Last time I checked, I had seven rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber, plus two full magazines in my pocket. Wish I had a bunch of grenades, but I hadn’t thought to bring them to the DARPA camp. If I’d had ten more seconds, I’d have taken one of the rifles and extra magazines from Major Schellinger’s guards. I hadn’t, and that mistake was going to cost me.
I took what I could grab and ran. Even then, it had been close. There were eight of them after me. The only proof I had that God didn’t actually fucking hate me was that they weren’t pack animals. They’d work together only because they were opportunists, but they were bred to hunt alone.
At least eight of them in the woods, I reckoned, and three of us trying to get away. How many chasing Rudy and Ghost? How many chasing me?
I didn’t know, but I was absolutely certain that I was about to find out.
The woods were so still, with only a faint hiss of leaves being brushed by the winds at the very top of the canopy. Down here on the ground, it was dead still.
I kept my back against the tree and pivoted in place, letting my gun follow line-of-sight, one finger laid straight along the cold rim of the trigger guard. There was a part of me that wanted to curl up and hide. The Modern Man aspect of my splintered psyche. He had no business out in the woods, away from cities and infrastructure and safety. He kept my fear alive and fanned its flames. Then there was the Cop part of me who was trying to logic his way through everything, selecting possible solutions, analyzing them, discarding them one after another, and then grabbing at fragments of personal experience or training in order to form a plan for a situation that could not be solved by logic.
And then there was the Warrior in me. The Killer. The savage brute who was a half step out of the cave and was as much lizard brain as monkey brain. He was shrewd, less naïve, more direct, and ruthless. In his way the Killer was every bit as terrified as the Modern Man, but fear had always been an active part of who he was. All wild animals are afraid nearly all the time. Fear makes them smart and fear makes them vicious. Fear makes them brutal.
So, yeah, I was letting him drive the car. I wanted that part of me in control when the monsters came out of the shadows.
I waited, feeling sweat carve cold lines down my hot cheeks, hearing my heart hammering like fists against the locked doors of my chest. The bruises, the bleeding, the damage all screamed inside my nerve endings, but that was okay in its way. The Killer ate that kind of pain; he used it as fuel. It made him sharp and careful and brutal. It made him want to inflict worse damage. There was survival instinct, and then there was payback. There was the red desire to do worse to the monsters than they’ve done to me. The monsters… and the monster-makers.
Crunch.
I spun toward the sound and it was there, breaking from the brush, running, leaping, crashing into me as I tried to bring the gun up. I fired.
Fired.
Fired.
And fell.
Bunny knelt and pivoted and fired his shotgun at the closest dog. The drum carried thirty rounds, and he had swapped it out for a fresh one when they entered the house. There were at least ten rounds left, and he fired every single one at the metal monster. It was built for war, but it wasn’t built for that kind of assault. Pieces of it broke away even as it fired its guns, but Bunny’s second blast had knocked the rifle askew and the bullets hammered into the floor instead of into the big man with the shotgun. When the drum was empty, Bunny swapped in his last and waded forward, buried the smoking barrel against one of the glaring red eyes, and fired. The entire head exploded with such force that Bunny staggered backward.
A dozen paces to his left, Top Sims was fighting the other dog. He had been closer to it than Bunny had been to his, and Top took the fight to the machine, dodging faster than it could track him and firing the remaining rounds in his magazine into the creature’s head, neck, and shoulder. It staggered but didn’t go down, and there was no time to swap magazines, so Top dropped the gun and leaped onto its back, grabbing a handful of cables for support and using his own two hundred and ten pounds of mass to cant the thing onto two legs and then send it crashing to the floor. Once they were down, Top planted one foot on the WarDog’s chin, grabbed the wires with both hands, and wrenched backward. Sparks chased him and he lost his balance but caught himself in time to shield his face as something exploded inside the WarDog’s head.
Behind him, Tracy Cole was fighting with Nicodemus. And losing.
Top wheeled, but the last of the firelight went out and the room was plunged once more into darkness.
“Gorgon!” yelled Bunny, but the only answer was a shriek of pain. He blundered through the utter darkness, wishing he had a flashlight mounted on his shotgun. He dared not fire for fear of hitting Cole or Top.
Then something hit him.
A body.
It struck him full in the chest as if it had been shot from a cannon, and the impact sent Bunny staggering backward. His gun fell from his hands and he sat down hard with the body in his lap. Pain shot up through his tailbone and the weight of the body knocked the air from his lungs. Even in the darkness, he could tell that it wasn’t Top. Too small. He felt with his hands, and there was a delicate face. Cole.
She was utterly slack.
“Sergeant Rock!” he yelled, more to give his position than anything. “Gorgon’s down.”
A laugh swept through the air. Male, amused. Delighted.
“I got the son of a—” began Top, and then there was lightning and thunder in the room as Top opened up in the direction of the laugh. In the strobe of the muzzle flashes, Bunny saw Nicodemus. Saw him move away from each shot as if he could see in the dark and knew where Top was aiming.
“On your three,” barked Bunny as he pushed Cole away. He pulled his sidearm, which had a tactical light. Bunny flicked it on and swept the room and found the two men. Nicodemus and Top were near the entrance to the computer room. Top’s gun was gone, but he was using hands and feet, elbows and knees, to try and destroy Nicodemus. The other man blocked and moved with cat quickness. The crazy trickster was even faster than Top, faster than Captain Ledger. His fighting style was weird, exotic. Not karate or kung fu but some kind of primitive style that nonetheless canceled out what Top was trying to do. Nicodemus struck while moving, and he counterpunched the attacking limbs. It was so smart, so brutal, that even Top, who was a superb combat veteran, was losing the fight.
Bunny surged up and rushed at Nicodemus from the blindside, wound up, and drove a punch into the man’s kidney that was so powerful it lifted Nicodemus off the ground and smashed him against the wall. Bunny was more than six and a half feet tall, and every ounce of his body was solid muscle. He knew how and where to hit, and he had killed men with that blow before. Twice.
Nicodemus rebounded from the wall, landed, improbably, on his feet but with bad balance, and backpedaled away. He kept upright, though, and stopped, feet wide, knees bent for balance, weight shifting onto the balls of his feet. Bunny and Top stared at him. The blow should have crippled him at the very least, but instead Nicodemus faced them with that reptilian smile and no evidence at all that he felt pain or had been damaged. He lunged forward with incredible speed and struck the back of Bunny’s arm, knocking the gun free. It was a trick Bunny would have believed impossible. The weapon skittered across the floor, the clip-on light spinning around, and then it came to rest with the flash painting them all in shades of stark white and deep black, like players on a stage.