by Rob Buckman
They headed North West up route 178 toward Lake Isabella. There wasn't a lot of ground cover along their route at first, but the going was reasonably easy. If he moved the team into the mountains where they'd have better cover, it would be slower going over the rough terrain, especially in the dark. Here, even in the dark they could move at a fairly rapid pace along the hard top. Decker still didn't want to push the pace up yet, they weren't ready. Right now, they were making about eight to ten miles a day, but once they got into the mountain that would drop to five miles a day if they were lucky. That didn’t take into account the stops for water and scavenging for food and supplies as they went. At least they could put the daylight hours to good use as long as they were careful. Eight to ten miles a night didn’t seem a lot considering how much they got fouled up with flankers losing contact with the main party, or the point or drag getting to far ahead or behind. It was difficult for a trained forced to move in an orderly fashion over unfamiliar terrain in the dead of night, but it would come. Even now, they were getting comfortable, despite the bitching, and complaining. Like any group of soldiers, they would gradually work out the kinks and start working together as a unit. Once they got into the mountains proper, he knew they had to move during the day and only bivouac at night, but eventually food would become a problem.
Once the MREs ran out, they'd have to hunt. That meant taking time out to kill and prepare whatever they found, and smoke the meat. For the moment, he tried to go from settlement to settlement and scavenge for canned, or preserved food as they went. So far, they'd been successful in gathering up enough foodstuffs to augment the dwindling supply of MREs. Day after day they moved steadily Northeast between dusk and dawn alongside the road. It was a risk, but with good cover on each side, he felt it was worth it. Once off the main highway and the depressing line of burned out cars, trucks and big rigs the aliens had destroyed, they found less and less. By now, at the sound of the short blast on his whistle, the girls dropped to the ground and froze in place. So far, even though several destroyers had flown right over them, only one had slowed to investigate before flying off. Whatever the aliens used for detection couldn't distinguish between an animal and a human. The litter of human bones and rotting bodies scattered along the highways attested to how efficient the little green men were at exterminating any upright bipedal creatures called human beings.
Before, the sight of a mound of desiccated or rotting bodies would have made the girls vomit, now they muttered a soft prayer, or made the sign of the cross before moving on. There was no way they could stop to bury the dead, as for one there was just too many, secondly, they couldn't afford the risk of being spotted. The aliens had to be smart enough to figure out that a freshly dug grave meant there were other humans about. By nightfall the fifth day, they reached the town of Lake Isabella off highway 178, and he moved the Pack into a grove of trees by Freemans Lakeside Realty. The first order of business was a defense perimeter.
By now, the girls had it down pat. Dump the backpacks and dig in was second nature. Decker used the Realty office as a CP, setting one office aside for Doc Mason and Andrea Granlund to do their medical thing. Once they got settled in, he knew there'd be a steady stream of girls going in to see her. Simple cuts and abrasions needed attention, so they didn't become infected, and he'd already told her to check feet. Her answer was to ask if he’d taught his grandmother to suck eggs. Decker chuckled and left her to it. In groups of four, he sent out scavenger parties while his scout team in their active cammo ghillie suits scouted the town for survivors and any useful information. Armed with the silenced assault weapons he doubted they have any trouble if they ran across any group of assholes.
The order of the day was shoot to kill and don't ask questions. The scavenger groups came back with a huge assortment of foodstuff, and instead of each team cooking for themselves as they usually did, he had a kitchen set up and all the designated cooks jump in to prepare a great spread. The longbow Team even managed to find and shoot several wild chickens to add to the feast. The Cowgirl Café and the Isabella Super market were completely stripped, but they did manage to scrounge up salt, pepper, and ketchup. Overall, everyone ate well that night.
CHAPTER SEVEN: LITTLE GREEN UFMs
"Code Red! Code Red!" Decker shot upright in his sleeping bag and grabbed his weapon. It was instinct, and other than slipping on his boots and grabbing his battle harness, he was out of the back room in thirty seconds flat. Shrugging in to his harness, he moved up behind the duty radio operator.
"Sitrep!"
"We have an unknown force of five tangos moving down the road towards us, sir, about an hour out."
"Good." He patted the woman on the shoulder. Grace must have given her instructions on how to report. Short, sharp and to the point.
"Who's on point?"
"Delta team." Decker screwed his earpiece in and clipped the mic to his lapel.
"This is Wolfman actual, Delta Leader - update." Slight static came back for a moment.
"Delta team Leader. The five tangos still moving down the center of the road - definitely military, but not ours - I say again, not ours - three of the tangos appear to be mechs, or maybe robots - can't tell in this light." Decker checked his watch. Just passed midnight.
"Copy that Delta Leader - shadow very carefully and prepare to act as an anvil if one of the tangos goes rabbit back towards you."
"Ten-four Wolfman - will shadow and act as anvil." Decker quickly checked with the other three team leaders.
By now the word had gotten around, and in ones and twos, the team leaders materialized out of the darkness, all draped in their hairy overcoats, and holding weapons. Moving into a crouch in the center of the gathering group, Decker kept his voice low.
