Bishop turned his attention to Colbrick, but Colbrick was no longer there. Instead, he was running to the center of the cirque, taking great care as to where he stepped, for the lacerations and mudpots were numerous.
“Let’s go,” Bishop said.
Angela stumbled down the talus to meet him, and hand in hand, they moved over the questionable surface of the cirque. Random patches of seething organic matter squelched below them, and a stench of biological decay filled the air. Embedded and sometimes exposed amongst the rocks and pebbles was a thin, silvery material that looked like the emergency hiking blankets he and his father used to use. Large swaths of the material were connected by taut wire-like lengths. A pang of familiarity hit Bishop.
“Where have we seen that before?” Bishop asked Angela, pointing at the ground.
Angela scoured the ground and touched the material with a bandaged hand. “Science Channel,” she said. “They were talking about these things called solar sails. The illustrations and videos looked similar to this.”
“This is the seed-mother,” Bishop said. “I can feel it.”
“My God,” Angela said as they maneuvered to the center. “How long has it been here?”
“A long time,” Bishop said. “Way before our meteorite tracking systems were in place.”
“We have no chance of destroying it,” she said, turning to him.
Bishop thought of Yutu pulling himself out of the burning apartment. “No one is ever really powerless.”
The vaporous air flickered with energy, and they saw something shoot across the sky—one of the projectile seeds. A second later, another projectile zipped across the sky, landing who knows where. The closer they got to the cirque’s center, the more frequent the projectiles became. Phosphorescent, blue spheres whipped into the sky in all directions like rotten, popped corn kernels.
The dense vapor cleared, and they stumbled upon Colbrick who was kneeling and peering into a crevasse the size of a small car.
“I can see it,” he whispered, motioning to them with his hand. “A big opening—about twenty feet down.”
Bishop gazed into the hole with his headlamp and stumbled back when he saw the interior of the seed-mother. An opening with synthetic, smooth and grey walls at least fifty yards long tunneled back into the ground, which must have formed over the seed-mother as it rested here during the Gelasian period of the Pleistocene. Numerous coiled tubes emanated from what looked to be stalls housing invasive creatures in various stages of development. A nursery, Bishop thought. Some of the larger creatures inside apparent birthing pods were encased in a kind of placenta, similar to the one they’d seen the frequency seal claw out of earlier. Smaller tubes connected to big ones and disappeared into holes in the flooring. Surrounding the nursery area was a foamy red substance three feet thick. Bishop guessed this to be some sort of sterilization foam meant to protect the nursery from rogue microbes and other contaminants. They’d seen this on the surface, too. Placed in various locations were dark vats of water. Above some of these vats mosquito-like insects buzzed and swarmed. Bishop assumed the vats must be full of eggs. His attention turned to the stalls, where animals shifted inside placentas that were hooked to artificial nipples that protruded from the wall. Inside one placenta, Bishop caught a flash of red. A tag. In another stall, a robotic arm holding a flashing tag poked into a viscous placenta and then pulled out. The next stall looked to be an incubator, and it held massive eggs off the floor on sturdy-looking pedestals. All along the walls of the dimly lit interior were telescoping and retracting robotic arms. Some of them carried frozen embryos from one container to another, passing them along the wall like prison inmates passing contraband through the bars. A larger robotic arm secured to a track on the ceiling pushed a bulging placenta into one of the tube openings on the floor.
“Oh my God,” Angela said. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing. This is life, guys. Sure, it’s not our life, but it is life.”
To the right of the stalls, closer to their location stood an armoire-sized silver panel full of circular red lights, the same color as the flashing tags. Bishop noticed only two unlit spaces left. They were running out of time.
Bishop turned to Angela as she watched the surreal scene before them.
Angela felt a chill, but also a sense of discovery as a puzzling creature broke free of a placenta, exited the birthing pod, stood, and started nursing from an artificial nipple on the wall. When it finished, it turned and stared right at her. Conflicting emotions and thoughts hit her in rapid succession. The animal stood on four long limbs ending in paws, making her think of the pictures she’d seen of the extinct dawn horse. Its long, upright torso with two forelimbs made her think of a centaur. Was it gesturing to her? My God, I’m the first creature it has ever seen, does it think I’m its mother? A robotic arm came out of the wall and attached a tag to its rump. The tag started flashing rapidly.
