by J. F. Halpin
“You take Asle from Zolah. Make me speak,” Asle said simply.
“We take?” Summers asked, confused. “Where’s Zolah?”
“Really far,” Asle said, pointing seemingly in every direction at once.
Then, the realization hit.
“Shit. No, no. We. No. Take. Not us.” Summers immediately understood that, for whatever reason, the 63rd had kidnapped a child. He rightfully wanted to distance himself from that.
“You take Asle,” she replied with a bit of finality, and more than a little accusation.
“I think she’s their translator,” Nowak concluded. When he saw Summers’ expression, he clarified. “Whatever the 63rd were trying to do, we know this ain’t anywhere on Earth. Not our Earth, anyway. Settlers used to do the same thing back when they first came to America. They’d take children, teach them to speak their way so they could help talk with the natives.”
“She’s just a kid,” Adams said.
“First thing’s first, you all right? We’ve been in survival mode, and I didn’t think about what you’d be going through. Sorry about that.” Nowak looked the girl over. Asle didn’t give a reaction. If she was bothered by the piles of bodies around her, she wasn’t showing it.
“Fine,” she said simply.
Nowak leaned down to the girl’s level. “Good. Do you think you can help us? We could really use some help right now.” He took her silence as permission to continue. “Do you know what that is?” Nowak pointed to what remained of the shambling moss creature that had torn into their friends. Asle nodded. “Are there more?” Nowak asked.
“Um. Skeen. Children feed,” she said, indicating the pale creatures around it. “Only one. Too big. No more,” she said, more confident. “Skeen gone, too. No mother. They find new.” She nodded to herself, seemingly proud for having an answer.
“So, queen bee and the absolutely terrifying drones?” Adams speculated.
“Sarge, I don’t know if I’m good with dragging a kid through hostile territory,” Summers said.
“We don’t have much choice. But I get what you’re saying.” Nowak glanced down at the girl. “Look, Asle, you don’t have to stay with us. We can find you somewhere—” Before he could finish, Asle’s eyes widened. It wasn’t quite an expression, but there was something of panic in her eyes.
“No leave! No leave!” she shouted. “I. Will. Speak. Good.” She seemed to put more effort into that sentence than the ones before.
“No,” Nowak said quickly. “You can leave if you want. Do you understand? You can stay with us if you want. But you do not have to.”
It took Nowak a few more reassurances before she started to calm down. “Wow, Sarge, you’re great with kids,” Summers muttered.
“Shut up,” Nowak said. “Reason I stayed single.”
“Uh huh.” Summers looked at him skeptically.
“Y’all want to explain what’s going on over there?” Cortez shouted as she left the tree line. She had about six guns slung over her shoulder and one in her hands.
“Uh . . . she’s an elf?” Summers shouted back, pointing to the girl beside him.
“Asle,” Asle muttered.
“All right. Fucking neato,” Cortez replied, completely nonplussed. “I found the big boss. Gonna need some help.”
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What Cortez had found was an LUV—a Humvee about thirty feet in the air, tangled in the branches of an absolute beast of a tree. At its side dangled the very much dead suit Summers had seen earlier.
“How in the shit did he get up there?” Nowak stared up at the dented Humvee.
“My guess is that the big guy tossed him,” Cortez answered.
“Real question is how are we going to get it down?” Adams asked.
“I got an idea,” Summers said, raising his gun and leveling it at the thick branch holding the Humvee.
“No. No. That’s a stupid goddamn idea,” Nowak said, seeing where Summers’ mind was going.
“You got a better one?”
“Just give me a second,” Nowak said, watching the Humvee intently.
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Two hours later, Summers took aim at the offending branch.
“Clear!” he shouted, and then fired a long burst into the branch’s base. The bullets tore through the wood in an instant. There was a loud crack, and then the Humvee tumbled down nose-first, slamming into almost every limb of the tree it could before landing wheels-down in front of them. Its suspension system bounced as the corpse of the suit crashed onto the hood with a wet thud.
