Silence the Living

by Brian Bandell

  “I’ve fortified my position. The mission comes first. Move out!” Colon responded as two arm-sized claws punctured the armor overhead. He flung his viewfinder goggles away and strapped on his helmet and hazmat gear.

  Colon wished he could send his wife and son one more message. He couldn’t say he regretted taking this mission. When he thought of his father dying in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion, he felt pride. The man had stood up for his principles and his homeland. Colon hoped Ernesto would remember him the same way. If only he could see his boy grow up, assuming he would have a world to live in.

  The Gila monster’s claws widened the hole by a foot. The claws retracted. A torrent of scalding rain poured through at Colon and his men. Klem took aim with his mask fogged up.

  “Hold your fire until you have a clear shot,” Colon ordered.

  It extended its forked tongue down into the tank. Colon couldn’t move as the tongue wormed its way toward him. Wider than his head, its fork poked and prodded his facemask, making it smolder from acidic saliva. Colon ducked away but resisted swatting it. What good would it do?

  “Taste this, asshole!” Klem leapt forward and smacked the tongue with the butt of his rifle. The tongue scooped him up underneath his arm and hoisted the screaming soldier up through the hole.

  A bone-jarring crunch rang out from above. Then, a rain of Klem’s blood.

  “God, oh God,” Rivera muttered.

  Colon lifted his chin and gazed up, seeing the tear widening to reveal the alien lights of its eyes. The purple hue filled the cabin. No more reason to be cautious, he blasted a hail of bullets at its face. Rivera joined in. The Gila monster head quickly disappeared.

  The only thing Colon heard was the acid rain slowly eating the armor. The lemon-colored liquid filled up the tank like a toxic swimming pool. Colon and Rivera balanced on some equipment to avoid the scalding as they waited. The beast hadn’t gone far. Their bullets hadn’t hurt it very much. At any moment, its tongue or claws could fly down and snatch them. Were the aliens toying with them?

  The answer arrived soon. The cowboy plunged through the gash in the armor, spraying acid rain everywhere. A splatter of droplets landed on the leg of Colon’s suit and started eating away at it. The cowboy’s boots sloshed through a puddle of acid as if it was merely spring water. He kept the brim of his hat low as the dust settled, then he raised it and met Colon with his glowing eyes and a purple-gummed grin.

  It was the New Mexico ranger he’d met at the massacre of migrants, the one whose trashed truck they’d found in Columbus.

  “Come join me for a shower.”

  71

  Before Colon and Rivera could raise their guns, the ranger violently spat out his teeth. They penetrated Rivera’s mask. The ranger’s detached teeth gorged on the flesh of Rivera’s face like mini piranhas as Colon watched in horror. Rivera fell face first in the acid puddle, another man leaving children and a wife behind on Colon’s watch.

  The ranger’s smoldering purple orbs eyed the human. He flashed a wide grin with all violet gums. One by one, his new teeth popped into place, all of them carnivorous canines.

  Colon heard a terrible voice inside his head. “Lose the weapon or these will be in your face too.”

  He could shoot the ranger, trade a life for a possessed body. But stopping the ranger would require a kill-shot to the brain, and the aliens would know of Colon’s decision the moment he made it. Colon dropped his gun. The ranger grabbed Colon’s loose-fitting hazmat suit and dragged him towards the downpour of acid rain.

  “No! Not out there!”

  Colon pried at the ranger’s fingers. His grip was strong enough to restrain a tiger. He emerged from the hole in the overturned tank. The giant Gila monster waited.

  Colon’s head was like a grape before its mammoth jaws. It opened its maw, pelting him with the stench of foul death. With a cruel grin on his face, the ranger shoved Colon’s head inside.

  “Stop!” Colon screamed. He closed his eyes, unable to stand the sight of that forked tongue, still stained with Klem’s blood.

  The ranger pulled him away and dumped him on the ground. As acid rain ate at his suit, Colon scrambled to his feet and inspected the withering fibers. Perhaps he had a minute or two. When his time ran out, he’d feel it. He lunged toward the column of tanks. The ranger reeled him back and led him another way with swift purpose.

