Eligo. I don’t need someone to translate the word for me this time. I understand it easy enough. Choose.
“Ike,” I say, knowing he can hear me over the comms.
“Dad!” He glances back at me. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.”
“You were speaking,” he says. “Latin, I think.”
“It happens,” Graham says, sounding calm despite the near constant din of gunfire. “What did it show you this time?”
“It?” Edwards asks. He’s nearly reached me and looks confused.
“The Machine speaks to him,” Mayer explains. “When he touches it. Did you touch it?”
I look down at my hands, still submerged, still in contact. “I still am.” Lightning cuts through the sky, reflecting in the water beneath me, forcing my eyes shut for a moment.
“What did it say?” Ike asks.
“That I need to make a choice.”
“What choice?”
“Whether or not to let you stay.”
The conversation falls silent. So do the guns. Even the storm seems to be contemplating my words.
Then it all starts back up again, like a bomb, like the bomb.
“What’s he talking about, Sergeant Major?” Gutshall asks.
“The bomb,” I say. “We can’t trigger it remotely, can we?”
“No,” Ike confirms.
Edwards arrives and offers me his hand. He pulls me up and then rushes to join the others, who have formed a defensive line, tracer rounds streaking across the glistening landscape.
I look back at Ike, hunched down beside the bomb, waiting to do his duty. Waiting to kill the Machine, and for it to allow him to do so. That’s the sacrifice. That’s the change in heart it’s looking for. The future it promises can only come if I sacrifice my son.
Plagued by doubt, I make my choice. “Cauldron, this is Science Guy. Do you copy?”
“This is Cauldron,” the Osprey pilot replies. “We have eyes on you.”
I search the chaotic sky and see the plane cutting a wide circle around our position.
I look at Ike again. He’s far away and hard to see through all the rain, but I see his nod. “You better be telling the truth,” I say to the miles-wide armored plate beneath my feet. I follow them by the hardest words I’ve ever had to say. “Cauldron... We are ready for Evac. Come and get us.”
45
“Negative, Science Guy. LZ is crawling.” The plane cruises past overhead, tilted to the side, so the pilot can look down at us. Lightning streaks above it, turning it into a silhouette. “Clear the area.”
I don’t like it, but he’s right. The Machine is moving forward, and hundreds of feet up and down with each step. Not crashing into the massive plates, while avoiding the towering spines sweeping back and forth, viewing the world through a rain spattered windshield and being blinded by near constant lightning, is already going to be a challenge. If the Osprey is attacked, we’re not leaving.
And part of me is content with that. I don’t want to leave Ike.
But he’s making this sacrifice for our family, and I should honor that by returning to them, and making sure that vision comes to fruition. He has two sons. His family will grow. And I’ll be there to protect them.
I free the XM25 assault rifle from around my back, chamber the first explosive round and shout, “All right, you heard the man. Let’s clear some room!”
I falter for just a moment, when I look up at the scene before me. Lightning flickers, giving us a strobe-light view of the incoming creatures, still visible in the moments of darkness because of their luminous undersides. White-hot tracer rounds zip away from Graham, Mayer, Gutshall and Felder, who have formed a defensive line fifty feet away. Most of the rounds deflect away from the bulletproof shells, but the rest of the explosive rounds perform as advertised, bursting on contact, or at a predetermined range. But they’re not even slowing the large creatures still barreling toward us, aiming beyond us, at Ike.
I glance back at my son, still working on the bomb, securing it in place and entering the passcode that will allow him to arm it. “Ike, if they get past us...”
“I’ll take care of it,” he says. “I just need another minute.”
I catch up to Edwards, who’s running to join the others at the defensive line. He looks afraid. Maybe because we’re in the worst possible situation imaginable, but I think it has more to do with leaving his team’s leader behind. Ike’s confidence fueled these men and kept them alive behind enemy lines for years. So I try to be that for them now. “Graham. Shock and awe!”
I see him reach to his chest and pluck away two small devices. “Flashbangs out!”
