SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

AFTER THE RED RAIN FELL Matt Hilton

Minutes Ago…

I should originally have been on point, but I’d been given the task of breaching the locks on the doors so “Duke” Dickinson went in first, and Duke died instead of me. I’d be a liar if I said a small part of me wasn’t thankful. Duke was no slouch, he was an experienced soldier, and he was armed with an M4 that’d tear new arseholes in an entire roomful of men, but the poor sod didn’t even get off a shot.

Our six-man team was stacked, ready for dynamic entry. I was the dedicated breacher, armed with a Remington 870 with a pistol grip and 12.5-inch barrel, and protected from any flying debris by a helmet, Oakley M-frames and breaching gloves, as well as an anti-ballistic vest over my battle fatigues. I aimed the shotgun at a downward angle at the lock, standing the requisite safe distance away, breathing slow and steady as I listened for the go. Cameras mounted on our helmets relayed live footage of the op back to a control vehicle where our officers counted down. I probably looked cool and collected but my butt-hole was twitching in anticipation.

Greenlight.

I pulled the trigger.

The shockwave from the Hatton round pulverised the locking mechanism and bolt. I ducked back against the jamb, allowing the shotgun to swing on its shoulder harness, and brought up my own M4 as Sgt ‘Hooky’ Johnson yanked the door wide and Duke powered inside. And that was it for him. A split-second of thunder as he brayed out a challenge that echoed through the warehouse, then steaming chunks of him splashed the threshold. Hooky was only a beat behind him, and he skidded on a slick tubular worm of Duke’s intestines. He went sideways, his shoulder rebounding off the doorjamb before he righted and lurched inside. His boots sucked at the splash of bloody guts on the concrete floor and he cursed loudly, but then the rest of us were charging past.

Things had happened so quickly that none of us realised there’d been no detonation, no drumroll of gunfire, that had ripped Duke to pieces, and we were already inside that gloomy space before I recalled that this was going to be no normal sweep and clear operation. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

The team was one man down and had no clear idea of what we were up against.

But we had an objective from which we wouldn’t back down.

We had to sweep and clear the building, each of us with an area of responsibility to secure with overlapping fields of fire, immediate, near and far zones. With Duke torn to shreds, it meant the responsibilities shifted for team members, but we were experienced enough that we could flow with the shifting circumstances. Hooky was now point man, and he cleared the immediate and near zones with one blistering hail of bullets while the rest of us formed a stack alongside the first corner we came to. While I crouched there, ready to proceed again, I looked for hostiles, dead or alive, but there were none.

So what the fuck had killed Duke?

Something shifted in the darkness ahead.

Hooky fired, his M4 lighting the corridor beyond with sporadic flashes.

“What the hell was that?” he said.

“Whatever it was,” snapped Jack ‘RP’ Wilson, “it got Duke. We aren’t leaving this place ’til I’m wearing its fucking skull for a hard hat.”

RP moved past Hooky, sliding along a wall in the darkened corridor, his carbine seeking targets. Hooky signalled the rest of us to move while he covered from the corner. I glanced at him as I passed, and saw that he was chewing his lips. He blinked at me. “I put half a clip into that fucker and it didn’t go down. Stay frosty, Muppet.”

Hooky wasn’t insulting me. We’d all gained monikers that had stayed with us since basic training. My real name is Bill Grover. Think of that blue puppet with the red nose from Sesame Street and you’ll understand why I got stuck with ‘Muppet’.

“I’m icy, Sarge,” I promised him. No way would I admit to almost shitting myself, even though we all were.

Then RP was in full reverse and his machine gun roared.

The two guys in front of me – ‘Brainpan’ and ‘Twinkle’ – made target acquisition at much the same time. Their M4s screamed in unison as brass rattled on the floor at their feet. Flashes and sparks lit the corridor, and beyond the drifting smoke I watched the shadows surge and contort, glimpsing reaching hands, and heads lolling on malformed shoulders. Many of their rounds struck walls, floor and ceiling, but as many bullets found their targets. The solid smack of projectiles through flesh was a drumroll that sung to my heart. I raised my M4 to join in with the chorus.

