The Earth Died Screaming

by Chuck Rogers

  I answered in English. "I shall name her Puppy McPupface."

  I had never seen Lalli nonplussed before. Oh, I'd seen the Aztec stone-face. I was afraid of it. The Aztec blank-slate face was new. It took Lalli several moments to process this information and respond.

  She responded in English.

  "You are not naming the dog Puppy McPupface."

  "I already did." I looked into the haunting, developmentally disabled doll-eyes of Miss Puppy McPupface.

  She started twitching the tip of her tail.

  I sang to her.

  "Look at the puppy, say pup-pup-pup! Look at the puppy, say pup! Look at the puppy, say pup-pup-pup! Puppy puppy pup-pup-pup!"

  Lalli and Cecilia looked at me with dawning horror.

  I looked back at them in shock. "What? You don't know the puppy song?"

  What? I like dogs.

  Lalli looked like she might be reconsidering our relationship.

  I returned my attention to Puppy McPupface. "I shall call you Face, for short."

  Face began wagging her tail so hard it oscillated her entire puppy body. I set her down in the grass. "C'mon, Face! There's a tennis ball in the garage!" I broke into a run.

  Normally?

  I don't like running.

  But I'll run from puppies.

  Face gave what may have been her first bark and puppy-galumphed after me. The route to the garage was circuitous, involving a lap around the BBQ and vaulting some lawn furniture to stay in the lead.

  "Look at the puppy, say pup-pup-pup! Look at the puppy, say Face!"

  Face barked and chased me in mindless joy.

  Lalli could front all she wanted to. Watching me frolicking with Face?

  She was releasing her eggs.

  Pretty sure Cecilia was too.

  * * *

  I TOLD LALLI that I was taking the rest of the day off.

  I told Lalli she was taking the rest of the day off.

  I told Face she was taking the rest of the day off.

  I was leaving the next morning. Lalli had a chicken coop and an RV coming in. For Face? Sit, down, stay and heel started after a farewell lick at dawn. So I strung Bobby's hammock, poured myself a well-deserved beer and lazed about. Face lay on top of me. Her sole possession on arrival had been a toy squeaky-bone.

  Now she had a tennis ball.

  She very sleepily gummed the one and cuddled the other.

  Lalli snuggled against me. I hadn't known she had a resting happy face, but there it was, smiling in the sun. Her eyes mostly closed like Face. Lalli's happiness oozed out of every pore of her body to permeate every cell of mine.

  Winnie the Penis's radioactive love hangover couldn't hold a candle to it.

  "Do you know something Miss Puppy McPupface?" Face struggled mightily to keep her soulless eyes open as I stared deeply into them. "Do you know who the prettiest girl in the world is?"

  Face peered at me intently.

  "Lalli is."

  Face wagged her tail in unwitting agreement.

  "Lalli is the prettiest girl in the world. Lalli is the most beautiful girl in the world. She's the queen of our world." I jutted my chin in Face's face. "Lick my chin if you agree."

  Face manically licked my chin.

  "See?"

  Lalli blushed and ground her face against my chest.

  I laid back and avoided the fresh stitches as I tickled her scalp.

  Her smiled widened. Her eyes closed.

  She was thinking about kids.

  You can always tell.

  I'm a liar if I said it didn't cross my mind.

  I scratched Face behind the ears and her head drooped against my chest.

  I was the luckiest man in the post-apocalypse.

  Hell, if Lalli had given me the time of day before the Deathstar I'd still be the luckiest.

  The honeymoon was over.

  But not in a bad way.

  I was going on recon. But that had been my job in the Marines. It had been my job when I'd turned informant for the FBI.

  That's another story.

  In a very real sense, recon, where the enemy was and what they were up too had been 90% of the job in LA.

  It was dangerous work, but lots of jobs are dangerous, and I was good at it.

  I sighed.

  The honeymoon was over.

  I had to go to work tomorrow.

  It happened to every couple.

  I knew Lalli would worry.

  I'd given her my dog tags. She wore them now and I think she intended to never take them off. I had no misgivings. I'd only known Line one night but I'd known she was the one, and I knew she'd want me to be happy. Eduardo sounded like a really nice guy, and I had an inkling he'd want Lalli to be happy too, and protected.

