Bly referred to the massive series of warehouses formerly owned and operated by Sysco Foods of Olathe, Kansas. Years ago the world’s largest food distribution company used the place to store everything from frozen mozzarella sticks to prime rib to bags of soda syrup. The entire complex stretched hundreds of yards from south to north parallel to Interstate 35. Rows of discarded tractor trailers lined the docking bays; abandoned cars lay swept into a pile at the perimeter of the massive parking lot; a handful of monks walked patrols with support from Spider Sentries and Ogres.
The facility seemingly served two functions. First as a refueling depot for The Order’s Chariots. The blob-ish ships swooped in, hovered above the center of the complex, and received fuel via wiggling tubes protruding from roof-mounted piles of metal and bubbling black rock.
That fuel, in turn, arrived at the complex in the form of a dark gel transported in on boat-like vehicles escorted by Shell Tanks. As far as intelligence could discern, Voggoth’s minions drained this ‘fuel’ directly from the soil, sapping the Earth of nutrients that could be used to grow crops.
The second purpose of the facility appeared to be command and control. Gordon Knox’s intelligence people suspected that directives—such as where to march and what to do—were delivered to The Order’s troops via broadcasts of some kind, perhaps radio waves, maybe even telepathy. All attempts to isolate and block those broadcasts had failed.
Nonetheless, those orders came from Voggoth from his Temple in the Urals to his army via his cadre of clergymen, in which the Bishop held high rank. The theory held that the Bishop distributed these orders via various Missionaries and couriers, with various levels of redundancy.
All of this knowledge held little interest to Nina as she watched the Bishop enter the facility with a gang of monks and a Missionary providing escort. Overhead an orange sunset shared the sky with a slow-moving veil of gray; not The Order’s storm but rain clouds of Earthly origin.
“You’d think they’d guard this thing with a little more heavy duty shit,” Bly went on, still not noticing Nina’s silence. “But I guess that clicks with what we were hearing this morning.”
Bly meant reports of Wraiths, Roachbots, Mutants, Ghouls and more pouring toward Excelsior Springs like ants to a picnic. Reinforcements, no doubt, for The Order’s core army elements destroyed by the B-52s.
When she did not react, Bly asked, “So what is it, Cap? This place a good target still?”
“The place? No,” she answered and thought but the Bishop, yes.
“Get the others ready. We hit it when the sun goes down.”
One of the blob-shaped Chariot craft hovered above the center of the complex. A series of pulsing red and green lights from the craft’s underbelly lit the starless, rainy night. In response, a black hose slithered from the roof like a snake rising from a basket and met a bulging orifice underneath the flyer. A burst of steam signaled the cementing of their bond.
Glug-glug-glug.
The sound carried above the noise of a steady rain clanging off the roof and drumming on the pavement as The Order’s version of fuel pumped up from a pile that resembled charcoal-colored gelatin atop the occupied warehouse.
After a few minutes, another burst of steam squirted from the bond and the hose fell away. The Chariot’s engines hissed louder and the ship flew away, passing over the dark parking lot on its way south.
The Dark Wolves moved between wrecked cars and approached the large complex. Nina halted her group and, through night vision goggles, eyed their entry point.
She saw the remains of a human building of metal and glass and concrete succumbing to tendrils of green and black ivory although the grainy haze of the night vision did not afford much detail.
She spied a steel door that had once been an employee entrance. Two monks wearing soaked brown robes stood guard outside, each armed with The Order’s version of swords attached to rope belts as well as forearm-mounted pellet guns. Above the door a solitary orb of light provided a cone of illumination.
Oliver Maddock joined Nina at the front of the group. They both raised suppressed Colt M4s. Two quick pops broke the silence in the parking lot followed by two damp thumps as the alien-assimilated bodies dropped.
Caesar and Bly raced forward with the latter making a little more jingle and clink than Nina preferred due to the light machine gun he carried.
Nina approached and opened the door. A gust of foul-smelling air rushed out. The Dark Wolves moved inside.
