It was like another scene in one of those bad horror movies, he thought wildly as he was lifted off the ground by his throat.
His throat screamed for his attention, and all he could do was kick out uselessly in response to the lack of oxygen and crushing pain.
“I’ve played with you enough,” she hissed in his face, the smell overpowering. “Time for you to go away now.”
Her grip tightened, and Masters knew that he had only seconds before she crushed his larynx and probably only seconds after that before she did the same to his spine.
“Do you understand now, I wonder?” she mused, sounding casual and almost idle as she slowly strangled him. “You really never had a chance. Even your friend, The Black, was out of his depth. Did you really think I would be as easy to defeat as my servants?”
His heart was pounding so loudly in his ears by then that he couldn’t hear her as she droned on, not that he really expected her to say anything of interest anyway. Masters kicked out, catching her solidly in the gut, but she took the blow easily, without even grunting.
Have…to…
He had to do something beyond clutching at her iron-solid grip. He knew he was at his last inch of line and life, literally. Masters called up what strength he had left and lifted his right arm as high as he could, bringing his curved kukri blade down on her as hard as he could manage.
That brought him a reaction.
She roared in pain and rage as the blade bit through her flesh and into bone, and shook him like a ragdoll. How his neck didn’t just snap, Masters would never be able to guess, but he held on with his left hand as he began to hack at her arm with the captured weapon.
It took three blows.
Three blows from a weapon he knew could go through his thigh, bone and all, in a single poorly aimed strike. Three agonizing blows while he hung on for his very life, but when the third landed, he felt the bone give away, cracking beneath his weight.
Masters hit his knees, still holding onto her arm as he went down. Ragged and desiccated flesh tore as he took the limb full from her body. It was still clenched around his throat and he had to drop the blade to pry it off, finally pulling in a deep breath as he tore the dead thing from his neck. He was still gasping for air when a dark snarl made him look up.
Oh crap. She’s pissed.
In point of fact, judging by the expression on the monster’s face — once he adjusted for the insane damage he’d already inflicted on her — she looked beyond pissed. That was understandable, and wasn’t what was worrying him. What was worrying him was the fact that even after having her arm hacked off, this…thing, woman, whatever she was…looked quite able to do something about her anger.
And he was pretty much her only target at the moment.
Ah fuck.
The thought had just enough time to cross his mind as she grabbed her arm from his grasp, holding it in her still-attached limb, and then snarled a wordless, guttural sound of pure rage before she backhanded Masters with her own dismembered hand. The blow sent him spinning to the cement, rolling to a stop some forty feet away.
He flopped listlessly onto his back, his vision blurred as he looked over at her approaching form without even the strength to sit up.
Masters smiled at her, his teeth bloody and his face bruised.
“What are you possibly grinning at, you simpleton? I’m going to rip your flesh from your bones, then feed you to my servants,” she promised him darkly as she approached.
“Maybe, bitch.” Masters kept grinning like a loon as she stood over him. “You gonna give them that arm of yours too?”
“Insufferable piece of filth…,” she muttered, placing a foot on his chest and forcing him flat on his back.
Masters felt the pressure escalate — it was more than he would have thought she could exert without leverage — and in seconds he was again gasping for breath as she made it more and more difficult for him to fill his lungs.
She leaned over, looked deep into his eyes, and cocked her head slightly to one side.
“Die slowly,” she told him. “I can see the blood vessels bursting in your eyes. Beautiful, you know. Soon your soul will end, and then there will be nothing left to light those lovely orbs. Oh, the things I will do to your body…”
That would have sounded rather nicely dirty if it had come from another source, or if he was not in the process of being crushed, Masters thought wildly. Lights were popping in his vision, and all he could do was weakly slap at her leg with his hands.
“Dying is so very unpleasant, isn’t it? I remember my death,” she hissed, leaning in. “I was tortured and murdered by an entire village.…Pity for them that death could not keep me. Pity for you, as well. Now, die. Die for m—”
A distant-sounding report echoed in Masters’s ears as he struggled to stay conscious. He felt the weight on his chest shift, and then the demon thing spun around as more reports sounded.
The weight on his chest vanished suddenly, the creature’s body no longer on top of him, and Masters sucked in air as he struggled to sit up and look around. Fighting off a wave of dizziness, he couldn’t see his opponent anywhere. She, it, had disappeared.
Across the room, on the far catwalk, however, he recognized a few faces as Keyz, Hayes, and Turner raced forward with their guns blazing…led by none other than Captain Judith Andrews.
Huh. He slumped back down, black spots playing in front of his vision. I may owe her an apology.
CHAPTER 17
Judith Andrews had to physically fight to keep herself from gagging. The smell of decomposition in the large room wasn’t strong, precisely, but it was pervasive. They’d come down through the roof access, where the catwalk led out to permit workers access to fuel-storage tanks, only to find a scene out of a damned zombie movie.
That wasn’t a huge shock by now, of course, but the scene on top of the generator enclosures had taken her by surprise. For all that she didn’t much like Lieutenant Commander Masters, she knew the man’s record. He was a fully trained SEAL who had gone into this engagement armed to the teeth with heavy weapons and at least some sort of a plan. She wouldn’t have been shocked if he had been dragged under by force of numbers, but seeing him laid out on his back by one opponent who appeared not only literally disarmed but, quite frankly, dead in more ways than one…well, that was a bit of a shocker.
That surprise didn’t stop her from giving the order to open up on the unknown attacker, and the team put multiple heavy 7.62-millimeter rounds into it. The next surprise was when the creature spun on them, snarling. She could have sworn that the bone of its skull…wobbled. It was vaguely nauseating, and that was something she didn’t need considering the smell that permeated the room.
When it moved, though, she lost the capacity to be surprised. She hoped.
It just blurred and vanished from sight, like nothing she’d ever seen before, and then she was staring at the commander’s recumbent body on top of the generator enclosure.
Thinking rationally in the midst of a crisis was one of the first things she’d been trained in, however, and now that the immediate threat to her team leader was gone, she turned to the SEALs who were with her.
“Make a kill box!” she ordered, waving Hayes and Turner forward as she and Keyz set up where they were. “Cover our people down there!”
It was a slaughter — there was no other way to describe it really. These things, people, whatever they were, didn’t stand a chance. From their position, Andrews and her people had the high ground, and in her experience there was no defense against a bullet in the head.