Hunter (53 page)

Just as Hunter edged carefully around a concrete pillar he glimpsed Brick's flattop-gray image—an old, big guy with teeth clenched in rage firing a fully automatic rifle with beefy arms—erupt from behind an overturned desk. Ducking back instantly Hunter evaded the cascading round that ripped steel and plastic and buried his section of the room in rifle fire. He waited until the barrage broke, then dropped the barrel of the M-16 around the edge and fired.

One guard went down as the other turned, raising aim. Hunter ducked back again as cement was reduced to chalk, and then Brick's enraged voice cut through the booming chaos.

"
Vis a vous, darlin'
!"

Hunter didn't look but knew who had fired first. Then he peeked out to see Brick standing coldly over the last guard. Massacred by a long stream of 7.62's fired from what Hunter now recognized as a
cut down AK-47, the guard was unmoving. Brick dropped a banana clip and withdrew another from his vest, racking the slide. When he looked at Hunter, his face held no remorse, no emotion.

"I think we got 'em all," the big man said.

Even so, Hunter knew what he had said more by vision than sound because he was temporarily deafened. He shook his head a moment and dropped the clip from the M-16, pausing to remove a bandoleer from one of the dead guards that had another six full clips. He inserted a full thirty-round mag and racked the bolt, rising as Brick approached carrying the Weatherby. The big man snapped the breech shut as another explosion rocked the laboratory.

"They started without us." Brick looked up, his voice low and controlled. "We'd better kick in and join the party."

"Yeah," Hunter mumbled, moving away quickly. He opened the door of the vault—a refrigerated, lead-reinforced chamber about twenty by twenty—and walked inside. In reality, it was simply a large freezer, and nitrogen-cooled mist rushed into the brightly lit room as he searched through the cold white atmosphere.

"I don't think I'd go in there without one of them blue suits, kid." Brick stood at a respectful distance, watching. "I heard everything, know the score. And we can take 'em down without the serum. There's enough proof, or there will be, once this is over. Come on," he added anxiously, "we're missing the fireworks."

Ignoring Brick's plea, Hunter located the serum module and spun the smoothly designed cylinder until he saw it: HD-66. It was surprisingly slim, a plastic bag filled to the top with an amber liquid. In appearance it was not unlike a saline bag used to rehydrate hospital patients, and Hunter slipped it in a small black canvas bag as he crossed the lab, moving for the elevator. They had used the ventilation shaft to descend, but they'd make it public when they re-emerged.

"You got anything else to do?" Brick shouted.

Frowning menacingly, Hunter walked toward the cylinder.

"Just one thing," he said.

He stopped directly in front of it and fired the M-16 from the base of the magnificent cylindrical sarcophagus to the crest and down again. Glowing green phosphorescence exploded into the electromagnetic field and the copper coils erupted violently with electrical discharge.

The proto
-human body hung for a moment before its great weight completely disintegrated the glass coffin. Hunter held aim, continued firing until the entire atmosphere was heated by the holocaust and the body pitched forward in an ages-overdue death.

It was shredded by the unceasing assault before it crashed into the copper and exploded instantly into flames, ignited by the spiraling electrical surge loosed by the short-circuited wiring.

Merciless, Hunter watched the body consumed by flames.

Turned away.

"Let's go," he said coldly.

Shocked at the carnage, Brick turned with him.

"Jesus, Hunter," he whispered.

Knowing it was likely their emergence would go unnoticed as the fight raged aboveground, Hunter speed-reviewed everything he had just learned about the creature. That it had once been a man was of no use; what it had been and what it had become were as night and day. He was already familiar with its enhanced healing ability. Only the revelation that it had a life span over ten times that of man had been new, and that had no bearing on the battle.

The elevator doors opened to a night already torn with flame and smoke and colliding sounds of rifle fire.   Soldiers sprinted  chaotically through the blackness and, somewhere in the distance, the louder roar of something huge surrendered to an inferno. Hunter felt a brief moment of panic.

But you have what it wants
... it will come after you.

Use it ...

Brick was at the door, almost filling it with his bulk. He pressed his back pressed against the frame as he glared outside, turned his slag face to Hunter. "Can't see jack in all this smoke!" he coughed. "The thing musta’ knocked out the power! Look, I'm gonna partner up with Chaney if I can find him in this mess! Where're you gonna be?"

Mounting stairs that led to the roof three at a time, Hunter called back, "I'm going high to get a visual! If I can get its attention, I think I can lure it away from the complex!"

Brick barreled into the night as Hunter turned on the stairs, ascending quickly as the howls and cries of the wounded and dying followed him.

***

Stunned almost into unconsciousness, Bobbi Jo rolled slowly across something flat and hard before realizing it was a section of tin. Blindly reorienting, she reached out and felt for the Barrett, found a section of severed steel.

With a groan that emerged as a curse, she brutally forced herself to a knee. The shock of plummeting through the overhang had numbed her entire body. She knew she might have numerous broken bones or other serious injuries, but was thankful that for now the volcanic adrenaline would prevent her from feeling them.

Acclimating to the reduced light, she found the Barrett and attempted to lift it, but failed.

Taking a deep breath she looked around and saw that no one else had made the jump. The roof above was silent while the grounds on the far side of the building seemed to reverberate with chaotic cries and panicked howls. Gritting her teeth, she slung the heavy sniper rifle from her shoulder, poised to fire from the hip, and racked the bolt to chamber a round.

Instantly she was moving at a fast walk, uncertain of her injuries. But she found that she could move well enough, and rounded a corner to see the storage shed in back fully ablaze.

From skills honed in a thousand training missions, she felt her load
-bearing vest for the extra five clips and confirmed they were still in place. She reached the back of the building and boldly stood in the open, searching coldly for the humped silhouette. She saw nothing but scores of wounded, some with their limbs torn from sockets and rolling in abysmal pain, others clutching huge empty holes in their body where the clawed hand had struck a fiendish blow.

