“To what?” someone asked.
“Concussion. Does anyone have a Stinger? Something with bite?”
The figures, some still on all fours, advanced, black lasers pointed at the soldiers.
“I think I know what to do!” said a private behind Amanda.
The soldiers parted as Amanda looked back to find him.
“Look!” he shouted, pointing behind the soldiers at a heavy delivery truck, worse for wear from the Event, but maybe still drivable. “Must have been on a rooftop when the water hit.”
Amanda nodded. “Good thinking! Anyone know how to hotwire?” she asked.
A skinny private from Pendleton ran to the truck. It belched a cloud of smoke and sputtered as the flooded engine struggled to stay alive. The private screamed, “Cover me!” from the driver’s seat. The rest of the soldiers made an opening just wide enough for the truck to squeeze through.
The soldier stomped the gas pedal to the floor and the truck lurched out from behind the soldiers. At least half of the bearantulas trained their arms on the truck and pieces of steel flew off as the lasers sliced through. Two wheels burst and flapped as momentum kept the big truck barreling toward the furred wall, now taller as the otherwise unphased aliens stood on two legs.
Another round of pointing by the aliens and the C-pillar collapsed. One of the lasers burned a fly-sized hole in the windshield before bloody flesh splattered over the rear window, deflating the cheering soldiers.
But the truck kept going, dead meat pressuring the accelerator. The lasers’ precision became their impediment as surgical cuts struggled to stop 10,000 pounds of rolling steel. The aliens couldn’t get any more lasering done before the truck broke their line. The stubby beasts were mowed down, only flinching at the last second. The remaining aliens preoccupied themselves with stopping the truck and turned toward it, away from the line of Marines only a quarter block away.
“Flank!” Amanda shouted and pointed to the sides of the street.
Her scream was accompanied by the first faraway flutters of helicopters zooming in from the Pacific. Smiles crept onto the young soldiers’ faces. They looked at Amanda for direction; by default she was the highest rank around.
“The high school is two blocks away,” Amanda said. “We’ll never make it with these things on our tail. Flank, split and defray!”
She hoped the maneuvers she’d learned in training were universal, or this wouldn’t work. The soldiers split into thirds, with the flanks crowding to the sidewalks, running up the street and hiding behind defilades that used to be yoga studios and coffee shops. The soldiers opposite Amanda climbed to the tops of the wreckage and set a firing line with three Stingers and five M32 grenade launchers. The bearantulas were distracted; otherwise, none of the soldiers would have made it more than two paces without being sliced in half.
“No rifles!” Amanda shouted, realizing the soldiers might not know what she knew about the strange fur that absorbed heat and energy. The lead soldier across the way tipped his helmet. They knew what to do. The enemy’s main weakness: unknown dangers on a strange planet. The most dangerous of all: physics. Although armed with better weapons, a five-ton truck still crushed their alien bones. Blunt force would be the aliens’ downfall if the Marines could muster enough.
The grenades would distract the aliens long enough to allow an escape, she hoped, both for her column and the Marines straddling the wreckage. She never heard the innocuous clicks of the M32s’ grenades escaping their chambers, but the close-range plops and crunches when they met their targets was welcomed by every human within earshot.
The aliens started to bleat in high tones that kept soaring out of human range. If any stray dogs wandered this part of the city, their ears surely bled. Panic set in at last for the invaders. The soldiers knew they had a chance.
While the M32s were bombarding the hairy, spider-like demons, the middle column Amanda left in the street busied themselves making a barricade of rucksacks and communications blocks. Anything that could provide cover was put down like a sandbag wall, with the short ends of the Stingers for mortar. As the aliens that still had limbs to aim turned toward the tops of the adjacent wreckage, hunting for the source of their strife, a chorus of high-pitched targeting lock tones emanated from the sandbag wall.
