Monster Hunter Vendetta (20 page)

The fire let up as the final guns ran out of ammo. Then came the simultaneous clatter of the well-trained agents quickly reloading. The oni wasn't moving. Nothing normal could have lived through that, but these things were not normal. "Cables," Franks ordered as he jerked the mag from his bullpup carbine and pulled a fresh one from inside his coat. "Go."

Wiping the water from my eyes, I stared in disbelief as four agents sprinted to the downed monster. Each one was carrying a giant steel manacle, thick steel cables strung between them. Several other Feds ran up behind them, carrying some sort of spear trailing a fat electrical cord. A generator roared to life. It was some sort of monster taser. "You've got to be flipping kidding me," I muttered. "Go cut its head off or something."

"Orders said take them alive," Franks replied.

That was stupid. Taking a cultist captive was one thing. Getting close to that downed monstrosity was idiocy. "There's another one around here," I warned.

"Bia," Franks said, indicating that he knew a lot more about these things than he had ever let on. Son of a bitch. "We'll take the big one first."

The red form stirred, the metal of the pickup truck grinding beneath it. The agents began to shout and they hit it with the metal spear. Electricity crackled and the oni jerked and twitched, thrashing violently, smoke rising from the impact with a smell like burning rubber. "Bag him!" one of the men shouted and they started locking the giant manacles around Cratos' thick wrists and ankles. Every time it began to move, the agents on the cables would step back, and they would hit him with the spear again. I had to admit, the MCB was effective. MHI would just have chainsawed the beast as soon as he was down.

Franks got on his radio. "This is Delta. We're taking Force into custody. Violence unaccounted for."

"Excellent. Research was positive that oni were vulnerable to electricity." I could hear Myers reply. "Is Pitt still alive?"

Franks scowled. "Yeah
.
.
."

"So, you got your monster to interrogate. I'm guessing we're square?" I asked hopefully.

"I've got three injured men because of you," the big man replied. "We're not done yet
.
.
."

"Movement. Shock him!" One of the agents shouted from Cratos' side. The men on the manacles stepped back and the spear was driven in, but nothing happened this time, no arc, no sparks, nothing. "Malfunction! Hit him again." The spear was jabbed again but with no effect. The agents cried for help with terror in their voices.

Franks stepped forward, trying to discern the problem. The red hulk started to rise. The men on the manacles retreated, yelling for assistance. I glanced to the side. The electrical cable leading from the portable generator to the spear had been severed. "Bia!" I shouted, as the purple figure threw off its cloak behind the men providing covering fire. Cackling, she slashed into the agents, ripping through their armor, blood spraying. They died quickly, having never even seen her coming.

"Aim for her eyes!" Franks shouted, but she was already gone, moving behind some parked trucks.

My attention snapped back to the big red one. An agent was shouting, "Sir, Force is—" but he never got to finish the sentence. The massive oni rose, bellowing, cables twisting and snapping, and one huge fist clocked the man, launching him across the garage in a cloud of bodily fluids. The other men started shooting, but they were too close to the beast now. With a roar, Force laid into them, living up to his title. With each movement, another agent went down, and in a matter of seconds, the survivors were retreating in disarray.

"All teams converge on the garage now!" Franks ordered into his radio. He put his rifle to his shoulder and aimed carefully at the twisting and jerking monster, searching for the eye. I put Abomination to my shoulder and centered the sight on the moving target. It was an exceedingly difficult shot. Franks fired and missed. The oni whipped one strand of cable wildly, cracking the air like a bullwhip, and a nearby agent went down. The man screamed incoherently, both of his legs severed at the knees. I tuned that out and exhaled. The eyes were moving. Focus on the holographic dot. The trigger pull was smooth and straight back to the rear.

My slug struck Cratos in one diminutive black eye. The giant paused stupidly, as if thinking about something exceedingly complicated. He stumbled and went to one knee. Something that looked like thick steam came pouring from the now-open socket. He put one meaty palm on the floor to steady himself and shook his head. When he looked back up through the rotating cloud, the eye had returned. His red lips pulled away from his tusks, and he snarled at me as the smoke dissipated. "Filthy souled Hunter!" He came off the floor and charged like an enraged bull.

