Dave was about to abandon his search when he heard a squeak, an almost familiar squeak, coming from the far corner where a heavy stainless steel door stood slightly ajar. The meat locker?
‘Who’s there? It’s me, Dave Hooper,’ he called out, reasoning that a survivor would answer and a daemon would not, unless answering meant exploding out of the freezer in a storm of talons and teeth. He was getting ready to speed up when a voice answered him.
‘Dave? Oh my God, is that you, Dave?’
Boylan.
‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ the lawyer kept repeating from inside the darkness and comparative safety of the Cracker Barrel’s freezer. ‘I did not sign on for this. I did not sign on for this. Oh my God, I did not
. . .’
Dave heaved open the heavy door and Boylan squeaked again in fearful surprise. Dave’s eyes were fully adapted now and he had no trouble making out the hunched and terrified figure of the attorney bundled up in a camouflaged parka and shivering as he cowered behind a tall box of the same potato wedges Dave had seen just a moment ago. His temper flared, but he suppressed it. Or maybe it was Lucille’s temper? The anger seemed to come from outside him. But that was a thought too bizarre to deal with, so he put it aside along with the strange feeling of being annoyed with Boylan for
. . .
What? Not being Emmeline?
‘You all right, X?’ he said. ‘Come on, it’s over now, they’ve gone.’
Boylan slowly pushed himself up off the floor and crept out from behind the big box of potato wedges, moving on painfully stiffened joints.
‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘They killed everyone, Dave, everyone, well everyone except the professors and a couple of waitresses from the Cracker Barrel, and a soldier, there was a soldier in here too.’
‘Come on,’ said Dave, using a tone of voice he might have employed once upon a time with his boys if they had got themselves into some sort of trouble that might not have been entirely their fault. Dave Hooper had a deep wellspring of sympathy for people who got in trouble for reasons that were not entirely their fault; it was the recurring theme of his adult life, his childhood too, when he thought about it. ‘So they took them? They didn’t kill them? They took Emmeline?’
‘And Professor Compton and the others. I only got away because I was in the kitchen when they came. I’ve been working, Dave, working on your family law matter. Working so hard in fact that the time had slipped away from me and I had completely forgotten to eat because that’s how hard I was working, Dave, and I was hungry and I don’t know about you, Dave, but I am not entirely familiar with the offerings of the Cracker Barrel chain of restaurants but I thought perhaps if I spent just a few minutes in the kitchen I might whip myself up something that was not without nutritional merit.’ He was babbling, talking about twice as fast as he normally did, which was about twice as fast as anyone but a horse race caller, leaving Dave to wonder whether he might need to step on the accelerator to keep up with what Boylan was saying.
‘Okay, okay, just calm down,’ he said in a low, soothing voice. ‘So you’re in the kitchen, and the shooting starts or whatever, and you do the smart thing which is to take cover, and that’s how you end up in the meat locker and alive. Let’s concentrate on that, X. You’re alive, and that’s a good thing. Now I need you to help me find Emmeline and the others.’
Boylan was shuddering. Deep-body tremors that looked powerful enough to eventually shake him apart. Dave heard the SEALs enter the building, shouting ‘clear left’ and ‘clear right’.
‘I’m in the kitchen with Boylan,’ he called out, not wanting to get shot in the back of the head. ‘Whole place is clear, no critters.’
He heard them dialling it down as he returned his attention to Boylan, who was slumping toward the floor in a dead faint. Dave threw him over one shoulder like a bag of frozen wedges and carried him out into the dining room. Heath was limping in through the gaping hole where the front door used to be, leaning on one of his men. Zach and Igor jogged over as smartly as they could, taking care not to trip over all the debris on the floor. They took Boylan and sat him down at the one table and chair which remained undisturbed. Still set with napkins, cutlery and a kerosene lantern.
‘Just give me a second,’ said Dave, before leaving them all in suspended animation as he searched for and found a bottle of bourbon from the deserted gas station a block away.
‘Not a problem,’ Zach Allen started to say, but Dave was already back and pouring the lawyer a solid shot before the chief got the third word out.
‘Here you go, X, get this into you. It’s just Jim Beam, I’m afraid, none of that top-shelf stuff we had on the plane, but it’s good for what ails you.’
