Charger the Soldier (17 page)

"Okay. Look, if you can't speak normal
English, can we speak to someone who does?" Pam said. Dean bent his
head to hide a smile.

"I'm sorry," the woman replied. "I am trying
to be as clear and concise with you as possible, so you can explain
this to the public, but perhaps this chance remark will help. One
of our test subjects, a man named Dal, often refers to himself and
his friend over there as vampires."

On the other side of the window stood two
large men, twice the size of the doctors around them. Their skulls,
misshapen from biomechanical enhancements, gave them a jigsaw
demonic appearance, and their dark, thick skin armor made their
appearance even more repulsive.

"What will happen to these men when the war
is over?" Pam asked. The men must have volunteered for this
experiment, but had they known what would happen to them? Did their
families know? Would their families even recognize them now?

The young woman did not reply.

Pam sighed. "I don't think I can explain this
at all."

Later, Pam and Dean sat in a cafeteria with
the young woman and the general. Pam, clutching her coffee cup
tightly, said, "What happens if one of these Hyborgs gets in a
fight with an ordinary soldier? The soldier wouldn't have a
chance."

The general snorted. "Don't be naive. We've
programmed them for obedience."

"Like robots," Dean muttered. "No free will.
That sucks."

Pam elbowed him. They were there to get
information, not confront the military on questions of ethics. She
said to the general, "You said you had to induce rapid aging. Does
this mean that they will die sooner than a human?"

General Harris shrugged. "If they die in
combat, what's the difference? All I care about is that they take
with them as many of those alien rat bastards as they can."

The young woman spoke again. "We are not
entirely sure how long they will live, but we do know that without
replenishing their blood supply and having them ingest meat, death
is a surety. The lack of blood and meat seems to stifle the body's
ability to continually produce stem cells. The rapid aging was
necessary for their bodies to evolve the desired changes we wanted.
The power source to drive the mechanical parts is proprietary and
can best be described as a type of star-in-the-jar technology. Once
it is activated, the power source has an unspecified
longevity."

"This living armor you spoke of earlier; does
that mean it's intelligent? Does the armor think, even at a basic
level?" Pam inquired.

"Try to regard their armor as much like a
turtle's shell, or like your fingernails," the young woman replied.
"If it is damaged, the wound self-heals, making the subjects almost
impervious to destruction, but there is no sentient thought
involved. We are presently working on a companion organism for our
Hyborg hyper-hominids. We had some success with dogs being able to
detect aliens at a distance, so an electronically linked, mentally
compatible extension seemed obvious."

"A what?" Dean asked.

Apparently bothered by her inability to
communicate with Pam and Dean, the woman scowled before responding.
"We are working with convicts from Megiddo max, who are as yet an
unused asset in this battle. We are attempting to alter them into a
human/dog-like hybrid, capable of being linked to our new soldiers
mentally, much like a bluetooth device for your phone."

"Convicts from Megiddo, Armageddon, the place
from the Bible? Like murderers, rapists, and psychopaths, those
kinds of convicts?" Dean prodded. Pam thought he looked a little
uncomfortable with this. He probably thought it was sacrilege to
have a prison there; he'd want a church.

General Harris snapped, "You and your
organization have had no problem reporting on the alien scourge.
I'm sure you can report to commanders across the globe on our
efforts to help in the war effort. We don't need our own boys
shooting at these Hyborg soldiers we send into battle!"

"Wait, the idea of using convicts in battle,
especially convicts from the Biblical town of Megiddo, or from
Armageddon, as you call it, is just a bit too much to believe. Why
convicts from Megiddo?" asked Dean, with a slight tremor in his
voice. "You're picking the very worst of the worst."

Pam knew that Dean was a deeply religious
man. She was fairly sure that his father had suspected he was a
closeted homosexual, for the man sent Dean away to a distant
university right after high school. Dean had confided that he found
this difficult at first, but soon discovered the university
population seemed to accept any and all lifestyles.

"What does it matter where we get the
convicts from? These men were accessible for the war effort and
easy to obtain from a landlocked area not fully engulfed in the
invasion," replied the general with a disdainful look.

"Dean is right," said Pam, realizing that the
general was as suspicious as Dean's own father. "You're asking us
to report on the things you're doing here. If people learn that
these soldiers were once convicts, and convicts from Megiddo, no
less, all hell will break loose on this story."

"So don't report that!" snapped General
Harris.

The conversation grew stale and soon Dean and
Pam were dismissed.

As they walked down the steps, Dean said,
"I'm heading for a bar. I'm going to have a few drinks and try to
get my brain wrapped around all this technology I never heard of
before. Speaking of which, where the hell has the government been
hiding it, anyway? And why?"

"Maybe it's not the government," Pam said.
"Maybe it's the military."

"Could be. That General Harris seems like the
kind of guy that would go for the kind of thing they're doing to
people. You coming for a drink?"

"Not me," Pam said. "I'm going straight
home."

She spent the rest of the day with her mind
reeling in disbelief at the military's unfettered actions. The idea
that it had been given free rein to create monsters without the
public's involvement seemed unconscionable. However, in times of
war, Pam kept telling herself, horrendous things are done in the
name of humanity's need to survive.

After all, look at what she had done only
yesterday.

"G
od damn it, what the hell is it with these Germans?"
Thad yelled to the guy next to him in the foxhole. Paratroopers had
been dropping from the sky all day and all night, from the one
country destined to make a difference. "We're not gonna let them
invade us and take over America! Quick! Shoot that one over there
too, before he lands." The impact to Thad's helmet from the back
was so hard that he almost blacked out.

"You stupid shit!" his corporal screamed.
"What the hell are you doing? Stop shooting them! They're here to
help us. Try to use your brain just this once, you idiot!"

