"Oh, man. We've made him mad," I said.
Franks scowled, doing the math. The oni was a few hundred yards away and closing quickly. "Go," he ordered without looking. He limped to a nearby construction vehicle and retrieved a length of heavy cable from the back with his good arm.
I didn't know what Franks was planning, but anything involving staying and fighting was suicide. "Come on!" I shouted at him as I ran to one of the Alabama DOT trucks. Of course, there were no keys in it. I swore.
"Primary mission, protect Pitt from the Condition," Franks stated as he pulled out the cable. His injured arm was leaking everywhere, but he still managed to use his left hand to open the steel clip on the end to fashion a loop. Franks tugged out the other end of the cable, pulled it over to the bus and crawled under. He started wrapping the cable around the frame.
"Pitt! We're below you," Grant screamed in my ear. A horn honked on the freeway just south of the wrecked truck. "There's a big red thing coming this way, and I think I just killed its sister or something."
Franks was going to sacrifice himself to slow down Cratos. He looked up from his work long enough to glare at me. "I've never failed a mission."
In other words, it was time to go.
The fastest way down to Lee and Grant was to go right over the edge. Skippy was way ahead of me. He climbed over the concrete ledge and jumped down to the top of the trailer. His boots bounced, and he fell, but managed not to go over the side. He stood and gestured for his wife. Gretchen was much more nimble and she had somebody to help catch her. Ed, weaving badly, but still managing more dexterity than I would ever have, went over next. I helped Mosh to his feet and we wobbled to the side. "You've got to be shittin' me," he said when he looked at what was still a pretty darn scary leap down to a narrow, stainless-steel catwalk. Cratos roared again, much closer now. "Point taken." He jumped, landing awkwardly. I waited for Skippy to help him before I went over.
The yellow sign said that this was a 20-foot overpass. It felt like ten times that when I stepped into space. My boots hit the trailer just as the smell hit my nose. Gasoline. Pain surged up through my ankle, still tender from Mexico. Strong hands grabbed my arm. Mosh shoved me toward the ladder. "Gas truck!" he shouted.
I slid down the ladder, past a bevy of red signs saying danger/peligro and flammable, and landed with a splash. I was standing in gasoline. The tanker had ruptured on impact. My brother was down a second after me. Lee laid on the horn. "Come on!" But then Mosh was running in the wrong direction. "Damn it!" I shouted as I followed. He was running toward where Bia had died. Didn't he realize we had to get out of here, either before this thing caught on fire or before Cratos got here? Stupid idiot.
Then I felt like the idiot as Mosh scrambled his way up to the wrecked truck. He was trying to get the driver. The engine block was completely smashed into the wall and fragments had been hurled a hundred feet but the trucker could still be alive. Mosh jerked on the door but it was crumpled tight. I reached him just as he crawled, headfirst, through the broken window.
"Hurry, man. We've got to go," I insisted.
"Working on it," came the muffled reply.
"KILL! KILL!" Cratos screamed.
I saw Agent Franks standing at the top of the overpass, perched in the exact spot that Bia had been in only a minute before. He held the thick loop of cable in his hands, noose ready. Was he going to actually try to lasso the thing? The rear of the tanker shook as Cratos slammed into it, pushing past, splashing into the gasoline. He was so absurdly tall that his head terminated nearly three quarters of the way to the overpass above. He saw me.
"FILTHY HUNTER DIE!"
Franks waited patiently for the monster to step into view.
Force roared. The sound began as a rumble, but then rose in intensity, until it was a primal scream of pure hate. He lowered his head and charged.
Franks tossed the makeshift noose. The oni's head passed right through and he made it three more steps before the cable jerked tight. The bus was jerked several feet. His beady eyes bulged as the cable tightened around his throat. Too enraged to stop, he kept tugging inexorably toward me, dragging the bus with him.
The ground was littered with wreckage, gasoline quickly spreading and washing over it. I realized with a shock that much of the debris was actually what was left of Bia. The purple bits looked like dried clay. "Grab my feet and pull!" Mosh shouted. I grabbed him, glad that he was wearing those giant lineman boots that laced all the way up to his knees, and yanked as hard as I could. The adrenaline was surging through my system and I pulled my brother back out the window. Mosh saw Cratos struggling less than a hundred feet away but he was a man on a mission. "Help me with this guy."
