Beast Hunters 8

by Tom Harem

  "You're going to pay for this!" He said, on the floor, with his hand on the opposite side of his shoulder, staunching the blood.

  Victoria shot the three arrows at the only man missing. He sliced them mid-air with precision and ease. Amid the turmoil, all I could see was Maggie pulling her arm back and throwing her flaming whip in his direction. The chain stretched, eliminating the laws of physics, and behaving like a thick flame that she could maneuver.

  "Don't stop!" Elisa yelled at Maggie, "Let's get out of here, come on. While we can. I'm not going to be able to hold this much longer. They're freeing themselves." She said.

  She was right. Small branches were emerging in the hand of the man with the earth glove and were clogging the ice. They squeezed it until the ice cracked, just moments away from tearing it to pieces. I ran to Kendra and helped her up. She could stand on her own. Then I did the same with Lipa. Both were hurt, but they weren't wounded below the waist.

  "Maggie, throw him down. Now!" I screamed.

  Her eyes turned blood red. The flames around her arm got all worked up. The chain receded and hovered in the air with half to the left and the rest upwards. The entire upper part was shaping, the chain unfolding to both sides, up until a dragon's head with a curly mustache on both sides and thick eyebrows surfaced and made its way across the air. It penetrated the man still with his swords crossed up in front of his chest. His clothes burned and dissolved, his face was singed, and the man dropped to the ground, totally inanimate.

  "Run!" I screamed as loudly as I could until I could feel my vocal cords twitching.

  We ran into the other corridor without even looking back. The ice chains had been broken. Uneven pieces of ice crashed into the ground. The albino still grabbed my pants, but I shoved him till he got out of the way. We were already amid the second hallway when we heard his terrifyingly scary voice, "Kill them. USE ALL YOUR POWER. IT'S AN ORDER."

  "We can't stop now. Come on, we're almost there." I told them. I was running almost sideways, always looking back, seeing if someone was following us.

  When we walked past the last door, I looked back and saw the two glove wearers at the previous door.

  Their eyes about to leap out of their bodies, the blue veins bulging in their arms and one in the ice boy's neck, their fists clenched and their clothes damp. The fun was over. Now it was for real and we didn't have 10 minutes to get out of there.

  "Come on. Don't stop, keep running." I told them. I fired five regular bullets before I turned around and started running, too.

  From afar I heard the bullets crashing into an ice wall. The casings froze, landed on the ground and snapped. We were only one hallway away. My heartbeat was louder than ever. Even the walls that surrounded us appeared to have one, and they too battered and forced the walls to narrow, leaving us with no room to run together and to breathe.

  I promised myself I'd just look back one more time. The earth glove wearer had his hand on the ground. His fingers trembled, tapping on the floor, until he lost balance and leaned against the wall. I thought that he had run out of strength, that the anger had triggered something in the glove, anything but what unfolded before my eyes. Dozens of small wooden spears with sharp, light-brown peaks shattered the floor. Like a boat sailing in a storm, the spears sailed forward, tearing the ground along the way, destroying anything that dared to get in the way. They moved fast and only the man's giggle by the wall could keep up with them.

  "Maggie!" I screamed.

  As soon as she saw what was coming, she fired three huge fireballs. They didn't do anything. They banged on the sharp points and split. But Maggie didn't give up. Her wrist was already scorched, and her knees were shaking. She summoned dozens of flaming arrows and with just a swaying finger ordered them to burn all the wood. We were already smiling at each other, about to celebrate, when the arrows crashed into thick walls of ice. The wooden spear boat didn't stop. All it needed was a chimney and black smoke, with a putrid smell, blackening all the way where it passed to be confused with a real boat. Elisa tried to freeze the wood, but it didn't work. It was as if the Titanic had destroyed the iceberg in a few seconds.

  "What do we do? We can't get to the door before it gets to us." Vic asked.

