“We really need to get together again sometime soon, Congressman,” I said. “Dinner at my place?”
“You set a fine table, Chad,” Congressman Bouvrier said. “Why don’t you have Remi call my people, look at the schedule?”
“Will do,” I said, weaving through traffic. I made a left turn through a red light and hit my horn at someone who didn’t know what a purple flashing light meant. “Sort of need to hang up at this point, Congressman.”
“Understood. Good talking to you, Chad.”
“Sam,” I snapped, handing over the phone. “Call the office. Tell Franklin we need everybody. Full call out. Boots and saddles and every heavy weapon we’ve got!”
* * *
By the time we got back, the sobek was two blocks up Lake Avenue. Looking down the long boulevard, it was one continuous scene of flipped cars, torn-down power lines and crushed homes.
The crocodile was wandering from side to side, wreaking havoc in a more or less chaotic fashion but steadily heading southward on the road. It had always seemed that the sobeks had a destination in mind but none had previously made it past the pumping station. This one, though, was determined to get to wherever it was going and seemed equally determined to do as much damage as it could on the way.
We’d stopped at the intersection of Lake and Bordeaux and it was about a block up, just short of Narcissus. NOPD was trying to clear the area but people were being people. Gawking, fleeing, some of them in cars, some of them on foot. One guy was out in his front yard with what looked like an elephant gun shooting at the thing. Which was just pissing it off more.
“I’ll entertain suggestions here,” Sam said.
“We’re pretty well fucked,” I said, getting out of the car. “Crocodilians can soak up an unimaginable amount of damage before they die. That goes for just about every kind. You can shoot them in the body all day long. They’ll slowly bleed to death but not fast enough. The only really good way to kill them is hit them in their remarkably small brain. Which takes an angle you can’t get from the ground and especially from in front.”
I’d opened up the trunk and reached inside. “Time to read it the LAW,” I said, tossing him one of the rocket launchers. “Which is going to, at most, slow it down.”
“Two LAWs is only going to slow it down?” Sam said.
“Fingers crossed.”
We both hit the sobek in the abdomen with the rocket launchers. This caused some of its guts to spill out on the road and knocked it down.
“Hell yeah!” Sam yelled in a satisfied tone.
Then the damned thing started struggling back to its feet.
“Back in the car. Get on the phone. Ask Franklin when he’s going to get here and how many heavy weapons he’s got.”
The crocodilian was not particularly smart, but it could put very big rocket signature together with very big hurt and count to two. So it was now concentrated on catching Honeybear. Which was fine by me. I wasn’t going to let it catch me, and chasing us, it wasn’t doing excessive secondary damage. The question was where to lead it to.
My first preference would be back into the canal. They’d always had a hard time getting out. Their bipedal form was bad for climbing, and there was less damage they could do to people in there. Problem being, there was a fence along the canal and no bridges in this area. If I went over to the canal we’d probably end up trapped up against it. That would be bad.
Lake Avenue did not continue forever. It ended at Metairie Road which was a fairly major cross street. There was a gas station at the corner. I vaguely considered luring it into the gas station then blowing up the pumps. Two problems. First, pumps don’t really blow up like they do in movies. Second, this was already a big enough incident and whoever was currently on their ass, MCB would flip the fuck out.
There was no place to lure it, no place to corral it that didn’t involve more loss of life or a much larger presence. Except the Metairie Bridge. That was a bigger incident but discreet had gone out the window when the fucking MCB sniper missed the fucking shot.
Sam was still talking to Franklin on the mobile phone. “Tell him to park on the Metairie Bridge, east side.”
To get it into a kill zone we needed to get it to follow us. I looked in the rearview mirror. The sobek was tiring and didn’t seem to want to chase us anymore. There was a large apartment complex at the corner of Lake and Bordeaux and I didn’t want it getting stuck in there.
“Lean out and shoot that thing again.”
“You’re serious,” Sam said. But he leaned back out the window and started shooting it with his CAR-15 popgun. The sobek didn’t seem to care.
