“What about the ceremony?” I asked.
“Major Harold was a little slow on the uptake. Wouldn’t let us disturb it even though I explained that something bad was about to happen.”
“And did it? Did anything bad happen?”
He grinned. “You should have seen it, sir. Golda Meier, Prime Minister of Israel, Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State, Vice President Gerald Ford, and a bunch of people I didn’t know but whose faces I’d seen on the news, all got up in the middle of the ceremony and began to take off their clothes. Ford hugged Kissinger and began to kiss the back of his neck.” Gomer couldn’t stifle his laughter. “It was ridiculous. One moment everyone was being serious listening to the president’s warlock do the Cremation of Care and the next they were acting out a scene of Roman debauchery.”
I could only imagine and I managed to smile. “What happened next?”
“Remi Calhoun dispelled it with a flick of his hand.”
I nodded to Burgess. “That’s what a Level VII can do. You make it there and you’re the president’s personal warlock.”
I could see Burgess take on a dreamy look.
A shadow passed over us.
Gomer stiffened as a blade pierced his back, the tip coming out his chest.
Burgess was lifted off the ground.
The Jack bounded twenty feet away, then stopped and turned, Burgess’s throat gripped in his left hand.
“Give me my brother,” Rehor said.
“I can’t,” I said, a spell beginning to form.
“Then he dies.”
“No!” I screamed, losing the frame of the spell.
Burgess’s eyes widened and his mouth opened into a scream as Rehor’s blade sliced deep through his neck.
Then Rehor was gone, melting into the night, the only proof he’d been there my two dying men.
Gomer grabbed at his neck, his fingers curling like the legs of dead spiders as they feebly tried to stop the blood flow. His mouth made movements as if he were trying to cast a spell he’d never learned. Healing was for Level Vs. I could heal, but I was too weak to heal them both. I could barely move. I could barely even frame the spell. But I managed. And as I laid my hand on Gomer, I watched Burgess die, all of his dreams of becoming something great feeding the ground in bright red blood.
EPILOGUE
July 27, 1970
Morning
Sunlight streamed through the windows of our San Francisco offices. Moma Told Me Not To Come by Three Dog Night played softly on the radio. I remembered when Gomer, Burgess and I had sung the words on our way to The Bohemian Grove almost three weeks ago. We’d all been different them.
Gomer came in and placed a stack of personnel files on my desk. It was my task to replace a boy who couldn’t be replaced. I wanted another American Indian, but there weren’t many in the program.
My arms still ached, even though Remi had come and healed me. After back briefing him about the mission, he’d nodded and admitted that he would have done little different under the circumstances. That we’d lost Burgess was unfortunate and he promised that the president would personally sign a letter to be sent to the family. Then he’d firmly asked me to leave, stating that the events of The Bohemian Grover were not my affair.
I could thumb my nose at a random Deputy Secretary of the Air Force, but Remi was my ultimate superior. What he said was law as long as I wanted to be a part of things. For a moment, I’d considered tossing it all away. But I’d discovered on the long drive back from Monte Rio with Burgess’s body in the back seat that I had a new focus. I had a new mission. Rehor was out there and I’d find and kill him, even if it meant that I myself would die.
I sighed and hummed the last words to the song, then addressed the pile of files. I needed to find a special person – one capable of speaking with energy and intelligence about creationism and dinosaurs and God and Superman and how on the reservation no one ever played Cowboys and Indians, but instead spent their days playing Indians and Indians, living a life we forced upon them rather than the one they deserved.
It was a long while before my eyes worked sufficiently so I could actually read the files.
After the Red Rain Fell
Matt Hilton
Minutes Ago…
I should originally have been on point, but I’d been given the task of breaching the locks on the doors so “Duke” Dickinson went in first, and Duke died instead of me. I’d be a liar if I said a small part of me wasn’t thankful. Duke was no slouch, he was an experienced soldier, and he was armed with an M4 that’d tear new arseholes in an entire roomful of men, but the poor sod didn’t even get off a shot.
