Swarm

by Devon C Ford

  Standing on the walls Harrison unconsciously ran his fingers, as he usually did when he was in deep thought, over the rough healed scar of the ‘T’ Tanaka had carved onto his chest all those years ago. No longer ashamed, it was a daily reminder of why he needed to keep his people safe— not only from the dangers that nature held outside the walls but from the cruelty and despotic rule that The Tanaka would exert over them if they weren’t constantly on guard against it.

  He reached his decision. He turned and climbed down from the walkway that ran along the walls. He saw one of his lieutenants and called to him.

  “Gather the people.” He let out a sigh full of regret and resolve. “I must speak to them.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Secrets Must Be Kept

  The Tanaka, surrounded by twenty of his personal bodyguards, stared at the smoke-blackened walls of the Three Hills. His failing eyesight made it difficult for him to clearly see the havoc he had caused but he could recognize the rows of freshly dug graves, just not how many there were.

  “It worked perfectly. How many dead do you think there are?” he asked the warrior, who didn’t know if the first part was a question or a statement. He chose to treat it as a statement and followed the safe route of replying to his master with sycophantic glee as he couldn’t count past twenty to be able to answer with any accuracy.

  “It did. Our warriors who’d climbed the tallest trees during the darkness said that the screams could be heard almost until the dawn. There must be many dead.”

  “Many?” Tanaka asked. “Is that somewhere between a few and a lot? Fool. Find me someone who can answer my questions.” The warrior hesitated, prompting Tanaka to fly into a subdued rage.

  “Get out of my sight!” he hissed, spitting through clenched teeth in a moment where his mask of sanity slipped. The warrior retreated until another was pushed forwards amid quiet and desperate protests. He was younger, smaller and less scarred, but he evidently had good eyes and more intelligence than the man he had unwillingly replaced.

  “I can’t count them all,” he said hesitantly, continuing before Tanaka lost his temper again. “But I’ll count a small area and multiply that …” He went silent as he did the quick mental work, counting just a quarter of the graves fast. “I think forty to fifty,” he said finally. “Maybe more because some of the graves are… some of the graves are very small.”

  As he thought about the number, Tanaka nodded with respect at the tough decision he had not thought Harrison could make in sacrificing the few for the many. He had hoped more than expected him to try and save all his people and in doing so put the entire settlement at risk, because if The Swarm had breached the main barricade then nothing could have stopped them until the sun began to rise.

  “Come,” he called, “we’ve dealt the Three Hills a serious blow. Tonight, let’s see if we can send the invaders a welcome present. The Swarm must still be hungry.”

  The men laughed more out of fear of displeasing their ruler rather than genuine amusement and only a few looked at him with respect and admiration. It was steeped in legend that The Tanaka had the power to control The Swarm, but as it could not climb the high walls everyone had built to protect themselves, and with the fragile peace that had reigned over both communities for generations, The Swarm was something everyone feared and thought of as an unstoppable terror-filled crawling morass of death that came with the full moon and not as something that was controlled.

  The Tanaka knew differently. He subconsciously patted the device only he knew about, which he kept carefully in the inner pocket of his jacket, and turned away for the long walk back to his seat of power. The device handed down through his lineage was only the size of his hand, but it would signal The Swarm to amass at the point they were directed to. It was what his predecessors had apparently called a beacon.

  That beacon, entrusted to nobody but himself, had been the best kept secret of his entire life. Of course, without it The Swarm still came each month for a few days at a time, sometimes less or not at all, but at least he could maintain the safety of the Springs and keep the peasants of Three Hills shut up tightly in fear.

  Only sometimes The Swarm did what it felt like, and great chunks of the huge mass splintered off if something caught their attention like it did with the newcomers from the sky.

  One of the young women who were privileged enough to share his lavish bedchamber when the mood took him had seen it once and asked what it was. It was shame she had asked because he found her to be pretty with an attractive innocence.

