Zombies versus Aliens versus Vampires versus Dinosaurs

by Jeff Abugov

  “Where the bloody hell did they come from?”

  *****

  The Alien Commander was asking the very same thing.

  He had thus far been quite impressed with Peyton. Long before the battle began, every possible human decision had been anticipated, and Peyton consistently made the right ones—often the low-probability ones. He had declined to weaponize his planes a second time, which would have been the typical, emotional, cocky human response, and he had kept his overseas troops overseas, which prevented the Dwellers from sweeping easily through Afro-Eurasia. That decision alone had added months to his master plan, yet still he was enjoying the chess game. But this?

  He watched the human advance through his scopes from the rear of his infinite battalion, wondering who these new soldiers could be. He knew that Peyton had been training civilian volunteers, but it would be foolhardy to send them into battle with so little preparation—and Peyton had proven to be anything but foolish.

  But the larger question was why? Given the overwhelming strength of the Dweller forces, it was sheer folly for Peyton to send his soldiers straight at them. There were but two possibilities: (1) the humans had some new secret weapon that had been overlooked by his spies, which was highly unlikely. The Commander had received the report about a new secret strategy but that did not imply a secret weapon, and this reckless move was no strategy at all, or (2) Peyton realized he could never win and was just trying to get the whole sordid mess over quickly, but that was also unlikely given what the Commander knew about humans.

  The move was utterly unanticipated—but even the unanticipated had been anticipated. He coughed an order to his Sub-Commander who in turn coughed the order down the ranks. On a dime, the Dweller soldiers altered their movements and ceased the extermination. With efficient perfection, the swarms took new strategic positions on roads and rooftops, every bug having known in advance precisely where he or she should be. Then they waited to see what came next.

  *****

  “Look at him!” Peyton shouted merrily from his director’s seat in the WTLV control room. Although most monitors displayed the various locations of the battle to come, Peyton’s eyes were glued to the one that showed a close-up of the Alien Commander. “He doesn’t know what the hell I’m doing, and it’s making him nuts!”

  “Has the old man lost his marbles?” Peyton asked as if he were the Alien Commander, then answered his own question. “Yes, I have, you ugly son of a bitch!”

  He smiled at Laurel who stood on the side of the room, watching the monitors as well. “You may have just single-handedly saved mankind, ma’am.”

  Laurel forced a confident smile back. “Let’s hope so.”

  The truth was, she was a nervous wreck. She had put all her faith in a species that she had despised for as long as she could remember. She knew they were lying, deceitful, self-absorbed monsters, and that their leader possessed those qualities more than any other. There was a better-than-not chance this was one big trick, that the vampires had worked out some kind of deal with the aliens, or that they were so arrogant that they sought to take out the aliens and humans combined to gain the planet for themselves—there was no telling what these fiends could have up their sleeve. Single-handedly saved mankind? She may have single-handedly destroyed it.

  Why did she do it? she asked herself as she watched Julius on the monitor. Why did she bring him here in the first place? Why did she convince Peyton to bring the monster into the fold? Why did she insist they put that giant clock on the wall to count down the hours, minutes, and seconds till dawn to protect the vampires from sunlight? To “protect” the vampires? What was she thinking? Why did she do this?

  Because, she answered herself, something deep within had told her that Julius was on the level, that Julius could be trusted—that Julius was, in fact, good!

  But she also remembered thinking that she needed more time to grieve for Michael and that all her instincts were off.

  “You better not be messing with me, monster,” she whispered to the monitor.

  *****

  “You’d better not be messing with us,” Major Denison told the senior vampire as he led the forces to battle.

  Julius maintained a mere half step behind Denison to confirm the soldier’s military seniority—that had been part of the agreement, and Julius felt it a small concession under the circumstances. Right behind him walked Prague and Africa, behind them thousands more of their kind, behind them a few hundred remaining human soldiers, and above them the military’s sole surviving helicopter.

