CHAPTER SIX:
ON THE GROUND
A convoy of ten Humvees, ten RATTs, and a lumbering Hazmat Analysis Mobile Lab set out from the forward staging area east of Gimhae. There was a warm, filthy wind blowing, a zero-visibility flying junkyard with random gusts a hundred miles an hour—the insertion aircrews had never been so happy to lift off in their lives. This was the gateway to no-man’s-land; everything east-southeast of here was blasted ruin, scoured by the typhoon. The only daylight was a sickly green line above the western horizon.
Driving into the black mouth of the storm, the vehicles skirted buckled roadways and collapsed bridges, only rarely stopping or backtracking. They made good progress. Blazing a trail, the dune-buggy-like RATTs courted the worst punishment, their space-helmeted drivers flirting with disaster as they weaved around obstacles and each other like a pack of hunting dogs searching for a scent. As often airborne as not, the snarling quad vehicles appeared to be in constant danger of flipping over. But it was one of the Humvees that was lost in a deep gully when the eroded bank gave way, the men escaping without harm to squeeze sheepishly in with another crew.
There wasn’t a building or tree standing anywhere; it was as if the Earth had shaken off mankind and all his works like a dog shaking off soapsuds. Fishbone rebar and flapping rags of plastic were all that remained to show that this had been a heavily populated, industrialized region. It was not lost on the men in the vehicles that a repeat of such violence would put a very abrupt end to their mission.
Despite the lunar desolation they encountered straggling groups of survivors, walking corpses huddled together against the wind and the pelting, greasy rain. They looked bad: many were injured, some grievously, and Major Queen reported their positions while KATUSA interpreters reassured them that help was on the way…eventually. The squad could offer nothing else—they had a specific objective and were duty-bound to keep moving, even as wails of supplication rose around them and mothers pressed dead infants to the windows. Queen was ashamed at how grateful he was to be wearing his biohazard suit—those people were crawling with bugs.
It was really awful—he had never seen anything like it: They were covered with open sores that seethed with living jellied beads like masses of frog eggs, squirming and spreading infestation with busy, burrowing tendrils. Queen could see them splitting in two, multiplying as he watched, taking over the victims’ whole bodies like a sticky caul of tapioca. Hideous, flesh-eating tapioca.
And this was not all: there were other things growing on them—colonies of rubbery white stalks like bean sprouts, and grotesque warty buds the size of new potatoes.
It was a relief to get going, to get beyond the threshold of civilian survival, where the team only need be concerned with its own existence. The convoy proceeded fifteen miles and was finally forced to stop before a towering bank of rubble. It was too steep and loose even for the RATTs—though they attacked it gamely, plowing upward, toppling back, and charging up again before the major called them off.
“This is it,” Queen announced over the radio. “The first of the pressure ridges around the epicenter. We’re less than two miles from ground zero.” He held his GPS device at various angles. “We’re losing the signal—it’s this weather.”
“No, the compass is fucked-up too,” said Deitz. “It’s some kind of magnetic interference. Check this out.” He showed them his compass, its needle pointing straight ahead as if tied by a string.
“Wow.” Queen called the men in the hazmat truck. “You guys picking up any radiation?”
Dennison’s garbled voice replied, “A minor amount. Nothing to worry about.”
“What’s a minor amount?”
“It’s elevated, no question, but that’s not unusual with any big earth upheaval. It’s no big deal. I’m more worried about the carbon-dioxide level out there—it’s around thirty percent…and increasing.”
“Thanks for telling me. Anything else we should know about?”
“Well, the temperature has risen forty degrees, in case you didn’t notice. It’s running around a hundred out there now, with a hundred percent humidity. Uh, there’s a strong magnetism that’s causing some glitches with the electronics. And get this: We’ve done a quick analysis of the rain, and it’s approaching the salinity of seawater. There’s also a great deal of organic matter in it—lipids, proteins, bugs—it’s a friggin’ soup. I can’t even imagine what the smell must be like. Solomon’s running more lab tests right now.”
“Well, strap on your spare air, because we’re going for a walk.”
“All of us?”
“No, I don’t want to expose everybody to risk. Just you, me, Ron, Allen, Patrick, Lieutenant Soon and whoever he wants to bring. Everybody else hold the fort.”
