by D. J. Molles
Billings and his squad sprinted for the vehicles, firing blindly behind them as they ran, their shots wild, striking more brick and concrete than flesh.
The primals poured towards them like ants out of a disturbed mound.
Sam had never seen that many primals in one place before…
“You fuckin’ half-boot motherfucker!”
Sam snapped out of it. Leapt forward. Grabbed the charging handle of the M2 and hauled back with his entire body weight. The gun spat out the jammed round, then clunked forward on a fresh one. Sam swiveled the fifty around and down, seeing that the lead primals were only paces behind Billings—and gaining—and he fired.
The machine gun chugged, thrashing in Sam’s grip like a beast. The tracer rounds plunged through the air and ripped bodies that were no more than thirty yards away. The soldiers running for the vehicles ducked their heads, but didn’t stop.
Sam screamed as he swept the pumping tracer fire back and forth through the encroaching crowd of primals, and they began to scream back at him, to howl as they were torn apart.
But they didn’t stop coming.
Sam’s eyesight had shrunk to two-degree tunnel vision, and all he saw was the mass of bodies flowing towards him, leaping towards him, their jaws hanging open, slavering, their misshapen limbs clawing up the ground, tearing through the distance between them…
All the air had left Sam’s lungs, and he didn’t seem to be able to draw a new breath.
Car doors slammed.
Engines roared.
Sam lurched in the turret, pulling the M2 off aim as the Humvee jumped forward.
The sound of its pounding reports ceased, as his thumbs slipped off the trigger.
He heard Billings screaming, “Go! Go! Go!”
Rifle fire crackled in Sam’s dim ears.
Sam righted himself, sucked in air, and wrenched the M2 around again, just in time to see a shape hurtling through the air at him. It struck the side of the Humvee and swatted the barrel of the machine gun so hard that it wrenched out of Sam’s grip and spun it—
The barrel smacked Sam in the helmet.
The creature bellowed, and all he saw was the mouth gaping towards him, the two hands like claws reaching.
Sam yanked his legs up, and let his body drop. He fell through the turret and tumbled into the mix of limbs and rifle fire that filled the interior of the Humvee.
“The roof!” he screamed.
Jones shoved Sam hard, crushing him into something like a fetal position, his body on top of Sam’s, almost laying on top of him as he pointed his rifle towards the opening in the roof of the Humvee.
The primal thrust its torso through, snapping and growling.
Jones fired a burst on automatic. In the enclosed space, the rifle sounded louder than the M2 had. The primal’s face disintegrated in the volley of projectiles and went limp, spilling gouts of blood across Sam’s head and chest.
Jones rolled off of Sam and hauled him up, shouting, “Get back on the fiddy!”
Sam didn’t hesitate. He sprung up, and despite the panic that he felt coursing through him as he touched the still-twitching body of the primal, he thrust upward with a cry of effort, pushing the primal’s torso out of the turret hole.
He scrambled up to his feet, shoved the body with everything he had, and it tumbled off the hood of the Humvee.
Night wind thrashed around Sam’s face, but he couldn’t hear it.
He seized a hold of the M2 again and swung it around to point at their rear.
The vehicles hauled towards the exit, but behind them and all around them, the crowd of primals chased them with superhuman speed, managing somehow to stay with the fleeing trucks.
Sam brought the machine gun around and fired again, guiding his shots by the light of the tracers, rather than the sights of the gun.
The two pickup trucks did the smartest thing and charged forward, hugging the backend of the Humvee’s bumper to give Sam more room to shoot.
The three vehicles hit Skibo Road in a scramble of screeching tires, right about the same moment that the machine gun went dry. Sam thought that it had jammed again and he ripped the charging handle again and tried to fire more, but it was done.
Had he already fired a hundred rounds?
“I’m empty!” he yelled, at about the same point that he realized that they were gaining distance on the primals now. The primals were fast, but not forty-five miles an hour fast.
“We’re clear!” Billings shouted from below. “Is everyone alright?”
Sam didn’t hear the rest of it.
He stood in the turret, gasping for air, and watching the green shapes of the primals, growing smaller with distance. As they reached the edge of the parking lot, they seemed to realize as one that they would not catch these prey, and they pulled up and stood there on two feet, watching them get away.
Snippets of the shouting below started to make it through to Sam’s brain.
“What the fuck was that?”
“I’ve never seen that many primals before!”
“How many were there?”
“Did you see how they came over the walls like that?”
“It’s like they were waiting for us!”
Mottled green darkness all around.
The wind of their acceleration buffeting him.
Sam kept thinking those last words to himself, over and over.
It’s like they were waiting for us.
It’s like they were waiting for us…
FOURTEEN
─▬▬▬─
JULIA
By midnight, Julia could no longer hold it.
Through an irritated half-sleep, she’d tried to ignore the growing pressure in her bladder, hoping that it was one of those times when she could just hold it until dawn broke. In the last few years, with so many field operations under her belt, she’d become an expert at holding it.
It wasn’t a big deal for guys who could simply turn around, unzip, and direct their piss where it was best. But Julia had to take her pants all the way down and squat, which made her very vulnerable, and it wasn’t something she wanted to do in the dark when she was half awake.
