by Eddie Patin
A woman’s scream intensified as the giant reached down out of sight again, and the beast must have pulled her from her car, because Harvey saw the monster lifting a flailing, scrambling human form into the air by one leg.
“Oh shit!” Mendez cried.
“Gotta help her, Sarge!” White exclaimed.
“Fuck that,” Becker replied. “Quiet down. Stay low. Let the thing pass...”
Harvey felt his face turn red.
“No way, Becker,” he said. “It’s gonna fucking eat her!”
Harvey jumped up and climbed onto the trunk of the nearest car, swinging out the legs of the M60’s built-in bipod. He slammed the weapon’s weight down onto the roof of the car, flinging the belt out to the left to hang off of the side.
This machine gun would have no trouble laying into the monster from a mere hundred yards away...
“Fuck that shit, Swanson!” Becker barked. “What if that 60 doesn’t kill it?? We have shotguns and .223’s! It’s too risky!”
“Then I’ll just have to kill it myself!” Harvey replied, looking down the sights.
The monster, up ahead held the flailing woman up in front of its body, and Harvey felt a wave of revulsion sweep over him as he saw the giant’s ribcage split open, the bones stretching and reaching out from the sides of its chest, as if to swallow the lady into some dark and demonic cavity where its heart and lungs should be...
“Fuck!” Price cried. “Look at that!!”
Harvey aimed for the giant’s pelvis. If he went for center mass, or the thing’s head, he might hit the girl. Maybe enough shots to the creature’s center of locomotion would disable it, and he could finish it off after the woman got away...
As his finger started squeezing the trigger, Harvey heard the sudden bleating call of a goat demon from behind them, followed by another. He paused.
“Shit!” Mendez cried. “We’ve got company! More goats and zombies!”
“Everyone get to that liquor store on the corner!” Becker shouted.
“Just a second!” Harvey yelled back. “Give me a second, hold out for just a little bit!”
“God damn it, Swanson!” Becker replied. “We’ve got to move!!”
But Harvey was already squeezing the trigger again. The giant moved the woman closer to the strange maw in its chest, its rib bones warping and yawning and reaching like the teeth of a monstrous carnivorous plant!
The M60 boomed with the first shot and kept going. Harvey laid into the goliath, sending a long volley of rifle rounds at its pelvis through the red haze. The machine gun sprayed empty shells and pieces of linkage into the air as Harvey kept the front sight on his target, hoping that the weapon would be effective...
7 - Chad Murray
Manhattan, NY
Chaos.
With an explosion of sensation, Chad found himself tumbling out onto the concrete floor of the UEA New York lab. He could suddenly hear everything normally again, as if coming up from being underwater! Chad could smell the acrid ozone odor of the fried electronics. His arms and legs flung out in all directions as he tumbled out of the American portal into total darkness, and felt himself crash into several chairs and a desk like he was a human bowling ball!
A yelp cried out from the crate he was carrying as the kennel with the puppy was ripped from his hand and scuttled off somewhere into the darkness.
Frantic voices were yelling and screaming all around him.
“—back online! Cycle the main power supply!”
“It’s dead! It’s all dead!”
“Unresponsive!” another man shouted. “There was an electromagnetic pulse! It’s all gone!”
“Then get the backup power!”
A small flashlight clicked on, and Chad could suddenly see—just a little...
It was the light on the front of a gun.
“Cameraman!” a soldier shouted from behind the light that suddenly blinded Chad in the face. “Come on!”
It was him, Chad thought. The UEA soldier from Geneva he came here with. He had the light.
“The dog!” Chad cried, struggling to get back to his feet. “I lost the dog!”
“Who cares about the damned dog?” the soldier replied. The light bobbed around in the darkness, lighting up the concrete floor at Chad’s feet. He felt the man’s gloved hand grip his arm and help pull him up. “Those things are right behind us!”
Chad suddenly found his feet under him. His shoulder and his hip panged. From the soldier’s gun light, he could see the wire-framed chairs he had crashed into.
“Stop!” a voice cried. “Soldiers, stop those men! Who are you? Where’d you come from??”
Looking back at the American portal, Chad saw that the gateway structure in this room looked a lot like Portal Zero. He heard men shuffling through the turned over furniture toward them. Inside the twisting gateway was the same scene—a tumbling, chaotic wormhole flashing with red and purple pulsing light. The dancing image of the Geneva lab was crystal-clear in the distance—a vision of fire and gore and terror—and the red tears in the tunnel walls were too far to notice from here...
And then the pulsing purple light revealed three of the long and angular monsters crawling along the wormhole walls right toward them all...
“Oh god!” Chad said. “There they are!!”
“Explain yourselves!” a voice bellowed. “You! Get the backup power online now!”
The Geneva soldier lit up a man’s face in the darkness. An older man, scowling and white-haired in a lab coat, glared and squinted against the light.
“Drop your weapon!” someone shouted from behind the man.
“You’ve got to get out of here!” Chad yelled. “Here they come! They’ll kill us all!!”
