SNAFU: Hunters

by James A. Moore

  They filed down the draw, the horses picking their way carefully over loose scree at the bottom. Okhchen rode ahead and then stopped. He beckoned and pointed.

  Up ahead the trail finally ended at its source – an irregular hole roughly three meters in diameter, ringed by piles of frozen earth. They peered over the rim. A foul odor wafted up from below and the horses became skittish, snorting and recoiling. The soldiers dismounted, unslinging their guns and snapping back the bolts.

  “Pogodin!” said Zakharov. The team’s engineer stepped forward. “Time to earn your pay. Two of you go down there with him and cover him.”

  Pogodin slung on two satchel charges from his saddlebags and clambered down into the hole, accompanied by two privates.

  “Comrade Sergeant, has anyone ever tried going all the way down one of these rat holes to find out where they go?” asked Kaminsky.

  “A team did once,” said Kravchenko. “They never returned.”

  “Okhchen believes they go all the way down to the Lower World, where evil spirits dwell. Says the ghouls spawn down there and then burrow to the surface.”

  Kravchenko shrugged. “Who knows? His people were living here long before white men showed up. They know this land better than we do.”

  * * *

  The demolition team switched on flashlights. The beams revealed that the hole was the entrance to a crude tunnel plunging down into subterranean blackness at an angle, delving past the permafrost deep into solid bedrock. Such geologic features were not unusual in the karst topography found in Siberia, but this was clearly not a natural formation created by erosion. It was too straight, too uniform in appearance. Just exactly how the ghouls dug them out was another unsolved mystery.

  Pogodin had been a geologist in civilian life. Chewing on his mustache, he carefully inspected the rough, gray limestone with an experienced eye, noting fissures in the walls, piles of rubble fallen from the ceiling, and other indications of instability. He set down his satchels and began unpacking spools of primer cord and demolition blocks of TNT.

  His two escorts stood guard nearby, pensive, weapons ready. They wrinkled their noses: the air was cold and dank, heavy with pungent ghoul smell. Then they tensed.

  Far down the tunnel they could hear approaching footsteps – the flat, echoing slaps of bare feet and the click and scratch of claws.

  Pogodin worked quickly, hurrying to place the high explosive at critical weak points in the tunnel. No time to drill boreholes; no time to double-prime charges either. He inserted a blasting cap into each block then crimped a short length of primer cord to the cap. The ends of these lines, in turn, he began tying to a long ring-main of primer cord so all the charges could be set off simultaneously by a single fuse.

  His guards shined their flashlights down the pitch-black tunnel, but whatever lurked down there was beyond the reach of the light. The footsteps became louder, nearer; hissing could be heard. Then the footsteps sped up. Others joined it. The privates glimpsed the malevolent gleam of unblinking eyes.

  “Here they come!” shouted one. “Vasily, hurry up!”

  “Hold them off!” said Pogodin. “I’m almost done!”

  As fiendish howls echoed the soldiers threw an illumination flare down the tunnel to blind the enemy then opened fire. The hollow roar of submachine guns was deafening in the confines of the passage, bullets spraying sparks as they ricocheted off walls. Empty steel casings clattered on the floor. The howls ceased; the flare burned out. The privates stopped shooting, ears ringing and nostrils filled with the acrid reek of blue cordite smoke.

  The respite was only momentary. The running footsteps resumed.

  “Fire in the hole!” said Pogodin, yanking the pull-igniter at the end of the ring-main. A thirty-second fuse hissed fiercely as it started burning down.

  His companions scrabbled back up the tunnel and out the hole as fast as they could. Pogodin tried to follow, then slipped and fell. The others frantically reached down and hauled him out. Up on the surface the rest of the team had already withdrawn to a safe distance. The trio scrambled towards them.

  Behind them a geyser of smoke and debris erupted from the hole with a muffled boom.

  * * *

  Zakharov waited until the air cleared, then cautiously ventured over to the crumbling edge for a closer look. The hole had collapsed and was completely filled with rubble. He nodded with satisfaction and returned to the others.

