SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

-1-

The last words I heard were, “Something hit us. We’re going down.”

Yelled real damn loud.

Then a big black nothing closed around us like a fist.

We were gone.

If that meant we were going down then I had to wonder, in those last fleeting seconds before the chopper hit the canopy of trees, how far down was the ride? Was it just to the trees, or to the forest floor below? Or would the world open its mouth and swallow us whole, gulping men, weapons, equipment and everything those tools of war signified? Would we slide all the way down into the pit?

Yeah, maybe.

We probably deserved it, too.

I’ll leave that for philosophers.

I was too busy dying. I was by the open door, hunkered down over the minigun. When the Black Hawk tilted I felt myself begin that long, bad fall.

-2-

I have expected to die more times than I can count. Nature of the job. I’m a first-team shooter for an organization that pits special operators against terrorists who have bioweapons based on absolute bleeding-edge technology. In those kinds of fights a lot of people on both sides take long dirt naps. A lot of my friends have preceded me into the big black. Most of them were better people than I’ll ever be, but being a good person doesn’t make your Kevlar work any better. It doesn’t armor plate you, or make you immune to poisons, venoms, and biological agents.

Each time I expected to die and didn’t, I felt like I was cruising more and more on borrowed time. When it comes to counting the grace of God — or whoever else is on call for this little blue marble — I’m overdrawn at the bank. One of these days they’re going to foreclose on me, and I won’t have any luck or grace left to pay the bill.

I thought today was that day.

Today should have been.

Just as being a good person doesn’t give you any added protection, being a right bastard doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’ll meet the fate you deserve.

The helicopter went down.

I didn’t.

Not entirely.

I woke upside down.

In a tree.

A long goddamn way from the ground.

Not the first time this has happened to me, either.

My life blows.

-3-

The first rule of survival is: Don’t panic.

Panic makes you stupid and stupid makes you dead.

Panic also denies you the opportunity to learn from the moment. You take a breath and judge the immediacy of your experience. You need to assess everything. Mind, body, equipment, environment… all of it.

The bright blue of the sunny sky had faded to a washed-out and uniform gray, so I had no way of telling the time. No way to judge how long I’d been out. Five minutes? Hours? I wasn’t hungry or thirsty enough for it to be longer than that. Our Black Hawk had been hit by something — probably a rocket-propelled grenade — at around ten in the morning.

My mind was fuzzy. That was the easy part to figure out. There was a big lumpy hot spot on the back of my skull where I’d hit something during the crash. My helmet was gone.

Most of the rest of my body felt sore and stretched, but hanging upside down will do that. Plus there would have to be some minor dents and dings from when I bailed out of the Black Hawk.

I paused, frowning.

Had I bailed out? I couldn’t remember doing that, though I must have because I wasn’t crumpled up inside the fallen bird.

Moving very, very carefully, I leaned back and looked down. The floor of the forest was about forty feet below me. Long damn drop.

Then I took a breath and tightened my stomach muscles to do a gut-buster of a sit-up. On good days I can bang out a whole bunch of these. Flat, on inclines, and clutching weights to my chest. Today was not a good day, so it took a whole lot of whatever energy I had left to lift my upper body high enough to see what was holding my feet in place.

I expected to see a tangle of branches. Or something from the chopper — rope, a cable, some of the net strapping used to secure cargo. I stared at my feet, at what held me to the tree.

No rope.

No cables.

Nothing that had been on the Black Hawk.

Nothing that belonged in this forest, either.

Nothing that belonged anywhere.

I was lashed to the branch by turn-upon-turn-upon-turn of glistening silk.

The strands were as thick as copper wire. And far stronger.

I turned and looked around at the rest of the tree. That’s when I saw it. It wasn’t that the day had become hazy and gray with clouds. No, there was more of the silk stretched in wild, haphazard patterns between the trunks and leaves.

All silk.

I wasn’t hanging from a tree.

I was caught in a web.

Yeah.

A fucking web.

-4-

It’s moments like this that make you want to seriously freak out.

I mean go total bug-eyed, slavering ape-shit nuts.

A spider web big enough to cover half a mile of treetops and hold a two-hundred-pound man — complete with combat gear — suspended? Yeah. Panic time. That is not normal, even for me. That is not something you start the day either psychologically- or tactically-prepared for.

Which changed the process.

Instead of letting calm passivity inform you and help you plan, you go bugfuck nuts and get the hell out of there.

Maybe you scream a little.

I did. Sue me.

I snaked out a hand and caught the thickest part of the branch I could, careful not to grab more of the webbing. Once I steadied myself, I reached into my right front pants pocket for my Wilson rapid-release knife. I wear it clipped to the lip of the pocket and it was still there. I pulled it free and flicked my wrist to snap the three-point-eight inch blade into place. That blade is short, but it’s also ultra-light and moves at the speed of my hand, which means it can move real damn fast.

I slashed at the web, terrified that the blade might stick or not be tough enough to slice through the fibers.

“Come on, God, cut me one frigging break here.”

The blade bit deep and the fibers parted.

I chopped and slashed and even stabbed at it, nicking my boots, slicing my trouser legs.

Suddenly I was free, and gravity jerked my feet straight down. My steadying grip on the branch immediately became the only thing preventing me from plunging down to a bone breaker of a landing.

I couldn’t close the blade one handed so I had to risk putting it into my pocket still open. Somewhere up in Valhalla I could see the gods of war raise their eyebrows and blow out their cheeks as if to say, “Boy’s tough but he’s a bit of an idiot.”

Whatever. I needed my other hand and I didn’t want to throw away the only weapon I had left. My rifle was probably in the chopper, and my holster was empty; the Beretta had probably fallen out while I hung upside down.

With a growl of effort and a lot of fear-injected adrenaline I swung sideways and up and caught the branch with my other hand. The bark was rough, but the wood was solid.

I hung there.

Boots swaying above the ground.

Streamers of spider web hanging around me.

What on earth had spun those webs? What on earth could have spun anything that big? The thought of some lumbering monster as big as a Range Rover scuttling toward me on eight massive legs was unbearable.

Was that what this was, or was my imagination taking the facts and spinning them out of control? Distorting them into science fiction implausibility. After all, there were spider colonies that made webs as massive as this. There were wasps and moths that covered trees with their nests.

That’s what this could be.