Boylan took the triple shot in one long gulp, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he drained the glass. He paled, turned his head to the side, and vomited it all back up.
‘Hit me again, just as hard,’ he gurgled, tapping three fingers on the tabletop.
Zach Allen made a face at Dave as if to warn him off, but Dave shrugged and poured again. He’d seen some interesting drinking styles in his long and illustrious career at the bar. Boylan took this one a little slower, but only a little. His hands shook violently as they raised the glass but had steadied some when he put it down.
Captain Heath’s human walking frame deposited him gently in the chair across from Boylan.
‘Professor,’ he said, his voice a little strained, probably with pain. ‘This is very important. We need you to focus, to tell us anything you can that might help us find the others.’
Boylan nodded, partly in answer to Heath but also to encourage Dave to pour him another bourbon.
‘I know they went in different directions,’ he said unsteadily, raising the second drink, but only sipping at it this time. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know who went which way. I couldn’t see much from where I was hiding. I hope you don’t think the less of me for hiding, Dave. It’s pretty much all I had to offer in the circumstances, hiding and spying on them. Spying is good, though, isn’t it?’
‘Spying is excellent,’ said Heath, cutting across Dave, forcing Boylan’s attention back onto him. ‘It means you can tell us something. So what did you see, Professor, when you were spying on the monsters?’
Boylan raised a hand, the one holding the whiskey glass and a few drops splashed out over the side as he pointed through the destruction at the front of the restaurant.
‘Some of them went that way and the others took off in the opposite direction,’ he said. ‘I
. . .
I don’t know why they did that, or who they took with them. I heard your lady friend screaming.’
At this, they all stiffened.
‘I think
. . .
I think she might have been with the group that was heading back toward wherever you came from, back up I-80, or in that direction anyway. But I don’t know, I’m sorry I just don’t
. . .’
Heath laid one dark hand on the top of Boylan’s arm. ‘It’s enough. Or I hope it’s enough. Thank you, Professor Boylan.’
He turned to Zach Allen and said, ‘Chief, I need an air controller five minutes ago, or at least a working link to one.’
‘I’m on it, sir,’ said Zach, hurrying outside.
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Dave. ‘And what can I do?’
He didn’t like the panicky edge to his voice. His job was to deal with the shit when it blew up in everyone’s faces. He wasn’t supposed to panic. Never had before. But he knew every second that Emmeline was with the Sliveen or the Grymm or whatever had grabbed her up, she was a whole hell of a lot closer to dying horribly.
‘You can help, Dave,’ said Heath. ‘We’re going to need your help. But first I need a couple of aircraft with some sort of night-vision system. Anything that could help to pick the orcs out of the dark. You have any sense of where they might go?’
‘Back where they came from,’ said Dave. ‘The UnderRealms. And I guess the holdings of the Grymm if it was Guyuk who put this together. If they didn’t kill them on the spot, they got a reason for wanting them alive, for taking them. We really need to get her before that happens.’
Zach Allen ran back in, dragging another soldier, or maybe an airman, behind him. The new guy was wearing tan
military coveralls that looked like a flight suit. Heath levered himself up from the table and put one arm around the shoulders of the SEAL who stepped forward and bent low to offer himself as a walking aid.
‘Son, I’m going to need a couple of eyes in the sky,’ he said to the airman in the coveralls.
‘Won’t be a problem, Captain,’ the pilot shot back. ‘There’s an E-8 Joint STARS providing recon cover over the area of operations. We’ve also got an AC-130 plus other army assets en route from the river.’
Dave wondered how all those bright and shiny assets would do down in the UnderRealms.
19
They fitted Dave up with new clothes, which he was relieved to discover hadn’t come off a dead man. Boots and thick socks better suited to stomping through the countryside, a pair of navy-grey camouflage pants which seemed to be mostly pockets, a black T-shirt and a dark hoodie. Dave transferred a couple of gel packs and protein bars from his vest into the voluminous pockets of his new pants, but then thought what-the-hell and ate them anyway. He could tell he’d burned up a lot of his fuel reserves warping over to the Cracker Barrel from the Platte River Bridge.
He stood slightly apart from a larger group of SEALs gathered in the parking lot of the Countryside Suites, which had the misfortune to be situated next door to the Cracker Barrel. The other SEALs had circled around Lucille, trying to lift her from the ground. Heath said the motel had been evacuated when the army set up its command post, but there were still a few civilian vehicles parked out front and the lights were on in a few of the rooms.