  Colon spotted their destination through the fog, the toxic waters of the maar lake.

  The voice blasted through Colon’s head again. “You had to come here, didn’t you?”

  He stared at the ranger. His mouth didn’t move, yet he spoke.

  “Your kind doesn’t live in this place. You don’t need it. And still, you can’t just let us build our home here. You had to eradicate us.”

  “We’re defending our cities before your storm arrives. We have a right to live too.”

  The ranger seized Colon by the nape of his neck and hoisted him off the ground.

  “Our storm was to keep you away. We already have most of what we need. But we could always use one more.” The ranger palmed the top of his cranium, sizing it up like a melon. “When your brain joins us for eternity, then you’ll understand. See your new home.”

  Momentarily, Colon’s vision became clear through the fog. He saw the barrier, and beyond it, down hundreds of feet, a lake of yellow, scalding acid. In the middle, he spotted something that resembled a pile of scrap metal melded with human and animal cadavers. The great worm that had served as the alien energy source in Florida had been rebuilt, only at four-times the size.

  The thought of his brain forever entombed in the slimy worm terrified him, but Colon focused his resolute stare on the ranger’s purple eyes. “I already have a home. You’re the one trespassing.”

  The ranger seized Colon under his arm and stepped across the boundary of the shield. The infected man suddenly lost his footing and was dragged away from the hole.

  Having fallen from the ranger’s arms, Colon rolled over and saw a large black-feathered hawk with a reddish tail yanking the infected man by the collar. As the ranger swatted at it over his head, Colon kneed the ranger in the back and broke free of his grip. How’d the bird survive the acid rain? Why would it save him?

  The ranger yanked out a handful of his own teeth but the hawk retreated before he could throw them. Pausing in his fight, the infected man gazed into the distance. Colon did the same. A new cloud of black, darker than the smoke, approached. It was a swarm. A swarm of bats, hundreds of them. Surrounded by bald wings and sharp teeth, a humanoid figure rode in the center. The ranger scurried off.

  A great rumble nearly knocked Colon off his feet. The Gila monster darted across the sand toward him. Two artillery shells landed around it, coming from tanks that had disobeyed his orders and stayed behind. It moved too fast. Nothing would deter it from its target.

  Colon ran. He didn’t know whether the Gila monster, the bats, or the acid rain – now through a tear in his hazmat suit and burning away at his flak jacket – would kill him first. With a whoosh of air that half spun him around, a huge collision occurred behind him. Colon kept running towards where his tanks went, still unable to see them, and didn’t look back. It wouldn’t matter. A pair of powerful hands scooped him up.

  Colon recoiled in horror as he met a face that resembled Moni Williams. The woman from the mug shots was no more. That seal-like skin, those metallic teeth, the sorceresses gaze in her dark eyes, she looked far more alien than the ranger. Of course she did. She’d been possessed far longer.

  “You want me all for yourself? Here I am!” Colon shouted, hoping she’d ignore the surviving tanks.

  Moni peered over her shoulder and nodded for Colon to look. The bats were smothering the Gila monster, tearing off chunks of it like a swarm of killer ants. The beast shook and thrashed but they were relentless. When they punctured its hide and flocked inside, Colon could stomach no more.

  She hoisted him over her shoulder. Colon kicked
and elbowed at her but she wouldn’t let go. She raced toward the nearest tank, C Unit. The acid rain pounded on the back of his hazmat suit. By now it was more like a trash bag full of holes, with his clothes underneath barely protecting him.

  “Sir, we see you coming. Do you copy?” the C Unit driver said through his headset. “We can’t identify who you’re with. Should we open the hatch?”

  Moni scaled the tank and set him down near the hatch. If he commanded them to open up, she could slip inside and kill all of them. Staying out here would mean certain death. They could complete the mission without him.

  “Negative,” Colon replied. “Proceed to the target.”

  Nodding her head in resignation, Moni knelt across from him with the hawk now perched on her shoulder obediently. “I’m sorry we had to meet again this way, Alberto. I’ve caused so much ruin for your friends and for your country. I can’t apologize enough.”