Not one big monster, but many small ordinary-sized ones.

It sounded good. It sounded great. It was doable. I could bear that.

Except that the strands hanging down around me were too thick. Too damn thick. No tiny insect body had spun them.

My mouth went totally dry.

Then I saw something that made it all much, much worse. Up there, tucked into the folds of the webbing, half-hidden by boughs of pine, were bones. I hung there and stared at them. I could see the distinctive knobbed end of a femur. In my trade you get to know the difference between animal and human bones.

The thing I was looking at was a human thighbone. Above it, obscured by shadows, were a half dozen curled and cracked ribs still anchored by tendon to the sternum.

Get out of here, I told myself.

I lingered a moment, though.

I listened to the trees, tried to hear past the soft rustle of branches stirred by leaves. Needing to hear any sounds that didn’t belong.

There was nothing.

Nothing.

And then…

Something.

Not close, but still too close. A scratching sound.

Like something climbing.

Then a brief, high-pitched cry. Not an animal cry, though. This was a chittery sound. Like a locust or a cicada.

Get the hell out of here right now.

My heart was hammering like mad, and sweat poured down my body. I had to get out of here right damn now.

I began climbing sideways, sliding one hand and then another to move along the branch. It was strong, but I was a solid two hundred pounds. The green wood creaked. And then there was a single gunshot-loud crack and suddenly I was moving downward. Not falling. Swinging. The branch broken but didn’t snap completely off. It swung me down like a lever and I thudded hard into the trunk and started to slide down. I instantly lunged for a second branch. It was smaller and broke right away, but it slowed my rate of fall. Not much, just enough for me to snake out a hand and catch another branch.

Which broke.

And another.

Which broke.

And that’s how I went down the tree. Each branch cracked and folded inward, slapping me over and over again into the trunk. Each time I cried out in pain, and each time I slid down the rough bark. I couldn’t hear the scratching sounds of whatever had made that nest, but no doubt it was coming. It was an awkward, painful, lumpy, uncertain process of fleeing by falling.

When I reached the lowest branch it held and I clung to it with desperate force, panting, praying, locking my fingers around it and holding on for dear life. When I built up the nerve, I looked down.

My boots were maybe six or seven inches from the green grass. I almost laughed, but instead I let go and thumped down onto the grass. My knees buckled and I dropped to them, then toppled sideways, my body feeling raw and beaten, my arms aching.

Above me the trees swayed and shadows seemed to curl and roil under the gray webbing.

I got back to my knees and carefully reached into my pocket for my folding knife. It was there, but as I drew it out I saw that it was the wrong color. Instead of bright silvery steel, I saw dark red smears.

That’s when I felt the warm lines running down the outside of my thigh. Very little pain, though. Or maybe so much pain elsewhere that I didn’t really feel it; but I knew that somewhere on my thigh was a cut. Couldn’t be too deep. I hoped. I had no first aid kit.

The trees above me rustled.

Get out of here, I told myself. You’re not bleeding to death, so get your ass in gear. Go anywhere but don’t stay here.

But that was as much bad advice as good. Fleeing was not really an option.

I tapped the earbud I wore, but there was only static. I figured that much. I quickly checked, and the little battery signal booster I wore was no longer in my pocket; until I could find it, I wasn’t going to be making any long distance calls. At best I might pick up chatter from anyone within a mile and on the same frequency.

I was in the Pacific Northwest, in the vast and seemingly endless forests of the Washington State timber country. All around me were millions of trees. Douglas fir, hemlock, ponderosa pine, white pine, spruce, larch, and cedar. The whole world was the green of pine needles and the dark brown of tree bark.

There had been four other people in that Black Hawk. There had been a briefcase filled with biological samples that I needed to get to my boss, Mr. Church, because he needed to get them into a goddamn vault where they would never see the light of day again. I was on my way back from a quick and dirty piece of business on the Canadian border where I’d helped dismantle a small but effective bioweapons lab. The bad guys were Serbians who had shanghaied a couple of biochemists and forced them to make designer bioweapons. Nasty stuff. Not doomsday plagues, but pathogens lethal enough to kill sixty percent of the crowd in Times Square on New Years Eve. That’s six hundred thousand potential victims.

I went in with two of my guys, Top and Bunny. My right and left hand. Top was First Sergeant Bradley Sims, a former Ranger who’d come out of retirement to fight in the Middle East war that had killed his only son and crippled his niece. He’d been recruited into the Department of Military Sciences because he was very probably the best special ops team leader in the business. Bunny was Staff Sergeant Harvey Rabbit, a six-and-a-half foot kid from Orange County. Looked like a surfer boy, fought like one of the Titans from Greek legend. Stronger than just about anyone you’re ever going to meet.

Top and Bunny.

They were out here. Somewhere.

Alive, I prayed.

Or dead, I feared.

The other three were the crew of the Black Hawk. I didn’t know them. They’d been sent to extract us when the Serbians went ass-wild on us and put forty guys in the woods with RPGs and LAW rockets. Our chopper had made maybe six of the eighty-two mile journey to the nearest populated town before it was brought down.

I needed to find my men. I needed to find that metal case filled with weaponized pathogens. A working radio would be pretty damn nice, too. So would a gun.

I froze. Above me I could hear the scratching sound.

Louder.

Closer.

I got to my feet and ran.

-5-

No, I don’t know what I was running from.

Maybe another guy — an ordinary chap or even a regular soldier — would have been stalled on that one thing. The giant web. And, sure, I was pretty freaked out about it. However I’m not an ordinary chap. I work for the Department of Military Sciences. We see the truly weird stuff that’s out there. Sure, most of the time that’s either a designer pathogen, a doomsday plague, transgenic manipulation, biotechnology like exoskeletons and cybernetic implants, nanites, or a dozen different madhouse attempts to cook up a super soldier. Frankenstein stuff. Jekyll and Hyde, if Jekyll worked for the government and Hyde was a field op. In the five years I’ve been rolling out with Echo Team and the DMS, I’ve seen horrors that stretch beyond anything I’d imagined was even potentially real before I’d joined. A prion-based plague that turned people into something too damn close to flesh-eating zombies. Genetically-engineered vampire assassins. Ethnic-specific diseases cooked up by modern day Nazi eugenicists.

Like that.

