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ELDRITCH OPS

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Larry Correia and Steve Diamond


Three pairs of children’s shoes rested on top of a small, folded pile of clothes.

Considering the things I’d seen in various timelines, across several centuries, on more eldritch hunts than I could count, I don’t know why that sight bothered me so much.

Two members of my squad stood silently beside me, each staring down at the threadbare rags on the edge of a road outside a small town in the middle of podunk China. I could tell it bothered them too. I took a deep breath and knelt down, poking the clothing with my M5’s suppressor. We’d learned the hard way not to touch suspicious stuff with our hands.

“Careful there, Sarge,” Lieutenant Cicero warned. He nodded his head at a barely visible swirl of black dust. “That looks like the same residue that got on—”

“Private White and melted his face in Vietnam. Yeah, I know.” I heard one of the boys make a noise. “You all right, Mok?”

Specialist Mok had his eyes closed and pinched the bridge of his nose. Getting launched through time and space could be both mentally and physically degrading. “Yeah, Sergeant Cainho. Massive migraine. I feel hungover.” He wiped his nose and showed me his bloodied hand. “I don’t know how you down timers do this.”

“Lots of practice, kid.” I’d done this more times than I could remember. Mok was the new guy, on his first jump, attached to this mission as our linguist because none of my boys knew Bai, the primary Chinese dialect spoken in these parts. “You good for now?”

“Sure. I just traveled back to 2028 because the Pentagon’s top-secret occult computer warned us the PRC government in this timeline was about to summon some ancient elder god whose name no one knows how to pronounce to start World War III so they can conquer the world . . . before I was born. Yep. Totally good. Anyone got a Snickers?”

I remembered when Snickers had been invented—1930. “They still have those?”

Cicero pulled out a small piece of glass and scrolled through strings of data. We’d been born in the same era, but unlike me, the LT had adapted to all the crazy technology people took for granted now. “Looks like Snickers bars stopped being sold in 1987 in this deviant timeline.”

Mok sniffed at the light nosebleed. “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

I flipped over some of the clothing, revealing more shiny black dust. A lot more. There was a certain feel to the stuff. It made the hair on your arms stand up. My team knew it well.

“Elder residue.” Cicero made the sign of the cross.

“All right.” I checked the countdown on my watch. “We’ve got two hours to stop these godless heathen communists from accidentally destroying the universe. This is where the wormhole dropped us. Where the hell are we?”

Cicero tapped on his datapad. “Shengcun.” Leave it to the miracles of future technology to make it so a West Point grad could actually do land nav. “It’s in . . . Yunnan Province. That mean anything to you, Specialist?”

“Yes, sir,” Mok answered. “It’s where they speak Bai.”

“No shit. Any notes on that toy of yours?” I asked Cicero.

“This area used to be known for rice terraces and markets. Some of these pictures make it look quite beautiful.”

I glanced around at the abandoned houses and empty, trash-strewn streets. The place stank like oil smoke and decay. “Yeah. Real tourist trap, LT.”

“That data packet say anything about, oh, I don’t know . . . giant, world-killing monsters?” Mok had backed away from the children’s clothes slowly as if they could explode at any moment. “This isn’t how I imagined visiting the land of my heritage, but, since we’re here, I suppose we should save it from being destroyed.”

“That’s the plan,” I lied, because poor Mok wasn’t cleared to know about this particular unit’s standard response for this kind of threat.

“Sensors are registering huge amounts of energy from that direction.” Cicero pointed. “An elder god might already be in this plane of existence.”

“Just our rotten luck. It’s Normandy all over again.” I gave a hand signal. The rest of the squad picked it up and passed it along. Riflemen rose from their covered and concealed positions. Time to move out.

Glancing over my squad, I could see exhaustion etched on their faces. How many missions was this? Twelve? Eighteen? Fifty? They all tended to blend together. Each trip through time and space ate at our minds. Each time we died and came back, things got a little stranger.

Most of these poor bastards had been in the 101st Airborne when we’d made a fateful jump into France, stumbling across a Nazi experiment that had gotten us stuck in an endless time loop. Our world hadn’t survived the unleashing of Yog-Sothoth at Mont Saint-Michel, but there were plenty of other Earths, so my squad had been plucked from the time stream and put to work. It hadn’t been the first time we’d been drafted. We were in an endless war where the eldritch gods feasted on our misery and loss.

