Earthlings (Soldiers of Earthrise Book 2)

by Daniel Arenson

  "You guys gonna clear the road?" the soldier cried down to Jon.

  Jon flipped him off. "Shut up, rubberneck."

  Then it all became too much, and Jon fell to the ground. He could only lie there, watch the smoke float above, and try to forget the screams of the burning driver.

  Chapter Six

  The Bargirl Bureau

  They gathered in Charlie's house. A dozen bargirls. Proud members of the Bargirl Bureau.

  Calling it a house was perhaps stretching the truth. Like most people in Mindao, Dalisay "Charlie" Santos lived in a shanty. Her husband had built the place, erecting crude walls of plywood and driftwood. A sheet of corrugated iron formed the roof, rusty and held down by sandbags. The place was built atop another shanty, which in turn balanced atop wooden stilts. A river of polluted water, human waste, and garbage flowed below.

  Countless such shanties rose over the putrid puddles, precariously balanced on sticks, always threatening to topple over into the filth.

  Fearing the Go Go Cowgirl, Maria had been hiding here for the past few days. Charlie had taken her in. The shanty was humble, yes. But Maria had found a warm home here. A loving family. Charlie's children were intelligent, inquisitive, and happy despite their poverty, and they filled the shanty with laughter. A house? Maybe. Maybe not. But it was certainly a home.

  And maybe it's unfair to call us bargirls, Maria thought.

  After all, Maria had only slept with one client, one she had then married. At heart, maybe she was still a rice farmer. The other girls too had not begun life as prostitutes. They had been fishwives, farmers, a few trash-sifters from the landfills. They had all washed up in the bars. Driven by poverty or war or loss or drugs. They were like the shanties of Mindao—risen above the trash, but only barely, and only balancing atop the thinnest of supports, likely to fall back in at any moment.

  Maria looked around her at the women. A dozen had gathered here, coming from several clubs along the Blue Boulevard. Charlie was the oldest, the matron of the group. The youngest girl was only thirteen, but she already worked the bars, selling drinks—and herself. Her baby boy, a mestizo, cried in her arms, always hungry. Many of the girls weren't much older. They were the victims of poverty. Or of war. Or of cruel men.

  But today they stopped being victims.

  Today they became the Bargirl Bureau. Today they would fight for their world.

  "Welcome, sisters, to our first meeting," Maria said.

  Charlie raised a cup of wine. "Cheers!"

  "Cheers!" the other women cried, raising their cups.

  Maria smiled thinly. "Sisters, we didn't gather here to drink! We have our bars for that. We gathered here to discuss how we, the bargirls of Bahay, can defeat Earth."

  "We'll drink them under the table!" one girl said. She stood up, raised her cup high, then chugged it down.

  "We'll fuck 'em till they die of exhaustion!" said another, thrusting her hips.

  Everyone laughed. Maria stifled her smile.

  "Sisters, please!" Maria said. "This is serious business. We're not fighters. We're not soldiers. We're not guerrillas. We're not—"

  "We're not sober!" a bargirl said, guzzling down another cup.

  Everyone laughed again. Maria rolled her eyes.

  "We're not victims!" Maria said.

  "Hear hear!" said Charlie, raising her cup. Wine sloshed.

  "We're not helpless!" Maria said.

  "Fuck no!" said the bargirls.

  "We can fight Earth," Maria said. "We can secure freedom for Bahay. Not with guns. Not with starships. Not with bombs or bullets. But with—"

  "Our dibdibs?" said another bargirl, pushing up her breasts. Everyone laughed again.

  Maria groaned. "I prefer to say, our womanly wiles."

  Charlie laughed and reached toward Maria's chest. "You barely have any wiles."

  Maria shoved her hand away, then covered her small chest. "That's not what I mean. We can do a lot with a soft smile. A kind word. A listening ear."

  Charlie rolled her eyes. "How are those going to defeat an army of a million Earthlings?"

  "And their starships!" added a bargirl.

  "And their giant pute ti-tis!" said another, holding her hands out wide, then collapsing into a fit of giggles.

  The other girls, Maria suspected, weren't taking this quite as seriously as she was.

  "They bomb our villages," Maria said softly.

