The Unlikely Defenders

by Scott Haworth

  Jennifer ran towards the screaming and gunfire. The design of the Museum of Modern Art caused echoes to reverberate all over the building. She could not tell what section was the source of the disturbance until she ran straight into it.

  There were already six children and one adult dead on the ground when she entered the room. Two children were still alive and huddling in one of the corners. A bulky, dark-skinned man with a nine-millimeter pistol was in the process of reloading and walking towards the terrified children when Jennifer entered. He turned his head sharply upon hearing her arrival. He looked surprised to find a gun pointed in his direction.

  Jennifer aimed her weapon and fired four times. Two of the bullets hit the man in the neck. He dropped to the floor clutching at his throat. By the time Jennifer made her way across the room he was dead. She kicked the pistol away from his body but made no effort to check his pulse. He was obviously not getting up again.

  Jennifer moved to the two terrified children as the unpleasant smell of urine hit her nostrils. “It’s okay, everything’s going to be fine now,” she said with the most pleasant voice she could muster given the circumstances. She turned away from the children to survey the carnage. “Let’s get you two out of here, okay?”

  One of the children, a young girl, looked up at Jennifer. “There’s another one,” she said quietly, her eyes moving towards the dead man on the ground.

  A wave of panic struck Jennifer as she checked over her shoulder. “Do you know where he is, sweetheart?”

  The little girl’s hand shook as she pointed towards the closest exit of the room.

  Jennifer moved cautiously towards the edge of the room’s exit. If there’s another one then why did the gunfire stop? she thought. She peaked around the corner expecting to see a terrible scene. She was surprised by what she found.

  Another dark-skinned man was crouched down behind a young girl. He had a gun to her head and was trying to use her as a shield. This proved to be difficult given the girl’s short stature. At the other end of the room there was a group of fifteen students who had been corned against a wall.

  “Put down your gun,” the man yelled with a thick accent.

  Jennifer walked farther into the room. Her pistol was still pointed at the man. “Drop your weapon. Now!”

  “No, you put down your weapon or I’ll shoot her,” he said, yanking back on the girl’s long blond hair. The girl screamed in pain.

  Jennifer looked towards the group of children in the corner and then back towards the man. Despite the girl’s small size she was an effective enough shield. Jennifer did not have a shot. Her eyes shifted back and forth between the group of children and the little girl. The images of the dead children in the other room flashed through her mind. In an instant she made her decision. Jennifer unloaded the rest of her clip at the little girl.

  The little girl and the dark-skinned man both fell to the ground. Jennifer jogged over and kicked the pistol away from the bodies. It was obvious that the gunman was dead so she turned her attention to the girl. There were several bullet wounds in her chest. She reached down to check for a pulse but did not find one.

  Jennifer fell back and sat on the ground. Her pistol fell slowly out of her hand and clanked on the museum’s floor. The other children did not move. They stood silently, huddled together in terror.

  Sean Altmann and the other members of his squad ran outside as the sonic booms began. Thanks to an ongoing field durability test, all of them still had their directed energy rifles. This proved to be a stroke of luck for the men of DEW Squad, as they had affectionately named themselves. However, it proved to be disastrous for the unfortunate Kessiams who landed inside the grounds of Fort Belvoir.

  Captain Mitchell, the squad’s commanding officer, made it to the barracks just as the noise was starting to let up. “Listen up,” he shouted to his men. “We’ve been put on high alert and there are reports of inbound enemies. You are free to engage all targets that land inside the perimeter.”

  “What enemy?” the soldier closest to Sean questioned.

  Mitchell hesitated but then spoke with the same confidence he had initially, “Aliens.”

  Every member of the squad simultaneously looked away from the sky and lowered their weapons to the ground. Some of the men began to laugh while others shook their heads.

  Sean shouldered his rifle and turned towards Captain Mitchell. “That’s a good one, sir,” he said. He made a grand gesture of wiping sweat from his forehead. “You had me going there.”

  “No joke, Altmann. What the hell do you think those sonic booms were?” Mitchell answered angrily.

