by Bob Mayer
Nosferatu stepped outside. The first thing he noted was the warships overhead. He saw dozens, the heavier concentration over Seattle. But there was one almost directly above the island. They were coming down through the clouds.
He’d felt something in his half-sleep stage. Something was changing and here it was.
Then he noticed the water. A strange surge was rippling in a line through the Sound. It washed ashore, barely a few feet high.
He didn’t know it, but that was the remnants of the tsunami from the Wyoming’s nukes.
He shifted his focus to the sky.
Nosferatu stepped into the shadow of the entranceway. Dragons took wing out of the warships. He took another step back as one swooped close by, spewing parasites. They hit the trees and ground, a squirming, twisting downfall.
Nosferatu had no desire to see any more. He ran the way he’d come. Opened the lid and slid in next to Nekhbet. He sealed it.
And waited.
SURVIVAL SILO, KANSAS
Coughing echoed throughout the silo. The condos were soundproofed, but there were people in the halls and the stairwells. Some families had locked sick members outside of their condo, trying to stay isolated. This was the latest in a series of eye-opening events that made Tremble realize he’d seriously misjudged most of his clients; actually he’d misjudged humanity.
Michael’s family had taken the news of his death poorly, until Doc explained it was a virus and was likely spreading. Then the focus had turned inward. It was a case of everyone for himself or herself.
One family had tried to get on the elevator and hijack the Beast to make a break for it, but Jack had stopped that. Power was set to night mode, not just to conserve fuel from the generators, but to give the illusion that it was time to sleep and maintain some sort of normalcy with the world outside.
Tremble wiped his forehead. His hand came away covered with sweat. He was a running a fever but there was no point going to Doc. The former Special Forces medic had confided to Tremble that at this point he was giving those who came a shot, telling them it would help, but it was just a mild sedative to calm them down.
There were nothing that could be done except ride this out.
Tremble was startled as a figure loomed up in the dimness.
“Come with me,” Jack said.
Tremble followed his security man out of the crew bunkroom to the command and control center on the top floor.
“I forgot this was here.” Jack sounded almost contrite. In one corner was a periscope. It had been hidden behind a locker containing weapons. “I got so used to the video monitors. This is from the original silo. It didn’t get torn out when the cap was poured.”
“What’s going on?” Tremble asked.
“Look,” Jack said.
Tremble pressed his face against the viewport. It was overcast and dark. It appeared to be snowing on the flat Kansas prairie. This limited visibility to around a quarter mile.
“Ash,” Jack said, as if sensing the question before it was asked. “Last we heard before everything went dark was that India and Pakistan pretty much wiped each other off the map. Add in the nukes in South Korea and Taiwan and the weather isn’t going to be the same for a while. Look to your left.”
Tremble grabbed the handle and tried to turn the scope, but it resisted.
“Takes some muscle,” Jack said.
“I got it,” Tremble snapped. He forced the scope, a grinding noise accompanying the movement.
There were figures in the ‘snow’. Walking, more stumbling toward the silo. Men, women, children.
“What’s wrong with them?” Tremble asked.
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “They started approaching about fifteen minutes ago.”
Tremble noted the bodies on the ground, which hadn’t been there before. “What did you do?”
“Watch,” Jack said. He slipped open the cover on a series of switches, a mirror to the one in the sniper blockhouse above their heads.
“Don’t,” Tremble said.
“Just watch,” Jack said.
Tremble forced himself to peer out.
Jack throw a switch. There was a flash and the flat crack of a Claymore mine exploding echoing through the feet of reinforced concrete separating them from the outer world.
The hundreds of steel ball bearings cut a swatch through the right side of the approaching crowd. Limbs were torn off, bodies eviscerated.
But the others acted as if nothing had happened. They kept coming, lurching forward as if against their own will.
“What the?” Tremble muttered. He squinted. There was some—thing? Beyond the people. Some things. Big. Looming in the swirling ash. Barely visible. Vaguely humanoid but too big. The head was oversized and the face was squirming? “What’s behind them?”
“That’s the million dollar question,” Jack said. “But I’m assuming that’s our aliens.”
“No,” Tremble said. “The things the news was showing were just balls with arms and a lot of eyes. Those are, I don’t know what the hell those are.” One thing for sure, they weren’t simply giant humans. The heads were too big and there was something wrong with all the parts. Tremble wasn’t sure he wanted a better view.
“What’s wrong with the people?” he asked. The closest were pressed against the fence and gate, which was only fifty feet away.
“I don’t think they’re people any more,” Jack said. “They’re fucking zombies.”
“There’s no such thing,” Tremble said.
“Then you tell me what the hell they are,” Jack said. “Your guess is as good as mine. But people, humans, don’t walk into a mined zone, see others blown away, and keep coming.”
“How long with the fence hold?” Tremble asked.
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “But either until there’s enough zombies pushing up against it or one of those monsters standing in the back decides to help out.”
