Brutal Asset Read online

  I bounded to the two by the kitchen door, forward flipping in the air and dropped an ax kick onto the top of one’s head with a mono-spiked heel. The spike drove through his brain, but in hindsight, it probably wasn’t necessary as his head was crushed flat by the force of the kick which also drove his neck down into his torso. He died with a snarl on his face, as the other, in wolf form, lunged for me, snapping her huge jaws like a bear-trap. I stuck my left forearm in her mouth, letting her own bite force drive the insanely sharp edges on my arm through her top and bottom jawbones, slicing her hardened teeth like clay. As the front of her face fell off, I ended her participation in the fight with a reverse knife-hand strike through her left armpit and out her right shoulder, cleaving her into wet chunks of furry meat.

  Eleven down.

  The two at the pool table were rushing me. Well, the closer one was, in wolf form. His pool partner, in beast-man form, was picking up the heavy pool table, most likely to throw at moi.

  A bolt of dark purple power shot from my right hand, the concentrated burst of particles blasting the legs completely off the were holding the table. He fell, the table fell and he squished.

  I side stepped the rushing wolf, grabbed him by the throat and slammed his skull into a convenient pocket of the pool table. Werewolf in the corner pocket! Easy shot!

  The bartender had pulled a battered Ithaca pump shotgun from under the bar. I called it to my left hand, using aura like a rope, pulling it from his grip and across the room. Then I shot him with it three times. Hmm, must be silver buckshot from the look of the wounds, which blackened and burned. I put the last two rounds into one of the wolves by the door, then jammed the barrel of the empty gun down through the skull of my pool pocket buddy, pinning his twitching body in place.

  The wounded wolf at the door fell, and his two partners, one male, one female, shot out the door on four feet, having come to the conclusion that they had better places to be. My aura-edged left hand clipped the downed wolf’s head from his body as I rushed by. I caught the first wolf just six feet outside the door, running over her sprinting wolf form with aura spiked boots that snipped her spine and pinned her heart, then head to the desert floor. Leaping from her back, I wreathed my body in mono-edges, grabbed the remaining wolf with my arms and legs, then sort of shimmied around him till he fell apart in little chunks, his head flying about sixty-five feet.

  Seventeen down. Time elapsed, nine point three seconds.

  Chapter 3

  Perhaps some background is in order. My name is Chris Gordon; actually, Christian Gordon. Ironically, I’m not very religious. Oh, I believe in God and the whole Heaven/Hell thing, I’m just not on good terms with the Big Guy. Mainly because I don’t think my whole family needed to die when I was eight, chopped to bits by a demon in human form. The fact that I am a natural demon exorcist is maybe ironic, as I lay huddled on the floor of my brother’s closet while my mother, father and older brother fought to protect me. I should have been the one doing the protecting. My grandfather says I just would have died then and there. I was too young to be a threat to the Hellbourne who hunted me. It’s occurred to me that maybe I should have died then and there.

  At age twelve I discovered the demon banishing thing, which manifests as violet light that seems to be part of my personal aura. The color exactly matches my eyes, which caused me no end of torment as a child. Let’s put it this way, more kids in my school knew me as ‘the Freak’ then knew my name.

  A week shy of my twenty-third birthday I stopped a Hellbourne from killing a girl in a spooky Goth nightclub in New York City. The girl turned out to be a vampire and a rather important one at that. She decided I was hers to keep and I didn’t argue the point. But during our introduction she drained me of a rather large amount of blood and in order to stabilize me she gave me a few CC’s of her own. I reacted to the vampire virus in her blood like I was made for it (which it turns out I was). I grew stronger, faster, more coordinated and developed the hyper senses of a vampire, but without the whole blood thirsting need to bite necks. I just eat like a pig instead.

  There were other developments as well. My violet aura, the source of my ability to banish demons, grew much more powerful and versatile. I can form the mono-edges around any portion of my body, making me a living blade. I can, in times of anger or combat, direct concentrated beams of power that disassemble the molecules of whatever they hit. I can alter the essential nature of complex compounds, like plastic explosives and smokeless gunpowder, rendering them useless. My friend Chet, who has more brains in his earlobe than I have in my whole head, tells me I can control and direct quantum particles, things like neutrinos, quarks, and mesons. He says I’m a walking particle accelerator. I don’t know what any of that means – I usually drift off as soon as he says particle or quantum. My lack of understanding doesn’t change the fact that I can do what I do.

  My other major life change was near the end of my courtship (that’s how I think of the first week) of Tanya. I was injected with a hypodermic full of demon blood which temporarily knocked out my aura abilities. Long term, it bound to my cellular structure and the primitive part of my brain that pysch dudes refer to as Id, giving that dark side of me a serious attitude problem. Hence, the berserker inside me, my dark , oh so violent self that thrives on fighting and killing.

  But listen to me, whining like a beat dog. We all have our issues, don’t we.

