Full Moonster [BUREAU 13 Book Three] (10 page)

"Nerve gas!” George shouted in warning, watching a meter on the environmental board hit the red-line.

Wow. It hadn't done that since our last visit to the Buffalo NY Chili Cook-Off. I glanced at the cracked ceiling. Only our velocity was keeping the lethal war gas from entering.

Slowly, Mindy removed her hand from the window handle. “Then we can't open any of the windows or gunports to fight!"

"You got it, toots,” George said, frowning deeply.

From the look on her face, George would pay for that ‘toots’ line later. If we lived. But that was becoming a doubtful proposition. The Scion Of The Silver Dagger wanted us seriously dead. Or more correctly, they wanted us dead and to get their claws on all the information we carried on the Bureau and its operations. Our organization was the only real deterrent they had ever faced.

"Ed, what do we do?” Raul asked, biting a lip. Hindered by the sheet of unbreakable glass between us and the Scion, even magic was under severe limitations.

"Anything we can,” Father Donaher said, releasing a flood of oil from the bottom of the van, followed by a rain of nail-clusters. There was no appreciable effect on the Scion.

"First, we're doing a Clean Sweep,” I announced. Removing the cigarette lighter, I shoved a finger into the hole where no sane person would shove a finger. As my prints were identified, a small panel swung out from the dashboard and I hastily typed in a Go code. The tiny computer screen repeated a request for authorization, asked several secret questions and when finally satisfied, gave a good long beep.

With a sigh, I reclined in my seat. There! Every computer file in the RV was deleted and in the process of being overwritten with the collected works of Oscar Wilde, my favorite author. Afterwards, the disks would be deleted again, melted, and then diced to pieces. Go ahead and try to reconstruct those records, ya bozos.

Brutally, our vehicle was pounded by a hail of armor-piercing bullets, most of which did not. Score another win for TechServ.

In less than a minute, the rest of the team had performed similar procedures to their own private records, burning papers, deleting Palm Pilots, and so forth. During this, Jessica had armed the self-destruct on the RV. With six hundred pounds of thermite packed into the hull, the werewolves might capture our dead bodies, but not in large enough pieces to even make a zombie
hors d'oeuvre
. The Scion was getting nothing from us. Period. End of discussion.

A rocket streaked by taking the side view mirror. Uh-oh, they were in trouble now. That's seven years bad luck.

"What next?” Father Donaher asked, crumbling a sheet of ashen paper into an unrecognizable mess.

More bullets ricocheted off our vehicle.

"We'll use the lasers,” I declared, holstering my Magnums.

Smiling, George fumbled at the vault in our arsenal and withdrew four sleek pistols. Top Secret weapons built for the Pentagon, the futuristic power pistols delivered the punch of an angry lightning bolt, but occasionally exploded on the user removing their hand and took a week to recharge. We saved them for dire emergencies only.

Dutifully, we switched the pistols’ setting from Flash, a disabling light burst that would temporarily blind anyone not wearing polarized goggles, to Beam, a polycyclic ray that cut steel. We didn't want the werewolves wounded, we wanted fried corpses. When we play, we play for keeps.

Crowding to the extreme right side of the van, Donaher, George, Mindy and I braced our pistols in our hands, while, on the other side, Raul and Katrina copied our position with their wands. They had a Deadly Light spell very similar to what our pistols could produce, and with the same limitations. Technology and magic, the only real difference was who held the patent: GE or God.

The motorcycles came closer. A LAW struck the highway just aft of us, clouding our view with flame and hunks of concrete. A chance chunk of shrapnel impacted off the rear Armorlite window and a small crack appeared. Horrified, I held my breath, but the crack did not penetrate all the way through.

"On my mark,” I commanded, with a dry mouth. “Ready ... aim ... fire!"

Straight through the clear glass rear windows of the Bureau RV there lanced out half a dozen scintillating energy beams. Only a fleeting touch of each beam was necessary for the werewolf rider to fall, minus a head or arm. Systematically, we cleared the road. But, as the charred bodies dropped lifeless to the highway surface and bounced away, the motorcycles leaped forward with renewed speed.

"Tricked!” Donaher roared, slamming a fist onto his knee. “The motorcycles are the attackers, not the drivers!"

