Bomb craters littered the pavement of Isley Boulevard. Between those craters and to the flanks of the road among the ruins of a bedroom community stood row after row of the six-legged crazy robots nicknamed ‘Roachbots’ . Nearly 5,000 of the insane machines waited there, including hundreds of the two-legged walking cannon Mortarbots.
A harsh wind blew over the lines of what had once been the Feranite race which now resembled thick iron bars with three legs and a metallic maw like a computerized Venus fly trap. Their arms sported Gatling guns. The hideous machines—only a year into their new existence as part of Voggoth’s minions—wobbled in the gust from two spinning whirlwinds raging back and forth across the greens of the Excelsior Springs Golf course.
Voggoth had called all his children to battle, from walking statues that had earned the nickname of ‘Stone Soldiers’ to a horde of the lumbering, red-eyed Deadhead monsters, to huge rolling balls covered in eyes and mouths, to thousands of the grayish-skinned skull-headed Ghouls that bound about and snarled like rabid apes.
They joined what remained of The Order’s core army: hundreds of metallic commandos, a thousand or so monks with swords and forearm guns, handfuls of walking missile launchers, hovering shell tanks, and half-machine/half-monster artillery pieces.
At the rear of the group loitered a quartet of gigantic Goat Walkers surveying the army spread around their cloven feet through red eyes on goat heads. But even those demonic beasts trembled in the shadow of three Leviathans.
The army of Voggoth waited as more and more numbers swelled its ranks. Monsters conjured from nightmares. Soldiers recruited from Hell. Machines powered by madness.
And then—on the morning of June 20th—they moved as if of one mind and marched to battle.
The last battle.
21. Voggoth
“Why do we humans have such a feeling of strangeness? Is this necessary? I have not yet considered it deeply, but it may be important to our self-preservation. We must complete the map of the uncanny valley to know what is human…”
–Masahiro Mori, The Uncanny Valley
The ground and the sky shared much in common: both charred black. Overhead that came in the form of storm clouds seemingly made from swirling soot. They shielded the land from the summer sun; it felt more like a frosty fall day.
Below, the terrain might have once been full of fruitful foothills, but now lay covered in a fine grain of charcoal dirt lacking any fertility. Even the smattering of weeds scattered here and there were long dead.
Ahead of Trevor the land rose to a lip of rock like the outer rim of a crater. The map identified the area as Satka, Russia, but some great upheaval had terra-formed the land into something an astronomer might expect to find on the harsh worlds of Mars or Venus. It felt wrong. Warped. Diseased. Dead. And devoid of hope.
He stepped to the parapet with JB at his side. It dropped away in a soft slope of gravel and more black dirt. A few dozen feet below the ground leveled again. Trevor reconsidered. This did not appear to be a crater, but a place where a great mass of Earth had sunk.
At the bottom of the hill the land stretched east on a plain of black soil and dried stalks that might have once been trees. Something had flattened the foothills approaching the Urals. No sign of Satka remained. No crushed buildings. No rubble. No stretches of street, no lamp posts, no trees—nothing.
The mountains themselves also suffered the devil’s touch. Trevor saw a massive wall stretching hundreds of feet in the air like a frozen tidal wave of rock devoid of color; as if a God’s bulldozer had dug apart the land, turning it into something cold and harsh; a fitting landscape for a circle in Dante’s Inferno.
Three miles across the stamped-flat plains at the foot of the barrier wall of rock waited the Temple of Voggoth: an infection of green and red bubbling from the surface of a cancer-ridden Earth. Spires of twisted vine reached hundreds of feet into the air from a convex roof lined with ribs. Wisps of smoke or steam slipped into the evening sky from hidden vents.
Smaller buildings—some round, some square, some domes—flanked the main hall like a cluster of foul warts.
Through a set of field glasses, Trevor spied a small group of defenders—mainly Spider Sentries—positioned around the facility; nothing that could not be handled in a few short minutes by Alexander’s approaching army.
“Is that where it is, Father?”
