by Jonah Buck
Fletch kept the controls angled back, and the plane went from angling upward to looping back. They spent a second completely upside down before switching into a steep dive. Fletch had just sent them into a tight vertical coil. The flyrannosaurus was now directly ahead of them instead of behind them. If their plane had machineguns attached, they could have raked them across the monster’s armor and maybe done some damage, but all they had was Denise’s elephant gun.
They were moving toward the coast again, but the flyrannosaurus was coming straight at them now. The plane and the monster came at each other like two trains on the same set of tracks. Denise clutched at the Nitro Express and aimed over Fletch’s head at the approaching abomination.
At the last second, Fletch dipped the plane again and shot straight underneath the creature, gathering speed as he swept into another dive. The plane bounced in the air as they passed through the creature’s wake. He pulled out of the dive, and Denise’s vision seemed to fade for a second as gravity tried to pull all the blood in her body down to her boots.
Behind them again, the monster had to slow and turn around once more. Denise watched it swing around in a slow, arcing path that opened up some distance between the creature and the plane. The aircraft was engaged in a sort of aerial bullfight, dodging the rampaging beast before waiting for it to charge them again. The only problem was, matadors had swords and a crew ready to help them if the bull got lucky. She and Fletch couldn’t do much more than run, and if the creature caught them, there was no help coming.
Denise could see the smoldering remains of Delambre Station ahead of them. Most of the structures had been reduced to rubble by the rain of shells earlier. The ice was cracked and cratered all around the area. The few outbuildings that hadn’t been destroyed had been gutted by fire and were just empty shells now.
Further out, she could see the cruiser anchored out in the water. It had steamed in close to shore, muscling its way into the protective center of the bay not far from where the Sulaco had gone down. Its troop transport craft were all empty at the station’s docks as men unloaded equipment from them.
The soldiers had seen what was coming toward them and started to scatter, though. They left behind pallets of equipment and motor sledges, all the things they would need to mount an assault on Merovée Station in the coming hours.
The plane zoomed over the first pile of burnt rubble. The flyrannosaurus followed close behind. Fletch angled the plane down again, sending them into a shallow dive over the station wreckage, gaining speed as they went. From here, it was only a short distance to the cruiser.
But the distance from the monster to the plane was shorter. The plane clawed its way forward, pulling out of its descent once it was no more than twenty feet off the ground. The ground zoomed past beneath them as the propeller roared.
Soldiers in white parkas fled in every direction, diving for cover amid the rubble. They would have been far safer if Dagenais hadn’t destroyed the station. There was no place to hide now.
Denise heard a noise like someone tearing a giant sheet of wet burlap. She looked over and saw someone firing a machine gun in their direction. She ducked down in her seat a little, but she couldn’t even tell if the man was firing at the plane or the monster. They were such a fast target that actually hitting them would be as much a matter of luck as skill.
No bullets punched through the plane’s skin or its passengers, though. More bullets shot up through the air in their general direction, but they came from rifles. They couldn’t fire quickly enough to have much hope of hitting the airplane.
All the activity caught the monster’s attention, though. It broke off from following the plane and landed directly in front of a group of French soldiers on motor sledges. The sledges went flying into the air, spilling men and supplies across the ice, as the creature lashed out with its claws. Blood and alien digestive fluid splashed over the ground amid a wave of screams.
The gunfire started to draw away from the plane and shift toward the flyrannosaurus. If Denise’s Nitro Express hadn’t been enough to do any serious damage, the smaller rifles weren’t any more effective. The creature lumbered over to a makeshift foxhole made from rubble and tore the men inside apart with its claws.
A man with a flamethrower dashed over and blew a jet of fire at the creature. The flyrannosaurus made a shrieking noise as some of the burning fuel landed on its leg. Rearing its head around, it sprayed a gout of acid at the soldier with the flamethrower and buzzed back into the air. The unfortunate man started to come apart like wet cotton candy. A second later, the caustic slime ate through one the weapon’s hoses, and the tank exploded in a massive orange plume. Burning fuel fell from the sky on the positions nearby. Men ran out of cover as flames sprang up all around them.
“We need the creature to attack the ship. We’re not going anywhere unless it forces the cruiser out of the harbor,” Denise shouted.
“Right.” Fletch wheeled the plane back around, trying to get the creature’s attention again. They needed to draw it out over the water and to Dagenais. Even if the creature wiped out every single soldier who had landed at Delambre Station, Dagenais would still be able to keep everyone bottled up on the ice if he controlled the sea.
Getting the creature’s attention again wasn’t going to be an easy task, though. There was so much prey scattered around the remains of the station. The machine gunner who had started firing at the plane a minute ago turned into a bubbling puddle of chunky soup as the creature attacked him. The monster paused long enough to slurp some of the remains up before turning to the next cluster of soldiers.
Denise heard the whistling sound, but it took her a moment to process the noise. Then she realized what it was. “Pull up! Pull up,” she shouted.
Fletch yanked the plane upward just as the first shell hit the scarred and blasted ice. Pieces of broken cement and shards of ice leapt into the air, shooting away from the explosion. Dagenais and the crew of the cruiser had seen what was happening and started firing the ship’s guns at the monster.
