Tails flicked from the back of the creatures and moved much like rat tails, but looked like they had a stinger at the end.
Taylor remembered how close he had come to being impaled and poisoned by the bear monster. His thick armor had saved him by being barely thick enough, and he had been able to walk away from that fight unscathed.
Now, these creatures seemed to have similar kinds of venom in them and could punch holes in armor as easily. It seemed suicidal to simply stand there, but he needed to learn as much about them as he could before the shit hit what promised to be an industrial-sized fan. His life and those of his companions might well depend on even the smallest detail he could identify.
The armor he now wore could deflect most gunfire except maybe rounds that were designed to be armor-piercing, but he had no desire to test how it fared against the fangs these creatures had. He needed to make use of the mobility the lighter suit provided him.
"What do we do next?" Banks asked grimly. She sounded surprisingly calm.
"We hunt," he replied simply.
All he had to do was try to keep the monsters in check and make sure that she and the hunter didn't get their asses killed in the meantime.
It would definitely be a pain in his ass.
"Move to the left when I say so," he said to both her and the hunter. "Don't bother to ask questions, just move. Banks, you cover for this asshole and protect him as best you can."
"What will you do?" she asked and immediately ignored his injunction not to. Why was he surprised?
"I'll try to get them into a position where we can flank them," he explained, his focus on the beasts that moved slowly over the trees like they attempted to study the humans, unsure of what they were looking at. "Which means on the ground. Are you ready?"
She nodded.
"Okay. Go!"
Banks grasped the hunter by the hand and dragged him to the left. They rushed toward an open area clear of trees for a dozen feet or so while Taylor raised his shotgun into the air and aimed at the beasts that reacted to his companions’ actions.
He felt a little bad for using them as bait, but he would put himself in the same danger in mere seconds anyway, so there really wasn’t a reason for guilt.
As the monsters moved, he kept his weapon trained on the one that seemed the quickest among them. It gained the ground first and surged toward Banks like she owed it something. He was certain that these were actually the spawn of the bear monster he had killed before. Maybe after laying eggs, it had needed more food, had begun to attack more and more creatures around it, and in doing so, absorbed their DNA and started to change. Perhaps these beasts had begun to do the same once they sampled the food in the area.
But that was a problem for the scientists to worry about. His job was to make sure they weren't on the menu and already, a few of them had completed their descent.
The AA-12 was equipped with a drum magazine containing thirty-two rounds that could be fired at around three hundred rounds per minute. He could effectively fill the air around them with flying lead if he wanted to.
And goddamn, did he want to.
Taylor pulled the trigger and the kick of the powerful weapon thrust into his shoulder. The mutants suddenly realized they were under attack. Two of them were shredded by the first couple of rounds while the rest reacted instantly and tried to take cover behind the trees.
The rain of lead didn't stop at the trees but ripped through them and the monsters that hid behind them. They fell and writhed hideously while they screeched and roared in pain.
It was a good start but it only lasted for a few seconds before the magazine was emptied. The smaller suit needed a little extra time to reload and the remainder of the creatures seemed to sense their window of opportunity. Many abandoned their slow descent and simply plunged from their higher elevation. He drew the sidearm from his hip and opened fire on the two that landed first. One shuddered and fell, clearly dead, while the other was wounded and screeched as it fell back and tried to escape the volley of lead.
The sidearm clicked and he tucked it into his holster and drew the second one clear. Banks realized that she needed to engage when other mutants began to converge on her. She raised her assault rifle and opened fire on the foremost creatures. Even the hunter pulled the trigger on his shotgun to empty both barrels.
Taylor couldn't tell if they did any damage, but the distraction was enough for him to reload the shotgun. As the monsters swarmed into the attack, he felt the comforting kick of the weapon as he fired systematically at both those on the ground and the few that remained in the trees. He did a fair amount of damage, some of it by felling the trees the beasts lurked in so one or two were crushed. Inevitably, he needed to reload, and as if they had anticipated the moment—like they had somehow identified this as a weakness—the monsters pushed into a combined assault.
"Banks, I could really use some help!"
She wasn't at all sure what she was doing there. Why had she elected to come out into the middle of the woods with McFadden? There weren't too many people who liked the woods anyway, and Niki wasn't one of those on a good day.
So again, why had she insisted that she accompany him when he was more than capable of doing his job?
Hell, maybe she was falling for him.
"No, fuck no. Don't even start thinking like that," she shouted, reloaded her assault rifle, and opened fire at the aberrations that now seemed to have focused their attacks on Taylor and he shouted for her to help him. The hunter huddled behind her and tried to reload his shotgun again.
Maybe a damn double-barreled shotgun wasn't the best thing to use when hunting mutants.
She cursed the necessity to place her shots in a way that she wouldn’t shoot Taylor. It would have been so much easier to simply tear through the creatures. Still, she must have done something right as they turned suddenly and rushed toward her. There weren't that many of them left, of course, but with each one that fell, those left seemed to become more and more rabid.
