SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

by Jonathan Maberry

  I raced the edge of a clearing and looked upon a scene from hell itself.

  It was a war zone.

  Three-sided and totally bizarre.

  On the far left side of the clearing, squatting down behind a tumble of boulders, were eleven Serbians. Eleven. All of them heavily armed. All of them yelling and firing.

  On the opposite side of the clearing were two of my guys. Bunny knelt beside the trunk of a massive tree, his Benelli combat shotgun smoking and roaring in his big hands. A few feet away from him, Top had a rough splint on his left leg made from tree branches and canvas strapping from the helicopter. His pants leg was dark with blood and his brown face was pale and grainy, but he held his Sig Sauer in rock-steady hands.

  In many ways that was what I was expecting to see. Two groups of combatants engaged in some kind of a stand-up fight, with me as the X-factor that hopefully gave my side the winning edge.

  Hope springs eternal.

  Life, on the other hand, sucks.

  Between the two sides, standing in the center of a hail of bullets, was something so very wrong.

  It was a metal ball.

  A big, broken metal ball.

  Well, it looked like a ball. It was round, at least. Forty feet across, dull silver, with a double row of colored lights, most of which were smashed and dark. The remaining lights flickered with a sluggish green glow. A hundred feet behind it was the total ruin of a second one. That one had split open and burned; the shell was coated with black ash. Both balls lay at the end of long trenches and there were mounds of dirt pushed up in front of them. From the angle and the depth of the trenches, it looks like they’d come in fast and hot from a long way up.

  Between the two balls were several humped forms. Maybe they had been spiders, or something spiderlike, but the force of that double impact had torn them apart and flung burning pieces across the ground.

  Then I caught movement beyond the first of the balls. A form moved from the lee of the big craft and scuttled toward a small boulder.

  The Serbians immediate shifted their barrage from trying to kill my men to trying to destroy this thing. The shape darted back to cover and a loud, high-pitched chittering sound trailed behind it.

  Speech? Or the fearful cry of a creature in peril. Absolutely impossible to say.

  All of this happened in a second, but my mind replayed it in slow motion because a lot had happened in that second. I ducked down into shadows to process it.

  The thing that had come lumbering out was a spider. Okay. That just happened. It was maybe eighty pounds, gray-green with bright blue and yellow spots.

  I recognized those spots.

  A giant spider.

  I had to give that a moment. Even though I’d been expecting something like a giant spider, let’s face it --you never really expect to see a giant spider. It’s like checking in your closet or under your bed and seeing a real boogeyman. You’ve been afraid of it all this time but you don’t actually think you’ll ever see it. Then bang!

  So, yeah, okay. Giant spider.

  Giant fucking spider.

  By a big silver ball that might be some kind of landing craft.

  Or, if the world was even more insane than I thought it was, a spacecraft.

  I had to ask myself if I was ready to accept the reality of a giant fucking spider from outer space. Not the easiest question to ask.

  And it’s a real bitch to answer.

  Every molecule of your body, every neuron in your mind wants to say, “No, bitch. Get real.” But my eyes had just seen it. My team and a bunch of Serbians shooters were clearly seeing it, too. Reacting to it. As much as I might have wanted to, I couldn’t dismiss that as being a product of my own warped mind. This was happening to all of us. It was happening.

  Giant alien spiders.

  This entire chain of logic and acceptance took maybe a full second.

  Then my mind shifted gears to analyze the scene the way a professional soldier should. The way a cop should. I’m both, so it was my job to make sense of this based on evidence and assessment.

  There were two ships. One was clearly destroyed, the crew dead. The second was damaged, though I couldn’t tell how badly. Some of the lights were still on, the hull looked intact.

  Survivors?

  At least one.

  I thought about the extent of the web network up in the trees, and the bodies I’d found along the game trail. Could one of these creatures do all that?

  My gut said no.

  That’s when I took a closer look at the boulder the spider had been trying to reach.

