Chapter 4: The Devil's Due
"Screw waiting. Let's get to their camp, kill the last of them, take that ship, and get the fuck home."
Everyone turned and stared at the outburst from Grigori. He was holding his AS VAL at the ready position. Royce and Xena smiled. "You all heard what he said. Let's get going."
Xena and Royce led the way, Isabelle and Grigori behind them, and Hans and the others pulling up the rear. They didn't get far before one of the rear members, an IRA soldier, stepped on one of the aforementioned traps. His scream of pain was answered by a roar of triumph in the distance. Xena trotted back, ripped off what was left of her shirt, knelt down, pulled open the jaws of the trap, and wrapped the torn garment around the wound.
He grabbed her arm and said, "Go. I can hold him off for a minute, maybe more. Hell, maybe I can kill him." He reached into his vest and pulled out a stick of dynamite wrapped in nails with a layer of plastic wrap covering the whole apparatus.
"No, I'm making sure that we all get off this rock," Xena reprimanded as she reached down to pick him up.
Before she could, he swung his AR-15 into line with her face. The implied threat was clear. "I'll only slow you down. It doesn't matter how strong or fast you normally are." He reached into his shirt just below the neckline and snapped away a set of dog tags. Clasping them into her hand he continued, "Make sure that my wife gets these. Please."
"I will. Give 'im Hell."
"That, I can most definitely promise. Now go!"
As they walked off, he lay down with the improvised shrapnel bomb in his right hand and its detonator in his left. As the hunter's heavy footsteps approached, he tensed his hand around the bomb. When he could tell that it was only a stride away, he activated the timer, set for five seconds. It reached down and picked him up by the neck; he shoved the bomb up against the hunter's stomach a second before the former detonated, shredding both of their bellies. The hunter survived, but barely. The IRA soldier was killed instantly.
A half a mile away, the group heard the explosion and stopped. "Allah bless his soul, he did it. I mean, he has to have done it, right?" asked an Arab, a Taliban insurgent.
"I don't know. But I don't think that we should wait around to find out," Xena replied, in Arabic, as she turned to continue on. She suddenly stopped and dropped to the ground as she heard a *paff* followed by the twang of twirling wire.
However, the net was not directed at her, as it hit another member of the group, a Tennessean in an orange jumpsuit. His Bowie knife dropped to the ground as he was thrown back against a tree. He groaned, demonstrating amazing pain tolerance, as the net began to tighten and cut into him. Xena rushed up and began trying to pull out the net's anchors, as she knew that the net would only cut apart anything that touched it. She succeeded in ripping out one anchor before she was knocked away by a hunter. She struggled to her feet and began to scurry away. "I'm sorry!" she shouted over her shoulder as she left.
"Wait! Y'all can't jest…" His plea was cut off as a blade entered his gut.
Xena caught back up with the group in a grassy field that smelled of decay. After slowing down to search for a moment, she found the rotting bodies of one hunter and a man whose build suggested an Oriental descent. It was what lay next to the man's body that most caught her attention: an old katana. She examined it carefully, but her fear turned out to be unwarranted. "Not Lejule's," she muttered as the group continued on. A few minutes later, they arrived at the hunters' camp. The detail Xena first noticed was the immense totem near the far end of the camp; and the Predator that was chained to it. She walked up to the hunter and studied a set of scars on his belly. Putting her hand up against his skin, she found that the scars matched her spread fingers perfectly. "I remember you," she said in Quechua.