“We need something it will notice.” I stopped the car and got out.
“It’s sort of meandering this way still,” Sam pointed out.
“SEALs,” I said. “Sheesh. Quit whining. Help me get Bertha out.”
We got the Barrett .50 caliber unpacked, the trunk closed, and the weapon in the front seat before the sobek caught up. Just. As I backed up, fast, it leaned over and clomped its jaws shut on where the car had been. But it also dropped on its face, so it took a bit for it to get back up. And it was pissed again. Then it tripped on some entrails and sprawled. I stopped to let it get up.
“Keep shooting it,” I said as I honked the horn and flashed the high beams at it. “Make sure it knows it’s us. And I’m going to take the next turn.”
“Uh-huh,” Sam said, taking the time to stuff some orange foam earplugs in. The Barrett is a huge, long, heavy, and generally unwieldy gun. Sam was a strong guy, but I suppose I couldn’t expect him to just hang Bertha out the window like with his carbine, but it still pissed me off when he turned around in his seat, levered Bertha about, and smashed out my back window with the muzzle.
“Hey! I just got Honeybear out of the shop!”
“Now who’s whining?” Sam said as he lined up the shot.
Realizing that the ejection port was right next to my head, I hurried and got my muffs off the dashboard and pulled them on. Sam fired. A big shell casing spun past my face. The muzzle brake tore up my upholstery. Stuffing flew into the air. Poor Honeybear.
But that got its attention. The sobek was back up and following us.
I drove slow enough the sobek could keep up. The big mobile phone started ringing, so I answered.
“Chad? It’s Franklin.”
“We’re sticking and moving on this thing getting it to chase us and ignore everything else.”
“Good. We’re—” As Franklin said that, Sam let go with another round of .50 right next to my head.
“What?” I yelled. The sound was deafening. And my ears were already ringing from the LAWs.
“We’re at the bridge!”
“I’m leading it back towards the canal. Going over to Orpheum, then I’m going to turn east on Metairie. I’m hoping it will jump in around there and just head uptown that way. We might be able to get a shot in on it if it’s down in the canal. Tell NOPD and SIU to close Metairie! Get set up on Metairie protecting the crossing if you can. We’ll try to drive it into the water there.”
“We’ve got the LAWs and the Ma Deuce,” Franklin shouted his answer. He could tell I was mostly deaf from the fire. “The MCB is going to shit a brick.”
“We don’t get this shut down quick we’re going to have hundreds of civilian casualties,” I yelled as Sam fired again. Check the mirror. Still following us. “This is their abortion. We’re just trying to fix it!”
The sobek, fortunately, was not particularly fast in normal circumstances and was having a lot of trouble with the spilled intestines. By the time I got off the phone we were just to the intersection of Grenadine and Orpheum. Orpheum paralleled the canal and had a high iron fence to keep people from falling or climbing in. The sobek could negotiate it easily but I suspected it wasn’t going to head straight for the water.
And it didn’t. It just kept following us as I made a slow turn south on Orpheum.
“You got any more a
mmo for this?” Sam said.
“There’s more mags in the trunk. We’ll can stop again, get out, and get the rounds.”
“Just because you can ride next to the edge of the cliff don’t mean you should, Chad.”
“What?”
“I’ll just space them out more. Anything that’ll soak up two LAWs like it wasn’t even hit has my full admiration.”
“They’re also tasty. Make a fine jambalaya.”
“I so don’t want to know how you know that,” Sam said.
“We used to have a Cajun sniper. Cajuns will eat anything.”
* * *
When we got to Metairie Road it had been blocked off by NOPD and Sheriff’s office. Good thing it was late at night because otherwise it would have caused one hell of a traffic jam. The Metairie Road bridge was the only way to cross the canal for a mile on either side.
Franklin and most of the rest of the team were in the middle of the road on the far side of the bridge setting up the M2 .50 caliber machine gun, generally called a “Ma Deuce.” The team van was parked to one side, more or less blocking the side street that paralleled the canal on the east side, back open.
