Ignition. The kickback of the missile firing nearly knocked Colon off his feet. Before he could blink, the fracking tower was engulfed in flames. The pump that applied the pressure to the ground water burst, spewing sludge all over. The tower’s scaffolding collapsed into the yellow water.
The bubbling from the hole in the maar ceased. Not only had it stopped rising, the water was receding.
Seeing that the fire didn’t spread across the sulfuric acid contaminated water, Colon lobbed a grenade at the worm. He didn’t think it could get any uglier. Then the explosive ravaged it, sending stolen organs and brain matter everywhere.
“Strike us down and we’ll rise again!”
A bony fist clubbed Colon on the back of his neck.
“Back-stabbing bitch!”
Moni ducked behind a boulder a moment before Skillings pulled the trigger. The bullets peppered the rock.
Skillings glared at the infected ranger, the closest one to her partner Carter. He stood with a purple-gummed grin right in front of the wounded man, daring her to fire and risk killing her man. Skillings circled, seeking a clear shot. Carter could make the ranger an easier target for her by shoving him away from behind, but he didn’t dare come near him.
Moni watched the scorpion body builder creep up behind the unaware Skillings.
The ranger would lure Skillings and Carter to their deaths. What’d it matter to her? They’d gladly empty a clip of bullets into Moni’s forehead if given the chance. They’d expect her to walk away, to abandon people like she always does. For so many years she wore a badge but never did anything that made her feel she truly deserved it. That could still change.
Moni pushed off from behind her rocky shelter, right at horned lizard man’s spiky face. She dodged his head butt. He swatted her chest with his rough digging claws.
She recoiled and dug her heels into the dirt. She bounced back with a flurry of punches to his gut. He barely winced. Horned lizard man grabbed her behind the knee and lifted her leg off the ground. Moni cocked her hand back to punch him in the face. No, those spikes could break her hand. Instead, she seized his horns with both hands and delivered a devastating knee to his sternum. Horned lizard man fell flat on his back.
Moni summoned her hawk, which she reanimated when the four left her vicinity. He dropped a heavy stone at her feet.
“You cursed me so I can’t be with Aaron,” Moni told them. “Now you want to murder my love, my only hope in this world? I’ll make sure you’re extinct.”
Moni grabbed the rock in both hands and bludgeoned the beast’s face until it was recognizable as neither man nor lizard. Its purple brain oozed upon the sand.
Skillings screamed. Moni looked up and seeing her barely fending off scorpion man’s stinger from her forehead by raising her AK-47 in both hands, she was snapped out of her frenzy. His pincers snatched the AK-47 from Nina and tossed it away. Skillings drew her pistol and shot the infected man in the ribs. Purple blood gushed from the wound, yet scorpion man didn’t slow down. From behind, the ranger batted her pistol down and seized her around the waist. The great scorpion reared his stinger back for the sitting target.
“Help me!” Skillings shouted to her partner.
Carter could have reached for the fallen gun, or charged them for a distraction. Instead, he sprinted the other way.
Gasping, Skillings showed devastation in her eyes. Even she didn’t deserve a man like that.
Moni bolted towards them. Sensing her coming, the ranger released Skillings and chased after Carter, a convenient cop out. The body builder’s massive hands throttled Skillings. He hunched over, giving his stinger a clear shot at her face.
Moni leapt through the air as the stinger thrust forward. She grabbed the scorpion tail just behind the business end and drove the deadly spike straight down into the man’s lower back. She yanked it up along his spine, cracking his vertebrae like uncooked spaghetti. She shoved the stinger up his neck into the base of his brain. His arms went limb. His eyes rolled back. She detected the alien presence dissipate from his body, leaving it cold and dead.
“You think you’re killing us, but these bodies are nothing more than shells, organic matter that we can utilize one day and discard the next,” their voice rang inside her head. “Somehow, we think you’ll feel differently about destroying this body.”
