"Necrophile Palace"
May. 20th, 2022 03:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dochermes"Necrophile Palace"
1/11-1/12/1994
One-thirty on a winter morning, and a gaunt man in black moved through darkened side streets. Even in the daytime, Newburgh was not a city that seemed safe or inviting. At this hour, the rundown empty buildings almost seemed to warn you themselves to stay away. At the corner of Liberty Street was a grocery store that had been boarded up for some time, and sitting on the step of its padlocked front door was a thin woman with orange hair.
Cutting through a miserable dead lawn cluttered with junk, Bane crept up to flatten against the wall of the closed store. He could just see the woman but so far she had not caught sight of him. It was not that cold for early January, just above freezing in fact, and she was wearing a thin cloth coat and a wool cap over her teased hair. A cigarette end flared up to show her face for a second. Early thirties, average looking, with a snub nose and bright red lipstick. In a short time, of course, she would lose being even presentable as the crack had its inevitable effect. In the meantime, she could still pick up customers to pay for her habit.
As a usual policy, Jeremy Bane was not concerned with streetwalkers or their clients. That had been going on for ages and would be around long after he was dead. No, the Dire Wolf had driven up here from Manhattan hunting bigger game, but without any progress so far. Dressed all in black, with a long coat and thin leather gloves, he was only vaguely visible in the gloom of a weak street lamp on the corner. As a white VW Jetta slowed and came to a halt at the stop sign nearby, the woman looked up and smiled. The car moved on, but Bane saw it signal a turn at the next block and expected it might swing around for the driver to take a better look. He lowered himself flat to the ground with only enough of his head sticking past the corner of the building for him to see what was happening.
A few seconds later, the Jetta came around again, its passenger side closest to the corner where the orange-haired streetwalker sat, and stopped. The window slid down a few inches and a man's voice called out, "Need a ride?" The woman stood up and said, "Sure," and went over to the passenger door. As she peered in the window, she asked, "You're not a cop, are you?"
"No, are you?"
"Nope," she said and opened the door to get in. Bane rose and moved swiftly forward. In less than a second, he would have swung around the car and yanked the driver's door open. With his reflexes, he could seize the driver before the man could react. But at that instant, two hard impacts hit him high on the back between the shoulder blades and something white-hot sliced across his neck. The Dire Wolf was slammed to his hands and knees with the breath knocked out of him. The Jetta pulled away at normal speed, evidently neither the driver nor the streetwalker had seen the incident in the darkness.
Instantly, Bane rolled over onto his back and his anesthetic dart gun appeared in his left hand. A black Jeep Forester went past and turned the corner in the same direction the Jetta had taken. Although he was up on his feet and had a clear shot, Bane slowly lowered his gun. He could not justify firing at a car when he didn't know who was in it or even if it was invoved in the situation. The Dire Wolf exhaled angrily and swung back to scan the area. He saw nothing, no movement on rooftops or between buildings. Every window he could see was closed.
Something warm was trickling on his neck, and he knew he was bleeding. Bane reluctantly holstered his gun, took a small plastic kit from an inside pocket and pressed an adhesive gauze pad to the wound. That nick had been a close call, he realized, if it had been just a fraction of an inch to the side... The Dire Wolf reached inside his coat and came out with a powerful pencil flashlight which he narrowed to show a beam no thicker than a thread. In a minute, he found two misshapen lumps of metal which he pocketed. They were still hot. The flexible Trom armor he habitually wore under his clothes prevented penetration and dissipated most impact, but bullets still had enough of a punch that they could knock him down.
Still wary, Bane circled the block a few times, hand on the butt of his revolver, grey eyes moving intently. Nothing. One window on the second floor of a white frame house showed the blue light of a television screen but the angle was all wrong for anyone to have shot him from there. Disgusted, he walked back three blocks to where he had parked his Subaru Outback and got in. That shooting had not made any sense. Suppose the driver who had picked up the woman was one of the Necrophiles, and the shooter was, too. Did they think Bane was a cop about to interfere with the snatch? Why not make sure he was dead? Why just drive away right after the Jetta? Why hadn't he heard the shots? Silencers were not that efficient, there was always some noise. Was it a specially made airgun?
Working this over in his mind, the Dire Wolf drove around the neighborhood in gradually increasing circles, searching for the white Jetta. If the driver who had picked up the woman was not a Necrophile but just a regular customer, odds were they would not have gone far. Ten minutes went by and he had not spotted them. He had seen some shabby motels on the 9W just outside of town, including one that advertised hourly rates and he would have to check them next, but his instincts told him it would be pointless. He had a sick feeling that the streetwalker was on her way to Necrophile Palace.
II.
At five on that same morning, a black Jeep Forester pulled up in front of a rented house just outside New Windsor, ten miles from Newburgh itself but much more open country in nature. It was a two-story frame home, with a shingled roof and a large back yard that bordered the woods. Several windows were lit. Getting out from behind the wheel, Neda Jilovska closed her door and waited for the man in the passenger seat. Henry Brockton Paige slammed his door with unnecessary force and stood with clenched fists. She came around to stand beside him, placing her hands on his arm.
"You mustn't blame yourself for everything, Henry," she said quietly. "I had to stop at that red light, there was a police car in the parking lot within plain sight. We would have been pulled over and the Necrophile would have escaped anyway."
Paige turned away from her, sullen and withdrawn. "I should not have shot the Necrophile who was on the sidewalk. Better to have put out the tires, then nailed them as they ran. The woman would be safe and now we know she is not only dead but worse.. she is being desecrated! What was I thinking?"
"What I want to know is what happened to the Necrophile you shot? When we came back, his body was gone. But we saw no one else in the area. Come, let's get inside, I'm freezing."
Paige got hold of himself. He was a good-looking man in his early thirties, just over six feet tall and athletic, with crisp dark hair and clean-cut features. He was wearing a black suit and tie, with a white topcoat and scarf, the material and tailoring showing he had money. Letting out a breath, he made himself untighten. "Yes, Neda, You're right. The Judgement's war never ends and losing the first skirmish has never stopped us before." He offered her his arm and they walked up to the porch.
The front door opened and a big form filled the open space. Suleiman stepped aside to welcome them in, closing the door and asking, "What will you tell me, chief?"
"Bad decision on my part, old friend." Paige went over to a table where a bottle of brandy stood, poured himself a small amount and tossed it down. "We saw a Necrophile pick up an unfortunate woman. We were nearby in the Jeep. A second Necrophile went to shove the victim into the car and I let him have three bullets. With my special gun, there was no sound of course and the way the car drove away, I suspect the driver did not even see what had happened. We followed.. but we lost them!"
"That was my fault," Neda repeated. She was a small woman, no more than five foot four, with a trim figure and curly brown hair. No accent remained in her voice. "I stopped at a light because a police car was watching us."
"And now that woman is dead! Even dead, the worst is yet to come for her!" Paige sank wearily into a chair and buried his face in his hands. "If I don't stop these fiends, who will? The police scoff at the idea of a Necrophile cult, they dismiss the missing women, the patterns of disappearances. The FBI will not even give me an audience. I tell you, there is no one else who can break this vile cult! It is the Judgement alone."
"Yes, yes," Neda said, bending to wrap her arms around him from the side. "You have already defeated so many masterminds. You will bring Judgement to these monsters as well. But the night is gone. Now you must rest to be ready for the next battle."
Paige slowly got to his feet and shrugged off his topcoat, which Suleiman took and hung upon a wall hook. "Yes. I must be ready. We will find leads to follow, clues to unravel. The Necrophiles will be smashed. But a few hours sleep is all I need." He turned and walked slowly up the stairs, loosening his tie as he went.
"The chief drives himself hard," Suleiman said quietly as he turned off the outside lights.
"He always has." Neda took off her own coat and yawned. "At first, I worried he might break under the strain. Now I worry he will not... and this crusade will go on forever."
III.
Just as dawn was starting to show, Bane gave up the hunt. He was not tired, just angry. Along Route 17K, he stopped at a diner and devoured scrambled eggs, pancakes, hash browns and bacon almost without coming up for air. His enhanced reflexes made him faster than normal Humans, but that metabolism needed lots of fuel. He downed a glass of orange juice, paid and left. Just a few miles down the road was the motel where he had taken rooms for the next couple of days. This was a family-type establishment, not the shady sort along the strip that advertised water bed and free X-rated movies in each room. The Have-a-Rest motel had put some effort into looking like a real house, rather than a cinder block row of anonymous cubicles.
The Dire Wolf backed up toward the door of Room 6, so that he could jump in the car and rush away if necessary. In the hesitant light before sunrise, he unlocked his door and stood for a second, listening, trying to sense if anything was wrong. His left hand was behind him, holding the grip of his gun as he closed the door behind him and flicked on the light. Nothing had been touched. Still wary, he checked the bathroom and the closet, inspected where he had left a pencil leaning against his knapsack, the angle he placed the pillows at before leaving. It seemed okay.
Checking that the door and window were locked and the curtains still pulled, Bane relaxed as much as he ever did. He tugged off his black sport jacket and sourly regarded the two ragged little holes high up between the shoulders. His black turtleneck would have the same holes. Hours earlier, he had tugged the bloody bandaid off his neck and discarded it. Now he checked himself in the bathroom mirror and saw there was barely a red mark where the third bullet had ripped along the skin.
He was used to this rapid healing. Almost twenty years of the tagra diet from Tel Shai had boosted his recuperative powers beyond what medical science could explain. He was not invulnerable, of course, and could be killed by a severe enough trauma, but Bane regularly bounced back from damage that would mean a week in ICU for the average person. As long as he was in the bathroom, Bane stripped down to take a hot shower and toweled dry. Naked, he was a startling sight, with almost zero body fat and long wiry muscles like a runner. Coming back into the main room, he strapped the matched silver daggers to his forearms even before he tugged on white cotton briefs and a plain white T-shirt. He seldom let those blades be out of reach for long. The clothes which he had worn the night before he hung up to air for a while, including the armor. This looked like a snug bodysuit of dark silk, leaving only the head and forearms unprotected.
Bane still was not really sleepy, being hyper and restless by nature, but he knew his body and mind needed a certain minimum amount of sleep to function well. He went to turn off the overhead light, checked that the thermostat was at 68, and pulled down the covers on the double bed. Stretching out under a single sheet, the Dire Wolf set his mind to awaken in four hours. Then he began the breathing cycles he had been taught at Tel Shai, clearing his mind and slowing his heartbeat until he dropped off within a minute.
At just before eleven, the Dire Wolf took a deep breath and sat up, completely awake and refreshed. He had slept later than he had planned, but no harm done. While asleep, his subconscious mind had been working and things seemed clearer. He decided that he had been shot by a third party, not someone aligned with the Necrophile cult but someone who had in fact gone in pursuit of them. A rival group of warlocks? Someone who had had a loved one murdered and abused by the Necrophiles and who sought revenge? There were a couple of possibilities there. And Bane thought it was likely that he had been shot for one of two reasons. One, the shooter had misread Bane as a Necrophile himself and had blasted him and left him for dead. Or two, the shooter had realized Bane was about to intervene and had shot him because the shooter wanted to kill the Necrophiles himself. Either explanation had its strong points.
Getting dressed, starting with the Trom flexible armor and the same slacks as the night before but a fresh turtleneck without holes, Bane brooded over the situation. A third party was complicating the hunt, that did not appeal to him. Putting on his sport jacket, he took the two battered slugs from its pocket and examined them under the lamp. They were the right size for a .32, he decided. He would dispose of them at the first good opportunity. Getting a notebook and pen from his knapsack, he picked the local phone book out of the nightstand and settled down on the couch. For the next tedious twenty minutes, he copied down the realtors' names and addresses and phone numbers from the yellow pages. He had maps of the area in his car. This was likely to be a day of tiresome detective work, but he saw no way out of it. He folded the paper into his inner breast pocket and decided to buckle down and get going.
