Millie just doesn't understand, he thought sadly. This land has been in my family for generations. This part of Kansas has always been known as Peaster's Farm... and it will stay Peaster's Farm for as long as I live and breathe.
Once again, Oswald Peaster regretted his eldest son's patriotic decision to join the Army. Instead of taking over the farm and carrying on the family tradition, First Lieutenant Michael Oswald Peaster had died on some forgotten, bloodstained jungle trail in Vietnam twenty-seven years before.
What a waste, Oswald thought as he set up the coffee to brew. Nearly thirty years and I'm still mourning him. It's a bad thing when a father outlives his son.
Oswald sighed and rubbed his shoulder again.
Neither of the Peaster girls wanted a life on the farm, he thought. Not that I blame them. Farm life is harder on women than it is on men.
Oswald thought about his two daughters. He realized he hadn't seen either of them in at least three months. He knew that Millie missed them both terribly.
Anna had married a grain dealer and lived in far-away Wichita. No children yet, but Millie was hopeful. Eleanor, still single, lived closer - she was a beautician in Russell.
Maybe we'll drive down and visit Ellie this Sunday, Oswald thought with a smile. Millie would sure like that.
Absentmindedly, he switched on the radio. Instead of the farm report, he found he was listening to the network news feed out of Alton. The news anchor was droning on in a flat voice.
"The creature that emerged from the Gulf of Mexico is still ravaging coastal cities on the Yucatan Peninsula. Yesterday, the monster destroyed the airport in the city of Merida. Elements of the Mexican Army and Air Force are converging on the area for a possible confrontation..."
Oswald noticed seven cakes lined up on the kitchen table. Five of them had chocolate icing. The other two were topped with vanilla. A piece of cake would sure go good with my coffee, he mused.
Oswald's mouth Watered, but he resisted the temptation. The cakes were for the bake sale. And anyway, his doctor had warned him off fatty food because his cholesterol level was too high.
What do they expect from an old man? he wondered. I'm seventy-two now - how much longer do they want me alive and paying taxes, anyway?
Finally, the coffee was done, and Oswald Peaster poured himself a steaming mugful. Then he sat down at the table and listened as the announcer droned on.
What time does Paul Harvey come on? he wondered.
"In other news, it's just sixty-six days until doomsday, and according to a NASA spokesman, Operation EarthFirst is ahead of schedule. In just ten more days, the space shuttle Discovery will launch from Cape Canaveral, carrying a payload of nuclear weapons into Earth's orbit. These weapons will be fired at the approaching asteroids in the hope of destroying them. In a statement issued by -"
Oswald snorted and switched over to the farm report.
The end of the world, he scoffed. Pastor Bob has been predicting the end of time since Millie and I started going to his church.
It ain't happened yet, and I don't reckon it will happen this time, either...
Oswald took another sip of his coffee, still eyeing the freshly baked cakes spread out in front of him. But as he reached over to scoop up a fingerful of vanilla icing, the electricity suddenly went off.
"Damn," Oswald muttered.
Setting down his cup, Oswald heard his two hunting dogs barking. They sounded loud and frantic, even this far away from their kennel behind the barn.
Then the six cows in the barn joined the chorus. They began to moo in fear and panic. Even the passel of chickens Millie kept in the yard began to squawk. Then Oswald heard another sound, a faraway rumbling, like distant thunder.
"What the hell?" Oswald muttered cantankerously.
With a grunt, the old man rose and rushed to the back door. As a precaution, he pulled down his double-barreled shotgun from the rack on the wall. He cracked the shotgun open and loaded both barrels with buckshot.
"Ozzie... Ozzie... what's all the noise about?"
Oswald heard his wife call to him from the bedroom. Her voice was still thick with sleep. The old farmer ignored her call. He hefted his weapon and stepped out onto the back porch.
The morning sun had just risen, and dew still covered the flowers and grass. Everything appeared normal, but almost as soon as he stepped outside, Oswald heard the rumbling again.
