She remained silent. He would be wondering if he’d gotten her. Perhaps, if she played dead, she could induce him to come her way. Get him halfway down the hall with nowhere to hide and he was hers.
“Why so quiet? Did I hurt your feelings? Come now, I gave you free rides on my amusements, the least you can do is talk to me.” His laugh was deep and rich; it was a sound that, in another time and place and coming from another person, might have raised her spirits. Now, it only served to fuel her ire. “You’re playing possum, now, aren’t you?” he called. “I thought you were braver than that.”
Still she kept her silence. She was about to go with plan B, and sneak back down the hall behind her, blowing shit up, when Darius cried out in surprise and another burst of fire echoed through the hallway. Wary of a trap, Queen crawled back to the corner, but then she heard an inhuman snarling sound, and she knew what was happening before she even saw it.
Darius was rolling on the ground, locked in combat with an oborot almost as big as him. This was her chance. She charged full-bore at the two combatants, firing at them as she ran. The way she saw it, it did not matter which of them she hit. Darius had to die for what he and the others had done here. The oborots, even after they returned to their fully human states, were doomed to lives of madness, interspersed with monthly transformations into mindless, violent monsters. Killing them would be a mercy.
She was halfway down the hall when something crashed into her from behind. She went down under a heavy weight, and just managed to twist around so that she landed on her side instead of flat on her face. The sound of Darius’s fight with the oborot had masked the approach of another of the creatures, and it had chased her down from behind. Her gun hand was pinned beneath her body but her knife hand was free. She drove an elbow into its jaw and followed with a slash to the throat. It was a shallow cut, but the oborot drew back, roaring in surprise and pain. Now that she understood what the creature was, she could see the human being behind the monster. Its eyes, however, were pure beast, and it would not stop until it killed her. The creature swiped at her, its fingers held like claws, and its nails raked across her cheek. Queen slashed again, opening a gash across the oborot’s thickly muscled abdomen. The oborot rocked back and raised its head as it roared in pain. She reversed the knife and plunged it into the beast’s heart. The oborot rolled off her and her knife was yanked from her grip as the creature struggled to pull the blade free. Queen sat up, leveled her Mark 23, and took out the Oborot with a single shot to the temple.
Before she could move, a shadow loomed over her and someone gave her gun hand a vicious kick, knocking her weapon from her grasp. She rolled underneath another kick and came to her feet facing Darius.
His eyes, alive with malice, seemed to glow against his skin. The scars on his head lent to his sinister air. He stood tensed, ready to attack, his hands opening and closing as if eager to crush her.
“Thanks for getting that thing off of me. If you’d been a better shot you might have killed it.” He circled to Queen’s left. Her gun was somewhere behind her, and doubtless he would love to get his hands on it. “The damn thing took off with my gun if you can believe it. A few of them are cleverer than the others. It didn’t know what the hell the gun was, I’m sure, but it carried it away all the same. I hope it wraps its mouth around the barrel.” He smiled as Queen moved in lock step with him, keeping herself between him and the gun she didn’t dare turn around to look for. “That just means I get to kill you with my bare hands. I’m going to like that.” His pearly white teeth glistened as he smiled.
The man outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds, but Queen was not the least bit intimidated. She wasn’t the first woman in special ops for nothing, and she relished hand-to-hand combat. She especially loved the look in the eyes of a bigger opponent the moment he realized he was being beaten by a cute little girl. In fact, she’d made quite an impression on Chess Team leader Jack Sigler, call sign: King, when she sparred with him for ten brutal rounds. Afterward, he had invited her to join his squad.
“A little less conversation, a little more action,” she said. With that, Queen sprang into motion, striking out with a quick jab that snapped his head back. Darius recovered instantly, and caught her wrist as she followed with a right cross. She yanked back, freeing herself from his powerful grip and ducked too late to evade his hook. The blow glanced off the top of her head and made her ears ring, but she’d been hit harder in her lifetime. Much harder.