Eyes narrowing, she searched, but it was not there. Nor was it on the roof. But it was somewhere close; the German shepherds were frantically howling and barking, each of them confused by terror and pain and the alien creature that strode with demoniacal power and wrath among them, leaving devastation and death in its wake.

A large figure came around the fir end of the complex and she swung the Barrett, finger tightening hard to—

Brick saw her outlined against the raging flame of the shed and waved hard, signaling. She ran as hard as her bruised body would allow, painfully halting before him as he gasped, "I think it may have gone
...inside." He breathed hard a moment, face contorted with the effort. "How many still alive?"

She found the strength to shake her head. "Not
... not many. Most of them are dead, the rest are dying. Their wounds ... God, I've never seen anything like it ...we can't do anything for them." She lowered her head, fighting the pain of a possible concussion. "Where’s Hunter?"

"He's alive," Brick responded
as if that in itself were a miracle. "But he won't be for long if we can't put this thing down. They're going to go head-to-head."

"I know," Bobbi Jo whispered, and together they ran for the side door; it was locked. Without words they loped as fast as possible to the front and it was Bobbi Jo who saw it first, Brick close behind. What happened next was chaotic—a glimmering black monstrosity holding the ravaged body of a soldier. The victim's entrails hung long and black and glistening, trailing into the night as the thing gloated at the feast. The soldier bore little semblance to a human form: its arms were severed at midshaft, its trunk had been eviscerated, and its shattered head fell backward on a broken neck.

It sensed their presence, turned its hulking torso.

Dropping the soldier, it leaped forward, hurling its monstrous form across the compound, the long legs covering the distance with superhuman strength and speed.

Savagely raising the Barrett with a vicious scream, Bobbi Jo fired instantly and the night was rocked by the thunderous blast. Then Brick had dropped to a knee and targeted as the massive black form seemed to stop magically in midair, held suspended above the ground, before it landed solidly. And in a space of time that had no true measurement, both of Brick's .454-caliber rounds hit it solidly, staggering it backward.

Not waiting to see the result of the shots, Bobbi Jo had cut loose with the Barrett, the .50 shells hurled thirty feet from her position as she pulled the trigger again and again, firing from the hip, each bullet flying true to hit the pectorals before it raised gorilla arms in front of its face and turned, running with long leaps that seemed to barely touch the ground. Brick had reloaded and his third round hit it squarely in the wedged back, propelling it forward. Roaring in rage, it staggered slightly as it rounded the corner, and the ex-marshal's last bullet pulverized a foot-wide section of cement.

Already Bobbi Jo had speed-changed clips, chambering another of the five .50-caliber magazines. She expelled a hard breath and waited for Brick to rip the smoking brass cartridges out and insert two more from the bandoleer. Then he snapped it hard and nodded. She didn't need more communication than that.

As they began to move forward a hand snatched her from the shoulder to pull her back. Brick whirled, prepared to fire from the hip before he recognized the flame-etched profile.

Bobbi Jo leaped into him. "Hunter!"

"Come on," he whispered, "we can't fight it like this."

Instantly, wasting no time on preliminaries, he crept back down the wall and Bobbi Jo asked no questions, though she recognized a fullness that had erupted in her breast at the welcome sight of his face. They edged carefully around the corner, separated only a few steps, and closed on the open rear entrance.

"We've got to pull back," Hunter whispered. But his eyes, constantly scanning, never looked at them. "If we try to fight it in the open, we'll lose. We have to trap it somewhere and then open up on it with all we've got. If we can hit with enough heavy rounds in a short enough period of time, we can put it down."

Despite the sweat that masked his face and plastered his ragged mane back over his head, Hunter appeared to be suffering little from exhaustion. His words were terse and his balance and poise perfect as he led them silently closer to the steel portal.

Brick's hoarse voice reached forward.

"Where's Chaney?" lie gasped. "And the Jap? They were securing the motor pool and back fence."

Turning her head briefly, Bobbi Jo stared at him. "Taylor, he's dead. I saw him go down. And then
Takakura went down but I don't know if he’s dead." She bent forward in a sharp surge of pain before shaking her head wearily. "I ... I don't know where Chaney is."

"Okay, this is how we're gonna play it," Hunter whispered, glancing inside the doorway to note the red glare of emergency lights. He looked at them. "I'm going out there to try to find anybody that's still alive. Did you say Chaney and
Takakura were at the back fence?"

"Yes." Bobbi Jo nodded as she wiped sweat-plastered hair from her forehead.

"Good. All right, secure this door. It's the only door that's open and the rest are welded shut. I've checked." He gave them a moment, but there were no objections.

"So give me ten minutes or until you see that thing coming again. Then you've got to shut and somehow bolt the door whether I'm back or not. The bolt is busted so you'll have to somehow wedge it and keep firing to keep it away from a rush. Weld it shut if you can. And once the door's shut, it stays shut. Get on the radio if you can find it and call for an emergency extraction . . ." He glanced at the Blackhawk—unmolested by the beast's rage as if it did not understand the importance of the machine—before he looked at Brick. "Unless one of you can fly that thing."

Bobbi Jo shook her head, drawing deep breaths.

"Not a chance in hell," Brick rasped.

"That's what I thought," Hunter responded, revealing no trace of disappointment or fear as he moved away from the wall. "Look sharp and use your ears. And don't forget to keep checking the roof up there for silhouettes. It might climb up the other side and attack you from above. Look quick."

"You'd better take this." Brick handed him the Weatherby and bandoleer. "You got two fresh rounds. They hurt him, but it ain't gonna put him down for the count."