Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (16 page)

“Anyone sleeping, let ’em,” Smalls said. “Then we’ll all do some sleeping in shifts. First the good news. Best we can figure, we’ve killed at least eighty of those sonsabitches—no offense ladies—an’ maybe more. Thank god for Cap’s swords-an-shields. We had fifty workin it by last act’s end, but he’s got the gear for a lot more teams and we’re gonna field ’em next act. Gunners keep working the air and those that come divin at you, but when they get in close enough we’re gonna decapitate ’em.

“Remember, when those APPs nail that wood, lean into them to snag ’em and tilt that shield hard, twist that stinger to lodge it in the shield. And you machete folk get in there quick and swinging hard. Cap, we got a lot to thank you for.”

“We’re makin more in the mill right now,” Cap said. “Listen—hear that?” And they could—a faint shriek from two blocks away: Cap’s machetes bleeding streams of sparks from the grinding wheels.

Ricky Dawes had just come in, looking glum. He raised a voice gravelly with fatigue. “I think it’s the ones’ve already stung someone we’re mostly draggin down. We had two break away from us, but the others we got just after they’d nailed someone. Like the stinging had weakened ’em maybe.”

“Fuckin high price to pay for a kill,” someone growled.

“Yeah,” sighed Ricky. He threw a hesitant look at the people around him. “Can I get up there a minute?”

When he had, he cleared his throat and looked at us all. From under his shaggy brows, his eyes seemed a tired old coyote’s, a friendly enough dog, but one who had some bad news for his pack-mates.

“Well first, I don’t want you all to think I’m—what’s that word for someone that thinks he’s gonna be, like, defeated?”

“Defeatist,” several voices offered.

“Right. I don’t want you to think I’m a defetus, but I think we have to by-god decide right now that whoever of us gets through this fight tonight, has to get busy, get ATVs together, and get every woman and girl out of this town a hundred miles gone before sunrise—no! No! No offense! I just mean…” Ricky was shouting his last few lines because of all the women shouting at him: “Fuck You! You run! C’mere an’ I’ll whip your ass for you!”

“Just please listen!” he shouted. “And I mean all the young men too, I mean all the ones under eighteen should go, because we want Sunrise to survive, and I don’t think anyone stays in this shoot is gonna. I mean, survive. I’m really sorry, but our dead count’s lookin way off. We been like, tallying, an’ there’s like twelve, maybe fifteen people we can’t account for, that it’s lookin like gel musta got ’em. I mean just the loose gel they melt down to when you chop ’em up! And we got as many more too crippled to fight. And tonight in the dark’s gonna be the worst fight yet, an that’ll just be half the battle. And … we’ll fight the second day on five hours’ sleep.”

Ricky’s voice got quieter toward the end, because the whole big room had done the same.

Smalls said, “Thanks Ricky. We all had to look at it. When it’s time, we’ll look at it again. Please all do some sleeping if you can.”

XIX

A BARBECUE

Curtis trudged back
toward the church, to check on Jool. The street was half cleared of bodies and debris … but here came a congested stretch where the patrol vehicles had to go to one lane around a big flatbed. The truck had a tension scale on the tail of its bed. Near were gathered a number of the headless APPs that had not gone to gel, and Dr. Winters seemed to be weighing them.

Curtis paused to watch him as he directed two men to hoist an APP between them. He set the scale’s load hook around the crooked tubular segment joining the wasp’s thorax and abdomen. The springs creaked and Winters said something to Trish, which she keyed into her com.

“Hey Doc,” said Curtis. “You got any idea why these ones didn’t melt?”

“Not likely to be a glitch in the programming. Must be some purpose to it.”

“We think the Studio wanted the visuals—the alien dead lying with our dead, monsters’ bodies mingled with our own, et cetera.”

“Whatever the reason, Curtis, we’re finding them very … informative. Is there a sizeable crowd in the theater?”

“Yes. Mostly sleeping.”

“They’ll have to wake up. We all need to discuss something. We’ll be there in a minute.”

Curtis went on to the church. Found Jool and Gillian awake and flanking Momma Grace with their arms around her shoulders. Momma Grace had fallen asleep between them, the tears on her face not quite dried, and the young women spoke gently to one another across her sleeping form, sensing that their voices comforted her grieving dreams. Women and youngsters were asleep all around them. He slipped in beside her. “You should both clock some z’s”—keeping his voice low—“there’s an hour and a half still left for it.”

