SNAFU: Hunters

by James A. Moore

  “Roger that, sir. Readying the decontamination shower now.”

  “No need for that, Sergeant.”

  “Sir, I can’t let you back in without decontamination. The dust on your suit would contaminate the whole vehicle.”

  “I know that, Sergeant. We’re going to hitch a ride on the outside. I need you to continue toward the hypocenter.”

  They continued across the desert, stopping half a dozen times for the old man to throw his chain in the dust and rest his old bones inside the circle. Sometimes, after performing their little ritual, Blake got new orders: either a new direction to take or an instruction to take readings on the mass spectrometer. Blake tracked their progress on his map, it was painfully slow. Their path picked a meandering line in a rough direction about two points west of the center of the explosion. At this rate they would be testing the limits of their air reserves before they even reached their goal.

  The rest of the team was growing impatient too. They all knew theirs was a one-way mission. They had to feel like it meant something; that their sacrifice wasn’t going to be in vain.

  Blake did his best to keep them focused. “Williams, get on the periscope,” he ordered. “Keep an eye out for any survivors.”

  “Survivors? For real?”

  “We’re still outside the kill zone, Private.”

  “Sergeant’s right, DeShawn,” said Lyons from the driver’s seat. “At Hiroshima they found survivors just a few hundred meters from the hypocenter.”

  “This wasn’t no fuckin’ airburst, man. This was a bad-ass truck bomb. Anyone inside a few hundred meters would have been atomized. We’re probably driving through a cloud of your ‘survivors’ right now.”

  “Contact right!” shouted Lyons.

  “Halt!” Blake ordered while DeShawn Williams panned around with the short periscope on the Stryker’s roof.

  “Contact, my ass. There ain’t nothin’ out there.”

  “What did you see, Marine?”

  “A person, I think. It was real quick. They looked like they were crawling… like they were on all fours.”

  “What’s up?” asked Borrows over the ‘com. “Why have we stopped?”

  “Sir, we have a possible survivor. Lyons saw–”

  “Where?” This time it was Carroll. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”

  “It was only for a second,” Lyons said. “Something moving in the dust storm.”

  “Williams, you stay on that scope,” Blake ordered. “Fernandez, Howard, you’re with me. Prep the portable decontamination shower and get a spare suit ready. If there’s anyone alive out there I want to get as much dust off them as possible and get them inside a suit and breathing clean air.”

  “Roger that,” said the two marines in unison.

  After buttoning up their JSLIST suits and checking each other for breaches, they stepped out through the airlock into the radioactive storm. Blake made his way carefully around to the right of the Stryker, where Lyons had said he had seen his survivor. The wind was almost strong enough to knock him off his feet. It was like being sandblasted; all he could see was the swirling brown dust, and his ears were filled with a sound like static from countless tiny impacts.

  “Williams, do you have eyes-on?” Blake asked over the ‘com.

  “Negative, Sergeant.”

  “Roger that. Switch to thermal, see if that helps.”

  “Switching to thermal imaging.”

  Blake scanned his surrounds, but could see nothing except the swirling dust until Carroll and Burrows advanced around the Stryker’s nose – both had their rifles raised. Blake imagined what the Stryker would look like to a survivor, let alone the five strange figures, armed and masked with bulky re-breathers. Whoever was out there would be scared shitless.

  “Lower your weapons,” Blake said over the ‘com.

  “Son, you’d better get back inside,” said Carroll. His voice was deep and calm, like the measured tones of a news anchorman.

  Blake ignored him. “How’s the thermal camera looking, Marine?”

  “Still sketchy. Wait… I got a signal but it’s moving too fast. Doesn’t look like— Holy shit!”

  Blake caught movement at the edge of his visor – a flash of white cutting through the swirling storm, then it was on him.

  It rode him down to the dirt. Hands clawed at him, gouging and ripping at the tough rubber of the JSLIST suit. A flailing limb caught his re-breather and knocked his whole mask upwards so the heavy rubber seal was across his eyes. He tasted dust. I’m exposed!

