Demon Accords 6: Forced Ascent (14 page)

I reached over and got my own handful, crunching them down dry.

A whisper of a footstep brought us both around to face the corner of the barn nearest the farm house.  A couple of seconds later, Marnie came around the corner, now dressed in jeans and a checkered shirt and a canvas barn coat, hair in a bun, holding two cups of coffee.  She came to an abrupt halt at the sight of the two of us sitting on the block of wood.

“Oh!  Ah, Tony, I thought you might like a cup of coffee,” she said, very uncertain of herself.

I jumped up and gratefully moved to take one of the cups.  She looked at Stacia, clearly intimidated and then back at me.  “One is black, the other is cream and sugar… I didn’t know which you might like.”

“Either,” I answered.  Stacia had a smile that was part welcoming and part knowing, like she was in on something I wasn’t.

Marnie, more uncertain than ever, looked a little helplessly at Stacia, who said, “Calories,
Tony,
calories.”

“Right, I’ll take the cream and sugar,” I said, smiling at Marnie, who blinked rapidly several times.

“Ah, would you like the other, miss?” Marnie asked.

“No thank you. I never really developed a taste for coffee,” Stacia said.

“Try growing up on a farm.  Sometimes it was all that kept me going,” I said.

“You grew up on a farm?” Marnie asked me.

“Yeah, a dairy farm in New York.  Lots of early mornings.”

“Oh yeah.  My father used to get my sister and me up at four-thirty every day, year round, to help.”

“
Every day?
” Stacia asked, eyebrows shooting straight up.

“Every day,” Marnie said.  The space next to Stacia was suddenly filled with a massive amount of black and tan wolf.  ‘Sos’s attention was completely focused on the box of Cheerios, his ears pricked forward as if a mouse might be inside it.

Without looking around at the beast sitting next to her, head as high as hers, Stacia took the box and poured it into what would have been open space except that a big toothy maw was suddenly there to claim the stream of Cheerios.  Sighing, she looked into the now-empty box and then at the giant wolf head whose jaws could stretch around her own skull.  “Pig,” she said mildly.  A big tongue licked her cheek. “There goes breakfast,” she said, crumpling the box.

“Oh!  Would you both like some breakfast?” Marnie asked.  All three of our heads turned her way and nodded.

Fifteen minutes later, we were all sitting in the farmhouse kitchen, watching as our hostess finished cooking a couple of slabs of ham, a dozen eggs, and half a loaf of bread.

She sliced off a few more pieces of meat from the ham bone and then turned to me with raised eyebrows and a meaningful glance at Awasos.  I nodded and she started to move forward with the meat, but instead looked at the bulk of fur sitting at attention in front of her. With a shrug, she gave him the meaty bone instead.  Holding it lightly in his jaws, he trotted to the kitchen door and pushed it open with his head.  Moments later, the sounds of chewing and splintering bone came from the little porch.

“Thank you so much for breakfast, Marnie,” Stacia said.

“Oh, no problem, Lisa. My mother would spin in her grave if I didn’t offer you breakfast,” Marnie answered.  I’d introduced Stacia as Lisa, the first name that popped into my head, which had caused her to give me a strange, questioning look.

“It’s nice to hear paws on the floor again.  Jimmy won’t let us get a dog.  Says they cost too much,” Marnie continued. She looked up in time catch our glance at each other. 

“He was much different when we were dating in school,” she said.  “His father owned the local tractor dealership, so they had some money, at least for this town.  He was on the football team and someday he was going to take over the business.”

“What happened?” Stacia asked.

“The economy, particularly the farming economy.  His dad had overextended on business debt, thinking he would keep growing the business.  Milk prices took a downturn and nobody was buying tractors.  Lost the business.  Bankrupt.  Lucky for us, I had the trust income.  It’s kept us alive.”

“Looks like you rent some fields,” I noted. 

She nodded.  “A few.  It pays for the kids’ school clothes, and we trade one field for beef for the freezer.  Jimmy works part time at a local garage.  He’s mechanical, used to help in the service department at the dealership.”  She suddenly looked embarrassed, covering it by bustling around picking up plates, turning on the little TV on the corner of the counter and then filling the plates with ham, eggs, and toast.

