Warlock of Omaha

By Hemaccabe

Chapter 6: In the Air Tonight

I finished getting ready. Then I went and took a shower and called Miranda. She joined me for a nap. Bullfighters say it clears the vision. I say it helps me fall asleep.

I woke up at one and called Jake, "Get ready, I'll be there in a few minutes."

Miranda helped me get dressed. I could do it all myself but getting dressed in a suit of armor is still a lot easier with help.

I went and got the Infiniti and drove over to the Jake's hotel.

Jake was waiting outside next to the minivan, wearing a similar outfit to the one he had before, grey hoodie, black jeans, aluminum bat.

I got out and went to the minivan. I had prepared a pot of mud and a spackling trowel. With a bit of artistry, the license plates became difficult to read, but not completely obscured. Enough mud was on the bumpers to make it look like it had happened by driving on a wet dirt road, not by hand.

I said, "You'll drive the minivan. Follow me. There's a service station across from the warehouse. I'll signal left to make sure you know it's the place. I want you to go in there, park, nose out, in the spot closest to the warehouse. If you're having trouble backing in, just pick the next best spot. Do it quick. I'll be coming back around to get you and I don't want to come to a complete stop. Do you understand?"

"Yeah, does this mean we're going in now?" He replied, eager.

"Not sure yet. Depends what I see down there. This may just be a dry run." I lied blithely.

"Uh, okay." He answered looking confused.

"Saddle up. We have a schedule to keep." I answered trying to sound like I knew what I was doing.

I got back into the Infiniti and pulled out. Jake followed me in the minivan. Omaha's normally tame traffic was practically comatose this late on a weekday night, so we made good time. I had a plan which I was reviewing in my head over and over as we drove. The first step was we needed to position the escape vehicle.

The service station across from the warehouse was closed and as I signaled, Jake pulled in and began to park. I drove a block up, did an illegal U-turn and came back around. I had meant to stop, but Jake had done well and managed to jump in my passenger seat while I was still moving.

I drove to the same landing in Council Bluffs we had used before, arriving a few minutes before two.

Jim was already there, his boat in the water. We boarded and began to move upriver.

To Jim I said, "Once we get off the boat, turn around and go home. Get in a good spot with your shotgun and keep 911 on speed dial."

Jim nodded, his face hard and determined.

I turned and looked at Jake, "I want you to follow me. Stay close. Your job is to keep them off my back. If you see something and you think you should tell me, speak low but clear on the earphone. Don't be cryptic. Can you do that?"

Jake nodded, I think trying to look like Jim, but you could see the scared.

Then Jake asked, "Are we going to get her out?"

I answered honestly, "There are a lot of possible outcomes, my guess is that there's better than a fifty percent chance we both die or worse."

"Those aren't good odds." Jake said.

"It's the best I could do on short notice. You're always welcome to fire me." I answered.

He nodded again.

When we were well away, I looked at Jake and said, "Pee in the river." As I got up to the side and started working my fly, harder than it sounds in armor.

"Uh why?" Jake asked.

I answered. "When you get scared, the first thing that happens is that you'll want to pee. If you do it now, it'll be easier. The less time you're thinking about how bad you need to pee and the more you're thinking about what you should be, the better."

He nodded in matter of fact agreement and pee'd.

As we got to the spot I wanted, I brought out my rifle, which I think surprised Jim and Jake. I started to give Jim specific directions and eventually I saw the big octopus/jellyfish rise up and start moving toward us. When it got close, I put the first shot into the center of it's life.

Shooting through water, especially a flowing, eddying river current is problematic. But I was shooting a powerful round at point blank range. I hit just off center and that was it for Octopussy. I put two more rounds into it for good measure and could really see the life drain out of it. Remember my rifle is suppressed, most of the noise it will make is about fifty yards downrange, as the bullet crosses the sound barrier, and I had fired at point blank range into water, so it made very little noise.

I swapped magazines and had Jim bring us a bit closer to shore. I pulled out two gummy chews and gave one to Jake.

"Eat this and follow me." I said.

Jake and I ate and then I jumped twenty yards from boat to landing. Jake was right behind me. Flying magic is tricky and magic expensive. But a single big bounce, not so hard. I barely kept my feet, Jake looked like he could have done it without the gummy. Jerk.

