

“That bad?” Graham said.

“That bad,” Barb said, shrugging. “The cave was filled with them. I’m not sure how many we killed. A bunch. And I’m pretty sure there were more. We heard some scrabbling behind us on the way out.”

“Look, we’ll do something like a full report in the morning,” Janea said. “I’m whipped. And not in a good way. Sergeant Struletz? Do me a favor and after you get cleaned up, come over to the SC house. I need to worship. Oh, wait, you’d find that a sin, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Struletz said, unhappily. “And I don’t think that ‘I figured I could just confess’ would sit well with my priest.”

“Master Sergeant?” she said. “Married, right. Okay, Randell?”

“So I’m third choice?” the FBI agent said.

“I could go find a Delta if you’d prefer,” she said.

“Nope,” Randell said, raising a hand. “Be there with bells on. I’m not planning on converting, though.”

“Sharice,” Barb said happily, as Barb and Janea wandered into the kitchen of the house. “I’d hug you, but you don’t want to get this muck on you.”

The homes in the neighborhood still held most of the furniture and possessions of the owners. They had been seized under eminent domain, but the rules were “use carefully.” After the emergency was over, the owners would be back and the government would pay for any damages. Assuming the entire region wasn’t swarmed by Old Ones.

The old witch, who these days rarely left the compound of the Foundation, was one of Barb’s favorite people. Elderly, wise and accepting, she was also one of the most powerful Wiccans in the world. If anyone besides Barb could handle a skru-gnon, it would be Sharice.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Sharice said, smiling brightly. “And there is the cat,” she added, looking at Lazarus. He’d stopped to clean himself, as he’d been doing repeatedly since getting out of the cave. “I have some premium cat food around here for you. Vivian!”

“Yes, mistress,” a plump young brunette said, coming into the kitchen. “Welcome back, questers! Merry moon and a fair day.” She bobbed a curtsey and smiled. Like Sharice, she was wearing a paisley dress, and was about covered in silver jewelry.

“Merry moon,” Barb said, nodding to her. “We met in Chattanooga but I never got your name.”

“Vivian Le Strange, Janea and the redoubtable Mrs. Everette,” Sharice said. “Vivian is one of my proteges. Dear, if you could find a can of something for this poor stray that has wandered into the house? And then get started on something for our weary questers. They are not vegan. Steak and eggs?”

“Sounds great,” Barb said. “And thank you. Showers?”

“Upstairs,” Sharice said, standing up and waving to the door. “I’ll wait for you to eat before plying you with questions.”

“This is not good news,” Sharice said, sipping her tea. “The Gar could not have produced so many Hunters if it was not well fed. And it must have been in existence for some time.”

“We’d gotten that far,” Barb said. “The FBI is trying to figure out where all the food is going.”

“What you may not have considered is that the Gar is reported as continuously growing,” Sharice pointed out. “If it has been in existence on this plane for that long, if it has been so well fed as to produce hundreds, at least, of Hunters…it must be very large. The facility to hide such a thing would be, in turn, large.”

“It could be in a cave,” Janea said, doubtfully. “But most of the ones around here are pretty small.”

“That’s a piece of data,” Barb said. “One the FBI needs. Damn, I was looking forward to sleep…”

“That is interesting information,” Graham said, yawning. “This area doesn’t have a lot of large structures. How large are we talking about?”

“A building that has at least twenty thousand square feet of open area,” Barb said, shrugging. “It could be a very large barn. An old factory. A warehouse.”

“Figure it’s going to be a barn,” Janea said. “Running a bunch of cattle or pigs into a factory is going to raise questions. If you run a bunch of cattle into a barn, nobody’s really going to notice that they’re not coming out.”

“The problem being, none of the farms around here have been buying a lot of cattle,” Graham said. “Fewer than normal. There’s been a long-term drought in the area and there’s a bit of a glut. The price is actually down.”

“Who is buying?” Barb asked.