We both reached through the window. I found an armpit, and we pulled, lifting the unconscious man through the gap. Of course, he had to be a big, heavyset guy, too. No, it would have been too much to ask to have to carry a petite person out of a probably soon-to-be-exploding truck with an angry giant thing trying to eat your soul. No, Owen Z. Pitt, you get a three-hundred-pounder. It took two strong and desperate men to pull him through the window. I slung the trucker over my back in a fireman carry and ran for our lives.
Cratos was trying to scream, but the sound was choked off by the cable. The harder he pulled, the tighter it got, but he was still getting closer. Driven by supernatural strength, he had dragged the tour bus partway over the cracking ledge. If that thing went over it was bound to spark and blow us all to kingdom come.
Then I heard the choppers. The MCB's Apache gunships were coming in, low and fast, from the west side of the island. Their mission was to put some hurting on this monster.
And they didn't know about the fuel tanker.
What Franks did next absolutely stunned me. With his knife held in his good hand, he leapt over the edge, not to the trailer top, but rather, straight to the ground, directly behind Cratos. Franks landed on his feet, automatically rolling to absorb the impact, but still surely breaking his legs. He tumbled through the gas, coming up in a petrochemical splash, right beneath the oni's leg. Franks slashed the knife brutally, chopping through whatever served as the unnatural beast's ligaments, hamstringing it. Cratos collapsed to one knee, the cable pulling even tighter.
The beast swung, tearing one mighty fist at Franks, but hitting only gas and pavement, as Franks had rolled behind the other leg, and struck deep there as well. This time Franks wasn't fast enough, and a backhand landed hard enough to tear a cloud through six feet of road. Franks was flung into the darkness, disappearing into the trees along the river.
Now, with both legs damaged, the oni toppled, hanging itself entirely. It struggled, twisting, legs flopping, as it swung back under the overpass.
The gasoline was everywhere, soaking my legs, as I lumbered up to the MHI van. Grant was holding the back door open. "Toss him to me!" he shouted. I shoved the injured trucker in before clambering up behind. Grant and Mosh were in a second later, and Lee had us moving before we could even get the rear door closed. An angry dragonfly shape passed overhead as the first Apache took aim.
"Gun it, Lee!"
"Going as fast as I can," the little man stated calmly, as he put all of his weight and will on the gas pedal. The MHI vans were all supercharged V8s, and that was a good thing.
"Go! Go! Go!" Grant shouted.
Behind us, Cratos raged and fought. The millennium-old killer was hanging, thrashing, tiny eyes bulging with hate, when the chopper fired. The 30mm cannon struck him in the torso, depleted uranium shells exploding out his back in a shower of fragments and white light. Rocket pods launched, lancing fury under the overpass. The gasoline caught, flames tearing across the freeway, leaping back up into the emptying trailer, igniting the massive amount of fumes in a conflagration that was probably visible in Cazador.
A wall of heat and pressure rocked the van, blowing the rear windows out in a spray of hot glass. I covered my head. A killing wind smashed through the interior, super hot and stinging. The exteri
or paint caught on fire.
But we made it.
A roiling red-and-black mushroom cloud rose behind us, hundreds of feet into the air. Somehow I alone could see through the conflagration to see the ancient oni's final moments. Through the curtains of fire and smoke and howling wind, the beast hung by a fraying cable, false flesh boiling away, energy fleeing, until finally in a flash, he was consumed. The container was destroyed, freeing thousands of trapped souls as his body exploded into clay dust that was sucked upward into the flaming vortex.
"You okay?" I asked softly.
My brother had spent the last fifteen minutes doing CPR on the trucker. The two of us and the rapidly cooling body were the only ones left in the van. He had done his best, and his chest heaved from the stress and exertion. He smelled like evaporating gasoline.
