Grunt Life

by Weston Ochse

  I struck bottom and the ground gave and gave and gave, sucking me in, drawing me into its bosom. Then there was nothing. No movement. No sound. Just a white light, enveloping me.

  My hands scraped against the side of my helmet, searching for the release. I couldn’t find it. I felt my fingers go numb. My chest burned.

  Then I was being moved, pulled backwards. I came up and up, a light spearing from my face into a blizzard of white. My helmet was jerked free and I gasped, inhaling as much ash as air. I coughed and wheezed. The ash began to fill the inside of my suit; it stuck to my face and lips. It tasted of rock and sulfur. But I didn’t care about any of that.

  I was alive.

  And as I turned, I spied Olivares, frowning with concentration as he fought to keep me from sinking deeper.

  Olivares punched me twice in the face and I knew it was hell. Only in hell would the man I hated and loved get to punch me when I was dead.

  He wrapped a rope around me. At first he tried for my throat, but it missed and he ended up hooking my arm. He pulled and I came towards him. I laughed. What had he said about heroes and killers and leaders? How special was he now, unable to even kill me? Instead of hanging me by the neck, he was hanging me by the arm.

  “You can’t hang my arm!” I yelled, only it came out as yougant hangamarm as I spewed spittle and ash.

  He screamed something at me that sounded like stpiting!

  I laughed at him, daring him to try and hang my other arm.

  But he ignored my laughter and hauled me up until I was no longer in the blizzard of ash, and found myself on a hard surface.

  I suddenly felt sick. I coughed, bringing up ash and bile.

  Olivares unlatched my suit and I felt a sting in my arm.

  Then I felt nothing for a while. I know my eyes closed. I know I dreamed of a place where Olivares and I skied down a mountain of EXOs. I know I felt the earth tremble beneath me.

  Then nothing.

  Then light.

  I opened my eyes. I felt like I’d been pummeled from head to tail by brass knuckles. A light came from somewhere to my left, and my mouth tasted like three miles of road. My breath was ragged. My stomach twitched like it was ready to spasm at any moment. If I’d been home, I’d have rolled over and gone back to sleep. But I wasn’t home. I had no home. I was in the bottom of a volcano in the middle of Africa, and somehow I was still alive.

  “Hold on. There,” Olivares said, cradling my head. “Breathe easy. Talk about prom dates. You reminded me of Cindy. She puked all over the back of my El Camino.”

  “I didn’t puke,” I managed to say after several failed attempts.

  He patted me on my cheek. “That’s right. You didn’t puke. You just keep thinking that.”

  Oh, yeah. I did puke.

  But why was I alive?

  He saw the question in my eyes. “Myo-inositol trisphyosphate,” he said. “Increases the amount of oxygen released by your hemoglobin.” He held out his hand. “And take these, too.”

  I glanced down and saw two eight-hundred-milligram ibuprofens. “Seriously? Ranger candy?”

  “It’ll reduce the nausea and inflammation.”

  I sat up to take the pills. He handed me a water flask and I drank deeply.

  “Easy now.” He sat back as I swallowed and got my bearings. “Feeling better?”

  “I told you I didn’t puke,” I said, both of us knowing better.

  “Then watch where you step so you don’t put your feet in the places you didn’t puke.” He stood and I realized for the first time he was in his fatigues and boots.

  “How...” I asked, but I couldn’t finish. I had too many questions.

  I pushed to my feet and it seemed like a hundred miles. As I looked around, it was like I was noticing the world for the first time. I felt like I’d been reborn. Never before had I reached the moment where I’d been so sure I was dead... so sure that I’d given up.

  Then I saw the rope.

  The incredible pile of ash.

  Two dead aliens.

  Our smashed suits stacked against a wall and our helmets angled to light the cavern we were in.

  “There’s a pile of ash in the other room at least sixty feet high. I think the aliens were dead when they hit. I’m afraid I landed on one.”

