Into the Looking Glass votsb-1

by John Ringo

  “Watch it!” Miller snarled as one of the rounds hammered into his body armor. “Save your rounds!”

  “Hey, I got it, didn’t I?” Weaver asked as his phone rang.

  “William Weaver,” he said, holding the smoking barrel of the pistol upwards where he wouldn’t tend to shoot one of the SEALs.

  “This is the NSA, we’re watching the news, where are you?”

  “In the Edderbrook house,” he replied. “I think we’re sort of cut off.”

  “Jesus! Get out of there!”

  “I don’t think that’s possible,” he noted as another of the damned things just strolled in the door. He aimed carefully this time and managed to hit it on the first shot. But the round only ticked it off and it turned and charged him.

  “Hold please,” he said, jumping to the back of the couch and over and then coming up with the pistol and shooting it in the back as it tried to make the turn. One of the bullets must have hit its spine because its back legs went out just like the other one. He aimed carefully and fired rounds into its neck until it stopped moving. He realized he’d gotten out of control when the slide locked back again. “I’m out of bullets again!” he yelled. “I’m sorry, I’m a little busy at the moment. Could we talk later?”

  “Sure,” the NSA said, bemusedly.

  “I told Garcia what I think is going on, based on the evidence,” he said, catching another magazine from Sanson and missing the toss from Miller. He reloaded and picked up the magazine he’d missed as he talked. Multi-tasking, that’s the key.

  “We’ll talk later,” the NSA said.

  “Yeah, later,” he replied as two more came through the door and one crashed through a window. “Guys! I don’t think I can hold them this time!”

  Sanson turned and shot the one under the window as Miller fired and killed one of the ones by the door. But that had emptied his belt and it was left for Weaver to finish off the last.

  “Up the stairs,” Miller said, pushing the scientist ahead of him.

  At the top of the stairs, though, was a large barricade constructed from a bed.

  “Hey!” Miller yelled. “Let us through!”

  “Catch,” a voice said from the other side of the barricade and a knotted rope came flying through the air.

  The command master chief started to hand it to the physicist and then stopped, taking the pistol and manipulating a lever. “Safety.”

  “Right,” Weaver said. “Thanks for the tip.” He dropped his cell phone in one pocket and tucked the pistol in the other then climbed up the rope, with a push from the chief, and tumbled to the floor on the top landing.

  The two SEALs followed him up the barricade and then spread out through the top floors.

  “VanGelder,” a voice said behind him. “Lake County SWAT. Who are you?”

  Weaver tilted his head backwards and looked up at a blond mountain of a man.

  “Doctor William Weaver,” he answered. “I’m a physicist studying the gates.”

  “Come to any conclusions?” VanGelder asked.

  “Yes, I wish Ray Chen had never been born,” Weaver said.

  VanGelder chuckled and pointed at the pistol. “You know how to use that?”

  “I killed four or five of them downstairs,” Weaver answered. “But the honest answer is no. And I’m pretty much out of bullets.”

  “Knapp carries an H K,” VanGelder said. “I’ll get you some magazines. You want a shotgun?”

  “I’d love a shotgun,” Weaver admitted.

  “Okay, you stay by the barricade and make sure none of them come up,” VanGelder said, walking away. “And I’ll get you a shotgun.”

  Weaver peered out through a gap in the barricade but none of the things seemed to be coming up the stairs. There was a crashing from downstairs and their weird ululation but they didn’t seem to be interested in the upper stories. There was firing from all around the house, now and he heard the sound of some of the thorn projectiles hitting the sides along with a curse from someone in one of the rooms.

  VanGelder stopped by and dropped four magazines on the floor, then handed him a shotgun.

  “Four rounds in the tube and one up the spout,” VanGelder said. “You know how to use it?”

  “You pull the handle back,” Weaver said, guessing. Sure enough when he did a shotgun round flew out the side. “I’ve watched television.”

  “You reload here,” VanGelder said, dryly, pointing to the slot on the underside and handing him the ejected round. “I’ll let you figure out the sights.” He dropped a box of ammunition on the floor and then walked back into one of the rooms.

  Weaver slid the round back into the shotgun and poked the barrel through the hole just in time to see one of the doglike creatures creeping up the stairs. It seemed to have trouble with the concept, raising its feet too high and missing the steps. He gave it a blast from the shotgun which knocked it off its feet. As it tumbled to the ground, howling, he shot it in the side. The load of double-ought buck put a hole in its side he could put two fists through. It twitched and then was still but by that time another was ascending the stairs. He shot it and this time it didn’t fall but just kept climbing, belly down on the stairs. He shot twice more and the last round apparently found something vital because it stopped and rolled into a ball, biting at its belly. He shot it again and then the shotgun clicked on an empty chamber.

  He loaded more rounds feverishly but no more were on the stairs when he looked. He leaned his head on the barricade and, just for a second, contemplated that this was a really stupid place for a physicist to die. When he opened his eyes again there were three of the things on the stairs, nosing at the dead monsters.

