by Tara Janzen
If she rolled six inches either way, she was toast—impaled toast.
Fuck.
She had to get the hell—
O geezus!
A short, muffled cough came from out of nowhere and almost sent her over the edge. Cripes. She wasn’t alone up here in this hole.
The cough came again, real close from behind her in the wreckage, a small, muffled sound of distress—and suddenly she knew.
“Jane?” she whispered. “Is that you?”
Tyler Crutchfield sat perfectly still in his poolside chair for only one reason: He had no choice.
These SDF assholes had the damn concession on duct tape, and they’d used plenty to keep him from being able to move in any direction. Hell, he’d been trapped for so long, he was probably paralyzed by now. Otherwise he would have risen up and beaten Lancaster to a pulp with his bare hands, just finished the bastard off. He had dried vomit down the front of his shirt and was sitting in a pool of his own urine, and it was all because of Randolph Lancaster.
Tyler’s last great hope, his only hope, had been the man bound to the pulley rig. Lancaster was slumped over, hanging limply from his restraints, having worn himself out trying to get free from the tangle of chains and cuffs and hardware tying him up. Or maybe he’d had a seizure and died.
Nope. Tyler saw him twitch, the old bastard.
“We’re going to die in this damn basement,” Tyler muttered, then raised his voice a few decibels to make sure Lancaster heard him. “We’re going to die here, you son of a bitch.”
Damn it all to hell! Tyler Thomas Crutchfield was not supposed to die like a filth-wallowing rat in a cage. It was incomprehensible—and yet he felt the doom of death bearing down on him. He wasn’t a psychic, but it didn’t take a crystal ball to know what happened to people tied up in basements, especially ones who’d already had a gun held to their head.
An involuntary shudder wracked his body. Never in a million years would he have believed a trip to Denver would get him killed.
Lancaster ignored him, the same way the old bastard had been ignoring him since Peter “Kid Chaos” Chronopolous had dragged him down here and chained him to the pulley rig.
Not one word. Tyler seethed with the thought. Lancaster had said nothing in Tyler’s defense, made not one plea to Hart for his release, knowing he was blameless for the LeedTech sales to Atlas Exports.
Tyler had never even heard of Atlas Exports until Hart had methodically outlined Lancaster’s acts of treason.
Acts his boss had not denied.
Lies.
That’s all he’d ever gotten from Randolph Lancaster.
Tyler had been such a fool, but he wasn’t the only one. The extent of Lancaster’s treason shook the very foundations of the U.S. government, but no one would ever know. The crime would pass unnoted if he and Lancaster perished in this damn basement.
The bastard.
A muffled groan from the far end of the pool deck brought Tyler’s head around. Sam Walls was reviving, for all the good that was going to do them. They were all going to die down here.
“Walls!” Tyler shouted at him. “Walls! Come on, man, get up! Get up and get over here!” If Walls could get just one of Tyler’s arms free of this damn chair, maybe they could make a break for it.
Except for Lancaster.
That sonuvabitch was doomed, imprisoned in his tangle of chains and handcuffs.
Too fucking bad, Tyler thought. Let the treasonous bastard rot.
“Walls!” Tyler called again. “Come on, man. Shake it off.” And get your sorry ass over here.
Walls groaned again and rolled over onto his back. Geezus. The guy’s leg. It was a mess, and Tyler had to wonder what had been going on with all these Atlas Exports “supersoldiers” Lancaster surrounded himself with. Nothing good, that was for damn sure. No wonder Dylan Hart was playing this game for keeps.
But it shouldn’t include him. He didn’t belong here. He was blameless. Blameless.
“I’ll give you fifty grand if you can get over here, Walls. Come on. Just crawl, man. Just crawl.” He had to get out of here. He really did, or Hart was going to kill him. “Fifty grand, Walls! Can you hear me?”
Money was a great motivator. Not that Tyler had any damn intention of parting with fifty thousand of his hard-earned dollars, or a fifty-thousand-dollar chunk of his trust fund. Hell, no. But honest to God, Walls didn’t look like he was going to last long enough to give a damn.
