Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The

by Molstad, Stephen

  “Should we burn it?” Edward asked.

  “No,” Yossi told him. “Maybe we can use it.” He whistled Reg over to take a look, then used a pocketknife to scrape away the layer of gelatin until he reached the layer of tough gray meat lining the inside of the shell. “Watch out, it might jump,” he warned the others before stabbing down at the meat with his knife. Nothing happened. Although the surface of the flesh gave when he touched it with his blade, he couldn’t tear it open.

  “He wants to steal their car,” Edward said when Reg walked up.

  “Maybe it works the same way as the pulse weapon,” Yossi said. “I think we should try it.”

  Reg looked down at the sand-soaked goop lining the inside of the chariot. “It’d be nice if we could run it through a car wash and clean it up first.” But he agreed that they should experiment. He used Yossi’s knife to clear the gunk away from a second area, then pressed a finger down onto the shell’s spongy lining. Nothing happened until Yossi did the same thing. With both of them touching it simultaneously, the joints in the stick-figure legs flexed and bristled. “Make it walk,” Reg said.

  Yossi looked at him uncertainly. “How?”

  “Just imagine it. Try to picture in your—”

  “Agh!” Yossi yanked his hand away when he felt the thing begin to step forward. The legs quit walking the moment he broke the contact. He looked at Reg. “It is very disgusting.”

  “I agree. Let’s try it again.”

  Within a few minutes the two men were walking the chariot around the grounds of the filling station like a clumsy, obedient dog. Using nothing more than their fingertips, they learned to make it stand in place, turn in a slow circle, and move in any direction they ordered. It was easy once they got the hang of it, simply a matter of will. But they couldn’t get it to move as gracefully as the aliens had. The legs became confused whenever the men gave it conflicting mental signals. They also learned that the gelatin material was an essential part of the operating system. When they cleaned it completely from an area, the vehicle didn’t register their skin contact.

  It was Fadeela who stopped them. “It’s time to go,” she said, reminding everyone they had an important message to deliver to the army at the oasis.

  “I think we should take this thing with us,” Yossi said. “It could be useful.”

  “It’s too big,” Fadeela told him. “There isn’t room in the truck.”

  But Reg knew what he had in mind. He grimaced down at the chariot’s bed of slime and then up at his Israeli ally. “All right. But it’s going to be a long, sticky ride.”

  A few minutes later, after saying goodbye to the elderly gas-station keepers, the truck rolled out onto the road and turned in the direction of Qal’at Buqum. A few car lengths behind, Reg and Yossi sat cross-legged in the alien chariot, their rear ends sunk into the layer of extraterrestrial ooze. They looked like characters in a futuristic version of A Thousand and One Nights, riding a strange-looking magic carpet across the desert.

  12

  BACK TO THE OASIS

  The sky was black, except for a streak of violet hanging over the western horizon when the old truck grumbled to the top of a rise in the road overlooking what still remained of Qal’at Buqum. The only lights in the oasis came from the scattered fires burning the last of its buildings. Ali pulled onto the shoulder and steered toward a cluster of civilians who had gathered on a bluff above the ruined village.

  When they saw the alien chariot skulking through the darkness behind the truck, the civilians panicked. Shots rang out. Fortunately, neither Reg nor Yossi was hit. Word of the captured vehicle spread fast, and soon there were a hundred people crowded around the sled-shaped craft. The human charioteers brought it around to the front of the truck and parked in the one remaining headlight to give everyone a chance to examine it. Some of them used the opportunity to throw stones and kick at the sticklike legs. When Reg made no move to stop them, neither did the others. These people had every right to be angry. Angry not only with the armor-clad alien warriors who had decimated their town, but with Faisal’s army, which had allowed it to happen.

