Nightmares (Jed Horn Supernatural Thrillers Book 1) Read online

  Nightmares

  By Peter Nealen

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination.

  Copyright 2015 Peter Nealen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, to include, but not exclusive to, audio or visual recordings of any description without permission from the author.

  Printed in the United States of America

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  Chapter 1

  Security was set and the sun was going down over the Jordanian border. We had the Humvees in a circle, turrets facing outboard, in the bottom of a wide wadi. Most of the other Marines, who weren’t up on the guns, were already stretching out on the ground or the hoods and roofs of the trucks.

  I joined the other Assistant Team Leaders and Gunny at the command truck, in the middle of the circle. There wasn’t much to go over; the op was going as according to plan as it was ever going to. That meant we hadn’t found any sign of the smuggling route that was supposed to be moving insurgents and munitions into Iraq from Syria. I’d pointed out during mission planning that up north along the Euphrates was more likely than out here in the middle of the empty desert, and while Gunny had agreed, there wasn’t much any of us could do about it. This was the mission, so we were going to do it as best we could. Comb the desert, aye, aye, sir.

  We talked about some inconsequential BS for a while, peppered with cynical jokes and wisecracks that would have gravely offended anyone not familiar with the kind of twisted sense of humor you develop in combat arms, before drifting off to our trucks to get some shut-eye until it was our turn to take security. Nobody expected anyone to be out here in the daytime, much less at night. Hajji slept at night; none of us had ever seen any sort of night operations run by the insurgents, and finding an Iraqi farmer out after dark was next to completely unknown. Not that we’d seen any farms out here; the most habitation we’d seen in five days was a single Bedouin tent three days before.

  I pulled my iso-mat out of my ruck, which was hanging by a snap-link on the side of our truck, and unrolled it on the ground beside the rear tire. It was still way too hot to use a poncho liner, especially since I wasn’t going to take off my cammies or boots. Empty desert or not, bad habits were bad habits, and we weren’t going to stop being careful just because we hadn’t seen a soul besides each other for three days.

  It was hot enough that I couldn’t go to sleep immediately, but just lay there, letting my mind wander.

  After a while, I suddenly noticed that my thoughts had wandered into some seriously dark territory. A formless disquiet had settled on my mind, coupled with a sense of being watched. It was a feeling I’d experienced before, when I’d been sure there were bad guys close. I just called it the heebie-jeebies most of the time, but I always followed up on it, just in case. I sat up, grabbing my rifle from where it was leaning against the truck.

  My first instinct was to check the perimeter. With the sun gone, the desert was nothing but empty darkness. The stars had come out, but the moon was still below the horizon. It wouldn’t be up for hours.

  Something made me turn around. There was a figure standing in the middle of the laager site. Any thoughts that one of the other Marines was walking around died instantly. This thing was taller than any of us, appeared to be wearing a cloak or thobe, and was blacker than any of the surrounding darkness.

  Except for its eyes. Those were points of bright flame.

  It stared directly at me for a second, while I was frozen in place, unable to process what I was looking at. Then its mouth gaped in a glowing, sulfurous grin, its teeth jagged black fangs against the furnace burning inside. Still looking back at me, it turned and brought a long arm slashing downward and smashed the command Humvee in half.

  With a violent sweep of both incredibly long arms, it threw the two halves in opposite directions, sending them spinning through the air to impact with crushing force against two more trucks, reducing them to twisted metal and killing the men sleeping in and around them.

  Gunny hadn’t been sleeping at the command truck; he’d been over near my vehicle. He was already up and moving, trying to get an angle on the thing. The sight reminded me of the rifle in my own hands, and I brought it to my shoulder, flicking the selector off safe and trying to pick up the thing in my ACOG in the dark.

  It was too fast. In the time it took to blink, it was on the other side of the laager site, sweeping two more Marines off the ground by their throats. They burst into screaming flames in its hands, and it threw them out into the desert, shrieking out their last breaths as they burned.

  Gunny opened fire at that point. I joined in a moment later, as my brain finally got out of the screaming lock it had been in since that thing had grinned at me. We might hit the Marines in that truck, but if we didn’t kill that thing, or at least drive it off, we were all going to die.

  “Mac!” I bellowed over the hammering of our rifle fire, “Get that gun up and shoot that thing!”

  Mackenzie, my gunner, had already started swinging the turret around and opened up with the .50, the hammering thunder almost driving me to my knees as it blasted just over my head.

  The heavy rounds flashed and sparked, and the thing disappeared in a cloud of dust and smoke as the .50 was joined by the 240 on Gunny’s truck, hammering at the thing and the Humvee behind it. The men in that truck were dead, if not by the creature’s hands, then by our fire. But we had no choice. It was shoot or die, and none of us wanted to die in that godforsaken desert, at least not without a fight.

  Finally, Gunny yelled, “Cease fire! Cease fire!” It took a couple of minutes and both of the surviving heavy guns going dry before anybody stopped shooting. I hastily shrugged into my vest and reloaded as I joined Gunny to carefully advance on the blasted wreckage where we’d last seen the thing.

