Hunters: A Trilogy (101 page)

Ken looked into those eyes and felt his mind wobble as the intensity of her cobalt gaze burned into his head; the dangers within her, leapt like fire from those blue eyes. He turned away, threw his cup into the hedge, leapt down from the platform and began sprinting toward the house, screaming as he went.

‘Stand to, stand to! This is
not
a drill – stand to!’

More explosions and the distant sound of hot steel, whining through the air, reached out to them from the lake. It, and the sound of men screaming, seemed to be coming from some other place, some other time – the noises were hollow.

Ken was only halfway to the house when he saw the door burst open. Junior and Michael sprinted across the porch and leapt down to the courtyard without bothering to use the steps. Landing heavily, puffs of dust rising from their boot soles, they turned to Ken. He saw their eyes, the eyes of Hunters.

Junior shouted: ‘Plan A…is it, Ken?’

Ken grinned and confirmed, saying: ‘Yeah, too right it is, boys! Plan-bloody-A! Get straight up to the Nest…Go now!’

They grinned like madmen and turned to sprint towards the barn. Junior laughed out his enthusiasm. ‘Woohoo, let’s get it on, baby, let’s get-it-on!’ the boy said, grabbing his partner by the shoulder and dragging him into the dark interior of the barn.

Ken grinned like the Devil himself. Considering there wasn’t really a ‘Plan B’ and that the time for death had arrived, he felt alive – the taste of battle was one he relished. His heart soared as he ran toward the house. Red and Jane were waiting in the kitchen for him; she looked at her husband in expectation.

Ken reeled off his words. ‘Right, they’re down by the lake!’ he said. ‘Jane, you watch the rear as planned. Tori will be here in about…’ He stopped as the door crashed open and Tori burst in.

She was breathless and had bad news. ‘There are hundreds of them, they’re moving in a long line up the gulley. Ken, there are so many!’ she said, and then shot a hurried glance at Red.

Ken grabbed her by the shoulder. ‘Good! All the more for us to slaughter,’ he said. ‘Come on…to your places, people, to your places! Take cover and shoot ‘em on sight. Shoot to kill, shoot to kill!’ The fire in his words was unmistakeable.

He waited until he saw the women had taken up their fire positions behind the sandbag walls – Jane covering out toward the rear and Tori watching the front – with his eyes rapidly doing one last check of their positions, and seeing everything was in place, Ken turned to leave. ‘Red, you’re with me, let’s go!’ he said. The two men ran outside and took cover by the sandbag emplacements they had made by the side of the barn.

Ken’s mind raced – had he done enough, were they ready? There was only one way in which the enemy were able to get to the house, and that was going to be straight past Red and him. The rear was impassable, coils of carefully placed wire and concealed mines had taken care of any possible attack in that direction. The sides of the farmhouse were also covered, except possibly the hedgerow in the distance. He calmed himself, letting his thoughts do some cold calculation. No, the only way to get to the house would be straight up the middle, straight through the wall of fire being delivered by Michael’s machinegun and Junior’s sniper rifle. Then there were the mines, grenade launchers and accurately-wielded assault rifles, the onrushing enemy had a lot to get past before they would ever hope of reaching the inner perimeter.

The sound of detonating explosives shattered his thoughts. Their booming resonance pulsed towards the house. More mines exploded, this time much closer. Ken saw them in his mind, heard Junior’s question flood into his head.

‘Four hundred yards, they’re heading into the open! Now, Ken – should we fire now?’ Ken watched the mental pictures that Junior and Michael sent him.

A long line of men were fanning out, left and right of the track leading to the farm, the enemy were using it as an axis and heading straight towards them. No cover there, only the heavily-mined gulley over to the enemy’s left.

Their formation, and lack of any decent cover, meant only one thing to Ken – perfect machinegun targets. He answered Junior’s question with his own thoughts. ‘Yes! Let ‘em have it, boys – kill ‘em all!’

Immediately, the belt-fed weapon began its staccato song of death.

‘
Che-che-chet…Che-che-chet…’

Tightly-controlled bursts of fire rained down from the Eagle’s Nest. Three to five rounds in each burst – disciplined, controlled, and deadly. Ken saw the distant enemy falling like wheat before an invisible scythe, tracer rounds flickering amongst them like supersonic fireflies, plumes of dirt and blood rose into the air as the heavy bullets hurtled into and through all which stood before them. The deeper, more resonating bark of the sniper rifle added its own baritone to the choir of death.

