Blood and Stone (2 page)

CHAPTER THREE

Sunrise was just a few minutes away. Soon, the golden rays of dawn would illuminate the skies over Las Vegas, revealing the dragon flying overhead—if he were to remain flying. Instead, the dragon tucked his wings in to his sides and dove at an ornate mansion built on the outskirts of the city. A sprawling, three level building with thick green grass and thicker foliage. The house was surrounded by jungle-like growth and a ten foot-high brick wall.

Touching down inside the walled compound, the shapeshifter quickly assumed a human form—that of a slender man, of average looks, with brown hair. He crossed the thick grass growing around the house and tried a door leading inside from a large brick patio. The door was unlocked and swung in quietly on ornate, golden hinges.

His bare feet making almost no sound, the shapeshifter slipped into the house. He was not surprised no alarm had sounded, or that his arrival had gone unnoticed. No human would dare intrude in this particular home.

Inside the home, marble and gold abounded. To the shapeshifter, who had been born in the early dawn of pre-history, the decor was as foreign as possible. Only his stolen memories, from the hundreds of hearts he had consumed in this modern era, enabled him to identify the theme. Ancient Greece, during the height of its empire. Or at least someone’s grand vision of what it might have looked like.

Shields and statues and ornate carvings in marble, filigreed frames. It was gaudy and decadent and perhaps a little bizarre.

The shapeshifter slipped past all the decorations displayed in the home as though it were a museum or palace, and went carefully up the stairs to the second floor. There he crept along to the master bedroom and its double doors.

The shapeshifter carefully opened a gold-handled door and entered the large room beyond. Almost immediately, his target sat up in bed.

The woman was in her prime, perhaps thirty years old, with pale skin, taut muscles and thick black hair that hung down over her shoulders and covered her chest. Fierce brown eyes regarded the intruder, standing naked in her doorway.

The woman threw back her covers and sprang from her bed, her size sixteen feet thumping loudly on the floor. At her full height of seven feet, her fists balled and every muscle on her body tensed for a fight, she was an imposing figure dressed in bright pink silk pajamas.

“You picked the wrong house, creep!” the woman called Samazon declared.

The shapeshifter smiled, his mouth parting and stretching out of shape. In fact, his whole head stretched. He was changing form again—assuming his natural giant form.

Samazon was surprised at the quick change. From a meek-looking, scrawny man with brown hair to a nine foot tall brute with coppery-red hair and bulging muscles. And six fingers on each hand.

The giant Tezcahtlip continued to smile, now revealing a double row of teeth in his huge mouth. He felt his mouth watering at the thought of soon eating the faux Amazon’s heart, and stealing all the power it surely held.

Tezcahtlip stepped forward, his six-toed feet thumping loudly on the ornate marble floor.

Samazon was faster than the giant had expected. Much faster. She sprang from the floor and leapt across the room in a single bound. Her heel smashed into the giant’s grinning face, shattering teeth and flattening his nose.

Tezcahtlip grabbed the giant-sized woman as she rebounded, gripping her by one ankle. He swung her around in an arc and threw her into the ceiling. Plaster exploded from the impact.

Samazon ignored the impact, however. She fell lightly to her feet and sprinted back at the giant again, fists balled tightly.

Tezcahtlip, the damage to his face already repaired by his shapeshifting powers, waited until the last minute, then raised a hand. He caught the left hook from Samazon. The impact was surprisingly strong.

Samazon swung with her right fist, but again, the giant caught her blow.

The two titans struggled against each other, muscles straining. Tezcahtlip was surprised at the strength of the woman. But then, he had come here to steal that strength.

Samazon stomped down with one foot, shattering the giant’s instep. She then quickly pivoted her hips and pulled, lifting the surprised giant off his feet. He felt himself flipped over then the hard marble floor slammed into his back. The surprise of the swift move caused him to release his grip on Samazon’s fists.

The large woman was on the giant in an instant, her knees crushing into his hips and her hands wrapped around his neck. Long nails broke his skin and his blood began to trickle out.

“You picked the wrong house to break into!” Samazon declared, her hair hanging down, blocking part of her face.

Had he been just the giant he was born as, Tezcahtlip might have succumbed to the woman’s impressive strength. But eating hearts and stealing the very lifeforce of prey gave him a strength beyond that of any giant.

Tezcahtlip grabbed the woman by her upper arms and pushed her to the side, rolling over and slamming her to the floor so that now he was on top.

He was impressed the raven-haired giantess maintained her grip on his throat. Very impressed. Perhaps there was more to this human than he had originally thought.

Samazon kicked with her legs, then wrapped them painfully around the giant’s sides. He felt his ribs break under the terrific force. Blood was flowing heavily from his neck now, Samazon’s fingertips firmly imbedded in his flesh.

It was time to end this fight. Tezcahtlip smashed his head down, driving his forehead into Samazon’s. The crack of bone on bone echoed in the large bedroom and the giantess lost consciousness.

