by Brad Munson
“They’re not from around here,” Diaz said. “The braniacs say not from anywhere on Earth. And we can’t even find the, the seed-pods or whatever to analyze them. But if it rains … they show.”
“And you know this because?”
“Because it happened once before,” Danziger said, trying to pick up the pace. He was clearly impatient to move this along. “Nineteen fifty-four.”
“That was the last time there was measurable rainfall out here,” Diaz said. “Nothing like this but … enough. Enough for us to see what was hiding out here. Science guys have been trying to duplicate and analyze it ever since, for more than sixty years now, but … nothin’. God, are they jonesing to get in here, but … not yet. Not ‘til the situation stabilizes.”
“Anything new?” Danziger called out. It took Ty a minute to realize he wasn’t talking to anyone in sight. The comm buzzed and a mechanical voice said, “Nothing to report.” Ty realized it was the commander or the gunner, in the turret above them. It took three people to run the A2; the rest of them were just passengers. And, quite rightly, they were keeping an eye out.
“And you’re telling me all this because …?”
“Because we need some locals to give us a sitrep,” Danziger said. “And frankly you’re the first one we’ve encountered. We’re just lucky you have some experience. So you’re elected.”
Except for one big problem, asshole, Ty said to himself. I’m not a local. I just got here. You soldier-boys just snagged yourself a tourist.
“Okay,” Danziger said, sounding like a man who had just made a decision. “Pretty Boy, you take Mister … you take him to the Cougar and debrief. Jameson and Toth will stay here with me; we’ll wait for the next vehicle to show.”
Diaz didn’t like that decision at all. “Sir, these are my men. I should be here.”
Danziger started shaking his high-and-tight head before Diaz had finished talking. “Not a chance. What, you think Jameson could handle the debrief? Or Toth, for fuck’s sake? Or any of those nimrods in the Cougar? No. Come on. It’s you.” He set his shoulders and looked leader-y. “We can handle whatever comes up.”
Diaz closed his eyes for just a moment, obviously suppressing a sigh that Danziger didn’t even notice, then started moving. He muttered into his comm unit and the hatch at the back of the Bradley began to lower.
“And give Mister … one of the spare IBAs. No more of this hillbilly armor.”
Ty almost smiled. “We used to call that shit we’d weld to this M2: ‘hillbilly armor.’”
Danziger gave him one more shrug. “Well, seemed appropriate.”
Ty nodded. Diaz thumped down the ramp and back into the storm; he followed him closely, still mindful of the debris flying through the wind and rain.
They made it to the other vehicle without incident; two more solders carrying M4s were flanking the hatch, grimacing into the rain as Diaz and Ty slogged their way across the rapidly flooding tarmac. Ty tried to get his head around what Danziger and Diaz had told him – all that they’d told him, so easily and so quickly.
Which was not a good thing, he knew. Even the hundred-word version that they’d shared was ten levels past Top Secret – not the sort of thing they would share with an unvetted and unknown civilian … unless they had no plans to ever let him go. As soon as they had everything they wanted from him, and they were sure, the “debrief” would end with a bullet between the eyes, or if they were truly professional a double-tap at the base of his skull.
All to cover up the secret of alien monsters hiding in the desert.
It was happening too fast. He couldn’t just cut and run and hope he could and disappear into the storm; not with two guys carrying rifles standing right in front of him. Maybe if I play along. Maybe as we move back to base they’ll get sloppy.
So he stumped inside and nodded at the soldiers like they were all buddies. He put his butt on one of the eight seats inside the MRAP, as Diaz peeled off his helmet and sat opposite him. Just like everything was going to be fine.
There were four grunts still seated, as well as the two at the hatch. They all look grim and spooked at the same time. “Jordan?” Diaz said. “Can you get that spare set of body armor out of the storage locker? Lower right, I think.” A hulking guy with a badly shaved head didn’t even nod; he just stood up, dragged open a trunk that was bolted to the storage shelf, and handed it to Ty. He didn’t hesitate; he peeled off his embarrassing makeshift suit, pizza trays and cookie sheets and all, and put the plates and straps of the padded vest and pants on in its place. It felt surprisingly comfortable – and once again, familiar. Like putting on a favorite old suit.
