Apex: A Hunter Novel Page 10

  Eventually, Bya cleared his throat. “Need to take a break, sir,” he croaked. I tried not to wince. His voice really did not sound quite right.

  “Of course. My aide will escort you,” Uncle said, and Josh got up and led Bya to the bathroom.

  And there, in the one place where cameras would not be, Josh became “Al,” and “Al” became Josh.

  Most important of all, they exchanged Perscoms.

  That was the reason for the heavy growth of facial hair Bya had sprouted. It mimicked the fake beard Uncle had gotten for Josh, a beard that effectively erased any chance that facial recognition software would pick him up as himself.

  When they came back out, Bya looked exactly like Josh. I was amazed. His human mimicry had improved beyond all recognition….

  But there were stories about that, in the pre-Diseray folklore, about creatures that could so accurately mimic a person that their own spouses could not tell the difference. “Shifters” did not always change from man to animal. Sometimes they changed to specific people. I think I had better talk to Bya about this. If there are more Othersiders that can do this…they might be walking the streets of the city this very minute!

  Of course, that was what the Psimons were supposed to be looking for, but I no longer trusted that they were.

  And there was something else hidden in all that hair on Josh’s face: a voice-distorter, one carefully tuned so that “Al’s” voice wouldn’t register as manipulated, but also wouldn’t match Josh’s voiceprint.

  Now “Al” did a lot more talking, and I was actually kind of impressed with the stuff Josh was making up. I wasn’t sure where he was getting it from, and I don’t think I would have been able to be so glib. But then again, he’d probably been given access to Uncle’s files on the rebels and was using them as the basis for his “report.”

  We kept this going as long as it seemed feasible, then just when I was beginning to think we were pushing our luck, our Perscoms went off. That is, mine and Kent’s did. Not with an actual callout, but with the request to run our Hounds and eyeballs over another site in Spillover, since all the on-shift Hunters but us were otherwise engaged.

  “Just drop me off there,” said “Al.” “I’ll make my own way home.”

  “Unarmed?” Uncle said, looking just enough concerned to be plausible.

  “Al” laughed. “Been running Spillover for twenty years, I figure I know how to get around by now, armed or not.”

  So we three headed for the roof, where the chopper picked us up and dropped us off in an area of Spillover unfamiliar to me in person—though I knew from my map this was where the shelter Kent had picked out was. We made a show of poking around, but we only stirred up a couple of Goblins.

  Then Kent ducked inside the wreckage of what looked like some sort of “official” building. There were carved stones that had fallen from the facade that said P and ICE, so I guessed “Post Office.” We headed down a long set of cracked and overgrown cement steps. It smelled of damp and crushed moss down here. Kent gestured to Josh to put his antique Perscom up against the lock on the door. He did; the lock recognized it, and clicked open.

  The door was massive. So were the walls. Kent shook up a chem-light, and we went in.

  Once inside, he found a hand-lamp, lit it, and closed the door. We were standing in an entryway that led to a second massive door, this one standing open. The wall must have been a good foot thick. We went in and found ourselves in an enormous open room.

  “Wow,” Josh said, pulling off the beard. “This is bigger than I thought.”

  “Government shelter from the Cold War days,” Kent said. Josh looked baffled. “Never mind. It’s probably as old as the building, decades before the Diseray. It was meant to hold a couple hundred people. This would have been the space where everyone spent their waking hours.”

  We walked through the shelter, which was cleaner than I had expected. There was the entrance room; the one big central room; a long room that was obviously a bathroom with sinks, showers, and toilets on one side of the central room; three smaller rooms including a kitchen on the other side; and a room full of bunk frames at the rear. The bunk room was pretty useless; the frames had been bolted to the floor, probably to keep them from going over during a bomb blast, and they had rusted and buckled into a tangle of dangerous metal. Somehow the bathroom still actually worked, maybe from cisterns somewhere that were still fed by rainwater, though I sure wouldn’t trust that water to drink. The kitchen was also useless—the big stoves had turned into single chunks of rust, and the refrigerator doors hung askew on fused hinges—but the two remaining small rooms had been cleared out, one turned into a storeroom, the other into a place to live.

