Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781603818681 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Camel Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2011 |
| Series: | From the Files of the BSI , #2 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.76(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Kal
The Apologetic Dead
Rock chips scored my cheek as a bullet smacked into the cave wall not more than three inches from my nose. A fragment of the shattered bullet creased my temple, stinging like a sonofagun. I knew, however, that once the adrenaline high wore off — assuming I survived the next few minutes — the real price of pain would have to be paid.
Head wounds are the worst, because they bleed something fierce and no matter what overly macho men might say, chicks do not dig scars.
"Dammit, Canton!" I roared into the green-lit tunnel as I scrambled backwards, blood running down my face. Bullets pocked the tunnel walls, following my hasty retreat. "Where are the grenades?"
Canton's deep voice boomed back. "Mouth has 'em! What's going on, white boy?"
"What's going on are dead guys with freaking guns!" Another bullet whizzed past my ear. I returned fire with the Lahti, then hightailed it down the tunnel as fast as I could, hoping that I wouldn't get shot in the ass.
The team and I, minus Winch — our sniper, who had stayed with the Jeep — had entered the labyrinthine tunnels deep in the guts of the Organ Mountains that morning. A couple hours later (after retracing our steps countless times) we reached our destination, the hiding place for Big Owl's Cloak of Feathers.
Big Owl was a boogeyman in Apache folklore, a giant human (something like an ogre) who took the form of a horned owl big enough to carry off children. Like most stories pertaining to the World Under (that shadowy Other Place Supernaturals hail from), this one contained a grain of truth. Actually, a whole beach's worth. The reality was an artifact — a feathery cloak that allowed the wearer to shape-shift into a giant owl. Hence, Big Owl. What the Native Americans lacked in the colorful name category, they more than made up for in accurate oral history.
Canton Alsate, my Mescalero Apache friend and comrade-in-arms, managed to unearth the location of the Cloak's resting place, a place called Cave of the Foolish People, smack dab in the center of a mountain range. The Organs were a serrated, severe set of mountains that thrust up like knives from the desert between the cities of Las Cruces and Alamagordo in southern New Mexico.
I bumped hard into Mouth, our hand-to-hand expert, as she emerged from a side tunnel, nearly turning her into cave pizza. "What kind of dead guys?" she asked, her matte black Desert Eagle at the ready. "Ghouls again?" By the green chemical glare of the big glow stick Velcro-ed to my chest, she looked rather undead herself, her delicate china doll features a bilious olive.
"Ghouls?" I shuddered. Six months ago a seriously disturbed (by that I mean freaking psychopathically off-your-bloody-rocker nuts) magician and former Bureau of Supernatural Investigation teammate of mine, had tried to have me digested by a pack of super-steroid enhanced ghouls she'd created. Fortunately, I'd managed to avoid becoming an undead appetizer and eventually blew her head off with a shotgun. Considering it was either she or I, my choice was an obvious one. Kal: 1, Psychopathic Bitch: 0.
"No, not ghouls. Revenants," I panted. "At least four, all with antique Colt side arms."
She shuddered as Canton ran in from another side tunnel. I couldn't blame her. Revenants were the undead equivalent of unstoppable vengeance on a stick, spirits of the dead stuffed back into their own corpses and rendered virtually unkillable unless nuclear weapons were at your disposal. Think of Brandon Lee in The Crow, but smellier and a lot, LOT harder on the eyes.
Even Canton, who wasn't afraid of anything except losing to an inside straight, looked concerned. "C'mon, Mouth!" he shot, sweat streaming down his swarthy face. "Hurry up and hand out the grenades."
"Damn!" she swore. "I left them with Winch!"
Canton cussed up a blue streak just as a voice slid down the tunnel toward us. "Give it up, son. You can't stop us, sorry to say." The words, carried on some other medium than air, slithered into our ears like skittering insects. The revenant, a man dressed in a U.S. Cavalry uniform circa 1870, stepped into the light of the glow stick, its green illumination doing nothing for his complexion. No amount of Proactiv could help that skin.
In life, judging by his saggy clothes, he might have been a big man, easily 6'3" or so, but time and mummification had shortened him up somewhat. Parchment thin skin covered his skull under a dusty, crumbling, navy blue cavalry hat that hung at what was once a jaunty angle, but looked rather obscene in light of circumstances. Stringy, colorless hair hung about his shoulders like dusty cobwebs. What really frosted my cake, though, were the two brown, very lifelike eyes that blazed wetly from his desiccated face.
