CHAPTER 8
The parking lot was nuts. There were several wounded, and people were trying to help them, mostly with improvised tourniquets from the look of things. The rest were running for their cars or hopping on bikes to get away. Anybody who had an outstanding warrant was fleeing before the cops get organized, and from the look of things, that was nearly half of them.
I couldn’t stick around, but I could still help out a little. When I reached my vehicle, I grabbed the med bag and threw it to one of the helpers who looked like they actually had a clue about first aid. “Here. It’s got real TQs and bandages in it.” Then I got in the company truck, put the borrowed sawed-off on the seat next to me, and drove off in the direction Sonya, Gutterres, and the Drekavac had gone. They were already out of sight, but I put the hammer down and hoped for the best.
Every MHI team draws from the same fleet of company vehicles. I’d taken the last thing in Boone’s garage, which had been a Ford pickup truck. Though it had a big engine, it was a tall, four-wheel drive, with a winch and a snorkel on it, so this wasn’t exactly a speedy vehicle. I was downright lumbering compared to the bullet bikes they’d been on. I had no idea what the hell the Drekavac was driving, but it had sounded like it had a friggin’ jet engine, so it probably wasn’t exactly slow. I suppose I could have stolen one of the bikes at the bar, but let’s be honest, if I hadn’t gotten shot by the owner in the process, I was a pretty mediocre motorcyclist, and would have ended up in a ditch in short order anyway.
It was a dark, moonless night, and we were heading farther away from the city, on a country road with thick trees all around. If they turned off, I’d have no way of knowing. Except, it appeared there was a stark line of icy fog hanging about a foot above the road, and since it was summer, there was no way that was natural. So I followed the Drekavac’s trail.
I got out my phone. “Call Earl Harbinger.” But there was still no service. That had to be interference from the monster because we were only half an hour outside of a major metro area. I’d seen certain unnatural beings mess with things like phones or radio reception before. As the needle on the speedometer climbed, I kept trying other members of my team, but kept getting nothing. I was on my own.
They have a pathological hatred of straight roads in the South, so I maxed out at about a hundred before having to stomp on the brakes going into a sudden corner. I made it through without flipping the 4x4 though, but that near miss reminded me to put my seat belt on.
There was no oncoming traffic, but there were multiple sets of headlights off to the side, crashed at weird angles. The monster had been running everyone off the road. Whatever the Drekavac was riding was causing people to swerve out of the way, and here that meant hitting a tree or driving off into the bushes. Some of the occupants had gotten out and were staring, baffled, in the direction I was going.
What the hell was I chasing?
The fog was getting thicker. I was catching up.
There was a blue glow ahead. From the smoke and dust hanging in the air, it looked like one of the bikes had crashed. The thing chasing them had stopped, and the Drekavac had dismounted in order to approach on foot.
I squinted, trying to tell what I was looking at.
It was hard to explain but imagine giving a mad taxidermist the carcass of a giant black horse and ordering him to stretch that over a bunch of bones put together by a maniac with no spatial awareness. Stitch it together with wire, add spikes and then set it on fire. Then make the fire blue, with ghosts and shit dancing in it because, why not? Shoot for the stars. It didn’t even have hooves. The thing just seemed to hover on a cloud of fog. And worst of all, the Drekavac’s vehicle—for lack of a better term—appeared to be . . . alive? Because as I rapidly closed the distance, it turned its head to look at me, and the eyes were like blinding headlights.
But before my eyeballs got blasted, I caught a quick glimpse of Sonya, lying there next to her wiped-out bike, and the Drekavac closing on her, sword in hand.
So I aimed for where I thought the Drekavac would be and floored it.
SLAM!
The monster went up over the hood, cracked my windshield, and went flipping over the roof. I saw fiery bits of monster raining down in my rearview mirror as I hit the brakes.
The truck came to a lurching halt. Thankfully, Boone kept up on his regularly scheduled vehicle maintenance, and the brakes worked great, because I stopped only a few feet from driving down a really steep hill.
The Drekavac had been splattered everywhere, but I’d already seen that wouldn’t last long. I saw Sonya in my side mirror. She was staggering to her feet. Judging by how trashed her bike was, she’d wrecked hard, so was either lucky to be in one piece, or her inhuman toughness had saved her life. Since her bike’s rear tire was twisted and glowing blue, it must have gotten blasted with some sort of Drekavac magic. I threw open the door and shouted, “Sonya! Come on!”
She pulled her badly scraped helmet off and tossed it in the grass, revealing that she was still wearing the same rocker face that she had at the bar. “Who are you?”
I pointed at where the fog was glowing and swirling as the monster came back to life behind my truck. “Does that really matter right now?”
“Nope.” She ran to the passenger side door and hopped in. “Go, go, go!”
“Where’s Gutterres?” I barely knew the guy, but I wasn’t about to leave a fellow Hunter behind.
“He tried to protect me, but glowing angry dude blasted him off the cliff with a fireball. He’s dead. Like we’re going to be unless you drive, moron! Drive!”
And to accentuate that, the Drekavac’s horse thing came from seemingly out of nowhere and shattered her window with its skull. I stupidly hadn’t expected it to act on its own. Sonya cried out as it tried to bite her with its big blunt teeth.
