Chapter One
2 April 2018
I grabbed the phone on the third ring. After looking at the clock, I realized I’d gotten a solid four hours of sleep. It had been a long six months, in part because Austin was down to two religious types for all the teams.
“Salazar,” I answered, turning on the bedside light.
“Dispatch. All hands alert. We need you to come in,” the voice on the other end said.
“Roger that,” I replied, sitting up in bed. “Who’s the team?”
“You’re working with the Brute Squad tonight, Father,” the voice replied. “Austin PD has got a mess over on Red River they say is entirely ours.”
“Right. Who’s senior on shift tonight?”
“Michael,” came the reply.
I started pulling on gear. Michael was Michelangelo, legendary artist, vampire, and vampire hunter. When he said jump, you jumped.
When Goodhart took over as Austin Director, he’d instituted a policy dictating that a senior person be on duty at all times to make the ‘difficult’ calls. Most of the time, ‘senior’ meant ‘way too much time in the field, with the physical and/or psychological scars to prove it.’ Realistically, the job went to the most senior individual on the injured reserve list—unless there wasn’t an injured reserve list. That usually meant the most senior members of the Quentin Morris Group (QMG) often got stuck with the job on top of whatever else they were working on, especially when things went to hell in a handbasket—which was a fairly accurate description of the supernatural activity levels in Austin most of the time.
Michelangelo had been with the corporation since just after the turn of the 20th century, first as a source, then as an active hunter in London. He was the second-longest serving person on the payroll and the most senior vampire/vampire hunter in Austin, so naturally, he got tapped to be supervisor when he was in town. Having an ancient vampire in combat is not the asset anime makes it out to be; they tend to get distracted by little things, like who’s the more elder vampire and whose maker was senior. The cherry on top? When Michelangelo was in town, we had a boss that never slept.
“Right,” I said, running a hand through my hair. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”
“Negative. Michael says to report to the onsite command. The Brute Squad will be there by the time you get there.”
“Roger that. Anything else?”
“Have a nice evening,” the dispatcher replied before hanging up.
So much for my sleep patterns. The undead have no respect for the living, I swear.
Twenty minutes later, I was standing in the warm rain of a Texas spring evening, turnout bag slung over my shoulder, arguing with a rookie cop so I could get past him to the Mack Granite conversion that served as a field office for the Brute Squad and go to work.
“Look officer, I appreciate your dedication to duty,” I said as he scrutinized my ID for the fourth time, “but if you don’t get the fuck out of my way, I’m going to see how far up your ass I can shove that damned flashlight without lube.”
I smirked at the thought. He was looking over my ID with a six-cell Maglite.
“Threatening me is not going to get you through any faster,” he replied.
My phone started ringing.
“What?” I snapped, answering it.
“Where are you, Jesse?” Jed, the leader of the Brute Squad, asked.
“Standing about fifty yards south of you, with Barney fucking Fife inspecting my ID,” I replied.
“Language, Father,” he replied with a deep chuckle. “I’ll take care of it.”
I watched the back door of the Mack open. Takahashi, Jed’s mad samurai, stuck his head out, and spoke to one of the APD officers standing by the rear of the truck. That officer ran over to an APD command truck and returned with another APD officer in full body armor. The two cops set out for where I was standing with my thumb firmly up my forth point of contact.
“Jennings, what the fuck are you doing?” a husky contralto growled.
I knew the voice—Captain Sarah Brown of APD SWAT.
“Ma’am?! I’m checking ID,” the officer in front of me replied, straightening half-assedly to attention.
“You stupid, time-wasting fuck, let Father Salazar through,” she replied.
“Yes’m,” Jennings said, thrusting my ID back at me and fumbling his Maglite.
“Captain Brown, good to see you,” I said, stepping past.
“Jesus, sorry, Father. Fucking rookies on the perimeter. We’ve got a real mess for you,” she said.
Brown had been with the APD for ten years, clawing her way to the top of the SWAT food chain. She was a rarity in Austin, a native born Austinite. Because of that, coupled with being a no-nonsense female in a ‘good old boy’ network kind of town—regardless of the press releases to the contrary—she’d gotten stuck with the shitty end of the stick. The first thing Chief Holly of APD had done upon taking the job was to appoint Brown the head of Austin SWAT’s ‘Special Cases’ teams, which meant long hours and dealing with the things no one else wanted. She knew the town was a festering cesspit of vampires and other supernatural activity. She’d told me once over beers that she was glad to finally have several someones here who thought the only good vampire was one that had been staked, decapitated, exposed to sunlight, and then its ash piles buried in separate locations. She’d thought the Brute Squad dragging a vampire to death behind a Tahoe had been ‘funny.’
“How bad?” I asked.
“I don’t know. We got a report of something going on in Eyelash, then nothing except loud music coupled with banging.”
