Stephen Molstad - [ID4- Independence Day 03]

by War in the Desert (epub)

  “If you were an alien,” he asked, “which way would you come?”

  “Wherever there’s no people to shoot at me,” Remi answ'ered.

  Khalid disagreed. “They are hunters. They will go where they can kill.”

  Through the trees they spotted the shell of a long, narrow, abandoned building. The doors, roof, and windows were all missing. It had become a temporary home to several families of refugees. There was laundry hanging on the bushes nearby and the smoke of a cooking fire, but otherwise no signs of life.

  “That’s it,” said Reg, and the three of them ran to reach the spot, splashing through a knee-deep pond that stood in their path. They could feel the presence of the enemy before they heard the moaning that came from inside the walls of the structure.

  “Look over there in the bushes,” Remi said. Two bodies, a man and a woman, lay flat on their backs with blood coming from their ears, eyes, and noses. Their eyes were wide-open, as if the last thing they’d seen had surprised them.

  Reg heard a gasping, shuddering noise that sounded like someone being electrocuted. He led the way to the building, put his back against the wall, and edged toward an open window. Reg grabbed Khalid’s arm and gave him a piece of advice. “Let’s don’t do anything crazy here. We’ve got to stay alive if we’re going to kill them.” He knew his friend sometimes couldn’t distinguish between bravery and recklessness. But the warning fell on deaf ears. Khalid went straight to the window and looked inside. What he saw made him recoil in horror.

  One of the aliens was kneeling in a doorway with the tentacles of his biomechanical suit holding three separate victims pinned to the floor. There were two children and a woman, their bodies convulsing in pain as the alien interrogated them mentally. Khalid screamed at the thing and opened fire. He sent a sustained volley of gunfire in through the window. The creature reacted by shuffling backwards into the next room, dragging one of the children with it. Khalid leapt inside and ran to the doorway. A pulse blast sliced through it and exploded against the far wall, nearly taking Khalid’s handsome face with it.

  The inside of the structure was a labyrinth of decayed walls and leaning doorways. By the time Reg and Remi climbed inside, the creature had retreated deeper into the building, dragging the child with it. Khalid bolted through the doorway into the next room and was immediately surrounded by pulse blasts. Despite the danger, Reg and Remi followed him in.

  Dodging the explosions, they followed the sounds of the alien through two more doorways. Khalid was about to step through the third when Remi held him back. They listened. The sound of sporadic gunfire was coming from several places in the oasis. During the spaces of silence, they could hear the child’s labored breathing on the other side of the nearest wall. Remi pointed into the next room. It was waiting for them.

  When Khalid peeked around the comer, there was a loud crunch, then something flew out of the doorway. It was the child’s body, a girl about nine years old. She slid down a wall and landed in a broken heap. Reg thought Khalid would rush into the room, looking for revenge. Instead, he kept his cool. “There’s a window behind him. You keep him busy, and I’ll surprise him from outside.” The men nodded as Khalid hurried back the way they’d come.

  Reg and Remi kept their weapons trained on the doorway as the harsh sun beat down on them through the open roof. Then Reg pulled Remi closer to the wall and pointed up. He could give the murderous invader something else to think about by firing a few shells over the top. But as Remi was boosting him up, Reg lost his sense of balance. A strange sensation moved through him, a sensation he recognized as the presence of an alien mind.

