Ripper (22 page)

“You should have negotiated,” sounded the deep voice.

Suddenly Jack reappeared in the facing of the wall. This time it was he who was smiling.

“You’re right, here’s my offer!” he shouted as loud as he could.

Guzman’s larger-than-normal eyes widened,
and just before Jack fired the M-14, the horrid-looking Anaconda raised his hands upward and jumped. Grabbing broken wooden beams, he heaved himself up and out of the laboratory a split second before the red-hot nine-millimeter round struck the saddlebags.

The explosion actually blew Collins backward into the tunnel as it started to collapse. As the excavated hole fell inward upon itself, a split
second of fire, rocks, and smoke flew through the hole. The combination of dynamite, and its natural offspring, nitroglycerin, detonated with power triple what the original makers intended.

Everett quickly picked himself up and with his ringing out of control, saw Collins lying motionless and face down in the hard, compacted earth of the tunnel. He reached down and handily picked Jack up. Shaking
him, not caring if he had a neck or head injury, Everett waited until he opened his dirt-caked eyes.

“Maybe a fuse next time!” Everett screamed.

“Remind me next time, will you?” Jack said, shaking himself to full wakefulness. Then he suddenly remembered. “Jesus, I think Guzman got out!”

It didn’t take the genius of Jack’s words to get Everett moving. He just turned, helping Collins to his feet,
and then they started running for their lives.

The raid on the hacienda called Perdition had ended.

The nearly ten-mile flight from a horror none of the four men could ever have imagined had just started.

4

It didn’t take long for the men to catch up with the women who were trying to negotiate the long and dark culvert in complete and utter darkness. The only time they could see anything was when there was a break in the concrete over their heads, which allowed the rising moonlight to penetrate the blackness. Sarah had kept pushing the young girls as much as she dared. All sixteen were close
to freezing up in their panic-stricken flight from the bowels of Perdition.

At almost every break in the culvert, the girls would stop, giving them the slightest break and hope at seeing the least bit of light.

“Vámonos, vámonos,” Sarah shouted from the rear as the young women stopped just under a large break in the roof of the large concrete tube. “We have to move!” she shouted as she pushed
through the block of scared girls.

Sarah saw the wide eyes as the adrenalin rush of their escape had just started to ebb. She saw the fear and terror of what they had been through seeping through them like sweat through their pores. She didn’t hesitate as she grabbed the oldest-looking girl and shoved her away from the light streaming through the large hole. The woman just stared at her and then
looked down the long dark tunnel.

Just as Sarah pushed the woman again, she heard the girls at the back of the pack scream and surge forward. Sarah cursed at not having a weapon as the girls crowded around her.

“Damn it Sarah, why aren’t these people moving?”

Sarah relaxed when she heard the familiar voice of Will Mendenhall as he burst around the small bend just before the break in the culvert.
He angrily pushed through the crowd of cowering girls, and when he saw their panic-stricken faces, he tried his best to reassure them.

“Because damn it they’re terrified and we have no light!”

Will reached to his side and handed his flashlight to Sarah. “Get them moving! We have company coming this way, and believe me it’s far worse than you can ever know. Now let’s get them going!” Will angrily
pushed two of the girls and then started gesturing for the others to follow Sarah and the light down the tunnel. He had just drawn his nine millimeter, feeling how inadequate the weight was in his hand, when more screams filled the small space.

“Does anyone follow orders anymore?” the angered voice of Collins said, echoing in the tight space. “We have a time issue here!”

Finally the girls stopped
screaming when they saw the three men come into view. Sarah pulled the older-looking girl and moved off down the tunnel. The others hesitantly started to follow.

“Will, I have your MP. I’ll take the rear, you get ahead of Sarah and take the point. Captain Everett, take our French friend here, who needs to lose weight by the way, and keep these girls on the move. No stops, no rest, Jack ordered.”