None of the guys had ever complained about having to cover her back while she took a nighttime piss, but she loathed having to wake them up and ask. And she was determined not to do so now.
But she wasn’t going to last until morning.
They’d been given one of the four bedrooms in the hunting cabin. It held two, bare twin mattresses on rickety pine bedframes, but compared to how they usually slept in the field, this was luxury.
Julia and Lee shared one of the mattresses, and Abe snored softly on the other.
Lee’s back was to her at the moment, which was good. She wouldn’t need to disentangle herself.
She began the slow process of rolling away from Lee and rising up to a sitting position. She slipped out of the poncho liner that she used as a blanket and set her socked feet on the ground. Deuce, who lay next to the bed, lifted his head and watched her with silent curiosity.
When she reached for her boots, the pine bedframe gave a treacherous creak.
Lee jerked and came up on an elbow, his hand going under his backpack that he was using as a pillow, reaching for the Glock he kept there most nights.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered.
Julia felt a wash of irritation directed at the bedframe. “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
“You need a piss?”
Julia grabbed her boots and slipped them on her feet. “I’ll be fine. They’ve got people on watch. Go back to sleep.”
Lee hesitated. Then melted back down. “Stay close to the cabin,” he advised.
Abe snorted and shuffled around in his bed. His breathing stayed steady. He was a heavy sleeper.
“I will,” Julia said, standing up gently to prevent another noise from the bedframe.
She eyed the two men with a rueful smirk.
They’d become her famil
y. Though she sometimes joked that Abe was her “field brother” and Lee her “field husband,” they’d become more than just field-expedient relationships. They’d become everything to her. To each other.
Because everyone else is dead.
The thought struck the smirk from her mouth.
She grabbed her rifle from where it sat underneath the side of the bed, and padded out of the room, rolling her feet along the outside of her boots so that the heels wouldn’t clump.
Before she closed the bedroom door behind her, she took a peek back and saw that Lee had rolled back over, and Abe was snoring again.
Good.
She descended the wooden staircase with care, trying to avoid creaks, and failing. How annoying nature was when it called in the middle of the night.
At the bottom of the staircase was the front door of the cabin, but it was barricaded by a strip of what looked like weathered barn wood, tacked into the frame. The back door was the only entrance she’d seen used, so she moved in that direction.
In the living room where Tex’s squad had congregated earlier, only two soldiers slept, one on the old couch, and the other on the floor. They didn’t stir as she moved past them, though one of them let out a soft fart and a grunt.
To her relief, the back door opened without squeaks, and she slipped outside into the cool night air. A half-moon was up, and it gave plenty of light for her to see by. She scanned along the woods, saw the dark shapes of the vehicles parked under the trees.
She wasn’t sure where Tex’s guys kept watch, but she wasn’t venturing out into the woods. Besides the possibility of primals, Texas had plenty of other unpleasant creatures that concerned her. Specifically snakes. And tarantulas. And scorpions.
No, she’d stick close to the cabin, as Lee had advised.
She went around the side of the house, found a corner where the log walls met the brick chimney, and she figured it was as good a place as any. She gave another look around her, saw nothing concerning—at least that she could make out by moonlight. She set her rifle against the brick of the fireplace, pulled her pants down to mid-thigh, and squatted.
She breathed a sigh of relief. The sound of urine splashing the ground mingled with the steady, rhythmic chirping of crickets.
She felt like she peed for five minutes straight.
No way she would’ve lasted through the night.
At least she’d been able to get it done without disturbing anyone.
She stood up and began to pull her pants up.
She registered the rush of footfalls just a half-second before she was slammed in the back.
Her first thought was Primals! Then her head struck the brick fireplace, and things became fuzzy.
She was still conscious. She groped for her rifle as she felt the weight starting to ride her down to the ground.
She hit the dirt on her belly. An arm reached out and swiped the rifle away from her in one movement, sending it clattering five feet out of her reach.
Not a primal’s arm.
Oh, shit.
She felt her pants yanked down farther, past her knees, and the reality hit her harder than the physical tackle had. She tried to writhe, to spin, to roll, but a hand clamped onto the back of her neck and pressed her face into the dirt, and a body put all of its weight on her back. She tried to yell, but it only came out in a muffled groan, and she tasted dirt in her mouth.
Hot breath struck her ear.
“Ssh! Ssh!” a voice hissed at her. “Don’t fight. I’ll be quick. I promise.”
Fear mixed with instant rage.
She clenched her teeth, and felt the grit of dirt between them.
She felt a fist between her legs, someone trying to guide themselves into her.
She took a big, dusty breath and bucked backward with her hips, knowing in an instant that, yes, it would make it easier for him to get at her, but also that it pitched his weight forward, and put him off-balance.
The second she felt his balance teeter, she rolled with everything she had, felt her hips come out from under the crushing weight. There was scuffling limbs and whispered curses, and then she was on her back, staring up at a stranger’s face, obscured by darkness.
He tried to straddle her again.
She brought her knee up hard, but it glanced off his thigh.