“Mostly feed-lots and slaughterhouses,” Graham said. “And that’s often more or less one operation. Most of those are over in the Midwest. There are a couple in the area. But a slaughterhouse is a big operation. Lots of workers. It’s not a one-man thing.”

“Special Agent, I got into this whole field when I stumbled upon an entire town that had been converted to the worship of Almadu,” Barbara said.

“And we’ve been ignoring the slaughterhouses,” Graham said, slapping his forehead. “We figured this couldn’t be a whole bunch of people involved.”

“I would suggest waiting until morning to check them out,” Barb said. “Have they been evacuated?”

“I’m not sure,” Graham admitted. “And I need some sleep, too. I’ll get somebody to run up a list overnight. Get some sleep. We’ll check it out in the morning.”

“We have work to do,” Barb said as they walked to the commo trailer.

She was tired and grouchy. Exhausted as she was when she went to bed, she had slept fitfully, her sleep constantly eroded by nightmares. There was the repetitive one, the one that she and Janea had identified as a Sending, of being held in a dark place. But she also woke up, more than once, with dreams that were memories of battling the hundreds of Hunters of the Dark. And she still suffered from nightmares of the battle against Almadu. They had eventually all rolled together.

She was starting to realize that PTSD really sucked and that she was, unfortunately, susceptible to it. Which meant she was going to have to find a PTSD therapist who either was already briefed in on Special Circumstance or who could actually be convinced she wasn’t totally crazy.

And now, instead of going and finding the Gar, they had to go to a videoconference.

“This operation has gotten huge,” Graham said. “Part of the work is coordination. You have to have it. And you two are the on-site SC experts.”

“This is usually the sort of thing that Germaine handles,” Janea said. “I can be…less than politic.”

“I already had a brief meeting setting it up with the aides of all the bosses that are going to be in the conference,” Graham said, waving to a golf cart. “I just pointed out that you ladies were the equivalent of mystical shooters and that they should expect shooter attitude.”

“I think I’m a bit more polite than that,” Barb said. “But I’ll admit I’m not at my best at the moment. Who’s going to be in the conference?”

“You don’t want to know,” Graham said, swallowing.

While the team had been in the cave, the operational tempo in the area had picked up. Goin had the look of a military post, with soldiers moving everywhere and several mobile command posts set up. Graham led them to a full-sized trailer with about a dozen antennas on top, and opened the personnel door.

The interior was lined by plasma screens, with workstations lining both sides. And it was occupied by only one technician.

“Bobby, we nearly up?”

“We’re going live in about thirty,” the technician said, waving to a set of three chairs. “Left side of the trailer and end. There’s a couple of minor players I’m having to shift to right, so if you have to look at them, you’ll have to spin around and everybody will be looking at the back of your head.” He handed Barb and Janea headsets and pointed to the chairs. “The cameras have pretty fair depth of field, but try not to move around a lot. If you’re wondering what you’re looking like, these are you,” he added, pointing to two small monitors at the work station.

Barb looked at the monitor and saw a very wan version of her normal self.

“I should have done my makeup better,” she said, shaking her head. She looked up at the row of monitors and shook her head again. “I can’t see most of these.”

“Center will be NSA,” Bobby said. “Right FBI, left Homeland. Spreads out from there. You can back the chair up if you need to look far to the side. Just try to stay in front of the camera. And we’re going live in five…three…two…”

“NSA?” Janea said as the monitors went from color panels to video.

“National Security Advisor,” Barb said, waving at the middle-aged man in the center screen.

Each of the screens had a tag on it so that the unfamiliar knew who they were dealing with. There was a name, but the title was always, unfortunately, an acronym, many of which she had a hard time working out.

NSA, FBID, HS, NORTHCOM, NGB, ARNGT, and on and on.

Barb spun briefly in place to look over her shoulder, and shook her head. Augustus was on one of the rear panels with the acronym USEURSCCOM under him. He smiled and nodded with a glimmer of humor in his eye. It was the first trace of humor she’d ever seen in him, and she suddenly realized that he must have a very nasty sense of humor.

