“That look actually works for you, Ed,” I told him. It was kind of odd. The cold, oppressive feeling of the island was dragging most of us down, but Tanya was positively glowing. “Are your people ready for this?”
“Better than okay!” The princess gave me an enthusiastic grin. She was having a blast. “You don’t get it. My mama has kept us hid for a long time. For our own safety, looking out for us, I know, but my people need adventuring. It’s in our blood. For y’all this is a job. For us, it’s the future. We pull this off, all the elves in all the trailer parks in the world gonna be talking ’bout what we did here. No more sitting on their fat asses collecting welfare. Imagine elves getting out in the big world! Imagine more elves getting jobs at MHI!”
That was kind of terrifying, in a redneck apocalypse kind of way.
Nate groaned. “Fantastic. I’ll go unload our gear,” he said as he escaped.
But I saw where Tanya was coming from. Her once-great people had lost their pride, and she was looking for a way for them to start believing in themselves again. Her mother was content to exist. Tanya was young and naïve, but also energetic and ambitious. She really was the future of her people. May God have mercy on their souls.
“I knew we could count on the elves. Right now I’ve got to update you on—”
“Dreamer stuff. Oh, don’t look surprised. I can tell they just showed you something. Their magic is still all over you. It’s super strong too.”
“You can actually see the connection?”
“I gotta remember human brains are all squishy for this stuff. You been touched. I can’t see far enuf to tell who it comes from, but there’s powerful magic on you, big medicine, hocus-pocus, call it what you want. You always had it. Born with it probably. Mama said you had it when she first met you, but you got it heavy on you now. Way heavy. You held up before, so now they’re pilin’ more hopes on hoping you don’t break. Somebody up there is betting on you big time.”
“Is that somebody good?”
“Uh…” Tanya bit her lip. That very basic question caught her off guard. “More ’n likely?”
“That’s comforting.”
“The big things out there don’t really get good and evil like we do down here.”
“I’ve found they tend to be more goal-oriented than morally motivated.”
“That sounds ’bout right.” Tanya popped a stick of gum in her mouth and began chewing loudly. “Mama says the factions pick champs and chumps, and humans are usually chumps. No offense.”
“None taken.” I’d gotten used to being a pawn in a cosmic chess game.
“Mr. Harbinger’s the same way. Your wife is the same way too.”
“Hold on.” That had come out of nowhere. “What about Julie?”
Tanya was taken aback. “You don’t know? Humans are even blinder than I thought. Yeah. From the marks. There’s eyes on her too, different eyes than on you, but it’s like y’all are horses in the same race. Some’re betting on you, another big thing is betting on her. Mama says somebody even picked that scary bugger Franks. Don’t know why they’d do that!”
“Have you said anything to Julie about this?”
“Nope. She tries to hide that she’s been marked. I was trying to be polite! It ain’t just y’all. All the different big evil ones all got horses in this race too.”
“Is Asag one of these?”
“Oh, hell no. He ain’t no horse, more like an evil horse farmer, with a field full of his own evil murder horses. He don’t want to win the race. He wants to burn the track down.”
Elves could really torture an analogy. I would have kept questioning her, but Harbinger’s voice came over the radio. “The ruins crew is assembling at the west side of the circle. Form up with your team. We leave in five minutes.”
I was out of time. “This conversation isn’t over.” I rushed Tanya through the details of my vision while she listened intently, smacking her lips while chewing gum and blowing the occasional bubble. After a couple of minutes I asked, “Any of that help?”
“Nope.” Tanya twirled some of her hair around her finger and shrugged. “But at least it reminds me to tell Mama’s trackers to try and not accidently run off the good ghosts hanging ’round you.”
It was a weird thing to wish for, but right now I would have loved to have been able to see the world the way an elf did. “Are there many friendly ghosts here?”
“The evil pushes most away, but there’s a few of the strongest watchin’. Real stubborn-like.”
