Battleground Earth Read online

Johnny and Julie emptied their thirty-round clips and paused to reload.

  “Everyone, mask up!” Vince yelled from close by.

  Frank watched as Johnny and Julie reached for the gas masks on their belts and immediately started putting them on. He looked at Wanda. “We better get the hell out of here.”

  Wanda glanced around. “Where’s Winston?”

  “I don’t know. We need to go.”

  “Not without Winston.”

  “Wanda. Vince is going to use chemical grenades.”

  “We’re far enough away.”

  Frank felt a breeze and saw the fog around them wisp through the trees. They were only 20 miles away from the Pacific Ocean, so coastal winds were prevalent in the area.

  “He sets those off, the gas is going straight for us. Go!” Frank grabbed Wanda by the arm and they started running.

  Crandall was standing next to a dead beetle. He was retracting the deadly rod back into the spring mechanism of the bolt gun. He looked up as Frank and Wanda raced towards him.

  “Where’s Shelly?” Frank shouted.

  “I’m not sure,” Crandall replied.

  “We have to get out of here, they’re going to release chemical bombs.”

  “Shit!” Crandall glanced around the trees. He grabbed his shotgun off the ground and ran after Frank and Wanda.

  Frank heard a concussion grenade go off then looked over his shoulder. He could see a yellowish cloud, which meant that Vince had also lobbed at least one chemical grenade. The wind was blowing in their direction.

  “Run!” Frank and Wanda ran over to the dirt path and jumped over the split rail fence like a couple of track stars vaulting over a set of hurdles. The ground was flat and solid so they were able to run faster. Crandall wasn’t far behind. He was fast for a big man and was catching up.

  Wanda almost stumbled but Frank made sure she didn’t fall and kept her on her feet.

  He glanced over his shoulder again. The fog was burning off. He couldn’t see any hint of a yellowish mist.

  “I think we’re okay,” he said, and came to an abrupt halt. Wanda and Crandall stopped running as well.

  “I hate it when they use those,” Crandall said.

  “Vince would only use a chemical grenade as a last resort,” Frank said. “The beetles must have massed together. It’s the best way. Let’s hold up and wait for them.”

  Twenty minutes later, they saw Max coming down the trail. He was still wearing his Darth Vader gas mask and was carrying Denise’s body over his shoulder. The four other Eco-Marines trailed behind. When they saw Frank, they began to remove their breathing apparatus.

  Julie’s eyes were red from crying and Johnny was walking close by her side with one arm over her shoulder in a consoling manner.

  Ace shuffled down the path in his fire-retardant suit with a sullen look on his face.

  Vince was carrying Max’s grenade launcher.

  “Did anyone see my wife?” Crandall asked.

  “No,” Vince said. He looked to the others. “How about you guys?”

  Ace, Julie, and Johnny shook their heads.

  “Could somebody please take off my mask?” Max asked.

  Vince rushed over and removed the helmet from Max’s head.

  “Thanks,” Max said. He readjusted Denise’s body on his shoulder.

  “How about Winston?” Wanda said. “Did anyone see our dog?”

  Again, the response was no.

  Frank put his hand on Wanda’s arm. “He’ll show up. He always does.”

  They stayed close together and continued down the path. In less than an hour, they were back at the parking lot. Something very big was lying beside the Suburban.

  It was a dead beetle.

  Shelly walked out from behind the truck to greet everyone and had a smile on her face until she saw what was draped over Max’s shoulder. “Oh my God. Is that Denise?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Frank said.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “What happened here?” Wanda asked, staring at the dead beetle, riddled with bullet holes.

  “It tried to get away. I followed it all the way back here.”

  “Good thing you got it,” Wanda said.

  “I had help.”

  “What?”

  Shelly turned and pointed inside the truck.

  Winston was gazing out the half-opened window, licking the glass.

