arm had been ripped apart from hitting the road, flesh shredded and hanging in strips, splintered bone shards visible through the welling blood. His clip-on tie had been applied as a tourniquet around the top of his bicep.
He caught my shocked expression. 'Just a flesh wound,' he said nonchalantly. 'BIA!'
The cry was so loud that the halogen lights overhead exploded. All of us flinched. Glass rained from the sky.
'SISTER!' Cratos was crashing down the freeway, colliding with the stopped cars. His gray cloak was flapping behind, rendering him visible to all. People ditched their cars and fled screaming from the red nightmare giant. 'Filthy souls! Filthy souls must die! Kill! Killed SISTER! NOOO!'
'Oh, man. We've made him mad,' I said.
Franks scowled, doing the math. The oni was a few hundred yards away and closing quickly. 'Go,' he ordered without looking. He limped to a nearby construction vehicle and retrieved a length of heavy cable from the back with his good arm.
I didn't know what Franks was planning, but anything involving staying and fighting was suicide. 'Come on!' I shouted at him as I ran to one of the Alabama DOT trucks. Of course, there were no keys in it. I swore.
'Primary mission, protect Pitt from the Condition,' Franks stated as he pulled out the cable. His injured arm was leaking everywhere, but he still managed to use his left hand to open the steel clip on the end to fashion a loop. Franks tugged out the other end of the cable, pulled it over to the bus and crawled under. He started wrapping the cable around the frame.
'Pitt! We're below you,' Grant screamed in my ear. A horn honked on the freeway just south of the wrecked truck. 'There's a big red thing coming this way, and I think I just killed its sister or something.'
Franks was going to sacrifice himself to slow down Cratos. He looked up from his work long enough to glare at me. 'I've never failed a mission.'
In other words, it was time to go.
The fastest way down to Lee and Grant was to go right over the edge. Skippy was way ahead of me. He climbed over the concrete ledge and jumped down to the top of the trailer. His boots bounced, and he fell, but managed not to go over the side. He stood and gestured for his wife. Gretchen was much more nimble and she had somebody to help catch her. Ed, weaving badly, but still managing more dexterity than I would ever have, went over next. I helped Mosh to his feet and we wobbled to the side. 'You've got to be shittin' me,' he said when he looked at what was still a pretty darn scary leap down to a narrow, stainless-steel catwalk. Cratos roared again, much closer now. 'Point taken.' He jumped, landing awkwardly. I waited for Skippy to help him before I went over.
The yellow sign said that this was a 20-foot overpass. It felt like ten times that when I stepped into space. My boots hit the trailer just as the smell hit my nose. Gasoline. Pain surged up through my ankle, still tender from Mexico. Strong hands grabbed my arm. Mosh shoved me toward the ladder. 'Gas truck!' he shouted.
I slid down the ladder, past a bevy of red signs saying danger/peligro and flammable, and landed with a splash. I was standing in gasoline. The tanker had ruptured on impact. My brother was down a second after me. Lee laid on the horn. 'Come on!' But then Mosh was running in the wrong direction. 'Damn it!' I shouted as I followed. He was running toward where Bia had died. Didn't he realize we had to get out of here, either before this thing caught on fire or before Cratos got here? Stupid idiot.
Then I felt like the idiot as Mosh scrambled his way up to the wrecked truck. He was trying to get the driver. The engine block was completely smashed into the wall and fragments had been hurled a hundred feet but the trucker could still be alive. Mosh jerked on the door but it was crumpled tight. I reached him just as he crawled, headfirst, through the broken window.
'Hurry, man. We've got to go,' I insisted.
'Working on it,' came the muffled reply.
'KILL! KILL!' Cratos screamed.
I saw Agent Franks standing at the top of the overpass, perched in the exact spot that Bia had been in only a minute before. He held the thick loop of cable in his hands, noose ready. Was he going to actually try to lasso the thing? The rear of the tanker shook as Cratos slammed into it, pushing past, splashing into the gasoline. He was so absurdly tall that his head terminated nearly three quarters of the way to the overpass above. He saw me.
'FILTHY HUNTER DIE!'
Franks waited patiently for the monster to step into view.
Force roared. The sound began as a rumble, but then rose in intensity, until it was a primal scream of pure hate. He lowered his head and charged.
Franks tossed the makeshift noose. The oni's head passed right through and he made it three more steps before the cable jerked tight. The bus was jerked several feet. His beady eyes bulged as the cable tightened around his throat. Too enraged to stop, he kept tugging inexorably toward me, dragging the bus with him.
The ground was littered with wreckage, gasoline quickly spreading and washing over it. I realized with a shock that much of the debris was actually what was left of Bia. The purple bits looked like dried clay. 'Grab my feet and pull!' Mosh shouted. I grabbed him, glad that he was wearing those giant lineman boots that laced all the way up to his knees, and yanked as hard as I could. The adrenaline was surging through my system and I pulled my brother back out the window. Mosh saw Cratos struggling less than a hundred feet away but he was a man on a mission. 'Help me with this guy.'
We both reached through the window. I found an armpit, and we pulled, lifting the unconscious man through the gap. Of course, he had to be a big, heavyset guy, too. No, it would have been too much to ask to have to carry a petite person out of a probably soon-to-be-exploding truck with an angry giant thing trying to eat your soul. No, Owen Z. Pitt, you get a three-hundred-pounder. It took two strong and desperate men to pull him through the window. I slung the trucker over my back in a fireman carry and ran for our lives.
Cratos was trying to scream, but the sound was choked off by the cable. The harder he pulled, the tighter it got, but he was still getting closer. Driven by supernatural strength, he had dragged the tour bus partway over the cracking ledge. If that thing went over it was bound to spark and blow us all to kingdom come.
Then I heard the choppers. The MCB's Apache gunships were coming in, low and fast, from the west side of the island. Their mission was to put some hurting on this monster.
And they didn't know about the fuel tanker.
What Franks did next absolutely stunned me. With his knife held in his good hand, he leapt over the edge, not to the trailer top, but rather, straight to the ground, directly behind Cratos. Franks landed on his feet, automatically rolling to absorb the impact, but still surely breaking his legs. He tumbled through the gas, coming up in a petrochemical splash, right beneath the oni's leg. Franks slashed the knife brutally, chopping through whatever served as the unnatural beast's ligaments, hamstringing it. Cratos collapsed to one knee, the cable pulling even tighter.
The beast swung, tearing one mighty fist at Franks, but hitting only gas and pavement, as Franks had rolled behind the other leg, and struck deep there as well. This time Franks wasn't fast enough, and a backhand landed hard enough to tear a cloud through six feet of road. Franks was flung into the darkness, disappearing into the trees along the river.
Now, with both legs damaged, the oni toppled, hanging itself entirely. It struggled, twisting, legs flopping, as it swung back under the overpass.
The gasoline was everywhere, soaking my legs, as I lumbered up to the MHI van. Grant was holding the back door open. 'Toss him to me!' he shouted. I shoved the injured trucker in before clambering up behind. Grant and Mosh were in a second later, and Lee had us moving before we could even get the rear door closed. An angry dragonfly shape passed overhead as the first Apache took aim.
'Gun it, Lee!'
'Going as fast as I can,' the little man stated calmly, as he put all of his weight and will on the gas pedal. The MHI vans were all supercharged V8s, and that was a good thing.
'Go! Go! Go!' Grant shouted.
Behind us, Cratos raged and fought. The millennium-old killer was hanging, thrashing, tiny eyes bulging with
