Crossing over the gateway that Emily had created with her Ascendant form was always stomach-turning, and it didn’t matter that I had travelled with her during several practice runs in preparation for this day. Walking through some kind of magic gateway from one place to another just wasn’t something your body got used to, I guess.
Still, I didn’t know how much of my current state I could contribute to the method of transport. I was bursting with a combination of fear, anger and excitement at finally confronting the Reaper. Aside from myself and Emily, Polly had given me eight of the best trained House members she had—nine people and Emily herself were the most we’d found the girl able to get through before she had to revert to her human, terrestrial soul form. But the members were all former or current military and were loaded down with top of the line weaponry and gear. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but between the team I had and the element of surprise, I felt sure we could face down whatever the Reaper threw at us.
And then we found three people—an old man and a young couple—sitting down chatting in what looked like a fancy basement rumpus room.
Is this what we had been afraid of? Surely not.
I had a second of indecision at seeing them, wondering if the shard of plastic hadn’t really been from the man who had killed an Ascendant in Atlanta years ago or if Emily had somehow made a mistake despite her seemingly unerring accuracy when she had become a gateway in the past. Then the old man looked at me as the younger guy stood up and started coming forward.
It was like a switch had been flipped in both of them—faces that had been open and relaxed a moment before were now hard and filled with purpose. The young man’s eyes were filled with barely restrained violence, but the older man’s gaze was somehow worse. He was just watching us with interest and maybe mild surprise, as though he had just found a new bug he wanted to study.
No, we were in the right spot. These were the fuckers behind all of this, or at least some of them. As we had planned, four of the men broke off to secure the location while the other four remained with me. Their guns were already trained on the trio as I stepped forward, an exhausted Emily in my arms as I addressed them.
“Hi there. I’m Jimmy, and we’re here to collect you in the name of the House of the Claw. You can come peacefully or you can resist.” I looked between the two men and then at the woman between them. “Please resist. I’ve got my orders, but I’d love to burn you all to death the way you did my little girl. I really fucking would.”
The woman looked a bit shocked at this, but neither of the men did. They were the ones that did it, or at least knew about it. Either way, they were all either coming back with us or dying here. And I had been honest about which I preferred.
“No need for any of that.” The old man was standing slowly now and seemingly with great effort. “I’m too weak to put up a fight, and they both have enough sense to know that any firefight in here would result in too many casualties.” He exchanged a look with the young man, who nodded and seemed to relax a bit.
“Yeah, sure. We’ll go with you. Just leave the girl, okay? She’s not a part of any of this. She’s only here because we made her come. She doesn’t have anything to do with your beef with us.”
I laughed. “Sorry, this isn’t a negotiation. Anyone who’s here is going with us. But just so my team doesn’t unnecesarily kill anyone trying to subdue them, do you want to tell me of anyone else that’s here?”
Another look between the old man and the boy. They looked similar, possibly grandfather and grandson? Not that it mattered. They’d both be dead soon enough. Still, their exchanges were troubling. They weren’t panicked, and it was clear they had some plan they were attempting.
The old man cleared his throat. “No one else is here, but there are booby traps around. Your men may not come back in one piece.” He pointed to the younger man. “Jason, why don’t you show them where the traps are. It won’t get them all, and it will only make the survivors go harder on us if their friends are dead.”
Jason frowned slightly at the older man. “Are you sure?”
The old man nodded. “Don’t worry. Just go with them and show them. We’ll be okay here. You can take that to the bank.”
I felt like I was losing control of the situation, but I didn’t see a strong reason to not take the help. If they were telling the truth, it would be good to know. If it was part of some trick, it would give me all the excuse I needed to kill them on the spot rather than risk taking them back for interrogation. Polly and Haley might be mad, but they could get over it.
I pointed to two of the members. I think their names were Rick and Selina. “You two. Stay with them. If they try anything, shoot them.” Pointing at Jason, I gestured for him to go to the other two men. “You go with them. If you try anything, they are going to shoot you in the head and then come back and kill these two. Understand?” I saw the man’s jaw flexing angrily, but he nodded, his eyes locked on mine. “I understand.”
