Elite: A Hunter novel (10 page)

THINGS
POURED OUT OF the door. Things I’d never seen before: half human-ish with
way
too many arms, and snakes for the bottom half and—they moved
fast.
They came right at us, and I hit them with the first things I could think of, strengthening my Shield around us all while simultaneously making a flash-bang and firing my shotgun, as beside me Sanders opened up with her pistol. The sound was deafening in the confines of the ’crete tunnel, but it still didn’t drown out the shrill shrieks of the
things
. My heart was going a zillion beats a minute, and my head was on a swivel, keeping track of them.

Nagas!
Bya shouted in my head, which meant nothing to me, and anyway, I was too busy backing the group up so we had the sewer wall at our backs, and opening up again with my shotgun. I got one square in the chest with the combination load of silver shot and blessed salt, and it stopped moving long enough for me to see these things had four arms—they were wielding
swords
, for heaven’s sake—and they had mouths full of needle-teeth.
Keep the Cits safe…
That was all I could consciously think of, but lucky for all of us, the crew wasn’t panicking, and they were just as concerned about keeping themselves protected as I was about protecting them.

Meanwhile, the Hounds weren’t idle. As the unarmed members of the group squeezed in between us armed ones and the wall so they had cover on both sides, the Hounds were attacking whatever parts of the creatures they could get. Gwalchmai managed to get his teeth into the tail of one and tried dragging it away from the others, but the thing was lithe, strong, and smart, and Gwalchmai had to let go and leap out of the way to avoid being diced by four swords. That was the problem all the Hounds were having: these weren’t stupid monsters, intent only on their prey.

“Kelly!” I snapped. “The door!” Because I sure did
not
want those things retreating into the smaller tunnel. There was no room to fight in there, no way to use anything more lethal than we already had without ruining what we’d come to fix, and they were better suited to those quarters than humans or Hounds were. I couldn’t see Kelly, who was behind me, but he must have triggered his gadget because the door slid shut and sealed again before any of the monsters noticed it was closing.

Now all we had to do was survive a tornado of whiplike snake tails and swords.

My Shield was at least keeping them at bay, and the Hounds had regrouped, rearranged themselves to the left and right of us in a group of five and a group of six, and had changed tactics to defense. They dodged and leapt and stayed in constant motion, always staying just ahead of the whirling blades and the wicked tails, blocking the things from going either direction in the sewer tunnel. And meanwhile those of us with firearms fired round after round of steel or silver shot into them when I briefly dropped the Shield. Their skin was really tough, armored hide maybe, so the shot wasn’t flaying them the way it would have something with just skin. But nevertheless it was having an effect. Every time one of them got hit with a load, it lost speed and a little agility, so it looked as if the steel and silver weakened them.

The cacophony of firearms and shrieking monsters was deafening. The monsters might have been slowed, but they never stopped moving. This was a stalemate; even if I pinned them down with a net, I wasn’t at all sure how long I could hold it, and they could
still
use those whip-tails and their swords on the Hounds or us.

Was there even a chance they’d be as resistant to fire as they seemed to be to damage from firearms?
Only one way to find out.

With a shouted cantrip and a quick tracing of Glyphs in the air, I formed up my net and dropped it on them, passing my shotgun to Kelly as I did so because I couldn’t hold that net down and shoot at the same time.
Bya! Fire!
I told my Alpha, and in the next moment, my seven
Alebrijes
Hounds breathed inferno on the netted monsters.

The shrieks quadrupled in pitch and volume, and I clapped my hands to my ears, feeling as if someone was sticking red-hot needles into them. Behind me, the crew doubled over, doing the same as we all tried in vain to block out the hideously painful noise.

But the fire was working as nothing else we’d tried. I didn’t even need to hold the net on them, which was just as well because with all that excruciating screeching going on, I couldn’t.

Thankfully, they had to breathe in order to scream, and when they sucked in air for a fresh shriek, they sucked in fire too, and that ended the noise. The screams cut off before we all dropped over from the pain, and by that point, the monsters were flailing on the concrete, and the few that still had their swords in their clenched hands were utterly unable to use them. The Hounds jumped them then and tore them to bits.

Even though I was blinking away tears of pain, I could still see somewhat, and as I swallowed and tried to clear my ringing ears, I saw something else that was new. These monsters didn’t go to goo as the Hounds inhaled their manna, nor did they fade away. Instead, they turned to dust. When the Hounds were finished, the floor of the tunnel was covered in piles of grayish-black powder, with swords scattered about the concrete as if discarded.

We took our sweet time recovering. Before we opened that door a second time, I wanted to make sure we all had at least part of our hearing back.

I passed around headache pills out of my pack, because all of us had
splitting
heads as well as ringing ears. Then for a while we all lined up sitting in a row, with our feet braced and our backs in the curve of the tunnel wall, and waited for our ears to clear and our heads to stop throbbing.

As for the Hounds, well, they were in fine fettle. Those monsters must have been pretty manna-rich, because the sword slashes the Hounds had gotten healed right up in front of our very eyes, and they looked as good as ever they had, long before our heads stopped hurting.

When the pounding in my skull finally eased up, I noticed something else—a scent. Where before there had been nothing in this tunnel but the smell of damp concrete, now there was the smell of snake musk—the bitter odor that some snakes give off when they’re handled. I recognized it for what it was because, well, I’m a turnip and I’ve handled a lot of snakes as a kid. But as the repair crew stopped hurting and started noticing, they clearly didn’t know what it was.

“What’s that stink?” Lee asked, his nose wrinkling.

“It’s from the whatever-they-weres, I guess,” Kelly replied.

“Feh. It’s nasty,” Sanders said. “Reminds me of my ex-husband.” By that I knew that they were getting back to normal. I got up first, and although the crew looked at me and sighed, they struggled to their feet as well.