“That actually worked better than I expected it to,” Nowak admitted.
Cortez immediately got to work looking the Humvee over. She shoved the corpse of the suit off the hood, popped it, and gave the engine a once-over. Then she quickly moved to the driver’s seat.
To his surprise, Summers heard the engine first struggle, then turn over. It actually ran.
“Oh, hell yes!” Cortez said with a smile. “We got our ride out of here.”
“Kill it. We need to preserve gas as much as possible,” Nowak said. He had his hands in the suit’s pockets.
Summers flipped the corpse over, helping his sergeant. “You got used to this whole grave-robbing thing fast.”
“Not grave-robbing. I just want some answers. Here we go.” At that, Nowak pulled a cracked phone from the suit’s pocket. Like the Humvee, it still had a charge. “Shit, it’s locked.”
“Give it here,” Summers said. As Nowak handed it over, Summers held up the corpse’s face to the camera. The phone flashed in recognition, and the home screen appeared as he handed it back.
Adams watched all of this with a look of absolute horror. “You people need some goddamn therapy.”
“Given the kind of shit we’re in, you should probably get used to it,” Summers replied.
Asle was prodding at the suit on the ground. “See? She ain’t scared,” Summers added. Asle opened her mouth, taking an experimental bite of the man’s finger.
“Never mind.” Summers quickly moved to the girl’s side, gently pulling the dead man’s hand from her grip. “We don’t eat dead people.”
Asle pouted, so Summers took one of the dead men’s MREs and handed to the girl. After showing her how to open the package, she seemed satisfied. So now he had to deal with a cannibal elf. Great.
“Actually, I guess it’s not cannibalism, if she’s not human?” Summers muttered. Cortez had roped Adams into checking over the Humvee. Nowak was still screwing with the phone, and Asle sat happily eating a burrito bowl.
“Got a med kit,” Cortez announced.
Nowak looked up from the phone. “Toss it here. I’ll head back to camp and make sure our friend is okay. Summers, you stick with the Humvee and watch for any funny shit coming out of these woods.”
“Roger,” Summers said in reply.
As Nowak headed off, Summers did his best to scan the horizon. Without all the crazy shit, it was actually kind of beautiful. Trees, birdsong—all the nature he could take. He could see twin mountains in the distance, just like the kind back at base . . . no, exactly like the kind back at base.
“Hey, Adams,” Summers asked.
“What?”
“Those mountains look familiar to you?”
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“Maybe it’s like fucking time travel or something!” Adams said.
They’d managed to get the Humvee back to their little encampment. Cortez had had to change out a flat and a dozen other little problems once they were back in the relative safety of the cave entrance, but it looked like they at least had transportation.
“I don’t think people have ever had pointy ears,” Summers replied.
“Those mountains are definitely the same ones we had back home,” Cortez shouted down. She stood on a high rock above the cave. “I’d bet my ass on it.”
“Maybe it’s just a different Earth? Like one where the first fish t
o walk on land went left instead of right?” Summers suggested.
He glanced over at Nowak, who was still on the suit’s phone. Every now and again, his hand would dart to a notebook at his side, jotting down a few words. “Sarge, questioning the nature of the world, here. Wanna chime in?”
“Shut up,” Nowak muttered.
“Screw you, too. Have you found anything we can use?”
“Yeah. They cracked into this world about two years ago. I’m looking through the general’s correspondence now. But this is just his personal phone, so I have to piece a lot of it together,” Nowak replied. “Now, leave me alone. I got about an hour or two of battery left, and I don’t want to waste it.”
“All right. Sure.” Summers backed away. He found Adams sitting with Asle and Logan. She looked concerned for the man, whose breathing was becoming even more ragged in his sleep. Summers moved over to the group and sat down across from them. It looked like Nowak had done a quick-and-dirty patch job on the leg. None of them were really trained medics, so they’d shoved a few pills in his mouth and kept an eye on the leg, which resembled a burst hotdog more than anything. Hell, even if they did get him back home, they’d still probably have to take it off soon or the tissue would start to necrotize.
