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

I ran to Melvin. He’d been splattered against the wall. Our troll looked down at where his body abruptly ended at the pelvis, then at me. “That is bullshits!”

“Hang on.” I grabbed Melvin by his remaining arm and dragged him toward the vault. He’d lost so much weight suddenly that I could actually do that easily now.

Trip got the door open. “Inside. Go. Go!” Only Trip didn’t go in himself. He’d hold his ground, covering the rest of us, until he was sure we were inside, and only then would he get to safety. Because that was just the kind of hero he was. Except as I went in, I grabbed him by the armor and dragged him and Melvin both inside. Heroic or not, Trip wasn’t going to accomplish shit shooting at a bulletproof monster until he got flash-fried by a lightning cannon.

The mercs were laying down fire, especially Messina with that SAW. LoPresto’s carbine went down and he immediately drew a DWX and kept shooting as they made an orderly retreat into the vault. If we survived, I was definitely going to see if these guys wanted full-time jobs.

Gutterres was the last one in. And he must have been freakishly stronger than he looked by the way he pulled that giant door closed by himself so fast. Lee was waiting and spun the wheel to slam the massive steel locking bolts. There was no way to open it from this side. We were now locked in. Lee quickly let go, which was lucky because he was one second away from possibly getting electrocuted. The whole room shook as the Drekavac blasted the door. It held.

For now.

We all stood there in the emergency lighting, breathing hard, looking at the door, kind of surprised to still be alive.

“Uh, Hunters?” Melvin said. “Where’d hole come from?”

I turned around to see what Melvin was talking about and dropped our poor dismembered troll in surprise. Ben Cody was lying on the floor, either dead or unconscious. There was no sign of Sonya. Earl’s full moon prison cell was just a plain concrete room with a drain hole in the middle of the floor, just big enough to contain a furious werewolf. Earl was like a beacon of calm compared to most werewolves, but even he turned into a bloodthirsty psycho when he transformed during the full moon, so this place was for his protection and ours. Except now the back wall was missing, and there was an eight-foot-wide earthen tunnel leading off into the darkness on the other side. And by missing, I don’t mean torn down or excavated, I mean a big circular section of the concrete had just disappeared. And it had happened so recently that the edges that had just been sheared through were still smoking hot.

“Ben!” Trip knelt next to Cody and checked his pulse. “He’s alive.”

There was a bunch of blood in his hair and beard. My guess was that he’d gotten clubbed, or maybe thrown down in such a way he’d banged his head on the floor. Had Sonya sucker punched him and bailed? Or had something else done it?

“She screwed us again.” Gutterres started toward the tunnel.

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“What else could it be?” he snapped. “She probably got a better offer again. She’s played us before.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think she knows how to do this.” I gestured at the hole, which had obviously been made by magic. Then I remembered what Franks had said before he’d run off. Lana is here. Despite Stricken’s words about trusting me to handle his mystery problem for him, he was still grabbing the stone for himself. “But I know what could. Stricken has a succubus who works for him. I saw her do something like this when she teleported him out of MCB custody.”

“That can’t work here though,” Lee said. “Julie had Tanya’s people put spells up all over the compound. None of that stuff should be able to operate on compound grounds anymore.”

“That’s what the MCB director thought about their offices too.” Except Tanya was too proud of being MHI to do a half-ass job for us like those other elves clearly had. Which meant that if Lee was right, Lana might have grabbed Sonya, but she’d have to travel on foot until they got outside the range of the elves’ enchantments.

BANG.

We all flinched and looked toward the vault door. It had just gotten hit hard. And it wasn’t the big gun either. From the amount of force, my guess was that he’d willed a sledgehammer into existence and had sucked up enough dead monsters to give himself super strength.

BANG.

The vault door shook. Little cracks formed in the reinforced walls around it.

“They’re getting away,” Gutterres said. “Let’s go.”

“Give us a minute to get our wounded to safety.”

“There’s no time, Pitt. That stone is more important than any one of us.”

There was no way I was going to leave Cody. And yes . . . even Melvin. “You’ll get lost without us.”

Gutterres glared at me, but he was a man on a mission. “Stick around if you want. I’ll pluck that Ward out of the shape-changer’s corpse if I have to.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Trip said.

“Test me and find out.” Gutterres entered the tunnel. His men shared an uneasy look, but they followed.

A moment after the Secret Guard were out of sight Melvin said, “What’s got up his ass?”

“He’s just trying to save millions of lives. Pressure makes you cranky. Are you okay?”

“Melvin will grow new legs. Old ones had rash anyway.”

BANG.

“We can’t stick around here though,” Lee said. “We’ve got to follow them.”

“Hang on.” The thing that Gutterres didn’t realize was just how much of a maze the old tunnels beneath the compound were. If the Vatican Hunters didn’t pick up a trail, they’d probably take the wrong path. Lana—or whoever had broken Sonya out—had a few different tunnels she could choose to get out and if we didn’t know which one she’d taken, we’d never catch her in time.

SCREEEECH!

A