Charger the Soldier

by Lea Tassie

  During a fight close to the Chinese border, the Russian Blood Brigade encountered the Hyborgs of Asia. They were a small group led by a commander named Chang, who carried three swords but no guns. This group preferred close quarters combat with the invaders. Though the Russians were pleased to add these odd-looking human combatants to their ranks, they were less than impressed that the Chinese no longer had a home to defend.

  The soldiers fought bravely, but after several months, Russia was losing the war. The Chinese Hyborgs spoke of the alliance between the Germans and the Americans. No one could keep a secret from China. Its spies had long penetrated several levels of world governments, so when the war started, they too began experimenting with Hyborgs of similar design and construction to those the Americans had developed.

  Ivan had survived long enough to get a small command of his own, seven men and five women, and they were joined with the remainder of the Chinese Hyborgs. The group numbered twenty in total and had perfected its fighting skills. It was the most lethal Russian combat group in their area; Ivan had received many medals for valor.

  "Gear up, meat balls," Ivan shouted to his small group. "Command has a new objective for us. Seems they're not happy we lost so much ground. They have decided to send us ahead to find a possible weak point to hit, maybe cause a little confusion."

  "Just send Stinky here into the fight, the aliens will certainly retreat from his body odor." Natasha laughed as she shoved hard on Mikhail's shoulder, trying to put some distance between them.

  "Laugh now, woman, but you will be begging me for a little more odor when those aliens have you by the panties!" Mikhail said sternly.

  "Shut it, you monkeys! We have to report to the command tent in ten minutes." Ivan grabbed the gear he would need for another kick at the enemy.

  The tent was quiet as the small group entered. Gathered inside were many soldiers and officers of the Russian Blood Brigade, all focused on small video monitors set up around the large tent. On the screens were images of the aliens, speaking to the cameras of captured reporters in a language no one understood. But the images were easy to interpret. They were holding the President of Russia captive. Three aliens yelled into the cameras while one of them created a weapon of glowing hot plasma and began slowly burning the neck of the Russian President. The man screamed in agony as his head was slowly removed from his body. It fell, with a sickening thump, on the ground where he knelt. The soldiers were first shocked, then outraged. Cries of revenge filled the air.

  "Seems to me that Russia has followed China," Chang said to Ivan. "Guess we're both on the losing side. Maybe we should take what little we still have and head to America. Reports say they are holding their ground, thanks to the Germans."

  "Americans!" spat Ivan. "I think I would rather go to hell first!"

  Russia fell and disaster after disaster ravaged the country. Within days, the remaining Russian and Chinese fighters boarded planes and flew to America over the North Pole, as their civilians massed in the frigid north, joining the civilians of the west, abandoning their motherland to the invaders.

  Survivors from all over the world were migrating to the poles of Earth; the cold areas seemed to be the one place where the invaders did not attack. Every day more and more soldiers poured into General Harris's command and he sent them into battle with little regard for the outcome. He didn't care about the humans; only the results that the Grays sought.

  With the loss of their country, the Russians on American soil gave up the term Blood Brigade, and adopted the term 'undead reds.' They were now the walking dead, all that was left of what had once been Mother Russia.

  Chapter 12 A new fighting machine

  A tremendous explosion made Charger's ears ring, and part of his side armor had been burned thin. "Stupid humans dropped another nuke," he yelled.

  Chang, fighting next to him, said in his best broken Chinese-English, "Yah, I think I hate those guys."

  "Really! And all along I thought it was just me." Charger laughed and pulled his sword from another sizzling, screaming alien body. It amused him to fight next to converts from other countries. Their body forms were so much stranger than his, and their living armor was a mess. Chang spoke bad English, but was a good fighter. Much thinner than the American Hyborgs, he was also shorter by a few inches, but still heads taller than any humans. He carried three swords and often said, with a snicker, "Number three for mother-in-law."

