“He’s moving.”
“Which way?” King asked.
“Up.” Knight’s head bobbed slightly as he followed the figure that only he could see. “Now he’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“He went in one of the passages. I can’t see him anymore.”
King did not like the sound of that, but since the sonic deterrent appeared to be working, there was no reason not to keep moving. “Keep your eye on him.”
They moved at a fast walk up the gentle slope of the spiraling balcony, and soon they reached the first of several enormous openings cut into the rock. King performed a cursory inspection to ensure that none of the ape-creatures—humanzees seemed to be the term favored by his teammates—were lurking within, waiting to spring out at them. The space beyond was empty save for a scattering of what looked like irregularly shaped black rocks. They were as thick around as a football and some were longer than King’s leg. Animal droppings, he realized, dried out, nearly petrified by the look of them. Nothing had been in this place for a long time. Months, maybe years.
The lower reaches of the city looked to be the sovereign realm of the giant ape. It was probably an attempt by Russian scientists to hybridize a primate with DNA recovered from the ancient occupants of the place—not unlike similar alleged experiments to recreate extinct species, like the woolly mammoth. A giant ape monster wasn’t very useful from a strategic or tactical point of view, which was probably why the creature had been exiled to the abandoned city. Of course, if the subterranean realm was a dumping ground for failed or useless hybrids, then Volos might not be the only long-term resident.
They pushed onward, occasionally checking for signs of activity in the passages and residences they encountered along the way. Mostly they trusted haste to get them through. The pungent smell of fresh scat reached their nostrils as they neared the spot where Knight had first sighted the giant ape. There was no sign of the creature itself, nor did they detect any activity when they reached the passage where it had disappeared.
The tension, accompanied by the constant sonic bombardment, was enough to drive King into a homicidal rage. He tried to channel it into a sense of urgency, quickening their pace to a jog. No one complained, not even Lynn, who was being shaken up and down with every step.
They finished a full circuit, and then another. They were a third of the way to the top, then halfway. And then, as they were completing the fourth circuit, the thing King had been both dreading and expecting finally happened.
Whether the ape had simply been biding its time, lulling them into a false sense of security, or it had simply reached the point where rage overcame the pain of the sonic assault, the creature was done hiding.
The attack did not take them completely by surprise. Knight, who had been trailing the group and checking their six every few seconds, saw it coming and shouted, “Down!”
As King went to the prone position, he twisted around so that he was facing down the slope, the same direction that Knight was aiming the RPG. He could not see anything in the darkness behind them, but over the insistent shriek of the sound pulse, he could just make out a series of rapid grunts—the heavy breathing of a charging animal.
Knight shouted another warning, letting his teammates know to cover up to protect themselves from the deadly backblast. Then the insistent whine in King’s ears was replaced by the slightly lower ringing of tinnitus, as the rocket booster motor detonated. With a thunderous boom, the warhead blasted out of the launch tube. The shockwave hit King like a kick to the gut. Then he felt the hot rocket exhaust wash over him, but he did not look away as the rocket streaked toward its target.
There was a flash, no more than seventy-five yards away, as the warhead detonated on impact. In that fleeting light, King saw the beast clearly. It was enormous—even bigger than his first estimate. Although it was hunched over, holding itself up on its knuckles, like a gorilla, it almost completely filled the space between floor and ceiling. King had, without even realizing it, brought his rifle around, aiming at the briefly illuminated target. But in the instant that he saw it, he knew that if the RPG did not take the creature out, there was no hope for any of them.
The light was gone as quickly as it appeared, vanishing even as the report of the explosion reached King’s ears. There were more loud pops from Rook firing blindly with his Desert Eagles, and then over the tumult, there was a shrieking sound. It was like a bull elephant trumpeting, only much, much louder.
Knight loaded a second grenade into the tube, a process that took all of one second. He raised it to his shoulder, but instead of shouting another backblast warning, he began crying out repeatedly, “Ceasefire!” He waved his left hand in front of his face, the universal military signal for the same.
Rook got the message, and in the stillness that followed, King realized the animal noises had stopped, along with the shooting. Over the stink of rocket exhaust and high explosives, King’s nose detected the distinctive odor of burnt hair and cooking meat.
“Knight, talk to me.”
“He’s gone. He went over the side.”
“Dead?”
Knight hesitated a moment before answering. “He had a great big hole clear through his chest. If that didn’t kill him, I don’t know what will.”
That was good enough for King. “They probably know we’re on our way now, so we’re done being sneaky. Rook, I’ll take your place on the litter. You take point. Shock and awe.”
“Testify, Brother,” Rook said, raising his pistols in the air like a supplicant praising a deity.
“Blue, can we turn off the noise?”
The harsh tone softened but King could still hear it faintly. He cautiously held the comm unit closer to his ear. “Blue, is it off?”
Deep Blue’s voice came through clearly. “It’s off.”
“Must be my imagination,” King said, fitting the earpiece into place.
After a moment, the sound went away, but then he heard something that definitely was not his imagination. An enraged growl, as loud as a jet engine, was echoing up from the depths.
41
If that didn’t kill him…
Knight’s own words had come back to haunt him.
