Chapter 24

The first mistake they made was leaving the electric net’s activation remote in Walker’s hand. He did seem like the reliable sort of guy, but I pounced upon him with superhuman speed the moment he turned away from me. I doubt he even heard the rustle of the fine metallic mesh of the net draped over me before I struck out.

By now, I was dimly aware of the monstrous strength my deceivingly slender limbs could apply, so after my own fashion, I was careful when I delivered the blow to the back of his neck. It was a lovetap, no more. In fact, I instantly regretted applying the Critical Strike skill, because even the gentle nudge from the palm of my hand sent the poor bastard rocketing forward, planting face first against the cold stone floor. At least he looked like he’d passed out before the crash and the helmet he wore ought to keep his skull in one piece.

In any case, I had more pressing concerns at the moment. My initial forward momentum had sent the net rising a couple of feet above my head. It was a laughably simple matter to duck low under its folds and escape from its clutches. Sounds of alarm and shouts to open fire had barely reached my ears when I was already free and away.

A single push from my feet propelled me forward at hair-raising speeds, allowing me to soar past Walker’s prone figure and straight toward one of the men lying in the shadows. Little did he know, they offered no protection from my newly acquired dark vision. In fact, the labyrinth of darkness of the sewer tunnels provided me with ample cover as the Cloak of Shadows spread its embrace about my shoulders and whisked me off into near-invisibility.

Of course, it wasn’t true invisibility. Instead, I felt the pitch black patches of shadow in the tunnel swirling protectively over my skin, effectively turning me into a shadow myself. My affinity with the darkness element seemed to further enhance this effect, leaving my intended target gaping open-mouthed as his wide-staring eyes swept this way and that, likely wondering how the hell I’d managed to vanish into thin air right before his eyes.

“He’s using the shadows! Flares out now!”

Now, that wasn’t very sporting of them, was it? After all, it was four against one. Well, make that three against one. A burly man sporting a generous mustache never even saw me approach from the blindspot on his left, reaching out from the pitch dark to lightly rap my knuckles against the side of his helmet. I say lightly, because that’s how it felt to me. It still launched him clear off his feet and across the stuttering beams of light coming from his teammates’ flashlights. He crashed hard, sheer momentum dragging his face forward a couple of feet along the lichen-infested stone floor.

“Damn, he got Muller! On my left!”

“He’s picking us off one by one. Where the hell is he?”

“Get your flares out! Martinez, you’re on the machine gun, we’ll cover you!”

A couple of errant shots from those odious stun blasters half-heartedly flew in my general direction, or at least where I’d been up until a couple of seconds ago. Much to my growing delight, I’d found that thanks to my new agility orb and the fading momentum of my Dash skill, I could move with such blinding speed that even gravity seemed like more of a general principle than a rule set in stone. The panicked men were busy tossing flares skipping across the floor, blithely unaware that I was riding my speed like a divine wind all along the walls of the tunnel. Not on a descending track, either. Instead, I steadily climbed higher until I found my head nearly scraping up against the ceiling above. I couldn’t help the grin of nearly childlike delight as I spotted a flare bounding particularly high after meeting an obstacle along the floor. Wondering if what I had in mind would actually work, I reached above my head and stabbed my fingers into the concrete ceiling above. They dug deep into the yielding surface, feeling more like styrofoam than actual stone. I barely stopped myself from letting out a victorious cry, and instead contented myself with swinging from my newfound perch and aiming a kick at the approaching flare.

“Hey, I see someth-”

That’s how far he got before the flare nailed him right on the forehead. It disintegrated upon impact, bursting into a cloud of blinding neon pink sparks. The man didn’t fare much better. He was instantly launched off his feet, crashing on his back with a solid thud, his arms splayed out to his sides as his eyes rolled up in their sockets.

Three down, two to go.

“Shit, Jackson’s down! Martinez, where’s my damn covering fire? Martinez?”

At the moment, Martinez was preoccupied with the smothering shadow that had landed on top of his back, sending him careening forward along the floor. He would have liked to put up at least a token amount of resistance, but his stun blaster had been sent tumbling from his grasp by the force of the crash. He’d begun fumbling at his waist for his pistol when he heard a soft voice whispering right next to his ear that instantly made him freeze.

“Say hi to Esperanza for me. Tell her she saved her papa’s life.”

Even before the question in Martinez’ terrified eyes reached his lips, I pegged him with a measured thump of the bottom of my fist against the top of his helmet. The man’s body instantly went slack under me, drool spraying from his mouth. Damn, I hoped I hadn’t overdone that. I reflected that Susan had been right about at least one thing: vanilla humans were so fragile.

A muffled thud jolted me forward all of a sudden. I don’t know what went through the nameless leader’s head as he fired once more and watched the mass of pulsing electricity fizzle out against the mantle of darkness draped about my shoulders, but from the bloodless grimace on his face, they couldn’t be very happy thoughts.

