Zombies versus Aliens versus Vampires versus Dinosaurs Page 10

  “Good thinking. Want some company?”

  “Hey! Pinche!” Miguel shouted. “She’s my sister!”

  Harve hadn’t made up his mind up about Johnny—the Captain—what a joke. After induction they had been separated into different units, and Harve was certain that Johnny would go AWOL, but he didn’t. The guy seemed competent enough to fly the machine, and he didn’t seem phased about heading into a danger zone, but there was just something about the brash Californian that rubbed him the wrong way.

  He was glad that Johnny would be flying back to base after this last drop and that a Marine lieutenant would be leading them. The thought of Johnny as CO was too ludicrous to fathom. The Lieutenant and the other twenty-five snipers would be in position by now, and Harve was looking forward to being led by a real soldier.

  The helicopter descended into a perfect, gentle set-down on their assigned rooftop, close to the wood crates of weapons and ammo that they had been unloading throughout the morning. All but Johnny disembarked to unload the new drop but there appeared to be not another soul around.

  Strange, Harve thought. They should have been here by now.

  “You sure we been hittin’ the right roof all morning, Cap’n?” he asked with more than a twinge of sarcasm on the word “Cap’n”.

  “Was that a joke?” Johnny replied unfazed. “Hey, everyone! Stop what you’re doing! Harve tried to make a funny!”

  “I’m just saying, ’cause the rest of them should’ve been here by –”

  “INCOMING!!!!!” Sergeant Sanchez yelled at the top of her lungs.

  For charging straight at them were seven swarms of alien soldiers, their weapons poised, the fingers of their lower arms pressed to the trigger-buttons.

  And the roars of their blasts were deafening!

  Harve and his team leapt out of the way not a moment too soon as white beams of time-space void whizzed right where they had been standing. Johnny dove out of his pilot’s seat and hit the ground. He tried to crawl to safety, but where was that? All he could see from his vantage point were deadly white beams and insect legs. A hand came down from above and yanked him up by the back of his shirt.

  “Come on!” shouted Harve.

  Harve ran and Johnny blindly followed. When the Sergeant dove behind a large air-conditioner condenser, the Captain did the same—an alien blast grazing across the top of his floppy brown hair.

  Johnny hit the ground behind the condenser to find his other three passengers there as well. They had removed their sidearms and were shooting back at the aliens—popping up from the condenser just long enough to get off a single shot or two, then dropping right back down to safety.

  “Thanks,” he told Harve.

  “Whatever,” Harve grunted, then drew his pistol and joined in the shooting.

  But what Johnny saw next shook him to his very bones.

  For scattered along the far side of the rooftop, in front of the other giant air-conditioner condenser, behind the elevator and stairwell and every other spot that could be used as cover, lay the Marine Lieutenant and his twenty-five snipers, all dead with perfectly round one-inch voids in the center of their hearts.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “So you killed your daddy?” asked the little blonde pixie girl in the tattered overalls. Her name was Rhiannon (pronounced “Ree-ANN-in” like the Fleetwood Mac song after which she was named).

  They were sitting on the beat-up sofa on which Patrick had spent the night, in her daddy’s dilapidated cabin deep in the southeast Georgia woods, the sawed-off shotgun and a large shovel laying by the little girl’s feet. The front door swung breezily from one hinge having clearly been shot up sometime earlier. The floor was littered with wrappers of Cheetos, Ding Dongs and Mars bars from which they had gorged, as well as cans of Pepsi and Mountain Dew. Patrick had to admit that although the little girl was the epitome of what his mother would call “white trash,” she had been quite an excellent hostess.

  “Yeah,” Patrick shamefully answered her question. “I mean, I think I did.”

  “Well ya did or ya dint,” Rhiannon said matter of factly.

  “Well I shot him in the chest and he seemed dead,” the boy explained. “But then he got up and tried to bite me. Then somehow I ended up crushing his skull, and he seemed dead again. So who knows?”

  “You killed him,” the pixie said with authority. “Not the first time but the second. Who else you kill?”

