The Dark Ones (The Vixen War Bride, #6), page 16
A head without fox ears.
Ramirez grit his teeth and brought his gaze back to the new group and the Va’Shen prisoner. The alien with the hands on his shoulders “spoke” to the others, his body changing colors rapidly. The other two did the same. A moment later, the alien stepped forward and shoved a clawed hand into the tod’s stomach, causing the Va’Shen man to scream. The alien pulled his hand out, and the tod’s innards spilled out onto the ground in front of him. The alien flashed something to the guards and turned, heading back to the others.
The guards knelt over the tod, and whatever they were doing to him, it was bad, because the Va’Shen man’s screams were loud enough to hear clearly across the river.
Ramirez said nothing in reply. One of the snails began to reposition itself at the bridge, ready to start moving, and Ramirez knew it was time.
“McClellan,” he said quietly. “See the one with the hands on his shoulders?”
“Yeah, I got him,” the marksman replied grimly.
“Jazz Hands first,” Ramirez ordered. “When the bridge goes, fire, got it?”
“Standing by, Staff Sergeant,” McClellan assured him.
Ramirez picked up the phone receiver and rested it in the crook of his shoulder before picking up the detonator in his hands.
“Archer, Lancer Six,” he spoke into the receiver, lifting the plunger on the detonator. Down below them, one of the snails began to move across the bridge. “Fire for effect. Fire!”
The snail-tank was about halfway across the bridge when a distant Whump! came from the northwest. As soon as he heard that sound, Ramirez slammed down the handle on the detonator. At the same time, McClellan’s sniper rifle boomed.
The result was that three different things all happened at the same time, and no one on the other side of the bridge knew what to do about any of them. The charges on the bridge went off spectacularly, throwing wood and stone into the air as the snail-tank traversing it let out a gargling wail and hit the water below. At the same moment, the Dark One officer Ramirez had dubbed “Jazz Hands” jerked to one side, a brownish fluid shooting from a hole in its helmet with the force of a fire hose. The creature fell to the ground as two others rushed over to it.
And as they did so, the first mortar hit, exploding dead center in the middle of the formation.
“HIT ‘EM!” Ramirez yelled.
WHUMP!
Another mortar sounded as the Rangers and commandos began to fire across the river at the Dark Ones. Some of the creatures ran for cover behind snail-tanks while some fired a few shots in return, the purple energy blasts going far wide.
The mortar impacted to the left of the first shot, not quite close enough to hurt the snail-tank or the creatures taking cover behind it.
Ramirez caught sight of the target he wanted: The Dark One with the human head on its shoulder. He put the top of the carrot of his prismatic telescopic sight on the creature’s chest and fired.
To his consternation, the thing didn’t fall. It turned and looked up in Ramirez’s direction as if it could see him. The Ranger continued to fire, but at that range, the only ones doing any real damage were the commandos’ hardlight rifles.
As the Dark One officer continued to ignore the rounds from Ramirez’s rifle, it turned and changed colors several times.
Whatever it said must have been an order. Two of the snail tanks turned and faced the ambushers, ignoring the fire raining down on them, although the occasional hardlight blast seemed to piss them off somewhat.
WHUMP!
A mortar round slammed down into the top of one of the snail-tanks, and the creature screamed, the roar of pain sounding like someone trying to cry out with melted caramel in their throat.
The two snail-tanks turning toward them stopped, and the tops of their hulls retracted. An electric hum filled the air and the swirls on the tanks’ “shells” began to glow blue. A moment later there were two explosive blasts from the snails, and two pink spheres about two meters in diameter sailed over the river.
“INCOMING!” Ramirez cried, grabbing the back of Alzoria’s head and pushing it down into the dirt. “TAKE COVER!”
The spheres sailed past them and struck the ground behind them, bouncing once before rolling to a stop against the trunk of a fallen tree.
Then nothing.
A few Rangers and commandos continued firing, but the rest had stopped, looking at the spheres in concern. Alzoria fought her way to a kneeling position and spat dirt out of her mouth before following everyone’s gaze at the two duds.
“Holy shit, that was close,” someone remarked.
Ramirez started to turn back to the fight, opening his mouth to order his men to do the same when something stopped him. One of the spheres moved, rolling to the right about a foot.
He had no idea what was about to happen, but Ramirez did know one thing for sure.
This is gonna suck!
One of the Rangers cautiously approached the spheres, his weapon up and ready, and before Ramirez could order him back, it all went to Hell.
All in the space of a second, something smashed its way out of the left sphere, grabbed the approaching Ranger with a pair of fleshy pink tentacles and tore him in half!
Throwing the two halves aside, the creature let out a blood-curdling shriek and pulled the rest of itself out of the shell.
It took a lot to shock Ramirez. He had seen some screwed up stuff in his life, but nothing like the thing that was looking at him now. Six tentacles covered in spiked barbs converged on a bulbous head and a toothed beak about two feet long.
Everyone was shocked frozen at the sight, and the other sphere, now for certain some kind of egg, broke open, revealing another identical creature.