  I lay contentedly in the hammock with my two sleepy girls.

  I felt the helicopters before I heard them.

  I exploded out of the hammock and nearly dumped the ladies.

  Lalli jumped up with Face in her arms. "Frame!"

  Face yipped.

  Then I heard them. I couldn't count the rotors yet but it was multiple aircraft. They were coming in very low and very fast. No time to get to the house. No time to get to the bomb shelter. I unhooked one end of the hammock and threw it to the ground.

  Half a hammock screamed abandoned.

  I grabbed Lalli's hand and pulled my girls to the BBQ and we huddled in fear beneath the shelter of the slaughtering board and the limbs of the spreading oak

  Bobby's scored and bloodstained door vibrated above us as the helicopters roared over.

  It was a Sea Stallion.

  Actually it was a Super Stallion.

  When the United States Marines need a medium-lift, twin-engine Sea Stallion helicopter to metamorphosis into a heavy-lift Super Stallion?

  They add a third engine.

  It was a big helicopter.

  Only Uncle Sam's Misguided Children don't paint their helicopters black. It had antennae and probes sticking out all over it and carried strangely shaped, non-weapon, sensor pods.

  Stallions didn't have door guns but they mounted a .50 caliber machine gun in each window right behind the cockpit. A third .50 pointed backwards from the open cargo ramp.

  The black Viper gunship flying escort had a three-barrel 20mm cannon beneath the chin and the stub wings had the standard load-out of two rocket pods and two quad packs of Hellfire missiles.

  It was painted black, too.

  The birds roared down into Malibu Canyon flying nap-of-the-earth.

  Lalli started to rise and I held her.

  "Frame?"

  "Call me baby."

  She was scared but she smiled. "Baby?"

  "Wait."

  I held Lalli and Face and waited for the second flight pair or for the sound of armor to start whining and clanking out on the road. We waited a good ten minutes. Then I heard engines on the road but I recognized Ted's truck screeching up to the gate. Lalli was the master of the house and the remote squawked from her pocket. "Frame! Frame!"

  I gave Lalli a big wet one. She crushed her lips against mine in response.

  "Baby, take Face. Take the Uzi. Get in the shelter. Take the remote but don't respond to anyone except me. If you don't hear from me in 48 hours it's all gone to shit."

  Lalli didn't say a word. She just kissed me one more time, took our dog, the Uzi and opened the hatch.

  "Buzz them in."

  I waited for the hatch to close and the fake hedge to fall into place before I went back in the house. I strapped the Beretta to my thigh, belted on six spare magazines for the M-14 and took up the big rifle. Ted and Mar-j spilled into my house breathlessly.

  "Frame!" Ted gasped. "Choppers!"

  No one calls them choppers anymore, Ted.

  Except on TV . . .

  Mar-J pointed past my house. "Down in the canyon!"

  Yeah, I was starting to think of the house as mine.

  They noticed I was arming up.

 
Mar-J frowned. "What the fuck, Frame?"

  "I don't know Mar-J, you tell me. You hear loudspeakers telling us the crisis is over? Are they dropping leaflets, bibles or care packages?"

  Ted's face fell. "You don't think they came for us?"

  "I hope to hell not. If they did they brought a gun ship."

  "So what are you going to do?" Mar-J asked. "Fight 'em?"

  "Not unless I have to. But I want to get eyes on them and see what they're doing."

  "I'll go with you."

  "Naw, you'll just slow me down."

  "I ain't staying here, man!" Mar-J wasn't having it. "And you can't make me."

  That was debatable. "Did you bring a gun?"

  "Mother . . . fucker."

  I drew my Beretta. "You know how to use this?"

  "Qualified expert in the Navy."

  I gave it to him and the spare magazine. "Keep up."

  "You keep implying I can't keep up with you."

  "You have two jobs. Keep up, and watch the back door."

  "I will keep up with you, white boy," Mar-J checked the load in Beretta. "And I got your six."

  "That's white man to you."

