Monster Hunter Nemesis (42 page)

Kurst shook his head, then turned back to Franks. “Where were we, Broth—”

Franks uppercut Kurst so hard it lifted the demon straight off the ground, high into the air, to crash back through several storage lockers.

“We were sending you back to Hell,” Franks snarled. He squeezed his fist closed and cracked his knuckles.

It still hurt. In fact, it hurt nearly as badly as the height of taking a normal dose of Elixir, only the burning he was still feeling now produced a fraction of the heat of Franks’ unholy rage. The molten glow was no longer visible through his skin and his muscles were responding. When he hit Kurst again his fist made an impact like a sledgehammer.

Kurst sprung up. Franks slammed his fist into the side of the demon’s head so hard that bone slivers erupted through the skin. Kurst bounced off the floor, then looked up at him in shock. The demon’s body had already taken a beating.
Now Franks was the strong one.
Franks kicked him across the factory floor.

The demon prince broke through the railing at the base of the stairs. He saw Franks coming after him, and scurried up toward the catwalk.

Franks watched him go, then moved toward his fallen agents. Jefferson was still breathing, but there wasn’t time to assess him. Franks knelt next to the rookie. The wound was terrible. He might have been Franks’ blood, but he had a body as fragile as any regular human. Maybe the Elixir could still save him . . .

The spirit had departed. Tom Strayhorn was gone . . .

Franks punched the floor hard enough to crack the concrete. He took Strayhorn’s rifle and stuffed a few of the magazines into his pocket.

Kurst was moving down the catwalk. Even hurt, he still was incredibly fast, and the grating beneath him shook with each heavy footfall. Franks put the red dot of the Aimpoint sight just ahead of the demon and let it rip. Most of the rounds hit sheet metal, but a few found muscle and bone before Kurst ducked behind the next girder.

There was a big platform behind Kurst’s cover. Franks couldn’t get a visual on what the demon was up to, so he kept moving, looking for an angle. There was a screech of metal rubbing against metal, and then a large machine came hurtling over the edge. Franks dodged to the side an instant before two hundred pounds of metal crashed right next to him.

“I’m going to smash your guts out, Franks!” Kurst appeared, a big cart filled with computers and electronic equipment held overhead, and he threw that as well. Franks barely had time to dive over a table before the cart bounced off the floor where he’d been standing. Bits of glass and plastic flew everywhere. “Then I’m going to eat them!” Kurst bent over, looking for something else to throw. He came back up with a heavy gas cylinder in both hands, zeroed in on Franks, and lifted it overhead.

Franks put a bullet into the gas cylinder.

It ruptured. There was a high-pitched whistle as thick orange smoke shot out. Franks didn’t know what chemical was in there—he’d been hoping for flammable or explosive—but whatever it was made Kurst roar in pain and clutch at his eyes. Kurst dropped the hissing cylinder, but the smoke cloud was already obscuring much of the platform. Kurst began to cough. He’d fashioned himself a fancy new body, but he was still breathing air through relatively normal lungs.

This was his chance. Franks ran back to Strayhorn. He was wearing a Strike Team uniform, and doctrine made them all organize their kit in the same way so they could use each other’s equipment in an emergency. Franks rolled the body over, found the big pouch he was looking for, took out the gas mask, and pulled it on. The rubber straps were far too tight on his big head, but it made for a good seal.

Jefferson was groaning. “Put your gas mask on!” Franks ordered. The agent was too out of it. He had more important things to do, and he should have just let him die for letting the rookie do something stupid, but Franks took a few seconds to get Jefferson’s mask on. It was like one of those annoying videos they made him watch on civilian airplanes, but if Jefferson died now, then Franks wouldn’t be able to punish him later.

He sprinted back toward the catwalk. The orange gas was heavier than air, and it was settling, rolling along the floor. The chemicals made his bare skin burn. Franks followed the sounds of Kurst crashing about until he thought he was directly beneath. He might have been able to see through the grate if it wasn’t for the fog, but when he figured he was close enough, Franks pointed the muzzle of the SCAR straight up and ripped a full magazine through the metal.

Kurst roared. “Damn you, Franks!”

Drops of blood fell through the grate and splattered against the plastic face shield of the gas mask as Franks slammed another magazine in. The booming footsteps were moving, so Franks followed them and emptied another magazine up through the grate. The muzzle blast blew the orange smoke away from him in a spiral pattern.

