Zone Yellow

Chapter 4

“People, we’re faced with the worst disaster ever to confront the Imperium: invasion, on a large scale, by non-human creatures who apparently intend to take over our world. They’re in all the major cities we’ve heard from. But we’re a long way from helpless. We have defense forces and trained and well-armed troops. They’ll be here soon. In the meantime we have to do all we can to hold the enemy off. Sigtuna has been selected as the headquarters for our defense in this province. Other forces are deploying elsewhere. I was placed in command of the defense here, and I need good men and women to help me. First I have to requisition stores of supplies to support our effort. I have lists here which I’ll distribute in a few minutes. Now, I’m calling for volunteers to man collection stations.”

A plump, middle-aged fellow spoke up. “Collect what?” he demanded.

“Whatever is in the town that we need in order to fight the Ylokk,” I told him.

“What’s this ‘lock’?” he wanted to know.

“We’ve determined that ‘Ylokk’ is the name by which the non-human invaders call themselves.”

“Non-what?” somebody yelled.

“The Ylokk are not human beings,” I explained. “They appear to be rodentia, descendants of highly-evolved rat-like ancestors dating back to the Cretaceous era.”

“I saw one fellow, looked human to me,” a thin woman shrilled. “This is just an excuse to justifying killing harmless strangers!”

“How close did you see him?” I interrupted her.

“Half a block,” she grumped. “Human as I am. Wearing an overcoat and everything!”

“If you’d seen one as close as I have, you’d know they’re not human,” I assured her. “In any case, we are certainly not going to stand idly by while they take over our country.”

A burly young fellow stood up. “I saw two of em break down the door to the grocery,” he said. “Knocked a man down; heard screams from inside, and an explosion, sounded like. Human or not, we can’t put up with that stuff right here in our own town! I’m volunteering, Colonel, for whatever I can do to help throw em out.”

Others spoke up, pro and con. A few who had gotten a better look at the rat-men tried to tell the others about them, but were met with surprisingly vigorous resistance, based on the theory that the Government was persecuting poor immigrants. Finally, I put an end to the debate by using a chair on two hard-looking fellows who had eased up to me and tried to hustle me. The chair was a light steel folding one, but it sent both of them back to regroup. Then I had to draw my issue pistol and put a round through the ceiling to get everybody’s attention. The room was in a near-riot condition, but they got quiet in a hurry when a shot was fired. A meaty fellow with a bloody nose pushed through to confront me.

“Go ahead, shoot me!” he challenged. “Your fascist tricks won’t work here!”

“Go tend to that nose,” I told him. “I don’t intend to shoot anybody but the enemy. I never met a Fascist. Mussolini’s been dead a long time.”

He snorted and turned to face the roomful of excited citizens, and started to make a speech. I spun him around by the coat collar.

“I don’t know who you are, Fats,” I told him, “and I don’t give a damn. Sit down and shut up.” I gave him a hearty shove to help him on his way. He tripped and fell on his back, and looked up, squalling. A fellow with a bleeding scalp jumped forward to help him up. “Here, Mr. Borg, let me just give you a hand here,” he gobbled, and gave me a dirty look. Borg got up with no difficulty, and ran along the wall to the door and out. The thin woman who had insisted the Ylokk were just harmless strangers darted after him. The noise level abated a little.

“Listen to me!” I had to yell to be heard. “This is war! We’re going to win it. If anyone here is in doubt as to which side he’s on, he’d better make up his mind right now. All in favor of lying down and letting these rats take over, move over to this side, please!”

Feet shuffled, but nobody moved.

“Fine,” I said. “Now that that’s settled, let’s get to work.

I gave them a resume of our resources: a hundred and fifty more-or-less trained troops, two hundred and ten townspeople, and another eighty-five refugees from Stockholm and other places, including too many women, kids, and elderly men. We had our six buses and five heavy trucks (one had broken an axle), and few local cars, and four light trucks; one field piece with fifty rounds, twenty-six hunting rifles, six revolvers, with a few rounds each, plus ten of the new anti-disruptor gadgets. Plenty of water from the town’s system; a warehouse half full of food, mostly canned goods; assorted blankets; extra clothing and so on. The Swedish weather is inclined to be cold all of a sudden.

“We’re in pretty good shape to hold our own,” I told them. “We can’t stand a long siege. The garden vegetables will have to be rationed, starting now.”

“Say,” a lean, hayseed type yelled. “Them’s my vegetables yer talking about.”

I told him he’d be compensated and he calmed down. Funny how people can keep their minds on money when their entire way of life, and life itself, are at hazard.

Lars Burman came in about then; I’d sent him out to reconnoiter to give us an idea of how many of the enemy were in the area.

