Chapter 15
Gray played at the edges of Flash’s vision, sweat sliding hot down his back. Each step was a fight to keep his legs moving, to keep the world from tilting into black.
Fifteen minutes later, they crested a low rise. The canopy thinned, opening into a scar of torn earth where the jungle had been chewed away. The scent of smoke clung low, acrid and bitter.
The crash sites.
The UAV lay in shattered ruin, fuselage blackened, pieces scattered in a wide debris field. Jagged wreckage jutted out like broken teeth, the scent of scorched metal heavy in the air.
Just beyond it squatted the Marine chopper, torn open, smoke-stained. The rotors were snapped, the tail sheared off. In the cockpit, two pilots sat slumped forward, motionless, helmets cracked and visors spider-webbed, uniforms dark with blood. Dead in their seats.
Low murmurs of anger ran down the line.
Flash’s hackles went up. Too quiet. Too still.
“Heads on a swivel,” Tex murmured over comms. “This isn’t right.”
But Flash’s gaze wasn’t on the wreckage. It was everywhere else, shadows in the trees, glimmering in the air, whispers in incomprehensible languages. His tattoos burned so hot it felt like his skin was peeling away, wings itching, cross searing. He pressed a hand to his temple, staggered once.
Then the jungle erupted.
Gunfire tore from the brush. Many rifles opened up at once, muzzle flashes strobing through the green. The team dropped to cover, returning fire in vicious bursts. Hot lead sparked off metal, chewed bark, ripped leaves to confetti.
Flash stood there frozen, like a sleepwalker caught between nightmare and reality. Bullets screamed past, then through him, the sound warped and hollow, as if he were already a ghost.
The tangos blurred. Red eyes glowed back at him. Demons. Monsters, grotesque and twisted, jaws gnashing, closing in.
He whipped his gaze to her, Emily, and in the next blink, it wasn’t Emily.
It was Lechuza. Her eyes gleamed with a light not made for this world, too bright, too knowing, and fixed on him as if she could see every fracture in his soul.
His chest convulsed. They were using him to get to her.
If she fell, they triumphed. Somehow, he knew it.
He lunged, grabbed her arm, jerked her up.
She cried out, confusion spilling from her lips, but the words were nonsense in his ears.
Panic twisted his gut into a knot of instinct.
He had to save her. He dragged her with him, ignoring the demon dog’s snarl, ignoring her resistance. Running for his life, his sanity.
He pelted through the jungle at such a rapid speed, she could barely keep up.
Vines clawed at her arms, branches whipped across her face, roots reached for her boots like the earth itself wanted to drag her down.
He snagged her around the waist, practically carrying her as he drove forward, momentum building like a man fleeing fire.
The air grew thicker, charged, every breath tasting of copper and smoke, heat clawing the moisture from his throat.
The jungle wasn’t just alive. It was chasing them.
Leaves shivered without wind. Shadows bent the wrong way, stretching long across the ground as if cast by some unseen fire.
The ground itself seemed to pulse under his boots.
Whispers slithered through the undergrowth, too sharp, too urgent to be anything human.
Lechuza stumbled with him. For a moment, he was inside her head, her lungs burning, her heart pounding with more than exertion.
The invasion twisted his gut with horror, his body moving with a frantic, otherworldly momentum that ripped her farther and farther from the rest of the team.
The world had split, dragging them sideways into some hidden place where reality itself frayed.
She cried out for him to slow, to stop, but Flash couldn’t. Her thoughts bled into him. What is wrong with him? His eyes seem to be locked on something only he can see .
Then pain snapped him out of her mind, stinging and sharp. Blood streaked her arm, bright, real. Mortal. She was mortal.
His sick sense of being gone twisted through him, wondering if he was even here anymore. His hands felt insubstantial, his breath hollow in his chest, as if he were nothing but a haunting echo tearing through the jungle.
His breath caught. Out of the corner of his eye, the jungle bent, light warping until it rose before him, a massive wall of pale green, glinting like liquid glass.
A wave, but alive, vast and deliberate. Shadows writhed inside it, threads of power curling and snapping like a storm contained, and then it fixed on him.
Sentient. A heat-seeking missile with only one target.
It roared without sound, a vibration that rattled his bones and filled his chest until he thought his ribs would crack. The air itself buckled, heavy with energy and intent.
