Monster Hunter Alpha-ARC (21 page)

Earl had needed time to regenerate, and that meant a place to hide. After touching the back doors, he’d leapt as far as he could manage toward the truck, hoping the spilling diesel smell would temporarily cover his tracks. He’d found the cold metal of the truck bed and, not seeing any alternative, had climbed in and buried himself in the sand. Most of his bones had knit back together, the bleeding had mostly stopped, and he could hear, and even see a little, but he was still terribly weak, disoriented, and now had sand stuck in every crevice of his body, and was therefore in a
really
bad mood.

Nikolai hit a shelf and went to the ground on his back. Earl was right behind. He landed on Nikolai and slugged him in the face. The Russian got his hands up, trying to shove Earl off, but Earl knocked the hands out of the way and hit him again. Then he got his weight onto Nikolai’s chest, and Earl’s fists were flying, one after another, slamming Nikolai’s head over and over again, beating his face into a bloody mess.

“Cheatin’ asshole!” Earl roared as he cocked back another right and tried to drive it
through
Nikolai’s face. Nikolai’s hand shot up, and he managed to hook his thumb into Earl’s eye. The Hunter bellowed as Nikolai gouged it deep into the socket, but he didn’t let up. Earl took Nikolai’s head in both hands, raised it, and slammed it into the floor repeatedly. The second impact cracked the tile; the third, Nikolai’s skull.

Gasping for breath, Earl raised his fist to strike again but stopped as a terrible pain shot up his side. He rolled off, cursing, reaching for the source of the agony, found the hilt of a folding knife sticking from his kidney, and jerked it out in a spray of blood. Nikolai raised one leg and kicked Earl in the chest, sending him crashing against the truck.

Blinking through the blood, Earl stepped forward. His opponent had already risen and had picked up a can of creamed corn. Earl threw the knife and missed. Nikolai threw the corn and didn’t. The can smashed Earl’s nose flat.

Nikolai used the moment to his advantage and charged, throwing his knee. He managed to hit Earl twice in the side while the Hunter’s hands had involuntarily flown to his broken nose. Each hit lifted Earl off the ground before he was able to shove Nikolai away.

The two moved with incredible speed, striking, blocking, each impact sufficient to kill a normal man. Nikolai grabbed Earl by the straps of his armor and rolled, throwing him down the aisle. Earl landed hard on his shoulder, but his hand fell on a weapon. Nikolai came in fast, but Earl slammed the wine bottle over the Russian’s head. The thump echoed through the entire store. Earl tried to club him again, but the bottle shattered across Nikolai’s raised forearm. Wasting no time, Earl drove the jagged remains directly into Nikolai’s abdomen. Nikolai’s responding snap kick launched Earl through a snack display.

They met in the next aisle. The two circled, breathing hard as their bodies healed.

“You’ve gotten slow,” Nikolai said, holding the contents of his stomach in with one hand.

“You’ve gotten sloppy,” Earl snapped. “I can’t believe you fell for that.”

“You’re the fool picking up booby traps.…” Nikolai wiped the blood and sand from his face. “You snuck up on me. You could have changed first. You could have torn me apart. Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t need to be a werewolf to kill a punk like you. We’re in a town full of innocents,” Earl answered, blinking as his eye popped back into place. Everything was much clearer now. “How dare you bring a challenge here?”

For a moment, Nikolai’s expression changed. His voice was suddenly too deep. “
This is no challenge. You want a challenge? Let’s—
” Then he grimaced, gnashing his teeth together. When he spoke again, his voice had returned to a normal pitch. “No…Not yet. You’re a nuisance, Harbinger. A scourge.”

“You ain’t right,” Earl said. The Russian was nuttier than he remembered.

“I’ll never let you have it.” Nikolai closed his eyes and shuddered. The other voice came back.
“Enough! We end this my way.
” Nikolai’s eyes flashed gold. The transformation had begun.

“We can’t do this here!” Earl took a step back. “You lunatic. You psychotic fucking lunatic. We’re in a town. People
live
here.”

“
Their mistake!
” Nikolai growled.

A transformation was incredibly risky, but he had no choice. Nikolai was changing, and if he didn’t, he stood no chance. Earl knew that he’d just have to destroy Nikolai and then maintain enough control to get away from civilization until the blood lust died down. He unbuckled his armor. “You could’ve done this the old-fashioned way, and nobody else had to get hurt.”

