Chapter 6
The G-Ride speedometer pegged at a hundred and forty miles an hour but we were going much faster as we entered Montgomery and headed west on the 85. The black-armored Suburban had been delivered to Franks sometime in the last few days by some of his minions and I was glad we had it. Although MHI had a lot of vehicles, none of them apparently had a friggin' quarter-million-horsepower engine forged in the fires of Mordor like this thing apparently did. It normally took me forty-five minutes to hit the outskirts of town from Cazador, but Franks had done it in less than twenty, and I wasn't exactly averse to speeding. The demonic roar of the engine was almost as loud as the banshee siren that warned everyone else to get out of the way or be flattened beneath our armored steel bumpers. Our tax dollars had equipped Agent Franks with the SUV from Hell.
Franks was emotionless in the reflected flashes of blue and red, still wearing his cheap suit. A pine-tree-shaped air freshener bounced around under the rearview mirror. I was in the passenger seat, hunched forward by the armor and pouches on my back. Abomination was muzzle down, balanced between my knees. It had been almost impossible to get dressed while we had slalomed around the corners of rural Keene County, but I had managed. The Goon Squad was in the next row of seats, also armed to the teeth, each one intense and ready to fight.
I had run into MHI headquarters long enough to grab my go-bag and give Dorcas a brief rundown. She had been trying to raise the others as we had left. I shoved my MHI-issued earpieces in, partially to protect my hearing from the siren, but also to check to see if any of my people were in range. I was alone. The radio mounted on the SUV's dash was tuned to the Monster Control Bureau's encrypted channel, so I knew that their strike force had mobilized and moved to the Buzzard Island Amphitheater, now only a few miles ahead of us.
"Alpha Team is in position outside the concert and holding," said someone over the radio.
"Any suspicious activity?" Agent Myers asked over the airwaves.
There was a long pause of open air. "Uh, sir, most of the people here are suspicious looking." Apparently they had never been to a Cabbage Point Killing Machine show before. Their tours were legendary. You could drop all sorts of weird supernatural creatures into one of their average gigs and nobody would notice.
My phone rang and I hurriedly pulled it from the small pouch on the front of my armor. "Yeah?"
"Z?" It was Albert Lee. "Dorcas just got ahold of me."
"Where are you?"
"We're a couple miles north of Cazador."
"Who you got?"
"Me and Grant. Dorcas raised Harbinger. They turned back too." Excellent. Lee was a good man, and Grant, say what you would about him, was a known quantity, more than I could say about my current carpool. "Listen, I've got to tell you something. Dorcas said it was Force and Violence. I've been reading up on them. Be really careful."
Franks must have somehow, impossibly, heard that. "Put him on speaker."
I complied so the Feds could hear. "First, what can they do? Second, how do we waste them?"
"Nobody really knows what they are. The descriptions sound kind of like an ogre and an ogress, but they're too fast, too smart, and apparently indestructible. Esmeralda thought they were Greek, and they've been seen in that part of the world a lot, for at least three thousand years, but from the descriptions, I think they're oni."
"Three thousand years?" Herzog said incredulously. "Bull."
Franks held up one hand to silence her.
"What's an oni?" I asked.
"Far Eastern legends talk about them a lot. They're evil spirits that have gained a physical body, usually really big and strong. They suck the life out of other things in order to power their own bodies indefinitely. That's probably what Skippy meant by getting paid in souls. I don't see why some of them couldn't wander over to Europe and end up in that area's folklore."
Some Hunters just seemed to geek out at monster factoids. "That's great. Now how do we kill them?"
"Beats me," he answered. "MHI has never killed an oni that I can find record of. Esmeralda said that bullets bounced off of them."
"Great . . ." I muttered. "We'll improvise."
"Electricity," Archer chimed in. "Enough current will stun an oni. That's what the field manual says."
"There's more. When MHI went up against them last time, they had a hard time tracking them, which is weird since witnesses say they're huge. But they would suddenly appear, kill something, then poof, they were just gone. So I'm guessing they're either able to fly or teleport. The Fed file said the necromancer can create shadow portals, so maybe they can too. They might even shape-shift, so who knows . . ."
"Well, that narrows it down. Thanks, Al. See you there. Go to the radio band when you reach Motown." I dropped the phone back in its pouch. This wasn't shaping up to be a fun night.
Updates continued to come in from the strike force as they surrounded the concert. They were all in position. "Stay low profile and hold your position for now," Myers ordered his teams. "Wait for the Condition to make their move first. Our primary concern is capturing a Condition operative. Civilian casualties are secondary. Myers out."
"What?" I shouted and slammed my fist into the glove box. Mosh was a sitting duck up there on stage. "Tell them to go in there and grab my brother now!"
Franks shook his head. "That's not the mission."
"Bullshit it's not. You're using him as bait, like you used me. He's not part of this." I reached over for the radio, but suddenly Franks' ham fist clamped around my left hand, immobilizing it as easily as if I were a child.
