Armageddon?? (26 page)

Inside
the fortified house, McElroy looked over the sandbags that blocked the doors
and windows to see the baldricks rapidly closing in on the forward defense
line. They were over the inner ring road, less than 200 yards away, running
into an area of ploughed sand where a new city block had been planned. Those
plans had been abandoned and would probably never be revived now that half the
city’s population had laid down and died as demanded by The Message and the
rest were refugees being sheltered further east. But the blocks either side of
the cleared area had been built and then they’d been fortified.

Human
infantry would have seen the deadly danger of that open ground and avoided it.
To the baldricks, it was an alley into the city and forty or more piled into
it. They’d been the first group through the wire and minefields, the first to
cross the open ground and get close to the city, the city that was defenseless.
To their astonishment, they could see the buildings in front of them, the
humans hadn’t built walls or moats to keep attackers out. Just the threads, the
exploding bars and their horrible magic fire-lances.

McElroy
gave a last check, the baldricks were in a three-cornered ambush with infantry
squads on both flanks and another in front of them. Worse, from the enemy’s
point of view, McElroy had dismounted the Browning .50 caliber from their
Humvee and had it on its tripod, firing through a narrow slit, its
green-and-white tipped bullets waiting to bite. Fine, the baldricks were in a
trap, time to spring it.

“Open
fire. Let them have it!”

Chapter
Nineteen

Defense
Perimeter Charlie, Hit, Western Iraq.

“Just
how many of these bastards are there?” McElroy was distinctly aggrieved.
Despite the fight they were putting up, he and the rest of his squad were being
pushed steadily back by the sheer weight of numbers that were being thrown
against them. They’d bled the attackers badly on Perimeter Alfa, the baldricks
seemed to have no idea of fire and maneuver, they’d just walked straight into
the machine gun fire. Only the waves behind the first group had simply climbed
over their dead and kept on coming.

“I
heard over a million.” Private Gerry Links repeated the rumor with grim relish.
“And it looks like most of them are here.”

“If
you mean right in front of us, right now, I’d say you’re just about right.
There’s more of them than we’ve got bullets.” And that, McElroy thought, was
the pure, unvarnished truth. Oh, the .50s were cutting the baldricks down all
right and the snipers were having a field day but there weren’t enough of them
and they were being swamped by the numbers coming through. More than just the
numbers, the bastards were so damned difficult to kill. The truth was that the
M16s just weren’t cutting it. McElroy had put a whole 30-round magazine into
one baldrick and the damned thing had still torn Jim ‘Cookie’ Fields apart
before it had gone down. Explosives were doing most of the work, grenades from
the M19 automatic launchers and the M203s. That and the Claymores, human or
baldrick, the spray of fragments from a Claymore shredded them nicely.

“Here
they come.” There was a crescendo of firing from the block to their left, a mad
minute as Baldwin’s squad poured fire into the baldrick assault teams before
leaving via the back of their building. That would leave McElroy with an
exposed flank and he’d have to fall back as well soon. To his front, he saw
black figures suddenly detach from the building in front and run out across the
street. He took a careful bead on the leader and fired as fast as he could
squeeze the trigger, watching shot after shot slam into the baldrick’s chest.
It was staggering but still coming forward, McElroy felt he would have better
luck if he spat at it. Off to his left, the squad machine gun snarled out a
burst and the baldrick McElroy had wounded went down. There was a crash that
shook dust from the walls and wrecked ceiling of the block, the last of the
unit’s claymores had gone off.

The
front of the building caved in, the baldricks were a lot stronger than humans
and the flimsy construction of Iraqi walls wasn’t even close to being strong
enough to hold them out. McElroy had lost some of his people first when the
walls the baldricks pushed down had trapped the men behind them but they’d
learned that lesson. Now they were in hastily-prepared positions at the rear of
the room, firing up and out at the baldricks as they loomed over the wrecked
structure. Baldricks weren’t actually that much taller than humans, McElroy
guessed that they averaged between seven and eight feet tall but they seemed to
be much bigger – especially when they were coming straight at you all teeth and
claws.

