Julie saw it too. The compound had an old-school intercom system installed in it that dated back at least thirty years. The Drekavac messed with air waves, but it probably wouldn’t be able to do anything that was hardwired. Julie let go of her rifle and picked up the handpiece. “Milo, crater the road.”
We’d buried some gigantic charges around the perimeter today, and Milo had them all wired to where he was stationed in our ad hoc compound defense center. Except there was no response to Julie’s call. The Drekavac was getting closer.
Maybe Milo had heard her and just not responded. Maybe he was working on it. But just in case we had a couple of bullhorns up here to relay orders, and if that didn’t work, different color flags to wave and flares to shoot to relay messages to the other Hunters. I picked up the gigantic industrial bullhorn and raised it to my mouth. Milo was only one floor down, so hopefully this would work.
“MILO.” Holy shit this thing was loud. I was glad I had my hearing protection on. “DETONATE THE ROAD BOMBS.”
The Drekavac came into view, and I couldn’t even tell you how fast he was going this time. I’m talking jet-aircraft-flyby speeds. Our roof-mounted minigun couldn’t even swivel fast enough to hit him. Except Milo must have heard one of us and pushed the big red button because all of a sudden the entrance was gone.
BOOM!
I don’t know how many pounds of ammonium nitrate Milo had buried there, but it was a lot. It made a visible shockwave that flattened trees for fifty yards. It blew the guard shack away. It broke a bunch of windows around the compound. It was so big that everybody on the roof felt it in their eyeballs.
“There go my rose bushes,” Julie said.
There were a bunch of spotlights pointed that direction already, but somebody angled one upward so that we could see the mushroom cloud, which was two hundred feet tall and growing rapidly. It began raining debris.
And the Drekavac fell out of the sky.
His mangled body landed inside the fence.
The perimeter was breached. “Oh, shit.” The body dissolved within seconds, but his fifth death came a moment too late. The evil fog moved with a hungry suddenness into the compound. I got on the bullhorn again. “THE MONSTER IS INSIDE THE WIRE.”
He had eight lives left to use against us, and no more do-overs. When those were gone, they were gone. It was going to be tooth and nail from here on out.
A dread quiet fell over the compound as everybody waited for the next shoe to drop.
The silence was broken. “South side, south side!” The sniper team on that end of the roof began shooting down toward the barracks. I ran in that direction, but there was a sudden hiss-CRACK as a bolt of lightning smashed into the building. The two Hunters were flung back from the ledge. We were all hit by stinging bits of concrete, and then everything was obscured by smoke.
As the two stunned men were dragged away by the others, a few of us reached the damaged edge, peered over, and saw the Drekavac walking toward us, blunderbuss in hand. He was less than fifty yards away, so he basically filled my entire cranked-up scope when I aimed at him. I nailed him twice in the chest with Cazador. He barely even twitched. Then the Hunter to my left opened up with a 240B and stitched him from knee to throat, before the Hunter on my right dropped a 40mm grenade right at his feet.
The Drekavac fell apart. That was six.
“Man your positions! Cover your zone,” Julie shouted. As we moved back to our stations, more Hunters ran up from the stairs to grab the wounded, and others took their place watching that direction. Since the Drekavac was going to be close now, I hurried and cranked Cazador’s scope down to the lowest setting of five power. I went back to watching the front of the compound for danger before I realized that I didn’t even know which of us had just gotten hit. There hadn’t been time to look.
A few nervous seconds passed. The fog was everywhere in the compound now, thick as soup, and really hard to see through.
This time the Drekavac was smart. He didn’t re-form in the open where our lookouts could see him. He re-formed behind one of the outbuildings on the east side. Our first warning was when a bolt of lightning hit one of the antennas on our roof. It came crashing down, spraying fire and sparks everywhere. The Hunters on that side returned fire, but the Drekavac fired again. The impact shook the roof and tore a burning gouge through the concrete ledge. There were only a few seconds’ delay between lightning bolts now.
