CHAPTER 18
The fog rolled in about midnight.
I was on the roof, braced against the ledge, watching my sector, when all of a sudden it got uncomfortably cold. Since I was wearing all my armor and gear I had been uncomfortably warm and sweaty because all that weight on your chest and back really traps the heat in, but then zap, within seconds I was chilled to the core.
“You feeling that?” Julie asked.
“Yeah. He’s here.”
Julie keyed her radio. “Wake up, everybody. This is Julie on the roof. We have a supernatural temperature drop outside. Get ready. I think this is it.”
Honestly, being a spotter with nothing to spot for several hours can be terribly boring, to the point that I’d been in danger of falling asleep. There were six two-man teams stationed on the roof of the main building, because it was our best elevated position. Everybody else was waiting at their designated battle stations.
The main building had already basically been a fort, but we’d done extensive renovations and put in improvements since Martin Hood’s attack. The walls had been reinforced and every window had armored steel shutters now. We’d installed more cameras and every kind of sensor you could think of. Tonight would be the first real-world test of Milo’s new point defense system, and he was downright giddy about that.
Tanya and her elves had checked and rechecked the magic markings they’d inscribed around the property to weaken the Drekavac. She assured us they’d used their most powerful magic—also known as “Mama’s special recipe” on the main building itself, which should theoretically keep the Drekavac from porting in or re-forming his body inside the walls. If the Drekavac wanted to come inside, he would have to do it the old-fashioned way. Since Sonya, the target of his unholy wrath, was hiding in Earl’s concrete cell in the basement, he’d certainly try.
Sonya had wanted to be outside, to be quote, where the action is, except Earl had told her to take her scrawny ass to the bunker, which was also a direct quote. That hadn’t been up for debate. Cody was with her and a bunch of books from the archives, still trying to figure out how to get the Ward detached.
Gutterres had walked us through what he knew about other Drekavacs’ thirteen manifestations. The Church’s records were spotty, and since each Drekavac was unique, possibly inaccurate for ours. Nobody had fought all the way through against this particular one and lived to tell about it that they knew of. So we’d prepared for everything we could think of.
I listened over my radio as the Hunters watching our video feeds reported in. There was something moving fast along the private road heading directly for the front gate. As I watched, that same thick, oily fog as last night oozed out of the forest and began poking through our chain-link fence.
“Alright, Hunters. It’s time to get to work. You know the plan.” Only as Earl spoke over the radio, the signal started breaking up. “Expect to lose coms. Hold your fire until after the exorcist does his thing.”
There was a lot of static. Something about the Drekavac’s aura screwed with our radio the same way he’d killed my cellphone, but we were prepared for that.
A single vehicle pulled away from our main building and started driving toward the gate. “There goes Gutterres,” I muttered. “I hope his little ritual works.”
“They’re the oldest Monster Hunting organization in the world,” Julie replied. “They didn’t last this long by being stupid.”
“Maybe they lasted this long because they can coast on tithing money while leaving the heavy lifting to companies like us?”
“I don’t know how big their memorial wall is, so fingers crossed. You’re just sore he left you stuck under a tree.”
Maybe I was a little indignant still. Hunters are a prideful bunch.
The car stopped by our front gate. Gutterres got out of the passenger side. One of his guys was driving and stayed behind the wheel, ready to get them the hell out of there. Gutterres walked by himself to the unmanned gate shack.
“Okay, that’s a little disappointing,” I said as I watched through Cazador’s scope, that I had turned all the way up to twenty-five times magnification.
“What?” Julie asked.
“He’s just dressed in normal clothing. I figured a combat exorcist would at least rate some cool robes or a big funny hat.”
“Focus, dear.”
The unholy screaming noise of the Drekavac’s ride approached. The fog hovering around the front gate began to glow. “The bad guy is approaching the main entrance.” I didn’t need to tell Julie the range to the front gate—five hundred and fifteen—because she had the yardage of every possible shot across the compound memorized. “Zero wind.” In fact, it was eerily still.
“Got it,” Julie said as she peered through her scope. Her JP Cazador was chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor, which had a way better ballistic coefficient than my .308. It had a trajectory like a laser beam. Hitting someone at that range would be child’s play for her.
“Can you hear me, MHI?” Gutterres asked.
“Barely,” Earl responded. He was in the command center with all the cameras and had the most powerful receiver and antenna. “Lots of static.”
“I’ll leave this transmitting so you can hear what the Drekavac says, but I will stop while I perform the rite. No offense.”
“None taken. I understand. Trade secrets.”
“More sacred than secret.” Gutterres let go of his radio. Obviously, he was still talking, but from way over here we couldn’t hear him. He lifted something silver in one of his hands and flicked it at our gate. Oddly enough, as Gutterres chanted the fog seemed to pull back from the fence a bit.