  “Um, only him, I think, maybe some neighbors. Mostly I was just running. How about you?”

  “Let’s see. Ma and Pa. Irene—she’s my big sister. And Uncle Ferd, who ain’t really my uncle just a second cousin who was havin’ sex with Ma behind Pa’s back.”

  “You don’t seem sad about any of it,” said Patrick.

  “Well it’s the virus what’s really killed who they was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like this,” Rhiannon said as she proudly launched into her zombie tutorial. “Picture a picture of a brain. It’s got all this bright red pulsatin’ stuff here and yonder. That’s our feelin’s, our memories, our idears—the stuff that makes us us. But when you catch the virus it all goes different. So now picture a picture where only a teeny-weeny part of the brain is lit, and it’s all just a dull pinkish, barely pulsatin’ at all. That’s them. No feelin’s nor memories nor nuthin. No longer who they ever was. Just a peein’, poopin’, killin’ machine.

  “And if they bite ya, or scratch ya, or heck, if they merely drool into your mouth—if they get any part of them into any part of you, then you become just like them. Dead—but not dead—but dead.”

  “Wow,” said the boy, impressed and terrified. “How do you know all this?”

  “Pa was swipin’ the cable from the neighbor so I’d watch Walkin’ Dead when he was passed out drunk. Hey! Want some hooch?” she asked as she made her way to a cracked wood cabinet alongside the wall. “I know where he keeps it, kept it.”

  “You’re too young to drink liquor,” Patrick told her. “I’m too young to drink liquor.”

  She pulled out a half-empty, unmarked bottle of something brown and headed back to the boy. “Way this zombie thing’s spreadin’, we ain’t gonna live long enough to be old enough. What’s your name?”

  “Patrick. Patrick Hutchins.”

  “Rhiannon Montadel,” she said, then raised the bottle in a toast. “Nice to know ya, Patrick.”

  She took a giant swig of the brown liquid then grimaced. “Ugh!” she cried out. “That’s herrible! Ich! Want some?”

  “Um, okay,” said Patrick as he reached for the bottle—no way being outdone by a seven-year-old girl.

  “Got smokes too, if you want ’em,” she said, referring to a pack of Kools and a Zippo lighter on the coffee table. “Me, I don’t get it, just makes ya cough, but knock yourself out.”

  Patrick took a deep breath as he prepared himself for whatever the brown liquid held in store, but before he could put the bottle to his lips, the front door creaked the rest of the way open. Rhiannon put her finger to her mouth to hush him.

  A zombie had just entered the cabin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “How the hell did they know?!” Peyton shouted as he watched the monitors.

  It had taken less than an hour for Lance to discover that his surveillance system had been sabotaged, even less time than that to get it up and running again, and even less time than that to realize that he needed to set up some kind of backup HQ in case a future form of sabotage turned out irreparable. But he knew better than to bring that up now because the leader of the free world was pissed.

  “Look at that!” the President shouted. “The damn bugs are on every rooftop we’re on! How could they have possibly known?!”

  Peyton had already warned the ground troops that they would have to proceed without sniper cover, and he despised telling them that. He had already given the order for the snipers to evacuate, but they had all left their communication devices inside the heli
copters from which they had fled, so none of them heard the order, and that only served to make him angrier.

  “Spies? We got spies right inside us?” he yelled to the room in general then turned to the Captain-with-the-scar. “You were supposed to check everyone out!”

  “We absolutely did, sir,” answered the Captain. “And our methods and technologies were impeccable. Every single person on this base, soldier and civilian alike, has been thoroughly examined and reexamined for a human past—their service records, employment records, prison, hospital, even high school records in some cases. There is no way that a nonhuman could have slipped through.”

  “The alien plan runs deep, sir,” Jean-François cautioned. “I worked for Raymond for fifteen years, and he was at NASA for ten years before that.”

  “Maybe they anticipated our plan, Mr. President,” the Captain offered as an alternative. “Maybe we did what they would have done so –”

  “This is more than anticipating,” Peyton told him. “Even if they assumed I’d take a high-ground strategy, look at the screens. The bugs are on every single rooftop we’re on, and only on the ones we’re on. How could they possibly have known the precise rooftops I’d choose other than through spies?”