  There was no sign of it. Just smashed, burned bodies and a Humvee reduced to twisted wreckage.

  I awoke with a start, the image of fiery eyes in a smoky, featureless face still seeming to float in my vision even after I was awake. I looked desperately around the room, disoriented as hell, until I remembered where I was; a small, cheap, ratty motel room in Bend, Oregon.

  With a groan, I sat up on the rickety, and now sweat-soaked, bed. It creaked and swayed alarmingly under me, or at least it would have been alarming if the rest of the room hadn’t been swaying along with it. My head was already starting to pound, and my mouth tasted like a small animal had died in it.

  I reached for the bottle of Jack on the nightstand to try to wash both the taste and the vision out, but in my drunken fumbling, I knocked it off and onto the floor. I scrambled to grab it before too much spilled out, but when I picked it up and brought it to my lips, it was empty. I threw it across the room in frustration.

  Every night. Every blasted night since that night in western Al Anbar, the same nightmare kept coming back, mingling with an ever-present sense of unease and fear until there wasn't a lot of difference between the nightmares and the waking world. That night had changed my life; I’d been in hell ever since.

  I heaved myself to my feet. It took a couple of tries, and when I finally got upright, the room was spinning and I swayed dangerously. But eventually I was able to stagger over to the small table in the corner, in search of the second bottle of Jack Daniels I’d bought that afternoon.

  That was when I discovered that the empty I’d tossed was the second bottle
. I swore, the word sounding slurred even in my ears. Well, that wouldn’t do. There was no way I was going back to Nightmare-Land without more booze.

  It took way too long to struggle into my jeans, well-worn Marine combat boots, and jacket. I almost forgot the key on the way out, but since it was an old fashioned metal one instead of one of the newer keycards, I couldn’t have locked it in the room anyway, so it probably didn’t matter that much. It wasn’t like I had much of anything in the room to get stolen.

  Even as drunk as I was, I still had enough of a shred of judgment left that I knew I shouldn’t drive. I started my slow, weaving way down the street, looking for a liquor store that might still be open. I didn’t even know what time it was; I hadn’t bothered to check, and my watch was somewhere in the room. I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was trying to drink the dreams away. It hadn’t worked yet, but it had to eventually. That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway.

  I don’t know how long I wandered the streets. There was hardly any traffic at all. It still took me a while to realize there was a car pacing me.

  It wasn’t new, but it wasn’t a junker gang-banger car, either. Not that I was in any shape to do anything about some gang punks getting their jollies by beating up a drunk in the middle of the night…

  The passenger side window was rolled down. A silver-haired oldster dressed in black was driving. “You all right, son?” he asked.

  I was focusing on him instead of where I was going, and stepped off the curb by accident. I just about face-planted into his fender. “Fine,” I slurred.

  “You sure don’t look it,” he replied. “Come on, get in, I’ll give you a lift.”

  I realized I was in no shape to refuse, so I struggled with the door and slumped into the passenger seat. It took a couple of tries to get the door shut. Then I just sat there for a moment, my head back against the headrest. I was beyond caring who the old guy was, or what his motive for picking up a drunk on the side of the street was.

  He slowly pulled the car away from the curb. I kept my eyes closed; it lessened the disorientation.

  “Where are you trying to go?” he asked after a few moments.

  “Somewhere with booze,” I replied.

  “No offense, son, but you don’t look like you need any more booze,” he said sternly. I cracked an eye at him. He was half watching the road, half watching me, and there was no timidity on that craggy slab of a face. Through my haze, I could somehow tell that this was no well-meaning but naïve old man. That wasn’t the voice of a clueless do-gooder.

  So, in spite of how pissed-off and miserable I was, instead of harsh words about minding his own business, I just leaned back on the headrest and said, “I still haven’t had enough to make the nightmares stop.”

  There was a different tone to his voice when he replied, “That much booze doesn’t exist on the face of the Earth, my friend.” There was a pause, while the night went by outside the car. “Where are you staying?”

  “I take it that means you’re not going to drop me off at a liquor store?”

  He chuckled. “Nope. Even if I was inclined to aid and abet your self-destruction, there aren’t any open at this time of night. So, where are you staying?”

  “The Dall Motel,” I replied.

  “That pesthole?” He sounded incensed. “Tell you what, we’ll go there, pick up your things, and you can crash on my couch for the night.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He stared at the road for a moment. “I’ve seen a lot of suffering in my day, son,” he replied. “Experienced a fair bit of it, too. If I can alleviate even a little bit of it, well, I believe that’s worthwhile.”

  “I don’t need a Good Samaritan, old man,” I said, closing my eyes again.

  He gave another dry chuckle. “’Good Samaritan’ is pretty close to my job description, son. We’re here.”

  I opened my eyes, and sure enough, we were sitting in the neon-lit parking lot. Somehow the dump of a motel looked even worse in the purple and red light. I fumbled with the door handle, got the door open, levered myself out, and promptly fell on my hands and knees and vomited on the asphalt.