Now we were all going slightly insane from cellular degradation caused by jumping back and forth in time, but the risks were fairly well known to us. The big brains back at HQ had machines that registered anomalies across timelines. These attacks were coming more and more regularly. My squad was a nothing more than a Band-Aid. Chewing gum plugging a hole in a dam. The scientists were trying to figure out why the number of timeline-killing events was accelerating . . . but not fast enough for my liking.

We moved toward the town, quick and quiet like.

Private Lunden gave the signal to freeze. Our machine gunner was a big, quiet fella, who’d been working lobster boats in Maine before the war. He had a gift for casual violence the likes of which I’d never seen. Sometimes I figured Lunden did so well in our current assignment because he’d been a little crazy before all this weird shit had started, so he’d had to make less of an adjustment than the rest of us.

I moved up to Lunden, and he pointed at the middle of the road. “If you tilt your head so the sun hits the dirt just right, you can see a black glimmer, like something left a trail.”

Signaling for Farris to check, I hunkered down to wait. Farris was a Jewish kid, who’d grown up in Idaho, guiding elk and wolf hunts. If there was a sign, Farris would find it.

Sure enough, Farris gave us the signal for tracks. Then he ran back to report to the LT. “Barefoot, and lots of them. Also, some animal tracks.”

“What kind?” Cicero asked.

“Don’t know, but whatever made them’s got claws.”

There were small, empty shoes on piles of clothing lining the path. That seemed somehow . . . profane. We didn’t see a single sign of life. No birds flew overhead. No squirrels fled from our approach. Even the sound of insects was absent. A light breeze caused the occasional door or window shutter to creak. The trail of black residue led through the empty town, then further through the rice terraces. The sun reflected off the water, making each of the irrigated fields look like liquid gold. In another time, in better circumstances, this place might have been as pretty as the LT’s little machine claimed it was.

But now . . . now I could feel anxiety and paranoia clawing at my chest. The men were no different. I could see the death-grips on their M5s, tensed shoulders, and rapid breathing. There was evil in the air. With any other squad I would have been worried, but these boys had seen some things. We’d fought everything from Roman legions to dinosaurs. We’d watched unspeakable horrors devour the stars, died, and then gone back to work the next day.

“Trail narrows ahead,” I warned.

“That glare off the water is killing me. Can’t see a damn thing. Anyone got better eyes than me?” When no one spoke up, Lieutenant Cicero said, “Good spot for an ambush. The sensor is showing massive energy spikes. We’re heading in the right direction, in case anyone needed extra verification.”

“This feel too easy to anyone?” Farris asked. “Last time things were this obvious we got jumped by that shoggoth in the Civil War.”

The memory was hazy, but I remembered being dragged by tentacles into a mouth full of teeth, and then being chewed as I pulled the pins on every grenade I carried. It wasn’t the worst way I’d died.

The squad moved faster than I would have liked, but time was of the essence. The future Army had issued us a whole bunch of fancy doodads and gizmos to spot landmines or lurking snipers, but there was no substitute for good old-fashioned human intuition. Too bad neither man nor machine functioned properly under the influence of the old gods.

“Hold up,” Mok said. “LT, there’s somebody in that field. Shit. It’s just a kid. Looks like a little girl. She’s in bad shape. I’ve gotta help her, sir.”

The new guy splashed out into ankle deep water before Cicero could stop him.

“Mok, wait!” The linguist was normally smarter than this, but time travel messes with your head, especially for first timers. I rushed after him, but the kid had a lead. “Lunden, help me.”

Sure enough there was somebody lying in the mud. It looked like an average Chinese child. Rail thin. Filthy clothes. Specialist Mok closed on the body and started speaking in rapid Bai. I couldn’t understand a word of it.

I wasn’t going to fault any of my soldiers for wanting to protect a kid. But something was off. The girl was shivering violently, like a terrified dog. No, not shivering. Vibrating. Rhythmically. “Damn it, Mok!”