But then Brainpan edged back, his eyes rolling as he glanced at me. Twinkle yelled something animalistic, a split second before he was yanked bodily into the surging wave of inhumanity that swept towards us. There was the briefest attempt at fighting back, Twinkle’s carbine snapping off a short burst, and then the timbre of his yelling changed to bleats of terror. His last scream was ripped in two along with his body.

“Twinkle’s down,” I yelled, and propped my M4 to my shoulder, filling the gap he’d left with a hail of rounds.

Brainpan was still backpedalling. “Get the fuck out, Muppet! There’s no stopping them.”

He was right. For all that my rounds punched into bodies, scattered gobs of bloody meat and bone in all directions, the tsunami of bodies advancing along the corridor came on as if untroubled. For the first time I got a clear view of the mass of limbs and torsos through my Oakleys and knew I’d be as well trying to hold it back with a pea shooter.

“Fall back!” Hooky’s order was rhetoric; I was already backing up alongside Brainpan. We fired, but we were wasting rounds.

“Shoot them in the fucking head,” Hooky commanded.

I did, but it was advice he’d gleaned from watching too many B movies, and was woefully misinformed. I blatted skulls, one after the other for all the difference it made, because the insidious things just kept on coming and coming. Chest shots didn’t stop them either. The only thing that slowed them was to render their limbs to stumps, but that was only momentary because they still flopped and squirmed, worming their way across the ground with singular intent. You might think an eviscerated torso harmless, but that wasn’t the case. These things didn’t need teeth to gnaw or fingers to rip, when even their jellied flesh consumed.

There were dozens of them, maybe even hundreds, because it was too dark to tell beyond the sporadic flashes of our weapons. The darkness surged and moved, and I was sure that those we could see were only the leading trickle of a tidal surge.

“Where the fuck did they all come from?” Again Hooky was shouting questions for questions’ sake as he laid down covering fire. None of us knew. All we’d been briefed on was that there was a small cell of infected holed up inside the warehouse, and we’d been given the order to go in and clean them out. Nobody told us to expect a horde.

Maybe it was something to do with the hive mind these things were suspected of having. Once assimilated, you became part of the larger organism. Maybe their cell had reached out and called more of their kind. Whatever. All that was important now was getting back out again with our arses intact.

Four of us.

Minutes ago we’d been six. A third of our force down already, and our chances of making the exit door were getting slimmer with every expended round and yet another failure to drop any of those things.

“Fire in the hole!” Brainpan was growing desperate. Using grenades in the corridor was as likely to kill us as it was the shambling mass surging towards us. But what was done was done. I turned, crouching, ducking my helmeted head as if that would save me. The grenade went off within the mass of limbs and torsos so the detonation was dampened by the pile of flesh between it and me. The sound was like God’s loud clap, and then I was pummelled by raining chunks of meat and bone. Some of the sharper clumps rattled off my helmet or stuck in my fatigues. Thankfully a spearing rib fragment lanced into my antiballistic vest and not in my throat. Blood spray was all over my Oakleys. I didn’t try wiping the smear away, just yanked off the M-frames and threw them aside, even as I lurched up and ran back to the first corner we’d initially cleared.

Brainpan wasn’t named for his high IQ.

“Crazy fucker,” I snarled at him. “You almost took me out with that grenade. Next time a heads-up would be appreciated.”

“If it comes to it, I’d rather go out to a grenade than torn limb from limb by those things,” Brainpan replied. “Promise me, if they’re gonna get me, you stick a frag down my pipe first.”

RP smacked a gloved hand across Brainpan’s helmet. “Don’t fucking tempt me,” he snarled. “I might just as well do it now as later.”

Shaking my head, I checked on Hooky. The blaze of the sergeant’s carbine told me where he was in the opposite corner, and only his covering fire had given Brainpan and me a moment to chat. There was no more time for talk, just saving our butts.

