The Last Hunter - Collected Edition (106 page)

29

Em, Adoni, Zuh,
I think, letting Luca know who I want my orders to be transmitted to,
split these hunters between you
.
Get them settled inside the base. Do your best to explain how we’re organized and how we are communicating. Put them in defensive units with hunters already among us.

Luca can send my orders to these new hunters just as easily as everyone else, and they’ll understand, but they need to be prepared for the mental intrusion.

Em speaks up from just behind me. She must have already been on her way out. “Hunters, I am Emilie, daughter of Tobias—”

“The daughter of Tobias,” a woman hunter says in surprise. She’s tall and slender with long curly, light brown hair that hangs wildly to her shoulders. She’s holding a double edged sword that looks like something a Roman centurion would carry in one hand and a long spear in the other. “Was he not slain by Ninnis,
father
of Kainda?”

Em frowns and nods. “He was.”

“And yet you stand beside her?”

I think I understand the gist of this questioning. In hunter culture, the slaying of one hunter’s kin by another might result in some sort of blood feud, or at least a deeper than average hatred.

Em steps up next to Kainda, who’s at least a foot taller, and looks up at her. “We are as sisters. The sins of our past, and those of our fathers, are forgotten. As they are for you, as well.”

To say the hunters are surprised is an understatement. The news travels quickly toward the back of the throng. It’s clear the conversation is about to expand and while I would love to explain the depth of their new found freedom, the rumbling beneath my feet is a constant reminder that we have no time.

“Hunters!” I shout. “Time is short. You all know what is coming. Explanations will come, but only if we survive the coming battle.”

“And if we don’t survive?” the woman hunter asks, sheathing her sword.

“Then you will die nobly, and free,” I tell her.

This seems to placate the crowd enough for Em and Kainda to get them moving toward the base. I notice many of the soldiers following the hunters with their weapons.
Lower your weapons
, I think,
they are with us now
. A moment later, the soldiers comply.

You’re doing well,
I think to Luca.

This is harder than I thought it would be,
Luca admits.
Speaking to you is easy. Speaking to more than a hundred thousand other people is not. I’m getting tired.

Me too,
I tell him. The darkness took its toll. I’m far more tired than I should be.
But we must persevere. This will all be over by the time the sun sets again.

Okay,
he replies.

But,
I think,
if you ever feel like you can’t handle it, or are worried you can’t reach everyone, you let me know.

I will,
he says.

As the woman with the Roman sword passes me, she offers a slight bow and pauses. She glances back toward the valley’s bottleneck. “It won’t be long.” She speaks perfect English with a Southern California accent.

“I know,” I tell her.

“We’re just a small group,” she says. “There are far more—”

“I have seen,” I say.

“Then it
was
you in the jungle?” she asks. Before I can answer, her face becomes serious, but then relieved. “We found Ares.”

I look at the sword hanging from her waist, and then to the long spear in her hands. Not Roman, I realize.
Greek.
“He was your master.”

“No longer...thanks to you.” She offers her hand and I take it, shaking it slowly. She motions to the hunters filing past. “They call me Deena, but you can call me Jennifer. I was a roustabout working at McMurdo. Must have been forty years ago. Don’t remember exactly what happened. Had too much to drink one night, woke up in the feeder pit. You know how it goes.”

Feeling a little bit like a politician on the campaign trail, I thank her and start to pull back my hand. She holds tighter, the calm visage of Jennifer replaced suddenly by the hard stare of Deena. “Can we trust you?”

I match her serious gaze and say, “I would die for all of you, or one of you.”

She holds my eyes for a moment, perhaps judging the sincerity of my words. Then she lets go of my hand and steps back. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

When the shaking ground intensifies, I urge her to follow Kainda and Em and she complies.