“We’re bottled up,” he blurted before I could shush him. “They’ve encircled the town, occupied the close farmhouses, and set up roadblocks all around. There’s hundreds of them, maybe thousands! We won’t be getting any reinforcements, it appears.” By now my little meeting was in near-riot condition again.

I soothed them, told them I’d have jobs for all of them, and questioned Lars more closely about troop dispositions. They had set up a thin line all the way around town; easy to punch through, if we’d had anywhere to go. They didn’t seem to care about the field HQ in the tent.

“For the present,” I told my audience, over their muttering, “we’ll sit tight and leave the next move to them.”

A fat old fellow who d been an army officer bustled forward. “We can assume they’ll close in after they think we’ve been sufficiently weakened by hunger and nervous stress,” he told me. “They’ll advance along the main streets into town, and that’s where we have to be waiting for them. I suggest we place our eighty-eight-millimeter in the square, where it can be swiveled to command whatever street they come on.”

I agreed with him, and picked ten able-bodied fellows in the crowd as squad leaders, telling them to recruit up to fifty volunteers each, arm them as well as possible, position them in the side streets, and be ready to flank any advancing column that appeared.

Lars came back from looking out the window. “Farmhouse or barn on fire to the east,” he reported. “Lots of the rats swarming over that way, too.”

A little man who’d been making a lot of noise uttered a wail. “That’s my house!” he yelled at us as if I’d ordered it burned. He started for the door. I asked him where he was going.

He turned and gave me a hurt look. “I’m not going to stand here while those animals destroy my place!” he yelled. There were a few faint cheers.

“What do you intend to do about it?” I wanted to know.

“I’ve got a weapon,’ he told me, and patted his coat pocket. “I’ll take a few of the vermin with me . . . and maybe…” He trailed off. He hadn’t quite realized he was committing suicide.

“Stick around,” I suggested, “and you can help do something effective.”

“Guess I’d better,” he conceded. He went to the window and turned and yelled that now the barn was gone, and it was too late to save the house, so what was it I had in mind. He whirled back to the window, which was open. “Listen!” he yelled. I did so. There were sounds of farmcarts on brick pavement, and shouts. I went over. Ex-captain Aspman was down there in the courtyard apparently organizing some sort of convoy of wagons hitched to shaggy northern ponies, loaded with our most strategically important supplies. I wondered where he thought he was going.

I called down to him, “Hold everything right there, Aspman!”

“Like hell I will, damn you!” he shouted back. “I’m going to save the people of Sigtuna, even though tjou intend to betray them!”

That was all it took: the roomful of civic leaders behind me all tried at once to climb on top of me. I had to hold them off without hurting anybody. Then they formed up in a semicircle with its end against the wall on either side of me and just out of reach. The shrill little woman who, I’d realized, ran the local social scene was front and center.

“You all heard what the captain said,” she yelled. “That’s him,”―she pointed at me―”right there―the stranger who came bursting into our city and is trying to take over, so he can sell us out to the strangers―strangers, like him!” With that off her flat chest, she subsided to muttering.

I took the opportunity to try to say something. “I’m Colonel Bayard of the Net Surveillance Service. I’ve been appointed by General Baron von Richtofen to assume command of this Field Headquarters, and this is it! Aspman is a fool and I had to relieve him, so just calm down and start doing what needs to be done.”

“So you’re the big man, eh?” the old witch cackled. “Let’s see some papers to prove that, feller! Anyways, I never heard o’ this Net Survey and all!”

“There wasn’t time to issue written orders,” I told them, feeling like someone offering lame excuses. “But while we stand here and gab, the Ylokk are making their troop dispositions. I say let’s interfere a little! You―” I pointed to the fellow who’d jumped me earlier. “You like to get rough; come with me and I’ll give you something to get rough with.” He stepped forward and opened his mouth to tell me to go to hell, but just then we all heard a yell from down below. I was first to look down into the courtyard; it was swarming with aliens, who had already pushed the carts over and herded the dozen or so men back into one corner. Aspman was dithering; then he drew a pistol he’d gotten from somewhere and before he could fire it, a rat-man flattened him with a disruptor. The people behind me screamed. “Why, they killed Captain Aspman! Look! He’s dead! His insides―”

The next moment they were all yelling at me to do something. I told them to calm down and wait for further instructions, and went down to the courtyard. The rat-men were still crowding in through the open gate that I had locked an hour before. I could see them in the street where the roadblocks had been removed, advancing unimpeded, the nearest only a few yards away. I pushed past an overturned cart and collared the uniformed sergeant who was taking over for Aspman and asked him what the hell was going on. I had to yell to be heard, and I used my dress saber on one Ylokk who seemed to have picked me as his special project.