“We’re from Geneva!” Chad’s soldier companion shouted. “They’re right behind us, in the portal! They’ll be here any second!”
“Drop your rifle! Get back to the side wall!” someone said.
The American director looked off into the darkness at a colleague. “Davidson! Grab that crate the other one brought through!” He pointed with an angry finger, and Chad followed the gesture until he caught a brief glimpse of Max’s cage in a flash of purple light, tipped over on its side a short distance away.
Click.
Chad was suddenly thrust into total darkness again as the soldier next to him seemingly turned off his light.
“Come on!” the soldier exclaimed, and Chad felt the man tug at his sleeve. He started leading him to the side of the room away from the front of the portal.
Smart, he thought. They can’t see us without his light.
Soldiers and scientists shouted out all around them, and Chad found himself up against the wall just as all hell broke loose when the monsters emerged from the portal behind them...
It was like a repeat of before...
The icy fear washed through Chad’s guts and limbs as he turned to see the first monster creep out of the portal’s shiny ring, long legs with thin, clawed feet stepping down to the concrete, its body uncurled from the gateway, and its spindly, corded arms unfolded, splaying out its long many-jointed fingers into the open air. The monster was lit only by the purple and red light of the wormhole behind it...
The nightmarish creature casually stepped out into the scene.
Another came out after it, then a third...
As the first beast let out a low hiss that gradually transformed into a clicking, long growl, all of the scientists and soldiers in the room hushed, staring at it in wonder.
Then it roared—an animal, metallic sound that almost made Chad fall down, and launched itself at the first human within reach with blinding speed!
The hush was over.
Everyone panicked, all of the scientists screaming and stampeding to get away from the monster laying into them, the soldiers lowering their machine guns and opening fire, filling the room with deafening booms. A woman screamed, and for a moment, Chad thought he recognized Katherine Hall, another correspondent fr
om his news company, her face warped into a shriek and lit up by gunfire, in the far corner of the room!
“Katherine!” Chad cried.
“Come on!” the Geneva soldier shouted.
The man clicked the gun light on again, and pulled Chad’s shoulder with his left hand, crouching low. Chad noticed that he was holding the rifle with just his right hand, but it was strapped to his vest somehow.
“Wait!” Chad cried, and paused to reach for the puppy’s crate as they passed it in the darkness.
He grabbed the plastic handle and hefted it upright again, feeling the small weight of the young Jack Russell terrier shift around inside.
The two of them ran up to the door on the wall opposite the American portal and the soldiers that stood around it, firing at the monsters. As their guns barked, slapping Chad’s face with the concussive force in the air, the young cameraman held one ear shut with his free hand and clamped the other against his shoulder.
The soldiers hardly noticed them.
“Get out of here!” the Geneva soldier cried at the one in between them and the door. “You can’t kill em! They’re gonna to slaughter everybody!”
Stopping for a moment, the American soldier glanced over at the two of them, then over at his comrades, then back to the battle.
“Okay!” he shouted. “Go!”
The American UEA soldiers were dressed and armed in the same way the Geneva soldiers were, even down to the bright blue helmets that said “UEA” in big, white letters.
And why not? Chad thought. Same organization, same global government—just two different locations.
“How do we get out?” the Geneva soldier shouted.
The American trooper pressed his lips together, taking a moment to look over the scene of carnage in front of him. Chad looked back over his shoulder, and saw that the monsters were wreaking havoc and devouring the dead men—only two scientists remained, flailing around in the darkness, trying to get away. One of the creatures had already leapt across the room, and was battling a couple of UEA soldiers a short distance away from where they were standing right now...
“Follow me!” the soldier next to the door said, reaching out and smacking his nearest buddy on the shoulder, who was standing beside him, firing at the monster in the corner.
Chad gasped when one of the monsters vented. It was eating a body, then paused like it was trying to take a shit, pulled its arms in, and suddenly a massive bloom of flames blasted out from holes running along its back, setting a desk and the clothing of a couple of dead bodies on fire!
The heat hit the cameraman in the face and made him squint.
Chad and the Geneva soldier followed the two American soldiers as they all retreated from the room, running down a long, dark hallway with pale blue walls and a smooth concrete floor.
The screaming and gunfire and shrieks of the monsters started to fade behind them.
“Did you guys lose all of your electronics too?” Chad asked as they ran, following the gun light of the Geneva soldier.
“Yep,” one of the Americans responded. “Even our weapon lights are toast.”
“Where are we?” the Geneva soldier asked. “Are we underground or what?”
“Ten stories under, yeah,” the other American replied. “We’re heading to the elevator.”
“It’s not gonna work.”
“Then we’ll have to take the stairs!”
“Hopefully we can take the stairs this time!” Chad said.
“What the fuck’s that mean?!” one of the American soldiers replied.
“You don’t wanna know,” the Geneva soldier replied. “Let’s get the hell out of here before it’s too late!”
The four of them ran past the elevator and its electronic access port, straight to a set of industrial double doors with small windows that led into darkness. Chad listened to all of the gear and guns strapped to them jostle and bounce up and down as they fled.