Then the fucking birds came out of nowhere and hit us.
I’d dealt with one ghost falcon last night. This time there was a flock of the damned things. They dropped out of the sky like meteors, screeching and clawing for our eyes. I reflexively clubbed one out of the air with Cazador’s suppressor, then stomped on its head with my boot. Then I watched in horror as another bird nailed one of the Hunters, who was distracted shooting at the Drekavac, right in the back of the helmet. He was already hanging dangerously far over the edge of the roof, off balance, in order to get a good angle. The impact was enough to shove him over. He went over the side with a scream.
I ran over, looked down, and discovered Vaughn Spencer about two feet down on the other side hanging by his fingertips. The drop probably wouldn’t kill him outright, but it was enough to break some bones, and then he’d be lying there in the open in the line of fire of an angry Drekavac. He saw me and shouted, “Give me a hand.”
“Hang on.”
“No shit, Pitt!”
I let my rifle dangle by the sling so I could hold onto the ledge with one hand and lean way over to grab his wrist with the other. Spencer was one of the out-of-town Hunters who had flown in earlier to help. Luckily for both of us, he was only about 5'9" and 170, but with the armor and ammo, heavy enough to make this a challenge. I pulled hard. He managed to get his boots against the wall enough to find some purchase. I almost had him, but then one of the damned birds was flapping around my helmet, wings smacking me in the face.
“Hold still,” Julie ordered, which is a lot harder to do than it sounds when a ghost bird is trying to peck your eyes out. But I did. A bullet whistled right past my helmet to smack the blue falcon out of the sky. Bird gone, I went back to lifting.
The building the Drekavac was hiding behind was being riddled with bullets. The monster was surely getting nailed too, but he’d gotten tough enough that he was shrugging most of the hits off now, and I watched, horrified, as he swung around the corner and aimed his blunderbuss at us again.
I pulled Spencer over the edge and we both dropped as the monster fired. The bolt slammed into the spot we’d just been occupying. The impact shattered the concrete wall, pelting both of us with hot fragments.
Luckily, Skippy had seen where the lightning bolts were coming from, because the Hind tore past, firing rockets, and the Drekavac and the outbuilding he was hiding behind were obliterated. Which was too bad, that building was where we parked the bucket tractor we used for range maintenance. I was going to miss that little Kubota.
Julie had drawn her pistol and was shooting ghost birds. When she saw that our cover was being obliterated by the Drekavac’s gun, she ordered, “Fall back. We’re abandoning the roof.”
It was the right call. We were hanging out in the open here, and this asshole just kept developing new abilities. If his next trick was lobbing a fireball like a mortar round, we were all dead.
“Covering,” I said, as the other Hunters headed for the exit. Abomination would’ve been perfect for skeet shooting all these damned birds, but I’d brought my rifle instead because of the expected range. But at least I had a micro red dot optic offset mounted on Cazador for this up-close and personal stuff. So I twisted my rifle at an angle and started blasting falcons with high-powered rifle rounds. It wasn’t efficient, but it was satisfying.
The Hunters all rushed down the stairs. I was the last one out and made sure the roof was clear of good guys before I ducked inside. Spencer slammed the heavy steel door on a ghost bird hard enough to cut it in half, then dropped the big crossbar
to lock the door. Immediately a bunch of birds started thumping against the other side.
“Hold this entrance,” I told Spencer, and then I went after my wife.
Chapter 19
Julie was in the hall, giving orders to the roof crew to take up their secondary positions, when Earl walked into the hall and spotted us. “You two. Command center. Now.”
“We couldn’t hold the roof, Earl.”
“I know. Come on.”
As Julie and I followed Earl to our so-called command center, I could hear heavy gunfire through the walls. Skippy was laying down the hate. We passed a bunch of Hunters who were manning the narrow firing slits through our armored shutters along the way. Everybody stumbled as the entire building shook. Dust rained from the ceiling. Lights flickered. That had felt like artillery. The Drekavac’s gun was getting kind of ridiculous.
