SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror Page 5

  As the four men got to work, Cade didn’t fail to notice the condition of the furniture piled near the entrance to the tunnel. If the demons broke inside on their own, the furniture, especially the older wooden pieces, should have suffered much more destruction. As it was it was barely touched...

  Almost as if someone had opened the door.

  But who?

  The answer, as it turned out, was waiting for them upstairs in the nave.

  The survivors had begun the awful task of collecting the bodies of the dead, carrying them from the nave and putting them inside the sacristy where Nils and Cade had met earlier. Cade pulled Nils aside and explained what they’d found in the downstairs.

  “A tunnel?” Nils said, when he heard what had been hidden behind the stack of furniture. “Father Giesler used to talk of a secret passage that had been used to smuggle out Jews during the war, but I’d always thought he was just making it up.”

  “The tunnel exists, there’s no doubt about that. And the demons used it to gain access to the church, though how they got that iron door open still remains to be seen.”

  “Oh, I think I can help with that,” Nils said, and led Cade across the room to a sheet-covered body lying behind a nearby row of pews. Nils bent and pulled back the sheet – which Cade saw was really an altar cloth – and exposed the corpse lying beneath it.

  Cade recognized the dead man as one of those who had wielded one of the homemade flame throwers earlier that evening. He’d never been directly introduced so he didn’t know the man’s name, but he rarely forgot a face.

  Which was a good thing as the man’s face was about the only part of him that was still recognizable. The rest of the man’s body was frozen in the midst of metamorphosis; he must have been undergoing a protean phase-shift when the bullet that killed him had found its home in the center of his forehead. Cade squatted beside the corpse and looked it over carefully. The man’s limbs had stretched a good foot longer than normal, giving him a decidedly unbalanced appearance. He’d also grown a covering of rubbery flesh that looked more like the hide of a seal than the skin of a human being. Nubs of bone – possibly the beginnings of horns? – were jutting out through rips in his shirt along the top of his shoulders and others could be seen along both sides of his torso. Cade couldn’t see below the man’s waist – the cloth covered that part of his body – but he had no doubt that he’d find the same thing were he to expose the rest of the man’s corpse.

  The man had clearly been ‘infected’ by one of the demons; the question was when.

  Cade glanced up at Nils.

  “How did this happen?”

  A shake of the head. “His name is... was... Stefan Braun. He was a halfway-decent mechanic at the auto body shop here in town and one of the men who helped this afternoon. You know, with the flame-throwers.”

  Cade nodded.

  Nils went on. “He seemed to withdraw after our excursion, but he didn’t seem hurt or anything. Just tired, you know? One of the women said she saw someone go down into the basement about half-an-hour before the attack and thinks it was him, but admits that she was half-asleep and could be wrong.”

  Cade didn’t think she was, though. The drones they’d been dealing with all night didn’t have the spiritual power necessary to cross that threshold uninvited, so someone had to have opened the door to the tunnel in the basement and invited the hellspawn into the church. If Braun had been injured when he’d come out with Nils to rescue Echo, he might have fallen under the demon’s influence without anyone knowing about it. A Judas in their midst. Then, when everyone else was sleeping, or at least when he thought they were sleeping, he made his way down into the basement and opened up the door, letting the demons inside.

  Cade explained as much to Nils.

  To say the priest was horrified would have been an understatement.

  “I led this man out there to try and rescue you and your teammates,” Nils said, the anguish on his face quite evident to Cade. “I told him it would be all right; that we had the firepower to defeat the creatures. Now you’re telling me that I’m responsible for turning him into... that? And as a result he let those things in here?”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Nils. Braun could have spoken up; he could have told us he’d been injured. There might have been something we could have done for him at that point, but not later, not once the demon had taken control. And once that happened, not even Braun could be blamed for his actions, never mind you.”

  Nils wasn’t convinced, but Cade didn’t have time to waste on his feelings at the moment. Braun hadn’t been dead long, so there was still a chance Cade could get some useful information out of him. But to do so he needed to act quickly, which meant keeping Nils occupied...

  “Either way, there’s nothing you can do for Braun now. But the same can’t be said of the rest of your flock. They must be terrified after all this. Why don’t you go do what you can to reassure them, check to be sure no one else has sustained any injuries we don’t know about, and then pray with them? My men and I can handle this,” Cade said.

  Nils stared at him blankly for a moment, then blinked and seemed to come back to himself. “Yes. You’re right. Pray with them. Of course.”

  Cade waited until Nils had started across the room, then caught Riley’s eye and called him over with a toss of his head. Once the men had gathered around him, he filled them in on what he’d learned from Nils and then told them what he intended to do.

  “Braun hasn’t been dead for long,” Cade said. “There’s still a chance we can learn something from him via my Gift. I want the three of you to keep the locals away from me until I’m finished.”

  “Roger that, boss,” Riley replied.

  Olsen nodded as well.