  Sean put out his hand and waved across the area to reiterate his point. He scanned the vicinity and expected to find nothing. As if they were intentionally trying to make him look foolish, the Kessiam pods began to land as he was making the gesture. Sean quickly brought his rifle off of his shoulder, bent down and aimed at the closest pod.

  Thirteen pods landed within sight of the DEW squad. The sounds of scraping and crashing from other parts of the base indicated that many more had landed inside Fort Belvoir. The squad, filled with combat veterans, reacted instantly. They spread out to form a perimeter around the Kessiam landing zone. Sean, still crouching, shuffled to the outside corner of the barracks.

  A Kessiam named Crulox was the first to emerge from his pod. He had the softest landing of any of his comrades in the vicinity. He had been overjoyed when his pod landed squarely in the middle of a large dirt area. It was as if it had been specifically designed for him to set down. Eager to get started, Crulox popped open his canopy and tried to hop out. Struck by the severity of the gravity on the planet, he was forced to slow down and crawl backwards out of his pod. Feeling accomplished for just having exited his entry vehicle, he turned proudly to take in his first glimpse of New Mortair.

  “What the hell is that?” Sean asked as the Kessiam emerged from its pod.

  Mitchell, who was about ten feet away from Sean, was crouched with his own rifle pointed at Crulox. “An alien, Altmann. Pay attention!” he said condescendingly.

  As Crulox turned towards the men, Captain Mitchell opened fire. The other members of the squad joined in immediately. Crulox was hit by ten energy bursts. His body was decimated by the barrage. What was left of the alien splattered to the ground.

  The squad had little time to dwell on their first engagement with extraterrestrial life. The other pods were beginning to open. Two of the Kessiams made it out of their pods. Neither of them got more than a foot or fired a shot before getting gunned down by the humans. Most of the aliens died in their pods. As traditional gunfire rang out from other parts of the base, the DEW squad unleashed a volley of energy blasts into the pods. The pods quickly deteriorated into lumps of metal. It was quickly clear that they were no longer a threat.

  “Cease fire,” Captain Mitchell yelled over the noise of the directed energy weapons discharging. “Cease fire!”

  The noise died down as the squad members reluctantly held their fire. The calm did not last long. Two Kessiams ran at full speed, which was about a quarter as fast as a human at full speed, into the DEW squad’s kill zone. A volley of energy blasts dropped them easily.

  “Second squad coming in!” yelled someone in the direction from which the two Kessiams had run.

  “Hold your fire,” Mitchell said to his men. “You’re clear!” he yelled back to the unseen man.

  Eight soldiers emerged from behind a building. They trotted towards Sean’s squad and eventually took up a similar defensive position. The officer in charge made his way to Captain Mitchell and saluted.

  “Sir,” started the baby-faced second lieutenant. “Major Summers is organizing first battalion for immediate departure. He said if you feel comfortable with your weapons your squad should tag along.”

  “What about the base?” Mitchell inquired. Gunshots were continuing to ring out in the distance.

  “Second battalion is going to reinforce the garrison. The
inside of the base is pretty much clear already though.”

  Mitchell nodded his head affirmatively. “You know anything about where we’re heading?”

  “These things are landing all over, sir. First battalion has been ordered up to Washington to secure the White House.”

  Mitchell raised his voice so his entire squad could hear him, “Grab as many spare energy packs as you can and reassemble here in five minutes. Fall out!”

  Sean scurried off to comply with the order. He was frantically stuffing ammunition into a satchel when another member of the squad walked by and punched him on the shoulder.

  “Have you ever seen shit this crazy?” the squad member asked rhetorically.

  Sean turned away from the man and continued packing. “Yeah,” he said simply.

  Sean was the last of his squad to return to the assembly point. Mitchell gave him an annoyed look but did not take the time for a proper chewing out. Nothing like a little alien invasion to change people’s priorities, Sean thought to himself.