  The voice inside his head sounded just like Moni. Had the woman’s mind survived inside that mutated body? It could be a trick.

  “Everything that’s happened here is my fault. I thought I could contain them inside me. I couldn’t. But I’m not running any more. I’m going to destroy every last cell that escaped. Complete your mission. My fight is with the offspring of my foul blood.”

  This time Colon stared at her silently. If she wanted to wipe out his soldiers, she wouldn’t have destroyed the tank-cracking monster. Colon’s body marinated with his sweat inside the crumpling hazmat suit, barely protecting him now. That’s not a bad reason to trust her either.

  “Open the hatch!” Colon ordered his men.

  As they ushered him inside, he gazed up at Moni. Making no effort to follow, she winked at him, sans eyelashes.

  The tank’s gunner closed the hatch. “Was that a woman out there?”

  “I don’t know what she is now,” Colon huffed as he cut away his pants leg, stripped off his tattered suit and put them in a biohazard bag. “Don’t shoot her, but watch her closely. Moni has deceived us before.”

    

  Liquid death, that would decimate any human, poured out of the sky. The acid filled Moni with vigor. She weaved through the smoke blowing off the toxic maar lake and struck the final blow against their giant Gila monster. Its severed head was the size of a golf cart, a crushed one.

  Moni felt the presence of her bats swirling through the air. Her iron army had done well, overwhelming the aliens’ larger mutants by sheer numbers. Some were missing though. They’d gone off course. Mentally seeking them out, she found them sinking their iron fangs into a tank.

  She hadn’t ordered them to attack the military. Their aggression took over. If that had been an exposed person, they would have killed them.

  “Come back here,” she told her stray bats. “Follow me and I’ll satisfy your appetite.”

  Her black-winged soldiers reformed into a dense wave and swept through the last line of mutants emerging from the lake. Coyotes, snakes, vultures, none of them stood a chance.

  In a flash, her connection to them was severed. Her bats dropped to the sand like scattered leaflets. Even her hawk slumped off her shoulder in a faint. Moni caught the bird before it smashed its head on the rocks. Possessed Ranger Blake treaded toward her over the field of fallen bats. He had friends.

  “You think they’ll obey your puny brain when all four of us order them to drop dead?”

  Moni instantly recognized the other three. They were the men who had tried to assault her in the gas station when she first passed through Las Cruces. After she fought them, they had chased her and Aaron into the desert.

  They’d finally found her, but they weren’t the same men.

  72

  The Lagoon Watcher tugged at his handcuffs until his wrist bled. As the great drill penetrated the limestone and severed the vital root system of the trees, the ground shuddered in pain. Vibrations shook his feet. The Earth cried out to him in agony.

  He jerked at his handcuffs again. If he could stretch another foot, he’d snatch his phone from where Captain Dobbs had dumped it on the ground and make this ecological crime go viral.

  Trainer whispered Leonard Ho’s name and caught his attention. He not-so-subtly tilted his head toward his phone. Although he initially nodded, Ho then glanced at the SEALs making their battle preparations. Captain Dobbs eyed him. The NASA scientist wimped out.

  Trainer couldn’t blame Ho this time. Those soldiers wore faces of men minutes from a battle. Seven of the SEALs, including Dobbs, donned full-body wet suits and scuba gear, with only their hoods and masks off as they waited for the drill to finish its work. The divers would take no precautions to preserve the habitat this time. Each had underwater rifles, miniature laser-guided bombs and underwater grenades. Lines on their backs tethered them to mechanical pulleys on heavy concrete blocks on the ground, which would allow them to be hoisted out of the hole. The remaining three SEALs wore their regular camouflage fatigues and stood watch over the hole with conventional assault rifles. Nothing could go in or out unless it’s one of their own troop, they were told.

  “If the acidity level is similar to my last dive, then you should be okay in those wet suits,” Trainer said. “But if the alien environment has thrived and grown more acidic, you won’t last more than a minute. Test the water first.”

  Dobbs waved him off. “I’ll run the pH when I’m down there. We need to attack soon after the hole opens or we’ll lose our surprise.”

