by J. F. Halpin
“You’re telling me something survived a grenade detonating point blank?” the colonel asked skeptically.
“I don’t know how far it got, but it was moving,” Adams said, then added, “uh, sir.”
“And the people, like the woman who attacked you . . . ?” the colonel prompted.
“Sir, she was going for my gun, sir. Summers saw her, sir,” Adams said quickly. He looked like he wanted to tack a few more “sirs” on there as he looked to Summers for confirmation. As the colonel’s attention turned back to him, Summers nodded in confirmation, deciding that the less he actually said, the better.
They heard the door behind them swing open, and Summers looked up to find a panicked lieutenant in the doorframe. “Sir, we’ve secured the entrance to the bunker. There hasn’t been any activity; however, we’ve heard gunfire further up. Should we move in to assist?”
The colonel considered that for a moment. “Organize what fireteams we can muster. Keep the rest at the entrance. If we’re going in, we’ll do so with everything we have.” He turned back to Summers and the increasingly nervous Adams. “You’re dismissed. I’ll want a full report when this is over.”
That was . . . odd. It was a given that the colonel knew something about what was happening, but generally, when two of your guards killed a room full of people, there was at least a few minutes of consideration before you handed them back their guns. Then again, the base was also apparently a warzone. Just what in the hell was happening?
The lieutenant saluted. Nowak stood as well, turning to Summers. “You two still combat effective?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” Summers replied automatically, after which he realized he’d just volunteered to go back into the active combat zone with said cannibal nudists. Shit.
The colonel nodded approvingly. “You have ten minutes. Get yourselves ready.”
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The scenery really was beautiful, Summers noted. He hadn’t taken the time to appreciate the twin mountains the base was built beside, or the natural beauty of the landscape around them. He took a moment to correct that while also doing his damnedest to keep his shit together. It’s not that he was afraid of dying. Well, he was, but he’d accepted that risk a long time ago. He’d joined up with a combat unit, after all. But being eaten alive hadn’t been something he’d ever given much thought to. There was a primal, animalistic fear in that, to which Summers responded by checking his weapon and admiring the view.
And while he hadn’t really had time to think about it earlier, he’d had a moment of realization shortly after leaving the colonel behind. It occurred to him that, for all they knew, an entire platoon of soldiers outfitted and trained for whatever it was they were about to do had been wiped out. Conversely, they were going in blind, with less equipment and less intel on the enemy. Common sense would suggest that they were screwed.
“This is such a stupid way to die,” Summers muttered to himself. It was true, too. This was the slowest, most out-of-the-way place some of the brightest minds in the US Army could find for him. And he was going to die there.
“Summers!” Nowak called. Summers got up, heading over to find Nowak with Cortez and Adams beside him.
“You good?” Nowak asked.
Summers nodded in response. He noticed Cortez had her hand wrapped around her rifle—and the under-barrel grenade launcher attached to it. That made him a little nervous.
“You know, if you fire that off in the bunker, it’s just as likely to kill us as whatever else is in there,” Summers said, indicating the weapon.
“It’s what they gave me. Don’t worry. If it comes to that, I’ll shoot you first. Make it nice and quick,” Cortez replied. Summers nodded, as if that settled the matter.
“From here on, we’re designated as Fireteam Delta. We’ll be running point,” Nowak said.
“Ex-fucking-cuse me?” Summers asked, then immediately regretted it. In his defense, he’d thought they were screwed before the colonel decided to throw him into the blender first.
“I don’t like it any more than you do, but me, you, and Cortez here are the only boots at this base with any actual combat experience. So that’s our role. We go in, back up any remnants of the 63rd—that’s what the colonel’s calling the other platoon—and then help with extraction.”
“You going to tell us what’s going on now, Nowak?” Cortez prodded. Nowak only looked annoyed in response.
“I know as much as you do. There’s bad shit in yonder hole, and we need to kill it,” Nowak responded.
