Something like a giant mosquito was attached to his neck and more were flying through the air. Sanson shot at one and missed, then Glasser realized they were in an untenable situation. This was a place for Raid and shotguns, not M-4s.
“Back, back!” he shouted, backing into the gate and out.
The chief grabbed Howse and threw him over his back then bolted out the door as the rest of the team filled the room with lead. Howse, however, was the only one hit as the mosquitoes stopped well away from the gate.
Howse was on the ground with a local paramedic bent over him when Glasser, who may have been last in but was also last out, came through the gate. The thing that looked like a mosquito on the far side was, in the decent light of a normal sky, anything but. It had long wings shot through with veins and was colored light green. But the body was nothing but a blocky box and there was no apparent head, thorax or legs. It was attached to Howse’s neck, though, and pulsed oddly in the light.
“What’s it doing?” Sanson asked, stepping back.
There were tendrils extending out of its body and, as they watched, they burrowed into the environment suit and, presumably, into Howse. Howse’s face was distended, his tongue sticking out, and he appeared to be dead.
“Okay, we have a real biological hazard, here,” Weaver said. “Get him in a body bag. He needs to be in a level four biocontainment room, stat.”
“He needs a hospital,” Glasser objected.
“He looks pretty dead to me,” Weaver said. “And I’d rather that we not contaminate the whole world with whatever that is. We need a way to stop them, for that matter, if they come through the gate.”
“They stopped short,” Miller said, walking over to the ambulance and coming back with a body bag. “Sanson, help me get him zipped.”
“What the hell do we do?” Glasser said, shaking his head. “If those ‘demons’ come back, we can shoot them. But those things… they’re too small. Too quick. Maybe with shotguns.”
“Big cans of bug-spray,” Woodard said as the chief and the seaman slid the late SEAL into a body bag and hastily zipped it over the flier. “One of those sprayer trucks.”
“We don’t know that bug spray will kill them,” Weaver pointed out. “But we can catch them if they come through. We need to get some of those light-weight nets for catching birds over this gate. Those things don’t, apparently, have any way to cut. What do they call them? Gossamer nets or something.”
“Where?” Glasser asked.
“University of Florida will probably be closest,” Weaver said, shrugging. “In the meantime…”
“Down!” Sanson yelled, triggering his M-4 into the first of the things through the gate.
Weaver understood why the, apparently late, Mrs. Edderbrook had called them demons. The thing stood about a meter and a half at the shoulder and was quadripedal. It had small eyes that were overshadowed by heavy bone ridges and more bone ridges graced its chest and back. The head, which was about the size of a dog’s, ended in a beak like a bird of prey. The color was overall green with a mottling of an ugly purple. It had talons on front and rear legs. It had spikes sticking out of its shoulders and chest and a collar of them around its short neck. And it was fast.
The first of the things through the gate caught Woodard by the leg and threw him to the ground, worrying at the leg like a terrier, the beak crunching effortlessly through flesh with a brittle crack as it severed the bone. But there was more than one; they seemed to be pouring through the gate in a limitless stream.
Weaver took one look and decided that this was clearly not a place for a physicist. He turned tail and headed for the building line of entrenchments, hoping like hell that none of whatever those things were caught him and that he wouldn’t get killed in the crossfire. Already the national guardsmen had opened fire and he heard bullets fly by as he sprinted for the lines. He also heard screams behind him and hoped like hell that the SEALs had had the sense to beat feet.
“Sanson, Miller,” Glasser shouted, dropping to one knee and opening fire on the beast that had Woodard by the leg. “On me!”
The three of them formed a triangle, firing at the beasts as they piled through the gate. They would have been overrun in a second if it hadn’t been for the National Guard, though. The guardsmen had kept all of their machine guns, both the platoon level MG-240s and Squad Automatic Weapons (SAWs) pointed at the gate and manned. So when the first of the beasts came through all they had to do was flick them off safe and open fire.
The result was a madhouse as six MG-240s and fifteen SAWs filled the gateway with lead. The beasts were heavily armored but enough rounds pouring into them killed them and they started to mound up in the gate, green ichor splashing in a wide circle, as the SEAL team backed away. As soon as they were clear of the immediate threat, and it was apparent that the infantry was piling up the enemy, the three turned their back on the gate and ran for the entrenchments.
Weaver was waving from a hole behind the main defenses and they made a beeline for him, passing between a shallow hasty fighting position where one of the national guardsman lay, firing careful bursts from an M-16A2 and crying, and a slightly deeper position where a SAW gunner was laying down three- and five-round bursts between what sounded like half-mad cackles.
Glasser, Miller and Sanson dove into the largish hole head-first, then the three SEALs turned around and began adding their own fire to the din.
Sanson drew a bead on one of the things and fired carefully, watching the placement of his shot. When they had first been retreating it had been a matter of laying down fire as fast as possible and he wasn’t sure but he thought most of it was bouncing of the damned things. Sure enough, when he shot one in the head it didn’t even seem to notice it. The things had overlapping scaly plates as well as the bone underneath. More shots in its side seemed to be effective, though, punching through the scales in a flash of green ichor. He wasn’t sure whether it would have been a killing shot because even as he fired one of the MG-240s hit it and it went down. The ambulance that had supplied the body bag for Howse was in the way of fire from one side of the semicircle of national guardsmen and the things were trying to use it for cover. But the other side of the positions covered the dead ground and they were filling up the space with bodies of the things.
However, they were clearly spreading out from the gate, despite the fire.
“We need more firepower,” Glasser shouted through his mask.
Even as he said it mortar rounds started dropping in the clearing around the gate. The mortars, however, didn’t kill the things unless they dropped right on them and the shrapnel from the mortars didn’t seem to affect them at all.
Weaver heard a truck engine revving behind them and turned around to see one of the support trucks, a big five ton, pull up behind the entrenchments. There was a big machine gun in a circular mount on the top and it started hammering away, adding its fire to that of the company.
“Ma Deuce,” Glasser said, sighting carefully and firing a short burst. “Fifty caliber. And it’s doing a job, too.”
The big machine gun’s bullets weren’t stopped by the armor of the monsters. Head, chest, side, legs, the massive rounds punched right through. The gunner knew what he was doing, too, working his way from the outside in, pushing back the tidal wave of monsters until they were hemmed in around the gate again. But then he stopped firing.
“Has to change barrels,” Glasser said when he saw Weaver flinch. “You want a weapon?”