He
had a fresh magazine in his rifle, that was the good news. The bad news was
that it was his last one, he’d run through his basic ammunition load in just a
few minutes. He saw the green spurts as the bullets tore into the chest of the
leading baldrick but, as McElroy had expected, the damned thing just kept
coming. “Everybody out!”

He
heard the rest of his unit scramble out the hole they’d knocked in the back
wall of their block. McElroy paused just for a second, tossing a hand grenade
at one of the baldricks. The black monster caught it and looked curiously at
the small metal egg. The sheer incongruity of the sight caused McElroy to delay
for a second and that killed him. The baldrick he’d just shot slashed at him
with his claws, ripping through his body armor and tearing his chest open.
McElroy screamed as the baldricks fell on him, tearing him apart and stuffing
meat from his body into their mouths. Then the grenade went off and he, along
with the baldrick who had been holding it, died.

Gerry
Links heard the screams and explosion and knew that he was now in charge of
what was left of the squad. The building they had been defending backed on to
another with a narrow alley down the side. That lead into the divided highway
that ran through the center of Hit and, hopefully too the open ground the other
side. He turned and hosed out fire from his M16 then he and his men dropped
flat as an automatic grenade launcher thumped out a burst from the buildings
opposite.

“Down
the alley fast, the grenadier will keep them back.” They were being pushed
back, certainly, but they were bleeding the baldricks at every step. The time
to fight it out, room to room would come later. And that, Links thought, would
be a bloody day. Links fired another quick burst and saw a baldrick flinch. The
M16s might not be killing them but they could hurt. Off to his left, he heard
screams, human screams, was it the grenadier who’d held on to give his squad
cover? Links didn’t know and didn’t have time to think about it. He and his men
emerged from the semi-shadow of the alley and saw the most welcome sight of
their lives. A Bradley was sitting on the road, its turret trained on the alley
they had just come from. They could guess what was coming and scattered to
either side. There was a rasping burst from the chain gun and this time the
screams were baldrick. M16s may be ineffective but 25mm APHE was not.

“In
the back fast.” The Bradley commander snapped the order out. Links and his men
piled into the back and the ramp closed behind them. They were safe at last,
behind armor.

“Where
we going?”

“Defense
Perimeter Delta. The other side of the clearing. We’re holding there. No more
falling back.”

“Just
how the hell are we supposed to do that? These 16’s ain’t worth shit against a
baldrick.”

“You’ll
get sacks of grenades and AT-4s issued when we get back to your position. And
M72s. Once we’re in Delta, we’ll do it Stalingrad style. Room to room.

Headquarters,
Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA

“Do
you believe her?”

“If
I’m in the same room as her, probably.”

Randi
chuckled. There had been some discrete experiments going on. Put a subject in
the same room as Lugasharmanaska, measure their initial reaction to the
succubus and then watch as that changed. Their prejudice started to soften
within five minutes and by 30 minutes at most, they were friendly. “What do you
think? Mind control?”

“Can’t
be. We know roughly why their mind control works, they have the ability to
entangle pathways in our brains using a bio-generated electrical field as a
carrier wave. Your work with Julie and kitten shows we can do the same only we
can’t generate the bio-electric field as a carrier. We also know that
electrically conductive headgear blocks out the signal. Humiliating that isn’t
it. For years people who were being persecuted by demons tried to warn us and
tell us how to block the signals and we laughed at them. Ridiculed them, then
locked them up and doped them to the eyeballs. The tinfoil beanie became a
symbol of cranks and nut-cases – and all along they were right. Anyway, we’ve
all been scrupulous about wearing our tinfoil beanies yet Lugasharmanaska gets
the same reactions every time. Must be something else. We’ll keep trying until
we get there.”

“Nicely
switched away from the subject Robert. Now, do you believe her?”