The efficient middle third let hail a barrage of Stinger fire as Amanda led her column of soldiers up a side street; Linden Drive. She heard the echo of the missiles heading out at close range. Made for surface-to-air combat, the missiles searched for a heat signature. Given their endothermic fur, the missiles might have skipped their alien targets and hunted for more attractive fare. However, the bearantulas were so close that dumb force, the inability to turn a rocket in close quarters, brought them to bear on the invaders efficiently.
Strange taps and whistles came as the errant missiles that missed their primary obstacles scraped the broken street or bounced into buildings. Ordinarily this might be a problem, but against this enemy, blowing shards of glass or toppling steel might be as much of a win as a direct hit. Many aliens crunched like popcorn when the missiles hit, many more were trapped or squashed by falling girders. American soldiers were, too.
Amanda realized too late that some of the enemy had fanned out after the M32s landed and avoided the Stingers altogether. They were behind her, and making good ground somehow. She didn’t discover this by looking back, but by hearing and smelling soldiers get literally cut down around her. On her left, two arms clattered to the ground still holding a rifle, while the former owner screamed out before being sliced a third time diagonally right through the heart. Blood gushed, thankfully in the opposite direction of Amanda, from the two halves of the dead body.
Amanda was startled for a moment, realizing that the soundless weapon of her enemy held a tactical advantage. “Don’t run in straight lines!” she screamed and strengthened, knowing the lack of sound left more courage in her troops than a chasing Gatling gun might. The lasers also seemed limited to short, targeted bursts, probably using a lot of energy each time. That was another good thing about lasers, unlike a Gatling guns, where the enemy could mow them all down in one long spray. Without enemy gunfire it was also easier to relay orders. “They have to aim,” she reminded the column. “Don’t give them an easy shot. Use your surroundings.”
Amanda and her soldiers headed west through an alley to Spaulding Drive. A powerful “ka-kow!” more deafening than the earlier missiles and grenades, echoed for miles. A washed-out mansion behind the troops burst into flame from a terrific explosion.
“Someone had a Javelin!” she screamed, recognizing the unequaled destruction provided by the anti-tank artillery. Wondering if that meant other troops had joined the fight she peered back through the smoke. Their pursuer seemed to be buried in the rubble from the Javelin strike.
Further back she could see to the original street where she’d given the order to defray. The middle column had evaded the laser fire smartly. Radio packs and provisions lay in neatly-sliced chunks in the street, toppled off the abandoned Stingers, but few bodies lay with them.
Through the closer rubble on Spaulding, a pile of glass burst outward like glitter. An alien emerged and clambered over pieces of flooded cars and mushed drywall. It looked more like a spider than ever, skittering low to the ground and twitching unnaturally.
‘If anything positive comes out of this, it’s that I’ll never shiver at the sight of a house spider ever again,’ Amanda thought, absentmindedly rubbing her grandfather’s ring.
The soldiers at the front of the column never stopped running. She tapped the soldiers around her closer to the rear. They let those in the back run forward and around while she and four others carefully pulled pins from their grenades.
“Don’t wait for my command-just throw and take off,” Amanda said low, while pulling two more pins, holding the first grenade gingerly on her finger.
They threw their grenades and didn’t look back. Amanda prayed one of them hit that mo
nster right in its beady-eyed stomach as she led the column further south, taking every kitty-corner available, until they reached the high school.
A gate, uprooted by the tsunami, separated the high school track field from the street. The football field looked more like an actual field, waterlogged and growing out of control. A Chinook set down in the tall grass as Amanda’s column approached. Marines hopped out on either side of the chopper to provide cover. In the distant northwestern sky a second Chinook approached; more dotted the horizon.
Amanda and the other soldiers streamed onto the field, making a beeline for their rescue. The Chinook exploded from inside out, knocking the soldiers on their backs. On the wet grass they craned their heads up to see four of the alien delta-shaped troop carriers slip overhead. A group of Apaches shadowing the destroyed Chinook swung behind the alien delta ships in pursuit. The “karang” of heavy machine guns ricocheted over the soldiers through air filling with black smoke.
