by SD Tanner
They could only hear Jo’s side of the conversation. “We’re here to get you out. How many of you are there? Twelve….can you all walk? Yes, we know about the sticky goo….okay, don’t panic…you need to make a space…I’m sending a nav down.”
Turning to him, she said through his headset, “They’re sealed in, but the goo’s starting to move so we haven’t got much time. They say it’s been…eating them.”
“I’ll go down there and pass them up. Lexie, take them to the window and hand them to Tuck and Trigger.”
Dropping through the hole, he landed and bent his knees deeply to absorb the impact. His hydraulic knees compensated and he flicked his visor to reality viewing. Looking around the bleak room, it had clearly been their prison for a month. Boxes were untidily piled into the corners, and the faces staring back at him were dirty and frightened. The door was covered in the sticky goo, and a puddle of the stuff was slowly making its way across the floor towards him.
These people had been through a terrible ordeal, and he felt his face tighten into an angry grimace. Ark had told him they’d bombed Seattle, and if Amelia were dead then at least she would have been spared this sort of torture.
A tall, well-built teenager put his face directly in front of his visor and was saying something he couldn’t hear through his helmet. Ordering his onboard computer to open a channel, he heard the boy’s rapid chatter through the external speakers on his helmet.
“…the goo about four days ago, but she’s still alive. Rhona put a tourniquet on her arm and I think it stopped the stuff from killing her. I mean, everyone else died within a few hours, so she’s gonna be okay, right?”
The swarm behind the door was growing not lessening, and they didn’t have time to get into an in-depth discussion about anything. Wanting to keep the boy calm, he asked, “What’s your name, son?”
“Ben. My sister’s called Cassie. She needs to go to the hospital. She’s real sick.”
“Okay, Ben, but first we need to get you all outta here.”
A man with a deep beard and greasy hair flattened to his head grabbed at his arm. “How are you gonna get us outta here?”
“The same way I got in.”
The man looked up at the broken ceiling and then back at the frightened survivors. “They’re too weak. They can’t climb up there.”
Not wanting to waste time explaining anything, he grabbed the woman closest to him under the arms; easily raising her into Tank’s waiting hands. “We need to be quick. The building isn’t secure.”
One-by-one, he lifted the people into the air and handed them to Tank. While he worked, he asked brusquely, “Tuck, sitrep.”
“Loading ‘em into the cars now.”
“I don’t know if they’re in any condition to drive,” Jo said worriedly.
He hadn’t considered whether they’d be able to drive, and he cursed himself for his lack of foresight. Ben grabbed his armored glove and pointed to a crumpled coat next to the boxes in the corner of the room. “Cassie can’t move on her own.”
Moving to where she lay, he pulled back the coat, revealing a young woman with dark brown hair. Scooping her gently into his arms, he lifted her up to Tank. “She’s not conscious.”
“Okay, I’ve got her.”
Once he’d handed Ben to Tank, he grabbed his hand and allowed himself to be boosted from the room. By the time he returned to the second floor, Jo and Lexie were already outside of the building.
Jumping from the broken window, he landed next to Jo. “Can any of them drive?”
“A couple of them are okay to drive. They had food and water, so at least they’re not starving.”
Ben tapped his helmet. “Cassie needs to go to the hospital.”
Jo replied, “I’m sorry, but there’s no hospitals left.”
“B…b…but she’ll die if she doesn’t get help. Rhona said the tourniquet is cutting off the blood to her arm, but I think it stopped that stuff from killing her.”
“Was she touched by the goo?”
Nodding vehemently, Ben said, “Yes. It’s been attacking people, and after they died it sort of absorbed them.”
The survivors had propped Cassie up in the backseat of one of the cars, and he peered into her face trying to decide what to do. “Ark, do you think Dayton would like a patient who’s been infected with the goo?”
“That’s a strange thing to ask, Leon, but I’d say yes.”
Leaning into the car, he gently pulled Cassie out and carried her to the MaxxPro. “We’ll take her back to CaliTech.”
