So It Begins Page 6

  “Shit!” I cursed and tried to worm my way out from under. I had to get back into this fight. Suddenly two of the bars right over me were pulled back and I saw Hastings there, crouching down, pushing the bars aside. Tennet, the reporter, stood gawping behind him, his handheld camera shifting back and forth from the battle to me. He hadn’t lifted a frigging hand to help Hastings dig me out.

  “Sarge!” Hasting yelled. “You all right?”

  “Help me up,” I said. He grabbed my arm and pulled me out from under the pile, and I staggered as more of the pipes clanged and rolled down around me. There was a flash and a bang and suddenly Hastings was down, his faceplate smashed by a hard-shell flare, and as I watched in total horror the flare exploded inside his suit. Our flexsuits are designed to be fireproof. It had saved our lives a hundred times…but the fire is supposed to be on the outside. The flare burst inside his suit and within a second the suit puffed out as the fire ignited the oxygen inside and roasted Hastings alive. He screamed like I’d never heard a person scream before, and the expanding gasses ballooned his suit for a moment before he fell out of sight. There wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it.

  A separate fire ignited inside of me. Pure white-hot rage!

  Tennet caught the whole thing on camera and for a moment our eyes met. His face was white with shock but his eyes were alight. Adrenaline can do that. Even at the worst of times it can make you feel totally alive.

  My rifle was gone, lost under all the debris, so I pulled my sidearm.

  The room was a melee. The gunrunners badly outnumbered us and two of my guys were down. Dead or hurt, I couldn’t tell. The rest had taken up shooting positions behind pieces of machinery, and they’d littered the deck with bodies. But the numbers were bad. The gunrunners had a variety of weapons—flares, hatchets, wrenches, hand-welders. No guns, which was kind of weird. They worked in teams, two men holding up a big piece of plate steel and moving it forward like a shield while others crowded behind it, throwing stuff, popping flares over the barricades behind which my guys hid. We had the better weapons, but they sure as hell had the numbers. And I could see more men pouring into the room from the far end.

  I tapped my comm-link and called for Zulu team, but the unit was dead. Smashed along with most of my helmet.

  I pushed Tennet behind me and took up a shooting posture, legs wide and braced, weapon in a two-hand grip with my arms locked in a reinforced triangle. I fired careful shots and dropped seven men with six shots, and for a moment it stalled the rush of the gunrunners. I was at a right angle to their advance, which created a nice cross-fire situation. If I conserved my ammo we might pull this out of the crapper.

  Then something occurred to me and it jolted me so hard that I took my finger off the trigger.

  “Christ! These aren’t gunrunners,” I said aloud. I turned to Tennet. “Does your comm-link work?”

  He lowered his camera and tapped his throat mic. “No . . . it’s malfunctioning.”

  “Fuck. We have to get word to the fleet. This is a cluster-fuck. These aren’t gunrunners. Look at ’em. They’re machinists, factory workers. That’s why they called me a pirate. They think we’re the bad guys. Shit.”

  Tennet picked up a length of steel pipe and held it defensively, then abruptly pointed past me. “Sergeant! Behind you!”

  I whirled around. There was nothing. I heard a voice behind me say, “I’m sorry.”

  It was Tennet, and it was an odd thing to say.

  It was even odder when he slammed the pipe into my head.

  I could hear the bones crack in my head. I felt myself fall. The taste of blood in my mouth was salty sweet. Sparks burst from the wiring in the machines and fireworks ignited in my vision. I fell in a pirouette, spinning with surreal slowness away from the point of impact. As I turned I could see the gunrunners renewing their advance on my remaining men. I could hear the chatter of weapon’s fire from the other end of the room. Was it Zulu team? Had they broken through? Or was it the gunrunners with Zulu’s weapons?

  As I hit the deck, I wondered why the gunrunners didn’t have their own guns. It seemed strange. Almost funny. Gunrunners without guns.

  And why had they called us ‘pirates’? Even if my brain wasn’t scrambled those pieces wouldn’t fit. I sprawled on the ground, trying to sort it out. Trying to think. I felt blood in the back of my nose. I tasted it in my mouth.

