From hell alex hunter 8, p.6
From Hell: Alex Hunter 8, page 6
One of the last of Harper’s elite force, a muscular young woman with a tattoo of a tear under her left eye, came at Casey with her own blade, a hunting knife with a serrated back. She held it deftly, feinted once and then lunged.
Casey parried the blow and the two short steel teeth clanged together time and again. Casey spun, letting her blade bounce off the woman’s, coming back up frighteningly fast, only to be met with matching speed and strength.
From the corner of her eye she saw Alex Hunter watching with excitement. He leaned over the railing. “Kill her!”
Casey tried not to let the words distract her. It wasn’t easy, as it hadn’t sounded like Alex Hunter at all.
The pair came together, blades locked, and grabbed each other’s free arms – big mistake. Casey Franks had trained with the best in hand-to-hand combat, and her skills extended far beyond street brawling, or anything that could be taught by Jihadis or Russian agents.
She used her elbow under the woman’s chin, rocking her head back, then jammed her blade into the meat of her throat.
Casey held the blade there, sunk deep, and moved her face in close. The woman’s mouth and eyes were wide in surprise. Casey stared into her eyes and saw that her blade gleamed in the back of her open mouth. She grinned. “Yeah, hurts, huh?”
She swept the razor-sharp knife to the side, slicing through the woman’s throat. Blood spurted and the woman gagged wetly then fell to the side like a tree.
Casey spun to the remaining intruders. “Get on the fucking ground!”
Around her, a few knives and metal bars clanged to the floor, and the men and women went to their knees with hands on heads. Casey Franks snorted with disdain as she picked up one of the handguns. Her eyes went to the hostages, who seemed even more fearful of her and Alex Hunter than they were of the terrorists.
She crossed to Hondo, who groaned when she lifted his head. “How you doin’, sleeping beauty?”
He coughed and blood speckled his lips. “Like coming off a three-day whisky binge.”
“You’ll live.” She let him go. “We’re bugging out, so stand tall, soldier.” She turned to Alex. “On you orde—”
Casey saw that Alex was staring straight ahead, his eyes vacant. He gripped the railing so hard his hands vibrated from the strain. The metal began to compress with a sound like screaming banshees and then impossibly, began to bend upward.
“Noooo.” The railing broke in Alex’s hands, and a line of blood appeared from one nostril.
Oh shit, she thought. She should have known from his brutal voice.
“Boss?” She stayed where she was, watching as the man known as the Arcadian tried to pull the demons back into their cage. Or rather, just one demon.
Casey always wondered whether the Other was a totally separate entity, or Alex Hunter himself, the real one, unbound, the manifestation of everything dark about a human being’s psyche. His “monster from the id”, Colonel Jack Hammerson had muttered once. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know and hadn’t asked.
She turned to the hostages, who were all looking on the verge of panic at their supposed rescuer’s transformation into something more beast than man.
“Hey!” she yelled, dragging their attention from Alex. “You will place your hands on your head, and proceed to the front car park in a single line. Armed officers will meet you there, and you will not lower your hands until you have been certified. If you do, you will be shot. If you step out of the line, you will be shot. If you deviate in any way from our or their instructions, you will be shot. Is that clear?”
She waited. “Is that fucking clear?” Casey fired the gun she held twice into one of the bodies at her feet. “Clear?”
It was enough to terrify them into action, and they nodded jerkily, clamping hands even tighter on heads.
She turned back to Alex. His face was wet from perspiration and his eyes burned like a furnace.
“Wait.” His eyes focused and stared down at the remaining intruders. “Zip cuff them, except for that one.” He pointed toward one of the intruders. It was the last of Harper Van Owens’s elite, the one named Jaz. “Leave that one. He stays.”
“We surrender.” Jaz’s lip curled. “I know the law, and I know our rights.” One of the other intruders beside him lowered his hands to pull off his mask. His youthful face was streaked with sweat, but following Jaz’s rebellious words, his eyes had also become defiant.
“Fuck you!” he yelled up at Alex.
Others began to follow his lead.
“Shoot him,” Alex said.
Casey didn’t blink as she shot the young man dead. Hands went straight back onto heads.
Alex leaped over the railing and dropped the eight feet to the ground, landing lightly. His face was healing rapidly and smoke rose from the wounds in curling wafts, but he still looked like something from the pits of Hell. The men and women backed away when he held up the detonator.
“You were prepared to kill millions of people when you blew this facility.” He glared. “Men, women, children.”
“I surrender.” Jaz shrugged. “I’m a lawyer, soon, and I have rights.”
His eyes still burned with defiance, and Alex leaned in toward him. “You’re in my world now, and in that world, you don’t have any rights.” He nodded to Casey.
Casey moved among the intruders, jerking their arms down behind their backs. She zip cuffed them all, except Jaz. She leaned around him to sneer into his face, “Enjoy the party. Or what’s left of it.”
“Take them out,” Alex ordered. “I have questions for this would-be assassin.”
Casey sneered at Jaz again then she turned to the hostages, her face hostile and in no mood for disagreements. “Everyone else, now, single file, move the fuck out of here.”
