"Who's afraid?" Banks asked.
"The bear. It's hiding inside the cave." Taylor looked around, more confused now than ever. "She's afraid. Now…what on earth would have a four-hundred-and-forty-pound beast so terrified that it will only defend and not attack when cornered?"
"I have a feeling you have an answer to that."
"I don't, unfortunately." His sensors pinged movement from the cliff above the cave. "But I have the distinct feeling that I'm about to."
Chapter Twenty-Four
Rocks began to rumble down the cliff face as if something had dislodged them. He imagined that whatever it was had woken up and really didn't like him to stride around in his heavy metal suit.
Calmly and quietly, Taylor backed away from the rocks and rubble that rolled down the mountainside. Faint hints of movement caught his eye at first. It was hard to make out what the beast was and the only thing he could really see was the wings. The massive appendages spanned dozens of feet, almost as large as a small airplane, and fanned and waved like it tried to catch the wind before it took off.
"Oh, you are gorgeous," he said softly and smiled as he looked at the cliff, where the creature peered over the edge and down to where he stood.
"Do you see the monster?" Banks asked. "Repeat, do you have a visual?"
"Yeah," he said softly. "More importantly, I think it has a visual of me right now. Desk, would you mind telling and showing Banks that I'm about to try to kill what looks like a giant fucking pterodactyl?"
"A what?" the agent asked.
"A big, fucking, flying dinosaur!" he roared, spun quickly, and tried to get as far away from the cliff as he could. A thunderous screech issued toward him and the entire forest seemed to shake under the force unleashed when the monster took flight.
"What's with these Zoo monsters looking like dinosaurs, anyway?" he yelled as a rhetorical question to himself rather than for the benefit of anyone listening and hurdled a fallen log. "Well, at least we know what the fuck a grizzly bear is afraid of now, right? Something like that probably makes you feel like a rat trying to escape from a goddamn owl!"
"Are you talking to me?" Banks obviously hadn’t grasped the full gravity of the situation.
"No, I'm talking to myself—shit!" He flung himself to the left as the beast swooped and the gargantuan wings flapped hard enough to cause a huge gust through the trees. "Another thing we seldom had to deal with in the Zoo was flying creatures—aside from the fucking locusts, of course, which seemed never-ending. There weren’t many other winged mutants around the jungle and nothing this size that I recall personally."
It shrieked defiance at him, unable to dip beneath the tree cover. Instead, it perched on the treetops that groaned beneath its weight and tried to find an angle down. He continued to run and dodged constantly from left to right to make himself a more difficult target.
After a moment, he could almost hear the famed intelligence these creatures were known to have begin to tick in its head and had no doubt that it would find a way to reach him. It wasn't long before it flapped its wings, still grasping the top of one of the trees. The wood creaked and cracked under strain until, with a twist, the creature soared skyward with half the damn tree trapped in its claws.
"Oh shit. Oh shit!" Taylor drew his assault rifle from its place on his back and attempted to target the monster effectively as he pulled the trigger. He couldn't tell if he had even hit the damn mutant. If he had, the bullets didn’t seem to do much damage as the monster continued to fly even higher until it simply released the huge section of the tree.
He pulled the launcher up on his shoulder, primed one of the rockets, and fired it. A comforting whoosh saw it on its way and a plume of white smoke trailed it to where it impacted hard with the falling tree. A blast flashed brightly and suddenly, it rained splinters and leaves around him.
A screech of annoyance was the immediate response from the creature and it banked sharply, circled once, and flapped its wings to thrust itself back to the cliff face. Monstrous claws curled around two boulders.
"Well, talk about a one-track mind," he muttered.
He wouldn’t be able to reliably destroy the boulders in the air like he had the tree. While he could shoot at the beast itself, there was no tracking mechanism in the rockets themselves. He would have to fire and pray he would hit the target. When something moved that high up and that far away, he definitely wouldn’t be able to fire accurately from this distance. And who wanted a random rocket to fall from the sky?
He needed a better solution and he needed it immediately. The boulders fell from the creature's hands, one at time. They spun almost lazily and with impossible accuracy to where he stood.
"Sonofabitch!" he roared and dove to the left as the boulders plummeted at frighteningly high speed now and bulldozed through the trees above him like they were made from paper. They thudded to a stop powerfully enough to shake the ground and buried themselves in the mud that had collected.
"No fucking way." Taylor growled and delivered a string of epithets as he pushed to his feet and looked up. The mutant swooped again with a series of screeches and roars. The force generated by its wings was almost powerful enough to knock him off of his feet without any kind of direct attack.
He raised his assault rifle and fired a couple of rounds at it. He knew they wouldn’t actually do much good, but as long as he was able to do something, he could feel better about himself.
At least the two women made no effort to talk anymore. Chatting while he hiked through the forest was all well and good, but when he was engaged in a fight with what he'd come to the damn forest to kill, he didn't need distractions.
The flying beast collected two of the destroyed trees like they weighed nothing, elevated powerfully, and circled in an attempt to find a clean shot. He continued to duck and dart between the trees.