He broke them up and cannibalized King, took a bite out of him. Dylan Hart’s words slid through Tyler’s mind for about the hundred millionth time. He’d heard them, but he didn’t believe them, not for a minute. Hart was just trying to scare them all senseless.
Touché. He’d succeeded. Lancaster had gone catatonic since Hart had raced out of there. It was that Monk guy business, just like in Bangkok, when Randolph had gotten so buggy with the booze.
Cannibalized, as in eaten.
No fucking way. Tyler shook his head. No way. No one Tyler had ever known had been as brutish as the dynamic duo of King Banner and Rock Howe, and they’d never eaten anybody. If they had, he would have heard about it forty-eight times by now. Bragging about their badass exploits was those boys’ favorite pastime.
Or it had been, Tyler thought with a slow shake of his head. Dead. It was hard to believe … and if Walls moved any slower, they were all—
Wait. Tyler froze in his chair, absolutely froze solid, listening with every fiber of his being, listening for …
“Lancastaaaaa …” The cry came from somewhere above them, unlike anything he’d ever heard.
Twenty feet away, Lancaster whimpered and started to cry.
Cry? The bastard was crying?
An unholy terror of death and destruction was descending upon them, and all the old man could do was cry?
A vacant sound of rapidly running footsteps echoed on the ceiling, and, for a moment, Tyler wished with all his might that Quinn Younger had just blown his brains out. Aything would be better than what he was facing now.
Oh, so help him God. So help him, he did not want to be eaten alive.
An unbearable trembling took hold of his body, and all he could do was sit there, trapped, and shake.
“Lancassstaa …” The eerie voice grew nearer and nearer, the sound of it making Tyler’s blood curdle in his veins.
“W-walls,” he moaned. “Walls! Good God, man, get up!”
Oh, geezus, geezus, geezus.
Over in a darkened corner, Tyler heard the sound of someone moving a heavy metal grate in the ceiling.
No, no, no, no, no … this couldn’t be happening, not to Tyler Thomas Crutchfield.
“No,” he said out loud, then again, more vehemently. “No!”
He didn’t deserve this, to be butchered in a basement.
Not to be butch … butch … bu—His mind stuttered to a dead stop, his eyes growing so wide they hurt.
Whatever was coming was coming now. A huge hand reached through the hole in the ceiling and finished moving the grate aside. Then a man dropped through to the pool deck. Monk.
Ungodly big, ripped to the point of distortion, every muscle so hard, so delineated, he looked like a caricature, like a comic-book hero in the flesh.
Albino flesh. Long white hair, disheveled.
Bare-chested and bloody.
The blood was dried in streaks down his arm but still fresh and running down his face from a wound across his cheekbone.
Eyes so silvery pale they seemed to have no color at all met his across the basement, and all the energy went out of Tyler in one rushing wave of despair, every last ounce of it. The only thing holding him up was the duct tape.
Monk quickly dismissed the gutless weasel taped to the chair. That one was no warrior and none of Monk’s concern. Neither was the man wallowing and struggling half naked on the pool deck, Sam Walls, one of Lancaster’s idiot lackeys.
But the third man meant the world to him, the new world he’d awoken to
in pain and confusion. Monk had detected his scent the minute he’d entered the building.
Lancaster himself—roped and chained and cuffed.
An emotion he couldn’t describe welled up and filled Monk’s chest, made him ache with longing and disgust, with love and despair.
Lancaster’s last moments of life had come to him.
Monk walked across the pool deck and slowly dropped to his knees in front of the old man, bringing them face-to-face.
Lancaster was such a mess, hanging so heavily from his chains. He had blood on his shirt and tears on his old, wrinkled cheeks and no hope in his tired, weary eyes.
“Scott,” Monk said, speaking the name that had once been his. He wasn’t Scott anymore. He was MNK-1, a beast of strength and cunning who would never have made the mistake Scott Church had of putting his life in this man’s hands.
