So It Begins (10 page)

  The ride to the surface was silent, the journey up-earth long. Anticipation poured off my men in waves. They were good soldiers: Abernathy, Barnes, Champ, Foster, Itgen, Marvin, Morris, Smith, and Testa.

  And me, Colin Rook.

  They were my soldiers; they were Rook’s Raiders.

  I hoped we’d all come back together.

  I knew we wouldn’t.

  Riding up-earth, I felt as if we’d always been fighting the Frek, as if the pre-invasion world had only ever existed in movies and dreams, and as if no time before my first day in bootcamp had been real. I couldn’t remember the day I decided to enlist, or even when the Frek invasion had begun.

  Like everyone else, though, I knew their first assault had come without warning.

  We hadn’t even known that the Frek, or any other alien life, existed until they attacked us.

  Even now, no one really understands why they invaded Earth.

  I lean toward the mistake theory: the Frek thought there were no intelligent species here, and by the time they figured out otherwise, it was too late to change course. If all Frek invasions are alike, then they’re pretty much impossible to stop once they’re underway. Frek females give birth to about 500 young at a time. Frek children pop out of the womb in little, curled-up bundles no bigger than soccer balls, but they grow to the size of lambs in about three days, and they’re more vicious than badgers. The first anyone knew we were under attack was when pregnant Frek mothers, already in labor, began dropping from the sky and popping out killing machines. They dropped about thirty per continent to start, and within days 15,000 hungry, newborn Frek bastards shocked the world. What’s worse is about thirty Frek out of every litter were female. Those things mature, mate, and reproduce in a matter of weeks. Soon as we caught on to that, we made hunting the brood-mothers a priority. It wasn’t enough.

  That’s when the scorched earth campaigns began.

  We started with full nukes.

  Freks burned to cinders in the blasts, but the radiation barely slowed the survivors. It did have the benefit of sterilizing them, which made them easier to fight without worrying about picking up some Frek microbe that would blind you or turn your organs to slush. So far the white-coat grunts have identified about thirteen separate bacterial strains the Frek brought to Earth, seven of which are deadly to humans. They’re working on cures and vaccines, but anything better than the crude, imperfect immunization shots they give us in bootcamp is a long way off. You catch a Frek death germ and get sick, you may as well throw yourself in front of a firegun for all the medics can help you. Thank God, the Frek bugs haven’t mutated to airborne or human-to-human transmission yet.

  Centcom switched to skybusters, which had about the same effect as nukes but without spreading as much fallout. The sterilization campaigns began in earnest then.

  They say Africa is clear of Freks now. Thing is, it’s also pretty much clear of humans. No one’s sure we really won that battle.

  The Frek control half of Asia and all of South America. Bombing runs along their perimeter 24/7 keep them in check.

  Australia has fared pretty well with about half the country still habitable and mostly Frek free.

  Europe and North America still hang in the balance.

  That’s where Rook’s Raiders and a million other grunts came in. We were trained in the western deserts where the Frek never landed and then shipped east and north where the Frek are the densest. Now it was time to go see what there was to kill.

  Fighting Frek isn’t easy.

  The children have skin like a beetle’s carapace, and they can launch razor-sharp quills from their upper legs. Shooting the bastards five or six times usually drops them. Grenades are better. The only thing that makes it manageable is they’re stupid and impulsive, and they tend to come running straight at you. They’re fast, though. If you let one through, there’s not much you can do but pray somebody’s got your back.

  The brood-mothers are worse.

  They’re about the size of personnel helicopters. Soon as they finish giving birth, they’re back on all ten feet fighting. They spit streams of the vilest soup imaginable. It’ll burn you bad. Guys who are allergic to it go anaphylactic and drop dead in seconds. The worst of the germs comes from the birther spit. You might survive being doused, but you’ll spend a couple of months in D and Q, shaved hairless and having layers of skin flash-burned off you, while robot medics prick you and pop tubes into all your available orifices three times a day.

  The mothers are uglier than the kids too.

  They lumber around like octopi with stilts rammed into their tentacles. Their heads are flat and stretched into squares, and they got five big, red eyes that never blink.

  I’ve never seen one in person, but they showed us plenty of vid records in bootcamp. Every grunt and officer gets a camera chip implanted in their skull beside their left eye, so every soldier is a cameraman. That’s created a bounty of raw battlefield footage, and the top brass use it liberally.

  That shit’ll give you nightmares.

  We made our rendezvous, and my first thought was someone at Centcom has a wicked sense of humor. That’s the only explanation I can muster for why they cloned Peter Lorre to lead the Special Forces team. It wasn’t only him, either. Although the other spooks hung back in the shadows, I’m sure I saw Karloff and Price in Captain’s bars, Rathbone a Major. We were inside a blasted-out warehouse, and it was dark and gloomy, and I had to choke back a laugh. The movies those guys made were the ones I liked best: the classic monster flicks. They were the only ones with a touch of style to them. They could be gruesome, violent, and morbid, but there were real stories there, romances a lot of the time, and none of that formulaic, jingoistic cheerleading that was in almost every war movie we saw. Those old fright flicks came closer to reminding me of what I was fighting for than anything else we watched. That’s because the heroes in those movies—and yeah, sometimes the monster was the hero, like in
Frankenstein
or
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
—the heroes were almost always noble.

  I could buy that in a monster movie.

