Tye collapsed to the floor and howled in pain. The next thing he knew, Reg was kneeling beside him, checking his wounds.
“Am I dead?” Tye asked.
“No. But our little helper is. He made you do this, didn’t he?” Tye nodded. “Listen, they’re down there, right below us. And they’ve got the case.” He quickly explained what he’d seen through the floor, then lifted his head and looked at his wounds. “I’m not going to die or anything like that, am I?”
“Wait here for the others,” Reg said, then turned and sprinted away just as Fadeela ran up to the spot.
“Reg, wait,” she called. “Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer. He tore into the dark hallway and flew down the trellis ladder. A few seconds later, he was running headlong through the darkness of the exit bay with his machine gun gripped tightly between his hands. He didn’t switch on his flashlight for fear of showing the aliens where he was. Instead, he took his best guess about where the taproot was and plunged blindly ahead. To his right, the first violet-blue light of morning showed the outline of the rectangular opening at the front of the tower. In a few minutes, there would be enough light to see where he was headed. But he didn’t have a few minutes to spare. He continued moving forward, all of his senses on alert, searching for the aliens Tye had seen. When he heard a noise in the distance, he stopped running and stood stock-still. Above the sound of his labored breathing and furiously pounding heart, he heard it again. It was the sound of the clasps being opened on the silver case. He aimed his machine gun at the sound, then switched on his flashlight.
A pair of bulging silver eyes looked back at him from beside the taproot, only a few strides away. It was another Tall One, awkwardly manipulating the metallic suitcase that Reg had been chasing ever since he first saw it at Al-Sayyid. One of the three clasps was still fastened. He’d arrived just in time.
“Back away, handsome,” Reg growled at the alien, trying hard to sound cool, composed, and in control, when the truth was that he was terrified. When the alien didn’t obey, Reg gathered himself and started moving forward, ready to blast through the alien’s scrawny chest if it made a sudden movement. There were two more Tall Ones standing nearby, but they seemed unconcerned with Reg’s presence. They turned their backs to him and resumed the tasks they’d been performing before he’d interrupted them. Although Reg didn’t look in their direction, he found that he knew precisely what they were doing: going ahead with the deployment of the biological weapons. They were breaking open the membrane that covered the fourteen slotted cartridges that would accommodate the test tubes.
Just give me the box and I won’t hurt any of you, Reg told them without a sound escaping his lips, but he was also thinking, As soon as I have it I’ll kill all three of you. He edged forward until, face-to-face with the nearest Tall One, he extended a shaking hand and grabbed the handle of the silver case. When at last he had the thing safely in his grasp, a nervous smile crossed his lips. He breathed a huge sigh of relief and wiped the sweat from his eyes with the sleeve of his uniform. Now that he was holding all the cards, he could relax. Three quick bullets, he thought, one for each of these ghouls, and then I can leave. But before he could finish the job, the machine gun began to feel heavy in his right hand, and he let it rest on his hip. Three quick shots, he told himself.
Then again, he thought, there was no real need to kill them. The Tall Ones didn’t seem to be violent like the smaller aliens. They were, in fact, a rather admirable species. Reg began more and more to see the situation from their perspective and had soon developed second thoughts about taking the biological weapons away from them. After all, they were only doing what was necessary. Their invasion of the Earth was a matter of their own survival, not some random act of cruelty. Compared to humans, they were kinder, cleaner, better organized, more peaceful, and, ultimately, wiser. They were, in short, the far superior species and deserved to inherit the Earth, even if they planned to stay only a short while.
It was a horrible idea, but it continued to unfold in his mind with an undeniable logic, like the blossoming of a sweet, poisonous flower. He suddenly saw humanity through the eyes of the aliens: a race of filthy and sadistic animals, the equivalent of cockroaches with guns. Suddenly, he regretted having killed the Tall One who had led him upstairs. The gentle creature had only been trying to help, keeping the humans out of the way while the final preparations were made to inject the microbes deep into the earth. Instead of being thankful, Reg had blown its brains out, murdered it execution-style.