Our six-man team was stacked, ready for dynamic entry. I was the dedicated breacher, armed with a Remington 870 with a pistol grip and 12.5-inch barrel, and protected from any flying debris by a helmet, Oakley M-frames and breaching gloves, as well as an anti-ballistic vest over my battle fatigues. I aimed the shotgun at a downward angle at the lock, standing the requisite safe distance away, breathing slow and steady as I listened for the go. Cameras mounted on our helmets relayed live footage of the op back to a control vehicle where our officers counted down. I probably looked cool and collected but my butt-hole was twitching in anticipation.
Greenlight.
I pulled the trigger.
The shockwave from the Hatton round pulverised the locking mechanism and bolt. I ducked back against the jamb, allowing the shotgun to swing on its shoulder harness, and brought up my own M4 as Sgt ‘Hooky’ Johnson yanked the door wide and Duke powered inside. And that was it for him. A split-second of thunder as he brayed out a challenge that echoed through the warehouse, then steaming chunks of him splashed the threshold. Hooky was only a beat behind him, and he skidded on a slick tubular worm of Duke’s intestines. He went sideways, his shoulder rebounding off the doorjamb before he righted and lurched inside. His boots sucked at the splash of bloody guts on the concrete floor and he cursed loudly, but then the rest of us were charging past.
Things had happened so quickly that none of us realised there’d been no detonation, no drumroll of gunfire, that had ripped Duke to pieces, and we were already inside that gloomy space before I recalled that this was going to be no normal sweep and clear operation. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
The team was one man down and had no clear idea of what we were up against.
But we had an objective from which we wouldn’t back down.
We had to sweep and clear the building, each of us with an area of responsibility to secure with overlapping fields of fire, immediate, near and far zones. With Duke torn to shreds, it meant the responsibilities shifted for team members, but we were experienced enough that we could flow with the shifting circumstances. Hooky was now point man, and he cleared the immediate and near zones with one blistering hail of bullets while the rest of us formed a stack alongside the first corner we came to. While I crouched there, ready to proceed again, I looked for hostiles, dead or alive, but there were none.
So what the fuck had killed Duke?
Something shifted in the darkness ahead.
Hooky fired, his M4 lighting the corridor beyond with sporadic flashes.
“What the hell was that?” he said.
“Whatever it was,” snapped Jack ‘RP’ Wilson, “it got Duke. We aren’t leaving this place ’til I’m wearing its fucking skull for a hard hat.”
RP moved past Hooky, sliding along a wall in the darkened corridor, his carbine seeking targets. Hooky signalled the rest of us to move while he covered from the corner. I glanced at him as I passed, and saw that he was chewing his lips. He blinked at me. “I put half a clip into that fucker and it didn’t go down. Stay frosty, Muppet.”
Hooky wasn’t insulting me. We’d all gained monikers that had stayed with us since basic training. My real name is Bill Grover. Think of that blue puppet with the red nose from Sesame Street and you’ll understand why I got stuck with ‘Muppet’.
“I’m icy, Sarge,” I
promised him. No way would I admit to almost shitting myself, even though we all were.
Then RP was in full reverse and his machine gun roared.
The two guys in front of me – ‘Brainpan’ and ‘Twinkle’ – made target acquisition at much the same time. Their M4s screamed in unison as brass rattled on the floor at their feet. Flashes and sparks lit the corridor, and beyond the drifting smoke I watched the shadows surge and contort, glimpsing reaching hands, and heads lolling on malformed shoulders. Many of their rounds struck walls, floor and ceiling, but as many bullets found their targets. The solid smack of projectiles through flesh was a drumroll that sung to my heart. I raised my M4 to join in with the chorus.
But then Brainpan edged back, his eyes rolling as he glanced at me. Twinkle yelled something animalistic, a split second before he was yanked bodily into the surging wave of inhumanity that swept towards us. There was the briefest attempt at fighting back, Twinkle’s carbine snapping off a short burst, and then the timbre of his yelling changed to bleats of terror. His last scream was ripped in two along with his body.