“Swear on your mother’s grave?” Cortez asked.
“She ain’t dead, but . . . sure?”
“Good enough for me. Private in front?” Cortez gestured to Adams.
“Sorry, what?” Adams brain had only just caught up to the situation at hand.
“Yeah, I’d rather not get shot in the back of the head. Sorry, kid. It’s the best place for you,” Nowak agreed. Adams looked to Summers for help.
“Once we’re out of the hall, we’ll have some cover, don’t worry.” Summers placed a reassuring hand on Adams’ shoulder.
For his part, Adams was doing his best not to look terrified. He was failing miserably, but they appreciated the effort.
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Summers stepped in, past what remained of the bunker door. It was all twisted, pockmarked metal. The grenade really did a number on the facade, but the thick doors had weathered the actual blast pretty well. No doubt it would have held, if Summers hadn’t felt the need to check on the noise. He could thank himself for that.
“What’s this shit?” Cortez asked, glancing at the bodies around the hall. There were about a dozen corpses between the soldiers and the . . . creatures Summers had subsequently liquified. He hadn’t noticed before, but there was a lot of green in the hall. Not blood. More like . . . grass stains. Moss, leaves, foliage that didn’t look natural—it was littered all around.
“Eyes forward,” Nowak urged. He was probably trying to sound professional, but the tension in his voice was obvious.
Bang!
Summers turned on his heel, leveling his gun on the fireteam about thirty feet behind them. He saw a young private, their finger on the trigger and gun trained on a very dead body. One he’d shot for some reason or another. It would be understandable that the group was jumping at shadows—the corridor was literally painted with the dead—but the corpse he’d shot had been one of their own, wearing army fatigues. Now, the private was quietly being chewed out by his sergeant.
“Move faster,” Summers urged, eager to get more distance between them and the trigger-happy group at their back.
They passed through what would normally have been a security checkpoint. Large rows of computers with a distinct 1980s flavor broke up the room. There were no bodies, but they still saw the strange green stains around every corner in the room, like someone had dragged a tree through it.
The distant sound of automatic fire caught their attention from up ahead. But that wasn’t right. The next room was the storage area, the biggest, and the last room in the bunker. The gunfire was too far away for that.
Then, they came upon it. A lush forest stretched out in front of them. It wasn’t a portal, or a window, or anything like that. It didn’t really have an edge at all. It was as if the room just merged with the landscape. The concrete ceiling gave way to a cave’s rough-hewn stone, and the tiled floor turned to a leafy brown-and-green mulch just a few feet beyond that. Something that looked like a half-assembled satellite sat at the center of the merge, vibrating the air around them. It felt . . . wrong.
“Sergeant, I did not sign up for this shit,” Adams said, staring at a scene that rightfully shouldn’t exist.
Another shot resounded in the room, followed by a scream. A woman’s scream. No, a girl’s scream. Summers remembered the kid he’d seen when the suit first arrived. She had to be someone’s daughter or something, right? They wouldn’t have been dumb enough t
o bring her along, would they? More gunfire was the only response he got.
“I am not paid enough for this,” Summers whispered to himself as he pushed forward. The others must have wrapped up whatever internal debates they were having as well, as they started to follow.
They ran for about five minutes, trying to make a beeline for the noise. Near as Summers could tell, it was moving. Then the tree line in front of them exploded, the sound of wood splintering so loud it made his teeth vibrate.
About 300 yards ahead, he saw something moving through the debris. It looked like a mound of corpses two stories tall had been bound together with sticks and moss, and was moving impossibly fast on stumpy legs. Like a tidal wave, it swept through the trees on a direct path toward them.
It occurred to Summers that the creatures he saw in the hallway couldn’t have overwhelmed an entire platoon on their own. As terrifying as they looked, they were, at their core, just unarmed combatants. They were scavengers. This was the predator.
“Fuck me,” Summers muttered.
