Matt Archer: Blade's Edge (17 page)

Then I remembered I hadn’t known, either, and here I was.

Mike gestured to the new guys. “Kirschner, Wynn, this is…” The corner of Mike’s mouth turned up. “Special Agent Archer. One of our wielders. Mr. Cruessan is his muscle.”

Wynn, who was slight and lean like Schmitz, stared up at Will. “I can see that.”

Will grumbled something impolite and threw his bags in the bin bolted to the floor behind our seats. Grinning, I stuck out my hand. “Nice to meet you.”

Wynn shook hands with me. “Likewise.”

Kirschner, a bulky guy with olive skin and a scar under his left eye, just nodded. I shrugged, taking a seat next to Uncle Mike. Colonel Black stole Will’s chair and plopped down next to me.

“You’ll want to get some rest on the flight,” the colonel said. “We’ll land at Bagram, then your team will immediately catch transport to meet up with Parker. More than a dozen villages have been hit in the last three weeks. Eighty dead or missing in that time.” Colonel Black stared at his hands. “Thirty-seven are children under the age of twelve, and twenty-six are women.”

“So many,” I said. “Last year it took the monsters months to kill eighty. And that was across five continents.”

“It’s what we’ve been afraid of, Chief,” Uncle Mike said. “We need to put a lid on the situation.”

Will leaned over my chair back. “Then what happens, after we finish these guys off?”

I shook my head. “The next wave. And the next, and the next.”

Until we got to top of this pyramid of evil, monsters, demons and dark spirits would just keep coming, like cockroaches invading a greasy-spoon diner. With no end in sight.

There will be an end,
the knife-spirit insisted.

That’s what
I
was afraid of.

Chapter Eighteen

B
uilt like a cross between
a Humvee and a tank, the M-ATV offered the safest means of ground travel in Afghanistan, even if it nearly rattled my teeth out as the tires fought the rocky ground. It even had a remote-control, roof-mounted M240 machine gun. Some of the others had grenade launchers on top. It was easy to feel invincible in this vehicle. Well, except for the rattling teeth. Even so, I had this uneasy feeling in my gut, a constant nagging of low-level interference that wouldn’t let me relax.

We took a path through steep hills leading this way and that. The terrain provided lots of cover for anything hiding among the boulders, human or not, and Wynn sat tense in the front seat next to Lieutenant Johnson as the first village came into view.

My eyelids felt like sandpaper against my tired eyes and I rubbed them for the seventeenth time. Like the other sixteen tries, it brought no relief. Will coughed next to me, sagging in his seat like a piece of wilted lettuce. I’d love to get out and walk around a little, and I bet he would, too. We’d been traveling for two days—the flight, then by Chinook to an outpost, and finally by M-ATV—all in hopes of piecing together stories about whatever was attacking people. If we knew that much, maybe we’d have better luck in finding Ramirez. The series of caves where he disappeared was completely empty, a dead-end. I kept waiting for the knife-spirit to perk up and tell me where the monsters had taken him. Except for sharp warnings about danger, she hadn’t been much use so far. Weird for sure.

Johnson pulled in behind Parker. The village was surrounded by a stone and wood wall, with a little gate at the front. It didn’t look like it’d do much to keep predators out. The wind whipped, and a lonely sound whistled through the canyon.

We waited for a few minutes, but no one came to greet us. Parker got out of his vehicle slowly, and Kirschner slid out behind him, covering Parker with his rifle. Johnson gave Wynn a quiet order to cover them both with our mounted weapon.

Nothing moved inside the village.

Parker took a few steps toward the gate, calling out something in Dari, the primary language spoken in these parts.

Still no answer.

“Didn’t someone say this village was populated?” Johnson muttered.

“Yeah,” Wynn whispered. “It’s supposed to be.”

Parker and Kirschner crept through the gate. A second two-man team followed. Three minutes later, Parker reappeared and waved to us. Everyone piled out.

“What happened?” I asked as we gathered together. “Where is everyone?”

Parker addressed Uncle Mike instead of me. “Sir, we found evidence of a recent attack. Suspected supernatural activity.”

“All right,” Uncle Mike said. “Matt, why don’t you go take a look. See if you can, um, sense something.”

Not like I had so far, but I nodded and headed for the gate. The first thing I noticed gave me chills. The town’s outer wall was riddled with bullet holes. I checked the building just inside the gate—a one room house made of stone—and its ceiling had bullet holes in it, too. The shots were all over the place, like the shooter had panicked.

