Milo’s turrets started blasting the monster. Shockingly enough, the impacts didn’t ignite the gas. The blue sparks flying from the Drekavac’s wounds weren’t real fire, and the turrets were far enough away from the lawn that their muzzle blasts didn’t ignite the rapidly expanding fume cloud yet.
However, when the Drekavac lifted his blunderbuss to take out turret two, all hell broke loose—because his lightning was flammable.
A lot happened in a few seconds. The turret was ripped apart in a violent flash, and it still had a bunch of grenades inside of it. They rapidly cooked off in a chain reaction of explosions. It was a good thing our headquarters building was basically a hardened fortress, because that would’ve ruined our night otherwise.
The lawn ignited. A rolling wall of flame rapidly spread across the grass, consuming everything in its path. The sprinklers turned to flamethrowers, spinning twenty-foot streams of flaming hot death. Within seconds the main building was surrounded by a ring of fire. The Drekavac’s fog actually shrieked as acres of it were burned away in a flash.
The Drekavac’s glowing eyes could be seen through the wall of fire, glaring directly at our window as it turned to ash.
Ten.
“He sensed where that order came from somehow . . . ” Earl warned. “Put your killer robots on autopilot and then everybody out of this room.”
“Even the Claymore Roombas?” Hinerman asked hopefully.
“If you can do it in less than thirty seconds, then sure, whatever that is too, then fall back. Everybody else evacuate the command center. Now.”
Me and Franks stayed by the window, me because I was trying to catch a glimpse of where the monster was going to come back, and Franks, probably because he didn’t like being told what to do.
Milo was staring at the monitors in shock. Our Newbie barracks had caught on fire. “Were you really serious about this coming out of my pay, Earl?”
“Of course not,” Earl said as he grabbed Milo by the strap on the back of his armor and dragged him toward the door. “I don’t pay you enough to cover this. Move!”
It appeared that the heat from the fire had driven the fog back, but on the other side I could see the glowing stuff moving, glowing, flowing like it was alive and angry; it almost looked like a giant snake. It was gathering in one spot.
“He’s already back,” I shouted. The monster rose on the other side of the fire, easily over twenty feet tall now. The puritan affectation was gone. The coat and hat were missing. Now it was just a giant sort of man-shaped skeleton made of twisted wire and powered by blue flames. “Main parking area, about two hundred yards out.” Then I watched in horror as the Drekavac bent down and easily lifted a car by its front end. He began to spin the vehicle around like he was doing a hammer throw. Even Franks decided that was a good time to back away. I did, too, because the car was gaining speed until it was whistling through the air around him. Then Drekavac let go and whipped the car toward MHI HQ.
It sailed through the air like it had been launched by a catapult. It was a white Audi R8, and it managed to even look good while flipping end over end through the sky. The Drekavac’s aim was good and he hit the command center wall. The impact shook the building so hard it knocked me off my feet. Dust filled the air. The window I’d been standing by was gone, replaced by mangled metal and broken concrete with rebar sticking out of it.
Holly ran into the command center carrying an AT-4. She pushed past Franks, saw me lying on the floor, then she saw the remains of her new car sticking through the wall.
“You motherfucker!” she screamed. Holly went over to the hole in the wall and aimed the smoothbore anti-tank weapon at the monster. “I just paid that off!”
The command center was a really big room, but the back blast on an AT-4 was still a bitch, so I got to my feet and fled to not get burned by the overpressure.
Holly fired. The concussion was insane. Anything in here that hadn’t been ruined by the Drekavac got scorched or blown away by that instead. This kind of hostile work environment bullshit was why I had tinnitus.
The Drekavac had picked up a pickup to toss at us when Holly’s 84mm warhead hit him in the midsection. The explosion cut him in half. Both halves melted into the parking lot as the truck burned on top of him.
Eleven.
