“What’s going on here?” asked Kiebler.
The soldiers looked at each other again for a moment, and then the younger one seemed to look sideways at me for a split second before speaking.
“There’s been a threat to the general populace that needs to be contained,” said the younger soldier.
“We’re here to make sure there is minimal damage to property and resolve the situation,” said the elder soldier. “Because of the nature of the danger we are particularly interested in medical facilities.”
“What? Was there some kind of bleedin’ monkey virus outbreak?” said Banyan.
The two soldiers looked at each other again and then the elder spoke.
“We’re particularly interested in anything strange happening in the hospital today,” said the ebony skinned soldier. “Can you tell me anything that happened today in this hospital?” His direct gaze almost commanded me to speak.
All three of us looked at each other. We held each other’s gaze, hesitated, and then took turns spilling the beans. We each described what happened and a few short minutes later the two soldiers had been fully informed of the day’s events, including the creature that had come out of me.
“So you’re a surgical physician that can perform appendectomies and you were able to remove a creature from this man?” said the older soldier.
Something felt wrong. Their wording being used by these guys seemed strange. Something in the pit of my gut told me to shout out, to tell Banyan to deny it, say it was all a joke. To my regret I resisted the urge.
“That’s right, mate,” said Banyan before I could follow my urge to warn him.
Banyan spoke with a slight grin, as if he was happy the soldier believed him.
With that both soldiers rushed forward.
“Detain the prisoner!” barked the black soldier to his junior officer.
The younger soldier pulled a set of cuffs out from some hidden place in his armour. He quickly swept around Banyan, cuffed him, and struck the back of Banyan’s knees with his armoured shin, sending the elderly surgeon to his knees on the ground before stepping back and away from his cuffed prisoner.
I tried to scuttle forward and protest, but it all happened very quickly.
I managed a “Hey!”
It was too little, too late. The senior soldier’s rifle began to glow and charge with energy. A blue ball of light grew at its muzzle. The high-tech weapon made a humming sound as it charged.
And then Banyan’s head was vaporized into a red mist.
Chapter 5 – Keep Running
Kiebler and I gasped in surprise. As I saw Banyan’s headless corpse slump forward on the concrete, my mind turned off. I was overcome with rage. Without thinking about what I was doing, I launched myself at soldiers. A deep piercing scream of rage filled the air, and it wasn’t until seconds after the whole melee that I had realized that it had come from me. The man who had quite literally saved my life less than an hour earlier was now dead and I was upset. Let’s face it; this was a much worse day than I could have ever anticipated.
In my seething rage I threw myself at the senior officer. Taken by surprise, he was unprepared and fumbled his shiny gun. As we tussled on the ground his hippy comrade nervously levelled his rifle, but hesitated, unable to get a clean shot and not wanting to hit his superior officer. I used that advantage to grab the rifle and shoot from the hip, aiming generally for the only exposed area on my long-haired enemy, his face. The gun hummed and quickly charged, firing off a smaller blast than Banyan had gotten. All the time spent on the firing range in combat training scenarios paid off. I hit my target, first try.
When the gun fired, it wasn’t the glowing charge energy that fired. A lifetime of watching sci-fi shows left me expecting to see a blue or red laser fire at my enemy, but that just wasn’t the case. The same as when Banyan was fired upon, the glowing energy didn’t shoot forward, it just simply seemed to serve as a charge or catalyst for something, I don’t know. It was some sort of transparent, nearly invisible wave of energy, almost like a solid ball of sound.
In any event, the energy ball hit its target, peeling the hippies face off and splattering it on the ceiling of the emergency entrance car port. Thick chunks of tissue clung and dripped from the stucco as the junior officer’s body fell backward. His body convulsed and the armour rattled on the ground.
The black general I’d been struggling with was suddenly climbing over my shoulder again, a long arm reaching out toward the rifle that now rested in my hands. In a fit of rage I screamed, turning and slamming the butt end of the shiny rifle full force into his face. Startled, he fell backward again, at which point I climbed on top of him and drove the butt end of the gun home again, 2-3-4 times into his face before I heard Kiebler.
“Jace!” she yelled, pleading at me with her eyes.
The soldier beneath me was still and unmoving, I looked around to see two more full armoured soldiers pointing at us and shouting. They broke into a panicked sprint. I tucked the gun under my arm and quickly hopped over to Kiebler, grabbing her arm and telling her to run. We ran along the building and toward an open parking lot area. Bricks suddenly erupted from behind us, pelting us with bit of hard clay. The running soldiers were firing at us.
“Keep running” I yelled to Kiebler as I slowed to level my gun and fire back.
A ball of solid sound whizzed by my head and a breath later a car in the lot behind me exploded. The force of the blast caused me to stumble, but I quickly regain my balance, levelled the gun and fired.
