by Paul Tassi
Alpha’s good hand clutched the long, standard-issue alien energy rifle that Lucas had seen a thousand times when the creatures swarmed the streets. His mechanical, six-fingered claw (which, he explained, was not weaponized, and only for complex technical procedures) was wrapped tightly around the ship’s glowing core, which he said was necessary to stop the mothership’s larger core from deteriorating further once they reached it.
As they made their way through scores of wrecked fishing boats and approached the wall, the smell of the air became acrid. Whether it was rotting flesh, burning flesh, or some combination of the two, Lucas couldn’t be sure, but it was enough to make his eyes water.
Periodically as they moved up the slope, Asha and Lucas slowly turned around to make sure they weren’t being flanked from the rear. Life indicators in the ship didn’t say there were any stragglers outside the camp, but then again, the system wasn’t functioning correctly much of the time. Alpha’s powered down armor didn’t have its heartbeat sensor online either. It was one of many functions that fell by the wayside after extreme use. They were going in blind.
The wall was a twisted bramble patch of wood, metal, and stone, stacked high enough that it would be exceedingly difficult to climb without being shot by a sentry. But now the makeshift guard platforms that lined the inside had collapsed or were vacant. The gate looked like the most reinforced link of the entire chain, though on the ground now lay the bones of its two heralds. The human and creature skeletons formerly occupying pikes were shaken loose thanks to a blast from Asha that had decimated an entire section of the wall next to the gate.
The crater was still smoking as they carefully stepped through it, weapons at the ready. Smoke clouded their vision, but dissipated as they progressed, and they saw the town laid out before them. On the ground were the bits of Norwegian cannibals that had been caught in Asha’s line of fire. Further up, there was a man slowly crawling away from them through the sand, missing the lower halves of his legs with wide burn marks across his back. Judging by the length of the trail, he’d gotten pretty far from where he’d originally been hit. He didn’t appear to have a weapon, but . . . thunk.
Lucas jolted as an axe appeared in the back of the man’s head. Asha crept a little further up to him and removed the hatchet with a crunch, wiping it on the man’s rags before sliding it back through her belt loop. Alpha and Lucas hurried up to follow her, and the three fell back into formation. Silence was still of the utmost importance, as they didn’t want to start a gunfight if they didn’t have to.
As they reached the street, it became clear the once bustling cannibal carnival was now a ghost town. There was no phalanx marching out to meet them, as perhaps they imagined that with a functional, deadly creature ship also came functional, deadly creatures. These men hadn’t survived this long without running away from a fight or two they couldn’t win. But where were they?
The stone buildings hinted at what shops used to reside within. Though only scraps of Norwegian words remained, a bicycle wheel here, a torn up winter jacket there indicated what the stores used to sell. The glass in all the windows had long since shattered, probably during the firefight that took down the ship, or the crash itself. The trio scanned each vacant window carefully until Lucas finally saw what he was looking for.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he raised Natalie and fired two slugs at the man in the third-story window. The shots echoed down the empty street as the pair of bullets passed through his throat and skull. Lucas heard him collapse in a heap alongside the sniper rifle he had been clutching moments earlier. Alpha and Asha had their gaze jolted upward after the shots, but when two cannibals rounded the corner to see what had happened, they shifted focus. They each raised a weapon and Asha fired her revolver. The right man’s chest caved in and he flew backward as blood arced out of the wound. At the same moment, Alpha let loose a blast from his energy rifle that took off most of the other man’s head who then crumbled into a heap and his remaining singed brains spilled out onto the pavement. No further adversaries showed themselves as the sound of the two blasts bounced off the walls and down the street.
Bodies littered the road as they marched toward the center of town, stepping over the two fresh ones barring their way. Their clothes were streaked with blood, but the camouflage they wore was unmistakable. Soldiers, Lucas thought. It was always the soldiers.
Asha had made quick work of many of them from the sky, and there were few corpses that hadn’t lost a limb or two. Unrecognizable, charred chunks indicated there were even more dead than they could see. But still, it wasn’t enough. Where had the rest gone?