“FUCKING KILL IT!” someone screamed, and everyone began to fire into the things.
The first creature shrieked again and dashed forward, grabbing another Ranger with its barbed tentacles and literally shredding the man like it was trying to make him into pulled pork.
Alzoria held her hands over her ears as the cacophony of fire deafened her. The creatures didn’t seem to mind being hit with so many bullets and hardlight blasts and continued to systematically grab Rangers and commandos and shred, bite and tear them apart.
The Huntress saw a Ranger go down and ran toward him. He was obviously dead, and she needed a weapon. She pulled at the M-31 in the dead human’s hands but was foiled by the Ranger’s single-point sling. She started grabbing whatever she could from the man that might let her fight, but all she managed to get from him was a bandolier with several familiar black cylinders with pins protruding from each.
Sensing something, she looked up and saw one of the creatures turn to look at her. It didn’t mind killing humans, but it was bred and trained to kill Va’Shen. Seeing Alzoria, it shrieked and ran toward her, using half its tentacles as legs while the other half grabbed stumps and trees and pulled itself toward her.
The Huntress, now decidedly the prey, turned and dashed into the trees, the creature right on her heels.
* * *
On the opposite bank, the caste leader looked toward the source of the fire they had been taking, pleased to hear it more panicked than before while no longer aimed at them. The falling explosives, however, were still a concern, and as he stood there, seemingly unaffected by it, the rest of his soldiers were taking what cover they could.
The caste leader turned back just as another explosive round landed near enough to throw rocks and dirt onto him, but he ignored it and began to issue orders. The Dark One troops saw the colors of their leader’s body change and began to act, turning their armored beasts and preparing to move them per the leader’s orders.
That task complete, the caste leader once again turned and regarded the sounds of panicked shouting and weapons fire in the forest across the river. If a couple of hunting pods was all it took to subdue the enemy, they should reach the next village without trouble.
And then north.
And then home.
* * *
Alzoria ran through the trees, deliberately moving toward denser vegetation in hopes that the creature pursuing her would be slowed. But the shrieking horror had no problem squeezing its body through narrow gaps in the trees, flattening itself and pulling its way past them faster than the vixen could.
With the distance between them closing, the desperate Va’Shen did the only thing she could think of. She leapt upward and snagged the branch of a tree, climbing quickly onto it and jumping again for the next one.
The tentacled beast paused at the foot of the tree and shrieked up at her, reaching up with its toothed appendages and wrapping around the branch she had been standing on a second before.
Panting, Alzoria spared a glance downward and saw the monster climbing the tree after her. Realizing she had nowhere else to run, she decided the only thing left to do was fight. She had hung the dead Ranger’s bandolier over her neck, and now she hurriedly grabbed for one of the black cylinders on it. Not thinking, she hurled one of them down at the creature, watching it bounce off its bulbous head as it reached another branch.
When nothing happened, she realized she had done something wrong. She took a deep breath and tried to steady herself. She was a Huntress. As scary as this thing was, it was still just an animal, just meat. And that meant a Huntress could kill it. A panicked kit couldn’t. But a Huntress could.
Alzoria grit her teeth and pulled another cylinder from the bandolier. Seeing the ring protruding from one end, she suddenly remembered what Ramirez had told her about how they worked. She grasped the pin and pulled it from the cylinder.
Looking down, the creature was just below her. Its beak widened, giving her a close-up look at the nightmarescape that was the inside of its mouth. Tiny curved teeth were hidden behind the larger, sharp knives that lined the edges of its beak.
It screamed at her.
She screamed back and threw the cylinder down at it as hard as she could.
The creature shut its mouth and gagged as the flash-bang grenade struck the back of its throat, throwing it off for a moment. Before it could recover, a loud BOOM sounded, and the creature’s body expanded like a balloon for a moment before returning to normal.
Alzoria watched the monster go limp and sag down toward the ground until only a single tentacle wrapped around the branch below her was keeping it off the forest floor. The rest of its tentacles hung down and brushed the ground below.
The Huntress stared down at it, breathing hard, waiting for it to suddenly turn and scream at her again, but after several moments of nothing, she began to settle down.
Grasping the branch above her head, she looked down at the dead horror with gritted teeth.
* * *
Back at the ambush site, Ramirez and the half of his Rangers and commandos that were left had managed to form a semi-circle around the other creature and were continuously firing into it as it finally began to show signs of slowing down.
The creature, its body littered with burnt holes from several different weapons, crawled toward Ramirez at the center of the formation with three of its tentacles. The other three it dragged limply behind it. It shrieked at the Ranger, now barely three meters from it, still trying to complete its life’s mission in the final moments before death.
Ramirez fired again and again, finally flipping the switch on his rifle to AUTO and pouring the remaining rounds in his last magazine into it. When he heard the click signifying that the bolt was locked back and his weapon was empty, he released it and let it hang from its sling, drawing his sidearm and continuing to fire into the mound of disgusting flesh.
The creature stretched out to him with its last tentacle and offered a last spiteful shriek, the clawed tip coming within three feet of the Ranger NCO before finally giving up the ghost and going slack.