“Banging?”
“It sounded like something was being dragged along the walls—hard. Patrol unit was about to go in when one of the regular denizens came running out screaming about these two ‘really mean chicks who were beating the shit out of each other,’” Brown said with a sardonic smile. “I figure two full grown women beating the crap out of each other who don’t show up on thermal imagers are SEP—Somebody Else’s Problem.”
“QMG gets paid to handle SEP by the City Fathers of Austin,” I replied, dropping my bag so I could pull out my body armor. “When they let us do our jobs.”
“Something like that.” She smiled back.
Terry Polk, aka Padre, stepped down from the Mack. “Jesse.”
“Padre, we got anything?” I asked.
Padre was combat ineffective because she’d managed to break an ankle tap dancing with a pair of akaname who’d decided the rest rooms at the Barton Springs Pool were the perfect place for them to take up residence. The Japanese filth lickers were an issue in Austin—usually around the water treatment plant, but they occasionally sent scouts out looking for better locations.
“You’re going to love this. Before we got here, Michael sent in that new guy from London,” Padre said. She didn’t look happy about that either.
“Great,” I said. We got the transfer from London a couple of weeks ago. Like Michelangelo, he was a ‘Special.’ In Group lingo that usually means ‘vampire,’ but it might occasionally mean ‘werewolf’ or ‘bastard who should be dead but for some reason just won’t die’ like Jed’s great grandfather. But it usually meant ‘vampire.’
“Okaaaaay,’ I said, pulling my pistol out of my bag and checking it before holstering it.
“He reported he was going to take ‘an enthusiastic walk inside to see what was happening.’ He’s been in there about a half hour.”
Great. A Special with a sense of humor. Just what I wanted to deal with tonight on four hours of sleep.
“Anything after that?”
“The volume of the crappy-ass industrial-techno-goth-a-billy-ska that was playing went up,” Padre replied, pointing to the parking lot across the street where two cars sat with rusted, eight foot sheets of tin imbedded in them, “and part of the walls came off the building.”
“Don’t forget the window AC units mounted by the door went flying into the limo in the parking lot, too,” Brown added helpfully.
“Peachy,” I said, pulling my submachine gun out, inserting a magazine in the well, and running a round up the spout.
QMG had been replacing the last of our worn out Heckler & Koch (usually referred to as HUNDK by everyone in Group who wasn’t a Germanophile) MP5 submachine guns with the latest product from H&K, the UMP—literally the Universale Machinenpistole or Universal Submachine Gun—mainly because HUNDK had started really jacking up the prices to make parts for the special order MP5’s we had in .45 caliber. Our resident gunsmiths hadn’t been impressed with the .40 caliber MP5’s.
“Whenever you want to go in, Boss,” I said, looking over at where Jed stood in thought in the door of the big Mack conversion.
“The walls are a little thin for Capdepon’s M240,” I added.
Eyelash started life as an industrial space, somewhere around the turn of the 20th century. It had been a lot of things in its time, the latest incarnation being an ‘alternative’ night club. It’s the kinda place where things that go bump in the night can hang out without having to disguise their nature. It had a brick façade along Red River, but the sides and rear were sheet metal-clotted with spray foam insulation. The .308 rounds from Capdepon’s M240 would go through the brick like it wasn’t there. The tin? We’d be pulling bullets out of cars blocks away. Shooting up the other businesses along Red River drive would not be a mitzvah, even if we burned Eyelash down. Might even get us a warning from higher, or worse.
“The Special is in there,” Padre said, running a scan on the building with a handheld camera. “I’ll be coordinating from outside.”
“The new Special is apparently playing DJ for the fight,” Jed said, stepping down from the Mack, finally.
Jed had been my gunnery sergeant in the Corps, back when we were visiting such scenic locations as Sunny Iraq to break things on behalf of the US Government. He’d never lost that Marine gunnery sergeant ability to dominate the area, even after ten years working for Group. The rest of his team stepped up, and he started passing out assignments.
“Joseph, Takashi, y’all cover the door. Jesse, you’re with me. If you have to open up, Capdepon, try to shoot low and hope the ricochets don’t penetrate.”
“Roger that, Boss,” Joseph said with a grin.
Have I ever mentioned I hate industrial music? The dooka-dooka-dooka sounds like meth’d up ferrets dancing on a keyboard. The volume inside Eyelash was louder than the last firefight I’d been in while deployed to the Sandbox, which probably didn’t help my thoughts on ‘industrial music’ much, either. Thank the gods for ear protection.
“How are you planning on handling this?” I asked Jed as we walked through the doors.
If anything, the sound was worse on the inside. We both went live on our mikes as soon as the wall of sound hit us.
“Haven’t got a clue,” he said.
