Highways to Hell (25 page)

Jack laughed. “Maybe next time, pal.” He chambered a round too, then propped the gun’s barrel over his shoulder and fished his cigarettes from a jacket pocket. Jack always had a smoke in the last moments before heading into a firefight; it helped calm his nerves. He fired a smoke up with his Zippo and looked beyond Lucien at the warehouse. “You sure this is the place, then?”

Lucien nodded. “Positive.”

Jack took another drag off his cigarette, nodding as he exhaled more smoke. “The scent is that strong? You followed it here all the way from Bill’s apartment?”

Lucien nodded again. “Their stench is almost overwhelming, at least when I’m in full-hound mode. Followed it like a beacon. They had some people keeping watch outside, armed guards.” He grinned. “They’re no longer a factor.”

Jack let his half-smoke cigarette fall to the cracked and faded asphalt, extinguishing the still-glowing ember beneath the heel of a wingtip. “Let’s do this.” He looked at Raven. “It’s your time to shine, Rave.”

Raven remained expressionless as she strode past the men, climbed the short set of stairs to the back entrance, and positioned herself to aim a kick at the steel door.

Lucien frowned again. “Why is Raven taking the lead?”

Jack smirked. “You’ll see.”

Raven let out a grunt as her right foot shot forward with tremendous force and knocked the door off its hinges.

Lucien said, “Oh.”

Jack chuckled. “Yeah, but there’s another reason, too. Let’s go.”

Raven moved through the dark opening and into the warehouse. The men clambered up the steps and followed her into the darkness.

7.

Full-Tilt Rock and Roll

The threaded barrel of Raven’s Ingram M10 was fitted with a Sionics suppressor. The weapon made a flat, snapping sound when she fired half a clip into the face of the first alien they encountered. The thing’s head nearly disintegrated, spewing white goo as it toppled to the concrete floor.

Jack’s voice was a barely audible whisper in the darkness: “
That’s
why.”

Raven remained on point as they moved deeper into the warehouse, moving in crouches as they progressed from one row of steel shelving to another. She dispatched five more alien guards with the same lethal efficiency. Each of the men fleetingly wondered whether the slightly built (but deceptively powerful) girl would accomplish this entire mission single-handedly.

For his part, Jack sincerely hoped not. He admired the hell out of Raven, but his male ego reacted in typical fashion, urging him to take out his share of bad guys before the evening’s festivities were finished. He managed to suppress the urge, an all-too-rare case of common sense winning out over his baser impulses. Heavily armed though they were, this was an extraordinarily dangerous situation they’d walked into. Better by far to proceed with relative stealth, allowing Raven to pick off stray aliens with her Ingram, than letting loose with a barrage of attention-drawing shotgun blasts.

The darkness began to fade as they moved closer to the warehouse’s center, where banks of flickering florescent lights gleamed overhead. They reached the last row of shelving and crouched down behind a rusting forklift.

Jack’s blood boiled as they surveyed the scene at the heart of the warehouse. Pushed against the far wall were the remnants of some sort of assembly line. The warehouse’s center floor area had been given over to an array of gleaming metal tables. Each had a naked, drooling human strapped to it. Aliens in white cloaks stood over the tables, poking and prodding at the bound humans with various instruments. The men and women on the table barely reacted, even when something sharp was inserted into their flesh.

Drugged
, Jack thought, his teeth grinding.

More humans crouched in cages suspended by chains from the ceiling. Men and women, even a few children. All of them nude, all of them drugged to insensibility. Armed guards patrolled the perimeter of what Jack instantly thought of as the “operating theater.” There were maybe a dozen of them in all, each of them carrying rifles or handguns. Jack began to smile as he studied them. They were sloppy. They didn’t expect intruders, so they weren’t looking for any. They milled about like bored high school students lounging outside the cafeteria between classes, talking and occasionally laughing.

Jack looked at Andy and held out a hand. “Stunners.”

Any nodded and reached inside his jacket. He snapped a stun grenade off a strap and pressed it into Jack’s open palm. He passed another to Lucien, and another to Raven, then palmed one for himself.

Jack said, “These bastards aren’t half as disciplined as the worst of Saddam’s front-line conscripts. Look, the one group of complacent sons of bitches is wandering back to the other group of complacent sons of bitches.” He looked at Andy again. “How’s your pitching arm?”

Andy flexed his shoulder, limbering up. “Pretty good, I think.”

Raven nodded.

Lucien grunted an affirmation.

Jack pulled the pin on his grenade and the others did the same.

“Count of three.”

Jack counted off, then leapt to his feet, his arm coming forward in the same motion, sending a fist-sized black blob hurtling through the air. Three more followed it in similar arcs. The alien guards didn’t realize anything was amiss until the grenades clattered on the floor and rolled between their legs—and by then it was too late. The M429s erupted in nearly simultaneous blasts of flame and smoke. The guards pitched to the ground, most of them losing their weapons in the process. Jack and his gang of liberators charged out of their hiding place, speeding past the startled “doctors” and moaning “patients” en route to the still-stunned guards.