It wasn't that she didn't know how to fire an assault rifle, she reminded herself a little desperately. The problem was that these monsters moved in a way that looked unnatural and were somehow able to jump and bound off the trees for more speed as they attacked.
One fell with a handful of holes in its body, but the other two reached her. The hunter flung himself out of the way as she was knocked off her feet. She flailed in an attempt to keep herself from falling on her back.
The split jaws latched onto her arms and tried to bite and tear through. She twisted her arm violently and the action broke the first one’s neck, but as she turned, the other had already moved to pin her down. It screeched and hissed when she tried to knock it away. The claws and fangs were latched on tight, and the only way would break free was to rip its head off. She was both terrified and enraged enough to do it but didn't have the angle for it.
The hideous tail tilted up and lashed down in an effort to punch the stinger through her armor. The first strike did no damage, but the second found a break in the plate, and she could feel a pinch as it dug in deeper and attempted to find something to inject its venom into.
"Shit!" She screamed and increased her fight to wrench herself free.
Suddenly, the creature stopped pushing. Something yanked it off, Niki realized and stared in abject horror when the fangs and head remained in place while the remainder was hauled free.
Taylor held the body, stood over her, and hurled it at the beasts that were still alive and on the offensive. He had dropped his shotgun and it looked like his pistols were empty too, which left him with nothing but what looked like a machete.
He bulldozed into the three remaining monsters with a powerful roar to hack, slice, and slash through them. His vicious onslaught left them in pieces while he seemed impervious to their attacks.
When it was over, he stood over the bodies and panted for breath. He made sure they were dead before he turned to where Banks struggled to push to her feet.
"Are you okay?" he asked, both to her and the hunter who stared at them with a slack jaw.
"Yeah," Niki said and shook her head. "Well, now I understand what she sees."
"Understand what who sees?" Taylor asked and narrowed his eyes.
Oh, shit. Had she said that out loud?
"Huh?" She tried to sound bemused in the hope that she could avoid the truth. "Oh…nothing. I was thinking aloud. We need to call someone for a cleanup in the area."
"That sounds good." He obviously still needed to catch his breath. “We'll…uh, stand here and wait, I guess."
Chapter Thirty-Two
He rather liked the idea that choppers would come in—not exactly to the rescue because he’d taken care of that, but as part of the mission. They hadn’t taken too many choppers into the Zoo. It was difficult enough to get shit on wheels to work in there with too many obstacles in the way to make it a comfortable ride along with the hellish vines that somehow knew to sabotage wheels, axles, and engines.
This was, thankfully, an entirely different scenario. It was nothing like the Zoo, and that was one of the reasons why he liked it. There weren't too many good things about being out in the boonies, but not having monsters on a regular basis was certainly one of them. And, of course, the absence of the kinds of trees with vines that would pick you up off the ground to either have you for lunch or kill you by dropping you from a dizzy height.
That and the view. He scrambled onto some high ground to make sure there weren't any more of the creatures. While he doubted there would be, his job right now was to be extra careful, and Taylor had begun to take it seriously. There was no way in hell he would let this place turn into the Zoo Two, after all.
The view around him was something else. It was the middle of the day and from the rock he'd selected as his high ground, he could see for miles in every direction. It wasn’t all that far up into the mountains behind him but it was a view to kill for. It would hopefully only be monsters he killed, but he was flexible on that. His experience told him that humans often turned out to be shitty as well.
"Do you see anything?" Banks called from the bottom.
"Yeah, the choppers are incoming," he said. "I don't see anywhere for them to land, though."
"They won't need to," she said and used the comms in their suits. "They'll drop the people and equipment and they'll get to work."
"I really hope they don't expect me to do any of this cleanup work," he told her as he worked his way slowly down to where she and the hunter waited for him.
"Well, no. You're not paid for that," she replied once he reached them. "But I'm sure they'd always appreciate help, though. All the shit-fucking way out here and with this much work to get done, you have to know they'll hate every second of it."
"That's what the crews are paid to do, right?"
"Well, yes."
"And I won’t be paid extra?"
"Nope."
"There you go. My hands are tied."
"You're the one who tied them but sure, okay," she said and laughed. "Thanks for doing all the climbing there. I think the monsters took a bite out of my suit and the hydraulics were nicked or something."
"Nah, if the hydraulics were cut, you would see the fluid all over the place and you wouldn't be able to move at all." He shook his head firmly. "No, the chances are you simply need a little regulation. Probably around the hips—that's where most of the controls run and they get a little testy. Did you even calibrate the suit before you put it on?"
"No," she said defensively. "Did you calibrate your suit?"