‘Put this on,’ said Zach Allen, helping him fit a headset just like the one he had seen Heath wearing on the way out to the bridge. ‘It will help the spotters feed you targeting data.’
‘It’ll what?’
‘There’s a bunch of helicopters and airplanes in the sky right now,’ said Igor in a manner that gave Dave to understand his question had been exceptionally stupid. ‘They’re fitted with all sorts of sensors, infrared, FLIR, ground-target tracking radar and a lot of other shit
.
Don’t know whether they’ll spot a demon in the dark, but anybody travelling with them will stand out like bright, cherry red action figures.’
Zach finished fitting the headset.
‘It’s a push-to-talk system,’ he said. ‘Choppers are going to sweep along the axes that your lawyer said he saw the Djinn heading out on.’
‘It was the Grymm,’ Dave corrected him, ‘with some seer-scout Sliveen. UnderRealms special forces, if you like. But not the Djinn.’
‘Whatevs, dude,’ said Zach. ‘You’re going on a bug hunt. Let’s give your rig a test.’ The Chief showed Dave where to press a rubber button to activate his communications link.
‘Any station this net, radio check, Trident Two-One,’ Zach said.
‘Trident Two-One,’ a voice said. ‘This is Ghostrider One-Eight. Solid copy. Out.’
Dave stood there, confused, lost, feeling a bit stupid. Just a few days ago he’d been miffed that he didn’t have a headset. Now he was confused by it.
‘So, you good to go?’
‘Guess so,’ he said. ‘What are we waiting for now? Ah, what is my callsign?’
‘Persuader.’ Zach grinned.
‘And what are we waiting for now?’
‘Warm bodies,’ said Igor.
Dave tore open another Snickers bar, his fifth, and chewed it up, swallowing it as quickly as he could without doing any magic tricks.
‘Dude, really,’ said Zach, ‘you should be eating clean proteins and good fats, avocado and egg, instead of that garbage.’
‘It’s all I got,’ said Dave, trying not to sound peevish. ‘Unless you want to head back to the Cracker Barrel and grill me up a couple of T-bones with a blue cheese sauce,
chef
.’
Igor patted down the pockets on the front of his camouflage jacket and came up with a protein bar.
‘Here, it’s a little squashed. And warm. I might have sucked it, too.’
‘It’ll do.’
Dave took in all the food he could, trying to replace the energy reserves he’d burned off during the run up from the river. Zach was probably right. He’d have been fitter if he ate better – how many times had Annie nagged him about that? – but where the hell was he gonna get organic venison and quinoa salad on the edge of Omaha at this time of night? With daemonum on the loose as well. The front half of the Cracker Barrel was trashed but there were shelves full of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Tootsie Roll logs, bags of chocolate-covered cherries and an old-time ice cooler full of Sprite. He’d eaten four jars of fried apples and considered the salted ham still in the bag before deciding against it.
‘Where’s Boylan?’ he asked around a mouthful of Pringles he’d also lifted when he got the Jim Beam earlier.
‘Having a restorative nap,’ Igor replied.
‘And Heath?’
‘On the net to National Command Authority,’ Zach told him.
‘When the fuck are we –’
‘Got ’em!’ It was Zach. ‘Choppers picked up two groups. One heading due south across the fields and one running due west on the northern side of the freeway. They’re about three miles apart, and getting further apart all the time.’
Dave’s mouth felt dry, and not from all the cheap chocolate. He fumbled a water canteen from his hip and took a swig. It reminded him of the metal boy scout canteen his brother had when they were kids.
‘Any idea which group is which?’ he asked over his shoulder as he jogged the few yards over to the SEALs to retrieve Lucille. ‘Sorry fellas. Got a date with my lady here.’
‘Shoulda called her Excalibur, man,’ said a wiry operator with a drooping moustache. ‘She’s not giving it up for anyone but the king.’
‘That’s right, she’s not.’ Dave said, before returning to Zach who was holding his hand up like a traffic cop. He had the appearance of someone who was listening, or trying to listen, to a conversation just out of earshot. Then Dave’s own headset crackled into life and he didn’t have to wait for the information to be relayed to him as he dropped into the same communications channel.