The girl leapt and spun. Her body convulsed in midair, and her hands suddenly doubled in size, transforming into massive claws. She swiped at Mok, who fortunately had his rifle held before him. The girl’s claws struck the barrel as Mok threw himself backward. The girl’s mouth split into a wide grin exposing massive, pointed obsidian teeth. Her jaw unhinged like a giant snake as she threw herself on top of him.

I raised my M5 but didn’t have a clear shot. Then Lunden tackled her the instant before her claws could rip into Mok. The monster hissed and spat, clawing at the big man. A knife appeared in Lunden’s hand, and blood spattered from both of them as they rolled through the mud.

Lunden maneuvered behind the creature, then stabbed it in the throat and ripped the blade outward in a spray of arterial blood. Where it hit the ground, it landed more like tar than blood. Night black, thick, and it seemed to . . . move. The new necktie hadn’t stopped the monster in child’s skin, but it gave me a brief window, and I shot it in the chest repeatedly, before Lunden was back in the way, plunging his knife into the monster’s right eye. When the thing continued thrashing and tearing at him, he grabbed its head and wrenched it to the side as hard as he could. We all heard the wet crack as the monster’s neck snapped.

The creature went still.

I rushed forward and pulled the child’s body off Lunden. He was covered in black blood. The thing was far heavier than I expected. From the looks of it, it shouldn’t have weighed more than fifty pounds, but felt like one-fifty.

“I’m sorry, Lunden,” I heard Mok saying behind me. “I didn’t . . . I mean . . .”

“Don’t worry about it, kid. I should’ve seen it coming. I . . . shit . . . I’m not feeling so good.”

I knelt next to Lunden. His arms were cut to ribbons and covered in the monster’s blood. As I checked his wounds, I found a hot patch of red blood under his left arm. I pressed my hand against the wound, but from the rapid flow, I knew it was too late. At some point the thing had pierced him through the armpit.

“That you Sergeant Cainho?”

“Yeah, Lunden?”

“Can you tell my sister . . . tell her . . .”

“I’ll tell her,” I said, even though Lunden’s sister had died of lung cancer in 1967.

And then he was gone.

The LT was shouting for the squad to set up a perimeter, and sending men to help me. He was no stranger to fixing goat ropes.

“Shit, shit, shit.” Mok collapsed against one of the terrace pool’s retaining walls. “How could I have been so stupid? How—?”

“Get your head on straight, Mok.” Where the monster’s blood had got on my gloves, my hands felt suddenly heavy. I ripped the gloves off and rubbed my hands together in the irrigation water. I felt . . . unclean. Like I needed to see a priest urgently. “We only have a few minutes before the trackers in his blood transmit a flatline back to HQ. He’s gonna blink back real quick here. Help me drag him.”

More men had reached us, and they barely paused when they saw Lunden was dead. We’d all seen it before. “Bishop, grab the MG. Milton, help Mok drag him onto dry ground. Hurry.”

Farris met me at the monster’s body. He knew what to do. The thing’s hands were still massive claws. They weren’t covered in human skin, but rather were more like bone growths. He threw a loop of paracord around one of those claws, pulled it tight, then did the same with the other arm. We each grabbed a cord and struggled to pull the monster’s body back to lay it next to Lunden’s. We only had a few minutes until his body returned to HQ, and when it did, the monster’s corpse would go with him now. The scientists back there would want to study the creature. The girl. I forced myself to not think of the monster as what it used to be.

As we got the monster back onto the path, Flynn, our medic, was working on Lunden, but we all knew he was just going through the motions. Farris tapped my arm. “Sarge, I think only one of the monster’s legs worked.”

Sure enough, he was right. One of the legs was twig thin. The knee joint was bent backward in extreme hyperextension. Given the thing’s impossibly increased mass, the leg had probably given out.

“Maybe that’s why it was out here alone. Whoever turned the girl into . . . this . . . left her behind.” I thought back to the empty shoes lining the path here and had a sobering thought. A thought so sobering it made me want to drown it eternally. “Any of you see any adult shoes on the way here? Or just kids?”

