Assault Troopers

by Vaughn Heppner

  She was a sight: pretty little hat, red lipstick and wearing nice white gloves. We’d seen her before. She was visiting her sister, one of the protesting labor leaders, and this girl liked to laugh. My superior, Mike Edwards, couldn’t take his eyes off her, and he’d been muttering for days what he’d like to do to her in our shed.

  His uncle ran Black Sand on Java, so he thought he could get away with anything. Mike was a big bastard, too, with a big gut, wide face and mean black eyes. He constantly needed a shave and there were always taco stains on his shirt. The man was a drunk, and mean drunk this time from too much scotch.

  Edwards told her to get out of the jeep.

  Rollo and I glanced at him. We knew her papers were in order.

  Edwards took a wide stance, gripping his gun belt with his thick fingers and dirty fingernails. He liked to feel important, and he shouted at her to hurry it up.

  She was classy, opened the door slowly and put high-heeled shoes onto the dirt. She had great legs and a short skirt, showing that her ass was as wonderful as the rest of her.

  Edwards licked his lips, and those piggy eyes shone with lust. I’d seen that look in prison, before I’d bashed faces and broke teeth with my olive jar.

  “Is there a problem?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” Edwards slurred. One of his paws descended onto her wrist, circling it like a fleshy manacle. She gave a little gasp of surprise. Edwards dragged her, and when she tried to dig in her heels, he yanked, making her stumble after him.

  I’d heard stories about Edwards. He liked to rip off women’s clothes, make them scream and press down on them afterward as he indulged himself. In truth, the man was a pig, a big one, a rutting boar of a rapist.

  “Edwards,” I said.

  “Bugger off,” he told me. “I’m busy for a while.”

  “What can you do?” Rollo whispered to me. “His uncle runs the place. If we lift a finger, we’ll be in trouble.”

  The little woman with the white gloves peered over her shoulder and gave me a pleading look.

  “Edwards,” I said again.

  He swiveled that wide face of his, stared at me and spat in my direction. “If you’re smart—”

  He roared with pain because I had stepped up as he spoke to me. I’d grabbed his thumb, the one on the girl’s wrist, and twisted hard. That’s what made him yell. Then I grinned in his face, twisting harder until he released her delicate wrist. Then my right foot happened to move behind his left heel, and the wallowing pig tumbled backward onto the dirt.

  “Run,” I told the woman, “vamoose.”

  She backed away with terror in her eyes, staring at me and then at Edwards. He bellowed from on the ground, and unsnapped his holster.

  I took two steps and kicked. The revolver he drew out of the holster spun into the jungle, the heavy thing slapping banana leaves before thudding somewhere out of sight.

  “Go,” I told her, pointing at her car.

  She hurried to it, slammed the door after getting in, looked once more at me, and peeled out as Rollo held up the crossbar.

  Edwards was a tough guy and he was used to getting his way, especially in these things. He rose like a ponderous elephant and shook his hurt hand. When he was done with that, he squinted at me, charged and took his first swing.

  Rollo told me later that I was grinning crazy-like as Edwards’s fists hammered against my ribs. I don’t know about that. I let Edwards take several swings, though, before I beat him into unconsciousness.

  Soon thereafter, I found myself reassigned to Antarctica with these eggheads. Rollo joined me because he hadn’t helped Edwards defend himself. Naturally, the uncle hadn’t believed our side of the story. Or maybe he had, but didn’t care. And that was the fact of my life: the powers that be sticking it to me because of greedy self-interest.

  It seems like it should have gotten easier, putting up with these injustices, but it never did.

  In any case, now the wind howled outside in Victoria Land, Antarctica beating against our building. Rice hunched over the radio set, spinning her dial with her glossy red fingernails with the little sparkly swirls. Others re-watched starship video as if it was their favorite porn, seemingly unable to get enough footage of the destruction. I sat on my chair in a black funk, wishing there was an alien conqueror for me to kill. I debated praying for the first time in years, asking God to send me an alien.

  The main door swung open then. It felt weird and surreal. Had God heard my thoughts? The idea bemused me.