I didn't look, but I knew Jim was turning out to river to turn around.

I had a plan. The Dark Glass guys had been surveilling for a while and had kept a guy hidden in the brush across the river with powerful scopes to watch what the water side defenses looked like. I had a feeling about these Fomor. They would think water was their ally. They'd think anyone who knew anything would come at them from the land side rather than challenge them on water. Anyone who didn't know, should have been eaten by Octopussy. By rights, it should have been able to swim up, undetected, then kill and eat everyone on the boat. My magic sight is rare, as I understand it, even in the magic community. That meant that if one could bypass the critter, the Fomor's back was almost undefended. Almost.

The Missouri river runs generally south and east. It comprises the eastern border of Nebraska and Omaha sits hard on that east border at the confluence of the Missouri and Platt rivers. However, rivers eddy and curve along their length and at this point the Missouri was flowing east to west. That meant the warehouse's south side faced the river. There was a deserted landing that would normally be used to transfer cargo from the warehouse to a barge.

I'd love to say I did this next thing on purpose. I'm not some sort of "Mission Impossible" guy. I had tried to set it up this way though, and the timing had worked out perfect, probably impressing Jake.

A Fomor guard walked around the building. Except he wasn't a Fomor. He was a Man in Black. The briefings at the Bright Future Society had said the Fomor grunts dressed like Steve Jobs clones. The guy who came around the building was wearing a sixties-era black suit. I knew that every couple hours, one guard would do a sweep around the building and come from the east side to south, where we and the docks were. The Fomor was clearly surprised. I put a bullet in his face.

I swear I saw a hole in his face just right of his nose, below his left eye. Then the back of his head vaporized, and the front blew apart in chunks. The headless body armed with it's small machine gun dropped to the ground very defunct.

Once again, the bullet had been nearly silent, stopped from passing supersonic by my target's head.

Jake moved as if to grab the gun, I put my arm across him. "Leave it, you don't know what these slimy bastards have done to it. Don't touch anything in this place you don't have to"

I was a little shaken and more than a little scared. I had tried to prep and plan for this evening as much as I could. Somehow, a detail as basic as how the grunts were dressed had been missed. Further, these weren't just Fomor, they were the stuff of my personal nightmares.

On the other hand, I wasn't the couple in Vegas. Even if I died right now, I'd taken one of the bastards with me. Somehow, that really changed how I felt. I wasn't so much scared, but angry. I still had to pee though.

I walked up to the dockside door of the old industrial river-side warehouse, a simple security door. I used my axe to pull it open. They hadn't even bothered to lock it. I entered at the southwest corner of the building.

I had a lot of scans of this place. It's possible they had some booby traps, but I didn't think so. This was a quick and dirty base. In and out. Booby traps take time, logistics and resources, which I knew well from building my place. If this became a permanent base, if they invested in it, maybe then, but nothing was likely right now. But my guard was up as I entered the enemy's lair.

The building's interior layout was essentially an open middle with a central blockhouse/office in the middle. Catwalks running around the North, East and West side. Ground level on the same sides was semi-enclosed around the perimeter. The interior was lit by old florescent fixtures, gloomy, but workable. The place was run down and dirty. There were lots of footprints in the dusty floor. I immediately picked up a guy facing away from me straight in front of me and one on the second level almost directly to my right.

I shot the one in front of me in the back of the head. He did as well as his buddy. The second shot had been more than fifty yards. It wasn't the loudest crack, but it was definitely a gunshot. I turned and shot the one on the gangplank. He'd just started looking in the wrong spot for the shooter when I sent him to Fomor Valhalla. Three down. Three to go.

I had one edge. I'm sure the mothers of thousands of dead US soldiers were glad to have sacrificed their son's lives for some bullshit gun control laws, but it gave me an advantage now. Normally, a gun goes pop where it gets fired. If you hear a bang, you look where you heard the bang. But because my rifle was so well suppressed, when it went bang, the sound came from roughly fifty feet away. That meant the bad guys were looking for me in the wrong places. They were moving though.

I started moving forward. There was a stairway near where I shot the first guy in the northwest corner, a guy came down that stairway looking east, his bullet got him in the right side of his head.

I got to the middle of the west side of the building and set up at a support pillar I knew would be there. The last two bad guys were in the north east corner, one on each level, both locked and aiming hard at where they'd heard the shots, the north west corner.

