Early fall sunlight bathed the western slopes of the White Mountains as Templar Team Echo flew two UH-60A Black Hawk helicopters toward Gales Ferry. Cade watched the sun setting with detached contentment; he’d come to prefer the darkness the last few years.
The helicopters landed near a bend in the river at a public park. Their pilots deftly maneuvered the enormous vehicles, kicking up a fine spray of water, foam, and dirt. Cade led the disembarkation, and his command squad followed close behind, setting up an immediate scanning perimeter. The rest of the team were out of the helicopters within seconds, and the pilots took off, headed for a friendly airfield three miles east which had been called into use for the occasion by the Order. Unlike the Lord’s loaves and fishes, Templar resources were finite . . . but also vast.
Each man flipped on his night vision monocular and peered through it, searching for any signs of life. Upon first inspection, the area was vacant.
Cade whirled two fingers in the air. The men gathered and each took a knee on his own protective pads. Cade paused until the Black Hawks were far enough away to make a quiet voice heard.
“Two squads,” the commander said, his whisper cutting through the still air like a razor. His exhalations proffered no vapor yet, but might by the time the sun had fully set. “Moro, you take five, head to the high school, then the churches. Maybe everyone’s in one place, those’ll be the biggest buildings.”
Moro, six-foot-two with skin as black as wet coal, smiled broadly at the leadership opportunity. A Yoruba Nigerian, Morohunmubo recently transferred to Echo after clashes with Vatican officers who didn’t care for this soldier’s adherence to his cultural religious traditions. Always happy to take on seasoned vets with a streak of insubordination, Cade and Riley put Moro through his paces a month prior, making him run the selection process all over again with their own added Echo Team surprises, and Moro passed with flying colors. He’d proven himself in combat with the supernatural since then, and his additional insight into things not necessarily Christian had already come in handy more than once.
Given the unknown nature of the threat on the ground, Cade thought those insights might be useful tonight.
Moro named five men, each who nodded in turn, accepting their role in the section.
“Riley, you and I are marching up the main road,” Cade continued. “The rest of you, standard pattern on our sides. Anybody sees anything, and I mean anything, speak up. Got it?”
One of the men, Kirkland, raised a gloved hand. “Quick question,” he said, and asked - because there’s a joker on every team: “The street we’re patrolling, it’s really called ‘Hurlbutt,’ sir?”
Short laughs broke the tension just enough to calm everyone’s nerves. “That’s affirmative,” Cade said. “We’ll call it Main from now on so you won’t give away your position by giggling, Kirkland. Now let’s cut the smokin’ and jokin’ and do the job.”
The men muttered their "yessirs" and "Yes Commanders." Cade gave one quick gesture, and the squad broke up. Moro and his men virtually disappeared into the darkness less than thirty yards from the LZ, headed east. Two of Cade’s men—Kirkland, and a man named Gore—took point, scouting ahead at a distance of thirty meters from one another and from Cade. Duncan and Olsen silently dropped back another thirty, leaving Cade and Riley protected in the middle of a sixty-meter square.
Cade, for the third time in thirty minutes, checked his HK MP5 submachine gun, then tugged his sword into its most comfortable place on his back. In addition to their primary weapons, each Echo teammate carried a 9mm sidearm and a broadsword blessed by the Pope, designed to work on beings that could shake off the best that human technology had to fire at them. Any single Templar Knight would be perfectly comfortable facing a master kenjutsu practitioner. Echo Team, under Cade’s guidance, could face much, much worse with these elegant, blessed weapons.
“All right,” the Commander said. “Let’s see who comes out to say hi.”
“I do love being the bait,” Riley said.
“Join the Order, see the world,” Cade replied. They would have slapped hands had it been appropriate.
Once Gore and Kirkland attained proper distance, Cade and Riley began their trek through the park, headed north to pick up “Main Street.”
The pair of soldiers walked somewhat casually, soft-soled boots almost silent against the blacktop, MP5s tucked snug against their ballistic vests. Neither of them used their night vision scope, choosing instead to rely on the honed instincts of a Templar. For all their top-shelf gear, both men had learned through hard experience that reliance upon technology could be fatal when dealing with agents of the supernatural. Often, human instinct was not only preferable, but superior. Plus their four escorts, hidden in the shadows ahead and behind them, were definitely using their own scopes.
The sun had set and darkness ruled.
“No electricity on anywhere,” Riley said as they walked. “Not a good start.”
Cade nodded his agreement, saying nothing.
“You smell that, boss?” Riley asked a minute later as they swept past rows of dark houses. Their four teammates remined invisible ahead and behind them.
“Yes,” Cade said, though it wasn’t so much an odor as a taste, one that he was far too familiar with: the sickly sweet heaviness of decaying flesh. It wasn’t emanating from any one place that Cade could discern; rather, it had a battlefield quality to it, the kind of stench that’s everywhere and nowhere at once.
