Pulse

by Jeremy Robinson

  “Copy that, but see if they can squeeze another mach or two out of the Crescent. I’m not sure if we’ll be around in an hour.”

  Deep Blue’s shadow nodded. “The satellite feed will stay open. Use it to coordinate your actions. Who’s that behind you?”

  King looked back. Beck was looking over his shoulder. “A friend. Pawn.”

  The designation of Pawn said all that needed to be said. They could talk details later. “Good enough. God speed, King.” The screen returned to the infrared satellite imagery. Orange splotches wove through the forest in a wide swath, but eventually turned in a single direction. Downhill. Toward the campground.

  Before King could curse their bad luck, a burst of gunfire turned him around. He ran to the exit with Beck, fighting against the flow of people and looked inside. At the far end, where the last few stragglers fled, the Hydra rampaged. Bodies flew through the air missing limbs, spewing blood, and splattering against walls. The four Hydra heads took bites from the bodies, but never slowed its motion as it seemed to prefer still-living flesh over the freshly killed. King wondered if the creature was intelligent enough to know it was a man that had imprisoned it for so long and was exacting a kind of revenge. Or maybe it had simply gone mad, like a regen?

  Bishop unloaded with his machine gun, sending high-caliber bullets whizzing over the heads of the last few people running down the hallway. The Hydra fell over as the stream of bullets struck its front legs, spilling the creature to the ground. Knight fired his weapon, one accurate round at a time, focusing on the Hydra’s eyes. Blinding it. Stumbling it up. But only slowing it down. Each burst eye and ruined leg quickly healed. As the last of the fleeing Manifold personnel ran past, Bishop’s belt ran out of rounds. A moment later, Knight’s magazine ran dry.

  They watched in awe as the Hydra pounded down the hallway. It moved clumsily at first, as its legs and eyes finished healing, then picked up speed. When it roared with all four heads stretched out toward them, King shouted “Run!” and all three men leaped into the woods, bunny hopping fallen trees, plowing through brush, and, within thirty seconds, passing the slowest of the Manifold personnel. King wanted to stop and help, but with ammo needing to be switched out and the Hydra hot on their heels, they wouldn’t stand a chance. Until they’d regrouped, the scattered mass of people were on their own. That is, unless their own security force stepped up.

  King remembered Beck and looked for her. She was gone. Damnit, he thought. How could he have let her disappear like that? Better yet, why did she leave?

  A roar rolled down the mountain from behind them and propelled them forward. As they slid down a steep incline they heard a voice call out to them, “Here! Over here!”

  A woman wearing glasses and a lab coat waived to them from inside a small cave. King ran for the cave, followed by Bishop and Knight. “There’s room for all of you.” She ducked inside the cool, dry cave that descended slightly into the mountainside—a gift left from the passing of ancient glaciers. King motioned Knight and Bishop inside as a rustle of leaves told him someone else was approaching from above.

  One of the stragglers, an overweight man, working for each breath, stumbled down the incline. King lunged for him and took him by the shirt. The man shouted in fright at King’s sudden appearance, but silenced quickly upon realizing he wasn’t being eaten. King shoved the man into the cave where he was caught and sat down by Bishop.

  King ducked into the cave and was about to tell the man to stay quiet when the earth around them shook. The man fell silent.

  King backed into the darkness with the others as a single Hydra head appeared from above. It tasted the air with its tongue, flapped its ears against its neck, and let out a shriek. A second head joined it, searching the fringe of the cave with its snout. As the head slid into the cave, King aimed his assault rifle at it. He knew he couldn’t kill the creature, but he wouldn’t go down without a fight. If he was lucky, it would back off enough for a few of them to make a run for it.

  A distant scream—a man in pain—caught the Hydra’s attention. The head pulled up out of the cave and rose up, out of sight with the other. Hydra’s roar, just above them, shook the ceiling of the cave. The overweight man began to sob, but Bishop’s large hand covered his mouth.