As they reached the main square, the ground was scarred with crisscrossing burn marks from each of the ship’s passes. Many of the surrounding buildings were on fire or had already burned down. The field of stakes further ahead in the square was mostly uprooted and splintered, and Lucas couldn’t see any bodies hanging from the ones that remained.
Further ahead stood the ornate church the captured women had been shoved into. It was fully engulfed in flames, seemingly ignited by a nearby building unless Asha had specifically targeted it. Lucas raised his weapon as he saw movement at the doorway. Someone was struggling with the heavy plank that barred it. He was about to fire, but as they drew closer, he saw that it was in fact an older woman wrestling with the blockade.
“What the . . .” Asha said breathlessly.
The woman had to keep shielding her eyes from the flames above and was coughing due to the smoke pouring out from the cracks. She finally managed to lift the plank from the handles, and as she wrenched the doors open, more smoke and flames shot out, knocking her to the ground. She yelled something in Norwegian, but there was no reply from within. All those inside were either dead of smoke inhalation or the flames themselves. She fell backwards to the ground and began to weep.
Lucas walked toward her, gun still raised, but his grip loosened slightly. As he moved forward, she raised her head from her hands and saw him. Her eyes widened in horror and she scrambled to her knees with her arms outstretched above her head. She was wearing a torn apron with a worn dress underneath and was covered in soot from head to toe with visible burns on her forearms and hands. From the wrinkles caked on her face, she appeared to be almost seventy, a true rarity in the current state of the world. She was moaning something in Norwegian as tears continued to stream down her face.
“Hjelp! Vær så snill, barna! Barna!”
“What’s she saying?” Asha asked as she slowly approached.
“I have no idea,” Lucas said. “Alpha?”
“We have no time for this. End her or leave her, but we must press on,” he answered curtly.
Lucas turned to leave, but the woman sprang to her feet and grabbed his arm. Asha quickly raised the revolver to her head, but was stopped by a look from Lucas. She began tugging on his arm and pointing to another part of town to the east.
“Kom hit, kom hit!” she said pleadingly. Lucas tore his arm away and shook his head.
“Barna! Barna!” she cried.
“I don’t understand. We have to leave.” He noticed for the first time the broken shackles on her wrists. “You’re free now, go!”
The woman looked panicked and then sprinted off in the direction she had been pointing. Lucas briefly thought about shooting her, as this place was now a ruin and she likely had nowhere else to go, but he ultimately decided it wasn’t his place. Asha lowered her gun as she apparently came to a similar realization.
“What was she saying, Alpha?”
“I do not know this language,” he said quickly. “We must continue; time is of the essence.”
Lucas stared in the direction she went, but slowly turned and kept walking toward the downed ship.
They moved into a more residential part of town and immediately became far more wary; they could hear cries echoing from building to building. Some out of sight cannibals appeared to be injured, wailing from their houses or nearby streets. Others were s
houting with more authority. The sounds bounced around too much to pinpoint where they were coming from. The voices sounded distant, but it was hard to be sure, and Lucas clutched Natalie tightly. Searching the rooftops for any sign of movement, none of them were focused on the ground below. Not until Asha’s boot hit the tripwire.
Buried in the rubble that lined the street, none of them had seen the net that hoisted them into the air. Lucas and Asha were caught so off guard they lost their grip on their weapons, which clattered on the stone street below. Alpha would have likely dropped his as well were it not attached to his suit. Inside the net it was a wild tangle of limbs, rocks, and wood. They thrashed violently out of instinct, but Lucas quickly cleared his head.
“Cut!” he yelled, as he squirmed to reach the knife strapped to his chest. He heard holographic menus opening and closing and when he looked over saw that Alpha had already activated a humming saw on one of his metal fingers and was slicing into what appeared to be a military cargo net that was mercifully not laced with spikes or electrified. Lucas had seen such traps before. Squirming uncomfortably, Asha desperately tried to reach her hatchet, but was twisted in such a way that grabbing it was impossible. Lucas cut through one link with his knife, then two, then three. Alpha was having considerably more success with his automated tool. From her upside down vantage point, Asha saw men enclosing on their position.
