by James Axler
Ryan watched the hovertruck land beside the cave entrance, far beyond their reach. A pair of armed orange suits debarked from the cargo door and disappeared through the blue hole. They were searching the cave. Meanwhile three orange suits stood watch from the open bay door with assault blasters.
Another plan had bit the dust.
“What now, Ryan?” Krysty asked.
“Keep walking,” he said. “Don’t look back.” He took the lead, steering them toward the tightly packed mob of birds.
“Ryan, where are we going?” Krysty said.
When he glanced over his shoulder, Ryan saw the orange suits crossing the ice after them on a dead run. They had left the aircraft where it landed, which gave him hope that the pilot had joined the foot pursuit. Under the circumstances they probably wouldn’t leave someone behind who could shoot.
“We have to try to blend in with that flock,” Ryan told the others.
“You’re insane,” Lima said. “They will tear us to pieces.”
“Look around, whitecoat,” J.B. said. “The pengies are the only cover we’ve got.”
As they moved closer to the edge of the churning mob, it seemed less and less a good idea, but it was too late to turn back. Nothing in Ryan’s experience prepared him for what they faced: the number of animals in the small space; their sheer size and power; the momentum of their bodies as they undulated around and around; their nauseating stench—the stomping of webbed feet raised a waist-high mist of melted ice, shit and urine.
And the most unsettling detail of all: there were only a few yards between the companions and the flock of monsters. If the pengies decided to attack, as Lima suggested they would, there was nowhere to run.
But the giant birds didn’t seem to notice them, or if they did, they paid them no mind. They seemed to be in some kind of hypnotic trance, possibly brought on by the constant motion and physical contact. As they circled endlessly, they rubbed, they nuzzled, they gently touched. They vocalized, too, tipping back their heads and unleashing exuberant squawks and shrieks.
To escape the orange suits, Ryan knew the companions were going to have to do more than just spectate at the edge. They had to join in, to merge with the throng.
Pulling the skin tight around his chin, he fell into step behind one of the pengies, moving clockwise. Ricky who stood on his right did the same. The others saw what they were doing and followed their lead, matching their steps with the birds in front of them.
This drew wary, over-the-shoulder looks from the pengies in question.
Perhaps it wasn’t enough to just shuffle feet along with them, Ryan thought. There was a certain rhythm and body motion involved, as well. A swaying from hips through shoulders, like a slow-moving wave that repeated over and over again. When Ryan looked at Mildred and Krysty, he saw they had already mastered it. Even Doc was rolling his hips as if he’d been born to it.
“Mambo!” Mildred shouted at him.
The word meant nothing to Ryan. He didn’t know if it was an instruction or a warning. Or a proper name. He focused on mirroring the pengies’ motion without really thinking about the details: move this, then move that. When he did that, his body began to flow from ankles to head, just like Mildred’s. As he and the others sidestepped around the perimeter of the mob, it shifted without warning, and they found themselves sucked into its depths, surrounded, dwarfed by massive, head-bobbing creatures.
Ryan caught the giant birds eyeballing Ricky. The boy stood out because he was clearly terrified and shuffling along out of rhythm. It was getting him noticed.
Which could get them all killed.
With an elbow Ryan nudged the youth hard through his feather coat. “Dance, Ricky, dance,” he said.
It seemed to snap the boy out of his fear.
Ricky began to undulate in perfect unison with the mass of pengies, even turning the occasional pirouette. The curious birds lost interest. To the beat of webbed feet on slickened ice, amid the flock’s atonal screeching, Ricky gave voice to a song he had to have learned in his homeland of Puerto Rico.
It was hard to tell for sure, but it sounded to Ryan as though he was singing, “She-will-tear-your-snout, for givin’ Evita a poke-uh...”