Checking his equipment was such a habit at this point that he would have been extremely uneasy just strolling out without a rundown. The silver daggers he always had strapped under his sleeves. He examined the anesthetic dart gun with its thick barrel and holstered it behind his left hip. In various concealed pockets of his jacket and slacks were a dozen gadgets. The Trom oxygen membrane. A small first aid kit. An egg-sized smoke grenade and an explosive grenade the same size. Three thermal flares, no bigger than pencils. An assortment of lockpick probes. The communications device called a Link. Several other useful gimmicks, all tiny because they had been modified by the Trom who called himself Leonard Slade before his death. He varied the gadgets according to circumstances but at the moment he was carrying the standard assortment.
Bane tugged on his long cloth coat and pulled on thin leather gloves. A few more minutes were spend adjusing items in the room so he could tell if it was searched during his absence. Then he stepped out into a bitter morning. It was much colder than it had been the previous day, with a wind from the north. The Dire Wolf went to his car and pulled out onto 17K. He stopped at the same diner and tore through a lunch of two bacon cheeseburgers, fries and an iced tea, with a slice of apple pie. He never felt full. His metabolism burned calories like a shrew. Bane got on the road and started visiting the real estate offices in the area, checking them off on his list.
The day went as slowly and as fruitlessly as he had dreaded. He was honest at each office, showing the realtors his Private Investigator license and explaining he was looking into the disappearances in the area. Four women had gone missing in a little over a year, and the police were making only a token try at investigation because the victims had been known prostitutes and drug users. Bane told the realtors that the victims still deserved to have their fates found out and the guilty parties punished.
He wanted to know about newcomers to the area who had rented houses within the past year. They would not be young couples but most likely two or three middle-aged men who would seem prosperous.
Everyone said they wished they could help, several remarked sadly that even women down on their luck deserved to be avenged if they were killed, but they hadn't had any such clients. Long experience and training by experts let Bane decide the realtors were being truthful. He thanked them for their concern and moved on. The long afternoon dragged on this way. At ten to five, he pulled into the J K EMMETT REAL ESTATE office sitting in a strip mall between a laundromat and an Italian restaurant. The sole person there, a chubby blonde with a pile of papers scattered all over her desk, listened soberly and said she thought she could help....
IV.
After sleeping much of the day, Henry Paige rose clear-headed and dressed quickly . Neda had slept in her own room down the hall. They were allies but not lovers, which suited him as his cause did not leave room for any possible romances. He found Neda in the living room reading a magazine and sipping green tea. She was wearing a beige pantsuit with an off-white blouse.
"Good afternoon," she called as he stood in the doorway. "What's the agenda for today?"
"We must try a new approach," he snapped. "Patrolling the streets at night is too uncertain. No, I think I need to speak to the families of the victims. The police may well be looking for us already, they are always hounding the Judgement. How ironic! Judgement is their greatest ally but they think he is a common murderer. If only they knew the truth... but I am sure someone in the victims' families knows something that will point us in the right direction. Suleiman!"
The big man appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. He wore a plain dark jacket, pants and open-collared blue shirt. Suleiman was dark-skinned, with straight glossy black hair, a bristly beard and a prominent beaklike nose with two fierce dark eyes on either side. "Something to eat, boss?" he rumbled in his gravelly voice. "I can have an excellent omelet with green peppers and fresh mushrooms ready in a minute."
"No time for food now," Paige said. "There is much to do."
Watching Suleiman, Neda frowned. The huge fighting man almost filled the doorway. He claimed he was an Afghan from a tribe that had been wiped out by the Russians, but he sure didn't look like an Afghan. He looked to Neda like someone from northern India... a Sikh, perhaps. But he never wore a turban or mentioned his religion. She had seen him in action many times, and he was both fast and merciless with the long knives he carried strapped to his back with their hilts up for easy access. And he was devoted to Henry Paige with unquestioning loyalty, never saying why.
Neda Jilovska watched the two men and remembered why she had joined Paige in his crusade as the vigilante known only as Justice. She had herself suffered brutally from crime four years earlier but instead of being traumatized, she had been galvanized into an intense desire to fight criminals and see they never had a chance to claim another victim. In Paige, with his wealth and skills and his own obsessive desire to kill criminals, she had found the perfect partner.
Pulling aside the curtains in the living room to glance outside, Paige seemed to consider for a second. Then he swung around, raising an imperative finger. "Neda, please take the Jeep to the nearest convenient mart and buy a copy of the local newspapers. I believe there are three, the MID-HUDSON RECORD, KINGSTON DAILY FREEMAN and the ALBANY TIMES-UNION. I want to watch the local news at five. Suleiman, I believe I will have something to eat after all. We may have a long campaign ahead of us tonight."
"Very well, chief," grinned the big warrior as he faded back into the kitchen. "There is bacon as well."
As Neda headed for the door, grabbing her coat off a chair, she looked back. "I'm still curious about that Necrophile you shot last night, Henry."
"What about him? He was going to shove that woman into the car if she hesitated. I saw him lurking at the side of the house watching her and moving forward only as his colleagues pulled up in the car."
"What happened to his body?"
"Others from the cult claimed it, obviously." Paige turned his intense blue eyes on her critically. "I do not think they realize Justice is on their trail just yet. There are many shootings in this city every year. I have always wanted to bring our campaign to this hellhole of a city."
Neda nodded in agreement but said nothing as she left. Crossing over to the couch, Paige dropped down and found the remote, then turned the TV to the local news channel.
"Poughkeepsie police are combing the area for the dangerous vigilante who calls himself 'the Justice'," a cute blonde reporter was saying as she stared into the camera. "When the body of convicted drug dealer James 'Jimbo' Walsh was found shot to death Friday night on Downs Street, the trademark of the so-called Justice killer was discovered on his body. This is a simple playing card with a bullet hole through the center. The killer has been active for at least the past three years in various cities across the Northeast..."
Coldly furious, Paige sat through the rest of the story. Nothing about three missing women in the area. This was so typical of the police, he thought, they were such fools. If they gave him some room to operate, the Judgement could make progress wiping out the vermin of the underworld. But no, they didn't recognize their folly...
"Your meal is ready, chief," said Suleiman from the doorway. "Miss Neda and I have already eaten."
"Eh? Oh, thank you." Henry Paige jumped to his feet and headed for the breakfast nook, where he could smell fresh coffee. "I do count on you to keep me grounded."
Suleiman smiled behind his fierce beard and bowed very slightly.
IV.
Stopping at a red light on Broadway, Jeremy Bane studied the streets. Newburgh reminded him of the bad parts of Manhattan. The seedy bars and check-cashing places and dingy beauty salons, with lots of litter on the sidewalks and an old man curled up sleeping in a doorway. Adding to the bad impression was that the street itself had more cracks and potholes than any he had seen in years. He knew there was a lot of crime here, more murders and drug deals and burglaries than any other town upstate. The Dire Wolf frowned as the light turned green and he headed toward down toward where the river was visible. There was nothing Midnight War about the crime here, though. It was just poor people risking prison or death for a chance to get rich by selling crack or heroin or their bodies. He had no solutions.
Turning right, he went toward New Windsor. Suddenly he was back in open country, with individual houses that had large well-tended yards. It was a relief. Bane drove along, thinking about the two addresses that Amy at the real estate agency had given him. At a convenient mart, he pulled in to top off the gas tank. As always, he also checked his tires and cleaned the windows. More than once, this procedure had been a big help when a sudden chase came up. Pulling over to the side of the building, he read the newspaper that had been caught his eye when he had gone in to pay.
Two days ago, a known drug dealer who had been freed on insufficient evidence had been found lying on a side street in Poughkeepsie with a gunshot wound right between his eyes. Stucking in his shirt pocket was a playing card with a bullet hole in its center.. the trademark of the Judgement. The headline read NOTORIOUS 'JUDGEMENT' VIGILANTE IN AREA? The Dire Wolf memorized every word of the article and sat behind the wheel for a long time digesting the information. Judgement! He had followed the man's activities with mixed feelings. Bane had been a vigilante himself most of his life, tracking down maniacs and monsters on his own self-imposed authority. He had never felt the need to justify his actions but he realized now it left him in a position where he couldn't honestly criticize this Judgement character for doing the same.
But then he realized that it might have been Judgement who had shot him three times in the back last night, without knowing who he was. If Judgement made wrong decisions like that, it nullified any justification his crusade might have. Shooting one innocent person changed everything. Bane was only alive because he had been wearing the Trom armor under his clothes.
How many times had this Judgement killed the wrong man? Bane started up his car and pulled out onto the road, heading west. It was getting dark as he spotted the house she had described. He went past it and turned off on a nearby side road to find a spot where he could leave his car. Pulling off into the dirt, he parked behind a willow tree and got out. Suddenly he felt alive for the first time all day. Nocturnal and feral by nature, the Dire Wolf grinned to himself in the gloom and raced across the vacant field into the woods. He did not have far to go before he was creeping up on a very posh redwood house with a deck encircling it and an outdoor hot tub lit from beneath. Three windows were lit, all on the ground floor. The second story remained dark except for the faint glow of a nightlight in one room.
Parked in the gravel driveway was a new shiny black Jeep Forester. Perfect. Circling around the unlit side of the house, Bane lowered to fingers and toes and skittered up to the Jeep. It was locked but locks had not deterred him for many years. Getting in the back seat, he began searching. There was a small knapsack and he found it was packed with spare clothing and first aid equipment. A thick paperback had POLAND AFTER THE WAR as its title, and there was an empty water bottle. Leaning over the seats into the rear compartment, he tugged up a floor panel and found, not a spare tire, but a leather case two feet across. The lock on this was stubborn but he got it open. Inside, neatly stowed in separate compartments, were the parts of a remarkable gun. Basically a semi-automatic pistol resembling a Mauser. Caliber would be 32. There was a shoulder stock and attachable extended barrel for greater distance and there silencers that were unfamiliar to him. They looked like plastic 12-ounce soda bottles with vents on the sides. Very interesting, thought Bane. He took a small pair of pliers from an inside pocket and intended to disable the gun. But then his sharp hearing caught the sound of a voice, with a clarity that meant the speaker was standing in an open doorway.
Smoothly as if he had rehearsed it thousands of times, the Wolf dropped out of the door, rolled on the gravel and slid underneath the Jeep. This was one of the times that being thin was a huge advantage. He heard a man's voice say confidently, "I can feel it in the air. We will end these atrocities tonight." A woman replied, "Your instincts have always been good."
Three doors of the Jeep opened and closed almost simultanously and the engine revved up. Underneath, Bane wriggled toward the back end of the vehicle, turning his head away from the tailpipe. As the Jeep rolled forward, he got out from under it but lay still. Even if anyone had glanced back, he was difficult to spot in the night with his black outfit. He saw the Jeep turn left at the highway, heading back toward Newburgh. Faster than a real wolf, Bane leaped up and tore away into the woods back to his car. No time to search the house now, he was convinced the big showdown was near. There was his car under the willow. Jumping behind the wheel, he raced up the side road and headed in the same direction that the Jeep had gone.
V.
Neda had been talking with the woman for close to an hour before she made her apologies and got up from the shabby couch. In an easy chair stained with grease on one arm, Henry Paige got to his feet also, keeping a mournful expression on his face. From their bundle of fake IDs, Neda had produced credentials showing she was a representative from a women's rights organization in Albany, determined to bring some closure to what had happened to the unfortunate missing women of the Hudson Valley. The mother of Wendy Scheuer had quickly opened up about how her daughter had started making cash on the streets to help with expenses in their apartment, the bad company she had kept, the way the drug use had taken over. Cora had gone out one night to walk her territory on Water Street by the river and had never come back. The police claimed to be looking into it but the mother had little faith in them.