The Apaches scored direct hits on the delta ships headed towards the remaining Chinooks. The way the ships reacted was odd to anyone familiar with the destruction normally attributed to 30mm shells. Instead of blasting holes through alien fuselage, the delta ships absorbed the impacts, bouncing and spinning after every hit, sometimes out of control.
Several spun west and collided with remnants of the glitzy hotels on the Avenue of the Stars. Another ship, at the edge of the pack and taking the brunt of the lead Apache’s firepower, flipped end over end. It quickly lost altitude and ditched on the far end of the high school football field. The soldiers lay motionless in the uneven grass a hundred yards away.
Amanda ran to the Chinook, a charred husk burning from the front and back, its cargo hold a smoke flue. The big M60 mounted on the chopper was hot to the touch, but otherwise undaunted by the smolder still pouring from within.
“It’s gas operated!” a nearby soldier, still flat on the ground, warned her.
“Got a better idea?” Amanda shouted back, wincing from the hot smoke hitting her skin as she grasped the spade-grips and checked to see if the ammo feed was jammed.
‘Why am I bothering to check?’ she thought, leaning hard on the grips to tilt the heavy gun around at the other end of the field. Before she started firing she yelled to anyone that could hear, “I’ll cover you! Get down there!”
Her compatriots knew exactly what to do. The Apaches drew the fire of the remaining airborne delta ships; the soldiers had the burden of eliminating any threat from the ground. The dripping wet soldiers fanned out and crept low across the former high school football field as Amanda pelted the top of the alien ship with rounds from the M60. The rapid fire over their heads gave the weary soldiers a strange confidence; they were ready to make whatever drove that thing pay for coming to their planet.
The delta craft had come down nearly perpendicular, sticking into the earth on one of the longer sides. Unfortunately, the black bottom faced the troops. Just as in the air, the dark coating absorbed the rounds with little more than a vibration rippling the surface. As the soldiers got closer, they saw the craft remained intact, and their gait slowed. M60 rounds make Swiss cheese out of cinderblocks; the delta ships were stiffer stuff.
Amanda’s gun fell silent and the soldiers froze. She looked around for more ammunition, but the rest lay in a box so hot it wasn’t retrievable with human hands, especially Amanda’s, already burnt from the metal of the M60 handholds.
The soldiers looked back at her, surprised to suddenly lose their comfortable suppressing fire. “Hit the deck!” yelled one, and they all turned back to the delta ship. The legs of a soldier on the far side of the crash slid out from under his chest. He screamed in shock, not at his own misfortune, but at the soldier next to him. The laser's path had cut higher up on his friend, right into the armpit and on through the neck.
The headless soldier’s trigger finger reflexively compressed as she began to slump forward. Semi-automatic rifle fire arced across the grass, bouncing off the delta ship, and hitting two other soldiers in the legs before the dead hand hit the ground and released its grip.
The soldiers stayed on the ground, taking sniper stances. All eyes rested on the underside of the delta ship embedded in the earth. Sonic rips and snorts made the vicious air battle behind them apparent, but they couldn’t pay attention to it until nullifying the threat in front.
“Move forward!” Amanda commanded them, as she jumped down from the empty M60 and ran across the field. “Ready grenades!”
Behind her, the second rescue Chinook thrashed the grass as it prepared to land, using the smoke of the first helicopter as cover. A soldier in the chopper sprayed intermittent fire a hundred yards downfield through the black and gray wafting haze, pausing to steady and make sure the aim wasn’t low enough to hit any friendlies.
The soldiers, emboldened again, crept within yards of the delta ship, studying the corners of it, expecting one of the four-legged spiders to emerge at any time. In a firefight like this, the bearantulas struggled to see, since their eyes were in the middle of their “chests” instead of on a head. The backyard biologist in Amanda realized the things must have evolved as the largest predators on their planet, hunting much smaller game, probably literally running between their legs. If the soldiers could approximate higher ground, they’d have the advantage.
