Weston Ochse - Age of Blood

“Coming from the underground temple is another leper. He’s holding a leash attached to a collar around YaYa’s neck.”

“Oh, shit. Where are they going?”

“The temple.” Walker paused a moment. “He’s moving like a dog. His legs… they’re reversed . Fuck!”

Yank tried to imagine what Walker was describing, giving YaYa a dog’s legs that had knees that bent backward instead of the forward-bending knees of a human. It was a hard thing, but the image was ugly.

“He’s staking YaYa to the base of the temple. Now’s the time to go, if you’re going to do it. Keep low.”

Yank turned and got his hands and feet under him. He felt the twinge in his lower left side. Probably his floating rib. Then he was up and running. He saw the activity at the temple pyramid. He also saw YaYa, and as if the SEAL-turned-dog knew what was happening, it turned and barked at him.

Twenty meters.

Ten meters.

Yank slammed into the side of the left-most obsidian butterfly mausoleum, out of breath and afraid he’d been seen.

“Clear?”

“Clear.”

From his vantage point, Yank could see into the Yopico. Beneath an overhanging roof was a wall with images in relief carved upon it. He couldn’t make out all the details, but it had images of men cowering beneath giant winged beings. A door on the left side was lit from behind. Shadows cast themselves back and forth, promising that there were more things in the interior of the underground temple. What those things were was another matter.

Yank turned and examined the mausoleum. Made of stone, it was cut with smooth sides and sharp corners that rose about seven feet high. He could reach up and grasp the top. He was able to check three sides but still couldn’t find an opening, which meant that the opening had to be on the front.

His gaze was drawn to the left, where the water fell from the pipe. The foul liquid caught in a wide pool that flowed toward the rear of the chamber and seemed to disappear. Besides the way they came and the stairs, it might prove to be another way for them to escape.

“Ghost Four, any news about One and Two?” The others were due to come in contact anytime now.

“Nothing, Three. Should be hearing something real soon.”

Yank hoped that Laws and Holmes were okay. They should have been on-site by now. He was sure they’d run into something. It could have been an apparition like he and Walker had seen, or it could have been something worse. The longer he survived SEAL Team 666, the more Yank realized it wasn’t what you knew, or what you’d practiced, but how well you reacted when the supernatural shit hit the fan.

Suddenly he heard a great grinding of stone. He ducked and put his back against the rear of the mausoleum. Pieces of rock rained down on him.

“Do not. Fucking. Move,” Walker said in his ear.

Rock broke and crumbled, then there was a beating of wings.

“Seriously. Don’t move. ”

“What is it?”

“Remember the chacmools?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re not there anymore.”

“Where are they?”

“In the air. Now they are scary-as-fuck skull-faced obsidian butterflies.”

Against his better judgment, Yank looked upward. Out of the corner of his eye he saw just a hint of movement. An eye, blazing white. The feet and legs of a giant bird beneath a woman’s iron torso. A wing cut like a giant Damascus blade, layers and layers of metal, swirling to create an almost beautiful pattern.

Beautiful if it wasn’t so damned terrible.

Walker remembered his first mission in the Chinese sweatshop with the women whose lips had been sewn together so they couldn’t tell anyone the secret of their craft—that they were creating suits from the many-tattooed skins of dead people. Then came the creatures. Too many and too different to count. Back when he was still green, he’d had a lot of thoughts working in his mind, not the least of which had been the introduction of not only the idea, but the reality that there were creatures and forces out there that had an intent to harm his great Red, White, and Blue. The U.S. Navy and SEAL training had prepared him to fight other men, only to have him discover that he was now fighting creatures whose existence could only be foretold in mythology of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual . As a kid in the orphanage he’d dabbled in the game, creating a Paladin to fight the evil hordes. He’d learned about orcs and dwarves long before the Lord of the Rings movies made them popular. He’d chosen a Paladin because of the armor and the sword, but also because if he fought hard and did well, he’d have a chance to have a Pegasus as a steed. The idea of a flying horse had captivated his eleven-year-old mind and kept him playing long into the nights when he should have been sleeping. But the monsters and their evil had only been as powerful as his young mind could create, and no matter how inventive an eleven-year-old might be, he couldn’t conceive—nor would he want to—the absolute malignancy of a being whose only design was to see the human form be broken.

But the Aztec gods were different. They didn’t care about good or evil. Such ideas were human creations. Aztec mythology was based on rules of absolutes. If one wanted a good harvest, this is what you did. If one wanted to defeat an enemy, then this is what you did. There was no negotiation. Period. So it came as no shock to him to see the assembled Los Zetas middle managers being escorted one after the other from the Yopico toward the top of the pyramid. In the hotel they’d been big cheese, flaunting their power, ordering their minions around and flashing gold-toothed smiles, each and every one kings of their own particular trash heap. But they could be replaced. In the upwardly mobile world of narcotrafficking, any enterprising soldier could get promoted as long as he didn’t steal from his boss or sleep with his boss’s wife/sister /daughter/mother.

The Zetas in the hotel had ordered men to their deaths, women into their beds, and families to work harvesting the spoils of their war against the American anti-drug machine. Now they were sacrifices. Stripped of their clothes, they wore only underwear and socks, the sight as clownish as it was awful. Many of them were overweight. Some were hairy from head to toe. Others were in shape, their bodies not yet having the opportunity to become attuned to success. They came with scars, tattoos, and burns, all reminders of what it had taken them to get where they’d been. The only unifying trait they shared was the walleyed look of shock mixed with a stultifying knowledge of their inexorable death. Of the fifty Zetas, only one turned and ran.

The gold-and-red-robed men watched placidly as the obsidian butterfly that had been resting halfway up the pyramid rose into the air. It flapped its Damascus wings and soared after the pathetic man, even as he screamed and wailed, his lone voice speaking for them all. Then the butterfly was upon him. With a few beats of its flint-hard wings, it sliced him into several pieces, his torso hitting the floor before his head.

The others watched this, then turned to their own demise. They were either too stoned or too resolute to care.

Atop the pyramid, the priests of Xipe Totec began their terrible work. One after the other, they shouted toward the unseen sky then lopped the head off a Zeta. As blood began to coat the temple steps, the heads rolled to the bottom, were caught by two men, and placed in the skull racks.

The last man in line queued up. This one was escorted by a figure that was as instantly familiar as the man whom he was escorting. Senator Withers was naked from the chest up. He still wore ragged suit pants and shoes, but his belly hung over his belt. His face was a visual narration in misery. Both eyes were black and swollen almost shut. His face was yellow with bruising. More deep purple bruises dotted his chest and arms and back. Blood had dried at his nostrils.