Assault Troopers

by Vaughn Heppner

  You gotta relax, Creed, I told myself.

  Yeah, relax as I was engulfed by living alien technology. I focused on my old man. Mad Jack could have done this. He would try anything experimental. If I wanted to raise a tombstone to my dad, I had to beat the Saurians. I had to accept this slime.

  “Hey,” I told the blob. “I love you. This is the best thing that ever happened to me. You gotta turn me into the Hulk and we’ll stomp the shit out of these Saurians, okay?”

  It must have agreed, because the dark substance started oozing again, climbing my skin and enfolding me in warmth. This sensation wasn’t like the alien heat. As the second skin relaxed against my epidermis, I felt a good warmth. I felt comfortable. That decreased my tension, my anxiety and that speeded the process.

  “How does it know not to cover my mouth?” I asked Dmitri.

  He shrugged.

  Oh yeah, that helped—not. I grinned at Rollo because I noticed he was watching me. His skin had a touch of green and he squirmed slowly as if in pain.

  “Creed,” he said. He lips had stiffened.

  “Put the stuff on him,” I told Dmitri.

  “No,” Rollo said. “Please, no…”

  “The Saurians put poison on their blades,” I told Rollo. “Dmitri said the living armor can help draw it out of you. Why not try it and see what happens?”

  Rollo began to breathe raggedly. “We…never should…have come aboard.”

  “I know it,” I said. The living armor spread across my chest. I no longer noticed the crappy air in here. Even better, I felt as if I floated. I felt healthy: I mean one hundred percent well inside. This armor…maybe there was something to it.

  Dmitri tore off Rollo’s clothes.

  Rollo tried to work his mouth, but it had stiffened too much for him to speak. He groaned, and his fingers twitched. He didn’t want the stuff.

  First mumbling a Cossack prayer in Russian and then winking a Rollo, Dmitri set a blob on my friend’s bare legs.

  My second skin reached my throat and touched the soft flesh underneath my chin. I grew tense, and the living armor halted its advance.

  I squatted low and lifted a foot. The outer surface of the armor on the bottom of my foot had become like hard rubber. I tapped the surface armor on my arm. It was like dense rubber.

  I went to my pile of discarded clothes and drew my combat blade. It was a big Bowie-style knife, almost a small short sword. This sucker was razor sharp and the handle fit into my living armored hand like it was custom-made for me. I’d had a thing for knives for a long time. My stepdad had especially hated me throwing knives against our barn door. That had been during seventh grade in junior high school. I’d bought three throwing knives at a surplus store and had thudded them against the barn door for hours. I’d left two hundred marks or holes in it. My stepdad had walloped me good for that. Later, I’d made a target out of plywood. I could hit the centerpiece from thirty paces away nine times out of ten. Not that I had any intention of throwing the Bowie. It was a fighting blade for hand-to-hand combat.

  What did I know about that? In prison, there had been a thin little book written by a con from San Quentin. I’d read it fifty times and spoken to others. It had concerned prison knife-fighting. There had been little fancy about it. One kept the blade close and used it with a fast thrust: in and out, baby. Sometimes, a fighter didn’t let you get close. The trick then was to cut him, let him bleed and weaken.

  The point to all this was I knew something about knife-fighting, a mean and ugly style meant for quick results. There wasn’t anything gentlemanly about knife fighting: it was a combat technique meant to eliminate your enemy without causing any hurt to yourself.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked Rollo.

  The living armor spread over him like a disease. It had flowed over the envenomed cut.

  Rollo’s eyelids fluttered, and he began to stir.

  I flexed my biceps. “Is there a trick to smashing the lizards like you did earlier?” I asked Dmitri.

  “Act as you would normally,” he said. “The living armor will supply you with extra power.”

  “We have the armor,” I said, “but I’m out of bullets and I don’t really trust our alien grenades. We need to kill them, not just knock the lizards out of the battle.”

