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

those were gone, they were gone. It was going to be tooth and nail from here on out.

A dread quiet fell over the compound as everybody waited for the next shoe to drop.

The silence was broken. “South side, south side!” The sniper team on that end of the roof began shooting down toward the barracks. I ran in that direction, but there was a sudden hiss-CRACK as a bolt of lightning smashed into the building. The two Hunters were flung back from the ledge. We were all hit by stinging bits of concrete, and then everything was obscured by smoke.

As the two stunned men were dragged away by the others, a few of us reached the damaged edge, peered over, and saw the Drekavac walking toward us, blunderbuss in hand. He was less than fifty yards away, so he basically filled my entire cranked-up scope when I aimed at him. I nailed him twice in the chest with Cazador. He barely even twitched. Then the Hunter to my left opened up with a 240B and stitched him from knee to throat, before the Hunter on my right dropped a 40mm grenade right at his feet.

The Drekavac fell apart. That was six.

“Man your positions! Cover your zone,” Julie shouted. As we moved back to our stations, more Hunters ran up from the stairs to grab the wounded, and others took their place watching that direction. Since the Drekavac was going to be close now, I hurried and cranked Cazador’s scope down to the lowest setting of five power. I went back to watching the front of the compound for danger before I realized that I didn’t even know which of us had just gotten hit. There hadn’t been time to look.

A few nervous seconds passed. The fog was everywhere in the compound now, thick as soup, and really hard to see through.

This time the Drekavac was smart. He didn’t re-form in the open where our lookouts could see him. He re-formed behind one of the outbuildings on the east side. Our first warning was when a bolt of lightning hit one of the antennas on our roof. It came crashing down, spraying fire and sparks everywhere. The Hunters on that side returned fire, but the Drekavac fired again. The impact shook the roof and tore a burning gouge through the concrete ledge. There were only a few seconds’ delay between lightning bolts now.

Then the fucking birds came out of nowhere and hit us.

I’d dealt with one ghost falcon last night. This time there was a flock of the damned things. They dropped out of the sky like meteors, screeching and clawing for our eyes. I reflexively clubbed one out of the air with Cazador’s suppressor, then stomped on its head with my boot. Then I watched in horror as another bird nailed one of the Hunters, who was distracted shooting at the Drekavac, right in the back of the helmet. He was already hanging dangerously far over the edge of the roof, off balance, in order to get a good angle. The impact was enough to shove him over. He went over the side with a scream.

I ran over, looked down, and discovered Vaughn Spencer about two feet down on the other side hanging by his fingertips. The drop probably wouldn’t kill him outright, but it was enough to break some bones, and then he’d be lying there in the open in the line of fire of an angry Drekavac. He saw me and shouted, “Give me a hand.”

“Hang on.”

“No shit, Pitt!”

I let my rifle dangle by the sling so I could hold onto the ledge with one hand and lean way over to grab his wrist with the other. Spencer was one of the out-of-town Hunters who had flown in earlier to help. Luckily for both of us, he was only about 5'9" and 170, but with the armor and ammo, heavy enough to make this a challenge. I pulled hard. He managed to get his boots against the wall enough to find some purchase. I almost had him, but then one of the damned birds was flapping around my helmet, wings smacking me in the face.

“Hold still,” Julie ordered, which is a lot harder to do than it sounds when a ghost bird is trying to peck your eyes out. But I did. A bullet whistled right past my helmet to smack the blue falcon out of the sky. Bird gone, I went back to lifting.

The building the Drekavac was hiding behind was being riddled with bullets. The monster was surely getting nailed too, but he’d gotten tough enough that he was shrugging most of the hits off now, and I watched, horrified, as he swung around the corner and aimed his blunderbuss at us again.

I pulled Spencer over the edge and we both dropped as the monster fired. The bolt slammed into the spot we’d just been occupying. The impact shattered the concrete wall, pelting both of us with hot fragments.

Luckily, Skippy had seen where the lightning bolts were coming from, because the Hind tore past, firing rockets, and the Drekavac and the outbuilding he was hiding behind were obliterated. Which was too bad, that building was where we parked the bucket tractor we used for range maintenance. I was going to miss that little Kubota.

Julie had drawn her pistol and was shooting ghost birds. When she saw that our cover was being obliterated by the Drekavac’s gun, she ordered, “Fall back. We’re abandoning the roof.”

It was the right call. We were hanging out in the open here, and this asshole just kept developing new abilities. If his next trick was lobbing a fireball like a mortar round, we were all dead.

“Covering,” I said, as the other Hunters headed for the exit. Abomination would’ve been perfect for skeet shooting all these damned birds, but I’d brought my rifle instead because of the expected range. But at least I had a micro red dot optic offset mounted on Cazador