The Blastlands Saga

by DK Williamson

  “I think your dad is right,” Art said. “Rangers got nothing on mechanics.”

  Marian started the tape player.

  From the speakers came a loud riff from an electric guitar followed by the sound of an explosion breaking the silence.

  “This is WOMD Ninety-Seven-Point-One FM, New York’s heavy metal weapon of mass destruction. Weapons grade rock-n-roll!” the prerecorded intro blared.

  “Holy fucking shit!” a man’s voice said. “The damned aliens are riding rip-shit riot throughout the city. This is Jean LeFevre live, and I’m looking right outside our studio and it is unreal. There’s—”

  “You gotta be kidding me… you are not gonna believe this, but my producer is worried about my language and the FCC. We got alien creatures running loose on the streets of New York and he’s worried about the FCC. Fuck the feds, let’em get through all the carnage down on the street. There are people dying out there.

  “I’m looking out the window right now, and… jeez… it’s like a bad fucking dream. Where’s the cops or the army? They are supposed to be here, man! Get off the streets,” he yelled.

  “The hell with that. Get out of the city. If you can hear me New York, get out of here,” he continued as loud noises could be heard in the background. The noise grew louder, sounding like a house falling in on itself, snapping wood and clattering metal, then the sound of glass shattering.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” LeFevre yelled. “We got the damn things in the station! Get out of the city if you can, get out! I don’t believe this shit. I’m gonna get killed by a damn shit brown alien monster on the air! I wanted to die from fellatio overdose administered by a pro sports cheerleader squad, but I guess that ain’t gonna happen. Fuck it man. This is rock and roll, Ninety-Seven-Point-One signing off. One last thing… Booger!” He yelled, then he began laughing maniacally just before static cut in.

  . . . . .

  “Next we have some video, also from New York. This was the first video footage of the aliens on U.S. soil shown on American television,” Marian said as she pressed the play button on the VCR.

  The VCR tape rolled and from the three television’s speakers burst the cacophony of automatic weapons fire as the video showed a scene of horror. Spotlights set up behind sandbagged positions and military vehicles cast a harsh blue-white light on a Manhattan street, illuminating soldiers taking cover behind the sandbags and manning weapons mounted on vehicles as they poured fire into frightening creatures that rushed from the yellow haze five hundred feet away. Cockroach-like creatures, nearly two feet long, swarmed across the ground, while larger terrors followed behind. In the alien fog they initially looked like men, distorted by the glaring light and yellow mist. In fact, there was no distortion. They were bipedal, with grotesquely elongated limbs, but lacked the head a human being would possess.

  The bug-like creatures died fairly easily, a few solid hits and they stopped moving. The bipeds were a different matter, sometimes taking dozens upon dozens of bullets and losing limbs before going down, sometimes to rise and charge again.

  Within minutes the attack ceased. Not one of the creatures had made it within fifty yards of the sandbagged positions. Some of the troops started to cheer only to be stopped by non-commissioned officers growling, “At ease! Watch your front.”

  Moments later someone yelled, “They’re coming again! Get ready!”

  From out of the yellow cloud came another charge of brown horrors, this attack was larger, the aliens more numerous. Once again the soldiers fired streams of bullets downrange, red tracers could be seen ricocheting into the night when they missed their intended target and hit walls or the street that altered their travel. The creatures pushed farther this time with the last, a one-armed and bullet-ridden biped, finally dropping mere feet from the sandbags. In the background the sounds of similar fights could be heard, both near and far.

  “We’re gonna need more ammo if this keeps up,” yelled a soldier.

  “Stop your yappin’ and reload your mags! I’ll see to the ammo,” bellowed a sergeant.

  In the background military radio traffic could be heard, with units calling for reinforcements, ammunition resupply, and medevacs.

  . . . . .

  Those in the group that had never seen the footage before stared, transfixed by the images on the screen. “I’d forgotten what that hell looked like,” Bill commented with a haunted look on his face.

