“Listen to me, Jack. If this thing kills me before I can get clear, someone else is going to have to finish it. Do you understand?”
Parker’s appeal stopped him cold. What was happening down there?
He shook his head. There was nobody better suited to dealing with whatever it was that was happening at the Prime than Daniel Parker. “Roger.”
He pulled himself up again, peeking over the edge quickly to locate Rainer. He found his former CO, illuminated by indirect light from some kind of electronic device — a GPS unit or a PDA. Rainer’s eyes were fixed on the scene playing out beyond the fissure, where his remaining force of four frankensteins were preparing to overrun Chess Team.
As stealthily as possible, King levered himself up onto the floor of the cave, never taking his eyes off Rainer. He brought his carbine up, but in the darkness, he couldn’t get a good shot. He abandoned the effort, and in a smooth motion, he sprang to his feet and charged.
Rainer must have heard the ground crunching underfoot or sensed movement in the air, for at the last instant he swung around to face King. There was confusion in his eyes, as if he still didn’t comprehend what was happening, but as King slammed into him, he threw up a defensive arm that somehow struck King in jaw. Then, in a tangle of limbs, both men went down.
The PDA flew out of Rainer’s hand, shattering against the floor, its light instantly extinguished, but neither man noticed. King tried to get his hands around Rainer’s throat, but a fierce punch rocked him back and sent stars shooting across his vision. As he tried to shrug off the blow, Rainer squirmed from beneath him, and launched a flurry of blows — fists and elbows — most of which missed completely or glanced off King’s gear. A few however found their mark, and King’s head rang with the impacts.
He lowered his head to his chest, trying to make himself less of a target and clutched at Rainer. His fingers tangled in the other man’s shirt, then managed to snare one of the flailing arms. He tried to twist it around, but Rainer was not so easily subdued. The rogue Delta officer did not try to wrestle free of the hold, but spun around in the direction King was trying to turn him, and drove his body back into King’s chest, slamming him into the cave wall.
The breath was driven from King’s lungs, and his arms flopped uselessly to his sides, his nerves buzzing. Rainer whirled and drove a fist into his gut. King doubled over, partly from the piston-like force of the blow, and partly in a desperate attempt to trap his foe’s arm, but Rainer had already pulled free. With a savage growl, he gripped King’s shoulders and heaved him to the floor, descending on top of him with another crushing impact.
King felt a stab of pain in both biceps as Rainer straddled his chest and drove his knees down onto King’s arms, pinning him. Then, Rainer’s hands closed around his throat, and a darkness that had nothing to do with the absence of light began to close over King.
Rainer leaned forward, close enough that King could feel the man’s breath on his face. “Jack. I’ll be damned. You threw me a party. Used that little bitch as bait to draw me out. I’m impressed.”
King would have spit a curse in the man’s face, but the breath to do so had been driven from him and the choking hands kept him from drawing another. He struggled to free himself, to get even a moment’s respite, but Rainer’s position was unassailable. King felt his limbs start to tingle from oxygen starvation, growing cold and numb.
Then, as if in answer to a prayer he had not even thought to utter, Rainer’s grip went slack. He moved his hands away from King’s throat and held them up, flexing them before his face.
“What the hell?”
The rush of oxygen brought King back from the brink of despair. His arms were still tingling…no, not just his arms… Every square inch of his body was pins and needles, and the sensation was deepening, becoming a painful itch.
Through the fog in his head, he heard Parker speaking, and realized that what he was now experiencing had nothing at all to do with the beating he’d received. Rainer was feeling it too.
Whatever Sasha had done to the Prime was spreading, growing in intensity.
“There’s a ring of stones… I think that’s the marker.” Parker was saying. “I’m going to try to put it there. You’ll know if it works because we’ll all still be here.”
A low wail of pain came over the radio, grunts of exertion and agony, and then an abrupt silence.
Danno!
King heaved against Rainer. Distracted by the strange pain that was creeping over his extremities, the other man was slow to react, while King’s grief and rage opened a vein of untapped strength. He got one of his arms free and wrapped it around Rainer’s waist, and in the same motion drove his feet against the cave floor.
Locked together, they rolled once, twice…and then suddenly there was no ground beneath them, and they plunged into the void.
FIFTY-EIGHT
King had accomplished one of his objectives in the first moments of his struggle with Rainer. The destruction of the PDA had not only severed the link between the frankensteins and their leader, but it had also deprived them of their collective intelligence. Now, instead of four creatures working with a single mind, they were four wild beasts.
In every other way, they remained just as dangerous as before.
With a howl, they broke from cover and charged.
Knight felled one with a cannon-loud blast from the Barrett.
The other three continued, undaunted.
Rook leveled his Desert Eagle at the nearest target and squeezed the trigger again and again. The Action Express rounds hit with such energy that the frankenstein seemed to come apart before his very eyes.
The remaining two kept advancing.
With a bestial roar of his own, Bishop leapt forward and met the charge head on. He towered a full head taller than the monstrosity he faced, but the frankenstein did not show the slightest awareness of the fact. Its eyes locked onto Bishop, and it stretched its arms out to him, looking in that moment exactly like the iconic Hollywood character that had inspired its nickname.
As the two men met — one driven by steroids and inhuman surgical alteration, the other fueled by an almost incomprehensible primal rage — the frankenstein tried to seize hold of Bishop’s arms, perhaps intending to rip them from their sockets, but Bishop was too quick. Instead of drawing back to avoid the reaching arms, he stepped in close and hugged the thing’s face to his chest.
There was a sickening crunch and a wet tearing noise, as Bishop twisted its head completely around.
Only a few seconds had passed since the frankensteins began their final attack, and for those few seconds, Queen had felt completely useless. While she had stood by waiting for something to do, her teammates had seized the day and destroyed the enemy.
Not completely destroyed, though. One frankenstein remained. It had dodged Rook’s bullets and slipped past Bishop, even as the big man had torn its brother’s head off.
Knight brought the Barrett up, bracing it against his hip and firing point blank. The round punched a fist-sized hole clear through the creature’s abdomen. The frankenstein staggered back a step, but before Knight could fire again, it started forward, seizing the barrel of the rifle. There was an audible hiss as the thing’s skin blistered against the hot metal, but the frankenstein ignored the pain and pulled the gun, along with an unbalanced Knight, forward into its reach. The wounded beast seized Knight’s arms, stretching them out like a child preparing to rip the wings off a captured fly.
Queen ran at the creature, pummeling it with the butt of her carbine, but she was disdainfully swatted away. She sprang up, desperate to do something…anything…that might keep Knight alive long enough for one of the others to come to the rescue, but she’d lost her carbine in the fall. She groped for the knife sheathed to her combat vest, but her hand found something else instead, a hard cylindrical object.