  Charger wasn't entirely sure that the humans were still on his side. Toward the high point of the invasion they were relying a lot on the 'nuke option.'

  "Nukes no stop invaders, neither," Chang said. "Mostly just cook us like choy." Choy was what they had started calling cooked meat, choy and spooge, that was meat and blood. Charger felt hip as hell having his own slang.

  At least there weren't that many nukes. Most of the ones that did make it to Earth were launched from ships and subs located far out at sea to avoid the alien tentacles reaching out to destroy them. Missiles launched from these vessels had to run a gauntlet of alien spaceships in orbit waiting to destroy them with pulse weapons.

  Charger and Chang had been assigned to the 25th combat group, a platoon of two hundred newly created Hyborgs now stuck fighting the largest alien masses so far seen. Three of these gigantic masses were bearing down on their position that day, and they had been assigned to hold the center mass from advancing on a city occupied by refugees and soldiers. The mass was simply incredible, bigger than most of the buildings behind them and it moved forward with ground-shaking thumps. They quickly learned that getting close to it was a bad idea, so they waited till the alien troops dropped from the mass to the ground to fight. Then they would focus in pairs to slash and kill those that approached.

  However, even after a full day of fighting, alien troops were still dropping from the mass. But Chang seemed to have spotted something; he motioned to Charger to follow him. "Look, mass move forward on five legs, but leg number five not like others."

  Charger stared at this leg, which seemed the size of a battleship.

  Chang said, "Look at leg, it never leave ground."

  "You called me over for this?" Charger asked. "What's your point?"

  "The leg," Chang reiterated. "Mass move forward, but number five leg never leave ground. Other four do."

  Charger decided the last nuke must have hit a little too close to Chang's head; he really wasn't making much sense. Then he realized that the fifth leg never left the ground because it was attached to something below the surface.

  He moved dirt away from behind the leg, and found a thick red root maybe three feet down, slithering forward along with the mass. "Oh hell, you think it's like an extension cord or something?"

  Chang shrugged. "Cut and find out." They both started hacking madly at the red root. The mass shuddered and stopped. The aliens that had been dropping into combat all day suddenly stopped dropping on the defending platoon and started dropping in huge numbers toward Charger and Chang.

  "Yep," Charger yelled, "An extension cord for sure." It was a big relief when their platoon comrades noticed the change in battle and rushed to their aid. The leader radioed to main headquarters, which then called for an air strike on this new finding. The Hyborgs scattered to get out of the way. The center one of the three masses was the first to stop. The air strike on the fifth leg severed the connection between the mass and its coastal alien base, stopping it dead in its tracks. Unfortunately, the discovery came too late for the 7th and 13th undead platoons attacking one of the other alien siege towers, as the barrage of covering human gunfire focused fire on just the one central target. This lack of coverage resulted in the destruction of both undead groups.

  The center mass stopped only as long as it took the red tentacle to reattach itself to the fifth leg, then started moving toward the city again. Command was made aware of that fact just after General Harris's lack of foresight, or lack of caring, wiped out half of the existing forces on the American side.

 
Undeterred by the human devastation, Harris ordered three of the newest attack bombers to strike the weakness of the red roots with guided bunker buster munitions. These three new bomber aircraft were the most technologically advanced aircraft America had ever produced. They were shaped like a triangle and roughly the size of a World War II P-51 Mustang. The surface was black and had no visible controls. Instead, it used micro-metallic feathers all over its surface, which moved in unison to direct the airflow over the surface. This gave the small bomber-fighter craft amazing ability to maneuver, making it impossible for the alien invaders to bring it down.

  "Holy sheep dip," Chang screamed at Charger over the screech of the three small bombers. "What a rush!" A great laugh erupted from deep inside his battered and bloody body.

