Robert Crane - Soulless

I looked at him, then Charlie in turn. “Can you get Kat and Scott into my car and meet me in front of the safehouse?”

She got a lazy grin on her face. “You just need all kinds of help today.”

“Can you do it or not?”

She shrugged. “Sure. Keys?”

“Kat had them last,” I said, already turning to run down the street. “Check her pockets – and, Charlie…” She turned and I shook my head at her attire. “Remember to touch them only on the clothing.”

“No problem with the blond girl,” she called back. “But the boy…I might touch him some other places.”

I ignored her and ran down the street at full clip. I saw faces staring out of the windows of houses, saw curtains rustle in others as I passed. I watched the house numbers decrease until I reached 8453, a nondescript single story white house. I decided to avoid the front door and instead jumped over the wooden gate to the backyard. I listened over the slight ringing that persisted in my ears as I came around the corner and saw the back door kicked in.

I drew my gun, changed to a fresh magazine and stepped inside. The door led into a small hallway. I could see a kitchen to my left, along with a body and a lot of blood. Straight ahead was a family room, and off to the right was a hallway leading to several bedrooms. I went into the kitchen first, which had a nasty green tile backsplash over orange countertops and beige linoleum floors. Those were distracting, but the body in the middle of the kitchen was more bizarre than the horrific 70s color scheme.

First of all, it was obviously dead. There was enough blood on the floor to fill three bodies, and his face was frozen in anguish. He was elevated slightly off the floor by something on his back.

Worse than him were the remains of two enormous snakes lying on the kitchen floor. I shuddered. I do not care for snakes. I kicked at one of them to make sure it was dead. It didn’t move, but that didn’t make me feel much better. While I knew logically that they weren’t slimy, I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I touched it, it’d be slick and disgusting. I leaned in to look at the dead man, adjusting the body to see what was causing his corpse to incline.

When I lifted him, I almost retched. I saw what was holding him up, and it looked as though the snakes had been growing out of his shoulder blades. I dropped him and stood, stifling an urge to vomit. I kept my gun in hand and stepped over him, coming around the corner of the kitchen into the dining room to find another man on the couch, this one much younger, and with no obvious signs of snakes growing out of him.

He was also quite alive, though he was limp, arm hanging off the edge of the sofa. His chest moved up and down, eyes closed. I heard the faint sound of sirens outside and walked over to him, shaking him with one hand while keeping the pistol pointed at him with the other. He didn’t stir, and after two more attempts I left him and took a quick look around the rest of the house. Two bedrooms were pretty simple and a cursory look under the beds and in the closets didn’t reveal anything. The third bedroom seemed to be set up as an office, and I grabbed the laptop computer for later analysis by someone who’d know what to do with it.

I started to leave but paused as I headed toward the front door. There had to be a basement, didn’t there? I started to set down the laptop when I heard an urgent series of honks from a car horn, just outside. I clutched the laptop tighter and with a last look at the young man unconscious on the couch, I ran out the front door.

The Directorate SUV was next to the curb, and another violent blast from the horn issued forth as I went down the front steps. I saw Charlie in the driver’s seat and Reed’s long hair through the tinted window in the backseat. I jumped in the passenger side and Charlie gunned the engine, not even waiting for me to shut the door. She slowed the car at the corner, which was fortunate, because two cop cars went shooting by, sirens blaring, and my aunt gave me a grin. She made the car take a leisurely turn to the left, and off we went.

“Where to?” Charlie asked as we headed down the road. I saw a couple more sets of cop cars, lights flashing, go past.

“I don’t know.” I held the laptop tight, almost as if I were afraid to let it go, lest it vanish. “We need to lay low.”

“I thought you were with the FBI?” Reed spoke up from the backseat, his voice laced with sarcasm. “Why didn’t you just stay on scene?”

“Because while I and my colleagues might well be from the FBI, I’d have had a hell of a time explaining you two.” I looked from him to Charlie, who still wore a grin. “If I’d had to, I would have, but let’s just say I wanted to make that Plan B.”

“That coulda been a lotta fun,” Charlie said. I shot her a look of disbelief and she shrugged. “Come on, lying to the cops? Talk about a thrill.”

“So is this your aunt?” Reed asked.

Charlie looked back with a faint smile of pleasure. “You know me?”

“Charlene Nealon, A.K.A. Charlie,” Reed said. “Didn’t know you were still around, but yeah, I’ve heard of you. I particularly enjoyed reading about your exploits in Nevada.”

I saw a subtle change in Charlie’s persona then, a subtle clamping of her jaw as her smile disappeared and she turned back around to focus on the road. “That was a while ago. I barely remember Nevada.”

I watched Reed, and he smiled. “There’s some other people that could probably say the same.”

“How are they doing?” I caught Reed’s attention and nodded at Kat and Scott, both unconscious next to him. Scott was leaned up against the window like he had been the night before when he passed out, and Kat was lying gracelessly across his lap. I would have cringed for her, but, frankly, it wasn’t as though she’d never been in that position before.

“They’re out.” Reed illustrated his point by reaching over to give Scott a gentle slap across the face. Scott moaned, but did not wake. “The sweep team hit them with an amped-up version of a taser. No wires needed. I’m told they got the design from the Directorate after you guys left one behind at your house.”

“One of those things put Wolfe down on the ground,” I said. “I can’t imagine it felt very good for either of them.” I turned around to talk to him. “Who is Omega?”

He kept a cool dispassion as he stared back. “You don’t know?”

“The Directorate knows next to nothing about them.” I ran a hand through my hair. “Old Man Winter knows something, but he’s…not telling.” I frowned. “It’s above my pay grade.”

Reed shrugged. “I can’t help you, then. Sounds like something you’ll figure out when your pay grade goes up.” He gave me a maliciously self-satisfied smile. “Of course, if you want to leave the Directorate and join me, I could answer your questions instead of keeping you in the dark like they do—”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Charlie said. “They’re the gods, okay? The old ones, the ones from the myths, or what’s left of them.” She turned from driving to focus on me. “The Greek gods, the Roman ones? Persians, Norse, all else? There’s a reason there are some commonalities: it’s because they were all part of the same group. They ruled the planet for thousands of years, through their intermediaries, and vassals, and kings, and whatnot.” She turned back to the windshield as she made a turn, then glanced back at me. “You’ve gotta at least know that much, right?”

I squinted at her. “You mean…like Zeus and Poseidon and Thor and Odin and all that jazz?”

“Well,” she said, “Zeus and Poseidon are good and dead; so’s Odin. Not sure about Thor…but anyway…yeah, those guys. What’s left of the originals, and quite a few of their descendants. It’s kind of a cabal.”