“Odin’s missing eye,” Janea whispered.

“Uh, Janea,” Graham said, wincing. “We’re live.”

“I’ll be chairing this conference,” the National Security Advisor said. “If you wish to make a comment, press the alert button and I’ll bring you in. Review of the threat. As of this morning, we have the report from the SC Onsite Team that they encountered in excess of fifty of the…‘Hunters in the Dark’ during their penetration of the Goin cave system. This is in addition to previously encountering and dispatching a…screw-ganon?”

“ Skru-gnon,” Janea said. “Child of Foulness.”

“A skru-gnon in the first insertion, and in excess of twenty Hunters and a Child in the encounter at the Boone residence,” the NSA said. “Mrs. Everette, is there any way to get any sort of feel for the actual threat numbers?”

“No, sir,” Barb said, taking a sip of coffee. “The caves are just chaotic and you run into what you run into. My best guess is that we ran into only a fraction of the total. Every time we’ve gone deeper into the caves, we’ve run into more.”

“General Cable,” he said. “Any input?”

“No, sir,” the NORTHCOM commander said. “If we could figure out how many people there were in caves, it would make Afghanistan a lot easier. Tactically, the only choice on the cave end is to send in a large number of shooters with…SC support, and comb them out. Frankly, I’d be surprised if we get them all. This may be an ongoing issue.”

“We need a better answer,” the NSA said.

Janea sighed and pressed her button.

“Ms…Grisham?”

“Please use my goddess name of Janea,” Janea said. “It’s a point of protocol, not a bitch. You would not call a Catholic nun by her given name. It’s the same with a priestess. All of the information we have is from prewritten records, oral histories passed down from when humans were hunter-gatherers. So our actual information on the Old Ones is very sketchy. But the information that we have gleaned is that, even after the war against the Old Ones had been won, there were many Children left scattered across the globe as well as more numerous Hunters. Hunters, in fact, still remain in outlying areas; SC has battled remnants within the last decade. There may not be a good answer except combing them out over the years.”

“A point to keep in mind, and I apologize for my breach of protocol,” the NSA said. “Then we come to the subject of this…Gar? Pronunciation…Janea?”

“ Gar gyi dbang phyug ma, ” Janea said. “The mother of all demons, or the mother of all foulness. Progenitor might be a more accurate term.”

“The Gar,” the NSA said. “We are now informed that it might be physically large. SC team input.”

“Again, legends,” Janea said, shrugging. “There are one hundred and fifty-seven divergent cultures that have myths of the Great Flood. What really happened? Was it the rising water from the last glacier melt? No one knows for sure. The legends of the Old Ones are the same. Most of them we get from Tibetan scrolls, which are opaque even by Tibetan standards and in many places degraded. Some were lost during the Mao years along with their information. The gar gyi dbang phyug ma is never properly described. None of them are, for some cultural reasons. We can only get descriptions from the names that are used for them. Gar gyi dbang phyug ma is her short name. Her full name translates as something like: That Which Is Fifty Elephants Covered in Cobras That Walks as a Stomach That Is the Mother of Foulness That Perverts the Mind That Walks in Dark Places That Cannot Be Harmed That Creates the Horror…It goes on. Some of the name is missing from the scroll, and I can argue all day about various translations of the words. Mother could be progenitor, stomach could be gallbladder, things like that.”

“I see,” the NSA said, looking a bit stunned.

“The other thing to consider is that the Gar is one of the lesser of the Great Old Ones,” Janea said. “You don’t want to think about He Who Is Sleeping coming back. And don’t ask me for the full name. You don’t want the nightmares. But if someone has figured out how to bring back the Gar, it may mean that the great prophecies of the Old Ones returning is being fulfilled. This may only be the beginning. Or the tip of an iceberg.”

“If it’s like fifty elephants, why can’t we find it?” the NSA asked, returning to the point. “FBI on-site.”

