EnEmE: Fall Of Man (4 page)

Kiebler and I gasped in surprise. As I saw Banyan’s headless corpse slump forward on the concrete, my mind turned off. I was overcome with rage. Without thinking about what I was doing, I launched myself at soldiers. A deep piercing scream of rage filled the air, and it wasn’t until seconds after the whole melee that I had realized that it had come from me. The man who had quite literally saved my life less than an hour earlier was now dead and I was upset. Let’s face it; this was a much worse day than I could have ever anticipated.

In my seething rage I threw myself at the senior officer. Taken by surprise, he was unprepared and fumbled his shiny gun. As we tussled on the ground his hippy comrade nervously levelled his rifle, but hesitated, unable to get a clean shot and not wanting to hit his superior officer. I used that advantage to grab the rifle and shoot from the hip, aiming generally for the only exposed area on my long-haired enemy, his face. The gun hummed and quickly charged, firing off a smaller blast than Banyan had gotten. All the time spent on the firing range in combat training scenarios paid off. I hit my target, first try.

When the gun fired, it wasn’t the glowing charge energy that fired. A lifetime of watching sci-fi shows left me expecting to see a blue or red laser fire at my enemy, but that just wasn’t the case. The same as when Banyan was fired upon, the glowing energy didn’t shoot forward, it just simply seemed to serve as a charge or catalyst for something, I don’t know. It was some sort of transparent, nearly invisible wave of energy, almost like a solid ball of sound.

In any event, the energy ball hit its target, peeling the hippies face off and splattering it on the ceiling of the emergency entrance car port. Thick chunks of tissue clung and dripped from the stucco as the junior officer’s body fell backward. His body convulsed and the armour rattled on the ground.

The black general I’d been struggling with was suddenly climbing over my shoulder again, a long arm reaching out toward the rifle that now rested in my hands. In a fit of rage I screamed, turning and slamming the butt end of the shiny rifle full force into his face. Startled, he fell backward again, at which point I climbed on top of him and drove the butt end of the gun home again, 2-3-4 times into his face before I heard Kiebler.

“Jace!” she yelled, pleading at me with her eyes.

The soldier beneath me was still and unmoving, I looked around to see two more full armoured soldiers pointing at us and shouting. They broke into a panicked sprint. I tucked the gun under my arm and quickly hopped over to Kiebler, grabbing her arm and telling her to run. We ran along the building and toward an open parking lot area. Bricks suddenly erupted from behind us, pelting us with bit of hard clay. The running soldiers were firing at us.

“Keep running” I yelled to Kiebler as I slowed to level my gun and fire back.

A ball of solid sound whizzed by my head and a breath later a car in the lot behind me exploded. The force of the blast caused me to stumble, but I quickly regain my balance, levelled the gun and fired.

The first shot hit the ground in front of one of my armoured assailants who had dropped to one knee to steady his gun; the asphalt in front of him erupted and sent gravel and tar flying into his face, clouding his vision and sending him stumbling backward. The other soldier was already levelling his gun at me while in mid-run. Luckily I had the quicker draw and fired before he could. A much smaller energy bust than the last one, so it didn’t seem to damage his armour, but it hit him in the midsection, lifting him off the ground and spinning through the air, up over a parked car and down hard into the ground.

I turned to see Kiebler standing next to her car, fumbling with her keys.

“Move over. I’ll drive,” I screamed, running toward her just as she’d finally gotten her door unlocked.

To her credit Kiebler was a smart girl. She comprehended the severity of the situation and there was no argument about whose car it was. I hit the gas and tires screamed. As I approached the driveway of the emergency exit, a large army truck rolled into place, blocking the way. There was a large crowd of hostages being gathered to the right, so my only options were to turn around or drive through a group of innocent and bewildered people.

I turned the car with a loud screech and begin moving quickly toward the back of the lot. As I approached the chain link fence separating the back of the hospital parking lot from the lot of the adjacent liquidation store I stepped on the gas.