I held up a hand. "Listen, fella, we don't want trouble. We'll be on our way."
His eyes met mine and the force of his regard turned my bowels to water. "Sorry, son, but orders is orders. I gotta kill the lot of you for trespassin'." That whispery, insect-like voice carried a wealth of regret and sorrow. Just what we needed — undead that were really, really sorry.
Interesting.
Without hesitation, all three of us fired, bullets pummeling the dead man. Bits and pieces of shrunken flesh spattered the tunnel walls. While Canton and Mouth unloaded into the revenant's skull, I aimed for his gun hand. After six rounds from the Lahti (a 9mm Finnish relic from my grandfather that resembled a German Luger), the revenant's hand decided to separate from the rest of him (I couldn't think of the poor guy as an 'it') and the Colt dropped to the tunnel floor.
"Stop!" I yelled and, like the highly trained professionals they were, my two companions ceased fire. Wasting no time, I ran forward and threw a kick at the undead that hurled him back almost clean out of his boots. He was a lot lighter than he looked, a corpse anchored to gravity by the thinnest of margins. I retrieved the Colt, the dead man's hand still gripping the ivory handle. His flesh felt like dried leaves and squirmed in the palm of my hand.
Gross.
"Let's boogie!"
We turned to leave just as the revenant's re-enforcements arrived.
Rounds streaked past as we beat feet, following the glowing telltales we'd left behind like breadcrumbs so we wouldn't wander those tunnels for ... well ... forever. A tearing pain scalded the fat of my left side and a sticky wetness began to ooze. A quick assessment showed me that the wound was merely a graze, but still painful. Without a magician for a healing, it was going to leave a mark, but it also ruined a perfectly good blue Ralph Lauren polo I'd just purchased the day before. If the previous revenant hadn't sounded so sorrowful, so regretful as it tried to kill us, I might have turned right then to open up a can of Finnish whoop-ass.
And probably would have been shot into itty-bitty bloody chunks, too.
Behind me I heard Canton grunt in pain and I knew he'd been hit as well. A few steps later we came to the safety of a left turn, out of the direct line of fire.
"You okay, Canton?" I panted, hand pressing against the sticky wetness in my side.
"Sonofabitch shot me in the butt!" he cried while attempting to stem the flow of blood from the affected area.
Sometimes the little editor in your head is asleep at the wheel and you say or do something stupid. In my defense, the little editor must have gone home for a nooner because I laughed hard enough to put as stitch in my already abused side. Beside me, Mouth did the same.
"Yeah, laugh it up, white boy," Canton groused, not once breaking stride. "Wait until we get outta here; then I'm shooting you in the keister. See how you like it!"
I was saved a sarky reply by revenants appearing from the cross tunnels in front of us, Colts raised, cutting off escape.
Before they could shred us into bite-sized morsels, we were among them. Too close for firearms, we drew blades. In my case, it was a fourteen inch Bowie custom made and given to me by my father. Its twin was wielded expertly by Canton, who was doing his best to fillet the revenant to my right while I grabbed the gun hand of the one on the left and pulled him off balance. I rammed the blade into a leathery neck and twisted, drawing back for another stab.
"So, sorry, so sorry, so sorry," the dead man said in that annoying insect whisper that made me want to scrub my ears out with Comet. Mouth filled his undead jaws with eight inches of K-bar, muffling his apologies.
All too aware of the revenant coming up from behind, I chopped down with the Bowie and separated his gun hand from wrist. A trick worth repeating. If I kept it up, I'd have a very valuable collection of antique revolvers and enough disembodied hands for a host of Addams Family sequels.
Had the revenants been truly focused on taking us out instead of feeling sad and apologizing up a storm, things would have been much worse for mama Hakala's fair-haired son. As it was, all three of us had plenty of aches and pains to plague us over the next few days.
"Sorry, sorry. We're so sorry, son."
"What are they bitchin' about?" Mouth panted as she grabbed hold of Canton's arm and helped him shamble on.
"I think they're compelled to protect this place," I said, clutching at the burning pain in my side. Warm stickiness still flowed over and around my hand. "If they really wanted to kill us, we'd be dead already."
"Then who the hell sicced them on us?"
I pointed to Canton. "Talk to the guy with the hole in his butt."
