“Apex,” Hill replied. “They call them apex predators.”
“That thing better be the apex,” Tomlin growled. “I don’t want to see what might be able to take those bastards on.”
Hill looked his way and bared his teeth. “We took the fucker on. We would have killed it, too, but we were told to take it alive. We had our fucking hands tied, Tomlin. If we’d been using lethal force, there’d be more of us still alive.”
“Not again.” Tomlin shook his head. “We delivered one live specimen. We ever go against one of those things again, I intend to bring it down with extreme prejudice.”
“Amen to that, brother.” Hill stared at the distant wall and counted silently as the medic kept sewing his flesh back together. After a moment he said, “Four of us gone. Half of us. All because they wanted to study that thing.” He frowned. “Wonder what they have in store for it.”
“Orologas would have said it was important to better understand their language.”
Hill snorted. “King would have agreed. Poor bastard finally got religion today, and wouldn’t you know it, his god killed him in a second flat.”
“Well, at least he got confirmation before he went.”
“Yeah. Amen to that, I guess.”
They grew silent then, both lost in their own thoughts as the medics finished making sure they were still intact. Despite Tomlin’s fears, Hill was fine—aside from the stitching. Bastard had too hard a head to get a concussion.
Just ten minutes after they’d arrived, the medics and the Reapers alike were sent into decontamination, where the outer layer of their skin and a few millimeters of hair got burned away before they were shoved into cells behind a heavy glass wall. They had toilets, televisions, laptops and recycled air, and would remain in that area for at least the next three days, if all went according to plan. Better to make sure they weren’t going to spread a goddamned space plague, he supposed.
* * *
Elliott looked at the creature and remembered how to be afraid. He stood before it with no armor and no weapons. Instead he wore a hazmat suit and his skin tingled from the layer that had been burned away.
The first few people who’d encountered the creature, including the Reapers, were locked into confinement for at least the next seventy-two hours. If any signs of contagion showed up, they’d be locked away for longer.
When he saw the first video footage of the room where they had the creature, it felt like he’d damned near had a stroke. There were scientists and medical doctors with it, and only one of them had considered the risk of infection. It was a goddamned breach of protocol.
He understood though. On the one hand this was an amazing opportunity. On the other, they’d prepped for this, planned for this, and considered the possibilities for months on end. The Reapers could be forgiven, and the first responders, as well, but aside from them there was no excuse for the sort of sloppiness he’d seen in action.
His throat was still sore from the reaming he’d administered to the people in charge of the area. They’d been taken away, and the entire area had been scrubbed before any further work could be done. Now the beast was in a sealed laboratory and it was sedated. That was the way it was supposed to be handled.
They had removed the armor, and removed the mask that covered its face. It was worse than he’d remembered. Somewhere along the way he’d forgotten the texture of the thing, or how its head where the dreadlocks fell had reminded him of a crab’s exoskeleton. The mottled colors of this one were different. The dark spots were similar, but he remembered the thing having more of a greenish hue.
He thought all of that while he looked at the creature and felt his skin break into a sweat. Elliott licked at his lips and felt his breath tremble as he exhaled. How the hell could he have forgotten so many fine details?
Well, really, that was part of the job, wasn’t it? If he couldn’t forget things, he’d have never survived being part of the Phoenix Program in the first place. He did things in Vietnam that were dubiously legal and morally checkered. He was hardly in a place where he could be expected to remember every detail.
Even though the thing was already unconscious, it was properly restrained. He made certain of that. The restraints were thick leather and stainless steel, and heavy enough to stop a rhino from pulling free, according to what he’d been told. The links certainly looked as if they’d stop any attempt to break them.
Ignoring the walking nightmares for a second, Elliott reached over and picked up the war mask. The interior was scuffed and worn. The exterior showed signs of previous conflicts—several deep scratches including one gouge that was very fresh, and looked like a bullet mark. He pulled out the digital camera he’d slipped into his pocket earlier and snapped several pictures of the mask, then of the two gauntlets. One had heavy blades still extended, and the other sported a security cover that protected the computer system he knew was there.
He didn’t open it. He wasn’t a science type. He’d leave it for them to examine when the time was right. Instead he set the piece down carefully and took a shot of the grisly bone-and-skull necklaces the thing had been wearing. Trophies—that’s what they had to be. A couple of the skulls didn’t even look like they belonged to anything on Planet Earth, and he made certain to take close-ups of those. He never knew, really, what a scientist might find important.
Elliott wasn’t alone in the room. There were other people all around, a half-dozen of them, and they moved carefully. He figured that was to avoid catching his attention. They were worried about him.
They had every right to be worried. Elliott did his best to look innocuous, but to other people he was a scary man, even when he wasn’t trying to be scary. Somewhere along the way he’d gotten too intense for most people to be comfortable around him. He knew it, he understood it, and if he’d really cared he probably could have gotten better at hiding it. The problem was, he didn’t care enough. It wasn’t worth the trouble of changing.
