Hunters, Matt Rogers [pdf ebook reader .txt] 📗

He could die here as long as they survived. He’d lived a thousand lives already, and the pain of a fatal beating at another man’s hands didn’t faze him either. He’d felt pain in all its facets. Experienced it in every imaginable way.

Then again, he quite liked his life, so he fought for it with everything he had.

He powered his way to his feet at the same time as the other guy, whose long hair billowed in waves over his face. The man didn’t bother sweeping it back, just fought with it obstructing his vision like a hellish apparition from a horror movie. He darted forward in a crouch and threw a laser-sharp right hook at hip height, aiming to sweep it upward at the last second and pop it into King’s ribcage.

King brought his hands low, enacting a competent defence, but the strike never came.

A fake.

Oh, shit.

The other fist was coming at his head before he could change his hand positioning. He jerked backwards like an amateur contortionist in an attempt to avoid the shot, but the ends of the man’s knuckles still smacked him in the nose.

It broke King’s nose.

He recoiled, white hot pain drilling through his nose into his skull. He couldn’t think, couldn’t hear, couldn’t see. The pain was monumental. Either it had been a lucky shot, or the long-haired guy was a high-level striker.

The guy charged in and threw three consecutive punches into King’s mid-section, each one more powerful than the last as he built momentum.

Left-right-left.

King turtled up, almost sinking to his knees from the punishment, crippled by the pain. The guy loaded up for a final haymaker to King’s jaw, which would separate him from consciousness long enough to pick up a gun and put a bullet in his head.

But finally, miraculously, King saw it coming.

He ducked under the turbocharged right hand and grabbed the guy around the mid-section and drove him down to the floor. But the guy was a competent martial artist, not just a one-trick pony, and he bucked at the hips with the leverage and balance of an NCAA wrestler in Division 1.

King gave endless thanks for all the simulated sparring with Slater. If the bucking had worked, the guy would have rolled King over, wound up on top, and rained down punches and elbows and knees until King was broken and bloody and defenceless.

Instead, King slammed the guy’s hips back to the floor and swept his left leg over to mount position, establishing dominance.

Then the guy did something unanticipated.

He seized King’s left forearm in a kimura grip, and wrenched with all the kill-or-be-killed strength in his body.

King felt muscle and tendons tearing.

In half a second his arm would snap like a twig.

He sucked in a deep breath, narrowed his focus, channelled all the strength he had left into a final blow.

Ready?

Go.

He cocked his right arm at a ninety-degree angle and dropped it like a sledgehammer as the guy was torquing on his left arm. The elbow slammed into the man’s forehead and snapped his head back against the thin carpet. King saw his eyes and nose and teeth rattle from the brutal impact. He let go of King’s arm and King properly established mount position, then rained down three consecutive elbows.

Two to the face.

A final one to the exposed throat.

Game over.

The guy was either unconscious, paralysed or dead.

King reached for the overturned weapons rack and pulled his SIG Sauer P226 MK25 from the twisted metal. The guy’s face underneath him was inscrutable, masked by long strands of hair matted to the blood flowing from his mouth and nose. He took one final breath, looking up at King.

King put the barrel on his forehead and pulled the trigger.

The gun blared.

The blood pulsing at King’s temples and the adrenaline roaring in his ears slowly faded away.

He heard bodies crashing into hard surfaces in the kitchen.

Another fight to the death.

Slater.

King pushed himself up off the body without a second thought. It was only as his left arm took the majority of his weight that it buckled at the elbow, his forearm on fire, like his nerves were guitar strings that had been snapped with twangs.

There were no broken bones, but there was serious muscle damage.

He collapsed on top of the long-haired corpse, grunted his frustration out, and rolled to his feet, using his feet to push himself upright.

Left arm hanging uselessly by his side, he gripped the SIG tight in his right hand and stumbled out of the armoury.

21

Slater’s first thought was, Idiot.

Instead of shooting him in the back of the head, whoever was behind him had delivered a line designed to frighten him.

Slater was going to spin around regardless, whether he heard a whisper in his ear or the scuff of foot against the kitchen tiles, so theatrics were pointless.

But when he twisted on the spot the hostile was ready for it. Even though the CQBR was a variant of the M4 carbine, designed for effective use in tight spaces, it was still an assault rifle. It was bulky and hard to manoeuvre compared to a semi-automatic handgun, which would have acted as an extension of Slater’s hand. Instead he had to whip the bulky rifle around, and big hands snatched it and tried to wrestle it out of his grasp. But Slater held strong and he wrenched it back in his direction, using inhuman strength reserves, and he won.

He spilled back across the kitchen floor on his rear, holding the CQBR carbine the wrong way round.

The assailant loomed over him.

He was small and stocky in the way that most Special Forces operators are. King and Slater were wild exceptions in the clandestine community, each being over six foot tall and north of two hundred pounds. That much muscle is usually wasted, fatigued at the first sign of exertion, which made them anomalies due to their otherworldly conditioning, something they’d worked hard for. The best operators are small because the best operators have the ability to endure. They keep soldiering