  "There's only one solution. Take down the building. Hurry, now. Aim for the roof." I said it. The wood was just meters away from us.

  Maggie, who was already wobbling as she walked, raised a fireball the size of her hand and flung it against the ceiling. Victoria shot three arrows. Elisa fired ice spears. Small explosions ran through the ceiling above us. It collapsed in front of us, obstructing the wooden boat's passage with scraps of the material it was made of. But it didn't stop there. The whole place started to fall apart. Cracks zig-zagged across the walls until they imploded, increasing the pile of debris in front of us. The wood was still trying to drill its way through, but it had encountered some difficulties.

  "Let's just get the hell out of here," Elisa said.

  We ran to the basement. Nothing had changed. Our van was still there, with the white coats inside and no sign of any more guards. I and Lipa got in the van and the other four girls went to the back.

  "Step on it," I told Lipa.

  Chapter VI

  She took off, putting us on the path to get out of there. She didn't even stop at the gate. She drove straight through it, carrying it for a few meters until it fell, and the van ran over it. The van bounced but quickly Lipa took control of it and speeded up throughout the forest.

  "Are we safe? We really did it!" I told her and smiled at her.

  But as I looked at her, I noticed that her eyes were flickering, her right hand was barely holding the steering wheel and her left hand was inches above her left hip. I asked her what was going on and she showed me a blood-covered hand.

  "Something struck me." She said, in a weak voice, struggling to stay awake, "I can handle it. It's all right."

  "Get in the back. They can take care of you."

  "No, I can do it!"

  "I'm not asking you, Lipa. Let's make the switch."

  She still grumbled but ended up stopping in a hidden place with a vast landscape of trees covering it. I opened the back door and explained to the girls what had happened. With Kendra's help, we carried Lipa to the back and Elisa took her place.

  "Shouldn't it have exploded by now?" Maggie asked. It was still possible to see part of the lab's white roof amidst the different shades of green.

  "A minute and a half to go. What we have to do is get out of here before anyone sees us. The guards must be looking for us." Vic said.

  She was right. We each went to our seats and got out of there.

  We were on our way out of the forest when a deafening noise broke out for miles. Through the rear-view mirror, I saw the laboratory on fire, minor explosions happening at different spots of it until the whole complex collapsed on itself and was nothing more than a mixture of ruins and a black powder balloon that rose to the skies. Once again, the desire to celebrate was growing inside me like a buzz that didn't shut up. And yet, I still couldn't. Not even a smile. Innocent people had died there. Maybe they weren't genuinely good, but they didn't deserve to burn to death all of a sudden. There was a slight difference between what we had done and what the albino had done with the council. I knew that. I knew that while he had done it to seize the power, we had done it to save the world. But none of this changed the fact that from that moment on, we also had blood on our hands. It took about two months, but I was no longer the boy with grandiosity lusts of yesteryear. I no longer lived without a sense of what was going on in the shadows, without knowing how close to the end of everything we were. There were still a lot of questions to be answered. Would that be the only lab with human beasts? How long would the destruction delay them? Had they all died? The answer to one of them scraped off the glass when we were already on the freeway.

  "It's the albino!" Elisa shouted, "Damn, but won't he die?"

  "They must have come after us a
nd escaped. Can you slow them down?" I asked him.

  "Not much. They're getting closer." She said.

  They were in a red convertible, drifting away from the few cars that were on the road, and getting closer to us. The albino was firing a semi-automatic into the air and the two-sword man was firing at us. The bullets were going in all directions; one broke my rearview mirror, some pierced the signs along the road and some punctured other smaller cars which ended up losing control and crashing into the metal sides of the road. It was a high-speed chase and we were driving a gutter. My cell phone vibrated. Message from Maggie asking what the hell was going on outside. I called her and put her on the speaker.

  "The albino and the guards are alive. They're after us." I told her, watching the pointer going from 80 an hour to 90.

  "I'll help you."