Before the others could even get a word in, Adams was unloading his entire magazine into the creature’s mass. It was about as effective as you’d expect against something that had the momentum and bulk of a tank. Summers heard gunfire again and saw three soldiers moving toward them—the girl in tow. Well, that answered that question.
“Cover them!” Nowak yelled. Summers sort of admired the man’s ability to not lose his shit, given the situation. The group unloaded on the shambling mound of wood and flesh. He heard a distinct thump from beside him and watched as the creature’s left side just sort of collapsed. He looked and saw Cortez holding the grenade tube underneath her rifle. She looked just as surprised as he did.
“We need to move!” Summers said, as the shambling thing stumbled. It was definitely hurt, but something told Summers they’d need a tank to actually put it down. Nowak ran to the soldiers, shouldering the one who Summers just now noticed limped on a leg that looked as though it had been through a blender, a woodchipper, and a knife fight all at once.
“Where’s the general?” he heard Nowak scream over the intensifying roar of the thing behind them.
“Dead. We need to leave!” the soldier replied.
The girl running alongside them collapsed on the spot. “Ton! Ton sec!”
Summers didn’t quite understand what that meant, but he picked the girl up, slinging her over his shoulder, and ran all the same. It wasn’t the most dignified or thoughtful way to handle a child in distress, but in his defense, he was absolutely terrified.
The creature roared behind them, and once again, they heard the now distinct sound of wood being torn apart. It quickly became apparent that they wouldn’t make it. The monster was just so much faster than they were.
An M4 fired from somewhere to their left. Summers could just barely make out the same trigger-happy private from earlier as the rest of his fireteam unloaded everything they had into the creature. They were a good distance off; they must have gotten turned around in the trees.
“Oh, thank god!” Nowak said as the monster immediately changed course, heading for the other group, giving Summers and the others some much needed space. That relief didn’t last long, however, as it proceeded to immediately tear through them. Summers watched in abject horror as the trigger-happy private was crushed under a giant fist. The man had essentially traded his life for Summers’, even if he didn’t know it. Then more gunfire erupted, a lot of it. The creature charged at its unseen attackers, and Summers realized that it might have been them who’d gotten turned around. Shit.
“What happens if that machine we saw stops?” Summers asked the limping soldier beside Nowak. He saw “Logan” on the man’s nametag. Apparently, he was a corporal as well.
“What?” Logan managed to get out between breaths.
“That hunk of shit you put in the bunker—that’s what’s doing this, right?” Summers persisted.
“Yes?”
“That way!” Summers indicated, following in the monster’s wake.
“Are you nuts?” Cortez asked.
“We were the only one’s going after the 63rd, and that gunfire’s from the base. If they start a fight there and destroy that machine thing, we could be stranded in wherever the fuck this place is.”
He ran, the girl still slung over his shoulder. Whether the others saw the logic in his reasoning or not, they followed.
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What they saw was a slaughter. Somehow, more of the pale creatures had found their way toward the base. The shambling mound was in the process of dismantling Fireteam Beta, in the most sickeningly literal sense Summers could imagine, and it didn’t look like it was slowing down.
The two soldiers at Nowak’s side rushed for the base.
“Wait!” Nowak cried after them. They ignored his shouting and kept pushing forward.
“Goddamn morons. Cover them!” Nowak shouted, firing into a group of the smaller creatures as they converged on the two men. Summers saw Cortez and Adams pushing up, firing into the crowd as the fleeing soldiers were torn apart. The shambling mound turned its attention on the soldiers inside the bunker, many now running for their lives. There had to be thirty, maybe forty of them still left.
Summers recognized the faces of the dead in front of them, people he’d eaten with, killed time with. He didn’t like them, but they were still his people. The shambling mound ducked into the cave that became the bunker, close behind the retreating soldiers.
As it moved beside the strange machine—the only thing tethering them to their old world—Summers raised his gun and fired—into the machine.