The scene below was absolute bedlam. The flyrannosaurus moved too quickly for the cruiser to hit it with its big guns. By the time any given shell reached the monster’s previous position, the creature had already buzzed across to the other side of the compound and begun devouring the liquefying remains of more of the landing party. The big guns hit more positions where their own men were hunkered down than they came close to the creature. It was a massacre.
Dagenais hadn’t known about the flyrannosaurus anymore than Benoit and his team had. The creature hadn’t eaten enough trash and corpses to pupate into its final form yet when Benoit’s expedition retook the first station. Colonel Dagenais had brought plenty of equipment capable of dealing with the undead research teams and insectile humanoids, but they didn’t have the sort of gear they needed to deal with the devastating force and power of the flyrannosaurus. Maybe if they’d had more time to finish setting up defenses, they would have had a better chance. Right now, the entire expeditionary force was being slaughtered in short order, though.
Another man with a flamethrower charged across the ice toward the rampaging creature. A shell burst near him, and the fuel tank erupted in a massive plume of flame. Denise could feel the sudden burst of heat even from well above the battlefield. Meanwhile, the flyrannosaurus had already darted over to a new location, knocking down a storage shed to grab at the men huddled inside.
Denise fired down at the monster. Her goal wasn’t necessarily to save the remaining men trapped in the remains of the station. They would have marched out and murdered her and everyone else at Merovée Station eventually. They were clearly loyal to Dagenais, even if it meant killing the odd civilian here and there. Instead, she was actually concerned about the creature.
The monster might be able to shrug off small arms fire. It might even be able to take the hammer blows of larger weapons like her elephant gun. But she knew damn well that it wouldn’t be able to survive a strike from the cruiser’s guns. Those
shells were meant to punch through solid steel ship armor, and they were packed with high explosives. A direct hit from one of those would turn the flyrannosaurus into something resembling burnt guacamole. Even a near miss would likely cripple the creature. The shells had completely levelled a reinforced, concrete research station. They would pulverize living flesh.
The plane jerked slightly in the air as Denise fired the elephant gun downward. She had no illusions about hitting the creature; she just wanted to get its attention again. No such luck. Denise fired again, but there were apparently more tempting targets. She was almost out of ammo now.
The few remaining French troops broke and made a mad dash toward the transport boats at the docks. They couldn’t fight the creature without a tank or some sort of defensive positions. They didn’t have those, though.
None of them made it to the docks. The flyrannosaurus swept in, plucking men off the ground and tearing them apart. Others were doused in corrosive slime, and they folded in on themselves as their bones and ligaments turned to mush.
Only then did the monster turn its attention back to the plane. It shot up into the air straight at them. Fletch banked away and poured all the power he could into the engine, angling the plane directly toward the cruiser.
Something exploded in front of them. For a moment, Denise thought one of the ship’s big guns had fired a defective round that burst in midair, but the explosion was too small. Then she saw a succession of small muzzle flashes at the front and rear of the cruiser.
The ship’s crew had stopped firing the heavy weapons and switched to a pair of anti-air flak guns. The guns fired rapid bursts of small shells that exploded in the air, leaving debris trails of fire and shrapnel. Another burst of smoke appeared off to their side, and another behind them.
Denise slid as low as she could down into her seat. There wasn’t anything she could do about the anti-aircraft guns. After seeing what had happened to their colleagues on the shore, hopefully, the crews were aiming for the monster and not the plane. The creature was coming up behind them again, the sound of its buzzing wings filling the world around Denise.
Fletch aimed to fly right over the ship’s deck. That would give the creature an eyeful of the crew moving around and hopefully entice it to land and continue its rampage anew. Denise knew she should feel bad for the poor sods about to come face-to-face with the creature, but they’d blown up the Sulaco and tried to kill her as well. Even if they were just following orders from Dagenais, they should have known better than killing defenseless targets.
As the plane sped closer, the men on the flak guns started to find their aim. The bursts of smoke came closer and closer, faster and faster. She could smell the acrid burning scent of the shells after they burst. Denise didn’t dare turn around to see where the monster was anymore. The air was full of jagged, tearing metal scraps.
Finally, the inevitable happened. A shell exploded directly in front of them. Twisted spall slammed into the propeller with a noise like someone dropping a handful of coins into a lawnmower’s blades. More metal claws shredded the skin of the wings, tearing it to flapping pieces of tattered canvas and metal.
Fletch was in the front seat. His body protected Denise from most of the tiny buzz saws whipping through the air. He jerked violently as a dozen pieces of scrap metal dug into his body all at once. One piece missed him and tugged at Denise’s jacket, slicing part of her hood off and missing her head by a finger’s breadth.
Denise couldn’t tell if she was screaming or not. She wouldn’t have been able to hear herself over the sound of the plane’s engine tearing itself apart and the rapid-fire bursts from the flak guns and the angry buzz of the flyrannosaurus. The entire world was full of furious sound. One scream amid the chaos was nothing.