  “What are we going to do about the Saurians in the tanks?” Rollo asked. He sat up. The paralysis had gone, although his right eyelid drooped, half-hiding that eye. Dmitri had been right about the armor.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “Woozy,” Rollo said, “and thirsty.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Give me a second,” Rollo said.

  I kept my gaze away from the corpses on the tables and the dead women floating in the cylinders. That was the price for losing.

  “Do you know the layout of the ship?” I asked Dmitri.

  “Ella said something about the lower levels being used for storage and the higher decks being the ship functioning areas.”

  “If Ella’s right,” I said, “and we’ll have to bet she is—that would mean the control room is at the very top.”

  “That is good thinking,” Dmitri said.

  Rollo grunted as he heaved up onto his feet. He glanced at my Bowie knife and raised an eyebrow.

  “Remember how I told you I’ve been to prison?” I said.

  “I remember. I’ll stick to this,” Rollo said, hefting his Browning .45 in one hand and an alien grenade-launching pistol in the other.

  “How much ammo do you have left?” I asked.

  “Two more magazines,” Rollo said.

  “Dmitri, you ready?” I asked.

  “I have been ready ever since you broke me out of the test tube,” the stocky Cossack said.

  “Let’s do it then,” I said. “Let’s hunt down the aliens and kill every Nazi-experimenting one of them.”

  -6-

  The three of us moved through the alien lander as if it was the end of the movie time. You know, how during the beginning of an action movie, the hero usually does something supercool? Then he gets caught or the villain beats the crap out of him in a nasty way and steals his girlfriend. After a long time of getting ready and building up for the grand fight, the hero and his team smashes into the bad guy’s fortress and proceeds to blow everyone down until the final confrontation and movie twist.

  Dmitri, Rollo and I now smashed through the lander, sweeping down the corridors and entering small rooms, chambers and fuzzy-walled corridors of varying sizes and complexity. We found more tube chambers. Some of the upright cylinders held people. Others proved to be empty. Everywhere, we killed Saurians.

  Rollo ran out of bullets, but he found the shock grenade gun to his liking. He stayed in the back, firing into groups of Saurians, knocking down some and slowing down others with the electrical discharges. Dmitri wielded a long bar of iron, and he continued to parody the Hulk. Once, he smashed a lizard’s head clean off the body. Blood jetted from its neck, while the Saurian jerked like a slaughtered chicken and ran against a wall before flopping around on the floor. I used the Bowie knife, and my living armor no longer looked black but was slick with green-dripping Saurian blood.

  The suits pumped us with something, maybe a fast-acting drug to put us into a steroid rage. I felt elation at the slaughter and I felt powerful approaching invincible. The only trouble was a dry mouth. I really needed water. At times, my vision turned splotchy.

  “How much farther do you think it’s to the top of this thing?” Rollo asked.

  We strode along a wide corridor that went upward like a ramp to a pair of double doors. They were the first normal doors we’d seen. Everything else had been protected by a membrane.

  The doors ahead of us swished open and the biggest Saurian I’d seen so far limped out. Behind him in the room, I saw small windows showing an Antarctic storm outside. That was a relief. It let me know the lander was still on Earth. I’d wondered if I’d feel it if the ship took off into space.r />
  In the room I spied stools, lizards in crinkling-looking suits near what seemed like controls. If I were to guess, we’d reached our destination: the lander’s control chamber.

  As the doors swished shut behind him, the big Saurian strode toward us on his springy legs, with his long tail dragging and making clinking noises against the floor. This lizard seemed hoary with age, with a billy-goat’s beard under his scaly jaws and standing as tall as a man, a six-footer. The old one’s scales looked dimmer than the others and a crust of something encircled his eyes.

  He also wore more of the crinkly material and what seemed to be symbols showing his rank, and golden rings around his tail. They were what made the noise as he approached.

  I knew a little about lizards and reptiles. As a kid I’d read up everything I could concerning dinosaurs. For one thing, they kept growing as long as they lived. The biggest crocodile was always the oldest one. I was beginning to believe the same held true for the Saurians.

  Did this old one run the lander? Why had he come alone? Was he surrendering?

