by Chris Lowry
“Who was that?” Lutz asked.
“Robert Frost,” said Babe.
“I haven’t heard that since high school.”
“Lucky. My Dad quoted it almost every day.”
“I know this place,” Doc pleaded. “I know where we are.”
“That makes two of us Doc. We’re in a damn field exposed to every fucking Lick that takes the time to look. We don’t have time to stay out in the open like this.”
“I mean, the place where our lab was, the place where we worked on it,” Doc couldn’t stop grinning. “It’s here.”
“Where here?” Lt perked up.
His movement put the rest of the men on high alert and they readied their weapons for a trap.
“Not here,” said the Doc as he pointed to the ground.
“You ain’t making much sense.”
Doc took a deep breath and composed himself.
“As we were walking, the trees and terrain changed. We’re in a new part of the country, are we not?”
Lt looked at Danish, who nodded.
“Not much difference,” said Danish. “We moved from pine country over to Hill country.”
“Yes!” Doc clapped his hands with a small cheer.
“Well good for you Doc,” said Lt. “I still ain’t happy about being out here in the open.”
He motioned everyone to get moving. They did.
“But this view,” Doc continued, opening his arms to take in the expanse of the horizon and sky. “I’ve seen this view. From a road. That road will lead us to the lab.”
“Alright,” Lt said to his back. “I’m game. This the robot lab?”
“More than that,” Doc rubbed his hands. “You wait. You’ll be surprised.”
Lt watched Steph and Jake, but neither reacted any different than his men as they continued through the field.
He didn’t relax until they reached the cover of the trees across the way and froze when a voice called out from above them.
“One move and you’re dead.”
CHAPTER
“If you shoot me, Sherill, I’m going to fucking kill you,” Lt said from a frozen pose.
“Worthless son of a bitch like you, I’d be saving the Lick a world of trouble.”
“Don’t talk about our mom like that,” Lt shifted around and grinned up at a tree branch.
Jake couldn’t see anything at first, not until the man called Sherill moved. He was covered toe to head in camouflage, blended into the bark of the tree so well, even his gun was hidden.
He put the sling over his shoulder and dropped from the branch.
“Heard you might be coming.”
Lt glanced up at the large man towering over him by almost six inches and twice as wide.
The size of his chest and shoulders stretched the thin rifle strap to the point of bursting, but somehow it held.
He had a bald head, painted like the rest of his face to match the bark.
“They set you out here to wait?”
“Nah,” Sherill fell in beside Lt as they continued through the woods. He didn’t bother introducing him to the rest as they fell in line behind them.
“Just regular sentry.”
“Kind of far out, ain’t you?”
“They want advance warning. HQ was doing some secret squirrel shit, and my boss didn’t like it. Said it had the Licks buzzing like hornets.”
“Ain’t easy for Lizards to do.”
Sherill hiccupped a quick laugh.
“No, I suppose it’s not. Either way, I’m supposed to fire off a warning shot and then take out as many as I can to buy time.”
“That’s kamikaze shit.”
Sherill nodded.
“Yeah, it don’t sound right to me either. That’s why I was up in the tree. Licks have trouble looking up.”
Lt whistled low, under his breath.
“They that desperate?”
Sherill shrugged again.
“Hard times, brother.”
“Hard times.”
They walked on in silence for a few more minutes.
“You the reason they’re all riled up?”
“Now Sherill, you know I’ve been doing my damned best to keep ‘em riled up for awhile now.”
“More than usual?”
“We hit a supply train.”
“They had supplies?”
Lt could almost hear his stomach gurgle in hunger.
“And them.” Lt used a thumb to point over his shoulder.
Sherill looked over his shoulder and eyed Doc, Steph and Jake.
“Who’re they?”
Lt shrugged.
“Don’t know yet. He says he’s a Doc, the pede kind, not the medicine kind.”
“What kind of pede?”
“Robots, right Doc?”
“Nanotechnology and robotics, yes.”
“Sounds like a pede,” Sherill grinned.
“You should hear if I let him go on. Likes the sound of his own voice.”
“More than you like yours?”
“You’re hurting my feelings. Nobody likes the sound of their own voice more than I like mine,” Lt grinned.
They reached cleared off space in the trees, fifteen feet across. The felled trees had been used to build a wooden fort around metal buildings.
