The Glooming (Wrath of the Old Gods Book 1) (11 page)

Anders walked over to them and let out a gasp as he peered at the man’s face. “That man, he’s one of the hunters the police are searching for. I think his name is Mihkal, I believe.”

“Is this true? You are a hunter?” Dure said to the man.

The man’s chin was trembling. Bits of saliva dribbled out from his chapped lips as he answered. “Y-yes, I-I am Mihkal.”

Dure put his arm on the man’s trembling shoulder. “What happened? Where are the others?”

“T-they’re dead!” Mihkal cried.

Dure narrowed his eyes. “How did they die?”

Mihkal was sobbing again. “W-we were nearby when we saw them, everyone ran, but we were too slow, they caught up to us. I saw one of them pick up Lars and started chewing on his head! I ran and ran and I hid here!”

Dure crossed his arms. “Who did it?”

At that moment, a massive roar was heard that reverberated across the entire valley. It sounded like a strange combination of a lion’s bellow and a foghorn. For a brief second, everyone looked up in surprise. Then Mihkal started to scream.

Anders, Dure, and Ranju ran out of the front door. The visibility was still very bad as the snowstorm continued to swirl around them, but at least the base lights had illuminated the area so they could see that the other police constables had come out of the other cabins and started walking towards them.

Ramu pointed to the west. “Look!”

Due to the whiteout, they could barely see it. A strange ray of purple and blue-colored light was emanating from the very summit of Kebnekaise and up into what seemed like a hole in the sky. It looked like the fabric of space had been torn open and a vast, dark void could be seen right above the mountain. White wisps of strange, cloud-like air currents could be seen orbiting the shaft of light along with strange, dancing lights that were falling from the hole in the sky, like miniature shooting stars.

“Oh my god,” Anders said.

Everyone was looking in the wrong direction so they were all taken by complete surprise as a gigantic, grey-colored pudgy hand, the size of a small car, came in from right above them, picked up a screaming police constable by his head and then disappeared from view. Everybody let out a cry of alarm and scattered as a gigantic fur-clad foot that was as big as a small bus stomped another policeman into the ground, crushing him.

A few of them pulled out their pistols and opened fire as the two monstrous giants wandered into view. They must have been at least forty-feet tall, with sagging folds of skin and hooked noses beneath black beards the size of opera curtains and grey, stone-like flesh. The giants wore rudimentary fur clothing and boots so they at least looked somewhat intelligent, if it were not for their habit of picking up more victims with their massive hands and either crushing them into red pulp, or just popping them in their mouths to chew on.

Anders and Ranju instinctively ran back into the main cabin as the roar of the giants and the screams of the dying men reverberated throughout the doomed base.

“The power! Cut the power to the lights!” Ranju shouted to Anders as he dove underneath the table in the middle of the cabin, while the other man ran for the generator room. Mihkal was struggling to try and free himself, but the handcuffs held him fast and all he could do was to keep on screaming as one of the giants tore the roof off the cabin and sent pieces of it flying into the howling blizzard that was all around them.

Mexico

They called him El Paco. His full name was Gustavo Felipe Moreno Cabrera, but his mother always called him Paco, which in Spanish meant “free” because he had such a free spirit, even as a little child. He was the youngest of her eight children and her favorite. Even as a child he was a natural leader. Although he had five older brothers, by the time he was fourteen years of age they all respected him and did everything he suggested. That was because they all realized that he was smarter than the rest of them put together. His father hated him though because Paco just wasn’t willing to give him all the money that the boy had earned from selling fruit on the streets of Mexico City. Paco gave it to his mother instead so that the family could have something to eat rather than to support his father’s incessant drinking and gambling. So he beat the boy until the child could barely stand every chance he got. By the time he was a teen, Paco had had enough and together with his brothers, left home and traveled by foot all the way to Sinaloa, where they cultivated marijuana plants and started selling to local dealers in exchange for cash. Paco did not have much of an education since his father made him quit school when he was only in the fourth grade. Instead, he schooled himself, gathering as many books as he could find to read. By the time he turned nineteen, Paco was now a self-made man and the leader of his own gang. This was after he personally executed a local dealer when the older man insulted him in front of his brothers.

