ONSET: To Serve and Protect Read online

  David walked away from the station to his car in a daze. How did Hanson know anything about Omicron and the supernatural? Nothing about the old chief suggested anything about an involvement with boogeymen and magic.

  It was comforting nonetheless. Scared as David was about the world he’d stumbled into, and Warner’s offer, that Hanson knew about it offered a hope. A hope that someone he trusted could let him know where he stood.

  The world was a lot scarier than it had been a week before, but David White was a police officer. “To serve and protect,” he’d sworn. That oath meant more to him than he could ever explain.

  It meant the same, he knew, to Chief Hanson. As David reached his beaten-up old pickup truck, he realized that he was looking forward to dinner.

  #

  David followed the chief’s directions to the letter, pulling up to the Hansons’ old country home shortly after seven. Stepping out of the car, the short police officer inhaled the scent of the spruce and the smell of someone barbecuing in the early autumn chill.

  The Hansons’ house was several miles outside the town and buried in the trees. David hadn’t seen another car on the drive out. If Darryl wanted to talk in private, his home was a good place to do so.

  A couple of centuries or so before, the house had begun as a midsized farmhouse built mainly out of pine. A century or so ago, the old wood had been reinforced with fresher wood and stone. More recently, it had been refitted with modern amenities, adding several sets of large bay windows, as well as internet and indoor plumbing.

  As David stepped up to the ancient door in the original core of the sprawling house, it swung open to reveal the tall old police chief standing there with a smile on his face.

  “Good to see you, David,” Hanson greeted him. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like I told you earlier, I feel fine,” David insisted.

  “David, I can put two and two together,” Hanson told him. “And unless I miss my guess, you were bitten by a vampire. Am I right?”

  David looked at his boss in shock and then nodded slowly. The intellectual realization that his boss knew about the supernatural had only barely prepared him to actually hear his Chief mention the word vampire so calmly.

  “Thought so,” Hanson replied in a satisfied manner. “Come in; have a seat.”

  Hanson led David, still stunned by his boss’s matter-of-fact conclusion, through to a sunken living room and gestured to a leather couch.

  “How do you know about all this, boss?” David finally asked. He’d worked for Hanson for ten years, the last three as one of his senior officers. “They gave me the impression that this was all classified beyond Top Secret?”

  “It is,” Darryl told him grimly. “Marge knows as well as I, so we don’t need to worry too much about talking about it here. I technically still hold Omicron-Alpha clearance, though no one is really supposed to keep me in the loop anymore beyond the normal Outreach updates. Fortunately, I still have friends who let me know a bit more than I’m supposed to.”

  “How?” David repeated, and Darryl grinned at him.

  “I wasn’t always a small-town police chief,” he told David. “Once upon a time, I was a Marine Sergeant with more balls than brains. Rumor went around the base of some kind of covert op taking place in a closed hangar. I, being an idiot, took the bet to see what was going on.

  “The ‘covert op’ was actually a trio of vampires and some military flunkies setting up for…well, something. I never did work out what,” the police chief admitted wryly. “I made my peek just after the vamps had woken up…and were feeding on a girl their flunkies had bought them.

  “Marines are as Marines do,” he continued, “so I charged in, gun blazing.”

  “Against three vampires,” David observed. “According to the book they gave me, that would be only slightly more survivable than what I did.”

  Darryl nodded. “I had somewhat better timing that you did,” he admitted. “You had people diverted to save your ass. I charged into a vamp nest that OSPI—Office of Supernatural etc., you’ve heard the name right?”

  “The acronym was explained,” David replied slowly, looking at his Chief with new eyes. He’d known Hanson had been a Marine. The image of him as a young glory hound was still…new.

  “Heh. This was in the late seventies,” Hanson explained. “OSPI was it—the heavy strike force wasn’t even a pipe dream. In any case, OSPI had the nest under surveillance, and their agent was about as ready to stand by and watch vamps feed as I was. I had an M1911 sidearm. He was a werewolf with an M4 rifle loaded with silver bullets.