The fog immediately flowed back into that same spot. But I couldn’t even call it fog anymore. It was more like the ectoplasmic slime we’d seen in Las Vegas. And this time it was all of it. Every bit of the unnatural substance crawled beneath that bonfire. And a mere five seconds after its last death, the Drekavac sat up. The burning truck went bouncing away. The monster stood, covered in chunks of molten asphalt, bigger than the frost giant we’d fought during the siege, and he let out a roar of such intensity that people must have heard it in Birmingham.
Earl was in the hallway, bellowing, “Big guns on the parking lot now! Hit him with everything we’ve got!”
All along this side of HQ, Hunters threw open the armored shutters. We had a variety of man-portable heavy weapons ready to go, including bunker busters and anti-tank weapons. The Hunters started firing. It was like being inside a metal drum being beaten with hammers as multiple SMAWs and Carl Gustafs went off.
The Drekavac was rocked by so many explosions that I couldn’t even see it. This was an order of magnitude of more firepower than we’d used to obliterate Buford Phipps. The explosions staggered the monster but didn’t drop him. We’d been warned that the last few manifestations were powerful, but this was madness. We were hitting him with enough munitions to sink a battleship. Instead of dying, he reached down, scooped up a car that had caught on fire, and flung it at us.
The flaming wreck spiraled through the sky and landed on our roof. The gas tank must have ruptured because the next thing I knew, the roof was caving in and barfing fire everywhere.
Julie was shouting for every Hunter in the building to run to this side to concentrate fire on the monster. And whoever didn’t have a heavy weapon picked up a fire extinguisher or carried the wounded out of the way. Franks was firing a 20mm rifle freehand.
The Drekavac started running toward us, covering vast amounts of ground with every step. Milo’s secondary turrets lit him up. Mines went off. Warheads punched through his chest and head. Big chunks of monster were flung in every direction. Our Hind flew past, hitting the Drekavac with everything, but he didn’t even slow. The monster crashed through the towering wall of fire, falling to pieces but still pushing forward, until a lucky hit got him right in the knee. The bottom half of his leg came off. The monster stumbled, but he was so big that falling brought him nearly to the front door.
He was too close for big explosives without injuring ourselves in the process, so every Hunter there hung out the nearest window or fresh hole in the wall and shot at him with small arms. I ran to the remains of Holly’s car, clambered up the crumpled hood, hung Cazador out the gap and dumped a magazine as fast as I could pull the trigger. He was so big I couldn’t miss.
The Drekavac was dying, but not fast enough. He didn’t draw the sword this time. It was more like he willed it into existence. The crackling blade hit the first floor and sheared right through the concrete like it was a laser beam. I sure hoped the Hunters at those windows had gotten out of the way in time.
The floor beneath my feet rumbled. It felt like this whole side of MHI’s HQ was about to collapse beneath us. It was odd. Nobody screamed. Nobody panicked. We all just kind of froze for a moment, staring at each other wide-eyed, not even daring to breathe, as the building groaned below us.
It didn’t fall down.
We all started to breathe again. It was a good thing Grandpa Shackleford hadn’t skimped on the construction of this place.
The super-giant Drekavac slowly sank to his knees, too damaged to continue. And died. Twelve.
By my count, he still had one life left.
Franks appeared next to me, reloading the 20mm cannon that was longer than I was tall. “Hmmm . . . m
ake that five thousand pikemen.”
“The main doors have been breached.” Julie shouted. “Tanya’s spells are broken. He can come inside. Get ready for anything.”
I looked down at the Drekavac. As he died this time, he didn’t dissipate back into fog, because every bit of fog was already compressed into this one huge form. The body had been burning with that evil supernatural blue, but it looked like the fire was hardening into ice.
“Something weird is happening,” I warned.
The body crystalized. Cracks formed. The cracks began to spread, faster and faster.
Franks scowled, looking out into the night as if he’d sensed something. “Lana’s here,” he muttered.
“That’s your takeaway from this?” I flipped out. “That’s what you’re worried about right now? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“You got your mission. I got mine,” Franks said as he ignored the giant super monster that had suddenly turned into crystal, sounding like somebody had just turned a garden hose on ten million bags of Pop Rocks. Franks walked away. I looked down again to see that the Drekavac’s corpse was shaking with building energy.
