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sporting a red hole in his chest framed by the scar of an inverted cross. His wide-open eyes pointed emptily at the ceiling.  
    Talon dropped to his haunches and inspected the body. How had the man died? Had he been shot in self-defense? More importantly, why had the cult left behind one of their own? Maybe it was a form of punishment for getting himself killed.
    He touched the man’s body. Judging from the warmth of the corpse, the man must’ve died within the hour. Dammit, he just missed them! If he’d been just a little faster…
    Had anyone heard the gun being fired? The lack of cops seemed to suggest otherwise. Or if they had, they’d failed to report it. One bullet going off in the Arizona desert could easily be ignored.
    Talon proceeded to analyze the man’s bare torso. He took note of the frog tattoo with the Roman numeral six hidden in the design. He recalled Cabrera’s words: “I believe these killers were soldiers.”
    The Navy Seal tattoo seemed to confirm the priest’s suspicion. Classic ink for the unit was a trident, but nowadays most operators avoided unit-identifying tattoos. If a mission went wrong and an operator ended up captured in a foreign jail, Special Forces tats would be brought to the attention of the intelligence service. Selling a cover story of being a student visiting a Third World country was tricky with a trident on your shoulder. Smart soldiers hoping to avoid waterboarding and electrical shocks steered clear of classic designs.
    If Cabrera was right about the cult, its members were all former elite soldiers. What would drive these men to unite under such a dark ideology? The question baffled Talon and was real cause for concern. He was up against professionals like himself. Men trained in the art of war who now served the darkness.
    As Talon took a closer look at the corpse, he caught a faint whiff of an earthy, sour odor. Investigating further, a thin crust of dried droppings clung to the soles of the dead SEAL’s shoes. He’d become intimately acquainted with the smell while riding horses in the mountains of Afghanistan during the war with the Taliban.  
    This brought up an interesting question: Where would the cultists come in contact with horses?

C HAPTER T EN

    AS THE SUN set, the purple light took on a hint of orange, the desert cooling off quickly. The twenty-acre horse ranch squatted forlornly in the expanse of sage, pine, and cacti. At the center of the property, an old Victorian home with sandblasted exteriors and grime-covered windows sagged in the dust. A rattlesnake slithered through the sand, cutting a hasty retreat as two battered pick-up trucks pulled up to the ranch. Doors snapped open and four strongly built men emerged from the vehicles.  
    The army of the apocalypse soldier.  
    More men greeted them at the house with machine guns slung over their shoulders. Two wiry, compact soldiers carried Nicole’s unconscious form to the house. Their boots kicked up dust as they navigated the dirt road to a wooden barn, past the wreck of a rust-covered Chevy wasting away like a wounded beast. A few horses grazed inside a nearby corral.  
    They entered the large stable where more black-clad cult members sporting AK-47s waited. Starlight bled through the rafters and played across the old oak beams and bales of hay. A pentagram drawn in animal blood covered most of the floor. The two cultists bound Nicole’s hands and feet with zip ties and lowered her in the red circle.
    She lay there for a beat before one of the soldiers splashed water from a canteen over her upturned face. Nicole woke in a flash. Her eyes flickered open as she wiped her face and coughed up water.  
    Where am I?
    The smell of compost straw, wood, and human perspiration greeted her return to the waking world, and it almost made her gag. She soaked in her surreal surroundings, desperately trying to make sense of the nightmare she’d stumbled into. Masked men with machine guns encircled her, too many to