Silence the Living

by Brian Bandell

  “You think you can keep us here like we’re goldfish? We’re not your pets!”

  “You wanted a home on this Earth right? Now you have it.”

  “One day, when you’re begging us to end your life to halt your agonizing pain, you’ll regret playing these games. We won’t forget.”

  Those words lingered as Moni got dressed. No more. She wouldn’t live in fear. It was her turn to hunt.

  Moni set out on foot, a more stealthy method of travel, under the late afternoon sun. She hopped over the rocks and sand, barely slowing for even the steep inclines. Then she felt it again, a person’s mental signature. It came from the valley, just north of where the immigrants had passed before. There were fewer people now. That couldn’t be a good sign.

  She approached cautiously, scoping out the area with her binoculars from atop a mountain. The pickup truck had its windows smashed but otherwise looked in working order. Blood stained the back window. She counted one body in the driver’s seat, five splayed out in the dirt as if they were running and three more in the back of the truck curled up in a cowering position. None of them had heads.

  36

  The sights that greeted Harry Trainer when he dipped his mask below water never ceased to captivate him. Turtles paddled steadily along. Green algae tattooed the rocks below the trio of fish darting by before they hid between the tree roots extending past the shoreline. He couldn’t enjoy all of that natural beauty much longer, not when he knew what waited for him in subterranean waters, in the places untouched by sunlight.

  He wished he could stop right there in the spring, roll on his back and watch the light filter through the water’s surface. His companions, five Navy SEALs led by Louis Pierre, didn’t stop and drink in the scenery. They made a beeline for the underwater cave like a submerged jet squadron. All for the better, as this pristine paradise wouldn’t survive if the mutant had its way.

  Taking measured breaths through his full face mask, the Lagoon Watcher aimed his head lamp toward the birth canal of the cave and kicked his flippers. They moved apart and together, apart and together, as they propelled him into the cave behind the military men.

  “You keeping up with us okay, Mr. Trainer?” Pierre asked through the radio communication system inside his full face mask. His voice squeaked like a mouse from the helium-heavy air as he pressed the talk button on his neck.

  The scientist gave him a thumbs up. The SEALs wouldn’t let a civilian use their military-grade diving gear with a microphone, but they lent him an ear piece so he could follow along on their radio frequency. Once they got deeper into the caves radioing to the surface would be difficult, so they deployed circular transmission beacons to relay their radio signals to Ho’s receiver at the mouth of the cave. This communication system, which required a beacon placed every 20 feet, would also track their location. However, each beacon would die after 90 minutes so they still should keep their bearings in the bare-walled caverns.

  Trainer’s flashlight came upon a sign emblazoned with a grim reaper and scythe. “Experienced cave divers only.”

  A good way to prevent tourists from dying down here and polluting the sensitive habitat with their abandoned scuba gear. Normally, he didn’t feel the sign pertained to him. Today was another matter.

  Signs of marine life abruptly disappeared, revealing barren rocks. At first, the tunnel narrowed so much he could have barely crouched. It opened wider as the pathway descended. He faced a 70 degree dive into what resembled the mouth of a huge grouper. As he leveled out, the cave floor became soft, swept smooth by the current. Atop them and along the walls hung a gallery of limestone, carved into a spongy shape by millenniums of water leaching through the soil and becoming acidic enough to eat away at the porous rock. Some of the holes resembled eye sockets. Trainer pictured it as swimming through a catacomb, walls piled high with skulls. He drifted closer to the wall and reached out. Feeling the rock beneath his gloves, Trainer reminded himself not to succumb to anxiety. This would be the wrong place for one of his panic attacks. Breathe slowly. Don’t be an oxygen hog.

  He watched the bubbles from the divers in front of him flutter to the roof of the cave, where they gathered in tiny air pockets. It almost looked like cracks in the cave where the water touched the surface, but Trainer knew that was an illusion. Dozens of feet of rock separated them from the open air. Unlike a free water dive, they couldn’t simply surface in a minute if something severed them from their air tanks or wounded them.

