CHAPTER 19
Julie was in the hall, giving orders to the roof crew to take up their secondary positions, when Earl walked into the hall and spotted us. “You two. Command center. Now.”
“We couldn’t hold the roof, Earl.”
“I know. Come on.”
As Julie and I followed Earl to our so-called command center, I could hear heavy gunfire through the walls. Skippy was laying down the hate. We passed a bunch of Hunters who were manning the narrow firing slits through our armored shutters along the way. Everybody stumbled as the entire building shook. Dust rained from the ceiling. Lights flickered. That had felt like artillery. The Drekavac’s gun was getting kind of ridiculous.
We’d already had a room in the basement for monitoring all of our surveillance feeds, but it was too cramped for more than a couple of Hunters to work, so Milo had taken over one of the empty storage rooms on the top floor. When we got there, Milo was standing in the middle, giving orders to our technically minded Hunters who had been drafted for this job. Melvin had set up a bunch of computers for them. In addition there were a whole lot of rough-looking switches that looked like they’d been hastily wired together.
In addition to our guys, Franks was there. None of the Secret Guard were though, which made me a little suspicious, because part of me still expected Gutterres to make a move for the Ward. They’d been honorable so far, but I’d been screwed over too many times in this business for trust to come easily.
Milo saw us enter. “Hey, Earl. You want the good news or the bad news first?”
“Spit it out.”
“Skippy just bagged number eight for us. Bad news, it took about twenty direct hits with his 30mm nose gun to do it, so this jerk is getting really resilient.”
“That is bad,” Earl muttered.
“Oh no. That was the good news. The bad news is that he is already coming back and it looks like he’s ten feet tall.” Milo pointed at one of the screens, which showed the now gigantic Drekavac swirling into existence in front of our building.
“If he breaches the walls, Tanya’s spell will be broken, and he’ll be able to re-form in here with us,” Julie warned. “Where’s Skippy?”
“Coming around for another fast pass because he almost got fried by a lightning bolt when he was hovering,” Milo said. “So can I try out my system now or what?”
Earl thought it over. “Is everyone inside and out of the line of fire?”
“They’re supposed to be. If they’re not, they’re gonna want to duck.”
“Do it,” Earl ordered. “But if you wreck the whole damned compound I’m taking it out of your paycheck.”
Milo pumped his fist in the air. Our mad genius had been waiting for this moment for a long time. “Alright, boys, you heard the man. Hinerman?”
Dave Hinerman was a beefy, bearded Hunter from our New York team, who’d been a software engineer before we’d recruited him. “The program is running fine. Ready when you are.”
“Vivier?”
Eric Vivier was a tall, spikey-haired guy from Paxton’s team in the Pacific Northwest. He’d been an engineer. The two of them and a few of our other mechanically adept Hunters had helped Milo on the project while he’d installed it over the last year. Vivier checked his screen and reported, “All systems are go. Everything hardwired is still responding.”
“Let’s light this candle.” Milo sat down in front of a computer. “We’re living in the future, Earl. Today is one small step for MHI, one giant leap for Hunter kind.” Then he giggled, because Milo truly loved his work. “Activate turrets one and two.”
“Activating turrets one and two,” Hinerman said.
Screens were one thing, but this I needed to see with my own eyes. There was one window on the far wall of the command center, and luckily it was oriented in the right direction. The armored shutters were rolled down, but I’d still be able to see through the firing slits, so I walked over. Earl followed me, probably because he’d allowed Milo to spend a lot of money on this and wanted to see how much of it had been wasted. Agent Franks was already there, watching, and he appeared mildly curious as below us two armored boxes rose up through the ground, lifted by hydraulics. As the turrets rotated, bits of dirt and grass slid off of them. Ports slid open and barrels extended through. From up here, one looked long and skinny, the other short and fat.
“The first is an M2, and the second is an Mk19,” I told Franks. “Turrets three through eight cover the other sides.”
“Your project?” he asked me.
“I made the budget spreadsheet.”
Franks just grunted, unimpressed.
The Drekavac was fully formed, and he’d grown. The proportions were the same as before, but he was easily ogre size now, and he started toward our front door, determined to kick it in.
“Fire!” Milo shouted.