  Rollo raised his alien pistol at the lizard.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “He’s trying to stall us,” Rollo said. “This is a trick.”

  The old one wore a device on his chest, which hung from a band around his neck. He touched the device, lifted a microphone, or what looked like a microphone, and spoke into it.

  “You must cease this senseless attack.” The words boomed in English from the translator on his chest.

  He had gall, I’ll give him that. “Are you surrendering?” I asked.

  I had a good reason for not wanting Rollo to fire. I knew the membranes couldn’t stop us, but locked metal doors might. The doors behind the old one seemed solid. If I could, I’d try to talk my way into the control room.

  “Your words lack meaning,” the old one told me concerning surrender. “You are prey, beasts, animals.”

  “We’re people,” I said, feeling a prickliness in my chest. I was more than sick of their arrogance, but I had to contain that for a greater goal. “Answer my question. Are you surrendering? If you are, I give you my word of honor we’ll let you live.”

  “Go back to the chambers,” the old one said. “Remove the battlesuits and the Family will deliver you to the Jelk.”

  “What Family?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s trying to mess with your mind,” Rollo said. “Kill him and smash into the control room.”

  “Do you hear my friend?” I asked. “He wants to kill you. Why shouldn’t I gut you right here? You need to give me a reason to keep you alive.”

  “For you to kill me goes against the natural order of reality,” the old one said. “You are fighting beasts that have run amok. The Family’s duty is to destroy you lest you contaminate the others. However, in this instance, I will bring you to the Jelk. You must leave this area, return to the chambers and remove the battlesuits.”

  “Did you feel that?” Rollo asked me.

  I knew what he meant. The deck plates under my feet vibrated more than before, as if I stood on a hard-revving bulldozer. A loud whine penetrated through the bulkheads. If I were to guess, I’d say the Saurians had started the engines and were getting ready to leave Antarctica.

  “I’m giving you a last chance,” I told the old one. “Surrender the vessel to my control and you can live.”

  “This is obscene,” the old one said. “You have aborted the sequence of reality. The Jelk will be displeased.”

  “I’m displeased,” I said.

  “No. You are beasts. You are—”

  I could see where this was going: nowhere. And I was tired of being called a beast. I’d given him his chance. Now I was going to act. In three swift strides I reached the old Saurian. The engines roared and the deck plates shivered with power. I used the Bowie knife and thrust the steel through his squat neck. Then I threw the dead old one from me and lunged at the doors. They didn’t open.

  The entire corridor swayed and thunderous noises swept through us. The floor slid out from under me and I realized the lander must be lifting off the rocky soil of Antarctica.

  “We have to get in there!” Rollo shouted. “None of this matters if we can’t break into the control room.”

  Despite the roar and the vibration, I climbed up and put my green-dripping hands against the doors and heaved sideways. The doors groaned in a tortured way, but they held their place.

  “Give me a hand!” I shouted. “We have to get in there.”

  The other two rushed forward, and each of us strained against the doors, trying to slide them open.

  The corridor tilted even more, and the old one’s corpse slid away from the double doors. This vehicle must be headed into space.

  “They locked the doors,” Rollo said.

  I thrust my Bowie knife underhanded at the crack between the doors. The blade went in several inches. I shoved with everything I had. Inch by inch, the steel blade slid deeper between the doors.

  “What’s your plan?” Rollo shouted.

  I yanked on the blade, trying to force the doors open. “Push,” I shouted, “one of you per door.”

  The three of us exerted all the considerable strength of our living armor-enhanced muscles. I yanked on the Bowie knife, using it as a lever. I expected it to snap at any moment. Instead, we slid open the doors several inches so I could peer into the control room.

  Saurians turned toward us in surprise.

  “Give me your pistol,” I wheezed.

  While keeping one hand pressed against the door, Rollo shoved me his gun.

  Through the small crack, I fired two shock grenades into the control room. Saurians dodged to get away, but to little avail. The grenade sizzled with blue-arcing lines and lizards began flopping about in the room.

  “Give it everything,” I said. “It’s now or never.”