  Marian Tyler pressed the pause button on the front of the VCR player.

  “I’ve read about the aliens, but I’ve never seen videos. Those things still roam the earth, right?” Jim asked.

  “Yes, and there are more fearsome creatures than the ones we just watched,” she answered. “You guys ready to continue?”

  Jim and Bill both nodded as did many in the group. “This next part was recorded in Santiago, Chile,” she said as she resumed the video.

  When the tape resumed, the scene was a familiar one, looking much like the street in Manhattan. Soldiers and police positioned behind cover watching a yellow cloud downrange in a wide avenue with numerous alien bodies scattered on the ground from previous attacks. In Spanish, an officer told his men to stand ready. Within a minute, a mob of bipeds charged from the mist followed by a few larger bipeds that stood between fifteen and twenty feet high. They walked, shambled really, hunched over with long tendrils covering them and dragging on the ground behind them.

  Just like in New York, the soldiers and police delivered as much firepower as they were able. The smaller bipeds went down fairly fast, but the shamblers were a different story. They seemed much tougher than their smaller cousins, although a few went down very quickly after taking but a few hits. The Chileans fired hundreds of rounds at them. The last shambler dying right in front of the barricade and falling onto a police car, crumpling it and bending the trunk lid up exposing the word, POLICIA to the camera.

  The video then switched to another engagement in Santiago, this one in front of what appeared to be an ornate institutional building of some sort. The courtyard in front of the building was littered with alien dead, including some shamblers, a smashed fountain still sprayed water which ran across the courtyard and into the street.

  The military force here was larger, equipped with tanks, armored cars, quad mounted anti-aircraft cannon on the backs of large trucks, in addition to a considerable infantry force. Beyond the defensive line, some three hundred yards distant was the yellow gas cloud.

  Out of the fog came hundreds of cockroaches and bipeds alongside dozens of shamblers. On the heels of those monsters came a true behemoth, a dripping, brown, fifty foot tall version of the biped. The ground shook slightly at each step the monster took. Small arms fire and light cannons focused on the smaller creatures and proved sufficient to make quick work of the bipeds and bug-like aliens. The light cannon on the trucks and armored cars were able to chew the shamblers down just as quickly, but it took the combined firepower of the entire force to stop the behemoth with the main guns of the tanks doing most of the damage. The behemoth had to be shot to pieces before it was stopped just a few dozen yards from the defensive line.

  . . . . .

  Jim looked a little troubled.

  “You okay?” Bill asked quietly.

  “Yes, it’s just that I thought seeing those creatures would be fun or something, like a movie. It’s not.”

  “Those giant creatures are still out there?” asked Thomas Young.

  Bill nodded. “They are, but they don’t roam like the bipeds. They stay near the big clouds where the large cities used to be.”

  Art and Dan Geiger nodded in agreement.

  “Are you ready for the last little bit?” Marian asked as she scanned the faces of the people in the group.

  Nearly everyone nodded.

  “This is one of the last pieces of news footage filmed in the United States, at least as far as we have discovered. It shows the destruction of a gasbag in a place they used to call Iowa.”

  Ma
rian resumed the video and the VCR tape rolled.

  “This is Global News Network’s continuing coverage of the world crisis, I’m Brock Detmer,” said a man seated behind a news desk, the GNN logo visible on the front panel of the desk.

  “We have amazing footage shot by a helicopter news crew from KKUF TV Twelve News of a U.S. Military attack on an alien gasbag near the Turkey River in Iowa.” Detmer looked off camera. “Is that right? Turkey River?” He nodded. “The Turkey River near Elkader, Iowa, I am told.”

  The view switched from the studio to an aerial view from a helicopter.

  The audio on the video was dominated by the sound of the helicopter’s engine and rotor, along with the blast of air as the helicopter buzzed over the ground.

  “Watch our distance to that bleep thing,” the camera operator’s voice could be heard shouting over the noise. “The government called for people to stay ten miles away if possible for a reason.”

