Chapter 199: Infiltration
He didn’t run like a brawler charging into a fray. He surged forward in a low, predatory glide, closing the twenty-foot gap before the dust from the flash could settle.
The wounded lead hound was thrashing on its belly, drawing breath into its chest to unleash a hunting howl.
Nicholas stepped onto its writhing spine, driving the full downward momentum of his body into the creature’s thoracic cage with a heavy crunch of breaking bone. Before the howl could reach its vocal cords, he drove the muzzle of his suppressed pistol directly beneath its armored ear canal.
Pfft. Pfft.
Two muffled, pneumatic coughs echoed through the suppressed barrel. The armor-piercing tungsten rounds punched clean through the soft auditory tissue and scrambled the creature’s central brain stem. The beast went limp instantly, its heavy limbs shuddering once before falling entirely slack.
To the right, the large alpha hound shook off the blindness, snapping its serrated jaws wildly in the direction of the muzzle blast. It lunged blindly, its massive, razor-tipped claws sweeping across the floor in a lethal arc that would have torn a normal man in half.
Nicholas didn’t back away.
He ducked beneath the sweep, sliding along the slick tile directly into the beast’s blind underbelly.
Drawing a reinforced combat blade with his left hand, he drove the thick, double-edged steel upward between the creature’s lower ribs, severing the primary aorta. At the same instant, he pressed his second pistol against the soft junction between its jaw and neck.
Pfft. Pfft. Pfft.
Three rapid rounds tore through the throat, severing the vocal chords and pulverizing the spine. Black, viscous fluid sprayed across the floor as the alpha collapsed under its own massive weight, crushing the ticketing turnstiles beneath its bulk.
The third, leaner beast spun violently, sensing the death of its pack mates through the floor vibrations. Blinded and enraged, it reared onto its hind legs, preparing to slam its barbed tail down and unleash an unsuppressed screech toward the ceiling rafters.
From thirty feet away, standing in a rock-solid, balanced stance behind the iron pillar, Selena pulled the trigger.
Pfft. Pfft.
The first round struck the creature’s left eye socket, blowing the sensory cluster into gray mush. The second round punched through the soft palate of its open maw just as the shriek began to form, severing the tongue and deflecting into the upper cranial vault.
The beast choked on its own blood, stumbling backward into the derailed train car with a dull, hollow thud before sliding lifelessly onto the rails.
Silence reclaimed the transit station.
The entire engagement had lasted less than four seconds. Not a single unsuppressed shot had been fired. Not a single warning shriek had escaped into the night air.
Selena lowered her sidearm, her chest heaving as she kept her sights trained on the fallen beasts for five long seconds. Her fingers were tight against the polymer grip, but they were steady.
She exhaled a slow, controlled breath, clicking the safety back into place before stepping out from behind the pillar.
"Three targets neutralized," Selena said, her voice quiet but sharp with the residual adrenaline of the kill. She looked down at the puddle of black blood pooling around the alpha’s snout, then up at Nicholas, who was already wiping the dark fluid from his blade with a rag. "No acoustic alerts. The perimeter remains clean."
"Good shooting," Nicholas said, not looking up as he retrieved the monofilament spool and checked the tension of the wire. "You kept your balance on the second shot. Didn’t let the recoil lift the barrel."
"Your basement drills weren’t completely useless," Selena murmured, a faint, wry smile touching her lips before she adjusted her tactical vest. "What about our scent masking?"
Nicholas checked the waxy residue on his forearm. "The compound held. No evaporation spikes. We have roughly thirty-five minutes before we need to reapply."
He holstered his pistols, stepped over the carcass of the alpha, and gestured toward the dark pedestrian tunnel that led directly from the transit concourse into the city’s central drainage artery.
"The outer ring is breached," Nicholas said, his single visible eye scanning the dark tunnel ahead. "Let’s find Julie, get the eyes in the sky, and put this Master out of business."
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The climb up the interior of the old municipal clock tower was a test of nerve and friction.
Julie pulled herself up another rusted iron rung, her boots barely finding purchase on the cold metal. Far below, the hollow belly of the tower dropped into absolute blackness, filled only with the faint, rotting smell of stagnant water and the distant scuttle of rats. Above her, through the shattered wooden framework where the massive brass bell had once hung, the sickly violet glow of the dome filtered down in pale ribbons.
She paused on the upper maintenance platform, wiping a mixture of soot and cold sweat from her forehead.
The climb had taken twenty agonizing minutes through forgotten service shafts and structural drainage chutes, keeping strictly beneath the line of sight of the streets. Her knees were bruised, her fingers cramped from gripping damp masonry, but as she edged toward the northern face of the clock tower, the view that opened before her made her breath catch in her throat.
The giant four-sided dial had long lost its frosted glass face, leaving only a massive, hollow circle framed by ornamental iron.
Through the opening, four hundred yards out and sixty feet below, St. Jude’s Plaza lay exposed like a cruel, theatrical arena.
The entire commercial square had been cleared into a brutal amphitheater of scorched stone and shattered asphalt. Massive barricades made from crushed city buses and concrete slabs formed a jagged ring around the plaza, funneling the grand avenue into two narrow, heavily guarded choke points.
Right at the epicenter of the plaza, built atop the demolished ruins of the central fountain, rose the grand execution stage.
Julie unslung her specialized hard-shell case, resting it gently against the weathered wooden planks. She popped the biometric latches with a muted click.
Inside lay her masterpiece: the Aero-Specter MK-IV.
Unlike the mass-produced scout drones the Overseers had swatted from the sky earlier, this unit was a custom marvel of non-ability mechanical engineering. Its frame was forged from matte-black, non-reflective carbon composites, its counter-rotating micro-rotors encased in sound-dampening acoustic shrouds that operated below human hearing thresholds. Most importantly, it carried no energy signature—just mechanical inertia, optical lenses, and the hardwired ultra-shortwave transmitter keyed to the bank vault’s repeater.
Julie checked the wind shear through the broken clock face. The air inside the dome was dead and heavy, stagnant as a tomb.
"Don’t sneeze. Don’t wobble. Just fly," she murmured, steadying her trembling hands against the edge of the console.
She eased the analog control sticks forward.
The Aero-Specter lifted from the foam housing without a sound. It slipped through the hollow iron numbers of the clock face, angling upward into the stagnant twilight. It climbed fifty, eighty, one hundred feet, masking its silhouette against the jagged shadows of the ruined skyline before flattening into a stable, high-altitude hover directly above the center of St. Jude’s Plaza.
Julie tapped the master feed link on her tablet.
"I got it!"