  He pushed upwards, trying to free himself. Around the obscuring mask he caught fragments of his assailant: a white, hairless head with a terrible wound where the eyes should be – a wet crater above a mouth that was too wide and filled with broken ridges of what might once have been teeth. Long fingers encircled his throat. He wanted to gag from the sand in his mouth but he couldn’t muster the breath. The sand got inside his mask making the world dark… or maybe it wasn’t the sand.

  The sound of a shot cut through his foggy senses. The weight and pressure left him and he sucked in a great gulp of air only to cough it back out as the sand hit the back of his throat. Blake rolled to his knees, hacking and spluttering. Then someone was at his side squirting water into his mouth and yelling at him to spit. He managed to clear his mouth while the boom of Carroll’s big calibre rifle echoed around him. Specialist Howard slapped an oxygen mask over Blake’s mouth and he took his first clean breath. His head cleared enough for him to cleanse and re-set his own mask.

  When he turned around Carroll and Burrows were standing over the body of the survivor.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Blake yelled. “You just shot a fucking civilian.”

  They both looked back at him, inscrutable behind their masks.

  “Look at it, son,” Carroll said.

  Blake ignored him. “Some goddamn farmer or hitchhiker manages to ride out the shockwave from a nuclear blast, poor bastard, and then you come along with your big-ass elephant gun and blow half a dozen holes through him. What the fuck do you think we’re doing here?”

  “Just look at it.”

  Blake dropped his gaze to the body sprawled in the dirt. It was naked, clothes burned off, Blake guessed. It lay sprawled at an unnatural angle – the legs bent back as if on broken knees. How could it have moved so fast with injuries like that? It was impossible and yet it had happened.

  “Jesus!” Howard said from somewhere behind Blake. “What could do that to a person? The blast? The heat pulse? Dude’s fucked up.”

  “It’s not a person,” Carroll said. Burrows shot a glance at the man, but said nothing.

  “What do you mean?” Blake asked. “If it’s not a person then what the hell is it?”

  “Careful, Carroll,” Burrows said.

  “What does it matter?” The old dude said, “they’re all dead anyway. The least we can do is let them die knowing they done some good.”

  Blake looked at the thing again. The knees weren’t broken, they bent backwards like a dog’s hind legs and the wound on its face wasn’t a wound at all. The fleshy crater that took up most of its ‘face’ above the gaping mouth was pink and ridged with frills of tissue like the inside of a bat’s ear. But whatever it was, it didn’t look damaged. It was meant to look like that, like some kind of a cross between a giant nostril and a radar dish.

  “You know what happens at the center of a thermonuclear explosion?” Carroll asked.

  Blake thought of the twinned horrors at the heart of a thermonuclear bomb: the first fission explosion was terrible enough, but it was only a detonator, a way of driving the pressure high enough to cause fusion and unleash the terrible forces that powered the Sun itself.

  “I know the basics.”

  “No you don’t. Plenty of people thought they did, thought they understood the physics, and maybe they did up to a point, but they never stopped to think whether something else was happening. Something beyond physics… something meta
physical.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The concentration of energy at the center of the explosion is too much for the universe to handle. For a fraction of a second, it’s actually enough to rip a hole in the fabric of space and time. It tears a hole in reality itself.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “That ain’t even the crazy part,” Carroll said with a shake of his head. “You see ours ain’t the only universe. We’re not the only game in town and when the hole opens, it allows things to cross over. When there’s a loss of life in this reality, like those killed in those nano-seconds when the hole exists, it’s like there’s a kind of suction. It’s like opening a door on a plane at thirty-thousand feet. There’s a difference in pressure. Loss of life in this universe pulls life across from the other side: new life… different life.”

  “I still say bullshit,” Blake said, glancing between Carroll and Burrows. “Next you’ll be telling me that’s where Godzilla came from – just stepped through one of these holes at Hiroshima.”

