by SD Tanner
“Why do you think they’re clustered around this area?” Lexie asked.
“Like I said, maybe the radiation agrees with them,” Ark replied.
Something scuttled through the bushes ahead of him, but it moved so quickly he didn’t manage to identify it.
Sounding surprised, Lexie said, “That was a critter.”
The small cluster of bushes began to vibrate, making the dense leaves rustle excitedly.
She added dourly, “And it has friends.”
“Grab one of them,” Ark ordered.
“And do what with it?” She asked in disgust.
“Bring it back here. It’s different to the others, so we need to study it.”
“What are we supposed to do, Ark? Put it in a cat box?”
Leon and Tuck stalked past him to the moving bushes and plucked a small critter from the foliage. It was shaped like a spider and its fat, round body was the size of a basketball. While Tuck held it by one skinny limb, it wrapped its remaining legs around his armored arm, as if it was worried he might let go of it.
“I think it likes you,” Lexie declared with amusement.
“Tuck has finally found a date,” Ark said with a chuckle. Then he quickly added, “You might wanna leave now. It has a lot of friends.”
Ark tended to understate everything, and he looked past Tuck at the angry sea of movement in the distance. It was aligning into a marching army of tiny, buzzing critters, and he turned to follow the others. They were running swiftly, but he was getting tired of having to sprint from every engagement. A flamethrower would make crispy critters of them, and he made a mental note to talk to the weapons engineers to modify his gear.
While the others clambered into and on top of the parked truck, he continued to trudge at a steady pace. Critters were climbing up his wide legs, crawling along his spine and onto his helmet. There was nothing they could do other than cover his visor and he didn’t bother to pull them away. Unlike their larger brothers, they didn’t have the weight or strength in their legs and claws to cause any damage to his armor.
“Yuck, Tank,” Lexie said dourly. “You look like you’re covered in fleas.”
Before climbing onto the already slowly moving truck, he shook himself like a dog and muttered, “Stupid little fuckers.”
While the stunted critters flew from his armor like unwanted fleas, Ark said, “Maybe they defended themselves from the radiation by exploding into smaller ones.”
“You mean like that one did in the training hangar?” Leon asked.
“Exactly.”
“If that’s how they handle a nuclear bomb then NORAD need to stop bombing the cities. It’s turning the critters into a swarm.”
Bill had told everyone that only the squad and battle commander were allowed to talk on the grid during an engagement, but breaking his own rule, he said, “That’s what I’ve been saying, Leon.”
Climbing onto the top of the truck, he tuned out yet another argument starting between the two men. As usual, they were both right, but he knew neither would concede to the other without squabbling about it first.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Blind Sighted (Ally)
“What am I looking at?”
“That’s a nav screen.”
It didn’t look like any screen she’d ever seen before. It had a grid and blobs were covering it. Words were written down the margins and along the top and bottom of the screen. The words didn’t use the alphabet as she knew it, but for some reason she still understood what was written. The view was odd as well. She could see wider than her eyes normally could, and there was an option on the screen for reverse viewing, but she didn’t know what it meant.
“What’s reverse viewing?”
“You’re seeing through a collection of cameras built into your helmet, so you can see whatever they’re pointing at. There’s one in the back of your helmet.”
“What? I have eyes in the back of my head now?”
Donna chuckled. “Yes.”
They’d told her she was blinded by the drugs they’d given her when she was being kept in a coma to save her life. The man who’d rescued her from the side of the road had decided to have her useless eyeballs replaced with orbs, and now she was learning how to use a visor. She’d later learned the man who’d saved her was called Bill, and he’d brought her to a hospital inside a weapons research facility.
Waking up not knowing who she was or what had happened was disturbing, but Donna had begun to test her. She’d assessed her for brain damage and possible physical limitations, but aside from the amnesia, there wasn’t anything wrong with her. Her doctor, Dayton, had assured her some of her memories might eventually return. The neurologist they called One-of-One had blandly told her she was suffering from neural deficits, and given they were not of a limiting nature, they were therefore of no concern.
According to Donna, while she’d been sleeping the world had ended and seventy-five percent of the people were dead or aliens. In addition to being blind and not knowing who she was, she now lived in a world dominated by monsters. She kept expecting someone to leap out and shout, “April Fool”, but if no one did soon, she’d be forced to accept whatever life she had before was now gone.
The man sitting in the booth next to her in the training room had willingly replaced his eyes with the orbs. Donna was running them both through a simulation-training program and he said cheerfully, “It’s actually pretty cool.”
He’d wouldn’t tell her his name and no one else seemed to care. All he’d said was his family were dead and so was he. She thought he was crazy, but not in a dangerous way. Her other savior, Bill, wasn’t around, and the slightly crazy man had been her lifeline back into a world she didn’t recognize. While they were both stuck in hospital beds recovering from their operations, he’d been very kind to her and patiently answered all of her questions.