“We had been dismissing slaughterhouses as a possible hide point,” Graham said. “Until last night, the possibility that this might be part of a group conspiracy had not been addressed. Our next step is to check out the two slaughterhouses in the area. They have not been fully evacuated, since they had stock on site that required maintenance. Given the possibility of SC threat, we were waiting for the SC combat team to recover from their mission before checking them out. It’s next on our list, sir.”

“Elimination,” the NSA said. “SC command.”

“As Janea alluded, the Gar is mentioned as being resistant to conventional weapons,” Augustus said. “However, that was in a day when ‘conventional’ referred to spears and clubs. The height of military technology was the atlatl. So it is possible that modern weapons may have effect. Then again, it’s possible that they may not. In which case…” He paused and sighed. “In that case, we had better hope that Mrs. Everette’s Christian God is willing to give sufficient aid to our case.”

“SOCOM query,” the NSA said. “Go.”

“How can conventional weapons not have effect?” the admiral commanding SOCOM asked. The former SEAL was polite in tone, but his posture showed he was having a hard time believing the subject of the conference.

“Answer…” the NSA said then paused. “SC Onsite.”

“Pass,” Janea said, looking at Barb.

“In the case of demons, conventional weapons pass through them,” Barb said. “But they can hit you as hard as a tank. I’ve got the broken ribs to show. In the case of the Children, everything we’ve hit them with has bounced unless there is godly intervention. Then they’re easy enough to kill if you do enough damage fast enough; they regenerate like nobody’s business. Simply engaging most SC entities is hard enough for the unprotected. So far, we haven’t seen the sort of mind control that major demons have, but there are plenty of indications the Gar may have that ability. And the Old Ones… Perhaps as a fundamental attribute of their otherness and perhaps as part of a sending, they induce pathological psychological conditions on the viewer. It’s pretty hard to hit something if you can’t look at it. With the Children and the Hunters we’ve found, the effect is lessened under FLIR. But we haven’t had anyone view the Gar. My guess is that the effect is going to be stronger. I’ve done some pretty horrific targets, general. This is going to be a tough mission. Even by my standards.”

“NORTHCOM input,” the NSA said.

“We need to ensure that all non-briefed persons are held as far from the threat as possible,” the general said. “Both for security reasons and due to the nature of the threat. And promulgate a finding that any possibility of encountering threat requires use of FLIR, whether day or night.”

“That’s going to degrade our day viewing,” SOCOM interjected.

“Admiral,” Barb said, trying not to sigh. “SEALs are tough and tough-minded. Which is good. But if one of your SEALs or Deltas views one of these things with their naked eyes, the best you’re going to get is a broken man. What you’re going to get most of the time is someone who spends the rest of his days in a padded room under heavy Thorazine. Think of it as a safety measure; these things are HAZMAT for the brain.”

“CJCS,” the NSA said.

“Agreement with NORTHCOM,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said. “Order will be promulgated to all briefed personnel. Query: How high can we go on the weaponry hierarchy?”

“Non-nuclear,” the NSA said. “If we have to go nuclear…we might as well go public.”

“To be avoided,” Germaine said.

Janea started at a jerk from Barb and looked over at her. The housewife had a strange, wide-eyed expression. Janea had seen it before, though, and cringed at what was about to happen.

Barb reached out with a strangely uncoordinated hand and pressed the alert button.

“SC on-site,” the NSA said, then frowned at the picture of Barb and Janea.

Janea spun in her chair to look at the screen with Augustus on it. He had his head in his hands, but she could see the grimace on his face.

“The nations of the world shall be tested,” Barb said in a deep, resonant tone. Her eyes were still focused forward, wide and unseeing, and even her face had changed, becoming more solid, squarer, mannish. If the man was a triathlete. “The faith of this nation shall be its salvation or its doom. The great battle looms. May this be a sign of the end times, the ending of all things. This battle shall be but the beginning as the vanguard of Satan readies its panoply. You have this time to prepare.”

Barb closed her eyes and shook her head, then looked around.

“Sorry,” she whispered to Janea, closing her hand over the microphone. “Long night. I think I sort of drifted off there. Anything important happen?”