Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  Under Foot

  (Outside Context Problem: Book II)

  Series Listing

  Book One: Outside Context Problem

  Book Two: Under Foot

  Book Three: The Slightest Hope of Victory

  www.chrishanger.net

  http://chrishanger.wordpress.com/

  http://www.facebook.com/ChristopherGNuttall

  All Comments Welcome!

  When the smoke cleared, the little steamer had reached the misty horizon, and Carrie was safe. But the Thunderchild had vanished forever, taking with her man's last hope of victory. The leaden sky was lit by green flashes, cylinder following cylinder, and no one and nothing was left now to fight them. The earth belonged to the Martians.

  -Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds

  Under Foot Cover Blurb

  Earth has fallen...the United States and the Middle East have been occupied by alien forces, while the rest of the world is collapsing into chaos. And yet humanity is still fighting; the underground resistance fights a bitter insurgency against the aliens, with the population forced to choose between resistance and collaboration. The fight seems hopeless, yet humanity dares not lose. If the aliens win, resistance will not only be futile, but inconceivable.

  Earth has fallen, but the battle is far from over.

  Dear Reader

  Under Foot is book two in a series that starts with Outside Context Problem, which is also available on Amazon Kindle. You can download a free sample of that book – and many others – from my site; if you this book, please consider rewarding me by posting a review on Amazon.

  Book Three should be released, all being well, in February or March next year. Watch my blog or facebook page for updates.

  As I am not the best editor in the world, please let me know about any spelling mistakes and suchlike. Drop me an email and I will reward you with a cameo in my later books.

  Chris

  Prologue

  Yellowstone National Park, USA

  Day 83

  The small cabin was well hidden within the National Park, in a location marked as off-limits to both visitors and Park Rangers. The handful of Park Rangers who knew about the existence of the cabin believed that it was nothing more than the property of a slightly eccentric billionaire, who had paid out over a million dollars for an exclusive home. The truth was a little more sinister.

  Stanley McIntyre stood on his front porch and stared up into the darkness. So far from civilisation, there were no lights to impede the stars from shining down – along with the hundreds of alien craft in orbit. He’d peered up at them through his telescope and noted their size and rough dimensions, many of them far larger than anything humanity had ever put in space. The internet – the parts of it that were working – claimed that the aliens were landing in sparsely-populated areas and settling their colonists down where they could establish their cities. After the United States military had been beaten so comprehensively, resistance was limited, apart from a single successful strike at the heart of alien power. A massive spacecraft, larger than even an aircraft carrier, had been brought down over Washington. The aliens had hundreds of other craft, but losing such a major vessel had to hurt. He hoped it hurt.

  There was no one else nearby, apart from thousands of campers who had decided to hide out at Yellowstone. He couldn’t blame them for that, but they risked compromising his security – under the circumstances, KEEP OUT signs were likely to be ignored. They warned of landsides and other dangers, yet desperate men and women trying to hide from the aliens would be likely to run right into danger – or the land mines Stanley had placed around the perimeter. The closest possible help was miles away and if the cabin was attacked, he’d have no choice, but to hold out as long as possible. His superiors had believed that one man living alone would be less noticeable than a group of men – or even a mixed group – and he’d conceded the point. In hindsight, it had been a mistake. The Wrecking Crew were unusual in that they had female agents and one of them could easily have posed as his wife, or daughter. They’d done it before.

  Carefully, as if his life depended upon it, he folded up the telescope and packed it away for another day. Anyone looking at it wouldn’t have found it anything out of the ordinary – thousands of telescopes had been purchased after the alien mothership had been detected, before the human race had found out that the aliens were far from friendly – but caution had kept him alive before and would keep him alive for many years in the future. He checked around the cabin – experience had taught him that remote sensors were never as effective as the designers claimed – before stepping back inside and closing the door behind him. The interior designers had done a fairly good job. If he ever had to entertain, as unlikely as that was, he could easily pass for an eccentric rich man, even under the cold gaze of the IRS. The real surprises lay buried under the cabin.

  He glanced into one of the inner rooms and checked that everything was in place, even though no one, but he could have touched them. A stockpile of weapons, high explosives and other tools of the trade awaited his inspection, enough weapons to attract entirely the wrong kind of attention if anyone stumbled across them. The State Government would require a great deal of soothing and his superiors in the White House would be most displeased…not that either mattered any longer. The White House was a pile of rubble in burning Washington and the State Government was trying to cling on, knowing that it was only a matter of time before the aliens told them to collaborate – or else. His possession of the unregistered weapons was nice and legal now, although the aliens wouldn’t care. They’d probably suspect that he intended to wage his own private war against them. The irony was that they would be wrong.