I could guess who those were, and I was glad to hear it, because I needed all the help I could get. “Thanks, Princess.” I began walking away.
Tanya waved goodbye. Nate had returned carrying a rocket launcher and looking forlorn. He mouthed the words, Take me with you. Edward had already disappeared. Contrary to our princess’s wishes for a bodyguard, Ed would inevitably wander to wherever the action was. If you ordered Ed to do something, and he actually did it, that was probably just a happy coincidence. He was more of a force of nature than an employee.
Tanya called after me. “Don’t worry. Those ghosts got your back!”
They always do.
CHAPTER 18
There were over a thousand Hunters on this operation, but it wasn’t like we were all in one place at one time. Logistics are unforgiving, so there were Hunters staying at the harbor. There were more at the airfield. Our little air force wouldn’t fly itself. The biggest group remained guarding the camp around the Bride , because if we lost our forward operating base, we were screwed. Then we had our giant convoy, but not all of us could go beneath the ruins. Half would be staying outside with the vehicles, because losing our transportation and walking back would be a great way to get picked apart or freeze. Every part of the operation had to be manned and secured at all times, and lots of us would be serving as mechanics and ordnance handlers rather than trigger pullers.
All that meant only a few hundred of us would be going underground on this first attempt, but that many heavily armed and prepared Hunters was nothing to sneeze at. Especially when we were worried about things like giants, so we were packing hardware like AT4s and bunker busters.
The interior of the ruins were unnervingly off. The haphazard blocks were subtly wrong, like the geometry was skewed somehow. I’d gotten a glimpse of this place before it had been nuked, and it had been even weirder then. The original builders—my gut told me that wasn’t the Asakku—had been sufficiently alien that their rubble couldn’t even lie in a heap right.
Everything was blackened by a clinging, moist, ashen dirt, but when you struck that off, the blocks were a silvery gray beneath, and it wasn’t any material that I could recognize. It looked like a smooth, slightly reflective concrete, yet soft enough you could leave a little dent when you accidentally struck it with something hard like the barrel of a gun. Cody and the big brains were probably taking samples. I hoped they were wise enough to not bring any of this cursed shit home.
The whole area left me with a vague sense of unease. It was like I’d told Nate: places like this had a way of getting into your head. It would wear down your will to live if you let it, leaving you raw and vulnerable. It didn’t help that the rubble was the same color as the strange creatures we’d shooed off. Those obsidian monkeys would be practically invisible here, and the constant threat of ambush weighs on your nerves.
For today’s objectives I was on Kiratowa’s squad. We had a very important job, so we were holding back at the base of the pyramid while the others searched for a way down. One of the nearby Hunters found some old carvings that were relatively undisturbed and went to dust it off with his glove. “Hey. Check this out. There’s writing on here.”
Milo was walking by on his way to join up with the lead team and grabbed that Hunter hard by the wrist. He glared at the man over his little round glasses. “Don’t…Just don’t.” It wasn’t very often that you got to see Milo be threatening. Normally Milo would be the one fascinated by all of the nifty new
stuff to discover, but when even somebody that intensely curious was getting the vibe that things were best left undisturbed, it was best to listen. “That’s not for us. Got it?” Milo waited for the young man to nod in understanding before letting go of his wrist.
My friend was right. I’d seen a vision of what was beneath that grime. I hadn’t gone crazy—yet—but it certainly couldn’t be good for my long-term mental health. “Trust him. You don’t want that in your brain.”
As Milo walked past, he whispered. “I’ve got a really bad feeling about this place.”
“Good luck down there.”
“You too.” Milo was still a little disappointed that Earl had shot him down about going through the portal, but the expedition would get the most use out of its mechanical genius if he stayed on this plane of existence. “Good luck out there.”
It only took ten minutes for our scouts to find the first entrance. The path underground was so well camouflaged—just some deeper shadows beneath an overhanging rock—that it would have taken us hours to find it. Except our orcs could follow the traffic by scent and knew right where to go.