Giant spiders? Scary as shit, but if I could get me a good handgun or, better yet, a machine gun, I was going to ameliorate my terror by proving that armor-piercing rounds are an adequate answer to just about all of life’s little challenges.

The downside to that kind of bravado?

Yeah, I didn’t actually have a gun.

So, like any sane person who thinks there might be giant spiders in the trees, I ran away.

As fast as I could.

Then I skidded to a stop.

Far away and far downhill I heard the chatter of automatic gunfire. Heavy caliber rifles. AK47s, without a doubt. You go into combat on a regular basis you get to know the sounds of different kinds of guns.

Serbians.

Then I heard another sound. A long, ripping, soul-searing shriek of total pain. A human voice raised to the point of red inhumanity. It rose and rose and then was suddenly gone. Shut off. Torn away.

The sounds — gunfire and screams — had come rolling up the slope at me. Somewhere downland, bad things were happening. That was a direction I absolutely did not want to go.

But it was where I had to go.

God damn it.

I bent low, faded behind any available shrubs I could find, and ran toward the sound of battle and death.

-6-

There was a steep gully cut into the landscape and it provided shelter and an easier path downhill, so I slid down the side and jogged along the bottom. The ground here was moist and marshy and it was a good ten degrees colder. It was also much darker than I expected and soon I had to slow down and feel my way through sections that were black as night.

I fumbled my way around a bend in the gully when I smelled something burning.

Correction. Something burned. A past-tense smell.

Oil and copper wires and plastic. Meat, too.

I rounded the bend and there it was. Sprawled across the gully, its back broken, its skin black and blistered.

The helicopter.

The vanes were all gone. So was the tail section. The Black Hawk’s hull was crumpled from the impact with the ground, but I couldn’t see the kind of blast signature a rocket-propelled grenade should have made. And yet something had hit us hard enough to knock us out of the sky.

As I crept toward it I could see shapes inside. Twisted and withered from the heat.

Two of them. Both buckled into their pilot’s chairs.

Gone. Neither of them had ever had a chance. They’d stuck with it, fighting the controls of the dying chopper, and it had killed them down here in the moist darkness. Crushed them and cooked them.

Two men whose names I didn’t know. Part of an extraction team. Men I would probably have gotten to know once we were back in the world. We would’ve had beers, swapped lies. Become real people to one another.

Now they didn’t even look like people.

It took me three minutes to find the third man. What was left of him, anyway.

He lay against the steep slope of the gully forty yards beyond the smashed nose of the Black Hawk. His legs and face were burned, but it wasn’t fire that had killed him. When we’d boarded the chopper he’d taken possession of the metal suitcase in which the bioweapons were stored. Per our protocol, he’d sealed the case and then cuffed it to his own wrist.

The wrist and the cuff were still there.

The man’s hand lay on the ground between his feet. The case was gone.

The soldier’s body was riddled with so many bullets he was in shreds. Hundreds of shell casings lay in the damp earth. The Serbians had slaughtered him, a needlessly brutal demonstration of force to recover their bioweapon.

In the distance there was more gunfire.

They were still fighting. Their team had not been extracted and I had to wonder why. If they had the case, then why linger? Even if Top and Bunny were both out there, what use would it be for the Serbians to hunt them down? They’d won. All they had to do was leave and my guys would spend a couple of long, hard days walking out of these deep woods. By the time Top and Bunny reached a working phone, the Serbs would be back home, or they’d have vanished into a safe house.

Why were they still fighting?

Questions, questions.

I moved back from the dead soldier. Another man whose name I didn’t know. But I nodded to him, brother to brother. Acknowledging his life, respecting his death, making promises to his ghost I hoped I could keep.

I looked for any weapons. Nothing. I ran.

The gully split open and flattened into a streambed. One side of the stream was thick with trees, the other side a natural clearing. A Chinook helicopter lay in the field. Not stood. Lay.

It was over on its side, its propellers twisted like broken legs, the gray hull smashed in. Thin gray streamers of smoke curled from the engines. The grass and dirt was torn up and littered with more spent brass. And the exterior of the Chinook was splashed with blood and pocked with bullet holes.

I came up on the blind side and slunk along the bottom of the dead bird, but when I glanced inside I saw nothing but debris. No bodies at all.

And again, damn it, no weapons.

All I found was a torn open backpack, its contents spilled out like entrails. Among the junk I found two power bars and a full canteen of water. My stomach clenched like a fist at the sight of the food, and I tore open one of the wrappers with my teeth. I crammed the nearly tasteless bar into my mouth and chewed faster than I could breathe, then washed it down with half the water. It took an effort of will not to scarf down the other bar and to conserve the rest of the water.

In the distance the sound of gunfire had slowed to a few random shots. No more screams that I could hear. My best guess said that the shots were two to three miles away, and I still had no gun. There’s a lot of logic to the old saying that you should never bring a knife to a gunfight.

And yet…

I moved off in the direction of the last few shots I’d heard.

Now that I was in the open I was able to get a look at the sun. It was later than I thought. I must have been out for hours. I figured it for about two o’clock, give or take. That meant I had four hours of daylight left. After that…

It was going to be a moonless night, so despite some starlight, the woods in Washington State were going to get very dark, very soon.

I began walking again, keeping my pace steady so that I stayed cautious but still covered distance. It was almost fifteen minutes before I saw the first sign that I was going in the right direction.

It stood upright in the grass, almost perfectly vertical, like a post erected for a new fence. Slender and gray. A vane from the Black Hawk’s rotor. Snapped off near the base, driven inches deep into the wormy soil. The angle was right. The dying chopper must have hit the tops of the trees and then hurtled past this point to where it crashed and died in the gully.

As I drew near it I saw a couple of things that made me slow down and approach with greater caution.

The first thing I saw was that there was a slot of disturbed dirt at the base of the vane. From the angle of the resulting mound of pushed-up soil it was clear that the vane had struck at an angle. Then someone had come along and lifted the thing so that it stood improbably straight.

The second thing was writing. Someone had written a note in very crude fashion. The crudest. A fingertip and what looked like fresh blood.

I grinned. Cowboy was my combat call sign. The reference to ‘Indians’ was a reference to ‘Indian country’ — a shorthand soldiers use for an area filled with hostiles. He was telling me about the Serbs. The second line was easy, too. No need to translate what the ‘something in the trees’ was. The word ‘football’ referred to the steel biohazard case, and the strikethrough was Top’s way of telling me that it was gone. Balls. If the Serbs had recovered it, then we were back in deep shit.

