Thrusting both hands up, he caught the wrist as it came down, halting the blade a hair’s breadth from his face. The chef jumped upon him, weight bearing down, face a snarl and teeth bared. Coming around him now, Drake saw the legs of the second chef.
No way was he going to be able to move the big bastard atop him. The edge of the cleaver was already parting the tiniest hairs on his face. Every ounce of muscle, of concentration, was being poured into stopping that cleaver.
Chef number two dropped down to one knee beside his left ear. This man held a steak knife in one hand and proceeded to slowly level it up with Drake’s ear. He then placed a hand behind the shaft.
“Say when you’re ready,” he said to the first chef.
“Skewer its brain,” came the grunt of a reply.
Drake tried to twist away but there was nowhere to go. The second chef pushed the steak knife hard into his ear, but then the momentum stopped. The hand holding the knife fell to the floor and the bloody stump that was left flew up, spraying as its owner screamed.
“Let’s see how you like it.” Kenzie had swept the table clear and jumped to his aid. Her sword sliced and diced the second chef and then impaled the first. The man kept pushing despite the pain, seeing the end but trying to take Drake with him. The ex-SAS man pushed back with everything he had, holding the weapon at bay just long enough.
Kenzie pushed harder and all the strength fled from the chef. His face creased, his will all but sapped. Drake rolled him off and took the hand Kenzie proffered.
“Cheers, love,” he said.
“Just proving a point.” She waved the katana in his face to emphasize the wit.
“Always fancied the chef’s special,” Drake said. “Never thought I’d become it.”
“You will never take us alive!” Dantanion screamed above it all. “It will all come crashing down before we die!” He ripped the finger bone necklace from around his neck and threw it into the air—the chain broken and the digits dropping down all around him.
Ah, the quiet man finds his voice and his anger. At last.
“Sounds desperate,” Kenzie said.
“My job is almost done,” Drake said grimly. “Let’s push the bastard over the edge.”
Only three men separated them from Dantanion. To their right Dahl slipped in blood, fell to one knee and saw a knife thrust at his shoulder. Unable to twist to evade the attack he kicked the assailant’s legs away, felling him, and then stared right into the man’s eyes.
“Stab me whilst I’m down would you?”
The blade slashed at him. Dahl caught it, turned it, and planted it in his attacker. Another spider creature landed on his back, striking with elbows and knees, face mask lifted so the teeth could come into play. Dahl put a heavy boot into them and watched the black-clad man shrink away. Above, there were no more archers and the hall was becoming much less crowded. Mai managed to close the gap between them and the villagers, bringing the entire group closer together.
Dantanion screamed something about his family, his vision. The world he had built. As he finished, his self-imposed fangs glinted, a savage promise.
Standing alone, he did not run away.
Drake and Kenzie cleared the path before him.
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
Hayden fought her way to the cave door as the living quarters rapidly filled up. The crush worked against them; made up of attackers, defenders and those that wanted no part of it. They had nowhere to go. Some were being stabbed or crushed just to make space for more. Dantanion’s guards surged into and around the place, hunting out the insurgents.
Struggling, she tried to get the key into the lock. An arm swiped at her, making her lurch. She pushed the attacker in the chest, forcing him back. Aimed the key again and forced it into the lock. Yorgi kicked out at her side, forcing another away, doubling up a woman. When she looked up again her eyes were glowing, her face rabid. Hayden knew she’d ingested a ton of cannibal juice.
Cannibal juice?
Well, what the hell else would you call it? She twisted the lock, heard a click, and flung open the doors. Just in time. Another surge forced her down the narrow passage that was revealed and into a blast of cold air. Yorgi stumbled after her, then Fay. She’d already lost Smyth and Kinimaka, but assumed they were just trying to cope with the crush. She’d already checked and knew the Glock had six bullets remaining. Now, she pressed on, seeking out a niche or a junction where she might be able to stop and help her friends.