"Of course," he snapped in response. "You don't get into one of these without checking every little detail of it. These were basically invented with Murphy's law embedded into their code. Anything you don't check will be what fails you when you need it most. That’s almost a guarantee."
"Well, all right, then. The next time I head out into the field, I'll be sure to check every last inch of my suit."
"Yeah, that one is a little done for, though." Taylor tapped her shoulder. "The joints will be in a tiff, and of course, the connections around the hips were probably knocked out of joint. You won't be able to get much more out of that without repairs. Thankfully for you, I know a guy who works precisely in that field."
She laughed and shook her head. "I hate to break it to you, but I think the FBI has a contract with some of the larger companies to keep their suits in top—well, working shape, anyway."
"You see, that's what's killing America. The big corporations and monopolies kill the smaller businesses, the backbone of this country."
"Yeah, well, remember that next time you vote. Don’t complain about it to me."
He tilted his head and focused on unexpected movement. They had gathered most of the bodies into a pile to make the collection a little easier, but he could see one of the beasts at the bottom wasn't quite dead yet. It now tried to drag itself toward the tree the hunter had hidden behind when they'd run into him.
"What?" the agent asked as he moved toward the pile, drew his machete, and delivered the killing blow. You could never be too careful with these beasts.
It had, however, appeared to move toward something, and as he approached the tree in question with her and the hunter beside him, he realized that a hole had been burrowed into it. Although fairly small, it was probably large enough for the monsters to squeeze through.
"What do you think that's about?" she asked.
"While they had a purpose for our hunter friend, I'm more or less certain it had nothing to do with being bait," he replied, his expression grim with sudden foreboding. He retrieved a flashlight from his pack, turned it on, and directed the beam into what he assumed was a den under the tree.
Sure enough, the light illuminated about three or four dozen tiny, shining blue spheres.
"What in the hell?" the hunter asked and made the sign of the cross over his chest.
"Well, if I had to guess—and I'm no specialist, so take my words with a grain of salt—I'd say that is a clutch of eggs. You were positioned directly over the den, probably as the first meal for whatever the hell would crawl out of there."
The man gaped, and his expression evidenced a mixture of terror and disgust.
"Yeah, it’s not a nice way to go," Taylor said and moved away from the hole.
"What do you want to do with them?" the agent asked as she walked beside him.
"Well, if we had any scientists with us, I would say we should study them, learn everything we can about the monsters, and see what makes them tick. We could get your sister to poke them with needles to help us find a way to kill them more efficiently or whatever it is that evolutionary biologists do."
"It's not that, I can tell you that much. Without any researchers here, what do you think we should do?"
"Well, I say we blow it the fuck up and kill them all before they have the chance to hatch and attack us. What do you say?"
"That sounds great to me, but how in the hell can we blow it up? We don't have any explosives on us, remember."
"Damn it, you really didn't check your suit before you put it on," he complained and turned to face her with his arms folded. "You have a rocket launcher mounted on your back. Most of the larger power armor suits do. You call it up using the HUD, prime, aim, and fire. I assumed you simply held back in case the fighting got too bad, but now I realize you actually didn't know you had them."
Banks flipped him off, and the gesture caught him by surprise because he really hadn’t expected it. "Yeah, and you can go fuck yourself. How do I activate it?"
"Key the button at the right side of your chin and that should give you manual access to the weapons on your suit. I seem to remember the older suits had actual buttons in the helmet. Once there, you should be able to
call up—ah, there we go."
He backed away quickly as the shoulder-mounted rocket launcher came up from her back. The hunter pulled away as well, anxious to avoid being blown up accidentally.
"You simply click the button again to prime, and it'll use your eyes on the HUD to lock onto the target." Taylor kept his distance as she turned to aim at the den.
"How many should I fire?" she asked.
"You have four in the barrel so…fuck it. Fire all four." He turned to the hunter. "You might want to take cover. Oh, and cover your ears too."
The man nodded and raced behind a nearby outcrop of rocks with his hands already over his ears.
"Well…fire in the hole, I guess," Banks said when she finally managed to lock onto the target. Four successive whooshes followed one another in rapid succession as the rockets were launched toward the den.
Her suit did its job well and delivered the payload dead on. The powerful detonations were enough to decimate the whole area and topple the tree as well. The dust and debris settled slowly and the rumbled echo of the explosions were superseded by the steady thump of rotor blades as the helicopters he had seen earlier swept in to hover overhead.
"Is everything all right down there, Special Agent Banks?" asked a man through their comm line, likely one of the pilots.
"Yep. We merely finished a little business down here. There’s no need to worry," she replied. "You can send your people down. Everything's dead down here but us. Oh, and we have a survivor too."
"You two and the survivor can mount up in the helo once everyone's off," the pilot replied as a series of lines snaked out and a group of men in military garb began to descend, carrying heavy packs of equipment.
Hired Killer (Cryptid Assassin Book 1) Page 25