  Soon after Reg’s group had stolen away to the east, Faisal and his advisors had concocted a plan which they quickly put into motion. After dumping poison into the outdoor pools and burying a few land mines, they withdrew their forces toward the mountains and established a camp. The townspeople were left to their own devices. As the old woman who had sold them ammunition earlier that day put it, they were left as bait. Most residents had loaded their possessions into their cars and driven into the mountains, taking the road toward Dawqah on the coast. Others, the people standing around them, had retreated a few thousand yards into the desert, onto the bluff. A handful of desperate men, with only a few weapons among them, had stayed behind to defend the oasis.

  Late in the afternoon, the people on the bluff had watched the chariots come across the desert and spread out around the oasis before entering en masse. The men and boys who had stayed behind were counting on Molotov cocktails as much as on guns to repel the attack. Apparently, it didn’t work very well because the aliens used very few pulse blasts to subdue the human defenders. One group of survivors made it to the edge of the oasis, but when they tried to run across the open desert, a chariot followed them out and caught them one by one. As it began to get dark, the fires started, and the oasis village was burned to the ground. Some of the chariots had left again in the direction of their crashed airship, but no one could agree on how many.

  Reg stared down the hill as the last of Qal’at Buqum’s fires burned down. A pair of headlights came over the distant horizon, headed along the road that would take them through the center of the village. Everyone on the bluff watched quietly as the headlights entered the town, paused for a few moments near the central post office, then continued up the hill in their direction. Reg and the others ran out into the road to meet whoever was coming up the hill, which turned out to be a pair of Saudi soldiers in a jeep. The civilians surrounded their car, asking questions about their village. The soldiers said they’d seen nothing but a few dead humans and burning buildings. They said they were on an important errand and couldn’t answer any more questions. The driver put the jeep in gear and began plowing slowly through the crowd until Ali Hassan stepped into their headlights. When they saw him, the soldiers killed the engine and got out of the car. Ali told the crowd to stay back, then held a short conference with the pair. The three of them talked for a few minutes before returning to the jeep. Ali sat in the driver’s seat and spoke on the radio, shouting angrily into the handset. When he was finished, he began arguing with the soldiers, who drove away only after Ali threatened them at gunpoint.

  “What was that all about?” Reg asked, when Ali came striding toward him a moment later.

  “We need to talk,” the Saudi captain said, clapping one of his powerful hands onto Reg’s shoulders and escorting him toward the truck. When they were inside, he told Reg to roll up his window, then looked around to make sure no one was lurking nearby.

  “What the hell is going on?” Reg asked. He didn’t know what Ali had learned from the passing soldiers, but clearly it wasn’t good news.

  “It’s Faisal. He’s moved his army into the mountains. They are about six miles up the road that leads to the town of Dawqah. I know the place. It is easy to defend. If the aliens attack him there, he will make them pay.”

  “Then let’s hope they do attack. But not until after we’ve convinced Faisal not to bomb the destroyer.” Reg stayed quiet for a moment or two, waiting to hear the reason for the private conference. But Ali only stared straight ahead, gripping the steering wheel as if he meant to strangle it.

  Eventually, Reg broke the silence. “How long will it take to reach Faisal’s camp?”

  “There is a problem.”

  “Yes, I was beginning to suspect as much.”

  After glancing around once more, Ali explained. “Faisal has given an order. The order is to kill Re
g Cummins. There is a reward for the man who does it.”

  “I see. Well, I’m sure it’s a large reward,” Reg said, pretending to be flattered by the attention.

  Ali looked him in the eyes and nodded seriously. “Very large.”

  “Interesting,” Reg said calmly, as he began to think about the fastest way out of the truck. “Obviously, you learned about this from those soldiers in the jeep.”

  Ali shook his head. “I spoke to Faisal on the radio. He told me that if I didn’t kill you myself, I can never come back.”

  “And you’d like to go back?”

  “Naturally.”

  Reg casually slid his hand close to the door handle, preparing to escape if Ali reached for his pistol. “That puts you in a bit of a predicament. Have you decided what you’re going to do?”