The interior lighting immediately created problems for the team. They entered a long concrete hall with doors to either side. A pair of thick root-like conduits ran the tops of the walls, probably carrying electricity or fluids or whatever ungodly substances The Order needed to run their horror chambers. Two glowing balls provided patches of an almost liquid-like light illuminating either end of the corridor. The rest of the passage remained dark.
Nina removed her night vision. The others did the same. While shadows still remained the light created enough interference to make the high-tech gear more a liability than an asset.
They walked the hall stopping at each door to glance inside. They found empty offices with smashed computers, a chamber full of dust-covered filing cabinets, and a janitorial closet overrun with mice.
A continual rumble reverberated through the complex, helping to hide their footfalls but the sound added to the tension. Anywhere else Nina would say the noise probably came from large machines chugging away somewhere at the heart of the complex. But inside those walls laced with organic-like conduits and filled with the smell of decay, she easily imagined the noise to come from a giant creature. The noise of the machine or monster—whatever it may be—joined with the constant metallic pitter-patter of raindrops on the roof to create enough sound to make ‘hearing’ the least reliable of their senses.
They reached the end of the hall and paused where a human door had been replaced with skin-like drapes. A humid breeze blew in from beyond and a sound like a nervous stomach rumbling broadcast over unseen loudspeakers.
Something big moved past the other side of those drapes en route to wherever its orders commanded.
Nina used her silenced gun barrel to separate the slit sheaths and eye the darkness beyond. She saw a large room. The concrete floor wore yellow and white caution and traffic lines and a forklift lay toppled against one wall. Several rows of metal racks lined the chamber and loading docks remained sealed to the west.
Directly across from her position a wide archway with straps of heavy plastic offered access to one of the larger warehouses while this room, she realized, served as a loading and unloading zone for trucks.
Again, just enough glowing orbs hung on the wall to make night vision impractical.
Nina sent Vince first, then Carl, then Oliver, and then herself from the entrance hall and across the chamber. No signs of enemy activity. No hint of security devices.
The wolves gathered by the archway and then pushed through the sheets of plastic and entered a wide hall. Empty pallets, several parked forklifts, and wheeled garbage bins sat discarded to either side. Metal bulkheads—like small garage doors—lined the walls and the ceiling reached six stories tall but everything higher than twenty feet remained hidden in darkness. The lights along the big corridor provided only spotlight-like spheres of bright in an otherwise empty passage. The constant drum of rain on the rooftop echoed all around.
Nina felt naked in the open, but saw no cover.
Thirty yards away—at the far end of the hall—loomed a closed sliding door. Nina guessed the larger warehouses waited ahead and the Bishop somewhere further beyond.
The sound of another Chariot flying low over the building drew her attention for a moment. Nina wished she had not sent Odin with the human survivors. She forgot how much they depending on his sensitive canine nose.
“Cap?”
Nina answered Vince with a wave of her arm ordering them to spread out and move forward. The rain increased. The Chariot’
s engines sounded directly overhead. Nina glanced toward the ceiling again and saw only black.
What was that?
Did something move up there?
She heard—they all heard—a soft clang. Like a chain tapping against metal.
Nina gripped her rifle tight and took mental stock of her armaments: the Mac-11 in a shoulder harness; the desert eagle on a thigh rig; four grenades on her belt and—as a last resort—a short sword strapped to her left leg. She also carried a detpack in her kit.
They reached the halfway point of the hall. The closed door loomed ahead.
Oliver Maddock walked a step behind and to Nina’s right. The other two stayed close to the far wall.
The sound came again. A rattle. A squeak. Louder.
Nina’s eyes darted from wall to ceiling. Vince and Bly hurried toward the sliding door. Maddock checked their rear, turning around in time to see the thing drop from the shadows and swing toward his gut.
He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger. His silenced rounds went askew as the thing shaped like a scorpion’s tail cut into his chest and hauled him up into the darkness above.
More of that clanging noise.