“I’m not coming in,” Sherill told the Lt.
“Escort and sentry?”
The big man shrugged.
“Told you. Secret squirrels.”
“Ours is not to wonder why,” Lt sighed.
“All I do is wonder,” Sherill grunted and turned back into the woods.
Lt watched him go three steps, then the man stepped behind a tree and disappeared.
He couldn’t even hear his footsteps crushing the leaves.
“Babe,” he called. “Lutz. Take Leroy and circle this compound, meet up on the other side.”
“What if they start shooting at us?” Babe stared at the pointed tips of the logs used to build the barricade.
“They know we’re coming, they ain’t gonna shoot us.”
The men grumbled as he left and didn’t hear him say, “I hope,” under his breath.
CHAPTER
Lt led the way around the wooden fort. He could feel eyes watching him from the woods, patches of silence in the trees where the insects weren’t humming.
More sentries. Watching the open space from the forest to the fence. A killing field.
He kept the woods close to his side, watching the fence, then trees, then fence again, head on a swivel.
He would have felt better with his rifle up, but that might be too aggressive for the men watching him.
Sure, they were on the same side but he didn’t need someone with an itchy trigger finger getting scared and starting a bonnie and clyde shoot out.
Three men waited for him as he approached the road to the gate.
“Is that you?” the tallest one called out.
“Last time I checked.”
“No accounting for taste,” he said as Lt got closer and held out his hand.
The gripped forearms and the taller man pulled him into a one armed shoulder hug.
“Damn brother, it’s good to see you.”
Lt stared at the taller man, thin face brushed with a dark beard, long hair windswept and brushed back.
“That ain’t regulation,” he joked, and lifted his own hat to show his dirty locks.
“We do what we can. If I had known they were going to send you to talk, the reception would have been different.”
“This is Matthews,” Lt said over his shoulder to Danish and Crockett. “We did some work together back at the beginning.”
“Work!” Matthews boomed, his white teeth gleaming under his beard.
“Not what you’re doing now, but close.”
“Yeah, we had some laughs,” Lt squared off on him. “But now we’re on to something different. You get the Colonel’s plan.”
Matthews huffed.
“
I guess you know it. I don’t like it.”
Lt nodded.
“I figured you ain’t the only one. I’m here to ask nice.”
“You know what I liked best about the breakdown in command structure?” Matthews couldn’t wipe the grin off his face. “They left me the hell alone to survive out here. Until they need something.”
“How many you got in there?”
Babe, Lutz and Leroy appeared around the curve of the fence, moving slow and watching.
“Company of men, plus families,” Matthews answered. “We took in a couple of towns that were overrun.”
Lt raised his eyebrows in disbelief. Matthews knew why.
“It doesn’t look big, I know, but that’s by design. We dug in, have half a damn city underground. We’re on top of an old mine shaft, so that helped. And we’ve got double floors inside the structures.”
Lt studied the fence, working the math out in his head for circumference.
“Still,” he grunted. “You must damn near be sleeping on top of each other.”
“Hot racking triple bunks,” Matthews groaned, using an expression to talk about three story bunk beds and sleeping on them in shifts.
“Fuck.”
“You can say that again.”
A bomb exploded behind Matthews in the middle of his group of men. It tossed Lt up and back in a concussive wave that shook the trees.
Babe, Leroy and Lutz were knocked aside.
Lt rolled over in time to see Jake drag Steph into the woods. His ears were ringing from the explosion, and another followed on it’s heels, taking out the gate, splintering the thick trees.
Lt pawed for his gun, searching for the source of the artillery.
Lick hover transports zoomed up the only road in a straight line toward the compound.
His hand landed on his weapon. He rolled over, flipped the switch and sent a three round burst into the lead hover craft.
The bullets bounced off the alloy as the men hidden in the trees opened up on the attackers.
Babe sprinted out of the smoke and confusion, grabbed Lt by the arm and lifted him up.
“Lutz!” Lt screamed.
“He’s got Leroy,” Babe yelled back as lasers erupted from the convoy, slicing through trees.
Branches fell, the tops of trees sliced in half jumbled down, the screams of men as they fell adding to the din.
Babe dragged Lt back the way they came.
