by Orion, W. J.
“Okay,” Yasmine said.
In the bed of the pickup Trey rose up again, his sensor suite extended from the opening at the front of his armor’s head. As the elements of alien technology tasted, sniffed, and absorbed the environment he pivoted his head to and fro, searching for threats. He dipped his head down and wrote.
Stop here. I’ll climb that building there. He gestured towards one of the red brick buildings in the nearby downtown area of Shant.
Yasmine’s uncle stepped on the brakes, causing the truck and the two vehicles behind him to come to a halt. Trey’s massive chassis jumped out of the back of the truck, springing the suspension upwards as his weight departed. Like an enormous meek escaped from the darkness Trey’s giant biomechanical body jumped up and grabbed the stairs of an iron fire escape, then scampered up the side of the building without losing any speed.
“He was right about the climbing thing,” Yasmine said.
“No kidding,” the Baron said back, and he floored the truck.
The wheels skidded in the dirt of the dead town and the truck launched forward. The two vehicles behind followed suit and within seconds, they were back up to speed. The Monolith attack party sped by houses, discarded toys, a few bodies murdered minutes before by the crabs and an alley hiding a blackened crab with streaks of red in its shell.
One block—a hundred feet—short of the clinic the hidden crab stepped out of its hiding spot behind a stack of dried out boards and fired its energy weapon at the pickup truck Yasmine and her uncle were driving in.
Chapter Forty
The War Cry of a Thousand Valkyries
The blast of energy hit the pickup truck behind the passenger cab, cutting the vehicle straight in half. The precious fuel tank vomited its contents across the broken street and erupted into a lake of liquid flame as the two halves of the truck careened about, screeching metal on broken pavement. The bed of the truck smashed into a faded, worn blue mailbox as the front of the truck dropped backwards onto its rear and skidded to a sideways halt in the middle of the street, short of the clinic’s door.
The two vehicles tailing Yasmine and her uncle slammed their brakes, and the passengers disgorged onto the street, firing their weapons into the alley where the alien struck from. Black smoke curled into the sky as the flames on the street spread.
“Are you okay?” Yasmine asked her uncle, who was slumped forward onto the steering wheel of his bright red chariot.
She reached to him—looking over her shoulder out the rear of the truck as the crashing waves of gunfire grew—and pulled his heavy upper body back with a grunt. His nose was broken, and his eyes glossy but he was breathing.
“I’m hurt but I’ll live,” he muttered. “Let’s get to the clinic. We gotta move.”
Yasmine reached across his lap and yanked the door release. The door opened and she pushed him out as hard as she could so he fell with the vehicle between them and the battle with the crab raging nearby. She grabbed her backpack and halligan and dove across the truck, out and on top of him. He exhaled hard from her landing, but she rolled off of him quick.
“Ready?” she asked.
“I need you to guide me. My eyes are blurry,” he said to her. “Hand me my SAW.”
“Saw?”
“The machinegun behind the seat.”
Yasmine grabbed the heavy machinegun with a grunt and almost threw it at him. He shoots this with one hand? He’s crazy strong. Wait, I just threw a machinegun to a guy who said he couldn’t see.
He tossed the strap over his shoulder as she put her backpack on. The crab that attacked them shot another tremendous blast of energy at the black minivan wrapped in the familiar Faraday cage that had been closest to them. As Monoliths on foot ran and dove for cover the van’s steel and wire protections failed, and it was torn apart by the energy weapon’s discharge. The doors exploded outwards, sending windows and shreds of the roof in all directions. They ducked as the passenger door cartwheeled at them and lodged in the carcass of the red truck.
“Holy crap, grab me, let’s go.”
She lifted him with all her might and he got to his feet. The short distance to the clinic looked like a mile with the battle raging behind them. Bullets pinged and snapped against the walls of buildings as the smooth mechanical beast strode without fear into the center of the street. Human weapons were no match for the armor. Yasmine put her shoulder under her uncle’s arm and half-carried, half-led him away to Dr. Sonneborn’s place of business. She looked up and saw Trey—dusty white armor still somehow gleaming like an angelic insect—lean over the side of a nearby roof.