Cicero turned a little green, while Farris just looked sad. The ancient gods couldn’t come into a world unless they were invited. Which was why they whispered promises of power to the worst men in history, telling them all they had to do was read these forbidden tomes, brew up this ancient potion, perform this specific ceremony when the planets align, that sort of thing. I hated when they used children as guinea pigs.

“We’ve got to see what we can learn from this body before they blink.” Cicero grabbed our medic and pulled him away from Lunden. “No surgical scars, but there’s something at the base of the neck. Flynn! Get over here and help me roll it over.” From their grunting and straining, the body was still impossibly heavy. Cicero gestured at the spine. “Looks like an IV port of some sort. They were giving her some kind of transfusion.”

“I bet that means there’s gonna be more,” Farris whispered to me.

The smell of burning rubber suddenly filled the air. “Everyone get back!”

Electricity arced all over Lunden’s body, then from his to the monster’s. Soon they were covered in a writhing ball of the stuff, then with an audible pop, they vanished.

“Sir, would you kindly check your glass,” I urged. “What’re his odds?”

Cicero checked his device to see if any new messages from the future had passed through the wormhole. “There’s not a very good connection to his last place on the timestream, so Lunden’s only got a fifty-fifty chance at resurrection.” The LT took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He turned the glass in the direction of a distant hill. It wasn’t very big, but it was practically a mountain here. “The energy is two klicks that way and growing in magnitude. I don’t like where this is headed.”

It would be worse odds for all of us if we failed and this timeline fell to the enemy. I checked my watch. “We’ve only got an hour left.”

“All right, boys, you heard the sergeant. Let’s go.”

Mok was staring at the scorched patch of ground where the bodies had just been. I grabbed him by the neck, pulled him close, and said, “Yeah, you fucked up. You can feel guilty or stupid about that later. Right now you’ve got work to do. In one hour you can do whatever you want. Until then you’re not allowed to feel anything but hate and determination. Got it?”

He nodded, wide-eyed.

“Good. Now carry the machine gun.”


We passed broken, immobile husks of children all along our path to the mountain. The majority lay like cast-aside dolls, dead and unblinking. Malformed limbs marked most. Some looked to have been gnawed at by some wild beast. With the teeth of the girl-thing fresh in my mind, I suspected animals weren’t the cause of the half-chewed corpses.

On occasion we would stumble across one still living, but they were never in as functional a shape as the first we had encountered. They all seemed to be so burdened beneath their own impossibly dense masses that they mostly snarled at us or glared with baleful eyes. The ones that had eyes anyway.

We saw no other movement on the residue trail. No people. No animals or even bugs. The slight breeze we’d felt back in the village was completely gone, and the air itself had turned oppressive. None of us spoke. The terraces gave way to simple fields, and then to rocky terrain as we approached the mountain. Nightfall would be on us soon.

At the foot of the mountain, I finally noticed fresh signs that we weren’t the only humans around. Tire tracks. They led to an opening in the rocky formations around us. A cave highlighted by a large, inset pair of metal doors big enough to drive trucks through. Doors that hung open in the dead air.

We scouted the area, but there was no sign of guards. The power was on, and a diesel generator was running. There were barracks, but no sign of the soldiers who’d been stationed here.

“Blood,” Farris said pointing at a smeared handprint on a doorframe. The kind one would make holding on for dear life while being pulled in.

Cicero had the squad advance through the camp. Normally we’d want more time to recon the area rather than rush in, but according to the Pentagon’s magic thinking machines, this universe was thirty minutes away from the apocalypse. And everybody knows timelines are like dominos.

Mok didn’t say a word. Between the kid-turned-monster and Lunden’s death, the new guy was barely hanging in there. In the cave, everything was carved rock except the floor, which had been smoothed down and paved. Flickering lightbulbs hung suspended from ceiling wires at regular intervals, just like in mineshafts I’d seen pictures of.

In the stuttering light, I saw the small, huddled form of a child. The walls and floor around it glistened wet whenever the light hit just right. Around the child—the monster—were misshapen clumps of whatever it had been eating.

I looked deeper into the shadows and saw the whole passageway was lined with small, human forms. All the children who had once filled those empty shoes.