  One of the Cray looked like a bug that had been stepped on by a giant foot.

  “If it wasn’t for the ash and the suits, we’d definitely be dead.”

  I put a hand to my head. “We’re not dead. I feel too much like shit to be dead.”

  “That’s pretty much how I feel, too.”

  It was then I saw the right side of his head. It was red and purple and swollen in several places. His right eye was black and blue. His right arm hung strangely.

  He saw me looking at it and raised it halfway. “This is as high as I can get it.”

  “What about the side of your face?”

  “Not sure. It might be because of decompression. It doesn’t hurt.”

  I laughed. I was probably still a little drunk from the narcosis, but I remembered an old joke. Does your face hurt? Well it hurts me. But as I laughed, I felt pain in my own face, too. I felt around my eyes and they felt different.

  “You got a pair of shiners and your nose is broken. You hit the inside of your faceplate so hard you cracked it.”

  “Always was headstrong.”

  “Very funny.”

  “And the rope?”

  “I was already out of my suit and couldn’t move your heavy ass. I had to rig ropes to pull you out, or you’d have suffocated.”

  “I remember choking. I couldn’t breathe.”

  “Part of that was because of your face,” he said with a grin. “It was a close thing. The rope kept stretching and I was afraid it would snap.”

  I looked down and realized I was in my skivvies and toe shoes, but I wasn’t cold. In fact, I was pretty warm.

  “We must be close to magma,” I said.

  He nodded. “It’s somewhere near for sure, but we’re safe for now. If it was closer, we wouldn’t be able to breathe. Acid vapor.”

  “Thank God for small miracles,” I said, going over to my pack. But the moment I began to move, all of my muscles clenched and reminded me of what my body had just done. I’d taken two ibuprofens. I wanted about fifty more. I limped on both legs and began to pick my way through my things. Everything else had been emptied from the pack except my clothes. As I pulled on my multicam uniform and boots, I asked, “Did you do an inventory?”

  He moved to where he’d laid everything out and began to catalogue them. “We have nine liters of water, two first aid kits with more medicine for altitude sickness, three hundred rounds of 9mm ammunition, four kilos of Semtex with mechanical detonators, four thermite grenades, our blades, our pistols, one submachine gun, and enough rations for thirty-six hours.” He pointed to another stack. “We also have a full set of Kevlar each, including shin and forearm guards and ballistic masks.”

  “Only one MP5?”

  “Yours got bent to shit on impact.”

  “What about the tablets?”

  “They didn’t make it either,” he said.

  “Shit. How are we going to navigate?”

  “We’ll figure something out.”

  I looked at him standing there, beaten up, one arm dangling. I know I looked even worse than he did. And we were the cavalry. We were supposed to save the day. I couldn’t help but feel that the human race had the short straw.

  “So what’s the plan?” I asked, tying my boots and shoving the loose ends into the top, Ranger style.

  He regarded me for a moment, then turned to look at the dead aliens. He put his hands on his hips. “So I’ve been wondering about them, and why they came to the volcano.”

  That again? “Maybe it was one dragging the other and dumping him in,” I said.

  “Even better. There was no way down. They had to have known that. They weren’t from inside the volcano, or else they woul
d have climbed up from here instead of on the outside rim.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “What were they trying to hide?” He gently felt the swollen side of his face. “I can’t help thinking it’s something important.”

  “Well,” I began, standing and buttoning my fatigue top, “there’s one way to find out.”

  “And what’s that?”

  I reached down and pulled my blade free of my suit. “We operate.”

  “Yeah,” he said, scratching his chin. “I was thinking the exact same thing.”

  I miss cheeseburgers. I miss the melted cheese and the fat popping in my mouth. I miss everything about them, even the stupid commercials back on television, when we had television. Stupid thing to get emotional about, but it’s what I think about when I’m scrabbling for rations.