Riley worked his mouth and spit against the blacktop, trying to get the taste out of his mouth. “Bad news, man,” he said. “Whatever this is, it’s bad news.”
Cade didn’t bother agreeing. He didn’t need to.
They made short order of walking through the residential neighborhoods and onto what passed for one of the major arteries of Gales Ferry. With a population topping out at just over a thousand, Gales Ferry was small and quaint, mostly a retirement community and sometime-tourist trap. The wealthiest residents who were still working commuted to Manchester, or else worked from home in finance-related industries. The high school graduated no more than two hundred kids or so each year.
The business district was comprised of mostly one-story buildings housing hardware stores, small grocers, repair shops, and the like: Gales Ferry had either kept out the big box competitors by town fiat, or else there simply weren’t enough souls to warrant the expenditure by the likes of Walmart.
No lights were on in any of the buildings. Streetlights stood dead and dark like autumnal trees that had shed not only leaves, but branches.
Cade squinted into the darkness at a white globular sign hanging from a two-story brick building down the road. When he’d positively identified the sign, he touched his jaw mic to activate it.
“Alpha, let’s hit the police station,” he said softly, the mic picking up each subtle vibration and transmitting to the team’s earpieces. “A hundred meters on the right.”
Olsen, Duncan, Kirkland, and Gore each replied in the affirmative. Cade and Riley veered to the right, keeping a sharp eye out on their surroundings but still seeing nothing unusual—nothing, that is, other than the absolute nothing hanging over the town like a thick fog.
The police station sat stodgy and rectangular on its own lot, as old and quaint as the buildings surrounding it. Riley and Cade paused on the street to assess it while their escort men took up positions on the other four sides. Cade waited for them to check in, noting that there were no police cars parked in any of the spaces in front of the building.
“White, clear,” Gore reported over the radio from somewhere behind his commander. Cade and Riley could see that much for themselves since they were standing not twenty yards from the building’s entrance, but protocol was protocol; it kept men alive.
“Black, clear.” Kirkland. Nothing in back.
“Red, clear.” Olsen.
“Green, clear.” Duncan.
With all four sides of the police station secure, Cade and Riley made their approach, weapons raised, trigger fingers out of the trigger guard and pointed alongside their weapons. The other four men would remain in place unless and until something went down.
“Go to scope,” Cade whispered.
Riley flipped down his monocular and took a slight lead in front of his commander. Cade kept his scope in the upright position, wanting to continue using his natural senses until operationally unwise to do so. He tucked his MP5 close to his shoulder and put his gloved left hand on Riley’s right shoulder, following the bigger man into the building.
They only made it to the concrete steps leading up to the glass doors before stopping. Riley glanced pointedly down at his feet to draw his boss’s attention to the thick smears of blood that painted the steps a grisly black under the rising full moon. Riley paused and raised his head to give Cade time to assess what, if anything, the blood meant for their forward progress.
It didn’t mean much; clearly, someone had been brutally wounded and dragged down the steps. Tapping the toe of one boot into the fluid to test its tackiness, Cade gauged the blood to be perhaps twelve hours old.
He tapped Riley’s shoulder three times: Keep going. Riley continued up the steps, weapon trained and sweeping in wide arcs as Cade kept a lookout behind them.
The two men entered the Gales Ferry police station. Even without the benefit of his night vision scope, it was clear to Commander Williams that they’d entered the scene of a fight, and a big one at that. While the odor-taste of decay still clung to the air around them, he felt sure he could smell the residue of gunpowder as well.
The doorway opened into a waiting area and lobby, with the rest of the floor guarded by a desk-counter that ran the length of the room. But this wasn’t an urban center; no bullet-proof glass or other walls preventing them from being able to look across the length of the room, all the way to the rear wall. In the lobby, chairs were overturned and a potted plant lay on one side, bleeding soil. Past the counter, desks were upright but in disarray from what had surely been orderly rows.
Bullet holes riddled the walls and ceiling in every direction, blood lay in pools on the floor, and a streak of blood – most likely from a dragged body - went up and over the counter.
But there wasn’t a body to be found.
Riley pressed on, with Cade keeping step behind. Riley slipped through the swinging door, which gave readily; if it had a buzz-style locking mechanism, it was either disabled or broken. The gate made little sound as the two soldiers moved through it.
Now into the main working area of the station, the men saw a row of simple cells on their left, all empty. They reminded Cade of something out of a long-ago Andy Griffith episode, designed for the occasional drunk or a teenager in need of a scared-straight lesson. Gales Ferry was apparently not a hotbed of violent crime.
A staircase crept up the wall to their right. On the wall beyond where staircase began, a rifle cabinet hung with its glass doors ajar and the windows spiderwebbed with cracks. Upon closer inspection, Cade saw two rifles sprawled carelessly on top of a nearby desk. He paused long enough to check one of the rifles, and found it still had a number of unspent rounds in the mag.