  “I know,” the pilot responded, also in a shout. “That thing is doing a good hundred knots.”

  “I don’t care. Keep our distance and keep it steady.”

  The video was somewhat shaky and grainy as the cameraman leaned out of the side door, the camera zoomed in. It appeared the helicopter was flying just a few hundred feet above the ground.

  A gasbag moved over a rolling pastoral landscape. The fields of grain and pastureland edged by hedgerow trees with a lightly clouded blue sky in the background would have made a lovely scene were it not marred by the alien presence dropping the occasional liquid brown muck clump onto the land below.

  A sudden flash, then another an instant later caused the video to flare out.

  “Oh bleep! Was that what I think it was?” the pilot asked. “Bleep, it was! You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right,” came the cameraman’s reply.

  “Whoo. We’re okay, we’re okay.”

  When the image returned it was a view of the ground, a helicopter skid, and the camera operator’s foot visible as the ground moved underneath. The camera came up rapidly, making the image unrecognizable. Finally, it settled back on the distant gasbag.

  The alien entity was aflame and falling. It burned like a block of polystyrene foam set alight, brownish smoke from iridescent flames billowed upward, flaming pieces fell from the main body of the gasbag and descended alongside. As it neared the ground, the body of the entity began to bend in the middle, forming a shallow U shape. The river below momentarily reflected the image of the burning horror just before the gasbag struck the water with an immense splash, then disappeared in a cloud of steam and smoke as it settled in the river.

  By the time the river became visible again the alien was almost completely consumed. Brown piles of muck were spattered randomly around the edges of the disrupted waterway, a few of them emitting tendrils of yellow gas.

  The river filled the void in the riverbed quickly, the rushing water covering and washing away whatever bits of the alien that were in its path.

  “Did you get that?” the pilot asked.

  “Yes, yes, let’s get out of here,” the cameraman said.

  “Channel Nine will bleep themselves when they see what we have.”

  “Great,” the cameraman said flatly. “Let’s go.”

  “Start writing your acceptance speech for all the awards.”

  “I’ll settle for just getting through all this alive.”

  The video cut back to the studio, showing Brock Detmer and his artificially white smile.

  “That was exciting! Fantastic footage there. I’m not sure what we just saw, but I am told we will have experts in the studio to explain soon. Was that a nuke?” he said before the video stopped.

  . . . . .

  “That’s one thing I don’t miss from then,” Bill said, “television newscasters.”

  There were a few polite smiles from those that didn’t understand what Bill meant, while several people chuckled at his comment.

  Lost among this was Jim, who didn’t say anything, he simply sat in his place with a serious look on his face.

  “Last, I have this,” Marian said sliding a copy of a newspaper onto the projector. “It’s one of the last newspaper articles from then, written in the midst of the nuclear war.”

  THIS IS THE DAY THE WORLD ENDS!

  News Nationwide – Sunday, June 11, 1995

  Earth – This is our last edition. It is all but over. We hope some may survive, but we know News Nationwide will not.

  Here in our New York offices we have been told to seek shelter from an imminent nuclear strike. We send this to our regional printing and distribution centers throughout the country in hopes it might make it to newsstands and machines one last time.

  Johann Eldebrecht once wrote of, “an evil that marched from place to place, from star to star, inciting madness and destruction, leaving desolation in its path.” History records him as a novelist. Let it now show him to be a prophet.

  We are proud to have served you these past years. Dark days await those who survive. May God watch over us all.

  Behold, a comet! What ill omen it doth portend.

  —Henry Caeg

  Johan’s Reign

  Act 2, scene 1

  News Nationwide - America’s Premier Nationwide Newspaper.

  Jim stared at the image of the newspaper clipping projected onto the screen for a time with a sad and troubled look on his face. Several others in the group did as well.

  “Thank you for your time,” Marian said. “I’ll give you back to Lieutenant Geiger. Thank you for listening and feel free to visit the library. Good luck to you all,” she said with a wave.

  . . . . .

