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

riding hell-bent for leather. The horse’s legs were moving so fast that they were a blur. It had to be going about seventy. Milo had floated the idea of installing some of those big hydraulic car bomb barricades last year, but Earl hadn’t thought we’d ever need them. Usually monsters just walked or flew in.

“Open fire,” Julie said, and everybody on the roof was happy to comply. We had even mounted a 7.62 minigun on the roof earlier. At six thousand rounds per minute, it made a hell of a racket, but they walked a line of red tracers right into the fast-moving target. The Drekavac veered hard to the side, hit a tree, and went up in a big—very unnaturally blue—fireball.

Everybody on the roof cheered.

“That’s two,” Earl said from the control room. “Round three, fight.”

“Did Earl just make a Mortal Kombat reference?” I asked.

“I highly doubt it,” Julie said. Then she raised her voice so the roof crew could hear her. “Don’t celebrate yet. You heard the Vatican Hunter. We’ve got to keep this monster on the other side of the fence as long as possible.”

“There,” someone shouted. “Light on the main road again.”

That had been fast. The Drekavac wasn’t messing around. This time the monster had gotten a running start and was moving much quicker. The horse had to be doing at least a hundred miles an hour by the time it came into view. Every sniper on the roof shot him and then the minigun shredded the Drekavac and an acre of forest behind him. Only this time he got hit dozens of times before losing control. The horse flipped, end over end, tumbling toward the gate. It skidded to a halt, just barely touching the metal. As the bodies disintegrated, the fog seemed to close in a bit more.

“That was too close,” Julie said.

“That’s three,” Earl said. It was hard to tell with all the static now, but he wasn’t sounding nearly as confident.

“He’s getting too much momentum for us to stop him from crossing the line.” Julie keyed her radio. “Skippy, hit him further out.”

The Hind roared toward the gate. There were orcs hanging off both sides, manning door guns. They threw the horns at us as they passed. MHI owned thousands of acres around the compound, so that was our land, and we could blow it up if we felt like it. If somebody had blundered into the area by accident, they were about to have a real bad night, but this was a perfect example of why we had all those No Trespassing signs posted.

The Drekavac must have re-formed a thousand yards down the road to get more acceleration, because lines of tracers shot from the Hind were firing at something that was out of our view. From the way Skippy had to turn and chase his target, the Drekavac was moving even faster than before. Rockets lanced down from the chopper, causing a rapid chain of explosions along the road. But then Skippy stopped firing and banked away.

Skippy transmitted something, but I could barely make it out. It sounded like “Monster get blowed up.” That would be four down, only Earl didn’t confirm the count because that was when even our most powerful radios went out entirely.

Thirty seconds later, the Drekavac must have already re-formed, because I could see blue fire racing down the road. One of Skippy’s door gunners started shooting, but our orc wasn’t going to be able to swing his nose around in time to track the monster down with his big guns.

Julie saw it too. The compound had an old-school intercom system installed in it that dated back at least thirty years. The Drekavac messed with air waves, but it probably wouldn’t be able to do anything that was hardwired. Julie let go of her rifle and picked up the handpiece. “Milo, crater the road.”

We’d buried some gigantic charges around the perimeter today, and Milo had them all wired to where he was stationed in our ad hoc compound defense center. Except there was no response to Julie’s call. The Drekavac was getting closer.

Maybe Milo had heard her and just not responded. Maybe he was working on it. But just in case we had a couple of bullhorns up here to relay orders, and if that didn’t work, different color flags to wave and flares to shoot to relay messages to the other Hunters. I picked up the gigantic industrial bullhorn and raised it to my mouth. Milo was only one floor down, so hopefully this would work.

“MILO.” Holy shit this thing was loud. I was glad I had my hearing protection on. “DETONATE THE ROAD BOMBS.”

The Drekavac came into view, and I couldn’t even tell you how fast he was going this time. I’m talking jet-aircraft-flyby speeds. Our roof-mounted minigun couldn’t even swivel fast enough to hit him. Except Milo must have heard one of us and pushed the big red button because all of a sudden the entrance was gone.

BOOM!

I don’t know how many pounds of ammonium nitrate Milo had buried there, but it was a lot. It made a visible shockwave that flattened trees for fifty yards. It blew the guard shack away. It broke a bunch of windows around the compound. It was so big that everybody on the roof felt it in their eyeballs.

“There go my rose bushes,” Julie said.

There were a bunch of spotlights pointed that direction already, but somebody angled one upward so that we could see the mushroom cloud, which was two hundred feet tall and growing rapidly. It began raining debris.

And the Drekavac fell out of the sky.

His mangled body landed inside the fence.

The perimeter was breached. “Oh, shit.” The body dissolved within seconds, but his fifth death came a moment too late. The evil fog moved with a hungry suddenness into the compound. I got on the bullhorn again. “THE MONSTER IS INSIDE THE WIRE.”

He had eight lives left to use against us, and no more do-overs. When