  I wanted to cough, but I couldn’t.

  A shadow passed above me. Raising my eyes took incredible effort. I couldn’t manage it. But the shadow moved and came around to bend over me.

  Tennet.

  His eyes were still wide and excited . . . but he was smiling. Not an adrenaline grin. I’ve seen those. This was different. Almost sad. A little mean. A little something else, but I couldn’t put a word to it. My head hurt so much. Thinking was hard. He dropped the pipe.

  He bent closer. The noise around us was thunderous but it also seemed distant, muffled. My left eye suddenly went blind.

  Tennet was speaking. But not to me. His camera was pointed past me.

  “ . . . as the shootout rages on, the brave men of Jigsaw team are clearly over-matched by the determined resistance of the gunrunners.”

  Firefight. That’s the right word, but though my mouth moves I can’t get the word off my tongue.

  He clicked off the camera and looked down at me.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  I shaped the words ‘for what’?

  “Ratings, Sergeant. This is sweeps week. This story will get me back in the big chair. I’ll be an anchor again before your bodies are cold.”

  “The . . . tip-off . . . ” I managed.

  He nodded. “Good PR for everyone. Your bosses will leverage this for increased funding. The militia will get more money for security. And I get an anchor’s chair. Everyone’s a winner.”

  I was sinking into the big black. I could feel myself moving away from the moment, sliding out of who I was. “You mother . . . fucker . . .” I gasped with what little voice I had.

  “Hey,” he said, “you told me at least twenty times that you never get to pull a trigger, that good soldiering doesn’t require heroes. That’s a sad epitaph for a career Free-Ops agent.” He bent even closer. “I just made you a hero, Sergeant. I just made you a star! And your people have guaranteed me that anyone who falls today will be given full honors.”

  His words tore chunks out of me.

  I wanted to grab him by the neck and tear his head off. I wanted to stuff his camera down his throat. I wanted to destroy the hard drive and all its images of my men fighting and dying.

  But I didn’t have anything left.

  “They . . . knew?”

  He grinned. “Knew? Jesus, Sergeant, don’t you get it yet? This is their gig. I’m just another hump on the payroll. The government needs good press, too, and by God you and your team put on one hell of a show. You just made a lot of people happy, Sergeant.”

  So, with the gunfire like thunder around me, and the screams of good men dying on both sides, I closed my eyes. I knew that he’d turn his camera back on, that he’d film my last breaths. That he’d use my death—and the deaths of my men—to get exactly what he wanted.

  But what the fuck. That’s show business.

  Shit.

  WAR MOVIES

  James Chambers

  We watched movies underground while the surface burned.

  Down our rabbit holes, we couldn’t hear the bombs hit, but we felt the earth shake with their impact while we sat in the dark and watched moving pictures flicker in the dark. We knew what kind of hell was coming down over our heads: one full of heat, shrapnel, and death, worse than any atrocity long-dead, special effects wizards had left for us on film. When enough skybusters exploded at once, they set the air on fire. We wondered what we would find left of our home and of the Frek when we deployed up-earth, whenever that might be.

  Some of the guys worried that our twelve brutal weeks in bootcamp and three more
in psychprep would go to waste without one of us ever seeing so much as a skirmish.

  Other guys hoped for that.

  I knew better. We were weapons, and the Army didn’t make weapons it didn’t intend to use.

  The moment the movies started I knew we’d see action before long. All they showed us were war movies and monster movies—the blockbusters, the classics, the cult favorites, and even a few hits from the last summer before the Frek dropped down and started us fighting for our lives.

  The most gruesome movies ran two or three times a week. During the day we bled out our frustrations in the gyms and training rooms, and at night we stoked them again with images of violence and alienness, of combat and heroism, of strangeness, mystery, and the bloody struggle for survival. The picture shows were part of a slow burn, lit to keep our rage simmering. They reinforced the narrative we’d been taught in bootcamp. They showed us again and again that only country and fellowship mattered and that aliens like the Frek could never be anything other than slavering, man-eating, evil beasts, hell-bent on raping our planet and enslaving our species if we didn’t stop them.