  Out of habit, he pulled the Geiger counter off its hook as he headed down to the basement. The security measures were extreme, yet he was chillingly aware of just how pitiful they would have been against a determined assault. The counter clicked reassuringly in his hand as he inspected the inner door, without stepping through. The nukes were still in place and, if God were kind, he’d never have to touch them before someone arrived to take his place. Even with the Federal Government largely destroyed, the Wrecking Crew survived, serving the President as they had done for the last thirty years.

  Yellowstone National Park sat on a huge volcano. The last time it had erupted, modern humans hadn’t been around, although its effects were easy to see. The briefing had warned that a major eruption was expected to take place at any time, with disastrous results for America. The Federal Government – he had been amused to discover – had ignored the possibility, although it was hard to see what they could have done about it. If the eruption had been powerful enough, it could have exterminated the human race – indeed, he’d seen several bad movies and books concerning that very possibility. If terrorists had smuggled a nuke into Yellowstone and detonated it in the right place, it might have been the end of the United States…

  It might still be the end of the world.

  The orders had been clear. If humanity failed to win independence, or even equality, with the aliens, the nukes were to be emplaced in the right location and detonated. If the simulations were right – if, the briefing officer had explained, barely able to believe his own words – the resulting explosion would trigger the volcanic eruption to end all volcanic eruptions. If the aliens truly had nowhere else to go – another if – two races would die along with Earth, unless the aliens possessed some technology that could save their people from being choked by the ash, or frozen by the sudden cold. If, if, if…

  He took one final look at the sealed door and climbed back up into the comforting light of
the cabin. He’d volunteered for the mission against his better judgement and there were times when he wondered if Cabin Fever would get the better of him, or if his mind would fade and he’d go down into the basement and trigger the bombs without orders. The fate of the entire planet rested in his hands. If the Resistance failed to liberate the country, if the orders came from the President, if the aliens stumbled across the nuclear stockpile…

  Earth would burn and they would all die together.

  Chapter One

  Chicago, USA (Occupied)

  Day 95

  “They’re coming!”

  Master Sergeant Edward Tanaka braced himself as the alien vehicles approached. Once upon a time, the Marines would have had orbital observation satellites and optical sensors to help them locate their targets, but now…now there was only the Mark I Eyeball. The Marines – and the survivors of America’s military – had stockpiled weapons and equipment all over the country, yet his superiors had decided that Chicago’s gang-based resistance movement didn’t need access to such technology. It wasn't a decision Ed could reasonably disagree with, but now he would have been grateful for anything he could get. They were about to strike their first blow against the enemy and they desperately needed to succeed.

  Chicago had been his hometown, years ago. He’d pulled himself out of the ghetto to join the Marines and aim for a better life, but his superiors had decided that his talents would be better spent in assisting the gangs to become more practiced insurgents. It wasn't the standard work of Force Recon – it was something better left, he considered, to the more shadowy organisations – yet there was little choice. The resistance had to get organised before the aliens clamped down hard enough to make resistance impossible, even if humans wanted to fight back. The food and drink the aliens were handing out at their food stations might have been tasteless, yet for many in the area, it was the most they’d ever had. The gang leaders didn’t like it – their footsoldiers would be tempted away to join the alien collaborator forces – and they’d been plotting trouble for days. Ed had been quite happy to help them make life worse for the aliens.

  They’d sealed off most of the city simply by landing outside it and forming a cordon around it – and having their little fighter craft sink any boat that attempted to flee over the water – and they’d occupied the administrative section of the city, but they hadn’t attempted to put boots on the ground everywhere. Ed hoped that meant that they had only limited resources, but he had a private suspicion that the aliens rated part of Chicago as useless and surplus to requirements. He couldn’t really blame them for that decision, but it was one he intended to make them regret. There were thousands of Special Forces soldiers scattered through the cities, preparing to make the aliens hurt, and with the gangs they had all the manpower they needed.

  He didn’t trust the gang lords entirely though; that would be stupid. He’d visited some of the lords, demonstrated his abilities, and convinced them to send a handful of their best men to train with him. The AK-47s and other weapons – liberated from an arsenal that had been prepared for Middle Eastern soldiers – he’d brought had been carefully distributed, encouraging the gang members to be more loyal to him than their leaders. It wouldn’t last – many of them were already suffering from withdrawal as their supplies of drugs were cut off by the alien blockade – yet it would last long enough to keep them angry at the aliens. Many of them would have made good soldiers if they had had the courage to apply and leave the area forever, but that was the curse of the ghetto. No matter how you struggled, escaping was a bitch and few succeeded. And, even then, you carried the scars for the rest of your life.

  “Get ready,” he muttered. “Wait until I give the word.”

