The Never Army

by Hodges, T. Ellery

  “You know, they ain’t that big, I could go down there and roll them right back through,” Tam said.

  “That’s a negative, Tam, hold your position,” Jonathan said.

  The black balls moved suddenly, unnaturally, and in unison. Somewhat like watching three turtles suddenly flip themselves off their back with an acrobat’s grace. Each of the volleyball rocks orientated themselves, then jumped into the air before exploding.

  Had they been intended for grenades they’d have been unimpressive. However, thousands of tiny needle-like pins had shot from the balls when they exploded and covered everything in a ten-foot radius. The top surface of each of the three gelatinous bags was shredded with tiny holes.

  A moment after those holes were punched, massive spiny black spikes erupted, until the three large sacs looked like giant sea urchins resting in front of the conduit. Had anyone been within ten feet of that when it happened, he’d have been skewered.

  “Alright, rolling them back may have been poor judgment,” Tam said.

  WX gas began filling the air around the conduit. Seeping out through the tips of the spikes. Slowly at first, as though the pressure within the sac was climbing and forcing the gas out in all directions.

  Soon, the conduit’s opening became cloaked by a thick layer of WX gas and warning lights on their HUDs began to blink.

  “Don’t reload, empty your magazine into the conduit,” Jonathan said. “Keep the rest of the ammunition sealed and be ready to move. Olivia—are you ready?”

  “On your mark,” she replied.

  Tam watched with growing fear as the bullets flew through the gas. Under normal circumstances one cannot see bullets, outside what happens when they hit their targets. But as soon as the ammunition passed within a foot of the WX gas, they caught fire and broke apart. Winking out like tiny bottle rockets.

  “Seen enough,” Jonathan said. “Save your rounds and—”

  Perth and everyone watching knew why he’d cut off. Where the naked eye would have left them blind, thermal optics allowed them to make out what was happening within the gas. One Ferox. Then two, then . . .

  A Red came shooting out of the gas, launched itself up toward the buildings. The Gunners reacted, shredding him with alien steel bullets so fast that only a limp corpse ever reached the building. But, he was only the first.

  A number of Ferox were pouring out of the conduit, but many carried large towering shields of Feroxian stone. The shield holders were spreading out to form a ring around the conduit’s opening as the rest came through sprinting in a rampage before jumping out and up as they entered The Never.

  Within seconds the Ferox were bursting out of the expanding WX gas in all directions. At first, the Gunners held them at bay, but as it went on they rapidly spread their fire over an increasing number of targets. Soon the Ferox weren’t only jumping but crawling over the ring of shields to scale the buildings walls. Jonathan’s men could have held them at bay in that pocket of death outside the conduit longer—but over the next minute, WX clouds had expanded throughout the entire intersection and was reaching the lower floors.

  Those nearest the ground soon had to pull back, unable to fire without their ammunition igniting into flame and turning into metal sludge inside their magazines. In another minute, the swarms crawling up the building would be too great—they were going to get past the barrage of fire and force men into hand to hand.

  “Pull back to a safe distance and keep firing,” Jonathan said. “No risks here, this is not our hill to die on.”

  “Pulling back.”

  “Pulling back.”

  The sound of gunfire diminished slowly as gas pushed farther out.

  Jonathan had no doubt they had enough of those gelatinous bladders at the ready to put the entire city under a dense fog.

  “Olivia, when our people are out, begin the next round of demolitions.”

  “Received,” she said.

  “Washington Mutual Tower, fourth floor. Can’t get out, I got six of them in here with me. They haven’t found me yet, but they know I’m here.”

  No one recognized the voice, but everyone heard the fear.

  “Hold on, Olivia,” Jonathan said. “We still got a man stuck inside one of the buildings.”

  “I’m on my way,” Perth said.

  “You got a name, kid,” Perth asked.

  “Tre . . . Trevor.” The response came as little more than a whisper.

