Rage Read online

  Blood War Rage

  Doug Burbey

  &

  Mel Todd

  Copyright © 2018 by Melisa Todd & Douglas Burbey

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Bad Ash Publishing

  Atlanta, GA

  www.badashpublishing.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Book Layout © 2017 BookDesignTemplates.com

  Cover by http://www.ampersandbookcovers.com/

  Blood War Rage /Doug Burbey & Melisa Todd. -- 1st ed.

  ISBN 978-0-9905182-6-6

  To all of those who came home, but never forgot their brothers and sisters who didn't.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 – SASC Hearing Testimony

  Chapter 2 - Hanging it Up

  Chapter 3 - Scattered

  Chapter 4 - Rage Bubbles

  Chapter 5 - When Dealing with Mages

  Chapter 6 - Dreams

  Chapter 7 - Dumb and Dumber

  Chapter 8 - Demons Attack

  Chapter 9 - Allies?

  Chapter 10 – Coming Down

  Chapter 11 - Kayter and Miriam

  Chapter 12 - Shane is an Ass

  Chapter 13 – Spying on ICERs

  Chapter 14 - ICER Offer

  Chapter 15 - Offer you can't refuse

  Chapter 16 - New Toy

  Chapter 17 - Straps Shrunk

  Chapter 18 - Meeting with a Demon

  Chapter 19 - Puppeteer

  Chapter 20 - First Assignment

  Chapter 21 - Tank Rage

  Chapter 22 - Boss and Picnics

  Chapter 23 - VFW Scene

  Chapter 24 - Stooges Call

  Chapter 25 - Calling in Reinforcements

  Chapter 26 – Have Chopper Will Travel

  Chapter 27 - Late to the Party

  Chapter 28 - Post Mortem

  Chapter 29 - Fleeing the Scene

  Chapter 30 - Escape

  Chapter 31 - Boss Finds Out

  Chapter 32 - We Meet Again

  Chapter 33 - Dressing Down Kids

  Chapter 34 - Toys and Picnics

  Chapter 35 - Doors are made for Busting

  Chapter 36 - A Fae Walks into a Bar

  Chapter 37 - What do you say to a drunken Fae?

  Chapter 38 - Phonebooth

  Chapter 39 - Puzzle Pieces

  Chapter 40 – Grilling Up the Past

  Chapter 41 – Lighten up Georgetown

  Chapter 42 - Playing Batman

  Chapter 43 - Truth May Get You Killed

  Chapter 44 – Reset Raid

  Chapter 45 – All can die

  Chapter 46 – Everyone Lies

  Epilogue - Demons Have Plans

  Prologue

  To fulfill Presidential executive decree for the Demon War surviving United States military personnel in regard to LTC Declan Kenner.

  [Historical excerpt from Library of Congress of the Demon War complied for general usage]

  April 13, 2014 is officially the day Earth became aware of other planes of existence and non-humans, referenced as “Demons”, stepped forth and started their attack.

  Looking back, we realized they had been popping in and out for centuries, but their presence was only referenced in mythology and fairy tales.

  Initially, a glowing oval appeared just above the surface of the ocean about eight miles off Point Baltim, near the Kafr El-Sheikh Governorate on the north coast of Egypt. This immediately garnered worldwide attention. In the space of minutes, it started as a bright speck and expanded to a circle over fifty meters wide. The world tuned in as it glowed, with colors and swirls like something out of a special effects workshop. When the first demonic machine came through, the world lit up with social media, talking about invasions, alien visitors, the end of the world, and the final reckoning. They were all essentially correct.

  Large barge like vehicles emerged and began moving towards shore, even as more and more smaller vehicles filled with beings headed directly towards the city. The lore was only half right. Demons were hard to kill, perverted models of the human form, made to rip humans to shreds and some of them were dangerously smart. At the incoming horde, most people panicked, others watched, filming and streaming on social media. At least until they died, along with most of Cairo.

  A bridge of barges was created faster than the Egyptian military could mobilize and the hellish troops descended into the city. Once the bridge was created, the Harvesters were brought in. These tug boat sized, apocalyptic, demonic, tank-tracked mechanizations were part twisted organics and part machine. They acted like a mobile vacuum, extracting the blood and liquid from all dead mammal bodies within a range of eight kilometers of each harvester and it flowed into large tanks towed behind the machine. The rivers of blood talked about in the Bible became real, along with horizontal blood rain, as the blood was sucked towards each harvester through the air. The Demons ran through the streets, efficient killing machines, not doing anything but slaughtering every living thing as fast as they could move.

  The Egyptian military fought back but they had been caught off guard and couldn't mobilize fast enough to arrange any coherent response. While they killed Demons, they didn't kill enough to make a difference. In the space of two hours, they mowed through Cairo killing over 75% of all people in the region, then the horde moved towards Jerusalem.