Pieces of metal bent inward as Summers’ shots hit their mark, and everything seemed to stop. A moment of deafening silence, as if the world itself had to take a second to process what had just happened. Then, as if it were making up for lost time, reality exploded in front of them. Pieces of the shambling mound unceremoniously dropped to the floor, lifeless. They looked as though random chunks of it had just been carved out, or more likely, had ended up on the other side. There was no bunker anymore. Just a cave.
Summers let the barrel of the gun drop. A few of the pale creatures were screaming in agony, as parts of them looked to be similarly missing. The others were firing into the now stunned crowd of monsters. But even over the sound of gunfire, he could still hear Cortez’s voice.
“Summers, you fucking asshole!”
Chapter 3: The Asshole
Summers looked out to what used to be his way home. It was filled with the dead, some his own, some from the strange creatures of whatever this world was. He leaned down, picking up a rifle from one of the dead soldiers. He checked the magazine: still full. Summers tossed the unspent magazine into the duffel bag at his side.
“Find anything special?” Nowak called out to Summers.
“More of the same. Couple MREs,” Summers called back. He saw Nowak turn away. The 63rd had managed to set up a rudimentary camp, and though it looked like they were initially settling in for the long haul, whatever was left over in there after the attack was either destroyed or useless day-to-day bureaucratic bullshit. They desperately needed some supplies.
They’d settled on scavenging the battlefield for anything they could use: food, weapons, clothes that weren’t too messed up. It didn’t sit right with him, though, stealing from the dead like this. But with God knew how long they’d have to last out here, they quickly decided they’d need it more than their fallen comrades would. They needed medical supplies desperately. Nowak was doing what he could for Logan. They’d tied off his leg as best they could manage, but without somewhere to treat him, it was likely he wouldn’t make it. He was hoping they’d at least find some pain killers to make it a little more comfortable.
That wasn’t to say there wasn’t a screaming match for the stunt he’d pulled, closing their only way home. But after the tensions had died down, they’d more or less agreed that it was the right call to make.
Whether that attitude would persist past the first week of hoofing it through what looked to be an endless forest, they’d find out.
“Guys!” Adams shouted. He was standing under a small canopy, next to the young girl Summers had picked up, having been relegated to babysitting. They were doing their best to keep her away from the— in some cases—literal piles of bodies that littered the camp. The poor kid hadn’t said a word after what happened. Then Logan dropped out, given that he’d probably saved her life in the fight earlier, and he’d assumed they were close.
Summers jogged over to the private’s side. “What? What did you find?”
Adams pointed down at the girl. “Fucking look at her!”
Summers eyed Adams, then glanced down at the kid. She . . . was a kid. Long hair, probably on the shorter side for her age, blue eyes, pointed ears—wait.
“What?” Summers said, pulling the girl’s hair out of the way. He hadn’t noticed them before. She didn’t seem to appreciate the action, as she slapped his hand away.
“No touch!” she yelled. Only, she said it with a bit of an accent. He remembered hearing her speak something . . . something other than English when they’d first found her.
“Sorry,” Summers said, holding his hands up in a placating gesture. “So, uh, what are you?” Summers asked.
“Jesus, man, have some class,” Adams interjected.
“Sorry. Again,” Summers said. Adams may have had a point. “Where are you from?” Summers quickly amended.
“Zolah,” the girl finally answered. It solved nothing.
Nowak approached, saw both Summers and Adams crowded around the girl—and then her ears.
“Uh, is she an elf?” Nowak asked.
The girl saw everyone staring at her. She pointed to herself, speaking slow, as if to a child.
“I am Asle.”
“Are there more Asle?” Adams asked.
“Asle. Name,” she said, punctuating the words as if she were speaking to a bunch of idiots.
“You’re Asle?” Nowak tilted his head. “What were you doing here? With these men?” Nowak said, indicating the dead laying around them. Asle didn’t seem bothered in the least by the scene.
