Frank turned to his left. Two gunners faced opposite shoulder windows just outside the cockpit. The port gunner yanked back the slide on his belt-fed weapon. He yelled, “Incoming nine o’clock!” and fired off a loud barrage.
The helicopter pitched, taking some sort of evasive action.
“What’s going on?” Wanda yelled, seated directly across from Frank.
But before he could yell back, the other gunner started firing, the cargo hull sounding like an indoor gun range.
Dillon put both hands over his ears.
“Oh my God!” Ally screamed, turning in her seat.
Frank glanced down the length of the cargo bay and saw a giant yellow jacket fly in and land on the ramp. The wasp’s wings brushed against the curved bulkhead as it stepped inside. Everyone started unbuckling their seatbelts to move out of its way.
Lieutenant Riker remained calm, stood up, and walked toward the immense creature, a good two feet taller than he was. He aimed his compact machinegun and rattled off a quick burst.
The tight pattern of bullets punched through the wasp’s thorax, causing it to slip back on its own gore that spilled onto the deck plates. Riker fired again. The yellow jacket slid out and fell away.
A gunner yelled, “They’ve had enough!” and the shooting stopped.
Riker hit the control and the rear ramp began to close.
Everyone returned to their seats to gaze out the portals while the helicopter maintained a low altitude over the savanna. Frank spotted Gatura’s village but couldn’t see anyone outside the dwellings.
“Look, there’s Sasha,” Ally yelled, her nose to the glass.
Frank caught a glimpse of the white lioness, her young cub, and the rest of the pride, heading for the foothills.
He remembered when they first arrived and flew over the thundering herds of wildebeest and zebras stampeding majestically across the savanna.
Now all he could see was small groups of panic-stricken animals trying to outrun mammoth insects that shouldn’t even exist. Thousands of monstrous army ants were crawling out of burrows in the ground like debris spewing out of a backed up drain. An enormous black button spider was clinging onto the back of an elephant that was trying to keep up with the fleeing herd. Frank knew the deadly venom had to be swift when he saw the big gray stumble and fall.
Swarms of immense blowflies and other humongous insects were feeding on the hundreds of animal carcasses littering the prairie.
He sat back in his seat and closed his eyes to clear his head of the nightmare he had just witnessed.
“You okay?” Wanda asked, moving over to sit next to her husband.
Frank opened his eyes and looked at her. “I guess.”
Celeste leaned forward in her seat. “So, Frank. Think we can save the world?”
“One can only pray.”
65
It had been 157 days since the crew on the International Space Station had any contact with Ground Control or anyone on Earth for that matter; and now Flight Engineer Cass Freeman was the lone survivor on the habitable artificial satellite that was soon to become uninhabitable.
That tranquil feeling she’d once experienced drifting around the planet like a leaf spinning endlessly in a mountain stream had changed drastically to tumbling in a clothes drier filled with rocks.
Every piece of external equipment on the ISS had been damaged or destroyed passing through the asteroid belt, which for some unexplainable reason had attached itself to Earth’s orbital ring and refused to leave, much like a blood-bloated tick on a dog.
Before the last science officer had suffocated due to an airlock breach, she’d alluded to a theory that the denser asteroids were acting as a cheese grater, shredding the 3000 manmade satellites as they passed through the belt.
Cass gazed out the observation dome as the sea of space junk floated by; crushed motor housings, shattered solar panels, and mangled antennas.
The tiny living organisms on the other side of the pitted glass looked like something from a bad cold left on a sneeze guard at a salad bar.
The ISS was completing its pass over the dark side of the planet. Areas that had been dense cities were pitch black. She wondered if they would ever restore power.
Another chunk of space rock fell out of orbit and streaked down through the atmosphere. A twisted weather satellite tumbled earthward.
The alien life forms shimmered as an aspheric sliver of sun shone on the glass.
Cass hugged herself and shivered even though she was wearing her long-sleeved jumpsuit and gloves. It was cold as a tomb and soon the life support system would fail.
All her life she had dreamed of being an astronaut and making her family proud. Now she wondered if any of them were even alive. Something terrible was happening down there, and there was nothing she could do about it as she traveled 17,500 miles per hour 250 miles above the planet like a forgotten message in a bottle.
She gazed down at the Northern Hemisphere and the Great Plains. A wispy layer of white cloud cover parted slowly above the flat wheat-colored landscape.
A large mass was moving easterly.
“What the hell is going on down there?” she screamed.
But no one heard her.
Not even the things clinging to the other side of the glass.
66
Twenty-three M1 Abrams of the 41st Armored Calvary Tank Brigade rumbled across the broad expanse of flatland in a single row almost a quarter-mile wide. Each armored vehicle was spaced fifty feet apart from the next, ample room for the lower section of the tank to complete a 360-degree pivot while the turret remained stationary, never once taking its sights off its intended target.
All gun muzzles pointed in the direction of the perspective enemy steadily catching up, giving the appearance that the tanks were retreating in reverse when in reality, it was the turrets that were facing backward.
Engines roared at a cruising speed of 30 miles per hour; steel tracks tore up the lumpy ground and left prairie dog pancakes.