  “That was just an A-bomb, not thermonuclear, not powerful enough. Good job, too. That many lives lost… who knows what might have come through. Look,” Carroll said, as he calmly wiped the receiver of his rifle with an oiled rag. “I know this sounds hard to believe, but look at that thing and tell me it’s from this Earth. I hunted these things for twenty years, ever since the Bowline tests in ’69. Usually, what comes through is no bigger than a jack rabbit. We try to minimize the loss of life but we can’t clear every bird and mosquito out of the test area so there’s always some negative pressure. Hell, even the bacteria in the soil have life energy, and there’s more biomass in soil and rock than you’d think. But there hasn’t been much call for guys like me recently, not since the test bans.”

  “So let me get this straight,” Blake said, trying to make sense of what he’d heard. “You’re saying these terrorists smuggled a nuclear weapon across the border and when it detonated and killed them it sucked this… this demon through from another dimension?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Sergeant…” said Williams from inside the Stryker.

  “So we’re not here to gather intelligence about the bomb. We’re… Ghostbusters or some shit.”

  “No. You can gather all the intel you like. This was still a terrorist attack on US soil and you need to do your job. I’m the Ghostbuster.”

  “Sarge, you need to see this,” Williams repeated.

  For the first time Blake noticed the ring of steel in the dust, Carroll’s motorcycle chain and the small collection of items he’d placed inside its perimeter. One of the items was a candle – four inches of white wax like the kind kept in kitchen drawers across the country in case of a blackout. This one was stuck into the sand and despite the swirling dust storm it was still aflame.

  “What is it, Williams?” Blake said into the ‘com.

  “Another thermal trace, Sergeant. Bigger than the last one, and hot.”

  “A vehicle?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Blake noticed that although the candle didn’t seem to be affected by the storm, it was certainly being affected by something. The flame wasn’t burning straight up, nor was it guttering in the wind. It was horizontal. A little finger of flame pointing northwest.”

  “Williams, what’s the bearing on that heat trace?”

  “Northwest, Sergeant. About fifty yards and closing.”

  Carroll focused on the flame then looked out into the storm following its point. The man reloaded the Overkill with a handful of its massive rounds.

  Blake heard something above the roar of the wind that set ice in his veins. He unsnapped the quick-release buckles on the sling of his M4 and raised the carbine to his shoulder.

  A shadow raised itself against the back of the swirling dust – grey and huge. Carroll’s Overkill boomed in a steady rhythm. Blake wanted to see what it was before he started shooting.

  Then he wished he hadn’t.

  The creature was enormous, taller than the Stryker and massively muscled. Like the smaller creature Carroll had killed, it lacked anything Blake could call a face. The blunt head with its wet crater of a sense-organ sat between hunched slabs of muscle that banded its shoulders. Twin ridges of bone, halfway between horns and blade-like plates, ran back across its brow from above where the eyes would have been on any Earthly creature, to meet at a central ridge that ran along its back.

  Blake flipped his M4 to fully automatic and began to fire at the creature in short controlled bursts. Howard was doing the same, even Burrows joined in as a hail of lead rained down on the creature. They couldn’t miss, not with a target this big, not at this range. And yet it kept coming. They had already thrown enough lead at the thing to shred a bull elephant, but it hadn’t even slowed.

  It charged, forcing them to scatter or be trampled under its massive, clawed feet.

  “Williams,” Blake shouted into the ‘com. “Get on that .50 cal. now!”

  “Sergeant, there’s no airlock on the top hatch, the Stryker will be contaminated.”

  “Do you see that fucking thing? Forget the rads, if we don’t stop it none of us will live long enough to get cancer.”

  Blake slid into the dust under the angular nose of the Stryker, switched magazines and kept up his fire at the creature. It must have hide like steel plate. The storm of 5.56mm rounds didn’t seem to bother it at all. Only Carroll’s huge calibre rifle seemed to have any effect.

  The creature lashed out at Burrows with a huge hand. Its fingers were almost human, except the central pair was fused into on massive digit, the nail overgrown into a six-inch claw.

