Gore Point is the first in a trilogy of action/mystery/horror thriller novels about a brigade of demon fighters. Get your copy from the usual bookstores or get it directly from me for cheaper.
Chapter 1: THE RIFT
The trees grew strange as they approached the Gore Point, and Adrian Porter finally decided to tell Ray what was on his mind.
“Father James says Dad is going to Hell,” he said to his brother.
But Ray wasn’t moved. He was four years older and officially a teenager now. So of course he knew everything. “Father James likes to diddle kids.”
Adrian didn’t answer.
Ray’s words didn’t really mean anything. That was just the sort of thing he’d been saying lately, now that he no longer believed in the church.
In Adrian’s experience, Father James was anything but a pedophile. He wasn’t even creepy, and Adrian sometimes found the other priests creepy. And really, that right there was the problem. If Father James was creepy, then Adrian would be able to dismiss him same as Ray.
But Father James struck Adrian as reasonable and rational. Father James didn’t condemn kids to Hell for smoking or drinking or having sex or listening to heavy metal music. When new rifts opened and outbreaks spilled into the world, Father James hid like everyone else instead of throwing Holy Water and hoping that God might save him. He was actually a lot like Dad, except he wore a collar instead of swinging a Rollard.
So when Father James said Eldon Porter was going to Hell, Adrian had taken the idea seriously — even if he wasn’t sure whether or not to accept it literally. Father James hadn’t said “going to Hell” like a priest. He’d said it like a scientist reaching a foregone conclusion. It’d come out like a fact about their father, like how he lived on Chance Street and was six feet tall.
“I’m serious, Ray.”
“I know you’re serious. That’s what’s so sad about it.”
At first Ray said nothing else. They walked on, dead leaves and twigs snapping underfoot. It was almost noon and the air was dark gray, like gaseous ash. Ray’s flashlight helped less than it should. About thirty feet out its beam was swallowed by the gloom, as if it’d been eaten.
Ray climbed over the strange, low-hanging arm of a Teardrop tree, then leapt over what seemed to be a long-dead body. It’d been picked down to the skeleton — a grizzly discovery that Adrian took pains to walk around. The bones were surely a suicide.
Even this far from the Flats, Freaks still came here to die.
Ray didn’t even slow. Even though he wasn’t yet out of middle school, the darker side of life behind the Rampart didn’t bother him. He thought like Dad: Life began; life ended; life was random, so why bother worrying?
Adrian favored his mother: There was more to the world than eyes alone could see, and everything had meaning. The best time to worry was when you didn’t know what that meaning was.
Ray stopped short of another Teardrop tree, then turned to face Adrian. Reluctantly, he donned his you-suck-but-you’re-still-my-little-brother expression: the one that diluted his regular know-it-all with a parody of compassion.
“Listen. Hell’s just a word. Dad’s an exterminator, nothing more and nothing less. He’s not going to Hell. He’s never been to Hell, because Hell doesn’t exist.”
But Father James’s declaration wasn’t the only thing Adrian had been keeping to himself. He might as well get the rest off of his chest.
“Matt says Dad crossed a rift.”
“Legions don’t cross rifts. That’d be stupid. You can’t breathe over there without a rig. Besides, it’d be like walking into a wasp’s nest to get rid of the wasps. You kill wasps from the outside, dipshit.”
“Well, Matt says he crossed one.”
“Matt’s a choad.”
Adrian looked down and shrugged, wishing he hadn’t. The ground this far in was teeming with scuttling beetles. Harmless, but unsettling. Half of the crunching under his feet had been leaves, bugs were the other half.
“How the hell would Matt know what’s going on out here?” Ray continued. “He just sits at home all day playing D&D and pulling his dick.”
“His dad’s in the Brigade, too.”
“Yeah. And Dad says he’s a tool. Don’t listen to Matt. I’m your brother. You should listen to me.”
Adrian was considering this twisted bit of sibling logic when a massive cracking sound bent the air around them. It was like the sundering of the forest’s biggest tree.