The hatred and contempt the Tall Ones felt for him awakened all of his own self-hatred and brought him crashing back to the event that had shattered his life several years before: his illfated bombing run during the Gulf War. He remembered walking into that postflight debriefing room feeling like he was the king of the world, then the next moment wanting to curl up and die when they told him what he’d done. The whole gruesome scene replayed itself as if it were happening again for the first time. He remembered standing in front of a television watching rescue workers pull the dead, the maimed, and the burned out of the rubble of the gymnasium his missile had destroyed, and he wanted nothing more than to end his own miserable life.
He set the silver case on the floor and backed away, lost in the miasma of his guilt and self-loathing. Then he swung his machine gun over his shoulder and began to walk toward the opening at the end of the exit bay. Reg knew what he had to do: throw himself into the air and fly down to the desert floor!
As these thoughts dominated his mind and controlled his actions, another part of Reg was kicking and screaming with the desperation of a drowning man. Trapped inside his own mind and disconnected from his body, he struggled to regain control and shake off the effects of the telepathic haze the Tall Ones had cast over him. But thrash and struggle as he might, he continued to march toward the precipice. In his anxiety, his mind flashed back to the question he’d asked himself after surviving that first catastrophic encounter with the alien attackers: Had he lived to fight again or only saved himself for a more horrible death later on?
Now he knew. He was doomed as certainly as a man in a canoe speeding toward a waterfall without a paddle. And he told himself he’d been right all along: The people of Earth were too divided among themselves to answer the challenge of the highly disciplined alien forces. They’d come close with their too crazy plan, they’d shot the city destroyers out of the air. But that was cold comfort for a man marching toward his own unwilling suicide. He thought again of what he’d told the pilots gathered around the radio tent in the desert: that the only sane thing was to try something crazy.
In the sky beyond the exit-bay door, Reg heard a familiar sound: the screaming turbines of a jet as it dropped into a bombing run. He watched the plane rocket toward him out of the distance, hoping it would destroy the tower before the biological poisons could be released. But long before it came within firing range, it disintegrated in the green flash of a pulse burst.
“Reg! Reg!” He heard Fadeela’s voice over his shoulder. Part of him wanted to turn around, if only to see her one last time before he died, but the other part thought she’d try to stop him from doing what needed to be done. He broke into a jog.
DO SOMETHING! Reg screamed inwardly, but the nightmare continued to sweep him toward the opening. The southeastern horizon appeared before him like a pastel landscape painting, framed by the monumental rectangle of the exit bay. Only a few seconds before he would have stepped off the edge, he remembered how he’d tricked the alien behind the wall in the oasis, how he’d used his imagination to make Khalid, like a character in a dream, begin doing all sorts of improbable things: turning somersaults and flipping himself through the trees like a gymnast.
DO SOMETHING! DO SOMETHING CRAZY! Instead of toying to resist his forward momentum, Reg willed himself to run even faster. To his surprise, it worked. Then he imagined himself skipping like a carefree schoolboy, and his body responded again. He pictured himself movi
ng side to side, sliding his feet like an ice-skater. Soon his body responded, but he was still moving forward. He needed something crazier and needed it fast. So he did the first thing that came into his head: He danced. He broke into a very bad imitation of the dancing he knew from old musicals, a sliding athletic dance like Gene Kelly used to do. Even though his feet wanted to carry him straight ahead, he steered them into a sidestep shuffle. He was almost at the edge of the precipice. Keep dancing! he told himself. It took all his energy to maintain his concentration. He tried everything he could think of: spinning, leaping, tumbling, stomping his feet. Each of these strange gyrations worked for only a few seconds until the impulse to jump reasserted itself and carried him another step forward. Desperate to save himself, Reg started shucking and jiving, jitterbugging and hoofing, flailing around spastically, doing whatever odd movement came to mind. He kept it up until Fadeela’s voice broke the spell.