  It caught Burrows on that terrible hook, lifting him off his feet and flinging him away like a child’s toy.

  The effect on Carroll was dramatic. He stopped shooting and just stared at where Burrow’s body lay in the dust, the dead man’s guts drawn out along the furrow his carcass had carved in the sand.

  Carroll stepped backward into his steel circle and sat, his rifle lying silent across his knees.

  “Keep shooting, Goddamn it!” Blake shouted at the man but Carroll ignored him.

  The creature turned on Carroll, swiping one huge arm around, clawed fingers scything through the air.

  Blake expected to see Carroll’s body ripped in two, but the creature’s arm never seemed to make contact. It slashed and swiped at Carroll, but its blows were deflected as if by an unseen wall that extended upwards from the ring of steel around Carroll’s feet.

  Blake heard the clang of the Stryker’s top hatch being flung open and Williams opened up on the creature with the roof-mounted machine gun.

  It roared in pain and anger and turned its attention from Carroll to this new threat.

  “Watch out!” Blake yelled as the creature charged the armoured personnel carrier. Howard was crushed between the fiend and the steel wall of the Stryker as it slammed into the Stryker’s side. It lifted all four wheels on its left side off the ground, and fifteen tons of steel pivoted upwards. The creature roared again, its huge claws digging into the thick rubber of the Stryker’s all-terrain tires and lifted. The vehicle – their home and only safe haven in the radioactive storm that swirled around them – toppled first onto its side then turned full turtle onto its roof.

  Williams screamed as he was crushed half in-half out of the remote weapons station on the Stryker’s top.

  The airlock ripped away from the rear doors and two suited soldiers stumbled out. The creature lashed out, picking them up with one swipe of its massive arm. One, Blake couldn’t tell who, slammed into the side of the upturned Stryker with bone-crushing force while the other was flung a dozen yards.

  The creature turned back to Carroll and charged, trying to skewer the man on the thorny plates of its head. Whatever it was that had held the creature back before held firm again. It grappled against an invisible wall; clawed hands tried and failed to find purchase on the mysterious barrier.


  Now that Blake knew what to look for, he thought he could see the barrier in the swirling dust. A column of still, dust-free air surrounded Carroll, and the old man sat at its center with hands pressed against the sides of his head like a child wishing the world would go away.

  Damn him! Carroll had a shield and the most effective weapon against this brute and all he was doing was cowering in fear.

  Carroll had a shield… but maybe Blake could use it as well. While the creature hammered away at the invisible barrier, Blake sprinted past, keeping Carroll and whatever field the man had conjured between himself and the monster. Blake pressed his face to it and felt its strange, unyielding nothingness.

  “Fight, damn you!” Blake shouted at Carroll, but the old man gave no indication of having heard him. It was as impenetrable to sound as it was to the creature’s attacks.

  Blake smiled as an idea formed. He hoped the barrier really was is impenetrable as it appeared. Taking out a grenade, he pulled the safety clip and, keeping his thumb mashed down on the spoon, he pulled the ring from the fuse assembly.

  When he let go, the spoon sprang free, igniting the fuse. A wisp of smoke rose from the fuse assembly as it burned down toward detonation. With the fuse-delay of about four to five seconds, Blake was trusting his life to its accuracy.

  He counted down the seconds:

  One Mississippi…

  Two Mississippi…

  Three Mississip–

  Blake stepped from behind the barrier, threw the grenade straight at the fleshy concavity of the creature’s face and crouched back behind Carroll in one smooth motion.

  The grenade detonated right in front of the creature’s face, sending jagged shards of scorched metal casing through its flesh.

  The front of the creature’s head disappeared in a red mist. It collapsed forward, hung for a moment, slumped against the invisible column surrounding Carroll like a drunk leaning against a lamp post before sliding sideways and crashing into the dust.

  Blake stepped from behind the barrier and fired a few shots into the bloody stump that was all that was left of the monster’s head. The grenade at point blank range had done its work, as had the invisible barrier, protecting Carroll from the blast as well as deflecting the blast around Blake.