Slayers (Jake Hawkins Book 1)

by Matt Rogers

  Jake was only a few strokes from the bank, but he covered them in an instant. Then he clambered up into the mud and collapsed on his back. There was no movement from the surface of the river. He lay in the mud, panting, soaked from head to toe, hoping beyond hope that the jaguar would stay down at the bottom of the Napo. He had expended the last of his energy.

  It surfaced noiselessly. One second there was nothing, the next it rose up from the calm water and padded up onto the bank, only metres in front of Jake. He scrabbled to his feet.

  The beast glistened in the sunlight. Water dripped off its bare skin. On television, Jake had seen jaguars shake their fur free of water after a swim. This one didn’t have any fur. The slayer virus had turned it into a thick block of muscle. A killing machine. The bruise covering its face throbbed and pulsed like a living thing. Jake had no energy left. He was done. He took an exhausted step back and waited for the end.

  The jaguar shot off the mark. All four paws left the ground at once. Its muscles tightened in the air, preparing for a kill.

  Then it exploded.

  The sound hit Jake first, and then the shockwave. The jaguar was blasted apart from within. There was no fireball, no mushroom cloud, just a short, sharp, eardrum-splitting bang. He was hit by a torrent of invisible air. It was like a head-on collision with a truck. There was a momentary flash of colour as he saw the jaguar being blown to pieces, and then he was thrown off his feet and back into the mud.

  Indiscernible shapes danced across the sky. Jake didn’t know what was happening, but he was glad it was finally over. His vision became a pulsating mass of colour, then faded.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Dragged through the mud. Upended onto a seat. The loud whine of a motor.

  He was struggling to keep conscious, but flashes of reality still got through.

  “Come on, kid,” a voice said. “Snap out of it.”

  His head tapped continuously against the wood he was lying on. The movement brought his vision back. He sat up in a drowse.

  For a moment he was confused. He was in a dingy old boat, surrounded by men, heading down a river. Swell from the engine kicked up behind. The trees along the bank flashed past on both sides.

  Everything started to make a little more sense. It was an old speedboat that looked like it hadn’t been in use for centuries. Rust and grit covered the interior. Felix and Sam were sitting opposite him, on the other thinly-padded wooden bench running along the boat’s sides. They were both concentrating hard on their Snowdogs.

  He turned to look at the rear of the boat, and noticed that Crank and Thorn had returned. Thorn steered the outboard motor, directing the boat downriver, crouched low. Crank was propped up on the rear bench with a hiking pack covering his right leg.

  “Thought you’d never wake up, buddy,” Thorn said.

  Jake was still drowsy, incoherent. “Wha–?”

  “How are you feeling?” Felix said, looking concerned.

  “Um…” Jake tried to gather his thoughts. “Uh, yeah, okay. What … what happened?”

  “You took a big hit, brother,” Sam said. “We all saw it. Mind explaining why the jaguar blew up in front of you? We’re all a little confused.”

  By the time Jake was done recalling what had happened underwater, Sam’s eyes were almost bulging out of his head.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said to Felix. “Do you think it was ours?”

  Felix said, “That’s impossible.”

  Thorn said, “How else would a grenade end up in a riverbed?”

  Crank said nothing. He was white as a ghost.

  “Yours?” Jake queried. “You mean, from that mission all those years ago?”

  Felix nodded. “Archfiend threw all our gear in the river. Surely, it would all have been buried by now, though.”

  “That’s incredible,” Jake said. He turned to Crank and Thorn. “How did you guys catch up with us?”

  Once again, Crank didn’t respond. He simply stared into the distance, shivering. Thorn opened his mouth to speak, but suddenly Jake was overcome by a wave of nausea. He leant over the side of the boat and threw up into the water speeding past. The vomit disappeared from sight.

  Thorn cocked his head. “You okay, kid?”

  “Fine. Carry on.”

  “The jaguar attacked us, first,” he said. “We’d already covered pretty much twice the distance that you guys had. I hear you boys ran into a few sticky situations along the way. Anyway, we were probably a few kilometres inland when it jumped on us. Did you see that big mark on its cheek?”