He tosses the two grenades at the oncoming wave. The closest of the Crawlers is just fifty feet away. It will arrive in seconds. I raise an arm over my visor to block the light, trusting distance and the helmet’s audio filter to protect my ears. I see the flash around my arm, and I hear the boom as a loud pop.
When I look up, nothing has changed.
“They’re not Scionic,” I shout. The strategies we’ve developed over the years for dealing with the new life forms evolving on Earth might not be effective against these creatures, which have evolved over billions of years, hatching and growing for generations with each rise of the Machine.
What can we do?
How do we fight them?
“You son-of-a-bitch!” I shout at the Machine. “I made my choice! Call them off!”
I take aim at the nearest Crawler, unleashing six rounds. I feel the heat and shockwave of each explosive round bursting against its shell, having no effect. I turn down in defeat, and that’s when I see the solution reflected in a puddle beneath the Crawler’s glowing underside. The orange light’s source is a twisting coil of loose flesh, reminiscent of the Machine’s belly.
I pull the trigger, firing from the hip, the recoil nearly yanking the weapon from my hands. Three rounds zip toward the creature, the first two exploding against the front of its carapace, the third sliding beneath the body, striking the Machine’s hard shell, and exploding.
The explosion tears into the creature’s softer underside just as the Machine begins a downward step. The combination of the explosion’s upward force and the ground dropping away propels the creature over our heads, trailing a luminous arc of gore.
“Aim beneath them!” I shout.
As one, the six of us redirect our explosive rounds to the gap between the Crawlers and the terrain beneath them. The battle shifts in an instant, as the creatures are sent spinning through the air, their insides hollowed out. But for each Crawler that falls, several more take its place. And our ammunition supply is limited.
Lightning strikes the Machine’s back just to our left. I turn away from the earsplitting crack and the blinding light to see that we’re being flanked. Five Crawlers are nearly upon us. I open fire, launching two of the creatures into the air, their guts spiraling away, and slapping against Felder’s visor, blinding him.
He stands and lowers his weapon, confused by the sudden blindness caused by the viscous, glowing gore blocking his view. “What the hell?”
I kill one more of the creatures and mortally wound another, now twitching and writhing in circles. But the fifth reaches Felder before I can shoot it. “Look out!” I scream.
Gutshall hears the warning and turns to fire at the creature, but his weapon just clicks when he pulls the trigger. He’s out of ammo.
The Crawler skewers Felder’s chest, the powerful limbs punching through his armor with ease.
With the dead man stuck on its limbs, the Crawler rears up, twitching its leg, trying to shake Felder’s body free.
“Felder!” Gutshall shouts, launching himself at the creature’s underside. He draws a knife from his waist and plunges it into the thing’s gut, swiping the sharp blade upward. A wave of innards spills out over his body, but he keeps cutting and pushing. The Crawler’s limbs jut out straight, gripped by pain and then death. With a final shout, Gutshal
l pushes the dead Crawler onto its back.
Covered in gore, he slumps down beside Felder, trying to pull him free, totally unaware that another Crawler has reared up behind him.
I take aim for the creature’s underside, but to hit it, I would have to put a bullet through Gutshall’s chest. I don’t even have time to shout a warning.
The Crawler’s mandibles close over Gutshall’s head, and with a quick bite, severs it from his body. I nearly vomit into my facemask as Gutshall’s callsign: Dim Reaper, shown in my visor’s heads-up display, slides into the monster’s gullet, following the helmet’s signal. But my horror turns to fear when I raise my weapon to fire and it’s knocked from my hands by one of the Crawler’s flailing limbs. It lunges over the bodies of Gutshall, Felder and its fallen comrade, two limbs raised, ready to plunge into my chest.
I stumble and trip, falling hard on my back, defenseless. I fumble for the knife on my side, but fail to pull it free, and even if I did, I don’t have the reach or speed to fend off the monster.
But someone does.
Three rounds punch into the Crawler’s exposed underside, exploding inside the creature. A wave of guts and shattered limbs fall atop me while the shell is launched back, slamming into the next Crawler intent on killing me.