  Chapter 4

  The last were hit the ground, actually it was just his head, landing between me and the cleanup troops that I knew were watching, having followed the GPS tracker hidden on the bike.

  . The cell door in my mind was history and the beast was still out. Part of me observed as I raised my head and spoke in that deeper, more disturbing voice not quite my own.

  “Medics! Now!” I said, then turned and slid back into the broken building. Weres are incredibly tough, a few of my victims were still alive, but the damage was probably too great even for the LV virus to repair.

  The children still crouched in the corner, eyes wide in shock. The rational part of me wondered how the last half minute had seemed to them. Weres in a barroom. Beat-up guy dragged in. Beat-up guy pulverizes seventeen weres in less than ten seconds. Most of the fight a blur, Building bashed to hell, motorcycles flying. Altogether, epic weirdness.

  I kept my distance, observer/berserker me, content to just study them while I waited for the help I could hear roaring up on ATV’s and combat dune buggies.

  The grubby white of their sleepwear was now misted with a spray of blood, likely from the buckshot-blasted bartender. The boy was too shocked to react, but his sister’s expression combined shock with bewildered awe, like she had seen something more than he had. Probably just freaked.

  A swarm of rugged off-road vehicles slid to a halt outside, booted feet pounding toward the doorway almost before the ATVs stopped. A helicopter approached, rotors whumping in the cool night air.

  “Grim?” a deep authoritarian voice questioned from outside.

  “Clear!,” was my reply, as I moved to put myself between the combat troops now entering and the huddled children. No use taking chances, part of me decided.

  A five member ‘stick’ of entry troops smoothly entered the bar, two low, three high. Their squat AutoAssault-12 shotguns sweeping arcs, creating overlapping fields of fire. Technically, they are ‘Agents’ for Homeland Security. Yeeaah, right! The entire team that swept into the area had military origins, drawn from every branch. The entry team’s charcoal grey uniforms had emblems that depicted a cowled figured holding a purple bladed scythe. I’m not sure, but my bet was their previous emblem said ‘CAG’…short for Combat Application Group, which is the sanitized name for Delta Force. Calling them ‘Agents’ got around the whole Posse Comitatus Act which forbids military troops from acting within the boundaries of the U.S. The short, slim medic that followed them in had come directly from the Navy. Maya Hue’s slight form was weighed down by medic bags holding who knows what. She ig
nored the entry team and headed for me, veering into the corner when I pointed at the children. Her eyes slid right past my blood soaked form without hesitation, which showed how many times she had seen me like this.

  The next figure through the door, after Maya, was taller and curvier than the petit medic. A very attractive face of Hispanic origin scanned the bar room quickly, then studied me for a moment. Gina Velasquez froze suddenly, her wicked-sharp perceptions picking up something different about me. After a moment she spoke quiet words that made every member of the ‘Security’ team tense.

  “Grim? Why are you still out?” she asked, her voice even and calm.

  The team calls me Grim, short for Grim Reaper, which is my callsign. I can thank my friend Chet for that moniker. Gina, however, only calls me Chris, reserving Grim for when my alter-ego, combat persona is out and about. My dark self always retreats to his cell in my mind when the action is done. This time I was still in fight mode and she knew it.

  I didn’t answer right away, instead, noting the way the entry team started when they heard her mode of address. They know she only calls the beast inside me by that name. Suddenly, their attention was on me, not the dying weres in the room. Maya Hue’s gentle, reassuring voice slipped just slightly as she spoke in low tones to the children.

  Gina waited for my answer, staying exactly where she was by the door.

  “Those two – home,” my wrong toned voice answered.

  She didn’t answer immediately, instead turning to study the children with dark brown eyes that see way more than most. A slight widening of those eyes was all the reaction she showed before turning back to me. Gina would make an extremely dangerous poker player.

  “Okay, it’ll happen,” she said.

  “You promise?” my dark self questioned.

  “Yes,” was her answer.

  The intense, razor-sharp perceptions and internal heads-up display receded as my combat personality retreated to the doorless cell and my normal self reestablished control. Gina could read the change in me, no doubt from some subtle body language or something. She breathed a very small breath of relief, enough to tell the highly skilled combat operators in the room that I was back to ‘normal’….whatever the hell that is.

  Her eyebrows quirked in question, but I just shrugged and shook my head, not willing to discuss it yet. Instead, I slipped past her and out the door, nodding briefly at General Tobias Creek as he strode toward the door, directing commands at the swarm of gray uniformed men and women who had descended upon the scene. He nodded back, a little wary, then headed inside while I bee-lined for a little desert hill a hundred feet or so away.

  His comments still reached my hyper sensitive ears.

  “Christ what a mess! Is that the leader?” he said in disgust. It wasn’t the gore that bothered him, but the fact that the reason for my whole ‘get caught while undercover’ act was lying on the floor in two non-breathing, non-speaking pieces.