As he handed her to one of Jo’s squad, Ben anxiously hovered near his elbow. “Is that a hospital?”
“No, but it has one.” Pushing Ben into the truck with his sister, he added, “You get to come too.”
“Bill won’t like that,” Jo warned. “He’s worried CaliTech will get swamped with survivors.”
“Too bad. We don’t work for Bill.”
With so many critters around them, they couldn’t stay at the intersection. Within ten minutes, the survivors were slowly driving away in their stolen cars.
Watching their departing vehicles, Tuck said dourly, “That still wasn’t a solution, Leon.”
Sending terrorized people out of the city to an unknown destination didn’t solve anything more than their immediate problem. Nodding, he replied, “Yeah, I know, but until we have somewhere to send them what else are we gonna do?”
Jo replied, “That’s what we need the shelters for. Let’s go find out where they are.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Trapped in the city (Shirley)
Holding her hands over her face served two purposes. It protected her eyes from the insects and dust in the air, and it also helped her ignore what was happening to her. She and Clark had always flown first-class whenever they’d travelled, and her current method of transport didn’t please her. The unpleasant creature had its black arms and legs wrapped around her chest and hips, leaving her legs dangling awkwardly behind her. It didn’t fly exactly, but was gliding through the air, somehow using its complex webbed wing structure to catch gusts of wind.
Daring to peek at the ground below, all she saw was an aerial view of the desert. She wasn’t good at judging distances, but the scenery reminded her of what she would see from a plane before it disappeared above the cloud line. If the creature dropped her, she would surely join Clark on the other side. Growing bored with her flight, she wondered whether she would really meet Clark after she’d died, and decided they would only argue if she did.
Eventually the creature began to descend, and she peeked again to see where it was taking her. Surrounded by small and identical bumps, a huge pyramid-shaped dome rose out of the desert. With their thick bodies and skinny black legs, the creatures moving on the ground looked even more insect-like. They were scurrying in and out of the top of each of the small mounds, and hundreds were scuttling across the pyramid. It reminded her of an ant nest she’d seen in her garden as a child, and she didn’t like it.
At the top of the pyramid, sunk deep into the middle of it, was a cavernous black hole. Without warning, her pilot plunged into a downward spiral, straight into the black pit. Covering her face and expecting to crash, she squealed in terror. When the impact never came, she peeked through her fingers again, and finally felt something solid under her feet.
To her surprise, she was standing so deeply inside the pyramid the entrance was only a small opening above her head. The cavern was round, and at least the width of her five-bedroom house, but where she would have expected it to be dark, it glowed brightly. Spinning around, she tried to find the source of the light, and found that the walls and floor were glowing. Lifting her feet, the track shoes she’d stolen from the penthouse apartment clung to the ground, and she looked down in surprise. The floor was sticky with a substance that reminded her of the sap from a tree.
A static sounding screech came from below and knowing the noise well, she flinched in fear. Appearing to have completed its mission, he
r pilot lifted into the air and disappeared through the hole above her head.
Unsure what to do next she took a tentative step. Her shoe lifted with a slight tug and she walked across the cavern, looking for another way out of the room. A tall creature, with thick limbs and a spout for a mouth, appeared from a hole she hadn’t seen in the floor. It seemed bored with its work and it strolled in an unhurried way towards her. Backing away, she looked around frantically for somewhere to run, but she was trapped inside the cavern. Her heart began to race and she broke into a sweat. She was going to die, just as the people in the street outside the penthouse apartment had.
“G…go away! Shoo!”
The creature didn’t react to the sound of her voice and she turned and ran, not knowing where she was going. Another creature climbed out of a different hidden hole in the floor, followed by a number of the ones with the many skinny legs. While she ran wildly around the room, they stood patiently as if waiting for her to wear herself out.