Visibility was improving enough to see that Kurst had shoved his claws through the grate and was prying the metal apart to come down and get him. Franks dropped the rifle, pulled out the halberd blade, got a running start, and swung as he jumped. Kurst bellowed as two of his fingers fell off. The demon moved away from the gap he’d made, cursing in the old tongue. Not missing a beat, Franks pulled his last grenade from his coat pocket, yanked the pin, and tossed it hard, up through the hole.

“I will destroy you for this!
Destroy you!
” And then Kurst must have seen the grenade coming back down. It landed and rolled across the catwalk. “Shit.”

Metal fragments ripped through everything on the platform, blew a hole in the grate, and shredded the concrete beneath, but Franks was long gone by then. He’d been moving while Kurst had been ranting. Once the shrapnel had flown past, Franks had climbed on top of some boxes, leapt, and caught the edge of the catwalk.

“I’m better than you, Franks!” Kurst had been knocked back by the blast. The flesh on his chest was hanging in strips and blood was pouring from dozens of wounds. He was looking down at the mess, and plucked a chunk of jagged metal out of his ribs. “It’ll take more than another toy to stop— Aaaarrrgghhh!”

Franks drove the halberd spike through the back of Kurst’s knee. He wrenched the spike around, utterly destroying the joint before yanking it out in a spray of blood and cartilage. While the demon prince stumbled back on his collapsing leg, Franks pulled himself up over the edge, drew one of his full-auto Glocks with his left hand, and ripped the demon from pelvis to forehead in one continuous thirty-round burst. Kurst lurched and tripped, hitting so hard that the entire platform shook. Franks followed him, reaching across his body to pull the other pistol, and repeated the process, putting multiple bullet holes into every one of Kurst’s vital organs.

“I don’t give a shit how superior you’re supposed to be, that hurt.”

Franks dropped the empty pistol, took up the broken halberd shaft in both hands, and began methodically chopping at the demon as if he was splitting wood. He struck the partially blind and wounded demon ten times before Kurst had even had a chance to try to defend himself. Franks dodged a desperate kick and responded by slicing Kurst’s heel off. Franks was impressed; the Swiss made good steel.

The blade kept on rising and falling. “You should have listened.” Franks hacked into Kurst’s shoulder blade. “You don’t belong here.” The demon rolled over, swinging at him wildly, but Franks lacerated that bicep to the bone. “This is not your world.” Kurst raised one injured hand to defend his face, but Franks took the rest of those fingers off. “This was never your world.” The blade split Kurst’s jaw open.

So much blood had struck the gas mask that Franks could barely see. Kurst was trying to crawl away, desperately buying time for his body to heal. Franks paused to smear the blood around with one ragged sleeve in a futile attempt to clean the plastic off. Frustrated, he pulled the mask off and tossed it aside. The remaining chemicals made his eyes burn. Kurst had reached the edge of the broken platform. “You should have stayed in Hell.” Franks kicked him over the side.

The demon landed flat on his back. The rush of air caused the dissipating orange fog to be blasted away. Franks followed him over the edge, dropping directly onto his enemy. The impact hurt Franks’ feet, but broke Kurst’s ribs. Franks knelt on his opponent’s chest, spun the halberd blade around, and then he drove the spike through Kurst’s chest so hard that it was embedded into the floor on the other side. “You shouldn’t have attacked my people!”

Blood shot from Kurst’s mouth, but Franks was too angry to quit now. He grabbed the demon’s horns, used those as handles, and began slamming the back of his skull into the floor. Franks roared as Kurst’s skull broke into pieces. “You shouldn’t have killed my
son!
”

Kurst’s impressive demon body was shrinking. He almost looked human again, and a nearly dead human at that. Kurst laughed and spit up blood. “I hope it hurt.”

Franks jerked when the bullet hit him in the back. He turned and caught the next one in the chest. Then one of the partially formed demons tackled him, knocking him off of Kurst. “I’m not done!” Franks roared. They could communicate so Kurst must have called for help. The Nemesis soldier with the gun reached Kurst, pulled the spike out of his heart, and then picked his superior up. The demon on top kept wrestling Franks, trying to hold him down, while the other carried Kurst away.

