Grunge (ARC)

by Larry Correia

  The napalm was driven out under pressure by a nitrogen pressure tank. Nitrogen was a nonflammable, mostly inert, gas.

  We prepped the flamethrower and I drove the truck back out. I was in for a long walk in the spider haunted darkness. Wasn’t looking forward to that.

  “We’re going to need a phone,” I said when I found the city engineer. “How’s it going up here?”

  “We’re still getting people out of their houses,” he said. “We’ve got phones that will reach. You’ll have to carry a long wire spool.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “I’ll get somebody on it.”

  Lieutenant Shaw was out managing the clearance of the innocents. Which really sucked. I’d have liked to have, you know, said hello and good bye sort of thing.

  When the phone and wire turned up I headed back into the spider-haunted darkness.

  * * *

  The spiders were coming off the ceiling in a shit brown waterfall.

  The ethanol had worked. Too well.

  We were overrun. MCB was going to have to handle this. Portland was going to be overrun. The mechanical ambush had failed.

  Maybe.

  Military explosives are very stable. You can set them on fire. You can stomp them, knock them and shoot them. Even det cord is surprisingly stable.

  Generally. Mostly. In the main.

  Detonators, not so much. Detonators ride on the knife edge between “bit unstable” and “stable enough.” Every explosive expert knows to be careful with detonators.

  Hit one with a .50 caliber round and it’s going to blow up. Take the claymore with it? Maybe. And then the daisy chain would start and that led all the way to the C4 the shelob was still occupying.

  The problem being a detonator is a little tube of metal about the length of a woman’s pinky and the thickness of a pencil. One of those gimmicky narrow pencils. And the nearest one was nearly a hundred yards away. Even for a Marine this was going to be a tough shot. With spiders already on our position and fangs inches from my body.

  It’s one of those times when the words “Don’t panic” go through your head. You have to do a series of steps very carefully and very quickly or you’re going to die. Take a prone position. Get a good butt-to-cheek-to-shoulder weld. Place finger on trigger. Let breath settle. Take careful aim. Adjust for distance. No wind in a tunnel. Ignore the screams as Roy turns and runs, dropping his shotgun, the fucking coward. Ignore the legs of the spiders in the way, they don’t matter. Focus on the target. Will the round to…

  The sear let go without me even thinking about it. Then the world fell in.

  I’d known it was going to be a big boom. It was like a string of God’s own firecrackers. In the enclosed space it was positively painful. All the spiders on the ceiling and bulkheads, even the ones that were past the last claymore, fell off. The compression wave stunned most of them, even the ones that got to our position.

  I didn’t notice. I was back on my feet in an instant, laying in with my Uzi. I could not reload fast enough. There was smoke and dust everywhere. The tunnel had partially collapsed to the right of our position. Freaking spiders were still twitching in every direction.

  I laid in with .45, standard hollow-point expanding rounds. Full auto as I’d been taught, when the ambush triggered and the air was filled with dust, mag empty, reload without thinking, thousands of hours of practice making the moves fluid.

  The last spiders were down. The wave was gone. My smoking Uzi was out of rounds and I was out of mags in my pouches.

  I drew my 1911 and walked over to one of the spasming monstrosities. It was on its back and thrashing its horrible legs.

  I pumped a full magazine into it and reloaded. It was still quivering, the fucker. I was pretty sure it was dead. Not sure enough. I shot it twice more.

  “Shit!” I screamed, holstering the .45 with shaking hands. “Shit, shit, shit…”

  “Anybody hit?” Brad called. “Anybody hurt?”

  “Jesse’s down!” Phil screamed.

  One of the last spiders had gotten a bite in up and under his body armor. Right in the abdomen.

  “Oh, fuck no,” I said, slumping to the floor. My friend, my best friend, was shivering as the poison worked through his veins.

  “Ch…Cha…” he said, trying to reach for me.

  “I know, buddy,” I knew what he was asking. We all knew the deal with spider bites.

  I thought about the kappa. Too far and they were bone doctors. Joan the Sasquatch. But I knew the truth. There was no mystical cure. There was no miracle this time. Doctors would try, so hard, to save him. The miracles of modern medicine would keep him alive in screaming agony for days, weeks, maybe a month. With the hit where it was, more like weeks. And that would be all she wrote. Weeks of agony for nothing.

  I pulled Jesse’s head and shoulders onto my lap and drew my .45.