  He would have preferred a team of Marines by his side, but as far as he knew, he was the only Marine in the city. There were probably other soldiers working with the gangs as well, or laying surprises for the aliens, something that would have been kept from him. He had no illusions about the kind of treatment he could expect if the aliens caught him, not after what he’d seen in Antarctica. If the aliens had been willing and able to abduct thousands of innocent humans and dissect them for an unknown purpose, they wouldn’t hesitate to torture a captured soldier, if they needed to torture at all. For all he knew, they might have a mind-probe that could reach into his head and extract memories at will. Security was the watchword at all times.

  It was ironic, but the life of the poor in America was better than the lives of the rich in some of the hellholes he’d seen in his life. The gang members might have been the products of broken homes, poor education – if they’d had any education at all – and the harsh school of the streets, yet they made better warriors than some trained soldiers he’d seen in the Middle East. At least they listened to him when he issued instructions, although it might have had something to do with the fact he was more than willing to kick ass if it was required. Teaching Arabs or Afghanis had never been so easy. And besides…

  He’d sometimes speculated about returning to the ghetto with some of his fellow Marines and kicking the gangs out, reforming it by force. It might have made sense – the only reason the gangs were allowed to remain in the city was official indifference and political considerations – yet it wouldn’t have been easy. The gangs were composed of people who had no stake in American society, no interest in maintaining it and no real concern for their own lives, let alone anyone else’s life. The tactics he’d been teaching them would work even better against the American Government than they would against the aliens, assuming that they lasted long enough to see the government restored. The President was in hiding, no one had heard from the Vice President in weeks and the Mayor…was collaborating. The aliens hadn’t hesitated to take advantage of his decision to start putting the city back in order, their way.

  There were seven alien vehicles, he saw. Two of them were the armoured cars they’d used in attacks on military bases across America; the others were heavy transports carrying supplies to their base at the heart of the city. At least they weren't pressing human vehicles into service as transports, he decided, even though human trucks were often more capable than the alien vehicles. It might have been a security precaution or perhaps they’d simply decided that they could rely on their own people now, but it hardly mattered. All that mattered was that there were no humans caught in the crossfire.

  The resistance had carefully placed a small collection of oil barrels by the road three days ago and waited. Dozens of alien convoys had zoomed past without their escorting Warriors paying any attention to the barrels, much to his private amusement. They wouldn’t have lasted long in Iraq or Afghanistan, although the internet warned that they showed a remarkable capability for learning from experience. If they were a warrior caste, as seemed clear from their biology and the role they played in the alien society, perhaps they had the weaknesses of such a caste as well as the strengths. It would be very human of them.

  A day ago, the resistance had returned to the barrels and replaced the contents with high explosive. If the aliens had checked out the barrels, they would have discovered nothing, but sand…until now. Now…

  He reached for the detonator and smiled. “Goodbye,” he muttered, and pressed down hard on the trigger. The resulting explosion shook the building concealing him and part of the attack group, but it would be even worse for the aliens. The explosion would have devastated their convoy. He sprang to his feet, ignoring the plaster drifting down from the ceiling, and peered out of the window. The alien convoy looked as if it had been hit by the Hand of God. Four of the vehicles were burning wrecks, two were flipped over and badly damaged…and the seventh vehicle was nowhere to be seen. Alien Warriors were swarming out of the burning vehicles, swatting away at each other to put out the fires and trying to recover. Ed had no intention of giving them any time to recover.

  “Hit them,” he snapped, and squeezed the trigger. A withering hail of fire poured down on the aliens from both sides of the road. Th
e aliens reacted at lightning speed and dived for cover, but there was little cover to be found amid the ruined convoy. Ed silently counted off the seconds in his head as he targeted another alien and put a bullet through his head. It wouldn’t be long before the aliens responded in force to the imprudent humans who’d attacked their convoy.

  His radio buzzed once. The aliens maintained a CAP over the city using their oddly-shaped fighters, the same craft that had shot their way through the USAF and established air superiority before the ground invasion and the Fall of Washington. The spotter had been primed to warn him when one or more of the alien craft broke away from the patrol pattern and headed inwards, towards the ambush site. There was no more time to delay. The alien craft moved at staggering speeds and could cross the entire country within minutes.

  “Out, out now!”

  The gang members didn’t hesitate. He’d warned them in lucid detail of what might happen when the aliens responded to the new threat. They couldn’t hope to stand up to the aliens in a straight-up battle, so they’d fade away and strike again another day. They ran down the stairs, two of them dropping their weapons as they fled. He made a mental note to drop both of them from the team after they slipped away from the aliens and returned to their base. They couldn’t risk losing weapons, or giving the aliens priceless clues they could use to hunt down the resistance. The Mayor’s collaboration meant that some of the police would be helping the aliens – after all, they needed to eat as well. He didn’t want to think of the police as quislings – actually, coming from his background, it was easy to think of them as merely serving the powerful – but it had to be faced. The war against the aliens would be a civil war as much as anything else.