The demon was a slimy mass of bare muscle, and it had grown an extra pair of arms to claw at him. Franks began pummeling it as it scratched and tore at him. He didn’t have time for this bullshit. His mission wasn’t complete. His
revenge
wasn’t complete! Franks grabbed hold of the demon’s head, one big hand on each side, and he squeezed. The demon screamed as its armored skull bulged. Driven by the insane amount of Elixir running through his system, Franks kept on pushing. The demon’s eyes popped out a few seconds before its head exploded.

Tossing the effectively decapitated demon aside, Franks got up and ran in the direction Kurst had been carried. He’d lost sight of them. He reached the center aisle of the factory, but then had to shield his eyes from the sudden glare of headlights. A powerful engine roared, and Franks leapt aside as a military truck roared past. He caught a glimpse of the Nemesis soldier driving, Kurst’s bloody head in the passenger seat, and then he realized that strapped down on the flatbed was one of the glass growth tanks, and then it was past and heading for the exit. Franks’ hand instinctively flew to his empty holster. Then he keyed his radio and said, “Stop that truck!” before he realized his microphone ended in a broken cord.
Damn it.

Franks sprinted after the truck, but the driver had put the hammer down. It was speeding through the factory and even ran down a new demon that hadn’t been fast enough to get out of the way. Even as fast as he could run, Franks couldn’t catch up. The Swiss Guard at the exit were preoccupied battling demons, so by the time they engaged the truck, they only managed to put a few bullet holes into it before it was through the blast door and heading up the ramp.

Kurst will not get away.
Franks pushed harder. A new demon stepped in front of him, hissing, but Franks clotheslined it to the ground without even slowing. He approached the Swiss position. There was a pistol lying next to the outstretched hand of a dead man, so Franks snatched it up as he ran through the blast door. He caught sight of the truck as it reached the top of the ramp and cranked off a few futile shots from the Sig 226 before the truck was out of sight. Franks ran after them.

By the time he entered the hangar, the truck was outside and moving fast across the airfield. An Air Force C-17 had landed and its loading ramp was down. If Kurst flew out, in a normal situation Franks could just request a shoot-down or forced landing, but right now Franks was the fugitive, and Kurst was using Stricken’s extremely high level authorizations.
If
Franks could convince the military to act, by then Kurst could potentially escape, and if they could reverse-engineer that growth tank . . .

Escape is not an option.

Franks was breathing hard. He had a bullet hole in one lung. This would not do. The MCB command vehicle had a 40mm belt-fed grenade launcher, but it was on fire and there was no sign of Archer or the other techies. Franks looked around for a better option.

Gutterres had left his Ducati right inside the entrance, and the Vatican’s Hunter had left the keys in it. The motorcycle was an extremely powerful machine . . . Franks approved.

* * *

Heather and Earl were in an angled shaft. It wasn’t very long, and the exit was covered in bushes. The vault door at their back was warm from the fire on the other side. She didn’t know if that explosion had killed the other Nemesis monster, but it at least had to hurt.

Heather leaned against the dirt wall and caught her breath. Blood was running down the huge cut on her cheek and from a dozen puncture wounds in her arms. Earl put his arm around her and pulled her in close. “Are you okay?”

She smiled. “I will be. What’re you doing here?”

“I came to save you.” He kissed her on the forehead.

“How’d you know?”

“I tailed Franks. I promised him I wouldn’t, which is why I’m in disguise. How do I look?”

“Like a Fed.”

“Me looking like a Fed.” Earl laughed. “If that ain’t proof of my feelings toward you, I don’t know what is. Then I tracked your scent. I’m surprised you didn’t know I was here.”

She began to explain about still recovering from the poison, but then thought
screw it,
and she kissed him
hard
. She’d been wanting to do that for a long time. After several seconds they broke apart. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

“First I need to get you out of here, and there’s still business to attend to.” He jerked his head toward where Stricken had fallen.

But just as she’d expected, it wasn’t Stricken at all.

“What the hell . . .” Earl muttered as he kept his revolver trained on the hairy, confusing pile of limbs. He used the toe of his boot to roll the body over. It had a face like a spider, but all of its eyes were staring blankly into the distance. “That’s a Tsuchigumo. I haven’t seen one of these since Okinawa. Real nasty pieces of work, they create illusions and mess with your mind.”