Movement within one of the nearby windows drew his attention, and he instantly sighted the M4 in on the spot. Scanning for further signs of life, he scooped up Mueller and moved him to a more protected location within a nearby alley. He expected the narrow alleyway to be dotted by overflowing garbage cans, dumpsters and stray cats, but it was completely empty from end to end.
He pulled out one of the Berettas he had retrieved from the Osprey’s wreckage, chambered a round and handed it to Mueller. “Sit tight and watch your back. I’m going to find out who knocked us out of the sky.”
Moving silently, Knight moved inside the building, M4 raised, finger on the trigger. He used the pressure switch beneath his thumb to activate the flashlight on the end of the M4. The narrow beam of illumination paused on a sign that read Department of Urban Development and Control. He guessed that this was some type of government building. The reception desk was bare and covered by a thin layer of dust.
Backtracking the movement he had seen, he moved down a large windowless hallway with doors on both sides. Most of the doors stood open to vacant offices, but the final door on the right led into a room filled with a few modest cubicles. Only a few of the desks sported office supplies and family portraits, but it was still somewhat comforting to find even the smallest sign of life.
He moved toward a bank of windows on the far wall and peered out. He could see the spot on the street where he had been standing just moments before. This was the right window, but where was the watcher?
4.
Mueller examined a wound on his shoulder and adjusted the tourniquet that Knight had applied to his leg. He winced as tendrils of pain lanced through the limb. He pressed his head against the concrete wall at his back and tried to rise above the pain. The lesion on his leg went down to the bone and he knew that if he didn’t receive true medical attention soon, he would die from infection and blood loss.
His thoughts turned to his family back home. His younger brother had been the varsity quarterback that year, and he’d never even seen him play. His little sister was a freshman in college, and he had missed her high school graduation. He thought of his mother’s special white chicken chili, which only served to remind him of the last time he had visited and the argument with his father. Now, bleeding to death thousands of miles from home, he wished that he would have lived his life differently. He didn’t regret his service or being away. But he did regret the choices he had made when he was home and the unimportant things that had taken priority over his family.
A rustling down the street drew him back to the moment, and he raised his pistol in that direction. He considered calling out Knight’s name, but he resisted the urge. If it was Knight, he would know soon enough. He could tell the well-dressed man was some kind of specials ops operator. The way he carried himself—the confidence—meant the man had seen some crazy action and come out with his good looks intact. Believing Knight, whose real name was a mystery, was the cream of the U.S. crop gave him hope. Then again, it might not be Knight making noise. In fact, it seemed unlikely. The man moved like a ghost. And if it wasn’t Knight…
He felt a throbbing in his wounds as his heart pumped hard and surged extra blood through his veins. He had seldom been in combat outside of the cockpit, but he had been in this situation enough to recognize the distinct feeling of being watched by enemy eyes.
Dust rained down onto his head and shoulders, and he heard a scratching sound coming from above him.
The breath caught in his throat, but he forced himself into action. His muscles tensed, and he whipped the pistol up, expecting to see an enemy descending upon him.
But there was nothing there.
He pointed the gun back down the street, the sensation of being watched still a thorn in his mind.
5.
Knight caught movement out of the corner of his eye and jerked the M4 back in that direction. Two dark figures moved swiftly toward the door.
He didn’t hesitate.
He sprinted back toward the cubicles. The first row of office spaces had a low barrier and a flat shelf instead of a high walled enclosure. Upon reaching these first cubicles, he threw his shoulder down and rolled over the top of the barrier.
He didn’t miss a beat as he hit the ground running and took off after the fleeing watchers. His prey were weaving in and out of the rows, trying to reach the far door.
Knight realized that he wasn’t going to catch them before they reached the exit. Deciding upon a different tactic, he turned a corner and grabbed a rolling office chair sitting against one of the desks. He raised his leg, pressing his foot squarely against the seat of the chair. Then, he kicked the chair toward the two fleeing figures.
The chair rolled down the aisle and collided with the smaller of the two. A tiny, frail voice cried out, and the small form careened over one of the desks.
Knight closed the distance between them and grabbed the small Asian boy by the arm. The boy’s companion, an older girl of no more than fourteen, screamed at him and lashed out with a flurry of punches and kicks.
Knight kept her at bay with his free arm. “Hey, hey. It’s okay. Calm down!”
Eventually, the girl backed away and looked up at him with a smooth tear-streaked face. She was a beautiful girl with a small, upturned nose and long raven-black hair. Her clothes were expensive brands but were dirty and torn. He could smell the stench of body odor emanating from the pair and pegged them as some kind of homeless street kids. Their kind wasn’t uncommon in any major metropolitan area, but to his knowledge, these ghost cities were largely uninhabited and shouldn’t have any problems with the homeless, especially kids.
“Please don’t hurt us. We’re sorry that we were watching you,” the girl said in Mandarin.