Ryan had only been in for five months and was already Gunners Mate Private First Class and the mechanic on a four-man crew of a sixty-two-ton, four-million-dollar piece of ass-kicking machinery with enough firepower to take down a small army.
Thanks to the shit storm and accelerated boot camp training, worldwide military recruitment was at an all-time high. Fighting for freedom was a thing of the past. The real badge of courage was getting in the trenches defending the human race from extinction.
Standing waist high in the turret’s open hatch with the wind buffeting his back, Ryan grabbed both handles on his .50 caliber machinegun and glanced to his right at the other gunners jostling in their tanks, getting their kidneys handed to them as the armored vehicles pounded across the rough open terrain.
He turned, eyes glued on the horizon for the first sign of the enemy. He couldn’t help thinking about his family and how everyone had been affected by what was being called an alien invasion.
His stepfather, Frank, said it was more like Mother Nature getting dumped on her head. He had joined a coalition of entomologists and other scientists striving to eliminate the global threat along with Celeste and her associates at the Astronomical Consortium desperately tracking down the meteorite impact sites.
The last time he had heard from his mom, she was heading up the Nor-Cal Militia in a region of California, which had suffered heavy casualties throughout the past few months. He worried about his sister, Ally, a triage volunteer, and missed his little brother, Dillon. They were all living in the Nor-Cal survivor camp. Maybe someday, this would all be over and they could be reunited as a family again.
Rumors were rampant about gargantuan bark beetles devouring the woodlands and the rainforests all over the world, and if they continued at the rate they were going, there wouldn’t be a tree left standing in a year’s time and the planet’s oxygen supply would be depleted.
Bye-bye, Earth.
Ryan was damned if he was going to hand the p
lanet over to a bunch of bugs.
“Hoppers!” a voice boomed in the headset inside his helmet.
He stared out over the grassland and saw a two-mile-wide locust swarm come into view. Even at this distance, he could tell the nomadic grasshoppers were as big as station wagons. It was like a yellow wave rolling over the prairie.
Devouring everything in its path.
The horde took flight and ascended on the tanks.
“Give ’em hell boys!”
Twenty-three .50 caliber machineguns opened fire, obliterating the herbivorous insects. The result looked like yellow graffiti being shot out of a leaf blower. But for each hopper annihilated, there was another to take its place.
Ryan swiveled his weapon and knocked half a dozen out of the air. He heard one of the gunners scream. Some of the tanks were completely engulfed by hoppers.
Two of the Abrams broke ranks, careening into each other.
A giant grasshopper chomped on a gunner’s helmet and ripped him out of the hatch.
Every tank unleashed its main and secondary armament: M68 rifled guns, smoothbore cannons, and 10,000-round M240 machineguns.
Ryan watched in horror as one of the tanks covered with hoppers swung the barrel of its cannon and fired at the tank next to it. The armored vehicle exploded. Most of the tanks’ drivers were operating blind because the tank commanders couldn’t give instructions with the view ports smeared with insect entrails. Gunners were left as the only eyes on the road.
Two F-18 Super Hornets swooped down from the clouds. The lead jet dropped two bombs and laid out a long fiery swath of napalm that ignited hundreds of hoppers into crispy critters.
The second bomber came in for a pass. A massive wall of locust rose in the plane’s path. The twin engines sputtered as the turbines choked on the bug guts clogging the vanes. The pilot catapulted out seconds before the aircraft nosed into the ground and went up in a blazing plume of black smoke.
“Rafferty, button it up!” Ryan immediately obeyed his tank commander and dropped down, closing the hatch behind him. He squeezed into the tight quarters and manned the gunner position. He looked at the screen on the thermal viewer, but there were too many images to target.
So they waited until the locust swarm was gone.
They’d lost four tanks that day and sixteen crewmembers, not counting the eight gunners killed—men who died in the defense of their planet.
An hour later, Ryan was back in the open hatch manning his .50 caliber machinegun as the convoy of tanks rolled up to the command base surrounded by a twelve-foot tall solar-powered electrical fence and heavily armed gun towers.
He smiled at the banner he and a few of his buddies had stenciled and hung over the entrance in reference to something his stepfather had once said during a bizarre autopsy:
WELCOME TO THE NEXT WORLD.
Read on for a free sample of TITANBOA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gerry Griffiths lives in San Jose, California, with his family and their five rescue dogs and a cat. He is a Horror Writers Association member, has over thirty published short stories in various anthologies and magazines, as well as a short story collection entitled Creatures. He is also the author of Silurid and The Beasts of Stoneclad Mountain, as well as Death Crawlers with the follow-up standalone novels, Deep in the Jungle and The Next World, all published by Severed Press.
1
As he once again boarded the Lucky Lucy, Dr. Hank Newstead reflected again on the smell permeating all around him. There were lots of rivers throughout the world, lots of pristine places that were resisting the encroachment of man, but the Amazon somehow managed to smell unique among them all. Sure, there was the lush greenery and smell of exotic growing things, the sharp scent of fish and murky water and things growing and living beneath the sometimes calm and sometimes roiling surface. But there were also other things, things that could be found nowhere else in the world. There were the pungent odors of flowers and plants that could only be found here, and a deep, almost incomprehensible odor wafting out of the flood waters flowing among the roots of the trees.
