Plan 9- Official Movie Novelization

by Matthew Warner

  At last, his extensive knowledge of movies and TV had paid off. It was a quote worthy of a true action hero.

  The young cop—and Lucy and Paula and Becky—gaped as he walked briskly past them to the ladder.

  Chapter 20

  STARK

  During the briefing, General Claiborne had said Army intelligence believed the alien ship was on the east end of the island. So after crossing the bridge into Nilbog, Squad X spent most of its time tromping through woods and down undeveloped country roads. No one in sight.

  Stark began to relax. Maybe this would be a cake walk. They’d find the alien ship, blow it up with the C4 that Private Roy carried in his pack, and get back to forgetting this had ever happened.

  Yeah, right. And the fact there were 1,500 new zombies roaming this town wouldn’t factor in at all.

  Stay focused.

  If he died here, he would never see his daughter again.

  Horner took point, and Stark walked second. Sometimes, he stared at the tuft of red hair poking out from the back of Horner’s camouflaged baseball cap and tried to imagine what the man was thinking. Did the scars the captain’s knife gave him in Iraq still itch sometimes, like his own?

  Cap brought up the rear of the squad, behind Lester, Private Roy, and Colonel Edwards, so Stark couldn’t see what he was doing. Hopefully, he was aiming that absurd, sound-suppressed Uzi back the way they came and not picking out his targets from the men in front.

  None of them made a sound as they skulked past a small college campus, an airstrip, and a darkened factory building with the mural of a ketchup bottle on its side.

  The tree cover disappeared as they turned down a crumbly, desolate road named Pine Avenue, an inappropriate descriptor as there weren’t any pine trees in sight. Only a few of its street lamps functioned. They illuminated neglected buildings such as a four-unit strip mall—vacant, by the looks of it—and an old school at the far end, overgrown with weeds.

  Colonel Edwards directed them into the shadows of a boarded-up office building. He ordered them to take five.

  Stark wondered which structure contained their objective. How would they find it? A door-to-door search, probably.

  But their illustrious captain soon answered that question.

  Cap needlessly checked his weapon as he addressed Horner. “Which way to the mark?”

  Horner pulled a smart phone out of his pocket and tapped the screen. “That way.” He pointed to a two-story parking deck near the end of the street.

  The hell is going on? Stark tried to control his annoyance. They were supposed to masquerade as homespun militia members, and yet one of them carried a high-tech range finder? The general at least could have alerted them all to the device. Instead, the operational part of his briefing had consisted of orders to obliterate anyone in and around the space ship.

  “Any signs?” Cap said.

  “No, sir. Not nearby.”

  The captain nodded, and Horner touched the phone to lock it. A Hello Kitty logo appeared on the screen. As if that would fool anyone.

  Stark cleared his throat. “Is that scanning for zombie energy?”

  “No, the AWAC plane circling over us does that.” Horner smiled, revealing a hole where an incisor tooth used to be. “This just downloads the intel. Wish we had it back in the sandbox, huh?”

  Stark was about to answer when movement under one of the functioning street lamps caught his eye. Four zombies—three women and one man—stumbled into the glare.

  They were the first zombies he’d seen since Iraq, and the sight made him catch his breath. No, don’t be afraid. Look at them. They’re not as coordinated as the ones from before. They’re broken and bloody. Get macho, goddammit.

  He forced himself to smile like a cocky son of a bitch. “Fun time.”

  Horner followed his gaze and raised his rifle. “Here they come.” He sounded equally nonchalant, so Stark wondered if he felt the same way: secretly quaking in his jockeys.

  But Lester bought it. “You know, I find it amazing these goddamn things don’t give you the creeps.”

  “Nah, these guys are all play. It’s the other ones you gotta worry about.”

  “That’s enough chatter,” Colonel Edwards said. “Lock and load.”

  Stark waited for the zombies to come into range. The lead one, the man in the green shirt, sported a bullet wound over the right eye. He now remembered an important tip the general had left out of the briefing: you had to aim for the heart.