  “Good job, comrades,” he said. “Hole’s sealed.”

  He brought out his sextant. Locations of all known ghoul holes had to be recorded. As he annotated his notebook there was a distant rumble and the ground trembled beneath his feet.

  Okhchen let out a cry of alarm, his normally inscrutable Asian features taut with dismay. He pointed north. Zakharov scowled and raised his binoculars. His heart sank.

  “What is it?” asked Kravchenko.

  Zakharov answered by passing him the binoculars.

  Kravchenko looked for himself and swore vehemently in Ukrainian. A few hundred meters away a dust cloud billowed from a huge crater that suddenly yawned open. Crawling from its depths like monkeys were ghouls – scores upon scores of them, a swarm of gaunt figures in the eldritch gleam of the northern lights. He let out a gusty sigh and handed the binoculars back.

  “It’s a full-scale invasion,” he said.

  Zakharov nodded grimly. “Like six years ago. After that regiment was slaughtered the NKVD had to call in the air force to bomb the holes with poison gas.”

  “So that’s why the ghouls only attacked a few at a time. They were bait to lure our detachment north, overextend ourselves. We’re the only line of defense out here.”

  Zakharov realized how potentially serious this was. The German Army had overrun much of the western part of the Soviet Union, so vital industrial plants had been dismantled and evacuated to safer locations east of the Ural Mountains. Raw materials for those plants came from Siberia. A major ghoul invasion could threaten facilities vital to the war effort. Many of the forced-labor camps and exile colonies of the Gulag were located there too and a ghoul attack would hardly be liberation for the wretched prisoners.

  He swung into the saddle. “Fall back!”

  The team retreated towards the ridge. A great clamor of rabid howls rose. The ghouls had seen them and gave chase, their eyes glowing demonically. Zakharov knew they could sprint as fast as a horse and had greater stamina.

  This was a race he could not win.

  They rode up the draw and when they reached the top Zakharov signaled a halt. Grabbing Pogodin by the sleeve he said, “Ride like the devil! Warn the major!” He thrust into his hands the map case with the file, plus his logbook with the hole’s longitude and latitude.

  “Yes, Comrade Lieutenant!” Pogodin kicked his horse with his heels and galloped away.

  Zakharov turned to Kravchenko, his blue eyes narrow slits of determination. “We have to delay them, give Pogodin a chance to get away.”

  Kravchenko nodded curtly. He dismounted and turned to the others. “Comrades, we make our stand here. Not one step back.”

  The others knew what this order meant, but obeyed without question. They did not fight for Stalin, or for Communism, not even for Mother Russia. They fought first and foremost for the same thing that all soldiers have fought for since the beginning of time. They fought for each other.

  Swinging down, they hastened to take positions among a jumble of boulders at the head of the draw. They unpacked all their spare ammunition and turned the horses loose; no one could be spared to hold them. The escarpment had cliffs too sheer to scale so unless the ghouls went a dozen kilometers in either direction and circled around the far ends of the ridge, they had to come this way.

  A red emergency flare was launched even though everyone knew it was futile. No help would arrive in time. A few soldiers crossed themselves, the old Orthodox custom before battle that many rank-and-file in the Red Army still performed out of habit. The last illumination flare was sen
t up and it floated overhead on its parachute, the ghouls hissing and gnashing their teeth in anger, trying to shield their eyes from its bright, flickering glare.

  Okhchen braced his rifle on a rock and began shooting as fast as he could work its bolt-action, picking off creatures at long range, pausing only to thumb in more rounds to reload.

  Soon Kaminsky’s machine gun joined in, its pan magazine slowly revolving as he hammered away, spent cartridges spewing out the bottom, red lines of tracers streaking across.

  The flare burned out and darkness closed in again like a pall.

  “Steady, comrades!” shouted Zakharov.

  The screeching tidal wave of death poured into the draw.

  “Fire!”

  Submachine guns lashed out. The ghouls in front stumbled and fell, but those behind did not waver. Heedless of losses the creatures kept coming, jumping over the fallen. The soldiers shot them down in droves, gagging on the rising stench as disintegrating carcasses piled up on the steep slope. They flung grenades and the explosions sent lethal splinters slicing into gray flesh. The draw became a killing zone as their inhuman foes were funneled into it.