Above, she could only see rock and knew they were below the foundations of the house, its lower edge probably jutting out into space over them. Built as it had been against the mountain she knew it had to be anchored further up, and the concealed caves delved below. Two guards caught her first, and she beat them hard, rendering both unconscious in less than a minute. Fay stared in amazement.
“Why didn’t you do that before? At the feast?”
“Because I didn’t have backup then. And I thought I could find the keys alone. And—”
“All right, I get it. Jeez.”
Yorgi used the rock wall to gain forward momentum, running a few steps up at full speed and coming down hard onto another guard. Hayden backed further away. The cave entrance began to fill and then the passage. All manner of people followed her.
And attacked without conscience. Anything went in the caves. Men came low and she beat them down. Another slashed with a sharpened stick and she perforated his lungs with it. A spider creature crawled along the side of the tunnel where the wall met the ground, black and chilling. Hayden decided it was worth a bullet and saw it bleed red blood.
Thank God.
Still, they forced her backward. The tunnel opened out. Behind her came the sounds of a flowing stream. It crossed their path and continued underground. More attackers thrust forward. Hayden smashed one on the temple and then another. She fell atop them, forcing them under the water and kneeling on their heads. She fended a third off, catching punches and blows on her wrists and biceps, gaining bruises and not losing any ground.
Fay knelt beside her, crying.
“If you want to live,” Hayden panted between punches, “fight!”
A guard slipped in the stream, smashed his head against jutting rock. His weapon had been a baseball bat, so Hayden scooped it up and used it on the next. Yet another she smashed around the knees, three blows, until finally she felt the fight give in those she had drowned, and rose up.
Backing further away.
She took Fay by the jacket, pulled her back. The tunnel angled downward now, its walls moving further and further away. Hayden ignored her soaked feet, her soaked legs, and jabbed at another oncoming opponent. Beyond him now she saw the huge bulk that had to be Kinimaka, the shape of Smyth who grumbled even as he fought. The latter engaged a spider creature, pummeling it until it dropped, but failed to stop two guards sneaking around his back.
Kinimaka ended them with two shots.
Smyth jumped away. Hayden saw recruits coming now, the ones she’d arrived with and a dozen more, filing past Smyth and chasing after her; their eyes wild and petrified, their faces bruised and bloody.
“Nobody signed us up for this,” one yelled.
“I don’t remember signing up for anything!” another replied.
“Is it all part of the initiation?” Still another.
“Listen up!” Hayden cried out. “You’re now running for your goddamn lives. So believe that. And fucking fight!”
Fay stared up and down, left and right, eyes wide with horror. Hayden saw more than just fear of battle in that stare. “What’s wrong?” she asked, then gently patted the girl’s face. “What’s wrong? Fay!”
“Stories I heard earlier,” she whispered. “About flesh eaters that never leave the caves. Fed old meat through a hole. They’re just left down here to roam and . . . and . . .”
“And what?”
“To watch out for strays,” she murmured. “True monsters.”
Hayden looked down
the darker tunnel that stretched ahead, knowing it led toward the long lost Inca treasure. “We must go deeper. We’re under attack. We have no choice.”
Smyth came up. “Get a fucking move on!”
“There’s more,” Fay breathed. “A story of two brothers gone mad and wild who live down here together, worse than the flesh eaters and far hungrier.”
“Sounds like shit to me,” Smyth said. “Move your ass.”
Hayden used another bullet on a spider creature and Kinimaka fired two into guards. With the bulk of the people out of the way now they could puck off their assailants with ease, forcing most of them back up the tunnel and toward the house. Hayden stared into the dark passageway once more.
“Stick together,” she said. “We go down.”
“Not me,” Fay challenged. “I’m staying right here.”
“Where you’re just as vulnerable,” Hayden protested. “From above and below.”
“I am not moving. You see, I’m starting to stand up for myself.”
At the perfectly wrong moment, Hayden thought. Like so many kids. “All right, then I can’t help you. Any of you who stay. I want to . . .” She faltered. “Come with us. Please.”
Fay refused; others sat beside her. In the end all of the recruits chose to stay, especially when all sounds of footsteps along the tunnel back to the chateau died away.