  It was covered with soot and partly hidden by the shadows of a small pine tree.

  As I studied it, the boulder moved.

  Slowly, weakly.

  It wasn’t a boulder, of course. As it shifted I could see yellow and blue dots. And blood. Dark red and as thick as tree sap.

  A spider. Wounded, maybe dying. Trapped in the no man’s land between the two shooting positions.

  I hunkered down behind a thick tree trunk. So far no one had spotted me, which was good. The Serbs were closer to me than my own guys, but that could be a good thing.

  I tapped my earbud and very quietly said, “Cowboy to Sergeant Rock.”

  There was static.

  There was a burst of noise that sounded like a marbles bouncing around in a steel drum.

  And then…

  “…Rock to Cowboy. Repeat Sergeant Rock to Cowboy.”

  “This is Cowboy. I’m on your eight o’clock, fifty yards back.” I could see Top turn his head to stare past the Serbs. I moved my head two inches out from behind the tree and back again. Just enough for him to spot me. Not fast enough to spook the Serbs.

  “Damn glad to hear your voice, Cap’n,” said Top.

  “Damn glad to be heard. Status report?”

  “Doing moderately poor. Got a busted leg. Farm Boy stood a little too close to some shrapnel. We got the bleeding stopped, but we ain’t going to be running marathons.”

  “Hoped for better news,” I told him.

  “Yeah, well life’s all blowjobs and puppies, ain’t it?” said Top. “You got a plan?”

  “Working on it,” I said. “Want to tell me what in the wide blue fuck is going on?”

  “Don’t know much,” said Top. “Pretty sure one of those round ships clipped our bird. Took us both down. Farm Boy got me out, but the crew…”

  He didn’t need to say. Didn’t want to say it, and he knew I didn’t need to hear it.

  “Hostiles converged and we lost the package. We’ve been looking for you and playing tag with them. Trying to recover the package. And then our friends joined in. Been a moderately interesting picnic in the woods.”

  “Copy that.”

  “What have you got on our ‘friends’?”

  “Big and ugly, but they don’t like the Serbs.”

  “Why not?”

  “Call it a failure to bond,” said Top. “Soon as the hostiles saw them they opened fire. Cut a couple of ‘em down. And Bunny thinks that it was a Serbian RPG that took both of their birds down. Rocket hit them while trying to hit us, and that was like cracking pool balls. Serbs hit them, they hit each other, and one of them hit us. Now the Spiders from Mars are pissed off and looking for some payback.”

  I almost laughed. Top wasn’t one for pop culture references, but he was old enough to remember Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie’s best album.

  “Copy that,” I said. “So…basically these Serbians dickheads pissed off our visitors from the great beyond.”

  “Works out to something like that. We saw a couple of those critters ambush the Serbs. They do not play nice.”

  “I saw the leavings. Does all this make them friendlies?”

  “Enemy of my enemy is my friend,” he suggested.

  “All well and good if we’re talking bipedal mammals, Top, but how’s that going to apply here?”

  “I’ll be god-damned if I know, Cap’n,” he said, and
that’s when I caught it. Soldiers tend to use trash talk or banter a lot. Sometimes we forget why. It’s not because we actually make light of the dangers and horrors of combat, it’s not that we feel we’re invincible killers, or that we’re the life-takers and heart breakers of legend. No, the jokes, the bullshit, the light-hearted chatter is all about pushing back the fear. The genuine fear that any rational person feels when they’re about to go into battle, or when they’ve survived one fight and they wonder how much of their supply of luck they’ve already squandered as the next fight approaches. I know Top is tough. None tougher, and I’ve met the best of the best. He’s an experienced soldier who has been in more firefights than most people have had hot dinners. He’s walked with me through the valley of the shadow of death so often his footprints are indelibly cut into the ground. He’s helped save the world. The actual world.

