SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror

Cade waited until Nils had started across the room, then caught Riley’s eye and called him over with a toss of his head. Once the men had gathered around him, he filled them in on what he’d learned from Nils and then told them what he intended to do.

“Braun hasn’t been dead for long,” Cade said. “There’s still a chance we can learn something from him via my Gift. I want the three of you to keep the locals away from me until I’m finished.”

“Roger that, boss,” Riley replied.

Olsen nodded as well.

Duncan looked a bit uneasy, but Cade didn’t really blame him. The last time he’d done something like this in Duncan’s presence, it hadn’t gone so well. He’d ended up biting the younger man’s forearm, if he remembered correctly.

Never a dull moment.

Cade knelt beside the corpse and removed the thin cotton flesh-colored gloves that he wore everywhere outside of his own home. The gloves were there to protect him from those around him, even his closest friends.

Seven years before, in an encounter with the supernatural entity known as the Adversary, Cade’s wife Gabrielle had been killed and Cade himself had been wounded. When he’d come to in the hospital, he discovered that not only had he been left horribly scarred and without the use of his right eye, but that he’d gained some unusual abilities in the process. One of which was the power of psychometry.

In short, he could read the psychic impressions left on objects just by touching them with his bare hands.

The gloves he wore ninety-nine percent of the time kept him from being exposed to feelings and memories he didn’t want access to, but there were times when knowing such could come in handy.

Like now.

He removed the thin cotton gloves he was wearing and, with a glance at the others to be certain that they were ready, he reached out with his bare right hand and laid it on the dead man’s chest.

CHAPTER NINE

At first there was only darkness and a lingering sense of unease, as if he knew something was wrong but wasn’t able to put his finger on what it was.

Then the images exploded across the theatre of his mind’s eye, hundreds if not thousands of them, one overlapping the other overlapping the next, a literal flood, until it was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. With them came a cacophony of sounds and voices, crashing around and over one another in their haste to be heard.

Within seconds Cade was drowning in the tide.

He couldn’t discern individual voices, but the tone of each was unmistakably the same – pure, unmitigated terror. Whoever these people were, they were in fear not just for their lives but for their very souls. The images were no better; Kodachrome snapshots of men, women, and children suffering hideous fates, images so disturbing that they burned themselves onto the backs of his eyelids for all eternity.

And behind it all, the sense that something dark was coming.

Something that wanted to rip and rend and tear his flesh, to devour him whole...

Cade pulled his hand back with a gasp, struggling to push the images out of his head and regain some sense of connection with the here and now. It was never easy coming back from the visions generated through his Gift and this one was particularly difficult as the sights and sounds he’d experienced tried to drown him with their savage intensity.

He shook his head, trying to cast the memories aside, but he knew that they were here to stay as permanently as if they had been engraved on the inside of his skull. Just one of the darker aspects of this thing he called his Gift.

More curse than Gift. Not the first time he’d thought this, either.

“You alright, boss?”

“Yeah... yeah, I’m okay. Just give me a second.”

Cade took a couple of deep breaths and then rose to his feet. He staggered, suddenly exhausted, and was thankful for Riley’s steadying hand on his elbow.

“Anything?” Olsen asked.

“Not really. Or, at least, nothing useful. There were plenty of images – more than I’ve ever seen before, to be honest – but there wasn’t any cohesion between them. Nothing to tie them together. It was as if I was watching the memories of a hundred different people at once, all wrapped about each other like some kind of twisted kaleidoscope of pain and misery. It was not pleasant, I can tell you that.”

Duncan looked away and Cade was reminded of his sergeant’s discomfort with his methods. For all his own secrets, Echo Team’s newest member could be damned stubborn when it came to stepping outside the Rule, the code of conduct that the Templars swore to uphold when they took the oath of investiture and became a knight of the Order. Cade’s personal philosophy was much simpler – use whatever means at your disposal to conquer evil wherever and whenever it reared its ugly head.

Like now.

Cade was disappointed the attempt hadn’t produced anything resembling concrete information about the extent of what they were dealing with.

They were back to square one.