Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

The PDA flew out of Rainer’s hand, shattering against the floor, its light instantly extinguished, but neither man noticed. King tried to get his hands around Rainer’s throat, but a fierce punch rocked him back and sent stars shooting across his vision. As he tried to shrug off the blow, Rainer squirmed from beneath him, and launched a flurry of blows—fists and elbows—most of which missed completely or glanced off King’s gear. A few however found their mark, and King’s head rang with the impacts.

He lowered his head to his chest, trying to make himself less of a target and clutched at Rainer. His fingers tangled in the other man’s shirt, then managed to snare one of the flailing arms. He tried to twist it around, but Rainer was not so easily subdued. The rogue Delta officer did not try to wrestle free of the hold, but spun around in the direction King was trying to turn him, and drove his body back into King’s chest, slamming him into the cave wall.

The breath was driven from King’s lungs, and his arms flopped uselessly to his sides, his nerves buzzing. Rainer whirled and drove a fist into his gut. King doubled over, partly from the piston-like force of the blow, and partly in a desperate attempt to trap his foe’s arm, but Rainer had already pulled free. With a savage growl, he gripped King’s shoulders and heaved him to the floor, descending on top of him with another crushing impact.

King felt a stab of pain in both biceps as Rainer straddled his chest and drove his knees down onto King’s arms, pinning him. Then, Rainer’s hands closed around his throat, and a darkness that had nothing to do with the absence of light began to close over King.

Rainer leaned forward, close enough that King could feel the man’s breath on his face. “Jack. I’ll be damned. You threw me a party. Used that little bitch as bait to draw me out. I’m impressed.”

King would have spit a curse in the man’s face, but the breath to do so had been driven from him and the choking hands kept him from drawing another. He struggled to free himself, to get even a moment’s respite, but Rainer’s position was unassailable. King felt his limbs start to tingle from oxygen starvation, growing cold and numb.

Then, as if in answer to a prayer he had not even thought to utter, Rainer’s grip went slack. He moved his hands away from King’s throat and held them up, flexing them before his face.

“What the hell?”

The rush of oxygen brought King back from the brink of despair. His arms were still tingling…no, not just his arms… Every square inch of his body was pins and needles, and the sensation was deepening, becoming a painful itch.

Through the fog in his head, he heard Parker speaking, and realized that what he was now experiencing had nothing at all to do with the beating he’d received. Rainer was feeling it too.

Whatever Sasha had done to the Prime was spreading, growing in intensity.

“There’s a ring of stones… I think that’s the marker.” Parker was saying. “I’m going to try to put it there. You’ll know if it works because we’ll all still be here.”

A low wail of pain came over the radio, grunts of exertion and agony, and then an abrupt silence.

Danno!

King heaved against Rainer. Distracted by the strange pain that was creeping over his extremities, the other man was slow to react, while King’s grief and rage opened a vein of untapped strength. He got one of his arms free and wrapped it around Rainer’s waist, and in the same motion drove his feet against the cave floor.

Locked together, they rolled once, twice…and then suddenly there was no ground beneath them, and they plunged into the void.





FIFTY-EIGHT


King had accomplished one of his objectives in the first moments of his struggle with Rainer. The destruction of the PDA had not only severed the link between the frankensteins and their leader, but it had also deprived them of their collective intelligence. Now, instead of four creatures working with a single mind, they were four wild beasts.

In every other way, they remained just as dangerous as before.

With a howl, they broke from cover and charged.

Knight felled one with a cannon-loud blast from the Barrett.

The other three continued, undaunted.

Rook leveled his Desert Eagle at the nearest target and squeezed the trigger again and again. The Action Express rounds hit with such energy that the frankenstein seemed to come apart before his very eyes.

The remaining two kept advancing.

With a bestial roar of his own, Bishop leapt forward and met the charge head on. He towered a full head taller than the monstrosity he faced, but the frankenstein did not show the slightest awareness of the fact. Its eyes locked onto Bishop, and it stretched its arms out to him, looking in that moment exactly like the iconic Hollywood character that had inspired its nickname.

As the two men met—one driven by steroids and inhuman surgical alteration, the other fueled by an almost incomprehensible primal rage—the frankenstein tried to seize hold of Bishop’s arms, perhaps intending to rip them from their sockets, but Bishop was too quick. Instead of drawing back to avoid the reaching arms, he stepped in close and hugged the thing’s face to his chest.