Ramirez was breathing hard, the slide on his pistol was locked back, its ammunition expended. The others continued firing into the dead, unmoving beast until Ramirez finally collected himself to call a cease-fire.
His body on automatic, the Ranger sergeant dropped the empty magazine from his pistol and slapped a new one into it, hitting the slide release to chamber a fresh round. The other Rangers in the formation did the same, all of them breathing hard, from adrenaline or terror or both, it was hard to be sure.
“God damn!” Ramirez cried. “My taxidermist is going to shit his pants when he sees this.”
In that moment, with the terror no longer first in his mind, Ramirez realized several things. Several of his Rangers and commandos were dead. The mortars were still landing on the Dark Ones across the river. The other monster was gone. But the first thing he noticed...
“Alzoria?” he asked, looking around. Among the formation of humans and Va’Shen, there was no short pixie cut of red and gold. He looked around quickly but couldn’t see her. “Alzoria!?” he called. He turned to the others. “Where’s the other... thing?!” he asked. “Where did it go?!”
One of the Rangers pointed into the forest. “I think I saw it going that way, Staff Sergeant,” one of the privates told him.
“McClellan, get shit squared away!” Ramirez called to the marksman as he ran into the forest. He didn’t bother waiting for an acknowledgement. He wasn’t even completely sure McClellan was one of the Rangers who survived, but at that moment he didn’t care. His heart was racing in his chest even as a cold ball of iron began to expand in his stomach.
He was doing the exact opposite of what he should be doing, and he knew it. He should be consolidating his forces, regrouping, reloading, re-engaging, but it didn’t matter.
“ALZORIA!” he shouted. “ALZORIA!”
The Ranger was so focused on the path directly in front of him that he didn’t notice when a petite vixen crashed into him from the side and grabbed hold of him.
Realizing it was her, Ramirez froze.
Alzoria’s ears were fluttering in joy, her tail whipping around, collecting all manner of leaves and twigs as it swept the forest floor.
she cried happily. “Fucked it all up!” she told him in English.
She went quiet as the Ranger grabbed hold of her and embraced her, all but crushing her against the front of his body armor. For the first time, she heard the quiver in his breath.
“You... You’re not... You’re not allowed to do that anymore,” he gasped out. Swallowing back his fear, he tried to collect himself but couldn’t. The sight of men and tods being ripped apart by those things, the thought that she could have been one of them, her body shredded into a bloody mess, wouldn’t get out of his head.
“No more,” he said. “Okay?”
Alzoria closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around him, not quite able to get them all the way around his armor and equipment.
“All good in da hood,” she assured him quietly. “Good to go.”
“Okay,” he said, his relief finally overcoming the fear. “Come on, let’s get back to the others.”
The two trotted back to the OP, and as soon as McClellan saw them, he waved Ramirez over to his spot at the fallen tree. The rest of the Rangers and commandos were collecting weapons and ammunition from their fallen comrades.
“You need to see this, Staff Sergeant,” McClellan said as they approached. Seeing Alzoria with him, he nodded to the Huntress. “You okay, Alzoria?” he asked.
Alzoria had spent a lot of time on the FOB, so most of the Rangers knew her and liked her. So, there wasn’t a single word or arched eyebrow about Ramirez going after her.
“Good to go,” she said, giving him a thumbs up. “Fucked up big motherfucker,” she added.
“Hell yeah,” McClellan said, offering her a fist bump.
In the meantime, Ramirez had picked up the binoculars and was looking out at the far bank.
“I called off the mortars,” McClellan told him.
Ramirez didn’t need to ask why.
The far bank was completely empty. There were a couple of destroyed snail-tanks, but that was it. Even the bodies of the alien troops they had managed to kill were gone.
“Where’d they go?” Ramirez asked him.
McClellan shook his head. “No idea, Staff Sergeant,” he said. “By the time I got up here, they were already long gone.”
“Retreated back into the tree line, probably,” the NCO grunted.
“Probably.”
Ramirez lowered the binoculars. “How many did we lose?” he asked.
McClellan turned somber. “Six of ours, four furries,” he said. “seven wounded, but not badly. We’re policing up the bodies to take them back with us.”
Ramirez nodded. “Okay. Good job, McClellan.”
The marksman only nodded in reply.
“JOHN!”
Ramirez turned and found Alzoria pointed down toward the river bank. Lifting the binoculars to his eyes he looked across the river again, but there was still nothing.
“Alzoria?” he asked.
“Down!” she cried. “Look down!”
He turned his gaze downward at the near bank on their side of the river and found several domed heads emerging from the river. The rest of the Dark Ones’ bodies appeared as they marched out of the deeper parts of the river. Soon, they were followed by the tops of snail-tanks as the creatures breached the surface. More and more of them appearing.
“The fuck?!” McClellan cried, looking down his scope at them. “They fucking walked through the river?!”
Ramirez swallowed as another pair of armored mollusks emerged from the river. Most of their ammo was gone along with half their manpower. And in the end, they delayed the enemy advance by less than an hour.
