“They can’t, King.” Aleman’s voice was apologetic. “The chopper is still on the other side of the storm. It’s no longer blowing where you are, but it still stretches for forty miles. No way for them to get to you. You’ll have to hump it out to the LZ.”
“Knight?” King asked.
“Proceeding. We’ll catch up.”
Knowing he had to keep moving, and even then his time was limited, King made the decision. “Move out.”
The team picked up and headed toward the distant cloud that marked the edge of the storm, back the way they had come. The wind had stopped blowing in their location, but they could still see a far off wall of white and swirling brown. They double-timed it for the raging storm, keeping an eye on the receding worm, as it wandered aimlessly south and then west again, back from whence it had come.
The team made it halfway from the castle to the edge of the cloud when the rocks around them pinged with the ricochets of missed rifle fire. They each dropped, and rolled to the sides, then faced back toward the strange brown fortress. But the shots hadn’t come from that direction. They were coming from a small team – maybe ten strong – of additional guards to the north. They were still a few hundred yards away, their rifles only just inside the effective firing range.
Queen glanced at King and saw that he wasn’t reacting as quickly as she would have expected. His lips hadn’t turned blue, but they had lost their color, and his face looked pale against the black neoprene hood lining. “Rook, Bishop. Take this. I’m getting King to the LZ.”
Rook raised his SCAR and fired off a few rounds at the approaching men. The weapon had a much longer range, but at the distance, any kills would be simple luck. “Watch out for the Jumbo Fire Turd.”
“Nice,” Queen said, grabbing King by the arm and starting to run with him toward the nearby wall of the storm. “You kiss me with that mouth, remember.”
“Only because you ask me to—” Rook started to say, before his body was violently flung to the ground. Bishop had opened up on the approaching guards with the machine gun, but she stopped immediately and turned to Rook. The left arm of his suit’s fur was a deep maroon. “Shit in the milk carton! That stings like bastard.”
Bishop started opening a portable med kit they each carried, which was strapped to their stomachs, over the environment suits, but as she unzipped it, Rook spoke again.
“Just a through and through,” he growled. “I’ll be alright.”
Bishop lunged back to her trigger, trusting Rook’s self-assessment. They had all taken minor grazes from bullets – or worse – at this point in their careers. She laid down a suppressing fire that had the new group of guards diving for cover or simply dropping dead with tufts of crimson mist staining the white clouds around them. She counted ten men, but their number was dwindling under her constant stream of automatic fire.
Rook rolled over, pulling up his rifle and adding his bullets to hers. They had the guards, all of them wrapped in their brown furs, pinned just behind a small ridge of rock. But then two things happened at once.
The wind picked up again, the storm having shifted enough to cover them in waves of sand and snow. Their visibility was lost completely.
Then the building, so reminiscent of China’s greatest architectural accomplishment, detonated. The chemical reaction made the explosion far stronger than the bomb-spikes should have done alone.
A howling burst of flame ripped horizontally across the ground, with a pressure wave so strong that it rolled Rook’s body across the rocky ground, crushing him into Bishop’s prone form, and the two of them slammed into a low ridge of crumbling rock. The wall of flame came next, flashing across their bodies and whipping across the fur coatings on their environment suits until they were singed clean. The shrieking wind carried the rest of the destruction away.
“I think I just got a tan,” Bishop said, shoving Rook’s body off of her.
“You got off light,” Rook complained. “I think I just lost my nut hairs.”
“Aww, both of them?” Bishop said. She started to look for the machine gun, but found the barrel had been coated in small pebbles and sand, the grit having invaded the open gas ports. Attempting to fire it now would result in a misfire at best or another explosion in her face at worst. She left it, and hauled Rook to his feet. As she did, a huge wall of red flashed by on her right, just where she had been lying.
The death worm had returned.
