“Early Mesopotamia.”
“The fuck does that mean?” I asked.
“It’s where the symbols are from.”
“That’s a real shit clue.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t narrow it down. My people will keep cycling through them until they get closer, but for now, four-thousand-year-old symbols are all we have.”
“Four thousand?”
“Yeah.”
I started the Comet with a roar and dropped it in gear. “I know a guy.”
The man looked at Ledger’s phone with twinkling eyes. His thin fingers reached up and adjusted the wire-framed glasses on his face.
The glasses were all he wore.
We were outside his house in a small courtyard, surrounded by a tall privacy fence. It sat on a large plot of land outside the metro area that was shared by a commune. Acheron’s Grove was a vaguely Lovecraftian nudist colony run by Philben, the man in front of us.
He was a late-fifties-style English professor type with slightly stooped shoulders over a not insignificant paunch. A lot of people get uncomfortable being nude, but Philben was as unaffected as a house cat. We’d passed many of his people on our way in, all of them nude, and none of them seemed even remotely bothered by us, no matter their age, shape, or appearance. Philben fronted the money for it all, allowing the free spirits under his care the ability to be free indeed, no job or bills to worry about.
Philben claimed to be almost four thousand years old.
Probably full of shit, but there’s always the off-chance.
“Very interesting,” he said.
“What do they mean?” I asked. He was my referral, so I felt I should take point.
He handed the phone back to Ledger and closed his eyes. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that language. Let me process it.”
While we waited I studied Ledger. He was a stone-faced sonuvabitch, no betrayal of his emotions, if there were any. He could have been an android waiting for someone to turn him on. A woman came in and went to a bookshelf. She was young, late twenties, and comely. A nice figure on her and a pretty face. She adhered to the dress code of the commune and it agreed with her. Because of Tiff, I felt no pull toward her. I didn’t know what Ledger’s romantic situation was, hell, he could be gay, but he didn’t even flick his eyes in her direction.
After she left with a stack of books under her arm, Philben finally opened his eyes. “I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“These sigils are a summoning for an ancient deity named Doar’ Kun Shinnahleth.”
“English.”
“Loose translation is the Crushing Eldritch.”
“Don’t know that one,” I said.
Philben waved his fingers. “A Sumerian sect worshipped it long ago. It’s an elephantine god who will one day destroy the world by stampeding across it, using its immensity to press humanity into a sweet wine for its consumption.”
“Sounds kind of fucking ridiculous,” Ledger said.
Philben frowned. “The Sumerians were given to excess. They did imagine things, make them up from nothing but debauched imaginings. This deity isn’t one of those, it is real, but to try a working focused on it is sheer folly.”
“Why?” I asked.
“A god of this magnitude, well, it is just impossible to call. You are completely wasting your time.”
“So, these assholes are spinning their wheels?”
“Yes,” Philben said, “they cannot conjure this entity.”
Ledger frowned. “Why do you say that?”
Philben sighed. “A thing of this size would require a matching sacrifice to call it to this plane of reality. It only responds to bloodshed and death and destruction on a massive scale.”
“How many would have to be killed?” I asked.
Philben squinted away at nothing and scratched his face, then his balls, then his face again. “A half a million at least.”
“Well, fuck,” Ledger said.
We were back in the Comet, zipping up the highway at a high clip and driving right into a brilliant sunset of pink and orange and red. Ledger hung up his phone again.
“Apparently that’s what my guys needed.”
“What is?”
“That this thing revolves around death on a large scale and is an elephant.”
“An elephant.” I shook my head. “Cults and the shit they think.”
“They still have a nuke and a shitload of belief. It doesn’t matter how far afield it is after that.”
“True.” I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, cradle Catholic. I’ve seen a lot of fucked-up shit, but it always reinforces my belief instead of destroying it.
“So where can we find elephants in Atlanta?” Ledger asked. “The circus in town?”
“No, but we have a world-class zoo.” Sliding my thumb across my phone, I found Jimmy the Zookeeper’s contact info and hit the green call sign.
The Atlanta Zoo is a different place after hours. Trust me, I once had to hunt down a stray Nosferatu up in there, the place gets kind of weird.
Maybe it’s that I’m a city guy and all the fake forestry and jungle environs just give me the heebie-jeebies in the dark.
I was hunkered down beside a display, gun out. Behind me I could hear dull splashing as the alligators and crocodiles and whatever other big-ass lizard they put in a cement holding pond swam around and crawled over each other.
Every so often one of them would make a low sound, like a grunting bellow that rumbled across the entire area, and it would crawl up in the back of my brain and live there.
The oppressive taint of magick already had my skin feeling as if I’d been rubbed down with acid, that damn noise really set my teeth on edge.
“It’s me.”
I didn’t jump, not on the outside, but I had to clamp down on myself to keep from swinging my gun around. “You are one sneaky sonuvabitch.”
Ledger grinned. “I’ve cleared the path, but we need to move, now.”
He turned away silently.
Jimmy hadn’t answered his cell, so I’d called his wife. She hadn’t heard from him. This sent me and Ledger straight to the zoo. It was after hours, the park empty of patrons and employees, but the moment we turned on the road I felt the magick working that had begun. Because of Ledger we’d infiltrated our way this deep inside without detection. Left to my own devices I would have pulled the Comet up in the gate and driven to the elephant enclosure. It’s my way. I’m not a soldier.
Joe Ledger is a fucking soldier.
He acts like one and has the skills of one. I’m a thug. A goddamn gorilla with a purpose. I break shit to do good.
Usually it works out, but sometimes it has consequences.
The nightclub I used to own, now burned to the ground.
Friendships.
Kat… fuck. It cost Kat everything.
It cost Tiff her eye.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Give me a minute.
Pour another shot.
Okay.
So, with Jimmy the Zookeeper unaccounted for, the magick so cloying thick in the air I could barely breathe, and all of that guilt I keep shoved in the back of my skull, I followed Ledger’s lead and went into stealth mode.
We crept along the pathway toward the elephant enclosure. Halfway there Ledger pointed to the ground and we stepped over a black-robed cultist he’d taken out earlier. He knelt and parted the foliage and we were looking into the enclosure from across the way.
The place looked like a movie set full of extras.