The major opened the door of the lead Humvee, a specially-equipped GRC-206 Mobile Communications Vehicle, and stepped out into the gale. It almost blew him over, but he held on to the door and planted his feet. He shouted, “Look out, it’s really blowing.” His billowing suit wanted to carry him away. “Jesus!”
“You okay, boss?”
“I’m fine! Let’s just get everybody on a tether.”
It was a challenge to move—surprise squalls blasted in from every direction, and the intense, glutinous rain made it hard to see through the faceplate. Queen felt like an overmatched astronaut on an alien planet. “God, this slime!” The extreme adversity almost made him laugh—and this was a component of his personality that had gotten him through the SEALs and the Special Forces and now AFSOC…and had driven a wedge between him and his family. This was the craving that defined Harley Queen’s life:
It was so bad he was beginning to enjoy it.
Looking like retro space-invaders in their fluorescent yellow suits, the eight soldiers made their way in a line up the unstable slope, slammed from behind by powerful updrafts and only too glad for once to be weighed down by weapons and equipment. It was slow-going but steady. They soon lost sight of their vehicles, and even at the crest of the ridge it was impossible to do a decent visual—their spotlight beams congealed at point-blank range in a blinding frizzle. Between sheets of slop they had glimpses of still higher elevations beyond.
Trying to get weather readings off the Kestrel 4000, crouching in a circle with the others, Queen shook his head and said, “Barometric pressure is off the scale—this is it right here, the inner rim of the storm: On that side is the heat column and on this is the turbulence as it collides with denser cold air from outside, funneling it up into the atmosphere and turning it back on itself like a breaking tidal wave. If we can get over the top and into the heat sink on the lee of this range it ought to be a lot better.”
You hope, thought Captain Deitz. To him, things were looking less promising by the second. The unearthly moan of the wind was getting under his skin—at any moment they could get hit by lightning or carried away by a tornado. The hill could collapse. Not to mention the possibility of another volcanic event. He wasn’t afraid of death so much as loss of control—he didn’t like being lashed to the others under these conditions. As a pilot he was used to having ultimate autonomy. “How much farther, do you figure?” he asked.
Queen’s voice over the headset glinted with humorous reproach: “What, afraid of a little volksmarch? We used to love this kind of thing back in Kaiserstrasse.” As they closed up the equipment cases he began whistling the theme from The Sound of Music. Deitz noticed the three Korean officers looking at each other in amusement, and it embarrassed him. Finishing up, the major said, “Let’s get a move on.”
Blown this way and that, keeping down, they scuttled like beetles up one gravelly rise after another, each one broader and more gently graded, until at last they found themselves on a rocky plateau some six hundred feet above sea level, totally exposed to the weather. To make things worse, the rocks began small but soon became a difficult-to-negotiate field of boulders.
“Well this is kind of spectacular,” shouted Lieutenant Carl Dennison, sounding troubled.
“What?” asked Queen.
“Look at these things—they’re like pure quartz. And that looks like mica—whole giant crystals. This is amazing!”
“Huh,” said Deitz miserably. “Pretty.”
“Pretty my ass. It’s like a mineralogical Disneyland. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Deitz said, “What, are you a geologist now?”
“You don’t have to be a geologist to think this is weird. Every one of these things belongs in the Smithsonian! And what the hell’s this?” He kicked at a large white pod wedged between the rocks, an odd rounded shape. Hollow and tapering at both ends, apparently bone or ceramic, it was elaborately molded with a pattern of dimples, bumps, and striations that suggested either organic function or whimsical Christmas ornament. Shaking his head, Dennison said, “Would you call that art nouveau or art deco? Look, there’s more!”
“It’s weird, it’s weird, I got it,” said Queen. “File it and move on.”
As the boulder field began to slope downward, the steaming rain and wind became intermittent, a few last swift kicks for good measure, then abruptly thinned to nothing. The eye of the storm. There was a rather stunning silence, broken only by rumbles of thunder.
It was as if the men had passed through some kind of membrane: They stood drying while rain hung all around, a vast undulating drapery that enfolded them in gray, eastward-curving wings. In the thick overcast they could see now that the rolling berm they had climbed described a similar circle; it was part of a miles-long earthworks abutting a weather-seamed brown cliff hundreds of feet high. It reminded Queen of the bizarre rock formations he had climbed in northern New Mexico during his Special Tactics training: palisades of eroded sandstone resembling baked dough, dotted with pinyon pines and shrouded at the top by clouds. Having been hidden behind the storm, the ominous barrier now completely filled their field of view, stretching north-south like a fantastic bulging peninsula. Strangest of all, it bristled with whip-like spines all up its face, evenly distributed as desert shrubs.