His wife had left him a long time ago, and there were no kids. Without those factors, it wasn’t worth the effort. The Reapers weren’t scared of him, and he would’ve kicked the asses of any who were.
He knew it happened to a lot of his kind: the “spooks.” Maybe that helped them earn the name, because they looked and acted haunted. Not likely, but it made sense in its own way. Then again, not every operative had a personal demon that weighed in at four hundred pounds and stood over seven feet tall.
He took pictures of the feet, counting the toes. Seven per foot. One at the heel, one small nailed appendage at each side of the ankle, four toes at the front. He wondered if they’d all been bendable once. He’d seen several different birds in Vietnam that had been tamed and set on perches. They’d had four toes and they’d been able to perch with them, and grasp objects. The alien was wearing sandals. He took them off as gingerly as he could and took photos of the bottoms of the feet.
He was just taking pictures of the legs when the creature let out a small grunt.
Elliott didn’t actually achieve escape velocity when he jumped back, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. His heart hammered in his chest and his vision went gray for a second. He was too old for sudden scares, damn it.
The good news? The people around him had backed away just as quickly. It saved a little face.
Dr. Keyes came up to him and smiled.
“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I almost pissed myself.”
That massive, inhuman head turned in their direction, and the eyes that had haunted Elliott’s nights for as long as he could remember focused on Keyes.
“It’s awake.” Elliott barely recognized his own voice.
The creature turned its gaze, examining him with cold detachment. That vile mouth moved, and the teeth showed clearly. Along the right side of the face several thick scars showed where something with claws had left substantial wounds, once upon a time. Along the brow and closer
to the dreadlocks there were spines that grew from the thick skin, and where there were scars the spines were missing, marking the damage even more vividly.
Pappy Elliott stared, and the thing stared back, its gaze unreadable. How could anyone know what the damned things might think? They were too far removed from human in every reasonable sense.
“What the fuck are you looking at, you bastard?”
The creature narrowed its eyes, and then it made a sound that could only be one thing. It laughed. Like it knew what his words meant. Elliott felt his face flush red with an uneasy mix of embarrassment and anger.
“You laugh,” he growled. “Go ahead. There’s only one of us that’s strapped down.”
To make his point he leaned in, lifted the camera, and took a close-up of the creature’s face. He made sure to clearly track the line of scar tissue and to show the eyes in all their unholy glory. The alien grew silent again and watched as he continued taking pictures of its head, the neck, the torso and the hands at the end of those bound wrists.
The thing did not struggle in its bonds. Instead it merely watched him.
He turned away.
“Only one of us.”
The sound came from the thing strapped to the table. He could tell without a doubt, but when he turned back the alien’s face was turned away from him.
Rage filled him, unbidden. Not fear—not now—just a boiling, seething fury that he could not express, not with so many witnesses.
Instead he took more pictures and carefully catalogued each item that they had taken from the thing. There were small discs that sprouted a half-dozen deadly curved barbs. There was the bloodied discus-like object that had cut one of the Reapers nearly in half. Orologas died as a result of the blade along the edge, and the weapon still had his blood dried onto it.
There were several metal drawers in the room, each with a separate lock. They could have easily used those to store each and every item the monster carried. Instead Elliott took the helmet, the discus, and the shoulder-mounted laser thing. While it watched, he moved all of those devices to a different place. There was a small vault two rooms away. All three items went into that vault and were sealed away. Not for security reasons, but more because he suspected those were the items the bastard would miss the most.
That gave him some small satisfaction.
As an afterthought he took the computerized gauntlet and put it in the same vault. He made sure to show the piece to his prisoner before taking it away.
It didn’t make a sound.
16
Fowler was the one who found it. He remembered that clearly enough. The man was nearly quivering with excitement when they got close.
“Maybe half a click from us. These tracks are as fresh as they come.” By that point Fowler was whispering, because they had no idea what they were up against, only that it was deadly in the extreme.
Suddenly there was a scream behind them. It was Simons, with a nearly perfect round hole driven through the back of his skull. Whatever had hit him, it punched through his head and into a tree he’d been leaning against for a moment. It was a damned bad way to die and that was all there was to it.
Simons had been at the back of the group, yes, but he was plainly visible to Eppinger and Groff. They heard him scream and turned in time to see his head slammed against the tree. They’d watched while he died from an injury that appeared for no apparent reason. It wasn’t a bullet wound. It wasn’t an explosive. It was just a death blow that shouldn’t have been possible.
Then things went sideways.
Eppinger and Groff sent a hail of lead, tearing the hell out of the trees behind Simons’s corpse. If anyone was back there they were dead before the firing was done. But when they checked, if there was anything at all that they had hit and killed, there was no physical evidence.
Fowler scanned the area as carefully as he could.
“There,” he hissed. “Up in the trees.”
By the time Elliott looked, there was nothing to see.
“What was it?”
“I don’t know,” Fowler admitted. “Just movement—I couldn’t get a good look.”