“Been telling the kid he’ll be all right,” Adams said, nodding to the worried Asle.
“Well, you’re lying. Good chance he’s fucked. I know it, he knows it—the kid knows it, too,” Summers replied. He half-expected to hear crying a moment later, but Asle just watched him in response.
“We’ll do what we can for him. And hope for the best,” Summers added. Her shoulders seemed to relax, and he guessed she took that statement a little better. “It’s getting late. We should set up a watch. You all right taking the first shift if I leave you with Nowak?”
Adams nodded in response. “I know how to watch shit. That’s basically all they trained me to do, actually.”
“I’ll let Cortez know. Wake me up in about three hours.” With that, Summers headed off.
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“Holy shit!” Nowak shouted. Summers’ head snapped up from a dead sleep. He’d laid down with his gun and nearly blew his foot off. “What?”
Cortez was awake now, too. Adams looked over from his perch above the cave. They all waited for some kind of explanation, but Nowak just kept staring at the phone.
“Start talking, jackass,” Cortez yelled over.
“Sorry. Sorry. I just found a way to get us back home. Shut up a second. I need to get this down,” Nowak said, scribbling something in the journal at his side.
“You what?” was the general consensus from around the camp.
Nowak ignored all of them until he was done writing, then continued to scroll through the phone.
“Come on, baby, you still got a pixel left. Don’t die on me.” Nowak read as fast as he could. He took a few more notes before he powered the phone down himself. “Okay, I got what we need. I’m going to keep a small charge just in case we can use it down the line.”
“How in the hell are you going to get us home? Start talking!” Cortez shouted, a little more insistently this time.
“What we saw wasn’t the only machine. The 63rd were running a scouting group, or something like that. All their research is done out of some base in Nevada I’ve never heard about.”
“Area 51?” Adams prompted.
“No, not—of fucking course I’ve heard of Area 51. Somewhere different. General has a back and forth with a researcher there. They’ve got a permanent setup. If we can get to that, then we can get out of here. And if this place is a 1:1 match of our world, then we just need to go from their version of Alaska to Nevada.”
“On foot?” Cortez asked.
“With shit like that thing we killed walking around?” Summers added.
Nowak smiled sheepishly. “I didn’t say it was going to be easy.”
Chapter 4: Road Trip
“Are you absolutely sure about this, Sarge?” Summers watched as Cortez strapped a duffel bag, quite literally full of grenades, to the top of the Humvee.
“No, but if we run into more shit like that thing you killed, then it’s worth the risk,” Nowak responded.
On one hand, Summers could see the logic. On the other, they had approximately a fuckload of ammo, grenades, and guns strapped into and on top of an Humvee they’d be driving through rough forest terrain. As well as enough gas salvaged from the camp it was becoming an issue of weight. In fact, anything from the camp that wasn’t nailed down, they were trying to take with them. He couldn’t help but worry that one bump would spell a loud and colorful end to their little excursion. Cortez had also mentioned two bricks of C-4 being lodged in there somewhere. He took some solace in the knowledge that if something did go wrong, it would at least be so quick and brutal, he’d hardly even need to worry.
“What if we just stayed here?” Adams asked. “They gotta come back some time, right?”
“You’re assuming they know we’re alive. Or that they care. Near as I can tell, they only had the two machines, and Summers blew one to chunks,” Nowak responded.
They’d found pieces of the machine mixed in with the bodies. Summers was not optimistic about whatever remained of the 63rd fixing it. Or even wanting to fix it, for that matter. Losing an entire platoon and a goddamn general was probably a mess they’d spend months trying to recover from.
“And this plan of yours is solid?” Summers looked over to Nowak. “I don’t want to hump it through all this shit just to find out there’s nothing waiting for us in Nevada.”