As they stepped outside of the worn-down white brick building with its dirty windows and battered overflowing garbage can, Neda took Paige's arm. "She gave us nothing we can use, Henry."
"I believe our best bet is still to investigate that country club we spotted. It was closed for repairs almost two years and has not re-opened despite being ready from all appearances. It just seems suspicious to me." He stopped by the black Jeep Forester as a huge bulk loomed up. "What is it, Suleiman?"
The warrior spoke quietly. "Do not look across the street, chief. A drug dealer on that corner. The young black man with the wool cap standing next to the alley. I have seen two men walk up to him, talk and go into the alley for a few minutes."
In the gloom left by an inadequate street lamp far away, Henry Paige showed a predatory grin. "Well. No matter what, this will not be a night without Judgement. Let me assemble my gun..."
"I pray thee, allow me," said Suleiman. "I will be quick and silent."
Paige only hesitated for the barest instant. "Certainly, old friend. Why not?"
"I will provide the distraction," Neda said in the same hushed tone. She was wearing a white cloth coat that showed her slim figure to good advantage and her curly brown hair had been brushed out. As Paige turned to her, she pulled her Beretta partly out of her right pocket to reassure him.
"Very well," said Paige. "You two are as much a part of the Judgement as I am." He got behind the wheel of the Jeep and settled back. Neda and Suleiman glanced at each other and separated. The big Afghan strode quickly down one block and paused on the next corner. Neda crossed the street after a dark Hyundai blaring hip-hop rolled past and made it to the corner right next to where the dealer was lurking in the alley between the darkened window of ENG'S CHINESE TAKE-OUT and RELAX SPA- NAILS AND HAIR. Not even seeming to notice him, she turned and started walking slowly in the other direction, reached the end of the block and waited for a minute, then started strolling back toward him.
As she approached, Neda saw a big hand clamp down over the dealer's lower face and an arm tighten around his chest. The man disappeared into the alley without a squawk. Neda surveyed the area. From a side street, a red Ford pick-up emerged and
headed south. No one else was in sight. She crossed over to stand by the alley mouth and studied the cars parked along that street. None of them had anyone behind the wheel. This was not a police sting. Still holding the Beretta ready in her pocket, the Czech woman joined her partner in the alley. The dealer was already dead, propped up against the cold wall of the Chinese restaurant between two cardboard boxes of rubbish.
Suleiman was wiping the seven-inch blade of one of his knives carefully on the man's Army surplus coat. He straightened as Neda approached, and without a word held out six tiny plastic envelopes of white powder. They quickly searched the man, finding a pack of Newports, two lighters, a box of Tic-Tacs and some keys in his pants pockets. From the Army coat came a Glock and several thousand dollars rolled together with a rubber band. Suleiman pocketed the money but left everything else, including the heroin, on the corpse. Together, they emerged from the other side of the alley onto the main street and started walking.
At the next corner, Paige pulled over to let them in. They had worked out their procedures many times. As Neda filled him in, Suleiman settled into the back seat with a satisfied sigh. He leaning over and handed the money up front to the Paige. "I would say five to six thousand dollars, chief."
"We will donate to one of our charities, anonymously of course. Bad money put to a good cause. Now to resume our hunt for the Necrophiles!"
VI.
Behind the wheel of the Jeep, Bane slowed and pulled over beside the road. In a depression lay a frozen lake with a boathouse. Near it stood a sprawling resort building with a tennis court behind it and a parking lot with only two cars. A wooden sign up by the road said GOODWIN LODGE with a yellow sticker over it, CLOSED. He studied the layout for a moment. Lights were on in two windows but no outside lights and the lodge sat in the gathering darkness. The Dire Wolf went back on the road and found a good spot to leave his car under a tree a half mile away. He stepped out in the cold and the dark, sensing danger ahead of him and felt at home.
Dressed all in black, moving quickly and silently, Bane got onto the parking lot and crept up on the side of the lodge away from the lighted windows. Of the two cars parked in the lot, one was definitely the VW Jetta he had seen the night before and the other was a Nissan Sentra. He memorized their plates and placed a tracer inside the rear bumper of the Jetta, where it stuck magnetically. Creeping up on the side of the building, he examined a window and found no sign of an alarm system. Tentatively, he tugged and it slid easily open. Bane slid easily through the window without making a whisper, as long years of practice helped. He closed the window silently behind him and let his sense adjust. The room was completely dark, without even light showing under a door.
After a few minutes of listening, the Dire Wolf took a pencil flashlight from his inner pocket with its lense turned down to minimum. A beam of light barely thicker than a needle played around a bedroom. There was a dresser with a mirror, two chairs and a coffee table, a TV on a stand. A double bed stood against the wall, with a nightstand on either stand. The bed was neatly made. Lying on it was a body under a sheet.
Bane went over and pulled the sheet down. Yes, it was the streetwalker he had seen the night before, naked, lying with her legs modestly together and her hands folded across her chest. Her eyes were rolled up in her head. Bane examined her under the flashlight, curious that her skin was so wrinkled and dehyrdated. She looked as if she had been left out in the desert sun for days. The Dire Wolf covered her up again and stood there in the dark, fighting down his anger to keep a clear head.
There was no doubt now. He was in Necrophile Palace.
Stepping over to the door, Bane pocketed the flashlight and checked that his gun was ready for a draw, then opened the door a crack and stood listening. He stepped out into a darkened hall and saw dim light at its end. Stalking down that hall, moving so quietly it was eerie, the Dire Wolf came up on a bend in the hall and saw an open area with comfortable chairs around round coffee tables. Under a shaded standing lamp, a young man sat thumbing through a news magazine. He seemed to be of college age, no more than twenty-two, quite good-looking with wavy dark blonde hair and regular features. The young man was wearing khaki slacks, slippers and an olive green polo shirt. Well-defined muscles showed under the tight shirt.
Watching from the darkness up the hall, Bane was puzzled. He did not have much information on the Necrophile cult, but his understanding was that it was comprised of a few middle-aged warlocks. He was not certain who this boy might be. Maybe a driver? Someone to handle struggling victims?
As he watched, a woman emerged from a door and came over to the man, who glanced up at her without smiling. "How'd it go, Kate?"
"Not bad," she answered lightly. "I'm getting to enjoy doing it with you two. Maybe it's just practice but I think I could learn to like the sex with you guys even if it didn't make me younger." Kate was tall, maybe five feet ten, with full curves and a mane of black glossy hair that hung down past her shoulder blades. She was wearing a gold-colored bathrobe loosely sashed at the waist and was barefoot.
The young man flashed a grin with the perfect teeth of youth. "Glad to hear that. We might as well have a good time while we're drawing in lifeforce."
Kate sat down in the chair next to him. "It was pretty unpleasant at first, Alex. We were so old and decrepit. But as we get younger and better-looking, suddenly it's fun for its own sake."
A third man emerged from the same door through which Kate had come. He was also in his early twenties, tall and well-built, with a black crewcut and olive skin. The third man was tugging on a plain white T-shirt down to his jeans, carrying white sneakers in his free hand.
"And how do you feel, Garret?" asked the blond Alex.
"Hah. I'll tell you the truth, I'd rather be in bed with Kate here than any of our ritual partners. Gralic magick is fine and our ritual has made us forty years younger, but sex with a live woman is so much better in every way."
They all chuckled. Alex said, "Our guest is good for one more session, then she has to take a swim. Listen, how about we head into town for supper? I saw a Chinese restaurant on the way in that looked decent..."
Bane stepped into sight, holding the 38 on them. "You freaks are not going anywhere."
To their credit, the three Necrophiles remained where they were, staring at him without flinching. The dark-haired Garret said, "I don't know what you expect to steal, buddy. This place is closed. There's no money on the premises."
"You can take whatever we have in our pockets. There's no need for anyone to get hurt," Alex added from the chair.
"My name is Bane. Some call me Dire Wolf. My job is busting up cults like you Necrophiles. I saw your guest in the other room." He swung the pistol from one cultist to the next. "From what I gather, you guys have devised a variation on the Ghoul spell. Instead of eating dead bodies to gain longer life spans, you have sex with the recently dead. This makes you younger. Right so far?"
"You seem familiar with the Midnight War," said Alex, leaning forward. "Yes. I studied the scroll that Damozar wrote in the Darthan Age. When you're hitting seventy with a bum heart and arthritis, being twenty again seems worth any price. You'd do the same, don't kid yourself."
"I think I'd draw the line at murder and molesting corpses," Bane snapped. He turned his grey eyes on Kate. "And then you go to bed with these guys and draw off a little of the lifeforce they stole, is that right?"
"It's the best I can expect," she shrugged. "I don't get the full effect, but then I was younger than they were to begin with. Look at the results." She yanked her bathrobe off and stood there naked in the subdued light.
Despite himself, Bane looked at her for a split-second too long and by the time he got his eyes back on the two men, Alex had a 44 Magnum extended and firing. It must have been next to him in the chair. Four heavy slugs punched into the Dire Wolf, all slamming home in the center of his chest. The Trom armor prevented penetration but the impact that got through drove the blood from his solar plexus and he passed out. As he fell backwards, the revolver dropped from his grasp to the carpeting.
Alex was up in an instant, pointing the big Magnum inches away from Bane's head. "Nice distraction, Kate."
"I thought it might work," she laughed as she picked her robe up off the floor. "Is he dead?"
"No. Strange. Not even any blood." The blond cultist probed Bane's chest, feeling where the four holes had been ripped in the black shirt. "Some kind of bullet-proof vest. He's just unconscious. Garret, get the ropes and weight we had ready for our guest. This guy needs to go for a swim."
"What was he talking about? A something wolf?" asked Kate.
"The Dire Wolf. I've heard of this man. He has been breaking up magick cults for years. Red Sect. Those Who Remember. The Preincarnators. He's on some sort of crusade. Well, that's over now." As Garret returned with a coil of heavy rope and a concrete weight that had a ring at its top, Alex shoved the Magnum in his waistband and stood up. "Kate, help me carry him outside. Let's do this before he stirs and I have to shoot him in the head. I'd rather not have to scrub blood and brains out of the carpet."
In a few minutes, the three Necrophiles had hauled Bane out to the lake behind the lodge. The ice was thick enough that they could walk out to the center where a hole four feet across had been chopped out. As Alex and Garret bound the Dire Wolf's legs to the concrete weight, Kate announced, "I'm freezing," and spun around to run back to the lodge.
The two men held Bane up by the hole. Garret said, "This makes four bodies in this lake. Sooner or later, they'll be found, you know."
"So? We will be in California. Or Europe. With our collection of fake IDs and multiple bank accounts, we'll never be traced. And besides, the police will be looking for two men and a woman in their late sixties. We've got the perfect disguise. We're twenty years old!" The Dire Wolf groaned and shifted his weight slightly. "Hurry up, he's starting to revive!" Alex slid the heavy weight over the edge of the hole and they dropped Bane into the icy waters.
VII.
Driving past the Goodwin Lodge, Neda Jilovska slowed so that they could get a good luck. There were two cars parked next to the main building and only a few windows were lit. The front door and the sign on the roof remained dark. "It does look suspicious," she said.
"All my instincts scream that this is the den of horror we seek," Paige growled. "I say we leave our vehicle here. Neda, best if you go straight to the door and keep their attention while Suleiman and I infiltrate from different sides."
"Shall I claim my car broke down? Or that I am being followed by a car full of evil men?"
