Grendel Unit

by Bernard Schaffer

  It took him almost an hour to get out of bed and dress himself and make it out of Jebediah Strong's front door. He was moving better, but only slightly more. Each time he took a step it felt like his entire midsection was being sliced open. He often pressed his hand against his bandages to see if came away bloody. So far it hadn't and the stitches had held.

  Vic collapsed down into one of the rocking chairs and caught his breath, trying not to breathe too deeply so his chest and stomach would not expand too much and give him fits of pain. Finally, he was able to settle and gently rock back and forth in the chair, looking over the fields while the dark sky began to pale. He could smell freshly-turned soil and flowers and even fresh fertilizer, but did not mind. There were insects in the fields that buzzed in long, droning song, but he did not mind that either. He closed his eyes and inhaled, listening. Someone was coming.

  He'd heard the footsteps on the wooden floor inside Jebediah Strong's home before they reached the front door. He stilled himself and listened closer, drawing away from the insects and the sound of the wind, focusing as the door creaked open. He listened to the weight of each approaching footfall and turned his head slightly to say, "Can't sleep, Frank?"

  Frank gently closed the door behind him, taking a seat in one of the rocking chairs beside his captain. "You really think this plan will work?"

  Vic shrugged, "It's like anything else. We're doing the best we can with what we have." He looked over at him, "How about you? Do you think it will work?"

  "I do," Frank nodded.

  Vic looked at him, concerned. "That's all you have to say? You just do?"

  "Yep."

  Vic's eyebrows raised in surprise and he let out a quiet whistle. "Well, that's a surprise. Now I'm starting to have second thoughts about it."

  "No, don't take it like that," Frank said. "I have my reasons. It was in my visions."

  "Oh great," Vic sighed. "We're all going to die."

  "You only die in one of the visions," Frank said. "Pretty badly, from what I could tell."

  "This is not helping, Frank."

  "Don't feel bad, I die in one too. For the record, without me, you become this evil military dictator who kills Monster."

  "You're insane," Vic said.

  "Don't be mad at me. You're the one who kills all the mantipors."

  "Can you stop saying that?"

  Frank held up his hands, looking at his trembling fingers. "In all the visions, I have some sort of illness, and this is one of the symptoms. In the one where you died, it got so bad that I was crippled, but in the final one, the good one, there was one thing none of the others had. You know what I'm talking about?"

  "You lost the ability to talk?" Vic asked. "Because I can't imagine it being a good vision any other way."

  "It had the woman," Frank said, leaning close to him. "The woman was with us. And I figured that was impossible, but somehow, she's here." Frank's eyes glittered with hope and he smiled foolishly, "I think everything is going to be okay."

  Vic turned away, taking his time looking over the fields. "I haven't seen her. Have you considered that you might be suffering some sort of hallucination from your illness?"

  "Seriously?" Frank shot back. "I come out here to cheer you up and give you some hope and you tell me I'm seeing things?"

  "I'm a realist, Frank. I don't subscribe to visions."

  "Well, I'm not hallucinating."

  "If you say so."

  Frank groaned in exasperation and went to get out from his chair, when he looked up at a small streak of electricity across the dawn sky. The sun had not risen yet, and its light had not extinguished the darkness in the upper horizon, and Frank watched in mute horror as another streak and then another fired, racing toward unseen targets that blew up in a shower of distant sparks. "Oh no," Frank whispered, reaching for Vic's arm to get him to look. "It's starting. They're here."

  Vic stared up at the volley of streaking energy beams and the shower of explosions, "Ring the bell, Lieutenant. It's time."

  Bob Buehl had been dreaming of his wife and children when the bell rang. He was standing in the forge, showing them how he could craft tools from raw iron. In his dream, they'd come to visit him and he'd greeted them happily.

  "Are we going to live here now?" his oldest daughter had asked him.

  "We are," he said. "I've been building a house for all of us to live in."

  "But can we ever leave it?"