He had seen the gaping hole, big enough to reach his arm in without touching burnt flesh or bone. It went right through the center of the monstrous ape-thing’s torso. The warhead’s secondary charge had gone off an instant later, blasting the creature off the platform and sending it into the depths.
Now it was coming back.
His backscatter vision showed the monster, an enormous skeletal wraith of black smoke, heaving itself up the spiraling levels of the city like rungs on a ladder. It would reach them in a matter of seconds.
And the hole through its middle was gone. Completely healed.
If that didn’t kill him, I don’t know what will.
“It’s a regen,” he shouted, hefting the RPG tube onto his shoulder and aiming it straight down at the bounding primate. “King, get your mother to safety. I’ll try to slow it down.”
“Do what you can,” King answered. “But don’t be a hero.”
Knight knew King had done the math. If the creature caught them, they would all die, probably with just one swipe of its massive arm. But if Knight could knock it back down, it might buy the rest of them the time they needed to reach the top of the city.
Something moved beside Knight. He glanced over quickly and saw Rook standing next to him, a Desert Eagle in each hand, both trained on the nearly invisible mass rising up from below.
“King Kong is a regen,” Rook said, shaking his head. “Outstanding. Can this day get any better?”
Regens—humans, animals or hybrid mutant combinations thereof, imbued with rapid healing abilities verging on actual invincibility—had been the bane of the Chess Team’s existence almost from the beginning. There were different ways to go about making a regen, ranging from gene-splicing to exotic botanicals. Most of them shared the same vulner
ability: healing was tied to neural function. Destroying the brain or severing the head of a regen was usually enough to put it down permanently. Volos’s huge head would be an easy target, but whether it could be destroyed was another matter entirely.
Knight knew it would be a waste of time and breath trying to convince Rook to leave with the rest of the team. And if there were any weapons in their arsenal that might be capable of doing some serious damage to the monster in the event that he missed with the RPG, it was Rook’s .50 caliber semi-automatics.
He looked down again, sighting in the RPG. The creature was just three levels down, less than a hundred feet away, a grinning death’s head made of black smoke, looking right at him.
“Smile, you son of a bitch.” He pulled the trigger.
The warhead lanced down, driven by a tongue of fire, and the monstrous visage vanished in a flash and a puff of smoke.
“Well?” Rook shouted, still aiming his pistols into the void.
A smoke-skeleton, shrunken to ant-size by the distance, splashed into the water at the bottom of the cistern. Knight increased magnification and the X-ray image tripled in size. It showed him in full detail the damage wrought by the armor-piercing HEAT round. Half of the enormous skull was gone, along with an entire arm and a portion of the rib cage.
But the creature was still moving, thrashing to stay afloat. As he watched, Knight saw the damaged bones lengthening, as if someone was pouring smoke into an invisible skeleton mold. Judging by the speed at which the bones were filling out, he estimated they had less than a minute before the creature was fully reconstituted.
“Down but not out. This thing is going to keep coming back.”
Rook shook his head ruefully. “Like my hemorrhoids.”
Knight raised his eyes and saw the rest of the team on the opposite side of the chasm, halfway into the next circuit. Queen in the lead, King and Bishop trailing with Lynn’s litter suspended between them. Further up, the spiraling ramp fed into an opening in the gray concrete ceiling, a relatively recent addition, like the water pipes that also disappeared into it. The exit was too small to allow the ape creature through—probably designed for that very purpose.
It would be a journey of two, possibly three more minutes to reach it.
“We better move.” He loaded another warhead—their last—into the launcher, and then he and Rook were sprinting up the spiral ramp.
Not a minute later, another roar of primal fury erupted from the chasm.
“Time for some Preparation H, Knight,” Rook shouted.
Without slowing, Knight got as close to the edge as he dared and looked down. As before, the ape creature was moving vertically, scaling the levels in dynamic bounds that seemed impossible for so massive an animal. It was already half-way up and moving on a trajectory that would put it between the exit and the team.
“Damn it!” He skidded to a stop, shouldered the RPG, aimed it at a point just above the wraith-like figure and fired, all in one abrupt motion. The rocket streaked across the chasm, but just before it impacted, the smoke-skeleton swung to the side, as if telepathically sensing its proximity. The warhead detonated an instant later, the shockwave shaking the creature loose, but as it tumbled back down into the abyss, it somehow managed to snag hold of one of the water pipes, which buckled under the sudden load. Then it whipped itself around, flying through the air like a gymnast vaulting onto parallel bars. Knight felt the ramp lurch beneath him as Volos caught hold one level down from where he was standing.
There was another roar, this one louder even than the detonation of the rocket, and then the ape monster heaved itself onto the ramp. Knight tried to hit the deck, but a trailing foot almost as long as Knight was tall, caught him a glancing blow. The useless RPG launcher flew from his grasp as he went sprawling across the ramp.