The first shot hit the ground in front of one of my armoured assailants who had dropped to one knee to steady his gun; the asphalt in front of him erupted and sent gravel and tar flying into his face, clouding his vision and sending him stumbling backward. The other soldier was already levelling his gun at me while in mid-run. Luckily I had the quicker draw and fired before he could. A much smaller energy bust than the last one, so it didn’t seem to damage his armour, but it hit him in the midsection, lifting him off the ground and spinning through the air, up over a parked car and down hard into the ground.
I turned to see Kiebler standing next to her car, fumbling with her keys.
“Move over. I’ll drive,” I screamed, running toward her just as she’d finally gotten her door unlocked.
To her credit Kiebler was a smart girl. She comprehended the severity of the situation and there was no argument about whose car it was. I hit the gas and tires screamed. As I approached the driveway of the emergency exit, a large army truck rolled into place, blocking the way. There was a large crowd of hostages being gathered to the right, so my only options were to turn around or drive through a group of innocent and bewildered people.
I turned the car with a loud screech and begin moving quickly toward the back of the lot. As I approached the chain link fence separating the back of the hospital parking lot from the lot of the adjacent liquidation store I stepped on the gas.
The car exploded through the fence a split second before more fence and earth exploded behind us from one of our armoured friend’s rifle blast. I guess they had survived. I was more concerned with our car being airborne and the paved parking lot heading quickly toward our windshield. Unbelievably, our predicament wasn’t caused by the explosion that we’d narrowly avoided, but the fact that the hospital had been built up onto a hill, created by the building company when they had excavated the ground for its foundation. I was aware of this and if memory had served me correctly there was a good three to four foot drop between the two lots.
Memory was wrong. It was at least an 8 foot drop, meaning our crash through the fence was more like hitting a jump. We sailed a good 25 feet across the parking lot before crashing into the ground. We hit with an ear-splitting shriek, the undercarriage sparked against the asphalt and the front bumper of Kiebler’s car peeled off like a Band-Aid and was flattened by our rolling tires. Luckily we had both buckled up, so we were still securely in our seats.
“Fuck. I’m s
till making payments on this thing,” a forlorn Kiebler exclaimed, hands to her face.
Feeling smart, I replied, “I don’t think that’s gonna be a big priority when…”
I was interrupted by being smashed in the face with an airbag. I’d like to say I didn’t lose consciousness again. In all honesty, I did put up a good fight and I think it is fair to say, thanks to the flashes of white material and concrete in my memory, that I remained semi-conscious.
Thanks to my lead foot, the car sped on across the parking lot and careened into the front corner of the building that housed the liquidation store. There was a hard impact that reminded me that I was awake and alive. The car spun right around as chips of the concrete building façade pelted the hood and windshield. This must have finally done it in, because the high-pitched whine told me the engine was still revving, but it wasn’t moving anywhere.
My door popped open and before I could stumble out a firm, strong hand grabbed me and pulled me out. In a daze I looked up and saw military dog-tags, followed by a large chin on a face that looked like Guile from the Street Fighter videogames.
“Relax. It’s okay,” he said, dragging me away from the car. Then, over his shoulder, I saw the sitting terrace on the exterior of the upper floor of the store. On it was perched the biggest black man dressed in army camo I’d ever seen. He was squatting behind an enormous Gatling gun, preparing to fire.
Chapter 6 - Allies
With that, the huge man opened fire. Bullets sprayed the concrete and mowed down about a dozen angry-looking armed civilians on the other side of the street that had been moving menacingly toward the building.
“That’s a big fucking gun!” I said as my saviour dragged me over the asphalt.
“It’s an XM214 Minigun,” said the man with box-cut blonde hair. “And yes, it is.”
“It doesn’t look very mini to me,” I replied.
As the man lifted me upright and I got my feet under me, another soldier was pulling Kiebler from the car. He was a lean, muscled Hispanic with chiselled features, dressed in camo cargo pants and vest. My rescuer and I ran toward the entrance of the store beneath a shower of gunfire, followed seconds later by Kiebler and hers.
We all landed in a heap in the center of the store in a pile of sporting equipment. A grizzled looking old man peered curiously from behind an antique looking glass and wood counter. The soldier pulled a flashlight from one of his pockets, and shone it in my eyes.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you know what day it is?”
“Umm, yeah…Monday,” I replied.
“This one looks fine, too,” the Hispanic offered after glancing at Kiebler’s eyes.
“What’s going on?” asked Kiebler.
“Stay here,” the white soldier said.
With that they ploughed back out the front door and drew the automatic rifles slung across their backs and sprayed a volley of fire at the shrinking group across the street. The elderly gentleman behind the counter stared at us, looking as if he was debating whether we were of any value.
Moments later they returned, soon followed by the large man that had been firing the Gatling gun from the balcony.