We backed into the entrance vestibule. The shuffling, creaking and bubbling noises of our enemies filled the space as Hooky’s shooting fell silent. He jerked his head at the door we’d so recently blown open. “We can’t let them get out,” he said. “If they do that, and in these numbers, they’ll be all over town like sweat rash on a crack addict’s arse.”

He was correct. We thought we’d only to deal with a small bunch of infected people, not a horde. If they escaped the warehouse – an easy egress through the demolished door – their numbers would spread like wildfire once they got among civilians. We had to deny them escape, but I didn’t see how our guns, or even frag grenades, were up to the task.

But I guess that was what we were being paid for.

“When the fuck did I sign up for this shit?” Brainpan moaned.

“The same time the rest of us did,” I said, “after the red rain fell. Now suck it the fuck up, Brainpan. I don’t intend joining the flock, but neither am I going to let these bastards out if I can help it.”

“The world’s already gone to hell,” Brainpan reminded me. “Why fight it?”

“Because we can,” I said, full of shit. “No, because we must.”

My understanding of the plague is at a layman’s level, but here’s what I know. Back in 2009, after sending up high-altitude weather balloons, the Indian Space Research Organisation discovered three types of bacteria living in the extreme conditions of the upper atmosphere, at heights of more than forty kilometres, hailing them as proof of extra-terrestrial life. Debate was lively among scientists, some claiming that the bacteria could have originated on Earth, thrown into the upper atmosphere by volcanic eruptions, rather than having arrived there from outer space. Regardless of where the bacteria originated, it had to contend with conditions deadly to terrestrial bacteria. The UV rays alone were intense enough to kill them, let alone the extremes of temperature, lack of organic matter and sparse air particles, yet they flourished. Those were only the first of many discoveries concerning new life forms over the next few years, though nobody deemed them a threat to humanity. How wrong they were.

Intense solar flare activity, unprecedented weather patterns, and the shifting of the air currents all conspired against mankind, and in true Biblical fashion deluges from the heavens brought with them other uncategorised life that fell in gobbets of scarlet jelly-like lumps throughout many regions of the Earth. These scarlet globs were colonies of bacteria, and they responded robustly to the kinder conditions of the Earth’s surface, propagating wildly, and largely unchecked. Within days the simple bacterial forms had mutated into something more akin to parasitic amoebas. They weren’t picky about what they infested. Though they had no interest in the planet’s flora, everything else they contacted was fair game. All animal life was under threat of infestation, and the major culling of livestock and household pets wasn’t enough to stop the advance of the plague spreading throughout the world. How did you cull the wildlife, the vermin, or the insects, that continued the spread at exponential rates?

Throughout history there have been many major extinction events, most famously the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, and people began fearing that we were on the verge of the next and greatest extinction event the Earth had faced. But they were wrong. This wasn’t about extinction, it was about transformation. Infected creatures didn’t die, they became. Parasites require hosts to survive, and they need a manner in which they can continue to propagate their species. The mutations they caused were as wildly different and numerous as the creatures they infected. Seeing a beloved pet dog sprouting insectile mandibles and writhing tentacles armed with thousands of stinging needles can kind of throw you a loop, but seeing your fellow man transform into something equally unrecognisable, a walking delivery system for the alien species, can seriously fuck up your day.

There was a rudimentary intelligence in these new beings, one with singular focus. To spread their kind. It wasn’t about killing – apparently humans held the monopoly on that intent – but they weren’t beyond protecting themselves, and anything they deemed a threat was responded to with devastating consequences. Take Duke and the way he’d been torn to shreds. A similar fate was on the cards for the rest of us who’d the temerity to attempt stopping their progress. But as I’d just told Brainpan, we must.

