SNAFU: Hunters

Pointy had gone inside, so it couldn’t be flooded, but Matt doubted he’d be able to open it without giving away his presence. He sniffed the axle and detected no trace of WD-40 or grease, nothing to keep it from screaming like a banshee if he tried to open it.

If you’re going to be loud…

Matt pulled a fist-sized wad of C4 from his combat pouch, split it into two pieces and pressed it into and around the latching mechanism on either side of the door. The detcord came next, clothesline-like material impregnated with PETN that burned at four miles a second, not so much a fuse as a linear explosive. He pushed the nylon-like material into and around the gasket, as well as through the wads of C4. Last, he added a blasting cap and set the detonator to radio signal.

Sixty feet down the hall he rounded the corner into a side passage. He set the detonator’s remote on the floor twenty feet from the intersection, gripped his shotgun in both hands, and backed up. Then he ran.

A typical ICAP Aug could maintain a three-minute mile indefinitely, and run a hundred meters in eight seconds. Matt’s personal record topped out at seven point seven-two. Legs pumping, he tried to beat it.

The impact as he stepped on the red button rocked the world sideways, and the shockwave buffeted him back just before he reached the main hallway. Legs pumping, he ran halfway up the far wall, muscles straining to turn him ninety degrees at such speeds, and fired a three-round burst of fragmentary projectiles toward the remains of the door and anything that might lie behind it.

Still glowing from the aftermath, chunks of shredded metal and broken brick littered the small room, and the resulting hole opened up not into a sewer tunnel but a metro line. A pair of tracks led left and right, and hazy orange sodium-vapor lights dotted the walls amid generations of overlapping graffiti.

The whispers chittered in anticipation of the slaughter. As Matt rushes through the door, Pointy drops from the arced ceiling, a thousand pounds of muscle and brute force crushing him to the floor and pulping his head with one double-fisted crush.

Matt tucked into a roll as he flew through the doorway, pulling the trigger as Pointy’s gigantic form came into view. Two slugs impacted on the ceiling. Three found flesh.

Gore spattered Matt’s face as he finished the roll and spun, firing again. Pointy slapped the shotgun out of the way and punched, telegraphing the move without the slightest bit of finesse. Matt rolled with it, taking the impact on his shoulder. His armor stiffened with the blow, reducing the punch to a solid hit with a Louisville Slugger.

He backpedaled as Pointy advanced, the hole in the bonk’s leg knitting closed even as he picked up speed. A center-of-mass burst failed to penetrate skin, and the fragmentary rounds shredded Pointy’s pectoral muscles to expose a gore-covered solid mass beneath. Half-blind, face streaming blood from a thousand gouges, the bonk dove, arms outstretched to catch Matt as he tried to flee.

Instead, Matt dropped prone and rolled left. He screamed as Pointy stomped, crushing his knee to the ground right through the ceramic composite. Matt fired, and two rounds caught the bonk in the stomach before he slapped the AA-12 hard enough to dent the barrel and send it flying from Matt’s grip.

Chunks of meat and organs sprayed them both.

Matt scrambled back, his shattered knee a bonfire of itching, squirming flesh. He drew his official-issue pistol, a .50 caliber Barrett WildStang with ICAP-custom SLAP rounds. The depleted uranium core and tungsten carbide tip combined with a nanofiber composite sabot and fifty grains of powder to produce a bullet that would go through just about anything. It kicked like a mule, and took superhuman strength to fire with any accuracy.

Two shots took Pointy in the bloody meat over his heart, and another two ricocheted off of his forehead.

Pointy charged, strings of intestines flopping out of his abdomen to trail behind him.

Matt fired four more times as he rose to his feet, and two more before the bonk crushed him against the wall.

Blood erupted from Matt’s mouth as his ribs imploded. A giant hand smashed the gun against the wall, denting the metal in a shower of brick dust.

Pointy stepped back for another body check. Matt let his knees buckle, dropping to the floor, and tore at the exposed viscera, fingers digging into slippery organs, wrenching them out to splatter on the ground.

The dark tunnel exploded in stars as Pointy’s knee caught him in the side of the head. Deafened by the ringing in his ears, he scrambled to the side and whirled, pistol raised. A six-car double-decker train shimmied down the tunnel at forty or so miles an hour, its light catching Pointy’s right side, washed in bright red gore.