The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2014 (Volume 5)

by Kaaron Warren

  “Perhaps it’s not what the Zimbabwean’s have now, but what they might have to offer in the future. This is a potential diamond producing region, right?”

  Peel nodded. He touched the stone in his pocket, and liked how Ash could put incomplete puzzle pieces together and see a discernible picture anyway. “This region is rife with resistance fighters, backed by Botswana diamond mining companies.”

  “And Colonel Nambutu wants to eliminate them,” said Ash. “So the Zimbabwean State mining companies can come in and set up instead—”

  “—and so Nambutu decides he’ll finish off the resistance the easy way . . . with Farzi’s weapon.” Peel completed his field partner’s sentence.

  Ash grinned. “There are two RPG-7s in the back. You might want to prep one, sir.”

  Peel grinned with Ash, and they sped on. Peel had a lot of time for the sergeant, finding the man quick to assess any situation, and he always had Peel’s back. More importantly, they shared a similar sense of humor.

  Not far in the distance, dust trails from the three trucks ahead swirled skyward. Despite the gunned down ZNA soldiers at the farmstead who’d been a part of this group, Peel and Ash could still expect at least a couple of dozen more ZNA soldiers to contend with. Not great odds, but the end results if they didn’t at least try to stop Nambutu were too hideous to consider. Nambutu might think an ESB weapon could solve his problems, but reality was he would soon create a bigger mess than anyone could conceivably control, anywhere. Peel had an inkling of what kind of weapon the Cambodian’s had placed on the market, xenobiological because Peel had stolen samples of something similar from that country long ago. He’d thought he’d put that threat down, but maybe not.

  The former Major turned NSA consultant reached in the back for a rocket launcher, loaded a HEAT, or high explosive anti-tank warhead and then stood precariously in the roof top hatch, balancing the seven kilogram weapon on his shoulder while they bounced along the rickety road to catch the convey.

  Until now Nambutu and his men had failed to spot them, but Peel soon realized he had thought this too soon. Automatic gunfire peppered the front of the vehicle, the windscreen fractured, headlight glass shattered, and lead penetrated the radiator, but Ash maintained speed and course.

  With the last truck in the convoy in his sights, Peel fired the weapon. The rocket launched and light grey-blue smoke erupted around him. He felt no recoil as was often expected by novices who used the weapon, and watched the HEAT warhead accelerate away at three hundred meters per second.

  Whoomp!

  The missile struck the last truck low. It shattered with a sound that hurt Peel’s ears, and the truck spun in the air, sending ZNA troops into the sky with it as flapping body pieces.

  Then the truck thudded onto the earth, rolled, and kept rolling toward Peel and Ash at an alarming speed.

  Ash overcompensated, hit an obstacle, a pothole maybe, or perhaps he panicked in response to the fiery, gutted hull of a heavy military truck bowling toward them.

  In that instant the Jeep rolled, and Peel was thrown from the vehicle. He instinctively curled into a ball before thick scrub broke his fall, and hundreds of the African bush thorns cut his skin.

  Peel sat, momentarily stunned, and pain nodules erupted all over his body from the thorny cuts and bruising. He forced himself onto his feet and checked for broken bones. Thankfully nothing was.

  He half ran, half limped to the wreckage of the Jeep, finding his M4A1 in the dirt nearby. He smiled, something had to go right today.

  The Jeep had rolled, doing a complete flip but ending up righted when it had come to a rest. Emerson Ash was still buckled into his seat, bloody and bruised when Peel reached him. His wounds didn’t seem too serious, but one could never tell just by looking.

  “What happened?” Ash asked groggily.

  “Stupid private mistake, I fired too close. Are you okay?”

  Ash checked himself over. “I’m good, Major.”

  “Then let’s get to work.”

  Ash climbed from the wreckage of the Jeep, readied his M4A1 and grabbed a case of thermite grenades. He divided them between him and Peel. “I think we are going to have to be generous in giving today.”

  “I think you’re right.” Peel smiled.

  “I’m also thinking about that tentacle, Peel.”

  “Roger that. We can’t assume it was the only one.”

