Terminus: A Novella of the Apocalypse (12 page)

Now the rear door of the truck rolls high and the remaining handful of black crows begin streaming out.  Truck-Three shimmies and shakes, and then it jolts savagely on its springs, as we watch a pair of spiky black pincers tear it open, even as that impossible monster climbs on top of it.

“Uh,” drawls Guide, “what should we do?  What should we do?”

From either side of the roadway, emerging from the scrubby environs surrounding our much diminished convoy, dozens of juvenile alien bugs spring forward to pounce on our fleeing compatriots.  One by one, with a scream and mortal grunt, individual Stranglers collapse to the pavement or the dusty shoulder, where they thrash beneath a bristling, obsidian creature that immediately begins tearing them apart.  Mouths agape, we helplessly watch the carnage, and I note something curious among the curious.  The monsters are not feeding. Though they quickly dismember and gut the human beings trapped beneath them, they abstain from consuming the bloody morsels.  Instead, those rapidly working appendages simply rip away fleshy chunks to throw the remains carelessly into the surrounding desert.

Without instruction, our driver backs our truck with a savage reverse of its transmission and a vicious stomp upon its accelerator.  This movement once more tosses us toward the forward bulkhead, before the driver shifts to ‘D’ for ‘Drive’ to send us rolling toward its tailgate.

Distracted by its devotion to the dismantlement of Truck 3, we roar around the slaughter on the highway shoulder and speed away into the desert.  The roadway behind us becomes a tangled frenzy of violently agitated alien bugs, and only a few of the smaller ones give chase.  These little demons are extremely fast, however, and I estimate the truck pushes through sixty kilometers per hour before they begin to fall away, surrendering the chase for lost.

Reassembling the office, our eyes constant on the camera monitors, most of which are blank now, we gather at the desk, panting and assuaging our bumps and bruises.  For a time, we remain silent, until Guide resolves our confusion by gasping, “What… the hell… were those things?”

In unison, we shake our heads.  Chief supplies, “Obviously, not from this world.”

“Obviously,” agrees Engineer, rubbing a contused left elbow with his right hand.  “At least, I never saw one in any zoo.”

“Zoo?  Zoo?” demands a rather unhinged Guide.  “An acid-spraying spider-lobster?  Right!  Okay!  This road trip of yours has definitely taken a turn for the worst.”  In a mocking, high-pitched voice, he gushes, “Let’s go to Area-51!  Let’s play with angry hillbillies!  Let’s pet scary aliens!”  Resorting to his normally pinched and nasally tone, he concludes, eyes twitching maniacally, “What’s next?  Huh?  A rousing outbreak of bleeding hemorrhoids?”

“Calm down,” I soothe, “just calm down.  We’re still alive and rolling.  The countryside seems clear for now.  We’ll just go back another way, that’s all.”

“Go back?” softly asks The Engineer.  “Even I think you’re being a bit optimistic now.”

“Yeah,” concurs Chief, “if that’s crawling around Nevada, we have to wonder what else has happened to the world.”

I shrug.  “Maybe we can take comfort from the fact, too.  In five years, we never saw anything like this on the other side of the mountains.”

“You’re suggesting aliens might stick to the desert?”

“Sure,” groans Guide, continually panning his few remaining camera angles, “the desert.  Nobody cares about the desert, except the A-rabs.  And nobody cares about the A-rabs, either.  Hey!” he snaps his fingers.  “If it’s like this all over the world, maybe we got peace in the middle-east and we don’t even know it!”

Grinning despite my better judgment, I growl, “See?  The silver lining.”

Soberly, his eyes blank and unconvinced, Chief ogles the scrolling monitors and says, “If it’s like this here… what are we going to find at Groom Lake?”

AREA-51

“The way I see it,” I announce authoritatively, “we have a choice.”

Our truck idles at the top of a low hill looking down on the abandoned military installation that can only be the mysterious and officially unnamed Groom Lake Base.  We have already passed through a series of gates, all of them rather flimsy and previously breached by other visitors, and now our front bumper points along an unnamed road and directly into the installation with no more obstacles apparent.  Clearly, when functional Pre-Terminus, the site relied more on active security than barricades, since the chain-link fences and gates never posed a significant deterrent to entry.

“What sort of choice?” counters The Engineer softly.

“It’s getting dark,” I say, stating the obvious.  “We can spend the night here in the truck, or we can keep going to find shelter inside one of those buildings.  If we can get inside.”

As though responding to the same cue, we all rotate our heads to glance back the way we have come, memories of those giant spider-lobsters still fresh in our thoughts.  Then we return our attention to the monitors, which swim in the shadows of early evening and all the sinister, windowless buildings awaiting us inside Area-51.

“Some choice,” murmurs Chief.  “You omitted the third option.  We could return to The Village.”

“Actually,” drawls Guide, “it’s less of a choice than you might think.  Before we go much further, we have to find diesel.”

Engineer groans, “What is with you and the fuel supply?  First its fuzzy bunnies with meat cleavers and now giant insects.  Did you hope to find a convenience store out here?  Why didn’t we stop in Warm Springs when we had the opportunity?”