  “I was against this from the start,” Denison continued. “And I still am. But my Mistress takes you at your word, and I take her at hers. But if you double-cross us, I will dedicate my life to destroying you. No, not vampires anymore, only you.”

  “It will be what it will be,” Julius replied with a smile.

  “That’s not very reassuring.”

  “My dear Denison,” the vampire went on. “If I told you that you need not worry, you would worry nonetheless. Therefore, ‘it will be what it will be’ is the only truth of our moment. Qué será será.”

  Denison only grunted, and they walked the next few minutes in silence as the Major sized up the specific positions of the alien swarms. They were already close enough for the bugs to open fire, but they didn’t, just as the President had predicted.

  “Be ready,” Denison told the senior vampire as he raised his arm to the sky.

  “Parate bellum!” Julius shouted to his ranks behind him. The legions of vampires hissed and extended their arms to mimic the wings of a bat.

  The Alien Commander watched through his scopes. They were so close that he wondered if he should open fire—but that would be an emotional response, a human response. Or was that Peyton’s plan? Was this all a bluff to get his soldiers close? No matter. If things devolved into a mere gunfight, the Dwellers would win. He merely had to be patient and see what the humans had in store.

  Major Shaughnessy watched it all from his window. What the bloody hell was going on?

  Peyton watched from the control room, leaning forward in his director’s chair, giddy over the victory that he knew was to come.

  Laurel watched from the side. What have I done? What have I done?”

  “Wait for it,” said Denison slowly. “Wait . . . wait . . . wait.” Then with a snap he flung down his arm. “Now!”

  “Invadite!!!!!” Julius cried out.

  In a flash, the thousands of vampires transformed to mist and soared across the space that separated them from their enemy, sprouting their pointed fangs midflight. The Alien Sub-Commander, following his superior’s lead, coughed out orders, and the bugs opened fire. But their white beams whizzed through the mist to no effect, like punching a cloud. The vampires descended upon their enemy, wrapping themselves around the bipedal insects like vaporous boa constrictors, sucking out just enough blood to kill them before moving on to devour the next. Julius had warned the colonies about the tart, acidic taste—unlike human blood, which was sweet and creamy—so having been prepared for it, most of them found the feasting pleasurable. And oh what a feast it was.

  The vampires were gluttonous, ferocious, fierce, and none more than Julius.

  The human soldiers in the rear dropped to their knees and blasted M16s into the pandemonium with no concern for harming their vampire allies in front of them, their bullets merely whizzing through the mist and into the hideous bugs.

  “What are those things?!” the Alien Commander bellowed in his smoker’s-cough language. He tapped on the symbols on the keypad strapped to his lower forearm. The ground shook as a garage-sized wormhole opened behind him and his officers. The command vehicle slowly backed into the meadow within, stopping at the portal’s edge where the upper brass watched the debacle from the safety of their home, the Commander keeping his unguis perched upon his keypad to shut the wormhole down in an instant should these creatures get too close. “What are they?!”

  “Facite impetum!” J
ulius cried out once again. Thousands upon thousands of bats suddenly emerged to blacken the already black sky, crashing upon alien soldiers five, six at a time, pecking out their eyes, gnawing into their insect throats.

  The sole remaining helicopter glided forward from the rear to hover above the fray as Harve and Frank rained down grenades from RPGs—the bugs so consumed by what was around them that they could pay no heed to what hovered overhead.

  “That’s what they are? Really?” laughed Johnny.

  “And we’ll all burn in hell because of them,” said Harve as he blasted away.

  “Maybe, but they’re so darn cute!”

  “Yeah, baby!” shouted Peyton as he leapt up from his director’s chair like a little boy on Christmas morning. “This is the funnest battle I ever fought!”

  Laurel watched Julius at work on the monitor with a relieved, exhausted smile. “You were telling me the truth,” she said as if to her nemesis, welling up in a giant flurry of mixed emotions. “The whole time you told me the truth. My instinct about you was right. Go get ‘em, you beautiful monster.”