“What the hell is that?” said Deitz.
“Must be the volcanic mount,” Queen said doubtfully. “What else can it be?”
Dennison cut in: “No way. There’s vegetation on it. Looks as old as Ayer’s Rock.”
“Topo doesn’t show it—it’s gotta be new.”
“Maybe we got turned around,” said Staff Sergeant Patrick Snead. “Are we sure of our position?”
“I’ve checked and double-checked. Look at the telemetry yourself if you want.”
“No need to check, please,” said Lt. Soon of the Korean Army’s 1st Special Forces Brigade. He was a stocky, rather baby-faced man, yet he seemed utterly unfazed by either the punishing trek or the ominous, overhanging mountain. Beaming reassuringly behind his smeared faceplate, he said, “We are in the right place. I am familiar with the region, and I assure you there is no natural landform of this kind. This is certainly the source of the ground activity. Don’t you feel it?”
And as soon as he said it, they all noticed the odd, rhythmic tremors that shook the earth. It was not thunder, but consistent rumbles coming in sets of two, with about a forty-second interval. Regular as clockwork.
Watching Dennison hurriedly unpack the seismograph, Deitz said, “That can’t be good.”
“No need for concern,” said Soon. He held up his wristwatch. “I have been timing the frequency of the seismic activity—you see? It is consistent with readings taken by our Ch’ungmu Geological Research Station since the original event. It is our contention that these predictable tremors are of unknown origin, most unlikely to be volcanic. There is no indication of any imminent danger.”
Queen said, “But there wasn’t any sign the first time either, was there? Any warning? It just came out of the blue.”
Soon shrugged affably as if to say, What do you want from me? “All the data suggests an external source for the disturbance,” he said. “Perhaps something…artificial.”
“What would that be?” Queen scoffed.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“What are you talking about?”
One of the other Korean commandos said something to Soon in a low, urgent voice, and the two began arguing.
Deitz cut in, “He means man-made, Lee. American-made, to be specific. At least that’s the buzz I heard. Isn’t that right, Mr. Soon? Your government thinks we caused this. That’s why you’re here—to investigate and make sure we can’t cover anything up.”
“Give me a break,” Queen said, half laughing at what he thought had to be a bad joke. Seeing the grim expressions of the Koreans, his mouth fell open in astonishment, “What? I mean, what? Cover what up? That thing?”
Deitz shrugged apologetically, suddenly aware that he had goofed by not sharing this information sooner, however absurd it seemed. “That’s what I thought, too,” he offered lamely.
Queen was nearly speechless. “You have got to be—are you fucking kidding me? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!” He stared in disbelief at the looming cliff. “How in the hell could we have caused that?”
Soon said quietly, “Again, Major, I was hoping you could enlighten me.”
“Of all the—” Queen caught himself, and his voice suddenly took on the measured, flat tone that indicated he was truly furious: “Look, don’t waste my time. I’m here for one thing and one thing only, and that’s to do a risk-assessment with a view to establishing an LZ and base camp. Other than that, I don’t have a God-damned clue what’s going on around here—obviously.” He shot a dirty look at Deitz. “Where the hell did this asinine notion come from, anyway? It sounds like a Worker’s Party press release or something.”
Suddenly Lt. Soon looked uncomfortable, and Deitz said, “Bingo, chief.”
“Oh, come on. Now I’ve really heard everything,” Queen said, disgusted. To Soon, he demanded, “Since when do you guys pay attention to DPRK propaganda?”
Lt. Soon was offended. “We do not,” he said. “As you will agree, major, this is a very unusual situation. Many thousands of lives have been lost, a whole region devastated, and we do not yet know how or why. Until this matter is fully investigated, it is my government’s position that we cannot afford the luxury of either blind prejudice or blind trust. Is it your assertion that your government would do less?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Queen’s anger faltered—what the Korean said was true enough. “Fine,” he said. “Just tell me this: How in the world could we have done this? It’s ridiculous!”
“Major, this is not a public inquiry, and I have no officially sanctioned basis for accusation. What I do have is an event that defies conventional explanation—therefore I seek an unconventional one. That’s all.”