The car exploded through the fence a split second before more fence and earth exploded behind us from one of our armoured friend’s rifle blast. I guess they had survived. I was more concerned with our car being airborne and the paved parking lot heading quickly toward our windshield. Unbelievably, our predicament wasn’t caused by the explosion that we’d narrowly avoided, but the fact that the hospital had been built up onto a hill, created by the building company when they had excavated the ground for its foundation. I was aware of this and if memory had served me correctly there was a good three to four foot drop between the two lots.

Memory was wrong. It was at least an 8 foot drop, meaning our crash through the fence was more like hitting a jump. We sailed a good 25 feet across the parking lot before crashing into the ground. We hit with an ear-splitting shriek, the undercarriage sparked against the asphalt and the front bumper of Kiebler’s car peeled off like a Band-Aid and was flattened by our rolling tires. Luckily we had both buckled up, so we were still securely in our seats.

“Fuck. I’m still making payments on this thing,” a forlorn Kiebler exclaimed, hands to her face.

Feeling smart, I replied, “I don’t think that’s gonna be a big priority when…”

I was interrupted by being smashed in the face with an airbag. I’d like to say I didn’t lose consciousness again. In all honesty, I did put up a good fight and I think it is fair to say, thanks to the flashes of white material and concrete in my memory, that I remained semi-conscious.

Thanks to my lead foot, the car sped on across the parking lot and careened into the front corner of the building that housed the liquidation store. There was a hard impact that reminded me that I was awake and alive. The car spun right around as chips of the concrete building façade pelted the hood and windshield. This must have finally done it in, because the high-pitched whine told me the engine was still revving, but it wasn’t moving anywhere.

My door popped open and before I could stumble out a firm, strong hand grabbed me and pulled me out. In a daze I looked up and saw military dog-tags, followed by a large chin on a face that looked like Guile from the Street Fighter videogames.

“Relax. It’s okay,” he said, dragging me away from the car. Then, over his shoulder, I saw the sitting terrace on the exterior of the upper floor of the store. On it was perched the biggest black man dressed in army camo I’d ever seen. He was squatting behind an enormous Gatling gun, preparing to fire.

With that, the huge man opened fire. Bullets sprayed the concrete and mowed down about a dozen angry-looking armed civilians on the other side of the street that had been moving menacingly toward the building.

“That’s a big fucking gun!” I said as my saviour dragged me over the asphalt.

“It’s an XM214 Minigun,” said the man with box-cut blonde hair. “And yes, it is.”

“It doesn’t look very mini to me,” I replied.

As the man lifted me upright and I got my feet under me, another soldier was pulling Kiebler from the car. He was a lean, muscled Hispanic with chiselled features, dressed in camo cargo pants and vest. My rescuer and I ran toward the entrance of the store beneath a shower of gunfire, followed seconds later by Kiebler and hers.

We all landed in a heap in the center of the store in a pile of sporting equipment. A grizzled looking old man peered curiously from behind an antique looking glass and wood counter. The soldier pulled a flashlight from one of his pockets, and shone it in my eyes.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you know what day it is?”

“Umm, yeah…Monday,” I replied.

“This one looks fine, too,” the Hispanic offered after glancing at Kiebler’s eyes.

“What’s going on?” asked Kiebler.

“Stay here,” the white soldier said.

With that they ploughed back out the front door and drew the automatic rifles slung across their backs and sprayed a volley of fire at the shrinking group across the street. The elderly gentleman behind the counter stared at us, looking as if he was debating whether we were of any value.

Moments later they returned, soon followed by the large man that had been firing the Gatling gun from the balcony.

“Sorry about the interruption, but I think you folks can see we’re in deep shit,” the white soldier offered. “I’m Master Sergeant Cameron Hauer. These are Sergeant Lamont Freeman and Corporal Michael Alvarez,” he said, pointing to the large black man and Hispanic man respectively. “Over there is retired Captain Ben Albright,” Hauer said, pointing at the elderly gentleman who now had a big grin on his face.

“Thank you for helping us,” I responded, nodding to the military men in the room.