Cicero tapped me on the shoulder, and when I turned to look at him, he put his hands together next to his face in the universal signal for “sleeping.” I looked again at the nearest monster. The LT was right. I saw the slow, even rise-and-fall of the thing’s chest. If they had been awake, we’d probably have already been dead.

We didn’t have much of a choice. We had our orders, and the clock was ticking.

Every step felt like it would be the last I’d ever take. Regardless of how tiny they looked, these mutations were deadly. None of them looked as deformed as the ones that had been left behind on the road. Most had fleshy remains scattered about them. Some obviously human, some looked like other children who had been turned into the . . . things.

A monster to our left stirred, and the squad froze. Not that they would do much good. Sure, we’d smoke one creature, but we’d wake the rest.

The monster settled without waking up and murdering us all. I let out the breath I’d been holding as quietly as I could, looked over my shoulder and couldn’t see the door outside anymore. The path ahead showed no sign of ending, though it did seem like we were gradually heading downward. Maybe into Hell itself.

There was an eerie light ahead, pulsing like a slow heartbeat.

Every child we passed added to the weight of my dread, and I could only assume the others were feeling the same. Farris was sweating like we were in the middle of the Sahara. Cicero had his jaw clenched so hard I could hear his teeth grinding. Mok’s knuckles were white from gripping Lunden’s M250 like it was the only thing keeping him sane. At any time, I was sure the things would wake up and gut us like fish.

I looked to the LT, and tapped my fingers against my chest, questioning. Cicero had a pouch on that spot of his vest, but he shook his head. We had to be closer to be sure.

When you activated a Quantum Annihilator, you only got one shot.

Still stepping carefully around the huddled, sleeping forms of the infected children, we approached the growing light. It pulsed in the gloom, fluorescent white, then a sickly green. Cicero showed me the image on his device. The energy levels were spiking higher and higher with each flare of light.

We didn’t have much time.

The passageway widened ahead and emptied into a massive, open underground cavern. Steel girders lined the towering walls and crisscrossed all the space between. My eyes were drawn immediately to the center of the cavern where a slumbering god was chained to the floor. Its pose looked remarkably like the forms of the children in the passageway . . . as if those children had been mimicking their new eldritch parent.

The god wasn’t the biggest I’d seen, but it was still hundreds of feet tall lying down. A malevolent aura surged off it in waves. I could see a pair of leathery wings, folded in on themselves, and when the god shifted in its restless sleep, its head turned our way. For a moment I thought it resembled a lean dog, but in the pulsing light I caught flashes of what it really was. Or had been. Or maybe what it was supposed to be. Beneath the leathery skin was the serpentine body of a perversion of a Chinese dragon. Tendrils hung below its jaw where hair normally would have been. The horns on its head curled down like a demon’s. Its mouth opened in a yawn. Teeth larger than people. They were so large I could clearly see their jagged edges. Like fractals, they had their own, smaller teeth protruding off them.

I closed my eyes, squeezing them shut as hard as I could. I just needed a second. A little time for my mind to pretend it could cope. When I opened them and looked at my men, I noticed they had all done the same. This was the part where even strong men descended into gibbering insanity.

Rather than stare endlessly into the maddening visage of a corrupted dragonlike thing from beyond our time and space, I tore my gaze away and looked around the cavern. What I saw didn’t make me feel any better.

The floor was completely littered with sleeping children, covered in blood and human remains. I saw torn and shredded lab coats, and military uniforms, and quite a few heads absent their bodies. A number of the creatures slumbered with clumps of flesh hanging from their open mouths. There were partially eaten hands, fingers, and entrails.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cicero waving for my attention. He pointed beyond the children to the walls which were lined with open vats of liquid. The sides were made of some type of reinforced glass. I could see the ooze circulating, black as pitch. Each vat must have held tens of thousands of gallons of black fluid, and all had hoses attached to them, dozens of feet in diameter. They snaked across the floor, then up into the god’s body under the wings. I’d been so focused on the terror the thing exuded, I hadn’t noticed the Chinese had been tapping the god for its blood.