He released his grip on the boy, and the child quickly slipped behind the older girl, squeezing onto her leg. Each member of Knight’s black ops Special Forces team, known as Chess Team, had each learned a variety of languages for the different regions of the world based on their heritage. Since Knight was of Korean descent, he knew nearly all of the Asiatic languages. In a soothing and confident tone, he responded back to the girl in her native tongue. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m a friend.”
The girl didn’t seem convinced. He slid the M4 to the side. He would have bent down to her level, but the girl wasn’t much shorter than him. He guessed she was around fourteen years old; the boy, maybe nine. Instead, he perched on the edge of one of the desks and relaxed his posture to make himself seem less threatening.
“My name is Knight. What’s yours?”
She shied back a bit, her shoulders shrinking up and her eyes darting around the room as if she was searching for an exit, but eventually she said, “My name is Ling, and this is my brother Wu Jiao. But everyone calls him Jiao.”
He smiled. “Pleasure to meet you both. What are you doing here in the city by yourselves? Everyone was supposed to have been evacuated.”
Ling’s face scrunched up as if she had detected a bad odor. “My uncle was one of the city’s maintenance workers. Our parents were killed last year so we moved here to be with uncle. He’s…an unkind man and two kids...”
Knight understood what she was saying. The fines and extra taxes for having more than one child would have been inherited by the uncle who took them in. While taking them in might have been a mercy, it seemed his compassion had run out with his cash flow.
“We ran away. There are lots of places to hide in this city, if you can find food. We were on our own when the evacuation order was given.”
He didn’t press her on the relationship with her uncle. The abuse she had suffered was written all over her face. “Okay, guys. You’re okay now. I’m going to be meeting up with some friends shortly, and we’ll find a safe place for you. Just follow me.”
He moved down the hallway toward the exit, but the children didn’t follow. He turned the flashlight back on them. “Let’s go. Beat your feet.”
The little boy
trembled in the beam of light. He shook his head from side to side and started to sob.
“What’s wrong?”
The little boy mumbled something that Knight couldn’t understand. He could only pick out one of the words among the boy’s frightened ramble.
Monster.
6.
The boy’s words shook Knight to the core. While some adults would attribute the child’s claims to an overactive imagination, he knew that there were monsters in the world. He had seen them with his own eyes. He had fought them, and he had the scars to prove it. But unfortunately, the cruelest monsters he had ever faced were men of flesh and blood. Men like Richard Ridley, the former head of Manifold Genetics. Men like Ling’s uncle.
He squatted down to the boy’s level. “Don’t worry, kid. I’m a monster hunter.”
The boy’s eyes perked up. “Really?”
“That’s right. Stick with me, and you’ll be just fine. I promise.”
A string of gunfire drew his attention away from the boy. He swore under his breath and headed toward the building’s entrance. The children reluctantly followed. He checked the street through the M4’s ACOG scope. He didn’t see any movement or anything suspicious, so he called the children after him, and they went to check on Mueller.
He kept a cautious eye out as they rounded the corner, but he wasn’t prepared for what he saw. Mueller was gone. In the spot where Knight had left the man, was a scattering of spent 9mm shell casings and a pool of blood.
He heard a gasp behind him, and he grabbed for Jiao as the boy ran back out of the alley. The boy made it into the middle of the road before Knight could catch him. When he finally reached the child, he said, “We stay together, kid. No running off. Okay?”
The boy nodded, and Knight said, “You were right. Let’s get back inside.”
A shadow overhead blocked out the sun.
Knight’s reaction was instantaneous. He rolled to the side, holding Jiao under his arm. His free hand shot out and grabbed Ling by the shoulder, pulling her along with him.
In the spot where they had just stood, a massive chunk of concrete struck the pavement, splintering the road and sending a cloud of cement dust and rock chips into the air. He didn’t waste any time trying to determine the origin of the attack. Whatever had been large enough to toss a chunk of concrete the size of a Mini-Cooper wasn’t an enemy that he wanted to face with only an M4 and two kids in tow.
As he pulled the children toward the building’s entrance, he heard a sound that he had hoped to never hear again. The high-pitched, rattling wail that filled the streets at his back, echoing off sidewalks and the glass of empty office buildings, was eerily similar to that of a beast that he had thought long dead. A creature that had regenerative abilities the likes of which the modern world had never seen. A monster of legend that Chess Team had found was actually based upon fact. The Hydra.
7.
Knight slammed the door behind them and pushed the children into the building. The boy tripped over his own feet, but Knight was there to catch him and drive them forward. The roaring at his back grew louder. Closer.
“There’s a bomb shelter in the basement,” Ling said.
“Show me. Quick.”
Ling bolted off toward a large, gray door marked by the symbol for stairs. Knight scooped the boy up and threw his small frame over one shoulder like a fireman escaping a burning building.
Ling reached the stairwell door first and held it for the others. Knight slammed it shut behind them. “Move!” he said, urging her into the bowels of the structure.