“I think that’s the sprinkler thingy I saw in their van.”
“If it’s used for the ritual application of holy water, it’s called an aspergillum,” Julie said.
“How’d you know that?”
“Art history degree, remember?”
“Ah . . . ” And there was another example why other couples would only play Trivial Pursuit against us once. We were undefeated. The only other couple that had given us a good challenge was Trip and his new girlfriend, Cheryl, and that was because they got all the sports questions. Julie and I both sucked at sports trivia.
Gutterres finished his ritual just as the horse and rider came into view. The horse thing was so big it could have easily crashed through our gate, but it slowed down. As it slowed, the horrible sound tapered off. It came to a stop and the Drekavac dismounted to approach the gate on foot, his long coat nearly dragging along the ground behind it. The big black hat hid his awful face. I’d already dialed in the range so I put my crosshair on his chest. Gutterres opened the channel so we could hear the thing’s eerie voice.
“You know why I have come.”
“I do,” Gutterres responded. “Only I know who you are, Silas Carver.”
“You know my mortal name. Then you must also know that I will never stop. To stand in my way means certain doom. Move aside, Hubertian. My oath must be fulfilled. The transgressor must be punished. The auction must be retrieved.”
“No. I will not. For I too have taken an oath. Your oath is to the prince of lies. While mine is to Almighty God. I have invoked the exilium aeternum.”
The Drekavac’s angry hiss temporarily shorted out all of our radios.
“Which means however many lives we take from you after you cross this threshold, they are gone forever. Upon taking your thirteenth life after you enter these grounds, you will be banished from this mortal plane for eternity. Like most things who think they’re immortal, you’ve grown complacent. Break your oath, turn back, and relinquish this contract, or we will rid the world of your foulness once and for all.”
“You offer a false choice. There is another option. Kill you all before you can kill all of me and claim my prize. Your threats do not sway me.”
“Only the vilest sinners to walk the Earth have been offered your mantle, and only thirteen have ever been foolish enough to accept it. Mark my words, Hell Spawn. If you cross that fence, Satan will be down to twelve.”
“Okay, that is pretty metal,” I said.
“No kidding,” Julie responded.
“I shall slay everyone who stands against me until this place is soaked in blood.”
“You can try.” Gutterres turned his back on the Drekavac and started walking to the car. “All yours, MHI.”
“Dibs,” Julie shouted so everyone else on the roof could hear her. And since she was the CEO now, nobody was going to argue with that. She aimed, slowly exhaled, and fired on the respiratory pause. The suppressor mounted on the end of her Cazador turned the muzzle blast to a muted whump. The Drekavac’s head snapped back and its hat flew off.
“Hit,” I confirmed for her as the body turned into sparks and melted into the ground. “Looked like right in the face.”
“One down,” Harbinger told us all. “A dozen to go.”
Then, for good measure, Julie brained the horse monster too.
Gutterres got back in the car and the driver floored it, trying to get back to the cover of the main building as fast as possible. “Good shot, MHI. Keep the Drekavac on the other side of the fence for as many lives as you can. Once he crosses the threshold, his body will be able to re-form inside the perimeter.”
There was a lot of noise from the runway as Skippy fired up the helicopter’s engines. We’d kept him on the ground in order to save fuel so that we’d have him when we needed him the most. Now that it was on, Skippy could do what Skippy did best. Even though Franks was here, Earl’s executive decision had been to leave the munitions on the Hind. We’d risk the charges. That had made Skippy’s day.
Besides, Franks wouldn’t snitch. Grant, on the other hand, might. I’d jokingly offered to frag him, because accidents happen, but Julie had given me a disapproving look so I’d dropped the topic.
A few tense minutes passed. Surely the Drekavac had re-formed by now. The fog was floating back toward us. Every light in the compound was burning so that we could see better, and we had several giant spotlights mounted on the roof, but the bulbs by the front gate flickered and died. The eerie glow was growing again. “He’s coming up the road again. He’s going to crash the gate.”
The Drekavac appeared, riding hell-bent for leather. The horse’s legs were moving so fast that they were a blur. It had to be going about seventy. Milo had floated the idea of installing some of those big hydraulic car bomb barricades last year, but Earl hadn’t thought we’d ever need them. Usually monsters just walked or flew in.
“Open fire,” Julie said, and everybody on the roof was happy to comply. We had even mounted a 7.62 minigun on the roof earlier. At six thousand rounds per minute, it made a hell of a racket, but they walked a line of red tracers right into the fast-moving target. The Drekavac veered hard to the side, hit a tree, and went up in a big—very unnaturally blue—fireball.
Everybody on the roof cheered.
“That’s two,” Earl said from the control room. “Round three, fight.”
