Ogden softly called out orders. Dew rose to a crouch and quickly moved forward, ignoring his popping knees. The snow crunched and dry branches snapped underfoot. He was painfully aware of how quiet the Airborne soldiers were in comparison, almost silent despite the noisy footing. Once upon a time, Dew would have moved through the woods without a sound-getting old was a bitch-and-a-half.
He stopped after advancing thirty yards. The cover of night was gone. The construct’s glow lit up the two oaks as bright as day. Long shadows radiated away into the forest. The very ground itself seemed to vibrate with an ominous rhythm, a rapidly pulsing heartbeat of some monstrous evil. Dew felt a sense of trepidation, of wrongness, like he’d never known before.
This shit’s going south in a damn hurry.
“Give me some normal binoculars,” Dew snapped. Someone handed him a pair that were, of course, army-green. He stared into the depths of the archway, where the light was brighter than anywhere else, so bright it hurt his eyes and he had to squint to see anything at all.
“Ogden, ETA on the Apaches?”
“Sixty seconds.”
A blast of anxiety ripped through Dew’s body. He’d never felt fear like this, never felt anything like this. Even in the midst of the hand-to-hand fighting that had wiped out his platoon back in ’Nam, even when he’d been shot, he hadn’t been this scared; he couldn’t say why.
The construct grew still brighter. One of the soldiers suddenly dropped his M4 rifle and ran, screaming, back into the forest. Several of the others slowly stepped backward, fear wrapped up in their young faces.
“Hold your positions!” Ogden shouted. “Next man to run gets shot in the back! Now get down!”
The bounce of long shadows betrayed the motion of the hatchlings sprinting toward the platoon. Their strange, pyramid bodies slid through the woods. Like swarming insects, they’d detected a threat and were rushing out to meet it, to protect the hive.
“Ogden, we’ve got company!”
“Squads Four and Five, hold this position!” Ogden shouted. “All other squads move forward to support! Fire at will!” Gunfire erupted before he finished the last sentence.
Dew didn’t move. The construct’s glow didn’t fade, but it changed, sliding from the blinding white to a deep emerald-green glow. Suddenly Dew realized he was looking not just into the arch, but beyond it-the field of green reached far off into the distance.
Stunned, he glanced up from the binoculars. The construct hadn’t moved; neither had the woods behind it. He again peered through the binoculars. The field of green was inside the arch but stretched back for what must have been miles. But that was impossible, simply impossible.
M4 carbines and M249 machine guns roared all around him, but Dew remained steadfast. A man’s scream filled the night as one of the hatchlings made it past the hail of bullets. Dew didn’t flinch, or even notice, because he saw something in that field of green.
He saw movement.
Not the movement of a single hatchling, but movement so massive that it was the field of green. His eyes picked out individual creatures a fraction of a second at a time, like seeing a single ant in the midst of a swarming, angry hill. It was an ocean of creatures, reaching for the archway, pouring forward from some impossible distance.
“There must be millions of them,” Dew muttered, the horror creeping across his skin like a coat of millipedes.
A gun erupted only a few feet from his ear, shattering his trancelike focus. A hatchling rolled almost to his feet, flopping and twitching. Ogden had shot it dead just as it leaped to attack. The surrounding gunfire slackened but was replaced by more screams-the hatchlings swarmed in.
“We’re being overrun,” Ogden said calmly, his voice raised only enough to be heard over the shrieks and battle cries of his own men.
“Ogden, call a full strike now!” Dew roared. “Tell the Apaches to fire everything they’ve got- everything they’ve got! ”
Ogden grabbed the handset from the radioman. Dew drew his. 45. A four-foot-high hatchling ripped through a patch of underbrush, its black eyes fixed with fury, its tentacles whipping forward as it closed for the attack.
Dew fired five times at point-blank range. The black, pyramid-shaped body shredded like soft plastic, spilling great gouts of viscous purple liquid on the snowy ground.
Sounds came from all directions: gunfire, pounding feet, branches breaking, howls of pain, desperate pleas for help, and the horrific clicking and chittering noises of the hatchlings. He turned to see a hatchling closing in on a fallen and bleeding soldier. Dew double-tapped, firing twice, dropping the hatchling. As Dew ejected his empty magazine and loaded another, the wounded soldier drew his knife and threw himself on the hatchling, driving the blade in again and again until purple streamers arced across the white snow.
Eyes scanning for the next target, Dew backed up to Ogden, trying to protect him long enough to call in the air strike.
“Leader Six to Pigeon One, Leader Six to Pigeon One,” Ogden said into the handset. “Full strike, repeat, full strike on the main target. Hit it with everything you’ve got.”
As if on cue, the gunfire suddenly stopped. Dew looked for an enemy and found none standing. A few hatchlings twitched on the ground, but their struggles were soon ended by shots from the angry soldiers. Men lay bleeding and moaning on the forest floor; the skirmish was over.
Dew raised the binoculars just as he heard the rapid-fire roar of the Apaches launching their missiles. The sea of green had reached the archway. For one brief millisecond, Dew saw something he’d never forget, never be able to block out, for as long as he lived.
It was at least eight feet tall, an L-shaped, segmented red body covered in a strange green iridescent shell that must have been armor. Six thick, multijointed legs on the ground and four strong arms clutching what looked like a weapon. What might have been its head was covered with a helmet made from the same iridescent green material, a helmet that had no holes for eyes or mouth.
And there were millions right behind it, waiting to pour out.
It was the only look he got. The first creature stepped out of the arch-the impossible became a reality as the foot set down on the forest floor. Like watching in slow motion, Dew saw the clawed foot step on a twig.
The twig snapped.
Then the sky opened up.
Sixteen missiles smacked home in the span of three seconds. The roar of a dying god, a fireball so huge and violent it knocked small trees right out of the ground, roots and all. The concussion wave picked Dew up and threw him like a straw doll. Soldiers fell all around him. He hit the frozen ground hard but ignored the pain and rolled to his knees.
The fireball rose into the sky, lighting up the forest with the glow of a late-evening sun. A chunk of arch rose majestically into the air, spinning wildly, one end trailing fire and sparks. Two of the arches were completely gone, one stood tall, and one was shattered but half standing, sticking out of the ground like a cracked and broken rib.
A fusillade of Apache chain-gun fire ripped through the site, each thirty-millimeter bullet kicking up a small geyser of mud. The broken arch, the one that looked like a rib, fell to the ground and shattered into a dozen pieces.
Dew stared desperately through the binoculars. Were they gone? Had the missiles hit in time? He cursed the smoke as he hunted for movement, the movement of a million creatures spreading out through the trees, attacking.
The whistling roar of another missile barrage filled the air. Dew looked up in time to see eight more glowing smoke trails streaking toward the archway like striking ethereal snakes. The missiles slammed home, sending up another roaring fireball. Dew threw himself facedown on the ground as clods of dirt, sticks, and maybe even green strands sailed overhead with lethal speed.
And then it was over.