Read Online The Bounty Hunter: Into The Swarm by Joseph Anderson - Free Book Online

down.
    Three target reticules immediately popped up in front of his eyes.
Cass was quick to pick the dross out in the darkness and marked each of them
for him. Each were separated in the wrecked street below. The road was bloated
and broken as if it had died in an earthquake. Parts jutted awkwardly up into
the air and then dropped abruptly like a cliff. There was no pattern or logic
to the destruction, and he saw at least two places from the roof where a mortar
round had cratered part of the city. One of the dross was sleeping in the
center of one of the craters.
    Burke reached for the rifle on his back but stopped himself. The
aliens were sleeping and the sound of gunfire might wake them up or, worse,
wake up the dozens that were undoubtedly below ground. He couldn’t see any of
their tunnels nearby but he knew that wouldn’t stop them from digging directly
up if they heard a threat. He kept the rifle on his back and then stepped off
the building.
    He landed smoothly on both feet and stayed hunched on the ground
from the fall. He raised his head to see if anything moved from the sound of
his landing. Cass marked two new targets from their new perspective on the
street: two dross that were amongst the rubble of the collapsed building across
from them. Neither of them moved.
    From orbit he thought the planet looked dead. As he walked the
streets now, he felt like he was disturbing a mass grave. None of the buildings
had fared well in the battle. No windows had survived the fighting and every
room he saw had been torn to pieces, most likely from dross scraping their way inside
to feast on the people hiding behind closed doors. He saw no bodies or remains,
not even bones. The aliens ate everything, even the corpses of each other, and
he was the invader now. Despite what humans had left behind he couldn’t shake
the feeling that the planet now belonged to the dross.
    He stopped at the end of each building that he passed and leaned his
head around the corners. They had flown nine kilometers from the drone’s signal
before finding a landing spot but Burke still took it slowly when he could be
potentially blindsided. Each time he would stop and wait, sometimes pointing
out dross that Cass missed, other times surprised at the ones she could find
that he wouldn’t have noticed. The only movement they saw were around the
entrances to the alien’s tunnel network. They gave those a wide berth, even if
it meant backtracking and going around a collapsed building. Burke didn’t want
to risk being caught while climbing over rubble.
    They were on the outskirts of the city when he had to kill one. They
were three kilometers from the drone and he looked around the corner of a
relatively intact house to see a dross propped up against the wall. He knew
that the sound of his armor walking had been too loud for the alien to remain
asleep and he whipped around the corner and twisted his right forearm quickly,
ejecting the blade and stabbing it into the creature.
    The dross let out a low hiss and its bunched tails began to writhe.
He jerked the blade out and then punched both fists into the alien’s head. He
twisted his arms the opposite way, triggering the new direction of the blades.
Both pierced cleanly into its head and it twitched for a few seconds before
stopping for good. He twisted his arms once more and the bloodied blades
retracted back into the armor.
    “This one was small,” Burke whispered despite the helmet blocking
his voice.
    “They’re smaller than you remember?”
    “No,” he said. “This one looks like a runt. Maybe they force the
smaller ones to sleep outside at night. I don’t know. There wasn’t much time
for studies of the fucking things.”
    “Maybe that’s what the drone was for?” she offered.
    “Maybe. Something isn’t sitting right with me about this.”
    He pushed on, growing more tense as the density of tunnel entrances
increased as he walked further out of the city. Less than a kilometer from