“Did Earl just make a Mortal Kombat reference?” I asked.
“I highly doubt it,” Julie said. Then she raised her voice so the roof crew could hear her. “Don’t celebrate yet. You heard the Vatican Hunter. We’ve got to keep this monster on the other side of the fence as long as possible.”
“There,” someone shouted. “Light on the main road again.”
That had been fast. The Drekavac wasn’t messing around. This time the monster had gotten a running start and was moving much quicker. The horse had to be doing at least a hundred miles an hour by the time it came into view. Every sniper on the roof shot him and then the minigun shredded the Drekavac and an acre of forest behind him. Only this time he got hit dozens of times before losing control. The horse flipped, end over end, tumbling toward the gate. It skidded to a halt, just barely touching the metal. As the bodies disintegrated, the fog seemed to close in a bit more.
“That was too close,” Julie said.
“That’s three,” Earl said. It was hard to tell with all the static now, but he wasn’t sounding nearly as confident.
“He’s getting too much momentum for us to stop him from crossing the line.” Julie keyed her radio. “Skippy, hit him farther out.”
The Hind roared toward the gate. There were orcs hanging off both sides, manning door guns. They threw the horns at us as they passed. MHI owned thousands of acres around the compound, so that was our land, and we could blow it up if we felt like it. If somebody had blundered into the area by accident, they were about to have a real bad night, but this was a perfect example of why we had all those NO TRESPASSING signs posted.
The Drekavac must have re-formed a thousand yards down the road to get more acceleration, because lines of tracers shot from the Hind were firing at something that was out of our view. From the way Skippy had to turn and chase his target, the Drekavac was moving even faster than before. Rockets lanced down from the chopper, causing a rapid chain of explosions along the road. But then Skippy stopped firing and banked away.
Skippy transmitted something, but I could barely make it out. It sounded like “Monster get blowed up.” That would be four down, only Earl didn’t confirm the count because that was when even our most powerful radios went out entirely.
Thirty seconds later, the Drekavac must have already re-formed, because I could see blue fire racing down the road. One of Skippy’s door gunners started shooting, but our orc wasn’t going to be able to swing his nose around in time to track the monster down with his big guns.
Julie saw it too. The compound had an old-school intercom system installed in it that dated back at least thirty years. The Drekavac messed with air waves, but it probably wouldn’t be able to do anything that was hardwired. Julie let go of her rifle and picked up the handpiece. “Milo, crater the road.”
We’d buried some gigantic charges around the perimeter today, and Milo had them all wired to where he was stationed in our ad hoc compound defense center. Except there was no response to Julie’s call. The Drekavac was getting closer.
Maybe Milo had heard her and just not responded. Maybe he was working on it. But just in case we had a couple of bullhorns up here to relay orders, and if that didn’t work, different color flags to wave and flares to shoot to relay messages to the other Hunters. I picked up the gigantic industrial bullhorn and raised it to my mouth. Milo was only one floor down, so hopefully this would work.
“MILO.” Holy shit this thing was loud. I was glad I had my hearing protection on. “DETONATE THE ROAD BOMBS.”
The Drekavac came into view, and I couldn’t even tell you how fast he was going this time. I’m talking jet-aircraft-flyby speeds. Our roof-mounted minigun couldn’t even swivel fast enough to hit him. Except Milo must have heard one of us and pushed the big red button because all of a sudden the entrance was gone.
BOOM!
I don’t know how many pounds of ammonium nitrate Milo had buried there, but it was a lot. It made a visible shockwave that flattened trees for fifty yards. It blew the guard shack away. It broke a bunch of windows around the compound. It was so big that everybody on the roof felt it in their eyeballs.
“There go my rose bushes,” Julie said.
There were a bunch of spotlights pointed that direction already, but somebody angled one upward so that we could see the mushroom cloud, which was two hundred feet tall and growing rapidly. It began raining debris.
And the Drekavac fell out of the sky.
His mangled body landed inside the fence.
The perimeter was breached. “Oh, shit.” The body dissolved within seconds, but his fifth death came a moment too late. The evil fog moved with a hungry suddenness into the compound. I got on the bullhorn again. “THE MONSTER IS INSIDE THE WIRE.”
He had eight lives left to use against us, and no more do-overs. When those were gone, they were gone. It was going to be tooth and nail from here on out.
A dread quiet fell over the compound as everybody waited for the next shoe to drop.
The silence was broken. “South side, south side!” The sniper team on that end of the roof began shooting down toward the barracks. I ran in that direction, but there was a sudden hiss-CRACK as a bolt of lightning smashed into the building. The two Hunters were flung back from the ledge. We were all hit by stinging bits of concrete, and then everything was obscured by smoke.
