Occult Assassin 4: Soul Jacker (6 page)

Samia and Pierre followed the team in their unmarked Peugeot. The team would go in first and take the lead in the operation, but Samia didn’t intend to sit this one out on the sidelines. She was itching for action. As someone who’d grown up in the banlieues, she knew all too well the poverty and hopelessness fueling extremist ideology. Any crime committed by someone in the banlieues would be inevitably magnified through a lens of race and religion, reaffirming stereotypes and increasing harassment of the locals by law enforcement.
These attacks by fanatics were putting her people in a terrible light once again.
Rakan had to be stopped, and she wanted to be there when it happened.

Fat raindrops pelted their windshield, and sharp gusts of wind stirred the awnings of the stores they passed. Beyond the shops, the projects loomed, jagged and towering. As she tailed the RAID van, she noticed Pierre looking at her.

“Something on your mind?” she asked.

“I was about to ask you the same.”

She held his gaze and he said, “What do you think we’re walking into here?’

“I don’t know. I don’t even understand what happened the other day.”
 

For a second, the image of Mrs. Henni slashed through her mind, the woman’s mad face distorted, inhuman. Radicalism bubbled and simmered in these neighborhoods, but what could trigger such lethal ferocity, especially from a mother and directed toward her son? The memory made her shudder and she fought back the terrible vision of Mrs. Henni dragging her own flesh and blood to his doom.

Reality reeled her out of her thoughts as the RAID van screeched to a halt in front of the looming tenement. The back door burst open and a swarm of armed men emerged from the van into the misty night.
 

Samia slowed her vehicle and pulled up to the curb. Clouds of fog swallowed up the beams of her car. As she got out of the Peugeot, the raw April wind pierced her jacket and she clenched her jaw, fingers tight around the steel grip of her service revolver. The building felt abandoned, further heightening her unease. Many of the residents didn’t hold down steady jobs, and the apartments normally teemed with life and activity. There should be gangs of teens lurking near the entrance, locals shuffling down the sidewalks, lights flickering in windows. But the structure appeared as deserted as a moonscape. An eerie, unnatural silence reigned, almost as if aliens had abducted everyone in the vicinity. Something was wrong. And judging from the nervous expressions on the team members’ faces, they sensed it too.
 

“They knew we were coming,” Samia said to her partner. She wasn’t fatalistic, but the certainty had been building all day. Now that they were finally here, her worst fears seemed to be coming true. The tower loomed, oppressive and intimidating. Something waited within its thick walls, something that was all too aware of the twelve RAID team members and two homicide detectives making their way through its arched main entrance.
 

Deep down, Samia sensed they were walking into a trap.
 

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

A SCREAM WOKE Yasmine in the middle of the night. For a disorientated moment she drifted, neither asleep nor awake, still wondering if the cry had been an echo of a dream. Then a second bloodcurdling cry cut through the night, and she jerked upright. Eyes wide open now, she rolled out of bed. This wasn’t the first time high-pitched shouts had awoken her in the last month. It was turning into a semi-regular occurrence. She eyed the time on her phone; it was three-thirty in the morning. The terrified screams as well as the freezing cold inside her subsidized housing unit made her shake all over. Yasmine felt like she was seventeen going on ninety. Life in the banlieues had forced her to grow up quickly.
 

She wrapped a blanket around her body as she opened the bedroom window. Wind lashed her face with arctic force and her teeth chattered. Who needed coffee when one had a French spring? Many of the older Algerians complained incessantly about the damp weather in their adopted country and for once, she found herself on the same page.
 

Clutching the blanket tighter, she stuck her head out of the window, just in time for the terrified scream to reverberate through the night one last time. The way it suddenly cut off told her the man’s suffering had come to an end. The Flanders Tower had claimed its latest victim.
 

She craned her neck toward the dim lights glittering on the top floor of the thirty-story tenement. The cries always came from the top floor and always in the middle of night. She shuddered at the thought of what might be happening up there.
 