He saw Matthews dead on the ground, blue eyes staring at the smoke filled sky, and sent another three rounds into the Lick convoy.
More blasts tore up the ground between them and the roadway in.
Babe shoved him behind a tree and took cover behind another.
Lt shook his head, trying to clear it, but that just made the bells inside gong louder.
He stared around for Danish, for Crockett, and Waldo, saw them leaning around trees, shooting rounds into the Licks.
They were using single shots, careful aim knocking Lick soldiers from the back of the transports.
He couldn’t see the Doc, or Jake and Steph. Leroy and Lutz hadn’t come back either.
They needed to regroup, he thought. A superior force was bearing down on them, unknown numbers.
“Babe!” he yelled.
The big man stopped shooting and ducked back behind his tree.
“Get gone!” he screamed their code for strategic retreat.
Babe nodded, passed the order to Crockett and Danish. He didn’t wait to see if they followed as he dashed through the woods away from the battle.
Lt waited for Lutz. He glared around the tree and took a breath to scream out his name.
A black dot dropped from the sky, hovered over the fort and exploded.
The force of the wave washed down into the compound and across the woods around it, knocking everyone inside and within twenty meters of the fence out cold.
CHAPTER
The Nestmate stood in the back of the last transport and watched the bomb explode.
This far away, she could only feel a slight ripple in the air as the wave washed over them, but several of the Lick soldiers in the car in front of them winced.
The design was modified from a bunker buster bomb made by the humans. This one was created to explode mid-air, and like an EMP to electronics, this bomb turned off humans.
A temporary short circuit in their electrical systems that caused blackout and an hour or more of unconsciousness.
She clapped her claws together in joy, her tongue practically dancing in the air as she tasted the crisp tart scent of laser burns, the smell of cooked human flesh, and more. Explosions, fear, rent dirt and the gunpowder humans used to propel their projectile weapons.
All of it delicious to her senses.
She turned to see the Lick Commander staring at her, a peculiar expression his face.
She was Nestmate to His Eminence, but one of dozens, and he had never looked at her the way this Commander stared.
It stirred something in her, a longing. She hissed in a quick breath, her mouth open in a pant, and watched his eyes stare harder at her.
“Hunting humans,” she said. “I am not used to it.”
“This battle is nothing,” he waved a claw but didn’t stop staring at her. “The resistance they have left is meaningless.”
He said it to sound confident, but watched her eyes drift away from him and back to the battle a half mile further up the road.
He should have extolled her bravery, her willingness to participate in battle. It would have kept the sheen of excitement on her snout and put him in better graces with her.
But instead, he had told the truth, and regretted it.
The shooting from the woods died out as his soldiers fanned into the trees to capture the survivors.
More soldiers poured into the compound to begin the mop up operation. Each body would be bound and tossed into the back of one of the hovercraft, to be transported back to base to serve the Lick.
He reached out, slow and brushed the skin on her arm with the tip of his claw.
She jumped, but did not pull away.
“There is danger,” he hissed. “I did not mean to downplay it. I can still hear the fighters in the woods. It is brave to stay so close to it.”
He watched the muscles in her neck ripple in pleasure, the tongue slick in and out of her snout, searching for the smell of humans, of fighting.
“This is what you have been doing?” she said, her voice purring in admiration.
“This and more.”
“So different from hiding on the Nest ship and ordering underlings through long range transmission.”
He noted her use of the word hiding, her eyes still glowing with excitement.
“When they are done,” he said, moving so he was closer to her, their arms brushing together. “We will draw closer.”
She nodded. The Lick Commander was not sure, but it felt as if she leaned against him with a little more pressure than before.
Not fear, he thought. Desire.
His own tongue tasted the wind. He detected fear from the enemy, the sour tang of running and sweat drifting on the wind, almost overpowered by the smell of smoke and destruction but still there.
Run, he said to himself. For I will have my pick of who is inside the compound.
CHAPTER
Jack ran with Steph through the woods. They dodged trees, leaped over fallen boughs and put as much distance between the road leading to the fort and the battle as they could.
Until he tripped.
His foot caught on a root, sent him sliding face first on a carpet of leaves. He heard a whiz over his head and seconds later, the crack of a rifle shot.
Steph dropped to her knees next to him, pitched forward.