The Monster Hunters

  “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.

  “Franks!” But he was already gone, blasted right out the moving vehicle and into the night. Struggling, I pulled another Saiga magazine from my armor. A long purple arm stretched forward, searching for me, ripping up shards of thick carpet. Edward stepped forward, kukri swinging, and nailed her again. The blade bit deep but no fluids came out. Bia screeched, swinging at Edward, and without room to maneuver he couldn’t dodge. The orc sailed down the aisle, colliding with the dash. Ed tumbled down the stairs, landing against the door.

  Abomination reloaded, I put a round of double-aught buckshot into Bia’s face. She turned away from me, and noticed my brother steering, eyes on the road, a bunch of orange flashing lights pulsing through the windshield past his bald head. Bia crawled further into the bus. “Mosh, move! Move!” I scream
ed.

  But she wasn’t going for him. She knocked Mosh from the driver’s seat. Claws reached for the wheel and I realized what was happening, but too late to do anything other than shout something unintelligible about holding on. Purple fingers clenched and jerked, the wheels screeched in protest, and the orange flashing lights rushed up to meet us.

  We hit the construction equipment at about forty miles an hour.

  I woke up.

  It must have only been a moment later. I tasted copper. Blood was running freely from my scalp and down my face. I wiped it away with one sleeve, smearing it away from my eyes. The bus was resting at an angle, the right side and front end a lot higher than the rest of the vehicle. The door was open. Edward was still stirring slowly on the steps. The door was open. My brother was gone.

  “Mosh?” I sat up slowly, feeling the urge to puke. No answer. “You okay, Ed?” He gurgled. But he always sounded like that. I started to call for Franks, my brain needing a second to realize that Bia had already murdered him. The hole through the side of the bus was splattered with Franks’ blood. “Skippy? Gretchen?”

  “Pretty bus . . . all smash,” Gretchen said sadly.

  “War Chief?” Skippy asked. The two of them had ended up further back toward the Jacuzzi.

  “Mosh?” I asked again, pulling one leg out from under me. Dizzy, I crawled down the stairs, past Ed, hands crunching bits of broken safety glass into the thick carpeting, and tumbled, facefirst, onto the pavement. Bia had steered us into a giant orange vehicle labeled Alabama Department of Transportation. Judging by the front of our bus, it was one solid chunk of machinery. Other orange vehicles were parked behind it. One lane of the overpass, the one that we were currently in, had been blocked off by rubber cones. Glancing back, Mosh had managed to run over at least fifty of them. I pulled myself up the side of the bus, and tucked the butt of my shotgun against my shoulder. “Mosh! Can you hear me?”

  We were on the edge of the overpass. Southbound vehicles flew past beneath us, in the direction we were supposed to have been going to meet air support. Would the Apaches know where to find us? Gun raised, I stumbled around the side of the bus. That evil she-demon had to be around here somewhere.

  “Pitt. Come in, Pitt.” It was Grant.

  “Listen, we’re on the overpass about two miles south of the concert, just north of the river,” I replied. “We need immediate extraction.”

  “Damn it, that was you behind us.” His voice became quieter as he said, “Flip around, head back to the overpass,” then returned to normal volume. “We’re on the way.”

  The construction crew was on foot, running for their lives down the edge of the overpass, scared to death of something. A car zipped past in the open lane. Every passenger in the vehicle swiveled their heads in the same direction, a family of four, each of them with mouths wide open, all staring at something just around the end of the bus.

  Bia! I flew around the corner, Abomination up. I was going to pop her in both eyes and kick her ass off this bridge.

  “Hey, Bro . . .” Mosh croaked, “. . . could use a hand.”

  My brother was dangling over the edge of the overpass, Bia’s claws encircling his throat. Mosh was holding onto her wrist with both hands, arms bulging, legs kicking futilely as vehicles screamed by below. The oni smiled, her sharp white teeth a brilliant contrast to her leather skin. She was standing on the raised concrete barrier to keep cars from driving off the side. If the drop didn’t kill him, a passing car would.

  Bia dipped her head in greeting. “Greetings, Hunter.”

  “Let him go,” I ordered.

  She ignored me and continued speaking. My brother had to weigh at least 250, but she didn’t seem to even notice his struggling weight. Her focus was entirely on me. “I should have pulled you out of there instead of this one, but you humans all smell the same when stinking with fear.”

  Grant’s voice sounded in my earpiece. “We’re south of you. What’s that purple thing?”

  I keyed my radio as discreetly as possible. “Snipe her,” I whispered, hoping that the throat mike would pick it up.

  The oni didn’t seem to hear me. “The old gods have smiled upon us tonight. I was afraid we would have to harm you. The Shadow Lord’s contract specified that our payment would be halved if you were injured. Luckily, the foolishness of humans knows no bounds when their blood kin are threatened. When the Shadow Lord’s minion reported that you had left in such haste to come to your brother’s aid, I knew we would surely capture you tonight.”