Up close, the god seemed even larger, somehow. Every step nearer made me feel more and more nauseated. I could almost feel the thing clawing into my head. Mok’s nose was bleeding, but he kept both hands firmly on the machine gun. Cicero held up a hand and doubled over, vomiting as quietly as he could manage. Farris lifted his M5 and trained it on the nearest sleeping child-turned-monster. It stirred, then settled again. Farris let out a small sigh but kept his rifle level.

Cicero straightened up, but appeared shaky. He gave us a thumbs-up, in spite of trembling so hard I thought he would pass out.

The symptoms lessened as we passed the god and approached the back of the cavern. In the pulsing light, we discovered what had happened to all the adults in the village. Next to a line of cremation ovens were piles upon piles of misshapen corpses—adult corpses. They all bore the hallmarks of experimentation, but every one of them showed extreme deformities. I understood in an instant. The adult tests had all failed.

So they had moved on to the kids.

We went to the nearest vat of god blood. At its base, dozens of beds were arrayed. IV lines ran from the vats, to what would normally have been saline bags, down to dripping needles. I caught the LT’s attention, pointed at the needles, then tapped the back of my neck. This was what the scientists had been infusing into the children through their IV ports. I knelt down and carefully lifted the end of the IV line. It should have been as light as a feather, but instead was as heavy as a barbell.

The whole scenario became clear . . . well, clear enough. How the ancient god had gotten here in the first place was a question well above my pay grade—maybe it had been buried here all along—but the PLA scientists had experimented with its blood. When it wouldn’t work on adults, they had tried it on children. It had infected the kids faster and stronger than anyone had anticipated. Maybe some of the kids had escaped in the chaos and tried going home, only to succumb completely to the disease in their veins. Then maybe all the kids . . . well . . . had eaten everyone and everything. And whatever the Chinese army had been using to sedate this ancient thing was about to wear off.

I let the IV down gently, not wanting to get any of the black blood on me. I didn’t know how much it took to start turning a person, but I didn’t want to find out.

We had seen enough. Lieutenant Cicero slowly, quietly, and deliberately removed the Quantum Annihilator from the pouch on his chest.

The rest of the squad knew what was up. We’d all seen these things in action before. It would send us back to our main timeline as the crystalline matrix detonated, obliterating the otherworldly threat, and vaporizing everything within a hundred miles of it.

Cicero flipped the switch.

Nothing happened.

The god stirred, strained against its chains, then turned its head our way.

Six eyes—three on each side—flickered open and stared at us. Hate overwhelmed me, and I fell to my knees clutching at the sides of my head. Images flashed through my mind of horrors I didn’t even know were possible. I blinked a few times, and when my eyes cleared, I noticed movement all around us. All the slumbering monsters were waking and pushing themselves to their feet.

My squad didn’t need an order.

Everybody started shooting. The roar of automatic fire helped lift the fog from our brains.

“Why didn’t it work?” I bellowed.

“I don’t know!” Cicero shouted back, as he banged the weapon of mass destruction against a tabletop, then flipped the switch again. “Stupid future junk!”

I switched off my brain. There were only threats. Size and age didn’t matter. This wasn’t the first time I’d disconnected. To stay engaged that way was to invite the kind of madness only a self-administered bullet could fix.

To my left, Mok wasn’t able to disconnect like I was. Tears poured down his face, but it wasn’t stopping him from raking Lunden’s machine gun back and forth across the cavern.

The creatures came at us slowly, still waking up from their dreams of God-knows what. I dropped a mag and slammed another home. It was probably the fastest reload of my life. I pulled one of my shots to the right, and the bullet smashed against the side of a vat.

Milton got disemboweled. Flynn got his throat clawed out. They were gone and being eaten by the malformed monsters before anyone had a chance to warn them of the threat from behind. Farris pulled a grenade, yanked the pin, and lobbed it into the thickest pack of things shambling our way.

“Cover!” Cicero screamed, and we all dived to get tanks of god blood between us and the blast.

The concussion was brutal in the cavern. I stood and rounded the edge of the tank, and realized I’d dived behind a separate tank than the others. A horde of the monsters teemed between us. There was no getting back to the squad.