  “It’s the most beautiful place you can imagine, buddy,” I said, tears making it hard to see. “So green. Every day is stalking that perfect buck. That one you know is too wily to catch. And right at dusk, when you’ve finally given up, he walks into your sights…You can go hunting with your dad again. He’ll like that. It’s so much better than this hellhole…”

  And I blew my best friend’s head off.

  Nothing says “I love you” like double-aught to the face.

  * * *

  As I laid Jesse down on the floor the smoke was starting to clear.

  The tunnel was littered with bits and pieces of spider bodies. Sections had partially collapsed. Every claymore and bit of C4 had detonated.

  The “shelob” trap, though, had detonated behind the massive arachnid. And the shelob, leaking fluids from every side, most of its legs blown off, peppered by claymore pellets, blind from having its eyes blown out, was still crawling down the tunnel.

  “What does it take to kill that thing?” Phil asked, stunned.

  “Hand, ammo for the fifty,” Brad said.

  I didn’t hear him. I just stood up and started striding down the corridor towards the shelob.

  “Ah, hell,” Louis said. “Target’s kind of blocked.”

  “Let him get his mad out,” Brad said. “Phil, provide him some cover fire. Some of them are bound to still be alive.”

  I didn’t hear any of it. I didn’t hear the order. I couldn’t have heard the explosion again. I couldn’t see or think. My world was red rage.

  When I was half-way to the wounded shelob, Mo No Ken came whispering out of the sheath. And I started running.

  “ASSSSSSEI!”

  The main neural junction on a spider is on the fore-part of its abdomen. That is the “sweet spot” for killing a spider. The head just has sensory and food organs on it. And the fangs, of course. No real brain per se.

  I knew that. I didn’t care. I was going to get to the central neural processor by blending the head onto the floor of the tunnel.

  At the first slash of the blade the shelob reared up, trying to bite. First one fang then the other hit the floor. The poison sack burst down my blade as I stabbed upwards. I slashed across and the head was cut in half. The shelob writhed in agony, trying to back up, trying to escape the pain.

  I cut and cut in a fury that was primal. This thing had killed my friend. The shelob might not have touched him but it was her fault. She was going to pay. She was going to die in pain.

  I cut until Mo No Ken was starting to, unbelievably, blunt. And I kept cutting. I literally cut myself half way through a shelob. I chopped that bitch to pieces. I was covered in spider ichor. I was standing in spider guts.

  None of it brought Jesse back.

  Brad finally came up behind me and gently put his hands on me as I was futilely swinging Mo No Ken, trying to get some of the spider ichor and guts and whatever the hell else off the blade.

  “Chad,” Brad said. “We’ve got stuff to do. We need you back here.”

  “Roger, sir,” I said, automatically.

  “I sent Louis back for the tru
ck,” he said. “We need to break down the fifty and start preparing to pull out the gear for clearance and clean-up.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” I said, turning away from the shelob.

  “Let me take the sword,” Brad said.

  “Sir…”

  “Chad,” Brad said, placing his hand gently on the hand that still held Mo No Ken. “I’ve been around katanas for years. I’ll clean it up. You go break down the fifty, Marine.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” I said, releasing Sword of Mourning.

  Mo No Ken. Sword of Mourning. The irony burned like the enzymes splattered on my face.

  * * *

  Louis had found Roy half way back to the surface, sitting against the wall with his chrome-plated .45 in hand, sobbing. Louis had carefully led him back to the surface then gotten the truck.

  Phil and I had everything ready to pack up by the time he got there. Including Jesse. We’d brought body bags just in case.

  Brad made me wash some of the goo off. The enzymes from the burst poison sack really did burn. We had a cream for that. We packed up. I rode out in the back of the truck, door up, with my buddy.

  Clearing the shelob carcass was a pain. Clearing all the carcasses was a pain. MCB finally allowed a handful of fire-fighters to get read in. They came in with hooks and pulled out the carcasses. We provided security. It took a tow-truck to pull out the shelob and the body kept falling apart.

  One hundred and eighty-three sassus males. Maybe some more up in the tubes we never recovered. One mature sassus female. The PUFF for our five-man team cleared three quarters of a million dollars. And, yes, Roy got part of that as his severance bonus.

  Still didn’t bring Jesse back. His mom had already lost her husband. Now we were going to send his remains home in an urn with some bullshit cover story and a check.

  Didn’t seem fair.

