Demon Driven

DEMON DRIVEN

John Conroe

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either products of the author’s imagination or are used
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Copyright © 2010 John Conroe

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ISBN: 978-0-557-46609-2

“
Cry ‘HAVOC’ and let slip the dogs of
war!” – Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

Chapter 1

The corridor was long, dark and musty. It
ended at a 'T'. The werewolf was waiting around the left corner –
at least that's where I thought he was. I couldn't smell him or
hear his heartbeat, which was really frustrating. It’s amazing how
fast you come to rely on hyper acute senses. But all I could smell
was the sharp ozone odor of overworked electric motors. The only
sound I could hear: a faint whirring that seemed to come from
everywhere. The clock was ticking and I couldn't wait any longer.
Sliding silently down the hallway, I hugged the right-hand wall
with my back, and kept the full-auto Glock 18 in my right hand
pointed ahead, the smaller Glock 19 in my left pointed behind
me.

I didn't use to handle two pistols at once,
so-called two-gun mojo. But that had changed. A lot had changed.
I've often carried two guns, but it was more of a backup kind of
thing, I only ever used one at a time. A couple of months ago, the
ability to handle two at once had just sort of manifested. Odd?
Just the tip of the iceberg of odd.

Close enough to see part-way around the
corner; I began to 'slice the pie'.

That's what the Academy instructors call it.
When you are clearing a building, corners and doorways are
deathtraps. So cops are trained to gradually move around a corner,
getting an ever-increasing view (or slice of the pie), while
presenting as small a target as possible. Clearing a 'T' is a two
person job. But there was only one of me and I had to make the best
of it.

My leading shoulder was just about on the
edge of the right corner and there was nothing waiting on the left
side of the intersection. Uh oh! A slight rush of air from the
right was my only warning and then my fight brain took over. The
big toothy thing charging from the right
should
have taken
my right arm off at the elbow. Instead, it rushed into empty space
as I instinctively flipped over it, my legs pointing toward the
ceiling, my head and gun hand pointing down at the shaggy shape
below. Without conscious thought my finger feathered the trigger,
ripping a three round burst into the skull below me. Viscous red
fluid sprayed the white institutional walls and gray floor, as the
monster slammed headfirst into the wall, crunching through sheet
rock and wall studs. It collapsed in a spasming heap, while I
landed lightly on my feet. My attention shifted to the door at the
end of the left hallway, which was opening violently. A six-foot
humanoid figure with red eyes and two-inch fangs rushed at me from
the doorway. Four rounds to the chest, two to the head, sidestep
into the first hall to let it rush by, and double tap the back of
its head with the left hand gun. How I can shoot
and
hit a
moving target in the dark with my left hand while looking the
opposite direction is as big a mystery to me as anyone. I just can.
Of course, the V-squared virus might have something to do with
it.

I moved quickly toward the open door,
shifting first left, then right to gain some view of what lay on
the other side. The echoing gunshots that should have deafened me,
instead painted a sonar-like picture of the room ahead in my head.
Three people occupied space in the room. My mental picture had the
doorway coming into the room at a corner, where one of the long
walls of the rectangle met a short wall. One person was seated and
two were standing close together, one large, one small.

Slowing down wasn't an appealing option, so
instead, I dove through the opening, body horizontal to the ground,
guns pointed at the seated figure and the larger of the two that
were standing. Sharp flashes of light and concussive waves of sound
washed over me. I could feel tiny bits of burning gunpowder touch
my skin, as their bullets slammed through the air behind me. A four
round burst found the large standing vampire, at the same time that
two rounds from my left hand gun hit the sitting vamp in the
forehead. Rolling to my feet, my fight brain automatically scanned
for threats as I reflexively dropped the smaller model 19 into its
left-hand thigh holster, while my right hand ejected the partial
mag from the Glock 18. A fresh thirty-three rounder was just
seating home in 18s grip when the double doors at the other end of
the room slammed open, revealing a nine-foot tall, shaggy monster.
It charged.

Long burst to the chest, short burst to the
face, dodge right. The sasquatch slammed into the wall behind me
and I reflexively fired a third burst into the back of its
head.

Turning to the small female figure that was
the purpose of all my actions to this point, I was just in time to
see another flash of light and feel a sharp jolt to my chest. Her
face snarling and framed by flaming red hair, she was bringing her
silver handgun back on target, when a long burst from my gun
knocked her off her feet.

Instantly bright light from high overhead
illuminated everything, and a voice like God's boomed:“You're dead!
And so is your hostage!”

“You're half right,” I replied to the trio of
people sitting two stories up in the bulletproof control room.

“How do you figure?” Steve Sommers asked.

“My vest stopped the round,” I answered,
pointing to the red spot on my chest armor where the Simunitions
training round had impacted.

“Then why did you kill the girl you were
supposed to rescue?” asked the female form leaning over Steve's
shoulder.

“ 'Cause she was shooting at me! It was
obvious she had been Turned!” I answered, angry at the thoroughly
frustrating nature of the simulation.

Gina Velásquez's sharp brown eyes studied me
like a scientist with a strange new bug.

