Amanda’s squad ignored the battles beside, in front, and overhead. Instead, they navigated the increasing number of downed and burning aircraft on the path to the south portal of the alien installation. They passed more diced soldiers than the disjointed bodies of dead aliens, but each time they passed one of those multi-colored hairy things it awoke some kind of primal rage in Allan.
“Give me a gun!” he yelled.
“What?” Amanda yelled back from somewhere ahead.
“I want a fucking gun!” he screamed.
“You sound like you’d use it,” she said.
Soldiers next to them pulled their handguns from shin sheaths and deep waist pockets and offered them to the three. The other two scientists begrudgingly took them. Allan brandished his and aimed at the alien towers rising before them, one of which skewered the Sun. Struck suddenly by its beauty, his hands limped back to his side and he rested them on his knees for a moment, staring into oblivion.
Above the alien tower the Sun danced as its light shimmered through millions of minute strands of water. On the sand the sunbeams scattered into diffuse waves pulsing in time with Allan’s heartbeat. He thought for a moment he felt another heart there, too, standing at the bottom of the pool, diving mask on, waiting for his air to run out.
The ground burped and shook, knocking everyone to their feet.
“The fuck was that?” Amanda asked someone the scientists weren’t privileged to hear.
“That wasn’t another Apache going down,” Kam said.
An unknown voice echoed over the radios, “Booms are getting more frequent. Best guess is they’re leaving in two hours. Get in there!”
“How do they know?” Kam asked to anyone that would answer.
“They left China yesterday, same thing,” Amanda answered. “In two hours this place will be an ashtray twenty miles wide.”
The ranks of the soldiers ahead of the group were thinning out. Still a few hundred yards from the alien circus tent in front, it became doubtful they’d make it. Not that the scientists wanted to be trapped on an alien ship leaving the Earth anyway.
As the soldiers struggled to keep the perimeter around the scientists, a volley of Patriot Missiles launched minutes ago from the Pacific came down on target. Enemies in the bull’s-eye simply evaporated, those on the perimeter fused with the ground and shrunk like rapid-burning candles under the flames. The emboldened soldiers surged forward, and the scientists stumbled to keep up.
Their cover dried up; the Warthogs were going down, trying their best to slam into groups of the enemy after having neat lines cut through their fuselage from the alien lasers. With death on both sides, the scientists rushed headlong into its heart.
Another Apache roared a few feet overhead, but this time the chopper didn’t lay down its fire and circle back. The nose of the helicopter sheared clean and the pilots died instantly. Without a pilot to guide the damage onto enemy shores, the Apache went down in front of the shrinking group of soldiers escorting the scientists.
They used the chopper smoke as a defilade, but soon found their enemy had guessed their tactics and enabled a way to see through. They strategized while hiding behind the bunk of the Apache with the engine on fire opposite and facing the enemy.
“We’re twenty yards from the start of the black ground,” Amanda said. “There’s a Huey downed about ten yards out, and a Patriot crater after that. If we can sneak ‘round the Huey and into the crater they may not see us.” She paused for a moment to contact another platoon leader.
“Platoon twenty-three is just north and they’re falling back to cover us.”
“What happened to platoons three to twenty-two?” another soldier asked.
She didn’t answer, instead shouting, “On my mark!” and then counted down with her hands.
They rushed around the backside of the chopper and passed by the fanning flames of the burning rotor engine. Jill stumbled over a rotor blade, but Allan lifted her up and over. Then he felt something hot on the other side. A glance at his right shoulder told him what he already knew: an alien laser had burned a half inch into the flesh of his arm. The soldier next to him wasn’t so lucky, missing the left side of his body and bleeding out quickly.
Allan bent down to comfort the soldier. By the time he touched the flesh the man had perished. From the corner of his eye he saw something low to the ground approaching, twitching to one side, then the other, hiding behind rocks and bodies.
Allan took a stance on the ground, firing his gun straight at the oncoming beast. Less than twenty yards away and able to see what Allan was firing, the alien decided to jitter full-force ahead. It came fast through the billowing smoke in a creepy low-to-the-ground gallop like an octopus, swimming through its own ink. Allan had nothing to defend himself with on that ill-fated scuba expedition. The pistol the soldier had given him felt like it was firing blanks, but the bullets were simply dropping to the ground after hitting the approaching marauder. He could see the strange beak hidden between thrashing arms.
Allan wondered why the others weren’t helping; could they not swim? He glanced the other way and saw two more sea creatures approaching from farther out around the dirty pock-marked coral.
The twenty-third platoon was coming in from the north to catch the bears on the left, but on the right they could not fire towards the group without hitting friendlies. Soldiers near Allan rushed to his side to help as these three scientists were the golden geese and they’d all promised to give their lives to protect them.
Two soldiers with much larger rifles took a stance just in front of Allan, shoving him to the sand. “Stay down!” one diver shouted as they fired a speargun toward the octopus. The rounds only slowed it, nearly upon them. A swimmer in front of Allan used his weight to bash the monster sideways, losing his arm in the process as the creature fell backwards with laser snapping all soft flesh around.