He even took a moment to look down and check his gun before gulping loudly and watching me with the eyes of a jacklighted deer. He went as far as leveling his gun in my direction before I held up my palm to let him know that he really should stop being silly like that.

“That’s aggravating, you know? I’ve been trying my best not to kill you all, after all,” I said, sparing a glance toward the fallen figure of Martinez. For some reason, my stomach began growling once more and saliva swiftly pooled in my mouth. Damn, I was starving.

“W-What do you want?” the leader said, his breath coming in labored gasps.

“Nothing that you can’t afford to part with. Some food, some clothes, and a map out of this place so I can leave before your buddies get here and I have to start chopping off some heads. You know, unpleasant, yet unexpectedly savory stuff, like dig out their brains, slurp on their eyeballs, gnaw on their legs, snack on their fingers..”

I trailed off as I belatedly realized that my further elaboration on that topic wasn’t really helping my case of posing as a non-threatening, friendly neighborhood undead. I mean, by this point, even I had come to at least partially believe some of these tales. Blazing a path right through anything and anyone who got in her way and leaving only a trail of scorched earth and smoking cinders in her wake? Yep, that was all Allie in my book. Though I seriously doubted the reports regarding the innocents. She’d never been one for wanton cruelty, nevermind the needless effort involved in massacring countless innocents.

As for the claims that they were needed as fuel for a profane ritual? Maybe as a last resort kind of deal, after all other avenues had been exhausted. But even then, I could shrug such concerns off with laughable ease. How? Because no matter what the world said and how many fingers were pointed at her, it still didn’t change one fundamental fact.

I believe in her.

I chose to believe in my Allie. If she had in fact carried out such seemingly pointless massacres, then she must have had a damn good reason for it. Atrocities galore? Then someone must have pissed her the hell off, and it wasn’t her fault if people got stupid like that. After all, Allie was one of the most coldly calculating, ruthlessly logical minds I knew. Point in fact, my return from apparent death was probably the product of a long and convoluted series of plots and maneuvers on her part. It couldn’t have been easy to snatch my soul away from the odious claws of a sadistic little fucker like Charon. My recent off-kilter behavior could probably be attributed to that. Otherwise, what the hell was the matter with me? Had I truly become some sort of twisted undead abomination, a soul-less thrall under Allie’s tight-fisted tyranny? Not that the latter part of that sentence was anything new, but the undead and soul-less part did concern me, just a bit.

Still, I felt like me, not some hollowed out husk blindly compelled into groveling obedience to its summoner and master. Or mistress, in my case. I mean, I hate to put it like this, but if that’s what my Allie wanted, she really didn’t need to go to all the trouble. All she had to do was ask, and I would have happily lied down in the middle of traffic for her. Call it love, obsession, whatever. I don’t care. A world without Allie in it wasn’t one that I cared for much, if at all. Furthermore, I knew damn well that the same held true for Allie. There’s no way she’d just dump me like day-old newspaper, no matter what her fancy neon sign read.

So, I did the only thing a simpleton with supernaturally enhanced reflexes, strength, and constitution would do in my shoes. It was time to find Allie and ask nicely, “Honey, just what the fuck is going on?”

Yeah, just thinking about my eventual reunion with my Allie set off all sorts of butterflies and warm and fuzzy feelings fluttering all over my stomach - nevermind that all this while it hadn’t once stopped its unrelenting growling.

That’s when I realized that the leader was staring open-mouthed at me, on the verge of cringing away with a wail of terror. I followed his gaze and looked down to find, much to my undying and everlasting relief, that Little Kai down there seemed to have weathered the passage from death to unlife just fine, and was in fact standing at smart attention with just the mere thought of reuniting with my smoking hot, irresistibly luscious, and absolutely fuckable girlfriend.

“P-Please, I’ll give you anything you want,” the man quivering before me said with a tremulous voice, sounding like he was just about to collapse into howling tears at any moment now. “Just please, please, anything but that. I’m 39 but I’m still saving my virginity for that special one..”

I think my wolfish grin as I fondly recalled the richly blessed valley between Allie’s breasts and the sweet nectar flowing from between her legs didn’t help at all in this case, but what could I do?

No one’s perfect, after all.

“Damn, they’re here already.”

I looked up from the pants I’d finished zipping up and tilted my head sideways, inhaling loudly through my nostrils. “Hmm. So they are. I’m curious, how did you know?”

Grant, as I’d learned the team leader’s name to be, waved a hand toward the sleek device on the underside of his arm. It was composed of several curved displays that reflected a flurry of lights and text, with more and more prompts soon flooding the screen.

“Digital comms device, among other things. Cutting edge tech, much good it did us down here. The satellite link was cut off by all the layers of rock so we were forced to resort to short-wave radio communication.”

“Oh, no wonder I could hear you.. Ahem, your radio’s static all this time. Yeah, I guess technology isn’t nearly as foolproof as they’d have us believe.”

Grant nodded sourly at my words, then hawked and spit a large glob of phlegm to the side.