  "No, I'm sorry, my love," he'd said, smiling sadly at the little girl. "We must stay here forever." He'd bent down to kiss her and the just as his lips touched the silk of her hair, someone rang the emergency bell. Bob had made the bell just a few days prior at the forge, and Vic had ordered it installed on the front porch where all of them could hear it.

  He leapt from the bed, landing on the balls of his feet and raced down the hall in nothing but his underwear, shouting, "Is it time?"

  The look on Frank's face told him it was. Vic was sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, looking up, his hands folded across his lap. From the corner of his eye, he saw that both of his men were still standing next to him, and said, "Get moving, both of you."

  Minutes later, Frank and Jebediah Strong were straining to raise Vic onto the rear of a horse. Vic cried out in pain as they stretched him, then gritted his teeth and hissed, "Stop babying me, you two! Get me on this horse and quit stalling." They moved him again, flinching at his high-pitched cry, but kept going until his right leg was draped over the horse's flank, and Frank was able to climb up into the front of the saddle.

  Jebediah laid his hand on the side of Vic's arm and said, "You are one tough son of a bitch, Captain, you know that? All you boys are."

  Sweat stung Vic's eyes, and he blinked it away, looking up at the house. "Just in case I don't get the chance to tell you later, sir, I appreciate everything you did for me and my men."

  "We look out for our own," Jebediah said gently.

  "Make sure everyone stays inside, now. Don't forget what I said about what to do if we fall," Vic reminded him. He tapped Frank and said, "Let's go. We have some distance to cover."

  They rocketed forward, with Vic needing to wrap his arms around Frank's midsection to keep from being flung off the horse. Frank was too preoccupied with the multiple black dots descending through the sky, headed for the valley far below, to even comment. "What the hell are they?" Frank said, pointing up.

  "Escape pods," Vic said. "I count almost fifty of them." The pods were still high above them, their sides shimmering with flame as they dropped. "Their chutes are going to open soon. After that, we'll only have a few minutes at best," Vic said.

  Frank snapped the reins as they descended into the canyon, the horse's hooves dancing over loose rock that spilled over the sides, a reminder that with one false step, they would also be pitched off the edge, and it would be a short-lived resistance.

  At the top of the canyon, a large furry shape rose up, casting a shadow over them. Monster raised his right hand in salute as they rode past, and Vic shouted, "Give them hell!" as loud as he could, and the mantipor roared in response.

  They flew through the narrow canyon, ducking long branches that draped over the crags above them, with Frank carefully steering the horse away from the packages carefully hidden on either side of the path. They'd lined the middle distance with all of the karjarra packages and covered them with dirt and small rocks. Frank snapped the reins and pointed down at the karjarra, saying, "We accidentally step on one of those packages, and all three of us are going to spend this fight curled up in a ball, begging for more."

  Vic nodded, then tapped Frank on the shoulder and said, "Then don't step on them."

  Less than a quarter-mile ahead of them lay the opening. It was filled with sunlight, a wide-open coliseum formed by rock and dirt, with only a single road leading back up into the main settlement at the rear.

  Frank slowed the horse as they entered the opening, bringing it up aside the large wooden crate they'd hidden there,
covered by a dirty tarp and brush weeds. Frank leapt down from the horse and reached up, gently trying to swing Vic down from the saddle. Vic pushed his hands away and said, "Enough of that. Watch out!"

  "You have to go slow, or you'll tear yourself open," Frank said firmly.

  "I have to move fast, or the plan fails and we're all dead," Vic shot back. He cried out as he twisted to lower himself down, gripping the edges of the horse's saddle with all his might before making it far enough to let go and drop into the dirt with a thud.

  Frank moved immediately to help him, and Vic clung to his arm, pulling himself upwards. Frank quickly unscrewed a lid from one of the cantinas buried in the shade next to the crate, and passed it to Vic, who drank greedily. Some of the color returned to his face and he shook his head and said, "Quickly, you have to get back to Bob."