  7

  Vince helped Max put Denise in a black body bag. They each took an end and lifted the bag inside the trailer next to the oxyacetylene bottles strapped against the inside wall. Ace took off his twin tanks and fire-retardant suit and placed them in the trailer.

  Everyone gathered around in a circle, held hands, and bowed their heads. Max said a few words. Julie ended the impromptu service with a short prayer. And then, as if they were breaking from a huddle, the group dispersed.

  Frank, Wanda, and the Greens got in the Suburban while Max and his squad climbed into the transport truck. Max started up the beefy diesel engine and headed out of the parking lot. Frank pulled the Suburban around and followed.

  Even though the fog had dissipated somewhat in the forest, it was still thick coming down the road. It wasn’t long before they were passing through the streets of Mill Valley. Frank looked out his side window. The town looked deserted even though he knew that there were some people still alive and residing in the community.

  He figured they had heard the engines and gone into hiding. Lately, there had been reports of increasing activity of marauders. It wasn’t bad enough innocent people had to worry about stepping out their doors and being eaten by some damn mutated bug, they had to be afraid of their own kind hunting them down and killing them.

  At first, the role of the militia groups had been to assist the Eco-Marines in eliminating the bug scourge, but human nature being what it was, their duties soon expanded to protecting law-abiding civilians from renegade gangs and looters.

  With everyone in survival-mode there was no one willing to watch over the jails or prisons. While some convicts managed to escape—usually the most violent—many inmates had been left in their cells and died horrible deaths. Frank couldn’t believe how a civilized society could crumble so fast in only a matter of six months; but it had.

  Frank turned onto the onramp and followed the transport as it accelerated onto Highway 1.

  “It’s really socked in,” Wanda said. Normally from this vantage point near Sausalito they should have been able to see the city high-rises of San Francisco just ahead to their left but the fog cover was too thick. It was like driving through a cottony cloud.

  Frank quickly lost sight of the taillights on the transport truck’s trailer. He switched the headlights on low beam and turned on the windshield wipers. He glanced at the instrument panel to see how fast they were going and reduced his speed.

  “I can’t see a thing,” Wanda said.

  “At least we won’t have to contend with the toll booths on this side,” Crandall said from the backseat, meaning they wouldn’t have to stop at the checkpoint before crossing the bridge.

  “Maybe we should just pull over and wait for it to clear,” Shelly said, stroking the back of Winston’s neck as he took a nap on her lap.

  “Let’s see how it goes,” Frank said, determined to keep going. “It should clear up once we get to the other side.”

  He rolled down his window a notch, letting in a blast of cold ocean air. He decided to slow down even more and let his foot off the gas pedal. That’s when he saw a red flare burning up ahead. He pulled the Suburban to the side and stopped.

  Frank put the shifter into park and let the engine idle. He opened his door and climbed out. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Hello!”

  “Over here,” Max replied in the fog.

  “What’s wrong?” Even though Frank could see the glow of the flare, he couldn’t see Max or their vehicle.

  “The engine up and quit. Ace thinks it’s a clogged fuel lin
e. He’s working on it.”

  Frank heard a door open behind him and turned.

  “We shouldn’t be standing out here exposed,” Wanda said. She was carrying both of their shotguns. She handed Frank the Mossberg.

  Frank turned and saw Crandall and Shelly’s silhouettes in the mist as they had gotten out too. Frank heard something race up to his feet, and looked down. Winston brushed against his pant leg and sat next Wanda. The dog’s coat was already damp from the heavy fog.

  As they walked toward the flare fizzling on the pavement, they could hear hundreds of seagulls high above, shrieking and flapping their wings.

  Wanda looked up and squinted. “How in the world can they see in this fog?”

  Frank spotted the back of the trailer. Johnny was standing guard and was pointing his M16 at them.

  “It’s just us,” Frank said, relieved when Johnny lowered his weapon. It was easy to get jumpy in the fog. He certainly didn’t want them getting shot by friendly fire. The seagulls got even louder.