Bishop and Colbrick both spoke: “The panel has another light.”
The creature’s large silver eyes and bright red coat made her think of Christmas and Christmas made her think of reindeer. “It’s like a deer,” she whispered.
“We have our own God damned deer, thank you very much,” Colbrick said.
Angela looked around, a feeling of panic growing. “What if we could just dismantle it, capture the animals and study them?”
“Not interested,” Bishop said, his eyes hard. “Colbrick, do you need help with the dynamite?”
The head-high vapor shifted again, obscuring the crevasse.
“God damn it, get this fog out of here,” Colbrick said as he disappeared only four feet in front of them.
“Whatever we need to do, let’s do it,” Angela said. “The fliers—”
A prowling stillness swept over them, like a warm lull before a violent spring storm. Their cochlea’s twitched, catching the faint beating of wings.
Puffs of vapor breezed to the west in unison, and pointed shadows ghosted across the twisted, eastern spires.
Drumbeats of wings. Pounding, piping, searching.
The blue vapor smeared with green luminance.
A psychotic mocking blared off the spires in surround sound. It pierced their ears, distracting and irritating.
The looped mimicry of Colbrick’s shotgun blasts.
“They’re here,” Angela whispered, her eyes wide like a nervous rabbit.
“Get down,” Bishop said. “Move with the fog. Take your shoes off so you don’t make noise.”
They removed their shoes and their packs, moving about the rock with socks, only their breathing potentially giving them away. The vapor bobbed around the cirque like organisms caught in an eddy. Above them, the beating of wings grew louder, and without looking up, Bishop guessed there were at least five big fliers. A flurry of wings and looping gun blasts dove towards them, and they crouched, trying to predict which way the vapor would move. If they guessed wrong, the fliers would be on them in no time.
The vapor shifted, exposing Angela’s cotton sock to the fliers, causing several of the small fliers to dart in her direction, then fly away again as she yanked her foot inside the fog.
The vapor squeezed between them, prying them apart.
They were now all separated in the gloom, each working the changing density the best they could.
Humongous, leathery wings circled above, casting elongated shadows and green phosphorescence. Countless wings buzzed their heads, the looped mimicry searing them and then pulling away, only to come back again.
They know we’re here, Bishop thought. If the fog cleared they were done—done as in eaten alive.
Impaled.
Chewed.
Shit out.
If he was going to die, at least it was going to be with Angela.
The vapor thinned, exposing Bishop’s right leg, and he stepped to a denser patch. Nice recovery. He exhaled. Then he bumped into something and needed every ounce of energy he had to stop from screaming.
It was Angel
a.
He reached for her and held her in the zero visibility, and she cried onto his chest. He squeezed her, cherishing her body, her love, her soul.
“I love you,” he whispered to her.
She squeezed him with great verve, her bandaged hands at last gripping his back.
A shadow passed over them, followed by a hint of green and then another shadow.
They waited for what seemed like an eternity, stepping and ducking in the uneven vapor, dancing the dance of the doomed and hopeless.
A long time ago, Bishop had seen a wildlife documentary on television in which killer whales would poke their heads rhythmically out of the ocean in an unusual, vertical posture in order to observe a seal that was stranded on an ice flow. It had horrified him as a child, and now he knew what it was like to be that seal. The seal never made it, slipping off the ice flow and exposing a flipper. A killer whale that had been under the flow grabbed the flipper and bit it off, and the seal bled to death on the ice.
Fuck all that, Bishop thought.
After another sidestep, he gazed upon the ground and realized he was inches from the crevasse. And he almost gasped when he saw Colbrick halfway down it, one hand and one leg pushed against the wall, the other hand full of dynamite. Bishop tossed a pebble into the hole to get Colbrick’s attention. Colbrick looked up, his eyes pooling moisture.