The two turrets opened up. Fifty-cal rounds zipped right through the monster. The Mk19 rhythmically and ponderously slammed 40mm grenades into his chest.
Shockingly, the monster just lowered his head and kept walking through the onslaught. The Drekavac lifting his hand to protect his face seemed like an almost human reaction, except instead of blocking a punch, he was absorbing high explosives and armor-piercing shells. The turrets slowly turned, tracking him, pounding away. They just kept hammering. He got hit hundreds of times and was shredded down to what looked like a flaming wire skeleton before the Drekavac collapsed and disintegrated back into the fog.
“Gutterres wasn’t kidding about it getting tougher as the night goes on,” Earl stated flatly. “That’s nine.”
That had been scary impressive, and we still had four to go. “How’d mankind handle these things in the old days?”
“Send a thousand pikemen,” Franks said. “Expect to lose nine hundred.”
“Or they gave them what they wanted, and then hid in their huts hoping for suckers like us to come along,” Earl said. “Milo, status?”
“Status level awesome,” Milo exclaimed. “Okay, guys, go ahead and activate the other turrets and put them on standby in case he hits the other walls. Watch the cameras. Hey, Julie, would you warn everybody to yell as soon as he pops up? There’s no way he’s getting in here now.”
I know Milo was really giddy about being able to play with his new toys, but I wasn’t feeling as confident as he was. “You got an ammo counter on those things?” I asked Vivier.
“That used about half of one and three quarters of two’s belts,” he said. “And the only way to reload them or clear a malfunction is manually.”
“Don’t worry, Z,” Milo said. “We’ve got defense in depth. That’s just the first layer. Like a big lethal onion of doom.”
Franks was squinting through the gap in the steel shutters, studying the fog. I’d thought that once it had broken through the fence it had filled the whole compound, but from this vantage point I could see that the fog hadn’t covered everything yet. There was a clear circle around the base of our building, like the substance was being held back by something, either Tanya’s runes or maybe the warm lifeblood of all the Hunters inside, but something was keeping him from appearing right at our door.
“You feel that?” Franks asked me and Harbinger.
All I was feeling was unnaturally chilled to my core and a sense of unease.
But Earl said, “Yeah . . . He’s not in the fog. He is the fog. It’s got weight to it. It’s where his physical forms are coming from.”
I grasped what they were getting at. “It congeals, becomes solid. Like how things work in the nightmare world, only he’s doing it here on Earth.”
“Kind of like what we saw at the Last Dragon.” Then Earl looked out over the vast area covered by the soupy substance and frowned. “He’s got a lot of material to work with still.”
Then I spotted where the fog was swirling together. The circle was huge compared to what I’d seen before. The Drekavac was returning to the exact same spot he’d just died, probably to continue heading right for our front door. “He’s coming back even bigger.”
“We’ve got to burn off some of this fog fast, deprive him of mass . . . ” Earl said. “Milo! Did you get your sprinklers hooked up?”
“Sure did, Earl. I switched the pipes over this afternoon just in case.”
“Time to water the lawn.”
Milo leapt up from the computer, went to a nearby table, and started flipping switches.
“Is that like a metaphor for spilling blood or something?” I asked, because I’d missed this part of the plan visiting rats and had no idea what they were talking about. Except then below us, the compound’s sprinkler system came on. So Earl had been speaking literally, which made me even more confused. The sprinklers were a relatively new addition. When I’d started working here, everything had just been dirt, gravel, and natural plant growth. Only Julie had gotten tired of looking at that mess and declared that we could afford some real landscaping.
The Drekavac stood where he’d fallen just a moment before. He was still wearing the coat and hat, but they seemed stretched over his now hulking form. He had to be fifteen feet tall and broad as a bus. He started for the front door.
Then I smelled the gas fumes.
Milo wasn’t watering the grass. He was soaking it with gasoline. Sprinklers were spraying all the way around the main building. I didn’t know how big our system was, but it had to be pumping hundreds of gallons a minute.
Julie got on the intercom. “Everybody move back from the windows. I repeat, move away from the windows.”
The Drekavac drew his sword. It was long enough to slice an elephant in half. In his other hand was the blunderbuss, the muzzle of which was now big enough to drop a bowling ball down. He started toward the front door.
