Free Callsign: King II- Underworld by Jeremy Robinson Page B

would have been better prepared.
    A heavy thumping, reverberating through the ground beneath his feet, cut short his musings. Even through the mist, he could see the creature lumbering directly toward him, its red eyes fixed on him like targeting lasers.
    King didn’t hesitate. He stood fully erect, facing the charging creature in a slightly hunched over tactical stance, and with the carbine pressed against his shoulder, flipped the fire selector to burst. He pulled the trigger twice in rapid sequence, what range instructors called a controlled pair, though in burst mode, his double-pull let loose six bullets in less than a second. All six rounds hit their intended target; at about thirty meters and closing, it was hard to miss. The tiny bullets, each only a little bit bigger in diameter than a construction nail, perforated the creature’s broad, bare forehead in a tight grouping, right above the bridge of its all-too-human nose. Still the creature thundered forward.
    King triggered another burst, lower this time, into where the thing’s heart should have been, then hurled himself to the side, covering Nina with one arm. There was a tremendous thud behind him as the mortally wounded beast crashed to the ground.
    It was hard to say whether the first bullet had done the job…or only the last…or if it had taken nine rounds to vital areas to stop the charge. Either way, King knew that fighting the creatures wasn’t a viable option, and as the charge had revealed, trying to hide and wait wasn’t much better.
    He pulled Nina to her feet. “Come on. We’re getting out of here.”
     

 
     
     
    15.
     
    When the tent started to collapse, Pierce, in a moment of desperation, had started rolling sideways toward the edge of the enclosure. He’d crawled around in enough tombs and caves to know that when the ceiling started caving in, you wanted to be as close to an exit as you could. When he stopped rolling, he discovered that he had somehow rolled all the way out, and now lay in the open, shrouded in the shimmering silver mist.
    He struggled to a sitting position, and immediately regretted his hasty escape. For just a moment, he considered trying to crawl back into the collapsed tent, like a frightened child hiding under a blanket from nightmare monsters in the closet. The problem was, these monsters weren’t figments of his imagination.
    The camp was a scene of absolute chaos. Dozen of soldiers tried to fight the intruders, and while they surely outnumbered their foes, the creatures were everywhere. Pierce felt foolish for having been so dismissive of them when King had showed him the picture; these things sure as hell weren’t Wookies. In fact, they weren’t like anything he’d ever seen before.
    Primatology, like archaeology was a discipline of anthropology, and while his professional career had taken him down a much different section of that field, he remembered enough of his introductory studies to recognize that these animals weren’t behaving like any kind of ape species, or any other animal species for that matter. They seemed more like rioting hooligans, in the grip of mass hysteria, smashing everything in sight. The soldiers’ bullets were almost certainly injuring them, but the collective madness of the creatures, to say nothing of their imposing physical size, enabled them to shrug off all but the most lethal of wounds. Worse still, the creatures seemed to be everywhere.
    “Jack—”
    He caught himself immediately as he locked stares with a pair of eyes, gazing at him from across the collapsed tent. The eyes were bright red— reflective , Pierce realized, adapted for low light . While the creature looked at him, and he at it, he managed to remain perfectly still—paralyzed with fear, or intentionally trying not to provoke it, he couldn’t say—but when it tilted its head back and let out a banshee wail, Pierce had only one thought: Run !
    He could hear the pounding of the creature’s footsteps as it