No sign of a storm, he thought, looking at the morning sky.
He stepped to the edge of the porch and stared off into the distance, where a copse of century-old oak trees stood. As Oswald watched, the branches on the trees began to sway and shake, though there was no wind.
Then he felt a stirring under his work boots. He took two steps backward as the ground under the old house began to quake like jelly.
In the barn, the cows grew even more fearful, and the dogs redoubled their frantic barking, which became shrill with fear.
Oswald stared in the direction of his barn and silo as the earth continued to shake.
Suddenly, the rumbling grew louder. It filled the air. It sounded to Oswald like the stampeding feet of a thousand impossibly huge creatures. And the noise seemed to move closer to him with each passing second.
Oswald Peaster's blood turned cold.
Quickly, he rushed back into the house.
"Millie," he cried. "Get down here! Something is wrong. We have to leave!" Then the farmer went back outside.
Again, he stared off in the distance as the thunderous rumbling increased in intensity. He heard a crashing sound. He turned toward the barn.
As he watched in terror and disbelief, the tall silo with PEASTER'S FARM painted on its side fell to the ground and splintered into fragments with a loud crash.
Then the barn itself seemed to explode. Wooden boards flew outward, bouncing across the barnyard and scattering the terrified chickens. Oswald raised his arm to cover his face even as a nail struck his elbow, bringing tears of pain.
As pieces of the shattered barn bounced against his farmhouse, the old man looked up again.
Oswald Peaster watched, awestruck, as the fields around his house began to move. The entire farm, and the land around it, was crowded with gigantic roving insects. They looked like impossibly huge praying mantises. The largest of the creatures - a shiny green insect at least fifty or sixty feet long - knocked down the last section of the barn that remained standing.
As the structure collapsed, one of the cows broke free from its pen. The terrified animal burst from the ruins as another insect crawled over the shattered silo and instantly snatched it up with its huge, curved claws.
The giant insect lifted the cow to its mandibles, and they snapped closed, biting the cow in two. The head and front legs flopped to the ground, the cow's eyes still alive and rolling. Almost instantly, another rampaging insect snatched it up and devoured the carcass.
"Oh, my gawd..." Oswald moaned.
He rushed back into the farmhouse and slammed the door behind him. He locked and bolted it.
"Millie!" he screamed. "We got to get out of here!"
But it was already too late for Oswald and Millie Peaster.
Before the old man reached the stairs, the house began to rock violently. Plaster dropped on Oswald's shoulders, and a beam fell from the ceiling, smashing the kitchen table.
Millie Peaster's cakes smashed on the linoleum floor.
Again, the house shook as the huge insect slammed against it. Oswald tumbled backward and bounced against the sink, dropping the shotgun.
When he bent down to retrieve his weapon, he slipped on splattered icing and fell to the floor. Upstairs, he heard his wife's horrified screams and the sound of walls shattering.
"Millie!" he cried, struggling to his feet. "I'm coming!"
Clutching his shotgun, Oswald rushed to the steps. But when he looked up, instead of the upstairs hallway, he saw daylight. The creatures had ripped off the roof and part of the second floor! Oswald heard his wife s
cream again. But this time, her cries were cut off - as if Millie had been swept away in a tornado. Oswald remembered the cow and gagged.
"Millie..." Oswald moaned as he staggered up the stairs. When he reached the top, the house quaked again.
A shadow fell over Oswald Peaster, blocking the daylight that streamed through the hole torn in his roof. The old man raised his head and stared upward - right into the multifaceted blue-green eyes of one of the gigantic monster insects.
"Get away from my farm!" Oswald shouted, his legs spread wide. Despite the crumbling house all around him, he stood his ground and aimed the shotgun at the slavering, snapping mandibles of the insect monster.
"I said, get off my farm!" He squeezed the trigger and fired both barrels at point-blank range, but the shotgun blast didn't even slow the creature. The insect closed its gripping claw around the old man's waist. Under the crushing pressure of its grip, Oswald finally gave up.