  Conspiracy Theory Talk Radio,

  Night Stalker Monologue #1113

  CHAPTER FORTY

  FOR THE RECORD, the inside of a Cray smelled like nothing else I’d ever encountered. We had both of them laid out along one wall. I wore gloves mainly because it was too gross to root around inside the thing’s body barehanded. I didn’t mind killing something, but I’d never been the type to want to play in their entrails after. The entire idea made me a little ill. Still, Olivares had a theory and we had to check it out.

  We started with the one that had been carrying the device. I didn’t know jack about autopsies, but I’d seen enough television to know you had to slice them from stem to stern.

  “Does anything look strange?” he asked.

  I turned to him, as I held my bloodied hands up like a surgeon. “Seriously? Did you just ask if anything is strange?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  We searched through the body cavities and then the brains. It was in the second brain that we found something interesting. Something seemed to be attached to the rear interior wall of the skull with several wires, then implanted into the Cray’s brain. From the outside I couldn’t even tell it was there, but from the inside it was readily apparent.

  “I think this might be what we’re looking for!”

  He knelt and we both examined the wires. A flap of skin on the back of the head hid a triangular interface. Not having studied their anatomy other than during firefights, I wouldn’t have been able to see the flap if I hadn’t seen the wires from the inside.

  I glanced at the other skull and didn’t see anything even remotely similar. My guess was that the two drones had different functions. I’d always thought of all the Cray as being the same except for the wings, but it made sense that they’d have specialties. So if this one had a brain implant, then what was its specialty?

  “Think it’s for tracking?” I asked.

  Olivares seemed to consider for a moment, then shook his head. “I’m guessing it’s a transmitter.”

  “A communication device?”

  “I think so. Let’s get it out of there. It might come in handy.”

  “What are we going to do with it?” I began to pull the wires free.

  He shrugged. “Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.”

  It was an old Army saying, but it had merit. It took a few minutes, but I was able to extract the device without damaging it. I rinsed it with water and once I was satisfied, Olivares took it and placed it in a small plastic bag inside his pack.

  We covered the alien corpses with ash. We didn’t want them to be found, especially how we left them. I could only imagine how an American squad might feel, coming upon evidence of their own dead cut up and examined. I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that kind of anger.

  I slid on the Kevlar vest, the forearm guards and the shin guards. I slipped the ballistic mask into a pocket of the vest, not really willing to wear it right now. During our tactical briefing, we’d been warned that trying to go up against a Cray without some sort of armor would be our deaths. We’d become used to the protection of the suits and had ignored defense for the most part. I know I was exceptionally guilty of that. In fact, counting the present mission, I’d never gone out on a mission and returned with a functioning EXO. The designers would hate me if they knew.

  I checked our timer. We had twenty-three hours to make it to the rendezvous.

  Volcanologists had planned probable paths from the central cone to the mound. They hadn’t been certain of the exact route, but they’d been able to preprogram our tablets to provide directions based on probabilities. Traveling the warren of tunnels carved into the earth by a millennium of lava would have been a whole lot easier had our tablets not been ruined in our falls.

  Olivares was unwilling to give up on them, so he decided to stay behind and try and get them to work while I conducted reconnaissance. I had two choices: wait and twiddle my thumbs, or scout ahead a little. I went in black-out; for all I knew, we had Cray stacking up around the corner, waiting to attack, so the last thing I wanted was to draw them with light.

  I wore an AN/PVS-7D Generation III Night Vision Device with a single monocular lens. Strapped tightly to my head, it felt top heavy, but experience told me that I’d soon stop noticing it. The MP5 had a HK grip-mounted IR illuminator which would provide a thin spotlight of readable light. But I also had an OMBRA-created illuminator that fit like a collar beneath my chin. Both the NVD and the illuminators used AA batteries and we had seventy of them. The weight was significant, but as we ran through the batteries, the load would become lighter. The illuminators required the most juice. The collar took the most power, so my plan was to use it sparingly.