  He lined up the sights of his shotgun.

  But there was time for another confidence-building utterance. He tried to recall one from boot camp. Hoo-rah? No, that wouldn’t do. “Let’s spread hate and vacate.”

  Horner snorted as he opened fire.

  Bullet holes appeared all over the zombies’ bodies. Stark thought he was the only one aiming center mass as he blasted the man and then a woman with bone jutting from her leg. But a burst of small holes appeared in the chests of the other two, taking them down as well.

  So somebody else remembered where to aim. I bet I know who.

  Stark glanced at Cap to see him smiling.

  ***

  As they reloaded, Stark concealed the way his hand trembled by rubbing his eyes. He already hated this. Already wanted to go home. Was already losing focus. How many nights had he lain awake, reliving that descent into the sink hole—literally into hell?

  The greenhorn, Private Roy, was saying something to the captain. Stark returned to the present moment to focus on him, feeling like he was emerging from a tank of water.

  “. . . But you’ve been inside? How did you guys destroy that fucking thing?”

  “Well, for starters, we weren’t talking.”

  Colonel Edwards interrupted them. “Roy, snap to.”

  Roy nodded and walked off to take point.

  Although the colonel was glaring, Cap ignored him and calmly reloaded his weapon. He peered over Horner’s shoulder at the smart phone, which Horner had hauled back out. “Any of them on the mark?”

  “No, sir. Just some drones.”

  Stark assumed they referred to the space ship’s location, and the them were aliens. Not that he felt in the loop on any of this. He was only risking his fucking life, after all. Just a drone myself.

  The captain finally acknowledged Colonel Edwards’s presence by addressing him. “Killing this many drones has to get someone’s attention.”

  “Agreed. We best get flight of foot.”

  “Move out,” Cap said to the squad.

  Stark sighed as he followed them out of the shadows.

  ***

  As they marched, Private Roy’s question echoed in his mind. How did you guys destroy that fucking thing?

  Apparently, when someone filled in the greenhorn about what happened in the desert, he left out some details.

  Stark remembered the way the alien looked in his flashlight’s glare as it yanked Cap back into the meteorite space ship. Its red eyes. Its double rows of shark teeth. The other aliens who’d brought back the crystal artifact were already inside.

  The surviving squad members had looked at each other in hopelessness, conscious of the fact they were a half mile underground and cut off from the world. They would’ve called for help, but their radios no longer functioned. The aliens had what they came for, and now they held a Squad X member hostage. Either they would now return to Mars, or…

  “They’re gonna kill the shit out of us,” Lester said. His eyelid twitched in the glow of Stark’s flashlight beam.

  The rotten egg smell wafting from the space craft intensified. And, worse than that, the ship began to emanate a low-frequency hum.

  Sweat dripped down their faces as they craned back to look up the sink hole. Could they climb out in time? Or should they first attempt to blow up the alien ship—with Cap still inside?

  The last thing they expected was for human bodies to rain down on them.

  Some wore white linen burial shrouds. Others, recently killed,
wore their long thawbs—white tunics now stained with blood. The newer zombies still wore keffiyeh headdresses.

  They landed on the Squad X members like rocks. The impacts fractured the skulls of grunts not wearing helmets and snapped the collar bones and spines of those who were. Stark, wearing his brain bucket, was one of those who only suffered a broken collar bone.

  Free falling over 2,000 feet didn’t bother the zombies—at least those who could still walk afterward. With livers prolapsing out of their newly ruptured abdomens, they merely picked themselves up and lunged after the remaining soldiers.

  Stark, Lester, Horner, and four others fled into an adjoining tunnel formed by receding groundwater. There, they fought for their lives.

  The occasional sweeps of their flashlights illuminated nothing but bared teeth and smoke and blood, always blood. Dante couldn’t have imagined a worse fate than to engage in hand-to-hand combat with zombies at the center of hell, lit sometimes by the muzzle flashes of guns.