The useless gun dropped from his limp hand as the man was lifted high into the air. The last thing that Oswald Peaster saw was the insect's dark, looming, gigantic maw as the bony mandibles snapped shut, crushing the life out of him.
* * *
Within three hours, the swarm of gigantic insects, which numbered nearly a thousand, had swept across Osborne County. The ravenous creatures devoured everything in their path. Fields of grain, storehouses of feed, livestock, poultry - and even people - were consumed by the marauding insects.
By noon, the authorities had been alerted to the danger. The National Guard was sent to investigate the destruction, and military units moved from Fort Leavenworth toward the insect swarm. But for many, it was too little, and far too late.
Rural communities had been destroyed, their citizens devoured without any warning whatsoever. No one knew where the mysterious creatures came from, or where they were headed.
By late afternoon, dazed refugees with faraway stares and tales of horror began arriving in the surrounding towns of Russell and Alton. At first they came in a trickle, their faces pale with shock. Later on, as Word of the monstrous swarm spread via the Emergency Broadcast Network, the trickle became a flood.
Cars, trucks, buses, even tractors and horse drawn wagons, jammed the few highways out of Osborne County.
At sunset, a National Guard unit arrived in the largest town near the epicenter of the invasion, a town called Natoma. As three Blackhawk helicopters, fully armed and carrying a complement of troopers, flew over the beleaguered town, the National Guardsmen could not believe what they saw below them.
Natoma was in ruins.
Houses, churches, and businesses had been destroyed, and there was absolutely no sign of life. Even the trees had been stripped of their leaves, and many had been devoured whole. Only splintered stumps remained.
The commander of the guard unit ordered his troops to search the shattered streets in an attempt to find possible survivors who might be trapped in the rubble. At ten-thirty that night, they were rewarded for their trouble. One of the soldiers thought he heard a baby crying. Within thirty minutes, the National Guardsmen had spread out and located the source of the sound.
The men frantically dug through the smashed remains of a two-family house until a little baby girl was finally pulled from the wreckage.
Despite the destruction, the child was unharmed.
No other survivors were found. Though the soldiers searched through the night and into the next morning, they never even found a corpse.
The giant insects had eaten everything - and everyone - in Natoma, Kansas.
9
ARMED CONFLICT
Thursday May 27, 1999, 12:01 P.M.
The auditorium of Fort Hays State University
Hays, Kansas
Joint Services Military Command Headquarters press conference
On the banks of Big Creek, between the town of Hays and the natural wonder called the Cathedral of the Plains, an emergency command headquarters was established to deal with the crisis.
The command center, established in less than thirty-six hours, was charged with the task of halting the advance of the swarm of mysterious insect giants that had appeared overnight and decimated a good portion of Osborne County.
So far, the troops in Kansas were undermanned and undersupplied for the battle ahead. But that was quickly changing. Route 70, which cuts horizontally through the center of Kansas, was jammed with military vehicles coming from both directions. Trucks, tanks, personnel carriers, Hummers, and mobile artillery choked the highways running into Ellis County.
The airport in Hays, a town of less than 20,000 souls, had been taken over by two A-10 attack fighter wings.
Miles away, the municipal airport in the city of Hutchinson also had been commandeered by the military for air supply and support. McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita had been tapped to supply fighter and bomber cover when and if needed. It was the largest military operation conducted inside the borders of the United States since the Civil War.
The U.S. military forces were being helped by unseasonably cool temperatures in Kansas. kaijuologists conjectured that the species of gigantic insects - dubbed Kamacuras - evolved in much warmer conditions. Hence the creatures were dormant in cold weather.
A civilian adviser and animal behaviorist dissented. She suggested that the creatures just weren't hungry anymore.
But whatever the reason, after the initial decimation caused by the marauding swarm, the insects had halted their advance.
Surveillance photographs taken by Air Force spy planes and satellites in Earth's orbit showed that the swarm - which numbered over a thousand individual insects, each measuring between one and two hundred feet in length - now rested between Plainville and the banks of the Saline River.