“Lemme talk to my girlfriend, Curtis,” Jool murmured. “She saved my life.”

Gillian smiled, “We’ve been savin each other’s life all day long.”

“Hush, I’ve been knowin you a while girl, but I’m feelin you now.”

Curtis kissed Jool, and touched Gillian’s shoulder. “Then I’m feelin you too, Indian girl. I’m just gonna close my eyes a minute, gotta get back to the Majestic. The Doc has something to tell everyone.…”

And a moment later, Jool smiled sadly, feeling his head sag to her shoulder. Asleep. She stroked his cheek and whispered, “Sleep hon. Heal your heart.”

*   *   *

Dr. Winters and
Trish came into the Majestic muttering to each other, and mounted the dais still talking in an undertone. Gentle wake-ups were murmured through the room, and not a few awakened with a groan, or a yelp. Oddly—perhaps merely forgetfully—Trish had a gas tank and hose hung on her shoulder. Dr. Winters greeted his audience with the easy address of a thirty-year teacher.

“Friends, we’ve been weighing the wasps, and trying to answer a question their bodies have raised for us. Let’s start with the fact that their weight’s not uniform. They’re all identical—they don’t vary in size, or in any structural way at all, but the weights of our specimens vary within a range of thirty-five kilos. This is a fairly remarkable range because it makes individuals at the low end thirty percent lighter than those at the upper end.”

“It’s the poison’s weight,” said Laoni Meeks, one of the lean, solemn women who ran sheep on the lower slopes. “They pump it in three, four seconds at a hit.”

“The same thought occurred to us, Laoni. But let’s save that, because I want to consider just their overall mass for a moment. We’ve examined a random sampling of ten individuals. This group contained four top-weight individuals. Of the other six, two weighed about twenty kilos less, and the rest, nearly forty—some thirty percent of their maximum mass. This is scant data, of course, but Trish and I are convinced of its meaning. We think the differences relate to the number of times our samples struck prey. The heaviest, we think, were beheaded before they struck anyone. When they do strike, we believe the wasps are injecting significant quanta of their mass into their victims.”

He paused with a solemn air, as if expecting a general reaction. Complete silence greeted his revelation.

“My friends,” Winters said, showing just a touch of exasperation, “surely you’ve noted that these are ichneumonid wasps. They are modeled—except for their large heads and eyes—on Megarhyssa.” And, after another silence, “Oh, why did so few of you come to my Biology One!? Never mind. Never mind. Ichneumonids oviposit their prey. Their young devour the hosts from inside.”

“Their young…” said Smalls in the silence, his voice rusty from his absorption in these words.

“We can only speculate,” Winters said, sounding gentler now, “but it stands to reason. We’ve destroyed probably eighty wasps. Body parts they lose while alive, so to speak, revert to base-mode gel, and enough of this is loose in town to pose a serious threat. A score of people have lost hands or feet, and we’re pretty sure more than a dozen have been entirely ingested. Some sizeable masses of gel have coalesced and will be actively hunting. Still, raw gel just won’t provide the large-scale homicide they want for their cameras.

“Can the studio sustain losses like this, and still have a movie tomorrow? I’m sorry to say, I don’t think they’re worried about that. I’m very much afraid that our fallen friends may be the … source of new enemies tomorrow, and when tonight’s fight is over, we’ll have to surround their bodies with guns and gas.”

He had to raise his voice at the end, because everybody was talking now, their voices quickly rising to a roar.

“I’m sorry!” the doctor shouted, and had to shout it again and again. And when at last he had silence—except for the sound of people sobbing here and there, he said once more, “I’m sorry. Our dead were dear to us, are dear to us. What’s been done to us was not done by men, but by monsters, human monsters worse than these they’ve sent against us. But as I believe that a second wave of killers is growing in those dear ones we’ve lost, we must be ready to incinerate them the moment they emerge.”

“The gas doesn’t work,” someone cried. “It shrinks ’em and they shed the ash!”

Surprising many in that room, Trish piped up. “Not necessarily! We wanna try something.” She blinked, as if startled by her own boldness, little professional skulker and outsider that she was. “We want four or five people to help us out.”