‘This is Ghostrider One-Eight, I have eyes on dismounts,’ the radio squawked in Dave’s ear. In the background he could hear helicopter blades. ‘Fourteen large dismounts plus three smaller dismounts, bearing southwest on the south of the interstate. One of the smaller dismounts is struggling.’
‘What are dismounts?’ Dave asked the radio net.
‘Clear the net,’ someone said, calm but firm.
‘This is Ghostrider Two-One, I also have eyes on dismounts. Twenty in number, that is two zero confirmed, sixteen large, three small plus one who is very small. Bearing due west of your position.’
Someone struggling, he thought. He wondered if it was Emmeline. Compton was probably passed out with terror.
So. Fourteen orcs and three captives for one SEAL team to rescue, and sixteen orcs with four captives for the other team. But which group had Emmeline?
He heard Heath’s voice calling his name and saw the dark, injured figure emerging from a tent pitched on the grass verge between the motel and the interstate. The SEALs, except for Igor and Zach who stayed with him, had broken up and headed at a fast trot down the road to a couple of helicopters which were using the I-80 as a makeshift landing pad. The rotors were already turning and the men embarked quickly and in good order, reminding Dave for a moment of the utterly different scenes on the Longreach when his terrified rig monkeys were scrambling to get away from the Hunn. These guys were heading toward them, and eager to get there.
‘Dave,’ Heath called out again, hobbling quickly toward him on a crutch he’d scrounged from somewhere. ‘You’re on the northern group. Go now.’
‘That’s Emmeline?’
‘Just go,’ Heath insisted.
But Dave stood his ground.
‘Which one is Emmeline’s group, can you tell?’
Heath gave him a cold and level stare. He was locked into that military frame of mind Dave was beginning to think of as their ‘machine mode’.
‘You know how triage works, Dave?’
Again, a flare of anger, almost ungovernable.
‘Of course I fucking know how triage works. Highest priority first. I’m the safety boss of an exploration rig where
. . .’
He stopped. Heath was still staring at him.
‘You’re on Compton. You go north of the highway. We don’t have time for debate.’
Dave had Lucille in one hand, gripping her just under the solid steel head, as he took another long drink of cool water from his canteen. The helicopters, a couple of Blackhawks and two Apache gunships, had spooled up their engines to the point of takeoff.
‘That’s right,’ said Dave. ‘We don’t.’
The half-empty canteen hit the tarmac with a muffled thud, spilling its contents over the asphalt with a glugging noise. Dave Hooper was gone. Headed southwest after Emmeline.
*
He covered at least five miles in the first burst of speed, by his reckoning, most of the distance to a small town south of the city which lit up in his night vision like a county fair. In his travels he tipped a cow, leaped an electric fence and blasted through a chicken coop before vaulting a windbreak nearly twenty feet high. He dropped out of warp, landing on both feet with no more difficulty than one might exert while playing hopscotch. He keyed his mike.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘This is Dave Hooper. I’m chasing the critters that took the professor and a couple of other hostages south of the I-80, heading for the Platte River. I’ve gained about five miles on them, but I need you to lead me in now.’
‘Persuader, this is Ghostrider One-Eight,’ a voice came back to him through the headset. ‘Retask your effort to the northern objective, over.’
‘No, sorry, change of plan. You get your commandos to go after the group north of the I-80. I’m almost on top of these other assholes, so I’m going to deal with them and then go help the others.’
‘Negative, Persuader. You are ordered to one-eighty to the exfiltrating dismounts to the north
. . .’
‘Yeah, your boss don’t sign my pay cheque, so you can fuck off. I’m here now, I’m ready to kick ass, and every fucking second you delay that happy moment you put Professor Ashbury and the other hostages that much closer to the cauldron. An actual fucking cauldron. Did you know that? They chop people up and they put them into big fucking cauldrons that they call blood pots. That’s what’s going to happen to nice Professor Ashbury and the waitresses from the Cracker Barrel. They’re going into the blood pot and it will be your fault. Not mine. Because I’m here to rescue them. Now tell me where the fuck they are.’
‘Hooper!’
It was Heath.
‘Sorry, Cap, but you got more than enough badass Navy SEALs with big fucking guns to go get that asshole Compton. So go get him, I’m going after Emmeline.’