The infected poured into the room. Literally poured, like thick lumpy soup from an overturned cauldron. It was easy to see now why our guns were proving ineffective against them, because they had truly assimilated their hive mind now only one conjoined thing about them. Their jellied flesh and contorting bones had merged and moulded together, so that instead of hundreds they had become one immense writhing mass of mutated inhumanity. The pulpy mass was enough to engulf and drown us, before we too would become one with it, but the creature felt threatened and wished only to see us destroyed. It had sprouted spines and claws, and huge scythe-like protuberances, and without thinking too much on it I now knew what had minced Duke Dickinson.

RP said he’d wear its skull for a hard hat. Well, he had the choice of dozens, because the heads that once belonged to living, breathing human beings were now bobbing and weaving on thick tubular arms, and in those warped faces the eyes bulged and glared, and again without too much thought, I knew that the monstrous creature could see through them all at once. The heads swivelled on those tubes like crab eyes, simultaneously fixing all four of us under baleful stares. It weighed and judged us, and made its own target acquisition. A barbed tentacle shot from the mass, the tip formed of something like hardened chitin, and it cut through RP’s chest armour like it wasn’t there. He barely had time to croak out his agony, before the tentacle spasmed and he flew off his feet, suspended in the air a moment before he was slammed against the ceiling, then the floor, his body was a sack of broken bones. The monster wasn’t done with him though. The spear tip must have parted down the middle, because it scissored open, and the upper half of RP landed wetly at my feet while his legs flew over the mass, where other snatching claws tore them into bony fragments.

“Fuck me…” What else could I say?

Now our team was halved. And with RP that was stating the obvious.

Brainpan screamed. But give him his due, he funnelled his horror into rage and he fired, unloading on the vicious tentacle weapon and ripping it to fragments. But it was hardly respite, because half a dozen more tentacles writhed overhead, and the creature had picked the next man to die.

Me.

Lance-tipped, one of those writhing tentacles exploded towards me. I threw myself down, and the tip struck the wall instead of my body. It jammed in the plaster, before the creature yanked free, but by then I was scrambling for my life. The lance scythed overhead by inches and again I just threw myself bodily away. I went down flat on my face. A second lance-tentacle snapped into the floor inches from my eyes, and gritty concrete peppered me. I scrabbled sideways, finally got my M4 up, and fired off an arc of rounds. Whether I hit anything of importance or not I’ll never know, because by then I was back on my knees, then my feet, and then hauling arse away from the next sweeping tentacle.

Something snagged my collar.

I hollered, battering furiously backwards with an elbow.

“Watch it! You nearly broke my fucking face!” It was Hooky, and he had a hold of me, propelling me towards the door we’d so recently entered by.

“Sarge, where’s Brainpan?” My words were a breathless wheeze.

Hooky thumbed backwards.

I looked, but my vision was filled with grit and tears and I could make nothing distinct out of the writhing mass now filling the vestibule area.

The harsh detonation of a grenade hinted at where our pal was. But it was followed seconds later by the ripping and tearing of flesh, Brainpan moaning as each chunk of him was torn away.

“Should have held on to that grenade, Brainpan,” I said as I slammed my shoulders to the wall alongside the doorjamb.

“Hold that door, Muppet.” Hooky was braced against the other doorjamb. His carbine flashed.

I fired too, but the mag fell empty after a short burst of rounds. I grabbed at a full mag even as I dropped the empty one, rammed in the fresh ammo. Before I could hit the arming bolt my M4 was snatched upward. A hand – human-like – but on the end of an insectile arm with too many joints, wrenched my gun up and away. Another one grasped my throat, even as a third punched me in the groin. Only my armour saved me, but I still experienced the dull ache in my nuts from the impact. A lance speared for my face. I ducked out of instinct, my chin mushing into the jellied flesh encircling my throat, and the lance-tip careened off my helmet and sank into the doorjamb with a crack louder than a gunshot.