  “There is a third possibility, Mr. President,” proposed the Canadian Lieutenant. “If the aliens can travel through time like the physicist says, maybe they knew what we were going to do because they had already seen us do it.”

  “Non, they cannot change their past,” Jean-François explained.

  “But wouldn’t this be changing their present?”

  “Imagine the following scenario,” began the astrophysicist. “We succeeded at taking the rooftops, which led to us winning the day. To alter that, the aliens would have to send someone back to a time before our soldiers got on the rooftops to warn themselves of their defeat—the scenario we’d allegedly be in now. And let’s suppose that enables the aliens to win instead. Why then would they send someone back in time to warn themselves of a defeat they hadn’t experienced? Why would they take measures to stop us from holding rooftops that we never held? They wouldn’t. They couldn’t. Therefore, they didn’t.”

  Peyton merely stared at the physicist for a moment, then muttered to himself. “What a week to stop drinking.”

  *****

  “So what’s the plan?” Harve asked Johnny as he loaded a new clip.

  They hadn’t been there long but it felt like forever—pinned behind the large air-conditioner condenser, popping up to fire a shot or two then dropping back down for cover as white beams whizzed all around them. They were heavily outnumbered and outgunned, their pistols no match against the aliens’ high-tech-whatever-they-were. And although they had winged a few bugs, they had not been able to fire off a single kill. They may as well have been fighting with slingshots.

  “So what’s the plan?” Harve repeated.

  “What’re you asking me for?” Johnny replied.

  “Because you’re the highest-ranking, you idiot.”

  “I’m a pilot,” the Californian said, as if the most obvious thing in the world. “I don’t know anything about tactics. I haven’t shot a gun since basic.”

  “You gotta be kidding me.”

  “Okay. As senior-ranking, I’ll delegate. Sergeant, take the lead.”

  “Oh for crying out loud,” Harve groaned as he popped up, fired off another round, then dropped back down.

  “I don’t get it, Sarge,” said Frank as he ducked back down beside Harve after firing off two rounds of his own, one ripping a bug in its lower arm. “Why aren’t they exploding the chopper? They’re just leaving it right there in the open. It’s like they’re giving us a way out.”

  “Because there’s enough explosives in that bird and the crates around it to blow the top three stories of this building to kingdom come,” answered Harve. “And themselves along with it.”

  “And they wouldn’t let us get near it anyway,” Sanchez added.

  “Maybe,” said Harve as a thought began to form. “On the other hand, maybe it’s our only hope.”

  “What’re you getting at, Sarge?”

  “It’s a long shot, but we’re not going to win this thing with our Berettas. But if one of us can get close to that bird, those bugs won’t risk taking a shot at him.”

  “Or her,” added Sanchez.

  “Or her. So if he—or she—can get close, then he-she can get inside where we got our M16s, RPGs, everything we need. He-she grabs hold of one of them, then can sit out in the open blasting bugs all the livelong day without a trace of return fire. He-she gives the rest of us the cover we need to hightail it over there, then Johnny, you fly us off this hellhole.”

  “You get me in that bird, I’ll get us off this roof,” Johnny vowed.

  “It sounds like a suicide mission,” said Sanchez.

  “So is staying here,” Frank said. “At least it’s a chance.”

  “But what’s to stop the bugs from shooting down the chopper once we’re ten, fifteen, twenty yards off the roof?” she asked.

  “You get me in that bird, I’ll get us home,” Johnny repeated with intensity.

  “Enough talk,” Harve barked. “This is the plan.”

  “Hey, chico, you don’t outrank me!” Sanchez said defiantly. “We’re both sergeants, we both have the same three stripes. Just because you’re white –”

  “Don’t go there, girlfriend,” Harve barked at her. “The Captain put me in command, I’m taking command. That’s all.”

