War Demons: An Urban Fantasy Thriller (The Prodigal Son Book 1) Page 6

  He reacquainted himself with his old friend boredom. Now he remembered why his younger self had lived such a wild life. He had no interest in returning to that life. But if he didn’t find something to occupy himself, he knew he’d slip back to it.

  Eventually he decided to try something truly crazy. He returned to class.

  Chapter Ten

  “You want to tell us what’s really going on?” George asked.

  Two more girls had disappeared that week, bringing the total of missing students up to five. Michael didn’t know either of them, not even by name. He’d tried convincing himself they had no relation to O’Bryan’s activities.

  “Come on, man,” George chided. “We’re not idiots. What aren’t you telling the police?”

  Michael looked at him sideways.

  “How did you know I talked to the police?”

  “The police talked to all of us, man,” Denzel chimed in. “Especially me. Trust me, man, you do not want to be the black man in a southern town when a white girl goes missing.”

  He should have assumed the police would be talking to everyone.

  “I hope they’re not pressing you too hard.”

  “Naw, man. They ain’t got shit. They grilled me for an hour down at the station. But George had my back. We were at the club all night man, closed the place down!” George grinned back at him and the two high-fived each other.

  “Glad they didn’t take it any further than that,” Michael told him sincerely.

  “Ain’t no thing, man. ‘Cept you owe it to us to tell us what’s going on.”

  “I had nothing to do with Vickie’s disappearance.”

  George raised his hands defensively, but Denzel didn’t let it go.

  “Didn’t say you did, dawg. But you know more than you’re telling us.”

  “I think I know who did it,” Michael allowed.

  “Come on, Michael,” George cajoled him. “This is what the police do. Let them handle it.”

  Michael shook his head.

  “Not this one.”

  “Why not? What’s so special about this guy?”

  Michael paused.

  “He’s dead.”

  Denzel laughed at him.

  “It’s not funny. For one, he’s legally, officially dead. The Army declared it so.”

  “Ah,” George nodded. “That does present a wrinkle.”

  “Worse, I watched him die. I can’t take that to the cops. Best case they send me in for treatment and call it PTSD. Worst case, they decide I’m a suspect and blame it on PTSD.”

  “Probably,” George agreed. “You realize you probably really do have PTSD, right?”

  “Hell yes, I have PTSD!” Michael shouted.

  A moment later even Michael joined the laughter. It felt good.

  “So you saw this guy die?”

  “In a cave in Afghanistan.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “I held him in my arms.”

  “Why do you think it’s him?”

  It took Michael a minute to answer.

  “Because I saw him. The night Vickie disappeared.”

  “You saw him?”

  “He waved at me. And smirked. Taunting. And Saturday morning he called me, right after the deputy left.”

  “You’re crazy, dawg,” Denzel informed him.

  “Most likely.”

  “What’s this guy look like?” George asked.

  “Black haired. Light skin with freckles. Pale blue eyes. Tall – about 6’2. Well, he used to be, anyway.”

  “Used to be?” George asked.

  “His feet, um, got sliced off when the Blackhawk crashed. I carried him into the cave, dragging his bloody stumps along the ground.” He closed his eyes.

  When he opened them, he found everyone very pointedly looking somewhere else.

  “So how’s he getting around on little stumps?” George broke the silence. Michael’s classmates stared at the scrawny nerd. “What? It’s a legitimate question.”

  “I’ll worry about that after I figure out how he’s getting around while dead,” Michael answered.

  “I know this one,” Denzel told George. “It’s like in that Star Trek episode you showed me. He’s got an evil twin.”

  George followed up more seriously.

  “Could he have a real twin?”

  “No next of kin,” Michael replied. “His dad died in a factory accident when he was a boy. His mom died of lung cancer last year. No siblings. The Army gave me the flag at the funeral.”

  “It’s a twin from another dimension.” Denzel refused to let it go. “Did he have a beard?”

  “I never should have showed you that,” George muttered.

  “No, but he had a yellow nose.”

  The boys laughed until they realized Michael hadn’t joined them.

  “You serious, dawg?”

  “As a heart attack.”

  Just then, Abigail entered the classroom. They let the subject drop. By unspoken agreement, nobody included their teacher in the discussion.

  Amazingly, class itself just seemed to carry on normally. Abigail droned on about some old manuscript recently discovered in Poland. Michael paid it little heed. He had a hard time caring about some old parchment while people disappeared around him.

  He had just about concluded that his entire return to college had been a mistake. Surely, he could find something more useful to do. Maybe he could get a job working construction with Peter.

  He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d picked today to show up for class again. Abby had finally stopped nagging him about it, and that helped. He had no qualms at all about turning in today’s homework to the receptionist. Maybe he felt that he needed to give it one more go before he gave it up for good.

  Then one particular slide caught his eye. He sat up straight for a better look, and then rummaged loudly through his backpack, looking for his packet of research notes.

  The other students gave him an odd look. Abigail shot him the stink eye, but she continued as if he weren’t disrupting anything. Michael didn’t hear a word of it. He couldn’t find his notes. Frustrated, he dumped out the entire contents of his bag.