“ – ressmen  Britton, Sondale, and McFeeney are calling for an immediate investigation into the events of the missile launch.  It seems, Angela, that a New Jersey State Police investigator discovered his counter-terrorist radiation detection equipment had registered a strong reading from the missile, although the Navy claimed the Tomahawk was strictly a conventional weapon, one that misfired at that. The initial reading caused the head of the State Police to call in a Nuclear Emergency Support Team. Subsequently, the team found that the source of the radiation appears to be a small piece of depleted uranium, attached to the outer casing of the missile.  That produced enough of a signal to set off the sensitive equipment that modern law enforcement uses to look for terrorist dirty bombs and nuclear weapons. No explanation has been offered at this point, Angela.  Back to you.”

The early morning anchor moved on to another story, leaving Stacia and I staring at each other, chewing our first bites of breakfast.

“Honestly, our own Navy is shooting missiles and bombs at us.  What next?” Marnie commented.

I had a bigger mouthful, a side effect of having a bigger mouth, and Stacia was able to swallow her food first.  “Marnie, do you have a computer with Internet access that I can borrow for a few hours?”

“Well, yes of course, we have Internet—WiFi even.  You can borrow Taylor’s netbook.  Our other computer is Jimmy’s, and he doesn’t like anyone to use it unless he supervises.”  She picked up a small silver-sided computer from on top of a small bookcase just inside the little family room that attached to the kitchen.

“Thank you, Marnie.  Trust me, I’ll be super careful with it. I just want to check some news sites,” Stacia said with a warm smile.

“Well, that’s fine, dear,” Marnie said.  Me, I just kept eating, because for one thing, using a local computer carefully was probably fine, and for another, the food was awesome.  I said as much, about the food, between bites.

“Well, I keep some chickens and I think there’s a big difference between store bought eggs and farm fresh eggs.  And the ham came from the same farmer that supplies our beef.”

Stacia was looking over the beat-up-looking little netbook that Marnie had handed her and now she noticed the inroads I was making on the egg supply.  She hastily grabbed one more sunny side up along with another slice of toast before looking back at the power up screen on the computer.

“Goodness, you both have healthy appetites.  I thought maybe from the look of you that you might be on all kinds of diet restrictions and such.”

“No ma’am.  We both have pretty fast metabolisms, particularly Tony,” Stacia replied with a smile at Marnie and a mischievous gleam in her eye as she glanced my way.  “You should see him without his shirt on—not an ounce of fat,” she said.  Marnie glanced at my t-shirt-clad torso and looked away quickly, her cheeks getting pink. 

Suddenly uncomfortable, I finished my food, took my plate up, and thanked Marnie again.  Then I excused myself, giving Stacia a frown, which bounced off her knowing smile like water on Teflon. 

“Marnie, I see your wood is getting low on the porch.  I can chop some today and fill it back up,” I said.

“Oh you don’t have to do that,” she said, but her glance at the big Fisher woodstove that lived almost exactly between the kitchen and the family room told a different story.

“No problem.  Consider it repayment for an excellent breakfast.  Now I’ll just head out to the barn.  Thanks again.”

Nothing was happening outside, other than that ‘Sos had almost completely demolished the big ham bone, so I went back to the wood pile and started to pay for breakfast.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had split firewood, although I had been a bit jealous of my young friend Declan’s woodpile in northern Vermont a few weeks ago.  An ax or splitting maul, a pile of round logs, and a good chopping block were guaranteed stress relief for me.  It was also a pretty good workout, or at least it used to be.  Now it was more just Zen-like activity, as my strength and speed made short work of even the most stubborn logs.  I grabbed the maul and set a round log on the stump.  Whump. Two logs instead of one. Each half next became a quarter and just like that, my brain clicked into analysis mode.