“Everybody get back.”
For a second I’d thought the monster was going to go off like a bomb. What actually happened for his thirteenth and final form was a whole lot worse.
The giant shattered into an army of Drekavacs.
Chapter 20
There had to be hundreds of them, each the size of the original being. Every bit of the monster’s mass was converted into new bodies all at once, and it had been huge. The kneeling giant collapsed in an avalanche of skeletal blue bodies. The parts that had just been blown off by the explosives split into monsters too. All of a sudden, I was looking down at a concert-sized crowd of glowing horrors. The ones who had been born in the middle of our lawn inferno insta-died. The rest charged MHI HQ.
“We’ve got lots of monsters incoming!”
The Hunters opened fire. Only ghostly flintlock pistols materialized in about half of the Drekavacs’ hands and they shot back. Tiny blue bolts smacked into the walls around us as Hunters had to duck down. The pistols seemed far less powerful than the blunderbuss, but each impact still left a glowing blue hole.
While we were being pinned down, the other half of the army formed spectral swords or axes and charged our front door. I tossed a grenade out the window, and by the time I’d reloaded Cazador, it had detonated. Then I stood, picked out a Drekavac with a gun, and shot him in the face. I swiveled, picked up another monster, and shot him through the side of the head. Both of the creatures dropped. Which meant that they were probably only about as tough individually as the Drekavac’s first iteration. Too bad there were piles of them now. I had to duck as half a dozen ghost bullets clanged into the wrecked Audi.
The monsters may have all been aspects of the same being, but they sure didn’t act that way. It was like each one had an independent mind because they were moving in every direction and trying multiple lines of attack. Some were breaching our doors. Others were climbing up the walls to get in the opened windows. A bunch were taking cover and shooting at us. Milo’s turrets were slicing them down, but then groups of monsters began targeting the turrets. It was nuts.
Julie was shouting orders, sending most of us downstairs to reinforce the first floor, while she kept a crew up here to pick off the monsters in the open and climbing up the walls. “Owen, go with them.”
“On it,” I said as I jumped up and rushed to the stairs. My wife knew me well. Close-range face smashing was my specialty. I was wearing rifle pouches, but I’d left Abomination leaning in a corner with a belt full of drum mags, so I grabbed my shotgun along the way. There were several other Hunters ahead of me, including Milo and Holly.
Earl was in the lead. “These sons o’ bitches ain’t getting through us.” He shoved another mag in his Tommy gun and yanked back the bolt. “We kill as many as we can and leapfrog back as we need to. They’ll be heading for the vault.”
“We’ve got a problem,” Milo warned.
“No shit?” Holly said sarcastically.
“No, I mean a math problem. I don’t know his original density, but square cube law and all that, figure that big fella had to weigh one or two hundred tons at least.”
“That’s a lot of fog,” I said.
“Magic fog, so I’m assuming it’s less dense than something solid like a kaiju, and he looked kinda wispy so I’ll guess a hundred tons. The baby Drekavacs look pretty skinny all thin and wiry like that, but he’s probably heavier than he looks because of the strength displayed, no wonder he wears the big coat and hat, really bulks him up—”
“Milo,” Earl shouted. “Get to the point.”
“Quick math, if each of these little guys are between a hundred and two hundred pounds each, there might be up to a couple thousand of them out there right now. But that’s assuming a perfectly efficient system, and even magic recycling can’t be that good, but still we’ve probably got a thousand of them at least.”
“That’s your low estimate?”
We reached the ground floor and ran for the reception area.
The giant Drekavac’s sword had chopped our heavy reinforced door in half, but the Hunters stationed here had dropped the emergency portcullis to block the way. A bunch of the man-sized monsters were currently hacking and tearing at it. And from the way the steel bars were popping, these things were still freakishly strong.
Several Hunters were already here, using the wall corners and our big reception desk for cover. They were shooting down the hall through the gaps in the portcullis . . . and from all the glowing holes in the walls, the monsters were shooting back. One Hunter was being dragged away by his friends, screaming because of the smoking hole that had just gotten punched through his thigh. He left a red trail on the tile.