Franks shoved me aside at the last second. Cratos flew past and collided with the pillar, blasting a giant chunk from it. Franks spun one way, I sprawled the other, frantically dragging myself on my butt through the debris. The giant came out of the dust, shaking himself violently. One piece of rebar, unnoticed, was impaled through his chest. "Lose some souls because of you. Replace it with yours!" he growled, bearing down on me. I kept scuttling away, but he was right there, and I could taste his horrible sulfuric breath pouring down.

His tiny eyes bore into me and the blackness behind those lenses seemed to stretch on forever, inky pools from a horrible place, utterly devoid of light. He extended one giant red hand toward me, palm as big as my chest. I felt myself growing weaker, like all of the warmth was being sucked out through my ribs, leaving my limbs numb and cold. I couldn't breathe.

The life was being pulled out of me
.
.
.

Suddenly, it was as if I could see through his skin. The oni's body was just a shell, a constructed mass of false tissues, and underneath was the real creature, a swirling demonic bag of stolen souls.

The oni licked his lips hungrily.

Then he was gone. The rear end of a bus smashed into Cratos, driving him back into the pillar with a brutal crunch. I shook my head as air filled my lungs and blood flowed back into my extremities. It hurt. I stumbled to my feet. The door of the Cabbage Point Killing Machine luxury tour bus slid open with an automated hiss. Mosh sat behind the wheel. "Get in!"

One giant red arm was already flailing about, pinned between the pillar and the bus. The rear tires began to slide forward against his pressure. That's one tough monster. I ran and jumped into the vehicle. The three orcs were clustered behind Mosh. Edward had gotten cut on the arm at some point and Gretchen was ministering to him. Somebody pushed in behind me. Franks.

"Get on the freeway," he ordered. There was a huge gash across his chest, and his white shirt was hanging open and soaked with blood. I didn't know if it was his or somebody else's. Franks didn't indicate that he was in pain, but then again, I didn't know if he could feel pain. "They'll follow Pitt."

"Me?" Mosh asked in confusion.

"No, him." Franks jerked his thumb at me. "Drive."

I ran down the aisle of the tour bus as Mosh ground the gears. The bus was so opulent that if it hadn't been such dire circumstances, I probably would have stopped to gawk. It was like a death-metal version of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. "You've got a Jacuzzi in this thing?" I shouted.

"Hell, yeah," Mosh said. "Hold on. I've only driven this once before."

The bus lurched forward, stopped, lurched again, and then was building up steam, heading for the garage exit and the open night. The rear end was crushed and a giant red visage was glaring at me through the broken back window. Cratos' tusked face curled into a snarl as we pulled away, freeing him. I raised Abomination, aimed carefully, and put my finger on my gun's second trigger. These things absorbed people's souls, and somehow that's how they had lived for thousands of years. I'd seen the pressurized bag inside them. Apparently the gateway to that was in their heads. If he lost some energy from a .68 caliber slug through the eye, let's see how he did with a 40mm grenade up the snoot.

"HUNTER!" Cratos roared.

I shot him in the mouth as we drove away.

The explosion blasted his head wide open, unhinging his jaw. There was a billowing cloud of that same white smoke as the giant toppled over and thudded to the earth.

That had to have finished him. The oni shook on the ground, facedown, head deflated like collapsed dough as the false body seemed to shrink. "No backstage pass for you, jerk-off." I laughed.

But then the head puffed back up. The skull was briefly soft as it bulged and throbbed but then it seemed to instantly harden. Re-formed, he looked up and focused right in on me, black eyes filled with simple hatred. Cratos lurched from his knees and started running after us, each step like thunder.

"Step on it, Mosh!"

Chapter 7

We tore out of the Buzzard Island Amphitheater parking lot and up onto the freeway heading south. There were a ton of flashing lights, ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars arrayed around the hall now. Thousands of people were wandering around, aware that something weird was going on, but not knowing what exactly. And it was about to get a whole lot weirder for them when that unkillable red bastard came running out after us.

"Head for the Air Force base," Franks directed Mosh.

"Listen, big scary dude, I don't know where the air base is," Mosh said. "Owen, who is this asshole?"