  “When the dust settled, three vamps and twelve US military personnel who’d been working with them were dead,” Darryl said quietly. “And one junior Marine drill sergeant had moved into the elite category of folks ‘in the know’ about the supernatural.

  “The agent offered me a job on the spot. Before I knew it, I’d been transferred out of the Marines and was now an OSPI Inspector.”

  For a moment, David simply looked at the Chief he’d worked with for five years. In all those years, he’d heard Darryl’s time as a Marine mentioned a dozen or so times, but he’d never heard even the slightest hint of what had followed them.

  “I didn’t know,” he said finally, the words seeming inadequate. He wondered if anyone else in the town knew. Probably not, he realized, as secrets were hard to keep in small towns, and small towns always had men with ready prejudices and loaded guns. Men like David’s father had been…

  “No one’s supposed to,” Darryl told him. “If I wasn’t able to keep a secret, I wouldn’t have made Inspector. But…” He shook his head.

  “I made it five years,” he said finally. “The average field work life of an OSPI Inspector before being grounded by the psychs is less than four. The supernaturals take it better for some reason, but normal mundanes can’t hack it for much longer. We saw too much, and the supernatural has a weird effect on the brain.”

  “When the psychs told me I wouldn’t be allowed back into the field, they gave me two choices,” Hanson continued. “I could take a desk job in the Office, analyzing intelligence and giving advice and training to the new Inspectors, or I could go Outreach.

  “Outreach’s goal was to put at least one ‘in the know’ officer in every police department in the US—without actually going out and training anybody,” Darryl explained. “I’d met Marge on a mission out here—she’s a Mage—and decided to take Outreach. Joined the Charlesville PD twenty-five years ago, and that’s all she wrote.”

  “So, you know exactly what I went through,” David said quietly. “That vampire…I’ve never seen anything like it.” He paused. “Chief, I’ve served ten years. I lead our tactical team. I’ve had all the training and psych warnings about how to handle it, but I’ve never killed anyone before, and he…it was like killing him five times over.”

  “Don’t think of vampires as people,” Hanson said softly. “Some of them are very intelligent and very scary. Most are little better than junkies, driven by the need for their next drink of blood. They are horrendously dangerous, but they aren’t human anymore.”

  The younger officer slowly nodded. It didn’t make the images in his head go away, but it jived with the book they’d given him. Once a vampire had fed, it was too late for the vaccine. The only remaining cure was death.

  “Four years, huh?” David said finally. “That’s all they expect from an Inspector?”

  It was less than half the time he’d already given to service. It seemed too little time for the kind of sacrifice they were asking of him. If a man were to delve that deeply into darkness and magic to protect others, he should do it for more than a few measly years.

  “We saw too much,” Darryl repeated. “You learn to deal—you will learn to deal, David, hard as it seems right now,” he assured the younger man. “Some things…you just can’t deal with. More than anything else, mundanes can’t get used to dealing with magic. It scares us, somewhere deep down insi
de that we can’t teach any better.”

  David remembered his reaction when Warner had demonstrated magic to him, and nodded slowly.

  “The rumors I got said they’d classified you as Empowered,” Darryl continued gently. “I won’t nay or yea that, but if you are, it’ll be easier. Empowered can get used to magic—they have to. It’s inside them.

  “I also heard they offered you a position with the new strike force—which I honestly don’t know the name of,” Darryl finished, and looked at David expectantly.

  “What do you think?” David asked quietly. He wasn’t sure himself yet. There were too many things he needed to think about. Too much he had to accept. He felt a lot younger than he was, facing something he really wasn’t sure he fully grasped.

  Darryl shook his head. “I can’t tell you what to think,” he replied. “It’s a dirty job, David. It gets worse every year. But if nobody does it, people get hurt.”