  The air moved, ever so slightly. By now whatever filtration system had been designed to remove the radioactive fallout was long gone, but something was bringing fresh air down here. Maybe back when these shelters had first been cleaned out and stocked, the ventilation system was opened up. Again, there was a scent of damp and cold concrete, but nothing musty or redolent of mildew down here.

  And I was impressed by how well it had been stocked. There were cartons of Basic Ration Biscuits, enough to last a year, a good supply of clean packaged water, and plenty of other supplies I didn’t examine. In the living area were foam mattresses and sleeping bags, a bicycle-style battery charger, cartons of batteries, a basic rifle and pistol and plenty of ammo, a bookcase full of books, lanterns, and cartons of the same standard clothing Josh was wearing now, warm- and cold-weather versions.

  “If you lock the door into the kitchen, you lock access to all three rooms,” Kent said. “And if you think you hear someone trying to break in, I suggest you do that, then douse your lights and stay quiet, just in case they brought something that can get them past the blast door. Don’t leave anything anywhere else in this place that suggests there’s anyone staying here.” He spread his hands. “Other than that, it’s yours to do what you want. If I were you, I’d set up targets in the big room and use it as a shooting gallery.”

  That was Kent’s delicate way of suggesting he didn’t think Josh knew how to shoot well enough to protect himself. Josh nodded.

  “You’re far enough underground and sheltered enough by the blast walls that you should get the ‘cave effect,’ meaning it shouldn’t get colder than about fifty-five in the winter. If you’re here that long, we’ll have to figure out a way to heat your small room, at least.” I’d wondered about that. “I advise you to do some careful exploring around here; your Psi-powers should warn you if anything or anyone is coming close. And if they do, retreat and close and lock the blast door to the outside. Then do the same with the inside one.”

  “Ah,” Josh said, speaking at last. “I can open the door from inside, then?”

  “That Perscom you have now will unlock it from either side. It also has a Psi-shield on it,” Kent continued. “There’s a stud on the side that activates it. So if you suspect there is something or someone looking for you with psionic powers, use it. Don’t use it for anything but passive listening, reading, or watching what’s loaded in it, though, unless it’s a complete and total emergency. It’s an old Hunter model, but if you show up on the network people will wonder why it’s still active. I’ll give you a contact number you can use if it is an emergency, but normally we’ll contact you, not the other way around.”

  “I think I’d have to be bleeding to death before I’d call for help,” Josh said with a shudder. Then he seized Kent’s hand and began pumping it, repeating his thanks and his gratitude so many times I began to wonder if he was stuck in a loop. Kent rolled his eyes at me but seemed pleased enough. I certainly was. Josh had gotten his up-close look on how he was going to be living for the foreseeable future, and if he’d been faking all this, now was the time for him to back out.

  But he wasn’t. We’d removed him from home and comforts, we’d completely severed him from PsiCorps, and he was grateful. So there was my answer. He hadn’t been faking any of it.
Maybe I should have been ashamed of myself for doubting him, but I wasn’t. I was too busy feeling relieved.

  And about that time, our Perscoms went off. This was a callout. A real one.

  Kent called in for “me” to meet us at the chopper. Then he made a second call to Tober, Raynd, and Cielle. “I want you three in a chopper now, and get me an on-site assessment,” he said as we sprinted across the empty expanse of the big room. “We’ll be about ten minutes behind you. Don’t engage unless there are lives in danger.” We ran up the concrete steps, and Josh shut and locked the blast door behind us. Our chopper was coming in, and we jumped for it.

