“Okay, we are going to do this by the numbers, or someone will get killed,” I said as I flipped open the cylinder of The Judge and thumbed in fresh rounds. The nickel-plated brass casing of Lehigh’s Maximum Expansion 45 long-colt rounds, shown reassuringly in the light. They weren’t exactly silver bullets, but 220 grains hollow points were designed to expand against the flesh, so they threw one hell of a haymaker. I just wished I had five more speed loaders instead of the two I carried.

From behind the Jeep, a shaking hand rose and slammed down on the hood with a loud thump, “I’m poisoned!”

The sound of her retching again turned my stomach. It wasn’t the first time she’d made that god-awful sound, but she was about to trigger a sympathetic vomit-fest if she kept that up. Even poor Cam was looking green, and that’s hard to do when you’re mostly covered in fur.

“I’ll hide the bodies, and move the truck,” Cam said, but I was fairly sure that was just an excuse to get away from Mogwai.

“You shouldn’t have licked the Chort blood off your claws, I mean do you want a tape-worm? Because that’s how you get a tapeworm,” I said, but most of the humor I’d normally find in this situation had dried up.

The scene was eerily quiet. It was nothing like I would have expected after all the ruckus we’d made. Instead of a horde of charging Chort, or a rampaging devil goat, the building was just a looming solemn structure with an old incandescent light above the door, flickering for effect.

“I looked cool, right?” Mog said as she wiped her mouth on her sleeve and pressed her face against the cool door of the Jeep.

I laughed a little and shrugged, “Cam looked cool, did you see that sick ground and pound he put on the Shaman?”

“That was after he stole my baby and nearly got her killed!” Mog complained and petted the driver’s side mirror.

I let Mogwai have a moment as I took in our situation, and I had to admit I was stumped.

Where the hell were all the bikers? I thought the Chort was defending this place, but didn’t they have someone inside? Shouldn’t they have been flooding out of the main doors and rushing us? Instead, it was quiet, and calm, just another Saturday Night in the subdivision.

Camden came back up to the Jeep faster than I expected.

“You all done?” I asked.

Cam shrugged his furry shoulders, “yeah. I took the van behind the building and put the bodies in the back.”

Running his hand across his heavy brow, Cam nodded, his fuzzy head making me think of a gorilla that had escaped a zoo. He had a face of a teenager who haunts comic bookstores more than a monster of the wood’s kind of fierce expression, so it was easy for me to forget that he is ridiculously strong, “there are a lot of bags back there, this place must be in use, I just don’t understand where all the guards are. Shouldn’t they be kicking our ass about now?”

“I think we scared them,’ Mogwai quipped, but no one bought that.

I took a drink from one of the water bottles Mog had brought along, and handed one to Cam,” well we still got a mission. It’s just a matter of how we handle it.”

Camden rolled his massive shoulders and popped his neck, “Well, they know we are here, so there is no point in trying to be sneaky. I say we just kick in the door and clear the whole place room by room. If we, do it right, we should have the element of surprise still, and we should be able to clear it quickly. Violence of action is our friend here.”

“Slow down there, Seal Team Six,” I said and sneered at him a little, “we don’t have fancy flash-bang grenades or machine guns.”

“I’ve got some pepper mace! Let’s make a mace bomb with some gas and old rags,” she grinned.

“Pepper spray is water-based. I don’t think that will work. Though, with enough time, I am sure I could MacGyver that shit and make something useful,” Cam offered.

“No, we do this the old fashion way. I’ll come in the front, you two cover the back doors, and let me know if anyone else comes in.”

“That’s insane! You can’t just go in there alone,” Camden argued.

“Cam,” I said and put a hand on his arm, “You showed a lot of courage fighting that Chort Shaman, but this isn’t a brute force kind of situation, and you two don’t have any guns. Now, I’m going to go in slow and steady and if anyone comes at me, they are getting their head blown off. But until they do, I want to work this like I used to work recovery ops with Marv, and for that, I need someone to grab them if they come out the back.”

“I can mount the laser site to my mace can,” Mogwai said, but she said it with a forlorn humor that didn’t expect laughs.