  Her disappearance had not been quiet. He had given her over to three warriors he knew enjoyed certain depravations, and when her bloodied body was found outside the walls days later by one of the townspeople, Tanaka had decried the barbarism of the people at Three Hills and urged his own subjects to remain safe inside their walls.

  ~

  The Tanaka moved from his private quarters into his sleeping chamber. No one, under pain of death, was allowed to go beyond the door in his bedchamber hidden behind the leather curtain. No Tanaka had ever spoken about what was in the room beyond that curtain. It didn’t stop everyone wondering, but no one dared ask.

  No one had asked about it for more than ten years, not since one drunken night with the inner circle of Tanaka’s senior warriors. His newly promoted second in command, following the death in a skirmish where his predecessor had pushed a position too far, emboldened by drink, had demanded to know what was behind the door. Laughing, Tanaka stood up, pushing the girls who were draping themselves over him onto the floor and beckoned him over. Striking like one of the snakes in the trees near the river as soon as he was in front of him, he grabbed the drunken man by the hair and pulled him to the floor before commanding others to hold him down.

  Pinned, the unfortunate man lay helpless as Tanaka revealed a small blade from a hidden sheath on his sleeve and thrust it behind the man’s eyeball levering it from the socket. Ignoring the screams, he held the eyeball in his fingers and pulled it, feeling the resistance of the optic nerve, away from his face and leaned toward it.

  “So, you want to see behind the door then?”

  The man wailed, pleading with his leader that he was joking.

  “Oh no,” snarled Tanaka, “I insist on showing you.” He slashed the knife to sever the dangling nerve and dig the blade into his face to remove the other eye.

  He cut the man’s face as he hacked wildly at the other eye to hold both of them in his left palm before walking away to leave the man howling in unimaginable agony. Returning mere moments later Tanaka dropped the two useless orbs into the crying man’s lap and asked if he had been satisfied by what his eyes had seen.

  He looked around the now quiet room. “Does anyone else wish to see it?”

  No one answered or dared to even look at him or the man who was now clearly his former second in command. The Tanaka still kept the man close to him as a reminder to others who may be curious enough to ask.

  He sat, thinking back on that night and the many other brutal things he had done to those who displeased him, and sipped on the harsh moonshine they brewed in the town.

  He knew he would do many more harsh things to many more people, and the first on that list of future accolades was thinking about what The Swarm would do to the shining enclave of the newcomers after he had used the beacon to send it to their camp.

  They had guns. They had to have guns. Stories passed down through the generations told him what they were capable of, and those stories were kept alive by his possession of the last remaining gun that spread fear as much as it did awe. In the world they lived in now they would seem magical, like devices created by the gods, but he knew differently. He still had access to some of the technology from the past, therefore he had insight as to what the capabilities of the new arrivals could be. The few pictures and books he kept in carefully protected wrappings also showed him the power of their ancient weapons.

  He chuckled to himself as his mind tried to comprehend
whether thinking of them as ancient was right or wrong. Any weapons or technology the others had would be as new as the day they were made a thousand years ago. As new as his people had used when they first emerged from their underground shelter all those generations ago.

  Thinking of possessing that capability, as important to his people as the knowledge of how to make fire, he drew the weapon from the holster on his side and slid out the thing his father had called the magazine as he had done so many times.

  Staring down into the empty, black well he imagined what it would look and feel like to have it filled with the brass casings of real bullets which had run out many hundreds of years before. Slapping the empty part back into the weapon he pulled back on the slide and let it snap forward, shaking it in his small hand before he squinted his left eye closed and aimed the gun at the wall opposite.

  He squeezed, snapping the firing pin down onto nothing, and wishing for the day when he could kill someone with it.

  CHAPTER 4

  Heroes Are Born, Not Made

  I didn’t sleep all that well. When I did close my eyes all I saw were giant-ass bugs crawling toward me which woke me up, you know, because giant-ass bugs weren’t imaginary anymore.

