Weird World War: China, page 3
I closed my eyes, squeezing them shut as hard as I could. I just needed a second. A little time for my mind to pretend it could cope. When I opened them and looked at my men, I noticed they had all done the same. This was the part where even strong men descended into gibbering insanity.
Rather than stare endlessly into the maddening visage of a corrupted dragonlike thing from beyond our time and space, I tore my gaze away and looked around the cavern. What I saw didn’t make me feel any better.
The floor was completely littered with sleeping children, covered in blood and human remains. I saw torn and shredded lab coats, and military uniforms, and quite a few heads absent their bodies. A number of the creatures slumbered with clumps of flesh hanging from their open mouths. There were partially eaten hands, fingers, and entrails.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cicero waving for my attention. He pointed beyond the children to the walls which were lined with open vats of liquid. The sides were made of some type of reinforced glass. I could see the ooze circulating, black as pitch. Each vat must have held tens of thousands of gallons of black fluid, and all had hoses attached to them, dozens of feet in diameter. They snaked across the floor, then up into the god’s body under the wings. I’d been so focused on the terror the thing exuded, I hadn’t noticed the Chinese had been tapping the god for its blood.
Up close, the god seemed even larger, somehow. Every step nearer made me feel more and more nauseated. I could almost feel the thing clawing into my head. Mok’s nose was bleeding, but he kept both hands firmly on the machine gun. Cicero held up a hand and doubled over, vomiting as quietly as he could manage. Farris lifted his M5 and trained it on the nearest sleeping child-turned-monster. It stirred, then settled again. Farris let out a small sigh but kept his rifle level.
Cicero straightened up, but appeared shaky. He gave us a thumbs-up, in spite of trembling so hard I thought he would pass out.
The symptoms lessened as we passed the god and approached the back of the cavern. In the pulsing light, we discovered what had happened to all the adults in the village. Next to a line of cremation ovens were piles upon piles of misshapen corpses—adult corpses. They all bore the hallmarks of experimentation, but every one of them showed extreme deformities. I understood in an instant. The adult tests had all failed.
So they had moved on to the kids.
We went to the nearest vat of god blood. At its base, dozens of beds were arrayed. IV lines ran from the vats, to what would normally have been saline bags, down to dripping needles. I caught the LT’s attention, pointed at the needles, then tapped the back of my neck. This was what the scientists had been infusing into the children through their IV ports. I knelt down and carefully lifted the end of the IV line. It should have been as light as a feather, but instead was as heavy as a barbell.
The whole scenario became clear . . . well, clear enough. How the ancient god had gotten here in the first place was a question well above my pay grade—maybe it had been buried here all along—but the PLA scientists had experimented with its blood. When it wouldn’t work on adults, they had tried it on children. It had infected the kids faster and stronger than anyone had anticipated. Maybe some of the kids had escaped in the chaos and tried going home, only to succumb completely to the disease in their veins. Then maybe all the kids . . . well . . . had eaten everyone and everything. And whatever the Chinese army had been using to sedate this ancient thing was about to wear off.
I let the IV down gently, not wanting to get any of the black blood on me. I didn’t know how much it took to start turning a person, but I didn’t want to find out.
We had seen enough. Lieutenant Cicero slowly, quietly, and deliberately removed the Quantum Annihilator from the pouch on his chest.
The rest of the squad knew what was up. We’d all seen these things in action before. It would send us back to our main timeline as the crystalline matrix detonated, obliterating the otherworldly threat, and vaporizing everything within a hundred miles of it.
Cicero flipped the switch.
Nothing happened.
The god stirred, strained against its chains, then turned its head our way.
Six eyes—three on each side—flickered open and stared at us. Hate overwhelmed me, and I fell to my knees clutching at the sides of my head. Images flashed through my mind of horrors I didn’t even know were possible. I blinked a few times, and when my eyes cleared, I noticed movement all around us. All the slumbering monsters were waking and pushing themselves to their feet.
My squad didn’t need an order.
Everybody started shooting. The roar of automatic fire helped lift the fog from our brains.
“Why didn’t it work?” I bellowed.
“I don’t know!” Cicero shouted back, as he banged the weapon of mass destruction against a tabletop, then flipped the switch again. “Stupid future junk!”
I switched off my brain. There were only threats. Size and age didn’t matter. This wasn’t the first time I’d disconnected. To stay engaged that way was to invite the kind of madness only a self-administered bullet could fix.
To my left, Mok wasn’t able to disconnect like I was. Tears poured down his face, but it wasn’t stopping him from raking Lunden’s machine gun back and forth across the cavern.
The creatures came at us slowly, still waking up from their dreams of God-knows what. I dropped a mag and slammed another home. It was probably the fastest reload of my life. I pulled one of my shots to the right, and the bullet smashed against the side of a vat.
Milton got disemboweled. Flynn got his throat clawed out. They were gone and being eaten by the malformed monsters before anyone had a chance to warn them of the threat from behind. Farris pulled a grenade, yanked the pin, and lobbed it into the thickest pack of things shambling our way.