  “Fire at will, Major!” Colonel Williams barked into the microphone.

  “What the bloody hell is going on, sir?!” Shaughnessy was heard over the loudspeaker.

  “No time for that, Major. Fire at will.”

  “But it’s too chaotic! We might hit the—whatever those bleedin’ things are!”

  “Don’t worry about them, Major,” shouted Peyton with a smile. “You can’t hurt them. Just gun down as many of those son of a bitch bugs as you can!”

  “Aye sir!”

  The pandemonium on the ground hit a fevered pitch as bats and vampires devoured their alien foes like a Thanksgiving dinner. The swarms continued to blast their weapons only to have their white beams whiz through the mist to kill their own kind. Wormhole upon wormhole opened to bring alien replacements, but the humans shot the new bugs dead before they could even enter our world.

  Even Julius was coming to enjoy the sharp taste of the green blood. Perhaps he had gagged on Mary’s (the girl in the graveyard) so many days ago because he simply hadn’t been expecting the sublime harshness, like guzzling down a can of Coke when you expect a vanilla milkshake. The alien blood also seemed somehow lighter to him, for even after devouring hundreds, he didn’t feel close to satiated.

  The Alien Commander, having been genetically engineered to find defeat unacceptable, grew in insurmountable rage as he watched the fiasco through his scope from the safety of the inside edge of the wormhole. He had relied on the fact that Peyton wouldn’t send any of these new “soldiers” through the portal for fear it was some kind of trap. It wasn’t, and the Commander was relieved that his counterpart had fallen for the bluff. (The truth was that taking out the enemy high command had been a primary part of Peyton’s plan, but a sun was shining in that meadow. Prior to this battle, no one had ever considered whether vampires were vulnerable to all suns or only that of the Earth, but no vampire was willing to risk the horrid, painful death to find out.)

  “What are those things?!” the Commander continued to furiously cough. “Those are not human! How did I not know about them?! What are they?!”

  Then he wrapped his giant ungues around his Sub-Commander’s insect-throat and squeezed as he icily coughed.

  “I want one.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “As America asks, why are the bugs only attacking us?” droned the TV anchor on the wall. “In Russia, rebel forces have seized the Kremlin, while in India –”

  Patrick turned it off with the remote—it was just background noise by now anyway. Blah blah blah aliens blah blah blah war, but nothing at all about zombies.

  He sat at one of the deputy’s desks, deeply concerned. Why wasn’t the news saying anything about zombies?

  Hours earlier, he and Rhiannon had climbed the strange ladder bolted to the wall that led to a trap door in the ceiling that led to the building’s rooftop, and they had seen the thousands and thousands of zombies that circled the building in which they were trapped, and countless more staggering toward it. It seemed that the whole town had gone zombie, and they were all congregating around the building to share in their one final meal.

  This was typical for them, according to Rhiannon. “Zombies move in packs,” she had explained. “They follow each other even though none of them ever knows where they’re going no how. I’d say it makes ’em feel safer but they don’t feel nothin’ at all.”

  “Then why?” he had asked.

  “Dunno. Walkin’ Dead never ’splained us that part.”

  She had also described how a virus spreads quickly in our modern era, from city to city and around the world in a matter of days, using Rise of the Planet of the Apes as her primary source material for that particular point. But again, then why wasn’t the news reporting any of it? Could she be wrong? She was only seven after all, and the Apes movie was just a remake. Could it be that Heartsoot Creek was in fact the only infected spot in the world? Because if that were the case, no one would ever believe them enough to send help. And if it weren’t the case, no one would be able to send help. It looked like they would never get out of there.

  And even if they could, he continued, where would they go? The zombies would just follow them, and they’d end up infecting a whole new town, then another and another. He and Rhiannon would be the ones responsible for spreading the worldwide virus, and that was a responsibility he wouldn’t accept. They were stuck.

