Grunt Life

by Weston Ochse

  With the EXOs’ success in part two, part three would continue with an attack by the remaining battalions. One infantry battalion and special-troops battalion would be poised in the bunker and prepared to battle once they pushed through the underground wall into the mound chamber. The other infantry battalion, as well as the fires battalion, would infiltrate using the three holes the Cray had created in the earth, as well as the unfilled maw where the thermobaric bomb had detonated.

  Then, of course, there was Mr. Pink’s new weapon. He’d had it built in secret and had rolled it into the mess hall right before we left. The Black Box: roughly the size of a van, it rested on wheels and needed its own generators. Whatever was inside remained hidden. Mr. Pink had said, through an executioner’s smile, that its true purpose would be eventually revealed.

  All in all, we had a plan that might even work.

  But first we had to get into the volcano.

  We were a hundred meters from the top when we heard the noise. There was something up there. Was it waiting, or did it live there? We moved slowly and carefully, ready to defend ourselves.

  Kilimanjaro had seven man-made routes to the top: Lemosho, Machame, Marangu, Mweka, Rongai, Shira, and Umbwe. Umbwe was the steepest and quickest, taking us in a direct line to Uhuru Peak where the Kibo caldera remained. Past the scrub, the heathers, the forest, then the tree line, the last hundred meters were almost vertical... almost. We were still able to find places for our feet and hands, but just barely.

  The cold didn’t help much. The suits were designed for function and not for comfort. Although sealing the suit necessitated air conditioning and heating, we were forced to keep almost all of these off to conserve battery power. My fingers had begun to shake as we entered the ice field.

  Olivares was moving first, and I was backing him up. We had no plan or choice other than to rush the top by pure brute force. We wanted to stay as far away from the fumaroles and vaporized sulfuric acid of Kibo as possible, but we might have to skirt it. Frankly, the idea was mind-bogglingly terrifying. It was going to be hard enough descending into a volcano without imagining lava bubbling through the same tunnels.

  But there was time enough to be scared for that. We had to get to the top first, and then we had to survive what we encountered. As this was a covert mission, we didn’t have our usual suite of weapons. Gone was our Hydra missile system, and we no longer carried our miniguns. Instead we carried MP5 submachine guns and 9mm pistols; both were silenced to keep any killing we had to do as discreet as possible. We’d have loved the firepower, but the last thing we needed was for the Cray to come for us alone on top of this damn mountain. That is, if they could fly this high; CBT OMBRA’s xenobiologists weren’t certain about the Cray’s altitude restrictions.

  Olivares crept steadily towards the summit. I moved right behind him, copying his ascent as best I could.

  I checked my grip on the rock to make certain I wasn’t on ice.

  “Move on three,” Olivares said.

  I followed him to the summit, jerking free my pistol from where it was strapped to my thigh and grabbing my harmonic blade with my other hand. A flurry of black and brown greeted us. I was temporarily blinded as whatever was there attacked my face. I swung at it with my blade and stepped to the side.

  A moment later the fight was over.

  Olivares and I had killed three vultures. They’d been feeding on a desiccated body that looked like it had been up here for months. Glancing around to make sure the area was secured, I saw more bodies. The ground was about a football field long and covered with rock, leading up a ridge that hid the caldera. Dirty snow and ice dotted the field. Strewn across the length and breadth were bones, pieces of clothing, and cooking tools. I found a pot that showed little rust, suggesting it had been here for a relatively short time. We’d been wondering what had happened to the villagers. I think we’d just found some of them.

  How they’d died was another matter. I knelt beside a pile of bones. Each one had marks on it, like from a knife. But were they from the vultures, or had the villagers been attacked as they lay sleeping?

  Breathing with the assistance of the suit and an oxygen-rich mixture, I couldn’t help wonder how they’d lived up here. I didn’t see much that could have been used for fires. Nor did I see much of anything to eat. This sky-high killing field reminded me of all the people we’d lost. Not just my fellow grunts, but the people people. We were soldiers; we’d signed up knowing that there was a possibility we’d die. We accepted that and even joked about it. But our mothers and our fathers and our families, our neighbors, the people at our favorite stores and restaurants—there was a good chance that all of them were dead, murdered by an alien force intent on removing us from our own planet. These bones accentuated that.

  “Are you seeing this?” I finally said.

  Olivares looked out over the landscape. “A little overwhelming, isn’t it?”

  I walked towards a heap of bones much smaller than all of the others. These were their children. They’d probably piled them in the middle, not knowing what to do with them and unable to bury them. I tried to imagine sitting and staring at my dead child in a pile of other dead children and felt my throat tighten.

  Easy, I reminded myself. I had to stay on mission.

  I blinked away the moisture forming at the corners of my eyes.

  “What now?” I said.

  Olivares cleared his throat. “Now we look for the way in.” He called up several maps on the HUD. They were little more than squiggles on paper, transferred from expedition maps to overlays of the different craters. Unlike the moving maps we were used to, they were merely flat pictures that we had to try and superimpose on reality.

  “I think it’s over there.” Olivares began moving. “Cover me.”