With that, they headed up the stairs. Emily was awake enough to stand now, and as I sat her down, I debated where I should stay. It would likely be safer for her and myself down in the basement with the old man and the girl, but I wanted to see the rest of the place for myself and I didn’t trust anyone else with Emily. Also, she was looking increasingly alarmed as she came back to herself. It might be that exploring the place might be less distressing for her than watching a seemingly harmless pair of people being held hostage at gun point. I understood some of this was my rationalization for wanting to see the extent of “the Reaper” for myself, but that didn’t change anything. I was here to get revenge, and Emily, while a sweet little girl, wasn’t my daughter. She was a tool.
So giving her a comforting smile, I took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “Let’s go look around, honey.”
Narrative Summary of streamed body cam footage uploaded to cloud from Tattersall Security Unit 5482. Video partially corrupted. Files from other Units were somehow wholly corrupted and unretrievable.
The camera footage from Unit 5482, Selina Abarya, shows the initial entry into the Ascendant’s gateway and encounter with the suspected hostiles. 5482 and 5988 are told by HRL19 aka “Jimmy” to stay and guard the older man and younger woman. 5482 takes up a secure guarding position with AR-15 in ready posture while 5988 does a preliminary clear of the downstairs area beyond what had already been done by the recon quad.
No other hostiles are located, but 5988 does come back stating that he can’t open a large metal door in the hallway. He asks the hostiles what is inside, at which point the older man waves his hand and says, “Nothing, nothing. Just storage” in a hurried and visibly nervous manner. Based upon subsequent events, it is believed this reaction was artificial and intended to pique the interest of the team members.
It was successful.
Presumably thinking they were in control of the situation, 5482 and 5988 use command tone and language to direct the hostile to the metal door with orders to open it. The woman states she doesn’t know how to while the man protests, saying there’s nothing there to see. That it’s empty. This is obviously an implied contradiction to his earlier statement that it was “just storage”, and it is this analyst’s belief that this was again intentional to ensure the team members continue compelling the door’s opening.
5988 again orders the door to be opened, pressing the gun against the woman’s head while using command tone on the man. The old man complies, unlocking and opening the door. From the open doorway, a large metal room containing what appears to be an operating table and various apparatus is visible. The glimpse is brief before the old man starts to wail, clutching his chest and stumbling. His words are slurred, but he seems to be saying, “My heart, my heart, oh God, not now…”
The old man staggers toward 5988, appearing to be on the verge of collapse. 5988 pivots and catches him easily, but doing so moves his gun away from the female hostile. There is suddenly a grunt followed by a gurgling sound and 5988 is sliding down the wall clutching his throat. Further study of the video and brief frames that show 5988’s wounds in 5482’s camera allow a limited reconstruction of what occurred.
It appears that the man utilized the pretense of falling to get within arm’s reach of 5988. He then stabbed him deeply in the area of the axillary artery—one of the few areas not covered by his body armor. This wound, while not immediately fatal, provided sufficient distraction to allow him to deal a far deadlier wound to the throat approximately two seconds later. The result was that 5988 was incapacitated and dying as the old man turned on 5482.
5482 had her gun raised, but was in a poor firing position due to her reaction to the old man’s sudden outcry and subsequent attack of 5988. These factors, combined with her training about firing high caliber rounds in the direction of nearby steel, appeared to be the cause of her momentary hesitation. The old man, suddenly much quicker and stronger than he had put on previously, did not suffer from any such hesitation.
He darted forward, and based on his movements and position, it appears that he struck her somewhere on her arm with whatever bladed implement he had used on her teammate. She lets out a yell of pain, and almost immediately you see her gun fall from view and hear the sound of it clattering to the floor. Then she is being pulled into the vault by the man as he tells the female hostile to get in and close the vault door behind them.
As the door begins to close, the footage cuts out, likely due to signal interference from the dense walls of the bank vault 5482 had been pulled into.
The reason for the other body cam videos being corrupted is still being investigated at this time, and thus far, location of the operation is still unknown. It appears that some frequencies in the area were being intentionally jammed by the hostiles, so our best location estimates are based only limited satellite triangulation, placing the site of this slaughter somewhere in the Eastern U.S. This report will be updated as new information becomes available.