  As they came around the side of the transport, Frank saw Julie and Vince standing with their automatic rifles by the open hood. Ace was standing on top of the winch on the front bumper, leaning inside the engine compartment.

  He came out from under the hood, holding a rubber hose. He put one end to his mouth and blew gunk out the other end. “See, I was right. It was the fuel line,” he said with a grin.

  “Hey, look,” Max said, stepping around the front of the vehicle. “I can see some blue sky.”

  Frank gazed up. A wind had picked up and was shifting the fog in a southerly direction. He could make out the top of the North Tower, 500 feet up with its two massive cables sloping down and a portion of the suspension cables that held up the six-lane roadway that crossed the one-mile stretch of water.

  That’s when he saw the birds. “We might have a problem!” Frank yelled.

  “Oh my God,” Wanda said.

  “Everybody stand ready!” Max shouted to his squad.

  The seagulls weren’t perched on the cables.

  They were caught in giant intricate webs.

  Some of the gulls were already dead, covered in silk, while the ones alive were flapping their wings and snapping at the sticky webbing with their beaks in an effort to break free. The more they struggled, the more entangled they became. Frank knew he was only seeing a fraction of the snared birds. For all he knew, there could be hundreds more in the fog.

  “Hurry up under there,” Max yelled to Ace, who was having trouble reconnecting the hose to the fuel line.

  “I am, I am!” Ace hollered back from under the hood.

  Julie pointed at a shadow up above. “I see one!”

  Frank looked up. He should have been horrified but instead he was amazed at the magnificent creature. The orb-weaving spider’s body was as big a round as a hot tub and had a head the size of a beach ball. Each time the spiral wheel-shaped web jiggled, the spider would skitter over to the source making it move.

  As the fog shifted, Frank saw more spiders scaling down from the network of webs that stretched down from the top of the tower.

  “Everybody get back in your vehicles, I’ve got this,” Max yelled. He went around the side of the transport, peered through the collimator gun sight that aligned a dot on his intended target, and fired a single projectile from his six-shot grenade launcher.

  There was a loud concussion as a spider exploded fifty feet up above their heads. Parts of the arachnid fell down through the webbing, ripping sections of the rope-thick silk apart. Many of the seagulls were tumbling out of the sticking entrapment and falling—and so were the spiders.

  “Look out!” Julie shouted when a giant spider landed on the cab of the transport.

  It seemed unharmed as it struggled to get on its feet, slipping on the slick surface of the metal. As the spider rose, its front legs slid down the glass surface of the windshield.

  “I’m done,” Ace shouted. He reached up, grabbed the front of the hood, and slammed the cover down. He was shocked to see he was face-to-face with the hideous-looking creature, especially when it glared back at him with its eight black-orbed eyes.

  Julie jumped on the step-up over the gas tank and opened up with her machinegun. She fired off a second short burst. The high-caliber bullets ripped through the spider’s abdomen, causing it to lose its footing. It slid from the hood onto the pavement where Johnny walked up and finished it off with his weapon.

  The spring-driven cylinder rotated on the launcher as Max fired two more grenades, killing another spider and further destroying the massive webbing. He opened the driver’s door and climbed up inside the transport truck.

  Wanda fired her shotgun at a humongous spider climbing down the cable and it plummeted off the bridge. A faint splash could be heard a few seconds later as it landed in the ocean two hundred fifty feet below.

  Frank ran over and got in the Suburban. He waited until Wanda and Winston were inside before putting the idling engine into gear. Crandall and Shelly were already in the back.

  The fog was clearing and Frank could see roughly a hundred feet in front of the Suburban. The southbound three-lane roadway was covered with dead birds. There were also more than a hundred derelict automobiles that had been pushed to the side to make a path for working vehicles.

