The Bone Hunter, page 10
“With the Angry Bone Hunter?”
Brood nodded as they pressed forward. “That is the plan.”
As they made their way through the grimy water, Allison thought about the caves in Kentucky. She had only gone the one time because her father had made her. She had sold her rabbits to try to put together money to help her father being out of work, but then he insisted that she go on the class caving trip. Some of the other parents had pitched in to cover her trip because of her father’s heart attack.
“I’m getting better,” he had said. “Go. We don’t reject others’ kindness. It isn’t Christian. I’ll be here and better when you get back.”
She had gone. Secretly she wanted to see her friends again. They had played their pretend adventures. They kept teasing Rich, making train noises and telling him not to piss his pants. Even with all of that, they had enjoyed sloshing through the muddy water.
When they got back to the school, they had pulled Allison aside to explain a complication with her father. They tried to explain, but her ears had rung worse than from the train in the tunnel. She didn’t even have time to shower from the muddy water before they took her to the hospital to see her mother. She left muddy tracks in the lobby.
Her father was already gone.
During the graveside service, Allison walked away and pulled a honeysuckle from the fence. Three relatives came by to get her, and she had told them to leave her alone. Finally, her mother came down and grabbed her arm, demanding she say goodbye to her father. Allison had slapped her mother’s hand aside.
“He lied to me,” Allison had said.
Her mother had staggered back like she had taken a physical blow. “What?”
“He told me he would be fine, and he lied to me.” She had walked away without waiting for her mother’s response.
Allison had started fighting more in school. She hung out with the drinking crowd instead of the make-believe crowd. She graduated from drinking in the woods and fighting in school to doing both in bars.
Allison’s mom brought her pastor around to try to talk the devil out of Allison. She had stared at a Footprints in the Sand picture on the wall and waited for the lecture to be over. The first words out of his mouth had surprised her though. “Why don’t you enlist and fight for your country instead?”
Allison left the caves and the funeral behind in her mind, and returned to the present.
They climbed out in the air, still swirling with smoke, behind the ravine. The ground was charred black and crackled under their boots. Dark smoke still billowed up from the point of the armory ahead of them.
They continued toward the armory at a much less driven pace. With each step, water bubbled up out of the laces of her boots and formed a black sludge in her footprints.
Allison shrugged. “Should have wiped your feet, Jesus, you’re ruining the carpet.”
Brood looked at her and back forward. “Is that some American phrase I will never understand because I don’t watch the Netflix?”
Allison smiled and a wavy line of fallen, chain link fence came into view. “Yeah, it is what disrespectful girls say, if they want their mothers to slap them in church.”
Brood shook his head.
The complex consisted of a number of sheet metal buildings that looked like unmarked warehouses. The two closest to the side they approached where folded open and outward from the top, with smoking pouring out like chimneys. There were no guard towers in sight.
Brood said, “In Egypt, we just obey and respect our mothers to avoid being slapped.”
“I should have tried that. My mother would have liked a daughter from Egypt then,” Allison said. “Of course, you guys had a bloody revolution.”
Brood shrugged. “So did America. Now you have Netflix.”
They saw the guard towers collapsed on their sides and broken apart. Body parts lay severed around the concrete tarmac. The parts were also burned so that blackened flesh peeled back from raw, pink muscle and melted, yellow fat.
The concrete showed the slices in the pattern that reminded Allison of DNA. It was the same pattern she had seen on the rock face when she first tracked the monster.
Allison brought her weapon off her shoulder and to the ready. Brood lifted his as they clambered over the folded, blackened chain link. Their boots crunched on grit around the abused concrete and both left wet outlines of their tracks as the creek water continued to seep out with each step.
Three ATVs set out on the tarmac to their right, almost to the far fence. One was on its side; cut open through the body and engine. The other two still set on their wheels. One was occupied by a pair of legs in fatigues, with the rest of the body cut off at the waist. The other had a pair of gloved hands still gripping the handle bars, with no body to go with them.
“We should remember where those are for when we need to escape,” Allison said.
Brood shrugged. “Yes, looks like that plan worked out great for them.”
He pointed at a block of gray putty in a torn, red plastic cover on the ground in front of them. Brood pushed at her shoulder so that she stepped around it as they passed on both sides.
Allison looked down at the block and up at Brood. “C-Four?”
“Or something like it.” He looked up from the block at the burning buildings on both sides of them. “I don’t like that it’s laying out here like this. This place may not be done exploding.”
Allison put a hand on Brood’s chest and pointed forward with her rifle, as they emerged from between the warehouses.
The monster lay across the open space between body parts, with its back filleted open from one tip to the other exposing pale white gut. Its blades lay on the ground out from the edge of its open body like a deadly halo.
“Did they kill it?” Brood asked.
“It’s not healing this time.”
“Do you want to gather up more explosives and put it into a few more pieces before we go?”