* * *
ADAM LED WILLIAM, George and the other crewmen charging across the ice, trying desperately to close distance on their targets, even as those targets tried to reach the cover of the gigantic flock. If they had used the hovertruck for the chase, by the time they had it in the air they would have lost track of the eight people in pengie suits. The impostors could have melded into the moving mass of similar color and shapes. Their only distinguishing feature was their lack of height and bulk. And that was still apparent as they joined the edge of the circle.
Adam fully expected the pengies to attack at once, to engulf and destroy. In fact, he was counting on it. That’s why he hadn’t ordered the others to stop, kneel and open fire. Better to let the birds do the killing, and then simply drive them away from the corpses with concussion grenades and select fire. But the pengies didn’t attack, and the impostors began to move along with them, as if they belonged. As soon as they rounded the turn of the circle, they would disappear.
Even as Adam thought that, the mass of bodies parted slightly, and their targets were enveloped, hidden behind the much larger pengies.
Cutting hard to his left, Adam tried to maintain relative position with moving targets he could no longer see. Per his orders from command, he was not concerned with saving the pengie species for future harvests. To save his own life and the lives of his crew, killing them all was a viable option. Waving his men on, he shouted, “Wedge apart the flock! Use frag grenades. Blast the shit out of them! Make the sneaky bastards show themselves!”
The single file of orange suits angled closer to the edge of the mob as they turned along with it.
“Follow my lead!” Adam said. He pulled a grenade from his harness, yanked the pin and, guessing where the impostors would be, chucked the bomb over the bobbing heads, into the mass of bodies.
The men behind him threw grenades, as well. The small, black objects fell across a wide section of the mob.
Adam didn’t drop to the ice when his grenade exploded. There was more than enough flesh and bone to soak up the concussion and blossoming shrapnel. Big gaps opened in the throng as pengies were blown off their feet. The other five grenades boomed in tight succession. Pieces of pengie were visible for an instant, black against the sky, hanging thirty feet above them. Then, their upward momentum spent, they rained down in bloody gobbets of flesh and feathers.
The flock parted like an immense entity with a single brain, spiraling away from the dead and the mutilated and re-forming into a solid mass on the far side of them.
Adam waved his men forward through the smoke, ready with his assault rifle to clear a path if need be. Slimed with blood and shit, the sea ice was littered with dead and dying birds, pieces of birds and the spilled contents of their guts.
The orange suits quickly checked the fallen for human feet. They were all the real deal.
When Adam looked up, the rhythmic flow of bodies dizzied him for a second. Their targets were gone, lost in the constantly moving mass. Then the tenor of pengies’ screeching changed. Joy morphed into blind fury. Adam had learned what that sound meant—the hard way. A shiver ran down his spine.
“Close ranks!” he shouted, pulling another grenade from his harness. “Get ready to break out!”
As the orange suits pulled together, the outer edge of the mob swept past and encompassed them. Suddenly pengies were twenty deep on all sides. Adam and his men had become a stationary object caught in the middle of a powerful current. As the gigantic birds flowed past, screaming, lunging with their long beaks, they shifted course, closing in tighter and tighter.
Adam threw the grenade and without
waiting for it to detonate, swung up his assault rifle and opened fire full-auto, sweeping the sights across the mob of feathered bodies. By the time the grenade blew, his men were pressed shoulder to shoulder and back to back, shooting in all directions at once, trying to drive back the feathered monsters. The grenade explosions and rapidfire blasted holes in the turning mass. Through the gaps in the haze of smoke, Adam could see pengies that had been blown nearly in two trying to rise and fight on.
The holes he and his crew made lasted only a few seconds before they were refilled with angry birds.
When Adam’s assault rifle came up empty, he dumped the spent mag and cracked in a fresh one. There was no question of aiming at individual targets; there were too many of them and they were moving too fast.
After Adam had exhausted his small supply of grenades, after he had fired another sixty rounds full-auto, it began to sink in that this was going to end badly. No matter how many they killed, unless they killed them all, the pengies would not be denied. They kept dancing, turning at the same speed, hopping over their fallen brethern, dying by the dozen for the chance to take vengeance.