  Ali smiled. “Yes, I have. I told Faisal something I learned from American movies. I said, ‘go screw yourself!’” Ali laughed, and Reg joined in, uneasily. “And then I said something else, something stupid maybe.”

  “What was that?”

  “I told him to call off the order. I said that I’m going to kill him if anything happens to you.”

  Reg stared at him for a minute without blinking. “You really said that?”

  Ali sighed and nodded, indicating that the decision hadn’t been an easy one.

  Reg was impressed. The first words he could remember coming from Ali’s mouth were a chauvinistic warning to the Israeli pilots that no Jews were allowed in Saudi Arabia. But now he’d made an irreversible decision to join a group that included a Jew, an ill-behaved Saudi woman, a Palestinian, and three Westerners—one of whom had a price on his head. Reg knew it was one thing for him, a foreigner, to cast his lot with this ragtag, international group, but was quite another for a Saudi officer to do the same thing, especially on his home soil. It took real guts. Or insanity. Or both.

  “Did you tell Faisal about the biological weapons?”

  “He already knew about them,” Ali said. “He said there is a plan to attack the ship by air and land. I told him that we believe the germ canisters are inside the ship. Will that stop him from going ahead with his plan? I don’t know.”

  “Well, after your conversation, I don’t think you should be the one to go up there and try to talk him out of it.”

  “I don’t think Faisal would be happy to see either one of us.”

  “Still, we ought to send someone up there to try to convince him.” Neither one of them said it, but they knew that Fadeela would be the most logical candidate for the job. She had bargaining chips at her disposal that no man could possess.

  “Good,” Ali agreed, and opened his door. “But first we have to get out of this area. These people will soon hear of the reward on your head. Probably, they will not try to harm you. But they have lost their homes and everything else. They are desperate. We should find another place.” He stepped out of the truck to begin collecting the rest of the team.

  “One more thing,” Reg said. “Just in case I don’t get a chance to say this later: Thanks.”

  Ali smiled. “No problem.”

  A few minutes later, they were on the road again. The civilians of Qal’at Buqum, emboldened by what they’d heard from the soldiers in the jeep, started marching down the hill in a group to see what remained of their homes and shops. Reg and the team decided to escort them in case they ran into any trouble. If the town was clear, they would proceed with the task of stopping Faisal from bombing the downed destroyer.

  Only one of the truck’s headlights had survived when Yossi had driven it over the embankment that morning and smashed down on the alien chariot. Like a growling cyclops, the battered vehicle rolled down the middle of Qal’at Buqum’s only road at five miles per hour. Walking alongside and behind it were a group of Saudis, some of them carrying guns, some of them armed only with sticks and stones. Edward and Remi protected the truck’s flanks with their flamethrowers. Reg and Yossi knelt in the alien chariot, one hundred feet behind, resting the barrels of their assault rifles on the curving front wall. Tye and Fadeela were ready with the pulse weapon.

  Lying in the road were the remains of several of the men who had tried to fend off the alien attack. Some of the corpses were blackened by pulse blasts, others showed signs of having succumbed to the pain of mental interrogation. It wasn’t until they were approaching the post office at the center of town that they realized why the place felt so empty: The trees were gone. The two thousand palms and tamarind trees that had provided a lush canopy of green on either side of the road were missing. When they turned the headlight of the truck into the park, they saw what remained: felled and twisted trees, many of them broken off at the roots, others left standing but stripped of their foliage. The floor of the oasis had been swept clean of the ferns and ground-cover plants that had been there only hours before. Even the bark had been peeled away from the tree trunks.

  The trees had been damaged in two ways: Some had been broken, probably by the strength of the biomechanical armor. On other trees, the baric and leaves had been stripped away in furrows, almost as if they’d been cleaned with a large potato peeler. The furrows were continuous, traveling in spirals up the length of the trunks. It looked as if they’d been eaten, but there was no evidence that either teeth or blades had been used.