***

His name was Chadwick Phillips and he was bored out of his mind. He’d been bored for many years now. Bored of the same lush, green, manicured lawns. Bored with the same nearly-tasteless food. Bored with life.

The retired Army Colonel sat in his wheelchair in the common room of the nursing home, staring out the same window he’d been staring out for ten years. Before then he’d been in his own apartment, going about his daily life as a widower. Bored. Then Chadwick had his first stroke. It left him partially paralyzed and in need of constant care.

The Army had moved him to a private facility. A facility with high security and the best care money could buy. A facility reserved for men like Chadwick that had made serving their country a career. Men who knew some of America’s greatest secrets.

And like Chadwick, many of those men didn’t have any family or friends to come see them anymore.

Chadwick’s stare out the window was interrupted by the quiet footfalls of an approaching nurse. “Colonel Phillips?” the nurse asked softly. “You have a visitor.”

Chadwick blinked several times at the sentence. A visitor? No one visited the men here. They were like prisoners. Forgotten prisoners. He tapped the armrest control for his wheelchair and pivoted the electric chair around on quiet motors.

“A visitor?”

“Yes, sir,” the pretty nurse said, smiling warmly. As prisons went, the retirement home was at least a friendly one.

Chadwick grunted as the nurse motioned for him to precede her out of the room. He steered his wheelchair along, traveling from the brightly lit common room to a carpeted hallway. The nurse walked beside him then opened the door to a private meeting room.

Chadwick entered the room, alone, the nurse waiting outside.

The small room, decorated with art, flowers on tables and ornate furniture was occupied by two people. A short, big chested, blonde nurse and a large, muscled man in tan pants and dark blue polo shirt.

“Mark!” Chadwick exclaimed as he rolled into the room, genuinely surprised.

Colonel Mark Kenslir stood from the couch he had been sitting on with the pretty nurse and extended a hand. “Good to see you, Chad.”

Chadwick shook the hand, stunned. He knew Mark Kenslir never aged, but it was still so strange to see him after all these years. He looked the same as the day they’d first met, in 1968. Which was also the same as he’d looked when Phillips had retired in 1989.

Chadwick maneuvered his chair around to the other side of the coffee table in front of Mark’s couch. He noticed there was a folder on the table.

“What brings you back here to Florida?” Chadwick asked. He noticed that the pretty nurse made a puzzled expression when he said it. “And who’s your little friend?”

Mark sat back down on the couch. “This is Special Agent Pam Keegan, FBI.”

“The FBI has nurses?”

“No. But I thought it would look more plausible to your fellow retirees if I wheeled you out of here with a nurse.”

“Where am I going?” Chadwick asked, surprised. He kept looking down at the folder.

Mark reached across the table and opened the folder. It was filled with photographs. The first was of a corpse, a woman in her forties, laying on beige carpet, with a large hole in her chest, just below her heart.

“I’m recalling you to active duty,” Mark said.

Chadwick smiled, looking up from the photo. “You need some wheelchair ramps tested? You have noticed I can’t even walk anymore, right?”

Mark fanned the photos from the folder out on the table. Most were of similar victims, their chests torn open. Some were of larger men. Two of them—one with black hair, one with red. They had six fingers on their hands, six toes on their feet.

“We have a situation that I believe your electrokinesis would be perfect for.”

“Electrokinesis?” Pam Keegan asked as Chadwick examined the photos of the dead giants.

Chadwick held up one hand as he held the photo of a giant in the other. He held his forefinger and thumb about an inch apart. A blue spark of electricity leapt between the shaking fingers.

“That’s about all I can do anymore, Mark. What’s with these giants?”

“Notice the six fingers?” Mark asked. “They’re antediluvian.”

Chadwick had noticed. He’d seen skeletons like that in briefings years ago. But no six-fingered giant had walked the earth in thousands of years. Or so the Army had thought.

“Were they in blocks of ice or something?”

“Tombs,” Mark said. “One submerged off the coast of Cuba, the other buried not far from the Grand Canyon.”

“Someone wake them up, and they started misbehaving??” Chadwick put the photos down. If Mark Kenslir had killed the giants, why was he even here? And what could it possibly have to do with him?

“They’ve murdered a lot of innocent people,” Kenslir said. “ And they have an annoying habit of coming back from the dead.”

Chadwick leaned back in his wheelchair. Even if he was twenty years younger, he didn’t see why Mark would need him. He’d seen his former squad mate kill things much bigger and much deadlier.

“You’re going to have to just spit it out,” Chadwick said. “What do want from me?”

Mark Kenslir smiled—something Pam Keegan hadn’t seen him do in the month she’d known the Colonel. “I want you to get out of that chair and help me track down and kill the giant that’s still out there.”

A cold chill went down Chadwick’s spine. He wasn’t afraid of the idea of going into the field again. He was afraid of the answer to the question he was about to ask.

“You did it?”

Mark shook his head affirmatively. “Five years ago.”

Keegan didn’t like being left out of the conversation. “Did what?”

