Weston Ochse - Age of Blood

“Do you recognize them?” Alice asked, nudging one of the homunculi with the barrel of her gun.

YaYa nodded. “We need to make sure everyone in the room is properly debriefed.”

“I figured as much.”

Youers came up beside her. “So this is what you were talking about. Damn things look evil.”

Alice offered YaYa a weak smile.

He just looked at her and shook his head. “Wonder what they were doing with them.”

He spied the boxes that had been hijacked. One had been opened, but the others seemed to be untouched. The bones were gone from the open box, but off to the side were a large mortar and pestle, and inside the mortar was a fine white dust. He spied a basket of unfilled vials, the kind someone would wear around the neck. What quality would a chupacabra bone have? He examined the array of broken and unbroken glassware, but couldn’t figure out what they would do with them. And what did this have to do with the homunculi?

YaYa shrugged the questions away as exhaustion swept through him. They’d have to figure that out later. For now, he needed to get this packed up and shipped back to the Salton Sea facility. He’d just begun to organize the removal when a nasty, guttural voice in his head whispered harshly, “Look up!”

Without thinking, YaYa complied, and saw a shadowy figure moving swiftly across the top of the highest level of refrigerators. He pointed his pistol in a two-fisted grip and fired. The shot missed, but the sound of it caused everyone to jump, then follow the aiming point of his pistol.

A man moved along the top of the row, then disappeared on the far side. YaYa and Youers were closest and ran to intercept, thinking he might climb down. YaYa’s exhaustion made him slower than Youers. That YaYa had been a near-Olympic-class runner just weeks ago was testament to what was happening in his body, he thought.

He heard Youers shouting for the guy to halt, then gunshots. YaYa got close enough to see a man sliding a twelve-inch stiletto beneath Youers’s rib cage. Youers went stiff and straight, his face losing all expression. The man held the agent’s gun hand and gently laid him to the ground. Removing the blade, the man paused and for a moment stared into Youers’s eyes.

Then he moved. Impossibly fast, knife held forward like a lance. YaYa didn’t have the time to move out of the way, but felt his body picked up and slung against a nearby refrigerator, hard enough to knock it over. He lay stunned, unable to move. When he finally got to his feet, Alice was kneeling next to Youers, pleading with him to not die. YaYa stumbled over to Alice just as life left the young man’s eyes; as for the killer, he was nowhere in sight.

An hour later, with dead homunculi, the glassware, and the remaining chupacabra bones stowed into the back of a CIA SPG van and headed once more for the Salton Sea facility, YaYa stood in the aisle of a pharmacy, staring at the myriad medicines they had to cure bloating, dehydration, acne, diarrhea, and headaches. There were salves to relieve itching and burning and dry skin. There were bandages and splints and crutches and slings. What they didn’t have was what he wanted most. After searching the aisles, knowing they couldn’t possibly have what he needed, he was nevertheless disappointed that he couldn’t find a salve, cure, pill, capsule, or bandage that would deliver him from being possessed. He rolled up his arm and saw that the greens and purples from the wound had spread from his elbow to his wrist.

He knew that he’d have to tell someone. He’d rather do it in person than have the others learn of it without him there. He choked back a sob, then reached up and grabbed a bottle of milk of magnesia. He walked toward the cashier, but at the last minute turned to the door, shoving the bottle in his pocket like a lowlife thief.

So he wasn’t surprised when he set off the alarm and the glass door slid shut in front of him. And he also wasn’t surprised when he pulled out his pistol and shot the glass out. What did surprise him was Alice on the other side of the glass, her own pistol out and aiming straight at YaYa’s head.

“What the hell are you doing?”

YaYa glanced down at the gun in one hand and the milk of magnesia in the other.

“Drop the gun, SEAL,” she commanded.

He stared at her, ready to kill her, his face feral, his lips peeled back, his free hand wanting to rend and tear and break. Then he did what any self-respecting possessed U.S. Navy SEAL would do.

He cried.

They were given the ten-minute warning. They were jumping in and didn’t know when they’d be back, so they wore their wet gear and carried their dry gear in waterproof bags, which contained their weapons as well. Emily Withers had gone missing almost exactly twenty-four hours ago. If they found anything it would be a body. Still, after replaying the recording of the giant creature taking her, they concluded that they might need to be prepared for additional threats, so they also carried knifes sheathed to their legs, as well as gas-operated spear guns.

Laws wondered if they’d really encounter the giant fish. Their mission brief had included the history of the oarfish. It could grow upward of fifty, sometimes sixty feet in length. It was long held that the oarfish was perhaps the start of the mythology of the sea monster, sailors spying the great long bodies, either alive and beneath the waves, or washed up on the shore. The species held a fondness for the protected warm waters and rather shallow bottom of the Sea of Cortez.

But these great eel-like fish were not alone in these waters. The giant Humboldt squid also called the Sea of Cortez home. Some thought it might have been the inspiration for Jules Verne’s sea monster that attacked the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea . Whatever the truth was, the millions of tourists that came to swim in the lusciously warm waters had no idea of the sheer size of the squid that swam beneath them.

Never having seen a sea monster in person, Laws found that part of him actually wanted to. Growing up on the back lots of Hollywood studios, he’d seen his share of movie props. The head and teeth they’d used in the final scene of Jaws had terrified him for months when he’d first seen them after watching the movie.

But another part of him didn’t want anything to do with sea monsters. They’d grown from small eggs to become as large as they were. Each and every one of them, in its own way, had become the ultimate predator, needing to feed on everything else, anything else, just to survive. Was that what had happened to the senator’s daughter?

The ramp opened and air rushed in. He set his goggles and checked the valves of the man in front, just as his were being checked by the man behind. He heard the countdown in his intrateam underwater radio system and prepared to step off. Then came the moment, and he let the wind take him.

They jumped at five thousand feet, so it wasn’t going to be a very long trip. Still, he saw the twinkle of Cabo to his right and the lights of mainland Mexico farther off to his left. Beneath him, as he rushed seaward through the wind, he spied lights of varying brightness, each of these boats, both commercial and private.

When he hit a thousand feet, he lowered his dry bag on a line. He watched the altimeter and GPS on his wrist and began flaring, using the risers to bring him on target and slow his descent. When he was ten meters, he released his dry bag, and when he was five meters he released the chute. He had time to press a hand to his goggles; then he was slicing into the warm water of the Sea of Cortez. As warm as it was, it was a shock, and he felt his chest tighten as he held his breath. He allowed himself to sink, pressed his regulator into his mouth, and cleared the air. Once he was certain his breathing apparatus was functioning, he freed his fins from where they were attached to his side and pulled them over his feet. Then he turned to regroup with the others.