Pulse

by Jeremy Robinson

  King was incredulous. “What!”

  “Call me back from Ridley’s PDA. Hurry.”

  King didn’t argue. This was Aleman’s forte. He had no choice but to trust the man. He dialed Aleman from Ridley’s PDA. But when the phone on the other end picked up, a loud squealing sound came through, like a dial-up modem. A text message appeared on the screen.

  Just need a few minutes.—Lew

  A flash of movement tore his eyes away from the PDA message. As he turned, the moving object coalesced into a muddy wing-tip shoe. Ridley. King moved away from the kick, but only managed to soften the blow. Ridley’s heel connected with his cheek, knocking him across the cabin where he spilled onto Beck.

  When King spun, he expected Ridley to press the attack, but was greeted by a gust of wind and the unhindered noise of the rotor blades cutting through air. Ridley stood at the open door, clutching the sides while his suit coat flapped violently around his waist. “I could have offered you the world.”

  “You would have destroyed it,” King said as he righted himself.

  Ridley backed out a little farther, glancing down. His face twisted with nausea from the height.

  “Don’t be stupid,” King said.

  “Death is a more becoming alternative to imprisonment. I was meant to be free.” He looked at Beck. “Eternity awaits.” He let go of the door frame and fell back as a smile stretched across his face.

  King and Beck looked out the side, watching his body twist in the air. His face struck a horizontal pine branch tree that sent his body into a rapid head over heels flip. A second branch tore his arm away. He disappeared in a spray of blood as the pine canopy swallowed him up.

  King slid away from the open door and closed it. He turned to Beck, who had already moved back inside. “I don’t think that was quite the noble fall he had intended.”

  Beck glanced out the window as she began to reply. “Ridley was—

  Oh my God!”

  Beck’s cry drew King to the window. The campground quad spun beneath them as the pilot circled. The scene looked hopeless. Knight was on the ground, motionless next to the wrecked Chevy Tahoe. Bishop stood alone on the quad, backing slowly away from the Hydra, whose body and heads lowered to the ground like a cat about to pounce. In seconds Bishop would be a stain on the grass. And if he happened to survive the attack thanks to his regenerative abilities, his mind would most certainly be lost. His heart sank as he thought for sure he’d have to watch his friend die gruesomely.

  Then he remembered the Gatling gun.

  63

  New Hampshire

  Bishop swung high, bringing the blade straight down as the first Hydra head shot toward him. The razor-sharp machete cut cleanly through the snout of the Hydra’s open maw. But as the injured head reared back, stitching back together, a second was already striking. A third followed seconds later.

  Moving backward, Bishop swung the blade as fast as he could, hacking at the barrage of heads. The Hydra kept on healing and striking, but its low tolerance for pain kept an injured head from attacking until it was fully healed. Despite Bishop’s efforts, each attack pushed him back and came closer to striking home. It was a losing fight.

  As two heads struck at once from the front, Bishop swung horizontally, hoping to cut through both heads, but he failed to see a third head striking from the right. Instead of biting, it rammed his legs. Bishop fell to the side, causing the two striking heads to miss the mark, but the impact was enough to break his leg and jar the blade from his hand. The blade twisted through the air and fell into the grass, hard to see, impossible to reach.

  An intense itch ate at Bishop’s leg as the bone reset and mended. He could feel the sinews and veins as they stretched out to each other and bonded. He growled in annoyance and fought to stand, but the Hydra was upon him. Pain shot through his legs as jaws clamped tight around both his calves. The Hydra’s hooked teeth easily pierced and clung to his flesh and bones. The head yanked him off the ground and tossed him into the air. When he landed, twenty feet away, already healing from the deep puncture wounds, the beast was upon him. This time it took him by the waist and threw him again, playing with him like a cat does a mouse.

  Bishop landed hard on his side, breaking his arm. He screamed with rage as he stood again. The Hydra pounded toward him. But rather than run away or wait to be tossed again, Bishop charged with a battle cry. As he ran he took out a small throwing knife and clutched it in the hand of his freshly healed arm. It wouldn’t do much damage, but it was something.