  He shot one that was broadside, dropping it, then the other two clumsily charged upwards. He got one, somehow, but the third was scrabbling at the barricade and he was out of rounds. He dropped the shotgun and picked up the pistol, emptying it at point blank range into the belly of the monster. That stopped it, but its claws pulled the barricade partially down. More were on the steps now and he dropped out the magazine and started firing at them as fast as he could.

  He was pretty sure he was done for when there came a burst of firing from outside the house. Shotguns, rifles, a heavy “BLAM-BLAM-BLAM” that sounded sort of like the big machine gun that had been on the truck and another louder boom that he couldn’t place. The monsters were clawing at the barricade, though, so he kept reloading and firing. Then, suddenly, Sanson was at his side. He had a different rifle and he picked his shots, dropping the monsters one by one.

  “What’s happening outside?” Weaver shouted. All the firing had made him half deaf he realized.

  “I think the cavalry got here,” Sanson said.

  * * *

  Jim Holley had never had what most people called “a real job” in his life. After getting out of the Army he’d moved back to his hometown of Eustis and drifted from one job to another. He’d sold magazines, headed up a couple of charities, played at politics and spent a good bit of time working in retail. But what he mostly did was play with guns.

  All of his limited free money went to his gun collection and it had, over the years, become quite extensive. He was well known to all the gun stores in the Eustis area and could be found every weekend that there wasn’t a local gun show on one range or another firing a wide variety of weapons.

  He’d been hanging out in Big Bob’s Bait, Tackle and Armaments, wrangling amiably about the difference in quality between the British .303 and the .30-06, when they both heard the call from the SWAT team for any available unit to respond. If the National Guard couldn’t handle it and the SWAT team couldn’t handle it it had to be bad.

  Big Bob had rolled his cigar from one side of his mouth to another and shook his head.

  “I think it’s time to break out the big guns, Jimbo, what say you?”

  Jim had just nodded and they both walked into the back room of the store.

  Now, Jim had quite a collection but Bob Taylor was in the
business of supplying whatever a customer might desire. And his idea of what customers might desire was pretty eclectic. The back room of his store, which was only open to the right sort of individual, was the gun collector’s dream. He had two Barretts, M-82A1 and M-95, semi-automatic and bolt respectively. There were Armalites, MP-5s, Garands, Thompsons, Sten, Steyn AUGs and hanging in pride of place a .477 Tyrannosaur. On the floor was a huge gun with a stock and a bipod that was a Finnish Lahti m/39 20mm “man portable” engine of destruction.

  By the time they had the back door open and were loading ammunition the shop had started to fill up. Some of them were “help me” customers who, hearing what was happening had decided that this was the day to come in and purchase a weapon. But the vast majority were the usual crowd of hangers on. The latter filed into the back room and set to work unloading the room and loading the weapons.

  In no more than fifteen minutes they had two pickups filled with enough weapons and ammo to arm a very eclectic company of infantry, and a convoy of half a dozen battered pickups, cars and SUVs was headed down the road to Jules Court.

  They ran into the first monster nearly a block away. It was savaging a little girl’s bike, said little girl being up a tree, screaming.

  Jim was in the back of Bob’s pickup truck and he let the monster have it in the side with a burst of 185 grain rounds from the vintage BAR he had laid across the roof. Even driving along at fifteen miles an hour he managed to put three rounds in the side of the thing, which dropped in its tracks.

  “Time to unass,” Bob yelled.

  “No,” Jim yelled back. “Drive closer. Less distance to hump this shit!”

  But by the time Jules Court was in view, they could see that they were going to have to go tactical. Monsters were spilling onto the street. Some of them were like the first, the size of large dogs and covered in spikes. Others were bipedal and seemed to be firing something out of their snouts. Jim shot one of them with the BAR and then held on as Bob slammed to a stop.

  “I’ve got just the thing for those bastards,” Jim said, clambering over the tailgate and picking up the 20mm. He managed to get it set up on the roof and then slid in a magazine. “Eat Finnish hot-lead you alien freaks!”

  The rounds from the 20mm were not, in fact, lead bullets but exploding shells. As each of them punched into one of the larger beasts it exploded sending bits of the monsters in every direction and covering the area in green gore.

  The rest of the ad hoc militiamen had unloaded from the trucks and were laying down a base of fire, engaging the smaller beasts and letting the heavy weapons handle the larger ones. One of the requirements to be a “regular” at Big Bob’s Bait, Tackle and Armaments was that you had to “know what you were doing.” That meant you couldn’t just argue the relative merits of a Sharps Buffalo gun, you had to know what it was used for. Bob preferred people like Jim, somebody with real military experience. Cops were okay, but only if they knew how to shoot for shit and most cops, in Bob’s experience, didn’t measure up to his criterion.

  Most of the regulars, therefore, had a more than adequate idea of what to do in a situation where demons were invading the earth through a gate into hell. That is: lay down as much lead as necessary to push them back.

  Jim emptied the BAR magazine and reached back only to have another shoved into his hand. He slipped that one in and engaged another of the bipedal beasts, ripping a three-round burst into its torso that nearly severed it. There seemed to be about one of them for every ten or twenty of the smaller beasts. And the guys on either side with rifles and shotguns were clearing up the smaller ones.