I was pretty sure the Ma Deuce was, for once, spitting in the wind. You could pepper a sobek all day long with .50 cal and get nowhere. But they also had six light antitank weapons laid out.
I pulled up next to the machine gun on the same side as the team van and got out. Metairie Road curved at the bridge and I looked at the sightlines.
Franklin was shouting orders. “If we don’t force that thing to go in the water, we’re going to have to hoof it.” The sobek made the turn onto Metairie. “Damn. That is bigger and uglier than expected.”
I went over, picked up one of the LAWs and moved to the other side of the road to keep the backblast from interfering with the team.
The sobek was about halfway across the bridge. Franklin lit it up with the M2. We started hitting it with the LAWs. Each round from the rocket launchers knocked it down. But then it got up again. Down. Up. Down. Up.
If we’d been able to hit it from the rear, they might have had some effect—if we could hit it on the back of the head as it was swaying along in its ungainly walk. From the front, we were just tearing it up more but not really stopping it. Knocking it down and slowing it was the best we could do.
By the time we were out of LAWs, everybody switched to small arms. The sobek had taken a lot of damage at that point. It had been hit by eight weapons designed to take out light armored vehicles, the shots from the MCB sniper, and all the .50 that Sam had peppered it with. Speaking of which, Sam had gotten more ammo from the trunk and was adding to the carnage firing Bertha off-handed.
The sobek finally decided it had had enough. The water to the side was inviting. It clumped over to the side and more or less fell off the bridge.
“Bertha,” I said, holding out my hand.
Sam didn’t want to give her up but he handed her over.
I ran onto the bridge and spotted the sobek. It wasn’t moving much, but I could tell that was because it was sort of resting up. Not dead or even really dying quick. The amount of damage we’d done to it would kill it. Eventually. But it could be hours. I considered the angles and decided I was at a decent spot for a kill shot. I rested Bertha across a railing. I’d have preferred being about thirty feet up or that the sobek’s head was thirty feet closer. Or that it would…
The sobek struggled to its feet—again. It was ignoring us, clearly planning on continuing on to whatever its destination had been. But as it got to its feet, for just a moment the angle was juuust right for a…
I didn’t even realize the sear had released until the boom. And the sobek dropped deader than a doornail. It didn’t even thrash once. One shot, one kill, baby. Oorah for Marine marksmanship.
“That is how you are supposed to kill a sobek.” I looked over at Sam. “The one shot, one kill thing. Not the shooting up half the city part.”
“Well, it took a while,” Sam said, “but nice shot.”
“Thanks.”
* * *
“Was it really necessary to use six rocket launchers?” Special Agent Campbell fumed.
“It was eight.” I was packing up Bertha and didn’t even bother turning around.
“Eight?” Campbell was furious. “Are you completely insane or are you a moron? Why the hell were you shooting it with rocket launchers when you yourself said they didn’t work!”
“Because it was all we had.” I was weary, getting rained on, and getting tired of having to replace car windows. “Sobek stopped. Situation fixed. Scene cleared. Anything else, Special Agent?”
“Get out of my sight.”
“Have a nice day,” I said and left.
CHAPTER 11
“This is a pretty good ritual,” Sam Haven said, leaning back in the seat of Honeybear and looking out over Lake Pontchartrain.
I have a ritual for the full moon. I’ve talked about it before. I clean up myself and my gear. I go to confession, take communion, then I have a really good meal with some really good wine.
In this case, I’d taken Sam with me to K-Paul’s, Chef Paul Prudhomme’s world-famous hole-in-the-wall restaurant. We’d been in gear, pretty much fully rigged out, so Paul was kind enough to let us sneak in the back and eat at the chef’s table in the kitchen. Hot as hell, food was delicious. There were better places in New Orleans than K-Paul’s in my opinion, but Sam enjoyed it. Sort of. He didn’t want to admit that he wasn’t into “foreign muck,” but Prudhomme had gotten him over most of that by telling his backstory. Because Paul came from a tougher background than Sam.