Cap and Chops stood up. “Atcher service,” said Cap. Winters was going to speak, but Trish spoke first—finding her stage presence, it seemed. “We’ve got over an hour. We wanna try … like an experiment. Everyone that can should just keep resting up.”

Ricky Dawes and Laoni joined them, and the six trooped outside.

*   *   *

They crossed Glacier,
all looking behind them at one moment or other up to the eastern peaks. Was that a faint hint of silver light dawning? Trish led them to the concrete steps down to West Glacier, a narrower, residential street downslope. Over her shoulder she said, “We had people tracking it near the end of the battle because it was so big. They said just before shutdown it went into that house there, where the door was standing open.”

It was a high-porched, modestly ornamented little two-story. As they climbed the steps, a touching domestic smell wafted out of it, of lavender and dried rosemary. They paused at the door, pulling it all the way open, beaming their lights inside. The little atrium and half the parlor it flanked showed stark, webbed with shadows. On the parlor’s flowered rug sat a grayish, oblate spheroid, murkily luminous within. Its bulk squatted almost waist-high to Trish, who hesitated a few steps from it. “They didn’t say it was this big … Ohmygod! There’s something behind it!”

It was the hindquarters of a dog—a big shepherd, by the legs and tail. The stump of its stomach ended in a smooth curve which matched the arc of the gel-globe’s surface, where it lay contracted in sleep-mode mere inches away.

The rest of the house was empty, and when they had regathered from ascertaining this, Trish shot Dr. Winters a look before speaking, and he gave her a nod. “We realized, it dawned on us, that the gel we burned in our lab had, like, consumed a big guy’s head and both his hands. It had, like, a shitload of organic material mixed in with it. So … what if that was what made it flammable?”

“And if it was,” said Dr. Winters, “and tomorrow’s attackers are gestating in the bodies of our friends, then tomorrow’s new wasps will be vulnerable to fire. Now my friends, for safety’s sake, use the hooks, not your hands. Let’s see if we can roll it.”

What ensued wasn’t rolling—it was more like a taffy-pull. The hooks didn’t work. They just pulled out tentacles of the gel that shed the points and snapped back into the globe.

They unhinged a small closet door and started working it like a big spatula, forcing the door’s edge hard between globe and carpet, heaving up on it like a lever, tipping its mass off balance, and forcing the dense flabby fabric to flop torpidly forward a foot or two, where its sphere re-cohered.

Their sweat drizzled down and their backs ached. When they’d gotten it into the front hall, Cap panted, “’Nother door!”

Hammering out the pins of a bedroom door, Cap set it long-edge down along one wall: one bank of a channel to guide it out on the porch.

“Now as you lever it up,” he grunted, crouching behind the second door and bracing it, “angle it in here so we can squeeze it along between this and the wall.”

The gel, once levered into this channel, kept moving in a V-shaped front, seeking open floor to spread out and re-globe. When it poured out onto the porch, it did just this.

But here it needed only one more levering forward onto the porch steps. Because once the gel was on them, it poured all the way down, rejecting each successive step in its rush for flat ground and sphericity. These it found, and re-formed by the curb.

“Let’s find out!” snarled Cap, reaching for Trish’s gas rig—which she had to surrender quickly to avoid a bruised shoulder—and leaping down the whole porch-flight in one bound.

They all rushed down after him, and found that the gel, drenched with gas, wore an eerie loveliness. Under its hydrocarbon sheen, lights woke within it—gleams and wisps and nebulae constellated its interior, as if it were a piece of night sky. It looked like the egg of a universe, a
necro
verse of malignant design, and it made more than a few of them think anew that their world had been stolen, and was now in the hands of aliens.

Cap said, “Fire in the hole,” and they all stepped back. He thumbnailed a Diamond match alight and flicked it on the sphere.

Then, wearing a crest of whipping flame, the globe seemed a fierce dark eye beneath a blazing brow, while plagues and a whole pox of evils seethed within its gaze. But was it
scathed
in there? Did it just
wear
this fire till shedding it?

“… Buckling there! The sphere’s sagging.…”

“Feed it gas! Stand away!”

The gel began to crease in ridges, sag in hollows. “Contraction! Definite!” said Cap—they all stood smiling, watching it, the lumpish and angular subsidence of that baleful star-hive, at last into a coal-black tar, a fuming asteroid half its former mass, jutting in crazy peaks and spiky insect parts.