"We have a problem, and need to make a decision quickly." Decker looked around at his team leaders.
"Do we engage, or let them pass?" He asked.
"That's for you to decide, sir." Decker shook his head.
"No. I'm not going to put the girl's lives at risk needlessly."
"I'm wondering where they came from, sir. This is the first time we've seen the aliens this far out from one of their cities." It was a point to consider.
"They had to eventually. You can't really take a place until you can control movement. You can only do so much from the air."
"True, once they wiped out most of the concentrations of humans, the only way to take care of the rest in hiding is to go in after them." Decker nodded. The girls were starting to think like soldiers.
"Right, go into hiding and wait for them to pass. Let's see if they go back, and if so where to." Decker keyed his mic.
"Wolfman actual to Delta team leader."
"Delta Leader - go."
"New orders - fall back into cover and shadow them but do not engage - we think they may be scouts, with a definite goal in mind before they go back to where ever they came from."
"Copy that Wolfman - let the tangos pass - shadow them but do not engage."
Decker was thankful his talks on radio procedures had sunk in. Keep it short, to the point. It minimized the length of the transmission as even with frequency hopping radios the enemy could lock on and get part of the transmission. At this point he had no way of knowing what radio equipment the aliens used, nor if they were sophisticated enough to be able to catch all or part of their transmissions. He couldn't assume anything about the aliens at this point. They had traveled unknown millions of miles to get here, and that took a technologically advanced race.
The group of alien units walked straight down the center of the highway, and Decker spread the team along each side. Hopefully far enough back in the shadows of abandoned cars, trucks, and dumpsters in the various parking lots not to be noticed, and with orders not to engage unless engaged first. What bows and arrows would do against alien armor he had no idea, but he wasn't about to risk the girl's lives for no reason. Decker went to active cammo and took up a position atop the Cowgirl Café, with the L115A3 snip
er rifle. This position gave him a great field of fire and with a mag full of armor piercing rounds, he felt he could take out the aliens if need be. Even if the little green fuckers were wearing armor, unless they had a portable shield or other alien super shit, he was betting a headshot would take them out. He eyed the group walking towards their position, and got his first good look at the alien invaders through the night scope.
“I’ll be dammed.” He muttered. Up close, it was obvious the three odd looking aliens were combat robots or androids, while the other were definitely living beings. He worried more about the mech units, and what they could do, assuming they were heavily armed and armored. To his way of thinking, they were probably equivalent to a small walking tank, which made sense in an odd way. He knew the eggheads back home in England were working on a combat robot with all sorts of high tech detection equipment built into it. It was also rumored that is had offensive and defensive weapons as well.
The aliens had to be more advanced, so these units could have something that could detect where the enemy fire was coming from very quickly and drop a world of hurt on the shooter. A rope and a hole in the roof of the Cowgirl Café, gave Decker a very fast avenue of retreat, should anything start coming back at him. It was all a question of how fast the mechs reacted to an attack and with what shit they’d fire back at him. Not that he was going to hang around to find out. Mrs. Decker's darling little boy was going to get his hairy ass out of Dodge the moment he saw anything more dangerous than a snow ball coming his way. He was hoping they wouldn't even have to engage the aliens in the first place, but it was a nervous twenty minutes as they watched the group make its way down the road. Moonlight gave those with unassisted vision a dim picture of what was going on, but hopefully, most had their heads down and making like a bush or sheep. As if out for an evening stroll, the aliens walked past without so much as a glance at anything, and through the night scope, Decker got his first good look at a real live alien.
The two aliens were thinner and shorter than humans, and wore something resembling battle armor. Their helmets had ugly looking facemasks, and they had an assortment of unknown equipment attached to their harness, and carried an odd-looking rifle like weapon. The helmet or facemask had a snouty look, with large owl like eyes slightly to the side and further apart than human eyes. The odd glittering appearance of the eyes suggested lenses, but they could just as well be sensors, or low light night vision equipment. The one thing he didn't see was a backpack or rucksack. That could mean they were on patrol rather than going somewhere, as without a back pack they couldn’t carry much food or water, assuming they needed both. This conclusion proved itself twenty minutes later, when the aliens turned around and started walking back the way they'd come. The mechs on the other hand weren’t walking but rolling along on tracks like a tank, but they didn’t make a lot of sound like a tank would, so the tracks had to be made of rubber or a similar material. It meant they were limited in what hills it could climb or what rough terrain it could travel over. In that light, the grunts made sense. They could check out buildings and such, the mechs couldn’t. He was guessing the mechs were for fire support to take out any hard point or obstacles in their way. Overall, all five were ugly and brutal looking, probably intentionally so to intimidate the local natives into submission.
"All groups hold your positions – Wolfman actual to Delta team leader."
"Delta Leader to Team Leader - go."
"These ugly mother fuckers are heading back your way - stay under cover and follow with caution."
"Copy that Wolfman - Follow with caution - out."