His face opened above the tentacles, and she felt a strange pulsation of unseen energy in the air. The sensation reminded her of the tower’s elevator moving upward, though she wasn’t moving at all. Her eyes turned downward to the brazen, arrogant crab striding into the midst of its human attackers.
The beast—the alien murderer in blackened chassis—stopped its forward advance and froze. A moment later the mass of tentacles hanging under its chin reached up to the area where the still-closed sensor suite was and searched for a blockage, or damage. She could see the confusion in the way the blinded monster scoured its hull for an answer to its sudden plight.
“It can’t figure out why it can’t see. RUN!” she screamed at the monoliths fighting it. “Take cover, aim for the sensors when the hatches open!”
Some kept shooting, pinging bullets off the impervious hull of the alien vehicle but others ran, took cover, and prepared in the few seconds they had before the alien switched to its visual and aural sensors. As the Monoliths fought or prepared to fight smarter, she and her uncle moved with painful steps to the glass door of the clinic.
“Bust the door if it’s locked,” he said with gritted teeth.
Yasmine handed him her halligan tool and pulled her pistol from her pocket. She aimed it at the glass door and pulled the trigger once. The small pistol cracked a loud snap and bucked a bit in her hand. The door shattered, and glass crumbled to the ground as they kept moving forward. Inside the clinic down the hall Yasmine saw a strange flash of green light where the bullet must’ve struck.
“When did you get a pistol?”
“Had it the whole time,” she said and moved them sideways through the door and into the dirty lobby. “Can you see well enough to cover the door?”
“Yeah, go,” he said as he pulled his machinegun off his shoulder.
Yasmine bolted away down the hall towards the rooms in the back where she slept, and where the cache had been moved. In salvaged boots one size too big her feet pounded against the faded carpet. She took the corner hard, smashing into the wall, but pushed away and kept running. Her halligan left a hole where it hit the drywall.
She started ripping open doors to examination rooms on each side of the hallway, searching for the precious spray paint that might give them an ounce of a better chance against the monster outside, and its three allies. The first room was filled with shadows and an empty bed. The second room was the same, and the third. The fourth room was the room she’d slept in while she’d paid off her debt to the doctor, and the fifth was overflowing—packed almost floor to ceiling—with… totes!
She couldn’t see a light switch or a bulb anywhere, so she ripped her mom’s phone out and snapped on the flashlight. One plastic case after another she grabbed them from the room and threw them down the hallway, spilling their contents on the floor. All she cared about was the case of spray paint.
Cases smashed apart on the floor, their fragile plastic too old and brittle to take her throwing them around with such haste and vigor.
BBbbraaaaatttt!
She froze as her uncle’s machinegun started to fire in the lobby.
They’re close. It’s close. I gotta hurry. People are gonna die. She tore into the cases with rage, faster and faster like an insect burrowing into the sand to escape a predator. Pill bottles, splints, and boxes of bandages flew through the air. Her hands grabbed anything—
everything—and then stopped.
She held a cardboard box with six cans of black spray paint in it.
Yasmine spun and ran out of the room, box tucked under her arm. She sprinted back down the hall—crashing into the same corner she did on the way in—and burst into the lobby where her uncle was firing his machinegun.
“Got the paint!” she screamed over the chattering bursts of his firing.
“It’s headed straight at the door. The others busted it up a little bit, but it’s coming for us,” he said over his shoulder. “Stay outta the doorway. It’ll blast you. It’s about to blast the wall here to take me out. We gotta displace, go out the back and-“
Yasmine already had a can of the paint out, and was shaking it. In her other hand she had the halligan tool. Her uncle watched as she walked past him, dodging the gap of the open glass door with a leap.
“Draw it towards your side of the lobby,” she said, her eyes laser focused on the monster marching towards the clinic they sheltered in.
Her uncle—the brave, powerful Baron—sighed, chuckled, and hefted his massive machinegun in one hand like the pistol it was to him. He leaned into the doorway, making his body an obvious target, and he started yelling.