  “What the hell happened, Gina?” I heard him ask. She didn’t answer, at least not verbally, but she may have pointed at the kids.

  “Who the hell are they?” his deep voice questioned.

  “I don’t know, General, but I promised Grim they would be going home right away,” she answered.

  “What? They need to be questioned, debriefed and….did you just say you promised Grim they would go home?” he asked as he picked up on her words.

  “Yeah, I have an idea what happened and these two need to be headed home real soon. Maya is running their fingerprints through the system to see if there are any hits and we’re checking the law enforcement channels for any notices of missing children.”

  “We can’t send them home now! With the Alpha of this…mess dead we’re gonna need all the intelligence we can get!” he said.

  “Not an option General,” Gina replied. “Look around – does this look like any of the other nests Grim has cleared?”

  “No….no, those were precise, surgical almost. This looks like a bomb exploded!” he replied.

  “Exactly what happened, a bomb named Grim exploded on this pack of Spawn. The detonators were those children, held helpless by monsters,” she said.

  “Okay, I get it. He’s protective of children. But couldn’t he have been more controlled?” Creek asked. “This is simply brutal!”

  “General, the persona that I call Grim is one aspect of Chris Gordon. As near as I can tell, Grim’s foundations were laid when Chris’s family was murdered. When Chris was about the age of that boy over there,” she said.

  It was uncomfortable to hear them talk about me, but at the same time I was interested in Gina’s explanation. I was cheating by listening in, but it was less painful than self-examination.

  “At eight years old, Chris was completely unequipped to fight a demon. Faced with the horrific murder of his mother, father and brother, his mind created a separate part of himself to deal with being powerless. Then, when other children played games and had fun, he trained to become a fighter, a warrior. His buried persona absorbed those lessons with a vengeance,” she explained. “Fifteen years later, the vampire virus expanded those abilities .., well, like he was made for it.”

  She hadn’t mentioned the hypodermic of demonic blood that had been injected into me, but I could tell she had skipped it on purpose. Obviously, the part of me that had attracted the demonic essence was the fledgling combat persona born inside me as a child.

  “The events in the Spring, when Chris faced a threat from Agent Duclair, a gang of street toughs, a rogue werewolf, and, perhaps most importantly, thought Tanya had forsaken him brought Grim to the surface to deal with any and all perceived threats.”

  “Okay, so Grim handles the fighting because Chris doesn’t want to?” General Creek asked.

  I shifted feet, uncomfortable with his implication that part of me was afraid.

  “No, General, Grim handles the fighting because Grim is a custom crafted combat machine who can fight and kill better than perhaps anything else that we know of. Chris isn’t particularly afraid of much, except losing his friends,” she answered.

  “So you’re telling me that the single most dangerous man on Earth has a split personality, and the dangerous one is in charge?” he asked.

  “Not quite like that General,” she answered. “Chris controls his dark half pretty well. Grim has the same values as Chris, he’s just more ruthless.”

  “Then how come, Chris couldn’t control Grim here?” Creek asked.

  “Because most likely, Chris was in complete agreement with Grim,” Gina said.

  “Is he safe to be around? Safe to let go?”

  “Well, no one here could stop him if he wasn’t, but let me put it this way. In less than three days, he’ll be taking my daughter, Toni, to kindergarten, for family visitor day. I’m not worried.”

  “You know, Gina, your decision to make him your daughter’s godfather, might not have been the best idea you ever had,” Creek said, his tone intimating a poor choice on her part. “Have you ever thought of the bullseye that you have painted on your daughter?”

  I knew exactly what he meant. Anyone who kidnapped my goddaughter would have my undivided attention.

  Gina snorted. “General, my daughter became a target the day I first started working with Chris. With him as her godfather, she’s better protected than anyone,” she said, her voice ringing with a note of conviction that bordered on religious faith. “Do you know what she told me tonight when I called at bedtime? She said ‘I’m fine Mommy. Daddy’s reading me stories and Okwari keeps me company’. She’s got a god on overwatch!”

  Personally, I wasn’t so sure. I had seen less and less from Okwari since he had shown me how to make Toni’s necklace five months ago. Each visit had been more fleeting then the last. As if he was distracted. It had been a solid month since my last contact and I missed him.

  “Doesn’t she call her necklace Okwari?” Creek asked.

  “If you mean the pendant that Chris formed from solid pl
atinum with his aura, that connects her to both Chris and the bear-god, than yeah!”

  “Umm…I see. Didn’t know that,” he replied, his tone thoughtful.

  “Sir, I’ll talk to Chris in a few minutes, but first I’m more interested in the children. None of the previous nests had hostages, and certainly not children. This is important,” she said.

  “Exactly why we can’t send them home immediately!” the General answered.

  “Then you can explain to Grim why they won’t be safe in their family’s arms as soon as possible!” she answered sharply.

  The General was silent for a moment, then he cleared his throat.