Nina saw him go. She raised her rifle, but suddenly the darkness turned to bright as a hundred orbs of light sprung to life along the hall. She shielded her eyes with an arm and instinctively dove for a spot low against the wall. Maddock—screaming his last breaths—went higher and higher into the rafters carried by the half-shell, half-iron scorpion tail hanging from a series of chains and pulleys.
As it neared the crisscross of rafters above, the tail uncurled and let the man fall from 50 feet to the concrete. Nina—her eyes barely adjusted to the newfound illumination—could do nothing to save him. He and his gear hit the ground with a sickening crunch.
The metal door slid open of its own accord. Two Spider Sentries stood in the entry on their spindly legs. Their high-powered rapid-fire pellet guns fired. Vince Caesar barely avoided a burst as he rolled toward the wall and returned fire with his carbine.
Bly dropped into a prone position and rested his M-249 on its small tripods. As the alien rounds skipped across the concrete around him, Carl Bly fired a fierce volley. The loud rat-tat-tat of the machine gun joined with the falling rain, the complex’s constant rumble, and the hiss of Spider Sentry guns to fill the hall with an eclectic mix of sound that bounced off the high ceiling and echoed to ear-splitting levels.
Bly’s first rounds went wide but his steady hand guided the hose-like stream of bullets into one of the Spiders. Its round head disintegrated into goo.
Nina felt a shot hit her high in the shoulder, catching uniform and padding but not flesh. She concentrated her M4 at the head. The silenced rounds fired from her carbine in a series of pops. Those bullets annoyed the Sentry—knocked its round head side to side—but could not only chipped at its flesh.
Just behind the rat-tat-tat of the machine gun, the pop of her silenced weapon, and the sharp hiss of the Spider Sentry guns came the whir and clang of the scorpion tail descending from the heights somewhere—not far—behind her.
Vince, from one knee, launched an M203 grenade hitting the second sentry in the side. A nice chunk of its centerpiece fell away but it kept on shooting at Nina. She found cover along a metal bin—a kind of dumpster—but a new threat garnered her attention.
Her instincts felt the thrust of the scorpion tail’s razor-sharp stinger and she dropped and rolled at the last instant. The strange device hit the metal bin where its stinger lodged. The tail-thing immediately wiggled to try and free itself.
Despite incoming fire from the sentry, Nina wedged an anti-personnel grenade in the last joint by the tail’s sharp point. A moment later it freed itself from the metal bin and retreated toward the ceiling.
Nina threw herself to the ground alongside the bin and covered her head.
The grenade exploded. Pieces of metal and a kind of hairy skin fell to the floor but the sound of machine guns and air guns and rain drown out any noise the impact may have made.
Nina sat up and re-focused on the remaining Spider Sentry just in time to see Bly’s M-249 finish it off. The thing wobbled side to side and then collapsed.
“Move! Move! Move!” She commanded and led them into the next room—where they stopped dead in their tracks.
The three soldiers entered a massive rectangular chamber filled with pallets full of cereal boxes, canned fruit, powdered milk, shortening tubs, chemical jugs, pasta crates, and much more. All stacked in piles seven to eight feet tall, shrink wrapped into tight bundles, and aligned in rows to create a maze of boxes. Most of the goods inside certainly spoiled a long time ago; an acidic sour smell emanated from the collection joining with the already pungent aroma of the facility.
The room stretched as long and as wide as a football field. A catwalk ran the length of the chamber halfway up the four-story western wall. Bright fluorescent lights hanging from a flat metal ceiling lit the whole place up like a stage on which a play would soon begin and Nina knew exactly who the players would be.
“We have to keep moving,” she said, but she did not get a chance to finish the sentence.
Nina felt hot shot fly passed her face, inches from her nose. She instinctively dove toward the first line of packed pallets.
Carl never stood a chance. A round hit him in the forehead. The weight of his M-249 machine gun pulled his lifeless body over like a toppling statue.
Vince tried to dodge but another blast of alien bullets hit him in the leg. He crumpled over, barely finding cover behind another pallet of goods.
