Satisfied it was dead, Blake went to check on his team mates. Lyons was alive and still strapped into the driver’s seat of the upturned Stryker. Williams, Howard and Specialist Brad Hickman were dead, but Wyatt Pollin had survived being flung twenty feet by the monster’s blow although Blake suspected he had a couple of cracked ribs and some torn ligaments in his shoulder from where he had failed to stick the landing.
Blake turned his attention back to Carroll. “Get up, Carroll!” he demanded. “Get up and start talking. I’ve got three dead marines plus Burrows, and a wrecked vehicle. No more secrets! What the hell was that?”
Carroll eventually raised his head then reached out a hand. The instant it passed above the encircling chain, the barrier disappeared – Blake felt it as rush of stale wind.
“Couldn’t shoot,” Carroll said. “Would’ve broken the circle.”
“Fuck your circle, Carroll. What about the rest of us? What about fighting for your team? Your mission? I heard you in the Stryker when we dropped. ‘Ooh-Rah’. You’re a marine. Since when do marines run and hide like that?”
“You don’t understand,” the man muttered.
“Enlighten me.”
Carroll stared at the body of Nathan Burrows sprawled in the sand. “It doesn’t matter now. I’m a dead man.”
“You knew what this mission was about,” Blake snapped. “We’re all dead men.”
“Not me,” Carroll said with a shake of his head. “Burrows was going to get me out. That was our deal. One last hunt.”
“Bullshit. Get you out? Out of where? You’ve already absorbed enough rads to kill you. Die here or die in a Navy hospital, what difference does it make?”
“You don’t get it. I wasn’t going to die. Burrows was going to get me frozen. Cryogenics, just like Walt fuckin’ Disney.”
For a moment Blake was taken aback. “Why?”
“Twenty years, I been huntin’ those things. Twenty years of watching the tests and cleaning up afterwards and we never once cracked the walls of heaven. Never saw no cherubs, just those... things,” he gestured toward the monster’s carcass before taking a step toward Blake. “You see, I figured it out. There’s no heaven, only hell. Just us and them. I’ve seen the truth. I know where we go when we die and I ain’t planning on dying.”
The old man was clearly crazy, but then so was this whole situation and unfortunately Carroll was the closest thing Blake had to an expert on this stuff, so he was just going to have to deal with the old man.
“Look, I’m sure whatever deal Burrows promised you is still on the table. We just need to complete our mission and get clear of this storm so we can contact base.”
That wasn’t going to be as easy as it sounded. Not without a vehicle. “Lyons! What’s the news on the Stryker?”
Lyons came over shaking his head. “We could maybe right it if we had time. We can dig her out and try to roll her with the jack, but she’s got two shredded wheels and the front axle is busted.” He glanced back at the Stryker. “We could maybe remove the wheels from that axle and use them to replace the shredded tyres but that’s a hell of a job in the field.”
Blake nodded. “Okay. Better get started then. Everyone’s going to have to pitch in. That means you too, Carroll!”
But Carroll wasn’t looking at him. He was staring down at the candle that still burned despite the raging storm. Its flame was a brilliant white tongue of fire almost six inches long and pointing in the direction of the hypocenter. It seemed their mission was far from over.
* * *
They followed the direction set by the candle’s flame. It was tough going. The JSLIST suits had not been designed with operator comfort in mind and they were weighed down with as much equipment from the Stryker as they could carry.
Blake almost had to physically carry Carroll too. The old man seemed truly terrified of dying. Once he had realized this was no normal hunt, his whole demeanor had changed. But the man realized being alone was no guarantee of safety either, so he had eventually agreed to come with them.
Blake tried to keep him talking, asking him all kinds of questions about his time at the Nevada Proving Grounds. It helped to lighten his mood somewhat and it was all useful information.
“What about that shield thing?” Blake asked. “How does that work?”
“It’s called a circle of protection. It’s a holy space. Things work differently inside it, like the candle.”