  Right now, though, hearing his voice over the radio as killers and monsters, he was right there at the edge of it. Of his courage, of his ability to process terror, at the limits of his potential for handling stress. He was on that ragged edge where control is by no means a ‘given’, and circumstance and overwhelming odds make failure a rather likely option.

  It hurt me to hear it. To know it.

  It hurt just as much to feel it in myself. To know that even the pattern of my thoughts – the almost blasé way in which I’ve been accepting and processing the impossible data from today’s events – are the product of my mind trying to make light of it. To do otherwise would mean dealing with the reality of it.

  Now, crouched down here at the end of the hunt, the bravado – inside and out – was burning off. Two of the three members of my team were injured. We had guns and ammunition, but we were badly outnumbered.

  And there were the spiders.

  I joked about alien spiders before, not I had to face that. Not just giant spiders. I’ve dealt with too many mutation and genetically-altered freaks in this job to really be brain-fried about that part.

  Alien, though.

  Alien.

  A couple of years ago my team skated on the edge of a case involving a kind of Cold War that had grown up around technology that may – or may not – have been scavenged from crashed UFOs. I’d met two people who claimed to have some alien DNA mixed with their own. I’d seen a craft that I’m pretty sure did not come from around here – and by here I mean our planet and maybe our solar system.

  So, even with all that you’d think I’d be prepared for what we had here.

  You’d think that, but you’d be wrong.

  Seriously, say the phrase ‘alien space spiders’ aloud and tell me if that’s ever going to fit comfortably in your head. Ever.

  I could feel the change in my body as the absolute truth of it burned off the last of my ‘this can’t be real so I’ll just cruise with it’ self-deception. It started in my fingertips. They went cold right around the time they started to shake.

  You know why?

  Because in every single fight I’ve ever been in, it’s been good guys versus bad guys. Human good guys – me and my crew – versus human bad guys. Those bad guys, no matter how many or how bad, were still human. They were a known quantity. I could look at them and know how much force was needed to crack the hyoid bone, how many pounds per square inch it would take to shatter an elbow or knee, how exactly to rupture a kidney or spleen with a certain punch. All of that was knowledge already in my head. Even when outnumbered I was on safe ground.

  But... aliens?

  Spiders notwithstanding.

  Aliens?

  In my earbud Top said, “Cap’n—?”

  “Still here,” I said. “Working it through.”

  “Work fast,” he advised, “‘Cause something is happening.”

  He was right.

  Something was happening.

  And it all happened real damn fast.

  -9-

  There was a flash.

  A series of them.

  Suddenly the whole forest went from a collection of shadows in purple and gray to a uniform white that hit the eyes like a punch. I cried out and reeled back, the rifle falling from my hands. The light was so bright that closing my eyes, squeezing the lids shut didn’t do it. I jammed my fists into the sockets.

  I think there was a sound, too. Not an explosion. Something else. It was impossible to describe. I felt the noise as much as heard it. There was a sensation like a heavy vibration. Low and powerful, but it was like something inside my head was vibrating rather than something outside that I was hearing. There’s nothing in my experience that will make sense of it. The feeling – sound, sensation – was like how I imagine a microwave oven would sound. That kind of invisible, relentless, and powerful wave of force. My ears rang the way they would if I was standing next to a giant bell, but there was no real noise.

  The sound and the vibration were terrible. Thank God they only lasted for a few seconds.

  When it passed, whenever it was shut off, I collapsed onto the ground as completely as if I’d been dropped from a five-story roof. I felt breathless, smashed flat.

  Then I heard something else. A familiar chittering sound.

  Right behind me.

  I rolled over. Tried to roll over. Reached clumsily for the AK47, and as I turned I saw something bulky come rushing at me.

  Two somethings.

  They were big and gray and spotted with yellow and blue dots. But they weren’t the same as the spiders I’d already seen. These had some kind of mechanic implants on their bulbous heads. Like a kind of hood, or maybe goggles. Hard to tell. It covered most of the creature’s many eyes. And they came at me really damn fast. The first one slammed into me and knocked me flat again. It leapt onto my chest and bent low toward my throat, snapping at me with jaws that snapped like pincers. Clear drool hung from the gaping mouth and splashed like acid on my skin.