“More like damn collars they use to further choke the life out of us grunts. They must have known this was a suicide mission and they still forced us to march to our deaths.” He looked up to me as the lines of his face eased just a little around the corners of his eyes. “I owe you for this, by the way. And I don’t forget my debts.”

I waved it away. “Nah, I could tell you weren’t such bad guys.”

Grant was forced to look away, but I caught the haunted expression on his face as his fists clenched tightly at his sides. “You don’t know that.”

“Hey, we all carry our own demons, right? Just keep inching toward daylight and things will turn out alright. That’s what my.. girlfriend used to say.”

I let out a deep sigh of my own, feeling just a little lost and hollow without Allie’s boundless warmth to infuse light into this cold, gray world.

“Guess that’s all a fellow can do sometimes.” Grant shook his head then looked back at me. “Anyway, you should really get going. They’ll be here within 5 minutes tops, and they’re sure to cover the only two exits from this place long before that.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about that,” I said with a careless grin, buttoning up my freshly donated shirt.

That produced a worried scowl. “That’ll be the Red Brigade they’re sending. They’re worlds apart from mere grunts like us at the White Brigade. We’re just scout recon units, lightly armed for infiltration and covert ops. The Red Brigade’s where the organization’s anvil and hammer fall, crushing anything that stands in their way.”

“Huh, sounds like quite the happy bunch. Glad I won’t be around to mess with them. Now, about this organization of yours. You sure you can’t tell me something about them?”

Grant quickly shook his head. “I really would, but that would probably only make your life harder. If you’re the type of person who needs to know about them, trust me, you will. On the other hand, they take pains to go out of their way and eliminate any outsider who carelessly stumbles across their secrets.”

“I can look after myself,” I mused.

“I’m sure you can, but no offense, no one needs that kind of target on their backs. And I assure you, the organization can paint a big fucking target. Anyway, it’s not like you’re the target they’re looking for, not really. They probably want to seize you so they can interrogate you and track down their real target, so they shouldn’t devote too many resources to pursue you after you get away.”

“You mean the Angel of Death’s creature, huh?”

“Yeah, that’s the one,” Grant replied, nodding gravely. “After their last stunt nearly three weeks ago in what became known as the Chinatown Massacre, both the Dark Angel and her minion appear to have vanished off the face of the earth. Everybody’s after them, and I mean everybody. Government agencies, heads of organized crime, megacorporation giants, and even true powers like my organization. And from what I’ve seen in 15 years working for the organization, they’ll stop at nothing until they’ve been found.”

“Why?” I couldn’t help but ask, both fascinated and terrified by the forces arrayed against us. My hands suddenly balled into trembling fists at my sides. Had my poor Allie been dealing with all this by herself?

“Hell if I know, and truth is, I don’t want to find out. That’s way above my paygrade, and same goes for you. Listen, I think you’re a decent fellow. Hell, from the way you handled my squad, you might be a kickass adept. But you’re young and you’ve got that reckless air about you, like a talented rookie who’s about to charge straight into the front lines and get himself blown up on the first salvo and shipped home in a body bag. So just take the friendly advice from an old dog of war and simply walk away. There ain’t no shame in that and I guarantee you, there ain’t no happy endings as far as this whole fiasco is concerned.”

Unexpectedly, I found a burst of warmth toward this grizzled old soldier. “Thanks for the advice, old man. Maybe we can knock back a couple of beers sometime, once this whole thing blows over.”

“Heh, I can live with that. And hey! What old man? I’m only 39.” Grant lifted his chin and his nose stabbed high into the air as his eyes took on a resolute, nearly fanatical glow. “I’m in the prime of my years, ready to meet the love of my life so that the spring of my once-in-a-lifetime romance can finally bloom and sweep me off my feet!”

I cringed at the sheer audacity of this old dog and the utter lack of shame as he spouted such corny lines. Then again, I suppose that’s one of the perks of old age.

“Sure, whatever you say, old man,” I allowed, keeping my distance. Whatever madness it was, I hoped it wasn’t contagious.

Grant just scowled darkly at me, then threw his hands up into the air. “Bah, whatever. Time for you to get going, unless you fancy getting brainwashed and dissected by hordes of bespectacled lab technicians wearing golden monocles and purple-fringed coats.”

“I’m going, I’m going,” I replied, chuckling as I waved over my shoulder.

“Hey, that’s the wrong way.”

I slowly shook my head. “No, it’s the only way.”

Reaching the stone coffin, I spit into my hands and dug my feet deep into the ground before pushing against its cold surface as hard as I could. My suspicions soon proved right, as a draft of fresh air entered my nostrils.

“Allie, don’t worry. No matter where you are, I’ll find you. Just wait for me.”

With a final grunt of effort, a pitch black shaft was revealed underneath the coffin. Without any hesitation, I leapt forward into the dark abyss below, and there was no mistaking the eager smile on my face for anything but what it was.

I’m coming, Allie.