  They took to the road, covering each other in turns as they advanced upon the wreckage of the decimated ZNA truck. The other two trucks had stopped a hundred meters or so down the road and soldiers were disembarking, ready for gun battle. What at first appeared to be men, were smaller, lighter people. They readied Uzi submachine guns and AK-47 assault rifles.

  “Child soldiers.” Peel hissed through his teeth like it hurt to join those two words together. “Nambutu’s more of an asshole than I thought.”

  “I’ll let you kill him then, sir, if we get that choice,” Ash responded sarcastically, which made Peel chuckle. “I don’t care what Nambutu’s bought, I’m not killing children.”

  “Well then, we’re agreed,” said Peel through gritted teeth. They had likely already murdered children when they destroyed the first truck. That was enough innocent blood on his hands for one day. Peel didn’t want any more.

  One child fired his assault rifle wildly, more to scare than to do any real damage. In response Peel and Ash ducked behind the wrecked truck. It was instinctive to return fire, but they couldn’t, not if they were to keep their words.

  “Fucking, fucked up Zimbabwe,” Ash exclaimed.

  “You can blame President Mugabe for this country falling behind the rest of Africa,” Peel countered as he glanced toward their advancing foes. The young boys had covered half the distance already between Nambutu’s forces and the wrecked truck. Their only option was to disappear into the scrub and run for it. But that left Nambutu with his ESB weapon. That would be a whole lot worse.

  More gunfire, shots that sounded concentrated on a specific target that wasn’t them. Peel snuck a look when the bursts silenced momentarily. Between the children and the truck wreckage was an oil drum he had not noticed earlier. It had rolled from the truck wreckage, metal coils encased it with a strapped-on battery. It looked to be generating a magnetic field.

  The tallest boy in the group was close to the drum now, and fired his Uzi. He didn’t miss and the drum split open. Peel half expected it to explode as the oil inside ignited, but that wasn’t what the drum contained.

  A tentacle, moss covered and overrun with snapping mouths tore out of the split drum casing, then another, and another until dozens of the slimy, vegetative limbs thrashed widely. The pseudopods were too large to have fitted inside the drum, and Peel wondered if it was some kind of dimensional folding contraption that had contained the creature. He had witnessed similar abominations in Pakistan not that long ago.

  The monster finally broke free and the drum exploded around it, sending metal shards flying in all directions as blast shrapnel. Peel crouched low and hit the dirt, as did Ash.

  Thud!

  A sheet of the drum embedded into the truck right next to them, saving Peel from instance decapitation. It reminded Peel of the corrugated iron at the farmstead.

  The gunfire had ceased and Peel looked up again. Child soldiers were running everywhere, probably terrified of the creature from their darkest nightmares they had released. It was fully free now, standing more than fifteen meters high upon three legs that resembled fern stems but ended in hooves. At the top of its body were branches of tentacles, some thirty or forty meters in length above its central mass, which was covered in snapping mouths. It had no eyes that Peel could see, and probably didn’t need them.

  Several of the children were already dead, crushed or swiped by the angry creature. Peel watched as another boy was stomped underfoot by the monster, and there was nothing he could do to save him. The surviving children had dropped their weapons in fear and fled into the thick sava
nna woodlands.

  “Oh fuck!” exclaimed Ash when he took in the enormity of the alien horror before them. He fired his weapon at it, emptying the clip. It did nothing.

  What they had seen before in the homestead was tiny in comparison. It had not been allowed to grow as this one had.

  “What the fuck is that?” Ash exclaimed again, looking pale and shaken.

  “I don’t know, but the classified Code 89 files that cross my desk suggest it might be referred to as a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath.”

  “And what the fuck is that?”

  “Something fucking scary, not of this Earth, and probably the weapon Nambutu just bought himself.”

  “He’s got more?”

  Peel shrugged. “He needed three trucks.”