He searched for something to say while he stripped down to his underwear under the disinterested eyes of the soldiers. Anything to stretch the time, to wait for an opening. It would be easier to flee in the body armor, too. It actually increased his chances of survival.
“So,” he said as he cinched a pair of waterproof pants over the armor and pulled Dead Leonard’s parka back onto his shoulders, “why’s the colonel call you ‘Pretty Boy’?”
One of the other grunts snorted, but held his tongue. Diaz gave a fake-casual shrug. “Just a nickname.”
“It’s not like calling a skinny guy ‘Fatso’ or a tall guy ‘Shorty.’ I mean, you’re not that ugly.”
That actually made the other soldiers grin. “Tell ‘im,” one of them said.
Diaz just shook his head and looked at the floor of the transport. “Come on, guys.”
“It’s his name,” another said.
Ty settled into his seat, but stayed on the balls of his feet, ready to bolt, ready to move if he could. “’Diaz’? What’s the big deal?”
“No, man, his first name.” Now they were outright laughing.
Diaz looked at the ceiling, clearly wishing it would all go away. “Cameron,” he said. “My first name is Cameron.”
Finally Ty put it all together. “Your name is … Cameron Diaz,” he said.
“Yeah. She wasn’t famous when I was born. My parents didn’t know. It was my grandfather’s name.”
“Cameron Diaz.”
He glared at the chuckling soldiers. “Staff Sergeant Cameron Diaz,” he said darkly.
They shut up.
Diaz squared his shoulders and turned away from his men. The rain rattled at the roof of the transport; the wind pounded at the door. He leaned forward in the chair, elbows on knees, and clasped his hand loosely in front of him. “Okay,” he said. “So tell me everything. Start with the monsters.”
Tyler sat up straight and swallowed hard. This was going to be tough. “Well …” he said.
The comm unit at the front of the MRAP suddenly buzzed. “Cougar,” the A3 commander’s voice was gritty with static and tension. “We have contact.”
Diaz was on his feet in an instant. Ty’s eyes flickered from the soldier to the hatch and back again. They were all focused on their sergeant, on the radio. He might have been able to make it out if the door was open, but it was dogged shut. He was trapped.
Diaz had the comm’s microphone in his hand. “A3, this is Cougar. Another vehicle?”
“No. Not a vehicle. Not civilian. Something much bigger.”
“How big?”
“Bigger than us. Twice as big.”
The other grunts were on their feet now, reaching for their weapons. “Fuck,” one of them said under his breath.
A new voice, one that Ty recognized as Danziger’s, came over the radio. “Everybody out,” he said. “You know the protocol, we went over it. Deploy and hold position. Fire on command.”
They moved. It took them thirty seconds to pull on the last of their rough weather gear. One of the grunts, the one who’d teased the sergeant most, tossed Ty an ever heavier, hooded jacket. “That’ll do you,” he said.
“A weapon,” Ty said. “Got any –”
Diaz didn’t think about it twice. He pulled a weirdly altered version of an M16 rifle off a rack and pushed it into T
y’s arms. A moment later he slipped two additional ammo clips into Ty’s vest. It took a moment for Ty to recognize it: one of those ridiculous M231s, the specially modified Firing Port Weapons the Army had to make when they realized the M16s’ barrels were too long to fit inside a buttoned-up Bradley M2. Trust the U.S. Army to build a combat vehicle that can’t fit the weapons they have, he thought. And then keep using the weapons even after they take most of the firing ports out of the vehicle …
“We gotta go,” Diaz said. “Move out! Move out!”
The rear hatch of the bus-like MRAP had already been lowered; the six other grunts pounded down, helmets in place and rifles at the ready, to fan out on both sides and to the rear of the Bradley. Diaz paused only long enough to look Tyler Briggs in the eye one more time. “Help us with this,” he said, “We’ll take care of you.”
Tyler nodded tightly.
“No,” Diaz said, not breaking contact quite yet. “We really will.”
Meaning, Tyler hoped, we won’t necessarily kill you right away.
