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

that might be doing the same surveillance thing as us. There were a bunch that had been parked here the whole time, and several of those had windows tinted enough that I couldn’t see if there was anyone sitting inside. There could be a tac team waiting across the street for all I knew. Hell, with the MCB’s insane budget and how much they wanted to catch Stricken, they probably had a spy satellite overhead.

“How do you want to proceed, Earl?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Better think fast,” Trip said, though he certainly didn’t say that over the radio.

I heard the motorcycle engine before I saw it. The same bike that had passed by a minute ago had turned around and was coming back, only much faster this time. She zipped between a few slowly moving cars, turned into the parking lot, and stopped right next to Stricken’s BMW.

I hit transmit. “A white and red bullet bike just arrived at the target. Female rider, dressed all in black. Can’t see her face with the helmet. I don’t think security was expecting her, though. They’re headed her way aggressively.” Of course we couldn’t hear anything from way over here, but it was obvious the guards were telling her to move along. Nobody, Nobody, & Douchebag was currently closed to the public. She ignored them, put down the kickstand and took off her helmet. Trip snapped some pictures.

“The rider is an Asian female, late teens or early twenties. Maybe five foot five or so.” It was hard to estimate from this distance, but she appeared really young and relatively petite compared to the beefy security thugs who were telling her to hit the road. She shook out her long black hair, smiled at the nearest guard, and then whacked him upside the head with her helmet.

Before I could key my radio she’d sprung off the bike, spin-kicked another man in the neck, and judo-tossed the next guy across the trunk of Stricken’s BMW. “We’ve got some action here.” I tried to provide a play by play. “The girl’s jumping on the car. And she just leapt on a security dude’s head! She’s monkey-crawling onto his back. He’s flailing! Oh shit, she’s got the choke. That girl’s riding him like a pony!”

“Slow down.” Apparently, Earl didn’t appreciate my color commentary. “What’s happening?”

“The rider is beating the hell out of the guards. Really well too!”

“Everybody hold your positions,” Earl ordered. “Do you recognize her, Z?”

“Never seen her before.” The last two security guards charged, but she rolled off the one she’d been strangling, ducked beneath a clumsy swing, and palm-struck that poor fool in the nuts so hard that all three of us in the van winced in sympathy as he collapsed. Then somehow, she pulled off a leg sweep like something out of Mortal Kombat, which put the supervisor flat on his back on the cement. She ran for the door, having plowed through a wall of meat in just a few seconds. “And she’s inside. Okay, that was really impressive.”

“Like human impressive, or supernatural impressive?”

“Hard to say.” I’d better get this one right, because there was a vast gulf between how we were allowed to deal with human beings versus how we dealt with monsters. She’d had surprise on her side, but physics were unforgiving and weight classes existed for a reason. That waif-fu stuff where tiny ballerina-looking women routinely beat the hell out of guys my size only happened in the movies. “Probably not all human.” But as soon as I said that, umbrella guard was hurled through the front window and landed in the bushes about ten feet away. I couldn’t have thrown him that far, and I was built like a model for protein shakes. “Amend that. Definitely supernatural.”

With nothing to see at the building besides some dazed and battered security guards, I turned the binos back toward the food truck. Sure enough the taco vendor was headed toward the door, ditching his hair net and pulling off his apron. From how fast he was sprinting, yeah . . . that was Grant. He’d always been a motivated sort. Several of the people eating lunch around the plaza must have also been MCB, because they jumped up, pulled the handguns they’d been concealing, and rushed toward the building too. I reported that to the others.

“This is Holly. A table full of people just bolted from the restaurant without paying their bill. I’m guessing undercover Feds.”

“Damn it.” A whole lot of our effort and scheming had just been flushed down the toilet. Apparently, we’d not been the only party tipped off about this deal.

“I see Feds swarming toward the back too,” Boone confirmed. “Bad guys are busting out guns. Looks like they aren’t going down without a fight.”

The MCB were always gung-ho, so Earl was probably going to order us to retreat to keep us from getting shot or arrested. Whenever the MCB decided that MHI had been meddling in their business, it turned into a legal nightmare. But Earl surprised me. “Everybody hold your position. We’re just watching. If MCB sees us, we’ve got a valid excuse for being here.” He must have really wanted that Ward Stone . . . Or more likely, he was hoping to see Stricken get shot while running from the law. If that jerk tried to resist arrest with Agent Franks around, Franks would probably handcuff Stricken, then pull his arms off to use them like nunchuks to beat Stricken to death. That would be hilarious.

Several unmarked cars along the street were suddenly moving to block off the parking lot. Red and blue lights started flashing. This was a pretty big show of force for the MCB to use in public, but Monster Control Bureau was really good at pretending to be other mundane federal agencies when they needed to. The running MCB agents reached the front of the building. Most of them went through the door, guns drawn. The rest started handcuffing the downed security guards. Stricken’s driver got yanked out of the car