The Last Raven: An Urban Fantasy Noir (Riftborn Book 1), page 29
I vaulted over the ridge and started sprinting down the bank, hitting the flat at high speed and keeping low as I raced toward the fence. Searchlights moved slowly around the area, but clearly whoever was in charge of security didn’t think anyone would be stupid enough to attack the place, so they hadn’t used many of them. It left large parts of darkness that I used to my advantage until I reached the fence and spotted Ji-hyun already scrambling up toward the unsuspecting guard in the tower.
I turned to smoke and billowed up, tendrils of darkness wrapping around the guard’s body as more and more of me arrived in the tower until smoke tightened around his neck and I rematerialized beside him, driving a rift-tempered blade up into this throat, killing him instantly, and he fell lifelessly to the floor of the tower. A bright blue flash in the opposite tower signified that Ji-hyun had finished with her own guard.
I wiped the dagger on the guard’s thick winter coat, picked up the rifle that he’d been using, and looked through the scope to the entrance of the compound, where one of the two guards fell to the ground. The second guard raised his gun, and his head vanished in a plume of red.
“All done,” Nadia said through the comms I still wore. “I’ll keep watch up here.”
A guard who’d been passing by the entrance ran out to see what had happened and soon found his own head matching those of his two dead companions. At this rate, we could just let Nadia kill everyone.
I dropped down from the tower, partially turning to smoke to slow my fall, landing quietly and without harm, while Ji-hyun climbed down the ladder and ran over to me.
“Show-off,” she hissed with a smile.
“Right, you want to go building to building?” I asked.
“If Mason and Callie catch wind of us, they’re going to be a nightmare to get to,” Ji-hyun said. “How about you go scout out that main building and I’ll take care of anyone in the surrounding area?”
“I have to pass by that tent there first,” I said. “I’ll clear it out on the way. Leave you with a bit less to do.”
“Thank you so much,” Ji-hyun said with every bit of sarcasm she could manage.
I unslung the MP5 from my shoulder. “You ready?”
Ji-hyun nodded and readied her own MP5. “We’re keeping this low and quiet, yes?”
I gave her the thumbs-up and set off through the camp as Ji-hyun made her way to the closest structure, losing sight of her as I reached the tent nearest me, and moving inside with my rifle raised. It was empty.
“This is weird,” I said through my comms.
“No one there?” Ji-hyun asked.
“Yeah, that the same with you?” I asked.
“Yep,” Ji-hyun said.
“You need to get to the main building,” Nadia said. “It’s important.”
“You know what’s there?” I asked her as I left the tent and headed that way, making sure to keep an eye out for anyone who might like to do me harm on the way.
“No,” Nadia said. “It’s just darkness. But it’s a feeling. Something isn’t right here, Lucas.”
I reached the main entrance to the large building and found the door wide open. I stepped into the dimly lit building and found it to be a large storage area of some kind. There were several jeeps along the far side and wooden boxes on the opposite. A set of stairs were at the rear of the building, leading up to what looked like an office above.
Massive fuel cells sat at the far end of the compound. The work they’d done there must have needed a huge amount of energy to keep going.
There was gunfire from outside the warehouse, and I knew that whatever resistance Ji-hyun had encountered would be having a bad day.
A metal grate in the floor opened and four armed soldiers appeared, each of them carrying a SIG716, all of them aimed at me. They wore dark grey and blue uniforms, looking just enough like military, you’d think they might be unless you were aware of the differences. Mercenaries.
“Take a step back,” Nadia said in my ear.
The bullet hit the first of the five guards just under the armpit, punching through and hitting the one directly beside him in the ribs. I turned to smoke and flew back behind the nearest jeep, but the guards started to fire, and a round went through the smoke, causing me to re-form immediately. I managed to roll to the side behind the jeep as pain laced my chest and ribs. Damn it, I hated being shot by tempered bullets, even when they go through my smoke form.
The guards stopped firing. “You’re too late,” one of the guards shouted.
“Don’t move,” Nadia said. “Keep low.”
I readied myself as there was a shout, a small bang, and then the rest of the camp exploded.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The fireball that had been created by the explosions after the fuel cells and been breached could be seen from where I was inside the warehouse. The heat rushed in through the open door, and the force of the blast tore holes in the warehouse’s outer skin. For the first time in many years, I was a little concerned about Ji-hyun’s well-being.
The cacophony of malignant sound that tore through the night made the remaining guards scatter inside the building. I peered through the wheel arch of the jeep I was behind and found that the guards from before had run back down into the building behind them. I would have to hunt them down. Fine with me.
I moved my rifle up and stepped around the jeep, putting two rounds in the head of one guard who chose that exact moment to move toward me. His friend opened fire toward me, and I backed around the jeep as the sounds of bullets slamming into the reinforced vehicle combined with the noise of gunfire from outside. Ji-hyun was not done. The knowledge raised a smile.
With gunfire still being aimed at my location, I crept around the rear of the truck, lay down, and fired twice through the gap under the larger truck that my adversary was crouched behind. It hit him in the shin, and he toppled to the side, where I put two more rounds through his skull.