Adrian flinched. Ray lit up. All this unknown was a splinter under Adrian’s skin, but his brother thrived on it.
Adrian often envied him. Ray’s impulsiveness was always getting him in trouble, but Adrian didn’t know anyone who lived more in the present, disregarding both past and future, lessons and danger. It made him a jerk sometimes, but also fearless.
“Hurry,” Ray said. “That sounded like a big one.”
Ray ran toward the sound without waiting for an answer.
Adrian found himself in an impossible frying-pan-or-fire situation.
Did he want to stay alone among the bugs and bones under the impenetrable canopy, or run toward something even scarier with Ray?
Adrian chose the latter. He was nine years old now and reluctant to let his brother know how much he needed him, but that was still better than walking the forest alone.
They reached the edge of the dead zone less than two minutes later, to a night and day demarcation. As strange and surreal as the undergrowth was in the forest behind them, it was at least life. Beyond the demarcation, there was no life. Supposedly even the soil itself had been barren (no worms, not even any bacteria) since the ‘50s, when the dead area first appeared.
By the time the Zen mines started closing, the area finally stopped expanding, but by then it had grown from the size of a baseball diamond to over ten thousand acres. Adrian had studied it.
Ray was wrong if he thought Adrian was afraid of the Gore Point. It was actually fascinating, so long as it stayed an academic subject read.
Without canopy overhead, the dead zone was ablaze with noonday sun. The contrast from the dark was shocking, and Adrian had to shield his maladjusted eyes.
Ray didn’t even pause. He wasn’t academic like Adrian; he preferred the visceral nature of hands-on learning. His shoes churned dead soil as he ran — drawn to the ridge atop the rise ahead as much as Adrian felt repelled by it.
Adrian didn’t move at first. He’d been wary of drifting toward the sound of an opening rift, but he was even more wary now that he knew the source of that sound was just ahead. But then he seemed to hear something whispering in the dark behind him (maybe nothing … or maybe an escaped fiend) and sprinted to catch his brother.
“Ray! Wait!”
It was like Ray didn’t hear him.
Adrian ran faster. “RAY!”
He finally stopped to let his little brother catch up, waving Adrian forward. He was all smiles — no fear at all.
“Hurry up, slug!” he chided. “The fiends’ll be coming out any time now!”
Adrian’s voice grew smaller. “I … I want to go home.”
Ray stared at his brother for half of a second. Then a look of utter scorn crossed his face and he turned to run again, upward toward the lip of the rise, sparing no speed lest he miss a moment of the excitement to come.
Adrian followed at a crawl. He had to force himself to move upward, but the effort would be worth it once he got there. Ray would probably choose to descend the other side once he reached the top.
Then Adrian would lose sight of him. He’d be entirely alone for a while, and right now Adrian would do anything for some company out here.
Ray reached the top, then continued down as predicted.
Adrian ran hard to catch him — so hard that he almost tripped, turning to look when Ray hissed his name.
“Ade!”
Adrian stopped, but he didn’t see his brother.
Where had that voice come from? He felt his eyes go wide: classic deer in the headlights.
“Get down, numbnuts!” came Ray’s whisper-hardened voice. “You wanna get us busted?”
Adrian’s eyes darted, soon enough spotting his brother crouched behind a rock formation, waving feverishly and demanding that Adrian join him.
“Check it out, Ade,” Ray said as Adrian came over. “Isn’t this the coolest thing you’ve ever seen?”
Adrian didn’t look right away. He couldn’t share his brother’s enthusiasm. His heart hadn’t yet slowed from his uphill sprint, nor from the childlike certainty he’d felt that Ray, once his brother disappeared over the ridge, would be gone forever.
His stomach had clenched with permanence, unwilling to relax. He had to pee, certain on some level that he was just inches from pissing his pants.
Steeling himself, Adrian peered over the rock. The vista — which he’d seen many times in photos — was both awesome and obscene.
