resembled less a creature and more a walking void cut from the fabric of reality.
Whatever the Shadow touched, it annihilated. That is to say, matter disappeared. Vanished as if it never existed.
As it moved, it ‘swooshed’ its arms back and forth. Sometimes it walked straight though buildings. Walls and windows, metal and rock, anything it touched disintegrated.
This Shadow moved out from behind a tall, warehouse-like studio building. In front of it scrambled a pack of K9s, mostly Rottweilers. They could not actually fight this monster. Instead, they barked and snapped in an attempt to delay or confuse it but no one could be sure that a Shadow had sentience enough to be delayed or confused.
Nina’s crew stopped a hundred yards from the monster on the open pavement of the front parking lot. She spoke into her radio, “All units we have sighted the target on the grounds of the Screen Gem Studios. We need immediate assistance.”
That electronic, static noise buzzed everywhere. Nina felt the hair on her arms and neck stand straight.
One of the Shadow’s long, featureless arms swooshed at the pack of Grenadiers. It passed through the front half of a Rottweiler with no resistance, as easily as waving in air. The head, neck, shoulders and front paws of the dog disappeared with no trace. Messy innards from the lifeless back half oozed out as the remains plopped to the pavement.
The Shadow turned and ‘walked’ into a huge, long building. As it made contact with walls, those walls evaporated. No dust, no crash, no smashing. Instead, annihilation at some molecular level that left no atom intact.
As it erased one wall, a banner from an internal ceiling beam fluttered to the ground. It read, “Shooting Stage: One Tree Hill.” Nina saw catwalks and row upon row of colored lights hanging above a sound stage where, apparently, this show once filmed.
It moved off toward the back lot, seemingly uninterested in the dogs or the people for the moment. Nina did not waste the opportunity.
“Listen, we need to mass our fire,” she spoke to the Specialist and the Century Commander. “You know the drill. Sometimes you hit these things, sometimes you don’t. Grab one of the AT4s.”
The Specialist warned, “These three are all I got left, Cap.”
“Then they’d better do the job, right?”
Each soldier grabbed one of the shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets.
Nina then whistled to grab the attention of the K9s trailing the beast.
She waved and yelled, “Withdraw!”
The canines enthusiastically retreated from following the walking void and assembled around Nina and the two H-K handlers.
However, the Shadow noticed their withdrawal, or perhaps it heard Nina’s whistle, if it could hear at all. Regardless, the shambling creature changed direction, returning toward the front lot and stepping through an old catering truck on the way.
“Spread out, hurry!” She ordered the other two men who then jogged in opposite directions, trying to flank the Shadow as it closed.
It strode into the parking lot, although no part of the blackness seemed to touch the ground, despite making the motion of walking. No sound, no tremor, no impact she could see. Again, as if it did not exactly exist in her reality.
The dogs growled and snapped again, turning to face the approaching monster.
Nina yelled, “Fire!”
All three rockets launched nearly simultaneously.
Nina aimed directly where the creature’s ‘chest’ might be. The projectile passed straight through the target and headed harmlessly into the morning sky, its contrail drifting in the light breeze.
A second rocket came from the Shadow’s left and went through the blackness of what was supposed to be its head and continued on into that same orange atmosphere.
A third rocket, from the Specialist, impacted in what might have been the ‘gut’ of the thin entity. It exploded and shoved the Shadow backwards, not so much staggering as sliding. While the projectile hit, the explosion from the warhead seemed to miss, as if the entity faded out of existence in the microsecond between impact and detonation.
Undeterred, the Shadow moved toward Nina. She jumped in the Humvee and skirted away as the Shadow tried to smash one of its arms into the vehicle. It hit the pavement, leaving behind a gigantic pothole in the form of a perfect circle.
The other two soldiers and the K9s scattered. Nina drove between studio buildings with the Shadow in pursuit. While not particularly fast, it held the advantage of not having to go around anything, it simply sliced through buildings, cars, and walls as if they never existed in the first place.
As she struggled to round a left turn at the rear of the lot, her radio crackled.
“Captain Forest! The supply truck is here! We got the damn pinball!”
She stopped driving. The Shadow bore down on her.
“Send the Grenadiers to keep this thing busy!”
Nina slammed the gas as the Shadow bent its lanky frame and pounded one black arm at her. The strike missed, leaving yet another perfectly smooth scar in the pavement.
She raced to the front lot again. As she did, the pack of ten Grenadiers hurried in the other direction to confront and, again, attempt to delay the monster.
She and the Specialist rendezvoused with a deuce-and-half army truck at the front gate.
The driver of the supply truck jumped out and pointed in the distance at the tall black stick of a thing walking around. Like all survivors of Armageddon, the man had seen his share of nasty beasts but few matched a Shadow for outright weirdness.
Nina and the Specialist hurried to the rear of his truck. There they found a three-foot square metal box.
“Throw it in the Humvee,” she commanded.
“You ever use one of these before?” the Specialist asked as he helped Nina move the surprisingly heavy box.
“Once myself. Watched a couple of other times. Easy now, right in the back of the Humvee. You?”
“Watched once. Didn’t get to see it work, the Shadow took out the guys and then went away before we had another chance. How the hell does it work?”
They thumped it down it he cargo hold.
“FM”
“What?”
“Fucking magic.”
“Oh.”
“Look, I don’t know,” she told what she knew. “It’s a byproduct of the Hivvan matter-makers we’ve been using. I went to a briefing once where Anita Nehru said they think the Shadow only exists in some kind of ghost state. I forget the word. Ather-all, something like that. I think the pinball contains anti-matter or something like it. Something left over from the matter-makers from the transfiguration shit they do to the atomic structure of-oh shit, I don’t have time for this.”
She flicked a latch on the top of the box and opened the lid. The pinball earned its name from its looks, albeit much larger than something one might find in an arcade. The silver surface of the ‘ball’ fluttered a little, as if not quite solid. The ball itself did not touch the sides of the box; anti-gravity circuits similar to the ones found in an Eagle air ship kept the device from touching anything.
“Wow,” the Specialist said. “I hear it takes like forever to make one of these.”
“Look, I got to move. Pull the K9s back. If this doesn’t work, keep the civilians out of its path until you can find more rockets.”
Nina jumped into the driver’s seat and drove off in the Humvee. Behind her, the Specialist and the Commander whistled for the Grenadiers to retreat.
The Shadow wobbled along the parking lot adjacent to a large clearing amidst a patch of woodland. Pieces