The monster’s body pulsed, and its spines rolled up with the twitch before clicking back down on the concrete with an insect-like sound. The interior gut swelled like it was being inflated and shifted in color from white to pink. Its red hide folded back up from the ground and started to zip closed from one end.
Clear fluid spewed out from underneath and washed across the concrete, turning it dark toward their feet. Allison and Brood stepped back. Tendrils of steam rose from the exposed flesh of the monster and sizzled like cooking bacon. The Bone Hunter let out a screech that started low, but then rose to a piercing cry.
One end of the sizzling monster whipped toward them, and its hooked spines cut the air. Brood and Allison stepped back again. The monster paused, pointing toward them as its body continued to close.
“Is that acid?” Brood asked.
“Water, I think,” Allison said. “We need to get that C-Four and try to open this thing back up to buy us time.”
“I’m not sure that is C-Four,” Brood said. “And we may need water, if that is what slowed its healing.”
“Whatever it is,” Allison said. “We need to stuff it into this thing’s belly and blow it back open.”
“I’m not sure what sets off that explosive,” Brood said. “I’m afraid—”
The explosion knocked them onto their faces. The monster recoiled as flame washed through the air above them, but it did not seem harmed as it continued to heal. The remains of both warehouses folded away on both sides of the blast.
Allison’s ears rang as she raised her head. “I think heat will do it.”
Brood pushed her head back down as the monster sliced its spines through the air inches above them. The bright red monster started to roll, and its blades punched through the concrete as it cut a curve around and back toward them.
Allison took to her feet and pulled Brood along with her. They ran back through the heat of the warehouses engulfed in duel infernos. Brood made for the fence, but she pulled him sideways.
“The vehicles,” she said. “It’s our only chance.”
They ran along the tarmac between the surviving buildings, toward the remains of the men that had failed to get away before them. The front of a warehouse exploded out in their path. The cargo door ripped away from its track, and then sliced to pieces before it hit the ground.
The Bone Hunter pulled itself through along the concrete and turned toward the pair again. Allison brought her gun up to fire, but Brood jerked her to the side and they ran down the alley between structures.
The monster followed ripping apart the metal on both sides, as it plowed through the space far too small for its body. The living drill behind them blasted pieces of tables, papers, and unidentified metal frames through the air, as its spines hooked objects inside the buildings on both sides and tore them apart.
They cut to the right as they emerged into the open space. The creature did not wait, but drove through the building on its right, and into the next one after that as it ran parallel beside Brood and Allison.
A smaller building ahead of them had the doors off the hinges. The structures on both sides had already been razed. A pipe in the ruins of one sprayed an arc of water out across the front and over the ground ahead of the surviving building.
“This way,” Allison said. “We might have a chance.”
“That’s what you said about the ATVs.”
Brood followed her anyway.
The Bone Hunter cut through the back wall of a building beside them. They ran through the rain of water from the busted pipe and through the open doorway. Allison turned and fired through the water into the body of the creature as it closed on them. The wounds healed and bullets expelled, but she kept firing.
Brood raised his gun and fired as well.
The creature entered the spout of water, and then steam erupted from the few holes that had not closed a moment before. They shot a few new openings with it under the water, and the monster twisted away. It cut along the fence line and sent wire shrapnel firing out in every direction. A few pieces struck the outside of the building, and Allison stepped back from the doorway.
“I don’t think it’s gone for good,” Brood said.
Allison looked around the tables and cabinets in the single room behind them. “See if we are lucky enough to find something with a little more boom that we can use. We have to wound it and then drown it. More of that explosive will do, but we can also use oxygen tanks or even phosphorous.”
“What the hell is this?” Brood stood over a table, and Allison approached.
A red worm about the size of her forearm lay in a pan on the table. It was sliced open showing pale white inside with a bony halo of spines around its sides. Long, metal pins held it to the tray all the way around. A curved spout centered over its open body dripped water onto the creature one drop at a time. Each drip brought up a puff of steam as the smaller creature twisted against its pins, but did not pull free or heal.
Allison closed her eyes and shook her head. “They are experimenting on them?”
“Do you think the giant Bone Hunter escaped from this facility?”
Allison looked back at the open doorway with water raining down outside. Piped water was rare in this part of Africa and almost inexplicable out in the open. “I think there would be a larger hole through the door. Was it searching for this place all along, do you think?”
“We didn’t cover this in year seven science,” Brood said. He tapped her shoulder, and when she turned around, he pointed along the shelves beyond the table. Canisters lined the shelves. Through the plastic windows on their metal sides, she saw the spiny bodies of more, small Bone Hunters covered in rough layers of white frost inside where they sat unmoving.
Allison sighed. “I don’t think this was just an armory, Brood.”
Bony blades sliced through the wall knocking the canisters off the shelves. One broke open on the floor, and the frozen creature fell out with a clatter still curled up on itself. The monster sliced through the wall to their left, chopping it apart, letting in the light and heat from outside.
