LODGEMENT: Invasion Earth series

by Chris Lowry

  Waldo laughed and shifted his blaster up. The targeting software zoomed in on the camp. He could make out people moving, just vague shapes from this distance.

  “Too far to shoot,” he said.

  “Save your bullets,” Lt said. “I’m going down there to talk.”

  “Lasers, Lt. And is that a good idea?”

  “I’m not going alone, Babe. One of you is coming with me.”

  Babe stood taller.

  “Not you,” said Bonney. “You and Weber are going to sneak up on the other side of the road, be ready to pull my bacon out of the fire if it comes to it.”

  “Then who’s going with you?”

  “I will,” Jake volunteered.

  “Chief,” Lt glanced back at him.

  Babe frowned, but he didn’t say anything, just waved Weber to follow him. Lt watched the two suits march up the far side of the road.

  “Let’s go Chief,” Lt said.

  “We’re walking?”

  “Crockett, keep everyone loaded up. You see trouble, you either come in to pick us up, or you get gone. Savvy?”

  “Yes Sir, Lt.”

  Lt led Jake on the asphalt. They trotted into a fast jog and ate the miles away to the camp below.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  "What's your name?" he whispered in the semi-darkness.

  None of the lights worked in the warehouse where they were imprisoned, but there were windows along the top of the building that let in dim starlight. Not enough to make out details, but shapes.

  He recognized her by the shape of her head and felt another thrill in his stomach as she turned.

  There were guards they could see posted on either end of the building, but Lutz had found space in the middle, a piece of concrete to call his own. And the shadow crab crawling across the floor to sit next to him moved with a slow precision that wouldn't attract attention.

  “Don’t move so much,” she said as he rolled over to face her shadow.

  “You crawled over here,” he reminded her.

  “But I’ve had more practice than you.”

  “Crawling?”

  “Crawling, sneaking. I saw you. You don’t seem like much of a sneaker.”

  Lutz snorted.

  “I’m an excellent sneaker.”

  “Oh yeah, when have you ever snuck up on anything? Snuck around anything? You make too much noise, attract too much attention. Strutting.”

  “I don’t strut,” he said. “I’m a-”

  He stopped short of telling her he was a soldier, one of Lt. Bonney’s men. While he bet she didn’t know who exactly Lutz was in the scheme of the squad, William Bonney’s exploits had spread among the surviving human population. Babe was the most popular of the men, he knew, and didn’t begrudge him the title.

  There was something to be said about being an effective unknown member of the most devastating team to fight back against the alien invaders.

  But this girl could be a spy.

  And if she wasn’t, there were people around who might be. They could turn him in, trade on his identity for safety, or food, or hell, even survival.

  “You’re a what?” she whispered.

  Damn, thought Lutz. He hoped she would miss it. But she was paying as much attention to him as he was to her, straining to make out more in the milky glow leaking in through the upper windows.

  “I’m just a prisoner, like you.”

  “Slave,” she scoffed. “But not like me.”

  He heard a noise in the corner, from the direction where the guard stood and held his tongue. He could feel her holding her breath beside him. Around them, people snorted, snored and made the kinds of noises people make when they’re sleeping. But Lutz noticed they were muted sounds, as if even in the act of sleeping, the prisoners were afraid of being noticed, of being found out.

  The two of them held their silence, stretched for several moments, long enough for Lutz to wonder if she had fallen asleep. He strained to listen to her breathing, to measure the rise and fall of the dark lump at the edge of his field of vision.

  “My name is Pomona,” she said.

  “Like the horse?” Lutz whispered back.

  “Like the city in California,” she sounded sharp.

  Lutz knew what her nickname would be if Lt met her first. Cali. That was the only thing he could think of, and when it popped to the forefront of his mind, he snorted a small laugh. He’d been hanging out with Lt too much.

  “Carl,” he said. “But call me Lutz.”

  “Why not call you Carl?”

  “Because everyone calls me Lutz.”

  He could see one of her shoulders heave, and assumed it was a shrug.

  “What are you Lutz? You were going to tell me something.”

  “You’re planning an escape,” he said.

  She was quiet then and he was reminded of something else Lt told him. Sometimes, it was best just to keep your trap shut and wait for someone else to talk. Something about he who speaks first, loses.

  In this case, Lutz figured it was she who speaks first, and he wondered if she was planning to test him.

  It might have worked. He would have tried to find more ways to get her alone, to pursue her agenda, to find out the plan. But she didn’t make him play for it.

