Saturday, July 6th, 2012
Vernon Christopher leans against
an electric ATV past the Winslow city limits, gazing out into the desert for
any sign of activity. The dogs had just
run out a couple of minutes ago, as the Sun was setting; the Hunters had
learned that wherever this criminal force had struck, they were soon to
follow. So the Hunters had set up two
watch points just outside of town, on little hills where they could survey most
of the surroundings through binoculars.
Vernon would have liked a tighter perimeter, but Patricia only had the
two ATVs, and waiting for two others to catch up on foot from even a few short
miles away would force them to choose between letting the trail grow cold and
stringing themselves out.
Patricia opens up the
compartment beneath the vehicle’s seat to double-check their supplies: extra magazines, bottles of water, a first
aid kit, and a small bag of tools.
Vernon doesn’t turn around, but can hear her rummaging; he knows there’s
no point, the kits were checked and double-checked before they headed out, but
he understands that she’s restless and needs something to do. Fine.
It would be nice if her “something to do” involved keeping a lookout,
though. David and Michelle would only be
a few minutes, anyway. It wasn’t the end
of the world.
David and Michelle are in
earshot, now; Vernon can hear the thick treads of the tires churning the desert
dust, and the quiet droning hum of the electric motor beneath. He checks his knife in its sheathe (good) and
brushes his arm against his pistol in its shoulder holster as he unfolds his
arms (good). He tucks the binoculars on
their neck strap into his half-open windbreaker, and zips it up to just below
his collarbone. Patricia closes the
compartment and mounts the ATV; Vernon climbs on behind her.
“OK,” Jones says, rising to her
feet. “Let me stay a couple hundred
yards ahead of you guys. If anything
crazy happens, I want to run into it first.”
Patricia nods. “If anything comes
up behind me, I want you guys to radio ahead.
And whatever happens when we run into these guys, just follow my
lead.” Patricia nods again, and Vernon
has to stop himself from rolling his eyes.
Hunters weren’t cops, there wasn’t any chain of command besides what any
group established for itself; whatever covert organization Jones belonged to,
Vernon was damned sure that he didn’t
answer to it; he wasn’t even certain that Jones had the power to actually
arrest anyone. She had managed to pull
rank at a couple of the crime scenes with her forged DHS credentials, but
Vernon was able to get those all on his own.
When the FBI had shown up earlier in the week, though, she was able to make a call that wound up
with the lead agent getting a swift text message to let her have her way with
things. That had been genuinely impressive to Vernon, but fiascos like Abu
Ghraib tempered his growing respect for her:
too many cooks spoils the broth, and when too many spooks are able to
get by on three letters – OGA, “other governmental agency” – that usually signals
a coming clusterfuck.
“So you’re just gonna run the
whole way,” Vernon says more than asks.
“They could be over a mile away by now, those dogs are quick.”
“I’m pretty quick, myself,”
Jones replies, taking a swig from her water bottle and donning a baggy sweatshirt
to conceal her shoulder holster.
“Yeah, but we don’t know how far
we have to go,” Vernon says. “What if
they’re headed halfway to Barringer Crater?”
It was a realistic guess – the dogs had been running due West, and the
Crater had been the site of more than a couple showdowns in Vernon’s time. “You run fuckin’ marathons in your free time
or something?”
“Not marathons,” Jones says,
“But yeah. Cardio’s important. What are you gonna do if you’re being chased
down by a pack of werewolves?”
Vernon’s head tilts in
non-committal assent. “I figure if I’m
ever in that situation, that’s the day the good Lord calls me home to him.”
“Well, that’s the difference
between you and me,” Jones says flatly.
“I’ve got too much to do down here.”
Before Vernon can reply, she points over his shoulder at David and
Michelle approaching. “Wait for them to
catch up to you, then follow me.” She
takes off at a dead sprint.
Vernon looks back to see the
other quad at about a hundred yards or so, and gunning it. So much
for staying a couple hundred yards back, he thinks. As the other pair of Hunters draw within
spitting distance, Patricia starts the ATV.
Vernon wraps his arms around her waist, and they’re off.