  He glanced up at the ragged webbing flapping in the wind and knew by tomorrow morning the industrious spiders would have either repaired the damage or engineered an entirely new network of webs. Like the other giant insects that had taken over the planet, the orb-weavers had made their claim to the Golden Gate Bridge. During the day they stayed mostly out of sight, nestled in the sub-structure and girders under the deck but today the overabundance of snared seagulls had been too much of a temptation for them to ignore. The spiders were generally known to come out at night to inventory their webs, spinning their victims in silk cocoons then later returning to suck the hapless corpses dry of all bodily fluids.

  Frank was relieved to hear the diesel engine fire up on the transport. The truck shook as it started to roll away in low gear then gradually picked up speed.

  He glanced over at Wanda. Winston was sitting on her lap, gazing out the passenger window. She was holding him tight and staring straight ahead. Even though she was a strong woman and had been a sheriff before the invasion, there were times when even she was humbly reminded of the dangers they faced everyday and how easily their lives could be cut short.

  Denise Washington had only just joined Max’s team and this had been her first outing with the other members, which unfortunately turned out to be her last.

  8

  Cass propelled herself through the tight confines of the passageway. She had no sense of up or down in the zero gravity and had to be cautious not to strike her head on anything protruding from the bulkheads as she floated about. There were handholds along the way designed to aid the astronauts so they could control their movements, but after some practice living in the weightless environment, she’d mastered the ability to fly and navigate the inside of the space station gracefully like a comic book superhero.

  She drifted into the U.S. module, Tranquility, as she desperately needed to use the toilet. Weightlessness and eating only freeze-dried food had done a number on her digestive system, not to mention her nerves frayed being trapped inside a failing craft spinning around the planet.

  The toilet compartment was similar to the one used in the Zvezda module as Russian engineers had designed both. She quickly entered the tight quarters and undid the bottom of her jumpsuit. On Earth, going to the bathroom was just a matter of sitting down on the toilet seat and doing one’s business. Up in space it was nothing short of being an unglamorous chore.

  To urinate, she had to use an oval-shaped cup that sucked her pee down through a hose; for bowel movements, there was a fan-driven suction system on a sit-down toilet that collected her solid waste in micro-perforated bags, and to do either one was a different process. Being able to separate the two urge
s was often difficult if not impossible to control.

  After she was done, she drifted out of the toilet compartment.

  A thin plastic bag filled with a small amount of water was attached to the bulkhead, along with a flat white washrag. Cass squirted a single globule of water from the bag’s tip. The clear sphere wobbled in front of her face. She quickly captured the droplet on the washrag and cleaned her hands.

  Water was the most precious commodity on board—along of course with breathable air—and the most dangerous. If allowed to float freely, a small dabble of water could land on a piece of equipment and cause an electrical fire.

  Cass maneuvered over to the shaft opening and returned to the cupola for another look around. The seven windows facing Earth’s surface also gave her a view of the other modules and structures that were still attached to the space station; and of course the tiny alien life forms that clung to the outer glass by their tentacles.

  Before the asteroids had destroyed major portions of the spacecraft it had been over 350-feet across with wing-like solar panels made up of two four-panel sections on either side that generated electricity. Cass could see from her vantage point that most of the panels had been destroyed or were severely damaged with gaping holes.

  The Russian sleeping quarters module, Zvezda was dinged and battered, but the metal hull seemed intact.

  She glanced out another window and saw Kibo, the Japanese science lab. The largest module looked like a crushed, aluminum soda can and had become the crypt to three researchers, one being the American science officer. The Canadarm2, the crane used for positioning equipment out in space had been damaged and was missing three of its seven motorized joints, rendering it useless.

  Cass stared through the center glass piece of the observation dome at the Russian spacecraft, Soyuz, docked below the connecting module, Zarya.

  Zarya had taken a tremendous beating traveling through the asteroid belt. Cass could see the rough outer skin of an asteroid sticking out of the module’s hull near the mating coupler, which had blocked the passage to the access hatch to Soyuz. Also, after a system check, she discovered the compartment had a lower oxygen level than normal which might merely be a faulty reading on the gauge or the result of an atmospheric leak.