  “I am,” she whispered.

  “I want in,” Lutz told her.

  And as the night stretched toward morning, he listened to her plan.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I don’t like this plan,” Jake said.

  He felt like huffing, because in the past he had. He jogged with Lt, an eight minute mile that felt like nothing to the two of them as the nanos surged in their system and controlled the aches, the oxygen delivery, the lactic acid removal.

  “You got a better suggestion, Chief?”

  Jake shook his head. He didn’t.

  What he had was a nagging feeling that this was the wrong play.

  “It doesn’t feel right,” he shared.

  “Being out here, just the two of us, going into the lion’s den?”

  Again, he shook his head. That wasn’t it. There was something about the camp that felt off, something about the situation that bothered him. But he couldn’t put his finger on it.

  “It doesn’t feel like a trap,” he said.

  “I studied it,” Lt told him. “It’s not a trap.”

  “Then what is it? Why is it bothering me?”

  “Chief,” Lt said. “I think you’ve got what we call pre-battle jitters. Your body’s producing adrenaline in anticipation of the old fight or flight reflex, only this time we ain’t going up against the fucking Licks. We’re taking the war right into the heart of a pile of humans. It don’t sit well with you.”

  “I don’t think I care about that,” said Jake.

  “Well I fucking do,” Lt growled. “I fucking hate it. This is a waste of my fucking time, trying to bring a bunch of damn idiots into line, time that could be spent fighting the real enemy. But human nature, being what it is, requires me to iron glove the shit out of these fuckers to bring them back in line. I care about it quite a bit.”

  Jake ran beside him in silence as the miles to the camp dropped away. He considered the human encampment as they drew closer, and wondered if he did care about the fact that they were not aliens.

  He wasn’t bothered about the confrontation they might have. He wasn’t concerned that they were people instead of aliens. If there was fighting to be done, he would do it.

  What bothered him was the timing.

  They were in a stolen hovercraft on the way to the alien base and just happened to run across a group that tortured other humans.

  Lt was right. It was a waste of his time to deal with it, but to Jake, it felt more like-

  “Distraction!” he screamed as a flaming ball of rubbish arced through the air and smashed down on the asphalt in front of them.

  It exploded in a cascade of flaming debris, showering their suits with sticky burning pitch and flames.
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br />   Jake screamed as he watched his arm burn, waved it to try and put out the fire.

  Then he realized he didn’t feel the heat. Nothing burned through the suit. The fire scorched the exterior, but he was alright.

  A second round ball of flames arced up into the sky.

  “Are they using fucking catapults” Lt screamed and aimed his blaster.

  He sent a laser shot into the ball at the height of hit’s flight, creating a miniature supernova that rained embers, coal and flaming debris on top of and around them.

  Jake took a knee and rested the blaster against his shoulder. He searched the area where the flying cannonballs were coming from, and saw tiny figures working around a cart, with a long wooden arm on it.

  “Trebuchet!” Lt screamed and shot a blast into the group.

  Jake sent two more after his, clipping one of the ropes holding the arm down. The tension slammed the arm forward, the torque so strong it flipped the cart over, and trapped several of the men manning it in the flaming wreckage.

  They could hear the screams of the dying men as more figures raced out of the woods. They were armed with hunting rifles and pistols, a couple of M16 automatic weapons, and all aimed at the two soldiers in suits on the road.

  An order was screamed, and the howling group opened fire.

  Bullets pinged into the suits, ricocheted off. Lt and Jake stood under the onslaught.

  It hurt.

  But the suits were bulletproof against conventional weapons and neither man was harmed.

  Like being hit with a stick or a bat, and Jake thought about Babe.

  As if thinking of him brought the man to life, Babe and Weber ran in from the woods and flanked the men attacking them.

  Lt sent one warning shot into the crowd, blasting three men into smoking chunks of ruined flesh. Babe and Weber sent a shot each, laying out five more men.

  Then the man who screamed the order to fire now screamed retreat.

  They group broke in panic and ran back toward the tents.

  “Do we chase them?” Jake stood up.

  Lt reached over with a gloved hand and patted the flames off of one of the boy’s armored arms.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose we should. Think they won’t feel like talking too much now we done killed so many of ‘em.”

  “You sound disappointed,” said Jake.

  Lt started marching up the road, past the still smoldering bodies of what once had been men laid to waste by his blaster.