  Yossi returned from a quick foray deeper into the oasis and said he’d found an undamaged glade of trees surrounding one of the larger artificial ponds. The team decided to investigate, and Ali ran the truck over a curb and entered the park. The moon, the truck’s remaining headlight, and the small flames licking from the barrels of the flamethrowers all combined to cast eerie, crisscrossing shadows through the broken, denuded trees.

  When they came to the glade Yossi had described, it didn’t take long to discover that the aliens had left something behind. Dozens of white globules glistened in the glare of the headlight. Roughly the size of basketballs, some of them sat on the ground lining the banks of the pool, others drooped from the tree trunks.

  “What the hell?” Sutton asked, leading the rest of the team close to one of them. It clung to the yellowish base of a tamarind tree, dangling about a foot above the ground.

  “It looks like a ball of phlegm,” remarked Tye.

  “Or a cocoon,” Fadeela said.

  “I’m going to see what’s inside,” Reg said, pulling out a pocketknife. “Do me a favor, will you? If anything jumps out at me, kill it before it can do anything nasty.”

  Then he reached out and sliced through the membrane. It was hollow inside, like a pouch. When the incision was long enough, the membrane tore open and a lump of flesh spilled onto the ground: an alien embryo. It was alive.

  “Get out of the light,” Reg said, leaning down for a closer look at the thing. Its tiny platelike head was translucent and fully formed. There was no skull, so Reg could see the brain working like a muscle just below the skin. Its pulpy limbs were still incipient little stubs that writhed through the air like the antennae on a garden snail.

  “It wants to be cuddled,” Tye joked grimly. “He thinks you’re his daddy.”

  “Well, let’s see if baby’s hungry,” Reg said. He reached up and pulled off a handful of the tamarind’s red-and-yellow-striped flowers and sprinkled them onto the young alien’s body. Within seconds, they began to break down and dissolve.

  “It’s digesting them.”

  “I’m officially disgusted now,” Sutton remarked.

  “That explains the damage to the other trees,” Fadeela said. “The spiral markings. If they feed by dissolving their food and absorbing it through their skins, they could have crawled up the trees, eating as they moved. There doesn’t seem to be any mouth.” The fetus’s eyelids opened a crack, and the fetus looked up at the humans. Its silvery eyes reflected like mirrors in the light. Reg looked up suddenly and scanned the area as if he’d heard something.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, “b
ut I don’t think we’re alone. Let’s fan out and see what we can find.”

  “What do we do about Junior?” Tye asked.

  “Leave it,” Reg said. “We’ll have to burn the glade before we leave.”

  Suddenly, there was a rush of movement in the bushes on the other side of the lake. The group hurried toward the source of the noise, letting the flamethrowers lead the way. By the time they arrived, whatever had made the noise was gone.

  “Look at this,” Yossi said. There was a fresh splash of water on the ground near some bushes. “Something was hiding here, watching us.”

  “Found a footprint,” Sutton announced. “Only two toes on it. Headed that direction.” The team moved where he’d pointed, toward an area thick with ground cover. They fanned out and beat the bushes as they advanced. They’d traveled less than fifty paces when Fadeela stopped.

  “There it is,” she whispered. “There it is.” The others didn’t know where she was pointing them. Then she muttered something in Arabic, buckled at the knees, and fell to the ground. When the others reached her, she was clutching the sides of her head and moaning in pain.

  “It’s close by,” Reg shouted. “Find it before it kills her.” The others scattered in all directions, kicking the bushes and checking behind every tree. Reg got down on his knees and forced Fadeela into a sitting position. “Where is it?” he asked, shaking her. “Show me where it is! Point to it!”

  Desperate to help her, he picked her up in his arms and began to carry her out of the area. Only then did she extend her arm and point toward her attacker. She pointed straight up into the trees. Reg looked up and saw a pair of silver eyes amid the fronds of a palm. He reached for his pistol, took aim, and squeezed off several rounds. A moment later, the alien body came plunging through the air and hit the ground.