“Twinkle’s down,” I yelled, and propped my M4 to my shoulder, filling the gap he’d left with a hail of rounds.
Brainpan was still backpedalling. “Get the fuck out, Muppet! There’s no stopping them.”
He was right. For all that my rounds punched into bodies, scattered gobs of bloody meat and bone in all directions, the tsunami of bodies advancing along the corridor came on as if untroubled. For the first time I got a clear view of the mass of limbs and torsos through my Oakleys and knew I’d be as well trying to hold it back with a pea shooter.
“Fall back!” Hooky’s order was rhetoric; I was already backing up alongside Brainpan. We fired, but we were wasting rounds.
“Shoot them in the fucking head,” Hooky commanded.
I did, but it was advice he’d gleaned from watching too many B movies, and was woefully misinformed. I blatted skulls, one after the other for all the difference it made, because the insidious things just kept on coming and coming. Chest shots didn’t stop them either. The only thing that slowed them was to render their limbs to stumps, but that was only momentary because they still flopped and squirmed, worming their way across the ground with singular intent. You might think an eviscerated torso harmless, but that wasn’t the case. These things didn’t need teeth to gnaw or fingers to rip, when even their jellied flesh consumed.
There were dozens of them, maybe even hundreds, because it was too dark to tell beyond the sporadic flashes of our weapons. The darkness surged and moved, and I was sure that those we could see were only the leading trickle of a tidal surge.
“Where the fuck did they all come from?” Again Hooky was shouting questions for questions’ sake as he laid down covering fire. None of us knew. All we’d been briefed on was that there was a small cell of infected holed up inside the warehouse, and we’d been given the order to go in and clean them out. Nobody told us to expect a horde.
Maybe it was something to do with the hive mind these things were suspected of having. Once assimilated, you became part of the larger organism. Maybe their cell had reached out and called more of their kind. Whatever. All that was important now was getting back out again with our arses intact.
Four of us.
Minutes ago we’d been six. A third of our force down already, and our chances of making the exit door were getting slimmer with every expended round and yet another failure to drop any of those things.
“Fire in the hole!” Brainpan was growing desperate. Using grenades in the corridor was as likely to kill us as it was the shambling mass surging towards us. But what was done was done. I turned, crouching, ducking my helmeted head as if that would save me. The grenade went off within the mass of limbs and torsos so the detonation was dampened by the pile of flesh between it and me. The sound was like God’s loud clap, and then I was pummelled by raining chunks of meat and bone. Some of the sharper clumps rattled off my helmet or stuck in my fatigues. Thankfully a spearing rib fragment lanced into my antiballistic vest and not in my throat. Blood spray was all over my Oakleys. I didn’t try wiping the smear away, just yanked off the M-frames and threw them aside, even as I lurched up and ran back to the first corner we’d initially cleared.
Brainpan wasn’t named for his high IQ.
“Crazy fucker,” I snarled at him. “You almost took me out with that grenade. Next time a heads-up would be appreciated.”
“If it comes to it, I’d rather go out to a grenade than torn limb from limb by those things,” Brainpan replied. “Promise me, if they’re gonna get me, you stick a frag down my pipe first.”
RP smacked a gloved hand across Brainpan’s helmet. “Don’t fucking tempt me,” he snarled. “I might just as well do it now as later.”
Shaking my head, I checked on Hooky. The blaze of the sergeant’s carbine told me where he was in the opposite corner, and only his covering fire had given Brainpan and me a moment to chat. There was no more time for talk, just saving our butts.
We backed into the entrance vestibule. The shuffling, creaking and bubbling noises of our enemies filled the space as Hooky’s shooting fell silent. He jerked his head at the door we’d so recently blown open. “We can’t let them get out,” he said. “If they do that, and in these numbers, they’ll be all over town like sweat rash on a crack addict’s arse.”
