“For you, Corporal. It was not mine to begin with,” the man said.
“Ain’t that some shit,” Pierce said. “Armed Germans in a Kraut truck just handing us weapons.”
“He’s not such a bad guy,” a Lieutenant said. The man had been huddled between the German and a tanker. “He and his men helped us escape certain death.”
“Guess I’ve seen it all today, Lieutenant,” Pierce said, then leaned his back and closed his eyes.
Franklin Grillo turned his gaze back on the city of Bastogne. They’d been tasked with holding the area against a German counteroffensive, and they’d failed miserably. He’d been in Europe for less than twenty days. He hadn’t made a single jump, and his platoon was scattered to the four winds.
The city was in its death throes. Buildings had been collapsed, and a steady stream of soldiers and civilians poured out onto the streets in panic. Everywhere he looked, people were running. They tossed aside their belongings, and hitched rides on anything that had wheels. Men in military clothes double-timed it, or crowded into jeeps.
It wouldn’t be enough.
Behind them marched an army of the damned.
ALSO BY TIMOTHY W. LONG
It was a quiet Seattle morning until the skies filled with fire: without warning, a catastrophic meteor shower caused buildings to crumble and the lights to go out. Out of the rubble, five ordinary people arose to find themselves manifesting undreamed-of abilities.
Will they be enough to do what the military cannot — stop a massive alien invasion before the entire West Coast is destroyed?
IMPACT EARTH SAMPLE
Yuri Novitskiy awoke to pounding.
He tried to roll over, but remembered he was stuck in a cocoon that was Velcroed to a wall. Or, as Sheppard liked to call it, being mummified for eight hours. One of the hardest parts about living in zero-g was that it didn’t matter which direction you faced. There was no gravity to tell you which way was up and which way was down.
The familiar machine shop smell of the space station came back to him: a combination of oil, recycled air, and ionization particles. Then there were the constant noises of moving air and machinery humming away as the space station kept its occupants alive.
His thin door threatened to buckle as someone beat on it.
“Go away, zombie. I just closed my eyes,” he muttered, and tried to bury his face in the confines of his sleeping bag.
“Yuri. We need you, man, there’s an emergency.”
“Tell Oleg to take care of it. I am sleeping.”
The pounding ceased, and the door pushed open. Light flooded into his tiny space, illuminating his laptop, the floating paperback of a Tolstoy classic, and a package that had contained a Snickers—the greatest invention in the known world, as far as Yuri was concerned.
He looked at his watch, which was set to UTC, and shook his head. Why couldn’t the Americans take care of their own problem? It was always Yuri, we need this. Yuri, we need that. Yuri, you’re the only one who knows this system.
“Sheppard, what is so important that you must have Russia’s greatest mind awoken at…” He looked at his watch again. “It’s not even eleven. I’ve had less than an hour of sleep.”
“I’d tell you, bud, but you wouldn’t believe me. Trust me, Yuri, if this weren’t an emergency I’d be sound asleep too. You just gotta see this shit.” Sheppard’s lined face was split by a cocky smile.
“If this is another spore breakthrough, I am going to be very angry. You know what happened last time I got angry?”
“It’s not like that, Yuri. I promise. No prank this time.”
The prank war had begun with Sheppard appearing naked—with the exception of a well-placed cowboy hat over his genitals—riding an imaginary bull through the science pod.
Yuri had come back by playing a female voice that described how to perform a breast inspection for cancer into Sheppard’s radio while the man was on a space walk.
Ever the over-achiever, Sheppard had retaliated by breaking into a call Yuri made to his family back on earth, and had piped in a recording of how to do a proper testicle inspection.
There were the usual pranks after that, like switching the liquid salt with liquid pepper. One thing that wasn’t allowed in space was little particles of spice.
Yuri had ended the escalating war by crafting a little alien head out of PVC and a chunk of freeze-dried steak that hadn’t properly sealed before the trip to the space station. A few minutes with a knife had given it shape.
With liberal use of ketchup, he’d scared Sheppard half to death with his Alien movie imitation. The only downside had been cleaning up the little red drops that had drifted in zero gravity.
Yuri sighed and unzipped his sleeping bag. He caught a glimpse of his unshaven face and the wild, curly hair that rose about his head like a Jewish afro.
He could shave it like Sheppard’s, but he liked how it brought character to the station. Six people living 330 km above the earth on a vessel that orbited the earth every ninety minutes needed to have fun. He considered his clown hair fun, because it did not match his very Slavic and downturned features.
“We have to get to Cupola to see it.”
“It’s shuttered for the night.”
“Not now, it ain’t,” Sheppard said. “Bring a camera. The boys back home might take issue, so snap ’em while you can.”
“Such a rebel,” Yuri said, but he grabbed his compact anyway, just in case this was actually something interesting.
They zipped through habitation, hit a node, and then slid up toward Cupola. The other astronauts would all be asleep, except for Ryu. He enjoyed his all-night research, but really he just didn’t need as much sleep as the others. As a fisherman’s son, he hadn’t slept more than six hours a night as a kid. Now, nearly thirty years later, he was functional on four, but he could be downright wired on five.
Yuri nearly bashed his head on another laptop, and pushed the computer back on its rotating joint so it wouldn’t catch one of the other astronauts.
“I was working on that,” Ryu said from the corner of the space. He had a white blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and had blended right in with one of the spacesuits they’d had to store temporarily while he pulled out and went over a computer system.
Suzie had reported some anomalies on a spacewalk to secure a loose solar panel two days ago, and Yuri had spent two days going over the systems before realizing it was simply a miscalculation he’d made. Instead of explaining the mix-up, he’d informed the rest of the crew that he had fixed some code.
“Sorry. I almost hit it.”
“My apologies,” Ryu said. “You go to see it?”
“It?” Yuri asked.
“He doesn’t know,” Sheppard interjected.
“Better to sleep. Bad news can wait.”
“What does that mean?” Yuri asked.
“He’s just being melodramatic. Come on,” said Sheppard, tugging at Yuri’s shirt.