“What are you doing?” Bishop mouthed.
Colbrick answered with a determined glare and a jerk of his head towards the red, pulsating floor only feet below him.
In an act of friendship and respect, hard, tough Colbrick looked up and saluted Bishop. When Colbrick pulled his hand away from his forehead, the ground shook with a power Bishop had never felt before, knocking debris into the hole. Crackling, blue light flashed through the vapor, stunning all of them with an electrical surge.
They fell to the ground, more concerned about making noise than what pain the rocks would bring. The rocks brought pain. Bishop forced his mouth shut as his ribs slammed into stone.
Colbrick grunted from inside the crevasse.
A patch of vapor cleared, revealing the eastern sky. Bursts of light rippled across the sky, watering their eyes. The ground rumbled and heaved, buckling their knees and chattering their teeth. The sky flashed again in a shocking display of explosions and colors. Eye-welting swaths of orange and white engulfed the world and then retreated.
This is it, Bishop thought as his eyes burned and his skull rattled.
This is it.
Chicago Text Feed
JanineWolf Janine R. Wolf
@ShellyC What the hell is this outside my window
ShellyC, YOU HAVE PHOTO MESSAGE, DOWNLOAD?
DOWNLOAD PROCEEDING…
DOWNLOAD COMPLETE
ShellyC Shelly Caffareli
@JanineWolf Call animal control ASAP
JanineWolf Janine R. Wolf
@ShellyC They’re covering the entire window now. Monsters I saw on TV
ShellyC Shelley Caffareli
@JanineWolf Call AC!
JanineWolf Janine R. Wolf
@ShellyC They pushing on glass, making construction noises, mimicking the L, buses.
ShellyC Shelly Caffareli
@JanineWolf get out NOW
Ursus Arctos Horribilis
After the three hundred and twentieth U.S. Armed Forces casualty, all barriers came under assault by the United States Army and Air Force. The initial blasts of rocket-propelled grenades and incendiary bombs ignited the barriers and sent the new arrivals out into the night like a swarming colony of wasps.
The plan was to burn and crash the barriers and then disassemble them using construction cranes, bulldozers, and strategically-placed explosives. But half of the devices meant for the barriers reached the uncut forest, and in turn, created devastating explosions and fires.
A few cutting-edge, spinning incendiary bombs known as A-T4’s went berserk, shooting past the barriers and into the night sky in blinding streaks of light. A group of pigras which had arrived at Barrier 2 in search of prey were ignited by the device. One unlucky pigra crawled from the black cloud of debris with its legs broken, gibbering out to its dead clan. The calls were answered by a blast of boiling chemicals that drowned the pigra as it screamed, its hairy head arched back and the ridged roof of its mouth exposed.
The bombs continued to fall, destroying meadows and trees.
Streams became polluted. Unlucky forests were set ablaze, and these roaring tempests added to the unholy light that illuminated the Apex Valley. The air filled with smoke, and in the haze, heat, and maddening light creatures of the invasion darted—from pigras to eels to secapods.
And still the bombs fell.
Frenetic energy rippled out from below AH-64 Apache helicopters and A-10 Thunderbolt II jets and ignited the trees like the world’s biggest blow torch. A gang of frequency seals below one of the trees received the brunt, and they panicked into the night ablaze like stunt men, waving their burning limbs in front of their screaming mouths and melting faces. Their cries rang into the chaotic night, mixing with the cries of secapods, eels, and machine gun fire. The eels had it the worst, for the flames ignited their gaseous forms—the biological electrical systems a dangerous flame attractant. The blazing eels zipped through the ferns and trees, their trailing firelight eerily consumed by shadows. The panicking eels set the understory on fire as they sought company with others in their packs. Before they could escape, many of the eels were ensnared by a seventy-thousand-acre fire, the tallest flames rising to six hundred feet.
Amidst the spreading fires, the ground trembled from the explosions, sending four-hundred-year-old burning cedars crashing to the ground. Upon impact, millions of embers flew into the air, and the smoldering, white-hot wood incinerated a gathering of rotten leaves.