The black lake loomed ahead: a tiny thing perhaps five hundred feet across at its widest, located close to the center of the original quarantine area. It looked filled with ink, a perfect blot of ochre in all this nothingness.
Ray and Adrian’s father had told them the first rift opened near the lake, and that scholars now theorized there were smaller rifts at its bottom. Creatures were always emerging from what passed for its water, covered in bile.
They percolate up from the bottom, Dad had once quipped, like smoke from a bong.
But looking at the lake now, Adrian didn’t find himself thinking of the original rift. His eyes gave him a terrible sense of déjà vu. Their grandfather had shown them photos of himself as a child, fishing in this exact spot back when it had still been Cecret Lake. The difference between those photos and today’s reality was startling.
Back then, the pool of water had been liquid paradise in the middle of a wild, green national park. Now, it was a wasteland.
“Holy crap,” Ray said, staring toward the area Adrian’s eyes had been avoiding, which was about sixty degrees to the lake’s left side. “Dad was right. He’s always right.”
Ray respected very few adults (he claimed himself an independent, but in truth was more of a scoundrel), but Dad was his unabashed hero — maybe the only person in this world Ray truly wanted to be.
He probably would be, too. People said that Ray was Eldon in miniature — something Ray took as high flattery. They both had the same broad, square, effortlessly handsome face. The same thick chests and wide shoulders, though in Ray those things were still mostly a promise. They had the same moxie. The same bravery — though Mom had a different word for it that she’d shared privately with Adrian: foolhardiness.
They’ll be the end of themselves, Mom once said to a friend. He wasn’t supposed to have heard that, but he had … and in recent days Mom’s words and those of Father James had entwined in Adrian’s fears like a braid.
End of themselves. Going to Hell.
It felt like a case of first one, then the other.
“It’s right where he said it’d open up,” Ray continued. “Holy shit, Ade. What do you think that is? A four? Maybe even a five?”
Adrian understood the question, but was too freaked-out to weigh in. Their father had explained: Rifts were graded using the Minghai system, modeled after the Richter earthquake scale. The smallest rifts were ones, with the largest rifts in the range of six. But academic Adrian understood two important things that Ray probably didn’t.
Just like the Richter scale, the Minghai scale was logarithmic. A 2.0 rift wasn’t twice the magnitude of a 1.0, but instead ten times as big.
The second similarity was that neither had an upper limit. How big could an earthquake be? How big could a rift be? It bothered Adrian that the makers of the scales had allowed for the theoretical answer to be “infinite.”
He forced himself to look at the fiery gash in the valley ahead. It made an enormous flaming eye that seemed to float ten feet above the ground. It was one of the bigger rifts Adrian had seen, though all the others were from behind the safety of a computer screen. This rift wasn’t a four point anything. It was a five at least: a thousand times the size of the much more common 2.0s, and ten thousand times bigger than the tiny but troublesome 1.0s — the micro-rifts Brigades hated because they were like gnats: almost too small to find, fight, and close.
“Look!” Ray said. “There’s Dad!”
Now Adrian wanted to tell Ray to keep it down, because his exclamations might get them caught out here where children absolutely should not be.
But there was no real danger of loud voices giving them away; rifts above 3.5 roared with the sound of a blast furnace.
Simple thermodynamics, Dad had told him once. Hot air is excited. It wants to move, so it moves toward us.
Adrian, thinking he was smart, had added, But only when the air inside the rift is hotter than the air outside, right?
Eldon had gone serious at that. Son, ain’t no place on Earth where our air doesn’t feel sub-zero to them.
Adrian had always been strong in the sciences. But seeing those same simple thermodynamics in practice didn’t feel scientific at all. The air inside even the most timid rifts was hotter than his grandmother’s oven on Broil. In person, watching the other plane’s environment trying to equalize with autumn in Utah felt nothing like science.
The Legions, who stood closest to the opened rift with their face shields down and Rollards at the ready, all leaned forward against the onslaught of the great eye’s exhale. Even the Stitchers, who would stay at least fifty feet back until Legions cleared the first wave, wore thermal coats like firemen, the bottoms of each flapping like flags in a hurricane.