“Y-y-yes.” The harsh, whispered word fell from Lancaster’s mouth.
Paper-pushers, Monk thought with disgust, the money-mongers—they had no real balls. He wanted a battle. He wanted his destroyer to go out in a blaze of rage and fury, fighting for his life. But there was no getting a fight out of Lancaster any more than there’d been getting a fight out of Dr. Patterson.
It made him long for Farrel. J. T. Chronopolous had been a Marine before he’d joined SDF, and a Marine never went down without a fight.
It would be a fight to the death—especially after he used J.T.’s woman. Then he would have the other girl, the blonde, Skeeter Bang-Hart. Then he would kill them both. Break them in half and leave them for their men to find.
But first, Lancaster.
He reached out and fitted his hand around Lancaster’s neck and pulled him closer. He wanted to see the fear in the old man’s eyes, wanted to watch death darken them forever. It wouldn’t take long.
“N-no,” Lancaster pleaded. “Please! I have—”
He had nothing, nothing, and Monk slowly tightened his hand, squeezing the old man’s throat, crushing it and pulling him closer and closer, until he felt Lancaster’s last gasping breath leave him. Nothing else would get through his fierce grip, nothing except the tsunami wave of the old man’s fear.
“Monk,” he said at the last possible instant, before death claimed the bastard, wanting Lancaster to take the name with him into eternity.
When it was over, he let the old man’s head fall to his chest and rose to his feet, thoroughly unsatisfied. Limb by limb, he freed Lancaster from the pulley rig, ripping off and breaking the restraints. Then he slung the old man’s body over his shoulder, his burden. All his. Only his.
Lancaster. Held close at last, dead but held close.
Above him, he could hear the men of Special Defense Force scrambling, securing the building, and he had a damn good idea of what that entailed. They were warriors like him.
It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t save their women, and when he was finished with his prizes, he’d take on the men and vanquish every one of them.
Tilting his head back, he gave in to all the pain and longing and strength that was him, MNK-1—Monk!—and he roared his rage.
He roared until the sweat poured down his face. He roared until the room shook with the fierce power of his agony—and then he roared again.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Fuck. Creed’s eyebrows went sky high at the eerie cry reverberating through Steele Street’s subbasement. He slanted a look over at Travis and Red Dog where they stood next to him in the subterranean tunnels leading up through the bowels of the building.
Unperturbed, the Angel Boy was checking the load on the Para-Ordnance P14 handgun he’d had customized by the chop shop boys’ favorite gunsmith, a guy named Cullen over at Colorado Gun Works. Travis carried the full-auto-capable pistol in a shoulder rig with six eighteen-round extended, hi-cap magazines tucked under his other arm. The whole bitchin’-cool, deadly rig was easily concealable beneath a tac vest.
The hair-raising howl echoed through the tunnel again, the message crystal clear to Creed. The guy was calling them out, every last man jack of them, and Creed had to wonder, really, just how badass this Monk bastard was going to turn out to be—and he hoped to hell he and his team were the ones to find out.
Before the three of them had reached Steele Street, Dylan had called and ordered them to come through the 19th Street tunnels, their mission threefold: to look for Skeeter and Jane, to cut off any escape in that direction, and to clear the building from the bottom up, forcing the mad cannibal Monk into Dylan’s trap. But it sounded like they’d landed in the gravy. That raging roar was coming from close by. While the rest of the SDF team was busy setting claymores with optic trip switches in the elevator shaft, marking and mining it, creating a tunnel of death, Creed and his crew were going to be kicking butt and taking names.
Major butt, he thought, watching Red Dog check a thirty-three-round magazine of KTW 9mm armor-piercing rounds and slam it home into another of Cullen’s custom full-auto jobs on her H&K PDW. Between Red Dog and the Angel Boy, they could put fifty precision pistol rounds downrange in under five seconds—which just made Creed wonder what in the hell the two of them had been up to on all those missions General Grant sent them on that didn’t originate with SDF.
Maybe it was time to find out. Given the look of their weapons, they were getting some really big scores, and he wouldn’t mind a piece of the action.