The Geneva soldier hit the horizontal panel to open it, but stopped, and grunted against it.
“It’s locked!”
“Get back!” one of the American troopers replied, lowering his weapon.
“What are you gonna shoot the lock or something??” Chad said.
“Something like that,” the trooper responded, backing away.
“Make some space!” the other American said, leading them back down the hall.
When they stopped, Chad put the crate down on the floor and looked back, bringing his fingers up to his ears. They were like twenty feet away! The soldier was holding his machine gun out at the door from like fifteen feet away. Were they worried about ricochets? Something bouncing back at them maybe, or—
The trooper pulled at something on the front end of his gun, somewhere under the barrel, and Chad was surprised when the rifle didn’t fire like he expected.
The weapon thumped...
A fiery explosion erupted on the doors, making Chad jump and clamp down harder onto his ears! Chunks of concrete flew all over!
A grenade?!
The young cameraman was pelted in the face with several dusty pebbles of flying debris, stinging his skin. He wondered what it must have been like for the man firing the gun!
The circle of light from the Geneva soldier’s weapon suddenly became a solid beam, engulfed in smoke and dust, like a fat laser.
The other American soldier laughed.
“Let’s go!”
Chad picked up the crate again and followed the three troopers into the bottom of the stairwell. So far, the monsters weren’t pursuing them, but that could change at any moment, especially if they slowed down!
Surely everyone in the lab was dead by now...
Looking up the center of the ten flights of stairs, Chad groaned, and started running up the steps.
Luckily, the monsters didn’t overtake them.
When the group made it to the top, ten terrible, heart-pounding stories later, the local soldiers led the rest of the way to the outside of the building, then went separate ways.
Chad stepped out into the sunlight of Manhattan, New York, blinking in the blinding morning light...
He noticed that he was covered in dust, and hard a large swatch of blood streaked across his left pants leg.
“Are you hurt?” the Geneva soldier asked.
Chad could see the man much more clearly now—Hispanic, lean, with a kind face. He still had several clips of bullets held into his vest, a pistol at his side, and an olive-colored nametag on the top-center of his vest that said “Santos”.
“Uh, no...” Chad replied, looking down at the nametag, then pitching his head back to look up at the towering UEA building they just emerged from. “That’s someone else’s blood, I guess...”
“Shit,” the soldier replied.
“Your name,” Chad said, “Santos?”
“Yep. What’s yours, cameraman?”
“Chad. Chad Murray.”
“Have you ever been here, Chad?”
“Where? New York?”
“Yeah.”
“No, why?”
Santos looked around, squinting his eyes against the brightness. “The city is dead. Looks like the EMP zapped everything above ground too.”
Chad looked around.
They were standing under the one of several huge buildings that belonged to the United Earth Alliance. Nearby was a large pedestal with a metal statue of a gun—a revolver—with its long barrel twisted up into a knot.
“What the hell?!” Chad said quietly to himself, squinting at the weird sculpture.
Dozens of flags of many different countries whipped in the wind at the top of a lone line of flagpoles surrounded by vivid green grass. On the other side of the perimeter fence was the city...
New York.
Skyscrapers towered over Chad and Santos in all directions except behind them, where Chad could easily hear the sound of water and waves swishing around in the EMP-caused absence of the city’s noise. He couldn’t see the water, because of
the UEA building behind them, but he knew it was there. Many of the tall buildings in the city blocks ahead of him looked old, red, and dingy grey. A few blocks to Chad’s right, rising up above all of the other old buildings, was a tall skyscraper of black glass. As he looked around, a flash of movement drew his eye back to the UEA building they emerged from...
“What’s everybody looking at?” Santos asked.
Chad realized that the many people standing around them were murmuring, mostly staying quiet—definitely scared, but sort of ... flocking to the exit of the UEA complex in front of them. He realized that he heard the strong, heavy constant rush of water up ahead, too. Different from the sound of the ocean or whatever was behind them...
But when he glanced up back at the UEA building behind them, Chad felt the blood run out of his face when he saw one of the monsters crawling up the side of the shorter structure, perching up on the corner of the roof and looking out over the city like an exploring cat...
“They’re out,” Chad said quietly. “They getting out. They’re outside!”
Santos looked back and up at the monster on the roof and gasped.
“These are the end times, brother,” the soldier said. “Mankind fucked up this time...”
In the light of day, Chad got his first good look at the creatures. He already knew that they were long of limb and taller than a man, and they definitely were! Everything about the monsters was lean and deadly, from the smooth, corded muscles, to the angular features and sharp joints. Their toes were claws that this one easily used to dig into the side of the building, and their hands were broad and powerful with elongated fingers with many extra digits that ended in stout talons. The creature’s head was slightly insectoid—long and connected to a small neck, armor-plated, not unlike the shape of a cucumber ending with a tapered point. The front of its face showed a blunt snout with several eyes—like little spider eyes—speckled above the beak-like mouth like a row of black beads. All along its armored back were holes, like vents—Chad knew that the beasts blew fire out of those when they ate—and this one had a long, whip-like tail that ended in a barb like that of a cartoon demon!