  Studying his laminated map of the Peacock Springs cave system, Trainer estimated they were closing in on the room where Riggs had seen the mutant. Pierre held a waterproof tablet containing a map of the cave with the positions of the swam beacons glowing red to track their progress.

  Trainer saw only what the flashlight tied to his wrist, his head lamp and the lights of the SEALs ahead of him could reveal. Even with 12 of their torches scanning the cave as they waddled further inside, they couldn’t cover every patch of darkness. The cold blackness shrouded crevices, nooks underneath arching rocks, and side passages that a human would be ill-pressed to fit through. Trainer swept his flashlight between them, trying to clear them all. Do this enough and he might see eyes staring back at him. He didn’t know whether they’d be purple or human-like, but he knew they’d come, surrounded by four long limbs and meat-rendering tendrils.

  All of a sudden Trainer regretted not bringing a spear gun like the SEALs carried. He didn’t want to damage the habitat. His knife wouldn’t do more than provide the mutant with a pick to remove his flesh from between its teeth.

  He spotted a cylindrical imprint on the cave floor. There was a heavy depression and then a long drag mark. Beside it, he found something black and rubbery. Part of an air hose. This had been where Riggs had found the Russian diver’s air tank, but he’d been in such a hurry to leave that he left their equipment behind. No sign of it now.

  What would an aquatic mutant want with an air tank? Perhaps it took the metal to feed the alien-bred bacteria.

  “There’s something here,” one of the SEALs radioed in.

  The SEALs ahead of him stopped inside a chamber as wide as a typical living room. They gathered around something. At first he didn’t recognize it. Then three of the soldiers concentrated their light beams upon it and a shiver ran down Trainer’s spine. Morsels of shredded flesh and muscle swayed from the exposed bone of the carcass splayed across the cave floor. Bits of soft tissue leached from the few organs that remained. Clearly large enough to be a man, his ribs had been crushed by blunt trauma. The head had been removed, not surgically like the aliens did it, but ripped off with vertebrae-shattering force. Trainer scanned the chamber with his light until he found the head placed atop a pedestal of rock. The Russian’s blue eyes gazed blankly into the black depths. They were the only part of his face that hadn’t been scraped to the bone like a chicken breast.

  They found the woman’s body a dozen feet away. She’d been cleaned out more thoroughly, not leaving a lick of flesh, yet also delicately as her skeleton remained intact. What made Trainer cringe was her positioning, placed on her back with her arms extended above her head and her legs spread wide. Had the mutant sexualized its victim like a human?

  “Two bodies located,” Pierre somberly reported over the radio.

  “Copy that,” Ho replied from the surface. “I’ll note your location.”

  While the SEALs formed a circle around him, Trainer documented its handiwork on his camera. Zooming in for tight shots, he didn’t see any purple welts that would be telltale signs of an alien infection. When he moved his underwater lenses from the corpses to the surrounding chamber, Trainer found divots in the limestone that didn’t match the natural pattern of erosion. Something had latched onto the wall with a familiar hook pattern. He showed Pierre.

  The SEAL shined his wrist light on them and announced, “These marks in the limestone are its tracks. Look for them as we move.”

  After running a pH test and finding the water was
n’t overly acidic, Trainer bottled a sample for further analysis above. Then he wrote a message on his dive slate, but Pierre didn’t notice him as the SEAL gazed into the dark pathway that stretched beyond. Trainer tugged on Pierre’s flipper. The soldier whirled around as deftly as an eel, releasing a gaggle of bubbles, and pointed his spear gun at his chest. Pierre’s eyes went from wide to narrowed in annoyance

  At least I’m not the only one on edge.

  Trainer posed a question on his slate: “Should we recover the bodies and head topside?”

  One of the SEALs, a pale guy named Calvin Dobbs with the sack of swarm communication beacons around his waist, reacted with the same desperation in his eyes that a child gets when scheduled for a shot. The youngest member of the team had looked the most confident topside.