Earl’s team blazed a trail. After a few minutes, we got the call to move out. It was time to descend into the dark.
The ruins raiders had been broken into squads of various size, depending on our responsibilities. Team Harbinger was the biggest, and their job, provided Nikolai’s maps were still even sort of accurate, was to find and secure the portal. Kiratowa’s squad would then enter the portal and find our missing Hunters.
There were twelve of us. There had been a lot of debate between the companies who would get this dubious honor. It made more tactical sense to send a group that had been working together for a long time, but that meant only one company would be represented, and since MHI was footing the bill—through Management—it would be one of ours. Except everybody else pitched a bitch fit and threatened to bail. In the end it was decided that every company who had someone missing from the Last Dragon would send a man. It takes guts to volunteer to go into the City of Monsters. It takes suicidal bravado to volunteer to go into another dimension. Yet even then, there had still been over a hundred volunteers before we’d whittled it down to something manageable.
Assuming we could capture the portal, through it would go a dozen men, the best of the best, and we’d find our missing or die trying. Unless, of course, Rothman’s theory was right, because then I’d be on my own. I tried not to dwell too much on that. If the time came, I’d do what I had to do.
The way beneath was a blacker hole into black rock. I had to duck to get through the entrance. Beyond that, it opened into a wider tunnel, really more of a hall, and wide enough that we could probably get a four-wheeler through it. The path was already well-lit. One squad had set up a generator just outside, and the lead team was unspooling electrical cord and placing compact radio relays and emergency lamps as they went.
The relays were to boost and bounce signals so we could maintain comms underground. Besides the construction lights, we all had night-vision devices, weapon-mounted lights, flashlights, little personal LEDs, glow sticks, and worst-case scenario, we’d use lighters and rags to make torches. We weren’t screwing around on being able to see. MHI had learned its lesson fighting Martin Hood, and we were in this for the long haul. In addition to our radiation sensors, we also had monitors for the oxygen level and poison gas. Besides fuel and bullets, we were shipping batteries up here by the pallet. We’d tried to think of everything and could only pray that something we hadn’t thought of wouldn’t come along to bite us in the ass.
The tunnel angled sharply downward. It was enough of an incline that it made your shins hurt, and like everything else around here, just enough off that it made you feel dizzy. Within a hundred feet, the blackened rubble turned into that weird silver-gray. The unnatural stones were so well-fitted that you couldn’t fit a knife blade between them. We were out of the wind, but it was still too cold. Really cold air should feel dry. It should bite. This air felt moist, squishy. I hated it.
The lead team kept giving status updates as they went, noting every side tunnel and branch for future exploration. Already they’d found variations from Nikolai’s maps. That was a bad sign. Earl had said his old foe was crazy, but not that kind of crazy. It was more likely that the KGB agent’s theory was correct, and the ruins were somehow changing.
Kiratowa signaled for us to stop. The team ahead of us had entered a large chamber. We weren’t supposed to crowd up on them. If they needed to fall back, it would be going past us while we covered them. In exchange for his company joining the expedition, Kiratowa had demanded a personal spot on the portal squad. Since he was the most experienced, Earl had put him in charge. He took the chance to go down the line, inspecting each of us lunatic idiots dumb enough to step through a portal to the Nightmare Realm willingly.
Everybody had a partner. They checked in with their squad every few minutes. Each squad checked in with the others every ten minutes. The guard convoy was doing the same, and the radioman on the Bride was correlating everything. If anybody went missing, we’d know about it fast. In addition we all had GPS trackers on our armor, so at least the others would be able to recover our bodies, provided the signal wasn’t lost underground.
Kiratowa stopped in front of me. I was nearly a foot taller so he had to look way up. “How are you doing, Pitt?”
“Why does everybody keep asking me that?”
“Because your father just died and I want to be certain it does not cause you to become a liability. I intend no offense, but you have a reputation. You are a man of strong passions, very good at what you do, but can become foolish when angered.”
That was actually a fair assessment. “I’m okay.”