“The general talked about the similarities between this world and ours, which was a huge breach of security—but then again, I doubt anyone else would realize what he was talking about without first knowing about this place.”
Nowak flipped the journal over, showing Summers a haphazard string of nonsensical messages. “These guys were looking for something out here: something big, maybe some kind of classified drug—I didn’t really understand it. But topography was one of the reasons they came to our base, to confirm that it was the same . . . and in case something went to hell.”
“Think they’re covering up what happened?” Summers asked.
“Definitely. No way is a word of this shit making it out of that base,” Nowak responded. Summers wasn’t quite sure that would hold true. From what he could tell, the base had been a favorite dumping ground for guys like him—people that other people wanted to get rid of, but who couldn’t do it outright. He had no doubt one of the survivors would be telling anyone who listened what they saw. The only issue was if anyone believed them.
He saw Cortez step forward with another fuel can. They’d found two other Humvees, but neither were in as good of shape as the first one. They’d decided instead to siphon what fuel and parts they could for the road. Cortez tossed the cannister onto the pile. Summers heard something underneath it shift and froze for a long second. He was pretty sure it had just been the ammo, but for Christ’s sake, they were going to leave behind a crater the likes this world had never seen.
“So, what are we doing with all the crap we can’t fit?” Adams asked, snapping Summers back to reality.
“I don’t like the idea of those zombie things with guns. I say we dump them in a lake somewhere,” Summers responded.
“Skeen,” Asle corrected. “Monsters are skeen.”
“Skeen? Oh, you mean skin?” Summers asked, pinching the skin of his forearm for emphasis.
“I said skeen.” Asle mimicked the gesture. “They are only skeen.”
Nowak threw Summers a shovel. “You’re right. We should probably make sure no locals end up with all this. How deep do you think? Six feet?”
Summers groaned internally at the idea of burying all that gear, let alone digging a hole big enough to fit it. But it was the smart move.
“What about the bodies?”
“You want to dig a grave big enough for ’em, be my guest,” Nowak
responded.
“More skeen if not buried,” Asle added. That was news to them.
“What, are they going to eat our dead?” Summers didn’t like the idea of leaving them, quite literally, for scavengers to eat.
“No. They be skeen,” Asle said, pointing at a corpse off in the distance.
“Oh. Oh fuck, those things were actual zombies?”
Asle just tilted her head at that question.
“Dead people that get up and walk?” Summers amended.
“Oh. Yes! Skeen eat dead, lay egg, then wear dead. Trick people to come close, then eat, make dead, make more skeen. Only mother smart.”
“It’s like a parasite, then?” Cortez asked from atop the Humvee.
Asle tilted her head once again.
“We’ve got to teach her more words,” Summers said after a few seconds.
“They sound like skin-walkers,” Adams said. “They’re a Navajo thing. Creepy as shit. Talk in your voice, just like these things did. Not sure about the dead part, though,” he explained.
“Okay, then. Everyone in favor of not having an army of zombies behind us, say aye.” Nowak raised his voice slightly for emphasis.
It was unanimous.
“So, ideas on how we accomplish that?” Nowak asked the group. “I don’t know if we have the manpower to bury it all.”
Cortez beamed. “I got an idea, Sarge.”
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Boom!
Even from a distance, Summers could feel the impact from the explosion in his bones. Cortez had mounted every bit of boom she could to the Humvee, but they still had some of the larger ordinance left over.
So, the solution they’d settled on was to dig a pit, then blow it all to hell, creating a larger, more accommodating pit. Rinse and repeat. Once they’d finished their pit, they tossed in a few thermite grenades to ensure that nothing was getting back up or being used ever again.
Summers stood with the others as they finished their mass pyre, hoping that the burnt barbecue smell wouldn’t linger in his memory for long. He’d picked out the face of the private who had, in a fashion, given his life to save Summers and his friends. He said a silent prayer for the man before they turned to finish packing up the camp.