She turned to the aforementioned perforated individual. "What?"
Canton winced with every step. "Makes sense. My ancestors were at war with the U.S. government, and I can tell you we fought dirty and hard." He bit his lip. "I reckon that Big Owl's Cloak was set in here and they turned those soldiers into watchdogs. Question is, where's the Cloak?"
"I don't know," came my reply. "The cave where it was supposed to be was empty except for four dead guys with guns."
Mouth gaped at me. "Four?"
I did the math just as we rounded the corner and saw daylight ... as well as the fourth cavalryman silhouetted against the opening, twin guns in hand. "Oh, crap ..."
"Sorry, so sorry, I don't want to do this," he mourned right before he exploded with a deafening concussion. Pieces of shoe-leather-dry corpse pelted us the same moment the pressure wave knocked us ass over appetite. Our bodies became coated with bits of rock and we breathed in several lungfuls of dust.
Gagging and coughing, we picked ourselves off the ground and staggered toward the exit. A shadowy silhouette half-blocked the light.
"You guys look terrible," the figure said in a high-pitched voice.
I rubbed grit out of my eyes and spat it out of my teeth, along with revenant dust. Once again ... gross. I really did not want to think about how much revenant I'd taken into my lungs. "What the hell did you use?"
"Just some dynamite. A couple of sticks."
A bit of shredded leather rolled over my boot and joined with other pieces that were doing their best to freak me out by moving. Pieces' parts shouldn't move, damnit! I knew it would be only a matter of minutes before the undead soldier put himself back together.
Crap ... I hated undead. A lot. Even the apologetic ones.
Mouth and Winch turned a little green around the gills as they watched bits of revenant roll together and reassemble all in Terminator 2 style. It took no effort to shoo the lot of us outside before the other unhappy undead made an appearance. Canton wore an amused smile, no doubt proud of his ancestors' handiwork. I resisted the urge to plant a boot on his leaking backside as we headed toward the Jeep.
By the time Winch had us on the road to Las Cruces, Canton's jeans were soaked in blood that was also staining the tan leather seats. I myself started to become dizzy with the loss of my own precious fluids.
"Why was the cave empty, kemosabe?" I asked, holding my wadded up shirt to the hole the Supernatural's bullet had put in my side. It was a clean graze, but it really started to sting like a bitch.
"Hell, white boy, I have no idea," he groused, sitting on his own wadded up t-shirt, his skin a burnished copper in the bright sunshine. "My old man said it would be there."
Canton had asked all the Mescalero tribal elders about the Cloak and they had all sung the same tune: 'It's in the Cave of the Foolish People, safe.'
Well, we'd found the tunnels to the Cave of the Foolish People only after trespassing onto government property (White Sands Missile Range). It took three days of searching to find those tunnels. Three days of baking in the winter sun of the deep Southwest (at least in Minnesota it was properly cold and snowy) to find the hidden tunnel entrance and two hours of exploring through the gut-rock of the mountains to find the Cave. That cave was big enough to park a semi in and I had found nada. Jack squat. Just some mummified remains and a few crude paintings on the rough walls.
It was only when I first heard a dry, papery voice say, "Son, I wish you hadn't come here," that I knew we were screwed.
Mouth grinned at me, her overlarge teeth shining. "I reckon the Bureau found the Cloak first and left those revenants for the next party of idiots to find. That would be us, in case you hadn't noticed."
I raised an eyebrow. "Oh? You think?" My sarcasm was lost on her. No surprise there. Mouth was pretty much clueless to the whole damn planet except when it came to killing Supernaturals with her bare hands, and I loved her dearly for that.
Yeah, I know what you're thinking. How can I have such a vicious outlook on the Supernatural community? Easy ... go find the remains of unsuspecting Straights (i.e. regular humans) who have had run-ins with Supernaturals and, after you've wiped their guts off the draperies, come find me and try to be all touchy-feely. Don't believe me? Most people die in terror and unimaginable agony at the hands (or tentacles, whatever) of their Supernatural attackers, screaming until their throats collapse with the strain. It's how my sister died ... it's how they all die.
My former job at the Bureau of Supernatural Investigations was to kill them before they killed us and I did it for ten long years.
And I was very, very good at it.
Currently, I was using those skills to try to find an artifact. Most artifacts, however, were in the grasping hands of various world governments. There were a few — a precious few — that still remained unfound.