Mendenhall passed Jack his last two thirty-round magazines and then pushed off to catch up with Sarah and the girls in the lead. Collins struggled out of his body armor and let it fall to the culvert’s flow of water. He knew he had at least three broken ribs and assisting Farbeaux hadn’t helped. He looked up and in the moonlight could see that Everett was faring no better as he was bleeding from
at least three areas of his body from shrapnel wounds. Henri for the most part had exhausted any energy he had left.

“Give Henri the carbine.” Jack stepped up to the Frenchman as he changed magazines in the MP-5. “Cover Captain Everett, Henri, you got that? If I go down, you’re the only tail gunner we have.”

Farbeaux managed to look at Collins and then at Everett who was struggling to hold Henri
and himself upright. “Yes, just tell your captain here not to drop any excess weight when the chips are down.”

“Don’t worry; I won’t let it get to that point, Froggy. The chips are already down and I want to drop you right now.” With that said Everett headed into the darkness, not feeling much different from the girls who were near panic.

Jack charged the weapon, sending a round into the breach
of the MP-5, and then with a last look back and still wondering what sort of horror had befallen them, followed the long line of running men and women.

The group had gone close to a mile when in the rear Jack heard a far-off voice shouting down into the culvert from the spot they were just at not ten minutes before.

“I’m coming gringos, Mama sent me out for supper!”

Jack stopped and looked
back into the darkness. The voice was deep and seemed as if it could never have come from the voice box of what Guzman had become. It wasn’t brutish like the changed body became. But it was filled with savage intelligence, as if he was trying to scare and panic everyone in the tunnel. Jack knew it was working—he was scared.

He turned and started forward once more, wondering if the creature that
was once the Anaconda had entered the culvert. He realized then as he ran, panting hard from his broken ribs pressing on the muscles of his chest and sides, that the smart move for Guzman would be to cover ground up there and try to head them off. He sensed the change had not lessened the man’s intelligence.

In just under fifteen minutes, he was proven right.

*   *   *

Sarah turned to make
sure the frightened women were still following close by. She decided they would have to take a break if they were to make it to the river. She saw light about a hundred yards to the front where another break in the culvert allowed moonlight to enter the darkness.

“Will, the girls are near collapse. We have to stop for a minute.”

“No, keep them moving!” he shouted from the middle of the pack.
You have no idea what’s back there. Move, move!”

Sarah took a deep breath and then gently pushed the girls gathered around her forward. It took just under a minute to cover the ground to the next break in the culvert. Just as Sarah moved past the light, she heard a loud scream, followed by another, and then another. As she turned her light on the area where the screams came from, her eyes widened
when she saw a large arm and hand reach into the culvert from above. It hit upon one of the girls and grabbed her hair. In her flashlight beam she saw Mendenhall step forward and start bashing at the large, brutal hand as it started pulling the girl upward, out of the culvert.

The rest of the girls panicked and started forward, blocking Sarah’s view as Will opened up with his nine millimeter.
Sarah grabbed his arm and pulled his aim off for fear of him hitting the struggling girl. Then the girl was just gone.

“What was that?” Sarah screamed as girls started running by her in a blind panic.

“You don’t want to know. Now move Sarah, move!”

The panic-stricken girls were now far outpacing Jack, Farbeaux, and Everett. As they passed the open area where the young woman had vanished just
three minutes before, Everett turned and saw that Jack was struggling with the wounded Farbeaux. He turned and took the Frenchman’s other arm, and together the trio started making better time.

The entire ten-mile flight was one of panic-stricken sprinting, stopping for much-needed air. Then a noise would filter down from above them and the screams of terror would start the stampeding girls off
again. Sarah had to fight to keep them as bunched together as she could. She felt naked without a firearm and scared to death that the brave man she knew in Mendenhall was as frightened as the young Mexican girls he was trying his best to protect. As Sarah finally got the last girl past a small break in the upper section of the culvert, a large arm shot through and grabbed her shoulder, knocking
her against the curving side of the concrete tube. Mendenhall fired five rounds, with three of them striking the thick-boned arm and wrist. He was amazed when the massive arm didn’t pull away from the nine-millimeter rounds but kept working, searching for Sarah. McIntire’s eyes widened as the hand and long warped fingers swung back and forth in its quest to grab something.