  Frank stared at him, "I can't leave you here. If they make it through the canyon, you'll be overrun."

  "Go!" Vic shouted at him.

  "I can't do it, you son of a bitch! I can't just leave you here to die. I can't string up your body or do any of the things you told us to do. I changed my mind," Frank said hoarsely. "I can't do it. I won't let them do it either."

  Vic limped over to the crate and tossed aside the coverings, gripping the lid with both of his hands and grunting as he pulled it off and tossed it aside. He grabbed one of the revolvers from within and passed it to Frank, saying, "Go ahead. Fire this weapon. You fire this weapon and I'll let you stay and fight."

  Frank snatched the gun from him and aimed it at the wall, lips pursed together as he tried to complete the simple task of raising his thumb and laying it across the gun's hammer. He inhaled sharply, watching his thumb dance in every direction, unable to get it to make contact with the warm metal for long enough to cock it backward.

  Vic laid his hand on his old friend's shoulder and said, "Frank, I need you with Bob. It's your job to lure those bastards in. Otherwise, none of this works, and we all die."

  Frank's eyes stung as Vic took the gun from him. Frank quickly wiped his eyes on his sleeve, as Vic stuffed the revolver into his waistband and said, "Anyway, I didn't come out here to die today, Lieutenant." He pressed his hand flat against his stomach and winced as he inhaled, then forced himself to smile. "I've never felt better in my life."

  The first escape pods landed, crashing into the canyon floor in a plume of dust, so hard they embedded themselves inches into the dirt. Their parachutes collapsed against their hulls, as if exasperated from their efforts to land the containers, and Bob Buehl held his position.

  He watched intently when the next group landed, even as the first group's doors slammed open to emerge. He could not see who or what came out of the pods, because by then, there were multiple parachutes flapping in the wind, and dozens more escape pods landing on top of them.

  Several landed on top of one another, shearing off the doors, crushing the emerging figure beneath. Bob Buehl waited, looking down from atop the canyon road's steep incline at the basin far below. Oren Adams' wagon had been upgraded for its task. A sharply- pointed shovelnose plow had been fixed to the front where the driver's box and front boot had once been. There was no need for them any longer. No horses would be pulling the wagon, and no driver would be steering it.

  Now, there were long metal spikes sticking out of the center of each wheel's hub. When the wheels began turning, the spikes would whir in dizzying circles mean to shred anything they came in contact with.

  Bob held his position when the things that had once been men, soldiers like himself, struggled out of the escape pods, hunched forward, knuckles hanging over their bent knees, backs sloped so that the deformity of their muscular upper haunches bunched up behind their necks. Even from high above the canyon, Bob could hear their frenzied screeches as they searched the canyon, desperate for something to bite into with their elongated fangs and shred with their jagged claws.

  When the last pod landed, and the man-things were still grouped tightly together enough to serve his purpose, when they had not spread out yet in search of human flesh, Bob climbed into the rear of his wagon and closed the door behind him, making sure it was locked. He wrapped his hand around the interior brake and took a deep breath, steeling his nerve enough to slam it forward.

  The wagon's wheels began turning, inch by inch, as if the weight of the thing made it too heavy move. But just as Bob considered opening the rear door to give himself a push, he felt the slope of the road curve downward, and gravity took hold. Bob was tossed backward, slammed by the weight of the two rifles at his side, and for a moment, he feared that he might shoot himself by accident as he was bounced and tossed around the interior.

  He sat up enough to brace himself against the roof as the wagon bounced high into the air, and for one sickening second, he thought he'd gone over the edge of the steep road. It crashed back down, shifting sideways and tilting the entire rear compartment up on one side. Bob slammed his body against the far wall, giving it just enough of a heave to keep the wagon upright, still travelling downward, and picking up speed.

  His teeth were rattling together so hard he feared he might break them, and he ripped a piece of cloth from his shirt sleeve and clenched it between them, gagging on his own spittle. Through the open ports on the wagon's sides, he could see the sides of the canyon growing tall over him, and then with a mighty slam, he landed on the floor and was still rocketing forward.

