The Green Lama: Crimson Circle (5 page)

Please don’t let anything be broken
, Jean prayed to whichever deity was listening—she had met a few so she wasn’t going to be picky. She pushed herself up off the ground and onto her knees, an effort that took more strength than she cared to admit. Her wrist was on fire and her body was bruised to hell, but thank Whoever, nothing was broken.
I guess there are still miracles in this world
, she mused. She looked over to see the man running toward her, a wobbly gait that brought to mind a gorilla at the zoo. He let out a loud, horrible sound—at once a screech, a growl and a moan.

“All right, buddy,” she grumbled, shaking her head. “You’ve officially gotten on my nerves.”

Something metallic glinted in the corner of her eyes, just out of arm’s reach. Her lips curled in to a smile. Rolling over the cobblestones, she snatched up her pistol and fired, hitting the center of the scarlet wound on the man’s forehead, the back of his head exploding out in an eruption of brain and black. He stumbled forward, his legs moving impossibly one step, two steps forward before giving out completely. His body dropped to the ground with a slippery crunch, his head cracking against the ground, black fluid flowing out like a sickening waterfall.

Jean sighed in relief and found her way to her feet, her eyes never leaving the black bleeding corpse. There was something so unsettlingly familiar about this, like an echo of a dream or an after-image of another life. Her teeth began to chatter, but not from the cold. She glanced down at her hands and realized they were shaking violently.

Far above her, there came a crack of thunder and the clouds opened up. She tilted her face up to the rain, hoping it would wash everything away.

• • •

THE SPITFIRE from the German airplanes laced the sky around them, hot white streaks of light that burned in Caraway’s retinas and brought back awful memories of Bloody April. His throat tightened at the memories of air and fire, but did his best to keep his mind focused on the terrifying here and now. He worked to evade the gunfire, weaving through the air; but the plane was too fat and slow. It was only a matter of time before the German bullets hit home. They were over water; an endless black and purple speckled blur rushing below them. He had hoped to make it back to the States, but if they could just cross the Channel and make it on to English soil, they might be all right. At least, that’s what he hoped.

Keep it together, John, he reminded himself. They ain’t as bad as the Baron. No one’s as bad as ol’ Red. Keep it together for Harry.

“How you kids doing back there?” Caraway shouted back pleasantly, putting on the best smile he could manage. “Enjoying the roller coaster?”

“Robert threw up,” Nancy replied.

“Ain’t roller coasters fun?” Caraway replied, distracted as he worked over the controls, his smile a faded memory.

“No,” the little girl said.

“Yeah, everyone loves a roller coaster,” he mumbled as a bead of sweat trickled down his forehead. He needed to get them out of this, he had promised Harry; he couldn’t let him down now, not when they were so close.
Come on, you can figure a way out of this, Johnny. You’ve faced bigger things than this
, he tried to reassure himself.
Nothing can be bad as
—

The idea popped into his head, a trick Eddie Rickenbacker taught him back in the day; the “Whirling Dervish.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, trying to shove the notion back down into his unconscious, but... “Dammit, it worked before,” he said aloud. He turned to Helen: “I’m gonna try something, it’s pretty stupid and it ain’t gonna be fun, but it might be our only chance outta this.”

Helen met his gaze. “Then you should just get it over with,
nicht wahr
?” she said, tightly gripping her hands around her armrests, her knuckles bone white.

Caraway gave her a somber expression and nodded. He glanced back over to Nancy and Robert; they were both buckled up safely. He gave them one more reassuring smile. He wished he could promise them it was going to be okay, but he didn’t believe that was true anymore. Better to remain silent than to lie.

He turned back to the controls. “Here goes nothing…” He pulled the plane up into a steep climb, his body pressed against his seat as gravity fought to keep hold. “Dammit, where’s the Green Lama when you need him?”

• • •

BLOOD SPILLING out from his nose, Gary whirled around and aimed his revolver at the Fifth Columnist. All he needed was one clean shot—didn’t even need it to be deadly. Shatter a muscle or slice a bone. Just get the bastard to the ground and the machine gun out his hands. Simple as that, and no one was as good a shot as Gary Brown—at least that’s what he told himself.
Please, God let that be true now
, he thought. He squeezed the trigger, his stomach dropping as he heard the hollow, metallic
click!

Dammit
, he was getting rusty; he thought he had counted five.

Evangl had promised it was going to be simple when they were pulled out of semi-retirement to face off against the fascist terrorist group.
Come on, sweetness
, she had said, kissing him gently on the cheek.
How many times have we taken these guys down? Besides, after that mess up at the Fortier, this will be a cakewalk.
Maybe it was the war ratcheting up in Europe, maybe the Fifthers had finally gotten their act together, or maybe Gary was simply losing his touch; whichever it was, things had quickly gone south.

As the Fifth Columnist swung the machine gun toward them, Gary’s eyes snapped over to Evangl, whose face wore the same expression of panic, and he knew their thoughts were shared:
Who would take care of their daughter?

“Get down!” he screamed as he dropped his gun and raced toward Evangl.
Let me get there in time
, he thought.
Please, just let me get to her in time
.

It was all a blur of light and motion. The machine gun came alive in a blast of noise as fire laced through the air, brushing against Gary’s cheeks. Neither of them screamed—they were braver than that—but they couldn’t help but wince at the sound. But the bullets never hit, there was no burning pain of metal slicing through them—only the odd pitter-patter echoes of the slugs bouncing unusually to the floor.

Gary risked opening his eyes to find a wall of jade standing over them. “Tulku!”

• • •

THERE IS no word in the English language to describe what it feels like to wield the power of the gods, to know that with a flick of a wrist you could destroy cities, though Jethro Dumont tried hard to find one. It is nothing to stare down the barrel of a gun when you have the fire of ten thousands suns burning through your veins. The bullets struck Jethro’s chest and stomach with an echo of a sensation he would have once described as pain, but was now only an annoyance.