Trevor lowered his binoculars and found his son’s eyes.
“Yes, JB. Are you—are you afraid?”
Jorgie did not answer at first but his eyes wavered. He told his dad, “I trust you, Father.”
“Trevor!” Alexander’s voice interrupted. “You have to see this. Come here.”
The Englishman beckoned them away from the cliff and off the dusty path that had served as the main road to their destination. As they followed Alexander, Trevor took stock of his forces. They came from the west, a line of headlights spaced between packs of horses and carts, motorbikes and trucks. The collective sound of their engines made the ground tremble and filled a dark sky—far too dark for early evening—with a steady roar. Somewhere off in that dark sky a helicopter whirred.
He knew they would keep coming. In the ten days since marching through Zhytomyr, Alexander managed to tighten their formations a great deal. Yet still, the long snake of an army stretched for miles and they would arrive piecemeal at a continuous rate for the rest of the day, if not longer.
“Come on, Trevor! You have to see this!”
With Royal Marines on their flanks, Trevor and JB followed Alexander through an orchard of small trees that were now nothing more than tall sticks. It appeared to Trevor that something had sucked the life out of the plants so fast that they did not have time to fall. He saw what amounted to be tree skeletons propped upright in neat lines.
At the end of the orchard they came to a gentle hill that sloped away to the south forming a huge bowl of sorts ringed on all sides by more hills.
Gaston—the lanky black man who scouted for the Europeans—stood at the top of that gentle knoll with Armand and a small group of biker-cavalry.
“Father? What is it?”
Trevor made out things of various shapes and sizes filling the small valley, but no movement.
“My God,” Armand—standing next to his ride in his biker’s leather—muttered. “I think I have never seen the like. Am I really seeing this?”
Trevor raised his binoculars for a better view. His eyes managed to adjust to the darkness and as they did, he understood what he saw.
The tanks stood out the most. About a half-dozen Russian T-72s as still as statues. Their green armor had faded in several spots and thin coats of black dust settled across the cupolas. Their thick treads and long barrels made Trevor see them as something akin to T-Rex fossils: harmless at the moment, but fearsome to behold.
An additional pair of tracked vehicles shared the same fate as the tanks. It took Trevor’s collection of genetic memories a moment to identify them as Akatsiya self-propelled artillery pieces. Several wheeled vehicles in the form of BTR APCs also shared the graveyard of armor.
Yet it was not the tanks, APCs, or self-propelled artillery that piqued Trevor’s interest the most. That honor fell upon the dozens of empty—and some collapsed—tents, the boxes upon boxes of supply crates, the trio of tanker trucks, the collection of assault rifles and carbines lying about and—most important of all—the Russian army jackets, shirts, pants and boots scattered by the hundreds throughout the field. Enough clothes for a small army.
Gaston—who once worked for Russian intelligence—murmured loud enough for all to hear: “The 276th motorized rifle regiment. Part of the 34th Motor Rifle Division.”
A dry, cool wind blew across the scene. The sleeves of empty jackets waved.
“What the hell happened to them?” Armand asked.
“They disappeared,” Trevor answered. “It was happening all the time right before the invasion started. Remember?”
Gaston said, “I
have heard that during those first days the central government lost contact with villages and towns along the Urals and that elements of the 34th Motor Rifle Division were on a training maneuver near here. They were probably dispatched to ascertain the situation.”
“So what happened to them?” Alexander alternated his attention from Trevor to Gaston and back again. “What does it mean?”
Armand quickly shot, “It means more fuel and bullets for us, I would think. Don’t you?”
Trevor pinched his nose as if trying to sort through a chaotic collection of thoughts. He managed to simplify and told them, “Look, it doesn’t matter much right about now. Armand is right, see what your people can scavenge from the wreck. We have bigger things to think about.”
“The buildings down there,” Alexander stepped closer to Trevor. “Is that what we’ve come for?”
“Buildings?” Armand wanted in on the conversation. “What buildings?” Apparently he thought the remains of a vanished Russian regiment served as the day’s biggest revelations.