After we had stopped the van, Gretchen had examined the man for only a few seconds, shook her head sadly, then walked away. If Gretchen had said nothing could be done, then truly, it was over. Mosh didn't know what I knew about her healing powers and had continued trying to resuscitate, pumping the man's chest over and over, stubbornly trying to work a heart that was just plain done, then filling the lungs with air and trying again.
The back of the van was bare. It made a decent work space for first aid. Mosh leaned back against the wall and rubbed a filthy hand over his face.
"You okay?" I repeated, a little louder this time.
The trucker was a big old boy with a Charlie Daniel's beard, with those kind of thick arms that bordered on fat but were amazingly strong, and he had LOVE tattooed on one set of knuckles and HATE tattooed on the other. It was cheesy, but it didn't matter now, because he was dead, and it was my fault. College kids in Mexico, who knows how many innocents tonight, my family put in danger, and it wasn't going to stop. . . . All because of me.
Mosh gave a sad little laugh. It was a pathetic sound. "Hell of a night."
"Yeah . . . Listen, dude, I can explain everything."
He just shook his head. "Shut up."
"No, really. Everything you saw, I can explain."
Mosh lowered his hand. His face was bloodstained and scratched. "Just leave me alone right now, okay?" His eyes got a dangerous squint to them and just for a second I could see that family resemblance that everybody always told me about.
I nodded. I could understand. There was a -helicopter landing outside. This particular talk could wait. The back doors of the van were pulled open. Grant was standing there in his perfect black armor. "Feds are here," he stated, though it was pretty obvious with the black helicopter settling on the freeway a hundred feet away.
"Hey, Grant."
"Yeah?"
I clapped him on the shoulder. It was kind of awkward. "Good shot back there."
Grant just nodded, his expression inscrutable. It was no secret that he disliked me. "Just doing my job." Saving my life was a professional courtesy, nothing more. "I suppose that makes us even."
He was talking about me pulling him out of DeSoya Caverns. Technically I figured I was still ahead by one, but I had broken his nose for that incident. "Fair enough."
The fire was still burning in the distance. We were parked on the bridge between Buzzard Island and Montgomery. State police, by order of the Feds, had blocked the bridge into town. This area was now quarantined, certainly as part of what Myers had referred to on the radio as a Level 5 Containment Event. Agent Myers, trailed by Agents Torres, Herzog, and Archer, approached as Grant and I waited. The Goon Squad looked pretty beat up. Archer had a black eye and a Sig 229 dangling from one hand. Skippy, Gretchen, and Edward were nowhere to be seen, which was probably real smart right about now.
"Pitt . . . Jefferson," Myers addressed us, anger barely contained. I was waiting for him to explode. I was going to jail, if I was lucky.
"Myers," I said gravely. "Have you found Franks yet?"
"We will find him," Myers stated matter-of-factly, somehow talking while keeping his jaw clenched. "As for you . . ."
I waited patiently for my arrest.
Agent Myers hesitated, obviously waffling between having the cuffs put on or ordering his agents to just shoot me to get it over with. The look he gave me was a mixture of anger, frustration, and something else that I wasn't sure about. He turned from me, studied the surviving members of my protective detail one by one, and then scowled back at me, deep in thought. Finally he seemed to deflate. His teeth unclenched and then Myers just seemed like the tired, middle-aged, glorified bureaucrat that he was. "You, I'll deal with later. Go home . . ." He waved his hand. "Just . . . go home."
That was a surprise. "Seriously?"
"But, sir!" Herzog shouted. "He attacked us."
"I never touched you," I said, which was true. The orcs had beat the hell out of them—not me.
"He pulled a gun on Agent Franks." Archer said. "That's—"
"Enough!" Myers cut his subordinate off. "Pitt, if I thought it would benefit my mission I'd have you locked up for eternity. Your actions jeopardized my men."
I had no idea why he was letting me go. A smarter man would have kept his mouth shut, but my temper tended to run faster than my brain. "You knew more about these oni than you let on. I had nothing to do with your trap failing. Did you expect me to just let them kill my brother?"