  The lecture paused for a moment and everyone stared at him. Then Abigail continued haltingly.

  Finally he found the folder he was looking for and opened it. He thumbed through the papers, finding a familiar photograph.

  Gotcha. He ignored the contents of his bag spread all over the floor as he compared the image to the slide above. The art styles matched closely. At last, he’d found something that might help him. He studied the details on the slide.

  He finally stopped to listen, excited. For once, he might actually get something useful out of the lecture.

  “...outside of Kiev.”

  Kiev, he pondered. Two versions, thousands of miles apart? That had to mean something. These things had spread beyond the Spin Ghar mountains, then.

  “Note that this manuscript contains some very unusual elements,” Abby continued. “None of the creatures described or drawn in it quite match with other contemporary descriptions. It’s almost as if a modern writer took some old folklore and tweaked it for a book. Yet the one and only thing we do know for sure is that it’s an old manuscript – at least six hundred years old. It’s not a modern compendium or compilation, and it’s definitely not a fake. At least, not a modern one. Ink and paper dating confirms that.”

  The slide flipped. Michael nearly jumped out of his chair.

  “There are clearly mixed sources at play here. As you can see in this slide we just got from Georgetown, this creature resembles a traditional Western European vampire. However, there are several distinct differences. You can clearly also see traits of Eastern European revenants. But the yellow nose is unique, at least to vampiric drawings. The pigmentation on it is odd. We think they might be trying to imply that it glows. You might expect that out of a modern horror film, but it’s a bit surprising to see it in a work several hundred years old.�
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  The picture clearly showed an old, fragile codex. Michael instantly recognized the creature on the page. He’d seen it every night for months, in his dreams. He looked closely at the slide, then down at his desk, and then back at the slide again. He’d finally found confirmation.

  She changed slides again. A pair of men stood outside a tent. Their faces were out of frame, leaving the image focused on its subject: an old codex style manuscript. The men held the book open to show an intricate illustration of what appeared to be a werewolf. The artist had gone to painstaking detail, creating a beautiful image of a terrible creature.

  Michael’s jaw dropped.

  “The artists had an incredible imagination. This level of detail on an invented creature is simply breathtaking. This image was taken at the site in the Ukraine where the manuscript was found –”

  “No, Abby, it wasn’t.” The words left Michael’s mouth before he thought them through. Abigail frowned at him. His classmates gawked.

  “I’m sorry, but this is a very recent find. I got this from Dr. Jones himself. One would think that he’d know where he took his own picture.”

  He’d flustered her. He’d just questioned her authority in front of her students. He hadn’t meant to, but there it was. He should have waited and discussed it with her after class. He’d apologize to her later, for whatever good it would do.

  “Then Dr. Jones is a liar.”

  A line of scarlet rose over Abigail’s face.

  “Dr. Jones is one of the most respected –”

  Michael bowled over her objections. “I don’t know why he’s lying, Abby, but I promise you that he is. That picture wasn’t taken in Kiev. It was taken in a small village in Pakistan just across the border from Jalalabad, Afghanistan.”

  He had everyone’s full attention now.

  “And how exactly would you know that?” She snapped at him.

  Michael lifted the photograph off his desk and presented it to the class.

  “Because that’s where I was when I took it.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Most of his classmates went on to other classes or back to the various dorms, apartments and houses that constituted “home” for an undergraduate. A handful, however, followed them on to the library. Denzel distracted the librarian while George smuggled a pair of pizzas into the second floor study room they’d commandeered. Sam joined them for the first time since the night at the pub. Khalid joined them shortly after sunset.

  Stacks of books and journals framed the mostly eaten pizzas on the table. Michael arranged his notes and photographs strategically among the official documents. Michael’s phurba lay at the heart of it all.

  “When did you take these?” Khalid asked, fingering a few of the photos. One of them showed the same image as Abigail’s final slide. Michael’s uncropped version, however, clearly showed the faces of the two men holding the book.

  “March 28th. About two hours before I got on that helicopter.” Michael grimaced. “I’d been hoping to ask Dr. Stoegemoeller about it when I got here, but clearly that didn’t pan out.”

  Abigail made a face at him. He shrugged back at her.

  “Nothing personal. He’s the biggest expert on creatures of lore in that part of the world. I didn’t even know you were here.”

  “What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why Dr. Jones would lie about these photographs. He has to know that the secret will come out, and when it does he’ll lose everything – his grants, his tenure, his reputation... everything.”

  “I don’t know,” Michael responded truthfully.

  “What I don’t understand,” George responded, “is how he got Michael’s photos.”

  “When I got out of the hospital, they sent me all my things. But my memory cards had disappeared. All of my memory cards, including the ones I took these photos on. I’m willing to bet that the Army doesn’t know I still have them. If I hadn’t uploaded them to a friend’s file server, I wouldn’t.”

  “They’ve got to be hiding something,” Sam.