Kiebler looked taken aback at first, maybe intimidated by all the raging testosterone in the room. We looked at each other for a moment, until the nagging question in her mind boiled over.

“What’s going on here?” she blurted out. “Why were you shooting those people?”

The men all looked at each other for a moment.

“It’s obvious somethin’s fucked up and people is actin’ strange, right?” Freeman said first, in a defensive tone that made Kiebler and myself pull back a little.

Hauer stepped in with a cooler head.

“What Sergeant Freeman means to say is that it’s obvious something strange is going on,” said Hauer. “Some sort of sleeper cell has been activated and regular citizens and military folks are taking arms and rounding up civilians with no word or warning. No orders given. They are taking them somewhere and some of them, like medical staff, are being executed on sight.”

“Shit’s gone crazy,” added Freeman. “Our own commanding officers have gone rogue, started ordering us to round up civilians. Some of those who started the rounding up were just following orders, but when they started telling us to kill people a group of us spoke up and refused to follow. Our own people turned on us and we had to grab a jeep and fight our way out.”

“These people aren’t thinking for themselves,” said Alvarez. “It’s like their minds are being controlled, like they aren’t even themselves anymore.”

The other soldiers looked at Alvarez in a way that suggested he may have said too much. The look silenced Alvarez and made him blush, looking embarrassed for sounding so crazy.

“It’s okay,” I said. “If I told you the day we’ve had, we’d sound crazy, too.”

“All right then,” said Hauer. “Now that you know who we are, why don’t you tell us about you?”

With that, I introduced myself and Kiebler to the group…and then told them about our day and the attack that we were fleeing when they rescued us. To my surprise there was no reaction of doubt in their faces.

“You mean you’ve got one of those things in the hospital?” Hauer asked.

“Yeah, that’s what I said.” I replied.

“Why do you sound like you’ve seen one before and that you’re not at all surprised?” I asked, trying to keep the sound of suspicion in my voice to a minimum.

Hauser looked around tentatively at his fellow soldiers. There were no objections, just stares in other directions. Although his eyes were slit in suspicion, former Captain Albright gave Hauer a nod.

“Well,” said Hauer, “there is something to that.”

Back when we started bombing the Taliban in 2001, we were some of the first over there in the sand, kickin’
ass and stickin’ the American flag up Al-Queda’s ass.

Freeman and I were still second class privates at the time, and Albright was our Master Sergeant. We were doing our turn at prisoner duty, guarding hostiles captured in battle, some being interrogated.

One of our prisoners was named Abagull, and he actually wasn’t that bad a guy. There was even some doubt as to whether he had any useful information. We nicknamed him Abby. One day Abby started chattering and carrying on, with a crazy look in his eyes. The translator said he was babbling incoherently, gibberish about aliens and things inside of him. It got so bad that Abby had to be isolated.

One night we heard blood-curdling screams coming from Abby’s cell. When we got in, it was like a scene from a slasher film. Blood was sprayed all over the walls and Abby was screaming bloody murder, which was pretty much what was going on. Abby had worked a screw out from the bars in his tiny cell window. He had used it to scratch and pierce the skin on his right side and pulled and torn his own side open with his fingernails.

The most shocking part was the organ that had fallen from his side. We were aghast, and I admit that I froze for a minute. Just long enough for it to move. It actually turned and looked at us, blinking with big, bulbous eyes, before turning to hiss at Abagull.

I couldn’t even breathe. I took step into the room. The sound made the thing hanging from Abby’s side turn and hiss, flailing a long claw in my direction.

I opened fire by reflex. The creature and Abagull were both dead nearly instantly. I reacted in fear and I didn’t mean to kill Abby; I hadn’t even realized that I had until after it happened.

Freeman and I called for Albright right away, hoping he could make sense of what we saw.

When Albright got there, he had us seal off the solitary cell right away. He called the brass and we were told to just forget it and report for shift change before hitting our bunks.