“Well, we’re all in the same boat, then.” Dismissively turning away, Queen said to his men, “Start scouting around for a ground station, ASAP. Let’s put an end to this nonsense.”
The team found a relatively flat area at the bottom of the slope, a few hundred yards from the base of the cliff. Queen and Deitz decided it was the closest thing they were likely to find in the way of an airfield. The boulders there were littered with peculiar debris—cracked slabs of yellowish, fibrous material that had scaled off the overhanging wall like old plaster. Dennison mentioned that it looked a little like magnesium silicate—asbestos.
“So?” asked Queen. “Is that a problem?”
“No. Just making an observation.”
“Gotcha. Stick to essentials until this is done, okay? In your expert opinion, do you think we can land a chopper in here, or will the vibration bring that cliff down on our heads?”
“From the amount of rubble, I’d have to say it doesn’t look good. But it’s this or nothing, isn’t it? So before I render my expert opinion, what I suggest is that we take a closer look.”
Leaving half the men behind to begin setting up the equipment, Queen, Deitz, Dennison, and Soon ventured into the recessed space beneath the bulging cliff. It was very dark under there, cavernous. The deeper they ventured, the more slippery the footing became, like a polluted shore at low tide: Everything was encrusted with saltlike deposits and caked with fatty, yellowish goo. In places they had to slog through deep sumps of it, pools of rancid curds scummed with sickly colored alien flora, of which Dennison took samples.
Hyperaware of the terrain, always intensely focused on the next tricky step—one fall, one rip, could cost them valuable time, valuable equipment, or their very lives—the men were gratified to finally arrive at the base of the overhang, where no further advance was possible. Swinging their lights around the low, sweltering crevice, they took a breather.
They knew the place was strange; perhaps they thought a good close look would alleviate that strangeness. It did not. If anything, close proximity to the thing only made it more disturbing.
Hanging over them was a freakish moonscape, a barren inverted planet like a parched lakebed: quilted folds of what appeared to be baked and broken clay, peeling up from the substrate in filo-like layers, dimpled here and there with shallow pits that suppurated cloudy, sap-like liquid. The scaly, arthropoidal tree stalks, thirty or more feet long and perhaps ten feet apart, were all curved as if swept by a high wind. Those at the bottom were bent and driven into the rocks beneath, as if the mountain had rolled over them. It was not a heartening thought.
“It’s moving,” said Captain Deitz, dry-mouthed.
They all noticed it: A subtle swaying of the “trees,” a continuous drumming vibration apart from the regular tremors. A distant roar like surf. The sense of volcanic instability, of vast menace, was almost suffocating.
Dennison made his way up a slimy pile of scree and cautiously touched the peeling brown wall. Collecting scrapings and a vial of fluid, he said, “Geothermal. It’s hot, but not dangerously so. Pretty weird stuff, though.” Then his face became quizzical and he pressed up against the cliff as if listening. “Feels like there’s a subway train going by on the other side,” he said.
“Seriously?” Deitz asked.
“Well, no, I’m sure it’s just magma cooling.”
“Must be pretty damn cool already, for you to hump it like that.”
“That’s true,” Dennison agreed absently. He looked up the bellied mountain in wonder. “I still can’t figure out what the hell kind of rock this is. It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I thought you said it was asbestos,” Queen said.
“I said it looked like asbestos—that was the only thing I could think to compare it to. But it’s more like wood or something. Plastic. See how resinous? I don’t know, I could swear it’s organic.” He unsheathed a razor-sharp tactical knife and tried sawing off a piece. “It’s tough stuff; it holds together pretty good. I don’t think there’s much risk of an avalanche, not way out by the camp—I say let’s try calling in the whirlybird.”
They went back and set about making an airfield. It was hot work—the air from their rebreathers was not cooled, only filtered and circulated. Using a Nikon Total Station surveying set, the team tamped down the scree to create a reasonably level landing pad, laying out a pattern of pocket-size landing lights. They also set up a remote miniature weather station and opened a microwave uplink to the waiting vehicles, as well as to the mobile command center back in Gimhae. An MH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter full of supplies was immediately dispatched to them, as were air drops, road crews and heavy equipment, and a small army of full-bodysuited humanitarian-relief workers—just a trickle, but behind it all the affronted, pent-up industrial might of civilization, eagerly poised to rush in and restore order. It was only a matter of time now.