  The DEW squad, eager to get underway, piled into a pair of Humvees. They waited impatiently for ten minutes as the first battalion got organized. When the convoy finally rolled out of Fort Belvoir the two DEW squad Humvees were in the lead. They saw about thirty dead aliens outside the base, but they met no resistance as they turned to head north towards Washington.

  Private Sean Altmann awoke suddenly in the back of a moving vehicle. The throbbing in his arm let him know why he was awake. He looked over at Private Wagner who was seated to his immediate right. Wagner did not look happy.

  “Going to sleep through the entire war?” Wagner asked as he retracted his fist.

  “Apparently not,” Sean replied irritably.

  Sean sat up straight in his seat and rubbed his eyes before looking around the interior of the vehicle. The other soldiers seemed terribly tense which was, of course, not unexpected. Sean smiled to himself as he remembered learning about this type of vehicle for the first time in boot camp. The sergeant had pointed to the machine and called it a high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicle. The sergeant continued by saying that like his first girlfriend, Sean would spend so much time inside it that he would learn to love it. He would even be free to call it by the adoring nickname “Humvee”. The Humvee had a different nickname in this part of the world though. The men in Sean’s platoon had taken to calling it “Death Trap.”

  Sean had been in Iraq for a little over five months. It was a short enough time that he could not see the light at the end of the tunnel. However, it had been long enough that it was no longer new and exciting. Having been rotated in well after the invasion, Sean was part of the second generation of a war that was itself a second generation conflict. It did not have a sexy name like the Persian Gulf War. There did not even seem to be an official name for the conflict. Most people just called it the War in Iraq.

  “We’re supposed to be staying vigilant,” Wagner continued.

  Sean shifted in his seat and opened the canvass flap behind him. He looked out the window of the Humvee for a second before turning back to look at Wagner. “Holy shit, you’re right! Did you know there’s a gigantic fucking desert out there?” he asked.

  Some of the other soldiers in the Humvee loosened up enough to chuckle at Sean’s joke. Wagner remained unamused.

  After a moment of riding in silence, Sean turned back towards Wagner. “How far are we from Fallujah?”

  Wagner stared straight ahead and childishly ignored Sean’s question.

  After about twenty seconds another soldier spoke up to answer Sean’s question, “About another ten minutes.”

  “Thanks, Sarge,” Sean responded. He found it ironic that the sergeant could have cared less whether or not he was sleeping. It was the pissant Private Wagner who kept riding his ass. Wagner was just one of those guys who thought he had the right to get into everyone’s business.

  “I can’t see why you joined the Army in the first place,” Wagner said after a moment.

  Sean tilted his head back in annoyance. This guy was just not going to let up. “I wanted Uncle Sam to pay for college,” he said. He lowered his head to speak to the other soldiers in the Humvee. “But then a truly terrible thing happened. A war started and they actually expected me to fight in it. Me! Can you believe it?”

  Everyone but Wagner started to chuckle or nod their heads affirmatively.

  Sean decided to nail home his point. “It’s definitely not what I expected when I was signing up. I thought I’d be sent to Germany for a while… mix it up with the lovely frauliens,” Sean lamented. He let out a deliberate sigh to let everyone know he was picturing how lovely Germany was. “But no! I have to spend my time scraping sand out of my ass crack and getting shot at! And the worst thing is, the towel head women are covered up so much that I don’t even have anything nice to look at!” he finished on a high note of indignation.

  The rest of the soldiers, minus Wagner of course, were laughing so hard that the sergeant had to raise his voice considerably to say, “What are you going to study once you do finally get back to the states?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Sean said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “The more I think about it, the more I think I don’t even really want to go to college.”

  The soldiers were laughing so hard that the sergeant would have been unable to quiet them even if he had been inclined to end their fun. However, the Iraqi insurgency was not so laid back.

  Sean’s Humvee was the last in a convoy of three heading towards Fallujah from Baghdad. This turned out to be a lucky position. Two of the soldiers in Sean’s Humvee actually lived to tell of one of the most successful insurgent attacks of the entire war.