  Snow swirled through the open door. It blew between Rollo’s long legs as he came in. Nope. No alien. I was disappointed. High in the sky purple clouds raced like NASCAR madmen shifting into nth gear.

  Rollo stepped in and his goggle-protected eyes locked onto me.

  “What?” I asked.

  He opened his mouth, but couldn’t seem to speak. I saw confusion in his eyes: like an elk in the headlights.

  I stood up as my neck tingled. Without thinking, I chambered a round. I held my rifle, a good old M-14. There were extra magazines and two grenades in my parka pockets.

  His lips moved, and Rollo said, “Aliens.”

  I was already moving toward him. Maybe I sensed what he wanted to say.

  The others by the radio half turned, staring at Rollo. I clutched his right triceps and let my fingers dig in painfully.

  That cleared his eyes. He raised his left arm, pointing up into the swirling sky. “Aliens are coming. What are we going to do?”

  With a snarl, I jerked Rollo out of the way and charged outside with my rifle. My disappointment vanished and my mind became clearer. It was payback time.

  -2-

  As the wind hit me I remembered my goggles, hanging around my neck. The snowstorm raged, with stinging flakes biting my cheeks. I finally fit the goggles over my eyes, doing it one-handed because I still clutched the M-14. Once the lenses were in place, I tilted my head upward into the storm.

  I expected to have to search for the alien ship, a flickering dot moving up, down and all around. No need. This thing was the size of a jumbo jet minus the wings. It had a box shape, with the front slanted back, no doubt to lessen friction. The giant lander headed toward our shelters. We had three buildings and two high-tech tents. Make that one tent now. The new, crazy, messed-up wind had torn down the other one.

  Just like Rollo, I stood open-mouthed. Freezing flakes of snow landed on my tongue, a few hitting the back of my throat. This was a wild storm. With a click, I snapped my teeth together.

  Start thinking things through, because you’re not going to get a second chance.

  Right, I needed to think, to analyze. But before I could do that, I had to observe. The alien lander moved smoothly. It appeared that the wind didn’t buffet it hard enough to sway it from its flight path.

  Did the extraterrestrials possess antigravity? I’d read plenty of science fiction and played sci-fi video games with Rollo. I knew a few things, or I thought I did.

  No, I didn’t think they had antigravity. I spotted thrusters in back and jets of flame like from an F-16 using afterburners. I heard a thunderous roar, too. It was louder than a jumbo jet. I noticed as well that it did have stubby wings, small things, nubs really, which seemed to wobble the slightest bit.

  It told me the howling wind did buffet the craft. Somehow, that did it for me and helped me regain my mental balance. These weren’t magical creatures. Arthur C. Clarke had said something about super-high tech appearing as magic to less developed beings. The lander now didn’t seem magical to me, but understandable.

  Another group of thrusters appeared as the lander changed the manner and direction of its descent. The new thrusters sprouted from the bottom of the craft. They roared with flames as the lander came straight down. Swirling flakes melted in the stab of afterburners and the thunder grew ponderous.

  I dropped my M-14 onto the snow and clapped gloved hands over my hood-protected ears. The noise was incredible, with the rumbling booms shaking through my b
ody. Despite that, I watched, marveling at the lander. This thing was from another star system, who knew how many light years away. In it were alien beings—aliens who had annihilated most of Earth, including my dad.

  I ground my teeth together. This was my chance to hurt them for hurting us. Would it be a useless gesture on my part? I didn’t know. Everyone was wired differently. I was a fighter by nature, a counter-puncher. And I believed it was an ominous sign that they were coming down here. Why send a lander near one of the few sets of survivors? It couldn’t be for any reasons of kindness, but must be due to their vicious alien psychology. Yeah, okay. I was ready to duke it out, to bite them on the ankle if I could.

  After days of wishing for something like this, I was too angry to run away.

  As it neared, the lander began to look bigger than a jumbo jet. This thing had to be the size of a football stadium, making it gargantuan. That troubled me. What did they use for fuel?