She waited another minute before she closed the window and jumped back into the bed. She pulled the covers tight, but her body wouldn’t stop shaking. Something evil had taken up residence in her building.
 

An evil that was growing stronger.
 

Despite the nightmarish visions her imagination conjured in the dark of her bedroom, Yasmine managed to nod off. By the time her eyes fluttered open again, it was seven-fifteen and time to get ready for work. She showered and got dressed. She’d dropped out of high school a year earlier so she could work at a flower shop fifteen minutes down the street. Her teachers had protested her decision, believing she was throwing away her whole future. They were right, but someone needed to make money to take care of her grandmother. Her parents had been out of the picture for years, and her grandmother had done the best she could to raise her under not so ideal conditions.
 

Yasmine peeked into the adjoining bedroom where her ailing granny wasted away. She walked up to the bed and stifled her revulsion. The air was heavy with sickness and foul perspiration. Nevertheless, she kneeled beside her grandmother and planted a kiss on her cheek. The old woman smiled weakly at her. Yasmine gently stroked her grandmother’s worn face until she fell asleep. Granny spent much of the day in bed, and that was fine with Yasmine. The poor woman had worked like a dog for most of her life; it was time for her to rest. She deserved some peace.

Yasmine slipped out of the bedroom and left the apartment. Her unit was located on the ninth floor, and her steps reverberated in the desolate stairwell as she descended. Only a few weeks earlier the building had bustled with life. The elderly would play cards in the downstairs lobby over cups of hot tea, while teenagers would roam the passageways of the various floors, shouting and hollering and doing their best to make their presence known. She missed the energy that used to course through the building. Rakan had turned the tenement, which housed over eight hundred units, into a ghost town. The punks still haunted the floors, but now they did so in unnatural silence. The young men’s faces were masklike whenever they ran into her, their blank gazes following her with hostile intent. The wild abandon of youth had been replaced with a robotic, inhuman creepiness. Thinking about these changes made her clutch the Fatima necklace her grandmother had given her. She had no idea if it could actually ward off evil forces, but she felt safer wearing it than not.

Shaking off her disturbing thoughts, she reached the lobby without incident and walked briskly away from the tenement, which cast a long shadow in the grey morning light. Another rainy day awaited her. How she wished it was already summer. Even the weirdness unfolding in her building would seem more palatable if the sun could chase away the thick, grey clouds. She wished she could leave the tenement for good, but where could she and her grandmother go? The woman was sick, maybe even dying, and where else would they find a government subsidized dwelling? They were trapped in this neighborhood, trapped in that infernal building.

She arrived at the flower shop and welcomed the chance to throw herself into her work. Anything to get her mind off her troubles. The job could be monotonous, but the beautiful flowers distracted her and she tried to have fun with her arrangements. It turned out to be a busy day, and time passed quickly. Around five o’clock Yasmine’s mood darkened. All too soon she’d have to set foot in her building again. Her small steps lacked energy as she returned to the tenement. Fog clung to the deserted structure, and the few people she spotted in the mist walked past her in silence, features locked. There was something about the intensity of their quiet looks that wasn’t quite normal. Somehow she’d have to find a way for her and her granny to move out of this neighborhood before they became like everyone else.
 

With a heavy heart she entered her building and tried to avoid a run-in with a gang of teens. She was about to sidle past them when one boy spoke up. Hearing a human voice after the days of silent stares silence made her flinch.
 

“Your time has come, Yasmine.”
 

The gangbanger held up a vial with a clear liquid and a strange symbol engraved on its surface.

“Let us lift the veil, Yasmine.”

The chilling words galvanized her into action. She burst into motion, turning on her heels and running as fast as her legs could carry her the other way. She reached a second staircase, made sure she was alone, and tore up those nine flights of stairs as if she was being chased by the devil himself. Breathing heavily, face masked with sweat, she stumbled toward her unit…and paused. To her horror, the door to her apartment was open. Nerves frayed, her mouth went dry as she gingerly stepped into her dwelling, driven by one thought.
 