  That staggered me. There is a spy. I had a clean shot at her eyes, but I was terrified she’d drop Mosh. “I don’t care about your contract, just my brother.”

  Bia cackled. The unnatural sound caused the hair on my arms to stand up. “The contract is everything. Would you break a contract, my fellow Hunter?”

  “Fellow Hunter?” I snorted, never letting the muzzle of my gun waver. “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, we’re very much the same, we are. My brother and I deal in the same trade as you, only we’re not picky who we work for.” She reached with her free hand into her gray cloak and pulled out a tangle of rope. She tossed it at my feet. “Just like you, we have contracts to fulfill, and now I must fulfill mine.”

  It was just a small bundle of hemp rope. Then suddenly, it twitched. I took a step back. The rope moved on its own, uncoiling into a memorized circle. As the ends met, there was a flash of fire, and the cement inside the radius disappeared into nothingness. It was like there was a black hole in the floor of the overpass.

  “The portal will take you to the Shadow Lord. You will step into it willingly.”

  “Fat chance of that.”

  “Or I drop your blood kin to his certain death.” She shook Mosh painfully. His eyes were shut tight as he yelped in pain. “Then I will make you get in the portal. If I cannot, then my brother will be here in a moment. You would much rather do it my way than his. Cratos will simply pull your limbs off and toss you in. I would rather not lose our bonus. Either way, you will be at the feet of the Shadow Lord before this night is through.”

  “Violence . . .” The ragged voice came from slightly behind me. I turned.

  Franks! He was alive, barely. Blood was running freely from a dozen lacerations. His suit had been reduced to rags. He must have lost his gun, because now all he had in his right hand was a folding fighting knife. He limped right past me, one foot dragging on the pavement.

  He was seething.

  “We have no quarrel with your kind,” Bia said. “This is not your concern.”

  “Bullshit,” Franks muttered, closing, as he left a splatter trail behind.

  Bia was distracted by Franks. “Grant, you got a fifty?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got my McMillan.”

  He’d been working on precision shooting with the Newbies today. I could only pray that he had a good zero. There was no wind. “Head shot. Don’t miss. Wait for my signal,”

  “I’m three hundred yards away,” he protested.

  “It’s a big head, asshole,” I hissed.

  Bia shook my brother again. Mosh was struggling to hold onto her arm, slipping. “I only want the Hunter.”

  “You can’t have him,” Franks said slowly, still drawing closer to his target. I had to do something before he got close enough to attack, because I knew he wouldn’t care if Mosh was splattered into roadkill.

  “Have you grown so weak, so jealous, that you would live as a slave?” She extended one huge hand toward Franks, pleading. “The Shadow Lord understands the fallen. He can grant you true freedom. Join us.” Bia said something else in a strange, almost musical language.

  Franks stopped, turning his head slightly, as if thinking about her offer, whatever the hell all that weirdness meant. There was a bellowing cry in the distance. Car horns were blowing. Cratos was almost here.

  “Ready,” Grant said in my ear. “Hostage is blocking the shot.”

  “Hey, Bia!” I shouted. She turned
her attention back to me. I was way too far to make a grab for Mosh. “I’d go with you to save my family. Your shadow guy was right about that. But you’ve got one problem . . .”

  “Yes?” Her red eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  “That’s not my brother. You grabbed the drummer by mistake.”

  Curling her massive arm, she pulled Mosh closer for examination. Purple lips pulled back, puzzled, over those deadly sharp teeth. Mosh was suspended over the concrete now.

  Grant was calm. “Clear.”

  “Send it.”

  The impact made a distinctive sound, like a watermelon being struck by a bat. The boom of the .50 BMG sniper rifle arrived a split second later. The bullet missed her vulnerable eyes but pierced directly through her ear hole.

  Bia’s head jerked violently to the side. Mosh was thrown against the concrete, landing hard on his shoulder and rolling away. A terrible whistle emanated from the oni as something unnatural ruptured. Her hands clenched spasmodically over her ears, trying to staunch the energy screaming from her collapsing skull. The inner creature had been ruptured. There was a vortex of white light and vapor shooting from her ears, eyes, and mouth, spinning, flashing upward under the halogen lights.

  Franks covered the last few feet, stopped, and glared up at the monster as Bia added her inhuman shriek to the noise. “You always did talk too much,” he said simply. Then he put one hand on her chest and shoved the oni over the side.

  It was a twenty-foot drop to the freeway, but I couldn’t tell if she actually hit the ground before the speeding 18-wheeler’s grill struck her. The entire engine block of the semi instantly collapsed around her, driving steel through Bia’s animated body. The truck turned brutally to the side, trailer jackknifing as the truck’s weight slammed the oni solidly into the base of the overpass. The truck shuddered to a smoking-rubber halt. Suddenly a shockwave expanded outward from the impact point. Brilliant white light turned night temporarily into day. The wave passed and there were ghostly figures, literally hundreds of shapes, men and monsters, intelligences and lives that had been captive for thousands of years, now freed, leaping into the sky. They were gone in an instant.