Robert
O’Shea thought for a second. “No. That stuff about breeding with humans can’t
be true. We’re different species and different species can’t breed together,
that’s a basic definition. The question is why is she lying? And if she is, why
don’t we just hand her over to Doctor Surlethe and let him get some real
information from her.”

“She
might not be lying Robert. Just because she isn’t telling us the truth doesn’t
mean that she’s lying. She may honestly believe that what she is telling us is
true. It may be true, its just that we don’t understand what she is saying.”
Randi paused. “I’ve had that with people who honestly believed they had psychic
abilities. They were so convinced they were telling the truth that they just
couldn’t believe there were other explanations. Parents were the worst. They
got the idea their child was ‘special’ in some way, and which parents don’t
believe that, and couldn’t accept that there were rational reasons why the kids
were getting the results they were. We had one little girl whose parents
honestly believed she had X-ray vision, even when we filmed her moving her head
as she read a book ‘blindfolded’. Once we had sealed off her normal vision, her
‘ability’ stopped dead. And don’t get me started on dowsers.

“Look,
I’m a conjuror, not a scientist but I’ll say this. Luga’s given us something to
work with. It may be true, it may not be, but its something we can test. We
have a theory from her, we can test that theory against reality and come up
with the disconnects. Then we can learn by explaining those disconnects. And
the first disconnect is how everybody feels warm and fuzzy towards
Lugasharmanaska when she is, quite literally, a demon from hell.”

Randi
stopped and knocked on a door. There was a mumbled ‘Come-in’ from inside.

“Norman,
how are you settling in? And how do your cats like the Pentagon?”

“They’re
getting overfed already. And I didn’t know the Secretary of State likes cats.”

“That’s
a well-kept Washington secret. Did all your stuff get here safely?”

“Sure
did, I’m getting it set up now. Any chance of meeting Lugasharmanaska?”

“Not
at the moment, you can watch her but we’re trying to keep a limit on who
actually sees her. She seems to have an uncanny effect on people around her.”

“I
don’t see why; I’ve seen her pictures. She looks like something out of a
nightmare. But then given the habits of the Succubi, I suppose she should look
gross.”

“What
do you mean Norman?”

“Succubi
are supposed to mate with humans to collect male sperm. Then mate with their
male equivalents, the Incubi and transfer that sperm to them. Incubi then mate
with human females and impregnate them with that sperm. I guess that’s about as
close to a dictionary definition of yukkiness as we’re ever going to get.”

Randi
turned to O’Shea who was standing in the door with his mouth hanging open.
“Well, it is a different dimension from ours, Robert. But that might explain
how the Nephilim Lugasharmanaska was talking about could arise. They’re not
hybrid human-demons, they’re corrupted humans somehow. Score one for the
Succubus.”

“I’d
rather not. The thought of waking up next to that thing is just about the most
horrible thought I can imagine.” O’Shea paused for a second. “Except waking up
next to my ex-wife I guess. Thank’s Norman, those were mental pictures I could
have done without. My next week’s sleep is likely to be permanently ruined.”

“I
aim to please. Doctor Randi…”

“It’s
James, Norman. And I’ve never been any sort of Doctor. You want to be formal,
you could call me The Amazing Randi if you like, but James will do just fine.”
Randi gave Baines a gentle grandfatherly smile.

“James,
where are we going from here?”

“Lugasharmanaska
gave us some clues on how to open a portal to hell. I’m going to get my people
together and we’re going to try it. If it works, score two for the Succubus, if
it doesn’t we’ll learn from finding out why. By the way, spread the word,
Doctor Surlethe is on his way to Baghdad. The Army is collecting corpses of
baldricks for him but the Air Force won’t fly them over here. Dead baldricks
decompose pretty fast and the smell is dreadful. Even through a body bag so the
Air Force boys won’t have their nice clean transports fouled up by them. So, if
dead baldricks won’t come to Surlethe, Surlethe will have to go to the dead
baldricks.”