Two more buildings had bullet holes in their walls and ceilings, but no other sign of life. The little furniture these people owned had been kicked over, cabinets had been overturned and food littered the ground. In the house farthest from the gate, someone had scrawled a message onto the stone wall with a piece of charred wood.

“Parker, can you read this?” I called.

He hurried over, then mouthed the words as he read. “It says, ‘Beware—Takers.’”

“What’s that mean?”

Parker sighed. “The people out here call the things that are attacking them ‘Takers.’”

Given the emptiness of the village, Takers seemed like an accurate name to me.

Over the next two days, we scouted village after village. Some were as empty as the first. In a few we found bodies, usually men, that were blistered and disfigured. Sometimes, though, only part of the people had been taken. When we asked the survivors questions, they told us that the Takers had come. “Winged shadows,” an old lady told Parker, who had a little trouble translating what she meant. He asked her to clarify her statement and she said, “Flying death.”

At another village, a woman, covered head to toe in a black robe, grabbed my arm and rattled off a long string of words I didn’t understand. Johnson came over and said, “She’s asking you to find her babies. Two boys, ages seven and four. Their father died the night of the attack, trying to stop the Takers from kidnapping their children. She said they were like great, winged demons, snatching babies in the dark, and she’s afraid no one can stop them.”

He murmured something in Dari, and the woman bowed her head and nodded.

“What’d you tell her?” I asked. The woman’s pain really hit me between the eyes. I hated it when kids were targeted.

“I told her you were a guardian, sent to drive this evil away.” Johnson rubbed a hand over his face.

The evening of the second day, we received word about a nearby village that hadn’t been attacked yet. It was in a remote area surrounded by craggy, dusty mountains two hours from our present location. Definitely worth checking out, but there was no way to know if we’d find these Takers. It all banked on being in the right place at the right time in a country almost the size of Texas.

As we closed in on the village, I looked across Will to get a glimpse of the terrain as we bounced along. Nestled between the hills, ramshackle houses made of wood and sturdier stone buildings with flat roofs and thick walls huddled together, like people looking for warmth during a harsh winter. They had no wall or gate around the couple dozen buildings that made up their community. The whole place felt vulnerable, especially under the shadow of those mountains.

The village was quiet but light spilled out of several windows. When we pulled up, a group of men came out of the nearest building. All held semi-automatic rifles, AK-47s, which they pointed at the ground when they saw who we were. Their long shirts and head coverings blew in the stiff breeze coming down the hills. Most of them stood tense, wary; based on their behavior, these people were used to being on edge for one reason or another.

Captain Parker strode forward, calling out greetings. Probably “we come in peace,” or something like that. The lead man in the group nodded, gesturing in several directions. The men talked to Parker for a while before he came back to us.

“They haven’t been hit yet, but other villages around here have,” the captain said. “They’re really worried, because they’ve heard the Takers often come when the night is darkest, appearing out of the shadows.”

“Small wonder they’re scared—it’s a new moon,” Johnson said. “Can’t get a much darker night than that.”

I looked to the sky; it ranged far and black with no moon. Even though thousands of stars—far more than I’d ever seen, even on campouts in the boonies—shone white, they were too cold and distant to give us much light. Will shifted on his feet next to me, clearly anxious. I could feel it, too. A twinge of something ugly. Thoughts of bullet-riddled walls and deserted homes made me shudder. The knife-handle flashed blue, agreeing with us, and the hairs on my neck stood up.

The bogeyman was coming to pay us a visit.

Captain Parker took his team to the east side of the village. I followed Uncle Mike, Johnson, and Will to the west. Wynn and Schmitz covered our backs.

That left a lot of open ground. When I asked Mike why we didn’t stay closer to the buildings to have a better chance of responding, he said, “If the Takers come, we have to leave them a door, Chief. Then we can close in on them.”

So we were using the villagers as bait. I glanced at Will; his forehead was wrinkled. He didn’t like it any better than I did, but it was too late for second-guessing. Best we could do now was act fast if need be.

We found an outcropping of rock up the hill from the center of the village. The knife hummed constantly, a gentle drone that kept me on alert. Every ripple in the breeze made me jump, and I was cold, even in my GORE-TEX long johns and heavy canvas BDUs. Winter here was brutal. The winds gusted down the mountain, sharp and bitter. Maybe if I told myself it was the weather, I wouldn’t have to admit the shivers were from being scared of what lurked in the dark.