She helped Hondo up and looked at the small pad on her wrist to read some data. “Helo inbound in four, boss.”
Alex nodded. “I’ll only need two.” His eyes were like death itself, and his face was even worse.
Jaz suddenly seemed unsure of himself. He licked dry lips. “Uh, what … do you want to know?”
CHAPTER 07
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts – Languages Department
Professor Matt Kearns read his morning messages. The first was from a name he didn’t recognise, and he opened a German language mail from a Detective Ed Heisen of the Berlin Kripo – the Kriminalpolizei – the equivalent of NYPD Detective Bureau.
He read, his brows knitting. The guy wanted to get in touch about a series of gruesome murders in Berlin, but then it went all haywire with talk of little people from the future, and civilians being disintegrated.
Matt groaned. He hated this sort of stuff, mainly because it always intrigued the hell out of him. He tapped his lips for a moment.
“Okay, Detective Heisen, I’m putting you on the maybe-list for now.”
He moved to the next message. This one was from his friend at a Pompeii dig describing her work and what they’d found. He then did as she suggested and opened the image file, squinting at the faint scratches in the stone tablet.
Maria Monti was an extremely competent archaeologist, and in past times, Matt had worked with her on several digs and translations; she was like a bloodhound when it came to uncovering artifacts. She worked hard, researched deeply, and then only dug where she knew there was a high probability for discovery. Rarely did she come up empty-handed.
Maria was a little confused by the writing she’d discovered among some Pompeii remains. She had expected Latin, and though the inscription looked a little like Latin and had a number of familiar aspects, there were also many words and symbols that didn’t make any sense to her. As she had hit a roadblock, it seemed her plan B was to reach out to Matt.
“Well, let’s have a look then.”
His brows slowly came together as he leaned forward to inspect the first image. As well as Latin he saw Etruscan, Greek, even Phoenician lettering all blended together. He sat back and folded his arms. “Too primitive for that time.” The crease between his eyes deepened. “So why were you there, then?”
Matt knew that seeing the ancient form of Latin at Pompeii was the equivalent of finding a street sign in Brooklyn written in Old English, like the stylized written version in Cædmon’s Hymn from 650 AD – it was near incomprehensible, out of time, and out of place.
He focused, pulling back a little so as to remove himself from the granular level of identifying the individual alphabet of each language, and instead trying to read the mishmash of ancient tongues as a single message.
There seemed to be disparate words. And some were repeated. Perhaps because some of the text was disjointed, he thought.
“Τάρταρος – Tartarus,” he whispered the antiquated Greek word for Hell. Tartarus was a netherworld where the souls of the dead were sent. A place ruled by Pluto, their version of the devil, and depending on which cultural time and location, a place of despair and damnation. The Romans had assimilated a lot of words, customs, and even gods from the ancient Greeks, but the word for the Underworld was still rare at that time.
Matt made some notes and then returned to the text fragments. He squinted at the ancient words, trying to draw more from the faint lines. “Could be …” He wrote more notes, then rearranged the words, turning the scrambled Latin and Phoenician hybrids into a more modern Latin. “Illa vetus sectae.” He frowned at what he had written, and then translated into English. “The followers, or sect, of Her … or maybe more like She.”
Matt knew ancient Rome had a number of female goddesses – there was Juno, the queen of goddesses, Minerva, Venus, Ceres, Diana, and many more. Maybe these people worshipped one of them. He scribbled down everything he could, and then tried to tease out more, but the rest was indecipherable.
“Okay, let’s see what we got.” He rubbed his jaw. “A reference to Hell, and some sort of She-worshipping cult. Also, ‘beware’ … hmm, or ‘be fearful’ maybe, ‘of them that are of all of us’.” Matt sat back. “‘Of all of us’ – what does that mean?” He rested his chin on his fist – there was more: “‘She must be fed’.”
Matt sat back. “‘Beware them that are of all of us’? Of all men? Is ‘them’ supposed to be representative of all people?” He sighed. That doesn’t make sense, he thought. And if you’re going to give a warning, then why write it in a language no one in Pompeii could probably even understand? And what’s with “she must be fed”?
He was sure he was translating the words correctly, but their meaning eluded him. Matt started to type out a response to Maria, but stopped, not knowing how to frame it. He checked his watch. Maria had given him a voice-over-internet address and a good time zone overlap to have a chat about what he found out – much better than trying to lay it all out in an email.
He clicked the icon, and the familiar boing-pop sounded, indicating he was online and available. He saw that Maria was there, and selected her smokey-eyed profile. The link popped again, and then the attractive dark-haired woman’s face filled the screen as she sat closer.
“Buongiorno, handsome; long time no see.” She smiled, showing a row of perfect teeth in an olive-skinned face. “What have you been up to?”
Matt swept his long hair back and returned the smile. “I’ve been around, just hanging out and waiting for some beautiful Italian woman to send me a dead language or two as an ice breaker.”
She sat straighter. “So, it was a dead language, not Latin? I knew it.”
He chuckled. “Yes and no. Your language fragment would have become Latin in maybe another thousand years or so. Weird, considering the language hadn’t been used in that area for that long. Doesn’t make any sense.” He tilted his head as a thought popped into it. “Hey, what depth was this language fragment found?”