  Knight pulled himself up using the Tahoe’s rear door handle. He leaned against the SUV’s side and watched with horror as Bishop was tossed into the air like a rag doll. As Bishop was released by the Hydra, a trail of blood followed his arc through the air, but disappeared before he landed, fully healed. He was being torn apart and put back together again, over and over, and he was taking it all without losing his mind or focus on his enemy. Not yet, anyway.

  Bracing himself against the SUV, Knight limped to the back of the vehicle and threw open the rear hatch. He lifted a plastic panel, revealing a keypad, and typed in a code. A lock clicked open. He pulled the panel up and looked at the assortment of weapons, from small arms to claymore mines to heavy-hitting assault rifles, which is what he was after. He took out a spare SOPMOD M4 with attached 40mm grenade launcher, already loaded, and hobbled back around the SUV.

  When he faced the battle once more, a smell carried by the breeze struck him. It was a mix of coppery blood tinged with something foul, like fish that had been left to rot and bloat in the sun. Knight watched as the Hydra, charging at Bishop once more, slipped in the grass. Red liquid splashed around its massive paws. The field was covered in blood, both Bishop’s and the Hydra’s. The copper smell was Bishop’s blood. The rancid smell belonged to the Hydra.

  Fighting his gag reflex, Knight took aim, but what he saw next kept his trigger finger from squeezing. Bishop was charging the beast head-on like he was Superman about to stop a runaway train. It was madness.

  He watched as three of the heads launched forward, jaws open. They would have torn Bishop to pieces if he hadn’t slid down onto the grass like a baseball player stealing second. The momentum carried him forward as the Hydra’s charge carried it over him. He slid beneath its belly, jabbed the small knife up, and carved a three-foot incision into the creature’s belly. As the blade cut through the thick flesh it made a sound like paper being torn. The knife snagged on a bone and was torn from Bishop’s hand. But the damage had been done.

  The Hydra toppled onto its side as its entrails spilled out and dragged through the grass behind it, unraveling like an anchor line. Its head swung up and around, biting at the exposed guts as the wound tried to seal. But with too much flesh in the way, the wound remained open, seeping more rank blood into the grass. The Hydra flailed madly, but soon focused on the source of its continuing pain. It quickly bit away chunks of its own organs, snapping through them and discarding the shriveling meat. It stopped when the wound was clear and free to heal over.

  Knight took aim at the stationary Hydra, but Bishop stood in his line of fire. “Bishop!” he shouted. “Get down!”

  Before the big man could move, one of the Hydra heads, attracted by the sound of Knight’s voice, turned and found Bishop. It struck out, catching him by the waist. The head clamped down and twisted like a crocodile, tearing out a large chunk between his rib cage and hip bone. Bishop cried out and fell to the ground. A second head shot toward the prone man as the Hydra righted itself. But the strike never finished. A glowing burst of tracer bullets shot from the sky like a laser beam, striking the head and reducing it to the consistency of pulled pork. The headless neck flailed like a dying snake as the other six turned upward.

  Knight followed the Hydra’s gaze. A helicopter circled and unleashed a second round of Gatling-gun fire, striking Hydra’s side. With a rattling roar, the Hydra quickly healed and stomped off in pursuit of the helicopter, which stayed just high enough
not to be caught, but low enough to entice the beast.

  As the chopper spun around the quad, laying down bursts of powerful Gatling rounds, Knight noticed a small black speck in the sky above. Its boomerang shape brought a smile to his face. The cavalry had arrived.

  64

  New Hampshire

  Wind tore through the rear compartment of the Crescent as the rear hatch opened. It was cold enough to blister skin and powerful enough to suck a man’s breath away, but Rook and Queen didn’t feel its effects from within their thermal jumpsuits, face masks, and helmets. As the rear hatch continued to open, Rook looked over at Queen.

  “You sure that’s going to work?”

  Queen looked down at the weapon she and Rook had rigged during the flight from Gibraltar. They had raided supplies from the both the onboard armory and medical suite. With advice from experts quickly assembled by Deep Blue they were able to create a high-power dart gun capable of firing three rounds full of Alexander Diotrephes’s serum, which they had yet to test. Any number of things could go wrong. The gun could jam. The injection mechanisms could fail. The serum might not work.

  “Without a doubt,” Queen replied.

  The hatch finished opening and the pi1ot’s voice came over the comm. “Target sighted. Jump on my mark. Three...”