  Just then, on another rooftop across the way, human soldiers in another helicopter managed to make their getaway. But just as Sanchez predicted, the aliens merely waited for a safe distance to accrue between the roof and the chopper, then fired their rifle-like weapons into its fuel tank. The machine erupted into a giant ball of flame in the sky, leaving only chunks of scrap metal and human bone to drop like bombs to the battlefield below.

  Sanchez turned to Johnny. “Think their pilot mighta made the same promise you did, chico?”

  Johnny merely looked deep into her eyes and answered, simply, “Trust me.”

  It was a strange moment between them because, for some reason, she did.

  “Okay,” she said softly.

  “So unless anyone’s got anything better,” Harve announced. “This is the plan.”

  “I’ll do it,” volunteered Miguel. “I’ll go.”

  “No!” snapped his big sister. “Miguel, you don’t have to.”

  “Yes I do!”

  Sanchez turned to Harve with sheer determination and said, “I’ll do it.”

  “No! I will!”

  “We don’t have time for this!” Harve shouted, then turned to Miguel. “Okay, kid, you volunteered first, you’re up. Stay low. Don’t let ’em see you. We’ll provide distraction and cover. Remember, you only have to get close. Once you’re close, you’re in. Then grab a weapon and start blasting.”

  “Got it,” said Miguel.

  “I’ll take decoy,” Frank volunteered.

  “Good,” said Harve. “Go!”

  Frank bolted out and sprinted across the roof in the opposite direction of the helicopter. “Hey! Bugs! Look at me!” he shouted, drawing the aliens’ fire, diving for cover behind the elevator structure that protruded up from the floor below. At the same time, Miguel hit the dirt and slithered along the ground as fast as he could toward the chopper, concealed only by the gun smoke of battle overhead and the element of surprise.

  *****

  “Fire!” coughed out the Alien Commander.

  In less than a second, the deafening explosions of the alien weapons erupted through the streets of Southpoint. White beams of void rocketed toward their human targets. Giant alien cannons fired Buick-sized globules of time-space nothingness eradicating ten humans at a time. Bulletproof alien tanks rolled effortlessly forward to crush the human barricades that blocked the roads.

  But the humans fought back. Flame and smoke exploded from their M16s and RPGs as the
y fired from behind the barricades that they had constructed; they fired out through the open windows of modern apartments and office buildings; fired down from the giant oak trees that populated the boulevards’ medians and roadsides; fired up from the sewers in which they stood, only the barrels of their M16s and the tip-tops of their helmets exposed; and the human artillery units positioned a quarter mile back rained infernos upon the alien tanks, blowing them to bits long before they could get close to touching the humans’ barricades.

  The once charming roads were enveloped in smoke, fire, flames, white beams and globules—the integrity of the human structures kept intact thanks only to the pinpoint accuracy of the alien soldiers and their Commander’s severe orders. Red and green blood gushed and spewed everywhere. The screams of the dying could not be heard over the thunderous ruckus of battle. Humans were dropping like flies. Bugs were dying like people. Human medics dragged their casualties onto stretchers by the hundreds, then into ambulances to be driven north to hospitals, while dead and wounded aliens were engulfed in wormholes and whisked back home. In terms of calculating the deceased, it seemed an almost equal battle except for one terrifying fact.

  Every time an alien could fight no more, be it from death or injury, the ground shook, a wormhole opened and a replacement insect soldier ran into our world to blast away in his stead!

  The alien forces could not be lessened.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The zombie staggered its way into the dilapidated cabin without a goal or purpose—it just happened to have found its way there.

  Rhiannon motioned to Patrick to hide. She picked up the large shovel that was almost as big as she was, then moved toward the coat closet that was directly along the zombie’s jagged path. She opened the closet door and hid behind it, knowing full well that the zombie had already seen her, yet confident that the oblivious creature wouldn’t remember something that had happened almost five seconds earlier. She grunted as she raised the large shovel over her shoulder and waited to strike.

  The zombie staggered aimlessly past her, then the little girl bashed the metal blade across the back of its skull. The zombie went down fast, but Rhiannon had been through enough to know that it didn’t mean the thing was in fact dead. So she bashed the shovel down upon its head again, and again, and again.