‘
B-oww…’

There would be a pause, whilst a fresh target was located, and then a repeat of the sound, whilst hot on its heels, the machinegun spoke up again. Their chorus rose to a crescendo and Ken saw the whole thing in his head, it was as though he was standing next to the boys, he saw and heard everything they saw and heard. The magical gift, one that Maggie had shown them, was now fully unwrapped.

Ken laughed to himself, thinking: ‘Who needs radios when they have this type of stuff going on?’ The thoughts were crazy, but not as crazy as the pictures in his mind. He smelled the odour of battle from the position above him, he heard the boys’ voices – calm and collected in the heat of this, their second battle.

They were as clear as crystal in Ken’s racing mind.

He heard Michael, saying: ‘Over to the right, Junior! Three hundred yards…there! Yes, left, left!’

The machinegun spoke.

Michael, shouting: ‘Good shooting!’

He listened to Junior’s voice, calmly saying: ‘Pass me another belt of ammo, will you? Mind the barrel with your hand, its red-hot! Look at that stupid prick, the one over there to the left – take him out, Mikey!’

The sniper rifle boomed.

Junior, whispering: ‘Awesome shot, dude, awesome!’

Machinegun, sniper rifle, machinegun…it went on and on.

In his mind, Ken stood next to them, watching the enemy and giving the boys his own target indications, his orders crackling over the noise of their weapons.

‘Four hundred yards, half right…six of them by those small rocks, crawling in the open…’ The rattle of the belt-fed weapon jarred his thoughts and blurred his vision. The tinny sound of falling shell-cases and bouncing metal links only added to the surrealism of his surroundings – it was sheer madness. The enemy were in total disarray, falling like ninepins.

The sensation overcame Ken; it was as though he had become the master of some new-generation video game. Think a thought, point with your mind, and then let the soldiers in your head do the talking.

Thought: ‘Four hundred yards, by the hedgerow...’

Mind soldiers: ‘
Che-che-che-chet! ‘B-oww…B-oww!
’

It was unreal. For what seemed like hours, Ken, and the two boys perched above him, played havoc with the advance of their enemies. Not one of them managed to get nearer than three hundred yards. Their corpses littered the fields to fall in stacks against the dark line of the distant hedgerow. Ken had no idea how many they had destroyed, killed, but he knew it was a lot.

‘How many more are there?’

The thought broke his link with the shooters above.

As if in answer to that last thought, he heard Tori’s voice, she was screaming at him… ‘More men are arriving! Many, many more – down by the lake, there’s dozens of them!’ Ken couldn’t see anything in his mind. He turned and looked back at the farmhouse. Tori was standing on the step and shouting at him. ‘I couldn’t get through…you were in the battle,’ she yelled. ‘There are more of them, lot’s more, and they’re all running this way!’

Ken nodded and waved. ‘Go back inside! Be ready, everyone get ready, they’re coming back!’ He shouted out the warning, ran to the barn and hurriedly stamped his way up to the Nest. The steps of the wooden ladder were covered with empty shell-casings, as was the floor of the barn below – they had fired hundreds of rounds.

As he scrambled onto the floor of their position, the boys looked up and Ken saw the inferno in their eyes. Their inherited blood-line was now fully out in the open. Both the men, for they were in fact, men. Both had that calm, almost arrogant expression upon their faces. It wasn’t such a meaningless trait as arrogance, more of a fiery confidence, one of trust, belief in each other, and of overwhelming love. Emotions born from dealing with the undeniable horrors of blood and sorrow, emotions caused by the never-ending reason for their existence – fighting the Darkness was their life, and when that fight came, loudly arriving upon their peaceful doorstep, then the Hunters would shine.

And shine they did.

As Ken looked at them, calmly reloading their weapons, brushing empty brass cartridges away, looking out of their firing slits, waiting for more of the enemy to stray into their lines of fire, he saw them shine. In fact, he saw them do more than just shine – the light of their strange inner force seemed to sparkle from within them. Ken thought of the blueness, which he had seen Michael’s father radiate with, of how the light almost exploded from within Jack when his final moments had arrived. Their posture and, the perhaps imagined, slight twinkling aura permeating from the men before him, served only to remind Ken of two things. The first, being of how dangerous these men were, and the second, of how crazy his own life was!