Milo’s turrets started blasting the monster. Shockingly enough, the impacts didn’t ignite the gas. The blue sparks flying from the Drekavac’s wounds weren’t real fire, and the turrets were far enough away from the lawn that their muzzle blasts didn’t ignite the rapidly expanding fume cloud yet.
However, when the Drekavac lifted his blunderbuss to take out turret two, all hell broke loose—because his lightning was flammable.
A lot happened in a few seconds. The turret was ripped apart in a violent flash, and it still had a bunch of grenades inside of it. They rapidly cooked off in a chain reaction of explosions. It was a good thing our headquarters building was basically a hardened fortress, because that would’ve ruined our night otherwise.
The lawn ignited. A rolling wall of flame rapidly spread across the grass, consuming everything in its path. The sprinklers turned to flamethrowers, spinning twenty-foot streams of flaming hot death. Within seconds the main building was surrounded by a ring of fire. The Drekavac’s fog actually shrieked as acres of it were burned away in a flash.
The Drekavac’s glowing eyes could be seen through the wall of fire, glaring directly at our window as it turned to ash.
Ten.
“He sensed where that order came from somehow . . . ” Earl warned. “Put your killer robots on autopilot and then everybody out of this room.”
“Even the Claymore Roombas?” Hinerman asked hopefully.
“If you can do it in less than thirty seconds, then sure, whatever that is too, then fall back. Everybody else evacuate the command center. Now.”
Me and Franks stayed by the window, me because I was trying to catch a glimpse of where the monster was going to come back, and Franks, probably because he didn’t like being told what to do.
Milo was staring at the monitors in shock. Our Newbie barracks had caught on fire. “Were you really serious about this coming out of my pay, Earl?”
“Of course not,” Earl said as he grabbed Milo by the strap on the back of his armor and dragged him toward the door. “I don’t pay you enough to cover this. Move!”
It appeared that the heat from the fire had driven the fog back, but on the other side I could see the glowing stuff moving, glowing, flowing like it was alive and angry; it almost looked like a giant snake. It was gathering in one spot.
“He’s already back,” I shouted. The monster rose on the other side of the fire, easily over twenty feet tall now. The puritan affectation was gone. The coat and hat were missing. Now it was just a giant sort of man-shaped skeleton made of twisted wire and powered by blue flames. “Main parking area, about two hundred yards out.” Then I watched in horror as the Drekavac bent down and easily lifted a car by its front end. He began to spin the vehicle around like he was doing a hammer throw. Even Franks decided that was a good time to back away. I did, too, because the car was gaining speed until it was whistling through the air around him. Then Drekavac let go and whipped the car toward MHI HQ.
It sailed through the air like it had been launched by a catapult. It was a white Audi R8, and it managed to even look good while flipping end over end through the sky. The Drekavac’s aim was good and he hit the command center wall. The impact shook the building so hard it knocked me off my feet. Dust filled the air. The window I’d been standing by was gone, replaced by mangled metal and broken concrete with rebar sticking out of it.
Holly ran into the command center carrying an AT-4. She pushed past Franks, saw me lying on the floor, then she saw the remains of her new car sticking through the wall.
“You motherfucker!” she screamed. Holly went over to the hole in the wall and aimed the smoothbore anti-tank weapon at the monster. “I just paid that off!”
The command center was a really big room, but the back blast on an AT-4 was still a bitch, so I got to my feet and fled to not get burned by the overpressure.
Holly fired. The concussion was insane. Anything in here that hadn’t been ruined by the Drekavac got scorched or blown away by that instead. This kind of hostile work environment bullshit was why I had tinnitus.
The Drekavac had picked up a pickup to toss at us when Holly’s 84mm warhead hit him in the midsection. The explosion cut him in half. Both halves melted into the parking lot as the truck burned on top of him.
Eleven.
The fog immediately flowed back into that same spot. But I couldn’t even call it fog anymore. It was more like the ectoplasmic slime we’d seen in Las Vegas. And this time it was all of it. Every bit of the unnatural substance crawled beneath that bonfire. And a mere five seconds after its last death, the Drekavac sat up. The burning truck went bouncing away. The monster stood, covered in chunks of molten asphalt, bigger than the frost giant we’d fought during the siege, and he let out a roar of such intensity that people must have heard it in Birmingham.