"Use your own judgement as usual. Perhaps you might faint and take a while regaining your senses." Paige folded the lapels of his elegant dinner jacket over the white expanse of his dress shirt. Now, like Suleiman, he was dressed all in black. From the back seat, the fighting Afghan handed Paige his modified pistol, without the shoulder stock but with the small silencer screwed onto the barrel. The Judgement examined it briefly and fastened it to a harness sewn into the lining of his jacket. He pulled on thin leather gloves and started to get out of the Jeep, his heart pounding with sudden excitement. This was the crusade he lived for.
Neda went first, picking up some snow along the way to rub on her hands and face. At the door where the two cars were parked, she knocked loudly and insistently. A few seconds later, a curtain was pulled aside as a woman looked out and then the door opened.
"Oh thank you," Neda gasped breathlessly. "I'm frozen half to death. My car stalled a mile up the road and no one has driven by. I can't feel my fingers, please let me warm up for a minute. Perhaps I might use your phone?"
Kate hesitated for the barest instant before saying, "Of course. Come in." She tightened her robe around her naked body and step aside as the petite woman entered, then closed the door behind them.
"Is there someone you can call to come get you?" asked Kate.
"Oh, I don't know anyone in this area. I was on my way to New Jersey, and.. I feel..." Neda staggered and fell face down to the carpeting, her head hitting with a convincing thud. More annoyed than concerned, Kate knelt and took a pulse. The woman's hands WERE cold. Kate sighed and straightened up again as her colleagues entered behind her. Alex and Garret were hanging up their coats when they spotted the woman on the floor.
"Well, this is a surprise," Alex said blandly.
"Her pulse is strong, her breathing fine." Kate gave Alex a sour expression. "She claimed her car broke down and she wanted to use the phone. Then she fainted. Or seemed to."
Alex got down on his knees and turned Neda over onto her back. "Pretty little thing, don't you think? You know what I'm thinking..?"
"Forget it," Kate interrupted. "Look at her clothes. Her hair. She's got money. She's someone the authorities would be looking for."
"Yes. I'm afraid you're right. Too bad." He took her under the arms and hauled her up onto the couch that stood against the wall under a watercolor of a lighthouse. "It's sad that our.. guests... tend to be rather unattractive."
Neda made a retching noise and sat up. "Gonna be sick," she gasped. "Bathroom?"
Stepping forward, Garret took her hand and said, "Come with me. Right down this hall." He walked her quickly around a corner, arm across her slim shoulders.
Left behind, Alex exchanged a wary glance with Kate. "Are you suspicious?"
"Aren't you? We're playing a dangerous game, my friend. I think that woman is not an innocent traveler finding us by chance. In fact, I..." She was cut off by a strange deep cracking noise from down the hall and then the thud of a body hitting a floor.
Instantly, the blond Alex dove for the easy chair where he had been sitting and tugged the massive 44 Magnum up. Even as he straightened, swinging the gun into position, he had a split-second glimpse of the icy blue eyes of Henry Brockton Paige glaring at him. There was a soft coughing noise from the strange pistol Paige held and a slug tunneled through Alex's forehead to emerge with a splat from the back of his head and break the glass over the watercolor on the wall. With a comically surprised expression, Alex dropped backwards to sprawl against the couch.
Kate screamed and started to plunge toward the door to outside, but Henry Paige had somehow stepped in her path. The muzzle of the gun pointed unwaveringly right at her face, and his eyes were narrowed in anticipation.
"Wait, wait, there's some mistake!" she cried. "You've got me mixed up with someone else."
"I don't think so," Paige answered in a low chilly tone. "I examined the woman in the bedroom down the corridor. You are part of a vile cult. This is Necrophile Palace. There. Look at your pal."
Despite herself, Kate turned her eyes away and saw that Alex had aged fifty years in the past few seconds. The man's skin was dry and wrinkled, the hair white and thin, the arms and legs thinned by time. He looked seventy and a bad seventy at that.
"Alex..." she breathed. "Oh no."
"It was stolen lifeforce and he could not keep it." Paige gestured with the gun. "Turn around. I dislike shooting women face to face."
From around the corner, the towering bulk of Suleiman emerged, dragging Garret limply behind him. A few minutes earlier, the man had been fit and muscular, shining with health. Now he was stringy and worn, with a pot belly and only a fringe of grey hair around his ears. Suleiman dropped the corpse casually to the floor.
"Garret..." Kate sobbed. "You bastards. You murderers."
"Coming from you, that's ironic," said Paige. "Where is the rest of your cult?"
"What? There's no one else. It was just those two. They... they were keeping me here against my will. They used me in horrible ways, you have no idea." She started to weep. "I was their prisoner."
"That's not going to work," Paige told her. "Your reactions when you saw their bodies gave you away. No, you're in on it. And like them, you must face your Judgement." He fired once, the 32 bullet entering just above her left eye. Kate's head snapped to the side and she fell straight down as if something had been holding her up and now had released her. Paige unscrewed the hot silencer from his pistol and sniffed it as if testing a wine bouquet. "These new models are even quieter," he said to his partners. "I must congratulate the Gunsmith and offer him a bonus."
Neda had examined the three bodies as a matter of procedure, although they were obviously dead. As she straightened up, her large dark eyes were angry. "Suleiman came in just as Garret was starting to fondle me. These Necrophiles were not the nicest people."
Paige put his gun back in the harness inside his jacket. "I saw their most recent victim in that room there, the second one down. It was the woman we saw get into the Jetta last night. Poor unfortunate. We could not save her but at least Judgement has avenged her."
"And there will be no more victims." Neda shuddered. "It's still hard for me to believe these occult crimes really happen. Elderly fiends sucking the life from victims to become young again. Like vampires."
"Or Ghouls," Paige said. "Well, these three have claimed their last victim. Come, let us leave here. This was work well done but our crusade goes on." Opening the seam of his dinner jacket lapel, the Judgement took three playing cards, each with a bullet hole in its exact center, and folded them into the hands of the three dead Necrophiles. "We will call the police when we find an unobserved phone booth."
VIII.
The shock of the icy water galvanized Bane back into full awareness. Somehow, although not fully conscious a few seconds earlier, he had known to take a gulp of air and hold it as he was thrown into the lake. Now he reacted by instinctively trying to swim upward and realized his legs were tied together. Something was pulling him down. The Dire Wolf found his arms were free and he reached into the inner right pocket of his jacket and drew out the Trom oxygen membrane, slapping its panel over his lower face just as he had to take a breath. The Trom device was only a few molecules thick, separating oxygen from water more efficiently than the gills of a fish. Bane breathed in. The oxygen was bitter cold but at least it would keep him alive. He pulled the tabs back over his ears to hold the membrane on like a surgeon's mask.
Now he could take in the situation. He had obviously been thrown into the lake behind the lodge. The Necrophiles. Now he remembered. The blond boy had pulled a Magnum and for once Bane had reacted a bare instant too late. The aching in his chest showed where he had been shot. Damn. He tried to get his legs apart, then bent down from the waist to feel the rope tying them together. There was some sort of weight at the end of the rope, pulling him down.
With the oxygen membrane on, he didn't have to worry about drowning but the freezing water would kill him soon by itself. Bane slid one of the silver daggers from his sleeve and sliced at the rope, cutting his right leg a little in the process. He kept those blades as sharp as possible, but their innate properties as ensorcelled by the Eldarin made them capable of slicing through tough materials much easier than the best steel could. In a minute, he had his legs free. Despite the primal instinct to get to the surface, Bane made himself carefully sheath the dagger again. He did not want to have to go diving to retrieve it.
The cold was starting to get to him. Almost twenty years on a tagra diet had given him healing and resistance past normal Human levels, but he was not indestructible and his body was starting to feel numb. He had to surface before he blacked out. Vaguely, he realized there must be a hole in the ice overhead- the Necrophiles had tossed him in here somehow- but he couldn't see it. This was getting He was pressed up against the bottom surface of the ice. With fingers that had lost feeling, the Dire Wolf fumbled in an inside pocket and came up with a pencil-sized thermite flare. He barely managed to press down and twist the handle, but the other end suddenly erupted into a blindingly white ball of flame. Bane pressed the blazing flare up against the ice and kept treading water.
After a minute, he figured to take the second flare out. Grasping it and lighting its end took all his ability at this point. The two flames burned a cone upward in the ice. Kicking his legs to stay in place, Bane saw the ice melt through and the night sky show. In a few more seconds, a hole opened big enough to get an arm through. Shuddering violently, he managed to hold on just another minute. Finally, he dropped the still burning flares down into the black water, seized the edges of the hole and managed to pull himself up onto the surface. It was a tight fit and for a second, it looked as if he wouldn't make it. Gasping and shivering, he got up on hands and knees, stood up and promptly fell on his face. He knew he had to keep moving. Crawling at first, then finally rising and staggering like a drunk with his soaked clothes freezing to his body, Bane began heading across the lake.
He remembered to draw on his Kumundu training. Deep slow breaths, pulling air into his body, making the blood circulate faster, warming his muscles. Each step he took was a little steadier. The Dire Wolf removed the oxygen membrane and stowed it in a pocket as he neared the lodge. Both cars were still there, he saw with satisfaction. Tapping the holster behind his left hip, he found his gun was missing. He must have dropped it when he had been shot. No matter. As enraged as he was at the moment, not having a gun was not going to stop him.
By the time he reached the lodge, Bane felt almost back to normal. He shook every few seconds, but his body was already stabilized. It took a lot to kill a Tel Shai knight. He slammed the door open and strode inside to get one of the bigger surprises in his career. Inside the pleasantly warm sitting room, three corpses sprawled in a rough circle. Two men at least in their seventies, a woman maybe in her mid-fifties. The woman and one man had been shot in the front of the head and the second had his throat opened so the severed windpipe showed.
They were wearing the clothing the Necrophiles had been wearing. These were the Necrophiles, he realized at once. Once they had been killed, the stolen lifeforce left their bodies and they returned to their true ages. Bane exhaled slowly and sagged, suddenly feeling weary as he knew the fight he had geared up for was not going to happen. Bending low, not touching anything, he spotted the playing card each corpse was holding. He spotted his revolver halfway under a chair and holstered it.
The Judgement had been here! He had killed the Necrophiles in those minutes that Bane had been trying to escape from under the ice in the lake. What remarkable timing, he thought, just a little sooner or later he would have been able to capture Judgement as well. He felt unreasonably cheated.
Still a little dazed by what he had been through, the Wolf went over to stand by a heating duct and absently began squeezing water from his clothing. He had uncertain feelings about the whole situation. True, he likely would have killed the Necrophiles himself, there was no way to ever bring them to trial on charges any judge or jury would accept. But he had wanted to tangle with Judgement. The man had shot Bane in the back the night before entirely on mistaken perception, and there was no telling how many other innocent bystanders the Judgement had killed and never known his mistake. Even though he was a vigilante himself most of the time, Bane could not let Judgement remain at large.
After a few more minutes of drying off and warming up, the Dire Wolf decided he had to leave. He would phone the local police from a gas station or something and mark this off as a bad deal all around. He examined the bodies briefly once again and went out the door to stand in the darkness next to the two cars. There was the VW Jetta from the night before, all right. Motion up on the road caught his eye and he saw two police cars turning down the long drive toward him, their lights just beginning to flash.
Without hesitation, Bane wheeled and hurtled into the night, racing in the shadow of the building until he plunged into the woods and veered off to his left. Running across a frozen field, up a steep incline, he found his own car right where he had left it and he leaped in. As he started it up, he could just see the alternating red and blue lights of the cruisers in the distance. Bane pulled out onto the side road, saw no traffic either way and heading away from Goodwin Lodge. He would make a big circle, going as far as he could before heading back to the motel where he had left his gear. What a night. The Judgement had not only stolen his intended targets, apparently he had also called the cops and nearly gotten Bane caught flat-footed and red-handed with three dead bodies. Outrageous. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
5/17/2014
1/11-1/12/1994
One-thirty on a winter morning, and a gaunt man in black moved through darkened side streets. Even in the daytime, Newburgh was not a city that seemed safe or inviting. At this hour, the rundown empty buildings almost seemed to warn you themselves to stay away. At the corner of Liberty Street was a grocery store that had been boarded up for some time, and sitting on the step of its padlocked front door was a thin woman with orange hair.