  I held my MP5 at the ready as I picked my way through the bones to the rocky outcropping.

  “This is it,” Olivares said, pushing against the rocks. “Only these rocks aren’t shown on the map. Someone’s concealed the entrance; but could the villagers really have moved them?”

  “They could have used saplings as levers.” We’d passed through an entire forest on the way to the summit. “Then burned the wood to keep warm. Makes you wonder why they felt the need to cover the hole, doesn’t it?” I said, knowing the answer even as I asked.

  Olivares knelt and reached into a space between two rocks. He pulled on something; he had to bend it back and forth, until with a crack it came free. He held up a Cray claw.

  “My guess is that this was the reason.”

  “As I suspected. Damn.”

  “Let’s fan out and see if there are any other entrances,” he said.

  I headed to the far edge of the area, careful where I stepped, avoiding treading into the caldera altogether. I didn’t see any way to get inside. I climbed the slope until I could look down onto the caldera. The hole in the center was easily large enough to swallow a Cineplex. The ground around it was strangely smooth and covered with light gray rock.

  “Get down,” Olivares said.

  I ducked and turned to see Olivares plastered against a mound of rocks, and two Cray busily climbing above him. I slid my feet over the edge, towards the caldera, and gripped the ledge in front of me. I made myself as low as possible, activated the magnification tool on my HUD and focused on the aliens. No wings, and the extra set of appendages; the OMBRA techs had called them worker drones, but by the way they turned to each other and began communicating, they seemed more sophisticated than that.

  One of the Cray had something tucked in a belt that looked suspiciously like a weapon. They’d never had weapons before. The very idea of a Cray with weapons terrified me. It was almost funny. I’d been thinking of them as giant insects for so long, the idea that they were from another planet, possessed of technology hundreds of years beyond ours, had completely escaped me.

  “Olivares, they have weapons.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  �
�Weapons. And they’re coming towards you.”

  I tried to make out the shape of the weapon in their hands, but the magnification just wasn’t enough.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” Was I? “Almost. I mean they have to be.”

  “Jesus. You got to be sure.”

  “I can’t make them out properly. Listen. Do you want to just run at them and see what their weapons do, or do you want to play it safe and just assume they might fuck you up?”

  The Cray moved in short bursts, their legs moving almost faster than I could see. Olivares had his pistol in one hand and his blade in the other.

  The Cray moved from one pile of bones to the next, peering, examining, searching. But the bones didn’t seem to hold their attention. Where we’d taken great pains to step around them, the aliens trod on them without regard for their provenance.

  In sudden bursts the aliens covered the ground from the edge of the plateau to the other side of the rock formation. When they discovered the alien claw that Olivares had tossed aside, their demeanor seemed to change from curious to predatory.

  “Careful. They found the claw,” I whispered.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Getting pissed.”

  Their movements became increasingly jerky as they separated and came around the mound formation from either side. The one on the left was carrying a device which looked similar to a 1970s remote control. Maybe it wasn’t a weapon at all. Maybe it was a communications device.

  “Be ready. They’re almost there.”

  What the hell was that strange device?

  Both aliens rounded their respective corners at the same time, and Olivares did nothing.

  “Kill them!” I urged.

  But he wasn’t moving. His body had gone rigid. The alien on the right burst forward and stripped him of his blade and pistol, tossing them away.

  Olivares fell to his side and began to convulse.

  “Olivares. Staff Sergeant. What’s wrong?” I fought the urge to shoot. At this distance my weapon was virtually worthless. I had as great a chance of hitting Olivares as I did the Cray.

  I began to hear a whine in my commset. At first I thought it was some sort of interference, but I soon realized it was coming from Olivares.

  “Daddy,” came a little boy’s voice, cracked and broken. “Please don’t go, daddy. I love you daddy. I love you so—” His voice broke as he began to cry.

  I was transported back to the basement of the house in Dothan, Alabama. I remembered the shared nightmare, the death dreams of Romeo One.

  They had weaponized psychological warfare. They were turning our own memories against us.

  The Cray hovered over Olivares. The one that carried the device reached down and touched the faceplate of Olivares’s mask.

  The movement made me check my own oxygen: twenty-one percent remaining. I rolled over and pulled my blade and pistol free. I looked at them and imagined leaping over the edge of the ridge and running down the incline and across the field. I’d never make it. I put both weapons away and grabbed the MP5 again. The submachine gun had a maximum effective range of two hundred meters.

  “Olivares.” I whispered. “You there, man?”

  I heard a whimpering. I had to take the Cray with the device out first. I couldn’t afford to have it pointed at me. We’d be as good as dead with both of us disabled.

  I turned my sight towards them only to find them gone.

  Gone?

  What the hell had happened to them?

  I saw movement on the other side of the rock formation. It looked as if they were trying to move the rocks themselves, perhaps trying to get to their dead companion.

  I had to move now.

  I pushed myself to my feet and ran. I had the MP5 in a two-handed grip, struggling to keep the silencer-tipped barrel on target, knowing that I’d only have one chance. As I came round the corner, pulling the trigger, the Cray turned the device on me. I felt a wave of memories as I sent twenty-seven bullets into both aliens.