I snatched up the sawed-off. “Duck.” Thankfully she had the sense to listen, and I blew a gaping hole through the horse’s head. A shorty 12-gauge is really loud inside a truck cab. There was a terrible screeching noise as the monster horse fell over. I threw the truck in reverse and drove backwards, fast. There was a thump thump as the tires smashed the remains of the Drekavac, then I was back on the road. I put it in drive and accelerated.
A moment later we were clear of the fog and getting away. I took a deep breath and concentrated on not wrapping us around a telephone pole.
“I recognize you. You’re one of those dopes who chased me earlier. You’re the slower, uglier one.”
Only comparatively. It wasn’t my fault Trip was a fairly good-looking dude who could also run really fast. “Yeah, you’ve been a pain in my ass all day.”
Then Sonya surprised me by pulling a little pistol out of her pocket and pointing it at my head. “Who are you? Talk or else!”
It’s hard enough to speed on a windy country road in the dark without the added distraction of potentially catching a .380 in the dome. “Put that away, kid. I don’t have time for your drama.” I was still holding the shotgun, and it was still generally pointed in her direction, so I turned it a bit and thumped her in the stomach with the muzzle to accentuate my point. “If I wanted to hurt you, I could’ve cut you in half already.” Then I slowly removed my hand from the shotgun and left it sitting on the center console to show I meant her no harm. Plus, I really needed both hands to drive this fast. “See? Now put that thing down before you shoot me by accident and kill us both.”
I risked a glance at her and realized that despite being able to change her face, she really couldn’t hide her emotions that well. In the dim lights from the dash, I could see that her lip was quivering and her eyes were watering. She actually was scared. Good, because so was I. She slowly lowered the tiny pistol. “Okay. But only because I want to.”
“My name’s Owen Pitt. I’m friends with Earl Harbinger.”
“You know Harbinger? You’re MHI?” That seemed to surprise her.
“I bet you wish you hadn’t run from us now, huh?”
“Are you kidding? Earl’s cheap. The Catholics just paid me two million bucks for that rock.”
“No shit?” Robbing monsters really was lucrative.
“Well, it was one million, but they’re pretty desperate, so I made them a counteroffer. Speaking of which”—Sonya got out her cellphone—“I need to check my bank account and see if they wired the money yet.”
“Now? You’ve got other problems.”
Sonya scowled at her phone. “No signal? Lame.”
“Listen, the Catholics aren’t the only desperate ones. MHI really needs that rock. There’s an evil chaos god who wants to destroy the whole world, and that Ward might be the only thing that we can stop him with.”
“Sounds like a personal problem.”
There was a Y in the road. I went right. The Drekavac was out of sight. If we were lucky maybe I could shake him.
“Where’s the Ward now?” I demanded.
“So you can swipe it?” She barked a sardonic laugh at me. “It’s somewhere safe. I’m not telling you.”
“Then I should pull over and you can get out and walk home.”
“You wouldn’t leave me at the mercy of that thing. I know MHI is a bunch of goody two-shoes.”
I started slowing down.
“Whoa . . . Hey. What are you doing?”
“Letting you out. Maybe that glowing pirate can give you a lift.” I braked. “He seems nice. Or you can tell me where the stone is.”
“But the Secret Guard already paid me a bunch of money for it!”
“Pay them back.” But then I saw two blue lights in my rearview mirror, growing rapidly. Tough talk aside, I couldn’t actually leave her to get murdered by the spectral terminator. “Shit.”
As I sped up, Sonya smugly said, “Called it.” But then she turned around and looked out the back window, to see the rolling wall of doom fog closing fast. “You’d better step on it.”
“I am.” But from the way those lights were gaining on us, ghost horse was rocket powered. “How’s he tracking you?”
“I have no idea.”
Oncoming cars zipped past, but then they careened wildly out of control as the Drekavac’s ride struck them. He was coming down the middle lane and catching up fast. The only thing that seemed to briefly slow him down was actually killing him, and even that only seemed to help for about thirty seconds. “Can you shoot?”
“Duh. I’m an expert. Better than you probably. Didn’t Earl tell you who my dad was?”
“So shooting ability is genetically inherited now? Spare me the cocky bullshit, you friggin’ orphan.”
“I’ve got a mom.”
“And she seems nice. You should call her more often. She’s worried about you. There’s some gun cases in the back seat. Do me a favor and pop this guy.”
Sonya rolled smoothly into the back seat. My bigger guns were on the floor. I could hear her unzipping the top case. That would be my shotgun, Abomination. It had a short enough barrel it wouldn’t be too awful for her to maneuver back there.
“Okay. Got one. Now what?”
I checked the mirror. Ghost horse was within fifty yards and closing. “Shoot him!”
“Uh . . . ” There were some metallic noises as she ineffectually fiddled with various things. “How?”
“Expert my ass. See the big lever on the right side? That’s the safety. Flip it down.”
“Got it . . . ” She must have yanked on the trigger. “Nothing’s happening!”
“You’ve got to chamber a round.”
“I’ve not seen one of these before, okay?”