“What is it?”
We were standing in one of the other buildings now—another largely empty warehouse with a subterranean secret it turned out. Jason was looking concerned for the first time, and I felt a flush of pleasure at the worry on his face. He wasn’t afraid of me or the men I had brought with me, but he was afraid of whatever was buried under the recently poured concrete floor I was now standing on.
Shaking his head slightly, Jason raised his hand. “Look, you don’t want to open that. We’ve got explosives down there. Really volatile stuff. I don’t even know how to get into it. But if you start hammering away we’re all going to go up.”
I let out a short laugh. “I think your grandpa, or whoever that old fuck is, is a better liar than you, son.” We had met up with the other four members, and I figured the six of them could have that thing open quick enough. “Bust this open.”
One of them, Marvin maybe, asked me how they were going to do it. They hadn’t brought tools for that. I told them to figure it out, and after an irritated exchange of looks, they went and retrieved hammers and crowbars from the small workshop we had seen in a corner of the other building’s surface level. Jason remained silent until they started breaking out chunks of concrete.
“You’re all going to die if you keep at this.”
I smirked at him. “So you say. Just keep in mind, if you act up, not only will we gun you down, your friends die too. All it takes is a word on my mic and they’re done.”
He looked at me for a long time, his eyes seeming to bore into me with an intensity that caused me to finally look away. Just then, he said, “You know, you haven’t heard from those buddies of yours in awhile.” I glanced back up and saw he was smiling coldly at me.
I didn’t want to take the bait, but I couldn’t resist doing a quick check to make sure everything was okay with the hostages in the basement. These people were so strange and self-assured, and it was making me jumpy. Clicking the button on my body mic, I asked how things were going with “the other two”.
There was no response.
Worried I wasn’t using the mic right, as I wasn’t used to all this weird, paramilitary bullshit, I told one of the men tearing through the floor to try calling them. He did, but still no answer. I told them to send someone to go check, but then I heard Jason behind me, closer. One of the men had kept a gun trained on him while the others worked on digging out whatever was buried underneath the floor, but Jason seemed to be ignoring him now.
“I wouldn’t bother with checking. They’re already dead. Just like you’re about to be.”
He shot back toward the man aiming at him, wrenching the gun away with enough force that I saw the man’s wrist and arm twist past the points of breaking as he let out a scream. Impossibly fast, Jason slammed a fist into the man’s chest twice, and even through the bulletproof vest I could hear the muffled crack as his chest caved in. Within five seconds he was dead on the floor and the other men were screaming.
Except they weren’t screaming because of what had happened to their friend. They had finally broken through the floor and met what was sleeping underneath. I watched in mute horror as they began writhing on the ground before growing still as life was taken from them. And I thought I could see something pushing through the rubble, but then my world exploded as my head shattered into bright shards of pain and pressure and…something…
Something was in me. Oh God, something was in my head. I could feel it. It felt cold and unclean somehow, and in the illogic of my terror, I found myself looking at Jason, the man I had wanted to hurt and kill so badly just moments before, for some kind of impossible help. But his wide-eyed expression told me he had no help to give.
I felt like I was drowning, being pushed down into the black depths of some cold, ancient lake. An inhuman, cruel place that never saw light and only bred creatures accustomed to such conditions. It was with growing horror that I realized I was being pushed farther down into the darkness of my own soul. Not the soul of a young man full of hope and ambition as he tried to find a novel approach to the doctoral thesis I never finished. Not the soul of an older man full of love for his wife and daughter, proud of his accomplishments and what the future still held. But the dark and stagnant tides of a bitter old man who had nothing left but his grudges and a willingness to trade away the last of his humanity for a chance to wrong those who had wronged him.
And high above, seated now in the throne of my conscious mind, I could see a foul thing looking down at me. It was looking down at me and laughing a deep, raspy laugh. As I continued to drift down, I saw it look away, using my eyes to regard Jason, using my voice to speak.
“Hello, boy. Doncha think it’s time we finished what we started?”
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Credits
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