"You did what?" Julie shouted. "You tried to nuke Alabama?"
"Only a little one. It was for the best," he said defensively. "We didn't think you were going to succeed. I was certain that the bad guys were going to win, and I couldn't allow that. You know what would have happened then."
"Gee whiz, thanks, Myers. I was right there, and I didn't see a mushroom cloud, so I'm assuming you screwed up."
He shrugged. "When the bomb struck, the rift had already been opened. It passed through cleanly and detonated on the other side, inside the Old Ones' reality. It must have made them angry and from what our intel is telling us, it even hurt the big cheese of Old Ones. For some reason they think that you're the one that sent the weapon…Hence, the interdimensional hit out for you. Sorry."
"I don't think sorry covers the indiscriminate use of nuclear weapons, jackass." No wonder the Old Ones were blaming me. Not only had I wrecked their invasion, they also thought that I had attacked them in their own world as well. I've made a lot of people angry throughout the course of my life, but I'd never hit a 10,000-foot-tall crustacean with an atom bomb before.
"So, what now?" Julie snapped. "We just wait for this cult to come and kill my fiancé? I don't think so."
Myers shook his head. "We're going to fly you home. I want you to go about your business, and wait for the cult to make their move. I'll provide a protective detail to guard you, and when the cult strikes, we'll be ready."
"Why don't I just go hide out somewhere? Lay low for a while?" It was a rhetorical question. I was not the running type.
"They'll find you. The Condition aren't normal nut jobs. Unfortunately the stuff they believe in actually works. No. I want you in the open. And they are going to have to crawl out from under their rock to get you, and when they do…" Myers' slammed his fist into his palm. It was actually not a very intimidating mannerism from a person who looked like a junior college English professor.
"So after they kill me, you swoop in and arrest them?"
Franks finally spoke. "They won't kill you."
"And why not?"
Franks didn't answer. Myers patted the terse man on the shoulder. "You'll be safe because you'll be under the personal protection of my best men, led by Agent Franks himself. His primary mission is to keep you alive."
The very idea was preposterous. Franks? Protecting me? "Screw that," I sputtered. "I'll take my chance with the zombies."
"I've never failed a mission," Franks said simply.
"And what about the Natchy Bottom?"
"Doesn't count," Franks replied. I saw his cold eyes flick to the rearview mirror. He watched me for a moment before returning his attention to the road. Franks had gotten just as dead as the rest of us before I had managed to erase five minutes of time. He had put up an amazing fight and had taken inhuman amounts of damage before going down, but he had still lost.
"I can protect myself," I stated.
"MHI can protect him," Julie added. "We're better at this than you federal guys anyway."
"Civilians," Franks muttered as he swung the wheel hard and took a sharp right onto a less traveled road. I didn't know if he meant us or the other drivers.
"You don't have a choice. Your country needs you, Pitt," Myers said.
"Needs me as bait! I'm not down with that. Get yourself a different worm for that hook, Myers. I don't trust your people at all. And it'll be a cold day in hell before I put my life in the hands of that jackbooted thug." I gestured angrily at Franks. The big agent ignored me.
"You're going to let us protect you from the Condition, or we will make life very difficult for MHI. If you think you had it bad last time around, just push me and see what happens this time," Myers threatened. "You've used up your political goodwill from last summer, Harbinger isn't Congress' golden boy anymore, and my agency has been moved from Justice to Homeland Security."
"Didn't know that…" Julie said. Top-secret, shadow-government reorganizations didn't usually end up in the papers.
"Which means I'm now authorized to screw with your company more than ever before." Myers had once been a member of Monster Hunter International before he had left and joined the government. I did not know what had caused him to leave, but he certainly packed a bitter hate for us ever since. MHI had been shut down once before by executive order and I knew that some factions of the government were just itching for us to give them an excuse to do it again. "I'm prepared to take this all the way. Are you? Think on it."
Julie muttered something profane about Myers' ancestry under her breath. We both knew the senior Fed wasn't bluffing. The dark Mexican countryside flashed by outside the window as I glared at my reflection. This certainly sucked. In the previous twenty-four hours I had been attacked by a shadow necromancer and his zombies, beaten by Federales, deloused, visited by vampires, reunited with a shard of the most evil artifact in the known world, been targeted by a death cult, and had it topped off by being placed under the protection of a man who could best be described as not a member of the Owen Z. Pitt fan club.
No one spoke for a long time. Finally Myers turned back around to watch the road, knowing in his little black bureaucrat's heart that he had us beat. Julie rested her head on my shoulder. I grabbed her hand and squeezed. We had faced worse together.
Or so I thought.
"What's on your mind?" I asked quietly.
Julie had pulled me aside once we had disembarked at the small airport. A U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules was refueling nearby, and soon we would be on our way back to the States. The night sky was bright under the nearly full moon and I could make out the shape of Agent Franks shadowing us thirty feet away. He was scanning the chain link fence, looking for anything moving in the desert scrub. The man certainly took his job seriously. They were running some sort of loud compressor near the aircraft, so I wasn't worried about him overhearing us. Julie and I stood in the darkness behind a diminutive aircraft hangar while we talked about the day's events.
"This is crap," she hissed. "I'm so sick and tired of the Feds." She was obviously upset, and her pretty features were drawn into a hard scowl.
"And…" I prompted. I knew her too well. There was obviously something else.
She grimaced. "And what the hell were my parents doing here? I hate to say it, but when they offered a truce, I actually believed it. If they ever did anything against us, Earl would make it his life's work to track them down. I at least thought they had the sense of self-preservation to avoid that."
"Believe it or not, I think the truce is still in effect…" I briefly explained the nature of Susan's visit, but I'm ashamed to say that I held something back. I did not mention Susan's promise that Julie was going to die from the mark. I felt bad for withholding information, and I would tell her, but just not yet. For all I knew, Susan was lying, scheming, trying to find some way to unite more of her family into her dark world, the evil bitch.
"A shard of the artifact? How? It disappeared in Childersburg. I always assumed that the Feds got it when they cordoned off the area. How did my mom end up with part of it?"
I shrugged. "Beats me. All I know is that it hurt like hell when she touched me with it. I'm scared to death of that thing."
"Do you think…" She searched for the words. "Could it be starting again?"
"I don't know," I answered. I hugged her tight. I was terrified of the things that artifact had done, and could do, and more especially, what it allowed me to do. I'd rather kill myself than risk turning those things loose. "I just don't know."
"Oh, Owen…I've got a bad feeling about this. I thought I'd lost you."