This mutant was a little too smart like it knew he was a threat already and it had to eliminate him. He somehow knew this wasn’t a need to kill or eat him as it had the others. It merely wanted him dead and was willing to do almost anything to accomplish that goal.
I need some fucking ideas here.
A crazy, thoroughly stupid plan half-formed in his mind, but for it to work, he needed to be somewhere out in the open. Where had it pinned the bodies to the trees? There were clearings in the area that allowed it to reach down and snatch its victims, pull them up, and pin them to the damn branches.
"Oh, I'm so going to regret this," Taylor mumbled. He had to get it close enough for the rockets to be effective, and for that, he needed to draw it in. It had clearly become more and more frustrated with each failed attempt to crush him from afar. He could use the possibility that this would cloud its judgment to his advantage. All he had to do was draw it in so it would believe it had the opportunity to kill him.
His mind made up, he turned and pushed the mech as quickly as it would safely go as he returned downhill, which added to the speed. The beast overhead was more than capable of keeping up. It followed and tried to keep track of his movements, clearly looking for a way to reach him without being tangled in the trees where it already seemed to know it would be killed.
"Why do I always get the smart ones?" he muttered, more to himself than the two women he knew were listening. Zoo monsters were smart in general and maybe these needed to be even more so this far away from the jungle that would have sustained them if they hadn’t spawned elsewhere.
He could see a break in the trees not too far ahead, and so could the mutant. It began to move faster and higher and prepared to dive. Taylor primed one of the rockets in his shoulder for the strike.
All the warning he had was the frantic beeping from the sensors before the crackle of trees breaking him above told him he had made a couple of miscalculations.
"Oh shit!" he shouted as something grasped his midsection and twisted him. The rocket fired wildly and well wide of the monster that now had him clutched in its talons. It pressed down on his arms to hold them
in place as it dropped to a heavy landing, its weight pinning him down.
He was much closer to it than he'd ever intended to be, yet the proximity brought encouragement rather than panic. Not many would see it as such, but the lack of a beak—replaced instead by a long line of razor-sharp teeth—meant it had no way to break through his armor.
No direct way, at least, and it appeared to know that and made no effort at all to try those teeth on the suit. All he could feel was the added pressure of the creature on top of him, mostly held off by the armor. Unfortunately, he couldn't move his arms and had no clear shot with the rocket launcher either, not without him being caught in the blast radius.
The wings flapped again. The suit was much heavier than the humans it had lofted before, but it would still make it. With incredible strength, the massive appendages drove the mutant skyward and Taylor’s feet lifted off the ground.
It intended to do what eagles did when they couldn't get through a turtle's shell. The monster would drop him from a great height so the armor cracked.
"Like…fucking…hell," he mumbled and struggled to pull his arms free. The right was pinned helplessly to his side, but the left was a little less constricted. If he could only move it a little more, he had a chance.
They climbed faster and the trees started to move away. Only the tallest were still in sight when his left arm suddenly came free. He gasped with relieved frustration as he reached for the sidearm still at his hip, yanked it clear of its holster, and pressed the muzzle to a foot that held him in an iron hold. Without hesitation, he pulled the trigger.
A surprised screech issued from his captor as the foot released him. He wasn't free, but he primed the rockets in his shoulder—two of them this time. He wouldn’t take any goddamn chances.
The second claw released quickly when he pulled the trigger on his handgun again and a moment of vertigo filled him as he hung in the air and waited for gravity to kick in.
In the next moment, he began to fall. He gave himself one second before he launched the rockets. The white plumes clouded his vision for a moment and all he could hear was a loud screech of pain from the mutant before the twin explosions and the distinctive crackle and snap of tree branches breaking.
He met the ground hard enough to knock the breath out of him and immediately looked up. Two blackened holes had replaced the pterodactyl's chest cavity. It tumbled helplessly and its featherless wings caught and ripped on the trees as it finally plunged through to the earth below. The force of impact was so great that the ground shuddered, and he grasped a nearby tree trunk to steady himself, even though he was sprawled prone and wouldn’t fall.
He needed a moment. The air was full of smoke, and he had trouble breathing. Maybe he had a cracked rib or his body simply needed time to recover.
"I need to stop taking these jobs." Taylor hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but who the fuck cared? Finally, he managed to push into a seated position and stared at the still figure of the monster.
"Taylor?" Banks asked tentatively. "Are…are you alive?"
"I think so. The same can't be said for the big, winged bastard, though."
"Do you think there might be any more?"
"I very much doubt it. There was no nest up in the cliffs that I saw, but maybe Desk can check the footage to make sure—you know, zoom it or something for a closer look."
“I’m on it,” Desk said quickly.
He groaned and used the tree to haul himself slowly and carefully to his feet. Honestly, he hoped like hell there weren’t others because he sure as fuck did not want to have to face another one or climb the cliff.
“Desk?” the agent said, and he could hear the anxiety and impatience in her tone.
“One second,” the other woman responded. “Okay…fortunately, you looked at the cliff long enough to get a good feed I could work with. I’ve enlarged and enhanced it, and I’m positive there’s nothing up there.”