  The Hydra jumped down from above, landing elegantly, like a cat, despite its size. And its size is what King noticed most. It had nearly doubled in size since he saw it in the Manifold facility. It looked to be the size of an elephant now, sporting four ten-foot necks and a long whip-like tail. The creature landed lightly and bounded off into the woods, heading toward the screaming man.

  King looked back at the others in the cave. Bishop removed his hand from the fat man’s face, allowing his jowls to shake as he said, “Whoever that is doesn’t have a hope in the world.”

  Knight and Bishop reloaded their weapons and slipped past King, exiting the cave. King shot the man a serious glance before exiting and said, “He has us.” Then they were gone, giving chase to the world’s oldest living predator.

  58

  New Hampshire

  As King rounded a tree and entered a blood-soaked clearing he realized the fat man in the cave had been right. Body parts were strewn about. Flesh dangled from broken tree limbs like jerky set out to dry. A severed leg had rolled over and flattened a stand of ferns. And the body, missing several large chunks, lay face down, compressed in mud. The Hydra had killed the man savagely, eaten very little, and then stomped him flat.

  Knight said what he was thinking. “This doesn’t fit any feeding pattern I’ve ever heard of.”

  “I think it’s pissed,” King said.

  Knight knelt down by the severed leg as Bishop swept the area with his machine gun. “Check this out.” He peeled back the man’s blood-soaked sock. A deep slice severed the man’s Achilles tendon. “The cut is clean.”

  King inspected the deep gouge marks cutting across the man’s back. They were wide and jagged. The cut through the man’s ankle was made by something else entirely. “A knife.”

  Knight agreed. “Someone is stacking the odds in the Hydra’s favor. This man didn’t stand a chance because he couldn’t walk.”

  A distant scream rang out. High-pitched. A woman. But the direction was impossible to gauge. King produced his PDA, and watched the dance of infrared figures on the screen. A few distant dots were still moving fast—the fittest and most agile of the Manifold employees. Others were huddled together. Probably hiding like the group they’d left in the cave. Some wandered aimlessly, and a few looked to be lying down, perhaps hiding. King zoomed in. Or perhaps struggling to run away with sliced Achilles tendons.

  King watched as the human shape on the small screen reached up its hands. A scream rolled through the forest, matching the woman’s movement. It was her. He was about to launch toward the woman, but the image on-screen kept him from moving. Her glowing orange body lifted from the ground, flew back and forth, then apart. As pieces of her rag doll form cooled and disappeared from the infrared, King realized what he’d seen.

  “The Hydra is cold-blooded. We won’t see it on the infrared.”

  “But we can see where it’s going,” Knight said, pointing at the right side of the screen. A second person, struggled to crawl away. Then a third. And a fourth. A human bread crumb trail. King scrolled farther to the right, following the trail. “That doesn’t look friendly.”

  A crescent of orange dots, upwards of forty people, sat still and silent. An ambush. King recognized the cold, square shapes mixed in with the small army. The abandoned kid’s camp.

  “Let’s go.”

  The three were up and running, led by King, straight toward the next victim. King glanced at the screen as a man’s shriek filled the forest. On-screen, the next orange blob in line burst into pieces. The Hydra wasn’t even slowing down now. A second man began screaming. Hydra’s roar followed.

  King picked up the pace. People were dying because he was too slow.

  The man scr
eamed again, closer this time. He was silenced as his body burst beneath the Hydra’s pounding foot, sounding like an overfilled water balloon exploding.

  They ran past the man’s body, which had been crushed upon a rock. The Hydra hadn’t even paused to bite him. The next bread crumb, now screaming, posed too much temptation. As another woman screamed out, King paused. The scream meant they were too late to save her, but it also meant Hydra had entered the campground.

  Approaching low to the ground, King, Knight, and Bishop peeked up over a rock at the fringe of the campground. Hydra stood at the center, its four heads snatching chunks of flesh from the woman’s body King noted her uniform. Gen-Y had sacrificed one of their own to set the trap.

  Knight saw the uniform, too, and raised his scope to his eyes. He saw the face and sighed with relief. It wasn’t Beck.