Cutting through a miserable dead lawn cluttered with junk, Bane crept up to flatten against the wall of the closed store. He could just see the woman but so far she had not caught sight of him. It was not that cold for early January, just above freezing in fact, and she was wearing a thin cloth coat and a wool cap over her teased hair. A cigarette end flared up to show her face for a second. Early thirties, average looking, with a snub nose and bright red lipstick. In a short time, of course, she would lose being even presentable as the crack had its inevitable effect. In the meantime, she could still pick up customers to pay for her habit.
As a usual policy, Jeremy Bane was not concerned with streetwalkers or their clients. That had been going on for ages and would be around long after he was dead. No, the Dire Wolf had driven up here from Manhattan hunting bigger game, but without any progress so far. Dressed all in black, with a long coat and thin leather gloves, he was only vaguely visible in the gloom of a weak street lamp on the corner. As a white VW Jetta slowed and came to a halt at the stop sign nearby, the woman looked up and smiled. The car moved on, but Bane saw it signal a turn at the next block and expected it might swing around for the driver to take a better look. He lowered himself flat to the ground with only enough of his head sticking past the corner of the building for him to see what was happening.
A few seconds later, the Jetta came around again, its passenger side closest to the corner where the orange-haired streetwalker sat, and stopped. The window slid down a few inches and a man's voice called out, "Need a ride?" The woman stood up and said, "Sure," and went over to the passenger door. As she peered in the window, she asked, "You're not a cop, are you?"
"No, are you?"
"Nope," she said and opened the door to get in. Bane rose and moved swiftly forward. In less than a second, he would have swung around the car and yanked the driver's door open. With his reflexes, he could seize the driver before the man could react. But at that instant, two hard impacts hit him high on the back between the shoulder blades and something white-hot sliced across his neck. The Dire Wolf was slammed to his hands and knees with the breath knocked out of him. The Jetta pulled away at normal speed, evidently neither the driver nor the streetwalker had seen the incident in the darkness.
Instantly, Bane rolled over onto his back and his anesthetic dart gun appeared in his left hand. A black Jeep Forester went past and turned the corner in the same direction the Jetta had taken. Although he was up on his feet and had a clear shot, Bane slowly lowered his gun. He could not justify firing at a car when he didn't know who was in it or even if it was invoved in the situation. The Dire Wolf exhaled angrily and swung back to scan the area. He saw nothing, no movement on rooftops or between buildings. Every window he could see was closed.
Something warm was trickling on his neck, and he knew he was bleeding. Bane reluctantly holstered his gun, took a small plastic kit from an inside pocket and pressed an adhesive gauze pad to the wound. That nick had been a close call, he realized, if it had been just a fraction of an inch to the side... The Dire Wolf reached inside his coat and came out with a powerful pencil flashlight which he narrowed to show a beam no thicker than a thread. In a minute, he found two misshapen lumps of metal which he pocketed. They were still hot. The flexible Trom armor he habitually wore under his clothes prevented penetration and dissipated most impact, but bullets still had enough of a punch that they could knock him down.
Still wary, Bane circled the block a few times, hand on the butt of his revolver, grey eyes moving intently. Nothing. One window on the second floor of a white frame house showed the blue light of a television screen but the angle was all wrong for anyone to have shot him from there. Disgusted, he walked back three blocks to where he had parked his Subaru Outback and got in. That shooting had not made any sense. Suppose the driver who had picked up the woman was one of the Necrophiles, and the shooter was, too. Did they think Bane was a cop about to interfere with the snatch? Why not make sure he was dead? Why just drive away right after the Jetta? Why hadn't he heard the shots? Silencers were not that efficient, there was always some noise. Was it a specially made airgun?
Working this over in his mind, the Dire Wolf drove around the neighborhood in gradually increasing circles, searching for the white Jetta. If the driver who had picked up the woman was not a Necrophile but just a regular customer, odds were they would not have gone far. Ten minutes went by and he had not spotted them. He had seen some shabby motels on the 9W just outside of town, including one that advertised hourly rates and he would have to check them next, but his instincts told him it would be pointless. He had a sick feeling that the streetwalker was on her way to Necrophile Palace.
II.
At five on that same morning, a black Jeep Forester pulled up in front of a rented house just outside New Windsor, ten miles from Newburgh itself but much more open country in nature. It was a two-story frame home, with a shingled roof and a large back yard that bordered the woods. Several windows were lit. Getting out from behind the wheel, Neda Jilovska closed her door and waited for the man in the passenger seat. Henry Brockton Paige slammed his door with unnecessary force and stood with clenched fists. She came around to stand beside him, placing her hands on his arm.
"You mustn't blame yourself for everything, Henry," she said quietly. "I had to stop at that red light, there was a police car in the parking lot within plain sight. We would have been pulled over and the Necrophile would have escaped anyway."
Paige turned away from her, sullen and withdrawn. "I should not have shot the Necrophile who was on the sidewalk. Better to have put out the tires, then nailed them as they ran. The woman would be safe and now we know she is not only dead but worse.. she is being desecrated! What was I thinking?"
"What I want to know is what happened to the Necrophile you shot? When we came back, his body was gone. But we saw no one else in the area. Come, let's get inside, I'm freezing."
Paige got hold of himself. He was a good-looking man in his early thirties, just over six feet tall and athletic, with crisp dark hair and clean-cut features. He was wearing a black suit and tie, with a white topcoat and scarf, the material and tailoring showing he had money. Letting out a breath, he made himself untighten. "Yes, Neda, You're right. The Judgement's war never ends and losing the first skirmish has never stopped us before." He offered her his arm and they walked up to the porch.
The front door opened and a big form filled the open space. Suleiman stepped aside to welcome them in, closing the door and asking, "What will you tell me, chief?"
"Bad decision on my part, old friend." Paige went over to a table where a bottle of brandy stood, poured himself a small amount and tossed it down. "We saw a Necrophile pick up an unfortunate woman. We were nearby in the Jeep. A second Necrophile went to shove the victim into the car and I let him have three bullets. With my special gun, there was no sound of course and the way the car drove away, I suspect the driver did not even see what had happened. We followed.. but we lost them!"
"That was my fault," Neda repeated. She was a small woman, no more than five foot four, with a trim figure and curly brown hair. No accent remained in her voice. "I stopped at a light because a police car was watching us."
"And now that woman is dead! Even dead, the worst is yet to come for her!" Paige sank wearily into a chair and buried his face in his hands. "If I don't stop these fiends, who will? The police scoff at the idea of a Necrophile cult, they dismiss the missing women, the patterns of disappearances. The FBI will not even give me an audience. I tell you, there is no one else who can break this vile cult! It is the Judgement alone."
"Yes, yes," Neda said, bending to wrap her arms around him from the side. "You have already defeated so many masterminds. You will bring Judgement to these monsters as well. But the night is gone. Now you must rest to be ready for the next battle."
Paige slowly got to his feet and shrugged off his topcoat, which Suleiman took and hung upon a wall hook. "Yes. I must be ready. We will find leads to follow, clues to unravel. The Necrophiles will be smashed. But a few hours sleep is all I need." He turned and walked slowly up the stairs, loosening his tie as he went.
"The chief drives himself hard," Suleiman said quietly as he turned off the outside lights.
"He always has." Neda took off her own coat and yawned. "At first, I worried he might break under the strain. Now I worry he will not... and this crusade will go on forever."
III.
Just as dawn was starting to show, Bane gave up the hunt. He was not tired, just angry. Along Route 17K, he stopped at a diner and devoured scrambled eggs, pancakes, hash browns and bacon almost without coming up for air. His enhanced reflexes made him faster than normal Humans, but that metabolism needed lots of fuel. He downed a glass of orange juice, paid and left. Just a few miles down the road was the motel where he had taken rooms for the next couple of days. This was a family-type establishment, not the shady sort along the strip that advertised water bed and free X-rated movies in each room. The Have-a-Rest motel had put some effort into looking like a real house, rather than a cinder block row of anonymous cubicles.
The Dire Wolf backed up toward the door of Room 6, so that he could jump in the car and rush away if necessary. In the hesitant light before sunrise, he unlocked his door and stood for a second, listening, trying to sense if anything was wrong. His left hand was behind him, holding the grip of his gun as he closed the door behind him and flicked on the light. Nothing had been touched. Still wary, he checked the bathroom and the closet, inspected where he had left a pencil leaning against his knapsack, the angle he placed the pillows at before leaving. It seemed okay.
Checking that the door and window were locked and the curtains still pulled, Bane relaxed as much as he ever did. He tugged off his black sport jacket and sourly regarded the two ragged little holes high up between the shoulders. His black turtleneck would have the same holes. Hours earlier, he had tugged the bloody bandaid off his neck and discarded it. Now he checked himself in the bathroom mirror and saw there was barely a red mark where the third bullet had ripped along the skin.
He was used to this rapid healing. Almost twenty years of the tagra diet from Tel Shai had boosted his recuperative powers beyond what medical science could explain. He was not invulnerable, of course, and could be killed by a severe enough trauma, but Bane regularly bounced back from damage that would mean a week in ICU for the average person. As long as he was in the bathroom, Bane stripped down to take a hot shower and toweled dry. Naked, he was a startling sight, with almost zero body fat and long wiry muscles like a runner. Coming back into the main room, he strapped the matched silver daggers to his forearms even before he tugged on white cotton briefs and a plain white T-shirt. He seldom let those blades be out of reach for long. The clothes which he had worn the night before he hung up to air for a while, including the armor. This looked like a snug bodysuit of dark silk, leaving only the head and forearms unprotected.
Bane still was not really sleepy, being hyper and restless by nature, but he knew his body and mind needed a certain minimum amount of sleep to function well. He went to turn off the overhead light, checked that the thermostat was at 68, and pulled down the covers on the double bed. Stretching out under a single sheet, the Dire Wolf set his mind to awaken in four hours. Then he began the breathing cycles he had been taught at Tel Shai, clearing his mind and slowing his heartbeat until he dropped off within a minute.
At just before eleven, the Dire Wolf took a deep breath and sat up, completely awake and refreshed. He had slept later than he had planned, but no harm done. While asleep, his subconscious mind had been working and things seemed clearer. He decided that he had been shot by a third party, not someone aligned with the Necrophile cult but someone who had in fact gone in pursuit of them. A rival group of warlocks? Someone who had had a loved one murdered and abused by the Necrophiles and who sought revenge? There were a couple of possibilities there. And Bane thought it was likely that he had been shot for one of two reasons. One, the shooter had misread Bane as a Necrophile himself and had blasted him and left him for dead. Or two, the shooter had realized Bane was about to intervene and had shot him because the shooter wanted to kill the Necrophiles himself. Either explanation had its strong points.
Getting dressed, starting with the Trom flexible armor and the same slacks as the night before but a fresh turtleneck without holes, Bane brooded over the situation. A third party was complicating the hunt, that did not appeal to him. Putting on his sport jacket, he took the two battered slugs from its pocket and examined them under the lamp. They were the right size for a .32, he decided. He would dispose of them at the first good opportunity. Getting a notebook and pen from his knapsack, he picked the local phone book out of the nightstand and settled down on the couch. For the next tedious twenty minutes, he copied down the realtors' names and addresses and phone numbers from the yellow pages. He had maps of the area in his car. This was likely to be a day of tiresome detective work, but he saw no way out of it. He folded the paper into his inner breast pocket and decided to buckle down and get going.