“It’s a Kalashnikov! Third world goat herders use these!”
“Quit yelling at me. Jeez!”
Twenty yards. And objects in the rearview mirror are closer than they appear. “Pull back the charging handle all the way and let it go. That’s the handle that sticks out the right side.” The familiar noise told me that she’d just successfully loaded it. “Now—”
There was a thunderous roar as Sonya yanked the trigger. Unfortunately, the combination of my rushed instructions and her gun illiteracy meant that she had flipped Abomination’s selector from safe to full-auto, and a full-auto 12-gauge loaded with magnum buckshot, you really need to hang on and know what you’re doing. Which Sonya clearly didn’t, because she blew out the rear window, shot the tail gate, launched about fifty bucks’ worth of silver down the road, and then blew a hole in the truck’s roof in one burst.
“What the shit, Sonya?” My ears were ringing and none of those had been anywhere near the Drekavac.
“It’s empty.”
I leave a short five-round mag in Abomination when it’s in the case. The bigger mags were all too long to fit and still zip it shut, but I kept a ton of those on hand. “Pockets on the side of the case.” Then I saw a road sign warning me that there was a twenty-five mile an hour curve. I was going a hundred. “Hang on!” I hit the brakes on the way in. The truck managed to keep two whole tires on the road, but Sonya bounced off the back of my seat.
We made it around that turn at close to triple the recommended speed, but the Drekavac was right behind us, and we were deep in his fog bank. My headlights could only illuminate a few feet ahead, so I had no choice but to slow down.
All I could see of the Drekavac was its black silhouette in a blue halo, sitting tall in the saddle, using both hands to control its mount. Except then he reached down and pulled a weapon from a scabbard. From my vantage point it appeared to be shaped like an old-timey blunderbuss with a big bell end.
“Stay down.” I swerved hard.
There was a brilliant flash as a crackling ball of lightning burned down the side of my truck. It zipped past, hit a tree, and blew it into splinters.
“What the hell was that?” My passenger-side mirror was gone. The paint had caught on fire.
“That’s what he blasted the Catholic dude with.”
In one smooth movement, I grabbed the sawed-off shotgun with my right hand, turned back, craning my neck to see, pointed it out the broken back window, and nailed ghost horse. It let out a terrible metallic wail and pulled hard to the side.
“That’s how you do it.” I’d been aiming for the rider, but Sonya didn’t need to know that. I broke open the shotgun, fished two more shells from my pocket, and dropped them in, which was a lot harder than it sounds while steering a speeding truck.
“I think I’ve got it reloaded,” Sonya said as she sat up. “There’s another trigger on the front of this—”
“Don’t touch that. You’ll blow us up. That’s the grenade launcher.”
“Who puts a grenade launcher on a shotgun?”
“A genius.” That had been Milo’s handiwork. When I checked my mirror, ghost horse had corrected, and was gaining again. But worse, glowing fog was swirling in the bed of the pickup. “Look out!”
One of the demon hounds appeared in the truck’s bed, and immediately started climbing in through the back window, snapping at Sonya. She shrieked but grabbed it by the ear and forced its head away. The girl had to be incredibly strong to shove that beast around like that, but she couldn’t maneuver Abomination into it. “Bad dog!”
I leaned back and shot the dog right between the shoulder blades. It ruptured, spraying fire all over the truck. Thankfully, the blue fire burned cold rather than hot, because that would have been awkward. This way we’d just have frostbite instead of third-degree burns.
The Drekavac was right behind us, and it was aiming the blunderbuss again. “Hold on.” I hit the brakes.
The monster fired. The lightning ball danced across the truck, burned a hole in the passenger seat, blew out the front window and rolled down the hood. But my sudden stop meant that ghost horse smashed right into my back bumper.
It must have weighed a lot more than it looked, because the impact shoved the truck sideways. We went spinning around, tires squealing, glass flying, right off the road. The horse was pulverized. The Drekavac was thrown violently from the saddle. I tried to steer out of the spin but the nose of the truck dropped suddenly as we crossed the edge of the road, and then we were going sharply downhill. A single thought went through my mind as we started sliding through the underbrush. This is going to hurt.
I stood on the brake pedal but it didn’t matter. We might as well have been riding a sled. We shot down, crashing through branches, and just kept going. I nearly bit my tongue off as we bounced off a boulder. It was a miracle we didn’t flip. Then the front end clipped a big tree trunk, hard enough to bounce the whole vehicle into the air. My air bag deployed and smacked the snot out of me.
We were stopped. I was dizzy. It took me a few seconds to bring myself back to reality. Everything ached. We were sitting at a really weird angle. That was because the driver’s side was partially submerged in a stream. I shook my head and safety glass fell out of my hair.
“Sonya? Are you alive?”
“You suck.” She sounded muffled because she was lying on the floor, partially squished beneath my seat.
“You can thank me for rescuing you later.” I looked around. I had no idea where we were, other than forest. Thankfully, my door still opened. When I unbuckled my seat belt, I slid into the stream and got soaked up to my knees. I splashed over to the back door and opened it. “Come on. We’ve got to go.”
The unnatural fog was slowly rolling down the hill after us.