  I cried out in horror and disgust and punched the thing in the side with an overhand right. The spider staggered off of me, but then it immediately recovered and jumped back. This time its front legs jabbed at me, striking pressure points in both shoulders and leaning into them. My arms went dead. Just like that. The creature glared down at me, chittering in that high-pitched voice of theirs. The real eyes were dark and intense; the machine eyes burned with red fire.

  I tried to twist my hips to buck it off; tried to kick. Tried hoist my dead arms to bash it off, but it countered every move by striking another pressure point with another of its powerful, articulated legs. It had more legs than I did, and somehow it knew enough about human anatomy to shut me down.

  Then the second spider came scuttling over. It was smaller and its carapace was crisscrossed with scars that gave it a look of great age. And, somehow, of great power. Like it had earned those scars. Like they told its story. It had the same metal helmet covering half of its monstrous face, but even this was dented and dinged as if from hard use. As the creature advanced to climb atop me, the younger spider retreated in clear deference. The spider studied me for long seconds, but what it saw and what it thought were beyond me. I had no way to interpret the dark lights that burned in its eyes.

  And yet...

  The scars, the aggression, the combat skills. The cold confidence the creature seemed to exude – collectively, perhaps they did tell me something. They suggested something.

  These were different from the other spiders. These were clearly warriors of some kind. Perhaps these were the special operators who did for their race what guys like Top, Bunny and I did for ours. Maybe I was letting my imagination run amok, or maybe I was seeing what was in front of me. Seeing what was actually there, rather than the horror-show image suggested by their alien appearance. Or, maybe it was the warrior in my head, the killer in my soul, who saw and recognized some kind of kindred spirit.

  The spider turned and leaned toward my dead right hand. It bent low toward the bloodstains on my skin and on the cuff of my right sleeve. It sniffed at the blood; then bent closer and tasted it.
>
  The chittering sound rose higher and higher for a moment, then faded away.

  It turned quickly and looked at me again. The dark eyes fixed mine and for a moment we looked at each other with a kind of shared understanding that I’ve only ever had with fellow warriors on a battlefield. The kind of shared awareness that cannot be spoken, but which speaks volumes in that private language of the true warrior. Alexander the Great could have looked into the eyes of General Patton, and they despite a million differences they would have nodded to one another, understand something that cannot be expressed in actual words. I’ve even had that exchange with enemies, when catching the eye of the man you have come to kill, but fate opens a window in the smoke and fire and for just a moment you both realize something that no one else could ever grasp. Maybe not even most of your own troops. It’s reserved for those people who are defined by war, who are born to it, and who know that they will walk forever on the blood-soaked ground while a black and featureless flag ripples in the wind above them.

  The spider studied me, and then slowly, slowly, it backed away, crawling off my body until it stood in the trampled grass. The younger spider looked from his older companion, to me, and back again. Confused. Not sharing in that moment of insight.

  Forty yards away the Serbians had recovered from the explosion of light and sound and were firing at the metal ball. My guys were returning fire, but it was a fight they couldn’t win. The Serbs were spreading out, sending squads out in a flanking maneuver that was very quickly going to catch my guys and the remaining spiders down by the ball in a shooting box.

  “Do something,” I snarled to the older spider. Sure, I know it’s stupid. I don’t speak spider and he clearly didn’t speak English. But he turned to watch the Serbs.

  He did two things.

  First he snapped out at me with one of his legs and the round tip of it struck me on the shoulder. In a nerve cluster. He hit me really hard and the pain was ex-fucking-quisite. I screamed and flopped around like a beach mackerel.

  Then he twisted a leg so that he touched a fitting on his helmet. Immediately he and the other spider dropped down flat and curled their arms around their heads.