“It’s weird,” she replied unhappily.
Information would pop into her head and she couldn’t quite work out how she knew it. The simulation screen showed a pink blob she knew was a person and a green one that was a critter. They were twenty feet from her, and the simulated building she appeared to be standing inside was three-stories tall.
“I don’t understand how I know stuff.”
“The visor is reading your surroundings and feeding the data directly to your brain. You’re not really seeing in the traditional sense, but getting a direct feed to your brain based on what you focus your cameras on.”
“How are you doing that?”
“We’re not. It’s just how the visor works. It’s called advanced vision.”
“Why did you do this to me?”
“We only have one person with this type of vision who can use the gear, and we need more fully functioning navs. You can see critters underground and for miles. It gives us an edge and we need all the help we can get.”
She felt the crazy man nudge her arm and he happily declared, “We’re gonna be killing machines.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be a killing machine.”
“It’s your choice, Ally,” Donna replied steadily. “But when you get outside the wire I think you’ll change your mind.”
They’d told her people were being held captive in the cities and their situation was desperate. She would need to see it for herself to believe them, only now her vision was something she didn’t understand or trust. Dayton had said it was common for coma patients to wake up feeling paranoid, but she wasn’t convinced. Although she might not remember who she was before the accident, she was confident her life hadn’t been filled with evil monsters that held people prisoner. Surely, she’d have some recollection if that were the case, and she certainly didn’t remember living her life in terror.
Donna was making her learn to walk and move in the heavy gear they called Navigator suits. The simulator was showing her scenes Donna said were taken from the visor of a woman called Lexie. She was the other female with the orbs and she had yet to meet her. The gear might be
strange, but it was making her feel powerful in a way nothing else in her new life was. Of all the things she’d woken to, the Navigator gear was one of the few things giving her the strength to carry on.
Patting her arm patiently, Donna said, “It’s a lot to absorb. Give yourself some time.”
“If what you say is true then time is something we don’t have.”
“Now, you’re getting it,” the crazy man said confidently. “You’re gonna need to catch up fast, but we’ll learn together, Ally. You’re gonna be okay.”
While they were recovering in their beds, he’d said his whole family had been killed by the critters. As soon as he was trained, he was going to hit the road and kill them for it. When she’d asked him why he would risk his life that way, he’d said that he only lived to destroy them, and he would keep killing them until the day he died. She’d understood his grief at losing his family was so deep he no longer wanted to live, but she thought it was a waste of a good man. Her own life was deeply fractured, but she was grateful she was still alive, and she wished he felt the same way.
Not understanding what her new eyes were showing her, she felt a sudden spark of frustration. “I don’t want this. It’s bullshit.”
“It is what it is, Ally,” Donna replied steadily. “None of us wanted this, but it’s happened and now we have to deal with it.”
Giving her paranoia a voice, she replied uncertainly, “I…I don’t believe you. I think you’re tricking me.”
“Why would we do that?” The man asked in reasonable tone.
“To make me look stupid.”
She heard him chuckle. “That’s a very self-centric view. Do you really think the whole world conspired just to make fool out of you?”
She agreed it would have been a lot of work for very little gain. Sounding slightly sulky, she replied, “I s’pose not.”
“Come with me.”
“What do you mean? Where are you going?”
“Outside the wire. Come with me and I’ll show you the truth.”
Dayton had told her she was well enough to leave whenever she was ready, and Donna had taken her to the dormitory where everyone slept. Everything she needed was here, but she couldn’t spend her life wondering if she’d gone as crazy as the man next to her had. He might be nuts, but he’d only ever been kind to her. She needed to find the truth, and if she couldn’t believe what she was being told then she’d have to go looking for it.
Deciding to trust her instincts, she replied, “Yeah, alright. When are you leaving?”
CHAPTER THIRTY: Blind luck (Bill)
He’d brought them to the reserve base built into the mountain. With its blast wall and thickset security controlled door, they would never get inside, with or without the added strength of the Navigator’s hydraulics. Fortunately, NORAD had many entrances. Some were at the end of long underground corridors, others connected the site with military bases in the vicinity, and another was a single trapdoor close to the entrance. Clearly, the designers didn’t think much of being trapped under the mountain, and they’d designed the bunker according to their own paranoia. Of course, none of this was general knowledge, and if he hadn’t been privy to the power corridors of the Pentagon, he would never have known.
The winding road that had led them there had been free of abandoned vehicles and critters, making him wonder if they’d found the site. There was no reason why they should know about the satellites and their importance to them. In theory, there should be no trouble once the Navigators got inside the bunker.
Speaking through his earpiece, he said, “NORAD is a fully contained site. It has its own water supply, power generators and air recycling pumps. It’s basically like a village with roads and buildings inside.”
Tuck was surveying the mountain skeptically. “They put buildings inside that mountain?”