“Hey, Major,” Dennison said as they awaited the chopper, “I want you to take a look at this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s some of the test results Solomon’s sending from the mobile lab. Weird.”
“You’re abusing that word. Show me something here that’s not weird. Hell, if it wasn’t weird it’d be weird.”
“Sorry. Uh, well, he’s analyzed a number of our ‘bugs’ and found that they’re some kind of rudimentary, single-celled life form. They seem to, uh, secrete a toxic enzyme that breaks down proteins, which they then absorb through their surface membrane. They eat us like a kid sucking a Popsicle.”
“What the hell are they? Where did they come from?” Only half-joking, he said, “Outer space?”
“We’re still waiting for USAMRIID to get back to us on that.”
“So, what you’re telling me is you’ve never seen anything like them before.”
“No…actually I have.”
“Thank God. Where?”
“Under a microscope.”
“Say again?”
“I know this sounds…weird, but these things are dead ringers for common, everyday prokaryotes. We’ve identified cocci, bacilli and spirilla, ribosomes and all—it’s really kind of mind-blowing.”
“Look, I’m not a doctor like you. What does that mean?”
“Bacteria. They’re ordinary bacteria.”
“Ordinary!”
“No, not ordinary—obviously, bacteria don’t grow this big. That’s why they call them micro-organisms. They must be some kind of mutation or something, but structurally they’re typical of germs that live all around us. On us: Staphylococcus, Escherichia—all the reasons we wash our hands before eating.”
“Beautiful. Does that mean we can get rid of them with soap and water?”
Dennison didn’t laugh. “I doubt it; you’re not going to kill these babies with a little antibacterial soap. The capsule protecting the cell membrane is too tough. High heat might do the trick, or dryness—you notice we’re not seeing many of them around here. They need a liquid medium in order to be mobile, and without a food source their lifespan is very short. Once that rain out there stops they should all die off. They’re already dying off—a lot of them seem to be infected with monster bacteriophages. Viruses.”
“Viruses.” Queen felt a sickening chill. “Oh no.”
“I don’t think it’s a problem. Viruses attack individual cells and hijack the cell mechanism to replicate, but these ones are much too big to infect us—I’d be surprised if they even recognize us as a host. Their DNA is gigantic compared to ours—it’d be like trying to repair a watch using a jackhammer. I’m pretty sure they’re only a threat to these mutant bacteria.”
“Really? Carl, you just made my day.”
“In the meantime, though, the whole region is quarantined.”
“I should hope so.”
“It’s not just because of the bacteria. There also seem to be some freak strains of fungi present—parasitic ones.”
“Is that what we saw growing on those people? Christ.”
Dennison nodded. “They’re just like the hyphae of something I used to treat every day at the dispensary. They feed on keratin in the skin, then branch out and form sporangia—spore-bearing nodes. It’s very common.”
“What the hell are you talking about? I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”
“Sure you have.” He picked through the ground litter and came up with several lumpy objects resembling strange seedpods or nuts. “The spores are everywhere, just waiting for a host. Except for the size, these ones happen to look a lot like Trichophyton interdigitalis.”
“What’s that?”
“Athlete’s foot.”
Queen blinked.
“You son-of-a-bitch. You’re fucking with me.”
“I wish.”
“Well, what the hell does all this mean? Some kind of bio-warfare?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. But I’ll tell you one thing.” He cocked his head in the direction of the cliff. “That thing’s no volcano; it’s not the result of tectonic subduction or crust shearing or a thrust fault. I doubt it’s geological at all.”
“What do you think it is?”
“No idea. But check out these TIMS images I pulled off AWACS.” He handed over a sheaf of false-color printouts. “They’ve been verified as accurate to within a couple of meters.”
Major Queen looked at the photos. They were all high-contrast thermal images of what appeared to be a sprawled human body, dark red against a yellow background, taken from different angles and distances. “What’s this?” he asked. “There’s a survivor in there?”
“Look at the scale, Lee.”
Queen focused on the tiny grid markings at the margin of the picture—one inch was equal to a kilometer. He shook his head. “What’s this supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know, but it’s for real. JPL confirms it, too.”
“Confirms what? The Jolly Green Giant?”