  “Alright Trev, I got your position,” Perth said. “I’m gonna give you a distraction. On my signal, drop some flash grenades. The moment they’re blinded make a break for it.”

  “There are more now,” Trevor said. “I . . . I think they smell me.”

  “Focus, Trev, you ready with the grenades?”

  “Yes.”

  “When I say, you pull the pins,” Perth said. “They have a four second delay. You throw on three and run.”

  Perth had no love for the gleamers. That was to say, it had been clear quite early on that he was never going to be a Bodhi. He favored force over finesse. Luckily, he didn’t need the things to do anything fancy. Just get him into position quick and quiet.

  One hand kept him anchored on the side of the adjacent building as he eased down to Trevor’s floor. He could see Trev’s red dot on a map of the building in his HUD, but the maps were rudimentary. They didn’t tell him the layout of furniture or rooms, only where the load-bearing structures were. From where Trev’s dot was positioned, the kid’s back was against a thick concrete wall.

  At that moment, Perth looked down to see three Ferox step out of the WX gas into air that was still clear in the alley below him. They were going to spot in him any second.

  “Pull the pins, Trev,” Perth said.

  1 . . .

  The Ferox below looked up. Their guttural growls not far behind as their eyes locked on him.

  2 . . .

  Perth bent his knees against the building. The Ferox did the same on the ground.

  3 . . .

  He shot across the alley as the first of the creatures came rocketing toward him. Perth crashed through a window and hit the ground running. He didn’t bother with the office door, he ran straight through the drywall, just as . . .

  Bang!

  Bright lights and deafening sound exploded as Perth burst into a company’s lobby. His helmet and visor protected his eyes and ears as he ran headlong into the first Ferox he saw. The Green, shrieking in blind agony went flying into one of the others. Perth kept heading for the red dot.

  “You better be on the move kid—”

  Trevor hadn’t waited. The lobby desk exploded as the kid erupted out from beneath. Much like Perth had, he slammed into the closest blind Ferox like it was any other obstacle in his way. The beast disappearing through one of the lobby’s walls.

  Perth, hadn’t forgotten about the Ferox chasing in after him from the alley—they weren’t blind. He shot forward, ducking as one of the lobby Ferox’s claws swiped wildly at him. Grabbing hold of the Green’s tail, he yanked the creature from its feet, swinging into a 180 and letting go. The blind green shot back toward the hole he had emerged from a second earlier, hurtling into the first of the three chasing after him from the alley.

  “Run,” Perth yelled.

  Perth caught Trevor’s shoulder and pointed him in the direction of least resistance. He concocted this mad plan in a hurry, and had figured they would be leaving the way he’d come in, but now that he had brought more Ferox to the party with him, that option was out.

  So, he turned Trev in the opposite direction and the two barreled down a hallway toward the opposite side of the building. As they ran, they could see clear air on the other side, the WX gas hadn’t encompassed this entire building yet.

  Three Ferox lumbered into the lobby behind them, two running into their blinded brothers and knocking them over to take up the chase.

  “Jump,” Perth said. “No time to worry if we land pretty.”

  Trev didn’t hesitat
e, he shot through the window, Perth a split second behind. A hail of broken glass followed them out into the clear air.

  Perth stumbled a bit awkwardly as they hit pavement below, but not so badly as to keep him from quickly regaining his balance. The kid had engaged the gleamers in his boots—his landing wasn’t pretty, but it didn’t put cracks in the sidewalk.

  They looked at each other, smiled and bolted up the street.

  “We’re clear,” Perth said over the comms.

  “Green light, Olivia,” Jonathan’s voice said.

  One of the Ferox emerged from the fourth floor behind them as Seattle was rocked by the second controlled demolition of the last twelve hours. Trev and Perth lost their footing for a moment as the ground lurched beneath them. They turned around just long enough to see not one, but the four buildings closest to the conduit begin to fall toward the intersection.