Ray was squinting at the far-off action as if it might turn his eyes into telescopes. “This is bullshit. Let’s go closer!”
“Ray! No! We’re already—!”
But Ray didn’t answer because he was already gone, sprinting toward a group of rocks much closer to the action. A single member of the Brigade turning their heads would prematurely end this adventure, but Adrian would be secretly relieved.
The ground was nude; not even grass to hide him. Only the bones of the most stubborn trees had survived the last seventy years, and even then half of those had fallen over decades ago, hardy roots dissolved as if by salted earth.
Ray found shelter, unnoticed. He waved again for Adrian to follow. Ray was much closer to the Brigade now, but even from where he was Adrian could see his mouth making silent words: Come on!
He’d be safe to follow. The Brigade wouldn’t see him right now if he grabbed a dozen people and started a can-can line. All eyes were on the rift, waiting for the fiends to come.
More reluctantly than ever in his life, Adrian came.
“Look at Dad,” Ray said with pride. “He’s right up front. Tip of the spear.”
It wasn’t a surprise. Eldon Porter had been the world’s first Legion, and today he was easily the best known. He was also a showboat like Ray, and saw every job as a photo op. There was no press here now, but still Eldon was in the middle of the forward defense line. Combined with the rearward line behind it, the formation made a pair of jutting V’s like migrating birds.
Adrian kept comparing his hobby to this startling real-world reality. The popular version of riftfare was a highlights reel; Adrian understood that now. Despite his interest in the family business, he’d never seen (nor sought) footage of a repellance from end to end. He’d never had the stomach for it.
“Where are their Paulson rifles? Shouldn’t they have their goms out?” Adrian asked.
“They have to see what comes out first. Different fiends need different weapons.”
“But … they can’t just fight them hand to hand, can they?” Adrian knew the answer to that one deep-down, but he negated it now.
“They have to. Fire a gom at a Classical and you just make it mad. Paulsons are even worse. Paulsons fire Zen rounds. You do know where Zen Element comes from, right?”
Adrian punched Ray in the arm. He wasn’t an idiot.
“The first wave is always a scrap,” Ray said. “The forward line holds them back with Rollards while the rearward line figures out what they’re up against so they can pull the best weapons for whatever class they’re facing. Then the lines switch places. The rearwards fight with their new weapons while the forward line equips themselves the same way. Then the Stitchers—”
Apparently Adrian was going to have to say it. “Shut up, Ray. I’m not stupid. I know how it works.”
“Then stop being a butthole, will you? You’re going to make me miss the exodus. You know what that is, right?”
“I said shut up,” Adrian told him.
Then they waited. And watched. And waited. All the while, the red eye roared with breath hot enough for the boys to feel from their hiding place. A trick of planar light made the thing seem to have an aura of blue and purple flame. The eggheads at GEN supposedly called it “the aurora” because the inter-planar burn charged particles Adrian was far from understanding, and made them shine in miniature undulating curtains — like the aurora borealis.
“Any minute now …”
A Legion in the forward line flinched as the formation waited, gripping their Rollards. Then another flinched beside him. Dad said the time between a rift’s opening and the exodus was longer when the rifts were bigger; nobody but maybe the aforementioned GEN eggheads knew why.
It made the Legions edgy. They kept wanting to false-start the way overeager defenders false-started in a football game.
But then the fiends came — and as they swelled the temperature increased: the sheer breadth of their movement shoving even more superheated air through the rift.
Adrian found himself too terrified to even catalogue those that exited, though a defensive part of his brain recited random (and not even accurate) fiend names to keep his eyes open and his attention present.
Headbeater. Winker. Rolldog. He knew them all — as well as the classes — but in the moment Father James’s word was the most appropriate of all: Hell.
Demons. That’s what the world beyond the Rampart called the fiends.