The plane bled speed as the propeller snapped and broke apart, sending debris spiraling off in a hundred different directions. A fire was already starting to spread from the engine, the flames clinging to the sides of the plane for dear life as the wind beat at them. In front of her, Fletch clutched at himself before slumping down in his seat. They were going down.
The plane had dropped precipitously low for its intended pass over the cruiser. They didn’t have very far to go. The plane didn’t plunge straight down. The basic airframe was still intact enough that momentum allowed it to glide forward a little bit even as the engine lost power and died.
Denise held on as the plane’s nose dipped a few degrees at a time, taking her along for the ride. The plane went from forty feet off the ground to thirty to twenty. She tried to look past Fletch’s body to see where they were going. Maybe if they landed flat on the plane’s belly, it would skim along the surface of the water for a minute before coming to a stop and sinking. That would give her time to bail out. All she needed was a relatively clear landing path.
The landing path ahead wasn’t clear. There was a small sheet of ice directly in their path. The plane remained relatively flat as it sank down to ten feet above the water. A moment later, the landing gear kissed the top of the waves, sending up huge geysers of white froth.
At the same time, the flyrannosaurus swept past over Denise’s head. The downdraft from the creature’s wings stirred the water as it passed. The shadow zipped over Denise, and then it was gone, heading toward the cruiser. The sailors running for cover on its deck and the flash of the flak guns had caught its attention.
Denise didn’t have long to watch what was about to happen, though. The plane’s struts hit the floating ice sheet. Unlike the hull of an ice-breaking ship like the Sulaco, the plane’s landing gear was never designed to cut through floating debris.
In an instant, the front of the plane smashed downward into the ice sheet exactly like someone with their shoelaces tied together falling on their face. The plane’s engine block augured into the ice and came to a crunching halt.
Unfortunately for Denise, the force was like sitting in the bucket of a catapult. The rear of the plane rose up in a sudden upheaval as the front plowed into the ice. There weren’t any straps to hold her in place. The force of the crash launched her forward like a car crash victim plunging through their own windshield.
Visually, the world stopped making any sense. Everything became a blur of perfect blue sky, even bluer sea, and the white-blue ice that covered the land. She was spinning and flailing through the air, completely out of control. It was impossible to know which direction was up or down at any given moment. She couldn’t orient herself, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but submit to the forces of physics.
A blow like the business end of a freight train struck Denise on the thigh and she whipped around in the other direction so hard that she thought her head was going to twist off. For a single, incoherent moment, she thought the flyrannosaurus had snatched her out of the air with one of its claws and was carrying her away. Another blow hit her on the back and sent her tumbling, and she realized what had happened.
She’d hit the water and skipped like a stone. Going as fast as she was, the impact was like falling out of a tree onto concrete. Another blow sent her bouncing and crashing and sluicing across the surface of the water in a shower of stinging, freezing droplets.
Her entire world was spinning when the pain hit her. It was so intense and so sudden that she tried to scream, and then the pain was inside her, too. The sensation was like taking a sudden slap to the face, but it was all over her entire body. At first, she didn’t even realize that she was underwater.
She’d slowed enough that she hadn’t skipped on her last impact with the water. She’d gone under in a sudden, savage plunge. The pain covering her entire body was from the sudden, intense cold of the water.
She fought to draw breath, but she only sucked down a lungful of the freezing water. Denise gagged at the sudden stabbing pain in her throat and lungs, but all she accomplished was swallowing more water. Her lungs burned. Everything hurt. All her senses were disoriented and scrambled.
She was going to die down here.
BOARDING PARTY
Denise thrashed against the cold, fighting it like she was thrashing against a nightmare in her sleep. Her legs kicked out, and her arms grasped for something, anything she could grab onto. More than anything else, she needed air.
She kicked out, trying to breach the surface. Then, she saw a flash of light down by her feet. And then another. It was the burst of an anti-aircraft shell. She was upside down in the water, her head pointed down toward the seabed.
Hands clawing out, she paddled and kicked her way toward those flashes. Her soaked clothing felt like it weighed a thousand tons, dragging her down and resisting her every movement. Her boots felt like shackles tethering her to the sandy seafloor below.
The initial, furious pain from the cold had faded somewhat, mellowing into a sort of burning sensation that covered her entire body. In another five minutes out in this water, she’d be completely numb. In fifteen, she’d probably be dead. Actually, scratch that. If she didn’t get some air in the next few seconds, it wouldn’t take any fifteen minutes for her to die.
Her head breached the surface of the water, and she wretched up some seawater. Taking big, gasping breaths, she flipped her hair out of her eyes and looked around. She was maybe two hundred yards from the cruiser and considerably further from the shore and Delambre Station. There was no way she could make it back to the docks. Even if she could, there was nothing for her back there.
The research station itself was burnt rubble. There was no way to get warm or dry. Cornelia and Metrodora might find her blue corpse covered in ice eventually, assuming the flyrannosaurus didn’t fly back and eat her.
Instead, she started swimming toward the cruiser. There were some nets over the side leading down to the water so the assault troops could climb down into the now absent transport boats. No one had dragged the nets back aboard the ship. None of the sailors thought anyone was stupid enough to make a swim for the nets to try to board them.