by Kane Gilmour
Now outside the building and making his way between the abandoned cars in the road, Knight felt some of his normal cool persona returning, despite the fact that all he was armed with now was the knife. The creature’s roar had completely incapacitated him and he tried to analyze whether the noise had maybe triggered a dormant childhood terror, but that explanation didn’t feel right. He figured something in the beast’s vocalization had instigated a severe fight or flight response-except he was too paralyzed to fight and too full of hallucinatory fear to even consider taking flight.
There was no sign of the speeding white things along the road, but he had seen them go back into the glowing sphere, as if regrouping or afraid to be left behind, should this energy dome wink out like the others had. Knight squatted down low behind a garishly blue Ford and looked at the pulsing wall of light. The dome showed no signs that it was going anywhere anytime soon.
“Bishop? Where you at?” Knight tried his communicator again, but there was no response from his partner.
He moved from one car to the next, making his way toward the river. He wondered if the creatures could swim. They didn’t really look built for it-all sinew and claw. Still, when the creatures were upright, they looked like bipeds. If man can learn to swim, there’s no reason to think these things can’t. As Knight stepped onto the boardwalk adjacent to the water, a blur of movement in his peripheral vision made him pause.
Crap.
He could make out at least four more of the things tearing around the street. He looked for a pattern, but they moved chaot-ically, almost as if they couldn’t see him, or didn’t yet have a target. Knight glanced back to the water. Ten feet, and he could jump into the river. But will they follow me into the water? What if they swim better than a human?
“KNIGHT! INCOMING!” Bishop’s voice bellowed from the direction of the river.
That was all it took to get Knight in motion. Unfortunately, it was also the impetus the creatures needed to unite in pursuit of him.
He sprinted blindly for the river, moving in a straight line, whereas the beasts still needed to weave in and out of the abandoned car obstacle course.
Knight reached the river’s edge and saw the water level was a good ten or fifteen feet below the concrete lip of the boardwalk. But his speed carried him out over the water. A screeching noise filled the air, and Knight twisted in mid-dive to see the return of the Crescent.
The plane sped into the Bund historical district, firing rockets and cannon fire at the street, where Knight had been seconds before. He looked back to the water just before he hit and saw Bishop bobbing in the slow current on the other side of the river. He didn’t see the cars exploding and flipping in the air behind him as the Crescent turned the street, and the creatures skittering over it, into a swath of white, meaty slop.
A roar ripped through the air.
Knight’s mind registered what it was and what it was about to do to his body.
He tensed.
But nothing happened as his head submerged beneath the murky, polluted water. The liquid muted the fear-inducing scream, protecting Knight from its effects.
When Knight surfaced to take a lungful of air, snapping his head back to fling his shoulder-length black hair out of his face, he heard the powerful detonations on the road behind him, but no longer heard the roar of the white creatures. The Crescent pulled up and banked, coming in to hover over the pickup point at Bin Jiang Park, opposite the bend in the river.
Knight stroked over to where Bishop waited, a million questions on his mind, but Bishop had had plenty of time to think of the answers and preempted him.
“They can’t swim or maybe just don’t want to. They didn’t follow me into this muck.” Bishop pointed down at the thick stew of brown swirling waters. At least the current wasn’t particularly strong. “I heard the start of that roar of theirs before going underwater, and it was enough for me. Aleman got in touch. Says the sound causes some kind of physiological reaction. Adrenaline dump into the heart to the point of paralysis. Could even kill you, if you got scared enough.”
“I can believe it,” Knight said, lowering his eyes.
“You caught the full blast,” Bishop said. It wasn’t a question. “I called in the airstrike. Deep Blue wants us to regroup and gear-up. Starting with getting you a new headset.” Bishop swam over and pulled Knight’s earpiece away from his head. Knight flinched from the move. Bishop looked at Knight without a word. He hadn’t missed the flinch.
Bishop held up Knight’s earpiece, and Knight could see that the plastic frame was damaged and a small wire was hanging out of it. He hadn’t even noticed.
“We need some kind of headsets that’ll protect us from that roar.” Bishop watched Knight, his generally implacable features filled with concern for his friend.
Knight held his gaze for a moment, then looked away, still treading water. “Let’s just say it was pretty fucking terrible, and leave it at that.”
“Yeah,” Bishop turned and stroked overhand for the shoreline. Knight followed him.
Bishop crawled onto a concrete boat launch and stood slowly, looking back across the river at the energy dome. Before his eyes, the dome closed in on itself, disappearing in seconds, until only a glowing dot was left at the center of its radius, like an old cathode-ray TV set, moving down into a tiny dot of light before turning off completely. Or was it just a trick of the eye? An imprint left on my retina?
He reached down to help Knight out of the water. The little Korean man was usually so slick and self-assured. Not only was he a stellar sniper, but as a wealthy, well-dressed ladies’ man, his personality was the most confident on the team. But the sound of that roar had really rattled him.