  On the third time I did that, damn near falling out of my cot as I did the solo dance that everyone does when they think they’ve got bugs all over them, the light on my radio blinked rapidly. I picked it up and followed the long wire leading to the rugged earpiece and seated it in my ear.

  “Are you okay, David?” Annie asked as soon as I had connected myself to the radio.

  “I’m fine, Annie,” I whispered, slipping my feet into my boots and pulling on my jacket before tiptoeing as quietly as possible out of the shelter, “hold on a second.”

  The night air was fresh, like really fresh. I’d been on vacation to hot countries before and never knew a climate to change so rapidly like this, even though I knew some places swung between extremes in day and night.

  “Your heartrate and blood pressure indicate that you are experiencing elevated stress levels. Did you have a nightmare?” Annie asked as soon as I stepped clear of the shelter.

  “I’m fine, I just keep going over what we discovered today,” I whispered, zipping up my jacket and adjusting it to leave the still-unfamiliar weapon on my right hip accessible.

  “Your vital signs show otherwise, I’d recommend a mild sedati—”

  “Annie,” I interrupted, “I said I’m fine. I don’t need any sedatives or anything, just let it go. I need to think.” She didn’t respond, making me think I’d pissed her off.

  “Annie,” I said, trying to entice her back to the conversation.

  “Wait,” she said in a hushed tone.

  After a few seconds of silence I whispered back, “Err, Annie? You’re scaring me a little bit here…” She didn’t answer me directly but made a loud announcement over the radio that I knew wasn’t just for my benefit.

  “All Sierra team operators,” she snapped like a hardened operator herself, “incoming signal from the north east.” She didn’t need to say what the signal was. What other signal would there be? The Swarm of bugs, cat-sized bugs, was coming back.

  Hendricks’ voice filled my earpiece. “Geiger, Stevens, anything visual?” he called out over the sound of his boots pounding the hard-packed dirt.

  “Negative, boss,” came Stevens’ reply, “opposite side of the compound to us. Want us to head over?”

  “No, stay on the gates,” Hendricks said. “Annie? Get us a drone up please.”

  Annie didn’t respond immediately but I could already hear the high-pitched whine of two drones zipping overhead.

  “Visual up,” she announced, her voice taking on the same cadence and gravity as the operators, “large concentration heading straight for the compound walls. Distance two hundred and closing fast.”

  “Ready all automated weapons systems,” Hendricks ordered. “Jonesy, Weber, Nat, prepare fallback position in the center. Magda, keep all the civilians inside and quiet.”

  “No!” shouted a voice over the radio, making everyone connected flinch at the sudden elevation in noise. “Don’t use the auto-turrets unless we absolutely have to,” Amir interrupted.

  “Yes,” Hendricks said sounding less than impressed, “we absolutely have to.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, not pressing the button on the radio so only Annie could hear me and explain why Amir was so set against destroying The Swarm. My lip curled and my back gave an involuntary shudder as I thought about them again. Then I froze. Over the disappearing sound of the drones gaining altitude I heard another sound, like a million cicadas heading straight for me.

  “There are a lot more than previously,” Annie warned. “My recommendation?”

  “Go,” Hendricks snapped as the sound grew ominously louder.

  “Wait to see what they do when they reach the walls and respond accordingly,” Annie advised. “We saw no evidence that they could climb the outer surface of the pod wall last time.”

  “And if they can do this?” Weber asked.

  “Then we use the turrets.”

  As far as plans went, I wasn’t one hundred percent sold but seeing as I was the computer guy—the mostly pointless computer guy as my computer programmed itself now—I kept my opinion where it belonged: to myself.

  Hendricks was ahead of me near the center of our little compound and I could see the features of his face illuminated by the soft glow of the ruggedized tablet he was leaning over.

  “Something’s different,” Annie warned, concern in her voice.

  “Different how?” I asked, unable to keep my mouth shut.

