King ducked into the cave and was about to tell the man to stay quiet when the earth around them shook. The man fell silent.
King backed into the darkness with the others as a single Hydra head appeared from above. It tasted the air with its tongue, flapped its ears against its neck, and let out a shriek. A second head joined it, searching the fringe of the cave with its snout. As the head slid into the cave, King aimed his assault rifle at it. He knew he couldn't kill the creature, but he wouldn't go down without a fight. If he was lucky, it would back off enough for a few of them to make a run for it.
A distant scream — a man in pain — caught the Hydra's attention. The head pulled up out of the cave and rose up, out of sight with the other. Hydra's roar, just above them, shook the ceiling of the cave. The overweight man began to sob, but Bishop's large hand covered his mouth.
The Hydra jumped down from above, landing elegantly, like a cat, despite its size. And its size is what King noticed most. It had nearly doubled in size since he saw it in the Manifold facility. It looked to be the size of an elephant now, sporting four ten-foot necks and a long whiplike tail. The creature landed lightly and bounded off into the woods, heading toward the screaming man.
King looked back at the others in the cave. Bishop removed his hand from the fat man's face, allowing his jowls to shake as he said, "Whoever that is doesn't have a hope in the world."
Knight and Bishop reloaded their weapons and slipped past King, exiting the cave. King shot the man a serious glance before exiting and said, "He has us." Then they were gone, giving chase to the world's oldest living predator.
FIFTY- EIGHT
As King rounded a tree and entered a blood-soaked clearing he realized the fat man in the cave had been right. Body parts were strewn about. Flesh dangled from broken tree limbs like jerky set out to dry. A severed leg had rolled over and flattened a stand of ferns. And the body, missing several large chunks, lay facedown, compressed in mud. The Hydra had killed the man savagely, eaten very little, and then stomped him flat.
Knight said what he was thinking. "This doesn't fit any feeding pattern I've ever heard of."
"I think it's pissed," King said.
Knight knelt down by the severed leg as Bishop swept the area with his machine gun. "Check this out." He peeled back the man's blood-soaked sock. A deep slice severed the man's Achilles tendon. "The cut is clean."
King inspected the deep gouge marks cutting across the man's back. They were wide and jagged. The cut through the man's ankle was made by something else entirely. "A knife."
Knight agreed. "Someone is stacking the odds in the Hydra's favor. This man didn't stand a chance because he couldn't walk."
A distant scream rang out. High-pitched. A woman. But the direction was impossible to gauge. King produced his PDA, and watched the dance of infrared figures on the screen. A few distant dots were still moving fast — the fittest and most agile of the Manifold employees. Others were huddled together. Probably hiding like the group they'd left in the cave. Some wandered aimlessly, and a few looked to be lying down, perhaps hiding. King zoomed in. Or perhaps struggling to run away with sliced Achilles tendons.
King watched as the human shape on the small screen reached up its hands. A scream rolled through the forest, matching the woman's movement. It was her. He was about to launch toward the woman, but the image on-screen kept him from moving. Her glowing orange body lifted from the ground, flew back and forth, then apart. As pieces of her rag doll form cooled and disappeared from the infrared, King realized what he'd seen.
"The Hydra is cold-blooded. We won't see it on the infrared."
"But we can see where it's going," Knight said, pointing at the right side of the screen. A second person, struggled to crawl away. Then a third. And a fourth. A human bread crumb trail. King scrolled farther to the right, following the trail. "That doesn't look friendly."
A crescent of orange dots, upwards of forty people, sat still and silent. An ambush. King recognized the cold, square shapes mixed in with the small army. The abandoned kid's camp.
"Let's go."
The three were up and running, led by King, straight toward the next victim. King glanced at the screen as a man's shriek filled the forest. On-screen, the next orange blob in line burst into pieces. The Hydra wasn't even slowing down now. A second man began screaming. Hydra's roar followed.
King picked up the pace. People were dying because he was too slow.
The man screamed again, closer this time. He was silenced as his body burst beneath the Hydra's pounding foot, sounding like an overfilled water balloon exploding.
They ran past the man's body, which had been crushed upon a rock. The Hydra hadn't even paused to bite him. The next bread crumb, now screaming, posed too much temptation. As another woman screamed out, King paused. The scream meant they were too late to save her, but it also meant Hydra had entered the campground.
Approaching low to the ground, King, Knight, and Bishop peeked up over a rock at the fringe of the campground. Hydra stood at the center, its four heads snatching chunks of flesh from the woman's body King noted her uniform. Gen-Y had sacrificed one of their own to set the trap.
Knight saw the uniform, too, and raised his scope to his eyes. He saw the face and sighed with relief. It wasn't Beck.
"Fire!" The voice belonged to Reinhart, hidden somewhere out of sight. But the men obeying his order were not. They stood atop and inside the old cabins, rising as one and unleashing a barrage, at close range from their Metal Storm rifles and handguns. The number of rounds fired in the first thirty seconds was impossible to count, but the effect was clear. Hydra snapped at the air and twisted in pain as chunks of its body were blown away. Blood coated the pine needle-covered forest floor and clung to the sides of trees. The Hydra was being torn apart.
Some of the men focused on one of the necks. It severed and fell like a tree, crashing to the ground, where it writhed for a moment, then began to dry and flake. A leg burst and Hydra fell to its side, immobilized.
King wasn't sure who he should be cheering on. The Hydra was a monster to be sure. It would most likely go right on indiscriminately killing every human being it came across. And he wasn't sure they had the means on hand to kill it. Gen-Y clearly did, but if they survived, he, Bishop, and Knight would be facing a three on forty fight that he doubted all of them would survive. Maybe none of them would.
"Spray it down!" Reinhart shouted. Five men with large containers on their backs emerged from the cabins. They sprayed gouts of foam that expanded and hardened, locking the Hydra in place. Bishop recognized it as the same foam used on him, only a lot more of it.
"They're pinning it for something," Bishop said.
"Okay, fall back!" Reinhart's voice rang out again. "Incoming!"
When the Gen-Y team hit the deck, King, Bishop, and Knight did as well. "Incoming" was a universal term for "duck or die." King couldn't help but watch, though. He peeked one eye around the rock. Hydra was attempting to stand as its leg regenerated, but the foam kept it stationary. The creature shook with exertion and the foam began to shatter away, but a cloud of high-caliber rounds hammered Hydra from above. Trees disintegrated. The hard foam turned to dust. The ground shook. Hydra shrieked as its body became like wet Swiss cheese. As the rounds continued to rain down from above, King realized this was the same Metal Storm weapon used to nearly sink the USS Grant. As Hydra continued to shriek he couldn't help but feel bad for it. What kind of creature could sustain a barrage like this and still have enough fight to whimper, let alone wail. It had to die, but it deserved respect.