We’d already had a room in the basement for monitoring all of our surveillance feeds, but it was too cramped for more than a couple of Hunters to work, so Milo had taken over one of the empty storage rooms on the top floor. When we got there, Milo was standing in the middle, giving orders to our technically minded Hunters who had been drafted for this job. Melvin had set up a bunch of computers for them. In addition there were a whole lot of rough looking switches that looked like they’d been hastily wired together.
In addition to our guys, Franks was there. None of the Secret Guard were though, which made me a little suspicious, because part of me still expected Gutterres to make a move for the Ward. They’d been honorable so far, but I’d been screwed over too many times in this business for trust to come easily.
Milo saw us enter. “Hey, Earl. You want the good news or the bad news first?”
“Spit it out.”
“Skippy just bagged number eight for us. Bad news, it took about twenty direct hits with his 30mm nose gun to do it, so this jerk is getting really resilient.”
“That is bad,” Earl muttered.
“Oh no. That was the good news. The bad news is that he is already coming back and it looks like he’s ten feet tall.” Milo pointed at one of the screens, which showed the now gigantic Drekavac swirling into existence in front of our building.
“If he breaches the walls, Tanya’s spell will be broken, and he’ll be able to re-form in here with us,” Julie warned. “Where’s Skippy?”
“Coming around for another fast pass because he almost got fried by a lightning bolt when he was hovering,” Milo said. “So can I try out my system now or what?”
Earl thought it over. “Is everyone inside and out of the line of fire?”
“They’re supposed to be. If they’re not, they’re gonna want to duck.”
“Do it,” Earl ordered. “But if you wreck the whole damned compound I’m taking it out of your paycheck.”
Milo pumped his fist in the air. Our mad genius had been waiting for this moment for a long time. “Alright, boys, you heard the man. Hinerman?”
Dave Hinerman was a beefy, bearded Hunter from our New York team, who’d been a software engineer before we’d recruited him. “The program is running fine. Ready when you are.”
“Vivier?”
Eric Vivier was a tall, spikey-haired guy from Paxton’s team in the Pacific Northwest. He’d been an engineer. The two of them and a few of our other mechanically adept Hunters had helped Milo on the project while he’d installed it over the last year. Vivier checked his screen and reported, “All systems are go. Everything hardwired is still responding.”
“Let’s light this candle.” Milo sat down in front of a computer. “We’re living in the future, Earl. Today is one small step for MHI, one giant leap for Hunter kind.” Then he giggled, because Milo truly loved his work. “Activate turrets one and two.”
“Activating turrets one and two,” Hinerman said.
Screens were one thing, but this I needed to see with my own eyes. There was one window on the far wall of the command center, and luckily it was oriented in the right direction. The armored shutters were rolled down, but I’d still be able to see through the firing slits, so I walked over. Earl followed me, probably because he’d allowed Milo to spend a lot of money on this and wanted to see how much of it had been wasted. Agent Franks was already there, watching, and he appeared mildly curious as below us two armored boxes rose up through the ground, lifted by hydraulics. As the turrets rotated, bits of dirt and grass slid off of them. Ports slid open and barrels extended through. From up here, one looked long and skinny, the other short and fat.
“The first is an M2, and the second is an Mk19,” I told Franks. “Turrets three through eight cover the other sides.”
“Your project?” he asked me.
“I made the budget spreadsheet.”
Franks just grunted, unimpressed.
The Drekavac was fully formed, and he’d grown. The proportions were the same as before, but he was easily ogre size now, and he started toward our front door, determined to kick it in.
“Fire!” Milo shouted.
The two turrets opened up. Fifty-cal rounds zipped right through the monster. The Mk19 rhythmically and ponderously slammed 40mm grenades into his chest.