  Rook hefted a heavy AT-4 SMAW (shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapon) over his shoulder and strapped it down tight. It was loaded with a single high-explosive antiarmor rocket capable of obliterating any tank or armored vehicle in service.

  “Two...”

  He nudged Queen. “Hey, if I don’t see you at the bottom...”

  “You’ll see me in Hell.”

  “I would have said—”

  “One. Go! Go! Go!”

  Queen and Rook leaped from the back of the Crescent and quickly reached a terminal velocity of 124 miles per hour. The air pressure pushed against their top-heavy, weapon-laden bodies, threatening to make the fall an uncontrolled tumult, but both kept arms and legs spread wide, controlling the descent and staying on target.

  The first minute of the two-and-a-half-minute drop passed in a blur of clouds that covered their face masks in mist. Once through the cloud cover, the mist evaporated, revealing the scene below.

  The Hydra twisted and writhed under a constant barrage of Gatling-gun fire, shooting from the side of a small jet black helicopter. A pool of blood covered the field and reflected the sun. A small figure by a ruined SUV launched grenades, which blew gouts of blood and flesh away from the roaring creature. The sound of the roar was so powerful that it covered the distance to Rook and Queen, who heard it over the wind and through their helmets. But what caught Rook’s attention as they closed in was the body lying in the grass, fifty yards from the Hydra. The man’s size and dark skin made him wince. It was impossible to tell from this height, but his gut said the body was Bishop’s. He lay twisted and still. A dark red pool covered the grass to his side.

  He wanted to fall faster, but they had long since reached terminal velocity and would greet the ground in less than thirty seconds...far fewer if he forgot to pull his chute. He took hold of the ripcord and waited for the last possible second to cheat death.

  Knight held his fire as the two falling specs grew in size. Rook and Queen were taking the express route down. He watched as both chutes popped and unfurled, snapping the two soldiers violently, but only slowing their decent enough to avoid death. After a quick semicircle decent, Queen hit the ground with a roll and came upright in a crouch. She intended to take aim and fire upon landing, but Hydra lunged at her billowing parachute, took hold of it, and yanked hard. Queen was tossed low and fast. She landed in the blood-soaked grass, sliding to a wet stop. She fought past her revulsion of being covered in rank-smelling blood, wiped the grime from her helmet’s face mask, and took aim from where she lay. Lining up the Hydra was easy and she pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession. Three small projectiles shot from the weapon’s muzzle. The first ricocheted off at an odd angle. The next two pierced Hydra’s back and stuck there, dangling limply from its hide.

  Hydra turned toward the source of what was merely a pinprick and saw Queen’s parachute billow once more. It shrieked and charged the large fluid intruder.

  Queen discarded the makeshift weapon and tried to stand and run out of the path of the oncoming behemoth, which now had its eyes on her. But she had become entangled in her parachute lines. She drew her knife, intending to cut herself free, but it was easy to see she wouldn’t get loose soon enough. She drew her pistol and fired at the beast as it stormed toward her.

  Rook landed hard on the shingled roof of the Snack Shack, denting it. But his momentum didn’t slow. He rolled down the roof’s incline, toppling head over heels, and fell over the edge. But the ten-foot drop to the grass below was stopped short when the chute snagged on the roof’s cupola. He hung, three feet above the ground.

  A shriek brought his head up as he swung back and forth on the parachute lines. He looked up and found the Hydra, massive and horrific, bearing down on Queen, who was firing a pistol at it. He had no idea if Queen had managed to inject the Hydra with the serum, and if she had, how long before it took effect. But there was no way he was about to let this thing trample Queen.

  Rook unclipped and raised a beige cylinder to his shoulder and did his best to aim while hanging from the parachute lines. Not only did he have to line up the Hydra, he had to lead the last-moving creature. With only thirty feet between Hydra and Queen, he pulled the trigger. The SMAW boomed as a blast of flame burst from its back and a rocket shot from the front. The recoil, not normally enough to phase a crouched soldier, flung the hanging Rook back and up, smashing him against the roof’s overhang, knocking the now spent antitank weapon from his hands.

  Queen heard and recognized the noise. She dove down and curled into a tight ball, hoping the thick jumpsuit, flak jacket, and helmet would protect her from the blast.