“No one’s saying that. In fact, we’ve been advised to make no mention of it. Officially it’s just a geographic anomaly. But the security situation is going haywire—Central Command wants an explanation.”
“I bet they do. Holy hell.” It was too absurd to think about. “Look, they’ve got to realize this is a fluke, some kind of accidental formation, like Jesus in a potato chip, or that face on Mars.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The man would have to be a thousand feet tall!”
Dennison was grave. “More like six thousand, Major.”
Deitz’s voice suddenly came over the radio: “Underdog, this is Touché Turtle, come in.”
“Ten-two, Turtle,” said Queen. “This is Underdog.”
“Major, we’ve found some downed aircraft over here—at least three Army Blackhawks, from what I can see. They must be that recon flight that went missing—Colonel Stein’s birds out of Camp Walker.”
Queen looked at the GPS coordinates Deitz was sending. He and two of the Koreans were out doing a perimeter survey—they were only a few hundred yards north, hidden by haze and low embankments of rubble. “Any sign of survivors?” Queen asked, already knowing the answer.
“No survivors, no bodies. Nothing. The choppers are fairly intact, though—looks like they could have walked away if they wanted.” Deitz didn’t have to say what the major already knew: that without protective suits, Stein’s people couldn’t have gotten far.
“All right. Try sending up a flare, just in case.”
“Roger that. Stand by.” There was a distant, muffled report, and then a whistling red star that arced slowly downward through the gloom.
Queen waited until the signal flare sputtered out of sight, then said, “No?”
“Nope. Sorry, boss. I’d say the area’s deserted.” There was a hubbub in the background. “Wait, Henderson’s found something…” There was the jerky sound of Deitz hurrying over uneven footing, then he said breathlessly, “Looks like human remains, chief.”
“Looks like? Are they or aren’t they?”
“They are.”
“What do you mean, ‘remains’?”
“Bones, for the most part. It’s a lot of bones scattered around in the rocks.”
“And you’re sure they’re human?”
Deitz sounded manic, wired. “Uh, affirmative on that, Major. I’m looking at a skull in a flight helmet—says Captain Rodriguez. And there’s other gear around. It’s definitely Stein’s crew.”
“Any idea what happened to them?”
“Same thing that happened to those civvies: they weren’t wearing any DEET.”
Dennison cut in, “Not if their bones are scattered—the bacteria wouldn’t do that. How spread out are they? What’s their condition?”
Deitz sounded distracted: “What’s that, major? I didn’t copy.”
“Carl wants to know if those skeletons look abused. Torn up.”
“Well, they’re all over the place, if that’s…hold on a minute…”
Whatever Carl Dennison was suggesting, Queen didn’t like it. Making a snap decision, he said, “Mike? Just wrap it up and get back here. We can’t afford to lose your silly ass.”
“Wait a minute, chief.” There was a rustle as Deitz shifted, then he said, “Something’s moving.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t—I thought it was a boulder. Holy shit. They’re everywhere.”
“Mike, get out of there, now. Now. That’s an order.”
Suddenly Queen flinched at the burst of loud static in his earpiece—the garbled sounds of gunfire and someone screaming. At the same time, there was a maddening commotion close by, so that he couldn’t properly hear. “Say again?” he shouted. Straining to listen, it took him a second to realize he had problems of his own.
At his side, Dennison shouted, “Major, it’s Snead! Snead is down!” All the men at the base camp were scrambling for their weapons.
Major Queen looked up the slope to see his staff sergeant fighting with some kind of lamprey-like monster, its dark translucent body pulsing like a wet inner tube, the gruesome flaps of its mandibles clamped on his right leg. It was trying to pull the man down under the rocks. Queen was not so surprised as pissed-off to have been surprised, cursing himself even as he knew there was no way anyone could have foreseen such a threat.
“Shit!” he hissed. His hands automatically found and snatched up his SAW—his M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, of which every painstakingly cleaned and oiled part was as tenderly familiar to him as the intimate features of his wife’s body—more so. The gun made sense to him, unlike the mundane disorder of everyday life, and when he could fire it with impunity, as now, he felt he was fulfilling some personal destiny that had been arranged for him by capricious Greek gods: his own grim, golden stake in the universe. It was something he needed and loved.