  The last thing I grabbed was a can of Nightmarker-brand infrared marking paint. In the event we had to backtrack, I wanted to make certain we knew where we were going. There was the potential for getting completely lost in the caverns and tunnels beneath the volcano. If we did lose our way, no one would find us except, maybe, the Cray a thousand years after they’d successfully conquered our planet. Our bones would go into a museum along with our equipment, just as we’d enshrined losing populations before us.

  I began my trek and left Olivares sitting amidst wires and batteries. I moved down the tunnel until there was no longer any visible spectrum bleed, then powered on my NVD. Without any light, it was as blind as I was, until I toggled on the spot illuminator. I turned and let the light play across the wall, catching the cracks and grooves and creases of the rock. Outside the half-meter-wide circle of light was an abyss of darkness and shadow.

  I partially depressed the trigger of my MP5 and watched another IR illuminator spear the darkness. Like a surgeon’s laser, it sliced through the shadow, but it did little to show my way. It was meant for targeting.

  Finally I depressed a button on the back of my left hand. A band of sixteen IR LEDs on my collar fired, creating a supernova that temporarily blinded me as my NVD whited out. After it adjusted, it was as though I’d brought the sun itself into the depths of Kilimanjaro. Everything was washed out. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t see. Had there been a beetle with a mite on its ass, I would have been able to count the whiskers on the mite’s cheeks.

  I remember being afraid of darkness when I was young. Every kid had the same issues, whether it be the mystery of the shadows in the closet, or those under the bed. There was darkness here beneath the earth, but it was a different sort. The idea of darkness taking over the light was what was so scary. Beneath the earth there had never been any light to take over. It had always been dark. If anything, I felt uplifted, bringing light to a place which had never seen it, even if it was IR light.

  I counted my steps. When I reached twenty-five, I brought out the spray can and put an X on the wall. In visible light it would have been a dull black mark, but in IR it blazed.

  I moved another twenty-five feet and did the same. Then another twenty-five. Then after moving thirteen steps, the tunnel branched. I pierced the darkness with my weapon’s spot, but it didn’t show me anything. I turned on my IC, allowed my NVD to adjust, then beheld the
two paths before me. One went to the right and appeared to be relatively easy going. The other way ran straight ahead, the darkness littered with rocks the size of automobiles. Further in, my spot lit a gallery of glittering crystals along the ceiling and walls. I could just make out the ground far below, maybe fifty feet down. It was a huge room, no telling how large. It had once held magma, or perhaps water.

  I went down on one knee and turned off the illuminator collar. I turned off the NVD as well. I leaned my head against the cold hard rock and listened. Complete silence.

  While doing night maneuvers at Fort Bragg, I distinctly remembered the way the tall pines scraping against the moon-hung sky felt like the earth itself reaching up. I’d felt absolutely insignificant at that very moment; the creak of the trees as the wind teased them; the feel of the wind against my cheek; the sounds of insects commiserating about my presence in their night place.

  Here I felt the same sense of insignificance. I could die and it would mean nothing. I could fall and break a leg and no one would ever know where I was. Suddenly the immensity of my situation hit me. The invasion. Billions dead. My teammates dead. Thompson dead. Michelle... dead or missing. The ferocity of the Cray attack. The mound. That fucking mound.

  A sob surprised me, escaping into darkness. It flew through the stygian blackness and became part of the barrow.

  The earth sobbed back at me, echoes of my anguish, pain and loss.

  I wiped my eyes and relaxed my breathing. I sat there for a time, clearing my head, just being. The coming hours would be the most important of my existence. My success, my failure, the ability or inability to find a way through the maze of tunnels to the lair of the Cray, might mean life or death for the human race. It would have seemed impossible if it hadn’t been cold hard fact.

  I breathed again and sought to find a place of peace, however temporary it might be.

  A scraping noise came from somewhere below.

  It came again, and I knew I wasn’t alone.