‘Dave, you have no idea what you’re doing. We need to get Compton first. Ashbury will have to wait. There’re two birds in the air already headed for her. Out.’
‘Then turn them around and send them after Compton, because I’m not wasting time chasing that man-sized chunk of dick cheese. I’ll go get Ashbury and whoever is with her, then if you need help I’ll be all over that other shit like the Flash.
After
I get Emmeline
. . .
Er, over and out. I guess.’
Heath’s voice was thick with rage when he came back on the comm net.
‘Mister, you are endangering more lives than you can imagine. What the hell do you think you are doing making judgment calls about stuff you know nothing about? Out.’
‘What I’m doing,’ said Dave, ‘is looking for the orcs who are about to throw Emmeline into a fucking casserole dish. When I find them, I’m going to kill them all. Then I’ll warp over and help you kill whatever is left when Zach and Igor and their buddies have finished getting all Tom Clancy on the war band
north
of the interstate. So please don’t try to stop me. You’re just wasting time.’
To emphasise the point, he accelerated at about three-quarters of his top speed, or at least the speed he’d reached before, assuming there was a theoretical limit to how quickly he could travel through time and space.
‘Whoa!’
The voice he heard sounded like the guy he’d been arguing with in the helicopter, doubtlessly blinking at his instruments as Dave suddenly winked out of existence in one spot and re-materialised about a mile closer to the river a second or so later.
‘This is Ghostrider One-Eight. What the hell just happened?’
Yep, same guy. Dave pressed the push-to-talk button with his middle finger while he scanned the countryside around him. He appeared to be standing in the middle of a freshly reaped field. Some kind of grain crop, recently harvested. This far away from electric light his night vision had really powered up and his surroundings appeared to him as though he’d taken a stroll with dusk coming on.
‘Sorry for the gratuitous demo of why you won’t be stopping me,’ he said to Heath, the helicopter crew, and anybody who was listening, ‘but you won’t be. So best you just get on after Compton and guide
me on to the other
. . .
dismounts. Er, out.’
‘Motherf
. . .’
If that was Heath he got himself under control before the word could escape him. Dave heard him bark out a string of incomprehensible jargon which sounded as though he was reassigning choppers and SEALs on the fly. He heard the words ‘retask’ and ‘one-eighty’ as before, but they weren’t directed at him this time.
‘Hooper, you there, still. Out?’
‘Yep. Just waitin’.’
‘Ghostrider One-Eight, can you guide Persuader in on the target. Remember, he’s a civilian. June Bug out.’
Dave heard the crackle of a connection being severed before Ghostrider One-Eight came back on.
‘All righty, Persuader. Can I orient you toward the river? Out.’
‘I think I know where it is
. . .
umm, over?’ This military radio bullshit was confusing as hell.
‘This is One-Eight, Persuader. Just talk like you are on the phone. Don’t worry about the other stuff.
You were moving toward it before. Head in the same direction but bear, ah, move as though you’re heading for ten o’clock on the dial. Not twelve. Make sense?’
‘Thanks, Ghostrider. I think so. Lemme try something.’
He ran at warp for a few seconds. Stopped, and repeated.
‘Is that the direction you want me?’ he asked.
‘A little ways back toward ten o’clock, but yeah. You’re probably 2000
. . .
a mile and half or so from the exfils. You keep on that heading you’ll intercept them in
. . .’
‘Thanks.’
He accelerated and the world slipped around him as easily as black silk. Threading his way around isolated farmsteads, leaping three-post fences, and thundering down a few short stretches of sealed road when he could, Dave Hooper caught up to the raiding party a couple of hundred yards north of a large homestead, brightly lit. There were indeed fourteen daemons in the small raiding party, and three captives. All women. A Grymm warrior had slung one of the women over its shoulder, where she bounced off the armour and mail in a lifeless fashion, like a brace of birds. The other two were also being carried, but under the great, thickened arms of two more Grymm. One of the women was struggling and punching at the beast. The other was screaming, but offering no further resistance. The punchy bitch was Emmeline, he was sure of it. Had to be. Four Sliveen loped along beside the party, acting as outriders. They all had bows unslung, arrows notched. None had yet seen him pop out of thin air behind them.