World of Hurt

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

“We’re headed down to the lowest level of the cathedral,” Vidmark said. “The crypt level. This is where the first foundation stones were laid. There’s been a worship service here every day since it was finished in 1912.”

  “Did they miss any during the occupation?” Jezzy asked.

  Vidmark shook his head. “Like I said. The aliens turned a blind eye to this place, which is why it’s the perfect location.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “A portion of the new central command.”

  We hit a landing and moved past two chapels and a meditation center, until we were in a corridor that connected to what was called the Resurrection Chapel. Somebody had bolted black metal doors on the outside of the chapel that were heaved open.

  We stepped into the chapel and my nostrils curled up. The air on the other side of the black metal doors was heavy with the funk of stagnant water and mildew. I sneezed and saw that the chapel was impressive with vaulted ceilings and several walls covered in what Vidmark said were “joyful mosaics.” At the far end of the chapel was a mural of what looked like Jesus rising from the dead. “That makes perfect sense doesn’t it?” Vidmark said, gaping at the mural. “When you think about it, the story of resurrection is our story.”

  Glancing to the left and right, I saw that the walls without the joyful mosaics had been retrofitted to hold banks of electronic machines, enormous monitors synced to computers, and all sorts of military-style equipment. I squinted, watching what looked like real-time imagery on some of the monitors, which were being overseen by small teams of young men and women, a group of military analysts I figured, who were muttering into headsets and shoulder mics.

  President Landis raised a hand and the black metal doors were slammed shut. The space was so confined that I could feel the heat being thrown off by the computer equipment and the other people assembled around me.

  The President stood before us, a serious expression stamped on her face.

  “In the days before the invasion, there would have been protocol when holding a meeting like this. Most of what we will talk about would be considered classified, implicating national security concerns that would have been considered so sensitive that none of it could ever be written down. Observing protocol takes time and time is something that we simply don’t have at the moment. That said, none of what we discuss here today can ever leave this room. Do you understand that?”

  Vigorous nods followed from me and the other operators. President Landis gestured to one of her analysts. The lights in the room went down and a beam of yellow light splashed the faraway wall. Images danced in the light, footage of the prior night’s attack.

  “As you all know, your compound was assaulted by an alien force last night.” President Landis looked from the images in the light, back to us. “What you don’t know is that the attack on The Hermitage appears to have been a decoy … a distraction.”

  Murmurs and a few gasps sounded. The images on the wall changed to top-down, drone-style shots of another complex, a series of buildings. There were flashes on the ground in and around the buildings, what looked like explosions, followed by plumes of smoke and dozens of luminous forms running from the buildings. The shots zoomed in to reveal that the luminous forms were aliens sprinting away. There was a running firefight between them and armed men as an alien glider appeared. The glider fired down on the armed men before descending to gather up the aliens.

  “The real target appears to have been a government facility located on Maryland’s Eastern Shore,” President Landis said. “A prison that held around one-thousand aliens, scabs, and various other collaborators.”

  The hairs on my arms ridged because I was pretty sure I knew which prison it was. It was the one I’d been taken to after the hoversurf crash. My only hope was that Stryker had been knocked off during the attack.

  “At least forty-seven of the highest HVATs, high-value alien targets, were broken out of the prison.”

  “How come?” Simeon asked.

  “I was hoping somebody would ask that,” President Landis replied with a tight smile.

  The images on the wall flickered and flashed to reveal a never-ending sweep of sunbaked desert.

  “Does anyone know what that is?” President Landis asked.

  “Desert,” Ren answered.

  “It’s actually the largest gypsum dune field in the world. It’s near the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. That’s where the aliens are going.”

  “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” Dru said, “but why would the scuds want to hit the desert?”

  “Because they want what’s in it.”

  “Sand?” Billy asked with a snicker.

  “There’s something buried in the sand,” President Landis said.

  “Our intel is incomplete, but from what we can tell, there’s an alien ‘Leave Behind’ located at that site,” Vidmark said, stepping over to flank President Landis. Dexter handed Vidmark a silver laser pointer which he flipped on and waved at the images of the desert. “What some people refer to as a ‘pre-position vault.’”

  “What does this ‘pre-position’ mean?” Sato asked.

  “It means the aliens had secret stashes, places where they hid equipment, weapons, you name it, just in case they ever found themselves in hot water,” Vidmark replied. “And our best guess is that the remaining rogue alien elements, including those that participated in the assaults on The Hermitage and the prison, are headed down to one of the largest ones.”

  “How could anyone possibly know that?” Jezzy asked.

  “Our intelligence—” President Landis reiterated before Jezzy cut her off with a wave of the hand. I would never have had the guts to stifel the President of the United States, but Jezzy had serious stones (or “brass ovaries” as she liked to say to me).

  “Yes, ma’am, I heard you, but … what kind of intelligence?”

  President Landis bit her lip and a final image appeared in the yellow light of an alien lying back down on a stainless-steel table. The alien was dead, its chest opened and a misshapen set of six oversized ribs exposed, being prodded and poked by several people in white smocks.

  “One of the aliens apprehended during the prison break was … interrogated and found to have sixteen microchips the size of eraser heads implanted in its body,” the President said.

