ADAM

 

Sunday January 12 - 0857 CST

Three days until Turbocharger activates

 

We landed in New Orleans early in the morning. By the time we got our bags and the rental it was more like late morning and we still had a long drive left. Port Moreau was a little backwater town on the banks of the Black River in upper Lousiana. If you think of Louisiana as being shaped like a boot, then there were several rivers that acted as its laces. And the Black River was one of them.

We were just hitting the road at the bottom of its sole. So we had a ways to go.

Before hitting the road I scoped out a phone booth. My calling card still had some minutes left on it and after punching in Jessica's number we had a brief chat. It was the least I could do after skipping out on her up a second time in as many days. She was surprisingly supportive about my last minute trip.

That's how I know the Change really did a number on me.

When you're an out of shape guy on the shorter side with low self confidence, a girl won't bother sticking around if you stood her up just once. But when you're well over six feet tall and have abs of steel she'll hang onto you no matter what. The world just isn't fair to comic book nerds that way.

It didn't feel right, but if I'm being honest, I really did want to see Jessica again. "Alright, we'll do something fun when I get back."

I could practically hear the smile on her face over the phone line. "Okay, that sounds great. Good luck finding those terrorists. See ya!"

I shook my head at the hand set that was now buzzing with a dial tone. She still didn't believe that we were hunting demons.

A distant honk from our rental broke me out of my thoughts. Sterling had pulled up in the hatchback we would be using for this trip. The back seats were already folded down to make room for the big pelican case with the number 33 stenciled on its sides.

This was one of many special "Go-kits" they kept on hand with special equipment tailored for the team that would use it. In this case it was literally tailored and had a business suit that been custom fit for me. As Colonel Sterling explained this was a contingency they had planned for (and paid for) before my disappearance. Then they had held onto it in the hopes I would return. It was a detail forgotten in all the organizational reshuffling that happened so they never got around to tossing it out. That all worked out for my benefit though because it would have taken a while to get another suit tailored to my size. And we would need it soon because we were going to be pretending to be FBI agents.

You can't look like you're FBI without a suit.

Random people from out of town snooping around would draw suspicion. Especially when one of them was seven feet tall. But all that could be handwaved away with a suit, tie, and FBI creds. It might even get us into some places we wouldn't be able to go otherwise.

There were also several sets of credentials in there. These were the ones with the tiny badge and giant block letters spelling out FBI and there was one for each member of Alpha in there, including one with my picture on it. Besides all that were some burner cell phones, radios, and guns. Glock 22s chambered in .40 S&W. I'd never fired one before. Colonel Sterling assured me I'd pick it up really quick.

Sadly Dominus wasn't one of the guns. But the colonel assured me we were there to investigate cult activity, not fight monsters. And the Glocks would be enough for that, if it even came to a fight.

It was a lot of good preparation for what Colonel Sterling had in mind for us. He had always been good about having every contingency and sub-contingency planned out and prepared for. But one he missed out on was fighting the boredom of the long drive ahead of us.

As it turned out he wasn't into running the radio in the car. Not that I could blame him. I wasn't relishing the thought of hours on the road listening to country, or whatever they liked to broadcast in this part of the US. But then Colonel Sterling surprised me.

He started talking about himself.

It was really weird to think of him having a past, mainly because he put on this air of authority around him that made you think he was born as a crusty old colonel that came out of the womb without crying once. Because that would have meant showing emotion.

But he had been a pilot once. That much wasn't a surprise. A lot of Air Force officers are pilots and the little wings on his uniform sort of gave that away. What was surprising was that he was a helicopter pilot. In the Air Force it's easy to get lost among all the jets because there are so many of them and forget that there are helicopters too.

What Colonel Sterling flew was a big monster of a chopper called a Sikorsky MH-53. It was so large it actually had a crew of six and could carry thirty-seven troops. In essence it was a school bus with rotor blades and miniguns for the crew. And he'd flown them in two wars.

The first was during Desert Storm where he would use his flying school bus to ferry special ops troops behind enemy lines and later rescue them while under fire. The second was the recent war in Kosovo where again he was ferrying special ops troops like Alpha and Shadow to do the high risk stuff that didn't make it into the news. Then he surprised me with General Basser's name being mentioned.

At the time it was just Colonel Basser but he was still the same pushy jerk I got to know. And I'd barely just met the guy. Colonel Sterling and Basser had history which explained a lot, and why Basser seemed to have it in for the guy and everyone close to him.

They had a disagreement about a mission and Colonel Sterling ended up being right about it. Then right about the time the CTTC came into being Basser was actually tagged to run it. But seeing it as an unimportant mission because it wasn't an air combat command he pulled strings to have Sterling take it over instead. In his own logic he was not only avoiding an assignment that would hurt his career, but also getting revenge on Sterling at the same time. Two birds, one stone.

"His exact words were I'm not going to watch my career wither away and die in some rusting iron shack out in the middle of nowhere. That's what second rate officers like you are for." Colonel Sterling didn't even wrinkle his face in disgust at the memory of those hurtful words. But I could tell they stung him. You don't memorize phrases like that unless they left deep imprints in your heart. I felt bad for the guy, because I knew what it was like to be a punching bag for a bully.

Then a lightbulb clicked on in my head. "That's where you got the callsign from. Iron Shack. You got that from him."

"That's right. It was only fitting to use his words to describe us. With all the amazing things the people of the CTTC have accomplished I'm actually very proud of the term now. In my mind it means success and always doing the right thing. And in a satisfyingly ironic twist, now that Basser is in command, that callsign is now his. Though I doubt he even remembers saying it."

For a brief instant—and this might have been my imagination—I thought I saw the corners of Sterling's mouth quirk up in a half smile. He liked the thought of turning the tables on Basser. But then again it probably was my imagination.

I was shocked to see a sign up ahead announcing that Port Moreau was the next exit. Once Colonel Sterling had started telling me about his past the hours just evaporated away.

We crossed over a bridge that took us above the Black River. The ominously named river wasn't actually black though. Mostly it was a soupy green-brown mess that didn't so much as flow like a river, but drained out of the swamp at the speed of a clogged drain. Like you would expect, a city with port in the name sat right on the edge of the water, complete with piers.

There was also this creepy banner stretched over the main street as we entered the town. It read "Moreau Deliverance Days and Crawdad Festival Jan 14-15". There were cartoonish crayfish flanking both sides of the banner. But that wasn't what creeped me out.

It was the fact that these crayfish were colored black. That made them look just like the spider-crab in the warehouse.