  Bob grabbed the nearest rifle and propped himself beneath one of the gun ports, getting ready. He could see the soldiers ahead of him, their snarls louder than the whirring blades at his wheels. Suddenly, a juicy, slopping noise came from the front end of his wagon as it burst through the front ranks of the men standing before him, sending a fine spray of red mist over either of its sides. Bob felt the wagon bounce as his wheels turned over the bodies of the soldiers it had plowed through, and its wooden wheels began to slow.

  The first wave of soldiers were cut down by the spinning blades sticking out from the wheels, but the next wave vaulted over their fallen comrade's bodies, scrambling for the pair of widened eyes hidden behind the port holes.

  Gnarled fingers stabbed at him through the slots on either side of him and from behind, and Bob raised his first rifle and lowered his face to the wooden stock, aiming carefully before pulling the trigger. The man-thing on the other side of the wagon flew backward, the top of his head split open from the center of his eyes to the back of his skull. It did not slow the others. Bob felt a sharp, stabbing pain as one of the things managed to slice him across the back with its claws, and he spun and fired, sending the bastard back into the wheel's spikes.

  Bob cocked and fired and cocked and fired, over and over, until the rifle ran dry, then he tossed it aside and picked up the second one. As he raised it, he saw four of the man-things racing toward him, their arms braced in front of their faces, and realized too late what they meant to do.

  The wagon flew backward, tipping over on its side. It was only stopped from going completely over by the extended spikes, but Bob's back was flat against the wall, and it was all he could do to roll out of the way before one of the things grabbed him.

  To his horror, he heard a deep thud against the wagon's wooden floor. A thud, and another thud, and the sound of bones breaking and something wet, but then another, louder thud, and the cracking of sturdy wood.

  The creatures were coming in through the one section of the wagon that had not been armored, tearing through the wooden planks with their fingers. One of the things screamed before striking, and its hand burst through the floor, covered in splinters and blood. Bob rolled out of the way into the farthest corner and raised his rifle, forcing himself to wait. The first thing that tore enough of a hole in the floor to look through, Bob would fire at. Not until then, he commanded himself. I'm going to save all my ammo until I can get good shots, and then I'm going to make every shot count for as long as I can. He was terrified of what the things would do to him once they dragged him out of the wagon,
but he waited. Watching as the intruder grabbed the cracked sides of the floor board it had punched through, and began to pull.

  "Hey, you ugly sons of bitches!" a voice rang out from across the canyon, echoing loud and true.

  The wagon stopped rocking, and the man-things looked up, eyes blazing at the horse emerging from the narrow pass, and the rider sitting atop it.

  Lieutenant Frank Kelly reared backward when he saw exactly how ugly the things attacking the wagon were. They snarled at him like dogs, and Frank's mouth contorted in revulsion.

  The pack of soldiers ran for him like hounds set loose on a wounded deer. The horse beneath Frank trembled in fright at the howls erupting from the man-things, and Frank yanked on the reins, spinning it back toward the pass as quickly as he could. "Come on!" he shouted, snapping the reins over and over, "Move!"

  The horse broke into an open gallop, racing through the narrow confines of the canyon walls so fast that Frank lowered his head against its neck, afraid it would be smashed to bits against a jutting rock. Behind him, he could hear the horde of creatures chasing after him, and Frank raised his head and cried out, "Now, Big Man!"

  High above the pass, Monster peered down at Frank's galloping horse and the soldiers racing after them. The pass was narrow enough so that only five of them could fit at a time, but the things did not run like men, and when one of them fell, the others swarmed over it.

  Monster turned to the row of spears stuck into the ground behind him. He yanked the first one free and held it away from the wind, sparking the lighter in his paw and holding it to the oil-soaked cord wrapped around the spears length. It caught flame instantly and Monster watched black smoke rise from it as he hoisted it into the air and hurled it downwards with all his might.