  “Their families deserve closure, right sir?” Dobbs asked.

  Pierre held a bit of sympathy in his dark pupils, but much more resolve. “We’ll retrieve them on the way out. Our mission’s primary objective is to kill the target.”

  Trainer nodded. The group exchanged psi readings for their tanks. He couldn’t believe he had the lowest, even worse than the worry wart Dobbs. Still, he had a good 50 minutes left. He should be sitting cozy on the surface in less than an hour, but that seemed a long ways away.

  How can I think about my own comfort at a time like this? All of those fish and turtles I saw above are as good as dead if we don’t bag ourselves a big, ugly trophy.

  They continued on through the cave. Its walls constricted, becoming almost a crawl space. They barely had room to maneuver, especially if something lunged at them from the shadows. The shards of limestone rock on the cave floor grew larger. They were likely chunks that had broken loose from the wall or ceiling, another hazard. Trainer noticed Pierre up ahead come to a stop. He’d just entered a sizable chamber with a sandy bottom. There were several passageways they could go through, but the corners were so dark that the Lagoon Watcher couldn’t tell the difference between a path and a shadowy crawl space. Pierre nodded to Dobbs, who dropped a blinking swarm ball to highlight their location. The SEAL’s leader pulled out his map and checked his compass. There were two documented paths. Neither of them led to a surface opening anywhere soon. Pick the right direction and they’d run headlong into the mutant. Pick wrong, and it could sneak up on them from behind. Hard to paddle forward and watch your back at the same time.

  Pierre swam toward Trainer. He handed him his infrared scope and pointed toward the passage leading north. “Look and tell me what you think.”

  Switching off his light, Trainer gazed through the scope and saw a glowing hot line on the cave floor, just like the other symbols the mutant had followed all the way across the state. The aliens had lured it here for a reason.

  A pH test found a slight elevation of the acidity level in the water. It could be a normal fluctuation, after all the extra acidity of this water created this cave in the first place.

  They followed the line north. It soon disappeared, but the narrow cave gave the six men little choice but to head onward. This time Trainer took the second position, right behind Pierre, so he could show him another infrared marker should he find one. They encountered a passage where boulders covered the cave floor, leaving plenty of hiding spots. The ceiling became cavernous. It felt like swimming along the bottom of an underwater canyon.

  Trainer heard a deep rumbling. He reached for Pierre. A massive displacement of water came from above and swept them apart.

  37

  Moni approached the decapitated bodies until she became paralyzed by the sight. The murders were fresh, and yet so little blood stained the sand and the truck. The severed edges at the base of their necks were impossibly smooth with the spinal column unlocked yet undamaged – the precision of alien nanotechnology. The attackers had taken not only their heads but reached through the holes left by the decapitations and fished out their choicest organs. As she’d seen them do before, the possessed beings had drained their blood to siphon off its iron content.

  Moni knelt and covered her acid teary eyes with both hands. The aliens had found another host. The harvest had begun.

  In Florida, they had amassed a stockpile of human brains and biomaterial from all kinds of animals and sheltered it at the bottom of the lagoon as a kind of engine. It enhanced their mental powers and accelerated the production of mutants, as well as the alien habitat. Aaron had snapped the only photo of it while on a dive. He’d dubbed it “the worm”.

  Where could they locate an aquatic worm in this arid land? More concerning, she doubted they would harvest humans instead of infect them unless the aliens already had a sufficient number of human hosts for their task.

  Moni peered into the back of the truck. One of the victims was a young woman with a cartoon kitten sticker on her shirt, probably a good luck gift from her child. If Moni had intervened while passing them earlier, these people would still be alive. Her heart sinking, she bowed her head and rubbed her stinging eyes. Add nine names to the long list of people dead because of her. She should have found the courage to stop Mariella at the beginning, she should have encased herself in cement like the menace she was…there were so many paths she could have taken besides recklessly coming here and giving them another chance to unleash a massacre.