“Yeah,” he agreed as he peered up toward the cave and could faintly make out a large dark shape at the entrance. “And momma bear is bringing her baby out. She wouldn’t do that if there were another one of these fuckers to worry about.”
"That’s good enough for me,” Banks replied. It sounds like we need a cleanup crew now. Come in for a debrief. Good work, McFadden."
"Yeah, yeah, don't start falling in love with me again," he grumbled.
“I think you are safe from that.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
There was nothing more to do other than to move away from the forest location, peel his suit off, and head into the city. Despite his physical conditioning being on par with anything that could be found in the military, he could still feel the dull aches in muscles he never knew that he had. That aside, the pain in his ribs had eased and he assumed he’d escaped with bruising rather than anything actually cracked.
He would definitely be sore in the morning, but in the end, he had killed another monster, made the country a little safer, and walked away with one hell of a payday for his effort. There were worse ways to make a living and he had no desire to rethink his life choices.
Despite that, he would always complain, but that was merely to help his case when he presented the invoices and not because he had a genuine problem with how the jobs had gone down.
Banks' called him on the drive into the city.
"Do you miss me already, Special Agent?" Taylor asked with a chuckle. “Oww,” he finished and clutched his side. Even bruising could be a bitch.
"About as much as I miss having pimples as a teenager," she replied and punctuated it with a derisive snort. "Anyway, I'm processing your invoice now and it should be cleared by the bean counters in the agency soon."
"Really?" He had put in a couple of charges that he doubted he would get, which included the price for a few repairs his suit would need.
"Unless there's something you'd like to add or subtract on your invoice?"
"Nope, I have nothing to change. I'm curious, though, since I expected you guys to contest every charge like an insurance company. You are the government, after all. While you love taking money, you hate giving it up."
"That’s a fair comment, but you should know there are plenty of folks in the government who would rather pay their freelancers well and let them get away with a little something here and there rather than play the penny pincher and lose them to corporate interests." She paused for a moment. "You're not trying to get something past me, right?"
"I would never," he said and feigned a southern accent. "The very nerve. How dare you? My honor, ma'am. My honor is insulted, I say!"
"Well, you can go ahead and challenge me to a duel to restore it," she replied with a laugh. "But I'll have you know I'm one hell of a quick draw, so you'll probably end up dead."
"What if I choose swords? Do you know anything about using those?"
"According to the ancient laws of…uh, dueling or whatever, the person who is challenged gets to choose the weapons," she replied smartly. "With that said, do you know anything about using swords?"
"No, but I assume that since I'm bigger and stronger than you, I'd be able to use that to my advantage since you don't know either. But yeah, you'd get to pick the weapons. Question—can I wear one of my suits during the duel?"
"Well, we can establish that kind of shit when you get to a bar and we have a drink to celebrate a job well done. I’ll text you the address."
"I'll be there but I need to find a hotel and take a shower first. I don't know if you know anything about hanging out for extended periods in a mech suit but let me tell you that the smell does indeed get funky. I'll maybe get there in twenty minutes—or thirty, depending on how easy it is to find a hotel in the area."
"I'll see you then." She hung up and he continued into the city of Portland. The bar where she had chosen to meet him was a local dive and not entirely interesting but not terrible either. It seemed the perfect place that enjoyed a stream of regulars who would come in every night for a drink o
r a binge and stagger to their nearby homes.
At least, that was what it looked like from the online reviews, and who was he to question those?
"Still, a drink is a drink," he said to himself as he pulled into the underground parking garage of the hotel he'd chosen.
He had no intention to stay in the city for longer than a night since he needed to return to the shop to help Bobby and Vickie get their orders out in time. Check-in was a simple process and he took the keycard, headed to the room for a quick shower, and left. The bar was within walking distance from the hotel, which had been a primary motivation when he’d chosen it. He wouldn’t have to spend extra on a cab.
The establishment looked almost like it had been described. An older gentleman shared bar duty with a younger trainee and both poured drinks that seemed to be exclusively either neat whiskey or beer from a bottle or a tap. Those who asked for complex cocktails would get a sour look from them, which perhaps explained the two predominant choices.
The waitress seemed a little nicer and smiled and waved at the regulars she recognized. She probably lived mostly on the tips she received, while the other two had a living wage. From what he saw, no one could claim it had a huge turnover, and they probably made only enough to keep the doors open and everyone paid.
Still, it did have a kind of comfortable, lived-in atmosphere that made him feel at home. He eased his jacket off, careful to move slowly to protect his bruised ribs, and hung it over his arm as he joined Banks among the small group of patrons. The heat of the shower had eased some of the pain so he assumed it wasn’t all that serious, but it was still tender.
"It’s nice that you could make it," she said as he took his seat across from her. "I thought you would have wanted to have an early night and get an early start tomorrow."
"The night's still young, so I can still do that. But I might as well have a drink and take in the local scene of the Pacific Northwest. And—don't take this the wrong way—but you're actually not that bad as a drinking buddy."
Silent Death (Cryptid Assassin Book 2) Page 19