  Chapter 3

  Reaching for the Star

  The next two weeks would see the Ranger trainees complete the initial phase of their training, but not without some casualties. Trainee Jason Marcus was officially removed from Ranger training with prejudice for “potentially lethal misconduct and disregard for human life during training,” as Lieutenant Geiger wrote in Marcus’ personnel file. Trainee Smith was released without prejudice as “unsuitable for Ranger service.” Trainees Tubbs and Smits were released due to injuries incurred during training and were invited to reapply in the future. Trainee Brewster was released for hardship reasons, as his wife became seriously ill during the second week of the Ranger course.

  The seven remaining trainees then moved into more advanced areas of Ranger skills, which they would need to complete before they began field exercises.

  In the midst of advanced training the would-be Rangers were granted a few hours to take care of personal business, so Lieutenant Geiger used the time to gather the Geneva Rangers who had been conducting training in the headquarters building to evaluate the candidates thus far.

  “Let’s review where we are, and what we have covered the last few days,” the lieutenant said. “Art. Rifle training.”

  “The trainees are in great shape, LT. Hell, this was the easiest AK class I ever did. I let Jack take the group through most of it and he had them up to speed in no time. I think I spent more time explaining how we ended up with so many AKM rifles and 7.62 ammo from Soviet caches than I did talking shooting technique.”

  “What about Trahearn, Art? I scored him at the eval on day one. No offense, but the guy could barely hit the side of a shed from the inside,” Ranger Daley said.

  Art smiled. “He shoots as well as you now. I’m a damned miracle worker.”

  The Rangers laughed.

  “And Sikes?” asked Geiger.

  “He could shoot when he got here so that’s not a problem. He had some trouble disassembling the AK, but I’ve seen two-handed Rangers have more problems with it than Sikes. He cracked it and he’s good to go. He can find a rifle that might suit him better after training like most trainees do, if he wishes.”

  “What about the handcart?” Geiger asked.

  “C’mon, LT, it’s a handcart,” Art said. “They know how to pull it, load it, and maintain i
t. They’re good to go.”

  “Good,” the lieutenant said. “Corporal Braden. Land navigation and tracking.”

  “That’s a quick group we got, LT. The only person that had any trouble was Trahearn, and he went at it like he was busting rocks. He kept swinging till he got it, and once he did… he’ll be a good one, LT.”

  “Remind you of anybody, Lew?” Art asked with a grin.

  Braden smiled. “Yeah, me. That kid ain’t the smartest tool in the shed, but he is determined.”

  Braden glanced at a paper he held in his hands.

  “We covered it all, LT,” he continued. “Map reading, land navigation, operation of lensatic compass, and basic tracking techniques. They got a handle on it.”

  “Sergeant Tucker,” Geiger said.

  “Sir, I covered field protective measures and use of the radiation mask. Very quick group of trainees, save for Trainee Trahearn,” he said. He took a notebook out of his pocket and smiled as he glanced at Corporal Braden.

  “I wrote this down yesterday,” he said clearing his throat and holding the notebook in front of himself dramatically. “I quote, ‘Trahearn makes up for his lack of smarts by being one pugnacious young man, reminds me of Lew Braden,’ end quote.”

  The Rangers laughed once again.

  “They are all up to speed, LT.”

  “Good. Do you have a report from Ranger Tibbs?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Roger that, LT. I’ll just read it. ‘Ranger Patrick Tibbs, Supply and Logistics, Geneva Ranger Post. Field radiation detector and field radiation cleaning unit instruction and evaluation went well. Trainee Hays was most impressive, very good on technological matters. Trainees did fine with the rad cleaner, it is not a difficult feat. Some trainees had initial difficulties with rad meter, but less so than most trainee classes. All demonstrated proficiency with equipment satisfactorily.”

  “All right,” Geiger said with a satisfied look. “The trainees have already been through basic first aid, interpersonal communications, and patrol techniques, so we are ahead of schedule. Ranger Louis will start the trainees on the TROG this afternoon. Thank you, gentlemen.”