  We got the message loud and clear.

  One night a PFC from Kansas joked about why, if they were so hot for the “sky-fi stuff,” they never showed E.T. Without missing a beat, the guy next to him described in detail how he would shove a grenade down E.T.’s throat and “blow his fucking heartlight the fuck home and fuck needing to use the phone.” Everyone laughed so hard they stopped the movie.

  The strangest part of it is when you see some of these guys from on-screen walking around in officer’s dress. Seeing them on television, like when General Wayne and General McQueen address the nation, is one thing, but in person it’s unsettling. Colonel Connery is CO for our rabbit hole, and he looks exactly like the real deal, circa 1968, except you know what’s knocking around his head has nothing to do with anything from back then, and everything to do with death and killing and keeping our morale high. They clone them so well, I bet even their wives and girlfriends, if they were still alive, wouldn’t know the difference. It gets the guys’ attention, sure enough. No one’s mind ever wanders when the Colonel speaks in his powerful, Scottish accent, and whenever they run one of his old movies, a handful of guys always hit him up for autographs, ask him how it was shooting the love scenes.

  He only smirks and nods as if he knows.

  It’s a hell of psyche-out.

  No bombing for two days.

  Then our orders came through: surface clean-up for most of the men, but not for my platoon. We pulled special duty. We were to rendezvous with a Special Forces unit that had collected what our orders described as a “valuable artifact,” secure it from them, and bring it to Camp Scott, on the double-quick, of course.

  Leaving our rabbit hole, however, was a process.

  First, advance teams surfaced and reported back on up-earth conditions. Then everyone got booster shots against possible contagion from Frek remains, took anti-rad pills, and got equipped with live ammo and full-integrity body armor to replace what we’d damaged in training.

  Centcom had shipped us in and tucked us away only days ahead of the campaign to sterilize the Eastern seaboard. We’d been down-earth for two months, like cicadas waiting to hatch from the ground when the weather turned hot, and we were eager to go. Even the guys who’d been dreading the day they’d see action looked relieved to finally be doing something.

  Colonel Connery made the rounds while we suited up.

  Captain Willis and Captain Smith followed him.

  They helped with our gear. They steadied our nerves and tried to keep us from thinking too much about the blasted wasteland that waited on the surface.

  I snapped the last of my armor in place, checked my ammunition, and waited for my platoon to finish suiting up. I was their sergeant. I tried not to think about what that meant. I’d had weeks to ruminate on it. Now it was time to act.

  Colonel Connery reviewed our orders with me and said he was grateful to have a man like me in his division. I wondered how much of that came from what they’d programmed into his brain on the clone farm, or if he’d thought up any of it on his own. I guess it didn’t matter one way or the other. His pep talk was protocol. When he was done he slapped me on the back, said he’d keep a good cigar waiting for me, and then walked off into the crowd of soldiers.

  By then my platoon had gathered at the elevator.

  The ride to the surface was silent, the journey up-earth long. Anticipation poured off my men in waves. They were good soldiers: Abernathy, Barnes, Champ, Foster, Itgen, Marvin, Morris, Smith, and Testa.

  And me, Colin Rook.

  They were my soldiers; they were Rook’s Raiders.

  I hoped we’d all come back together.

  I knew we wouldn’t.

  Riding up-earth, I felt as if we’d always been fighting the Frek, as if the pre-invasion world had only ever existed in movies and dreams, and as if no time before my first day in bootcamp had been real. I couldn’t remember the day I decided to enlist, or even when the Frek invasion had begun.

  Like everyone else, though, I knew their first assault had come without warning.

  We hadn’t even known that the Frek, or any other alien life, existed until they attacked us.

  Even now, no one really understands why they invaded Earth.