I scramble back to my feet, wiping at my visor, letting the torrential rain help clean me off.
“You alright?” Ike asks, his voice clear in my comm despite the distance between us, the storm’s roar and the cacophony of gunfire.
I turn and see him facing me, XM25 raised to his shoulder.
“Thanks,” I say. “Felder and Gutshall—”
“Did their duty,” Ike says. “And I’m ready to do mine. You need to bug out. Now. Cauldron, what’s your status?”
“We can attempt a mobile pickup,” the Osprey pilot listening in says. “That’s the best we can do, and we’ll only get one pass. Incoming in one mike, half a klick east from your position.”
I look to the sky and see the Osprey banking toward us, the dual-prop rotors in their upward position, allowing the vehicle to fly like a helicopter.
“Frags out!” Graham shouts, as he and Mayer roll a half dozen fragmentation grenades at the oncoming Crawlers, now climbing over the bodies of their dead to reach us.
I turn and run with Graham, Mayer and Edwards, only to be slapped down by the concussive force of all those grenades. I’m yanked back to my feet a moment later and shoved from behind by Mayer. “Move it, old man!”
Did she not even fall? And here I thought I’d been toughened up.
While the three soldiers take turns running, reloading and firing, I sprint ahead, weaponless.
A quick look back reveals the Osprey swooping down, a hundred feet above the action. Landing would be impossible. The Crawlers would set upon the plane before it could lift off again. Beneath it, the monsters continue their pursuit, slowed by the explosive gunfire peppering the frontline, but not stopped. A flash of lightning reveals a moving torrent of the creatures, stretching as far as I can see. The Crawlers haven’t just been growing, they’ve been multiplying.
Gunfire draws my eyes back to Ike. He’s far to the right, hunched by the ledge where one plate overlaps another, firing up into the gut of a Crawler that approached from the east. A fresh cascade of lightning, streaking through the clouds above, reveals what lies ahead. Crawlers. Hundreds more, rushing to meet the wave pursuing us like the two walls of Red Sea water that crushed the Egyptian army in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments.
But we have something Ramses didn’t have.
“Here comes the ladder,” Cauldron’s pilot says.
I look up and back to see a rope ladder unfurl from the Osprey’s side door. It drops down, twenty feet above the horde. Several of the creatures leap for it, but they fall short, either not strong enough to make the jump, or beat down by the twin rotors’ wash.
The Osprey roars past me, still descending as the Machine reaches the apex of its step. “Go, go, go!” the pilot shouts.
The first rung of the ladder descends right beside me, and it’s about to pass me. I reach out, hooking my fingers around the bottom rung, and then suddenly I find it yanked tight in my hand.
My feet leave the ground.
They’re pulling up?
“What are you doing?” I shout.
“It’s not us,” the pilot replies.
It’s the Machine, dropping down as it takes another step, moving ever closer to the Yellowstone caldera. How far away are we? How long has it been? Time feels surreal and slow, but we must be nearly past the point of no return. I look down and forget all my questions. I’m hanging from a ladder now a hundred feet above the surface, and growing. The illusion is that we’re ascending, but the tug on my arms remains steady, and I’m able to pull myself up.
The gun battle shrinks away beneath us, but keeps moving.
“Maintaining speed and course,” the pilot says. “We’ll be here when you come back up. But that’s your last chance.”
I’m about to argue, when I get a good look at the scene from above. There are Crawlers incoming from all directions. The mass approaching from ahead will reach the others around the same time the now-ascending landscape reaches us. If the others don’t get on the ladder then, they never will.
The battle rushes back up, and my mind says that we’re going to crash, but the massive body slows at the top of its step, giving Graham and Mayer precious seconds to leap onto the ladder.
Graham and Mayer, but not Edwards.
I look for Edwards, expecting to find a torn-apart body, but instead I find him sprinting toward Ike and the bomb. “Edwards, what are you doing?”
