A Congress of Angels (The Collective)

by Fore, Jon

  In an instant he saw the appendage, the arm, the tube like thing fixed to the back of the filthy girl's head. It seemed embedded there, and then stretched back and into the darkness. Something hissed from his right and he twisted to find the source. His mind fused a moment, his thoughts seized like an old engine and he heard himself think, Gabriel, you fucking lost it now. Not getting out of the Marines nuts, but on your way to madness nuts.

  Squatted before him--if it could be called that--was a massive, pimply bag. It was easily twenty feet across the base, where the terrible flesh met the ground, and then it narrowed towards the top like a dollop of some dark and spoiled sour cream. Branching out of the mass was a whole bunch of segmented arms, long and seeking, swaying at their ends in a seaweedy way. Across the middle, or just above the middle was a slit filled with what looked like novelty Halloween teeth, dark stained and plastic looking, only there were hundreds of them. Above this were tiny little eyes on stalks, two of them and they seemed to be wrestling each other for a direction to look. That was until the light fell on the grey-green orbs. Then both eyes jerked together, focused on him, and seemed to stretch, to distend towards Gabriel.

  Gabriel almost laughed at the thought of a giant slug, which changed to a dreadful need to scream. Instead, he ducked the first tentacle that groped at him, and opened fire.

  The first round struck and sank deep. The bloated thing quivered violently, and its mouth opened slightly, revealing rows of teeth leaned inward, towards its enormous throat. He fired again, then again, forcing no more reaction than the first. Gabriel knew his gun was too small, not powerful enough to kill this thing, and he began working back towards his left as he fired. If he could just find the door handle.

  Somewhere in the distance, Gabriel could hear Fuggly barking for all his worth.

  Another of the long segmented arms swung at him, not quite able to reach, but enough to pull a shout from him. He fired again and finally bumped into the handle. Without another look, he turned, yanked the door open and almost tripped on Fuggly as he bolted from the building. He stumbled, and then river danced down the stairs. "Come on Fuggy!” He shouted and jogged to Lance.

  The horse was hoofing at the ground in a nervous way, his eyes wide with the terror Gabriel felt bounding around inside his chest. There was no time to sooth the animal, or Big Guy, who looked ready to bolt. He holstered his sidearm, grabbed the pommel of the saddle and almost lost his flashlight. In a single leap he was mounted, finding the reins with one hand and aiming the flashlight at the door with the other.

  There in the window was the little girl. She was staring her death trance again. It looked almost as if she was pleading. "Fuck that," Gabriel mumbled, and then released the reins to draw his gun. There was no way he was going to leave this monster its morbid bait. What person would leave a little girl in that building? He fired the last two shots from the revolver, striking the kid in the face. Her head exploded in a rancid, rotting burst. The little corpse fell and the tip of the appendage whipped back into the darkness.

  The image of a lantern fish went through his head. That grotesque toothy fish with the long lighted tendril designed to attract prey. That's what the girl was. She was just bait, like the lantern fish's light, and he fell for it. Others probably fell for it before him. The nausea twisted tighter in his gut.

  You just desecrated the corpse of a child, sunny Jim. The corpse of a little girl at that. Nice going, Marine. Conduct unbecoming...

  Gabriel knew it had to be done, but he felt like screaming until his lungs gave out, until his throat gave out, and the rage that had been building in him over the past month graduated to a whole new level.

  Chapter 4

  Gabriel controlled the rage, barely. He held the scream, barely, and jogged the animals to the gate. There was no way he could sleep here tonight. He would have to find some pasture, feed the horses, and then head on in the dark. There was no way he could lay still for very long, let alone sleep. That little girl was going to be with him a long time, join herself to the sixty eight other ghosts that haunted his closed eyes, feeding on his self-esteem.

  Hey, you can't count that as a kill, Marine. That chick was tied up....