  I lean toward the mistake theory: the Frek thought there were no intelligent species here, and by the time they figured out otherwise, it was too late to change course. If all Frek invasions are alike, then they’re pretty much impossible to stop once they’re underway. Frek females give birth to about 500 young at a time. Frek children pop out of the womb in little, curled-up bundles no bigger than soccer balls, but they grow to the size of lambs in about three days, and they’re more vicious than badgers. The first anyone knew we were under attack was when pregnant Frek mothers, already in labor, began dropping from the sky and popping out killing machines. They dropped about thirty per continent to start, and within days 15,000 hungry, newborn Frek bastards shocked the world. What’s worse is about thirty Frek out of every litter were female. Those things mature, mate, and reproduce in a matter of weeks. Soon as we caught on to that, we made hunting the brood-mothers a priority. It wasn’t enough.

  That’s when the scorched earth campaigns began.

  We started with full nukes.

  Freks burned to cinders in the blasts, but the radiation barely slowed the survivors. It did have the benefit of sterilizing them, which made them easier to fight without worrying about picking up some Frek microbe that would blind you or turn your organs to slush. So far the white-coat grunts have identified about thirteen separate bacterial strains the Frek brought to Earth, seven of which are deadly to humans. They’re working on cures and vaccines, but anything better than the crude, imperfect immunization shots they give us in bootcamp is a long way off. You catch a Frek death germ and get sick, you may as well throw yourself in front of a firegun for all the medics can help you. Thank God, the Frek bugs haven’t mutated to airborne or human-to-human transmission yet.

  Centcom switched to skybusters, which had about the same effect as nukes but without spreading as much fallout. The sterilization campaigns began in earnest then.

  They say Africa is clear of Freks now. Thing is, it’s also pretty much clear of humans. No one’s sure we really won that battle.

  The Frek control half of Asia and all of South America. Bombing runs along their perimeter 24/7 keep them in check.

  Australia has fared pretty well with about half the country still habitable and mostly Frek free.

  Europe and North America still hang in the balance.

  That’s where Rook’s Raiders and a million other grunts came in. We were trained in the western deserts where the Frek never landed and then shipped east and north where the Frek are the densest. Now it was time to go see what there was to kill.

  Fighting Frek isn’t easy.

  The children have skin like a
beetle’s carapace, and they can launch razor-sharp quills from their upper legs. Shooting the bastards five or six times usually drops them. Grenades are better. The only thing that makes it manageable is they’re stupid and impulsive, and they tend to come running straight at you. They’re fast, though. If you let one through, there’s not much you can do but pray somebody’s got your back.

  The brood-mothers are worse.

  They’re about the size of personnel helicopters. Soon as they finish giving birth, they’re back on all ten feet fighting. They spit streams of the vilest soup imaginable. It’ll burn you bad. Guys who are allergic to it go anaphylactic and drop dead in seconds. The worst of the germs comes from the birther spit. You might survive being doused, but you’ll spend a couple of months in D and Q, shaved hairless and having layers of skin flash-burned off you, while robot medics prick you and pop tubes into all your available orifices three times a day.

  The mothers are uglier than the kids too.

  They lumber around like octopi with stilts rammed into their tentacles. Their heads are flat and stretched into squares, and they got five big, red eyes that never blink.

  I’ve never seen one in person, but they showed us plenty of vid records in bootcamp. Every grunt and officer gets a camera chip implanted in their skull beside their left eye, so every soldier is a cameraman. That’s created a bounty of raw battlefield footage, and the top brass use it liberally.

  That shit’ll give you nightmares.

  We made our rendezvous, and my first thought was someone at Centcom has a wicked sense of humor. That’s the only explanation I can muster for why they cloned Peter Lorre to lead the Special Forces team. It wasn’t only him, either. Although the other spooks hung back in the shadows, I’m sure I saw Karloff and Price in Captain’s bars, Rathbone a Major. We were inside a blasted-out warehouse, and it was dark and gloomy, and I had to choke back a laugh. The movies those guys made were the ones I liked best: the classic monster flicks. They were the only ones with a touch of style to them. They could be gruesome, violent, and morbid, but there were real stories there, romances a lot of the time, and none of that formulaic, jingoistic cheerleading that was in almost every war movie we saw. Those old fright flicks came closer to reminding me of what I was fighting for than anything else we watched. That’s because the heroes in those movies—and yeah, sometimes the monster was the hero, like in Frankenstein or The Creature from the Black Lagoon—the heroes were almost always noble.