Page 37 of The Elementalist (Four Elements #1)

At least it doesn’t matter if I look like a militarized yoga enthusiast now.

My only mission at the moment is to get out of Nicaragua.

I open the pocket near my right hip and pull out the smashed remains of a burner cell phone.

Damn. Something tells me a 2,000-foot drop isn’t covered in the protection plan.

I go to toss the useless thing, but stop myself. Humans contaminate nature with enough junk already, they don’t need my help. I’ll carry it back to civilization, throw it in a trash can… and let one of them dump it in the jungle.

Right. Still stranded… somewhere in western Nicaragua.

Garza had been on his way to a meeting in Honduras.

I need to get to Dipilto Viejo, a small town near the border.

We have a guy there, a former Delta Force operator who can fly me to Cancún.

Easy enough to hop a commercial flight back home from there.

But first…

I extricate myself from the shallow grave my landing dug, dust myself off more, and turn in place looking at trees.

From my landing point, I’ve got no idea which way the plane crashed.

It went down way faster than I fell. Since my cell died an inglorious death, I check over the rest of my gear—handgun, sword, mini toolkits, electronic lockpick, etc.

Everything else appears intact, though the sheath on my left thigh has a small dent.

I still draw the wakizashi to check the blade.

Fortunately, it didn’t bend. Then again, it’s a tungsten alloy with a chromium steel edge.

Even I couldn’t snap this blade if I wanted to.

Though, my muscles can’t compete with crashing into the ground at terminal velocity.

And yeah, I have a sword. Night walkers are effing stubborn. The two best ways to kill them are beheading and complete destruction of the remains. A fourteen-inch blade is a lot easier to carry around than say, an active volcano or bathtub full of acid.

I slide it back into the sheath until it locks in with a click.

The orientation of my impact gouge tells me the direction the plane had been going.

I’d be remiss in my mission if I didn’t try to make visual confirmation of a kill, so I make my way into the jungle.

One good thing about this place: the thick vegetation overhead keeps the ground level dim enough that I’m not constantly squinting.

Talk about a grapevine effect. While the sun doesn’t hurt us, my kind prefer the dark since our eyes are designed to cope with it.

The Agency saves quite a bit of money by not having to issue me night vision gear.

Desert ops generally require sunglasses, but unlike the movies, we don’t burst into flames or anything.

I honestly have no idea who even came up with that whole sun equals spontaneous combustion thing.

My best guess is someone back in the 1400s or so heard a vampire complain about the sun because it made him squint, and somehow over the years that turned into instant death.

Even the night walkers aren’t like that, though daylight does hit them a little harder.

***

At 5:38 p.m. local time according to my watch, a whiff of burning finally blows by on the wind.

The soft scratching of aluminum shards on the breeze steers me a bit to the right. Soon, I discover the clearing the crash made, still with a few smoking patches of flames around it. I’m no NTSB investigator, but I strongly suspect this sucker went straight into the dirt like a dart.

My nose leads me to the heavily-blackened remains of several bodies.

The pilot died before the plane hit the ground, courtesy of the idiots.

I eventually locate what I think is Garza’s remains, but the piece I find is just that…

a piece about the size of my fist and squishy.

Could be a partial kidney. Were he alive, I’d probably be able to identify him by sniff, but the overwhelming stink of overcooked barbecue and jet fuel is far too strong to pick out something as faint as a human’s personal scent.

“Okay, I don’t see any tracks walking away and…

yeah.” I look at all the parts and junk strewn about.

“No way he made it out of that… the body is in pieces. I can’t even find the head. ”

For extra assurance, I decide to take a sample and bring it back for DNA analysis…

but the two phials in small pockets near my hips are pulverized.

So much for that. I’ll get enough weird looks walking into a civilized area in this suit, the last thing I need is to be carrying around a burned piece of human kidney.

Screw it. He’s done.

Well-done to be exact.

I toss the lump back to the ground, check my compass, and head north-northwest.

***

A few minutes after the sun sinks beyond the trees along the horizon, a whole mess of screaming breaks the silence of the jungle.

I’m passable with Spanish, though I studied Mexican Spanish…

so parts of the local dialect go over my head.

However, I can make out a middle-aged woman, a younger woman, and two men having an argument.

The older woman alternates between pleas ‘not to take her’ and threats of divine retribution, which the men laugh off.

Screaming coming from the younger woman mostly consists of ‘get off me.’

Ugh. Probably a tiny gang kidnapping a young woman for obvious reasons. Normally, I’d avoid contact with the locals while making my way to an extraction point, but I can’t let this go.

Besides, I’m hungry. Extreme skydiving takes a lot out of me. It’s kind of a high-impact sport.

I pick up the pace and divert toward the commotion, reaching a dirt road about thirty seconds later, which I follow to the left in the direction of the shouting.

Beside an old, battered pickup truck, two men struggle to contain a panicking girl of around sixteen while a third man holds a fortyish woman—who I assume to be the girl’s mother—at bay with his AK-47.

All three guys are dressed in T-shirts, with either jeans or camo pants, their clothing so worn out a thrift shop wouldn’t take it as a donation. Yeah. These guys are part of a small-time gang involved in less-than-voluntary prostitution.

They pin the girl against the side of the truck, forcing her arms behind her back.

She screams for her mother like a child half her age.

“Adriana!” cries the woman, her body language suggesting she’s close to rushing in even with a man poised to shoot her.