  The girls looked at her. They lowered their cups.

  "They spray poison on our forests, wilt our fields, and deform our babies," Maria continued.

  The girls lowered their heads.

  "They rape us," Maria said. "They rape children."

  The thirteen-year-old bargirl held her baby closer. A baby who was half-Earthling. A child of rape. Charlie patted the young mother on the shoulder.

  "They killed millions of us," Maria said. "These Earthling boys who come into our bars. They do this. They burn, poison, rape, destroy… and Earth doesn't know."

  Charlie tossed her wine glass aside. She glared at Maria.

  "What do you mean Earth doesn't know? Earth is doing this!"

  "Earth's soldiers are doing this!" Maria said. "And even they don't always know. Jon didn't know when he came here. He was shocked to learn what's going on, and—"

  "Your husband," said one of the girls. She snorted. "He's a filthy murderous pute."

  "He's not!" Maria said. "He's a good man. Many Earthlings are good. But they're ignorant. Naive. Brainwashed. Especially the Earthlings on Earth. They think they're liberating us from evil aliens. They think we're welcoming them with open arms. They don't know."

  Charlie snorted. "They know their boys and girls are coming back in body bags."

  A few cheers rose. Girls clanked their cups.

  "Yes," Maria said. "A hundred thousand—that's how many Earthlings we've killed. Not even one percent of one percent of their population. There are billions and billions of them. Meanwhile they've slaughtered millions of Bahayans. They've probably killed half our population by now. And they're not slowing down. They will keep going until every last one of us is dead."

  "And what do you propose we do?" Charlie jabbed Maria in the chest. "How are we to stop this?"

  "By exposing the truth!" Maria said. "We need to collect stories. Our stories! And tell them to Earth."

  Everyone was looking at her now. They were silent.

  "Our stories?" asked the youngest girl, holding her baby.

  Maria nodded. "Yes. Kim, you were raped by an Earthling soldier. The same man who murdered your family."

  Young Kim wiped her eyes. "I see him sometimes in the bar. He still asks for me."

  Maria turned toward another bargirl. She was a young, beautiful woman with tiny arms. Arms as small as a baby's. Her fists like acorns.

  "And you, Grace," Maria said. "You watched the Earthling planes spray Mister Weird's poison on your village. You reached into a river of poison to save your son. Only to pull out a little body. And to watch your arms wither and shrink."

  The young woman with withered arms couldn't even reach her cheeks to dry her tears. "I would give up my legs too to have my son back."

  "And you, Charlie," Maria said. "Do you have a story too? What—"

  But Charlie stopped her with a glare. "Don't talk about me."

  "Okay. Not all of us are ready to share. But I am." Maria raised her chin. "The Earthlings burned my village to the ground. They killed my parents, killed everyone I ever knew. Only I survived. Do you know what happened when Jon heard about this? His heart broke! And he swore to protect me! He didn't know. He came here thinking Bahayans are just monsters. Slits, they call us. Gooks. Slurs. Names for pathetic subhumans to kill. Not orphan girls from burned villages. Not us. We must share our stories with Earth."

  Charlie's eyes softened. "They must see we too are humans."

  "And not just our stories," Maria said. "Not just the tragic tales of bargirls. But stories from across Bahay. Every refugee i
n this city, the millions of them—they all have stories like this. We must interview them. Record them. Collect testimonials. Evidence of Earth's atrocities. And then—we must show them to every person on Earth."

  "How will that stop the war?" demanded one bargirl, a saucy little thing, her pigtails dyed red, her striped stockings tattered. Her real name was Angelica Lopez, but an Earthling soldier had once nicknamed her Pippi Longstocking, the name of a character from an Earth story. The nickname had stuck, and now even to her friends, she was Pippi.

  "Jon told me that there are elections coming up on Earth," Maria said.

  Pippi opened and closed her hand, mimicking a chattering mouth. "Jon this, Jon that."

  A few of the girls laughed.

  Maria plowed on. "A man named Hale is the current president of Earth. He hates us. He bombs us ruthlessly. But another man is running against him. A man Jon says is dovish, who vows to end the war. He's lagging in the polls, but if Earth knew about us… if they heard our stories… Hale would lose the election. The war will end."