Brood grabbed Allison and turned, spinning her body away from the wall. His grip tightened on her arms as two of the spines cut deep along his ribs. He showed his teeth and collapsed away from her into the table. His elbow knocked the tray out of the water and onto the floor.
The blades of the Bone Hunter vanished from the scarred wall, but its screech shook the laboratory.
The creature in the tray on the floor pulled up two of the pins, and its insides started to turn pink.
“Brood, we need to go.”
“I’m hurt. I’ll slow you down.”
“Shut up and move.” Allison pulled him to his feet, leaning him on her shoulder.
The Bone Hunter drove into the wall buzzing it away completely. The roof tore free and launched away from the building. Water poured in over and around them. Allison dragged Brood with her to the doorway as the monster chopped the tables into splinters.
She lifted her gun with one hand and fired wild into the body of the creature. The water washing down its sides erupted in steam, but the creature pressed forward.
Allison pulled Brood outside and through the missing back of another warehouse. On the far side, she saw the cargo door torn away and the ATVs sitting outside there.
Brood pulled up short of the doorway. “Wait.”
“I’m not leaving you, so come on.” She pulled him.
He pointed to open canisters. “Explosives, Allison.”
She looked in and saw that there was space for three blocks of the red plastic in each rectangular, metal box. A few were missing one or two red plastic blocks.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
Brood furrowed his brow and nodded as he held his bleeding side. “Yes. I’ll manage.”
“Can you drive?”
He looked out at the ATVs and back at her. His side under his hands was shiny. “I’ll try.”
“Let’s grab what we can,” she said.
“Be careful.” Brood closed one lid softly and lifted it expelling a grunt. “We don’t know how sensitive it is.”
The Bone Hunter drove through the back of the warehouse obliterating pallets in its path.
Allison slammed two lids closed and jerked them away from the stack. She ran outside, and Brood followed with his own box of explosive. She loaded the boxes on the basket behind one of the vehicles and shoved the pair of legs aside.
As she started it, she watched Brood carefully load his explosive. Blood dropped from his side in large globs. They needed to treat the wounds, but the thing behind them was going to cut them apart if they did it now.
Brood knocked the hands off his handlebars and started his ATV. “Go. It’s right behind us.”
They raced up along the corridor toward the burning buildings, where they entered the facility, which turned out to be more than a simple armory.
The explosion behind them lifted up the backs of their ATVs and dropped them back down on their wheels with a crash. Allison turned and saw a black mushroom cloud rise from the remains of the last warehouse.
She watched a moment for the Bone Hunter to emerge, but then turned her attention back forward.
9
The Footprints of a God
Allison cut to the left. The wheels of their off-road vehicles broke double trails through the scorched grasses leaving tan dirt tire tracks behind them.
Brood gripped the handles of the steering bar until his knuckles whitened.
Allison shouted, “Brood, veer this way. We’re coming up on the ravine.”
His eyes drooped, and his head sagged. Blood ran over his lips thick with saliva and sizzled as it oozed onto the manifold below him. Allison imagined him driving right off the side into the canyon, so she steered back beside him to turn off his ATV. His hand relaxed on the throttle, and he coasted to a stop with the engine sputtering and vibrating under him.
Allison stepped off her ATV and laid Brood back on the seat, with his head resting on the container of explosives in the basket behind him. Allison gritted her teeth as she thought about the vibration and the heat of the engine under that volatile cargo.
His side was painted in his blood and it still pooled inside the deep slashes. His pants were wet with it down the entire leg into his boot on that side. She had waited too long to address it, she thought. Allison considered trying to wrap the wound and moving him to the canyon floor for cover, but she wasn’t sure it would be enough. There might be more help in the village, if she could get the bleeding to stop before he was done, she thought.
Allison removed her head cover revealing her flow of auburn hair. She snaked her hand under Brood’s body, and he grunted. She tied it off on his other side with her hands covered in his blood. By the time she was finished, the cloth was already soaked through.
The grating roar carried across the burned plain. She saw the turf and dirt spraying up into the air before she saw the Bone Hunter at the head of the wake closing fast.
Allison cursed. She climbed onto Brood’s ATV and gunned it. As they careened toward the edge of the ravine, she pulled him upright behind her and he laid heavy against her back.
She made a sharp turn spitting dust and soot into the air. As they ran along the edge to get around the canyon, she watched the monster barrel down onto her ATV that was left empty and running. The monster’s skin still showed wide patches of raw pink between the spinning blades. The patches were closing fast, but Allison kind of hoped the Bone Hunter might drop down into the creek at the bottom of the ravine before it was done healing.
“Damn it,” Allison said, “I left the—”
The Bone Hunter blasted through the vehicle throwing wheels and scrap metal out several feet in every direction. The triple load of explosive from the two cases on the back of the abandoned ATV went up in multiple concussions. The ground shook under her, and she felt the air pressure change around her. As her ears popped, she was afraid the force of it was going to knock her off the side. Dirt blasted up high in the air in a cone like a volcanic eruption.
