by SD Tanner
“Forward,” he called.
Once both trucks were through the two gates they began to close behind them. Before they had completely closed, the vehicles they’d heard earlier came into view. They were driving erratically, and even through the thick trees, black shapes were visibly clinging to them.
Worried that their high-powered M2 machine guns would cut through the thin metal on the cars, he called, “Hold your fire.”
The cars were swerving wildly and dislodging some of the critters clinging to the hood and roof. As they were thrown from the vehicle, they quickly recovered and continued their pursuit.
“Target the ones on the ground,” he called.
In response to his order, the gunners on the trucks opened fire at the critters, causing them to jerk wildly before they collapsed. The first of the cars came closer and a head appeared out of the passenger window. The woman managed to shout, “Open the gate,” before a critter clinging to the roof swiped one lethally sharp, clawed foot at her, separating her head from her shoulders.
At least two critters clung to each of the two cars and they couldn’t open the gates without letting them into the site. He assumed the command center wouldn’t allow critters to breach the perimeter, but to his surprise, the gates began to swing open again.
“Don’t open the gates,” he called urgently. “There’s critters crawling all over the cars.”
A woman’s voice he didn’t recognize replied smoothly, “So? Critters can climb the walls anyway. The survivors might as well get into the main building while you sort this out.”
“Where’s Ark?”
“He’s busy with the bots. I’m Amber.”
He didn’t have time for introductions, and waving at the car now passing them on the road, he called, “What’s going on out there?”
Blood from the woman’s severed neck had run down the side of the car and another woman pushed past her lifeless torso to face him. With her eyes wide with terror, she said, “They’re coming and there’s thousands of them.”
“From what direction?”
She shook her head and then looked behind her fearfully. “I…I…I don’t know. They were everywhere. We tried to drive out of the forest, but there were more of them everywhere we went. This was the only road they weren’t on.”
That meant the critters were heading for CaliTech from every direction in their thousands. Even if the Navigator squad had been with them, there was no way they could hold back so many, and if they were already surrounded then they couldn’t leave either. Their only option was to pull back to the main building and try to hold the perimeter.
Waving the woman and carload of terrified survivors through the gate, he said, “Ark, we’ve got boo coo movement heading our way. We need to get everyone inside.”
“Roger that. Get anyone you find into the main building. We’ll batten down the hatches.”
Reversing their trucks through the gate, they followed the line of cars behind the wall, shooting the critters as they fell from the vehicles. More cars were making their way through the gates and he waved them towards the main building. Climbing out of the truck, he began to issue orders.
“Three squads on the roof. Put a squad on every exit to the building. Cover it from the inside. Line the windows. Watch your fire, you’re surrounded by civvies.”
Joining Spike, he and their squads walked through the main doors just as the shutters began to lower on the windows. Ark had told them Dunk was paranoid and the main building of CaliTech could turn itself into an armored turtle. He hadn’t quite understood what he’d meant, but watching the metal panels rolling over the glassed windows, he concluded Dunk must have had more money than sense.
Inside of the building, people were huddled together in the middle of the large room. Many held weapons, including automatics. “Ark, we can’t have people firing in an uncontrolled way. Why are they armed?”
“If they’re armed then move them to the front.”
“But they’re likely to shoot one another.”
“Hood, they’re part of your army now, so put them to work.”
As the shutters rolled over the main doors behind him, he stared at the hundreds of people clustered together as far away from the walls and doors as they could get. He had no idea whether they could shoot straight and suspected few of them had any combat training. Despite their lack of skills, those with weapons began to pull away from the main group, forming an untidy mob in front of him.
His radio crackled in his ear, “Hood! Incoming! Air and land!”
It was his squad on the roof warning him that they were about to be overrun. “Get back inside and bring the nav watch with you.” Returning his focus to the armed group now standing and watching him, he added, “Split up. Find yourself one of my squads and join them. If you’re a bad shot, give them your weapons and ammo when they run out. They will protect you until they die. If you’re a decent shot, then work with them. Follow their orders.”
Just as he’d instructed, his squads were forming into tight groups around the exit doors and windows. On the three levels above them, he knew more squads would be lining each shuttered window, and the building began to reverberate with the sound of loud banging against the walls.
Needing to see what was happening outside, he said, “Ark, put the outside cams on the screens.”
Ark didn’t reply, but the scenes of the bots moving through the glowing tunnels was replaced by views of the outside of their building. Instead of a white wall with shuttered windows, it was a seething mass of vibrating black. Despite himself, he glanced down from the screen and at the main doors. A few feet from him and with only a thin door separating them, were thousands of critters clinging to the outside of the building. They were slashing at the metal shutters and it would only be a matter of time before they would find a weakness.