The grenade blast knocked loose wires everywhere, causing showers of sparks to fly into the now-solid-green light. Nothing in the rock-walled cavern seemed all that flammable—until the sparks hit puddles of blood from the dozens of monsters we’d killed, and there was a whoosh as they lit up like they had gasoline in their veins.

The children—no, the creatures screamed as the flames consumed them. No matter how they rolled on the ground, the flames never went out. It looked like some were burning from the inside out.

A massive pack of the things shambled my squad’s way. For the moment, none of the things seemed to notice me. I jumped and waved until I got Cicero’s attention. I pulled an incendiary grenade from my pack and held it up.

“Do it!”

I popped the grenade and tossed it into the nearest vat. Then I ran for my life.

The vat turned into a pillar of flame fifty feet high. Fire raced up the giant IV line until it lit up one of the dragon god’s wings.

Veins glowed red and orange in the green light, then burst outward in a shower of molten blood. The dragon god roared so loudly it felt like it could almost stop my heart. Almost as one, the monsters collapsed grabbing their ears. Steel scaffolding collapsed, further separating me from my team. Falling rebar rained down on my men like hot javelins. A metal shard stabbed through Cicero’s eye. Another impaled him through the center of his chest, hitting hard enough to pierce the cavern floor.

Farris pulled a flare from his pack, struck it, and tossed it into the nearest vat. Molten blood splattered outward, arcing into another nearby vat which also exploded upward. Jets of fire hit the god one after another.

Some of the molten blood also hit Farris in his left arm, consuming it. His mouth opened in a scream.

Mok dropped his pack and dumped it, pulling out every flare and incendiary grenade. He ripped open Farris’s pack and did the same, then slapped a grenade into Farris’s good hand. Mok helped Farris up, then they began running, pausing only to toss flares and grenades into the tanks.

I ran toward the cavern’s entrance and pulled out every fire accelerant from my bag. I didn’t have much, just a single flare and a pack of matches.

I popped the flare, tossed it into a nearby vat. As it exploded upward, I ran to the last vat on my side of the cavern, pulled one match through the book to light the whole thing, then lobbed it over the edge of the glass.

As soon as I did, I knew I was too close. The explosion threw me back toward the entrance. My helmet hit the wall hard. For a moment, everything went black.

When I came to, I saw the eldritch god surge up and strike its head on the ceiling. Rock cracked as the cavern began to collapse. Every vein in its body glowed through its skin as its blood turned into fire. The lines of flame coursed up into its head. The six eyes exploded, and the dragon went limp, slowly falling to the ground. Directly beneath it was Mok and Farris. They hugged each other right before the god collapsed on top of them.

Few of the children were coherent in any way, but one crawled in my direction. I tried drawing my pistol, but my arms wouldn’t work quite right.

The monster was only a few feet from me, face stretched and looking more and more like the unholy combination of a child and the corrupted dragon eldritch god. Electricity arced around me. Somewhere in the conflagration, the damned Annihilator must have been triggered. Finally. HQ was pulling me back, and not a moment too soon.

My vision went solid white and blue.

Head swimming, I found myself lying in a glass coffin. On the other side of the glass was HQ’s launch control.

All I could do was try to breathe as my brain caught up with the journey across time. The relief of being home flooded me. My ears were still ringing from the explosions, but all I could think about was getting out of the coffin to check on my men. Hopefully they’d all been resurrected.

My eyes blurred, and for a second, I thought I was losing my vision. Then I realized it was just the lights flickering.

They dimmed, then went solid again.

Weird.

I managed to push myself up to wipe the steam from the glass. Instead of being greeted by our CO and the usual gang of scientists and doctors, all I saw was blood and body parts.

The glass of the pod next to mine was shattered and covered in black blood. Lunden’s coffin. This was where he would have popped back into the main timeline. On the floor in front of it was the body of the monster we’d sent back with him.

I caught movement from the corner of the room. In the wavering light, Lunden stood up, took a bite from a bloody arm he was holding. The severed arm still had part of a shoulder loop with general’s stars on it. Lunden shivered and twitched, still covered in the black blood from the kid he’d killed.

Infected.

Lunden’s eyes met mine—slitted and sickly yellow like the eyes of the dragon god—and he smiled at me with a mouth full of sharp and jagged teeth.


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Framed