  I understood some of the alien tech, but we were still the aborigines, the Native Americans or the Indians if you’re old school. I’d read a lot of history, mostly in prison, to help me pass the time. When the Europeans went exploring throughout the world, it never went well with the aborigines. If the primitives were too few or too far down the scale of technology, they ended up being annihilated or assimilated. As far as Earth went, it appeared to me that we were like Australia in the 1700s when the British showed up with guns and sailing ships, high tech for the time.

  That meant picking off the first alien—shooting him in the head—would achieve little. It would be like the Indians killing Christopher Columbus’s rowboat landing crew. It still would have left the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria off shore. Could I hurt these aliens in a more grievous manner?

  I gazed past the lander, past the purple clouds with their red swirls spinning like whirlwinds, and tried to pierce the intervening mists into orbit. Did that mother of a spaceship still sit up there? If so, that’s what I needed to shoot down.

  I snarled because I’d forgotten how to laugh. I felt so helpless. I almost picked up the M-14 to empty the magazine against the lander’s hull. Why didn’t the alien craft launch a missile at us? Were the aliens coming down to hunt the last humans like the Predators had in those old movies? Was I just a big game animal to them?

  I decided to wait and find out. I could always fire my rifle later. Yet what good would that do? I might as well have pissed at the alien craft, for all the harm I could do to them. My anger was hard and righteous, but fear kept trickling out of my gut, telling me to run and hide. Sometimes a mouse could survive where a lion died.

  Rollo stepped up beside me. I glanced at him. He looked over at me, with his hands pressed against his ears. I recognized the look: it was the same as when Edwards had dragged the girl toward the shed.

  What can we do?

  The answer was: Not a damn thing. We were ants, fleas. It might have been better if we could have been bacteria or viruses. Wasn’t that how H.G. Wells said Earthlings defeated the Martians in War of the Worlds?

  I watched the lander. What if I could carry a nuclear device inside it like a suicide bomber? That would destroy it. Yeah, it wasn’t indestructible. It wasn’t a chariot of the gods. The beings inside were mortal. Otherwise, they wouldn’t need a spaceship, right?

  I opened my mouth to help lessen the pressure against my ears. The flames from the thrusters licked out a hundred feet and melted snow on the ground. The lander—the stadium-sized vehicle—blew ice and frozen dirt. Giant struts lowered into place from the bottom of the craft, with huge sleds or skis on the ends.

  The flames of the thrusters weakened. The noise became bearable—a piercing whine—and the monstrous shuttle thudded onto the earth, causing the ground where I stood to tremble against the soles of my boots. At that point, the fire in the rockets disappeared and so did the thunderous sounds.

  Tentatively, I lowered my hands, and Rollo lowered his. I bent to scoop up my rifle.

  Rollo grabbed my shoulder. “Do you think that’s wise?”

  Bent over like that, I pondered his question. I could go open-handed to the aliens who had murdered the Earth. I could show them what peaceful, loveable creatures we Earthlings were so they’d spare the last of us. Or, I could carry a gun. I could go armed and fight back if the aliens decided they wanted the last Earthers as zoo specimens. They might kill me as too dangerous, but that would be better than becoming their cosmic play-toy.

  I picked up the M-14 and temporized because of the trickles of doubt radiating from my gut. I slung the carrying strap over my shoulder.

  “Are you coming?” I asked. The lander was about a half-mile away.

  Rollo hesitated.

  “Or would you like to huddle in the shelter with them?” I asked, jerking at thumb at Rice. The radio operator stuck her head out of the door, with several others standing in the shadows behind her, watching.

  “Do you think it’s safe?” Rollo asked.

  “No, but who cares?”

  He managed a sickly grin, and he patted his side, telling me he was strapping a pistol.

  Both of us gulped air, and the two of us marched toward the lander. I felt as if I walked to my gallows, a mouse marching to face a grinning hawk.

  About halfway there, the thing began unfolding a ramp from its side. They were coming outside. Would they be like the grotesque creatures from the movie Alien, or maybe like zergs from Starcraft? Would they be big, little, fast, slow, what?