“And the bad guys can’t get in?” Blake asked as they trudged on.
“Nothing can get in until the circle is broken from the inside.”
“Hey, Sarge!” said Lyons. “How do I get me one of those?”
“It won’t work for just anyone, son,” Carroll replied. “It takes practise and something to focus your faith on.”
“The chain?” Blake asked.
“Chain, chalk… it doesn’t really matter.”
The storm grew stronger until pushing through the wind felt like trying to walk underwater. Then, without warning it was gone.
Something else disappeared too; the constant clicking from their portable Geiger counter. Just seconds ago it had been so fast that it had sounded like the white noise between radio stations. Blake had just tuned it out. Now it was gone altogether.
Blake looked to Pollin who was holding the small instrument. “Fault?”
“No, Sergeant, not that I can tell. Just no reading. Not even normal background radiation.”
Blake spotted something glinting ahead; Howard had seen it too.
“What the hell is that?” the marine asked.
It hung, glinting in mid-air. It appeared to be metal – twisted and ridged like a section of spine from some metal beast.
“It’s a crankshaft,” Lyons said. “Part of one anyway.”
He was right. It had been scoured clean and gleamed like it was freshly-milled. It hung impossibly in the air. Blake waved his rifle barrel above and below it and then to the sides, but there was nothing holding it up. It was hovering.
He looked to Carroll. “You want to fill us in on why gravity seems to have taken a day off?”
“Search me,” Carroll replied with a shrug. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
Blake reached out and carefully touched the crankshaft. It felt entirely normal and entirely solid. After his first tentative touch he wrapped a fist around it and pulled, but it wouldn’t budge. He would have had more of a chance to right the fifteen-ton Stryker than to budge the floating crankshaft.
“There’s more over here,” Fernandez said. Blake looked over and saw a tiny metal leaf floating in mid-air – a piece of torn metal plate with viciously sharp and jagged edges.
“There’s paint underneath,” Fernandez said.
Blake peered beneath; in a hollow protected from the wind, some of the original paint remained.
They moved onwards through a cloud of suspended debris – not just metal, but also splinters of charred wood and what looked like shards of black glass fused from the Arizona sand itself.
The debris grew thicker, forcing them to weave through a three-dimensional maze of immovable particles until they eventually came to the source.
It was a house, or rather the remains of one. It seemed to have been caught mid—explosion. The troupe faced the back wall of the property. It was still relatively intact; the door was fixed in its frame, hanging open. A rear window hung like a shattered cloud just outside its frame. The front of the house was just gone. Through the open door Blake could see the front rooms standing open to the street, its contents pushed against the walls as if a great broom had swept through and cleaned the room furniture and all.
To the left and right other houses defined the edge of a dirt road.
“What the hell is this place?” Pollin asked.
“Ghost town,” Fernandez said. “I saw one on Sixty Minutes. There’re ghost towns all over this county, old mining towns just abandoned after the silver dried up. Nothing else out here worth staying for,
so folks just up and walked away.”
“Not everyone,” Lyons said, pointing to a car beside the house. Like everything else, it had been frozen at the moment of the explosion. The car stood almost upright in a permanent, impossible pirouette around one of its front wheels, but apart from that it looked to be fairly new and in good condition. It was certainly better than any abandoned vehicle should be after years in the desert.
“Looks like someone set up here. You think it was the terrorists?” Blake asked.
“Drug runners more like, or maybe organised people smugglers,” Fernandez replied.
Blake glanced at Carroll and noted the look of alarm on his face. “Carroll, you got any idea how much energy it would take to freeze a town like this?”
“The energy doesn’t freeze. The life force gets replaced.” Carroll’s frown persisted. “At the moment of detonation, when the forces are strong enough to tear open the portal between dimensions, any life extinguished here gets replaced from over there. That’s it. There is no freezing.” He shook his head “I’ve never seen anything like it. This is something new.”