  Ash nodded, but he seemed wary of Peel. Although he and Peel were friends and colleagues, they worked for different masters. Ash was an Intel cyber-analyst with the Australian Defence Force while Peel was an Intelligence consultant with the US National Security Agency. Both worked to put down Extraterrestrial Sentient Beings wherever they appeared across the globe, but with different databases to draw their knowledge from. There was no knowing what each other knew outside of their shared bilateral arrangements.

  “I encountered something similar in Cambodia a long time ago,” Peel said and wondered what they should do now.

  A tentacle thrashed toward them, it collided with the truck and sent it rolling away. Peel and Ash stood exposed.

  “Run!” Peel yelled and bolted, following the path of the child soldiers. He didn’t have time to look back to see if Ash followed.

  Under the cover of the scrub Peel kept sprinting, but he could hear the creature behind them, crushing trees and foliage as it ploughed through the semi-tropical forest.

  He saw a boy in front of him, no more than ten and dressed in camouflage and terrified. Peel lifted the boy under one arm without a second thought and kept sprinting.

  “Let me go, Mabono!”

  The boy struggled but Peel ignored him. He then bit Peel, forcing the Australian soldier to drop his human cargo. Peel trip on a root, fell with boy.

  “Musudhu! Pamhata! Dambe!” He leapt onto Peel, punched and kicked him.

  “Stop it!” Peel yelled, and protected himself with counter blocks, yet reluctant to hit or restrain the boy into submission, even though it would have been simple enough to do.

  The boy stopped, pale and looked up over Peel’s shoulder.

  Peel turned. He realized he had dropped his weapon somewhere. But he wasn’t really looking for the M4A1, but staring up, struck dumb by the huge, hideous monster that had followed them, with blood and sap-like goo dribbling from its many mouths. Its tentacles still thrashed wildly, while fifty or more nostrils huffed and snorted, smelling the air. He could smell it too, an odor like a fern forest gone moldy.

  Peel knew he was a dead man.

  Then it moved off, crashed through the undergrowth on its huge, fern-like legs, and Peel couldn’t understand why.

  The boy tried to run and Peel had just enough sense of mind to grab him, hold him in a lock until the boy gave up the will to resist. When his captive’s breathing slowed, Peel talked to him in calm tones. “I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to save you, from that monster, and Colonel Nambutu. He took you from your family, right?”

  The boy gave up fighting Peel’s grip, so Peel released him. The boy stood alone and Peel half expected him to run, but he didn’t.

  Peel scanned the bush for any signs of the sergeant, but there were none, and he resisted calling out while the monster was so close. He’d tried Ash through their radio mic to no avail, but he hoped Emerson Ash was alive, he was a smart individual and his friend could take care of himself.

  “Nambutu sent you to release that monster, knowing you’d die when you did.”

  “How do you know that, Mabono?”

  Peel tensed. He instincts screamed at him to flee this place before the monster returned, but he also wanted to save this boy, and as many of the boy’s friends as he could. “I know what men like Nambutu are like.”

  “You wear a uniform like the Colonel. You are no different.”

  “I am different. There is a UNHCR refugee camp in Botswana, just across the border where you can be processed, and hopefully, reunited with your parents. I can take you and your friends there.”

  The boy hesitated, wanting to believe Peel, but afraid.

  Peel noticed his M4A1 lying in the dirt. He desperately wanted to pick it up, to give him some level of comfort that he could protect himself, but he knew if he did he’d scare the boy.

  “My name is Harrison. I’m from Australia. You heard of Australia?”

  The boy shook his head. Chances were he’d never seen the Internet, or a computer, or any form of technology that could put him in contact with the rest of the world, or understand what he did not have in his dictatorship destroyed country.

  “My name is General Velempni!” the boy exclaimed proudly.

  “Velempni?” Peel asked. “That’s a fine name.” He didn’t want to image what tortures the boy had been subjected too. A favored trick of despot warlords like Nambutu was to have children practice firing assault weapons while blindfolded, not realizing that they were killing bound and blindfold men, women and children in the target range. The shock of what they did numbed them, terrified them, and so they became indoctrinated through the allocation of powerful names that made them feel like powerful soldiers. That was likely where the title ‘General’ came from.

  Peel would not use that title.