All of it was a far cry from the stale, antiseptic scent of labs and academia he was surrounded by when not in the field. And even though he was uncountable miles away from his mailing address, that ever-present smell made him feel truly at home.
“Newstead, you’re doing it again,” Morgan said.
Hank blinked several times, bringing himself back to the moment. “Doing what again?”
“Doing that brainy, ‘I-smell-a-thing,’ hippy-dippy shit you do.”
“I do not.”
“Yes, you do. Every time you come back to the Lucky Lucy, you stop and do that and look like a fool, all while making us late. So are you going to get your ass back to packing up the boat, or what?”
Although anyone else would have interpreted Captain M. Morgan’s words as gruff and angry, Hank had worked with him so often in the past that he was able to recognize the fondness hidden underneath his words. Morgan was somewhere in his fifties, and while graying hair and thick gray beard reflected that, no one would have otherwise guessed his age correctly based on his toned, rugged body, the product of a lifetime spent ferrying people just like Hank up and down the Amazon River in search of whatever scientific specimens. Morgan had been the first captain Hank had ever hired for an expedition fifteen years ago, and even though Hank had spent half that trip wanting to throttle the aggravating man in his sleep, there had never been any question about hiring anyone else for future expeditions. Captain Morgan knew the Amazon, and he knew how to get them out of predicaments most people wouldn’t have imagined. If you hired Morgan, you got an attitude, but you also an untold amount of skill and experience.
Which was quite the opposite of the other people currently crowding around Hank on the dock. He had five students, interns, and undergraduates with him this time, more than he was used to for an expedition like this, and already he was regretting it. As expeditions went, this was going to be pretty routine, and he’d thought that meant he could use that as a learning opportunity for a few of his students. He’d forgotten, however, what it was like being out in the field for the first time, the uncertainty, the awkwardness, the sea-sickness. Already one of the students was throwing up over the side of the dock, and they hadn’t even gotten on the boat yet.
As Katherine caught her breath between heaves, her boyfriend Stu rubbed her back and cooed soothing things to her, all while trying to hide the fact that he desperately wanted to laugh his butt off at her predicament. Katherine was the one Hank had specifically invited, given her crazy-high intellect and exceedingly young age – she was only nineteen, yet already an undergraduate – and when she had asked if Stu could come as well, Hank had initially been doubtful. Then he found out that Stu came from a well-to-do family of professional catamaran racers, and Hank had figured it would be good to have another person on the boat that knew how to hold his own on the water. Katherine, apparently, was not as used to the water as he was. Just the slight movement of the dock upon the river had already made her sick to her stomach.
Rounding out the group were Jasmine, Hank’s mousy little teaching assistant, Randy, a young colleague of Hank’s from the Folger Institute of Amphibian and Reptilian Studies, and Erin. Erin was one of Hank’s students, and if pressed, he would have told everyone that Erin was simply here because she had shown such an intent interest in the trip. In truth, Erin and Hank were in a relationship that straddled the edge of ethical lines between teacher and student. Erin’s interest in herpetology was actually minimal. She was here only because Hank needed to work out with her exactly where their relationship was going, and to see if they could find a way to do it without any major ethics violations.
Erin was the one who went directly down the dock and immediately stuck out her hand for the captain to shake. “Hi! Erin Gershwin. Hank has told me a lot about you.”
Morgan, obviously taken aback by the tiny blonde’s friendliness and forthrightne
ss, did something Hank rarely saw him do with anyone else: he actually reached forward and took her hand, giving it two quick pumps before letting go, as though he thought the human contact would result in some kind of flesh-eating disease if he held on for too long. “A pleasure, I guess,” he said. Morgan looked back to Hank. “Everything you sent ahead is already aboard. Get your people on already so we can get the hell out of here.”
“Don’t you want to be introduced to the rest, first?” Hank asked. He couldn’t help but smile. This question had become something of a tradition between the two of them whenever they were starting an expedition, as had the answer that Morgan was about to throw at him.
“Introductions are for people who plan on screwing at the end of the night,” Morgan said, not even bothering to look at Hank as he gave the customary response. “And I’m not going to screw over a single one of you.”
As the captain went about his business doing the final preparations on his boat, Randy came up to Hank and spoke quietly to him. “Dr. Newstead, this guy looks about as trustworthy as I can throw him. We should find someone else.”
Hank scowled. “Not only do we not have the time to look for anyone else, but I’ve lost count of the number of trips I’ve made with Captain Morgan. I trust him more than I trust some of my own family.” And certainly more than I trust you, Hank thought, although he didn’t dare say it.
“Captain Morgan?” Randy asked incredulously. “That’s seriously his name? Sounds more like…”
Randy apparently hadn’t noticed the captain coming up behind him until Morgan cleared his throat. “Sounds more like what?”
“Uh…”
“No, go ahead. Make a joke about my name. I don’t mind, but only on one condition. It has to be one I’ve never heard before. If I have, then I’ll break your arm.”
Randy blinked. “I’m sure you wouldn’t really…”
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