It landed in front of Allan, looking up with beady cold eyes. This was no starfish, no octopus; Allan came back to the surface, jumping upright and instinctively firing as many rounds as he could at the center of the alien, turning the furry face into a wet mess.
“No armor in the kisser, eh, you ugly fuck!” yelled a soldier next to him, nursing a deep laser-cut to the thigh. Scuba masks didn’t allow speaking, and gravity was pulling the man’s blood straight to the sand instead of the red cloud Allan half expected. Sharks or not, he knew predators were still coming for them. Where had he been the last few minutes? Pith had offered him a powerful cocktail of military grade chemical enhancements when Allan asked for a sleeping pill.
Did all soldiers see the battlefield like this? Hallucinating their fear away, displacing responsibility for casualties. Perhaps it was like the tabs Allan used to take in the good old days at Berkeley, everybody’s trip was different. Allan felt like he was going to die when that octopus attacked him on the dive. He hadn’t drowned in his fear like that again until crawling through explosions between dead bodies today merged the experiences into one frame of reference.
The voices of the soldiers wavered again, like grunts from fellow divers echoing through the water. Allan stared at the slowly heaving alien body under him, little different than an oversized starfish in the same sand. Who was the intruder here? They both struggled to stay in the present.
The bearantula lost the fight and went limp, firing the laser again as life escaped. Allan fell backwards.
For that instant, lying on his back, he could see smoke drifting sideways across the pink and gold clouds like the shoals of little fish that had looked down at him as his friends pulled him to the surface. Just like then, the uncommon beauty numbed his pain momentarily.
Unlike then, he had more than just a scrape to bottle up. Looking back down he saw his right leg, cut above the knee and propped over his left, similarly severed. That was a mistake. He should have listened to the dive master and looked away.
His hands at his sides felt a thick, warm liquid surround the fingers. When they hau
led him out of the ocean he’d let a hand drift over the side of the boat while they stitched the hole in his thigh the octopus had bit. He wanted to get back in the water.
Something unintelligible chirped over the radio. He remembered trying to tell what the worried Thai boatmen had said as they bandaged him. Allan tried to follow the words but they kept dropping off a cliff in front of him into the cool darkness creeping up.
He turned back to face the sky, but found it replaced by a gray haze. The haze turned to pitch without stars. Someone called his name from the surface as he sank deeper.
He remembered his wife. His son and daughter. Somehow they were there with him, within him. He could feel the energy of their love swell inside until it burst forth in a brilliant white glow. Gradually, the radiance became larger until it obliterated the dark and bleached his senses. The nothingness of everything at once overcame Allan as he left the self and headed into the unknown.
Chapter 13
“Give him a shot of morphine!” a stern voice shouted.
“Too late. Nothing else we can do for him,” another voice said, directed at Jill as they pulled her away.
Jill struggled to see through a mask fogged with tears. The soldiers pulled her along; she wanted to stay with Allan.
“You’ve still got a job to do!” Amanda yelled, reaching back and yanking her forward.
Kam stumbled blindly after her, silenced by his own fear. Allan was dead. He hadn’t bothered to befriend him in the aftermath of the Event when they were thrown together, but he’d seen the life in Allan, a brilliant mind now silenced forever. He could be next.
Amanda had to lead their ragtag group through one more crater before they’d reach the alien installation. It was easier to slide down and run across it than go around. On the cusp, Kam surveyed the battlefield. Strewn over miles to the north, hundreds of downed aircraft sent smoke signals. Between the gullies of smoke and flame lay bodies of men and beasts alike. More of the beasts poured from northern portals in the alien complex, skittering over the black surface to the sandy battlefront.
“We’re losing,” Kam whispered.
“You’re right!” Amanda shouted. “As long as that pilot is inside that damn ship, we’re failing our mission!”
“Take cover!” another shouted over the radio, as the majority of the twenty-third slid down into the crater with them.
Another missile struck just to the north and heated sand covered them.
“Go!” Amanda screamed over and over. “We’ll never get better cover without being blown to bits.”
Under the cover of the sand haze they ran to the base of the alien complex and up to the side, the infinite blackness of the surface betraying no markings to guide them. A few of the soldiers stumbled; it felt like running over nothing and the whirling sand flushed any sense of visual level.
Other platoons rallied and headed south to form a new barrier between Amanda’s group and the enemy. The portal seemed hopelessly hidden in the blackness that crawled up vertically in front of them. A laser sizzled through the front line of soldiers, the first shot from a bearantula emerging from an otherwise invisible door. The soldiers tossed grenades and stunned the enemy into submission as they ran to it.
“Hunter!” Amanda requested as they reached the opening.
A soldier moved to the front, activating a tracking device.
“If she’s still got that beacon, we’ll find her,” the soldier assured her.
Amanda grabbed the young soldier by the shoulder. “We’ll find Lieutenant Green or die trying, Private.”
“Y-yes, sir,” stammered the nervous private.
“Let’s get in before they figure out they’ve been compromised,” Amanda ordered.
The diminished troops rushed into the darkness, Kam and Jill sandwiched between them.