Bishop felt more than a little rattled himself, but more so over how damn hard it had been to shoot the creatures. It was one thing to know that you could drop them with a. 50 caliber round. But shooting something that moved in a blur? He shook his head. Wasn’t easy. He could hit them by firing in the path of their trajectory, but it was sloppy, wasted a lot of ammunition and he still missed the damn things more frequently than he hit them. Plus, the bastards hit like a freight train. He absently rubbed his right shoulder, which he had torqued when he rolled across the pavement after one of the creatures slammed into him.
“Nice timing,” he told Knight, and nodded with his head across the river, where the energy dome had been.
Knight looked across the river and sighed. “Think the thing is sentient?”
Bishop looked aghast. “The dome? No. Let’s hope not. The creatures are enough to deal with.”
They boarded the Crescent and took their seats, the vehicle launching them into the sky. Once they were at cruising altitude, Knight headed to the small galley on the ship, intending to fill up on protein. Bishop got in touch with Aleman and passed on their mission status, as well as his own personal observations about the dome.
When Knight came back, handing him a chocolate protein shake, Bishop gladly took it and leaned back in his chair, not looking at the little man. “Ale gave me good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”
Knight considered a moment, slurping liquid protein through a straw. “The good, please.”
“He’s got some full-body armor suits waiting for us at the next hotspot, which should help protect us in hand-to-hand against those things. They’re not bullet-proof, but he says they’re made of impact-resistant memory foam. Not too bulky. Should give us a nice edge, especially if they barrel into us, like that one that knocked me across the taxi.”
“Nice,” Knight removed his straw and gulped the rest of his shake. “Where is the next location?”
“London. Ready for the bad news?”
“Not really, but hit me.”
“Our original destination was Cape Town, South Africa, but there wasn’t just one energy dome there. There was a whole cluster of them. Cape Town is gone. The whole city. Gone.”
“Damn,” Knight stretched the word out. “Clusters?” His
face looked ashen, as if he had seen not just one ghost, but an entire convention of them.
TWENTY-THREE
Fenris Kystby, Norway
Zelda Baker, callsign: Queen, was out of ammunition. She had one more magazine for the M9, but she knew she’d never have time to load it. The thing at the end of the narrow corridor moved like lightning, leaping from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. She had fired 15 times and missed every shot but the last. Now, the thing stopped, hanging upside down from the ceiling. It looked at her through one of its baseball-sized eyeballs on the outside of its blocky head.
Queen had been expecting something strange since Rook had told her about the mind-controlled villagers and the Nazi experiments that had gone on in these labs. But she wasn’t prepared for this. It looked at least eight feet tall, but it crouched and sprang more like a cat than anything humanoid. Its translucent skin covered coiled muscles and an almost transparent white substance that looked to her like blood. Its claws, teeth and even the skull appeared clear, allowing her a view of its brain, which looked like congealed cottage cheese.
Definitely didn’t evolve on this planet, she thought.
Like the other members of Chess Team, Queen had faced unusual beasts before, but this one was odd. It had charged her at first, and she had fired all her bullets at the creature as it careened toward her. But then she hit it and it stopped.
Now it just looked at her.
She couldn’t tell if the creature was intelligent or not. Its oversized blocky head just remained fixed to the side. A lone bulbous eye locked on her face, the other looking in a different direction. Neither of them moved.
Maybe its vision is movement based?
She shifted her hand very slowly to the hilt of her KA-BAR knife-slow enough to not set off a motion detector. Her eyes never left the beast as her hand crept across her body.
The creature remained still.
Dust fell from the tunnel’s stone and brick ceiling, loosened by the recent bullet impacts and the holes punched by the creature’s claws. Loose streams of sandy soil poured down from cracks in the ceiling, too. Not so much that she thought the tunnel would collapse, but enough that the grit would get in her eyes if she moved.
Is that it? she wondered.
She decided to wait the thing out, staying absolutely still until it did something. Her fingers grasped the non-slip handle of the 7 inch knife, ready to pull it from its sheath and go to work on the creature.
But it didn’t move. The creature waited, too. She watched it and noticed that the dust was settling and the streams of grit stopped falling.
The creature tilted its head to the side.
Queen still held the M9 in her left hand-useless weight. Or is it? Queen’s eyes went up to the ceiling again, and then she slowly moved her gun hand, but not as slowly as she had moved the knife hand. She wanted to see if the beast would notice the movement.
As soon as she moved her hand, the beast turned its head again. The round eyes locked onto the movement. Queen smiled. When she moved her hand, it had been backward, as if cocking her arm for a throw. She launched the empty M9 at the ceiling between her and the creature, where it waited on the ceiling. The creature began to move toward the flying weapon, but then the gun struck the weakened brick ceiling. A cloud of dust and dirt spurted from the ceiling before the pistol smashed to the floor, sending up another plume of dust.
Queen took two quick steps forward and to the side, but the creature’s eye didn’t swivel in her direction. It remained perfectly still as it had done before.
The dirty air confuses it. Her eyes widened. They use some kind of sonar, like a bat, she guessed. The eyes must not work as well as they appear to. Maybe low light blindness. So they compensate with sonar. But sonar is no good if the air is full of debris. Sensory overload.