When we woke up in the morning, the camp was overrun with high ranking officers and five-star generals. They called Albright, Freeman and I to be debriefed by a General Morris. In the debriefing we were informed that what we had seen was classified. They said it was a new biological weapon experiment being tested by insurgents and that we were never to discuss it with any civilians or any fellow officers. Then we were told to pack our gear and prepare to be flown out on the same chopper that brought the brass. We were going back to U.S. soil to await further orders.

The brass had us pack up the evidence in a body bag; Abagull’s body still attached to the creature. We loaded it into the chopper, too.

Less than an hour after their arrival, the brass was seated on board that helicopter next to us heading back to the U. S. of A. All of them were stern and tight-lipped, no-one so much as acknowledging the corpse packed into the cargo hold.

When we arrived in the U.S., the chopper touched down on a classified base in the Colorado Rockies. We were instructed to load Abagull’s remains into the back of a cargo truck and await further orders. As soon as we were done, General Morris jumped behind the wheel and ordered us to board the truck. Before we even had the doors closed, the truck took off up a ragged mountain road for a short drive to a base built into the mountainside. Morris informed us that that this was the base that civilians knew as Area 51. It housed a shitload of delicate and confidential information, and wasn’t actually kept in one stationary location, but moved every few years to ensure that there was never a reliable location to be tracked back to, in the unlikely event that there was an information leak.

When we arrived, Morris said to leave the body in the truck and follow him into what looked like a hangar jutting out of the mountain’s face. Inside the hangar, we were treated to a house of horrors. Strange creatures, in different stages of development and deformity, all resembling the thing we’d seen come out of Abagull’s body. They were floating in glass jars filled with formaldehyde or some other preserving fluid.

“Gentleman, we’ve been studying these creatures for decades,” Morris stated matter-of-factly. “In fact, these things are the real reason that Area 51 was created, and they didn’t come on any flying saucer.”

We all looked at each other,  trying to process the info being dropped on us all at once.

“They come from right here,” continued Morris. “As distasteful as it sounds, they came from right inside the human body.”

“You’re telling us that this is some kind of bio weapon that the enemy is infecting us with?” said Albright.

“No, I mean that’s what we originally thought, and that’s what we still tell those on the ground, to keep them from asking further questions, like we did with you,” Morris said with a sad grin, “but we’ve come to realize that it’s much more complicated than that.”

“So just exactly what have me and my men been exposed to, sir?” asked Albright, trying to keep an angry tone of disrespect out of his voice.

Morris sighed. “You haven’t been exposed to anything that didn’t naturally occur in your body.”

We all looked at him, puzzled.

“From what we’ve come to understand from our research and analysis, every human being has the potential trigger to manifest one of these things,” Morris said, defeat creeping into his voice.

I cleared my throat as I exchanged worried looks with my comrades.

“I’m sorry sir, but I still don’t think what you’re saying is clear enough to for us to understand,” I said.

“The long and the short of it, Private,” said Morris with a slightly bitter edge, “is that it appears that every human carries a potential seed for one of these things, located in the human appendix. From what we’ve discovered, the parasite responds to particular radio frequencies and manifestation is triggered by a radio frequency out of our current range of capability. The creatures gestate inside the human body, growing a spine-like extension that attaches itself to the host's spinal cord. Once it takes hold the parasite grows into the human neural receptors and fuses with them, overtaking the consciousness of the host. Essentially, the human becomes the creature growing inside of it.”

We all stood, silent and dumbfounded for a moment.

“So like
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
?” Freeman blurted out.

“Yes, something like that, Private,” Morris said with an ironic grin.

“So what is our course of action regarding this threat, sir?” Albight said, trying to regain his composure.

“The same course of action we take whenever this situation heats up. Pack up the base and move it,” said Morris. “Since you men have seen one of these things, and you are already aware of this classified information, you’re our default moving men. Load everything you see in this hanger into the truck outside. When you run out of room, we have plenty of other transportation available for requisition.”

With that, we set to work loading the cylinders and jars into crates and packing them into trucks and helicopters on the base. We worked non-stop for hours loading specimens and machinery of all sizes. Radio frequency panels and charts, diagrams, all sealed up and removed as if the research facility had never existed.

