Forged From Ash (25 page)

“Is that the same rifle you used back when we were clearing Half Breeds out of Saint Louis?”

“She’s grown up since then,” Cole said proudly as he removed the rifle from the case to prop it against his hip. “Same Brown Precision Tactical I got from Walter way back when, but I’ve been fiddling with it whenever I get the chance. Had one of the gun nuts from Arkansas modify it to accept the entire range of modified .50 caliber rounds I’ve been cranking out. I tweaked the grip to improve the balance. But this here,” he said while removing the scope from its foam resting place, “is my real pride and joy.”

“Can it make you move faster or quieter?”

“No, but it can—”

“Save it for another time. I’ll scout ahead this way and let you know if I need help. Do you remember the signals we used to use?”

“Yes, I remember,” Cole said as he attached the scope to the top of the rifle.

“Good. Try not to trip any alarms.”

When Cole looked up again, Frank was gone. The only indications that the Squam had been there at all were a few branches swaying in his wake. Cole dug around in the truck for a box of ammunition and stuffed some rounds into his jacket pocket. A few supplies were taken from his other bags and collected into a satchel which he strapped across his body like a bandolier. Resting the rifle on one shoulder, he tromped away from the Ford.

It was a short but grueling walk to Tensleep Canyon. The road seemed much smoother now that he wasn’t being bounced around inside a metal can. His senses fell into familiar patterns to scan the terrain around him while searching for traps in his path. There wasn’t a lot to see apart from trees and an occasional four-legged critter scampering for cover. Knowing the prison had to be fairly decent in size, Cole listened for sounds of machinery or a generator big enough to power a place like that. He sniffed the air for a hint of exhaust or smoke from a cooking fire but came up empty on all sensory fronts.

He started to worry when he made it another half mile without finding any trip wires, cameras, or alarms of any kind. If he’d simply missed something anywhere during his walk, Cole could have let the prison know he was coming with plenty of time for The Vigilant to decide how they wanted to pick him off. From what Frank had mentioned earlier regarding the ways Cole had been numbing himself over the past few years, that possibility seemed all too likely.

Then there was the chance that there weren’t any alarms, tripwires or traps to be found. If that was the case, then that probably meant there wasn’t anything in the area worth guarding. While that was the least dangerous of the two options, it meant Cole had been led on a wild goose chase, and he’d brought Frank along for the ride.

Cole was thinking about how he could explain himself to Frank in a way that didn’t make him look like a washed out druggie when a man stepped out from the trees. Dressed in brown and green camo pants and a matching jacket over a plain brown shirt, he blended in fairly well with his surroundings. Compared to Squam camouflage, however, he might as well have been wearing jeans and a t-shirt. The man had the steely glare of a hardened soldier which was almost completely obscured behind layers of black and brown face paint.

“Lower the rifle,” the man said.

Cole held the Brown Precision Tactical in both hands and eased it to the ground. “Take it easy, buddy,” he said. “I’m supposed to be here.”

“What’s your clear code?”

“One, four, sixty-seven, Bravo, One Zulu.”

“Name?”

“Dressel.”

Even though he was certain he’d memorized the code perfectly after getting it from the man he’d captured back in Cody, Cole still thought he was about to be shot. The man in the camo paint didn’t move a muscle until he stepped forward and raised his AK-47.

“Let’s see your hands,” the man with the assault rifle said.

Cole extended both arms and held his hands out to display the scars on his palms. “There. See?”

“Step forward and turn around.”

“Come on, man. I’m running late as it is. At least let me check in first.”

“Step forward and turn around or you won’t leave this path,” the other man said.

“Sure,” Cole said as he moved his hands up as if to clasp them behind his head. He immediately found the wooden weapon harnessed to his back and took hold of it with his right hand. Hoping that the guard wanted to see the brand that Frank had mentioned, Cole shuffled toward him while slowly turning around. “I’m probably here to relieve you,” he said. “It’ll be nice to get out of these woods, huh?”

“Shut up and turn around.”

Cole had done more shuffling than turning and reached a point where he couldn’t do much more of either without tipping his hand. “So how many guys are out here on this detail?”