“Had to get out, Cap’n said,” the sergeant told me, at the same time putting a slug into the midsection of a tall, lean alien with three-inch incisors. “Said how the big shots were grabbing all the food and guns for themselves, and planned to make a deal with the enemy to let em have the townspeople in return for―”

“That’s all lunatic ravings, Sergeant. Who unlocked the gate?”

“I did, sir; Cap’n’s order, sir, to clear the way so we could make a run for it, sir.”

“You also removed the barricades, I suppose,” I said.

He nodded. “Had to move fast, Cap’n said.” He glanced at Aspman’s messy remains. “Guess Cap’n was wrong, sir. But he had the rank, and―”

“You did what you had to do, Sarge,” I comforted him. “Didn’t you think about the fact that you were opening a way in as well as out?”

“Cap’n said . . . they wouldn’t advance, had a deal with you, sir. I see now he was lying, just wanted to save his own sweet butt.”

“What about the guard detail at the city gate?” was my next query.

“Called ‘em in,” the non-com admitted. “They’re here, somewhere, I guess.” He looked around the crowded yard, where the Ylokk had now subdued all but two small groups of bleeding men, herding them into corners, and leaping it to bite, rather than using their weapons. The men were still firing, bringing down the Ylokks until their corpses formed makeshift breastworks. A few of the aliens had abandoned the attack and were now crouched, nibbling on their own dead. They ignored the human corpses. Apparently they liked rat meat better. I wondered why they were taking so many prisoners.

I gave the Sergeant his instructions and told him to get through to one of the embattled squads, and I forced my way to the other, climbed over the heap of dead Ylokk, and joined the firing into the crowd of now-confused aliens until it became hard to find a moving target. Someone had closed and barred the gate, so no more were arriving via that route, and the ones inside couldn t get out, but I heard a yell over the din and looked up to see a man fall from a third-story window. It was Borg, the greedy merchant. A Ylokk was looking out the window from which the man had clearly been pushed. I took aim and put a round right between his long, ivory-yellow incisors and he fell back, but was replaced in a moment by two others. They went down in a hail of gunfire from the sergeant’s bunch. I nailed the next one. Things began to get quieter, then almost silent. I looked across the hundred-foot-square courtyard and saw no Ylokk on their feet. One, with a yellow stripe on his overcoat, was lying near me, with his eyes open, moaning feebly. He’d been gut-shot. I climbed over to him to put him out of his misery, but he looked around at me and said clearly if squeakily in Swedish:

“Let me save my life and I will give you an empire.” Clearly, he’d boned up on our local history: those were Mussolini’s last words.

Before I could tell him I didn’t need an empire, the red eyes closed and he was dead.

I managed to get the uniformed troops lined up, and assigned them the job of shaping up the civilians. “We have to get through and close the city gate,” I told them. “We’ll form two squads”―I picked one of my NCOs to lead number two, so as to leave my sergeant in charge in the courtyard―”and advance along the parallel streets to the old city wall. Then we’ll move in on the gate.”

There were no rat-men in the side streets, and we made our rendezvous with no strife. The gate stood open; it was a rusty wrought-iron affair, intended only as a decorative replacement for the original Medieval oak-plank-and-iron-strap barrier, but it would at least slow an advance.

I did a reconnoiter of the area; no Ylokk in sight. Apparently the ones who had been in the street had retreated. They weren’t very enthusiastic warriors. Outside the gate I saw a party of them forming up in a column, no doubt preparing to make use of the treacherously opened gateway. They noticed me closing it, and two started toward me in the unbalanced-looking, slanting-forward, feet-pedaling gait of their kind. It appeared the rodentia hadn’t made the transition to upright posture as successfully as the early primates had. They looked like oversized meerkats. Maybe that was why in all our familiar A-lines, Men were in charge while the rats hid and lived on what they could steal from Man’s bounty. Anyway, I stepped out to where I had a clear shot, put one over their heads―they still apparently hadn’t realized our weapons would kill at a distance―and they went to all fours and ran down a side-alley.

“No guts for the close-in work,” my top sergeant, one Per Larsson, commented. “All we got to do,” he said, “is to get our manpower organized, and charge. They’ll run.”

“I hope so,” I told him. “Fall ‘em in now, Sarge, and try to explain what we have to do.”

“We going to take that bunch there?” he asked, sounding a little shocked.

“That very one,” I confirmed. “Let’s have a twenty-man front, ten deep. Fall in here, outside the gate, make sure your front rank are armed, and the rear ranks, too, as far as our weapons will go. Rear ranks to load and pass weapons forward. We’ll start at a walk, laying down aimed fire; when we reach the letter-box there”―I pointed to the blue kiosk with the yellow bugle―”we’ll double time. As we take casualties, we’ll close up and concentrate our fire on whoever’s leading them.”

“Yessir,” Larsson said, saluted, and took off, yelling orders.