"He's my bodyguard
.
.
." My brother started to turn around. I knew he had a lot of questions at this point, and the look he gave me indicated just how pissed off he was. "Just
.
.
.
Never mind
.
.
.
Keep heading south. I'll tell you where to turn." I held onto a stainless steel pole by the driver's seat as the bus jerked violently through the gears.

Franks keyed his radio. "This is Delta lead. Southbound in the black bus with the primary."

Myers came back. "Are you all right, Franks?"

"Yes, sir. But Alpha Team was rendered combat ineffective." Apparently "combat ineffective" meant that most of them had just gotten dismembered. The quiet man stated it with less emotion than the average person expressed over stubbing their toe.

"Evacuating them now. Apaches' ETA ten minutes," Myers replied. I breathed a sigh of relief at that. There was no way that Cratos could catch up to us on foot before we had some serious firepower overhead. "We've got a level-five containment problem here, a couple hundred viable witnesses." The senior agent sounded really upset.

"Did you get Violence?"

"Negative."

Franks started scanning through the darkened windows. "Roger that."

"Owen, we've got to talk," Mosh said as he painfully ground the bus into a higher gear. He turned and looked at me. "Okay, what the hell were those things? What are you doing playing commando? You're an accountant! And these weirdos keep bowing and calling me War Chief." He waved his hand at the orcs. All three bowed simultaneously. "See? See!"

"I'll explain everything."

"No. You won't," Franks ordered. I had to remember that part of his job was murdering witnesses who couldn't keep their big mouths shut.

"Wait," Skippy interrupted before I could tell Franks to go screw himself. "Smell monster." He lifted up the base of his mask, revealing his face. The wide nostrils in his piglike snout flared as he sniffed the air.

"Aaaahhhh!" Mosh screamed when he saw Skippy's face, jerked the wheel of the tour bus, and clipped the rear end of a passing car. The car careened off the freeway and out into the wetlands. He barely regained control before we went off the road, all of us being slammed back and forth, and stumbling in the aisle. "What the fuck!"

Skippy dropped his mask. "Sorry
.
.
.
War Chief." Then he bowed an apology to Mosh. "Sister here."

There was a thump on the roof.

I raised my shotgun and started blasting random holes through the ceiling. Franks had lost his rifle at some point. A Glock appeared in his hand and he started shooting. Skippy raised my .45 and popped off the remaining rounds in the magazine. The roof was Swiss cheese in a matter of seconds. A purple hand smashed through the roof and wrapped around the shoulder of my armor. Bia hoisted me from floor as if I weighed nothing. My head slammed into the sheet metal as she tried to tug me through the gap. My boots kicked uselessly. Franks maneuvered for a shot. I levered Abomination up and emptied the rest of the magazine through the roof and right into Bia's body. She didn't let go.

Skippy and Gretchen grabbed my legs and pulled down. Monster tug-of-war. I screamed as my head slammed into the roof repeatedly. Ditching the totally ineffective baton, Edward leapt up and pulled the kukri from my vest. He swung, embedding the blade deep into the oni's arm. She shrieked and the claws released.

I landed on the minibar, shattering a bunch of expensive booze bottles and a fancy mirror. The arm disappeared. I hit the floor hard but my new angle gave me a clear view of the freeway ahead. "Mosh! Look out!"

My brother, distracted, had turned toward the action. He swiveled back just in time to see the rear end of the semi we were about to collide with. All of us were flung about as Mosh cranked it violently to the right and stomped on the brakes. We tore one of our headlights off against the rear of the trailer. The bus bounced wildly as we went off the pavement, tearing huge swaths out of the grass. We slid, somehow moving sideways in the mammoth vehicle, then jarred violently back onto the pavement.

We were on an off-ramp.

Mosh righted the vehicle, but now we were curving back, heading to the northeast. We began to climb up an overpass, going back over the freeway. We were in too high of a gear, and the engine made a gurgling noise as Mosh downshifted.

"Wrong way," Franks said simply as he shoved a fresh magazine into his 10mm.

"Maybe we knocked that bitch loose!" Mosh said hopefully.

Bia crashed through the side this time, a purple blur swinging down from the roof. The oni's massive fist hit Franks square in the chest and he just disappeared, his body flying through the glass on the opposite side.