No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,115

much that wouldn’t. Better safe than sorry.

Most of the search hits were a miss. The one that looked most promising also looked the least promising, as in “Don’t be stupid, Ash: call Joanne in on this one,” least-promising. Demons and godlings were out of my league. I double-checked the data from the normal channels against the undernet sites most often used by adepts like Joanne and reapers like me, and didn’t come up with anything better. Either I was on the money, or the thing I was chasing was so obscure not even the connected world-wide efforts of scholars, demon hunters, and magic-users could had a database entry for it.

I cleared the windshield and muttered, “Joanne’s mobile,” to the car, which phoned her as I pulled out of the diner’s parking lot. Her phone went to voice mail, which made me check the time. No, I wasn’t calling at a bad hour, she just wasn’t picking up. Fair enough. “Hey, Jo, this is Ash. I’m heading for Keechelus Lake and maybe a Sumerian demon. If you’re not busy this afternoon I could probably use your help. The river’s boiling and the mythology says a god killed this demon back in the day. Give me a call if you can make it.” I hung up, drove back toward the lake, and pulled off the road where the bushes along the roadside were densest.

It wasn’t dense enough, to my eyes. I backtracked to fluff grass up where I’d stepped on it, and to drag deadfall into more of a blockade, but I still thought the car stood out like a sore thumb. That was potentially a huge problem. This far out of town I had to worry about State Troopers, and they were the leos with the millimeter wave scanners that a lead box in the trunk couldn’t trick. But there was road and there was mountainside. Not much choice in the matter. Not for the first time, I regretted driving an older vehicle: my Cadillac was three times as long as the newest electric cars. I could have buried one of those in the roadside bush without a problem.

But new cars minimal trunk space, and unlike Jo, I couldn’t afford to go into battle with nothing more than my charm and good looks. She had a magic sword, for Pete’s sake.

I had a grenade launcher.

I wasn’t supposed to, of course. Nobody was, especially since the country-wide crackdown after the election riots when I was seventeen. That was part of why I’d gone into the Army instead of becoming a cop—it had become clear there would be advantages to having friends who worked in military supplies. As a result, the trunk of my Caddy looked like I was preparing for the zombie apocalypse, though from what I understood, zombies were extremely difficult to raise and that threat was negligible. My arsenal was meant for other, more likely scenarios, and the grenade launcher was the least of it.

Most of the grenades I carried were flash-bangs, not frags, but I had lethal capability if I needed it. I also had stun guns, pistols, knives, a garrote, and a slingshot. I’d been surprised at how loud a gun with a silencer was, the first time I shot one. Movies lied. So I’d learned how to use the slingshot for when silence really mattered, and if I thought I would be doing range-hunting, sometimes I took the compound bow out of the trunk too.

Not today, though. I packed grenades, flash-bang and frag alike. I took my space blanket, in case I was out too late and needed warmth. The brand name was something else, but the common name had stuck through the decades, even though a modern space blanket was nothing like the sheet-of-Mylar old ones. Mine didn’t just trap body heat. It absorbed and re-focused solar power, and could be set to release warmth either slowly or quickly. I folded it over my backpack so it would gather heat while I hiked, then slipped my phone’s tiny flat-panel subwoofers into the pack’s outside pockets, muttering, “In case I’m out too late and need a party in my pocket to keep me going.” It sounded like something Joanne would say, which pleased me. I strapped knives to both thighs, slid the stun guns and one pistol into the backpack along with the frags, and shouldered the pack on before sliding my Glock into the custom holster built into the pack’s straps. I put a water bottle