“They call them buildings, but they’re more like prefab offices where certain functions take place. There’s buildings for combat operations and satellite maintenance.”
“How many people are in there?” Leon asked.
“There should have been about seven hundred people working in there, but some might have left and it’s possible some turned into critters.”
“Do you think people would have abandoned their posts?”
“It’s hard to say. Having been in a bunker during the main attack, people see abandoning their families in a very different light once it’s really happening.”
“But it should be clear of critters, right?”
He shrugged. “It’s probably the most secure site in the world. I don’t see how the critters would even know it exists, but some of the people inside could have turned.”
Even as he said it, he had a suspicion the critters did know about NORAD, but he couldn’t explain why. From the moment the invasion had started, they seemed to know exactly what to do that would hurt them the most. With the single tactic of randomly transforming people into critters, they’d taken out their government command structure and the military. It was probably the one thing they could have done to break their control over the country. Culling the population until there were more critters left than humans was another smart move. Introducing a weapon like the goo, that held people prisoner while killing and absorbing them, was yet another stroke of genius. The surviving people were now hungry, tired and terrified, meaning they were less likely to offer any resistance. It would make it easier to hold them in the prison camps being formed around what were once heavily populated regions.
There were now more critters than there were people. Only humans could have fought against their invasion, but now they were broken and the critters had successfully taken control. In just over a month, the critters had positioned themselves to become the most dominant species on the planet.
If he stopped thinking of them as overgrown insects and thought of them an intelligent enemy, he developed a very different view of their invasion. Gaining intelligence about your enemy’s strengths, weaknesses, strongholds and weapons was mandatory in any warfare. Assuming their attack hadn’t been a random freak of nature then it meant they had a plan, and it had worked too well for them not to have information about their defenses. If his analysis was correct, they knew about NORAD.
Batting Leon’s armored shoulder, he said, “But let’s assume they do know about the bunker.”
“Why would we assume that?”
“Because that way we’re prepared for the worst case scenario.”
“What is the worst case scenario?”
“They’re in the bunker in force.”
Sounding annoyed, Leon asked, “How would they even get inside it?”
Inwardly sighing, he reminded himself that Leon was an excellent combat leader, and he needed to let the kid have his airspace. It was only through their combined views of any problem that they would find the best solution. Even knowing this, he still had to bite his tongue and allow him to analyze each problem in his own way. With every engagement, he was growing more confident in Leon’s skills, and he prepared to answer him aggressively, knowing it would make him think even harder about his position.
Interrupting their argument before it got underway, Ark said, “We know they tunnel, Leon. NORAD might be reinforced, but it was never built to stop an oversized cockroach capable of burrowing.”
“Yeah, okay,” Leon replied grudgingly. “So, how many could be in there?”
That was a difficult question to answer. The critters always seemed to travel in force, rarely choosing to fight alone. He wasn’t sure if they fought as a group by intent or instinct, but if they understood the strategic importance of NORAD then he believed they would be holding the bunker in force.
“Let’s assume there’s a lot of them,” he replied.
“If that were the case, wouldn’t everyone in there be dead?” Leon asked.
“Not necessarily. There are sixteen buildings inside the mountain. Each one can be contained and survivors could form a stronghold to defend th
emselves.”
Ark said, “Okay, so the place is crawling with critters, but we have some survivors holed up in one or more of the buildings. How will we know which of the sixteen buildings to check?”
Leon objected forcefully, “That’s not the main problem, Ark. How will we even get past a swarm of critters to even look?”
It was a fair question, but they could use the buildings as cover. Their walls were made of metal and should form a barrier no critter could break through. Less critters could attack them if they were in the corridors, and they could move from one building to the next by using Tank to clear the gaps between them.
“Good point, Leon. I suggest you run through the corridors in the buildings. Anyone who’s alive will know you’re there, and Tank can blast the doors and gaps between the buildings.”
“Assuming anyone’s left alive, how do we get them out if the place is overrun?”
It was another good question, and it would depend on how many people they needed to bring out. “I don’t know. You’ll have to play that one on the fly. If you find no one then you can just leave. If you find a few people, then you should be able to give them cover. If there’s too many people, it’ll take multiple trips unless you find another option once you’re inside.”
It was a flaky plan, but the best they could do without any information. The thick, reinforced walls of NORAD didn’t allow them to use the visors to see inside, so they had no idea what to expect. In theory, the walls should have also prevented the critters from tunneling in, but he wasn’t confident they hadn’t found a way. There were more than the published entrances into NORAD, and he was sure there were many he knew nothing about. Even if the critters couldn’t make it through the walls, all they had to do was find an open entrance. If NORAD had gone the way of the bunker he was in, then some of the people might have become just as frustrated as he did and left. All it would have taken was for someone to have accidentally left one of the doors open, and the critters would be inside the bunker.
With a plan he knew was fraught with risk, he said, “Let’s get it done.”