The massive creature worked its way past them like a shark blitzing past its prey. It was so close she could reach out and touch it. It blurred by like a subway car if she had been standing too close on the platform. She could see the ragged gouges and holes in its scarlet hide, where she had riddled it with the 240 earlier.
The blasting wind slowed, and she could see once again in the direction of the small group of pinned guards. She wished she couldn’t. The worm ran straight for the men, snatching one guard up with its black tentacles, and flipping him into the air. The beast rose up again, close to twenty feet straight up in the air, like it was performing an old Indian rope trick. Then it grabbed the man before he reached the apex of his flight, and swallowed him down in one gulp. Again, Bishop was reminded of a shark.
She saw one of the other guards banging his heavily gloved fingers on an oversized remote control with a three foot long silver antenna. It reminded her of the controllers she had seen boys in Russia use on remote controlled toy cars. “They are controlling the worms.”
But then the worm flopped down onto the man, mashing him and two of his fellow guards into the ground, before another gust of wind obscured her view with a river of white snow. The gust curved down toward the ground and then straight up into the sky, like a geyser.
“I’ve got nothing you can fight them with,” Aleman said over the comm, “short of immense doses of electricity or dousing the region with chemicals from above – things we don’t have. Get out of there, Bishop.”
“We have one more thing that can do the trick,” Knight yelled, as the ground rumbled.
Rook turned in time to see – and then side-step away from – another giant worm. This one looked fatter, but shorter than the first. Twenty feet at the thickest part, just past the head, and then tapering down to ten feet in diameter, over forty feet away, down by its tail end. It was a darker, richer red than the first. Not as shiny, and without as many defined ribs. This one also had another unusual feature.
Knight was hanging from its side.
With one hand, he clung to one of the bomb-spikes, which he had manually impaled in the creature’s side. The worm was moving fast, and Knight was fifteen feet off the ground, as the creature rushed past, spiraling higher, so that Knight was lifted up and on top of it.
7
Anna Beck raced after the runaway death worm and its precious cargo. The thing was moving at a good clip, and the ground – covered with random clumps of hardy vegetation or craggy rocks – made for treacherous footing.
The plan had been simple. Knight had raced after the second worm, bomb-spike in hand. He hadn’t had a chance to load it into his launcher, and instead had run on foot toward the side of the massive creature. He should have impaled it and dropped away, so she could detonate the bomb once he was clear. Instead, Knight had held onto the spike, and been hoisted for a ride on the top of the charging worm.
“What the hell are you doing, Knight?” she asked, huffing, as she ran full out behind him. “You were supposed to spike it and get off, not go all rodeo.”
She knew the transmitters for the detonators on the jury-rigged spikes had a limited range, so she needed to be close enough to the creature to kill it, but she needed to get Knight and herself far enough from it that the blast didn’t injure them, too.
“Getting elevation,” he said. “There are more of them.”
She heard the distinctive crack of his sniper rifle go off, over the howl of the wind on her exterior speaker. Then she turned her head and saw a third worm – this one a mottled bro
wn and white – suddenly veer away from its previous course. Knight had just shattered its control box. If he hadn’t, she never would have known it was pursuing her until it was too late. Now the brown creature made a lazy turn heading back toward the destroyed lab.
“How many more?” Aleman asked in her ear.
“Enough,” Knight said, his voice terse as he concentrated on firing again. Beck knew his voice well enough to tell when he was aiming.
“Team, if you can kill those things with the bomb-spikes, you need to do it,” Aleman said, hesitating as he said it, as if he were doing three other things on the computer at the same time.
“King said to bug out, Blue,” Rook said over the comms. “Bish and I are already moving toward the LZ.” Everyone knew that King made the final calls when the team was in the field.
“Those things already have a taste for human flesh, if the guards have been using them for security. If even one of them survives, it could rampage across the countryside, devouring nomads – or worse, it might pilgrimage to a population center like Beijing.”
“Blue is right,” King’s voice came over the comms, his teeth still chattering. “We’re nearly at the chopper. I’ll be fine. Sending Queen back for support.”