Alpha’s slices met Lucas’s and the three of them were sent tumbling to the ground below. Ignoring the pain of the fifteen-foot drop, Lucas and Asha scrambled for their weapons as Alpha raised his, but they were already both in the hands of a bald, one-eyed cannibal standing in front of them. With a wide grin, he had Natalie propped on his shoulder and he pointed Asha’s Magnum at them. Lucas instinctively went for his boot pistol, but stopped when the blackness in the corners of his vision subsided, and he could see that they were surrounded by cannibals on all sides, each brandishing a weapon pointed directly at their heads. Lucas began to raise his hands but his muscles tensed as 10,000 volts of electricity ran through his body, thanks to a cattle prod between his shoulder blades. As he fell limply to the ground, he saw Alpha and Asha set upon in the same fashion, and the searing pain gave way to darkness.
7
There were no dreams this time, as Lucas’s unconsciousness lasted only minutes, not hours. When he came to, he felt his arms hoisted above him. When he looked up, he was glad that the cannibals had found some rope and he wasn’t crucified on the stake where he hung. At least, not yet.
To his right he saw Asha, still unconscious and miraculously with all her clothes still intact. She had a throng of admiring cannibals at her feet, as they surely hadn’t seen a woman like her in years. One reached out to touch her torn pants, but his hand was swatted away by the one-eyed cannibal who barked something in Norwegian.
On his other side was Alpha, taking up quite a bit more room on his stake with his feet almost touching the ground. He’d been stripped of his power armor and weapon, and there were bruises on his body, likely from multiple impacts by the stun baton. Though he was conscious, he looked worse than either of them and his breathing was heavily labored. He’d even been stripped of his translator, as any foreign technology was probably assumed to be dangerous.
Before them lay what was left of the village folk, a ragged assortment of cannibals all armed to the teeth. Most had long hair and beards, though a few were inexplicably clean shaven or had only light stubble. The majority were tall and blond, as was to be expected given the region, and many were wearing the remains of military uniforms. A few appeared to have scraps of riot gear on, which would explain the electric batons. There were a couple of bulletproof vests scattered amongst the crowd with the word POLITET on them. It was no stretch to imagine what that meant. The military and police had been best equipped and trained to survive a warzone like the one Earth had become, and as such he had run into them often in his travels. His own digitally camouflaged cargo pants served as a similar warning to any others he came across. A dozen or so other men were in dirty plainclothes, but then Lucas saw the man they had watched on the monitor earlier.
The colossus was even bigger in person and had to be about seven feet tall, though the power armor made him look eight—a giant in a town of monsters. It was clear from a primal perspective why the rest rallied around him. When he spoke, his voice boomed through the town square.
“Spør dem hvem de er!”
The man with one eye and both their weapons walked away from Asha, who was now conscious and looking annoyed, and stopped in front of Lucas.
“English?” he asked in a surprisingly high-pitched voice with little trace of an accent.
He looked over the tatters of Lucas’s uniform.
“Yes, English,” he concluded. “He wants to know who you are.”
Lucas said nothing and glowered at the man.
“No? No name? No rank?” the man asked with a smile that was eerily out of place in their current predicament. He turned and said something to the chief who did not look nearly as amused.
“How did you fly that ship? Where did you come from? Why are you here?”
Lucas answered the barrage of questions with further silence. The one-eyed man smiled.
“Okay!”
Without a moment’s hesitation, he whipped a familiar-looking buck knife out of the back of his belt and jammed it into Lucas’s thigh as he lay bound on the stake. He was silent no more, his scream reverberating through the crumbling buildings around them.
“Better? You will talk now?”
The man removed the knife quickly from Lucas’s leg and blood spurted out of the wound. Lucas cringed and bit his lip so hard that it too bled, but still said nothing.
The chief grunted and said something in Norwegian, motioning to Alpha.
“Why are you traveling with this . . . thing?” the smiling interrogator asked.
