Free The Sword of Michael - eARC by Marcus Wynne Page B

getting repetitive, Dillon,” I said.
    “What?”
    I pulled some shells out of my pocket and thumbed them into the Remington.
    “Cabal, Dillon. These guys aren’t really human. They were grown in tanks, animated by the Dark Forces.”
    “Grown in tanks? What’re you talking about, grown in tanks?”
    I looked up at the sky. Down the long road.
    Empty.
    At least to the naked eye.
    “The Cabal grew them. Clones.”
    “Like Star Wars?”
    I had to laugh. “Yeah, dude. Like Star Wars. Cabal grows them…the Dark Forces empower them. They use technology to embed skills and training in them.”
    “They’re human?”
    “It’s a toss-up, Dillon. They’re grown from human stock, using human DNA, but essentially they have no soul, no Light from the Creator. The Dark Forces breath a kind of life into them; they possess or inhabit them, but whether they’re human in the same way…I don’t know. It’s like a zombie, but different.”
    “‘Like a zombie, but different?’ Oh, dude,” Dillon said. “I should have stayed on the boat. Number One Rule is: ‘Stay on the boat!’”
    “‘The horror…the horror…’”
    Dillon shook his head. “It’s murder in this world, Marius. Guess we better find out who they were, since we figured out what they were.” He bent down and took out a credential case from the hip pocket of the closest body. He opened it up. “Department of Homeland Security, Special Agent.” He sighed. “Dead Federales?”
    “Cabal, dude.”
    “I’m gonna need another long talk, Marius.”
    “Let’s clean up your lawn first. You still got that chipper in back?”
    * * *
    “Why do you pray over them if they’re not human?” Dillon said.
    We washed our hands after spreading the bloody new mulch into his big compost pit.
    “Not for me to decide whether they have souls or not,” I said. “I leave that up to the Creator. Just my default. Enemy or not, I honor them and wish them passage to the Light. I do it for you and me, too. Keeps the karma where it’s supposed to be.”
    Dillon considered that for a long moment, his stillness a marked contrast to his fluidity in a fight. He nodded and handed me a clean towel to dry my hands.
    “So what now,” he said.
    “They’re moving on me hard. Which begs the questions: Why do it this way? Why send Feds after us instead of a midnight attack by the undead or the demonic? Where is the controller?”
    “These are Socratic questions?”
    “Your liberal arts education is showing.”
    “English degree’s got to be good for something.”
    “You got an English degree?”
    “Yes, Marius, I gots an English degree. To use the vernacular.”
    “Every day I learn something new about you.”
    “Every day I learn something more about you, and frankly, it scares the crap out of me.”
    “There’s that,” I said. “Scares me, too. Most days. I think they want to tie us down here in the Middle World. If we have problems with the cops in this world, it degrades out ability in the Other Realms. So we’re going to have to measure twice and cut once. We’ll get more action like this. But this controller and the Cabal…this is different.”
    “Refresh me on this Cabal thing.”
    I sighed. It always feels strange to say the words out loud. All the layers of reality come together in a strange way. It’s tin foil hat territory to the uninitiated, but to those of us who actually experience it—and live to tell of it—it’s as real as any other inanity of daily “ordinary” life, like mortgage foreclosures and Happy Meals.
    “It’s a war, Dillon. Conflict. The essential conflict. Dark against Light. It’s been playing out since the dawn of time. There are those who rejected the Light and were tossed down. There are those who stayed with the Light. Some of them come down into the Darkness to rescue those who want to return to the Light. The Dark Forces only rarely can work directly against us; they have to work through us. Just like the Light works