  Give him credit?

  Negro grinned.

  "Nigger on the trigger. Watching your ass." His grin lit up shit all around. "Old white dude."

  "How old are you, again?"

  "Yeah, it's the fucking Over-the-Hill Gang, man. Whatever. Let's do this."

  Team Navy went over the top and down Bobby's back slope. I'd been hunting the area for a week. I knew the terrain and I took off. Untrained people running down hill instinctively lean back and dig their heels in. I leaned forward and got out over my feet. I held the M-14 in a loose port-arms position and just 'let my legs spin' so that gravity did the work. My foot plants were springy and I flew down the hillside.

  Mar-J gave an "Oh shiiiiiiiiit . . ." and managed to kamikaze down the slope in my wake without breaking his neck or shooting me in the back. I hit the creek at the bottom and turned south. Water ran downhill and that would lead me into Malibu Canyon. I coursed through the woods like a wolf. Mar-J pounded along behind me but he kept up. It wasn't long before we caught the sound of rotors. I slowed as I spied the gunship orbiting above the trees. I took a bit of deer path out of the gulley and found myself on a nice little sheltered overlook. Mar-J hunkered down next to me. He was breathing hard but I was impressed.

  "Tarzan running motherfucker . . ."

  We gazed upon a bit of open field that'd been hit by a bomb.

  An operation looked to be wrapping up in the bomb crater.

  I counted ten of them not counting the aircrew.

  They wore full NBC protective gear. I'd trained on chem suits in the Marines and how they'd expected us to fight a war swaddled in those beekeeper outfits I'll never know. These guys? They had the full-on, mirrored faceplates, articulated limbs, we are astronauts from the future and we just stepped out of a black helicopter suits. They wore no insignia or badges. Just unrelieved black on black. Not even a subdued American flag sticker on their space helmets.

  All of them had side arms. The four of them watching the perimeter carried tricked out, silenced AR's. Including one mounting a grenade launcher.

  Mar-J said what I was thinking. "Who are these guys?"

  There were at least thirty military bases in Southern California that I was aware of, and that was assuming these boys were local or even on our side anymore. There were some great big chunks of rock in the crater. A King Stallion had a max external load of 36,000lbs and the boys in black had just finished cinching the heavy-lift straps around a rock the size of a Volvo.

  I did Marine Corps math. A fully loaded King had a combat radius of about two hundred klicks plus.

  That's about 124 miles to you, Citizen of the Republic.

  The King had an aerial refueling probe. The Viper didn't, but it had nearly twice the range. The winning answer was these assholes could have come from anywhere. One Man-in-Black stood next to the rock with what might as well have been a Star Trek tricorder tapping his touch screen.

  I had a feeling if I took the dosimeter down there the graph lines would be rocketing into the red.

  I started to get an inkling of what might have given Winnie the Penis his look and his attitude.

  "We're out of here."

  "What? I mean it's the fucking government, right? First we've seen of them. Shouldn't we, you know?"

  "Do something?"

  "Well, yeah?"

  "We should get out of here. We have no idea who these assholes are, but they want moon rocks. They don't give a shit about us. Let's not give them a reason to."

  Mar-J didn't like it, but mostly because he knew I was right. "Right. We got eyes on them. They want rocks? Fuck 'em. Let's go drink Carey James' beer."

  "Good man."

  The space suit minions gave the straps a final tug and gave tricorder guy the thumbs up. Tricorder guy circled his hand and the loaders started embarking the Stallion

  Mar-J and I hugged dirt as every helmeted head snapped around. They weren't looking at us or anywhere near us. The gunship running top cover had given the boys on the ground the heads up.

  My eyes flared.

  Their radios worked.

  They brought rifles to shoulder and my stomach sank as a white, City of Malibu municipal SUV with a flashing yellow light bar came down the fire road.

  "Oh shit! That's Soph!"

  Of course it was.

  "Who's that driving?"

  "Tom Vaughn. Malibu Fire Station Chief, retired."