Granny.

She considered all the missing elderly people and cold terror gripped her. The dark apartment amplified her steps. Once inside her granny’s bedroom, her worst fears became reality. The rumpled, sweat-stained bed was empty. Her grandmother was gone.

Sounds behind her
made her whirl, and she came face to face with the punks from the lobby. They crowded the doorframe. No further words were necessary. She knew why they were here.
 

Your time has come, Yasmine.

 
There would be no escape. No one ever did. As these thoughts tumbled through her mind, another noise broke the silence. This time it wasn’t a terrified scream, thank God. Instead sirens filled the night.

The police.

But would they arrive on time?

Two men grabbed her by the arms. She fought them with all her might, but her resistance ceased the moment a fist connected with her face. Her head snapped back, and the coppery flavor of blood filled her mouth. What did they want from her?

A moment later she received her answer. One of he punks leaned closer, glass vial in his hand. “Open your mouth.”
 

She tightened her lips, teeth clenching down hard. If she swallowed the substance in the vial, she too would become like the others. A shadow of her former self. One of Rakan’s soulless drones.

The leader of the group twisted her right index finger until she heard the bone break. Her lips parted with pain, and a tasteless liquid hit her tongue. A second punk pressed a flask of water against her lips, which made it impossible to not swallow the drug. She grew limp in her attackers’ arms, her will to resist swept away as the unholy concoction burned its way down her throat—and into her soul.
 

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

THE RAID TEAM charged up the tenement’s two main staircases in a single file. Samia and Pierre followed, weapons ready, eyes alert. Glass crunched under her shoes, and she realized the vials of the mysterious new drug littered the ground.
 

The inside of the boxy tenement building was hollowed out and contained a large atrium that spanned the height of the construction. Thirty stories worth of apartment units grew before her in each direction. It felt like she was standing in the courtyard of a prison, she thought. Balconies decked out with satellite dishes ringed the floors—a lifeline to Arabic programming. The pervasive graffiti only increased her growing feeling of dread. Making matters even worse was the tenement’s sense of spooky desolation. The heavy police presence would motivate many residents to stay in their units, but curiosity should’ve gotten the best of at least some of them. There had to be at least eight hundred apartments in a building this size. So where was everyone?

Voices of the ascending team members crackled over her earpiece, amplified by the building’s unnerving silence. She picked up the mounting tension in their exchanges; they all sensed the growing threat. Had Rakan and his crew taken up position on the top floors? Were they perhaps keeping hostages?

She craned her neck toward the upper floors. Shadowy figures flitted through the thickening layer of condensation. Was she looking at the RAID team or the enemy? The mist was now descending to the atrium at an accelerated pace, swallowing one floor after another, erasing the human silhouettes from view.
 

A strange banging sound suddenly drew her attention. The tip of a machete poked from a roiling cloud of fog about ten stories above the atrium. The man wielding the weapon kept rhythmically tapping the tip of the blade against the balcony’s metal railing.
 

Again and again.
 

Mist devoured the blade, but the unnerving sound continued unabated. It echoed and grew in volume. Phantom figures in the fog were joining the unholy chorus. At least ten knifes and machetes were striking railing and walls now like the drumbeats of an approaching enemy tribe. Any moment now the advancing RAID team would make contact with the machete-wielding locals. Knifes seemed no match for bullets, but these hooded gangbangers had the home turf advantage—not to mention the concealing power of the almost supernatural fog.

Pierre was clearly struggling to keep his growing panic at bay as the eerie fog kept expanding. Samia had never seen anything quite like the incoming cloud. It was almost as if the mist was assisting the enemy. Her heart hammered in her chest, but the firearm somehow remained steady in her hands.