I squatted there on my heels and considered the last line from the note.

What did that mean?

Then I got it, but it still didn’t make sense. Peter Parker is the name of the secret identity of Spider-man. I got that much; Top was telling me about the spiders. But why ‘Friend?’ Was he trying to tell me that the spiders were our friends? That made no sense at all. Spiders, natural or unnatural, were ugly, scary sonsabitches. I am not a fan.

And they were insects. How can an insect be a friend or not?

Did he mean that they weren’t carnivorous? Something like that? It made no sense to me.

The note had been coded because there were hostiles on the ground. Fair enough. I pushed the vane down flat on the ground and smeared out the message with the sole of my shoe. Feeling enormously insecure about the way this was all playing out, I set off to find my men.

Top was alive. Maybe that meant Bunny was, too. And if my luck was starting to turn, maybe all three of the chopper’s crew. Doesn’t hurt to ask the universe to throw you a bone every once in a while.

I located the footprints that headed away from the spot and followed, moving as quickly as caution and observation would allow.

And that’s when a strange day began getting stranger.

I found a dead Serbian.

Maybe ‘dead’ isn’t the right word. I found a big red splotch of wetness on the ground and, all around it to a distance of thirty-five feet, were parts. Arms, legs, chunks of meat. The man looked like he’d been hit by a grenade, but there was no sign of shrapnel, no signature of detonated explosives. Just a body destroyed in a way I couldn’t explain.

A dozen yards away was a second kill point, except the thing that had died there could not have been human, and this time there was clear evidence of the impact of a rocket-propelled grenade. Used at close range, too. The thing it had hit had been nearly vaporized. All that was left were glistening chunks of what looked like crab shell. Chitinous and rough, with faint yellow and blue spots. There wasn’t enough of it to make sense of its shape, though I still had that bad feeling in my head ever since I woke up with my foot in a web.

Some kind of mutant insect?

Maybe.

The shell casings on the ground told an interesting story. There had been a firefight, with the Serbians capping off a lot of rounds. The creature had apparently tried to take cover behind a pain of twin pines, but the RPG had blown the trees and it apart. The kicker was that there were 9mm shell casings in the woods on the far side of the combat scene. From the angle the brass had dropped, it was clear they were firing at the Serbians. The Serbian rounds had been fired mostly at the dead thing, with only a few shots returning fire from the guys with the small arms.

Did that make it a three-way fight? If so, the evidence suggested that the Serbians were more concerned with the creature then they were with Top and Bunny.

Not sure how to read that. Top and Bunny are generally scary enough to command full attention from any hostiles we meet. What could have unnerved the Serbs enough to more or less ignore them in a fight? The answer to that opened up new and very disturbing lines of speculation. I didn’t think I wanted to go down that path right now.

I kept moving.

I found a footprint punched deep into a spot of moist earth. Big shoe, military tread. Size fifteen-extra-wide.

Bunny.

The print was angled toward what looked like a game trail and as I bent low to follow it, I saw that there were more prints. Same shoe. No second set with the same tread. I had to think about the message back at the vane. It was definitely Top’s kind of thing, so why wasn’t I seeing his footprints?

And why were Bunny’s so heavy?

The answer came to me a split second before I saw the first drops of blood.

All along the game trail, scattered around the big man’s footprints, were random droplets of blood. Closer when the tread suggested Bunny was walking; farther apart when he was running.

The depth of the prints made sense now. Top was hurt and Bunny was carrying him.

Christ, has Top written me a note in his own blood? It seemed likely.

I moved on, and six hundred yards down the game trail I found another body. It was a Serbian. I think. There wasn’t a whole lot of him left.

His head was gone. Not just cut off. It was gone. Someone had taken it away.

One hand was gone, too. The lower leg was nearly off. The body lay in a pool of drying blood. All around the corpse were shell casings that matched the AK-47 still clutched in the man’s remaining hand. The barrel of the rifle was twisted almost at a right angle; the metal pinched shut as if it had been caught in a vise.

Sound carries, even in a dense forest. I should have heard these shots, unless they’d been fired while I was still unconscious. The blood was moderately fresh, though. So what did that mean in terms of timing? This fight had to have taken place no less than half an hour ago and probably no more than two hours before I woke up.

All around the scene were dozens of small, round indentations in the ground. I placed my right index finger into one and it was nearly a perfect fit.

No idea what the hell they were, though.

I looked around. The forest was still. Above me the trees were thick with dark green needles through which I could see patches of blue sky.

I moved on, keeping my knife in my hand, though it felt like a useless little toothpick.

The second body was a quarter mile farther on.

There was even less of this one. Just lumps of ragged red meat scattered around. If a guy swallowed a lump of C4 and exploded, the spread would be about this, though I didn’t think that’s what happened. Something had torn this guy apart. Torn him to ribbons.

I found no head, no hands.

There was another damaged AK47 and the boots on the dead feet were Timberland knockoffs. This wasn’t anyone from my crew.

Thank God.

But it was clear whoever was hunting these Serbians was also hunting my team. And it had killed two men who had been armed with machine guns. I had a knife. My confidence in the little pig-sticker was waning, let me tell you.

Still kept going, though. What choice did I have?

A half mile deeper into the woods I heard a sound. A voice. A fragment of something.

“…see that thing… Christ… Bunny…”

Then nothing.

I froze and tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Echo Team, Cowboy to Echo Team.”

Nothing.

I repeated it.

Still nothing.

“Cowboy to Green Giant,” I said, using Bunny’s combat callsign. When that didn’t work I tried Top. “Cowboy to Sergeant Rock. Do you copy?”

“… boy…?”

A fragment of a reply whispered in my ear.

And was gone.

Top’s voice, though. I was sure of it.

Without the signal booster the radio had less than a mile’s range. In these woods, with this density of trees, maybe half that. They had to be close.

I faded to the left of the game trail and instead ran through the tall grass. The trail wound through the trees, over hummocks, down through a gully, and deep into a shadowy grove of fir trees. I made no sound at all as I moved. I’m good at that. Last thing I wanted to do was draw fire if there were more Serbians. Or, I have to admit it, attract the attention of whatever was killing them.