“Reg! What are you doing?!” she yelled as she came running toward him down the immense corridor.
He backed away from the opening and, horrified at what he had been about to do, turned around to see her emerging from the shadows. “Over here,” he yelled to her. “I’m all right now. I almost jumped.”
She ran toward him without slowing down. “Come on, we’ve got to hurry. Let’s jump together.” She grabbed him by the arm and tried to tug him into the open air. When he resisted, she was angry and confused. “What are you doing?” she demanded. “We’ve got to jump. They’re waiting!”
Reg wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her off the ground. “Sorry, princess, you’re coming with me.” She thrashed from side to side and kicked savagely as Reg turned and started back into the exit bay. Less than halfway back to the spot where the aliens were readying the biological poisons, Ali, Edward, and Yossi came jogging up from the opposite direction.
“Help me!” Fadeela shrieked. “He’s gone insane. Help!”
The three men stopped running and looked on in bewilderment as Reg explained the situation. “She’s trying to jump out of the tower,” Reg told them. “The aliens, they’re controlling her. Help me hold her.”
“Why are you doing this?” Ali asked. “You understand what we have to do.” He gestured Yossi and Edward to move in from the sides, while he moved cautiously forward, speaking in a soothing voice as he prepared to spring at Reg. “Let her go, Reg. Put her on the ground.”
Reg tightened his grip around Fadeela’s waist and whispered into her ear. “Princess, I know you’re in there. I know you can hear me. I want you to pretend you’re riding a bicycle. Start kicking your legs.”
She replied by butting the back of her skull against the bridge of his nose. Just as Yossi and Edward closed in from either side and prepared to grab him, Reg tried one last time. “Kick, Princess.” Then he lifted her even higher off the ground and charged at Ali.
“I am not a princess!” she screamed. And her legs began churning in front of her like the blades on a threshing machine. Ali was standing in the way as Fadeela, legs pumping, came flying toward him. Reg threw her on top of the Saudi captain and, as the two of them crashed to the floor, he lowered his head and bulled his way past them, narrowly escaping the grasping hands of the other two men.
Running as fast as he could, Reg raised his machine gun in one hand and his pistol in the other and began blasting. As he came closer to the place where the aliens were working, he felt a numbness spread through his limbs and his pace slow to a trot. As the paralysis continued to spread, Reg gritted his teeth and pushed himself forward. He could feel the Tall Ones watching him from the darkness, trying to force their way back into his mind. Struggling with all his might against the invisible power, he dragged himself as close to the aliens as he could. Then he stopped and went perfectly still. His left hand went slack, and the pistol dropped to the floor. He appeared to be dead on his feet. He closed his eyes and felt/listened to the telepathic bombardment coming at him from three separate directions. Something like a smile flickered faintly across Reg’s lips when he realized that he knew exactly where each alien was standing. Three quick bullets. Reg snapped his machine gun into position and fired three shots into the darkness.
There was a crash as the silver case hit the ground and glass test tubes bounced on the floor. The silent screaming in his head went quiet, and the strength returned to his arms. He was sure the Tall Ones were dead. He moved forward a few steps until he felt the hardness of a test tube under his boot and stopped short. He backed up and squatted down, feeling for the vial with his hand, hoping it wasn’t broken. If it was, he would be dead in a matter of days, perhaps hours. Luckily, it seemed to be in one piece, and he slipped it into his shirt pocket. He set the gun aside and moved around the floor on his hands and knees, groping for test tubes as he listened to the shouts of Fadeela and Ali as they ran toward him.
“Over here!” he called to them. “But watch your step. There are test tubes all over the floor.”
By the time Reg killed the aliens, the four of them had run to the edge of the tower and were about to throw themselves off the side. Their flashlights lit up the area. Everything was riddled with bullet holes: the bodies of the three Tall Ones, the side of the taproot, and even the silver case.
“Oh, no. If any of the tubes are broken…” Edward began.