It was like seeing every horror movie Adrian had ever watched playing out live in front of him. First came a line of fiends that seemed to walk in backbends: bipedal creatures that scampered mostly bent over as if their spines were broken. Blended into the mix with them he saw upright brown-and-red halfskulls: creatures that looked like humans burned and gnarled by fire, with their heads half chopped off just above the grinning mouth.
He made himself focus, trying to figure out which class of fiends this was.
Which class had halfskulls? And what of the fat, hoglike things now buzzing through on tiny wings?
There was only ever one class of fiends in any expulsion, Dad had told them: something to do with the geography of their plane and the conditions on their side of the rift.
That was a good thing — arguably the only thing that made the Brigade’s job possible. All classes contained both small and large species … but every fiend within a given class was subject to the same weapons and style of attack.
That was how the classes had been defined: sorted into groups based on how they died.
Fiends are mindless like locusts, Dad had told them. But they also multiply like locusts. If you fight humans, there can only be so many of them. When they see friends up front dying, they get scared, and that makes them easier to fight … and more likely to run away before you have to face them. But have you ever tried to fight a swarm of ants? Step on all the ants you want and they keep on coming.
The thing Dad said next had given Adrian nightmares.
Now think about this, boys. Let’s say you’re fighting ants … but now every one of ‘em has to be killed in a different way. Some of the ants you can step on, but others you’ve gotta stab with a toothpick, or burn in the sun. You can spray some with ant spray … but be careful, because spraying the wrong ones will just make them stronger.
That’s what things would be like, if we had to face more than one class per rift: ten thousand fiends coming at once, but we’d have to fight them one on one. It would be impossible to stop them, boys. If they came at us that way, I’d die thankful for the Rampart. The nuclear solution for an outpouring of that size would be nuking everything behind the wall. But what then? Who’s to say a nuke wouldn’t just open the mother of all rifts?
Mom had overheard Dad telling Ray and Adrian that particular bedtime story. Two years ago, when Adrian was seven and Ray had still been young enough to admit he was scared. Mom had kicked Dad out of the house that night. He’d been drunk, and drinking always brought out the bastard in him.
Quietly terrified ever since, Adrian had done research that made him feel even worse. The only thing that eventually killed every kind of fiend turned out to be brute force, which usually happened at the business end of a Rollard … assuming the fiend was small enough for that particular weapon to do more damage than a pinprick.
Adrian watched the forward line doing that now, shivering inside at thoughts of what would happen if the Brigade had to fight hand to hand for more than the thirty seconds it took for the rearward line to find its bearings. A drawn-out hand-to-hand battle (the kind that would result if rifts expelled multiple classes, rendering projectile and energy weapons useless) would be like fighting Dad’s theoretical one-by-one swarm of ants.
It would mean the end of the Brigade. The end of Fortune. Maybe, if the Rampart didn’t hold, the end of the planet itself.
Ray had none of Adrian’s existential horror. He held his fist in the air as he watched, practically cheering. Forty yards away, Eldon Porter was making mincemeat, swinging the axe end of his Rollard one way, then striking on the backswing with the fork. The speared holding end of the weapon even got a few licks in: every few swings Eldon would parry and shove the sharp part backward, then pull it from his enemy with the help of his boot.
The rearward line acted fast. Soon enough they had fitted their weapons and were now each holding what looked like Thor’s hammer.
“Rattlers,” Ray said, naming the hammers. “Cool.”
The lines swapped places and rearward moved up.
Once the frontward line equipped with rattlers of their own, the two lines became one: a horseshoe formation that haloed the rift.
Fiend bodies started to fall much faster now that the Legions had equipped. The use of rattlers meant this was a Dorn-class rift full of Dorn-class fiends, and that was excellent news. When Adrian had seen the rift’s magnitude, he’d worried his father’s Brigade might be overcome with volume, but rattlers were an efficient weapon, able to handle vast swarms all at once. Using a rattler was like shattering glass with sound: the Zen Element in their heavy metal heads resonated with the chorus of a million crickets.