  “Fire!” The voice belonged to Reinhart, hidden somewhere out of sight. But the men obeying his order were not. They stood atop and inside the old cabins, rising as one and unleashing a barrage, at close range from their Metal Storm rifles and handguns. The number of rounds fired in the first thirty seconds was impossible to count, but the effect was clear. Hydra snapped at the air and twisted in pain as chunks of its body were blown away. Blood coated the pine needle-covered forest floor and clung to the sides of trees. The Hydra was being torn apart.

  Some of the men focused on one of the necks. It severed and fell like a tree, crashing to the ground, where it writhed for a moment, then began to dry and flake. A leg burst and Hydra fell to its side, immobilized.

  King wasn’t sure who he should be cheering on. The Hydra was a monster to be sure. It would most likely go right on indiscriminately killing every human being it came across. And he wasn’t sure they had the means on hand to kill it. Gen-Y clearly did, but if they survived, he, Bishop, and Knight would be facing a three on forty fight that he doubted all of them would survive. Maybe none of them would.

  “Spray it down!” Reinhart shouted. Five men with large containers on their backs emerged from the cabins. They sprayed gouts of foam that expanded and hardened, locking the Hydra in place. Bishop recognized it as the same foam used on him, only a lot more of it.

  “They’re pinning it for something,” Bishop said.

  “Okay, fall back!” Reinhart’s voice rang out again. “Incoming!”

  When the Gen-Y team hit the deck, King, Bishop, and Knight did as well. “Incoming” was a universal term for “duck or die.” King couldn’t help but watch, though. He peeked one eye around the rock. Hydra was attempting to stand as its leg regenerated, but the foam kept it stationary. The creature shook with exertion and the foam began to shatter away, but a cloud of high-caliber rounds hammered Hydra from above. Trees disintegrated. The hard foam turned to dust. The ground shook. Hydra shrieked as its body became like wet Swiss cheese. As the rounds continued to rain down from above, King realized this was the same Metal Storm weapon used to nearly sink the USS Grant. As Hydra continued to shriek he couldn’t help but feel bad for it. What kind of creature could sustain a barrage like this and still have enough fight to whimper, let alone wail. It had to die, but it deserved respect.

  For a full thirty seconds after Hydra’s wails were silenced, the storm of metal falling from the sky continued. When it stopped, a cloud of dust hung in the clearing like a curtain. King could hear the voices of the Gen-Y soldiers checking in, but their words couldn’t be discerned over the ringing in his ears. The dust settled in minutes and King got his first look at the Hydra. Its body was mangled, almost beyond recognition. More bloody pulp than living thing.

  Gen-Y soldiers descended from their rooftop positions while others exited the cabins. They approached the Hydra, some reloading weapons, some already taking aim at the fleshy pile. They split as Reinhart, Ridley, and Maddox appeared from behind a row of cabins. “Is it dead?” Ridley asked.

  “I’d say so,” Reinhart replied.

  “Burn it.”

  As Ridley turned to leave, King took aim. Ridley and Reinhart were their targets as much as, if not more than, Hydra. Then he paused. “Does something about the Hydra look different to either of you?”

  Knight shook his head.

  Bishop squinted. “I’m counting seven heads.”

  “How many did it have before?”

  “Four,” Knight answered.

  King lowered his aim. Even while being pummeled by the Metal Storm rounds, the Hydra had continued regenerating heads, three of them. He watched as the wounds on the side of the immobile creature began to fill in. The Hydra still lived. “This is going to be messy.”

  59

  New Hampshire

  The first man snatched screamed like a wounded cat before he was flung through the roof of a nearby cabin. A few of the men standing closest took aim, but the other six heads snapped out like whips, squeezing the life from them as rib cages cracked and internal organs ruptured, then tossing them aside and striking out at other men.

  Chaos ensued as the Hydra, still healing, stood again.

  Some of the Gen-Y men turned and fled without a second thought. Others fired their weapons, but with their force already cut in half they could do nothing to slow the rapidly regenerating Hydra. Some men threw grenades, which had an impact, but more than a few went wide and one bounced back. The concussion sent three men flying. One legless.