  When it was over, the only soldiers still alive were the ones who would one day attend the Squad X reunion in Nilbog.

  They stumbled out of the tunnel, broken and covered with blood—some of it the zombies’, much of it their own.

  The captain stood outside the alien space ship, waiting for them. He was naked.

  Orange goo covered his body and face, and that’s exactly the way Stark described it during his hospital debriefing with General Claiborne. Orange goo. The big son of a bitch stood there in his birthday suit and wielded his combat knife.

  The only reason they survived was because Cap attacked Lester first, and Lester was the only one without a broken bone. As Lester tried to restrain him from behind, Cap managed to slash both Stark and Horner—Stark on his forearm, Horner on his leg.

  And the only reason Cap survived was because by that point, they were completely out of bullets. Lester eventually wrapped his arm around Cap’s throat and choked him unconscious.

  In the interim, the meteorite ship’s low-frequency hum had ascended a few notches. “Is it charging up for something?” Stark wondered aloud. “Is it gonna blow up?”

  There was no point in trying to destroy the ship by that point. The explosives they had brought along were strewn somewhere in the tunnel behind them, pulled apart and useless. Who cared if the aliens had retrieved their crystal toilet scrubber? Fuck ’em. Better to escape while they still could.

  So, after tying Cap’s hands behind his back, they threaded rope under his armpits and began the laborious process of carrying him back out of the sink hole with their motorized rope ascenders. After a few minutes, Cap woke up and started talking in an alien language. It eventually devolved into ordinary profanities. He didn’t shut up during the whole climb.

  Halfway out of the hole, the ascenders failed, leaving them hanging and helpless. Below them, the hum from the alien ship steadily grew in volume and pitch. They knew they didn’t have much time.

  Stark looked down at the naked man hanging below them on the rope. He couldn’t believe what he was about to suggest. “Maybe we should cut him loose.” He had to speak up to be heard over the hum.

  Hanging from his rope, Horner closed his eyes and looked away.

  Lester shook his head. “Dude, there’s no way we’re in any shape to climb out of here with our bare hands, even without him. We’re screwed.”

  Tense seconds passed as they listened to the hum climb another notch in pitch. Stark thought he might cut the captain loose anyway and go for it, fractured collar bone or not.

  But the Army came to their rescue. There was a sudden yank upward on their lines, and then they were being pulled out of the hole.

  Fifteen minutes later, their rescuers finished hauling them out. It was nighttime, but Stark could see the piles of bodies near the sink hole’s entrance. Blood soaked the sand they laid him on.

  “Did you blow up the ship?” someone asked.

  It was at about that time the hum from the space ship—now a deafening, high-pitched whine, even up here on the surface—suddenly fell quiet.

  Cap spoke up from where he lay naked in the sand. “Oh, shit.”

  The sinkhole erupted like a volcano. Everyone hit the deck, shielding their heads, as the alien space craft spat out of the hole. It showered rock and dirt on them as it rocketed into outer space.

  Someone later claimed this was evidence of the aliens’ benevolence. Wasn’t it nice of them to wait until the remaining Squad X members were out of the hole?

  But Stark knew the truth. The captain being taken hostage, the zombies jumping into the hole, the attack up top—it had all been a delay tactic. That whine had been the space craft slowly charging up to blast off.

  ***

  The data from Horner’s smart phone led them to the two-story parking garage. A zombie stood near the entrance. To the casual observer, he might have been a janitor who stepped out for a smoke.

  Horner pointed at the concrete structure to make it clear they needed to go inside.

  They had all spotted the zombie sentry by that point, if that’s what it was, but Cap raised his fist in the air to make sure they did. Attention, the hand signal said. He opened his palm and let it drop to his side. Take cover.

  Stark hid with the others behind a bush to watch Cap sneak up on the sentry. He could see now that it used to be a young Caucasian man. Its throat looked recently torn out, as if by an animal.

  Cap seized it by the back of the neck and hurled it to the ground. He crushed its throat with his boot.