“Man, that is so not what I wanted to hear,” said Lyons.
“Okay,” said Blake. “Here’s how this is going to work. We sweep the town. You know the drill. We’re still on the clock and no matter what we’ve seen today, remember how this all started. Some asshole tried to drive a nuclear truck bomb into downtown Phoenix.” He pointed to the old man. “Now Carroll here is going to do his thing and we’re going to do ours. I want any intel bagged and tagged. I want samples and I want a vehicle. We’re going to have to get outside the radius of this…” he struggled to find the words. “Of whatever the fuck is happening around here and we’re going to do our jobs and get that intel back to HQ. Everyone got that?”
“Ooh rah!”
The marines pressed forward through the shattered building. It seemed to have been occupied fairly recently; Blake noted clothing and food that still looked fresh, all caught at the same frozen moment in the midst of the explosion.
He spotted movement out the street and dropped, making his way through the shattered room on his belly.
The main square of the old ghost town was a shattered bramble of broken shards of wood. Every building looked to have burst outward, growing up and away from what must have been the center of the explosion that had turned the buildings around the square into a crown of thorns.
But that was nothing compared to what lay at its centre.
A fused circle of black glass surrounded a central pit that glowed with otherworldly light. It flickered like the reflection of something constantly in motion. Across the surface of the black glass lay a twisted skein of tendrils. So dense were they, it looked like the floor was carpeted with black worms. Each was no thicker than Blake’s thumb, but so long their ends were lost among their tangled brethren.
They spread from the central pit, crawling up the walls of nearby buildings like ivy. Only there, at the farthest perimeter of the writhing mass could the tips of the tendrils be seen waving in the air like the fronds of some unimaginable sea monster. In some places they had fused together into sheets of motile tissue, flat and tough as dry kelp washed up on a beach.
Blake followed them back to the pit. From his vantage point he couldn’t quite see inside – he was glad. What little he could see hinted at something vast moving in the darkness beneath.
Other creatures surrounded the pit, and Blake counted half a dozen of the swift moving creatures – like the one Carroll had killed – as well as two of the big Stryker-killers.
“It’s the portal,” Carroll said in disbelief.
“What?”
“I’ve seen pictures from the tests. High-speed photography at the moment of the explosion. The portal looked like that,” Carroll said, pointing.
“But it’s supposed to be closed,” Blake shouted. “You said it was only open for the instant of the explosion!”
As he said the words, Blake knew the door between worlds was still open because the loss of life here had been much greater than in any mere test. This had been a town once – undocumented and off the maps, and probably the base of some smuggling operation – but still a concentration of life energy. When the bomb had gone off it had allowed something big to gain a foothold in this world. That many-tendriled thing that flowed from the portal like a mass of mating snakes was caught between two worlds, keeping the portal open.
“We need to get out of here,” Carroll said. Pale, his eyes darted left then right, and the man wore every one of his sixty-plus years on his haggard face. This was way more than he had signed up for.
“You hang in there, Marine,” Blake said, but the old man was right. This was more than they could handle. He had no idea what the powers-that-be could do about a portal to another dimension, but that wasn’t his problem. The biggest contribution he could make right now would be to get this information back to the outside world.
Movement out of the corner of his eye.
A creature was crawling up the wall. No bigger than a possum, its many-jointed legs told Blake exactly where it had come from.
“It’s okay,” said Lyons as he drew his knife from the kydex sheath slipped to his chest rig. “I got this one.”
“Wait!” Blake hissed, but it was too late.
Lyons slammed his knife into the creature, pinning it to the wall, but the thing wasn’t about to go quietly. It screeched and thrashed against the blade that pinned it to the wall, smearing black blood against the timbers.
“Fuck!” Lyons shouted. He grabbed the thrashing monstrosity and pulled his knife out ready for another blow, but the creature was too strong. It twisted out of his grip with desperate strength and skittered away out onto the street, still screeching.
“We need to move, now!” Blake ordered.
