Who comes outside in twenty degree weather in just their shirt sleeves?
Slipping his hands beneath the torso of the corpse, he flipped the body over onto its back, only to jerk back in surprise. The man’s chest was torn open along the sternum, the broken ribs on either side sticking up into the light with casual indifference. The man’s eyes were locked open in death and ice crystals were starting to form over them. Given the fact that it was barely twenty degrees out meant that he couldn’t have been outside too long; maybe a half-hour was Cade’s guess.
“What the hell?” Cade muttered.
The injury to his chest was bad enough, never mind the round bullet hole in the center of the man’s forehead, but the fact that the pavement beneath the body was completely free of blood put the whole thing into the surreal category.
How do you rip open a man’s chest and keep him from bleeding all over the place?
Logical answer?
You don’t.
He was about to start going through the man’s pockets, see if there was anything on his person that might identify who he’d been, when Olsen’s voice interrupted him.
“We’ve got company, boss.”
Both Riley and Cade turned at the sound, then followed their teammate’s pointing figure to where someone was standing in the middle of the street about twenty yards behind them.
The distance and the thick parka the figure wore made it difficult to tell if it was a man or a woman, but if Cade had to guess he would have picked the former. Something about the man’s stance, or perhaps his utter stillness, set the alarm bells ringing in Cade’s head.
Something was wrong here.
Cade moved forward until he stood near the rear of the SUV, slightly ahead of his three companions.
“Hello?” he called. The figure didn’t verbally respond, but he began shuffling forward with an unsteady gait, clearly favoring his right leg.
“Hello?” Cade called again. “Are you all right?”
The figure kept coming.
By now the other three Templars had gotten a good look at the state of the corpse lying in front of their vehicle and knew that something wasn’t right in Denmark. They formed up behind Cade, their attention on the slowly advancing newcomer.
Cade focused on the other man’s injury. From a distance it was hard to tell what was wrong, but as the figure drew closer things became clearer and eventually Cade could see that the man’s right leg was broken just below the knee, the foot twisted at such an unnatural angle that it was pointing nearly in the opposite direction.
The pain had to be incredible.
And yet he’s on his feet. On his feet and moving toward us…
Those internal alarm bells were clanging full bore by now and Cade’s grip on his pistol tightened. As his arm came up, pistol in hand, the figure ahead of him abruptly stopped.
Twenty, maybe twenty-five feet, separated them at this point and from that distance Cade was able to get a much better look at the man standing opposite him. The man’s face was gaunt to the point of starvation, the skin stretched tight as a drum over the bones beneath, making it full of flat plains and sharp angles. His eyes were sunk deep in his skull, the tissue around them stained as dark as midnight. He resembled nothing so much as a plague victim straight out of the Dark Ages and Cade was instantly certain that he didn’t want the man to come even a foot closer.
“That’s far enough,” Cade called out, the muzzle of his gun now firmly centered on the man’s head. “Now identify yourself.”
Slowly, the man’s mouth came open.
In the next moment the slim hope Cade had that the man might actually cooperate with them was dashed as a horrible shrieking cry issued from the man’s gaping mouth.
The sound itself was a physical assault, clamping around Cade’s guts like a vice and sending a wave of fear sliding through the bones of his six foot frame that was nothing but pure, primal reaction to the sound, as if his body remembered something from man’s distant past that his mind did not. It instinctively made Cade want to turn heel and run, to get as far away from the sound as he possibly could.
Thankfully, Cade had long since stopped listening to any instinct that had him acting like a frightened rabbit; he was a Templar and the things he faced in service to the Order could make grown men weep just from the sheer sight of them. If he’d reacted to every horrific sight and sound he’d encountered, on duty or off, his time on the Echo Team would have ended long since.
It was a good thing, too, for the figure standing in front of him, the thing that had once been a man but was now both something more and something less, chose that moment to come rushing toward him with a speed that belied the injury to his leg. One second he was standing there shrieking and in the next he’d reduced the distance between them by nearly a third. Another few moments and he would be right on top of them.
Nothing human moved that fast, certainly not with that type of injury. Cade didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger of the weapon in his hand. But as the crack of his pistol filled the night air, the head of the creature before him slipped sideways on a suddenly elongated neck and the shot whipped past, missing its mark.
Thankfully Cade wasn’t the only one reacting to the thing’s hideous cry or its unnatural speed. Riley’s Mossberg went off nearly simultaneously with Olsen’s MP5, the roar of their weapons so close behind Cade’s that they sounded almost like an echo. The kinetic impact of their rounds knocked the creature clear off its feet while blasting chunks of flesh from its form. Riley’s shotgun was particularly devastating, striking the oncoming figure close to the hip and separating its already injured leg right from its body in a bloody blast of gore.
For a moment no one moved, their gazes locked squarely on the body of the thing lying on the ground in front of them as its blood stained the snow a dark hue.
“Is it dead?” Olsen asked, in a hushed tone.
As if in answer the thing’s head suddenly rose up on its stalk-like neck and howled at them.
The bark of Cade’s pistol sounded again.
This time he didn’t miss; the bullet slammed into the creature’s forehead and splashed the back of its skull across the ground behind it in a wet arc.
Cade wasn’t about to take any chances. He turned to Riley, told him to keep his eye on the creature, and then marched over to the SUV. Reaching into the backseat he grabbed his sword case and flipped it open. Inside, nestled on a bed of black silk, sat the sword he’d been given at his investiture ceremony when he’d become a Templar. The blade had been forged by the Order’s swordsmiths and consecrated at a special Mass before it had come into his hands. It had served him well through the years; it would do the same tonight.
Cade walked back over to the where the other three men stood, their weapons pointed at the monster’s corpse. Despite losing a limb and taking a bullet through the skull, the body was still twitching spasmodically. Cade approached cautiously; if it was still moving, it was still a source of potential danger. When Cade was within reach he struck out with his blade and slashed through the thing’s strangely elongated neck, severing the head.
Rather than turning away, Cade watched and waited some more.
For a long moment nothing happened.
“What are you looking…” Duncan began to say, but Cade cut him off with a raised finger and a quiet, “Shhh.”
The severed head twitched.
Duncan recoiled in surprise but Cade had been waiting for that very thing. He gripped his sword in both hands, blade pointed downward, and as the head moved a second time he brought his hands up over his head, preparing to strike.