The Killing Floor

“Heads up!” Davis shouts.

A dark shape flutters through the smoke and lands heavily on one of the vehicles to their left, which groans and sags under the impact. Arnold cries out in terror, the grimy lens on his facemask dotted with sprayed blood.

Another body flies through the air in a rain of broken glass.

Tanner shoots at it, misses. The rest of the squad opens fire.

“Cease fire!” Rod roars, furious at the lack of fire discipline.

The boys obey the order, panting in their masks.

The gunfire shattered many of the windows. Bodies fall like human missiles, limbs flailing. Glass rattles across the cars. The crash of the impacts multiplies until it is continuous. A car alarm wails its grating alarm. Others join in.

The boys begin firing again, but this is not combat. The onslaught is nothing they can fight.

It’s an avalanche. We can either weather it or get out of the way.

“Off the street,” Rod roars, pushing at Sosa’s shoulder until the man obeys.

He pulls his fireteam to the right side of the street while Davis pulls his to the left. Rod peers through the grimy glass windows into the building’s lobby. No threats there.

“What the fuck is this?” Tanner screams, gaping at the bodies falling onto the cars, shattering windshields and splattering across the crumpled metal. “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?”

Sosa grips the back of his neck and forces him to look away while Arnold and Lynch bend close, telling him he’s okay, everything is going to be okay.

“It’s not okay,” Tanner sobs. “Nothing about this is fucking okay.”

“Stay frosty, vatos,” Rod tells them. “All that noise is going to attract attention.”

He feels vibrations in the soles of his feet. The sensation migrates up his legs to his knees. Ash dances on the asphalt. He turns and pulls on the building’s front doors. They’re unlocked. He holds one open and waves the fireteam inside.

“Get in there! Move!”

The soldiers enter the lobby, half dragging the dazed Tanner, and deploy into firing positions. Rod turns and sees Davis directing his men into the burned-out building across the street. The downpour of bodies has stopped. An incredible roar reaches his ears, the crash and pop of crumpling metal and shattering glass. The traffic jam trembles, cars shifting by inches.

Inside, his fireteam tenses, ready to open fire at whatever is coming.

“Get down,” he says.

They look at him.

“Eat dirt!” he roars.

The air fills with a long blast of foghorns.

The thunder grows in volume until they are certain the world is ending. The first juggernaut bounds across the roofs of the vehicles, crumpling their frames under the impact of seven tons of flying muscle and bone. The rest of the herd follows, tentacles flailing around their brontosaurus bodies, crashing over the cars and flattening the traffic jam into crushed metal.

As the last monster leaps across the wreckage, Rod lunges to his feet and rushes to the RTO, yanking the handle from the field radio and shouting, “Hellraisers, Hellraisers, this is Hellraisers 3. How copy?”

Jared Kelley’s voice responds: Hellraisers 3, this is Hellraisers 5, go ahead, over.

“Large herd of Bravo Mikes inbound on your position from M Street. Estimated size forty, fifty adults, moving at gallop speed, over.”

Rod waits during the long pause as Kelley processes the fact a stampede of about three hundred tons of monster is bearing down on his position at twenty-five miles an hour.

“Bravo Mike” is the current Army slang for “big motherfucker.”

Solid copy, out.

“They’ll be all right, won’t they, Sergeant?” Sosa asks him.

“I don’t know,” Rod answers, feeling shaken and humbled. He has not heard of Bravo Mikes attacking the line en masse. As far as he knows, this is the first time it has ever happened.

If the bug has a lot more monsters to throw at us, the U.S. military may have just lost the initiative in this fight. We will stop being attackers, and start being defenders.

Gunfire erupts to the southeast. Fifty-cal machine guns pound in the distance, followed by the WHAM WHAM WHAM of bursting grenades. The sounds roll down the street, filling the air with white noise.

It’s over quickly; the firing stops.

Rod counts his ducklings and, satisfied they’re all present and in one piece, orders them back onto their feet. They pause at the doors, waving at Davis and the other fireteam across the street, all of them shifting their gaze to the giant metal pancake blanketing the road. Getting across the wreckage is going to be like walking across a field of knives.

Treading with painstaking slowness over the jagged edges, slicing their uniforms and legs, they work their way back to the part of the road that is cleared, and jog toward their lines.

Minutes later, the outline of a Bravo Mike emerges from the gloom, lying on its side and defecating in its death throes. The soldiers give it a wide berth and find themselves confronted by a looming hill of dying monsters, their tentacles still thrashing. They hear men screaming.

“Over here,” Davis calls from the flank.

He shows them a way around. Further down the street, they find more of the monsters lying dead or dying among trampled human remains. Several sprawl broken across the front of the Hercules. Beyond, even more lie among Stryker vehicles flipped onto their sides or jammed against each other. One vehicle has been shoved half inside the front of a Thai restaurant.

Men scream for medics. Soldiers run everywhere. A military ambulance lurches to a halt and discharges stretcher bearers moving at a sprint.

“Make a hole! Make it wide!” several soldiers shout at them as they race past, carrying a screaming man with a shattered leg. Rod jumps aside and catches a glimpse of bone jutting from torn fatigues.

Rod watches them go and feels an unnatural rage take hold of him.

What a waste of the world’s finest combat infantry.

“What are your orders, Sergeant?” Davis asks him.

“Sergeant Rodman!” Lieutenant Sims calls. He and Kelley stand in front of the diner where they gave Rod his orders less than an hour ago.

Rod jogs over to the Lieutenant with his squad in tow.

“Good to see you and your men back in one piece, Sergeant,” Kelley says.

“You too,” Rod responds. He tells the boys to get inside the diner and wait for orders, then turns to Sims. “How bad is it, sir?”

“As bad as it looks. We’re still sorting it out. We made out okay, but First Platoon lost some good men.”

“The big bastards slammed into the Hercules,” Kelley says. “It was like watching tomatoes thrown against a wall. The guys were cheering. Then the rest of the Bravo Mikes just ran right over it. Plowed straight into Comanche.”

“The Captain appreciates your heads up on the radio,” Sims says. “That was good work.”

“Thank you, sir,” Rod says impatiently. “What can we do to help here?”

“Nothing,” Sims tells him. “They’re taking us off the line.”

“To hell with that,” Rod snaps, feeling the rage surge inside him again. “We can help the docs get the wounded into their vehicles for evac.”

“Rod, our people are in good hands,” Kelley says. “We’re getting a lot of help. We’ve got to let the docs do their job. We’d just be in the way.”

Rod sets his jaw. “Then we’ll go back out and finish our recon.”

“We’re done here, Rod,” Sims says. “We’ve done everything we can. Now get your men ready to move. Got it?”