Bullets pelted the unreal monster, scoring its tough blubber, yet the thing seemed oblivious, imperturbably drawing Snead deeper underground with each flex of its body. All at once the man’s leg separated from his hip with a cartilaginous pop and a rending of flesh and rubberized fabric. He fell back screaming from the garish fountain of his own blood.
The others converged on the escaping creature, getting in a few last rounds as it retracted out of sight with the severed leg. Queen let drop his empty rifle and picked up Snead’s M4A1 SOPMOD 5.56 carbine just as the monster disappeared.
“See to him!” he barked in frustration, well aware that Patrick Snead was a lost cause. As Dennison tore open the medical kit, and Soon took one of his men to scout out Deitz’s lost patrol, Queen grabbed the satphone.
“Alpha Tango, this is Romeo One-Niner,” he said urgently, scanning the ground for any further signs of danger. “We have at least one man down and require emergency evac, over.”
Through a shower of static, the operator replied, “Copy that, Romeo—your ride is hot on its way—ETA two minutes at most. Hang tight.”
“Roger that.” Switching to his squad radio, he called, “Touché Turtle! Mike! What’s your status, over.” For a long moment there was no reply.
Then a gloriously welcome, ragged voice broke through: “Volksmarch my ass.” It was Deitz. He sounded like he was running. A staccato burst of automatic fire could be heard from over the hill, closer than before. “Returning to base under heavy…animal attack. Two men lost. Weapons ineffective. Request you lay down a heavy suppressing fire as I approach—try to slow them down.”
“Soon is halfway up to you right now, and there’s a chopper on the way. Just keep moving. What’s after you?”
Deitz didn’t seem to hear. “They’re right on my ass. Sorry about bringing them down on you like this…”
Now Queen could see the small dark figure of Deitz cresting the hill, only thirty or forty yards above Soon. He was waving frantically, and Queen was alarmed to see that he was bareheaded—an astronaut without his helmet. In fact he had shed all his weapons and gear, stripping down to one slim straw—the last survival strategy and the first, hardwired in from the days of Australopithecine: Run. Run fast.
And as he came, Queen saw humped shapes rising behind him. Not more of the giant worms, as he had expected to see, but huge lumbering beasts, like a herd of bison or rhino. These animals were nothing so mundane, however: Covered with thick plates of polished amber, with pulsing organs visible within, each one had many crablike legs and no proper head at all—just a grotesque, sowbug-like body that terminated in massive jointed antennae and a wicked set of jaws. The ground shuddered with their approach, and volleys of Soon’s covering fire could be heard. Dennison and the others looked up, torn even from their desperate task of staunching Snead’s bleeding by this outlandish new menace.
Then came another sound, a familiar deep drumming threaded with the silvery whine of turbines—a sound as welcome as the bugle of cavalry: the helicopter. It crested the hill at high speed, trailing a ribbon of mist from the storm. Queen hardly had time to toss out a smoke canister before the careening aircraft was upon them, swooping in so low along the rocky slope that the men on the ground reflexively ducked, blasted by its downdraft. The bug-like monsters scattered before it, springing in all directions. It came so close that Queen could hear the pilot—Ned McPherson of the 353rd, a funny guy, but not usually given to barnstorming—shouting into the radio as his Pave Hawk buzzed them and erratically continued on, nearly colliding with the cliff face as it arced sharply up and away. He didn’t seem to have any intention of landing.
“Where’s he going? Hey!” Queen yelled. “The fuck does he think he’s doing?”
“Evasive action,” replied Deitz, stumbling up and collapsing. Pointing westward, he gasped, “Look!”
Now a second flying object came barreling through the clouds—one much larger and less familiar…though vaguely similar in its wasp-like configuration. Instead of matte dark gray, however, the newcomer’s bulbous fuselage was bright yellow and black, massively armored in overlapping jointed plates, bristling with antennae, and churning the air with fantastic iridescent wings that created a violent shockwave with each stroke. Its undercarriage was a mass of six articulated grappling claws. It was a flying nightmare—the ultimate war machine. Yet it was alive.
Spellbound, the men watched in dread as the pursuing thing overtook the zigzagging helicopter. With an elegant, impossible maneuver, it turned over in midair and snagged the craft from below with lobster-like limbs, whirling the Pave Hawk upside-down and ramming its spike-tipped abdomen into the chopper’s fuel tanks. There was a dismal whine of straining engines, then the rotor blades flew apart and the helicopter swung dead in the grasp of its insectoid captor.
