CHAPTER FOUR
I tug my bulky and heavy Colt M-10 from my back, pull a round from my bandolier, and I arm the round by spinning the base from safe to arm it, setting it in the middle range—twenty-five meters—and loading it into the Colt’s breech as I run back to the parked vehicles of the convoy.
“Creepers!” I yell again, and the soldiers just freeze for a moment, most looking to Nakamura for guidance, and she looks equally pissed and confused, and she says, “Lieutenant, how in hell do you know there’s Creepers out there?”
Thor is barking, barking, fur bristling, and I yell, “My K-9 is keying on an approaching Creeper! Get this convoy out of here!”
Nakamura says, “How do you know it’s not a dead Creeper out there—”
“Sergeant, get these vehicles moving!”
And bless the old sergeant, her training kicks in, and she goes to one truck, and I go to the other, and I slap the door and tell the driver, “Go, go, go! We got Creeper sign!”
The drivers don’t wait, and with a belch and a bellow, they start grinding their way out of the parking lot, and it sounds cold and cruel, but it’s so very true, that in this interstellar war, trucks and gear are more important to save than bodies.
The farmers are also speeding away, the drivers standing up, working the reins, yelling at their horses to get moving. Bushels of corn bounce off the rear of the open wagons, tumbling to the ground. The armored Humvees button up and back away, even though their powerful machine guns are a waste against aliens. At the MTA bus there’s a frenzy of soldiers climbing in, others getting out, weapons and gear being tossed, and that engine starts up as well.
Nakamura runs to the bus, yelling, “Off! Off! Everybody off that bus!”
Diller yells back, “It’s my bus goddamn it, my bus!”
She starts driving out of the parking lot, two troopers tumbling out, and the tractor trailer unit hauling the fuel tanker grinds and grinds. I’ve got the M-10 up now, looking, seeking, and hating the fact that I’m the only damn soldier here with a weapon that can kill a Creeper. Each cartridge has a binary nerve gas in it, and when the round explodes at the set distance, the cloud—if you’re good and the wind isn’t blowing too hard—will come up against the Creeper and be brought into its breathing membrane, killing it in its buggy tracks.
I’m scoping left, scoping right, wondering if the Creeper is going to come from one side of the building or the other. Thor is still barking frantically but he’s at my side, and then there’s the whiff of cinnamon, and then—
Click-click.
Click-click.
Click-click.
Creeper approaching, coming in quick, coming in now, and I’m still looking left, still looking right, when the damn thing comes at us over the roof of the strip mall.
It’s a Battle Creeper, segmented arthropod, eight legs moving quick, its two weapons pincers up and ready for attack, and there’s yells and some of the M-4s start firing, and from the corner of my eye, I see two soldiers running down the road. The right segmented Creeper arm snaps into their direction and with a quick flick, flick, laser bursts take them down at the base of their skulls.
But the Creeper made a mistake. It ignored the threat in front of it.
Me.
The M-10 is tight up against my shoulder, I get the Creeper square in the center of my Colt’s open iron sights, and—
BLAM!
I’m so very used to it but the recoil still hammers me, and I work the big bolt, eject the spent cartridge, get another round from my bandolier.
So much happens in the next few seconds.
So very much.
There’s a satisfying and loud pop! as the M-10 round explodes right in front of the Creeper’s center arthropod, but the Creeper is still moving, and its other weaponized arm sends out a rolling tongue of flame that laps up against the end of the moving MTA bus. The bus catches fire at its end, wavers, and then hits one, and then two old utility poles before coming to a grinding halt.
But just as that’s happening, the gas cloud I’ve sent down range is enveloping the Creeper, and it skitters back, back, like it’s trying to get away, but my shot was too good and for once the wind is in my favor, and the alien is enveloped. It starts to shudder, move to the side, only one set of legs now working, and then it crashes through a weak section of the strip mall’s roof, its tail flickering again and then stopping.
There’s smoke and the bus is on fire, and a few soldiers get out, dragging their gear, and Diller the driver is the last one off, and she’s got a small red fire extinguisher in her hands and she goes to the rear, screaming, “It’s my girl, it’s my girl!” and she starts spraying at the roiling flames and smoke with small spurts of CO2, not making a difference at all.
The Humvees are out on the road, their soldiers still looking over their twin 50-caliber machine guns, and I’m maneuvering away, trying to find some cover, and the fuel truck is still grinding and grinding its engine.
Nakamura is in front of me, yelling something and there’s movement, and another Creeper emerges from the wooded path where the farmers had escaped. I push her aside, hammer off another shot, and this time, damn it, I’ve fired too soon. My elevation is off, and the round screams over the Creeper and explodes against a tree, its gas cloud useless.