I heard three things at almost exactly the same time.

The first was a rattle of automatic gunfire interspersed with the hollow poks of small-arms. Overlaid with that was a strange clicking sound. Almost metallic, but not quite.

Dominating both sounds, though, was the rising, ear-splitting, agonized shriek of a human voice calling out for God and his mother. In Serbian.

-7-

I began to run.

That turned out to be a stupid choice.

I was so intent on following Bunny’s footprints that I spent too much time looking down and not enough time looking around. Rookie mistake. Unforgivable, even if I was in shock.

The path followed rain runoff paths. Sometimes the ground was soft enough to take a clear print and sometimes exposed rock left me nothing to find. I reached a spot where a fallen tree blocked the path and I stopped and tried to imagine how Bunny carried an injured Top past the obstacle. There was no obvious route right or left, so I did the dumb thing and climbed atop the trunk to take a look. Sounds like a sensible plan if you’re out hiking with your friends. Not so much when the woods were filled with hostiles.

As soon as I stood up on the trunk there was a crack and something hot burned past my right eyebrow. The bullet couldn’t have missed me by more than a quarter inch.

Shit.

I threw myself forward, hit the ground and rolled, and as I came out of the roll there were two more shots. I heard them hit the tree. I spindle-rolled against the trunk, listened as a fourth and fifth shot chipped splinters off the wood, and then got to fingers and toes and ran like a scared dog north along the trunk. The shots were coming from the far side. There was a pause and someone said, “Dimitrije, go around, go around.”

The man spoke in Serbian. Not my best language, but I can understand the basics.

The speaker sounded like he was close to the torn-up roots of the fallen tree, which meant he was close to me. Dimitrije was probably going to circle the tree from the top end. Fair enough. Nice pincer movement.

I moved away from the roots and squatted down behind a copse of young spruces. In special ops they teach you how to become completely still. It’s not simply a matter of not moving, but a way of thinking. You become part of the natural landscape. You breathe slow and shallow, you blink slow, and if you have to move, you do it in time with the wind moving through the surrounding foliage. People who are bad at it move when they feel the breeze, which means they’re moving slightly behind the wind. Out of tune with it. The smart fighters listen to the approach of the breeze and they let it push them. They move at the same speed as the wind. They don’t make sounds that a forest wouldn’t make. Everything is about harmony.

I already had my stupid moment. Now it was time to be smart.

The Serbs had guns. There’s a tendency in people who have superior numbers and superior firepower to act as if they don’t require stealth. This is not so.

I saw him come around the tangle of torn-up roots. A big man. Taller and broader than me, with a crooked nose and black hair pulled back into a ponytail. Not Serbian regulars. These were probably ex-military mercenaries. Fine.

He held his AK47 well, making sure his eyes and the barrel moved in concert. But he was walking upright, ready to kill. Not ready to defend.

I made him pay for that.

As he passed the line of spruces I noted the cadence of his footfalls. Everyone has a gait, a walking pattern. He came within five feet of me and when he turned my way he saw trees and shadows and nothing else. His face turned and the barrel turned with it as he passed.

I rose up and as he took a step, so did I, matching pressure and sound.

Until I was directly behind him.

Then I reached out with both hands. My left was empty and I snatched his ponytail and jerked it back and down as hard as I could. The leverage in something like that is devastating. His head snapped backward, his back arched, the gun flew up and his finger jerked the trigger and fired a single shot into the sky. I wanted him to do that.

The second I jerked his head backward my right hand moved. The little Wilson rapid-release knife was blade down in my fist and I drove the blade into his eye socket, gave it a wicked half-turn and tore it free. His scream was high and shattering, but I was gone before his body thudded to the ground. He landed hard, twisting and thrashing and screaming. I hadn’t stabbed him deeply enough to kill him. Not yet.

I spun away and ran around to the far side of the tree, listening as Dimitrije came pounding up, yelling, firing randomly into the woods. He stopped over his friend and stood there, emptying his magazine as he turned in a half circle, killing a lot of leaves and chipping bark off of trees. None of his rounds came anywhere near me. By the time he’d emptied half a magazine I was on the other side of the tree and scrambling up atop the trunk. I peered over. Dimitrije blasted the spruce trees and clicked empty. His friend was still screaming and thrashing.

The killer inside my head smiled.

Then I was in the air, leaping at Dimitrije, hitting him between the shoulder blades as he slapped his fresh magazine into place. He star-fished in the air and his gun went flying. I bore him to the ground and let his body take all the impact, then scrambled up, drove my knee into the small of his back, grabbed his short blond hair with my left, jerked his head back and cut his throat from ear to ear.

I pivoted and leapt onto his friend. He had both hands clamped to his bleeding eye, so I corkscrewed the knife between his forearms and buried it to the knuckles in the hollow of his throat.

Silence dropped over the forest.

I tore my knife free and wiped it on his jacket, but my hand and wrist were soaked with blood. The knife went back into its holster in my pocket and I snatched up one of the AK47s. They are not my favorite weapon, but they’re sturdy, reliable and I had two of them. Between the two corpses there were six magazines. Fun. No grenades, though. And no satellite phone. Would have been nice to call my boss and arrange for the entire United States military to come rescue my ass. Not an option.

I slung one rifle, held the other, ran sixty yards into the woods, stopped, knelt with the gun raised as I listened to the forest.

No shouts in Serbian. No gunshots.

But I heard that strange high-pitched chittering sound again.

Close, too. On the far side of the tree, near to where I’d left the bodies. I heard it but didn’t see it. I waited a long time. The chittering sound faded and then vanished, leaving the forest sounding like a forest again.

After a long time of waiting, watching, and listening, I trusted the landscape enough to begin moving again. It took me twenty minutes to find another of Bunny’s footprints.

Armed now, I began hunting in earnest.

-8-

I raced the edge of a clearing and looked upon a scene from hell itself.

It was a war zone.

Three-sided and totally bizarre.

On the far left side of the clearing, squatting down behind a tumble of boulders, were eleven Serbians. Eleven. All of them heavily armed. All of them yelling and firing.

On the opposite side of the clearing were two of my guys. Bunny knelt beside the trunk of a massive tree, his Benelli combat shotgun smoking and roaring in his big hands. A few feet away from him, Top had a rough splint on his left leg made from tree branches and canvas strapping from the helicopter. His pants leg was dark with blood and his brown face was pale and grainy, but he held his Sig Sauer in rock-steady hands.