“According to the Catholic faith I am now good to go for reentry to heaven,” I said. “Touch of some minor venal sins like checking out hot girls and some would say gluttony. But otherwise, I’m pretty good to go.”
I hadn’t taken Sam along with me to church. I wasn’t as close to him as Milo. But he knew about it. “So the number fifty-seven, that’s like a religious thing with you or something?”
“It’s a recurring sign. When I died I was told to be on the lookout for the number fifty-seven. I’ve found it’s symbolic. It’s shown up in some damn weird places.”
“Sounds like nonsense, but that was a really good meal,” Sam said, picking shrimp etouffee out of his teeth with a toothpick.
“Based on experience with New Orlean’s full moons, always possible to be my last,” I said. “Full moons have been heating up almost back to normal. Fewer loup-garou since Earl took care of the assholes who were creating all the new ones. One good thing he did before he fucked us.”
“Earl’s a good leader. You should get off his case. How was he supposed to know you guys would get attacked by an army of crayfish? On the scale of likely events that’s got to be somewhere to the left of getting anally violated by Gumby.”
“It’s New Orleans. Weird shit happens.” Then we got our first call of the night, and it was right next door. “Speaking of which…”
We only had to drive for a minute before we heard the screaming through the open window. There was a twenty-something girl running as fast as she could in high heels. And behind her was…
“That a grinder?” Sam asked, looking at the thing on the shore.
“Fricking moon’s not even up, dammit!” I snarled, getting out of the car.
I’d even noticed the girl earlier as she’d walked by. She’d been with some redneck in a ball cap set on sideways. Pretty hot brunette, she was basically Points with more chest and a few years off of her. The boyfriend appeared to be missing. Based on the human leg hanging out of the monster’s…mouth? Boyfriend was in its gullet.
“I don’t think that’s a grinder,” I said, heading to the trunk. The whatever-it-was looked more like a mobile pile of seaweed. Similar to a grinder in size and shape, but not the same. Just another monster. “You see any grinder teeth?”
“No,” Sam said thoughtfully. “We made flash cards in newbie training, but I don’
t know what the fuck that is. I think it’s dissolving that guy with something.”
“When in doubt, blow it up and burn it.”
“Help! Help! Oh, God, help me!”
“Working on it,” I said as the girl came running up to Honeybear. The thing was squishing itself along behind her, but it didn’t seem particularly fast. In classic horror movie style it had probably slithered up while they were making out.
“Please, my boyfriend!” she was out of breath.
“Working on it,” I said, finally finding the right satchel charge. “And, miss, I’m sorry to tell you this, but I don’t think he’s going to make it.” And what I was about to do to stop that thing would make sure of it. “Just let me do this, okay?”
“What are you going to do?” she and Sam asked more or less in unison.
I just walked over towards the thing swinging the claymore bag in my hand. When I got to within about thirty yards of it, the thing seemed to sense my presence. It was definitely using some sort of enzyme on the girl’s boyfriend. The leg had stopped thrashing and I could see a yellowish slime burning up part of the exposed leg.
“Miss,” Sam warned, “you’re gonna want to duck.”
The monster seemed to be composed of some sort of seaweed. I’d been told that some seaweed was algae and not a weed at all. It came from the sea and was some sort of weed so…seaweed. I left the rest to marine biologists. I pulled the fuse on the incendiary satchel charge and tossed it on the monster. It stuck. The thing reacted by heading for me, faster than before.
I wasn’t going to run toward Sam and the girl, so I headed across the street instead, fast as I could go in armor. Two reasons. One, I didn’t want to get dissolved. Sounded like a nasty way to go. Two, I didn’t want to get burned by my own satchel charge when it detonated. A really nasty way to go.
Unfortunately, we were down the end of Breakwater Drive. Depending on how long it lasted I was going to hit the water going that way. So I angled a bit to the right as I hit the road and broke into a sprint on the solid pavement. I could hear the thing slithering along behind me, a wet schlup, schlup, schlup.