Our Asian host shrugs.  “I figured it would be more interesting this way. Besides, who cares?  I’m not afraid.  Are you?”

For a moment, the diminutive man’s mustache twitches angrily, and then he relents.  “Right.  Sometimes, I… I forget.”

“We all do,” I console on a whisper.  “Maybe it’s not so bad, though.  Look.”

I point to one of the forward-looking camera views.  It focuses on the first set of buildings guarding the road into the wider installation.

“Well, son of a gun,” spouts Chief.

“See?  I told you!  A convenience store!  Like I said, I’m A god, not THE god.  Yet.”

“You didn’t know it would be there,” accuses The Engineer.  “So just shut up!”

Guide punches keys and the last battered truck of the once mighty Clan of the Immaculate Strangulation rolls forward, down the slight grade, and into the parking lot of the modestly-sized store.  It bears no signage and no windows.  Not even the fuel pumps are marked.

Without further instruction, his or her hooded head turning warily on the watch for giant spider monsters, the driver exits the truck’s cab to start the fueling process.  Cautious and nervous, we exit the cargo bay office and spread out around the truck to admire our surroundings.  Even for late fall and early evening, the weather is warm.  We all begin to sweat almost immediately.  Around us, the landscape is eerily quiet and pastoral.  Gratefully, we note a decided lack of movement in the scrub surrounding the base.

At the pump, our robed driver works scores of master keys around a jingling keyring.  Finding a match, he uses it to turn a lock securing the mechanism’s front panel.  Once he or she removes this, the Strangler returns to the truck for a loop of electrical cable, which he extends toward the now opened pump machinery.  Several minutes later, the crow unscrews the tank cap and plunges a nozzle handle into the resultant opening.  On a yank of its activating lever and with a whir of mechanical movement, the diesel begins to flow.  We all breathe a collective sigh of relief to hear the resultant chug-chug-chug of pumping fuel.

By now, Chief has wandered over to try the building’s door.  Unsurprisingly, he finds it locked.

The Guide joins him with a small toolkit in hand.  Giggling with that grating nasal sound I detest, the Asian teases, “You’re on the wrong side of the law when it comes to this kind of thing, big guy.  Here, let a professional get to work.”

For perhaps fifteen minutes, he fumbles with the lock picks.  Long before he hacks open the door, our driver finishes fueling the truck to return to its air-conditioned cab.  As we grow impatient and the rings of perspiration grow around our armpits, Guide tosses his hands and declares, “It must be some kind of super government lock or something!  After all these years, the feds are still messing with us!  Shit!”

When we back away to examine the little tools with him, a loud gunshot shatters the silence!  Another!  Another!

Jumping, clapping our hands over our ears with startled yelps, we turn to see The Girl blasting away at the door jamb.  She has apparently fetched a massive forty-four caliber magnum revolver from her purse to shatter the lock.  On the fifth round, the door pops slightly open.  The Girl lifts the smoking barrel of the revolver to her lips and blows, gloating with a silently mischievous sparkle of her verdant eyes.

My ears ringing, I shout to Chief, “I thought you guys confiscated all firearms at The Village gate!”

He shakes his head, “Only machine guns.  Pistols are okay.”

Shrugging, I follow him into the darkened building inside.  It reeks of rotted food and spilled sodas.  The cloistered stench is so strong, in fact, that we all breathe through our mouths, our nostrils pinched tightly shut.

Once again, The Girl comes through with a large flashlight, which she extracts from her apparently bottomless designer handbag.  For several minutes, she shines this around as our only source of illumination until we locate the store office and a bank of switches, one of which is labeled “Emergency Power”.  Flipping this, a series of dim lights wink hot to bathe the foul interior in stark shadows.

More than a standard convenience store, we see this is actually a kind of Base Exchange.  It once offered everything from clothing through fresh produce to a single-chair hair salon, optometrist, dentist and medical clinic.  Through the rear of the compound, we find a small garage rigged to service everything from passenger cars through large semi tractor-trailers to industrial grade heavy equipment.

Here, Chief unlatches and rolls one of the towering service bay doors open, while The Kid rushes back through the store to direct our driver to bring the truck around.  Once we have it parked safely inside, we reseal the building, including the shattered front door, and then we pick our spots for the night.

As the sun sets in a blood red agony of dying light, we eat sparsely and then entertain ourselves by wandering the store.  Everything here is nondescript, unlabeled and generic.  Nothing is terribly interesting.

When the complete darkness of nightfall settles across the land, The Girl and I drag a pair of new sleeping bags and air mattresses into the bed of a pickup parked in one of the service stalls.  There we make our nest.  The Kid, as usual, settles on the concrete floor nearby, his scarred, moonlike face ever attentive to The Girl’s individual movements.

He watches intently as we get busy, pleasuring himself through the show, but we don’t mind.  Nothing is as it was before, Pre-Terminus.  The boundaries of offense and outrage have moved so far away from former norms that they have been rendered invisible and unconsidered.