She shook her head. “Same depth as the gladius and the other specimen. The ash and pumice layer showed the same unbroken geological striations, so it hadn’t been thrust up, or buried later. Had to have been contemporaneous.”
“Damn, there goes that theory.”
“Matt, you don’t know the half of it. So, anyway, what did it say?”
“Okay, I’ll send through the full transcript when we’re done here, but in a nutshell, it says: ‘Beware’, or maybe ‘be fearful of them that are of all of us’.” Matt laughed. “The local politician maybe?” His face became serious. “Sounds like a warning; does it mean anything to you?”
“A warning, yes, that might make sense.” Maria’s face remained stony.
“There was a little more,” he said. “There were several references to Hell – ‘Tartarus’. Plus a few lines indicating they worshipped some sort of female She deity, and also a fragment that translated as: ‘She must be fed’. I’ve checked it several times, and though the words seem right, that sentence means nothing without context.”
“Si, si.” Maria sighed as she seemed to think it through for a moment. “Well, it was certainly a time of Hell coming to the surface, si?” She looked up, and there was nervousness around her eyes. “Matt, I need you here. There were other … specimens we uncovered. Other things that shouldn’t be there – no, no, I think these things shouldn’t be anywhere.” She looked over her shoulder. “Maybe you called too late. They’re closing us down, confiscating everything.” She licked her lips and leaned closer. “We found bones, but strange, not like human bones.”
“Animal bones? Like from horses, sheep or dogs, you mean? Or something more exotic?” Matt knew that the Roman Empire covered the known world at that time and traded in exotic animals. So if she had found elephant bones, he still wouldn’t have been that surprised.
“No, I know bones, and this is something big and not natural … unidentifiable. When we tried to get an expert to assist us it seemed we showed our hand. Instead of gaining knowledge we got a platoon of government teppisti, who started sealing off our dig.” She lowered her voice. “We managed to save some of the images, more writing, but I can’t send it to you as our email and texts might be rerouted. It’s only safe to talk face to face; can you come?”
“Maria …” He groan-sighed. “I’m on my spring break.”
“Matt, please, I wouldn’t ask, but this is important. I’ll even pay.” She smiled anxiously. “Plus I’ll cook you your favorite paella.”
He laughed. “The one with the big shrimp in it?”
“Of course. A few days holiday, my treat.”
He sighed even louder. “So, what about these bones anyway?”
“They –” Her eyes became even wider. “They seemed to be … growing.”
CHAPTER 08
USSTRATCOM, Nebraska – debrief
Colonel Jack Hammerson placed a hand on Alex’s shoulder and pressed for a moment before letting it drop.
“Good work at the Ginna plant. The information you extracted from the terrorists led us to the local network and financers. We’re squeezing them hard to find out a little more about their international accomplices.” He looked up and smiled, but with zero humor. “Then we’ll pay ’em a visit.”
Alex looked at him from the corner of his eye. “Sorry about that last guy.”
“It wasn’t you.” Hammerson waved it away. “Besides, he came to kill. He got what he deserved.”
“He surrendered.”
“And he still got torn apart; so what? He wouldn’t have blinked at the opportunity to kill thousands, hundreds of thousands.” Hammerson looked at his protégé. “Don’t forget what they did to Zegarelli.”
Alex lowered his head. “Yeah, good soldier, gone.”
“That is our lot, son. But you all got the result we needed.”
“Did you find out anymore about that ‘She’ character they kept mentioning?” Alex asked. “They seemed to regard it as some sort of powerful person, leader, or even a deity. Might have been their ultimate controller.”
Hammerson shrugged. “Nothing in the databases, and never heard it before. We’ll open a file on it, and if we get any crossmatches in the future, we’ll be ready.”
He and Hammerson were on level five of USSTRATCOM’s underground research and development laboratories. The huge facility was dug into the bedrock below the base. The first two levels were armor and weapons research plus prototypes, and also firing ranges. Then on the lower levels there was the biological and nuclear research. The lowest level, the one they were on now, had no designated name and was simply marked classified. Commander in Chief Jack Hammerson, Alex, and military rank above general knew what went on down here, and none spoke about it above ground.
“Just glad we could save so many of the hostages,” Alex said, and stopped before the formidable-looking metal door.
“A good mission. Almost perfect.” Hammerson turned to face his soldier. “He – it – got out, huh?”
Alex exhaled then nodded. “Yeah.”
Hammerson grunted. “You’ve nearly got it under control. Maybe one day we can rid you of the Other forever. But our objective right now is for you to control it, harness it.”
“I can and can’t control it,” Alex said. “So far it returns to its dark place when it decides it’s had its fill of blood or vengeance. But I don’t know what will happen if it ever decides that it doesn’t want to go back.”
“Well, you pulled it back, so you’re still winning.”
“I think I had help this time.” Alex jaws clenched for a moment. “But it’s getting stronger, Jack. One day it’ll be the winner.”
“You let me worry about that. That help you mentioned … was it Joshua?”
Alex stared at his commander for a moment before simply shrugging. “Hard to say.”