  Jake nodded. “Big bruise. Took up nearly half its face.”

  “I did that. It attacked Crank, so I punched it in the eye and threw the thing off a cliff we were moving along. That was the last we saw of it.”

  “You threw it?” Jake couldn’t believe what it was hearing. “How?”

  “Picked the damn thing up and tossed it.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “You haven’t seen me angry,” Thorn said. “When a friend’s hurt, I can almost do anything.”

  Jake paused. “Who’s hurt?”

  Crank, still speechless, bent across and lifted the hiking pack off the bench next to him, revealing what lay underneath.

  “Oh my god,” Jake whispered.

  Crank’s entire lower leg was missing. His pants were tied off in a knot at the knee, and everything below was simply not there. The stump was bulging underneath the khaki material, obviously heavily bandaged, but not enough to stop blood seeping through. It was a grotesque, unnatural sight. The last time Jake had seen him, Crank had been moving with the lithe of an athlete. Now, the life was drained from his eyes.

  “How … how did it happen?” Jake stammered.

  “Jaguar,” Crank managed feebly. “Bit it off. Thorn … got a tourniquet on it, real fast. Did the job. Lost … a lot of blood.”

  “Oh my god,” Jake repeated.

  He judged the expressions of the boat’s occupants. Thorn stared straight ahead, emotionless, his face blank. Felix and Sam had their heads bowed and were shuffling their feet against the floor of the boat. All three of them knew the inevitable but no-one wished to voice it.

  Crank would never hunt slayers again.

  “Sixty seconds,” Thorn called.

  He was steering the boat through a tributary that branched off from the main river. It was wide and shallow. Jake could see the riverbed just by leaning over the edge. The water was much clearer than the main section of the Napo. Up ahead, the muddy banks morphed into rock plains, plains that spanned almost the entire width of the tributary. The rock was smooth and flat, providing no cover, and ended on both sides with a steep, impenetrable slope crammed with vegetation. The slopes arced up into the rainforest.

  “By the way,” Jake said, “how did we get a boat?”

  Thorn said, “I was carrying Crank down the mountain. Came across a local fishing village. I couldn’t communicate with the locals, but it was clear that Crank was in bad shape. They gave us one of their old boats and told us to head upriver, back towards Iquitos. Then we heard the grenade go off.”

  “Alright, Jake, here’s the deal,” Felix said. “Once we get up that hill,” – he pointed at the slope to their left – “there’s nothing more than a short hike through the rainforest between us and the clearing. Crank’s going to stay on the boat. Thorn and I will take the lead, and you and Sam will follow right behind us. If anything moves, make sure it’s not Wolfe and then shoot it. We have to be on full alert. The GPS says he’s still in the clearing.”

  “The tracker shows that?” Jake asked.

  Sam nodded. “One hundred and ten percent. He hasn’t moved in days, man.”

  “Could he be dead?”

  “The only way that tracker stays on is if he has a pulse.”

  Jake hefted his Snowdog onto his knees. It felt heavier than usual. He was weak and nauseous from the grenade blast. But right now there was no other option than to follow the team into t
he clearing. Wolfe’s life hung in the balance. Spray kicking up from the motor splashed across his face, doing little to cease his shaking muscles. He was scared.

  Thorn killed the engine and pulled the boat up against the rocky plateau. It grated against the side with the harsh screeching of metal. Sam and Felix leapt from their seats down onto dry ground, followed by Thorn who gave Crank a reassuring bump on the shoulder as he jumped out.

  Jake cast a glance at Crank as he rose.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, kid,” Crank said.

  “Nerves.”

  “At least you’re not missing a leg.”

  With that, Jake vaulted over the side of the boat, landing in step behind the other three men. They treaded slowly across the open ground, looking up at the dense rainforest ahead. Jake found himself doing the same. It was impossible to see anything. A hundred slayers could have eyes on them, and they wouldn’t have the slightest idea.