“I said shut up and keep turning,” the guard snapped as he approached Cole with his assault rifle at his shoulder.

As soon as the other man was close enough, Cole pulled the halberd from its harness and pivoted while swinging it downward. He didn’t bother shifting the weapon into a new form since the compact shape made it the perfect length to catch the AK-47 squarely. Although the original wooden spearhead would have knocked the rifle away well enough, the modified Blood Blade sliced through the middle of the barrel and cut all the way through to the curved magazine. The man holding the rifle was a Skinner himself, so he wasn’t completely surprised by the weapon in Cole’s hand. His finger would have tightened around the trigger, but the halved rifle dangled from his hand like a limp appendage as metal chips and a dusting of gunpowder from broken rounds fell to the ground.

Cole flipped the shortened halberd partway around so the forked end was pointed up. He followed up with a sharp jab that caught the guard on the side of the face where the pointed ends left a pair of shallow gashes. The guard staggered backward to get out of Cole’s reach. He wore several weapons on his belt and back, but his hand went for a holster on his hip. Just as he drew his pistol, a hulking shape emerged from the trees behind the guard. Frank lunged at him to drop both arms down around the guard’s shoulders and chest like a roller coaster’s safety harness.

Even as he was dragged backward, the guard attempted to fire a shot at Cole. Frank’s hand closed around his wrist, digging claws into the guard’s flesh deeply enough to make him drop the pistol before it went off. Kicking and thrashing to break free, the guard snapped his head back to slam against the side of Frank’s jaw. The Squam let out a croaking grunt, reeling as one of the guard’s boots slammed down onto his wide, webbed feet.

“All right,” Cole said while moving toward the guard. “Time to go to sleep.”

Despite a lizard man grappling with him and a Skinner coming at him with a blade ripped from a medieval exhibit, the guard kept enough of his wits about him to reach for another weapon hanging from his belt. The knife he selected was shaped like a military model with a sharpened edge on one side of the blade and a jagged edge on the other. Instead of metal, however, the blade was crafted from the same varnished wood as any other Skinner’s weapon. Before he’d drawn it all the way back for his first swing, the blade was already growing into something that looked like a tooth broken from a dragon’s mouth. He swung to deflect Cole’s incoming attack, creating a burst of sparks as his blade met the metallic end of the halberd. When Cole pulled his weapon back and prepared for another strike, he was outplayed by a quick slashing move from the guard.

“Son of a bitch!” Cole snapped as the short blade raked across his knuckles.

Frank attempted to bring an end to the fight by lifting the guard up so he could carry him back into the trees. As soon as he left the ground, the guard pulled both legs up to kick Cole in the chest and side of the head.

Reeling from that, Cole shook the fog from his brain and drove his halberd straight into the ground near his feet. “Drop him,” he said to Frank.

The Squam looked at him questioningly while trying to keep the guard from squirming loose.

“Go ahead and drop him,” Cole said. “Now.”

Grudgingly, Frank opened his arms and allowed the guard to hit the ground on both feet. Almost immediately, the guard reached for the radio clipped to a pocket on his jacket. Before he could touch a single key on the communication device, Frank snatched it away from him. The guard turned around to face the Squam, but Frank had already disappeared into cover.

“Who the hell are you?” the guard asked as he spun around to face Cole.

“Doesn’t matter. Tell me all you can about the prison, and I’ll let you live.”

“You don’t scare me, boy,” the guard taunted. “You should have finished me off when your lizard friend got the drop on me.” With that, the guard sent a fist toward Cole’s face.

It had been a while since Cole had been in a straight-up fistfight. Once he’d allowed himself to relax and give in to reflexes trained over the course of years by one of the best scrappers he’d ever seen, Cole blocked an array of incoming punches and easily stepped out of the path of a few vicious kicks. The guard didn’t get flustered as he missed. He merely stepped up his game to come at Cole with an even more brutal series of attacks.

The guard snapped a kick into Cole’s shin and drove a couple lightning fast jabs to his ribs. After absorbing those, Cole spun his body around in a tight circle to pound an elbow into the guard’s back. His left fist smashed against the guard’s kidneys before the other man turned to face him head-on once again.