A couple of them had already managed to stagger to their feet and begin to raise their weapons. Jack aimed his shotgun and squeezed the trigger, blowing apart the first one’s head. The roar of another shotgun, this one wielded by Lucien, blew apart the neck of the second. It remained upright and continued its labored effort to bring its weapon to bear, but Lucien just chambered another round and shot it point-black in the face. Most of the remaining guards stayed on the ground, still stunned, a few even holding their trembling hands up in supplication. Andy leveled the barrel of his weapon at the back of one’s head, then squeezed the trigger. It jerked once and slumped to the ground. His face expressionless, he moved to the alien next to it and killed it, too. Jack and Lucien followed his lead, systematically executing the remaining guards. They’d discussed it beforehand—none of them were to be left alive.

Raven left them to it and hurried after the fleeing faux-doctors. She was faster than a normal human, but that was because she
wasn’t
a normal human. The descendent (from her father’s side) of a refugee clan of wizards from another galaxy, she had alien blood flowing through her veins, too. Which kind of made things more personal for her—these interplanetary thugs offended both aspects of her nature.

She swung the Ingram back and forth in wide arcs, taking most of them down within moments. She ejected the spent clip, snapped another one in pace as she pounded after the few still-mobile aliens, and started firing again. The final three aliens fell to the floor and Raven quickly finished them off, obliterating most of their heads with close-range bursts from the Ingram. She then went back to the initial group of wounded white-cloaked aliens and used another full clip to do them in. When it was done, she flicked the gun’s safety on and returned to where the men were standing.

Jack looked at her. “You okay?”

A corner of Raven’s mouth twitched. “All in a day’s work, boss.”

Lucien’s gaze swept over the rows of gleaming tables and strapped-down slaves. He glanced at the ceiling, too. “Okay, so the bad guys are vanquished. That was the easy part. What do we do about these poor bastards?”

Andy flipped open a cell phone. “Got it covered, mate.”

Jack grinned. “Come on, Lucien. You knew he’d say that.”

Lucien shook his head. “The mysterious, all-knowing Svengali thing freaks me out a little sometimes.”

Jack said, “Yeah?”

Andy moved away from his friends, turning his back to them and talking in hushed tones for a minute or two. Then he turned back to them and snapped the cell phone shut. “A clean-up crew and medics are on the way.” His gaze flicked upward. “Let’s do our part and figure out how to get those people down from there.”

Before Jack could ask how they were supposed to do that, a portal opened and a big man in a blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt stepped through it. He was followed by a team of white-suited men and women carrying first aid kits and other medical supplies.

Jack blinked rapidly for a few moments. “Well…that was fast.”

The white suits immediately started attending to the people on the tables, and Mr. Hawaiian Shirt came over and bear-hugged Andy O’Day. Andy slapped the other man’s back. “Good to see you again, mate.”

They separated and Andy said, “Jack, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. This is Fred Grimm.” Andy winked. “No relation. I think.”

“Huh.” Jack shook the affable man’s hand. “Are you sure we’re not related?”

Fred’s eyes twinkled with amusement. “Oh, pretty sure.’ He half-turned away from them, taking in the totality of the situation. His voice took on a graver tone. “We’ll handle all this. Go on and get out of here.”

Andy glanced again at the caged humans hanging from the ceiling. “But—”

“You’ve done enough tonight. We’ve got this covered.” Fred grinned again. “Even superheroes need a little rest.”

Jack frowned. “Superheroes? Hey, listen—”

Andy clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t argue with him, brother. My advice, someone calls you a superhero, go with it. There are worse things to be.”

Jack let out a sigh. The man had a point.

Better heroic than Damned anyway.

“Okay. Fine. Let’s get out of here.” He looked at Fred, studying him intently for a moment. “We’ll talk again, you and I.”

Fred smiled. “Oh, I don’t doubt that.”

The members of the Grimm Detective Agency walked out of the warehouse exiting through the rear door Raven had kicked down less than half an hour earlier. They moved slowly down the steps, each of them feeling that deep tiredness that comes in the wake of surviving a battle, a sapping of energy that had more to do with the relief of high-level stress than with physical exertion.

As they reached the parking lot, a hunched figure lurched toward them out of the darkness and Jack instinctively raised the shotgun.

But Lucien pushed the barrel down. “Don’t.”

The figure came closer and Jack saw it was just a grime-covered man in filthy clothes. The man staggered like a drunk, and in a moment Jack realized it was because he was in fact, very, very drunk. Jack shuddered, and a vague chill settled in his gut. A part of him sometimes suspected he’d wind up like this poor fellow one day.

Duke Carlyle gasped at the sight of all the weaponry. “Don’t shoot me.”

Jack said, “Go sleep it off elsewhere, fella.”

Duke squinted at him. “Who’re you to tell me what to do?” His gaze went to each of them in turn, lingering for a moment on Lucien. He frowned. “Why ain’t you got no clothes on, boy?”

Lucien smiled.

And shifted to hound mode.

Duke fainted.

Lucien reverted to human form. “That’s why.”

Jack sighed. “What do we do with this guy? Leave him here? It’s not like he’s got a home to go to.”

Andy shook his head. “You have something of a point, but that’s not what superheroes do.”

Jack rolled his eyes. “Again with that nonsense.”

Andy said, “We’ll get him to a shelter, see he’s looked after, at least for tonight.”