  “My father would not approve,” David said quietly. His father had been a racist and openly disapproving of anyone outside the normal. The idea of his son being some kind of “freak”, as he would have called it, probably had the man turning over in his grave. But…

  “I took an oath to serve and protect,” he continued. Those were the words ringing through his head now, drowning out his memories of his father. The ball and chain that dragged him toward something he really didn’t want to think about.

  “It’s up to you to decide whether that means the people of Charlesville or everybody,” the Chief told him.

  Footsteps alerted David to the arrival of Darryl’s buxom wife. She bustled in, her blond-and-silver braids swinging around her head, and like Major Warner, she looked nothing like David’s image of a Mage.

  “There’s as much need for those who know the truth here as there are with the Offices,” she told David abruptly, as if she’d been listening to the conversation all along. “But there’s also a need for those who can stand and fight to be able to be everywhere. Like Darryl says, the choice is yours. Unlike the choice of whether or not you’re going to eat my dinner,” she said calmly. “That is ready now.”

  #

  David stood on the back porch of the country house, staring off into the darkness of the woods with a forgotten beer in his hands. He ignored the cushioned wooden chairs behind him and leaned against the railing, looking into the shadows.

  If ONSET was right, he was more than human. He didn’t really believe it—but part of him reminded him that they were probably better qualified to judge. Even if he didn’t admit that, there were memories of that night in the warehouse that pushed his incredulity.

  In amongst the horror of what he’d dealt with, were the flashes of moments at which six vampires hadn’t been a threat. David remembered that very clearly. Amidst the horror, there’d been a few points when he had not been afraid. According to the book they’d given him, that was something very few supernaturals—let alone mundanes—should have been able to do.

  He was sad to find a small part of him was glad that his father was dead—that the old man who’d despised anything out of the ordinary wasn’t here to face this. Yet, for his father’s narrow mind, he’d taught other things as well. He’d taught David responsibility, and to be true to his word.

  If he was what they said he was—if he was everything that night in the warehouse implied—did he have the right to deny people the protection he’d sworn? “To serve and protect.” It meant more than just the populace of one town, he realized.

  He hadn’t sworn that oath only with Charlesville in mind. It was just that as one ordinary man, one smallish town was all he could help protect. He’d done well at that—his rank and responsibilities proved that. Now…it was possible that he could help make sure they never had to fear the menaces that stalked the night.

  “I have something for you,” Darryl said from behind him. “Whether you decide to go or not, you’ll need it.”

  David turned around and Darryl held out a matte black metal case, thicker though otherwise smaller than a regular briefcase. Wordlessly, David took it and opened it.

  Nestled in the gray packing foam were a familiar-looking pistol and four magazines. The glint of the lamplight off the exposed bullets in the magazines showed their silver sheen.

  David’s reading had already brought up the fact that silver was antithetical to the supernatural. No one knew why, but no supernatural could use their abilities with silver touching them. For this reason, OSPI and ONSET both carried and used solely silver ammunition.

  “The Colt Model 1911A1 was the standard pistol of the US military for years,” Darryl said quietly. “The FBI Hostage Rescue Team used it as well. When OSPI needed to adapt a pistol for its own use, it was the obvious choice. The gun was modified over time to take into account years of OSPI experience with the difference in bullet dynamics between traditional rounds and OSPI’s silver bullets. Our cartridges have higher muzzle velocity and the rounds foul the barrel like crazy if you don’t watch it, but it’s still the same gun, with all the reliability of the model.”

  “A gun for silver bullets,” David said quietly.

  “They gave me two when I went Outreach,” Darryl told him. “I want you to keep this one, regardless of what happens.”

  David closed the case and turned to look at the man he’d worked with for the last ten years. Everything he’d been thinking about, the oath he’d sworn, the loyalty he felt to the people around him, and the dogged determination to protect that had driven him to be a police officer in the first place—even his own father’s teachings—crystallized at last, into one final decision.

  “I’m going,” he said simply.