  "Stay there. You've used too much energy. We'll take care of it."

  "Are you sure? It seems to be tricky out there." She said, the sound being drowned out by the bullets.

  Now they were both shooting at the van. The earth glove boy seemed to have a wood-hardened wrist, but from afar, I wasn't sure. I assumed so, that the same thing that had happened to Maggie was happening to him. He overloaded his own glove and the body was suffering the consequences.

  "Hold the wheel," I told Elisa.

  I stayed away so she could put her hands on it while I was pulling my gun out of the holster. I leaned against the window and fired an entire bullet magazine into their vehicle. One of their bullets still scratched my shoulder. Still, I had more aim. They were swamped with anger and I was only thinking about surviving. There was no room for failure. One bullet broke one of their mirrors, another punctured the hood and one of them blew one of their tires. It began to deflate, whistling along the way, the open-top car, losing control on the road. The left side scraped off on the metal road dividers until it lost its color and only the original grey remained. My phone's vibrated again. This time it was a message from Elisa. Just an address that I quickly typed into the GPS. Drops of sweat barred my vision. I yanked my hair back and wiped my forehead with my sweater sleeve. They were still on our glue. The ice boy filled the holes in the tires with ice strong enough to roll down the road. We were 10 minutes from our destination, but it could be an hour. There was no difference in the time.

  "I don't know how we're going to dodge them." Elisa said to me, "Hell, this is not how I expected it to end."

  "What the hell are you talking about? This is not the end of us. At the most a beginning in which we have the advantage over the Reapers for the first time." I said, "Do you remember the fight against the human beast? It also seemed to be our end, and we survived. Now it's all the same. Put that glove to work. You're not going to tell me the great Elisa doesn't have a trick up her sleeve, are you?"

  "You're right. Damn it. No way I'm giving up." She said and we switched places again.

  I was driving and she was on her side, with her hand outside the window, a thick stick of ice stretching diagonally until it reached the road and frosted the tar. Their car swerved backward, and as a result, we earned a few minutes' advantages.

  "Excellent, Elisa! That should be enough to throw them off." I said it.

  We were two minutes away from the town where Lipa's address was. The hearts quieted down, and the mind took the opportunity to finally rest.

  "I have no idea where this place is." She said, "Lipa really does have hiding places everywhere."

  "As long as we're safe there it could be at the end of the world," I said and breathed deeply, reclining on the seat.

  I drove down the highway and got off at the second exit of a roundabout. A ghost town arose on the slope of a mountain. The sun couldn't get there unless it was at its highest peak and there were still two hours before that. An everlasting shade covered the city from one end to the other, shadowing the depressing concrete-walled buildings and the old church, which was nearly colorless in the heart of the city. There was no one outside. A few men in black suits with white lapels watched us from the parapet. I didn't think it was normal for them to have guests.

  "Are you sure this is it?" Elisa asked me when I stopped in front of the church.

  "You can see for yourself." I told her and put the phone in her hand, "This is the address."

  We get out of the van and open the back door. Once again, I helped Kendra carry Lipa until we got her out of the van. She was pale, the blood varnished her dark clothes and she dragged her voice as she told us to go inside.

  "Come on. The blue door."

  I wrapped her hand around my neck and helped her walk until we entered the church. The gold-plated walls had images of saints and angels engraved on them. Dozens of stools lined up allowing access to two small stairs leading to a stage where there were a microphone and an elliptical ceiling. Any sound there, no matter how low, would travel throughout the whole building in seconds. The place was lightened by clusters of three candles on four shelves, two on each side.

  The blue door was in the lower left corner. A four-digit code was required to enter.

  "2,4,1,2" Lipa said.

  "Is your code my birthday?" Kendra asked her.

  "I..." She started but ended up spitting blood, begging for help just with her eyes, "I needed... something that I wouldn't forget."