  As his Ethiopian comrade looked on in confusion, Reg sank to the floor, grimacing in anguish. The creature was reaching through the wall to infiltrate Reg’s mind. A cramping pain shot through him, as if his body was a pincushion pierced by freezing cold needles. As quickly as it began, Reg knew there was only one way to make it stop. He had to tell everything he knew, had to open his memory to the intelligent presence inside him. And he did. At the alien’s command, he conjured up the mental image of the post office and the Saudi soldiers trying to get across the road, then he “remembered” something he’d never seen before: a view from inside the compound, looking out at the post office and the radio tower, and as fast as he could think it, he was identifying the directions the soldiers would come from, then he was huddled in the bushes listening to Miriyam say, “three groups of three,” and running toward the back of the building and splitting up. The pain and the rapid series of images running through his mind confused him, made him feel the need to show the alien everything it wanted to see. And then he was showing himself, sending an image of him and Remi huddled at the base of the wall. And the third one, where is the third one? It wanted to know about Khalid, and, for the first time, Reg resisted the thing’s power, tried to deny it, but the memory-images were coming out of him in an unstoppable stream. He pictured Khalid running back through the tangle of walls toward the empty window frame. He tried to stop thinking, tried to take back control of his mind, desperate not to betray his friend, but found himself imagining Khalid running along the outside wall toward the alien’s hiding place. Then he found a way to resist. With all the concentration he could muster, he steered his image of Khalid away from the wall and toward trees of the oasis. It was like guiding a dream while he was having it. To sustain his concentration, he made the image of Khalid start doing the first crazy things that came to mind. Khalid began to skip, then jumped into the air, grabbed the branch of a tree, and flipped himself impossibly high in the air like a gymnast.

  The alien mind flared with anger inside his own, realizing Reg wasn’t cooperating. The painful seizure intensified, and the wordless question rang through him: Where is the third one? But Reg was learning quickly. In his imagination, Khalid was suddenly dressed in top hat and tails, dancing through the oasis like Fred Astaire in the old movie Reg had seen a week earlier. The pain began to subside as Reg began to understand how he could control the confrontation with the invisible presence. The idea occurred to him that he might even be able to turn the tables and attack his attacker. At that point, the alien presence quickly withdrew.

  A second later, the real Khalid leaned in a window and blasted away at the bioarmor until it collapsed, and the alien was tom to shreds.

  In another part of the oasis, Tye had injured himself twice before his team had spotted any of the invaders. First he cut his hand tripping over a garbage can, then twisted an ankle trying to run backwards. For his own safety, Miriyam assigned him to stay where he was and “guard” the center of the oasis. Then she and Ali disappeared into a thicket of tall ferns and densely clustered palms.

  The twigs and dried leaves on the ground crunched under their boots as they prowled forward, glancing at one another through the vegetation. The pair of them were about as different as two people could possibly be, but they shared soldiering skills in common and were able to move ahead efficiently and quietly, coordinating their movements with subtle gestures and facial expressions. Miriyam froze in mid-stride when she heard Ali tap his finger against the side of his assault rifle. He had seen something. She followed his gaze until she saw it, too. Far ahead, one of the tentacled gray giants was coming toward them. It was following a trickling stream of runoff water into the oasis.

  Speaking only with his hands, Ali suggested they put themselves in the predator’s path and lie in wait. Miriyam agreed and followed him toward a little clearing where the water ran close to a set of picnic tables. After selecting their hiding places, they settled in to wait. Between occasional bursts of gunfire coming from the battle near the post office, they could hear it rustling closer. Ali couldn’t see it from where he was, so he relied on Miriyam to monitor the thing’s progress. She was hiding behind a tree and pecked around it every so often, then nodded in his direction. Then she looked around the oasis as if she were just realizing where she was. She shook her head and smiled at the absurdity of the situatio
n. Ali smiled back at her, agreeing wholeheartedly. Silently, she asked if he was scared. He looked back at her with an expression that said of course not. But a moment later, he changed his mind and nodded that yes, he was. Terrified, in fact. They both smiled again until Miriyam realized the rustling had stopped.

  She peeked out and saw something repulsive. The creature had stopped and lowered itself into a squatting position over the water. The large skull-thorax opened slowly, like the halves of a clamshell, to reveal the smaller body tucked inside under a layer of clear gelatin. It was an indistinct mass of tissue except for the bulging eyes. They stood out like a pair of polished-silver goose eggs. Ali snapped his fingers to get Miriyam’s attention, but she waved him off without looking away from the gruesome sight. The alien lifted itself partially out of the body cavity and reached down to the water with its two-fingered hands. Although it made no attempt to scoop the water up or lower its mouthless face to the surface, it appeared to be drinking, absorbing the water through its skin.