  But there seemed to be no end to the creatures: still more scrambled out of the crater, and the team could only hold the frenzied horde at bay for as long as they had ammunition. All too soon, gritting their teeth, they snapped in their last magazines. One by one they ran empty and the slobbering ghouls, shrieking with bloodlust, greedily surged forward.

  Two privates blew themselves up with a grenade as the monstrosities sprang onto them, taking their foes with them.

  Kravchenko dropped his empty submachine gun and plunged a combat knife into a ghoul’s belly up to the handle. He viciously ripped upwards, but no entrails spilled out, just a black gush of acidic ichor. The steel blade melted and he screamed as the ichor ate through his clothing and burned his flesh.

  Okhchen sent his last bullet crashing through a leering face, then gripped his rifle by the barrel and swung it like a club to crush the skull of a second enemy with the wooden stock. The next tore his head off.

  Kaminsky bellowed in defiance and rose to his feet, holding his smoking DP-28 waist-high as he raked the ghouls with slugs. When it was empty he threw it aside and swept out an infantry spade. One edge of the blade was sharpened so it could also be used like an ax – or as a weapon. Wielding it like a battle ax he hacked and slashed at the ghouls like a warrior of old, laughing and cursing them in Yiddish, splattering their gore on the rocks until finally they overwhelmed and dismembered him.

  The magazine of Zakharov’s Tokarev service pistol held eight rounds. Seven he pumped into the nearest ghoul, bringing it down. Then, as three more lunged for him, he pressed the muzzle to his temple and pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  His gnawed bones, and the gnawed bones of his comrades, could not be seen by the aircrews flying high above the ridge a week later. But they could see the crater in the tundra, and the Tupolev bombers carried full loads.

  The Secret War went on.

  Outbreak

  V. E. Battaglia

  Rook was going to be sick.

  He had always been susceptible to motion sickness. Reading in the car made his head spin, storm and wrack violently. Boats jellied his legs and turned his skin to sagging seaweed. Hell, even standing too fast could sometimes throw his head through a foggy loop. His stomach achieved acrobatic proficiency in those moments, all back flips and hand springs and harsh landings.

  Now, as he sat tight in his seat with the constant whir of helicopter blades pounding above his head and harsh wind coming in at odd angles from the open hatch to his side, Rook remembered why exactly it was that he had opted out of joining the Air Force. He could barely breathe without a wave of nausea sweeping over him. He tried looking out at the city, tried to focus and found that it was a strange still-frame, a city floating on clouded air. High rises climbed endlessly, their windows blistering bright against the dread darkness of a dangerous night, lights flickering on and off and no inhabitants in sight. Fog had crept down through hollows and alleys, drifting towards street level in poisonous wisps that blanketed roads and dissolved short, squalid, razor-edged buildings into acidic vapor.

  Acid. Dissolving. Melting. Decaying.

  His stomach pushed up at his throat violently. He choked it back down. Bad idea to look out the window. He stared up at the ceiling with bulging, glassy eyes and started thinking through terms he had learned in training, reciting them to himself in no particular order. Revenant: angry revenge ghost, destroy remains. Imp: small servant of witches, dragon’s breath injected into the heart. EMP: electromagnetic pulse, disrupts poltergeists. It was the only trick that helped, albeit very slightly, when he felt sick or nervous.

  “Looking a little green there, Rook.” Mouth’s voice chirped through Rook’s headset.

  “First drop. Definition of green.” That one was Cypher. “Looking a little sick too.”

  “You vomit, then you vomit outside my rig, Rook. I’m not cleaning that shit up.” Chopper. Definitely Chopper, that one.

  “Clean?” Mouth chuckled, slapped Deacon on the arm and gave him a scrunched what the hell? look. “Clean what, Chop? My ass has been sticking to the same cum stains since ‘99.”

  “Keep it up. I’ll leave your ass out here, Mouth.”