As the last of the hunters walk past, I bring the razor wire back together. I can’t weld the strands back together, but I bunch and overlap it enough that the jutting razors entangle and hold the two sides together. Standing at the front of my army, I look toward the end of the valley. No one yet fills the gap, but I know they soon will. Nephil will react to being wounded and chased off with blind rage. On one hand, this benefits us because rage is often absent strategy. On the other hand, it means they will likely rush our position en masse, which is the one strategy that is most likely to succeed. If that happens, the only thing that will slow them down will be the bodies of their own dead.

I stand still, listening to the rumbling footsteps. Distant battle horns sound out. I reach out, feeling the earth and the air. There are so many that I cannot distinguish a human footfall from a behemoth. It’s all just one giant force, crushing the land and trampling the jungle.

Five minutes,
I think.
They’ll reach the bottleneck in five minutes.

The thought was intended for myself, but I hear a soldier in the trench behind me whisper, “Oh God,” his voice filled with terror. Luca must have transmitted the timeframe to the entire camp, which is probably good, but the twinge of fear I felt was also sent to everyone.

Sorry,
Luca’s voice says in my mind. He sounds small and apologetic, no doubt realizing that my thought wasn’t intended for public consumption.

Its fine,
I think,
we’re all afraid, and I need to say something about it. Ready to give a lecture?

I can feel him smiling.
Ready.

Making a note to watch the intensity of my personal thoughts, I turn around and face the base. An army stares back at me. Men from the trenches, from the tanks, and the walls. But there are many more inside the base, waiting by the choppers, manning artillery and crewing the distant ships who need to hear what I have to say, too.

After taking a moment to collect my thoughts, I project them through Luca, to an army.

The Nephilim are mankind’s oldest and most vile enemy. They have ruled us, enslaved us and broken us. Our ancestors worshiped them as gods and they became immortalized in our history. You know the eldest of them as Zeus, Odin, Osiris, Enki and so many more names that have been distorted by time and intention. They seek not just dominion over the planet, but the extinction of the human race, of whom they are jealous. For it is we who were given souls that live on after death, it is we who are more powerful and it is we who are protected by a grand design beyond understanding.

They are large. Huge. They inspire fear in all who see them. They attack without hesitation or remorse, and they delight in pain because they can heal from most any wound. Some will fly with outstretched wings, others will sting with scorpion tails, and still others will attack our minds with their own. Our enemies are the heroes of old, men of renown, and they are to be feared.

But the human race has defeated them in the past. Long before we had guns, tanks and warships, an army of men stormed the city of Jericho, a Nephilim stronghold. Using sword, spear and the blast of horns like the one that just freed three thousand men and women from the Nephilim’s corrupt grasp, men conquered that city, vanquished the monsters inside and sent the Nephilim scrambling to the underworld where they have hidden for thousands of years.

In that time, they have grown stronger, and they have plotted against us. Their hatred has grown. And now, freed from the ice, they are once again on the cusp of destroying our world. But once again, an army unlike anything in the history of mankind has been brought together. It is
we
who stand in their path now, and it is
we
who will stop them. But this time we will not simply turn them away and send them back to the underworld. We will destroy them. We will scour them from the face of the planet. We will end their soulless existence so that they can never threaten the human race again.

I pull Whipsnap from my belt and hold the now iconic weapon over my head, letting out a battle cry, both mental and physical.

As my army shouts back—including the cresties—charged and ready to fight, a rumble rolls beneath my feet so strong that I know the enemy is just seconds away from filling the bottleneck.

Prepare yourselves
, I think, and then give the order that sets everything in motion.
Jericho-Alpha.

30

The first thing I need to do is get out of the line of fire. Although a part of me wants to lead the charge, that’s not the strategy we’re playing. This is, in effect, a tower defense. We’re going to sit tight, hammer them with everything we’ve got until we run out and if that’s not enough, then we’ll charge. If I were to storm the enemy, shaking my weapon boldly, it might be inspiring—until I took a tank round in the back.