As far as the Bureau was concerned, I was a rotting lump of meat buried six feet under in a Minnesota graveyard, killed by a vampire at the same time I drove a stake through its putrid, black heart. I would have been worm food but for a magician who was good with stasis, healing, and soul-storing spells to bring me back to the land of the living. Thanks to my actually being dead, I no longer suffered Interdiction, the spell placed on everyone in the know about the Bureau's existence. It kept peoples' mouth shut, which was a good thing because if the Straights ever did find out about Supernaturals and the World Under, there would be mass panic and religious hysteria the likes of which the world has never seen.
No longer under the Bureau's employ, I had focused my energies on finding a way to kill the thing that had murdered my sister right in front of my eyes twenty years earlier. Thanks to the aforementioned psychopath who had tried to turn me into ghoul chow, I had the weapon. All I needed was the ammunition ... hence, my search for an artifact.
CHAPTER 2Kal
A New Direction
A spike of nausea pierced my stomach as Winch administered a shot of morphine just before she stitched the hole in my side. Then a blessed lassitude settled over my brain and I didn't mind the large gauge needle punching through my skin. I didn't care. The motel bed was oddly soft and comfy enough for me to half-doze while she worked.
All of us had basic medical training, enough to qualify as EMTs. A 'patch 'em up and send 'em back out' kind of training. If we'd had access to a magician, we wouldn't even have needed a needle and thread. Hell, there wouldn't be any scars. Usually. I was one of the 'lucky' ones who had a few. Okay, a lot. My torso was covered in thin, ridged burn scars from silver wire that had absorbed enough magical energy to become red-hot, fusing the silver to my flesh. The damage had been so bad that not even magical healing could erase all the evidence. I don't recommend that as a party trick. I'd barely survived and, consequently, I wouldn't be posing for The Boys of the BSI calendars anytime soon. Some people think scars are cool, but not the kind that bring gorge to your throat.
Despite my disfigured torso, Winch worked impassively and with an economy of motion that most docs would envy. Pretty in a Betty Boop sort of way, she looked like a dizzy brunette without a care in the world, a look she cultivated to hide the razor-wire sharp mind housed in her skull. We were lucky to have her.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "What Happens in Vegas, Dies in Vegas"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Mark Everett Stone.
Excerpted by permission of Coffeetown Enterprises, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Chapter One (Kal): The Apologetic Dead,
Chapter Two (Kal): A New Direction,
Chaper Three (Kal): The Desert Pride,
Chapter Four (Kal): Not in Kansas Anymore,
Chapter Five (Canton): New Old Enemies,
Chapter Six (Kal): A View to a Thrill,
Chapter Seven (Kal): Mayhem,
Chapter Eight (Kal): Marcin's Journal,
Chapter Nine (Winch): The Real Question Is, Can I Keep The Car?,
Chapter Ten (Mouth): My Least Favorite Nazi,
Chapter Eleven (Kal): It's a Kind of Whiplash,
Chapter Twelve (Kal): The Bureau by any Other Name,
Chapter Thirteen (Mouth): Definitely Not a Vacation,
Chapter Fourteen (Kal): A Deal Struc,
Chapter Fifteen (Canton): The Situation Has Not Improved,
Chapter Sixteen (Mouth): I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia,
Chapter Seventeen (Kal): Out of a Perfectly Good Airplane,
Chapter Eighteen (Mouth): Allies among the Allies,
Chapter Nineteen (Kal): Sleep Is for the Weak,
Chapter Twenty (Mouth): Inn Big Trouble,
Chapter Twenty-One (Kal): My Favorite Pastime,
Chapter Twenty-Two (Kal): The Hard Part is Cleaning Up,
Chapter Twenty-Three (Kal): Sneak In,
Chapter Twenty-Four (Mouth): Sneak Out,
Chapter Twenty-Five (Mouth): Sneak Back,
Chapter Twenty-Six (Canton): No Time to Bleed,
Chapter Twenty-Seven (Kal): What Happens in Vegasâ&8364;¦,
Chapter Twenty-Eight (Kal): â&8364;¦ Dies in Vegas,
Chapter Twenty-Nine (Kal): All's Well that Ends,
Chapter Thirty (Canton): Rage in a Cage,
Chapter Thirty-One (Kal): Out of the Frying Pan, into the Bureau,