  It turned out to be now, because we forced the doors wide enough for me to slither through—the blood dripping from my suit helped grease my way. Then the portal banged shut behind me. Two remaining sorry-looking, half-shocked lizards sat hunched at their stations. They were stubborn creatures. We had that much in common.

  The chamber was like a quadruple-sized cockpit of a regular jumbo jet, with seven Saurians in attendance. Five lay tased on the floor. Two tapped frantically on their panels. The windows showed the darkening of approaching space, with stars beginning to appear. The lander obviously headed for their mothership.

  I started toward them. One of the Saurians hissed. The other slapped a button, and weightlessness came to the control room, for I found myself floating in midair. Fortunately, my forward momentum still kept me heading toward them.

  The lizards didn’t wait on the stools, however. Each leapt away from me, soaring through the chamber to another location. I reached a stool soon enough and leapt after the nearest one.

  The next few minutes proved tedious and frustrating. The two lizards were much more agile in the weightless chamber than I was. At times, they used their tails, thrusting off the bulkheads or using them to reach and shove, adjusting their flight paths. I kept sailing after them in an attempt to catch one or to cut it with my Bowie knife.

  This went on long enough so several of the frozen Saurians on the floor began to stir. That changed the tactics of the two survivors. They landed near one of their own, shaking him and hissing urgently, trying to speed his revival.

  All the while, the lander headed for space. The last blue of Earth’s atmosphere had already faded to black, and now the stars blazed in profusion.

  What would I do with seven Saurians, seven flying monkeys moving in crisscrossing patterns through the chamber? This couldn’t go on. I had to stop the lander and bring it back to Earth, or barring that, I had to stop it before the vessel reached the mothership.

  Therefore, I changed tactics. This wasn’t a game or a sporting proposition. This was life or death, extinction or the continuation of the human race. That mean
t bitter ruthlessness. No one would give me a prize for playing fair. It was either win or lose. Prison had taught me some bitter lessons: the most critical of those lessons was to cheat when the stakes became high enough.

  I cheated now by landing on or beside the five stirring Saurians. I killed each one, finding I had to hold the head in order to cut the throat. Otherwise, I’d merely push myself away as I attempted to ply my blade in the weightless situation.

  “You shouldn’t have come to Earth!” I roared at one, feeling guilty at this slaughter. “You should have left us alone.”

  After finishing off the last of the five, we played the game in earnest, the two survivors and I. Like a hungry, angry wolverine, I chased them up and down and side to side throughout the compartment. They used every trick, I suppose, in weightless maneuvering. I learned fast, and I’d always been good at pool. It was all about angles, figuring them out and using them to your advantage.

  My living armored hand finally caught a Saurian by the tail. The lizard thrashed, and at the last moment, I felt the muscles of the tail bunch and writhe like a python. The creature became desperate and launched itself at my head. It was a smart move, for it made the most sense, as my head was the one vulnerable spot left. It didn’t help the Saurian, but given his situation, it’s what I would have done in his place.

  We hugged, and I punched my blade into him. The tip must have hit a bone, momentarily blocking my thrust. Then I could feel the blade grating against it, sawing into the hard structure. I twisted the knife to make him die as fast as I could, and to get the edge off the bone.

  Afterward, my back bumped against a bulkhead. “What’s it going to be?” I shouted at the last Saurian. “Surrender, show me how to work the controls and I’ll let you live. You have my word.”

  The last Saurian crouched against the far wall. His eyes were glassy and he kept his lizard mouth open as he panted.

  “You’ll die unless you surrender,” I said.

  He watched me, but it seemed clear he had no idea what I said. Why didn’t he get a translator? Maybe it had something to do with him seeing me butcher his pals. Also, he must have thought of me as an animal gone berserk. Would I try to reason with a blood-maddened tiger that had just clawed and bit six of my friends to death? I almost pitied him—until I remembered the dissected corpses on the tables and the dead floating in the tubes. These lizards treated us like animals. This one merely reaped the reward of his kind’s cruelty to our world.