  Surprisingly strong hands gripped me under the armpits and lifted me off the ground and back into the car. “Give me the key,” he said. “I’ll get your stuff, and then we’ll go.”

  “My truck…” I started to say.

  “We’ll come back and get it when you’re sober,” he said. He held out a hand for the room key. I had to search my pockets to remember where I’d shoved it. When I handed it to him, I noticed he was wearing a Roman collar for the first time.

  “You’re a priest,” I mumbled stupidly.

  He smiled faintly. “Yes, I am. Now just sit there; I’ll be back in a minute.”

  I might have passed out for a little bit there; it seemed like an eyeblink later he was back at the car, with my pathetic pack full of what little I had with me. “Is this all, son?” he asked.

  I just nodded. I didn’t have much anymore. Some of my stuff I’d sold, some I’d just lost track of in my drunken haze over the last few months since I separated from the Marine Corps. He put the pack in the back seat, then got behind the wheel again.

  I don’t remember much of the drive to the rectory. I vaguely remember him pulling me out of the passenger seat and slinging my arm around his shoulders as he helped me into the house and lowered me onto the couch in the living room. After that, it all just goes a little black.

  For the first time in months, the dreams left me alone. I woke up to the sun streaming through the front windows, feeling better than I had in what felt like ages. I still didn’t feel good, mind you, but better than rock bottom is still better. I was still in my clothes, though my boots were off and on the floor at the end of the couch.

  The rectory was quiet. There was an old grandfather clock in the corner of the living room that ticked quietly, keeping the silence from being absolute. After a few moments of gathering myself together, I started to hear some rustling and low speech from the back rooms, so I padded over to investigate. My head was splitting, but I was somewhat clearer.

  Past the tiny kitchen, I found a small study, practically overflowing with books, with an ancient, well-worn writing desk and three chairs. The Father was sitting at the desk, and another man was sitting in one of the armchairs.

  The other guy turned to look at me as I walked in. He looked like he was in his mid-forties, but his eyes looked like he’d seen far more than forty years. His hair, cropped short, was going gray at the temples, and his face was weathered and clean-shaven. He was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt under a leather jacket, and the way he was sitting, he could easily get at the big Magnum revolver on his hip and train it on the door.

  Father O’Neal turned from his desk, wheeling the chair away. “How are you feeling?” he asked. The man in the armchair didn’t say anything, but just studied me with an intensity I found increasingly uncomfortable even through the haze of my hangover.

  “Like I got hit by a truck,” I replied. “But I guess I’m alive.”

  “Breakfast?” he asked. My stomach did a flip-flop at the idea, and I imagine I turned a little green.

  “I don’t think I could eat much right now,” I admitted.

  He shook his head. “Food’s the only way you’re going to kill that hangover, son,” he said. “There’s some bread and butter in the kitchen to get you started.”

  After some hesitation as my head throbbed, I nodded and headed into the little kitchen. After a few bites, I actually started to feel a little more human. I wandered back into the book-lined study, chewing as I went, and sank into the other armchair.

  The other guy was still studying me with that intense, unnerving stare. His eyes were dark gray, almost blue but not quite. I’m not usually one for studying another dude’s eyes, but when they’re boring into you like they could set you on fire by just staring at you, they tend to get your attention.

  As my head cleared, I st
arted to sense the tension in the room rising. Neither man said anything, but just watched me eat. Finally, I finished chewing, swallowed, and said, “Mister, just what are you staring at?”

  His expression didn’t change, but he leaned back in the chair a bit. “So, you’re Jed Horn.”

  That cut through my hangover more than the food or the tense silence of the room had. “How do you know that?” I asked, the last of the bread forgotten.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” he replied. He reached down beside the chair, and I tensed. It wasn’t an entirely rational reaction; he obviously wasn't reaching for his Magnum and I wasn’t in any shape to do anything if he was planning to attack me anyway. He came up with a manila folder and tossed it casually in my lap.

  I stared at him for a moment before reaching down to open the folder. When I saw the pictures inside, I almost retched.

  They were crime scene photos. At least, they were labeled that way. And they were gruesome.

  The first was of a young man hanging by the neck from the rafters of what looked like an abandoned building somewhere. Maybe a barn. The surroundings were kind of lost in the fact that he was a hanged corpse, and that his eyes had apparently been gouged out. Blood and destroyed tissue had flowed down his face.

  The others were worse. Two more young men and a young woman were lying on the floor around the hanged man. All had had their eyes gouged out, and then had been eviscerated. Their intestines had been wrapped around their wrists and throats. It was worse than anything I’d ever seen in Iraq, even the night the…thing came calling.

  I looked up at the two of them, sickened. Both were still watching me coolly. “Recognize them?” the guy with the Magnum asked.

  I looked down at the pictures again, trying to study the disfigured faces without losing what little was left in my stomach. It took a couple minutes of just staring, trying to see past the horror, before it struck me.