I searched the ground that I could see for more boots that needed urgent ventilation and, when I found none, got back to my feet and moved quickly around the side of the warehouse. I stopped at the back of a large truck, the loading bed dropped down and empty. The truck had chains on its tires, and I thought back to how Hannah had said that there was a boat in the nearby ocean. I wondered if the truck had been here to take stuff from the boat or bring stuff to it. Another question to ask the guards.
I rushed to the staircase and quickly climbed it, practically kicking open the door and moving into . . . a small, empty room. “Well, that was anticlimactic,” I said to myself, pushing the button for the lift that, apart from the light switch, was the only thing inside.
The lift arrived, and the metal doors opened, revealing a gleaming interior of polished wood and glass.
“I’m going in a lift,” I said into the comms.
“I’ll join you soon,” Ji-hyun said.
“Me too,” Nadia added.
I stepped onto the lift, and my comms cut out as the doors automatically closed and the lift began to move down. It was pretty clear that we were soon well underground, although when the lift didn’t stop for some time, I began to wonder just how far underground we were going. There were no buttons to select a floor, or even a panel to hide them behind. No screens of any kind. It was the most minimalistic lift I’d ever been in, and it wasn’t like they were known for their clutter in the first place.
After what felt like a solid minute of movement, the lift stopped, and the doors opened. I had readied the MP5, but the tiled hallway beyond was empty.
I stepped out of the lift and looked around. The corridor had glass partitions on either side of it, showing two huge labs, each one looking sterile and empty. The labs were white and silver, and everything looked incredibly pristine, like someone hadn’t taken their new toy out of the packaging yet for fear it might lose value.
There were four doors inside each lab marked with AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in big red letters. I wondered if they needed checking, but I figured that doing that alone was probably not the best idea, so I continued down the corridor.
I reached the end, where the corridor opened out into a large foyer-like area, with two metal doors—with an A or B on them—blocking whatever was beyond, and turned back to the corridor to make sure I was still alone.
One of the metal doors—marked with an A—was slightly ajar, so I figured that was the first place to go. I pushed it open with one hand, keeping the MP5 ready in case something decided to have a try.
The room inside was huge, easily as big as one of the labs I’d just passed, but unlike those, it wasn’t empty. It was, however, filled with corpses. A lot of corpses. Probably fifty people in total, some in lab coats, some in street clothes that looked old and tatty. Prisoners and people who no longer held value. I was going to hurt someone for this.
I stepped inside and checked the room, discovering that the victims inside the room had been mown down with gunfire. They’d fallen all around the room, and there were dozens of bullet holes in the walls. Some had tried to escape through a metal hatch at the far end of the room and had died holding the circular locking wheel. Judging from the number of tables, and the fact the window on the door some of them had tried to open revealed a spacious kitchen, this was a mess hall.
I moved back to the entrance and stepped out into the foyer again, moving to the second door and pushing it open. It moved without any friction, opening into a dim hallway. Two doors sat along either side of the hall, and as I moved slowly down the hallway, I opened each one to reveal a different office. There was a lot of mess in each of them, with the contents of paper, computers, and furniture having been thrown around. Fingernail marks could be clearly seen on two of the doors, and there was a head-sized hole in one wall.
A metal door at the end of the hallway was open, revealing a room similar to the foyer except for the two dead mercs inside wearing uniforms identical to those I’d killed up on the warehouse floor. Both had been torn into by something big. Apart from the dead bodies, there was a desk, which was still intact, and a door behind it that, from the looks of things, led to some kind of break room.
The only other thing in the room was the large open door that led into a blue-lit tunnel going down. “Great, more down,” I said to myself, stepping over one of the bodies and entering what I hoped was the end of my searching for something that might tell me where Mason and Callie were. Or who they’d sold to.
The tunnel had metal rails down the centre of it, a bit like the tunnel under Gabriel’s church, although I doubted it was for as wholesome a reason as to go see a train.
It turned out I was right. The tunnel opened out and I followed around a bend, directly into a large cart. It had an engine on the front, the key still in the ignition, and at least ten bodies piled up on the flatbed at the back. They all looked to be in various shapes and forms of not human, although most of them had at least human parts, so they could be identified.
Beyond the cart of death—which I decided there and then that if it wasn’t already an eighties horror film, it really should be—was a large cavern with twenty cells all around the exterior. The walls were made of stone, and it was exceptionally warm. It also stank of blood, shit, and death, not necessarily in that order. The floor was dark stone, but there had been a thick layer of something placed over it. I looked a bit like a clear film you put over phone screens, but in gigantic size. There were little bubbles of air in places where the stone underneath didn’t quite sit level, and a lot of the film was tinged pink. I got the feeling this thing was washed down a lot, considering how many drains there were around the outside of what was essentially a giant icosagon.
There were several bodies in the room, all looked fresh. One was halfway through a door, a set of stairs behind it leading up into a room that overlooked the icosagon.
