All too aware that he was out in the open, Scott contemplated whether he should lower his rifle and use his elbows to shuffle backward. After a few moments, he decided against it. If the Hunter wanted to take him out long-range it could do so at any time, so why create further temptation by spending several minutes wriggling across the clearing like a maggot? Presumably the enemy was up there in the trees, hidden behind its invisibility shield, relishing the chaos and fear it was spreading with its sporadic attacks. Or maybe it had identified Dutch, armed with his own version of the Hunter’s energy weapon, as its primary target, and was now working its way round to him, intending to remove him from the equation.
Where, in fact, was Dutch? Scott quickly glanced around, but couldn’t spot him anywhere. He counted the men he could see. There were eight of them altogether, including Ishfaq and Lau crouched behind a rock ahead of him and to his left, rifles trained on the burning trees, and a couple of Dutch’s guys over to his right, pressed up against the trunks of a pair of trees that edged the clearing.
As Scott’s restless gaze flickered back toward Lau and Ishfaq, he saw a shimmer in the air, like a shoal of silvery fish, above the rock behind which they were crouching. A second later the “shoal” settled over Lau, who immediately began to writhe and scream.
But only for a moment. Because abruptly the “shoal” seemed to come together, to tighten around Lau, and then, incredibly and horribly, his squirming body simply burst apart, sliced and shredded into unrecognizable chunks of meat, as if attacked by frenzied piranhas.
Shocked beyond measure by the second sudden and violent death, in a matter of minutes, of one of his best and most trusted friends and colleagues, Scott’s instinctive reaction was to open fire at the space above the rock in the hope of hitting the cloaked Hunter. As he fired – and he was not the only one – his mind raced, trying to make sense of Lau’s death.
A net! he thought. It must have been a net! He knew, not only because Dutch himself had almost lost his life to one, but also because the Major had once given his team a lecture about the various weapons the Hunters were known to employ, one of the more specialized of which was a “net gun,” which fired a metallic net that settled over its victim and instantly began to contract. Presumably the net could contract slowly, bestowing a slow, drawn-out and painful demise on its target, or – as in this case – swiftly, resulting in a messy but instantaneous death.
After raking the area above the rock with bullets for several seconds, Scott realized he was shooting at empty air and ceased firing. There was nothing left of Lau now but a spatter of blood and offal, which dripped and slithered down the rock he’d been crouching behind, as if someone had thrown a bucket of animal guts over it. Ishfaq, meanwhile, drenched with his friend’s remains, had thrown himself to the ground and covered his head as soon as the barrage had started. Now, as the crash of gunfire ceased, he raised his head cautiously.
As he did, there was a shimmering distortion in the air beside him, and all at once the Hunter, decloaked, was standing there. Before anyone could react, it grabbed Ishfaq by the back of his combat vest and lifted him into the air as easily as a boy might lift a kitten by the scruff of its neck.
Ishfaq yelped in surprise, and tried to twist round, to bring his rifle to bear, but the Hunter used its free hand to swat the weapon from his grip. Then it stamped on it, crushing the barrel, when it hit the ground.
All of this happened in less than two seconds. Two seconds in which every man, in and around the clearing, trained their weapons on the Hunter. But no one dared pull his trigger for fear of hitting Ishfaq.
As if taunting them, the Hunter raised Ishfaq a little higher, effectively using the kicking soldier as a human shield, and then swung him left and right, daring one of its enemies to open fire. When none of them did, it threw back its head and made a crackling, chittering sound, like that of a Geiger counter encountering a high dose of radiation.
The fucker’s laughing at us! Scott thought, anger tingling through him. He watched as the Hunter shimmered and disappeared again, leaving Ishfaq, still struggling and kicking ineffectually, looking as though he was dangling in midair.