  And Jon can come back to me, Maria thought. She dared not say that part aloud, fearing Pippi's scorn.

  Charlie tapped her chin. "So basically, we're going to expose President Hale—and bring him down." She nodded. "I like it."

  Maria held out her hand. "Are you with me, Bargirl Bureau?"

  The others placed their hands atop hers.

  "For the Bargirl Bureau!" Pippi said.

  "For the Bargirl Bureau!" they all repeated.

  Charlie grabbed a new bottle of wine. "Now let's get fucking pissed!"

  She popped open the bottle. They all cheered.

  Chapter Seven

  Hellhole

  For weeks, the army slogged through the jungles and wastelands. And for weeks, the enemy harried them without rest.

  On the road north, the Apollo brigade joined other units. More brigades mobilized from forts along the way. Soon an entire division was rumbling up the road to Basilica, capital of North Bahay. The land shook. Here it was. The greatest push north since the early days of the war.

  The generals called it Operation Jungle Fever. The final invasion of North Bahay. An invasion that could end the war—or lose it.

  I just had to be drafted this year, Jon thought with a sigh. Just my luck.

  The Hades Division, in which Apollo rode, was a force to be feared. They called themselves Earth's Fiercest. Hundreds of tanks. Dozens of helicopters. Ten thousand infantry troops, battle-hardened and eager to kill.

  They were, Jon thought, a lumbering elephant. And like hungry wolves, the Kennys constantly nipped at their slow, swollen heels.

  Every hour, another armacar rolled over a mine. Sometimes the explosions were so powerful they overturned even these enormous vehicles of armored steel. Jon's ears still rang from the bomb his own armacar had rolled over. And the mines kept detonating. Again. Again. Tearing armored plates open. Burning men alive. The screams never stopped.

  And the army rolled on.

  Whenever soldiers fled burning vehicles, they were there. Enemies in the trees. Hidden like ghosts. Firing with fury. Burning soldiers ran down the road, only to be riddled by bullets. Boys and girls crouched behind armored trucks, weeping, desperate to scoop up their spilling entrails. Dying in the mud. Calling for their mothers as their blood watered the soil of an alien world.

  And the army rolled on.

  Planes flew above, bombing the forests along the roadsides. Fire blazed. They moved onward through hell. But the mines kept exploding. And the soldiers kept dying. And still they rolled on.

  After a week, the jungles were no more. They traveled over barren landscapes. The planes had flown. The fire and herbicide had fallen. Sometimes the land was burned, and smoldering ash spread to the horizons. Sometimes the land was poisoned, and the ancient rainforest lay in sticky black clumps like tar, and villages rose like fragments of bone from dark wounds.

  Jon saw Bahayans traveling this nightmarish landscape. Deformed. Twisted. People whose skin had turned bright red, glowing and pulsing like living magma. People with withered limbs. Mothers carrying babies with no faces. Children with pointy bald heads, with eyeballs that dangled, with hearts that beat outside their chests. Conjoined twins, melted and fused together, crawling across the land, eating insects and worms.

  Sometimes the soldiers shot these miserable creatures. Clay took particular pleasure in slaughtering them. And Jon wondered if this was murder or mercy.

  We poisoned them, deformed them, Jon thought. This is what we did to Bahay.

  And the army rolled on.

  Jon sat in a jeep, watching the landscape. Few soldiers wanted to ride in jeeps. That meant being exposed to the open air, to poisonous fumes, to enemy snipers.

  The other soldiers fought for a seat in an armacar. They felt safer in those massive boxes of steel. Jon did not. He had been inside such a massive box of steel when it rolled over a mine. He had seen that death and fire. Armacars to him now felt more like deathtraps. He had chosen the jeep, and he sat in the back seat, the ashy wind blowing over him.

  But watching the land, seeing the deformed and dying, he now missed the dark innards of an armacar.

  "It's horrible," George said, gazing at the desolation.

  Jon lowered his head. "I remember seeing photos of deformed Bahayans. They told us they were monsters. Demons."

  "What happened to them?" George said.

  "Mister Weird," Jon said. "Poison. Our planes rain it from the sky. Look."