  We reached the lander as the end of the ramp clanged against rocky ground. The entrance up at the top of the ramp opened, but it remained gray, as if covered somehow. The magnitude of the entrance bothered me. Were these things the size of elephants?

  Maybe thirty second later, a tracked vehicle pushed through the wall, or membrane of the opening. The substance seemed to cling to the tank, like a soap bubble to a finger pushed through it.

  Why bother with such a membrane?

  “Do you see that?” Rollo asked me.

  “The tank or the membrane?” I asked.

  “Membrane,” he said, as if tasting the word. “Yeah, that sounds right. They must use it to keep our atmosphere from rushing into their ship.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Rollo was a bright, geeky guy. Yeah, his idea made sense.

  The tracked vehicle was the size of an M-1 tank, and it began to clatter down the ramp. By my reckoning, it weighed seventy or eighty tons, but it was built along different lines from an Abrams. The alien tank was longer and lower to the ground and it had a bubble canopy in the middle. A heavy machine gun-sized turret poked out of the bubble, but I couldn’t spy an orifice at the end of the barrel. The U.S. had fired depleted uranium shells from their tanks. Well, the United States was gone, history now. Their tanks had used such shells. I didn’t think that little turret fired solid projectiles, though. Likely, it projected some kind of beam.

  “It squeals just like our tanks,” Rollo observed.

  He meant the treads. They clanked, squealed and rattled as the vehicle climbed down the ramp. The treads needed oiling, servicing, which made the aliens seem a little less frightening. They had problems just like us. Well, maybe not extinction problems, but you know what I mean. The vehicle reached the snowy ground and turned sharply toward us. The turret lowered until it aimed at our chests.

  “I don’t like this,” Rollo whispered.

  I shrugged because I didn’t know what to say. The fear in my stomach had grown enough to dampen my former rage. Gripping the rifle strap with one hand, I put the other on my hip and stared at the turret. My feet itched with the desire to run away. My mind told me that was useless. If I ran, the turret could easily track and fry me. No. I’d come this far. Now I’d stick it out in a game of chicken, which I was going to lose in less than thirty seconds.

  The thought of my coming death revived the anger. I forced myself to study the alien tank, searching for a hatch to force. If I could, I’d rip out all my fingernails trying to pry open a ha
tch so I could fire one bullet after another into the alien crew.

  All the while, the tank trundled closer, the treads churning over snow and spitting a muddy colored spume from the sides.

  “Creed,” Rollo said. “We gotta move.”

  “So move,” I said, staring at the tank heading straight for me, hating it the closer it neared.

  “What’s standing here going to prove?” he asked.

  “Not a damn thing,” I said, with my gaze riveted onto the tank. I was a mouse daring a hawk, and I was about to become squished human.

  Despite my best efforts to observe, I didn’t see a hatch, a way into the tank. I revised my plan then, because it seemed insane to let myself get rolled over. Bite, scratch, do something to hurt them. The open entrance up there on the lander gave me an idea.

  “When I give the word,” I said out of the corner of my mouth, “go left. I’ll go right.”

  “Yeah,” Rollo said, in a skeptical tone, “and then what?”

  “Then we circle the tank and sprint for the ramp.”

  “What? Why do that?”

  “For the best of reasons,” I said. “We rush up the ramp, storm inside the lander and kill everyone onboard. Then we have ourselves an alien space vehicle.”

  Rollo looked at me. He didn’t look scared, but confused. It was enough to cause me to glance at him.

  “Are you crazy?” he asked, in a voice telling me it was a genuine question.

  Before I could answer, the alien tank squealed to a halt thirty feet from us. At the same moment, the end of the turret glowed with a pink color. Before we could move, a ray beamed in a wide swath, including Rollo and me in its path. I’d played chicken with the aliens and obviously lost. I was sure this is exactly how they’d treated my father.

  The beam wasn’t hot, but it was bright like the sun and seemed to encompass my mind and thoughts. My first instinct—after finding myself alive and on my feet—was to drop to my belly and slither away, but I hesitated. The pink light continued to flood my eyesight and I found myself blinking rapidly. What in the…in the…