‘This whole situation is totally fucking nuts!’ he thought, jerking back into reality as a voice invaded those nearly-overwhelming thoughts.

‘Crazy, but real, Ken, look at those bastards, there’s hundreds of them!’ Junior’s soft voice ripped Ken back from the chasm of his whirling thoughts.

He crawled forward to take a look.

Red’s son was right, there were a lot of armed men advancing upon their position, whether they were in the hundreds was not something Ken would be able to confirm, and he had no intention of laying there and counting them.

He looked at the men, saying: ‘Right, same drills as before! Short bursts, well-aimed, effective fire only. Don’t blast off in panic, and keep your heads down! Don’t fire from the same position for too long, move around, okay!’ Ken watched as they nodded. ‘Don’t forget,’ he ordered, ‘if they reach that wire then you guys must come down straight away, I don’t want you trapped up here! We’ll take ‘em on in the courtyard!’ They nodded in acknowledgement once more. As Ken slid down the ladder, he heard Junior cocking the action of the machinegun.

The sequence of battle repeated itself, but with one change – this time the enemy tried to approach up the gulley towards the water tower. Red saw them and yelled out a warning. Looking up from where he was kneeling behind cover, Ken saw the rapid, stiff-fingered pointing that Red was making with his hand.

He heard Red’s voice in his head.

‘Gulley, Ken…they’re heading for the gulley!’

At the same time as Ken heard the big man’s words, all the hounds began to bark loudly. Their leader, Rufus, who had spent the previous half-an-hour running around the perimeter of the farmhouse with his cohorts in tow, hot lead whipping past their heads, leapt across to the sandbag wall. With his forelegs propped up on the makeshift barricade, hackles bristling, lips pulled back viciously, the old hound started howling in the direction of the enemy. Looking at the dogs in amazement, and deciding that, perhaps, it was time to join the fight, Ken rose to his feet, swapped his rifle for the grenade launcher and ran to the water tank.

Nearing the tank, he saw the enemy in the distance, they were about two hundred yards away – a perfect target. He laid the launcher across the wall and pulled out the golden eggs from his bandolier. After placing them in a long line along the wall, he flicked the launcher’s sight up and adjusted the range drum.

Very shortly afterwards, Ken began to have what he considered to be a turkey shoot. He and ‘Mister Blooper’ had a field-day.

Taking aim, he let loose with the first shot. The 40mm grenade sailed through the air, impacting right in the middle of the group of men who were heading for the gulley. The exploding anti-personnel round did nearly as much damage to them as did the terrible, mental shock of having high explosives lobbed onto them from an unknown position. About six of the men went down in the blast, whilst the remainder actually did run around like headless chickens. The second round blew another four of them off their feet – and that’s when the chaos really started.

The entire enemy force started firing at once. It was wildly inaccurate and mostly on full-automatic, but nonetheless, a lot of high-speed lead started heading toward the farmhouse. Bullets whizzed above, splitting the air with their ferocious crackle; the dull sound of weapons firing at them from a distance also reached Ken’s ears, heavy thumps slightly behind the noise of the cracks. More rounds passed overhead, lots of them. Some of the bullets started to hit more than just the surrounding air. Heavy, walloping noises, alongside screeching ricochets, started to fill their ears.

Then, as though they were facing a swarm of supersonic bees, the air began to fill with a vicious whipping noise. There were no sounds other than the sharp cracks of a repeatedly-breaking sound barrier as hundreds of high-velocity bullets whistled around them. Their sound conquered everything else. It seemed as though a wall of lead was pouring toward them.

Under such a torrent they, the Hunters, all of them, cowered.

It was at times like this when Ken’s knowledge and experience became the most valuable thing on the farm, more valuable than life itself. For without those hard-won talents, there would be no life remaining to be of any value. He screamed, with his voice, with his mind, and with his heart, Ken screamed at them: ‘Get your heads up, keep your heads up! It’s not accurate; they’re just blasting off, fire back, fire back! Kill them, kill them all!’

Leading by example, he immediately opened fire with the grenade launcher. Reloading like an automaton, firing, reloading, and firing again – hands blurring as he fired round after round. They leapt from the heavy muzzle of his smoking weapon, a veritable stream of golden death hurtled into the air, followed by some more, and then yet more. Ken kept firing the launcher until its fat barrel sizzled with heat.