“You need time to reach the minimum safe distance, sir,” Edwards says.
“He’s right,” Graham says. “Cauldron, you are good to go!”
I grip the rope ladder as the Osprey ascends and peels away. After looping my arms around a rung and linking my hands, I look down expecting to see Graham and Mayer clinging to the ladder below me.
But I’m alone.
My only friends and company for the past fifteen years are with Edwards, running back to Ike, buying time so that I might live.
“No!” I shout, and I nearly let go. But we’re several hundred feet in the air now. I couldn’t join them if I wanted to.
“The world needs you more than it does us grunts,” Graham says. “Take care of yourself.”
Lightning streaks past the Osprey, drawing my eyes up to see if the plane’s been struck. But we’re still moving, pulling away from the Machine. That’s when I notice I’m only twenty feet from the hatch now. The ladder is being winched back inside.
“Graham...” I find myself at a loss for words. He and Mayer are as much my family as anyone.
“Suck it up, buttercup,” Mayer says. “A soldier couldn’t ask for a better death than this.”
“Minimum safe distance in two mikes,” the pilot says.
The response to this statement is garbled by the sound of gunfire and shouting.
The last words I hear, are my son’s. “Beside you! Three o’clock! Get down!”
46
Ike
Master Sergeant Ike Wright had seen combat before, but nothing like this. They weren’t fighting back a wave of Fobs from the familiar setting of the Mount Hood Lodge, the forest or even on the bare mountain peak that vaguely resembled the current battlefield; they were fighting strange new monsters atop the miles wide and long back of the creature that had nearly destroyed the human race. It wasn’t just a living landscape, it was mobile. The wind shifted as the massive body lumbered forward, sliding side to side and up and down. Ike’s stomach churned with each new descent and rise. He had never been on a roller coaster, but he imagined they felt something like this, only without the man-eating beasts, lightning and pelting rain.
Ike had never believed in the fire-and-brimstone version of hell popularized by the Middle Ages, carried to American shores by the Puritans and adopt
ed by modern conservatives—before most of them were killed—but it no longer seemed that scary. At least fire would be warm. As the nearly absent sun fell below the living horizon, and the rain continued to saturate his body, a chill ran through him.
His hands shook as he worked the bomb’s control panel, thankful that his brother had thought to make the whole system waterproof. Ishah had always been the smarter of the two, more like Mina, while Ike took after Sabella, the religious, passionate mother turned warrior. It was funny how that worked out, but he and Ishah identified both women as their shared mothers, with love shared equally among them, bonded by a common element—Abraham.
Ike had dreamed up scenarios where his father returned to them, but in them he was always kept at a distance. Ike loved his father and remembered him fondly as the brave man who set out to save the world. But as he and Ishah grew up, he knew his brother had more in common with their science-minded father.
But now, after living in the wilds for fifteen years under the tutelage of a fellow Ranger and a Mossad Agent, his father was one of the finest warriors he’d ever seen. But his mind hadn’t lost its edge, either. They had a chance to win after all this time, because of him. His father was the kind of man the world needed. The kind of man who could bring humanity out of the darkness once more.
Ike would happily die for him, and knew he would have to before he’d stepped on the Osprey. Ishah had told him how the bomb worked, that there hadn’t been time to create a remote trigger, and even if they had, it might not be reliable. Looking at the storm overhead, there was no doubt about that now. Leaving his sons before getting to know them broke Ike’s heart, but he understood the sacrifice. He’d never once felt angry at Abraham for leaving all those years ago. He respected the man for it. Let the sacrifice guide his life. And now it was his turn. What Ike couldn’t have predicted was that so many others would be willing to die for his father, too.
Ike finished setting the bomb. All he needed to do now was push a button. And then he, Edwards, Mayer and Graham would be vaporized, hopefully along with the Machine. He could push the button now, and end it, but he was determined to hold out as long as possible. It wasn’t just the world that needed his father, but his family as well. Mina, Sabella, Ishah, Layla, Katelin and all the kids, for generations to come.
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