During the 1980’s, the Colombians used Mexico as a transit route for their burgeoning cocaine business in the US and Paco’s gang became one of their local affiliates. Paco had a very efficient system of transportation: he simply bribed the police and the politicians to make sure the shipments would not be stopped. He also killed any of his men who failed to deliver the cocaine on time. He got so good at it, and was invited to Colombia as the personal guest of Pablo Escobar for a month. As the US authorities tightened their patrols over the Caribbean and Florida in the succeeding decade, the Colombians became even more dependent on Mexico to bring the drugs through to the point where the Mexicans began to establish their own powerful cartels. The Mexicans ultimately became independent as the Colombian government along with the DEA, finally made headway against Escobar and the other Colombian cartels. By the beginning of the new century, Paco was now the de facto leader of his own cartel. He had now amassed a fortune bigger than Escobar had ever made over his lifetime. By this time, he had added “El” to his title and was now known as El Paco. His beloved mother had died peacefully in her sleep with the thought that she had finally raised a good boy and El Paco had an elaborate mausoleum built for her.

But there were always problems. Just as the Mexican cartels’ power had risen, so had the attention of the United States. They began pouring in resources to help the Mexican government’s efforts to stem the drug trade. The uneasy peace between the cartels had also been shattered as former members started their own families and attempted to take territory away from the old guard. The most brutal of these upstarts were the Zetas, a group of former Mexican special forces soldiers who deserted and became an enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel, until they decided to strike out on their own. The Zetas engaged in terror attacks, routinely chopped heads off their enemies and massacred scores of civilians along with anyone who came up against them. The Zetas began to take over vast stretches of territory. Being the head of the most powerful cartel in the country naturally made El Paco the number one target for the Zetas, and they tried everything they could in order to kill him. Three of his brothers died in the war against the Zetas, but El Paco was always one step ahead of them, just as he was always one step ahead of the law. Ultimately, El Paco was able to wear out the Zetas as he masterminded an alliance against them with the other cartels, at one point even cooperating with the Mexican government and the DEA in order to locate and have them arrest the leaders of the Zetas group.

After the Zetas were weakened, another problem arose when the government finally turned on him and made him the most wanted man in the country. But El Paco was still one step ahead. He had an army of three hundred heavily-armed bodyguards and informants who warned him every time the police and the military got too close. He had been hunted for over twenty years, and a legend began to grow that he would never be caught as he lived up to the name of El Paco. His stature began to grow even more, when people would tell of him brazenly walking into a popular restaurant unannounced, as he sat down to dinner while his men would confiscate all cell phones, which would then be returned to their owners after he left, and everyone’s bills would be fully paid.

El Paco continued to smoke his Cuban cigar. He sat comfortably in his chair while facing the inner courtyard of his ranch-style mansion, just a few miles from Toluca. The fifty-hectare estate was newly built up in the mountains near a protected lake sanctuary. He had decided to come out in the open again, just days after much of the country had suddenly lost touch with the Federal Government in Mexico City, just an hour’s drive away. In just a few weeks after the never ending rains started, there were rumors of rioting in Mexico City and within hours, all contact with the city to the outside world had been lost. The Mexican Army mobilized and since most of their brigades were based in the area, they quickly moved in but the regional governments had lost any and every form of communication with them as well. The Congress and governors of each state in the country quickly met to find a solution, but were unable to formulate a consensus. So the standing orders for all remaining military and police forces were to maintain a perimeter just outside of the capital city, no one was allowed to go in until more information was found as to what had happened. The entire country was now nearing a state of anarchy as local governments had been unable to cope with the loss of their national leadership.

