air support. The enemy considered this a safe region.
“Whaddya think, hero? Today the day?” Albright asked.
He nodded. “We’ll hit the next one that comes through.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m tired of this shit hole.”
Charlie Hernandez came bounding up the slope a moment later. Most of his black, bug-like armor was hidden under overlapping pieces of ragged cloth, and he looked like some kind of vagrant grasshopper.
The higher-ups wanted someone to observe and report back on the viability of Jack’s tactic. Charlie was between posts at the time and quickly volunteered. “The chain is set and ready to go. The forward team’s just waiting for a target,” he said in his mechanically altered voice.
“What about Trash’s group?”
“Locked and loaded.”
There was nothing left to do but take cover and wait.
Twenty minutes later, they spotted a dust cloud at the northern end of the canyon. Jack raised his binoculars up, and could see the alien walker galloping in at full speed.
“Here she comes,” he said.
From his vantage point, he could hardly see the forward team’s position five hundred meters on, and he couldn’t see the chain at all. That’s how it was supposed to be.
Then, just as the walker was about to pass the forward team, the thick metal chain snapped taught eight meters above the ground. The walker saw it at the last moment and tried to stop, but it was too late. Its forward legs buckled and snapped, and the vehicle lurched forward, tumbling end over end through the narrow canyon, and then skidded along the rocky soil.
It ground to a halt amid a thick cloud of kicked up dust right under Jack’s position. Trash’s team immediately went into action.
“Fire one!” Trash hollered, and a rocket propelled grenade raced down from out of the rocks with a hiss, followed by a trail of white smoke. The shot struck the back of the walker’s body and exploded in a ball of fire and debris.
“All clear!”
It was time for Jack’s team to move. He, Charlie and Albright rushed down the side of the canyon, interspersing quick hops with controlled slides through the loose soil. By the time they came to the bottom, the smoke had cleared and the walker lay face first in the dirt with its blasted ass in the air, broken and twitching, a massive singed hole where its back-end used to be.
Chase and Trash came down the opposite side, and stopped behind a rock above the walker. They had their rifles trained on the wreckage. “Got yer back, chief!”
Jack team moved. His team clambered up the side of the vehicle and swept their barrels across the opening, ready to take down anything still moving. There was no motion inside the vehicle, only strangely colored blood and carnage. “Sweep through and put a round in every skull. No survivors. Charlie, you documenting this?”
“Recording as we speak,” Charlie said. “We’ll have plenty of footage.”
“Good. Albright, pick out two good specimens of each kind.”
“Roger that,” she said.
The creatures were strapped to the walls with tendril-like harnesses, much like the inside of a leviathan, actually. Jack quickly pushed the thought out of his head before he had a chance to feel anything approaching sympathy.
The three soldiers moved through row by row, and finished each occupant with a single round to the head. It was mechanical work, and they did it quickly and without passion.
“Jack, take a look at this,” Albright said from the front of the cabin.
He strode over to meet her, and found her standing before a creature they hadn’t seen before. Its flesh was shiny and off-white, like uncooked scallop meat. It was thin and spindly, with no apparent bone structure. It had six arms, a finned tail, and a bulb of a head with thin mouth and a single, off-center blue-green eye.
It sat in some kind of cradle, with its arms hooked into burrows in the walker’s flesh. It was alive, but badly wounded. It mewled in pain and fear.
“Must be the pilot,” Albright said.
Jack nodded. He thought back to the first village back in China, and remembered the floating, six armed creature that directed the operations there. It shape was right, but all of the details were different. “Sounds about right. I think they wear some kind of armor when they go outside.”
The thing was twitching uncontrollably, and whenever it jerked, the ruined walker quaked. It looked up at Jack with pleading in its giant eye, and it whimpered.
Jack had his forty-five in hand the whole time. He raised the weapon to the creature’s head and pulled the trigger, splashing grey and green on the wall behind. The creature was silent.
“You’re a cold son of a bitch, Jack.”
“You should talk,” he said. “If you can get it out of the cradle, take this one too.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack heard the rumble of their troop transport outside. The forward team packed up faster than expected. That was good news. They needed to get out before the next walker came.
In silence, Jack and his team carried the alien corpses out, loaded them into the transport, and left for Al Saif. They left the broken walker out in the open, where it would be found a half-hour later. Jack hoped the message was clear.
Chapter 30:
Dissect
Jack wasn’t quite thirty and he’d already seen thousands of open wounds. He became numb to the sight of blood and gore, but that hadn’t always been the case. No, back when he first joined the Corps, he thought he was a real tough guy, but all the bravado flushed away when he came upon the remains of someone blown apart by a roadside bomb.
The air was thick and smelled like a slaughterhouse, but he didn’t immediately put it together. Not until he saw parts he recognized. A hand. A leg sheared off below the knee. Intestines spilling over a curb. Then the floodgates opened and realization rushed into him all at once. The smell was human meat.
Jack ran away and puked his guts out, and was grim and despondent for days afterward. That’s when he first met Leonid Nikitin, another young corpsman who already had a year of duty behind him.
Nikitin had enough sense to take Jack out for a beer and listen while the young corpsman came to grips with what he was feeling. He didn’t say a word all night, not until Jack was done, and then all he said was, “It’s good that you’re disgusted, Jackie-boy. You better be, because it’s a damn disgusting world out there. That’s why we’re here, ain’t it? Because we’re disgusted. Because we care enough to try and make things right. Need another beer?”
That was enough to help Jack pull through. He had a pounding headache the next morning, but when that passed, he was alright. Really alright. He got up, he did his job, and a handful of years later, he became head of his brigade.
That was eight years past, but Jack still thought about it sometimes. As he stepped down into the darkened shelter that had been converted into a ramshackle morgue, the smell brought the memory back again like a freight train. For a moment, Jack thought he was going to lose his lunch, but he metered his breathing and concentrated until the nausea passed.
It took him a little while to adjust to the light. The center of the room was sharply lit by a single overhead lamp, and everything beyond that faded to blackness. Something sat on a raised platform, attended by someone in a white coat. A moment later, Jack recognized Lisa Albright, who looked temporarily like a doctor again. She was busy dissecting and documenting the aliens, while Charlie stood off to the side, manning a camcorder.
Albright had protested that she wasn’t trained for this kind of work, but she was the best they had, and the bodies were already starting to decompose. Without refrigeration, they wouldn’t get half-way to the Russian Ark