With a leap, I cover the distance between the trenches and the wall, guiding and slowing my descent with the wind so that I land back in my spot next to Holloway. The general gives me a nod, which I think is about as much of a compliment as I’m going to get at the moment.

The air behind the base fills with the reverberating thunder of rising helicopters, their rotors chopping the air. They lift from the ground and take up hovering formations three hundred feet above and behind the line of artillery. They’re armed with an array of small missiles and chain guns that shoot bullets so fast they’re kind of like laser beams.

Even louder than the choppers is the roar of jets lifting off from several aircraft carriers. Each jet will fly in a holding pattern until they’re called on. They pack a serious punch and can outrun any flying Nephilim, but our real firepower comes from the Navy Destroyers. Not only do they have some really big guns, they can launch missiles designed to flatten buildings. There are also several submarines lurking in the depths.
Nuclear
submarines. While they won’t play a role in the coming battle, they’re our contingency plan: Cleansing Fire. If we lose the fight, and the fate of the human race is at stake, they will launch their nuclear payloads, essentially erasing the battlefield along with everything in and around it. The plan belongs to Holloway, and while the idea of it makes me cringe—I read the books and saw the pictures of Hiroshima when I was a kid—I couldn’t argue with the logic.

But it’s not going to get to that point,
I tell myself.
I won’t let it.

A rumble beneath my feet pulls my attention forward. Despite the din of modern war machines, a kind of peace settles over the troops as we wait for our enemy.

Rumble.

C’mon,
I think,
where are you?

And then, it’s impossible to miss. A behemoth steps into the gap, nearly filling it. Its massive white body gleams in the rising sun. Its long tentacles of red hair writhe around its body. Its solid black, bulging eyes, are blank like a shark’s so that you never really know if it’s looking at you while at the same time, you have no doubt that it’s looking at you. The top of its head tilts back, the mouth opening wide to reveal teeth the size of sailboat sails. Ropes of drool ooze down from the top like waterfalls. And then it lets out a bellow that’s high pitched and a deep rattle all in one.

Yeah
, I think,
Nephil is angry
. But he’s got a decent strategy, too. I have no doubt that this behemoth will be followed by a mad rush of Nephilim. But this is also our chance to slow them down and kill their momentum.

Behemoth-Alpha,
I think.
Go.

As though in response to my mental command, the behemoth takes a giant step forward. And then another. A third brings it just inside the bottleneck and a fourth, all the way through.

But then, six fighter jets whose make and models are unknown to me, but which look really sleek, streak past overhead.

The behemoth takes a fifth step and I realize that just fifteen more will bring it to our doorstep.

The six jets unload with everything they have, launching missiles and peeling up and away. The missiles twist and swirl through the air, leaving white contrails in their wake, like long tails. And then, one by one, they find their target in the midsection of the giant beast. A ball of fire and billowing black smoke obscures the giant, but its wail reveals the strike caused it pain.

I watch in silence, waiting for some sign of success. I don’t wait long, but what I see is not success. The behemoth takes another step. It slides out of the black curtain of smoke revealing its prodigious belly. If the missiles caused it any harm at all, there’s no evidence of it. The monster has completely healed.

“How the hell are we supposed to take off that thing’s head,” Holloway mutters.

“We might not have to,” I tell him. To my knowledge, only warriors need to be decapitated, or have their weak spots pierced. Other variations of Nephilim can heal, but not as quickly, or as completely.

“How do you mean?” Holloway asks.

“We don’t give it time to heal,” I tell him, and then I send an order to the tank gunners, helicopter crews, artillery crews and fighter jet pilots.
Fire!

This time, I have to put my hands to my ears. The volume of this many tank cannons, artillery shells, missiles, jets and helicopters is more than my ears can bear. Unless... Yes, I think I can—
Whump!

“What just happened?” Holloway asks me, and I can hear him perfectly. He didn’t even have to shout.