Sweat running off her face, Mindy brushed away a strand of damp hair. The temperature of the RV must have risen twenty degrees from the secondary effect of the lasers. “Got to be demonically possessed,” she guessed intelligently.

"Ah, not necessarily,” Raul said, with pained expression.

Oh, what now? “Report,” I ordered, annoyed. The power level on my laser read 50% charged.

Trying to radiant innocence, Katrina started studying the ceiling and Raul cleared his throat. Twice. “Well, there is this theory. Only a theory, mind you—"

"Talk!” George yelled impatiently.

Raul sighed. “It is believed by some wizards, that if werewolves could ever become sentient, they would have the ability to decide what the curse would change the victim into."

Silence filled the van for a small eternity.

"Anything?” Mindy gulped, swallowing a small internal organ.

The mage gave a solemn nod.

"So those might not be from the Scion,” she started.

"But Scion members themselves,” Raul finished. “Correct."

Intelligent, hostile, paranormal were-motorcycles. Should we lodge a complaint with Consumer Reports or the ASPCA?

"Here they come!” Jess shouted in warning, veering the vehicle about from side to side.

In a whining roar, the motorcycles surged ahead and we fired again. But this time, the nimble bikes wheeled crazily about in a Gideon knot of confusion, making it impossible for us to get a clear sustained shot. Switching tactics, I ordered the highway destroyed in an effort to make the cycles crash. The lasers brutalized the highway before they winked out. But the sleek two-wheelers merely bounced over the buckled ridges of asphalt. Some of them wobbling badly and almost toppling to the rushing road surface, but then miraculously righted themselves.

Shocked expressions filled the van. The damn things must have gyroscope stabilizers. They couldn't fall over!

As the rest of the team heaped verbal abuse on the Scion, a dozen plans went through my mind, each critically flawed by the fact that we couldn't open the windows. Vestiges of the nerve gas still adhered to outside of the RV.

Painfully, I gnashed my teeth in frustration. Missiles gone. Out of bullets. Lasers drained. Low on magic. No help was coming. Yet, if we didn't do something fast, those kamikaze kooks would soon reduce us into covert Federal hamburger. Desperately, I tried to think of something clever, and succeeded.

"Katrina prepare to cast a Hook,” I commanded, drawing my Magnum. “Raul, get ready to do a mass Meld. Mindy, get me a stick from Storage. George grab a map, and everybody get ready to go EVA!"

Nobody bothered to reply. They just did it.

Handing the stick to Jess, she shoved it in between the gas pedal and the dashboard, holding the pedal to the floor. Using rope, she tied the steering wheel into position.

"Katrina? Raul?” I asked, filling my pockets with ammunition and grenades just in case this didn't work.

The wizards nodded.

"Hook!” I ordered.

Muttering words of power that visibly glowed in the air, Katrina gestured and from the side of the RV there shot a glowing green chain appended with a giant anchor. It hit the highway and embedded. On screeching tires, the van brutally arced about on the ethereal tether.

This had to be done perfectly. Timing was everything. “Ready and ... release!"

Poof. The chain was gone. Now facing in the wrong direction, the huge RV hurtled itself towards the enemy bikes.

"Meld!” I shouted.

Suddenly, we became insubstantial, and moved with ghostly rapidity through the physical mass of the Bureau vehicle. We found ourselves standing on the highway watching our twenty-four tons of armored Recreational Vehicle race straight at the oncoming array of motorcycles: a solid wall of Detroit metal moving at a relative velocity of 300-plus miles per hour. Without a doubt, ramming speed.

"Duck!” I cried, and the whole world seemed to shatter into pieces and then reform, so powerful was the mass detonation of the motorcycle's explosive cargo of plastique, aided and abetted by the six hundred kilos of thermite in our RV. Shrapnel and bits of concrete pounded all around us, while a brutal shock wave rattled the bones loose in our bodies, a single heart beat before a boiling thunderhead of flame extended hungrily for us.

"Berlin!” Katrina called, and we crouched low behind her magical Wall.

A wave of fire engulfed our position, but the licking flames spread out harmlessly as they rebounded from the resilient spell. However, killing heat seeped around the edges and our roasting seemed to last forever.