  I remembered the first time I had sex, with Monica Albright in South Carolina. The rush of ecstatic pleasure jolted me like a live wire. I felt my eyes begin to close as I remembered skin the texture of new paper, eyes the shade of the sky on the first spring day, and breath coated with the taste of grape soda and grain alcohol.

  And the Cray fell, its weapons pointing at the sky. It was like a switch had been turned off. Gone were the sensations of that long-ago time, replaced instead by the need to save Olivares.

  I fought back to my feet, slipping once as her lips brushed the back of my neck. I slapped a fresh magazine into the MP5. I jerked back the bolt carrier.

  The Cray on the right moved a claw towards me. I gave it ten rounds. Then I gave it six more in the face.

  The other one stared at the sky. I raised my weapon and prepared to shoot, but it was dead already. I knelt carefully, keeping my aim on the creature as I leaned forward and removed the device. There wasn’t much to it: a composite-metal rectangle a little too large to fit into one hand and filled with unknown alien electronics. I couldn’t see anywhere to activate it, but I was careful nonetheless, especially since I wasn’t sure which end was live.

  Olivares groaned. I put the device down and leaned over him.

  “You okay, man?”

  The inside of his faceplate was coated in vomit. I was afraid he was going to choke on it, so I hurriedly unlatched his suit. There was a hiss of compressed air as I pulled the faceplate free and checked his mouth, hooking a finger into it.

  Olivares batted at my hands and moved his head away. A good sign. His mouth and throat were clear. He wasn’t going to choke. But now he had another problem. I’d removed his helmet, which meant he’d just depressurized at almost twenty thousand feet. Hypoxia was an immediate concern. He had maybe twenty to thirty minutes before his organs would start shutting down.

  “Take it easy, man.”

  I wiped his faceplate clear, then snapped his helmet shut before resealing his suit. He was moving slowly, but he wasn’t fighting me. Another good sign. The procedure took seven percent of his oxygen mix, which meant that if we got in trouble, he’d be hurting before me. I just hoped that wasn’t something we’d have to worry about. I checked his breathing and oxygen levels and watched them climb back to normal. I kept an eye on the dead Cray, but my main concern was for Olivares. It’s a funny thing being angry at someone in the military. You could hate them to their very core, but once the shit hit the fan, they were closer to you than your own family.

  I stood and scanned the perimeter, securing the Cray device in an ammo pouch. I checked Olivares one more time, then jogged towards the other side of the plateau.

  My ammo was good. My head was clear. This was something I could do, without question. I almost hoped to find Cray. Olivares was right. I was a killer. It’s something I’ve always been good at.

  When I reached the edge, I dropped and low-crawled the rest of the way. I was almost disappointed to see nothing there; just scrub and rock and the tree line far below. I rolled over and stared at the sky.

  The mound seemed so far away. And to think we had to find a way underground and travel back there. I chuckled. It was the definition of a wild goose chase. And what happened if we couldn’t do it? Not much. It was only the entire human race depending on us.

  I’m not sure how long I lay there, but I started to relax, staring at the bright white clouds floating in the upside-down sea of the sky. I blocked out all the bad that had happened and began to remember things I’d forgotten. Like the first time I’d stormed up Victory Tower in basic training at Fort Jackson, or the feeling of accomplishment after my first twenty-one mile ruck march. Winning Soldier of the Month competitions and my promotion to sergeant, which had seemed so long in coming, but had really only taken three years. Thinking about those times was bittersweet, however, because as I remembered each thing, another part of me reminded myself that each of those people and plac
es no longer existed. I fought the idea; they might not exist in the real world, but as long as I remembered them they existed in my mind.

  The sky was blocked suddenly by the head and torso of a figure.

  “You sleeping?” Olivares asked.

  “Just resting.”

  “Come on, you can—”

  “I know, rest when I’m dead.”

  He helped me to my feet.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Smells like a prom date in here, though.”

  “Need better prom dates then.”

  He laughed. “No kidding. At least ones who can hold their liquor.”

  “I should point out that eighteen-year-old girls shouldn’t be able to hold their liquor.”

  “We knew different sorts of eighteen-year-olds,” He looked down the side of the mountain for a moment, then back to me. “What’d you do with them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Cray. What’d you do with their bodies?”

  “Their what?” I sat up and stared back towards the rock formation. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Then where are they?”

  They’d been dead. I knew they had. But then I remembered I hadn’t checked the other one. In fact, I’d held my fire. It must have been playing possum.

  Damn!

  We’re surrounded. That simplifies the problem.

  General Chesty Puller, USMC

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  WE TOOK OFF running. Olivares went left and I went right. We met on the other side. Sure enough, the dead Cray were gone.

  Olivares was turning in circles, scanning the terrain.

  We saw it at the same time: drag marks.

  Again, we took off running, following the trail across the plateau to the rim of the caldera. When we got to the ridge, we searched but didn’t see anything.

  There was no way it had moved that fast.

  “Are you sure you shot it?