  He heard screaming, more gunfire and in the distance, the monster flung a body far and high across the sky.

  Peel lifted his assault rifle, readied it, and he took Velempni’s hand. “We have to find your friends. Get us all out of here.”

  Velempni didn’t resist as they took off in a brisk pace. Peel found a trail where a dozen light-footed individuals had trampled through the undergrowth ahead of them. No doubt more young boys forced into soldiering.

  They passed acacia, ziziphus and mopane trees. When they crossed over bare granite rock tiny lizards with rainbow colored reflective skins darted for cover. The trail was simple enough to follow, with bare footprint and boot prints in the dirt to lead the way, and occasional drips of blood. All the time they could hear the monster never far away, tearing through the undergrowth searching for more victims to trample and consume. They heard stampedes, kudu antelope or zebra most likely, fleeing the creature.

  Ahead, Peel could see the trail led to a rise of domed granite and balancing rock formations. Someone in the group ahead was smart enough to realize they might find cover there. Peel wondered again what had happened to Ash and tried the radio with no luck. The sergeant still wasn’t responding.

  At a corner in the thick scrub, a volley of bullet ripped the air above Peel. He ducked instinctively, readied his weapon and crept forward to find a dozen boys ranging from ten to maybe sixteen huddled together. The eldest was the only one with a weapon, an AK-47 and he had just depleted the clip. When he saw Peel with Velempni, his eyes grew wide with surprise.

  “Sizabantu!” Velempni yelled loudly calling his friend’s name. “The Mabono helped me.”

  “I can help you all,” Peel spoke loudly taking the opportunity to win their ‘heats and minds’ as the Americans liked to phrase it. “I can get you away from here, all of you.” He pointed at the eldest boy. “You, Sizabantu your name?” Despite almost being shot, Peel kept his voice calm and authoritative. “Are you in charge?”

  The eldest boy nodded. Although he was trying to be brave, he let his guard down for a moment and expressed relief that an individual other than himself was taking charge. Peel didn’t doubt for a moment that in the back of all their minds, all these children expected him to transform into a tyrant at any moment, like every other corrupt soldier in this destitute land. He had to treat them with respect and caution. He was also thankful he was the only one with a weapon
that worked.

  “Any of you hurt?”

  Sizabantu pointed to one of the smallest boys, who had a deep wound on his leg, the source of the blood they had been following. “Ngqobile got cut by the exploding drum.”

  Peel moved forward and checked the laceration. It was deep and bleeding fast. He took his first aid kit, wiped down the cut with iodine and used strip bandages to hold the wound in place. Peel took a tube of skin glue he always carried for emergencies, and sealed the wound.

  “Can you walk, Ngqobile?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “I’m going to carry you, okay?”

  He nodded, so Peel lifted him. The boy was lighter than he expected, malnourished most likely. That would make his work easier and his hatred for Nambutu stronger.

  “We head for that granite dome. We should find cover there.”

  They took off at a brisk pace, and Peel was relieved to see everyone kept up. He counted their number at eleven. If he could save these eleven children, then he would have done some good this day.

  Peel heard the Mil Mi-24 helicopter gunship before he saw it, flying low from the northeast, from Bulawayo. He could just make out the Air Force of Zimbabwe insignia. It cut through the air fast in their general direction.

  Up on the rise now, scrambling through the granite rocks, Peel could see down into the valley from where they had fled. The creature was also easily visible, rising above the tree line with its head of thrashing tentacles about a kilometer from them now. It moved with alarming speed, faster than their Jeep could drive, and the undergrowth did nothing to slow it. It still hunted.

  The gunship flew low in the direction of the monster. It fired a high explosive anti-tank missile—not at the creature as Peel had hoped—but near it sending the scrub into a torrent of energetic flames. The creature moved away from the heat, toward Peel’s direction.

  Colonel Nambutu was herding it toward them.

  Peel readjusted his grip on the uncomplaining Ngqobile, and picked up the pace. The rise they headed to was sharp and wide. If they could get over the rocks, perhaps the creature would be too cumbersome to follow them, and they could escape.