"You're a free man for one reason only. You're still our only in against this group," Myers spat. "Don't mistake my actions for mercy. I need all of my available men for this containment but I'll provide another protective detail shortly. We'll assess how tonight's setback affects our case against the Condition. Hopefully, the cultist your father shot will survive and we can get some information out of him."
"How are my parents?" I asked.
"Fine. They're on a flight now."
"Parents?" Mosh spoke up from behind Grant, concern evident in his voice. "What happened?"
Myers gestured into the back of the van. "One of your people?"
"That's my brother, the one you were going to leave to die," I said, pointing to Mosh, who looked really exasperated.
Myers sighed. "I meant the dead one."
"Driver of the tanker." Grant spoke for the first time.
"We tried to save him," Mosh said.
"I understand." The senior G-man nodded. "Men, carry this body to the chopper."
"What about Mom and Dad?" Mosh demanded.
"I'll explain later," I said. Mosh scowled in a manner that suggested he was giving serious thought about attempting to kick my ass. I was bigger and had a lot more experience but I knew my brother was damn tough when he got angry. "Chill out, dude. They're fine." Mosh punched the side of the van and stomped away. I waited until the Goon Squad had picked up the trucker before returning my full attention to Myers. It took all three of them to hoist the body up and shuffle away, each of them telegraphing their distaste for their superior's decision not to haul me off. "Any idea how many more dead?"
"Not as many as you would think," Myers replied. "We got lucky. Some civilians at the concert and I have four men dead and several more wounded." I didn't know if he was counting Franks in that quantity. "We got most of the cars stopped away from the tanker and the people stuck behind the crash were smart enough to run when they saw Force drop his invisibility. As far as we know, nobody else was caught in the explosion. In the meantime, I've got hundreds of witnesses and a slew of damage that I have to explain. Some idiot is going to talk about this and that means they'll have to be dealt with . . ." He trailed off, finding the idea distasteful.
"Wouldn't it be better if we just let the truth be known?" I suggested.
"Not my call, Pitt. I just enforce policy. I don't make it." He began to walk back to the waiting Blackhawk.
"You murder survivors and witnesses!" I shouted. "You destroy lives to keep up this illusion of safety! People should know what's really out there."
Myers paused, turned, and shook his head sadly. "Can you imagine what would happen if the world found out the truth? Chaos
. Pandemonium. No. People need to be kept safe from themselves, and I'll do whatever I have to, lie, cheat . . . kill . . . anything, to keep my country safe." The professor was a dedicated man.
It was disgusting. "How do you sleep at night?"
Myers actually chuckled, his normally bureaucratic demeanor apparently damaged by his losses. "I don't. If you knew what was coming"—he resumed walking, the wind from the rotors snapping his cheap tie over his shoulder and making it difficult to hear—"you wouldn't sleep anymore either."
"What's that supposed to mean?" I shouted after him.
But he didn't answer. The chopper lifted off a minute later, leaving me to ponder what it was that Myers thought was coming. Clearly there was more to this cult than the Feds were letting on. Lee hobbled around the side of our van. He was in jeans and a Schlock Mercenary tee shirt. He had bailed out of the compound so fast he hadn't even had time to gear up. Grant must have gotten dressed on the road. The sight of Lee in normal attire made me especially thankful for my friends. They hadn't hesitated to go after me any more than I had for my own brother. "Z, I've got Harbinger on the phone. He's been trying to reach you."
I pulled out my cell phone. It had gotten cracked at some point during the evening's excitement. "Piece of crap!" I cocked my fist back and chucked it far out into the Alabama River. That small bit of random violence made me feel better.
Lee shook his head and grinned. "You know the company phones have a warranty on them, right? You could have got that replaced for free. Now you'll have to buy a new one."
I groaned. "What did he say?" I knew it had to be some variation of Pitt, you suck. Go hide at the compound. Lee handed me his phone.
My boss actually sounded concerned. "How're y'all doing?"
"We're good. Only minor injuries." I hurried, knowing that he was going to rip me for disobeying his orders. "We got to my brother in time. Agent Franks is dead." Saying that sounded weird. Franks had always seemed so stoic, so invulnerable, that it was hard to imagine anything being able to end his life.