“Warriors have emotions too. There is no shame in needing time to regain our focus. I must know if you are still up for this?”
I laughed. “If you’d known my dad, you’d know how stupid that question is.” He kept staring at me. It was hard to see his eyes beneath the shadows of his helmet, but Kiratowa struck me as an extremely focused and humorless individual. I gave the most honest answer I could. “Yes. I’m ready.”
“Excellent.” He continued down the line without another word.
Since the twelve of us had all come from different companies, and we’d only had a little while to train together in Alaska, I’d partnered up with David Gerecht. We had at least worked together briefly once before. He leaned over toward me. “Don’t worry. Kiratowa’s got no room to talk about emotions. I heard the reason he insisted on leading the portal team is he’s never lost a Hunter under his command before Las Vegas. He took that as a personal insult.”
“Not one?”
“Never. Well, his company has, but his personal team? Not one in ten years of him being in charge, until the Last Dragon.”
I whistled. The Japanese Monster Hunters were busy too. That was a pretty badass record. Hopefully he carried that lucky ratio with him. “What about you?”
“Ari is a friend. Someone from Maccabeus had to step up. We may be smaller than MHI, but we have a reputation to maintain.”
“Don’t worry about your rep. The elves are already writing songs about us.”
“Good…maybe. And you have the ring?”
I held up my right hand. The Ring of Bassus was hidden beneath my glove, but he’d get the picture. It had barely fit over my pinky, and even then it was too tight. The Romans must have had tiny hands. “I just hope it works.”
“That ghost stabbed one of my men, so it had better. I’m worried though. Rothman’s right far more often than he is wrong, and he’s afraid it’ll turn back everyone but you. You’ll be on your own.”
“I know.” It was kind of nice that it was just assumed that I’d still go through with the mission by myself, but everybody here would do the same. None of us were quitters. “If that’s the case, what’ll you do then?”
“Hold that gate until you bring back our friends, of course
.” He was dead serious about that. “You have my word.”
It wasn’t just ghosts who had my back. “Good. I really don’t want to spend the rest of my life floating around limbo.”
Gunfire echoed up the hall.
“This is Harbinger,” I heard over the radio. “We’ve made contact.”
* * *
The Petrov Report had said that the portal was in a vast cavern directly beneath the pyramid. That much hadn’t changed. He had also said it was swarming with hostiles. Unfortunately, that part was also accurate.
The next twenty minutes were the longest of my life, as Earl called down other squads to help clear out the big room and we had to stay in place. Kiratowa’s team had to squeeze to the side and watch other Hunters run into danger, while we sat there, useless.
The battle raged on. They were expending a lot of ammo on something. I knew we were being held back for a specific purpose, but it still sucked. We were antsy. When you know it’s your people in danger, it’s hard not to run toward the sound of the guns. Kiratowa kept telling us to prepare to move, but then something else would happen and Earl would flag us off.
Twice, Hunters ran back past us, returning to the surface, carrying injured. We couldn’t even ask them what was going on because they couldn’t spare the time. All the Hunters could do was warn us to make room, and they had to shout to be heard over the screaming of the wounded.
“Those were claw marks on them,” Gerecht whispered to me after the second group went by. “Bad ones.”
The wounded had been shredded, skin rent, muscles exposed. I had recognized both men, but didn’t really know either well. I stared, fixated at the trail of blood splatter they’d left on the floor. The radio chatter had said the enemies had white skin and fought like suicidal lunatics. “It’s the Asakku.”
“That’s right,” Kiratowa said as he walked back down the line. He paused where a bloody bandage had been dropped on the floor. He poked it with the toe of his boot. “Below us they are fighting the Children of the Mountain, the very army of Asag…Yet they are not our problem.” He looked up at us. “Focus on your mission, gentleman. These men are bleeding so that we can do our job. Will we allow them to bleed for nothing?”
Monster Hunter Siege (Monster Hunters International Book 6) Page 27