“Cover!” Cicero screamed, and we all dived to get tanks of god blood between us and the blast.
The concussion was brutal in the cavern. I stood and rounded the edge of the tank, and realized I’d dived behind a separate tank than the others. A horde of the monsters teemed between us. There was no getting back to the squad.
The grenade blast knocked loose wires everywhere, causing showers of sparks to fly into the now-solid-green light. Nothing in the rock-walled cavern seemed all that flammable—until the sparks hit puddles of blood from the dozens of monsters we’d killed, and there was a whoosh as they lit up like they had gasoline in their veins.
The children—no, the creatures screamed as the flames consumed them. No matter how they rolled on the ground, the flames never went out. It looked like some were burning from the inside out.
A massive pack of the things shambled my squad’s way. For the moment, none of the things seemed to notice me. I jumped and waved until I got Cicero’s attention. I pulled an incendiary grenade from my pack and held it up.
“Do it!”
I popped the grenade and tossed it into the nearest vat. Then I ran for my life.
The vat turned into a pillar of flame fifty feet high. Fire raced up the giant IV line until it lit up one of the dragon god’s wings.
Veins glowed red and orange in the green light, then burst outward in a shower of molten blood. The dragon god roared so loudly it felt like it could almost stop my heart. Almost as one, the monsters collapsed grabbing their ears. Steel scaffolding collapsed, further separating me from my team. Falling rebar rained down on my men like hot javelins. A metal shard stabbed through Cicero’s eye. Another impaled him through the center of his chest, hitting hard enough to pierce the cavern floor.
Farris pulled a flare from his pack, struck it, and tossed it into the nearest vat. Molten blood splattered outward, arcing into another nearby vat which also exploded upward. Jets of fire hit the god one after another.
Some of the molten blood also hit Farris in his left arm, consuming it. His mouth opened in a scream.
Mok dropped his pack and dumped it, pulling out every flare and incendiary grenade. He ripped open Farris’s pack and did the same, then slapped a grenade into Farris’s good hand. Mok helped Farris up, then they began running, pausing only to toss flares and grenades into the tanks.
I ran toward the cavern’s entrance and pulled out every fire accelerant from my bag. I didn’t have much, just a single flare and a pack of matches.
I popped the flare, tossed it into a nearby vat. As it exploded upward, I ran to the last vat on my side of the cavern, pulled one match through the book to light the whole thing, then lobbed it over the edge of the glass.
As soon as I did, I knew I was too close. The explosion threw me back toward the entrance. My helmet hit the wall hard. For a moment, everything went black.
When I came to, I saw the eldritch god surge up and strike its head on the ceiling. Rock cracked as the cavern began to collapse. Every vein in its body glowed through its skin as its blood turned into fire. The lines of flame coursed up into its head. The six eyes exploded, and the dragon went limp, slowly falling to the ground. Directly beneath it was Mok and Farris. They hugged each other right before the god collapsed on top of them.
Few of the children were coherent in any way, but one crawled in my direction. I tried drawing my pistol, but my arms wouldn’t work quite right.
The monster was only a few feet from me, face stretched and looking more and more like the unholy combination of a child and the corrupted dragon eldritch god. Electricity arced around me. Somewhere in the conflagration, the damned Annihilator must have been triggered. Finally. HQ was pulling me back, and not a moment too soon.
My vision went solid white and blue.
Head swimming, I found myself lying in a glass coffin. On the other side of the glass was HQ’s launch control.
All I could do was try to breathe as my brain caught up with the journey across time. The relief of being home flooded me. My ears were still ringing from the explosions, but all I could think about was getting out of the coffin to check on my men. Hopefully they’d all been resurrected.
My eyes blurred, and for a second, I thought I was losing my vision. Then I realized it was just the lights flickering.
They dimmed, then went solid again.
Weird.
I managed to push myself up to wipe the steam from the glass. Instead of being greeted by our CO and the usual gang of scientists and doctors, all I saw was blood and body parts.
The glass of the pod next to mine was shattered and covered in black blood. Lunden’s coffin. This was where he would have popped back into the main timeline. On the floor in front of it was the body of the monster we’d sent back with him.
I caught movement from the corner of the room. In the wavering light, Lunden stood up, took a bite from a bloody arm he was holding. The severed arm still had part of a shoulder loop with general’s stars on it. Lunden shivered and twitched, still covered in the black blood from the kid he’d killed.
Infected.
Lunden’s eyes met mine—slitted and sickly yellow like the eyes of the dragon god—and he smiled at me with a mouth full of sharp and jagged teeth.
LURKING DEATH
David Drake
Breyer had never met this district commissioner before but he had no reason to be concerned. The aide who met him outside the building was a young fellow with dark blond hair. “Commissioner Erskine wanted me to warn you that you’ll be meeting not only him but also some American gentlemen,” the aide said.
The Indian servant was already jerking open the door. Breyer asked, “Is this about the tiger last June?”
The aide bowed at him through the door. “It may be, sir,” he said.
Erskine rose from behind his desk when Breyer entered, as did the three other men in business suits sitting in chairs along the wall.