Jorgie, perhaps trying to chase away concerns over what was to come, hurried to Armand and took hold of his hand. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
With one arm holding his stuffed bunny and the other leading the Frenchman, Jorgie Benjamin Stone led the group away from the abandoned military equipment, through the orchard of skeletal trees, and to the ledge overlooking the dead plain where Voggoth’s temple waited.
The rumbling mass of charcoal-colored clouds sprung to life with a sudden blast of energy. Lightning sizzled. Thunder boomed.
“You can see it all from here, Mr. Armand,” Jorgie tried to sound cheerful; a stark contrast to everything around him. “It’s right there.”
Jorgie stopped speaking as they reached the cliff and gazed across the earth toward the monstrous wall of mountain. The plain there—the one stretching from the observation point to the temple—was no longer empty.
All around the temple lay thousands of blobs of green goo of various sizes and shapes. Trevor could not be sure, but he thought he saw puffs of smoke—maybe steam—rising from the things. Perhaps cooling or sizzling after their journey through time and space.
“My god…” Armand’s voice trailed off.
One by one—repeated a thousand times—the green bubbles ripped and popped and parted. The barbed legs and jagged fangs and sharp claws of thousands of monsters of more shapes and sizes than any nightmare could conjure poked and pushed free from the capsules.
Trevor recalled how humans taken in the vessels had been found unconscious, but Voggoth’s demons traveled with no such limitations. No doubt the discrepancy lay in the difference between life and lifeless. Regardless, Voggoth had brought an army to face them. An army, Trevor felt certain, that a moment ago infested the cities and towns of middle America in years past.
Those creatures could have done no good against Dreadnoughts and armored divisions, K9 corps and jet fighters. But there in the shadow of the Urals they could serve Voggoth as a last-gasp stopgap against the surprise strike of the European force.
“My god, what do we do?” Alexander’s shock and surprise cut through his more rational tendencies.
Armand coolly answered the obvious, “We bring the army up. We fight.”
“But if Voggoth could do this once, he may very well keep doing it.”
Trevor told Alexander, “Let’s hope so.”
Even Armand found that answer surprising.
Trevor said, “After we cut through these things, Voggoth will send more. And then more. And then more. He will keep sending them until he can stop us from doing what we came here to do. I think that each time he brings these things through space and time it disrupts the natural order of things, like splashes in a quiet pond. I think the other beings who are involved in all this know that he should not be making those splashes, but they’ve either not noticed or ignored him so far. Let him keep sending them until those splashes can’t be ignored. If he does it enough, maybe someone will listen to me.”
Alexander and Armand shared a look and then Alexander asked, “Who will listen to you, Trevor?”
He did not answer Alexander’s question. Instead he knelt and rested his hands on his son’s shoulders. With his eyes settling smoothly on Jorgie, Trevor said to the others, “We have to get in that temple. Armand, I’m counting on you to get us past all that. Can you do that?”
Armand snorted a chuckle.
“Can I do that? Trevor, it is what I was born to do.”
The mortar shell exploded in the midst of a group of charging, four-legged horse-sized creatures covered in metal-like armor with horns and jagged barbs everywhere. The concussion from the blast knocked three of the things over but they each regained their feet fast. A fourth was not so lucky. Shrapnel hit it square in its relatively unprotected face; a face covered in pin-sized lights that might be eyes arranged above a screaming, elongated jaw from which bellowed one last ghastly death-scream as the blast tore away its blood-red flesh.
Not far from them, a swarm of things best described as mutated alligators—dozens of them—charged at the northern flank of the European lines. Their spines glowed white from some unearthly energy bottled inside; their snouts snapped open and shut, flashing hooked teeth. The rest of their bodies were covered in constant slither as thousands of tiny parasites—worms of a hellish sort—lived on the hides of the devilish things.