“It will be ok, y’all, I’ve run down bikers before, and other than some horns and funny-shaped legs they aren’t much different. Both yell a lot, bluster, smell funny, and think they’re tough. I’ve got this,” I said and both of them shot me a skeptical look.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

“No, really this time,” I laughed and moved toward the door.

**

“Point your gun where you’re looking,” I said to myself as I swept into the lobby and cleared behind the desk.

I’d learned basic room clearing during MOUT training. (Military Operations, in Urban Terrain) but it was a long time ago, and honestly, those early tactics were more like a familiarization course. They had helpful little mantras like, ‘Doors and corners, that’s where they get you,’ and that was true enough.

That might have been why I was watching the unisex bathroom off to my right so closely, “Clear everything ahead of you, leave nothing behind you unchecked,” I said and took a deep breath.

Hugging the wall, I made my way to the door, then opened it quickly, but made sure not to let the wooden door slam into the wall. There was no need to let them know exactly where I was.

To my relief, there was nothing inside, just a single toilet, with the seat cover-up, of course, and surprisingly enough a nice lavender soap bar. “That’s weird,” I thought and drug the wastepaper basket in front of the door to keep it propped open.

Nothing in the place screamed Biker Club House. No pool tables or dart boards were there for the gang’s amusement, no motorcycle paraphernalia, it was just a reception lobby like you might find at any office.

On end tables, big pots with fake plants accented the room, and I could just image soft compassionate music playing for the families of the dearly departed in the background, “that’s because it is an office, a morgue office.”

Crossing the room, I was ready to clear the entrance to the next when once again, my plans went to shit.

“Wow, yeah. You can’t be here. We’re not open to the public,” she said but her tone was a long way from how they trained people in customer service.

During normal working hours, I had no idea what she looked like, but as she stormed toward me, she was clearly un-natural. Dressed in a set of tan slacks, and a cornflower blue shirt sleeve blouse that had a name tag that read, ‘Sophie,’ she didn’t cut an immediately imposing figure. She was built like a human from the feet to her shoulders, where long brown hair flowed from a hornless white and brown goat’s head.

“You’re a female,” I blurted out, and just knowing that caused me to make a critical mistake, I lowered the barrel of The Judge.

"You can't have our MEAD!" she screamed and took that moment to show off her skills in Parkour. With a leap, she bounced off the reception desk and rebounded right at me, fist raised. I was already back peddling, so the move made me rush and in a second, I was going down in a heap. Sophie came down on top of me, her fist only glancing the top of my shoulder, but it was hard enough to make me drop The Judge.

Ju-Jitsu wasn’t my most proficient skill, but I had my 90 hours of army combative training bi-annually, so I wasn’t completely helpless. Grabbing both of her wrists to keep her from beating me senseless, I jerked her down and brought my head up.

I know what you’re thinking, don’t headbutt a goat, but even a goat’s nose bleeds when you smash it. And bleed it did after my forehead slammed into the soft snout. It could have been my imagination, but I was fairly certain something crunched, and Sophie must have shared that thought because she immediately rolled to the side and tried to pull her hands free so she could cover her bloody nose.

Rolling with her I got into a full mount and having learned from Cam’s fight. I locked my feet under her thighs so she couldn’t escape. It was my turn to do a little ground and pound, but I opted for elbows instead of fists, and with three of them landing, fully backed by my weight.

I felt each blow reverberate from my elbow, through my shoulder, and into my neck. It was like elbowing a cinderblock and in no time my elbow was bloody. Whether it was her blood or mine, I couldn’t be sure. The side of her scalp had split open, and blood poured from the wound, but my skin wasn’t in much better shape.

When she quit fighting to protect herself, I knew she was through, and I leaned back up and took a few hard-earned breaths. The air was sickly sweet, and just as pungent as Marv’s kimchi cheese fries. “God, you stink!” I growled and stood up and grabbed The Judge.

It took me a few minutes to realize that the smell, on her, was also coming from the doorway she’d come at me from, and it wasn’t just a smell, it was something I could see.