Decker froze, as for an unknown reason one of the mechs, which now trailed the aliens, came to a sudden stop, the top half of its body rotating, as if searching. Whatever caused it to halt didn't provoke a lethal action, and after a second or two, it continued up the road. Decker let out a sigh of relief, relaxing his finger on the trigger, wondering if his radio transmission or something else caused the mech to stop. While gathering the Alpha team to move out after the aliens he queried the team leaders to find out if anyone had moved. That was a negative, so the question remained, what triggered the mech to stop? Somehow, he needed to get a look at one of those mechs up close and try to find out what detection equipment it had, if he could. It could mean life or death for the Pack. The alien grunts on the other hand didn't appear to be that smart. They hadn't maintained unit spacing on the patrol and acted more as if they were out for a stroll. Was it arrogance, over confidence or just plain stupidity was the question?
Or, as had happened before in human history, were they too reliant on their electro-mechanical equipment, assuming it could detect anything, especially humans or other dangerous life forms. At the closest point, the edge of the Pack was no more than twenty feet from where they walked down the road, yet neither the grunts, nor the mechs had detected them. It was something to ponder. There was also the question of how the Alien grunts were 'seeing' at night. Like Decker, they might be using an alien version of night vision, or IR. If so, why hadn't they detected the infrared signatures of so many 'hot' bodies alongside the road? Switching to thermal imaging, Decker took a careful look around, and as expected, he could see the softly pulsing red blobs of the Pack members scattered along each side of the road. Having worked with the infrared equipment for a long time he could tell the difference between human bodies and other IR heat sources such as Max and Goldie, cars and trucks, rocks or the road, still hot from the day’s sun.
It might be that the aliens couldn’t readily tell the difference between humans and animals. Coming from a distant world where heat signatures might be so different from what they knew, it would take time for them to adapt. It was a lot of assumption to make on such a short examination, but Decker remembered the old adage about function following form - form following function. The fact the aliens were bipedal surprised him, as he was half expecting an alien monster out of a Sci-Fi novel. They were monstrous enough as it was without having tentacles or face sucking appendage. Decker shudder at the thought of the face grabber from the movie ‘Aliens’ as he climbed down from his perch and walked back to the CP. An updated report from Delta Team took longer than expected.
"Delta Leader to Wolfman." The TAC radio came alive at last.
"Wolfman actual - go."
"The UFMs have walked into a base - Need you to move up and take a look."
"Hold what you have - be there in ten." Decker spread the word to the rest of the team to hold here out of sight until further notice. “UFMs? I take it that’s the new code name for these alien.”
“Yes, sir, you called it. They really are ugly mother fuckers.” Dennis Michelson came back and Decker laughed.
"The rest of you get some sleep, in shifts if you can, but stay alert."
Decker ghosted along the highway, cammo on full active mode and night vision on. Even so, he almost stumbled over Delta Team. They'd picked their position with care, blending in with the background perfectly. He might have found them sooner if he'd switch to IR, but his field of vision was limited in that mode. Night vision only switched night for day in black, white, and green with 'hot spots' showing up a little brighter. Decker sank down beside Dennis Michelson as she waved him over.
“What do we have?”
"The three UMFs and the mechs walked into a base just around the bend, and haven't come back out yet."
Taking great care, Decker worked his way forward until he could see around the bend, not liking what he saw. The alien base straddled the road, and part of the Paradise Cove parking lot to prevent anyone moving passed. It put the lake on one side and a steep mountain slope on the other. Right where he was, there was also a steep drop into the lake, and that gave Decker a nervous feeling, as if he was walking into a giant trap. His map pad showed him a possible alternative viewpoint and moving back he took the Delta team up Yankee Canyon Drive. Panting at the steep climb, they made their way along Pioneer Drive until just before the crest of the hill. Here he went d
own on his belly, motioning the rest to do the same, and crawled the last few yards until he could look over the edge and down into the compound.
Even with his face shield down and the zoom maxed out it was too far to make out any great detail, but it did give him a good over view of the situation. Decker carefully surveyed the alien base and in many ways, it reminded him of a Viet Nam era firebase. The walls were about twelve feet high and made of what looked like plastic, but he was betting it wasn't. There were weapon emplacements set on pillars at each corner, covering every square inch of ground out for an unknown number of feet or yards. They also used the pillars to support the black ‘plastic’ wall beside an additional two for the main gate. This consisted of what looked like an alien version of razor wire wrapped around thin horizontal poles on a hinged metal frame, so it could be lifted rather than swung open. Using his rifle scope, Decker studied the turrets on top of the pillars. The trashcan size unit had a rounded top, with twin, stubby barrels sticking out. As he watched, the turret swung 135 degrees to point along the wall on each side, which made an odd kind of sense. Stupid of them really, not to consider the possibility of bad guys getting inside the base. With 135 degrees of track, the weapons couldn’t swing all the way round and shoot them once they were inside. From what he could see, they could traverse up, to take out any air bourn threats such as RPG, mortars, aircraft and the like.