Apparently Dorn fiends couldn’t take whatever waves they sent out; their bodies ruptured and they collapsed. It was an efficient way to clear a first wave — and, by Legion standards, a relatively safe way as well.
The pulse of fiends slowed to a trickle, then to nothing. The Legions called Clear, then yelled for the Stitchers to come forward and close the rift.
But apparently that wasn’t all the rift had in store.
The ground shook. Even Ray’s eyes grew alarmed. At first Adrian had no idea what was happening, but then he realized what it was. The king daddy of the Dorn class must be approaching the rift from the other side: a twelve-foot macerator, rumored to be so dense in structure that it weighed almost thirty tons.
“Oh, shit, Ade. I heard about these things from Matt.” Ray grinned hard at his brother, his disparagement of Matt apparently forgiven. “When they’re rattled-at, their heads explode.”
The Stitchers held their positions at a gesture from the Legions. The Legions, in turn, held their rattlers at the ready. They’d hit the macerator the second it emerged … and then if Ray was right, everyone in the valley would be slathered in its gore.
But what came out of the rift wasn’t a macerator, with massive gnashing teeth and absent eyes. Instead it was a thing that looked like the Devil himself: a towering twenty-five foot hellbringer with horns so enormous, the creature had to duck through the rift.
Ray was still grinning. He didn’t realize the terrible, impossible thing had just happened. Ray was still waiting for his grand finale, wherein the Brigade would simply dispatch a different boss than the one they’d expected.
Adrian knew otherwise. He, like the baffled and backing-away Brigade ahead, understood that the hellbringer wasn’t a Dorn-class fiend, which it should be. Instead, it was a Classical.
Rattle at a Classical-class fiend and it’d draw strength. Rattle at that big son of a bitch, and it’d be the last thing the Brigade ever did.
“Ray. Ray! We need to get out of here!”
But Ray didn’t seem to hear Adrian’s panic. His pride had subdued his common sense; he seemed only to notice Eldon taking point all by himself and all the other Legions retreating.
To Ray, this was a glory moment in the making, but Adrian knew better. Equipping for the first time took a well-oiled Brigade thirty seconds, but de-equipping and re-equipping to fight an entirely different class might not even be possible as far as Adrian knew. Swapping gear mid-repellance was never done. Until now there had never (ever) been the need.
“Ray.”
Ray’s face shifted, maybe seeing the writing on the wall.
“RAY!”
But all Ray said as reality dawned was: “Dad?”
The hellbringer looked down on Eldon and roared. The sound was claws down a human spine. Adrian did lose his urine then, far past caring. Still he found the wherewithal to grab Ray and tug, craving the primal protection of curling up with their faces in the dirt.
But Ray was too strong; Ray held the rock and stayed put with eyes wide and mouth open. And because Ray was strong, Adrian stayed upright too, failing to unseat his brother.
They were both there, in full view of everything when the demon raked a massive red hand through the space where Eldon had been — and then Eldon, as an intact human body, existed no more.
Blood gushed. Body parts flew. Someone screamed.
At first Adrian thought it was only Ray, but then he realized that his own yelling was louder.
Over the hellbringer’s cry and the roar of the rift, two among the Brigade looked and saw them.
They rushed for the boys as the others fell back. Adrian was running hard toward his father’s body when a Stitcher named Halstrom tackled him, pinning the boy to the dead earth with his body.
There were sounds after that — sounds Adrian later understood to be the Brigade’s split-second solution to the problem.
He learned the next day that someone had gotten behind the wheel of the squad’s truck and rammed the heavy vehicle into the the hellbringer’s leg hard enough to hobble the beast. The remaining Legions surrounded it after that, beating and slicing at the fiend with Rollards until a backup Brigade arrived and re-equipped, with Classical armaments, to deal with the creature correctly.
All of those things, Adrian learned later.
In the moment, covered by Halstrom’s protecting body, he knew only the suffocating heat of fear and blood and loss and sin.