  In five minutes we were back at HQ, and as soon as we set down, “I” ran out and jumped into the chopper. I’ve been in too many communal hot tubs to have been embarrassed by stripping down in front of Kent and exchanging clothing and Perscoms again with Scarlet, but doing so in a moving chopper was…an adventure.

  “Team TRC to Kent.”

  “Go, TRC,” Kent replied, as Scarlet and I lay on our backs and kicked our legs in the air, pulling our pants on as quickly as possible.

  “Get here as fast as you can,” Tober said. My blood ran cold. “It’s something new.”

  “HQ, can you ID?” Kent asked as we raced toward the ag-station. This one had been in harvest mode, up and running at full capacity, which meant it was completely manned with at least a dozen ag-techs. The electric fences were down, the solar arrays destroyed, the wind generator lying on the ground in a complete state of wreckage. There was an open Portal about a hundred yards away, just outside of the remains of the electric fence.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that one of the big cargo doors to the loading area was torn off its hinges, and the Othersiders were inside. Now there was just one door between them and the inside of the station where the techs were.

  Othersiders that weren’t like anything I had ever seen before.

  Before the Outsiders spotted us, we dove for cover beside the rest of the team behind a harvester that had been turned off and left in the field when these things attacked. We all took time to size the situation up.

  These things were just wrong, in a way that nothing I had seen before had ever been. Like someone had taken three different critters and mashed them together. Not at all like the Minotaurs, who gave the impression that cattle had managed to evolve into bipeds. Even the Nagas had a certain symmetry to them, once you got a closer look.

  But these…

  Let me just start with their size. Big. As big as the average farm truck. Sand-colored, furry bodies, and bushy dark manes like a lion, but that is where the comparison broke down. They had tawny humanoid faces, faces that were just human enough to slingshot them into the uncanny valley, with big flat noses and upper and lower fangs protruding over the thick lips. It just looked…wrong. Like something had carved off the lion’s head and stuck an almost-human face there. A demonic face, maybe.

  Then there was the wrongness at the other end, because instead of lion tails, they had fat, segmented, chitinous tails curving up over their backs, exactly like a scorpion’s, complete with wicked stingers. And just to mess things up some more, their feet were scaled instead of furred, and looked like they’d been yanked off a giant reptile.

  “Folklore says Manticores,” HQ replied promptly. “Seen in Eurasia, not here. At least, not until now. Sting carries a toxin.”

  “Because of course it does,” Kent muttered.

  “Claw strikes are lethal, bite is lethal, sting can be lethal or narcotic. Reports are they can control the amount of toxin.”

  “Of course, if that stinger goes in the eye or the heart, the amount of toxin won’t matter,” Raynd pointed out. We were all subvocalizing through our headsets to avoid being heard by the monsters.

  “We’re Hunters. We’ll figure it out. More Hunting, less talking,” said Tober impatiently. And he was right. Those things were trying to enlarge the door into the station itself, and if they succeeded, they’d be a lot harder to attack without putting the staff in danger.

  “Bullets work,” HQ said helpfully. “They don’t Shield.”

  “That’s what we need. Kent out.” The armorer unslung his assault rifle. Cielle and I did the same. Until we killed a couple of those things, Cielle was more use as a markswoman than using magic.

  The guys had already brought over their Hounds; in the shelter of that enormous red harvester we opened the Way and brought over ours. Bya, of course, was still not among them.

  They packed up around me, looking at me in expectation. Myrrdhin for now is pack alpha, I said to all of them. Then to him, Use your best judgment. I was just grateful Myrrdhin was as competent as he was. I couldn’t have asked for two better pack leaders than Bya and Myrrdhin.

  We all moved on the building as a group, staying below the tips of the crops and creeping along slowly, with the Hounds between us and the Manticores. The Othersiders didn’t seem to notice us; they had managed to pop the door out of its frame, and now they were trying to enlarge the hole where it had been. All the ag-buildings out here were reinforced ’crete, hard to break or dig into, but there were a lot of the Manticores, and they were powerful and determined.