  Duncan looked a bit uneasy, but Cade didn’t really blame him. The last time he’d done something like this in Duncan’s presence, it hadn’t gone so well. He’d ended up biting the younger man’s forearm, if he remembered correctly.

  Never a dull moment.

  Cade knelt beside the corpse and removed the thin cotton flesh-colored gloves that he wore everywhere outside of his own home. The gloves were there to protect him from those around him, even his closest friends.

  Seven years before, in an encounter with the supernatural entity known as the Adversary, Cade’s wife Gabrielle had been killed and Cade himself had been wounded. When he’d come to in the hospital, he discovered that not only had he been left horribly scarred and without the use of his right eye, but that he’d gained some unusual abilities in the process. One of which was the power of psychometry.

  In short, he could read the psychic impressions left on objects just by touching them with his bare hands.

  The gloves he wore ninety-nine percent of the time kept him from being exposed to feelings and memories he didn’t want access to, but there were times when knowing such could come in handy.

  Like now.

  He removed the thin cotton gloves he was wearing and, with a glance at the others to be certain that they were ready, he reached out with his bare right hand and laid it on the dead man’s chest.

  CHAPTER NINE

  At first there was only darkness and a lingering sense of unease, as if he knew something was wrong but wasn’t able to put his finger on what it was.

  Then the images exploded across the theatre of his mind’s eye, hundreds if not thousands of them, one overlapping the other overlapping the next, a literal flood, until it was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. With them came a cacophony of sounds and voices, crashing around and over one another in their haste to be heard.

  Within seconds Cade was drowning in the tide.

  He couldn’t discern individual voices, but the tone of each was unmistakably the same – pure, unmitigated terror. Whoever these people were, they were in fear not just for their lives but for their very souls. The images were no better; Kodachrome snapshots of men, women, and children suffering hideous fates, images so disturbing that they
burned themselves onto the backs of his eyelids for all eternity.

  And behind it all, the sense that something dark was coming.

  Something that wanted to rip and rend and tear his flesh, to devour him whole...

  Cade pulled his hand back with a gasp, struggling to push the images out of his head and regain some sense of connection with the here and now. It was never easy coming back from the visions generated through his Gift and this one was particularly difficult as the sights and sounds he’d experienced tried to drown him with their savage intensity.

  He shook his head, trying to cast the memories aside, but he knew that they were here to stay as permanently as if they had been engraved on the inside of his skull. Just one of the darker aspects of this thing he called his Gift.

  More curse than Gift. Not the first time he’d thought this, either.

  “You alright, boss?”

  “Yeah... yeah, I’m okay. Just give me a second.”

  Cade took a couple of deep breaths and then rose to his feet. He staggered, suddenly exhausted, and was thankful for Riley’s steadying hand on his elbow.

  “Anything?” Olsen asked.

  “Not really. Or, at least, nothing useful. There were plenty of images – more than I’ve ever seen before, to be honest – but there wasn’t any cohesion between them. Nothing to tie them together. It was as if I was watching the memories of a hundred different people at once, all wrapped about each other like some kind of twisted kaleidoscope of pain and misery. It was not pleasant, I can tell you that.”

  Duncan looked away and Cade was reminded of his sergeant’s discomfort with his methods. For all his own secrets, Echo Team’s newest member could be damned stubborn when it came to stepping outside the Rule, the code of conduct that the Templars swore to uphold when they took the oath of investiture and became a knight of the Order. Cade’s personal philosophy was much simpler – use whatever means at your disposal to conquer evil wherever and whenever it reared its ugly head.

  Like now.

  Cade was disappointed the attempt hadn’t produced anything resembling concrete information about the extent of what they were dealing with.

  They were back to square one.

  And time was running out.

  “So now what?” Olsen asked. “If this bloke was stupid enough to invite those things inside, we’ve lost what little sanctuary we had. There’s nothing holding them back now.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Cade replied. “This is still holy ground and its difficult for creatures of that ilk to trespass on it, invited or not. And given the way they ran out of here with their tails between their legs, I’m not so sure that they’ll try again tonight. If they do, we’ll be waiting for them, as always.”

  Cade’s quiet confidence was just the thing his men needed to hear. They’d been through a lot together and hearing his determination to hold fast to their mission no matter the odds was somehow reassuring.

  “I don’t want any more surprises, however, so we’re going to stand watch in pairs. Duncan and I will take the first watch and—”

  Riley’s deep voice overrode Cade’s with ease. “Nick and I will take first watch; you need to rest.”

  Cade opened his mouth to argue, but then shut it again without saying anything. Riley was right; the use of his Gift on top of the battle they’d just fought had stolen the last of his energy and if he didn’t get some sleep he’d be useless when he was needed.

  He caught the stony look his master sergeant was giving him and smiled in his direction to show his acquiescence. “Right, as I said, Riley and Olsen will take the first watch. I want one of you by the main entrance and the other stationed at the top of the basement stairs. Leave the door open so we can hear anything going on in the basement; might give us a few extra minutes of warning if it comes to it.