  We traversed the old stone corridor until we reached an oval space with three different exits. Dirty water dripped from the shredded ceiling and a failure straw between the walls let in a veil of light that embraced the depths where we were and the damp ground, with puddles, where we stepped.

  "Now what?" Vic asked her.

  "Middle one. Black market." She said.

  "Black market? Let's get into the wolf's den!" Maggie answered.

  "Well, at least they won't be looking for us there," Elisa said.

  Lipa seemed to be getting heavier by the minute. I kept carrying her down the new corridor; narrower and the ceiling was arched. At the end of the track, there was only a purple and violet silk tapestry.

  "Behind," Lipa said and this time spat even more blood, the red dripping from her chin into her clothes.

  Vic and Kendra deviated the silky curtains, and, behind them, a totally different world stood out in all its splendor.

  Chapter VII

  Neon lights hovered in the air and dozens of voices erupted in the parallel streets, mixing until everything sounded the same. From there we could see the dozens of tents and tables where the vendors had guns, items, everything and anything else, and a banner indicating the promotions. We couldn't waste time on any of that.

  "Now what? Lipa, just a few more seconds. Where are we going?" I asked her.

  Her eyes were almost blank. Her head dropped under her body and she faded for a few seconds.

  "That house... there. Key, left pocket."

  It was a house at the bottom of a skewed street, on the opposite side of where the confusion stirred up. All the houses there had windows with steel protections and the doors covered with thick metal. Men with bad aspect, scars, and yellow smiles, were like statues in front of some houses.

  We arrived at the door that she had pointed us to and I knocked about five times until a hoarse voice asked who we were.

  "Open..." Lipa said and passed out in my arms while the person was still opening the metal door. It glided across the floor, making no noise at all.

  "Lady Lipa!" The man said, scrolling through our faces, "Who are you? What happened?"

  "She's her sister and we're... friends? I guess so, yeah. We got into a mess and she got hit. She's the one who sent us here." I answered him.

  "Come on in, quick. Has anyone followed you?" The man asked. He wore round-bottomed glasses and a brown leather polo shirt next to brown trousers with over-marked linings. His lips were covered with lipstick and his nose shifted to the right, "lay her on this table. Come on, hurry up."

  "We lost them. Nobody followed us." I told him, and with Kendra's help, I laid Lipa on a marble table in the kit
chen.

  The man disappeared into the house corridors and came back seconds later with a young man. He had tattooed arms, a piercing in his right ear and a dark beard that covered half of his face. In his right hand, he carried a first-aid bag which he placed on one of the chairs by the table.

  "Follow me." The older man said. Underneath the light one could see that there were already some white threads between the dark brown hair and one another on the eyebrows.

  "We're not leaving her here."

  "Don't worry. I can handle this easily," the young man said. Despite the blackness of his hair, he had a strangled voice, "20 minutes and she's as good as new. She just needs to rest."

  We looked at each other. We didn't feel comfortable leaving her there, but there was nothing we could do either. We were doomed to wait. We all followed the man, except for Kendra, who stayed in the kitchen. The older man took us into a room on the second floor. A room with several sofas scattered around it and with a view over the entire black market.

  "They can't see us here."

  From that room, I could see practically the entire black market. The streets were like labyrinths and the buildings were all the same size except for a palace that was on the highest slope. The man explained to us that it was from there that the albino tried to govern the black market but to no avail lately. There were more and more factions uniting against him and his guards no longer dared to go beyond the walls surrounding his house.

  "A war is coming and it's not going to be pretty. Who would think it would be a good idea to collect money and try to imprison criminals?" The man asked rhetorically, "You can stay here. There's food in the fridge downstairs, and I'm making lunch in a little while. I'll call you then." He said and left us alone.

  "Now what?" Vic asked.

  "We have fulfilled our mission. We have to get the bullets and Lipa needs information."

  "What about Gordon? Now we know where he is." Kendra asked.

  "Let's save him, of course. But, first, we need to arm ourselves properly. It must be a well-protected place."