In many ways that was what I was expecting to see. Two groups of combatants engaged in some kind of a stand-up fight, with me as the X-factor that hopefully gave my side the winning edge.

Hope springs eternal.

Life, on the other hand, sucks.

Between the two sides, standing in the center of a hail of bullets, was something so very wrong.

It was a metal ball.

A big, broken metal ball.

Well, it looked like a ball. It was round, at least. Forty feet across, dull silver, with a double row of colored lights, most of which were smashed and dark. The remaining lights flickered with a sluggish green glow. A hundred feet behind it was the total ruin of a second one. That one had split open and burned; the shell was coated with black ash. Both balls lay at the end of long trenches and there were mounds of dirt pushed up in front of them. From the angle and the depth of the trenches, it looks like they’d come in fast and hot from a long way up.

Between the two balls were several humped forms. Maybe they had been spiders, or something spiderlike, but the force of that double impact had torn them apart and flung burning pieces across the ground.

Then I caught movement beyond the first of the balls. A form moved from the lee of the big craft and scuttled toward a small boulder.

The Serbians immediate shifted their barrage from trying to kill my men to trying to destroy this thing. The shape darted back to cover and a loud, high-pitched chittering sound trailed behind it.

Speech? Or the fearful cry of a creature in peril. Absolutely impossible to say.

All of this happened in a second, but my mind replayed it in slow motion because a lot had happened in that second. I ducked down into shadows to process it.

The thing that had come lumbering out was a spider. Okay. That just happened. It was maybe eighty pounds, gray-green with bright blue and yellow spots.

I recognized those spots.

A giant spider.

I had to give that a moment. Even though I’d been expecting something like a giant spider, let’s face it — you never really expect to see a giant spider. It’s like checking in your closet or under your bed and seeing a real boogeyman. You’ve been afraid of it all this time but you don’t actually think you’ll ever see it. Then bang!

So, yeah, okay. Giant spider.

Giant fucking spider.

By a big silver ball that might be some kind of landing craft.

Or, if the world was even more insane than I thought it was, a spacecraft.

I had to ask myself if I was ready to accept the reality of a giant fucking spider from outer space. Not the easiest question to ask.

And it’s a real bitch to answer.

Every molecule of your body, every neuron in your mind wants to say, “No, bitch. Get real.” But my eyes had just seen it. My team and a bunch of Serbians shooters were clearly seeing it, too. Reacting to it. As much as I might have wanted to, I couldn’t dismiss that as being a product of my own warped mind. This was happening to all of us. It was happening.

Giant alien spiders.

This entire chain of logic and acceptance took maybe a full second.

Then my mind shifted gears to analyze the scene the way a professional soldier should. The way a cop should. I’m both, so it was my job to make sense of this based on evidence and assessment.

There were two ships. One was clearly destroyed, the crew dead. The second was damaged, though I couldn’t tell how badly. Some of the lights were still on, the hull looked intact.

Survivors?

At least one.

I thought about the extent of the web network up in the trees, and the bodies I’d found along the game trail. Could one of these creatures do all that?

My gut said no.

That’s when I took a closer look at the boulder the spider had been trying to reach.

It was covered with soot and partly hidden by the shadows of a small pine tree.

As I studied it, the boulder moved.

Slowly, weakly.

It wasn’t a boulder, of course. As it shifted I could see yellow and blue dots. And blood. Dark red and as thick as tree sap.

A spider. Wounded, maybe dying. Trapped in the no man’s land between the two shooting positions.

I hunkered down behind a thick tree trunk. So far no one had spotted me, which was good. The Serbs were closer to me than my own guys, but that could be a good thing.

I tapped my earbud and very quietly said, “Cowboy to Sergeant Rock.”

There was static.

There was a burst of noise that sounded like a marbles bouncing around in a steel drum.

And then…

“…Rock to Cowboy. Repeat Sergeant Rock to Cowboy.”

“This is Cowboy. I’m on your eight o’clock, fifty yards back.” I could see Top turn his head to stare past the Serbs. I moved my head two inches out from behind the tree and back again. Just enough for him to spot me. Not fast enough to spook the Serbs.

“Damn glad to hear your voice, Cap’n,” said Top.

“Damn glad to be heard. Status report?”

“Doing moderately poor. Got a busted leg. Farm Boy stood a little too close to some shrapnel. We got the bleeding stopped, but we ain’t going to be running marathons.”

“Hoped for better news,” I told him.

“Yeah, well life’s all blowjobs and puppies, ain’t it?” said Top. “You got a plan?”

“Working on it,” I said. “Want to tell me what in the wide blue fuck is going on?”

“Don’t know much,” said Top. “Pretty sure one of those round ships clipped our bird. Took us both down. Farm Boy got me out, but the crew…”

He didn’t need to say. Didn’t want to say it, and he knew I didn’t need to hear it.

“Hostiles converged and we lost the package. We’ve been looking for you and playing tag with them. Trying to recover the package. And then our friends joined in. Been a moderately interesting picnic in the woods.”

“Copy that.”

“What have you got on our ‘friends’?”

“Big and ugly, but they don’t like the Serbs.”

“Why not?”

“Call it a failure to bond,” said Top. “Soon as the hostiles saw them they opened fire. Cut a couple of ‘em down. And Bunny thinks that it was a Serbian RPG that took both of their birds down. Rocket hit them while trying to hit us, and that was like cracking pool balls. Serbs hit them, they hit each other, and one of them hit us. Now the Spiders from Mars are pissed off and looking for some payback.”

I almost laughed. Top wasn’t one for pop culture references, but he was old enough to remember Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie’s best album.

“Copy that,” I said. “So…basically these Serbians dickheads pissed off our visitors from the great beyond.”

“Works out to something like that. We saw a couple of those critters ambush the Serbs. They do not play nice.”

“I saw the leavings. Does all this make them friendlies?”

“Enemy of my enemy is my friend,” he suggested.

“All well and good if we’re talking bipedal mammals, Top, but how’s that going to apply here?”

