Operation: Loch Ness

- 15 -

“Remember, go for the headshots,” Banks shouted. “Center and sides.”

They all knew what the command meant; they each had a sector to defend with Wiggins on the left, Banks in the center, and Hynd on the right. The beasts gave them enough time for three hurried shots each. Wiggins put one of them down hard, Hynd wounded one in the shoulder, and Banks laid two bloody furrows along the back of a third, but the beasts had momentum on their side, and the squad had to retreat completely into the narrow doorway. Wiggins knelt down, Hynd crouched just above him, and Banks went up one step so that he could fire over Hynd’s head.

Wiggins put the closest beast down by putting three bullets down its throat when it tried to bite him. It fell at his feet, effectively making a barrier that the others had to clamber across. Banks helped Hynd put another down on top of that, blowing half its head away with six closely placed shots. That only left two, barking and howling out on the ledge behind the dead.

“Fire in the hole,” Wiggins shouted and pulled the pin on a stun grenade, lobbing it out over the dead beasts onto the ledge. The three men turned their backs and closed their eyes as the grenade went off with a blinding flash.

Wiggins was first to turn back. He jumped over the nearest dead things and Banks stepped down into the doorway just in time to see him finish off the two others where they lay, concussed and bleeding from eyes, nose, and ears on the rock shelf.

Seton came back down the steps to join them.

“You don’t need to come down if you don’t want to,” Banks said, taking out his earplugs for what he hoped would be the last time. “It’s a hell of a mess down here.”

The ledge was slick with blood, shards of skull and brain tissue that felt sticky underfoot, and the stench of piss, shit, and blood was almost overwhelming.

Wiggins and Hynd rolled all of the bodies off the shelf to splash down alongside their mother below and they all stood, watching the surface of the lake return to its previous flat calm.

“Are there any more of these buggers?” Wiggins asked Seton. “And where the fuck did they come from?”

Seton had picked his way through the gore to stand beside them.

“Whether there are more, I have no idea,” he said. “But I think the big one must have given birth when it came to full maturity, and did it fairly recently at that.”

“Bollocks,” Hynd said. “How could it get pregnant? There was only one of the fuckers.”

“Self-fertilization is my guess at that,” Seton replied. “One of the results of the alchemical quest is the perfect, immortal hermaphrodite. I think Crowley got closer than anyone ever imagined, at least for one of his experiments. And we also have a reason for the large one to have become so emboldened in recent times; it was hunting to feed its offspring. Otherwise, it would have stayed nocturnal and reclusive and we might never have known it was here.”

“And the young? They’d be hermaphrodite too?” Banks asked.

“In theory, yes.”

“And what if there are more? What do I tell my superiors about this bloody mess?”

Seton laughed.

“Tell them the loch will once again have its monsters, but they will be elusive as ever, staying mostly nocturnal and quiet, feeding on fish or maybe the odd seal. They won’t reach full size or maturity for a hundred years or more. It’ll be somebody else’s problem by then.”

They made the climb back up into the light in silence, each man lost in his own thoughts.