Then he was gone, out into the storm. Tyler was right behind him, looking for an exit from the field of fire with every movement.
He sidestepped to the right, flanking the massive battle vehicle, peering into the storm beyond it. The wind was vicious, the rain so heavy it struck with the violence of a physical blow, cold and strangling.
He heard and felt the response from the Bradley before he even saw the thing, as the 25mm chain gun roared, pounding two hundred rounds a minute. Ty’s knees nearly buckled when the boxy TOW missile belched fire and an anti-tank round surged into the mist. When it detonated it exploded with a bone-colored white light and illuminated the thing that was coming for them …
It had no face. It had no eyes. No mouth. It was a rolling, tumbling tangle of claws, limbs, cylinders, blades, each larger than a man, spinning and turning madly, towering in the storm, more than fifty feet tall, as wide as the two-lane highway itself, and grinding, growling, roaring as it rumbled forward.
It was coming for the Bradley.
Tyler Briggs backed away from the vehicle, his rifle up. The soldiers spread even farther apart and began to fire as the thing, the breaker, swarmed towards them, loomed over the Bradley.
The rear hatch of the vehicle fell open, faster than Ty thought was possible. Danziger almost tumbled out, still without a helmet, clutching his M4 to his chest; his two soldiers were behind him, more controlled in their advance, sweeping the M4 left and right, right and left.
Ty backed even farther, right to the edge of the asphalt, as the breaker rolled and spiked closer, seemed to almost fall forward, against and on top of the Bradley. Massive, angular limbs, a hundred feet long, swept in from the left and right and slammed into the vehicle with a deep crashing, ringing clang. The huge vehicle was a toy in its jagged arms; blades twenty feed wide and sharp along both edges swept under the Bradley and lifted it, lifted it as javelins of bone swept down and pierced the armored vehicle as if it was made of paper. The breaker enveloped it, consumed it, and Ty heard the steel crack like an eggshell and shatter, collapse, compress.
Three men dead in an instant, crushed in its giant, brutal embrace.
Ty watched from the edge of the road, rifle slack at his side. He was only distantly aware of the grasping fingers of alien plant-life tugging at his heels.
He watched as the others soldiers circled away from the wreckage, but they did not retreat – that wasn’t what they had been ordered to do. Almost in unison, they raised their weapons and began to fire, pouring round after round into the tangled and swinging angles and blades, aiming for anything, aiming for all of it. It swallowed the bullets without so much as a spark of a ricochet, planted a thousand legs on the ground and swept out a thousand more, all different lengths and shapes, to take them down.
One man was decapitated in an instant, his head spinning into the wind, blood misting from his severed neck. Two more were clubbed by swinging limbs as thick as logs, another crushed to paste by the single blow of a flat-bottomed bludgeon. But the others kept advancing, the others kept fighting, Diaz in the lead bellowing silently as he fired and fired—
All but Danziger. He ducked into the rain and ran straight to the armored bus, his back to the creature and his own men, diving into the open hatch and skidding on his belly, terrified and scrabbling.
Tyler saw the hatch begin to rise, to close, before Danziger had even stopped his struggling. Twenty feet away, two more men were skewered by stone spikes the breaker grew out of the air. It lifted them from the ground, shook them like a dog with a toy, then broke off the sharpened claws and left them in the pierced corpses as they thumped to the flooded ground.
Diaz was the last to go. The talons and battering rams swirled around him; he fired until he ran through his last clip, then turned the weapon in his hand and swung it like a truncheon, breaking off claws and knife-sharp stalactites as they groped for him, getting closer and deeper and faster with every moment. But he would not stop, he could not retreat.
He didn’t see the descending scimitar of bone. It came from behind and to his left, high and dripping wet, then swooped down fast, powered by some kind of counterweight that made it a blur against the downpour. It cut him in two with a single swipe, from shoulder to hip, and suddenly he was falling in two different directions, toppling apart, gushing blood into the rain.
Ty saw it happen. And he heard the mechanical roar of the LARP as its rear lights flared and the vehicle lurched forward. It was only that – his only means of escape – that made him finally move.
