down a side hall deeper into the building.
The corridor led past a collection of conference rooms and utility closets, each blasted, picked clean and burned out as if the Invaders had harbored a personal vendetta against the Hilton chain. Jason smothered an insane giggle at the thought of the aliens travelling across dozens of light years simply to trash a hotel, like some kind of interstellar rock band. Trying hard to concentrate on the problem at hand, he followed the hallway around several twists until he finally ran smack into an emergency exit.
He pushed through the door without thinking and instantly regretted it when a hooting fire alarm sounded, still under power from integral batteries and keyed to go off when the emergency door was opened. Cursing heatedly, Jason pumped his legs as fast as his damaged knee would endure, sprinting toward the open end of the blind alley between the hotel and the connected restaurant next door. He’d almost made it to the street when an armored figure moved into the alley mouth, blocking his way, arms filled with the metal bulk of a drum-fed machine gun.
Not even hesitating, Jason brought his handgun to shoulder level and fired as he ran, emptying the magazine into the creature’s head and upper torso, barely a meter away from the thing as the last slug pierced its faceplate. The Invader collapsed in a heap, and McKay scooped the machine gun from its hands, shoving his pistol into his waistband as he took off across the street. Ricochets whined all around him as the downed trooper’s cohorts spotted him and opened fire from the front entrance of the hotel, nearly a hundred meters away.
McKay chopped off a burst at the group of armored figures as he sprinted across the street, the large-caliber machine-gun slugs downing two of them and peppering the front wall of the hotel with bulletholes. But the others made no move to seek cover, simply standing in open and emptying their rifles at him; halfway to the shelter of the alleyway opposite the hotel, Jason stumbled at the red-hot punch of a rifle slug in his side.
He cried out sharply and a wave of nauseating agony washed through him, but he forced himself to stay on his feet. Managing to keep hold of the machine gun, he staggered into the shadowed alley between a bank and a tailor shop, feeling the warm rush of blood soaking his right side.
Shaking himself, he forced his mind back to clarity and twisted around to see three of the armored troopers lumbering toward the alley mouth, reloading their rifles as they ran. It cost him a flare of fresh pain, but he brought the barrel of the machine gun up and hosed the approaching troops with twenty rounds, the muzzle spitting a ten- centimeter tongue of fire, a stream of brass-colored cases bouncing off the wall of the bank. The troopers went down with fist-sized holes in their armor, but McKay was already stumbling laboriously down the passage between the buildings, aiming for the daylight on the other end.
He emerged on a narrow side street, but spent little time sightseeing; instead, he ran straight across to the opposite alley, trying to make his way to the edge of town. Once he hit the outskirts, he figured he could travel more leisurely along the perimeter of the city until he came around to where the rover was parked.
As he shuffled across street after parallel street, the banks, hotels and shops slowly began to give way to the uglier, boxier shapes of warehouses and factories of the industrial district. This section of town had been hardest hit by the Invaders: there didn’t seem to be a single structure left intact, and their insides looked to be as empty as a politician’s promise, stripped bare by the looting aliens.
The skeletal buildings stared down accusingly at Jason, haunted corpses of a raped and murdered city, and he paused at their scrutiny, mesmerized by the anthropomorphic image his stress-fired imagination had built up. An unsettling sense of claustrophobia closed in on him in the looming shadows of the surrounding buildings, a numbing sensation that smothered the pain from his side and his knee as it threatened to smother his thoughts. Part of his mind, the small part that was still thinking clearly, was shouting at him to get moving, that he was slipping into emotional and physical shock; but the mental inertia seemed to drag at him like lead weights.
The metallic clomp of Invader boots from a side street startled him out of the fugue into which he’d been slipping and sent him scrambling through the open side door of a nearby warehouse. A fleeting glance of a dimly-lit snowfield of scattered packing foam over the stripped wreckage of offices and the overturned hulk of an industrial exoskeleton, and then he was hugging the inside wall, edging close enough to the opening to peek out at the street. There were half a dozen of the armored Invader troopers outside, milling around the empty buildings, hunting for him.