Scott’s gun was getting heavy, his head swimming again. He looked down at his wounded leg and saw that the bandage he’d wrapped around it was already red and sodden. His surroundings began to spin sickeningly and he knew that if he didn’t lie down, he’d pass out. He slumped over onto his right side and lay his head on the ground. Mud squelched up around his helmet, but not high enough to obscure his vision. On the far side of the clearing, Ishfaq still appeared to be levitating, though his struggles to get away were becoming feebler now. Scott felt a great lassitude sweeping over him; he was starting to feel numb all over. It was not an unpleasant feeling, and he had a great desire to give in to it, even though an increasingly tiny voice in his head was screaming at him to stay alert, to do his duty.
He closed his eyes.
Immediately he was drifting on a black but incredibly calm sea. Time lost all meaning, and so he had no idea how much of it had passed before he became aware of the tiny voice yammering again in his ear: Wake up! Wake up!
Opening his eyes seemed such a strain it made his eyeballs ache. The light was painful, and he had to blink several times before his vision came into focus. On his right was mud, on his left trees and sky. This disoriented him for a moment before he remembered he was lying down. But there was something else too, a dark shape that bisected the trees and sky, and that was getting increasingly bigger. It was only when he realized that the dark shape was vertical, and not horizontal as he was seeing it, that he understood what it was. It was a person moving toward him. No, floating toward him.
It was Ishfaq!
Which meant the Hunter was crossing the clearing, heading directly for him!
The sight jolted his thoughts into action, as if someone had applied electrodes to his brain. Did the Hunter know he was here? Was it heading specifically for him? Or did it assume he was just another dead soldier, lying in the dirt?
Moving slowly, so as not to draw attention to himself, he fumbled for his gun, which was lying on the ground in front of him, and dragged it up to his face with arms that felt like lead, until he was able to peer through the sights. Ishfaq was still swinging from side to side, his dangling feet about a meter and a half off the ground.
Which meant… which meant…
Still lying full-length on the ground, Scott waited, allowing the cloaked alien to get closer…
When it was only around six or seven meters away, he opened fire.
His bullets tore across the clearing, so low to the ground that some of them must have virtually skimmed through the mud. They passed under Ishfaq’s swaying feet and cut the Hunter’s legs from under it.
As splotches of green, glowing blood suddenly appeared in midair and flew in spatters across the clearing, the alien bellowed in rage and pain. Ishfaq’s body lurched to one side, and then was suddenly flying across the clearing toward Scott, a human-shaped projectile of flailing limbs. Scott caught a glimpse of Ishfaq’s sweating, panicked face, and then all one hundred and sixty pounds of him, not to mention the forty pounds or so of equipment he was carrying, crashed down on top of him.
In truth, the injuries to both men caused by the impact were superficial – Ishfaq hit Scott’s body, then bounced off and flipped over, landing on his back in the mud – but on the way through, his foot, or his knee, or some other part of his body, caught Scott’s injured leg a hefty whack, sending a white-hot, zigzagging flare of agony tearing through him.
It was like a firework shooting up through Scott’s body to explode in his head, wiping out all sensation but pain. It engulfed him so completely that for several seconds he couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t see or hear or feel anything else.
Then, after what seemed an eternity, the burst of fire and light began once again to ebb, and his senses slowly returned. Colors and shapes spun back together, and the firs
t thing Scott saw when they did was the face of the Hunter, mandibles thrust aggressively forward, teeth bared, eyes glaring, dreadlocks swinging, as it hauled itself through the mud toward him.
It was no more than three meters away, its massive clawed hand groping toward him, when he pulled his revolver from its holster. Arms and hand shaking uncontrollably, he pointed and fired – once, twice, three times.
Green blood flew from the side of the thing’s face. It roared. But it kept on coming.
Scott saw strings of saliva stretching between the Hunter’s widening jaws. Saw taloned fingers on a crocodile-like hand stretching toward him…
Then a shadow fell over Scott’s upper body as a figure appeared on the creature’s left, and suddenly there was a whhooooooshhh! like a rocket taking off, and the Hunter’s head disintegrated in a burst of light and luminous green blood.