Through the hole above her head, she could still see the soft blue sky and she threw herself at the wall. With a rising panic, she clawed at the gooey surface hoping she could somehow climb to the top of the room. Grunting, she held her arms above her head and planted her palms against the wall, praying they would stick well enough for her to lift herself up. The gooey substance was moving and it wrapped itself around her fingers, making her snatch her hand back in horror.
Turning away from the wall, there were three times as many creatures as before standing around her. None of them made a move towards her and they appeared to be waiting for something. Still more black rubbery creatures crawled from holes in the floor and walls, and one appeared on her right less than three feet from her. There was no way she could escape the room by climbing the walls, and she tentatively walked to where the latest creature had appeared. The hole was covered in a thin layer of the sticky goo and she pushed her hand through it. Parting like a membrane, it led into a well-lit corridor. If she couldn’t climb the walls and she couldn’t stay where she was, then she would have to go down.
Pushing her legs through the thin skin, she slid down the hole until her feet touched the ground. The corridor in front of her was just like the room above. The sticky goo gave off a light, and she tentatively walked along the corridor looking for another exit. Another creature appeared out of a wall, and she realized the sticky membrane was hiding the exits from her. Just like the cavern above her, this corridor was full of doorways she couldn’t see.
The creature stopped in the corridor in front of her, and she turned to go back the way she came, but her exit was blocked by another of the tall ones with a spout on its face. With no choice other than to go where they were herding her, she broke through a membrane and dropped into another corridor.
Slowly, the creatures were forcing her through a complex warren of corridors, each taking her deeper underground. She didn’t know where they were leading her, but it was obvious they didn’t intend to kill her, not yet anyway. Giving up any pretense of being able to escape, her heart rate settled and she followed their silent directions. What was she going to do? If she refused to move they might carry her again, and she hadn’t enjoyed the flight to the pyramid. If she tried to turn around and climb back to the original room, her path was always blocked by a cluster of creatures.
She was being led somewhere, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it so she didn’t try. Losing track of how far she’d travelled, she found herself in another cavern like the first. These walls were also covered in the sticky goo, only they contained large bumps. Staring around the lit room, she was trying to understand what the lumps were when one spoke.
“Hello?” A voice whispered weakly.
Startled, but relieved to hear a human voice, she made her way across the sticky floor. “Where are you?”
Another voice called softly, “Help.”
The cavern filled with the sound of sobbing, and she finally realized the voices were coming from the walls. The lumps in the sticky substance were people and she walked to the one closest to her. Although covered in the gooey substance, she could faintly see an outline of the clothes they were wearing. Only a mouth and nose were visible, and every other part of the person was smothered so thickly they couldn’t move.
“Can you hear me?” She asked.
When the person didn’t answer, she assumed they probably couldn’t. Maybe they’d detected her movement in the room or perhaps they always cried out. They couldn’t see or hear her and she couldn’t talk to them. Somewhere her mind registered this would be her fate too, and tears began to run down her cheeks.
When the black rubbery creatures herded her into another corridor, she knew her time with her own kind was over, and she continued to descend deeper into what she now realized was a nest.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The chocolate factory (Bill)
Weapons research was done in a building that stood a safe distance from the main offices, and as soon as he walked inside, he could see why. Tables were cluttered with the half guns he knew attached to the Navigator suits, others were filled with odd shaped devices he didn’t understand, and against the far end of the enormous floor was a firing range behind a bulletproof wall. Men and women were working at various workbenches, and every so often the sound of a drill or saw cut through the air.
“Welcome to Toyland,” Jenkins boomed with a wide grin.
“What am I looking at?”
“Every possible way to fuck shit up.”
Jenkin’s delighted enthusiasm was catching and he found himself grinning back at him. “Is that your official brief?”
“Pretty much. Dunk wanted us to explore every way the nav gear could be applied, and he gave us a helluva big budget.”
“So, what have you tried?”