  I watched the images on the wall, saw the people in white smocks lower the lights and flip on a laser of some kind that emitted a beam of blue light. The light danced across the chest of the dead alien and refracted off the sixteen microchips, rerouted over the alien’s corpse to form a map in mid-air.

  Vidmark stabbed at the microchips with his laser pointer as President Landis continued. “The map reveals what we believe is the location of every alien pre-position vault in the contiguous United States. Every single one of those vaults was assaulted last night at or around the time The Hermitage was attacked. Every vault but one or two.”

  “Including the one in the desert?” I asked.

  The images on the wall vanished and the lights in the room suddenly flashed back on. President Landis was staring at me. “That’s right,” she said. “We have reason to believe the aliens are indeed making their way to the vault, picking up others along the way. But they’re never going to get there.”

  “Why not?” Simeon asked.

  President Landis grinned. “Because you’re going to stop them.”

  7

  President Landis held up her hand. “Your unit has been selected to intercept the rogue alien elements at the desert site. You will confront and terminate them with extreme prejudice and then destroy the alien vault.”

  The other operators began high-fiving and cheering. “Time to bring the hammer down once and for all on the scuds,” Billy said.

  “All aboard the train that is the pain train,” Sato said in broken English, slapping palms with Ren and Dru.

  “Don’t get cocky,” somebody said. We looked over to see Richter rising from his chair and tu
rning to us. “The enemy will be well-armed and numerous by the time we greet them.”

  “All of you are, of course, familiar with Mister Richter,” President Landis said with a sweep of her hand. “He’s been asked to … consult on the operation.”

  “How long do we have to prepare?” I asked.

  “A little more than ten hours,” Richter replied. “Just enough time to shake and bake and get oriented to the new equipment.”

  Jezzy’s eyes crimped. “What kind of new equipment?”

  * * *

  My old man loved him some “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” I mean, the guy was such a fan of the classic movie that he programmed his Scienta account (the one he passed on to Frank and me), so that in order to fully access the library of movies he’d chosen, we first had to type in the password “Ravenwood” and watch “Raiders” three times in a row. I mention the movie because there’s a scene at the end where the Ark of the Covenant, after being recovered by the good guys, is wheeled into a ginormous government warehouse filled with crates and boxes. Now imagine that warehouse exists and it’s located under the streets of downtown Washington, D.C., and contains every conceivable alien weapon that could be scrounged after the occupation ended. That’s what Jezzy and me, and the other operators were heading toward twenty minutes after meeting with President Landis at The National Cathedral, sliding through underground walkways toward a cavernous room that had been hollowed out of what was left of the Friendship Heights Metro Station.

  “So are you stoked or what?” Jezzy whispered to me as we exited a walkway and padded down a flight of stone stairs.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “Our new president. Hello. She’s a woman!”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  Jezzy elbowed me. “It’s about time, right?”

  “Yep, all it took was the end of the world to elect a female president.”

  I hadn’t meant anything by it (and thought it was pretty damn funny if I’m being honest), but Jezzy was not amused. She pinned me with a dismissive look. “Was that your idea of humor, Deus?”

  “No, I was being serious,” I lied, putting on my most somber face. “How dare it take the end of the world to elect a woman president!”

  “You’re such an ass,” she muttered.

  We reached a landing and entered an area that was as large as a football field, dimly lit by overhead track lights, and stacked nearly floor to ceiling with equipment, machines, mechs, drones, gear, weapons, and bundles of weapons parts and ammunition. The place resembled Santa’s Workshop by way of a friggin’ Seal Team Six weapons depot and I could tell by the shapes, sizes, and markings on the equipment that most of it was indeed alien in origin.

  “This is a just a portion of the material we recovered from the aliens,” President Landis said, leading us on a stroll through the stacks of gear. My eyes were everywhere, taking in hundreds of pieces of equipment. There were rifles, and rocket launchers, and small drones with long, telescoping sensor necks that we used to call “Swans.” There were sets of blood-red armor, sabers, rocket packs, and all manner of small and mid-sized mechs.

  “I’ll take one of everything please,” I said to the laughter of the others.

  Baila held up a set of armor and Simeon inspected an alien rifle. “As you may or may not know, most if not all of the equipment originally contained self-destruct implants which would have prevented us from utilizing it. Those implants have been deactivated.”

  “Which means we can hop and pop with any of this stuff?” Billy asked as I picked up an alien rifle.

  “Which means you can turn those weapons against the scuds!” somebody shouted.

  Out of the hazy light appeared the outline of a woman with broad shoulders and short, black hair that was swept back. She walked with a slight limp and was tall, nearly six feet. Most of us gasped because we’d seen images of her before.

  “Jesus,” Jezzy gasped, whispering to me. “Do you know who that is?”

  I nodded.

  It was Quinn, one of the Marines who’d led the attack that brought about the end of the alien invasion.

  For a moment she didn’t look real.