  When the bombs hit the target, they first dug deep into the earth before exploding. Once ignited, the ground rose dramatically, heaving upward like a gigantic breathing chest. The explosion didn't break the surface, but vaporized everything in its path, thus creating a gigantic hollow sphere underground. This completely severed the connection of the alien mass from its command structure. The heaving of the surface toppled the mass forward, where it crashed down upon the attacking soldiers, wiping out another platoon of German and American commandos.

  General Harris, apparently pleased with the results, repeated the same order for the second and third masses attacking his position, achieving the same results, wiping out the invaders, but killing thousands of human soldiers. Once the battle ended, General Harris sent word to the leaders of other battles raging in America, telling them how to stop and bring down these new alien siege weapons.

  Chang and Charger walked through the fields of dead and dying back to the command base, hearing the cries and begging of the human soldiers, but powerless to do anything about them. From that day forward, Charger regarded General Harris as a war criminal. But Command continued to rely on him to guide the war.

  In the weeks following, Charger and Chang heard from Command the rumor of a new type of fighting alien, the Shillelagh. They soon saw it in action.

  The Shillelaghs were larger than most of the aliens that had come before. They moved like a blur in the mist they emitted, making it hard to get a fix on them, and consisted of two parts. The solid part seemed to move around inside the liquid part as it advanced toward them. With a sound like the scraping of steel chains against a metal deck, the solids appeared through the semi-transparent part only long enough to move forward. Then the solid part would disappear behind the liquid part, then back again to form a solid, which made it blur to the eye as it shifted from side to side. Its one weakness was its eyes. Charger found they were always visible, those gold, reflective multi-faceted eyes, looming out of the mist toward him.

  "Bitch!" Charger heard Chang exclaim. "Three Shillelaghs move into our five o'clock, ten yards out and closing." Charger turned off the detector, which was clicking a signal on his wrist computer, and they both crouched into a guarded stance, awaiting the approach of the three invaders.

  The mist began to engulf them and, as a result, Charger's eyepiece switched to infrared mode, then to motion mode, to help him find his prey. But this did not turn out to be an ordinary fight. The first of the three Shillelaghs struck him and snapped his sword in two before he felt the piercing heat of its body-formed weapon slice through his shoulder. Bewildered, he lurched backward, trying to reach the broad axe strapped to his back. Then he realized that Chang was fighting the other two, and not doing well.

  Like two cats toying with a mouse in the middle, they kept slicing piece after piece off Chang as he swung his sword wildly, trying to find some sort of weakness in their armor. An impact to the axe strapped to Charger's back sent him hurtling like a rag doll over an embankment and down into a fast-flowing river. He gasped for air as he floundered around, seeking the shore. When he was back on dry land, he gathered his senses and again reached for his axe.

  Only then did he realize his arm had been sliced to the bone and was hanging at his side. His arm enhancements were sparking and short-circuiting, holding his arm tight to his body. He tried to compose himself and, stumbling forward, tripped over a large portion of Chang's body. Looking up at the mist now moving away from him, he could just make out the three Shillelaghs darting into a line of Australian army recruits and destroying them as easily as if they were just paper held to a raging fire.

  He needed to help them. He needed to fight, but the wet mud at his feet made it hard to climb the embankment. Turning and running downstream, he finally found a path upward. He reached the top and found shredded human corpses and the stench of gunpowder. Stumbling over spent ammunition and broken bits, he staggered forward to rejoin the fray, only to see the Shillelaghs vanish over the horizon.

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  Charger had been at the medical center for a few weeks, being patched together, when one of the doctors there suggested that he could have an upgrade. He thought about it for a bit, and then remembered Chang. He had traveled this far from humanity, what was a bit farther going to matter? So he said yes.

  "This will be a new symbiotic addition, not new living armor," one doctor said. "The upgrades are internal to you, like adding blue tooth. You're going to be linked mentally with a Lycan counterpart."

  "All the same to me, doc," Charger replied. "Go nuts."

  "Nurse, prep him for tomorrow morning. Charger, try to get some rest. You will need all your strength," the doctor said before he left the room.