“Sir,” said Breyer even as he took the commissioner’s outstretched hand, “I told you exactly what happened. I had full permission from Mr. Graves”—Erskine’s predecessor as commissioner. In fact, Graves had invited him to come deal with the man-eater—“and if something went wrong, it wasn’t my fault.”
“No, it certainly wasn’t,” Erskine said, seating himself again. “You’ve done nothing wrong, Mr. Breyer. These gentlemen just want to talk with you. They’ve come all the way from America to do that.”
“All right,” Breyer said, “but there isn’t much to tell. I came to Naini because Mr. Graves told me there was a man-eater he’d like some help with. He assigned me a two-room forest bungalow near the village but in heavy scrub. I walked around the village and found no tiger markings though there was a large pugmark I couldn’t identify. It had sunk into hard soil deep enough that it had to be something as big as a tiger.”
The eldest of the three strangers leaned forward in his chair. “Mr. Breyer,” he said, “why were you sure that the animal was a tiger?”
“I wasn’t sure,” Breyer said. “The villagers said it was a tiger, though the color was funny. It had pulled down a full-grown buffalo. Nothing but a tiger could have done that, though it had torn the buffalo’s throat open with its jaws, instead of leaping on its back and using its claws. But it was the man-eater I’d been sent to shoot. It had killed a herdsman the week before and before that, a woman cutting grass for fodder.
“I know now it was a hyena, but that never crossed my mind. It was way too big for a hyena and anyway it was tan and covered with spots, not like the hyenas I’d seen in the zoo in Madras.”
“What you saw in Madras were the standard Asian striped hyenas,” the man who was smoking said. “The animal you shot was colored like the spotted hyena of Africa.”
“We’re a thousand miles from Africa here,” Breyer said.
“The distance is a lot farther than that,” the stranger said. “The hide color seems the same as the ordinary spotted hyena, but the museum says the bones are those of the cave hyena, which has been extinct for at least tens of thousands of years.”
Breyer shook his head and went on, “Anyway, I went out to where the buffalo had been killed. A grown buff is too big for even a tiger to eat in one go. So I figured he’d be coming back to the kill site. It was rugged country. The attack had been in the open but the drag line was down into a steep narrow valley. From the precipice above I could see the buff lying just inside a patch of wild plums. Most of the body remained, so there was a good chance the tiger was coming back. There was a good-sized pine tree in the plums only twenty feet from where the buffalo lay, but to reach it without being seen by the tiger, I’d have to approach from the valley below.
“I made the long circuit to reach the lower end of the valley and started up the next morning by foot. I was only carrying my Winchester and my knapsack with a rope ladder, and a thermos of tea and a sandwich for lunch. Even so I was almost all in when I reached the base of the pine. I tossed the ladder over the lowest branch in the late afternoon and climbed with my rifle slung. There was enough breeze that the stock swung against the tree as I climbed.
“I’d judged that the lowest branch of the pine would make an adequate perch. When I got onto it, I found it was in fact a trifle less comfortable than I’d expected because the branch didn’t spread immediately from the trunk, so my position was cramped. I also had trouble getting the rope ladder to lie in as broad a loop as I wanted to support my feet, but I judged it would do. Tigers can climb, but I wasn’t expecting it to.
“I wasn’t expecting it to come from behind me either, but that’s what he did. He must have been deeper in the plums, but made a near circuit to reach the kill. I was looking down from above as the tiger slunk past. The size seemed right, but the color was dun and mottled instead of orange with black stripes. I waited for the beast to settle before I took a shot. Unfortunately, it stepped over the dead buffalo and remained half hidden as it worried out a rib with a large gobbet of meat clinging to it. I got a look at the beast in profile though, and saw it was a hyena rather than a tiger.
“He tossed the buffalo’s head and then lowered it to begin crushing the bone he was holding. During the moment he was concentrating on the bone, he was still. I squeezed off my .405. The shot made a sharp crack, and the bullet hit with a dull sound like a tree limb falling to the pavement.
“The hyena twisted and snapped in the air where a man who had just kicked it would have been standing. I worked the underlever to eject the empty case, but recoil on my awkward position prevented me from laying the sight back on target in time for a follow-up shot. The beast leaped into the plums and was lost to sight.
“Villagers had been watching from the precipice and could probably see the hyena though I could not. I took my time about getting down from my perch. I’d seen the hyena’s jaws snapping. They could bite a man in half. They could bite me in half. I told the villagers to pick up clods of dirt. The ground in this valley had no pebbles to pelt the wounded animal or stir it out of the band of trees when we located it.
“The trees weren’t closely spaced, so by lying flat on the ground the men accompanying me could see quite deep into the forest. They moved out ahead of me while I remained upright in a relatively clear portion where I had clearance for my rifle if the hyena came rushing out.
“In fact the beast sprawled only fifty feet into the trees. It didn’t move under a bombardment of dried clay.
“We strapped it to a litter made from a pair of saplings and dragged it back to Naini. I didn’t bother skinning it, but I cleaned the skull and some of the big bones on an ant hill and shipped them back to Commissioner Graves.”