  The politicians back in the United States usually lumped members of the insurgency together with terrorists. While international terrorists had snuck into Iraq to add to the chaos, the insurgency was far more efficient. Its members were Baath party loyalists or Sunnis who feared the formation of a Shiite state. They were better equipped, larger and had more military experience than the terrorists. They were also trying to defend their homes and their way of life. This was perhaps their greatest strength.

  Whatever their personal motivation, the small insurgent group that attacked Sean’s convoy did so with ruthlessness and overwhelming force. Two rocket propelled grenades struck the first Humvee in the convoy. It erupted in a small fireball which stopped the other two vehicles in their tracks. The mortar rounds started landing just as the remaining U.S. soldiers were scrambling out of their vehicles. One round landed squarely on the roof of the second Humvee. The explosion sent shards of metal into the interior of the vehicle, killing or fatally wounding everyone inside.

  Despite being in the center of the last Humvee, Sean was the first one to make it outside. He dove for a ditch along the side of the road. In his zeal to reach cover he had underestimated the distance to the ditch and so flopped face down several feet away. Far too terrified to be embarrassed, Sean quickly rolled the rest of the distance into the ditch. It was only then that he took the time to look back and check on the other soldiers from his vehicle. Most of the soldiers were moving in a tight group towards Sean and the relative safety of the ditch. They did not make it. Sean could not tell if it was a lucky shot or the most accurate mortar fire he had even seen. Either way a round exploded in the center of the soldiers, cutting them all to pieces.

  Sean turned away and squeezed his eyes shut. He tried to wedge himself deeper into the shallow ditch as more mortar rounds exploded around the road in front of him. He was so consumed by the noise that he shrieked in terror when a body flopped down next to him. After opening his eyes, Sean found the bloody and unconscious sergeant sprawled out in the ditch next to him.

  Private Wagner flopped into the ditch on the other side of the sergeant. He was panting heavily from having carried the sergeant the short distance from the Humvee to the side of the road. “Thanks for the help, Altmann,” he yelled angrily.

  Sean sa
t frozen and did not respond.

  Wagner pulled several bandages from his personal first aid kit and quickly applied them to the sergeant’s wounds. Confident in his work, he poked his head out from the ditch and surveyed the land around the far side of the road. “I can see a couple of them. They’re pretty close,” he said loudly so Sean could hear him. He slunk back down into the ditch and turned to Sean. “If we crawl about twenty yards down the road I think we’ll be in a good position to run at them.”

  Sean nodded his head, absent-mindedly agreeing with whatever Wagner was saying. After a moment he processed what Wagner had actually said. “Are you fucking nuts? You want the two of us to cross forty yards of open desert to assault god only knows how many insurgents?”

  “The sergeant’s dying and we’re not going to last long either. If we do it fast enough we’ll catch them by surprise,” Wagner responded. He was disgusted by Sean’s lack of enthusiasm for his plan.

  “We should wait here,” Sean said, shaking his head at Wagner. “Reinforcements will be here any minute. The Iraqi’s know that. They’ll pull out any second.”

  Wagner’s response was delayed by another mortar round exploding very near to their position. “Does it look like they’re pulling back to you?” he shouted. “You think any of the Humvees had a chance to send out an enemy contact report? Use your fucking head!” he yelled. Wagner, seething with rage, grabbed Sean by the soldier. “Enough of this bullshit. Are you coming or not?”

  Although Sean did not respond, Wagner could tell by the look on his face that the former man was going nowhere. Wagner sneered and started crawling inside the ditch along the road. “Give me some suppressing fire then!” he shouted over his shoulder. “And watch the sergeant!”

  Although he had received the order from a fellow private, Sean decided that checking on the sergeant was an excellent idea. The order acted as a distraction from the barrage of mortar shells. More importantly unlike Wagner’s previous suggestion, checking on the sergeant did not involve leaving the safety and security of the ditch. The sergeant was still bleeding heavily despite the pressure dressings. Sean added another bandage from his own medical kit to one of the sergeant’s more minor shrapnel wounds. When he was finished he put two fingers against the sergeant’s neck. He still had a pulse but it was growing weaker.