  “They’re coming straight at us, not like last time…”

  Any answer was cut off by a metallic thud from over my right shoulder. I spun toward the sound on instinct but saw nothing. What I heard made the sensation of creepy-crawliness go away and be replaced by outright terror of being eaten alive.

  “Oh Jesus Christ,” Hendricks blasphemed, “they’re trying to climb each other to get up the walls. Activate turret syste—”

  “No!” Amir’s voice yelled again. “We need them t—”

  “Annie,” Hendricks interrupted, “ignore all overrides from Weatherby, authorization Hendricks, Sierra team leader.” Annie’s answer could be heard for miles around as the rotary barrels of the automated guns spun up for a brief moment before spitting a storm of lead projectiles into the oncoming swarm.

  “Target any group that look like they’re getting above waist height,” Hendricks added, not that Annie wouldn’t know how to prioritize but he was the leader and even if it was superfluous to Annie’s needs, a leader needed to issue commands.

  The guns chattered and whirred as the barrels moved to the dance of their sentient artificial intelligence. Hendricks didn’t have to order his team down from their positions atop the wall because as soon as the guns activated, they followed the rule of self-preservation and got themselves out of the firing line.

  “Breach, sector twelve,” Annie announced in a volume and tone I’d describe as a yell, lighting up section twelve with the pod beacon lamps.

  “Switch to night optics,” Hendricks ordered, “advance in pairs. Weber and Nat secure the civilians. Annie, how many?”

  “Five, no, seven,” she replied almost desperately as either Geiger or Stevens caught sight of one of the bugs and added the sounds of their rifles to the maelstrom.

  ​I was glued to the spot. I didn’t know what to do, or even if I could do anything useful. The professionals were handling it and, I had to admit, that included my creation Annie as a kind of command and control angel connected to every system we had. As the guns on the wall stopped spewing death at our attackers another sound tore through me like an icicle to the heart.

  Behind me, away from the main shelter where the majority of our people slept, came a scream of fright from the medical tent. My legs moved before I could tell them what to do. It was like they were responding to
coding I couldn’t see and didn’t recall ever uploading. By the time I realized what the hell I was doing I found myself bursting in through the partially open flap of the medical shelter and laying eyes on a terrified Cat who was pressed to the back wall staring with horrified wide eyes at something I couldn’t see.

  Two steps further inside the shelter and I saw it. Crouching defensively on the chest of someone who hadn’t come out of cryo doing too well, like it was defending a meal against anyone who would take it away. Like a stray cat hunching over a bowl of food and hissing at anyone even thinking about looking their way.

  Only it wasn’t cat food, it was a person. It was a human being and the thing was eating it. It spun to look at me and clacked its big jaws together with a sound that was more like metal than anything natural. Cat screamed again, stopping only when she clapped a hand over her own mouth and continued to bellow her fear into her palm. The thing swung its head back toward her, clacking the gore-covered mandibles again, and readied its six legs as though it would make a jump and pounce at her.

  I was stupid. I forgot I was armed until it was almost too late and even when I did realize it, I could barely make my hands function as I tugged at the gun, forgetting to hit the thumb break to release it, effectively just yanking my pants up and down. I finally dragged it free from the holster and time seemed to slow to a crawl.

  I gripped it with both hands, pushing my arms out in front of me and bracing my elbows just how I was taught so long ago, and lined up the crouching bug just as it sank down ready to leap.

  I breathed, squeezed, kept both eyes open, and kept squeezing.

  Shooting guns on TV looks easy, but in real life it takes a whole lot of physical effort. It’s loud, concussive and confusing, and it takes away your senses for a while.

  I’d nearly emptied the magazine before the bug dropped from the man it had been feeding on and time returned to normal. I kept the gun in both hands as I stepped forwards, seeing the thing spinning on its back as stuff squirted out of it. Cat wasn’t screaming anymore, I knew that much because in the sudden silence over the ringing in my ears I could hear the thing snapping its jaws at me, trying to eat me even as it was dying. I emptied the magazine, squeezing the trigger until the bullets ran out and the slide locked back.