EARTH ORBIT
It wasn’t hard to find the Battle Core.
Turcotte glanced at the flashing yellow light. Things he should have thought of before occurred to him now, too late. If the Fynbar lost power, did that also mean the air system? Or just the drive? What about heat, a rather important thing in space?
“What about what about?” Turcotte muttered. He glanced over at the empty co-pilot seat. Where was Yakov? Where had the mothership FTLTed to? Were they still alive? What was Mrs. Parrish up to? Could Yakov and Nyx and Leahy maintain control of the mothership?
The pounding in the back of Turcotte’s head was the steady tap of a hammer to an icepick in the base of his skull extending to his forehead. He wanted to shake his head to dismiss all the questions pouring through, but he was afraid it would hurt worse. He was at the point where he was willing to do just about anything to get rid of the pain.
Die?
The Core was directly ahead, its approaching edge looming over the curvature of the Earth. There were warships above it, providing security from an outside threat; a very unlikely event. They were tiny dots compared to the Core. Turcotte imagined one of them would bring about his demise. If not, there was always a blast from a particle accelerator on the surface of the Core.
Either would be fast and final.
He headed directly for the Core.
“Fuck it,” Turcotte muttered. He accelerated. His hands were tight on the controls. He was leaning forward.
A warship loomed, the arms bristling with weapons. Turcotte trained the Tesla cannon on top of the Fynbar at it, but didn’t fire. He waited for the warship to engage, but it didn’t
Turcotte relaxed slightly and slowed down as the Core loomed. There were weapons nodules on the surface, but none fired. Turcotte noted warships coming and going from numerous portals in the pitted black surface of the Core. He stopped the Fynbar several miles away.
He hadn’t expected to still be alive so he had no plan.
If you know the enemy and you know yourself, in a hundred battles you will never be i
n peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy, but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.
Turcotte had always thought Sun Tzu a bit simplistic but simple was true. He felt like he was in the third, really bad situation right now. He was uncertain of himself and had little clue what the Swarm truly was. What did it want? Why did it Reap, and what was the purpose? If it couldn’t be defeated, perhaps he could gain some intelligence and leave it behind for others to find? Perhaps the mothership would return some day? Perhaps pigs will fly.
Turcotte directed the Fynbar toward one of the portals.
MIDTOWN MANHATTAN
The Assassin watched the lowest arm of the nearest warship touch down on the southern edge of Central Park. She’d already lased the distance: 2.1 miles. That was a bit beyond the normal range of her rifle but she did have a great height advantage.
As the arm touched ground, the warship came to a halt. Out of openings all around the tip, the Metamorphosis poured forth. The Assassin had seen many terrible and horrible things in her time in the military and then as a hired killer. Nothing in the worst hellhole on Earth had prepared her for what came out. Her first emotion was relief over sparing Marla this vision.
The spiders skittered in all direction, followed by Naga and Cthulhu and Medusa. The arm emptied, the warship lifted, rotated another arm down, and disgorged the same. As the Assassin watched, a spider ‘ran down’ a man and sprung from the ground onto his back, the claws digging in to hold on. One of the parasites detached and slithered into the man’s mouth. When he came to a halt, in the thrall of the Swarm, the ‘spider’ let go and moved on, searching for another target.
The dragons were ahead of these beasts, spewing forth their parasites in strafing runs.
As the other creatures spread out, humans infected by a parasite numbly filed in the other direction, toward the warship and into the arm. She didn’t want to speculate on what happened in there.
So far none of the dragons had sprayed the Empire State Building with their parasitic vomit.
So far.
There was a burst of semi-automatic firing not far away on 34th near Madison. Four people dressed in black were making a run for it. All were armed and firing at the closest spiders and a Naga. The spiders were getting blown away. The scales of the Naga seemed to be weathering the 5.56 rounds. The Assassin considered giving fire support, but it seemed worthless given the odds.
She reconsidered as all four turned and focused on the Naga slithering toward them, aiming at the heads, specifically the eyes.
That took a dump truck load of courage. The Assassin aimed at one of the Naga heads and fired. The six-inch long, half-inch diameter round, with a hardened depleted uranium core, punched a hole through the snakehead. That head dropped like a stone. Two of the other heads also went down from the four people firing.
The Naga kept coming, sliding over its own dead heads. Which was indicative of a lack of intelligence, as it became a tangled mess.
The four humans, however, had a more dire and immediate problem as a swarm of spiders encircled them. They fired, but there were more creatures than any amount of ammunition a person could carry.
The Assassin powerlessly watched as they were swarmed under. It took only a few seconds, then the four humans were lurching toward the arm of the closest warship, their weapons lying in the street.
Clusters of spiders began entering each building. One very long and thick line was heading directly toward the Empire State.
It was just a matter of time. The Assassin smiled grimly. She’d faced the reaper many times in the past. After a while, a person in her line of work began to numb out at the prospect.