He looks ahead to see Jones
running in the distance. Huh.
She’s actually off to a good start.
He glances over Patricia’s shoulder to look at the speedometer: 15mph.
After several seconds at that pace, Vernon sees that the spook’s figure
is beginning to shrink.
“Pick it up a bit,” he says to
Patricia. She nods and smoothly rotates
the throttle. At 20mph, Jones is still
losing them. They gun it up to 35,
careful to leave her at least her requested football field, then seem to find
her speed somewhere between 25 and 30mph.
Vernon frowns. Another
one of those damned augmentations, I bet.
This was Olympic sprinter speed, not marathon speed, and Vernon
estimates that she’s kept it up for somewhere between a mile and two. After noticing her hand, he started keeping
an eye out, and sure enough, the wretch had more than a few other parts wired
into her: she kept looking at things
that Vernon couldn’t see, which would lead her to details at crime scenes that
the others chalked up to a keen detective’s instinct. But Vernon knew better. She also seemed to have a knack for spotting
the supernatural at work – one particularly bad night, there had been murders
at four separate households in as many hours.
They stopped as quickly as they started, all between six and ten; at
midnight, Jones said she needed a drink, so the party had obliged. But she seemed to spot a demon riding a guy
like he was carrying a banner around. A
“troll,” she’d called him – Vernon would have called him “Goliath” – “That guy,
holy shit, troll for sure,” were her exact words (she’d had a few). Vernon was happy to chalk it up to drunken
ramblings, but when she started tailing him, things went to Hell in fairly
short order: he wound up cornering them
(one guy, cornering the five of them, which was a first for Vernon) in an
alley, and they had a fight on their hands.
Then there was the other thing:
not only did the guy slam Jones into a wall, only for her to shrug it
off; he tore apart a discarded pallet and caught her in the shoulder with a
couple of nails in it, and the wounds were completely closed up the next day.
Vernon was starting to seriously
consider the possibility that this was beyond “augmented human,” and into the
territory of “demon conscripted into human service.” He was getting sick of this woman and her
tricks – no matter how useful she was to this particular investigation, she was
too corrupted by far to be any kind of trustworthy. How long would it be before she stabbed them
in the back? He wouldn’t put it past her
to ditch them just to save her own skin; Hell, what if her superiors decided
that Vernon and his crew knew too much?
That, at least, wasn’t a great
concern to Vernon. Supernatural
goings-on were the stuff of tabloids, and likely to be the only sympathetic ear
a Hunter could find if he ever tried to go to the press. Even if he managed to find some kind of
convincing proof (which would be damned hard to come by, given the nature of
the forces he was up against), an after-the-fact cover-up would probably be
easier to manage than comprehensive prevention.
It was a simple matter of resource allocation: if an organization like Kelly’s was able to
keep tabs on every Tom, Dick, and Harry who’d had a brush with demons, or even
a quarter of them, they’d most likely be better off ingratiating the local
Hunters rather than intimidating them into silence or eliminating them.
That was the answer, Vernon
supposed. In the final analysis, corrupt
organizations would be best served to take a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch
yours” approach. This made it all the
more important for Vernon to keep an eye on his own behavior, and make sure
that he didn’t sink to Jones’ level, no matter how helpful or convincing she
seemed.
Vernon’s train of thought was
derailed more than once by the terrain.
The ATVs, to their credit, had marvelous suspension. Still, they’d had to lean back to avoid
rolling forward any time they entered a little gulch, then lean forward to
avoid falling ass-over-teakettle coming up the other side. The spook was still outpacing them, but
they’d managed to keep her in sight under the bright stars as darkness settled
in. Near a wide dry wash, Jones had
stopped and removed her sweatshirt. Her
pistol was drawn by the time the others had caught up to her.
“They haven’t come up the other
side,” she says as they shut off the ATVs and ready their own weapons. “Things have just settled down, but I don’t
know what we’re going to see down there.
Just don’t make any sudden moves.”
The Hunters nod, almost in unison, then Jones turns and approaches the
edge of the erstwhile riverbank. She
takes aim and shouts, “Freeze!”