“Standard high velocity weapons emulating the less than fifty cal guns and heavier duty caliber as well. Single shot, multi-bullet, and continuous fire. Grenades. Hollow point depleted uranium-tipped bullets. Belted ammo and magazine loaded hand held automatic weapons. Computer-controlled targeting automatic guns inbuilt into armor. Forty-five cal handguns with oversize magazines. Pretty much all the stuff you’ve seen on the current nav armor.”
“What about the sound based weapon you used on that critter in the training hangar?”
“Ah, well, that was our mad money budget. We used that to design anything else we could think of.” Waving his arm at the room, he added, “There’s a bit of everything here. Sound weapons, laser tech, Tasers, gas, flamethrowers, EMP disrupters, and even liquid nitrogen. Pretty much anything you could imagine using to disable an enemy.”
It sounded like quite the waste of money to him, and the army had no doubt paid a handsome sum for Dunk’s designers to amuse themselves. A bullet or grenade pretty much disabled any enemy without having to get fancy about it. Almost none of the weapons he’d mentioned were of any use other than the high velocity weapons emulating a .50 cal by using hollow point depleted uranium-tipped bullets.
“Dayton says the critters are made from a form of hardened plastic. Have you got any weapons that could defeat that?”
Jenkins gave a disappointed shrug. “Not really. We didn’t design any weapons to kill an oversized Stay Puft Marshmallow Man either. It just wasn’t a scenario we planned for.”
“Stay Puft Marshmallow Man?”
“Nevermind. The point is we spent most of the money designing weapons to defeat a conventional enemy.” Giving him a baleful look, he added, “We might have had some fun with the other stuff, but we knew it was nothing the army was gonna pay us for.”
“That sound weapon had some effect on that critter.”
“It sure did, but I don’t know if it was the sound that made it explode into thirty little guys. For all we know that’s just its standard defense whenever it feels threatened. You know, like a gecko drops it tail when it’s scared.”
“How far advanced is the design?”
Jenkins gave a heavy sigh. “I
t isn’t. We have what you saw and it’s not exactly easy to transport or use.”
“What were your plans for it?”
Waving at him to follow, they began to walk across the enormous floor to a section marked, “Alternate Weapons Research & Test”. This area had its own wide u-shaped partition with a bank of desks lining it, and in the middle were a cluster of workbenches covered in tools, circuit boards and boxes.
As they walked into the section, a woman looked up. “Hey, what can I do you for?”
“This is Bill. He was a Colonel in the army and he wants to know the status of the sound weapon.” Flicking his hand at the small, stocky woman, he added, “This is Candy. She’s in charge of anything outside the box.”
Candy waved him to a stool at the workbench. “The sound weapon works by disrupting an object at a molecular level. We can definitely get the tech to work, but at the moment the units are too large and take too long to blow anything up.”
“Where are you heading with it?”
“We wanted to create handheld devices much like a gun, but we’re not there yet.”
“What about the lasers?”
“There’s no problem creating a handheld unit that fires a focused beam, but we can’t stop the laser from cutting through anything behind the target.”
“What do you mean?”
“It cuts through the target just fine, but it doesn’t stop and continues to slice through anything in its path. We had some real issues during testing.”
Jenkins gave a hearty chuckle. “That’s an understatement. The damn thing sliced straight through the living quarters.”
She nodded sagely. “Yeah, we were lucky no one got hit.” Brightening, she added, “But we’re getting somewhere using pulse lasers. They pump out short and more controllable bursts, so their range is a lot shorter.”
They clearly enjoyed their work, but they weren’t telling him what he needed to know. “I just want to understand what alternative weapons are within reach.” When they both looked at him quizzically, he added, “Look, conventional weapons aren’t doing the job. Sure, above fifty cal or a missile will blow the crap out of anything plastic or otherwise, but it’s a lot of large ammo and the weapons are heavy. We need lightweight weapons, and preferably ones that won’t cause us a supply problem. We have no manufacturing, so every bullet we fire is one less bullet we have left to use. Your sound and laser weapons don’t need ammo and that appeals to me longer term.”