For a moment it seemed even this would not stop the alien’s advance, such was its single-minded fury and tenacity. The fingers on its upraised hand clenched and unclenched, its now headless body twitched and shuddered – and then the life simply went out of it, and it hit the ground with a meaty thud.
Scott, caked in mud and drenched in the creature’s blood, began to shudder too. After the heat of pain and adrenaline, a wave of numbing cold swept through his body, and the light above was blocked out as a shadow fell over him.
Is this death? he thought. The shadow spoke.
“Captain Devlin? Scott? Can you hear me?”
If this was Death, then he had a German accent. Scott blinked.
“Dutch?”
“You’re in a bad way, Scott. Your leg’s fucked. But you’ll be okay. Trust me.”
Scott heard a tearing sound. Vaguely he was aware of Dutch moving down toward his injured leg, crouching beside him. Then he had something in his hand. A canister.
He’s going to spray paint me, Scott thought, like a used car. His thoughts were mushy now, shooting off in all directions, colliding like wasps dizzied and confused by smoke.
There was a long hissss. He felt coolness on his leg. The pain receding.
“Soon get you patched up. Hang in there, buddy.”
Dutch’s voice, rich and deep, echoing along a spiraling corridor.
The distorted hacking of helicopter blades, somewhere above him.
He tried to look up, but instead found himself sinking.
Down the rabbit hole.
Into…
…blackness.
CHAPTER TWELVE
2013
It was the same church where Marcus and Devon had got married.
Watching the flag-folding ceremony, Scott couldn’t get that thought out of his head, couldn’t come to terms with the contrast between that day and this. He had only been in this building twice, and those two occasions had been the best and worst days of Devon’s life. On the first of those she’d been a vision in white, utterly radiant, the epitome of beauty and happiness. Now, dressed in black, she looked thin, almost withered, her dark skin not glowing but ashen, her eyes wet with tears.
When the military chaplain presented her with the flag that had adorned her husband’s coffin, she looked bewildered, like a child receiving a merit badge without knowing what it was for. Seeing her made Scott’s heart ache – literally ache. He wanted to go to her, wrap his arms around her and protect her from all of this. And maybe he would have done if not for the damn wheelchair. Or rather, his damn leg, which was the reason he was in the damn wheelchair.
Beside Devon were her and Marcus’s children, Michael and Precious, Michael staring at his father’s coffin as if he couldn’t work out what it was, or what it was doing here, or what he was doing here, and Precious clutching a fluffy white horse with a pink mane, her saucer eyes flickering constantly and fearfully toward her weeping mother. Wearing her best powder-blue dress, white tights and patent leather shoes, the little girl was leaning against her grandmother on her other side. Marian Thorne had a protective arm around her granddaughter’s shoulders, and, like her husband, wore a stoic expression – although it had to be said that Marcus’s dad, Fraser, seemed a hell of a lot older and more stooped than the last time Scott had seen him.
Scott hadn’t cried since his best friend’s death, and he didn’t cry now. He couldn’t. Grief had dried him up, hollowed him out. He felt like a tree, once hale and mighty, now eaten up from the inside by termites. It might have been less than two weeks since Marcus and Lau had died, leaving him the only survivor of their original quartet, but already he felt that if anyone were to hug him too hard, or shake his hand with too powerful a grip, his bones and flesh would simply crumble like old wood, leaving nothing but dust.
The church was packed – more packed than it had been for Marcus and Devon’s wedding – and although it was gratifying to see so many people honoring his friend’s memory, that fact made Scott feel obscurely sad. Many of the mourners were in uniform, but because of his wheelchair, he had been one of the first to enter the church, and, after the ceremony was over, was one of the last to leave, and so he didn’t realize that Dutch Schaefer numbered among those uniformed mourners until much later, when he saw him in the crowd that had gathered in Devon’s parents’ house to pay their respects.
Scott was about to ask Ishfaq to wheel him over there – in time, he would be able to do it himself, but right now he didn’t have the strength, having broken three ribs when Ishfaq had landed on top of him, which flared with pain whenever he so much as clenched his fist – when the crowd seemed to part before him, and suddenly there was Devon.