  The car ground to halt about thirty meters away. Sophina got out looking like a million bucks. She looked like the first black woman who was going to run for president and win. A silver-haired older guy in full fire chief uniform and the requisite old school police/fire porn star mustache killed the light bar and joined her. He took off his chief hat and crooked it in his elbow.

  What remained of Malibu's municipal government had come out to greet their dark overlords. Sophina's smile lit up the moon crater and she waved happily.

  The guy with the tricorder waved them forward.

  "Hey!" Mar-J was appalled. "Those guys are wearing suits! That's a hot zone! Why are they waving them in?"

  Mar-J was not wrong.

  I raised my rifle. "Mother . . . fuckers . . ."

  Maybe Mar-J was wrong. Maybe the boys in black had shown up in suits but it was all clear. Maybe they wanted to have a parley. Maybe they were going to take our leaders to meet their leaders.

  Maybe they just wanted to get Sophina and Tom away from the cover of the truck.

  Sophina and Tom began picking their way forward over the crater rubble.

  Two of the suits raised their carbines and cut Sophina and Tom in half.

  "Jesus . . ."

  Maybe the Men-in-Black wanted to establish dominance.

  Maybe they wanted to hide the evidence of their shitty moon rock treasure hunt.

  Maybe they were letting us benighted citizens of the municipality of Malibu, the state of California and the remains of the greater Constitutional Republic at large know that we had better mind our P's and Q's.

  Fine.

  Punk card thrown.

  You going to pick that up, Frame-o?

  Oh, fuck yeah I am picking that up.

  You don't shoot our civic leaders without consequences.

  Only we get to do that.

  I brought scope to eye and shot the grenadier first because he was the most dangerous.

  I shot tricorder guy through the faceplate because I wanted to.

  Mar-J's eyes went wide but bless his heart he turned to watch the back door. "Here we go!"

  I shot another rifleman and hugged dirt as the other two shooters and the Stallion's gunners began spraying in all directions. Between the engine and rotor noise they hadn't even heard my shots much less knew where they'd came from. The gunship swooped low and its cannon barrels began spinning.

  The 20m
m machine cannon started tearing the hillside apart.

  "Jesus!"

  Mar-J grabbed my shoulder and hugged in. I didn't tell him to fuck off. Aerial bombardment sucks. We cringed in place and waited to be torn apart.

  It got way too close.

  The gun ship didn't have eyes on us. They were firing for effect and covering the extraction. We covered our heads with our hands and watched as the last Men-in-Black embarked the Stallion. The giant helicopter roared to take off power and turned the crater into a dust storm. The heavy-lifter rose, the lifting straps went taut and dirt fell away as the massive chunk of moon rock escaped the Earth's surface.

  Bits of brush and tree flew in all directions as the gunship gave Malibu Canyon another good hosing down and the cannon fire got way too close this time. If he cut loose with the rockets we were done.

  The King dipped its nose and roared due south for the safety of the sea. The gunship broke off and veered away to follow. I grabbed Mar-J's shoulder. "Wait."

  If I were the Man-in-Black in charge and feeling vindictive I might just wait a little while. Let the shooters in the hills feel safe enough to come down and investigate the scene of the crime.

  Then I'd send the gunship back to catch the hapless assholes with their pants down and light them up with rockets.

  We hunkered in place for twenty minutes.

  I stared long and hard at a chunk of moon rock the size of a mausoleum. "Okay, it's a question of exposure time. Let's make this quick. You pull the city truck around."

  "We take our people?"

  "We take our people. We take their people. We take everything."

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me? B-E-N, J-A-MIN, F-R-A-M-E!

  THREE DEAD ASSHOLES lay on my lawn. The rifleman looked Korean. The grenadier had been black. It was hard to tell about tricorder guy, but shooting someone ethnically indeterminate in the face with a high power rifle can have that effect. They were all big men who looked to have spent a lot of time at their local MMA gym. Beneath their chem-suits they wore off the rack, black, base-layer shirts and pants. Their boots were black but off the shelf. Mar-J kept a pair that fit. The other two I gave to Lalli for trade.

  No dog tags. The black guy and tricorder guy had some ink but none of the tattoos had any relation to a service branch, not that it meant much once you start deploying out of black helicopters.