“I’ll take the brown one, then,” Pawn said, changing direction and pursuing the large mottled worm. As she ran, she mounted one of the two bomb-spikes Knight had handed her into her spear gun. She planned to chase the thing into range and then simply fire the weapon at it, but the lumbering creature turned instead of continuing straight. It performed a slow loop back to the north, and then in the direction Knight had gone, riding on the back of the brick red worm.
The ground shook with each leaping step she took, and she found it easier to run in the patches of loose sand than on the vibrating rock. As the thing changed direction again, cutting across her path, her distance to it was shortened, and she soon got within spear-gun range. As she loosed a spike from the weapon, the visibility increased yet again, and she saw the brick worm, Knight squatting on its back, charging straight for her mottled brown worm. The two would either attack each other, or pass right next to each other, like speeding trains. Unsure of which it would be, and what Knight would need, she continued racing for the collision site.
As she ran, she saw Knight stand up.
Then at the last second, the two speeding worms altered direction just slightly, and she could see that they would pass right next to each other. Knight leapt from the reddish worm to the brown one, rolling on the back of the latter. Pawn altered her trajectory to follow the brown worm. As the red worm’s tail cleared the brown’s tail, Knight activated his transmitter, and the speeding red beast’s front end exploded in a gout of thick white fluid and chunks of brick-red skin. Much of the obliterated head was involuntarily swallowed by the hollow, fast moving cylinder of its body, before the creature ran out of steam and seemed almost to deflate, finally stopping its momentum.
Pawn chased the brown worm as it fled into the storm with Knight now surfing on top of it. “Brick-red one’s down. That leaves the brown one Knight’s on and the one you guys filled with lead,” she announced on the open channel. “What next, Knight?”
“Run alongside,” Knight told her. “I’ll lower a rope.”
“Why not just get down?” she asked, frustrated that he didn’t get off the thing. How could she blow it up, if he was still in range?
“This one is going our way.”
“The first one is still out there,” she pointed out. “We need to get them all.”
“Nah,” she heard Rook’s voice say, followed immediately by a resounding boom. “Queen and I just took care of Chuckles, the Swiss Cheese Worm. That just leaves yours, Knight.”
Pawn ran as fast as she could, but she didn’t think she would catch the fleeing brown worm and the man riding it. The ground rumbled hard under her feet, making every leap and hop treacherous. Her boots had slid more than once, and she was afraid she would turn an ankle. She was also starting to sweat and overheat in the warmed suit.
“Guys, I’m seeing a much bigger Richter pattern than before. The seismic readings suggest a full on earthquake is coming. Maybe all the tunneling from the worms?” Aleman sounded uncertain. “I think you should bail. You can re-arm and come back for the last worm.”
“Shit,” Knight blurted.
“What is it?” came King’s voice. His words no longer stuttered from cold, and Pawn assumed he had reached the helicopter and a spare environment suit.
“It’s turning,” Knight replied, and just as he said it, Pawn burst through a cloud of swirling snowflakes and grit that gusted so hard it almost knocked her backward. She saw the brown worm turning. It would cross her path if she didn’t hurry. Getting stuck between it in front of her and an earthquake behind her, with the helicopter on the other side of it did not appeal to her. She poured on the speed, intending to run past its head, like racing a train, and continue through the storm. She had already seen the thing was slow to corner, so she wasn’t worried it could change direction at the last second and maul her.
“Time to get down, Bronco Billy,” she said, as she raced past the thing’s black-tentacled mouth. As she passed it, she saw Knight slide down the creature’s ribbed side like it was a playground slide. Until its curvature stopped at its widest spot, a good ten feet off the ground, and dipped back under the fast moving beast. Knight dropped those last ten feet into a sand dune and rolled in the dirt, his furred suit flinging a spray of grit in the air like a car’s tire spinning in mud.