As if the critters had read his mind, the sound of breaking glass came from his left. Shattered particles of glass skittered across the floor, and skinny black limbs reached through a tear in the side of the shutter. Several guns fired simultaneously, but the arms didn’t pull away and more skinny limbs pushed their way past the shutter, widening the crack even further. Another window shattered to his right, and he didn’t need to look to know they were breaking through.
Typical of the critters, once one knew something they all did. While glass began to shatter from every window, voices sounded off through his earpiece.
“Level two is breached.”
“Level three is breached.”
“Level four is breached.”
Moving towards the window tearing open under the weight of so many critters, he said grimly, “Ground floor is breached.”
Critters were forcing their bodies through the sides of the metal shutters, only to take a head shot courtesy of the squads guarding them. It didn’t help. As one critter was downed, its body was yanked out of the way, allowing another one to push through the window. Each time it happened, the damaged shutter was further torn, widening the hole until two and then three critters could fight their way into the room. It was only a matter of time before they would tear down the shutters and swarm the floor.
“Hold the perimeter!” He called across the room and to anyone on the grid.
His words were echoed from one shooter to the next, but their voices had an edge of desperation, making him wonder if his did too. Frustrated, he began to walk behind the shooters lined up in front of the unarmed people huddled in the middle of the room.
“Stand ready! Fire at will. Hold the perimeter.”
As he walked along the line, the shooters slowed their movements, and hunched behind their gunsights ready to fire. The room began to quieten, and all that could be heard was the screeching of the critters and the groaning of tearing metal. Glancing at the screens hanging from the ceiling, the building and area around reminded him of ants smothering a corpse. Their jerky, restless movement swamped the building and there was no way out.
He hadn’
t expected a last stand to happen so quickly, but knowing that they couldn’t win and wouldn’t be willing to lose, he prepared to lead his last command.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: One wrong move (Ark)
“Ark…Ark…Ark!”
The increasing urgency in Amber’s tone made him pull his eyes away from staring at the nest on his screen to look at her. “What?”
Tapping the screen in front of her, she said, “Look.”
At first, he couldn’t work out what he was seeing. Sitting deep inside of the underground bunker in the command center, they were insulated from anything happening above them. On Amber’s screen, their usually white building was a black seething mass of claws. Although the building might have been compromised, the critters would never make it through the thick security doors and into the bunker unless someone unlocked the entrance.
Without Amber and Dom to help, managing the movement of the baby bots had absorbed all of his attention. They were still tumbling down hidden holes in the floor, and he’d tried to maintain a rough estimate of how far below the surface they were. He couldn’t be sure, but he guessed they were nearly half a mile below the pyramid, and they were still slipping into holes leading to more tunnels and caverns. The complexity of the nest amazed him. It was well lit by the goo and spread far, wide and deep into the earth. The critters must have broken rocks, drilled through clay and dammed the underground water table to create their home. Its very existence spoke of an engineering brilliance he knew they could never replicate.
Some of the levels had more of the lumpy bodies they now knew were people and others had smooth walls. He couldn’t see a pattern as to why one chamber was clear of people and another wasn’t. If he compared it to a military bunker, he guessed these chambers were a pantry, and the people buried inside of the walls were feeding the goo that provided nutrients to the critters. He suspected the critters used people as fuel the same way they used oil. It still didn’t explain why they were holding people as prisoners in the cities, and trying to understand what they were doing, he’d pushed the baby bots to keep diving into every thinly veiled hole he could find.
“Ark! The building is breached,” Amber said urgently.
Distracted by the baby bots and their mission, he muttered, “I know, but what do you want me to do about it?”
She punched him sharply in the shoulder. “Ark! The building is breached! They’re all gonna die! My kids are out there!”
“Knock it off,” he replied irritably. “I’ve spoken to Hood and his army are out there, plus all of our people are armed.” Sighing, he tore his focus away from the bots again. “Hood, gimme a sitrep.”
“That’ll be fucked and fucked.”
“And that means what in the Corps?”
“Fucked is fucked, dude.”
“The bots haven’t made it to the bottom of the nest yet. Can you hold the building?”
The sound of gunfire blasted through the speaker at his console, and he tiredly rubbed his eyes while he waited for it to stop. “Hood?”
The rat-a-tat sound of shots didn’t stop and Hood shouted, “Unless you can do something to help, we’re busy out here.”
Realizing Hood wasn’t going to give him any answers he could use, he began to flick through the images from the security cameras inside and outside of the buildings. Hood may have described their situation crudely, but it was accurate. Critters were exploding through the windows on all levels of the main building. People were huddled in the middle of the rooms and shooters were firing at the critters as they burst inside. Some of the remote guns were still firing at the movement all around them, but most had already run out of ammo and were sitting idle. When they’d been told the critters were coming in force, everyone had been ordered to the main building, and now it was the focal point of their attack. The building with their living quarters and cafeteria was free of critters, but there was no one left inside of it. Next door, the training hangar was wide open and the engineering building was also empty.
Leon’s voice came through his speaker. “Ark, what’s going on?”