I fought to get free of the hand choking me. But I went down, and now the insectile arms rose up and the hands transformed into wicked hooking talons. They raked down on me, not to rip me apart but to ensnare my clothing and drag me towards the pulpy mass now rearing over me. Hooky swung in like a barbarian warrior, his M4 empty, but still a club. He batted at the arms dragging me, breaking fragile limbs that at once reformed, growing needles that hardened into giant thorns. Something akin to a giant thresher arm ripped sideways through the air and hit Hooky in the chest. He flew out of my vision, and if I’d to be totally honest, out of my immediate concern. I tore away from the grasping limbs, and fell out of the door.

How many minutes had passed since I’d gone inside?

It’d be under three, but it had felt like an eternity.

Five heavily armed soldiers had died in less than one hundred and eighty seconds. What did that mean for the rest of humanity? I was never very good at math, but even I could add up our chance of survival if this thing was allowed to continue unchecked. If it were only about halting this one mass then perhaps the human race had some hope, but this was only one of millions of outbreaks already reported. Though this was the first where the individually infected had been known to come together in one massive conjoining. Was that the plague’s eventual intention, to become one entity? A world-wide mass formed of a singular living organism? Fleetingly I imagined a planet wreathed in a reddish pulpy mass, the only signs of terrestrial life the trees and bushes, all animal life consumed – no, combined. It was a nightmarish snapshot, but it was enough for me to rage against it.

“Sarge?” I yelled. “Hooky! Where are you?”

The chatter of his gun told me he was still fighting for his life.

I looked back to where our command and support team was entrenched. There should have been a dozen armed troopers, vehicles, and a 50-cal machine gun. They were no longer where I’d last seen them. I saw the back end of a truck – troopers stacked in the rear – burning rubber for a nearby underpass.

“What the fuck?” As usual my question was rhetoric. I knew what was wrong. Our ill-fated assault on the warehouse had been observed via our helmet-cams, second by second, and death by violent death, and our officers had given the order to fall back from a fight they knew they couldn’t win with conventional weapons. They thought both Hooky and I were dead, so I could partly forgive them for abandoning us, but they should have made sure. You didn’t leave anyone behind, not ever.

That thought galvanised me, because I’d all but abandoned Hooky to his fate, so who was I to judge? I immediately turned to the open doorway. My Remington 870 still hung on its sling from my shoulder, and I’d regular ammo in the chamber – once the Hatton round was fired, you needed a backup plan in case the breach man came under immediate assault. I swung it up into play, and went back inside.

The amorphous creature now filled the vestibule area, a writhing mass of limbs and protuberances less identifiable. Heads on tubular arms swung towards me. One of those malformed faces was still identifiable by its twinkly blue eyes, the defining feature that had given him his nickname during basic training. There was no hint of recognition in Twinkle’s eyes as they swivelled towards me. His mouth opened in a soundless snarl and his teeth were wicked barbs.

“Sorry, Twinkle,” I whispered.

I blasted his head to mince.

“Muppet? Muppet!”

Despite the odds, Hooky was still alive. I looked at where the creature seemed to be focusing and saw the vague form of Hooky barricaded behind an overturned desk. He was out of ammunition for his M4, and down to only his sidearm. Rather than waste bullets, he was using his revolver’s barrel to bat away the questing hands reaching for him, but other thin, pulsating tendrils had wrapped his arms and one leg. The creature seemed to understand that he was no longer much of a threat and had chosen to assimilate rather than rend him to pieces.

“Get it the fuck off me!” Hooky roared.

I racked the Remington, fired, racked and fired.

Chunks of protoplasmic jelly flew, splinters of chitinous stuff crackled on the floor. The bulk of the creature swung towards me, but those tendrils kept a firm grip of Hooky, tugging him up and out of hiding. He fired at close range with his pistol, to little effect.

“Muppet! Do something!”

“I’m trying, I’m trying!”

Racked and fired.

“I’ve one round left. I’m not gonna waste it!” Hooky promised.

“Don’t! Let me…”

Too late. Hooky placed his gun barrel under his chin.

Our gazes met, both our heads shaking in denial.

Hooky squeezed the trigger.