  Hydra threw itself into the remaining men. Their gunfire did little to slow the enraged beast. As one man became mush beneath its foot, another was eviscerated by its snapping tail. But the majority of damage came from the lightning-fast heads, snapping out like a twisted game of hungry, hungry hippos.

  Five more Gen-Y men fled, all running in the fastest direction: downhill. Maddox was among them, clutching his briefcase.

  Reinhart and Ridley, however, fled away from the others, heading back toward the Manifold facility.

  Hydra spun in circles, looking for more attackers, but found only bloody, oozing corpses. It roared, louder than ever as the last of its wounds finished healing. Then all seven heads spread in different directions, tasting the air. Snapping branches caught their attention. All seven heads looked downhill, where the fleeing men were doing little to conceal their frantic flight. The Hydra roared again, then smashed through a cabin, reducing it to splinters, before barreling down the hill.

  King cursed. He’d watched the whole gruesome event alongside Knight and Bishop. The Hydra was a killing machine. That a single man had managed to subdue the creature seemed impossible. If Deep Blue was right, and its regenerative ability could be stopped, it would be possible, but it had withstood a barrage powerful enough to destroy anything man-made and had come out stronger. And to make matters worse, it was heading for a campground full of families. The Hydra had to be stopped.

  But he also couldn’t allow Reinhart or Ridley to escape. He turned to Knight and Bishop. “I’ll go after Reinhart and Ridley. Do your best to slow it down. Make protecting the people in the campground your—”

  Bishop was already up and moving. He passed through the decimated kids’ camp and launched down the hill.

  “—priority,” King finished, then added, “Switch weapons. You’ll need the heavier firepower.” Knight took King’s M4 and handed him the MSG3.

  “You might need this, too,” King said, handing him the PDA.

  As Knight pocketed the PDA and jumped up to follow Bishop, King added, “Keep an eye on him.”

  Knight gave a thumbs-up and sprinted after Bishop. He was faster than Bishop and could normally catch up, but he was still human, and already breathing heavily from the past hour’s action. Bishop, on the other hand, seemed right as rain; no doubt a benefit of his regenerative abilities. He couldn’t get tired.

  As Knight reached the drop-off behind the kids’ camp he paused and looked downhill. In the distance he could see six small figures popping in and out of view as they moved between trees. Behind them ran the Hydra, its heads flailing, rattling, and roaring. Though it gained on the fleein
g men, it did so slowly. It ignored trees and other obstacles, preferring to smash through them than run around. The result was a chaotic stumbling stride that left a cleared patch of forest in its wake. Knight stole a glance at the PDA map. They were just under a mile from the campground. They’d reach the quad in ten minutes. Maybe less.

  Clutching his weapon, Knight dashed down the hill, leaping stones and running along fallen trees. His chest heaved from the exertion, but he was happy to see that he could still move faster than the average man, or regenerative man for that matter. He gained to within twenty feet of Bishop, just as Bishop caught up with the Hydra...and Hydra caught up with the fleeing men.

  Knight had to duck as a man was snatched up and flung backward. The man soared over his head, screaming as blood seeped from a myriad of tooth punctures. A loud crack issued from behind him as the man struck a small but sturdy maple tree, folding his body around its trunk, backwards. He wiped the man’s blood from this face as he leaped a fallen tree.

  The Hydra struck a rock and careened head over heels, rolling over three more men, crushing them into the mountainside. Without missing a beat, the creature was back on its feet, nipping at the heels of the lone remaining Gen-Y guard and Maddox, whose scream undulated with every rapid footfall like Axel Rose squealing on a scratched Guns N’ Roses CD.

  The Gen-Y man tripped and screamed as his leg snapped. The Hydra snapped down at him as it passed, taking an arm and portion of the man’s chest with it.

  “Help me!” Maddox screamed, realizing he was next. “Somebody help me!”

  Knight slowed some as he passed the armless, dying man. The fear stitched across his face turned to placidity as his life ebbed. He had never come across something as unforgiving and capable at killing as the Hydra, and for the first time in his life he felt his steady hands shaking.