I yell, “Sergeant, take cover!” as I move with Thor—still barking away—and get behind a black suburban with a bundle of rags and bones in the front seat, and Nakamura says, “Lieutenant, I think—”
A flash of light that hurts my eyes, and Nakamura falls against me, her head lolling on her shoulders, the smell of burnt and scorched flesh, and then her head falls off and her torso hits the cracked pavement.
The Creeper takes its time coming at us, and one Humvee does the right thing and gets the hell out of this bloody and burned mess, but the other Humvee stays put, the twin 50-calibers chattering, and I know that the guy running the Humvee and the gunner are hoping for that magical “golden BB,” the one uranium-depleted round that can punch through a crack in the arthropod’s segmented body, but there’s no magic today.
The Creeper’s right arm rolls out another stream of flame and the Humvee is swallowed up so quick and fast there’s no time for any screams, and when the arm stops flaming, the Humvee is on fire, the charred gunner up top slumped against her machine guns.
“Thor, silence!” I yell—bless him, but I think we’re beyond being warned at this point—and I quickly put in a new cartridge, just as a combination of laser and flames strike the fuel tanker, which goes up in one hell of an impressive ball of fire and smoke that warms my hands and face, even though I’m scores of meters away.
I wait for the smoke to clear some and then I take my time, and in a few seconds, my shoulder and ears are aching again, there’s a second dead Creeper in this old parking lot, and three burning vehicles, and a score or so dead troopers.
The live ones are scattered around the lot, crouched behind cars, some carrying their M-4s or other gear, and I step out and yell, “Troopers, rally here! Come on, move your ass!”
By ones and twos, they emerge, and I put another fresh shell in my M-10, and damn it, Thor begins barking again, and I hear that damn noise once more.
Click-click.
Click-click.
Click-click.
Another attack? A third Creeper? For a damn convoy?
“Move it!” I yell out, and with six soldiers coming after me—including the two Powers brothers—we run across the road, into a small drainage ditch, and into the treeline.
I give the ambush area one last glance.
A third and—sweet Jesus—a fourth Creeper are coming around the building, going up and over the old parked cars, moving in our direction, and the last thing I see is the doomed driver of the MTA bus—Diller—desperately tossing handfuls of dirt into the inferno of her burning bus.
Another second later, a Creeper opens fire, and the inferno at the bus expands to take her down.
We run, we run, and run some more. I hold up my arm, chest heaving and hurting. Only three of my crew are armed—two guys and a gal—and the two Powers brothers aren’t among them.
I take a deep breath, try to ease my hammering heart. Thor is a couple of meters away, fur bristling, growling, his body tense.
The soldiers are clustered around me. Too tight, they need to scatter, but I don’t have time to do things the right away.
“Out of you six, who are the best with the M-4s, hands up, right now.”
A brief pause, and the Powers brothers, and an older guy and a young woman join them. The other two boys stand tight, M-4s in their hands. I say to the woman, “You’re coming with me. You two . . . give the brothers your M-4s. Now.”
They move with some grumbling and whispering, but in a few seconds, the woman—PFC Stella Martin—along with Ross and Tommy Powers, are the only ones armed. I say to the other three, “Scatter. Run. Find your way to a unit or installation, tell them what happened here.”
Two of the fortunate three don’t have to be told any more than that, including one young boy and the older guy. They bail out, crashing and running through the woods like a fat deer smelling gunmetal.
One of the boys stays behind. He says, “Stella . . .”
“Donny . . .” she says.
Donny is fourteen or fifteen, and he looks behind him, where the ambush took place, and then at Stella, and he says, “Stella . . .”
“Shut up,” I say, realizing what’s going on. “Stay or go, make up your damn mind. We don’t have time to waste.”
“Sorry,” he whispers, and he turns and he’s gone, too.
When the war began, ten years ago, there were lots of horrific stories of fathers abandoning their families, parents abandoning their children, loved ones breaking up, all in a desperate attempt to survive.
Still hard to see, ten years later.
I wince as I hear another boom off in the direction of the shopping center. Maybe one of those vehicles was carrying something explosive, because any remaining gasoline back there would just be sludge by now.
But it means the Creepers are still there, lasing and flaming.
Stella wipes at her eyes and says, “What do we do now, sir?”
For a moment I feel like shaking her hand, for this is the first time in my Army career that anyone in uniform has called me sir. Instead I say, “We stretch out in a skirmish line, you with me, Tommy and Ross at my right, and we start moving, as fast and as quiet as we can.”