Eventually, the wall flickered into nothingness as Katrina ran dry of magic and we lay panting in the middle of the disfigured Ohio highway. Battered, broiled and bone-weary, the team grimly prepared what weapons we had and crossed fingers in a primitive luck ceremony. Failure? Success?

Then from the rumbling firestorm down the road, there appeared a smoking motorcycle tire that rolled aimlessly along for a few meters then wandered off the road to collapse in the weeds.

We cheered until our throats got as sore as the rest of our bodies. When everybody else is dead, you win: Bureau 13 axiom number seven, I do believe.

Romping in from the fiery horizon, came Amigo. As he reached our group, the collar around his neck rippled with light and he was a tiny Gila lizard again. Picking up our pet, Raul scratched him under the neck and Amigo came as close to a purr as he could.

"Map,” I wheezed, loosening my smoking necktie.

Bleeding from both ears, George offered the charred piece of paper to me with a bow. I thanked him and managed to focus my vision long enough to see a milemarker and locate our position. Painfully, my team hobbled off the road and headed for the someplace named Zanesville, the nearest town with an airport. We had a lot of work to do and not much time to do it in. This made twice the Scion had forced us into a retreat.

There would be no third time.

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As we stumbled into downtown Zanesville, our appearance frightened a small child. So the team stopped at the local mall and got shaved, showered, shampooed, haircuts, bought new clothes and wrapped ourselves around a reasonably priced meal at a nice restaurant.

While the team was devouring everything on the menu, I ambled over to a payphone and placed a discreet call to the Bureau. With the relay in our RV gone, our wristwatches probably couldn't reach wherever-the-heck our HQ was located. Which made a public phone was my sole option.

After being endlessly relayed through exchanges in Alamogordo, New Mexico to Trevose, Pennsylvania, I finally reached somebody in authority I could formally report to. The exchange of information was short and succinct.

Returning to the table, I gleefully informed the group that since we had been in direct telepathic communication with the Scion, no other Bureau team was going to interfere and chance exposure. We alone had been given the honor of stopping the Scion. Somehow, my friends were able to restrain themselves from doing the dance of joy at this news.

Appropriating a chair, I called for a group discussion. Katrina cast a small Dome of Silence over the table and everybody gathered in close.

"Okay, obviously we can't go to Hadleyville without some sort of psionic protection,” George noted, mopping the last vestiges of gravy from his plate with a buttermilk biscuit. “Raul? Katrina? How about some big juju magic?"

Conferring for a moment, the two wizards were glum.

"
Nyet
,” Katrina sighed so deeply, she almost burst out of her new blouse. “Spells for minds must be cast on each person and only last few minutes. Drain Raul and me in quick time."

"Raul and I,” Jessica corrected primly.

She nodded. “
Da
, both of us."

"Horta, old pal?” I asked hopefully.

Almost knocking over the condiment tray, Raul was madly flipping through his big book of spells, currently disguised as a menu. “Sadly, that seems to be the case,” he announced. “There are some alchemist potions which might work, but the side effects are rather unpleasant."

"Such as?” I asked curiously. Headaches? Stomach cramps? We could take those if it got the job done.

Scowling, Raul ran a finger down a page in his book. “Let's see, there is Lungfire, Demonic Cancer, Brain Spiders...."

"Enough!” Mindy called, holding up a palm. “We get the general idea."

"And we're eating,” George munched, his mouth stuffed full. There were priorities.

Her steel wand pulsating with flashes of hot power, Katrina barked a long phrase in Russian. It didn't sound very cheery.

"This is intolerable!” Father Donaher raged, snapping a bread stick in half easy as a baseball bat. “Just because the Bureau has no operating telepaths, we're supposed to sit on our butts while the Scion of the Silver Dagger does...” He gestured vaguely. “Who knows what! How many civilians have perished already? And how many more will die?"

It was a good point. Where the Scion went, death followed and lots of it.

Mindy struck the table a resounding blow with her fist rattling the silver. “God damn it! We discover a coven of sentient werewolves, the biggest threat to the world in recent memory, and we can't even
investigate
just because the bad guys can read our minds? I say we go back to Hadleyville anyway, and kick some butt!"

"Yeah!” Raul agreed. “If we move fast enough, or independently, even if they know what we're doing, they may not be able to stop us."