Although Traeger hadn’t risked trying out the cannon himself, he’d been present at some of the tests, and it had proved an effective weapon. Still running, he affixed the cannon to his shoulder and pressed the sensor against his skull just below his ear. He gritted his teeth, expecting to feel a little pain as it clamped itself to his flesh, but it adhered painlessly. He swiveled his head and the barrel responded, completely in sync with his movements. Bingo!
Feeling some of his old confidence flowing back, he tossed the duffel bag to the nearest merc—it was the one with the yellow goatee and the worried eyes.
“Carry this,” he ordered.
Somewhere to their left—in the darkness of the jungle it was impossible to tell how far away—a branch snapped loudly, a sound that could clearly be heard even over the tramp of their footsteps and the constant rustle-swish of the undergrowth they were running through. Flashlights turned in that direction, but there was nothing to be seen except overlapping leaves and black shadows.
Most of the group simply faced front again and picked up their pace, but Traeger saw the merc with the yellow goatee suddenly stop dead, his eyes going wide and his mouth dropping wetly open. His body shaking as he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack, he delved into the duffel bag and pulled out the shuriken that Traeger had previously rejected.
“Whoa, easy,” Traeger said, but panic had the merc in a vice-like grip now, and he was too far gone to listen. As the soldier turned to face the direction that the branch-snap had come from and drew back his arm, Traeger raised his hands and his voice.
“No, no, no,” he warned. “You need the wrist thing—”
Too late. The merc pistoned his arm forward and the shuriken flew from his hand and disappeared into the blackness of the jungle. Traeger looked at him, aghast, and began to back away.
By this time everyone else had not only slowed, but stopped, and they were looking back to see what was happening, some of them raising their guns, as if fearing an attack. As a couple of the mercs moved toward their goateed colleague, Traeger waved them back, as if the man was infected and should not be approached.
The merc, meanwhile, simply stood where he was, as if rooted to the spot, staring in fear at the black wall of jungle in front of him. All of them could hear the swift metallic whickering of the blade he had thrown, as it sliced its way with apparent ease through whatever was standing in its way. The sound, loud at first, grew fainter, and eventually dwindled to silence; a couple of the men started to relax. But Traeger knew it was not over, and sure enough, after three seconds’ grace, they all heard it again. But this time the whickering sound, faint at first, began to grow louder. The goateed merc’s eyes stretched yet wider with horror as he realized what was happening. The shuriken was coming back!
“No,” he gibbered, “no, no, go away!”
He backed off, instinctively throwing up his hand to shield himself.
Traeger saw a flash of metal, and next second the merc was writhing on the ground and squealing like a stuck pig, blood spurting from the stump of his wrist. His severed hand lay a few feet away from the rest of his body, fingers curled in toward the palm. The shuriken, having effortlessly lopped off the man’s hand instead of clipping back into the wrist gauntlet as it was designed to do, now rapidly lost momentum and embedded itself in a tree.
The merc continued to squeal. Traeger stomped over to him, furious.
“Shut the fuck up!”
He contemplated using the shoulder cannon on the man, silencing him for good—if McKenna and his crew hadn’t been watching, he might even have done so. Instead, he bent down and slapped the man hard across the face, once, twice.
Shocked, the man swallowed his scream.
But then, as though in imitation, another merc, standing on the periphery of the group, gave a sudden startled yelp.
They all turned as one to see him rising rapidly into the trees, as though yanked upward on an elasticated rope.
When he was around ten meters from the ground, legs kicking wildly, there was a shifting in the shadows somewhere in the canopy of leaves and branches above his head, and then something detached itself from the darkness and slid down the trunk like a vast snake. The group on the ground could only watch in horror as the Upgrade descended the tree headfirst. It paused to regard them, eyes glinting, mandibles stretching to reveal pink flesh inset with jagged shark-like teeth. Then it reached out with its long arms, grabbed its prey by the shoulders, and hauled him upward.
Seconds later the real screaming began, and blood began to patter down from the tree like rain.
McKenna was the first to start shooting, blazing away at the darkness above their heads into which the Upgrade and its victim had vanished. The man immediately stopped screaming—either put out of his misery by McKenna’s bullets or killed by the Upgrade—but nothing fell from above. Nebraska, Nettles, Coyle, and Baxley were all firing too, but the remaining three mercs had already turned tail and fled. The noise was tremendous, bullets causing sparks to flare in the trees like a multitude of angry sprites. After a few seconds, McKenna waved an arm to call a halt to the shooting—if the Upgrade hadn’t crashed dead to the ground by now, that meant it was no longer there—and indicated that they should beat a hasty retreat.
As they lowered their weapons and began to hightail it out of there, Casey grabbed McKenna’s sleeve and indicated the merc with the severed hand, who was still lying on the ground, sweating and groaning. McKenna looked anguished, but shook his head. If they were going to have any chance of surviving this, they couldn’t allow themselves to be lumbered by anything that might slow them down. He half-expected Casey to protest, but she simply nodded, and mouthed “Sorry” at the man.
Then they cleared out, leaving him alone.
The merc’s name was Bruce Willis, a handle that had proved both a blessing and a curse throughout his thirty-six years on this earth. Partly because of his namesake’s reputation, he had become a tough guy almost by default, developing from an amiable fat kid from a middle-class family (his dad was a pharmacy manager, his mom a school secretary) into one who did weights, and boxed, and eventually dropped out of high school to take a job first as a nightclub doorman, and then as a prison guard. He had become a merc because a friend of his told him the money was good, but he had always felt like a phony. He felt like he was never quite as committed, or ruthless, or downright batshit-crazy as the guys around him, that one day he would be found out, and when that day came he would find himself in deep shit.
And now that day had come. Because here he was, in a jungle clearing, at night, on his own, being hunted by a monster. He had lost a hand, and a fuck of a lot of blood, and was in indescribable pain, and probably dying. There was a part of him that wished he could just pass out, slip into oblivion, but he couldn’t, because he had so much adrenaline racing through his system right now that it felt like his whole body was screaming. On the other hand (ha-ha), maybe now that everyone had gone away and left him, he would be left alone too. The monster would chase after the others, and he would be free to live or die at his own leisure, depending on what God (because he did believe in God, despite his mom’s insistence that, by choosing the path he had chosen in life, he had forsaken his faith) had in mind for him.
He was still thinking these vaguely comforting thoughts when he heard a heavy thump to his right. Although it hurt to move—funny how losing a hand could make every other part of your body bellow out in pain too—he turned his head. What he saw chased all thoughts of God’s mercy from his mind. The monster was standing right beside him, its colossal legs stretching up to its equally colossal torso, and from there to its hideously ugly head.