They kept looking. There was nothing else to do about it. They grabbed the dog tags, wrapped Simons up in a canvas sack. The body had to be left behind, though. If they could, they’d pick it up on the way back, but there was no telling when that would be. They had every intention of continuing their march until they found what they were looking for.
Elliott said a prayer for the man.
* * *
His faith was tested for the next two days.
Groff disappeared. They never found an indication of what happened to him. No body, no tags. Not even a drop of blood. It was always possible that he just decided to run, but Elliott didn’t believe it for a second.
A few hours later they found Eppinger, or at least most of him. Something had literally torn his skull and spine free of his body. The remains were close by, yet he’d never made a sound. That was the most terrifying part. The poor bastard went off to relieve himself—his pants were still down around his ankles when they found him—and something killed him and pulled him in half without making enough noise to alert the men standing maybe thirty yards away.
* * *
The third day saw Carter skinned. The man had several tattoos that he’d gotten abroad. Morbidly Elliott wondered if that was why his flesh was peeled away.
On the fourth day Elliott, Rabinowitz, Fowler, Hancock, Burton, and Chambers were all alive and well when the sun went down. Before they settled for the night Fowler moved away from the group and laid out some Claymore mines. He made good and damned sure that everyone knew where to look and where to not go. They’d lost enough people to whoever was hunting them.
Claymores were simple and direct. Fowler pointed them in the direction he wanted covered, laid out the tripwire, and whatever triggered the damned thing would get enough buckshot to shred a squadron of soldiers. Fowler had set them up the last two nights and never caught anything, but he remained persistent when Elliott would have given up.
The first explosion woke them up.
“What the fuck was that?” Burton said, keeping his voice low.
“The Claymores,” Fowler replied, a hint of victory in his voice.
The second detonation saw them ready for whatever was coming their way. Except there was no way they could prepare for what they saw.
The enemy crouched in the branches above. It looked to be at least seven feet in height, big and muscular, with a metal mask over its face and weird hair like dreadlocks. It wore armor on its shins, knees, and part of the thighs. There was some sort of contraption on its shoulder, and it was bleeding in a dozen or more places. The blood was green.
It was bloodied, and it was pissed.
The thing dropped down from a height of easily twenty feet, and when it dropped it swept a heavy blade in front of it and cut Chambers in half. The guy never had a chance. He was hacked in two, and Elliott was the first among them to scream bloody murder at the sight.
Fowler came up with a hunting knife in one hand and his pistol in the other. He took a stab with the knife—a wicked thing with a seven-inch blade—and caught the creature as it was charging toward him. Then he fired the gun, once, and the bullet bounced off the armor on the creature’s chest.
A second later Fowler exploded.
The device on the thing’s shoulder was a mounted weapon, and it blew him apart.
Hancock lifted his M-16 and fired it repeatedly at the thing, hitting it several times. He had much the same luck as Fowler, though, and most of the rounds struck armor and were deflected. Two hit flesh and cut through it, but the monster didn’t stop. It fired something from a wrist mount and Hancock fell back with a smoking wound in his chest. He coughed blood before he stopped moving.
Rabinowitz and Burton ducked into the trees and tried to flank the thing, and that left Elliott in the thick of it. The beast came for him; he saw the blades pop
free from the wrist gauntlet, and managed to block the first attack. They came in fast and he stepped in closer, rather than dodging, and used both of his arms to stop the blow, but his best was barely enough.
The thing grunted and flexed and the next thing he knew he was hurled through the air and rolling into the foliage. He came to a stop with his heart hammering away and his eyes bugged out, not just because his opponent was so damned big, but also because he was inches away from the tripwire for one of Fowler’s Claymores.
Before it could come for him again, Rabinowitz moved around from behind a tree and fired several rounds. The line of holes spread upward from the left thigh and into the stomach of the creature. Three more blew into the massive body, each of them leaking a vile green blood that shouldn’t have been possible. He understood then that the thing had to be from another planet, or another dimension, or damned near anywhere that wasn’t Planet Earth.
Even as that thought came to him, Rabinowitz’s round found the face of the creature—the metal mask that hid that face away, at least—and blew a hole through its eye socket. The head snapped back for a moment, and then another jet of the foul green blood spilled out.
The roar that came from the thing made his guts tighten and his teeth clench. The thing fell back and screeched and then moved quickly around one of the trees.
Elliott should have fired on it while he had the chance. Even though he was still on the ground, it was in his line of sight. But instead he froze, mesmerized as the alien took off its face mask and looked around. It was as ugly as anything he’d ever seen, and it was royally pissed off.
Alien? Demon? Whatever the damned thing was, it was the stuff of nightmares. One eye was missing, but the other glared balefully as it scanned around, searching for the source of its pain. It disregarded a wound that would have sent an ordinary man into shock.
The creature saw Rabinowitz and flung something through the air. The man tried to dodge, but failed. An instant later he was on the ground and screaming. Half of his arm was gone, and his M-16 lay next to him.
THE PREDATOR HUNTERS AND HUNTED Page 11