“I’ll be god-damned if I know, Cap’n,” he said, and that’s when I caught it. Soldiers tend to use trash talk or banter a lot. Sometimes we forget why. It’s not because we actually make light of the dangers and horrors of combat, it’s not that we feel we’re invincible killers, or that we’re the life-takers and heart breakers of legend. No, the jokes, the bullshit, the light-hearted chatter is all about pushing back the fear. The genuine fear that any rational person feels when they’re about to go into battle, or when they’ve survived one fight and they wonder how much of their supply of luck they’ve already squandered as the next fight approaches. I know Top is tough. None tougher, and I’ve met the best of the best. He’s an experienced soldier who has been in more firefights than most people have had hot dinners. He’s walked with me through the valley of the shadow of death so often his footprints are indelibly cut into the ground. He’s helped save the world. The actual world.

Right now, though, hearing his voice over the radio as killers and monsters, he was right there at the edge of it. Of his courage, of his ability to process terror, at the limits of his potential for handling stress. He was on that ragged edge where control is by no means a ‘given’, and circumstance and overwhelming odds make failure a rather likely option.

It hurt me to hear it. To know it.

It hurt just as much to feel it in myself. To know that even the pattern of my thoughts — the almost blasé way in which I’ve been accepting and processing the impossible data from today’s events — are the product of my mind trying to make light of it. To do otherwise would mean dealing with the reality of it.

Now, crouched down here at the end of the hunt, the bravado — inside and out — was burning off. Two of the three members of my team were injured. We had guns and ammunition, but we were badly outnumbered.

And there were the spiders.

I joked about alien spiders before, not I had to face that. Not just giant spiders. I’ve dealt with too many mutation and genetically-altered freaks in this job to really be brain-fried about that part.

Alien, though.

Alien.

A couple of years ago my team skated on the edge of a case involving a kind of Cold War that had grown up around technology that may — or may not — have been scavenged from crashed UFOs. I’d met two people who claimed to have some alien DNA mixed with their own. I’d seen a craft that I’m pretty sure did not come from around here — and by here I mean our planet and maybe our solar system.

So, even with all that you’d think I’d be prepared for what we had here.

You’d think that, but you’d be wrong.

Seriously, say the phrase ‘alien space spiders’ aloud and tell me if that’s ever going to fit comfortably in your head. Ever.

I could feel the change in my body as the absolute truth of it burned off the last of my ‘this can’t be real so I’ll just cruise with it’ self-deception. It started in my fingertips. They went cold right around the time they started to shake.

You know why?

Because in every single fight I’ve ever been in, it’s been good guys versus bad guys. Human good guys — me and my crew — versus human bad guys. Those bad guys, no matter how many or how bad, were still human. They were a known quantity. I could look at them and know how much force was needed to crack the hyoid bone, how many pounds per square inch it would take to shatter an elbow or knee, how exactly to rupture a kidney or spleen with a certain punch. All of that was knowledge already in my head. Even when outnumbered I was on safe ground.

But… aliens?

Spiders notwithstanding.

Aliens?

In my earbud Top said, “Cap’n—?”

“Still here,” I said. “Working it through.”

“Work fast,” he advised, “‘Cause something is happening.”

He was right.

Something was happening.

And it all happened real damn fast.

-9-

There was a flash.

A series of them.

Suddenly the whole forest went from a collection of shadows in purple and gray to a uniform white that hit the eyes like a punch. I cried out and reeled back, the rifle falling from my hands. The light was so bright that closing my eyes, squeezing the lids shut didn’t do it. I jammed my fists into the sockets.

I think there was a sound, too. Not an explosion. Something else. It was impossible to describe. I felt the noise as much as heard it. There was a sensation like a heavy vibration. Low and powerful, but it was like something inside my head was vibrating rather than something outside that I was hearing. There’s nothing in my experience that will make sense of it. The feeling — sound, sensation — was like how I imagine a microwave oven would sound. That kind of invisible, relentless, and powerful wave of force. My ears rang the way they would if I was standing next to a giant bell, but there was no real noise.

The sound and the vibration were terrible. Thank God they only lasted for a few seconds.

When it passed, whenever it was shut off, I collapsed onto the ground as completely as if I’d been dropped from a five-story roof. I felt breathless, smashed flat.

Then I heard something else. A familiar chittering sound.

Right behind me.

I rolled over. Tried to roll over. Reached clumsily for the AK47, and as I turned I saw something bulky come rushing at me.

Two somethings.

They were big and gray and spotted with yellow and blue dots. But they weren’t the same as the spiders I’d already seen. These had some kind of mechanic implants on their bulbous heads. Like a kind of hood, or maybe goggles. Hard to tell. It covered most of the creature’s many eyes. And they came at me really damn fast. The first one slammed into me and knocked me flat again. It leapt onto my chest and bent low toward my throat, snapping at me with jaws that snapped like pincers. Clear drool hung from the gaping mouth and splashed like acid on my skin.

I cried out in horror and disgust and punched the thing in the side with an overhand right. The spider staggered off of me, but then it immediately recovered and jumped back. This time its front legs jabbed at me, striking pressure points in both shoulders and leaning into them. My arms went dead. Just like that. The creature glared down at me, chittering in that high-pitched voice of theirs. The real eyes were dark and intense; the machine eyes burned with red fire.

I tried to twist my hips to buck it off; tried to kick. Tried hoist my dead arms to bash it off, but it countered every move by striking another pressure point with another of its powerful, articulated legs. It had more legs than I did, and somehow it knew enough about human anatomy to shut me down.

Then the second spider came scuttling over. It was smaller and its carapace was crisscrossed with scars that gave it a look of great age. And, somehow, of great power. Like it had earned those scars. Like they told its story. It had the same metal helmet covering half of its monstrous face, but even this was dented and dinged as if from hard use. As the creature advanced to climb atop me, the younger spider retreated in clear deference. The spider studied me for long seconds, but what it saw and what it thought were beyond me. I had no way to interpret the dark lights that burned in its eyes.

And yet…

The scars, the aggression, the combat skills. The cold confidence the creature seemed to exude — collectively, perhaps they did tell me something. They suggested something.

These were different from the other spiders. These were clearly warriors of some kind. Perhaps these were the special operators who did for their race what guys like Top, Bunny and I did for ours. Maybe I was letting my imagination run amok, or maybe I was seeing what was in front of me. Seeing what was actually there, rather than the horror-show image suggested by their alien appearance. Or, maybe it was the warrior in my head, the killer in my soul, who saw and recognized some kind of kindred spirit.