  He entered a state of hyper-alertness. It happened before every high risk situation. Now, he was learning to roll with it, to use the heightened senses to his advantage, instead of the adrenalin leeching out of him through fear. Every sound was standing out on its own. There was the faint roaring of a waterfall to his right. He glanced across and noticed the tributary ended in a series of rapids. That was where the noise was coming from. There was no escape that way. The only way they were leaving with Wolfe was back the way they had come.

  There was a flash of movement near the waterfall, amongst the rocks. Jake squinted.

  A crouching figure came into focus. It was stalking along the ground toward them. And it was definitely a slayer. Nothing else was that pale. The figure was slinking in between boulders in an attempt to conceal itself, probably trying to sneak up on them from behind as they pushed into the rainforest.

  Jake took off. He dropped his Snowdog to his waist so that it swung from its shoulder strap and pumped his arms laterally to gain more speed. The slayer wouldn’t be expecting an assault. He was going to kill it before it knew what was happening.

  “Jake!” Felix called after him.

  But he wasn’t turning back, not now. An ambush was not a desirable outcome.

  He rushed over to where he last saw the slayer, traversing water-filled crevices. The rapids grew louder. He rounded the corner and burst out into the middle of the open ground, past the boulders. The Snowdog was now clenched tight between his fingers. All four barrels swept over the space in front of him.

  There was nothing. No sign of the slayer. He pivoted, aiming at the water. Nothing hiding there. He swung back around, aiming behind him. No movement. Another ninety degrees, so that he was facing the boulders.

  Dead silence.

  Jake panted hard, suddenly nauseous. If he had been feeling sick before, it was a hundred times worse now. He was on the verge of fainting, woozy from the heat. He retched.

  He took a single step, and slipped. There was a moment of complete terror, as he lost all control. Then he landed hard on his back and the Snowdog skittered away. He watched it drop off the edge of the plateau and into the rapids, where it was carried away by the frothing water.

  He swore.

  There was no way of recovering the Snowdog. By now it would be long gone, pulled by the current far downstream. Going after it would be a waste of time.

  He felt horrible. The sun beat down on his cold, sweating face. His limbs shook. He had no weapon, and he felt dizzy from the fall. The slayer he had spotted was nowhere to be seen. It had never existed.

  It took less than two minutes to make it back to the boat. Jake stumbled on shaky legs, hoping for some kind of miracle. He wanted Wolfe to come sprinting from the trees, along with Link, and then they could all pile into the boat and fly back to Australia like nothing had ever happened in the first place. But that was not what he saw.

  He saw an empty boat. He saw empty land in front of him.

  There was no sign of Crank, or the other men. There was nothing but silence. The boat rocked idly in its position. Water lapped at the hull.

  Everyone was gone.

  “This isn’t good,” Jake muttered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  He couldn’t have been out of sight for more than five minutes.

  They wouldn’t have gone in without me, Jake thought. He was sure of that. Something had happened, and he didn’t know what. His chest grew tighter. The quiet was unsettling. Around the other men, he felt safe. Now, he was alone in the rainforest, with a clearing to head into and no knowledge of what was lying in wait. The panic intensified.

  He remained by the boat for a while. Hoping that there had been some kind of mistake. The trees ahead rustled softly, and back from where he had come the river gurgled and flowed, and those were the only sounds. No calls of wildlife. It was too quiet.

  Eventually, he decided that waiting around in the open wasn’t the best idea. He checked his pistol was loaded and headed up into the undergrowth.

  The slope was almost unclimbable. With each step he took, a chunk of loose dirt broke off from the earth and scattered down past his feet. He lost his footing multiple times, and had to catch onto a tree to find purchase on the ground.

  The terrain was the least of his problems. He began to notice deep indents in the dirt, like a large group of people had moved upward. There were claw marks gouged intermittently into the trunks he was passing. He saw at least ten before he lost count.

  The ground petered out as he reached the top of the slope, but the rainforest was as suffocating as ever. Claustrophobia kicked in. He was boxed in on all sides. He slipped his machete from its holster on his back and began to force his way through the jungle.