She took two more steps forward, but this time moved closer to the center of the tunnel, and directly behind the stream of sand and dry dirt trickling from the ceiling. She took one more step right up to the dust, so the stream of dirt was coming right down in front of her face. The upside-down monster hung less than a yard from her position on the other side of the little falling soil.
Queen raised her knife.
The creature’s eye twitched in her direction.
The stream of soil slowed-her only cover, about to be gone. Queen abandoned caution and leapt forward, the wicked blade of the KA-BAR leading as she burst through the trickle of dust and plunged the knife into the creature’s eye.
The knife slid into the creature’s clear skull, up to the hilt, from the force of her thrust. She pushed until the beast’s body toppled over. She didn’t release her pressure on the knife until she felt the tip of the blade strike the stone floor.
She squatted next to the creature and wondered what it could be. She was about to remove the blade from the dead thing when a small skittering sound came from down the tunnel behind her. She withdrew the blade with agonizing slowness. Have to make it like I’m not even moving.
A rock rolled across the floor and hit the wall of the tunnel with a loud clacking noise.
Queen drew in a breath.
The newcomer was less than ten feet behind her. The blade of the knife came free and Queen spun in a whirl, raising the knife for another killing stroke.
But that stroke never came. Instead came a noise. A roaring vibration like a hundred jet aircraft in her head.
Her arms turned to limp spaghetti.
The knife fell from her hand.
Her legs quivered and her teeth chattered.
Her eyes watered and a thick river of drool slipped from her mouth. She never saw the second beast. Its roar filled her world, and her eyes clamped shut trying to force out the terror, but as she fell to the ground, her whole body shaking like an epileptic in the throes of a seizure, she could utter only two words:
“Daddy, no!”
TWENTY-FOUR
Manhattan Island, NY
3 November, 0630 Hrs
Major General Michael Keasling’s permanent scowl didn’t alter when he saw the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter settle in the middle of the cordoned-off city street, but he did breathe a sigh of relief as its rotor blades whipped dust and grit into the sky. The situation in New York hadn’t gotten out of hand yet, but he knew it would. He had 200 men out of Fort Dix, and another 200 on the way, but he knew they wouldn’t be sufficient for this mess. He also suspected the two men emerging from the helicopter might not make much difference against such an alien threat. Still, these two men were among the most capable soldiers he had ever known, and they were both his friends.
Keasling absently raised the fingers of one hand and stroked the smooth skin under his nose, where he had worn a mustache for most of the last twenty years. With the recent receipt of his second star, he’d made a few simple but profound changes in his life. No more coffee and more time in the gym for one-although with his short, stocky barrel shape, he’d been muscular enough. He wasn’t looking to become more intimidating but to increase his lifespan with cardiovascular exercises he hadn’t bothered with since long before he had become a General. His wife was long in the grave from the cancer, but his daughter had just had her first little blonde-haired son, Liam, and Keasling now wanted to live long enough to see the boy become a man. Funny how family changes everything, he thought.
The loss of the mustache wasn’t as physically life changing as the exercise, but he found his hand returning to the lack of it repeatedly, as if the loss of hair signified this new phase in his life as much as it reduced the appearance of his age by a decade. As the two men approached him on 6 ^th Avenue, and the helicopter took to the dawn sky behind them, Keasling thought about the chaos of the present situation and wondered, not for the first time since he had received his second star, if maybe it was time to stop. He knew he never would, though. The vicious cycle of thought further fueled his gruff demeanor as he stepped forward to greet his friends.
“King, you look like the fucking Mic
helin Man.”
Both of the recently arrived men were dressed in personal body armor suits that looked to Keasling like they were wearing sculpted pillows on their bodies. The General knew the suits were an extension of research carried out by the Pentagon and a Canadian man that started out making a suit impervious to grizzly bear attacks. Lewis Aleman’s genius had been further applied to the designs and the result was an incredibly lightweight, tactical battle-suit, which, while it would not stop a large-caliber bullet, would significantly reduce damage from impacts, falls and knife-or in this case, claw — attacks. Keasling’s people in the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) had been involved in the Pentagon’s end of development on the suit, so he was aware of its capabilities. He understood the necessity of such body armor. Still, they looked like the Tempur-Pedic memory foam pillow he used during the few hours of sleep he got at night.
The suits had multiple sculpted angles that resembled the boxy radar-reflective surfaces of stealth aircraft, and the color scheme for the entirety of the suits was a grayish black, reinforcing the similarity. Both men wore full-face-mask helmets that kept their identities hidden as well, but Keasling knew each man by his gait.
“General,” Deep Blue said from behind his armored faceplate. “If King is the Michelin Man, what does that make me?”
“Very dignified and presidential, sir.”
“I was going to say my valet,” King started, “but dignified works too.”
“Show some respect, Delta Boy,” Keasling said, but he was smiling as he said it. King and his Chess Team cohorts were all former Delta, and they were used to a level of informality and a lack of ranks not approved of in other branches of the service. However, in just a few short years, Keasling had gone from being constantly irritated at the informality to having immense respect for Jack Sigler. The two men had become close friends.