  “Sure,” agreed Khalid – for once seeming reasonable. “But what? A secret Afghani archaeological expedition that dug up some old book on folklore? Blood diamonds or human trafficking, that makes sense. Drug dealing? Hell, Afghanistan is a massive source of opium. I could buy that, sure. But how does this fit in with any of that? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It wasn’t an archaeological expedition,” Michael added. “One of the local tribal leaders showed this to us. He’d never even tried to hide it. Just the opposite, really. He showed it off like a trophy. O’Bryan and I just thought it looked cool. He wanted his picture taken with an Afghani warlord and his monster book.”

  “Why’d they let the image out at all?” George asked. “Why does the Army care about scholarly analysis of folklore myth?”

  “Maybe this Dr. Jones is just well connected,” Sam conjectured. “Could be they had something going on that they didn’t want to let out, but he found out about it and got a friend to hand it over – on the condition that he couldn’t say where he actually got it.”

  “That could be,” Abigail confirmed. “Dr. Jones is pretty well connected. But it still doesn’t really explain what the Army’s hiding.”

  Khalid fixed Michael with a penetrating look.

  “What aren’t you telling us?”

  Awkwardness filled the room.

  “That’s a little uncalled for, isn’t it?” Abby asked him.

  Khalid didn’t back down. He turned aggressively toward Michael and prepared a verbal assault.

  “No, he’s right,” Michael answered preemptively.

  Everyone fell silent and looked at him expectantly. Even Khalid seemed disarmed by the comment. Michael sat down and exhaled slowly.

  “Look, I didn’t say anything about this before because I didn’t think anybody would believe me.”

  “Why not?” asked George.

  “Because it’s just… weird. And the Army didn’t believe me.” The room went quiet. “Here, let me start at the beginning. The afternoon before the crash we stopped in a village inside Pakistan.”

  “American forces aren’t supposed to be in Pakistan,” Sam interjected.

  “We weren’t supposed to be, but sometimes it happened.”

  They accepted that.

  “We’d dropped in on this tiny, remote little place tucked into the Spin Ghar mountains. None of us would’ve even known it was there. They didn’t give a damn about the US or Afghanistan or even Pakistan, they just wanted to be left alone. But one day they send this messenger out to find us and ask for help, giving us a story about some al-Qaeda big dogs moving into town and pushing them around.”

  “Yeah, they don’t want to take sides, but they sure want us on their side,” Sam quipped.

  Nobody laughed.

  “They fed us a lot of bullshit,” Michael replied. “We knew that before we even went in. At first, we figured they wanted us to provide security for their opium operations. They weren’t the first to try that. Turns out, though, that they wanted to drag us in on a little hyper-localized warfare against the village on the other side of this tiny rock outcropping they lived on. The other village’s shaman had cursed their shaman or some crazy thing like that.”

  “Wait, isn’t Pakistan a Muslim nation?” asked Tim.

  “Mostly,” answered Michael, “and a little bit of Hindu. But these remote villages are a world all to themselves. The people weren’t even Pakistani. We had an anthropologist, Lieutenant Griggs, in one of the National Guard units with us. He joined us for a few trips to the village. He guessed that their ancestors had migrated over from Tibet or Nepal. They practiced this weird mash-up religion, kind of a cross between Islam, Buddhism, and Hindu shamanism. Didn’t make much sense to us, but it was deadly serious to them.”

  “They migrated in all the way from Tibet?” Khalid asked skeptically.

  “Seemed odd to us, too, but Griggs had all these notes about Tibetan language and religi
ous influence.” Michael answered. “Besides, it had to have happened centuries ago. These people had been there for a long time.”

  “How come nobody knew they were there?” Sam asked.

  “You can hide anything in those mountains,” Michael answered. “Even in an era of satellites and drones. The place is nuts.”

  “So what did you do? Kill the other shaman and break the spell?” George asked.

  “Well, at first we planned to give them the finger and tell them it wasn’t our problem.”

  Abigail said, “I sense a ‘but’ coming on here.”

  “We found out that the other village really was harboring al-Qaeda fighters. These villages try that trick all the time. Claim al-Qaeda or Taliban, and then send in the Americans to do the dirty work. Poof, no more rival village, and they didn’t even have to lift a finger. But these guys never even brought it up.” Michael shook his head.

  “Anyway, there was a small cell that harassed the locals. We already knew that. We just hadn’t tracked them down. But we find out these are our guys. So we blow in and snag them. The ‘shaman’ died in the firefight – shot by accident by his own side, believe it or not. We got a hero’s welcome. The day of the crash we’d stopped in for some kind of award ceremony.”

  “That’s when you took the pictures?” Abigail asked.

  “Yeah. They brought out this book, treated it like some kind of holy relic. They did a reading from it and did some ritual that I didn’t understand at all. And they gave me this.”

  He picked up the phurba from the table.

  “What is it?” George asked, reaching for it. Michael handed over the item.

  It resembled a dagger. Some would call it three bladed, but on this particular object it more closely resembled a three sided pyramid. It joined with a round handle and finished with a pommel engraved with three faces.

  “It’s called a phurba. It’s inscribed with the three faces of Vajrakila – joy, wrath, and peace. They make them from seven different materials, but I can’t remember all of them.”