And still no bodies. Blood and bullet holes, but not a casualty anywhere.
Then:
“Movement, white bravo two!”
Gore’s voice broke in on their earpieces, causing both Cade and Riley to instinctively point their weapons up—white bravo two was the second floor, facing the street, second window from the left.
Riley moved, and Cade followed behind. The two men took the stairs as silently as possible, barrels poised for contact with whatever enemy might be lurking in the dark waiting for them.
The second floor turned out to be storage, with dozens of crates, boxes, and filing cabinets stuffed into what was more of a landing than an actual room, with the floor covering only half the length of the building. Cade gave his XO two taps to the shoulder and Riley nodded once. They split up, Cade moving straight along the wall and Riley breaking right to take up a flanking position on the window where Gore had reported movement.
Cade slid forward carefully, his feet effortlessly finding places where the wooden floor wouldn’t creak. What would have been a two-second walk in any other circumstance became a full minute’s trek as Cade checked between each filing cabinet and around each cardboard box before advancing.
He came around a stack of cartons cautiously, edging his shoulder and MP5 around its corner an inch at a time. When he saw what had caused the movement Gore reported, Cade touched his mic again.
“Duncan, second floor, now.”
“Yessir,” Duncan radioed back immediately. The others would circle the building to be able to cover all four sides with only three pairs of eyes.
Cade cleared the breadth of the landing quickly, and met Riley at the second window, the XO having finished his sweep as well.
Riley said it so his boss wouldn’t have to: “Oh, my God.”
By that point, Cade had already knelt beside the poor man they’d come across. Even as Cade tried to take his vitals, the man’s arms spasmed upward, knocking into the drawstring that dangled off a window shade. His fingers grazed it once or twice, enough to cause the shade to flutter and for Gore to note the motion and report it.
The guy was a uniformed cop, presuming the damp, pulpy remnants of the uniform on the floor beside him were his. Riley crouched and slipped a pulse oximeter on the officer’s finger, which clicked off a slow, laborious pulse in red digital numbers.
Riley, who’d flipped up his scope, looked at Cade. “You think Duncan can . . .”
“No,” Cade admitted. “I doubt it. But he’s got to try.”
The cop’s upper body seemed frozen somehow, his arms and fingers moving relentlessly for the window shade only because that was as much range of motion as he could manage. The limbs moved jerkily, as if on marionette strings. His face was flat and expressionless, except for his eyes, which were bright and alive and aware. Cade got the distinct impression he was partially paralyzed and was doing his level best to get someone’s attention.
He certainly had Cade’s attention, because the old vet hadn’t seen anything quite like this before—that notorious phrase that very few Templars could say with honesty.
Only bone remained of both the cop’s legs. Except for the stray bits of meat still clinging to the femur and tibia. His legs—with intact feet still shod in short black boots—were as skeletal as a classroom model. The loss of flesh went halfway up the cop’s hips. There was no sign of the muscle and sinew. Combined with the enhanced sound they’d heard on the 911 call, Cade had a pretty good idea where all the flesh had gone.
Duncan’s footsteps sounded on the staircase. Cade called to him, guiding Duncan to their position.
Duncan came around the same corner that Cade had, but stopped cold as he took in what remained of the policeman. He uttered an uncharacteristic curse, then ran to his teammates.
“Found him like this,” Cade said. “Can you do anything for him?”
Duncan stared at the grisly aftermath of whatever had gotten to the cop, then shook his head. “No, no way. Sorry, sir. There’s just . . . no.”
Duncan’s position as team medic had not been a random choice on Cade’s part. Duncan possessed a divine ability to heal human flesh, though the miracle came with certain limitations. He was unable to heal Cade’s eye, for the wound was too old. In the case of this police officer, the damage was simply too extensive. A single gunshot or stab wound, perhaps even multiples of each, Duncan could likely handle.
This? This cannibalistic butchery? No.
Mercifully, the cop died a moment later with one long wheeze issuing from his throat. In the silence that followed, Cade allowed himself a moment to study the cop’s face in the relative darkness, and saw he was perhaps half Cade’s age. Practically a child.
“What does this to a man?” Duncan whispered. “Commander?”
Cade, distantly, was pleased to note that while Duncan had a pallor to his face, his voice was strong. He was getting used to the horrors of serving in the field, for better or worse.
As to Duncan’s question, Cade had no response. What, indeed? Certainly he had encountered a number of supernatural entities capable of stripping flesh from bone, but this seemed deliberate, not the wanton rending of human flesh that most demons favored.
There was one way to find out.
Cade pulled the glove off his right hand. “Let's find out.”
Duncan sighed audibly but said nothing.
Riley knelt beside Cade and set his weapon on the ground. “Ready when you are, boss.”
Cade laid the bare skin of his palm against the officer’s still-warm cheek, and activated his Gift.