  Miriyam put her fingers to her lips, slid away from her tree, and began snaking silently closer. To get the shot she needed, she had to get down into the streambed away from intervening obstacles. She would be vulnerable, away from cover, but she wanted to pick the enemy off with one shot rather than risk a prolonged firefight. She crawled forward on her stomach until there was nothing between her and her target. Before she could kill it, the sound of an automatic weapon erupted in another part of the oasis. The alien darted back into its burrow and the bioarmor snapped closed. It started marching forward, fast. Miriyam had nowhere to run.

  Ali reacted quickly when he saw she was trapped. “Here I am!” he cried. He stood up and showed himself in the clearing, waving his arms. He taunted the creature with choice Arab-style insults. “Come get me, you son of a jackal; come close so I can spit in your mouth.”

  A twelve-inch-long finger pointed at him, and a pulse blast sizzled between the trees, exploding into the picnic table beside Ali, tearing it to pieces. Running in a crouch, he got out of the clearing and into the trees, where he figured he was safe. “You missed me, you scab on a monkey’s ass.”

  Miriyam bolted out of the streambed and ran for the nearest cover. She ducked behind a thick palm just as a white flash ripped into the other side of the trunk and broke the tree in half. It crashed down, pinning her to the ground. Ali made it over to her and tried to lift the tree away.

  “Get me out of here!” She winced.

  “I will,” he said. Then he slipped out of view.

  “Ali, don’t leave me here, you bastard.”

  The exoskeleton’s head was in sight, bobbing above the vegeta-lion as it moved steadily forward. Miriyam didn’t have a clear line, but she took aim the best she could and began to blast away. Ali hurried back with a thick plank of wood from the ruined picnic table and wedged it under the fallen trunk for leverage. The powerfully built soldier lifted the tree away as Miriyam continued to fire. The alien was almost on top of them. Its shell was cracking under the barrage of Miriyam’s bullets, but not giving way. It was too late to run. The creature stepped out of the streambed and pointed its curving spike of a finger down at Miriyam.

  Before it could fire, a series of gun blasts came from a new direction and hit the side of the shell. This distracted the creature just long enough for Ali to swing the wooden plank. With a loud cracking noise, the alien’s hand broke off and hit the ground. Squealing in pain, the alien sent a tentacle forward to impale Ali, but he dodged it and jabbed the end of the plank into the thing’s face. The shell wall collapsed, and when he pulled the wood away, Miriyam pumped bullets into the opening he had created.

  The eight-foot-tall body wilted into a heap on the ground.

  Miriyam and Ali breathed a sigh of relief, then looked to see where the mysterious salvo of shots had come from. Tye jogged up to them and looked down at the dead alien. “There’s got to be a better way of killing these things,” he said.

  In another area of the oasis town, Yossi, Sutton, and Edward were about to discover a better way. The three of them were pinned down behind a low stone wall, with bullets whizzing over their heads in one direction and alien pulse blasts going in the other.

  The land was higher at one end of the oasis, ending in a set of hills. The slope had been graded into a series of terraces, three-foot-tall walls made of stone. A large group of Saudi civilians, members of the same clan, had been living there since the invasion started. When they heard the shooting begin, they grabbed their weapons and rushed out to the stone walls, using them as barricades. They opened fire when a pair of tentacled killers came marching down the slope. When the Brit, the Palestinian, and the Israeli rushed up the slope to help them, a second pair of aliens appeared at the top of the hill and began blasting away. After slaughtering the defenders near the top, the aliens began picking off humans one at a time with their pulse weapons. The members of the clan hid themselves at the base of the slope, doing their best to keep the alien invaders at bay.

  But their numbers were dwindling quickly. The day before, in the air, the pulse blasts coming from the alien attack planes had been only marginally accurate, connecting with their targets about ten percent of the time. But in their bioarmor, the aliens were much more lethal. Every thirty seconds, it seemed, the humans sustained another casualty, especially those trapped on the terraced hillside. The pulses couldn’t reach them behind the walls, but almost everyone who broke into the open and dashed for the bottom of the hill was picked off.

  Edward was desperate to get off the hill. “We’ve got to create a diversion and get down into the trees.”