The spider turned and leaned toward my dead right hand. It bent low toward the bloodstains on my skin and on the cuff of my right sleeve. It sniffed at the blood; then bent closer and tasted it.

The chittering sound rose higher and higher for a moment, then faded away.

It turned quickly and looked at me again. The dark eyes fixed mine and for a moment we looked at each other with a kind of shared understanding that I’ve only ever had with fellow warriors on a battlefield. The kind of shared awareness that cannot be spoken, but which speaks volumes in that private language of the true warrior. Alexander the Great could have looked into the eyes of General Patton, and they despite a million differences they would have nodded to one another, understand something that cannot be expressed in actual words. I’ve even had that exchange with enemies, when catching the eye of the man you have come to kill, but fate opens a window in the smoke and fire and for just a moment you both realize something that no one else could ever grasp. Maybe not even most of your own troops. It’s reserved for those people who are defined by war, who are born to it, and who know that they will walk forever on the blood-soaked ground while a black and featureless flag ripples in the wind above them.

The spider studied me, and then slowly, slowly, it backed away, crawling off my body until it stood in the trampled grass. The younger spider looked from his older companion, to me, and back again. Confused. Not sharing in that moment of insight.

Forty yards away the Serbians had recovered from the explosion of light and sound and were firing at the metal ball. My guys were returning fire, but it was a fight they couldn’t win. The Serbs were spreading out, sending squads out in a flanking maneuver that was very quickly going to catch my guys and the remaining spiders down by the ball in a shooting box.

“Do something,” I snarled to the older spider. Sure, I know it’s stupid. I don’t speak spider and he clearly didn’t speak English. But he turned to watch the Serbs.

He did two things.

First he snapped out at me with one of his legs and the round tip of it struck me on the shoulder. In a nerve cluster. He hit me really hard and the pain was ex-fucking-quisite. I screamed and flopped around like a beach mackerel.

Then he twisted a leg so that he touched a fitting on his helmet. Immediately he and the other spider dropped down flat and curled their arms around their heads.

I had a half second to do the same, and as I did I realized that my arms were no longer dead weight. I wrapped them around my head and squeezed my eyes shut and screamed.

Another big fucking white light.

Another wave of the vibration that shook me all the way down to the bones.

Maybe their version of a flash-bang grenade.

Alien shock and awe.

I could hear, somewhere beyond the wall of blistering light and sound, the Serbians screaming. Maybe my own guys were, too. Probably.

Then the spiders were up and moving, the two of them flashing down the slope at incredible speeds. They raced toward the dazed Serbians and then they were among them.

I fought to get to my knees, to grab the AK47 and fire it. To join the fight.

All I managed to do was fall face-forward onto the ground.

A big black well seemed to open up beneath me and I fell and fell and fell.

-10-

I woke up to see that the sun was a dying red ball behind the treetops.

A voice said, “Welcome back to the world, boss.”

I turned my head. Just a simple thing like that took a lot of goddamn effort. Bunny sat with his back to a tree. His face was bruised and bloody. His shirt was torn to rags and there were crude bandages wrapped around his huge arms and chest. Beside him, Top Sims lay asleep. He looked fevered and weak.

“Is he…?”

“He’s bad,” said Bunny. “Shock. And his leg’s a mess. They’re going to have to be creative on it. I set it the best I could, but it’s going to need more than that.”

I looked around.

“I was able to salvage a sat phone from one of the Serbians. I made a call. Mr. Church is sending an extraction team. Should be here in a couple of hours.”

“Thank god.”

“Yeah.”

We were on the highest point of a clear slope. There was a campfire burning, the smoke spiraling up into the darkening sky. Farther down the slope was a dark, lumpy tangle of things that might have been human beings. Might have been. Bunny followed the line of my gaze.

“The Serbians.”

“Oh.”

“They did that.”

“They?”

He nodded up at the sky. “They.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

I looked around. “What about the briefcase?”

Bunny snorted. “They melted it.”

“Melted it?”

“Yup. One of them opened it and suddenly made that weird high-pitched noise they make. And then they pointed some kind of thing at it. Maybe it was a ray gun, the fuck do I know? Next thing the whole case and about ten feet of ground around it is a puddle of boiling mud and liquid metal.” He shrugged. “Guess they’re not big on bioweapons.”

“Points for that,” I said.

We sat in silence for a long time. Real long.

“Not sure how to talk about this,” Bunny finally admitted.

“Me neither.”

“At the end there, before everything went to shit… I saw two more of them spider things. Like the others, but…different.”

“I know.”

He cut me a sharp look.

“I saw them, too,” I said.

“You saw that they were different, right?”

“Oh yes.”

Bunny started to say something several times and stopped each time. Finally he gave it up shook his head.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

After maybe five minutes of silence during which the forest grew darker and the fire grew brighter, he tried it again. “This is going to sound stupid but…”

“Say it.”

“I think they were like us.”

“I know.”

“I mean, I think they were soldiers.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“Like us.”

I nodded.

He nodded back. After a while. Above us the first stars ignited. Somehow it made the sky look bigger. Farther away. Stranger.

“Those things,” he said. “The ones that were getting killed, not the ones that came after. They weren’t fighters.”

“No,” I agreed. “They weren’t fighters.”

“So the others. The two that came in later? What were they? Some kind of extraction team?”

I thought about it. Nodded.

He nodded again, too. The answer seemed to offer him some measure of relief. It was a theory and it made a kind of sense. Enough sense that you could tie a rope around it and use it to keep your sanity from flying off into the air.

“Boss—?” he asked much later.

“Yeah, Bunny?”

“Think we’ll ever find out who they were? Or… where they came from?”

I shook my head. Not because I didn’t think so, but because I simply did not know.

Above us more and more of the stars were kindled to brightness as the day burned away and night took possession of the world. We lay there, confused, scared, hurt, and watched the stars and planets and galaxies appear in their numberless brilliance. Which one of those was the home of our visitors? Would we ever know?

I sat and watched the wheel of night turn.

When I looked at Bunny I saw a single tear on his cheek. It glistened, reflecting starlight. I reached over and gave his shoulder a single squeeze. Didn’t say anything. Nor did he.

Somewhere far off to the south we could hear the faint beating of helicopter rotors.