  It was only when the last of the bipedal beasts in view were down that he noticed there was firing from the second story of one of the houses. And at the far end of the road there was a group of soldiers in desert camouflage who had been holding a fall-back line.

  “Bob, we got to move it in,” he said. “Push them back to that gate, wherever it is.”

  “Yeah,” the gunshop owner said, reflectively. He waved at an arm that had been thrust out of the second story window. There was firing from inside the house, too. “Everybody head for the house!” he yelled. “Get in and drive, I’m going to stay on the 20mm.”

  Jim got in and put the truck in gear, slowly rolling it forward as the infantry on either side kept pace. Twice he stopped as more waves of the monsters came out, one time ducking down as a line of something like thorns stitched the truck. They were tough and hard, though, he noticed, prodding at one that was shoved through the driver’s side door. Sharp, too. He pricked a finger and hoped like hell they weren’t poisoned.

  Finally they made it up to the house and Bob called a halt. They’d left two bodies behind, both of them from getting hit by the thorn-throwers. As they pulled to a halt in the driveway the Lake County SWAT team came barrel assing out of the house and guardsmen started filtering out from other houses in the area.

  “Glad you could make it,” VanGelder said.

  “Where’s this gate?” Bob answered, sliding off the side of the pickup, then taking the 20mm that was handed down to him. The weapon was nearly two meters long and weighed right at fifty pounds, so it wasn’t like you could fire it off-hand. But he slung it over one shoulder and grabbed a box of ammunition for it.

  “Behind the house,” the SWAT lieutenant replied. “The backyard is crawling with these things.”

  “I’ll get up in the house and cover the advance,” the gunshop owner said.

  “Right,” VanGelder nodded. “Get the thorn-throwers, we’ll handle the dogs.”

  * * *

  “Our cavalry is a group of rednecks in pickup trucks,” Sanson said, dryly.

  “Don’t knock it,” the command master chief said, spitting on the floor. “That’s more firepower than I’ve seen outside Ashkanistan.”

  More of the locals had moved into the downstairs and a big man carrying an absolutely huge gun shouldered past Weaver into a back bedroom. Another of the locals wearing a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt was following him carrying three large boxes of ammunition. More flooded up carrying a motley assortment of only very large guns. The last was carrying the largest “normal” rifle Weaver had ever seen. It had a bolt action and looked like what his friends back home used for deer hunting, but it was about twice as large.

  “What’s that?” he asked Miller.

  “Is that what I think it is?” the chief said to the local at the same time.

  “If you think it’s a Tyrannosaur, it is,” the local said, smiling.

  “Damn,” the SEAL muttered. “I’ve got to move to Central Florida. They’re death on those things in Virginia.”

  Firing had started up again from the back of the house and rose to a crescendo that was unbelievably loud. There was an occasional scream but the progress of the attack seemed to be steady. He could hear the firing from downstairs moving forward and thought about the gate. They couldn’t stop the things by just shooting at them; they had to close the gate somehow.

  “We gotta close the gate,” Miller said, looking at him as if reading his mind.

  “I don’t know how to turn it off,” Weaver said. “But what if we took one of the bulldozers and parked it in front of it? At the very least it would give us some warning that they’re coming through.”

  “Well, I don’t know how to drive a bulldozer,” the command master chief admitted, sounding ashamed. “Do you?”

  “No,” Weaver said. “But I bet one of these locals will.”

  Sanson came back a moment later with the guy who carrying the big “Tyrannosaur” rifle.

  “We want to block the gate with a bulldozer,” Weaver said.

  “So he told me,” the local replied. “Makes sense. Where’s the dozer?”

  “There was one over to the left,” the physicist noted. “But it’s more or less behind the gate. I don’t know if the monsters have spread that way or not.”

  “They seem to be heading for the houses,” Miller pointed out. “They don’t seem
to be going behind the gate at all, yet.”

  “We could drive around back,” the local said. “Try to drive right up to it.”

  “That might attract their attention,” the chief pointed out. “So far we have a one-axis threat. That would make it multi-axis. And that would really suck.”

  “Hey, you’re a SEAL, right?” the local replied, chuckling through his beard. “You wanna live forever?”

  “Preferably,” Miller answered. “But let’s go see if you know what you’re doing.”

  By the time they got to the pickup truck the locals and what was left of the National Guard company had retaken the fighting positions and, with the support of heavy weapons in the houses overlooking the gate, were holding the monsters in a small perimeter right at the gate itself. The monsters were still attempting to pour through but the additional firepower of the locals had them pinned at the entrance. As they crowded into the front seat of the pickup Weaver noticed some things that looked like the alien “mosquitoes” hovering near the gate now. He dreaded those more than the thorn-throwers or the “dogs” but it turned out that these were not the semiparasitic mosquitoes. What they were became apparent as a television helicopter drifted too close to the battle.

  One of the things flapped its wings harder and began to ascend. When it got to about ten meters above the ground the wings dropped off and a jet of fire shot out of its rear. It accelerated fast on what appeared to be a rocket engine and then slammed into the helicopter. The helicopter exploded in midair sending flaming pieces far and wide.