“…we might as well go back and jump,” Yossi finished the thought. They began searching the floor and quickly found half of the fourteen test tubes, all of them with their seals in place. Five more were discovered inside the taproot, already loaded into the slots that had been grown for them. The meat of the root was wet and orange, like the flesh of a ripe mango. Ali reached inside and gingerly worked them free one at a time, then handed them to Edward, who used his good hand to place them, ever so carefully, back into the battered case.
“I’ve got another one right here,” Reg said. “Give me some light.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the tube he’d stepped on with his boot. It was cracked from top to bottom, but not all the way through. The structural integrity of the tube hadn’t been violated. The honey-colored liquid inside looked harmless enough, like a sample of clean motor oil. Reg gazed nervously at the deadly nectar, which was enough, in theory, to send the entire human species into extinction. “Hey, Edward,” he said with a slight quiver in his voice, “I think you’d better get over here with that case before I drop this thing.” His fingers were trembling and continued to do so until the fragile beaker was resting peacefully in its foam channel.
“We need one more,” Edward announced. “Be careful where you step.”
As the team searched the floor on hands and knees, a pair of explosions shook the tower. A handful of Saudi jets were still in the sky, intent on toppling the tower. The massive structure groaned loudly and tipped even farther. All the equipment the Tall Ones had left scattered on the floor began sliding. Shouting filled the exit bay.
“Time to get out!”
“Let’s go! Back down to the shaft!”
“Not yet!” Reg yelled. “Listen!” Cutting through the rest of the noise was the high-pitched tinkle of rolling glass. The final test tube was skittering downslope with the rest of the debris.
“Hurry! Before it breaks.”
They chased the sound of the tube through the darkness.
“I’ve got it!” Yossi shouted. He carried it to Edward, using both hands. When it was finally locked inside the damaged case, he took off his glasses and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
“Now can we please get the hell out of here?”
They ran to the trellis and began to climb down, Edward hugging the case to his chest. They were almost to the floor of the lower story when Fadeela stopped and looked around.
“We’re missing someone. Where’s Michael?” she asked. In all the confusion, they’d left him behind.
“I’m right behind you!” came a voice from above. They turned their flashlight upward and saw him climbing down the bars. His uniform was s
oaked in blood from his wounds, and it looked like his stomach was severely distended. When he caught up to the rest of the team, Yossi turned a flashlight on his swollen belly.
“What, did they make you pregnant up there?”
“Oh, that?” Tye asked, patting the front of his uniform. “I decided to bring Big Mama along with me. She’s practically human.”
“No!” Fadeela said. “You’ve got to leave it here. If you bring it, they’ll know where we are. We can’t let them get the bioweapons back.”
“We’ll talk about it outside,” Reg said. He knew Tye had saved the strange creature for “humanitarian” reasons, but he suddenly realized it might serve another purpose. The six of them rushed across the floor, threw themselves into the esophageal elevator, then climbed down the several flights of X-shaped girders. Bomb blasts continued to rock the tower. As quickly as their feet would carry them, the team was on ground level once more. They hurried out of the tower, looking for the chariot they’d left near the abandoned jeeps.
Tye lagged behind the others. He had made the first part of the trip down without any assistance, but his stab wounds began to take their toll as he climbed down the last few stories. He couldn’t use his left arm, and his stomach was cramping. Reg and Ali stayed behind the others to help him. As they brought him down, the entire tower groaned and leaned, threatening to collapse at any moment. When they came running out of the tower and into the area where the jeeps were parked, they learned that the chariot was gone. Yossi, Edward, and Fadeela were laboring to push-start one of the jeeps.
“Get in,” Yossi yelled, as soon as the engine kicked to life. Ali and Reg tossed Tye into the passenger seat and jumped aboard a second before Yossi slammed his foot down on the pedal and went careening around the corner. He took them bumping and swerving along the side of the tower until they saw daylight filtering in through the gash in the exterior wall. There was no way to make the jeep climb over the debris that the chariot had crossed on the way inside, so they left it behind and exited the city destroyer on foot.
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 81