Apocalypse Soldier (6 page)

Ashley’s screams intensified.
 

Nicole had to help her friend. But first she needed her gun. Still a bit buzzed from the beers, Nicole stumbled into her room. Hands shaking from the fight, she reached the dresser, pulled out the bottom drawer and grabbed the Glock. She rushed toward Ashley’s room.
 

In the living room, Rob remained sprawled on the carpet, still groggy from the blow to the head. Ashley’s screams were still building in intensity.
Oh God, what is that psycho doing to her?
 

She dreaded the answer but still managed to kick open the door to Ashley’s bedroom. The door swung back and she stepped inside, gun up and… froze. Ashley stared back at her with big wet eyes, lips quivering. A deep gash ran across her throat and spurted red onto her pink comforter.
 

No…

The light in her scared eyes was already fading. With one hand Paul finger-painted occult symbols on the wall in Ashley’s blood, while the other clutched a bloody knife. Paul turned. He was shirtless and sported an inverted cross on his chest, a twin to Rob’s scar.

Knife up, he barreled toward her.
 

Nicole trained with her Glock at least once a month and what happened next was automatic, more reflex than conscious action. She fired and the bullet tore through Paul’s inverted-cross scar almost dead center. The knife clattered on the floor as he went down.

She’d expected her hands to tremble, but her grip on the Glock was rock steady. Gun out, she moved deeper into Ashley’s bedroom. She didn’t have to be a nurse to know the glazed expression on Ashley’s face meant that she was dead. Poor Ashley… She couldn’t be gone.
 

Hot tears welled up and now her initial calm began to waver as the reality of what had happened came crashing down on her. Who the hell were these freaks? For years she’d worked hard to establish a sense of normalcy in her life, and just when she was beginning to feel hopeful about the future…

All thoughts stopped when she recognized the image on the wall. Her parents had paid a small fortune in reconstructive surgery, but some of the scars of her possession ran too deep to be erased by a scalpel or a laser. The bloody symbol dripping onto the bedpost was identical to the occult sigil etched into her stomach.
 

The mark of the demon.

Oh my God, it’s starting again.
 

For years psychologists had tried to convince Nicole that her feeling of being possessed could simply be explained away in psychological terms. To their way of thinking, she’d been going through a difficult phase. Nicole knew goddamn well that her experience hadn’t been some phase. She’d stared into the abyss and an unfathomable evil had risen from it to nearly consume her. It had taught her a vital lesson.
 

Evil was real.
 

The darkness was real.
 

And now it was beginning all over again.

She heard footsteps behind her and whirled, but the man sneaking up on her was faster. The butt of an AK-47 slammed into her head. Seeing the sigil of the demon oozing down Ashley’s bedroom wall had distracted her long enough to give the assailant the upper hand.
 

She dropped to the floor, reality becoming blurry. She caught a brief glimpse of a man dressed in combat black, eyes peering from a ski mask like he was auditioning for the part of a burglar on some crime show.
 

And then the world turned dark.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

SPECIAL AGENT FRANK Doyle was on his way to question Father Cabrera when he spotted the male nurse emerging from the priest’s hospital room. The growing escalation of these crimes and their religious angle had necessitated the involvement of the FBI. As their resident expert on cult crimes and ritualistic Satanic abuse, Doyle had been tasked with the job.
 

He’d met all the nurses and doctors responsible for Cabrera’s well-being earlier in the day, yet this man leaving Cabrera’s room was a stranger to him. There could be a perfectly innocent explanation for this newcomer’s presence, however, and at this point Doyle was still more curious than suspicious.
 

The male nurse pivoted and walked down the corridor in the opposite direction. His gait was relaxed, deliberate. But Doyle’ alarm bells were going off. There was a coiled intensity in the man’s features, a lean, almost wolfish quality. He looked dangerous.
 

Doyle decided to have a few words with the new face. “Hey, wait up… I want to talk to you about the patient…”

The male nurse never looked back and never slowed down.
 

Doyle followed. “Hey, I said hold on…”

The man in scrubs disappeared around the next corner. Doyle loped after him. He came around the bend and saw the man vanish through a door that led to the staircase. At 33, Doyle ran every day and considered himself in better shape than when he first joined the Bureau. Picking up his pace, he sprinted and reached the staircase seconds later. His quarry was already a flight down, taking two steps at a time.

Doyle pounded down the stairs. The male nurse disappeared through another doorway, and Doyle tore after him. Arriving in a deserted corridor, he spotted the stranger farther ahead, now striding briskly toward a set of double-doors.

Doyle followed. He still hadn’t called for backup, partially because he was baffled by the situation. He drew his pistol, barged through the doors and entered the hospital morgue. Freezers lined the walls. Harsh, fluorescent light spilled down on the shroud-covered bodies resting on their shiny steel slabs.
 

The dead triggered a flashback to the terrible scene he’d encountered in Cabrera’s church only 48 hours earlier. Walking into that defiled setting and taking in the bloody remains of the men, women and children sprawled among the pews like broken dolls had torn him up inside. He’d sworn right then and there to bring to justice the monsters responsible for these heinous crimes.
 

Doyle took a few hesitant steps, moving deeper into the morgue. He passed the row of corpses, choking back the chalky taste in his mouth. A sudden noise made him whirl and he spotted one of the dead bodies rising from a table behind him. The revenant cast off its shroud, revealing the male nurse.

Doyle leveled his pistol just as the man shoved a nearby gurney toward him. Wheels screeched over the stone floor as the gurney slammed into his stomach and the shot went wild. He gasped and desperately tried to regain his bearings but before he could, the stranger loomed above him. His attacker snatched Doyle’s arm and twisted until he released his pistol. It clattered to the floor.

Before he knew it, Doyle was looking up at the muzzle of his own gun. The man’s penetrating gaze bore into him.
 

