After a long time of waiting, watching, and listening, I trusted the landscape enough to begin moving again. It took me twenty minutes to find another of Bunny’s footprints.
Armed now, I began hunting in earnest.
-8-
I raced the edge of a clearing and looked upon a scene from hell itself.
It was a war zone.
Three-sided and totally bizarre.
On the far left side of the clearing, squatting down behind a tumble of boulders, were eleven Serbians. Eleven. All of them heavily armed. All of them yelling and firing.
On the opposite side of the clearing were two of my guys. Bunny knelt beside the trunk of a massive tree, his Benelli combat shotgun smoking and roaring in his big hands. A few feet away from him, Top had a rough splint on his left leg made from tree branches and canvas strapping from the helicopter. His pants leg was dark with blood and his brown face was pale and grainy, but he held his Sig Sauer in rock-steady hands.
In many ways that was what I was expecting to see. Two groups of combatants engaged in some kind of a stand-up fight, with me as the X-factor that hopefully gave my side the winning edge.
Hope springs eternal.
Life, on the other hand, sucks.
Between the two sides, standing in the center of a hail of bullets, was something so very wrong.
It was a metal ball.
A big, broken metal ball.
Well, it looked like a ball. It was round, at least. Forty feet across, dull silver, with a double row of colored lights, most of which were smashed and dark. The remaining lights flickered with a sluggish green glow. A hundred feet behind it was the total ruin of a second one. That one had split open and burned; the shell was coated with black ash. Both balls lay at the end of long trenches and there were mounds of dirt pushed up in front of them. From the angle and the depth of the trenches, it looks like they’d come in fast and hot from a long way up.
Between the two balls were several humped forms. Maybe they had been spiders, or something spiderlike, but the force of that double impact had torn them apart and flung burning pieces across the ground.
Then I caught movement beyond the first of the balls. A form moved from the lee of the big craft and scuttled toward a small boulder.
The Serbians immediate shifted their barrage from trying to kill my men to trying to destroy this thing. The shape darted back to cover and a loud, high-pitched chittering sound trailed behind it.
Speech? Or the fearful cry of a creature in peril. Absolutely impossible to say.
All of this happened in a second, but my mind replayed it in slow motion because a lot had happened in that second. I ducked down into shadows to process it.
The thing that had come lumbering out was a spider. Okay. That just happened. It was maybe eighty pounds, gray-green with bright blue and yellow spots.
I recognized those spots.
A giant spider.
I had to give that a moment. Even though I’d been expecting something like a giant spider, let’s face it — you never really expect to see a giant spider. It’s like checking in your closet or under your bed and seeing a real boogeyman. You’ve been afraid of it all this time but you don’t actually think you’ll ever see it. Then bang!
So, yeah, okay. Giant spider.
Giant fucking spider.
By a big silver ball that might be some kind of landing craft.
Or, if the world was even more insane than I thought it was, a spacecraft.
I had to ask myself if I was ready to accept the reality of a giant fucking spider from outer space. Not the easiest question to ask.
And it’s a real bitch to answer.
Every molecule of your body, every neuron in your mind wants to say, “No, bitch. Get real.” But my eyes had just seen it. My team and a bunch of Serbians shooters were clearly seeing it, too. Reacting to it. As much as I might have wanted to, I couldn’t dismiss that as being a product of my own warped mind. This was happening to all of us. It was happening.
Giant alien spiders.
This entire chain of logic and acceptance took maybe a full second.
Then my mind shifted gears to analyze the scene the way a professional soldier should. The way a cop should. I’m both, so it was my job to make sense of this based on evidence and assessment.
There were two ships. One was clearly destroyed, the crew dead. The second was damaged, though I couldn’t tell how badly. Some of the lights were still on, the hull looked intact.
Survivors?
At least one.
I thought about the extent of the web network up in the trees, and the bodies I’d found along the game trail. Could one of these creatures do all that?
My gut said no.
That’s when I took a closer look at the boulder the spider had been trying to reach.
It was covered with soot and partly hidden by the shadows of a small pine tree.
As I studied it, the boulder moved.
Slowly, weakly.
It wasn’t a boulder, of course. As it shifted I could see yellow and blue dots. And blood. Dark red and as thick as tree sap.
A spider. Wounded, maybe dying. Trapped in the no man’s land between the two shooting positions.
I hunkered down behind a thick tree trunk. So far no one had spotted me, which was good. The Serbs were closer to me than my own guys, but that could be a good thing.
I tapped my earbud and very quietly said, “Cowboy to Sergeant Rock.”
There was static.
There was a burst of noise that sounded like a marbles bouncing around in a steel drum.
And then…
“…Rock to Cowboy. Repeat Sergeant Rock to Cowboy.”
“This is Cowboy. I’m on your eight o’clock, fifty yards back.” I could see Top turn his head to stare past the Serbs. I moved my head two inches out from behind the tree and back again. Just enough for him to spot me. Not fast enough to spook the Serbs.
“Damn glad to hear your voice, Cap’n,” said Top.
“Damn glad to be heard. Status report?”
“Doing moderately poor. Got a busted leg. Farm Boy stood a little too close to some shrapnel. We got the bleeding stopped, but we ain’t going to be running marathons.”
“Hoped for better news,” I told him.
“Yeah, well life’s all blowjobs and puppies, ain’t it?” said Top. “You got a plan?”
“Working on it,” I said. “Want to tell me what in the wide blue fuck is going on?”
“Don’t know much,” said Top. “Pretty sure one of those round ships clipped our bird. Took us both down. Farm Boy got me out, but the crew…”
He didn’t need to say. Didn’t want to say it, and he knew I didn’t need to hear it.
“Hostiles converged and we lost the package. We’ve been looking for you and playing tag with them. Trying to recover the package. And then our friends joined in. Been a moderately interesting picnic in the woods.”
“Copy that.”
“What have you got on our ‘friends’?”
“Big and ugly, but they don’t like the Serbs.”
“Why not?”
“Call it a failure to bond,” said Top. “Soon as the hostiles saw them they opened fire. Cut a couple of ‘em down. And Bunny thinks that it was a Serbian RPG that took both of their birds down. Rocket hit them while trying to hit us, and that was like cracking pool balls. Serbs hit them, they hit each other, and one of them hit us. Now the Spiders from Mars are pissed off and looking for some payback.”
I almost laughed. Top wasn’t one for pop culture references, but he was old enough to remember Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie’s best album.