Surprisingly, she wasn’t as numb as she would have liked. She’d never planned on going to prison, death was preferable, but she’d given her solution for that problem to Marla. The thought of becoming one of these slack-jawed individuals stumbling into the Swarm warship held no appeal.
She adjusted the scope on the Barrett .50 caliber rifle. Her position’s extreme height was something she’d never had to calculate before, so she adjusted as best she could, knowing the velocity of her round, the distance to target and the elevation.
She centered the reticules on her target.
She exhaled, stopped breathing, and squeezed the trigger. She savored the recoil of the big gun. With a muzzle velocity of 2,779 feet per second, it took the round almost four seconds to reach the target.
She fired twice more before the first round hit dead center in the orb on top of the closest of the eight Medusas. It was followed, slightly over a second later by another round and then a third.
The rounds punched in, through and out the other side taking with them large chunks of bone, brain matter and grey blood. The creature dropped to the ground.
And something else happened, something extraordinary. All the Nagas and spiders that had come out of that arm of the warship stopped as if the pause button had been hit.
“All right, then,” the Assassin said. “We’re on to something.”
But the Swarm also understood and the reaction was fierce. Every dragon changed path toward this sector. On the ground, all the alien constructs adjusted direction.
The Assassin pulled the Barrett back and slumped down, with her back to the outer wall. She heard a dragon fly by so close, the air swirled from the closest wing tip. Seems the Swarm could leave a Naga tied in a knot, but one of their own?
She waited a minute, then popped up to take a quick look. Two Medusas stood over the corpse of the one she’d shot. The spiders and Nagas were moving again. She couldn’t see the entrance to the Empire State due to the way it was tiered, but she had no doubt they were pouring in. She wondered how long it would take them to climb the stairs?
Dragons were prowling, searching for the source of the Swarm death.
The Assassin checked the Barrett. There was a round in the chamber. She’d expended three, so she swapped out the magazine with a fresh one holding 10 rounds.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then popped up, placing the bipod of the rifle on the outer wall. She began firing, as fast as she could sight and pull the trigger. Both Medusas standing over the dead one went down. Then she fired at the dragons as they converged on her location. Two shots to the head of one of the dragons sent it plummeting a thousand feet to the street below. She hit another in the head, but it kept coming. Her next shot missed.
The dragon didn’t slow down or swerve. It slammed into the side of the Empire State Building with a solid crunch. The building had sustained a B-25 crash, it survived the dragon, but upon impact, the dragon let loose a wave of parasites.
The Assassin rolled away from the squirming flood. She dropped the Barrett and being firing with her pistol. A pointless thing since there were so many parasites and they were so small. But she was a professional and counting her rounds. With two left, she stuck the gun in her mouth just as she felt a parasite slither up her pant leg.
She pulled the trigger.
EARTH
Someone with an imagination would have called the Swarm warships descent right on top of some of the most significant of man’s achievements as deliberate, but the reality was most were located in the center of major population concentrations and it was just tactical considerations dictating location.
The Eiffel Tower crumpled as a Swarm warship descended directly onto it. The Gateway Arch didn’t slow the warship that came down on St. Louis and struck it a glancing blow. It tumbled over into the Mississippi River. The tallest building in the world wasn’t any more as the Burj Khalifa came down along with the Shanghai Tower, Abraj Al-Bait, One World Trade Center and others that were easily crushed by two mile in diameter Swarm warships landing on them.
The warships that landed further apart, in less populated regions, had to spread their invading forces out further, with Medusas ranging miles away to supervise their minion
s. For most species invading an entire world might be time-consuming but the Swarm had arrived in an almost planet-sized spaceship and had the numbers. It also had the experience.
Humans fought back. Mostly disorganized. A handful of military units were somewhat intact and fought battles that were furious for as long as a half hour. A few of the most powerful and organized military clusters lasted even longer, before a warship would come overhead and begin firing its particle beam weapons to destroy the most stubborn resistance.
Overall, though, the Swarm was taking the vast majority of people ‘alive’.
If possessed by a Swarm parasite could be considered alive.
THE FAR SIDE OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM
The Scoop had the wide, open part of the ship directed toward the star. One by one, at the same interval they’d been fired, with almost exactly the same trajectories, the spheres came rocketing toward it. They were bright red, pulsing with the immense power they’d gathered while traversing the star.
Each one hit the hollow interior of the wide part of the scoop, channelized into a single opening where they were recovered and brought inside, placed into their cradles.
Once all 42 ruby spheres were recovered, the Scoop began the journey back to the Core.
ON THE SIXTH DAY: THE REAPING
PRIVATE ISLAND, PUGET SOUND
“What is that?” Nekhbet murmured.
“Nothing,” Nosferatu lied. The sound of parasites slithering over the sleep tube had been going on for a while.
“This Danse you spoke of,” Nekhbet said, slightly more aware. “What was it again?”
“A poem,” Nosferatu said. “Sometimes set to music.”