“Over here you semi-mechanical squid in a fish tank piece of trash!” he screamed. “Your mother was a sea cucumber!”
Yasmine caught a glimpse of the monster’s sealed hull. The shell was open at the nose, its delicate glass or crystal eyes visible as well as nests of tiny filaments that tasted, and sensed the world. This was her target. The monster pointed itself at her uncle, and the tip of the crab’s primary weapon began to emanate a blue glow.
“Dive, get down!” she screamed at her uncle.
He dove.
As the front wall and windows on one side of Shant’s clinic exploded she shielded her eyes and turned away. Bricks, wood, glass and pieces of metal pelted her, all red hot from the searing burst of plasma. She screamed in pain as her exposed skin collected an army of burns, but she persisted. She turned towards the window on the other side of the lobby—ignored the voice in the back of her head that said she was about to get herself killed—and ran straight at, halligan raised.
She smashed the glass and dove headfirst out of the window, tucking her shoulder down into a roll over a sidewalk and street covered in shards of razor sharp window. If she was cut by the crunching debris, she didn’t feel it. No time to realize the pain.
She somehow managed to stay physically organized enough to end her roll so she came up on her feet. Mixed blessing that was, as she came to a stumbling stop within arm’s reach of the crab and its plasma weapon. All six of its crustacean legs hammered in concert to turn the body above towards her. The weapon’s faint blue glow grew stronger. She felt a sudden rise in heat coming from it.
Yasmine screamed the war cry of a thousand valkyries and ran straight at the monster’s turning face, and blister of sensors that sought to find her, and kill her. In her right hand, she swung the halligan tool and its sharp spike in a wide arc while she readied the can of blinding paint in the other.
She would disable the crab, and its weapon right then and there, or she’d be incinerated to less than ash like billions of innocent human beings had before her.
Chapter Forty-One
It’s Smarter to Avoid the Front End of a Crab
The spike of the halligan tool crunched into the fattest lens in the open, unarmored face of the alien menace, puncturing the crystal or glass. Lodged there, she used the handle of the tool to pull her other arm closer to the face of the monster, just above the sudden, savage warmth of the charging plasma cannon.
Her index finger jammed the spray button down, and a cone of black paint shot out. The sensitive antenna and receptors turned ebony-black as the paint coated them. She held the button down for less than a full second then let go of the tool and dove away.
The crab’s plasma weapon discharged.
Pavement erupted up, tossed in the sky twenty feet high with Yasmine leading the way. The force of the explosion picked her up and threw her away from the monster, towards its rear and in the opposite direction of the clinic and her hopefully intact uncle. As time dilated—as she soared towards the lake of burning gasoline—she watched as the Monoliths sprinted at full tilt out of their cover towards her. They yelled and screamed in exultation and fear as her frail human body careened towards the wreckage of the Baron’s red truck.
She landed like an anvil on the hood and all the air burst out of her. A bone or two in her ribs and back cried out as they were bent wrong by the impact and stars danced across her vision. She grunted in pain and rolled to the side of the hood as the asphalt and concrete fell, plunking off the hood and leaving pockmarks. One chunk hit her in the back as she rolled and fell to the ground.
A tornado of gunfire spun up.
With shocked arms and weak legs she pulled and pushed her way to the front of the truck to see the action. Her uncle had strode out of the destroyed lobby of the clinic—SAW firing at a murderous rate—and put bullet after bullet into the blinded, unsteady alien construct wobbling in the street. One after another—faster than anyone could see—the bullets smashed into the blinded sensor array, eradicating the delicate instruments and piercing the unarmored chassis beneath. Other Monoliths ran to his aid, unloading their precious bullets and shotgun shells into the gaping hole their leader made in the face of the monster.
The tentacles in the chin of the crab flailed at the assault, trying to swat the rounds away like they were angry bees. The defensive gesture was for naught. These angry bees stung hard.