“I have a plan,” I said as the last of them got up. “If there are any more of those things in there, they won’t have run away when the others died; in my experience, killing Othersiders just makes the rest want your blood more.”
Or, except maybe for Thunderbirds
…

“Well, aren’t you a bundle of good news,” Lee said sourly.

“Actually, it is good news because it means they won’t be sneaking up on you while you’re in there making your repair,” I pointed out. “So what we’re going to do is: you all are going back up the tunnel, far enough that you’re barely in range for that gizmo to open the door again. The Hounds and I will stay here. The second the door’s open enough, I’m tossing a gas grenade in, and I want you to shut the door again on it.”

“Poison gas?” Kelly wanted to know.

I shook my head. “Just tear gas. You’ve got nose plugs, right? And goggles.” They all nodded; of course they did, that would be standard kit for anyone coming down here to fix things where they might encounter sewage gas. Methane can kill you, and not just by blowing you up. “Right, so we’ll leave the door closed for about a minute, then open it up again. If there’s any more of those things in there, they’ll stampede for the open door and better air, and my Hounds will fry them.”

I didn’t hear any objections, so I pulled my full-face mask out of my pack and waited while they got their nose plugs in and goggles on. When everyone was ready, we all moved to our respective positions, and Kelly cracked the door.

It went like clockwork and was anticlimactic, because when Kelly opened the door for the second time, nothing came out but gas.

So we waited for the gas to clear some, then the crew went in and did their work while the Hounds and I stood guard. I even had Bya and Dusana in the maintenance tunnel with them to make sure there were no more surprises.

Then I collected some swords and stowed them in my pack, and we all trudged back up to the exit hatch again. Once we got to the ladder, I waited while the others climbed, and sent the Hounds back through their Portal. That was just to avoid putting the ones that couldn’t
bamph
through the hassle of getting up the ladder the hard way. They
can
climb, but it’s hard for them—they don’t like to do it, and I don’t blame them.

I was the last one out, and Kelly locked the door. And then they all turned to me. Kelly spoke first. “What in hell were those things?” he asked.

Well, I was already asking my Perscom that particular question. “My Hound Bya called them
Nagas
,” I told him, while I looked up the word. “I’ve never seen anything like them before.” My Perscom was no help. So evidently there was no record of those things in any Hunter encounters here in and around Apex, nor in the folklore my Perscom could access. “But look on the bright side,” I continued. “We know they burn quite well.”

The members of the crew looked at each other as if they weren’t sure if I was being serious or not, and then Sanders cracked a smile. “True,” she said. “And now we’re never going down there without at least one of you Hunters with us.”

“That’ll be me for a while, anyway,” I replied with a little shrug. “The worst part was being caught off guard. That won’t happen again. And my pack knows what to do about them now.”

None of us talked about the buffalo in the room—how the wretched things had
gotten
down there in the first place. This wasn’t a herd of Knockers, who individually are small and have a chance of getting in through some hole in the defenses one at a time, nor Vamps, which sneak in at night. The
Nagas
had been about six feet tall head-to-floor, with another four-to-six feet of additional snake tail.

Then again…these people must already have been sworn to secrecy just to be allowed to work down there. This might not be the first time they’d seen something new. Kelly took off his blue safety helmet and scratched his head. He had a baby face, but his hair was going thin on top. “I don’t suppose that you’ve still got the energy to pose for some pictures with us?” he said hopefully.

I am never going to understand this,
I thought. Because an hour ago we’d narrowly escaped being turned into cold cuts by snake people. And now they wanted selfies with me.

I reminded myself again that this was part of the job. And I smiled and posed with everyone, and only after their pod had come and taken them off did I call for mine.

Once
in
that pod, though, I called HQ. I cut straight to the heart of things. “HQ, you got the feed from the tunnel cams, so is there any record of anything called a
Naga
in the files, or anything that looked like those snake-men?”

“Negative, Hunter,”
came the reply.
“Did your Hound give any other clues as to origin?”

“Negative,” I replied. “I think you need a folklorist.”

Because of course I was going to get Bya as soon as I had the chance and grill him about it. But I wasn’t going to let HQ know that. So far as I am aware, most Hounds, even if they do speak with their Hunters, are just not what you’d call chatty, and very few ever volunteer information.

“Report to debrief as soon as you arrive, Hunter.”
That was a new voice, and completely expected. I sighed. So much for going back on rotation or hitting another part of that sewer today. Unless a full-team callout came in, I was going to be toasted over a grill for the rest of the day.

This wasn’t disciplinary, of course; it was informational, because there’s so much that the camera can’t pick up, like scent. But once I got back, I was in a little room with three skilled debriefers going over and over every second of the encounter, and pummeling my brain to try and think of something I hadn’t remembered the first time. Having a headache the whole time didn’t help. I kept drinking water, and eventually the pain faded, but it took a while. Somehow, having a headache that bad is worse than being mauled by a Wyvern.

These were three earnest, focused, and hyperorganized people (two men and a woman who looked so alike they could have been siblings) in a new sort of uniform—like a modified police uniform in dark, dark green instead of black. They sat across the table from me. They had done their level best to make the debriefing room as comfortable as possible: the walls were a nice, soothing pale green, the acoustics were perfect, quiet without being maddeningly so, and my chair was…well, as a kid I used to daydream about sitting in clouds, and that was pretty much what it felt like, and it even reclined. They got me headache pills, anything I wanted to drink, and they’d have fed me if I hadn’t been nauseous. I couldn’t have been annoyed with them if I’d wanted to be; I knew just how important this was. A new Othersider…the implications weren’t good, and it was vital we get on top of this.