Like a fever dream it appeared, a cross between a millipede and a crab, mixed with a dose of Herbertian sandworm. It pulled itself along by dozens of segmented legs tipped by hard, clacking claws. It shot out of the crater and gripped the ground, pulling up the elongated, chitinous exoskeleton. It had no eyes, of course-the enemy didn't go in for eyes when it created its workers-but the head of the thing, a ten-foot wide black mass of waving tentacles and lumpish sensory bulbs, seemed to be focused on Bess and her group. She felt her equilibrium wrench-things like this were not supposed to exist. In a sane universe there were no monstrous leviathans bursting from the earth and towering in the sick, yellow sky, cleaver arms waving, cilia whipping like the snakes of Medusa.
"Jesus Christ, Bess," snarled Gomer, scrabbling for his gun. The other members of the assault team had rushed to join them. Bess could almost smell their terror through the cocoon of her airproof suit.
"We can't kill that thing," said Bess, staring at the Digger, waiting for the inevitable-waiting for it to notice them. "Everyone-STOP MOVING!"
"We've got to fire, boss," said one of the soldiers. She thought it was Blake, one of the younger men in the crew. "Maybe with enough explosive bullets..."
"Vibrations," she said, lowering her voice. "It's sensed our vibrations. Team, this is a direct order-do NOT move a step from where you are right now!"
"And if it comes over here?" asked Sandford, sounding more calm than he must have felt.
"If it starts moving toward us, do whatever you can," said Bess, feeling her heart rattling in her chest as the monster finally-eighty feet later-pulled its entire body from the hole in the road and began turning in slow circles, its body glistening with mud and ooze and slimy secretions, the multitudinous clicks and clacks as its claws scrabbled for purchase on the ruined asphalt created a discordant symphony.
Most of the thing's body was flat on the ground now, but its 'head' rose twenty feet in the air. The tentacles swirled about the head, in an obscene corona of questing motions. Every nerve in Bess's body screamed for flight, but she held her ground. So did her men. Underneath the blinding panic she felt a surge of pride in them.
The Digger began to move. Not directly toward them, but in their general direction-if it continued on its path, it would miss them by thirty feet. It moved slowly, razor-tipped arms doing some of the work, with the smoothly-rolling muscles doing the rest by surging the massive body along. It obviously wasn't meant for above-ground motion, but Bess could easily imagine the thing gliding through the dirt, arms whirling and crumbling rocks, the thing's maws sucking in any trace of oxygen buried in the soil and spewing out whatever foul chemicals would make the planet more livable for its alien masters and their flora.
"It's coming," whispered Gomer, having regained his weapon.
"It can't see us," said Bess. "If we stay very, very still..."
"You thought about sound waves?" asked Gomer, a grim smile on his face.
"Not until this very moment," said Bess, her entire body chilling at the implications. "Thank you very much." If the thing could sense vibration-and she couldn't think of any other reason the monstrosity had chosen this spot to break ground and emerge-perhaps it would be able to pick up their words as they perturbed the air.
She raised her hand again in the 'silent' gesture, fighting to keep her breathing even and slow. In their suits they wouldn't be expelling gas-she'd been religiously checking her CO2 tank, and it was still only a sixth full of her waste exhalations-but maybe just the sound of their breathing would ping on the creature's sensory organs, wherever and whatever they were.
The tableau held as the Digger crab-crawled over the broken earth; the humans standing as silently and motionlessly as statues, the dinosaur-sized horror groaning and clicking across the landscape in slow motion, cilia whirling and waving like willows in the wind...and then one of the men broke.
It was Chet, one of the oldest soldiers among them and, Bess thought, one of the least likely to snap under pressure. She'd once seen him working on one of the electrical generators in the power station, supine beneath a half-ton fan unit when one of the supports for the machine had broken, sending the huge hunk of metal down, pinning him to the ground. As Bess and the others in the work crew had frantically tried to pull the thing off of him before the other support broke and turned him into strawberry jam, he'd calmly joked with his rescuers from his helpless position, the screws and hard corners of the metal digging divots into the flesh of his chest and stomach, blood seeping from beneath the iron. "Do me a favor, Bess," he'd asked. "I can't move to scratch it, but I've got a little itch."
"Where?" she'd gasped, shoving a crowbar beneath one side of the fan unit, glad that he was still conscious, still talking.
"Right where the circumcision was."
She hadn't known whether to snarl or laugh, but the rest of the men in the room had guffawed as they worked, and pretty soon they'd managed to heave the unit off of Chet. He lay there gasping and bleeding, cautiously feeling his ribs for breaks.
"You're a fucking pig, man," she'd said-but she'd been smiling while she said it.
Now, he broke and ran.