The unintentional hit knocked the wind out of him and left him struggling simply to stay conscious. He rolled over, fumbling for a weapon, and he was knocked flat again, this time by a blast of hot ape breath that reeked of rotten meat. The creature was bent over him, roaring, its fanged simian face—more like a baboon than a gorilla or chimpanzee, or any of the hybrids they had faced—was close enough to touch. It raised its fists above Knight, preparing to squash him like a bug. Each looked the size of a Volkswagen.
But before the death blow could come, the creature’s head began twitching. One massive hand, then the other, came up to swat the air in front of its face. Through the haze of pain, Knight could hear the throaty report of Rook’s pistols. The heavy caliber rounds weren’t really doing any damage—mosquito bites to a creature that size—but they were keeping it busy, giving Knight a chance to slip away.
As soon as he started to move, though, the creature’s full attention came back to him. The enormous fists were raised again. This time it did not stop until it had smashed them both onto the stone floor.
But Knight had already slipped away, darting between the monster’s pillar-like legs. Rook took advantage of the confusion to reload. Then he resumed shooting, pumping rounds from both pistols directly into the creature’s face. He focused his fire on the somewhat more vulnerable eyes and mouth. One grotesquely curved canine tooth shattered, spraying the area with flakes of calcium.
The barrage got the creature’s attention. It forgot about Knight entirely and turned its full rage against Rook, who stood less than fifty feet away—a couple of strides for the monstrous ape. It leaned forward, preparing to charge, but Rook stood his ground until both pistols were empty again.
From the creature’s blind spot, Knight saw what was about to happen. His only weapon was a SIG pistol. If Rook’s Magnum rounds had been nothing more than bothersome mosquitos, the 9-millimeter bullets would be like gnats against the ape-thing’s shaggy hide. Still, if gnats and mosquitos could ruin a hike, maybe there was something he could do to keep Volos occupied. He just needed a shot.
He realized the monster did have one vulnerability that was practically staring him in the face. Its feet, shaped a little like deformed human hands, with fingers—or maybe they were toes—as long and big around as a man’s leg. Before the creature could take a step in Rook’s direction, Knight drew a bead on one knuckle, and started shooting.
Little explosions of red marked the hits. The bullets were barely man-stoppers, and probably didn’t penetrate much further than the top layers of skin, but the wound had the effect of stepping on a Lego block while barefoot. The ape-thing let out a cry of agony oddly disproportionate to the injury, especially considering the punishment it had taken from both the RPGs and Rook’s Desert Eagles. Then it twisted away, lost its balance and crashed down on the ramp, clutching its injured toe.
Knight was so stunned by the success that he could only stand and stare in disbelief. Then he heard Rook shouting, and knew it was time to start running. He barely made it to Rook’s side before Volos shook off the injury—or more likely, regenerated the damaged tissue—and was back in pursuit.
“Split up!” Knight shouted as he ran past. It was about the only thing he could think to do. They had used up all their tricks and most of their luck.
In the back of his mind, Knight recalled the old joke about two hunters running from a bear. One man, ready to give up, told the other that he would never be able to outrun the bear, to which the second said, ‘I don’t need to outrun him. I just need to outrun you.’
It was a grim thought under the circumstances. Given the distance separating them from the top of the city, not to mention the creature’s intelligence, there was little guarantee that the creature would settle for just one of them.
Knight felt the stone rampart shudder beneath him as the creature started forward, each footstep sending a tremor through the rock. Even without looking, he could guess its pace. At ten or fifteen feet per stride, it would be on them in seconds.
But then the footsteps stopped. He risked a look back and saw the beast once more trying to protect its face from some unseen nuisance. Rook was still running, sta
ying close to the city wall, which meant the shots were coming from somewhere else.
Over the monster’s roars, Knight could hear the faint pop of gunfire from multiple weapons. Some of the rounds struck the stone behind the ape-creature, but most struck its head and upraised hands. One and a half levels up and opposite them, the rest of the team had reached the end of the ramp—the city limits. They were now providing covering fire to give him and Rook a chance to escape.
The rifle bullets were higher-powered, designed to go farther and penetrate deeper, but it was still like trying to bring an elephant down by throwing sewing needles at it. Nevertheless, the distraction was working.
A little too well.
The creature knew the origin of its torment. It let out another primal howl, and then pivoted off the platform, catching it with one outflung hand. It swung there for a moment, gathering momentum, and then swung itself up to catch hold of the next highest level. It was now just half a circuit away from the end of the ramp and the rest of the team. It did not climb up, but continued swinging hand over hand along the edge of the platform, covering twenty or thirty feet at a time.
Knight couldn’t see what was happening above, but he knew that in saving him and Rook, their teammates had brought the creature’s wrath upon themselves. He kept running, struggling to keep up with Rook, who was likewise sprinting at full-tilt, no longer running away from battle but toward it.
But just as before, Knight knew there was no way they would reach the end of the city in time.
42
Peter strained against the leather restraints that held him fast on the examination table. But he was no more able to break free of them than he had been the grip of the Presidential bodyguards, who had held him down and fastened the thick belts around his limbs. The rational part of him knew that his efforts would be futile. He would accomplish nothing more than wearing himself out. But the primitive reptilian part of his brain compelled him to keep struggling.
Empire (A Jack Sigler Thriller Book 8) Page 28