“Where’s the rest of our team?”
“I don’t know, sir,” said Dragonfly. These must be people from the town that they captured before we firebombed it. The tubes running into them are probably keeping them fed and sedated.”
One of the bodies, still breathing, was missing the top of her cranium. Where her brains should have been was a mass of wires and tubes that ascended toward the ceiling. One of her hands was missing, with more wires leading out. Other tables were topped with animals in varying stages of dissection and decay. Snakes, big lizards, even a mountain goat.
“We still need to clear the next room, and theres a long tunnel leading from the over there.”
John didn’t bother to find out who was talking. He nodded, and heard footsteps leaving to the right. In the far corner of the room were vertical glass tanks, similar to Jennifer’s alien holding pod. Each tank held one human being. The bodies were fixed with metallic hardware, swollen halfway from normal human to the red monsters that protected these halls.
“You picking this up on my body camera, Ryan?”
“I’m seeing it,” said the colonel. “I guess snakes aren’t the only critters we need to keep an eye out for.”
A smaller table near the tubes was topped with an aquarium full of spiders, a few tubes of black goo, and several syringes. “You think they’re prepping these guys like they did with the snakes?”
“Trucks are on the way. Just make sure everything gets loaded up. Savage can tell us what all that crap is.”
“Fine. Let her deal with the spiders.” In the back corner of the room was a stack of the same black food tubes, but open and hollow. One sat upright under something that looked like a meat grinder, with a pile of intestines in the hopper.
“Fuck sake.” As if a constant stabbing pain over his heart wasn’t enough, his stomach and throat added metallic-tasting pressure from inside, and the smell of rotten meat attacked his nostrils.
He needed to get clear of the disgusting room quickly, before he popped. A few gunshots gave him an excuse to rush past the tanks, M4 drawn. Cat followed on his right, guarding the hallway.
“More red monsters,” said Doc over the radio. Splatters and gunshots echoed through the tunnels. John started to wonder if he would make it back out.
He called over his radio. “Commander. You might want to get the other team inbound to finish the job if we don’t make it out. Tell them to load heavy on explosives.”
The colonel didn’t answer. Another thought crossed John’s mind, a memory from that pit of hell in Africa. He’d been left stranded by the colonel before. Maybe he wasn’t the best person to lead this team.
The walls of the next room were lined with giant machines, and no indication what they were for. With the blue fire coming from the next hallway, they would likely never know. John lobbed a couple of grenades down the tube as Dragonfly called over the radio, “There’s a bunch of them hiding the hallway.”
He was on the other side of the complex. They’d have to deal with the problem in front of them first. The grenade exploded, and Doc tossed in another.
“Full auto. Aim for the neck.”
Cat nodded in the flash from another blast, and both of them turned into the hallway to unleash hell. They dropped the two monsters standing before them. Behind the falling bodies, their stray bullets hit something else, and sparks erupted from a glowing vertical tube as it shattered.
Doc rushed to the end of the tunnel, scanning with his rifle. He relaxed and stood tall. “Room’s clear, no other exits.”
“Dragonfly, how are you guys holding up?”
“They stopped shooting.”
“What do you mean they stopped shooting?”
“They’re just standing there, sir. A couple of them dropped their weapons.”
John scanned the room ahead. A central console was bordered by stools on either side. Flexible film wrapped the wall, glowing like a dozen television screens. The images looked like heat maps of the subterranean lair. The broken glass pipe showering sparks was attached to a strange purple sphere covered with some kind of linear steel accents. It stood atop a metal layer cake. He grabbed the tube.
Pulling straight did nothing, but the sparks didn’t burn or shock him. With a sharp twist, the glass rod came free, and the finally stopped sparking. It looked like some kind of fluorescent light bulb. “This must be the antenna for the box. You think this is what’s controlling them?”
“I don’t trust it,” said Doc. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to see how it works.” His fingers probed the cylinder, looking for any kind of button or switch. A thick wire ran from the rear of the device to the wall, like a power plug. The top of the cylinder, just below the ball, came to life with a series of square images arranged in a grid.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” said John.
“What is it?”
“This thing looks like a cellphone display. Apparently you touch a button to make them act a certain way. I guess everything else is encoded. What’s this? You can assign groups too.”
“I wouldn’t mess with that thing.”
“Then antenna’s busted, relax.”
“Sir, I—”
“Oh, God. Fine. I’ll leave it alone. We’ll let the Mexican and that fat engineer to play with the alien toys when we get back to the base. Let’s get moving to the door so we can defend it if more of them show up.”
“How can we do that?”
“Grab that ray gun. Plasma rifles should be good enough to kill anything that comes flying in too close. If they can shoot down our choppers, we can tear up their shit, too. And it looks like the aliens did Jacob’s job for him. They already adapted the rifles for human hands.”
Savage looked confused. “So you aren’t holding a grudge for insubordination?” she asked.