Moni felt Aaron’s distress. She should have detected it earlier, but she was so focused on combat.
She whirled around and nearly fainted. Mountain lion man held Aaron in his jaws. He hoisted Aaron by the back of his shirt with his teeth as if he were a misbehaving cub. A metal box rested in the infected gangster’s hands. He hadn’t harmed him, yet. The aliens wanted Moni to witness it.
“Feel the pain inside his head,” they told her. “This memory will haunt you until your dying day.”
Moni remembered what she’d told Aaron that first time they parted in the desert, when she begged him to stop following her: “I can promise how it’ll end if you stay with me. You’re going to get hurt. When I’m around people, they die. Or worse.”
Another man shouted behind her. The ranger had caught up with Carter. He’d knocked the FBI agent down and stomped on his ankle so he could run no more.
“Nina, shoot him!” Carter ordered. “Aim for the head this time.”
Realizing Skillings had retrieved her pistol, Moni turned toward the policewoman. She found herself staring down the barrel of a gun at point blank range.
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The bone golem pinned Colon flat on his back against the acid-drenched rocks as the world inside the alien bubble collapsed upon itself. Cracks in the shield had started forming. It would fall, killing him, unless he escaped.
Its pale fingers, hard as sharp stone, seized the collar of his suit and ripped it open. It forced his head back, pressing the top of his cranium against the rock and exposing his bare neck to the torrent of acid rain and black ash. Colon howled in agony as his skin blistered and burned. That was nothing compared to the pain once they got inside him. A million stings irritated his veins, riding through his bloodstream like horses with flaming hooves.
Colon turned to his memories while he could still grasp them. He went back to the time he first saw his son. He’d slipped his finger into Ernesto’s tiny hand as he lay underneath the heat lamp in the delivery room. He’d nearly missed the birth, having gotten off the plane from Iraq only 45 minutes earlier and hauling it to the hospital as fast as he could. The first time his son saw him, those little dark eyes barely able to stand the light, Colon had worn military fatigues. His boy didn’t know what it meant then, and perhaps he still didn’t fully understand all these years later.
Today, he would know what made his father a soldier.
The shockwave of pain shot up the arteries in his neck toward his brain. He resisted the urge to clutch at his gagging windpipe and looped his finger into the pin of the grenade on his belt. Damn, his hands were numb. Colon pulled it.
His world suddenly cut short, as if someone had yanked the plug on his consciousness. Purple lights flooded Colon’s eyes. A moment later, a raging fire entered his sockets. His last sensation was the smell of his immolating body.
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Nina Skillings retrieved her pistol and pointed it in the face of the woman who had shattered her life.
Moni Williams stared back in resignation. She’d done more than enough to deserve a bullet from that chamber hammering through her skull.
For weeks Skillings had craved this moment, from her hospital bed to the funeral of her fallen friends, and now she had one opportunity for vengeance. Her finger loitered over the trigger. It didn’t escape her that only seconds ago this woman had saved her life. Yet last night, Moni had left them all to die. What was different now?
“You’re right. I did leave you and the orphans to die in that house.” Skillings heard Moni’s voice clearly in her head. It reflected the regret emanating from her eyes. “I was afraid you’d kill me
. Maybe you would have, but that doesn’t mean I should have abandoned you. It was a scared, selfish choice in a long line of them.”
“Apologies won’t bring the dead back to life,” Skillings said.
Moni bowed her head, then focused on Aaron. Her eyes watered with toxic juices. “I’ve made so many terrible decisions. So I’ll turn this one over to you. Shoot me if you have to. Kill these monsters inside my body. But please, don’t let them hurt Aaron.”
Skillings glanced over her shoulder at Aaron at the mercy of mountain lion man. Holding the metal box with the syringe in his paw, the feline freak deployed his claws around Aaron’s throat. He could have sliced the kid open already. He was baiting Moni, creating a distraction for the other aliens, or Skillings, to kill her.