As he stared silently out into the courtyard while listening to the incessant falling rain and enjoying the cool evening, El Paco’s walkie-talkie that was sitting on the carved wooden table began to squawk. That meant that his guest was arriving. A uniformed maid came by and placed a silver tray with a steaming pot of Colombian coffee on the table nearby. She poured him a cup along with a spoonful of brown sugar, just the way he liked it.

A few minutes later, a bald, clean-shaven man wearing a raincoat and slacks walked into the covered part of the courtyard. He was flanked by four heavily-armed men with assault rifles and body armor. The maid withdrew back to the kitchen as the man stood in front of him and held out his hand, but El Paco just had a blank look on his face as he continued to sit there and smoke his cigar.

Finally, the man withdrew his hand and took off his raincoat before sitting down on the sofa, his empty side holster at his belt. “That’s a hell of a way to treat an old friend,” the man said in perfect Spanish.

El Paco blew some cigar smoke at him. “You’re a friend now, Barton?”

Doug Barton leaned forward. “We’ve met a few times over the past decade. I’d like to think of you as a friend, El Paco.”

“Cops can never be my friends. You know that a cop killed one of my brothers, yes?” El Paco said. “I paid over two million dollars to have him killed, along with every member of his family. It took my men two years to do it because he had many children, and many brothers and sisters.”

Barton smiled. “But I’m not really a cop.”

“You’re DEA,” El Paco said. “No difference there.”

“We’re Federal agents, El Paco. Not police.”

“Same thing. Just another cop with a different badge. Where is your partner by the way? I gather this isn’t official since he doesn’t know about our relationship?”

Barton tried to keep a straight face. His informants were good. “He’s back in Tijuana. He doesn’t know about this meeting because my superiors weren’t quite sure just how he would feel about the offer I’m supposed to give you.”

El Paco smiled. “I can’t respect a cop who hides information from his own partner. In my line of business, trust is everything. If I feel I cannot trust a man, then I take steps to make sure that my risk will be minimized.”

“You mean by killing that man,” Barton said.

“Of course. There is no need to delay the inevitable. If a man cannot be trusted, then you must kill him as soon as possible.”

“You know what’s going to happen if you kill me, right? There are already US troops on full alert, stationed at the border.”

“The brigades you have along the border are mostly part-time soldiers in the National Guard, although I admit you do have a few Green Beret alpha-teams and SEALs on standby. But then again, your government is having its own problems with no planes in the air and parts of your beloved country are slowly getting cut off.”

Barton shook his head. “We’re getting away from the subject here, El Paco. My orders have changed and that’s why I’ve come to see you. We’re no longer aiding the Mexican government in arresting you.”

El Paco laughed as he sipped his coffee. “Well, considering that your government is no longer in contact with my government since Mexico City has been cut off, then there’s not much you can do about me, is there? The governors of the other Mexican states are in a panic and I can now do whatever I want right out in the open.”

“Look,” Barton said as a matter of fact. “If the situation down here gets any worse, my government will enact its contingency plan. We will start to occupy the Mexican cities along the boundary to establish a buffer zone. We will stop the refugees streaming over the border and that will include dealing with cartel members in a free-fire zone. All we’re asking for now is a truce, stop your drug shipments, especially along the Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez routes and we’ll leave your people alone. You can have Mexico.”

El Paco laughed again. “Barton, you are a fool. Mexico is already mine. Just a few days ago, my men wiped out the entire Cardenas clan. Now the entire Tijuana Cartel is gone and their territory is mine. The Zetas have not shown themselves since the Federal government was cut off. I’ve won.”

“You may think you have this country now,” Barton said. “But how long do you think you can hold it? We have very recent intel reports that the remaining troops along the Mexico City outer perimeter have either run away or disappeared. Whatever is in that city will swallow you up as well.”

El Paco smiled as he shook his head. “I’ve dealt with government people before, and I went up against the Army before, and even you and the other DEA agents, even the FBI, and I’ve always been one step ahead of them all. Whatever foolishness is going on in Mexico City I will deal with once I’ve consolidated all my territories. My army of assassins grows by the day.”