“Copy that,” I said. “So…basically these Serbians dickheads pissed off our visitors from the great beyond.”
“Works out to something like that. We saw a couple of those critters ambush the Serbs. They do not play nice.”
“I saw the leavings. Does all this make them friendlies?”
“Enemy of my enemy is my friend,” he suggested.
“All well and good if we’re talking bipedal mammals, Top, but how’s that going to apply here?”
“I’ll be god-damned if I know, Cap’n,” he said, and that’s when I caught it. Soldiers tend to use trash talk or banter a lot. Sometimes we forget why. It’s not because we actually make light of the dangers and horrors of combat, it’s not that we feel we’re invincible killers, or that we’re the life-takers and heart breakers of legend. No, the jokes, the bullshit, the light-hearted chatter is all about pushing back the fear. The genuine fear that any rational person feels when they’re about to go into battle, or when they’ve survived one fight and they wonder how much of their supply of luck they’ve already squandered as the next fight approaches. I know Top is tough. None tougher, and I’ve met the best of the best. He’s an experienced soldier who has been in more firefights than most people have had hot dinners. He’s walked with me through the valley of the shadow of death so often his footprints are indelibly cut into the ground. He’s helped save the world. The actual world.
Right now, though, hearing his voice over the radio as killers and monsters, he was right there at the edge of it. Of his courage, of his ability to process terror, at the limits of his potential for handling stress. He was on that ragged edge where control is by no means a ‘given’, and circumstance and overwhelming odds make failure a rather likely option.
It hurt me to hear it. To know it.
It hurt just as much to feel it in myself. To know that even the pattern of my thoughts — the almost blasé way in which I’ve been accepting and processing the impossible data from today’s events — are the product of my mind trying to make light of it. To do otherwise would mean dealing with the reality of it.
Now, crouched down here at the end of the hunt, the bravado — inside and out — was burning off. Two of the three members of my team were injured. We had guns and ammunition, but we were badly outnumbered.
And there were the spiders.
I joked about alien spiders before, not I had to face that. Not just giant spiders. I’ve dealt with too many mutation and genetically-altered freaks in this job to really be brain-fried about that part.
Alien, though.
Alien.
A couple of years ago my team skated on the edge of a case involving a kind of Cold War that had grown up around technology that may — or may not — have been scavenged from crashed UFOs. I’d met two people who claimed to have some alien DNA mixed with their own. I’d seen a craft that I’m pretty sure did not come from around here — and by here I mean our planet and maybe our solar system.
So, even with all that you’d think I’d be prepared for what we had here.
You’d think that, but you’d be wrong.
Seriously, say the phrase ‘alien space spiders’ aloud and tell me if that’s ever going to fit comfortably in your head. Ever.
I could feel the change in my body as the absolute truth of it burned off the last of my ‘this can’t be real so I’ll just cruise with it’ self-deception. It started in my fingertips. They went cold right around the time they started to shake.
You know why?
Because in every single fight I’ve ever been in, it’s been good guys versus bad guys. Human good guys — me and my crew — versus human bad guys. Those bad guys, no matter how many or how bad, were still human. They were a known quantity. I could look at them and know how much force was needed to crack the hyoid bone, how many pounds per square inch it would take to shatter an elbow or knee, how exactly to rupture a kidney or spleen with a certain punch. All of that was knowledge already in my head. Even when outnumbered I was on safe ground.
But… aliens?
Spiders notwithstanding.
Aliens?
In my earbud Top said, “Cap’n—?”
“Still here,” I said. “Working it through.”
“Work fast,” he advised, “‘Cause something is happening.”
He was right.
Something was happening.
And it all happened real damn fast.
-9-
There was a flash.
A series of them.
Suddenly the whole forest went from a collection of shadows in purple and gray to a uniform white that hit the eyes like a punch. I cried out and reeled back, the rifle falling from my hands. The light was so bright that closing my eyes, squeezing the lids shut didn’t do it. I jammed my fists into the sockets.
I think there was a sound, too. Not an explosion. Something else. It was impossible to describe. I felt the noise as much as heard it. There was a sensation like a heavy vibration. Low and powerful, but it was like something inside my head was vibrating rather than something outside that I was hearing. There’s nothing in my experience that will make sense of it. The feeling — sound, sensation — was like how I imagine a microwave oven would sound. That kind of invisible, relentless, and powerful wave of force. My ears rang the way they would if I was standing next to a giant bell, but there was no real noise.
The sound and the vibration were terrible. Thank God they only lasted for a few seconds.
When it passed, whenever it was shut off, I collapsed onto the ground as completely as if I’d been dropped from a five-story roof. I felt breathless, smashed flat.
Then I heard something else. A familiar chittering sound.
Right behind me.
I rolled over. Tried to roll over. Reached clumsily for the AK47, and as I turned I saw something bulky come rushing at me.
Two somethings.
They were big and gray and spotted with yellow and blue dots. But they weren’t the same as the spiders I’d already seen. These had some kind of mechanic implants on their bulbous heads. Like a kind of hood, or maybe goggles. Hard to tell. It covered most of the creature’s many eyes. And they came at me really damn fast. The first one slammed into me and knocked me flat again. It leapt onto my chest and bent low toward my throat, snapping at me with jaws that snapped like pincers. Clear drool hung from the gaping mouth and splashed like acid on my skin.
I cried out in horror and disgust and punched the thing in the side with an overhand right. The spider staggered off of me, but then it immediately recovered and jumped back. This time its front legs jabbed at me, striking pressure points in both shoulders and leaning into them. My arms went dead. Just like that. The creature glared down at me, chittering in that high-pitched voice of theirs. The real eyes were dark and intense; the machine eyes burned with red fire.
I tried to twist my hips to buck it off; tried to kick. Tried hoist my dead arms to bash it off, but it countered every move by striking another pressure point with another of its powerful, articulated legs. It had more legs than I did, and somehow it knew enough about human anatomy to shut me down.
Then the second spider came scuttling over. It was smaller and its carapace was crisscrossed with scars that gave it a look of great age. And, somehow, of great power. Like it had earned those scars. Like they told its story. It had the same metal helmet covering half of its monstrous face, but even this was dented and dinged as if from hard use. As the creature advanced to climb atop me, the younger spider retreated in clear deference. The spider studied me for long seconds, but what it saw and what it thought were beyond me. I had no way to interpret the dark lights that burned in its eyes.