“I turned down the volume,” I say. He looks at me like I’m crazy. “I created a dome of compressed air over the base and the trenches. The sound waves are either being slowed to the infrasonic range or they’re being redirected.”

A bright flash turns our attention forward. The continuous volley reaches the behemoth. I can see it roaring in pain, and can even hear it some, but my ears are spared.

I quickly communicate the reason for the strange silence to the troops, so that they’re not disturbed by it. When I’m done, Holloway says, “
Now
it makes sense.”

More missiles pass by. These are larger, the kind that no fighter jet could carry. I’m not sure what they are, but they’re big, and powerful. And there are twenty of them racing from the Destroyers at sea toward their impossible-to-miss target.

Explosions rock the valley. Despite the sound being muffled, I can still feel the force of each blast. These last twenty dwarf even the footfall of a behemoth. Rock slides race down the sides of the distant cliffs. The human race is dishing out some serious might.

And yet, the behemoth staggers forward. But it’s not immune to the attack. Volcanoes of purple blood erupt from each wound. Chunks of boulder-sized white flesh, the same stuff I subsisted on during my first months underground, fall to the ground.

Another step.

The wounds are healing. This isn’t going to work. It’s going to stumble forward until we’re out of ammunition and then just roll its fat body over us.

Behemoth-Beta!
I think.

The jets arc away, while the rest of the big guns hold their fire. If this next trick doesn’t work, we’ll be in real trouble.

But then I add a second order,
Backfield-Alpha.
The jets moving away from the fight turn in a wide arc that brings them around toward the back of the valley. Missiles launch and lines of tracer fire glow orange as they shoot at targets on the ground
behind
the choke point. The planes will continue to strike the backlines of the Nephilim forces, returning to the aircraft carriers to rearm, refuel, and then head back to the fight.

The artillery opens fire again, having taken time to adjust their aim. A fresh volley of rounds arcs up and over the battlefield, dropping down behind the cliffs and striking even more enemies that are out of sight.

While all this is happening, a single jet, which I actually recognize as a Russian MiG fighter thanks to
Top Gun
, cruises through the battlefield from the south. It cuts beneath the soaring artillery shells, yet above the behemoth. The pilot has guts.

As it passes over the behemoth it drops a single bomb. The silver cylinder glows blue for a moment because of friction, and then strikes the behemoth’s head and detonates. At the moment of impact, white phosphorous inside the bomb ignites a gel composed of benzene, gasoline and polystyrene. This highly flammable mix sprays out in all directions, coating the behemoth in a fiery slurry that will burn, white hot, for ten minutes.

The monster’s shrill cry pierces my dome of dense air and makes me cringe. Were this any creature but a Nephilim, I would feel immense pity. The creature stumbles forward and then topples over. It crashes to the ground, sending a wave of pressure through the earth that rattles the base and knocks over some of the structures and piled supplies.

I kick up a strong wind from the ocean to keep the dust cloud at bay, forcing it back and down to the earth from where it came. As the behemoth twitches and burns, I watch its flesh fight to repair itself. It’s a slow battle between fire and flesh, but after nearly a minute, the rocket-fuel’s fire wins. With a groan, the behemoth lets out its last breath and seems to deflate.

As the body shrinks in on itself, several of the long red stands of its living, hair stretch outward. At first I think it’s simply twitching as the body dies, but then I realize it’s a last act of defiance. The long, python-like hair sweeps in a wide arc, striking the rows of razor wire. The sharp coils of metal tangle with the hair like Velcro and are torn away. In a single attack, the monster removes all but one row of razor wire, effectively destroying our first line of defense.

Then it stops moving completely.

“It’s dead,” I say, honestly a little surprised.

“Napalm tends to do that to things,” Holloway says.

Before we have a chance to celebrate, the behemoth moves. Its belly twitches and jerks as though something inside is fighting to get out. No, not
as if
... It’s
exactly
like something is trying to get out.

And then, it does.