Checking his equipment was such a habit at this point that he would have been extremely uneasy just strolling out without a rundown. The silver daggers he always had strapped under his sleeves. He examined the anesthetic dart gun with its thick barrel and holstered it behind his left hip. In various concealed pockets of his jacket and slacks were a dozen gadgets. The Trom oxygen membrane. A small first aid kit. An egg-sized smoke grenade and an explosive grenade the same size. Three thermal flares, no bigger than pencils. An assortment of lockpick probes. The communications device called a Link. Several other useful gimmicks, all tiny because they had been modified by the Trom who called himself Leonard Slade before his death. He varied the gadgets according to circumstances but at the moment he was carrying the standard assortment.
Bane tugged on his long cloth coat and pulled on thin leather gloves. A few more minutes were spend adjusing items in the room so he could tell if it was searched during his absence. Then he stepped out into a bitter morning. It was much colder than it had been the previous day, with a wind from the north. The Dire Wolf went to his car and pulled out onto 17K. He stopped at the same diner and tore through a lunch of two bacon cheeseburgers, fries and an iced tea, with a slice of apple pie. He never felt full. His metabolism burned calories like a shrew. Bane got on the road and started visiting the real estate offices in the area, checking them off on his list.
The day went as slowly and as fruitlessly as he had dreaded. He was honest at each office, showing the realtors his Private Investigator license and explaining he was looking into the disappearances in the area. Four women had gone missing in a little over a year, and the police were making only a token try at investigation because the victims had been known prostitutes and drug users. Bane told the realtors that the victims still deserved to have their fates found out and the guilty parties punished.
He wanted to know about newcomers to the area who had rented houses within the past year. They would not be young couples but most likely two or three middle-aged men who would seem prosperous.
Everyone said they wished they could help, several remarked sadly that even women down on their luck deserved to be avenged if they were killed, but they hadn't had any such clients. Long experience and training by experts let Bane decide the realtors were being truthful. He thanked them for their concern and moved on. The long afternoon dragged on this way. At ten to five, he pulled into the J K EMMETT REAL ESTATE office sitting in a strip mall between a laundromat and an Italian restaurant. The sole person there, a chubby blonde with a pile of papers scattered all over her desk, listened soberly and said she thought she could help....
IV.
After sleeping much of the day, Henry Paige rose clear-headed and dressed quickly . Neda had slept in her own room down the hall. They were allies but not lovers, which suited him as his cause did not leave room for any possible romances. He found Neda in the living room reading a magazine and sipping green tea. She was wearing a beige pantsuit with an off-white blouse.
"Good afternoon," she called as he stood in the doorway. "What's the agenda for today?"
"We must try a new approach," he snapped. "Patrolling the streets at night is too uncertain. No, I think I need to speak to the families of the victims. The police may well be looking for us already, they are always hounding the Judgement. How ironic! Judgement is their greatest ally but they think he is a common murderer. If only they knew the truth... but I am sure someone in the victims' families knows something that will point us in the right direction. Suleiman!"
The big man appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. He wore a plain dark jacket, pants and open-collared blue shirt. Suleiman was dark-skinned, with straight glossy black hair, a bristly beard and a prominent beaklike nose with two fierce dark eyes on either side. "Something to eat, boss?" he rumbled in his gravelly voice. "I can have an excellent omelet with green peppers and fresh mushrooms ready in a minute."
"No time for food now," Paige said. "There is much to do."
Watching Suleiman, Neda frowned. The huge fighting man almost filled the doorway. He claimed he was an Afghan from a tribe that had been wiped out by the Russians, but he sure didn't look like an Afghan. He looked to Neda like someone from northern India... a Sikh, perhaps. But he never wore a turban or mentioned his religion. She had seen him in action many times, and he was both fast and merciless with the long knives he carried strapped to his back with their hilts up for easy access. And he was devoted to Henry Paige with unquestioning loyalty, never saying why.
Neda Jilovska watched the two men and remembered why she had joined Paige in his crusade as the vigilante known only as Justice. She had herself suffered brutally from crime four years earlier but instead of being traumatized, she had been galvanized into an intense desire to fight criminals and see they never had a chance to claim another victim. In Paige, with his wealth and skills and his own obsessive desire to kill criminals, she had found the perfect partner.
Pulling aside the curtains in the living room to glance outside, Paige seemed to consider for a second. Then he swung around, raising an imperative finger. "Neda, please take the Jeep to the nearest convenient mart and buy a copy of the local newspapers. I believe there are three, the MID-HUDSON RECORD, KINGSTON DAILY FREEMAN and the ALBANY TIMES-UNION. I want to watch the local news at five. Suleiman, I believe I will have something to eat after all. We may have a long campaign ahead of us tonight."
"Very well, chief," grinned the big warrior as he faded back into the kitchen. "There is bacon as well."
As Neda headed for the door, grabbing her coat off a chair, she looked back. "I'm still curious about that Necrophile you shot last night, Henry."
"What about him? He was going to shove that woman into the car if she hesitated. I saw him lurking at the side of the house watching her and moving forward only as his colleagues pulled up in the car."
"What happened to his body?"
"Others from the cult claimed it, obviously." Paige turned his intense blue eyes on her critically. "I do not think they realize Justice is on their trail just yet. There are many shootings in this city every year. I have always wanted to bring our campaign to this hellhole of a city."
Neda nodded in agreement but said nothing as she left. Crossing over to the couch, Paige dropped down and found the remote, then turned the TV to the local news channel.
"Poughkeepsie police are combing the area for the dangerous vigilante who calls himself 'the Justice'," a cute blonde reporter was saying as she stared into the camera. "When the body of convicted drug dealer James 'Jimbo' Walsh was found shot to death Friday night on Downs Street, the trademark of the so-called Justice killer was discovered on his body. This is a simple playing card with a bullet hole through the center. The killer has been active for at least the past three years in various cities across the Northeast..."
Coldly furious, Paige sat through the rest of the story. Nothing about three missing women in the area. This was so typical of the police, he thought, they were such fools. If they gave him some room to operate, the Judgement could make progress wiping out the vermin of the underworld. But no, they didn't recognize their folly...
"Your meal is ready, chief," said Suleiman from the doorway. "Miss Neda and I have already eaten."
"Eh? Oh, thank you." Henry Paige jumped to his feet and headed for the breakfast nook, where he could smell fresh coffee. "I do count on you to keep me grounded."
Suleiman smiled behind his fierce beard and bowed very slightly.
IV.
Stopping at a red light on Broadway, Jeremy Bane studied the streets. Newburgh reminded him of the bad parts of Manhattan. The seedy bars and check-cashing places and dingy beauty salons, with lots of litter on the sidewalks and an old man curled up sleeping in a doorway. Adding to the bad impression was that the street itself had more cracks and potholes than any he had seen in years. He knew there was a lot of crime here, more murders and drug deals and burglaries than any other town upstate. The Dire Wolf frowned as the light turned green and he headed toward down toward where the river was visible. There was nothing Midnight War about the crime here, though. It was just poor people risking prison or death for a chance to get rich by selling crack or heroin or their bodies. He had no solutions.
Turning right, he went toward New Windsor. Suddenly he was back in open country, with individual houses that had large well-tended yards. It was a relief. Bane drove along, thinking about the two addresses that Amy at the real estate agency had given him. At a convenient mart, he pulled in to top off the gas tank. As always, he also checked his tires and cleaned the windows. More than once, this procedure had been a big help when a sudden chase came up. Pulling over to the side of the building, he read the newspaper that had been caught his eye when he had gone in to pay.
Two days ago, a known drug dealer who had been freed on insufficient evidence had been found lying on a side street in Poughkeepsie with a gunshot wound right between his eyes. Stucking in his shirt pocket was a playing card with a bullet hole in its center.. the trademark of the Judgement. The headline read NOTORIOUS 'JUDGEMENT' VIGILANTE IN AREA? The Dire Wolf memorized every word of the article and sat behind the wheel for a long time digesting the information. Judgement! He had followed the man's activities with mixed feelings. Bane had been a vigilante himself most of his life, tracking down maniacs and monsters on his own self-imposed authority. He had never felt the need to justify his actions but he realized now it left him in a position where he couldn't honestly criticize this Judgement character for doing the same.
But then he realized that it might have been Judgement who had shot him three times in the back last night, without knowing who he was. If Judgement made wrong decisions like that, it nullified any justification his crusade might have. Shooting one innocent person changed everything. Bane was only alive because he had been wearing the Trom armor under his clothes.
How many times had this Judgement killed the wrong man? Bane started up his car and pulled out onto the road, heading west. It was getting dark as he spotted the house she had described. He went past it and turned off on a nearby side road to find a spot where he could leave his car. Pulling off into the dirt, he parked behind a willow tree and got out. Suddenly he felt alive for the first time all day. Nocturnal and feral by nature, the Dire Wolf grinned to himself in the gloom and raced across the vacant field into the woods. He did not have far to go before he was creeping up on a very posh redwood house with a deck encircling it and an outdoor hot tub lit from beneath. Three windows were lit, all on the ground floor. The second story remained dark except for the faint glow of a nightlight in one room.
Parked in the gravel driveway was a new shiny black Jeep Forester. Perfect. Circling around the unlit side of the house, Bane lowered to fingers and toes and skittered up to the Jeep. It was locked but locks had not deterred him for many years. Getting in the back seat, he began searching. There was a small knapsack and he found it was packed with spare clothing and first aid equipment. A thick paperback had POLAND AFTER THE WAR as its title, and there was an empty water bottle. Leaning over the seats into the rear compartment, he tugged up a floor panel and found, not a spare tire, but a leather case two feet across. The lock on this was stubborn but he got it open. Inside, neatly stowed in separate compartments, were the parts of a remarkable gun. Basically a semi-automatic pistol resembling a Mauser. Caliber would be 32. There was a shoulder stock and attachable extended barrel for greater distance and there silencers that were unfamiliar to him. They looked like plastic 12-ounce soda bottles with vents on the sides. Very interesting, thought Bane. He took a small pair of pliers from an inside pocket and intended to disable the gun. But then his sharp hearing caught the sound of a voice, with a clarity that meant the speaker was standing in an open doorway.
Smoothly as if he had rehearsed it thousands of times, the Wolf dropped out of the door, rolled on the gravel and slid underneath the Jeep. This was one of the times that being thin was a huge advantage. He heard a man's voice say confidently, "I can feel it in the air. We will end these atrocities tonight." A woman replied, "Your instincts have always been good."
Three doors of the Jeep opened and closed almost simultanously and the engine revved up. Underneath, Bane wriggled toward the back end of the vehicle, turning his head away from the tailpipe. As the Jeep rolled forward, he got out from under it but lay still. Even if anyone had glanced back, he was difficult to spot in the night with his black outfit. He saw the Jeep turn left at the highway, heading back toward Newburgh. Faster than a real wolf, Bane leaped up and tore away into the woods back to his car. No time to search the house now, he was convinced the big showdown was near. There was his car under the willow. Jumping behind the wheel, he raced up the side road and headed in the same direction that the Jeep had gone.
V.
Neda had been talking with the woman for close to an hour before she made her apologies and got up from the shabby couch. In an easy chair stained with grease on one arm, Henry Paige got to his feet also, keeping a mournful expression on his face. From their bundle of fake IDs, Neda had produced credentials showing she was a representative from a women's rights organization in Albany, determined to bring some closure to what had happened to the unfortunate missing women of the Hudson Valley. The mother of Wendy Scheuer had quickly opened up about how her daughter had started making cash on the streets to help with expenses in their apartment, the bad company she had kept, the way the drug use had taken over. Cora had gone out one night to walk her territory on Water Street by the river and had never come back. The police claimed to be looking into it but the mother had little faith in them.