Above, he heard the screech of glass and metal tearing apart. Whatever was out there was small enough to follow them inside but large enough to destroy half the structure while doing it. He thought of the first time he had faced the Hydra inside one of Manifold Genetics’s Alpha facility in New Hampshire—the subterranean complex that would soon become Chess Team’s clandestine base of operations. He could still hear the screams of the researchers and security personnel when the beast awakened from its several thousand-year slumber and attacked. The sound of thundering footsteps from the floor above and the memory of screams pushed his legs to churn faster.
When they hit the door to the floor below, Ling pushed inside and pointed down the corridor. “We’re almost there. Follow me!”
She shot off down the hallway, and he was on her heels. He had been trained to quickly notice the details of his surroundings. It was a skill that had saved his life on many occasions. In this hallway, he immediately recognized vacant security stations and signs reading Authorized Personnel Only.
Ling pushed through an open door that adjoined one of the security stations. The door was clear, but he could tell that it was made of bullet and impact resistant Lexan polycarbonate. They ran into a long concrete maintenance tunnel lit by bare bulbs hanging from a conduit along the ceiling. The air was stale.
A loud banging noise echoed out from the stairwell, and he guessed that their pursuer had just burst through the door to the floor above and would be upon them within a moment. He slammed the security door shut and hoped that it had some sort of automatic locking mechanism.
“This way!” Ling said.
A large hatch resembling that of a bank vault loomed ahead. He could hear the thing coming down the stairs, but he didn’t risk looking back.
Ling ran forward in front of him down the long concrete tunnel. She glanced back over her shoulder and lost her balance. She stumbled forward and slid to the ground.
Knight scooped her up as he passed, carrying her the rest of the way. They reached the hatch, and he slid inside, dropping the children to a white tile floor.
His eyes shot back to the wall next to the hatch, searching for some mechanism to close the massive steel door. He found a red button along the right edge of the opening and pressed it. The sound of grinding gears gave him some solace, but the closing mechanism hadn’t been designed for speed.
He heard the security door burst inward. The resistant material the door was made from provided little protection against a force that could break it free from its frame.
The creature’s size was substantial enough that it could barely fit its bulk into the large tunnel. Knight still couldn’t catch a clear view of the thing. As it moved forward, it smashed into the lights hanging from above, shattering each with the impact. The scene before him looked as if the darkness was stalking in on them, destroying all light in its path.
He took aim with the M4 and unleashed a barrage of 5.56 ammo into the beast, but it didn’t even slow from the bullet strikes. He knew that every round had struck its target, but the thing kept coming.
The door continued to grind shut, but it wouldn’t be closed before the creature was on top of them.
Knight’s mind fought for a solution.
The M4 had a mounted grenade launcher that would surely slow the beast’s progression, but the resulting explosion would also be likely to seal the passageway and trap them inside the shelter like a tomb.
But then, he caught sight of a fire extinguisher mounted along one side of the tunnel. He took aim at the extinguisher and waited for the right moment as the beast approached.
He forced his thundering heart to calm and released his breath as he sighted in on his target. He would only get one chance at this, and if he missed, they would all be dead.
Just before the massive shadow overtook the extinguisher, he squeezed back on the trigger. The M4 barked fire and propelled a line of hot metal toward the red extinguisher.
As the bullets struck, the compressed contents of the device broke free. White foam exploded outward, covering the beast. The massive shape shrieked and swiped at its face. It stumbled forward and to the side, and slammed its head against the wall.
Within a couple of seconds, it was back on its feet and charging forward.
But the distraction had bought them enough time.
The hatch swung shut and sealed with the sucking sound of pressurization just as the
beast closed in. He could hear the creature roaring from the other side. The hatch shook, and dust rained from the ceiling as the monster tried to tear its way inside.
After a moment, the scraping and banging noises ceased, and both sides of the hatch were completely silent.
Knight released a long breath and turned back to the frightened faces of the children. “Everyone okay?”
The two children just stared wide-eyed at the hatch without acknowledging him. He couldn’t see any blood and all of their limbs were intact. He wasn’t a shrink; if they made it through this alive, the therapists could deal with shock. He had to contend with more important matters.
He glanced around the space behind the children, but it was obscured by darkness. He scanned the side wall of the bunker and reached out to flick a switch. Overhead fluorescent lighting hummed to life with a hiss and snap.
He stepped forward and surveyed the inside of the bunker.
“This isn’t a bomb shelter,” he said.
8.
At least forty flat panel monitors populated the wall in front of Knight. A long gray Formica desktop in front of the monitors contained five workstations, each with a black leather rolling desk chair, a transparent keyboard dotted with Chinese lettering and a trackpad. Knight reached out and pressed a random key at one of the stations. The forty monitors instantly blinked to life. Images of the city rotating from different angles and orientations filled the screens. From the camera views, he guessed that some were mounted on buildings and some were roadway cameras stationed on traffic signals.
Callsign: Knight - Book 1 (A Shin Dae-jung - Chess Team Novella) Page 2