Hayden eyed her team. “Looks like it’s just us, guys.”
Yorgi inclined his head. “I will stay with them. I have a full weapon and I can protect these boys and girls.”
Hayden saw vulnerability in his eyes then, and guessed he saw much of his old self in the gathering of lost souls. He wanted to go with the team, but needed to protect the kids.
“Good luck,” she said. “We’ll see you soon.”
Smyth and Kinimaka followed her into blackness, trying not to hear the whisperings and slitherings that suddenly started up around them.
CHAPTER FORTY THREE
Drake stopped before Dantanion, expecting the usual barrage of bodyguards to launch a last-ditch assault. After ten seconds he began to feel exposed, after twenty a little silly. Finally, after more than half a minute Alicia tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hey, you gonna say something. Drakey? You scared of the mighty cannibal king?”
“No, I’m not bloody scared,” Drake spluttered. “I was waiting for something to happen.”
“Seriously? Because you looked scared.” Dahl peered at him.
“The only thing that scares me, mate, is when the sausage is done before the bacon. ’Cause that way you’re not gonna get your fatty edges nice and crispy.”
“Then I guess this dude and you might sometimes have the same problem,” Kenzie said, placing the point of her sword against Dantanion’s throat. “Do you have any bodyguards lying in wait? A ninja or two?”
The inscrutable leader sniffed but made no movement. “It took ten years of hard toil to build this movement. The shattered bones of many men. It takes ritual devotion and sacrifice to provide and care for this family, something you would never understand. You have come here, invaded us, and destroyed it all in ten minutes.”
“Fifteen.” Alicia tapped her watch. “Maybe even twenty. But then we are dragging weight.” She winked over at Kenzie who flashed a wicked grin.
“We made the world a safer place,” Drake said. “Or this part of Peru at least.”
“The warmongers will never assuage their greed. The hungry politicians will always believe they can kill, maim and take whatever they want by force. And the worst part is—they think they have the right to do it. That they were born to rule and lead and make war, regardless of the innocent people they displace and murder.”
Drake shrugged. “Crazy as you are, pal, you just made sense.”
“Can whacko go full circle?” Alicia asked. “I mean, y’know, all the way around and back to sane?”
“Of course there will always be war,” Dahl said. “But knowing that our current and potential world leaders might be power-hungry dictators, and that others want to live in a post-apocalyptic world doesn’t exactly earn you a medal these days. Turn around, asshole, and put your hands behind your back.”
Drake still waited, still expected an attack. But it never came. For once this maniac, this Dantanion, was all he appeared to be—a calm, intelligent maniac with a long-term plan and the wealth to back it up.
“Maybe he’s a ninja,” Alicia said, turning once more from a quiet surveillance of the room. “Watch him, Torsty.”
“It’s all about the spectacle,” Dantanion said with utter coolness and then threw his hands in the air.
They erupted from behind black banners that ran floor to ceiling—half a dozen spider creatures with blades attached to their elbows and their knees, all capering in mad, haphazard fashion and striking out straight for the soldiers.
With the spiders came a man dressed like a skeleton, bones on the outside, a spear clasped in one hand. Alongside him strode two more seven-foot-tall giants, both with skulls tattooed over their real faces. They were naked and they were eunuchs and they carried maces. Drake was in shock, mouth hanging. Dahl cleared his throat and even Alicia remained speechless.
It wasn’t over—not by a long shot. A hunchback shambled free, face as wizened as ancient bark and, cackling, he raised a crossbow. Finally came the worst of all—a broad, fit individual who once might have caught a lady’s eye. That was before the surgery.
They had taken his lips away, and part of his jaw. The teeth were exposed all the way from ear to ear, and every single one had been impossibly sharpened. Drake suddenly wished for all the world that he had saved a mag of bullets for this terrible circus of horrors.