And still the bombs fell, maiming the valley. The bombardment sent hundreds of skeletons and other fleshy matter out into the nightmarish landscape, the bones and branches at first dark, then lit in unwanted detail as they were thrown into the massive wall of flames that consumed the barriers.
Subsequent blasts knocked over flaming old growth trees like they were bowling pins and sent uncountable sparks and debris into the night sky. Jets and helicopters roared above the maelstrom. An errant bomb exploded in Mission Lake, creating a huge wake that sloshed over Mission Dam, sending a flood of water east towards lower elevation towns and woodlands which happened to be geographically unlucky.
*
Corporal Erickson didn’t sign up for this. He thought he’d be shooting foreigners in some desert, not battling these freak animals in the forests of Montana. But as his mother always told him, life’s an adventure. Yeah, some fucking adventure, he thought as he sat tight against a tree just outside the devastation zone of Barrier 2. The creatures had breached Barrier 2 after the air assault. He’d lost his platoon and saw his commander carried off by some Godforsaken thing with green eyes. He heard them still, hovering overhead, echoing the sound of crisp, burning trees and gunfire. Some of the things in the sky even echoed the rotors of the Apaches. He’d run to the sound of the rotors once, and had to double back to a mess of fallen trees as it wasn’t what he thought. Oh no, it wasn’t even close. Luckily for him, the canopy had caught the thing’s wings, allowing him to escape.
Erickson wiped his eyes and turned to the north. The woods were darker there, and he wouldn’t be exposed. His night vision optics gave him an advantage, but who knew how many more of the things were out there.
Erickson turned to the south, the firelight reflecting in his eyes. He put a hand to his mouth to muffle a cough. Back through the flames and dead bodies was Outpost 2, and possible salvation if he could reach Outpost 3. But the smoke was too much. Asphyxiation was a real possibility. And if he ran into any of those things in the light, all he had was a single clip.
Erickson reached into his pocket and pulled out a photo of his daughter, Abby. He smiled as he studied her short blonde hair and tiny nose
. The background was that fuzzy blue marble color all the mall photo stores used. His mind drifted to the soothing music and air-conditioned sterility of Rexford Mall. He wished he was there with his family, having a slice of Sbarro’s, and talking about shit that was inconsequential. He scrunched his eyes closed and kissed the photo. North it was.
He put on his night vision goggles and sprinted uphill, branches and leaves brushing against his uniform. His priority now was to clear the smoke. He wasn’t equipped to outlast that, and his survival depended on finding a clear route away from the fire.
The contrast of what was behind him and what lay ahead was remarkable. He felt the heat on his back, and was sure he was visible at least for a few more dozen yards from the south. Ahead was nothing but darkness, with the occasional flash in the sky. Erickson knew for certain that as his backside cooled, he was sinking into the darkness and becoming less of a beacon for the creatures. After five more minutes, he disappeared into the Rocky Mountain night, the crackling of burning trees now behind him. He stopped to catch his breath and checked his M16. All good. His face was sweaty from the night vision goggles, so he removed them. After wearing the damn things for so long, he wanted his eyes to feel the cool air. He blinked and squinted at the sky and the display of stars. Abby loved the night sky. She’d always ask questions about the moon, the planets, and the stars. He’d even researched the solar system so he wouldn’t seem ignorant when she asked him the questions. He thought he’d be the teacher when they had her, but in many ways, Abby was teaching him. And that was OK. He’d rather learn new things and spend time with his daughter than hang out with his friends who’d begun to drink too much. The weekend benders they’d enjoyed since high school had turned into every day partaking, and the spark of it all had been replaced by a slow, throbbing fade. Abby was a light in the darkness, that much he knew. He also knew he needed to get his damn goggles on ASAP or risk ambush by the creatures. Erickson stretched the optics over his head and proceeded uphill into the bigger trees. The air cooled again, and his lungs cleared.
The Invasive Page 27