To their surprise, the interior passageway was as drab as any hallway at the Pentagon, gray walls sloping to meet a floor of continuous aluminum-looking material, completely absent of the magical black gunk they stumbled over to get there.
“It’s a factory,” one of the soldiers said.
“Or a prison,” another reminded them.
“You picking up anything on that tracker yet?” Amanda asked.
“No, sir,” came the dismayed answer.
“Could be weak in here; we don’t know what this stuff is made of,” Amanda reminded them. “Keep going, search everywhere.”
“Sir!” a soldier hollered. “Our orders are not to touch anything.”
“Look, but don’t touch, unless on my orders,” Amanda confirmed. “These things don’t have hands, so I expect to find some sliding doors, or something like that.”
Low ceilings forced the soldiers to stoop as they took cautious steps. No doors appeared, sliding or otherwise, just endless connected passageways of gray. Occasionally a trio of cartouche-like symbols appeared at what might have been the eye level of the aliens, but demarking what it wasn’t clear.
“Nobody home?” one of the soldiers asked eventually.
“What’s procedure back on base for a facilities breach?” Amanda asked him rhetorically.
“So where are they hiding?” another voice came back.
“We’ve been walking for twenty minutes and not seen anything but hallway,” said another.
“A trap?” warned a third.
“We could be skulking around in their janitor’s closet, for all we know,” Kam said.
“Stop!” a soldier yelled after seeing Jill take her gloves off.
“These signs are genetic markers, gene configurations,” Jill said.
The soldier grabbed her arm, but it was too late. Jill pressed her hand to the right of one of the cartouches on the wall. The wall faded to a nearly transparent sheen, the interior almost as horrific as the battle outside the ship. The light coming through the sheer wall activated something, and the room, coated with organic material, came alive.
A viscous rambling tube of undulating purple and silver wrapped around the room several times, supported by a series of hooks, or perhaps legs, attached to the ceiling with hardened mucous. Every few seconds a piece of the tube would shiver or shake like a dog coming out of the water and dispense a mass of silvery, three-legged organisms. Each, the size of a human hand, flexed three legs culminating with a crude beak.
A few of the soldiers vomited inside their helmets.
“Do NOT take your masks off!” Amanda warned them.
The tripods struggled to take first steps after descending to the floor on a long stringy cascade of material birthed along with them. Once on the floor the creatures learned quickly how to run, struggling over each other in a quivering race to escape the room’s other occupant.
When the tube broke, a much larger creature stretched on long wiry legs nearly to the ceiling. It flexed a lithe frame covered in a patchwork of metallic woven cloth while unfurling a long tendril from its jaw. Feet and hands, covered in webbing, spread to the walls and maneuvered to the ceiling, where it pulled the rest of itself upward.
It hung with a wide eyeless face toward the soldiers, while lashing the tendril at the terrified tripods. Each sting inflicted a toxin, freezing individuals from the insectine mass so two of the four large hands could grab and break apart the beaks. With the only hard part disposed of, the smaller creatures were ingested through an opening on the side of the large, upside-down, eyeless head.
“Horrific,” a soldier said.
“Another hostage,” Kam said.
“Then Lee can’t be far off,” Amanda said. “And alive. Everyone take off your gloves and open these windows.”
“But they said not to touch anything. The microbiome is-“
“Just do it!”
They crept down the passageway, peeking into the cages of an intergalactic zoo. A few sported local Earth wildlife, a desert tortoise, a red-tailed hawk, and a band of coyotes.
“They must not be completely malevolent,” Jill said. “Taking specimens means they’re i
nterested in alien biology.”
“How do you know that interest isn’t malevolent?” a soldier asked.
Jill stopped offering opinions.
“Found her?” Amanda asked a soldier standing mesmerized by one of the rooms.
“I’ve found something . . .” the soldier’s voice trailed off.
Inside the room another hominid kept an odd position, on its knees, bent forward in prayer with fingers too long to be human pressed together in front. Slowly the being looked up and put the hands down, letting a dirty robe fall away at the elbows, revealing too-long forearms. It turned slightly, revealing an elongated skull with pools of deep teal. The eyes held the soldier transfixed. Above them elaborate horns twisted in intricate designs.
“It’s telling me something,” the soldier said, as a few others crowded around.
“I don’t hear anything,” another said.
“Not language. Emotion.”
The being moved on long double-jointed kangaroo legs, quickly covered by the flowing robe. It turned and sat on the small bench in its drab cell, unable to stand in the low room.
“I feel sadness, but also hope. It’s going home after a long absence.”
The large eyes shifted away from the first soldier to regard the others. Folds underneath turned up the way a human face might smile, but there were no lips, nor mouth, to deliver it.
“I’ve got her!” shouted one of the soldiers at another window down the passage.
The soldiers rushed to the other window. They banged on the wall, hoping Lee’s emaciated body was immobilized only from sleep. She didn’t move and the soldiers began to fear the worst.
“Stand back!” Amanda ordered.
The soldiers instinctively got low to the ground and turned away as Amanda took out her Desert Eagle .44 Magnum. She aimed high for an angle that would ricochet down the passageway if it didn’t stick.
The Filter Trap Page 34