As they stepped outside of the worn-down white brick building with its dirty windows and battered overflowing garbage can, Neda took Paige's arm. "She gave us nothing we can use, Henry."
"I believe our best bet is still to investigate that country club we spotted. It was closed for repairs almost two years and has not re-opened despite being ready from all appearances. It just seems suspicious to me." He stopped by the black Jeep Forester as a huge bulk loomed up. "What is it, Suleiman?"
The warrior spoke quietly. "Do not look across the street, chief. A drug dealer on that corner. The young black man with the wool cap standing next to the alley. I have seen two men walk up to him, talk and go into the alley for a few minutes."
In the gloom left by an inadequate street lamp far away, Henry Paige showed a predatory grin. "Well. No matter what, this will not be a night without Judgement. Let me assemble my gun..."
"I pray thee, allow me," said Suleiman. "I will be quick and silent."
Paige only hesitated for the barest instant. "Certainly, old friend. Why not?"
"I will provide the distraction," Neda said in the same hushed tone. She was wearing a white cloth coat that showed her slim figure to good advantage and her curly brown hair had been brushed out. As Paige turned to her, she pulled her Beretta partly out of her right pocket to reassure him.
"Very well," said Paige. "You two are as much a part of the Judgement as I am." He got behind the wheel of the Jeep and settled back. Neda and Suleiman glanced at each other and separated. The big Afghan strode quickly down one block and paused on the next corner. Neda crossed the street after a dark Hyundai blaring hip-hop rolled past and made it to the corner right next to where the dealer was lurking in the alley between the darkened window of ENG'S CHINESE TAKE-OUT and RELAX SPA- NAILS AND HAIR. Not even seeming to notice him, she turned and started walking slowly in the other direction, reached the end of the block and waited for a minute, then started strolling back toward him.
As she approached, Neda saw a big hand clamp down over the dealer's lower face and an arm tighten around his chest. The man disappeared into the alley without a squawk. Neda surveyed the area. From a side street, a red Ford pick-up emerged and
headed south. No one else was in sight. She crossed over to stand by the alley mouth and studied the cars parked along that street. None of them had anyone behind the wheel. This was not a police sting. Still holding the Beretta ready in her pocket, the Czech woman joined her partner in the alley. The dealer was already dead, propped up against the cold wall of the Chinese restaurant between two cardboard boxes of rubbish.
Suleiman was wiping the seven-inch blade of one of his knives carefully on the man's Army surplus coat. He straightened as Neda approached, and without a word held out six tiny plastic envelopes of white powder. They quickly searched the man, finding a pack of Newports, two lighters, a box of Tic-Tacs and some keys in his pants pockets. From the Army coat came a Glock and several thousand dollars rolled together with a rubber band. Suleiman pocketed the money but left everything else, including the heroin, on the corpse. Together, they emerged from the other side of the alley onto the main street and started walking.
At the next corner, Paige pulled over to let them in. They had worked out their procedures many times. As Neda filled him in, Suleiman settled into the back seat with a satisfied sigh. He leaning over and handed the money up front to the Paige. "I would say five to six thousand dollars, chief."
"We will donate to one of our charities, anonymously of course. Bad money put to a good cause. Now to resume our hunt for the Necrophiles!"
VI.
Behind the wheel of the Jeep, Bane slowed and pulled over beside the road. In a depression lay a frozen lake with a boathouse. Near it stood a sprawling resort building with a tennis court behind it and a parking lot with only two cars. A wooden sign up by the road said GOODWIN LODGE with a yellow sticker over it, CLOSED. He studied the layout for a moment. Lights were on in two windows but no outside lights and the lodge sat in the gathering darkness. The Dire Wolf went back on the road and found a good spot to leave his car under a tree a half mile away. He stepped out in the cold and the dark, sensing danger ahead of him and felt at home.
Dressed all in black, moving quickly and silently, Bane got onto the parking lot and crept up on the side of the lodge away from the lighted windows. Of the two cars parked in the lot, one was definitely the VW Jetta he had seen the night before and the other was a Nissan Sentra. He memorized their plates and placed a tracer inside the rear bumper of the Jetta, where it stuck magnetically. Creeping up on the side of the building, he examined a window and found no sign of an alarm system. Tentatively, he tugged and it slid easily open. Bane slid easily through the window without making a whisper, as long years of practice helped. He closed the window silently behind him and let his sense adjust. The room was completely dark, without even light showing under a door.
After a few minutes of listening, the Dire Wolf took a pencil flashlight from his inner pocket with its lense turned down to minimum. A beam of light barely thicker than a needle played around a bedroom. There was a dresser with a mirror, two chairs and a coffee table, a TV on a stand. A double bed stood against the wall, with a nightstand on either stand. The bed was neatly made. Lying on it was a body under a sheet.
Bane went over and pulled the sheet down. Yes, it was the streetwalker he had seen the night before, naked, lying with her legs modestly together and her hands folded across her chest. Her eyes were rolled up in her head. Bane examined her under the flashlight, curious that her skin was so wrinkled and dehyrdated. She looked as if she had been left out in the desert sun for days. The Dire Wolf covered her up again and stood there in the dark, fighting down his anger to keep a clear head.
There was no doubt now. He was in Necrophile Palace.
Stepping over to the door, Bane pocketed the flashlight and checked that his gun was ready for a draw, then opened the door a crack and stood listening. He stepped out into a darkened hall and saw dim light at its end. Stalking down that hall, moving so quietly it was eerie, the Dire Wolf came up on a bend in the hall and saw an open area with comfortable chairs around round coffee tables. Under a shaded standing lamp, a young man sat thumbing through a news magazine. He seemed to be of college age, no more than twenty-two, quite good-looking with wavy dark blonde hair and regular features. The young man was wearing khaki slacks, slippers and an olive green polo shirt. Well-defined muscles showed under the tight shirt.
Watching from the darkness up the hall, Bane was puzzled. He did not have much information on the Necrophile cult, but his understanding was that it was comprised of a few middle-aged warlocks. He was not certain who this boy might be. Maybe a driver? Someone to handle struggling victims?
As he watched, a woman emerged from a door and came over to the man, who glanced up at her without smiling. "How'd it go, Kate?"
"Not bad," she answered lightly. "I'm getting to enjoy doing it with you two. Maybe it's just practice but I think I could learn to like the sex with you guys even if it didn't make me younger." Kate was tall, maybe five feet ten, with full curves and a mane of black glossy hair that hung down past her shoulder blades. She was wearing a gold-colored bathrobe loosely sashed at the waist and was barefoot.
The young man flashed a grin with the perfect teeth of youth. "Glad to hear that. We might as well have a good time while we're drawing in lifeforce."
Kate sat down in the chair next to him. "It was pretty unpleasant at first, Alex. We were so old and decrepit. But as we get younger and better-looking, suddenly it's fun for its own sake."
A third man emerged from the same door through which Kate had come. He was also in his early twenties, tall and well-built, with a black crewcut and olive skin. The third man was tugging on a plain white T-shirt down to his jeans, carrying white sneakers in his free hand.
"And how do you feel, Garret?" asked the blond Alex.
"Hah. I'll tell you the truth, I'd rather be in bed with Kate here than any of our ritual partners. Gralic magick is fine and our ritual has made us forty years younger, but sex with a live woman is so much better in every way."
They all chuckled. Alex said, "Our guest is good for one more session, then she has to take a swim. Listen, how about we head into town for supper? I saw a Chinese restaurant on the way in that looked decent..."
Bane stepped into sight, holding the 38 on them. "You freaks are not going anywhere."
To their credit, the three Necrophiles remained where they were, staring at him without flinching. The dark-haired Garret said, "I don't know what you expect to steal, buddy. This place is closed. There's no money on the premises."
"You can take whatever we have in our pockets. There's no need for anyone to get hurt," Alex added from the chair.
"My name is Bane. Some call me Dire Wolf. My job is busting up cults like you Necrophiles. I saw your guest in the other room." He swung the pistol from one cultist to the next. "From what I gather, you guys have devised a variation on the Ghoul spell. Instead of eating dead bodies to gain longer life spans, you have sex with the recently dead. This makes you younger. Right so far?"
"You seem familiar with the Midnight War," said Alex, leaning forward. "Yes. I studied the scroll that Damozar wrote in the Darthan Age. When you're hitting seventy with a bum heart and arthritis, being twenty again seems worth any price. You'd do the same, don't kid yourself."
"I think I'd draw the line at murder and molesting corpses," Bane snapped. He turned his grey eyes on Kate. "And then you go to bed with these guys and draw off a little of the lifeforce they stole, is that right?"
"It's the best I can expect," she shrugged. "I don't get the full effect, but then I was younger than they were to begin with. Look at the results." She yanked her bathrobe off and stood there naked in the subdued light.
Despite himself, Bane looked at her for a split-second too long and by the time he got his eyes back on the two men, Alex had a 44 Magnum extended and firing. It must have been next to him in the chair. Four heavy slugs punched into the Dire Wolf, all slamming home in the center of his chest. The Trom armor prevented penetration but the impact that got through drove the blood from his solar plexus and he passed out. As he fell backwards, the revolver dropped from his grasp to the carpeting.
Alex was up in an instant, pointing the big Magnum inches away from Bane's head. "Nice distraction, Kate."
"I thought it might work," she laughed as she picked her robe up off the floor. "Is he dead?"
"No. Strange. Not even any blood." The blond cultist probed Bane's chest, feeling where the four holes had been ripped in the black shirt. "Some kind of bullet-proof vest. He's just unconscious. Garret, get the ropes and weight we had ready for our guest. This guy needs to go for a swim."
"What was he talking about? A something wolf?" asked Kate.
"The Dire Wolf. I've heard of this man. He has been breaking up magick cults for years. Red Sect. Those Who Remember. The Preincarnators. He's on some sort of crusade. Well, that's over now." As Garret returned with a coil of heavy rope and a concrete weight that had a ring at its top, Alex shoved the Magnum in his waistband and stood up. "Kate, help me carry him outside. Let's do this before he stirs and I have to shoot him in the head. I'd rather not have to scrub blood and brains out of the carpet."
In a few minutes, the three Necrophiles had hauled Bane out to the lake behind the lodge. The ice was thick enough that they could walk out to the center where a hole four feet across had been chopped out. As Alex and Garret bound the Dire Wolf's legs to the concrete weight, Kate announced, "I'm freezing," and spun around to run back to the lodge.
The two men held Bane up by the hole. Garret said, "This makes four bodies in this lake. Sooner or later, they'll be found, you know."
"So? We will be in California. Or Europe. With our collection of fake IDs and multiple bank accounts, we'll never be traced. And besides, the police will be looking for two men and a woman in their late sixties. We've got the perfect disguise. We're twenty years old!" The Dire Wolf groaned and shifted his weight slightly. "Hurry up, he's starting to revive!" Alex slid the heavy weight over the edge of the hole and they dropped Bane into the icy waters.
VII.
Driving past the Goodwin Lodge, Neda Jilovska slowed so that they could get a good luck. There were two cars parked next to the main building and only a few windows were lit. The front door and the sign on the roof remained dark. "It does look suspicious," she said.
"All my instincts scream that this is the den of horror we seek," Paige growled. "I say we leave our vehicle here. Neda, best if you go straight to the door and keep their attention while Suleiman and I infiltrate from different sides."
"Shall I claim my car broke down? Or that I am being followed by a car full of evil men?"