  Chapter 4

  Michael was taking advantage of a respite from team meetings and training to actually get some of the stack of paperwork ONSET required done when his phone rang. The ONSET Team Commander looked at the black phone, as unmarked and unremarkable as the wooden desk it rested on, the green steel filing cabinets along one wall, or the white walls that were the rest of the tiny office, for a long moment. Then he answered it.

  “O’Brien,” he said into it gruffly.

  “This is Warner, Michael,” the Base Commander’s voice said from the speaker. “Your police lieutenant, White, just called in.” She paused. “He’s volunteered. You’re the designated contact officer. Meet me in my office ASAP and I’ll give you the rundown. Busy?”

  Michael looked at the over-three-inch-high stack of paper in his inbox. “Not really,” he responded, glad for an excuse to avoid that stack. “I’ll be right down.”

  #

  O’Brien entered Warner’s office to find the Base Commander on the phone. She nodded to him as he came in and gestured to a seat. The Base Commander’s office wasn’t much more adorned than his. She had the same green filing cabinets along one wall, and the opposing wall was lined with low bookshelves. Above the bookshelves was an assortment of pictures and awards from Warner’s time in the Army before she’d bounced into OSPI.

  Behind the Major’s heavy oak desk, the only real affectation in the office, a pair of flags rested on the wall: the stars and stripes of the United States of America, and the blue flag with the Omicron Office’s lightning-crossed O police badge. The two flags flanked a medium-sized portrait of a dark-furred wolf.

  “I understand, sir,” she said into the phone after a moment. “I am aware of the President’s concerns. But we lost three entire teams last year—we have to recruit aggressively to keep pace with our losses.” She paused. “I know he understands that intellectually, sir,” she continued into the phone. “But the stink he’s raising about any visibility is starting to risk our people—and I will not allow that to happen.” A moment of silence followed. “No, I am not talking about disobeying the specific directives of our President,” she said calmly. “Dealing with the politicians is your job, sir. I’m just telling you what those of us who have to do the job this organization was created for think.”

  The next pau
se was long, and Michael began to get the feeling that this was probably not a conversation he should be listening to.

  “Sir, every incidence of the paranormal is up across the board,” Warner said into the phone. “They’ve been increasing for as long as we’ve known about them—that’s why ONSET was created. Our recruiting efforts aren’t affecting that trend. That trend—and the deaths, Colonel, it’s causing our people—is why we need to recruit.”

  A very long pause followed. Finally, Warner nodded. “I agree completely, sir. But talking to the President is your job. I have recruiting to arrange.” Pause. “Yes, sir. Good luck, sir.”

  With that, she hung up the phone and turned to Michael.

  “Sorry about that,” she told him. “The Colonel called just after I got off the phone with you.”

  “No worries,” Michael replied. “Anything I should worry about?”

  “No,” Warner said flatly. “Our current President is having heebie-jeebies about anything supernatural. He wants the entire Omicron Branch to run completely black, make sure nobody knows about us.”

  “Difficult,” Michael responded thoughtfully. “Not without accepting a higher level of civilian and Omicron casualties than we already have. And it’s not like anybody will believe anything that leaks.”

  “That’s what I told Colonel Ardent,” she replied. “Of course, he knows that, and he’d already told the President that. I am very glad I do not have his job,” Warner said fervently.

  “Agreed,” her subordinate echoed.

  Warner snorted. “For me, that’s a rhetorical statement,” she said dryly. “You could have had Ardent’s job if you’d wanted it. Or my job. Or any position in the Omicron Branch you wanted.”

  Michael shrugged uncomfortably. Before OSPI’s High Threat Response teams had been spun off to form ONSET, he’d been the Brigadier, their commanding officer, the only Omicron officer to ever hold that rank. When HTR had become ONSET, however, he’d refused the Commander’s role and gone back to leading a team. He was the longest-serving supernatural in the ranks, and had made a lot of both friends and enemies along the way.