I wasn’t surprised to see that Dorcas was there, even though she was a one-legged senior citizen, whom Earl had specifically told to go home because she was too old for this kind of roughneck shit. She was leaning on her desk, shoving 12-gauge buckshot shells into the mag tube of a Mossberg 590. “About damned time, Earl.”
“I thought I told you to sit this one out.”
“Oh, stick it. This is my turf.” Dorcas pumped the shotgun. Over the decades those two had known each other, he had only aged a few years but she’d gone from young girl to crusty old lady, so Dorcas was one of the few people around who gave Earl lip. “Ain’t no assholes gonna run me off. Now get to helping. That gate ain’t gonna hold them for long, and they’re hitting the other doors too.”
Earl started grabbing various Hunters and sending them in different directions to reinforce those entrances. I flipped over the table next to the memorial wall, braced Cazador over the top, and started flinging .308 rounds down the hallway. Milo crouched next to me and started shooting too. Ejected brass bounced off my armor. There were so many bodies throwing themselves against the gate that we couldn’t hardly miss. All I needed to do was not accidentally hit the portcullis.
We killed a pile of them and they just didn’t care. Bars bent. Welds snapped. The portcullis was down. They were coming in.
Dorcas picked up a clacker. “Fire in the hole!”
We got down as she set off the claymores.
MHI’s entryway was shredded by hundreds of projectiles. Dozens of monsters were torn apart. The air was filled with smoke and drywall dust. Then there was only the briefest delay before the bad guys came pouring in.
There were several of us shooting down that narrow channel. It was a fatal funnel filled with flying silver and lead. The Drekavacs pushed forward anyway. The wire strands of their thin limbs unraveled beneath the high velocity impacts. But not every aspect of the monster was suicidal because some of the creatures used cover and fired back.
There was a blue flash as the table Milo and I were hiding behind was struck. Splinters flew. Milo got hit and the impact knocked him down. He landed on his back and clutched at his chest. As more bu
llets hit the table, I grabbed Milo by the drag strap on his armor and pulled him down the hall and around the corner.
“Ouch! Ouch!” Milo was struggling to get one of the pouches open on his armor. He yanked out a magazine that was dripping molten plastic from the glowing blue hole burned through it. The spring shot out of the damaged mag and rounds went rolling across the floor.
“You okay?”
Milo grimaced as he shoved one hand inside his armor. “Oh, that hurts.” He pulled it out. Clean. No blood. “Oof. Low velocity. Not enough penetration to punch our armor. Lots of energy dump though. About like getting kicked by a horse.”
“You can analyze the ghost bullets later. Can you walk?”
“Sure.” Milo staggered to his feet and winced, clearly in a whole lot of pain. “Uh-oh. You know that feeling when you put a rib into one of your lungs?”
“No.”
“It’s not pleasant.”
I glanced back toward my previous firing position. It had been turned into swiss cheese. The reception desk was a smoking wreck. Hunters were falling back. Earl had picked up stubborn Dorcas and was carrying her over one shoulder. She wasn’t wounded. She was just too pissed off to retreat. In fact she was still shooting her shotgun as Earl ran. One of the blue streaks nailed her in her fake leg and blew her foot clean off. “Not again!” Dorcas tossed the now empty Mossberg and pulled out her hand cannon. She managed to crank off a couple of shots before Earl got her out of the line of fire.
I leaned out to cover them and dropped another monster with Cazador. They were close enough I just twisted the rifle to the side and engaged them with the micro dot sight instead of the much more powerful scope.
Earl passed our angry little receptionist off to Milo and Holly. “Get all the wounded to the cafeteria.”
“That looks like most of us, Earl,” Milo said.
“I know. Holly, keep them alive. There’s only one way into the pantry. That’s the choke point. Hold it.” Then he clapped my shoulder and gave me orders even as I was shooting. It was a good thing my rifle was suppressed so I could still understand him. “Basement, Z. We’re gonna reinforce them.”
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