When all of it was packed and we thought that we were finished, Morris approached with a serious look on his face. He was silent for a full minute before he spoke.

“All right, you’ve done a great job, men. It’s time I showed you the really confidential stuff,” said Morris.

We all looked at each other.

“You mean this ain’t the real confidential stuff? You get a Bigfoot in drag somewhere or somethin’?” asked Freeman.

Without answering Morris pulled out a plastic card on a metal chain, turned and walked back into the open hangar. He marched up to a red door, turned and faced the following soldiers, grinning.

“Bigfoot is old news, son; we eliminated those bloodthirsty cavemen years ago,” said Morris.

With that he swiped his card through a slot on the side of the door. It opened with a vacuum-sealed hiss, and he stepped inside with the rest of us close behind him.

In the center of concrete walls lined with video monitors and all sorts of testing equipment sat two chairs. In one sat a sweaty, dishevelled U.S. soldier, naked from the waist up. A young, good looking black man in his mid-20s. In the other chair sat a small, equally sweaty, but fully formed creature that looked like the thing that had come out of Abagull. Both bodies were strapped down to their chairs and covered with electronic sensors that led to the machines. Between the two bodies ran a long, black, bony cord covered in a layer of tissue. It ran from the lower back of the creature and into the open side wound of the soldier, treated and packed, with some sort of clear plastic device keeping the wound open, possibly for inspection. I would guess that the I.V. running into the soldier was some sort of antibiotic to prevent infection.

“Men, meet Private Abrams,” said Morris.

A look of contempt crossed both faces, that of Abrams and of the creature in the other chair.

“That was the name of my human host!” both restrained prisoners spat out with contempt simultaneously, the creature with a raspy, hissing voice.

We all froze in shock, trying to comprehend what was happening between the soldier and this creature.

“Private Abrams,” Morris continued unfazed, “was pulled from his barracks and brought to a med-tent where he was stationed in Kabul because he was screaming about a pain coming from his side. The attending physician diagnosed him with appendicitis and ordered an immediate surgery. Imagine his surprise when he cut Abrams open, only to have a monster lunge out and slit his throat.”

At the mention of the now deceased physician, both the creature and the soldier grinned a sick, twisted grin of pleasure.

“Thanks to the fact that I was already on the ground in Kabul when the report came in, we were able to subdue the subjects and transport them alive to this location in order to study the infection.” Morris glared at the creature sternly, displeased with its apparent pleasure.

“We study
you
,” the Abrams/Creature combination jeered again. “You could not pronounce my real name with that fat human tongue.”

The creature and soldier, moving in perfect synchronicity glared in contempt at all of us in the room.

“We have been with you for centuries. We are always with you. We activate in small sleeper cells, waiting for the day when we can overtake all of humanity.],” it snarled.

“I think you’ll find humanity is made of tougher stuff than that,” retorted Morris.

It laughed.

“We visited you when you were still crawling in the dirt and eating your own feces. We altered your very DNA. Every single one of you is a soldier in waiting; our drones are manifested and nurtured by your own biology.” The two-bodied creature laughed. “You are our cattle and we are preparing to harvest you. You have no choice in the matter.”

“Yeah, well, that may be true, but with the info we’re getting from examining you, we’ll be able to prevent it,” barked back Morris.

The creature inhabiting both bodies burst into a fit of evil laughter.

“Stupid human!” it chuckled. “Everything I see, everything I hear, is fed back to my people’s hive mind. It’s instantaneous. Even back to our home planet.”

“That’s impossible!” Albright stammered.

“No, it isn’t. We are each a piece of the mother and always connected. Your scientists have been researching the phenomenon for generations. You call it quantum entanglement.” The creature hissed. “Believe me or don’t, it makes no difference. Everything you have said and done in front of my human host has been instantly recorded and seen by my people in deep space. All your research and technology, the location of this base even. This conversation is being watched even as we speak by an armada of warships already on their way here!” The creature and the human host released another evil laugh.