“Sorry about the interruption, but I think you folks can see we’re in deep shit,” the white soldier offered. “I’m Master Sergeant Cameron Hauer. These are Sergeant Lamont Freeman and Corporal Michael Alvarez,” he said, pointing to the large black man and Hispanic man respectively. “Over there is retired Captain Ben Albright,” Hauer said, pointing at the elderly gentleman who now had a big grin on his face.
“Thank you for helping us,” I responded, nodding to the military men in the room.
Kiebler looked taken aback at first, maybe intimidated by all the raging testosterone in the room. We looked at each other for a moment, until the nagging question in her mind boiled over.
“What’s going on here?” she blurted out. “Why were you shooting those people?”
The men all looked at each other for a moment.
“It’s obvious somethin’s fucked up and people is actin’ strange, right?” Freeman said first, in a defensive tone that made Kiebler and myself pull back a little.
Hauer stepped in with a cooler head.
“What Sergeant Freeman means to say is that it’s obvious something strange is going on,” said Hauer. “Some sort of sleeper cell has been activated and regular citizens and military folks are taking arms and rounding up civilians with no word or warning. No orders given. They are taking them somewhere and some of them, like medical staff, are being executed on sight.”
“Shit’s gone crazy,” added Freeman. “Our own commanding officers have gone rogue, started ordering us to round up civilians. Some of those who started the rounding up were just following orders, but when they started telling us to kill people a group of us spoke up and refused to follow. Our own people turned on us and we had to grab a jeep and fight our way out.”
“These people aren’t thinking for themselves,” said Alvarez. “It’s like their minds are being controlled, like they aren’t even themselves anymore.”
The other soldiers looked at Alvarez in a way that suggested he may have said too much. The look silenced Alvarez and made him blush, looking embarrassed for sounding so crazy.
“It’s okay,” I said. “If I told you the day we’ve had, we’d sound crazy, too.”
“All right then,” said Hauer. “Now that you know who we are, why don’t you tell us about you?”
With that, I introduced myself and Kiebler to the group…and then told them about our day and the attack that we were fleeing when they rescued us. To my surprise there was no reaction of doubt in their faces.
“You mean you’ve got one of those things in the hospital?” Hauer asked.
“Yeah, that’s what I said.” I replied.
“Why do you sound like you’ve seen one before and that you’re not at all surprised?” I asked, trying to keep the sound of suspicion in my voice to a minimum.
Hauser looked around tentatively at his fellow soldiers. There were no objections, just stares in other directions. Although his eyes were slit in suspicion, former Captain Albright gave Hauer a nod.
“Well,” said Hauer, “there is something to that.”
Chapter 7 – Hauer’s Story
Back when we started bombing the Taliban in 2001, we were some of the first over there in the sand, kickin’ ass and stickin’ the American flag up Al-Queda’s ass.
Freeman and I were still second class privates at the time, and Albright was our Master Sergeant. We were doing our turn at prisoner duty, guarding hostiles captured in battle, some being interrogated.
One of our prisoners was named Abagull, and he actually wasn’t that bad a guy. There was even some doubt as to whether he had any useful information. We nicknamed him Abby. One day Abby started chattering and carrying on, with a crazy look in his eyes. The translator said he was babbling incoherently, gibberish about aliens and things inside of him. It got so bad that Abby had to be isolated.
One night we heard blood-curdling screams coming from Abby’s cell. When we got in, it was like a scene from a slasher film. Blood was sprayed all over the walls and Abby was screaming bloody murder, which was pretty much what was going on. Abby had worked a screw out from the bars in his tiny cell window. He had used it to scratch and pierce the skin on his right side and pulled and torn his own side open with his fingernails.
The most shocking part was the organ that had fallen from his side. We were aghast, and I admit that I froze for a minute. Just long enough for it to move. It actually turned and looked at us, blinking with big, bulbous eyes, before turning to hiss at Abagull.
I couldn’t even breathe. I took step into the room. The sound made the thing hanging from Abby’s side turn and hiss, flailing a long claw in my direction.
I opened fire by reflex. The creature and Abagull were both dead nearly instantly. I reacted in fear and I didn’t mean to kill Abby; I hadn’t even realized that I had un
til after it happened.
Freeman and I called for Albright right away, hoping he could make sense of what we saw.
When Albright got there, he had us seal off the solitary cell right away. He called the brass and we were told to just forget it and report for shift change before hitting our bunks.
When we woke up in the morning, the camp was overrun with high ranking officers and five-star generals. They called Albright, Freeman and I to be debriefed by a General Morris. In the debriefing we were informed that what we had seen was classified. They said it was a new biological weapon experiment being tested by insurgents and that we were never to discuss it with any civilians or any fellow officers. Then we were told to pack our gear and prepare to be flown out on the same chopper that brought the brass. We were going back to U.S. soil to await further orders.
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