Shockingly, the monster just lowered his head and kept walking through the onslaught. The Drekavac lifting his hand to protect his face seemed like an almost human reaction, except instead of blocking a punch, he was absorbing high explosives and armor-piercing shells. The turrets slowly turned, tracking him, pounding away. They just kept hammering. He got hit hundreds of times and was shredded down to what looked like a flaming wire skeleton before the Drekavac collapsed and disintegrated back into the fog.
“Gutterres wasn’t kidding about it getting tougher as the night goes on,” Earl stated flatly. “That’s nine.”
That had been scary impressive, and we still had four to go. “How’d mankind handle these things in the old days?”
“Send a thousand pikemen,” Franks said. “Expect to lose nine hundred.”
“Or they gave them what they wanted, and then hid in their huts hoping for suckers like us to come along,” Earl said. “Milo, status?”
“Status level awesome,” Milo exclaimed. “Okay, guys, go ahead and activate the other turrets and put them on standby in case he hits the other walls. Watch the cameras. Hey, Julie, would you warn everybody to yell as soon as he pops up? There’s no way he’s getting in here now.”
I know Milo was really giddy about being able to play with his new toys, but I wasn’t feeling as confident as he was. “You got an ammo counter on those things?” I asked Vivier.
“That used about half of one and three quarters of two’s belts,” he said. “And the only way to reload them or clear a malfunction is manually.”
“Don’t worry, Z,” Milo said. “We’ve got defense in depth. That’s just the first layer. Like a big lethal onion of doom.”
Franks was squinting through the gap in the steel shutters, studying the fog. I’d thought that once it had broken through the fence it had filled the whole compound, but from this vantage point I could see that the fog hadn’t covered everything yet. There was a clear circle around the base of our building, like the substance was being held back by something, either Tanya’s runes or maybe the warm lifeblood of all the Hunters inside, but something was keeping him from appearing right at our door.
“You feel that?” Franks asked me and Harbinger.
All I was feeling was unnaturally chilled to my core and a sense of unease.
But Earl said, “Yeah . . . He’s not in the fog. He is the fog. It’s got weight to it. It’s where his physical forms are coming from.”
I grasped what they were getting at. “It congeals, becomes solid. Like how things work in the nightmare world, only he’s doing it here on Earth.”
“Kind of like what we saw at the Last Dragon.” Then Earl looked out over the vast area covered by the soupy substance and frowned. “He’s got a lot of material to work with still.”
Then I spotted where the f
og was swirling together. The circle was huge compared to what I’d seen before. The Drekavac was returning to the exact same spot he’d just died, probably to continue heading right for our front door. “He’s coming back even bigger.”
“We’ve got to burn off some of this fog fast, deprive him of mass . . . ” Earl said. “Milo! Did you get your sprinklers hooked up?”
“Sure did, Earl. I switched the pipes over this afternoon just in case.”
“Time to water the lawn.”
Milo leapt up from the computer, went to a nearby table, and started flipping switches.
“Is that like a metaphor for spilling blood or something?” I asked, because I’d missed this part of the plan visiting rats and had no idea what they were talking about. Except then below us, the compound’s sprinkler system came on. So Earl had been speaking literally, which made me even more confused. The sprinklers were a relatively new addition. When I’d started working here, everything had just been dirt, gravel, and natural plant growth. Only Julie had gotten tired of looking at that mess and declared that we could afford some real landscaping.
The Drekavac stood where he’d fallen just a moment before. He was still wearing the coat and hat, but they seemed stretched over his now hulking form. He had to be fifteen feet tall and broad as a bus. He started for the front door.
Then I smelled the gas fumes.
Milo wasn’t watering the grass. He was soaking it with gasoline. Sprinklers were spraying all the way around the main building. I didn’t know how big our system was, but it had to be pumping hundreds of gallons a minute.
Julie got on the intercom. “Everybody move back from the windows. I repeat, move away from the windows.”
The Drekavac drew his sword. It was long enough to slice an elephant in half. In his other hand was the blunderbuss, the muzzle of which was now big enough to drop a bowling ball down. He started toward the front door.
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