Nikolai’s strange voice roared, his hands curling into fists, teeth visible, every vein in his neck standing out, as he fought…
something.
“You have no room to talk!” The first Nikolai shouted. “You killed her! She was innocent, defenseless!”

“I’ve killed a mess of folks. You’re gonna need to be more specific.”

“Lila!” Nikolai was enraged. Bloody spit flew from his lips. “You murdered her. You murdered my
wife
.”

Earl paused, scowling. “I’m drawing a blank.”

Nikolai screamed as he leapt.

* * *

“I told you we’d have a good fight,” the Alpha said. The witch glowered at him, then went back to watching the battle. She didn’t like being proven wrong.

He was pleased to see that he’d made the right choice. Harbinger and Petrov were both unbelievably fearsome while still in human form. He could only imagine what they would do in their purified state. Certainly, he could defeat either of them in a challenge, but he was beyond such things. No slave to the old ways, he would set his own path, forge a new way for all of their kind. Harbinger’s foolish rules dictated that they were only men, nothing better, just different, and that they needed to live in humanity’s bloated shadow. On the other hand, at least Petrov understood that they were superior beings, super predators, but even then, he was content to remain a mere tool for human ideologies and lacked the imagination to do what needed to be done. Petrov had a slave’s mentality. Neither of them had the vision necessary to lead their kind into the future.

His superior senses told him that many humans were coming out of their homes. They’d heard Petrov’s explosion. Some of them had realized that they were under attack and were spreading the word. The streets were coming alive. His children were confused. The magical storm had reached an unbelievable intensity. But none of that mattered. The important thing was which of the mighty werewolves below would be the one whose soul would power his ascension.

It was a perfect struggle. Nature had selected these two as the ultimate predators in their sphere. One would die. One would live to feed his hunger. Which would fuel his metamorphosis? The excitement was unbearable.

The witch pointed at the street below with her flesh hand. “We have visitors.”

A black SUV was sliding into the parking lot of the Value Sense. The driver was clueless in the snow, and they gently collided with a light pole. The doors opened and five heavily armed humans got out. “MCB?” he asked. There should have been no way that they could have arrived through the storm. In fact, they wouldn’t even know about the slaughter of Copper Lake until morning.

“Worse,” the witch muttered. “Hunters.” She held a very special hatred for monster hunters.

“Harbinger’s men?” That seemed odd. His intelligence had said that Harbinger surely would have come alone. He would never involve his human pack in werewolf business.

“No…not even close. I’d know if they were. MHI has a certain…
swagger
. Nothing would make me happier than the arrival of MHI,” the witch grumbled as she extricated herself from the thick snow of the roof. “Enjoy your show. I’ll handle these intruders.” She made a clicking noise, and one of her diggers stepped forward, ready to serve. Eight feet of armored monstrosity bowed before its witch. This time she pointed with her artificial hand. The steel gauntlet seemed disproportionately large sticking out from the sleeve of her fur coat. “Destroy those humans.”

The massive digger leapt from the roof and fell silently to the ground two stories below. The Alpha nodded approvingly. The unnatural things were nothing if not efficient. It would eradicate those vermin. His attention returned to the grocery just as an ear-splitting howl rose into the night. The main event had just begun. “Beautiful.”

* * *

“Look what you did to my Caddy!” Horst shuffled through the three feet of freshly accumulated snow to where the Escalade’s front bumper was crunched into the light pole. It actually didn’t look too bad, but Lins had screwed up. Sure, it was hard to drive through slush, but that was no excuse for scratching his ride. “Is that a dent? That’s a dent. That’s coming out of your pay, moron.”

Lins was livid as he got out. “Screw you, Ryan. What do you expect in a blizzard?”

“Shoulda let me drive,” Jo Ann said. “I’m at least—”

The sound that cut her off pierced all of the Briarwood team to their cores. It started as the cry of a man, filled with anger and pain, only impossibly loud, but as it went on the cry changed, becoming deeper, fiercer, seeming to linger far after any mortal lungs would have run out of breath, until it slowly mutated into a full-on animal howl. A primal, terrible cry, instinctively more terrifying than anything that could ever emanate from a natural creature. The storm had frozen Horst’s skin, but that howl froze his blood.