A tripod mounted machine gun behind a wall of toppled boulders met the monsters hitting those in the lead snuffing whatever spark of motivation masqueraded as life within the damned animals. Still, more than half of the alligator-beasts crashed into the machine gun nest. One German soldier was caught between jaws from behind as he abandoned his post a second too late. Another managed to break free thanks to covering fire provided from Turkish assault rifles, but one of the warped alligators spat a stream of fire from its belly and incinerated the man.
Similar scenes repeated across the battle field as the lead elements of the European army arrived soldier by soldier, truck by truck and the legion of monsters guarding the temple moved to meet them.
To the south at the foot of the ridge overlooking the black plains, a line of Spanish infantrymen with light arms and grenades waded into a sea of half-metal devil dogs the size of small cars.
To the north a brave charge of Italian horse soldiers violently collided with rhinoceros-like beasts sporting twin horns from which arced electrical bolts capable of microwaving a man.
Across the center raged a chaotic battle. Polish fighters on foot and in light trucks advanced with Danish regulars on their flanks. They hit the enemy with assault rifles and mounted machine guns. That enemy hit back with burning balls of screaming fire flying like comets and dropping napalm on the human ranks; with axe-wielding ten-foot-tall crimson-colored octopuses slashing the attackers in an insane fury; with bipedal yellow-eyed fur-covered mammals resembling upright tigers capable of leaping fifty feet in one bound.
On the ridge to the west, mankind’s reinforcements kept coming as the stretched army arrived at its destination piece by piece. Military vehicles with machine gun and anti-tank mounts re-fueled and deployed toward the action; towed artillery assembled and prepared to fire; fighters ranging from young and old, amateur to professional grabbed rifles and pistols and raced toward the action.
To the east beneath the wall of rock cut out of the Urals, bolts of lightning reached from the charred heavens to the Temple of Voggoth. Every few minutes those flashes illuminated yet another crop of green sarcophagi appearing on the plains around the blasphemous building. Those bulbs burst open and more claws, mandibles, and walking horrors joined Voggoth’s defenses.
The battle raged in the sky. The Euro Tiger helicopter strafed the demonic mobs with cannon fire. Giant flying insects swooped into the chaos and plucked hapless victims from the carnage like gulls snatching fish from the sea.
This was no pitched battle. It was the nature of war itself: bloody, anarchic, and merciless
. The wonder weapons of man’s futuristic arsenal played no role. Bullets fired at close range—explosives tearing apart apparitions—sharp and blunt weapons, fists and kicks battled talons and jaws, breath of fire, spitting acid, and swinging clubs.
A V-shaped formation of motorcycles cut through the madness. Heavy cavalry led the charge with lances knocking aside and skewering any beast that dared block the path. Guns blasted; swords swung. Armand’s riders led the way like a plow clearing a snow-covered road.
In the middle of the formation, Rick Hauser drove the heavily armored van Trevor and JB had called home during three weeks of travel from France to Eurasia.
One of the Royal Marines sat in the passenger seat alongside Hauser. Trevor and JB huddled behind gripping the van’s cargo nets as the vehicle bounced and wobbled over rough terrain and dead bodies. Through the windshield Trevor could see Armand on his Ducati zipping side to side and adding his FAMAS fire wherever the battle needed it.
The scene outside the van’s windows reminded Trevor of the Battle of Five Armies, albeit on a much grander scale. The shots of gunfire, the thumps of explosions, the clang of armor, and the screams of victims filtered to his ears but the sounds were hollowed by the insulation of the van’s walls. It gave the noise an unreal edge; as if it might come from a radio broadcast.
He glanced at his boy. Jorgie held the cargo net in a death-grip. Water streamed from his eyes.
“Jorgie, what is it?”
A stupid question, of course. Nine-year-old boys did not belong in the midst of such carnage. Still, Jorgie looked more sad than afraid.
“Father—this is so—this is very bad…”
Trevor slung an arm on his son’s shoulders.
“Yes, it is,” he felt it important that his mysterious son realize as much. “People are dying out there. Lives are being lost, Jorgie. Fathers and sons; even mothers and daughters. That’s why we have to stop it.”
Beyond Armageddon V: Fusion Page 37