"Shit," Bess heard Gomer say from beside her-but he didn't move. She raised her weapon and switched the rifle from single-shot to automatic. Her breathing grew fast, but she didn't move another muscle while Chet took off at a sprint.
He got ten feet before the Digger noticed him, and then it was all over. She'd thought that the monster was ungainly but when it had prey in its sights it moved pretty damned quickly. It instantly changed course and aimed at Chet, who was flying across the rough ground at admirable speed-he wouldn't have won the hundred-yard dash against a real athlete, but he was moving faster than Bess had ever seen him move before. The rest of the men and women in the group shuddered in suppressed panic, but no one else budged, even when it became apparent that Chet was going to lose this particular race.
The beast tore a furrow in the earth as it ran, claws tearing apart hunks of rock and alien shrubbery. It plowed through a hummock of moss-covered stone like the granite was paper, sending shrapnel through the forest and a roar of violated matter through the air. Chet had achieved the trees and darted between them, but the Digger didn't slow as it slammed into the vegetation. Wood and fungus flew like splintered matchsticks.
At the last moment, for whatever reason (and Bess thought that 'reason' was far from the first thing driving Chet's mind), Chet tried to climb one of the trees. She could hear his screams and could see the fabric of his suit get snagged on the rough bark of the bole, slowing him. The suit tore, releasing him. He continued to fight his way up-two feet, five feet, seven feet-and the Digger was on him.
The cilia split like they were affixed to a clamshell, revealing a cavernous mouth filled with jet-black teeth. The monster dove, engulfing the man and slamming its jaws shut with a slobbery splat that sent crimson blood flying into the air.
"Fuck me," said Gomer.
The tree collapsed under the bulk of the monster. Dirt spread into mist as the Digger took its prey and plunged into the earth. A hazy cloud of debris rose into the air and Bess swore that she felt the ground rumble beneath her feet at the violence of the thing's passage. In seconds the entirety of the creature had disappeared, leaving the slowly-settling smog to drift down into the new crater. The Digger had, like a dog given a bone, taken its prize to a secure place to gnaw on it.
"Okay," said Curtis, his voice frantic. "We don't know how long we have. Bess?"
"Bomb squad!" she barked. "Get your asses onto the handles and let's roll!"
With a clarity born of fear and panic the men leaped to their stations, heaving the cart up and beginning a plodding trot forward. Bess and the remaining soldiers trained their weapons on the entrance crater, but they were all aware that, should the thing re-emerge, it wouldn't come out in the same spot it went in.
"Goddamn it!" swore Sandford. "Goddamn it to hell! How many people are going to die on this goddamn mission?"
"Maybe all of us," said Bess grimly. "But, Jesus, Doc-did you want to live forever?"
"That's the spirit," said Gomer, grinning manically.
A river flowed before them.
Bess remembered the picture in Curtis's office, that beautiful painting of a blue ribbon winding through green trees beneath an azure sky. Looking at the South Platte made her want to cry with frustration.
The shock that the riverbed had fluid of any kind didn't settle in her thoughts. What she saw before her wasn't the way things were supposed to be. The fluid was yellow, like the rest of the world. It was a bilious yellow with dim browns and blacks shooting through it, like the phlegm from a tubercular leper. And it was thick-more like mayonnaise than water, and it flowed slowly. The banks of the river were loose stone and black lichen. The pilings, remains of the bridge they'd hoped would still be intact, jutted out of the viscous slime like middle fingers mocking their temerity and stupidity.
"Now what?" asked Bess. They'd taken the opportunity to rest, and Sandford was moving from soldier to soldier, checking vital signs and gas readings. Bess and Curtis stood watching the sickening current ooze past them. The Chief seemed lost in thought.
"Curtis?" she asked, turning to him.
"The cart that the Bomb is in will float," he said, still staring at the river. "If our suits can handle that stuff, we'll send someone across and rig a pulley."
"What's going to happen at the station?" asked Bess. "When we get there, when we get the ARM into the building-what exactly are we going to do with it?"
"We'll turn it on," said Curtis. "That's all we have to do. You punch in your code, and in a half-hour the thing will activate."
"A half-hour," said Bess, troubled by a small sense of deja vu. "That's so we can get away?"
"Yes," said Curtis. "The procedure may be...violent."
"We've paid for this in blood," she said. "I hope it's as violent as you can get."
He turned to her, a half-smile on his lips. "I don't think you'll be disappointed."
"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe."
-Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky They broke from the forest just before sunset.
"That's a city, isn't it?" asked one of the scientists, looking down.
The road continued in its broken fashion down the slope for another ten miles or so, and the landscape it traveled across was smooth. There was no visible vegetation.
"A town," said Curtis. "Leavick, if I remember right. It was so long ago..." The man stood ahead of the rest of them staring down across the valley floor at the jumble of collapsed buildings. From their distance they looked like toys scattered by a heedless child.