  Trev, perhaps a little delirious with joy after his brush with death, began to laugh. He stared at the one Ferox who had made its way out up the street. A Green, young male, it seemed to watch with horror as the four buildings collapsed.

  Perth nudged him with a light elbow. “Kid, you alright?”

  “Yeah,” Trevor said, pointing vaguely at the collapsing building. “Was just thinking how they probably thought they were done digging.”

  CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

  EVENTUALLY, KEEPING THE Ferox from making contact with his forces became impossible. There were only so many buildings Jonathan could drop around the conduit before those he needed standing came into play.

  After a day of dropping wreckage on them, the Ferox and their cloud of gas had made their way into The Never.

  “We’re in position, how many you got on your tail?” asked Rivers over the comm.

  At that specific moment, Bodhi was crouching—sort of.

  To be more accurate he was gleaming south down Alaskan Way at dangerous speeds while holding one knee to his chest. A split second earlier, he’d had to drop down into a spin to keep from being clotheslined by the She-rox that had come barreling out of nowhere into the road in front of him.

  Two inches off the street’s surface and still very much in motion, he stood up just in time to jump as the next incoming beast leapt at him headlong. An instant later, he was running sideways along the side of an industrial building that lined the sidewalk.

  “What, you think I stopped to take a head count,” Bodhi snapped.

  “A hundred or a thousand?” Rivers asked.

  “However many we lured into Qwest Field!” Bodhi yelled as he jumped off the wall, flipped over the parked cars and put himself back into the center of the street.

  For this to work, he had to stay visible, which meant resisting the very strong instinct to run as fast as he could. He had to keep just enough distance between him and the Feroxian horde on his heels to believe they were a moment away from closing on him.

  “All of them?” Rivers said with genuine surprise. “How’d you swing that?”

  “Lance and Matthews dropped a gasoline truck on their Alpha.”

  He’d seen a Red coming at him ahead, but the trick to this was letting them get close enough, then dodge at the last second. The closer they came to connecting the more it seemed they couldn’t resist joining the mob trailing him. Bodhi dodged the Red as planned but he hadn’t seen the Green coming at him from the opposite side of the street. He barely slipped under its claw when he saw, but the Green was quick, didn’t only come at him high, but spun through to bring its tail around low.

  The tail clipped Bodhi’s feet—which was no small problem at his current speed.

  He lurched forward in an awkward tumble, but before he face-planted, he managed to flip to his back and spread himself. This dispersed his weight across the gleamers, so that he didn’t drive straight into the asphalt.

  He took one breath of relief as he stared up from his back, shooting down the street and watching the sky fly by overhead.

  “How’d you—”

  “Rivers, we’re gonna need to discuss this later.”

  Flipping onto his stomach, then back up into a gliding run, Bodhi let himself drift to the road’s guard rail as he came around a long curve.

  “Right . . . ETA?” Rivers asked.

  “You should be able see me any second,” Bodhi said,

  “Yep, I got y—”

  Rivers trailed off, his thoughts as interrupted as his words by the horde of rampaging Ferox chasing after Bodhi as he came around the corner. “Jesus, still think we need a bigger boat.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Bodhi said. “Sam, how things going on your end?”

  His response came between breaths of exertion. “I regret to report. I could not save. The Krispy Kreme. Bastards barreled right through it.”

  Bodhi sighed. “Dammit, that was gonna be my reward for not dying.”

  “Weren’t you the one telling me to stay focused,” Rivers said. “Sam, when should your mob hit Bodhi’s?”

  “About halfway through the train yard if I can shake the pack of Tar-locks on my heels,” Sam said.

  “Tar-locks?” Bodhi said.

  “Well, what have you been calling the females?” Sam asked.

  “Oh . . . Miss Piggies.”

  “What? Your whole thing was Sesame Street, Miss Piggy is a Muppet—”

  “How are you idiots still alive?” Rivers interjected.