About the time we begin to doze, however, a reality of the new world order disturbs us.  We hear a strange clicking noise emanating from the desert surrounding the base.  As the starlight rises, the levels of the noise increase.  The individual sounds of it blend into a long, continuous roll, which reminds me of cicadas rasping through endless summer nights.  This is fall, however, and there are no trees to shelter such insects.

When the noise rises to an undeniable presence, we sit upright in our blankets.  Now, we hear soft impacts against the stout metal doors.  Diminutive shadows play across the small oval windows set into the door panels about head height.  The frequency of these impacts increases, along with the strength of the mysterious strikes.

Soon, all seven of us, scarecrow driver included, gather at the doors and, on tiptoes, stare through the little windows to see what we can see amid the night-bound landscape.  Presently, something soft and fleshy bounces off a nearby portal.  We jump, gasping.  Moments later, another impact.  Then another.

Within minutes, the stars above wink more and more frequently as silhouettes flit back and forth before them.  Our eyes adjusting to the combination of starshine and moonglow, we begin to discern shape from shadow.

Softly, I ask, “Birds?  Or bats?”

“I don’t think so…,” drawls Engineer.  “They seem to have two sets of wings.”

“Like dragonflies,” offers the normally reticent Kid, his voice a mumble, as though marbles fill his cheeks.  “Gigantic dragonflies.”

On the mention of insects, we collectively shudder.  Regardless of our apprehension, we cannot peel our eyes away from the windows.  Now the click-rattle sound rises another level.  It penetrates the building to echo from its walls, both interior and exterior.

“What is that?” demands Guide unhappily.  “Do you think they’ll keep it up all night long?  It’ll give me bad dreams!”

I refuse to speculate why strangulations apparently don’t have the same effect on him.  Sidelong before one of the oval portals, I point.  “There!  Moving between those two small buildings.  Is it one of the things we saw on the highway?”

They squint.  They lean forward, as though this few centimeters will enhance their view.  Momentarily blended with the greater shades of night for its stillness, when the thing moves again, my comrades gasp in unison.  Their heads jerk backwards to recover those sacrificed centimeters of safety.

“No,” provides Engineer soberly.  “Something else.”

“Look!  It seems to be feeding on the flying things!”

Indeed, tentacle appendages snap out from the shadow across the silhouette of the moon to snatch the four-winged creatures from the air with amazing speed and alacrity.  These range in size from sparrows to oversized geese, but the predator among them focuses primarily on the larger specimens.  Clicking and rattling, it purrs while it satiates itself.  Squealing and squeaking, its prey shrieks sharply before disappearing into the shadow-hulk’s unseen maw.

Farther away in the distance, we hear a new sound.  This is a low foghorn bellow that rises in pitch and intensity.  Once the first emanation falls silent, a second answers from the distance to our right.  Then a third from the left.  Now the first sounds again.  And a fourth on the other side of the building, perhaps situated within the base perimeter.

More soft impacts sound against the panel doors.  One of the flying things alights across the frame of one window, and we can observe it more clearly.

Without instruction, The Kid lifts a flashlight and shines it onto the thing.  Six spindly limbs splay wide across the window while four oblong, gossamer wings make a shimmering ‘X’ over the back of its body.  Like a smaller version of the highway bugs, its face seems to be centered between its limbs.  We see a triple-maw that is circular, concentric and ringed all around by barbed ridges that must be its teeth.  This works open and shut, open and shut, as though panting.  Most startling of all, it possess multiple eyes like the alien spaceman.  Four are fixed and bulbous, fly like and green.  While the fifth is bulging and orbital, terrifyingly human.  Bloodshot and nervous, it roves this way and that, startled by the sudden shine of the light.  In the flash of this unnatural illumination, that disgusting orb disappears into a deep fold of scaly tissue and it screeches shrilly!

Perhaps because it has become highlighted by the beam, a long, serpentine tentacle snaps down from overhead to snatch the creature off the door with a terrified squeak.  As we hiss for The Kid to extinguish the flashlight, we realize one of those tentacle-wielding predators must be perched on the roof above our heads.

We back away from the windows as darkness returns, but the display has not passed unnoticed.  A large, bristling insect-like monster drops to the tarmac in front of us, its many feeding tentacles coiling and uncoiling in the dim light.  Back and forth it sways, its evilly gleaming eyes crisscrossing the windows to search the interior shadows of the building.

Instinctively, we freeze for the duration.  Several minutes pass breathlessly before the thing moves away, once more distracted by the flying frenzy flitting back and forth across the parking lot.

From deep inside the interior shadows, we watch the show with mesmerized terror, while alien vocalizations dominate the night.  Clearly, this part of the world is overrun with strange, otherworldly creatures, and we can only guess how and why.  My own thoughts return again and again to reflect on Terminus.  Adding these two events together, I formulate a sinister conclusion.

Perhaps an hour later, when the frenzy seems to move deeper into the desert to leave us in relative peace, we all return to our sleeping spots in silence.  Because nobody speaks, I know they are thinking the same black thoughts.  Even as I hope to find answers the following day, I wonder what I will do in the event of failure.

Having passed a restless, largely sleepless night, we rise early in the morning.  First thing, we all visit the windows alone or in pairs to find the tarmac empty.