No communication had been established with Plainville, or nearby Codell, since the crisis began. The authorities assumed that these towns were completely destroyed and their citizens devoured.
However, as General Burt Selkirk noted in his opening remarks during the first televised press conference, this information was conjecture.
General Selkirk was the overall commander of the joint military operation. A short, stocky man who had risen to prominence by commanding an armored division in Desert Storm, Selkirk was a no-nonsense fighting man who spoke his mind. He had little patience with civilians, especially members of the press. But the press didn't feel the same way about the general. Selkirk was colorful, and the media loved him.
On this cool, sunny afternoon, the auditorium on the campus of Fort Hays State University was filled to capacity. Reporters from all over the world listened to the general outline his plan to destroy the Kamacuras. On the stage with Selkirk was Dr. Max Birchwood, of G-Force USA, and Dr. Chandra Mishra, the co-discoverer of the Reyes-Mishra Asteroid Swarm.
After opening remarks, General Selkirk turned the proceedings over to the two scientists.
"As far as we can determine, the swarm of Kamacuras is of extraterrestrial origin," Dr. Chandra Mishra announced to the stunned journalists.
"The seeds of these creatures were deposited on our world mere weeks ago, during the violent meteor storm that appeared over North America," Dr. Mishra continued.
"We have found evidence of a kind of parasitic alien DNA in meteorite fragments discovered in a farmer's field. We think that DNA somehow bonded with that of a praying mantis, and the alien infection spread to create the creatures we call Kamacuras."
"The horde of gigantic insects has an extraterrestrial origin, unlike the creature now rampaging through Mexico," Dr. Birchwood interjected, "which is of terrestrial origin -"
"Do you mean Varan?" Peter Jimson of ABC News interrupted, shouting from a front row.
Dr. Birchwood nodded and scratched his dark beard. "We've studied blood and tissue samples of the creature you call Varan, obtained after a failed attack by the Mexican Army. From these samples, we have concluded that the kaiju in Mexico evolved right here on Earth -"
"Wait a second," Jimson inter
rupted again. "Are you asking us to believe that a giant flying reptile evolved naturally?"
"Well, first of all, Varan doesn't fly," Birchwood corrected. "We speculate that it can somehow separate the oxygen and hydrogen in water. The creature then expels the oxygen and pumps the hydrogen molecules into sacs along its torso. So you see, Varan actually floats, or glides. It does not fly. Of course, this is all speculation."
The scientist paused before continuing.
"As to your second question... nobody said that Varan evolved naturally. We think that chemical and industrial pollution on the Mexican subcontinent may have contributed to the monster's creation -"
But General Selkirk cut the scientist off. "That information can be supplied later," the general announced. "I have a lot of work to do, so let's get to the business at hand."
General Selkirk rose and stood before a detailed map of Kansas.
"At 0600 tomorrow morning, we are going to attack the Kamacuras from the air," he announced. A hush fell over the chaotic assembly as he pointed to the map.
"Originally, the Air Force planned to carpet-bomb the swarm from high altitudes, using B-52 bombers. It was felt that this would eradicate the horde before it moved again and before the creatures began their reproductive cycle.
"But because there is still a chance that survivors may be hiding in the area and unable to flee, the joint command has decided to try a surgical strike first, using A-10 Thunderbolt II attack aircraft. Employing their 30mm cannons, along with air-to-ground missiles and high-explosive incendiary bombs, these low-flying ‘Warthogs' will cut a swath of destruction through the swarm."
A buzz rose among the audience, but the general ignored the reporters.
"As you know, the A-10 ‘Warthog' is a tank killer, and we feel sure that its armor-piercing cannons will easily penetrate the thick exoskeletons of the Kamacuras."
"But what if the swarm starts to move again!" Nick Gordon, INN's award-winning science correspondent, demanded.
"We have tanks and heavy artillery surrounding the swarm. At any sign of movement, they will be deployed, and heavy bombing will commence from the air, despite the risk to any survivors."
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