  Through the gates, he turned right swallowing bile over and over. At the end of the fence, he kept the horse pointed south and came to the end of the small field where the forest started again, only this wasn't a forest but a slender glen of trees between the manufacturing complex and a field of what looked like wheat or barely. It didn't matter. What he was looking at now was a boon of food for the horses.

  Finally.

  He dismounted and watched the field for twenty self-loathing minutes. The young stalks only curled their backs to a light breeze, then stood erect again. Nothing else seemed to be moving, no sound but that light breeze. Fug eventually came and lay across his boots, looking up randomly, fretting the sour mood of his human.

  Sometime later, Gabriel mounted and headed into the field. It was too wide to see the end even from horse back, but he could see the southern edge where another tree line stood, waiting. Taunting. Gabriel could not tell if it was just a patch of trees or not, but it didn't matter. He would find out soon enough, after the horse gorged themselves and he cut some stalks for Big Guy's back.

  When he reached the approximate center, he stopped and dismounted. He had to wrestle with Lance to get the bit out of his mouth so he could eat more easily, but Big Guy let him handle his muzzle without argument. Then the horses began mowing the young wheat or barley or whatever it was. Didn't matter, there was a lot of it, and they needed a lot of it.

  Gabriel found Fug looking up at him with long doleful eyes, as if to say 'don't let that girl bother you, chief.' Gabriel knelt and rubbed at the dog’s neck, just where he liked it, and Fug tilted his head to one side to give Gabriel better access to that particular spot. Then Gabriel retrieved Fug's bowl from Big Guy, and poured half of the remaining dog food out and gave it to the Fugster. The dog didn't wait for anything, and in an instant, the dog's butt was in the air, his tail wagging in a longhaired fury.

  Gabriel went to Lance, pulled out a fist full of venison jerky, and began to eat as he watched the horses. He wasn't hungry, not in any real way, but his stomach did not complain about having the dried meat. It was obviously a full moon considering the sky seemed to glow an ethereal shit brown, but in the open field, it allowed him to see the horse and Fug's whipping tail easily enough. He tried to listen over his own chewing, the horses repeated tearing of the grass, and Fug crunching on dried food. It seemed rather useless considering all the other noise but he did it anyway. He added to this a slow rotation, turning like a minute hand on a clock face, watching the grass stalks for movement.

  When he had eaten the first fist of dried meat, he drew his Colt and reloaded it from the bandolier again, then went to Big Guy to fill the bandolier. He still had a generous pile of bullets left in the oiled leather bag, which was good. He seemed to be using a lot of them over the past two days, and didn't know if that was going to get better or worse. Better he hoped, but only a little. He wanted to kill these things. Kill as many as he could, but he also knew that even though they went down easily enough, not much harder or easier than a human, a pack of them could end it for him. Get eight of them together, and Gabriel just might not make it out. Hell, thirteen, and he would run out of bullets and end up boxing one of those lizard things or worse, the wolf things. No way to punch that beast in the nose.

  What are you going to do now, sunny Jim?

  Leave me alone! Gabriel thought-shouted at the voice in his head. He was supposed to ignore it, the analysts told him, but fuck them and the voice.

  Gabriel retrieved his machete from Lance, and began cutting and piling stalks of grass. There were plenty of crop fields between here and wherever humanity held the invasion, but he wanted backup. He had to shoo Lance away twice while he cut the first pile, once while he tied it in a tight bundle, and then none as he completed a second and a third b
undle. He would have taken a forth, but he was out of twine. Packed as tight as they were, the bundles were still wide, maybe two feet wide, and Gabriel tied them to Big Guy's back while he continued to tear up and munch more grass.

  A half hour of eating and Gabriel figured it was time to move on. He bridled both horses, packed Fugs bowl, and mounted, heading south and to the new tree line. Fuggly fell in alongside Lance and Big Guy followed. After eating, it seemed the animals felt better, or at least more willing to travel. Gabriel wondered how far they had actually come. How many miles had it been?