He reached back to his harness for a full mag and discovered there wasn’t one. Tossing the rifle aside, he pulled his sidearm from its holster and opened fire. The short Beretta allowed him to select and lead individual targets as they moved past, but the 9 mm slugs had little effect that he could see. The pengies soaked up every body hit and kept on moving.
The rifle fire from his crew slowed, then stopped as they, too, ran out of ammo. They drew their pistols and resumed firing. Because they couldn’t drop a pengie with every shot, they couldn’t keep the living walls from closing in on them. Like three-hundred-pound battering rams, the pengies exploded their six-man phalanx, knocking the crewmen on either side of Adam on their butts and driving the others to their knees. Before any of them could recover they found themselves not only surrounded, and at close quarters, but cut off from one another.
Adam dodged and ducked the downslashing black beaks, shoved the Beretta’s muzzle up into a pengie’s eye socket and touched off a round. The skull exploded and a puff of warm, liquefied brains blew back into his face.
It was a taste that spoke of home.
Then a beak struck him from behind, pile-driving into his shoulder between neck and collarbone, which snapped like a dry twig. The impact and the pain dropped him to a knee. Even as he screamed, the pengie jerked out its beak. Blood fountained from the gaping hole and the torn arteries, spraying the side of his face and neck.
Before he could rise, he took another jarring strike high in the back—this one very deep, next to his spine and between his ribs. The beak’s point speared into the middle of his right lung. When the beak pulled out, hot blood poured into the damaged organ. He was drowning and the awful, coppery smell of it filled his nostrils.
With trembling fingers Adam Charlie jammed the muzzle of the Beretta under his chin, closed his eyes and pressed the trigger.
* * *
WHEN THE STRING of grens exploded, Ryan and the companions were twenty feet away, closer to the center of the mass and separated from the blast and shrap by the bodies of a half dozen pengies. Through the smoke, blood and bits of flesh rained down, pelting the heads and shoulders of their coats. The scent of the blood seemed to agitate the birds as they waddled through the downpour. They snapped their beaks and juked their heads as if they were trying to stab something. Anything. When the automatic fire started up, Ryan was already guiding the companions deeper into the crowd, and away from the danger. It was a matter of going with the flow, but with a purpose. Maintaining a slight angle one way or another as they danced moved them closer to or farther away from the center.
The autofire and gren explosions continued, but the noises were behind them as they turned. The undulating shuffle eventually brought them around full circle. By that time, the gren explosions and automatic fire had stopped. There were still gunshots, but they sounded like single fire from handblasters.
Peeking out between the lapels of his feather coat, Ryan caught a glimpse of the orange suits’ last stand. All around them lay a swathe of dead pengies. They were firing their Berettas almost point-blank into the attacking birds.
It was a lost cause.
The birds were hit but didn’t fall.
Slides locked back on empty chambers. Pengies bowled over the men in orange, and then had at them with driving beaks. Spearing their prey once was not enough; they struck over and over, taking turns as they undulated past. Their huge bodies blocked Ryan’s view of the finale. Then a single gunshot rang out and a plume of gore sprayed up between the bobbing heads.
As the birds tore the orange suits to ribbons behind them, Ryan angled the companions to the outer edge of the mass. When they stepped away from it, the flock kept turning.
They put distance between themselves and the flock, slowly at first, then faster until they were running full-out. The pengie heads bounced between their shoulder blades as they raced across the ice for the hovertruck.
Mildred was laughing hysterically. Whether from relief, or at the sight of them running in their coats, Ryan couldn’t tell.
As they approached the aircraft, the cave mouth spilled forth a half dozen enormous animals, easily close to a thousand pounds each. But for the flippers, the long stiff whiskers and the huge yellow fangs, they looked like gigantic, gray-spotted caterpillars. Moving rapidly over the ice, in a lumbering, shuddering, blubbery way, they circled the companions like a wolf pack and roared rotten fish breath at them.