Dantanion shrieked for an attack, then joined his horrendous sideshow. Drake dodged a mace, bent low and, ignoring his attacker’s nakedness, drove a fist into the muscled abdomen. The mace swung around, missing his body. The second mace-swinger converged on him. Drake skipped back, then dived in, giving them little room. Well-placed punches sent them staggering. Alicia fought the man dressed as a skeleton, took his spear away and fell backward, allowing him to jump after her and impale himself. She then scrambled free, and leapt at Dantanion himself.
Dahl assessed the worst horror of them all, wondering where a weakness might lie, then turned to ward off two of the spider creatures. The four found themselves suddenly beset, surrounded, and unable to defend against every blow and thrust and sharpened edge. Mai then descended, kicking and killing two spider creatures and maiming a third in one leap; and with her she brought the villagers.
Curtis and Desiree still had bullets. Anica and Marco used guns as clubs and scrapped for their very lives. Brynn wielded a knife, stabbing and evading, cutting and nipping aside, the school teacher was fighting for her friends, her village, their very existence. Others came too, mourning their dead, but seeing their killers, their terrorizers, found courage in unity.
Drake caught a mace just below the ball, yanked its wielder off his feet, then slammed the ball itself into the skull of the other man, having to leap upward in the process. Both giants fell hard, bleeding. Mai took out the final spider and then launched a flurry against the hunchback. Dahl engaged the man whose exposed teeth inspired terror, slamming stiff arms and fists into the fleshy part of his body. A strike at the face produced blood only on Dahl’s knuckles.
Alicia pushed Dantanion back and back, toward the rear wall. The man appeared to have no fighting prowess at all, and she pursued him only to put him out of action, giving him no chance of escape. His face grew bloody, his left arm hung limply. Still he stood and still he glared with purpose. In the end, the wall halted his retreat; he stood laughing.
“The end is upon us.”
Alicia flexed her bruised fists. “Stand still and take it. We’re in a hurry.”
“Did you not hear me?”
“Something about the end is upon us.” She walked closer.
“No. before that. I said I would br
ing it all crashing down upon us. And I meant it. Literally.”
Alicia put it all together in a split instant; the fastest her mind had ever worked. Suddenly it was all forgotten—Dantanion, the horror show, the surviving cannibals.
Suddenly it no longer mattered.
“Drake!” she screamed. “Run! Just fucking run!”
Dantanion reached behind him to the wall, pressed a button and watched a compartment slide open. Inside, a red button glowed. With pleasure, reverence and a sad prayer he pressed it.
The house that was built on the side of a mountain exploded.
CHAPTER FORTY FOUR
Stunning bravery elevated the next few minutes, and stunning, sickening evil marred them. Drake grabbed an embattled Dahl by the shoulders, tore him away from the sideshow freak, and pushed him toward the rear of the house. Alicia spun and ran, catching hold of Mai and dragging the shocked woman along with her as Dantanion ran screaming toward the windows. Kenzie leaped over fallen foes, screaming like she never had at all of the villagers, urging them to run as if flesh-eating demons were at their heels.
And all this before a single explosion.
Then it happened. Dantanion sank to his knees beside the windows and the valley view, smiling in contentment, the robe settling around him. A blast like thunder shattered the air apart, rocked the house. A second and then a third followed and then came the most terrible groaning sound. More timed explosions, two below and two above, and then the great three-story chateau began to pull free of its moorings. Pure terror laced the air like hellfire. Dantanion had lured them into this trap knowing full well that he could never lose. Drake found Alicia and Mai, still pushing Dahl, and raced as one unit, running nowhere but never giving up.
A part of the ceiling fell in, rubble collapsing to Drake’s side. Dantanion’s horrors came after them, still battling. A spear flashed past Dahl’s head and struck a villager, taking him down and making him tumble away, already dead. The Swede slowed, turned and met his aggressor’s assault. The man with exposed teeth struck him full on, but Dahl didn’t wilt. He head-butted and kicked out and still ran with Drake, wrestling as he moved. Drake slowed and traded punches with another as Mai found two fleeing guards and fought to best them. Alicia helped, snapping teeth from one’s mouth with her boot, sending him flying.
Inca Kings (Matt Drake Book 15) Page 25