  There were only three of us left to clear the cistern. We went back in with airpacks sans silver suits and with flamethrowers. We fired them up at the bend, just in case. Then got blown on our ass when the ethanol exploded in the most gentle explosion of all time. No injuries. Jesse would have laughed his ass off. None of us laughed.

  All of the spiders had been in the assault. We found not one in the cistern. Nor did we find any survivors. Lots of web. Big pile of bodies. Not only human. Rat, dog, cat, even a few deer and rabbits.

  I didn’t find that out then. Found it out later. Didn’t really care, then. No human survivors. Jesse’s still dead. What’d you say again? I was thinking about something else.

  Doctors Nelson showed up at some point, having cut their vacation short. They shouldn’t have. We had this.

  They should have. They needed to. We didn’t have this, it had us. We were all shell-shocked. Not just about Jesse. Even tough, stoic, Brad was in a daze. We were working on muscle memory and could barely form a coherent sentence. And it was just us three left. But we had this. We’d hold the line or die trying. We hold the line! Hold this line, Marine! Stand your ground! Not one step back, Marine! Do you understand me? Chad! Chad! You there, Chad?

  What do you mean, we already won?

  We were all still in the spider haunted darkness.

  The Nelsons took over working with MCB and the locals. Amazingly enough, Special Agent Mathis was not being a prick when we came out of the tunnels. He could see the horror in our eyes. He also knew we were both necessary and crunch toast. So he called MHI and they called the Nelsons and the Nelsons got on a chartered jet, courtesy of MHI, and flew back in champagne class.

  Even they couldn’t get through to us. We didn’t have to worry about nightmares for the rest of our lives. We had an abundance. We were walking in them.

  * * *

  It was two and a half days after Jesse died when I woke up in a woman’s boudoir.

  It wasn’t the first time in my life I’d woken up in a woman’s bedroom by any stretch. And what with some occasional over-indulgences in the demon drink it wasn’t even the first time I’d woken up in one not remembering how I got there. But it was the first time after an op. And I was still covered in dried spider goop which was messing up the sheets.

  I looked around trying to ascertain some clue about where I was, how I’d gotten there. There was a picture on the bedside table. A tall man was standing next to a red-headed girl of about nine at a guess. She was holding up a salmon and grinning ear to ear. The man was holding a rod and also grinning.

  “My dad,” Lieutenant Shaw said from the doorway.

  “Looks like you had a better relationship with him than I did with mine. Mine never took me fishing. He did take me to a strip club when I was about that age. He used me as a prop to pick up a stripper.”

  “Yours still alive?” Shaw asked. “That was the summer I was ten. The following fall he was coming home late from work one night and a junkie killed him for five dollars.”

  “I’m sorry. Back-story of why you’re such a dedicated policewoman explained. Mind if I use your shower?”

  “Please,” she said. “That spider crap’s starting to rot. It’s going to be hell to get the smell out of the bed.”

  She climbed into the shower while I was soaping my hair.

  “I have shampoo you know.”

  She really did have a spectacular body.

  “Marine habit,” I said, rinsing out the soap. “Saves time and effort.”

  “You do my back, I’ll do yours,” she said.

  “Why? I’m good with any answer including sympathy.”

  “That,” she said. “And I don’t know a better way to help with mourning. And…I don’t have any relationships ’cause I don’t want them. Workaholic. Relationships get in the way. So having somebody on the side who feels the same way is doable.”

  “Well, I’m all about doable.”

  “And you promised to let me play with your Barrett,” she said.

  “If you play your cards right.”

  * * *

  And that’s the last of the Seattle stories. It’s not that there weren’t other hunts or other stories. I was in Seattle for five months after the Portland Shelob. But it was the last spectacular or unusual or important one.

  So now on to the assignment that put the Portland Shelob in perspective.

  * * *

  One last note. I later had to leave Seattle courtesy of Cheyenne the trailer park elf girl. Long story for the next memoir. But shortly before that little issue came up I was in Saury, per usual. I filled out my form and handed it to the server. A new guy.

  “You want California Roll?” he asked in broken Engrish. “We got riff avocado!”

  For all the good I have done in my life as a hunter, I still feel deep and abiding guilt for two things: I infected Seattle with California Rolls and ValSpeak and that bitch later met a down-and-out guitar player called Kurt who’d spent months living in the company of gnolls.

  Remember my comment “Smells like teen urine”? The record company balked at the word “urine.”

  Yeah. I’m ultimately responsible for Grunge. I sincerely apologize.