A slow-moving fog was rolling from the doorway as you’d see in some bad horror movie, and soon it was ankle deep and I was glad I grabbed The Judge when I had. There was no way I would have found it easily in the soup that was growing around me.

My left shoulder was throbbing, and I guessed the collarbone was either cracked or broken, and my right arm was numb from the bashing, “that’s going to slow me down.”

Shaking my hand a few times to get a normal feeling back into it, I slowly moved toward the doorway. The lights were off and the backspace was dark with the expectation of the light from the green exit signs, which I had to admit were brighter than I’d expected.

From what I could make out, the place had been ransacked by the Chort and pretty much used as a clubhouse. Beer bottles and cigarettes littered the ground, and the far wall looked like someone had accidentally set it on fire.

Something under my foot was crushed with a squish that made me feel sick. Pulling out my smartphone, I turned on the flashlight and glanced at the ground. What I saw made me jump and nearly yell.

Fleshy red lips were smashed under my boot! I stumbled backward and held my hand to my mouth as I looked at them in horror. “What the hell? They ripped someone’s lips off?”

I muttered, then realized something about it didn’t look right. Where they’d been stepped on, the lips broke rather than smashed, and blood or fluid was running from them. “Wax lips, like the Nik N Nip wax candy,” I thought, and with another scan of the floor discarded and smashed wax was everywhere.

“Using your own product is never a smart sales practice,” I said and continued to scan the room. The space had once been an office. Now, the cubical was all broken down and stacked in the corner or laid in a pile where someone had been using them as a place to sleep. Some office chairs were arranged around a stack of the cubicles that they had been using as a table, but that was about as far as the orderly arrangement of décor went.

The place was disgusting, and it smelled to high heaven. I just wished Cam was with me, he would have just loved the place with his obsession for cleanliness.

The fog to my left danced and spun a dervish of agitation and movement. Frantically I searched the space again with the flashlight, but with the fog and shadows, I couldn’t see a damn thing.

A chill slowly grew in the air and my rapid breathing became visible in the frozen air. “Is someone there?” I asked, then felt stupid for sounding like a damsel in a fifty-cent horror movie.

Another flash of movement caught my eye, and finally remembering I was a professional, I raised my gun and crossed my wrists so my light and aiming point were in the same place. The place was empty, except for the detritus, but it felt more than empty.

Swinging my light around again, I searched for the far wall, but the far wall was gone. As if something massive as reached in and pulled the wall away, there was a void there, and the emptiness made me feel small and sick.

Turning away from the emptiness turned out to be impossible. No matter which way I turned, the office was just gone. The cubicles, the chairs, the exit signs, everything was just gone. I was alone in some abyss, and even my flashlight couldn’t find a wall or flat surface.

My mind recoiled from the void, unwilling or unable to face it. Yet, there was no avoiding it, it just stared into me and turned me inside out. I felt exposed as I’d never been before, and the growing dread shook my sanity.

Was this from the Sweet Wax? Was it in the fog, or the air?

“This is from The Lady,” a voice snaked into my consciousness, and I froze in utter horror. There was something in the space with me, and it sounded huge.

From the darkness, two radioactive waste pools of light blossomed, and a wave of nausea washed over me.

“What Lady, the Night Gaunt?” I managed to say, but my lips were quivering, and my throat felt tight like someone was slowly strangling me.

“So, I’m not the first. You hardly seem worth it, are you worth it?” It asked and with each moment its mouth opened, I could see more of that light behind its teeth. The beast was demonic, massive, and dark, and I felt the need to pee become almost overwhelming.

“Holy Hell, no. I’m just in the wrong place at the wrong time a lot lately. I saw a goat chick in the other room, she might be the one you’re looking for,” I said reflexively, and then admonished myself for being a smartass so often.

The Beast crept into view and my heart nearly stopped as the massive wolf's head glowered at me unamused. “She was right, you are mouthy, and not very smart. Killing you won’t be much of a challenge, but I bet your bone marrow will taste sweet.”

I lifted my gun and it barked five times as I let The Judge give my response.