  The rocket blazed through the air, leaving a twisted coil of smoke in its wake. It covered the distance in seconds, striking the Hydra in the side before the beast could react. As the rocket penetrated the Hydra’s side, it let out a wail—seven octaves of pain—before its body burst. Its bulk came apart in every direction, as its flesh was liquefied by the force wave and then charred by the flames. Fiery entrails rolled across the grass, leaving slick stains behind them. Necks and heads shot free, twisting in the air like loose ropes before landing. A wet crater was all that remained of the Hydra’s body.

  Rook shed his harness and helmet and ran to Queen. He helped her up out of the bloody soup, which covered her from head to toe. She wobbled for a moment, shook up by the explosion. With Rook’s help, she removed the helmet, freeing her clean face and hair. “I’m okay,” she said, looking up at him.

  “Good,” Rook said with a slight smile. Then he remembered the body he’d seen when descending. “Bishop!”

  Together, they headed for Bishop. Knight approached from the SUV. The helicopter landed and idled as King and Beck exited. They all arrived by Bishop’s body at the same time. No greetings were exchanged. No job well done. One of their own was down and they all wanted an answer to the same question. Was Bishop dead?

  King knelt and checked Bishop’s pulse.

  His hand was angrily swatted away.

  King jumped back as Bishop growled and stood. He took aim with his handgun.

  “King...” Rook said.

  “Two minutes ago he had a chunk the size of my head missing from his side. He’s been torn apart, burned to a crisp, and doesn’t have a scratch.”

  Queen shook her head. “He’s a regen.” She drew her side arm and took aim, as did Knight.

  “Is that why he’s been so pissy since Tristan?” Rook asked. King nodded.

  Bishop’s face was twisted with rage as he stood. He grunted, stumbled, then straightened, glaring at them. King placed his finger on the trigger.

  “No way this is happening,” Rook said, stepping forwa
rd, reaching a hand out.

  What happened next was so quick, neither Queen nor King could get off a shot. Bishop stumbled forward, reached out, and fell into Rook’s arms. He winced, grit his teeth, and clenched his eyes shut. When he opened them he looked at King. “You need to shoot me.”

  He tried to move away from Rook, but he held on tight, straining against the stronger man’s struggle. Bishop let out a growl, yanked an arm free, and swung it at Rook. But he was tired and slow. Rook ducked, caught the arm, and pulled it behind Bishop’s back. He kicked out his legs and put him face down on the ground. Rook put his weigh on Bishop’s back, pulling his arm back tight and pinning him.

  “You’re still you,” Rook said. “You’re still Delta. Choke it down. Beat it.”

  Bishop winced. His clenched fists shook as an internal rage like nothing he’d ever felt ate up his insides. “Shoot me!”

  The two men struggled for a moment before Rook let him go. Bishop stood in a flash, face-to-face with Rook.

  “If you go regen, I’ll be the first to die,” Rook said. “Now get a fucking grip.”

  Bishop stumbled, shaking, and was caught again by Rook. But he wasn’t alone this time. King helped support Bishop’s body, extending him help and trust, and like Rook, making himself vulnerable. Bishop fought harder, taking control of himself. He let go of them and stood on his own. His face calmed. He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. Control returned. His muscles cooled and stopped shaking. His breathing slowed. When he opened his eyes again, he looked at Rook and said, “I’m sorry. I—”

  “Ahh, save it for when your future wife sees your little pecker.”

  Bishop smiled as his rage subsided further, then noticed the pungent smell of explosives and burned flesh hanging in the air. “Is it dead?”

  They looked over the blood- and flesh-covered quad. King counted six unmoving heads, but movement caught his eye. One of the heads was still moving, writhing in a pool of blood. He ran to the back of the SUV and reappeared with a grenade. He strode to the head. It moved, but showed no response to his approach and it wasn’t regenerating. Whatever Queen had shot it up with had done the trick. He pulled the pin on the concussion grenade, forced the Hydra’s mouth open with his boot, and dropped it inside. He jumped back, shouted, “Fire in the hole!” and moved behind the SUV with the others. The grenade detonated with a muffled and very wet boom. The head burst like a melon, further adding to the rancid mess on the quad.