I shot the one at ground level. His buddy above tried to look below, where the sound of the shot seemed to come from and was moving toward the stairs in the north east corner when he got it in the side of the head.

Six up. Six down. My guess was that Cassie was in the bunkhouse. If there were any traps and final defenses they'd be there.

I swapped mags again.

As we moved across the open space, we got very close to the bunk house, "We've almost done it!" I was thinking exultantly when a string of shots rang out.

In a split second, I realized the bullets had gone straight through where I appeared to be, having set up the illusion that I was standing a foot to my right. Jake, who had been following me just behind and to the right ate a bunch of them and went down to the floor instantly. With the speed of many hours of three gun practice I spotted the last guy and shot him in the face.

Son of a bitch!

I dropped my rifle and let the sling hold it while I grabbed Jake's hoodie by the shoulders and dragged him up to the wall of the blockhouse. They had seven guys. Made sense. The last guy was probably hidden, maybe with magic, maybe just in a good spot, waiting for someone to make a move toward the blockhouse. Very well thought out ambush.

I scanned the rest of the place as best I could, it was quiet. I looked at Jake, it was hard to tell with his baggy clothes how bad it was. We had come here to do a job, so I decided to complete it.

We were on the south side of the blockhouse, where the door was. I picked up my rifle and used my big boot to kick the door in.

I'm not sure what I expected, some Ctulhu-esque Fomorian horror? Bullets? Images of torture?

Instead there was an attractive woman standing in the middle of the room.

She had long, curly, light brown hair. Her face had a pleasant roundness, with red lips and cheeks. On those dreamy cheeks was a faint glow of rouge, not makeup, but what makeup wished it could emulate. She wore a crown of wildflowers and all she was wearing otherwise was light thin garlands of flowers. She was a healthy young woman, perhaps five six? She was not supermodel attractive. She would not have been selected by Victoria's Secret or Sports Illustrated. However, some women have a raw sexuality that is hard to define. She had it. In spades.

I looked at her and said, "Cassie I presume?"

"I'm so glad you came Jack. I was wondering how long you would take before you took my invitation." She said. Her voice sounded nice.

"Invitation? What are you talking about?" I answered, confused.

"I found Jake because I knew you wouldn't just come to call. I knew I had to intrigue you." She answered and the way she said "intrigue" made my hips want to twitch.

"So, nothing between the two of you was real, you just used him to get to me?" I asked.

"I'm sure Jake's feelings were real, they had to be, or you wouldn't have come." She answered then continued.

"Such a lovely little provincial town you've chosen to build your castle in…" She started to talk. It was hard to follow, I was paying way too much attention to the way her body shifted weight, exactly which strategic bit of anatomy might be exposed by swaying garlands, etc. Her stuff shouldn't work on me, but I could feel it moving through me, drawing me in. I couldn't stop staring. Most men are sex-insecure. They don't know where their next opportunity is going to come from, but I'd had two to four attractive women around the house ready to go on a moment's notice for years. On top of that, a fair amount of promiscuous action on the side. Further, I now knew my way around a seeming. I had defenses in place. Her stuff shouldn't be working. Then, as I fought it, I realized that it was working because I wanted it to work. When you're very sex insecure, as I had been before I'd figured out seemings, and even more so when I'd been a teenager, women can be so exotic and alluring. The life I'd been living would probably seem like I was living the dream. Except, now it took so much more to rev my engines. When you can't have ice cream, then it's all you want and every little taste you get seems like magic. When the ice cream is lying around all over the place, it's not special anymore. She was offering me the forbidden fruit, a promise of something so much more. Like offering the junky the chance to try their drug again for the first time. When I realized what she was doing I finally came back to myself in time to hear her say, "So you know you can't hurt me, or poor Jake will be heartbroken and all this for naught. He'll never forgive you, but if you come with me, I can promise you an exalted place at my side."

Should have sealed the deal, but I was back in charge of myself, so I snapped my rifle up, the muzzle had drifted down to the floor, and put a round through her face.

It's hard to explain what happened next. One second, I was talking to a living breathing woman who was very alive and hyper-present and the next it was a mannequin with a big whole in it's face. The thing was made from pale mud, mixed with leaves and twigs and hollow inside. I just knew it would be the stuff of future nightmares.

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