Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

“It’s overgrown. Shin said he was able to move faster on the high ground.”


A blistering retort rose to King’s lips, but he bit it back. She was right, of course. Trying to blaze a trail, in the dark no less, was an exercise in futility. “You pick the route, and I’ll keep us moving in the right general direction,” he said. “But if we get lost, you have to promise not to blame the officer.”

Zelda actually laughed. “Deal. This way.”

She guided them up a hill where they could see the compound. The place looked completely deserted. A glow appeared in the distance, in the direction of the road, and then it abruptly rose like a tiny sun over the crest of the hill. It was the headlights of a Burmese army truck. A second pair of lights followed right behind it. As the truck charged down the hill, a few of the abominations stirred from their refuge in the shadows, and went out to meet the arriving forces. With a little luck, King thought, the Burmese would be so occupied with the frankensteins, they wouldn’t even realize that his team had been there. He wanted to watch the chaos unfold, but a bestial hooting sound from behind them, answered by several more similar cries from all around, reminded him that most of the monstrosities were already in the woods and hunting him.

Another two hundred meters brought them to the place marked on his GPS as the rally point. Zelda picked up a plastic chem-light tube, which gave off light only in a spectrum visible through her night vision device, and confirmed that they had arrived.

“Those things are everywhere,” Tremblay remarked without his customary humor. “We can’t stay here.”

King was about to agree when another cry tore through the night, only to be silenced as abruptly as the fall of a guillotine blade.

Zelda immediately keyed her mic. “Irish, come in.” She listened for only a moment before raising her head to the other. “They’re in trouble.”

“Where?”

Zelda asked the question of Parker at the same moment King asked her, and when the reply came, she didn’t bother to put it into words, but broke into a run, heading northwest.

Though Zelda had only been given a rough approximation of where Parker, Shin and the others were, the noise of a disturbance in the underbrush, growing louder as they moved, brought them to the spine of a low ridge. In the darkness, King could barely make out two human shapes struggling to climb the slope below. He started down to assist them, but Zelda snagged the back of his shirt.

“Wait!”

It wasn’t her grasping hand or her admonition that stopped him, but rather her tone; she didn’t sound frightened exactly—King didn’t think anything could frighten Zelda Baker—but she was definitely rattled.

“There’s something down there.”

“What?”

“I—I can’t tell.”

The men on the slope were definitely fending off some kind of attack, alternately shooting into the darkness below their feet and trying to advance up the incline.

“You’ll have to give me a better answer than that.” King started to pulled free, but Somers was faster.

Moving with a speed and agility that seemed unnatural in someone so big, he charged down to the other men and grasped one with each hand, heaving them bodily halfway up the hill. It was the boost the beleaguered Delta operators needed. Bounding to their feet, the two men—Parker and Shin—scrambled up to join the others.

Somers started to follow, but he had time only to turn around before something snatched his feet from under him. The big man toppled like a tree, crashing heavily to the ground. He was whisked away into the underbrush.





THIRTY-ONE


Somers felt as though his left foot had been caught in a bear trap. Only the heavy leather uppers of his combat boots had prevented the vise-like jaws from snapping his ankle.

Jaws—yes, he’d been grabbed by something with jaws and teeth. It was an animal of some kind, impossible to identify, but low to the ground like a crocodile or alligator. The beast was dragging him back, into the thicket where, presumably it would do more than just nip his ankle.

Not today you won’t.

Somers drove the heel of his free right foot into the ground and tried to wrench his trapped left foot loose. He was only partly successful. The creature didn’t let go, but his mighty heave overcame the power of its retreat, and for a moment the beast was lofted into the air, still clinging to his foot. Somers caught just a glimpse of a thick, torpedo-shaped body with stubby legs paddling at the air and a long thrashing tail before his leg and the attached animal crashed back to the ground.