Will settled down in a depression behind the rocks and got out his night-vision goggles. I followed suit. No movement outside the buildings, which glowed a brighter green on a faded green background, like a landscape from another planet. The villagers with the guns waited inside their guardhouse, ready to defend their people in case we didn’t get the job done. Not that their bullets would be of much use.

As the night crept on, the wind nearly froze me solid. Will winced when he changed positions, and Mike slapped his chest, a trick he swore warmed him up. Except for swirls of dust drifting along the ground in the village, all was quiet.

Then a child screamed.

Everyone behind the rocks popped into a crouch as lanterns blazed to life in a number of windows. New screams rang out—women this time. Nothing moved outside the buildings. Nothing visible, anyway.

“We’re going in,” Uncle Mike ordered. Everyone stood and ran low to the ground, trying to use the rocks’ shadows for cover.

“What is it?” Johnson asked as we raced toward the buildings. “I don’t see a damn thing out there!”

No one answered at first, then Will gasped and yanked off his goggles. He pointed. “There! Some kind of…dust?”

As we got closer, the knife’s warning alarm went off big-time. I pulled off my goggles to get a better look. When Uncle Mike shined a flashlight on it, we saw the dust wasn’t your regular old dirt stirred up by the wind. A brownish-black fog seethed along the ground and whatever it was, I knew instinctively the stuff was dangerous.

I slid to a stop, yelling, “Don’t touch it, don’t touch it!”

Sergeant Wynn must not have heard me; he ran ahead. The second his leg went into the fog, his entire body seized up and convulsed. With a hacking cough, he spewed blood everywhere. Wynn staggered around, holding his hands out to us, but he was five feet into the fog and it was drifting our way, so we had to back off.

Wynn fell to his knees as sores broke out on his face. Blood and drool ran down his chin and he screamed and screamed. Then his skin split, cracking around the sores. He gurgled out a plea, “Make it stop.
Please!
”

Johnson exchanged tense looks with Uncle Mike, who grabbed Will and I by the arms and spun us around. As soon as he’d dragged us ten feet, a rifle shot cracked.

The sergeant stopped screaming.

There was a horrifying moment of silence, then Schmitz murmured a blessing. I wrenched my arm free from Mike’s grip, took two steps and threw up, not sure if it was the state of Wynn’s face or the sound of the bullet making me sick. We had to mercy-kill a guy on the team. We had to
shoot
him to save him. Oh, God…I wanted to curl up in the fetal position with my arms over my head, but the wail of a little girl brought me back to reality.

“That way,” Will said, his voice shaking. He pointed toward the guardhouse.

The guardhouse was at the corner of a row of buildings. Fog seeped down the alleys between them, so we skirted the village. As we passed between buildings, I got glimpses of pale bodies walking through the fog, some carrying a struggling person.

The fog hadn’t gotten all the way around the guardhouse, but we had company, so we couldn’t advance. When I saw what waited for us, I skidded to a halt, and Will crashed into my back.

Mike hit it with the beam of his flashlight and gasped, “What
is
that thing?”

A creature covered in sores, like the ones on Wynn, stumbled along slowly, carrying a wriggling little girl over its bony shoulder. The girl was probably six or so, and she was missing her two front teeth. Her long nightdress tangled around her legs as she thrashed to get free. Black fog swirled around the thing’s skinny, chapped ankles and it paid no attention to the flashlight beam shining in its face. It didn’t look like any zombie from movies I’d seen. Sure, it had been a man once, and it’s skin was pasty white, but the creature was thin, almost wraith-like, and it didn’t drool or moan. It just shuffled one step at time, clutching the girl tight with skeletal fingers. What scared me most were its eyes. Not the cataract-type eyes I expected out of a run-of-the-mill zombie, but black…solid black. No iris, no nothing—just black, shiny eyes in a chalk-white bony face.

“Can you throw the knife?” Mike asked. “Keep it from taking the girl?”

“I could, but how would I retrieve it?” I said. “Besides, if I hit that thing and it goes down, the girl will fall into the fog.”

Schmitz, always scouting, pointed at the roof of the guardhouse. “Try taking it from above. Maybe you can grab her before she falls. We’ll cover the building, stave off any ground attack.”

Good plan. “Will, hoist me up.”

Will and Johnson made me a foothold with their hands and flung me onto the roof. I landed hard on the slick tiles but didn’t roll off. Gunshots and screams echoed through the village as, commando-style, I spider-crawled across the uneven roof. The zombie carried the girl around the back corner of the guard house. This would be my only shot. Slipping and sliding, I moved as fast as I dared, hoping to cut them off.