Amanda turned back to the hovering Chinook nad made eye contact with the M60 gunner. He shifted his aim and she turned again to face the alien ship. “Stand tall!” she shouted, “Their eyes are low, that gunner’s gonna aim over us so it can’t stand up. The first hairs on that thing’s . . . whatever . . . that peek over the edge, grenade it!”
The group advanced, grenades ready. When they were nearly upon the bus-sized black triangle the ear-splitting chatter of the M60 ceased. Something was wrong.
Amanda, still closer to the first downed Chinook, turned her head to avoid the slice of the main rotors as the chopper rolled right and dropped out of the sky. The rhythmic thumping of the Chinook rotors became an ear-splitting clanging followed by a scraping of metal. As it hit the ground, the rotors, still feeding on torque from the engine, warped, bent and splintered off into chest-width killing spears. One spear flew through the still smoking Chinook and sailed inches over Amanda’s head.
A stranger sound made the soldiers in front of Amanda wince as the tail rotor buzz-sawed right through their ranks and came to rest in the side of the alien undercarriage. With their big gun in the sky, not to mention their escape in pieces, most of the young soldiers lost their confidence.
They were easy picking for the short, furry figure that took a sniper position on top of its own ship. Retreating soldiers were cut to ribbons. Closer soldiers moved forward and hid under the tipping backside of the delta ship, out of view of the laser-wielding sniper on top.
The creature focused its weapon on the second downed Chinook, cutting it in large pieces through the underside. In full view of the soldiers hiding under the back of the delta ship, when one of the larger pieces of the Chinook cut away it revealed the former pilot.
Through this, Amanda lay flat in the grass, searching her training for what to do.
“Run!” she screamed, and the remaining soldiers headed to either side of the field, perpendicular to the alien’s line of sight between the two downed craft and its ship. The giant spider thing took the bait. Its downward-facing eyes saw the movement of the soldiers on the side and aimed.
Amanda hated using her fellow Marines in such a way, but she was the closest to the second downed Chinook. She knew the others would do the same if the roles were reversed but the order gave her no pleasure. She didn’t have long to think about it as she sprinted to the chopper and slid through one of the slices in the bottom. She had to pull apart and remove the pieces of the pilot to climb where she needed to go.
The chopper had come down on its side, and Amanda noticed that while the gunner had been sliced through, the gun remained, sticking up like a flag from the hulking green fuse
lage. In the darkness inside, she struggled to climb up to the opening, guided by the trickle of stars against the visual silence of the bare gray metal. Unlike the first rescue chopper, the alien weapon hadn’t managed to cut a fuel line or anything explosive in this one . . . yet.
Amanda delicately reached her hand up and found the grips of the heavy machine gun and pushed as hard as she could. It moved about forty-five degrees closer to her target, but not enough. If she pulled the trigger she’d probably down more Chinooks, instead of helping her friends; something was in the way. Taking more risk than she originally intended, she pulled herself through the gap and stayed low, lying on the exposed and upright side of the chopper hull.
The chaff dispensers, normally mounted to the side of the hull just in front of the rear gunner window, had been slammed beneath the gun mount. It didn’t look fused to the hull, it was just stuck there. A solid kick might do away with it. Amanda slowly moved her leg out and across.
The helicopter shifted. The big exterior engine was sliced partially away from the rotor housing and slid across. Amanda swung her body over the hull, holding onto the edges of the gunner window and almost avoided the big cone at the front. The tip caught her boot and banged her leg against the hull, almost taking the rest of her with it before thudding to the earth and cracking.
‘Fuck it, my foot already hurts and that bug’s gonna aim for me next,’ she thought as she swung back the other way violently. She smashed her foot into the mangled chaff box as hard as she could. It popped out like nothing, but she overshot and the big gun fell all the way down onto her leg. She fought the urge to glance back at the hairy monster, she knew she’d never see it coming anyway, best try to ignore it and try to live, and that gave her the best chance of actually doing it. She pulled her body forward using every ounce of muscle in her core to drag the long heavy gun turret off.
The Filter Trap Page 30