The fact that depleted uranium showed up attached to a Navy missile meant two things.  First, that the strike was set up and directed by someone like General Creek, who had access to classified information about me, and second, that they didn’t have any idea about Kirby and his blatant disregard for radioactive metal.  Only my aura powers and my healing were affected by DU, not my vampire-given abilities or any of Kirby’s.  Since Creek had spoken about the use of DU in our Albany meeting, any of the parties there were suspect, and McFeeney was involved in the investigation.  Being part of the investigation was an excellent way to make sure nothing was really revealed. 

The split wood continued to pile up while I thought dark thoughts about my government.

Chapter 13

All of the pre-cut stove-length logs had been split and stacked on the porch.  Next I tackled the five big problem logs that were lying around.  These are the big, knotty chunks of maple or oak that most woodpiles accumulate.  So fibrous and tough that the owner gives up and sets them aside to wait for the day he rents or buys a hydraulic splitter.  Jimmy didn’t seem like the rent-a-splitter type, so I went ahead and beat the big knots of old maple into manageable chunks.  That left only full-length logs that had been piled up under the pole barn roof to await a chainsaw.

At some point during my work, I noticed that Marnie had left in the Corolla, then an hour later, Jimmy took off in the truck and about forty minutes after that, Marnie came back.  Stacia, who had been sitting on an old New Holland tractor and scanning websites while making notes on a pad of paper, hopped down and got our supplies from her.  When Marnie tried to give back the excess money, Stacia made her keep it, which is exactly what I would have done.  When Stacia came back, she brought a pile of huge turkey sandwiches made from some of the groceries.

I stopped and took a big drink of water from my Lupine Industries water bottle that I kept filling at the spigot in the barn.  Stacia handed me a sandwich and took one herself, after dropping one whole into the bottomless wolf pit named Awasos, who bit twice and swallowed once.

“What have you found?” I asked around a mouthful of really fresh turkey, mayo, and lettuce.

“Where to start?  I first went on the Drudge Report to see what had popped up there.  Tons of stuff about the missile, about how ugly the confrontation got between the feds and the staties.  Eventually, the government had over five hundred armed soldiers and at least ten helicopters, some of them Marine Cobras.  Video after video of some stellar screaming matches between Leland, his boss, Colonel Betchel, and various New Jersey politicians with a Navy admiral, a Marine colonel, and some Homeland guys.

“President Garth hasn’t spoken yet, which seems odd, but the White House is supposed to trot out their pet spokesperson pretty soon.  Meanwhile, he’s getting reamed as ineffectual and weak by the conservative bloggers.”

“What about what Tanya did to the Hummer?” I asked.

“All over Youtube.  Huge number of hits; it went viral sometime last night.  The biggest one is titled
Vampires are real… and hot!
  Pretty good quality off one of the policemen’s cell phones.

“Bloggers are going crazy over it, trying to figure out if it was faked.  The fact that three other slightly poorer clips from other cops’ cell phones is lending credibility.  But don’t you want to hear about your pet reporter, Miss Chatterjee?”

“What article did she write?”

“She wrote about you, the missile, demons, and portals to Hell on her own blog site.  And I found the link to her site on Drudge as well.  So it’s getting lots of attention.  In fact, hers is by far the best and most complete explanation to date.”

“Can I see it?” I asked.

“I actually snuck into the house and printed it out.  Here, read this,” Stacia said, handing me several pages of paper.

Across the top was the banner
Cryptic News: covering the strange, the dangerous and the latest from the fringe.
A picture of Chatterjee took up the left corner, a handy headshot for any crazies or supernaturals that might want to hunt her down.  Brilliant.

The title of the article was
Hammer of God. 
Somehow, I just knew I wasn’t gonna like this article.

I’ve been at this business for some time now.  Five years, in fact.  Trying to shine a light on the dark shadows of society, looking in the corners and dusty places for the truth about the Other aspects of our world.  Other as in things we call supernatural, paranormal, cryptozological, or what Grandma Chatterjee calls raksas—monsters.  I’ve made some contacts and gotten closer to the dark side more times than I ever expected.  And found, like so many things in life, that there’s a rhythm to these things.  And lately, that rhythm has gone crazy.