He glanced back at Gary and Evangl crouched behind him. Gary was staring at him with a mixture of shock and amazement—and perhaps, fear—on his face. Jethro fought back a frown; he had forgotten Gary hadn’t been there with them at R’lyeh, hadn’t seen him become the Scion and defeat a deity. There was so much to explain, but now was not the time to give answers, only a quick wink of reassurance.

Jethro turned back to the Fifth Columnist and raised his hand. A green light began to emanate from within his veins, out into his skin, growing brighter and brighter until his whole hand was a single point of emerald luminance.

He whispered, “
Om! Ma-ni Pad-me Hum!
” as a short blast of energy shot out from his open palm, disintegrating the machine gun in an instant, an explosion that sent the Fifth Columnist flying back through the doorway, crashing into the far wall of the neighboring room.

Boots clomped against the rotting wooden floor, racing down the steps, the metallic click of machine guns being loaded as men shouted in German. Jethro closed his eyes, pricked up his ears, and listened to the footfalls rushing towards him. There were six of them, all armed. Jethro grimaced.

“Stay down,” he commanded Gary and Evangl. He took a step toward the doorway, feeling his heart thrum in his chest. The Fifth Columnists funneled down the hall past their fallen comrade. That was sloppy, Jethro thought. These weren’t the soldiers he had faced back in his early days down in Camp Himmler; these were hate-filled boys falsely believing themselves men. Another energy blast was out of the question. It was one thing to send out a small controlled blast to incapacitate one gunman, but to take them all out at once would require an amount of energy that would more than likely kill them along with Gary and Evangl; and that wasn’t an option. He had already broken that central tenet of his faith once when he had murdered Heydrich in R’lyeh; he would not do so again if he had the choice. Instead, he would have to face them one-by-one.

To the naked eye, Jethro appeared to be little more than a green blur, a continuous streak of motion that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once, but for Jethro, it was as if time had slowed down. The first Fifth Columnist charged forward, his gun already singing. Jethro grabbed the muzzle and twisted up. He heard a bullet hit the inside the barrel and bounce back into the magazine, the gun exploding in the Fifther’s hands. Jethro then moved to the second attacker and struck him hard in the jaw with an open palm. A tooth flew out of the attacker’s mouth with a bloody comet’s tail as he fell backwards, his gunfire going wild. In a single motion, Jethro caught four bullets that were heading toward Gary and Evangl and dropped them carelessly to the ground. Then, without a micron of hesitation, Jethro shifted his left leg out, tripped the third man, and slammed an elbow into the back of the man’s head.

Two more men charged at him. Jethro dove forward and whipped around in mid-air, tapping them both at the base of their skulls, sending a small shock into their vestibular nerves and the Brocas Centers, shutting down their balance control and speech centers. The effect was instantaneous and both men collapsed into two limp, mumbling piles.

Jethro rolled into a crouching position as bullets whistled past his ear, a sound that, in a past life, would have left him frozen in fear, but had now become so commonplace there were days that he almost felt he missed it. Jethro spun around to face the final terrorist, a brick wall of a man with a forehead to match, his machine gun ablaze. Ignoring the bullets now bouncing off him, Jethro focused his energy into his glowing fists, wincing at the sensation—power did not come without its cost—and in a fluid attack, struck the gunman in stomach, chest, and head. The man was unconscious before his legs decided to give out.

The air crackled with electricity as the energy slowly ebbed from Jethro’s hands. The sensation was intoxicating, if not frightening. Looking over the destruction in his wake, he was reminded that with power like this, he could easily conquer the world or, he so desired, destroy it. There were those who would call him a god, and perhaps that was true, and if not a god, then a member of Asura, a demi-god. But, he was not, he reminded himself. Though a Bodhisattva, he was still flawed and breakable, filled with passion, desire, doubt, and pride, hunting for enlightenment. He was still part of the samsara, the continuous flow, the Human Realm.

“Holy God,” Gary breathed in disbelief as he and Evangl gingerly got to their feet. “How the hell did you do that?”

The Green Lama looked back at them, fear stinging their eyes, and gave them a tight, somber smile. “Things have changed.”

Chapter 2:
The Twenty-Two

THE PROJECTOR rattled to life, the soft white glow doing little to lighten the darkened conference room. Twenty-two figures sat around the long black table, their faces hidden in shadow. Seven seats were conspicuously empty, and an eighth had been permanently removed. The film fed through the lens and the numbers counted down. 5, 4, 3, 2…

“As with other costumed vigilantes and adventurers, we have been tracking this Green Lama, for a number of years. We can confirm his activities in New York as early as 1933 and his work against the Medusa Council in 1935. This, however, was the first footage we were able to find of him,” one man said, a small gold Γ—the Greek letter Gamma—on his lapel. His voice was gravelly, old and scratched from years of cigarettes. His fat fingers were soft with long, well-manicured nails. “Item number four-five-five was filmed the twenty-fifth of January 1936 by an operative in Cleveland during the Pelham Incident.”

The first of a series of clips began to play, an extreme wide shot of a city street littered with unconscious bodies and stalled cars. A robed man darted out from the shadows toward a hardware store and then disappeared.

“Hm, not much is it?” another man frowned, considering the blurry black-and-white footage, drumming his boney fingers on the table. He was wearing a gold ring with the Greek letter Δ—Delta—in the center of a field of black. His voice was like reeds on a windy day, just above a whisper and disquieting.

“This next clip is significantly better,” Gamma said. “From the unfinished Carter Mitchell film,
Midnight in the Garden
, marked item number six-six-one.”