Vernon steps up beside her to
take in the scene: almost a dozen men
are laid out in a mess stretching off to the right, the remains of a
half-devoured corpse beyond them. The
broken bodies aside, it’s a scene he’s become all-too-familiar with while
chasing the dogs over the past week. He
has no idea who she’s shouting at, though; he can see no signs of life.
Jones Kelly feels the tension
course up her spine as she nears a wide dry wash. Good, that means she’s getting close. She slows her pace, doffs the sweatshirt, and
draws her pistol. Coming up to the edge
at an easy trot, she hears the pair of ATVs rolling up behind her, and looks
beyond the veil to see a full pack of moonkin savaging a monstrous spectral
scorpion.
Well, she thinks, That’s
unexpected. She backs off a couple
paces, until she can no longer see any sign of the ensuing feast. The vehicles slow to an easy stop within arm’s
reach of her.
“They haven’t come up the other
side,” she says as vehicles are turned off.
“Things have just settled down, but I don’t know what we’re going to see
down there. Just don’t make any sudden
moves.” The four Hunters, pistols drawn
and cocked, nod their assent.
Jones steps back toward the dry
wash, and sees something new as she approaches the edge: at the bottom of the embankment, a dozen
emaciated corpses lay broken and bloody, pocked with what appear to be numerous
erupted boils as well as some clearly more fatal wounds. The veil hides the strangest part from all
eyes but her own – hundreds of regular-sized spectral scorpions are skittering
to and fro, emerging from the dead men’s ragged wounds, fleeing their predatory
superiors.
Jones raises her pistol and
thumbs off the safety as the ghostly beasts howl silently (to her ears) at the
Moon. “Freeze,” she shouts, taking aim
at the biggest one, glowing a fierce white in his grotesque
transformation. The five of them snap
out of their primal revelry to look at her.
“All right, you five know I can see you – and I assure you, I can shoot you.” The beasts snarl in silence, baring their fangs
and flexing their massive claws. Jones
hastens to add, “But it doesn’t need to come to that. You’ve got some explaining to do,
though. So let’s all just simmer down a
bit, and have ourselves a chat.”
Four of them tilt their heads
slightly to the big one, doubtless the alpha, without taking their eyes off of
Jones. He relaxes his posture with a restrained
snorting motion, and his shape slowly shrinks to man-sized proportions as he
loses his glow. Jones sees what looks
like a misty, holographic projection of Samuel Carter.
“Hunt’s over,” Carter says to
his pack. “And it went damn well, if you
ask me. Let’s not push our luck. Lady wants to talk? We’ll talk.
I bet she could tell us a thing or two, as well.” The others shift back to their human forms, then
follow Carter to the Outside.
Vernon stares, wide-eyed but
unflinching, as four men and a woman materialize before his very eyes. Standing beyond the carnage, they look like
they’ve spent a few hours at the gym, but otherwise no worse for wear. He recognizes Samuel Carter, William
Williamson, and Uma Stoneburner – the very old Indian-looking guy and the young
dude with the new beard are strangers to him.
His suspicions about Jones are
all but confirmed, as well: she’s not in
this to vanquish evil, she just wants to collar the ones who make a big scene. It’s not about cleansing society, for her
type; it’s about keeping up the mere appearance of the status quo for the
masses who don’t know that a war’s on.
He weighs his options very carefully. Patricia is one of the faithful, but the
other two almost certainly buy into the spook’s jurisdictional clap-trap. If it came down to it, Vernon would be seen as disobeying a direct order from a
superior if he were to draw first blood, regardless of the reality that this
traitor’s unconvicted pragmatism robbed her of any legitimate authority. Best case scenario: Vernon and Patricia against two of their
former compatriots and the freak – then the dogs mop up and call it a
night. Worst case scenario: the eight of them overwhelm Vernon and
Patricia, and form some pact to keep the city running smoothly by day even as
it rots at night.
Discretion is the better part of
valor, here. Vernon must endure this
indignity for the present, then take stock after the spook skips town to see if
he can undo the damage and maybe find a way forward through this mess. That’s his most productive course of action.
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