  Not so much in the combat pics. In those, the hero died in the end way too often, and anyway, I’d seen fifty guys wash out of bootcamp for everything from cowardice to dementia to battlefield incontinence, and I knew soldiers weren’t always noble. That’s why it struck me as funny about Peter Lorre being cloned for Special Forces. He never played the hero in the horror shows. The thing about him was he was unnerving even if you didn’t recognize him. He had a tic, and his eyes looked rheumy enough to slide out of their sockets. Considering the Special Forces guys fought in the dark and had little contact with anyone but the enemy, the creepier they were, the better, I guess. Not that the Frek cared, but I guess it mattered to someone.

  With Lorre they even got the voice right.

  “Sergeant,” he said. “We have your valuable cargo, ready for transport to Camp Scott. Are you prepared to take possession?”

  “Ready, willing, and able,” I told him.

  “Excellent. Your papers?”

  I handed him our orders. He skimmed them as he led me to the back of the huge transport truck, and then he opened one of the rear doors. Inside was a canister about twelve feet in diameter and roughly twenty feet long. It was spattered with mud and other dried gunk, and it looked like a rusty, oversized oil drum. Sealed up tight and strapped down solid enough to stay put even if the truck rolled, it filled almost the entire cargo space. I’d never seen anything like it.

  I asked him what they had in there.

  “We have captured one of the enemy’s brood-mothers before labor and have trapped it in stasis in this tank. Frek bodies are quite pliable once they’re subdued.”

  I guess I made a face or didn’t speak for too long, because Captain Lorre’s expression got even more worried, and he pulled out a white handkerchief and wiped sweat from his brow.

  “Are you deaf, Sergeant?” he said. “I tell you we have captured one of the enemy birthers and have trapped it in this tank, yet you have nothing to say.”

  I’d heard him fine. No one had ever taken one of the Frek birthers alive. I thought we’d have heard the news.

  “It is secret, of course, which is why we must get the prisoner as quickly as possible inside Camp Scott. You and your men only have to drive this truck home, like good chauffeurs. Do not interfere with the canister. For God’s sake don’t try to open it, or there will be horrible consequences. Absolutely horrible.”

  I asked him if he’d be coming with us.

  He shook his head and wiped his brow again, and I saw why his unit had to pass the baton. Captain Lorre’s sleeve pulled back from the hem of his glove, uncovering about eight blood blisters on his wrist, a sign of Frek infection. The rest of his unit must have been contaminated, too. They’d probably caught the germ while subduing the birther. Word was when Special Forces picked up a Frek bug, they didn’t bother coming in for triage, they simply ran suicide missions to kill as many Frek as possible before they expired. I felt a little sad for the captain, but in the end he was only a clone. No doubt there were other Special Forces “monster units” running around out there. Centcom hated to waste a good clone matrix once they’d developed it.

  Captain Lorre handed me the keys to the truck and turned to rejoin his unit. I called him back before he disappeared into the shadows.

  “Hey,” I said. “They forget Lugosi?”

  The captain smiled. “Oh, no, they could never forget Lugosi, but I’m sad to have to tell you he didn’t make it. He’s in the canister, with the prisoner.”

  Morris drove. I rode shotgun.

  In back with the trophy were Abernathy, Champ, Marvin, and Testa. Barnes, Foster, and Smith rode the gun positions mounted behind the cab. Itgen sat between me and Morris and worked up a sweat navigating.

  We had maps and GPS and high-level training in dead reckoning. Only problem was all that was keyed to geography that no longer existed. A few days of skybusters had chewed up the landscape and spit it back out in a bold, new arrangement. Even when we followed the compass, we kept coming to roads turned into craters, bridges reduced to splinters, and buildings blasted across every inch of ground creating a litter of obstacles where the map showed clear paths. Camp Scott should’ve been a six-hour drive from our rendezvous with Special Forces, but we’d driven that long and covered only a quarter of the distance.

  Every so often we spied the dark specks of surveillance drones coasting past the horizon.

  At one point we passed a rabbit hole and thought we might stop there for help, but an off-target skybuster had cracked its lid and let the Frek in. We knew what we’d find down there. We moved on, fast.

  Another hour and we covered maybe fifteen more miles. We’d started in daylight. Now dusk was creeping into the horizon. I debated whether we should push on or stake a defensible position in the rubble. Neither option appealed to me. Being indoors at a secure location overnight was survival 101.

  While I was mulling that over, Foster popped off a dozen rounds into the shadows of a broken building, and everyone snapped alert with weapons ready.

  Something moved behind a pile of debris.

  Several other somethings followed it.

  About thirty Frek bastards skittered out from beneath the rocks and charged us. How the hell they survived the skybusters, I’ll never know, but I didn’t worry too much about having an opportunity to rectify that. I climbed onto the hood of the truck and opened fire.

  Barnes and Smith kicked in with the fireguns. The rest of the men started lobbing grenades from the rear of the vehicle. One of them went wild and ripped a grapefruit-sized hole in the truck’s armor. Everything turned fiery and frantic and sounded like it was happening far away once the explosions numbed my eardrums. Most of the Frek were dying, but the ones that made it through, instead of coming for us, they tried to claw their way through the side of the truck. They must have sensed the birther was in there. The truck’s armor slowed them down enough to make them easy pickings, and it wasn’t long before the battle ended. Not a casualty among us, but the Frek were all dead.