“Why are all of you so damn ugly?” Lucas spat out.
The one-eyed man laughed. “He speaks!” he said, turning to the crowd of thirty-odd men behind him, some of whom gave a low chuckle. He walked over to Asha, knife still in hand.
“And what about you? Do you speak? Do you think we are ugly?” he asked her with the same sickly grin.
Asha stared daggers at him and attempted to spit, but her mouth was too dry.
In the back, a few men were going through Alpha’s power armor, attempting to activate it. Only a dim, flickering red light was lit on the gun. A few yards away, two other men were turning the glowing core over, trying to understand its purpose. A shorter man with a large scar across his lip was wearing Alpha’s translator like a crown.
Back in front of them, the one-eyed man’s smile faded.
“You attack our town, which we’ve worked so hard to build. You destroy our food, kill our men, and burn our women, and now you have nothing to say?”
The look on his face turned downright menacing.
“You will have something to say.”
He paused.
“Cut her down.”
“No!” Lucas shouted as two men sliced through the ropes binding Asha’s arms. As they came free, the first cannibal got a broken nose and the second claw marks across the cheek. When her right foot came loose, she knocked the front teeth out of the next closest man. But more cannibals converged on her and pulled her down from the stake.
Whatever their problems had been back on the ship, Lucas was now in a frenzy, shaking his stake back and forth violently trying to free himself to reach her. As his head jerked back and forth, he caught Alpha’s gaze to his right. He growled something, but without the translator, it was indecipherable. He turned his head to the side and closed his eyes. Lucas couldn’t heed his warning.
The right half of the assembled crowd erupted in a blue fireball. The force of the blast sent a shockwave that not only flattened everyone still standing, but knocked over all three stakes, which splintered at their bases. Lucas hit the ground with a thud. His vision was spotted and
white from the light of the explosion and the impact of the ground. Looking up, the red sky was brilliant and blinding, and a shadowy figure soon came into view. As his vision came back into focus, he saw it was Asha with his knife, still dripping with his own blood. As soon as she cut his arms free, she flung Natalie at him, which he caught out of reflex, despite his diminished motor skills. She was yelling something at him, but he couldn’t make it out and only heard a low, dull tone in his ears. As he got to his knees, he saw the one-eyed man on the ground to his left, his throat slit and blood pooling in the cracks of the cobblestone.
Asha continued yelling and her voice slowly began to overpower the ringing in his ears.
“FIRE! FIRE!’”
She grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to his feet, where he faced the crowd. Though many were clearly dead due to the initial blast, some were beginning to rise with their hands over their eyes and ears. Nearly all were disarmed, and Lucas finally realized a unique moment was at hand. He and Asha began unloading into the smoke. Natalie’s thirty-five-round clip emptied into the living and dead alike, and those trying to regain their footing immediately came crashing down again, now riddled with bullets. At this close of a range, Asha was making short work of the cannibals with her Magnum, and its .45 caliber slugs made six heads explode before she ran out ammo. Her throng of attackers must have shielded her from the blast, as she seemed in much better fighting form than anyone, Lucas included.
After their initial barrage, the smoke began to clear, and no one was attempting to get up anymore, save one. The chief. Protected by his power armor, he had only been winded by the explosion. He got to his feet and let out a roar that needed no translation. Attempting to fire his power weapon, he found it non-functional, and in a rage sprinted toward Lucas. A few clicks told Lucas that he too was out of ammo. He prepared to swing his rifle like a baseball bat, but the chief was on top of him before he could bring it around. As the pair of them hit the ground, he felt his bottom two ribs snap and an explosion of pain surged through his body. Natalie cascaded down the stone street out of his reach. The chief lifted a fist the size of Lucas’s head and prepared to merge his face with the ground. Asha had dropped her own empty gun and she flung herself at the chief, grabbed his arm, which was almost as thick as her waist, and pried him off of Lucas using every bit of her strength. He tossed her aside, but as he did so, Lucas saw his knife stuck in the man’s shoulder blade. He didn’t even seem to notice.