  Tacticians, in retrospect, determined that the emptiness between the two cities delayed Jerusalem's fate. Missiles started to fly and the horde retreated. While we know demons were killed, an exact count of their losses was never tallied. The demon horde pulled back to the portal and it snapped closed, leaving the world in shock. As panic flashed through the world, militaries mobilized, and people demanded answers. The world remained at DefCon 1 for three months and nothing - no portals, no demons. If not for the deaths and ruin of Cairo it might have been a bad dream.

  On August 25th, 2014 they came back. A portal snapped into existence outside Minsk, Russia and devastation rolled out. The portal appeared almost dead center of the city and by the time they realized it, the death toll had sky rocketed. Minsk became a wasteland in an hour and the horde - bigger, faster, and moving with a speed even rail couldn't match - swarmed towards Moscow.

  The Russian army tried to maneuver into position but they couldn't get organized fast enough. The city was razed by demons, larger than anything filmed in Cairo and even tanks had a hard time killing the biggest ones. Not as much was streamed into the internet as Moscow didn't hold the same tourist population but the pictures taken afterward of the remains were burned into the fabric of civilization. Tanks, missiles, even knives were used against the horde and it barely slowed down. This time, however, with Moscow in ruins, another portal snapped into existence, the harvesters, tanks full of blood, and the ground troop demons streamed back through it and were gone.

  What few demons had been killed were snapped up by government agencies around the world for study, everyone trying to figure out if there was a solution to stop them. Many prayed for an H.G. Wells solution but the results all came back negative. Resolutions were passed unanimously allowing the use of any, and all, force by the U.N. member nations to defend humanity. And the world waited.

  The world offered aid for Cairo, Minsk, and Moscow but the devastation in those cities could only be compared to Hiroshima. Some of the Demons had b
een big and strong enough to knock down smaller buildings. People lived who hid in the larger buildings but then our own weapons killed them collaterally when trying to stop the invaders.

  It was at this point that strange stories came out, of soldiers creating fireballs, sinking into a berserker state and killing in close combat like the Vikings of old. Where a year ago the stories would have been dismissed as the ravings of people with post-traumatic stress disorder, the scientists listened, everyone wondering about the blood. Why was the blood of people so important? That was when blood became everything, the key to magic, to fighting these invaders, and why we were being attacked. The demons had come to harvest our blood and fuel their demonic magics in some religious zeal for power.

  Again, the world waited, but more demons kept coming. Smaller raids, ten to twenty demon soldiers, with portable blood harvesters on their backs, killing and draining, leaving bodies drained of blood, but not desiccated like the larger harvesters, behind them. People fought back, but each raid resulted in dozens to hundreds of dead. One memorable event had a small portal manifest Los Angeles, CA. Street gangs went to war with demons and the death toll was humans five, demons fifteen. But these were only minor engagements compared to the huge portals. The wait for the next major attack wasn't as long and the United States found out the hard way why nuclear weapons would not be the answer to this problem.

  On December 1, 2014, a portal appeared outside of Minneapolis. Evacuation procedures kicked in, people knowing that to stay was to die, and the military moved in. Response times had been cut down to minutes and the US military didn't even need to institute the draft as people flocked to join, terrified by what they had seen. Jets took to the air, attacking as the first harvesters came out and it was then that the military found out portals and flying objects, or electronics of any kind, didn't mix.

  The US launched hundreds of planes from nearby bases, Canada joined the fight by sending their troops and planes into the fray. As the planes got within three miles of the portal avionics went dead, all electronics failed, and the planes fell from the sky. Missiles fired at them experienced the same fate. Even ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) once within that range simply became a kinetic weapon and they weren't traveling fast enough to do the level of damage needed. One insane helicopter pilot figured out that if the chopper stayed within twenty feet from the ground all equipment worked, letting them use machine guns and rockets on the demons. But only a few pilots could pull that off and not end up killing more of their own people than demons.

  The horde rolled through Minneapolis and people couldn't evacuate as fast as the horde moved, so they fought even as the military swarmed in to try and protect them. The US's tactics proved a bit more effective and the military had started equipping and training their own force of novice mages. After embracing the new found human ability to leverage magic, they moved heaven and earth to gather every bit of lore ever written on the subject then put it to use. The decision had been made at the top to use a nuke but the problem became how to deliver it.

  In a name that would go down in history, half reviled, half honored, Major General (Retired) Emory Jenkins, volunteered to take a W54 style nuke to the portal. Set up in a high-speed armored dune buggy with a nuke strapped to the back, the general wove through the demons and detonated it a half mile from the portal when his buggy became immobilized, and he was swarmed by the horde. The bomb exploded into the expected mushroom, sending death and destruction with a ten-megaton yield. The world watched horrified and hopeful at the same time. Exultation rippled around the world as the scene cleared and dead demons coated the ground, nothing moving. Hope spurted that if you hit it hard and fast enough, the casualties could be limited. But, the portal had stayed open and demons started coming out, pausing as they stepped into the human realm.

  Satellites directed at the spot captured what happened next. The demons swelled, their skin glowing, and they changed. When they started moving they moved faster, stronger, the radiation altered the exposed demons into something even worse. The same demon types that had been destroyed by tanks before were now ripping the American main battle tanks to pieces.