  He pointed. In the distance, they could see it. A plane flying over a last swatch of rainforest, spraying yellow liquid. Where the liquid landed, the forest wilted. So did the people.

  "Why?" George balled his enormous fists. "Why do we poison them?"

  Jon sighed. "The planes are trying to clear out the forest. To give us safe passage north. To get rid of any hiding places for the Kennys. And…" He swept his hand across the scenery. "This is what happens."

  A few Bahayans crawled in the rice paddies nearby. At least, they had been rice paddies once. Now the water was yellow and foamy, and the rice looked like human fingers, millions of human fingers rising from the muck. The peasants raised bloated, eyeless faces. Mouths opened to scream, toothless. Eight arms extended from their swollen bodies. They had become things like spiders, naked, begging.

  A child crawled toward Jon's jeep. He had no head, no neck, but his body still moved, and an eye blinked on his torso. A mouth opened. Begging.

  "Food. Food."

  Jon reached into his pocket for an energy bar. He leaned down, handing it to the poor creature.

  But another jeep rolled by. A soldier fired. The deformed child fell down dead. The soldier laughed and his jeep accelerated, spraying mud onto the corpse.

  And the army rolled on.

  "We're called the Hades Division," Jon said. "Named after the ancient god of death. And that's what we've become. Gods of death risen from the underworld, withering the land."

  Etty sat between Jon and George. The young Israeli had been silent for long hours. Her eyes, normally so large and green and glimmering, seemed sunken and dim. Her skin was ashen, and she hugged herself.

  Finally, for the first time today, she spoke. "Bullshit poetry."

  Jon looked at her. "Etty?"

  "Bullshit poetry!" she repeated. "Gods of death risen from the underworld? Fuck that. This ain't some mythological epic. Call this what it is. Genocide."

  "Etty!" George recoiled. "You can't say that. Genocide is like something Nazis or aliens do. We're the Human Defense Force! The army that fought the alien centipedes, and the giant spiders, and the cyborgs. We're the good guys."

  Etty lowered her head. "We used to be. Back when President Einav Ben-Ari led us. Back when we followed the Golden Lioness to battle. Ben-Ari always rode with her army. Always fought for justice. Now she's gone, and now President Hale sits in his palace on Earth. And we're here. Killing. Murdering. How many millions of Bahayans did we kill?"


  George stood up in the jeep. His fists clenched. "Dammit, Etty! The Bahayans joined the aliens. We offered them a place in the Human Commonwealth. They refused! They chose aliens over humans! So, well, we—"

  "Decided to kill them all?" Etty said.

  "To liberate them!" George insisted.

  Etty looked around her. "Do you see adoring crowds welcoming us with flowers?"

  They looked around them. At the withered forests. At the miserable crawling things that had once been human. At the soldiers shooting, killing, laughing.

  George sat down.

  "No," he said. "I see… hell."

  "A hell we created," Etty said.

  Jon looked at the young woman. He remembered a time at boot camp. They had watched a propaganda film. Ensign Earth, a superhero soldier with a shield painted like Earth, had taught them that Bahay was evil, that heroes had to liberate it. Etty had stood up, dismissed the film, called it lies.

  Jon had confronted her then. Had questioned her patriotism.

  The slits murdered my brother! he had said.

  Now Jon reached over and held her hand. "You were right, Etty. You knew before we did. You tried to tell us. You were—"

  The land rumbled.

  The ground cracked.

  Across the poisoned landscape, a canyon opened like a ravenous mouth, gobbling tanks and jeeps.

  Jon watched them fall. And then his own jeep was plunging into the darkness.

  * * * * *

  Everyone in the jeep screamed.

  The canyon opened around them. They fell into darkness. Into hell.

  They flew from their seats. Jon slammed his head into somebody above him. The jeep rolled. Etty tumbled out of the jeep and vanished into darkness. More jeeps were falling, and a tank plunged down at their side.

  But it was not the sundering world, nor the falling soldiers, that terrified Jon.

  It was what lurked below.

  The fall was only a few seconds long. But he saw. And he knew he would never forget.

  Monsters filled the pit.

  Mutations. Beings of nightmares.