  But the zombie still moved because its heart was intact. Lying on its back, it flailed its arms, trying to adjust to the newly broken weight atop its shoulders.

  The captain crouched beside it and drew his knife. The zombie’s chest made a hollow thump as he stabbed it.

  The attack took less than four seconds.

  Stark had certainly seen his share of combat—nothing really phased him by that point—but the ferocity of Cap’s actions still surprised him. The captain was one person he hoped never to go up against.

  Cap raised his fist and pumped down. Move out.

  ***

  Ten seconds later, they were arrayed on either side of the entrance ramp. The parking deck was a sorry looking structure. Steel girders held up two massive, L-shaped slabs of concrete crisscrossed by ivy and cracks. Stark doubted it had ever been used and could only shake his head at the dunderheaded urban planning that created it. Unfortunately, although it might not hold any parked cars in its shadowed corners, it might conceal plenty of zombies.

  Horner consulted his smart phone again before shrugging his shoulders. “We have to go through.”

  Cap leaned close to Colonel Edwards for a whispered conversation. Stark listened as he scanned the street behind them.

  “Flash bangs?”

  “And announce our presence? Are you crazy?”

  Stark rolled his eyes. Of course Cap is crazy, he wanted to say. You’re just now figuring that out?

  “Horner takes point since he knows which way to go. You go second, Stark third, and—”

  Colonel Edwards cut off at the sound of grating metal.

  The squad instantly trained their weapons on a manhole cover moving in the center of the street, about a hundred feet away. Stark grimaced. What was it with zombies and holes in the ground?

  A white face poked out of the opening. The lone street lamp functioning on this side of Pine Avenue reflected off eyeglasses. The man scanned left and right but didn’t see them before climbing out.

  Stark took note of the badge clipped to his coat. So he was—or had been—a police officer.

  Four more people followed the man out the hole: two more cops and two female civilians. None of them looked recently dead.

  The second male policeman out of the hole spotted the Squad X members. “Hey, the cavalry!” He started running to them, holstering the revolver he’d been carrying.

  Is this where we pass ourselves off as militia members? Shit.

 
; The policeman jogged steadily closer. “Hey! It’s okay! We’re alive!” He was one of the local cops—some college-aged kid, really, wearing his short-sleeved brown uniform shirt despite the cool evening. He waved his arms like an idiot while the rest of his party hung back.

  Squad X kept their weapons trained on him like he was a zombie. Stark was about to suggest they lower them when Lester spoke up from behind his rifle scope: “All right, talk to me. What are we doing?”

  “Stick to the plan,” Edwards said.

  Cap raised his Uzi. “Right.”

  By the plan, Stark knew the colonel meant their orders to obliterate anything moving in or around the space craft’s landing site. But this was a survivor, for God’s sake. They weren’t really supposed to blow away—

  Cap fired a single shot. The sound suppressor made it sound no louder than a phone book dropping on the floor.

  A bullet hole appeared in the center of the policeman’s chest. His face slackened in surprise before he pitched forward.

  “Oh my god!” someone in the crowd of newcomers exclaimed.

  “Run, run run!” someone else said.

  One of the cops, a tall African American woman, pumped her shotgun and stepped toward the squad. “You son of a bitch!”

  But the first one who’d climbed out of the manhole grabbed the barrel of her gun and wrenched it around. “Becky, we are leaving!”

  They joined the others in their group, already running away.

  Stark watched them go, numb with shock.

  The captain must have read his mind because he needlessly repeated their orders from the general. “No one leaves this sector alive.”

  Stark shook his head. “I didn’t sign on to kill innocent people.”

  Colonel Edwards faced him. “You will do what you’re ordered to do, soldier.”

  Stark couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The colonel was as much of a psychopath as Cap. He turned to the others for support, but Horner, Lester, and Private Roy studiously kept their eyes on the ground. Like they were at boot camp and this was nothing more than a dressing down by a drill sergeant.

  “Move out!” Cap said. Without waiting for the others, he marched into the parking garage like he owned the place.