Pawn veered toward Knight, but he was already rolling to his feet and running toward the distant helicopter on the other side of the storm’s whipping frenzy. He wasn’t waiting on her to catch up, so she forced herself to sprint faster.
When she felt they were far enough from the receding brown worm, she activated her transmitter, and the sky behind them filled with an orange ball of flame and smoke, billowing from the last worm’s split open center. The massive creature rolled across the ground, out of control.
The ground shook hard, and Pawn realized it wasn’t from the explosion, but from the earthquake Aleman had mentioned.
“Don’t look back, Anna,” Knight called. “Just run!”
Her eyes grew large inside her faceplate as she realized what he was saying.
It wasn’t an earthquake.
She really didn’t want to know how big this one was.
She really didn’t.
But she looked.
8
“Report,” King’s voice came over the comms.
“Umm,” Rook said, taking aim with his spear gun. He pointed it up in the air like an English longbowman, and Queen, to his side, picked up on his intent and did the same with hers. “Knight and Pawn are being chased by the biggest friggin’ large intestine you can imagine.”
With that description to King, he fired, and Queen did likewise. The twin bomb-spikes arced through the air and over the heads of Pawn and Knight, who were running toward them full tilt. Behind them was a massive death worm. This one dwarfed the others, with a diameter at the head of forty feet. As far as Rook could see, the thing’s body trailed behind it a hundred yards.
The spikes implanted themselves in the top of the thing’s neck, and Rook loaded another spike. Then he turned to run toward the edge of the storm, where King and the helicopter pilot, a retired Marine named Woodall, waited ready to take off at a moment’s notice.
“We’ll be coming in hot with the giant shit garage on our six.”
“Taking it too far,” Queen said, berating his disgusting description, while twisting in the middle of her run to fire another bomb-spike backward in an arc. This one implanted in the creature’s back, ten yards further down from the first two. Then she continued her twist until she was facing forward. She kept running.
Knight and Pawn were catching up to them, and the megaworm kept twisting through the storm on their heels. It was so large that even when the gusts of snow ble
w through the air, mostly obscuring Knight and Pawn, Rook could still see the bright, shiny red of the thing’s skin and the dark waving tendrils at its mouth through the blizzard.
Knight pulled alongside him, as Rook bunny hopped clumps of pale grass and stunted shrubs growing from rocky patches in the ground where they had sunken roots deep and found a source of water. Looking over, Rook saw that Knight carried a rope bag in his left hand and an empty spear gun in his right.
The bag held a neatly coiled 11mm climbing rope, and it was designed so the tip could be pulled out one end, and the rope would keep feeding out of the bag without tangling. The team carried two such rope bags. Knight had one and Queen wore the other strapped across her back. Rook wondered if they could lasso the giant slithering creature, but he quickly discarded the thought and poured all his energy into running for their one and only escape route.
As a larger, heavier man than the others, Rook was a slower runner. Pawn and Knight soon pulled in front of him, and he could no longer even see Queen in the distance. He glanced over his shoulder at the massive oncoming freight train of tendrils, the mouth of the worm yawning open like a dark cave that was chasing him. He found a second wind and began stretching out his strides.
“Hurry up, ma puce,” Queen said over the comms. “We need to leave. The pilot says the storm is getting worse. If we don’t take off in the next two minutes, the engine might get borked from the sand.”
Even with the new burst of speed and Queen’s encouragement, using her pet name for him, Rook didn’t think he was going to be able to make it. Each step he took rattled his bones, as the pursuing giant worm shook the earth. He didn’t even know if the few bomb-spikes they had planted in the thing would be enough to stop it. This one was twice as thick as the last one and many times longer.
What if the bastard splits in half from the explosion and turns into two worms?
Then he burst out of the boiling cloud of snow and sand to find he was running across clear, open, sandy ground. The sudden lack of wind resistance almost pitched him forward onto his face, but his legs awkwardly pinwheeled until he regained his step.
SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest Page 32