Earl was in the hallway, bellowing, “Big guns on the parking lot now! Hit him with everything we’ve got!”
All along this side of HQ, Hunters threw open the armored shutters. We had a variety of man-portable heavy weapons ready to go, including bunker busters and anti-tank weapons. The Hunters started firing. It was like being inside a metal drum being beaten with hammers as multiple SMAWs and Carl Gustafs went off.
The Drekavac was rocked by so many explosions that I couldn’t even see it. This was an order of magnitude of more firepower than we’d used to obliterate Buford Phipps. The explosions staggered the monster but didn’t drop him. We’d been warned that the last few manifestations were powerful, but this was madness. We were hitting him with enough munitions to sink a battleship. Instead of dying, he reached down, scooped up a car that had caught on fire, and flung it at us.
The flaming wreck spiraled through the sky and landed on our roof. The gas tank must have ruptured because the next thing I knew, the roof was caving in and barfing fire everywhere.
Julie was shouting for every Hunter in the building to run to this side to concentrate fire on the monster. And whoever didn’t have a heavy weapon picked up a fire extinguisher or carried the wounded out of the way. Franks was firing a 20mm rifle freehand.
The Drekavac started running toward us, covering vast amounts of ground with every step. Milo’s secondary turrets lit him up. Mines went off. Warheads punched through his chest and head. Big chunks of monster were flung in every direction. Our Hind flew past, hitting the Drekavac with everything, but he didn’t even slow. The monster crashed through the towering wall of fire, falling to pieces but still pushing forward, until a lucky hit got him right in the knee. The bottom half of his leg came off. The monster stumbled, but he was so big that falling brought him nearly to the front door.
He was too close for big explosives without injuring ourselves in the process, so every Hunter there hung out the nearest window or fresh hole in the wall and shot at him with small arms. I ran to the remains of Holly’s car, clambered up the crumpled hood, hung Cazador out the gap and dumped a magazine as fast as I could pull the trigger. He was so big I couldn’t miss.
The Drekavac was dying, but not fast enough. He didn’t draw the sword this time. It was more like he willed it into existence. The crackling blade hit the first floor and sheared right through the concrete like it was a laser beam. I sure hoped the Hunters at those windows had gotten out of the way in time.
The floor beneath my feet rumbled. It felt like this whole side of MHI’s HQ was about to collapse beneath us. It was odd. Nobody screamed. Nobody panicked. We all just kind of froze for a moment, staring at each other wide-eyed, not even daring to breathe, as the building groaned below us.
It didn’t fall down.
We all started to breathe again. It was a good thing Grandpa Shackleford hadn’t skimped on the construction of this place.
The super-giant Drekavac slowly sank to his knees, too damaged to continue. And died. Twelve.
By my count, he still had one life left.
Franks appeared next to me, reloading the 20mm cannon that was longer than I was tall. “Hmmm . . . make that five thousand pikemen.”
“The main doors have been breached!” Julie shouted. “Tanya’s spells are broken. He can come inside. Get ready for anything.”
I looked down at the Drekavac. As he died this time, he didn’t dissipate back into fog, because every bit of fog was already compressed into this one huge form. The body had been burning with that evil supernatural blue, but it looked like the fire was hardening into ice.
“Something weird is happening,” I warned.
The body crystalized. Cracks formed. The cracks began to spread, faster and faster.
Franks scowled, looking out into the night as if he’d sensed something. “Lana’s here,” he muttered.
“That’s your takeaway from this?” I flipped out. “That’s what you’re worried about right now? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“You got your mission. I got mine,” Franks said as he ignored the giant super monster that had suddenly turned into crystal, sounding like somebody had just turned a garden hose on ten million bags of Pop Rocks. Franks walked away. I looked down again to see that the Drekavac’s corpse was shaking with building energy.
“Everybody get back.”
For a second I’d thought the monster was going to go off like a bomb. What actually happened for his thirteenth and final form was a whole lot worse.
The giant shattered into an army of Drekavacs.