  The drill operator radioed Dobbs they were about 15 feet from the caverns, so they could expect at least two more hours of standing around. It would have taken much longer with a rocky mantle, but Florida’s porous limestone offered relatively little resistance. A pump siphoned away the ground water to make the digging go smoother.

  Seeing the pristine spring waters sucked from the ground and unceremoniously dumped into a runoff pool made the Lagoon Watcher think of a bloody crime scene on a sidewalk. After killing the monster, Dobbs said they’d flush out this section of the underwater caves with bleach to eliminate all traces of the infection. That was assuming the military left anything besides a massive crater. The Lagoon Watcher noticed a beehive-shaped bomb the size of a bumper car they kept on a rolling track a short distance from the hole.

  “Keep visualizing the game plan in your minds because when the window opens, we’re mission go,” Captain Dobbs told his men. “Locate the target and relay its location. If I say evacuate, hurry your ass out of there because the heavy ordinance is coming in.”

  The Lagoon Watcher groaned as Dobbs eyed the bomb.

  “We’ll exterminate these water bugs, sir,” said one of the SEALs in diving gear.

  Just then, the drill’s speed revved up. The grinding sound from underground ceased as the drill spun with no resistance besides air. The soldiers exchanged confused stares.

  Dobbs didn’t miss a beat. He climbed up to the drill operator and patted him on the back. “I guess that cavern wasn’t as deep as we thought. Pull her up.”

  As the captain hopped down and fitted on his dive hood, Trainer shouted, “I was down there and I guarantee it was 45 feet deep. You’re well short. If you don’t believe me, call your brother for a change and ask him.”

  “Maybe the air bubbles in your blood distorted your brain,” said Dobbs, to laughs from his men. “Whatever the reason, if the hole’s clear, we’re going down.”

  With the drill halfway out, Trainer waved Ho over. When Ho saw the SEALs were focused on their combat gear and not the biological expert, he snuck to Trainer’s prison at the generator, a good 30 feet from the hole.

  “You saved me once so I’ll tell you this and, once you see I’m right, you better promise to never gloat again. Okay?” Trainer said quietly.

  Ho rolled his eyes, but nodded anyway.

  “Stay far away from that hole,” Trainer said.

  “Don’t worry. If you’re scared, I’ll hold your hand.” He extended his palm sarcastically.

  Trainer swatted i
t down. Ho stayed beside the generator with him, trying to offer annoying chitchat about the weather. Trainer signed, regretting that he said anything.

  Once the drill moved aside, three heavily-armed soldiers surrounded the hole and shined the flashlights on the ends of their assault rifles down it. Standing just behind the scouts, Dobbs and the other six on the dive team had their full gear on, including helmets, and were holding their underwater rifles at ready.

  “See anything with a lot of teeth and bad breath?” Dobbs asked his scouts.

  “I can’t tell, sir,” said a SEAL scout. “The water’s starting to fill back up, and fast.”

  A geyser of water burst forth from the hole, not with steam and tremors like from a hot spring, but with great pressure as if a hose deep within the Earth sprayed upon its assailants. No sooner than the water touched the forest floor, fumes of decay rose through the air.

  Acid turned the leaves and branches black. It had a much worse effect on the three uncovered soldiers who stood at point-blank range. Trashing about, their faces and necks melted into puddles beneath them. Their gaping mouths mustered no screams, not a sound.

  As the shivering Ho clutched his arm, Trainer saw a patch of singed leaves a few feet in front of him, and another behind him and to his left. They weren’t safe if another blast came. But that wasn’t their most immediate problem. The SEALs in protective dive gear, including Dobbs, ran over to aid their fallen brothers.

  “Wait! Stop!” Trainer yelled.

  Gunfire rang through the forest, tearing through torsos and tree trunks. The three fallen soldiers stood, assault rifles in hand, their eyes a deadly shade of purple. Five of their former colleagues lay dead. Dobbs and the other surviving SEAL gazed upon them in shock, both armed with only underwater rifles and other aquatic weapons. Trainer had seen a Russian version of that rifle in a museum once. It wasn’t much better than a dart gun above the surface.