The fiends were upon them.
CHAPTER FORTY THREE
Crouch struggled to breathe, gasping. Jensen squeezed harder, intent on watching his opponent’s face turn from pink to red, purple to black. His own face was feral, possessed. Alicia kicked out as shadows flitted to and fro through the meagre pinpricks of light. One struck at her leg and then her ribs, making her groan. One more kicked Caitlyn in the mouth, drawing blood. Caitlyn fell back, striking her head on the floor.
Alicia groaned, saw another motion of dark and managed to block a harsh blow. The flashlights were rolling around and useless, the demonic figures somehow used to the dark. It was chaos, savage, malevolent. It was the nameless and the unfamiliar that disrupted their focus. Alicia had never been in such a situation, faced with enemies that she could not identify nor clearly see. The bizarreness of it all beat at her as hard as any fist.
Crouch fell off the crate he’d been sitting on, causing Jensen to lose his grip and utter a curse. That single act penetrated Alicia’s odd fugue.
Darkness struck at her.
Alicia caught its left boot, twisted, and threw it sprawling to the floor. Listened to it cry out in pain. Saw it rise up in the shape of a young man and hit it hard around the ribs. A crack attested to its fallibility, a scream to its humanity. She smashed its throat with her elbow, wrestled the knife away and then searched the face for clues.
Night goggles.
She wrenched them away, threw them immediately to Caitlyn. “Call it!”
A patch of night struck her chest, then her face. Alicia tasted blood. No need to call this one. Three strikes and the apparition was down, passing again through rolling flashlight beams, shapeless and alien. Caitlyn pushed the goggles over her head and began to shout instructions.
“Russo! Two feet dead right. Coming at you. Alicia, at your feet, rising now. Michael, take that fucker down!”
Crouch rolled and rolled, finally breaking Jensen’s hold. Though bruised and panting he wasted no time in recovery, just kicked out and rolled again. Still keeping hold of his flashlight, he shone the light straight into Jensen’s eyes.
The head whipped away, the goggles flaring. Crouch launched an attack faster than an RPG, crashing into Jensen’s midriff and taking him to the ground. Caitlyn whipped her head back to where Alicia and Russo struggled.
“Behind you, Alicia. Three, two, one… Russo — duck!”
With the ongoing instruction and the sure knowledge of what they fought, the soldiers soon showed their superiority. Alicia realized they faced local thugs high on something. But their blood flowed as well as any enemy’s. Russo finished his last opponent, winded and slashed, but went immediately over to where Crouch fought Jensen.
Alicia, maddened by the shadowy battle and uncertain source of it, annoyed with herself for succumbing to doubt, picked her final opponent up by the hair and launched him bodily at Russo.
“Here. Throw that in the bloody bin.”
Russo caught the human projectile, hefted and increased the momentum, flinging him across the room and into a ceiling-high, double-row of old barrels. Alicia watched them fly apart, timbers sparring away, as she jumped to Crouch’s aid.
Dark liquid flooded the cellar floor as the local thug groaned.
Crouch found a blow that struck under Jensen’s chin, snapping his head back and sending him to the floor. Caitlyn gathered up all the flashlights and made a double-sweep of the cellar.
“No more… Welsh fairies.”
Crouch pushed his body to its knees and crawled over to Jensen’s side, voice rasping. “Where?” he grated. “Where’s the goddamn treasure?”
“Dunno,” Jensen all but laughed. “We were waiting for you.”
Crouch’s head hit the floor. “Bollocks.”
Caitlyn passed night goggles out among the team. Everyone slipped a pair on and then sat back on their haunches. Truth be told, to Alicia, everything looked pretty much as she’d expected. No secret doors or hidden ledges, no suspicious veins in the rock. The floor looked solid, but she guessed they’d have to move everything aside to get a proper take.
Caitlyn’s voice was a whisper. “Guys.”
Crouch looked up, face creased, old and bloodied, eyes only for Jensen. “At least you will get all you deserve,” he said. “And a long time coming.”
“I escaped once…” Jensen rasped.
“Guys…” Caitlyn said a little louder.
Alicia reached out for Russo. “You okay there, Rob? Look a bit cut up.”
The big soldier held his arms out, streaked with blood. “One of those sneaky bastards got past me. Early on.” He added the last as if that explained the slip-up.
“Um, guys…”
The door at the top of the stairs opened. A man looked down, saw the figures and perhaps the blood in the flashlight beams. His next words: “I’m calling the police!” confirmed it.
“Thanks,” Crouch said and meant it.
“Fuck! Guys!” Caitlyn screamed so loudly now Alicia jumped a foot off the floor.
“What the hell is it?”
The researcher just pointed. Alicia followed her gesture and saw the unfortunate man Russo and she had thrown against the wall. And the stack of barrels. It was the barrels that drew the interest though. Destroyed, splintered and leaking a dark liquid Alicia could only guess to be rum, they revealed that which had been hiding behind their heavy bulk.
A door. Clear through the goggles, but invisible in half-light. Crouch stared hard at it.
“Could be,” he muttered excitedly. “Could be.”
Alicia felt hope but then Russo dashed it. “I find it hard to believe it’s been there four hundred years behind all those barrels.”
“So do I,” Crouch said with half a smile. “So ask yourself why all those hefty barrels are stood in front of it.”
Russo’s lips moved but nothing came out. Alicia pondered the rather interesting line of reasoning.
“Because when it became a pub the new owner checked behind it… and found nothing?”
Crouch nodded. “Let’s go see.”
They slogged through the spilt rum, finding it a little ironic considering in whose footsteps they were following, and wrenched open the locked door after finding a crowbar. They took Jensen with them, held by Russo. Crouch flung the door open and used the night-vision goggles to peer inside.
“Well, it’s a storage room, I guess. But small. So small you’d be hard-pressed to fit more than a few crates in here.”
Crouch sounded depressed. Alicia handed him the crowbar. “Dig around for a bit.”
Under the six-hundred-year-old pub, under the very earth that had once belonged to Captain Henry Morgan’s father; inside the dwelling where the young boy had grown and returned only once as a man and a condemned pirate, the Gold Team dug and pounded and searched. They gouged every wall, slammed every surface. They broke bricks apart, shattered stone. Crouch wedged the wrecking bar further and further into a hole he’d made and eventually found no more resistance.
“People,” he said. “I just found air.”
Air was good. It meant there was space beyond the broad wall that made up the back of the storage room.
“Six blocks thick.” He panted. “If I hadn’t been so bloody desperate I would never have kept going.”
The dark, old, untouched mortar came apart. The stones fell inward. Crouch passed them to the others, working hard and sweating profusely. Soon a space had been made large enough to fit his head and shoulders through. The boss then turned to Caitlyn.
“Would you like to do the honors? For Zack?”
She smiled and nodded, fitted her slender top-half into the hole and looked around. When she returned she took off the goggles and flashed a pair of eyes so bright they might light up the cellar.