  Vines, plants, branches: they all limited visibility to a couple of metres. He pushed through a mass of entangled vines.

  And came face-to-face with a lone slayer.

  They almost collided. It had been coming from the opposite direction. The slayer’s eyes went wide and it opened its mouth to roar a warning to anyone in the immediate vicinity. Jake was faster. He brought his pistol up and pumped the trigger once. The shot passed straight through its open mouth. Its legs gave out from underneath as it died. He lunged forward and caught the body with two hands. Gently lowered it to the forest floor. He moved on, his heart beating a million miles an hour.

  As soon as he felt like he had covered half the distance, he dropped to his knees and began a slow, silent crawl towards his destination. The trees ended up ahead. He shuffled right to the edge, buried down into the bushes and observed the clearing.

  It was an enormous expanse of dirt and shrubs, perfectly circular, but it appeared to be natural. There was a huge palm tree in the centre. Its leaves cast everything underneath into shadow. Crank, Sam, Thorn and Felix were sprawled across the clearing floor. Their hands were bound in front of them and their legs were tied together. They were all fastened to one another, forming a chain of prisoners. Resting on the floor a few metres away, silent and brooding, was a man Jake felt like he hadn’t seen in years.

  Wolfe.

  He struggled to suppress a gasp. All this time, an uneasy feeling had plagued him, that Wolfe was dead, that Archfiend was merely baiting them. Now, there was a flicker of hope. Wolfe looked skinnier than usual. Fatigue was wearing him down. There were huge bags under his eyes and a pained expression on his face.

  Archfiend himself was standing in front of the five men, pacing back and forth. In the daylight, he was terrifying. He looked far more human than a slayer. His pale white muscles shone in the sun. There wasn’t a square centimetre of fat anywhere on his body. He was an unnaturally constructed creation, a raw powerhouse. And his eyes were piercing. There was something human in them. Some kind of intelligence.

  Three clusters of slayers prowled around the clearing: a group of three were over by the tree, stalking around in the shade, a group of five were standing motionless on the other side, watching the clearing intently, and a pair were moving around the perimeter, peering into t
he rainforest. The pair were only a few paces to his left. They would be on him any minute now.

  Jake realised what had happened. Archfiend and his posse of slayers had been lying in wait as their boat had arrived. When he had foolishly run off to pursue the slayer, Archfiend had ambushed Felix, Sam and Thorn, taking them prisoner. Crank had clearly been unable to put up a fight.

  Now, Archfiend was livid.

  “Where’s the kid?!” he spat at the men. “And why did he run off?”

  No-one answered. Jake put it together in his head. The slayer he had spotted hadn’t been a distraction. There had been no deliberate attempt to lure him away from the rest of the group. He had merely come across a stupid slayer. And now he was the only thing stopping Archfiend from killing the entire team.

  “No matter,” Archfiend continued. “We’ll find him, and we’ll kill him right in front of you. How’s that sound, ‘Wolfe’?”

  He placed emphasis on the word ‘Wolfe’. Sarcastic emphasis.

  A nagging doubt began to slip into Jake’s mind. Was the gang being truthful with him? There was something they were hiding. Archfiend was amused by Wolfe’s name. Too amused.

  Wolfe grunted. Jake glanced across and saw the two slayers patrolling the perimeter were getting closer.

  They were five metres away.

  Four.

  There was no more time to think.

  Jake launched up out of the bushes, machete in one hand, pistol in the other.

  Both slayers whipped up and stared at the space he had materialised from, momentarily shocked. He shot the closest one through the forehead at point blank range. Push-kicked it into the dirt. Then he vaulted over its dead body and swung the machete into the second slayer’s neck. The blade sliced almost halfway through. Jake let go of the handle and the machete fell to the ground with the slayer attached.

  The ordeal was over in three seconds. The clearing’s occupants were only now beginning to notice his presence.

  He didn’t waste any time. Two rounds were left in the six-shell magazine. He raised the pistol up and fired twice.