“That’s just fucking great, Gunny,” I replied.
The combatants, for lack of a better term, were both resting at the edges of the dance floor. To the left was a very butch-looking blonde in what looked to be purple leather, along with her entourage, while to the right, a petite, dark-skinned Hispanic in a princess outfit stood, surrounded by meat popsicles wrapped in leather. Vampire fashions make no damn sense to me, for what it’s worth. There were a few ‘normals’ huddled against the far wall, which showed signs of someone’s face being run along it, repeatedly. Sure enough, the London ‘Special’ was in the DJ booth. He killed the sound as soon as he realized we were standing there.
“Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce the final players in our little drama, the Reinhumation Specialists of the Quinton Morris Group!” the Special said into the mike.
“Fuck me running,” I said.
“With a rusty chainsaw,” Jed finished.
The two groups of vampires turned to face us.
“Remind me to kick Michael in his balls when we get back to the office,” I said.
“You’re going to have to get in line behind me to do it,” Jed replied.
“You can leave now, mortals,” the blonde said with a slight German accent. She had occult patterns tattooed around her eyes, which had to be a bitch, because she would have had to have them redone every six months or so. Vampires heal.
“Like, fershure, this totally doesn’t involve you,” the Hispanic said, her accent pure San Fernando Valley.
“Jed, did I ever tell you how I feel about Valley Girls?” I asked, raising my voice.
“No…”
“Can’t live with ‘em, can’t kill ‘em,” I replied, swinging my UMP up and cratering the Valley vampire’s chest with three rounds into the fragile set of blood vessels above the heart. Sure, the pump still works, but there’s nothing connected to it for what passes as blood in a vampire to spread. On top of that, company-issue bullets are frangible silver, to which vampires have an adverse reaction.
With that, the dance was on. The damn Special in the DJ booth at least had the good sense to put on Rammstein. Mien Teil came thundering out of the speakers as we started killing vampires. Gunny ran his M1897 Trench Gun dry in five shots, dropped it to hang by a patrol sling, and switched to his ancient, family 1911. I ran my UMP dry on Valley Vamp’s minions, then dropped the magazine and reloaded in time to dump the second full magazine into the Butch Vampire as she leaped toward the ceiling to clear the tables between us and the dance floor. As soon as Butch Vamp went down, the remaining vampires froze.
“Glamour,” the Special called, stepping out of the booth. “I can control a lot of lesser vampires, but not until you got those two randy cunts thinking about how much they hurt.”
“You. Fucking. Asshole,” I panted.
Combat is cardio, I don’t care what anyone else says.
“Yes?” he replied.
I looked him over. He was wearing a red zoot suit—red-pegged trousers and a long red jacket with wide shoulders over the ubiquitous white peasant shirt, topped with a red, wide-brimmed hat. He even had on red-tinted glacier glasses.
I felt his mind try to probe mine, then beamed as he bounced off.
“My that hurt,” he replied.
“You know, we don’t work with Michelangelo for nothing,” Jed replied. Apparently the mind probe had been general, not specific.
I went through the messy side of the business—staking and beheading—assisted by Capdepon. Crash helped Jed sort out the normal survivors, followed by prepping the live lesser vampires for transport. The Special leaned against a wall, maintaining control of the lesser vampires until we could move them out. Once all the work was done so the cleaners could move in, and the lesser vampires were moved out of Eyelash, I stepped wearily to the Special.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“You can call me,” he paused dramatically, “Tim.”
I kicked him in the nuts with a steel-toed boot. Even in the undead, it’s a sensitive spot. He went to the floor, hard.
“Listen, Tim, I don’t give a shit how big a wonder you were in London. You pull shit like this again around any team in Austin I’m working with, I swear I’ll fucking scrag you myself and file the damned paperwork on why it was a justified action, you read me?” I said, one hand resting on the receiver of my UMP.
He lay on the floor in a ball around his groin, but nodded, weakly. Finally, he straightened out and cautiously stood up.
“What…” he coughed. “What kind of boots are you wearing?”
“No fucking clue,” I replied. “Company issue, so there’s probably a layer of silver in there, somewhere.”
“Tim, allow me to introduce Father Jesse Salazar, Church Very Militant. All we know for sure is he wreaks havoc on monsters,” Capdepon said, grinning.
Jed turned to the head of the cleaners.
“Y’all got this?” he asked.
She gave us a thumbs-up, and we went out into the dawn.
“Jesse, debrief at the shop,” Jed said as I walked back to the command truck to grab my bag.
“Right, Gunny, see you in the office.”
“Sure,” he said with a smile.
Captain Brown was waiting when we got over to the Mack.
“I hate to do this to you,” she said.
“Where?”
“Nah, I’m yanking your chain,” Brown said. “Seriously, go home.”
* * * * *