Alejo gave an exasperated snort. “He says we complete the mission.”
“Good,” Magnolia said. “We’re almost there.”
“I’ll take point,” Rodger said.
“Not a chance.” She got up and moved toward the exit before he could get out in front.
Rain drizzled onto the slick sidewalk just outside the door, and lighting flashed over the skyline. The thunderclap came a moment later, followed by the high screech of a Siren.
She hesitated in the open doorway, looking, but saw nothing. There was no sign of monsters, and no sign of Michael or Sofia.
How was that possible? According to her HUD, the other divers should be right across the street. The building there had collapsed, but the data put the two remaining divers on Team Raptor somewhere in the area.
She brought up her scope just to make sure, zooming in on the pile of debris. As she scanned, brown flesh darted past the crosshairs. She tried to follow, but it was too fast.
“What?” Alejo said quietly.
“Siren, maybe, but the flesh looked darker.”
“Maybe we should find another route,” Rodger said.
“No, Michael and Sofia should be right out there,” Magnolia said. “We just have to find them.”
She waited another moment before signaling the team to follow her out on the sidewalk. The new vantage provided a view of the demolished structures on both sides of the road, but no Michael or Sofia.
Baffled, she looked at the tangle of vines stretching across the asphalt. Could they be crawling through the thick flora?
She followed the beacons on her HUD over to the closest vine, wrapped around a slab of concrete. Stepping onto the slab, she looked over the edge. The lip of a sinkhole was a few feet away.
Michael and Sofia weren’t inside the vine or in the buildings, she realized.
They were under the road.
She stood looking down at the trunk of vines that wound deep into the cavernous hole. The roots flashed, spreading a dull glow over the muddy slope and the multiple footprints going down it.
But why in the wastes had the divers gone down there?
Unless some beast took them…
She signaled the team to join her. Rodger and Alejo were already moving low across the road. Santiago stepped away from the wall, but Ruiz suddenly squirmed on the sidewalk, his arms tight at his sides.
Before anyone could help, Ruiz was yanked off the sidewalk and pulled up the side of the building.
Magnolia brought up her rifle and aimed at the rooftop, where two naked men were pulling the Cazador up by the rope they had lassoed him with.
“Ambush!” she yelled.
Something whizzed past her before she could pull the trigger, and she jumped away. Another projectile thunked into the vine in front of her. An arrow. A third hit one of the bulbs, which blew out droplets of sap.
Magnolia rolled away from the toxic spray and bolted for the safety of the building as the naked men on the roof fired more arrows. The four remaining members of the team all took cover against the wall. Rodger brought up his assault rifle, but Alejo pushed the barrel down.
“Don’t fire,” he said. “It will draw the beasts. We have to run.”
“Screw that, man,” Magnolia said. “We’re sitting ducks down here.”
Something crunched down on the pavement outside of the coffee shop. Rodger let out a yelp and backed away from a splash of blood and gore.
“Dear God,” Magnolia whispered.
The hunk of meat on the concrete was Ruiz—or, more correctly, the upper half of Ruiz. The naked humans, or whatever they were, had cut him in two at the waist.
“We have to get inside the sinkhole,” Magnolia said.
Alejo nodded and relayed the plan to Santiago.
“The laser rifle is quiet,” she said. “I’ll lay down covering fire.”
“Get down!” Alejo said.
Magnolia dropped, and Alejo threw his knife over her head. She heard a dull smack and turned to see a naked man crumple to the ground not twelve feet away, the knife buried in his chest.
As if on cue, a dozen more men came rappelling down the sides of the buildings and running over the debris piles across the road.
Arrows bracketed the wall around Magnolia’s team.
In a few seconds, they were surrounded.
Alejo, too, must have realized they couldn’t win this fight.
“Don’t shoot,” he growled.
She moved her rifle from target to target as they moved in with bows. She counted fourteen, all of them dark-skinned and naked.
But as they got closer, she saw that their skin looked odd, dried out. Perhaps, these were the people from the bunker, who had somehow adapted to survive in the toxic conditions here.
The leader of the group carried an axe in either hand. Both blades were caked with dried blood. He was almost as big as Rhino and had a horn sticking out of the center of his forehead.
“What are they?” Rodger stuttered.
The horned man walked over, and in a prolonged lightning flash, Magnolia saw that he wasn’t one of the people from the bunker after all. He was wearing the people from the bunker.
Dried, shriveled flesh covered his armored body from head to toe.
“Skinwalkers,” Alejo said.
“!Hijo de la gran puta!” Santiago yelled. Magnolia knew this one from gambling with the Cazador warriors—something about a son of some great whore.
The big man did not speak but simply gestured for them to lower their weapons. Alejo kept his rifle trained on him, and so did Magnolia and Rodger.
An arrow crunched through Alejo’s armored shoulder, knocking him backward. A second hit his weapon, knocking it from his hand. Rodger and Magnolia finally lowered their weapons.
Santiago laid his shotgun on the ground and drew his sword. The skinwalkers fanned out into a circle around him but did not riddle him with arrows as Magnolia had expected after the insult.
“Saludos, general,” Horn said in a voice that sounded almost robotic. “Nos encontramos de nuevo.”
Santiago replied in only a few words that Magnolia understood, but she didn’t need a translator to know that the two men were about to fight to the death.
She subtly glanced at the sinkhole, gauging whether she could make a run for it with Rodger and Alejo, but two bowmen had already flanked them and nocked their arrows.
She crouched beside Alejo to check his wounds. Blood trickled down his armor. He snapped the end off one arrow.
“The pinche cabrón must have heard your radio messages to the people in the bunker,” he groaned.
“I thought the Cazadores don’t use radios,” she whispered.
“They don’t transmit, but that doesn’t mean they don’t listen.”
Alejo stumbled, then rested his back against a wall. He was done for unless they got him patched up soon, and the only way to do that was to get into the sinkhole.
“We led him right to the bunker, didn’t we?” she said.
Alejo nodded. “And now they are going to fillet us like fish unless General Santiago pulls off a miracle.”
Metal clashed against metal as Santiago’s sword met Horn’s axes. The leader of the skinwalkers jumped backward, avoiding the next sword stroke. He swung one of his blades at Santiago, following it with the other axe.
The second blade clipped the armor covering the general’s right arm but did not penetrate. He thrust his sword at Horn, and Horn parried the blow with an axe.
A screech sounded. The clanging weapons had alerted a male Siren. The beast swooped down to examine the noises, only to crash into the debris pile, bristling with arrows.