"We'll rebuild," said Gomer. He took a suck from his water tube. "After the air comes back and the aliens are dead, we'll build cities ten times that size."
Bess could see Curtis's smile through his faceplate. It was grim, but it was a smile. "Leavick had maybe six hundred people living there when the meteors hit. Denver had six hundred thousand."
Bess had known, intellectually, how many people had died under the alien onslaught, but the view of the crumbled houses and barns was like a bulb lighting in her brain. She could still see the foundations of some homes and they were some distance from one another. The humans of Earth had the entire surface of the planet to live on-they hadn't crammed themselves into dark warrens, scraping and struggling for sufficient air. They'd built where they pleased, laid highways in thousands of miles of weaving ribbons, and if they didn't want to have a bunkmate or even a neighbor within twenty miles, they'd had the option to move out here, to Leavick, Colorado or any of the other thousands of towns in America. They enjoyed the open spaces, the clean water and the wide skies.
She felt a sudden rush of anger, a boiling resentment at the monstrous unfairness of the holocaust her species had suffered. Humans had built bridges across tremendous rivers, laid cables beneath the ocean, piled buildings up to scrape the sky, even flown across the gulfs of space to walk upon the moon...and the moon that was now rising in the yellow dusk, once they saw a face on it, then it became a symbol of man's indomitable bravery and technology, now was a dead lump of orange rock grinning down at a landscape from Hell. It was enough to make her weep.
Instead, she cleared her throat. "How much farther, Chief?" she asked. Curtis was carrying the maps, and though she had a spare set in her pack she knew he'd know exactly where they were and how much longer their trip would be. "Where's the atmosphere processor?"
"We won't make it tonight," he said. "We'll have to camp."
"We can make it to that town before we lose our light," she said.
"Why?" he asked, turning to face her. "There's nothing there anymore."
"Sure there is," said Bess. "That's a place humans used to live. I want to see it."
"I'm with you, Boss," said Gomer, and she heard a couple of murmured assents from the others. Even the soldiers who'd been bucking the Bomb all day and were now faced with the prospect of struggling it downhill over rough terrain for a few more agonizing miles seemed brightened by the prospect. "I've never seen a town before. I'd like to look around and see how things were, back in the old days."
Curtis looked around at all of them, a terribly sad expression on his face. "The houses will be broken and the fields have been invaded by alien plants. The town-and every other surface community-will do nothing but depress us. Is that how you want to see the world? Do you really want to witness the destruction, the death and hopelessness the aliens brought with them? Are those the images you want to have in your minds?"
"Yes," said Bess. "Yes, that's exactly what I want. I want to bear witness for those who died and lay a wreath on their grave. I want to stand in the middle of a boneyard and swear that these atrocities will never, ever happen again. I want to spit right in the bastard's eye and I want to do it in a place he never thought humans would once again stand."
"Fucking A," said Gomer, grinning. "Come on, Bomb Squad-daylight's a wastin', and we've still got miles to march!"
With a ragged exhalation that might have been a kind of cheer, the men heaved up their poles and moved forward, led by a few scouts who immediately began clearing brush and finding secure places to stand. Bess and Curtis watched them go past, and she nodded. "You're outvoted, Chief."
"I know," he said, shaking his head. "You're not going to like what you see down there."
"We have to see," she said. "We owe it to the six billion who died, and the six billion who will come after us. We owe it to humanity."
"So be it," he said. "Let's get going."
And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.
Revelation 6:1 The tents were almost set. They'd hooked together the frames, tightened the seals, and were pumping out the bad air, replacing it with a breathable mix, which was a weak kind of broth for lungs used to heartier fare. They'd chosen what had once been a farmyard to pitch camp, near a splintered barn that was nothing more than a skeletal frame with boards hanging from it like lampreys. Seven or eight skeletons-cows-were crumpled together in a heap outside the structure. Bess wondered what had gotten to them first, the Diggers or the Demons. Not that it mattered.
Bess and Gomer left the workers to finish the tent, skirted the latrine area they'd set up behind a particularly huge alien tree (many of the men had made crude jokes about shitting on the adversary) and cautiously moved toward the farmhouse.
The farmhouse had once been white, and you could still see the red of the trim, but decades of disuse and atmospheric cataclysm had reduced the colors to a faded gray and dirty black. Some kind of reddish moss spider-webbed over the boards and spread across what had once been the front yard. In the final light of the setting sun, Bess noticed lumps on the ground, human-sized lumps, but couldn't make out what they actually were beneath their covering of fungal niter.
"Let's go in," she said, pulling out her flashlight, letting her pack drop to the ground.