The staff of Briarwood Eradication Services was actually quiet for once. Horst looked to his employees. Every one of them except for Loco was staring back at him with wide eyes. Their big man just grunted and went back to pulling his machine-gun out of the Caddy, probably too dumb to be scared.

“I think I just pissed myself,” Kelley said.

Jo Ann turned toward the grocery store. “What the
hell
was that?”

That
was an actual monster. The other things they’d run into were nothing compared to that. The fear ran deep. It wasn’t any sort of conscious, logical thought. It was deeper, coming from the lowest part of his brain, warning him that they needed to get away before that awful thing consumed them all. Horst forced himself to speak, and tried to sound as confident as possible. “That’s the sound of money, baby.”

Then there was a second howl, even louder than the first, and somehow Horst instinctively knew that this was a
different
werewolf. Lins jumped. “There’s two of them? You didn’t say nothing about two of them!”

They were chickening out. “Shut up!” he shouted. “Everybody shut your stupid mouths.”

“This isn’t nothing like those zombies we killed,” Kelley exclaimed. “I’m outta here.”

Jo Ann and Lins were babbling, too, as the three of them started getting back in the Caddy. His dreams were falling apart right in front of his eyes. His people were scared senseless. None of them were cowards, but they hadn’t been expecting this. That howl was just wrong, and the answering one was even worse. He understood now that Stark had been telling the truth. This wasn’t a normal werewolf; that thing in there was ancient, and therefore worth a huge PUFF bounty. They couldn’t back out now. There was a reason the government had to pay such stupidly large bounties for this level of creature, because no sane person would willingly go looking for one.

Somehow, Horst found his courage. He was the leader of an elite company of monster hunters. If he walked away, it would be like all those stuck-up MHI chumps would be laughing at him. Ryan Horst had vowed that he was never going to be a nobody again.

He needed to do something quick. He thought back to his brief time with MHI. What would they have done? Those bozos were always motivated. What would Earl Harbinger have done? He would have gotten his crew fired up.
I can do that.
Horst reached into his coat, unsnapped his shoulder holster, and drew his FN 5.7 pistol. He hoisted it into the air and yanked the trigger.

The sudden bang got their attention. Horst realized how stupid that had been as soon as he’d done it, because the insides of his right ear suddenly felt like someone had hit it with a hammer. “Listen up!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs, waving his gun toward the giant hole in the grocery store. “This is what you signed up for. Pull yourselves together, damn it. Each one of those hairy bastards in there is worth at least fifty large. Fifty large! We came all this way to kill these things. We got guns. We got silver bullets. What do they got? Teeth? Shit. They got nothing! I am
not
going home until I got one of these bastards as a rug. You hear me? We’re Briarwood, and we’ve come up here to show these animals who’s boss.”

The three mutinous members of his crew turned their heads sheepishly, afraid to look him in the eye.
Damn right.
Lowering his piece, Horst glared at them. After chewing them out, Earl Harbinger had always softened his voice when he was trying to make a point to the MHI Newbies, like they weren’t worth raising his voice over, but it forced you to listen extra hard. So Horst tried it, speaking quietly, but firmly. “So get your shit together and let’s go. We can
do
this.”

They actually surprised him then. His people responded and went to work. There were a series of metallic
clacks
as weapons were readied. A smirk crossed Horst’s face.
Damn. I’m good.

* * *

Nikolai was on him in a flash, claws erupting from the ends of his fingers. Earl moved aside easily, the change pumping massive amounts of adrenaline through his system. His body was flushed with heat. Despite the freezing wind blasting through the gaping wound in the store, sweat rolled from every pore. Time slowed as Nikolai tore at him, Earl swung with all his might, hand open, fingers wide, and was rewarded with a spray of blood as his nails ripped through the Russian’s flesh.

His enemy stalked away, circling. Four lacerations crossed his heaving chest, having cleanly sliced through his ammo pouches. Nikolai ripped the canvas off and tossed it aside. “MURDERER,” Nikolai roared, his jaw already distorting.
“I’ll rip you apart for what you did to her.”
Nikolai leapt at him.