He ripped his feet away from the greedy tug of the undergrowth, lurching forward, back onto the asphalt. “Hey!” he shouted, knowing he couldn’t be heard. “HEY!”
Whether Danziger was driving the LARP himself or he’d held one soldier out, Ty would never know. All he knew for a fact was that his ride to safety was disappearing right before his eyes.
“WAAAIT!”
The U.S. Army blockade of the two-lane Highway 121, the only way in or out of Dos Hermanos, California, lasted exactly fifty-seven minutes. Tyler Briggs would never learn it, but the loss of the M3 Bradley to the breaker convinced the military to move the blockade back to the ridgeline, a quarter-mile away from the storm wall. No soldier entered Dos Hermanos again – not until after the rain stopped, and the rain would not stop for days.
Ty watched the transport dash away, throwing water everywhere, skidding across the drowning highway. As it disappeared into the roiling mist, he put it all together: even if he somehow got it to stop, Danziger would simply take him back to base, interrogate him, and kill him. He knew that for sure. And now Danziger would have two reasons to do it: good ol’ American security and to keep the story of his own cowardice a secret.
No. No. He was stuck in Dos Hermanos for the duration. There was only one direction to go.
He turned away from the receding brake lights as they flared one last time. He brought his new rifle up to port arms and started to trudge south.
South: deeper into Dos Hermanos.
Fourteen
Douglas Pratt was the first to return from the big meeting at the Convention Center. He looked slightly harried to Barrymore, as if he had taken the trip far too quickly on the treacherous roads, just to get back to the school before anyone else arrived.
“How did it go?” the gym teacher asked as his boss bustled prissily through the front entrance, spraying water like a jittery and untrained dog as he entered.
Pratt glared at him. “Not well,” he said. “Those … people are more worried about the weather than they are about their children.”
Barrymore looked past him into the tortured night – rain and debris everywhere, twisting shadows cruising and flying just beyond the lights of the parking lot. “Well, you can’t blame ‘em too much,” he said. “It’s pretty crazy out there.”
Pratt made a sound like a cat with hair in its mouth: “Feh.” He raised his arms and waved his hands too fast, too nervously
, to be comforting. “Attention everyone? Attention!”
Jeez, Barrymore thought, who actually talks like that?
“The parents will be arriving to pick up their children in a very few minutes,” Pratt said. “Please have them dressed and the sign-out sheets ready.”
Not a thing in the Cafetorium changed. It was as if he hadn’t spoken at all. Most of the kids had been carrying their jackets and wet shoes with them all night; the clipboards were already waiting at the doors, with working pens attached. Once again, Barrymore confirmed, your presence is entirely unnecessary.
Trini excused herself from a table full of kindergartners she’d been drawing with and joined the grown-ups. “How did it go?” she asked.
“Don’t ask,” Barrymore told her.
“Sheriff Peck said the storm will be over soon. Tomorrow afternoon at the latest.”
Trini frowned. “And he knows this because …?”
“Because he’s the authorities,” Pratt said in his most condescending tone, “and it’s his job to know.”
“Oddly,” Dave Drucker said, “I do not find that terribly comforting.” He had sidled up from the nearly empty coffee machine to join them.
The look from the principal would have been enough to kill a normal man, but these were professional educators, immune to such things. Barrymore simply shrugged. “Well, it started all of a sudden. It could very well stop that way.”
“And I gather you’ve had as much luck getting on the Internet as I have?” Drucker asked. “No weather.com, no news sites – nothing.”
“I haven’t even tried,” Barrymore said, “but I can’t say I’m surprised it's not working. Whatever … what, transponders or Wi-Fi nodes or whatever the hell keeps the Internet alive around here has probably been blown down or shorted out by now.” He sighed deeply. “Gonna be a hell of a clean-up phase.”
The entrance doors squealed open, and the first few parents came in to pick up their children. Trini went to greet them as more parents pushed their way in. Once the flow began, it didn’t stop. It became a continuing weary, wet wave, and every parent that Barrymore could see had the same expression: a hollow, haunted look that barely changed when they saw their children were safe and sound. They’re not really looking at their kids at all, he realized. Their eyes were on the shadows.