He was correct. We thought we’d only to deal with a small bunch of infected people, not a horde. If they escaped the warehouse – an easy egress through the demolished door – their numbers would spread like wildfire once they got among civilians. We had to deny them escape, but I didn’t see how our guns, or even frag grenades, were up to the task.
But I guess that was what we were being paid for.
“When the fuck did I sign up for this shit?” Brainpan moaned.
“The same time the rest of us did,” I said, “after the red rain fell. Now suck it the fuck up, Brainpan. I don’t intend joining the flock, but neither am I going to let these bastards out if I can help it.”
“The world’s already gone to hell,” Brainpan reminded me. “Why fight it?”
“Because we can,” I said, full of shit. “No, because we must.”
My understanding of the plague is at a layman’s level, but here’s what I know. Back in 2009, after sending up high-altitude weather balloons, the Indian Space Research Organisation discovered three types of bacteria living in the extreme conditions of the upper atmosphere, at heights of more than forty kilometres, hailing them as proof of extra-terrestrial life. Debate was lively among scientists, some claiming that the bacteria could have originated on Earth, thrown into the upper atmosphere by volcanic eruptions, rather than having arrived there from outer space. Regardless of where the bacteria originated, it had to contend with conditions deadly to terrestrial bacteria. The UV rays alone were intense enough to kill them, let alone the extremes of temperature, lack of organic matter and sparse air particles, yet they flourished. Those were only the first of many discoveries concerning new life forms over the next few years, though nobody deemed them a threat to humanity. How wrong they were.
Intense solar flare activity, unprecedented weather patterns, and the shifting of the air currents all conspired against mankind, and in true Biblical fashion deluges from the heavens brought with them other uncategorised life that fell in gobbets of scarlet jelly-like lumps throughout many regions of the Earth. These scarlet globs were colonies of bacteria, and they responded robustly to the kinder conditions of the Earth’s surface, propagating wildly, and largely unchecked. Within days the simple bacterial forms had mutated into something more akin to parasitic amoebas. They weren’t picky about what they infested. Though they had no interest in the planet’s flora, everything else they contacted was fair game. All animal life was under threat of infestation, and the major culling of livestock and household pets wasn’t enough to stop the advance of the plague spreading throughout the world. How did you cull the wildlife, the ver
min, or the insects, that continued the spread at exponential rates?
Throughout history there have been many major extinction events, most famously the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, and people began fearing that we were on the verge of the next and greatest extinction event the Earth had faced. But they were wrong. This wasn’t about extinction, it was about transformation. Infected creatures didn’t die, they became. Parasites require hosts to survive, and they need a manner in which they can continue to propagate their species. The mutations they caused were as wildly different and numerous as the creatures they infected. Seeing a beloved pet dog sprouting insectile mandibles and writhing tentacles armed with thousands of stinging needles can kind of throw you a loop, but seeing your fellow man transform into something equally unrecognisable, a walking delivery system for the alien species, can seriously fuck up your day.
There was a rudimentary intelligence in these new beings, one with singular focus. To spread their kind. It wasn’t about killing – apparently humans held the monopoly on that intent – but they weren’t beyond protecting themselves, and anything they deemed a threat was responded to with devastating consequences. Take Duke and the way he’d been torn to shreds. A similar fate was on the cards for the rest of us who’d the temerity to attempt stopping their progress. But as I’d just told Brainpan, we must.
The infected poured into the room. Literally poured, like thick lumpy soup from an overturned cauldron. It was easy to see now why our guns were proving ineffective against them, because they had truly assimilated their hive mind now only one conjoined thing about them. Their jellied flesh and contorting bones had merged and moulded together, so that instead of hundreds they had become one immense writhing mass of mutated inhumanity. The pulpy mass was enough to engulf and drown us, before we too would become one with it, but the creature felt threatened and wished only to see us destroyed. It had sprouted spines and claws, and huge scythe-like protuberances, and without thinking too much on it I now knew what had minced Duke Dickinson.
SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest Page 25