McKay watched them, trying not to let his gaze linger on any one of them, giving in to that old soldier’s superstition that an enemy could feel your stare. His breathing seemed to be intolerably loud in his own ears, and he wondered that they couldn’t hear it; he would have held his breath, but he knew at this point that, if he did, he would pass out. Gradually, as his gaze remained glued to the activity without, he became aware of a “tip-tap” sound somewhere in the warehouse: a persistent, nagging drip, as if someone hadn’t turned a bathroom faucet quite all the way off. The noise abraded his nerves like sandpaper, and he was sure that one of the troopers would finally notice it and come to investigate.
Then, a stray glance downward revealed to him the source of the sound: it was his own blood, soaking through his shirt to drip steadily onto the metal base of the doorway. A small, crimson pool of it had gathered around his right boot, and the realization of just how badly he was bleeding sent a fresh wave of dizziness through him. He barely caught himself as he was about to pitch over sideways, had to grab the edge of the doorway for support. Unfortunately, that meant taking a hand off the foregrip of the weighty machine gun: the barrel slipped down to scrape loudly across the gnotty buildfoam of the inner wall.
Six helmeted heads snapped around as one, and Jason thought, absurdly, of an old cartoon he’d once seen about a pack of clumsy, stupid hounds chasing after an elusive, clever fox. Except he felt neither elusive nor particularly clever at the moment. As a matter of fact, he felt very much like he was about to lose consciousness. The Invaders started for the warehouse, tromping forward in an unorganized clump. He thought this was especially odd, since they’d maintained a textbook wedge formation when they’d attacked the mansion.
Gunny Stockwell, his D.I. from boot camp, would have had the old training platoon doing pushups for a year if they’d bunched up like that in a tactical situation. “One worthless motherfucker with an automatic weapon’d take out the whole worthless motherfucking lot of you!” he would have bellowed at them. He decided it was time to figure out if that sadistic old bastard was right.
Taking in as deep a breath as he could without doubling over in agony, Jason brought the machine gun to high port and swung around through the doorway, finger already squeezing the trigger. A scream of rage and desperation exploded from him as he fought with the weapon to keep the muzzle from rising, a flare of gunpowder ripping through the air.
The machine gun bucked hard against his shoulder, sunlight winking off the brass of the spent cases as they flew over his head in a slow-motion dance. McKay could see with paranormal clarity each slug that impacted the armored troopers, see the way the armor-piercing rounds punched through their chestplates and helmets, see the way they jerked backwards with a strange, unnatural motion like the robot mannequins in a store display—not as if they weren’t alive, but more as if they didn’t feel the pain of the wounds and were only reacting to the physical damage of the bullets.
A small part of Jason’s mind wondered why they reacted that way… and why his finger stayed frozen in a death-squeeze on the trigger once all of the Invaders were bloody heaps on the ground, and why he didn’t let up on it even after the machine gun’s bolt locked open empty in a bluish cordite cloud, and why he was still screaming hoarsely at the dead emptiness of the street, and why his arms didn’t seem to have any strength anymore, and why the gun was clattering to the pavement when he couldn’t remember letting go of it, and why everything seemed to be spinning around and sinking into a haze of darkness as the road rose quickly up to meet his face…
Awash in a sea of mist, Jason came to brief clarity in the middle of a fever dream. Invader troopers stood over him, surrounding him, and he knew he was dead. But why would enemy troopers be wearing grey Marine armor? Then he saw the ugly, heavy-browed face of his old Drill Instructor staring down at him grimly, and he knew it must be a dream.
“He’s alive,” the man mouthed in a rumbling bass that was not his own voice. “Get him up.”
A wave of agony washed over him and consciousness fled once more, the blackness covering him as he had one last, disjointed thought of Shannon.