  Just then one of those stinger tails lashed forward to strike something I couldn’t see.

  “Kent!” I shouted, as the Manticore lunged forward and then spun around and dashed out of the cargo bay, a limp human in its mouth. But Kent had already seen it, and so had Cielle and Scarlet.

  The beast tried to make for the Portal, but Scarlet’s and Cielle’s Hounds harried it from the air, and half of mine cut it off from the Portal. Kent, Cielle, and I let loose with a volley of shots, aiming for the body. We didn’t dare shoot at the head, not with a victim in the thing’s mouth.

  It tried to fight through the Hounds, but there were too many of them, so it turned to face them. It moved as fast as a regular scorpion, and although its mouth was encumbered, its tail and forepaws were not. The Hounds worked together like a well-oiled machine, dashing in and out, keeping it confused with a multitude of targets, until we finally got enough bullets into it to drop it. Dusana dashed in and picked up the limp body of the man the Manticore had stung. Get him somewhere safe and guard him! I ordered, and as I heard his wordless assent, turned my attention back to the Othersiders still trying to get into the building. Our assault on their companion had gone unnoticed, so they must not have had any psychic links. They might be like Minotaurs—once they got focused on something, it would take a grenade to pull their attention away.

  Grenade!

  “Kent, do we care about the stuff in the dock?” I shouted over the radio.

  “Hell no!” came the reply.

  “Good!” Tober snarled, as if he had read my mind. “Fire in the hole!”

  And with that, he brought up the RPG launcher he was carrying and fired into the loading dock. Before I could blink, the loading dock vanished in smoke and a flash, and the heat and shock wave of the blast struck us.

  When the smoke cleared, the trailers that had been unloading there were in bits. There was vegetable pulp everywhere. And there were a couple dozen pairs of flat, golden eyes staring at us angrily. A couple of the Manticores opened their mouths and roared at us, and the rest charged.

  The Hounds wove a gauntlet of protection between us and the Othersiders as the beasts did their best to get within striking distance, and we unloaded bullet after bullet into their hides. But as we had seen with the first one, these things took a lot of damage before they went down. Those wicked stingers lashed out again and again, fast and deadly, and I felt them just skimming past my Hounds’ hides as they danced with death.

  If they got as far as us…

  But they didn’t. The Hounds saw to that.

  And once we’d killed three or four, Cielle’s Hounds were able to feed her magic energy, and she was able to open up on them. That was something they weren’t able to shake off.

  I didn’t know she was powered
up until suddenly the Manticore I was shooting at lost its face.

  “Holy—!” I exclaimed, startled. The thing had dropped in its tracks, of course, and a second later I was shooting at another, but I hadn’t been prepared for how vulnerable these things were to Cielle’s blasts. If bullets worked, magic seemed to work better! So I dropped the muzzle of my rifle and let it dangle from the sling while I unloaded a levin bolt of my own.

  It was nothing like as powerful as Cielle’s, but this Manticore dropped too, with a massive hole where its eye had been.

  Seeing our results, the others did the same, and after another four went down, the Manticores suddenly realized that we were mowing them down. One of them roared, and they all turned tail and ran for the Portal.

  The Hounds chased them all the way there; the others followed, but since we had them on the run, I headed for Dusana, where he was standing guard over the tech we had rescued.

  Dusana had blown himself up to his full height and planted himself right over the man’s unconscious body. I didn’t doubt that Dusana could have held his own against any Manticore that had wanted to recapture its prize.

  How is he? I asked as Dusana moved aside so I could examine the man.

  Unconscious, Dusana replied. But as far as I can tell, no worse.

  “Kent,” I called into my radio, as I knelt beside the poor man. “I have the victim. He’s still unconscious.” I felt for a pulse, and got one. “Pulse is fast, he’s twitching and drooling and sweating. Anything I should do for him?”