The colonel thought carefully while swirling the cold drink in his glass. Operations never went exactly according to plan, and this one turned out well. He had half expected the entire underground alien lair to explode, but it hadn’t. The truck crews ransacked the base, and they recovered everything. It was hard to be angry about that. “He got in there and he got the job done. Course if he had failed, he wouldn’t be here to yell at. Win-win situation for him.”
“I suppose so,” she said. “Here’s to getting the job done.” She toasted her glass and took a sip of the aged whiskey. “Well. He dropped by the lab earlier, once we had the truck offloaded. He was confused that we got the alien device powered up so quickly. The engineering team has the alien voltage and phase pretty well figured out. I still need to decipher all the symbols on that thing, but I think we made amends. He actually apologized for insinuating that I wasn’t American. Kind of funny.”
“I think that’s the first time he’s apologized for anything in his life. Savor the moment.”
“Well, I impressed him by pointing out how stupid his ideas about the alien symbolism were.”
“What about the new aliens they brought in? Any ideas?”
“As far as if they used to be human? No idea, but my first guess would be not. Rick turned white, not red. They could be similar humanoid creatures, but I haven’t had time to get much more than a passing glance at them.”
“Maybe this is a further mutation caused by the virus.”
“It could be, Colonel. But that would be quite a trick. We took some blood samples. I won’t have anything back on the DNA right away, but if those things started as human, then the virus is much more advanced than I thought. That or they took another step after the conversion.”
“I don’t understand why it’s so far fetched. The virus already mutated snakes and people. They look human.”
“Yes, but those snakes and people retained their basic functioning. Rick still has hemoglobin in his blood. That’s an iron based compound that makes human blood red. When we pulled blood from the monsters, it was blue, like the squiddies. Screwing around with cellular activity is one thing, completely
morphing something into a different type of organism with different organs and blood is crazy. Or maybe that’s just as possible and I’m not yet able to wrap my head around it. Either way. I’d suspect that there’s at least a two-step process for turning mutant humans into. . .whatever the hell those things are.”
“I think anything is possible when it comes to aliens from outer space.”
“Except me jumping on a chair when I see a case full of spiders.”
“What?”
“John. He said that he was waiting on me to panic. That’s when he apologized. I have to admit. If it had been a jar full of wasps I might have jumped. He made sure to deliver the aquarium full of alien arachnids personally, with a black cloth over it to add some suspense to the big reveal. It didn’t work. I’m not terrified about spiders, especially when they’re caged. I don’t like them, and this is one extra nightmare that I’m going to have about them getting out, but aquariums don’t freak me out. Thinking forward to what those spiders might be carrying, on the other hand. . . .”
“We thrashed their base, but maybe they were already finished with whatever they needed to do. Next step in to get the CDC down here with military personal and just burn the whole area. We can’t risk anything getting out. I don’t have the necessary weapons to scorch a huge area of desert, and my funding is running dry.”
“How do you plan on containing it the virus? Assuming that they’ve finished it, and loaded a bunch of critters up to spread it, it could already be affecting surrounding towns.”
“No idea. But that’s a problem for another time. The general told me to take out the base, and I took out the base. We need to get that control system online. If it can control squiddies and demon people, maybe it can control the vermin too.”
“Can you contact the general?”
“Now that there’s something to report,” he nodded. “There’s a secure line I can use to get hold of him, but I can only really use it once.”
“What are the odds of us heading home soon?”
“We’re still a bunch of terrorists, remember? I guess the news will let us know. Once the government is in position to combat the alien threat publicly, then we’ll all be pardoned and exonerated, probably given some stupid medals by congress. But first, you guys need to figure out that control mechanism. They’ll need something to fight with.”
“That’s how it works?”
“Usually, unless we fail.”
“What then?”
“Then we’ll get blamed for anything that’s gone wrong for the past two months. Benefit of being terrorists. You become the scapegoat for everything. It’s easy to bear if you’re dead, and the puppet masters can wash their hands of the operation.”
“Well,” she said. “We got one base. And we’re still alive. I’m just wondering what’s next.”
“I have no idea, Savage. Let’s concentrate on solving the problems at hand. Engineering will power that thing up. You and Reyes finish your testing. The strike teams will get a well deserved rest. After that.” He shrugged. “You never really know till it happens. We’ll have to wait and see.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martin McConnell holds a Physics degree from SIUE, and when he isn’t writing speculative fiction, he’s motivating other authors, stargazing, reading, or playing Kerbal Space Program. He avidly encourages everyone to seize control of their dreams by driving their own plot. You can find him on twitter @spottedgeckgo, or at his website writefarmlive.com. If you would like to receive updates on his future projects, send him an email at [email protected].
OTHER WORKS
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Other works by title:
Viral Spark
Finish the Damn Book
Dark Age - Short Series
Alien Agenda Page 5