  The trees turned out to be thicker as well as deeper. They seemed to be a remnant of an elderly forest cut down to make room for the farmer's field. The floor was a tangled carpet of vines and scrubby brush, the smallest parts filled with recently discarded leaves. This forced him to ride slowly through the twisting fist of trunks and tripping vines for hours before the forest gave way to a narrow unmarked road.

  It was a rural, seemingly unused road, even before the invasion. Gabriel could just make out the potholes and the degrading edges. On one end, the road curved gently and vanished through the trees and darkness. Towards the other side stood alone white structure, most likely a house. It was hard to see in the darkness, and he considered heading that way, but decided against it. Directly across the street, the brush became more of a thicket and Gabriel couldn't tell if those tendril like vines had thorns or not. He also didn't want to find out by way of a lame horse, or a horse with torn-up legs.

  He turned toward the white structure and set off at a slow pace again, watching the far side of the road for a break in the dead flora. It didn't take long to find a sandy trail leading into the trees some yards away. He was close enough to the structure to see it was a house, a two story plantation-style farmhouse, complete with what looked to Gabriel like an antique tractor in the side yard. No light shined in the house and it, like the manufacturing plant, felt dead. He knew how deceiving that could be now, and decided to let it alone. Instead, he turned Lance toward the trail across the road.

  It didn't seem wide enough to be called a riding trail, but not a game trail either. It was worn dirt, like many feet had walked it over many years. This made Gabriel remember the wooded places he used to haunt with his high school friends. That was ancient history, maybe five years ago, but the memories were still there.

  They called it 'the Field', and used to play army or hide and seek there as children. As preteens, they would collect there after trick-or-treating or to get away from their stupid parents. As they got older, they would go there to experiment with drinking, campfires, and girls. Just before leaving for the Marines, he watched as a strip mall pulled The Field down and flattened it. He knew right where his favorite spot had been, at the far end of what was now some western store, under a sawhorse with a saddle. He visited the spot once before leaving for boot camp, and that moment seemed to hang in his mind like some sad milestone of maturity.

  Gabriel had gotten lucky there once, with his longtime girlfriend--which meant almost four months--who killed herself drinking and driving his senior year. He had broken up with her by then, but when he found out she was dead--actually not alive anymore--he was destroyed all the same. It wasn't that she was his first, his last, or even his best. It was entirely because she was dead. It was a mouth full of life to swallow for a high school kid, and his first experience with death. At least human death.

  After ducking a number of low hanging branches, he eventually came to a sandy dune like circle, in the middle of which sat a campfire, long dead. It was not much more than a blackened spot in the middle of the sand, and one fire-eaten bit of log. Whoever used to come here--probably the kids from the farm house--hadn't been here in a long time. Still the dunes looked like an inviting place to rest until day break, which his watch told him would be in three hours or so. Just a little rest for the horses, that was all. Not even long enough to bother with the saddles or the cargo rig on Big Guy. Just a lock-kneed nap.

  He dismounted, untied Big Guys reins from Lance, and after a moment's thinking, he dropped them in the sand. He took the rolled blanket from Lance’s saddle, and hunkered down against a barren pine tree. It was weeping sap from many parts of its trunk, so Gabriel scrubbed handfuls of sand over the the sticky tears to keep himself from becoming glued. Then he leaned against the trunk, and covered his legs with the blanket. Not the most comfortable place, but better than the others he used since leaving his little ranch. Fug laid next to him and rested his head on his thighs, rolling his eyes up to him, then back into the woods.

  Gabriel scratched absently at Fuggly's ear with his left hand, drew the colt with his right and laid that on the blanket. Then he removed his hat, laid that on the Colt, then stuck his hand beneath to keep it warm. Something dark was rising along his spine, through his mind, and it made him colder than the weather allowed. He took deep breaths, looking for the calm the therapists taught him to find, and clenched his eyes closed. Over and over in his head, he repeated, 'Get a grip... Get a grip... Get a grip...' like some religious meditation chant, but he could not silence the killing man inside.