  Bodhi caught sight of Sam as he launched out of the streets in the lower business district with a horde of Ferox thundering after him. Hitting the train yard, Sam wasn’t much slowed by the number of stacked cargo containers that lined the railway, but not many of the horde following him chose to gracefully jump the same obstacle. Whether on purpose or accident, the majority of the Ferox ended up rampaging through. It sent large metal containers stacked three high toppling over while others were split to shreds by the stampede.

  When Sam and Bodhi met and turned hard, they lost speed, and one of those metal containers crashed into the street behind them. This one had been thrown, as it was rolling directly at them, end over end with far too much precision to be random.

  They stared for a moment as the cargo exploded out both sides.

  The next few seconds, they finally let loose, breaking into full speed. Sam chanting with growing anxiety as the cargo container rolled end over end toward them, “Running! Running! Running!”

  They exchanged a glance, then pushed off one another with the gleamers. Each shot away from the other in a V as the cargo container rolled between them, lost its momentum, and finally came to a stop. There was no time to celebrate. Before the container even took its last roll, the combined horde was swarming over the top to get to them.

  Hurtling past the fence into the Port of Seattle, Sam turned to Bodhi. “I can’t believe we almost did that thing where we almost die trying to run away from something just because we’re too stupid to turn,” Sam said.

  “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  “Great minds,” Sam said.

  “Anything more than like minds is pushing it,” Rivers said.

  As they made their arrival, Rivers’ team was in position. On any normal day, the stretch of asphalt lining the Duwamish waterway was a maze of stacked containers waiting to be loaded onto massive cargo ships. Today was not a normal day.

  Rivers’ Command along with The Cell’s agents had spent hours in the lead-up to the Feroxian arrival decorating for this party.

  The cargo containers were no longer arranged in rows but stacked tightly together into a slowly rising staircase that straddled the very edge of the waterway—just one container higher than the edge of two cargo carriers themselves.

  At the moment each level of the massive staircase had three or four of Rivers’ team with their chest implants unshielded—like sirens singing for the Ferox to come crash upon them.

  As the Ferox chasing Sam and Bodhi caught sight of them, their guttural battle cries erupted from the horde’s ranks. They raced all the more
recklessly up the staircase. River’s men slowly pulled back—cowering in the face of the Feroxian horde’s overwhelming numbers.

  As they disappeared over the top of the cargo carrier staircase the Ferox barreled after them onto, what none of the beasts seemed to notice, was not a final platform lining the water.

  The unshielded men waited as long as their courage allowed in the face of the sheer numbers swarming onto the carrier after them before diving off the side to the greater safety of the waterway. Most of the men plunged straight into water, but a few who were adept enough with the gleamers came to stand on the surface as the cargo carrier was overtaken by the battle thirsty creatures.

  They surged onto the platform—grounding to halt at the edge to howl in rage at prey that had run from combat. Some nearest the edge were knocked into the water by the weight of the horde pressing in behind them.

  “West side, time to show us what you got,” Rivers said.

  On the opposite bank, men emerged from cover and ran into the open. Few of the Ferox noticed them, even fewer would have noticed that they fell into ten highly suspicious rows of five along the west bank. Much as it was with humans—Ferox mobs were no place to find shining examples of restraint and wisdom.

  The mob was too focused on Bodhi, Sam, and the few others who stood hovering above the water with their chests ablaze—daring the creatures to risk the waters if they wanted to get to them.

  Meanwhile, the men on the west side moved in sync, each group of five reaching for a massive black chain laying on the shoreline. As they began to pull, ten chains emerged from beneath the water and grew taut against the spindles affixed to the carrier. At first the tug of war was slow. But as these things go, the cargo carrier began to move away from the shore with increasing speed as it leaned toward the water.

  “Olivia, we’re almost ready here at the Port,” Rivers said.

  “Received, awaiting your mark,” Olivia replied.

  As the massive vessel lurched into the waterway, the Ferox mob crowding the decks began to realize their mistake. They were not standing on land at all.