Monster Hunter Bloodlines - eARC by Larry Correia (read a book .txt) 📕

She was probably thinking of the tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park, but what the hell. It was worth a shot. We held perfectly still as it circled high above us, then it let out an unearthly shriek, banked hard, and began flying back toward where we’d wrecked. Apparently, Sonya’s Wild Kingdom hot take about magic bird vision had been incorrect.

Just like Skippy and Milo had tracked Sonya across Atlanta, the Drekavac had done the same thing to us. This was just the low-tech, supernatural version. Low-tech problems require low-tech solutions, so I shouldered Abomination, led the falcon just a bit, and pulled the trigger. There was a flash followed by a rain of blue fire feathers.

Except the bird must have had some sort of telepathic connection to its master and didn’t need to make it back to report. There was a horrible, echoing shriek back the way we’d came. It was a sound of delight. Then the hounds began barking.

“We’ve got to move!” The time for slow and stealthy was over. I flipped up my goggles and turned on the tac light I had mounted on Abomination, which was a scalding thousand lumens bright. It turned the night into day as we ran for it.

It was easy to forget just how supernaturally athletic Sonya was, until she easily got ahead of me. Then she turned on the light I gave her and quickly left me behind, running effortlessly, leaping over logs and ducking beneath branches fast as a deer. We made it less than a quarter mile before I had to shout after her.

“Hold up. We need to stick together so we can cover each other.”

She stopped, way ahead, perched on top of a rock, turned back and called, “You know that old joke about how if you’re chased by a bear, you don’t need to outrun the bear, just your slowest friend? It’s like that. Sorry.”

I thought about demonstrating my favorite version of that bear joke by shooting her in the knee, but instead I said, “Go ahead then. You’ve got a handful of shotgun shells left and a pocket pistol, while he’s got two dogs, a horse, a bird, a death ray, and keeps coming back to life. So I’m sure it’ll work out splendidly for you.”

“It always does.” But Sonya hesitated, torn, but the sound of barking must have convinced her I was right. “Fine, but try to keep up.”

“Except you’re going the wrong way.” I pointed the direction I thought the road would be. If I did have reinforcements coming, they’d find us faster by the road than blundering deeper into the woods.

We kept running, and Sonya’s light stayed ahead of me, only at least now she was stopping to let me catch up once in a while. Thankfully, the underbrush wasn’t too horribly dense here, so I only tripped half a dozen times. From the noise, the dogs were getting closer, and every time I crossed a gap without trees, I could see that damned glowing bird had re-formed and was above us again. Only it had learned its lesson and was flying high enough that it would be really hard to blast out of the sky again.

I was going as fast as I could, sweating, my face and arms continually scratched by thorns, yet the hunting dogs were getting closer. Then I realized that there was only one animal barking behind us. The other had gone silent. Instinct told me the quiet one was circling ahead while the loud one herded us toward it.

“Sonya! Wait!” Except she had gotten too far ahead of me again and didn’t hear me that time. Her light kept bouncing away. I’d tried to warn her to stay close, and now she was going to get eaten by a demon dog. “Damn it.”

Behind me was a new noise, and it was a sound that brought back memories of running from the Fey. The thunder of hooves. When the Drekavac’s horse had re-formed, it must have lost the high-speed ghost hover and come back in a more terrain-appropriate form. It turned out the Drekavac liked to make a lot of noise, because it let out a sound that sounded like a higher pitched wolf’s howl. It was a frightening noise because you could feel the savage joy of the hunt in it, like the monster wanted its prey to know it was having a good time.

I shined my light back the way I’d come from and, sure enough, the fog was getting closer. I assumed the thickest part represented where the monster was coming from, and there was really only one spot here wide enough to ride a horse through.

“Okay, you want to play, you son of a bitch?” I dropped my pack and pulled out the experimental device Milo had given me. “Let’s play.”

Milo didn’t have an official name for his new, nasty little smart mine yet. He was still trying to think of a cool acronym featuring the words Explosive, Quick Deploy, Area, and Denial. The rest of us just called them Milo’s spider mines on account of all the legs. I stuck the bottom spikes into the packed trail dirt, aimed it where I thought the Drekavac would have to ride through, pulled the safety pin, hit the arm button, and then ran like hell to get away from the evil little machine before it went nuts.

Thirty seconds after I pushed the big red button, the IR targeting lasers turned on. They served the same purpose as trip wires, only there were eight of them, instantly. And as an added bonus, if our monster didn’t set it off, the lasers were on a timer, so it would go inert fast, hopefully before some innocent hiker tripped over our unexploded ordnance. Milo was considerate like that.

I think the default on the timer was thirty minutes but it could be turned up or down, depending on the mission.