  Charger knew what Lycans were. The first ones had been small, nasty things, plain black in color and hard to control. Charger had seen a few trainers turned into chew toys and it made him giggle. It was only after the red hybrids, where canine DNA was blended with primate DNA, and then blended with humans, that effective Lycans were created. Dal had called them werewolves. That was because he read too many comic books.

  Lycans were about the size of a large man and could stand upright, with arms and legs a little bit splayed out. But it was no 'dog head on a human body' thing like in the movies. These were twisted, fur-covered humans with vicious fangs and claws, who hunched forward a little when they walked but ran on all fours like a chimp. They were good hunters, not surprising for something that looked more like a wolf than a human, and this hunting trait was valuable because the aliens did a lot of their fighting underground. They howled like wolves, too; he'd heard them a few times. He'd heard also that the best way to control a Lycan was to make it psychologically part of you, so you didn't end up as a chew toy.

  His upgrade turned out to be unique. His brain was fitted with not one but two additional biomechanical core stems, which were then linked mentally to two Lycans, each with a very different disposition.

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  Dart speaks to Reader:

  What kind of people would volunteer to be Lycans? Well, I'm not sure that many did. I suspect General Harris and his underlings decided who was going to volunteer.

  No, you're right, the difference between volunteering and being volunteered is not exactly subtle. But General Harris had a war to win and he didn't care how he did it.

  Here, I'll give you the histories of the two Lycans, Mac and Jill, who were hooked up mentally with Charger and you can decide for yourself what happened.

  Mac wrote his will in 2025, before he was taken from Megiddo Max to the lab where he was converted to a Lycan as part of the military's experiments to create powerful infantry weapons in case of war.

  The world is mad, but I am sane.

  This is the Last Will and Testament of Mac von Shallow. I, Mac, do hereby bequeath all my worldly possessions to my rat, Felix. Felix has been a good companion over these few years in prison. I would just like to state for the record that both Felix and I are fully responsible for all the deaths we have caused. I would also like to take this opportunity to write down my life story, and Felix's, too.

  My grandfather was a Jew in Germany in World War II, and my grandmother was part of the Hitler youth. She was resp
onsible for turning my grandfather in to the SS and he was imprisoned until things got bad for Germany. Then he was drafted and sent to Russia, where he was shot, captured, and placed in a Russian prison until late 1955. He returned to Germany to find that my grandmother had taken his only son to America.

  My father was a violent man, who took great joy in torturing and killing trespassers who unfortunately found their way to our country property. He refused to have any contact with my grandfather. This selfish attitude meant that not only did I never have the opportunity to meet my grandfather, I also felt it was my duty to avenge all the wrongs ever committed against him. My mother was a schizophrenic, with a passion for sleeping with as many strange men as she could find. My father was often responsible for the deaths of these unlucky men. I finally found it necessary to end both their lives to give myself some sense of peace.

  I am however quite sane, and cognizant of all my faculties. I have been in prison these past five years. I don't mind, now, admitting to another crime of which I am quite proud, killing two men in Germany. To say that these men deserved to die for their crimes against humanity is not an exaggeration, for they were clearly the two post guards of my grandfather's prison in Germany. My only regret in this instance is that the hours I spent removing the flesh from them were too short.

  My years in solitary confinement in Megiddo Max over these last few years have shown me that I am not the monster the media has made me out to be; that I am in fact just the opposite, a saint. I have been described in the news as unfeeling, cold, calculating, intelligent and ruthless, but my pet Felix will surely testify to the opposite. As for the killings of the supposedly innocent victims in the night club, the tour bus, and the grade school in Berlin, let me assure you that they were all sons and daughters, or grandsons and granddaughters, of German war criminals. As for the deaths of the three prisoners who were responsible for having me put in solitary confinement, I will state for the record that had they chosen not to interfere with the library privileges that I worked so hard to get, they would still be breathing.