  “Yeah, you promise?”

  Deacon shook his head. “God help us.”

  “Quiet.” And that one was the Boss. Sergeant Klinkhammer, but no one called him that. His name was Boss. And his word was law. When he said to be quiet, the he-lo took it down a notch. First rule of Shadow Team: Boss is God. Second rule: Do as God commands. Third: See Two. “Cypher. Access the south-side apartment’s computers. I want schematics and a guest list with running count.”

  Cypher instantly went to work, pulling a laptop from her pack. Her fingers moved rapidly across the keys, the tapping silenced by heavy blades cutting the air. In seconds, she was done and had turned the screen towards everyone.

  The screen scanned through a rapid-fire set of binaries and registry keys, then bisected into two windows. The top, a rotating graphic of a run-down apartment building with fire escapes running down its sides – a vertical slice of the building had been cut away like a piece of cake, showing a quick layout of the interior. The bottom window showed a running tally of guests currently registered to the apartments totaling 123.

  “Alright, listen up and listen well because we’re ETA 4 minutes, max. Two weeks ago, during a routine scan of New York, Intel picked up on an anomalous energy spike.” Boss’ voice boomed over the headset. “PK and EM readings went off the scale for three hours without explanation. Then they stopped. Further scans throughout the day returned no results. In response, we bumped our alert status from blue to yellow and activated SAR Protocol 1. Leak was sent in the following day with instructions to maintain station for a month, investigate grounds and tenants and check in daily with Intel. Two days ago he missed his scheduled check-in time. Scans showed him still within the building and his vitals were steady. Continuous PK-EM sweeps of the building were ordered. Twelve hours later, he fell off the grid entirely. When he reappeared–” Boss looked to Cypher and she reached around the screen, tapped it. “–this signature surfaced, originating in or near his apartment.”

  A small, dark mass appeared in the vertical slice on the 6th floor of the building, pulsing like a beating heart and radiating angry, jagged waves of red in all directions.

  “This signature has continued since his reappearance. He has still not checked in. The job is simple. Standard SR&R. We are to evaluate current SAR status while inside, but our primary objective is to rendezvous with Leak in his 6th-floor apartment and get him out of there.”

  Rook noticed that everyone had taken huddled positions by the he-lo doors, weapons strapped and slung. He followed suit, awkwardly bumping into Cypher, who stared at him with disgust. Had he just heard Boss say rescue was priority?

  “We go
in quiet. That means weapons slung, people. I don’t want engagement before we find our man unless absolutely necessary.”

  “ETA twenty seconds, Boss,” Chopper cut in. “Sorry for interrupting, Boss.”

  “Do not touch down on the roof, Chop. We’ll drop in. Stay local and stay in the air. We don’t know what’s down there and we’re not taking chances. This shit goes sour and we may need evac ASAP. When I call for dust off, be ready.”

  “Boss,” Rook said tentatively. “Sir, I’m confused. Shouldn’t our priority on a Search, Recon and Rescue be to assess and contain threats in accordance with Supernatural Antagonist Response protocols?”

  All eyes set upon him, pinning him in place like a butterfly on display. He could feel the needles in his skin.

  “That’s what we were taught, Boss,” he added meekly.

  “Rook, what I say is priority in every mission. Period. That’s what you should have been taught and you’d better learn it quick or we’ll all pay the price. We are one body. I am the mind. This is not a democracy.”

  “We’re in place, Boss,” Chopper said and, with no more than a nod from Boss, the doors on both sides of the he-lo were sliding open, rappel lines thrown over the edge on either side, clamps attached then Shadow Team was gliding down the ropes towards the rooftop in perfect unison, with Rook trailing a few steps behind.

  * * *

  Rook landed on his feet with a heavy thud. The shock went straight into his knees. It stung. He unclipped from the wild rappel as it snaked through the choppy air.

  “Squeeze harder next time or you’ll break your leg,” Cypher said as she passed him without looking up from her arm-mounted computer. “Entry that way.” She pointed to a rusted doorway sticking up from the roof like a festering sore, her MP5 tight to her back.