  “I don’t like killing humans,” Lt said. “Even fucking scum of the earth murderin’ sons of bitches like these.”

  Jake watched Lt pull ahead as they got closer to the tent city set up on the side of the road. They were closer to the riverbank than he thought, a small shallow dip that ran twenty feet to the swirling water below.

  Jake saw clothes spread out on the blue river rock to dry, and heard people screaming as they approached.

  Babe and Weber joined them.

  “Old fashioned weapons,” said Weber. “I’ve only read about those in history books.”

  “What were they?”

  “Catapults,” said Weber.

  “Trebuchets,” Jake corrected.

  “What’s the difference?” Babe asked.

  Jake shrugged.

  “It’s what Lt said.”

  “If they had those, they might have built- Shit,” Weber shouted and shouldered them both to the ground.

  A six foot arrow sliced the air over their head. Weber whipped his blaster to his shoulder and had enough time to watch another arrow plow into Lt’s chest plate and knock the man backwards, narrow wooden shaft vibrating as it stood straight up in the air.

  CHAPTER

  Lick Commander stared at the Nestmate stretched in front of him, the lazy gaze of her yellow eyes watching him as her tongue flickered in satiated pleasure.

  “He underestimates you,” she hissed.

  Here, in the privacy of his chambers, they could forgo the voice box translators worn on chunky chains around their throats, but she kept her chip on, so he did as well.

  The humans had a saying he had heard of, and he found it very fitting. When in Rome.

  It translated well to his native tongue.

  He preened under her adoring gaze and worked to remind himself that she was trained in the art of making even the lowliest soldier feel like His Imminence.

  Part art but he was open to the possibility that she was right, that their Leader did indeed underestimate him.

  A part of his subterfuge, he told himself. But also his fear.

  Perhaps all underestimated what he was capable of achieving because they could see the truth.

  And if they were able to see the truth, then the concubine lounging in front of him, basking in the afterglow of their sex, would be a liar.

  If she could lie about such things, one thing, then she could lie about everything.

  “To his detriment,” Lick Commander answered.

  “Will you share your plans with me?”

  His tongue flickered in and out, masking the indecision. He took a calming breath. She would taste his fear, his indecision. She would taste all, and perhaps report back, though he had monitored no communications from her chambers.

  That did not mean she didn’t make them, just his techs could not discern them.

  “They are yet complete,” he hissed. “The humans on the base have been replaced. But our initial purge of the infestation had an unforeseen consequence.

  There were no skilled humans left. The slaves they brought to the base were little more than janitorial staff, working on the maintenance of the occupation.

  Cattle to be burned through and discarded. Easily replaced.

  But the slaves who showed promise, the ones who knew the secrets of the world were now too hard to find.

  That didn’t mean he wouldn’t unlock the secrets that nestled in the heart of the base, behind hidden walls and locked rooms. Those would be broken, those would be pillaged.

  They would give up their secrets to him, and he would in turn, decide what to share with His Imminence.

  Decide how to share it too, his skin rippled in pleasure.

  The Commanders of the Mars Campaign, his mind still reeled at the way he was thinking even, more human every day spent in this sector.

  Those Commanders spoke of weapons the human’s possessed that could harm his people, destroy them even.

  It was the reason His Imminence enacted the elimination protocol, the reason they slaughtered so many upon arrival.

  But those weapons were lost in the purge, and the men who knew about them, the humans who knew how to make them gone as well.

  “I would see him gone,” she said. “And you in his place.”

  He rippled again. She shared his dream, but again, it was her skill, her training to do so.

  Yet, he pondered. They were far enough from the home world that he could rule this sector, this galaxy with the thousands of habitable planets to seed, to colonize and conquer.

  He could imagine himself at the head of it all, an Imminence of his own.

  But before the dream could capture him, before he got lost in the what if of it all, he turned away from her.

  “It is as you wish,” he told her. “Things move fast and there is still much to be done before we reach that point.”

  CHAPTER

  “Shit,” Jake screamed.

  He wasn’t sure if any of the others heard him, but he saw Lt go down and dropped to his knee again to return fire.

  Laser blasts shot over his head and sliced into the crowd. The others had seen too.

  The tents caught on fire as the bolts seared through the dry canvas. People screamed, men yelled and over it all the rat a tat of automatic weapons shooting back at them.

  Weber stooped next to Jake.

  “Advance in a line,” he shouted an order. Jake turned his visor and saw Renard line up next to him on the other side, blaster raised.