Some of the breath was taken from Cole’s lungs when a punch landed solidly against his solar plexus. Somehow the guard managed to bring a knee up in an attempt to double Cole over, but Cole hopped back to clear some room. As soon as the guard’s foot came down again, he brought his entire body around to snap a backfist out at Cole like he was cracking a whip.

Cole had seen the move, and others much like it, when sparring with Paige. She’d caught him with it more times than he could count and hit him harder every time she snuck it through his defenses. Learning the motions of blocking and countering was the easy part. Doing them fast enough to do any good was a true test of Cole’s patience and endurance. If he hadn’t figured it out when he did, he was certain Paige would have started knocking his teeth out one by one. During those sessions, Cole had had plenty of choice words for his instructor which he knew better than to say out loud. In the years since then, her efforts had saved his life on countless occasions.

When the guard spun around now, Cole saw it coming as if it was in slow motion. His upper body turned, and both arms came up. When the guard’s attempted backfist hit Cole’s block, it was immediately trapped as both of Cole’s arms wrapped around his to sink in a tight grip. Cole continued to turn so he could use the guard’s momentum to his own advantage and redirect it several inches to one side. As the guard stumbled in that direction, Cole twisted the arm in his grasp until he heard a wet crunch. The guard flopped to the ground on his chest with Cole’s boot pressed against the back of his head, shoving his face into the dirt.

After pulling the guard’s arm out of its socket, there was more play in it when he twisted the limb gently. The guard’s mouth was wedged solidly against the ground, spewing muffled screams as his legs thrashed in pain.

Easing up on the guy, Cole asked, “How long have you been a Skinner?”

The guard turned his head and spat out some grit. “F…Fuc…”

Cole cut the profanity short by twisting the dislocated arm against its socket. “How long?”

“Th…three years.”

“Then you should be able to heal from this before too long. One word of advice, be sure to get it popped back as soon as you can or it’ll heal in the wrong place. Take it from me, that sucks.”

“You’re…not Dressel.”

“Very good. Now how many Vigilant are in that prison?”

The guard turned his head even further to get a look at Cole. Reading the surprise in the other man’s eyes, Cole said, “Oh yeah. I’ve heard of The Vigilant. Don’t worry, though. They still qualify under a secret society. Don’t make me ask my question again, or I’ll let my lizard friend skin you so he can make a set of luggage. See what I did there? Irony.”

“There’s five of us here. Five.”

“Come on. You can do better than that,” Cole said before bending a knee and pulling the guard’s dislocated arm against it like a lever.

As pain shot through his body from a newer, deeper angle, the guard gritted his teeth and scraped the sides of his boots against the ground. “I’m telling you, there’s five.”

“Five of you on patrol?”

“No five total.”

“Bullshit,” Cole growled. He was about to give the arm another twist when he heard a familiar hiss in the trees. Looking back in that direction, he saw Frank scowling at him. “Is he lying?” Cole asked.

The Squam was hunched amid the trees. His scales had shifted to a color that rendered him almost invisible to a casual eye. “I can hear no deception in his voice, and I can see only one other human walking the perimeter of this canyon.”

One of the key elements in the Squamatosapien bag of tricks was the ability to see scents as well as body heat thanks to a substance secreted by their extra tear ducts. If anyone could see how many guards were on patrol at a glance it was Frank.

“So there’s you, one other on patrol and only three more inside the prison?” Cole asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“How many of us are supposed to fit inside that place?” the guard asked. He’d caught his breath and was probably lightheaded from the mix of adrenalin and healing serum flowing through his system right about now.

“What kind of weapons do you have?”

“Assault rifles, explosives, two jeeps, two mortars, pistols, shotguns…”

Cole laughed under his breath. “Now that sounds more like the Vigilant I know and love. You guys all have your Skinner weapons, too, although you don’t seem to be in very good practice with them. That’s the problem with the new generation. No respect for tradition.”

“Doesn’t matter…what you know, asshole,” the guard said. “You won’t get any closer than you already are. We got…enough to hold back an army.”