Flash changed direction and ran, clutching Lechuza, no, Emily , against him, and for one wild, impossible heartbeat wings burst from his back.
He imagined flight, imagined beating the air with powerful strokes, carrying her out of reach.
But even in that dream, the wall loomed.
The Veil let him rise only to swat him down.
Then the visions came.
They slammed into him, too many, too dense, pressed in like a flood bursting through a narrow crack. Faces blurred and stretched, eyes staring, mouths open in soundless screams.
Cities burning. Sirens wailing as firestorms consumed whole blocks, London, Dresden, Nagasaki. YOU .
Trenches filled with gas, men clawing at masks, skin blistering, the air itself turned against them. ARE .
Red-coated soldiers breaking ranks in smoke and gunpowder, muskets flashing, bodies falling in ragged lines across frozen fields. OUR .
Wooden ships shattered by cannon fire on a gray, heaving sea. HOPE .
Muskets cracking in endless forest, smoke curling through towering pines, savage warriors painted for battle striking from the shadows. YOU .
Blue and gray uniforms locked in tragic combat, brother against brother, the air thick with blood and smoke. ARE .
Helicopters strafing a jungle canopy, men screaming as napalm rolled like liquid fire. OUR .
Dust and fire swallowing steel towers, a sky torn open, the world shattering in a single morning. GUARDIAN .
Each image shredded his grip on reality, ripping him apart. He clawed for breath, for silence, for anything that was his. But the torrent only surged harder.
STOP FIGHTING US SO YOU CAN HEAR!
Beyond it all, deserts littered with wreckage, armored vehicles burning under a merciless sun. Patriots falling in battle after battle, and still the voices pressed in, desperate, unrelenting, echoing in every nerve.
Then it hit.
The force swallowed him whole, a breaker crashing down, tumbling him end over end. He was dragged under, twisting and spinning in a current so strong it stripped his bearings away. No up. No down. Only green fire, shadows, and the unrelenting push of something vast and merciless.
The monsters swarmed closer, not with teeth but with voices, an avalanche of whispers clawing into his skull. Too many. Too much. Words tangled into gibbering babble, pain lancing his brain like fire and glass.
He clutched his head, writhing. Lechuza bent over him, no , Emily, shouting, her mouth forming words he couldn’t grasp. Shadows reared behind her, stretching long and sharp, swallowing her whole.
Then…an anchor in the swirling glitter. Brawler. He felt him like the roots of a massive oak buried deep in the earth, arms locked in a bear hug, trying with all his might to hold him steady, to haul him back from the abyss.
Others flared in his vision, Tex, Bondo, Easy, Shark, Twister, Dagger, all of them bright threads of brotherhood spun like fragile spider’s silk across the ages.
He saw them on ageless battlefields, Tex shouting orders over the crack of muskets, Bondo choking in mustard gas, Easy charging through jungle smoke, Shark braced against cannon fire, Twister dragging men from rubble, Dagger standing silent in shadows.
They were his. They had always been his.
He loved them with a warrior’s soul that recognized them from eons of battles, from the beginning of time itself.
The power pressing around him seemed to love it too, seemed to drink in his devotion, then it severed it.
Flash convulsed as if cut open, the cords of connection snapping one by one. He couldn’t breathe. The loss of his team slammed into him, shattering his chest, cracking his spirit until anguish roared out of him. Tears froze on his cheeks, carved permanent lines into his skin.
Without a tether, he was hurled into a bottomless pit, slammed flat onto the ground. Stars detonated across his vision in a brilliant, shattering spray.
He screamed, the sound tearing out of him raw as a wrenching, ravaging force ripped out his very soul.
Hollowed out, helpless, seized and struggling, he howled for them, for his brothers, for her, alone, loss bright and crushing as darkness swallowed him, and the light in him went out, extinguished into the void.
Emily stumbled, half-carried, half-dragged by Flash’s frantic momentum. She could hear the team somewhere behind them, gunfire splitting the jungle, but Flash was pulling her farther and farther away. His breath rasped ragged, his eyes glassy, darting at things she couldn’t see.
“Flash, stop! You’re hurting me!” she cried, but he didn’t hear.
He skidded to a halt, chest heaving, sweat streaking down his face, a hunted look so fierce, she gasped. His eyes went wide, pupils blown, locked on nothing. Horror carved deep into his features, so raw it turned unspeakable.