  The images began to flash, the images of all those people he had killed from so far away. Each of the stilled memories flashed across his mind’s eye, just inside his forehead, and he began to wince at not just the violence depicted, but the violent way the images slammed into place in his skull before flipping away to be replaced with another. Only this time, there was the image of a wide eyed girl, her mouth hanging open, the still depiction of the very moment her head exploded.

  Gabriel felt that familiar tightness in his throat, the sharp broken-glass ache in his head, and he clenched his eyes tighter, squeezing tears free. They were never going to stop, these mental visions. Every time he closed his eyes for the rest of his life, these people would return in rapid brain-thumping succession, over and over, faster and faster. That or perhaps he would finally crack and it would end. End or become something different and worse. Either way he wouldn't care because, well, he would be crazy and who cared about crazy people's crazy thoughts?

  The crazy person, that's who. Idiot.

  Shut up! He shouted at the other in his head.

  You're losing it already. Idiot.

  The voice was right, and Gabriel felt himself sliding, releasing his body to the other.

  He stood suddenly, knocking Fug to one side without care. He needed sleep. Needed sleep so bad it hurt, but it would never come. Never again. He realized he was grinding his teeth and forced his jaw open. They had done this to him. They the government, they the Marines, they the fuckers invading the planet. The rage boiled up and became a flavor in his mouth.

  'Stop!’ Gabriel’s true self screamed from a distant place.

  Kill one, or another one, actually.

  That thought was clear, simple, and probably right. He needed to get some. Get some more. A bit of revenge. That would help. A lot of this would be coming when he linked up with the rest of the American forces, but if he could get a bit now. Then he would feel just ducky, right?

  Fire.

  Fire. He needed a fire. That would draw them in. He could hunt his own position with a fire. Get light, get warm, get some.

  What a deal.

  Stop, please...

  He rushed around the clearing to collect branches, and came across a small pile of roughly split wood. It looked as though it had been here a while, but who cared. It would burn, just like the beasts. He brought this together into a bonfire shape, and used his magnesium fire starter to scrape life into the pile. The pine sap ignited quickly, sending the entire stack into a roar of light, of heat, of triumph. Then he took his sniper rifle from its holster and froze. What about the animals?

  You didn't think about them, did you? The true Gabriel shouted.

  The fire had become something all its own, and well beyond putting out. Even if he used the last of his water. Well, he was in it now. Again.

  He brought the horses to the center
and tethered them together. Then after looking around quickly, he chose a wide grinning maple at the edge of the sandy clearing. It was about thirty yards from the fire, and that would make any shot he took, easy.

  Easy as cake.

  He stalked over to the maple with a determined pace and climbed into the woody grin some ten feet up. He fixed himself into the crux of the two largest branches, and steadied the barrel against a third, chambering a round and waiting. This is what he was good at after all. Waiting.

  So he waited.

  And drifted.

  Chapter 5

  "Angel two-six, how copy, over."

  Gabriel lifted his hand from the stock of the rifle to find it cramped, clenched in the same position now for over an hour. An hour at least. He pressed the talk button with some effort, "Angel two-six, loud and clear, over."

  "Angel two-six, interrogative, L.O.S. my position and southeast, over."

  Gabriel slide his scope to the right and found the three forward tents, the command bunker for the push, then using the tent as a reference, trailed out to the horizon. "Angel two-six, wide and clear, over."

  "Angel two-six, we got intel says foot troops with armor support inbound on my southeast. Request eyes on until further notice, over."

  "Angel two-six, received, over."

  It had been an active invasion, but not nearly as active as he expected. Some sporadic gunfights along roads here and there. Fourth battalion, six infantry got into it for a few hours at a bridge somewhere, but the resistance was so light that the surge continued on and into its third day. Gabriel was exhausted, hungry, horny, and becoming sick of the fight. Not the fight itself, but the bald boring in between.