"Right," said Gomer, shrugging off his own pack. Now carrying only their oxygen, their guns and Bess's torch, they moved to the front porch. The man tested wood, stepping hard on the boards with his full weight, and though the old timber creaked and complained, it held. They walked to the front door, which had swollen tightly in its frame. Gomer shoved on it until it cracked open, sending up a spray of dust.
Bess went in first and looked around. "I've never been in a house," she whispered.
You had to whisper. She wasn't religious-and Gomer, for all his Bible talk, believed as little as she did when it came to a kind, caring Creator-but it was like being in church. The front parlor of the house was still and silent, and the beam of the flashlight revealed the stringy remains of curtains hanging lifeless from their rods. There was a couch that may once have been comfortable and inviting, neighbors had perhaps sat and sipped iced tea or bourbon while talking about the crops and the livestock. Now it was a mass of rusty springs jutting through a rotten mess of blackened upholstery. Pictures had fallen from the wall and lay under broken glass... broken memories. It wasn't a church, of course-but it felt like a holy place, the tomb of a saint, a place that demanded reverence.
Bess froze the flashlight on something on the floor. Gomer crossed the room, the floor moaning in protest and threatening to send him crashing through into the root cellar. He bent and picked up the illuminated doll and brought it to Bess.
She examined it in the cone of light. A plastic torso, smooth and sexless as a river rock, arms and legs missing, the head still attached with a few daubs of paint still vaguely recognizable as eyes, nose, mouth. A few strands of blond hair in a pattern of holes across the skull, and a swatch of what might, at one time, have been a pretty gingham dress stuck by some ancient glue to the plastic. Bess turned it around and around in her hands.
She'd had a doll as a girl, a proper doll. God knows where her parents had gotten it-it had probably come from one of the families in New America who'd lost a little girl-but Bess had loved it with all the passion and intensity of a three-year-old. She'd taken it to class, she'd taken it to sleep, she'd dragged it all around the caverns and passages like an extension of herself. She hadn't named it for months, somehow sensing, with her childish wisdom, that the naming was important and couldn't be wasted on just any Betsy or Baby. Later, while watching one of the DVDs that had accumulated in the common area (now, long gone-worn out from overuse), she'd discovered the perfect, the only name for her wonderful companion.
"Dorothy," she whispered.
"Pardon?" asked Gomer, startled out of some reverie. He'd given her the doll and then moved to an inner doorway. He stood staring contemplatively at the dining room and its dust-covered, decrepit furniture, perhaps wondering what dinners had been like for this family.
"I had a doll, back home," she said, raising her voice slightly. "I loved that goddamned thing."
"What happened to it?" asked her second-in-command.
"I don't know," she said, realizing that, honestly, she didn't know. All of her childhood memories skittered through her head, and in many of them Dorothy had been present, while in some of them she hadn't. There was no dividing line, no memory of losing the doll, or giving it to some other little girl, or being heartbroken and hysterical at the loss of her. There was nothing.
Her daughter came into her head, wrinkled and crying and fighting to breathe.
Spring had never owned a doll, and never would.
"Let's get out of here," said Bess, shivering. "This is..."
"A place for the dead," said Gomer, moving back to join her. "We're welcome to visit, but we can't stay here."
"No," agreed Bess. "No. Let's get back and see how badly they fucked up the tents."
She leaned forward and put the pathetic little hunk of plastic onto a table that had amazingly retained its legs. Her fingers lingered for a second on the doll and she wished she could feel the cool plastic, but through her suit she felt nothing but a slight pressure. She withdrew her hand, turned and left the farmhouse to its ghosts, returning to the alien night.
"Jesus that feels good!" said Bess, pulling back her mask and yanking the hood back over her head, inhaling deeply of the new air. It wasn't good air by any means-it smelled and tasted like a dozen unwashed bodies, it was too thin to fully satisfy her but, least it wasn't just her own body she smelled anymore.
"Big day tomorrow, Boss," said Zeke, offering her a tin of reconstituted baked beans. "Hungry?"
"Not really," she said, but she took the proffered meal and reached for a fork. "Thirsty."
"Something wrong with your water tank?" he asked, suddenly concerned. Their suits had done wonderful work protecting them through the long, harsh day, and any glitch was reason for worry-a broken water tube might not hurt, but a faulty seal would certainly kill.
"I'm a little tired of water," she smiled. She didn't feel like booze either, but wanted an opening to give the OK for her crew to have a little something.
"Ah," he said, comprehension dawning. He reached into his belt and pulled out a flask. "Care for a snort of something a little more fortifying?"
"No, thanks," she said, still smiling. "I'm in charge of this chickenshit outfit, and I need a clear head. When we get back to New America you can buy me a drink."
"Deal," he said, making the contraband disappear into his suit. "And, in a few years, we'll be up here stomping on grapes and making some kick-ass vino."
"Have you ever had wine?" she asked, amused.
"No, but it sure sounds good in all the books," he said.