This is a crossover with Casca the Eternal Mercenary from the series of books written by the late Barry Sadler in the 70s and 80s. Mr. Saddler was a Green Beret in Vietnam and wrote and sung the popular "Ballad of the Green Berets" song. Enough of Casca's origin and some of his adventures are mentioned in the story for you to get an idea of his background, but you can find more info at pjfarmer dot com in the Wold Newton Chronology Central section.

All characters are the intellectual property of their respective creators, film companies, etc.; this story may not be sold or distributed on a profit-making basis. I welcome free distribution of the story, but please let me know if you are going to do it.

Prologue

Some time ago in China I chanced to be passing a graveyard and saw the body of a young girl being buried by a grieving and prosperous family. For some reason the memory has lingered in my mind. These days I look back and wonder if she had been some ordinary girl or if she had been the Chosen.

The Eternally Cursed

Excerpts from the unpublished "Chronicles of Casca" memoir

I was getting my virtual butt kicked in the demo version of online Blackhawk Down by the -oZi- squad when I got the call. "Damm those guys are good," I muttered as I took off my headset and picked up the phone. When I put it down five minutes later I had a job.

I hadn't accepted many missions since the bloodbath in Africa, but my go-between's tale of a blood feud going back to the Boxer Rebellion had me intrigued. Blood vengeance is an old companion of mine and I was a stage where I'm feeling nostalgic about the 1900 rebellion. You see, I had been there.

Six weeks later I was in a van with my night vision binoculars trained on a darkened house in Sunnydale, California. My eight man team and I had swept the city for a few weeks until we had finally spotted the target crossing a street and going down an alley. It looked like he had been carrying a body. By the time all of us had converged on the target, he had entered a house.

We set up a perimeter around the house and swept it with military heartbeat sensors. This was my first time using the new technology in the field and my principal had payed a pretty penny for us to obtain them on the black market, but we had tested them extensively and they worked well within the specified parameters. There were no heartbeats detected within the house. That was logical given that our target was a vampire and didn't have a beating heart.

We camped on the house on thirty minutes as I weighed the options. No heartbeats meant no living persons in the house. We didn't have to worry about civilian casualties. The main worry was that there might be more vamps in the house. It was far better to corner the target in the house where his mobility was limited, so I gave the "engage, engage" command over my throat mike.

We left a guard at the front and back of the house and entered the residence with two teams. I was in the front breach team and we battered the door down with the ram and swept each room until we met the other team. He wasn't in any of the rooms, so that meant he had to be in the attic or basement. I left a man to cover the front and rear doors and dispatched a two man team to search the attic. The attic was clear, so five of us went down to the basement.

We were hit just as the point man reached the bottom of the stairs. The first two men were hurled into the air before we knew what was happening. I tried to get a shot in using my taser as the target came at me with blinding speed, but he knocked it out of my hand and threw me halfway across the basement.

The fourth man did connect with his taser, but the target was still able to grab the man's arm and break it. The vampire was kneecapping the fifth man when I put a tranc dart into him. The point man recovered and put another dart on target and the vampire finally went down.

We secured the target with cuffs on wrists and ankles, worked on the wounded, and took them out to the vans. I was policing up evidence in the basement when I heard a couple of muted thumps sound from the upstairs. I sent one of the two men guarding the target up the stairs to check on the disturbance as I tried to find out what was going on using the comm.

"Status report. What's the noise."

The back door sentry hissed back, "We have multiple hostiles in the house. At least two men down." I heard the thud of a knife hitting home in a body and didn't hear anything else.

"We're about to get visitors," I said to the man in the basement with me as I pulled out my silenced 9mm beretta. "I'll take the first wave coming down the stairs and you take the second while I reload."

We didn't have long to wait. Within seconds a black robed figure was coming down the stairs with a knife in his hands. I gave him and the two that followed double taps to the head. It didn't look like the losses were slowing down this mob, so I switched to single head shots. Still I popped my 15 rounds within a minute.

"Reloading." I called to my partner and dug into a pocket for another clip. Un-noticed the vampire had woken up and used his legs to sweep my partner off his feet. I reloaded and shot two of the black robes before the gun was knocked from my hand by a third. Then I blocked a strike and grabbed my knife and punched it into his ribcage, but another one plunged his pigsticker into me from behind. Painfully I twisted around and buried my gerber in his chest. There was something odd about his eyes. Then I got mobbed and felt several more knife impacts and then blackness.

I woke up and it was still black. I felt bodies above and below me and dirt dribbled into my mouth when I tried to take a breath. I realized that the only oxygen I had was what was in my lungs when I had taken the knife wounds before. I think one of my lungs had been punctured then. I frantically tried to push my way out of the grave, but there was too much weight above and I didn't have enough air. Blackness again.

The next time I opened my eyes, I could see dirt, but I was able to breathe out my nose. Someone had lain me face down on the basement floor next to the bodies of my men. I heard a man and a woman talking.

"No bite marks," the man said. "At least I didn't sire them."

"But why did you kill them and what's the deal with the big pile of bloody black robes and weapons at the bottom of the hole?" said the woman. She sounded young.

"I don't remember although I'm getting flashes of killing most of my sires. And knives aren't my style. Wait a second. One of them is alive. I can hear his breathing." I felt hands turning me over and then I was looking into the target's face. I was still too weak to fight, so I prepared for the blackness again.