"Use your own judgement as usual. Perhaps you might faint and take a while regaining your senses." Paige folded the lapels of his elegant dinner jacket over the white expanse of his dress shirt. Now, like Suleiman, he was dressed all in black. From the back seat, the fighting Afghan handed Paige his modified pistol, without the shoulder stock but with the small silencer screwed onto the barrel. The Judgement examined it briefly and fastened it to a harness sewn into the lining of his jacket. He pulled on thin leather gloves and started to get out of the Jeep, his heart pounding with sudden excitement. This was the crusade he lived for.
Neda went first, picking up some snow along the way to rub on her hands and face. At the door where the two cars were parked, she knocked loudly and insistently. A few seconds later, a curtain was pulled aside as a woman looked out and then the door opened.
"Oh thank you," Neda gasped breathlessly. "I'm frozen half to death. My car stalled a mile up the road and no one has driven by. I can't feel my fingers, please let me warm up for a minute. Perhaps I might use your phone?"
Kate hesitated for the barest instant before saying, "Of course. Come in." She tightened her robe around her naked body and step aside as the petite woman entered, then closed the door behind them.
"Is there someone you can call to come get you?" asked Kate.
"Oh, I don't know anyone in this area. I was on my way to New Jersey, and.. I feel..." Neda staggered and fell face down to the carpeting, her head hitting with a convincing thud. More annoyed than concerned, Kate knelt and took a pulse. The woman's hands WERE cold. Kate sighed and straightened up again as her colleagues entered behind her. Alex and Garret were hanging up their coats when they spotted the woman on the floor.
"Well, this is a surprise," Alex said blandly.
"Her pulse is strong, her breathing fine." Kate gave Alex a sour expression. "She claimed her car broke down and she wanted to use the phone. Then she fainted. Or seemed to."
Alex got down on his knees and turned Neda over onto her back. "Pretty little thing, don't you think? You know what I'm thinking..?"
"Forget it," Kate interrupted. "Look at her clothes. Her hair. She's got money. She's someone the authorities would be looking for."
"Yes. I'm afraid you're right. Too bad." He took her under the arms and hauled her up onto the couch that stood against the wall under a watercolor of a lighthouse. "It's sad that our.. guests... tend to be rather unattractive."
Neda made a retching noise and sat up. "Gonna be sick," she gasped. "Bathroom?"
Stepping forward, Garret took her hand and said, "Come with me. Right down this hall." He walked her quickly around a corner, arm across her slim shoulders.
Left behind, Alex exchanged a wary glance with Kate. "Are you suspicious?"
"Aren't you? We're playing a dangerous game, my friend. I think that woman is not an innocent traveler finding us by chance. In fact, I..." She was cut off by a strange deep cracking noise from down the hall and then the thud of a body hitting a floor.
Instantly, the blond Alex dove for the easy chair where he had been sitting and tugged the massive 44 Magnum up. Even as he straightened, swinging the gun into position, he had a split-second glimpse of the icy blue eyes of Henry Brockton Paige glaring at him. There was a soft coughing noise from the strange pistol Paige held and a slug tunneled through Alex's forehead to emerge with a splat from the back of his head and break the glass over the watercolor on the wall. With a comically surprised expression, Alex dropped backwards to sprawl against the couch.
Kate screamed and started to plunge toward the door to outside, but Henry Paige had somehow stepped in her path. The muzzle of the gun pointed unwaveringly right at her face, and his eyes were narrowed in anticipation.
"Wait, wait, there's some mistake!" she cried. "You've got me mixed up with someone else."
"I don't think so," Paige answered in a low chilly tone. "I examined the woman in the bedroom down the corridor. You are part of a vile cult. This is Necrophile Palace. There. Look at your pal."
Despite herself, Kate turned her eyes away and saw that Alex had aged fifty years in the past few seconds. The man's skin was dry and wrinkled, the hair white and thin, the arms and legs thinned by time. He looked seventy and a bad seventy at that.
"Alex..." she breathed. "Oh no."
"It was stolen lifeforce and he could not keep it." Paige gestured with the gun. "Turn around. I dislike shooting women face to face."
From around the corner, the towering bulk of Suleiman emerged, dragging Garret limply behind him. A few minutes earlier, the man had been fit and muscular, shining with health. Now he was stringy and worn, with a pot belly and only a fringe of grey hair around his ears. Suleiman dropped the corpse casually to the floor.
"Garret..." Kate sobbed. "You bastards. You murderers."
"Coming from you, that's ironic," said Paige. "Where is the rest of your cult?"
"What? There's no one else. It was just those two. They... they were keeping me here against my will. They used me in horrible ways, you have no idea." She started to weep. "I was their prisoner."
"That's not going to work," Paige told her. "Your reactions when you saw their bodies gave you away. No, you're in on it. And like them, you must face your Judgement." He fired once, the 32 bullet entering just above her left eye. Kate's head snapped to the side and she fell straight down as if something had been holding her up and now had released her. Paige unscrewed the hot silencer from his pistol and sniffed it as if testing a wine bouquet. "These new models are even quieter," he said to his partners. "I must congratulate the Gunsmith and offer him a bonus."
Neda had examined the three bodies as a matter of procedure, although they were obviously dead. As she straightened up, her large dark eyes were angry. "Suleiman came in just as Garret was starting to fondle me. These Necrophiles were not the nicest people."
Paige put his gun back in the harness inside his jacket. "I saw their most recent victim in that room there, the second one down. It was the woman we saw get into the Jetta last night. Poor unfortunate. We could not save her but at least Judgement has avenged her."
"And there will be no more victims." Neda shuddered. "It's still hard for me to believe these occult crimes really happen. Elderly fiends sucking the life from victims to become young again. Like vampires."
"Or Ghouls," Paige said. "Well, these three have claimed their last victim. Come, let us leave here. This was work well done but our crusade goes on." Opening the seam of his dinner jacket lapel, the Judgement took three playing cards, each with a bullet hole in its exact center, and folded them into the hands of the three dead Necrophiles. "We will call the police when we find an unobserved phone booth."
VIII.
The shock of the icy water galvanized Bane back into full awareness. Somehow, although not fully conscious a few seconds earlier, he had known to take a gulp of air and hold it as he was thrown into the lake. Now he reacted by instinctively trying to swim upward and realized his legs were tied together. Something was pulling him down. The Dire Wolf found his arms were free and he reached into the inner right pocket of his jacket and drew out the Trom oxygen membrane, slapping its panel over his lower face just as he had to take a breath. The Trom device was only a few molecules thick, separating oxygen from water more efficiently than the gills of a fish. Bane breathed in. The oxygen was bitter cold but at least it would keep him alive. He pulled the tabs back over his ears to hold the membrane on like a surgeon's mask.
Now he could take in the situation. He had obviously been thrown into the lake behind the lodge. The Necrophiles. Now he remembered. The blond boy had pulled a Magnum and for once Bane had reacted a bare instant too late. The aching in his chest showed where he had been shot. Damn. He tried to get his legs apart, then bent down from the waist to feel the rope tying them together. There was some sort of weight at the end of the rope, pulling him down.
With the oxygen membrane on, he didn't have to worry about drowning but the freezing water would kill him soon by itself. Bane slid one of the silver daggers from his sleeve and sliced at the rope, cutting his right leg a little in the process. He kept those blades as sharp as possible, but their innate properties as ensorcelled by the Eldarin made them capable of slicing through tough materials much easier than the best steel could. In a minute, he had his legs free. Despite the primal instinct to get to the surface, Bane made himself carefully sheath the dagger again. He did not want to have to go diving to retrieve it.
The cold was starting to get to him. Almost twenty years on a tagra diet had given him healing and resistance past normal Human levels, but he was not indestructible and his body was starting to feel numb. He had to surface before he blacked out. Vaguely, he realized there must be a hole in the ice overhead- the Necrophiles had tossed him in here somehow- but he couldn't see it. This was getting He was pressed up against the bottom surface of the ice. With fingers that had lost feeling, the Dire Wolf fumbled in an inside pocket and came up with a pencil-sized thermite flare. He barely managed to press down and twist the handle, but the other end suddenly erupted into a blindingly white ball of flame. Bane pressed the blazing flare up against the ice and kept treading water.
After a minute, he figured to take the second flare out. Grasping it and lighting its end took all his ability at this point. The two flames burned a cone upward in the ice. Kicking his legs to stay in place, Bane saw the ice melt through and the night sky show. In a few more seconds, a hole opened big enough to get an arm through. Shuddering violently, he managed to hold on just another minute. Finally, he dropped the still burning flares down into the black water, seized the edges of the hole and managed to pull himself up onto the surface. It was a tight fit and for a second, it looked as if he wouldn't make it. Gasping and shivering, he got up on hands and knees, stood up and promptly fell on his face. He knew he had to keep moving. Crawling at first, then finally rising and staggering like a drunk with his soaked clothes freezing to his body, Bane began heading across the lake.
He remembered to draw on his Kumundu training. Deep slow breaths, pulling air into his body, making the blood circulate faster, warming his muscles. Each step he took was a little steadier. The Dire Wolf removed the oxygen membrane and stowed it in a pocket as he neared the lodge. Both cars were still there, he saw with satisfaction. Tapping the holster behind his left hip, he found his gun was missing. He must have dropped it when he had been shot. No matter. As enraged as he was at the moment, not having a gun was not going to stop him.
By the time he reached the lodge, Bane felt almost back to normal. He shook every few seconds, but his body was already stabilized. It took a lot to kill a Tel Shai knight. He slammed the door open and strode inside to get one of the bigger surprises in his career. Inside the pleasantly warm sitting room, three corpses sprawled in a rough circle. Two men at least in their seventies, a woman maybe in her mid-fifties. The woman and one man had been shot in the front of the head and the second had his throat opened so the severed windpipe showed.
They were wearing the clothing the Necrophiles had been wearing. These were the Necrophiles, he realized at once. Once they had been killed, the stolen lifeforce left their bodies and they returned to their true ages. Bane exhaled slowly and sagged, suddenly feeling weary as he knew the fight he had geared up for was not going to happen. Bending low, not touching anything, he spotted the playing card each corpse was holding. He spotted his revolver halfway under a chair and holstered it.
The Judgement had been here! He had killed the Necrophiles in those minutes that Bane had been trying to escape from under the ice in the lake. What remarkable timing, he thought, just a little sooner or later he would have been able to capture Judgement as well. He felt unreasonably cheated.
Still a little dazed by what he had been through, the Wolf went over to stand by a heating duct and absently began squeezing water from his clothing. He had uncertain feelings about the whole situation. True, he likely would have killed the Necrophiles himself, there was no way to ever bring them to trial on charges any judge or jury would accept. But he had wanted to tangle with Judgement. The man had shot Bane in the back the night before entirely on mistaken perception, and there was no telling how many other innocent bystanders the Judgement had killed and never known his mistake. Even though he was a vigilante himself most of the time, Bane could not let Judgement remain at large.
After a few more minutes of drying off and warming up, the Dire Wolf decided he had to leave. He would phone the local police from a gas station or something and mark this off as a bad deal all around. He examined the bodies briefly once again and went out the door to stand in the darkness next to the two cars. There was the VW Jetta from the night before, all right. Motion up on the road caught his eye and he saw two police cars turning down the long drive toward him, their lights just beginning to flash.
Without hesitation, Bane wheeled and hurtled into the night, racing in the shadow of the building until he plunged into the woods and veered off to his left. Running across a frozen field, up a steep incline, he found his own car right where he had left it and he leaped in. As he started it up, he could just see the alternating red and blue lights of the cruisers in the distance. Bane pulled out onto the side road, saw no traffic either way and heading away from Goodwin Lodge. He would make a big circle, going as far as he could before heading back to the motel where he had left his gear. What a night. The Judgement had not only stolen his intended targets, apparently he had also called the cops and nearly gotten Bane caught flat-footed and red-handed with three dead bodies. Outrageous. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
5/17/2014
