fight out of Lancaster any more than there’d been getting a fight out of Dr. Patterson.
It made him long for Farrel. J. T. Chronopolous had been a Marine before he’d joined SDF, and a Marine never went down without a fight.
It would be a fight to the death—especially after he used J.T.’s woman. Then he would have the other girl, the blonde, Skeeter Bang-Hart. Then he would kill them both. Break them in half and leave them for their men to find.
But first, Lancaster.
He reached out and fitted his hand around Lancaster’s neck and pulled him closer. He wanted to see the fear in the old man’s eyes, wanted to watch death darken them forever. It wouldn’t take long.
“N-no,” Lancaster pleaded. “Please! I have—”
He had nothing, nothing, and Monk slowly tightened his hand, squeezing the old man’s throat, crushing it and pulling him closer and closer, until he felt Lancaster’s last gasping breath leave him. Nothing else would get through his fierce grip, nothing except the tsunami wave of the old man’s fear.
“Monk,” he said at the last possible instant, before death claimed the bastard, wanting Lancaster to take the name with him into eternity.
When it was over, he let the old man’s head fall to his chest and rose to his feet, thoroughly unsatisfied. Limb by limb, he freed Lancaster from the pulley rig, ripping off and breaking the restraints. Then he slung the old man’s body over his shoulder, his burden. All his. Only his.
Lancaster. Held close at last, dead but held close.
Above him, he could hear the men of Special Defense Force scrambling, securing the building, and he had a damn good idea of what that entailed. They were warriors like him.
It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t save their women, and when he was finished with his prizes, he’d take on the men and vanquish every one of them.
Tilting his head back, he gave in to all the pain and longing and strength that was him, MNK-1—Monk!—and he roared his rage.
He roared until the sweat poured down his face. He roared until the room shook with the fierce power of his agony—and then he roared again.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Fuck. Creed’s eyebrows went sky high at the eerie cry reverberating through Steele Street’s subbasement. He slanted a look over at Travis and Red Dog where they stood next to him in the subterranean tunnels leading up through the bowels of the building.
Unperturbed, the Angel Boy was checking the load on the Para-Ordnance P14 handgun he’d had customized by the chop shop boys’ favorite gunsmith, a guy named Cullen over at Colorado Gun Works. Travis carried the full-auto-capable pistol in a shoulder rig with six eighteen-round extended, hi-cap magazines tucked under his other arm. The whole bitchin’-cool, deadly rig was easily concealable beneath a tac vest.
The hair-raising howl echoed through the tunnel again, the message crystal clear to Creed. The guy was calling them out, every last man jack of them, and Creed had to wonder, really, just how badass this Monk bastard was going to turn out to be—and he hoped to hell he and his team were the ones to find out.
Before the three of them had reached Steele Street, Dylan had called and ordered them to come through the 19th Street tunnels, their mission threefold: to look for Skeeter and Jane, to cut off any escape in that direction, and to clear the building from the bottom up, forcing the mad cannibal Monk into Dylan’s trap. But it sounded like they’d landed in the gravy. That raging roar was coming from close by. While the rest of the SDF team was busy setting claymores with optic trip switches in the elevator shaft, marking and mining it, creating a tunnel of death, Creed and his crew were going to be kicking butt and taking names.
Major butt, he thought, watching Red Dog check a thirty-three-round magazine of KTW 9mm armor-piercing rounds and slam it home into another of Cullen’s custom full-auto jobs on her H&K PDW. Between Red Dog and the Angel Boy, they could put fifty precision pistol rounds downrange in under five seconds—which just made Creed wonder what in the hell the two of them had been up to on all those missions General Grant sent them on that didn’t originate with SDF.
Maybe it was time to find out. Given the look of their weapons, they were getting some really big scores, and he wouldn’t mind a piece of the action.