The front legs of the monster gave way, then the middle, then the rear. All the while the Baron pressed forward, gun firing until the barrel started to glow the now familiar cherry red. He stopped his fusillade when the belt of ammo ran out. Taking his cue, the Monoliths held their fire as the tiny swarm of squid bodies inside the twitching chassis hopefully died. On the monster’s back tiny vents opened to vent scalding steam into the air.
A muffled thump from inside the fallen vehicle shook the crab as Yasmine got to her feet. As she steadied herself on the truck’s wreckage she watched as the legs fell off the chassis, and a stream of hissing, bubbling acid issued from the maw of the killed creature. The strange caustic substance pooled around her halligan, but did no damage to the titanium.
“Self destruct, bitch,” her uncle said. Caleb snapped the top of the SAW open and put another belt of ammo in. “Everyone reload if you can. Get the anti-tank guns out we’ve been sandbagging. There are more of those six-legged bastards here.” He jogged over to Yasmine and looked her up and down. “You ok? You bleeding?”
“No more than usual,” she muttered, checking for blood. “Any idea where the others are? We need to act fast before they gang up on us.”
“They’re gonna find us right here and as the other units hit the other gates we’ll get them scattered. Pull them in different directions. Let’s hunker down and patch our wounds. Hit them hard with the last RPGs we have. We lost people just now.”
“So did they,” Yasmine said. Her conversation with Brent about how many humans died for every crab to die came back to her, and she squashed it away. She hated math. “Clinic?”
“Yeah, there’s enough wall for us to take cover. We do need to make sure they don’t come over the roof behind us and drop down from above.”
“Our guardian angel Trey has an eye on us from up there,” she said, pointing at the dirty white crab on the rooftop they’d befriended. “You cover the front, I’ll cover the back.”
“Not alone you won’t,” Knox said to her. The tiny, shotgun-toting Monolith had approached from a pile of spent shotgun shells. She slid more shells one-by-one into the bottom of her twelve gauge as she grinned at Yasmine.
“Agreed then,” Yasmine said.
“Are you alright?” Caleb asked her. “That was some crazy stuff just then. You don’t have a death wish, do you?”
Do I? Maybe I
do. “No. I just finally think I know what needs to be done and I’m gonna do it. Besides, what’s the last thing a crab expects me to do? Run at its face, that’s what.”
“People are gonna tell stories about you,” Caleb said with a grin. “The Hero of Shant. Interstellar diplomat. Kicker of Crab Asses.”
“I’m not doing this to be a hero,” Yasmine said as she gently picked the halligan up from the pool of alien acid. She shook the green slime off. “I’m doing this to protect the people I care about.”
“Real heroes never do heroic stuff because they want to be heroes,” her uncle said. “Your father and mother… you’re like them. You’re a—“
A blinding shock of energy flashed diagonally overhead from the rooftop Trey was perched on towards the roof of the clinic. His mining laser’s shot and evaporated—disintegrated—a crab that had crept up over the flat roof of the nearby building. A shower of black carapace and bioorganic innards went up into the air as they crouched down to avoid the debris. Parts fell, and Shant became quiet once more. Yasmine covered her eyes and looked at the clinic. On a spot of the brick that was still upright she saw Trey’s marking laser spell out a message.
EASIER WHEN YOU SNEAK UP FROM BEHIND.
TWO DOWN.
TWO TO GO.
Yasmine and Knox broke off from the main group after Yasmine gathered up her belongings and made sure she wasn’t squirting a fountain of blood out of a bullet hole she couldn’t feel. The two women dashed through the clinic lobby and down the hall towards the back patient rooms and the rear exit of the building. They had to protect that door. Be ready for the last two crabs…
Yasmine paused and admired the giant hole her pistol made in the wall. The bullet had set a small fire where it hit, and the scorch mark and fist-sized hole made her feel like she wielded a hand cannon.
“Where is everyone?” Knox asked between breaths as they ran.
“What?”
“We haven’t seen a single person since we got here. They can’t all be dead,” Knox said, huffing. “Where are they hiding?”