“Fucking bitch! Stop fighting!”
She thrust her arm up, grabbing his neck, sinking her fingers into the skin on either side of his larynx, trying like hell to rip his throat out. He gagged, jerked backwards, then reared a fist back and the next thing she felt was her nose breaking, and stars colliding in her vision.
She thought she blacked out.
She panicked, thinking that she couldn’t defend herself if she had blacked out…
She couldn’t feel the weight of him anymore.
Her sparkling vision cleared enough for her to perceive two shapes in the moonlight. She scrambled backwards, running into the brick wall and hauling herself up, pulling her pants up at the same time so she could get her legs moving.
The first figure started coming at her again and she managed to get her pants high enough that she was able to send out a single solid kick that landed in the man’s belly and sent a gust of air out of his lungs.
The second figure was just a flash of shadow.
Two arms snaked under her attacker’s armpits, then thrust up, the hands interlocking behind her attacker’s head so that his arms jutted out at an awkward and useless angle. His body writhed, his feet kicking, but whoever had ahold of him from behind kept him standing and exposed.
Julia didn’t think. She moved. She saw the man’s half-erection, still hanging out of his pants, and she lunged forward in a fury, her arm coming up like a softball pitch. She slammed her hand into the man’s crotch and wrenched her fingers hard down on his genitals, and she felt one of his testis pop like a grape.
The man’s eyes went wide, and his body seemed to implode, trying to curl around the pain.
Forced into a standing position, the moonlight hit his face, and Julia registered that it was the man from the meeting earlier. The one who’d been jerking himself in his pants.
Pikes.
The figure behind her attacker heaved, and sent the man flying into the side of the log cabin in a tumble of limbs.
It only took Julia a bare second to realize that the other figure was Lee. And in that fractional moment, he snatched his pistol out of his waistband and brought it up.
“Lee!” Julia shouted at him, not sure why.
The man on the ground moaned and wrapped himself in a fetal position, like a dying bug.
Lee didn’t say anything. His face was emotionless, but the moonlight hit his eyes at a strange angle and made them look wild. “You want me to pop him?” Lee’s voice ground out, quiet to the point that Julia could barely hear it over her own pulse pounding in her head.
Yes.
Julia almost said it.
But a moment’s hesitation gave enough time for reason to reassert itself into the situation.
And she registered the sound of shouts from inside the cabin, and the rumble of several feet running. The sound of the backdoor slamming open. A light struck them from out in the woods, wavering and shaking. The weaponlight from one of the sentries, running towards them.
“Stop!” the sentry shouted. “Drop that weapon!”
Lee turned his face to Julia. Still and cold. Half in stark white light, half in blackness. “Do you want me to kill him? Or do you want to do it?”
He wanted an answer from her.
“Don’t,” Julia said.
If he shot the guy on the ground, the sentry would shoot him. Julia knew it. Lee had to know it too, and maybe he just didn’t care.
From around the back of the house a cluster of figures appeared at a sprint.
Sergeant Menendez was in the lead, trailing a few of his troops, and Tex was in the rear.
They all rushed to a stop in front of Lee and Julia and the
man on the ground.
They were all shouting, and Julia couldn’t pick out what any of them were saying.
Tex’s voice hissed, making it somehow clearer than everyone else’s yelling. “Shut up! Shut up! Everyone shut the fuck up!” He shouldered his way to the front of his soldiers, all in various states of dress. All pointing their rifles at Lee.
Still looking at Julia, Lee pulled his fingers away from the trigger guard and grip so that his pistol rested in the crook of his thumb, and he raised it so it pointed at the sky.
It was abruptly silent.
Tex put his hand on Lee’s shoulder, but didn’t reach for Lee’s weapon. “The fuck is this?” he demanded in a harsh whisper. “What the fuck is going on?”
Lee hadn’t taken his eyes off of Julia. And he didn’t respond.
Julia became aware that her right eye was swelling. She tasted blood on her lips and wiped it with the back of her wrist. A hundred thoughts collided in her head, action and consequence, all of them muddled by a swirl of anger and fear and violation.
Tex seemed to register that Lee was looking at Julia, and his eyes landed on her as well, then went down and took in her pants hanging off of her, then back up to her bloodied nose, and her swollen eye.
The man on the ground let out a low groan and spoke in a high-pitched mewl: “She fuckin’ popped my nuts!”
A wash of embarrassment hit Julia and she grappled her pants back up onto her hips, her fingers shaking so that she couldn’t get them buttoned again. She knew that she shouldn’t feel shame. But that didn’t stop it from coming over her in a burning wave that made her want to sit down, made her eyes sting like they were about to tear up. And all of that just fed her anger even more.
I should’ve let Lee kill him!
I should’ve killed him myself!
Say something!
She coughed to hide a sudden sob, and hated herself, and hated the man on the ground, and even hated Lee.
“Someone better start fucking talking!” Tex commanded.
Julia couldn’t make sense of herself. She just wanted the situation to dissolve. Like it had never happened. Or she wanted to deliver the facts in a calm and collected way, like she always imagined that she would if she ever found herself in this situation.