CHAPTER
FOUR

The giant Tezcahtlip, once more in his dragon form, was flying low, over the ocean, headed north. Dawn was still a half hour away, the sun hidden behind the Rocky Mountains. To his right, the California coast was speckled with the lights from towns and moving automobiles. To his left and only fifty feet below him, the ocean was vast and dark. Ahead, the dragon could see the cluster of gathered lights packed much tighter. He was nearing his goal, San Francisco.

Tezcahtlip dipped lower, dropping to just thirty feet above the water. His huge, leathery dragon wings nearly brushed the surface of the water as he flew. The air began to thicken as he entered San Francisco Bay—a thick fog was hanging over the water.

Concealed by the fog, Tezcahtlip flew on, until he was just a few hundred feet short of his destination. Then he tucked his wings in close to his body and nosed down into the water.

Once he was below the surface of the cold sea water, the shapeshifter shed his dragon form, turning into something more suited for swimming.

***

Brad Burton hated this particular detail. It was boring and uneventful. The other guards thought he was crazy, but Burton would much rather be inside tonight, instead of patrolling the docks on foot.

The bay was quiet at this time of morning. The thick fog muffled the sounds of nearby San Francisco, and wrapped Burton in its cold embrace as he walked along the dock, with nothing to see.

Suddenly, Burton stiffened. His body froze in mid-step, as though he were instantly paralyzed. He felt a sense of detachment at first, then imprisonment. He couldn’t even move his eyes. Then his body began to move on its own.

Burton was shocked, then horrified, as his body turned and walked back down the dock, away from the island. When he reached the end of the dock, Burton’s body didn’t stop. It walked off the end of the concrete structure—right into the cold San Franciso Bay waters.

Burton felt panic as the seawater surrounded him, soaking his uniform and making it heavier. He still had no control over himself. As he sank, he realized that his body was at least not breathing anymore.

Then Burton saw something in the dark water. Something moving toward him. Something large.

It was a creature. More specifically, a crocodile. The largest Burton had ever seen. And its jaws were wide open.

The massive crocodile clamped down on Brad Burton’s sinking body, teeth smashing his bones as the jaws squeezed shut with terrific force. Burton felt intense pain from the bite. Then he finally lost consciousness.

***

Tezcahtlip pulled himself, in his giant form, from the cold water of the bay. Standing on the dock in his bare feet, he brushed water from his hairy skin. Then he began to shrink. He assumed the form of the guard he had just consumed in the water.

Tezcahtlip made gestures in the air with his hands. Bright blue energy swirled around the shapeshifter’s fingertips. The energy floated slowly out and around him, circling him and expanding. Then it settled onto his body and solidified, forming a duplicate of the guard’s uniform.

Tezcahtlip smiled, pleased with the spell he had just used. It was a minor spell the Las Vegas Sorceress Femagick had known, but it would serve Tezcahtlip well. After all, he couldn’t walk around Alcatraz naked.

***

In the 1970s, the world had been suddenly made aware that people with special abilities existed. One of them had donned a costume and proclaimed himself a super-hero, the Sentinel of Liberty. He could fly, he seemed impervious to injury and he possessed great strength.

In less than one year, dozens of other parahumans had come forward, revealing their own special abilities to the public. Some tried their own hands at crime fighting. Most turned to crime.

The United States Government had known about parahumans and their abilities for many years. They had relied on parahumans as spies and as soldiers. Research had been conducted on the paranormal since the 1800s. The government was not blinded by adoration and astonishment. It was prepared.

Parahumans who committed crimes were swiftly apprehended and imprisoned. But their numbers, and their abilities, soon called for a specialized institution to hold them.

The solution was found in California. At a place called Alcatraz.

Having served as a prison until 1963, the island offered an isolated location at which parahumans could be properly detained without the public prying into the methods used to control and subdue their special abilities.

In 1972, the facility re-opened as the United States’ maximum security detention center for paracriminals, many of whom found themselves locked away indefinitely.

Tezcahtlip, the shapeshifting giant from the dawn of history, had learned all this after consuming the heart of the sorceress Femagick. The black-haired magician had for years captured paracriminals on behalf of the United States, and seen to their safe transport to Alcatraz. There, prisoners were restrained and kept securely away from the rest of the world.

And every morning, after breakfast, those prisoners were allowed outside, to exercise.

“Isn’t your shift over?” a guard asked Tezcahtlip as he stood watching the prisoners file out into Alcatraz’s exercise yard. The shapeshifter still wore the form of the Guard from the docks.

Tezcahtlip turned to the guard and his eyes flashed with yellow energy.

The guard froze in place, his mouth open as if to speak again. His skin turned gray, a wave of discoloration radiating out from his eyes, over his body, very quickly. Beneath the guard’s polyester uniform, his skin turned gray then hardened, quickly turning to stone. In only seconds, he had been petrified.

Tezcahtlip walked away from the stone guard, toward the main body of the prisoners. Heavily sedated, given a drug to suppress both their abilities and most of their free will, they were a docile crowd of two-legged sheep.

And Tezcahtlip was going to consume them all.