  To make matters worse, their food supply was running low as evidenced by the many candy wrappers, empty soda cans and broken glass that littered the front of the vending machine they had smashed open hours before. Patrick had suggested they ration their supplies because they didn’t know how long they would be stuck there. Rhiannon agreed in theory but didn’t listen at all in practice, and just ate to her heart’s content.

  What could he do? Hit her? She was just a little girl. Better to simply match her binging so as not to be left without any sustenance at all.

  And so he sat at the deputy’s desk, munching on the very last Milky Way bar when he noticed certain words on the deputy’s telephone display. He brightened slightly. It was worth a try.

  *****

  The tumultuous sounds of the Southpoint battle thundered even throughout Northbank miles away. Private Roger Hayes motored across the reception area on his shiny electric wheelchair to answer the ringing phone. He had stopped trying to figure out whether the Captain-with-the-scar was the alien mole some time ago because he realized that it didn’t matter. He would serve his benefactor loyally, whatever he was. If it turned out that he was the spy, and the aliens won the war, perhaps his Captain would keep him around like some beloved pet or something—it was certainly more than the humans would do once they no longer needed him, and that Rog knew from experience.

  “Base. Security. Captain’s office.”

  “Thank God!” said the little boy on the other end. Rog noticed the caller ID and groaned—his Captain had been getting crank calls from this number all day. “My name is Patrick Hutchins! I’m twelve years old from Heartsoot Creek, Georgia! Zombies have overtaken our town! Please send help!”

  “You again?” Rog said impatiently, ultraprotective of his Captain’s precious time. “What, aliens and vampires aren’t crazy enough for you wackos, you gotta have zombies too? How’d you get this number anyway?”

  “It was at the top of recent calls,” the boy answered innocently.

  “I meant the first time.”

  “This is the first time! From me, I mean. The other calls would have been from the Sheriff or a deputy or something. But they’ve all turned!”

  “Listen to this, boy,” Rog barked then held the phone toward the open window. “It’s the sound of war. Good men and women are dying so that you and I can live, and none of us got time for your little games! Got it? Don’t call this number again!”

  He slammed the receiver down hard with a bang as the Captain-with-
the-scar came out of his office carrying a large manila envelope. “What was that all about?”

  “Nothing to waste your time with, sir.”

  “Good,” said the Captain-with-the-scar as he handed Rog the envelope. “Get this to the control room, pronto. Hand-deliver it to Colonel Williams personally.”

  “To the Colonel personally. Yes sir!”

  The Captain-with-the-scar briskly turned his back on Rog to return to his office, as he would have with any other private. Rog wheeled himself out the front door as ordered, shaking his head with a wry smirk.

  “Zombies. Sheesh. As if.”

  *****

  Sergeant Sanchez had remained unconscious since she had collapsed in Johnny’s arms hours earlier, but the thunderous roars of battle stirred her awake at last.

  She sat up in her hospital bed. Her once beautiful skin was now covered with ugly gray blotches, her teeth were rotted, her fingernails were four inches long, and her open eyes may as well have been closed because they revealed no soul within.

  Her head, not her eyes, darted about the room to survey her surroundings, but she lacked the mental capacity to comprehend anything she saw. If she could have understood, she would have assessed that she was in a very large hospital ward. The walls were glass, but the curtains were drawn closed so that no one from the outside could see in, or vice versa. Hundreds of beds lay empty, with only a few containing unconscious soldiers who looked somewhat like her, their zombie-virus having yet to fully gestate. The other two hundred former soldiers, now zombies all, staggered into the glass wall desperate to reach the source of the powerful sounds they adored, bounced off the wall, then staggered right back into it again.

  Sanchez was enamored with the ruckus as well. She lacked the capacity for words, the capacity to think even, but if she hadn’t been so lacking, her thoughts would have been these:

  “Pretty boom.”

  She lugged herself out of the hospital bed and staggered toward the wall to join those of her new kind. She walked into the glass wall like the others, bounced backward, then staggered back into it again, and again, and again.