“Who the hell are you?” Doyle asked.
 

The stranger’s answer was to back away toward the exit and turn off the lights, plunging the morgue into blackness.

Doyle followed the sound of the swinging doors, trying not to think about all the dead bodies that shared the darkness with him.
 

By the time he stumbled his way out of the morgue, the stranger was long gone.
 

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

CASCA ARRIVED IN Silicon Valley right on time to attend Xtel’s monthly board meeting. His father had built a technological empire in the early seventies and Xtel chips could be found in twenty-five percent of all computers on the market. It represented the source of Casca’s wealth and power, but he’d never fully embraced his legacy as CEO of a billion-dollar-plus conglomerate. Consequently, he wasn’t exactly enamored with corporate rituals and saw these meetings as a necessary evil, at best.
 

Once in a while, though, the boss had to check in with the men and women who took care of the day-to-day operations of the company.
 

Today was one of those days.
 

Casca struggled to keep his mind on business matters, his thoughts repeatedly shifting back to the church massacre. On the return flight to the Valley, he’d speculated about the objectives of this cult. What would drive these fanatics to hunt down three exorcists?

By the time he arrived at Xtel for the big meeting, there were seven new images on his phone. While his chief operating officer rattled off the latest sales figures, Casca stole quick glances at the pictures. The murderous cult had branded the Arizona church with seven sigils, each one representing a Judeo-Christian demon associated with the seven deadly sins: Lucifer for pride, Mammon for greed, Asmodeus for lust, Leviathan for envy, Beelzebub for gluttony, Satan for wrath and Belphegor for sloth. The sigils provided a better sense of the cult’s belief system, but still shed scant light on their goals.
 

Perhaps Casca was giving these murderers too much credit by assuming they had an endgame of some kind. Maybe they just liked to sign their grisly handiwork with the signatures of demonic heavy-hitters. Casca knew Talon was planning to talk with the priest who survived the massacre. Hopefully Father Cabrera could answer some of their questions.
 

The one-hour meeting felt like it was never going to end and Casca stifled a yawn on more than one occasion. He was eager to get back to his true calling. As the CEO wrapped up his projections for the coming quarter, his cell buzzed again. A text told him that Talon had talked to Cabrera and gotten a name.
 

Nicole Roberts.

Reading this gave Casca a jolt of adrenaline and all traces of weariness vanished. His breath hitched and he pursed his lips, his whole being surging with excitement. “
The Exorcism of Nicole Roberts
” was one of the most famous cases of demon possession in recent history. They’d written a book and even made a film about the incident. To the public it was just another exorcism tale supposedly based on a true story, but people schooled in demonology regarded it as one of the few genuine cases of possession reported in the 21
st
Century.
 

Armed with this new piece of information, the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The cult wasn’t hunting exorcists. Father Cabrera and the other priests had been a means to an end – the cult was after Nicole Roberts, a young woman who had been saved from the darkness. A shiver spiked up his back and a feeling of dread settled in. It all made sense now.

Casca knew what these soldier cultists were planning to do…

And it was far worse than anything he’d previously imagined.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

TALON CURSED UNDER his breath as he dashed out of the hospital and jumped into the Jeep Wrangler. Running into the FBI agent was an unfortunate development. He’d hoped to stay under the radar, but now the authorities would know that a new player had entered the picture. He’d have to move fast.
 

Arid expanses of desert stretched all the way to the pale horizon as he guided his rental past Tucson’s city limits. The wheels of his vehicle whipped over the heat-cracked highway while the white-hot sun bounced off the rocks and hills in shimmering phantom waves.
 

Wiping sweat from his brow, Talon sent Casca a quick text and updated him on the situation. At least they now understood the agenda driving the cult. These cultists were looking for Nicole Roberts, who had legally changed her last name to Stivers. The attacks were beginning to make sense. The cult had targeted priests with a background in exorcisms, hoping to find the one who’d performed the ritual on Nicole. That information had never been disclosed publicly.
 

They’d started in New York, worked their way south to Miami until they found Cabrera in Arizona. According to the priest, Nicole had recently graduated from nursing school and moved to the small Mexican border town of Sierra Nogal, population 9,000, located about two-hundred miles southwest of Tucson. Cabrera was privy to all this information because he’d continued to check in on Nicole over the years. He even believed that Nicole had gone to school in Tucson to be close to him. A precaution on her end, in case the demon should return one day.

Unfortunately, her decision to share her plans for the future had backfired.
 

Talon wondered how Nicole coped with the knowledge that evil could consume her life at a moment’s notice. A giant darkness hung over her, casting a deep shadow over her future. Despite these challenges, she was working hard to build a better life for herself. She struck Talon as a born fighter.

Even though he didn’t know Nicole personally, he related to her on some level. A dark entity had invaded his mind in Silicon Valley, providing a mere taste of what the poor girl had gone through. His bodily possession had lasted less than a day, but the experience still haunted him. For a short period of time another intelligence had seized hold of his mind, poisoning his thoughts, turning him into a monster… Only the memory of his beloved Michelle had managed to break the spell.
 

He couldn’t imagine what it was like for Nicole to share her body with such an entity for a prolonged period of time. He didn’t want to imagine it. Talon suddenly experienced an emotion he never had much time for in the past – anxiety. Hoping to distract himself, he checked the radio stations. A right-wing talk-show host went on about the evils of illegal immigration and Talon quickly turned off the diatribe. He was neither in the mood for music nor politics.
 

Instead, he rang Casca. He might as well spend the duration of the ride talking to the billionaire and learning more about the woman this cult was hunting. After the third ring, Casca’s educated, refined voice filled the bouncing vehicle. There was a dark urgency in his voice. He skipped any small talk and got right to the meat of the conversation.