  The US managed to force them back to the portal this time, but the costs were staggering. Over 2 million civilians were declared dead or missing. The military strength of the US was now depleted by a third as battalions of men were dropped into the zone, knowing if the demons didn't kill them the lingering radiation would. They killed every demon and none of them made it back through the portal but of the 150,000 service personnel that went into that battle, 131 walked out alive. Within the next 45 days, 29 of the survivors died of radiation poisoning, 74 unexpectedly committed suicide and the final twenty-seven simply disappeared back into the nation’s population.

  There was another period of silence, with only small portal raids into remote areas of the world by the demons. The biggest, with three hundred demons, happened outside Jerusalem and ended in a battle that all but destroyed the area with most of the buildings within 15 miles. After the consequences at Minneapolis, everyone agreed that nuclear weapons were not the answer but more research was needed. At this point most of the world was focused on building up armies and being ready for the next attack. And the world waited.

  January 7th, 2015 humankind was exposed to a new revelation. The U.N. General Assembly was called into session to hear from a man named Lwellyn Ich Salidian. He claimed to have critical information about the war that he would only share with a global body and not a lone nation-state. He revealed that humans were not alone on the Earth and, in fact, he was not human. He was the local leader of a race spread throughout the human world in small numbers, called the Fae, who had been placed in our realm to act as scouts. They monitored our realm’s development, assessed possible threats from us, and alerted their home realm of any demon appearances in ours. They had been on earth long enough that their earliest encounters with humans spawned the human mythology of elves before they learned the skills to hide, completely camouflaged in human societies. The Fae have fought the demons through their history, with devastating losses, before they successfully shut off the passage from the demon realm to the Fae realm. They feared that the demons would use the human realm as a possible pathway to once again cross the realm wall using the human realm as a gateway point.

  A small number of Fae Embassies were established to allow formal interspecies communications. Fae scouts began to provide the human governments with a trove of information on demonic tactics, weaknesses, and weaponry. But while they had no army in the human realm, and none would ever come from the Fae realm, they would share with humans what they knew of magic to help us in our fight against the hordes. Every nation on earth took up the Fae scouts’ offer of aid and began training more proficient human mages quickly.

  May 3, 2015, a major portal opened about thirty miles outside Pyongyang, North Korea. Refusing all outside assistance, the leader of Korea didn't listen and drove in nuke after nuke, putting ballistic missiles on flatbeds ordering them to be driven as close as possible before detonating. When South Korea was confronted with the invading horde from the north, the US directed more of its quickly diminishing resources to aid its long-time ally. The deciding factor ended up being rail guns from US Naval Ships, along with troops from China and Russia, smashing into the horde from a second front. The kinetic impact of the rail guns did more damage than almost anything else. Efforts began immediately to create lighter, higher rate of fire, rail guns that could be moved into position with the most advanced power cell storage systems ever developed. By the time the horde was stopped, North Korea was a wasteland of radiation and the dead; the portal collapsed but nothing remained of that country except a handful of survivors.

  New rules of engagement were put in place - ground forces only, anything else just wouldn't work. The militaries worldwide ramped up again. By strokes of luck, or planning, these invaders had not taken out any major industrial or agricultural areas. While the world wa
ited and planned, life outside of the hard hit areas proceeded almost as normal, except for the sensation of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  Minor demon raids continued and gun orders went through the roof. Most of the industrialized nations becoming open carry zones but the death toll outside the major portals rarely climbed higher than bad natural disasters. Australia was hit but with typical Aussie fashion they kept the death toll down and beer consumption up. In July of 2015, another large series of raids hit Guadalajara, Mexico. Over twenty portals opened in that city during the month. By the time the mini raids were done over fifteen thousand people were declared dead.

  A massive portal opened inside of the city of Detroit, Michigan on October 25th, 2015 but this time the US was ready. Rapid deployment of tanks, personnel, and kinetic weapons were moved in, the rail lines cleared even as the city evacuated. The joint military ground forces, now including the battle-hardened SSAU “Demon Hunters” and mages, moved in with orders to win at all costs. Those who couldn't evacuate, fought. Gang leaders and law enforcement officers, factory and office workers, hunters and ex-military personnel moved into legendary status as they fought side by side against the demons.

  This time with hardened armor, enhanced small arms and artillery munitions, the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines understood that no quarter would be given. The military drove them back, not letting a single harvester back through the portal before it collapsed. The Battle for Detroit cost the United States Army the lives of nearly 75% of the 1st and 7th Infantry Divisions. But now, with a survival rate for troops pushing upwards to 25%, it was considered a huge success from previous battles. Even though the demon horde was not completely destroyed and had begun to move westwards down the I94 highway corridor, its size had been reduced by nearly 50%. The biggest win was figuring out where the portals opened and that had been aided by the mini raids. While Ley lines had never been accepted by science, the reality of Becker-Hagens Grid lining up with the portal openings could not be disputed. Small crossings allowed the mini-portals to open enough to let in a few demons but to open the huge portals, all of them required a multiple crossing of lines.