The military had entrusted Nina to protect the syringe. If the aliens obtained it, they might develop a counter measure. She recalled her father’s stories of Vietnam, when men died defending a hill one day, only to abandon it the next. She had asked him why he didn’t just let them have it. Her father had said only traitors disobey orders.
“Nina! Get him off me!” Carter screamed.
She turned in the other direction, while keeping her gun fixed on Moni, and saw Carter dumped on his back with the ranger’s boot pinning his ankle to the ground like a mouse caught by the tail. The ranger’s purple eyes shone bright from beneath the brim of his cowboy hat. The infected man raised his arms, egging her to take the clear shot at him. When those thought-readers knew you were about to fire, they were damn hard to hit.
“Nina, shoot him already!” Carter ordered. “You love me don’t you? You know I love you.”
Love, she hadn’t heard that word from a man since high school. What she had with Carter gratified her physically, although perhaps not as much as it did him. Those steamy nights gave her the impression that he cared about her, a theory proven wrong today. After she had answered Carter’s cries to save his life and put herself in danger, he ran like a coward.
Skillings’ lover had spurned her. Her most detested enemy had saved her.
But he never betrayed his country like Moni had.
Skillings returned her gaze to Moni. She heard everything she thought, everything she felt. Moni seemed to look through her, beyond her eyes deep into her mind. A purple tear leaked from the corner of Moni’s eye.
She had one shot at this. Fire once and aim well, because the other possessed ones won’t wait for her to shoot again. Skillings couldn’t let Moni influence her decision this time. Decide she did.
Skillings aimed for the forehead and fired her pistol. The bullet’s impact sent a purple mist spraying into the air. Mountain lion man fell dead.
Gasping in shock, Aaron immediately tore off his shirt, as infected blood had splattered on its back. He tossed the shirt away. It smoldered like a Molotov cocktail as it hit the ground. Finally, he rolled the corpse over and reclaimed the syringe box.
Carter yelped in agony before Skillings could turn around and aim her gun. The ranger hoisted the FBI agent up underneath the armpits and dug his teeth into his neck. He approached Skillings with her man in his arms as a human shield. Carter wouldn’t stay human for long.
Moni lunged at the ranger and drove her shoulder into his ribcage, separating him from Carter. Instinctively, Skillings dove forward and caught Carter before he cracked his head on the rocks. She cradled her man as his body convulsed; his movements rigid and wracked with pain. She gently set him down before his newly-infected blood smothered her arm. Feeling his wrist, she found his pulse thundering as if his heart was an engine on the verge of overheating.
“Cam, I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.” Skillings tried sounding stoic and holding in her tears. She couldn’t.
Kicking at the dirt, he contorted his body sideways and reached out for her. As much as she yearned to squeeze his hand, she couldn’t let him contaminate her. Skillings backed away.
Carter stared past her and pointed. She gazed over her shoulder at Aaron holding the syringe box. His concern for his infected girlfriend as she scraped with the ranger had him distracted. Skillings could swipe the needle from him for her man. It might cure him or kill him, but anything was better than seeing the purple light erase his eyes.
Carter opened his mouth as if to speak. He gagged. She knew what he would have said.
“Our mission is to use the syringe on Moni. You came here knowing that, and so did I. We both understood what would happen if either of us got infected.” Skillings looked away as she stood up and took a few paces back. She stared at her gun. Never had she hated it so. “You wouldn’t hesitate to do it for me. I know that.”
Carter’s fingers latched onto her heel. She glanced behind her just long enough to target his face, now with violet beams in his eyes, and pulled the trigger. Skillings closed her eyes and bowed her head to avoid seeing the consequences. Knowing was enough.
When she finally had the courage to open her eyes, Skillings zeroed in on Moni and the ranger circling like two dueling cobras. He did this. She would kill him, if only he didn’t move so damn fast.
“Wait, Nina,” Moni spoke inside her mind. “I know what you just did was so hard. This one is my challenge. He was my friend and it’s my fault they infected him. Let me destroy him before he claims another victim.”