“CaliTech’s been overrun. There are thousands of critters attacking the main building.”
“It’s in shut down, right?” Lexie asked anxiously.
“Yeah, but it’s not holding up.”
“What are you saying?”
“We’re breached.”
“What are you gonna do about it?”
Strumming his remaining fingers against the table at his console, he watched as a bot slipped through a hole in the floor, only to land inside of another empty chamber. He was convinced something was hiding at the bottom of the nest and he needed more time to find it. They’d never get another chance like this to uncover the truth, and it might be the difference between the survival of a few and the annihilation of mankind.
“I dunno, Lexie. The bots haven’t hit the bottom yet.”
Leon’s voice sounded again. “Ark, we should head back to CaliTech.”
“What for? It’ll take you two days to get back here and by then it’ll be over. You should finish your mission.”
This time it was Bill he heard through his speaker. “No, Ark. They need to get back here. Even if only some of us can hold our line, they’ll still be needed to help anyone left alive.”
He didn’t agree with either of them. If the bots could find whatever it was that controlled the critters then Leon’s squad might be needed to destroy it. The attack on CaliTech was diverting them from their primary mission and putting their strategy at risk.
“I don’t agree. The real problem isn’t about saving CaliTech, it’s about dealing with whatever is inside of that nest.”
For the first time since he could remember, Dunk’s voice came through his speaker. “Ark, do not let my company fall. Even if you destroy whatever is inside of that nest there’s a hundred more of them. You need CaliTech. The world needs CaliTech.”
It was Dunk’s undercurrent of megalomania that made everyone call him the skunk. Trying to remind himself that it was only his excessive narcissism that had made CaliTech possible, he sighed. “This has nothing to do with your damned company, Dunk. If we have a chance at killing whatever is inside of that nest, then we should take it.”
It was only when Lexie spoke that he realized he was going to lose the argument. “You know I don’t care what Dunk wants, but CaliTech is our home and the people there are our family.” Pausing briefly, she added firmly, “And I won’t leave you or them. I’m coming back with or without the squad.”
Lexie knew he wouldn’t let her travel back to CaliTech without the squad and she’d effectively overruled him. In many ways, he was relieved. He was being asked to choose between the people he cared about and the faceless mass of mankind, but his instinct was to save the ones he saw every day. Looking across at Amber’s screens, a full-scale firefight was in progress. Critters had broken the shutters on every level and the screen was sparking with tracer fire. There were people fighting in corners and shooting wildly, no doubt killing others by accident. For as much as he wanted to deal with the bigger problem, the bots would have to go. CaliTech was falling and he had to choose between saving those around him, or dealing with the thing that had created the problem.
Lexie had just made the decision easy for him. Realizing logic wouldn’t get to rule the day he prepared to pull the pin on the squad’s mission.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Last stand (Survivors)
Ryan and Binkin
Tables and stools had been pushed into rows in front of the people in the middle of the room. It formed a barrier around them that wouldn’t do them any good, but it was all they could do to defend themselves from the critters clawing their way through the torn shutters. One of the soldiers, that he presumed was the leader, was striding along the line of troopers between the windows and the undefended group.
He’d already joined the line of shooters, and Binkin was staying loyally by his side, but he’d given up barking. They all knew the cr
itters were inside of the room and no further warning was needed.
Gunfire was being directed at the critters breaching the perimeter. Firing so many rounds in the tall ceilinged room was creating a deafening roar that was overriding the screeching of the critters. They appeared to be fearless, but he suspected the critters were just stupid. Bullets were ripping through the metal shutters, only making it easier for them to tear the flimsy metal apart. As one critter fell under their wall of bullets, another five replaced their fallen comrade, and the room was rapidly filling with a seething mass of black rubbery bodies.
One appeared about ten feet from his position and hoping for a head shot he finally began to fire, adding his noise to the others. He missed and hit the critter in the chest, pushing it back against its brothers while they continued to push it forward. For a moment, the critter went back and forth while bullets hammered into its body and its brothers kept pushing it from behind. Using their wounded buddy as a shield, the critters heaved another few feet towards their hastily assembled perimeter. Screaming erupted from somewhere along the line of shooters, and he assumed the critters had broken through to the people in the middle.
The troopers to his left and right were steadily shooting, reloading and then firing again. The entire line had become a wall of bullets. Plaster was flying from the walls behind the critters, and black rubbery limbs and chunks were flying away at all angles. His eyes stung from the stench of so much gunfire and his ears were ringing so badly it was dulling the sounds around him.
Bent on one knee and firing at a steady pace, Binkin was safely behind him, and he could feel his paws scrabbling across the back of his leg. No one knew if the critters would attack an animal, but he hadn’t seen many dogs since they’d arrived so he wasn’t optimistic. He would save one bullet for himself and another for Binkin. This was the end. They were going to die under a mountain of critters that no amount of bullets could ever hold back.