She looked lost. She also looked both much older and much younger than her thirty-eight or so years. She stood in front of his wheelchair, staring down at him, then she dropped to her knees, and as though the thud of impact had caused it, tears welled in her eyes, then spilled over and ran down her cheeks.
Scott hated himself for it, but he wished he were somewhere else. He had never been great with raw displays of emotion, and this was as raw as it got.
Almost immediately, however, his antipathy was subsumed by a great wave of shame and guilt, and the next moment he found himself whispering, “I’m sorry, Devon. I’m so, so sorry.”
She reached for him, wrapped her arms around him. He winced, anticipating the scream of protest from his ribs, but the pressure she exerted was gradual and gentle. As their cheeks met, he felt the wetness of her tears on his face. But what really broke his heart was the sweet and delicate scent of her skin – something floral, like lavender or lilies.
“You ain’t got nothin’ to be sorry about,” she said in a small, broken voice. “You were Marcus’s best friend, and you looked after him, and he loved you.”
Scott’s heart wasn’t just aching now, it was tearing apart. “I didn’t look after him well enough,” he said. “I wish I could go back. If I could take his place, I would.”
He felt her shake her head next to his. “Don’t say that, Scott. What happened happened for a reason. I wish it hadn’t, but it did, and that’s all there is to it.”
She broke away from him, her hands sliding over his back and down his arms until they were resting in his.
“So what about you?” she said, and despite everything she was going through there was real compassion in her eyes. “What’s the news?”
He grimaced. “Leg’s beyond repair. I may walk again, they say, but only with a cane.” He tried to turn his grimace into a smile. “Course, I’ll try to prove them wrong. You know me.” After a pause, he admitted, “But it looks like my army career’s over.”
“Oh, Scott,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
He shook his head, wanting to tell her that she had lost far more than he had, but found he was unable to speak.
Eventually she asked, “So what will you do?”
He shook his head, and managed to say, “I haven’t really thought about it yet.”
It was a lie, of course. He had thought about nothing else, but so far all he had been able to see ahead of him wa
s a void. He had spent long hours in his hospital bed staring at the photo of his mom, hoping it would imbue him with purpose, provide him with inspiration, even supply a magical answer to his problems.
“You will, though,” Devon said, cutting in on his thoughts.
Scott blinked. “What?”
“You’ll think about it. And you’ll do something amazing. I know you will. You won’t let a little thing like a gimpy leg stop you. Marcus always said you were the most single-minded person he’d ever met.”
“Stubborn, I think he meant.”
That raised a ghost of a smile. “Determined.”
Scott wanted to tell her what an incredible, compassionate, brave, warm-hearted, unswervingly loyal man her husband had been, but all that came out of his mouth was, “Marcus was the best of men. The best.”
It may have only scratched the surface of what he wanted to say, but it earned him a real smile this time, and that smile broke his heart all over again.
“I know it,” she whispered, the tears shimmering in her eyes once more, flowing anew down her cheeks.
They were still holding hands, both of them too choked to continue their conversation, when a small figure appeared beside Devon’s kneeling figure and tugged at her sleeve. Not for the first time, Scott felt a pang at the sight of little Michael in his suit and tie. It was an all-too-poignant reminder of the occasion – not that he needed another one.
Forcing himself to swallow his emotions and smile, Scott said, “Hey, little guy.”
Michael turned a shy, almost sulky gaze on him. “I ain’t so little,” he said.
“I guess you’re not at that,” Scott said. “You’re a pretty big boy now.”
Devon sniffed and said, “You remember Uncle Scott, don’t you, Michael?”
Michael nodded. “Uh-huh. You’re Daddy’s friend.”
“I am,” Scott said.
“My daddy’s dead,” Michael said bluntly. “He died in a war. He was brave.”
Scott didn’t dare look at Devon. He kept his gaze fixed on the little boy. His voice light, he said, “He sure was. He was the bravest man I ever met.”
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