“Chris, the scenario states that the girl has
only been missing for a day. You, yourself, have told us that it
takes at least three days for a human to be Turned,” she
stated.

“Then why did she attack me?” I asked.

“Easy, she was mind controlled,” Chet Akins,
the third of my tormentors, explained.

“What? Where the hell did that come
from?”

Now I was really pissed off. The shoot house
simulations I had been running were becoming harder and harder to
win. My trainers in NYPD's Special Situation Squad were
understandably handicapped by a lack of direct knowledge of the
supernatural world, the dark, violent societies of vampires and
weres. It’s hard to get good information when the object of your
interview is ripping your throat out or using your arm as a
toothpick. But when they started to make up stuff, it made me
crazy.

“Chris, we have numerous documented cases of
humans being....enthralled would be the word, by vampires,” Gina
said.

“Well, that's a new one for me. I've never
heard of that from any of my vamps,” I said.

“Have you ever asked?” was her calm
reply.

“And what the hell's up with the sasquatch? I
asked, still angry, but starting to feel like a bit of a jerk.

Steve and Chet looked at each other, both
shrugging as Chet answered.

“We found him on eBay. Left over from a B
grade movie, 'When Bigfoot Attacks'.”

Coming down a bit from my combat high, I was
becoming more and more uncomfortable with my own actions.

“Well, it's actually kinda cool,” I
allowed.

Sommers was already half way down the metal
ladder that provided the only access to the shoot house control
booth. Aikens was waiting impatiently to follow and Gina was still
watching me, her damnably perceptive eyes continuing their cool
evaluation.

The Squad's shoot house was an old Brooklyn
warehouse that had been seized by the NYPD after it had been taken
in a drug lab raid. I had been along on that raid, as had the
entire Special Situation Squad, because the building had housed the
laboratory that had manufactured Hance, a potent street drug
derived from vampire and demon blood. That raid had been a pivotal
point in my relationship with the squad, as well as my introduction
to one of my more unique friends. That's saying something, as I
have some extremely unusual friends.

The shoot house was located on the lowest
level, three stories underground. The concrete floor had been
mostly empty when we had raided it, now it was a veritable maze of
movable walls and doors. Separated into three, distinct shoot
zones, it could host all manner of scenarios involving everything
from terrorists to the more exotic supernaturally themed situations
like I had just run. Chet, our technical guy, had enlisted the help
of his robotics club to build our 'vampires' and 'werewolves'.

“Dude, what the hell have you done to my
wolf?” Chet asked.

He was looking down at the bullet shattered
head of his most prized creation.

“Sorry, Chet, but it startled me and I just
... reacted,” I said.

He had built the life-size werewolf robot
according to my limited knowledge of them. Since the head was
chest-high on a human, he had built the skull to absorb 'kill'
shots from the front, not through the top. My burst of nine
millimeter slugs had exploded intricate mechanisms, spraying red
hydraulic fluid all over the place.

“What was that move? We couldn't quite follow
it and we haven't reviewed the footage yet,” Steve said.

I explained my twisting, head-down jump over
the wolfbot. Steve and Chet looked impressed, Gina, who had joined
us on the floor of the shoot house, just watched me, her arms
crossed. I knew the signs. She was working up some
words
for
me.
Words
from Detective Sgt. Velásquez were not usually
enjoyable and the thought of enduring a blistering ream-out
contributed to my sour mood.

I grabbed a broom and started sweeping up
expended brass while Chet looked over the robots and Steve
cataloged the damage to the walls and doors. The only real problem
was the wolfbot and the wall it ran into. The other bots had taken
slugs in the foam-filled portions of their anatomy that were
designed for such abuse. Sensors in the gel recorded damage
'points' from successive hits and when a proper number was reached,
the computer that ran everything would 'kill' the bot.

“Wolffie is down and out,” Chet said. “It's
gonna take a week to fix this mess.”

I sighed. “Chet, I'm really sorry.”

“Yeah, well, me too!”

Chet, with a hand from the brawny Sommers,
began loading the heavy robot onto a dolly to transport it to his
workshop. I sensed Gina's approach, although my back was to
her.

“Chris, let's chat a minute.”

Oh boy, here it comes,
I thought. Gina
is my handler, so to speak, a position assigned to her when the
previous Police Commissioner had begun to realize the extent of my
abilities. That's not to say that they knew the real extent of what
I could do. Hell, I was still learning that, even seven months
after my 'transformation'. But they knew enough.

“Chris, I'm disturbed by your actions. I
can't believe you shot the hostage.”

“Okay, I'll admit, I probably shouldn't have
capped her, but you gotta understand just how frustrating these
things are.”

“Frustrating how?” she asked.

I kept my voice down as I answered. Chet was
already mad at me, I didn't need to insult his handiwork on top of
the damage I had done to his wolf.

“There's no scent, no life sounds, the
movements are slow and jerky,” I said. “Even the echoes I get are
obviously from non-living objects. It's hard to make believe it's
real, when all my senses tell me it's not.”

“You can
hear
the difference in the
echoes from a living body to a mannequin?” she asked.