Now the immense creature plummeted with its burden, dangling those long, articulated legs and landing so heavily that the helicopter was partly crushed beneath it. The monster itself appeared utterly unfazed by the impact, busily intent on its gruesome business. As Queen and the others gaped in horror, the thing reared up and briskly peeled open the cockpit with steam shovel-size mandibles—literally jaws of death. Glass and avionic debris rained down as it prized Captain McPherson from his harness and bit him in half. Blood and soft tissue gushed from seams in its antlike maw as the creature chewed, splattering the rocks below. The co-pilot, Lt. Oscar Kirsch, pride of the AFSOC Men’s Choir, was plucked up and devoured as he tried to crawl free.
Major Queen and his men did not suffer this horror in dumb shock, but immediately cut loose with their weapons. The monstrosity was downslope, less than a hundred yards away, and quite as big as a balloon in the Macy’s Day Parade—they could scarcely miss.
“Go for its eyes!” Dennison shouted, and the hail of fire converged on those two glittering baubles, each one a many-faceted crystalline hemisphere at least four feet across. As with the earlier worm-thing, their small arms barely seemed to have any effect, though they emptied every gun in their arsenal, from their M9 pistols to the devastating 12-gauge 870. It was unbelievable—anything they threw at it just pranged off like windblown grit.
Tired of fucking around, Queen unstrapped his trusty M203 40mm stand-alone grenade launcher and fired a round into the ruin of the helicopter. This was a little more satisfying: The ruptured fuel tanks blew up, enveloping the straddling monster in an enormous fireball. Sunset colors played across the bleak cliffs as the insect writhed in flame.
“That got his attention,” said Deitz wearily.
Incredibly, the thing was not destroyed. As the men stared, faces gleaming in the firelight, the monster’s great wings suddenly flexed, causing an explosive concussion that instantly dispersed the fire, blasting rocks and burning helicopter wreckage in all directions. Snead, unable to take cover, was all but beheaded by a whirling metal plate. As the other men dove for meager shelter, the creature lifted off, each wing beat a violent shockwave that scoured the hillside. It rose a few hundred feet and hovered there, its sleek, Porsche-shaped head swiveling, searching, until it saw the five tiny buffeted figures hunkered amid the rocks. Then it went for them.
Shielding their faces from the explosive gusts as they awaited death, Queen and the others did not see what happened next: The creature’s terrible wings, supersonic kites of smoked-glass a hundred feet long and half as wide, stronger than steel, with branching ribs like leaded cathedral windows, suddenly erupted from above in darting sparks and shrapnel, as if somebody had set off a mother lode of firecrackers—fireworks enough for a hundred Chinese New Years. The wings split and cracked, fracturing further as they batted the air, rudely crazed in a thousand places. All at once, the monster wheeled sideways and fell, slamming into the boulder field with as much force as a crashing jumbo jet. But though it gouged a deep trench in the earth, it did not disintegrate…or even die outright. It continued to heave and flap in its pit, struggling to fly, as more manic firecrackers danced up its back to its head, shredding its antennae, pitting its silvery eyes.
“Gunship!” Deitz cried, and suddenly the plane could be seen, an AC-130H Spectre from the 160th SOAR, banking in from the east with its port side 105mm howitzer and 40mm cannon and five-barrel 25mm Gatling gun all spitting flame and steel. The plane made several passes, hammering the monster with rivers of hot metal until it slumped, quivering, immobilized if not dead. The guns also strafed the routed beetle-creatures, ensuring they would not soon return, and as a final boon the plane dropped a large cargo-pallet of supplies, tipping its wings as it roared away through the clouds.
“Well that was exciting,” said Deitz. “What are we gonna do with the rest of the day?”
Queen wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “Prep Pat’s body for evac,” he said. “And get yourself scrubbed and covered up.” He had been in contact with Echo Company and the 353rd SOG, and they were sending a regular airlift this time, a real fleet, storm or no storm. The stalled ground vehicles had been recalled to base and now would be flown in under heavy air cover. The military did not intend to relinquish its foothold, though to what purpose Queen couldn’t guess. He didn’t let himself dwell on what Soon had said—it was probably bullshit…yet what could explain the insane events of this day? All he knew was, he didn’t want his people here any longer than necessary. Queen had to admit it: There was such a thing as too much excitement.