  I mean, she was eerily silhouetted against a bank of lights on the faraway wall that made her appear like some kind of hologram … or ghost. She drew near and as the light resolved around her, I was struck by her eyes, which somehow didn’t seem human. They were the kind of eyes you might see on a feral animal or a great bird of prey. Quinn never blinked and when she glanced at each of us, I was forced to look away.

  President Landis moved toward Quinn who summoned up a smile. “Everyone,” President Landis said, “I’d like to introduce you to—”

  “Quinn,” Jezzy blurted out.

  Baila nodded. “We know who she is.”

  The other operators surged toward Quinn, crowding around her like fan boys and girls, but I kept my distance. She was the face of the revolution and one of the greatest heroes in American history. Most of us had heard the stories about everything she’d gone through with, and without, her daughter Samantha (a mysterious figure who was purportedly off fighting other battles), and I figured she probably preferred people to keep their distance.

  “Quinn has been assisting our recovery efforts while our administration finds its legs,” President Landis said. “She’s in charge of a small procurement team.”

  “Which is just a fancy way of saying I’ve been doing some collecting,” Quinn added. “We’ve gathered up as much of the most advanced alien technology as we could find and brought it here. We’re calling this place ‘The Candy Store.’”

  Everyone laughed and Quinn gestured at the rifle in my hands. I handed it to her and she angled her hand back.

  “Once you familiarize yourself with the tech, you’ll notice subtle things.”

  She pressed her fingers into the stock of the alien rifle which began shifting and reordering itself, the stock seeming to mold around Quinn’s thumb and forefinger as if it was a living thing.

  Quinn handed the rifle back to me. She looked to President Landis who nodded. “The mech operations team has been authorized to appropriate anything here.”

  I saw Simeon and the others look over. “Anything?” Simeon asked.

  The President nodded and Quinn’s face fell. “God knows you’ll need it,” Quinn said, her voice barely above a whisper. The other operators weren’t listening, they’d already set off through the stacks of goodies, pointing at various weapons and gear.

  I moved over with Jezzy and examined a small alien mech that stood mute and motionless, its mighty arms hanging at its side. We admired the shape of the mech and how its right arm and rocket pod seemed to have been formed out of one continuous piece of gray, shimmering alien metal. I thought it was a rocket pod because it was long and oval-shaped, but in truth, I didn’t know what the thing was because there was no opening on its end, but I liked the looks of it.

  “What is that thing?” Jezzy asked.

  “I have no idea, but I think I’m in love,” I replied, running my hand down the strange material, searching for a joint or a button that might open it. I noticed that no matter how much I touched the object, it never revealed any smudges or fingerprints and there was kind of electricity coursing through the material that made the hair on my head stand up. I looked back to Jezzy. “Oh, yeah. This is it. This is definitely the new Sump’n Sump’n weapon.”

  Richter tossed me a red crayon and thinking there might be some way to detach the pod from the alien mech and bolt it onto the Spence mech, I reached up and slashed a mark across the pod, claiming it. Jezzy was nearby, perusing an alien rifle.

  “I’m assuming you’re against those?” Richter said, gesturing to the alien rifle in Jezzy’s hands.

  Jezzy’s eyes slitted as Richter took the rifle from her. “Why would you assume that?” she asked.

  “Several reasons…”

  “Because I’m female?”

  “That was reason numero uno,�
�� Richter replied.

  Jezzy snatched the rifle back from Richter, reconfigured the stock and pulled the firing bolt back on the gun. She did this so quickly her movements were just a blur. She brought the gun around and peered down over the barrel at Richter.

  “I’m a female alright. A female who’s originally from Texas, Mister Richter.”

  She handed the gun to a flummoxed Richter and set off across the room as I followed her, the two of us inspecting all of the additional weapons and equipment. The other operators were literally like kids in a, well, a candy store. I saw Simeon try on a set of Syndicate armor while Billy and Dru hefted rocket launchers. Ren shrugged on a rocket pack while Sato played with a long black saber that she wielded like a quarterstaff.

  “You’ve got fifteen minutes to mark the gear you want, people!” Richter shouted. “Fifteen minutes and then it’s time to move to the next station!”

  By the time I’d marked some stuff and looked back, Quinn was gone.

  * * *

  After selecting our alien equipment, we climbed into the SUVs and drove over what remained of Connecticut Avenue into the heart of downtown, Washington, D.C. It’s difficult to describe the sheer scope of destruction at the outer edges of the city as a result of the invasion. I remember coming down to the nearby zoo when I was a kid and I didn’t recognize it. The entire area and an adjacent section of Rock Creek Park and the surrounding neighborhoods were just … gone. It looked like one of those slash-and-burn fields in the Amazon that you used to see in the old time National Geographic magazines.

  All of the trees were charred nubs and most of the land where homes and businesses once stood was so badly mangled that it looked as if it had been plowed under by a huge machine. There were a few stone chimneys still rising up out of the rubble, the fire from the alien bombings so intense that it fused cement and metal. Only a few steel girders survived to maintain the structural integrity of several edifices, making clear where the original building outlines once were.

  There was a cleanup in progress, soldiers and workers laboring alongside an endless number of trucks which arrived and were loaded with heaps of waste as other machines pushed more of the debris into towering mountains that were five stories tall.