When Red Dog looked up, Creed gave the signal to move out, and the three of them slipped into the darkness.
Con stood in the pouring rain in the alley, looking up at 738 Steele Street. He saw the cameras tracking him and didn’t make a move to avoid them. They were no threat to J. T. Chronopolous, no threat to him, unless the men watching them tried to keep him from his mission: killing Randolph Lancaster.
It was a chance he couldn’t take.
He followed the cameras through one more loop, and the next time they came to the place where he’d been, he was gone. From his calculations, there was only one possible way of getting into the building unobserved, and that was to climb it from the outside. He started with the old freight elevator, whose shadows and struts and cables hid his movements, and when the elevator ran out, he took to the wall, one finger jamb after another.
Partway up, two unexpected scents came to him off the bricks and stone-cold riveted his attention: Jane and the beast. The rancid, metallic smell of Lancaster’s newest abomination was unmistakable, and so was the warm, wild woman smell of Jane.
Dread and confusion collided in his mind. She was here, the Wild Thing, and Lancaster’s beast had her. Whatever had happened at the house on the west side, somehow the beast had gotten the better of the SDF boys.
Fuck.
Fear had been burned out of him a long time ago, but with love, he realized, it had only been lying in wait. It came back to him hard and fast now.
Doubling his speed, he scrambled higher and found the broken window on the eighth floor. When he dropped inside, he felt another punch of home, but it was the trail he was following that held him—and the trail led up.
Zach looked up from one of the comm console’s video-feed computer screens. “Looks like we had the wrong bait for the last eight weeks. Are you going, or do you want me to do the honors?”
“This one’s mine,” Dylan said, reaching for the rifle he’d set on the desk earlier. He slipped the sling over his shoulder, then checked his Springfield, making sure he had a full magazine in the .45 and four extra magazines on his belt.
Behind him, Zach was already on the radio, letting everyone know J.T. had breached the building—like every other damn person on the planet tonight—and that the boss was going after him.
The boss—Dylan started up the stairs. He didn’t feel like the boss of anything, not with Skeeter missing. His brain was frying on the edges with fear.
No one could see it, but it was taking everything he had to run this operation like a mission and not just go on the rampage, looking for his bad girl. The only thread of reason
he had was knowing there wasn’t a better way to get a whole lot of people killed.
So he was cool.
Cool, cool Dylan Hart—so torn up inside, so full of fear, so wanting to take Steele Street apart at the seams, brick by fucking brick, and howl his rage.
“The smell—”
“—is disgusting.” Jane finished Skeeter’s thought and wiped the rain off her face, before going back to tugging at the knot of material at Skeet’s back. The man, if he could be called that, Jane’s “ghost,” had tied his shirt around Skeeter, and tied it so tightly, she was losing circulation in her arms.
A crackling web of chain lightning sizzled across the sky and gave her a moment’s light to work by—and made her pray she and Skeeter didn’t get fried.
Her head was pounding with pain, her muscles ached, and she was shivering with the cold rain beating down on her. She felt like she’d been in a dogfight, and lost. Every part of her hurt.
It had taken what had seemed like forever for her to work her arms out of the sheet she’d been wrapped in, and every move had cost the two women, with pieces of the stairwell dropping away underneath them like clockwork. Skeeter was hanging by a thread, almost literally, precariously perched on their diminishing island of metal trash and building guts, and the only thing holding Jane in place was Skeeter.
But they had a plan, to get them both free of their bindings and climb to the roof, which was still ninety percent intact and only five feet above them. And as long as Skeeter didn’t fall to her death and drag Jane in her wake, it just might work.
“Done,” she said finally, releasing the last of the knot. “Wiggle your fingers.”
Steele Street’s original bad girl kept herself in amazing shape, and, in seconds, she had movement back in her hands and arms.
Thank God, Jane thought, wiping at her face again.
She and Skeeter had gone hoarse calling out to the guys, hoping the team would find them—but the chances that their voices had risen above the sounds of the storm were slim to none.