Will changed magazines,
but before he could bring up the Beretta to fire, Everett shot past him and with knife poised to strike, sank his K-Bar deep into the forearm of Guzman. The large knife sank deep until it hit bone, and Carl cursed as he felt the hardened steel of the knife glance off the bone and then break off. His momentum sent him to the running, muddy water on the bottom of the culvert. Mendenhall helped
him to his feet as Jack and Farbeaux ran past.

“You okay?” Mendenhall shouted as he dodged the bleeding, massive arm that swiped the empty air.

“Yeah, but I’m out of knives and bullets, so I suggest we get the hell out of here!”

As they covered the last mile to the river, Sarah managed to make her way to the front of the straggling line of girls, making each one scream as she ran past them.
She knew exactly how they all felt as she was close to panic herself. Finally Sarah could see moonlight ahead of her. It was distant like the small rabbit hole Alice had fallen through on her journey to Wonderland, only Sarah knew they weren’t escaping from that magical place, but from one that had quickly become an underground hell. As the girls started to bunch up behind her, Sarah held out her
arm to stop the stampede toward freedom. She had seen a shadow cross the opening, momentarily blocking the light cast by the moon.

“What’s the holdup? Let’s get them out of here,” Will said breathlessly as he caught up to the front of the pack.

“Whatever that thing was back there I think it’s ahead of us,” she said as she bent at the waist and rested.

Will was about to break for the opening
to clear a way for the girls when suddenly the culvert exploded inward from above, showering the retreating party with broken chunks of concrete and mud. Then to everyone’s complete and utter horror, the thing that was once Juan Guzman crashed through the hole he had just punched to land directly in front of the screaming women. Will didn’t take long to empty the nine millimeter into the torso of
the hulking figure ahead of them. In the dark he was lucky to see it at all. The monstrosity bent over as the rounds entered its muscled chest and abdomen. But in the filtered moonlight Mendenhall saw it slowly start to straighten. It was so much larger than it had been just thirty minutes before that it had to bend at the waist to accommodate its size. Will frantically reached into his belt for
another clip of nine-millimeter ammunition and then realized when his finger searched the empty pouch that he had just expended everything he had.

“Oh, shit,” Mendenhall said as he pulled Sarah back into the bunched-up women behind him. He quickly dropped the useless weapon and then pulled out his own knife.

The women screamed again as Everett crashed through their ranks and then slid to a stop
when he saw Mendenhall ahead of him, and to his front, dwarfing the lieutenant, was Juan Guzman. The beastly apparition was standing there, taking deep breaths as it studied the small men and women cowering before it. In the bleached moonlight cascading through the new opening it had just made, Everett could swear he saw the creature smile.

“Damn!” Collins said as he pushed his way through the
crowded culvert. He handed Farbeaux off to Sarah and one of the older girls and then slowly stepped to the front in between Everett and Mendenhall.

“It seems I am in possession of something that may become very beneficial to my operations,” the beast said as it raised its left arm. It examined the change that had come to it and with tilted head closed its fist.

Collins looked at the man standing
before him. Then he saw a strange thing—the creature winced in pain. In the moonlight Jack could see that Guzman’s skin color as seen in the firelight back in the laboratory had diminished as the creature had exerted itself. The tough hide that had become its skin was now a sickly looking gray color and seemed to be flaking off in large chunks. It was as if the beast were starting to wilt before
his eyes. Collins’s eyes followed a long tuft of hair, bunched together with water, mud, and sweat, fall from the side of Guzman’s head. Then even more black hair fell in the moonlight.

“It seems maybe you inhaled a little too much of that miracle drug, Anaconda. Feeling a little weaker than you were a moment before?” Jack said, buying as much time as he could.

Everett saw this and then grabbed
the first girl he could reach and brought her to his side as he spied one of the first holes in the large culvert they had come across inside the long and dark tunnel. He was just about to lift her up when the beast suddenly turned to face its rear. Something or someone had come up from behind it.