  She realized she wasn’t alone. Moni detected the mental signatures of two people approaching from the south through the valley. Listening closely, she recognized one as Ranger Blake Natonaba. Normally she wouldn’t mind gazing into his gray eyes all day, but the headless bodies might spoil the ambiance. The other person she didn’t recognize, but Moni could tell it was a female who thought in Spanish. Something had horrified her.

  In another few minutes the ranger would see her. Moni could slip away first. Why put him and his friend at risk of contamination? As much as she longed to see his smile again, how could he look upon this scene with anything but disgust? That’s the true reaction she should inspire in men. Damn her pretty face.

  Yet, if she ran, that might put him in more danger. The infected host could still be out here, using this trap as bait for more victims. Moni shuddered at the thought of Blake’s uniformed body lying in the dirt, his head cleft from his neck.

  Turning around and kneeling down, Moni clenched her jaw between her hands and twisted it until it resembled the face of the woman he’d met before, not the brute from the casino. She nearly grinned as he strode nearer, but she thought better of flirtatiously welcoming him to a murder scene. The grief-stricken little girl trudged along with her face buried into his hip. Moni’s expression became somber in a hurry.

  Those dark eyes pooled with sorrow, the timid shuffling of her tiny feet, Moni had seen it before. What seemed like a lifetime ago, she’d coaxed Mariella out of the mangroves along the lagoon that contained her parents’ corpses. This time the girl wasn’t infected, as became clear from her whining at the sight of the bodies on the ground.

  The child collapsed into a sobbing heap. “Donde mami?” she wailed.

  Blake scooped up the girl, about six years old, and sheltered her tears with his shoulder. Moni had been so startled by the child that she nearly forgot about him. Never mind the stoic cowboy from before, what she saw now with the deep concern on his brow, the tender way he held her and the caring in his eyes made Moni wish she could have been half as compassionate when she helped children.

  “Maggie, holy shit, what are you doing out here at this horrible…this horrible massacre,” said the ranger, reminding Moni that he didn’t even know her real name. “I found this poor girl scurrying all by herself and she led me here. Did you see what happened?”

  Catching herself before she instinctively sent a mental response into his head, Moni drew her phone and typed a message into the notebook app: “Got here too late. You’ve seen this before?”

  “Not with people, but a local farmer lost some cattle this way. Had his sheet metal shed stolen too. The whole damn thing lifted off its foundation! What about you?
You’ve been roaming these hills, though by the look of those sturdy new boots of yours and that sat phone, you made a supply run.”

  She glanced at her hiking boots bashfully as if he’d complemented her on a dress. That’s as much skin as she’d let him see in her condition. She typed out another note.

  “I’ve seen photos from Florida. The invaders are here. You should go.”

  Blake sternly shook his head. He clenched his lips and raised his chin, highlighting the cheekbones of his Navajo bloodline. “My ancestors have called this land home for thousands of years. We fought the Spanish, we fought the Americans when they sent the Army to kick us out, and we’ll fight whatever the hell you call these. If you want to join our battle, you’re more than welcome. You look like a warrior without a tribe.”

  Finally, someone who asked for her help instead of warning her she should hide because she’s so fragile. Aaron showed confidence in her, but he also wanted to protect her. He held onto the mistaken belief that she could transform back into the old Moni. Blake saw her for what she’d become, a woman built for the rugged wild.

  She typed a message for him. “I work best alone. I’ll find the ones who did this.”

  The girl’s face emerged from her hiding spot against his side, prompting him to set her down. She stared right at Moni. Those black eyes transfixed her. They longed for a feminine touch. No one could replace her mami, but she needed a motherly embrace. As the child mulled taking a step toward her, Moni drew back.

  “Has visto mi mami?”

  Blake explained that the girl asked whether she’d seen her mother. Cringing, Moni didn’t know how she should respond. How could one so young comprehend her mother’s death? Shaking her head might give the girl false hope that her mother had escaped, leaving her futilely awaiting her return. She never hated being silenced more than at that moment.