As the two stunned men were dragged away by the others, a few of us reached the damaged edge, peered over, and saw the Drekavac walking toward us, blunderbuss in hand. He was less than fifty yards away, so he basically filled my entire cranked-up scope when I aimed at him. I nailed him twice in the chest with Cazador. He barely even twitched. Then the Hunter to my left opened up with a 240B and stitched him from knee to throat, before the Hunter on my right dropped a 40mm grenade right at his feet.
The Drekavac fell apart. That was six.
“Man your positions! Cover your zone,” Julie shouted. As we moved back to our stations, more Hunters ran up from the stairs to grab the wounded, and others took their place watching that direction. Since the Drekavac was going to be close now, I hurried and cranked Cazador’s scope down to the lowest setting of five power. I went back to watching the front of the compound for danger before I realized that I didn’t even know which of us had just gotten hit. There hadn’t been time to look.
A few nervous seconds passed. The fog was everywhere in the compound now, thick as soup, and really hard to see through.
This time the Drekavac was smart. He didn’t re-form in the open where our lookouts could see him. He re-formed behind one of the outbuildings on the east side. Our first warning was when a bolt of lightning hit one of the antennas on our roof. It came crashing down, spraying fire and sparks everywhere. The Hunters on that side returned fire, but the Drekavac fired again. The impact shook the roof and tore a burning gouge through the concrete ledge. There were only a few seconds’ delay between lightning bolts now.
Then the fucking birds came out of nowhere and hit us.
I’d dealt with one ghost falcon last night. This time there was a flock of the damned things. They dropped out of the sky like meteors, screeching and clawing for our eyes. I reflexively clubbed one out of the air with Cazador’s suppressor, then stomped on its head with my boot. Then I watched in horror as another bird nailed one of the Hunters, who was distracted shooting at the Drekavac, right in the back of the helmet. He was already hanging dangerously far over the edge of the roof, off-balance, in order to get a good angle. The impact was enough to shove him over. He went over the side with a scream.
I ran over, looked down, and discovered Vaughn Spencer about two feet down on the other side hanging by his fingertips. The drop probably wouldn’t kill him outright, but it was enough to break some bones, and then he’d be lying there in the open in the line of fire of an angry Drekavac. He saw me and shouted, “Give me a hand.”
“Hang on.”
“No shit, Pitt!”
I let my rifle dangle by the sling so I could hold onto the ledge with one hand and lean way over to grab his wrist with the other. Spencer was one of the out-of-town Hunters who had flown in earlier to help. Luckily for both of us, he was only about 5'9" and 170, but with the armor and ammo, heavy enough to make this a challenge. I pulled hard. He managed to get his boots against the wall enough to find some purchase. I almost had him, but then one of the damned birds was flapping around my helmet, wings smacking me in the face.
“Hold still,” Julie ordered, which is a lot harder to do than it sounds when a ghost bird is trying to peck your eyes out. But I did. A bullet whistled right past my helmet to smack the blue falcon out of the sky. Bird gone, I went back to lifting.
The building the Drekavac was hiding behind was being riddled with bullets. The monster was surely getting nailed too, but he’d gotten tough enough that he was shrugging most of the hits off now, and I watched, horrified, as he swung around the corner and aimed his blunderbuss at us again.
I pulled Spencer over the edge and we both dropped as the monster fired. The bolt slammed into the spot we’d just been occupying. The impact shattered the concrete wall, pelting both of us with hot fragments.
Luckily, Skippy had seen where the lightning bolts were coming from, because the Hind tore past, firing rockets, and the Drekavac and the outbuilding he was hiding behind were obliterated. Which was too bad, that building was where we parked the bucket tractor we used for range maintenance. I was going to miss that little Kubota.
Julie had drawn her pistol and was shooting ghost birds. When she saw that our cover was being obliterated by the Drekavac’s gun, she ordered, “Fall back. We’re abandoning the roof.”
It was the right call. We were hanging out in the open here, and this asshole just kept developing new abilities. If his next trick was lobbing a fireball like a mortar round, we were all dead.
“Covering,” I said, as the other Hunters headed for the exit. Abomination would’ve been perfect for skeet shooting all these damned birds, but I’d brought my rifle instead because of the expected range. But at least I had a micro red dot optic offset mounted on Cazador for this up-close and personal stuff. So I twisted my rifle at an angle and started blasting falcons with high-powered rifle rounds. It wasn’t efficient, but it was satisfying.
The Hunters all rushed down the stairs. I was the last one out and made sure the roof was clear of good guys before I ducked inside. Spencer slammed the heavy steel door on a ghost bird hard enough to cut it in half, then dropped the big crossbar to lock the door. Immediately a bunch of birds started thumping against the other side.
“Hold this entrance,” I told Spencer, and then I went after my wife.