That placated Skillings for the moment, but it didn’t solve Moni’s bigger problem. The alien tech inside Ranger Blake was making a furious last stand. He grabbed a boulder with both hands and aimed to batter in her head. She leapt back, so he slammed the rock into the ground and flipped forward over top of it, bashing his boots into her chest. He stood over her. Moni scissored her legs around his ankle and knee and rolled, sweeping him down. She delivered a hammer fist across his forehead that knocked off his cowboy hat.
The ranger greeted her with a perverse smile.
“Is that all? You can kill a normal man with that. Not me. You weren’t even trying. We both know you’d never destroy this body you love so much. You still lust for it, don’t you?”
He draped his purple tongue over his lips and licked them. Blake would never be so crass, yet for that moment, Moni could only imagine how his kiss would have tasted.
“I felt it and I know you did too,” Moni told them. “Your machine in the lake has been destroyed. It’s over. You’re too weak to…”
The infected ranger drove an elbow into her stomach. As she doubled over, he sprang up and went berserk, whaling away at her head.
A few blows landed on her cheeks until she shielded her face with her arms. He stuck an uppercut that split her defenses and rattled her chin. Her skull shook from the impact. Tasting her foul blood inside her lips, Moni unsheathed her iron nails and lashed out. His beautiful face, those high cheekbones and proud nose, were split by purple gashes. She had nearly ripped his face in half. Her heart ached at such tragic carnage.
Moni couldn’t stop there. She seized his shoulders, dug in her nails and raked them down his arms. His muscles and tendons peeled off as if combed by iron bristles. She kicked the nearly defenseless husk of a man down and pinned him with a foot on his chest. He couldn’t even lift an arm to fight back.
“Your kind ends here,” Moni told them.
“Lying whore! You broke your promises!”
“Who are you to talk about promises? Nothing but machines with programmed memory. You’re not intelligent. You don’t have a conscience. If you did, maybe you’d see that the human race can’t simply be replaced.”
Her red-tailed hawk delivered another heavy rock for her. A pity the ranger’s face would be obliterated like this. Perhaps she could hit only the top of the skull, she thought as she held the stone in both hands. In that moment of hesitation, the ranger spat at her. Four teeth pieced her skin just under her ribcage. Moni’s blood went cold.
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Moni dropped the rock at her feet and collapsed on her back. The infected ranger rolled the rock up her body onto her chest. Once s
trong enough to throw it up a mountain, now she couldn’t budge the melon-sized stone.
All Moni could feel were his detached teeth inside her. They moved. Pinching her like wasp stingers, they deployed what felt like living roots inside her body then pulled them slowly through her chest cavity, scalding everything in their way.
“We’re headed for your brain. We’ll devour every piece of it.” The infected ranger towered over her, his cheek ripped open to reveal purple gums and rows of crooked teeth. “You’ll feel everything. When we finally take our rightful control of your body, we’ll lift you up and give your boyfriend Aaron that kiss you’ve always wanted. Too bad you won’t be around to feel it.”
Moni tried warning Aaron to run. Her mind couldn’t focus. She gasped for air.
She clutched at her neck and squeezed, hoping that it would somehow constrict her veins so much it would block their path. The four teeth crawled atop her windpipe.
Gazing through tears of pain, she searched for Aaron, praying that he’d leave her side, knowing he never would. He wouldn’t let her die alone. Unable to see him, she reached out with her mind.
The ranger knelt face to bloody face with her. His ghastly breath would be the last air through her nostrils. As their foreheads made contact, she probed into their mind as deeply as she could. The alien network had been diminished. The ranger was the only infected human left under their control. Most of the mutants were slain and their worm had been set ablaze. She’d done it, almost.
“We wouldn’t rest the hope of our species in this desert. You’ve shown us more fertile land.”
Silence the Living (Mute Book 2) Page 40