As Thad's head cleared and his ears stopped
ringing, he looked behind the corporal, behind the front line that
faced the alien menace. German troops were landing there too and,
as soon as they landed, they were in motion. Now they were passing
Thad and the front lines, moving at blitzkrieg speed toward the
stunned and scattering aliens.

It was this defining moment of fearlessness
that caused the Americans to begin the surge forward, instead of
backward. Abandoning the civilians they had tried to shield from
the alien onslaught, American soldiers joined the German troops and
began a tactic of hit-and-run fighting in wolf packs that seemed to
work very well. The aliens fought like rabid dogs; they made no
distinction between soldier and civilian. They did not seem to
sleep, and they would attack anything, even cars and mailboxes.
They didn't seem to care whether an opponent was human or not.

The real war began that day; no more ground
would be given. The first of the world's alliances in this war had
formed and was stalling alien superiority.

The following week started like a rally on
the stock markets, everyone scurrying about, excited about the turn
of events. German and American forces, joined by what remained of
the Canadian troops, were now coalescing into an effective wall of
military might that seemed to stall the invading scourge, which so
far had been unstoppable. Some parts of the globe had been hit
especially hard in the first few weeks of chaos, including Canada,
one of three major landing points for the aliens. Little could be
done now to stop the advance on Canadian soil, so it was deemed
best to add the Canadian strength to the fight on American
soil.

By Friday, it was obvious that those invaders
being crushed by the united military front were the most expendable
troops the aliens had. Even so, the standard alien soldier was
difficult to stop. Its body was enveloped in some kind of
semi-transparent slime, allowing the more solid center to move
forward and form into a variety of weapons. Their most popular
weapon was similar to porcupine quills, which were fired into enemy
combatants. It took a concentration of gunfire centered on the
solid parts of the aliens to have any real effect in killing them,
while all the time the human soldiers tried to avoid being skewered
by flying quills or directed rods resembling spears. If an alien
soldier managed to get close to a human soldier, it would try to
tear the human to pieces.

Reports started trickling into command
headquarters of large objects moving toward the united forces.
These large aliens, or alien machines, now moving slowly toward the
new front lines looked like they'd be even more impossible to
stop.

"I heard they were about twenty or thirty
feet tall," Thad said to one of the young Canadians.

"Where did you hear that?" Jeff was a tall,
skinny farm boy from central Canada. He often described his home as
the wheat belt.

"One of the chopper pilots was out on a
reconnaissance mission and said he saw the damn things moving,
maybe a hundred of them."

Jeff felt uneasy. Surviving for this long had
been hard and the thought of facing something even more devastating
was almost unbearable. He shifted, trying to find a more
comfortable place behind the overturned cars and trucks being used
as fortification. "Back on the farm, we got these critters called
ground hogs that would eat a whole crop in a week. We found the
only way to stop them was to flood the fields. Maybe we could do
that here. They can't advance if they got no grip, right?"

Thad said, "Maybe when one of the generals
walks past, we should mention it."

One of the German troops approached out the
darkness and said, "I just hear, one of the big aliens he maybe
fell over a nuclear missile silo. Big explosion. Command say the
aliens stopped and they seem confused."

Thad let out a whoop. "Maybe we can just nuke
them, saves us having to fight."

"Nein, they not die, just stop," the young
German said.

The youthful conversation carried on far into
the night and in the morning the three were still clustered
together behind their bunker of cars and trucks when a Major
General with a grim expression emerged from a command tent barely
fifty feet from their position. He hurried past them and into an
older building, to a command room occupied by other high-level
brass.

The morning news revealed that the large
aliens had resumed their slow and methodical march toward the
stalled front lines. The ineffectiveness of aircraft was discussed,
as well as the lesson learned from nuclear weaponry. Though the
arguing went on for some time, the next step was clear. These new
aliens were very different from what had been faced before, and no
one knew whether or not they could be stopped. There was only the
glimmer of hope that a surprise explosion of tremendous force like
the one that had just happened would be an effective tactic.

>>>

Charger sat polishing and adjusting his
plasma swords, while he listened to a newscaster summarizing the
early weeks of the war. "Humanity had few choices after the attack
started," the newsman said, "and we could not help feeling that
using any weapon, no matter what, was preferable to defeat. Most of
our cities fell victim almost at once to the mist the invaders
generated, a biological weapon that first terrorized humans, then
turned them into rotting corpses."

Charger shrugged. This was old news.

"Government arms like the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, formed to help survivors of catastrophes, were
faced with hellish chaos and were soon overworked and understaffed.
No cataclysm ever imagined by civic planners could have prepared
rescuers for the millions of corpses piling up in the streets of
cities and small towns on every coastline in the world."

Charger knew about those. He'd seen them.

The newsman continued. "Our military at first
mounted a brilliant defense, actually forcing the alien invaders to
scatter. But the aliens regrouped and again began generating the
mist that killed hundreds of thousands. The force of the invaders
was so strong that dead bodies piled up in the streets faster than
they could be put into graves."

"Accurate tallies of those killed by the mist
are available," Charger muttered, "so why doesn't this guy use
them? As of yesterday, it was 53,677,431 in America. My brain maybe
doesn't work as fast as it used to, but I'm still good at math." He
focused again on the opinion piece.

"The alien tactics are random, difficult for
military minds to understand," said the newsman. "The thought
processes of the invaders seem to bear no resemblance to the chess
game of strategy, but are more like chaos theory run amuck. And,
most puzzling, every time these creatures leave an area, all plant
life has been wiped out, leaving not a single root or seed, nothing
but the dirt. These invaders apparently don't want our home; they
only want to ensure that humanity will not survive. The question
is, why?"