He’s my first priority.

I hurl myself into a sprint as fast and quiet as possible in the daytime.

I’m way faster than humans, but not so fast they can’t see me.

I do, however, get lucky and reach the guy aiming at the mother before the other two react to my approach.

My target doesn’t notice me until I grab his rifle and shove it upward.

He squeezes off a burst that goes over the woman’s head an instant before I ram the weapon into his face hard enough to knock him senseless.

Both other men abandon their hold on the girl’s arms to go for the rifles slung over their shoulders.

I fix them with a stare, stabbing them in the brain with a mental command to stand still.

Their arms fall slack at their sides and they stare vacantly into nowhere.

“Mama!” shouts Adriana, running to hug her mother before bursting into tears.

The mother regards me with a look of mild distrust. She grabs Adriana and retreats a step, looking back and forth between me and the two men. “W-why are they just standing there? Even if you run them off, they will come back.”

I smile at her. “No they won’t. At least not these three.”

“You’re an American?” asks the teen girl, a hint of a smile peeking out from under her tears.

“Yeah. Is my accent that obvious?” I pivot the AK down and shoot the first man in the chest twice.

Neither Adriana nor her mother flinches at all.

“What are you doing here?” The mother blinks at me.

“My flight made an unscheduled stop.” I walk over to the two catatonic thugs. “If you have to fly, don’t take Garza airlines. They’re a total letdown.”

The young woman and her mother both gasp as I pull Kidnapper One into an embrace and bite down on his neck.

“Y-you’re a vampire!” blurts the mother.

My lips still clamped on the man’s neck, I stare into her eyes. It seems a bit wrong to make a sarcastic remark to a woman who almost watched her daughter forced into prostitution, so I merely say, Yeah telepathically.

Her eyes widen in fear.

One good thing about finding a piece of shit like this after a dive from an airplane is that I don’t have to fight my hunger while feeding.

With each mouthful of blood, the dull aches and pains that had been suffused throughout my body fade away.

Sigh. I evidently hadn’t healed all the way.

A minute or two later, I drop his corpse and debate taking a bit more from the second guy. Yeah, screw it.

My mental compulsion wears off within seconds of biting him, so he starts screaming and flailing around.

I reapply a state of calm by accelerating his face into the side of the pickup truck a few times.

The bang, bang, bang startles a couple birds out of a nearby tree.

I’m beyond full before taking enough blood to be lethal to the second guy, so I throw him to the ground, and feed him a couple bullets from the AK.

The girl stares at me with a mixture of awe, gratitude, and revulsion.

Since it’s only been like twenty years since my kind revealed ourselves to the world, I probably should do a little PR. “We usually never kill when eating, but these three deserved it. I hate kidnappers.”

“Please, you take Adriana as a thrall, yes?” asks the woman.

“Mom!” The girl stares at her, ‘oh hell no’ written plain on her face.

“Go with her. It is much better than you winding up with men like these.” The woman hugs her again as if to say farewell.

“No, Mama!”

While I can understand the woman’s opinion that being enthralled to a vampire is a fate superior to forced prostitution, I don’t much like the idea of that either. Kidnapping is kidnapping regardless if the restraints are physical or psychic.

“Relax, both of you. I don’t take thralls.” I grab the first dead guy and toss him into the pickup truck’s bed. “And the others I know who do, only accept willing ones.” That isn’t technically a lie, since knowing someone and knowing of someone are different things.

The body hits the truck with a dull thud.

Adriana’s eyes widen at me with a grateful expression.

“You’ve killed these men but others will come,” says the mother. “They always do. I do not want my daughter to be…” She chokes up and covers her mouth with one hand.

“I can’t take her with me, nor does she want to be anyone’s servant.”

Adriana nods at me, then looks toward her mother. “Those men are from Ocotal, they won’t come back here, Mama.”

While the two of them get into a whispery argument over the mother’s willingness to let me take her daughter as a servant, I collect the other two dead guys and toss them in the truck. Adrianna stops arguing first when I approach them holding the three AK-47s.

“Here. If more come back, these should help.”

Adriana takes one eagerly. Her mother less so, but she grabs the other two by the straps.

“Which way is it to Dipilto Viejo?” I ask.

Both of them point up the road.

“Go that way. First time you can turn left, go left. It’s six miles after the turn.” The mother eyes the rifles like she’s not exactly sure how to even hold them. “I don’t know if this is going to work. They’ll only kill us.”

“I’d rather die,” mutters Adriana.

“Is there nothing more you can do for her?” Her mother stares pleadingly at me.

Ugh. I can’t take some random kid back to the States.

I gaze into her eyes and implant a few memories of combat training.

I’m no Special Forces commando—some of those guys can put a bullet into a one-inch circle at twenty feet without even looking over the sights—but even the fuzzy, watered-down quality of inserted knowledge should be enough for her to deal with these morons.

Her eyes flutter when she lifts out of the mental fog. She glances at the rifle, eyebrows furrowing in confusion at the sudden knowledge of how to use it.

“There. That’s as much as I can do to help. Gotta go.”

Adriana offers a grateful smile. “Thank you. You’re like an angel from heaven.”

I raise a finger, about to make a quip about falling out of the sky, but nah. After nodding at the mother, I trot over to the pickup, hop in, and head off down the road, looking for a spot to ditch the bodies.