  “Go ahead,” Yossi sneered. “You’ll never make it. We’ve got to wait for them to come to us.”

  “We’re dead. We’re definitely dead,” Sutton moaned.

  A couple of kids bolted into the open, running together. While everyone else was trying to get off the slope, these two came out of the trees and started advancing up the hill. The sound of clanking bottles came from the cardboard box they carried between them. They crouched a little as they ran, but otherwise failed to appreciate the danger they were in.

  “I don’t believe it,” Sutton said. “Those are two of the little punks who pickpocketed Tye.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Sounds like they’ve got bottles,” the Englishman said. “Maybe they’re going to try selling us some sodas.”

  The men cringed as they watched the boys zigzag their way up the hill, waiting for the inevitable flash of the alien weapons that would tear their bodies apart. But somehow, miraculously, they made it all the way up and joined the others behind the wall.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “We kill dem,” said the younger boy.

  “We have many bombs we make,” announced Mohammed. He tipped the box and showed them what was inside: bottles tilled with gasoline. Rags had been stuffed into the openings to act as wicks. Mohammed pulled out an engraved silver lighter and pretended to light the gas-soaked rag, then pantomimed tin owing the bottle at his young friend, who summed up their strategy in three words.

  “I am boom.”

  “Yes, we know. Molotov cocktails,” Sutton said, shaking his head sadly. “The problem is that these creatures are wearing armor. 'ITiey’re protected. We need bazookas, not these rinky-dink little bottle bombs.” The boys didn’t understand a word he’d said.

  “I am boom,” repeated the younger boy.

  “How much?” Sutton asked sardonically, assuming the boys were there to make a sale.

  “Very good merchandise, very good price,” Mohammed said with a grin. “For you, my friend, price is free.” He offered one of the homemade weapons to Sutton, who refused it.

  “I’ll stick to bullets, thank you.”

  “They’re coming,” Yossi announced. The others peeked over the top of the wall and saw the four exoskeletons moving closer, one terrace at a time, peppering the area with pulse blasts as they t ame. When they notice
d the human heads peeking over the top of the wall, they changed direction, moving in for a quick kill before continuing down into the trees.

  The younger boy lit a bottle, stood up, and threw it as hard as he could. Rather than duck back down, he watched its flight through the air. Before it hit anything, he was dead. A pulse blast hit him square in the solar plexus and knocked him twenty paces down the slope. The alien energy bursts caused different kinds of damage depending on the material they interacted with. They twisted the heavy steel girders of the radio tower out of shape, but didn't explode human flesh. The boy’s body was smashed, blackened, and bloody, but still in one piece. Mohammed’s first reaction was to run to his friend, but Sutton pulled him back and pinned him against the wall, holding him there until he stopped struggling. An angry roar of gunshots came out of the trees, but the aliens continued to advance.

  Yossi lit one of the gasoline-soaked wicks, sneaked a quick look over the wall, then threw as best he could, grenade-style, protecting himself from the counterfire. The bottle landed without exploding.

  “That was terrible,” Edward said. “You throw like my grandmother.”

  “You think you can do better?” He handed over a lit Molotov cocktail. “Show me.” Edward measured the weight of the bottle in his hand before setting it aside and picking up a heavy stone.

  “I know you Palestinians like to throw rocks,” Yossi said, “but these guys aren’t Jewish soldiers with rubber bullets.”

  “Just watch,” Edward said. He lobbed the heavy stone high into the air in the direction of the aliens. As it reached the top of its arc, he stood up and tomahawked the bottle thirty-five feet on a straight line. As he hoped, the aliens were distracted by stone falling toward them. The bottle shattered against the blunt bone face of the closest creature and spread fire over the surface of the bioarmor. Edward ducked behind the wall again before a single pulse blast was fired.

  Behind the wall, the men heard squealing and thrashing. They peeked over the edge and saw the creature staggering around, swatting at the flames with its tentacles. The walls of the big skull-thorax shell opened, and the fragile, skinny creature riding inside jumped out of the suit. Before it could scramble into the nearest bushes, a barrage of bullets came from the trees at the base of the slope and ripped it to shreds.