  “If you hear anything unusual, anything at all, wake me up, understood?”

  “Roger that.”

  Satisfied that his men knew their duties, Cade wandered over to the nearest pew and stretched out on the wooden surface.

  Within moments he was sound asleep.

  * * *

  Cade.

  Wake up, Cade.

  The voice pulled him from his dreams as smoothly as a fish on a line, dragging him up from the depths to leave him lying open-eyed on the hard wood of the pew on which he’d laid down to rest.

  He blinked the sleep from his eyes and slowly sat up.

  Around him, the room was silent.

  Still.

  No one moved; no one even seemed to breathe. It was as if everyone but him was frozen in time; locked in the space of a single moment that stretched on and on into eternity.

  Cade felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

  The voice, one he knew all too well, came again.

  Cade.

  With his heart pounding in his chest and his pulse racing wildly, he jumped to his feet and looked around. It only took him a moment to locate her standing at the top of the steps, the door to the basement open behind her.

  Gabrielle.

  She was wrapped in a long robe with the hood pulled up to partially obscure her face, just as she’d been the last few times that he’d seen her, but he had no doubt that it was her. He would know her anywhere.

  When she saw that she had his attention, she turned and disappeared down the steps.

  Cade hustled down the aisle and over to the doorway. He was just in time to catch a glimpse of Gabrielle as she stepped off the stairs and into the darkness of the room beyond.

  He hurried to catch up.

  When he reached the bottom, he found her waiting by the iron door leading beyond the church. The barricade he and his men had erected only a short while before had been cleared away and light could be seen emerging from the depths of the tunnel beyond.

  What the hell was going on?

  This wasn’t the first time Gabrielle had appeared to him and when she had deigned to do so previously it had always been in his best interests, so he wasn’t worried about her leading him astray.

  At least, not too much.

  Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have some idea where he was headed.

  “Where are you taking me?” he called to her across the room, his voice sounding unnaturally loud even to him in the stillness of the church.

  She said nothing in reply, however, simply turning and walking into the mouth of the tunnel.

  Cade followed.

  Once inside the passage, he was surprised to discover that mining lights had been strung along its length at some point in the past; he hadn’t noticed them earlier in the evening when he and his men had discovered the entrance. The bare bulbs cast a dim light on the earthen walls around him, but at least he could see well enough to follow along in Gabrielle’s wake without tripping over the occasional pile of rubble that lay along the floor.

  The air inside the tunnel was cold and smelled of damp earth and old decay, causing him to eye the walls and ceiling uncomfortably. They looked sturdy enough, but he’d be thankful just the same when he emerged at the other end.

  Wherever that might be.

  He tried to catch up with Gabrielle more than once, but no matter how quickly he hurried along, she always stayed just out of reach. He got close enough once to catch a glimpse inside the depths of the hood she wore and wished he hadn’t; the wet gleam of bone showing through on the ravaged side of her face was such a sharp contrast to the smooth, unblemished skin on the other.

  After that harsh reminder of how he’d failed to save her the night the Adversary had attacked them, Cade wasn’t in such a rush to stay close.

  Roughly ten minutes after he descended into the church basement, Cade stepped through a hole in the rear wall of the caretaker’s shed that stood at the far edge of the large cemetery that occupied the back of the church property. The door ahead of him was wide open, the harsh winter storm having pinned it back against the shed wall, and through it he could see Gabrielle winding her way thr
ough the gravestones toward the dense copse of trees just beyond.

  Any chance of mistaking Gabrielle for a living, breathing woman was dispelled when Cade noticed the thick carpet of newly-fallen snow that the storm had deposited on the ground over the last few hours was completely undisturbed in her wake.

  Bracing himself against the cold, he stepped out into the storm and followed his murdered wife.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Duncan awoke to find Riley’s hand on his shoulder and the other man leaning over him in the semi-darkness.

  “Time to get up,” Echo’s executive officer told him. “Cade wants us ready to move in five.”

  Move? Duncan thought. Move where?

  He didn’t bother to ask, for he knew Riley would just tell him to wait for Cade’s briefing. He nodded instead and said he’d be ready.

  When Duncan joined the others in an alcove off to one side of the nave a few moments later, he discovered they were as curious as he. For once, Riley didn’t know any more than he was telling, which was rather strange in its own right. As the number two man in the squad – in the entire Echo Team for that matter – Cade usually kept him pretty well up to speed, but not this time. After all they’d been through in the last twelve hours, the thought made Duncan uneasy.

  That feeling only intensified when Duncan saw Cade approaching from across the nave. The Knight Commander was walking beside Father Nils, speaking earnestly to him as they came toward the others, and it was clear from the expression on the young priest’s face that he didn’t like whatever it was that he was hearing. Though they were keeping their voices down, the tension between the two men was obvious and Nils was repeatedly shaking his head in the negative. It seemed he didn’t want to do whatever it was that Cade was suggesting.