'Cultists? These punks? Well, I got three of them. The last one's crawling down the driveway, but he isn't going very fast with all those holes in him, so I'll mop him up in a second. What the hell's going on?'
I let out a huge sigh of relief. He had survived everything assorted communists and terrorists had thrown at him in twenty-five years of warfare, both official and unofficial. He wasn't the type to scare easily.
'Dad, listen carefully. Hang tight, cops are on the way. You've got more guns, right?' I asked. He grunted, almost like that was insulting. 'Okay, good. Grab some big stuff, just in case.'
'How big?'
'Big as you've got.' And I knew that for Dad, that meant some serious firepower. The militant apple didn't fall far from the militant tree.
Franks interrupted. 'Cult survivors?' I held up one finger. 'We need him.' I nodded.
'Dad, don't shoot that last guy anymore. The cops want to question him.'
'Well, they best hurry up then. I'll go toss him a towel and tell him to put some direct pressure on it and quit his crying. Now, you listen to me, boy. They were talking about you, that this is all about you. What kind of bullshit are you mixed up in? Is this some sort of mafia accountant thing?'
Of course he still thought I was a CPA. 'I'll explain everything later, I promise. I need you to get to Alabama as fast as you can. The Feds will escort you here.' I glared at Franks as I said that, but he nodded in consent. At some point he had summoned the Goon Squad, because Archer, Herzog, and Torres had come running, carrying all their equipment. 'Did they say anything else?'
Dad gasped. 'Damn, forgot. Yes. Your brother, they said that they were sending ‘violence and evil' or something like that after him.'
'Force and Violence?'
'Yeah. But then I went for the kitchen gun.' Growing up, it had been Pitt family custom to stash at least one gun in every room of the house, so having a kitchen gun had finally paid off, 'I shot the son of a bitch that said it in the face, so I was a touch distracted. We've got to get to David.'
'He's near me. I'm on it, Dad. I'll see you in Alabama. Just hang tight.' I hung up and scrolled through until I found my brother's number. My hands were trembling so bad that it was hard to work the little trackball on my phone.
'Yo?' Somebody unfamiliar picked up and my heart lurched. Was I too late?
'I need to talk to Mosh right now!' I shouted.
'Dude, he's going on stage in a minute. Call back later.'
'It's a family emergency,' I said forcefully.
'Well, I'm his manager. I'll pass it on when the show's over.' The voice was very laid back, bordering on obnoxious mellowness.
'Mosh is in danger. You need to get him out of there, now!'
'Look, man, lay off the dope. It makes you paranoid. Call back in a couple hours.' He hung up.
Bellowing something profane and incoherent, I started for the main building. I needed my gear.
'Where are you going?' Torres asked.
'They're coming for my brother. He's in Montgomery tonight. I have to get to him. We can be there in half an hour.'
'Our strike team is camped at Maxwell,' Archer said quickly, referring to the Air Force base in Montgomery. 'I'll raise them.'
'Myers said you weren't supposed to leave the compound,' Herzog snapped.
'Our team is already there. They can handle it. Driving up there will just put you in danger. This is probably just what the Condition wants you to do,' Torres suggested softly. 'This could be a trap.'
'I'm going,' I spun around. 'And I'll kneecap the first one of you who tries to stop me.' I'm a physically intimidating specimen when I'm enraged. The three junior agents stepped back automatically. Franks didn't flinch. None of them said another word as I stared them down. 'You gonna help me or not?'
Franks mulled it over, probably weighing the pros and cons of endangering his charge versus being able to go kill something. The decision didn't take long. 'I'll drive.'
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.'