The lights in the room were dim, little more than spotlights from above, shining unpleasant and harsh light down on the icosagon floor. I ignored it and watched as the creature that had once been human half-walked, half-pulled itself out of the open cell at the far end of the room. It was seven feet tall and naked from the waist up, its skin purple and blotchy, covered in what appeared to be boils. One arm was considerably longer than the other and ended in two long spear-like fingers. It had six eyes and a mandible where its mouth should be. The long dark hair on its head merged into fur across its back and arms.
The creature looked over at me and shrieked, fully pulling itself out of the cell. It had dark orange trousers on, but they were torn and covered in blood. I had no idea if the blood was theirs or not; it didn’t much matter.
I fired two rounds into the thing’s head, which snapped back with force. The creature shrieked again, so I put four more in its chest and another two in its head. More shrieking. Goddamned rift-tempered bullets, I thought to myself and tossed the rifle onto the ground, unsheathing my two daggers and readying myself for the inevitable.
The creature shrieked again and charged, moving much quicker than I’d anticipated. I dodged aside and slashed with one of the daggers, catching it across the side of the abdomen and opening a nasty wound. The creature stopped, put its fingers in the wound and licked the dark green goo it had for blood. The wound bubbled and hissed before closing shut.
“Well, that’s new,” I said with the sigh of a man who knows his crappy day is about to get much worse.
The creature ran at me, its deformed arm dragging along the ground, flicking it up at the last moment to try and spear me in the chest.
I’d turned partly into smoke, letting me move quicker than I had before while not having to worry about using too much power too quickly. My daggers flashed as I moved, cutting through the creature’s spear-like fingers. They made a horrible sound as they fell to the floor and the creature shrieked once again.
I darted back to finish things when I saw a door directly below the glass window open and the soldier stepped out, raising his rifle and firing twice. I threw myself to the ground, the bullets hitting air as the creature pounced at me, landing on my chest, its mandibles clicking loudly as its bloody stump of a hand tried to hold me down.
I grabbed hold of the creature’s arms—one in each hand—and turned to smoke.
Turning to smoke when someone is holding you, or you’re holding someone, is not fun. It’s something I try exceptionally hard to not do for two reasons. One, it causes me pain that tears through my body like water down a stream, and two, the aftermath is less than pleasant.
My turning to smoke filleted the creature’s arms where I’d touched it. The creature looked like it had been peeled. Its legs, groin, and arms were all torn apart, leaving long wet pieces of flesh and muscle to hit the floor as the creature rolled around and screamed, causing even more blood to spill over the floor.
I’d looked for not even a second when the three bullets hit me in my smoke form, forcing it to disperse. The problem with dispersing my smoke form was that it became harder for me to think straight. It was like my brain was in a thousand places at once, each piece experiencing different sensations, different sights, and different sounds. The bombardment on the senses was unpleasant at best.
The bullets kept coming, forcing me to disperse more and more, each time my senses becoming more and more overwhelmed, my brain trying to keep everything together. I focused on the soldier, who ran out of the stairwell, jumping over the body of his comrade, firing the whole time. I felt all of those senses, all of those tiny pieces of consciousness, snap into focus with pure distilled rage.
The soldier had emptied a magazine and was sliding in a fresh one when all of the parts of my smoke moved toward him in a rush, re-forming myself and driving my fist into his face with terrifying speed and power. The soldier hadn’t anticipated the attack and had left himself open, his magazine clattering to the ground as I kicked out his knee and drove my own into his stomach, forcing him to drop his rifle, which I kicked away with one foot.
I turned to seek out my daggers as the creature, still dripping gore, leapt at me.
I used the creature’s own momentum against it and threw it behind me, into the soldier, who was turning into a shadow, the darkness having already covered his head and chest and moving down toward his legs. The creature’s arm got lost inside the soldier’s shadow form, and it began to kick and scream like a trapped animal, only making things worse as the soldier tried to disengage himself from the situation.
If the soldier had turned into a shadow, the fight might have been much more complicated. Hooded revenants who can become shadow are hard to pin down, and with the amount of shadows that were created over the floor, it meant he could pop up from any of them or merge his own shadow with one to leap out of.
I picked up both daggers, ignoring the squealing that had begun from the creature as the soldier continued to try and get away from it. The creature’s blood began to bubble and boil as it was sprayed all over the floor, its flesh trying to heal and then begin torn apart again and again.
“Get off me,” the soldier screamed, the shadows over his face now gone, the creature’s mandible trying to snap at the shadows, to tear it away, and only resulting in the mandibles themselves being stuck in the shadows.
“It’s a real catch-twenty-two situation you’ve got going on there,” I said.
The soldier stared at me, turned completely into shadow, decapitating the creature, and vanished into the ground.
I really should have just kept my mouth shut.
The head of the creature came flying out of the ground a few feet from where the soldier had vanished. I avoided it easily, but it was enough to move me a step closer to where the soldier exploded out of the ground, punching me in the face and kicking me in the chest.
I drove one of my daggers up toward him, but he vanished again, the shadows on the floor around me moving and merging, giving me no clue as to where the bastard was about to pop up from.
I moved back to the corner of the icosagon, kicking my MP5 as I went, picking it up when I was completely in the darkness of the edge of the room, and using the rifle to shoot out the lights that sat all around.