The shots came from the catwalk overlooking the maze of crates from the west wall. One of Voggoth’s mechanical commandos served as assassin.
Nina raised her rifle and tried to return fire, but more shots came in from the advantage of an elevated position. She retreated, pulling Vince along with her by his utility belt.
Behind cover, Nina took stock of her mates.
Bly lay in the open in a growing puddle of crimson. The impact tore away the top half of his head. Despite knowing battlefield gore all her life, Nina felt a sharp pang in her heart at the sight of her friend so badly mangled.
She turned to Vince. Blood streamed out and over his black BDUs from a wound to his knee. His face twisted in agony, but he refused to cry out.
Captain Forest removed her pack and retrieved a heavy bandage. She struggled to wrap it around the wound. His leg shook violently from the pain.
“Listen, we have to stop the bleeding; or at least slow it down,” she spoke the obvious. “Then I can get you out of here.”
“I can’t walk, Nina.”
“Not yet you can’t. But look, I’ve got strong shoulders. We’ll get you out of here.”
“Strong shoulders? Yeah—yeah…” he mumbled as she wrapped the bandage tight. Blood spouted but with each trip around the leg the dressing grew firmer and pressed against the hole in his leg.
A grating metallic sound interrupted the first aid treatment. The two soldiers faced south and saw the bulkhead from which they had come slam shut with a very permanent clang.
Nina returned to her work, pulling the bandage tight on its final trip around his knee.
Another grating metallic sound. This one farther away. This one from the north end of the warehouse. Nina did not need to see the bulkhead opening; she could picture it in her mind. She wondered how the Christians had felt when the Romans opened the tigers gate on the far side of the coliseum…
The north side door finished opening and out of the black came Voggoth’s robotic commandos skating in and swaying side to side on the wheels in their heels. Kind of like rollerbladers gliding along a sidewalk.
Bronze-colored metal helmets protected solitary round red eyes that swiveled sideways surveying the warehouse as they moved in. Their skeletal bodies wore bronze metal ribcages that protected blobs of bio mass that blurred the line between robot and animal. Gun barrels affixed to forearms gave the Commandos fire po
wer equivalent to a human carbine.
A Sergeant—identified by black chevrons atop silver shoulder plates that also sported twin grenade launchers—generated a static-filled electronic tone that served as a communication. The squad of ten commandos split into pairs and entered the maze from the north side and searched for their quarry…
Nina tried to clamp the bandage but Vince grabbed her hand.
“Go.”
“What? Listen, I’m not going to leave you.”
“Then what, Nina? We’ll just wait here until they come and gun us down? Don’t be—don’t be stupid. Get going.”
She stared at him for a moment. Thought. Then pulled him into a small space between two pallets.
“Wait here,” she said. “I’m not going to leave you.”
He opened his mouth in protest, but she silenced him with glaring, narrow eyes.
With that, Nina adjusted her beret tighter on her head and ran into the maze from the south moving fast but silent. She discarded the sound suppressor on her carbine as she moved.
Sterile bright lights from above cast over the labyrinth, chasing most but not all shadows. The same smell of rot that lived throughout the complex remained in the air here, but joined by the sour odor of decaying foodstuffs hovering over the field of crates.
She followed the nozzle of her gun as she ran forward then turned right along a wall of grain sacks, then left and forward again between row upon row of number ten soup cans piled eight feet high.
The sound of wheels rolling on the concrete floor carried through the passages of the maze. The noise grew, then spread all around her. Some to the east, others to the west, more to the north.
Movement to her left.
Nina flattened against a barricade of white cases marked “Sysco Imperial Brand”, held her breath, and grabbed her M4 by the barrel upside-down.
Two pair of wheels rolling—closer—closer…
She stepped around the corner and waved her rifle like a club. The stock smashed into a Commando’s head. The casing cracked. The creature emitted an electronic wail one step removed from a turntable needle scratching across a warped LP. The metallic neck of the thing bent backwards and its red eye went dark as it hit the hard floor on its skeletal back.
Beyond Armageddon V: Fusion Page 31