"He is now," Franks said, blank eyes never leaving the road as he steered with one hand between freeway traffic at absurd speeds.
"That's my brother out there. Don't you have any family, Franks?"
He scowled. "Yeah. Big family."
"Would you just leave them to die?"
"Not my problem . . ."
Something broke. I'd had enough. Mosh wasn't going to die if I could help it. Fury bubbled up from the pit of my stomach, as my STI .45 cleared its Kydex drop leg holster with a snap. I screwed the fat muzzle into Frank's ear, hard, and snapped, "Order them to get Mosh, right now."
It only took the Goon Squad a second to react. There was a click of a manual safety as Herzog put her HK .45 against the base of my skull. "Drop the gun, Pitt! Drop it!" she screamed. Archer was a split second slower but he slammed his Sig 229 into my head as well.
"Shut up!" I shouted. I wasn't going to let my brother get killed for their stupid mission. My finger was on the trigger and blasting Franks at this speed would surely end us all. "Call Myers!" Spit flew from my lips. "Now!"
Franks didn't take his eyes off the road, but he did unconsciously squeeze my left hand harder. Bones creaked and I grimaced. "Negative," he said.
"Owen, put the gun down," Torres urged softly. "Use your brain, man. We warned you about the Condition. They'll just keep on attacking everyone you've ever loved until they get you. We have to capture some of them or this will go on forever. Please, put the gun down."
Franks was utterly calm, even with a silver .45 slug aimed down his ear canal. "Do it."
My brother was going to be killed and there wasn't a thing I could do about it from here . . . Damn it. I couldn't threaten Franks. Shooting him wouldn't accomplish a thing. Deflated, I thumbed the safety back on and slowly lowered my gun. Franks let go of my aching hand and went back to 10 and 2 on the wheel. Archer and Herzog kept their guns trained on me.
"Hand your piece back, slowly!" she shouted, voice shrill in my ear. "Do it or I'll blow your brains out! You're under arrest."
"Screw you," I said. She pushed even harder with the muzzle. I knew that I'd gone way too far this time. "All right." Slowly, I passed the custom long-slide, double-stack pistol, turning it back butt first. She thumped me again, and I handed Abomination over my head, the stubby and bulky shotgun and grenade launcher combo difficult to pass between the seats. Another thump and I sent back my secondary STI off my left hip, this one a compact, bobbed and chopped .45.
"Everything." She whacked me again for good measure.
I slowly passed back the two Spyderco knives I kept on each hip pocket, then dragged out the 21" Chitilangi heavy kukri that replaced my lost Ganga Ram. MHI was one of Himalayan Imports' best customers. "Careful, that one's sharp," I said as I passed it back. Hopefully one of them would cut their fingers off by accident. Another thump. I was going to be covered in lumps from that hag. "Damn it," I muttered as I reached down to my ankle and pulled out the snub-nosed .357 Airweight Smith & Wesson that I kept stashed for worst-case scenarios. Now the three of them had a pile of weapons to contend with.
"How many guns do you have?" Torres asked in exasperation.
"It's a Second Amendment thing. You wouldn't understand."
"You're under arrest for threatening a federal agent, Pitt. Put your hands on your head," Herzog snarled.
"Uh . . . he's still got hand grenades," Archer pointed out.
"Stand down," Franks ordered his men, sounding exasperated. It took them a moment to respond. "I said STAND DOWN." That time both metallic weights left my head. Franks turned and looked at me, not paying any attention to the freeway that was flying past. For once he actually showed some emotion, and unfortunately for me, it was anger. His black eyes burned a hole through my soul as he sedately said the most words I had ever heard from him at one time. "Primary mission. Keep Pitt alive. We need live bait, so I can't twist your head off. But if you ever point a gun at me again, you'll pray for the Old Ones to take you away, because compared to what I'll do, the Elder Things will be a fucking picnic." He veered us past a semitrailer without looking, and it zipped by so quickly that it was just a silver blur. Franks just kept staring, his black eyes containing nothing but barely controlled rage. The three agents tried to shrink back through the seats. "Got it?"
"Yes."
"Good." Then he slugged me.
It was so unbelievably fast, so staggeringly hard, that I didn't even see it coming. A big fist crashed into my cranium like a lightning bolt from a clear blue sky. A bomb went off inside my gray matter. My head rebounded against the bulletproof glass of the passenger side door hard enough to crack it. He didn't just hit me in one place, but it was like he had somehow punched my entire face at once. My eyes automatically filled with tears and blood billowed out my nose in a froth of bubbles.
I was stunned, reeling, my brain trying to process what the hell had just happened as I came back to full consciousness either a minute or maybe a day later. "Ouch," I croaked, with the ultimate of understatements.
Franks was back to driving insanely through the evening traffic. The bright lights of the state capitol and downtown Montgomery were off to our right. He took one hand off the wheel long enough to crack his knuckles. "Now we're even."