He got a look at the ceiling and it wasn’t good. It looked like the inside of a tent. There was a groaning from nearby and then a hoarse shriek. He tried to move his fingers and was rewarded with a lance of pain again, bad enough that he nearly passed out.
“Dr. Weaver?” the voice said, again.
“Ow,” was all he could get out.
“Are you in pain?”
“Owwwww!”
“I’ll get a doctor.”
He swiveled his one good eye around and saw that there was a line of beds, filled with casualties. It was a tent, a big one.
“Dr. Weaver?” a female voice said. “I’m going to give you some liquid Valium. We’re running low on morphine; we’ve got more casualties than we’re supposed to have for a field hospital this size. You’re in no danger. You have some serious burns from an electrical fire and a broken arm. Other than that, you’re in good shape compared to most of the rest of the injured. We’re going to be moving you, soon, to another hospital. Just rest as well as you can.”
“Uhhh,” Bill said and then God answered his prayers and made the pain go away.
“Hey, Doc, you’re not out of bed, yet?”
Weaver looked up from the mess of gruel that the hospital consider a nourishing meal to where Miller was being wheeled in the door by a candy striper. The chief had a big bandage over one eye, an arm and a leg in a cast and a very nonpermissible cigar in his teeth. He’d managed to find a set of BDUs, somewhere, though and he had a new set of rank pinned on his collar, a yellow bar with a black check in it that Bill recognized, now, as the insignia of a warrant officer.
“Like a bad penny, you keep showing up,” Bill said, grinning. He grinned a lot these days; the world hadn’t come to an end.
Things were still bad. The gates, and the track three bosons that generated them, were well and truly gone. But the Titcher/Dreen had established large bridgeheads before that happened. They were using their surviving forces and the bridgeheads to begin colonization, continuing to create monsters that were a tough battle to destroy. But, slowly, they were being pushed back. Where the bridgeheads were observable from the distance, it was apparent that the Dreen, as they were being called now, built special-purpose structures to produce their fighting forces, some for dog-demons, some for thorn-throwers, others for the mosquito-missiles. As that became obvious, artillery was brought to bear from long range, saturating the air defenses until the structures that provided the missiles and centipede tanks, which were the only things that stopped air assaults, were destroyed. After that it was a matter of killing the monsters and their structures faster than they could be produced. It was working, slowly.
In the meantime, the “real” world had continued though. Units had had to be redeployed from Iraq and the nascent democracy in that country was having a hard time with ongoing guerilla activity. Terrorists had exploded a truck bomb in New York, killing nearly fifty people. But that was probably going to be some post-9/11 high water mark; the Middle East had other problems.
Dreen pockets had broken out in several different, decidedly odd, places. They were all out of the way and most had not been noticed until they were well established and started spreading.
One was in the Bekaa Valley, in Lebanon, near a center for Hamas and Hezbollah recruitment and training. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Syrians who actually owned the territory, immediately blamed it upon the United States and sent out proclamations that they would reduce the incursion in short order. The proclamations had been going out, steadily, for a week. There was no indication that they had had any real success. Indeed, news reports filtered from the U.S. government said that satellite imagery indicated at least a twenty-five percent spread.
Another was just north of the holy city of Qom in Iran. It had apparently started at the head of a valley which housed an experimental farm run by the Iranian Ruling Council, the fundamentalist religious council that ruled upon shariah law in Iran and was the actual government behind the scenes. An “unnamed U.S. spokesperson” had pointed out that the farm was one of several sites in Iran suspected of running a clandestine biological weapons program. The Iranians hotly denied the accusation and stated that it was a plot of the Great Satan and the forces of the Revolutionary Guard would quickly contain and destroy the infestation. Like the infestation in the Bekaa Valley, it was still spreading.
So was the one just south of Mecca, this one conveniently near the coast at another “experimental farm.” The area was a Saudi military reservation and the Saudi National Guard had assaulted the infestation with Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. Survivors from the group stated that upon entering the fungus area it had attacked the tanks, choking their systems.
The Saudi government had not charged the U.S. with planting the Dreen infestation on holy ground, but the mullahs throughout the world were more than happy to blame it on the Great Satan.
Qom was the holiest city in the Shia version of Islam and Mecca was the holiest city in Islam, period. Both the Iranian Ruling Council and the Mullah of Mecca had pronounced jihad against the alien invaders and mujaheddin from the Philippines to Algeria, not to mention various western countries, were being flown in by the Saudis and the Iranians to try to fight the infestations. The bulk of their fighters would have probably come from the Bekaa Valley, but they were all extremely busy. Or being converted to more monsters.
The fungus and growth structure of the Dreen had been, at this point, carefully studied by the U.S. government. It was determined that the fungus spread via a small wormlike creature that had been specially modified to convert terrestrial biology to Dreen. As it did so, terraforming the soil, eating plant and animal material, the “fungus” spread behind it. The fungus was anything but, an entity that not only gathered energy from a chlorophyll analogue but had an extensive vascular network for moving materials from one place to another. In addition, it could sprout structures that reproduced the megafauna that did the work of the Dreen. The fungus, left alone with some functional materials it could “eat,” pure fertilizer would work, and sunlight, could spread and grow unchecked. It also was damned hard to keep contained if it had materials available, sprouting subgrowths that would attack any container it was placed in. It was considered a level four biological hazard. It was, however, responsive to burning, acid and certain powerful herbicides and did not grow well on soil that had not been preprepared for it by the worms.
One scientist had done an analysis and concluded that one human body could be converted into a dog-demon in two days. Or two humans in three days for a thorn-thrower, given the structures to make same.
Reports from the Bekaa Valley indicated that, the majority of their Katyusha rockets and a goodly part of their artillery rounds having been expended trying to break into the main areas, the Syrian, Hamas and Hezbollah forces were now attacking with rifles and flamethrowers and sustaining heavy casualties. The response by American military spokespeople was notably unsympathetic.
“You look good,” Miller said. “Hey, honey, can I talk with my friend alone for a minute?” the chief added to the candy-striper.
“Of course, Mr. Miller,” the girl said, smiling. “I’ll come back in about fifteen minutes, okay?”
“Works,” Miller replied. He gestured at the turned-down TV where the latest news from Mecca, via Al Jazeera, was showing. “Bit of a bastard, ey?”
“Well, I know you didn’t do it,” Bill said with a chuckle. “And I know I didn’t do it.”
“And I happen to know that we didn’t do it,” Miller said, shaking his head. “Give us some credit, okay? Besides, I checked with the Teams and they’d know if anyone did. They did it to themselves. Okay, maybe with some help from the Israelis.”