Into the Dark

There was no security cordon at all.

Releasing a pent-up breath, I sat on the sloping banks of the river and gazed upstream some hundred-fifty meters at the smashed-up Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was barren; the only sign of life the glow of the roadside sign spilling ‘cross the ground to either side, back-lighting the silhouette of the gutted building.

I thought back on Kenta – talking about calling in specialists before they even began to track the beast; all that about priests and rituals, passive hardening while they waited for legal to spin their wheels, of all things – and realized he’d meant every word.

I’d had no clue at the time if he did; even the US government’s own “magical threats” agency was tiny and extremely secretive, and acknowledgments between governments that a magic even existed was often only tacit at best. It was exacerbated by how small a role we played; the magi themselves typically hunted down real threats; be they renegade mages or supernatural monsters, and we “estimated” (with what scant data we had) that maybe thirty percent or more of said beasties were whacked by vigilantes – just local citizens or cops with a quick draw that were put on the spot, and less commonly by dedicated hunters who made it their business to hunt down that which went bump in the night and bump back harder. That world had more or less run itself for millennia, and still was – our agencies existed because neither magus nor hunter was obliged to do such, and the taxpayer was owed protection by their government.

Thus there was very rarely need for any intergovernmental cooperation on wrangling magical threats, and given the extreme secrecy often made it difficult to get other departments of my own government to cooperate even after I flashed a Department of Energy badge, it was small wonder we weren’t very chatty about wizards and warlocks with Our Reliable Allies™.

I sighed, expelling the last lingering doubt with it. Even if I did call the numbers on those water-warped business cards in my wallet, there was no way in hell one rifle custodian on the pointy end was budging an entire national government – or even convincing two very busy people to stop executing their own playbook and heed some stranger’s. At home I could’ve called backup, from NAIC or my own contacts – but even with Dan already in the air by the time he was wheels-down at Yokota it’d probably be too late for some unlucky son of a bitch out there.

I was on my own.

I pulled out my phone. One of the few perks of this job was good equipment; including a “smartphone” that could rely on a Starshield satellite connection in lieu of using local towers; an almost untraceable, encrypted line to Uncle Sam. And much more bandwidth than bouncing through MILSTARs, too. Still no flying cars but the 2020s weren’t all bad. I opened up the camera and started recording.

“Captain’s Log, Stardate…” I closed my eyes, the phone seeming to gain a thousand pounds in my hands as a wave of exhaustion clubbed me like a wet sandbag. “… fuck it.” I rubbed my face, and for a moment, just those few moments, let my reality catch up long enough to feel it.

“If you’re listening to this, I’m either dead or on life support. In which case, pull the damn plug.”

My will was all set with legal, and my family had the best explanation they were ever gonna get, ‘lest someone was willing to risk Federal prison to read them in.

That just left the “why.”

“Dan… they don’t get it. These islands ain’t that big when you account for the mountains; they’ve been elbow-to-elbow with their spookies for thousands of years and they’ve got them… if not tamed, then they’ve at least backed them down a bit. Everyone’s got the measure of everyone else, you know? Ain’t nobody’s first rodeo.”

I rubbed my face again as the exhaustion bore down like a mudslide.

“Yeah, the ground shakes and smokes and tsunamis crash over the land here, but... everything is so neat here. Even the rivers; they corralled the Tone before America was even founded. Meanwhile we’re riding the Mississippi like a bronco and barely hanging it on; hoping it won’t change course and leave New Orleans high and dry. We lose houses and lives every year to massive tornadoes out on the Plains, bigger ones than anywhere else on Earth. The scablands, the Grand Canyon… there’s a scale to America, that defines it. Our myths, our monsters… they’re nothing like what they’re used to. And they’re not gonna realize their assumptions are wrong till people start turning up dead.”

I sighed, turning my face to the heavens. Even in the relative countryside with rice paddies sprawling all around, the sky was fairly washed out, but the major constellations still popped out; Hercules and the Big Dipper spiraling ‘round each other high above. I thought about the other “why,” the “why me,” turning it this way and that as if after years of being unable to summarize it, the puzzle might suddenly solve itself for me.

Of course, it wouldn’t.

Not like it was any of their business, anyway.

“I’ve got a job to do,” I said quietly. “And there’s nobody else here to do it for me. So that’s that.”

I ended the video, saved it, and uploaded the file to my personal server with the dead-man’s switch just in case the phone got fragged along with me.

Then I put on my NVGs.

* * *

I stalked east along the south side of the riverbank, guided only by intuition and the disquiet that oozed from the placid river like a bad smell.

The dreamings and strange seemings had started in Mosul, but this was something deeper; instinct whispering from that part of the human soul forged when naked apes clutching rocks sensed the saber-toothed tiger stalking them through the dark forest. A truth that I learned fast doing force-on-force training in the primeval Canadian forests; not to look directly at someone I was tracking or observing, because people can sense eyes on their back. As I sensed them now; some denizens of the river tracking my progress down the bank warily.

I didn’t have to guess who’d spooked the locals so badly. They knew who I was after and wanted no part of that fight.

The river – the “Kamihoshi-” headed east till it bent due-south; where it met an artificial canal that tapped into the mighty Tone river only two-point-five clicks north. As I strode through the darkness, feeling the ill omens in the air grow stronger with every step while the riverbanks continued to yield neither sign nor spoor, my nerves began to fray.

My instincts were right – he was heading for the Tone. The canal flowed south fast, but water was its element – and an artificial canal built in the 60s wouldn’t have shrines or local kami to stand in its way.

About forty-five minutes and four kilometers later, I’d reached the bend of the river. Sprawling fields and solar farms had yielded to suburban streets to my south, and across the Kamihoshi, in the triangle where canal met river, a picturesque little park slumbered in the moonlight.

And there, on the riverbank some forty meters opposite, was the unmistakable “slide out” where a gator had dragged itself out of the water and up the riverbank, complete with claw marks to either side.

Just bigger.

A lot bigger.

Heart in my chest, I hustled back towards the little road bridge I’d just passed. I’d been right. And if it was facing a long swim against a strong current it might’ve decided it wanted a snack first. I felt my breathing hitching as my stomach tried to climb up my esophagus (was I too late?) but forced it down; habit and training steadying it out almost reflexively. I felt the world pushing in; sights and sounds growing more vivid even as the colors faded ‘round the edges; senses now filtered through a threat-scan. I reached the bridge and accelerated to a foxtrot as I crossed, rifle up to low ready as I slid into combat mode–

–only to see someone waiting for me at the other end some thirty meters distant. A woman; long-haired and dark-robed… and then the unmistakable glint of moonlight off steel as she drew a sword.