Tommy’s face is red, either with fear or excitement. “We gonna fight the Creepers, Lieutenant?”
I call out, “Thor! Pace!” and to the rest of my crew, I say, “Hell, no. We’re going to get moving and survive. Let’s go.”
I don’t have a compass, I don’t have my battlepack, I don’t have a lot, but I’m doing the best I can. From where the sun is setting I can tell we’re moving west, but I have no idea where in hell we are. My squad doesn’t know either, and the only thing we’re certain of is that we’ve left New York State and we’re either in Massachusetts or Connecticut.
It’s mostly brush and trees we push through, and I keep our breaks as quick as possible, stopping for a breath and to take sips from the two canteens that PFC Martin managed to carry with her. And that’s about it for supplies, save a couple of food bars that Ross Powers was carrying in his trousers.
At one break we’re in a rocky area, and there’s stream nearby, and Martin fills up her canteen, and the Powers brothers take a moment, bringing up water in their cupped hands. I’m glad for the water. We can go days without food, but water . . . that’s another story.
But I’m hoping it won’t come to that. I’m hoping that at some point, we’ll hit a road, or a farmhouse, or something that will lead us to an Army unit, somewhere we can report the ambush and get hooked up with the nearest installation.
Hope.
Thor should be lapping at the water, refreshing himself, but he’s not. He’s about two meters away, staring at where we’ve come from, and he’s on full alert. Martin comes up to me with a canteen, I take a cold and refreshing swig, and she says, “Your K-9 . . . what’s going on?”
“Creepers are following us.”
Her eyes are puffy and red rimmed, either from the smoke earlier on, from seeing her boyfriend run away. “But . . . in basic, they told us that Creepers usually stick around their Domes, only come out for raids or to hit military targets. There are only four of us here! Why should they be following us?”
Ross comes up from the stream, wiping his wet hands on his fatigue jacket, his M-4 slung over his shoulder. “Because they’re aliens. We can’t understand ’em, we never will.”
Tommy joins him, carrying the M-4 at port arms. “I don’t hear anything. Or smell anything. Aren’t you supposed to hear or smell ’em?”
“My dog does,” I say, “and that’s all that counts. Let’s get going.”
It looks like we have a couple of hours of daylight left, and I’m confident we’ll run into something marking civilization, but we don’t. It’s hard making way without a compass without going in circles, but I do my best by trying to aim in the direction of one landmark—like a stand of birch trees—and checking off another landmark—like a fallen pine tree trunk—and proceeding that way. It’s awkward, difficult and slow, but I sure as hell don’t want to circle back to our alien pursuers.
After our third rest break, Tommy Powers comes to me, face lit with excitement, and he says, “I see light reflecting from something, Lieutenant. Like a window.”
“Show me,” I say, and he leads me to a clump of boulders, and climbing up, I see where he points. Sure enough, the setting sun is reflecting off something. I slap him on the back. “Good eyes. Let’s see what it is.”
We start to move in that direction—a bit to the southwest, it looks like—and for a few minutes, we lose track of the light, but the woods are definitely thinning out. Maybe a farmhouse, maybe some sort of outlying community, I don’t know, but a reflection like that means glass, and glass doesn’t come up naturally.
Now we’re on a slope, and it’s rough going and I see open areas, and then there’s metal in the distance, and Martin says, “Looks like something, Loo, it looks like—”
We all break into a run, get up to the top of the slope, and look around us.
Damn.
Ross swears and wipes at his sweaty forehead. “A crash site. That’s all. A goddamn crash site.”
We move slowly through the old burnt tree trunks and the scattered chunks of metal, plastic, and wire. I kick at what looks to be a piece of a wing. Further on is a huge airliner engine, resting up against a shattered pine that’s gone gray for the years that have passed. There are also rows of seats here and there, the plastic still there, bits of clothing, but no apparent bones, thank God.
“Look at this,” Martin whispers. “The poor folks. Imagine what it must have been like.”
I really don’t want to, but it can’t be helped. I was told in class years back that on any given day, there could be up to five thousand airplanes in the air, carrying hundreds of thousands of people . . . until the time the Creepers let loose the NUDETs in our upper atmosphere that fried everything electronic on the globe, from cell phones to computers to power plants and cars and trucks, and airplanes. All those airplanes . . . and to think of being safe and secure in such a comfortable jet airliner, and to feel the engines shudder and cut out, the lights go off, and you fall, and fall, and fall, for long minutes, all that screaming, yelling, shouted prayers . . .
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s get out of here.”
And just as we manage to clear the crash area, the trees overhead burst into flames.