There was a heavy thump as something landed on the ceiling above them, then another.
Blake looked up. Half of the shattered room was open to the sky and peering over the lip of the lattice of ruined joists were two of the demons, their cratered faces tracking Lyons and Blake like radar dishes.
“Contact!” Blake shouted and fired up through the boards. No need for subtlety now. This would have to be a fighting retreat.
The hail of bullets should have shredded the timbers, and torn into the creatures above, but Blake had not accounted for the unnatural strength of the stasis-locked structure. His rounds just stopped as if they had hit armored plate, and fell as squashed mushrooms of lead to mingle with the brass of his spent shell casings.
One of the creatures jumped down, slamming into Lyons who still had his knife out. The marine stabbed the creature again and again, but it seemed to have no regard for its own safety. It ignored Lyon’s blows and concentrated on delivering its own. It clawed through his JSLIST, talons snagging on the tough MOLLE webbing of the man’s chest rig.
Blake didn’t dare shoot for fear of hitting his squad mate, and watched in horror as the monster’s mouth opened impossibly wide and closed on Lyons’ head, crushing mask and skull beneath.
Pollin and Blake opened fire at the same time, both knowing their teammate was dead and both wanting to exact revenge on his other-worldly killer.
The second creature landed in the room, but Fernandez was ready for it. He fired at point blank range. Rounds chewed into the creature, but it seemed to be made out of spring steel and Kevlar. Fernandez’ rifle finally clicked down onto an empty chamber, but the creature was still very much alive. It swiped at him, raking clawed appendages across his throat like a quartet of switchblades.
Blake kicked the creature and grabbed Fernandez by the hood of his suit, hauling the marine toward the back of the house. He expected the creature to come leaping back, but although it screeched in fury, no attack came his way. He checked over his shoulder; the creature squirmed in mid-air, clutching at a sliver of timber protruding from its chest. Blake’s kick had impaled the creature on a fragment of the shattered structure like som
e alien bug in a collection.
He fired one handed, aiming for the sense organ at the centre of the creatures head. It thrashed once then was still.
The ground shook. The mass of writhing tentacles surged from the portal, and hidden in its fronds was another of the creatures. It wriggled free of the tendrils and took its first breath in its new world.
“It’s no good!” Carroll shouted. “You kill one and another just takes its place.”
A zero-sum game. Every scrap of life-energy lost on this side of the portal was immediately replaced from the other side of that bridge between worlds. It was like trying to bail out a boat that was already half sunk – for every bucketful of water emptied over the side, more just flowed in to take its place.
Blake knew what had to be done. There was no point killing the creatures on this side; they would have to cross over. Killing these demons on their home turf would have the opposite effect, sucking life from this world into the next.
Blake grabbed one of the bags they had brought with them from the Stryker. Inside were three half-pound blocks of C4 used for controlled explosions of enemy munitions.
“Get as far away as you can,” he shouted and ran straight toward the pit. He made a mental tally of his remaining ammunition – he was going to raise hell. Those demonic bastards had no idea what was about to hit them.
He raced across the carpet of tendrils, and they squirmed underfoot. One of the bigger creatures started to lumber toward him, but it was too slow. Blake would reach the pit before it got near him.
The portal yawned in front of him, and for the first time he was able to look down into it… and the horrors it contained.
“We never cracked the walls of heaven,” Carroll had said. “Never saw no cherubs.”
No cherubs indeed, but surely no religion had ever envisioned a hell such as this.
The world beyond the portal seemed to be made of nothing but writhing tendrils. There was no other Earth, nothing so normal as a planet orbiting some other sun. This was a world of flesh – a twisted inter-weaving skein of black tendrils thicker than any jungle canopy. Other things moved within the darkness. The only light came from the flickering around the edges of the portal. Hundreds of creatures swarmed through the mass like clownfish through an anemone’s fronds, making their home on the body of this thing that was their entire world.
SNAFU: Hunters Page 7