“They’re leopard seals,” Mildred said. “Their favorite food is penguin. That’s what they think we are. And we’re easy pickings outside the protection of the flock.”
“Nuke that!” J.B. said. “Aim for the heads!”
As the seals charged, Ryan and the others whipped their MP-5s from beneath the coats—all but Lima who dropped to his knees, lowered his head and hid under his cape. Autofire erupted on all sides. Ryan poured bullets into an oncoming animal’s open maw and face. The fangs cracked off with the first burst and blood gushed from its mouth. The second burst of sustained fire cut a V-shaped groove down the middle of its skull, from between its eyes to the top of its head. Smoking casings were still falling as it flopped to its belly at his feet. He leaned forward and carefully put three slugs into the exposed strip of brain.
The autofire stopped, and its clatter rolled off over the frozen sea.
They stood in the middle of a ring of dead seals, once more splattered with fresh blood, but still alive and ready to fight on.
Chapter Twenty-One
J.B. threw back the door of the hovertruck’s cargo hold and the companions piled inside. Ryan had to drag Dr. Lima into the aircraft with them. He appeared to be in shock from his recent experiences, either from the long exposure to the elements or the threat of violent death. His rational whitecoat brain couldn’t integrate what his body had been subjected to or that he had somehow gotten through it all alive. Lima could not speak and did not respond to pokes or kicks from the companions. It was as if he was made of wood—he didn’t even flinch.
“Heat,” Krysty said, as she unslung her submachine blaster and set it down. “Gaia, we need heat!”
Everyone agreed that was first on the agenda.
“There’s heat in the cockpit,” J.B. said.
Leaving their weapons behind in the hold, they scrambled up the gangway. There weren’t enough seats to go around. Doc, Ricky and Mildred took the back row of chairs. Ryan grabbed the copilot’s seat next to J.B., Krysty took a place on his right, and the odd men out, Jak and Lima, sat on the floor near the gangway hatch.
J.B. powered up the hovertruck’s turbos and quickly had the recycled hot air moving in the cabin.
It took only a few minutes for it to get toasty inside. The cabin heat brought out the full pu
ngent aroma of their feather coats, but they kept them on until they could feel their fingers and toes. When they were all warm enough, they stripped out of the stinking things and tossed them through the hatch opening down into the hold. The redoubt’s yellow newbie coveralls were now blackened with crusted blood from shoulders to ankles and greased with a coating of pengie fat.
Mildred sniffed at the sleeve of her black suit and wrinkled her nose. “It doesn’t smell any better without the pelt,” she said.
Leaving the others to enjoy the warmth, Ryan and Jak descended to the hold and did a quick recce of their remaining arsenal. The hovertruck’s weapons store had been pretty much stripped. The rack held a single assault blaster and beside the buttstock were four mags of 7.62 mm rounds. Aside from a few concussion grens, there were no explosives left in the cabinet. The companions had brought MP-5s, and there were a couple of extra mags left for everyone. Ricky had left the RPG in an empty crate by the gangway. Mildred’s backpack held ten pounds of C-4, some frag grens and extra magazines for the handblasters they had appropriated.
When they were done, Ryan and Jak climbed back into the cockpit and gave their report.
“Could be a lot worse, I guess,” J.B. said.
“We’ve got mebbe two hours before it starts to get dark,” Ryan said. “Whatever we’re going to do, we’d better get on with it. Either we start flying for Argentina, or go back to Polestar Omega and try to reach the mat-trans.”
“We have no choice but to fly back to the redoubt and take our chances,” Doc said. “We are never going to get away from here without using the mat-trans.”
“Going back there is suicide,” J.B. said. “You can bet they will be ready for us this time. We’ve got no band of muties to draw their fire.”
“J.B.,” Krysty said, “you can’t fly this thing three thousand miles.”
He didn’t seem convinced of that. “We could do it in thousand-mile legs,” he countered. “Save the ocean crossing for the last leg.”
