Weston Ochse - Age of Blood

Madame Laboy’s voice rose. She screamed a series of words that weren’t part of any language Walker had ever heard. Her hands punched at the air in a complex pattern. What she was doing was many levels of mastery beyond the raising of the dead.

Walker watched as the monstrous hand lost its grip on the crypt cover, and let it drop back in place, disappearing beneath it.

Madame Laboy ran around the bulletproof shield and sped toward the crypt. With the help of Yank, she climbed on top of the lid, where she began to spit, and curse, and cast more spells.

“What was that?” Holmes asked.

She ignored him for a moment, then said, “Something I’d almost forgotten about. Something I’d misplaced.”

“Pretty fucking big to misplace,” Laws said, casting a worried eye at the crypt.

“You live as long as me and you’ll forget a lot of things, mon petit guerrier .” She stared at him, as if daring him to ask her age.

Laws snorted. He knew better than to upset a voodoo queen.

Triple Six sprawled in the briefing room chairs as they watched the training event unfold over and over and over on the flatscreen television. At first everyone laughed, pointing to where Yank had stepped into the guts of a zombie and almost fallen, or where Laws had missed the same old woman over and over, only to accidentally skewer her when he tripped. But by the fifth time through, no one was laughing. Sure, they’d survived the event, but they all knew they wouldn’t have if they hadn’t been wearing so much Kevlar body armor to protect them. They could also feel their collective breath cease when the thing in the crypt tried to get out.

“Do we know what that was?” Walker asked.

Laws, who was on his second Big Gulp, paused in chewing on the straw long enough to answer, “Don’t remember anything like that in the mission logs.”

The logs went back to the Revolutionary War. Triple Six had existed in one form or another since its creation by the First Continental Congress. Their first existence was as the Light-Horsemen, a Continental Army special-mission unit under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Lee, the grandfather of Robert E. Lee. A special unit of Lee’s Legion, the Light-Horsemen worked behind the scenes to hasten Cornwallis’s surrender, most notably at Pyle’s Massacre, the first evidence of the British use of lycanthropes against the colony. Henry Lee’s son would command the Red Dragoons during the Mexican-American War, their greatest service coming during the bloody assault at Molino del Rey.

Triple Six had also been known as the Roanoke Irregulars, Jefferson’s Order of the Mount, Roosevelt’s Special Brigade, and Wilson’s Warders. The names changed, but the missions remained the same—a dedicated group of men and a dog assigned a mission no one else knew about to recover, kill, disable, or remove something so far beyond the norm that the average citizen should never know of its existence.

Walker was just beginning to read the mission logs, choosing missions at random, just to become familiar with some of the things the team had encountered before. Covering seventy-two volumes, the handwritten logs were lengthy accounts of the missions, sometimes grinding into excruciating detail about the men, the equipment, and the methods used to take down one supernatural foe or another. It was beyond interesting, and he’d have loved to make the reading of those who’d come before him a priority, but he had his fiancée, Jen, to consider, and he was eager to spend more time with her.

“I do remember Madame Laboy, though,” Laws added, looking over at Holmes to see if the leader had anything to add. When he didn’t, Laws continued, “She’s mentioned several times. Hurricane Katrina and the Battle of New Orleans, for instance.”

“The Battle of…” Yank gave Laws a look like he thought the other SEAL was joking. “Maybe it was a relative.”

“Maybe so.” Laws sipped his Big Gulp, with a slight smile on his face.

“But don’t count on it,” Walker added.

“You really need to read the logs,” YaYa said, his voice barely above a whisper.

Walker noticed that he was still sick. YaYa had been enduring a seemingly unshakable flu. With his jacket zipped up and his hands shoved into his pockets he looked positively miserable.

“If I had more than eight seconds, I’d look at the damn logs,” Yank said, still unused to the pace and closeness of Triple Six. At times he seemed to get visibly angry, reacting as if they weren’t a close-knit bunch of brothers. “But that helmet shit fucking sucked. When are we ever going to be forced to wear those?”

“Easy, Yank,” Laws said, trying to win the FNG over with a smile.

But Yank clearly had something to get off his chest. He leaned forward and came just short of pounding the table. “What sort of team is this to put us with a bunch of fucking zombies? I mean, when you said it, I thought you were kidding. Fuck.” He gave the TV, which had been paused on the battle, an angry glare. “If I’d known, I might not have joined.”

Everyone turned quietly toward Holmes. “Do you want out?” Holmes asked, his voice low but sharp as a razor.

“No, I just want—”

Holmes cut him off by sitting forward quickly, “I asked if you wanted out. I didn’t ask you for your opinion or for your favorite color. A one-word answer will suffice.”

Yank breathed through his nose and his nostrils flared. His fists remained on the table, but they seemed to strain to stay there.

Laws set his Big Gulp down and leaned forward. “I think you’d better answer the question,” he said softly.

Walker didn’t know what everyone else thought as they stared at Yank, but no matter how mad and how mean he looked, Yank seemed more scared than anything else. Walker recognized it because he’d felt it himself. His first day at the orphanage, his first day at BUD/S (basic underwater demolition/SEAL) training, his first day with Triple Six. Walker’s life seemed to be filled with first days. Maybe that was the problem. Yank didn’t have many first days. And this was his first day embracing the reality of the Triple Six mission.

Finally Yank shook his head. “No.”

Holmes nodded and sat back. “Fine. Then stop telling us what you think and start telling us what you’ll do. I brought you on because you’re a weapons specialist and an expert on hand-to-hand.” He pressed the remote and the action continued. “See there,” he pointed. “Laws was using the same technique over and over. Although it worked, anything else but a zombie might have figured that out.”

“Ouch. Damned with faint praise,” Laws murmured.

“What we need,” Holmes continued, “are some moves we can transition to when we’re concentrating on not using any of our senses.”

“Sounds like something out of Kwai Chang Caine ,” Walker said. He’d been folding a piece of paper into an airplane and was finishing the creasing of the wings.

Laws shook his head. “Nuh-uh. You mean Kung Fu .”

Yank turned to observe the pair as they argued.

“Wasn’t that the TV show?” Walker asked.

Laws nodded. “Caine was played by David Carradine. Took the place of Bruce Lee, who originally came up with the idea for the show.”

Walker nodded, dropping the paper airplane on the table as he leaned back in his chair. He remembered catching episodes of the show dubbed in Filipino when he was at the orphanage. “Yeah. For sure Bruce Lee was badass, but Carradine was cool. Guess they wanted cool.”

Laws laughed. “Actually, they wanted white.”

YaYa snatched the airplane from the table, lit the tail of it with a match, and soared it across the room. “Actually,” he said, mimicking Laws’s tone, “that white man died in a backroom brothel in Bangkok with a noose around his neck and his Johnson in his hand.” When the plane crashed into the wall, YaYa added, “Kaboom!”