“Fuck!” he yelled. “I miscounted. Muppet, you’ll have to do me. Don’t let this thing have me.”

“Can’t, Sarge,” I said.

“Fuck you, you can. Just fucking do it. That’s a bloody order!”

I fired.

But not at Hooky. I placed the shot into the nearest claw bearing down on me. I’d tried to count my rounds too. How many left? I racked and the spent shell clattered at my feet. It caught my eyes as it bounced, and only then did I see the squirming tendrils that had wormed across the floor to latch around my ankles. I turned the Remington on them, but the gun clacked empty. I used the stock as a club, mashing the tendrils into the floor, kicking and dancing free. When next I checked, Hooky was suspended in the air, and now it wasn’t only tendrils that had him, but four of the insectile arms. In desperation, Hooky had yanked out his knife, his final recourse to cut and slice.

“Muppet! You coward! Just fucking do me.”

I threw away my shotgun. Pulled out my sidearm.

Deeming him more trouble than he was worth the creature lanced Hooky through the gut, the tip spearing out of his lower back, dripping with his viscera. Blood flooded his mouth, but he turned to me, his eyes pleading. You can do it, his expression said.

OK, Sarge, mine said.

I shot him in the face.

The creature must have sensed his instant demise, because it suddenly whipped half a dozen lances into him and they scissored, chunks of bloody flesh and splintered bones flying overhead. Then those lances whipped towards me.

I tripped, but good job, because my fall took me back out of the door and I slid down the short incline to the pavement. Before I’d got my arse under me, the monster was forcing its gelatinous bulk out of the doorway, reminiscent of the way an octopus can contort and constrict to negotiate seemingly impossible places. As its compressed form cleared the doorjamb, it grew exponentially, almost flooding the ground around the exit with barely recognisable shapes. The heads had absorbed into the mass, but now they began popping out on those stalks. Rolling eyes searched for and then fixed on me. Sitting there, I fired, and my rounds took some of those faces, some of those bilious eyes, but for each one I obliterated a couple more oozed out of hiding.

It began pouring towards me, and those waving arms that came through the door reached out. But they didn’t snatch at me; they simply wavered overhead, the fingers moving like an impatient pianist’s.

I didn’t run.

Why bother?

Something squirmed in my chest and I knew.

I allowed my handgun to slip from my fingers and reached down to fasten it over the splinter of rib bone that had pierced my vest when Brainpan let loose with that first grenade. The bone was red with gore as you’d expect, but the red was too jellified to be human. I pushed down on the rib and felt a corresponding scratch against my own sternum.

Sonofabitch…

The bone had punctured my vest, got through my fatigues to the skin beneath, made a shallow groove in my flesh. The wound was so inconsequential that it hadn’t really registered when I’d expected to be torn to ribbons by the detonation. Shit, at the time I’d only been thankful that the rib hadn’t sliced through my windpipe. Now I wasn’t as sure.

The squirming was in my throat in the next instant, and in my gut and groin. I felt as if I needed to shit. I did pee; there was no controlling it. I rolled back my head and peered up at the hands above me. They now gestured, coaxed me, soothed me with their gently waving motions.

Now…

I am becoming.

Bill Grover is a memory, one that will be forever lost, forgotten, no more. Muppet barely exists anymore. I can’t recall the names of my teammates. They aren’t important. They were a threat but they have been dealt with. I shouldn’t be troubled with their memories. They… are… no… more…

I look to the greater part of me. Those welcoming hands, those faces that are me, those lancing spines that will protect me, and I reach up to accept.

A noise.

Some dim recollection tells me what it is.

Something called an ‘officer’ once watched me.

Abandoned me.

Called in this rocket strike.

I don’t know what a rocket is any more.

I don’t even recognise these final words that play through my fleeting conscience, but I know they are dangerous.

Offsuuu… I moan in warning to my beautiful brethren.

Rohcutt…

My words lose meaning.

I am become.

White and heat and burning…

I am…